Mild Amusement

At this point, the "sensuous life" bit has been thrown around enough that it deserves its own series. The first post was, understandably, about defining the sensuous life , and the second was all about a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to rename mac and cheese (to "pasta a la fromage"). Basically, we just like adding a touch of pinkies-up to our lives. It's neither hard to do nor ridiculously expensive, but it always adds some hilarity into our lives. In this particular episode of the Sensuous Life, I'd like to discuss cheese platters. You see, one of the very first documented instances of the Sensuous Life was when we decided we wanted a cheese platter as part of our dinner. We sliced up a couple of cheeses from Costco, arranged them on a plate, mixed in a few fruits, and enjoyed the heck out of eating it for dinner. Every now and then, we mix in some cold cuts to go with it, so we often refer to these plates as " charcuterie boards." Strictly spea...

As you can probably tell by the recent titles, Friendsgiving was all sorts of fun. We had juice boxes , and the food got high marks from little kids . You can just imagine how much laughter was involved with all of that. Still, those were mostly funny things that happened on the day of the event. Today's post involves a little bit of fun that won't be going away anytime soon. I mentioned before that one of the munchkins was at the age where she was learning new words. She was quick about learning them, too, often repeating things that she had just heard. I know lots of friends of mine who have kids have warned me that their kids repeat anything and everything, but this was my first time seeing it play out in real time. Sure, I've seen kids at the daycare say things that I was certain came from their parents, but this was the first time I'd seen the action up close and personal. We realized this almost immediately after she repeated the word "juice" a minut...

Last time, I described the thought process behind the beverage selection for Friendsgiving  (there were juice boxes). That led to quite a bit of hilarity around the juice boxes, but the juice was not the only item on the menu that led to some full-on laughter. No, the other food managed to make an impression, too. More importantly, it managed to make an impression on the munchkins that were involved with Friendsgiving. I mentioned last time that one of those munchkins was a precocious fourteen month old. I know it's common for parents to gush about their child's accomplishments and potential, but this particular child impressed both the Mild Wife and me by picking up on words and incorporating them into her vocabulary very quickly. She was clamoring for juice a few minutes after walking in the door, and she'd never even heard the word or had the contents before. Like I said, she was a quick study. The really amusing part, though, came after she tasted the food. While s...

A little while ago, the Mild Wife and I decided to host some friends for a Thanksgiving celebration (a " Friendsgiving ," if you will). We figured we'd play it straight for this particular outing, so we offered to make the turkey. Still, other folks were inevitably going to ask what they should bring, so we let them pick something that reminded them of home cooking. Basically, it was more of an excuse to sit, talk, eat, and be merry than an expectation that they bring their culinary A game . This, however, led to a discussion about what to pair the turkey with. We had lots of options, and everyone loves a good side dish at Thanksgiving. Heck, some people care only for the side dishes. So, we put a bit more thought into what else we were going to make that day. We did ultimately settle on a few items that were a hit (including the infamous cheesecake ), but the bit that really led to some laughter the beverage selection. You see, we had a combination of folks at the p...

Coffee is an interesting beverage to me. I actually went most of my life without drinking it, so I don't have a long history with it. Still, in the few short years that it has been a thing in my life, it's led to some interesting, and therefore amusing, stories. This happens to be one of them. I should probably start by mentioning that I mostly started drinking coffee around the time that the Mild Wife and I got together. The reason was fairly simple: she likes it, so we had more of it around. Prior to that, I used to mostly drink water, tea, juice, or the occasional soda. Still, the Mild Wife enjoys her coffee, so we started having more of it together. In theory, this should've been simple, but it led to quite a few laughs. The first amusing bit was me trying to learn how to make the coffee. You see, I wasn't familiar with the whole world of coffee, so trying to internalize what filters, pour over drippers , and mocha pots do was a bit of a struggle at first. If h...

