Oh, it's good to be home.

We have just returned from a week at my mother-in-law's house in rural Vermont. It's a newly-built and charming house built right on the shore of Lake Champlain. so it's all scenic and crap. Additionally, my mother-in-law's hospitality was so great that since there weren't enough bedrooms for all the guests, she gave up her own bedroom and slept in a different house. It's safe to say that had I been the host, somebody would have been sleeping on the floor and it wouldn't have been me.

Despite her excellent hospitality it's still weird staying in someone else's house.

First, there's always weird soap and shampoo in the guest bathroom. I'm familiar with this phenomenon. The extra bathroom in my house has whatever weird crap I stole from a hotel or found in the backyard. (Bark, incidentally, is a tremendous exfoliant). My mother-in-law's guest bathroom had two kinds of soap in the shower: a liquid persimmon soap and a peppermint oil soap.

What would you rather smell like? A persimmon or peppermint? I went for a blend, alternating the persimmon and the peppermint on various body parts. I ended up washing my crotch with the peppermint oil.

Wow! That's tingly!

Also, when you're staying at someone else's house, you have to watch their TV shows. One evening we watched my mother-in-law's new Barbra Streisand video, and then an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and then I was gay, fabulously gay. The ho-mo-sex-u-al culture is very contagious, you know.

When I wasn't rubbing peppermint oils on my penis or planning a life of sodomy, fabulous sodomy, I was doing wholesome holiday activities like playing in the snow with my daughter. One day she begged me to help her build a snow man. I was pretty sure that this activity was doomed to failure, given that I had never successfully built one of these snow creatures before, but damned if the snow wasn't perfect snowman-building material that day. I made snowballs and then rolled them along the ground, accumulating more snow until they were the perfect size. We used various plant parts for arms and facial features, topped off by a spiky bouffant of weeds. Soy una artista!

Another day we went to visit a dairy farm. This is the rural equivalent of going to see a movie. We spent most of our time in the calf barn, where the cows varied in age from 1 day to 10 weeks. I must admit, they were pretty cute. Not too cute to eat, mind you, but cute. Everytime we walked near, they'd stretch their heads out from their pens and try to suck on our hands. Calves, as it turns out, LOVE to turn your hands into raw slobbery messes. We also got a chance to feed some of the smaller ones some milk via a bottle. They are messy and insistent eaters, like 80 pound babies.

Then, we had steak for dinner that night. It was cute too.

Overall, it was a pleasant enough vacation, and everyone likes a snowy Winter Present Tree Day Christmas, but I was mighty pleased to get home last night (at 3:30am!) and sleep in my own bed.

On a final yuletide note, someone got to my blog on this week by searching on nude mike in his christmas attire and friends

Soon to be a Christmas special on Cinemax.

Boo, I lose ten bucks.

Yay! I'm not going to be stranded in NY.

Looking forward to coming home, out of the cyberdesert of rural Vermont....

Ten bucks says I get stranded at JFK airport in New York in about 2 hours....

Please prove me wrong, Jet Blue!

Daisy got sick last night, so we brought her into our bed. All three
of us hadn't slept in the same bed together since a brief ill-fated
experiment with the "family bed" back when she was a baby and her
sleep problems were turning us into the living dead (but not as
lively).

Beds, as it turns out, are not built for three people. I'm sure if
you're doing some sort of sex act that I can only dream of, then it's
a happy fun place, but if you're just trying to sleep, it kind of
sucks ass (note, this was not necessarily the act I was referring to).
With the three of us there was always someone moving, coughing,
squirming, or seemingly planning a jihad. "Daisy!" I'd stage-whisper,
"Enough with the ulululus!"

Also, there were only two pillows. Hank deftly snagged one for her
very own, leaving me to share one with my feverish and chilled
daughter. Normally, I OWN my pillow. I hug it, wrap my arms around
it, and position it just so. I make sweet sweet looooove to my
pillow. Having a sick kid hunkered down on her end of the pillow
totally kills the mood.

There was not much sleep to be had.

Astonishingly my daughter literally bounded out of bed this morning,
performing cartwheels, so I'm hopeful that tonight will be more
sleepful.

Precious few minutes here in Vermont before I'm dragged away from this computer in the "business center" of this Comfort Inn. Time for some business!

