Verbisaurus Blogicus

Saturday, 21 July 2012

So, if you’d asked me five years ago what a zine was, I’m not sure how I would have answered. I might have guessed that it was a new brand of alcoholic beverage. Or I might have thought it was a new way kids were shortening the word “magazine” in the same way they were calling pizza “‘za.”

But, according to Wikipedia, it’s “a small circulation publication of original or appropriated texts and images.”

In the past half-decade, I’ve been to a few bookfairs, and I’ve perused some of the zines for sale. They’re usually small – think of a magazine, and then imagine something just one-half or one-quarter that size – and they’re usually pretty short. Too short, in my opinion, though whenever I begin to bemoan that something is too short, I immediately remember that being too short just means that I want more – which is great.

Last week, we finally acquired zines of our own. Specifically, we purchased a pair of zines available from our friend AT THIS SITE. They were great. I suggest you buy “Will There Be Smoking?” which explores some of those questions parents-to-be and new parents aren’t prepared for.

Did I mention they’re locally grown, so you’d be supporting a local business instead of some big corporate publishing agency? The zine creators have their own fest annually, too. CLICK HERE for info on that.

Sunday, 22 July 2012

My wife found out about a Family Fun Night, sponsored by Creative Kidstuff. She signed up our kids and, tonight, after the store closed to the general public, we showed up for a Fun Night.

Our kids loved it. And it was free, so I loved it, too. There was ice cream, rock painting, a butterfly garden, temporary tattoos, real live reptiles, a scavenger hunt, other random games, and even fish painting.

Here’s how fish painting works: the kids painted a fish carcass. I’m not very good at identifying fish species. In fact, I’m really bad at it. This was some sort of freshwater fish, about a foot long. It was silver color. That’s all I know. Anyway, the employee wiped it off (to remove the paint from the last kid), and then gave Owen the paint brush. Our daughter stood next to him and did the deed at an adjacent station.

Once the fish were painted, the employees pressed a canvas bag against the fish, leaving a print on the bag for the kids to take home. Isla’s is pink and red; kind of all mixed together. Owen’s is a third green, a third pink, and a third blue. One employee explained that this is how fishermen used to document their catches in the days before photography was affordable – they lathered up their catch with paint, then smacked it on the side of a board or canvas or whatever, then they had proof of what they’d fetched from the sea.

Tuesday, 17 July 2012

Today I volunteered with Habitat for Humanity. They’re a Lutheran organization that builds and repairs houses and sells them to people in need for relatively cheap.

This wasn’t totally volunteer, I suppose. A few months ago, my supervisor asked our department what we’d like to do for a summer outing and, instead of selecting a ballgame or booze cruise or laser tag engagement (all things I’ve done in the past with my department), everyone agreed it’d be nice to do something meaningful for the community. So, today, i was at a house in south Minneapolis scraping mud off the wall and, in the afternoon, painting the walls.

Here’s a picture of the house we worked on today:

It’s a pretty nice house, actually. Four bedrooms, two full bathrooms, and a large living room. The yard is small, and there’s no greenery on the lot (except for that one tree in the front). It’s also devoid of many amenities: no central air, no dishwasher, no two-car garage, and the same windows that my wife and I had in our townhome (which allow steady drafts to blow through all winter – great for blowing out candles!). Still, I would live in this house, despite the fact that I did some of the painting.

Wednesday, 18 July 2012

Session II of the strength training course at my job began this afternoon. I was one of the first participants to arrive, and when the instructor asked how I was doing, I informed her I was sore from working on a house yesterday. She said she’d go easy today. And she was right, too, perhaps because she’d just sprained her ankle and wasn’t up to par.

It appears a lot of people lost interest in the class. During the first course – which ran through May and June – there were always a dozen or more participants. Today, there were seven.

After holding a paint brush over my head for most of the day yesterday, while balanced on a step stool, in the stiffling heat, and now using weights and bands to work my muscles, my arms feel like rubber. I’m gonna try to not use them for the rest of the day.

Thursday, 19 July 2012

Right now, Owen and I are reading through The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster. I have known about this book for a long time, but I’ve never read it before. When someone mentioned it in a blog post recently, I started looking into again. I figured Owen would like it because it has Mathmagicians in it (and Owen fancies himself a Mathmagician) and there are discussions about infinity and dodecahedrons and other mathematical curiosities.

Well, we haven’t arrived at the math part yet; that won’t come until Milo arrives in Digitopolis, but we’re nearing the halfway point. In some ways, the book reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, in that crazy things just happen to the young child for no reason other than just because they give the author a chance to say or do funny things. It wasn’t even until chapter six, or mayebe seven, that some sort of plot seemed to be coalescing.

At any rate, Owen seems to be enjoying the read. I’m just doing my best to plow through it, eager for the day when we can return to the A to Z Mysteries.

Friday, 20 July 2012

So, I’m sure you’re sick of reading about my wedding ceremony escapades, so I’ll try to keep that part toned down in this blog entry…

This evening, I participated in the rehearsal for a wedding I’ll be officiating in 24 hours. Instead of talking about the details of that rehearsal, or tomorrow’s wedding, I want to talk about the location:

The Little Log House Pioneer Village in Hastings.

