A Momentary Lapse of Reason

I yell a lot. Just ask my kids. Heck, ask my wife and she’ll tell you that all too often I let the kids get to me and I raise my voice. I hate it. I’ve tried taking a deep breath and reacting calmly when they ignore me, but it’s much easier to just yell.

Take, for instance, video games. I have a seven-year-old and a four-year-old who both love video games. But these games are expensive so I tell them not to leave them on the floor to get broken. I have to tell them every day and they still do it. Jonathan especially like stepping on things. So this bothers me when I see it:

A game controller on the floor. And this really bothers me:

See? Not only are they on the floor, but there’s a disc missing. Where’d it go? Don’t you realize how expensive these games are? Of course not, you just ask for stuff and it magically appears, doesn’t it?

You get the idea. We need to take care of things. So when we decided to get a video game for our nephews for Christmas I wanted to make sure it arrived at there house in pristine condition. Except this game isn’t available new any more so I had to buy it used. I saw lots of scratches on the surface of this disc and, although it worked perfectly, decided to “clean it up” a bit. So I reached for my trusty bottle of acetone.

Let’s call this my second Public Service Announcement. Acetone destroys discs. I’ll assume this happens with CD’s and DVD’s too, but I haven’t tried that yet. If any one is willing to make a donation I’ll be glad to try it out on a Shrek the Third DVD.

Murder!

I killed Karen’s computer. Well, technically it was my computer, but in our house Karen gets all the cool electronics and I get what’s left over. Karen confiscated my laptop when our other computer started doing this:

This is what I stare at every day. I have no idea what my blog really looks like. It took me several months to be able to look at the screen without getting a headache. Karen still can’t do it. My in-laws have visited and they steer clear of this thing. I’m sure they all get together and laugh at me for having such a suck computer. And seeing that picture on this monitor makes is look worse.

Anyway, looking at my laptop is like taking a step back in time. Perhaps the same year I bought it several technologies went obsolete. The parallel port:

The serial port:

The floppy drive:

The hard drive on this laptop started giving problems back in the spring. If you let it shut down all the way it wouldn’t always start back up. But once it got going it was fine. Monday it quit for good. I often had visions of someone breaking into our house and stealing it, only to get it to the pawn shop DOA. It still makes me laugh. There is a sense of security in knowing that there’s nothing in your house worth stealing.

What I really want is an iMac. I grew up in the days of the Apple II, and I’ve always wanted to go back. But the real reason I want a Mac is that their commercials are way cool. I think I look like the “I’m a Mac” guy. I’ll be posting more praise for OS X later, in the hopes that Apple will give me one for free because of all the publicity I’m giving them.

Dear Commissioner Goodell,

I would like to watch a football game without seeing 8 commercials for ED medicines. Please make them stop.

Thank you.

15 Weird things in the Wal-Mart dairy section

Daddyforever had this great meme, called “15 weird things about me.” It quickly turned from “weird things” to “his wife will stab him 15 times with a kitchen knife for this.” Hopefully the wounds won’t be fatal and the police won’t find his body washed ashore on the Pacific coast somewhere.

So instead of airing my laundry I decided to stay on the Wal-Mart theme I started on Friday. When you’re shopping you kind of have blinders on, and if something’s not on your list you don’t really see it. Well I didn’t have that luxury while stocking the shelves, and let me tell you the dairy section has some of the nastiest products in the store. So here they are, in ascending order of nasty, fifteen weird things in the dairy section of Wal-Mart.

Before you ask, yes, the refrigerated juices count as the dairy section. Don’t ask me, I’m a mindless drone. Start the countdown!

15. Goat’s milk - Not really weird, but we never had it in stock. The day before I left we got a shipment of one carton. A customer was very happy that day.

14. Pineapple Orange Banana juice

13. Frigo Cheese heads mozzarella/cheddar swirled cheese sticks

12. Soy chocolate milk

And now, something from the yogurt wall…
(that’s right, it’s the wall where the yogurt is.)

11. Thick & Creamy Light key lime pie flavored yogurt - “Thick & Creamy” and “Light” don’t go together.

10. Boston Cream Pie flavored yogurt

9. Pina Colada flavored yogurt

8. Vanilla yogurt with mini Reese’s Pieces to stir in it

7. Coffee flavored yogurt

6. Flan - This isn’t really weird, it’s just not something I’d buy from a box at Wal-Mart.

5. Gallons of Great Valu orange juice - didn’t resemble juice at all, so naturally we couldn’t stock it fast enough.

4. Yoohoo! - does anybody really know what’s in that stuff?

3. Soy yogurt

2. Cottage cheese with pineapple jam for you to mix in with it

1. Salmon flavored cream cheese

There was also an extensive selection of items in the pre-made dough section, but that’s another post.

