Hola de Peru!

Hey kids, it´s December 29th and we´re enjoying our second day in Cusco, Peru. I´ll be making occasional trip posts on our dedicated trip blog, Cuzcotopia. You can use that there link, or the one that I´ve added over there on the side. Doooo it.... dooooo it.

The Great Blizzard of Diggity Six

At the turn of the 21st century, my friends and I were sitting around the Hub, drinking coffee, playing Scrabble, and trying to outdo all the retarded media talking heads who were trying to predict how people would come to refer to the first decade of the century. "The Eighties" sounded great, but "The Oughts"? "The Zeroes"? Here it is, in the Year of Our Lord 2006, and we still don't have anything good. The best we came up with on that balmy California fall evening was "The Diggitys." Individual years would be referred to as "diggity-ought," "diggity-one," "diggity-two," and so forth. As with all moments of brilliance, it comes from the Simpsons -- specifically, Grampa Simpson:

"Now, my story begins in 19-dickety-two. We had to say "dickety" cause that Kaiser had stolen our word "twenty". I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles…"

See? Diggity-six. 2006. Perfect. Please don't quibble with me on the spelling. We decided that "diggity" was the way to go.

So anyway, the blizzard. Our neighborhood got some of the heaviest snowfall in metro Denver, according to the snow pundits. In addition to a good two feet of snow, the wind was fierce, causing drifts five feet high in some places. We shoveled our driveway clear of 1 1/2 feet of snow -- twice. Mr. Plow came by this morning, and hopefully they'll soon spray the mag chloride stuff that melts the streets. The only thing that sucks is it looks like my car will be living at work for the next 2 weeks -- I still don't trust it to not get stuck at icy intersections.

Overall, the Diggity Six Blizzard was a good adventure. I'm just glad we don't see them too often round these parts. Check out the pictures from Wednesday night on Chris' blog. Below are some more.





Here's me, post-snow angel.

This is a view out our kitchen window, looking into our side yard and that of the neighbors. Those fences are about 5 feet high.

Same view, taken downstairs from the computer desk.

Best. Dog. Ever.

More awesome photos later. I just had to take a moment to point out that I have the most prettiest dog in the world. If you click on the picture it will come up bigger, so you can wallow in the cuteness of my dog.

Proof of God... or that I need more sleep.

There are many thousands of tiny things that I must successfully accomplish before leaving on Friday to go home for Christmas. Among them is making a stocking for Chris to be hung up at my house. I was working on it this evening, and found that I needed to quickly dry some glitter that I had glued to a pipe cleaner, so I threw it in the bathroom sink and applied the wrath of the hair dryer.

This process is exceedingly boring.

So I was kind of drifting off and wondering whether I'd get any good sleep tonight (with this cough I've got, probably not) when I noticed one of those little things that makes one think "I bet no one on Earth has ever seen this before," right before doing the math of billions of people times millions of years and realizing that one is probably dead wrong. There were two drops of water clinging stubbornly to the sink basin, each containing a single piece of silver glitter. As the air from the hair dryer agitated the water, each bit of glitter was spinning slowly around in its respective drop of water. It looked like the most abstract googly eyes I had ever seen.

Back to gluing bits of felt to other, larger, bits of felt. Thank you for your time.

The elusive giant bow.

Every Christmas, car manufacturers roll out their "Holiday Sales Event" commercials, which inevitably show a woman being surprised by her husband revealing a new car in the garage or driveway on Christmas morning. It's never the other way around. Ever. But that's not part of this story. What I'm here to talk about today is the gigantic bow that's always perched triumphantly on the top of the car.

Where do these bows come from? Do the dealerships always order a few of these in November to have them on hand for the holiday season? I finally got obsessed enough with this concept that Chris Googled "giant bow" and came up with the company that makes them. So they exist. But I've never seen one on a car, known anyone who has received a car with a bow on, or known anyone who's known anyone who's received a car with a bow on.

I call shenanigans.

Maggie turns four

Attention new parents, including Michelle and Justin. If you're ever looking for a surefire way to remember your child's date of birth or litter number, why not consider getting tattoos placed inside his or her ears? It was with the help of such technology that we were able to learn about Maggie's beginnings. She was whelped on December 12, 2002 and is the progeny of sire Talented Mr Ripley and dam Abita Tinkerbell. Her racing name was TS Talented Tami. She was then cruelly named Tilia by her first family, which I still don't get.

At any rate, yesterday was Maggie's fourth birthday. We thought for a moment about buying a small cake from one of those specialty dog bakeries (one of the things that's seriously wrong with America), but realized that she's a dog who licks her own butt and doesn't realize it's her birthday to begin with. So we candled up a raw turkey neck that we would have given her anyway, sang the song, and watched her gnaw at it. Good times.

Kittens do not equal Christmas.

