October 31, 2006 | Books, Memes

I have to admit, I have been waiting for this one. I was finally tagged for the book meme by Nicky at A Skirmish of Wit.

1) One book that changed your life: Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand. I know a lot of people hated this novel, but I read it at exactly the right time in my life. It was liberating.

2) One book that you’d read more than once: Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I love all of his work, but this really stands out as his best. It is a classic for a reason.

3) One book you’d want on a deserted island: War and Peace - Tolstoy. I have wanted to read this novel for a long time, but the length is intimidating. I think if I were stranded with it I could read it.

4) One book that made you laugh: Angela’s Ashes - Frank McCourt. I know it is a serious and sad memoir, but it was hilarious.

5) One book that made you cry: We Were The Mulvaneys - Joyce Carol Oates. Holy shit this book is depressing.

6) One book you wish you’d written: Harry Potter (just for the money) or Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk. I know it’s two, but it is for very different reasons. I think Fight Club is amazingly insightful and well written. It is the best book I’ve read in years and I think about it all of the time.

7) One book you wish had never been written: I really hated On the Road but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I wish it had never been written. Maybe What to Expect When You’re Expecting. That book just lists birth defects one or two at a time so you feel even more terrible during your entire pregnancy.
One book you’re currently reading: The Ha-Ha - David King

9) One book you’ve been meaning to read: I have a four page list running, but I’ll tell you Three Fallen Women by Amy Guth. I was trying to score a free copy, but I eventually broke down and ordered it the other day. Now I’m just waiting for it to show up.

10) Tag people: I’m picking people who I know are big readers mostly because I want to find more good books to read, so Beth, Chris, Sassymonkey, Alison, Becky and Jack’s Raging Mommy.

October 30, 2006 | Parenting, The Goon Squad, Twin Stuff

…and then I took a picture.

I’ll have more pumpkin/jack o lantern pictures up on flickr later, but while we’re on the subjects of things that nobody should ever have to say, the other night I was giving twins a bath and when I was trying to explain why they shouldn’t consume their bath water I said the following out loud - “You don’t really want to drink anything your butt has been in.”

It is true. I know I don’t want to drink anything my butt has been in.

Oh, and yesterday The Goon Squad decided that they liked each other a lot. Well, either that or they realized that when they hug I make a huge deal out of it and take pictures.

Which leads me to the third thing I said this week that I never thought would come out of my mouth.

“No! You guys are NOT hugging. You are going to bed.”

Yes, I went in to check on them when they were supposed to be sleeping and they were standing in the middle of their room. I heard Claudia say “Let’s play ring around the rosie.”

I said “No ring around the rosie. It’s time for bed.” That is when they pulled the “We can’t go to bed. We’re hugging.” and they gave each other a big hug and grinned up at me.

Nice try Squad. It was a good effort, but I’m on to you two.

Searching

I am still trying to calculate the scores from Friday Flicks. Who knew it would be so complicated? I am also working on a meme about books. In the meantime I wanted to share some more of the messed up things people are searching for.

For example, why was someone searching for cinnamon buttcrack? How did they end up here? For that matter can anyone explain the rest of these?
Thanksgiving Flashdance

Love jokes to tell on Halloween

carnivore toys

dad fart

happy butthole

doodlebops drug bust

what is Helloween?

knock knock jokes and “poop”

_____

Okay, I’m off to watch the Halloween episode of “The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” for the third time today. It is one of the few ways I can stop The Goon Squad from trying to hug their jack-o-lanterns that we (and by we I mean Gabe) carved yesterday.

October 27, 2006 | Randomness

Now I’ve seen everything. (thanks Frank Sucks)

I stand corrected. (Frank again)

Other Bloggers, movies

Every Friday Kelli has a game on her site called Friday Flicks. She puts up ten movie quotes and you guess what movie they are from, who said them and the theme of the quotes. I try to play every week.

Rules of the Game!

• I will post the week’s game every Friday morning. You will have the rest of Friday to guess. Sometime Saturday I will post answers and tally points.
• You get one comments worth of guesses, so make it good. You can guess at one or all of the quotes. Just don’t keep coming back and adding more comments.
• In order to get the points, you need to name the movie and the speaker. It can be the actor’s name or the character’s name.
• Only the first correct answer gets points. But go ahead and throw it out there if you think you know. Sometimes the other guy is wrong. You could still win.
• Please be honest in your guesses. Don’t go google it. Anybody could do that. Do you really want to be that guy?
• As for group guesses… no fun if you get the whole team together and knock out every single answer. Just get your friends to play too. I’ll give you an extra point if your friends come and guess and say you sent them.

