It's beginning to look a lot like

your momma.

Today was my day to sleep in. What that means is that The Mrs. gets up with MaxieC, but leaves the bedroom door wide open so that the rising sun comes through the entryway clerestory window and shines directly in my eyes. Then I get up and close the door. Then FreddyC gets up and barks at the closed door so he can go out. So I open the door and then close it again. Then five minutes later, he barks again to come back in. So then I let him in and leave the door open enough for him to go in and out.

But this means I can hear MaxieC. Not a quiet kid, that one.

Then, finally I get back to sleep. Eventually, I will be awakened by this, coming from right next to the bed:

The Mrs.: No, Maxie. It's Daddy's turn to sleep in. Don't wake him up.
The Mrs. [talking into the phone]: Poor DaaDaa. He's asleep, and MaxieC wants to blow the whistle in his ear. Yack yack yack yack.
The Mrs.: Maxie, stay off the bed. Daddy is still sleeping.
The Mrs. [talking on the phone]: MaxieC is climbing up onto the bed now. He really wants to blow that whistle in CherkyB's ear. Yack yack yack yack.
The Mrs.: Maxie, give me the whistle.
MaxieC: It's a saxophone!
The Mrs.: OK. Give me the saxophone. Don't blow it in Daddy's ear. He's still sleeping.
The Mrs. [talking into the phone]: Yeah, he's very upset I called it a whistle. It's one of those slide-whistle things, but it's shaped like a little, yellow saxophone. Yack yack yack yack.
The Mrs.: Maxie, no.
MaxieC: TWEEEEEEETTTTT!!!!!!!
Me, CherkyB: Ow.
The Mrs. [talking into the phone]: He blew the whistle right in CherkyB's ear. It's OK, though. He wasn't asleep. He was faking. Yack yack yack yack.

I got up this morning with purpose. I was going to go to Target to buy a scale. There's no sense in cutting out between-meal snacking if you can't track the progress. The Mrs. asked if I had plans for the day, and I said, "Yes, I'm planning to go to Target."

Then she took me aside and asked, "Is this a trip we can all go on?"

Now, I thought for a minute. She's asking if I'll be buying Christmas presents at Target, I think. But maybe I just want some alone time after the fiasco that was yesterday. But I know I'm not allowed alone time on weekends because The Mrs. considers my time at work to be alone time.

She has, to this day, absolutely no idea what my job is like. I've explained it many times, but it's as if she'd stuck her fingers in her ears and said "blub blub blub blub" every time for all she has absorbed about it.

So I said, "Yes."

Oh joy. The whole fambly is now off to Target. The Mrs. has decided to make a side run to the pet store (which is right next door) to return all the unopened hamster Christmas presents, given the untimely demise of dear Angibelle. And she's decided we should buy a whole bunches of lights to put on one of the trees in the front.

One of the trees. Keep that in mind.

The shopping trip went pretty smoothly, all things considered. The only squabble was when MaxieC and HannieC both wanted to put the credit card into the magic credit-card sucking device that Target so uniquely has. This was resolve by letting MaxieC put the card in, and then letting HannieC sign the screen. (I may have helped her a little bit with my signature.)

When we got home, it was 11:45, and The Mrs. suggested we start hanging Christmas lights. I put my foot down. No. It's time for lunch.

As per usual, The Childrens ran around like crazy idiots during lunch. Except for MaxieC, who sat quietly and ate the bread off his sandwich (to which he required to have more mustard added) without touching the innards.

I was sitting there, minding my own bidness, quietly eating my sandwich, when HannieC came up and shrieked as loudly as she could right into my ear. To which I, quite naturally, responded by yelling, "Jesus F'cking Christ!" It being the holiday season and all.

The Mrs., always the smart-arse, said, "Have you had enough parenting already today?"

I am apparently very bad at this parenting thing. But that's OK, since it doesn't pay anywhere near as well as blogging does.

The Mrs. then said, "I wonder how long it will be before we hear that one come out. I bet it'll be when your parents visit, and MaxieC will yell it at your mother."

Maybe.

We went outside shortly thereafter to being with the Christmas lights. The plan was to string icicle lights on the fence across the front of the property on the left side of the driveway, and then to light up the 15' pine tree in the center of the yard. The Mrs. was going to handle the fence lights, and I was going to light up the tree.

Fatal flaw - no one was assigned to watch The Childrens. I figured we'd just let them play in the front yard, which is 5x the size of our old back yard. And there's no traffic on the street or anything. HannieC did fine, riding her Big Green Machine around. MaxieC, being two, headed straight for the Koi pond. He got out his leaf net, and started fishing out the leaves. The Mrs. could not handle it, since we couldn't see MaxieC behind the bush in front of the pond, and fretted up a storm.

So we had to take turns watching MaxieC.

We ran into troubles in the lighting plan right off the bat. The icicle lights said you couldn't string more than 3 strings together, each string was 10 feet, and we had about 80 feet to do. So we decided to light up 30 feet on either side of the driveway. This required me to figure out how to run an extension cord through about 30 feet of 15" diameter drain pipe that passes under the driveway, but I did that in short oder with some lengths of conduit that came with the garage and could be fitted together to make a pipe that long.

Then I wired up the tree while The Mrs. tried to get MaxieC to nap. HannieC tried to help me, but mostly she just played on the stepladder. Here is the view from in front of the icicle-lit fence and the tree behind it. The smaller tree to the left of center is one of the neighbor's trees. This is pretty much all we had planned to do.


But then The Mrs. noticed that we had some lights leftover. So she decided to light up the little bush in front of the Koi pond. Then, she also decided we should light up the 20' pine on the right side of the driveway. This required a trip to Ace Hardware, since I didn't have any lights for that tree, not did I have enough extension cords and whatnot.

I took MaxieC with me to Ace. They have free popcorn. He loves that. He fell asleep in the truck on the way home, so I left him there while I wired everything up.

But The Mrs. was not done. No. She discovered even more lights, and wired up two more little evergreens by the Koi pond. Of course, I didn't have the hardware necessary to power this, as I bought only what I needed on the last trip to Ace, so it was back to Ace again. When I got in the truck, MaxieC woke up. He wasn't all that happy about going back to Ace, but whatever. Here is the right side of the driveway, including the 20' tree lit up in green, the icicle fence, and the three bush/trees around the Koi pond.


This is the view west (left) from the driveway. The neighbors outdid us. I'm sure next weekend will involve many trips to Lowes and Target and Ace until we reach parity.


I guess I never posted a picture of our big, fat, and slightly bent Christmas tree. Here it is:


And while I was digging through the camera memory, I found a Thanksgiving turkey picture. This picture I like to call, "That's right - it's almost MaxieC's birthday."

I'm still alive

Thanks for asking.

It was a horribly rough day. I got up with MaxieC at some ungodly hour that started with a 6. He was cranky. Very cranky.

When The Mrs. finally waltzed out of bed almost four hours later, she announced she was going to Toys'R'Us to buy something for HannieC that was only on sale that day.

She left without feeding us breakfast.

MaxieC and HannieC fought with one another the whole time The Mrs. was gone. She was gone for an obscenely long time. Must have been close to an hour and a half.

Then she came home and immediately went out somewhere else with HannieC. I can't remember where, or any of the details. Maybe I imagined it. But I know MaxieC screamed the whole time she was gone, and she came home with Sonic.

Then, while we were eating, she said, "You know the GPS/backup camera thing in my van? Today it did something weird. It kept asking me to enter a code."

Did it display the map?

"I dunno. I didn't notice."

So I had to go check. Sure enough, everything worked except the GPS, which kept asking for a code. I remembered something about this being an anti-theft feature from when I picked up the van. I checked the manual. Yup, it asks for a code if the GPS has been unplugged from power.

This is doubly bad. First, I dunno where the stupid little card is they gave me when I picked up the van, and second, the GPS has not been removed from power. That means there's a loose connection somewhere, and I can probably expect it to lose power right at the most inopportune time sometime in the future.

I was angry. Angry because I had lost the little card. Angry because I had spent an extra $7000 to get a Honda over a Dodge, and this kind of stuff was what was not supposed to happen in a Honda. Angry because now I was angry in the middle of my lunch, which was my first meal of the day, and I was starving. And angry because I had already lived through 6 hours of non-stop 2-year-old hollering, and it was just past noon, and The Mrs. and HannieC were going to see The Nutcracker a 1pm, leaving me home alone again with screaming MaxieC in less than an hour.

Bruce Banner used to say, "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

I watched for it, but I didn't turn into a giant green monster.

I found the card right where I thought I had put it. Of course, I didn't look there right away, because I forgot right where I had put it. Then, when I did look there, I missed it by a few inches and didn't see it. Took me about 20 minutes to get back to searching the same spot over again (big house), and then it turned right up. I punched in the code, and the GPS was again happy.

The Mrs. then took off with HannieC. MaxieC hollered.

And hollered.

And hollered.

He refused to take a nap, as he generally won't nap without The Mrs. putting him to bed.

Two/three hours later, The Mrs. called to say she was sitting at a railroad crossing waiting for a train to go by. She did it just to annoy me.

Eventually, she got home with HannieC, and then the two childrens started at it again.

My head was killing me, and I had had it by this point. I was reduced to arms-length backhands to try to keep The Childrens from screaming in my ears and climbing on me. It was like a living pinball machine. No matter what I did, they just kept coming at me, all hollering and such.

The Mrs., always a wise-arse, said, "Why don't you stop parenting for a while," and she took The Childrens off somewhere upstairs for like 6-7 minutes. It was my only reprieve of the day.

I really stepped in it

Sometimes you do something that seems like a good idea at the time. In fact, you talk it over ahead of time with a few people you might actually trust, and they even think it's a good idea. Then you think about it some more, and you say to yourself, "Self, I know you used to think this was a bad idea, but maybe that was due to some fear of failure or fear of the unknown. But it's something that really needs to get done, and this is a great opportunity for yourself, self."

