Amberance: Keeping The World Safe From Douchebag Pickup Artists

Amberance is sitting at the bar conversing with two other girls. Two drunk fans arrive direct from the Cubs game and come sidling up to us.

Drunk #1 (putting his arms around the other two girls and staring at me): Hello, ladies. I see you're having a delicious beer. We were at the game.
Me: I gathered.
Drunk #2: It was an awesome game.
Me: Yeah grand slam, I saw that.
Drunk #2: You were watching it?
Me: We were watching that and the Bears game. Oh and a couple college football games.
Drunk #2: Really? We love girls that can talk about sports, right Aaron?
Drunk #1 (Aaron, apparently): We do. That's super hot.
Me: Wait, your name is Aaron?
Drunk #1: Yeah.
Me (overly excitedly and clapping hands): That's my boyfriends name too!
Drunk #1 and #2 mumble something inaudible and walk away.

Amberance and Jenny: LOLdorks

Mrs. Sizemore: ummmmm genius: http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/snuznluz.shtml
me: wow
Mrs. Sizemore: O HAI, PETA. u can has dollarz because i sleep too much?
me: kthxsnuz

Squirrelarity Ensued

A while back, I cleaned out some junk from my apartment to make room for new junk that the bartender inherited from his mom. Among the things I discarded were an old beat up TV stand and a penguin cookie jar that was merely taking up space on my kitchen counter. The TV stand went out on the deck to serve as a table we won't use to go with the chairs we don't sit in. The cookie jar got put on the bottom shelf of the TV stand and forgotten about.

This morning the bartender was watching a little TV when he got home from work, but kept getting distracted by a loud ruckus coming from the deck. Eventually he got annoyed and went outside to see if perhaps Crazy Next Door had passed out without bringing her animals again, or possibly a hobo had climbed three flights of stairs to ransack our sparsely furnished deck.

He did not find a dog, a cat or a hobo. What he did find was two squirrels. One squirrel panicked and jumped into a nearby tree. The second squirrel stood on the railing staring defiantly at my roommate - with an enormous cookie in his mouth. Apparently I had baked some cookies, put them in the penguin and immediately forgotten about them, and then never checked inside to see if there were any actual cookies in it before I dumped the cookie jar outside. Where it sat for about four months before the two enterprising squirrels figured out something was inside it, pried the plastic seal from around the mouth of the jar, knocked the penguin's head to the ground and made off with the tasty loot.

I want a squirrel.

Inner City Living Can Be Demanding

One thing you can do that's REALLY douchey is to slam into someone's parked car so hard you leave a dent that I can fit my whole head in, and then just drive off. Fair warning to whoever did exactly that to Alistair: my roommate is livid and a very vindictive person. I would suggest not parking within a half mile radius of the place you hit my car if you plan on being able to drive yours.

Dreams Can Come True With Science

While I am not nearly finished grieving for my kitty angel Kristen, fate has stepped in to unite me with my next pet.



Behold: the minicow. (scroll down a bit for video)



It is too bad that there would be no practical reason to adapt this breeding technology to give us whales that can fit in the palm of your hand. But no matter. I love cows.

Klingon Clock

There is an episode of Star Trek: TNG ("Ethics", season 5) in which Worf undergoes an experimental and dangerous surgery to replace his entire spine, which had been damaged in an accident leaving him paralyzed, with a brand new replica spine created in the lab. Unfortunately, removing a spine and sticking in a new one is no walk in the park and he dies on the table. But shortly thereafter, when the counselor goes to inform his young son of his death, Worf miraculously comes back to life. This is because Worf is a Klingon, and his physiology has built in redundancies that back up all his systems, including neural function. Klingons need this because as warriors and a generally angry race, they have a tendency to get stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, impaled, etc. on a pretty frequent basis. Without it, they would probably all die in their youth and have no ability to propagate the species. But that's not really my point.

My point is that I think my alarm clock may be a Klingon. Now I realize this may seem far fetched. My clock is not prepared for battle, in fact it is quite peace loving. There is also the somewhat minor point that alarm clocks are inanimate which may disqualify them from being considered a part of a humanoid alien species. But Klingons are down with meditation, much like my clock, and it is also capable of spontaneous regeneration.

Much like Worf, my clock was recently faced with a catastrophic injury. While I was away in Baltimore, the storm of the century hit Chicago, sending down as many bolts of lightning in a couple of hours as the area normally receives over 6 months. Seriously. Lance Berkman actually ran off the field in the middle of a play during the Cubs/Astros game amid almost constant lighting. My alarm clock, being plugged into the wall, got hit with a huge power surge and promptly died. Also like Worf, my clock underwent experimental "surgery" when I attempted to get it to run on batteries in the hope that it was just the electrical cord that was damaged. No luck. My dead clock sat on my night table, not chiming and not telling me the time.

