Spanish-language Coca-Cola commercial

Great ad.  I'm intrigued by the green-label Coke.  What's up with that?

Hot Doughnuts Now

Krispy Kreme has a new strategy

The Krispy Kreme less than a mile from our house closed several years ago, which was probably good for our waistlines, but I hate spending 45 minutes in the car making the round trip to the nearest store for pumpkin spice.  (It's pumpkin spice season now!  Go get some!)  I hope that they'll open another store, perhaps not quite as close and impulse-friendly, but at least somewhere in town.  Oklahoma City can support two Krispy Kremes!

I have never gotten the point of buying them in the grocery store, however.  If they're not fresh off the conveyor belt, I don't even bother with the glazed.

What if Barbie had internal organs instead of a fatal eating disorder?

Artist Nikolay Lamm used a 3D printer to make a Barbie with the measurements of a non-mutated human female.  Click this link to read more and see more side-by-side comparison photos.

She actually looks better!  Probably much easier to dress, too.  Pulling those tiny waistbands up over her hips was always murder.

The Less You Know

Just watched a very poorly-written public service announcement during a rerun of Friends.  It was for a cancer-fighting organization and starred someone who's presumably a starlet of some type whom I didn't recognize.

She ended the spot by saying, "Every hour someone dies from melanoma.  It doesn't have to be someone you love."

...which means, of course, that if you play your cards right and donate to the organization she's endorsing, it can be someone someone else loves.  It can be a stranger.  Or maybe, if you're really generous, it can be someone you dislike.  They have that power over melanoma.

Poor logic or poor writing?  Most likely some of both.

Spoilers for Man of Steel, if you care....

I have no intention of watching Lame New British Superman, but I would like to see him told off by Tony Stark.

Let Us Now Denigrate Famous Men (because it makes us feel all warm and superior inside)

John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture, interviews Eric Metaxas about his new book 7 Men and the Secret of Their Greatness.  Haven't read the book and probably won't anytime soon, but I have to say I love Eric's response to this rather snide question:

Why do we hear almost nothing about the flaws of these men?

Because most of them were so genuinely wonderful that it would be a disservice and a distortion of the truth, especially in a short chapter. If someone asked me about you and even though I think tremendously well of you I felt the need to think of one negative thing to say, just to be "fair," that would in fact be deeply unfair and wrong. For example, shall I tell everyone who asks me about you that you stole from those dear elderly people you were visiting? Besides, you needed that jewelry, didn't you? Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, it's nobody's business.

Okay, but seriously, let me wonder right back atcha: Why is our generation obsessed with the flaws of famous men? At some point in the last 40 or 50 years we've swung from never revealing the flaws of famous men to focusing exclusively on those flaws. I talk about this at length in the introductory chapter of the book. It's become genuinely pathological. We've gone from hiding the glaring flaws of seriously troubled men like JFK—who everyone feared might be "too Catholic," but who in reality regularly brought prostitutes into the White House, which is not all that Catholic, now that we think about it, eh?—to tearing down genuinely great men, like George Washington, who did so much for this nation that we are all profoundly in his debt, but who now must always be gravely scolded for having owned slaves at a time when not one single Virginia landowner did not own slaves. Of course there was a time when we may have overpraised even the great George Washington, but for the love of Mike, let's not all leap from being Parson Weems to being Bill Maher or Chelsea Handler. Can't we strike a balance?

We've got to regain our common sense and be able to tell the difference between heroes and villains—and yes, those categories still exist—without endlessly feeling the hand-wringing obligation to say that some hero wasn't perfect. Of course every one of the men in 7 Men is a sinner and flawed, but since none of them is Jesus, shouldn't that go without saying? We owe it to ourselves—and to young people especially—to be able to make the distinction between Joseph Stalin and Christopher Columbus. And we have got to snap out of the adolescent habit of saying that unless we report on the one bad thing someone did, we're not telling the "whole" story. Our constantly tearing down leaders and over-focusing on their flaws has had a tremendously baleful effect on the culture at large. It's made us all cynical and world-weary. There really are times when it's okay to be innocent and hopeful, but like some eye-rolling Goth 15-year-old, we've decided that that's just like so naïve. To which I must needs reply: whatever.