So then you goes to your boss and you says, "You know, I been thinkin' it over, and I think I wanna do this particular job." And then your boss says, "Hey, that's greeeaaaaat. Somebody really needs to do that. What an excellent opportunity."

But you can't help but think that in the split second between when you said you wanted to do that, and when she responded, there was kind of a startled look. And you wonder. Startled because it's so great to find just the perfect someone to do the job that no one wants, or startled because someone you had heard wasn't a complete dumb-ass just signed up for something for which all roads lead to great suffering and almost inevitable doom, a suicide mission? But you say, hey, my boss seems to genuinely care, and she'd tell me if she thought this was a big mistake.

And it's not until about a week later that you're sitting there in your little cube, an inhumane space not fit for human inhabitation yet somehow perfectly fit for keeping "resources", and you say to yourself, "Self, what is that smell?"

So you sniff around, and you realize it's coming from your foot. You examine the bottom of your boot, and there wedged deeply into the waffle, you see a big, steaming pile of "What did you volunteer for, you dumb-ass?"

And so it begins.

I realized yesterday that I've gotten fat. Like, somehow almost overnight, I have developed a big beer gut. I mean, I'm no JohnnyB, but at the rate things are going, I will be by summer. Last time this happened, I switched to diet soft drinks, and the gut immediately faded. But I never went back to non-diet soft drinks, so what is my next step?

I thought about it a lot. I wondered if I should give up beer for a while and do the patented GerryP vodka-tonic diet, only with diet-tonic (fixing the fatal flaw of the GerryP diet, which accidentally ended up substituting high fructose corn syrup for beer residuals and led to a weight gain of about 5 lbs during the dieting phase). It seems awfully drastic to give up beer. I've done it before a couple times, but it's not very much fun.

What I've decided is this: this is seasonal fat. All I need is some short-term quick fix to tide me over until the grass starts growing again and I have to mow it every week. So I've decided to cut out the between-meal snacks. Particularly my habit of eating ~1/2 bag of potato chips every night right before bed. I finished up all my Halloween candy at work last week, so that should also help. And I did 60 situps while HannieC was in the tub. That'll probably hurt tomorrow.

I was going to photoblog the belly, but I decided against it. I'm not sure it would achieve the celebrity that other, less successful, bloggers' body parts have. If I really cared for my readers, I'd go out and buy a scale so that we could track my diet progress. But I don't really care.

And neither do you.

Slow, Lingering Death

I hear Dr. Adlerberg, one of my oldest and dearest friends in the world, and his lovely wife had a baby on Saturday. I hear this from my wife, who heard it from his wife. Not from Dr. Adlerberg himself. Apparently, he's to worn out from the birth to send out an announcement. But, hey, I understand the suffering that is new babyhood. Congratulation to Dr. Adlerberg and JennyH.

We're mummifying a chicken. That's a non sequitur, in case you were wondering. We started on Saturday. It's a science/history project for HannieC's homeschooling. She's studying ancient Egypt, and the book has a mummification project. It seems pretty straight-forward. You start with a chicken, remove all the guts (which you can mummify, but the book says they'll still smell even after mummification (we chose to toss them)), wash it out with hot water, and then wash it with alcohol (it suggests isopropyl, but notes the real Egyptians used wine. I'll be damned if I'm wasting good drinking alcohol washing a chicken, though that bottle of peach schnappers hasn't been touched in years.).

Then, you make a mixture of 1 can of salt, 1/2 can of baking power, and 1/2 box of baking soda. To this you add nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves. Then you stuff the chicken with it and put it in a baggy with the remainder. You change the mixture whenever it gets damp, which is after the first day, then like two days after that, and at progressively longer intervals for about 40 days. Then I dunno what happens, but it involves linen and olive oil. I'll let you know when we get there.

We did the second change of stuffing today.

HannieC named her chicken. She had been quizzing me about which end of the chicken was which, and she learned that the little hole was the head end, and the big hole was the butt end. Then, she named it, "Lucy."

When she heard the name, the Mrs. accused me of having named it. I don't know why.

Hey, I got my first payment ($111.81) from Google AdSense (the doods that put the ads on Me, CherkyB) on 11/27, a mere 8 months and one week after I started blogging. I'm pretty sure that won't even cover the amount of JD I've consumed while blogging during that time period, but I probably would have consumed roughly the same amount anyways. The Mrs. only threatened to divorce me due to excess blogging twice during that time, and only accused me of having an affair with a commenter once, so overall, I think it has been a big win.

Especially when you consider the joy and happiness I've brought to the world through my blog. Not to mention the great insight and learning.

A big win for everyone.

Let me thank you for your patronage. Well, let me thank those of you in California, New York, and Colorado, in that order, who have accounted for nearly 100% of my ad clicks over the last quarter. The rest of you can GFY.

It's poker night tonight. I'm not there. I would lose most of my AdSense earnings if I were, as MoodyT somehow always managed to bust me. I wish I didn't suck at poker, but I do. We can't smoke cigars during MoodyT's poker nights, hardly anyone drinks anything, and they're usually over by 10pm. It's very different from StinkyJ's poker nights.

I'm trying to figure out a way to make the title to this post relevant. I can't.

Such is life.

Fascistic

fa·scis·tic /fəˈʃɪstɪk/ [fuh-shis-tik] of or like fascism or fascists.

I don't know what it is with these idiots. I go out drinking with them dutifully every Thursday, and yet they accuse me of making up words. You'd think a bunch of neo-Marxist Democrats would have heard of the word "fascistic". You'd think they'd have used the word themselves numerous times in their rants about Bushilter. But then again, I'm not sure Air America even airs in the Fort TomCollins area.

Just to be fair, it's not obvious that the whole lot is a bunch of neo-Marxist Democrats. Back in San Schmose, the whole fat camp lot was. Except maybe the foreign guy. I'm not sure they officially let foreign nationals register to vote so as to be Democrats in California. Not unless you're the right kind of foreign, i.e., you don't have an education or any hope of a decent job or speak any English. Then you can register to vote all you want.

It's possible, for instance, that the Hamburgler is not a Democrat. And possibly El Torrito. The rest of the lot sure as hell is, though.

I was talking to Tinfoil today via IM, the deployment of which probably is responsible for $10 of the lost of value of The Company's stock, and he actually said this to me, "I need to drink more."

Yes, well, so do a lot of people. But the real leaders step up to the plate and do it. The others just talk about it. I'll follow-up next week to see if Tinfoil a leader or a talker be.

CJ is only allowed to Fat Camp once a month now, word has it.

Discovered that Cavitation is a mommyblogger! Only his blog seems to be about last week's Giants loss to the Titans cuz the guy didn't tackle the quarterback. And in his one and only post (oddly titled "Friggin' G-Men"), he made reference to me, CherkyB. If he could slip in a couple shots at The JohnnyB and then let me rename his blog, he has a shot at being the next Blog of the Week. (A title still held by Rhonda, since you keep the title until displaced.) If not, he'll remain on the watch list. But at least we'll all get to make fun of his momospherism. I'm not going to post a link, but I'm sure you can find it if you need to [nudge nudge wink wink].

I got to go to one of those "parent" things after work today. It was performance day at dance class, and what this entails is the kids dressing up in performance-like garb (which as far as I can tell means HannieC wears a tutu in addition to her leotard), and then having a normal dance class for the first 45 minutes where they practice their performance piece with all the parents watching, then they officially perform the piece twice in a row (roughly 1 minute long each time) with all the parents watching, and then they play freeze-dance for 5 minutes with all the parents watching (praying that this is the end), and then they do some other stupid game with all the parents watching (and praying), then they have cookies (amen). MaxieC got to participate in the freeze dance. I got to spend most of the time out in the playroom with him, with him bored out of his skull.

See, The Mrs. had handed me this big bag and said, "I brought lots of stuff for MaxieC to do for when he gets bored." But all she brought was books. Lots of books. One was a coloring book, but MaxieC didn't want to color. One was a Crayola Magic Finger Painting book, but MaxieC didn't want to finger paint. Everything else was a reading book, and he didn't want to read a book. I dug and dug and found a yo-yo. MaxieC is much too little to yo-yo, but I stood him up on a chair and tried to teach him. He had fun for about 2 minutes. Then he demanded "something to play with".

Luckily, a little girl about MaxieC's age showed up with a toy barn, a horse, a lion, and a unicorn. She sat at the little table, so MaxieC started running in circles around the table. Circling his prey? She looked at me and said, "He's running around the table."

Yup.

"I want him to play with me."

Hey MaxieC, why don't you play with this little girl?

He sat down on the other side of the table. She handed him the lion and said, "See this black spot. I drew this on it. Then my daddy yelled at me and I cried and he sent me to bed. It wasn't fair."

MaxieC did not respond. Good boy. Don't let them draw you in to their little victimization mind-games.

Then she started talking about her unicorn. She said, "This horse has this funny bump on its head. I don't know why, but it doesn't come off. It's stuck there."

MaxieC said, "That's a unicorn, not a horse."

The girl said, "I don't know what this bump is."

MaxieC said, "That's a horn. It's a unicorn, not a horse."

She said, "It's the baby horse."

Then MaxieC looks at me as if to say, "Jesus H., pops, this place is lousy with Democrats." Then he looks the girl straight in the eye and goes, "It's the sister, not the baby."

I'm still glad he didn't just say, "It's your momma."

On the way home from dance, HannieC rode with me. She was very excited as she found one nail and many nail holes in the mantel over the fambly room fireplace, and she wanted to move the Christmas stocking in there. Except we'd also have to move the Christmas tree. Then she was very concerned that Santa might come down the wrong chimney, as he was clearly used to coming down the fambly room chimney, and we were putting our stockings in the living room (having four fireplaces is problematic for the Santa thing). Then she was concerned that we were just laying our stocking on the floor, and Santa might not see them and accidentally step on them and get them all sooty if he came down the chimney feet first. She was also very concerned that Santa couldn't get in through our fireplaces, as they are gas fireplaces that have a fixed glass panel across the front. Man, the lies you are forced to make up on the fly for this Santa business, it's starting to really weigh on my conscience. She better figure this out soon, or I'll crack.

