Chandler and Bette Get Coal in Their Stockings

 

I see those funny dog videos on YouTube and I thought that it would be fun to make one of my own. Unfortunately Chandler and Bette are very poor actors. They take direction poorly and even with a lot of editing, aren't anywhere near as good as those dogs I see on YouTube. Anyway, here is my try at putting my dogs in the movies.

I don't know where the video went. Google Blogger lost it.

Dinner is Served

Before

Before I write another word, let me just say that I love having people over for dinner. I enjoy the conversation, I enjoy being with folks who I might not see that often, and I enjoy the light buzz of that second glass of wine. If I could have friends and family over every evening for a relaxed dinner, I would. Last night we had a visitor from the chilly north, from the bullet riddled streets of Chicago. Sam the man was here, and Mark made a delicious Cuban dinner for him. Something people of Cuban descent apparently can never get enough of. Plantains, black beans and rice, roast pork, and of course Mark's famous flan for dessert. Here's the problem, other than dinner, I only got to spend about fifteen minutes talking to Sam and catching up on things not fit for Facebook. The rest of my evening was devoted to cleaning up the kitchen. How on Earth can one skinny little guy cook dinner for only three people, and leave a mess as big as the World Trade Center pile. Seriously, I was in the kitchen for over an hour last night cleaning, and then this morning I spent another half an hour cleaning up the clean up from last night. If it were up to me dinner would be ordered out and served on paper plates. Unfortunately, Mark does not go along with that idea. He always goes full out for our guests. He insists on the best food and the best presentation. So if you are ever invited to our house for dinner, do not turn it down. You will not be disappointed. Unless something happens and Mark isn't around. Then you can expect pizza delivered in a cardboard box. But I can guarantee that there will be a fair amount of liquor and wine served with that pizza.

After

Flan-again

I'm in my office doing some very important work on the computer, when I hear Mark screaming from out in the kitchen. The problem with Mark is that he will scream like he's being murdered whether he is actually being stabbed to death, or he's caught a hangnail on the cheese grater. I just never know, so I put my gin rummy game on hold and go see what all the hubbub is about. I get to the kitchen door and there is a thick cloud of white smoke.

"I've ruined it... waaaaa.... my flan, it's ruined. Waaaaaaaaaa!"

I make my way through the smoke and find Mark by the stove with a sauce pan in his hand. The sauce pan is smoking and Mark does not know what to do with it, so I steer him out the back door, into the dog run, where I proceed to hose it down.

"I looked away for two seconds, two damn seconds."

What it was, was sugar. Mark was making flan and it involves melting sugar. You have to understand that Mark almost never makes a mistake like this. He is an excellent cook and it is very seldom that I have to come into the kitchen to put down flames. In the end it all turned out just fine. I handed Mark another pan, and he proceeded to melt some more sugar. This time without burning down the kitchen.

I am not the only one who likes Mark's cooking. Our dog Bette has become completely spoiled. She will only eat what we are eating. I started her out on dog food, which she quickly determined was not the same as the stuff Mark was handing her under the dining room table. I have tried every brand of dog food that is sold at the supermarket. She hates it all. So yesterday I had Mark bring me up to the Petsmart, where I bought some gourmet dog food in a can. Somewhere I had heard or read that dogs like sweet potatoes, so I bought a small can of venison and sweet potato dog food. It cost around ten dollars an ounce, but I figured that if I could wean Bette off of people food it would be worth it. When I got home, I opened the can of dog food and scooped some into Bette's bowl. Bette walked into the kitchen, over to the bowl, and then looked at me as if I had just put dog shit into the bowl.

"Sorry, I don't eat shit." And she turned and walked away.

Fine, but if that little bitch thinks she is getting any of my flan, she is dead wrong.