For three days.

Until two days ago around midnight when I heard from inside the closed lid the sound of a chime tuned to E. I quickly opened the lid to discover that my alarm clock was on and flashing 12:00, having apparently regenerated itself from its redundant Klingon anatomy. It is obvious that there can be no other logical explanation. From now on I will try to always show honor and courage in front of my clock and try very hard not to piss it off.

QAPLA'!

Perils of the All Ages Show

The bartender: I've got 14 year old boobs in my back.
Me: That's ok, I have 14 year old elbow in my boobs.

Airport Entertainment - Boobs

waiting to board a flight at O'Hare

Me: Want to play "I Spy"?
The agent: Ok.
Me: Can I go first?
The agent: Yes.
Me. Ok. I spy giant cans.
The agent: You can't do that!
Me: What?
The agent: You just told me the answer!
Me: No, you tell me what color they are. I spy giant cans.
The agent: Are they in a green shirt?
Me: Yes!

We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

Episode 2 of Dumbassity was posted a couple of weeks ago, in which we discuss food, gaming and torturing Barbie.

You can download it here.

R.I.P. Kristen Ann

Sorry about the lack of posting. I spent the last two months or so focusing on Kristen the angel cat. Caring for a kitty in end stage renal failure takes a great deal of time and effort. It is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. Posting was not a priority. In the end we couldn't stop her decline, and so my pretty princess died on July 30. I'll get back to regular posting as soon as I can.

Mommy misses you, Kiki. I'll see you at the Rainbow Bridge baby girl.

Levity

Not funny: Learning that your beloved kitty is in kidney failure. Also: stabbing her with a needle every day to administer vital fluids that are keeping her alive.

Funny: The process of explaining this to your boyfriend.

Me: I have to give her subcutaneous injections every day.
The agent: What?
Me: Subcutaneous. It means under the skin.
The agent. Under the what?
Me: Skin.
The agent: Oh! I thought you said "ceiling".
Me: No. Cats don't have ceilings.

Should Have Called It Leningrad

Following a conversation about Billy Joel's "Vienna"

Me (trying to be romantic): I want to go to Vienna with you.
The agent: For the crossroads?
Me: Yes. And I want to go to Amsterdam with you.
The agent: Oh yeah?
Me: Yeah. And I want to go to Venice with you. And I want to go to Paris with you. And I want to go to St. Petersberg with you.
The agent: Ooo! For Spring Training?

Word I Laughed At The Most This Weekend

Douchetastic.

A.D.D. Storytime (or Amberance Would Make a Crappy Mother)

I like bedtime stories. A lot. And I have a habit of asking for them from the agent and occasionally the bartender. This never goes over well, I suspect because I am 30 years old.

"Tell me a story," I demanded of the agent Saturday night. "Tell me the three little pigs." He balked at this.

"I don't want to. You tell a story."

I didn't want to tell a story either. I wanted to be told a story. So to teach him a lesson I told the three little pigs. Badly. "Once there were three pigs and a wolf wanted to eat them. So he knocked over the first pig's house and they ran away. Then he knocked over the second house and they ran away. Then he tried to knock over the third house but it didn't fall down, so the pigs were safe. The end."

This turned out far less annoying than I had planned. He actually thought this was hilarious and made me tell more abbreviated stories.


Cinderella

Cinderella was a girl that lived with her step family. Her stepmother and stepsisters hated her. One day she wanted to go to a ball, but her stepmother wouldn't let her. She went anyway, but when she left her shoe fell off. The prince found it and married her. The end.

The Godfather

The Godfather is about a guy named Michael who is born into an Italian crime family, but doesn't want to join the family business. Later someone shoots his dad, so he joins the family business anyway and becomes a bad person. The end.

Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty was an egg. He fell off the wall he was sitting on and broke. No one knew how to fix him. The end.

The Incredible Hulk

The Incredible Hulk is about a scientist named Bruce Banner who gets radiation poisoning. When he gets mad he grows huge, turns green and breaks stuff. The end.

The Little Mermaid

A mermaid goes to a witch and trades her voice in for legs, but the man she loves really likes her voice. Latter she gets her voice back and they live happily ever after. The end.

Hansel and Gretel

Hansel and Gretel are a brother and sister that go wandering in the woods until they find a candy house. When they go inside there is a witch and she eats them. The end.

Death of a Salesman

A salesman dies. The end.

The Tiramisu Story

Of the whole anniversary dinner, the highlight was always meant to be the tiramisu. I knew I was making tiramisu before anything else because it is the agent's favorite dessert. I also knew that I wanted to use a specific recipe of a friend of his because he had said it was the best tiramisu ever.