I'll probably at some point have to tell her that "Democrat" is not a synonym for "moron", but is actually a synonym for "self-hating megalomaniac". But let the little kid have her dreams, right?

Incoherent Rambling

Some days, you really have something good, and some days you just do it out of obligation.

That's a blogging-marriage metaphor, in case it was too obscure for you. Sometimes I wonder if being a Me, CherkyB reader actually lowers your IQ, or if it's just you.

I'm not going to warn of a CJ-quality post tonight, because last time I did that, I ripped out a masterpiece. But here we are at paragraph three, and I still haven't thought of anything much to say. And I've already insulted both my readers and CJ. That doesn't bode well. I've pretty much got that old standby of insulting The JohnnyB in my back pocket in case of emergencies, but after that, the well is dry.

We'll have to see if my good friend JackyD thinks of anything for me to write about along the way. Until then, I'll fake it.

We've been having a bit of a cold spell here in the Fort TomCollins area. We've had snow on the ground for 5 days now, which I am told is unusual. I've now gotten a good feel for the excitement that is driving a pickup truck on hard-pack snow and ice in rear-wheel drive mode. These uphill starts from stoplights on highly crowned roads are a bit problematic, since they neither plow nor salt anything other than main streets around here. But, hey, my years of driving in snow and ice in the Barfalo/Rottenchester metro areas have really paid off. In the five days, I have only made a right turn and ended up facing left once. And that was one of those "this is a really big intersection with no traffic at all, and I wonder if I can power slide through the turn like a sprint car" kind of things.

The answer, as it turns out, is no. Same answer I got about 18 years ago when I was driving a friend's IROC-Z back from bowling league in the rain (cuz he was too drunk to drive it), and he yelled, "Punch it!" when I was making a left on campus, and, well, I had never driven an IROC-Z before, and I punched it, and I ended up facing right. I learned then that when you are driving drunk people home, it's often not the best idea to take their advice on how to drive.

I think we won the championship that year.

So The Mrs. had me come home from work early on Friday to take HannieC and her friend from across the street, LizzyS, sledding. Our subdivision sit atop a hill, looking down upon the riff-raff that is "the meadows" below (though the meadows has recently added a golf course in an attempt to raise their level of cachet), and there is a whole bunch of open space up front isolating the housing plots from the main drag. There's an OK-sized hill (perfect for a 6-year old) up there, and so we all piled in the pickup and headed there. I mostly kept the truck in 4wd mode so as to not do anything too exciting with The Kiddies on board.

The hill turned out to be pretty good, but the girlies turned out to be a couple of lazy, flabby babies. They went down the hill maybe 10 times each, and then they kinda just stood there looking stupid and complaining of being bored. Then, along came a couple boys who were going over the jump (made of plywood and 2x4's) and one of them was riding a snowboard instead of a sled. They sat and watched the boys for like 20 minutes, then got bored again and asked to go home.

Then, naturally, they had a discussion about how tomorrow was Saturday, and they could go sledding for the entire day.

Riiiiight.

HannieC, Demagogue

On Wednesday, I was looking for a DVD to load up for The Childrens in the basement TV room, and I saw that we had Elf. This is what next transpired:

Me, CherkyB: Hey, we've got Elf. Did you get it from the library?

HannieC: Yeah. It's a great movie, except it has this Democrat elf who sneaks into Santa's bag when Santa visits, and Santa takes him to the North Pole and makes him an elf and raises him.

Me, CherkyB: How do you know he's a Democrat?

HannieC: Well, there's this time when he goes to a big city and he eats bird poop! He thinks bird poop is candy! That's just so stupid. It's like he's being really Democratty Democrat. That's what Democrats do.

How about that.

I've Got Nothing

I gotta tell you, it's been nice being back at work finally. It's a lot less hectic than being at home on vacation with the fambly. I even got back all rejuvenated and found myself caring about work. Actually caring. Someone today even accused me of "being all worked up" about the quality of our cache power rollup and how this showed that I cared about getting things right.

Then, of course, I talked to StinkyJ, and he reminded me in his inimitable, subtle way, why it is that caring about work is a giant waste of emotion. I'm sure that wasn't his intention, but he's not much of a motivational speaker. We actually go so far as to try to prevent him from giving motivational speeches when there is trouble brewing at work.

We got a couple inches of snow today at the homestead, and I went out after dinner to play in it with HannieC. MaxieC refused to go out because it was "too dark", though oddly he got up at 5am this morning and declared "it's light out and time to get up" when it was equally dark. HannieC, also in her inimitable style, decided to ride the tire swing. She decided to spin around in it really fast. Right after dinner.

So our time in the snow ended with barfing through the hole in the tire swing. Going to work apparently just caused everyone to save it up for when I get home. I'm sure the dog will be out there tomorrow cleaning that up.

He likes ham.

MaxieC, Wise Guy

An actual conversation:

Me, CherkyB: I smell poop.
MaxieC: I smell you.
Me, CherkyB: Why do I smell poop?
MaxieC: Why do I smell you?

Day 8 of 9, From Bad to Worse

HannieC's hamster died this evening. RIP Angibelle.

Busted!

Back on Day 5, when we were at Dick's, HannieC also wanted to check out fishing gear for MaxieC. We found a little beginner's kit, and I said, "This is just like the one I got you, except a different color." And HannieC replied, "Hey! You didn't get that for me. Santa did!"

Day 7 of 9, Merry Christmas

I really haven't got much to write about today, but my fans (well, Fat Moother) are clamoring for a post. I'm going to warn you ahead of time that this is going to be a CJ-quality post, not the normal CherkyB-quality.

BTW, did you people catch that shot CJ took at my wife in his Thanksgiving post?

We probably will stick around town in the next few days and maybe go to Rocky Mountain park on Saturday. Usually we wait for our guest(s) to adjust to the altitude before taking them to higher grounds.

Just for your information, you little bastard, it wasn't the elevation that did in Fat Moother. And don't think you can make fun of The Mrs. without consequences. That's my job.

While I'm at it, I'd also like to address a comment made by the inscrutable Navie-B,

I wonder how come you are all C's (including FreddieC), and Dave is suddenly a T.
Interesting twist.

Uh, Navie hon, check up there at the top of the page. Does it say "CherkyC," or does it say "CherkyB". Yeah. I thought so. And Dave is a T because he's a m'f'ing teapot. Duh. ™

Today was a faux-Christmas with Fat Moother. It started out just like a real Christmas, with MaxieC cranky as all hell. See, he wasn't sick anymore, and he was starving from having barfed up everything he ate or drank for 24 hours. But he was also terrified of eating anything for fear of barfing. So he just lay there on the floor and wailed. I mean really wailed. Good God Almighty, but was that annoying as all get-out.

Then something even worse happened. He decided he only wanted Daddy, not Mommy. Every time The Mrs. went near him, he hollered like he had just been set on a creepy department store Santa's lap, and the whiskey breath was burning his eyes. Ingratiating to Daddy, i.e., Me, CherkyB, but all in all I prefer when The Childrens are overbonded to their mother. It gives me more time for my second income-producing job.

The Mrs. tried to feed him a little chicken soup, but again it was Santa-roll-of-quarters. I had to take him down into the basement to sit at the bar and watch me play bubble shooter. A game that, oddly enough, I first saw when The JohnnyB was playing it during boring meetings at work many years ago. It just about the only thing I ever learned from the JohnnyB at work, though I must say he learned an awful lot from me. Now that may be because I know a lot more than The JohnnyB, or it may be because I'm a lot more dense than he is and thus incapable of learning. I'll let you folks hold the two blogs up side-by-side and decide for yourselves. But this I say with certainty: I'm clearly better-looking. That's why almost all my readers are womens, and well, almost all The JohnnyB's readers are his wife.

Though if you were sitting there at work towards the end of the day and going, "Man, I'm thirsty," and you had to choose between The JohnnyB and Me, CherkyB to go have a beers with, it'd be a tough choice. If you were in it for the long haul, I'd be the obvious choice, as I'm a much better conversationalist. Hell, I can conversationalist with myself for hours without any outside intervention as long as there is beer. However, if you're in it for the short term, The JohnnyB is an excellent beer invite because nearly all after-work beer engagements with The JohnnyB go like this:

The JohnnyB: Let me get the first pitcher.
You: OK. I'll get the next one.
[pause for beer to arrive - The JohnnyB's allure that you read about on his wife's blog is powerless against cocktail waitresses.]
[beer arrives]
You: {guzzle guzzle guzzle}
The JohnnyB: {guzzle} {smoke smoke smoke}
{ring ring, ring ring, ring ring}
The JohnnyB (into phone): Yeah?...
The JohnnyB: Oh crap...
The JohnnyB: OK, I'll be right there... No. I'm not doing anything. OK... Yeah... Be right there... I don't know, like 20 minutes... I'm at work... Well, next to work... At SC-13... Yeah, that's why I said I'll be right there... OK... OK... Can we talk about it in 20 minutes when I'm there?... OK... I'm sorry, it's just... Yeah... OK...
The JohnnyB: I gotta go. Navie-B did {something non-flattering, and she needs me to fix it right now.
You: {guzzle} You're going to finish your beer, at least, right?
The JohnnyB: {gulp} OK gotta go. Bye.

But I digress.

After a little while of watching me play bubble shooter, MaxieC decided he wanted some soup. So we went back upstairs, and he ate exactly 4 spoonfuls that I fed him. Then back downstairs for more bubble shooter. Then he said he wanted to go eat the rest of the soup, but he was going to feed it to himself. And he did.

Joy.

One little bowl of soup did not heal the lad, however, of his propensity to howl. We got plenty of little, angry, two-year-old howling most of the morning and into the afternoon.

