Overheard in the grocery store

I walked past two girls in their early twenties, who clearly and joyously have not bought a membership in my neighborhood's Plastic People and Soccer Moms club.  They were kind of hip, kind of punky, but not too much.  Anyway, it went like this.

Tara:  "Well, I totally nailed the baking brownies thing.  At least I got that done okay."

Girl B: "Tara, honey, I have to tell you something.  Those were the worst brownies I've ever tasted in my life."

I guess it's good that Tara heard it from a friend.  I was laughing my ass off though.

Stupid calendar

So I'm standing in the kitchen, eating half a turkey sandwich, as you do, and I'm staring at the magnetic calendar/whiteboard thingy that's stuck to our fridge.  It was left on our front door by the Real Estate Wizard.  He's got a name, but when you've invested in a moniker like the Real Estate Wizard, you expect other people to roll with it.

At any rate, the calendar has little pictures to go with each month -- tulips in April, a starfish on a sandy beach in August, and a snowy plains scene in December.  Here's my problem with this, and all other similarly-themed calendars: speaking as a human-type person who lives in a place with seasons, I don't need to look at the calendar in January and see MORE F@*KING SNOW.  I want to look at a picture of palm trees waving lazily in the tropical trade winds, you know?  And maybe in August, when we're all sweating our balls off because [this bit of the blog has been redacted by the Coalition for Coloradans for Upholding the Myth of Perennial Cold], I'd rather see some ice skaters or a close-up of a snowflake or something.

Dunno.  I can't be the first person to have thought of it.

Grandpa Bob

My grandpa Bob passed away this last weekend.  I'm sorry to see him go, but he was happy and healthy right up until the end, and that's the most that anyone can ask.  Here's the last picture of him, taken just a couple of weeks ago on my dad's CrapCam.  He was doing what he does best, which is having way too much fun with the simplest of things -- in this case, a rubber chicken.  Okay, that's the second best thing he did -- the first best thing was being able to fix anything with duct tape and sheer will.

I'm back, and from this end, I look a lot cooler.

For the last couple of months, this household has been running on the worst cobbled-together computer equipment you've ever seen.  Our old PC died, so we had the hard drive plugged into my 8-year-old Dell laptop, which features 256 centimeters of RAM and a dejected demeanor.  It was good for viewing one -- if you were lucky -- website at a time, and not much else.  Especially not blogging, as uploading pictures and such took forever and a day.

That all changed this last weekend, when we finalized the adoption papers for our new Mac.  It's so pretty, and there's no irritating buttons, cord jacks, little blinking lights, or much else on it to indicate that it's a mere machine.  Remember the monolith from 2001?  Now make it out of brushed silver and put a silhouette of an apple on the front of it. If you wish, you may tape a sign to the front that says, in large, friendly letters, "Don't Panic," but that would disturb its qi.  Please do not disturb the qi of my new Mac.

So once again, I have a permanent computer where I can upload photos (they've all been living on my camera for ages) and generally entertain the two people who ever check into Funundrum anymore.