Oh, and I did mean to post on the Kwanzaa controversy, but as you may recall, I had lost the links. Here's one take on it, which points to founder Maulana Ron Karenga's violent past. And another, which takes issue with Kwanzaa's proximity to Christmas.
Full disclosure: we don't celebrate Kwanzaa here in the Blah Blah household. Viva does own My First Kwanzaa, so she knows what it's about, and as I have said, her teacher talked with the class about all the holidays at this time of year. I feel the need to explain why we don't celebrate Kwanzaa, but you know what? That's completely ridiculous.
Some Assembly Required!
Viva got this for Christmas:
I put it together backwards (with the door on the wrong side) and had it 89% assembled before I realized I had to take it apart and start over. Frickin' frickety frack!
Viva also got this lovely train set,
necessitating a last-minute Christmas Eve run to the supermarket for batteries. Sad to say, the train died the day after Christmas after it apparently fell off the track, got carpet wound around its innards, and began emitting smoke, which was not one of its stated features. Sweet Wills had to go out and purchase a replacement (of the train only, not the entire track)the next day -- also known as Boxing Day, Chanukah, the first day of Kwanzaa (Umoja), and the day I left my husband and child and drove 95 miles to get my grandmother out of the hospital and help her and my mom pack up the house they are moving out of in two days.
All I can say about my trip to my mom and grandma's house is this: after finishing packing up my grandma's room and then starting on my mom's, I was quite exhausted. Imagine my shock and awe when I found, among the detritus in my mom's room, a Ladies' Home Journal from January 1992.
Do you see what I was up against?
Do you have a junk drawer in your home? The one where, when you open it up, you say, "Oh, Jesus, I don't know what to do with this stuff," so you close it and walk away? It probably contains stuff like random paper clips, rubber bands, a few coins, a couple stray keys, maybe some takeout menus, wrinkled bits of paper with cryptic notes on them, books of matches, pens that don't write, screws and brackets and crap like that, right? My mom's entire bedroom is like that. It's kind of terrifying.
The really scary part is that when I found the Ladies' Home Journal* from 1992, I just kind of chuckled in weary amazement and then moved on to put all 917 of my mom's decorative pillows into one box.
* Originator of "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" Whew, yeah.
1 comment:
Aileen, mine did the exact same thing, how spooky is that?? He actually did get it to work, I think because he is so damn obsessive. He even took a picture of it so he would remember how to put it together again - I'll see if I can dig up the picture and post it!
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