It's the holiday season

You know, it didn't really feel like Christmas until I was driving somewhere in the middle of nowhere, on my way to my parents', and I stumbled across a station playing all Christmas music, and some Andy Williams tunes came on.

I never knew that was the guys' name, but he and Ray Coniff and his choir literally defined Christmas for me growing up.

Good thing it hit before the holiday actually did.

I'm back home for a period of less than twenty-four hours: I drove back from Mom and Dad's last night, and today I am driving up to a friends' for New Year's and skiing. And I need to get packing.

Jay is coming with me. But we're not dating. No, really. We're not.

Off to packing it is, then.

sweet

It's only been two months, but I think I have found the pill of my dreams. I have fewer cramps, a lighter period, and a sex drive that is the highest it's been since I was 19, in college, drunk 60% of the time and had never taken the pill.

Simplicity

We'd spent the waking part of the day on the couch in the living room, watching football. I was still in my pj's, he was dressed. I was supposed to get up and get in the shower so I could go to a holiday cookie exchange.

He'd been playing with my hair through the latter half of the game. He started tugging it, pulling it, making my breath come faster and shallower, waking me up from my drowsy inactive state.

I was led into the bedroom by my hair, dragged along behind him, unable to stand up straight. He threw me onto the bed unceremoniously, stripped me, and proceeded to fuck me blind, with no foreplay but the hair-pulling. It was loud. And but good.

Then we slept.

So I have no idea what to get people for the holidays, especially Jay.

Give me fucking steam, already

Now, I like to consider myself an intelligent person, but there are certain things I don't like (like fire), and certain things that are categorized under "I push the button and it works". My heat is under the latter, and the boiler that powers it is under the former.

My expectation, then, of the fucking heat, is that when I push the little switch on the thermostat to "heat", and program the temperatures on the thermostat to "not freezing", the heat will automagically kick in and make my house comfortable.

In large part, this is exactly how it works. My house is very comfortable. Except for my bedroom, which is fucking arctic.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people that likes their house to be eighty in the winter and still wears a sweater and wool socks. 70 is the highest my thermostat is ever set, and that's in the am so that we have extra hot water. That's really all I ask.

I investigated, because leaving my door open all the time to benefit from the heat in the rest of the house is clearly not an option. I put my hand on my radiator, and was thankful that it wasn't quite cold enough that my hand would stick. I put my hand on the other radiators, and quickly jerked it back because they were very hot. Not cute.

I go online and start trying to educate myself about steam heat and radiators (since that's apparently what I have, who knew) and am confronted with a miserable morass of obscure terms and incomprehensible troubleshooting instructions. I can't very well do anything if I don't even know what you're referring to, now can I. There was much waving of hands and whining and frustration and girliness.

The one thing - the one thing - I manage to figure out is that my radiator needs to be tilted towards the pipe going into the floor, so that water can run down it. Okay, that I can handle. I dig around and come up with a piece of cardboard, which I fold in half and attempt to place under the far end of the radiator. Mind you, I wasn't even aware of the fact that the radiators were not actually secured to the floor. (I told this to Jay. His response? "Well where the fuck are they going? Nowhere, that's where.")

I manage to heft up the end of the much-heavier-than-it-looks radiator and shove the cardboard under, all by my lonesome, and I realize that the cardboard will compress and thus be useless. I find a useless trade magazine and shove it under there too.

I am soon rewarded with mild warmness in perhaps 10% of the radiator. This is better than before, so I am gratified. The rest of the radiators in the house were cool, so I wasn't expecting lots of heat at that time. I slept with my door half open, to again benefit from the heat in the rest of the house and also freak my shit out, and went to work today.

I came home to discover the house toasty-warm, and my room, not so much. Once again, I had a cold radiator and no one else did. God fucking dammit. Okay. The knob is open, the system is on, I almost burned my thigh in the bathroom again (the radiator is RIGHT. NEXT. to the toilet. Seriously). What the hell else could it be?

Okay, maybe it's the air vent. I don't feel comfortable with actually taking it off, so instead I get the brilliant idea that maybe it's clogged and I can poke around with a pin! So I do. Thankfully, steam did not come rushing out at my hand.

However, the radiator heated up. Hooray! I enjoyed warmth and closed the door to my room.

And then froze my ass off, because for some reason, my room is determined to be cold.

I fucking give up. I pushed the button. Where is my heat.

dweeb

I love alpaca socks.

I'm a little bit of a sock fiend. I've been known to spend my last two dollars in my wallet on a nifty-ass pair of socks, because socks have the amazing ability to make me giggle like a schoolgirl when I put them on. I have toe socks, stripey socks, argyle socks, etc. and so on, and I loves them.

But my favorites right now are definitely my alpaca socks. Yes, socks made from alpaca... wool? Hair? Whatever. MADE FROM ALPACAS. They are warm and soft and I use them for skiing and I loves me some skiing, so I loves me some alpaca socks.

They are some of the most expensive socks I own, at $15/pair, but they are worth every penny. I just washed my pairs and they are fresh and clean and oh-so-soft and ready for skiing which is good because HOLY CRAP it looks like it might finally be ski season for reals across the country. That's the awesome.