check it.

so i was standing in the twits' doorway, admiring the new artwork i finally gotten around to hanging on all the walls (pictures posted tomorrow... because it completely rocks. i pimped their cribs!) i moved their old toddler art - finding nemo cel art, the winnie the pooh wall hanging that started its life at evilgremlin's crib quilt, buzz lightyear posters - to monkeybeef's room (and he is impressed!) to make room for about a 25 year accumulation of star wars art in their room - a darth maul poster, a special edition teaser poster of young anakin walking on tatooine, followed by a vader-shaped shadow, a darth vader helmet-and-flames poster i ate many, many cheezits to get the boxtops for, the 4 original episode 4 posters my mom got them on ebay and mounted on foamboard for them, and of course the original empire strikes back (spazmonkey) and return of the jedi (dramaqueen) bedsheets from the 80s. we were commenting on the awesomeness of it all, when posterspositiverolemodel came up behind me and, after grabbing my ass, told me to try the beer he had in his hand, and guess what it was.

i ran. not because of the beer, but because, as i was saying goodnight to the twits, dramaqueen decided to start up a long-running argument between the two of us:

DQ: pwincess weia is NAWT a jedi!
me: dude, i am so freakin tired of this particular argument-
DQ: she uses a GUN, not a lightsaber, and she can't force on the bad guys.
me: i can settle this one right now, i just got a book... you stay right here.
DQ: she's not a hero!

i ran down two flights of stairs to grab book two of a trilogy i just bought yesterday, the dark nest trilogy, with the cover art serving as proof of leia's jedihood. i ran back up, pushed past a husband still howling with laughter at me (not so hard that he couldn't make another grab for my ass), and tossed the book on the twits' mattress. spazmonkey and dramaqueen were wide-eyed and impressed.

SM: WHOA! look how she has a blue lightsaber!
me: that's right. you know why? because IN YOUR FACE!

so anyway. the twits thus delighted with princess leia's new status as a hero (and trying desperately to read the 400-page novel to themselves as a bedtime story,) i tried the beer. i sniffed it several times first, because the aroma of this mystery dark-brown beer was absolutely amazing. it was a thick, sweet, complex caramel smell of country molasses - not that blackstrap shit, but the deep amber syrup you can still find in some rural markets (there's a particlarly good local source of it here, from lynneville, ia) that tastes more like fresh caramel than like candy cigarrettes that some asshole actually tried to light. repeatedly.

so i tasted it, and it was awesome. i finally had to give up on what it could be, because there was no way it hell it was any of our recent brews - two meads, two light beers, two lambics. this beer tasted like it smelled, with heavy undercurrents of pronounced yet mellow maltiness, a slight, almost ill-fitting tartness.

me: what is it?
PRM: so the cap said... coffee '96.
me: no SHIT? dude, it doesn't even taste like coffee anymore. this is the kind of beer sam adams can put in an 8.5 oz cobalt bottle and charge like $12 a bottle for because it's "rare" and "complex," and "aged 12 years."
PRM: it's pretty good.
me: o my god; i rock!

see, this is a beer i brewed before i was even actually legal to drink (and guess what: according to the law of that state at that time, it was legal for me to brew it, so NYEAH! you didn't even just catch me admitting to somethig illegal!) and it spent the first 8 years of its life on this planet tasting like brewed cat piss (which, i imagine, is what most 8-year-old-boys, a demographic not renowned for its personal hygiene, would all taste like, too). we hadn't tasted it at all for at least 4 years, but there was still half a case of it stashed in our fledgling-but-gorgeous honest-to-god beer cellar, a labor of love as we build it together (okay, mostly, it's a labor of laziness. there are just... other things we'd rather be doing.) and now, suddenly, it's GOOD. like, REALLY good.

so, like i said, i totally rock. it may occasionally take me a decade or so, but i CAN polish a turd enought that it actually changes into gold. witness my alchemy!

hand me down my walkin cane...

