Winter Wonderland

Well, it's not quite that wonderlandish around here yet, but according to the fine folks at Weatherunderground, our second blast of true Northeast Ohio winter weather is on the way tonight, tomorrow and Monday. As I write this, it's been fitfully drizzling rain for a few of hours in temperatures that feel a bit too mild for the kind of snow we're slated to be getting...so I guess I'm in for a hell of a surprise when I open the curtains Sunday morning.

Now, there is some good news to the forthcoming crappy driving conditions and evil wind chill factors -- according to the current long-range forecast, we're in for an early and lasting white Christmas (not one of those last-second midnight-on-Christmas-Eve arrivals like we've had the past two years), which raises my currently drained spirits quite a bit. Hopefully, this will also finally be the kick in the ass that drives people into the store at last (we seem to have derailed in our early seasonal momentum the last five days or so) and gets us the rawkin' year-end figure we've been busting our asses all year for.

With the weather going bone-chillingly horrible tomorrow, I'm looking forward to an at-least-partially relaxing day off punctuated with some more mandatory home refurbishments (which I am getting as sick of writing about as you must be reading about them). This week's work will consist of planing down the door to the downstairs bathroom so that it actually fits into it's bent frame and latches correctly, followed by the installing of new screens into the computer room windows. I'm not looking very forward to either of these tasks right now, since I am probably dangerous with running power tools in my hand when it comes to door-planing, and I haven't the slightest goddamned idea how these new screens are going to fit into the window frames when I had a hell of a time getting the old and busted up frames out last week.

I should mention that in our ongoing quest to make Inspector Scene happy with our condo, a tip of the hat is very much due to Sarah, who has really been outdoing herself on the home improvement/fix-it tip. Thanks to her work over the last week during an impromptu work vacation, the front door is now insulated and doesn't leak heat to the outside (while letting in invisible jets of cold air), the back door now latches when closed, the crack in the wall above the staircase is nearly entirely invisible behind layers of fill-in goop, and the cracked kitchen tiles around the outlet are repaired and looking dandy.

While we're talking home improvement, it's been a while since the last time we last talked holiday decorations. After an iffy start, Moe appears to have adapted pretty well to having a string of brilliant green lights all the way around the bay window. He did so well with them, in fact, that I finally decided to put up a Christmas tree. Going one step further, said tree is a brand new pre-lit model. My initial financial second-thoughts to this entire idea were put to rest in short order last weekend when we found some very nice models at the local K-Mart for 25% off, thus putting them well into my financial range (which is currently being stretched by the recent start of my Christmas shopping).



Not bad, eh?

Round Three of Moe vs. The Christmas Decorations had only just begun when our little boy came out of the corner swinging: we weren't even finished getting all of the pieces of our new tree out of the box before Moe had decided to take a few exploratory munches on the wires and branches. Thus, out came the water bottles and the Bitter Apple and the battle was joined. With the bottom of the tree now unfit for feline palates, the cats seemed to find it a cool new hangout instead of a 7 foot tall snack bar. Sarah and I thus ultimately claimed victory. People 3, Cats 0.



As it turns out, there was also to be a Round Four. Satisfied after a couple of days that Moe wasn't going to electrocute himself chewing on any of the lighting cords, Sarah decided to put up a few ornaments up on Wednesday. Bad idea. Apparently, Moe was up on two legs in no time batting away at the lowest ornaments in his reach. Not entirely surprised by this, Sarah moved the ornaments farther on up the tree, figuring that would solve the problem, but it only succeeded in getting Moe's diabolical little mind working on a solution. Apparently, Moe thought of one: when she returned home from a shopping trip that afternoon, Sarah found four ornaments scattered about the living room and into the kitchen. I personally have no idea how in the hell Moe managed this stunt (did Ghidorah suddenly turn mischeivous and give him an alley oop or something?), but after this episode and a situation later that night where Moe attempted to reach another shiny bauble and settled for jumping directly into the structure of the tree itself (much to my dismay), the ornaments came off and were packed away. People 3, Cats 1.

A parting thought before I wind down and head to bed: I'll give this much to dear ol' Martha Stewart, while I find her at best condescending and at worst outright fucking annoying when I see her foofy little show on T.V., her company sure knows how to put together a strong fake Christmas tree -- Moe's little escape gambit the other day didn't even budge it an inch, which was surprising to me considering how little I paid for the thing. Yay.