Monday, December 8, 2014

Good morning crew,

It's Christmas at the ol' homestead, whether I want it to be or not. This weekend the wife got it into her head that she wants to decorate, to which I said, "Great!" I have a box tucked away somewhere with a beautiful, little two-foot artificial tree that I have had since 1998 with all sorts of size appropriate little ornaments and lights. I told her we could have that up on a table top and decorated in about a half hour.

Apparently, while that was fine in the condo it wasn't going to fly in a house. So starting at nine o'clock in the morning we went to a decorating warehouse. I didn't even know they had decorating warehouses, but they do, and they are filled with Christmas decorations, and I mean thousands of cubic feet of Christmas decorations.

The wife started down the first aisle and immediately began pulling boxes off the shelves while I trailed behind her attempting damage control.

I tried not to sound like a Scrooge by positing logical arguments, like; "Why do you want to buy a six-foot tall artificial tree to put in the front yard when there are already three 30-foot tall real trees in the front yard?"

Or; "If you put a $400 life-sized illuminated Santa with rein deer on the roof you might scare away the real Santa."

In the end, thanks to a little judicious browbeating on my part, we were able to get out of there with less than a mortgage payment's worth of decorations, but one thing I could not talk her out of was a real tree.

So off we went to the Knights of Columbus, or whoever was selling a small forest of firs in the parking lot of a bar-be-cue restaurant, of all places. Because nothing puts a person in an out-doorsy, woodsy, Christmasy, dead tree shopping mood like the mouth-watering aroma of succulent, slow-cooked pork products.

That was actually the easiest part of the day. While we literally spend a half hour trying to decide what kind of twinkle lights we wanted to buy, picking out a tree barely took ten minutes. We just went to the row marked "Under $40".

Of course five hours later, when we finally got everything back to the house and unloaded, we discovered that unlike artificial trees, real trees don't stand up by themselves.

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

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"Today two men dressed as Batman and Captain America tried to rob someone at a gas station. They're being charged with attempted robbery and mixing Marvel with DC." -Conan O'Brien

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"The birthrate in the United States is at an all-time low. Whereas our death rate is still holding strong at 100 percent." -Jimmy Kimmel

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"A brother and sister in Minneapolis are opening the world's first vegan butcher shop. At the vegan butcher, they promise to kill all the flavor but in a humane way." -Jimmy Fallon

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My friend was working at an amusement park when a couple stopped him. "Excuse me," said the woman, pointing to a pond. "Do you know what that water is made out of?"

Confused, my friend replied, "Two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen."

"See?" she said to her boyfriend. "I told you it wasn't real."


*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
My brother Scott brought over a photo album of his camping trip. One picture showed a brown bear helping itself to his food. "What kind of bear is that?" I asked.

"It's called a Kodiak," Scott replied.

"Oh, yeah?" my husband Keith shot back. "And I suppose those white ones in the Arctic are called Polaroids."