Experimental budget month is nearly over and I managed to squirrel away almost $100 for Xmas. I already bought Ethan’s Xmas present from a guy I know — it fell off a truck, I’m sure — and today is the day we do holiday decorations. I’m not doing anything big this year because E will be at his dad’s. I’d just as soon skip the holiday and spend a night at an open diner by myself with a book like I usually do on the off year, but E has the holiday spirit and I can’t let him down. That money should be my savings, since I have none, but I’m going to hit the craft aisle at the big box store and see if we can make something cute by ourselves. As long as I don’t have some plastic Santa in my window I’m cool. Plus, my fake Xmas tree is so sad (the stand broke a few years ago so I prop it up against the wall) we might end up copying the Xmas Ficus anyway.
UPDATE: So I bought some bells and a big red bow. The bow will top the sad-ass tree and the bells will be hung on my front and back doors. Because somebody tried to break into my house this Friday.
You could also try getting some evergreenery and pine cones. Like, real life ones, if you know someone with a pine tree. I know that’s lame–lame that I’m not more creative–but that’s all I can come up with. And someone tried to break into your house? You should start a paypal account so we can buy you a gun.
Oh no, the bells will keep me perfectly safe. Almost as good as a 9 mm and a pit bull.
Do you think it was burglary attempt, or just some drunken college kid trying to get into the wrong house (I think you said you live near Purdue’s campus)?
By the way, how are things going? Are you applying to grad schools? Looking for any second-semester teaching positions? How all is (relatively) well.
Hmmm….do you think this was random, or that there was left somewhere a tell-tale sign that you had something worth taking?
(Sorry, my Gary mindset is reacting… ;-))
Obviously a few students screwing around. Still pisses me off to no end. Chef scared them off — a story that’s probably too colorful for the blog.
Hire Joe Don Baker for $5 and a grilled cheese sandwich for holiday security.
“Chef scared them off — a story that’s probably too colorful for the blog.”
Aw, come on. Did he pour boiling water on them? I bet he poured boiling water on them. That’d be sweet.
Damn. We had that happen last semester – some extremely drunk guy got the wrong apartment and was banging on our door and windows at 3:30 in the morning. I told him to try four doors down! The Canadian woke up one morning to find a guy passed out on his couch and his window broken. You should have him tell you that story. He also has another story about waking up to find another guy passed out on his couch sans broken window.
Do share your story and keep your doors locked!
And hey, these are the Internets, so how about pictures of that ’sad-ass’ tree?!
The short version:
Chef stays up really late because of his hours. I was in bed because I had to work on Saturday (mind you, Ethan is asleep across the hall, which is what really pisses me off — these dickheads trying to break into my house for what, scaring me and my son). Chef hears two loud bangs, checks on me and Ethan (both still dead asleep), and, with 10″ chef’s knife in hand steps onto the front porch. Nada. Chef mutters something to himself and two kids bust out from behind the neighbor’s tree, hauling ass down the street. Chef takes off after them like a provoked dog (no, calling the cops doesn’t occur to him), barefoot in twenty degree weather, waving his knife in the streetlight.
The funny thing, he says, is that there was no hooting and hollering, there were just three scared kids running spooked in the night (third one popped out from behind the church during the pursuit). Away from the crazy dude with the really fucking big knife.
The moral of the story: run quietly and carry a big knife.
Aw, come on. Did he pour boiling water on them? I bet he poured boiling water on them. That’d be sweet.
I actually have vats of boiling duck fat poised above the door. Should the perpetrators be caught I’m planning on nailing their little flippers to the floor and force feeding them grains until their livers are the size of footballs.
Ha! “Because you have disturbed our slumber, we are going to make fois gras out of you. Prepare to suffer, and have Anthony Bourdain make tacky jokes about it.”
We decorated on the cheap this year, too. HUHO ideas for decorating:
Of course our windows are covered with 6 sided snowflakes cut out of paper. This was my mom’s ornament trick from our most deeply impoverished days.
Need: Scissors, paper. Tape for windows.
Fold paper in half, and in half again. Take the corner that is completely folded and point it towards you; then fold in thirds – a smashed cone object. Then you get the scissors in there, cutting all sorts of shapes into the sides of the paper. The edge you can make any which way you like, as long as you cut off any excess – the “back” of the cone, where the front pieces aren’t folded over, need to go: you want all your fancy pants cutting to go into all the paper at once. Once you’re done, unfold, & voila.
Also, we invented these cool “snowmen” this year. I had receiving blankets I was shredding into rags, and used baby food jars but a small jam jar and rags/cut up white-ish Tshirts would work.
