New Year’s Day finds me, as ever, feeling extraordinarily stingy and thrifty. I always spend too much on Christmas, but seriously, I cannot help it. I grew up poor (cue the black and white grainy footage and the goddamn violins already) and that messes with your head. My mother-in-law has the same illness and we totally get off (eeuww) on the same spendy thrills, so I don’t think this is exceptionally weird or anything, just a side effect, like scars from having scratched chicken pox (Metaphor breakdown alert! Unlike being poor, scratching a pock feels oh soooo fucking good at the time, damn it. The back of my neck is a mine field of scars because I would only allow myself the pleasure of scratching where the scars wouldn’t show). However, I woke up today with the inexorable need to wander the cluttered aisles of TJ Maxx and stare at clearanced crap and pseudo-antiques. It was with great regret, however, because I knew that I’d probably talk myself into buying shit and again, my credit card is whimpering in the corner, struggling under its balance. However, Esteban was game in that we could look for furniture for the mostly finished dining room cum den situation. We desperately need to fill that room, as Tilly has been claiming it as her own and has been slowly marking every inch of the cream carpet with strategic hairballs. She’s playing Battleship on the berber and quite frankly, it really sucks. And also, the yodeling must be stopped with something that absorbs what must be very satisfying echoes.
I must interject my own thoughts and tell you that I am so fucking sick of fake vanilla scent that the next time it is foisted upon me, I may just shit my own pants to create a fog of poo smell as a type of self defense mechanism. It works for octopi, it should work for me in TJ Fucking Maxx.
I ended up only buying a faux fur throw that looks a lot like a skinned Muppet but makes me laugh. Then we went to World Market and, due to the clearances, made it out of the store with a ton of random booty (mostly Esteban’s weird beers) for hardly anything, and I got some little teeny Tabasco sauce bottles for my new Mr. Bento, which was one of my gifts from Esteban.
I’m weirdly super excited about the Mr. Bento. It’s pretty perfect, because with my current role, I spend hours sitting at my desk attached to my phone headset and if I can manage to get away for lunch, it’s not until very late in the afternoon. And the refrigerators at work are always super packed and sometimes your food isn’t there when you go to get it. Thus, if it’s not one of the days where we have catered lunches, I usually go with a protein bar or make very bad choices from the vending machine and Mr. Bento purported to be a good solution to my problem. I went out on a special grocery shopping excursion to buy fresh fruits and veggies for the Bento and have been perusing Bento sites, looking for ideas and tips. I definitely did not also look on eBay for Hello Kitty bento supplies. No. Because that would be OCD or something.
Yesterday, I packed my little Bento for its first field test and while the combo of breakfast/lunch was visually pretty boring, I definitely learned that you can’t pack cucumbers and snow peas in the same container as hummus without some kind of barrier because Very Bad Things happen (some kind of hummus/pea slurry, I think) and also that sandwiches suck because you have to play Tetris with the pieces to get them to fit in the container (although I think I did pretty well) and also, I am not a fan of sandwiches, unless they involve peanut butter and jelly. However, having access to attractively packaged healthy stuff was pretty awesome and I actually ate it rather than just resorting to a cold package of Pop Tarts and a pack of peanuts or dashing out for bean burritos at Taco Bell because it’s close and fast. I hope I can sustain this, though, because I worry that the toting and washing of the pieces every night is going to suck. But that’s what normal people do, right?
So, to sum up, I’m either going to abandon the Mr. Bento in, like, two weeks, or I’m going to be sculpting Hello Kitty rice balls by mid-February.
Green Bay has almost as many churches as bars (slap that shit on a bumper sticker, because “Almost as many Churches as Bars” is motto gold) and they’re always having fundraiser meals and whatnot. I can’t imagine ever going to some random church’s Pancake and Porkies (which, as a child of 80’s cable, always made me think of entirely other Porkies) breakfast with the parish. But right now, on the main street near our house, there’s a sign that says “Prince of Peace Beef and Pork Jan 8”. I so want that to not be advertising for a meal but that there really is a Prince of Peace and also Beef and Pork. I know that Jesus was Jewish so he never got to eat bacon but maybe he’s down with it now that he’s making the rules? I don’t know, but this is why proper punctuation is next to godliness. And also, pork.
Speaking of meat, holy shit, I just realized that the Green Bay Minicon is in, like 24 days! Wow! We had to move up the dates this year because the awesome host hotel is completely booked by a private group for almost two months over our normal late winter time frame, so we either had to move it back and chance the fact that we’d have a soggy, rainy, muddy gross Minicon, or just move it up to the last weekend in January.
And of course, I’ve thought almost nothing about it since deciding on the specifics, which means that the sound you just heard was the sound of my head exploding.
By the way, if you’re interested, there’s still spots left in the Minicon, but I am hoping for a final count by Jan 10th so that we can purchase food and stuff. Everyone is welcome and flights are still very reasonable (although they’re going to start going up very soon).
To recap, here’s last year’s video:
And the one before that:
You can find out more information here and you see that everyone actually has even more fun than it would appear on film. And there are more boobies. Tits never make into the final cut.