Growing up, watching television was never really a huge part of my day. Sure, I watched television like other kids did, but I never felt like I had to watch a particular show or that I needed to get lots and lots of screen time. I don't know if I could explain why to you, either. We watched a bit of television before dinner, and then we had to do our homework, but after the work was done, I just never quite went back to the television. I got my fill early on, and I was good. That habit has generally translated over to my adult life, so on a day-to-day basis, I probably watch something like thirty minutes of television. It's not really television, either, but one of the streaming services instead (specifically, Netflix). In fact, I usually get my fill of Netflix while doing the dishes or ironing a shirt, because I am stationary at that point and I prefer a bit of entertainment to pass the time. The Mild Wife and I also have a habit of watching Netflix, though, interestingly e...

At work, I help out with the university recruiting efforts. As I like to joke, it's a self-defense effort to make sure that the coworkers around me know what they're doing. I'm a worker bee, so it's not like I am in a position to hire or fire people. So, I do the next best thing if I want to make life easy on myself at work: I try to help identify talented people as entry-level employees and interns. I figure if any percentage of them stick around, my work life is bound to get better. The only reason I mention this is that this means I sometimes attend recruiting conferences. If you want to hire students, you go to the events that draw them in big numbers. There are a few of those every year, and I happened to be at one a few weeks ago. And as it just so happens, a particular moment stood out as flat out hilarious. You see, we are not the only company that attends these conferences. Part of the reason why so many students attend some of these conferences is that ...

Every now and then, the timing is more amusing than the actual thing. For example, I once let my sister and her husband use my bedroom when they stayed with us, only for me to have a hilariously hard time getting into a new routine during that time. I did eventually figure it out, but only on the very last day of their stay. Like I said, the timing is sometimes the funniest bit of the whole thing. In this case, it wasn't so much a slow crescendo that set up the joke. No, in this case, I had the PG&E public safety power shutoff to blame . If you're unfamiliar with what that was, the biggest utility company in California proactively shut off power to lots of people during some inclement weather. The craziest thing about it was that it wasn't even the kind of weather that you normally worry about. It wasn't high heat, extreme cold, pouring rains, or a hurricane. No, the root cause was high winds. Think about that; the wind blew so hard, that the utility company was ...

As I've mentioned before, I have some geeky tendencies. It often leads me to find humor in situations where others may or may not find the same humor (e.g., if a meat shredding tool reminds me of Wolverine ). It's just a part of my personality, so I've basically come to accept that this is my place in the world. It's not good or bad, it just is. Recently, though, this particular tendency has been amplified by work. For starters, my teammates have started a tradition that involves the Microsoft ninja cat . If those three words alone don't give you a pretty good indication of where this discussion is headed, let me present a picture of said ninja cat (from the very same link): In case it's not apparent, that is a ninja cat riding a fire-breathing unicorn. Just let that sink in for a moment. It takes a special type of humor to find that amusing, and it just so happens that I am surrounded by folks who find that amusing. You can imagine what kind of jokes tha...

I have mentioned it on occasion, but I sometimes get mistaken for a Filipino person . Honestly, I'm never surprised when it happens. For one, it's happened enough times that I recognize that it is a thing. For another, I have a complexion that looks very much like what a stereotypical Filipino person looks like. All in all, it sort of makes sense. Still, it's amusing when it happens. What makes it all the more confusing for people passing by is that I sometimes hang out with a whole lot of other Filipinos. For example, any time I am with the Mild Wife's family, I happen to be one of many people who are/look Filipino. Given the context clues, I can't fault someone for assuming that I am simply another one of the family. I mean, there are people in the family who are lighter than me in skin tone and there are people in the family who have a darker complexion than me. I'm somewhere smack dab in the middle, so it's a perfectly reasonable assumption. If y...