Mark ruins August

Benchmarks are always good. It’s good to know “Ick, I ruined dinner, but it wasn’t as bad as last week’s Jerk chicken.” or “This pizza isn’t very good but it’s not the shape of Wisconsin.” Our family (and by that I mean Mark) has a new benchmark for success, or more specifically, failure.

In life we all make mistakes. We all make bad decisions, errors in judgment. And in these mistakes there are varying degrees of disaster associated with them. And in our house we now know that there are bad ideas, horrible ideas, and then there’s Wal-Mart.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. If I’m still home to watch the boys during the day I can work two or three nights a week third shift, right? Right? Perhaps not. Had I been working just weekends I still would have failed, but it certainly didn’t help that I was on four nights a week - in a row. By the morning following night #4, the boys were on their own, playing video games all day in their pajamas and eating candy for lunch. And it would take three days off for me to start feeling normal again. Well, as normal as I can be.

I’d been working nights for two weeks when I gave my notice. I told them I’d work the existing schedule and then be done. Problem was, there was three weeks of schedule already done, and two of them were jammed together - four days on, one day off, four days on. Ugh.

It’s amazing just how neurotic you become with sleep deprivation. Do you know how confusing it is to start your shift on Monday and finish it Tuesday? Halfway through the night today turns into yesterday and tomorrow turns into today. And somewhere along the line (I’m not sure the exact time) tonight turns into this morning. People start talking about “tonight” and they really mean “tomorrow.” Then I get to go home and sleep all day watch the kids. Is it any wonder that my love affair with coffee became an addiction? After working those eight nights during a nine day period I actually said to the boys “If you don’t eat your dinner tonight I’m selling the Wii on ebay!”

I once had a college professor who told me “You can’t fail if you never try.” This is something you never want to hear from a college professor. He was trying to make me feel better, knowing that at least I’d had the courage to pluck up and do something stupid. And I suppose it’s true. Adding something to the list of my stupid ideas is better than sitting around wondering what would’ve happened if I’d tried this or that. And boy, I set my sights really high on this one, didn’t I?

Oh, and a guy made a pass at me while working the cheese wall at 2:00am on a Saturday night. Or was it a Sunday morning?

Vinegar is vinegar

It was one of those days when I felt I could do no wrong. I’d been watching a lot of the Food Network and felt invincible. I wanted to make my own steak sauce. Watching Bobby Flay make them on camera gave me a false sense of security. He talks about them casually, making it sound easy, while he puts them together with at least 200 ingredients. I knew it was my time.

Looking for a steak sauce recipe I saw this one from Bobby Flay and thought it sounded doable. So I set off to the grocery store in search of sherry vinegar, piquillo pepper, horseradish, and molasses. These were the ingredients we didn’t have on hand. They didn’t have piquillo pepper, so I got some poblano peppers instead, and they didn’t have sherry vinegar. Hmmm. Nobody around here has sherry vinegar.  I thought about just using sherry, but then the thought came to me, right there in aisle 12. “I don’t really know what sherry vinegar tastes like, but I like balsamic vinegar; I’ll just use that.”

For future reference, when you get ideas while you’re in the grocery store with three unhappy boys under the age of six, they’re not good ideas.

Every so often I’ll make something so bad that even I can’t muscle it down. This was one of those times. My first thought was “Maybe it’ll taste different on the steak.” But no, nasty in the bowl is still nasty when you put it on the steak. Karen spent a half hour trying to save the steak sauce, but the only one who ate it was the garbage disposal. Apparently balsamic vinegar is nothing like sherry vinegar. I ended up making Cabernet steak and mushrooms instead (which included another trip to the grocery store, and the liquor store for the wine).

This was one of those life changing moments when I realized one of my limitations. But I was so depressed at the time that I couldn’t even enjoy the steaks I’d made. I had been looking forward to this for weeks, and come to realize that I have no ability to make my own steak or barbecue sauces. Even from recipes.

If you’re wondering why there are no pictures to document my enlightenment, it’s because this happened last summer, and is one of the original inspirations behind this blog.

