Dear family,

See you soon!



~Holly

Bits and Pieces

• I do not have a job at this time. I had a second interview for a job last Friday, but they have not called me back. This is disappointing because getting to the interview was super stressful and I kind of feel like the universe owes me.

• Last Thursday my eldest sister came up with her four kids and spent the day with us. Saturday, two other nieces came up and spent some time here too. I think that every doorknob and light switch in the house is sticky at this point.

• Martin bought a table a while ago, but it was on back order and finally came in a few days ago. So we pulled all the seats out of my car and brought it home to assemble. And now I can't get the seats back into my car because it is too hard. Also massive cardboard boxes and various other packing materials have taken over the kitchen and dining room.

• I finally got stuff hung on the walls in my room. I also rearranged my furniture a while ago, and my room is officially awesome now. Humphry sleeps in there all the time, and Martin even comes in to watch movies sometimes.

• Martin bought a little wooden Christmas countdown thing with two numbered cubes that you can move around each day. But the blocks are really only designed to display numbers 1-25, and there are currently 39 days left. So I turned the '8' block on its side so it looks like the infinity symbol. I think it is bumming Martin out.

Conflict of Interest.

I had a boss that always had an answer to everything. Problem was, sometimes he'd just make it up. Like the time he told someone that corned beef was named because it was traditionally serve with corn. Um... no. It's called corned beef because of the peppercorns used to season it during the boiling process.

Now, he's not alone in telling this kind of lie. People want answers, and often making them up is the easiest way to satisfy everyone. I've done it on occasion. And parents, in particular, seem to be huge perpetrators of this kind of lie.

Martin and I were actually talking about this the other day. Sometimes I'll be going about my normal day and it will suddenly dawn on me that some "fact" my parents instilled in me (when I was an impressionable, malleable child) is completely without basis. And not just the old wives' tales like don't swim for an hour after you eat.

No, no. These were outright lies they made up so they would have some sort of factual reason for making us stop our annoying behavior in a way that we couldn't argue with. On long car trips, they told us that the back seat reading lights would blind other drivers and we had to keep them off. "For safety." Clearly, they just wanted us to stop playing with the lights and sleep. But to this day I still get nervous when someone turns on interior car lights when I'm driving at night.

Anyway, back to my former manager. One time we were doing inventory of our ice cream novelty items, and I mentioned that sales would probably drop off now that it had started snowing. He told me that ice cream sales actually go up during the winter. I was properly amazed by his knowledge of all things sales-related, and then moved on to counting individual sticks of cheese.

But the other day, I was actually discussing ice cream consumption in winter, and my brain immediately piped up with that long forgotten factoid. After thinking about it for a minute, I became a bit suspicious. I decided to turn to my pal, the Internet to get some real answers.



See? I knew Internet would tell me the tru...

Wait a second... NONE of the top results can agree with each other? Internet! You have failed me! Can I trust no one?



*sigh*

How I wake up. Every single day.

The cat is upset.
The cat is upset because the door is closed.
The cat is concerned that I am unaware of his displeasure.
The cat attempts to make me aware of the problem by:

(a) meowing
(b) swiping his little cat paw under the door
(c) scratching
(d) more meowing

I do not open the door.
The cat does not give up.