I never really thought to blog about this place.  I spend two hours a day here, twice a week.  Back when I thought I’d be all over Chemistry, it kicked the shit out of me and unfortunately, that was my early class.  So here I sit waiting for my math class to start, and I people-watch.  There are a lot of interesting things to see while people-watching, and I wonder if kids act like this at other, more prominent schools than this.  And it’s not a diversity thing.  I wouldn’t be surprised if half this school was of middle-eastern descent, but that’s to be expected in this community.  Everybody is the same at some level.

A while back I tweeted that I hate everyone between the ages of 16-25, and I still kinda do.  However, it’s a fascinating group of people.  For one, at least in this environment, they don’t seem to give two shits about what I or anyone else thinks of them.  They’re bold, loud, and at least appear genuine.  That’s about how far that goes, though, because the conversations I overhear suggest they’re the most full-of-shit people on the planet.  They’ve all done something to outdo someone else, and it never ends.  I guess that’s to be expected, really.  I’m sure I was the same way at that age.  Maybe I still am to an extent.  I dunno.

Today I saw two people walking through the cafeteria holding hands.  This was obviously a couple, and while I hate to speculate, I’d bet these are two people who don’t have much hand-holding time in their lives, and now that they do, they’ll fly that freak flag for anyone who cares to see it.  It struck me as odd and immature, but what the hell, they ARE odd and immature.  You like how judgmental I can be?

Another girl just walked by and she has leg warmers over her jeans.  Cool, huh?  The guy across the way has a pretty cool-looking Sony VAIO laptop that probably has all the bells and whistles, but the yellow wire running to the wall suggests he couldn’t squeeze wifi into his purchase.  Good thing he got the premium red case, though.  Amateur.

A Macbook in the corner had the Snow White holding the Apple gelaskin, which is pretty cool.

There are a few people doing the same as me – observing.  I wonder what they see through their own eyes.  Do they note the cafeteria worker with the weave that wasn’t obvious enough that she had to get one with bright red tips?  What do they think of that dude typing on his laptop?  What do they think of that guy.  He looks pretty cool.  I think everybody wants to be him.  Modest, that one is.

It’s almost time to mosey on over to my class, which is in another building.  I’ll have to trudge through the frozen tundra uphill both ways to get there, of course.  A small price to pay to have the luxury of sitting here watching everybody.

Heh, a cop with about 9000 keys hanging from THREE belt loops just walked in.  Obvious rental.

Get off my lawn!

I like beer.  If this news item comes as a shock to any of you then GTFO, because why in blue hell are you here anyway?  Actually, you can stay.  Anyway, I like beer, and I’ve been drinking it for a long time.  Back when I started drinking, my body did a great job of metabolizing the Bud Light and MGD Light no matter how much I enjoyed it, but as I’ve gotten older that’s not the case.  Couple that lack of metabolism with my enjoyment of higher-calorie beers, and you have a gut.  Well, maybe not you… but I have a gut.

Last night we went to Twisted Rooster for dinner, and they have several Michigan-based beers on tap, not to mention Faygo!  I came thisclose to ordering a beer that was rated in Men’s Journal’s top 25 American beers, but my stomach was empty and that is one of few times I don’t like beer.  Empty stomach means beer doesn’t sound good at all.  Later on, I enjoyed a cigar on the deck with some Goose Island Summertime Ale, and it was pretty good, but while I sat there I started to think about my love affair with beer.  I realized that just about every day, I make a conscious decision to either drink beer or not drink beer.   I can’t say that I’ve gone a day without thinking about beer.

It’s not like I’m a falling-down drunken fool every night, because really, I’m not.  I enjoy the flavor and the letting loose that beer affords me, but I don’t often get drunk.  That’s not to say I don’t drink too much of it at least one night a week.  I’m what might be loosely described as a binge drinker, because when I drink, I either have one or two, or I have eight.  Yeah, that’s bad news.  Bad for my health, bad for how I feel, and it makes it harder to maintain my girlish figure.

