Archive: December 2007

Last year, JG and I hosted a New Year’s Eve/Penn State bowl game extravaganza with our friends with tons of food, hours of games, and very little sleep. I had grand delusions of being the hostess with the mostest again, but a pesky combination of Working The Whole Time and Reality caught up to me and convinced me that maybe making 2 gallons of chili and staying up half the night wouldn’t be the best decision. I raised my hands in surrender, so we’re having a little two-person party at our house instead.

When envisioning the raucous goings-on at the RA-JG household tonight, keep in mind the following elements of what I considered an eventful weekend:

• Finished a book while JG collected star bits with Mario.
• Cut out pieces of corrugated cardboard for winding up Christmas lights and avoiding entanglement next year. I even cut slits for sliding in the ends with plugs and made sure that they would stack neatly into our storage boxes.
• Efficiently deconstructed Christmas decorations and proved the usefulness of my cardboard spools.
• Ate jambalaya while Penn State beat Texas A&M.
• Laughed at the majority of Juno, but cried at the end.

Since a flashy weekend at our house consists of reading, video games, putzing around the house, and eating, it will come as no surprise that our New Year’s Eve activities will include bacchanalian activities such as:

• Dentist appointments!
• Grocery shopping!
• Mussels and fries!
• Sparkling cider!
• Peanut butter brownies!*
• The entire second season of The Office!**

I tell you, we are wild and crazy guys. While other folks are slinking into glittery tops and revving up their champagne consumption, JG and I will settle down into the sedative folds of our couch to see if we can even stay up until midnight. If we manage to do so — kudos to us. If we don’t — well, it won’t surprise anyone.

See you in 2008!

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* Audrey, I promise that the recipe is coming this week.

** If we don’t fall asleep prematurely.

I finally received the Best Buy gift card on Thursday, after a hard-fought struggle with customer service. Although I didn’t have the card in time to give to my cousins, I sneakily gave them the gift card that my sister sent JG for his birthday (in the exact same amount) so that they would have something to open on Christmas Day. When the replacement card came in yesterday, I simply passed it on to JG.

During the whole debacle with Best Buy, it was nice knowing that I had a contingency plan, but I felt even better when I finished writing and proofing a scathing letter of feedback. I started off with the only positive comments I could offer (polite representatives and an intuitive phone system) before dishing out a timeline of my shopping experience and all of the factors that led me to the decision not to grace them with my business. I used every persuasive tactic in my toolbox, including this slam-bam conclusion:

It is with this experience in mind that I have decided not to patronize Best Buy in the future. I will not deal with a company that will not advocate for me when I am clearly not at fault. I will not deal with a company that does not have the means to accommodate a busy shopping period. I will not deal with a company that will ask its representatives to make promises about delivery times and supervisor calls that are unreasonable or not kept, or both. I will not deal with a company that is satisfied with providing mediocre — even inferior — customer service because there is a strong belief that losing an individual customer will not make a significant impact on the bottom line, despite a spoiled reputation. My interactions are an indicator of an unreliable vendor that no longer has the credibility to warrant my patronage. If I had received my gift card within the 7-10 business days, I might have bought other items from Best Buy. If I had even received a replacement gift card after the first phone call, I might have returned as a customer. However, my experience of frustrating phone calls, waiting on hold, and lack of follow-up by Best Buy staff has compelled me to take my business elsewhere.

By tomorrow, the letter will have been submitted to Best Buy’s online customer service, sent to their corporate headquarters, and e-mailed to IHateBestBuy.com. Even if my letter gets tossed into some corporate vat of paper, writing it out was cathartic for me, so I’m glad I did it. Situations like these make me glad I took those rhetoric classes in college. Booyah.

Ah, Ted’s first Christmas — a time of wonder and discovery. But first, a rant about a neighbor’s dogs.

Our next-door neighbor’s parents, who live just up the street, clued us in about avoiding a certain woman who has “two giant dogs,” because she would keep us talking forever. I never ran into this woman during my morning walk with Ted, so I figured that she must take her dogs out later in the day. JG encountered her during one of his afternoon walks a couple of months ago; one of her dogs got loose and came after Ted, so JG turned on his Stern Teacher Voice and gave her an earful about controlling her dogs. I figured that I wouldn’t need to deal with her after all, so I put it out of my mind.

On Christmas Day, JG and I swapped walk duties so that I could sleep in, so I took Ted out while JG futzed with the turkey in the early evening. On the way back home, I heard the sound of a chain scraping against the concrete sidewalk, and I saw a medium-large, short-haired, brown dog wandering on the other side of the road. When I looked past the dog to the house behind, there was an enormous, black and white, hound-like dog with its paws up on the railing of the front porch. Oh. These were the famous giant dogs. I straightened up into my best calm-assertive posture, and pulled Ted along, ignoring the other dogs. The brown dog noticed us across the way and came running toward us, barking. I scooped up Ted and said loudly, “Get down!” as it jumped up on us. When my attempts to walk home and ignore the dog seemed to incite it to follow me, I crossed the street with every intention to bang on the door and give whoever answered it a piece of my mind about controlling dogs and the responsibility toward the safety of the neighborhood.