I had no idea this place existed until the betrothed couple wrote it down on our contract. Even then, I just made a mental note that it was in Hastings and then, this afternoon, I looked it up online to figure out how to drive there.

This evening, I drove through the city of Hastings, then just kept going south until, right when I started to fret that I had gone too far, I saw the sign and made a left. About a mile down the roud – right in the middle of farms – a tiny city just popped up. It looked like something out of the 1950s; the kind of place where Clark Kent grew up. There was an old gas station with old fashioned pumps, an old post office, an old church, an old saloon, several old homes, and even a mid-centruy style automobile bridge across a creek. There were several old vehicles sitting around, too. Everything looked meticulously maintained. The grass (with signs ever five feet or so saying not to park on it) was perfectly groomed, and all the buildings looked like they’d somehow escaped the ravages of the decades.

I overheard a few groomsmen talking, and they claimed the owner, on older gentleman who grew up just down the road, began collecting old buildings on his property. He goes around the country looking for buildings he likes, buys them, has them disasssembled, shipped, and reassembled in this city-sized museum.

Despite the name, I never saw a log house, and I don’t think it’s within the city limits of Hastings. The place is nearly always closed to the public, too, just opening their doors for weddings (there was a wedding taking place today), retirement parties, corporate functions, and, well, anything that anyone rich enough to rent out the place would like it for. According to one of the groomsmen (and confirmed on the website), the place opens up to the public during the fourth weekend in July – which is just a week away.

I’m considering taking the family for a looksee.

Monday, 16 July 2012

I mentioned in my last post (see: My Last Post) that my wife spent the day up at the cabin with the other ladies in her family. She came home that evening bearing gifts. Most significantly (to me) were the gifts of food.

Ever since I started shoehorning my way into Jennifer’s family, they’ve had this minor tradition attached, like an appendage, to their larger tradition of hanging out at the cabin. That minor tradition is: bringing something from the local KFC to dine on.

Upon inquiring as to the roots of this tradition, my wife believes it stems from the dual reasons of her grandfather liking KFC and KFC’s proximity to the cabin. Up until, say, this century, KFC was the closest restaurant to the cabin (there are at least three closer nowadays).

Anyway, I don’t really go for eating food out of a bucket and, as a pescatarian, there’s not much on the menu at Kentucky Fried Chicken (as it used to be known) for me, anyway. I also have this short list of fast “food” restaurants I positively despise. Among them are McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Taco John’s, Dairy Queen, and KFing C.

But…

Let’s face it, some of theses places have some irresistible delectables. Primarily, Dairy Queen reigns large in the dessert department. So even though their fries = near instant diarrhea and they use melted PVC in place of cheese, I can’t say no to their frozen cakes. And in the KFC department, I love me them biscuits. 

So, among other items, Jennifer arrived home Saturday night with a bag of biscuits and the accompanying condiments. I applied the honey and butter – noting that the butter was, in fact, termed, “buttery goodness” – and scarfed down a biscuit. The biscuits were gone in no time, with a bunch of spare condiment packages. I told Jennifer I’d take the honey packets to work, where I could add them to my cups of tea. So I did.

This morning, for the first time, I took a closer look at one of those “honey” packets. To my horror, it wasn’t honey; it was Honey Sauce. I nearly gagged on my tea.

Take a look:
Notice, honey isn’t the first listed ingedient. It’s THIRD! It follows both high fructose corn syrup, and just plain corn syrup. Just in case you might be under the delusion that the packet contains 30, or even 25%, honey, there’s a side note that alerts you the concoction you’re about to put into your body is only 7% “real” honey.

Yuck.

Also, notice that fructose is ingedient #4, and all the remaining ingredients account for less than 2% of the packaged bile. So…we’re talking above 90% fructose and corn here. Gross. This explains why the “honey” wasn’t a rich, amber color but, instead, a piss yellow hue reminiscent of, well, corn.

That is just disgusting KFC. Please, charge 25 cents a packet and put in 100% “real” honey and, I promise you, I will swing through your drive through to buy a sack of biscuits.

Saturday, 14 July 2012

Today I officiated wedding #3 of 4 this month.

As far as commutes go, this was the best one: it was only about five miles from my front door to the event center. All in all, I was away from home for less than two hours. But with Jennifer spending the day at the cabin with all the other ladies in her family, I still had to find something to do with the kids.

Enter my mom. She’s been in town for about a week now, and when I asked her if she’d like to spend the day with us, and watch the kids for a couple of hours, she accepted.

I gotta admit, I felt a little strange leaving my mom’s presence to go perform a wedding ceremony. The reasons are varied, but they stem primarily from the fact that, as a Witness, I had wanted to perform wedding ceremonies, but was denied. So, first of all, performing a wedding ceremony is kind of an act of rebellion against my mom’s religion. Second, it’s a reminder that I’m not a Witness anymore; if I was a Witness, I wouldn’t be performing weddings and, even if I was performing weddings, I surely wouldn’t be performing weddings for non-Witnesses. Third – and this one’s the biggest – my mom remarried back in 2009, and I was not invited. Actually, I was invited, then I was un-invited, then I was re-invited with the condition that I sit in the back, don’t talk, and leave immediately after the ceremony. So I didn’t go. So – and maybe this is all in my head – but leaving to attend a wedding today was a reminder of my mom’s wedding; a wedding I did not attend. How funny that I should attend – and officiate – a wedding of two people I just met earlier this year when I didn’t even go to my own mother’s wedding. So, you know, that’s all weird.

