Yeahtwins Where adventurageous still means something

Possibly one of the best conversations that I have had recently with Veronica is about beer.  While that is probably not something that most people openly admit or go running around telling people of the world, I think it is pretty clear from my track record that it is something that I would end up posting on this site as I have almost no common sense.   All that said I should probably point out that my wife has taken to drinking beer, my guess is because one needs to become intoxicated to live with me and that it is the only alcohol that is readily on the premises – and going to the store to continually buy something else might clue me in.

Also for your consideration is that it is entirely possible to get into odd habits that become hard to explain to others.  For instance my grandmother drank Tawny Port for decades because when she and my grandfather were first married it was what they could afford to make an attempt to impress their parents when they dropped bu, and would get drunk on it afterwards.  For most of my life I have been drinking Labatte Blue because my father drinks it, and managed to start drinking any beer that was cheap during my long stay at being unemployed.  Last Friday, before going to work, I was pulled aside by my loving wife and simply told, “We are not broke.  You don’t have to buy crap beer anymore.  It is ok.”

Now I know two things that are worth pointing out, the first is that Yuengling isn’t that exotic of a beer or what most people would classify as a “high class beer,” as I will not be pulling out my monocle and top hat while drinking it.  The second is that there is a rather large beverage center that is located rather closely to me.  Both of these things are true, but in the same instance you don’t tell your kid to plan a cross country road trip the moment that they get their license.  Also, please keep in mind that this is ending a several month spree of buying basically only Coors, so this is like eating European (cheap) candy after years of eating what Mexicans try to pass off as candy.  No lie, I watched Stark try to eat an olive encased in a clear looking gelatin. It also smelled.

It has been long enough since Christmas that there isn’t really any reason that I can’t talk about it on the site, mainly because it has given me enough distance from the event that it adds some kind of flavor to the event for everyone involved, but also because I am lazy and only getting to it now.  In all honesty I am going to talk less about Christmas and more about one gift that we received.

The Bread Maker.

I don’t know the last time that my family received something that fundamentally changed pretty much every single day of our lives.  Granted, last year Veronica got a chest freezer that seemingly only holds random awesome—because no one argues with a bag of cookies that appears for no reason during the day—but I am pretty sure that our bread maker has undergone more usage at our house then by the company that was contracted to test the thing.  If it wasn’t so awesome I would feel bad for the Freihofers because they are losing upwards of two bread sales a month from us.

One of the things that I have noticed is that we do seem to find random reasons to use the device, as if both Veronica and I are trying to ignore the perfectly good, although almost two day old, piece or two of bread that we have left while making another loaf.  Sure, warm, fresh bread is probably one of the few things that all people can agree is amazing—but it is getting hard to justify eating this many carbs.  I am not even someone that believes in the Atkins diet, but I do have to believe that eating a loaf of bread to your head a day might not be the best thing in the world.

All of that said it is hard to deny the fact that homemade bread with my dad’s maple syrup is the greatest thing.  Also, because I know that the Zimmermans are reading, we have had eggs in a basket (African eggs if you hail from the family) with the bread as well.  Even though I have constant complaints about how well Veronica has cooked this dish in the past… she really managed to win the right to continue cooking it this time.

Also, homemade pizza is both awesome and cheap.

Things happen.  Veronica and I are no longer the proud owners of a flying squirrel.  Not something that I really want to go into, because I wasn’t happy with the way that everything went down dealing with it.  Needless to say both my wife and I ended up feeling terrible about everything, and in an effort to make me feel better about my place in life it was very briefly mentioned that we pretty much had everything that was needed for us to own a hamster.  At the time this was kind of annoying and hallow because another pet was the last thing that I wanted to think about.

Until the other day when we both walked into PetSmart to pick up some Timothy Hay for Chaz and noticed a sign on the Chinchilla enclosure saying that the store was giving away free hamsters.

It turns out, that for some reason unknown to man, that the pet store cannot selling animals that were born in the store.  Even though I had already been promised a new animal to get over my mourning I gleefully turned to Veronica and said, “Can I have a free hamster?!?”  While it has become a lifelong goal to turn that woman into an animal person I have to admit that both her growing love for furry things and obligations to past promises was entirely ignored in favor of hearing the words “free” around what I was saying.  Honestly I am sure I could pass off coming home with an alligator if I wrapped it around the word “free” enough times.

Now, granted, this is a retail store late at night.  This simple, “I can get one of those free hamsters” turned from a 30 second prospect into an hour of us waiting around for someone to come around who knew what we were talking about. Also Veronica demanded that we receive a girl, I think so that she doesn’t feel so clearly outnumbered in the house by us awesome men, although considering that the store is supposed to be an “all female” store and one of the hamsters had babies I strongly doubt the ability of the people working there to lift up the skirts and check to make sure that they aren’t just very confused boy hamsters.

