Every other year we’ve been in PHX for Christmas, we leave on the 30th in the morning, and as such, we miss the influx of bowl game fans coming to whatever bowl game is being held at the UoPHX Stadium next to the hotel.  Given that I am not leaving until tomorrow morning and even though the Fiesta Bowl isn’t until the 2nd, there has been a decidedly noticeable increase in hotel guests who have decided to make a long weekend of it with pre-game golfing and such.

Not a shocking development by any means – heck, I’d do the same if GMU somehow found itself in the Fiesta Bowl.  And as such, the college football fans have arrived.  (Has the Fiesta Bowl always been on the 2nd?  I thought it had been a New Year’s Day game – is this the BCS continuing to screw things up or am I just remembering wrong?)

So, there is an influx of fans deciding to make a drinking and golfing weekend of it leading up to the game and staying at the hotel.  Can’t say I blame them, the weather is pretty decent.  I will tell you right now, if there were any Stanford fans staying at the hotel, I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup, cause they’re just quietly enjoying the weekend.  Can’t quite say the same for the Oklahoma State fans – several of which I ran into this evening during my postprandial Cabernet.  The Quote Of The Night goes to the gentleman to my right who said, “We’re from West Texas, you have to grade us on a curve.”

No shit, Sherlock.  Still, no biggie.

However, there was also a wedding reception this evening at the hotel.  A Muslim Ethiopian/Somali wedding reception.  With some of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous dresses I have seen in my lifetime.  Seriously – when I headed out for dinner, a half dozen ladies were walking in and I was just stunned by the dresses and I got caught just staring like an idiot and one of the ladies said, “Hi! Happy New Year’s!” and I found most of my voice and (likely sounded like an awed 8 year old) – “You have the most beautiful dresses I have EVER seen!  They’re just… GORGEOUS!”  They were more than happy to tell me that they were traditional Ethiopian dresses (though they really need to add “formalwear” to that “traditional” tag, cause I’m fairly certain these don’t get worn while getting dinner together.)  Seriously, these dresses crossed the lines from “lovely” to “works of art”.  (In talking to some of the younger gals later in the courtyard, I have now discovered that there is a pretty big Somali community in PHX.  Never would have guessed it.)

Now, let’s consider the “grade us on a curve” group and “happy wedding reception”…

Yes, there were some snarky comments from the West Texas contingent as some of the wedding party went back & forth through the lobby.

In a true moment of clarity, I realized going with what would be considered the “Northern Liberal Elite” (of which I am only 2 of the 3) route would do nothing, and my brain said, “It’s time for the ‘Bless Your Heart’ approach*” – cause any southerner knows it means, “You dumbass.”  When the next snarky comment came up, I just went, “Now darlin’, you just need to HUSH!  They are having a wedding and everyone deserves a fun wedding and reception and they’re just all having fun.  So you just hush up now.”

And damned if that didn’t work – if in no small part cause the wives then piled on to boot.  +1 for basically going with “Sheldon Cooper, don’t make me call your mother” maneuver.

Seriously folks, different doesn’t mean anything but different – and if you take the time to talk to people, you’ll find more similarities than you realize, like when I joked with the first ladies I saw this evening that they outclassed my jeans, they said, “But your jeans are more comfortable!”  Or when I was talking to the gals in the courtyard, I was helping them lookout for relatives that would be annoyed that they were hiding out and smoking.

We’re all just people mucking our way through the same mess.  So, be nice.

*While I don’t technically qualify as a Southerner and as such cannot legitimately use the “Bless Your Heart” approach, I spent enough summers with my grandparents in Atlanta to learn how to use it…

Now, I don’t know much about Miss Middleton, other than she can really rock a big hat, and apparently she is “new money” vs “old money.” OH, THE HORROR! Though that is hardly a UK issue – I’ve seen that nonsense in the US over the years, and honestly, who truly gives a crap? If you’re in love, you’re in love and net worth really shouldn’t come into the equation. (And yes, I know it does anyway.)

However, I’m quite sure I will know more than I ever wanted to know about Miss Middleton over the next several months. But, I hope she is truly smitten with William and should his Grandmother & Father disown him that she would still be just as smitten with the young man without his pedigree.

I distinctly remember Charles & Diana’s wedding – mainly because it was in the middle of the summer, so school wasn’t an issue, and we were up early to see the wedding. (Looking back, it does seem a bit stalker-ish. Sorry about that.) What still sticks in my mind the most was not the dress, the 25 foot train, the pomp & circumstance – it was the carriage. Mind you, I was 9 years old at the time, and I had been told it was a glass carriage. Having seen Cinderella multiple times by that age, I knew EXACTLY what a glass carriage should look like. And damned if the Royals didn’t heartily disappoint me on that count.

