The Tacky Christmas Lights

Last year in our first year of marriage, Derrick and I were ultra-lame (lamer than usual) and didn't even bother to get a Christmas tree.  We blame the fact that Derrick was at the end of his first semester of law school and was hibernating at the library studying for finals and didn't have time to get one.

This year is different!  We were bound and determined to get our very first family Christmas tree!

Weeks ago, we thought ahead and picked up a stand and some lights, even stopping to discuss how many we thought we would need.  "300?"  "Yeah, that should be enough."

Yesterday, we braved the cold, winter Philadelphia streets in search of the perfect tree - nothing could stop us!  Except wine and brunch, but then on we went again in our search!

A whole half-block away we picked up our tree and brought it home.  Derrick carried its heavy, bountiful body up the stairs of our walk-up and hand-sawed its trunk.  After an hour of preparation and balancing, voila!  A perfect tree, ready for decorating!

I swiftly got to work on the lights after bragging to Derrick about how good I was at string-lighting a tree.  But something was amiss.

We had accidentally picked up lights with WHITE CORDS instead of GREEN!!!  Not only that, we barely had enough to cover the top half of the tree!

How could I have been so careless?  Christmas is Derrick's favorite holiday.  He even has a Christmas Excitement Dance that involves him jumping up and down yelling "CHRISTMAS!  CHRISTMAS!  CHRISTMAS!"  Here's how it goes:

So you can imagine his disappointment when he saw our tacky white-cord-lighted, awful Christmas tree.  He was devastated.  I had failed as a wife.

After a few tears, we jumped in the car walked 10 blocks to our car and drove around in search of proper tree lights.  For whatever reason, the first store was completely out of normal-people lights, but they were brimming with giant LED lights, snowflake-shaped lights, Jesus-shaped lights, red, blue, purple, pink, gold lights, and any other unnecessary novelty light you can think of.

I decided we would steal lights off of someone's house before we went home empty-handed.

Thankfully, the second store we went to had industrial-sized coils left, so we went home with 800,000 perfect lights.

Christmas was saved!

Fantasies

After Derrick graduates in May of 2012 with law and business degrees, he intends to spend the summer studying for the bar exam - you know, just for fun. I have decided that the best place for him to hole up studying for the summer is the small studio cabin behind my parents' mountain house in North Carolina.

That's not a real goat.  Or is it?

Here, Derrick can live out his dreams of solitude and isolation, never sleeping, yet cuddling with and caressing his law books, growing his ginger beard for three months, and collecting his own urine. He will befriend country mice and then eat them, make his own clothes out of molted snake skins, and his only companion will be Tonto, the bodyless mantel Indian.

I'm Tonto.  You're Crazy.

  
I've heard that the bar exam can drive a man crazy.

The First Post

So many people have approached me about starting a blog, and you should always do what other people tell you to do.

My Facebook status updates have amassed a successful following, but I have wondered if my one-liners can make the leap from supporting character on your news feed to carrying an entire show.  I don't know what this blog will end up being other than general musings about the day to day: failing to make ends meet while my husband works his way toward law and business degrees, avoiding molestation on the streets of Philadelphia, hating the celebrity trivia that fills my head, balancing a desperate desire to be skinny with a constant yearning for wine, cheese and chocolate, being judgmental about grammar and spelling, missing family and friends in North Carolina.  

But I am certain about one thing: pictures of cats in baths are really funny.  A bath for a cat is totally unnecessary and the documentation of it seems solely to exist for the purpose of entertaining humans.  Cats don't need baths; they're self-cleaning - like ovens.  They hate water and they hate you for putting them there.  They are angry, desperate, scrawny, alien-like, and totally adorable.  This blog will not focus entirely on cats in baths, but occasionally it will come back to that, because let's face it: I'm not going to make you think or enlighten you in any way.  I've never been particularly smart and I haven't always been gorgeous, so at one point all I had was my sense of humor.  Let's hope this guy retains his: