The Life Of The Party

My father-in-law, ladies and gentlemen.

New Years Drinking Plans

I'm gonna mix this with Franz's top-shelf vodka. He loves it when I drink the good stuff.

Bodacious P In Da House!

Christmas Presents

I know, I know. It's been a while. I've been busy as all hell, but I expect to have some free time soon to have a blog-post orgy. Or something like that.

In the meantime, here's the stuff I got for Christmas.

New jacket and hat. I'm wearing them. Duh.
A new martini shaker and flask. That'll be good for my...uh...drinking.
Planer boards. So's I can slaughter the fishes next year.
Sweatpants. I been wearing 'em.
Sweatshirt. The gray one. I'm too lazy to remove it from the closet.
Colorful sweater. Here it is in the washing machine.

And here I am wearing it, in the company of my in-laws, Franz, and Juan Valdez.
2nd best movie ever. Anybody know the first best?
Assorted candies. I loves me some muthafuckin' Junior Mints.
I love getting stuff.

Hmmmmmmm

I just received 200 donation envelopes to a church I don't belong to. Seems a bit presumptuous, eh?

Thanks! I Think...

Since Franz's kids outgrew their Kitty Cat snowmobile, it ended up getting dumped dropped off at my house. When I saw it sitting sadly in my front yard, I lovingly brought it into the refuge of the garage, where it proceeded to leak an entire tank of gas onto the floor.

"Oh yea, there's a gas leak", I was informed. No shit? My nephew then tried to fix it with tape (yes, that gas will be no match for some tape!) and refilled the tank, which proceeded to leak all over my garage floor. Again.

When I finally got around to fixing it myself, I found that there was a crack in the fuel line. I bought a new one, put it on, and filled up the gas tank. Oh, crap! Forgot the hose clamp. More leaking.

My garage smells terrible.

Anyway, once we finally got it fixed, the kids were off into the night.

We have a lot of land around our house, so I was able to build a pretty extensive trail system. The kids then freaked the shit out of my by taking off into the woods 200 yards from our house. That sucked, and it was a really long run to catch up with them. Running sucks.

So I've basically spent the last 4 days watching the kids ride this thing. I'm kinda jealous. It doesn't move very well when I get on it.

Fun With Hair Extensions

Lazy Sunday

I Went To An Ugly Sweater Party...

...and somehow ended up wearing a woman's shawl.

I declared that I was going "shawl-out". Yes. Yes, I am very funny.

See that candy cane hangin' from my neck? It fell in the toilet. And I still ate it.

Holly Ball

Another December, another Holly Ball. As usual, I hate getting pretty but have a blast once I'm there. No super-exciting stories to tell, so I'll let the pics speak for themselves.

The crew:
The Franz
Some guy wiping his nose
See me shake it. Shake, shake shake.
Check out the lady in the background!

Rockin' The Zubaz

I know everyone has been jealous of the Zubaz we've been wearing in the infield the last couple years, so prepare to be blown away. They've stepped up their sponsorship, which means - that's right - MORE ZUBAZ. The kit design isn't complete, but here's a guess and what I will look like next year.

Yes, the head size is to scale.

Zzzzzzzzzzzz

I'm tired.

Maybe Franz gave me his mono. Though, I didn't kiss him, so that seems unlikely. Oh, did I mention? Franz has mono. He's combating "the kissing disease" by sleeping lots and working out twice a day. Pretty sure he's going to die.

I fell asleep at 8:30 on Wednesday night, and I felt awesome yesterday. Then I went to bed at 1:30 AM last night and I'm draggin' ass today. I'm in the middle of a 4-hour demo of the new testing capabilities of Visual Studio 2010. The first two hours were good, but it's Friday. My brain is shut down.

Since my employer has "use-it-or-lose-it" vacation, pretty much all my coworkers are out of the office for the rest of the year. Oh well, no one to bug me. I better be productive!

I hope the tone of this blog post properly conveyed exactly how frumpy I feel right now.

Real Christmas Trees Are Fun For No One.

Since I'm always a ray of fucking sunshine around Christmas, Kristin decided it would be an awesome family activity to go cut our own tree. In theory, that sounds great. In reality, however, it kind of sucks. First of all, we were about a week too late, so most of the good trees were gone. It was also cold. Like 5 below. And here we are, wandering around a tree farm finding something wrong with every damn tree we see. All the while, the kids are getting more and more annoyed (and annoying!). Addi kept tripping over stumps, because it's apparently not in her nature to look where she's going. It took over an hour to pick out that damn tree, then I got the joy of putting it on top of my Explorer and scratching the shit out of the roof. It also cost more than most fake trees.

