Part one in my multi-part interactive online artwork series, cleverly entitled Random Stuff That I’ve Scanned From Old Boxes Of Papers And Photos. The interactive part comes in when you leave comments. :)

These first two photos are from Christmas 1992, Ginger’s 21st birthday party. I can only assume we celebrated with alcohol earlier in the evening, because we came home to her mom’s house and decided that it would be a GREAT idea to decorate the Christmas tree with socks and bras. Allllll kinds of bras and socks. I think they were all Ginger’s dainty things…. or maybe we each contributed some, I can’t remember. Her mom knew that we were all “artsy” types and was cool with having her tree decorated unconventionally.

This tree decoration was only topped by one Christmas when Ginger and I shared an apartment, when we made terribly naughty gingerbread people out of salt dough and hung them on our tree. Too bad I don’t have any photos of that.

Ginger, Bonnie and myself wearing some of the tree ornaments. Apparently this was before I discovered the  magic of eyebrow plucking, and letting my hair go naturally curly.

This is one of my favorite photos ever taken of myself, at Tyler State Park. I think that I am trying not to throw up due to the liter of wine I drank the previous evening.

Dear baby Jesus, Allah, Buddha, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster: 
Please make my belly look this good again some day. And let me appreciate it that time around.
Thank you. 
Love,
Katy

Aww. My old driver’s license. I looked so young!! I suppose that’s because I was.  Note the fancy eyeliner and blood red lipstick. I do believe I am wearing a Cure shirt.

One of my best friends when I was little was a boy named Jesse. He was the grandson of my grandma’s next-door neighbor/best friend, Fran. Fran’s family and my family might as well have been blood relatives, we were so close. I only saw Jesse in the summers when I would get to visit Grandma for a month or so. We had all kinds of fun driving his go-kart, building hammocks, exploring the woods, swimming in the sound, setting off fireworks, and building crab traps (and taking out the leaky rowboat to set them, and actually catching crabs!) (not in THAT way, we were like 8 years old, get your mind out of the gutter!). During the school year we’d write each other letters, often in “secret code” so my little brothers couldn’t decipher them. Our secret codes were like a=1, b=2, c=3 and so on, but we sure thought we were being clever! You can click the letter below for a larger, more legible version.

Oh. My. God. We looked so YOUNG! This is me, Margret, and Kathryn on Earth Day 1991. We were 18. What the hell did I do to my hair? Good lord.

December has been an eventful month but I haven’t been posting much. I extend my apologies to my two readers (who perhaps didn’t even notice that I’ve been MIA, or perhaps were waiting with baited breath for my next genius missive).

In early December Doc and I went to Boston so I could go to the Web Design World conference (which turned out to be about 70% fantastic, which is a great ratio for a conference) and spend a couple of days with my brother Bob. We had a great time, in part because it was so cold and snowy. The city was decked out in twinkly colored Christmas lights that looked so pretty with the snowy scenery.

The first day that we spent with Bob, we’d planned to go to the science museum and aquarium but they both closed early because it was snowing. I thought that northerners could still function in the snow, but apparently not! We spent a long afternoon riding the subway around to our various destinations only to find out that they’d already closed down. Then when we got back to the car at the train stop a mile from Bob’s apartment in Somerville, it took us about 90 minutes to get home due to incredible non-moving traffic. We ate pizza for dinner and Bob and Doc played Rock Band for a while.

Luckily Boston has a great snowplow system, so by the next morning the streets were clear enough that we were able to get ourselves down to the aquarium.

I wish we’d had more time to spend with Bob, but we had to leave the next morning. It was a lot of fun, though.

Over Christmas, we visited Doc’s mom and grandmother and great-aunt and brother and sisters and their families in Derby (near Wichita), Kansas. That was a heck of a lot more people than I’m used to being around, but it was a lot of fun nonetheless. Doc’s grandma Rose and great-aunt Pat are in their late 80s but sharp as tacks and very up-to-date on what’s going on in the world. It was great seeing them again, and we plan to come visit more often now that they’re closer to us than they were in Idaho for all those years. All our nieces and nephews (most of whom are in their teens, and there’s about ten or so of them) got into a snowball fight on Christmas day with some of the moms and dads in the backyard. Doc got some great photography of people in mid-throw or mid-being-hit. He avoided getting into the fight until the very end by claiming “hey, don’t hit the guy with the camera, please”… but then threw a snowball at his sister on the way in. Sigh… brothers!