Scofflaw

Today was my dad's 87th birthday.  I made double chocolate pound cake and was led to wonder if there is a more often broken instruction in the world than the one on the back of the cake mix box: Do not eat raw cake batter.  We ate raw eggs and butter and loved it.

Star Trek writer/director apologizes for gratuitous lingerie shot...

...and is called to task for it in a blog post which leads with the lingerie shot in question.  Really?  "Look how bad this guy is for turning strong female characters into sexual objects to be leered at ... and leer at her while we're congratulating ourselves on how feminist we are!"  :P

Gutter ball?

From a bowling alley in Moore.

Rescue pets

A rescued kitten near Shawnee.

Hitting close to my hometown

This Okie girl is heartsick for Moore tonight.  Whole neighborhoods gone and the death toll still unknown.  God bless.

At the Volees

This is the second year our church has had a red-carpet banquet for volunteers: free dinner, free childcare, tons of fun!

Sonic Peanut Butter Fudge Shake

Thankfully, they make you click to open the nutrition information for this delicacy, because I don't want to know.  But it's like drinking a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup through a straw.

I'm a PC (natch)

Another vacation destination crossed off the list

Add Guam to my list of places never to go....

The grapes are probably sour anyway

From here.

New boy in the neighborhood/ Lives downstairs and it's understood...

In case you didn't read the Sunday comics, now you can have that song running though your head like I have through mine all day.

Where the Time Goes

At least until basketball season is over, Thursdays kill me.  (Friday I have no excuse for.)  It's math day; Faith has basketball practice at 7 which means there's no time for dinner between when Tommy gets home and time to leave; and I leave practice early to catch the beginning of "Person of Interest" at 8 so I can tell what Tommy what's happened when he gets home with the kids.

I'm two weeks behind on reading the daily newspaper, and this Thursday it was 11 PM before I realized I hadn't eaten anything all day.  I didn't eat breakfast, skipped lunch, and didn't have time for dinner.

Don't call us Dallas

A couple of interesting articles on the Dallas-Fort Worth rivalry:

This one was in our newspaper today, and this is in Texas Monthly.

2012 Flashback: Upward Basketball

Just realized I never uploaded a photo of the kids in uniform last year.  I can't believe how much older Eric looks just a year later!

Most Valuable Fan

As a follow-up to this post, there's a boy on Faith's team named Nathan.  Her team played just before Eric's on Saturday, and Tommy went to their post-game meeting while I found seats at the other court where his team was playing.  When he came down to sit with me, he said Nathan's mother had been there and had thanked him for cheering for her son from the sidelines every game.  Nathan told his mom, "Faith's dad is great.  He's like my biggest fan."

Putting all our eggs in one basket

I had to run to Target today because we were out of milk.  A family with three small children and a baby in the parents' arms was walking in the door just ahead of me, and the three ambulatory kids were running ahead of their parents, talking about who was going to be the last one in and, thus, the "rotten egg."

It reminded me of about three years ago.  We were leaving our favorite pizza restaurant, and Tommy was trying to motivate the kids to get in the car quickly so he said that 'last one in is a rotten egg.'  Well, Eric raced for the car, climbed in ahead of Faith, and cheered, "I'm the rockin' egg!"

So in our family, the first one in is the rockin' egg.

Serendipity

This guy was at the kids' basketball games this morning.  Turns out his dad owns the sports photography company that takes the team pictures every year, and he came along to help sell photo packages to parents. Turns out, even more coincidentally, that he grew up in Fort Worth and actually came to a few youth lock-ins in our church gym where the games were played today when he was in junior high.  Our family pastor who doubles as our announcer asked him to speak at halftime and tell his story, so we heard it twice, once during Faith's game and again during Eric's.  I, obviously, had never heard of him, but apparently he was on a reality show in addition to being a mixed martial artist (which I only know is a thing from Monica's millionaire boyfriend on "Friends.")

Book Lovers Outraged Over Sexy ‘Anne of Green Gables’ Cover

Book Lovers Outraged Over Sexy ‘Anne of Green Gables’ Cover:

And you thought it was controversial when Bernice bobbed her hair....

Wardrobe function?

A local radio DJ said on the air today that when a friend's eight-year-old saw Beyonce's Super Bowl halftime show, she turned to her mom and asked, "Does that lady know she forgot some of her clothes?"