okay, i'll refrain from accusing you of sucking if you don't know that song. but i highly suggest you get to know it, because it rocks. my favorite version, by robert earl keen, has more soul than you'll know what to do with; if you're a huge pussy, play it safe and try out the more traditional version by norman blake.

so the other night, monkeybeef was playing his favorite game with his daddy: "whassup?" when positiverolemodel walks in the front door, monkeybeef yells "huh duh!" (which, if i suffered from the typical parental delusion that my baby is the smartest baby ever, i would pretend was only a slight mispronunciation of "hi dad!") and pounds his little butt over to the baby gate, stands on a footstool, and starts trying to crash the gate down (this succeeds roughly 25% of the time, by the way.) when prm drops all his stuff in the hall, he comes over, scoops the baby up, and rolls around on the floor with him, yelling, "whasssssuuuuuup little dawg!" monkeybeef screeches back, "huzzub!" and they wrestle and make faces at each other and get progressively louder and goofier as they exchange whassups (and usually get joined by 1-3 other little boys.)

so as they were playing "whassup" the other night, at some point monkeybeef pulled up to standing on daddy... and let go. and just stood there, not holding onto anything, not even wavering. prm started laughing - his room-filling subwoofer cackle that made the baby cry in terror every time he heard it for his first few months of life - and yelled, "look at you, little man!" and the boy got this absolutely beautiful shit-eating grin on his face... because he knows what's coming.

at just past a year, he's now officially the latest walker of all of the brothers. he also has, in a house full of kegheads, the biggest head of all of them. his pediatrician says babies with bigger heads tend to walk later. because apparently, even babies have a pretty good understanding of how gravity works.

it's that time of year again, bitches!!! (now with footnotes instead of a bunch of parenthetical shit in every paragraph!)

well, our snowboarding trip got cancelled, but we salvaged what turned out to be an incredibly awesome vacation by keeping my parents as babysitters for the rest of the weekend, while positiverolemodel went ahead and took his vacation days anyway... so, courtesy of all the free time i've had over the last several days, i bring you the following nonsense:



i came up with a great idea for this year's art project, and prm added so many poetically degenerate details... my god; it'll be beautiful. i can't say too much now... because arbitrary secrecy just makes it all that much more special.(1) also, because the peeps aren't what this post is actually about. because, the misleading title? yeah. i love fucking with your heads, that's why.

this post is about my hair.(2) i only get it cut about 2-3 times a year, because i'm cheap, and because it looks good plus or minus about 12 inches either way, and mostly because, after trying three different hairdressers when i couldn't get back to my hometown to let my favorite hairdresser cut my hair, and getting three straight horrible cuts, i said fuck it - i am NEVER letting anyone except my homeboy cut it again. period. these days, living 4 hours away with 4 small kids, there may be 4 months or more that pass between visits to my hometown. not thinking it through, at my last cut over christmas, i didn't get enough cut off. i realized a couple of weeks ago that, by the time i got my next cut, it would damn near be down to my waist. at that length, it won't curl, it looks kinda straggly, and the ends start to get split. also, between that and the 4 kids, i look like some flavor or another of fundamentalist.

back in undergrad, when we were just best friends instead of married, i had done the same thing - left my hair too long, was unable to go back home for a cut for a few more months - and positiverolemodel offered to cut it for me. now, i wound up not letting him do it - i almost did, but then he started cackling. and anyone who has heard my husband cackle and has two brain cells to rub together starts feeling his balls sweat when they hear that sound. he's too damned special a person not to be up to something, and you'll never know what until it's already smacked your ass or otherwise stolen your dignity. so, until i heard him cackle, i was going to let him do it, because truth be told, i'm a sucker for a good scalp massage, and the thought of prm with his hands tangled in my hair is the kind of thought that could keep me up at night with a loopy grin on my face.(3)