It snowed throughout the midwest the night before we drove to Kansas so by the time we reached the Kansas border everything was pretty well blanketed with snow. The residential streets in Derby hadn’t been cleared and so the driving was a bit iffy. On the way home on the 26th it had started snowing again but we didn’t have any trouble driving this time. We stopped at a restaurant in Arcadia, Oklahoma, called Pops 66. It has really interesting future-modern architecture and 500+ different types of bottled soda. Neato.

For Christmas Doc and I went a little lighter than normal with the gifts, by choice. He gave me some really nice things though, including some balsamic vinegar, bamboo cooking spoons, and this gorgeous Le Creuset cast-iron skillet. I adore it. I can barely lift it, it’s so heavy!! And the enamel is droolworthy bright beautiful red.

I’ve had the whole week of Christmas off, and I don’t go back to work until January 3. This week I’m taking it easy, trying to get a little exercise in, watching movies, hanging out with Doc. Saturday we went to Six Flags with Brittney and Chris. I could only go on two rollercoasters this year; I just didn’t feel up to going on some of the bigger rides. It was really crowded at the park, much moreso than in previous years. Wait times in line for the rides seemed about as long as they are in the summer. We had a nasty dinner experience too: we waited in line at a little kiosk with the “Papa John’s Pizza” label on it, but I can tell you definitively that the pizza was NOT Papa John’s quality. It was some of the nastiest pizza I have had in recent memory. For $7 per slice I would at least expect the cheese to be completely melted, but it wasn’t. I could only eat half of it. I complained at the guest services desk that they were misleading people by putting a brand name label on disgusting sub-par crappy foodservice pizza.

But, that icky food experience got made up for a little while later. We ran across a kiosk run by some grandmotherly type ladies with crockpots who sold baked potatoes, sweet potatoes, roasted corn, cocoa, hot cider, and OMIGOD cinnamon rolls fresh out of the oven with frosting ladled on out of a crockpot. I loves me a grandma with a crockpot of warm icing!!

Tonight is New Year’s Eve and I am perfectly content that we are staying in tonight and maybe watching some movies and ordering pizza. I’m not sure that any of our friends are having parties this year, and we’re not either. We’ve hosted NYE parties in the past, but after hosting Halloween and Thanksgiving and then being out of town so much in December, we just didn’t feel up to it this year.

Happy 2008 to everyone! It’s going to be an exciting year!

Oooh, how I wish that post title was a typo.

Guess what I got for Christmas? Stomach flu! I actually managed to LOSE weight over the holidays, but in a totally not worth it kind of way.

We have spent the past few days with my parents in Houston, and they have assured us that it will be the last Christmas in that crowded, hot, sweaty, smelly city with nutjob freak drivers and no zoning laws (there is a preschool next door to an oil refinery a few blocks away from my parents’ neighborhood). Of all the places I have lived, Houston is at the bottom of the list. Yes, even Sherman ranks higher. The parents feel the same way and can’t wait to move next year to a cool, sunny city on the ocean.

Mike, Vanessa, and Bob flew in and it was fantastic to see all of them, as usual. I have the greatest brothers and sister-in-law. All very smart, very cool people.

I was having a nice time up until about 6 a.m. Christmas morning when I woke up from a nightmare about being queasy. And it was all downhill from there. The entire day was kind of a blur of crawling back and forth to the bathroom, trying to catch brief snatches of sleep, trying to drink fluids (nope, not even water was agreeing with me), shivering under four blankets, and apologizing to Doc for ruining Christmas. He was being his usual sweet self, checking on me every few minutes, going all over the city to find a store that was open so I could have juice and ginger ale (which I wasn’t even able to drink until the next day), and trying to make me comfortable. Meanwhile, I heaved and whined and shivered and complained and eventually I was able to sleep for a few hours.

My wonderful mom changed her Christmas dinner menu to not include anything strongly scented enough to waft upstairs to my room and make me nauseated, and the whole family elected to postpone opening gifts until the 26th, when I was finally feeling somewhat human again.