We went and cut down a Christmas tree in the early afternoon, as is our day-after-Thanksgiving tradition. We had to drive all the way out to the far side of Greeley to get one. Actually, we ended up having to cut down two. We found the prefect tree and cut it down, but then when they put it on the needle shaker (something I've never seen before - an electric platform that you stand the tree on, and it shakes it until all the loose needles fall off), the top broke off. It turned out to have some latent rot damage up there. So they sent us back out for a new tree.

The new one we got is big and fat, and slightly bent. Hey, it's what you look for in a girlfriend, why not in a Christmas tree?

Nearly all the rest of the day was spent setting it up and decorating it, and then opening up all the presents Fat Moother had brought. I got two forstner drill bits, a tongue-and-groove router bit, a Pepsi hat, and bathroom reading book. Woo-Hoo!

We should have Christmas every day.

Day 6 of 9, Happy Thanksgiving

MaxieC is still sick, but not nearly as bad as yesterday. I'm still sick - a little worse than yesterday but not too bad. Everyone else is not sick.

I took HannieC out for some lawnmower joyriding, then she wanted me to pull her in the bike trailer to the park that's a couple blocks over. I did that, but I paid for it later. It really wiped me out. I had to go down into the basement and take a nap on the couch. I lay there peacefully, undiscovered for about 1 quarter (the second quarter of Dallas v. Tampa Bay), until The Mrs. woke me up to "play" with MaxieC.

It turned out what she meant when she said "play" was "change his nasty, poopy diaper".

We shall eat soon, I suspect.

The good new is that I found Dave:

Day 5 of 9, Late Night Edition

Fat Moother is fine. I had to wait a half hour in the parking lot and then another 20 minutes in the ER waiting room before they let me pick her up. Seems the hospital was on lockdown because someone pulled a gun in the maternity ward and then started running around with it. Eventually, he went outside, and they locked down the hospital so as to not let anyone in or out.

If I had known the reason they asked me to wait in the van was because there was a crazed gunman running around outside, I might have driven somewhere else to wait. But they didn't tell me.

They actually drove everybody to their cars, one at a time. Even though I was parked just 100 yards from the entrance, and even though they had made me sit in that very car for a half hour already, I wasn't allowed to walk back to it with Fat Moother.

Whatever.

When I got back home, I made myself some tea. If I were The JohnnyB, I would have just whined a lot until someone made me tea. But that's how it works in his house. His wife is an enabler. My wife, on the other hand, is not. This is how it went in my house:

The Mrs.: "Are you making yourself some tea?"
Me, CherkyB: "Yes. My throat is killing me."
The Mrs.: "Make HannieC some, too."
The Mrs.: "Decaffeinated."
Me, CherkyB: "Where's Dave?" [editor's note: Dave is the name of our teapot. It's a long story.]
The Mrs.: "I don't know. Just make yourself a cup of tea. Dave doesn't hold more than that anyways. Why can't you just make the tea and forget about Dave? Is that so hard? Jeeze. Make sure HannieC's is decaffeinated."

So I made myself a mug of tea and a mug for HannieC, too. I had the mug almost to my lips when I heard that wonderful sound of someone barfing. It was MaxieC upstairs. The Mrs. was with him. I set my mug down and waited for the sound to stop. Then I went upstairs to see if there was something for me to clean up.

There was, as it turns out. MaxieC had managed to explosively poop out the top of his diaper, up his back, and down his sleeve. The kind of thing a milk-fed newborn does, only he's almost three and much, much bigger. He was not at all happy about this.

Neither was I.

The Mrs. informed me that she was going to sleep on the floor next to MaxieC (who had moved to the floor due to him barfing all over his bed while I was sitting in the van being bait for a crazed gunman). This was the best news of the day. Better than the shower not leaking.

I got her an old couch mattress we have that she likes to camp out on, and I brought her her three pillows and her teddy bear. Then she requested one of the spare comforters that's in the basement. So I went to the basement and picked out the nicest one. I looked at the other two and said to myself, "Self, you ought to bring those up, too, if you don't want to be making this trip two more times during the night."

But I didn't. I'm such an optimist.

I covered up The Mrs. and headed to the kitchen to drink my tea. Just as I got to MaxieC's door, I heard a wretch. I turned around and turned on the light. MaxieC had barfed on The Mrs.'s comforter.

God hates optimists.

I schlepped back to the basement, got the remaining two comforters, took them back to The Mrs., then I drank my tea. I drank it quickly.

Day 5 of 9, You Wonder Why I Never Take Vacation

Today started out like any other middle-day-of-the-vacation day. That is, I woke up with a terrible sore throat. This came as no great surprise, as I went to bed with one the night before. Normally, I would have knocked down the sore throat during germination with my homeopathic gin'n'tonic remedy, which had been holding it at bay for a couple days already. But I had to go pick up Fat Moother at the airport last night, and then I had to be on my best behavior all night because we had company, and then I didn't want to listen to a lecture about how gin'n'tonic actually makes a sore throat worse if for some bizarre reason the remedy didn't work. Like that time I had pneumonia, for example. But I digress.

I mentioned to The Mrs. that my sore throat had not improved during the night, and that I wanted to make a run to Walgreensberg to pick up some medicine, since we didn't have any, and tomorrow being Thanksgiving and all it'd probably be closed. She said, "I'm going to take my shower."

Which was a bright spot in the day. The shower did not leak. Sure, it still leaked after $9000 of rebuilding. Sure, it still leaked (though in fewer places) after I recaulked the door seal where it was leaking. But the contractor came back and redid one of the grout seams, and now it doesn't leak.

Joy.

While The Mrs. was in the shower, HannieC started complaining vociferously. How is that different from normal? Well, it isn't. Only this time she was upset because her hamster had peed on her nightgown, and it was a special nightgown covered in cows that she was wearing because Granny Moo Moo (aka Fat Moother) was a cow fanatic. I don't know why.

So I had to dump the special cow nightgown into the washing machine so that it would be washed and dried before Granny Moo Moo got up. As I was doing this I said to myself, "Self, I wonder which of these 5 baskets of laundry I could throw in with this load? If I choose the wrong one, I'll get yelled at quite heartily. I am, after all, banned from doing laundry because of improper color matching. But, if I wash only one tiny little girl's nightgown, I'll get yelled at for being too lazy to put in any of the other wash. Well, self, since almost all roads lead to getting yelled at, you might as well take the lazy route."

So I washed only the cow nightgown. Oddly enough, I didn't get yelled at. "Self, laziness is clearly the right direction."

After The Mrs. got out of the shower, I went to take mine. As I am accustomed to do, I locked the door. I do this as The Childrens seem to always miss me right when I get in the shower, and there's nothing more annoying than screaming little childrens pounding on the shower door when you're trying to wake up.

I'm not so much a morning person.

When I got out, The Mrs. lectured me about having locked the door. See, she "needed to talk to me" while I was in the shower. Why, pray tell? Well, she had talked to her The Sister, and they had decided to get Fat Moother a digital camera for her birthday (which is Sunday, I think), and I needed to get it today because Fat Moother had forgotten her film camera at home and wanted to go out and buy a couple disposable cameras today. She needed to tell me this while I was in the shower because, at only 5000 square feet, there isn't any possibility of being out of earshot of Fat Moother anywhere in the house other than the master shower.

Not to mention Fat Moother was still in bed asleep when I got out of the shower.

So now I was going to Walgreensberg and to buy a digital camera. Now, back where I'm from (silicon valley), they sell digital cameras at Walgreensberg. So, if you don't mind not getting the absolutely best price or selection, this is still a one-stop trip.

"Oh, and can you stop at the library and return these books? They're due today."

"Oh, and pick up balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing, too, for Fat Moother."

"And take HannieC with you. She'll be ready in a minute. HannieC! Daddy is leaving without you if you don't hurry up! What are you doing? Put the hamster back! Daddy is leaving. Hurry up."

About 20 minutes later, we left. Just as we were leaving, Fat Moother called The Mrs. from the basement on her cellphone to announce her awakening. I don't know why. I left.

Dropped off the library books without incident. Hit Walgreensberg. No salad dressing. No digital cameras. Great. That's two more stops.

King Stoopers is right next door to Walgreensberg, so we score some salad dressing quite quickly. I worry because it says "fat free" on it, and I don't want Fat Moother to be offended by me suggesting she might be fat and buying her fat free salad dressing. But all the balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing says "fat free" on it, so maybe it's just naturally fat free, like beer.

Though none of my beer says "fat free" on it.

Now, after the third stop of my running out to get sore throat medicine, I can finally head down to Loverlyland where there is a Worst Buy. I like Loverlyland, cuz it's not as populous as Ft. TomCollins, so the stores are less crowded. We live midway between, so it's a pick'em drive-time-wise.

Went into the Worst Buy, and looked for the camera I owned. I'm pretty happy with it, and it was reasonably priced. Well, they've now incremented the model number by 10 (from A520 to A530), added 1 more mega-pixels, and deleted a couple of the strange shooting modes that I have never used. I talk to the dude.

Me, CherkyB: "Hey dude. I'm looking for a digital camera for XXX price. I see you've got four of them. I own one like this, and I like it a lot."
Dude: "That's by far the best camera at that price."
Me, CherkyB: "OK. I'll take one of these."

He grabs it, we grab a 1GB memory card, and he takes me to the checkout, where there is no one in line at all. That's why I love Loverlyland.

Next to Worst Buy, there's a ColdStoned. HannieC sees that and suggests we stop by for a little treat. What the hell. We're on vacation.

Go into ColdStoned, and it's a little dark. Guy comes out from the back, "Uhh...we're closed. We don't open until noon." It's 10:30. Great.

Sorry, HannieC. Why don't we head over to Dick's to look around?