In honor of the ever-improving Colbert Report, let's do a quick Tip Of The Hat / Wag Of The Finger.

A tip of the hat to Jet Blue! Having a TV built into each seat is like traveling with your own personal nanny. All they're missing is a wet nurse (guess I can only go for one blog entry without making some breast reference).

A wag of the finger to only sleeping for 4 hours. Despite putting our daughter to bed at 2:00am (11:00pm California time), she woke up 4 hours later at 6:00am. We then all spent 4 cranky/cry-y hours trying to goad each other back to sleep. This game ended when I furiously demanded that we get up.

A wag of the finger to me furiously demanding that we all get up. The wife put an end to my histrionics by explaining that she would tell me to leave if I didn't act like a big boy. "Leave?" I asked pitifully, "Where would I go?"

Nowhere, as it turns out. And thus an attitude readjustment was required.

2 wags to 1 tip. Not bad.

I spent a long time pondering who deserves a healthy dose of my own special brand of Christmas cheer. Orphans? No, let them believe in something. Katrina victims? No, they've suffered enough. That leaves...

My inlaws!

Yes, tomorrow morning the family and I will depart for the great state of Vermont where I will bitch and moan to a new audience.

"I'm cold!"
"Do we have to celebrate Christmas?!?"
"How do you people live like this?! No Tivo? No broadband?? SNOW?!?!"

My in-laws are nice people, but they've made the mistake of indulging me in the past. Now they have to put up with Grinch 2005 in their house.

I'll be blogging while I'm gone, but let me take this opportunity to wish you all a Happy Winter Present Tree Day!

Well, I made it to the party. I didn't wear my black jeans, white sneakers, or any of my free running t-shirts. The wife done dressed me up all purty.

(I just spent about 15 minutes trying to cut-n-paste together a picture of my outfit with the cartoon image of my head from my Blogger profile. Apparently my pitiful image editing tools are incapable of such herculean tasks. Just imagine a very sharp-looking outfit, headed by a guy with a coffee cup glued to his face. Hilarious indeed.)

The party was pretty good, and the guests were fancily and festively attired. As it turns out, most fancy dresses for women don't cover the breastular area, (I guess that costs extra) thus the party was delightfully bosomy. I don't recall what most of the guys were wearing, but there were some tuxedos.

Being at the party reminded me of how horrible I am at mingling. I clung to my wife for dear life, wary of having to make non-feces-related small talk with the other guests. Within minutes of arriving at the party, I ditched my suit jacket because the very pressure of mingling was causing me to sweat profusely. I vaguely recall the following conversations:

1) When it became obvious that my wife required more social stimulation than I could provide while hiding behind her skirt, I turned to the nearest person and said, "Hi! I'm mingling!" The lady was nice, but soon the conversation degraded into a list of ingredients that went into the meatballs. I have a hard time feigning interest in meatball recipes. It's a character flaw I'm prepared to live with.

2) The wife and I chatted with one tuxedo'ed lawyer who, while swirling his glass of wine, bemoaned the lack of racial diversity in the enclave of Mill Valley, where he had recently moved. Poor guy. I'll bet he misses all his homeys from the projects here in big city.

3) There was another conversation that included someone sitting more than four feet away, so I was totally unable to hear her end of it. When there's background noise, as there is in virtually any social setting, I find it exceedingly difficult to hear people who aren't within a four-feet radius of me. It's the cone of conversation. Folks who are 4.5 feet away probably find me standoffish.

I find that when I do try to insert myself into conversation, it's invariably to make a smartass comment. It is, apparently, the only thing I bring to the table at a party. I listened in on one conversation about a painter who juxtaposes HIV-related imagery with Japanese writing, painted in a 17th century European style. I nodded knowingly and added that I do the same thing with my Java code.

My wife introduced me to some chap who she said did, "some kind of underwater, nuclear, robotic engineering," I gasped and said, "Me too!" He was taken aback and asked what exactly my experience was in that field. I was ready to write the guy off at that point. However, later, he was raving about how all his neighbors get together every month to perform big projects for each other, like building a deck, or revamping a garage, and I chastised him for wearing flashy buttons, inappropriate for an Amish gentleman. This he took in stride, redeeming himself as a conversationalist for me.

