Ghost of Christmas 2007 Past
My immediate family is somewhat large: there are both my parents, of course and five kids (myself included). Throw in the newly arrived Caleb and it makes for a pocketbook busting Christmas of around 42 presents to be exchanged. Everyone ends up buying the baby a present — he’s just darn cute that way. Besides, it’s 100% American to heap goods on the youth of America in excess. There’s a clause in the Constitution regarding it.
To keep things manageable, we’ve instituted a buy-one, get-one policy. All the kids pull a name from a hat and buy his or her a gift. No muss, no fuss. This last year, I decided to opt out entirely of Christmas gifts (well, half so — I still bought the gift I was assigned to give, I’m not a complete ass) for myself and asked people to do something kind instead. When I was asked by one of my sisters what I wanted, this is the email I sent around:
Hmmm. Here’s what I’ve come up with: everyone’s off the hook for Christmas with me this year. After thinking about it for a while, I’ve realized that everything I need I already have, and anything I’ve ever wanted I don’t really need. So rather than a gift this year, I instead have a few requests to make (don’t fret they’re easy).
- Clean out your closet (I mean this in a literal, not a figurative way). Find a few pieces of clothing you have which you haven’t worn in over a year, that doesn’t fit you or that you have had second thoughts about. Give them away — doesn’t matter to whom. Organize the rest. (Bonus points for doing this with the junk drawer.)
- Say something nice to and do something good for a complete stranger. Don’t expect anything in return. The gift is in the experience of giving, not the investment for a thank you.
- Consider giving a gift to increase peace in the world. You can, for example, use Heifer International (www.heifer.org) to give a flock of geese to a family in Cambodia ($20), or make a microloan (www.kiva.org) to a woman entrepreneur building a sustainable economy in Africa ($25) or you could help remove landmines from playgrounds in Cambodia with www.changethepresent.org ($50).
The third is entirely up to you, but I would appreciate hearing about the first two. And yes, I will still be sending out presents and cards; even I know that not everyone is excited about providing fishing poles and nets to a village in sub-Saharan Africa.
Pretty easy stuff.
Happy Holidays Everyone !
-Chris
For the most part, everyone respected the request and I got some pretty nice emails about how clothing trends from the 1980s were no longer in dry storage. The one person who didn’t honor the “no gifts” policy was my mother. This was to be expected, of course. I ought to preface the remaining story to clarify that I’m not the easiest person to buy for. Having no dependents beyond two cats, general impulse control issues and readily disposable cash make for a pretty consistent kickline of instant gratification in my household. In this particular case however, I was taken entirely by surprise.
I had two wrapped items under the tree, both relatively small in size. The first item turned out to be a set of heat-resistant rubber spatulas. Apparently my mother was looking for one the last time she cooked in my kitchen, could not find one and opted to use Christmas to correct the egregious oversight on my part. Nice, trivial, easily used at home. Perfect. The second was a pair of tempur-pedic house slippers. Same “NASA”(r) quality visco-elastic memory foam everyone’s grown to know and love, just in a foot-sized package. They’re uber comfy and keep your toes quite warm to boot. (Exactly where she bought these are a mystery to me, I was actually looking for a pair after I tried on my brother’s and loved them. By the look of them, they are something you can only find at an airport Brookstone store, while in between delayed flights, late at night on alternating Fridays. Either they make like two a month or they’re shipped in from the Twilight Zone. Possibly both.) It wasn’t until I was getting ready for the drive home that she told me I had a third present waiting for me, except this one she didn’t manage to put under the tree, it was in the trunk of her Jeep.
Standing behind my mom’s truck with the trunk door popped, I could see this was no minimal present. First off, it was a cube, easily two feet on a side, gift wrapped. Secondly, it sat atop a wooden stand not entirely dissimilar to a trucking pallet. Thirdly, when I tried to take it out of the trunk to toss it in the car I realized it was incredibly heavy. Won’t budge an inch, listen to the suspension creak as I move it, who ordered the metal plates kind of heavy. I was thinking perhaps mom had bought me a lifetime supply of lead buckshot.
