Yummy, It Tastes Like Razor Blades

It was just about six months ago that I first saw a cute little puppy named Chandler at the shelter. When I finally got him home two weeks later, he was a wild, twenty five pound, biting, chewing, pooping, machine. Now, five and a half months later, he is a wild, seventy pound, chewing, biting, machine, thanks to Mark using him as a garbage disposal. At least the pooping in the house part has been eliminated. I still remember the folks at the shelter assuring me that "He won't be more than fifty pounds, max.". I have tried restricting him to just two cups of dog food per day, but the way he hangs around the dinner table catching all the food that flies while Mark eats, I'm sure he gets the equivalent of another two cups.

The biggest problem with Chandler, is that he will eat anything. While my last dog, Molly, could lick a plate clean of all evidence of meat, leaving peas and potatoes untouched, Chandler sucks it all down. Unfortunately his eating doesn't stop there. A few days ago he came trotting by, happy as could be, chewing away on something. I looked down and realized Chandler was eating one of Mark's discarded razors. I wrestled the razor out of his mouth, and checked for blood, all the while imagining the worst. Luckily his mouth must be tough from all the crap he has chewed up, and he was fine.

Later in the day I noticed him walking around, chewing away like a teenage girl with a wad of Bubblicious in her mouth. This time he was gnawing on one of my Breathe Right® nasal strips that I had left on the night stand. Yes it was used, which probably made it even more delicious and irresistible to him. But the worst was Sunday evening when I decided to pour myself a cocktail and watch a movie on television. At one point I put the movie on pause and made a quick trip to the bathroom. Upon my return, I sat down and reached for the cocktail. Gone. Nothing but ice and a few drops of liquid on the bottom of the glass. I wasn't worried about the effects of the alcohol on Chandler, he seemed fine. What really bugged me was that he drank the last of my vodka, and he didn't even have a hangover the next morning.

Photo Friday

Home made by Mark, from scratch.
Blueberry Muffins.

Video Thursday

Going to Ikea with the worst driver in the world.

Mark's Treasure Island

Mark has been bugging me for a year to go out to Ikea with him. It apparently is some kind of shopping nirvana that satisfies shopaholics the way free porn on the internet excites sex addicts. Ikea is a store that sells inexpensive, knocked down furniture, that you take home and put together yourself. In other words it is the worst of both worlds for me, shopping and do it yourself projects.

After a white knuckle ride on the interstate, a gleeful Mark pulled up to the huge blue and yellow Ikea building, as excited as a kid seeing Disney World for the first time. Our first stop was the Ikea food court, which is really no more than a high school cafeteria without the high school. On Marks suggestion I had the Swedish meatballs and mashed potatoes. Disgusting! How could a guy who cooks such great dinners for me, think this glop was good? After I choked down my lunch we set off into the vast clutter of the Ikea showroom. The first area was full of some cute looking sofas. When I got up close and sat on a few of them, I realized that they were not only very cheaply constructed, but that they were built for very small people. I think maybe the Swedes were given some bad information about Americans, and thought we were a nation of midgets. We are not, we are a nation of fat asses and we need much larger places to park that lard than the dainty little sofas at Ikea.

As we continued on I understood why Mark was impressed with the place. It wasn't so much the merchandise as the way it was displayed. Little apartments mocked up from all the cheap crap that they sell, put together in a very attractive way. Cheap, cheesy, cabinets, and other products, combined into cute looking kitchens, with bric-a-brac displayed all around. As interesting as that might be for Mark, I reached my window shopping limit within fifteen minutes, and started looking for the exit. This is where the Ikea marketing department showed their genius. Each sign pointing the way to the exits, was actually pointing me on to the next showroom, where I would be exposed to more of Ikea's stuff. I wouldn't be shown the actual real exit until I had been led through the whole building, exposed to the most product possible. I was a rat in a trap. When we finally found our way to the exit, Mark pulled out a brochure he had secretly been carrying. It was the official Ikea map showing the tortuous route we had taken. I know why he was hiding it, the bastard knew I'd have bolted if I had known I'd be on a shopping safari.

Grrrrreat !!

I was never a picky eater. I would eat just about anything my mom put on the table, unless it was her infamous dish called 'Shipwreck', an unpalatable collection of ground beef, tomato soup, canned peas, and half cooked, sliced potatoes in a casserole configuration. I still shudder when I think of it. that's why Mark loves to cook for me. I will eat almost anything he puts out, even if I don't particularly love it. He knows that he will get an honest opinion of his cooking from me. One thing that amazes Mark is that I will eat last nights leftover dinner for breakfast. He believes in the traditional breakfast foods, cereal, eggs, pancakes, etcetera. To me, food is food.

As a kid, I usually ate cereal for breakfast. This was in the days when pre-sweetened cereals were rare in our house because my dad believed he was saving money by not buying it. To sweeten the cereal I would take my Cheerios, and heap sugar on them until I had replicated the snow covered Alps right there in the bowl. As the sugar slowly dissolved into the milk, it would sink to the bottom, and after powering through the Cheerios, I would have a delicious half inch layer of partially dissolved sugar left that I would then suck down. After that nutritious breakfast I would run off to school, all hopped up on sugar, only to crash two hours later and fall asleep at my desk.

Another favorite cereal of mine was Quaker Puffed Rice, which was basically made up of air surrounded by a thin skin. I liked it because it would float on top of the milk, and I would pile even more sugar on to weigh it down, leaving even more of the sweet stuff on the bottom of the bowl. If my dad had only known how much sugar I piled on that cereal, I am sure he would have stocked up on the Sugar Smacks, and Frosted Flakes more often, but I probably would have put sugar on those too.

Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo

I was walking down the aisle at Best Buy, and I stopped and asked, "Do you have anything that plays cassette tapes?". The kid looked at me like his grandfather had just dropped in for a visit. I could have asked, "Do you have a Victrola that plays wax cylinders?", and got the same reaction. “Everything we have is on the shelf.” he said, and wandered off. On the shelf were these things that looked a little like speakers with a slot for plugging in an ipod. Once again technology has shoved me aside and sped right past.

When I was a kid the technology was simple. My sister, brother, and I, shared a little record player that was no more than a turntable with a speaker. On that record player we would spin our collection of red, and yellow, children’s records, including ‘Old MacDonald’, and my favorite, ‘Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo’ from Disney’s Cinderella. The only problem was that we didn’t have a proper needle for playing records so we found a small nail on my dad’s work bench and used that. The nail tended to skip so we rectified that problem by taping a nickel on top of the tone-arm. You could actually see the vinyl being shaved off of the record as it ground away under the “needle”. By the time I was about five years old, all of our records sounded like they had been recorded by Edison himself, lots of static with bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, barely audible in the background.

I guess I will have to give in to progress and eventually get myself an ipod or some other mp3 player. I’ll have to download all my music off of Amazon.com, but something about it just doesn’t feel right. I miss reading the back of the big LP’s, and the cover art. Even the cassettes and the CD’s had inserts and tiny little cover art. You just can’t replace something like the cover of The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers, with some downloaded picture that you printed out on your inkjet. By the way, I went to BestBuy.com, and although I couldn’t find a Victrola, they do have cassette decks for us old farts. Five to be exact, out of 227 results for my stereo inquiry.

Photo Friday

January 22, 2009

The Back Yard

The Front Yard