He immediately found someone else to talk to.

And that's why I work from home.

I'm going to a holiday party tonight (note: saying "holiday" makes the baby Jesus cry). The invitation says, "most festive outfits (black tie optional, ballgowns encouraged)." Festive, eh? Oh, surely this work-at-home computer programmer has TONS of appropriate attire.

Let's take a stroll through my closet, shall we? We shall.

Mostly I own t-shirts. A lot of t-shirts. They are gaily festooned with logos of energy bars, shoe companies, and insurance companies. Festive enough? Maybe. One of them is black.

I also have many polo shirts, mostly in black, blue, and white. They are festive like bruises are festive.

One ill-fitting grey pinstriped double-breasted suit. It probably makes more of a I-used-to-be-a-banker-back-when-I-was-even-ganglier statement than festive. Still, let's put this at the top of the list. Nothing says party like grey.

Jeans! Lots of jeans. Mostly blue, but black also (Vixen, you know I look sharp in those). I'm guessing that's not dressy enough, so maybe I must take the next step to....

Khakis! I like the word khaki because it sounds very similar to the yiddish word that mother used to use for feces. Although they're not fancy, having a feces-related story to trot out at cocktail hour vaults these babies into contention. "Hello holiday (sorry, baby Jesus) reveler! Funny story about these pants...."

I also have other slacks. They are kind of nice. Survey says....not funny!

Rumor has it that I also own some button-down shirts and those decorative noose-like things that men tie around their necks. Nooses are pretty festive.

It's going to be hard to pick out an outfit. Would would baby Jesus do?

Oh, who am I kidding? I'm gonna march my wife into the closet and not let her out until she selects some clothes for me. This is why computer programmers get married.

Oh holy mother of crap, my job sucks. It sucks the big wazoo right now. It's hard to explain exactly what's wrong without sucking the life out of each and every reader, but I'll try.

The company I work for makes gigantically complex software that it then sells to other corporations so that they can be 1% more efficient in how manufacture plungers or make doodads or whatever. For the most part I work on small graspable parts of this machine. There are other parts that are not so small, not very graspable, and exceedingly important.

One of them is called something like the Computerized Runtime Application Processor. It was designed by a bunch of smart people, and then written by some slightly less smart people, and then all of those people left the company.

Computer programs, as we all know, do zillions of things per second. They plot trajectories to Mars, and predict hurricane paths, and generate Britney Spears songs. The Computerized Runtime Application Processor, however, doesn't work quite so quickly. Rather than performing millions of operations per second, it performs about one. One per second.

As it turns out, one of our customers, let's say the plunger manufacturer, needs to make 6000 plungers an hour. That's about two per second, or roughly twice as fast as the Computerized Runtime Application Processor (man, that's hard to type. I wish it had an acronym) goes.

Right as this customer started to go ballistic, someone not smart at all looked around and decided that I would be a good person to own this piece of software. Me and one of my coworkers. Us.

First, I looked for a knob. I was hoping there was some knob set at "1" and I could twist it up to "2" or maybe "11". No such luck. Then I rebooted the computer and tried again. Nope. Then I was pretty much out of ideas. Meanwhile, the Computerized Runtime Application Processor, which is essentially a giant house of cards, has started to crumble. I'm standing inside it.

So, that's why TODAY I decided to start sniffing around for a new job. I browsed some online ads and networked a bit. Although I'm way too much of a chicken to follow through on this effort, it gives me solace just to look around. If things get much worse, I'm going to head down to one of those parking lots here in the city where day laborers gather, looking for work.

"Java!" I'll cry, "Java programmer! SAVE MEEEEEE!"

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High among the very long list of things that I hate is "planning". I hate planning for my retirement, or planning events, or even planning a weekend. It's not that I don't think that planning is valuable, I just can't bring myself to do it. I'm not exactly sure which one of my major personality flaws is to blame for this.

Am I incapable of thinking more than 2 minutes ahead? Do I have an exaggerated fear of being disappointed at goals not met? Probably I just possess superhuman laziness. Attempts by others to get me to plan just bounce harmlessly off my underdeveloped chest.