At Dick's, we try on ice skates. She needs childrens 13, and they only have down to youth 1, which is one size up. I lace them all up, and HannieC tells me these are great, they fit perfectly, I really think we should get them. Then,

Me, CherkyB: "Are you sure they fit perfectly? Are you sure you're not just saying that because you really want them? We can go to another store and get the right size if these don't fit."
HannieC: "We should go to another store. I really need the 13's. These are too big and uncomfortable."

So then we go do what I wanted to go to Dick's to do - check out youth-sized pellet rifles. Shhh...don't tell The Mrs.

I talked to the gun counter guy. He didn't have any youth-sized pellet rifles. He wasn't even aware that they made them. But, and this is what I love about Colorado, he did suggest an alternative. The Rossi Triple Play. This is a youth-sized stock with three interchangeable barrels, a .22LR, a .243, and a 20 ga shotgun. Then he says this to me:

You start her out now just playing with the .22, then when she gets to be about seven, you can move her up to the shotgun.

Uhhh...I'm really just looking for an air rifle, cuz we're just shooting in our garage right now. Thanks for your time.

Damn tempting, though.

When I got home, my life was planned. We were going to the local hotdog/gyro place for lunch, and then we were driving to Rocky Mountain National Park so that Fat Moother could see the mountains. I asked, "Who's going to sit in the way back seat?" The Mrs. said she was. I mentioned how she gets carsick, and this was going to be a two hour drive each way through a winding mountain pass. She then volunteered her mother. We argued about that for a while, given her mother's propensity towards carsickness, but The Mrs. insisted we couldn't displace HannieC from the middle row because she wouldn't be able to see the DVD screen as well from the back row.

Jesus. You're just provoking me again. What is it with you womens?

I said, no, HannieC sits in the way back seat. You and your mother can decide amongst yourselves who sits in the front and who in the middle row.

The Mrs. immediately claimed the front.

We were just about one hour into the drive, just before Estes Park (which is a town, not a park, oddly enough), when I heard from the middle row something no driver of a brand new minivan wants to hear. "Is there any way to get some air back here?"

Oh rats. Fat Moother is getting carsick. Luckily, in modern minivans, the second row of windows opens wide, so I opened her window. The Mrs. opened her air vent and aimed it at her, too. It was dicey for the next 5 miles, but we made it to the Estes Park Visitors' Center, where they have wonderful bathrooms. It was a planned pitstop location, since Rocky Mountain National Park is mostly outhouses.

We spent about a half hour there with me watching the Childrens down in the riverbed where they were throwing rocks into the water, when Fat Moother decided it was time to purge. Luckily, she had two shirts.

The Mrs. went across the street to Safeway and bought some dramamine. I put The Childrens back in the van to watch DVDs cuz they were getting bored with the spectacular scenery of the great frigging outdoors in the Rocky frigging Mountains, and they preferred Monsters, Inc.

We waited around a while for the dramamine to kick in, and made a run back to Safeway to buy barf bags while we left Fat Moother in the cool air sitting on a bench right near the door next to the bathroom. Then, for some bizarre reason, they all piled into the minivan and The Mrs. said, "We just need to drive somewhere where there's a bench for my mother to sit down and rest."

I noted that we had spent the last hour some place where there was a bench to sit down and rest on, and it was right next to a bathroom to boot. Literally and figuratively. But, I was overruled as per usual, so we headed off into the tourist trap that is downtown Estes Park. Downtown Estes Park is like three blocks long, so we were immediately through it and headed up the road to Rocky Mountain National Park, since that's the only thing on the other side of Estes Park. Luckily, we immediately spotted a herd of elk between the highway and a parking lot. We decided to go back for a closer look, which required us to circle back and get on a parallel road.

When we found the elk, whose parking lot were they right behind? Estes Park Brewery. The local brew pub. There I am with a queasy mother-in-law, a cranky 2-year-old who missed his nap, an angry 6-year-old who wanted to go to see the snow and wasn't going to get to, and a harried wife, and God deposits me in the parking lot of a brewpub.

God was screwing with me.

Or, just maybe, God is pointing the way to salvation. Maybe, just maybe, I am like Moses, and the brew pub is like the parting in the Red Sea, and who am I to look at it and wonder if I might get my feet wet? So I took the shot.

"Uh, ma'am (I call The Mrs. "ma'am" in person), you think I have time to run in and have one while your mother rests and The Childrens look at the elk?"

Yup. God is just screwing with me.

The ride home was touch-and-go, but we were able make it all the way home without incident. It went like this: MaxieC shrieked as loud as he could, then he kicked the back of Fat Moother's seat, then Fat Moother moaned and said, "MaxieC, don't yell and stop kicking my chair." Then repeat. For one solid hour. At least HannieC slept through the whole thing.

When we got home, the womens headed for the bathrooms while I got MaxieC set up watching some TV and having a snack so I could cook dinner. The Mrs. showed up first with this:

I laid a big load in toilet upstairs, and it didn't go down at all. Just leave it. I'll bail it later.

Then, the mother emerged from the first floor bathroom and headed downstairs to the guest room. The Mrs. was in there shortly thereafter mopping up puke.

After that, The Mrs. packed Fat Moother off to urgent care. I microwaved some kiddie meals for The Childrens. MaxieC stood up from the couch, and I could see his butt was wet.

With diarrhea.

Changed his diaper and pants, got his meal out of the microwave, and called him to the table. He came right away, and immediately threw up on the kitchen floor right next to his chair. Hot dog with ketchup - that was lunch.

The Mrs. called to say they were bouncing Fat Moother from urgent care to the ER for "additional tests".

I gave MaxieC a cup of ice chips, at HannieC's insistence. Max took one chip and promptly dumped the rest of the cup on the floor right next to the pile of puke.

HannieC ate her dinner.

MaxieC declared himself tired, too tired to watch TV even, and insisted on bed. I put on his night-time diaper, got out his jammies, and he promptly barfed on his bedroom floor. More hot dog with ketchup. Ketchup. I paid $12k for this rug in August.

The Mrs. called to say Fat Moother would be there a while, and did I want her to come home. I tried to not sound desperate.

"It would not be unhelpful if you were here."

She came home.

Now, dinner is ready. I'm going to go eat.

How is your vacation going?

[Update: MaxieC barfed on the toilet lid of a third bathroom just as soon as we sat down to dinner. Good thing we have four bathrooms. I'm heading out to pick up Fat Moother from the hospital now. She's OK.]

Day 4 of 9, Nightime Update

From some of the comments, like this one from Navie-B, "Bad day at work, Ha?" I know you folks haven't been paying attention. Now, maybe it's only Navie-B who hasn't been paying attention, but given the fact that she hits my website at least 30 times a day, I'm suspecting that she's just playing dense to see if she can provoke me.

That's the problem with you people. You're always trying to provoke me. Really, how could I have been "less PC" before? I defy you to point to one PC thing I've ever written. Just one.

There you go again, provoking me.

Anyways, let me explain for you folks who don't really pay attention because you have jobs or kids to raise or noodie models to go throw dollar bills at: The nine days is the number of days I have to spend in a row with my fambly. Now, since there are apparently both Democrats and Canadians reading this, let me explain something that maybe I considered to be implicit: the way I spend 9 days in a row with my fambly is by not going to work. See, if I were at work, I wouldn't be with my fambly. See? Do you? No, really? See, so if I'm not at work because I'm in day 4 of 9 days in a row with my family, that kind of implies (again, I assume my readers can draw logical conclusions despite being mostly womens, and that's probably my own personal failing for keeping that small, happy spot in my heart still alive that believes humanity isn't doomed to go the way of Europe) that I'm NOT AT WORK. And, again with the implications, if I'm not at work, I can't really be having a "bad day at work" now, can I?

Today was mostly uneventful. I picked Fat Moother up at the airport, though we had a bit of a snafu where I didn't know that you can't actually pick people up at baggage claim, but you have to pick them up one level below that cuz only buses and limos and taxis are allowed on the baggage claim level at DEN. This led to the inevitable phone call that goes like this, "I'm at the curb, but I don't see any place where cars can come. Just buses, limos, and taxis." "I'm at the curb, too. Only I don't see any place for buses, limos, or taxis." Rats.

The Childrens went a little crazy when I arrived with Granny, though FreddyC (the dog for those not following along - which is apparently all of you except maybe The Mrs., who for sure knows who FreddyC is) may have gone the most crazy of all. But now things are calm. MaxieC is asleep, and HannieC is playing the piano.

Oh, and my barstools finally arrived today. Like 11 weeks after ordering them.

I'd like to welcome a new member to the blogroll fambly: Rhonda of Rhonda's Blog fame. I filed her under the Borebloggers category for now. We'll have to keep an eye on that. I am bestowing upon Rhonda's Blog the much coveted "Blog of the Week" title and the inevitable Cherkylanche of hits that come with that. Too bad she doesn't have her AdSense context-sensitive advertisements up yet.

I think The Mrs. put it best a couple days ago when she nonchalantly asked Me, CherkyB, "Who's Rhonda?" To which I answered in a very non-rehearsed way, "I don't know."

The Mrs. gave me one of those, "but wait, there's more" looks, so I expanded. I said, "I was clicking on 'next blog', and I came across Rhonda's first post, to which I left comment. Then she left a comment back on Me, CherkyB, and she has left comments on most of the posts since then."

On the same day, I also left a 10 or 11 paragraph advisory comment on the blog of some dude in Texas whose band just broke up and was complaining that his parents thought he might be gay and that everyone else was pretty sure he was hooking up with his "just friend" Kimmy. I'm a regular Tom Leykis. Haven't heard back from him, but statcounter tells me I have a pretty regular reader in Plano now, and I don't know anyone in Plano. I don't think I even know anybody who knows anybody in Plano. So, here's a shout out to Plano dude. Welcome.

