Susan's Scribblings the Blog

I sometimes come across telephone conversations that stymie me. This week I was helping with some phone calls at work when I encountered one for the books. I only understood one word in twenty. It was in English. Sort of.

The only words that made sense were “one hour.” That was the only clue I needed to decipher what the customer needed, but even so, I missed out on what could have been a stimulating conversation. This customer might have spoken some philosophical magic which would have enlightened my life, but by not being able to understand a word, whatever was said was lost to history.

It is always better to speak slowly and get the point across. Fortunately the person did not seem to be eating while talking, but the words came out a mile a second. I spoke slowly and calmly and thanked the customer for being patient while the situation took longer than an hour. They seemed satisfied, though I also could not decipher an expression of thanks.

Our phone personnel have a translator service, but how does one request one for bad use of English?

My calendar has been in such an upheaval, I haven’t been anyplace at my natural time. This includes my blog posting. Next Friday for sure, though, I’ll be watching the new Star Wars movie with about a gazillion other people except. apparently, everybody at work.

Yes, I work in a Star Wars-less office.

That’s okay. I’ll be putting out my figurines, including a newly acquired porg (a character in this installment resembling a penguin). I’ll be practicing the patience of a Jedi as I struggle through the workday and try to make it through traffic. I’ll work out with my movie buddy how to eat dinner and still get a good place in line at the theater.

Hopefully I’ll avoid any spoil sports in the lobby, not get fat on popcorn, and not bawl like a three-year-old when Carrie Fisher is onscreen.

Maybe I will be timely in my post next week, and I won’t overdo it by gushing or complaining about Star Wars.  The next thing on my calendar is Christmas, so can this year end be far behind?

My office includes a 24-hour operation, so the manager decided it might be fun to let the associates wrap their holiday gifts there, sparing the nearly impossible task of sending the kids off with the family while one clears home space to play Santa. As an administrative assistant, I was one of the assigned coordinators for the event: in other words, I get to do the buying.

My first stop was the Five Below on Black Friday, which I covered previously. Upon checking my receipt, I realized there was a problem: The first attempt at ringing up my strange basket full of purchases brought the total to way higher than I had bought, so the checker worked with me to re-ring up the purchases. That meant struggling with the endless roles of wrapping paper, tissue paper and tape and bows, taking them out of those ubiquitous plastic bags. She said she had to do some of the purchases over, but did not re-ring the gift boxes. In fact, she left them off altogether. This means that I, being honest, must go back to get them redone.

Strike one for a good brick-n-mortar shopping experience.

My next stop was Dollar Tree (or, as a three-year-old I heard say once, “Dowah Twee”). It does have twee items. It also offered a folding knife in a gift box. I think that belongs in a Cabela’s, but that’s just me. The lines met in the corner of one vertical and one horizontal aisle. That was partly my fault, because I should have pulled the cart behind the man in the vertical aisle, but a family of four was in the connecting aisle, so I pulled up, and the other customers obediently pulled in behind me.

It turned out okay: everybody got the equal opportunity to part with their income in order.

A dozen more rolls of wrapping paper, tags, more boxes, more ribbon and a couple of solar dancing toys for me later, I realized that I had not learned my lesson about those unwieldy rolls. Dollar Tree uses shopping carts with a pole at a height which restricts its use to inside the store as it won’t fit through the door jamb.  The ring-up was correct, but I was now stuck with six of those re-labeled versions of the ineffective little plastic bags trying to contain oversized, rather fragile sticks of lightweight wands in the wind that I needed to gather up and take outside and across a crowded parking lot. It was a struggle, but I got them into the car and then home, and I found a nice, long bag I had saved from Boscov’s in which to stow my purchases until I get them to the office.

I worry about the next trip. Where should I go? Do they have big shopping bags, or should I go with wrapping paper by the pre-folded packs? Not to mention that we will need scissors. Or maybe I should get a folding knife.

I missed all the crowds and fistfights on Black Friday, because I went to a different store: I went to Five Below, where all merchandise is–you guessed it–five dollars or under. I wasn’t really shopping for myself, but before I got in the door I had bought three cat beds. So much for a spending plan.

I was really in there to buy gift wrap for the office; one of our 24-hour departments at work decided to give the associates (read employees) a chance to wrap their holiday gifts in the assured privacy of work. We have over 100 people working various shifts, so that will mean a lot of wrapping paper, so there I was looking for dollar bargains.

