1) Last year Mrs. ACW gave me a container of powdered eggnog mix for Christmas and to be honest, I’m a little scared to even try it. I thought I would be able to get up enough gumption yesterday, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Especially considering that the third direction is to “allow mixture to sit for a few minutes and thicken” (that’s what she said! ha! I’m hilarious) I’ve been particularly apprehensive. Even after having already come up with similes and metaphors relating to foamy reindeer ejaculate and elf orgies I still couldn’t bring myself to try the stuff. Or maybe that was part of the problem. Regardless, I’m going to attempt to try it at some point in the near future, and believe me, you’ll hear about it.
2) Last night I finally bought our Christmas tree. Last year I paid $20 for a tree that cost about $27. I didn’t haggle. I didn’t bargain. I just pointed to the tree I wanted and said, “I’ll give you 20 bucks for that one.” This year my success is debatable. Because of the drought, tree prices were a bit higher this year than last year. And by “a bit” I mean “ridiculously more expensive”. I saw quite a few trees that looked like our tree last year, the shabbiest of which cost about $50, and the one most like last years was going for about $78, and it was still no prize compared to some of the other trees on the lot. The nicest tree I saw went for about $150 bucks, which I guess is like buying a disposable ivory back-scratcher; nice to look at, but really completely pointless. I found two trees on the lot that were less than $40, which I figured was the upper limit of my bargaining range, and set about comparing them. The $37 tree was taller, but it was missing huge sections of branches, so I went with the shorter, chode-ier tree, even though that meant we’d have to put it up on some sort of small table. I found the saleswoman and told her I’d give her $20 for the tree. It was priced at $31.
“Well, I’d love to but that’s a blahblahwhatthefuckeverblah kind of tree, and people rarely pay less than full price for those.”
“I’ll give you twenty bucks.”
“I’m not sure I can go that low, but I can probably let you have it for 28.”
“I have a twenty dollar bill. It’s twenty or nothing.”
“Okay. $22.50. It’s as low as I can go.”
“I’m not sure you understand. All I have is a twenty. I can’t pay you any more than that. No one else is going to buy this tree. Do you want to make twenty bucks off it?”
She didn’t look like she was going to relent, but just at that second a whole gaggle of wide-eyed suckers wandered onto the lot, so seeing her chance to sell a blahblahsomefuckinkindoftreeblah to them for a hundred bucks, she took my twenty and left.
A guy came over to cut off the bottom and bag it in that plastic netting, but I told him not to worry about it, rolled my passenger side window down, and had him stuff it in there. Voila: a Christmas tree.
3) Today is our Holiday Party at work. I say Holiday Party because our boss is Jewish and the co-chairs of the planning committee are Jewish, Musilm, and Hindu. In fact, now that I think about it, the other three people on the committee are Non-denominational Christian, agnostic, and a non-affiliated spiritual zen Buddhism-type guy. Weird. Anyway, an email went around a few weeks ago about the gift-exchange at the party this year. It’s one of those events where people buy $10 worth of crap and then pass it around for a while until everyone is unhappy. Every year people hound me to participate, and every year I demurely turn them down. Finally my colleague, the non-denominational Christian, asked me why I don’t participate, and I decided to be completely honest. Why would I pay between $10 and $20, and spend the time to pick out something nice that just about everyone could enjoy, when I’m guaranteed to get crap in return? The gift exchange is nothing more than complicated, protracted boondoggle for me to pay $20 for something I don’t even want. That’s money I could be spending on beernog.
