Holiday Faux pas or how to avoid pissing off your host this holiday season.

                                                  With the holiday season I am here to give some advice to those attending all those parties and get-togethers:

1. If the host is serving any kind of mixed snacks such as nuts or snack mix, do not stand there and pick out your favorites.  For example, if there is a bowl of mixed nuts, for God's sake don't cherry pick the expensive cashews, walnuts, and pecans leaving the host a bowl of peanuts, hazelnuts and Brazil nuts that no one else really wants to eat on their own.  If you don't like everything in the bowl DON'T EAT IT!  
2. Don't ever, for any reason ever double dip.  Seriously that's just gross and completely ruins the dip for the entire rest of the party.  No one wants to consume dip contaminated with your saliva!  If you want more dip you have two solutions:  either break your chip in two or scoop some dip onto your own plate and double dip away!
3. Please R.S.V.P.  I realize we all are busy and sometimes we forget, but by not R.S.V.P.ing you are sending a message to the host that you are keeping your options open and don't want to commit until you know if you have a better option.  Even if that is not what happened that is the message you are sending.  Hosts go through a lot of money and expense and plans enough meat (or main entree) and beverages for everyone.  No host want to run out or waste money purchasing food and drinks for people who don't show up.  Even a difference of 2 people can throw a host off.  
4. If you have very specific drink requirements just bring your own please!  No host wants to have to purchase a different drink for everyone coming.  If for example, you just refuse to drink nothing but Coke and if you can't have Coke you won't drink, just bring some!  Hosts are not not mind readers.    
5. Either eat or don't.  Either eat a lot or just nibble, but please don't eat and then complain about how much you ate; about how you are going to have to fast forever or stay up all night running or whatever totally ruining it for everyone else.  It's a party not a diet club meeting.  

Do I sound like a cranky curmudgeon?    I probably do, but after throwing years of casual parties, these are things that just bug me.  I don't think I'm asking too much of people. 

Okay, now you are equipped and ready to party on!

Pencils, an annoying necessity.

     I have a love/hate relationship with pencils.  I work as a paraprofessional in a grade school, so I am around pencils and use them all day.  I like writing with a perfectly sharpened, new pencil that still has the eraser on top.  The problem is, when they become dull, it is almost impossible to sharpen them!  One of two things happen--either the wood comes up the point and won't sharpen away, leaving the user with 1/2 of a pencil tip or the pencil sharpens beautifully, but then as soon as you go to use it, the lead falls out. I have thrown away more pencils because they wouldn't sharpen. 

     The other issue is the sharpeners; none of them work properly.  The hand held ones become dull very quickly.  The wall mounted ones would work properly, probably, if the district maintenance/janitorial stall didn't insist on putting them up incorrectly.  The way they hang in my district is so that the narrow, end where is shavings are suppose to collect is towards the wall.  Leaving the shavings no where to collect, causing them to get caught in the grinding mechanisms and dulling them.  I have tried to put them back correctly, but the kids all think it is wrong and immediately fuss with the sharpener trying to put it back.  Electric sharpeners sound like a nice idea and usually work very well, the problem is they too break and need replacing after a time and the district and the teachers neither one wants to spend the money. 

     The end result of all of this is endless dull pencils that don't write well made worse by sharpeners that don't sharpen well.  I think more time is wasted by staff and student alike by messing with pencils and trying to find one that writes.  As a new parent (years ago) I purchased my child 48 (yes, the required number is 48!) of the high quality pencils knowing that having quality pencils are important.  The problem was that the teachers all dump them in a collective bin, so you have no incentive to purchase good quality pencils and believe me almost no one does.  Even the pencils that used to be good now seem to be cheapened.  Parents wonder how it is possible to run through so many pencils, well now you know.  A good number of them get chewed up just trying to sharpen them; another large amount get tossed because they just won't sharpen; and finally there are those students who break pencils either for fun or because they are frustrated. 

