googled

you know how google posts fun little pictures and links when there’s a holiday or something going on? like the o’s become hearts at valentines day or whatever. this is my favorite one to date.



i can’t figure it out. a) it’s for “happy holidays” but other than the christmas cannon, i don't remember cannons ever being part of holiday decor. b) why is there a guy launching another guy wrapped in a ribbon? c) when you click on the image, it takes you to links and stuff related to the holiday. this is google’s explanation for this one:

i bet some intern lost his job over this. which is sad because it's the holidays. but it's even sadder for his friend because now the intern has lots of time to celebrate the holidays - which apparently includes shooting said friend out of a cannon. should've kept him onboard, google.

so this is christmas

just a couple random sightings during our christmas trip to albuquerque:

and you thought rudolph was a nice whiff of added christmas commercialism

in front of a family gift shop. i regrettably didn’t go in and ask. i was too scared. not quite sure what they were going for with the quotation marks…

the extent of christmas décor in a public colorado springs restroom. it was scotch taped onto the ceiling

the cookie update

it's a christmas miracle! we did it! our second attempt at sugar cookies actually turned out! except for when meghan accidently put red food coloring in our dough instead of vanilla. eh - adds to the christmas spirit

c is for cooking cruddy cookies

so i consider myself to be a fairly decent cook. stir fry, pesto, spaghettios…i’m a master. but i will openly admit that my skills aren’t as polished when it comes to baking stuff. probably because i never had an easy bake oven. how’s a kid supposed to learn without an easy bake oven?? but i can at least still do the basics – cookies, brownies, playdoh molds…until recently. i’d like to say it has something to do with living with meghan because that’s when the problems started. before i share some examples, let me defend myself – we always (start out with the intention to) follow the directions but we’re busy people and baking takes a long time and plus sometimes we don’t have the right ingredients and the closest store is (approximately 0.2) miles away. to top it all off, we have plenty of perfectly good food already at our house that is going to waste so why wouldn’t we just use that as part of the recipe?

example #1: we’ve been getting super festive…iated(?)…this holiday season so we decided to bake the most wonderful sugar cookies known to man. we made a shopping trip specifically to pick up ingredients and gingerbread-man sprinkles (i know!) and christmasy cookie cutters (i think they’re stockings but they look an awfully lot like squatty crew-cut socks). so what if meghan can’t eat dairy so we have to use cant-believe-its-not-butter from a tub? so what if we don’t have a hand mixer so we blend using a rice spoon? so what if we were mysteriously out of vanilla (i’m talking not a drop in that little thing - and we’ve only used it once! (i think meghan’s been hitting the bottle hard after long days of work)) so we decide to use lime juice in its place? the point is this. none of those should be legitimate reasons for our cookies not to turn out. oh yeah and we also put a lot of extra flour in there because they were super sticky…and then we read the recipe fine print and discovered they’re supposed to sit for an hour to lose their stickiness… oh well. at least we could still decorate them up and nobody would know the difference. so then we followed the frosting recipe perfectly (except for lime juice instead of vanilla) and it was the grossest sugariest thing i’ve ever put in my mouth. meghan even violently kicked the fridge when she tried some, the sweet shot through her so hard. so we did what any logical chef would do. added peanut butter. and meghan somehow made a lovely shade of purple food coloring. wrong holiday sweetie. purple’s for…uh…err…another holiday. but don’t worry, we’re not quitters. we know what went wrong and are determined to justify buying all those cookie decorations! my coworkers agreed to be guinea pigs for this next batch. i made sure they like peanut butter.

