Not so Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving was a very different one.

It was the first Thanksgiving without my grandmother there.

She is still alive, but she is now in a care facility.

She has stage four, adrenal/lung cancer and for her own safety, due to a fall, and to lessen the stress on my grandfather, she went into one of the top of the line care facilities in Auburn. My sisters and uncles visited her during the day, but my mom and I stayed at home to prepare for the meal.

Naturally my grandfather didn’t come to Thanksgiving dinner. He stayed at the care facility with my grandmother and ate dinner with her. So Thanksgiving was short two people, leaving us with only thirteen at the table.

My mom had made a fabulous turkey and my sisters had made wonderful sides. It was great to see my family. My cousins I only see once a year, even though they only live in Minden, Nevada, which is like a two-three hour drive.

Not really that far.

Every Thanksgiving they come over to see us and stay for a couple days. Their dad comes with them, my mom’s brother, but their mother never comes. I would say that I haven’t seen her for a good seven, maybe eight years.

Being the youngest, I am still not quite clear on why she does not come. She used to come to Thanksgiving, but ceased to do so when they move to Minden. Though even when we lived in Solvang, my uncle would come all the way down with my cousin and spend time with us.
Apparently she stays home while they are gone and decorates the house for Christmas and has her “me” time. I find it to be very bazaar that she would not want to spend her Thanksgiving with her family.
I’ve heard that it’s because she does not like my Grandfather, which is understandable, since he isn’t the easiest to get along with.

He’s an Aries. Need I say more?

He likes to work the room, tell his jokes and be the center of attention. After awhile it really gets to be kind of old. Also it is near impossible to have a conversation with him. It’s very one-sided.

He talks.

You listen.

That’s it.

So if that were the reason I would completely be on her side, and understand. I’ve also heard that it is because my uncle told my grandparents something embarrassing about her and her family.

Ok. That works, but after awhile you’ve got to get over it. It’s not like anyone is going to hold it
against you. Everyone’s got their own issues, so it doesn’t really matter.
But whatever the reason is, I think it’s kind of silly for her not to spend time with her family on Thanksgiving.

My cousin’s are six and twelve. The oldest is getting to an age where she has to be wondering why her mother doesn’t come, and knows that it probably isn’t because she has to get the house all ready for the next holiday.

That would be an interesting conversation to be a fly on the wall for.

Then we get to my other uncle and his new wife, wife number three. You know what they say, third time’s a charm. I swear they are absolutely perfect for each other.

Each perfectly giving the rest of the family the cold shoulder. Got to love a couple who are so perfectly matched.

For reasons that I won’t go into, since I am steadily approaching the word limit, he and my mom aren’t entirely getting along at the moment and the sentiment has stretched to the entire family.
He and his wife were very guarded the entire night and where among the first to leave, with my late arriving grandfather.


Everyone was out by nine, which was perfect since I had to be up at three, to go to work for the ever exciting Black Friday.

But that’s a story for another column.

You killed it....

Achmed, Bubba J, Walter, and Peanut.

All are dummies.

Well, dummies for the ventriloquist comedian, Jeff Dunham.

Jeff Dunham has an interesting routine for a standup comic.
It is hard to come up with new, funny jokes all the time, but it is even more difficult to do so with characters. You need to have jokes that fit the character’s personality. This is something that Dunham does well.
He has done many shows and various specials for comedy central. Clips from his routines are all over YouTube. His current venture is a half hour comedy show on Comedy Central.

The show opens with Dunham talking and then it moves on to one of his characters. He starts out with a standup style opening and then it goes to a skit of one the characters. They either go to the doctor, or some other event that works with the character’s personality.

It’s usually a five minuet short, with the characters by themselves without Dunham present.

In itself that’s kind of interesting, since they are puppets.

In an episode he has Achmed the dead terrorist, who is a skeleton with a turban on his head; try to become a U.S. citizen. He sits in the class and answers the U.S. history questions with his funny smart ass remarks. It gets so ridiculous that even though you try, you can’t help but laugh. Achmed’s signature line is “I kill you!” In the short he becomes fed up with the teacher and says “I kill you!” She then straight faced critiques him on how to properly say the phrase. By the end, the entire class was attempting to repeat the phrase with an appropriate American accent.
Horribly painful by the end, but so bad you had to laugh at the ridiculousness.

Most of his characters show up in every episode, even if it is for a brief moment. Though it is nice to see his whole cast of characters, the little throw-ins do not make any sense. Even worse, they are not even funny.

