Gifting Fruit to a Nut.

Today is my anniversary. 4 years, or 1,460 days, but who's counting?! I love you hunny.
Each year I get stumped on what to give Mr. Jones as an anniversary gift. I never really followed the traditional anniversary gift list. Which you can view here. I decided to give the traditional route a spin this year. My choices were fruit or flowers, or both I guess.

       After much head scratching I decided I needed to do something that would catch him off guard. Aside from unexpectedly throwing fruit at him, I figured this had to be one of those "go big or go home" situations. I decided what better way to surprise Brett than to park a bunch of FRUIT TREES inside our house for him to stumble upon. Originally I thought about strategically placing them in our bedroom, but I must say that my original plans were poorly executed.

         Scene change - I am at Home Depot yesterday afternoon, and I have to ask where the trees are (strike one). After finding the section of fruit trees they send someone in to help me, pffft...like I needed it. I tell the fellow that i'd like an apple tree and a peach tree because I am indecisive. He informs me that I must buy these in pairs so that they can cross pollinate, and different types will work best. I sigh and shake my fist at the sky saying "why are there so many rules?!". I'm pretty sure he laughed at my dismay. I then take way too long to try to pick out 4 trees, meanwhile he asks me "what do you plan to do with these?". To which I answer, "Oh, i'm just putting them in my bedroom!". The very confused man then helps me pick out 4 trees and loads a cart for me and hauls it to checkout.

          As I am paying a thought occurs to me, "sonofabitch! I am in my CAR, and I just bought TREES." I tell the workers I don't need help because it would then be more blatantly obvious that I am ill prepared for tree purchasing this day. I trudge to my car and open every single door on it. Readjust seats a time or two, and then spend about 5 minutes looking at the trees, and then looking at the car. Trees, car, trees, car. I then just start leaning and shoving them into various corners of the vehicle and quickly shutting all of the doors. By the way- TREES ARE HEAVY. Windows also get cracked so that the sporadic branch or leaf bundle can hang out of the windows for added comfort.

           I get home and I hide the tall, heavy trees in the basement. Since I wound up with 4 trees instead of 2 I also realize that placing them gently in our bedroom while he is sleeping that night isn't going to happen. Few reasons why:
1) He goes to bed later than I do.
2) Our 3 dogs may think the tall trees are intruders and bark, or pee on them, whatever.
3) Did I mention that TREES ARE HEAVY?
4) From the looks of my vehicle I can infer that they put off a lot of water, dirt, and bark so I don't want to clean my carpet.
I then learn that he is going to get us breakfast in the morning so the opportunity to set it all up presents itself. As soon as I heard his car roll away this morning I ran downstairs and furiously carried the tiny orchard into our entry way. Hello cardio.

He also got a card (Oooohhhh) which incorporates the last 3 years that I slacked on:

In case anyone was wondering, I glued some of my pictures from a Departures magazine to the card.
And yes, I do realize that in the card I spelled pollinate incorrectly. Real life doesn't have an autocorrect. Gah.

Happy Thanksgiving

Today is Canada's Thanksgiving Day (if the interwebs have served me correctly it is supposed to be the 2nd Monday of October each year).

Considering I am not Canadian, and my husband is on the brink of no longer being Canadian, we were confused and celebrated last night. But we celebrated with the Olive Garden so I am pretty sure that can't count for much.

I thought it over this morning and I wondered, wait a tick, what do Canadians celebrate for their Thanksgiving?
I have my theory:
     They have their feast and conversation centers around how thankful they are that they aren't as stupid as the Americans are. Since we celebrate a holiday that centers around the idea that the pilgrims and indians actually got along well enough to have dinner together. Yes, I understand ultimately it is to celebrate the harvest and a time for being thankful - as per the cartoons I recall from my childhood showing the lovely peaceful feast I would see between the pilgrims and indians. But it is a little odd to me that essentially we traded the Native Americans seeds for death. Go America.   

In actuality- Canadian Thanksgiving is apparently in celebration of some guy named Martin Frobisher who had a really crappy voyage to Canada. During said voyage half of his fleet got completely rocked, and then he threw his hat in and went back to England with what he thought were thousands of tons of gold ore, but in reality it was just a bunch of rocks, or dog poop. Your call. I am not sure who is sillier, them or us. Looks like both of us were just fishing for an excuse to eat too much turkey.

I know what they eat at a Canadian Thanksgiving feast because I have been to some family holiday gatherings for Brett's family for past Canadian Thanksgivings. It is much like ours, save that the sides are actually vegetables and not a bunch of vegetables suspiciously hidden inside of a high calorie casserole. Don't get me wrong people, I will eat the hell out of a casserole. But I think there is a reason why our region is overly obese and fairly diabetic in nature.

Another thought I had: Canadian Black Friday. Wait wait, they would have a Black Tuesday. I imagine it is heavenly. I envision it being much calmer and less aggressive than the American Black Friday. Or the intense shoppers might actually wield hockey sticks so I could be way off on my original assumption. All I know is that bitches around here take that day rather seriously.

The great part? When Adeline is older she can appreciate having two Thanksgiving feasts. Too bad there aren't going to be two Christmases.


I would like to cite my sources. Thank you Wikipedia. Yes, you should believe everything you read on the internet.

Crap That People Have Forgotten About. Illusion Edition.

I think I would like to start a series for this. Crap That People Have Forgotten About. Consider this my first edition.

I would like to take you back to 1993. So let's see, there was Jurassic Park, Whitney Houston singing I Will Always Love You, Beanie Babies came out that year (on the market, not the closet), but this isn't about any of those. Want to know why? Because those are easily googled subjects. Anyone who can't recall the excellence of subjects such as those can just plug in and find out about them too easily.

I want to bring back to your attention something a little more down played. "Off the map" if you will. I don't know the technical term for it, as google did not provide much assistance in finding it for me. We will call it the Optical Illusion Art Prints craze. REMEMBER THOSE?! Hours of fun for everyone. Dozens of squiggly lines to focus in on and find a scene in behind the fuzz. I say hours of fun for everyone, but I guess some people can't get past the squiggly lines to see the pictures. I feel sorry for those people. At any rate, we still have one hanging in our office/museum of old dirty stuff we have collected about the building. See:

As you can see, it is strategically placed near our water cooler. That way our employees can have a refreshing glass of water and train their eyes to see a Rainforest. Or have a flashback from 1993.  I recall in the 90's these prints were so popular I actually went to a store that was an entire gallery of nothing but these optical illusions. I had to stare blankly at every one until I saw the picture underneath before I could leave the store. Nerd alert. Maybe they can make a come back in another decade or so. Let's use Maybe lightly here.

And that concludes this month's edition of Crap That People Have Forgotten About. 

Disclaimer: Don't actually try to find the rainforest in my picture I posted. You have to actually stand in front of it to focus in on it. Duh.