example #2: when we were staying with dustin and riley awhile back, we decided to be nice and (not spend a dime of our own by using their ingredients to) bake them cookies. peanut butter cookies. it’s not a recurring theme. we just always have peanut butter. i prefer creamy. dustin and riley apparently prefer crunchy. once again, we followed that recipe exactly. except we couldn’t find brown sugar (who has peanut butter but not brown sugar?) so we used white sugar mixed with syrup instead. at least dustin ate the cookies (that’s not saying much…dustin eats things he finds on the floor). oh yeah and they did have brown sugar. it was hiding right in front of the white sugar. not quite sure why we didn’t check that canister. probably we subconsciously just wanted pancakes instead of cookies. peanut butter pancakes. hmm…that actually sounds kinda good.

example #3: let’s just say that when you write down a recipe using abbreviations, 1 c - b.s. doesn’t necessarily stand for baking soda..

ding ding dong ding

300 tubas. what better way to bring in christmas? i was impressed with how silently they played silent night. they probably only had 5 tubas playing silent night and all the other ones were just pretending. joke’s on us. thanks for risking your ears and windows, denver, by letting 300 tubas congregate in a confined area to play us christmas carols. it just wouldn’t have been the same if it was oboes.

to top it all off, mr zachman was a guest conductor! mr zachman was our music teacher in junior high. he was cross-eyed. i have nothing against cross-eyeds, but it does make it rather hard to follow instructions when your conductor points at you with his baton but looks right at your neighbor. also, he was huge on lecturing on how to take good care of your instrument – keeping it clean and tightening the screws when needed and such. that’s why it was funny when he got really upset in class one time and threw his clarinet against the wall. shattered to pieces. way to take care of your instrument mr. zachman. oh…you weren’t talking to me?

white elephant how to

(me coveting, riley presenting and jack just being hot)

i’m pretty impartial when it comes to actually wanting a white elephant gift, but when it’s a jack skellington gift, there’s not a lot i wouldn’t do to get that guy. let me back up and give credit where credit’s due… riley – you rock! not many people can perfectly capture jack-ee-poo’s charming skeleton grin and dreamy curious eyes using mostly toilet paper tubes…talk about another notch on the “dustin definitely married up” chart. now here’s the good part about white elephant gifts. if you’re smart and determined enough, you can totally work the system. i won’t lie, you will probably have to make a few sacrifices and a few tears might be shed, but if you’re fighting for jack skellington, the end definitely justifies the means. here’s a quick how-to:

1. hone in on the gift you want (i know this seems like a common-sense step, but in this day and age, i don’t want to leave it out and then get sued because someone didn’t do this step since it wasn’t spelled out and then the results were off.)

2. form an alliance with another participating white-elephanter (keep in mind that both of you probably won’t benefit so find somebody who loves you enough (or is drunk enough) that he/she doesn’t mind giving up the chance at a good (is there such a thing? (yes…it’s called a toilet paper jack skellington)) gift. plus, you have to accept the fact that what goes around comes around and at a future white elephant exchange, you have to be willing to be the sucker for somebody else.)

3. pray your guts out that one of you gets the gift on its final exchange. (an alternative to this step is to form an alliance with someone really tough and bully-like. then you can just gang up on the person who got the gift you want at the end of the game. joke’s on them (note: if you’re really tough and bully-like and plan to take this approach, you can skip step 2.))

in this particular case, my mom ended up with jack skellington and i ended up with a food scale, which was apparently a pretty hot ticket item back when people still cooked with black and white food. what a great woman to agree to switch with me so i could longingly look into jack’s eyes while she weighs her carrots.

but like i said, you have to be willing to be on the brunt side sometimes. at my company christmas party, my coworker tom was dying to get this antler rack that my other coworker amy brought. my number was one of the last so i vowed to get that thing for him. i did. and in return, i got this rockin’ gift.

discovered uses thus far include giving “the rock” to my nephew, holding a drink/flowers/crumpled up paper because who would want to just hold those in your bare hands, acting like you became the hulk (or had a deadly tar-growth) on one limb of your body, and of course, a winter glove. the funniest part about tom getting the rack was that amy brought it to get rid of it and never have to look at it again and tom’s bringing it into the office to display at his desk…he sits right next to amy…i feel partially responsible but not that bad because who can even feel bad after getting an oversized fist?