2012 Flashback: Birthday cake

As you might have been able to tell from the photo in Saturday's post, Faith's birthday cake this year was a Kit-Kat cake.  If you haven't had one before, it's a round two-layer cake with Kit-Kats stuck on vertically all around the sides and mini M&Ms covering the top, so none of the frosting is actually visible.  Ours was a white cake; they offered chocolate, but I can't even imagine how rich that would have to be: chocolate cake with chocolate frosting coated with chocolate candies.

This was Faith's birthday cake last year.  Very cute, but those icing polka-dots and ribbon are absolutely inedible.  They're so thick, you can barely cut through them when you're slicing the cake.  It's like trying to eat chewing gum.

Birthday girl

2012 Flashback: Birthday girl

Faith turns 10 this Saturday.  Last year, she had a dental appointment the day before her birthday.  All the hygienists know how to make balloon animals at our pediatric dentist, and for birthdays, they make a hat:

Eric was very jealous; the six-month gap between check-ups means he'll likely never be there on his birthday.  When I was a kid, all I got from the dentist was a plastic toy and a lecture on brushing.

Blast from the Past

Man, I love this goat.  Doesn't take nothing from nobody.  I'm fairly certain he's too edgy for Sesame Street today.  It's a kinder, gentler Street.  Heck, even Oscar has friends over for playdates these days.

"French playwrights and the Bible" for 200, Alex

During Eric's basketball practice tonight, I was reading a review (from summer 2012) of a book on the history of the Conservative Party in Britain, and I came across this gem of a sentence:

"But if, like Naaman in the House of Rimmon, Churchill conformed without believing, it is not evident that Chamberlain and Baldwin -- or even David Cameron -- can be similarly absolved on grounds of political Tartuffery." -- Michael Knox Beran

What a delight of obscure references!  The Second Book of Kings and Moliere both in the same sentence and  pressed into service to discuss the prime ministers of Great Britain!  And not a frisson of context or whiff of a footnote!  I think what I miss most about academia is the sheer intellectual elitism in which one is permitted -- nay, encouraged! -- to engage.

Young ladies' man

The children at our church are dismissed to go to "junior church" after the song service and just before the sermon.  We generally sit in what they call the "stadium seating," wings on either side with graduated rows of pews and stairs on each side.  There was a little girl about Eric's age sitting in the row behind us, and as she got up to walk down the stairs, he waited at the bottom and kept reaching out to take her hand; I could tell he was trying to help her down the stairs, but she had no idea what he wanted.

After the service, her mom leaned forward and said, "Your little boy is so sweet!"  She proceeded to tell us the conversation she had with her daughter afterwards: The mom had explained that Eric had been trying to take her hand to help her down the stairs, and she replied, "I didn't know, mom!  He told me I had pretty hair, and I said thank you."

Dereliction of duty

So I missed two days of blog this week.  Thursday night, I forgot about trying to think of something clever until I was already in bed.  Friday night I knew I should have posted but was just too tired to care.

Get Fuzzy page-a-day calendar?  Still on January 11th.

Yesterday I took the kids to McDonald's where I generally do some reading while they play and tried to get caught up on the daily newspapers dating back to last Friday.

I'm obviously struggling against a rising tide here.

One man's trash

Eric likes to pick things up.  Off the street, I mean.  He collects rocks, sticks, small pieces of plastic and metal, empty eyedrop bottles, Christmas light hangers, and all kinds of trash.  Every time we walk across a parking lot, he has to stop to pick something up.  A while back I asked him, "Eric, why do you pick up so much trash?"

He looked at me, a little hurt, and explained, "Sometimes it's treasure."

2012 Flashback: Dreaming of a White Christmas

We had one this year.  It started snowing just after noon, big fat flakes, and snowed most of the day.  Here's Eric and Faith shortly after the snow started falling.

