Do the Yak

My last couple of posts referenced National Blog Posting Month where you post to your blog every single day for the month of November. Apparently the pressure caused a total seize-up of the creative machinery. So now that it's almost a new year, I hope to get back to this a bit more often. So what's happened in the last almost-two-months? Thanksgiving involved a really nice trip to Delaware via Amtrak. Ben's mom was predictably baffled by the trip as she has lost almost all sense of time and place, but it wasn't really a problem. Oh yeah, Ben got a job that started with a two-day orientation trip to Raleigh during Hanukkah, but it was totally fine, especially since so far he really likes the job. And Hanukkah was great -- I gradually bought little things for the kids starting in the summer and so I had time to get them stuff I think they really liked. My stepmother also got them Lego kits, which were even more of a hit than I expected. Ben and I were in a short stage...

I entered this anecdote in a contest sponsored by hilarious  Let's Panic About Babies site, where they asked parents about an embarrassing parenting moment... There was the cheery night after Sarah spent her first two days of life in the hospital gazing around beatifically before she came home and promptly got hungry as hell while my milk still hadn't come in. Of course I nursed her (though no more than every two hours as per the helpful schedule sheet provided by the hospital) so she couldn't POSSIBLY be hungry with all that delicious colostrum, but for some reason she still screamed like a banshee for hours on end. Ben and I were psychotic with anxiety and sleep deprivation. In yet another attempt to cure this baby of its mysterious caterwauling, Ben decided to change her again. And when the wet baby wipe hit her butt at 2 a.m... well, as we described it later, she bobcatted (actually it was a puma we were thinking of, sort of like this ). Now the embarrassing part: in...

National Blog Posting Month just started and I'm already a day behind. Whatever. Saturday was Halloween. Weirdest weather ever -- about 90 degrees with a 90-mph breeze. Becky (dressed as a yummy hot dog) got scared after only a short while, so we repaired back to the home of a neighbor who hosts a really nice pre-trick-or-treating party every year. We chatted with other adults who had stayed behind to guard the wine while their spouses took the kids around. Then it was Sunday with an extra hour of sleep -- YES-S-S-S! Did I let that stop me from also taking an afternoon nap instead of going grocery shopping? HELL no! Then we had leftover pizza with our good friends in Natick (our daughters are best buds from Hebrew school) and discussed Sociopaths We Have Known. And there have been a few.

We gather here today in memory of the departed innocents -- the kiwi and strawberries who gave their lives and were shamelessly mutilated and had their corpses displayed in vulgar fashion atop a burial mound made of Cool Whip. We will now pour cheap brandy over the whole mess and use the candles to set it on fire in the Hindu funereal tradition. As an added bonus, recently widowed Hindu women who make this dish may wish to participate more fully by committing sati . I myself might feel the urge after seeing my guests' faces after serving this vat of gooey white wonder.

Have you seen those commercials for twin recliners that also have cupholders , coolers and reading lights? We always joke that if they just came with a Foley catheter attachment, the lazy slob would never have to get up. Well, this guy did it one better -- a motorized recliner for zipping over to the local bar for a beer or nine. Except he got arrested for drunk driving. * * * A few weeks ago, we were tripping and sliding over all the acorns in our yard (apparently there's a bumper crop of them this year), and foolishly I told the kids within earshot of Ben that Native Americans used to somehow grind them up and make acorn flour. This sent Ben hustling to the Internets, where he actually found a website explaining at length just how to go about doing this . And he gathered a bunch of acorns. A-a-a-and... he made acorn flour. I didn't think this was possible, but it had an even higher ratio of required labor to outcome quality than the Indian cutlet fiasco. In a nutshell ...

...or maybe just letting her decide if there should be a plug or not. Terrific NY Times piece by Timothy Egan discussing the notion that hey, maybe we can talk about reducing the country's end-of-life care expenses without veering immediately into OMG-plug-pulling-Kevorkian-death-panels-black-helicopters paranoia and political cynicism. As Egan says, "how do we reform a system that lavishes most of its benefits on a cure for the 'disease' of aging" when many studies as well as common sense show that most people want to die at home, yet Medicare will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for endless hospital procedures and tests but won't pay for non-hospice home caregivers. And then I read about a guy who was basically lynched by a bunch of hillbillies in Kentucky . Not because he was black (he wasn't), but because he was... brace yourself... a FED! (a census worker, to be specific). And we know this was an issue in motivation for the murder because they...

It's Twitteleh ! ...and another plug for Justin's tweets .