In a moment of clarity just now, I realized why people drink at this time of year. It's not because of the lack of daylight, or the general festive feeling. It's because if you drink alcohol, you should not drive - and nobody in their right mind would question that decision. Hence, drink alcohol = unable to run another errand.
I had the day off yesterday. This means that I spent it sitting in my car, fighting holiday traffic, to go to stores where I fought holiday crowds in order to get to the lineup at the register, where I listened to piped in Christmas carols. The Little Drummer Boy must die, preferably along with Rudolph and Frosty (and when did Parson Brown become a circus clown?). Because I wasn't *quite* cranky enough, I put the Boney M Christmas CD into the stereo on the way home. My car stereo auto-loops the CD. This put me into the perfect mood for another of my favourite activities: wrapping presents.
Today, I spent my morning at VW, waiting for them to do a safety recall on an earlier recall. And changing my tires and an oil change. But *not* attending to my check engine light, because it spontaneously went *off* about two weeks ago. It didn't come on until I was at least 10km from VW after my service today. It's ok, I know what it is - and I know that no matter what they do, it will come back on anyway, because my car needs the attention. I probably jinxed myself by killing time looking at both the new Rabbit and the City Golf, and letting the salesman think that my next car would be either one of these.
Now, I'm supposed to be packing. I've optimistically put my skis and my snowshoes and many mittens and gloves and toques and winter boots into the car. Hope springs eternal, I guess. And I still haven't given up hope that, instead of grumpily sitting inside a cottage looking at each other, Kevin, Jim and I can have the winter wonderland adventures for 2006. Like that time in 2002, back when I was still contemptful of the word "blog" but was working my way up to installing MT as a CMS because I was getting sick to death of my tables-based stupid layout on my webpage. But click on that link! See how sparkly everything was? How winterwonderlandish? That's what I *expect* when I drive eight frickin' hours north.
Sigh. Green Christmas. Reason number I've already lost count to be cranky. And cranky I am. And I still have errands to run. And a long way to drive.
But I just dumped a whole lot of Baileys into my coffee, and thus no further errands can be run, and no travelling can be done. I'm just going to read the book I'm currently obsessing about now, probably consume the entire cute little holiday gift to coworker size Baileys, and curse the weather gods. And maybe write a fan letter to Lynne Truss because every time I see Baileys I want to put a damn apostrophe in. The family was Bailey, it says so right there on the bottle. I consider it considerably more likely that the product in the bottle is a concoction made from Bailey's recipe, or at least in Bailey's factory - see, *apostrophes* - or at the very least from the factory of multiple Baileys, make it the Baileys' factory - *still* an *apostrophe*, not actually mutliple Baileys in the bottle.
Like I said, I'm cranky.
Posted by Johanna at December 23, 2006 02:04 PM