Today was the first real winter-y day in the desert. We went all out and dug out the parkas and fuzzy boots. It was 50 degrees. That’s freezing, people. Our Alaskan friends are going to make fun of us, but we totally expect it. If we’re not here to be made fun of, we don’t know what they’d do. Go ahead, point and laugh. We can take it. We won’t be able to hear you with our earmuffs on anyway. Here are some things to amuse.

1. Gingerbread houses. Once upon a time, Amylynn decided to make a gingerbread house with her kids. That will never happen again. The pieces wouldn’t stick and the frosting got everywhere. Someone ate all the candies and then the dog ate the entire house.  No one really likes gingerbread anyway. We’re going to leave it up to the professionals from now on. These people should make gingerbread houses all year long. Follow the link and be amazed.

2. Obama says, play hockey. Mr Obama is sick of this no hockey bullshit – at least that’s the way these guys reported it. We agree wholeheartedly. Gary Bettman didn’t return our call, but he sure as hell better return the president’s. He has access to nukes. Anyway, the NHL has ruined our New Years Eve plans and we’re not having any more of it. The Alaskan friend had predicted the lockout would resolve in January. We sincerely hope he has the right of it.

3. Vacation days. As we stated earlier in the week, Bank of No Forks won’t allow us roll over vacation days so we have to use them all up
by the end of the year. That means taking vacation days for absolutely no reason. We guess we like not getting dressed and taking 2 hour lunches but still, we’d rather be in Antigua on blustery days like this.

4. Cacti wearing hats. A Saguaro in a Santa hat is how we know for sure that it’s Christmas in the desert. Otherwise, we’d wonder why the traffic is so damn awful and they keep playing that ridiculous music on the radio. Besides, everyone loves a good hat.

5. Cookie Dough. The best part of Christmas may very well be the cookies. And the dough. And the warm cookies. And the cool cookies. All of those things  are truly wonderful. You all know the absolute best part. Not sharing. You know it’s true.

Aside from lunch, every time I sat down for longer than fifteen minutes, I fell asleep. More blog tomorrow.

I’ve been trying to figure out a birthday present for Ava. It’s a curse I bear – trying to find perfect presents for people. I’ve yet to be able to pull one off for Ava. I tried to get the actor who plays Boris on Royal Pains to give her an autographed picture but he – or his representatives – blew me off. This time I was on a quest for an action figure of Daryl Dixon from The Walking Dead. We’ve seen them. We even have a friend who possesses one. If you want one these days you can pick one up on Amazon for $279.99. Seriously.

So, then I started hunting for a Jax Teller of Sons of Anarchy action figure. Those don’t exist – not for any amount of money.

Crap crap crappity crap.

Instead I gave her something priceless.

I made her a gift certificate that entitled her to win one of our arguments. No matter what the subject matter, if she redeemed her coupon I would immediately stop arguing and she could win. For example, I would shut up and go get a stupid flu shot or immediately stop arguing and vote Republican or whatever repugnant thing she came up with.

I don’t have to worry about that Republican thing for another four years and, at this point, she seems to be actually hoping I get the flu so she can lord it over me that she got a flu shot and I refused.

Still, I wait with some fear in my heart. Perhaps I should avoid arguing with her for a while. At least until she loses the Golden Ticket.

Ava’s out all week. She’s trying to use up her vacation time because Bank of No Forks won’t let you roll over any vacation time. Essentially that means that the entire office is trying to fit in all their days by the end of the year. There’s hardly anyone here on any given day.

With Ava gone all week, I have to get my amusement where I can get it.

Some back story. The night janitors who come to our office after hours are fairly worthless. The only reason I’m convinced that they come into our office at all is to use our sink to dump their mop buckets. Apparently, they are also moonlighting at the zoo and, before they get to our office, they mop out the elephant enclosure. Our sink drains about as fast as molasses so every morning when we come into make coffee the sink has a five-inch ring of mud in it. Grooooooooss.

I had our receptionist complain about it to building maintenance. I love to sic the receptionist on people. She’s like an attack dog with ribbons in its hair.

Flash forward to today. I’m in my office. Jojo Kitty is asleep on my desk. The phone is ringing with disgruntled customers. I’m considering getting drunk. It’s fairly typical for a Monday morning. The only difference is that Ava isn’t across the hall.

The receptionist comes into my office during a lull and plops herself down in a chair and grabs the Self magazine on my desk. I have no idea why this magazine comes to my house, but it shows up every month without fail. I assure you I am not paying anyone for it. It has stupid articles like how to make your hair look like Kate Middleton’s (I suggest you buy a good wig), or that if you don’t sleep well, it could be that

Self Magazine Nov 22

you’re afraid of the dark and don’t even know it (eye roll).

The receptionist leafed through it and read me the headlines and commented on pictures and features and such. She stopped when she got to a pull out section on yoga. Clearly she’s never tried yoga cause she looked at these poses and acted like they’re so easy.  The added whammy on these poses is that you’re supposed to do them against a wall amping up the pressure on your arm or whatever other spindly appendage is supposed to be balancing your weight. She shows me a plank where the skinny girl’s feet are on the wall and she’s perfectly straight.

“Oh, that looks easy,” she says.

“Really?” I look at her in disbelief. I happen to love yoga and that shit looks impossible to me.

“Sure. It’s just like a push up.”

“OK, try it right there.” I pointed towards an empty space in my office.

The whole thing worked out as well as you’d expect only now when the landlord comes down to see to our complaints, I’m gonna mention the feet prints on my wall.

This morning The Bandit was babbling some story to me and, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really listening. You can’t possibly listen to everything your children tell you. It’s impossible. Sometimes it makes you feel like a bad person, but they talk all the time. ALL THE TIME. If you listen to everything your head would explode. God’s honest truth. Their stories never go anywhere. The sentences never actually end they just wander off to a pointless question. There’s always a question at the end and that’s where the trouble is. You can’t just blindly agree because then you’ve agreed to let them shave the dog and you don’t want to say no because maybe, just this once, they asked if they could go clean their room or something.

Just this morning I listened to twelve minutes of Sassy’s latest dream before I had to tune her out and just do the nod and “uh huh” trick.

Then The Bandit came up with his nonsense while I was making school lunches. It was something about space aliens and the car and somehow the principal of the school.

“…then I said he was an ****,” the Bandit told me with enthusiasm.

I swear to Zeus he said “asshole”. NOW I was paying attention. “Did you just say someone was an asshole?”

“No!” He looked at me aghast. “I’m not allowed to say that word.” There was a pause then he added hopefully, “Am I?”

Yeah, no.

We were on another one of our epic conference calls at Bank of No Forks today. Mostly Ava and I don’t pay much attention – especially to these town hall type of calls. Today we screwed around on Pinterest and complained that we were starving and that the call was too long and who were these bozos anyway?

Finally at the end they tossed up the question and answer section. That’s when we always tune in. The questions can either be stuff your sorta interested in or they are so freaking stupid you can’t believe the asker is able to get through the day under their own locomotion.

Today one of our fellow associates stated that everyone was worried about layoffs (Duh!). He stated that it was awfully close to Christmas and that fact really amps up the level of concern. He basically asked if the upper management on the line would just come clean and tell us how many people would be laid off and when.

Oh sure, like they’re going to say there will be 172 of you in the next 37 days.

Then I thought – hey – what if they made a game out of it? Like a combination of Thunderdome and The Hunger Games. Or we could put up the Octagon in the parking lot and just go at it like Ultimate Fighters. 500 employees enter – only 250 leave.

We could get someone really cool to do the theme song like Tina Turner did for Mad Max.

Ava and I are really looking forward to the cool costumes.