All I ask of the newlyweds is this: If you’re going to tell the world that you’ll have a glass carriage, you’d better have a Cinderella worthy ride. If not – feel free to go get hitched in Vegas. The Bellagio has a lovely chapel. (And carriage or not, I wouldn’t blame you for a minute if you went to Vegas anyway.)

Somehow this has taken me ALL DAY LONG.

The Lily Monster?  The loud, brash bruiser, who were she were human, would likely be a redhead?

Or the Carmenator, the quiet little grey puffball who evokes images of Helen Mirren, and still isn’t really sure about the whole ceiling fan thing?

If you answered Lily, I wouldn’t fault you for it, especially given the general consensus that redheads are all insane.  However, you would be wrong.

There’s a reason that Helen Mirren is playing a top-notch wetwork agent in the upcoming “R.E.D.” movie.

It would seem that my little grey puffball Carmen Sandiego is a rather effective mouser.  I was sitting in the living room earlier, minding my own business, when I heard a bit of a noise in her general vicinity.  I look over and see that she has something – not quite sure what, but she has something and she appeared to be quite over and done with it all.  I say, “Carmen, what on earth have you got over there?”  And then get a closer look.  “Oh lord…Um, thank you?!…Good girl?!….But you need to drop that now, OK?  Please?”  Thankfully, Moxley came over to be the enforcer and she dropped it, and then I had to make *him* drop it. (He has a habit of taking the cat toys away from the cat.  Unfortunately I couldn’t convince him to pick it back up and take it outside.  I tried.)

Yes, Carmen had done an excellent job of quickly and cleanly dispatching a house mouse* that made it beyond the threshold.  However, as I was gathering multiple plastic bags to dispose of the body, I couldn’t help but have some minor flashbacks and was seeing my obituary reading something along the lines of “death by zombie house mouse” much like the thoughts I had on the potential zombie squirrel that Mox brought in winter before last.  (We had a conversation a bit later about cement shoes.  I don’t think she was listening.)

But, the more I thought about it, if I had to pick one of my two felines to be the ninja assassin – it would be Carmen.  Not that Lily isn’t capable, but if Lily did it, it would be loud, messy and hardly quick.  And there is the old adage that cats with big ears make good mousers.  When Carmen was a kitten, I feared she’d not grow into her ears, much like I worried that Lily wouldn’t grow into her feet.  I feel I can no longer give Carmen a hard time about her sleeping habits, because she is obviously working hard when we’re not looking.

I will say that Moxley is looking at Carmen with a somewhat wary eye this evening.

*Perhaps I should be more flipped about a mouse in the house, but I’m not.  Mice get into houses.  And as my brother pointed out, once every three to five years, a mouse gets in here.  This time around, we had the Carmenator to deal with it – and she did so quite masterfully!

Those with cats, dogs, puppies or kittens have a completely different answer…

Tonight that answer was, Iams for Cats Avec Poulet (no, I don’t know why I manage to get the bags in French, but I do) and fortunately it was just as well received as the Iams Avec Poisson.

One thing I have learned with free-feeding felines is that if you want to be able to sleep through the night, you will have the food bowls filled and available for snacking at 4AM if you value an uninterrupted night of sleep. My brother has learned this lesson taking care of the monsters while I have been out of town, and I was very recently reminded of that little rule the other night when I neglected to check the level of the bowls before I went to bed – at around 3:30AM I was treated to the wonderful sounds of “things being chucked off the counters of my bedroom furniture.” Fortunately, I don’t keep anything actually breakable on my dressers anymore. (Thank you Snoopy & Target for that lesson, and for eventually watering it down to “stomping all over me in bed”.)

But, the food bowls are near-overflowing for the little monsters, and there is also a brand new box of biscuits for the AwesomeDog in the morning. All the critters are happily pacified for the time being.

And for all the studies that I have read about animals being color blind – yes, they may very well be color blind, but by god, they can distinguish shades of grey and shapes of boxes. There is no other way I can explain the cats recognizing the orange food bag, or the dog recognizing the red biscuit box. Trust me, they ALL knew what I brought into the house this evening.

However, The Fates/Karma/their various partners in crime felt I needed a little more adrenaline in my life! I started the evening at home watching the Redskins/Cowboys game, no plans to hit the pub whatsoever, cause it gets just a tad obnoxious. (I am a die hard Skins fan, but I am also realistic. I am happy when they win, sad when they lose, but I do not claim to be Super Bowl Bound when they win two, or even ONE game.) My brother had already gone up for a pint or two, and called me en route letting me know that the main feeder road off our street was closed off by the police, and said law enforcement professionals were standing around with shotguns. Oh, and there was a police helicopter circling overhead. Well, isn’t that SPECIAL??!?

