Another weird day in Tacoslavia

I'm cornering the market on weird. I know that sounds great now, but once I've done it and you guys are clamoring for a little oddity to spice up your mundane days, I'm going to charge ten times as much. You've been warned.

We took the cats to the vet for their usual checkups this week. I got a call from the vet today with the results. Said results? One cat's in perfect health... and the vet thinks the other one may have diabetes. They're doing a test to verify that now. We're supposed to know by Monday.

In retrospect, naming the cat Twinkie seems kinda mean now.

Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! Release Date! Release Date! Release Date!

Got an email yesterday from the fine folks who are bringing us Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! They finally announced a release date for the DVD. I preordered my copy yesterday. In less than a month, I'll be watching glorious strippers vs. zombies action.

Why aren't you ordering? This is high cinema, people.

Another whoseywhatsit post

Once again I find myself in a position of having nothing particularly interesting to say, but wanting to maintain the dubious discipline of periodically posting.

1. We got a call from my son's school last week warning us that he may come home with some bruises. Seems that one of the kids in his class decided to take up bullying. So I guess we get to start dealing with that kind of bullshit now. We talked about it with my son at length, and all seems to be well on that front. The school seems to have handled it adequately, which is good, but also robs me of anyone to yell at for now.
2. I've tricked a few of my friends into running a game of Serenity on my website. I've never run a real game before, much less in this format, so it may be a spectacular failure. I'm really excited though. And that reminds me, I need to get off my ass and update them with the latest info. Slack, Taco, slack.
3. My friend Bill came up from my old home town to visit us this weekend, which was awesome. We got him to bring up some peaches from the orchard back home. They're fantastic, but I misjudged how much I'd ordered. I've been giving them away to everyone who gets within arm's reach for a few days. Still... these peaches are dangerously fucking delicious. NOM NOM NOM.
4. I got Bill hooked on WoW battlegrounds while he was visiting. He's already better at it than I am, which I suppose is no great accomplishment considering that my own talent for it seems to run mostly in the vein of being patient enough to grind endlessly until I can have the gear. It's fun having more friends to rip it up with though.
   
5. The dog seems to be settling in somewhat. My daughter annoys him frequently... she loves animals and no amount of scolding will keep her from getting right in his face, pulling his hair, etc. Even so, when Bill was saying his good-byes this weekend and placed a hand on my daughter's head, the dog flipped the fuck out. Had to put the dog out into the back yard while we finished our farewells.
6. Friend of mine got a new job that sounds fucking awesome. No intention of stealing his thunder or any of that, so I'll leave it that vague, but yay!

Guess that's about all I've got. Carry on, citizen.

Bag of what now?

Noq: This AV is a fucking joke. WoW is minimized right now. That's how little i care about it.

Taco: Wow. That bad?

Noq: Yes.

Taco: I was in one of those last night. Pissed me off.

Noq: Imagine two bags full of retarded children being swung against one another.

Taco: *choke*

Noq: That's this AV.

Caught in between

Ever notice that we always seem to be caught in between? It's never as easy as it used to be, and it's never as awesome as it'll be in a while. Conventional wisdom seems to be "appreciate the moment" but I'm not entirely convinced it isn't "stop taking on so much fucking complication."

Minty Fresh

I told this story to fett the other day. Hadn't thought of it in years, and now I can't resist sharing it with the rest of you [poor sumbitches].

I'd guess this all took place around the time I was sixteen. I was seeing this girl Courtney, and for the first time, "seeing this girl" actually meant going out on dates instead of that lame "going together" thing kids do at lunch before they can drive.

It was not going well, due largely to my being painfully fucking shy (not to mention a complete dork).

(And I am so fucking not Sheldon, no matter what Blue and my wife say.)

One of my best friends decided to have a little fun with me, so for my birthday, he got me a box of mint-scented condoms. Partly, I guess at that age, it's just exciting to buy condoms. You're barely past the stage where you giggle every time they're mentioned. Mostly, I think, it was to make fun of me, since, being the giant lump of low self esteem you see before you e'en unto this day... they couldn't have been more useless to me.

Now, far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth. I decided to get some mileage out of the present anyway. We had another friend, Amy. Amy was smart and funny and crass and vulgar... and basically awesome. I decided it was time to get her involved in the caper.

The three of us were all marching band nerds, so I snuck into the instrument room and opened Amy's trumpet case looking for her flip book... basically, a little flip folder that could be attached to a musical instrument, and which contained all the music we played in the stands during the football games, plus the national anthem and the school's alma mater, which we had to play at the beginning of every home football game.

I popped the flip folder out, flipped through until I found what I was looking for, and booyah... opened up one of the condoms and stretched it across the Star Spangled Banner. Then I packed the folder back up nice and neat to hide my handiwork and went about my business.

That Friday was a home game, so we had to go do all the pregame stuff. We all played trumpet, so it was gong to be easy to see the results. And of course I'd told all my friends what I'd done, so there was a nice big crowd of trumpet players gathered around Amy, jockeying for prime hilarity-viewing real estate, snickering, and generally failing to hide the fact that something was up.

I... haven't really matured much over the years.

We played the school's alma mater.

Then we all flipped to the Star Spangled Banner... and SPLUT. There's the condom across Amy's.

Right there in the end zone, she fishes the condom out of her folder, inflates it, and goes, "Mmm... mint flavored, too!"

The entire trumpet line pretty much dissolved into laughter at that point. Hell, we all damn near fell down right there on the field. So there was no melody at all for the national anthem.

Now, I grew up in a football town. The whole town shuts down at 4pm on football Fridays. So everyone was there.

The band director was livid.

I don't remember what the punishment was, but it was totally worth it.

Wakin' up is hard to do.

I fucked my wrist up big time this weekend. No clue what I did. I just woke up Saturday morning with a stiff, painful wrist, and by Sunday, the damn thing was too painful to use at all. Yeah, yeah. Guess my wrists just aren't as supple as they used to be since I got married.

Anyway, I wrapped the damn thing up with an ace bandage, and that seemed to help. I tied some frozen peas to it at night, and that seemed to help, too. The pain's tolerable today.

I worry a lot about carpal tunnel. I type for a living, and play guitar to punish people within earshot. I have a set of Baoding Balls that I use regularly to try to keep my wrists in decent shape. They are disappointingly less prurient in nature than they sound at first. Sorry, Coyote.

So fearing that the rest of my career would involve searing agony, I made an appointment with the doctor. He checked me out, asked me a few questions, and declared that it was a bad sprain. In his opinion, I probably managed to sprain my wrist in my sleep. I'm such a deep sleeper it never woke me up.

Lucky me. I can kill myself in my sleep and never know it.

Bonus points: the lump on my tricep that's been causing my wife no end of worry is just "fibrous tissue" and nothing to worry about. If it gets larger, they may take it out to preserve my vanity, but there's no reason it would ever be threatening to my health.

While I was in there, they praised me for losing some weight, then admonished me that they wanted me to lose ten more pounds. The doctor yelled at me to lose weight. There's another milestone passed. Getting older every year.

I'd flip the world off except, you know, gimp hand.