Thanksgiving Live Blogging

The thing with a live blogging is that you have to update the same post again and again with new information as it happens "live." I don't actually plan to update every couple minutes. Sorry. You'll have to enjoy Thanksgiving with your own fambilies.

First, I'd like to open up with a reflection upon what I am personally thankful for this year. Yes, that's right, The CherkyB is capable of being serious on special occasions. As you all know, the last year has been a tough one around here with a lot of seemingly unnecessary and gratuitous stress that had driven me to a state of quiet desperation and, quiet honestly, way too many liquor store owners and bar wait staff knew me by name. Which, on the surface, would seem like a good thing but turns out not to be.

However, all that has changed. So this year, for Thanksgiving, I would like to say that I am thankful that the daemon who has haunted me for so long, driving me to the brink of destruction, is gone, and I'm back to my cheery old self that you may remember from my childhood.

Unfortunately, she just ran out to Safeway to pick up a couple onions for the stuffing, so she'll be back in about 20 minutes.

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Morning in the Cherky household means a hearty breakfast prepared by The Mrs. This morning, it was a can of mandarin oranges for MaxieC and two cheese danishes from Sam's Club for Me, CherkyB. We might be eating lightly due to the feast later.


MaxieC then did his post-breakfast chores. Just because it's a holiday doesn't mean that the house is going to clean itself, after all.


HannahC cheerfully greeted everyone and wished them "Happy Thanksgiving!" in her own special way.


Later, after non-stop bickering between The Childrens, I forbade them from speaking to one another. MaxieC then said, "OK. Sooo....Hannah, what are you up to today?"

Here is MaxieC staring at the countdown timer on the bar microwave waiting for his time in Naughty Corner to expire.


I need to clean the bar. Luckily, we never, ever have company.

The Mrs. got right down to her daily routine, which involves spending about 10% of her time cooking, cleaning, and hollering at everyone and the remaining 90% of her time talking to her mother on the phone. If she can squeeze it in.

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For the first time ever, we got all the outside Christmas lights up before Thanksgiving. We didn't turn them on like many of our neighbors did, though. I replaced a bunch of the older lights with LEDs - I do a little every year. In this case, it was 9 boxes of C9-sized LEDs for the front fence and 4 boxes of "normal" mini-light LEDs for one of the pine trees.

As The Mrs. was removing the first set of mini-lights from the box and taking off all the twist ties that the poor Chinese child laborers had put on, she announced,"

The Mrs.: "Oh. This box already has two sets strung together."

Me, CherkyB: "No. It's one set. It's just plugged in ummm..."

I couldn't for the life of me remember the phrase I was looking for. So I used this:

Me, CherkyB: "...ass-to-mouth."

Yeah, that wasn't it. Turns out either "head-to-tail" or "end-to-end" would have been acceptable phrases. But we did have quite a conversation trying to decide which end of the lights was the ass end and which was the mouth end, and how "head-to-tail" syntactically translates to about the same thing, but has a completely different meaning.

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I've used this joke before on the blarg, so I'm gonna let it slide without comment.


One of our Thanksgiving traditions is to make stuffed mushrooms. There used to be a bar in Barfalo named that where they had lots of "battle of the bands" events, but it's apparently long gone. MaxieC snagged on of the mushrooms prior to stuffage.


HannahC made the traditional alive and pickle tray. I think this tradition started because they had a great olive bar at Cosentino's.


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It's good to know that a couple hours into this, not a single person has read this so far. You may be the first. That's good, because it means you may all have lives.

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We just walked the dog. I would have taken pictures, but I forgot.

It's my job to baste the turkey, cuz I'm the master baster in the fambily.

This despite me never having even taken a single womyns studies course.


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Ellie and The Locksmith just got Motorola Droids. I guess The Mrs. and Me, CherkyB aren't so special anymore. I still can't believe there's no Blogger app for android and that the WYSIWYG "compose" window doesn't work in the android browser, either. I mean, WTF?, they're booth Google. You can only use the "Edit HTML" function, which is fahbulous if you like to blog in HTML from a goddamned phone keyboard.

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The Mrs. wants me to say that she didn't forget the onions, and that the story about her going to Safeway was merely a plot device and not literal truth, as only an idiot would forget the onions.

The rest of the story she does not dispute.

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Oh. Only The Locksmith has a Droid. Ellie has the lowly Droid Eris. I say at most a week before she realizes what a huge mistake that was.

A Worlde of Paine

Today is Lego Robotics day. HannahC is on a team that will likely not win. My job is to watch Max. Apparently, I do it very poorly, as The Mrs. is constantly directing me to do it differently.

There needs to be a blogger app for Android. I don't get why there isn't, given they're both Google products. This is a pain.

[Update: Their robot came in 19th out of 48, but overall scores were not yet published. The team won the coveted "Most Professional Courtesy" Award. Which is bizarre. Both the award and that any team containing HannahC could win it.]

