checkin in w/ the sandbox for the holidays from your parents'/relatives'/in-laws' house

That is a good question! I already got the pedals and foot straps I wanted secondhand from a friend, so I'm getting new handlebar tape and idk what else. Rear cargo rack maybe? STEVIE D ARE NOW FIELDING SUGGESTIONS

I stayed home alone for the first xmas in aaaages and Im really glad I did. LOL Melb actually had a white xmas day, cuz the city was hit with a MASSIVE FUCKOFF HAILSTORM that destroyed cars, flooded ppls houses, total crazyness.

Hardcore Pawn is on the tv, which is much more of a horribly classist show than I remember.

5-year-old nephew is practicing his reading Dick & Jane aloud and doing a good job.

bout to celebrate jewish christmas w/some friends: dim sum and a movie, baller

― Cooper Chucklebutt, Sunday, December 25, 2011 9:16 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink

12 hours later, it was a magical christmas

feeling u

it was p epic, somehow snaked a table at sold out dim sum, mi5 ghost protocol, nachos and my 1st glance of the new nba season accidentally walked into weirdly packed green bay bar, unprovoked near bar fight, champagne, japanese home cooking, drinking at all venues of course, and now for real nba action, thank you santa

Home in MI, went to coooold beach yest w brother to drink beer and look at rolling green waves and tossing beach grass and dunes and trees in touch of setting sunlight. That sight is good for what ails ya.

Today was mega-dose of family, plumb tuckered out now. Wine, beer, ilx, freezing hands from smoking outside.

My dad totally ate my raw kale salad, biggest score of week tbh!!

:)

omg so glad to be home now

sooooo hammered and happy after hangin at BFF's place playin dominoes.q

3rd year in a row of Christmas just the two of us. Kind of like it but actually missing the family a little this year. We are surprisingly sensible at not overeating/eating the bewildering amount of chocolate in the apartment, when it's just us. Watched Dr Who & Pirates of Caribbean 4 and did a lot of cooking.

just went over to my dad's house for the first time in like five years. it is a fucking sty. there's an issue of the economist from 1997 sitting on the steps and it seems at least plausible that the bathtub has not been cleaned since then.

i'm not even a neat/clean freak, but i don't understand how these ppl that raised me live this way

i found my dad's "congratulations for winning the 1956 [town's name] chess tournament" certificate under a pile of my mom's shoes. does that make you feel better?

a) that's awesome -- go dad

b) i don't think you realize the full horror of these environments! i would take pictures but i didn't bring my camera plus i'd feel guilty sharing photos of my parents' squalor with the world

My parents live in a small but 3-bedroom (plus guest attic room) house with my younger brother. My mum mentioned some time ago that they were casually looking for a *bigger place* but couldn't find anywhere. All the rooms are filled up with junk and I am so so desperate to get in there and just chuck it all out. When I was back there last year I was trying to cook in the kitchen which has a lot of counter space yet it's ALL filled up with rubbish except this one tiny square. Example: A letter rack full of those return envelopes you get with bills. I laughed and started to chuck it out but my mum said dad wouldn't let me. Even if you want to keep such a thing, WHY on the kitchen counter?! It's not quite crazy hoarder level but I think they just don't see it. Even in the living room you can't sit down anywhere without moving a bunch of stuff first.

I think that qualifies as hoarding

my dad isn't much better though - I've found things around the house that I distinctly remember putting into the garbage can, only to be rescued at the very last moment by my dad

mookieproof, that is so unsettling.

Mookie, I do get it. I totally 100% get it. That was my "funny" example.

If anyone wants to talk about this offboard, webmail works. I can't rant about my parents on any public board even under 5 layers of pseudonyms. Anyway.

ruh roh, i have 200mb of internet left to see me through life at my mum's house until the 11th of january. i am boned. RIP images, hello mid-90s-looking internet.

drinking with yr family is kinda odd. i get along fine with them all and can even have a good time with them!!!, but it seems a waste of tipsiness, somehow.

I honestly think I have broken one of my molars from grinding my teeth this weekend. Calling the dentist tomorrow.

my family was split across two locations for xmas and i got a desperate report by text message from my closest ally in place a informing me they have suffered disharmony which was avoided entirely and thankfully and a bit surprisingly here at place b.

my mom seems committed to doing everything with time-saving modern technology, even though it never saves time. it's like watching the pentagon buy a $1500 screwdriver.

she is sending me a box in the mail. but her palm pilot, for some reason, refused to wirelessly print to her printer. so she plugged it into one laptop, which wouldn't recognize it, then succeeded with the second. at which point she managed to print out my name and address on a piece of paper, which she taped to the box.

simply writing the address by hand? inconceivable. after four days of this i am turning into the lex.

oh mookie, how much longer do you have to stay there.

13 hours, 25 minutes!

13 hours, 22 minutes!

glad estela avoided disharmony, sad about mookielex

Had a fight w/bf last night over what kind of pasta sauce we were to have for dinner. I threw an honest to god tantrum because he refused to let me cook the one I wanted, even tho he was also insisting he'd do the cooking and I could relax and sit down. WTF is wrong with me :( I am a grade-A moron.

dammit. post got eaten.

Looool mookie. Oh man.

Went to the Oak Ridge Museum of Science & Industry with Mom. Neat place, but you could tell it was last updated in the mid-90s. Renewables were seriously underrepresented tho they had a big ol exhibit about coal.

That may have more to do with the funders than how au courant it is.

Yeah. On our last (first and only) trip to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in 2006 or so there was a brand new exhibit about coal! Is awesome! Forever!

And there was a little exhibit about solar energy that was mostly broken so you'd try to light the bulb with solar energy and it would barely work or not work at all while AWESOME COAL ALWAYS was huge and shiny and function and you could ride in a bulldozer.

MOSAI is precisely what I had in mind.

i'm out! (well, i'm ion a train)

my mom had me install voice recognition software on her computer before i left. i thought it was going to be for learning a language, but no -- it's just to control the computer, because mouse/keyboard is apparently too inefficient. so *next* year when she's trying to print out my address, she'll have a telemarketer headphone set on and be yelling PRINT MOOKIE'S ADDRESS at her computer.

also i learned that the main reason she still has a landline is that she's afraid she wouldn't be able to find her cellphone at any given moment. given the state of her house, this is a very reasonable concern.

I am glad you are free!

i am envious. i am getting mad cabin fever. twenty minutes after arriving late on christmas eve, my sister (who i haven't seen in almost two years and who barely "hi" when i came in the door) turned up the volume on the television as i told my mam about my journey home. she was watching a michael bublé christmas special.

is this the macbook air sister or the other one?

the other one

the macbook air sister is generally a delight

smoked bowls and walked around

http://photos2.crosscountryadventures.us/albums/2010/July/6_canyonlands/IMG_6447.jpg

bought this book:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/416SNAW7R6L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Wow. That's the Needles, I presume? Chesler Park?

Where is the thread for checking in from your own residence which has been commandeered by occupying holiday forces?

it got Occupied

james redd and the hungry holidaying blecchs.

They are all so happy, so full of holiday cheer. Trying to restrain myself after the umpteenth adjectival use of "pretty," prohibited by my sixth grade schoolteacher, is some serious I, Robot wrestling, interiorwise