OK, so it probably wasn't all that bad, but I was crabby as all hell. I did get a chuckle out of the buck-toothed llama in the petting zoo.
And the world's unhappiest Santa (though I would have been unhappy, too, if I had to sit in a freezing-ass cold barn with a bunch of stinky animals).
Evidently, Addi has now overcome her fear of horses, because we were able to go on the hay ride and she even touched them afterwards.
Once we got the tree home, I carried it through the house while it dropped needles everywhere. We then discovered that our tree stand was not big enough, so we had to haul the damn tree back outside, dropping needles all the way. We went to the store and bought a new stand, and the rest of my family began to decorate it while I attempted to watch football. Because I hate decorating things.

The kids had a good time, and I got sent to my room for being a crabby fucker.

In the end, I guess I'm glad we did it. It smells awesome, it looks nice, and it's festive as fuck. Maybe I just need to bring some rum with next time.

Eew.

No wonder no one shops at Big K anymore.  They have this shit displayed at the registers.

Is there really anyone out there who sees these and thinks, "YES, this is what I've been craving!  Hot and spicy watermelon rings!"

Eew.

No wonder no one shops at Big K anymore.  They have this shit displayed at the registers.

Is there really anyone out there who sees these and thinks, "YES, this is what I've been craving!  Hot and spicy watermelon rings!"

How I Got Kicked Out Of The Dorms

When I left for college, I wasn't what you'd call "mature". Or "responsible". Or "ready handle life on my own". I was more into partying and girls. It didn't help that our dorm director was a bitter, man-hating lesbian.

It took only 2 days for me to obtain my first alcohol violation. Fortunately, I brought down almost my entire dorm floor with me! There were super impressed. We were all hanging out and drinking in my neighbor's room and I had to piss. I took my drink with me to the bathroom, and on the way back, our RA saw me. With drink in hand, I sprinted back to the party room, dove inside, and locked the door. He'll never know where I am! Then, 10 seconds later, knock-knock-knock. Shhhhhh...don't let him in! Oh, snap! He's got his own key! Almost 20 of us got popped because of me. Oops.

Prior to leaving for college, I had sold my Blazer and bought a Sunfire (which was a huge piece of shit, but I won't get into that now), so I didn't have room for my two 15-inch subwoofers anymore. What to do? Put 'em in my dorm room! We could rattle the walls all the way to the end of the hall. This nabbed us 3 noise ordinance violations (which seemed pretty weak, but apparently they add up).

I also had an affinity for wandering around at night. Ya know, just to see if anyone was awake. Well, it's frowned upon to be aimlessly wandering the female floors alone in the wee hour of the morning. BAM! Escort violations.

At this point, I'd been at college for almost a month, and had clearly learned nothing.

My roommate and I figured out how to open doors with a credit card, and we had an awesome plan. We were going to sneak into the room of some girls we knew and hide an open can of tuna somewhere. It was gonna be awesome. Ya know what's not awesome? Getting busted on a girls floor at 2:00am with a beer in one hand and an open can of tuna in the other by a bitter, man-hating lesbian. Bitch was piiiiiiissed!

She tried to kick me out then and there, but the college decided that I should have another chance. Think I made the most out of it? If you said "yes", you don't know me very well.

Generally, when we bought beer (or, had beer bought for us), we would come up with some creative way of sneaking it into the dorms. Sometimes we'd empty out a case of soda and refill it will beer. Other times we'd hide it in our laundry. Sure, this is easy with cans, but what about returnable Busch Light bottles?

Using my superior intellect, I threw a flannel shirt (don't ask) over the box and attempted to sneak up the back stairs. Guess who just happened to be coming down at the exact same time? "What's in the box?" she asked. Because I'm cool under pressure, I replied, "A hamster".

Then, I ran. I ran as fast as I could. Down the stairs, out the door. I sprinted to my car as the bottles clanged in the box. I threw the box in the trunk and was about to get in the car and take off when I got boxed in by Public Safety. That bitch called campus security on me!

I got out and ran again. They pursued me on foot. Fortunately, they were very very slow, and I was able to evade them and find refuge in a friend's room.

Eventually, though, I had to go back to my room. As expected, they were there waiting. I got screamed at for a while, which was fun. I was also informed that they had put a boot on my car. Because it was used in a crime. What the figgity fuck? A crime? Wow, someone takes their shit too seriously!