I checked the locks on all the doors and windows and pulled the curtains, and wished my arsenal consisted of more than a Ruger-22 revolver that had been left with me for safekeeping. (As it is, I much prefer a 10+ clip. I don’t want to do the Dirty Harry move of “were there 5 shots or 6?” – I want to say, “Sucks to be you, doesn’t it?”) Finally the creep-out factor got to me way more than the “dealing with drunken Skins fans, win or lose” factor and I scanned the side yard, grabbed my keys, dashed out the door, locked it and leaped into my car – I figured my car was the biggest and best weapon I had should I see some unsavory character running across the street.

WTOP and Twitter failed me greatly, as did every other news site about. It wasn’t until the (very late) 11PM news came up that we had any idea what had been happening – A home invasion. Even then I couldn’t find any more info on the net other than the Washington Post blog entry – and that was only via a Facebook friend. Fan-fucking-tastic. I still didn’t know if it was safe to venture back into my neighborhood.

So, I called FCPD non-emergency dispatch and said, “I live in the neighborhood where the Field Master home invasion happened, and I have been out watching the Redskins game like everyone else. Has a suspect been apprehended, and if not, is it safe to go back to my home?” The answer was that yes, they felt it was OK to go home, as there were still multiple officers on scene, and they felt the suspect was no longer in the area. (Sorry for those *not* in the area where this creeper might be) I might have mentioned my willingness to run over any suspicious types with my car – the gentleman in dispatch just asked that I call 911 first. Fortunately he understood my comments to be nervous outbursts, and not an actual threat against any random person crossing the street.

FINALLY, I heard on WTOP that the shooter was known to the victim, and the Post blog was updated accordingly (with no mention of this being new information – DAMMIT, when you edit a blog post with anything beyond a grammar or spelling correction, YOU SAY IT IS AN UPDATE.) – which made me feel a fair amount better. And I shouldn’t feel “better” about any crime like this, but to know it wasn’t completely random, well, it did make me feel better. Quite the jackass for feeling it, but better.

Still, I don’t need this crap to worry about – it really makes me think more than a few times about selling everything I have and buying a little cottage at the beach and putting in some grass seed for the pup and really becoming the beach bum I know I was meant to be.

In short (too late) – I was celebrating breaking away and warning those to not let themselves decide that “can’t quit” must encompass all parts of ones life. It seems it was a horridly written post – but it did and still does make perfect sense to me, but then again, I did write it, so I’m quite biased. Regardless, the support was incredibly heartwarming – even if it might have been very lovingly misguided by my lack of clarity with my words.

Second, I am bouncing about like a PE class red-rubber-dodge-ball between “this will be fun” and “holy crap, this is the worst idea I have had in a while” when it comes to my high school reunion this weekend. If nothing else, there is an open bar for a couple hours and I have booked a room at the hotel, so hey, breakfast in bed on Sunday morning! No matter what, I suspect some fun will be had. :)

And finally – I joke about being the mother hen to my little chickadees that are at the pub when I am there, but at the same time, I’m pretty damn serious about it. These were the folks that were there for me as I came in for late-night bacon cheeseburgers & beer and explained that the reason that I was back in the neighborhood was cause my Mom died and I was moving back into the family homestead, and they provided shoulders to lean on and ears to listen when I needed them. And for that, I am very, very protective of my friends at the pub, and there is nothing that raises my ire faster than someone – anyone – messing with them. If you are someone I count among my friends, there is good reason that you are there – and that is why I get very upset when someone is messing with anyone in that circle. So, note to all – don’t screw with my friends, OK?

But, eldercare doesn’t come with an HR department or sane employer. So, you’re kind of stuck.

The stuck part will ooze it’s way into other parts of your life and you won’t even realize it, and you keep trying to power through it, because your brain has gone into “can’t quit” mode. Thing is – you may not even realize that it’s gotten it’s hooks into you – lord knows I didn’t until today.

In a completely and separate part of my life, I realized today, “This isn’t working. I need to just walk away.” It wasn’t some massive life changing portion of my life, just something relatively minor that I kept feeling the need to just power through instead of considering going another direction rather than running through the roadblock. I just hadn’t even considered the option of going another direction before today.

I swear, the minute I realized I was on the hook 24/7 with my grandmother (until I such time I could pass it on to *competent* caregivers,) I should signed up for 3x a week therapy so I could figure out how to keep it from getting into the rest of my life.

Let me be your cautionary tale: Don’t let yourself be trapped.

Apparently I did when I joked about buying a new fridge vs. cleaning the drip pan. Honestly, I thought it was just a gunky, disgusting drip pan overflow, and I was truly kidding about buying a new fridge vs. cleaning up the old one.

