11:55 a.m. - 2006-01-01
New Years in Elgin

A Wild New Years Eve

We have had a string of warm but gloomy days for maybe two weeks strait now and it is getting depressing. I need to remind myself though that here in Chicagoland, sunny days in the wintertime mean icy cold, therefore I try not to complain about the cloud cover holding the warmth against the planet.

I won't call this a resolution, but I have been trying not to complain about my Mother In Law, opting instead to just find a way to deal with the things I find disgusting and intolerable. Most days I have no problem as I am gone during the week and by the time I get home, I only have to endure her moping and complaining for an hour or so while also having to endure a half hour of Wheel of Fortune (Lord spare me).

Having two 3 day weekends in a row though is finding me a little short tempered at moping, whining 89 year olds who constantly talk about wee wee and vomit especially when you are in the middle of taking a bite of lunch or dinner.

Yesterday, she refused to eat any lunch then at 4PM whined about how I just had to make dinner because she was starving to death. This request was stated with the whiniest of southern accents which sent a chill right up my spine, hurdling my body into the kitchen to throw together a meal so she would just shut up.

The quickest thing I could put together was smoked sausage, mashed potatos from a mix and a mixed green salad. I don't know why but after all of this it pissed me off when she called the mashed potatos "creamed potatos", thereby rendering them unedible to me (I am very squeemish and the thought of my potatos being creamy made me sick), or perhaps it was the way she scraped the smoked sausage out of it's casing and cut and mashed it up to the consistancy of the potatos before eating it that curlded my stomach, or perhaps it was the gurgling and burping that went on as she shoved both the creamed white mash and the pinkish mash of sausage down her throat and then announced that she was going to go vomit that did me it.

OK...I'm done venting...hope you weren't eating while reading this.

Anyway, after the vomiting hag put herself to bed (did I just say yesterday I was learning patience?) Mike and I put on "Charlie and The Chocolate Factory" as our New Years Eve entertainment.

OK...what in the hell did Tim Burton do to my beautiful sexy Johnny Depp? He looked like a woman. He didn't look like Johnny Depp and I admire his acting skills as much as I do his adorable face but he just didn't carry this one off. And what's the deal with veering from Roald Dahl's story line to venture into the touchy feely back story of Willy Wonka's horrid childhood and distrust of adults. The movie could have done without that.

I think the Gene Wilder adaptation was a beter story and Gene was a better Willy. The Gene Wilder version's Oompah Loompah's were also funnier as was their song of "Oompah Loomph doopity doo, I've got another puzzle for you."

In short, my review of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory???? Save your $3.99.

Oh, yeah...I mentioned a wild New Years Eve...We had heard tales of gun shots going off in Elgin (apparently some kind of Mexican ritual) on New Years Eve and opened our front door to see if we could hear them. We didn't hear gunshot but there were fireworks coming from every block. I have never heard more private fireworks going off in my life. Then the geese chimed in. For about an hour after midnight, every goose on the Fox River was honking loudly like it was the end of the world. It was positively sureal and kind of upsetting to listen to.

Thus went our first New Years in Elgin.

P. I. Yarnsmith

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