Welfareloser's Rules, #31: never, ever, ever throw food away.

this is subtitled ""never cook like an asshole." or maybe the right subtitle is "always cook like an asshole." decide for yourself after you've read it.

so, there is only one way a po'-ass family like mine can do things: NEVER, EVER, EVER THROW FOOD AWAY.

this rule has many exceptions, most involving previous contact with little boy hands or mouths. i'll spare you the details and examples; you get the idea. this rule also has two corollaries that are gospel:

1) if it's not sweet or dessert-like in nature, it is suitable for being baked into a pot pie or empanada. i'm talking everything from vegetables you bought a few too many of for dinner three nights ago, the last couple of chicken nuggets, any potato product whatsoever (okay, i haven't tried pringles, but now that i mention it, is that not an awesome idea? look out, frito pie; here comes welfareloser's pringles-cheezfoodinjectedhotdog-barbecuesauce pot pie! fuck yeah. recipe to follow in a few days. you may be hoping that i'm kidding. i'm not).

okay maybe i should stop pretending i'm so cavalier about it. i'd skip the leftover stir fry. but seriously, the tail end of any unused, uncooked ingredients that are about to run out of shelf life: potatoes, onions, garlic, greens, ... any vegetable you've got that you aren't going to use before it goes bad, (and maybe a few fruits, too) any fresh herbs that you had some leftovers from, any meat... oh, it's not "leftovers night" at this house, baby. i mean, it is; but that's not what we call it. we call it "EXPERIMENTAL TRASH-FUSION MOTHAFUCKIN CUISINE TONGUE-BONER" night.

seriously. that's what we call it. even the kids.

also seriously... i'm not kidding about the pringles pot pie.

2) if it is sweet or dessert-like, it's fair game for a bread pudding. since you can serve still-warm-from-the-oven bread pudding with a scoop of ice cream melting all over it, this makes bread pudding one of the top 3 desserts mankind will ever know (the other top 3 being group sex, and anything involving chocolate.)

take tonight's creation, for example. having been gone for the three-day weekend (details of the most awesome family vacation ever to follow tomorrow night; i'm still trying to catch up on my sleep and that post involves uploading a bunch of artfully trimmed pictures) there were a few things that needed to be dealt with in the fridge before they spoiled. also, i'm slowly trying to clean out the freezer to make room for popsicles... in case it ever hits 80 degrees here. which it hasn't yet. because iowa is AWESOME!

so tonight i made a bread pudding (and by bread, i mean: 2 blueberry bagels, 2 hot dog buns, a strawberry jelly donut, an apple-fritter donut, and 2 cinnamon-streusel apple bagels) by throwing in leftover mexican eggnog and the last of a 3lb bag of cherries i bought last week. and holy shit, is it good. just picking out a cherry and eating it is so freaking good - baking cherries in a fat-saturated steam bath of rum, cinnamon and nutmeg is some sort of blasphemous alchemical magic. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-WOO-WOO-WOOOOOOOOOOOOO! i'm a the best kind of heathen... the culinary kind.

anyway: any bread, donut, cake, or cookies, any fruit, dried or fresh, any nuts, any chocolate or candy bits the last quarter of a bag of toffee chips. a pile of halloween-leftover mini chocolate bars that your kids won't eat (because they're "crunchy," ie, have nuts, krispies, cookie bits, pretzels, etc in them.) and don't forget the eggnog.

okay, so i'm kinda diggin on this whole blog thing, where you can run your mouth authoratatively about any subject you choose, no matter how little you actually know about it, call it a rule for living correctly, give it a number, and pretend you're doctor fucking phil. ah, if only i, too, could make a daily gstringful of money doing it in front of live audiences of overweight white women, then all would be right with the world. anyway, i think i'm going to keep this up, and occasionally blog other Welfareloser's Rules. in random numerical order. because i'll decide later what Rule #1 is. also, at some point in the future, i can assign a ridiculously high number/low priority to a rule, thus subtly enhancing the overall humor of the post.

also? the first time i typed the title, i typed "cock" instead of cook. hehehehhehee.

an open letter to Mars Snackfood LLC

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing regarding your new product, Skittles Chocolate Mix. Getting any of those flavors, let alone all five of them, past the test market stage of development is a testament to pure corporate determination unsullied by trivial concerns of profit potential and social responsibility. Bravo! Dogbert would be proud.