I never miss an opportunity to do something wrong

Timing is everything. Take the previous owners of our house, for instance. They split (and left town) shortly before just about everything in this house self-destructed. Here’s the range that came with the house:

We’ve been having intermittent problems with this range since we moved in three years ago, but with the cost involved we’ve been putting it off. Recently it we’ve had to re-categorize our oven from “temperamental” to “broken” since it will preheat then shut off.

Now I’m not sure when this range was built, but the manual was printed in 1991. It started giving us problems in 2004. That’s thirteen years, folks. We’ve had ranges in our first two apartments that were older than me and they still worked fine. I’m not sure what you’re paying for when you buy Jenn-Air, but it’s certainly not durability.

Pop quiz:  Given the picture above, which of these two replacements would you purchase?

Me too. Guess what. I was wrong.  What I ordered was a drop-in range that is apparently built into the cabinets, and you have to build a box to put it on.  What I needed was a slide-in range that stands up on its own.  That’s pretty evident from the pictures, right?  Yeah well Jenn-Air has to go make things difficult for me.  Apparently I had a slide-in range with no drawer because of the downdraft fan.  So after 3 weeks of backorder the delivery guys rip open the box and I say “That doesn’t have legs.”  Oops.  Here’s my new range:

Oh yeah, and apparently my kitchen floor is not level.  It was very interesting to level my oven on that floor.

Arguments for $1 ticket prices

Shrek the Third opens this weekend and that means lots of money for Katzenberg. It also means that we will be taking a Saturday afternoon sometime soon and seeing it. But it also brings to my mind a question. Has anyone else noticed the disturbing trend of Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks making identical movies? Here’s what I mean:

Insect Movies:

Dreamworks: Antz 1998
Pixar: A Bug’s Life 1998

This one started it for me. This was back when we were all enamored with the idea of computer animation, and it didn’t really matter whether the movies were any good or not. I remember thinking “Do we really need two ant movies in the same summer?”  Were we really supposed to tell these two apart?  A co-worker actually told me “No, I saw Antz, because in real life ants have six legs.” Engineers are so stupid. What kind of freakish logic is that? You’re not smarter than me just because you can count to six.

Fish Movies:

Pixar: Finding Nemo 2003
Dreamworks: Shark Tale 2004

When Jonathan was born and Karen was still in the hospital I took Isaac to see Finding Nemo. Isaac was three. Can you say five bathroom breaks? Who makes a kid’s movie set in the water, anyway? This movie has the highest gross ticket sales of any Pixar movie, and it’s no wonder. You got kids, you’re only seeing half this movie at a time thanks to potty breaks. There were some scary moments in that movie, too.  There were scary sharks, scary jellyfish, a scary angler fish, but the part that scared Isaac the most was when Nemo’s daddy was yelling at him.  Reminded him too much of his own abusive father I suppose. Shark Tale sucked, although the scene of that shark coming out of the closet dressed like the Village People was pretty darn funny.

Movies about zoo animals who are accidentally sent back to the wild:

Dreamworks: Madagascar 2005
Disney: The Wild 2006

In this case Dreamworks and Disney released, in consecutive years, two bad movies with exactly the same plot, setting, and most of the same characters.   I’ll be honest, I never saw The Wild, and I only saw a tiny bit of Madagascar because it was boring. How can a movie with Chris Rock in it not be funny? Ask Dreamworks, they did it. Bad timing for Disney, though, because when The Wild was released everybody had already seen it the year before, when it was called Madagascar.

Rat Movies:

Dreamworks: Flushed Away 2006
Pixar: Ratatouille 2007

Two movies about a rat who likes living the high life. In Flushed Away, he was the high society pet rat in a wealthy house, and in Ratatouille he’s a master chef in Paris. Maybe he should’ve been voiced by Gordon Ramsay. I’m siding with Dreamworks on this one even though Ratatouille isn’t out yet and it looks very funny. Hey! A food movie! Maybe I can write a review! I wonder if I can claim the ticket price as a tax deduction. But Flushed Away wasn’t really done by Dreamworks, it was done by Aardman. I’ve been a Wallace & Gromit fan for a long time now and anything with Nick Park’s name on it wins in our house. And who doesn’t like singing slugs?

Bird Movies:

Dreamworks: Chicken Run 2000
Disney: Valiant 2005

As stated before, anything from Nick Park wins in our house, and Chicken Run was his first full length movie. Since these movies take 2-3 years to write, direct, and produce this is perhaps the only set capable of being a true copycat in the list.  I never saw Valiant, but seriously, did anyone see Valiant? Anyone? Valiant it proof positive that Disney has lost their magic completely. My only consolation is that Disney lost $20 million on it.  Almost immediately following this flop Disney bought Pixar.

