2003-12-9 - 6:14 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Presque Rien", Francis Cabrel

December 5

SNOW!

Woohoohoo!!

The little girl who lives behind me is playing on her back deck. She's trying to throw snowballs. When I was watching, the snowball fell straight down out of her hand as it was cocked back to throw, so she threw with all her might and nothing happened. Hee.

Her Barbie is leaning against the back door. Barbie is naked and is getting snowed on. Poor Barbie. It makes me feel colder just looking at her.

So, it looks like this is shaping up to be a REAL SNOWSTORM!! WOOHOO!! And on the weekend, too, so we can just curl up inside and enjoy it.

I was very amused by Jason's childhood snow games:

When I was younger, I used to play for hours, frequently by myself, in the backyard. Ours was such that if you went out after a snowstorm, you couldn't see anything but trees and the snow-dusted wooden fort my father had made for me, so long as you kept your back to the house. There were no other children growing up in my neighborhood, and so on weekends, or snow days, there were hardly any sounds at all. It was perfectly serene, calm, and completely silent. It was easy to pretend you were in another world. I usually picked the snow world of Hoth from Empire Strikes Back.

I loved pretending that I was one of the ill-fated Rebel soldiers who tried to defend the base against the stormtroopers and their AT-AT's. I didn't realize it until recently, but I never once emulated the Imperials. And I never attempted to fantasize that the Rebels won the battle, though sometimes I'd make an escape. It was somehow more fun to impersonate a bleak battle in that setting. After a series of imagined blaster shots spattering the snow nearby, I would envision some of them hitting me, or the log pile that I believed to be a defense laser, or something similar. And then I'd fake the death scene with gusto, flailing backwards, brushing snow from low-hanging tree limbs, and finally plopping down into a snowdrift.

Apparently this was a common childhood snow game, because Brad did it too. I copied all this to Poindexter on IM, and he said:

Poindexter: who hasn't?
Poindexter: that's all I did in Fishkill.
Me: REALLY!?
Poindexter: lol
Poindexter: no.
Me: Aw.
Me: I was thinking, you poor thing, deprived of the opportunity to do this, growing up in CA.
Poindexter: I PRETENDED THERE WAS SNOW!
Me: LOL
Poindexter: It was much more comfortable.

December 8

Canuckgirl is talking about J-Cloths, which is to dishtowels (in Canada, at least) like "Kleenex" is to "tissues", far as I can tell. Or as "Xerox" is to copiers. A brand name that has become a generic word.

While musing on this I suddenly recalled somebody -- my dad's father, the McSorley's guy, probably -- referring to his little packet of Kleenex as "paper handkerchiefs". This means that he was probably born before they were invented or widely used, so he felt a need to distinguish them from cloth handkerchiefs. Yep -- he was born in 1910 and it looks like Kleenex was born in the 1920s.

I hope I live a long, long time so I can see all the nifty new things that are going to be invented in the next 50+ years. Fifty years ago the technology that now exists inside my tiny little hearing aids needed a room-sized computer, if it was even possible at the time.

Yeah, yeah, I know I keep bringing this up. But it's pretty staggering.

December 9

This past weekend I attacked the big clutter box (which had gotten disturbingly full) and managed to throw away and file enough things that I could have two small shoe-box sized boxes -- one for paper and one for objects, a la Camille.

So, yesterday I was doing some Christmas shopping, and I was in the gifts section of the Burlington Coat Factory looking at, among other things, hatboxes.

And I thought, "Wow, those hatboxes are so pretty. I kinda want one. But what would I do with a hatbox? I don't have any fancy ha-- HEY!!" Camille to the rescue again -- she mentioned in some post of mine that she uses a hatbox or two for HER clutter boxes.

I have no innate talent at organizing. Everything I do I learned from someone else -- my mom, my MIL, my friend Louanne, and LiveJournal.

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