The next morning I had a meeting with whoever the fuck is in charge of all the dorms to explain myself. I apparently did a poor job of that, and I was informed that I had to vacate at the end of the semester, which was 4 days away.

I had to get the police involved to get the boot off my car, but I still had to pay $100 in parking tickets because I was unable to move my fucking car because of the fucking boot. I tried removing it myself, but someone called campus security again and they came and screamed at me in barely-understandable English.

So, anyway, I moved out, met a little blonde hottie at the beauty academy, knocked her up, married her, and lived happily ever after.

I feel like I learned a lot from my time in dorms. Like, don't mess with someone who hates penises.

Super-Hot Dragon Jacket

I fucking love WalMart!

They're Right Fucking Here

Recap of the last...shit...5 days? Huh? 6 days? Fuck.

So when we left off, I was getting drunk at our company Christmas Holiday party. We finished off the bottle of sub-standard rum I brought, just in time for happy hour specials! I kept a pretty low profile since I had to drive home, but a couple of my coworkers got all sloppy drunk. One threw a dart (yes, a real fucking dart) at our manager, and another got cut off by the bartender at 8:00pm. Oh, and the only two girls in our whole department were making out most of the night, then getting mad if everyone wasn't watching. Gotta love those attention whores. Wait...what the fuck am I complaining about?

Friday was a "working from home" day. I was dead-ass tired and spent most of the day on the couch.

Saturday I went hunting with a buddy up in Alexandria. We flushed 30-40 birds and shot 4. We should have shot more, but I didn't buy T3's gun from him so I can't shoot straight. Bandit had a blast, and I got to hunt behind a couple awesome Springers. After trudging through the brush all day I could barely make it home without falling asleep. Seriously, I was convinced I would have to pull over and take a nap.

Sunday I was equally worthless, and was crabby as hell to boot. We went to the tree farm to get a Christmas tree (more on that in another post). There was a petting zoo and hay rides. It probably would have been fun if I hadn't been such a little bitch about it.

I spent the rest of the night watching the Vikings suck it up. What the fuck were they doing out there? I know I shouldn't be panicking after one loss, but we got absolutely demolished! We got outplayed in every single way that a team can get outplayed. Worse than anything, we got out-coached. I've been saying for years that Childress is worthless and we've been winning in spite of him, not because of him. I can't foresee this team making it very deep into the playoffs. Not the way we played on Sunday night, and not with Brad Childress at the helm. Though, I hope they prove me wrong. Next week doesn't look any easier.

The last two days have been crazy busy at work. I did 3 product demos yesterday, with plenty more to come. It's been a fun ride so far, gotta keep it going.

I made pheasant poppyseed casserole on Monday night and have been eating the leftovers for every mean since. Hot damn, that's nummy!

In other news, I still don't have socks that fit me. Kristin bought me some fucking knee-highs. I can't deal with that shit. I may have to - GASP - do my own shopping!

I've also been lifting consistently for 5 weeks now and I'm starting to see some good results. However, now that my shoulders are bigger, all my shirts are too short. Stupid long torso...

I'm going to have to start watching what I eat. The offseason has not been good to me.

My max power on the ergo is still pretty good, so hopefully that's a sign of things to come next season. I don't want to get too eager, train my ass off all winter and burn out by June, but I'm starting to get excited to ride.

I'm also going to switch to skiing this winter instead of snowboarding. I've been snowboarding for like 10 years and I'm still not very good at it, so it's time to go back to skis. I'll rock the terrain park on my twin tips. Or I'll crash and everyone will laugh at me. Either way, someone will be entertained.

Door Prize

Yippee.

Let's Add Bowling To The List Of Things I Suck At

I blame the rum.

Company X-Mas Party

I'm sneaking this little guy into the venue so I don't blow all my cash on drinks today. I'm frugal!

Excercises In Futility

Look Familiar?

I figured out how to get Android running on my laptop, because I thought it would be cool. Well...it's really not.

Turns out, it's a great OS for a cell phone...not so much for a PC. I think it will prove useful for testing apps, but without being connected to a cellular provider the functionality is very limited. The fact that there's no App Store makes it nearly useless.

It's still kind of fun to do, though.

My Baby Is 4 Years Old!

Addi has grown up so fast! It makes me sad and happy all at the same time. I remember when she was just a chunky little baby, so fat the doctors couldn't even find veins in her arms.

From day one, she's been an absolute joy. When I found out we were having a baby, wanted another boy. Now, I wouldn't trade my girl for the world.