I did not have his friend's phone number and I couldn't ask for it without arousing suspicion. Fortunately for me, she does have a MySpace page. Unfortunately for me, she does not allow messages from people who are not her MySpace friends. So I sent her a friend request and hoped she would would get it in time for the dinner. And luckily she did, so I got the recipe in plenty of time. She also sent notes about the specific coffee and rum she used, so problem #1 solved.

Tiramisu requires one to brew coffee. As neither the bartender nor I are coffee drinkers, I do not own a coffee maker or a coffee grinder. On top of this, the coffee his friend used to make this was espresso from Intelligentsia. Intelligentsia is the agent's favorite coffee and the only one I know is right next door to where he works. He is therefore there all the time. So first I had to get into Intelligentsia undetected somehow, and then I had to get some coffee. My options were to buy beans and then grind them and brew it at home which would require buying a coffee maker AND a coffee grinder, or order it already brewed. I needed almost two cups of coffee, and with espresso being sold an ounce or two at a time, I would have had to order a dozen or so. This seemed excessive to me in both time and expense, so in the end I decided to buy the equipment to brew it myself, figuring I can use it for holidays or something. So then all I had to do was figure out how to get to the beans.

How to get the beans was what I was pondering as I wandered around Whole Foods getting other items and talking to a stranger about what sort of wine to buy. In so doing I wandered right into a display of...bags of Intelligentsia coffee beans! And what do you know, they even had the espresso. I was gleeful as I put the beans into my basket. I had been on the verge of deciding to try to sneak into the coffee shop on Friday afternoon and now I didn't have to. Hooray! More time to prepare. Or so I thought.

Tiramisu also requires the purchase of lady fingers (of which I am not actually aware of any other use). I did not find them at Whole Foods like I thought I would. No matter, I figured I would get them at Jewel.

Except Jewel didn't have them.

Trader Joe's didn't either.

Fuck.

On Friday morning I raced to work in a panic and explained to BrownsFan that I needed to find lady fingers. I CANNOT MAKE TIRAMISU WITHOUT LADY FINGERS. I needed to find an Italian grocery, figure out how to get to it, go there and then get home to make the tiramisu before the agent got to my house for Friday night dinner (tiramisu needs to set overnight). Luckily for me, BrownsFan is a Googling master. Instead of finding me an Italian specialty store, she found me a forum in which people were discussing their trouble with finding lady fingers, to which someone had posted "You can get them at World Market". This was great news as I knew where to find a World Market and what the procedure would be when I got there. What I could not be sure of was whether they had them in stock. So I did the unthinkable: I called the store on the phone and spoke to someone. Unbelievable, I know right? Hey, I was desperate at that point. The conversation went like this:

Me: PLEASE tell me you sell lady fingers.
World Market lady: Yes, we sell them.
Me: PLEASE tell me you have some in stock, like, RIGHT NOW.
World Market lady: (laughing, I can only presume at me) We do. Would you like me to set some aside for you.
Me: Holy crap, yes. I'll be there in an hour.

W-O-R-L-D-M-A-R-K-E-T spells relief.

So now I had everything I needed and I'm at home. It was 2:00. The first step was to brew the coffee, but now I had another problem. Coffee makes the whole house smell, the agent would be over for dinner at 7:00 and he knows that the bartender and I don't drink coffee. I attempted to solve this problem in the obvious way: by brewing the coffee on the floor of my bedroom with the door shut to keep as much coffee smell out of the house as possible. For the most part that worked, but being totally paranoid, I ran around the house opening windows and turning on fans, all the while concocting a story to explain what the big baking dish covered in foil in the refrigerator was in case I was asked (the bartender was making lasagna for...work...and we were not supposed to touch it on pain of death).

With all of that done, I finally sat down to watch some tv for a while, but my phone rang immediately. It was the agent telling me he was done with work early so he was coming over right now! This sent me running outside so I could come back in and see if the house still smelled like coffee.

The next day, when I went over to prepare the surprise dinner, I took the coffee beans with me because I certainly had no other use for them and they had a much better chance of being used by the agent, a known coffee fiend. What I didn't plan for was the agent to be there while I was cooking, so I was unprepared when he looked in the cabinet and said "Oh, you bought more coffee!" Fearing he would see it was espresso and guess what I had made for dessert, I turned the bag around with the label facing in, hoping he wouldn't look at it.

At dessert time I unthinkingly told the agent he should brew some coffee. "The coffee you brought over, right?" he asked. No!

Me: No!
The agent: No?
Me: No. Brew your own coffee.
The agent: So you don't want me to brew the coffee you brought?
Me: No.
The agent: But then why did you buy coffee?
Me: STOP ASKING QUESTIONS! Just brew your own coffee.

