Final Christmas Thought

Here is the final Christmas video. "Christmas Comes But Once a Year" is a Fleischer cartoon (the creators of Betty Boop) from 1936 and stars Professor Grampy, who was added to the Fleischer character stable in an attempt to tone down the risque innuendos of Betty Boop's early cartoons which brought the wrath of the censors. I can remember watching this on our black-and-white television set in the late '50s. Running across it in color is a real treat.



Tomorrow is the last day of school before the Christmas weekend. Last night, I baked up a small storm, making my semi-famous "killer cookies" for Ron (who has taught most of my classes) and Tiffany (my career counselor at New Horizons) because giving gifts is a good thing, and sucking up to people who don't need sucking up to is also a way to impress. But mostly, I just really like them both. It won't hurt to have them in my corner once my studies are completed and I start looking for work. (The school helps place people; they have lots of contacts in the entertainment industry, and I'd like to stick in that general area, if possible).

So the shopping is done. Here's a shot of presents under the tree: not too many this year, but they're really pretty. I'm so glad that last year I dropped about $50 on really nice, quality wrapping paper. There was lots left over for use this year, and it looks like it will meet our needs next year, as well. We also have a stash of bows and ribbons from years past that is still serving us well. I find something really pretty I forgot we had every time I open the box. And you know I like wrapping presents, especially nice square boxes with clean corners! But, for the life of me, I don't think we have a single name tag in the house.

The cat has taken to molesting the little red present in front; he gnaws and pulls at the decoration, and when you chide him for it, he starts eating the tree; this from a cat who never showed interest in anything Christmassy before. Now he sits under the tree with the presents, looking like it's all there for his personal pleasure.

I had my phone interview with the Employment Development Department today to check me out for continued training benefits. I haven't received any unemployment benefits for almost seven weeks now (I know, I keep bitching about it), but the guy on the phone seemed to think my approval was a slam dunk, and that I would be back to getting checks (including retroactive payments) within a week. God, I hope so.

One of the things I've realized since I started my Dreamweaver classes (the main program for the Web) is that I really have to have the most recent version of the Adobe Suite to make the classes effective. They are running CS4 at school on PCs and I have CS3 at home on a Mac. I can deal with working on both platforms at the same time, but the program versions are throwing me. The upgrade, unfortunately, is about $600. Once the cash flow begins to improve, I can make the jump to CS4. When I do, I'm positive that Adobe will announce the impending release of CS5, so another upgrade will be on the horizon. But, hopefully, I will be gainfully employed by the time I need to upgrade once again.

That all was certainly not filled with yuletide joy. It's kind of hard to maintain the feeling this year. So much lousy stuff has happened, everything that was familiar is now disrupted, and resolution for everything seems months and months away. Even the weather is bucking holiday cheer. So here's one more picture, the final ornament close-up, to set the mood (you can see it on the tree in the photo of the presents).

After several days of 75- and 80-degree weather this weekend, it's dipping back into the low 60s-uppers 50s, and there's a real nip in the air. It's been extremely blustery, and we even have frost advisories in the valleys overnight. It helps reinforce the feeling of impending holiday cheer. But Christmas Day it's supposed to be back in the 70s. And no rain, the closest to snow we get in these parts.

So, what the hell: Merry Christmas, everybody! I wish I had the time and wherewithal to bake cookies for each and every one of you (and perhaps I shall once I arrive in Arroyo Grande). But know that you're in our thoughts and hearts this holiday season.

Someone told me that Jesus was really born sometime in March (or was it October?), and we celebrate Christmas in December because it matched up with the pagan holidays of the winter solstice; celebrating then, Christians would avoid persecution and/or arrest.

Maybe so, but I think we celebrate it during the dead of winter because that's the time when we'd like to have a savior come along and assuage the darkness and uncertainty through the longest nights of the year, even if he shows up as a baby out in the barn.

