Here, take some Thanks.

Well, hello there!

I hope everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving had a super duper one, and I hope that everyone who does not celebrate Thanksgiving had a grand November 25th anyway.

This year was my first ever year hosting Thanksgiving.  My mom drove up from Southern California, my little sister Booger came over from college, and we three had a feast.

My holiday started on Wednesday, when Booger and I made some awesome late-night Thanksgiving decorations.  Remember a while ago when I joked that I’m likely to develop an addiction to art supplies?  Yeah...on my way to get Booger from school, I stopped by a Michael’s and spent way more than could ever be appropriate on felt and glue and buttons and pipe cleaners and thread and cloth and toothpicks and styrofoam balls of various sizes.

DEBT, HERE I COME.

But it was totally worth it because we made some fantastic place mats, complete with hand-turkeys, hand-dinosaurs, and hand-octopuses; and some crazy-looking turkey centerpieces.

I woke up early-ish Thursday morning to go to the grocery store to pick up my pre-cooked, pre-packaged Turkey dinner.  I am as far from a chef as it is possible to be, and there was no way I was going to risk Thanksgiving by trying to actually cook anything, so I ordered a dinner package from the local grocery store, where I headed Thursday morning.  I prepared myself for horrible lines of stressed and frantic people trying to purchase all of their forgotten Thanksgiving supplies.

Nope, the grocery store was pretty much empty.

I was pretty sure I was supposed to go over to the deli area to pick up my dinner, but there was no line to tell me for sure if I was in the right place, so I asked a guy who was rolling some sushi where I should go, and he shouted for someone to come help me out.

The guy who came out asked for my name, which I gave, and then flipped through his folder of orders.

Then he flipped through his folder of orders again, a little more slowly this time.

Then he flipped through his folder of orders again, rubbing each page carefully between his fingers to make sure none of them were sticking together.

Meanwhile, I stood at the counter, frozen in horror.

The guy said he couldn’t find my name, and called a lady over to help.  She looked through the folder, flipped over a purple divider, and pulled out an order form with my name on it.

Apparently my order was for Wednesday, not Thursday.

(I would just like to say that I am absolutely certain that I said Thanksgiving Day on the phone when I placed my order for that dinner, because I first said Wednesday, but then remembered that I didn’t have my work schedule yet and didn’t know whether I would be working on the 24th or not, and so I said, “You know what, let’s change it to 9:00 Thursday morning, since I know I don’t work Thanksgiving Day.”  So it’s all totally their fault.)

(But it doesn’t even matter anyway, because they still had my turkey in the back.  No harm, yes fowl.)

“Don’t worry,” the lady told me (I must have looked like I was going to collapse).  “Your dinner wasn’t going to go anywhere.”

So I happily took my meal and drove back to my apartment, where I broke open my box and took a look at the included instructions.

“Place breast side up in roasting pan.”

...

“Roasting pan?”

I took a look in the drawers and cupboards in my kitchen and didn’t see anything that screamed “roasting pan.”

“Whatever, I’ll just use a cookie sheet instead.”

...

Luckily my trusty friends Alarm Bells started going off in my head, and they politely informed me that using a cookie sheet as a roasting pan would probably create more of a disaster than I was prepared to deal with my very first time hosting Thanksgiving.

So I put the cookie sheet away, got back into my car, and drove back to the grocery store to pick up a roasting pan.

(Actually, I drove to a different grocery store, since I was a little embarrassed about the fact that I clearly had absolutely no idea what I was doing this holiday day and I didn’t want people who knew that I was making a pre-cooked turkey to see that I didn’t even know how to warm up said pre-cooked turkey without multiple trips to their store.)

I also picked up a baster, since I knew they have something to do with turkeys and  they were right next to the roasting pans anyway.

We didn’t use the baster.

Apparently precooked turkeys don’t need one.

Whatever.

ANYWAY, about that time my mom arrived (she left our house at 3:00 in the morning to get to my place in time for Thanksgiving--THANKS, MA!) so she was able to help me with the overwhelming task of heating up all the different foods included in my box in the right order so they were all ready to be served at approximately the same time.

With the exception of some mashed potato-related troubles, our dinner-heating went pretty smoothly, and soon we were stuffing ourselves with our delicious meal.

I think my first time throwing a Thanksgiving was mostly a success!

