Thanks to all of you who voted for me in the recent PF Olympics competition. With your help I came in second and received $250 worth of American Express gift cards.
These will help defray the costs of my upcoming move to Alaska.
This is what happens when you don’t allow enough time to breathe: You turn blue, albeit in a vaguely artistic way.
I haven’t posted much lately, mostly because I was in Alaska. Meeting deadlines and spending as much time as possible with friends and loved ones sucked away most of my hours and all of my energy.
Last week I was so distracted that I never even posted a giveaway. More on that below.
Many years ago, cartoonist Chad Carpenter had just a few syndicated clients. One of them was my then-employer, the Anchorage Daily News, so I actually know the guy. (Well, if “know” is the same as “I used to bug the crap out of him every chance I got.”) These days his daily strip is syndicated in just over 500 newspapers and other publications, mostly in the United States and Canada but in some other countries as well.
At first I wondered how some of the humor would translate to, say, a Norwegian or Jamaican audience. Then again, I guess jokes about outhouses, snowmen and the Grim Reaper are pretty universal.
Which is why I’m putting another Carpenter collection up for grabs — who wouldn’t snicker at a drawing of people being forced to wear life jackets while heading across the River Styx?
I went to a 12:02 a.m. screening of “Prometheus,” one of the most unsettling films I’ve seen in a long time. Not horror-movie scary, sci-fi-movie creepy. It left me so jittery that when we got home at about 2:45 a.m. I couldn’t go right to sleep.
Instead I added video codes to today’s MSN Money post, cleaned up my e-mail inbox and finished tidying the scene of an earlier kitchen mishap involving overboiled blueberries (apparently I have something against my friend’s stove).
It was 4 a.m. before I finally went to bed, which probably isn’t the healthiest sleep habit. The kettle corn consumed at the theater wasn’t so smart, either, no matter how much I try to convince myself that popcorn = corn = daily vegetable intake.
But damn, it was fun. My friend’s got me hooked on midnight screenings. We’ve seen five since I got here.
Sorry to have maintained radio silence for so long. I’ve had to take some time to grieve because my daughter had a second miscarriage. She found out she was pregnant while I was visiting last month, and would have been due close to Christmas.
That was May 11 – their fourth wedding anniversary and two days before Mother’s Day.
I’ve been on a major de-cluttering kick in preparation for “Superfluity,” my church’s annual rummage sale. The idea is to strip your life of superfluous stuff. You get cleaner digs and the church raises cash for its various social programs.
Although I knew my place was getting crowded, I had no idea just how much superfluity existed around me. As I fill bag after bag I can only say, “Holy crap.”
My great-nephew is 10 years old. I expect this is his last year of believing in Father Christmas. No doubt he’ll return to school on Jan. 3 saying, “Santa Claus brought me a Kinect and two of the ‘Heroes of Olympus” books!’ and some cynical fifth-grader will reply, “Dude, your mom bought those gifts.”
This year, though, he still believes. Witness the note he left on the kitchen table.
No, I am not kidding. Picture a 43-foot-tall artificial tree draped with more than $11 million worth of jewelry and precious stones.
If you want to get a closer look, you’ll have to travel to the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi. But not too close a look — the tree has four guards.
The 2011 Talkeetna Bachelors Auction and Wilderness Woman Competition has come and gone in its usual whirlwind of oddity. Funny how it all seemed so normal at the time.
Last year I wrote about the auction in extensive detail. This year I decided to deliver scenes from the weekend as a series of tweets. I’m doing this because I need to get in the habit of posting more often on Twitter.
Note: This doesn’t change my conviction that no one should use the verb “tweet” unless he is, in fact, a bird.
I’ve been meaning to write an update to “Lactobacillus love: Is it wrong?” Making yogurt in the slow cooker was pretty easy in the summer, but autumn brought several fails in a row – and I never could get the process right while up in Alaska last summer. So I went online to research what I might be doing wrong.
Turns out I should have been making sure the milk was heated to 180 degrees and then cooled to between 105 and 110 degrees, and also making sure of a guaranteed, long-lasting source of warmth. The latter isn’t easy in a cooler or downright cold season.
One writer suggested heating the oven to 100 degrees, then shutting it off (but leaving the oven light on), then putting the covered bowl of milk and starter in to “cook.” Despite the current cold snap in Anchorage, this worked great.
That is, until I set my friend’s oven on fire.