You make essentially those kleenex ghosts from Hallowe’en, only you use your sturdier fabric and stuff it with toilet paper – and tie them twice for the top two balls. For the bottom ball you put the jam jar on another rag, and stick toilet paper around that to make it more circular and less jam jar-like. Put a little white glue on the inside rim, and fold the fabric up and stuff it into the jam jar. The top two balls rest on top of the jam jar, and all the excess fabric slides in. Then, we glued buttons on, and the kids drew faces with marker. I had some red fabric (from an old baby shirt), which I cut into scarves and I made hats by folding triangles (like a diaper). The kids glued those on. Sparkles, markers, feathers – whatever strikes your fancy and you have around; ours are vaguely drag-queen looking, but they’re snowmen, and my son feels very proud at the ornamenting that HE did. Anyway.
Another with kids ornament trick, also my mom’s: you need twine, small balloons, and white glue. And, if your kid is like my kid, lots of sparkles. Anyway, blow up your small balloons. Run twine through the white glue (and you could put some tempura paint in there) and gloop it all over the balloon, every which way, as long as by the end the twine touches itself in lots of places and makes a vague sphere. Festoon with sparkles. Wait until tomorrow when it’s dry. Massage the balloon so it cracks away from the twine, then pop the sucker and pull it out. Little lacey roundish ornaments in whatever colours of paint or sparkles you’ve picked.
One thing we’ve done years without a tree: if you can borrow someone’s aluminum stepladder, or have one yourself – the kind that stands up like an “A” – you can wind your lights/popcorn around it and hang ornaments from it. Put presents on the rungs. It’s industrial looking, but actually quite fabulous: my second year away from home we did this and it was one of my favorite “trees” ever.
I K*N*O*W this is hokey, but when I was 10 I made this Reader’s Digest Xmas Tree and I still haven’t gotten over the flush of pride it gave me, as a child, to create such a lovely Xmas decoration.
Here are the instructions: http://www.rd.com/content/openContent.do?contentId=19258
Ethan might really enjoy it.
Lauren, is there a current version of your list of desired bribes?
Purdue is a bad place for strangers invading homes. We had a girl just walk into our house one Friday and use the bathroom before we fully comprehended what was going on. My SO had two very drunk sorority ladies come into her living room and insist they were in fact in their apartment for about 10 minutes. I have never, ever mistook one place for another, even when extremely intoxicated.
About pine cones:
When I was a preschooler, I broke all of the glass bulbs on the Christmas tree by bowling them down the long coffee table and off the end for fun. My parents were really struggling and could not afford to replace them, so my mother (a Mainer from a subsistence-farm) took us to the local park. We got pinecones from on and under the trees, some wide Hemlock cones and some long, narrow ones. My mom got tiny cheap screw-in eye screws from a hardware store, and then spray-painted the cones gold and silver. She hung them with bent paper-clips. I still hang several on the tree every year, and my son is almost the age I was when we made them.
Purdue, sadly, is far too much all about the booze and the Greeks.
When I was much, much younger and stupider, early in my freshman year I was dragged by my dormmates to a couple of frat parties as the prelude to going for fraternity rush. I’d seen my share of drugging n’ drinking in my high school years, but the alcohol in play was just enormous – people were literally drunk beyond all reason and logic. More than once I helped roommates get through situations where they were a couple drinks shy of alcohol poisoning.
And part of that was because the alternatives weren’t promtoed much. Purdue used to have a halfway decent foreign movie series through the school year, and usually had at least a halfway decent live music series (I saw the Pretenders both in Chicago and a year later on campus, and the campus show was far, far more accessible and just plain fun) – I hope they still do. But there were never many events that were campuswide and easily accessible, as there were/are at IU or Illinois or even Notre Dame. What there was was Greek-dominant (though the GDI crowd tried to do this and that when I was there), and probably still is so.
And at least when I was at Purdue, it was because the university was afraid of being involved in situations where alcohol was involved, while they concurrently turned a blind eye to the Greeks and their craziness.
My two bits…
I know how you feel. I just saved over $100 by not calling a plumber and instead fixing my clogged sink. Not only is having more cash in my pocket a good thing but being able to fix things myself is very liberating (even if it is something as silly and simple as plunging a kitchen sink).
You could always try making ornaments and other doohickeys out of that salt dough used for crafts. Roll it out, cut out shapes with cookie cutters, punch a hole in them, then bake.
And, yeah, spray-painted pine cones make great ornaments. Also good centerpieces if you put them in a bowl.
For the table: this is something my mother and grandmother used to do, which probably dated from the 50s, so it’s both festive AND retro: They sprinkled big, shiny Christmas-themed confetti on a white tablecloth, then covered the whole shebang with red netting. Centerpiece was usually glass ball ornaments in a glass bowl.
Oh, and there’s always “wild” holly. The kind that falls off the back of a truck.
Oh great – now I have this image of wiseguys and ill-gotten shrubbery… ;-)