Well, it finally happened, the first snowfall of the season started Saturday evening and sprinkled its way into Sunday. Some of you already know that when it comes to snow, I am not a fan… and to those of you that didn’t know, now you do. Sunday started a bit late for me thanks to a fabulous evening with some friends, and a late night Castle marathon my sweetie-baby-cutie-pie-wifey-pooh and I started once we got home. See, we don’t have a lot of time… make that patience for television… commercials to be more exact.
So, when a new series comes out that is worth watching, our friends, who do enjoy a good series from time to time, will let us know about it. Then, once it comes out on DVD we’ll Netflix it. One thing I’ve noticed with this patter is Angela’s all-at-once commitment to a series when she finds one she likes. When she gets sucked in she wants to get caught up as soon as possible. Take Castle for example, I was interested in watching the show because of my affinity for Captain Mal of Firefly fame, and as I’ve watched the series I’ve been entertained enough to keep watching. Angela, on the other hand, is hooked.
Here’s how our television watching usually goes at the house, Angela will sit on the couch and work on her laptop while we watch something and I play with her hair. No it’s nothing like me trying to French braid it, or me using her hair to make me funny mustaches, while I look at myself in a hand mirror and giggle. No, it’s just me running my fingers through her hair while we watch. So when a show catches her attention she has to see what happens next, which is her phrase of acceptance and appreciation. Every time an episode ends, she says, “Next,” and I fast forward through the closing credits to the next episode on the DVD. Welcome to this past Saturday night.
When we got home and she checked the mail to discover we had received two new disks of season two, and of course we had to watch one episode before going to bed. Four episodes later with one DVD ready to be sent back, it was about 3:30 in the morning, and I was done… mainly because I was on the verge of passing out due to the cold medicine I had taken. The thing about her watching murder mysteries is that when I decide to call it a night, I know she won’t be staying downstairs and to watch any more episodes without me. Not because she doesn’t want to stop watching them, but because she gets scared from watching them and doesn’t want to be left alone. I know, I know, but I think it’s kind of cute.
So now with all that unnecessary exposition is out of the way, welcome to my snow day Sunday, and my noon o’clock wakeup call. Taking nighttime cold medicine at 2AM is a good way to ensure that sleeping in on a Sunday is going to happen whether you want it to or not. The thing about our snow day is that, and I’m not exactly sure how, but the storm managed to knock out our internet, until about 7PM that night. Sure it was an inconvenience, but, well, here are a few things I got from my internetless snow day Sunday:
It’s nice to unplug every now and again. Even though there were some things I wanted to get done, which required the internet (specifically, getting a podcast hosting site set up), it could wait, and did.
The importance of knowing how to shuffle. Yes, even though my PC still worked, I chose to kick it “old school” and pulled out a real live deck of playing cards for the sake of enjoying a few hands of Solitaire.
I love books. Even though they are starting to diminish in number and populate like bunnies in the virtual world, what with electronic book readers becoming the next step in literary evolution and all, a book is permanent and there for you when all the power goes out, and the batteries go dead. There is something comforting about curling up in an oversized chair and reading from a book you are holding in your hands.
I still enjoy listening to mixed tapes… I have so many that have been ignored for far too long. That’s right, not only do I still have cassettes, but I still have a piece of electronic equipment that actually plays them.
It’s amazing all of the things you can do with tofu when you spend two hours in the kitchen playing Iron Chef… and you already know what the secret ingredient was.
It might not seem like much, but it really was a great snow day, and I didn’t have to go out into the snow once. Not to mention, out of everything I learned that day, I didn’t have to Google a single thing.
So, how did you spend your first snow day of the season? Or if you don’t get snow where you live, what did you do the last time you had an internetless day? I am curious to know.
Image Sources:
Google Images, keywords: snow day, couple watching tv, yawning, shuffling cards, and Google it.
Families are odd little things. They are their own country in a way, with rules, laws, regulations, and rulers. In looking at some of my friends growing up and their family world was quite different than mine. The ruler concept is always easy to understand when you go from home to home. It was always the parent(s) and when they were not home it broke down oldest to youngest.