By the time I had been in the store about twenty minutes, I had taken one of their gigantic, unwieldy but serviceable blue wheeled baskets and filled it to the brim. I also got a couple of solar dancing bobbles for my office windowsill, and a holiday tree hat, and all without getting lost in the wonders of the candy aisle, where I could have been found hours later with a gut full of YanYan.

The boss said I still needed to buy more. I know, I said: more ribbon, tape and big rolls of generic wrap, along with stuff with which to cut it. The process of concealing the identity of presents is a bigger adventure than finding the gifts themselves.

Next stop will be another dollar store like Dollar Tree, Family Dollar or something like that. A place with no tempting aisles of YanYan.

Every year I perform a ritual: the annual Black Friday Newspaper Weigh-In. I read two papers, and both of them have different ads in them, but for the Thanksgiving holiday, the soft “thunk” of the paper hitting the ground is replaced by the crash of something resembling a smaller model Dumpster. Each weighs about as much as a bowling ball.

I feel sorry for the folks who have to stuff those monstrosities. I don’t know how it’s done, but it must resemble playing rapid-fire card games, only without winners or losers or pretty face cards. And to think that it is all done in the early morning hours by folks who then have to drive around and hurl them at residences and maybe jam them into the mail slots of multi-unit complexes. Nothing can prepare you for a newspaper that big, unless you are a grateful bird owner.

Sometimes we get six or seven of one ad, probably because the person stuffing them had more of them than papers in which to put them. I always wonder which ads got missed. Probably the ones in which I would actually spend the most money.

These days people are depending more on online shopping than going to an actual store, probably because stores these days look like apocalypse zones within minutes of some poor guy opening the door at 7:00 AM. I do enjoy looking at what will be going on sale, even if I’m not buying it. And I always wonder why stores seem to save up some of the most extraordinary stuff for the last month and a half of the year to put out. Plus, they always put out only twenty when they are going to have 200 shoppers vying for them.

What I really miss about Black Friday is the unveiling of the holiday display windows. When I was a kid, the joy of looking at a festive store window was a treat, but now it is a dying art relegated to major cities like New York and only for high-end clothing in set-ups frozen in time and looking like nothing one would actually experience in the real world. GSN, the Game Show Network, actually had a contest built around window displays. They didn’t bring it back this year, probably because stores are a dying art.

The real winners are the pharmacies like Rite-Aid, Walgreens and CVS. They have everything you don’t want to visit a department store for. Their ads are colorful. Their prices reasonable, and they carry needed items like batteries and the missed half gallon of milk. Even that can appear in a Black Friday ad, and we will actually buy it.

I am working on Black Friday, but at least the stores will open at 7:00 AM, so I can poke my head in and see what a madhouse it is before going to work. And no, I won’t carry the paper with me: it weighs as much as a newborn.

I’m giving myself today off. I’ll be back next week, and with any luck I will have some accomplishments or good thoughts to replace the negative ones that nearly a year without a week’s vacation can cause.

Sometimes we keep learning the same lesson over and over again: never announce that you want something, because the minute you do, everything will get in the way of your obtaining it.

I was planning to participate in National Novel Writing Month (also called NaNoWriMo for short), taking up the challenge to write 50,000 words during the thirty days of November. Of course there are the usual obstacles like Thanksgiving and Black Friday to contend with, but when my own equipment turns on me, maybe it’s time to quit.

On November 1, I found out I didn’t have Internet, and that lasted two days. So I figured I could try writing at work with the guest WiFi, but my attempts to get to the office early were met by a traffic jam, and I got out of the house ten minutes late in the first place. Being somebody who doesn’t always get an assigned break and, when she does, uses it for the restroom (which is much needed at a certain age), I’ve managed to squeeze in about twenty minutes since the event started.

So my first four days have been met by not only those problems, but no cloud access, so I can’t get to what I managed to write, and no quiet time at all for the past 96 hours that I wasn’t trying to sleep away work-related stress, eating or, shall we say, biological time. Have you ever used a portable computer on the john? Me, neither. I’m not one of those who takes phone calls in the restroom, and I certainly don’t want to play Edward Bulwer Lytton (the author of the famous opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night”) in the bathroom. Though the idea of writing a good line might be beneficial to my digestive system.

So what does one do when you’re supposed to have written over 6,000 words already, and you’ve got about 300? Thank God for every word one gets put down somewhere that it can be counted, and cuss through the whole process.

Kids don’t know how easy they have it when they want something. Somebody usually does it for them, like buying that hot toy for the holidays. Then when childhood ends, we end up chasing a carrot called dreams on an impossibly long stick. We chase it until death makes it unnecessary. Giving up is not an option. Failure means at least I wrote something, but not enough.