When Bertie Bott's Black Pepper Bean made my 3-year-old cry, I understood. I was, however, rather caught off-guard by getting roughly the same reaction out of my now-five-year-old when he tried your S'Mores Skittle. The horrified retching that accompanied his spitting it into the carpet adversely affected his enunciation, but I believe he stated that it tasted less like chocolate and toasty marshmallow, and more like "melty plastic." Also? Only about 10% of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans suck - just something to consider when analyzing the imminent failure of your new product.

But before the Skittles Chocolate Mix goes down in history with New Coke and Smurfberries Cereal, I respectfully suggest that you rename your innovative flavors as follows:

Chocolate Caramel: "Feces"
Vanilla: "Yankee Candle Co. Sale Rack"
Chocolate Pudding: "Actively Fermenting Monkey Spoo"
Brownie Batter: "Barely Recognizable and Marginally Edible Artificial Chocolate Flavor"
S'Mores: "Melty Plastic"

May your black souls be eternally excruciated as Satan's cock mercilessly slams your unlubricated bungholes for ever and motherfucking ever,

WelfareLoser

he's a brick.... house.

a brick SHIThouse, to be more precise. that is, if the bricks were made out of jello.

funny little baby waddle!

cracker gamebags

this is the name of a game the twits made up. it involves turning the family room into an obstacle course with sofa cushions and beanbag chairs. then there's some bouncing from stripped sofa ("DON'T FALL IN THE CRACKER!") to cushion path to beanbags ("WE'RE ON THE GAMEBAGS! BOSS LEVELLLLLLLLL!!) to piles of blankets. and shrieking. lots of shrieking.

it seems we're on level nine, now. i'm blogging from the sidelines, because i've been barred from playing, apparently for life, i take it from the scowls. seems i was cheating. something about being too tall.

welfareloser's reason's why...

..EVERYONE is going to hell.

REASON #237 PRM IS GOING TO HELL:

may 10th was "stamp out hunger" day. postal workers picked up bags of food left by mailboxes to donate to food pantries. i put our bag together the night before. PRM was rifling through our bag, cackling to himself.

me: what?
prm: wouldn't it be funny if we took a sharpie...
me: no.
prm: ...and changed the brand names on these?
me: i think that's a great way to have the police come knock on our door to have a little chat.
prm: "get a job" brand chips! "fuckers say i don't qualify for disability so i have to eat this shit" brand toaster pastries!
me: republican turd.
prm: "my back pain has nothing to do with the fact that i weigh 300 lbs, now get me a menthol" brand soup!



reason #532 EVILREDHEAD IS GOING TO HELL:

she laughed her ass off when i told her about prm's renaming when i visited her the following friday. but we knew she would laugh; this is the woman who called me "pregasaurus rex" when i was at +60 lbs with baby #4. she accented this with reptilian screeching noises every time i approached food.

but backing up for a moment, the visit started with...

REASON #533 EVILREDHEAD IS GOING TO HELL:

she greeted me at the door with, "nice stripper boots! but i'm all out of ones."



REASON #122 DRAMAQUEEN IS GOING TO HELL:

his penchant for playing backup chords on his guitar while i play the banjo almost makes up for this one... but when i play the fiddle, he likes to stand there quietly, listening. and when i make a mistake, he jumps, winces, snaps his fingers and yells "D'OH!"



