Still Life, With Cats

I flew home last night. The plane I was on was less than 60% full. I know this because they called up all the people in rows 8 – 11 and re-seated them elsewhere because apparently if the plane is that empty and everyone is in the front then it gets nose-heavy and isn’t safe to fly or something. Of course, the fun part of this is that rows 8 – 11 were all the economy-plus seats, where the frequent travelers who didn’t make the first class upgrade cut get to sit with a couple inches more leg room.

I am not sure how I feel about the fact that a massive piece of machinery capable of traveling great distances through the sky can be apparently be brought down by 24 people sitting in the wrong spot. But luckily, despite the great lamentations and woe that all the re-seated people expressed, many at length, to the gate agents during the entire re-seating process, everyone stayed in their new seats and we all made it to SF in one piece. Yay.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

The hotel room has a bathroom scale. Why? Who decided this should be a thing?

There is a bench in one of the elevators in the hotel. I am confused by this. The hotel only has ten floors. It isn’t as if it takes a really long time to travel up or down. I mean, major high rise, okay, it could be useful for a quick cat nap, but 10 stories?

“Our restaurant just earned a Michelin Star,” I was told when I first checked in, “so if you’d like to dine there, you’ll need to make reservations.” After the very long meeting yesterday I brought up the restaurant website and took a look at the prices. HA HA HA NEVER MIND, and this is why one doesn’t dine at Michelin Star restaurants when one is traveling for business and I totally earned that peanut butter shake after I had to walk all over the damn place to get more reasonably priced food so STOP JUDGING ME hotel bathroom scale.

There is an ice bucket in my room. This is normal for a hotel room. What isn’t normal is the loud crackling noises that startled the patooties out of me as I sat there, enjoying my (locally sourced, hipster-produced) cheeseburger in complete defiance of Judgy McJudgyScale in the bathroom, and continued until I realized that the sounds were from the ice in the ice bucket, settling. The ice that I DID NOT PUT THERE. So, apparently policy in this place is to fill up the ice buckets. This perplexes me on so many levels, not the least of which is that they did this alongside the notice about conserving water.

One final note. I realize that the world is changing and technology is taking over, but it is very cruel to make a tired person who is suffering from jet lag and also insomnia (because hello, wide-awake at 3am – whee!) try to figure out a complicated coffee making doodad in order to ingest the caffeine that is required in order to figure out a complicated coffee-making doodad.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

I flew to DC today, for work. Because it would take less time for me to drive to San Francisco and take the direct flight across the country, than to fly out of Sacramento and deal with the inevitable layover, I left the house at 9am for a 1pm flight. This worked reasonably well, as I missed the worst of the morning rush hour (although there is really no escaping the Berkeley brake check if one is driving in daylight hours, and we shall not speak of the toll plaza crunch).

On the way to the airport, I saw a car with the license plate “CATBUS1”, and I had so many questions! Does it belong to a person who does cat rescue? A vet? Are the cats commuting to work? If this is Cat Bus 1, does this then suggest that somewhere out there is a Cat Bus 2, or more? Can one sign up to ride on the Cat Bus? Is this a potential career option I hadn’t ever considered? And also, is it possible I haven’t had nearly enough caffeine yet?

The flight to DC was uneventful, in that there was very little turbulence, I had an empty seat next to me, and I got a lot of knitting done. The taxi ride to the hotel was fun, because the driver was very chatty and somehow we got on the subject of that big Powerball jackpot a year or so back, and what we would do with it, and it turns out he’d given it a *lot* of thought, so we came to an agreement that, should one happen to win 1.6 billion bucks, real estate is totally the way to go, and if the words ‘and you could also then buy a presidential election’ were uttered, well, that’s between the two of us.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

Today started far earlier for a Saturday than some of us might prefer (okay, by ‘some of us’ I mean Richard because due to a number of issues, only some of which are furry, I pretty much never sleep past 6am anyway) because we had haircut appointments at 8am and there was no way we were skipping that because we were both feeling really shaggy. So once that was done, we hit a couple stores because I had this hope that maybe, just maybe, we could get all the remaining Christmas shopping done early for a change. Hah – if only (although we did cross a few more names off the list), but since there was a PetSmart right there in the same big open shopping mall, I suggested we swing by, just to look. Four bucks later (because cat humiliation is always better when it’s on clearance!), we headed home, cackling evilly.

For the better part of the day I have been swooping down on unsuspecting cats, stuffing this on their heads, and then frantically snapping pictures of their ensuing death stares while laughing hysterically. Because nothing says Happy Holidays like cats plotting your slow and painful demise!

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

The past couple days have been a bit of a scramble, what the usual work stuff, and some non-work projects needing to be finished up and sent off. The number of holiday decorations popping up all over the place grows exponentially every time I turn around in the office, more and more neighbors are putting up their lights, which means our house looks even more Scrooge-like in its stubborn non-lit darkness, and this is the time of year when I am grateful that I do not listen to the radio in my car during my (short) commute anymore, since that means I can then avoid the inevitable overload of yet another wannabe pop star massacring a Christmas tune.

Uh. So. In other words, I am finding it a bit hard to get into the holiday spirit this year. 

Which is why this seems somehow appropriate (click here if the preview doesn’t automatically display below). 

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

It’s December 1st, which means it’s time to dust off this blog and try once again to post daily for a whole month (driven primarily by the deep feelings of guilt when I inevitably don’t make it because I’m one the people running this whole thing and really, if anyone ought to be posting daily, it’s me).

So. Yay. Welcome back to Holidailies! If you’re new here, I hope you’re prepared for a whole lot of blather about knitting, and cats, interspersed with the occasional ramble about baking or singing, oh, and also, special for this year, now with bonus politics-based frothing at the mouth, because for some weird reason the fact that this country just STUPIDLY elected an immature thin-skinned orange narcissistic imbecile whose reaction to pretty much everything is to throw a tantrum on Twitter, and who actively embraces racism, misogyny, science denial, and bigotry, just brings out my rage.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

Three things that make me happy today:

• A KitchenAid with a dough hook.
• A proofing bucket 
• Fresh-from-the-oven baked rolls with cream cheese and homemade Spiced Tomato Jam.