There were a few awesome individuals who were sadly missing from our mini-feast.

But thanks was given for them from afar, and I’m confident they had a good one, even devoid of my clearly awesome company.

Hope you all had a super one too!  <3

Brrrr.

It’s cold, it’s cold, it’s really really cold.

And I’m told it’s not even the coldest it’s going to be.

Now, I like cold weather.  I much prefer it to hot weather.  It’s just that I’m from Southern California, where I was able to get by with a winter wardrobe of jeans and sweatshirts.  I rarely had an umbrella, which was fine because a hood mostly sufficed (plus, I’ve had a lingering dislike for umbrellas since high school, where umbrella-level for everyone else was face-level for me, which got pokey fast).

Every time it rained, I would mention vaguely that I should buy some galoshes, but since it probably wasn’t going to rain again until the next year, I never got around to it, and so my footwear mainly remained less-than-waterproof sneakers.  But now I’m living quite a bit north of home, and apparently my not-so-winter clothes just aren’t going to cut it.  Because I am freezing.

I kept trying to write this post earlier this week, but my fingers got so cold so quickly that I gave up multiple times and opted instead to watch TV just so I could sit on my hands to warm them up.

A bonus is that when my hands get cold, they turn blue.  It starts in my fingernails, and if it’s REALLY cold, the color starts creeping down towards my knuckles.  It used to happen a lot in my classrooms that way overcompensated for the summer heat by setting the air conditioner to Antarctica.  I almost started bringing gloves to class mid-summer.

And it's not just my hands that change color like a mood ring.  My legs turn purplish, as I learned in high school when stretching before basketball practice in the winter.  My lips turn blue too, especially when I'm swimming.

Which I will not be doing any time soon, for fear of turning into an ice cube.

Basically I’m like a tree, only instead of turning orange for autumn, I turn blue for winter.

Speaking of trees:

Goodbye, yellow, orange, and red trees!  I will miss you when you’re gone!

EVERGREENS ARE LAZYGREENS!

AAAAA PRETEND IT'S NOT MONDAY!

Yyyyyyyeah, I am not improving on my time management.

SO.  Kindly pretend today isn't the day that I'm supposed to post something new--oh, wait.  Dang.  It's not the day I'm supposed to post something new.  It's the day after already.



Whoops.



Um.

Sorryyyyyyyyy!  Something better than this will be posted tomorrow (er...later today?) or WEDNESDAY AT THE LATEST.

OKAY BYE.

What the--HOW IS IT MONDAY RIGHT NOW!?

I must have inadvertently discovered time travel!  It’s absolutely the only explanation, because I could have sworn that it was Monday just yesterday.

HELLO, MONDAY, I AM COMPLETELY UNPREPARED FOR YOU!

My very deepest apologies, World.  I seem not to be adjusting very well to having actual responsibilities again.  In the time between graduation and finally finding a job, I had nothing but free time, and now I suddenly have stuff to do every day, which seems to be messing with my ability to do Very Important Things like draw pictures illustrating my rambling love for things.  To be honest, even my newfound employment isn’t really an excuse for my not being productive.  I still have plenty of free time, I just seem to have misplaced my time management skills.

I should probably look for them.  But not now.  Later.

So today will have to be another day of posting random old drawings that have nothing to do with anything!  Enjoy!

The weather has been pretty cold here recently.  Today isn't, though.  Today is warm and sunny with LOTS OF WIND, which is, I think, my favorite type of weather.  I like wind.  It's like a fan that follows you around outside. I think I'd feel differently if I still wore contact lenses, since wind is a pro at throwing stuff in a person's eyes, and that hurts when you wear contact lenses.  But now I wear glasses, and those basically function as a shield against the otherwise agony-inducing wind-blown debris.  So I'm good with this weather.

I don't play softball.  I'm pretty sure I'd be terrible at it.  I have enough hand-eye coordination for basketball, but that ball is about ten times as big as a softball.  I think I'd lose track of the little ball really easily and would only find it again once it hit me in the head.  And then I'd be left wondering why it was called softball, because I am certain that would hurt a heck of a lot.

Have a super duper day!

GET OFF MY LAWN, YOU HOOLIGANS.

It's November and it is cold.  Mostly I like cold weather, but one aspect of it that I could do without is the fact that it makes my right knee ache like an old person's.

