Off again

We'll be getting up at three o'clock tomorrow morning to catch a red-eye flight to Indianapolis for four days of catching up with family and friends. My mother *still* does not have high-speed internet. Loverly.

A photo of your blogger

No, I'm not the horse. Hint: I'm wearing an orange Please-Deer-Hunter-Don't-Shoot-Me vest.

Your post-Thanksgiving, Monday morning dose of nature

From jlb over at Arboreality, go watch this video if you have a few extra minutes. (I didn't want to embed it due to the copyright notice on it.)

Try not to lose heart when the juvenile buffalo is attacked -- nothing about this video is predictable.

Well, at least it wasn't black this time

What? Me vomit?

I was lying down in the living room in front of the fire when Thomas trotted over, plopped down, and promptly barfed two inches from my left shoulder.

This has left me quite speechless.

Late as usual

It's late afternoon, and the turkey's in the oven. It's been a rather disorganized holiday, which is fine with me. Dinner is pretty late this year, because the grocery store got fresh Dungeness crab in yesterday and we decided to have crab cakes at the last minute for dinner last night. That's a fairly complicated process that pushed the dessert making off till this morning, which pushed everything else back as well. Eh, who cares. It's just me, Mr. T, Tony and The Kid. And all The Kid wants to eat is pumpkin bread anyway.

Time for a spell in the PornoHotTub.

There is absolutely no traffic on this blog today, but I'll ask anyway. How's everyone's Thanksgiving?

Help the googlers find organic Christmas trees

Given recent google queries, it may be time to rerun last year's post about pesticides and Christmas trees (complete with video showing neat but carbon-intensive means of harvesting.) I've only had time to do a little bit of update research, but as far as I can tell, organic Christmas trees are still as rare as they were last year. My organic Christmas tree will be a small tree that needs to be cleared from my yard in Montana to create defensible fire space, but not everyone has an overage of conifers in their front yard.

Anyone have any leads for your area? Drop them in the comments, please. (And if you want to poll your readers for leads, it would be really nice to have something to offer the googlers.)

Here's a page with a few sources.

Free Rice

Redneck Mother has introduced me to Free Rice, a website aimed perfectly at egomaniacs like me. It's a vocabulary game, and for every word you get right, ten grains of rice are donated to the United Nations Food Program. (Advertisers pay for it, duh.) I donated 3,300 grains of rice so far tonight because I'm all pissy that I can't get past Level 46. The FAQ states that people "rarely" make it past 48.

Thanksgiving dinner may have to wait.

Vuck Off

So Mr. T is trying to finish up the last of the green bathroom remodel, which involves a great deal of grunting and swearing as he tries to connect the sink pipes. Mr. T is ordinarily a slow-tempered, easygoing type, but he was not winning the Bolt-Turning Battle.

Mr. T: AUUUUGHHHH! GUUUUUUUUUH!

Silence. More turning, more grunting, then a snap.

Mr. T: FUCK!!!

The Kid: Vuck? Daddy, what's vuck mean?

Me: Yeah, Daddy, what does that mean?

Mr. T: It, uh, has to do with the sink.

Later, Mr. T walks by, shoulders drooping, to turn the water back on.

Me: How ya doin? Get your vuck on yet?

Looking forward to the post-petroleum economy

We'd made it about an hour outside Portland when The Kid announced that he was hungry, and might die if not fed. Because The Dalles, which is the town where he made this announcement, is the last readily available food for the next three hours, we scowled and pulled over. We ate lunch at a restaurant where the server dumped a generous quantity of ice water onto my right hip and butt cheek.

I looked at Mr. T. "Why is it whenever we leave the house....?" I began to think we may have a repeat of our Labor Day misadventures.

"So what do you think will go wrong with the vehicle this time?" I asked Mr. T after lunch, as we hurtled down I-84. Last June, you see, we purchased a lemon. Four weeks after we bought it, we spent $3,000 to replace the engine. Then, on our last trip, the engine refused to start at our hotel in Richland, Washington. I'll take A Brand New Alternator for 400, Alex!

But even I thought that was a rhetorical question, which is why ten minutes later, I was shocked to notice that my right foot was wet. The server hadn't hit my foot, so I knew something was up.

"It's leaking," I announced flatly to Mr. T, whose forehead was now sporting a pulsing blue vein.

"How much?" he asked through gritted teeth. I helpfully demonstrated the answer by saying "drip" every time a drop of water plunked onto the carpet. "Drip." I said. "Drip. Drip. Drip. Dripdripdripdripdrip."

Apparently it only leaks when a) it's raining and b) we're going downhill. Once we fix this new thing, the lemon will have been turned into lemonade -- a nearly perfect vehicle. There's only one problem.

"I hate this car," Mr. T snarled.

He's curled up near the fire with his laptop, looking for a new vehicle.

TTFN

I'll be in transit for the next odd day or so.

See you when we get there.