Monster Movies:

Pixar: Monsters, Inc. 2001
Dreamworks: Shrek 2001

This one’s a bit of a stretch, I know, especially since I loved both movies. I can’t say anything really bad about these two except that the make-believe creatures weren’t made as scary or ugly as they could’ve been because they’re marketed towards kids. Is it me or are those monsters cute?  For those of you who’ve never read Shrek!, the book by William Steig, you must. It is hilarious and I guarantee you’ll love it. Shrek is far more repulsive in this book than he is in the movie. That being said, both these movies are winners in my opinion, and are actually fairly original stories, which is hard to find in one movie a year, let alone two. Shrek was pretty good but it was nothing compared to Shrek II. Dare we dream that Shrek the Third is better still?

Superhero Movies

Pixar: The Incredibles 2004
Disney: Sky High 2005 (Live Action)

This is perhaps the real surprise of the bunch because they’re both from Disney. Disney has long been known for beating lots of dead horses, and I won’t even get into movies like Cinderella II, Cinderella III, Pocahontas II, The Lion King II, The Fox & the Hound II, Little Mermaid II, Bambi II, Lady & the Tramp II, The Hunchback of Notre Dame II, Brother Bear II, The Return of Jafar, and all the other cheap-ass sequels that went straight to video. Did anyone actually pay money to see Sky High, when you knew it would be on the Disney Channel in a month or two?

Now that I think about it, maybe Sky High is more of a copy of the X-Men franchise. Either way, boo to Disney for producing some cheesy knockoff of a real movie. I must say I really liked The Incredibles, and for months Isaac ran around the house at top speed like Dash.

Is it me or has Fiona lost weight?

I’m not sure if I’m imagining things but it seems as though Fiona the ogre has hit the gym since we saw her three years ago.  You decide:

I understand that ogre obesity is on the rise, but so are ogre eating disorders so I’m a bit surprised at the decision.  At this rate Fiona will be a size 2 ogre in a little ogre miniskirt and haltertop in Shrek 4.

Beans are neither musical nor fruit

It started out as a simple search for a can of chicken noodle soup. I opened up our pantry and started moving around cans of beans, tomatoes, and broth looking for this elixir of life for Jonathan, who isn’t feeling well. He’s been puking every night after dinner. It started this weekend, and oddly enough, I cooked all weekend. So I’m looking for chicken soup but we don’t have any. What we do have, however, is beans.

Black beans, garbanzo beans, kidney beans, baked beans, refried beans, black eyed peas, if you want beans we have beans. In all we had twenty-five cans of beans in our pantry and I thought to myself “Well, the boys can’t have soup tonight, but I can.” So I took two cans of black beans and made some black bean soup. My next problem came when I made the soup. Now I’ve made this soup before. You take two cans of black beans, a tomato, some cilantro, cumin, oregano, some hot peppers and some water, blend it all together and then heat it to a simmer.  Simple, and it always tastes great. But this time I had this really big deep green poblano pepper that I used, and holy cow if that soup didn’t look green when it was all said and done.

It didn’t come out in the picture, but trust me it was green.  With Karen’s help I tweaked it enough to save the flavor but the presentation would make Shrek proud. New rule: For the black bean soup use red peppers.

So the title is a little boring; Karen told me I couldn’t use the word “fart.”

Living on decaf

This is how I feel.

I made a decision a couple weeks ago, and now I’m living with the consequences of that decision. I was standing in the coffee roasters’ store and I said to myself “You should not be reliant on caffeine.” Wow, I thought, what a great idea. Going back to drinking decaf like I did before Ben was born. Caffeine isn’t really good for you, it’ll be a health kinda thing.

I haven’t been getting headaches. I’m thankful for that. But holy cow, I am tired. I get to about 10:30 before I think to myself “I could really use a nap.” The only problem is you can’t nap with a three year old jumping on you.

I used to drink decaf exclusively with no problem. I was proud of myself. Standing in that store I convinced myself that I could switch back after a year and everything would be the same. Ugh. I suppose that was a stupid thing to think.

Perhaps it’s all in my head. There are times when I have to stop drinking regular coffee for a day or two (for reasons which we’ll not get into here) and everything is okay, but now I know that all the caffeine in the house is gone. I couldn’t have regular coffee now if I wanted it, and believe me, I do. So maybe I’ve got the “flu vaccine” syndrome. Nobody gets the flu shot unless there’s not enough, then everyone wants it. I don’t need caffeine unless I don’t have any.