Vintage Santa

Not a lot to report today, but I wanted to put in an entry so I could continue with the holiday video treats. This one is from Disney, circa 1932. Color was still a big thing back then.

It's interesting to note that Santa's house looks an awful lot like Sleeping Beauty's Castle at Disneyland. And those elves aren't unlike the happy human fodder who work for the Disney magic factory even today. See if you can spot the four places where Walt indulges in that campy '30s racism he's so famous for (a hint: two blacks, two asians and a Jew).



I have two classes next week and then things kind of shut down for the holiday week, not starting up until Jan. 5. Also, next Tuesday I will have my phone interview with EDD concerning my eligibility for CTB (California Training Benefits), which will continue my unemployment payments while I'm studying (which will be through April). It's been six weeks since they halted my unemployment benefits, so I really could use a continuation of the money flow. We're scraping through the holidays just fine, though and, monetarily, things should be back to normal in the middle of January.

I finally got my Christmas shopping done on Thursday. There was one item I had been searching for for the last two weeks and I finally located it. Now all I have left is shopping for the stocking stuffers for Steve. I am horrible at finding decent stocking stuffers. I think it's because they have to be small, and my eye goes to big, shiny things this time of year.

Hope everyone is doing well. I am looking forward to seeing everyone at Mom's memorial at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 2. Should be a pretty good party. So, until then, Happy Holidays everybody!

Merry Frickin' Christmas

The season is upon us, and the joyous magic of the holidays can be felt most acutely here in Southern California in the parking lots of the various malls in and around the Southland. The innocence of the yuletide masquerades as idiocy as drivers vie for the closest parking space -- or any parking space -- in order to stow their vehicles and join in the excitement of holiday shopping.

And so the spirit of giving becomes much like a jolly, roiling cesspool under immense pressure. When one dunderhead too many joins into the sludge of the Christmas car parking, the true spirit spews forth from the drivers with such heralds as, "Hey, MOVE YOUR FUCKING CAR, ASSHOLE!" and "EAT MY ASS, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!" And this with kids in the car. Thus, we are all covered with the great, steaming, holiday experience of sharing with our fellow man and woman ("Get that brat in the car, BITCH!") as we seek out the special gifts for those we love so well. And, hey; it's only gonna get worse.

And with this introduction, I provide the second installment of holiday video for your viewing pleasure.



To be honest, the magic has seemed to escape the holiday season this year, at least for me. I think the first inkling of its absence manifested in a real irritation at how many ads on TV are taking traditional carols and substituting the lyrics with their own poorly rhymed chants to hawk their wares. The one that really gets to me is when T.J. Maxx (a discount store here in L.A.; I don't know if they have them back east) rhymed "Christmas" with "nauseous," referring to how you will feel when you find out how you're paying too much if you shop at the mall instead of their store.

Then there's the ad where everyone on the suburban street has decked out their upper-middle-class homes with profusions of sparkling holiday lights, and the yuppies next door simply pull out their Audis from the garage and turn on the headlights and have "the best lights on the block." It makes me want to slap them. Really hard.

I've been out several times looking for specific holiday gifts and have found them difficult to locate. Luckily, the Burbank Town Center Mall is just a block away from my school, so I have been able to browse through the establishments there on my lunch hour while sampling the menial repast of the food court. The Japanese place is not too bad, but I eschew the sushi. There is a McDonald's, believe it or not, and today I tasted the dubious "food" at Panda Express, where you get chow mein drenched in white vinegar and orange chicken that is actually brown and has never known any sort of citrus.

I also trekked out this last Sunday and spent three-quarters of my time in parking lots, going up and down the rows of cars with dozens of other motorists, hoping for a spot to open up. At two locations I never even got out of the car, simply giving up and heading back home.

This last weekend was WET! There was loads of rain from Thursday through Sunday morning, and the temperatures were chilly (for us). It's also nice to have a number of days in a row when the skies are full of dark clouds, because it lets you really appreciate blue skies when they do return.

