Sophistication

When we moved in to the new house, I wasn't all that excited about the gas stove in the living room. I mean it's nice and all, kind of classes up the joint a bit, but I didn't forsee spending a lot of time in the front room. I'd post a pic but I'm at work and it won't let me for some reason.

Anyway, my love for the stove was increased drastically last night when I fired it up, got a giant pillow, and read my zombie book. I just kind of rotisseried myself, turning when one side was warm and the other cool.

Reading a book in front of the fire = total sophistication.

But there's kind of a downside, too, because now I have to hire a butler, a maid, and a driver and I just don't make sophisticated money. Plus I don't think farting is very sophisticated so I think I'm giving up the lifestyle before it even begins. Aaah well, it was good while it lasted.

They Call Me, "Uncle Beef."

So Nellbot and I have a tendency to kind of fall in love with words. Sometimes we just realize that a word is fun to say or inherently funny. "Rudabega," is a fine example. Just say it a couple times, you'll see what I mean. Welp, one of our favorites is, "beef." There's just something so goofy and final about it. I dunno.

Anyway, I was in the meat section of the grocery store yesterday and I realized that I had been tuning this little kid out who was doing something repetitive. As I paid closer attention I realized that he was saying, "beef, beef, beef, beef, 100% beef....beef - beef," over and over-like. I had to giggle to myself since the little guy was saying one of my favorite words. He was one of us.

I told Nellbot about it in the car and we had a good laugh.

Later we visited our friends Pammy and Jim and their kickass kid, Daniel. Now Jim doesn't quite have the obsession with funny words as Nellbot and I do but he can appreciate them when we bring them up. That's why, "DOUCHE," is still uttered relatively often amongst our friends. So I tell the story of the beef boy and we all have a good laugh. Inlcluding Danny. He starts saying his version of, "beef," which he pronounces, "bee." Then Jim and I start saying it again and Danny laughs super hard. For about 45 minutes after that Danny would saunter over to me and say, "Bee! Bee! Bee!" and then I'd say, "Beef! Beef!" He'd laugh and run off. It was then that I realized the boy's nickname would forever be, "Beef."

Later, Jim and I went to get some food being the hunter/gatherer types we are. The second I walked in the door Danny started saying, "Bee! Bee! Bee! Bee!" Pammy was excited because Dan remembered me. Then she said, "Nope. You're Beef." To which I replied, that's cool, I'll be Uncle Beef. It'll make the stories he tells his friends all the better."

"One time, me, my dad and my Uncle Beef went to the Monster Truck Rally...."

The utlimate test will be to see if he starts yelling it next weekend at the house warming.

Corn Chips and Some Salsa

I absolutely love salsa, particularly fresh salsa. That is, there are very few canned or jarred salsa that I actually enjoy. There are many canned salsas that are tolerable, but fresh salsa has always been the way to got. The wierd thing about fresh salsa is that there are very few big chains that make it. So whenever we move to a new region, I begin a fairly exhaustive search for quality fresh goodness to eat on my corn chips. When I lived in Arcata it was Casa Lindra. The stuff is made locally and is positively addictive. I was completely heartbroken to find that CL hasn't made it this far east. Eventually I settled on a brand the Safeway we frequent always carried. It wasn't bad, but it was no Casa Lindra. We made due.

A couple of months ago Nellbot and I went on a road trip with some friends of friends in an RV. Somebody brought Mexican food and they had some canned salsa that blew my mind! I was pretty sceptical at first: Not only was it canned, it was in a pretty ghetto-looking package. But there were corn chips and salsa sitting in front of me, what was I to do? Eat a whole jar of the stuff, that's what. Herdez is a brand which is some sort of subsidiary of Hormel. I don't know if the stuff just gets imported from Mehheeco or if it's made to look that way, but you can see by the packaging that it looks like some sort of off-brand, grocery outlet-type food. You know, like Campbell's Gazpacho and the like. Check it out.We had the red salsa, in the middle there. Now we can't get enough of the stuff. We bought two jars of it on Monday. We ate one jar promptly after getting back from the Over-Wal-Mart. The next day we polished off the second jar. Wednesday, Nellbot broke her fish, Gillagain's tank and so had to go back to the Wal-Mart of DOOOOM (seriously, the thing is friggin' enormous!). I told her to pick up some more salsa as I scratched my arm in anticipation.

She came back with 2 giant bags of corn chips and six jars of salsa. We're down to 3 jars today. I ate one for breakfast. Anyway, if anybody out there likes salsa, give this stuff a shot. You should be able to find some with little trouble in your local grocery store since it's distributed by Hormel. Bon apetit!!!

This || Close To Jail

So Nellbot hadda' get her hair done today at the mall. While I was waiting I went off and got a tasty pretzel with nacho cheese, looked at movies, cool t-shirts, and some posters at various stores. I knew it was getting to be about the time that she'd be done so I headed back over to the get your hair done place and sat on the bench in the hallway.

Enter The Family. A family of four came in through one of the entrances from outside and started milling about the hairdo place. There was a boy of about 10 and another around 12-13. The 13 year old started wandering off toward's Macy's and the dad asked him where he was going. "Macy's," was the kid's reply. "Why?" asked the dad. I didn't catch the kid's response but whatever it was, the dad didn't like it because as the mom came out of the hairdo place he said, "If he talks back to me again I'm gonna' bust him in the fucking mouth."

