How Many Adjectives Can You Think Of For Mackerel?

So, I really need to blog today, but I am fresh out of things to say. Instead, I leave you with this lovely link.

Just fair warning, don’t click on this unless you are at a place where you can safely laugh your ass off. These are Weight Watchers recipe cards circa 1974, and the commentary is just hilarious. I seriously laughed so hard I cried when I read these. Just go to the bottom of the screen and click on the link to start the tour – or just click on a recipe and it will take you straight to that one.

I hope you read my blog again after this. If not, I understand. It’s all so…. Disturbing.

The Great Consumerism Battle of 2008

“Excess is its own punishment.” ~ Douglas Coupland; JPod

So, back around May-ish I went on this wild crusade to rid my heart of consumerism . Sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? It actually was a good idea. I was learning a lot about the things I value and why, and I was making good progress in making this H person a less consumeristic person which, in turn, was making H a more patient, more content person who was happier in her marriage. Not too shabby, if you ask me.

However, then the unthinkable happened. Then… DUM-DUM-DUM (insert sound effects here) September happened. Ugh. September. That was not a pretty month. Nor was October or November, and especially not December. I spent a good chunk of those months just trying to take care of me, and to get through each day. During this time the progress I made on my consumerism stayed fairly level. I was still conscious of the choices I was making, but I wasn’t making any forward progress and in some areas I was kind of being a slacker.

Anyhow, I’ve now determined that if I can’t feel like my old self again, I can at least try to keep up with the things that were making my old self a better self. Maybe it will help me like my new self better. Who knows? I think its time that I revisit my consumer hysteria and see what changes I can make…

First, let’s have a little chat about consumerism itself. Obviously, we consume stuff. Otherwise, we’d die. This seems like a fairly big deal to me, so I’m not going to just quit consuming cold turkey, as I very much like being alive. However, I think there comes a point where our consumption of stuff becomes a problem. Key problems with consumption, from my humble point of view, include:


**When we start having attitudes of entitlement about things. For example: *So-and-so has (whatever thing you want), so I should be able to have one, too; *I work hard and I’ve earned (whatever) so I deserve it! (usually accompanied by high pitched whine and a pouty face).

**When we start depending on things we don’t really need, or depending on things for poor reasons. Examples: *we go shopping and spend $ because we’re bored or depressed, *we rely on possessions to define us or give people good impressions of us.

**When we get to where we can’t let go of stuff. Examples: *We clean out our closets but don’t actually get rid of anything ‘just in case’ we might wear it again. *We tell someone they will have to pry the Dark Tower books from our cold dead fingers before we’ll give them up (oh wait, was that just me?)


Now we can be consumeristic about a lot of things. We can very obviously be consumeristic about material things, but I think it is also possible to have consumeristic attitudes about other things as well. For example, we can be consumeristic with the way we spend our time, or how much love we choose to bestow on other people. So I guess I don’t really see consumerism as a material problem, so much as I see it as an attitude problem. This shouldn’t really be a surprise – after all, our actions and attitudes and beliefs are pretty interwoven, aren’t they? And would it really be a surprise that a generation raised on the ideologies of entitlement and instant gratification would struggle with this? I don’t think so.

So why do I think I need to curb this consumeristic monster that is taking over the inside of me? The answers are complicated, but I’ll try to make sense of them here:

**First, I read an interesting article in Relevant Magazine several months back. The article focused on this particular problem of consumption, and one quote that I remember read, “God created an economy of enough. God didn’t create a world of scarcity. But we’ve created poverty and need by not living out this command to love our neighbors as ourselves”. Now I’m not totally sure on the God part – being totally sure about the God part is not a luxury afforded to people in the throes of grief (and if they tell you otherwise, I’m 99% sure they’re lying), but I do feel pretty sure about the not living in a world of scarcity thing. I live in one medium sized city inside of one state in one country on one continent in this world and everyday I see so much stuff it seems to me that Fort Wayne could support a small country, if we had to, just on the stuff we already have. I remember reading Generation X and being convicted by Dag’s comment on doing a job that was indirectly enslaving third world countries. I don’t think I necessarily do a job that enslaves third world countries, but I think my lifestyle enslaves people. I have all this stuff and all this cash and all this time, and by being selfish with it I’m enslaving others who don’t have it but need it. Not a very capitalist view, but my heart says that it’s true. And frankly, I can’t live with this. I can’t live with feeling like my life is a drain on the well being of other lives. It’s so easy to do – just go about my life however I feel like it – because I don’t see those people that desperately need my spare room or the $20 in my pocket or an hour of my time to learn how to read. But they’re there, and I’m tired of being part of the problem. I want to be part of the solution.

