Here we have Ugly Sweater T-shirt w/ gingerbread cookies and other g-bread creations. Also, we have one gingerbread person Bow Tie o’ the Day and three gingerbread dude Ties o’ the Day– baking a tasty theme. Two bonus, not-theme Ties o’ the Day present Santa opening his own X-mas gifts and Christmas dinosaurs.
Obviously, I am still mostly stuck on yesterday’s Office Depot experience, which I angrily posted about. I am still wrapped up in gingerbread BITE ME.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I wore an entirely fitting Tie o’ the Day on my foray into Office Depot this afternoon.
I needed toner for my printer, so Suzanne and I dashed to the Office Depot in Bountiful, to hurriedly grab two cartridges and get home by JUDGE JUDY o’clock. I managed to find one of the two toner colors I needed. The cartridge shelves were bare (and not because of X-mas), with little signs informing me I can order toner online.
In fact, 1/3 of the Office Depot had shelves like that– empty but with the little signs that might as well have said, “Too bad, sucker! Too bad you got off your couch and drove to our bigly brick-and-mortar store, which has almost nothing we advertise as being here. Too bad you wasted your time coming to see our clerks, each of which drives you bonkers with their ‘What can we help you with today?’, when our physical store has no more than one thing on your shopping list. ‘Sorry, we don’t have that in stock.’ Go home and order from our website, sucker.” That’s precisely what those signs on the bare shelves said to me. You can bet I wanted to say BITE ME! And I did think it and I did wave Tie o’ the Day in the direction of the clerks.
As we drove home, I griped incessantly about my yellow toner cartridge ordeal. And then Suzanne lost her marbles for a second and said words I never thought I would hear come out of her mouth, even if we live for all eternity. Suzanne said, “Just order the toner online.”
Excuse me!!! Blasphemy!!! It’s an office store! Suzanne knows dang well how I feel about going to office stores. She feels the same way I do about them. We basically have a fetish for office stores. We love any excuse to go to an office store to check out new Post-it Notes and pens and paper and staplers….. When we go to an office store, we want to see office products. We want to touch office products. We want to buy office products and put them in the car and drive home, giddy with anticipation.
And perhaps the saddest thing of all is that despite the inconvenience, I will continue to visit brick-and-mortar office stores for my office-y needs and wants. I’ll be like Ahab in MOBY DICK, stalking the white whale until his last breath. A yellow toner cartridge will drive me mad and be my doom. Glug, glug.
Bow Tie o’ the Day is covered in splendid little elves. To heck with Elf on a Shelf: I’m wearing Elves on a Bow Tie. (And I’m wearing my wintry cape, which I intend to wear all winter– except when I’m wearing other capes.)
Way in the back of this photo, almost out of the frame, you can see the back of Suzanne’s head. She has literally turned her back on me. I am being shunned!
It started out innocently enough. We drove up to Nuttall’s in Layton to pick up Suzanne’s sewing machine, which had been there having a tune-up. If you don’t know Nuttall’s in Layton, all you need to know is that it’s like JOANN. It’s JOANN lite.
I did a stoopid thing at Nuttall’s. I’ve told you before that when Suzanne and I shop at fabric/craft stores, what that really means is this: We go into the store together, where I walk around for five minutes, then leave the store to go somewhere else. After a couple of hours, Suzanne texts me that she’s in the check-out line and ready to be fetched, and I drive back to retrieve her and her fabric booty. It ends up being a lovely shopping venture for both of us.
But yesterday at Nuttall’s, I decided I would be really nice and actually shop the rows of fabric right alongside Suzanne. We are chums, after all. After making it down one aisle of splendiferous bolts of fabric. Suzanne said, “I’m done.” She turned to leave. Well, see, I realized my mistake right away: I had spoken. I had pointed out fabric I thought was cape-worthy. I had committed the sin of distracting Suzanne while she was in a fabric store. I should have known better.
I knew Suzanne wanted to stay longer to gaze at the full bolts of material and think of the possible projects she could construct with each and every one. And I wanted her to do it because it makes her happy. I promised her I would act like I didn’t even know her and her tuned-up sewing machine. Off she went, back into the bowels o’ the bolts. And I wandered around trying to stay out of her peripheral vision.
I thought of driving somewhere else while she studied the material. I thought of going to the car to people-watch and listen to The Shins. But nope. I wanted Suzanne to see me roaming around the fabric store, lovingly ignoring her. I wanted her to see the reality of how she had cast me out.
I wandered over to the bigly-armed sewing/quilting machines, where I asked a Nuttall’s clerk very loud questions about their finer points. I looked at prices. I felt like I was looking at car prices. (That’s not an exaggeration.) I asked the clerk even more questions, very loudly.
Suddenly, Suzanne began to pay attention to me. I’m sure she was contemplating whether or not I was already thinking about making one of the machines a birthday present for her, even though her bday isn’t until July. I’m sure she was asking herself: Is one of these giant machines in my future? Of course not. We’d need to take all of the walls out of all the bedrooms to make room for one of these behemoths to live in the house with us. Maybe she wants a bigger house to put it in. (Not gonna happen.) But my interest in the machines got Suzanne’s attention. Bow Tie o’ the Day and my wintry cape and I were no longer shunned by Suzanne, and she came back to reality.