Of course, by then my poor dad had the same thing. He felt well enough to emerge for a brief time so we could do a lightning round of gift opening before he needed to go back to bed.

In the spirit of nonmaterialism, my mom promised no gifts this year, except money to help us all travel to Houston to be together for the holidays. But since she makes the rules she apparently can also write loopholes into her structure: SANTA can gave gifts. That sneaky Santa clause.

Since I was a little out of it during the gift opening this year, I wasn’t keeping close tabs on what everyone gave and received. Gift certificates were popular this year amongst us kids. Vanessa gave Mike a certificate for a flying lesson (yes, my brother will be in charge of a plane. Run! Flee!) Bob spent a lot of time shopping at the Discovery Channel store, which is always a great source for gifts. Collectively, we all gave my dad an iPod nano (green) and my mom a new digital camera to replace her 6-year-old Playskool-looking model. Doc gave me two beautiful giant rosemary plants in giant pots, trimmed into pine tree shape. He wanted to get me something that would remind me of us getting married (isn’t that sweet??!!), especially since we don’t know how much longer our one surviving rosemary wedding table centerpiece that we have is going to last. (It is entirely possible that I will inadvertently kill it, as I do not have the gift of the green thumb. I am just now reminded as I am typing this that I forgot to ask Kathryn to water said rosemary plants and our orange tree while we were out of town. Shit.)

Today I felt well enough to travel, so we came home this evening. It’s always nice to get home, no matter how nice a time you are having elsewhere. The kitties all missed us. Our fridge quit working while we were gone so we’ve had to throw away most of our food. It’s always something, isn’t it? Doc knew I was still not feeling well so he undertook the yucky job of sorting and tossing. Do you throw away butter that’s been at about 55 degrees for anywhere from one to four days? I know you do mayonnaise, and formerly frozen vegetables and meats. Also, jars of salsa that have fermented to the point that they’re hissing are probably not edible any longer.

Unless, of course, you want the stomach flu again. Heh.

I’m still exhausted and queasy (have barely eaten since Sunday) but definitely feeling better.

we spent a week in seattle over christmas, visiting mike and vanessa, and arushi and shyamal. the family didn’t do too many presents this year, which was great (from both a we-don’t-want-material-things-to-clutter-up-our-lives standpoint, as well as a travelling-on-a-plane-with-gifts-sucks standpoint). before we left, though, doc and i exchanged gifts. he gave me some more beautiful glass tree ornaments, a panini maker (which we’ve used almost every single day), the book “wicked,” some kitchen implements, balsamic vinegar, some invader zim toys featuring gir (including tacos, pig, and squeezy moose). i gave him some fancy mustards and chocolates, a leather jacket to replace his worn out one, and some MOMA italian leather shoes to replace his worn out pair.

christmas day was really fantastic. mom and vanessa and i spent most of the day cooking in her beautiful kitchen, complete with granite countertops, deep stainless sink, and 6-burner double-oven viking range. we made turkey breast, ham, 2 kinds of mashed potatoes (smoked gouda and chive, and horseradish), green beans with tomatoes, lemon, and balsamic vinegar, green salad, spicy cornbread dressing, tomato and kalamata olive tarts, wild mushroom tarts, cinnamon ice cream, apple cheesecake torte… and probably some other stuff that i’m forgetting.

we didn’t have much of an agenda while we were there, so we had a lot of time to sleep and relax, which is really a lot of the point of vacation. we saw a movie (”narnia”), hung out with arushi and shyamal and had dinner at their place one night, saw john and sue as well as reed, lisa, and their little boy (whom i have never met; in fact i have not seen reed since he got married in… 1997 maybe?) (and let me just say that the richardsons seem to have gotten all the energy in the family… they were only over for like an hour and i was exhausted by the end of it!).

we also went skiing one day, where i concluded that i am just not cut out for winter sports. the forward-leaning position that you have to have while on skis made my calf muscles tighten and burn so badly that i only lasted about an hour and 15 minutes of my 2 hour group skiing lesson (taught by a 14 year old… sigh) before i had to sneak away and sit down. i couldn’t stand it any more. it wasn’t as bad while i was moving, but much of the lesson consisted of standing there listening or practicing leaning this way or that, which made the pain unbearable. doc had much the same problem with leg cramps during his snowboarding lesson, but we seemed to be the only ones at the entire place having these problems. of course, we appeared to be older than most people there and possibly not in shape… or at least not in the right kind of shape for this type of sport.