Every year, companies work with United Way in a coordinated week of volunteering effort . Basically, it is a way to try to make a difference by getting a bunch of people to all focus their efforts in a set amount of time. I usually try to pitch in, because I think it's a worthy cause. Hell, I think it's a bunch of worthy causes, and doing my part in some way has always seemed like a good idea. This year, my willingness to volunteer led to some unexpected laughs. You see, this year I volunteered with an organization that has a big yearly yard sale. I think they might make some money off of the effort, but the general idea isn’t actually to be a fundraiser. Instead, the idea is to have a sale of affordable items for their constituents. To give you an idea of what they have in mind, they sell items of clothing for five bucks. I think they might make actually make some money from the process, but that’s almost incidental at that point. I thought that was pretty c...

The Mild Wife and I live in California, which means that we had to contend with the recent power outage . For those of you who are unaware, the local utility company preemptively shut off power in select areas to avoid any raging wildfires. The rationale was deceptively simple: the last major fire in the state started because winds and a power line combined to create a spark, so if there are going to be high winds, they wanted to remove the power in "power line." I actually took/take issue with this (it shirks some of the responsibility around doing proper maintenance), but it did lead to some unintentional hilarity. Since the company announced that there would be waves of shut-offs, they announced start times for when those waves would start. However, because the ultimate impetus for this was the weather, the timing was also highly dependent on mother nature. More specifically, whether the power was shut off or not depended on whether our weather reports had accurately pre...

Every now and then, the fact that I am not the same age as the people that I spend time with is amusing as all heck. The folks older than me know things that I don't or have life experience that lets them see things in a different way, so they will occasionally poke fun of me. We all have a good laugh about it, and life is better all around. However, my favorite moments are the ones that involve kids. It's basically the same scenario as the first one, only I get to play the part of the older person. Heck, it's why I wrote ten parts to the " Little Kids Are Awesome " series. In this episode, I start with the fact that I once realized that some of the kids for our family friends did not grow up with some of the same video games that I did. I forget how it came up, but somehow or another, the Mild Wife and I realized that the kids of our family friends (also family friends, for the record) had no idea what Street Fighter II was. Now, this is a classic video game. ...

Every now and then, I get into a mood where I want to listen to a particular style of music. I don't think there's any discernible pattern as to when I want to do this. I just seem to randomly decide to listen to a particular genre or artist. If I'm really feeling like that genre, I will listen to the same song on repeat for hours . It's not really that I love that one song as it is that I feel like listening to that particular sound or set of lyrics. For this particular blog post, I'll point to an episode where I was listening to 1990's R&B. Again, I don't quite know how this started, but I did start listening to a few songs from that era. There were a few fun trips down memory lane in the course of that mix, since my adolescence was from that general time period. Let's just say that I knew more of the lyrics from memory than I expected. Still, I didn't know all of them. When it came to Des'ree's "You Gotta Be," I couldn...

I mentioned it recently, but I have a bit of an opinion about valid units of measure. Specifically, I am a fan of the metric system when it comes to temperature . As I mentioned in that post, a system that tells me that the temperature is "negative four degrees" is much better at explaining that it is flippin' cold than one that tells me the temperature is "twenty four degrees." The negative sign matters. Now, as soon as I mentally conceded that the metric system made a ton of sense for temperature, I immediately started thinking that it probably makes sense for other units, as well. I mean, if I'm going to apply the whole "this just makes sense" standard to the ambient temperature, it makes sense to think about mass, volume, and length in the same general way. Why force people to remember that there are sixteen ounces in a pound? Or that, more confusingly, there are eight  fluid  ounces in a cup? The conversion rates just seem arbitrary at that ...

My sister was in town recently, so that means we got to spend a little time with her and her family. It was good seeing them, as always, though the fact that she has young children means that seeing "them" includes having interactions with little kids. This, as you can imagine, means all sorts of amusing anecdotes. In this particular case, it was less something that a kid said and more what was said about a kid. You see, the Mild Nephew has a decent memory. He will remember specific things about people, the sort of things that amuse him. I guess on some level we all do this ("oh yeah, I like so-and-so. They're nice"), but it's not nearly as refined in a little kid. Apparently, he will flat out say to his mom that he wants to go visit so-and-so because they have dogs and he wants to see the dogs. The same sentiment applies to other people, and other attributes. What's more, he has an impressive-for-his-age mental rolodex of people and attributes. When...

