Category: Uncategorized

Teel, you’re Obi-Wan Kenobi
(The Classic Star Wars Test)

Teel, you’re single because you don’t want to settle
(Why Are You Still Single?)

Teel, you’re a Romantic Kisser
(What Kind of Kisser Are You?)

Teel, you’re a Phoenix!
(What’s Your Goddess Identity?)

A Scorpio! It’s sooo you!
(What Zodiac Sign Should You Be?)

Teel, your true talent is mechanical ability
(True Talent Test)

I also took the “Are You Ready To Be a Mom?” test, but it didn’t have a cute answer phrase, just a graph that says I’m more ready for Motherhood than not.

That’s enough tests for now.

My family never had much in the way of Christmas traditions, that I remember. Some years the whole extended family would get together for a party, but it wasn’t a regular thing. Our immediate family’s traditions were pretty simple. A tree with a new ornament for each family member each year. Father reading about the birth of Christ from the Bible Christmas Eve. Presents opened Christmas morning. Supper by mom Christmas afternoon. Oh, and baccala.

All day Christmas Eve mom would make baccala, and every Christmas morning baccala was breakfast. Some people don’t get it. Some people don’t like it. I grew up with it. For every other thing that’s changed, baccala was always there. When my parents got divorced and dad wasn’t there to read scripture, baccala was there. When I moved out and wasn’t there for Christmas morning or an ornament on the tree, mom always made sure there was baccala for everyone in the family.

And now mom isn’t there anymore. Not to make Christmas dinner and not to put up a tree, and not to see her family’s joy on Christmas morning, and not to make sure everyone gets their baccala.

After I moved out, after my mom got sicker than I’d seen her, before it was too late, I made my mother teach me how to make baccala. It isn’t actually difficult to do, once you get the hang of it, but it took me three or four attempts before I got it right. There’s a recipe, but it isn’t really a recipe that you can follow and get it right. Too much of it is by feel, by sense memory, to taste. The first time I asked her for the recipe, a couple of years ago, she wrote it down for me as she made it right in front of me. I tried following what was written down and came up with something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike baccala. So, with some help from Zoe and my mother we worked out what was wrong the first time, and tried again, and were still wrong. Eventually, as I said, we managed to get it right, so that when family got together after my mother’s death, we were able to make baccala properly.

So, this Christmas I’m unemployed, I’m not sure where I’m going to find money to pay my bills after another couple of weeks, and I may have bought all the Christmas presents I can afford in one $6 gift yesterday, but I just tracked down a real Italian deli and bought two and a half pounds of the magical ingredient at the center of baccala. No matter what else happens, whether I get a tree up or presents or anything else, there must be baccala for Christmas. Two and a half pounds may be overkill, but if I can’t offer my family anything else, I can offer them baccala.

My older sister is married, has two kids, and this year is housing my younger brother as well. She’s got her own family, and in light of changing times is trying to make her own traditions. Which is a good thing. But they’re not my traditions. I don’t want her new traditions. I don’t even mind losing most of mine too much, though I did buy myself a new Christmas ornament this year. It isn’t just because it’s different, it’s because her family isn’t my family. She’s part of my family, but her family is not my family, and the traditions she is inventing for her family are not for me.

So, I’m going to spend Christmas Eve and/or Christmas Day making baccala, and Christmas afternoon I’ll be seeing my sister’s family and the rest of my family for a little while and I’ll be sure they get their baccala for Christmas.

I just realized that it has been a year since I last used shampoo.

A year.

No shampoo, no conditioner. 365 days. More than a year, by my calendar. It almost seems strange.

I haven’t shaved my head in a few weeks and my hair is starting to grow in a bit. Well, more than it has all year, and anyway, my head itches. I have that itchy flaky scalp thing that I’ve always had. Except that when I could afford to buy lots of razor blades and shave every day or two, I didn’t. Presumably because I was shaving away the layers of dead and dying skin that would otherwise be caught in the mesh that is my hair. Now, those shampoos designed to treat itchy, flaky scalp have mostly worked for me. Nizoral worked, and even T-Gel worked, which I always thought was great because the ‘active ingredient’ in T-Gel is coal tar. I remember back in the day when coal tar, petroleum, and all sorts of other things modern people wouldn’t consider healthy to consume or rub on one’s body were sold as cure-alls. Now I can buy coal tar shampoo, and by golly, it actually cures my itchy, flaky scalp.