When I returned this evening, I of course began talking about the details of the ceremony: how beautiful the landscape was, how hot the sun was (yep, it was another outside ceremony), and some other observances. My mom was detachedly involved in the conversation, probably just out of courtesy. But she left to drive back to her sister’s home less than five minutes after got in the door.

Like I said, weird.

Sunday, 15 July 2012

Being as today is the only day on our wall calendar between July 6th and July 21st that we don’t have anything written down, I was hoping to get a lot of housework and yardwork done. Alas, we are currently in day #20 of shitty weather, so it was hot, even in the house.

We didn’t get much done in the house, either (though I did manage to replace the showerhead in the bathroom), due to Jennifer’s computer. Turns out, it’s dying. It’s six years old, and it’s time for the planned obsolescence to kick in. She spent last night trying to finish up a home video she’d been working on before the computer crashed and she lost all her hard work. And today she had to figure out how to create a birthday party invitation for Isla’s upcoming birthday. This is trickier than you might think.

For one thing, we don’t buy those generic fill-in-the-blank invitation cards. We make our own. And Jennifer has such demanding standards of quality, that basic image editing software, such as iPhoto or Paint aren’t sufficient. She has 9or would that be had?) Adobe Photoshop on her computer, but with that one out of commission, she had to resort to mine. Not only do I not have Adobe, but I don’t even have the newest Mac operating system (I don’t care about updating), so my wife couldn’t just pop in the disc and load it onto my computer. She found an older version and managed to download that onto my computer. Success!

Anyway, the video is done, Isla’s card has been uploaded to the printing shop, and now we just have to get a new computer. Yuck.

Thursday, 12 July 2012

 Today I had my six-month dental check-up.

When the dentist came in and took over from the hygienist for a few minutes, I told him I had a chip on one of my molars. I said it had just happened a few days ago, and I don’t even know how I chipped it. My tongue just went over there and noticed the rough spot, and I’ve been favoring it ever since. He took a look, noted that chipping of the back molars was common when people have such a cusp, and suggested we just leave it alone. Fine with me.

He walked away, and the hygienist told me my molars (teeth #3 and #14) have a Cusp of Carabelli.

I felt the tooth on the other side of my mouth and noticed she was right. “Not everybody has them,” she said. Wow! I’ve lived all this time and never knew I had two Cusps of Carabelli. This was astounding. It’s like when I noticed that not everyone has hanging earlobes, or that some people have hairlines that come to a widow’s peak.

 After several back-and-forth movements of my tongue to study this new-found part of my body, I asked the hygienist: “Does it give me any special powers?”

I think it was a good question – maybe I can walk through walls, but only if my tongue is touching one of the cusps at that moment. Maybe possession of a pair of cusps means that I could be one of Professor Xavier’s X-men.

The hygienist laughed, and said that unfortunately it didn’t endow me with any special powers. Too bad. I was hoping that ‘with great cusps of Carabelli comes great responsibility.’

Friday, 13 July 2012

So, here’s an article from Gallop regarding their recent (and recurring) survey.

Basically, every so often, they poll Americans on their willingness to vote for candidates with certain traits. They break it down my age group, too, so you can see how the respondants’ ages affects their answer (or, correlates).

Of special interest this year, if the respondants’ willingness to vote for a Mormon. If you scroll down in that article, you’ll see that 72% of people self-identifying as Democrats would vote for a Mormon, while 90% of Republicans said they would. This is amazing, because in most other cases, Democrats are more open-minded here; they’re more willing to vote for a woman, a black person, an atheist, a Muslim, and a gay person. Republicans are more willing to vote for a Jew or Catholic…but only just barely (3% and 2%, repectively). But when it comes to Mormons, they’re 18 percentage points ‘ahead’ in their tolerance.

Why is that?

Simple, says ElectoralVote. Accoring to this brief article, published today…

While interesting, what the poll really says is what people are willing to tell a pollster, rather than how they would actually vote. Although 18% of the respondents said that would not vote for a Mormon, when push comes to shove (and the shoving date is Nov. 6, 2012), given a choice between a white, Republican Mormon and a black, Democratic generic Protestant, it remains to be seen whether the expressed bigotry against Mormons dominates. It is also possible that some of the anti-Mormon voters rationalize their vote by convincing themselves that Obama is a Muslim, which in their eyes is even worse.

For the most part, I think this is an accurate assessment, though I also think it’s safe to say that when push comes to shove, 18% of Republicans still will not vote for Romney. Many probably just won’t vote. Some will write-in a candidate or leave it blank. Others will opt for Obama. I don’t think this is necessarily because Romney is Mormon, it’s simply because they maybe don’t like the guy.