Mild Amusement

Eating is always a source of amusement for me. Somehow, my attitudes and experiences when it comes to food find a way to make me laugh. Sometimes, the ingredients themselves cause a few laughs . I've even had the amount of food I eat make me and the Mild Wife laugh . Of course, no discussion of my relationship to food is complete without the " come y calla " story, and that's usually good for a laugh or two if you've never heard it before. Now, of all of the foods that I eat, dessert seems to occupy a special category in the amusement scale. For starters, I don't really eat much dessert. I'm not sure that I ever get sugar cravings, so if there's an entire course geared towards increasing sugar intake, I'm not particularly interested. Sure, I will eat some if presented with dessert, but I almost never ask for that course myself. It certainly doesn't help that my body reacts with some very strange dreams if I have dessert too close to bed time ...

As with most couples, we tend to split up chores around the apartment. It's only fair that no one person has to do everything. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that we each do exactly half of every single chore. For one, there are some chores that I don't like doing, and there are some chores that the Mild Wife doesn't like doing. For another, we sometimes have time constraints that make it easier for one person to handle the task. Long story short, we each have our assigned tasks. Most of the time, this is just how we do business. It's a fact of life, and it's fairly mundane. In one very specific instance, however, it has led to quite a bit of conversation. You see, I am in charge of our petunias. We got them a long time ago as a gift from our neighbors, roughly around the time when we moved in. I don't even remember how we came upon that particular division of labor, but that's how it went down. Now, I don't have tons of experience wi...

The last time that I used this particular title, I told the tale of a pair of ripped jeans . I'd actually forgotten about the episode until I did a search for posts (I don't like reusing the post titles), but it seemed incredibly apropos given the story I want to tell this time. I don't want to give away the punchline, but you'll see what I mean. So, during that last story, I had to buy a new pair of jeans at the last minute, and I ended up having to change in a public bathroom. It all just felt very odd. Fortunately for me, I was at home when the shenanigans happened this time around. Specifically, this happened: Yes, that is a belt in two pieces The real kicker of it all was that I wasn't even wearing the belt when it decided to end its waist-cinching days. It was, as you can see in the photo, hanging on the hook. I forget what I did, but there was no violent motion involved. I think I tried to move the hanger, but I don't really remember. However, the ...

For all that the Mild Wife and I like to cook and  prepare our own food , we still enjoy some of the simple things in life. We still buy fast food every now and then, there is a monthly Cheeto allocation , and we have done things like eat dino nuggets for dinner . The point here is that we have no qualms about consuming food that is, shall we say, less-than-gourmet. Sure, some of those options probably have less nutritional value than the , but so long as our diet doesn't consist solely of dino nuggets, I figure we're fine. Basically, we like to live a little. I mention this because this particular habit carries over to how we buy groceries. We like buying fruits and vegetables because they're good for us, but some other items make their way into our baskets, shamelessly so. The Cheetos aren't going to allocate themselves into our jar, for example. We've been known to buy frozen food or ice cream, too. Like I said, so long as we consume it all in moderation, I fi...

The Mild Wife and I are trying to save up as much money as we can, so we started a budget that we try to keep to every month . Honestly, it's not even so much that we want to spend less money every month, it's that we want to make sure that we spend it on the right items. Generally speaking, we can live with the results if that's the plan that we go in with. Now, it just so happens that we tend to spend a bit less money when we actively try to track our expenditures, so it all works out nicely. I know I've certainly had moments where I decided I didn't want an extra beer, after all, because I knew it'd get me dangerously close to, or above, the threshold we set for ourselves. I didn't want to be the one to throw the budget off, you know? Regardless, the beauty of all of this is that we've gotten a lot better at estimating what we do and don't need for a given period of time. Yes, that block of cheese will likely last us through the week. No, that...

These days, I do a lot more cooking than I used to. As the Mild Wife has often pointed out, I should probably know how to cook some of my favorite dishes. Plus, we both enjoy the process, and I make a decent sous chef . In the process, there have been quite a few amusing stories. I can now pick out the ingredients in my food with better-than-zero odds, I get to plate the food however I want to , and we even managed to find some funny Amazon reviews in the process. Ultimately, the point is that cooking is an enjoyable process for the Mild Wife and me. I suspect that's a big chunk of the reason why we enjoy watching the Great British Baking Show . I fully realize that baking is not the same as cooking savory food, but it's still fun to see people create things. And in some ways, the fact that it's a different skill set makes it easier to sit back and watch. I am not realistically going to make royal icing any time soon, so it's fun to watch it appear when someone else...

I don't spend as much time with the kids at the daycare these days, so the little kid posts have been fewer and farther between. In fact, the last time I wrote one of these was a little over four years ago . As it so happens, many of the kids have been fairly young, so they haven't exactly been good at providing quote-worthy sound bites. However, they are still people, albeit little ones. That means that they have little personalities, little motivations, and do little things. And it's fun as all heck to watch those little people do those things. It's just plain awesome sometimes. In this case, one of the little munchkins is at about the age where he's learning to move around. He's got control of his head, he can sit up, and he's curious. That set of conditions tends to lead to bucking around and jolting in an attempt to get at things in one's general vicinity. After all, you're stable, and you've got things you want to see and touch. Unsur...