So I think I’m giving it up, at least in the short term.  I really REALLY need to lose weight (I could afford to lose 70 pounds, honestly), and if I don’t I’m going to be in trouble with my doctor, with my health care provider, and with my family, because beer, cigars, and crappy food is going to kill me.  And if I die, I’m gonna be in a world of shit. 

So while I thoroughly enjoyed the good times, Beer, we need to take a break.  I need some space.  I’ll call you in a few weeks and maybe we can go out or something.

The County Fair is this week, and my boys spent a significant amount of time there over the last couple of days.  My niece has a sheep there and therefore stayed the week.  My sister is a horse trainer of some sort so she’s there, too, and ergo, so is my mom, who invited the boys along for an overnight and a couple days of animals and rides on the midway.

I was somewhat surprised by their interest in the rides.  P has always been relatively fearless and will do just about anything for the fun of it, while M is a bit more apprehensive because he’s more apt to think things out and therefore consider the worst that can happen.  This didn’t slow him down this weekend, though, and he enjoyed a lot of stuff that I didn’t expect him to, and that was pretty awesome.

When I was their ages I was at the fair for a different reason, and that was because I was learning about livestock.  I raised goats and was showing them at that time, but I was terrible with goats.  It wasn’t unusual to find me and my cousin holding up the 17th and 18th positions in any random goat show, and we often were able to move up because we cheated.  Yes, we cheated in goat shows.  You see, goats, like people, will jump when you pinch them in the back of the thigh, and we used that to our advantage.  My sister and our friend Louise commonly beat our asses in showmanship, and we always trash-talked like we’d get ‘em next time, but we never did. So we tried our hands at sheep.

We were awesome with sheep.  Every year we were good for at least one big showmanship win and we regularly got excellent prices on our market lambs.  Yes – we raised them to sell them for meat.  Vegans beware, but it was all about the benjamins for us.  We didn’t name them until we were asked by the judge what our sheep was named.  There was no reason to make the mistake of getting attached to the animal, and that was how it was.  For a long time it was easy to make money because we bred our own and therefore saved the expense of buying a lamb.  Spend $100 on a lamb and it cuts deeply into what you hope is a profit, especially when feed and care costs are static, or, at least they were back then.

It taught us a lot about finances and about how food gets on your table, and it did so at a young age.  Occasionally someone would balk at selling their animal, but really it was well understood that this is what we did, and we learned that this was the life of these animals.  Call it cruel if you’d like, but we raised them for the purpose.  Beyond this, we learned about the processing of the animals after they were sold and perhaps some of us took issue with how that was done.  My uncle and I were talking about a couple of processors who were still around now, some 30 years later, and it was well known that one of them was decidedly unsanitary.  This is an important thing to consider, because while you may enjoy the steak or lamb chops of bacon that sits on your plate, remember there is a humane way to get that to your table and there is an inhumane way.  I respect the views of my friends who feel that “meat is murder,” but meat isn’t going away.  We can control how we treat it, though.

I’m pretty shocked this became a PSA.  Maybe tomorrow something different will spew from my brain.

Several years ago when I was more into Netflix and movie-watching I considered honing my chops on scriptwriting, be it television or movies.  I bought myself some overpriced software that would auto-format everything, fired it up, and stared at it.  And stared at it.  And stared at it. 

My mind was blank, so I decided to table it for a while.  And by “a while,” I of course mean “several years.”  You see, I always wanted to write, but struggle with it quite often.  Who doesn’t, though, right?  Perhaps if I were to focus on dialogue I might have some success, and considering what’s headed to the silver screen these days, I couldn’t do much worse, I think. 