**Secondly, I think that when we work on taking the consumeristic attitudes away, it allows us room to let the beautiful things in. I don’t exactly know what those beautiful things will be, and I suspect they will be different for different people. I can tell you that from May to September last year I found myself becoming more patient and more content, and finding intense joy in little things and small moments. I think it was a good thing. I hope it comes back to me more as I travel this journey. I just think if I change from consumeristic, I have to change to something else, and I suspect that something else will be more beautiful. And I am definitely up for being more beautiful.

So here I am, working on this consumerism thing again. I’m going to identify a few changes I’d like to make in my life that I think will help. Now you may be asking why I am going to change specific things in my life when I’m trying to work on a general attitude. I think this is a fair question, so I’m going to address it. I think that by starting with a few small changes, I will start to become more conscientious of the bigger picture of my life. Ultimately, the things we do are reflections of the people we are. So if I change a few of the things I do, and if it helps me to see other things I should change, and if it makes me overall more conscious of the way I am living, hopefully it will help to change the person I am. In the end, I hope that I can measure my attitudes by looking at my actions. I am hoping this makes sense, because I don’t know how else to describe it. If it doesn’t make any sense, somebody let me know and I’ll work on an alternate explanation – maybe an analogy of some sort, which, if at all possible, will involve a hippopotamus because right now I think they’re really funny looking animals.

Anyhow, here’s the part I’ve been trying to get to all along: the stuff I want to change. First I’m going to revisit some of my goals from May 2007, then I’m going to start a list of the new changes I want to look at. Here goes:

May 2007

*The Great Soda Pop Debate: Anyone have any idea how much Diet Coke I am capable of consuming in one sitting? It’s not pretty. I realized that I was on this diet soda binge for one reason only, and a very stupid reason at that: water is not sweetened. I also decided that sweetness was not a good enough reason to spend a lot of $ on diet soda and fill my body with artificial chemicals. So I am continuing my cutback on the diet soda for this round. The general rule is no more than 1- 12oz. can per day, and less if possible. I have pretty much stuck to this since May with the exception of nights when I drink and need a mixer. I’m going to keep going with this one.

*Clothing: I’m going to try not to buy clothing from anywhere but second hand shops for the next 6 months, unless something catastrophic happens and I suddenly need an entirely new wardrobe (i.e. I lose a bunch of weight, gain a bunch of weight, get preggers, have a house fire, etc.). And I’m just plain not buying shoes. I have so many shoes I’m ashamed. I followed this for awhile and have recently been impulse buying (well, as impulse as it gets for me anyways – meaning I bought an article of clothing recently without feeling loads of guilt and then wondering when I got home if I should take it back). So I’m going to try going with this again. There is one modification to the rule from last time around: I have decided I can make clothing, if I want to, and I can buy brand new fabric for that.

*Tick Tock, Tick Tock: Last time around I decided I was awfully selfish with my time and the person who was most affected by this was my husband. So I self-imposed a rule that I would be home and make supper for him every night before doing my other activities. So far it has worked well, so I’m going to stick with it. Interestingly, it has forced me to better manage my time, make better choices about what to say ‘no’ to, and has actually made me like my husband more. Weird, huh?


The New Stuff

*Fast Food Nightmare: So, up until the dreaded September I pretty much didn’t eat fast food. For some reason I’ve started eating it. This is problematic for my waistline, my wallet, and my sanity, as fast food restaurants don’t do much of anything toward making me a calmer person. So I’ve decided to give it up entirely during the week, and only indulge on the weekends if hubby and I happen to be out and need fed. I don’t see any good reason to use resources on food that is actively bad for me when those resources could be somewhere else doing something good.

*My Favorite Legal Drug: So, hubby and I have this weekly ritual of hitting the Starbucks on Sunday mornings. This is a fun little ritual that ensures us time to just hang out and do nothing once a week. I like it, D likes it, we all like it. It’s good for our marriage to have something that is so ours, if you know what I mean. However, this does not mean that I need to make a Starbucks run three or four times a week. I might as well throw 4 bucks through the shredder. I mean, Starbucks coffee is good, but do I really need to indulge myself so frequently?