We attended the Christmas party of friends in Claremont, Steve and Roberto, last Saturday, and ended up leaving after just a few hours when I noticed the storm causing transformers in the nearby neighborhood to short and flash. It was a wise decision, since the rain started pouring down in sheets when we were just a few miles from home. Again, folks in cold climes will laugh at driving 20 miles in the rain. But then, you're not driving 20 miles on L.A. freeways. (I loathe freeways; thank God Steve doesn't and drives with with aplomb.)

Having spent a year or two in Alaska, I know it sounds really whiney to complain that the temperatures aren't getting out of the 50s during the day, but this is stuff we're just not used to. No need to worry, though; this week we should be back up into the mid-70s by Wednesday or so, and the rest of the year promises to play out with clear skies and warm temperatures.

School is going really well, and at the end of this week I will have completed my lecture classes in Illustrator, Photoshop and the XHTML language for the Web. The two really tough courses, though (Dreamweaver and Flash), are still to come in January. Once I've gotten into them, though, I think my Web site will begin to take shape quickly.

We have one woman in our classes who is either profoundly stupid or extremely inattentive; in either case, she is most certainly irritating. She has difficulty creating a new folder on the desktop of the computer, and any task beyond that is an absolute mystery. When the teachers no longer allow her to stop the class for her pointed questions ("Where's the pen tool?" "In the toolbar." "Where in the toolbar?" "In the box with the pen in it."), she will begin to ask her the person sitting nearest to her, still unable to comprehend no matter how much assistance she is given. Then she will openly criticize the teacher for not "walking us through it," which is exactly what has been occurring since the class began. I had the misfortune of being that person next to her several times, and it gets to a point where you have to snap at her just so she'll leave you alone.

All the frustrations of the holidays and schooling melt away, though, once I get home. This has been a shitty, shitty, shitty year for the whole family, by any accounting, and my unemployment has made it even more unpleasant for me (though I'm glad I was out of work when mom died; I didn't have to finagle favor from superiors to take weeks at a time off to be in Arroyo Grande). All I can say is, I look forward to next year, a return of jobs to those without them, and an improvement in finances and an expanding real estate market. I just really want to feel some of the stability in life that I had gotten so used to in years past. I know we can't go back to what was, but something as good or better that approximates the previous experience is what I yearn for.

Peace on Earth would be nice, too, but I'm not holding my breath.

Cold Enough Fer Ya?

I know folks in the north and east will find it tiresome, but it's been cold here in Southern California this week: dipping to the mid-30s at night and not getting out of the 50s during the day. Yeah, I know: Boo-hoo. But the mountains are covered in snow and it does make it feel a bit more like the holiday season. And so I have decided to include some seasonal video on the blog for your amusement. The first one is below. I waded through YouTube and found this and the upcoming entries:



You've seen a shot of our Christmas tree in the last entry. The next few will include close-ups of some of my favorite ornaments on the tree, like this one. I bought it in Monterey on a trip with Cousin Pat and her husband Billy on her last visit to the coast. She knew her cancer was terminal, and I wanted to share this last special time with her. We drove up the coast highway, overnighted in Big Sur and spent a few days in Monterey on Cannery Row; it was very special for us all.

I like having ornaments that bring back memories of years past and people no longer with us. I suppose that's part of getting older: Holding on to memories becomes almost as important as making new ones.

I'm finally getting into the swing of school this month, especially since I'm starting to take classes in the programs that I'm not so familiar with, like Dreamweaver. I'm also concentrating on learning XHTML coding, which is the basis for all Web pages and the language of Internet browsers.

Being a designer and inherently right-brained, it's maddening to have to switch over to the left side to work out all this rather abstract code. Add to that the fact that HTML, which I used back in 1998 to write my Web site, is now sliding out of date, and much of the coding I learned for that site (and have since forgotten) is now what they charmingly call "deprecated," meaning your browser will read it, but don't expect that to last forever.