Enlisting my brother Matt to get it from her car, I tore off the gift wrap. Underneath, was a non-descript cardboard box. I lifted up the box to discover my mom had bought me a safe. Not a Sharper Image executive plaything safe. Not a RonCo “protect your valuable documents” safe. A bone fide, where’d-you-stash-the-blood-diamonds-damn-you kind of safe. A safe with thick reinforced steel walls, meant to be permanently installed into your foundation or perhaps cunningly hidden behind that Monet hanging in the palor. (With Ms. Scarlet and the candlestick.)
It took me six months and an industrial dolly to get it up the cruel stairwells in my house. This coming holiday season, I’m asking for MP3 downloads at the Amazon store.
The furniture fiasco
Anything that can go wrong …
If you work in or are connected to the sales profession, you know that the start of the new year generally coincides with performance bonus season. This just so happens to be right around the time that most sale-y folks go out and start going household upgrades. We’re no exception to this rule.
For the past few months Bill has been antsy about replacing our living room furniture. We bought a big sectional from Room & Board in Chicago around the autumn of 1999. Set us back a few thousand dollars at the time, but we were having a friend of ours do a major design renovation of our house in Chicago so we sprung for it. In the intervening 7+ years, that sectional hasn’t fared too well with three major moves: Chicago->West Coast storage, West Coast storage->Lower Queen Anne Seattle, Lower Queen Anne Seattle->Magnolia, Seattle. The topper was when the chaise lounge fabric started become threadbare and developed a 14-inch tear right where your feet would rest. The sectional had to go. We’ve also been sleeping on a bare mattress for about the same time, so it made sense to buy an official bed set at the same time.
Personally I hate shopping for furniture — actually I hate spending large amounts of yet-to-be-deposited money — so Bill did all the research and running around. He likes that kind of stuff. He picked things out, I didn’t particularly hate any of the selections he made, so just this morning he set out to buy the new furniture while I ran around town doing some errands. Fast forward to noon.
Bill (on cellphone): “Omigod. I can get the new living room furniture today from Dania. It’s a total coup! They have the furniture in the warehouse and we can get it today. They wanted to charge us $150 to deliver the furniture (can you believe that!) but we can do it now with the rental truck.”
Me: “Rental truck?”
Bill: “But we can get the furniture tooodaaaaay.”
Me: “Uhhhh”
Bill: “And, at the same time, we can get the bedroom set at Far Fetched. They wanted to charge us by the stair to deliver!”
Me: “Well, does that mean I have to lift heavy furniture today?”
Bill: “I’ll be home in 5 minutes.”
Rental truck in hand we made our way up to the Lynnwood Dania where the helpful warehouse staff picked the new living room set (couch, loveseat and chair) carted it out with a dolly and loaded it into the U-haul. We then drove down to Seattle to the Far Fetched warehouse where they also helpfully picked the bedroom set out and loaded it into the now completely full U-haul. We drove home, it’s now around 4pm.
First things first at home, we have to get the old furniture out. We move all the intervening furniture (two tables, a tall glass curio cabinet brimming with tchotchkies, three heavy granite end tables) and stow the kitties. Takes about an hour. Just outside, it starts to rain and the temperature drops. We pickup and move all the old sectional pieces one at a time down the hallway and into the garage, getting rained on the whole time. After that’s done, Bill calls up one of his employees and sells her the old furniture sight-unseen (he’s a good salesman, that Bill). It’s now about 5pm.
I back the rental truck up to the garage as much as I can and we go about unloading. Only the helpful warehouse staff have managed to successfully wedge all the furniture into a perfectly interlocking puzzle of sofa dimensions. Highway jiggling haven’t helped matters either. We pull, pry and push the bedroom set out of the mix. About 15 minutes to get that one piece out. It’s huge, unwieldy and heavy as hell. We opt to slide it into the garage rather than carry it in the house. It’s still raining.
Right about now, something my best friend Chris calls “a boy fight” starts to brew. It’s cold, it’s dark, we’re getting rained on and we’re moving huge, unwieldy and heavy as hell furniture about. The bickering starts.
We move on to the living room set, which is carefully wrapped in layers of protective plastic and pale blue padding foam. Protective plastic, which, when wet, provides next to zero gripping to move the furniture. It continues to rain. These pieces are curiously heavier and bulkier than we thought they would be, but we continue undaunted. With breaks every 10 feet or so, we carry the furniture up the two flights of stairs and into the house. It’s now about 5:45 and we’re fairly soaked, grimy from warehouse dirt and tired from hefting furniture around.