It's that time again. "You know, ho ho ho, and mistletoe, and presents to pretty girls," as Lucy would say. I love it all. Someday I will have a Christmas with mulled cider and a gingerbread house placed carefully somewhere that my dog can't eat it, and a tree that's not denuded of all ornaments below greyhound mouth height. This is not that year. I'm doing what I can with a little bit of snowfall, a tree that's beautiful above greyhound mouth height, and the promise of some really good stocking presents on Christmas Day.

I also enjoy Christmas music. Most of us do. It's a guilty pleasure to sing along with the Waitresses' song "Christmas Wrapping" or anything done by Bing Crosby. Throughout the years, tradition has also placed some songs firmly in the holiday genre, though they may have very little to do with Christmas itself. Some examples are "Baby, It's Cold Outside" and, well, others. "Winter Wonderland" perhaps. They get by quite nicely with solid winter references. I'm not sure how the Southern Hemisphere feels about these songs. They're too busy standing around the barbie turning snags.*

There is, however, one song that baffles me to the point of apoplexy every single year. It has nothing to do with Christmas, very little to do with winter (or summer for that matter) and makes no mention of anything that reminds me of Christmas.

That song is "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. What the hell, people. I have asked roughly 736 people why they think this song has any right to be a Christmas song, and most of them either try to tell me that it's a song about what people want for Christmas or else that it's about presents, citing the "packages" lyric.

I spent hundreds of hours in high school and college tearing apart lines of poetry. As a result, I'm uniquely qualified to tell you that this vaguely retarded song has nothing at all to do with Christmas. For your convenience, I have reproduced the lyrics below.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things.

Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things.

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver-white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things.

When the dog bites,
When the bee stings,
When I'm feeling sad,
I simply remember my favorite things,
And then I don't feel so bad.

"Aha!" you say, "but look at the mentions of wintery things!" Yeah, but there's more stuff that's non-winter than there is winter stuff. And the packages thing? Let's look a little closer. "Brown paper packages tied up with strings." Um, no. If I got anything of this nature under the Christmas tree, I'd assume it was filled with poo and refuse to open it.

Since it's past time for me to leave for work, I'll leave it at that. If anyone can give me the remotest reason why this song should be accepted into the pantheon of holiday classics, I'm willing to listen. But I probably still won't believe you.

*This description of Christmas, by the way, is what my dad thinks heaven must be like. I sure hope so.

Christmas time is here!

Yay!!! We are shopping and it has been snowing and just now, some Olde-Tyme carolers from the days of yore stopped by for some wassail. Okay, everything but the carolers. We went out and got a tree yesterday. The trees here are really fresh, on account of them being kept out of doors in below freezing weather. Darn thing drank a gallon of water in its first 12 hours in our house.

My parents will be happy to note that it passes the only Christmas Tree Rule that I've ever insisted upon: it can be scraggly, lop-sided, a little bald in places, or just plain sincere looking, as long as it's taller than I am. This one's a beauty, even though we don't have as many ornaments for it as I'd like (yet). I still plan on making some, and Christmas ornaments have a funny way of multiplying over the years.

Here's a couple of pictures of the tree and the front of the house, so you folks can feel the same Hallmarky Christmas cheer that we are.

It was damn cold that night. We are wearing ski gear.


My turn to hold the dog...

OBEY THE HYPNODOG

HypnoDog™ here wishing you a Merry Christmas season. YOU SHALL ENJOY THE BOUNTEOUS HOLIDAY CELEBRATIONS GOING ON AROUND YOU. HYPNODOG™ COMMANDS IT.

The longer you gaze into HypnoDog™'s mesmerizing DazzleTron™ eyes, the more likely you are to think, yes, the couch is a perfectly good place for a hairy collection of dog legs to take a load off. The good couch? Certainly. WHOOMPwhoompwhoomp- WHOOMPwhoompwhoomp [this is meant to be a kind of Flash Gordony-type noise indicating either hydroelectric turbines or HypnoDog™'s amazing powers].

HypnoDog™ also wants cookies.







HypnoDog™ sold separately from HypnoToad™, HypnoGoat™, and the rest of the Amazing DazzleTron™ Collection. Suggested serving pictured. HypnoDog™ measured by weight, not volume. Some settling may have occurred during shipping. Some assembly required. You put it together. Batteries not included. Do not use in the bathtub or while sleeping. HypnoDog™ may include small parts that present a choking hazard for children under the age of three. The Surgeon General has determined that using HypnoDog™ impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems.

My company has lost it: Update

Just so's you understand that I'm not totally making this up, here's a terrible picture of me and Linc together. Linc looks great -- me... well, I thought they had already taken the picture and I pulled my head back in reaction to something someone said. Voila, double chin. But at least now I have this eternal keepsake commemorating the time I spent with Linc, the anthropomorphic, philanthropic hot dog.