I almost didn't notice, but I have been blogging for a decade. Yes, ten whole years. In fact, I was bad enough at tracking the dates that I am now a month late in celebrating the ten-year anniversary of my first post  (the first one was apparently in August 2009). I never imagined that my random musings would lead to a full-blown writing practice, as the Mild Wife calls it. Still, here we are, all these years later. I figured the most fitting way to mark this occasion would be to revisit some of the more memorable/fun blogs posts during that time. As you can probably imagine, a lot has happened in ten years. So, I present you some of the highlights from the last decade: I got married a couple of years ago . There were several blog posts about it, but the term "Mild Wife" started making an appearance in posts shortly thereafter. The resulting Mild Honeymoon also led to plenty of laughs. I decided at about the two-year mark to  stick to a schedule of one blog post ...

The Mild Wife and I both like to cook, but I don't immerse myself quite as much in the endeavor as she does. I will occasionally suggest an interesting combination of ingredients (grilled onions in a salad is delicious), but she just has a passion for it that I can't match. Why do I say this? Because she doesn't just enjoy cooking, she enjoys learning new recipes, looking at social media posts about food, and the like. To paraphrase the Batman villain Bane , I merely adopted cooking. Now, to be clear, this does not mean that the Mild Wife does all the cooking. I put in my share of effort, to the point where we joke that I am the sous chef . Like I said, I enjoy the activity, and I do like to play with the ingredients to try to come up with something delicious. However, I find new recipes far less often than the Mild Wife. Most of the time, the Mild Wife will find something, and we will try to make it at some point. One of the most memorable instances of this, however, i...

A while back, the Mild Wife and I decided to get a fancy shmancy smart scale ( something like this ). We both like to keep an eye on our health, and the scale is one of those numbers that provides some hints about general health. Sure, the actual weight number can be misleading, but that's where a smart scale fills in some of the gaps. If you measure both your overall weight and your fat percentage, you've got a decent picture of what's happening with your body. Now, we both know that the numbers aren't supposed to be completely accurate. However, so long as they're consistent, you can make deductions about how your diet and exercise are treating your body. Let's say the scale consistently says that you're five pounds heavier than you actually are. That's nice, but it's the same five pounds every single day. If my weight is lower on a Tuesday than on a Monday, that still means I lost some weight. So far, the scale has proven useful, but I get a b...

As I've noted here, there have been quite a few travels during the last few months. On the last leg of the trips, the Mild Wife and I ended up in Colorado to visit some family . During that time, we had some fun exchanges with my sister, my brother-in-law, and her kids. Not surprisingly, the ones with the kids were the most amusing. For this particular post, I'm going to describe one of the food-related ones. Specifically, I made causa with my nephew at one point. Now, if you've never had Peruvian causa, I added a link to a Wikipedia article that has a picture of it. That article is in Spanish, because the dish in question is more well-known in countries that speak Spanish. Still, if you want to get an idea of what it is, the picture there is a good way to get the gist of it. In the simplest terms, it's a potato/tuna casserole. The version I've always seen isn't as fancy as the one in the link; we usually just used a big Pyrex container and made a big sheet o...

To finish out the great world tour of 2019, the Mild Wife and I ended up in Colorado the week after the Kazakhstan trip . If you've been following along, this year has included trips to two different continents away from home. This wasn't the plan at the beginning of the year, but somehow, this is where we ended up. Still, I've been lucky to be able to go on all these trips, so I'm not complaining at all. In fact, I'm blogging about it to share some of the fun. For this particular trip, I was visiting family, so it was all play and no work. I left my work stuff at home, and the Mild Wife and I threw ourselves into spending quality time with my sister, her husband, and her kids. There were lots of fun moments, but the general memory I have was of interacting with our older nephew. His younger sibling is still a baby, so while we had some very cute moments and pictures with the baby, we spent more time talking and playing with our nephew. Since the Mild Wife and I...

