The jingle bells no longer rock at The Compound’s main gate.
Piss on the fir and call in the dawgs. The Christmas-New Year’s holiday is done and dusted.
Herself is on a mission this morning, breaking down all the holiday decorations and returning them to their closet.
The fake tree is closet-bound.
Later I’ll unplug the multicolored strand that’s a component of the outdoor lights encircling our courtyard tree. We use the white strand year round, ’cause having little dangly lights strung around and about to no particular purpose is kind of a New Mexico thing.
All this rooting around in closets is guaranteed to trigger a flurry of eBaying as useless items come to light.
“What’s this?”
“Beats me.”
“Can I sell it?”
“I dunno, can you?”
The answer to this last is, “Yes,” because Herself can sell anything. She could sell an anvil to a drowning man.
If my attention drifts for a nanosecond she will sell the office chair right out from under me. That chair and its occupant are not big earners lately. And they’re not cute, like the cat. They’re battered and stained and they smell like canned farts and broken dreams.
And they never purr.
Thus, sacrifices must be made. Propitiate the goddess. Quick, find some extraneous electronica to place upon her altar.
Not the outdoor lighting, though. It’s still New Mexico.
• One final holiday gift: Arlo and his new(ish) bride.
Tags: Christmas 2021, eBay, New Year 2022
Mad Blog Media 
January 2, 2022 at 11:16 am |
Canned farts and broken dreams. You remind me of something I read a week ago.
January 2, 2022 at 11:29 am |
I have no idea why all women are not gay. Sure, they require our participation in the continuation of the species, but there has to be an easier way than living with us.
January 2, 2022 at 11:37 am |
PO’G: Shouldn’t you be good on the tech front with Herself for at least another week with the Mac Mini obeisance?
Meanwhile, we’re also in the New Year’s post-holiday tear-down process. The good news is that the lights, tree, decorations, etc. seem to come down faster than putting them up.
January 2, 2022 at 12:00 pm |
My mom always went with Epiphany, Jan 6, as the day to tear down. We had two Jan 5 birthdays and a Dec 22, so that allowed for all three kids to do the cake thing with the same decorations.
Plus, as a card carrying heathen, It’s always fun to play stump the chump with the true believers.
January 2, 2022 at 12:00 pm |
I think you have a variety of old Apple products she could hawk on the ebay. Isn’t there an obsolete Apple Power Mac around the joint? It’s worth $200 or so.
January 2, 2022 at 12:03 pm |
JD, it’s like newspapering. You’re only as hot as your last story.
“Yeah, sure, great, but that was yesterday. What have you got today?”
Pat, the old G4 Power Mac is what I use to scan and color the cartoons. Twenty-three years old and it still works. Boots into the “Classic” OS and Mac OS X. It’s also a warehouse holding decades of my nonsense. Think of it as a digital version of the final scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
If it croaks, as Yoda says, “There is another.” A G4 PowerBook that’s a few years younger.
January 2, 2022 at 12:03 pm |
The key to the puzzle is to not put them in the first place. Our decorating shrunk over the years. And, this year I sold my electric “N” gauge train set the used to go under the tree. No train, no tree, no nuttin.
January 2, 2022 at 1:18 pm |
“N-gauge?” That’s a new one on me. I think I had an O-scale. But I lost interest in it after getting a 1/32 scale slot-car set. Zoom zoom zoom. Kept it in the unfinished crawl space at the Loring Circle house in Bibleburg. Nothing down there but the tar paper, the creepy-crawlies, and me. I’m surprised my parents didn’t nail the door shut.
“No, officer, we have no idea where he might have gotten off to. Led astray by evil companions, no doubt. He was — um, is — a troubled child.”
January 2, 2022 at 2:21 pm |
The “N” gauge train was about 10 years old. A toy for an older guy, me. When we moved to our current joint, there was no room to set it up. Sold it to the next door neighbor right before xmas. It was a really neat set, well made in Japan.
https://www.micromark.com/Kato-USA-Chicago-Burlington-Quincy-Silver-Streak-Zephyr-N-Scale-Starter-Train-Set?msclkid=8ea35fb5b54e12ef2d2a3e67a3f0dbaa&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=NX_NTM_Shopping_Segregated&utm_term=4576510997829462&utm_content=N
January 2, 2022 at 2:29 pm |
I remember a guy in Canada, older fella — everyone was older than me, I was maybe 7 — who had this monster train setup in his basement. I don’t recall how we met him, but when he showed us his trains I about took an infarction.
It was epic. One of those tabletop deals that nearly filled the room, with landscaping, miniature buildings, roads, cars, and people, the works. A whole tiny town and the train wound around through it. Very cool.
January 2, 2022 at 2:01 pm |
Take down the Christmas stuff? Why, I just put it up last month. I’m in no hurry to hang off the roof in the snow ala Chevy Chase. Nope, I think I’ll let the neighbors appreciate their neighbor’s pretty lights until the end of January or so.
Several years ago I sold several strings of 50+ year old incandescent Christmas light strings. They were starting to become a safety hazard and the extra power to illuminate them cost enough to justify the LED versions made in that big communist country that prides itself in telling people what they must do.
January 2, 2022 at 2:19 pm |
Back in the Day® the newspaper bar in Bibleburg was a dive called Jinx’s Place. Jinx and her minions left the Christmas lights on all year round. Every year one or two bulbs went to St. Peter and never got replaced. Eventually the entire place got replaced.
We were down there when the popes were dropping like flies in 1978 (and most other nights too).
“Did you hear? Pope’s dead.”
“Old news.”
“No, this is the FNG.”
“Fuck shit fuck. …”
January 2, 2022 at 7:08 pm |
They got what they wanted, and it wasn’t at Alice’s restaurant.
Meanwhile, in the Southeast, moving to the Northeast, the jet stream is undulating like a pole dancer at a dive bar.
January 3, 2022 at 5:41 am |
I’m not sure if it’s you or your chair that smells like canned farts. Name brand or private label? Either way it saddens me since you used to smell like Boeshield on the few occasions we met.
January 3, 2022 at 11:22 am |
I thought he had that “fresh baked cookie” smell that reminded me of DuMonde Tech Lite. Maybe it was cookies?