I was discussing Five Year Plans with my friend Pablo this week. Somehow, in my close-to-40 years of life, I've never constructed a Five Year Plan or the more mythical Ten Year Plan. Hell, I've never even written a meaningful One Year Plan, although my manager asks for it on a nearly annual basis.

Although in general I'm not much of a "goals" guy, somehow I've managed to luck into a pretty good day-to-day life. I've got a great kid, a sassy wife, and computer programming is a decent gig. Alll this without ever making a damn plan. Should I start now? What other shape would I want my life to become in five years? Rhomboid?

I guess it would be cool to be an astronaut. Or maybe taller. Also, I wouldn't mind having an extra wife, maybe with 3 breasts.

There. That's my Five Year Plan. Done. For a Ten Year Plan, uh... that's harder. I wouldn't know what to do with the fourth breast. Let's go with world peace. No! Wait! I pick invisibility. Yeah.

Phew, planning is hard.

"Mike?" you ask seductively, "Out of all the people in the world, including the Dalai Lama, Mary Kate Olsen, and Spiderman, who do you think has the least faith in your ability to craft a blog post? Who finds your posts soooooo boring that they feel obligated to tag you with the most rote of blog memes?"

Good question. Hmmmm. It's pretty much a tossup between Spiderman and the saucily lowercase janelle renée. In honor of them, I present the world's most boring blog meme. I have been asked to....

1. Go into my archives.
2. Find my 23rd post.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five other people to do the same thing.

Tell you what, janelle (and blog-less Spidey), I'll meet you 4/5ths of the way. The sentence that you have been eagerly anticipating all day is.....

She was waggling her derriere at my wife, squealing "Kiss my booty butt!".

Man, apparently not much has changed around here in a year and a half.

I won't do step #5 because the line must be drawn HERE!

Quick update. My lottery winnings seem to be bogged down in a bit of bureaucracy, but I think I can cut through the red tape by throwing around a few smackeroos. This is a no brainer.

Meanwhile, however, I'm still stuck at my day job. I can report two things:

1) Listening to one person for 3 days is less fun than it sounds

2) Anyone who starts a 3-day meeting by saying that working with them is a lot of fun is, defacto, not a lot of fun.

See you all at my yacht (the Mike-Stir!) party next week!

There are lots of different kinds of lucky. Some folks are lucky in cards, while an equal number are tritely lucky in love. Then there's good health, being in the right place at the right time, not getting hit by lightning, blah blah blah. Those are well and good but not nearly as important as my kind of lucky.

I just won the lottery!

Actually, that's not completely accurate. I didn't win the lottery, I won four of them. I know, I know. When it rains, it pours. I'd actually feel a little guilty about this if it weren't for the fact that I so richly deserve these winnings. I have played Lotto here in California literally dozens of times without winning, so I was pretty damn due.

In the last four days, I have won four separate lotteries in three separate nations. Considering that I didn't explicitly enter these lotteries, it would seem unlikely that I had won them all, but I have actual proof of each of these victories in my handy Gmail Spam folder. Obviously I'll be sending a smarmy bug report to the idiots at Gmail for thinking these lottery notifications were spams. As if!

On December 2nd, I won the Irish Lottery, worth 7,408,677 Euros.
On December 3rd, I won the ONLINE SWEEPSTAKE Lottery International in the United Kingdom, worth 2,500,000 US dollars.
On December 4th, I won the HERITAGE MEGA JACKPOT LOTTERY in the United Kingdom, worth 5,000,000 Pounds
Then, today, I won the Sonic BV Lottery in Amsterdam (which, apparently, is referred to as Armsterdam by the Dutch), worth 1,500,000 Euros.

This all comes to $21,568,933.83 (US Dollars).

Holy crap! In my last life I must have been a saint. Maybe I was Mother Theresa or Jon Stewart or something.

This is perfect timing too, because tomorrow is the first day of a really boring three-day meeting at work. I was actually supposed to be in the office. I think I'll show up tomorrow, at first just quiet and coy, but then when the meeting gets going, I'll jump up on the table and start crapping out flaming $100 bills. This trick will involve a few crumpled $100 bills, beans for breakfast, and a lighter. Obviously I've been planning this stunt for a while, waiting for this very day.