REASON #12 MONKEYBEEF IS GOING TO HELL:

he cackles til he falls backwards out of the banjo case every time dramaqueen does it. during new, still-reading-off-the-sheet-music songs, this can happen pretty much continuously, with him not always having enough time to right himself before falling over again. turd.



reason #793 I'M GOING TO HELL:

me: we need paving stones.
prm: okay.
me: you know, let each kid put his handprint on one, shove in some marbles and pennies, write his name and shit.
prm: and spell r2d2. and c3po.
me: right. and so you're walking down our little path, and the last stone is ours.
prm: right.
me: and it'll be my buttprint, with your mushroom stamp headed right for it.
prm: hot.
me: and the neighbors will be too polite to comment... but they'll stand and look at it for a reeeeeally long time.

the healing power of music

so monday? shit day. but prm managed to turn it into an awesome day when he got home, pretty much a christlike feat. so guess what made it all better? well, yeah, that too, of course, but you're not getting pictures of it.

a little bit of this:



(you can't quite see it, but the twits are chasing a pair of ducks that have taken up residence in some of the neighbors' koi ponds.)

followed by a bit of this:


that's daddy's beer spilled down his leg. don't worry; he didn't try to drink it. he just poured it down his own leg because he'd never tried that before. he only attempts to drink daddy's beer if it's a chelada (that would be the budweiser and clamato abortion) because monkeybeef is every bit as big an asshole as his daddy.



and a little of monkeybeef's new instrument, a steel drum:
movie 1 ... movie 2.

notice how he throws the sticks over his shoulder? he does that because he throws EVERYTHING over his shoulder. never even looks around to check on the stuff he throws, he just does it and moves on. as PRM says, no need to teach the boy the meaning of the words "fuck it." you can stop monkeybeef dead in his tracks with a pile of leaves... because he has to throw every. single. one. over his shoulder. now, i must admit, it is useful when he's going through the bag of cans for recycling. he tosses coke zero, a&w, budweiser, club soda, etc, over his shoulder... to get to the chelada cans. those, he upends into his mouth. before tossing over his shoulder. yep.

now, spazmonkey and dramaqueen noticed that there are never pictures of me. i explained that this is because i'm always behind the camera. so they decided to take pictures of me:



so i sat down...

(while they continued to take pictures)

...to explain that it's kind of nice to have my face in the picture, too. so they took some more pictures:


and then i mentioned that it was even better if my WHOLE face was in the picture. so we finally got to this:



...before they ran off and took 300 pictures of their legos.

houston, we have liftoff.

it's official. as of monday night, monkeybeef is finally walking for real. 15-1/2 months old. yay, caution! he walks 5-10 steps, lands on his butt, then stands right back up and walks some more. also? he walks backwards as steadily and quickly as he walks forward. as you might imagine, a huge shit-eating grin accompanies that trick. this morning, 12 hours after he suddenly decided to start walking, i picked him up out of his crib, put him down on his feet, and he took off across the room skipping. seriously. hopping, jumping, skipping - and cackling - all the way down the long upstairs hallway, without falling once. then he walked down the stairs without holding onto anything. prm figures he'll be sprinting and breakdancing by thursday or so.

Happy Mothers' Day!

A conversation with the twits as we drove across some gorgeous fishing water in northern IL last night:

spazmonkey: MOM I WANT TO GO FISHING!
dramaqueen: but i don't!
me: it's almost bedtime now, but we're going fishing tomorrow.
SM: I WANT TO GO FISHING RIGHT THERE! THERE'S FISH IN THERE!
me: yeeeeeah, but this is kind of a long drive. i think tomorrow we'll go fishing at a park next to our house that has a pond with fish AND ducks.
SM: YEAH I CATCH SOME FISH FOR YOU FOR MOTHERS DAY!
DQ: and i catch you some ducks.
me: well, ducks are pretty hard to catch.
SM: YEAH WE CHASE THEM AND CHASE THEM AND CHASE THEM IN OUR YARD AND FRECKLEBEASTIE'S YARD AND ALL THE YARDS AND WE NEVER CATCH THEM!
DQ: i can catch them.
me: how are you going to catch them? nets?
DQ: no. i frow watermelons at them.

