Cue Christmastime

        

I'm almost ready for Christmas! Happy November 30th!

Edit: Apparently my phone always fails the first time I try to post? So much for blogging from the bar and actually getting it on the internet.

Can't Wait for December

This photo is from my last NaBloPoMo post last time around, and I still think it is so perfectly pleasant. I jinxed myself, back then, when I wrote, "I think, after all those false starts, I've brought the blog back." Ha. I posted four times that December (almost entirely about the great trials I faced in finally getting internet in my home), seventeen times for all of 2012, and then I made an effort in 2013 from January to April, before complete ignoring the blog until NaBloPoMo came around again. So that was a bit of a disappointment. I was going to say that I had totally forgotten the blog existed over the summer, but truthfully, I thought about it a lot. I battled with myself over whether or not I needed to start an entirely new blog, or just get a new template, maybe with a new name. I searched for pre-made, free templates; I despaired.

It's really thanks to this temporary job I have right now, which is, at times, even more soul-crushing than my old law office job, that I did NaBloPoMo at all. On November 1st, I had nothing to do. I had just received an email from BlogHer about NaBloPoMo starting. I thought, why not?, and so I tried a little harder to figure out how to make my blog look more the way I wanted, and met with some success. I went home feeling pretty accomplished. 

I still need to make a new header, and I am seriously considering changing the name. It's not like I've built any sort of brand recognition around it. Instead I have years—five and a half years—of personal identification with "der Landstreicher," even as I have lived in the same town for the past four and a half, "[spinning] out the fragile thread of [my] pseudo-career." 

Speaking of pseudo-careers, I have to be at the restaurant in just under an hour, so I should probably pile up a plate with Thanksgiving leftovers and prepare myself, mentally and physically, for six hours hosting at a downtown Ann Arbor restaurant, the night before the Ohio State game. Let's hope for the best (crazy-customer-wise; I'm not sure hope's gonna help the football game).

And for the record, I am excited for NaBloPoMo to be done. I'm going to work out a posting schedule, and have plans for different kinds of posts, and I am not going to blog every day. No more cop-out posts with one picture that may or may not relate to the included words. No more staying up past my bedtime every night because of it. I would have much rather read a book on the couch before the sun set than stared at this damn computer screen in my post-workout-shower-M&Ms haze for two hours. Grrumph.

Feast At Our Place

We hosted our first Thanksgiving ever this afternoon. Cooper's mom and sister came into town with pies and wine, I made a corn casserole and set up the apartment, and Cooper did the turkey, gravy, potatoes, and broccoli. Straightforward and delicious.

I didn't take a picture of the full spread, which we served on our side island/cart in the kitchen, partially because I forgot and partially because we had some turkey difficulties. The turkey was ahead of schedule, so he turned down the heat to slow it down, and slowed it down too far. So the full platter of carved turkey was not on display until after I'd started putting the sides away. (We ate parts of the bird as they reached doneness, but most of it was in the oven 'til we finished eating.) We ate at a card table in the living room, because the kitchen felt like the inside of the oven, and because we can't fit four chairs in the kitchen even though the table is larger, and because there were things everywhere. Card table + tablecloth = good enough for me, though. Whenever we had big meals at my grandparents' or cousins' house the kids would eat at a card table. It feels good to continue the tradition.

Haroun pretty much spent the whole day in the living room. In the morning he sat on the back of the couch, meowing at us for attention while we cooked and cleaned. All afternoon and evening, he sat on the couch or on the floor and napped, with some fun interludes of mouse-on-a-stick play. What a people cat.

BTW: Yesterday's post, which I will admit I posted after midnight because we were en route from Grosse Pointe and it didn't occur to me to blog in the car on my phone, failed to upload but I didn't notice because I blogged in bed on my phone and my phone let me down. So I just uploaded it again now. Oh, and I found the errant leftover pie and I ate it for lunch. Delicious.

Thanksgiving

We got home from dinner at my parents' house close to midnight. What can you do?

Hope the cats don't find the piece of John's apple pie I brought home with me but stowed...somewhere. 

