old long since

(doesn't auld lang syne have a better ring to it? I agree, Mr. Burns)

As detailed above - "auld lang syne" literally means "old long since" - but a more idiomatic English translation would be something like "long ago", "days of long ago", "in olden days", or even "once upon a time"..

The complete lyrics, as Burns wrote them, are as follows -

Burns’ verse:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne ?

CHORUS:

For auld lang syne, my dear,

for auld lang syne,

we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

for auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
And surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae run about the braes,
and pou’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin’ auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin’ auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
And gies a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie-waught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

Burns’ verse above is taken exactly from Songs from Robert Burns, published in Great Britain
by Collins Clear-Type Press in 1947, and sold at Burns’ Cottage. Most traditional use of the song involves only the first verse and the chorus - with the last line changed to "and days of auld lang syne".

Trivia:

• The last line of the chorus is frequently mis-sung by crowds and untrained groups as for the sake of Auld Lang Syne. This is partly because the words themselves are not understood, but also because it has become common practice. It is rarely (if ever) incorrectly performed by trained choirs.
• The song is sung at the end of the Last Night of the Proms by the audience (rather than the performers). As such it is never listed on the official programme.
• The melody of the song is used as the unofficial alma mater for the University of Virginia.
• The melody is also featured at the beginning of the Tom Waits song 'A Sight For Sore Eyes'
• The song is sung in a famous scene at the end of It's a Wonderful Life, a movie traditionally shown during the weeks before Christmas in America.
• In the 1942 re-release of the Charlie Chaplin film The Gold Rush with added sound, the song is sung at a New Year's Eve party. It is not certain if the same song was sung when the original silent film was released in 1925.

* all info directly plagiarized from Wikipedia
* We'll be ringing in '07 watching horror movies and inventing new drinks. There will be a brief interlude of posing in the Member's Only jacket for the mandatory photo op. These are traditions we just can't shake.
* Happy 2007, all! Ring it in with blind abandon!

going to pot

It's almost midnight and there are people outside of our apartment yelling and carrying on, fighting and making the walls shake. The cat keeps looking at the door like it's going to jump off of the hinges and chase her under the bed. I glanced to make sure the chain was locked.

We don't live in the ritziest apartments, but they're not excessively grungy, either. They're middle-of-the-road in a nice-enough neighborhood. And tonight I'm bringing you a breaking story: I'm about to brave outside to figure out what all this noise is about... (tra-la, tra-la)

It's the apartment directly across from us, the new young neighbors, and I think there's a half-dozen or so people in there watching some kind of sports thing, cheering and carrying on. So it's not that exciting; no domestic dispute, no animal cruelty, no reason to call the cops. Just people having a good time.

I won't rain on that parade.*

You have to wonder what the imaginary line is you'd have to cross to upset the apple cart, rain on the parade. Last night while checking the mail I witnessed a drug deal. I pretended not to pay attention, but it went down just like it does on the HBO specials, in front of God and everybody.

Now that's a parade that pushes my buttons.


* Besides, if this goes on any longer I know my other neighbors will come ask them to cool down.**
** Exactly ten minutes after I wrote this, that's exactly what happened. She told him that they were watching a fight and it's over now. You gotta love predictability.

imminent

I don't know this guy.

Fall of 1999 I was student teaching in metro Nashville. I wanted to go to the city kids because I thought I already knew how to get the country kids to eat out of my hand. My first rotation was in a 5th grade class where I taught English and Social Studies, an excellent combo that was much fun. There were about 26-28 kids in my homeroom class, one who spoke no English and another 5 or 6 who were in ESL (English as a Second Language) programs at the school. Another ten kids in the class barely read on a third grade level. (And you want me to teach a lesson on gerunds?) I think my class alone represented direct lineage from five or six different countries around the world.