Having a friend text you at work and tell you that his webpage, that you host and run all of the tech support on, has been hacked is not something that anyone wants to hear at the end of a work day.  Having your father text you, keep in mind this is my father (a man that didn’t know how to use a cellphone until he was forced kicking and screaming to use it), and ask what happened to your –blog minutes later– is the last thing anyone wants.  Given how busy I was at work today it sure managed to end pretty poorly.

As some of you probably already know, and the rest of you have probably ended up guessing by my rather long intro, the site was hacked today.  A friend of mine and I have gone through and managed to restore everything to as close to normal as we can figure at the moment.

I am not going to mention the hackers “handle”, because that could be possibly spreading some form of attention that they seemingly want, I will point out that there was some kind of anti-woman hate message left in place on all of the sites that I host.  Now don’t get me wrong, normally I am a person that thinks women are up for any job that men can do– today it is hard to be that person.

A long time ago Justin Bucko, Pat King, and I took a road trip to see a college friend.  We spent a very sad and rain filled week at his apartment, in which he was not there because his Grandmother had just died (and he oddly still let us use the place), playing Halo and getting very drunk.  When we were driving home, at this point in the story Bucko is taking his turn behind the wheel (sober, but hating going back to classes the next day), a person in a mini-van passes Justin, cuts him off and slams on their breaks.  They proceed to drive like there was a nest of hornets sewn into their seat for several miles, basically causing everyone around us to become afraid and annoyed at them.

After less than a minute of this Justin uttered something that I will always remember, “Maybe if you want to convert me to Christianity with your bumper sticker it would be better to not drive like the biggest jerk ever.”

He was right, you know.  After everything that happened today with the website all I can think is, “Man, Feminists are jerks” and not that hackers are terrible people.  If this person was part of a giant pro-man group using attacks on people to slowly turn them against women, good for you and your amazingly lack of logic approach– I think it is working.

Most people who know me know that I am a huge fan of terrible things that should not be, when you mix that concept with candy it is almost always a sure fire way to get me to eat something.  Veronica loves sales, if you mix that with candy she is probably going to buy—possibly all of—it.  This is a story about how we ended up with several bags of Sponge Bob approved crabby patties.

Halloween ended.  This means two things for the world at large; the first is that you have a large amount of pumpkins kicking around that are going to rot if you don’t do something about that.  The second is that every store every conceived of has an overstock of candy on their shelves that they try to get rid of under the pretenses of it being on sale (who really does a price check on this though?  How do we know it isn’t double the price with a sale sign on it?).  Short story long Veronica dragged me out on the first of November to check out the discounts.

While my smart and awesome wife was looking for the more mainstream Hersey type products I was busy digging through the racks to try and find the most obscure items possible.  For most people this might be an eyeball candy (which always suck) or something that says it is “super sour!” (which never lives up to the “super” moniker that it tries to boast).  The truth is that these are the normal oddities that you can find pretty much anywhere.  I want to find something that you look at and not only wonder about the poor series of choices that led the manufacture to create it, and try and sell it, but also wonder about my sanity by buying it.

Entire the Crabby Patty.

I knew from looking at the packaging that this was probably going to be a home run.  Most novelty candies try to focus on one thing if they are going to make any attempt to do it well, like make this eyeball taste like strawberries and marshmallows.  A dead giveaway on these is when it says that is also has another flavor inside, like grape tongues.  Add in some “sour” ones and you have a trifecta of half-hearted attempts at your cash.  Sponge Bob’s packaging promised me all these things. Also it was marked down dramatically more than everything else there, which is never a good sign of a well selling product.

I grabbed a bag and walked over to Veronica and threw it into her little shopping basket, I tried to mumble something under my breath of, “It is cheap, please don’t judge me.”  To which she only smiled and acted like I wasn’t of questionable intellect to be trying to buy a themed candy for a show neither of us had watched in the better part of a decade.  Happily the only time that she mentioned it again was when we were checking out, and the price—for a rather large bag—came up to 1.50 to which she commented, “those are really cheap!” Something that both disproved my theory that she doesn’t hear me when I speak insanity and that she is never truly surprised by what I do anymore.

Sadly everything kind of falls apart after that.  There was a grand idea that they would taste like poop left out too long, but the truth is that they kind of taste like rejected peeps that produced a child with gummy worms.  While they are about 90% air they have an interesting enough texture to almost make them enjoyable to eat.  The best part about this is that when Veronica went back to buy a large amount, or as I call it an unreasonable amount, of re-marked down candy she bought several more bags.

The answer is four years.  It took me four years to drive my wife to my level of insane.