after we fell in love for real, i told him that little story, and he's always loved the fact that i would really trust him to cut my hair. so over the years, he's periodically jokingly offered to cut it for me. today, after two weeks of being annoyed by the straggly ends of my hair every time i look in the mirror, and after a weekend spent wandering around the magically snow-covered downtown and declaring our undying love for our new home of iowa city,(4) pillaging the music section at the public library, going to the mall and laughing our asses off in the mens' dressing room at JCPenney(5) while spendng a massive gift certificate on incredibly hot new dress clothes,(6) eating out at a different, fabulously ethnic, child-unfriendly restaurant for every meal,(7) staying up way too late running our mouths, telling stupid jokes that spiral out of control until we're howling and trying to breathe, doing unmentionably dirty things to each other, and just generally falling in love with each other all over again, i asked him to cut my hair for me.(8)

it looks awesome. the man is an artist. you know how bob ross paints his happy trees and joyful clouds, and makes it look easy? okay, bob ross is fast. my husband is otherworldly. when bob ross is painting, you can still see him making all the same brush strokes you would. when PRM draws something, he stares at the paper for a moment, gets lost inside his own head, and then you see his arm flash out and move across the paper a couple of times, and then he's done. you blink, and a fully-formed work of art has appeared, and you have no idea how he did it. genius. since i draw about as well as any eight-year-old, the times that he has drawn me represent the only times i have felt at all artistic.

so, i described to him where to cut my hair and what shape i wanted it in. he sat me down, brushed my hair, wet it down, brushed it some more, stroked it thoughtfully, studied it.(9) then he started snipping, and even though he's never cut hair before in his life, he didn't hesitate, didn't falter, didn't second-guess himself. and that's not because he's overconfident; he's actually the most circumspect person i've ever met. not wishy-washy, not uncertain, just absolutely prudently circumspect. so... his hands were sure because he was sure. when he was done, it looked like a professional job. i keep stopping to admire it in the mirror.

life is good. holy CRAP life is good. i was still grinning about my awesome haircut when i started dorking out last night over the simple fact that our house was clean, we had the room to organize everything, find everything without having to search through piles of crap, and he asked if it was really me, getting all happy over some martha stewart bullshit. over the last two years, i've been through a rough time emotionally, what with the oops baby and all that came with him. and i was so sure that i couldn't talk to prm about it - i thought that he couldn't possibly love me anymore if he knew what i was really thinking and feeling. i'll never make that mistake again. two years of bottled up bullshit just poured out, and suddenly, the weight has lifted, the clouds have melted in the sun, the poison has been cleared, and i feel like i've gotten my life back. not only would i not have believed that it would be okay to talk to him about it, i never would have guessed that talking to him about it would make the whole thing so... small. so nothing. so over. and i was a fucking idiot for not knowing that it would all be okay.

i haven't been this carelessly happy for awhile, so he had to make fun of me for suddenly having a martha stewart goofy-fit. he hasn't seen me smile so much in too long. he just wanted to make sure i was happy with my life. and yes, i am. i know i'm supposed to be some angst-ridden post-modern train wreck over some tragically beautiful shit, conflicted over whether to take this path or that, just like every other terribly hip gen-x'er... career vs family! should i stay or should i go! yadda yadda yadda!

i accidentally tried that out, and i've discovered that i'm just not that person. i'm going to have to admit that i am fulfilled, happy, and thus completely uninteresting. my life is so bland, married to my best friend, the love of my life... and any other uninteresting cliche you care to come up with. i'm a soccer mom, a housewife, i let my husband take the lead of the family in the purest, poetically biblical sense (meaning that he, as a perfect person, puts my needs first as he leads, thus choosing what is best for both of us, every time,)(10) we love each other more every day, we're both dedicated to constantly working to be better people, for each other and for our children(11), i build my life around taking care of my family and making our home a happy place, and it makes me happier than i knew you could ever be... i think it's a story that happens every day in lives that get led all over this world, and it's not a story we ever tell, because our stories must be unique, or tragic, or heroic, or epic... "interesting."

