I am bound and determined that this holiday season is not going to be as stressful as last year’s. Last year, I was taking a server-side coding class (Coldfusion/MySQL) plus an intense user experience class (four 40-page papers written jointly with a partner plus a 25-minute solo presentation on a topic of choice). And how could I forget project managing the redesign of a large, local social services website. My coding final was Monday *night* the 18th (I got home at 10 PM!), and I started my Christmas shopping the next day. I was with Sam the Archaeologist up in the Lansing area and we went to a big box housewares store to get was it helicopters? for her nephews and my brain was actually clear enough for once to be able to process the idea of Christmas gifts. Talk about stopping banging your head against the wall. Parties and visitors and a huge family wedding ensued. Do not get me wrong! It was all great fun! But at the end of it all, I felt like a walking train wreck. “This will NOT happen again next year,” became my battle cry!

This year, I am not exactly UN-busy. But I’m on my last Illustrator project and I just have a two-page paper to write for my other class and it’s about my internship experiences and that’ll be a piece of cake. Er, hopefully that wasn’t famous last words. So, I saddled up my cute little blue honda civic this morning and headed out. My first stop was the grocery store, which went smoothly except for the fact that “cocktail grapefruit” was not coded into the uscan and the cashiers didn’t know what one was and while we were fiddling around about that, my uscan started screaming about being unattended and that caused another little kerfluffle. I don’t know what “cocktail grapefruits” are either but they are green and now I know that they are 99 cents a piece. It’s okay Mom, I left my uscan unattended but I had my purse clutched tightly in my hot little hand.

Onward. Post office and then downtown. Parked in the library lot and walked down to Main Sreet. Hmmm. All the stores were dark inside. What gives? Oh, duh. It’s 9:30 and none of the stores seemed to open until 10 or 11. I knew Border’s would be open though, so I headed up there. And by the time I was done in there, other stores were beginning to open up and by the time I got back down to Main St., even the 11 o’clock stores were open.

Christmas shopping was a lot easier when the Beach Urchins were little girls. I always went totally overboard and bought all kinds of toys, trinkets, and other crap. Lots of packages to open on Christmas morning. So now they have a whole bunch of crap they don’t know what to do with. And after observing the relatively large footprint I seem to be leaving on the earth, they have decided not to emulate me and are specifically asking me *not* to buy them anything they don’t need. As Lizard Breath says, “I have too much crap already.” And she’s not even talking about the childhood stuff she left behind when she drove off into the sunset. So, I am trying even harder this year to ignore all the pretty gewgaws out there that don’t necessarily serve a purpose and might not fit into someone else’s decor. Books, I may be able to pick out for someone else. After all, if you don’t like the book, you can post a review on your goodreads or librarything site and try to foist if off on someone else. Clothing? Hmmm. I was *great* at picking out clothes for little girls. 20-somethings? Hmmm. But I am off and sorta running and making a little progress, against all odds.

I am not going to be a walking train wreck come January 2nd. The GG and I are supposedly doing a quick little xmas shopping errand over here on the west side (not going *near* midnight madness downtown) before eating at Knight’s (Porter, be there or be square ;-)). And I’m sure this thing is full of typos and the like but I need to dredge the GG out of his reading room nap and get going or we won’t get our errand done. And I need my QOFE button. Where is my QOFE button?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.