So, don't expect any blog posts for a while. I'm going to be out whoring, and hiring buxom nurses to tend to my charred ass, and then maybe whoring.

Out.

According to various personality tests there are 16 different types of humans on the planet. I'm an INTJ or an ASDF or a WTF or something like that. The result of the test didn't really resonate with me because it didn't explain as much about my life as it promised. I think the true lesson learned from such tests is that it's not meaningful or relevant to put people into one of 16 boxes.

I have a better classification system. It has two boxes: Hot and Cold.

Me? I'm a hot person. I want cold air blowing on me while I drive, and I wear short sleeve shirts 9 days out of 10, and I will sweat the sweat of the damned on a warm day. My biggest battle with heat, however, is in the bedroom.

(Note, this story is less sexy than it sounds. Ladies, your virtue is safe. Gents, put away the lotion.)

I can't sleep well when I'm too warm, so I take all reasonable efforts to keep myself cool. I sleep in the nude (dang, my bad, this story IS sexy) and I push all the blankets down to the bottom of the bed where they can keep my sweet little tootsies warm, and nothing else. I then take a solitary cotton sheet, pull it up about halfway up my body, and that's about right. On hot nights the sheet is stifling and gets kicked away, and on slightly cooler nights, I pull the sheet all the way up.

However, this last week here in San Francisco, it has been COLD. No, not Montana-cold, Leesa, and not Canada-cold, Vixen, but it's been dipping into the 30's at night. This gives me the opportunity to do something very rare.

I GET TO PULL THE BLANKIES ALL THE WAY UP!

Ooooh, I'm so cozy in my wittle bed! I can't tell you how pleasing this is. I can even cuddle up with the wife for a few moments without sweating (too much) on her. Man, it's nice. There's just something satisfying about having some nice thick blankets pulled all the way up. It's a rare treat.

So, a big shout-out to my main homey, winter!

The wife called this afternoon:

Hank: Have we ever fed Daisy shrimp?
Me: No, we always meant to try it, but we haven't so far.
Hank: I'm at the store right now and I'm thinking about buying some shrimp for dinner. What do you think?
Me: Well, as long as we're prepared to spend our evening in the emergency room, I think it's a good idea. We've got to try it sometime.
Hank: Ok, I'll do it.

Daisy, as I've mentioned before, has some serious food allergies. According to an allergy test she took earlier this year, she should not be allergic to shrimp, but some of her other allergies are so severe, that we've always been scared to try any kind of shell fish. We never cook shrimp at home, so we only ever consider it in a restaurant, and that's generally not where we want to conduct medical tests on our daughter.

But, conducting a potentially life-threatening test at home? Sure!

Hank cooked up a batch of shrimp for dinner in garlic and non-dairy butter. Meanwhile I mentally reviewed where we keep our epinephrine pen, fully prepared to stab her in the thigh should she start ballooning up worse than two weeks ago when I accidentally fed her nuts (cleverly hidden in pesto sauce). Hank brought out a plate of shrimp and gingerly placed it in front of Daisy.

Now we were faced with the goals of monitoring Daisy's reaction to the shrimp, while simultaneously not frightening her, and also encouraging her to enjoy a new food.

"Ok, sweet pea, I'm going to ask you to do something a little odd. Take one of these pieces of shrimp, and just rub it on your lip a little bit. That's all," my wife gently suggested.

Daisy seemed a bit concerned, but she rubbed a bit of shrimp on her lip. Hank and I stared at her, inwardly tense, yet outwardly serene.

"How's that feel?" I asked, "Does it make your lip itchy?"

"Nope. Not at all." Daisy replied.

"Good. Good. I didn't think it would. Just checking. How about you eat something else on your plate, like pasta, and we'll get back to the shrimp in a minute."

Daisy happily complied since pasta is her favorite food. After a few minutes, we asked her how she was feeling and she told us that all was well, so we encouraged her to actually eat a small bite of the shrimp. She wasn't crazy about the texture, but nothing bad happened. We kept an eye on her, but eventually concluded that this is a safe food for our little girl.

Hazzah! Peril avoided!

We succeeded in two of the three goals. We kept her safe and didn't overly frighten her. If only she had actually enjoyed this food that she's not allergic to, it would have been a perfect meal. Oh well.