I’ve had some ideas in the past but never got around to even writing them down, and they went away.  A couple weeks ago I bought some new scriptwriting software and have been thinking about it quite a bit since then, and have even come up with a couple ideas.  I’ve even got something in mind that has a beginning and an end, both very, VERY raw, but nothing in between.  And no, I’m not telling you what it is.  Not even you, wifey! 

I’ll spend some time this evening getting it down on paper, so to speak, so it doesn’t go away like past ideas have.  If nothing else I can work the beginning and ending I have and the middle will come to me.  I’m pretty excited about it without expecting much to come from it. 

I guess if I can’t come up with anything else, I’ll just sell it to Michael Bay.

BLOCKBUSTER, BABY!!!

I got a curious text message from the missus today regarding dinner plans.  It seems the boys were pretty fired up about making dinner for us, thanks to some coaxing by grandma, and we were not to pick up anything to eat and dinner would be ready when we got home.  I started to think about the things they could safely and easily make and figured there probably wasn’t much that could go wrong.  I assumed I’d get home to a big bucket of soup, or some kind of sandwich-based meal, or maybe something from the pressure cooker that they dumped in.  Like I said, pretty basic stuff.

What I didn’t expect, and what was probably easiest of all, was that they’d hunt down a box of Stouffer’s lasagna and throw it in the oven.  This is something the dog could do, assuming the dog had thumbs, which she does not, which can be quite annoying.  There was a pretty awesome homemade tossed salad that included several items from our backyard weed box, as well as some from-a-box cheese sticks.

As the five-year-old was proudly telling me about this wonderful dinner he and his brother prepared, he said the word “surprise.”  Umm… what was the ‘surprise’ portion of this lasagna?

Again, Occam’s Razor got the best of me, because what else would a 5- and 7-year-old put on top of lasagna to make it “Lasagna Surprise”?

You guessed it…

Hot dogs

umm… yum?

I said on Twitter today that I’d blog every single day until BlogHer ’12, as if I’m actually going to go or something.  The biggest problem with that proclamation is that my life is inherently boring, and really, remaining a Woodersonish enigma is a much more attractive goal than attending any blogging conference, unless, of course, there will be cake.  Nazi, racist cake.  Then I’m in.

New York is a city that was blessed with my presence just once, but it loved me very, very much.  I didn’t make a lot of time for its nightlife, but perhaps that could change the second time around.  I could go and get raked by a cab driver who finds a way to charge me $9 to drive a block and a half, and I could search for a traditional New York-style pizza and wonder what the big deal is, and eventually I could regale you all with stories of how my “almost-seven-year-old still doesn’t poop outside of his drawers.”

Fun, huh?  Break out the confetti!

We still don’t have any idea if we’ll have a spare couple of days to visit NYC, because we have a lot of stuff planned for the summer of 2012 already.  But if there’s gonna be racist cake, COUNT ME IN!!!

I decided to mow the grass diagonally today, because it’s always been done lengthwise or… width.. wise.  But today was diagonal cuz fuck you grass.  Anyway, I’m going around the deck when I see a piece of plastic on the ground, so I reach down to grab it and come up in what feels like a spiderweb.  I brush it off, only to have the “spider web” pretty much double in size, so I brush again, and HOLYFUCKITSASWARMOFBEES!!!  :ahh:

There was probably only about 20 around me but it felt like approximately 4,019.  Thankfully I was only stung twice, but it felt like I got hit in the side of the head with a 2×4.  (Not here, or here so much, but right here)

So FUCKYOUBEES, amirite?  I double-fist the RAID that “KILLS BEES/WASPS/YELLOW JACKETS/SCORPIONS (!) FROM 29 FEET AWAY!!!” and I empty that sumbitch on what I’ve now learned is one of those gray paper hives, and it’s about the size of a small basketball.   I wait a moment, only to pretty much hear a chorus of laughter from the hive as they continue to fly around, only with more vigor and, well, quantity.  Pretty sure one of them called my momma a whore (is she?).