In one episode they had Walter giving advice to a couple. The segment is titled Walter’s relationship advice. In the segment Walter does not cover anything relationship related. He gives the guy advice on how to get a job. It wasn’t to particularly funny and subpar to what his normal routines are.

As much as I hate to agree with the critics, the show is not as good as his regular comedy. His normal routine is far superior to this show. I am not sure if it was because I was expecting it to be like his stand up, or if it is really just a crappy set up.

During his stand up, he does a bit with one of his characters and then movies on to another. Even when he is on another character’s routine he will still incorporate one of the others.
For example, if he was doing a skit with Achmed, you would hear comments from Walter. You would never see Walter, but you would hear him or his laugh from somewhere off stage.

Also Peanut and Jose did a whole segment together, and even though Dunham put Jose away he would still talk from the box, which added a lot of extra humor to the routine, though his puppets are hilarious by themselves.

It really is a shame that his comedy central show is not quite as good as his stand up. It has, though, gotten an enormous amount of ratings

One critic, Randee Dawn, pointed out that just because it is popular that doesn’t mean that it is good.
As much as I disliked the rest of what the critic said about the show, I have to agree.

Maybe if they can work out the kinks within the show, then maybe it will improve. But until then I wouldn’t recommend watching the show.

For more of Dawn's review http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/tv-reviews/the-jeff-dunham-show-tv-review-1004026350.story

It's the most stressful time, of the year

As fall 2009 semester is winding down, the students stress levels are winding up.

Projects and tests are moving into the forefront of professors agendas. Not to mention that they are trying to wrap up the semesters, on target. They take the last couple weeks to cram as much information into our brains in order to “teach” us all they had planned, and have us spew it back out on a test the following week, plus everything we learned at the beginning of the semester.


Many students tend to put things off a little bit, which never helps. This is the time of the semester were people have to buckle down and focus on school, while still trying to maintain a reasonable social life, as well as their work schedule. If you work in retail, you know this is the biggest and busiest season, with Christmas coming and all.


Walking into the mall is a reminder of that. However pretty the decorations are, you always wonder, why can’t they wait until after Thanksgiving?
Though there are plenty of reasons for them to start the decorations and visits with Santa early. Ok how about waiting until after Halloween?


The decorations go up overnight anyways. There’s a thought, you never see half finished decorations in the mall. It’s not there one day, and boom! It’s all decked out the next.
So getting back to how this affects school, and the students. If you work in retail, the stores start staying open later and later the closer it gets to Christmas.

Our favorite is when the stores are open until midnight. In Grass Valley, no one is out at midnight. No one is even out past nine o’ clock. You maybe get a few people until ten, but past that, is pushing it.

So we poor associates have to stand around and do absolutely nothing. Sure we have to straighten and do go backs and make the stores look presentable for the next day.


That was done around seven thirty, and due to lack of traffic, hasn’t changed much.

In the back of your mind you find yourself thinking, there was a test that I could be preparing for, or I need to do my part of our groups power point presentation.


But no, we have to be there, in case someone wants to come shopping.

The other thing that is adding to the stress this year is planning for next year’s classes. This week they just released the new sign up dates for spring 2010. For me, the spring semester will be my last. So, of course, I submitted my graduation application last spring so I would be all set.


I wonder that if when they took in all of our graduation applications, if they knew that half of the classes we put down on the sheet wouldn’t be offered for the spring.

Sure the mock up of the schedule that was posted on My Sac State, said the classes would be offered, leading us into a false sense of security that everything would be fine and all we would have to do is sign up on our registration date.

Ah, but then we get down to our little budget crisis. Now half of the classes that are listed on my graduation application are not being offered anymore, and another one is moved to a different day.

A class being moved to a different day is a huge deal for me, because I drive in from Grass Valley every day. Well, every day I go to school that is.


It’s a bonus for me to get all my classes on two days so that I won’t have to use as much gas, and spend as much time driving.

Not to mention keep my work schedule, semi-normal.

So now, on top of projects and tests, I have to worry about if I am going to be able to get all my classes, including the substitute ones, so I can actually graduate in the spring.

This truly is the most stressful time of the year.

Pole-Dancing Cat

“You should carry it around with you, then you can do a little pole dance.”

Ahh…A kind customer’s suggestion for an improvement to my Halloween costume.

A few moments before, my well-meaning customer, came to me looking for a hook to get a workout top down from one of the face outs. (Face outs: metal bars protruding from the wall, where retailers put merchandise high up out of the average customers reach, to torment them, of course.)

First, she complimented me on my outfit saying that I looked “cute” and then proceeded to ask if I knew where the “pole that is used to get things down with” is, aka a hook. During the hunt for the elusive hook, slyly hidden on the opposite wall from the shirt she wanted down, came her good natured suggestion.