A bit of whole wheat in the butter crust, and oh so good. 

Let's Talk About Chairs

I'm not feeling inspired, especially not in this awful space in which I am currently "working." My supervisor is on vacation, his office is being moved down the hall next week, and today when I got to work at 12:15 there were no computers at our desks and a student was carting filing cabinets out. There was no one else around on the fourth floor; what people I could see were behind closed doors in the conference room. It was ridiculous.

Now I have a loaner laptop from downstairs, an awkward Hewlett-Packard with a weirdly soft, matte finish and a terribly pale screen I can't focus on. (I am thankful for my Apple computer.) The fluorescent lights aren't actually buzzing above me, but it feels like they should be, and the copier is humming and tapping, although it's accompishing nothing. We have a nice view out our floor-to-ceiling windows, but the desks face us away from the windows and toward the hallway all day long. Outside is just an impermeable grey haze; better than the dull taupe of the pinboard in front of me, if only I could stare at it, but instead I have this LCD screen surrounded by aging office accessories.

I am fully aware that this is silly, ridiculous, unacceptable—but one reason I'm averse to the office-drone life path is that it is dressed in drab patterns of nothing colors, accentuated by bad lighting. That alone is a good reason to work at home. At home, my tiny desk is a clean, bright white. Sometimes I light candles at it and in the cocoon of warm darkness I try to write. I still need to hang my pastel map of Germany, alongside my new Ikea corkboard, lovingly decked out in postcards from Europe and other mementos. It's too small, but it fits where it needs to fit, and if I stay focused on corralling the clutter, I can work in the space.

My desk and chair in the old apartment.

Except I'm using my broken chair at the desk, because I need the two intact ones for the kitchen. The back has fallen off, because the screws don't screw into anything anymore, and I haven't stuffed the holes with toothpicks and glue yet like my father does because...I haven't. I want a slightly sturdier chair for my desk, so I can cross my legs on it and stay there longer. I want to put a chair there, and put a (fake?) sheepskin on top of it. Then all the cats will be so jealous while I blog away on my pile of softness, and my life will be so design-y.

I spent a long time making these collages on the PicStitch app on my phone, because it seemed like the easiest way. Please excuse the image quality; they're made of iPhone screenshots. I was really into the way they looked on the phone, but not so much on this huge 13" screen. I don't really like the white chair on the top, but it's a cheaper alternative to my top choice: the Tobias chair, the clear one on the right. It has a cantilever base like my parents' old chairs, for some sense of continuity in the chair collection, but it's comfy and wide. So wide, really, that it can fit a person much larger than I and might actually look silly tucked in under my tiny desk. It's also $80—a lot less than comparable non-Ikea chairs, but a lot for me.

I'm not sure why the coloring in the two collages is so different, but whatever. I did it all with my thumb and finger on my phone, so it's hard to complain. I like the idea of wood and sheep, or black and sheep, maybe, but I don't think these would be as comfortable. They're just wood chairs, and I don't know if the sheepskin will help with that. They're all cheaper than the Tobias chair, but also not free.

Maybe after Christmas I'll take a serious chair-shopping trip to the Ikea in Canton, and spend my gift money on one.

Participation Was Always My Least Favorite Part of School

Hey, readers!

How are you faring this cold November? I'm pretty sure some of you aren't even that cold (cough, people in Georgia, cough) (people in California, cough). Tonight I saw a movie (Blue Is the Warmest Color) and I got a drink at a bar that opened...like a year ago...downtown (Vellum), but it was new to me and it was good. I also tried to pick my bike up from Main Street but I remembered that not having my housekeys with me and having to have Cooper lock the apartment door meant I also did not have my bike key with me. Whoops.

So, readers:

What did you eat for dinner tonight? How ready for Thanksgiving are you? I'm most excited to only work one job a day Wednesday-Friday, and no jobs Thursday. Also, Cooper and I are hosting his mom and sister for Thanksgiving, which will be weird/fun.

I also read this poem today, via The Hairpin. I like just the title, but also the poem itself. November: I no longer hate it so much, but I really used to.