This pain comes from my freshman year of high school, when I hurt my knee playing basketball and had to have surgery.

When I played basketball in high school, I was a super duper shot-blocker.  This may sound like bragging.  That’s because it is.  It’s okay, though, because I’ll also freely admit that I was pretty near useless on offense.  I could shoot the ball well enough when I was by myself, but in an actual game I almost always panicked whenever the ball was in my hands.

BUT!  Back to what I’m good at!  As a kid I played in a league that had the specific rule that you were not allowed to block shots.  You were supposed to stand between the basket and the kid you were guarding with your arms straight up in the air.  You weren’t allowed to swing down and I’m pretty sure you weren’t even supposed to jump.  I think the grown ups in charge didn’t want any kids getting discouraged by having their shots swatted away all the time, and they were probably also trying to cut down on children being smashed in the face by an over-zealous defense.  Playing this way weirdly taught me how to block shots better because I learned how to get in the way just enough to mess with people’s shooting abilities without fouling all the time.

Plus I have the arm span of a pterodactyl, which helped more than a bit.

Aaaanyway, I tell you about my shot-blocking abilities mostly just because I’m a braggart, since it is only veeeeeeeery loosely related to how I hurt my knee.

It’s seriously the least impressive story of a sports injury ever.  It was during a scrimmage (and it wasn’t even a real scrimmage.  It was me and four other freshmen on a half court, playing two-on-two and swapping in the fifth player every made basket).

I was on defense.

I leapt into the air to block a shot.

My knee snapped straight much much much too sharply and a flash of “AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!” ripped through me.

I landed (very luckily on my left foot, otherwise I would almost certainly have crumpled onto the court in a pile of ouch) and hobbled over to the coach, who I told that I really really wanted to go home.

I didn’t even block the shot.

My mom took me to a doctor who had us make an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon, so I was walking around on my busted knee for a few weeks or so before getting it taken care of.  During that time my leg went through a couple of different stages of hurt.

First my knee mostly just felt a little weak, except that every once in a while it would simply buckle under my weight and a burst of the most painy pain I’ve ever felt would shoot through my leg.  

I believe it might even have been worse than a paper cut.

After a few days of these sneak attacks of hurt, I resorted to simply walking with my leg completely straight.  It would only do its weird buckling thing when it was bent, so I locked my knee and wobbled around like a pirate with a peg leg.  This worked pretty well until the day I woke up unable to straighten my knee all the way.  My leg would get almost there, and then would hit some sort of hurty blockage and would go no further.  So then I had to limp along with one leg bent, like a pirate who had jumped into the air too enthusiastically during a basketball scrimmage and now walked with a limp.  

Pretty soon after this development, we went to see the orthopedic surgeon, who discovered that I had somehow managed to break off a few fragments of bone in my knee.  This bone was now floating around without a care in the world, presumably tearing its way through my cartilage along the way.

I had to have surgery to remove the bone chips, stopping them from doing any more damage.  I was told I’d be on crutches for a few weeks (partly bummer, partly cool because I’d never broken a bone before and secretly thought crutches would be super fun), and also that I’d probably not be able to play basketball anymore, since my cartilage was most likely pretty chewed up.  Once the bone fragments were removed, I’d also be left with a good sized hole in my bone, and the doctor informed me that bones with holes in them ought not to be run with (ALL BUMMER AND NO COOL).

I’m sure my surgery was very suspenseful and exciting, just like all the ones on TV, but I slept through the whole thing (would you believe it!?), so I’ll just have to give you the main points:

My surgery was supposed to take 1.5 hours.

Instead it took 3.

The doctor took one peek inside my knee and was all, “OH WAIT.”

(But don’t worry!  It was one of those rare good OH WAITs.)

He was like, “OH WAIT. These bone chips are still connected to some ligaments.”

This was good for a few reasons:

1.  The little bone chips were still alive.

2.  The fragments hadn’t been able to move freely throughout my knee, so the cartilage was in much much better condition than expected.

3.  Because of numbers 1 and 2, these pieces of bone could be fit back in place like a really icky jigsaw puzzle.

Which is what the good doctor did.

So I was on crutches for the whole summer instead of only a few weeks, but I also didn’t have a gaping hole in my knee, which was definitely a plus because it meant I would be able to keep playing basketball.