As the last couple of blog posts pointed out, I was recently on a trip to Kazakhstan . So far, I've regaled you with stories about, essentially, pieces of paper. Sure, they were important pieces of paper (the postcards were important to me), but they were just that: paper. In a way, though, they highlighted just how different things were in that country compared to what I was used to. I don't normally have to track customs forms or have that much trouble finding a way to mail something, after all. Today's post, on the other hand, is the opposite of that. The more things change, the more they stay the same. As I mentioned last post, I was in town the day before a local holiday. That led to shenanigans when it came to the operating hours for the post office, but it also led to the set up for this post. Specifically, I needed to have dinner the night before this holiday, and I wasn't feeling particularly adventurous. So, I figured I'd wander down to the hotel restaur...

Continuing with the theme of travel-related humor , Kazakhstan offered up a second opportunity for hilarity. The first time around involved a customs and immigration paper that I watched like a hawk. The second time involved some postcards, so it was far less official. However, it also led to more sustained laughter. As you can probably guess, I decided to send some postcards. I can't remember if this was my idea or the Mild Wife's idea, but I want to say that something she said inspired this plan. Specifically, I wanted to send postcards to our younger nephews and nieces. It seemed like a cool little souvenir, since it'd very likely be a unique gift. Also, they're old enough now where they'd probably appreciate receiving something in the mail. Even if they didn't actually know what the postcard said, they'd understand that the item was meant for them. As the Mild Wife has mentioned in the past, a little kid knows when something is for them, and they tend ...

Continuing with the theme of  travel-related humor , I recently had to travel to  Kazakhstan  and that led to more than a few chuckles. Now, Kazakhstan is not a place where I travel very often. It's in Asia, bordering both China and Russia, so it takes at least a couple of flights in order for me to get there. Essentially, it's far from home for me. To make things a bit more complicated, I don't speak any Kazakh or Russian, so I am very much a foreigner in that country. Sure, I'm very willing to try the food , but that doesn't quite help when trying to answer questions or hold a conversation. Similarly, I don't any of the local laws, because, again, I am a foreigner in that country. Given that I don't speak the language, this basically means that it is in my best interest to not run afoul of any regulations. I mention these two specific facts because they bring me to the focal point of today's blog post: the white piece of paper. When you arrive in c...

In the latest round of stories about our recent Argentina trip , I'm going to talk about pizza. It's not the first time that pizza has been the subject of a blog post , and it probably won't be the last time, either. It's just one of those dishes that shows up a bunch in life, y'know? First of all, I should start by pointing out that Argentina has its own special brand of pizza. There may actually be several of these varieties, but the one I kept hearing about was the fugazza . The first time I heard about it, the Mild Wife had had some during the day, and mentioned to me that it was both different than the pizza we got at home and tasty. Given that she liked it, I was more than a little intrigued. As it turns out, I was not the only one intrigued by this pizza. One of my other coworkers on the trip also had his curiosity piqued by this local pizza. I don't remember how it came up in conversation, but someone must have mentioned it at some point. Well, from ...

So, we were in Argentina for a while . Specifically, we were in the Buenos Aires area for a good amount of time. I normally leave off some of those details because I figure they won't really add too much to the story, but in this case, it might be relevant (I will allow you to decide). During that time, we got to explore a little bit and see a bit of the city. More importantly to the Mild Wife and me, though, that also meant we got to sample some of the food. We had actually scouted out particular dishes before we got there, so there was something of a list to try. Argentina is known for its steak and wine, so those were givens. However,  empanadas and medialunas  also made it on to the scout list, in part because the Mild Wife did a bit of homework (side note: in looking for good sites to link the two items in this sentence, I discovered a piece that says the pastry names are actually a form of political dissidence . Who knew?). Basically, we had a few items that we were i...