You're welcome

Having given thanks for the year, I feel it's time to now give out thoughts.   For me the day after Thanksgiving is Thoughtsgiving.  I know it won't become official until Hallmark creates a commemorative candle or Peanuts make a Thoughtsgiving Day special.

I wonder about holiday food traditions that don't show themselves the rest of the year.  Let's use the can shaped cranberry sauce that I see once a year.  Once.  That's it.  Either it's good in May or it's not.  I'm not sure you could say that it's good one day of the year but it's not so much any other time.
It's in a can so it's not a freshness issue.  I think it's all in your head.  I point out your head and away from my head mostly because I don't like the stuff in May or November.  Oh sure you can point back at me and say, "what about your annual Secratary's day apple sauce lunch?"  Well, you've got me there fella. (it's always the fellas that point out my hypocritical holiday meal leanings)

and now a few recipes:

Stuffing is composed of bread cubes, onion, celery, seasoning and salmonella.

Dressing is cooked outside of a turkey and is composed of stuffing minus the salmonella.

Corporate Sell Outs

You think I'm going to let myself be bought out by the Man?  Oh sure Mr. Man, I'll buy into your corporate holidays with all the fixin's.

Please Dr. Butterball, prescribe for me a prescription...to my woes.

This holiday has been brought to you by the letter "M" as in money, as in Macy's, as in leMMings.

All about thanks?  Pilgrim please!

So enjoy your mashed dreams and your cranberry guilt.  Take your hopes and aspirations and stuff them up the insides of an over-testosteroned chicken wanna-be.

Not me.  I'm rockin the vote.  I'm fighting the good fight.  I'm saying "no more" to the hate crime of injustice that screams at us with the only possible conclusion being Consumer Madness Friday.  Not this guy.  Oh no.  I won't buy into your holidays sister Kroger/Meijer/Piggly Wiggly.

-this message brought to you by Nadar/Gonzalez 2012

Giving and Receiving

There is an apartment complex in town that is set up specifically for adults with disabilities.  A few of us are going to go to the complex - Geir Apartments - and help them wrap gifts, make crafts and decorate cookies for the holidays.  And by "a few of us" I mean that I'm hoping there will be a few of us...

I'm pretty sure this will be one of the greatest things I do this week (love my wife, love my kids, watch Sags...) and I'd love it if you joined me. 

Society has largely marginalized many of the folks living in this complex.  I'd like to spend some time with them... and if wrapping presents and making crafts is a decent way of doing it...I'm in.

Keep in mind that I have a benign tremor and that I'm about as crafty as Candace Bergman (famously uncrafty).  It might not be pretty.

So, if you'd like to join me - let me know and we'll hang out and ice cookies together.  We have all the supplies ready to go...I just need you.

kids

I have a few fairly solid thoughts on kids.

1.  If you were force fed baby food out of tiny jars full of strained nastiness, you'd probably be fairly picky about what you ate for the next ten years too.

2.  Kids were created to peak in their cuteness at the exact same time that they peak in their loudness/crankiness/unreasonableness.  This keeps you from putting them in timeouts for 23 1/2 hours a day.

I'm not sure I have much written date to back either of these thoughts, but if you'd like to come on over and see for yourself...we live in front of the purple mailbox in the Dub-C.

QCP Tonight - 8:00 - 6543 Montgomery Road

So tonight we'll take suggestions from the audience and turn them into performance art.  It's sort of like when your kids take all the tongue depressors and turns them into bookmarks with crazy jiggly eyes on them.  At first you think it's crazy that they would do that to your tongue depressor collection, but then you realize that you really do love those crazy kids and it's worth five bucks to see them perform improvisationally...

I just coined a word right in front of your eyes.  This is sort of the weblog version of what you could see tonight. 

We live in a golden age my friends...a golden age...

my 1,004th best post

um...I guess I've passed the one thousand post mark.  I just pulled up my account and saw that I had 1,003 posts on this blog.  I feel like I missed an important event in my relationship with blogspot. 

I'm not sure if I should send flowers or just sort of ignore the event like it's not really that big of a deal to me.  Maybe I could just casually mention in conversation how cool I think it is when other web-loggers don't make a big deal out of their first couple thousand posts.  But I'm sure I'll hear it, "Oh Steve just bought Typepad some flowers and sent a nice note".

I feel like it's too late at this point.  I should probably just take my medicine and shut up.

Forever I'll remember my TexMex post as number 1,000.  Oh the memories...the OhioMex reference...the mariachi band...