Three months later I was off crutches, but still super not ready for the running and jumping that is integral to the sport.  This was a pesky time for me.  I couldn’t play yet, but I could do a bunch of leg-strengthening exercises, which included me pulling myself around the gym on an old creaky office chair with a missing wheel, using only my weak leg.  

I HATED THAT OFFICE CHAIR WITH THE FIRE OF A THOUSAND STRIKE ANYWHERE MATCHES. 

I also spent a lot of time doing lunges back and forth across the gym.  I also hate lunges, but probably only with the fire of one small BIC lighter.  Some of the freshmen thought I was being punished, since I wasn’t allowed to play with the rest of the girls, and so I had to explain (a few words at a time as I lunged past their lay-up practices) that NO, I wasn’t in trouble.  I was just BROKEN.  

NOW.  Back to my favorite pastime:  bragging.

The first game after my surgery that I was allowed to play in, I blocked seven shots.  This was mostly because I was so excited that I was being allowed to run around again that I went a little bit crazy and simply DID NOT ALLOW MYSELF TO STOP.  I only got to play because for some reason the JV team had been scheduled for two games at the same time that day.  Poor planning, perhaps, but it ended up working out really well for me because it meant that our team had to be split in half and only 6 girls (including me) went to one of the games.  And that meant that either those other five girls were going to have to play the entire game with no substitutions, or I WAS FINALLY GOING TO GET PUT IN.  The game started and I sat excitedly on the bench, just waiting for someone to get winded (I’m nothing if not a team player).  FINALLY someone got tired, and I was sent in to give her a short break.  

I hadn’t really run in over four months, and I felt like I was going to barf or fall down most of the game, but I was so very very happy to be playing again that I just KEPT GOING, like the Energizer Bunny if the Energizer Bunny had a slight limp.  The coach was apparently impressed with my maniacal enthusiasm, so he let me play the whole rest of the game.

Aaaaaanyway, the whole ordeal was a pain (LITERALLY! BAH!) and it’s still annoying when the rain starts a-raining and my knee starts a-aching, BUT it did make for an excellent college entrance essay.

And who could ask for more than that?

The Evolution of My Work Socks

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I got a job (and since then I've obviously begun introducing myself to people as "Kendra B., employee").  Well, last week I had my very first day at this new job.

On Wednesday I looked through my closet and picked out the clothes I was going to wear for my first ever day at work.  The pants and shirt were super easy.  But then I got to my socks.

And there my troubles began.

I’ve mentioned before in this blog that I like colorful, mismatched socks.  To demonstrate this love for unsynchronized stockings, here is a picture of my sock drawer:

I clearly have plenty of socks to choose from.  The problem was that I had no idea whether there was some kind of secret sock policy at my new job that I didn't know about just yet.

The dress code had been explained to me over the phone, and it’s really very relaxed.  We wear jeans and sneakers and the only restrictions I was told about were that nothing could have holes in it, and you're (WEIRDLY) not allowed to wear obscenities scrawled across your chest.

But we’re also supposed to have some semblance of presentability, and I had no idea whether crazy socks just happened to be a SERIOUS SERIOUS offense, dress code-wise.

And so, just to be safe, I scrounged around for my nicest pair of boring solid matching socks for my first day of work.

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO THE VIEWER:  Do not worry!  My pants aren't actually that short.  I used my thinking and realized that if I drew my pants their normal length, you wouldn't be able to actually see my socks, which are the very things I'm trying to show you!  That seemed less than helpful, so I shortened my pants for the purpose of clarity.  If these nerd pants offend your fashion sense, please simply imagine that I am lifting normal-lengthed pants up in the picture above, and in those following.  Thank you for your consideration.  We now return to our regular scheduled programming.

Not surprisingly, at no point in my first day orientation did anybody mention socks (mine or otherwise).  I noted that the dress code was very much geared towards comfort, and even less strict than I had previously assumed, and so the next day I felt comfortable risking some color:

I kept it all matching, though.  It was only my second day, after all.  No need to go crazy just yet.

But by the end of Thursday, I realized that nobody was dwelling upon my choice of sockwear even one quarter as much as I was.  And so I showed up to work on Friday in all of my Happy Sock glory:

I think me and this job are going to get along.