so skiing is not my thing, and as we learned in 2004, neither is snowboarding. snow tubing is much more my style — especially the face-forward kind.

i had a lot better time sitting in the lodge with doc and my mom, drinking hot irish cocoa. (when i say “lodge” you probably get a mental image of a wood paneled room with a roaring fire and comfy chairs… ha! try instead a college bar atmosphere with wet beer stained carpets and prepackaged nachos and other “snacks” at a cafeteria style counter).

poor shyamal hurt his arm pretty badly on his last run down the mountain (he and arushi went a couple of weeks ago and had fun, so they came with us this time too and apparently are much better at it than us). he somehow yanked his arm backwards in its socket while holding on to a stuck ski pole. he didn’t think it was broken or torn, just badly pulled. i need to call and see if he’s ok now, actually.

just a few days before we came home, an alaska airlines plane leaving seattle (much like the one we flew) tore a hole in its fuselage shortly after takeoff, apparently because a baggage handler ran a cart into the side of the plane and didn’t report it. i am glad that i did not hear about that until after i got home. i’m a nervous flyer anyway and that would not have helped.

today i had more success at finishing my shopping than yesterday. i located and purchased the one remaining xmas gift for doc — the one in whose pursuit i had the “bitch experience” at town east mall last night and i think that i also forgot to mention that the traffic was so terrible (like dorothy parker said “this was fancy terrible. this was terrible with raisins”) that it took me about 55 minutes to get out of the mall parking lot and home, which is only about six miles total — at the dallas galleria, and although i was dreading driving over there and trying to park and navigate through the hordes of rich folks, it was surprisingly calm for two weeks before christmas.

(boy howdy, that was one hell of a run-on sentence!)

the salesdrones at the galleria kiosks have apparently been instructed to snag passersby by any means necessary to bolster their holiday sales. they were very agressive, almost uniformly so. a woman at a skin care products kiosk stepped in front of me as i was walking past and said, “ma’am, can i ask you a question about your skin?” in a way that made it clear that my skin was dry, alligator-like, ugly, blemished, and in desperate need of the kind of help that only her $180 sea weasel placenta sugar scrub could rectify. a dude at a jewelry kiosk (ugly jewelry, at that) accosted me and tried to grab my upper arm while intoning in a low voice “i have something very special to show you, miss.” yeah, i bet you say that to all the girls.

what do you say to these people? it’s not in my nature to be rude and ignore them. i think i usually say something like “no thanks” or “not today” while making eye contact, smiling briefly, and most importantly, walking on by without stopping. i’m not a fan of aggressive sales tactics. in fact, it generally has the opposite effect on me than what they intend — i resolve NOT to buy anything from a pushy salesperson.

i learned my lesson last christmas when the guy at the cinnamon almond stand suckered me into buying some almonds. i mean, they were tasty, but not $25 per pound tasty. i was probably his first customer of the day, and i think i fell prey to his winning smile, cute foreign accent, metrosexual shoes, and the free samples. i know better now.

i had a great lunch with kathryn, and spent some time catching up with her. it sucks that she lives in the far reaches of what might not even be considered “the metroplex” anymore… although i know she loves it out there. damn her and her ability to see stars at night!

she and i went to another place where i thought there might be an off chance that i could find one other particular thing for doc for christmas, and surprisingly enough, i had some success there too. i didn’t find what i came in to get, but i found something else that i think he’ll like. and if not, it’s exchangeable. :)

then we went over to the downtown neiman markus to look at their christmas window displays. their theme this year is, apparently, either Attack of the One Billion Killer Butterflies, or Holiday in the Trailer. they had these odd full-size representations of airstream and other style trailers throughout the store, made of plexiglass, with really expensive crap displayed inside. one of the mannekins inside a trailer had hair that looks like mine when i blow dry it.