Then there is the collection of rules that you need to follow to ensure you didn’t get beat, verbally reprimanded, put in a corner on time out, or hugged and kissed in front of your friends until you promised never to do that again and amazed the embarrassment didn’t kill you. The thing that is so incredible to me is the absolute adherence you had for so many of these rules growing up. Rules that make absolutely no sense now, but back then, sure, you could see the point… if only because your parents would explain your confusion with the always “impossible to argue with” statement, “Because I said so.”
One of these rules recently came to mind one evening while I was enjoying a bowl of “magic soup”, which I believe most people call cereal. I mean I call it cereal as well, but only when I’m having it for breakfast. The rest of the time it’s lovingly referred to as “magic soup”, because… it is. Cereal enables to you build a magical fortress that you can hide behind, or do games on the back, or dig through to find a decoder ring with a special message on the box that, once decoded, tells you to eat more cereal.
The cereal rule I had growing up was a rule based on sugar. Because sugar cereal was, is, and will always be more expensive that unsugared cereal. I guess to be clear, for me sugar cereal constitutes cereal like Honeycombs, Frosted Flakes, Fruity Pebbles, and Lucky Charms, where unsugared cereal means Corn Flakes, Cheerios, Raisin Bran, and Corn Chex… even though technically they all have some sugar in them.
The rule was this; we could only have sugared cereal on the weekend, Saturday and Sunday, and only one bowl for each day. The rest of the time, if we wanted cereal for breakfast, we ate crappy unsugared cereal, which I would drown with sugar. Seriously, after all the cereal was gone I loved slurping down the left over milk, which was about half sugar. It had the consistency of clam chowder. The thickness was a result of all the sugar I poured over the flakes, one bite at a time. Thinking about it now almost puts me in a sugar coma. Pardon me while I embrace an uncontrollable shiver or two. (/shiver) Seriously though, left to my own devices, my regular cereal had about three times more sugar than my sugared cereal. And yet, I remember the sugar cereal always tasting so much better.
We followed the rule too. Mainly because if any of us screwed up, or took sugared cereal on a day we were not supposed to, everyone would lose their sugar cereal rights for about a month. Not to mention that there would be a good chance that you would be accosted by all of your siblings when the parents weren’t looking.
In looking back, there is one thing about this rule that makes absolutely no sense… Sunday! I managed to grow up in a religious home were every Sunday we would go to church. Now while at church it was hammered into me that church was a reverent place. A place where I was to sit quietly, listen to the stories teachers would read, and above all else I place where you behave.
So my question is this, if good behavior was an important aspect to the overall effect of this church going experience, then why was one of the only days of the week I was allowed to get wired and jacked up on sugar cereal on the morning of the day I would be going to church. There was no chance in hell I was going to sit quietly though an type of meeting after emptying a bowl of Fruit Loops just before going to a build designed to get people engaging in some type of holy experience.
Occasionally my parents did experience good behavior on my part, but this was only because I had opted to add sugar to my sugar cereal and by the time we got to church I had already hit my sugar peak and was crashing right as service started. I’d sleep through the whole thing, which I suppose was a rather peaceful experience for me as well. Although there were those times that I think my parents, usually my dad, appreciated my sugar rushed behavior, but only on the occasion that a sermon was excruciatingly drab and dreary. If, I mean when I’d misbehave on days like this, my dad was always more than happy to pick me up and escort me out of the main room.
Sometimes he’s smack me on the butt, because I’d more than likely earned it. Other times he’d just smile and give me a hug and take me outside to run around the building to work off some of my excess energy while he sat outside and watched me (out of earshot of the sermon being shared inside). Apparently, sometimes badly behaved children can be an answer to a parent’s prayer… but only if that prayer is for the sake of getting them out of church. Who knew? At least I’m glad I could help. Who knows, maybe that’s the reason right there for why sugar cereal was only allowed on the weekend.
What were some of the rules you had growing up that when you look back made absolutely no sense?
Image Sources:
Google Images, keywords: family, cereal, pillow fighting kids, kids in church, holding kids, and spanking kid.
Well, it finally happened, Facebook temporarily suspended my account because their system detected I had engaged in abusive behavior. So what was this abusive behavior? It’s not like I was going around typing flatulence sounds on people walls, or going to cat fan sites and saying how much better dogs are than cats, or going to the Tea Party Facebook page and telling them that Obama is the only Christian in power that will save this country. Nope, what I did was efficiently ask people from my home town for a little help. Efficiently being the key element here.