Triumphantly, Bill starts to unwrap. I start to clean the layers of sticky warehouse dust which now cover me. I hear Bill shout from the living room. The reason our furniture was bulkier and heavier than we had thought: it’s not our furniture. Expecting to find a modern cream leather set, we’re surprised to discover instead a taupe overstuffed microfiber arrangement. The kind you might expect to see in the Brady’s living room. Very retro stuff.
Dania closes at 6pm Saturdays, so Bill immediately calls the store:
Bill: “Hi, we were just in the store and bought the cream leather living room set, but when we opened it at home it’s the wrong furniture.”
Dania guy: “Oh, we delivered the wrong set to you.”
Bill: “No, no … we picked this up from the warehouse a few hours ago.”
Dania guy: “Oh, we must have given your furniture to someone else.”
Bill: “No … the warehouse guys were very specific with the furniture they got for us. They double checked and everything.”
Dania guy: “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”
Bill: “How’s about giving me the furniture I wanted?”
Dania guy: “Hmmm. I can get someone out there in a week from today. Please keep the furniture clean and don’t unwrap anymore until we’re there.”
Bill: “Wait a second, that’s ludicrous. Give me the store manager.”
Dania guy: “I am the store manager.”
Bill: “Well then give me the sales lady who just sold me the wrong furniture.”
Dania guy: “She’s busy serving another customer.”
Right about now is when Bill — metaphorically now — loses his mind. A switch gets thrown, a gasket blows, ballistic things happen, the whole kit-n-caboodle.
Now living room furniture-less, we still have to get the old sectional from the garage and to SeaTac where Bill’s employee is at home waiting for us to drop it off. We have until around 9pm to return the rental truck to U-haul. Once more into the rain, we load the old furniture into the truck and drive off. Along the way, we stop to pick up Bill’s car from a lot where we parked it earlier in the day before all the furniture moving. I get into his car since I’m going to follow the rental truck to SeaTac. As Bill pulls away, I notice that we’ve now been driving the rental truck — packed with the the furniture we’ve sold to someone else — with the back door wide open. I lay on the carhorn to make Bill stop before he pulls onto the highway. A quick check later and it looks like we have lost a cushion. I now race off in Bill’s car madly looking for a sectional cushion that is on the highway, in the rain, in the dark on the opposite side of the road.
I run the whole drive path, flashing unfortunate oncoming cars with my brights to find a cushion lost in the darkness. No luck. I get back to the lot where Bill is waiting and tell him the cushion is gone for good. “Oh” he says, “I was going to call your cellphone but you didn’t have it. I miscounted.” Boy fight number two erupts.
The Green-Eyed Monster
One of my high-school classmates is, quite likely, a billionaire. Or perhaps a multi-millionaire. Once your air becomes rarefied, I’m pretty certain the matter becomes a distinction without much of a difference. Suffice it to say, he has got more zeros in his net worth (on the most worthwhile side of the significant digit at least) than I do. You see, Gerald Beeson is the chief financial officer of a $12 billion hedge-fund responsible for a good daily percentage of trading traffic on the NYSE and Tokyo stock exchanges.
I came across this information in a rather roundabout way, when I was monitoring a stock I hold, E-Trade, which is a company I invested in as a rebound / bottom-feeder investment. Personal disclosure: I have come to realize my shortcomings as a stockpicker. Cum Laude Finance B.A. in hand — with an analyst stint under my belt at a bulge-bracket investment bank natch! — my capacity to pick ‘em should only be matched with the phrase “for just how far they can fall,” but I digress. Any semblance to a good investment idea, alive or dead, is purely coincidental.
Now in E-Trade’s most recent double-digit slide (huzzah!) I saw a mention of an outside hedge-fund, Citadel Investment Group making a $1.2 billion capital infusion into the company. This infusion came about as a result of the present MBO sub-prime meltdown; financial institutions must maintain a certain amount of retained capital for liquidity’s sake. The name Citadel sounded familiar to me, when I realized I saw that company’s name in the Marist High School alumni book. A little google-stalking and bingo — $$$-aire alumni.