Oh, and I got a death threat comment from someone else who had a single post that said, "This is my new blog," and I left the comment, "What happened to your old blog." Interestingly, I'm not really sure it was really a death threat. I deleted it from the comments section, but it went exactly like this:

Dear Cherkb,

I am sorry I must say but you caused a DISASTER ! You ! Cherkb wrote a comment " What happened to your old blog ?" incom and you caused a disaster. Better say sorry or ... yyou'll die in 2 days ! Say sorry by contacting Yan Ching @ Address : Blk 280 Tinga Rd # 03-11111 S(89819191) Tel : sssssw355444444444

Tomorrow will be day 2, so if I die mysteriously, you can blame Yan Ching. From statcounter, it appears Yan Ching lives in Singapore. I'm not convinced this isn't a joke post. Hey, Yan, if you're serious about killing me, can you send me better contact info? I don't know how to dial sssssw355444444444.

You know, something that may be interesting is that thus far, the majority of "Blog of the Week" recipients have been people I never met.

Oh, really?

NavyA-B, has apparently been working through the archives today. She posts the following comment on this classic:

"Hey, you used to be much funnier and less PC in June... [...]"

Well, the reason for that is quite simple. You see, back in June most of my readers were men. Today, however, most of my readers are women. In response to that demographic shift, I've had to seriously dumb-down my posts so as to not go over their heads or offend their delicate sensibilities.

So why don't ya'll go play a game of hide and go fcuk yourselves.

Sheesh. Everyone's a critique.

Day 3 of 9. Early evening report.

I got to go to the DMV today. Again. I failed in my attempt to get a Colorado dribblers libcense last week. Not because I failed the test or anything (which isn't required in CO if you have a valid out-of-state libcense. Unlike in CA.). No, I didn't make it past the screener at the door. He didn't approve of my birth certificate. It did not contain enough information to qualify for a CO dribblers libcense.

I argued mightily, as this was the certificate I had used to get my passport. 'Course, I got my passport back in 1987, and it has long since expired since I can't figure out any country in the world that would be a better place to visit than my own. Except maybe Canada to go see "the ballet" in Fort Erie. Never needed a passport to go to Canada, though. Haven't been there in 8 years, so maybe that has changed, too. I think Fort Erie still has lots of ballet troupes, though.

The man was nice enough. He said, "Obviously you're a citizen, but we can't accept this birth certificate because of homeland security rules." Then he ave me a number to call to order up a Minty Fresh birth certificate that would be acceptable. That number gave me the option of ordering online from a NYS health department site, so I went there, and it directed me to a third-party vendor that handled it all. The NYS site said it would cost $46. The vendor charged me $16. I was worried that I'd gotten the wrong thing, so I tried every possible configuration, and it was always $16.

They tried to sell me FedEx for an additional $14, saying this would cut the delivery time from 14 bidness days to 5. Well, maybe for suckers. It doesn't take any 10 bidness days to snail mail anything from Barfalo to Fort TomCollins. So I paid for just the regular shipping. I got the certificate on Saturday, which was 3 days later (2 bidness days - and FedEx wouldn't have delivered on Saturday unless I paid $25 instead of $14 extree).

The Fort TomCollins DMV is a rather farcical place. It has a screener at the door who checks all your documentation before assigning you a number in the queue. Then it has 1 to 4 front counter workers, one cashier, and one photographer. They all rotate positions about every 30 minutes, and the rotation inserts about a 10-minute bubble into each station where nothing gets done other than one person logging out and then the next logging in. I was 15th in line. They averaged one person every 6 minutes during my stay. We only suffered through one computer crash at the photography station, which took that station offline for 20 minutes, so three people had to queue up again for photos. It was back to normal by the time I got to it, except the cashier had gone to lunch, and the photographer was covering both stations. So I had to wait about 10 extra minutes for the photo shoot.

The most interesting aspect was that there seemed to be an excess of middle-aged fat women behind the counter wearing winter jackets and drinking mugs of coffee. They stood around and kvetched about how cold it was back there behind the counter for a while, then one of them would go, open up a front counter station, wait on one person, then return to the gaggle, at which point one of the others would head up to the station and open it. As I said above, it takes about 10 minutes to log on/off from a station, so despite the fact that there was sometimes four windows open, on average I think there was about 1.5. One dude sat there the whole time, never got up and pushed through people at a rate of about one every 10 minutes. The remaining 3 staff members managed to bring the throughput up to one every 6 minutes, so all together, they accounted for less than one dude worth of work.

The dude, who happened to be the same guy that didn't like my birth certificate last week, made a joke. He was asking if I was wearing contact lenses, and I said yes. He asked if I could drive without them, and I said, "No. I can't see a thing without them."

He said, "Well, that can be a blessing in some circumstances." Then he used facial and eye motions to indicate a couple of the women around him without pointing or actually looking at them. Then he cracked up.

DMV humor.

The Mrs. is much calmer today. The calm before the storm. She actually managed to do the one remaining chore she had planned for the impending arrival of her moother (clean the basement bathroom). She's happier when she's completed her chores, though she puts in artificial roadblocks to that happiness. For instance, this visit, she decided that she had to get all the Christmas shopping done and all the gifts wrapped prior to preparing for her moother's arrival. So this is what caused most of the nuttiness yesterday.

HannieC and I checked out the shooting range today. Then The Mrs. came out and wanted a turn. The Mrs. shot very well, but she was using the bench with rifle rest that I had HannieC set up on. This is cuz HannieC can barely lift the pellet gun. The Mrs. is quite a good shooter. All those years of musical instrument training has given her excellent fine motor controls. Now that we're on CO, I can get her a nice .357 for her nightstand. California always frowned on that kind of thing.

MaxieC is upstairs yelling at something. I don't know what. Nobody else is home. I needs to go check on that.

Day 2 of 9. PM report

HannieC is funny as hell sometimes. I don't want to turn into a mommyblogger, but I'm going to relate two stories:

Yesterday, we were at Old Chicago for dinner. HannieC was having me read something to her from The Childrens' menu, and I was doing my bad Russian accent. She leaned over to my ear and whispered:

Daddy. I have to tell you something. Right now you're sounding an awful lot like a Canadian.

Wow.

Then, today we were out back, and I was cleaning and refilling the ponds. HannieC came up to me and complained that she couldn't find any "pet quality" bugs. I explained that it was winter, and all the bugs went underground for the winter. She said:

But it's warm outside now. What kind of Democrat bug would go down into the cold ground to get warm when it's warm up here?

So, now I know that my darling daughter uses the words "Canadian" and "Democrat" to mean "idiot." That's what you get for having a certified super-genius, I suppose.

Right on schedule, The Mrs. began to melt down today. She always goes absolutely insane about 2 days prior to her mother visiting. I think it was exactly 50 hours before the flight lands this time. Somewhere around 3-3:30ish she want bazonkers. I had just started to make the pellet gun backstop, and somehow this triggered some kind of panic attack in The Mrs. Can't really explain it, but everyone ended up hollering. About an hour later, everything returned to normal. The Mrs. came out to say, "What have you been doing all this time? You've been working on this thing for two hours already and you haven't done a thing!"

Quite the contrary, I had been working for only one hour, and I had already cut the board in half, modified the hinges with the Dremel tool (they did not open as far as I needed), disciplined HannieC for trying to kick her mother, pushed MaxieC around on his tricycle, rescued many tools from the clutches of MaxieC, listened to HannieC complain about how mean I was, listened to HannieC complain about how mean The Mrs. was, picked up most of the toys in the backyard, put away the hose that I had used to fill the ponds, helped The Mrs. find a wire on which to hang a Christmas Tree ornament she had made while it dried, and spilled my Keystone Ice. All The Mrs. recognized, of course, was that I had cut the board in half.

I took me two hours from cradle to grave with the backstop. I didn't end up using the 2x4 legs, as I ground the hinges to only open to as far as I wanted. I also attached the foam so that it met perfectly there and also helped hold the right angle. I expect it'll all fall apart soon, and I'll have to do the legs, too. But it was getting dark and cold.

The neighbor lady across the street came over after dinner with her three childrens. Her hubsband got to go down to Denver for the football game (lucky bastard), so she came to hang with us for a while. The five childrens were pretty well behaved, though MaxieC managed to throw some kinda toy at one of the other kids, and that caused some crying and all. Nothing major.

Our dear neighbor brought over some margaritas that she had mixed up yesterday but that she felt were too strong to drink. She handed me a 12oz glass and said, "You'll probably only want to drink that much of this," denoting about 1/3 of the glass. The Mrs. and I exchanged a knowing glance, and I said, "You don't know me all that well, do you?"

I made the ladies black Russians. They did not want to try Minty Freshes. I don't know why. Probably all the smack talking about mixing red and green. Though The Mrs. claims it's because she can't imagine having lime juice mixed with Creme de Cacao. Their loss.

The margaritas were standard-strong, I would say. Nothing special. I enjoyed the glass, though I transferred it into an on-the-rocks glass a little at a time so as not to look like a craven drunkard.

I also vacuumed the first floor and the stairs to the cellar. I did this so that the neighbor would think that The Mrs. is an exceptional house keeper. But I was four stairs from being done when the company showed up. Our dear neighbor said, "I hope you didn't vacuum on our account." So I replied, "No. I vacuum every day after dinner. It's part of my chores that The Mrs. assigned me."

I'm not sure anyone bought that story.

Day 2 of 9. AM report.

Checking in on the second day of nine in a row with the fambly.

This morning, when I hauled my butt out of bed around 8am (it was my turn to sleep in - we take turns again, and this is what got me unbanned from blogging), The Mrs. announced that she and HannieC were going Christmas shopping. That leaves MaxieC home with me. I can't figure out what to do with ourselves. All MaxieC wants to do is watch Pixar moovies. He's sitting there in his jammies (won't put on his clothes) watching the tail end of Toy Story 2 and eating candy corn right now. [Oop - just ended. Now he's watching Finding Nemo.]

What a life.