Ok so here’s the thing, hmm, it’s a little tough to write about since it’s a surprise birthday present, and if the person happens to read this and I give specifics the surprise factor loses all of its ‘sur’. Ah screw it, here’s the situation, I’m trying to collect stories about my dad from his students. We was a teacher for over 25 years in the same little town, and since he’s turning 70 this year I thought it was be a nice gift to surprise him with a collection of stories/memories from people he worked with and/or taught during those years.
I even managed to find a site on Facebook that is dedicated to people who grew up in this little town. So I’ve been sending everyone on the site messages asking them if they knew my dad and if they have a story they’d care to share. In order to be efficient, I wrote one master letter explaining all this. Then I cut and paste the letter to 10 to 20 people on the site and send them the message. I send messages until I get that warning that says I am engaging in spam like behavior and I stop for the day.
This is because I am cutting and pasting, instead of writing the same thing over and over again and wasting a bunch of time. What they notice is how fast I am sending these messages and not the content of the messages. I was told I was behaving like a spammer… and in a way I guess I am spamming people I don’t know, but it is directed at people that grew up where he taught, so there is a good chance they may know my dad even if they don’t know me. Besides, it’s for a good cause.
Now I’ve got two weeks to go, and am a little unsure how to proceed with trying to contact more people about writing about my dad. I really don’t want to lose my Facebook account because some program flags my actions as abusive, just because I’m trying to get some stories about my old man… shame on you Facebook for trying to destroy an old school teacher’s birthday surprise.
I mean, I do get it. I understand the “leave people you don’t know alone” concept. However when you have a creation like Facebook that is about interacting with other people, wouldn’t part of that experience also include making friends with people you don’t know? I’ve met many brilliant people from all over the world as a result of asking strangers to be my friend for the sake of taking a peek at my writing in hopes that it will make them smirk a bit. Thank you all by the way. I’m very grateful for the opportunity that Facebook has given me to introduce myself to, to connect with, and to call these people friends.
That being said, let’s take a look at some of the details Facebook sent me about this “abusive” behavior.
“Facebook’s security systems are meant to make everyone on Facebook feel safe sharing and connecting with one another.
Your account will be permanently disabled if you do not follow these guidelines:
Do not use the site to contact strangers thought the Messages feature, friend requests, or other avenues.
Do not send messages or friend requests to strangers for the sole purpose of increasing membership in your Facebook groups, Events, or Pages.
Do not send messages or friend requests to strangers to gain advantage in games or applications on the Facebook Platform.
Do not use the site to recruit or network with strangers for the purpose of promoting your business, event, or other opportunity.
Do not provide false information on your Facebook account. Your account must accurately reflect your real identity, including your real first name and last name. “
Apparently the way to be respectful of others on Facebook is to avoid contacting strangers in any way. For being a site that is all about “Friends” that sure doesn’t appear to be very friendly behavior now does it?
I guess the thing that strikes me as silly about all of this is I get a message like this and when I restored my account the first thing to greet me on my Facebook page was that row of Facebook Ads, which are doing exactly what Facebook says I are not allowed to do. Difference being is that others are paying Facebook to behave the way that would get my account permanently disabled. I mean, isn’t all an ad on Facebook trying to do is recruit and network with strangers. Aren’t these ads essentially a message being sent to thousands of strangers (or more) by someone on Facebook? They might not show up in the strangers message Inbox or as a friend invite, but they are messages posted on strangers Facebook page in the form of an advertisement. Ahh capitalism, whoever says you’ve left us?
So is the birthday book at a “cease and desist point”? No. It’s just more at a “we need to talk” point. I think I might have a new plan that just might work. For now I’ll need to rely on the kindness of friends who know strangers that might have been taught by my dad. Wish me luck! I sure hope it’s not considered abusive behavior to cut and paste a form messages to hundreds of my Facebook friends that grew up in your home town asking them to send the message to people they are friends with from my home town. In the immortal words of one princess to one desert roamer, “You’re my only hope.”
If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
Image Sources:
Google Images, keywords: time out, spam, new friends, Facebook ads, and you’re my only hope.