*New or Used?: So, in the Dark Tower, Rolland tells Jake that a man who can’t stand to share his habits is a man who needs to give them up. I ask myself: What am I ridiculously possessive of? The answer is: Books. I think my book collection makes me look cool. My book collection says: I am a person who reads. I am a person with culture and intelligence. I am enlightened and exotic and cool. Or it says: H, you buy too much crap. So for the next 6 months my goal is to check out the majority of books I want to read from the library. If for some reason I think it would be wise to own a particular book (I’m reading it for book club and will be writing all over it, etc.), I will try to find it used rather than buying a new copy.

*You Are All Going To Laugh At Me: Sadly, I see myself becoming a POAS addict. That’s POAS: Pee On A Stick (take a pregnancy test). Like I said, it’s sad. And, like I said, you are all going to laugh at me. It’s really not fair that you should be laughing. All women trying to bring home a live baby are at-risk for POAS addiction; just like smokers are at risk for lung cancer, needle users are at risk for AIDS, etc. Anyway, you can spend an awful lot of money on sticks only to pee on them and throw them in the trash. This makes no sense whatsoever, but I do it anyways because I have to know if there is even the remotest, teensiest chance that I could be pregnant and the stick could know about it. Pee sticks hold the knowledge of the gods, I tell you. This has to stop! Peeing on a stick is not going to make me any more or less pregnant. Either I am or I’m not, and the sticks can’t change that. So, I am going to try not to pee on sticks unless I have a reason to believe I should (late period, tri-phasic temp pattern, etc.)

This is not about saving $. This is not about losing weight. This is not about a healthier lifestyle. If my assumptions are correct, my little experiment will benefit me in all of these areas, but these are not the goals. These, my friends, will be the side effects. The goal is to make me more aware of what I need and don’t need; to show me the places where my heart is selfish and whiny; to learn to appreciate things more; to soften my heart to the things that really matter. This is not about a certain behavior or a certain possession; this is about the state of my heart. Certain behaviors and possessions are involved, but they are merely means to get to the part of my heart that needs to grow and change.

And if I fail at something? If I make 8 Starbucks stops and pee on 12 sticks and drink a 2 liter of Diet Coke? Well, then I fail. But I fail at a particular task. And this is okay. If I make 8 Starbucks stops, I haven’t met my goal, but I’ve certainly given myself something to think about. If I POAS 5 days earlier than I should have, I have the opportunity to pick apart my reasons for needing to do so – maybe it’s a control issue, maybe it’s a fear issue. Whatever. I pick it apart and I work on the ugly parts and I pick up and hope for better the next month. I refuse to define failing at a particular task as failing to learn and grow. So keep me accountable – ask me how many lattes I’ve had this week or how many spicy chicken sandwiches I’ve demanded or whether I’ve made my husband dinner. And if I tell you I’ve failed, find out why. Ask me what I’m learning from it. Ask me what my failure is showing me. But don’t assume that I am a failure. I’m sure not going to.

If I am going to grow, I need permission to fail. It’s a hard concept to grasp when we’re all ultimately trying to succeed, but I think that sometimes it’s the only way to go. Without permission to fail, I will stick to every goal – but I will do it because I feel like I have to, or everyone will disapprove. And if I fail, I’ll get flustered and give up. If you give me permission to fail, I will try to stick to every goal. I will try to do this because I want to discipline myself and I want to see how I can grow. But I will also probably fail. And I will dust myself off and move on, because you’re going to be cheerleading for me and exploring with me the whole way. See the difference? So don’t be alarmed if I fail now and then, and don’t be afraid to ask me why.

So that’s what I’ve got for now. I know it’s a little long, but hey, it’s my heart here! My heart and the growth it needs can’t really be summed up in two paragraphs or in a short bullet-pointed list. And if it could, I wouldn’t really want it to be my heart. I’m going to go for it, and work on this ugly part of me and hopefully…. hopefully we’ll clear out some of the clutter and let some of the beautiful things in.

My Hips Don't Lie... Or, At Least They Won't In Another 7 Weeks

I am happy to report that Mia and I survived our first night of bellydancing! I don't have a lot to update, but I will leave you with these little bits:

First, we are going to get to use veils at some point. So Mia and I are basically going to be sexy little vamps behind our secretive little veils. Yikes!

Secondly, if we go for the 2nd and 3rd 7 week sessions, we can be in an actual performance in June. Holy crap! Hollywood, here we come!