And like every other elementary classroom, we were all mashed up together, teaching down the middle to hope that the slow kids would catch on and the smart kids wouldn't get too bored. They were the future teachers and politicians, construction workers and NFL running backs (all of the boys either wanted to grow up to be Eddie George or Steve McNair), the future sociopaths and homemakers-- all together in a glorified trailor-park classroom learning how to be good little citizens (as any Foundations of Education professor will tell you is the purpose of the Department of Education and Brainwashing).

I always tried to connect current events into my lessons. I tried to use examples of things that they would understand. I tried to use names of people who I knew they would all know. Usually this strategy worked for me.

Until one day.

One day I was in the middle of an English lesson (on something probably as exciting as gerunds) and I wrote a sentence on the board with the name "Saddam Hussein" as the subject. This was in no way a political statement, but that didn't matter... two of my usually quiet and nonconfrontational kids jumped up and started yelling.

One of them jumped out of his chair and ran up to me in the front of the class. He kept yelling, "I hate Saddam! Saddam is a bad man! You should hate Saddam! I hate Saddam!" and so on.

These were city kids, remember. I broke up fights just about every week I was there. I had even taken knives off of a couple of kids... and this one was in my face just getting louder and more aggressive.

What does the diplomat do? I agreed with him. I repeated everything that he said. Yes, Saddam was a bad man. Yes, I do hate Saddam. I told him I hated Saddam so much that his name wasn't worthy of being on the board, and I erased it. I yelled as loud as he did, reaffirming everything he said.

He nodded his head, went back to his seat, and I wrote a different sentence on the board. We returned to the lesson.

After the class was over, the teacher with whom I was working told me that I handled that situation well, as it was different than the usual attention-seeking outbursts we usually had in the class. And then she told me that student was Kurdish and Saddam Hussein's minions gassed that kid's family, and that's how they ended up in Nashville.*

I don't know that Saddam Hussein guy, but I'm compelled to think he's a bad man.

I've just refreshed my CNN page to see that the bad man has been hung. I can't say if killing him would really make a difference in the world, but I do hope it will bring peace to those who were tortured and killed by his hand.

* Nevermind that was something she should have told me earlier in the semester, especially considering how I dropped all kinds of political names in class... That's a good point, but not the purpose of this story.

* I still think about those kids. If none of them dropped grades they'd be Seniors this year. I wonder if they remember getting in trouble for sneaking under the stairs to look up my skirt.

inventory

I'm glad that it's Friday. And I'm glad it's a three-day weekend.
And I'm glad I'm not counting inventory on 2nd Street!

It was a good appointment at the endocrinologist's office. He said that usually there's a whole set of scans and things a year after treatment, which would be September of 2007. In lieu of wanting to work on making babies ASAP, he said we could do the whole diet/scan thing again in March. He didn't notice any new lumps in my neck, which is always a good thing. We drew labs, but I probably won't hear back from them for a couple of weeks.

We may not have to go off of the Synthroid again in March. There's a possibility I may be able to stay on it and take Thyrogen shots instead to lower the levels, which means it wouldn't take two months to unzombify me. But I hear those are hella expensive and insurance companies are notorious for being hob-knobbers about approving and paying for it... so I may end up being a zombie anyway. We're not going to worry about any of this until mid- to late-February.

After that I don't really know what the next step will be. We're praying that my thyroglobulin (Tg) levels will continue to go down to zero. We're also praying that when I go off of the Syntyroid those same Tg levels will stay in the toilet. As long as those levels stay down and the scans look decent we should get the green light to get on with the rest of our baby-making lives.

It's arguable that I've never been "normal", but I sure do miss being as normally abnormal (or is it abnormally normal?) as I used to be. The c-bomb sucks.

In honor of inventory on 2nd Street, there are 295 words in this post. That's also 1,570 spaces, Obmij.

back to the salt mines

This morning The Hater and I are going to another endocrinologist appointment. This one is a general follow-up visit, my first after the second RAI. I'm expecting there will also be lab drawn (as my six-week mark for the newest dose of synthroid was six weeks and two days ago)... and other than that, I'm not expecting much else. We're hoping it will be a boring visit.