Jou got to choot jour gunz maign

Yes, I have used an old quote from the cousin of a feller who was arrested about two years back for killing someone with a bullet that fell from the sky after he and a bunch of his buddies decided to celebrate New Years by firing off about 40 rounds into the air. Tragic event, really. And an opportunity to trot out that old wives' tale about how a bullet shot into the sky lands at the same velocity that it left the gun. No, it doesn't. I leave the Newtonian physics to the reader, but I will note that, unlike when you were a freshman, this problem does not contain the phrase "in a vacuum" anywhere.

But ever since they splashed that soundbite all over the radio for a week, everyone 'round these parts has managed to latch on to it. As in:

Me, CherkyB: "Hey. I'm going to the gun range tomorrow. You wanna go?"

Friend: "Oh yeah? Jou got to choot jour guns, maign?"

Me, CherkyB: "I got to choot my guns."

Friend: "Yeah, jou got to choot jour guns."

Years later, the details of the case are fuzzy, but the soundbite lives on.

OK, mostly because of me.

I did finally manage to get to the gun range on Friday. This is the first time I have chot any of my guns for over two years. It's sad. And, even sadder, I still didn't get to choot my shotgun cuz we only had two hours. I got to choot all the pistolas, though.

Plus, I got to choot four of someone else's guns. That's always fun. I'd like to just say, for the record, that I'm going to add the S&W scandium/titanium .44 magnum to the list of guns I don't really enjoy chooting all that much. Or standing one lane over from when someone else is chooting it, given its ability to throw hot gasses and particles six feet sideways, where they burn the arm of the person in the lane next to you.

I did, though, manage to set up to the left of my buddy, so I got to land hot shell casings on him from my USP .40C as payback. That'll teach him

Now, funny story here. The gun range I belong to is waaay out in ranch country, and on a Friday afternoon it is largely deserted. Plus, not much is labeled. We took up residence on the 25 yard pistol range, and I set up a 17"x22" target area. (That's a 2x2 grid of 8.5"x11" paper targets from Midway USA, for those of you trying to figure out the dimensions.)

And then I proceeded to miss the targets completely with about half the shots. "Well, I haven't shot in over two years, so I'm a bit rusty." I improved a bit during the session, but not to how well I used to be able to shoot at 25 yds. But, you know, that was always indoors, and this was outdoors (though calm and sunny), and I used to shoot a lot more often than I do now. Like once a month as opposed to the once every couple years now.

It wasn't until I was relaying the story to a different co-worker, who has been a member of that gun range a lot longer than I (and has been there more than three times), that I discovered this wasn't the 25 yd range. He swore up and down that it was a 50 yd range. So we fired up Google maps and measured on the satellite view, and from that it appears to actually be a 50 meter range when measured vs. the scale on the map. It is also 1/4 the length of the 200 yard range, which is also advertised as being 200 meters, depending on which sign and/or web page you consult. All I can say is that things look smaller when you're out on the plains than they do indoors.

Oh, and I can never set foot in California again, as I fired off quite a number of rounds in his new SIG AR-15 and enjoyed it quite a bit. I declined to let him shoot the tracer-rounds, though, as the berms were completely covered with dried grass and tumbleweeds.

Yeah, that's right. I'm the one with the good judgment.

Choreblogging

If you ever decide you'd like to have a nice Koi pond, I have a little advice for you: you're wrong. Yes, I know, this may come as a shock to many of you who are used to always agreeing with Me, CherkyB. But I call it like I see it. And you're wrong.

That said, this week all but one of our trees decided to drop all of their leaves. Now, this year was going to be different. This year, I had a plan. Yes, I was going to get the bagging kit for my beloved lawn tractor, and then suck everything up with that. I googled the living shite out of my lawn tractor, and I couldn't find the bagging kit anywhere. Heck, I couldn't even get a model number from the manufacturer's website (which is a pathetic website, as you can't even get the model number of the bagging kit for any of the tractors they sell today, much less one from 3 years ago).

So, after a while, I found this nice little bagger on Amazon that was a Poulan. But it said it fit all Poulan, Poulan Pro, Husqvarna, and a couple other brands they make that had 42" decks.

I have a 42" deck on my Husqvarna. So, since I have Amazon Prime, I got it delivered in two days for free.

Of course, it didn't fit. Not even close, really. Completely wrong mounting bracket. Amazon was nice enough to send UPS out to get it for free, since it was technically a listing error on their website.

Then I decided to look in the packet of stuff that came with the tractor, and lo, there was an accessory guide that had the model number. Googling that model number came up with many, many places selling it. All for $450. Plus shipping. And it's big.

Now, I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $450 plus shipping just to rake up leaves. I don't bag the rest of the year, as I've swallowed hook-line-and-sinker that eco-liberal claptrap about mulching being better for your lawn. Better, shmetter. I like it because, like a top-notch prom date, it's cheaper and easier.