I haven’t kept up much with my friends from Marist, a situation complicated by geography, the general inertia of adult life, and partially owing to the fact that I am dead to the school. And I don’t mean that in a figurative “Screw him, he’s dead to me!” way — the Marist rolls literally list me among the deceased student body. (I have no idea why this is the case but I hope I went out in an over the top John Woo Hollywood-esque extravaganza with pyrotechnics, extreme GunFu and the cliched, gratuitous slo-mo dove flyby.) This of course means that a school’s worth of bored, eyes glazed over high schoolers has been praying for my immortal purgatory-toasted soul for about a decade; a vision which fills me with a Tom Sawyer like glee. That being the case I should also add that mere death is not enough to keep Marist from sending capital campaign requests to my door. The Lord does indeed work in the most mysterious of ways.
I do remember Gerry pretty well from high school. He was, and I’m sure still is, a really great guy: a quick smile, very easy going; someone you’d want to be around. I drove him to school a few times in my baby-poop green car back while I lived with my grandmother, we talked about my cousin who went to St. Gall grade school with Gerry, chatted in the hallway about general high school stuff.
I also remember the last (and sadly, only) time I met up with some of the Marist guys (Erik Kantz, Chris Fusco, Kevin Patula, Jon Harmoning, Maury McNulty and Gerry) which was at a very real memorial for our friend Mark Mucha. We were all sitting in a golf course clubhouse drinking a pint of beer, where we raised a pint to Mark’s memory and to a lesser extent my surprise resurrection. Great guys all.
But I’m still not a $$$-aire.
The latest model of Lihosit is now one year old
Hurray hurray! The kid has turned one!
Just this September 1st my baby nephew, Caleb James Lihosit, celebrated his first birthday. Or rather, the Lihosit/Rittenburg clan celebrated the event, as I am quite certain that one year-olds are blissfully ignorant of anything not involving food time, grandma visits and tupperware. (Any parent can tell you that — clever marketing notwithstanding — an infant will readily opt for a non-toy over anything developmental at the first opportunity. Give the kid a wooden spoon, a length of string and tupperware and watch him go to town. Save your bucks when it comes to the Baby Einstein / Fisher Price young years stuff. Apparently teaching kids with kaleidoscopic animation is not particularly effective. The Mouse(tm) is pissed.)
I guess the thing to do on these occasions is to set a chocolate cake before the child and wait for the gross motor control hilarity to ensue. Not one to play to the demands of tradition, Caleb steadfastly maintained a healthy, respectful distance from the cake. The cake, which I should add, was about the size of his head, liberally covered with frosting and had a good dose of candy bits sprinkled about. Were I 19 inches tall I would be daunted by it too.
Mommy got the party started by putting his hands on his cake and then touching his hands to his face. Aghast, Caleb tried to wipe the sticky stuff from his hands off onto his clothes and bib. The importance of hygiene cannot be stressed in these formative years. While the audience of 20 people loomed over him with bated breath, he bowed the the performance pressure and delivered a crowd pleasing performance with gusto. Infants on a sugar rush are funny.
Caleb is special in terms of the Lihosit family. And I don’t mean that in a proud uncle way. My father came from a family of four boys: Stanley, Robert, James and August Joseph (my dad). Each of those boys themselves had boys. I have cousins Anthony, David, Doug, Steven, Robbie and Michael, and my dad had yours truly and my brother Matt. My sister Kara and my uncle James’ daughter Judith were the only girls born, which made them celebs in their own right at the time. However, the bell curve finally caught up with the all boy streak. The most recent generation has been exclusively female, a whole gaggle of girls. That is, until Caleb James came along. So unbeknownst to him, he gets to carry on the Lihosit name.
I say this because while I would love to be a father, the likelihood of that happening is beyond remote. That is, unless I can somehow figure out reproduction by parthenogenesis or budding or something. So Matt and Marie had better be fruitful and multiply, multiply, multiply, cuz it ain’t coming from me nohow.
Being the first — and currently only — grandchild for my parents, the media coverage has been heavy. Even in the womb, Paparazzi were dispatched to get the first public images of the child:
And again, at his grand coming out party, despite security measures to the contrary, he could not avoid the flash of the camera:
