Mild Amusement

So, my sister had a kid, so I have a new baby nephew these days. He's the first in my immediate family, so there's all sorts of excitement having to do with him. We are all very excited for his parents, and we're all very excited to meet him. My parents, understandably, were the most excited of the immediate family to meet him. They were the first to spend time with my sister and my nephew, and they were quite happy about the whole thing. The funniest part, to me, was that my mom insisted that my nephew looks like me. I didn't really think much of it, since there's almost always someone who insists that family member X looks like family member Y. Of course, my mom has years and years of experience with this whole baby thing. Also, she's MY mother, so she is one of the two foremost authorities on what I looked like as a baby. Not even I can say what I looked like as a baby, so I really should've listened when she threw out that particular tidbit. In fact,...

Funny things tend to happen when I'm asleep. I obviously don't try to do any of these things, since I'm asleep at the time. Nevertheless, the Mild Fiancée still has all sorts of interesting stories for me when I wake up. This shouldn't really come as much of a surprise: I already wrote about how I say really goofy things when I'm half asleep and I have really amusing dreams when I have dessert before bed . Well, I sleep a lot (for HOURS every single day), so I have lots of opportunities to come up with more stories. These, friends, are two more of those stories. I play a couple of phone games to kill time every now and then, and it apparently has sunk into my subconscious. One of those games is a color matching game, where you try to line up multiple blocks/tiles of the same color in a line. Basically, you move a bunch of stuff around in order to progress through the game. Keeping that in mind, I once started moving stuff around while dead asleep. I sort of reme...

I was never really allowed to be picky about food when growing up, so I learned to eat all sorts of things. My parents still made our favorite dishes , but they also allowed no room for whining about what was on the dinner table. Whether we liked it or not, we would eat what was served. It's a habit that has come in handy surprisingly often over the years, but it also leads to a surprising amount of hilarity. In this case, it's relevant that my brother-in-law and sister-in-law aren't quite so willing to eat other foods . In fact, it's become something of a running gag for us. In both Peruvian and Chinese cooking, you will occasionally be served something that I grew up calling "pichon." The English term for this, as I've discovered, is squab . However, neither of them is particularly fond of that food item, so they usually avoid the squab if it is served. We have all noticed this, so we frequently joke about having pichon for dinner if we want to needl...

The Mild Fiancée and I are not rich. We don't have a huge place, we drive older cars, and we don't take fancy vacations. Sure, we go out to eat every so often, but it's not like we're going to lavish steak dinners every night. Basically, we get by with what we have. We add a few little flourishes here and there, but we are by no means living a luxurious life style. I say all of that so that you have the proper context for the part that comes next. You see, we also like to add small little touches here and there. For example, we'll light a candle at dinner. That's not the sort of thing that takes tons of money or effort, but it does make the meal a little bit nicer. Sometimes we buy a bottle of wine, or mix drinks on the weekends. Again, you'd be surprised at how cheaply you can do this: we've bought five or six dollar bottles of wine and enjoyed them just fine. Now, I'll give the Mild Fiancée full credit here; she's the one who's good at ...