Except that I haven’t much thought of shampoo in a year. The only bottle in my shower is my anti-bacterial body wash. I’m not even sure if I’m equipped to be growing my hair out like this. I’m going to have to go through my closets and try to find my old bathroom stuff and see if there’s and old shampoo waiting for me. I would be especially pleased if it would do something about my scalp problem.

I was holding off shaving until right before my interview, which was supposed to be this week last I heard (I’ve emailed to follow up, but haven’t heard anything back yet), so I would have a presentable head. I’m running out of razor blades and money to pay for new ones. I may have to just let my hair grow out, willy-nilly at this point.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. For a couple of months I used my electric shaver on my head, but it clogs up really fast when covering the surface area and hair density of my head, even when I pre-clear my head with clippers. Oh, and it takes longer and doesn’t shave as close without a lot more effort. Sigh. I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. I’ll decide something. Soon.

It’s only a week away. Five days. It hasn’t exactly been sneaking up, but somehow I don’t feel ready for it. I remember back towards the end of September or the beginning of October thinking that Christmas was coming, that I needed to figure out how I was going to be getting ready for the holidays. Then everything else happened. So much. So much. I’ve been unemployed, but I haven’t run out of things to do. There’s always so much to do. Not like the busy work teachers have been giving to students forever, but actual things to do. School work until recently, and writing novels on top of that in November, and then when the intensity of final projects for school was over, an intense week of working from waking until sleeping on rebuilding the site, and I’m not quite done yet. Paintings I want to paint, novels I want to write, a job I want to find and get, fixes and changes and upgrades I want to make to the websites, letters I want to write, and on and on and on and oh yeah, normal stuff like dishes to wash, floors to clean and vaccum, laundry to wash and dry and iron, and other not very exciting things. Oh yeah, and somewhere in there I’m supposed to do something about Christmas.

I… I have a plan to pay my rent, but any bills after that look pretty iffy. I think I’m going to go get one Christmas gift today for a friend of mine for under $10 & will likely not spend more on Christmas unless I find my way someplace that sells salted cod. Stopping watching movies, despite what you may think, would not help, since the $40-50 I would save in a month would not pay the $123 and $220 bills I’m worried about being able to pay. (Plus, they help me feel better and be happier, instead of worrying about money all the time.)

I’ve been cleaning up a bit today, for the first time in weeks, and if I get the place clean enough, I may end up getting out my tree. If it gets clean enough, I’ll definitely end up getting a painting or two done. That’s an interesting thing about my lifestyle: I am most comfortable starting creative projects in a clean environment, but my creative processes fairly rapidly create a messy environment.

Something is stalling my writing this. I keep not knowing what to write next, getting up and cleaning a little more, coming back. I think I’ll just post what I have and if I think of something else to say, I can always come back.

So, like I said, I launched the new version of ME without going through every sing comic in the archives and making it searchable, and adding a thumbnail image. I’ve just spent all night working on that, and I’ve only done the College Comic, the Gaming Comic, Behind the Comics, A Couple of Guys and Their Talking Animals, and Diablo. Which means I still have I Like Blue Skies, the Stick Figure Comic, and the two longest-running, wordiest comics on the site, ME and ME2.

I tried to sucker Iain into re-typing every word he put into ME, but he didn’t fall for it. That’s 152 comics, some of them 9 panels long, to go through. Plus at least as many of the other remaining comics. Hooray! At least I survived re-typing the Dr. Lobster and Twix saga. You should go read it, or re-read it if you’ve already read it. I did. Backwards, actually.

Did everyone notice that the item features on the left hand side of the main page at modern evil is a random item from the right hand side? Fancy, eh?