Suzanne found all the fabric she wanted, and now the Layton Nuttall’s is out of business until they get another shipment of material. I kid you not. When Suzanne was done loading up the car, it had become a lowrider.
These two Bow Ties o’ the Day push the holiday bow tally to an even 100, which was one of my goals. I’m still rooting around in the nooks and crannies of The Tie Room to make sure I’ve gathered ’em all for the season. I’d hate for you to not see every last one of them, even though there’s no way I could actually wear each one. And I want the tally to rise even more.
I wore the gold-reindeer-on-velvet bow tie to the Christmas afternoon food-and-family fest at Suzanne’s parents’ house. I wore it especially for MyBlaine (bro-in-law) and MyColton (nephew-in-law), who are pretty much mountain men. I aim to please those good ol’ tall boys, and I’m honored to be related to ’em. However, I had to ditch my bigly-racked bow tie soon after I arrived at the affair, cuz its antlers kept poking my chin and neck as I talked and hugged folks. Maybe MyBlaine will mount it for me to hang on my wall.
The amazing Liam (grandnephew) wound up at our house after the family party. I almost threw him back out into the snow. First, he wanted nothing to do with me, and that’s not right. It was only Skitter he wanted to play with. And worst of all, Liam wouldn’t wear Tie o’ the Day. Even with a funny dog and paw prints on the tie I picked out for him, he wanted nary a thing to do with wearing it. I managed to snap a picture of Liam with Skitter and Tie o’ the Day anyway. Despite his tie misbehavior, I let Liam stay with us and play inside the toasty house with Skitter. It was Christmas, so I had to be nice.
Ties o’ the Day make a quick, story-less appearance this morning. This celebration time of year is keeping me hopping with escapades galore, and I have little time to post about my adventures. Same for this post. The neckwear and I will write what we can, when we can. We’ll catch you up on things ASAP. But keep enjoying the ties while they last. We’re about Christmas-tied out.
HOLIDAY TIE TALLY: 98 Bow ties. 200 Neckties. We hit our necktie goal!
Ties o’ Last Night are ecstatic to present the wintry cape’s flip-side, which you haven’t yet seen in all its fabulosity. Both sides of this shimmering cape drop glitter wherever the cape travels. Suzanne be the Cape-maker to the Ties. And to me.
I chose to display these ties together as a way to sort of illustrate something I think about occasionally– especially at this time of year when everybody’s talking about making resolutions: What kind of person am I, and is that the sort of person I want to be?
Am I Scrooge, holding my little candle, and saying BAH HUMBUG as I move through life? Am I an elf, happily completing whatever project or errand I’m assigned to do, without doing much bigly thinking? Am I a jolly ol’ gal who gives much and expects nothing in return? Am I just a cold blob with one goal: don’t melt? Am I a HO?
Of course, all of those traits are angles of our personalities. Any given person is a spectrum of human thinking and emotions and roles. I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying, “Well, YOU might be a HO, but I most certainly am not!”
After much reflection, I do believe that although I am all these ties, I am a HO most of all. And I think it’s a good thing. It’s certainly a much-needed aspect of all emotionally healthy human beings to sometimes HO around. Of course, I mean it in the HO HO HO way. The greetings-to-all way. The laughter way. The explosion-of-wonder way.
Being a HO is my go-to. It’s how I make sense of a sometimes out o’ control planet. If I can’t laugh about difficult things I can’t change, I try to HO HO HO my way through it. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s a way to maintain sanity. We all need some HO in us.
I have tried to make HO-ing a skill. I hone my HO-ness to the point I think it’s worth passing along in these posts, in the HOpe it will touch the HO in you enough that you can pass along some of your HO HO HO to others. It can be a confusing and tough life at times, so embrace your inner HO. HO’s are for sharing.
My primary Christmas wish for my family and for y’all is for us to drown in happiness, peace, silliness, courage, and love. And every other positive, exciting thing we can add to that list.
The next important wish I have for this year’s Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa season is for me to make the Holiday Tie Tally go higher than the 100 mark for the bow ties, and the 200 mark for the neckties. I’m working to make that happen in a way that allows you to examine the finer points of the neckwear designs which show up on your screens.
The two Ties o’ the Day I most enjoy in this post’s pix are the pathetic Chuck Brown X-mas tree and the one with the mutt peeing on the snowman. Of course, I love my Ties o’ the Day and Bow Ties o’ the Day equally, as any parent would. They all bid you a grand Merry Christmas.
Bow Ties o’ the Day and Bow Ties o’ the Day wish you a merry Christmas Eve.
I admit that on Christmas Eve I am ALWAYS in the naughty category. Actually, I and my SWWTRN do the same naughty thing, whether we’re together or not. If we happen to drive past a store that has a parking lot full of cars, we get apoplectic about it, and say the same thing: “Look at all these flippin’ stoopid people at the flippin’ store! Didn’t they flippin’ know when flippin’ Christmas is? My hell, it’s on the exact same flippin’ day every flippin’ year!!! Have these flippin’ dopes not heard that it’s not against the flippin’ law to do their flippin’ Christmas shopping BEFORE flippin’ Christmas flippin’ Eve?” And so on. And then I go back to being my peace-on-earth-good-will-to-all-God’s-children self that I am.