So it was back to the Echo ES-210 Shred'n'Vac. I have very mixed feelings about this leaf vac. The second time I used it, the choke lever broke off (it does have a 5-year warranty, though, so if I could just find the receipt, I could get it fixed for free). Other than that, it seems pretty well-constructed, despite being made in China. The design, on the other hand, is questionable. There's really one Achilles heal to the design - too much clearance between the blades and the housing means it is prone to clogging.

There's about a 1/4" gap where stuff can get around the blade, and the stuff that tends to do this is twigs. Little, 1/4" diameter, 4" long, flexible twigs. And when they slip in there, they get wedged in and wound up around the blade, and the motor stalls. This wouldn't be so bad if there was some way to clear the clog that didn't involve requiring a screwdriver to loosen the worm screw on a metal band clamp in order to get the feed tube off, and then having to tighten up the band clamp again when putting it back together. If there were a lever to release the clamp, I would say I actually like this leaf vac. But having to carry around a screwdriver is annoying, and the worm screw clamp is needlessly time consuming.

Doubly bad when you consider that one of my trees doesn't just drop leaves. It also drops tons and tons of little twigs that are exactly the right dimensions to clog this. If I'm lucky, I can make it 5 minutes without a clog. If I'm unlucky, 8 seconds.

I decided to grind up everything under that tree with the lawn tractor, and then just suck up the mulch with the vac. That worked pretty well.

I managed to get 3/4 of the leaves up today in about 5 hours. I left the last 1/4 for the kids to play in. Plus, I couldn't move my arms anymore, and my hands were tingling like crazy from the vibration of the motor. So screw it. Those leaves are all trapped by our fence in a corner where they have formed a 2.5' deep leaf drift that is about 10' long. Perfect for jumping in.

I met my wife in school

It's true. I distinctly remember because there was this new kid in class on the first day of seventh grade, and the school had put her name down as "Dennis," and so for the entire day we got to hear all different teachers trying to make witty comments about how she didn't look like a "Dennis".

It's sad when teachers try to make witty comments. It's not that there weren't teachers with wit (remember, this was nearly 30 years ago, when schools were populated with teachers who had gone to college prior to the 60's). It's just that it's a bit of a humor-constraining environment. It's not like you can just blurt out, "I've never seen a rack like that on anyone named Dennis. Well, not since our '72 blowing league championship, at least," to a seventh-grader. The best you can really do is something like, "Oh. I guess the 'e' is especially silent in this case."

But that's probably not going to get many laughs.

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I've decided for Christmas what I really want is one of those electronic rim shot/applause boxes. That way, I could better punctuate my continuous stream of "your momma" jokes. Except I can't find anyone who sells one. I mean, I've checked Amazon, plus both Google and Bing, and nothing. Closest I can come is a stupid iPhone app. And iDon't have an iPhone.

If you find one, send a link to my wife.

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I miss wine. We had this spectacular roast beef on Sunday, and I didn't have any wine. I ran out of wine about 2 months ago, and I never replenished the supply. I decided it was an exceedingly bad value in terms of alcohol/dollar, so I cut it out of the budget. I ended up having to drink a combination of Diet Coke, Captain Morgan, and Jack Daniels with the roast beef. It tasted nothing like red wine.

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Today, three different people commented on how "loud" my sweater was. All three were dudes. So I need to decide if (a) suddenly all my co-workers have become flaming homosexuals, or (b) it's time to update my sweater collection. I'm leaning towards it being (a), though honestly, most theories that require simultaneous failure of a number of unrelated systems turn out to be wrong.

I just don't get how it could be (b) though. I mean, my fashion sense is just spectacular. Like fucking awesome levels of spectacular here. You've all seen pictures of me. It's just got to be (a). There's no other credible explanation.

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I need to defrost my bar fridge. I can barely get the ice tray in the freezer anymore. My next-door neighbor has a tap system in his bar. I am mightily jealous. Except the tap said "Bud Light" on it, so I'm jealous in a sad "how can you waste such a gift?" kind of way.

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No, you can't retrofit a 2003 Dakota with the rear-seat headrests from a 2010 model. The only option is to buy a completely new truck. Damn shame, really.

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I think the fact that Sam's Club sells cheese balls in a 3-gallon jug (which is only 35oz of cheese balls by weight) is affecting how well my pants fit. Though, honestly, if you eat 35 oz of cheese balls over the course of two weeks, will you really gain 35 oz?

I should probably do some sit-ups.

"Sit-up" is what men call crunches, for you womens out there reading this. I know when I do a sit-up, nothing crunches. I also know that if things start crunching while I'm doing sit-ups, it's time to stop and see an orthopedist.

Or it's time to see if any of the giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches have escaped.