That's My Bix!

This weekend, we had Christmas Tree drama.

It’s likely that our movers destroyed our Christmas tree — we haven’t opened the storage bag yet, but it looks distinctly WRONG.

Before we moved to Vegas, we traditionally had two trees, but I had gotten rid of the older of the two when we moved, rather than paying to store it for three years. We took with us an extremely high quality tree I’d found on insane discount at a church thrift store — it seemed to have been used maybe once or twice and I adore that tree. Now that tree might be fine or it might look like it has been hefted on Cheryl Strayed’s back across the entirety of the Pacific Coast Trail to be thrown off a cliff during a momentous moment. I hesitate to ask Esteban to haul it up from the basement, and my knee is still too janky to try going down the basement stairs, and honestly, if it’s completely fucked, I don’t know if my spirit could take it after the continued series of small and large disappointments associated with that move across the country.

I only had lugged one partial set of ornaments with us to Vegas. My huge collection of 30s-60s mercury glass ornaments have been safely stowed away in climate controlled storage. And honestly? I missed those ornaments. Some of them belonged to my grandmother and my great grandmother, and we are looking at a fourth Christmas in a row of being alienated and away from family (despite in some cases being just a few minutes away by car). With limited tolerance for standing and twisting (thanks janky knee) and limited bandwidth for activities that aren’t related to unfucking this house (thanks janky pandemic home buying experience), if I was going to focus on putting up a tree, it should be with the ornaments I haven’t seen since I tucked them into their storage boxes in January 2017.

So Esteban proposed buying a second tree. Or maybe an only tree, depending on how screwed our current tree got in the move.

My general mode for buying Christmas trees is one of opportunity. My $40 thrift store tree was the most I’d paid for a tree to date. The tree before that was a $400 tree Esteban had scored for $25 when he worked at Shopko Corporate offices — it had been used for one December as a lobby tree in the main HQ. The tree before that was Esteban’s grandmother’s 5 ft plastic tree – that one was free.

Since we’d been celebrating and decorating trees for years and had still yet to pay more than a collective Benjamin, Esteban suggested we invest a bit. Esteban went on a brief trip to Costco to score the one tree they had that would fit under our ceiling — a 7.5 footer. However, once we made room among the yet-to-be-unpacked art boxes in the living room, and he set it up, I was disenchanted. It was a slim drink of water — which is fine and I could grow to like that — but it wiggled and wobbled along the connections between the segments. It was like a Bobblehead tree. I tried to gird my loins to accept this instability, but then did the math and realized that if it was this wibble-wobbly in Year 0, what would it be like in Year 3? Or Year 10?

Back in the box and straight back to Costco, which has a great return policy and easy no-fuss transactions. From there, we went to our local garden center, which is known for being Christmas HQ as soon as the mercury drops below 40 degrees.

They are also known for carrying some of the most bespoke Christmas trees this side of Balsam Hill.

Since Esteban has decided that I’m too precious to set foot inside stores, even masked, but he is not, I sat in the parking lot while he did a Google Hangout and showed me the threes. Since of course I had already scoped out the tree I lusted for, when he came upon it, I said “Yes, that’s the tree I want but it’s soooper expensive” and then he just turned to the lady and said “I’ll take this one.”

I have intense guilt about this purchase, to be honest. The house needs a million dollars of fixing, and we’ve already “splurged” to have gas run to the fireplace and the kitchen so that we can “splurge” again to replace the apartment-grade electric coil stove with our preferred gas range (a splurge that feels less splurge-like by the day, since we’ve now learned that this piece of shit is a whopping 50 degrees off, thanks to a $4 in-oven thermometer we purchased to confirm this suspicion). But then Esteban did the math — I have invested tons of effort into my vintage ornament dragon hoard curated collection. I vastly enjoy setting up the tree, so much so that I am constantly scheming for more tree concepts and placements. And since I refuse to actually spend real money on what has become a seasonal hobby, it’s not like we’ve ever seriously invested in a tree. Plus, we had ditched the last one and we should have a tree that makes us happy.

We stopped at our climate-controlled storage to see if we could reach the ornaments (luckily we could) and were set to rock and roll. Back home, we set it up like one two three — in fact, he had it half together while I stepped into the kitchen to grab a soda. I still had to dig my vintage bubble lights out of their hiding place, but I couldn’t resist opening my vintage ornament trove and putting a few of the non-glass ornaments up. Hi friends, I missed you.

It’s a funny thing to have excitement. I didn’t realize how much the pandemic has robbed us of excitement until that moment. I haven’t been looking forward to anything for so long, but I love Christmas and I love Christmas trees and I love decorating and seeing so many of my vintage treasures that I inherited from my grandmother and my great grandmother. It’s like spending time with family even though we can’t see our families this year. It’s a good feeling.

Ole also declared that the tree was just fine with him.

So, I had an appointment for a boob smash and boob listen I had remembered I had to be there at 7 am today. Cool. Sucky time but cool. Then I got an appointment reminder saying not to forget my appointment at 8 am today — whoops, that was lucky! Man, I would have been unhappy if I got up extra early for a boob smash and boob listen and then had to sit around in the parking lot waiting for it!

So I go today at 7:40 am (be there 20 minutes early they said, and I follow directions!) and they say no, your boob smash was at 7:20. But! My appointment reminder, I say! I got an email! Oh, that was for the boob LISTEN appointment, not the boob smash appointment. You should have gotten a separate email for your boob smash appointment, you probably missed it, so many emails these days, you probably have a lot of spam, etc. But, can I at least get the boob listen done, since that won’t be for another 20 minutes? Oh no, they won’t listen to your boob before your boob gets smashed, so you’re fucked.

I got a rescheduled smash and listen (IN THAT ORDER) and went back home to check my email.

The ultrasound appointment email came a full 15 hours prior to the appointment. The Boob Smash reminder email? Came in at almost 11 pm last night. Less than 9 hours before the appointment and during hours when most people AREN’T CHECKING EMAIL.

The medical care in Las Vegas sucked massive balls but apparently what I need to trade for competence and compassion from my beloved Coldington doctors is a failure to understand the best practices of written communication in this the year of our lord 2020.

My latest publication is up at Jet Fuel Review, so if you like bog bodies, this is gonna be your JAM.