My company has lost it.

I just wanted to take a moment to give each of you an insight into the kind of environment I work in. Since I came from a crappy corporate culture, then no corporate culture, I can imagine that you might think I'm exaggerating the awesome qualities of my new company. Not so, readers. My company really puts everything it has into its employees and community outreach efforts.

For example, we are in the midst of our annual United Way campaign. This year's theme is, somewhat inexplicably, sausage. Don't try to reason that one out, you'll just make your brain hurt. Anyway, to represent this year's United Way sausage theme, we got a mascot named Linc. He's a hot dog. On the day we began the campaign, a guy actually dressed up in a hot dog suit and presided over the sausage-themed sculpture contest.

This is only a little bizarre. What really put the whole thing over the edge was something I noticed last week.

Linc has a cubicle.

I mean, someone trussed up an empty cubicle with pictures of hot dogs, signed pictures of other mascots, and similar items to suggest that an anthropomorphic hot dog actually works for our insurance brokerage. They even put his damn name up in the fancy laser-cut letters that I had to wait weeks for.

It's a little bit scary, but mostly hugely entertaining.

Funundrum wants to know

Chris and I had pretty much settled on calling our upcoming Peruvian adventure "Cuzcotopia." I even reserved the blog address and everything.

Until now.

My trainer, who looks like French Connection-era Gene Hackman (pictured), and I were talking about upcoming appointments when he asked if I would be in at the end of December. No, I said, I was going on my trip.

"Oh yeah," he said. "You're going Perusin'."

Perusin' is almost a cooler name for the trip. Almost. I'm not sure. What do my readers think?

Funundrum recommends

Today Funundrum would like to recommend these sock monkey slippers. They are available at Target for the low, low price of $14.99. They are comfy and funny-looking without being cumbersome, and are an excellent choice for anyone on your Christmas shopping list who enjoys monkeys or slippers.

Mostly I am recommending them to let my mom know that I already have some, because they are exactly the sort of thing she would see and buy for me. Mom, I will pretend you bought these for me already. Thanks. You are awesome.


I would also recommend the spider pajama pants I'm wearing, but they were a Halloween-only deal at Old Navy.

Tryptophan: El sedativo de los dios

I'm just now recovering from my turkey-induced stupor, only to find that nothing is still happening around here. We had a lovely Thanksgiving -- check out Chris' blog for a couple pictures -- although it wasn't the same without my cousin Jon around to roll his eyes back in his head and declare "Mmm, tryptophan -- opiate of the gods." It was funny the first time he did it years ago, and it's still funny every time I think of it.

On a slightly unrelated topic, our trip to Peru (which shall be known as Cuzcotopia) looms near. With Thanksgiving out of the way, we have but four weeks to prepare. We've gotten our vaccinations for typhoid, tetanus, and hepatitis A, and I'm beginning to put together packing lists that include toilet paper and hand sanitizer, as well as shopping lists that include rain gear.

The funniest thing I find myself doing, though, is inventing situations in my head that would require well-understood Spanish, delivered frantically and emphatically. Every "Learn Spanish" CD we've gotten from the library fails to teach anything more than sentences that start with "Where is...?" and "I'd like to..." This gets boring quickly, so I started to come up with dialogues that might require me to know the words for "lightheaded" and "extreme blood loss."

This morning, apparently limb loss wasn't even enough to hold my attention, as I found myself daydreaming about being kidnapped and held for ransom by the few remaining guerilla members of the Shining Path. "Somos turistos de los Estados Unidos," I'd tearfully plead. "No sabemos nada del Sendero Luminoso porque somos estupidos y gordos." Emphasizing our extreme ignorance due to nationality and stupidity always seems to go over well with foreigners. Eventually, the little drama plays itself out with the guerillas giving us our freedom because we convince them that we know a guy who can get their leader on The Daily Show. "La publicidad es todo!" I'd shout, while shooing Chris towards the closest beat-up taxi that looks like it could whisk us back to Cuzco. "Recuerde, publicidad mala es todavia publicidad!"

If there's any Spanish speakers out there, I'd love to hear the correct translation of "Even bad publicity is still publicity." I don't know if it will actually come in handy, but I'd still like to surprise someone in Peru -- even if they're not holding me for ransom.

Oh, moisture. How I love you.

Today we had the HVAC man come to our house to install a humidifier. He was very nice and I like him very much on account of the fact that he's bringing us the gift of humidity, something sorely lacking in Colorado.

However, I must take exception to the fact that he used, in context, the phrase "Git-r-done."

Under my roof.

I feel somehow dirty and I've spent the better part of the day wondering how to counteract the low-class energy now hovering around the closet where my water heater lives. Perhaps I should light some candles and create a shrine from my Chambers British dictionary, Chicago Style Guide, and Emily Post's Etiquette.

