Anyway, I couldn't find anything so I'm just going to send about $70 in American currency, one of those new plastic £5 Scottish notes, and some canned haggis. It might get confiscated because you can't import that stuff to the US but see how it goes.
I thought about other Scottish food. But there's nothing amazing. There's Irn Bru, I guess, but I think she tried that when she was in London.
There's Mackie's crisps but I'd have to time the sending of the package to get there around Christmas and I don't like running around and people are stressed and crowds, et cetera. And anyway, those aren't anything special.
There's also Tunnock's Snowballs but that's just a woefully inferior version of a similar American product called Snowballs which I think are made by the Hostess Corporation. So they'd just be a letdown. "Ooh! Snowballs! Oh. These are really bad."
US Snowballs are chocolate cakes with a cream filling and have a marshallow/coconut coating. Tunnock's Snowballs (and another Scotish manufacturer who puts out an identical product) are just some bad marshmallows with a coconut coating. As somebody who enjoyed Hostess Snowballs, extremely disappointing.
So yeah, just the haggis. It's an interesting product. I would have never guessed that such a thing exists.
As for giving cash as a gift, I support it. My grandfather used to give us $50 every Christmas. That's good. It stopped when I was about 18, I guess.
I checked out my niece's Facebook for some ideas of things she might like but nothing. She posted a picture of herself and her sister and cousins when she was like 7. This was shortly after I moved.
My mother told some story about how when she was in high school (I think...maybe not that old) they needed to submit pictures of themselves and my niece chose a picture of her from when she was about 6 years old.
She seems to have some issues around that age. It's when I moved. It's sad but I had to go. I probably should have visted, though. I don't know. For the first few years, I didn't have any money to do that. Even when I started working in the courts, I wasn't making hardly anything for the first three years. So maybe there's not a whole lot more that I could have done. Still, it's unfortunate. I missed all of her growing up.
But how much responsibility can an uncle have? I only met my uncle once as a child. And my other uncle, I've never met. It's only a problem because I was there when she was born and we all lived in my mother's home until she was about five and I was kind of a father figure. Her actual father is a black man so you know how that goes.
Lego is really dragging their feet on this order. Oh wait. "In warehouse"? What does that mean? Oh sweet. It means it's all packaged and about to be shipped. That's the US package, though. Let me check mine...yeah, backordered. I had two items that weren't yet in stock. "Will ship by December 11"? It was December 2 when I ordered. Maybe that new date is just for new orders. Although, the other backordered item now says that it's available. Oh wait. It's some complicated crap with using the US site versus the UK site. Hopefully, I still get that snow globe. It says one order per customer but elsewhere it says one order per household. And does it make a difference if I'm using the US site and the UK site? I hope it does.
I was looking at this website rebrickable.com or something. Shows you what other sets you can build with the parts that you have. It's pretty sweet. I'm going to try some of those. I won't have all the parts and the colours won't all be right but it will be fun to see how close I can get to those other models using the parts that I do have. Have to make some substitutions. Improvise. It will be great.
Man, just think of all the great shit I could do if I still have my childhood Legos. For one thing, I could rebuild all of my sets. I lost some of the directions but they're all available online now. But yeah, I could combine all that shit into something amazing.
I've been reading stories of adults who resent their parents for throwing their toys away. A lot of disturbing stuff. Most of these stories are on sites for adult children of narcissistic parents. I looked it up and it's not narcissistic as in Lex Luger when he first joined the WWF. It's more a controlling person who doesn't respect boundaries. That all rings true. Uses guilt to manipulate people. Yeah. Effectively, feels threatened by toys because they don't want the toys to comfort the child. They want to be the only thing comforting the child.
I'd rather have the toys. Put her in the bin behind my sister's part-time school gig.
I always took care of my stuff. Many kids destroy their toys but not me. I always wanted to keep them for the long-haul. But I had the misfortune of beiung the son of a lunatic.
Man, what karma that her house got "burgled". Somebody kicked the door in and stole all of her shit. Grandmother's jewelry? Gone, melted, never coming back. Great example of the ancient Hindu concept of karma. It's not fun when somebody steals your shit, is it? But in my case, it wasn't some desperate junkie, it was my own mother. That's what makes it so much worse.
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