and my life is every bit as much a work of art as any story worth telling, tragic or otherwise. even with all that pesky fulfillment getting in the way.(12)

we've done all the hard work that a real relationship requires, so, despite our mistakes and missteps,(13) we're stronger than ever. we haven't coasted on fumes, we haven't pretended things were fine when they're not, we've been honest even when it was hard, we've been willing to change, willing to admit fault instead of pretending circumstances were beyond our control, and it has paid off. we proved that this weekend. where some people might keep up appearances at all costs, and let reality go to hell, we've occasionally rocked the boat, not kept up appearances... and made damn sure that our reality was really good, rather than just looking good for the peanut gallery.(14) we can, and do, tell each other everything, absolutely every honest detail, no matter how messy, and it will always be okay.(15) that's why i still feel butterflies in my stomach every time i hear the front door open when he comes home from work and his kisses steal my breath.(16)

for some people, "i love you" is just something they like to hear themselves say. and they can get people to love them back... for a while. but it can't last. nobody can stay in love with a worthless sack of shit forever (not even another worthless sack of shit!) if you don't ever stand up for those you claim to love, defend them, be there for them when they need you, if you take what you need from them and have nothing to give, never step one toe off the path of least resistance for them... they can't love you back for long. because real love is something that you do. and if you're not doing it, you don't get the privelege of saying it. saying it without doing it is a lie, and a pathetic one, at that. and prm does it for me, always. which is why i can only love him more every day, not less. and i can only hope that i will always be that person for him, too. (he says i am. but then, he wants to get laid tonight, too.)

anyway. i thought i'd rhapsodize about how much ass prm kicks... to hide the fact that nothing has been happening here over the weekend. nothing important, anyway... except that my husband reminded me that he is the most wonderful person in the world and that our love gets stronger ever day.

oh, also, a plan for this year's peeps diorama series has entered into development. now that's important. because i think we're going to top the bunny ranch AND the christmas seige.

anyway. my point? life is perfect.(17)

okay. wierded out yet? good! i'll go back to being a pain in the ass for my next post. i just had to mix it up a little. this way, even if my next post is rather uninspired and not terribly funny, you'll be so goddamned relieved that i didn't torture you with epic ramblings about how much i love my damned husband that you won't even notice.




(1)okay, so it involves dixie plates, flashlights, and even a black bedsheet that i will purchase JUST TO HAVE THE MOST AWESOME BACKDROP EVER. seriously. i'm going to go out and spend like $20 at kmart on something that i'm probably going to take home and immediately set on fire. now THAT'S dedication to my muse.

(2)not! but i promise i'll get to the point soon. okay, not soon, either. ha!

(3)he doesn't read my blog, because he's a huge turd, and his ego is already plenty big, thank you, so don't tell him that. there's no reason to remind him that a part of me has been in love with him since the moment i met him.

(4)except for the part where the wind chill is negative something. like, negative thirty? yeah. we could do without that.

(5)we did nothing illegal or unsanitary. i swear. not that me swearing means anything, but hey... i went to the effort to say it because i CARE what you think!

(6)for prm to wear to work on those 4-10 days per year that he feels bad for living in scrubs.

(7)i talked to the boys on the phone while we were at a sushi restaurant on valentine's day for dinner - yes, we missed the boys already; we are officially too sappy to be party people these days - and when spazmonkey asked what we were doing, i told him that we were eating raw fish. he laughed so hard that i thought he was going to pee himself. this is why we will not be taking them to any restaurant that does not have a ball pit for at least another 7 years or so.

(8)my sense of irony insists that it would be hilarious now if this story ended with an o. henry twist, wherein the thing i asked him to do out of being overwhelmed by love for him and from him, resulted in an unforgiveably awful haircut that caused me to not speak to his stupid ass for the next six months.

(9)that alone was awesome.

(10)also meaning that he's looking for a sister-wife for me right now. preferably one with huge boobies.