For the past two months the game has been travelling. This Friday it is my week. Please don’t cheat, make me look good over here. Also go tell Kelli hi and that I sent you because then I get extra points.

See what you can do with these (and try to comment before Gabe because he has probably seen all of these movies a billion times)

1) That guy is tense. Tension is a killer. I used to be in a barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois. The baritone was this guy named Kip Diskin, big fat guy, I mean, like, orca fat.That guy is tense. Tension is a killer. I used to be in a barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois. The baritone was this guy named Kip Diskin, big fat guy, I mean, like, orca fat.

2) We grow copious amounts of ganja here, and you’re carrying a wasted girl and a bag of fertilizer. You don’t look like your average horti-fucking-culturalist.

3) See, when a nuclear weapon detonates it unleashes an electromagnetic pulse which shuts down any power source within its blast radius. Now that tends not to matter in most cases because a nuclear weapon usually destroys everything you might need power for anyway. A pinch creates a similar electromagnetic pulse, but without the fuss of mass destruction and death. So instead of Hiroshima, you’d be getting the seventeenth century.

4) Is this the superintendent?… Yes, sir, I would like you to know that you have a whore living in 2R. Rossi, Janice Rossi… He’s MY husband. Get your own goddamn man.

5) Let me tell you what “Like a Virgin” is about. It’s all about a girl who digs a guy with a big dick. The entire song. It’s a metaphor for big dicks.

6) It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.

7) Say Lou, didya hear the one about the guy who couldn’t afford personalized plates so he went and changed his name to J3L2404?
They all have husbands and wives and children and houses and dogs, and, you know, they’ve all made themselves a part of something and they can talk about what they do. What am I gonna say? “I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How’ve you been?”

9) They say the fucking smog is the fucking reason you have such beautiful fucking sunsets.

10) Now, dicks have drive and clarity of vision, but they are not clever. They smell pussy and they want a piece of the action. And you thought you smelled some good old pussy, and have brought your two small mincey faggot balls along for a good old time. But you’ve got your parties mangled up. There’s no pussy here, just a dose that’ll make you wish you were born a woman. Like a prick, you are having second thoughts. You are shrinking, and your two little balls are shrinking with you. And the fact that you’ve got “Replica” written down the side of your gun and the fact that I’ve got “Desert Eagle point five O”
written down the side of mine should precipitate your balls into shrinking, along with your presence. Now… Fuck off!

_____

Good luck everyone!

PS - Devra and Aviva are giving away free stuff. Go check them out.

October 26, 2006 | Other Bloggers, Sports

1) Two of my long lost friends from High School came to visit me. I hadn’t seen them in eight and ten years (respectively) and it was as if we had seen each other six months ago. It was great. We had a lot of fun.

2) The Bucs beat the Eagles. The Bucs beat the Eagles in the last 4 seconds of the game on a 62 yard field goal while there were seven (well five, the twins were wearing their jerseys, but they weren’t really paying attention) Tampa Bay fans in my living room. We were screaming so loud that we made Ian cry. I felt kind of bad about the crying part, but I’m still glad they won.

3) Gabe made some really good barbecue.

4) On Sunday morning the kids slept until after 8:00 am.

5) I beat Metro Dad in fantasy football.

(Okay, I totally admit this post was just a huge ploy to gloat about beating Pierre. It would have been posted closer to the actual weekend, but I’ve been trying since Tuesday to figure out how to post the scoreboard which I am clearly incapable of doing but the score was 83 - 71 if you were wondering.)

October 25, 2006 | Gabe

I have mentioned before that Gabe and I have a tradition of giving out cards for the wrong occasion or cards in foreign languages. The goal is never to get anything touching or appropriate but to get a good laugh. Our anniversary was a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, I was sick that day so Gabe came home with two cards.

One card was in braille. It was my “Get Well Soon” card.

The other one was my anniversary card. Mark was over here the other day and he thought that my anniversary card from Gabe was funny enough to take a video of and then post on his video blog. Mark also got a huge kick out of what Gabe wrote in it.
Now that you’ve seen it, you can imagine how much The Goon Squad loves this card. What you couldn’t possibly imagine is how many times I’ve heard the first 20 seconds of “The Final Countdown” in the past 10 days. Ian will just walk around with the card and open it up over and over and over again.

On a non-card related note, Claudia is sound asleep sitting up on the couch in her jacket, sunglasses and a string of silver beads that includes skulls and crossbones on it that my friend Angie brought to the kids from a Bucs game. I’m just going to let her sleep like that. At least she is napping.

October 24, 2006 | Son of a...

Those thieving bitches over at Bitacle have now stolen my stuff too (if you are reading this on Bitacle, please stop supporting them now.)