Then it's back to the salt mines. Groan. It's been a good vacation from work, but I'm not quite ready to go back. I've had enough time for my brain to breathe, but I still haven't made a decision about the job for which I'm still in the interview process. I'm supposed to give a few presentations by early January, so maybe by then I'll be more excited about it. For now my alarm bells are still dinging. Maybe secret job #2 will call back and want to interview me, too, to make this decision even more exciting.

Yesterday The Hater ventured out to recon elliptical machines. He went to several stores while I washed a mountain of laundry. After I get off of work this evening he says we're going to go look at the most promising models. He found one place that will assemble and deliver it, which sounds great. I'd pay them extra if they'd walk on it for me, too.

one ring to rule them all

Believe it or not, this was the first season of my coaching a fantasy football team... and we returned home to check the stats to find that we won the Super Bowl. Here's the complete story:

Yoknapatawpha Yuccas won the Super Bowl Championship by a score of 108 to 61. Marvin Harrison led the team in scoring in the championship round and Brian Westbrook led the team in scoring for the season. Congrats once again to Yoknapatawpha Yuccas on a terrific Fantasy football Season.

That's right, the Yoknapatawpha Yuccas have seized victory on the fantasy field. And I have won a very fancy fantasy Super Bowl ring to show for it. Bling.

Sorry, Petyon. I was sure you'd get one first. Maybe next year I can draft you for my team and we can get you one. The Hater says he'll help us; he's an excellent GM.

Meanwhile, MTSU is playing their debut bowl game in Detroit. We're just too proud that Little Middle took the Sunbelt. The Motor City Bowl will never be the same.

We arrived back in OKC about noon, after about a 12 hour drive. We tagged-teamed and leapfrogged, and we made a few stops (including the unplanned stop for the guy who ran off the road at about 1:30 am outside of Memphis). We've Christmas'd for about a week, and we're glad to be back in Uglyhoma.

We had a wonderful trip home. Those trips are never long enough.

I have tomorrow off of work, too, which was a great idea. My plans include sleeping late, procrastinating laundry, considering cleaning and thinking about putting up new goodies. My number one goal is to cuddle with the kitty; she missed us.

She's also super proud to be wearing her Titans tag! The Hater says Vince Young should be the Rookie of the Year. He now says the Titans are on the 2-year plan, not the 5-year plan.

je vous veux au joyeux noel

. . . et une bonne anne!

rubber ducky

We are receiving much needed rain. And it looks like it's going to follow us all of the way home. Slushy.

I've got the presents wrapped in garbage bags, but it seems inevitable that they will get wet while taking them to the car. So our pretty presents will be splotchy by the time they get home. C'est la vie, my family; you'll be getting spotted presents this year.

I'm working a half day and then coming home to finish packing my toiletries and the car. We hope to be in (C6H12O6+H2O) mid-morning tomorrow. I'm chomping at the bit to be home, in the land of dial-up internet.

I'll catch you on the flip-side... try to stay dry.

random facts

This is the 474th post to the haiku. It's had approximately 14,656 views in 17 months. An arduous copy and paste task has yielded a 361 page (single-spaced) word document of the blog in print for its computer-illiterate fans. (That's a word count of 125,468!)

Over the last year I've noticed several bloggers who are trying to peddle their wares to publishers. They hope to be noticed like the actress-waitress at the greasy dive outside of Hollywood. They want to blog about their stupid dog or their "unique" view of life, and they want to think that their take on the world is worthy of binding and selling to other people. It's a great pipe dream*, and although that would be neat, I'm not quitting my day job.

I'm just proud that there are a few people who care enough about my antics, which really aren't that fancy, to make the effort to upload this blog and read it. This whole blog thing started out as a way to communicate with some friends in different parts of the country, but it's morphed into a filtered hobby.

Dear Reader, as hokey as it sounds, thanks for stopping by (time and again), for commenting, for calling me out in real life about things that I've written here. I know it's no big deal and that you only hang around for an average of a minute and a half, but it's a golden minute for me.

Thanks for making it worth my while.