Eggnog is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy...

but for proof that god loves me so much more than any of you assholes, you have only to turn to page 52 of "the beautiful cookbook" series' "mexican border flavors," which i was flipping through for cinco de mayo recipes, and see the recipe for MEXICAN EGGNOG, which is the same as regular eggnog, but adds ground almonds, cinnamon sticks and cloves. and the best part is that you serve it chilled! it's a summer drink! score! oh, lord was it good. and it marks the first time that i've successfully made a custard - don't laugh unless you've tried it yourself, dammit. there's a fine line between a smooth custard and a chunky egg drop soup, and across this line, you do not... dude, please.

so the mexican eggnog was actually the only recipe i followed. the margaritas were improvised (substituting half the tequila with passionfruit flavored rum gets four thumbs up... because of the double vision!) the rice was ro-tel, the beans were hy-vee brand, and the shredded chicken was "slow cooked in cider... with some spices thrown on... and some garlic... and some other stuff i found," and the shredded pork was "hey, i don't know what GrandpaMoose and PositiveRoleModel put on it before smoking it, but if i thaw it in the oven in a pan full of beer, shred it, and add cumin, we're calling it mexican!" okay, i did actually follow a recipe for the tortillas. because it's pretty hard to do something "fun" with the big, soft saltines.

RadHippie, ChristmasEveryday, DirtyMartini, FargoBlues and even FamilyGuy (who, as you might imagine, has obligations besides working out and drinking in his time off) stopped by to empty a few pitchers and squeeze a few lime wedges. dinner was late - darkness, sounds of nature (and the blender), a cool breeze, and happily sleeping children (and one up doing his homework) - since everyone had worked late for one reason or another. RadHippie had to brag that he worked late because he slept in til noon. bastard! enjoying that roofie-and-exlax margarita yet?

you'll never need more than this*

and a couple of movies of the kite-flying: movie 1 ... movie 2
this was the first time i had met most of the kids that were out at this end of the neighborhood. there were a couple of 11-year-old girls who were SOOOO nice to the younger kids... climbing trees to retrieve stuck kites, and one even ran home to grab an extra kite string after her younger sister hopelessly tangled EvilGremlin's string when he gave her a turn with his. if you remember anything about your middle-school years, you may remember being a complete asshole. i'm always surprised when a middle-schooler is not just not a turd, but actually a really incredibly conscientious and kind human being. like the time EG was 3, and i took him to a park, and he wanted to run off and play tag with a rowdy group of middle school boys, and i freaked and started to drag him away... but the boys were like, no, he can play! and they spent the next hour playing with him, picking him up to help him climb over things that were too tall for him... it's the kind of thing that restores your faith in humanity.






there was some planting. and some un-planting. and some tulip-tasting. and dirt-tasting. and rock-tasting. because they can't ALL taste like shit, right? PRM bought 3 small shovels and put the boys to "work." (i think he did actually get some identifiable help out of them, too, though dramaqueen was more interested in digging a nest for the ducks that have been hanging out in our yard than anything actually assigned to him.) he's got a second raised bed built, and it's now full of tomatoe plants. sweet! i *think* the last frost of the season was a week ago. TexasRoadKill lost his tomato plants to it. and if there's a may frost, well, dammit, i might actually have to quit making fun of him for putting his shit out too early.

two movies of some crawling... i didn't do the best job of capturing what i think is the funniest locomotion ever - even funnier than the frog-hop crawl - which is running on all fours. not hands and knees. hands and feet; ass up. there's a little bit of it here, though. movie 3 ... movie 4



and our backyard has started to bloom, so we have three separate vases of flowers on the table right now, which is kind of awesome!

okay, we actually only own 2 vases. so the small yellow tulips are in a hookah bowl. whatever!

so all that plus some grilling and picking pretty much sums up our sunday. we got all the kids bathed and in bed by 830... remembered to bring the guitars and fiddles and banjos back inside when it got dark... SpazMonkey only needed like 6 bandaids to get through the day... i think that qualifies the day as "a success."



