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 ...

One of the more interesting things that I've noticed as I've gotten older is that parents control what their children eat. For example, most parents try to limit the amount of sugar that their kids consume. Sugar tends to make kids really hyper, so it's just best for everyone involved if they don't eat enough of it that they start bouncing off the walls. In that spirit, one of the tricks that I've often seen employed is to water down juice. Some of the juice that you buy is just teeming with sugar. I occasionally check the nutritional information for these things, and I was surprised by just how many grams of sugar there are in a serving. It's not quite bouncing-off-the-walls high, but it's high enough that I did a double-take the first time I noticed it. I don't have any recollection of this happening to us as kids, but it's entirely possible that my folks were just really good about hiding their tracks. Or that I was entirely oblivious to the w...

I get a lot of mistaken identities. I've been suspected of stealing my own car , and had random people assume that I was my own gardener . I also look young for my age, while simultaneously  making old people plans  on occasion. Throw in my apparently surprising penchant for speaking Spanish , and I'm just full of surprises for other people. All in all, it makes life pretty interesting. Now, I've gotten used to it. I've clearly had plenty of those experiences (see the links in the above paragraph as proof), so it comes as no surprise any more. However, if there's a second person involved, things get exponentially funnier. Take, for example, dinners out with the Mild Fiancée. She is only a year younger than me, but she looks even younger than that. We both get carded routinely, as we apparently do not look our age. For the record, that is not a complaint. The two of us will happily look young for the rest of our lives, but it's just funny when it happens. I...

So, I was home alone one day. This was not a particularly special day, it was just another weekend. It's not like we're talking about Christmas or a new member of the family or something. No, it was just another weekend, like any other. The only real difference on this particular day was that I was by myself in the house. Now, I had to do chores around the house. The first thing I was focusing on was laundry, so I threw a load into the wash. Everything was going well, and I was multi-tasking so that I could do some writing while I waited for the laundry to finish. Of course, washing the clothes is only the first half of the chore, so I had to throw that load of laundry into the dryer. I also had a second load of laundry to do, so I decided to multi-task. I threw the second load of laundry into the washer, and moved the first load into the dryer. Yes, I know that everyone does this. It's more or less standard practice. But you can't help but feel a little bit product...