What I'm reading now

I haven't read a physical book in quite a while.  I'm still working on catching up on the magazines I fell behind on two and a half years ago; several times I've gotten well into the seasonals stack only to bog down in a review of a philosophical or political book for a few weeks, during which time the biweeklies and monthlies start to arrive again.  Right now, I'm in a Claremont Review of Books from Summer 2012 and had less than 8 (admittedly thick and small-fonted) magazines left in my stack, but I'm wading through a multi-page opinion piece on issues that were germane before the election and now are fairly moot.  (You want to know what was all the rage in Winter 2011/12?  Occupy and Rick Perry.  Seriously.  How long ago does that seem now?)  And about 5 new magazines came in this week.  :P

I have, however, read a few books on my Kindle, thanks to the Kindle Lending Library and the ease of carrying a Kindle Keyboard places where a 8-½ x 11 folio wouldn't stuff in my purse.  I just finished reading  The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, and ran across this quote from the homeschooling author with which I immediately identified:

"In Knox's Cub Scout troop last week, a boy asked how homeschool is different from public school.  Another boy answered: 'At public school, your Mom isn't yelling at you.'  True.  Good Point.  Mea Culpa."

...and in away jerseys

Anyone who has ever watched a sporting event with Tommy knows that he watches sports LOUD.  He's no different watching the kids' basketball games.  One of the boys on Eric's team was on the same team with him last year too and is used to hearing Tommy cheer at the games.  Before the game this morning, Gage's mother came up to tell Tommy that her mother was visiting from Lubbock this weekend, so she told Gage that both his grandmothers would be watching his game Saturday.  Gage looked up at her and asked, "And Eric's dad?"

Basketball and other time sinks

My page-a-day calendar?  Still on January 11th.  I've missed three days of blog this week.  Resolution not going so well.  :P

Part of the issue is that it's basketball season again.  We have practice two nights a week and games Saturday mornings.  The kids are having a great time and, apart from time pressures, we are, too.

Life imitates old joke

I went in Braum's today to buy a gallon of milk, and the woman who was ringing me up was simultaneously on the earpiece for the drivethrough.  The man in the car had her listing off all the kinds of ice cream they had available -- somewhere just south of 30 varieties -- and after she was done, she paused a moment and then replied to him, "Double dip of vanilla, yes, sir."

"Seriously?" I asked her.  "After making you list off all that, he ordered vanilla?"

She grinned at me.  "Happens more often than you'd think."

Just saying....

There is no one I have more respect for after reading their Twitter feed.

Seriously.  If there's any pop cultural figure out there you have some residual affection for, just don't go looking.

Christmas cards

When I was a child, my parents used to display the Christmas cards they received on strings around the doorways of the living room and den and across the beams of the ceiling.  Our house doesn't have exposed ceiling beams or molding around the doorways so I spent a few years trying to figure out something to do with the Christmas cards we receive, other than just put them in a stack where no one can see them.

Several years ago, I saw one of these on Amazon and thought it might be just what I was looking for.  They're made for photos, but they work even better for cards.  I filled two of them this year, using one as a centerpiece for the table and the other (just barely visible in the background above) on a side table.  All the pretty cards and family photos are visible and accessible, easy to flip through and spin around, and it's much more decorative than a stack of cards on a table somewhere.  They've even got a big floor-standing version that you could use as a Christmas tree to put presents under if you live in a loft and are all chic and avant-garde.

Why we read

A case can be made that people who read a preposterous number of books are not playing with a full deck.  I prefer to think of us as dissatisfied customers.  If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find "reality" a bit of a disappointment.  People in the 19th century fell in love with "Ivanhoe" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" because they loathed the age they were living through.  Women in our own era read "Pride and Prejudice" and "Jane Eyre" and even "The Bridges of Madison County" -- a dimwit, hayseed reworking of "Madame Bovary" -- because they imagine how much happier they would be if their husbands did not spend quite so much time with their drunken, illiterate golf buddies down at Myrtle Beach.  A blind bigamist nobleman with a ruined castle and an insane, incinerated first wife beats those losers any day of the week.  Blind, two-timing noblemen never wear belted shorts.

....  No matter what they tell themselves, book lovers do not read primarily to obtain information or to while away the time.  They read to escape to a more exciting, more rewarding world.  A world where they do not hate their jobs, their spouses, their governments, their lives. A world where women do not constantly say things like, "Have a good one!" and "Sounds like a plan!"  A world where men do not wear belted shorts.  Certainly not the Knights Templar.