Feeling somewhat defeated, I decide that a bit of pride can be saved if I can just rescue the mower from underneath the nest and continue cutting my grass (which was looking pretty awesome in its diagonally-cut gloriousness).  I slowly walk up the neighbor’s driveway, and about 20 feet from the mower, I notice an angry swarm hovering just above it.  Slowly I retreat.

My next stop is the fridge, where I grab a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and call Mr. Honey, the beekeeper.  Yes, that’s his real name.

Fuck bees.

“If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you ARE! And you should know that!” – Crash Davis

Several years ago I played fastpitch softball for a pretty decent team out of Ann Arbor.  We’d often travel for weekend tournaments throughout the state of Michigan, sometimes venturing into Ohio and Indiana.  We were good enough to play in a few national tournaments, in College Station, Texas; Aurora, Colorado; Hastings, Nebraska; and Eugene, Oregon, where we finished fourth overall in the country in Class C Men’s Fastpitch.  My favorite place to play was a ballpark in Petoskey, Michigan that overlooked the Little Traverse Bay.  This park was impeccably maintained, surrounded by a marina and just a couple blocks from a quaint little shopping district.  Waves crashed the rocks just beyond the left-field fence, and if you hit a ball well enough, you’d splash the chilly water of the Bay.

During a game one evening, after taking warm-up tosses from his pitcher, the catcher walked back to the backstop, kicked the left side of the fence, moved to the right and did the same, then came to the middle and kicked the fence there before taking his position behind the plate.  He did this every inning he played that weekend, and for the most part nobody noticed.  By Sunday afternoon more people were shaking their heads and laughing at this ritual, but by now his team was in the championship game, so who knows, maybe it worked.

That catcher was me.

I don’t know how I started that little ritual, or what significance it had, but we were winning while I did it, so it stayed.  We lost that championship game, and kicking the fence probably had absolutely nothing to do with our success (and failure) that weekend, but I still had to do it.  The beauty of it all was that my teammates saw me doing it, but they knew what it was about without asking.  We were ballplayers.  We all had quirks.

Everybody I know who knows a lick about baseball knows that Wade Boggs ate chicken before every game.  They’ve seen Big Papi tighten his gloves, spit and clap several times every night.  They watched Nomar Garciaparra go through a crapload of ticks and acts before every pitch.  Gloves tightened, bat moving, toes kicking.  Nomar was a show all by himself.  He was no Turk Wendell, though.  Wendell wore number 99, chewed black licorice, brushed his teeth after every inning, and even once signed a $9,999,999.99 contract.

I’m not as bad about this today as I have been in the past.  I used to sit a certain way, no matter how uncomfortable, just because the Tigers were having a good inning, or the Wings were playing well.  In the past few years, however, I’ve wised up to the fact that my favorite teams will perform in any way they can regardless of how I sit, or what I drink, or if I even watch.  One night in 2004 I was working on my basement and saw the Tigers take a 14-4 lead on the Texas Rangers.  That was the night I adopted the idea that with a big lead, I don’t need to watch the end of a game because my team will either win, or lose in a way that I wouldn’t want to see anyway.

So when the Red Wings went down 3-0 to the San Jose Sharks, I quit watching.  They won game four.  They won game five.  Now it was game six, in a thunderous Joe Louis Arena, with a chance to climb all the way back from that seemingly insurmountable deficit, and how could I not watch?  Well, superstition said I couldn’t, so I didn’t.  For about four minutes.  I turned on the game and it was a dominating performance by the Wings, but then something happened in the 3rd period – the Sharks scored to take a 1-0 lead.  Off went the game and I played the Playstation.  Before long I wanted an update on the game, and I turned it back on and it was 2-1 Wings.  The superstition was working!  Now, however, I didn’t want to be far away from the score so I turned on the Tigers-Twins game, but it was in a weather delay (golf-ball-sized hail, for reals!) so I went back to the PS3.  When I turned it back on, there was 1:30 left, the Sharks’ net was empty, and not long after that Darren Helm put the puck in that empty net for a 3-1 final.

