Some girls are crafty like ice is cold; I am more like an Otter Pop that's been left on a picnic table for ten minutes in mid-summer. That said, may I recommend this spiffy craft from Martha Stewart?
My Girl Scout troop and I made these crackers tonight (well, not the ones at left -- ones like the ones at left) and if sixteen ten-year-olds can produce perfect Halloween crackers, you can too. All you need are: a glue stick, scissors a few empty toilet paper rolls (or a paper towel roll cut in half), some embroidery floss or twine, some crepe paper, Halloween stickers (if you like embellishment) and some candy. I picked up everything I needed at a local craft store and Target -- go now and you can get some nifty bat rings to embellish the ends of the crackers.
Note: this craft does not include the oh-so-satisfying snapping sound. But if you wanted, you could order cracker snaps online, then maybe whip up a new batch of crackers as placecards for Thanksgiving.
So my mother's hitting A Landmark Birthday in a few days. I was originally going to throw her a surprise party -- I had colluded with my stepfather and brother on this, I had my Woman on the Ground in Virginia to help with the prepping, I had a list of people to invite -- and then Mom called and said, "I think I'd like to spend my birthday in California."
"We'd love to have you," I replied, while my inner party-planner stamped her foot and began a steady monologue that went: #$%&! #$%&! #$%&! "Put Joe on, would you?"
When Joe got on, I asked, "How serious is she about this trip?"
"She's pretty serious," he said. So I called off the party planning.
Two months later, my mom called again and let slip, "I don't think we'll be able to make it out to California after all."
"Um," I said. "Put Joe on."
#$%&! #$%&! #$%&!
So I ended up buying a ticket out to Virginia as a total non-surprise, and arranging travel for my brother to come up, so that we could have at least one surprise as befits the observation of A Landmark Birthday.
Then my brother called. "You may have noticed I live in coastal Florida," he said. "You may have also noticed that it's hurricane season. Do the names 'Gustav' and 'Hanna' ring a bell? The airlines keep laughing whenever I call to ask about flight schedules. Also, what should I get Mom for her birthday? She's anti-material goods. And I don't want to encourage her remodeling mania, so don't even try the Home Depot gift card on me."
"She likes chocolate," I said absently. "She loves the chocolate we can't get in the states. Get her a few cases of Bounty bars."
"Great!" said my brother, then signed off so he could resume storm-proofing his place. It hit me that not only had my last surprise been thwarted, I had also given away my emergency backup birthday gift idea.
#$%&! #$%&! #$%&!
Let my sad plight be a lesson to all of you: never try to plan ahead. And never tell anyone else your emergency backup birthday gift idea, even if they do share 50% of your DNA.
And let me take this opportunity to survey you. Charitable donation to a cause the recipient cares about: Great gift or obvious last-minute scramble?
A few weeks back, I was shooting the breeze with the cashier the local pool, and she mentioned that Weezer had recently played out on the decommissioned Naval base on the west end of the island.
"They're this sort of alternative band ..." she added helpfully.
"I know who they are!" I protested. "I was in school when Weezer came out."
"Oh, I'm sorry. It's just that you're ..." and then she trailed off, because there is no good way to tell your boss at lap swim that she's old.
Reader, let me tell you: THAT was nothing. Because a few minutes ago, our mail room guy came rolling through the office, looking to drop off the metric ton of press releases we still get via the postal service, and he passed the Lionel Ritchie album someone put up next to the printer as a joke.
"Excuse me," he asked. "Is that Nicole Ritchie's father?"
This is so wrong on so many levels.
Because I read this in "Dear Prudence" :
I tearfully explained to him how sad I was that we don't hold each other at night. He then told me that it's uncomfortable for him—too hot and confining. Is it unreasonable to ask a partner to change their sleeping style to accommodate this particular show of affection? Maybe one night a week? Sleeping entwined with my lover is a very tender experience for me, and I intensely don't want to lose this lover, yet I'm finding it very hard to accept that he is unwilling to find a way to make this meaningful act a possibility for us.
And my first response was to tell the letter writer to save that adolescent drama for Cary Tennis.
My second was to write a response to the letter-writer's new luv-ah. "Dear Solo Sleep Fan: Get out. Now. Ten bucks says she likes to watch you sleep, and we all know how creepy that is."
I don't recall whether or not I've told youall this already, but our trip to the Big Island that I was all excited about a few months ago ... was cancelled. We had our tickets on Aloha airlines, and while we were in Blacksburg, that's when we learned that Aloha had shut down operations.
In theory, I was supposed to spend this past week marveling at lava flows at Hawai'i Volcano National Park. In practice, I have been reading about the vog that the park is grappling with and fuming at our credit card company. You see, when we learned that Aloha was shutting down, we turned to each other and said, "Hey! One of the good things about using a credit card to purchase goods and services is that when said goods or services fail to materialize, you can call them up and dispute the charge! Credit card companies even tell you this!"
I first contacted the customer service hotline at our credit card company on April 1. We are still negotiating with the company. We have sent them copies of the billing statement where the tickets showed up (copies which -- heh -- they had to send to us first before we could officially send them back), copies of our e-tickets and proof that we tried to resolve this matter with Aloha airlines before asking the credit card company to eliminate the charge for the service that was not delivered. I look forward to seeing what delaying tactic the card company uses with us next.
And by "look forward," I mean "sublimate my irritation by writing cranky consumer letters." In the past month I have:
-- Heavily edited a letter Phil sent to the San Francisco Giants front office after he had a thoroughly unpleasant experience with some peanut-throwing gibbons in the Oracle suites.
-- Sent an email to Martha Stewart Omnimedia after a peel-down Swiffer ad kept me from clicking a hyperlink five times in a row. I'm okay with ads on websites. I am not okay with the ad completely biffing the entire user experience. It is not a good thing.
-- Sent an email to Dairy Queen denouncing this commercial as sexist and revolting.
-- Sent an email to my representative on the EBMUD board of directors pointing out that an across-the-board 19% reduction in water use effectively punishes people who were already conserving and only provides incentive to whoop it up in the fat times so that the next round of cutbacks doesn't hurt.
With the exception of the last letter, I've received quite nice replies. (As I should, since I wrote quite polite letters.) And someday, Phil will tell you how the Giants made everything okay. But here is the weird and guilty thing: I freakin' love writing these letters. It is better than yoga for reducing the tension in my back.
So now, I have only two things to worry about. First, that I really am on the road to becoming one of those cranks who writes everyone about everything. And second, that I'm never getting my money back from the credit card company. Because if that's the case, I'm going to need to do a lot of letter-writing to get the tension out of my back.
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