Today I am planning to build HannieC a pellet backstop commensurate with her shooting skills. Mean, really really big. I bought some material last weekend for it - an 4x8 sheet of 1/2" OSB and 2 2x8 sheets of 2" rigid foam insulation. My plan is to cut the OSB roughly in half to end up with 2 4x4 sheets, cover these sheets on one side with the rigid foam, and then set one on the floor and lean the other at ~45 degrees above it to form the backstop. The idea being that anything that hits the backstop and doesn't stop in the foam will ricochet down to the piece on the floor, where it has another 2" of foam. Nothing will get past that. Lead pellets really lose their energy pretty fast on impact, but HannieC managed to ricochet a bunch back all the way to the shooting station at the old house.

There, I was using a 45 degree canted piece of OSB as a backstop, no foam, and just the concrete floor of the garage. I would lean the backstop against the bench on which I set the pellet target/ trap.

Now, as I get closer to the construction of this one, I start to fret the details. For instance, I'm not sure I want to just lean the backstop up against the bench. I'm thinking I actually want to put some hinges or something back there to attach it to the floor piece and keep its foot from sliding out. I am also thinking I should put some 2x4 legs up front to hold it up rather than leaning it against the bench.

Then, if I put legs up there, I'm going to need to cover those with some foam or something. Maybe a piece of surplus carpet. And I'll need the router to cut angled notches into the 2x4's so that they mate properly with the backstop. So I'll need a trip to Lowe's for hinges and 2x4's (since they wouldn't move any of my lumber, I have to buy new lumber for every project now). This will end up being a big, day-long build by the time I'm done over-designing it. The Mrs. will probably holler. But I'll let HannieC help, and that'll make it easier on everyone but me.

And it'll give me an excuse to finish up that 3.2 Heineken that's in the fridge. Nothing goes better with power tools than 3.2 beer.

I'm also thinking of upgrading my Christmas tree lights to LED this year. Average LED life is 20,000 hours. That's pretty darned good. Problem is, they cost like 5x what normal lights cost. Most of our light strings have gone bad lately, so I need to buy new anyways. I'll have to see if I can find them on sale somewhere.

I'll check in again later.

My Artistic Creation

After a while of reading all this artsy stuff on Thoughts, one gets to wondering if really blogging is enough of an artistic outlet. Apparently, it's overwhelming for some, but for me, I feel I can contribute So Much More. Plus, I spent the whole day at the Denver Museum of Natural History with The Mrs. and The Childrens, so I'm pretty much climbing the walls already. And it's only the first day of nine consecutive days in a row I have with The Fambly.

Vacation time can be a curse as well as a blessing.

So I decided to create something that would bring joy to the world. Something beside my incredibly humorous blog, that is.

Without further adieu, here it is. The first Original CherkyB Cocktail:

Minty Fresh

1.25 oz Vodka
0.5 oz Triple Sec
0.5 oz Creme de Menthe
0.5 oz Creme de Cacao
splash of Grenadine
Juice of 1/2 lime

Stir. Serve over ice.

Drinker's impressions:

Has a look kinda halfway between iced tea and flat coke. The Creme de Menthe (green) and Grenadine (red) combine to make what would otherwise look like to total chick drink end up looking kinda nasty and uninviting. Ah, but with the first sip, all trepidations melt away. The primary flavor is the mintiness of the Creme de Menthe, but the finish is vaguely reminiscent of Tootsie Rolls. Damned if I can figure out why, but there it is. Might call for a cherry or a slice of orange. Will have to work on that aspect of it.

Does anyone know how to submit a drink recipe to Webtender?

OK, here's something marginally interesting

A while back I blegged for the identification of Chinese food. Because I know that my readership is mainly a bunch of newbs, I linked to a wikipedia page that defines a bunch of blog lingo. Apparently, The Mrs. follows all the links, as a couple days later, this transpired:

The Mrs.: Who is this Steph "yoga mom" person?
Me, CherkyB: She's someone I used to work with on debug back in SC.
The Mrs.: She's a Mommyblogger.
Me, CherkyB: Yeah. That's why I don't link to her.
The Mrs.: But so is CJ.
Me, CherkyB: Hmmm. I guess he is since he had the second kid.

Alright CJ. You're on notice now. Spend too long as a mommyblogger, and I'll have to delete your link.

It seems most everyone else I link to, plus Me, CherkyB, are borebloggers.

It's Interesting

If you can figure out what it is, please let me know. I can't think of anything interesting right now.

Duh or No Duh &trade 2

Tonight at dinner the lovely HannieC told me a joke she made up:

HannieC: Knock Knock

Me, CherkyB: Who's there?

HannieC: Cactus

Me, CherkyB: Cactus who?

HannieC: Cactus says, "If you kiss me, I'll poke you."

HannieC: Do you get it? Huh? Huh? See, cuz a cactus has those pricky things, and if you kiss it, you'll get poked by the pricky things. See?

No duh. ™

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Old Salt Ale

I'd like to take a moment to further describe the story behind me drinking an Old Salt Ale that I mentioned yesterday. You see, it went like this:

I was on my way to Hudson, Mass. for a bidness trip. I had not been in Hudson since 1995 when I interviewed for a job with what was then Digital Equipment Corp. Oddly enough, the bidness trip I was on was to the same building in which I was interviewed then, only now my present company owns it. When I got to the airport, I discovered three other people from work were on the same flight as I: my boss, a guy named StackyB (no relation), and another guy I had heard of but never met. There were a bazillion people from my site traveling to Hudson, all for different reasons. There were at least four different meetings between our teams going on at the same time. But I digress.

After we got our luggage in Boston, the other folks decided we were going to stop at Legal Seafood in Framingham for dinner. So we went there. Everyone else had been there before, I think. After selecting my dinner from the dinner menu, my eyes drifted to the separate drink menu, as they are wont to do. It was loaded with all kinds of nasty-nasty sounding cocktails (how many different ways are there to ruin a martini with fruit juice, I wonder?) and one and only one beer: the aforementioned Old Salt Ale. I read the description. It claimed that it was brewed by the Harpoon Brewery, which is actually known for pretty good craft brews. It claimed that it was specially brewed to complement seafood, which I was planning to eat. Then it said, "served with or without salt on the rim and with a lemon wedge."

This was a red flag. I made some comment about that not sounding like a particularly manly beer, but as always happens with the FC crowd, this was met with a challenge to not be so uptight.

Oddly, for Colorado, not many folks at work seem to have even the most rudimentary understanding of the rules of manhood. Like finishing your beer. Like not drinking fruity drinks with umbrellas. Like drinking whiskey of any kind without mixing it with Dr. Thunder. I scanned the dinner menu, too, and no beers were listed there. I craned my neck to look around, and no beer taps were to be seen anywhere. So, given that I was with my boss and StackyB, both of whom I have to marginally impress in some way in order to keep the cash rolling in to support The Mrs. in the lavish lifestyle to which she has become accustomed, and given that I really really wanted a beers after flying in cattle class on United Airlines for 4 hours and then driving in a cheap rental car for an hour, I decided to not be so uptight. I took the plunge and ordered the Old Salt Ale with my dinner.

The waiter said, "Would you like that with salt on the rim?" I answered with a resounding, "No!" He said, "Have you ever tried it with salt around the rim? It's much better that way."

Now, I can put and two together as well as the next guy, in particular if it's almost 9pm and I haven't had my first beers yet. The waiter is telegraphing to me that this beer is crap-o-la without the salt. He was like a 20-ish year old dude and didn't look the least bit fru-fru, so I figured maybe he knew what he was talking about. I ordered up the salt. The other two guys also followed suit, since they didn't want to be out-adventured by me.

The only thing about this whole scenario that wasn't a mistake was getting the salt. I took the first swig with full salt. Yeeeargh, that's bad beer! I took another swig from the same spot, now cleared of salt from the first swig. York york york, that's even worse! Then I did something I never in my life expected to do.

I mentally figured out the optimum swig size for the beer. Too big, and I risked ralphing. To small, and I risked running out of salt before finishing the "beer." I weighted it a little towards the ralphing side of the risk matrix, as it seemed like that failure mode had a smaller downside than running out of salt. I put my plan into effect, and all came out well. No ralphing, and I had a little salt to spare at the end. I can't help myself; I'm an engineer. This is what I do.

As an aside, yesterday on the way back from lunch, we were discussing desserts. This is because one of the guys knew one of the managers at the restaurant at which we at, and the manager had come out at the end and given us each a coupon for free dessert. We didn't use the coupons as we had already paid up and were set to leave. But we were discussing what kinds of desserts the place had. It's one of the minor Italian chains, so naturally someone mentioned they had tiramisu. I noted how tiramisu was like a classic chick dessert, and then I did a mocking impression of a woman gushing over tiramisu.

At this point, MoodyT interjected that I had an awful lot of hangups about man vs. woman stuff, and he was starting to suspect I was probably secretly gay. Those of you who know MoodyT will appreciate the irony in this. But, it underscores how most of these guys out here have no idea about the rules of manhood, and they mistake an adherence to traditional manliness rules for closeted sexual confusion. The Democrats have gotten to these kids. It's a good thing I'm here now.

As a second aside, I got to witness some true talent on Wednesday night. Still in Hudson, I went out with a few of the guys - MoustachioP, Cavitation, and WoodyWoody - for food and drinks after a long, long day at work. Normally, I'd be the top of the food chain at this kind of event, but WoodyWoody put on a clinic. I was in awe of his superior skills. I interoffice mailed him a copy of "Modern Drunkard Magazine" as an homage when I returned to FC. (He's back in SC.) Cavitation put up a small battle, and MoustachioP never got much past the starting gate, so I think I came in a distant second.

Though I caution you, this is not a competition. Please, no wagering.

There's a face off in the corner

Way back when we were planning to move to FC, HannieC raised numerous objections about how she'd miss all her friends, in particular that JoeyG boy down the street that she was planning to marry, and miss all her teachers, and all that rot. So, as a good parent, I tried to soothe her fears.

With bribery.