Which brings us to tomorrow’s game seven.  What should I do?  Do I stick with it and not watch, while risking missing an awesome game?  Do I tune in anyway, superstitions be damned?  Do I just get drunk and blame the beer if they lose?  Help me, people, my skin is crawling here!!!!

Brothers gotta hug!

They get along really well, probably better than we could hope for.  We see siblings scrapping all the time but these two are best friends.  Sure, Preston gets angry when Matt won’t stop “hugging” him, and Matt doesn’t want to play cars and legos nearly as much as his brother does, but those are minor annoyances between the two boys.  Fighting, I’m not afraid to admit, is non-existent.

Saturday’s weather was decent, at least as far as late December would allow, so I sent the boys outside to play in the snow.  Having been cooped up in the house all week, they were happy to oblige.  We bound them up in their winter gear and set them on their way, and they went ahead and shoveled snow off the deck before making their way down the steps to play football in the yard.  Before long, Dawn was out there with the camera taking pictures, and all seemed well.  Until the scream.

If he has no other faults, Matt has a problem with the truth.  It’s not that he lies, per se, but he certainly does a Yeoman’s job of stretching the truth.  He wasn’t aiming the nerf gun at my head, he was aiming at the window behind me.  He didn’t break the light saber by throwing it off the loft, it fell and broke.  You see, he’s not flat-out lying, but we usually have to dig for, as Paul Harvey would say, the resssst of the story.

“I didn’t mean to hit him in the face, I was throwing the football over his head.”  Umm… no you weren’t!  Preston was in full cry mode, his face was red and he was in pain.  Both boys were now in the house peeling off their multiple layers, and Preston would move to the couch with a comforting cup of juice.  Matt was on his way to the stairs to sit in his time-out.  Before long, Preston was over it, Matt’s time was over and he apologized, and all was well in their world again.  It didn’t take long for legos to take over, and 30 minutes after the football struck the boy’s nose, you’d never guess that something had gone terribly wrong outside.

It’s great that they get along so well, and I hope they do for the rest of their lives, but it’s times like these that probably keeps them close.  I know Matt meant no harm by hitting Preston with the ball, and I do believe he didn’t intentionally throw the ball at his face.  I just hope that next time he remembers what can go wrong when you tempt fate in that way, and it keeps him from prematurely ending another good time.

A couple times a year we make a bad-ass taco dip to munch on.  It’s way too much for four people (two of which are short and loud) but we don’t care, but it’s tasty as all get-out.  An important component to this dip is the nacho, or tortilla chip.  Really, though, the nacho is mentioned solely for the purpose of plugging glamgranola’s site, because I don’t think her husband has one.  Even if he did, too bad for him.  I’m plugging the missus.

You want the recipe, don’t you?

Ingredients:

1 pkg taco seasoning
1 lb ground beef
1 8-oz pkg cream cheese
1/2 cup sour cream
1 jar picante sauce or salsa
Cheddar cheese (shredded)
Lettuce
Tomato
Green onion
Green pepper (if desired)
Olives (if desired

Brown one pound ground beef.  Follow directions to make into taco meat.  Let cool completely.

Mix 8 oz. cream cheese, 1/2 cup sour cream and 1/2 bottle of picante sauce (or salsa if so desired). Mixture will appear slightly pink – this is okay!  Spread out over a platter or large plate.  Chill for about an hour.

Spread cooled taco meat on top of cream cheese mixture.

Layer shredded cheddar cheese (as much as you’d like) on top of meat.

Layer on shredded lettuce.

Finally, add chopped tomato and green onion.  If desired, add chopped olives and green peppers.

Serve with your favorite tortilla chips (or nachos) and enjoy!

Make it for the Super Bowl!  Make it for the Conference Championships!  Make it for Tuesday!  You’ll love it.  :D