christmas rocks!

so if you’ve never taken the opportunity (or even worse – you’ve never even thought about taking the opportunity…shame on you) to see the transiberian orchestra in all their concert glory, you haven’t truly experienced all that christmas music has to offer. also, it’s a great blast to the 80’s, and who doesn’t want that to be part of their holiday festivities?? i’m having a hard time limiting my highlights of the show. let’s just say there were lots of lasers and fire and strobe lights and probably about a thousand band members and a narrator telling a really cheesy christmas story. and a couple of singers with good gravely voices. and everyone had really long hair. and the girls all had blue eyeshadow like barbie and the rockers. and there were a handful of guitar duels and a piano duel and those triangle shaped guitars. and it started snowing inside the pepsi center.

i’m serious – it had every ingredient necessary to make a perfect flashback rock concert. it was awesome. plus, all their music is so fun – what better way to get in the christmas spirit than with a jam session of oh come all ye faithful? i think the absolute highlight for us was the main violinist, anna phoebe, though. she was incredible. she had this custom made bright pink electric violin that she would just wail on – she must have gone through at least a dozen bows. aside from that, i’ve never seen someone with so much energy. 3 hours of running back and forth, doing backbends, running up into the crowd…wow…i’m in love.

meghan and i also learned some things about each other we hadn’t realized before during this concert. another christmas miracle. we both have the exact same pitched “wooo!!” like after a song is over and you’re resisting the urge to throw the beast, so you scream “whoo!!” instead? yeah – identical. and we’d start and stop at the exact same time too. it would’ve been funny to put some poor unassuming person in between us – surround-sound whoo-ing!

reasons why i love my great grandma tick tock

grandma tick tock (officially mcclintock, but meghan couldn’t pronounce that when she was younger…and tick tock just fits) is 90 years old. she still works part time, dresses up for halloween (one year, she dressed up as cleopatra and she loved her costume so much she wore it everywhere for weeks before halloween. my aunt had to take the costume away because people kept getting surprise visits from an 80-something year old cleopatra wanting to borrow a stick of butter or whatever.) she’s never missed sending a birthday card and she makes us watergate cookies every year for christmas. i’m not really sure why she calls them that, but i’m pretty sure they’re made out of pistachio pudding. oh and she’s obsessed with dr. phil.

recently grandma’s health started failing, so she decided to pretty much rip up her will and to instead foot the bill for her entire family to go on a disney cruise with her to celebrate her life. how amazing is that? so we spent a week in the carribean with 52 of our relatives – from uncles and aunts to great and second (maybe even third??) cousins. the cruise itself was a blast (i’ll get to that in a second), but the thing that stuck with all of us the most was the realization that we belong to such an amazing legacy. there were people there that i haven’t seen in years, but that didn’t matter. we were all the same family and everyone was treated as such. in the spirit of grandma, who insists on talking to everyone she passes (the entire cruise staff knew her and even other families wanted pictures taken with grandma tick tock), we opened our arms and our hearts to get to know each other and to get to know grandma even better. by the end of the week, kids in the fifth generation were crying because they had to say goodbye to people in the third generation. second cousins hated to leave great uncles. what a great connection. i belong to such a cool legacy. thanks grandma tick tock for helping us all realize what’s really important in life!! and thanks for making me realize that i’m going to have to start saving for my wedding – i always wanted a small one, but now there’s no way i wouldn’t invite all 52 of those people!! love you grams!!

and now…

reasons why the disney cruise rocks

1. because you get to dress up like pirates

2. because you could get proposed to by a member of the cruise staff

3. because your waiter constantly plays practical jokes on you during your formal dinner

4. because where else do they light the christmas tree using pixie dust?

5. because they sell artificial hairpieces with little mickeys in them

6. two words – jack sparrow

7. one word – tarzan (no pic sadly. his abs broke the camera)

8. because all these people are there!