I told her that after we moved, we'd get an air hockey table. This was because many of the houses we had looked at had air hockey tables, and HannieC and MaxieC became addicted. To the point that we have to pay to use the coin-op ones whenever we come across on in a hotel or bowling alley or where ever.

Now, as I child, I had had a cheap air hockey table. My brother, SunshineBand, and I had played for many many hours over a number of years until eventually the motor fell off. That turned out to be unfixable.

A week ago Saturday, I had to drop HannieC off at a birthday party at Windsor Main Park, and then I had some errands to run. Mostly, I had to go to the liquor store cuz we were having our neighbors over for dinner. Despite filling a shopping cart completely at the liquor store (they give a 15% discount on wine if you buy at least 12 bottles), I was left with a little time to kill before it was time to pick up HannieC.

So I went to the local pool table/bar stool/foosball/air hockey store. There, they had a wonderful selection of four air hockey tables. Two of them were quickly dismissed due to the lack of electronic scoring. The other two were a tough call. Both were deeply discounted from their "regular" price. I finally decided to go with the one that had a black-light overhead and fluorescent green pucks and rails for ultra-cool glow-in-the-dark action. Thing is, I couldn't get it home that day. I would need help.

I was out of town (in Hudson, Mass. - more on that later if I get permission to start blogging again) Mon-Thurs, so my next chance to pick it up was Friday. Friday came, and I poked around looking for all my "friends". Needless to say, I was only able to scare up CJ, since most of my "friends" are remarkably unreliable. I was a little worried that CJ might not be a very good furniture mover due to unfortunate ethnic stereotypes that are imprinted upon me.

But I shook that off.

On the way to the store, as we were walking to our vehicles, CJ asked if it weighed very much, because he wasn't very good at lifting heavy things. Hmmm...

I said, "I dunno. Maybe 100lbs." As I check the web page, I see I missed that by a factor of 3. Oops.

We got it disassembled in short order, and then lugged it to the truck, taking many rests along the way and suspecting that my 100lbs. estimate wasn't all that accurate. We loaded it up, and I got to teach CJ how to use ratchet tie downs. This is an important skill for a man to have. Not as important as being able to lift heavy things, but important nonetheless.

See, that's Me, CherkyB, always trying to teach people things. I'm a regular altruist.

When we got it home, I enlisted the help of The Mrs. in hauling the thing down the stairs to the basement. Now, The Mrs. ain't all that good at lifting heavy things, either. But I figured between the two of them, they'd probably add up to a decent-sized man.

That turned out to be about as accurate as my 100lbs. But I got out my furniture dolly, and we got to wheel it everywhere except down the stairs. We charged the stairs with great gusto. I took the bottom, hefted it up, and began walking down the stairs. The Keystone Cops at the other end immediately broke into disarray, with The Mrs. barking orders at CJ and complaining that he wasn't carrying his load, and CJ running around like a chicken with its head cut off in an effort to placate The Mrs. and be useful at the same time.

Meanwhile, I basically just pulled the table downstairs and hoped that one or both of them might lay a hand on it long enough to soften the crash as their end dropped from step to step. This elicited a lot of instructions from The Mrs. about how I was going too fast.

We made it almost to the bottom when a "rest" was declared for the two at the top. Me, CherkyB, well I got to stand at the bottom holding up my end while their end rested happily three steps up. I suppose I got to stand still while shouldering my burden, which maybe counts as a rest.

I was reminded of a similar situation carrying a sleeper sofa up to the master bedroom sitting area of the San Schmose house with Spanky and The Mrs. CJ is my new Spanky, except that Spanky was a much, much better drinker. And conversationalist.

I'm working on both those things with CJ. Check back in about a year. CJ, like the Spanky before him, has a heart of gold and is always willing to lend a hand. So I say these things are area of development, not as areas of improvement required.

Here, at long last, is a shot of the air hockey table in its first hours. As you can see from this and all pictures of MaxieC, he is a very morose and introspective child. I hope he grows out of it.


Here's the rear quarter shot. If this were a car, it'd look better from this angle. I'm not sure it adds much to the air hockey table.


I tried to capture a shot of the blacklight-lit tabletop, but damned if my digital camera doesn't make it look all terrible. Pretend this is an eerie glow.


While we were setting up the air hockey table, the mattress delivery guys showed up to bring us our new guest room and master bedroom mattresses. I hung up the blinds on Saturday morning, and that concluded the Guest Room project. Here are a couple photos The Mrs. snapped. The room anxiously awaits the arrival of Fat Moother for Thanksgiving.


When I was in Hudson, I was snookered into drinking a vile concoction called "Old Salt Ale" at dinner the first night. This turns out to be a wheat beer served with salt around the rim of the glass and a lemon floating in it. I took a picture of it because I didn't think anyone would believe that I would order such a thing. I blame jet lag. I managed to choke it down, as a man always finishes his beer. But I had to quickly quaff a Sam Adams to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Duh, or No Duh? &trade

I have a wonderful installment of Something Not to Do ™, but I talked it over with The Mrs. at lunch, and we decided I shouldn't post it. I couldn't figure out a way to post it without causing some trouble, and neither could she.

So instead, I'm going to start a new, parallel series called "Duh, or No Duh? ™" which will feature Certified True ™ stories that will all end with either, "Duh," or, "No Duh."

The irony here, for my many readers who perhaps grew up in one or more of those poor, sad countries where they do not speak English, is that "duh" and "no duh" are frequently used interchangeably, much the way "I couldn't care less" and "I could care less" are. Technically, "duh" means "you figured that all out by yourself, you moron" and "no duh" means "just because you're a moron doesn't mean you should assume I am too, you moron." Fairly subtle differences that you the Me, CherkyB reader will now be aware of such that you can be sure to choose the correct phrase in the future. You're not going to get that kind of education on The JohnnyB, that's for sure.

So, now that I've introduced the series, let's jump right into the first installment. It all began yesterday, when CJ was helping me pick up the air hockey table I had purchased on the Saturday before. (More on that later, if I can get permission from The Mrs. to start blogging again.) After the table was all set up in the basement and The Childrens were playing on it, I gave CJ the tour of the house, since he'd never been here before.

When I showed him the bar, I opened up the cupboards to show the stock. It looked like this:


CJ said, "Wow. I thought you drank it all before the move. You must have restocked."

Duh. ™

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Banned from Blogging

You may have noticed how I haven't posted anything for a while. Not even a comment on one of the insipid blogs I link to. Well, I got temporarily banned from blogging. The Mrs. hadn't been getting much sleep, and I was going out of town for 4 days (M-Th), so she very graciously asked if I could stop wasting all my time with you idiots and concentrate on her. Or else she accused me of having an affair with one of my commenters (nearly all of whom, you will note, are womens). I'm not 100% certain, because when The Mrs. doesn't get much sleep, she doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and it's best not to push for clarity.

So I took about a week off. We got new mattresses delivered today (one for us and one for the guest room), so The Mrs. will be sleeping much better starting tonight. I expect to resume some blogging over the weekend. I have so much to share.

Trick-or-Treat!

[A parody]







It's official: The Childrens love Halloween!

They loved everything. Dressing up, face painting, knocking on the door, saying trick-or-treat, saying thank you, getting candy, getting candy, getting candy...

On a different note, we got Chinese take-out today from some place owned by a long-lost relative of someone I used to work with back in SC. The Mrs. had this:


She really liked it, but she couldn't remember what it was she ordered. Was it Hunan beef? Szcheuan Beef? Mongolian Beef? Well, I don't know. I wasn't there when she ordered it. So, given my remarkably generous nature, I'm going to do my first bleg. Just what exactly is this? And don't say it's JackyB's butt. If you can identify this dish, maybe I can convince The Mrs. to write-up her flu/bowling/hospital story.

Comment blogging

Today, I had nothing cohesive to write about. Yet, I felt I needed to write something given the prolific nature of my competition over at Thoughts in the USA. However, I still really had nothing to say. So I did the next best thing. I spent a couple hours posting comments to other blogs. Not my best work, which I save for my paying customers here, but it gave me a creative outlet with very low standards. All I had to do was be better than the other commenters, which isn't all that hard if you read the quality of comments on most blogs.

This one I like to call "Mutiny on the Ellie". In fact, I'm renaming her blog that just as soon as I can crack her password. It doesn't seem to be "Exisabiga-hole" or "Ishouldhavekeptthecats323". I may have to rename the blog through the powers of persuasion. That might be tough from 2000 miles away and without any communication contact whatsoever (phone, email, YM, etc.). I have to use brain waves, and I'm not sure mine make it out of the basement even. Like, a lot of times, I'll be thinking, "Bring me a beer. Bring me a beer," and nobody brings me one. Oddly, those powers seem to work a lot better if I'm at a bar, as after usually not more than a couple minutes of concentrated thought, a waitress will appear from nowhere and ask if I want a beer.

Since tomorrow is Fat Camp, and I'll be at a bar, I'll try thinking real hard about how Ellie should rename her blog. Then I'll check back Friday. She'll probably be asleep when I'm thinking it, so she'll wake up thinking that a new blog name came to her in a dream and is thus either an epiphany or a message from God, or both given the slightly overlapping definitions. Then she'll head straight to the compooter to change the blog name, only she'll check on her eBay auctions first, and then by the time she's done with that, she'll have forgotten.

So there's really no hope that on Friday morning you'll go to see if there's finally, finally a new post on Ellie323 and discover it's now called "Mutiny on the Ellie". But you should all still check, because as I learned from the children's classic, "Two Frogs in Trouble," where there is life, there is hope.

One or more of you might have a life.

Then, after commandeering Ellie323, I had to add my two cents worth into the ongoing saga regarding JackyB and the sudden celebrity of his big-giant butt. He's even become a celebrity at work, given that I have multiple readers back at his location who all hit the site today. And then I had to leave a big-giant comment on the latest post at Thoughts just because.

After all that, I have nothing left for you.

I was thinking of posting some photos of The Childrens in their Halloween costumes, but I don't do requests. Sorry Steph.