*as in:
You think you'll be happy if granted one more wish
But the truth is you'll never need more than this.

they're song lyrics, damn you. keep up, now.

great song. great album. my current favorite album, actually. vanessa carlton is a genius. also? she sings in my vocal range, so i can sing along really, really loud to her albums without my voice doing a 13-year-old boy impersonation. track 4 will make you cry. and track 9. and track 10. the title track, though - track 7 - will probably do nothing for you, since it was specifically written to be my theme song.

saturday night... SPECIAL.

positiverolemodel, having momentarily left his ass unattended, got it spanked. by a six-months-pregnant stripper.

your imagination can probably fill in the rest of the details.

except for the bucket of KFC we ate at 3 AM. bet you would have missed that.

reason #759 that i'm going to hell.

the baby spent all day friday crawling.

at most, he'd do some cruising.

but give him a cake batter ice cream/ cream soda float? yeah. he'll walk for that.

coldstone cake batter ice cream: overcoming baby too-pussy-to-walk syndrome since 2008.

so that was friday night. do the math. between friday afternoon and friday night, there were 15 other reasons i'm going to hell. because i am nothing if not efficient.

reason #743 that i'm going to hell.

so yesterday was one of those patented midwestern on-again/off-again rainy days... it'd rain for 3 minutes. then it would be sunny and humid. then cloudy. then sunny and rainy at the same time. then cloudy and pouring. then cool and breezy and sunny. then hailstones came flying. etc. and every now and then, the wind would pick up, and blow the rain damn near horizontally (to the point that i had to close windows a couple of times to keep the carpet dry.)

school lets out at 3:00. between 3:05 and 3:10, the kids that live on our block come tromping up the greenway that divides the two rows of backyards, then up their respective back stairs.

so at 3:00, it was sunny. at 3:03, the wind suddenly picked up and raindrops the size of walnuts went flying at about a 45 degree angle. and, from my don't-wake-the-baby-during-naptime fiddle practice spot on our (safely screened-in) back porch, i could hear, all at once, the howling of several dozen indignant children from about a 3-block radius. it quit raining two minutes later, and a bunch of soggy, pissed-off kids came running home with their umbrellas turned inside-out.

and it made me think of ben kenobi saying, "I feel a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced."

and it took me quite a while to stop laughing.

weekend update

for the adults, the last couple of weekends have involved lots of fishing and shooting during the day, grilling and chilling at night. no pictures of any of the parties, because i'm lazy. i didn't take the camera along for any of the shooting, either, which is a shame, because one of the 3rd year residents, PimpDragon, brought his little beretta handgun. it's a shame that i didn't get a video of the 4 of us going through about 50-60 rounds and putting exactly 3 holes on the paper target. my accuracy notwithstanding, i still maintain that i need a handgun. for fly-fishing. you think i'm kidding.

i did bring the camera along for last weekend's fishing trip. it was, at 39 degrees, actually colder than the previous week's fishing trip. that's not including wind chill. at 20-30 miles an hour (we had spent the previous day hiding in the basement from a tornado again), i'm thinking windchill was significant. fuck it, it took us all day to warm up after 2 hours on the water, but it was still an awesome day out!

i call this one "still life with man-ass"








on the way home, we stopped at the grocery store. PRM, not surprisingly, hung out by all the meat:


and i covered the refreshments:


and then we went back to accidentprone's for some grilling and movie-watching. despite his philosophy that "women love assholes," and his tendency to call her "piggy" (the second-worst term of endearment i've ever heard someone use with a straight face), make fun of her accent, and ask if she had a driver's license for her mule back in "whatever country you're from," accidentprone can not only get, but also keep, a real live girlfriend:

despite the fact that PRM enjoys refering to her as accidentprone's mail-order bride, she's a graduate student, meaning she doesn't have to put up with accidentprone to keep her green card. she puts up with him because... well, i don't know. secret anthropological research into the mating habits of assholes, maybe.

notice that my nose is still red as we watch a movie later:


PRM had to take some refrigerator porn. he's impressed by the quantities of pickled vegetables in accidentprone's fridge. he says this picture is to show that accidentprone "isn't fucking around."