* That was a hard level in Super Mario Brothers. The flying red turtles were tough to get past.

holiday travel

Christmastime is calling, "Traffic! Traffic!"

Here's hoping that everybody's upcoming travel plans are as smooth as greased lightening.

PS: For your own safety, you may want to stay off of I-40 (Eastbound) Wednesday night after 5pm (CST) and Thursday moring until about noon (EST). We're going to tear it up.

futuristic wishes

It won't be long before we make our long trip home... (Wednesday after I get off of work we'll make the 14 hour drive to east TN for progressive Christmas celebrations.) But while we're gone there will be some big fancy celebratory days we should mention: anniversaries.

Two big anniversaries, to be exact: On the 21st my parents celebrate their wedding anniversary. On the 22nd my number one LBG blog-reading-fans will celebrate their wedding anniversary, too.

Congrats, yall. The well-wishes are early, but we won't have our wireless connection to make more timely wishes then. So this is your early version. Tada.

And as long as we're wishing things early, we hope everybody enjoys their holiday celebrations.

ready, set, party

The Hater and I have been faking the Christmas spirit in the 70 degree weather the past couple of days. Last night we started at his work party... and bowed out after a couple of hours for party number two... and left there for get-together number three.

We slept late this morning and finished up shopping things in time to make my work party tonight. Little Brother has come over and we're all watching football. (and ultimate fighting during the commercial breaks)

Little Brother is antagonizing me. The Hater is playing bartender. We're trying to soak up the football as long as we can.

Tomorrow we're having our party and present-opening celebration... so we can play with our stuff before we go home for parties 2-6, or 6-8 depending if you count work parties are parties... and a partridge in a pear tree.

drinking straws and duct tape

It's the holidays and all of the people with whom I work are talking about all of the baking goodness they are producing from their kitchens. Patients are bringing in baskets of homemade confection perfections. It's certainly that time of year. Ho-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.*

The Hater and I don't really have any holiday baking traditions. We're told this will change after we have little Haters running around looking for Santa. But being surrounded by this season of refined sugar, I thought we might throw something together for the holidays. So I went through the stacks of the recipes of my coworkers and found one that looked both different and easy.

Except it called for melting chocolate in a double boiler, which we don't own. Our kitchen is smaller than most people's master bathrooms... so we've yet to accrue many fancy kitchen gadgets. And we don't have space for many of the fancy kitchen gadgets that we do own and were given at our wedding. Long story short, I told my coworkers that I couldn't make the goodies because we didn't have the equipment.

But lo! They told me that I could improvise if I used two pots, the larger on the bottom with boiling water; the smaller floating on the water. It certainly sounded do-able, so on the way home The Hater and I stopped to get the supplies.

Tra-la-tra-la...

We get everything together and I rig up the redneck double boiler. After a while the chocolate begins to melt. Except it never got really melty, and the pot I used on top was too small, so stirring in the peanuts and chow mein noodles was difficult and not at all the vision of Nana-grade goodness I was hoping to attain.

The steam burned me while we were stirring. And the chocolate goodies didn't really goo together on the wax paper, which leads me to believe that maybe I put too much stuff in the chocolate goo. We have plenty of ingredients, so we may try it again this weekend with different pots and more goo.

But as of now, we're thinking this isn't the Christmas baking tradition we want to recreate every year...

* We stopped for some wine on the way home. When we got home there was a small bottle of rum in the bag.

fantasy drama

My fantasy football team, the Yoknapatawpha Yuccas, will play Angry Dissenter's team, the Las Vegas Goobers, this weekend in the play-offs.

The Yuccas (8-6) have led the West division and the Goobers (9-5) have led the Central division. The Hater's team, the Evil Empire (6-8), took a dive and traded its better players to us so that we would have a better chance against the leader of the East Division. He's such a good General Manager.

We were hoping that one of us would accrue enough points so that we'd both be in the finals, but it looks like we're playing in the semis instead. Which is good, really, because that means at least one of us will be in the finals.