(11)though we do have the occasional setback. like, a couple of days ago, as we were putting a bunch of enlargements of some of our favorite photos in frames on the wall - the twits at 2 years old, alseep on top of each other in a bedroom they had worn themselves out destroying; evilgremlin at 3, abject terror on his face as he dives away from an 8-foot-diameter googly-eyed pink windsock/kite/ball at the park; monkeybeef with his little face scrunched up as he screams with all the horrified outrage his little 2-month-old self can muster, sitting in daddy's lap, prm wearing a smile layered with humor, wisdom, and love that says, "it's all good, baby" - we came up with a plan to make two paper crowns, one reading "mom's favorite," and one reading "daddy's favorite." we'd bestow them each upon a child. when that child misbehaved, we'd rip off the crown and put it on some other brother's head. and hilarity would ensue!

(12)i know you're sitting thinking, "oh, yeah, well, me too!" bullshit. bitch, don't even try to ride my coattails on this one. you know why you've never had this thought before? because it's not true, that's why! when are you going to learn that, even though you're in love with the sound of yourself saying it, something falling out of your mouth like verbal poop doesn't make it true? so grow up, you professionally unfulfilled selfish piece of miserable gen-x shit! oh, and... yo mama! that's right, you heard me. YO. MAMA.

(should this happen to apply to you, you owe me $50 for the totally dead-on pop-psych analysis. should you feel that this does not at all apply to you, it's probably because you're deluding yourself. i mean, does an asshole ever truly believe he's an asshole? of course not. so pay up.)

(13)prm would have me note here that, by "our," i mean "my."

(14)this is also known as "keeping it real."

(15)like, this weekend, after i shared with unwavering honesty every ugly detail, from how i felt to what i was thinking, of some ultimately irrelevant stuff that i should have shared a long time ago, prm, i guess feeling left out of the catharsis party, contributed the fact that he's never liked my perfume. the one i've been wearing for, oh, 5 years. yep. better late than never! so, this is a quest from hell in the making, given that i've tried hundreds of perfumes over the last two decades, and found exactly two that i've ever liked enough to purchase and wear. one's been discontinued. the other makes my husband slightly queasy. so until i get off my ass and seek out the new "me" perfume, it's bath and body works coconut-lime body silk. because smelling tropical when there's a foot of snow on the ground, school's been cancelled for the third time in as many weeks because there's another foot on the way, and it's so cold your boogers freeze the second you step outside, is funny.

(16)go read 12 again. i have a strong suspicion that you need the reminder to quit lying to yourself. yes, you!

(17)not that it couldn't be more perfect with the addition of the legend of zelda wii controller. because nothing is more existentially fulfilling than a green light-up sword and shield to play video games with. seriously. i've thought about this, and i've never been more certain of anything in my life.

witness my bookshelves!

so despite the fact that this house has damn near 3000 square feet - about 80% more space than out last house - we've been living in a state of suspended junkie squalor since we moved in last summer. see, we're sick of shitty walmart bookshelves that bow under the weight of our books, have the shelves so far apart that half the wall space is wasted, and generally look like hell. so, we left our books in boxes on the basement floor, awaiting the day that we would build some massive, sturdy, custom-size shelves. and lo, that day did come. and it was good.





i got them loaded up, which freed up all the floor space in the basement, which has allowed us to move a bunch of crap that was laying around upstairs to storage downstairs... and the house almost looks clean! we don't know what to do with ourselves now. and we have all of a shelf and a half empty - it may not look like this is a huge problem, but you have to factor in that i only permanently keep about 5% of the books that i acquire. i guess it's about time to load up some more boxes to pass on to my other book-devouring homies, or admit that i have a book problem almost as severe as my stringed instrument acquisition syndrome. it's almost like playing six degrees to kevin bacon - i pass most of my books on to smitingthewicked and ra-ra (or to nodamnsense, who then passes them to STW and ra-ra), who then pass them on to another of NDS's siblings, superviking. from there, i expect they get scattered all over the florida panhandle.

i ought to start writing my name and URL in all the books that pass through my hands, just to see where some of them wind up. nerd fun at its finest! it's kind of like this awesome thing my sister and i did for my college boyfriend - we wrote "SHANE IS A WEENIE" in sharpie on every penny that passed through our hands, just to see if he would ever get one back. it took a few months, but he eventually did. this was when i found out his sense of humor wasn't quite as awesome as mine.

okay, bitches. we're off for a weekend of snowboarding and other nonsense with all the homies we have stashed in the denver area for safekeeping. more on that next week. i'm assuming it's safe to promise that, since the chances of me breaking BOTH arms is pretty slim.