Now, for those of you who don't know, I spent four solid years working with kids from the ages of 6 - 18. I did so because I believe passionately that, cliche though it may sound, they're our future. I feel our future generations need our attention now more than ever and that we need not focus solely on our own kids' well-being.

So naturally I bristled a little when I heard the guy say this. It wouldn't have been so bad if the guy had been letting of some steam out of ear shot of the kids. But the younger one was standing right next to the dad. There's no fucking reason for your kids to hear such things. As the older kid sauntered back the dad said, "You're just a fucking kid. Your opinion doesn't carry a damn bit of weight."

Then they were leaving. It took everything I had in me to not get up and beat the guy senseless. The last thing those kids need is to hear their dad tear into them about how they don't matter. I've been sitting here for a couple of minutes trying to find a way to express how enraged I was to see this asshole take something as incredible as his kids for granted and I just can't do it. I wanted to show him how it feels to not matter. All I wanted was to break him down and make him feel as worthless and helpless as his kids no doubt feel.

Anyway, I don't think I would have just given him a sound thump on the head or two: No doubt somebody would have ended up pulling me off of him. Since I have plans to raise our own children some time in the no-so-distant future, I felt that doing 3-5 for assault and battery seemed like a pretty bad idea.

Impulse Buys

Hey, everybody's done it: You're in the express lane at the grocery store and you see that they're going to clone Jesus so you pick up a copy of the Inquirer and who can read the Inquirer without eating a Slim Jim? Nobody, that's who.

Well, Nell and I are big-time impulse buyers. We've learned to control it over the years, for the most part. But there have been moments in our lives where we just bought the thing and then were blown away that we bought them later.

Take our bed, for instance. I had about 2Gs worth of tuition reimbursement. Well, obviously we had to buy iPods, that was a given. But what about the rest of the cash? Welp, we were sleeping on a crack-house bed, i.e. just a mattress on the floor so we decided we would drop a solid grand on a decent bed. We set out early for a long day of bed-shopping and price comparisons. The first store we stopped at was just about a block from our home, the illustrious (sing it with me) Mattress LAAAAAAND. After about 6.32 minutes of browsing, we went ahead and bought a nice Certa with the individually wrapped springs. To this day it sleeps like a dream (get it?) and we've always been happy with it.

Then you got the White Ninja. You all know and love it as the rockin'est fuckin' fuck machine on the road. We applied for credit online with a car place and got approved. So we went in that Saturday, ready to test-drive a car or two and then compare notes with some other dealerships. Imagine our surprise when we drove home an '03 Focus! Talk about impulse buys!

Today we were thinking, "Hey, how could we possibly top the impulse purchase of a fucking car?" And that's when it hit me, we'd buy a house! So I made a quick phone call and we headed out to Spanish Spring around 4:00 to look at a house. By 4:20 (smoke 'em if you got 'em) we were signing paper work.

The sellers want to move to another school district and they want to do it soon so they knocked off $30,000 off the price and offered to pay all the buyer/seller fees. On top of that, the guy that's doing the finance is the mook that lost our info when we were looking for a house in '03 then blew us off. Our realtor sends him a LOT of business and was apalled that he'd been so unprofessional so she went ahead and got him to do the financing for FREE!!!

It is literally not going to cost us a penny of actual cash to buy this joint. Sure, we'll still have to sell our souls, but neither of us have much use for 'em.

So anyway, we'll be moving in on the 22nd of July so keep your calendars open!!

Rev. Joshua 'n' Sister Nell

P.S. We need to find something that will blow impulse-buying a house out of the water for this time in '07 or early '08 so put on your thinking caps!

Back In Action

Welp, it's been a while but I'm back. I'm married now, too.

We were in the Oddfellows building which has a lodge/chapel and a reception hall in the same building. The ceremony was short and sweet, complete with Calvin and Hobbes quote (search the page for, "love"). From the time we got people seated to the time everybody was leaving the chapel was about 7 minutes. Lynell and I spent about 45 minutes alone, enjoying our first momens of matrimonial bliss and eating dinner. Then we signed the appropriate paperwork, got some photos with the families, and got to drinking.

We had an open bar and everybody was glad. We all got really trashed and had lots of fun jumping about to music and so forth. I was double-fisting beer and gin 'n' tonics all night, which is why I don't really remember the last hour of the reception or hurling in our bed that night. As we saw friends and relatives over the course of the following day (Sunday), they all told us what a great time they had and how happy they were for us. I guess we all know that our friends love us, but it was still great to have so many of them show up to the wedding and wish us well.

We spent Sunday recuperating and then had dinner at the Oceano with the remaining members of our family who were still in town. Monday we took care of some loose ends then headed off to Nice, CA right next to Clear Lake for the honeymoon. We didn't do much except what folks do on their honeymooon and watch a lot of movies. It was peaceful and quiet and extremely pleasant. We came back on Sunday and have the rest of the week off so we can get our lives in order before we wade back into work.

All in all, everything went extremely well and we're happy and stuff. Good times.

Confessions of a Madman

So I decided to stop consuming caffeine the other day. I've been contemplating it for some time as I've been having irregular sleep patterns and quality thereof for the last couple of weeks. I'm also super paranoid about getting kidney stones, even though I drink at least a liter of water every day.

This is the beginning of Day Two.

It's weird because I didn't know just how much I rely on it until I cut it out. As I was driving into work today I thought, "Wow, pretty soon my ass end is going to fall out. I'll just have a cup of coffee and everything'll be fine." Well, I'm not drinking coffee now so that theory's out the window.

I'll keep you posted.