Category: Holidays

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Do they make flame-retardant chip dip?

I was at a friend’s New Year’s Eve party last night and he talked me into putting a few drops of Death Sauce on a chip and eating it (or Hell Sauce or Fire Sauce or whatever that spicy stuff is that’s supposed to singe the hair on your chest when you eat it). That led me to two discoveries:

1) I chewed it with the right side of my mouth and the burning sensation was only on the right side… at first.
2) It took about eight hours for the sauce to pass through my digestive system and it burned just as much going out as it did coming in.

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Once again, I got nothin’

I’m too busy being lazy to think of anything really amusing and I can’t afford to be lazy: there’s a party to attend! And the weather is supposed to turn really crappy in a couple hours, so I should probably get up, run some errands and get wild and crazy for the rest of 2010! And by “get wild and crazy”, I mean “watch some movies, eat too many snacks, feel bloated when we ring in the new year and pass out into a food coma.” Same old, same old.

So to everyone out there on the Interwebz, I hope you have a very safe, very happy, very merry, very splendid, very very very spiffy New Year. Enjoy 2011, y’all. I’m sure it’ll enjoy you just as much.

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Did Santa leave a friend under the tree for me?

Now that Christmas is pretty much over and the orgy of capitalism known as “the holiday season” has almost passed, this post isn’t as relevant as it could have been, but I still think it’s important. In a way, I guess it’s a re-emphasis of this blog post, but I wanted to write it anyway.

To keep it short and simple, I hope that you all remembered what was really important this December. Sure, presents are awesome. I rarely turn them down unless they look and smell like flaming dog poop—a man’s got to have standards. But there’s more going on than presents. There are the people who gave them to you.

There’s plenty of stuff getting passed around and plenty of people doing it. If not for the people… sure, you’re stuck buying gifts for yourself, but that’s not the point. The point is that they’re the ones who make this time the best. Stuff—material objects—will never be able to take the place of people. At least until they build androids that can travel back in time and try to kill Sarah Connor.

But it’s the human interaction that’s the most important part of the season. Love, joy, cherishing each others’ company… that’s the good stuff, baby. So I hope you all got to spend time with your friends and family and made your lives more complete because of it. Unless they gave you flaming dog poop as a present. Then you can ditch ’em.

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It’s only the first day?!

How I celebrated the Winter Solstice of 2010:

1) Silently wished my older brother and his wife, Brent and Gail, a happy 7th anniversary.

2) Shoveled another 5″ of snow off the front steps and driveway that came down yesterday.

2a) Got hot and sweaty doing it due to temperatures in the 20s.

2b) Became sad when realizing that “in the 20s” is a warm first day of winter here in MN.

3) Took a looooooong, hot shower to help melt away the aches and pains of shoveling… and rinse away the sweat, too.

4) Napped off and on for several hours due to exertion and lack of sleep last night.

5) Learned that this is the 2nd snowiest December on record.

5a) Did not curse upon learning this fact.

6) Received a copy of EA Sports Active 2 for the Wii that I ordered from Amazon.com to help combat some of the lingering after-effects of my trip to Norway: “Have seconds!” “Go back for another serving!” “Time for delectable desserts!” “I TOLD YOU TO EAT MORE, DAMMIT!”

7) Wrote this blog entry of the day and felt a great deal of self-satisfaction having done so. Yay me.

So that’s a summary of today’s events. Given how crazy things got, I can only imagine what the second day of winter will bring.

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A quarter century and counting

Today was Jeremy Gustafson’s 25th birthday party. Two days ago, I also thought that today was supposed to bring freezing rain and seriously hazardous road conditions. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal, although there wouldn’t be as many guests at the party, but that doesn’t account for the last few years when his birthday has brought heavy snow, ice and pretty much everything but frozen gerbils falling from the sky. If that rain had come down tonight, we might have started wondering if God didn’t want Jeremy to celebrate his birthday anymore. Or maybe our eating at IHOP was enough of a punishment, I’m not sure.

There were also a few quotes worth sharing (there were a lot, really, but only a few that make sense without worrying about context):

“I stay out of trailer parks. That’s Cracker City.”
“It’s funny how talking about sterility can kill a conversation.”
“To pronounce the name ‘Marissa’, just pretend you’re a Chinese person saying ‘Melissa’.” (I’m probably going to Hell for that one, but it sounded really funny when I said it.)