Much better mood

I'm giggling over my SO SRS picture of me (that really is my SO SRS expression) with a pancake on my head being deemed "adorable" by a member of the opposite sex.

I guess I'm in a better mood now than I've been in a while. It's hard to know why - as I said, I often feel as much an observer as a participant in my moods, and it often baffles me a bit how they change. There are any number of things that could have kicked me back into "normal gear." It could have been the couple of freezes finally killing out the ragweed and removing its pollen from the air. Or it could be deciding that in the absence of news, I can put the thing I was worrying about back to the back of my mind. Or it could be the pending holiday and the realization that this time next week, I will be seeing many of the people I love best in the world. Or it could be that I can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel of this semester, and have decided that it's not actually an oncoming train. Or it could be a purely, um, cyclic thing.

It could also be that it FINALLY feels like the seasons have changed. It gets cold at night (And also: I'm sleeping more soundly again, as I always do when I can let it get actually cold in my house), it's chilly enough that wearing wooly clothes is a possibility, I can finally put away the little cotton summer dresses that I have become so tired of.

Or it could be that the holiday ads have started up. Not the icky, skeevy ones that seem to imply if you don't buy your wife/girlfriend/female partner jewelry for the holiday, you are a loser who doesn't deserve her. Or the car ads. But there have been a few local-business ads on that are more in the vein of "We wish you and yours a lovely holiday season, and may 2011 be the best year ever."

I like the businesses that do that.

And I also admit: I like the horrible, tacky-cheap gift ads. The Chia Pet and the Clapper being two of the perennials, and now the Snuggie seems to have joined them. (Though I think the Snuggie has realized the only way it can do ads on itself is to slip into self-parody).

That said? I would be more amused than offended if someone gave me a chia pet for Christmas. Sometimes my dad has done stuff like that - gotten a nice gift and then some kind of joke gift, and either wrapped the joke gift more nicely (so it gets grabbed first) or pushes the person to open the joke gift first. We all know what the eventual outcome will be (that there will be a nicer gift), so no one's hurt by the joke gifts.

(I think part of the reason I like the ads is that they're a childhood memory of the season, just as much as A Charlie Brown Christmas or the "Santa Tracker" that some of the weather-radar guys do on Christmas Eve)

I wonder if the SpongeBob SquarePants Snuggie I saw in the drugstore comes in adult sizes. If it does, I would not be at all surprised if someone bought me one.