The day still has 24 hours in it (and this night we get 25 because daylight saving ends), but why does it seem we have less time than ever to do what we want?

The new term for Christmas showing up in stores as early as September or October is Christmas creep, as in it creeps in and invades before anybody can stop it. And we really must stop this madness.

I’m no Scrooge, but there is jump-starting the holidays and there is going a bit too far too soon. Stores have emptying shelves of pumpkins and Wonder Woman costumes, while a shelf or two has turkey themed merchandise, and the real space is saved for inflatables and cards and decor galore. Ho ho oh no!

One major store promised they would not advertise Christmas early, then backpedaled and said they would put nothing on the outside of the store, while prep was already going on inside.

Dare I go into the details about how celebrating the most phenomenal birthday in human history has been conveniently moved to December 25? Dare I bring up the fact that commercialism and church are not really a pair, and yet we tend to do both only because of this date? Do I risk the ire of many by bringing up the fact that more people likely celebrate another December festivity rather than a Christian one, and yet somehow we always manage to stand on our personal beliefs like clouds of superiority and make others feel bad, while at the same time making ourselves look crass.

If Christmas became more of a holiday for giving of ourselves, rather than a retail nightmare–more like the wise men who honored goodness by bringing things they apparently had made or earned themselves–maybe stores would devote more than November and December to providing things we really need, and less of the junk that is forgotten within a week of its coming out of the wrappers.

Maybe the Christmas creep is who we see in our own mirrors.

I recently discovered one of the many funny little things about aging; I’m getting eyebrows like Andy Rooney. If you recall the late CBS 60 Minutes curmudgeon, he had brow hairs he could have donated to a dozen needy over-plucked people. They were not a bad thing in any way; they actually gave him character. However, I don’t think he got his one brow hair at a time like me.

My schedule has left little time for up close and personal minutes in front of a cosmetic mirror, but I recently bought a magnifying mirror because it promises 15 times magnification. This means that you can see things you don’t want to see, like an eyebrow hair which suddenly grew out of control, is a good quarter-incher, white and right in the middle of my otherwise dark blonde sculptured sideways parenthesis.

Those new grey hair covering sprays probably would not work on such a hair. Neither would an eyebrow pencil. I felled it with scissors, which means it will be back, and I guess I have to deal with having Andy Rooney brows. At least I won’t look like another highbrow eyebrow dude from the movie Dune named Thufir Hawat.

I have an unlucky knee. I may not be left-handed–though I can use both hands for some things, which can be creepy (and another topic)–but I am left-kneed. Over the course of my lifetime I have had more left knee scrapes, bumps and bruises than I can count. One time I got an infection in my left foot, probably because it was jealous of my knee. This week I got scrape number one jillion and one.

It’s right over an old scrape, too, which I got two years ago. That one took some time to heal, but now it’s probably ready to throw in the towel and stay injured. Our skin is supposedly our largest organ, and we mess with it all the time. We stick jewelry in it, shoot colored ink into it, slather goop on it, dry it out, get it wet, overuse it, cover it up one season and hide it the next. It’s little wonder we get so tired in our old age: it isn’t the inside that goes on strike, but the outside.

Of course we get afflictions like psoriasis, acne, and such. We get skin cancer. We get sunburn and windburn. Yet our skin is our armor, the enrobement that makes us what we are. We should be more careful with it.

Aging, of course, does not help matters, particularly in the knee region. At what point in our growth does genetics say that we should lose the padding that helps as as kids to kneel on the sidewalk to check out a bug or play a game? Suddenly it hurts to take a knee, whether we’re in church or on a football field protesting during our national anthem.  That’s one thing I find interesting: that those burly football players are probably sore when they do that. You would think that would encourage them to stand and do some other protest action. After the song is over.

So off I went to the pharmacy to buy ultra large bandages to put on my gross, leaky, bruised knee. No matter how many boxes of those medicine chest staples you buy, you never have the size you need for the job. Unless you make like a roofer and try to piece together twenty junior sized ones into a big patchwork one.

Back in my days as a dancer, I had knee pads for cushioning during jazz routines. i wish I had them now. Of course, they don’t go with work attire, but maybe I can go another year or two without another disaster. I’m sure my knees are begging on their. . .whatever. . .begging me to play it safe. Ain’t happening. I have some years left on both knees, so next time I’ll try to lean toward the right one and alter the course of history. That would be the bee’s knees.