Last night our instructor attempted to teach us the Belly Dance stance (or posture, or some such other word that I can't remember right now), which she says will make our hip movements more prominent. I went home and showed D. He agrees. He agrees a lot. He agrees quite heartily. But enough about that. Our instructor also attempted to teach us how to pinch our finger and thumb together so that our fingers look like little snake mouths. She says this is sexy, but so far I just look like I'm trying to make shadow puppets of wolves with Tourette's. Add a little swearing and wha-la! there you have it. I suppose there is always room for practice.

Ok, so I'm sure most of you know that belly dancing involves rolling the belly. According to our instructor, this is just a series of isolated tummy movements that you put together to make the tummy roll. She explained it and demonstrated each of the movements and put them together and it appears that she knows what she's talking about. However, no one prepared me for how incredibly creepy this is. She seriously looks like her stomach has been inhabited by some alien creature which is just hopping around inside of her, jumping from organ to organ. It's very creepy. It's I-don't-know-if-I-can-bring-myself-to-do-it creepy. But I will continue to press on for the time being. Besides, I can barely do all the movements by themselves, let alone put them together and imitate alien invasion. Maybe by June I'll catch on...

I Signed Up!

So, here's the first step toward meeting my New Year's goals...

drumroll, please....

I signed up for Belly Dancing!

Mia and I will start classes on Thursday. Stay tuned for tales of our (mis)adventures!

New Year = New Goals

Ahhh… it is a new year. Most people make resolutions, don’t they? I have never been one who is big on resolutions because I don’t really stick to them anyways. Plus it always seems that resolutions focus on things we don’t like about ourselves that we want to fix – and we’re usually unkind to ourselves in the process. So I’ve decided to set some goals for myself that are things I really want to do (as opposed to the things I think I *should* do). We won’t call them resolutions because if we do, it’s certain that I won’t do a single one of them. So we’ll just call them goals or things-H-feels-like-doing and hope that I don’t psych myself out with this.

I will dispense with my goals momentarily, but I must first note that 2008 simply has to be kinder to D and I than 2007 was, doesn’t it? Because if it’s not I don’t know what I’ll do. So along with all my new goals, I’m also hoping against all hope that 2008 is kinder and gentler and more blessed and all that jazz. Please hope and/or pray for the same thing for me, if you have a moment. I need all the hope I can get.


Goals for 2008:

*Take a Belly Dancing class

*Walk Dingo 1-2 times a week when the weather is nice (this will make Dingo very, very happy)

*Read Dante’s Divine Comedy

*Publish my book!

*Make and use re-usable shopping bags.

*Participate in the AIDS walk.

*Work on being a good mentor for the young ladies in my life.

*Get a bike and bike instead of driving when possible.

*Work on adjusting my consumeristic lifestyle and be happy with less.

*Blog once a week (will this make you very, very happy, dear reader?)


So, that’s not too shabby for a New Year’s list of goals. Not too unkind, not too demanding – but definitely worth thinking about. Hopefully I’ll be able to meet at least a few of these goals – that should at least make for an interesting 2008, even if it isn’t any gentler…

2007 Quote Review

I thought with only 4 more days left in this year it was probably safe to go ahead and post my annual quote review. So here they are, my favorite quotes from 2007:

First, the silly stuff:

• So, if you want to get some salt water fish, I could go take a bath in your bathtub. ~ Velma
• I'll take it any way I can get it from you... I meant in regard to cookies. ~ me
• I hate Pine trees because you can’t run barefoot in the yard. They have all those needles and they stab you in the foot and I take it personally. ~ me
• I have this thing that I don’t do and it’s, like, tell the truth. ~ Velma
• Everything’s pointy when you’re naked. ~ Cuthbert
• Jesus is the way, the truth, and the Calvin Klein Obsession. ~ Cuthbert
• If I ever get indignant at your house I’m going to put my hands in my pockets and go, “Poof, poof, poof!” ~ Cuthbert
• And some days, I get drop kicked. ~ Mia
• Wait! I’m gonna protest you killing me. I’m gonna write my congressman! ~ Cuthbert
• Aren’t those the healthy cigarettes? ~ Dana
• I think it was C.S. Lewis. No, maybe it was Oprah. ~ me
• You’ll have to pee by the light of the shower. I think Meat Loaf had a song about that. ~ Cuthbert
• I thought about being a mountain climber today and moving to a place that has mountains because I really like mountain climbing... apparel. ~ Velma
• There’s no place like rehab! There’s no place like rehab! ~ I don’t know who said this, but it was during the passaround story with Britney Spears’ golden I-don’t-give-a-fuck scissors!
• When something tragic happens… or butter. ~ Mia
• Even at an early age I knew what it was like not to have a star on my belly. ~ me
• She really wasn’t down with me spitting in her mouth. ~ Velma
• Nobody drop kicks my sister! ~ my 5 year old nephew

