LMNOP

1. Pancake tries to sneak in for some affection from Pebbles.

2. Pancake is rebuffed.

This happens a lot in our house.

(I love how in the first picture, Pebbles is actually wincing.)

Thanks to a little press from Dooce.com and a subsequent minor inundation (minundation?) of coaster orders, I am a bit busy at the moment.  I might not be able to put a proper post together for another day or two, but I have come up with an alternative: I have devised a question so provocative and challenging, it will surely be enough to occupy your minds until I return.

See if you can answer this for me:

Out of all diet sodas available on the market, Diet Dr Pepper does the best job of approximating its "regular" counterpart.  At the same time, however, it is also one of the worst-tasting diet sodas.  How is this possible?

. . . Who wants a hamburger bed?

My roommate owns this incredible, enormous, leopard-print  blanket, and while "gigantic leopard-print blanket" is probably not the first box you'd check on a list of Classy and Versatile Decor Options, you just have to trust me when I say that this blanket is the most comfortable and wonderful thing in the world.  Since the weather has gotten cold, there has pretty much not been a single moment when at least one member of the household (either human or canine) hasn't been cuddled up on the Magical Leopard Blanket of Wonder.  It's just that awesome.

When I woke up last Saturday, our yard was all snowy.  I let Pancake out for a few minutes, got really cold from my momentary exposure to the outside air, and decided we should go back to bed.  Three hours later, I woke up (again) and let Pancake out (again).  This time, the snow was completely gone, which just goes to show that most any problem can be solved by going back to sleep.

My life's philosophy=reaffirmed.

As I glanced down at my dinner plate today before starting to eat, I realized today's meal looked even more awful than my usual creations.  I decided to photograph it and then provide you all with the simple, five-step recipe for making it yourselves.

1. Take an unlabeled bottle that you think probably contains olive oil and dump a generous amount into a possibly-clean skillet.  Set the burner to medium-ish so the oil heats while you are preparing the chicken.
2. Get out a can of bread crumbs and dump some onto the chicken.  Ignore the instructions on the can that say to first coat the chicken with milk/egg/flour/whatever.  Trust me--if you dump enough on, some of 'em will stick to the chicken.
3. Drop the chicken onto your heated skillet.  When it starts to sound angry, flip it over. and cook some more.
4. Plate your chicken and cut it into pieces.
5. Garnish with an English muffin with strawberry jam.

Bon appetit!

. . . The "don't take candy from strangers in vans" rule has been expanded.  It will now read: "Don't take candy from strangers in vans OR the Craigslist 'free stuff' section."

Please update your internal Common Sense Handbook accordingly.

[Source]

Yesterday Kelly and I went to get $20 pedicures (cheap!) at a slightly, um, not upscale place in her neighborhood.  The nail salon is located right next door to a Payless Shoes, as if to say, "so you like to buy things of sub-par quality for your feet?  Have we got a treat for you!"

Based on the price of the service and the location of the shop, we were not expecting a very luxurious pedicure experience.  Still, even with our low expectations, we were downright shocked by how shitty the service there ended up being.

Things started off well, actually.  The place was not at all crowded; a young Asian man greeted us promptly and led us to side-by-side reclining chairs equipped with standard-issue foot baths and started the water, informing us that we should sit and relax and our pedicures would start in just a couple of minutes.    So we sat and relaxed for a couple minutes . . . and then a couple more.  And a few more on top of that.  And then we noticed that the same man who had started our foot baths was now in the front of the shop, slumped to his side on the waiting-area couch, fast asleep.  Like, mouth open.  Almost drooling.

In retrospect, I now see that this was the moment when we should have left.  But we did not, and soon enough a young woman came over and started to work on my feet.  Unfortunately, it was another 25 minutes before anyone came to work on Kelly, which meant that even after my own pedicure was f-i-n-a-l-l-y done, it was still another half hour before Kelly was ready to go.  This made out our total stay in The Pedicure Shack from Hell last over an hour, which may even have been fine if the issues of People were, say, only two months old instead of three, or if the lone other customer in the joint was able to keep her conversational voice to oh, say, 50 decibels instead of 150.  But these things were not to be, and therefore the $10 I saved on footcare will likely be going toward blood pressure medication in the near future.

[Conversation while driving home from the movie theater after seeing Slumdog Millionaire.]

Ben: What did you think?
Me: It was really good.
Ben: Yeah.
Me: I can't even remember the last time I went to the movie and the whole audience stayed to watch the entire credits, and then burst into applause like that.
Ben: Yeah . . . the last time I can think of that happening was when I saw Rookie of the Year.
Me:
Ben: What?  It's a great movie!
Me:
Ben: Come on!  He struck out Heddo!
Me:
Ben: Whatever.  It was good.

 
This picture is from a while back, but I don't think I ever posted it.