I felt bad for the bloggers that this was happening to, but I figured I wasn’t cool enough to be on their radar. Apparently I was mistaken. I am much cooler than I suspected.

While we are on the subject of stealing, I totally stole this picture from the Sierra Nevada website. I figured they wouldn’t mind too much because I just ripped it off so that I could tell you that I just bought a six pack of it and it is damn tasty.

This is a non-paid, non-solicited advertisement. I just love beer.

While we are on the subject of solicited advertisements, my new buddy Charlie (yes, THE Charlie, the one who was giving bloggers free portable DVD players a while back) sent us a package of Reynolds Fun Shapes.

The kit I got also came with a disposable camera so that we could participate in a photo contest that they are running.

The kit was adorable. They sent stars, hearts and little ghost shapes for Halloween.

I took the Goon Squad out to the store and we bought a brownie mix to use then we came home and started the project.

Here is what I learned:

1) Two year olds are a little young for baking.

2) My kids LOVE to take pictures with disposable cameras.

3) I love brownies.

Okay, technically I already knew I loved brownies. I didn’t get any good pictures because I was usurped as photographer, but the brownies themselves were very cute and delicious. I think these would be really fun if your kids were a little bit older, but mine didn’t seem to get it.

Then again my kids aren’t always the best barometer for what is normal. Today Claudia told me she had a problem and when I asked what her problem was she said “dancing” and then she did a little dance.
I don’t get it either.

October 23, 2006 | Preschool

There is this other mom in The Goon Squad’s preschool class (you know what I mean. Her kid is in their class). She is beautiful. She is always well dressed and fully made up. Until a couple of days ago she was really really pregnant.

When I first met her I was thinking you’ve got to be kidding me. Who looks this good when they are hugely pregnant and has a two year old. Who has time to do their toenails and hair and makeup when they are 35 weeks pregnant? All of her maternity outfits were cute and they all matched. She was probably a cheerleader in high school. She seemed nice enough but I thought I would end up hating her.

It turns out she is great. She is really friendly and nice and funny and very laid back. I like her a lot, even though I would put down good money that she weighed less than I do now at 40 weeks pregnant.

So last Wednesday we are dropping the kids off at school and she says (very nonchalantly) “Yeah, I’m having contractions. They are about eight minutes apart.”

Another mom and I start freaking out. “OH MY GOD! HAVE YOU CALLED THE DOCTOR? GO TO THE HOSPITAL RIGHT NOW!” etc.

She says “No. I’ll call if they get closer together.”

The rest of us begin to make plans on what to do with her kid because clearly she won’t be around to pick him up in three hours.

Three Hours Later

We are all picking the kids up. In walks this woman who is in labor. “Hi.”

“Did you call the doctor?”

“No I went shopping. The contractions are still eight minutes apart.”

“How can you remain so calm?”

“I don’t know.”

Five Days Later

I walk into preschool. I am disheveled. I am carrying a screaming girl. It is raining and I don’t even know where the raincoats I bought for the kids are. I see the formerly pregnant Mom standing in the classroom looking gorgeous.

“So?” I say.

“It a girl.” she says “I had her on Friday.” And she gestures at this perfect little angel in some sort of Laura Ashley outfit with a matching hat. This baby is not crying. She is sleeping peacefully.
The other mothers and I are all stunned. I say “At this point I was still in the hospital. You look great.” All the other moms agree and we laugh about what wrecks we were and someone else says “My daughter is two and a half and I’m still not right.”

How can she be so together? I’m pretty sure that this woman is younger than me. Is it wrong that I want to be like her when I grow up?

October 21, 2006 | Music, Other Bloggers

Karen wrote a post about how she used to be a big loser where she admits to going to a New Kids on the Block concert. After I got done laughing my ass off, I started thinking about concerts I have been to that might not have been that cool in retrospect.

For example, one time I went to go see Strutter. According to Strutter’s website they are “America’s #1 KISS Tribute Band”.

Ahem. So, now that we are all clear who they are it should make it even funnier that the fake Paul Stanley reached down into the audience and put his guitar pick right down the front of my shirt. It’s true. You can ask Tammy. She was there. (In my defense it was even hysterical at the time.)

I also mentioned to Karen that one time I bruised my ribs at a Tesla concert.

Here is another gem. One time at a Cinderella concert, Jeff LeBar (Duh. he guitar player) sweat on me. I thought it was awesome.

Shut up. Like you were cool.
Oh, there are more. (Thank Ozzy that I can’t find a the picture of Lori and me dressed in black spandex mini dresses on our way to the Death Angel/Forbidden show, or you might be looking at it right now.) But I’m not giving them all up that easily. Your turn. Tell me about your embarrassing concerts.