Christmas Ideas

If you're overwhelmed by the thought of asking for more "stuff" for Christmas (or people gifting you stuff even though you didn't ask for it), try asking for something a little different this year... like a sheep, or a crocodile, or an irrigation system. Not for you, of course, but for people for whom a gift like this could change lives. Oxfam Unwrapped has a ton of new gift ideas since the last time I talked about them, so you should check it out and see if there's anything in there that strikes your fancy.

I know that personally I'm afraid to give these gifts to most of the people I need to get gifts for, because I'm afraid of offending them by not giving them something tangible that can clutter up their homes. Maybe I'm totally misguided, but I keep hearing everyone's unenthusiastic "uh.. thanks... this is... just... great," when I think of giving these gifts. So if you would like something like this, make sure to tell people so that they know this is a gift you would enjoy. I'm all for it, in case you were wondering. :-)

laying low

Not a whole lot going on here; nothing to report. I have been really lazy during my long weekend. Really lazy. As in watching hours of YouTube videos and playing games on my PDA lazy. I planned on going out shopping on Friday, but then I went through all the Black Friday ads and realized that there were no better sales than normal sales. If there were some good sales on hard drives, maybe a cheap PC laptop to replace the one that is falling apart, maybe some good sales on jeans, I'd be out there fighting the crowds with the rest of the good Americans doing their patriotic duty to spend money the day after Thanksgiving. But when the "sales" are things like $30 jeans and buy one pair of shoes get one pair half off, or $600 laptops, it just wasn't worth it. That's the kind of sales these places have most of the time. So why would I fight the crowds on the busiest shopping day? No thankyou.

So to make up for barely leaving the house Friday, I planned to go run some errands on Saturday. But then Chris got some awful food poisoning from our Tin Drum Asia Cafe take-out, and woke me up in the middle of the night with it. So we had a rough night, and he spent most of Saturday recovering from that. I just thank God that I didn't get food poisoning, too. The last time we were both out of commission with food poisoning, and that was about the worst two days of my life. We were so helpless we had to call a friend to bring us gatorade and soup, and then we didn't know how either one of us would manage to open the door when she arrived, because we were afraid if we moved an inch we'd be sick again. Awful.

Anyways, I left the house long enough to get us some groceries and cleaning supplies, and that's about it. (I did go to Michael's to get some yarn that was still on sale for the rest of Saturday, but that was a lame sale too, so I only bought what I needed. Disappointing sales). Anyways. I've been lazy.

Chris works tomorrow so we won't go to church until the evening service, and now that I've spent 3 days being lazy I don't know if I'll be able to snap out of it and make myself leave the house when I have no plans and most the people I know are still out of town for the weekend. Maybe I'll just work on my sweater. I've finally got the body completed and I sewed snaps on it today... now it's just down to the sleeves, and I'll have made my first sweater. If I'm really diligent this week I might even finish it in the month of November, which was my goal for NaKniSweMo. Huzzah!

Chris says it's bedtime, so off I go.

chased down

So if you haven't read Chris's account of our drive up to see my grandma last week, you need to start by reading that now. Then come back here, because I'm not going to repeat it, just add to it.

You back? Okay. So being pulled over by the police 3 times in 4 hours is Nones The Cool. I was freaking out by the end. I knew we weren't speeding, but here were these cops insisting that we were speeding, and treating my husband like a criminal, patting him down and making him sit with him in the cruiser while they make sure he's not a wanted felon, all because they say we were driving 64 in a 55. (And let me take this time to say, for all you haters out there who have already decided that we must have been at fault if the police pulled us over, that Chris's cruise control was set to 60. Going 5mph over isn't illegal. And my boss, who is awesome, let us borrow his TomTom last night to check our speed, and it turns out our spedometer is off by 2mph, so we were probably really going 62mph. NOT 64 like these cops insisted. That's a big difference too, because you know a cop isn't going to pull someone over for 7 miles over, it's not even worth it.)

It was really ridiculous. I'm pretty sure that the Indiana police were looking for something in particular... either specifically looking for a car that met our description (which is what it felt like) or maybe they were specifically targeting a certain group who tends to drive cars that look like ours? I don't know. I'm also pretty sure the last guys who pulled us over and said we were going 64 knew they were lying but wanted a reason to pull us over. When I said to Officer #2 (while Chris was in the cruiser) "Our spedometer must be off, because I know he was only going 60," the guy just said "Or he was lying, and didn't want to admit he was going 64," like there was no way they were wrong, AND there was no way our spedometer was wrong. We MUST be lying, because Chris is bald with a long ghoti. It was also weird when they got the confirmation over the radio that Chris's ID came up with nothing, the way the cop assured me "Well, there's not a warrant out for his arrest, so you're fine." He told me like this was NEWS, that I would be happy to hear. I just stared at him like "Well no kidding. I knew that before you did." And THEN that's when they wanted to search our car. After all this other crap, they are still so determined to find something because apparently we fit some bullshit profile, so we MUST be carrying drugs. But, thank goodness for my sanity, after questioning us extensively they decided not to tear apart our car to look for the non-existent drugs.

After all this nonsense, the only thing I can say is that, okay fine, they're doing their job and if they were looking for a car like ours (which is the only reasonable explanation), then sure, pull us over every hour, but when you realize we're not the people you're looking for, just freaking LET US GO and don't search for reasons to give us expensive tickets or waste our time searching our car. Really. I would be much less pissed off if these guys were just honest about what they were doing. I can't afford a ton of meaningless tickets because some other jerk did something with a green acura integra or something. It's just unreal.

That's all I have to say about this ridiculousless.