In light of the messed up dinner surprise, he did stop asking questions and brewed his own coffee, which we drank with the tiramisu while I regaled him with my very first telling of The Tiramisu Story, and which, after reading this long long post, I have realized I tell much better live, but it is what it is.

(The tiramisu was good. Especially for breakfast.)

The Anniversary Dinner Story

A couple weeks ago marked the first anniversary of my first date with the agent and because I am either an awesome girlfriend or friggin' psychotic (depending on how you look at it), to me this meant an elaborate surprise needed to be prepared entirely by me in the form of dinner. The menu:

Pear pistachio salad with raspberry walnut vinaigrette
Blue cheese crusted Fillet Mignon with port wine reduction sauce
Alaskan King Crab legs with garlic butter
Garlic mashed potatoes (strictly for the agent obviously)
Tiramisu

Preparations for this included, but were not limited to: buying a cast iron skillet, discussing and selecting a bottle of wine for dinner with a TOTAL STRANGER, shiny new black linens for the table, a dozen red roses, a long black evening gown which gives the illusion of my having breasts and the soon to be infamous making of the tiramisu.

The key to any good surprise is the ability to keep it a secret, so to that end, I told the agent that I had made dinner reservations somewhere and it was a huge secret he would not learn until I gave him directions. In the meantime, I waited until he left for work on Saturday and snuck over to his apartment to prepare. I cleaned the kitchen and set the table, prepped everything that could be prepped, and laid out everything I would need for cooking later. Then I got in my car and went home because a) the bartender needed the car to go to work later and b) my car being at the agents house would be very suspicious. Very. After that I hopped on a bus to head back over and finish getting ready.

In my head I was imagining a very specific scenario where the agent calls me when he was leaving work. "I'm on my way to pick you up!" he says (in my head), and I reply, "Actually I think you should just come home." Then he drives home in confusion and arrives to find the table elegantly set and candles lit and Vivaldi playing softly in the background and me all dressed up smiling and handing him a glass of delicious Portuguese wine. At this point he variously starts crying or declares me the greatest woman who ever lived or immediately takes off his pants (fantasies vary).

This is what I was picturing right up until I got of the bus and walked toward his backdoor... which is when I saw his car parked behind the house. I tried to convince myself that it wasn't really his car, just some other car of the exact make, model and color that happened to be parked in his spot.

"Why are you home?" I shouted when he answered the door in his underwear. The one thing I hadn't counted on was my ability to tell a believable lie. The agent was so excited about the fancy restaurant that we weren't going to that he decided to come home early to change and get cleaned up. He managed to arrive in the 45 minutes that I was gone and figured it out when he saw the table all set.

The best laid plans....

Anyway. Dinner was fine and the agent was suitably impressed and everybody wins! and then it was time for dessert, which I was excited about not so much to eat the dessert but to tell the story of it. And that story is next.

The Grand Announcement - For Real This Time Version

With as much fanfare as I can muster having gotten only a few hours sleep, I am proud to (finally) present Episode 1 of Dumbassity. You can download it here or subscribe to it here.

A brief warning: Unless your boss is Larry Flint or you are a porn foley, there is absolutely no way this podcast is even remotely safe for work. It is also not safe for children, the sexually repressed or the vast majority of my family. I'd like to reiterate that last part: if you are related to me but are not part of my generation or named Rick, my advice is to skip this podcast and put on a nice quiet Michael W. Smith record instead.

For everyone else, please realize that a) this is our first podcast b) we lost a solid 20 minutes of BRILLIANT material because we weren't actually recording and c) MrSteve and I are on a learning curve with the new editing software we've each acquired. We will get funnier with time. I swear. We welcome comments and suggestions (provided they are not "This is the WORST fucking podcast I have ever heard in my life! You should all jump off a bridge and end your miserable existence."). You can make them here.

Thank You Captain Obvious, For Clarifying That

Joe Morgan on Sunday Night Baseball: The slower the pitch, the longer the batter has to recognize what it is.
Me: This just in: the ball is round and the bats are wooden.

Where is Wendy the Snapple Lady When You Need Her?

Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Inc. began trading on the New York Stock Exchange today. Shares of the third largest soft drink manufacturer in the U.S. which was recently spun-off from Cadbury Plc. opened lower than expected, showing that investors are reluctant to invest in a company that makes and markets Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, despite the fact that normal Diet Dr. Pepper really does taste more like regular Dr. Pepper.

Mr. Pibb declined to comment for this story.

The View From The Cheap Seats Is Good

A mainstay of televised baseball is the gratuitous crowd shot which, more often than not, is of some busty blond in a tiny tank top or a general assortment of really hot chicks. Of course these are not the only fans in attendance, but a fat guy eating a brat just is not good television. The bartender summed this up succinctly:

"You want to see the nipples! I'm sorry, but that's baseball."