Friday, 26 December 2008

• Christmas Day and that upcoming move...*shudder*

  
  

  I took a break from learning kanji to celebrate Christmas, of course.  I wasn't expecting to get a thing, but I did get a couple of gifts that led me to believe my husband thinks I am easily twice as old as I really am.  No shit.  The gifts I got are the type you would give a senior citizen on their death bed.

  While all the other housewives of the world are getting bottles of Chanel No. 5 and cashmere sweaters, I opened up an orthopedic pillow and a neck-wrap around with massage feature and heat.

  Just keep me comfortable until I die.

  I crawled under the tree to find a sweetly wrapped bottle of narcotics or cyanide to help speed up the process to no avail.  When I admitted that I found my Christmas gifts hysterical, my husband was slightly insulted.  I wasn't being ungrateful.  I have occasional neck cramps that hurt like hell.  I can appreciate practical gifts, but at the same time, it does nothing for my spirit when I feel like the lone thirty-something on a base of twenty year olds who look at you like you are grandma.  Why couldn't he give me some really racy lingerie?  Seriously.  I would kill for that stuff, at the moment.  I would even wear a tacky feather boa and stripper heels.  Anything, for crying out loud.  My husband going shopping and thinking, "What do I know about my wife?  Oh.  Sometimes her neck hurts!"  Dear God, that's depressing.  We've only been married five years, not fifty!  I told my best friend what my husband got me for Christmas and she burst out laughing.  See?  I'm not the only one who found it humorous! 

  Tonight, I get to sleep on a new pillow, but for God's sake, if you happen to be reading this and are male:  If you are married, get your woman something that makes her feel like a woman, not a grandmother.  She will love you for it.  You will get laid.  In this case, I had to double-check my stocking for a tube of Ben Gay.

  A little tangent here:  When I was a tween-ager, I was in a class where our assignment was to think of a marketing slogan for popular products already on the market.  I got a brilliant idea for a slogan...An old man all bent over uses Ben Gay and then his back is straight again.  My slogan? "Ben Gay!  And now I'm all straight!"  My teacher found it hilarious.  In fact, she had tears in her eyes.  If only viral marketing had been so big back then...I may have had a job out of high school.  That product could have been marketed to Catholic parents as an alternative to straight camps.

  Other than my geriatric gifts, the kids came downstairs to find a dollhouse set up and weren't interested in the other presents at all.  Eventually, we took to opening stuff up and dangling it in front of their noses.  They both would take it, examine it, throw it to the side and go back to the dollhouse.  I guess you could say that was their "big" present, this year.  Unfortunately, it was a really scaled-back Christmas.

  The stray cat who adopted us also came bearing gifts like a furry little disgusting wise man.  Two mouse halves with bloody, exposed entrails right outside my back door which nearly caused me to vomit, yesterday.  When I told my husband he could clean up the cat's gifts, since he was the one who insisted on feeding this creature and endearing it to us, he decided to retaliate.  No, he didn't put the mouse in my stocking, which seriously would have been grounds for divorce.  Instead, he decided to get on the phone with his dad and tell him what a "pussy" his wife is because she won't pick up dead things.  He told his dad that my mother would have picked it up, thrown it in a skillet and sautéed it...since she is a hillbilly from Kentucky and all.  He then commenced the tale of how, when he was on deployment, my mom came to visit and tore down a hornet's nest with her bare hands.  It sounds like he wanted to marry my mother and not me.  I can't help it.  Dead things and things that bite, sting, maul, or what have you freak me out.  I also reserve the right to add the Burger King guy and the old man from those freaky Six Flags commercials that danced to the Venga Boys to that list.

  Since we didn't really get any gifts to keep us entertained, I took my neck pillow and my new foam pillow and napped...twice.  Blaine spent the day talking on his military forum online. The kids fought over everything.  That was our day.

  Now that Christmas is over with, I'll imagine we will finally have to get into high gear with all this moving and packing stuff.  I really don't know how I'm going to handle this part of things because I like my space.  I like having a corner of the world where I can retreat and tell everyone to @#$% off.  Packing up my home means losing that...even though I know this place was never really our home to begin with.  It's military housing.  We don't own it...but it's where our kids have been born and has been my comfort zone and prison for the past four years.

  When we get to Okinawa, we will have to live in temporary housing until we can find a home.  Temporary housing is basically like a hotel room, with probably an adjoining room for the kids, but a hotel room, nonetheless.  I lived in hotel rooms for two weeks at a time when I was a flight attendant.  It was extremely boring.  However, this time, it will be with my family which will upgrade "boring" to "completely insane".  From what I've been told through various sources, it could take two weeks to months to find housing.  I'm not sure how all this works, but I'm fearing living in a hotel room with nothing but what we flew over with on the plane for a while.  If that's the case, I am bringing my guitar as a carry-on item if it kills me.

  We do finally have a sponsor, over there, and due to a few paperwork snags, my husband said we might be able to get our leave date extended a month, though he's not sure yet.  I am crossing my fingers and hoping.  He told me the other day, in no uncertain terms, that he is not excited about this move and refuses to be excited about it.  He does not want to sort through our stuff.  He does not want to go through the move.  He doesn't really want a part in it.  Seriously, Morticia Addams would be more cheerful.

  He's still pouting because he really wishes he could be a civilian contractor and go do dangerous things, but at some point, I really hope he snaps out of it and realizes he is making the right choice.  He can do all that after he retires from the military.  It would be silly to get out, now, when he has seven years left.  In any case, he's had me tearing out my hair because I'm the only one doing research on everything we need to know.  He says he'll find out all this when he gets there.  I remind him that there is a lot of information he needs to know before he goes.  He just shrugs.

  No wonder he's getting me gifts you would give your senior citizen mother...I've had to turn into his mother just to get him going, lately.  These are the times when I wish I could close my eyes, tightly, and just will myself to where we are going and not go through the packing, planning, moving and transport stage.  I would rather look at it all as one big adventure and make it fun for my own sanity and the sake of the kids, but I've got that dude from the Rainbow Brite cartoons sulking next to me popping my bubbles of hope with needle words of how much this or that will suck.  You know the dude I'm talking about?  The guy with the rain cloud over his head - I think he was in Rainbow Brite unless I'm thinking of the wrong 80's cartoon.  What would Rainbow Brite do?  Besides hanging rainbow flags all over our house, which might give the neighbors the wrong idea?

  This grandma wants to know.

  
   

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