Come next month, I'll be starting classes in Flash (Web interactive animation) and its program language, ActionScript 3.0, and the left side of my brain will be pumping even more mental iron as I attempt to master this far more complex language. Luckily, both Dreamweaver and Flash do a lot of scripting for you as you work, so I won't have to be an absolute coding wiz, I'll just have to know how to read it and fix it if it screws up.

On the home front, I've been cooking and baking more since brother-in-law David installed the flue for the stove fan. Here's a shot of my first attempt at cheese danish. They were actually pretty good, and with a little practice and jiggering of the recipe, they might turn out even better next time.

Steve is still on his three-day-a-week schedule at work (Monday, Wednesday and Friday), still being supplemented by unemployment benefits. As for me, I have been without unemployment benefits since I started school back in November. When you start school or training, you check a little box on your EDD benefits form, and once you do, the payments stop until they can verify that you qualify for CTB (California Training Benefits) which will continue throughout your training period.

I just received the letter today informing me of my phone interview with EDD on Dec. 22. Hopefully, it will only take a week or so to get the benefits flowing again. I will be receiving retroactive payments, and a tidy sum will come my way sometime in the near future, but it does look like I'll be dipping into the savings (something we have avoided doing all year) to pay some bills in the upcoming weeks. Still, I feel very fortunate that we haven't had to resort to credit cards to make purchases or payments. Unemployment (and underemployment) is really rough, but I have to remind myself that, still, we are among the lucky ones going through this.

So this year is going to be tiny Christmas with small meaningful gifts. And the further I get into my studies, the more I realize that getting a new computer and upgrading my software are both going to be high priorities in the early months next year: we're talking a total of around three grand all tolled. Now if that will only get me to the point where a new job is in my future, I'll be glad. And, of course, it would be nice if companies would start hiring folks back again, since the economy is doing so well, I'm told.

Tomorrow is a day off for me, so I plan on going out and doing some Christmas shopping. I can't share my gift ideas here, since Steve reads this blog and the only presents I'm buying this year will be for him. (A few well-chosen and thoughtfully selected items, with the emphasis on few. He's doing the same for me, as well). The real gift this year will be getting together with the family again in the New Year, sharing Mom's memorial on Jan. 2, and regrouping and moving on.

I'm planning three more blog entries between now and Christmas (since I have three great videos I want to share), so look for them. They may not be much more than an the video and a little blathering, but sometimes that can be enough. And, after all, it's tiny Christmas.

'Tis the Season to Be Dealt With

We open this year's first December entry with the mandatory Christmas-tree shot. More on that later. But isn't it pretty? It's the same artificial tree, same lights and mostly the same ornaments, though we've added a few more, as we do every year.

An avid reader of this blog has written an e-mail, chastising me for not writing an entry for a month. To be sure, things have been hopping for me. And, too, a lot of the goings-on have been fairly mundane.

Since Halloween, I've been busy starting up at school. The lecture classes are all-day affairs, supplemented with what is called "mentored learning," which is basically self-paced labs with an instructor available in case you get stuck. The lectures fall one or two a week (sometimes three), and then I fill in with half-day labs. There's no real rhyme or reason to the scheduling of the lectures, except that two-day lectures occur a week apart.

So far, things have been fine, since I'm taking classes in programs I pretty much already know. But, as with any computer program, you tend to know the functions you use, and others you might be totally unaware of, so they've been good refresher courses for me. This Friday starts my Web-specific lectures (Dreamweaver and Flash), and I am sure I will find those much more of a challenge.

The big news in recent days is a visit from my sister Kittie and her husband Dave, who came down for the Thanksgiving weekend. They arrived on Wednesday around noon. I took the Gold Line down to Union Station to meet them, as they were taking Amtrak down from Grover Beach. The train was about a half hour late (which is typical) and we ended up on opposite sides of the terminal, me in the waiting room and them at Patsouris Plaza where the local buses make their connections. Kittie had forgotten her phone at home, so all of the detailed messages I was leaving on her voice mail were for naught. Luckily, Dave had his cell phone, so I got a call from him: We located one another and were soon on the Gold Line back to Pasadena.