Hopefully it'll be the mighty Yuccas of Yoknapatawpha County. (yuk-yuk-yuk)

LeBron

The Hater and I went to see the OKC Hornets and the Cleveland Cavaliers play tonight in the Ford Center. We were excited to see LeBron and CP3 do their things.

CP3 made some crazy drives to the basket for some serious pointage. He ended up with 30 points, 11 assists, 5 rebounds, 2 steals... not to mention being clutch in the 4th quarter. It was a Vince Young performance of the NBA.


LeBron had some good plays in the first quarter, but the Hornets figured out how to 2-man him to keep him in check. That's really all you can do against that powerhouse. If Cleveland had bunches of good players it would have been nasty.

Cleveland did have another player who was virtually unstoppable in the first half of the game. We called him Side Show Bob because he had crazy hair. (In the nose bleed section we get to name players special nicknames because it's hard to see their numbers. So we cheered for Ogre, Side Show Bob, and LeBron for the Cavaliers. And we could always tell CP3 by his blue shoes. Forrest Gump was right; it's always about the shoes.) Side Show Bob must've been tired during the second half because he didn't play so well. And CP3 dunked on him, which we think hurt his feelers. (Don't you think the picture on the left of Side Show Bob looks like Cleveland's Anderson Varejao on the right?)


We came back to our apartment to meet our neighbor, a Hornet fan. We gave him our yellow plastic whackers ("thunderstix") and relived the game for him. He offered us some $10 nosebleed tickets against the Lakers and Detroit later in January. We had such a good time tonight that we might have to take him up on both games.

HBDTY AD

Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday to you!!
Happy Birthday, Angry Dissenter!
Happy Birthday to you!
(and many, many more)

We hope #28 serves you well.
Sorry that the FedEx people broke your package. They suck.

Love you!

ho-ho-hum

Christmastime is calling, "Traffic! Traffic!"

We had great intentions today to avoid holiday traffic by staying in and making a shopping game plan for later this week. We've washed and folded laundry. We've straightened the tables. We watched football. We've watched some tv that we'd DVR'd. We've mourned that we have to work tomorrow. But we've not really done anything as far as list-making goes.

We think we're totally finished with all of our shopping things except for each other. And Sister called today to announce that we only had 14 shopping days left... but we were planning on exchanging before our trip home, which means we really have about 8 1/2 days left. We're usually more organized by this time of year... the truth is that we're more excited about our trip home than we are about shopping!

It's hard to get motivated when it's cold and windy out. Tomorrow starts a heat wave; it should get up into the mid-60s. Zoloft will hardly know how to act.

j-weird

We had a very awkward experience this afternoon at lupper. So awkward, in fact, that we'd argue it was j-awkward...

Everybody knows that The Hater shoots marbles; that's just his thing. We actually met on the marble-shooting team in college. And he teaches marble-shooting techniques now. The marbles have really come full circle, pun intended.

Anyway, we went with Little Brother yesterday after a marble-shooting tournament to eat at a restaurant. The story becomes more complex if you realize that The Hater actually coached Little Brother at collegiate-level marble-shooting tournaments, and that's how we know him. After the waitress brought the first round of drinks and bread, The Hater saw someone out of the corner of his eye: the coach who was the head marble-shooting coach when The Hater coached Little Brother, who we'll call The Ghost of Christmas Past.

Drama ensues if you realize that The Ghost of Christmas Past was fired from his marble-shooting job this past year... and neither Little Brother nor The Hater had heard from him for several months. And there he was, apron and all, working as a server where we were eating.

Little Brother panicked; there were many unresolved conflicts with he and The Ghost of Christmas Past. We had already ordered our food. He voted we stack some cash on the table and leave. The Hater thought we should ask for it to go. I trumped them both and said that we were already there, the food was already ordered, we'd already made accidental eye contact; we might as well stay.

Little Brother directed his attention to his cell phone and sent out an APB to other marble-shooters he knew. The Hater grabbed a crayon and pretended to draw pictures of Lyle Lovett. I was in a unique position where I could see the entire restaurant; my job was to nonchalantly watch but not watch so that we would always know where he was. I was scolded several times for not being as nervous as they were.