Then, the serious stuff:

• There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal ‘Once upon a time’. Endings are heartless. Ending is just another word for goodbye. ~ Stephen King; The Dark Tower
• I never want to have something that’s just mine. ~ Mia
• Life, liberty, and the pursuit of more stuff. ~ Cuthbert’s rant on consumerism
• It made him feel very small, and he supposed there was nothing wrong with that. In the scheme of things, he was very small. ~ Stephen King; The Waste Lands
• I’m just waiting for the church to die so that church can happen. ~ Cuthbert
• Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering. Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well being? Man is sometimes, extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering, and that is a fact. ~ Dostoyevsky; Notes From Underground
• Storytelling always changes time. At least it does in my world. ~ Stephen King; Wizard and Glass
• Church is where you can capitalize on Jesus’ admonission to love, fuckin love. ~ Cuthbert
• I write not to stop my mind from thinking, but because I can’t stop it. Writing at least produces some fruit from the labor of compulsive thinking. ~ Brian McLaren
• If I have a choice between the kind of trouble that comes from too much passion or the kind that comes from too little, my choice will be easy ~ Brian McLaren
• One of the most tragic things ever to happen to the gospel was the emergence of the message that Jesus takes us somewhere else if we believe in him. ~ Rob Bell; Velvet Elvis
• If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many. ~ Douglas Coupland; JPod
• Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go do that, because the world needs people who have come alive. ~ Relevant Mag
• Maybe the Bible’s not the final word. Maybe God’s not done speaking to humanity. ~ Cuthbert
• One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. ~ C.S. Lewis
• The more one respects Jesus, the more one must be brokenhearted, embarrassed, furious, or some combination thereof when one considers what we Christians have done with Jesus. ~ Brian McLaren; A Generous Orthodoxy
• Having guests and visitors, if we do it right, is not an imposition, because we are not meant to rearrange our lives for our guests – we are meant to invite our guests to enter into our lives as they are. ~ Lauren Winner; Mudhouse Sabbath
• Excess is its own punishment. ~ Douglas Coupland; Polaroids From the Dead
• It is not so much the suffering but the senselessness of it that is unendurable. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
• You rarely defend the things you love. You enjoy them and tell others about them and invite others to enjoy them with you. ~ Rob Bell; Velvet Elvis
• We are not just called to be candles. We are called to be fire. ~ Shane Claiborne; The Irresistible Revolution

Feel free to grab these quotes and use them whenever appropriate... or, er, I guess some of them won't ever be exactly appropriate.... but you know what I mean, right? Hopefully 2008 will hold many more great quotations! I look forward to discovering them with you.

Christmas Trees & Orange Prison Jumpsuits

This weekend my family went to pick out Christmas trees. I say ‘trees’, as in ‘more than one tree’, because this sort of excursion involves multiple households now that my sister and myself are on our own. What was once a short family excursion to find one perfect tree* has now turned into a three ring circus with five or more of us running around like crazy trying to figure out how many trees we need, how we will ever locate this number of perfect trees, and how we are going to load them all up on the same truck so that they don’t fall off into the road on the way home and so that we are able to remember whose tree is whose by the time we get home.

*The idea of the perfect tree differs from person to person. While everyone else wants a nice, tall, full tree I always feel sorry for the straggly, Charlie Brown looking trees off in the corner being peed on by wild animals. For this reason, and because of my choice of pets who tend to have, uh, how do you say, some challenges, my husband has forbidden me from adopting any children, as he is afraid I would choose one whose medical issues would put us into bankruptcy or whose behavioral issues would leave us with yellow crime scene tape fencing off our house from the public. He is probably right. I’m such a sucker, even for sad looking trees.

This year the entourage consisted of my dad, my mom, my sister Velma, my husband D, and myself. We were looking for 4 trees – one for my parents’ house, one for Velma’s house, one for my house, and one for my mother-in-law, who couldn’t join us but was brave enough to trust our judgment in tree purchasing.