Before I reached the house, a short woman* with curly black hair emerged, stammering in broken English that she was sorry. I watched as the brown dog bolted away from the woman and she toddled after it, calling out halfheartedly. When the dog reached the end of the block, the woman turned around and walked back to the house. Still holding Ted, I asked sharply, “Are you going to get your dog?” Yes, she said, that’s my dog. “No. Are you going to get him?” It was hardly a question. She was going to get her son, she said. Irritated at the situation, I stalked off with Ted without another word. I know that it was rude, but there was clearly no reasoning with a woman who had no control over her dogs and didn’t see anything alarming about a fairly large dog roaming around at twilight. Ted and I made it home without further incident, and he didn’t seem affected by the unpleasantness.

I know that I am more sensitive to dogs and dog behavior now that we have Ted, but seriously. It is not okay to have large dogs loose in an area where there are cars and children. Besides the obvious risk to people and potential damage to property, owning a pet without being aware of the animal’s behavior in general is completely irresponsible. If I was still in my state of dog fear, seeing a loose dog when I was by myself would have undone me. Owners just can’t assume that everyone is automatically at ease with their dog and the dog’s behaviors. I would hope that this would be common sense, but one can’t assume that, either.

Aside from a short conflict that was more traumatizing to me than to Ted, our little dog had a very nice first Christmas. He had a whole, luxurious day with both of his people, starting off with the exciting present-opening ritual. We filled up his bone-patterned stocking with a new hoof chew toy and a tennis-ball-bungee apparatus to replace the ones that he’s destroyed, and JG wrapped up a package of treats. We nudged the packages toward Ted, and he investigated them thoroughly before tugging at the ribbon and tearing into them.

JG rewarded his effort with a tasty new treat, which proved to be quite the entertaining plaything. While JG and I finished opening our presents, Ted pounced and prowled around his piece of filet mignon before finally devouring it. It’s the thrill of the hunt, I suppose.

Come and get your (almost) daily dog dose with Rufus, Ben, Gus, and Zapp!

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* January 6, 2008: It has been confirmed that the woman JG encountered and the woman I met are two different people. The former has dogs that are like two grizzly bears, and I passed them today during Ted’s walk. Nevertheless, the rant still holds.

When faced with a choice between A) sorting through pictures, synthesizing my thoughts, and crafting a coherent post; and B) alternating between eating and sleeping, I think it’s pretty clear why I am a tad belated in wishing the World Wide Web a merry Christmas.

So, Merry Christmas!

The mood around our house yesterday was lovely and drifty and drowsy; I spent the entire day in pajama pants and glasses. JG walked Ted in the morning, and we all took turns diving into our stockings and presents. I went for a geeky-puzzle-y theme for JG’s gifts, and I was so pleased that he liked his deluxe Scrabble set (with a turntable!), a book of Mensa logic puzzles, and a deck of verbal brainteaser cards. The highlight of his presents this year seems to be the sleek binary clock, which is currently blinking away in a benign blue haze on our dining room buffet, but it will soon have a place of honor on JG’s desk at school to, as he put it, “drive the kids crazy.” JG did very well for his part, gracing me with a stocking stuffed with red candy, a sentimental card, a Delaware football jersey with my favorite player’s number, and sundry other items for my amusement in the kitchen and for bedtime reading. Along with the joy that is ripping paper apart, Ted came away with new toys — a hoof and a tennis-ball-bungee thing to replace the others he has killed — and a bag of filet mignon treats, because we spare no expense when it comes to our doggie.

It was with great anticipation that JG and I had been planning yesterday’s meal plan, and it did not disappoint. Fluffy pancakes made a delicious breakfast, and stuffed mushrooms constituted a light lunch in preparation for the big dinner. See, we earned a free turkey from the supermarket, but since we went to Mimi’s for Thanksgiving, we decided to cook it for Christmas dinner instead. (I should note here that turkey and all the fixings is JG’s all-time favorite dinner, so to let a turkey go uneaten by him would constitute a travesty.) With that in mind, JG took the coupon to the store and came home with a seventeen-pound turkey. For two people. I was horrified at the sheer mass of the bird, despite the protestations that a smaller one wouldn’t have been free. Needless to say, we saved up our stomach room for all of the lovely food spread out on the table — turkey, green beans with pancetta, garlic mashed potatoes, and sausage herb stuffing. The dinner was a momentous accomplishment: JG had never cooked a turkey or made gravy before, and I persuaded him to try a stuffing that had a little more to it than bread. I do not exaggerate in the claim that our Christmas dinner was the best meal we’ve ever cooked. We barely made a dent in the food, but the refrigerator now is happily stocked with Thanksgiving-style leftovers for lunches throughout the week.

Between the presents, the food, and the time away from work, I savored the time spent with JG and Ted most of all. For me, the sweetest moment of this year’s Christmas was when I woke up to the sound of the oven timer. I had fallen asleep inadvertently on the couch during a long string of deleted scenes from the first season of The Office. JG was sitting a couple of cushions down from me, dozing away with his feet propped up on the coffee table, while Ted snoozed on the sturdy platform of JG’s legs. I would love to have a picture of all three of us, zonked out on the couch, on a cold Christmas day.