Thanksgiving Recap

The Thanksgiving holiday is over.  My daughter came home from college for the first time since the semester started.  We watched movies, played board and card games together, colored (those adult coloring pages!), and generally relaxed. I got some reading in my Lewis & Clark books done.  (They have reached the Gates of the Mountains in present day Montana.)  It was a really nice break.  We did venture out to Target on Saturday--we could not resist the lure of the book section, but that was about it.  I did do some on-line shopping (hey, I'm a busy working mom, I had to get it done), but didn't go out Thursday night/Friday early. 

I will attempt to stay relaxed and not get worked up about how much I have to do as the Christmas season gets closer.  That kind of thinking is totally reversed from what we should be doing during this season.

Lewis and Clark Total Immersion!

                                     
I am currently reading two Lewis and Clark books at the same time!  I started to read Undaunted Courage years ago on vacation to Montana, but never finished it.  I always intended to, but you know there are A LOT of other books I wanted to read and I never got back to to.  Well, in the mean time, a friend of the family, published his Lewis and Clark book, Fraught with Difficulties and asked me to read it.  Fraught with Difficulties is a novelization of the Lewis and Clark story that takes you on the journey with the Lewis, Clark, and the Corps of Discovery and Undaunted Courage is a non-fiction account of the famous expedition.  I am finding them both interesting and am enjoying reading the events, written from different perspectives, at the same time.

I will publish reviews of each when I am finished reading, but I don't expect it to be anytime soon, with the holiday season here.

All schools should be Scent-Free Schools

     People, I've noticed, love to smell good and surround themselves with artificial scents!  They apply scented hand creams, liberally douse themselves with perfume, they spray air freshener in bathrooms, and use those scented plug-ins or the electric wax warmers.  The problem is that most of these scents aggravate people's asthma.  I work in a school and notice as I walk the halls that almost every room has some different artificial scent wafting out.  I see that this is a problem that I don't understand why it hasn't been taken more seriously.

     Schools have done a really good job keeping the schools safe for food allergy sufferers.  The problem is those children with asthma aren't being given the same consideration.  It is well know that artificial scents and perfumes cause aggravate asthma and cause an asthma attack, which like a food allergy attack, can be life threatening. School districts need to ban the use of artificial air freshers and perfumes at school for the health of the children attending.  I know it will be a hardship for some, all those sweaty bodies packed in a hot classroom (phew), but think big picture.  What is merely annoying to you can be causing someone else to struggle to breathe and it is really hard to learn when you can't breathe. 

Random Questions!

Five Questions for today!  

1.  Why do people drive right on my bumper in a long line of traffic on a  two-lane highway?

2.  Why do parents literally send full sandwich bags of crackers and cookies for snack time at school and then get upset that their child won't eat at meal time?

3. Why do adults like Disney?

4. Why can't people who disagree about politics have a civil discussion?

5. Why don't people wear their Pandora bracelets anymore?  After spending hundreds of dollars on them, now no one wears them? 

Okay, that's all!  

Thanksgiving or PreChristmas?

     Thanksgiving is in just a few days and I am bracing myself for the Christmas onslaught.  Every year I am overwhelmed with the way the big kick off to the Christmas shopping season overshadows what is a wonderful fall, harvest day of thanks.  I just want to shut myself in the house and not emerge again until Christmas season actually starts, which is the first Sunday of Advent (December 3 this year).  I know, we are only talking a difference of 10 days, but I think they are important days. 

    

     It is nice to have a couple of days off work to eat and relax and take note for what we are thankful for in our life--what is important to us.  It is family time.  It is time to go for a hike on a crisp fall day and come back in and have hot chocolate.  It is a time to play board games, to read, to watch parades relax and recharge.  That is what is important.  Planning our shopping conquests, running ourselves ragged trying to get the best deals takes all of that away.  Thanksgiving becomes the start to a commercial race I don't even want to watch, let alone participate in.  

     This year, we are having a low key Thanksgiving dinner and family get together.  We are playing games and watching TV.  We are relaxing the rest of the weekend and will go back to work/school refreshed and energized.  The next weekend, we will attend church and celebrate the beginning of the Advent season and put up the Christmas tree.