Except the drip pan theory was the wrong theory. And it took us a while to figure that out.

Night before last there was a small puddle of ‘god knows what’ next to the corner of the fridge. My brother & I both looked at it, and he said, “Cat puke, and I’m pretty sure it’s Carmen.*” I have had cats for 26 of the 27 past years, and cat puke is a very reasonable explanation for many kinds of ‘god knows what’ that may show up on tile or carpet. And we asked Carmen to not puke in the kitchen in the future, and it was cleaned up, and we thought that was that.

Except we were wrong. Which was the point where I though, “Ahhh, gunked up drip pan! We live in a house with 2 cats, a fluffy dog, and ME. Quite likely the coils are in need of a vacuuming, and the drip pan needs to be emptied and hosed off.”

Wrong again. Wherever the drip pan is, it ain’t at the front of the fridge. And we looked again, and again. Donald had already looked at the innards of the freezer in an attempt to find some item that had exploded/leaked or such and found nothing. And we then looked again. Oh crap. The leak had been melted ice cream, that had melted out of the (CLOSED!) container, onto the bottom of the door shelf, under the gap between the shelf and the “shelf wall” then down the interior of the door, and into the INSIDE of the door seal, and then dripping out the bottom of the door – which manifested itself as a leak from the underside grate, because I just couldn’t see exactly where the “leak” was coming from.

Well, I am fairly certain that melted ice cream is NOT a good sign. And then I noticed the ice in the ice tray had melted and refrozen. Not good either. (The fridge is still nicely cold for the moment.)

So, tomorrow is fridge/freezer hunting. Fortunately, little bro has said, “the kitchen is your domain, don’t go cheap, go with what you want” – while I will still be very conscious of price, at least I don’t feel that I have to go look for the cheapest fridge/top freezer combo on the planet, and we will again have a freezer-on-the-bottom-combo.

But really, I was just kidding about buying new vs. cleaning the drip pan!!! Totally joking! Seriously, it was a total goof to say it…

Here’s to helping the economy with a new fridge.

*I have apologized to Carmen. I think Donald still owes her an apology as well.

- First, I woke up before my alarm clock, and NOT because of the trash trucks coming through!* It was one of those, “roll over, realize I’m awake, and I am totally OK with the fact that I am awake” moments.

- Despite waking up before my alarm, I felt GREAT! Can’t remember the last time I had such a spectacular night’s sleep like last night. (And I wish I could say I’d done something different before bed, but I didn’t.) It’s much more fun to have entertaining dreams when you’re running about with Raylan Givens** blowing things up in the name of law enforcement than having dreams where your dead relatives are showing up saying that they’re “taking Grandma to go shopping” and you wake up wondering if that was some otherworldly sign that Grandma is dead…

- When I came downstairs, the dog was exceptionally mellow. Lately, he’s been a bit hyper in the mornings, and he was quite content to go out, come back in and just chill out while I checked my emails and paid bills.

- Carmen was just hilarious today with her reaction to the rain. She was an ANGRY little sleeper. (As it is, she naps with great passion.) She came downstairs, FLUNG herself into my lap, scrunched up her face and slammed her head into my knees and went back to bed in my lap. When Lily came around to see what she was up to, Carmen shoved a foot into her face. Not so awesome for Lily, but hilarious for me.

- I LOVE my new phone. (I went with the Android, and it was the right decision.) So many very spiffy and shiny apps to play with! So far I think my fav is the whitenoise app – nice to go to sleep with the sound of the ocean! (And I’d used it before last night, so I can’t say it was the surefire reason for my excellent sleep, but it could have been a contributing factor.)

- Realizing that this particular phone can easily replace my aircard – I returned the aircard, and being within the 30 days of when I had to replace my previously exploding & catching fire aircard – no termination fee! (That surprised the gent at Radio Shack, but hey, 30 days guaranteed satisfaction is 30 days, and I beat it.)

- Got some cute shots of the kitties today with the phone. (Still kills me that my PHONE now has a camera with as many megapixels as my “good” camera, which is huge and weighs a ton comparatively.)

- Got all the “I really WANT to get this done today” stuff DONE.

- Chicken salad on croissants for dinner. (And lunch tomorrow.) ‘Nuff said.

- Joe Saunders pitched a complete game! No, I’m not an Angels fan, but he went to my high school, and it’s always nice to see a local kid do well. :)

I won’t hold my breath that tomorrow will measure up, but it could still be a fair amount worse and still qualify as decent.

*Seriously, I’d be exceptionally OK with once a week trash pickup if for no other reason than to cut down on noise pollution. Or 5:30 AM wakeup calls.
**Watch Justified on FX.