Let the holiday mini rants begin

The BBQ Pit
281

Yep. So…

Dear Unknown Neighbors,
you have lovely cats. They’re nice and friendly. How do I know how friendly your cats are? Well, come just after Christmas every year, the little fuzzies begin to roam the neighborhood looking for food and a place to curl up out of the wind and snow for the night - they’ve taken up our offer of spending the night in an old insulated dog house more than once. I’m not positive, but my strong suspicion, given that this happens year after year, is that you go somewhere warm for the winter…and throw the cats outside to fend for themselves all winter.

What the fuck is wrong with you??

I’ll be buying another bag of dry catfood soon, because I just know you’re going to do it again.

282

Here’s one more.

Yes, I know it’s Christmas, which means it’s time for classroom/after-school parties. Can we please please please dial it down on the candy and sweets? I’m tired of festively-stained clothes and tummyaches. I’m not saying you have to eliminate them entirely and serve only vegetables, but I’d rather see Christmas-themed pencils than another shirt with red or green frosting stains on it.

283

I think you’re supposed to get up and mingle. If you can’t dazzle them with your charm, bore them with stories about your cats. That’s what we all do. And thank God for Tiger Woods because he gives us something we can talk about aside from the weather!

284

They’re having the annual “bring in goodies” thing at work now…you sign up on a calendar, and a few people bring in food each day. Nice. This year, however, they had the brilliant idea to make it into a competiton – everyone in the office gets to vote on the best dish, and the winner gets a debit/gift card. So now I have half the office pestering me: “Did you try anything yet?” “You gotta taste everything!” “Food’s almost gone! Go get something!” :mad: I don’t want anything! I eat breakfast before coming to work, and I eat a nice lunch. I don’t want to spend my workday feeling bloated from room-temperature dips, soggy-looking cakes, and bacon-laden cheeseballs!

285

Pullet, make your mother a tin of brownies.

Tell her your pretty sure you were able to cull out the ones the cat licked. :smiley:

286

Can you bring them in and adopt them for yourself or start looking now for people who might want a kitty? That kind of behavior is reprehensible and if you can help the kitties find new homes where they aren’t abandoned for vacations that would probably be better.

287

I appreciate the sentiment, but mingling with people I don’t know isn’t something I’m interested in doing. My version of “lighting a candle” (instead of cursing the darkness) will be having an iPhone with me at next year’s party. :slight_smile:

288

I’m about to throw Luci and Annie out on their butts if they don’t leave the tree alone!!! Especially Annie (the white one). God, every day, more and more ornaments on the floor, the dog gets hold of them and if she gets one of the hooks, she might swallow it and get hurt…

I’m ready to cut her tail off and beat her with it!!! (At least, that’s what I keep telling her)

289

Cats and Christmas trees just don’t go together. It smells intriguing, there are all those fascinating things dangling from it – obviously just begging to be batted at and attacked…
One year, way long ago, my mother received a set of ornaments as a gift. Lovely things, birds, covered in real feathers… Uh huh.

290

I feel the same way about my 2-year-old, except for the tail part.

291

Somehow the tree skirt managed to get stuck in the tree stand; apparently it’s been wicking water out of there since yesterday morning. Mom had to re-wrap five soggy gifts, and pull everything else out from under the tree to remove the tree skirt. Of course, package that got the worst water damage contained books. I haven’t actually seen them yet, and Mom has a very different definition of “soaked” than I do, but still…

292

Does ANYBODY actually like going to staff Christmas parties for their spouse?

Not only do I have to go to one for Mr. Neville, but it’s at Allegheny Observatory. It’s a lovely place, but the drive up there and back scares the crap out of me, especially when it’s dark. I hate driving on dark, winding, not-well-marked roads with the fire of 6.02 * 10[sup]23[/sup] suns. I wish I had the light of all those suns to see by when I am doing it. He’s a worse driver than I am, so I can’t get out of it by making him drive. Why can’t they have their party where they actually work, on campus, like normal people would? And why on earth can’t they have it during work hours? That way, everybody gets some time off work so even the introverts are happy, and spouses who don’t want to come have a ready-made excuse not to.

I don’t like parties in general. I’m at least a little face-blind, so I do a very poor job of recognizing people at them, particularly people I don’t see very often. My hearing’s not the best, so I don’t do so well carrying on conversations with lots of background noise. Add in some general social awkwardness, and well… I generally avoid large gatherings when I can for those reasons, and I don’t usually enjoy them when I do go. I wish I could stay home with the cats instead of going to this one.

Cats and menorahs aren’t the best combination, either. We have to keep a very close eye on ours (both the cats and the menorahs) when they (hopefully, only the menorahs) are lit.

Bonus rant: why does it have to get dark so fucking early this time of year? I hate it when I leave work at 5 and it’s already dark, really I do.

293

We had that last year on the 4th day. The cat jumped up on the table to sniff them, turned around, and he was marking day number five with his tail. I was two feet away and snuffed him out quickly enough so just the fur was burnt, but the smell lasted for a nasty amount of time.

294

Mr. Neville reminded me at lunch today that the party is this Friday. Now I’m in a bad mood because I’m dreading it.