as for the other half of the weekends, activities with the kids... have i mentioned how much i love the kids in this neighborhood? there's ScreamySpaz, who is kind of like a taller, blonder version of Spazmonkey. like Spazmonkey, all dialogue coming from her mouth will be written in all-caps... because that's how they talk. even if it's just asking for a glass of water. IT'S JUST ALL SO EXCITING!!! i would steal her and make her mine if not for the certainty of hearing damage to everyone else in a household that contained both ScreamySpaz and SpazMonkey. anyway, ScreamySpaz and her big sister PrincessNinja have been over quite a bit for the monkeybars, scooter-riding, tag, and lightsaber fighting... but strangely, one day PRM, using some sort of jedi mind-trick, got our three oldest and the two girls to rake the leaves in our yard... and they thought it was fun! they were actually begging each other to take a turn with the rake!






the two boys a couple houses over, ArmyOfOne and SuperFly, also own 8 million lightsabers:



we got mariokart for the wii, with 4 steering wheels. it came in the mail wednesday. i opened the box, and left them out on the kitchen table, thinking the boys would be thrilled when they discovered it. they never discovered it. they spent the entire stretch of time between dinner and bedtime attempting play the star wars theme music on an accordion and two harmonicas. if you know anything about degrees of difficulty of music, you already know that this was a spectacularly unsuccessful endeavor - not for lack of trying, though! they finally noticed the stuff thursday... and declined to play it, since there was more interesting stuff going on outside. losers! it was all ours. briefly. but back to that in a moment.

here's a little something i didn't know about may day. the twits came home from preschool with "may baskets." they were little green plastic baskets, lined with rainbow-stripe tissue paper, decorated with pictures of flowers they had cut out and colored, and filled with a mix of cap'n crunch, m&ms, and gummi bears. the only explanation i got was "it's a may basket. and i don't like to kiss anybody." later, FreckleBeastie and PaleFace (NewfieMama and RadHippie's kids) walked by with their own maybaskets. Then ArmyOfOne and SuperFly. EVERY kid on his or her way home from school had one, and there seemed to be a lot of excited discussion going on about them. finally, EvilGremlin came home with his (filled with corn pops and skittles), and i got the full story: you leave your may basket on someone's doorstep, ring the doorbell, and run. if they catch you, you have to kiss them.

so the rest of the afternoon, the doorbell would periodically ring. my boys waited to the count of ten to avoid catching anyone (who would then have to kiss them) before retrieving the maybaskets left for them. SpazMonkey declared the basket full of mini marshmallows and twizzlers HIS, period, but other than that, they shared them in the backyard; 12 kids passed around at least that many maybaskets full of dinner-ruining goodness. at some point in the evening, they wandered into the house, and found me and PRM jumping up and down, laughing at each other, calling each other very long, expletive-ridden names, and occasionally beating on each other (this passes for "friendly competition" around here, so long as nobody's crying or bleeding) as we played mariokart, and the boys finally decided to take a turn at it.

so we had an 8-boy mosh pit (9, if you count monkeybeef, though his only contribution to the mariokarting was to periodically clamber over the obstacles to smack at the buttons on the tv, and then cackle as the big boys howled) for a while before dusk and everyone's mom's starting calling them home for dinner and baths and homework. and let me tell you, that many boys between the ages of 5 and 9 is about the cutest damned thing ever. they're all trying to be cool, and all failing miserably. it's kind of like a midget version of revenge of the nerds. they have a loooooooong way to go before they actually impress girls with their chest-pounding, high-fiving, smack-talking, shoulder-punching displays of testosterone.



as for the coming weekend: friday night at the pub after work with the homies. because 5-7 pm is half-price half-gallons. not to drink there; we're not alcoholics. you take those home to drink later. the mug club mugs that we do drink there with our wings and cheese fries are only about 1/4 of a gallon. see? we're not assholes.

saturday morning, while PRM takes his mock board exam, i'll be at the grocery store on the corner. they're having a "children's olympics." all i know is that this will involve competitions and prizes. and probably me singing. because my impulse control at 10 am on a saturday? not so strong.

saturday night... PRM actually extracted a promise from me NOT to blog about the plan for saturday night. i can only tell you that MyEvilTwin and i formulated the plan. and it is good. and i will not have cash in my wallet. at least, not at the beginning of the evening.