WARNING!! LEAVE NOW IF YOU ARE NOT AMUSED BY D&D REFERENCES!

because you suck half-orcish ass, and are not welcome here. quit polluting my cyberspace. you go now.

now, back in the day, when i had one kid and was planning on stopping at two kids, valentine's day was cute. i realized this year that, with three kids in school, i was suddenly going to lose an entire day to the manufacture of v-day paraphernalia.

and no, i'm not some martha stewart hard-on handmade-cards-and-homemade-candy kind of psychopath pain in the ass. i'm talking about some rock-bottom, bare-minimum shit. seriously. at some point, i guess all the teachers of every grade school and preschool in town got together and decided that decorating a box to hold valentines was standard pre-v-day protocol. and you can't just slap stickers and scribbles on a box. because where the fuck might one find a PLAIN box these days?!?! art is cheap in this country, and image is everything, meaning any decent-sized box is covered in slippery artwork of whatever shoes, diapers or beer used to inhabit said box. so only after taping some slabs of faded construction paper (i think the construction paper in this house, along with most of the spiral notebooks, were bought during my own childhood) in various shades of red, pink and white to some shoeboxes, covering them in the stickers that came with the boxes of cheap, shiny cartoon-character valentine cards, did we get to start putting together the actual valentines.

we made nearly 80 valentines today. my fingers actually hurt from the two pieces of tape per valentine to attach the candy. the whole thing was disconcertingly civilized... three little boys sitting around a table for two hours with glue and stickers and markers and shit. PINK stickers, and markers, no less. (i'm not saying i care. i'm saying THEY do. for the record, i think it would be great if they liked the color pink, barbie dolls, and any other gender-role-bucking thing they pleased. however, i didn't just manage to have 4 boys, i managed to have boys so boyed-up they will plant their feet and HOWL if i so much as attempt to take them with me into "the pretty store," which is what they call victoria's secret. at the top of their lungs. every time we approach it. which happens all of twice per year as, stupid me, i attempt to redeem my semi-annual free panty coupon.)




i am contrasting this civilized afternoon with this morning's first hockey practice for the twits. and by "contrast," i mean "apples and tapeworm-ridden dogturds." i don't know why, after 8 years of this shit, i'm always surprised by their creativity...

dramaqueen is chaotic neutral. i am going gray at the mere thought of trying to get him through the next 13 years of public schooling.

(for those of you who can't instantly rattle off the other eight choices besides "chaotic neutral"... this is the part where you go. you go now!)

so, if you've never taken the online alignment quiz, you should do so now... i think it's actually fairly accurate.

this quiz put positiverolemodel at lawful good (which offends him mightily... he fancies himself chaotic good. ha! he only wishes he were that cool.) it pegged me as true neutral. now, a lot of DMs would caution you against trying to play a true neutral character, because it's rather difficult to keep your actions true to that alignment. my last DM cautioned me against it... until he got to know me better. i am actually that kind of an inscrutable pain in the ass in real life, so playing one in the prime material plane is no big deal. i'm the mage/thief who will let the enemy prisoners go, steal from the nice rich man paying my mercenary ass, risk my life to save a member of my party, and leave another party member in the practically-unguarded rural jail if freeing him would interrupt my lunch, all in the same campaign. i rule!

