Quiet time

  It is one of those periods of relative calm here in my section of Pittsburgh.  Last week was finals for the college students, so most have packed up and headed home for holiday, those that are still here are less inclined to throw parties outside when the temps dip into the teens and single digits at night.  It is times like these, when the place clears out a bit that I get a little more reflective.  Things enter my head, which lead to other things, which lead to yet other things.

My neglect of the page and the site in general being one of those things.  So we spruce up the place by changing the background photo and adding a little something something called shelfari over on the right as a place to add the books I have read (as well as the Neverending Threads).  So far I have entered the 2010 entries and the 2009 entries onto the bookshelf, but I still have 2008 plus many assorted books that are laying around my apartment onto the list, so for now we will consider it a work in progress and leave it at that. 

But while on the page doing the editing I was caught up in a little more nostalgia for things that have happened this past year.  The advantage of having people never visit your site is that things don't go away all that easily.  Even though I only let my comments go 5 deep on the homepage, and since I have blocked any form of html on the comments themselves, I was nonetheless surprised to see that the last visible comment was from Donna way back on June 28th, to wish me a happy birthday.  That of course then led me to this, given the time of year and all that jazz.  I am not sure what to make of Christmas this year.  On one hand I got an earlier start than normal on my Christmas shopping, not that I am finished by any stretch, but at least I have a few things bought already.  Yet I wonder how it will all play out, I have time off from work so I am not going to be rushing around, I have a week to do all of the visiting and just take in some down time, but at the same time this will be the first Christmas without either one of my grandparents around.  There was just something about being in their house on Christmas Eve with the family sitting down to a nice meal and the kids not wanting to eat because the sooner we stopped eating the sooner they could open their presents.  My aunt Amy is trying to step into that void, doing the hosting of the Christmas Eve getogether and what not, and I truly love her for it, but there is still that void of the first holiday with grandma no longer with us. 

Okay, I refuse to let this blog be a complete and utter downer, even with the less than stellar start to it.  After all it is Christmas time and just because I have my brooding moments doesn't mean I am not looking forward to the season, just tempering my enthusiasm somewhat.  It still is what it is, and I have been listening to Christmas carols at work for better than a week now.  Not just the schlock that comes on the radio either, I have went and brought all of my Christmas CDs in to play on the radio as well, as has Sammy, so it is not uncommon to hear either one of us strolling through the basement singing along with anything from your more standard fare to me firing off a little "Santa's Beard" by They Might Be Giants. 

I'll be honest, I have become at best an influence on Sammy, and at worst a bad influence on him.  Not that I can't be a role model, I am not going all Charles Barkley here, but there are limits to what I would say is a good and bad influence out of the things I do.  It's one thing to have a similar work ethic, and I think mine is pretty good by most standards, and Sammy tends to follow suit in that regard.  At the same time, I speak in a certain vernacular that I would call unique and I am finding Sammy is copying that as well, which may not be as good.  Prime example would be this morning he and I were in to do the Saturday order, it was my last chance to train him on it before my vacation, and the process usually goes as follows.  First we will order anything that Rick leaves us on a list for the deli section, next will be the cigarette order, followed by the grocery order and last we will get a list from Belinda regarding any other tobacco related products we need (i.e. snuff, chewing tobacco, lighters, etc.)  Well we bang out the deli order pretty quick, I do the cigarettes because I am much faster at it, Sammy does the grocery order on the floor and then we go see Belinda and she doesn't have the tobacco order ready yet.  She says we got everything done too fast for her when I bust out one of my many work phrases "That is because of our cat-like quickness" when Sammy steals the rest of my line and goes "Meow".  I question how much of a positive influence that really is,

Sammy is cool though, we have continued to go to breakfast through his training, almost always at DeLuca's, where I am making an effort to see if they actually have a bad breakfast item on the menu.  I have been there four times now, each time I have tried something different; 1) blueberry hotcake special with chorizo sausage, 2) Mixed grill with eggs over easy and kielbassa, 3) Steel City breakfast, eggs over easy with a waffle and 4) cheeseburger omelet, and every time the food is just awesome.  Today was the best and worst so far, the best because the cheeseburger omelet was fantastic and worst because I finally saw one of the breakfast sundaes being made I previously blogged about, and had I not had a completely full stomach from the omelet I might have hopped the counter and stole it from the waitress before she ever got it to the table.  A waffle the size of a plate with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, surrounded with strawberries and topped with whipped cream, drizzled with hot fudge and hot caramel and served with a cherry on top.  Needless to say, Sammy and I are getting breakfast sundaes on our next visit after I get back from vacation, though I am leaning toward the granny apple sundae myself (waffle, ice cream, apples, caramel, cinnamon and whipped cream). 

Before I forget, mentioning the waitress brought something else to mind about this page.  I was sitting around the other day thinking about what I could do that was holiday related when I thought about the idea of doing a week long Karaoke blog series with nothing but Christmas carols, or at least holiday themed songs, if I could find the videos.  One of the first ones I went to look for was "Christmas Wrapping" by The Waitresses, but I couldn't find the video to the song, instead I found this



It was just so cool that, while it isn't an actual video to a song, it is worth some form of inclusion in a blog entry.  Let this be that inclusion.

Only .76 gets added to the change meter since I last posted it, leaving the total at $193.15 with two weeks left in the year to try and come up with the 6 bucks and change needed to get to $200.  It is looking less and less likely, but as another example of my bad influence on Sammy at work, he has also started picking up change on the floor, so now it has become almost a daily competition  between he and I as opposed to my own personal little project.  It is hard enough to real that $200 milestone to begin with, now I have made it even moreso.  Why am I so cool that people wish to copy me?  I would say "Because all I do is dominate" but I think Sammy would say the exact same thing.  Actually I should have put that on my Christmas list, a  t shirt with that printed on the back.  Someday maybe I will do a blog entry that is just a lexicon of the things I say, because me typing it without going into some long drawn out explanation of what it means makes it seem like I am typing an inside joke that only I get.  Then again, that might be one more person than the number of people who will actually read this.

Well I should call it a night.  I am off tomorrow, but I have plenty of tasks that I have plans to get to (Christmas shopping, cleaning, laundry, wrapping gifts, doing Christmas cards) and Monday night is the hockey game I have tickets for, so there will be no work done then, though I might be back here posting pictures from the game (and the new Consol Energy Center where the Penguins play), but for now I think sleep is the best option.