Still in food coma

We've still got a ton of leftovers from Thanksgiving. I have pretty much spent the entire time since Thanksgiving day in some form of food coma. It's a blessing and curse, as Monk would say.

It was great to have family come and spend the holiday with us. It's the first time we've hosted Thanksgiving and it was a lot of fun. The pic is my brother's family with mine at our zoo. We love our zoo and it was a great way to get out and walk off some of the holiday tonnage.

Hope everyone had a great weekend and welcome back to the land of work.

Happy Thanksgiving

Sometimes, too many brains is too much of a good thing.

Thanksgiving music #2

Clutch - Wishbone



On the losing end, of the wishbone
And I won't pretend, not to mind

Thanksgiving music #1

Samhain - November's Fire

This isn't new

But it really brightened up my Monday.

Danzig tries to cheer up the tomato baby.

Computer use is a real pain

And I'm not talking figuratively. I use the computer a lot. All day long at the office and many hours in the evening for entertainment. I have developed tendonitis that messes with my wrists, but that's pretty much mitigated now. I have learned how to hold my hands and such that I'm not causing myself to aggravate that pain. However, recently I've developed some sharp pains at the top of my forearm. Just on the interior of the arm, below the bicep, but right at the top of the forearm. It can be pretty harsh. My question to y'all is, have you experienced anything like this? It's almost like I tried to curl too much weight and have pulled/torn a muscle.

When someone puts a burn notice out on you, you get to assist in reenlistments

Burn Notice stars Bruce "If Chins Could Kill" Campbell and Jeffrey Donovan become even cooler (if that's even possible for Bruce) by assisting a reenlistment during a visit to Iraq.

Via Blackfive.

I'm reading a lot of Hellboy right now

I have nothing else today. Here are some delicious pancakes:

Weird commercials: Uncle Lou's

This isn't particularly weird, in fact I'd say it's pretty good for a local commercial. Except all the explosions. They seem a bit out of place.

Uncle Lou's Fried Chicken has been featured on Diners, Drive Ins and Dives and is another Memphis institution. For some reason I find their commercial hilarious. It used to come on every morning when I was getting ready for work. Haven't seen it in a while though. The person who uploaded this video caught a bit of another commercial and Uncle Lou's commercial doesn't start until the 0:14-0:15 mark:



The thing to take away here is that with the right recipe, you can be a general. Keep that in mind military professionals.

Weird commercials: Mister Hats

We've got this store in Memphis called Mister Hats. The commercials come on early in the morning or very late at night.

Anyway, the guy who owns the shop straddles a line between creepy and disaffecting. I can't decide. This video is the only one I could find on YouTube that features the owner (the kind that air every morning). In it, the guy's not too bad. The one's that have been airing lately are far more odd.

Lowered expectations

I was in the shower yesterday and I started thinking. That isn’t to say that I’m prone to deep thinking in the shower. I’m just as apt to be singing Louie, Louie or some Hannah Montana song (if that’s what my kids were listening to on the radio) as I am to think something out. Heck, to be honest, I’m probably more apt to be singing something. So, on this rare occasion, I was thinking.

J-mom had just cut my hair. She did a pretty good job. I mean, anyone that can make this head look decent is doing good things. It was first time cutting an adult’s hair and only her second-ever hair cut. But, in the shower, I started thinking about how, after years of going to barbers, I have an innate sense of what should happen when I get a haircut. Even knowing that my wife had only ever cut my son’s hair prior to mine, there was an expectation there. Because it was there, I found it harder to just be happy that I was getting a free haircut than if I’d just accepted the fact that even if she screwed up badly, I could just shave my head – which was my last haircut.

UPDATE: It was pointed out to me that I might not have been very clear. I am quite happy with the haircut. What is weird is that when an experienced barber cuts your hair, you expect the clippers to move a certain way across your head. It was just a different experience. Not in any way a bad one.

ALSO, I should point out that over the past couple of years I have paid for some pretty lousy haircuts.


Seriously. There's only so much
you can do with this head.


So, I jumped to a conclusion. Self, I hypothesized to myself, it might be a better world if we lived without expectation. Just think how better entertainment would be if we had no preconceived notions about what we were getting into. Think how wonderful and surprising our experiences would be if we didn’t have any expectations guiding our attitudes. Think about how thankful we’d be if we didn’t expect certain things from people.

Yeah, that sounded good for about second. Then I quickly thought about how bad it would be if we didn’t hold certain people to a level of expectations. How bad would car repairs be? How bad would our educational system be (how much worse can it get, I guess)?

So, maybe it wasn’t the most enlightening rabbit trail, but it’s what I was thinking about. Perhaps I’ll just stick to singing for a while.

Legacy

Just came back to work after a five-day weekend. A micro staycation, I guess. Really I was just taking advantage of my regular every-other-Monday-off and this Wednesday’s holiday to get some stuff done around the house. All I had to do was take Tuesday off to get that five-day. Doesn’t happen too often.

Anyway, my family is coming in for Thanksgiving and there are many things to get done. I could have done a lot more, but I’m happy that I got a couple of things accomplished that J-mom’s been wanting me to do for, oh, two years or so. Shelves in the garage. Man, who’da thunk something so relatively simple to do would take me so long to get around to? Well, anyone who knows me pretty well would have to say that they would. But they’re done now and the garage is almost there.

I’m not sure what other projects J-mom has in store for me, but I still have to haul off some things from our back porch and do some general cleanup back there. I’d like to be able to actually move around on my porch while doing Thanksgiving setup/cooking.

As for the title of this post, to prove that I didn’t just throw that out there for no reason, I present to you my office shredder:



Is there something poetic in this or what?

Veteran's Day

To all veterans, past, present and future, those who paved the way for the freedoms we now enjoy, my contemporaries and those I've known, those who've yet to serve - thank you.

RIP Fort Hood soldiers

Rest peaceful warriors.

On dreams and dairy

I don’t often have vivid dreams, but last night I did. I dreamed I was a contestant on The Next Iron Chef. I guess it’s not terribly odd as I’ve become a pretty big fan of the show and I find myself wanting to become a better cook the more Food Network I watch. What’s weird is how completely sane and average the dream was. I mean, even the rare times I have a vivid dream and it’s about something mundane, fantastic things usually happen. There is often flight or some other kind of superhuman or supernatural goings on. This time, we just cooked.

I also remember what I cooked. I pounded out a chicken and pork cutlet very thin, almost paper thin (guess that’s a bit of fantasy). I then wrapped them around some sliced veggies and a fish stick. Can’t remember what fish I used, but I cut and breaded it myself in the dream. I wrapped the cutlets around the veggies and fish stick and then deep fried the entire thing. I’m almost thinking this isn’t sounding too bad.

Oddly, I was so proud of what I’d came up with. I was sure I had the winning dish. Alas, it wasn’t to be. I was beaten out by Amanda Freitag, who is an actual contestant on the current iteration of the show. Man, I was bummed (even though she’s my favorite to win the actual show). I had to, in my dream, placate myself with an amazing caramel apple cake.

Maybe it was the lortab I had to take yesterday, but that was a damn fine dream.