The Ghost of Christmas Past made every effort to not walk by our table. The Hater and Little Brother made every effort to not make eye contact. I made fun of them both for being turkeys.

The Hater and Little Brother inhaled their food. They squirmed until I asked for the rest of mine in a doggy bag. We left, noting that it was, by far, the most awkward dining experience The Hater has ever had -- and one of the most entertaining ones I have had.

In retrospect, The Hater says that it would not have been as j-awkward if Little Brother hadn't been with us. He says that we probably would have spoken to him if it had just been us.

Knowing what we know now, there's no way we're going back to that restaurant for a while.

beta

The first time I can remember hearing the word "beta" was at a slumber party. I was in fifth or sixth grade and we wanted to watch a movie that someone had brought to the party. The birthday girl had a sad face and said that we couldn't watch the movie because her machine was in beta. Whatever that meant; to me it meant we couldn't watch the movie. Beta must be bad.

Around this same time we went to Memphis for Thanksgiving with my aunt's family. She had a son a couple of years older than me (although at the time that seemed like an eternity). He had two or three beta, and each of them was inside a little bowl. I remember asking why they were separated. They were beta, I was told, and they would eat each other if they were together. Weird. Beta must be carnivorous.

And then there were high school algebra and trig classes where we used alpha and beta and sines and cosines. I hated math classes. Beta must be complicated.

Tra-la-tra-la...

Time passed. The Hater and I became a thing. He was sucked into the beta fish-and-plant gift combo. Fluffy the beta ate the roots to the plant that sat on top of my book shelf. I liked holding mirrors up to the fish bowl and shining a light so that Fluffy would strut her stuff and get mad. That fish lived for about a year and a half without me changing the water. Beta must like muck.

I joined a Greek theater fraternity and had to learn the Greek alphabet for pledging. I could say the whole thing in about nine seconds. (Thank goodness for rote memory.) The powers who decided that clowning was enough to be considered "theatrical" also were so impressed that they made me say the alphabet again so that they could time me. Epsilon always threw me off. Beta must be simple.

Learning the Greek alphabet threw me off when it came to my summer of ROTC. It was bravo, not beta, which you have to admit has a better audible ring. (Although the Drill Sergeants were less than impressed and more than willing to assign push-ups when you called bravo the wrong name. I know this from personal experience.) They divided us into groups for several things. The Alphas were always the best groups and the Echoes were the worst groups. I stood proudly in the echo group for most things, except for shooting an M-16. I was the best female shot in my platoon, which made that the ONLY alpha group to which I could belong (with the exception of the book-learning stuff because I'm a natural nerd). I averaged delta and echo, and I was okay with that; I was there to endure, not excel. Bravo, much less beta, would have been an over-shot.

There may or may not be more beta memories lost in my brain. The point is that I don't have a great association in my head for beta... and now the blog is exactly that. This is my first beta post, and I'm not entirely sure what that means. But here it is. Ta-da: betafied.

I hope that everybody can still access and read it. Else beta will forever be known as FUBAR.

holding my breath

I interviewed for another job Monday night. It's with my current company. There were four applicants, so I'm excited for pretty good odds...

I have no idea if I'll get it or not. No clue. I'm more than qualified for the position, but I can't fake seniority or years with the company. So we're just waiting for now. I'm afraid they're halfway looking for a puppet, and I'm afraid they know my strings aren't easy to tug.

We'll just have to wait and see, but until we find out, let's all hold our breath.

the deal-breaker

I had a crazy dream last night. Surreal crazy.

I dreamed that The Hater was trying to convince me that he should let these people cut him up and put him in a stew. And while they were doing just that I was trying to decide if I could confide this drama to a family of trapeze artists.

This morning I woke up and told The Hater he didn't have my permission to let someone cut him up for a stew. I told him that I didn't think reincarnation worked that way. He assured me he didn't want to be stew meat.

