Christmas in July

I go to the library every few weeks and get a handful of kids books, a stack of sewing and knitting books, maybe a business book or two (ya know, to try to figure out what in the world I am doing to myself).

I pour over my library books and take notes on the patterns. I try some patterns, love some, hate some, then I decide if the book is 'purchasable' by my standards.

When I find a book worthy of buying, I add it to a list I've compiled of all of the titles I need to take to Borders/Amazon. It's a pretty long list. A terrifying list. An embarrassing list.

I look at this list of titles and think 'oh what I would give to have enough money in my pocket to buy them all'. To go to Borders and lay my stack on the counter and say 'here, I want these... yes, all of them... no, I am not nuts, nor lonely, nor strange... ok, fine, a little strange'.

But at $20-$30 each, I'm not anywhere near this dream. I could chip away at them, which I do, but again, the list is long and as soon as I buy one I replace it with another library find and I am no better off. It's a perpetual dilemma. The better I get at sewing/knitting, the more books I find 'worthy', the longer my list. Yada, yada, yada.

So here is my thing. I don't see any change in this problematic behavior of mine. And there will come a time (say in December) when my parents or my grandparents or my aunts & uncles & cousins & in-laws will come to me and say 'is there anything you want?' and I will say no, because I always do, because I don't need anything and I can never think of anything, because I hate saying 'why yes, I want a vacation near a beach where I can read a book and get a golden tan and hire a hottie to refill my cocktails while I wear a bikini and show off my tight buns and I brag about getting my boobs back, is that going over our spending limit?'. And when this happens, when I say no, I want someone to call me a liar. I want someone to tell me they remember some rant and rave way back in July where I complained about my 'book list'.

Because I will forget. Not that I will forget that I want them, but I won't think to ask for them because I will be busy shopping or baking cookies or corralling the kids or policing Turbo while he enjoys his 'holiday spirits'. Because I have a lot going on and I forget things like this all of the time and I can hardly remember what my kids names are or where I live, much less what in the world I want for Christmas.

In 6 months.