I have already started two different Smirks today. I was half way though sharing about an experience I had in my painting class during one of my teachers many “what is art” tangents, when I decided to check my email. Plans with a friend were in the works for tonight and I was waiting to hear where we would be meeting up. The email from my friend was there, it was just that the email right above his was from a dear friend of mine who I had not heard from in some time, mainly because she died a few years ago.
I admit I have seen the occasional ghost hunting show, and I still enjoy watching a Scooby-Doo episode or two when I am hanging out with my niece, but emails from the dead… that is a new one. When I say her name in the From: column, it took me a minute. I struck a pose like a dog that is being given instruction on how to set the clock on a VCR. They know what you are saying is important, but they just can’t make sense of the whole thing. They even tell you so by tilting their head to one side while the still show interest and wag their tail.
It kind of made me want to go on the John Edward’s show and when John asks me why I am there, I could tell him, “Because I received a message from a dearly departed friend… in my Inbox!” It would be one of those stand alone moments in television history, like when JR got shot, or when Bob Barker left the Price is Right, or when Greg was caught smoking, or when Mike and the Bots finally returned to Earth.
Of course I opened the email, how could I not? And I mean that metaphorically and not literally, because I literally know how to not open an email. I mean if I were superstitious, I might think twice about opening up an email sent to me by a dead friend, but since I’m a Capricorn, we’re not superstitious by nature. Turns out it was just some random link, probably to kind of virus. Call me a ethereal buzz kill if you want, but I think it’s a relatively sound rule that when you receive some random link from a friend that’s been dead for a few years, clicking in it is going to create more problems than not.
So logically I figure some lout hacked into her email and started sending a virus link to all the friends on her contact list, which makes me a little sad. However, from a purely illogically point of view, it could mean that the dead have become technologically savvy and are trying to make contact with friends and family to warn them about an evil entity that is hell bend on ruling the afterlife… or something like that. The sad thing is that you know it is only a matter of time until Hollywood steals that plot and decides to make it into a poorly made B-movie that only adolescent teen boys would watch in hopes of seeing high school girls running around in bras, screaming, and getting dismembered by some disgruntled computer generated cloud… because they don’t have the budget to make a whole monster.
Wow, that was an unexpected tangent. Although, is a tangent ever really expected? I mean to the person on the tangent? I have some friends that I know will be going off on a tangent way before they even get to the unexpected tangent. I’m probably one of those friends.
Regardless, there was something good that came from all of this… the memory of a friend. It’s been a while since I’ve thought of her, and even though the email was sent with malicious intent, I did give me some remembrance time, and for that I am grateful.
So, have any of you gotten an email from a dead person?
Image Sources:
Google Images, keywords: you’ve got mail, confused dog, ghost typing, and thinking of you.
I few months ago a friend sent me a link to a music video someone had made and posted on Youtube. The song by itself was quite mediocre and excessively uninteresting, like watching a video of a flower opening at dawn, but not in high speed… in actual real time instead. At least this s what I think based on my personal music appreciation. The song is Tik Tok by some lady named Kesha, which I think is spelled funny for “artistic” purposes. I believe she is an avid supporter of trailer park lifestyles, based solely on what I saw of her official Tik Tok video. I will state for the record that I was unable to finish the video due to valiant effort on my part to regain some of the sanity I had lost from watching the first half of the official video.
It is the unofficial video that my friend sent me, that explains why this song gets its very own Smirk. The unofficial Youtube video takes the song and gives it an image and theme worth the viewing. The person who edited the video “Treked” it up, introducing an entirely new fan base that would be willing to listen to this song all the way though because of the video’s new subject matter… Kirk and the gang. Brilliant unintentional marketing.
When I first saw this video, and was so entertained by it that I shared it with family, friends, readers, people I haven’t talked to since high school, and people I’ve never met and quite possibly will never meet. That’s right, I stuck it on Facebook. Soon I discovered that I was not the only one out there that found this combination satisfying enough to not only keep a smile on my face every time I watched it, but who enjoyed it enough to post it on their Facebook page to share as well.
The thing is it’s the combination that works for me. The song by itself… well, ten times out of ten I’m always going to change the station when it comes on. And as for old-school original series Star Trek, sure it makes me laugh, and I have a great deal of nostalgic appreciation for it, I can really only watch one episode. Then I need a few days to a week or two before I watch another one again. I just can’t watch them in a row… no idea why.