giant strands of gold and green butterflies hung down from the ceiling throughout most of the first floor. oh, also the elevator bank, which was probably thirty feet long and maybe twenty in height, was completely swathed in big gold sequins. you know how sometimes you’ll see a sparkletts water truck on the road, and it’s got that wacky thing on the back made of hundreds of silvery hanging tiles that flap around with the movement of the truck, which i guess is supposed to make it look like shimmering water? this is what the elevators looked like, except in gold.

so all in all, totally ostentatious.

maybe all i need to do is blow dry my hair and wear something with metallic sequins to make people think i’m fancy.

i got some great laughs from looking at the price tags on things. i mean… shit, i could make two house payments or buy a ragged yellow and white tweed cardigan.

oddly enough, i didn’t get the feeling from any of the salespeople that (like valerie said the other day) i clearly did not belong in their store. i had on levi’s 501s and a pink cardigan over a green “where the wild things are” tee shirt, and riverdancing shoes. in otherwords, they don’t sell anything i was wearing at neiman’s. yet i didn’t get “the look” from anyone. maybe they’re desperate for sales. who knows.

we had a great time out last night. first off, we went to a little early evening holiday party at my company’s VP’s house. it was funny how most people, rather than mingling, stood and talked to their immediate co-workers. me included, of course. i’m not that outgoing. i have to say that the mashed potato bar rocked. i’d never thought of serving mashed potatoes in martini glasses and letting people top them with things like pesto, mushrooms, cheese, sun dried tomatoes, etc. the VP’s house is quite nice. quite large. quite the cool wide-plank hardwood floors and all stainless viking appliances in the kitchen.

after an hour or so, doc and i, brittney, yvonne and nate, and ben and his wife chelsea went over to the cock and bull pub in lakewood for a drink. i had SO much fun!! chelsea and brittney are both like four feet something tall and veeeeery outgoing. like two peas in a pod. she might even be perkier than brittney. ben is my supervisor but he’s a lot of fun to hang out with socially. he and chelsea left after a while but the rest of us stayed for a couple of hours. i like that place. not terribly loud, not smoky enough to make me want to immediately leave, nice colors on the walls, small, not full of college frat boys, and good happy hour prices. doc said that the hamburger he ordered was the best he’s had in recent memory. then he and nate started talking about all the good burger places in town. we resolved to try keller’s, if only for the cheezy drive-in classic car factor. i can’t even remember what all we talked about but after a while i started to get a headache — i blamed it on the smoke but what i didn’t want to admit (for whatever reason) was that the headache was from laughing so hard and my face constantly having a smile plastered on it. it started to hurt after a while! how dumbass is that!!

doc’s two belhavens put him over the cluster edge; at the time he said it would be worth it to have a drink (24 hours later and the headache’s still going… now he’s rethinking the wisdom of that plan). we had talked about going back to yvonne and nate’s house to play board games and have more drinks and snacks, but we decided to go home instead. maybe next time.

i really like yvonne and nate, and i’m glad to be making new friends. not that there’s anything wrong with my old friends!! i don’t see them nearly enough, and i miss them. but as i said before, i’m not very outgoing and don’t make friends easily. i also tend to assume that all strangers are completely unlike me and are not the type of people that i would want to be friends with. until, of course, i meet someone under circumstances where i am able to slowly get to know them (like work, say) and my preconceived notions unravel. maybe it’s from living in texas which is full of right wing religious republican SUV-driving gay-hating yokels (ranging in looks from cowboy to highland park mom), and me being a left wing atheist/agnostic liberal tree-hugging gay-loving person, i tend to assume that there are very few people like me, and what are the odds that i’ll meet another one.

i oughta give strangers more credit, but somehow i just can’t. i guess it’s closed-minded of me to assume that. maybe i should work on it harder.

so today i tried to bust a move and get all my holiday shopping done. i nearly succeeded; i just need to get one more item from doc and i have to go to another location of the store i was at to find it. i spent about seven and a half hours shopping today. it was kind of a nightmare. i hate crowds, traffic, shopping, and people. i hate malls especially. do not, under any circumstances, go near town east mall this time of year. i held the door open for a woman who was exiting dillards, and got called a bitch for my trouble. i was going in the same door she was coming out of, and i stepped back and caught the edge of the door for her. did she think i was in her face or something? whatever. even though she was mean to me, i decided to be extra nice to other people while i was at the mall instead of taking it out by being rude to other people. building up extra karma points or something.