i'll spare monkeybeef the alignment assessment until some future date when he's a little more in control of his own actions. spazmonkey, like his father, is lawful good. he may be noisy and goofy, but by god, that kid ALWAYS does what you tell him to do (even if he complains about it at length while doing it.) evilgremlin is lawful neutral... he may or may not do what you tell him to do, but either way, you're damn well going to discuss why he should. in dork circles, this is known as a "rules lawyer." then there's dramaqueen. chaotic neutral. before we proceed, let me remind you that this is the kid who once crapped himself intentionally to get out of participating in a practice for the preschool christmas pageant. the kid who will say NO! to what i'm telling him to do... as he's actually doing what i told him to do... just to be confusing.

so. hockey. signed the twits up for 3-4 year old hockey at the park district. because why not? the coach starts by asking each kid his or her name. spazmonkey answers the question correctly. dramaqueen answers by pointing to spazmonkey, saying, "his name is spazmonkey," and then shifting his gaze to the far wall, perhaps hoping this will help him to stay unnoticed. yep. off to a good start!

okay, now of course, all the other kids are being goofballs, too. there's the kid who answers with his name, his sister's name, the name of his dog, and the rest of his (mercifully short) life history. there's the kid who, when asked if she wanted a blue stick or a yellow stick, answers NO! and refuses to take any stick. there's the kid who wouldn't stand in line. the one who could not be convinced this was, in fact, hockey, and not baseball. et cetera. i wasn't even worried when spazmonkey started twirling his stick like a double-bladed lightsaber (while dramaqueen, our beatbox-in-residence, helpfully sang darth maul's theme), because two other kids were already having a lightsaber battle with theirs.


then there's dramaqueen. he's the one you see in the middle of the floor, with no stick. this is because he's pretending to be an evil robot. thanks, dav pilkey! at least he wasn't pretending to be a jurassic jackrabbit, instead.


here you see dramaqueen with the stick behind his back. it may look like he's in line with the other kids, but he's actually just near the line. actually, he's deliberately directly in front of the line, blocking it. it's a shame the photo couldn't capture him doing his best daddy-baritone, yelling, "NONE SHALL PASS!"

next, you'll just have to imagine him on the field as the other kids practice dribbling the balls from one wall to the other. i have no photo of him running around kicking the other kids' balls. this is because i had put the camera down to go talk some sense into him.

also, when he was supposed to be doing stretches and warm-ups, he did some breakdancing. while singing the theme song to "cops." i really have no comment on that. it kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it?

happy birthday

so. he ate cake. he threw it on the floor. the baby just turned 1 year old!

in honor of his new status as "almost human," i'm changing his name. (okay, honestly, it's more to confuse you than out of any honor for anything. because i have to weed the idiots out of my audience somehow!)

remember when the twits were babies, and their names were evilgenius and evilninja? of course you don't! anyway, the point is, babies don't have much of a personality, and i can give them a better nethandle after they've developed one. so... like an aztec child who has survived to the age of 7, trogdor is now worthy of his adult name. and his adult name shall be... MonkeyBeef.

don't ask. it just fits.

and, proving that he's related to his big brothers, his portrait shoot went about as well as you might expect. note how much help his father was in getting the boy to hold still for a nice, civilized, frame-worthy pose.






though 95% of the frames looked about like that, there were a few that were good. and i'm too lazy to upload them. they're here.

i can act like a woman sometimes!

i'm officially a shoe whore! a couple of years ago, i had some shoes. i loved them. they fell apart. i went to buy another pair of exactly the same shoes. this was the first time i'd ever cared what shoes looked like to the extent that i would actually go shopping and seek a specific style (my normal method being to go directly to the sale rack and buy the first non-ugly pair that fits.) so that's why i didn't know that shoe styles are discontinued after 6 months. period. i've known this about toys for some time - ever since i started buying my star wars toys myself, in the late 90s. somehow, the fact that they did the same shit with shoes had eluded me until now. i'm generally not in the habit of paying much attention to fashion (you've met my belt buckle, right? thanks, nodamnsense! still the most awesome christmas gift ever.)

seriously, these are the coolest shoes i've ever owned. i have yet to wear them without at least one person saying, oh my god, i LOVE your shoes. so. after extensive googling, i find them still in stock at some korean store... for about $120 a pair, plus god knows how much in shipping. fuckers! so. i start checking ebay for them. like, weekly. religiously. not a pair would slip past me!