Now put those two things together and I can watch that video over and over again, and every time I’m grinning like that odd little kid in grade school that doesn’t say much, but just won the school spelling bee and is eminently pleased with their own existence. It’s a combination of true greatness, like peanut butter and chocolate, or grapes and fermentation, or Abbot and Costello. It just makes more sense to have them together than to keep them apart.
There is one more thing though, it’s the residual appreciation that I didn’t know I had. I learned this when I was in Hawaii. I was in a situation where the song was being played and I did not have the option to turn it off or change the station. What I learned is that as the song played, I found myself smiling as wave after way of Star Trek images from the video danced though my mind, enabling me to appreciate a heinous piece of pop music drivel, or, in short, making a bad song good. And to the person responsible for boldly going where no one has gone before and making this video in the first place, well done. If I knew who you were and where you lived I’d send you some cookies to say thanks.
What are your thoughts? Does the Trek make this bad song good? Or, if you are of the disposition that it is a good song, does it make it better?
Image Sources:
Google Images, keywords: Tik Tok, Reese’s cups, and listening to music.
Some conversations end before they ever have a chance to get started. Others are one-liner conversations, much like reading the cover of a Cosmo while in the checkout line at the grocery store. And then there are conversations that begin with such obscurity that you can’t help but stand in muted awe until the person speaking explains what the hell their talking about. Take me for example, this weekend my sister was over visiting and the first thing out of her mouth was, “My boyfriend finally came out to me.”
And I just stood there, my mouth slightly open, wanting to say something, but pretty sure I needed a little more information before I began adding anything to the conversation. My sister must have noticed this because she quickly added, “He’s a closet meat eater.”
“He eats closets full of … or he eats meat in his closet?” I asked.
I think the new layer of confusion now resting on my face was the indicator that she needed to start this whole conversation over. “He’s vegan, at least he was. He has been for years.”
Turns out her vegan boyfriend, has been enjoying a little meat consumption without anyone knowing, and feeling just terrible about it, sort of. For the record, it’s only fish. He still is highly opposed to him consuming any mammals or fowl of any kind. But when it comes to fish, letting that boy lose in a sushi restaurant is like watching a claymation King Kong tear apart a model of New York. Oh the horror! Still, he does his best to keep his “closet” fish eating to himself and away from his friends and family.
My sister and I began discussing her “out” (or “fish-nivorous”) boyfriend and the issue behind calling yourself a vegan, when you are not even a vegetarian. Her perspective was that claiming you are a vegan, when you clearly aren’t, is lying to yourself about the person you truly are. I decided it was just like smoking. I have had many friends over the years who would only smoke when they drank, all the time referring to themselves as nonsmokers. They clearly were smokers, even if they only drank once a week, but because it wasn’t an everyday thing, they held to the personal opinion that they were nonsmokers.
There are a lot of people that do this though. People are constantly calling themselves something they’re not. Take me for example, for years I’ve called myself a “beady eyed vegetarian”, which meant that I would eat vegetables and animals with beady eyes. Things like fish or fowl, but big eyed animals like cow, lamb, pig, etc. were right out. So was I a beady eyed vegetarian? Not at all, because I ate meat, I still do. I mean if I really wanted to get more exact about my eating habits, I suppose I should just call myself a “carb whore.” Bread is my kryptonite.
If I am placed in front the consumables for what is traditionally called a meal, and there is any possible way of me pulling it off, ten times out of ten I’m going to be making a sandwich. It happens every time I have dinner at my parents. Even at Thanksgiving, or any meal even remotely Thanksgiving themed, I always grab a dinner roll first and slice that thing in half. I’ll place a scoop of stuffing on the bottom piece, then a slice of turkey, then some cranberries, then some of the lettuce from the salad, maybe a little salad dressing, and pop on the top of the roll and tada, I’m having a Thanksgiving dinner sandwich.
I guess I could call myself a “carni-lite” or a light carnivore, but that might confuse people because I am not a light person. I guess because I eat mostly fish, I could call me self an aquacannibal. It sort makes sense when you realize fish eat mostly other fish. Of course there is always going to be that one smart ass that thinks an aquacannibal is someone who only eats people who know how to swim. This is problem that always seems to happen when you introduce new labels into the already saturated human labeling market.
