Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Good morning crew,

So, a little bit of planning, a little bit of effort, and about $200 worth of booze resulted in a fairly successful Halloween party.

After last year's New Year's Eve fiasco when I spent a hundred bucks catering the party and not even half the food got eaten, I learned not to worry about providing comestibles. And I was right. Lots of people brought something. There were two crock pots, three trays of snacks, dips, veggies and dips, an entire tray full of mini-sandwiches provided by my sister-in-law, plus cookies, brownies and plenty of leftover Halloween candy.

My biggest effort went into decorating. In addition to my front lawn graveyard I festooned the basement with fake spider webs, hung giant spiders from the ceiling and the bar, and with the creative use of a few black, plastic garbage bags I turned the laundry room into a sarcophagus complete with a life-sized skeleton with a noose around its neck and a strobe light for a creepy, hallucinogenic effect. I even built a fire in the fireplace for a little atmosphere.

The wife did her part too by adding skull and goblin stickers to the windows, putting out spider web table cloths and jack-o-lantern plates and napkins, and taping skull head and witch decals all over the walls.

Nobody was going to mistake it for a bar mitzvah.

The wife must have been busy with her cell phone and social media accounts too. I invited four people (two of whom didn't show up), but we ended up with about 30 people at the party. For a while it was quite a mad house.

You know, it's an odd thing; people at a party seem to be attracted to kitchens. I have a beautiful, 800-square-foot finished basement with a bar and a fireplace, and where were most of the partiers? Crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the little 200-square-foot kitchen. Maybe the scary decorations were keeping them out of the basement.

To tell you the truth, I didn't participate in the party all that much. I seemed to spend a lot of my time running drinks back and forth and cleaning. I must have washed 20 or 30 glasses. But that stopped around 10 or 10:30 when I came up the basement stairs into the kitchen to find one of the wife's drunk friends on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor, mopping up a substantial pool of RumChata, whiskey and ice with my dish towels. All of them.

After that dirty glasses just accumulated in the sink.

You know, when we moved out of the condo and into the house I was sure that there would never be a situation when we would ever use all of the glassware that I seem to have accumulated over the years. That was until I found people drinking wine out of coffee mugs toward the end of the night.

But it wasn't just beer, booze and wine (most of the RumChata ended up on the floor). I did force a number of people to play some party games (like wrap your partner up in toilet paper like a mummy) and we had a best costume contest.

I even gave away prizes from PulseTV. The pair who won the mummy-wrapping contest got a couple of CREE Flashlights and the winner of the best costume contest got a Humidifying Aqua Stone.

Actually, that is not 100 percent true. The winner of the costume contest was the dog, Mini. The wife spent hours creating a tiny little taekwondo master's dobok for the dog out of a baby's onesie, complete with a black belt and everything. The dog actually got a majority of the votes, but since the dog has no use for a humidifying stone the prize went to the runner-up.

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

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"Amazon is considering starting its own clothing line. Which is strange, because what's great about shopping on Amazon is not having to wear clothes." -Conan O'Brien

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"Daylight saving is one of those things we do for no reason. Like signing up for a gym membership, it makes no sense." -Jimmy Kimmel

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"A new survey found that 46 percent of doctors have used Google or Yahoo to diagnose their patients' symptoms. Yeah, last time I got sick, my doctor was like, 'I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have 'Server Not Responding.'" -Jimmy Fallon

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My wife cannot ride in a car without telling whoever is driving what to do, when to do it, etc. She is, bar none, the worst back seat driver in the world. I have long thought this, though she would deny it. She claimed she seldom, if ever made comments about my driving. I, of course, claimed the opposite. Now I have proof.

The other day we were headed for the mall and my daughter piped up, "Daddy, before you married Mommy, who told you how to drive?"


*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
I was working in a scrap yard during summer vacation at engineering university. I used to work repairing construction equipment.

One afternoon, I was taking apart a piling hammer that had some very large bolts holding it together. One of the nuts had corroded on to the bolt; to free it I started heating the nut with an oxy-acetylene torch. As I was doing this, one of the dimmest apprentices I have ever known came along. He asked me what I was doing. I patiently explained that if I heated the nut it would grow larger and release its grip on the bolt so I could then remove it.

"So things get larger when they get hot, do they?" he asked.

Suddenly, an idea flashed into my mind. "Yes," I said, "that's why days are longer in summer and shorter in winter."

There was a long pause, then his face cleared. "You know, I always wondered about that," he said.