What The Hell is a Parson Brown?

In a few short hours, we'll be off to Patrick's parents' home to spend Christmas with his family. We still need to get everything together - get dressed, pack a few things to wear, gather the gifts, give the place a tidy, load up on allergy meds so that their cat, Angel Snowflake Byck, does not succeed in her plan to cause misery and destruction to anyone that dares enter her palace.

Ahh, the holidays. While we're not religious in any way, but we really do love them. For me, this time of year is all about:

* People not really wanting to work during the week leading up to the 25th. And so we don't. We don't even pretend
* Super fun staff parties and hilarious "Yankee Swap" gift exchanges
* Letting people know how much you care about them
* Having chocolate and booze for breakfast
* Staying in cozy pajamas for the bulk of the day
* Random people saying "happy holidays" to each other
* Appetizers. Appetizers. Appetizers.
* Buying some kick ass gifts for the charity toy drives
* Cheery songs (see: today's blog title)
* Decorating the home (or in our case, shoving a tree into a very tight space and throwing a lot of green shiny things on it)
* Forcing family members to play cards and board games
* Slipping the homeless guy a 20 and genuinely not caring (see: judging) how he spends it
* Christmas Specials - every channel, every hour, every style of crappy animation!

Happy holidays, everyone!

Why Phone Etiquette Is Oh So Important In This Day And Age

Just now someone called my home. The conversation went like this:

Me: Hello?

Teen: Yo.

Me: Um ... hi. Who wer...

Teen: *click*

Nice.

A simple "Sorry, I have the wrong number" would have been supremely easy to spit out and would have been gladly accepted. I'm blogging this little exchange as a warning to all the politeness-challenged morons out there who have yet to realize that manners are important.

Just imagine that you, Teen, hung up on someone that was a REAL a-hole. A busy-body. A psycho. A gamer that has been camping outside of a Best Buy in vain, coming home empty Wii-handed. A woman who is raging with PMS and just ran out of chocolate. I could go on ... basically, Teen, these are the people in your neighbourhood. People that you should not be messing with with your lack of phone etiquette.

Why, asks the ignorant Teen? Because, stupid Teen, these people more than likely have the most basic access to everyday technology. Call display, for instance, and a computer that hooks up to the Internet. Pretty standard, yes?

Within 2 minutes of the click in my ear, I - and anybody that knows how to read and type - was able to find out the following:

* The name of Teen's mother

* The home phone number

* Teen's home address

* A map leading me to that address

* Teen's mother's volunteer organization, of which she is on the board

* Meeting times of Teen mother's organization

* A map to those meeting locations

And I'm not even that driven to find you, Teen. You are so lucky that I still had some Toblerone in the house.

You Know You're A Yuppie When ...

... you put up a Holiday Bamboo Plant and decorate it with ornaments from IKEA: