B365V2.168 - Frohliche Weihnachten

Grettings and salutations, sorry if the title shows off both my brilliance and my ignorance, brillance because I retained a little something after four years of high school German (You should hear me sing Rudolph mit rotem Naschen) but ignorance because I couldn't find umlauts on a keyboard to save my life.  Which would make for a funny Japanese game show, killing people who can't find umlauts.  Just sayin.

Anyway, hope everyone had a good holiday.  Mine wasn't great but wasn't awful either.  It just was what it was and we will leave it at that.  I did take some time this holiday season to update my change meter, which I have been neglecting like my father neglects his kids.  Anyway I am adding another $25.88 so the new total as we close the books on 2015 is $660.98.

As for what I did for my holiday, well it started off with me working.  Sorry, but if I am going to ask my crew to work holidays then I am going to do it too.  But rather than make it a sucky kind of experience I thought I would be the nice guy and made a smallish Christmas dinner for those of us that worked, just a turkey, some mashed potatoes,gravy, green bean casserole, corn and some cauliflower/broccoli steamed veggie mix with cheese.  I also picked up a tray of shrimp and cocktail sauce and threw together a quickly devised cheese and cracker tray as an app.

Apparently the turkey turned out okay (actually I know it did, I ate some of it after all) because by Saturday morning it was all gone, as was the corn and mashed potatoes.  I love cooking, I just hate cleaning up afterwards.  And anytime I can flash my rudimentary kitchen skills for someone besides myself  I am up to said task.  If I am cooking for myself, I will get by on PBand J and cereal.  But with a holiday next week I figured I could get my ordering done early, then have the whole weekend off which would be nice.  I could go home for Christmas if I wanted, which would be nice since I still had the gifts for my family in my apartment from last year.  So anyway I finish up at work around 4:30 on Christmas, come back to my apartment and finish wrapping gifts, because I procrastinate like anyone who reads this blog should know.  How long has it been since I blogged, two weeks now?

I go to sleep Christmas night, though I had no visions of sugar plum fairies dancing in my head.  Hell I don't even know what those are so how could I possibly visualize them.  I figure I will run into work Saturday morning then come back to my place and possibly see what the family had planned.  They had offered to come pick me up on Christmas day, but they called while I was at work and I do have a certain dread of staying too long there which I have covered in a previous blog entry and, like your parents when you were a kid, I am not repeating myself.  Suffice it to say visits take on an uneasy ambivalence for me.  So when I got home from work Saturday morning, I kept having a running mental debate with myself about whether or not to call.  Turns out it was good that I didn't call, my phone rang at 11:30pm, one of the over night guys didn't bother to call or show up, so now I am dragging my tired ass back to work to do an overnight shift when I had mapped having the whole weekend off.  That solidified any Christmas plans I had, I wasn't going home and I was going to be stuck with two years of Christmas gifts in my apartment.

I work the overnight, which was incredibly slow, no students downtown, just crack heads and porn shop patrons for the most part until 7am when the next shift came in, I hurried up and dropped my money in the safe and got out of there.  At that point I had been up for 22 hours straight and bed sounded really good.  I got home and fell into bed around 8am and my eyes just started to close when my mom's husband called me.  Would I like to go out to dinner Sunday, I say sure what time and he say 3pm.  I figure that is good, I can get some sleep before they arrive.  I get off the phone and it rings again, it's Ed in Florida asking if I worked all night to which I say yes and then he tells me me all of the things I already know, we need to get some new people, put an ad out, get applications yada, yada, yada.  Nothing I am going to do at 9am on a Sunday morning, but I know I will have to do on Monday.  Finally I get to close my eyes, I wake back up around 1pm, figure I better hop in the shower if I am going to confront the day, so I shower and get dressed and am waiting for my parents to show up.  they get here around 4pm, there was a detour on the Parkway east due to the impending implosion of the Greenfield Bridge on Monday.  They get here, I grab all of the presents I have for them and climb into their truck and we opt to go to IHOP for dinner, Mike has a gift card for there.  Doesn't matter to me, it's food.  Besides it was about my breakfast time anyway.

Turns out they didn't get me anything, not that I am surprised, my mom has been all off kilter since her stroke and Mike is Mike, he isn't going to run out and do Christmas shopping.  Still they are taking me to dinner, beggars can't be choosers right.  Except we get there and Mike doesn't have enough money for dinner, he has two gift cards, an IHOP card and a Visa gift card, I make up the difference.  As a personal note, I would never ask someone to dinner and not have the money to pay for it, it's just the way I roll.  (Wink and a nod to Kat on that line, she will get it.)  So we get back to my place and Mike asks me about working Christmas, I say I got paid time and a half and got an extra vacation day out of the deal, so by January I should have 13 days saved up.  Again long time readers of the blog know that I am planning a vacation, thus my accumulation of days, when Mike spouts out, good, you can take some time off then and help us put in the new carpeting.  Excuse me, but I am calling the shots with my time off, the fact they left their home fall into a state where they need new carpeting isn't my fault, I did not have a pet(s) and let them piss and shit on the rugs, or have a hole in the roof and then wait around to get the insurance company to fix it (the hole was due to a fire at a neighbors place) to the point where they had extensive water damage making the problem far worse than it had to be.

All in all I can say I can wait the 364 days to do this again.