I made it clear that if he ever thought that being cut up alive for a stew was a good idea, that would be a marriage deal-breaker. We decided that was fair; it's healthy for our marriage to know exactly what is expected of each other.

tech: good or bad?

We had no electricity last night for eight hours. It cut off after The Hater came home from work and didn't come back until after midnight. The Hater was at a total loss without his technology.

We folded and stuffed Christmas cards by candlelight and went to bed early. He hooked up the splitter to his iPod and we listened to a "Coast to Coast" radio show as we tried to stay warm under several quilts.

We went out to eat for supper and killed some time walking around a few stores before realizing that we'd have to entertain ourselves by candlelight. Even in such a desparate situation I still could not talk him into playing a game of candlelit Scrabble with me -- so that box remains unopened on the toy case.

So we couldn't watch Monday night football (instead we would just hum the theme song for it). We couldn't check our email (or play blog games). We couldn't even listen to Christmas music or the radio. The Hater had some seroius technology Jonesing and almost broke out into hives for some remote control action.

We ended up finding an alarm clock we liked this past weekend after my trusty buddy of twelve years passed on to the big dump in the sky. But we couldn't set it to alarm without any electriciy. The Hater set his cell phone alarm, which did not snooze this morning.

The cat kept showing off that she could see better than we could. She attacked her strings and hid on her blanket. We lit all kinds of candles. I thought it was neat for a change. We even broke out my old ROTC green flashlight.

The Hater was less than impressed. He's more dependant on the tech than I am, although I admit that I was grossed out this morning when the wireless wasn't working on the laptop and I had to come into the other room to use the Mac to do the important email checking and blog posting.

We wouldn't have made it in the Amish flock.

a house divided

The Hater and I can't agree. There's been much banter today.

He thinks I should support the Titans under all circumstances. I think he should support the legacy of Tennessee football under the same circumstances, which means cheering for Peyton under all circumstances.

He says it's not the same. I disagree. He says we'd have to cheer for any Tennessee alumni if that was the case, which means most games would end in a "push". I disagree. Peyton's the trump card. He knows that, but he still disagrees.

But today they played each other despite our disagreement... and in the past we've cheered for both teams together, but this year The Hater is cheering for the Titans instead. He says that Peyton can take another loss and still have the best team in the NFL. I say that if the Titans win, it's not going to change this season, and Peyton needs the padding now for the ring later.

We've argued about this all weekend, but to no avail. A 60-yard field goal within the last seconds of the game secured a W for the Titans. Sorry Peyton.

We'll go back to cheering for each team individually next week. Go team go.

the bleak midwinter

Yesterday was an interesting day. Early in the morning, after being told that my work would not be open, The Hater and I decided to slide out and get some groceries before the big snow came. Slide we did, but not into anything, so that was okay.

The Hater grilled hot dogs for lunch. I made mac and cheese. This might sound boring, but really it was a big deal. We've not had hot dogs since we moved here, and mac and cheese has NEVER intentionally landed on my plate. I'm slowly trying to appreciate the world of cheese, albeit fake cheese, and although I ate some of the macaroni, it's not a culinary masterpiece I plan on making or eating again.

I've wrapped all of the Christmas presents that we'd already bought. We watched movies. I made Nana's cornbread dressing for supper.

Sometime after I sauteed the goodies for the dressing and before we decided to mull some cider for supper the stove top died. Fortunately the oven still worked. We ended up microwaving the mulled cider, which we admit was a redneck solution, but we really didn't care.

We took some of the dressing to a neighbor who lives on the other side of the complex. It was still snowing, and we found it to be between ankle-deep and shin-deep. By the time we made our way back to the apartment we had lost a scarf. The Hater told me it was too yucky in the parking lot to go to work today.

So I called my boss. She said that was fine. It's not supposed to get above freezing until 2 this afternoon. I've seen some people sliding around the apartment complex, and saw one person slide into the gate. I woke up The Hater to tell him I was feeling guilty, that maybe we could make it into work.

So far the plan remains to stay here. Even as I type I can hear people spinning wheels and scraping ice outside. They're braver than we are today.