I had a nice Christmas. We went to Houston to spend it with my family. Both my brothers were there, along with Mike’s girlfriend Vanessa, who seems very nice. For a holiday where we weren’t supposed to give too many presents, we sure all ended up with a lot of stuff! Mom made each of us a personalized quilt. It is so cool. Mine has photos of all the pets I’ve ever had on it. Doc’s is really cool; I call it his “smartass quilt.” Be careful what you are a smartass about when asked about your likes and dislikes, or you might end up with a quilt that has a picture of a Mudflap Girl, skulls and crossbones, and Sunbonnet Sue smoking a pack of Kools on it. Mom also made me, Mike, and Bob each a scrapbook with old photos in it, in pretty much chronological order. She’s not finished with them; mine goes up through college. There’s hundreds of pictures in it. Very very cool! Doc and I gave each other a new set of pots and pans (Calphalon Stainless Steel). He gave me some computer games, calendars that I’d asked for, gloves, some Christmas ornaments, a mixed drink book, and also bought me/us a scanner. It’s very neat in that it is basically just a sheet of glass with a frame, that you set on top of whatever you’re scanning. It also has a stand if you want to use it that way. I ****HATE**** scanning…(hate…scanning… so… much…) but this may make it not such an ordeal.

Now I’m in sort of overload mode. I have freelance work to do (and am having no end of trouble with FTP! GRRRR!!!!) but also two new computer games; the house looks like a tornado came through here; we have a New Years party on Wednesday that almost no one has RSVP’d for… which reminds me, I’d better send out a reminder message, ’cause if it’s just going to be Joel and Valerie and us, then I don’t want to make six tons of food.

Sigh. Too much to do, not enough time, and zero motivation for any of it.

I have managed to completely mess up my font situation on my home computer. I think I deleted some important system fonts while trying to wrangle FontBook, because now everything is completely screwy. Regular old standard system fonts are defaulting to other ones, etc. Right now this is supposed to be displaying in nice smooth anti-aliased Arial as I type this, and it looks all Helvetica-y and somewhat jagged, even though Arial appears to be activated.

I think I might actually have to reinstall something. Yuck.

Happy birthday, Bob! I can’t believe my youngest brother is 24. Wow.

So, my division at work gave out Christmas gifts yesterday… a nice card with a nice imprinted message, along with a sheet of address labels featuring our home address… which is all very nice. But then, included in the card, was a donation request form. Merry Christmas, now return some of that paycheck! Many companies give out holiday bonuses — THEY give US a little something extra (and I’ve never had any illusions that this would actually occur at my office). But asking US to give money back?? And in the guise of a Christmas card??? Talk about tacky!! They might as well have said “Yeah, happy holidays, whatever. Now, down to the real business — give us your money.”

We have finally acquired a Christmas tree. We got a real one this year (spiky old Scotch Pine, but they all turn brown and die within a couple weeks anyway). We might look for a nice fake tree during the post-holiday sales. We haven’t named him yet. Oswald was our tree a couple of years ago. I’m having trouble thinking of a good name for this one. Maybe Emporer Crumpington. Now, for the fun part — decorating! I loooooove my ornaments. Doc bought them for me a couple Christmases ago. They are freakin’ gorgeous. I don’t get all girly and knick-knacky about much of anything, but I just loooooove these ornaments.

I put lights in the tree in the front yard and on the garden gate on Sunday night. And some around the interior of the house as well. I guess I have a little more holiday spirit this year than usual. Maybe it’s that two week vacation I’m taking starting next week.

OK, on to other more important topics. I could talk for a while about the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the way the media has reported on it, but Hillsman at work summed it up best this morning: “Four more years.”

. He’s probably right, too. I haven’t been paying enough attention to the Democratic debates, but it seems like the Dems are a house divided this year. If they do not get together and strongly back one guy, ONE GUY (or gal, although that’s not looking likely, even thought it is freakin’ 2004, for god’s sake), then the Dem vote will be split and Bush will be a no-brainer in 2004.

And I do mean no-brainer.

Just what every holiday tree needs.