In order to get these trees, we headed out to a tree farm that we have frequented for many years. Tree farms are awesome because you can cut your tree down yourself and haul it away. This makes us sedentary Americans who lock ourselves indoors 22 hours a day feel like we are actually participating in nature, even if all we are doing is chopping down a tree with a 4 inch diameter trunk, thus inflating our carbon footprints for the sake of tradition. Also, these trees were $7. Yep, $7. You can’t beat that.

We all gathered at my parents’ house to head out for our annual tree excursion. I walked down to the basement to pick up some things I had left at my parents’ house a few weeks ago. I look up, and my dad is standing on the basement stairs. Wearing an orange prison jumpsuit.

Did you read that? Wearing an orange prison jumpsuit.

A few questions come to mind. First, where did my dad get a prison jumpsuit? Most people don’t just have one lying around. I certainly don’t. And it’s not like you can just go down to the prison jumpsuit store and pick up a few when the urge strikes you. Secondly, why is he wearing the jumpsuit? Even if one landed on my doorstep I would not wear one. Does he think it makes him look more outdoorsy? Maybe he’s worried about hunters not being able to see him (not that I’ve ever seen a hunter at the tree farm). Maybe he fancies that the jumpsuit has a slimming effect? No idea. I have no freakin clue what possessed my dad to don an orange prison jumpsuit, but there he is, standing on the basement stairs, wearing one.

I raise my eyebrows and make eye contact with Velma. She looks at me and suppresses a giggle.

After a long search for the saw (you can’t go tree hunting without a saw, after all) we head out. My parents drive their truck and the rest of us follow in my little Jetta that I’ve named Rollie (pron. Raww-lee). Go, Rollie, go! We keep a camera in the front seat just in case my parents get pulled over. If an officer makes my dad get out of the truck with that orange prison jumpsuit on, we want a picture.

We make small talk on the trip up to the tree farm. My husband laments that there might not be enough trees, as last year the tree supply was severely depleted. He says:

“Watch, we’ll get up there, and there will only be 2 trees.”

To which Velma replies, “Good, we can each have one!”

Um, not sure what kind of math you’re doing, Velma, but last time I checked we were looking for 4 trees to split between 6 people. This frightens me deeply, as Velma works for a Credit Union (not telling you which one!).

We arrive at the tree farm to find that the tree supply is pretty depleted, but there are more than 2 trees. This makes picking out a tree relatively easy, as there aren’t a whole lot to choose from. My dad hikes around in his orange prison jumpsuit. My husband studiously analyzes each tree, keeping tabs on their every characteristic with the Excel spreadsheet that’s going in his head. I look for the weak stragglers, knowing full well that no one is going to let me take them home. Poor little unloved trees.

As Velma begins her hunt for the perfect tree, my husband begins to lecture her on how to make a good tree choice. He tells her you have to look for the 3 T’s of Christmas tree choosing. Um, the 3 T’s? Has anyone ever heard of the 3 T's? I sure haven't, and it takes me about 4 seconds to figure that D is full of shit, and just made that up on the spot because he likes the way it sounds. But, you've got to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, so I ask what the 3 T’s are.

D: “Triangular shape, tightness…”

Me: “Tightness??”

D: “Of the branches” (with a look that says, “of course it’s of the branches, but I don’t expect you to know that”)

Me: “What’s the third T?”

D: “It’s um, uh,… well, um,… (triumphantly) Non-Tipping!!”

Non-Tipping?

That’s not even a word. Oh, and it doesn’t begin with a T – which kind of throws off the whole ‘3 T’s’, theme, but hey, I don’t want to ruin it for anyone. It occurs to me to mention that any tree that isn’t currently lying on the ground could be classified as non-tipping, seeing as how it is still standing upright, but then D would accuse me of not having holiday cheer. Whatever. He is having fun, Velma is doing a great job picking out her tree even without perfect alliteration, and overall everything is going well.

Anyhow, we cut down 4 trees. My dad and D haul them back to the truck. My dad looks like he is doing hard labor in a prison camp and D looks like an oversized 5 year old on Christmas morning, practically skipping with his tree in hand (did I mention they were very small trees?). He gets way too excited about the holidays for my taste, but I guess if it makes him happy I’m alright with it. We hauled the trees home without any of them falling out of the truck. My parents didn’t get pulled over and my dad didn’t get mistaken for an escaped convict. We were even able to remember which tree belonged to who when we returned. Overall, it was a successful tree-chopping trip! I’ve even managed to put my tree up and decorate it.

Now, if we could just figure out how to get rid of that orange prison jumpsuit…