-- Joe Queenan, "One for the Books" 

What we're reading now

It's been a while that I've been trying to find books that Faith is interested enough in to read through for fun of her own volition, like she did The Boxcar Children.  (Still does, actually, as she's reread it a time or two.)  We had some success with Ramona Quimby, as she read most of Beezus and Ramona in one day, but she was disappointed that Ramona grows up from book to book; Ramona really is more entertaining as a preschool force of chaos totally alien to the viewpoint of her big-sister protagonist than the after-school special about how to deal with school/ parents working or being out of work/ dads quitting smoking she morphed into.

It was my mom that hit upon Hank the Cowdog.  She's in her second year of mentoring a boy at a local grade school, and the school librarian suggested the series as a popular choice.  My mom's been getting the books from the library, and Faith's been tearing through them.  She can easily read one a day.  (Fortunately, there's sixty books in the series right now, but she's still going to run out eventually.)  There are audio books too, and Eric's gotten into the characters listening to the CDs.  He's reading the first book now, a chapter a day, for his daily reading/ spelling/ vocabulary lesson, and the kids have been building a replica of the ranch Hank lives on in the spare room at my parents' house, using my old Fisher Price farm set, cardboard, craft sticks, and markers.  They have a chicken house, a machine shed, a gas tank, a pond, and a corral, in addition to the barn and main house.

Important instructional video that could SAVE YOUR LIFE!

...or not. :)

De-Christmasing

It didn't take long for me to miss a weekday this year -- although the weekends are made for make-up days.  And my new 2013 Get Fuzzy page-a-day calendar?  Still on January 1st.

We spent yesterday afternoon taking down all the Christmas decorations and packing them back up in the attic.  The nice thing about living in Texas is that there's virtually always at least one sunny, sixty-degree day Thanksgiving weekend to put the outside lights on and another one about a week after Christmas to take them all down again.  This year, we had to wait longer than usual: constant highs in the forties with clouds, cold wind, and occasional rain.  We finally got a very pleasant sunny day near 60 yesterday and took advantage of it.  Good thing, too, as today wasn't as warm and boasted a cold breeze as well.

When I was young, it used to depress me greatly when all the Christmas decorations went away; my parents would take it all down while I was in school to avoid my protests.  Now, it's nice to have it all put away for another eleven months.  And I always feel like we've added a room to the house when we get back all the space in the front window that the tree takes up.

Reason to be glad you're not a citizen of Iceland

Iceland apparently only allows babies to be named from a government-approved list of less than 2000 names per gender.

Does it strike anyone else as ridiculous that Blaer, the phonetics of which I'm assuming approximate those of Blair Warner, distinguished alumna of Eastland School, is disallowed but Bjork is considered a stolid, sober, unmockworthy name for a girl?

Zoo Year's Eve

Faith and Eric spent New Year's Eve sleeping overnight at the zoo with 43 other children between the ages of 6 and 12.  They called it Zoo Year's Eve.  We dropped them off at 5 o'clock on New Year's Eve and picked them up at 9 AM New Year's Day (a little early, considering the suggestion was for parents to leave their kids at the zoo and go out for their own festivities).  They got to eat pizza for dinner and go into the zoo in the dark after hours and stay up until midnight with hot chocolate and sparkling cider.  I took this picture in the parking lot before dropping them off.  When I picked them up, the first thing Faith asked was if they could do it again next year.

Return of Blog: The Bloggening!

To give you the idea of what kind of year I had, I had a 2012 page-a-day Get Fuzzy calendar so I could read a strip 6 times a week.  (A few years ago, it was seven days a week, but they've since got cheap and put Saturday and Sunday together on one page without lowering the price.)  Last night, for New Year's Eve, Tommy and I sat down and read through the pages one by one going back to mid-July, which was the last time I actually took the time to pull the page off.  It's not that I never had free time, obviously; just that whenever I did, there were other things that took priority over getting caught up on my calendar.

2012 is proof I haven't the discipline to keep up with a blog without a binding commitment to crack the metaphorical whip, so I've made it my New Year's resolution again to update every weekday (with weekends providing make-up days if ... no, when -- when necessary).  I've all last year's worth of photographs to share and stories to tell when life just isn't interesting enough in the coming months; hopefully, I can make 2012 stretch to cover what 2013 doesn't.

So stay tuned and watch this space five times a week!