Once back home, I took them to a local Japanese restaurant for lunch, then stopped by Trader Joe's to pick up a few things I had forgotten (like chips to top the tuna casserole for dinner). Steve got home from work a few minutes before we returned, and we spent the evening watching "Coraline" (a very weird movie) and catching up. On Thursday we headed out to McCormick and Shmick's for our Thanksgiving dinner and returned home to watch "Pumpkin Chunkin'" for two hours (which is basically bubbas who have built bizzare contraptions to hurl pumpkins unrealistic distances: we're talking 2-, 3- and 4,000 feet. If you've ever seen Dave's Volkswagen bug, you'll understand his fascination for this sport).

On Friday we had brunch at Green Street here in Pasadena and then decided to do our patriotic duty, going out to the Beverly Center Mall to do a little shopping and catch Hunky Santa and the Candy Cane Girls aerial show. The traffic was horrendous, and there is no easy way to get from Pasadena to West L.A. (we took Santa Monica out to Fairfax), but I had decided that if we were going to brave a mall on Black Friday, we should go to one of the glitziest. Actually, I was kind of disappointed in the decorations. The place was crowded, but not nearly as bad as I had expected. One good thing, though: the parking was free for the day, so we saved $10 or $15 right there.

Yes, only in L.A. would you have a buffed out twenty-something Santa with his six-pack abs highlighted with airbrushing (it looks better in the pictures). Here, the season isn't about kids and presents or even celebrating the birth of Christ. Only in L.A. can we take a most important holy day and turn it into self-indulgent hedonism. We do know how to market on the West Coast. And we know how to consume.

I am glad we went, though: It was good timing. Two days later, one of the Candy Cane Girls fell about 20 feet while performing, breaking a hip, a leg and a rib, from what I understand (see the video below). The show has been canceled for at least a week until a replacement can be trained, although I'm sure Hunky Santa is still making his regular appearances.



Dave checked out some boots at Gucci's that cost $3,000 (or some such vulgar amount). We window-shopped in Bloomingdale's and Macy's and all the smaller shops. Everyone bought candles at the Moonlight Candle Shop, and Steve purchased my first and most expensive Christmas present, a copy of Microsoft Office for the Mac (since most of my study materials are either in Word or Excel). Late in the afternoon we left, wending our way back to the provincial pace of Pasadena. Friday evening was pizza and a viewing of "National Treasure."

Saturday was a stay-at-home kind of day. We pulled out all the Christmas decorations and made up a list of stuff we needed (spending quite a bit of time at OSH and Home Depot getting this and that). While we were decorating, Dave installed a flue for our stove vent (the previous owners had removed it and we had never bothered to have it reinstalled), replaced the pump in the patio fountain (which had died a few weeks before) and put in a door stop in the downstairs bathroom (he was the first person to realize we needed one). The rest of the day was putting up the tree (assembly required), decorating it and the general living area downstairs and indulging in cheese, crackers and egg nog. We even had Christmas carols, as I had loaded up a seasonal mix on my iPhone, which plugs into the sound system. That evening we screened "Team America: World Police." Kittie's only comment was, "You actually purchased that movie?" I guess she doesn't like pornographic puppets.

Sunday I scrambled up some eggs for breakfast and we took off for Union Station around 1:30, returning our guests to the good graces of Amtrak and their ride home. All in all it was a really great visit and a nice way to face the fact that Thanksgiving is no longer about gathering at the Moms' house.

So here it is, December 1st, and the Christmas cheer is bearing down on us fast. Yes, sir; 'Tis the Season to Be Dealt With. But thanks in part to Dave and Kittie, we have a really nice leg-up on the process. And with the stove vent operational again, I may just get some holiday baking done. You know, I've always threatened to make a gingerbread house. Maybe this is the year.