I have a friend to calls himself a vegan, but in reality he’s just a “sugar whore”. He might not eat any meat or dairy, but that chap eats more sugar than a nine year old with ADD on Easter Sunday who keeps announcing to the congregation that, “Blessed are the rabbits, for they shall lay chocolate eggs for all the good children of the world and have their feet considered lucky”… or something like that.
I mean if you are attempting to become a vegetarian then call it like it is. I would say calling yourself a “struggling vegetarian” might work, but I have a coworker that claims he is a struggling vegetarian, but to him it means that he struggles to eat any type of vegetable period. Actually, I think we should just make it a general rule of thumb, if you eat meat of any kind you are not a vegan or a vegetarian, especially if you are calling yourself one in between bites of your Chicken Caesar salad. I suppose technically, if you are eating a vegetarian dish, you could call yourself a vegetarian for that meal since you are following the dietary guidelines that coincide with the established definition of that label. But don’t. It’s confusing to everyone in the long run. Please for the sake of world sanity quit calling yourself something you clearly aren’t.
You can still be a vegan or vegetarian supporter even if you eat meat and vice versa. Also, vegans of the world, stop telling meat eaters that Tofurkey or a tofu anything that is processed to look and taste like meat actually tastes like meat… it doesn’t. Quit trying to convince anyone, yourself included, that it does. Good for you sticking to your dietary convictions, but you’re not fooling anyone telling us it takes like meat. How would you know?
Likewise, to all you excessive-amounts-of-meat eaters, don’t be a douche and when hanging out with the veggie people and constantly talk about how delicious meat is, and asking the veggie people if they want a bite of your steak. To them meat is murder… tasty, tasty murder… kidding, sorry (I saw that on a t-shirt once and it always pops into my head every time I hear the phrase “meat is murder”). To them meat is the equivalent of, well, a carnivore eating a Tofurkey loaf for Thanksgiving. Get over it and try having a non-meat related conversation with them. And in one final attempt to those that still don’t get it, if vegans and vegetarians don’t eat meat that means there is more for you. Same goes to you veggie people in regards to vegetables. That way we all get something we like and we all get along… Check please!
I know “beady eyed vegetarian” might be a new term for some of you, what are some of your self-created food consumption labels?
Image Sources:
Google Images, keywords: conversation, confused, vegan, thanksgiving sandwich, eating chicken Caesar salad, and eating meat.
Well, it finally happened, the first snowfall of the season started Saturday evening and sprinkled its way into Sunday. Some of you already know that when it comes to snow, I am not a fan… and to those of you that didn’t know, now you do. Sunday started a bit late for me thanks to a fabulous evening with some friends, and a late night Castle marathon my sweetie-baby-cutie-pie-wifey-pooh and I started once we got home. See, we don’t have a lot of time… make that patience for television… commercials to be more exact.
Here’s how our television watching usually goes at the house, Angela will sit on the couch and work on her laptop while we watch something and I play with her hair. No it’s nothing like me trying to French braid it, or me using her hair to make me funny mustaches, while I look at myself in a hand mirror and giggle. No, it’s just me running my fingers through her hair while we watch. So when a show catches her attention she has to see what happens next, which is her phrase of acceptance and appreciation. Every time an episode ends, she says, “Next,” and I fast forward through the closing credits to the next episode on the DVD. Welcome to this past Saturday night.
When we got home and she checked the mail to discover we had received two new disks of season two, and of course we had to watch one episode before going to bed. Four episodes later with one DVD ready to be sent back, it was about 3:30 in the morning, and I was done… mainly because I was on the verge of passing out due to the cold medicine I had taken. The thing about her watching murder mysteries is that when I decide to call it a night, I know she won’t be staying downstairs and to watch any more episodes without me. Not because she doesn’t want to stop watching them, but because she gets scared from watching them and doesn’t want to be left alone. I know, I know, but I think it’s kind of cute.
It might not seem like much, but it really was a great snow day, and I didn’t have to go out into the snow once. Not to mention, out of everything I learned that day, I didn’t have to Google a single thing.
