Mild Amusement

I'm not the biggest fan of Daylight Saving Time. For one, I get up really early to begin with, so it's not like it does me any good to have sunrise be off by an hour. There are pretty good odds that I'm going to get up when it's dark no matter what the clock says. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly to me, it doesn't really seem to work (as a quick example,  see the last item on the History Channel's article ). Basically, we spend all this effort to try to get a benefit, but it doesn't seem to materialize. So why bother? Regardless of how I feel about it, though, that's how everyone does things where I live. It's not like I can wage a one-man boycott of Daylight Saving Time. I will inevitably have to meet with someone, either for work or for pleasure, and bad things would happen if we had two different ideas of when 10AM was. Basically, I have to play along because time is one of those things that everyone relies on. So, when it was the app...

My parents like to cook , so they spend a fair bit of time working with recipes. My Mom likes to try new recipes, so it's not uncommon for her to decide to make a new recipe out of the blue. I've seen her make biriyani at home, for example. We don't have cultural roots in that part of the world, but she figured it'd be fun to make, so she tried her hand at it (I liked it well enough). The interesting bit, though, is that they try to perfect certain recipes. Once they've tried it once or twice, they'll try to get the flavors and the textures just right. It often makes for some good meals, because these are people who care about how the food comes out. In general, that one fact tends to make the end result better. The funny thing to me, though, has always been just how striving for perfection shows up in day-to-day life. Specifically, overhearing my parents talk about what they want to change for a particular dish leads to some comically precise discussio...

It's funny how work settings tend to play out. For the most part, everyone tends to dial things down, because they don't want to cause drama or otherwise rock the boat. That doesn't mean that everything has to be entirely bland, but you also hear a lot fewer off-color jokes. It's just safer that way. Still, every now and then, a situation calls for some wacky humor. In this particular case, one of my coworkers was dealing with someone who just wouldn't stop talking. I wasn't there for the actual conversation, but apparently this person didn't catch any of the social cues and insisted on continuing the conversation. He just kept right on droning on, hoping to achieve some goal in the process. As you can imagine, said coworker was not particularly thrilled. She looked around to see if anyone else could bail her out of this situation, but alas, no one was to be found. She was stuck. Many hours later, she would then recount this tale of woe, and lament t...

It's not much of a secret, but I tend to have some awfully nerdy habits and hobbies. I used to have a standing chess game with a coworker , fercryinoutloud. There's really not much I can do about hiding the fact at that point. If he looks like a nerd and talks like a nerd, he's probably a nerd. That said, I am not one hundred percent nerdy about everything. Frankly, I'm not even sure that's possible. I'm not sure I could read for hours, play multiple games of chess, watch several hours of science fiction television, AND write a bunch of code in a single day. I still have to eat and sleep, after all. Heck, I have a day job, too. Basically, for all that I am a nerd, there are certain areas of nerd-dom that are foreign to me. One such area is Dungeons & Dragons . I know what it is in general, but I've never played a single game. I don't know that I have any objections to it, I just never got into the game. I'm guessing a part of it was that I di...

Every now and then, the Mild Wife and I will comment how some people just ... act funky. Whether it's because they were never taught any better, they simply don't care, or circumstances in life have forced them to operate at a different level, they just do things that the rest of us don't consider acceptable. The simple, short-hand description that we use for someone like this is " hoodrat ." Now, you don't have to actually live in the 'hood to act like a hoodrat. There are rich people that have no manners and have no class. Basically, we've found that the term is still relevant even if we don't live in a super rough part of town. As a case in point, I will point to a recent Costco trip. The Mild Wife went this time around, and she remarked that she will never again go on that particular weekday at that particular time of day. It was a madhouse. There were tons of people there, and everyone was trying to get their groceries. People were bumping...

As I've been writing these blog posts over the years (amazingly, it's been over 9 years now), I've noticed that there are certain things that keep coming up. It's possible that I just find certain things funny so I write about them all the time, or maybe I do actually have certain things happen to me surprisingly often. Either way, there seem to be certain themes that routinely make me chuckle. Today's post involves one such theme: food and diet. If you don't understand quite why I say this, let me remind you of a few recent posts. First, there was the puny salad that I had for lunch while volunteering . Second, I point you to the time that I accidentally grabbed a bowl of chili, and only chili, for lunch . The last exhibit in my case that food-related hijinks are a thing in my life comes from an unusual pairing with potstickers . Like I said, we tend to have some food-related laughs around here. The latest in the string of food laughs came up when I went to...

This story starts out with a pretty innocuous event: a grocery run. We were going to host people at the Mild Abode, so we went to the store to pick up groceries. The Mild Wife had actual done a really good job of planning ahead, so we didn't need to pick up tons of items. Still, we didn't have every last item we needed for the shindig, so we headed to the store. Now, I don't really remember all of the items we needed, but we did want to buy a bigger rice cooker. You see, the Mild Wife and I usually just cooked for ourselves, so it's not like we needed mountains of rice for the two of us. However, making enough rice for a party using our small rice cooker would've meant having to cook several batches, and therefore spend forever cooking. No, we decided. We would rather just get a bigger rice cooker and make it all in one go. We actually had two stops to make, and the rice cooker was supposed to be a purchase from the second stop. However, when we were walking thr...