after EIGHT MONTHS of this, i found another pair in my size. yay! then, a week later, another pair, and i bought them, too, just so i would have them when the current pair wore out. best of all, they were like $15 each, which was about a quarter of their original price.

then, a couple of months later, i acquired the blue ones.


then, nothing for over a year. i figured the worlwide back-stock of them was finally exhausted... and then, oddly enough, a store called 6pm.com randomly had 3 pairs each of the blue AND THE PURPLE in stock, IN MY SIZE.

okay, purple shoes? even more awesome than red shoes, and the purple had been incredibly elusive. wtf? the goddessess of shopping-as-heroin-for-the-bitch's-soul must have really wanted to reward me for all those style points i've accumulated for being so goddamned awesome all the time.

so anyway. i bought a back-up blue pair, and 2 pairs of the purple. they are pretty, and wearing them makes me smile. despite this, i still consider myself a deep and interesting person. ah, the powers of human denial know no bounds.

three totally random vignettes

vignette #1:
having run through the topics of socks lost in the wash, passive-agressiveness, snowboarding, and ex-girlfriends, among other things, the topic turned to threesomes, and how one might pray to the deities of fornicating to get some divine help in getting one:

jokerjitsu (9:27:16 PM): I'm about to get lucky
jokerjitsu (9:27:25 PM): Luckier than I've ever been before
jokerjitsu (9:27:53 PM): I've got two chicks going at it like maggots in a kill zone
jokerjitsu (9:28:26 PM): And they're looking at me like I'm Orlando Bloom
jokerjitsu (9:28:31 PM): Made out of chocolate
jokerjitsu (9:28:54 PM): A magic chocolate that makes them lose 10 pounds

poetry, or genius? all of the above, and an evil whiff of wrongness, too!

welfareloser (9:52:30 PM): it's kind of awesome.
jokerjitsu (9:53:08 PM): Thank you
jokerjitsu (9:53:17 PM): I can retire
welfareloser (9:53:45 PM): on the money you'll make from the t-shirt sales?
jokerjitsu (9:59:12 PM): That's a damn awesome idea
jokerjitsu (9:59:18 PM): I give it to you
jokerjitsu (9:59:24 PM): For your kid's college future
jokerjitsu (9:59:40 PM): Make 'em up
welfareloser (9:59:43 PM): hehehehhehehe. he'll get it from crude sexual humor! i love it!
welfareloser (9:59:57 PM): it's like getting a hooters scholarship!



vignette #2:
so last night, my husband's midnight snack was a huge, unmitigated bowl of refrigerator-cold kimchee.

my husband is an asshole.


vignette #3:
evilgremlin has curled up on our bed and is watching me play a game of online scrabble against ialsohaveadream, suggesting words and analyzing our strategies.
welfareloser (9:57:00 PM): evilgremlin: "hmm. looks like ialsohaveadream is beating you."
welfareloser (9:57:16 PM): eg: "does he always beat you?"
IAlsoHaveADream (9:57:37 PM): Always, EG. Always.
welfareloser (9:57:42 PM): :-)
welfareloser (9:58:00 PM): eg: "like, how many TIMES have you beat him?"
IAlsoHaveADream (9:58:35 PM): "Son, given enough time the sun will shine on every dog's ass at least once."



anyway. maybe tomorrow i will be motivated enough to post pictures of a certain dickhead's 1st birthday last weekend. but between deciding i was by-god going to practice my banjo AND my fiddle every day, and my awesome*** husband building freaking sweet ceiling-height bookshelves all over every basement wall to hold our 30+ boxes of books, finally allowing me to actually clean the basement, move a bunch of crap from upstairs rooms to the basement, and actually have a damn-near grown-up looking house for the first time in my life... i haven't gotten around to the blogging.



***my husband, in addition to being awesome, is still an asshole (see vignette #2... he just went down for another bowl. and offered to get me one, too.)