On an unrelated note - Big improvisation happenings tomorrow night at Ballet Tech.  I've been told that it starts at 8 and is gauranteed to be awesome or Joe will refund your five bucks.

SHOW INFO!
Friday, November 21
Ballet Tech Cincinnati
8:00pm
6543 Montgomery Road
Cincinnati, OH 45213
513-841-2822

not so secret service

President elect Obama has a new nickname.  He's "Renegade" when the secret service is talking about him on their fancy walkie talkie ear phones.  This was all over the news yesterday.  His code name is Renegade so that no one will know who they're talking about....unless they happen to read or watch tv.  They also have given R nicknames to the rest of his family just to further confuse the bad guys.

Wouldn't the secret service be better off keeping the code names in code?  I'd also think you'd name one guy Renegade and his wife Spatula or Hulk Hogan... just so there was no confusion.  I'd like to think you'd want each family member to have a very different code name and that would avoid any national security situations.  You'd hate to put his daughter on Air Force One because you forgot that he was Renegade and she was Radiance.

Because I've finally decided to not run for the office I'm going to go ahead and let you in on the Murphy family code names.

I, of course, would have been known as "Sags".  Annie would be "Coccia House".  Cooper would be "Coop De Ville", Parker would be "Parkin Link" and Griffin would be "Captain Von Scooberstein"

We're still working on an Aunt Peggy name...

Trading Spaces

Annie wrote about this yesterday, but I want to give you a slightly different perspective.  For Griffin's 8th birthday we celebrated by giving him a completely overhauled room.  And by "we" I mean Annie.

She took our spare bedroom (also known as Grandma's room) and transformed it into Griff's new room.  He's been rooming with Cooper via the bunk bed for all of Coop's life.  The times they are a changin'.

She went with a skateboard motif.  She bought some signs, made some posters, and that's about where I would have quit.  She was just getting started.  She made two shelves out of skateboards.  She made a headboard.  I didn't know you could do that.  I'm still not sure it's legal. 

She painted the outline of a skateboard fella on the wall and there was a matching quilt special made by grandma.  This room is awesome.  When I came home there was still the same general non-skateboard theme to our room...I'm just saying that I've never really had a room this cool.  I'm a little jealous.

I have the best wife and Griff has the best mom - that's the bottom line.

back from Hope

And I'm back.  I left Texas at 5a.m and arrived in the heart of it all around midnight. 

I'm not sure I want to ever be a trucker.  Oh sure, I'd love to have a "handle" and wear trucker hats.  I guess I'd also wear trucker shoes, trucker socks, a trucker watch...you get the point. 

So I drove through Texas for the first time...and Hope, Arkansas.....and Little Rock....and Memphis. 

I can now say I've been to Oklahoma...and I know absolutely nothing about it.  That's sort of one of those check the box situations.  I've been there, but I just sort of drove right through it.  It didn't really affect my life and I didn't really experience it the way that I could have.

I spent more time with friends in Austin and Kansas City than anything else.  It was great to see so many old friends and was inspiring to be around my friends who are living radical lives of faith.  These guys live out all of the things we read in the Bible and talk about in church.  They don't just talk about the easy or fun or seeker sensitive parts of the Scriptures and they press into something much deeper as a result.  I found a group of folks that "fear man" much less than I tend to.  They're not wrapped up in looking cool (especially Luis) or ashamed to live out whatever they feel like God is calling them towards.  They're the opposite of much of American spirituality and look both out of the cultural loop and in the affecting the world around them loop.

It's ironic.  We often try so hard to be relevant or with it and we are....and see little bits and pieces of growth here and there.  It's collateral growth.  Do something big enough or often enough and you'll generate some stuff every once in a while...but is that what we're called to?

I often just sort of drive through the Christian faith and can tell people I've been there...but it's not the same.

TexMex

I had my first taste of authentic Tex-Mex food last night.  Apparently that's Mexican food that you eat in Texas or Texan food that you eat in Mexico...one of those.

I went with the Mexican food eaten in Texas.  We went to a party and were greeted on the lawn of the house by a mariachi band.  I'm guessing the Tex-Mex authenticity factor will never be more greater in this reporter's lifetime...

I will say that Annie makes some sort of combination of tortilla, salsa, chicken and cheese that rivals that of the Tex-Mex variety.  She rarely dresses up in a sombrero and seranades the meal with mariachi music, but her Ohi-Mex food is pretty solid nonetheless.

I'm looking forward to someday eating authentic Ohi-Canadian food.  I imagine it would be some sort of fried salmon with ketchup.