The Squirrels Probably Don't Like the Color Anyway

The light at the end of the tunnel

According to The Bible, God created the universe in just six days. According to my mother, Santa Claus flies around the world and visits every child that believes in him, in just twenty four hours. And that includes going inside each house and eating cookies with milk at each stop. Neil Armstrong flew to the moon, landed there, played a round of golf, and returned to Earth in just over eight days. All very impressive feats, especially that creating the universe thing. I think Mom might have exaggerated about Santa Clause though. Nobody can drink that much milk. Like I said, impressive. So you would think that when I decided to  paint my house, from front to back, that I would be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time. I started the paint job on October sixth, seventy days ago. Two days ago, I finished the job. It was not as easy as I had envisioned it to be. Seriously, I looked at my building and thought to myself that I could probably paint it all in about two, or at the most, three weeks. Ten weeks is what it actually took. Ten weeks of fighting off mosquitoes, getting scratched up by the bougainvillea I planted everywhere, and climbing up and down a ladder with my gouty ankle. It truly sucked. But I am now done. My house is now an interesting shade of gray with a slight bluish tint. Okay, I lied. I'm not totally done. I do still have to paint the large awning that hangs over the front entrance and then re-hang it. Oh, and then there is that wall that faces the fence on the side of the building that nobody ever sees except for the squirrels. I have to paint that too, and I am pretty sure that I'll get around to it in the next week or so. Really, I'll paint it...  I will.

Help Me Rhonda

Mark and I were watching the television show Empire the other evening. One of the characters, Rhonda, who is very pregnant, is standing at the top of some very steep stairs. Mark says, "She's going to fall down those stairs." The very next scene involved crazy Anika, who is also pregnant with the child of her ex-husband's son. I then tell Mark, "No, that crazy bitch Anika is going to push Rhonda down those stairs." Sure enough, a few scenes later, Rhonda takes a tumble down the stairs, pushed by a shadowy figure who looks a lot like Anika. That's how television is, they kind of clue you in on what's going to happen. For instance, if a character suddenly has a bloody nose for no reason, they are going to die from brain cancer. If one of the people in a show starts coughing up blood into a handkerchief, that person has lung, or stomach, or spleen cancer. It never fails. Which is why last night when I got up to pee in the middle of the night, while I was standing there in front of the toilet and my nose started to bleed, I panicked. You have to realize I was groggy because it was like four in the morning, and the first thing I thought of was brain cancer. Also I seem to have one of those pesky canker sores in my mouth, so that didn't help my state of mind. Maybe it's mouth cancer, I thought. I went back to bed. I had a hard time falling asleep, until I remembered that I have a blood vessel located near the surface of my right nostril that bleeds all the time. Also, that canker sore? I'm pretty sure that was caused by my holding the flashlight in my mouth while I pick up Chandler's dog shit every time he poops on my neighbor's grass.

Priceless

I hate scams. Even more, I hate getting caught up in a scam. Some years ago I saw a great fare to Chicago on Spirit Airlines. They were at least ten dollars cheaper than any other airline. I immediately bought two tickets. Unfortunately, I did not look further into what I was buying until a few days before the flight. When I went on line to check in and choose my seats, I found out that I hadn't bought seats. I had bought two tickets, but the tickets did not include seats. I had to buy the seats extra. Not only that, I had to pay for luggage, carry-ons, access to the lavatory with an extra charge for more than one sheet of toilet tissue.  Okay, I might be wrong on that last charge, but I do know that after I was done paying for all the extras, Spirit Airlines cost as much or more than any other airline. On top of that the employees were not the friendliest. I assume that would be because Spirit is screwing them as much as they're screwing the passengers.

I ran out of ink on my HP Printer this week and I have to send out Xmas cards. So Mark and I were off to the Office Depot to buy some more ink. Or as I like to say, we were off to get screwed again. Why is printer ink so damn expensive. I would bet it costs no more than fifty cents to manufacture those cartridges, yet there they were on the shelf at Office Depot for twenty eight dollars. I needed all four, black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. Total price (cheaper if you buy the three colors in the combo box), sixty eight dollars. Located on a shelf three feet away was a brand new HP Printer for sale at sixty five dollars. Included in the box with the printer were the ink cartridges. I looked that up. They are called starter cartridges. On the PC Magazine web site, they said they are almost the same as the ones I was buying. Yes, we seriously considered just buying a new printer, maybe three for backup. But I just can't justify such waste, throwing a perfectly good printer in the garbage every time the ink ran out.  So I coughed up the money, and bought the very over priced ink cartridges. I really do hate scam artists.