As the chill picks up in the air I’m half tempted to embrace the coming holiday season (and the other half, is of course, tempted to run for the hills and hide). I never really had any family food traditions for the holidays. Sure, Gram would make a turkey for thanksgiving and a ham at christmas and there were the necessary items that went along with each but nothing really brings back the sensory elements of the christmas season for me like wintergreen candy canes.

Every time I have one I’m instantly transported back to my grandmother’s house. We’re getting the the hook to pull the string down that will pull down the attic stairs. Crawling up the stairs into the bitter cold of the attic and smelling that cold musty air. Bringing down the tree and all the boxes that contain the glass ornaments from years past. There is nothing like the smell of old cold metalic garland. And the rush of heat you get when you come back into the house after being in the unheated attic? Priceless.

But as time goes on it’s harder and harder to find wintergreen candy canes. A few years ago Walmart (and I loathe supporting this store in any way shape or form) had probably 30 different flavors of candy canes ranging from strawberry to blueberry to raspberry and probably even rootbeer. I’ve noticed that candy canes must not be as popular anymore because all I can ever seem to find are the standard peppermint and cherry flavors.

Oh sure, there are the starburst or sour patch kid variety out there as well. Possibly even a Jolly Rancher flavored candy cane, but nothing really speaks to me the way wintergreen candy canes do. Everything else is just a piece of hard candy bent into a crook.

This hunting season, instead of tracking down a defenseless animal, I’m on the hunt for a wintergreen candy cane.

This weekend was relatively quiet. Jason and I spent time at home with the animals. In all honesty it was really too cold to do much of anything. When it gets this disgustingly frigid, I like nothing more than to get in some comfy clothes, throw on a sweater and sit.

We did venture out a few times though. We went to Target for a specific reason that I can’t remember right at the moment but during our adventures there we actually bought something we needed which was two lightbulbs for inside the refridgerator. I blew the only remaining one out the previous night.

I tasked Jason with this job finding the correct light blub as this is out of my area of expertese and also because the shiny glittery Christmas section was luring me in like a moth to a candle.

After I procured (and really, everyone should have this) a gift set to create alcoholic peppermint popsicles (because it’s not cold enough?) I found Jason amid the lightbulbs and this is when he pointed out what I can only call dishonesty in action.

There on the shelf was a lightbulb for appliances (such as the fridge and stove) for $3.94. Three light bulbs away was a two pack of lightbulbs for ceiling fans that were $3.59. On closer expection it wsa determined that these are THE SAME LIGHTBULBS. You can buy two of the same lightbulb for less money than you can purchase one lightbulb simply because the piece of cardboard attached differs in what it’s recommending the usage to be. But the lightbulbs are the same. Same wattage, same size, same clean beautiful light!

After grabbing the two pack (because we needed two and basically it was like buying a light bulb for less than cost and then getting a free one thrown in just for shits and giggles) I was a bit outraged that GE and Target think that consumers are stupid.

I would totally write an angry letter of some sort but it would be wasted energy and wasted postage. Instead I’ll post photographical evidence that I’m not a crazy ranting person.

This morning when I got up everything was again white from the 5 specs of snow that we received. Which, for all intents and purposes, was fine really. It was easy to dust off the pathfinder and be on our merry way.

Rewind though to an hour or so before this discovery. There I am, a warm person under the mass of blankets and Jason comes and wakes me up earlier than normal. You see we alternate who has to get up early to get a shower because neither of us want to get up early. Or at all. I’d be content to sleep every day until 11ish.

Anyhoo, so he wakes me up and says he needs to borrow me. Borrow me? For what? Am I standing in for someone? I was half asleep and confused. Then he tells me he needs to me to look at something. Normally when I’m needed to look at something it’s a dead bug of some sort. Knowing all of this, I pulled myself out of bed and stumbled downstairs to find that someone had been painting on the tiles.

Except it wasn’t paint. It was blood. Lots of it. There were splatters and smudges and half paw prints. In short, it was disgusting and I was the one who got to confirm Jason’s thoughts that it was blood. I touched it (because apparently I can deal with blood when its not my own) and it was dry so this lead me to believe it had happened hours before. Work with me here people, it was before 7am and I hadn’t had coffee yet.

My next step was to go and turn each of the cats upside down to see which one had sprung a leak. I knew it wasn’t mine and I was pretty sure it wasn’t Jason’s so the only other living things in the house were the cats. Neither was hurt. I checked them all over (much to their annoyance because they were happily shoving their faces as far into their food dishes as they could) and there wasn’t a scratch or patch of matted fur to be found. They were both pristine.

Earlier this week we had been experiencing some drain issues with the downstairs bathroom (which seem to have rectified themselves with no outside intervention which are the best kind of problems to have) and so I have come up with the theory that Sid the wiley clog gnome was finally caught in the act of trying to completely block the shower drain and calvin and claudia kicked his ass and sent him packin.

or it could have been a mouse.. but I don’t think so and I’ll tell you why! We’ve never had mice before. Not that there isn’t a first time for everything but when we lived in the townhouse that was ghetto adjacent (fo reel) we had a mouse or two and Calvin always killed them but he never ripped them apart. He would play with them to death and then be so proud to show off what he had done so I couldn’t imagine that if it were a rodent of some sort that he wouldn’t have been like ‘Hey! Look what I did!’. Plus there were no body parts. Just blood.

It’s a mystery.

Meanwhile, look at what is going on outside in the world. It’s snowing. We should totally close the office down for the day. What if we get a quarter of an inch or something??

This post has nothing to do with landslides, or Fleetwood Mac or anything related to the title. I’m quirky like that. In all actualality I have that song stuck in my head on infinate repeat. That wouldn’t normally be a bad thing but I’d like to listen to something else ya know?

Today was one of those days where you feel like you’re half asleep all day no matter what it is you do and problems keep turning up at every corner so you think you’ll just sit at your desk (or crawl underneath it) and they still manage to find you. Just plain old weird stuff is happening.

For instance, someone calls you and you don’t recognize the number, but you aren’t fast enough to catch it and they refuse to leave voicemails so you dial them back and they don’t pick up so you’re all “Whatev” and then the second you stand up to walk away they call back. So you answer and all they wanted to do is reserve the conference room. That couldn’t be left in a message?

Or you are making photocopies for a meeting and you scan them all through so that you can go away and come back to a stack of warm papers that have been neatly stapled together. You come back 10 minutes later and the copier has jammed. So you fix it and then come back 5 minutes later. Yup. Jammed again.  Repeat this for 3 hours, because that’s how long it took me today to make copies.

It is definately a beer kind of night.