O' Christmas Brick

I used to consider myself to be a pretty Christmassy kind of person.  Not pretty in the sense of wearing pink tights and having freckles and ponytails, but in the sense that I really got into the Christmas spirit and had warm fuzzies about the holiday.

Sadly, it seems like each year those feelings fade a little further and further, especially now that Little Smoot has joined the squadron of non-believers.  It was a lot more fun when we could sneak around and pretend that a fat guy was going to come down the chimney and load us up with gifts.  We had fun with that for years, even though we don't even have a chimney.

I just got done, moments ago, hauling our damn tree up the steps and into the livingroom.  If you have a keen sense, you may already detect that I am not having fun with it so far.

This is a pre-lit tree, which is a very convenient feature since all you really need to do is haul it up the stairs and plug it in.  At least that's what's supposed to happen.  In reality, you drag the damn thing up the stairs and find out that three of the seven strands of lights do not function at all, causing Holiday Rage Syndrome (HRS).

I contacted Mrs. Smoot to give her a heads-up on this situation, and she suggested that our options are to put the tree up and just not light it (which would look dumb), add more lights to the existing burned out ones (which would look dumb), go spend a fortune on a new tree (which would cost a fortune), or wait until after Christmas and get a new tree at a discount (which kinda still leaves us without a lit tree THIS Christmas).

I want to suggest another idea... I'm thinking we should just move to a country that has an easier form of symbolizing the holiday.  Perhaps there is a country out there that, instead of having a Christmas Tree, uses a Christmas Brick.  Just bring the brick up to the livingroom and view it in awe, reminding us of that special night 2000 years ago when Jesus was born in a manger, which may have been... near a brick.  Whatever.

This Bites

I'm wondering if there's any way of making a kid believe in the Tooth Fairy again after the child has become a non-believer.

The Tooth Fairy used to be very helpful to me when Little Smoot had loose teeth.  I don't know whether she gets sentimentally attached to various teeth ("I once used this tooth for a particularly memorable bite of macaroni and cheese...") or what, but it seems like it takes forever for her loose teeth to fall out.

I'm sure it doesn't help that she knows that it makes me sick to see her teeth dangling around in her mouth.  She loves to show me that stuff, and I wince in agony every time she does it.  So right now she has a tooth that can probably hang a full inch below her gum line when she opens her mouth.  She complains about it constantly, and I obviously can't wait until the thing finally falls out.

Not too long ago I was able to convince her of all kinds of stupid things, thanks to the Tooth Fairy.  I'd tell her, "You know, I heard that the Tooth Fairy is most generous on Thursdays because that's her deadline for getting teeth to the factory in China."  Or whatever.

Surely at age 12 she's running out of baby teeth.  I'm sure running out of techniques to encourage her to get rid of them.

Cat Burglar?

I'm growing very suspicious of our cat.  Don't get me wrong, Murray is generally a very good cat and everything, but I am getting increasingly concerned about him.

Every day for the past couple weeks, he has attempted to thwart me from reading my newspapers.  The instant I sit down to read the papers, he'll literally jump up onto my lap and obscure my view, oftentimes sticking his butt right into my face.

So I can't help but wonder what it is he is trying to keep me from reading.  Is he worried that I'll see his name in the police blotter?  Murray is strictly an indoor cat, but there are periods of time where I have no idea where he is, and it's entirely possible that he has managed to sneak outside to commit some sort of crime wave.

One of the daily newspapers I read is the Beaver County Times, and they have a feature every week called "Mugshot Monday," where they show pictures of everyone who has wound up in jail from the previous week.  I always get a kick out of reading that feature, if for no other reason to feel good about myself and my remarkable ability to stay out of jail so far.

Anyway, I have this nagging feeling that Murray is going to be featured on this page one of these days, and he is trying to keep me from seeing it.  Thankfully he hasn't realized that I can read the newspaper on the computer, because I really don't want him sticking his butt in my face while he curls up on the laptop.

Making the World a Better Place

Ok, so it has been a few days (?) since my last posting here, but I'm sure you would understand that I have been busy making the world a better place.  Day in, and day out, that is precisely what I have been working on all this time.

You see, back in Junior High -- where all of the world's best ideas are hatched -- some friends and I came up with a truly remarkable idea.  It's an idea that will one day shape the whole idea of productivity for generations to come.  Clearly, something of this magnitude is worthy of the time and effort, and if a blog entry or 50 go by the wayside, well, that's the price we have to pay for this kind of progress.

The idea I'm talking about, of course, is the Lunch in a Straw initiative.  In Junior High, we came up with a few brilliant ideas.  One of those ideas was to flick Jello (or whatever that substance was... it was probably called "schmello" or something) onto the walls of the cafeteria to see what would happen.  As you're probably aware, after several months this substance formed a remarkable bond on the wall, and it's undoubtedly still there today.

As a result of that research, NASA is currently using cafeteria-grade Jello to seal cracks in space shuttle fuel tanks.  Obviously, our work paid off for the betterment of mankind.

Well, now we want to introduce our popular Lunch in a Straw concept.  During those formative days, we used to experiment by taking our drinking straw and poking it into our various school entrees.  The end result was a straw that had inch-long segments of various food substances, or whatever that stuff was on our trays.  Think about it -- an entire meal, compacted into the convenient size of a straw!

We believe that this concept will revolutionize the food industry, and productivity will soar like an eagle on speed.  Let's say the average worker has a 9-hour day, and one of those hours is wasted on lunch.  Not any longer, it isn't!  The worker can simply whip out his Lunch in a Straw, and with one long suck he can ingest a series of foods, even an entire turkey dinner with all the trimmings!

Turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, pumpkin pie, coffee... one suck, and it's done!  That one-hour lunch has now been reduced to about 15-seconds, and 10 of those seconds would likely be devoted to unwrapping the straw and playing with the straw paper.

Of course NASA is also interested in this technology for their programs, since the space savings is tremendous.  That's assuming they're ever able to get another person back into space once they retire the shuttles next year.

Anyway, I apologize for this lapse in blog postings, but I think you can now understand and appreciate my absence.