Cooking Thanksgiving dinner is generally handed off between my grandmother, my aunt and Moogie. This year is Moogie's turn to cook the bulk of Thanksgiving dinner, and I guess it's already bothering her, because she's taking out her frustrations on me.

For instance, yesterday I shaved my beard off a second time in the last short while (my skin is still doing odd things, so it's easier to shave and let my skin heal up a little before I let my beard grow back in permanently) and had taken a shower to get all the hair off, and since I'm not the best shaver in the world, get the blood off, too. I had just gotten out of the shower and was toweling off when the phone rang. I wandered around looking where I'd left it, and found it on my desk.

"Hello?" I asked, trying to keep too much water from puddling up on the floor with the towel.

"What are you doing?" Of course, it was Moogie. She can't say hello, or how are you doing, or even I called to ask you something. Instead, it's an immediate interrogation.

"Nothing." It doesn't do any good to say you're doing something, because what you're doing is never as important as what she needs done, or thinks you should be doing. I could be performing CPR on somebody who dropped dead just outside, and she'd tell me that since brain death doesn't occur for a few minutes I could take a couple to do something she wants done.

"Well, I called to see what's for dinner."

I roll my eyes. She knows I never cook dinner this time of the evening. "I don't know, I haven't looked yet..." I trail off because I am being cut off as usual.

"Have you even washed the dishes yet?"

Oh, yes, mundane tasks are the stuff I live for. "No. I've been knocking off my beard."

"All day?"

This had entered the realm of being ridiculous. Of course not all day. However, it wouldn't be very good to tell her that I had spent all day in bed basically hiding from the world. Granted, I'd been up all night working on my r�sum� (which looks pretty damned spiffy now, if I say so myself) and digging up job leads to send it to, so I needed some sleep, too, even though I had other things to do. Far be it from me to have to explain this, though, because it wouldn't matter.

"No. Look, what do you want for dinner, that's what you called about wasn't it?"

"Never mind. Goodbye," she hisses into the phone.

"Fine, bye," I say, and hang up the phone. "Bitch," I say as I walk out of my bedroom and pitch the phone into a dresser drawer on top of my boxers.

So... rather than look at the day's new job postings or call the county mental health authority to try to schedule a new appointment, I go into the kitchen and start to wash the piles of dishes and wonder what to fix.

After I get the bulk of the dishes done, I start to look in the freezer to see what there is to fix. Unfortunately, none of the options are very exciting. I drag some steak out, and peer down and see some pre-fab stir fry veggies, look in the cabinet and find some teriyaki sauce. Stir fry it is.

So I am standing in the kitchen chopping these little frozen flank steaks into strips when the phone rings. I figure it's Moogie again, so I don't get in a big hurry to answer it, but manage to pick up on the fourth ring before the answering machine starts its thing. It turns out it's my aunt calling for Moogie.

"No, she's not here right now. What's up?" I have to be nosy, of course.

"I was calling to see if your mother is fixing anything besides turkey for dinner Thursday."

"You mean besides turkey, or..." Why won't anybody let me finish my sentences?

"Yeah, besides turkey. I invited momma and my sister over to Thanksgiving dinner, and she doesn't think she can come unless she brings something, so she wants to know if she can bring a ham or something."

I am experiencing fear.

You have to understand, I like my aunt and all, she's okay, but she has one fatal flaw. She's from the next town over, Friendswood, a/k/a The Land of the Plastic People or Yuppie Hell. Her mother still lives there.

Her mother drives me insane. She drives everybody else in my family insane. And apparently we're not alone, because she has six kids, and invariably it seems like every time we turn around she's being invited to dinner to spend time with us.

Her sister is worse. She's haughty, she's boring and she's clueless. She doesn't realize any of this, however, and expects you to be enraptured by the glorious tales of her life and all the witty things she knows.

Be kind and kill me now.

Of course, Moogie, already in her wonderful mood, didn't think much of this news. Nobody knew she'd been invited. She spent the next ninety minutes on the phone ranting to my grandmother about it, and spent the next half hour pacing the floor complaining, cursing and slamming stuff around.

I do strange things when I'm sleep deprived.

Last night I did a Mahir Cagri spoof. Why? Hellifino. Partly, I thought putting the link at the bottom of the page would help me pick up a couple readers, perhaps? (Go ahead, say it, "hit slut!")

Okay, so I was wrong. It's getting a good number of hits. Maybe if I change the link at the bottom to some animated gif teaser banner, and Yahoo! and the Mahir portals pick it up...

However, it was somewhat fun. The Santa Claus one didn't turn out quite how I wanted, due to lack of suitable pictures and the fact that Xoom is so slow. That's okay. I have another one in mind to work on.

Tabitha's alive! We kept missing each other, but we finally met up. She's kind of in the same place as me, just withdrawn into herself.

Thank goodness she's alive. I can't believe she let me worry like that, though. [big frown]

I made a new appointment with the county mental health authority for next week. We'll see what happens.

Too bad I couldn't talk to the lady who answered the phone rather than the one they made me talk to last time. She was much more friendly and helpful.

Gillian's brain surgery seems to have taken. She stays a constant 38 degrees Celsius. Knock on wood I don't have to replace this fan, too.

As for other updates, lots of people told me that the A&M Bonfire collapse was big news there. Apparently I just picked the wrong news source, and I was in a bad mood that day. However, I don't feel differently about supporting alternate media. Just, what to do...

I finally updated my r�sum�. Now I just have to send it out. Entirely different creature.

I emailed the recommended webhost a while back, and got no response. Ugh. I may try a different account (like sales@ rather than the one they say to mail on their website).

The other day I went to the store and discovered my front tires have questionable tread. In fact, I saw belt showing on one of them. I knew my front end was out of line, but this is bad. Fortunately, the ones in the back are fine.

These are the same tires that were screwed up when I had a bent rim on my car after my accident, though, so I guess it's to be expected. The ones currently on the back are the ones that were on the back then, and thus emerged unscathed.

Of course, considering I am on a serious budget (after all, I'm shopping webhosts, even though I can't sign up right now) with Christmas and bills and all, and no income, now I have to go shop tires. So I call around.

I call one automotive store, and they can mount the tires and align the front end, but the low cost of tires is made up in the mounting charges.

Another place that specializes in tires doesn't align the front end.

Wal-Mart has some really cheap tires (so cheap I might be able to get four instead of just two, and let's be serious, this car has almost 122,000 miles on it, the tires may outlast the car, right?), but they don't do front-end alignments.

I can't even get K-Mart's automotive department on the phone.

I desperately long for the days where I called around finding out who could do it fastest (and would actually answer the phone), rather than looking for whoever is the cheapest.

restlessmind