What I got for Christmas

You won't believe this, but I was surrounded by a bit of a Christmas "jinx sphere" this year. Every time anyone tried to pick up or order a present for me, it would invariably show up wrong, broken, or mis-ordered. Here are some examples.

1. Weber Q Barbecue. My wife tried to order this compact, highly-portable gas grill for me. Unfortunately, she actually ordered the Weber Baby-Q, which is a much, much smaller and less powerful version of the same grill. Who do I blame for this mix-up? That's right: our Baby.

2. A bottle of wine. A friend, who is a great wine enthusiast, forgot my gift (a bottle of good wine) back at his house on Christmas Eve. He had also left his jacket, his inhaler, and his car keys (he had caught a ride with an extremely undiscerning motorist). He says I might get the wine later, "if he cares."

3. Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. This frequent New Yorker contributor's book on the psychology of first impressions was high on my list. Unfortunately, some dude in the storeroom at Borders had bent it and drawn on the inside cover, and it had to be sent back to the distributor. My first impression of Borders: do not draw on the book, and break it over the edge of a stair, because then I do not get to have it, Borders.

On the upshot, I am extremely tired and will probably not toss and turn with terrible thoughts all night. I will fall directly to sleep and dream of a tiny, ineffectual barbecue with a single sardine hanging off either end, its eyes twitching and mouth gasping while its belly lightly steams.

Year-end wrap up

I forgot that I had a wish list at Amazon! I don't think I've looked at this since last Christmas. I enjoy looking back over it and remembering the man that I used to be. I was a man without a baby, a man without a queen-size bed, and clearly a man without Steve Martin's "A Wild and Crazy Guy."

MY POLICY ON PEOPLE I DON'T KNOW GETTING THINGS FOR ME OFF MY AMAZON WISH LIST:
Thanks!

Other matters of year-end business:

We're happy to announce that Nice Pete's book should be ready in January of 2006. He left a "highly urgent" copy here for me to read, and it looks pretty much done, except some of the pages seem to have had hair stuck to them during photocopying. I'm not sure if he'll want to reprint those, but we've agreed to sell the book in our Achewood shop either way, since I don't want him making a cape out of my dog, or e-mailing me pictures of him dropping live caterpillars into a deep-fryer.

Thank you to Rod Mann, who owns the German auto repair shop that I used extensively this last year while getting a vintage car ready for selling. It looks like I bled enough cash there to make it onto his premium client list, which means that a 2lb box of See's Candies showed up today, with his business card tucked under the ribbon. You guessed it: sitting on my dinner table is Rod Mann's 2-pound Nut Sampler. Rod Mann's 2-pound Nut Sampler. Either American slang is completely lost on this guy, or it is completely understood by him.

That's about it for 2005! Thanks, year.

I have a new bed.

It's true — I have a new bed. You may notice a bit more spring in my spiel today, or perhaps a sly smile playing about my predicates. We'd been sleeping on a mattress that was the chiropractic equivalent of taking a tumble down an interior wall of the Grand Canyon, and my arm had started to fall asleep so badly every night that I'd begun to have dreams where the flesh had turned mustard yellow and hung heavily at my side like a thirty-inch Cotechino. The situation was simply not tenable. Fortunately, we accumulated some money, and shortly thereafter we went to a mattress shop.

Have you ever bought a new mattress? It's a curious ritual where you walk into an enormous room, and a salesman looks at you while you lay on ten different mattresses which all feel more or less the same, and you say out loud "I have no idea what I hope to gain by any of this," and he says that the Sealy "Salome's Garden" has a seventy-five dollar rebate, and the next day two strong men show up at your house with a "Salome's Garden" and a mis-matched box spring. They haul away the old mattress, which is easily folded into a taco shape, and take it to a lab that uses liquid chromatography to analyze how gross your life is. I am anxiously awaiting the results; I fear that I am "very gross" because ever since the baby came I have not been exfoliating quite as much.