Oh, and drinking at the party isn’t an option, either- I have to drive home :frowning:

295

Old one I meant to post but didn’t, and here’s a convenient holiday mini-rants thread:

Dear SIL, I know it’s tough to find time to see each other since your brother and I are estranged from your FIL and thus from family gatherings. So I was happy to hear the day before Thanksgiving, through my husband, that you had a birthday present for me (from this summer) and would stop by while my husband was at work, the day after Thanksgiving sometime during the day, to say hi and drop off my present and pick up his present to you (also a couple months late).

I normally don’t even leave the house on Black Friday, but this time I had to at least get some coffee beans for the next morning, and wanted to check out the sales at the local shops. I’m not a crazy shopper so I wouldn’t have gone out early. And you didn’t set a time.

I’m just sad you didn’t show. Didn’t call. I don’t have your number, your brother does, and I wasn’t going to bug him at work on that day. So I stayed in all day, leaving a note and your gift for the short time I ran to the nearby store to get coffee beans. It wasn’t about getting a present, even. Either you completely, utterly forgot about what you’d told him two days prior, or you lied about having a present for me, couldn’t find something that morning (or overslept the sales), and either way were possibly too embarrassed to say anything later because we didn’t even get an “oops” call/E-mail. For someone I counted as a “Good SIL” I’m sad I don’t count for much of anything at all, apparently.
Another SIL: We sent you an E-mail - because that’s one of the few ways to get hold of you, as you work late hours and don’t have a cell phone - a week prior to us wanting to go out to a restaurant in downtown Chicago, inviting you along. We also sent it to another SIL but she responded promptly saying she didn’t think it would work for her. You didn’t respond until your brother was on the train on the way downtown, that very night, E-mailing him that you weren’t going to have dinner but you’d stop by the restaurant and hang out with us for a while. :confused: That’s not exactly a polite thing to do in a restaurant. Also, if we’d had a half a brain and made a reservation, it would have been made well before that evening; the only reason my husband even knew she was coming is that he added a data plan to his (non-Blackberry, non-iPhone, regular) cell phone and could and did check his E-mail.

But see, we didn’t have half a brain between us, didn’t make a reservation for a restaurant in one of the busiest parts of downtown Chicago for this sort of thing, and didn’t even go in early when we passed by an hour before we wanted dinner and saw they had some open tables. So when we finally arrived at 7, the place had a 2.5 hour wait. :smack: Duh. And when you swung by later, we weren’t there, and you missed our messages because you were gone from work. Please let us know earlier in the future, and please don’t just plan to “hang out” at a nice restaurant!
Note to me: Make a goddamned reservation in the future, thanks.

296

It’s not a holiday specific rant, but it is the holidays…

My 2 month old car. The one I waited 7 months to get. The one I saved and scrimped for. Thanks to the motherfucker who smashed into the front wing last night and didn’t bother to leave a note. That’ll put me in the Christmas spirit all right.

297

You have my sympathies. Do you have an iPhone to bring with you? You can play games and surf and just look like you’re checking messages. :slight_smile:

villa, you have my sympathies, too. We had three hit-and-runs on the streets before we got our garage this year (one on New Year’s Day). Being able to tuck our cars safely in the garage while the streets are slippery and full of assholes has been an incredible weight off our minds.

298

Please, let’s not think of a way to actually use this horrible behemoth of a client contact system that we have to organize company-wide holiday cards. No, let’s have it just put together individually as one big cluster-fuck, where half the time individual consultants are just throwing things together without coordinating with the account exec for that client, and when the AE does ask for suggestions, nothing that comes back is in the system, nor does anyone really know how to spell the names.

Shut up, chattel aren’t allowed to talk.

Seriously? You didn’t have other people on *this board *saying, “Yes, that’s totally fucked up?” I find that disappointing.

My first name has about a billion variant spellings, but mine is the simplest and most common, so I normally win out there. My last name, however, is an uncommon variant on something seen much more often. Most people read the first four letters, then just gloss over the rest, ending up with the final syllable as a scrambled version of what mine is. On the plus side, this helps me to spot telemarketers from a mile away.

I had to sing that in my Vocal Jazz ensemble in college. I just looked up the lyrics, and apparently we got a bowdlerized version. Wow, that’s… really creepy.

Yeah, but “Snowflakes that stay in your hair and the ruff of your hood, and land on your nose and eyelashes where they pause, then quickly melt” doesn’t scan very well.

But “*He *hastens and chastens.” The IPU is female, I’m pretty sure.

You’d think that would actually work out well for the stores. “Merry Christmas, ma’am, remember that Jesus is the reason for the season! Oh my, is that only **one **shirt you’re buying? I’m afraid that doesn’t fit our Luke 3:11 policy.”

299

No iPhone, unfortunately.

I thought those were potholes.

Me neither. I am not Mrs MrNeville’sfirstname Neville, dammit, and it annoys me to no end when people address stuff like that! When I’m in certain moods, I will refuse to open mail addressed that way, as it does not have my name on it.

I refused to address any of our wedding invitations that way. Miss Manners can kiss my ass if she has a problem with that.

300

Thanks. I have a garage, but I need to get rid of the old car which is in there because it has no tax on it… Time is most certainly not on my side.