Celebrity coworkers

Due to my faulty hearing and the somewhat garbled PA system at my company, the following high profile persons are apparently my coworkers:

1. Jayne Mansfield
2. Inigo Montoya

I really don't know what Inigo Montoya is doing at an insurance brokerage, but I'm mentally compiling a short list of people who look like they might have killed his father, so I can befriend him at the Christmas party.

It's almost here!

Several days ago, Chris and I ate at the only Carl's Jr. in town and realized that there's a cool specialty food store right next to it. This is an awesome store that's a little bit Trader Joe's, a little bit gourmet food store, and a whole lot of butcher/deli/dairy case awesomeness. The second best things I saw there were the butter turkey and butter Christmas tree -- little molded pieces of butter, about the same volume as a stick of butter, but shaped like a turkey or tree. Must have one this Thanksgiving.

The best thing I found, personally, was Hob Nobs. Hob Nobs are English oat cookies that are really oaty but sweet enough to be super tasty. They only had regular, not the ones with chocolate on one side. It was during my blissed-out description of chocolate Hob Nobs to Chris that I made a huge realization. I didn't want chocolate Hob Nobs (well, I did but I'm making a point here) -- I wanted Tim Tams.

Tim Tams, which originated in Australia, are better than anything you've ever had. Except maybe Oreos. Alone, they are really nothing more than chocolate-covered biscuits, but don't even bother unless you've got a cup of hot tea. The purpose of the tea is not to make you feel fancy and anglophilic, though if it does... you've got way too much time on your hands. No, the tea is there to facilitate the finest cookie-related ritual in the world (sorry, Oreo). The Tim Tam Slam is deftly performed by biting small bits off opposite corners of the rectangular cookie, then using said cookie as a straw to suck up the tea. As soon as the tea hits your mouth, you'd better pull the cookie out and bite off the other end, as it's busy disintegrating into individual molecules of pure joy.

I ordered some Tim Tams as soon as we got home -- they should be here today. I'm way more excited than I have any right to be.

Bad marketing idea of the day

You know Hostess Cupcakes? Sure you do. They're an American icon, are oh-so-tasty, and sustained a great many of us in the form of vending machine-provided meal replacements in college. (Some other time I'll tell you about the amazing bounty of food available at one of the universities I attended -- it was truly spectacular.)

The Hostess Cupcake has long had a little anthropomorphized mascot -- I think he used to be dressed up in a blue hat and a mustache and named Captain Cupcake. In recent decades, however, he's looked more like this:

I guess the decadent goodness of regular Hostess Cupcakes weren't good enough for some focus groups, so they came out with a yellow cake version that still has the trademark chocolate icing on top. Fine. No problem. The issue I have here is with the resulting mascot:

Now, maybe I'm just looking for stuff to complain about here, but what I see is a tasty little blackface cupcake. I just refuse to believe that Hostess made it through the entire marketing development phase of the Golden Cupcake without someone -- a PR lackey, a vice president, a lowly secretary -- pointing out that this little guy carries some fairly serious negative vibes.

Perhaps I'm the first.

If anyone from Hostess is reading this, you would be well advised to contact me about this so we can come to an amicable settlement to ensure that I don't take this to the forever-hungry gaping maw of the American media. CNN has a lot of hours to fill, if you know what I'm getting at, Hostess. You've been warned.

Man, it's like putting on cozy pajamas.

The imminent destruction of the human race has been postponed slightly by yesterday's election results. With the Democrats in charge of the House as well as the Senate, there is a chance that a few things will change around here. I mean, not that great a chance, because they're all still old white political guys, but a greater chance than there was this time last week.

All of that, plus Rumsfeld stepping down? Ladies and gentlemen, Christmas has come early to the great US and A*. Well, it's come for most of us, anyway. Stephen Colbert is none too happy. I took the liberty of transcribing his emotional breakdown from last night's Midterm Midtacular show because it made me giggle:

Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world -- a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags -- where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants.

OH, AND EVERYBODY'S HIGH!!! WHOO!

Feels good to be a Donkey today, people. Even though I'm not a registered Dem, it works kind of like St. Patrick's Day. Today, everyone is a Democrat. Even you, Mr. President. And there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it.


*PS -- Funundrum highly recommends that my under-40 readership see the Borat movie. For my over-40s, consult me on an individual basis to determine whether this film would entertain you or simply cause you to become cranky and restless.

Funundrum wants to know

Does it seem weird to anyone else for there to be commercials for the WIC* program on a cable channel? A cable channel that is part of a cable package that costs money every month?

Yeah, I thought so too.



*For my international peeps: WIC is a government program that gives food stamps and other assistance to low-income mothers and their children.

Update: I just got this comment from my mom, who works at one of Orange County's welfare offices: "That makes about as much sense as taking a taxi to the welfare office." I do not have much confidence that she's joking.