chuggnutt.com

Making lunches for the next day: my daughter's, then my own. My daughter's is simple: peanut butter and honey, carrot sticks, CapriSun, GoGurt, cheddar cheese sandwich crackers. Oh yeah, throw some candy for dessert in, too. Pack it all up in the Barbie cooler.

Start on mine. Bologna and cheese on wheat, very original. Retrieve from the fridge: mayonnaise, dijon mustard, bread. Pause, then queue up some Journey on the computer. The kitchen is apparently in need of rock ballads tonight.

Highway run
Into the midnight sun
Wheels go 'round and 'round
You're on my mind

Sandwich comes together. Set it aside, back to the fridge. Carrots, celery... celery is droopy, good thing it's the last of it.

Any way you want it
That's the way you need it
Any way you want it

Oddly appropriate music to chop veggies to. Careful of the fingers, the carrot is rolling a bit. Now, cottage cheese or yogurt?

Streetlights, people
Living just to find emotion
Hiding somewhere in the night

Cottage cheese. It's the big container, Costco-sized but not from Costco. Scoop some into the tupperware-that-isn't-tupperware plastic bowl, snap a lid on it. Pack it all up into my lunch cooler (soft-walled), then grab an orange while Steve Perry tells me to Don't stop believin'.

Lunch is ready.

So there's this article that appeared in the New York Times about Activia, Dannon's yogurt that is filled with "live cultures" that are healthy and good for you. And they're marketing it like it's something new and revolutionary.

Ummmm, okay...

Except every bit of yogurt I've ever bought—regardless of brand—has been full of live cultures that are healthy and good for you. That's what yogurt is. Seriously, go buy a generic brand of yogurt—it says this on the container. Are people not aware of this?

Yeah, I know there's a lot of misinformation out there, but for some reason this one just rubbed me the wrong way.

I find it rather surreal that the Oregon Lottery is now offering Space Invaders lottery tickets. Seriously. It's part of their "Travel back" line of Scratch-Its. They look rather complicated though, and cost $3 a pop.

Now they need to come out with other classic arcade games: Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids...

Just a collection of links to things I like and/or found amusing recently.

• dive into mark: Spaceships
  "Parenting is like an ongoing episode of CSI. You’re always following the evidence back to the crime."
• The Bend Bigfoot stuff:
  • Jake's original link
  • The KTVZ story
  • My Hack Bend post
  • My photographic evidence of Bigfoot on Pilot Butte
• YouTube: Discover Card "Scissors"
  Is anyone else as freaked out as I am by the image of thousands of scissors coming to life and swarming the streets?
• Project Gutenberg: The London and Country Brewer (1736)

Yes, it's that introspective time again. Since I've done these for the last two years already, I thought it would be interesting to put it all together in a table format to compare years.

I'm adding up the numbers from my three blogs, and it turns out that between them I wrote approximately 101,192 words among 511 blog entries for 2006. Wow... the previous year the numbers were 78,181 and 466. Another way to look at it: that's roughly the equivalent of a novel a year.

Time has been passing too quickly lately. Seriously. Where has it been going? I keep finding myself surprised to discover that something I thought happened just last year was really three years ago, for instance, or that I've been at my current job for four years, and it doesn't seem nearly that long.

Part of it is that I get older, the passing of time seems to speed up. My grandmother used to say this all the time, and while (as a kid) I knew the truth of this, I never really knew the truth of it, you know? I'm not sure that's possible when you're young; time seemed to pass so slowly then.

(And yet, here I am now, stuck in the present like always.)

I don't mean to imply that I'm depressed about my age, or anything like that. It was more of a fleeting observation that I wanted to write down—without sounding too maudlin. Perhaps I'll have more to write about this at a later time...

I did this same thing last January, and thought it was good fodder for looking back on 2006: my favorite posts over the last year. I noticed that I wrote less here as I stepped up my writing on The Brew Site and Hack Bend, and I wonder: if quantity went down, did quality go up? :)

• Mouse fire!
• NYTimes on Bend (late review)
• 10 ways Dick Cheney can kill you
• Anagram map of Downtown Bend
• Smoke alarm batteries
• Blogday, Earth Day, and a lawn rant
• Growing Up in Central Oregon: Introduction
• Growing Up in Central Oregon: Water in the Desert
• The Dirty Screech (mostly for that photo I found...)
• The truth about vampires
• These Santas are so wrong

I suppose the measure of how good a New Year's party is would be the hangover you have the next day... if so, then the party we had last night was a pretty good one. It wasn't wild or crazy or anything like that, we just had friends over (a bunch of them brought their kids), and it was just the accumulation over the course of the evening that did me in.

That, and the two (two! ugh) shots of Jagermeister I drank. I was mostly fine until that.

Anyway.

I never did the obligatory post-Christmas post-birthday post, either. So I'm rolling it all into one.

My birthday was very nice. We had lunch at the Bend Brewing Company where I drank their Hophead Imperial IPA and their seasonal Doppelbock. Both good. I love the fish and chips there. For dinner we had take-out Chinese and my mom and brother and his girlfriend joined us. Cake was a delicious dense dark chocolate cake.

My gifts? The traditional photo Christmas ornament (the photo is of the kids), a beer rating guide book (the name escapes me at the moment and it's not nearby), Barnes & Noble gift cards, money, a PS2 video game, a bottle of Jack Daniels with a measuring shot glass, and a neat shot glass and beer tasting glass from my brother in San Diego.

Christmas Eve was dinner at our house with the family. Lasagna, this year. (We don't really have a traditional Christmas Eve dinner, unlike, say, ham on Christmas day or turkey at Thanksgiving.) We set out the mountain of presents (90% for the kids) and the kids could hardly get to sleep.

Christmas morning the kids were up at 6:30 and going through their stockings by flashlight. So I got up a little before 7, started coffee, checked out the stocking loot, and helped the kids sort out presents. You can imagine what followed.

My gifts? Stephen King's latest novel, Lisey's Story, slippers, a bottle of beer, a book on the making of the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special, some crafty ornaments from the kids, more money, another PS2 game, a gift certificate to Pegasus Books here in town, and surprisingly, I even got the lightsaber I asked for! Totally didn't see that one coming.

Am I forgetting anything? ...probably.

Since then, I've spent some of my money and gift cards on a bunch of books, another PS2 game, some beer. And, I only worked two days in the past 11—five days off around Christmas, two at work, then four more for this last New Year weekend. Going back to work tomorrow? Uh, yeah, not really looking forward to it.

...but at least I'm not still hungover!