Ah the costume.

At my work, we are allowed to dress up for Halloween, as long as the costume does not interfere with our ability to do our job and as long as it is within dress code.
Check. Check.

Mine, consisted of an animal print dress with a six inch band of fur across the bottom. Faux fur, of course. It also had a layer of faux fur around the neck and attached to the back was a black tail. The dress wasn’t that short, but to prevent any situations arising, I added black leggings. Also in order to keep the outfit appropriate, I added a shrug to the top just in case people thought the cut of the shoulders was too revealing.

With black boots, and black gloves, I was almost all set. I painted on a nose and whiskers and made ears with silver pipe cleaners. For whatever reason, the outfit also included a blonde wig. As a brunette, I thought this could be kind of a fun experience, being blonde for a day.

I pinned the ears onto my blonde wig and I was set.

A blonde cat. It was Halloween, so it worked.

My co-workers got a kick out of the blonde wig, and the outfit in general. Most of the customers did as well. Plenty of “Oh my gosh! That is so cute!”’s were thrown my way. I was the only cat out of all the associated in the store, followed by a witch, a “shot in the dark”, and I’m assuming the other associate was a, putting it nicely, lady of the night. Though she was referred to, multiple times, as our bosses, “ho.”

Overall we were a pretty creative and eclectic bunch. The only other person that did not approve of the outfit was in fact not a person at all.


It was my tortoise shell cat, Kaci.

She happened to be in the front yard when I was on my way out. The look that cat gave me said it all.
“What is wrong with you?, What have you done?, and Why?,” were combined all into one, and followed swiftly by a disapproving “meow” and a shake of her little head.

With that she turned away and as if to prove that a real cat was the only cool cat, she gave me a sassy swish of her tail.

With that reaction, I guess I should have known better than to actually go out in public.

Carroling Along

“Those Romantic Islets of Langerhans.”

Not a typical title for a column on diabetes, especially since the author has type II diabetes himself.

For Jon Carroll this is just another one of his daily columns for the San Francisco Chronicle. This particular one was from February1999, part of his “greatest hits” collection that is linked to his biography, on the Chronicles website.

Carroll was born in Los Angeles and raised by his mother in Pasadena. He attended University of California, majoring in experimental chemistry and biology. Interestingly enough it was in a non-classroom setting, but he left after a year and a half.

He started out at the Chronicle editing the crossword puzzle and also wrote summaries of TV movies. In 1970 he was the assistant editor of Rolling stone. In 1971 he was the editor of Rags. In 1972 he was the editor of Oui and in 1974 he was the West coast editor of Village Voice. He also was a consulting editor for WomensSports magazine and in 1978 he was the editor of New West magazine. He won the national Magazine Award in 1979.

He started writing his column at the Chronicle in 1982. He has been writing columns there for fifteen years, on a daily basis.

Most of his columns seem to discuss what is going on in life and in the country, and many have to do with things in his own life. The best quality of Carroll’s columns is that they all have a humor aspect to them. Some are funnier than others, but even the straighter, less humorous ones have that line, or two that make you stop and laugh.

Getting humor into a story and making it truly funny is a very hard thing to do, but Carroll seems to do it well. Even his biography on the SFGate has a humorous quality to it. It reads almost like a product description. It even ends with, “store in a warm, dry place. Rapier wit sold separately.”


He always puts a little bit of himself into his columns, where you learn little facts about him that are interesting, strange, or just plain amusing. One of his recent columns was entitled “Bad house Guest.” In this column you learn a lot about Carroll and his perspective on things. Though part two of the column was much more amusing than part one. You can almost picture this guy sneaking out of a party back to his house for awhile and then sneaking back in, hoping to do so unnoticed, worked the first time, but not the second. Even in part one, you can picture him sitting on the bed in someone’s guest room perusing a book off their book shelf, until he decides he wants to come back out again.

It’s interesting that he puts a lot of first person into his columns, but when he really makes a point he uses “one” instead of, “I.” For example in his column, “Semi-coherent babblings,” he was talking about the Bay Bridge breaking. He used “I” in a lot of the column, but in one portion he said, “One hates to say, ‘shoddy workmanship’, but one is thinking that, and then he puts it back out to the readers. It is a very clever way to pose a question and give your answer at the same time.

Carroll has greatest hits of his columns over the years linked to his biography page, as well as his Mondegreens columns.

Columns on misheard lyrics and phrases.

Not only are they hilarious by themselves but there are marvelously set up within the column.