Mutant Crabs

Welcome to the great state of Massachusetts, home of witch trials, drunk Kennedys and mutant creatures that sound like something straight out of The Simpsons. The photo above is of a 3 eyed fish from Argentina (something about a power plant fits into the story) I used the photo of the fish because quite simply I never took any pictures of my mutant crabs.

There were several of us that headed to a beach in Salem not to far from a power plant. The government promises that the water is safe to swim in, catch fish and simply hang out on the beach. We decided to catch a few of the crab around and then let them go, we flipped rocks over and waded through the water and caught tons of them.

The thing that started bothering us were the strange colors that they all were. They came in every color of the rainbow and a few even sported a few extra legs and such. Now I know the color of crabs and even know the number of legs they are supposed to have and these things honestly were freaks. I thought it was kind of funny and just assumed they were an inbred family of shellfish but Judy pointed out how close the power plant was.

I love living here and now that I know that Massachusetts is as cool as The Simpsons and Argentina I am even prouder then ever for choosing to move here.

Hippie Woman

There are days when a guy just has to stand around with his mouth hanging open all day simply because he is so slow on getting pop culture that he just assumes the world went nuts. I seem to be having more and more of these days and I guess it is because I am an ancient guy in my 40s.

I am out in public the other day and I start looking around and noticing all of the neo hippie chicks hanging around and trying to look cool. I go into a store and they have upper end hippie rags plastered all over the store and go into a grocery store and notice how much vegetarian hippie food there is. All of this evil hippie movement of course has driven me to the edge of insanity but hey, this too will pass.

There are a few things I just do not get about the latest hippie craze. The first is why anyone would want to dress and act like some antiquated group from the 60's that burned the brains on drugs and smelled awful because of their lack of showers. This seems to me to be about as smart as trying to look like a person in federal prison or a caveman....... why would you want to do it?

The next thing is simply the big bucks being made by big corporations off these left wing wacko, politically correct protesters. You know the people who scream about all of the rich people but love their mall clothes and would be shocked that teachers in America are part of the top 1% income earners when you count the whole world.

Now I have no problem with vegetarians but I have always wondered why a person who hates the thought of eating meat will go out of their way to buy some food product that tastes, looks and feels like meat but contains nothing even close to animal flesh. To my old and musty brain it seems like it would be like a Jewish person loving bacon flavored potato chips because they contain no bacon and are kosher.

This is the way my poor brain is rambling today...... hopefully I will learn to be hip and cool in the near future and understand these oddities.

Today I Realized I am Old

Over the last couple of days old age completely crept up on me. I do understand that if you are not old like I am then you simply will not understand the concept that old age just jumps out of the bushes and whacks you over the head, knocks you down and when you finally get your old dusty bones working again and manage to get to your feet you realize you are now old.

I do have to tell you that I do not feel any older then last week and I still do the same stupid stuff and consider music stale and old if it was released more then a few months ago but none of that makes me not old. The realization came from my relationship with my wife, I know you would think it would have to with our girls but they all thought we were old more then a decade ago.

There has now been 4 different times in 6 days that has made me face reality.........

I will not go through each eye opening event because it would be to painful (for me to recall and you to read) but I will tell one story very briefly. My sweetheart who still gets guys who are young enough to be her son to rip their head off their neck when she walks by, and I were walking down the beach holding hands. We were not doing anything more then looking for shells, kicking sand and a little flirting when two girls walked up to us and one said " I really hope that when my boyfriend and I are your ages that we can still be in love like you two."

Now, I like that people think we look like a cute couple, smile at us and aspire to have a relationship like we have but when ever I look around and see what I think is an old couple that are "cute" they are like in their 70's...... I guess now it is time for me to wear my paints up to my arm pits, eat dinner at 3:30 and drive like I am in a bumper car and there is nobody else on the street.


But I will still flirt with my wife no matter how old I am.

I am woman, hear me complain

I am woman, ok, not really a woman but at least I know how women feel. If you really want to get technical on all of this the honest truth is that I am so un PC that I am happy to admit that I do not even have an itty bitty bit  of a feminine side to enhance let alone explore. Just call me an unrefined, conservative, wacko and you will most assuredly get me right.

Let me explain my new found understanding of women.... you do need to follow along because quite frankly this blog entry is probably more insane then most of the others that I have posted and did so with great embarrassment later.

I am a Kansas City Chiefs fan (see, I told you this was embarrassing) so I proudly wear my Chiefs shirt in public, even though I live in the Boston area. I actually had the guts to scoot around town today in my KC Chiefs shirt and was totally amazed at the reaction of people.... It made me realize what it was like to be a woman in modern American.

Ok, I know that you are totally lost with me finding a deep understanding with how  women feel because I wore a shirt with a simple NFL logo on it but it is true. Every where I went today people acted strange. I will give you an example of the strangeness..... I went in to pay for a bit of gas today and the jerk behind the counter NEVER looked at my face, he simply looked at my chest and smiled. The same thing happened at the  grocery store. Instead of looking at my face they all looked at the logo on my chest.

I finally had enough of this obvious sexual  harassment and told the last guy that my eyes are not on my chest but instead he needed to pull his gaze up a foot or so...... the next time a woman complains about guys not looking at them I will be able to say honestly that I feel their pain.

Insanity?

There are times in life when a guy just has to admit that he ain't the smartest thing on the block. It is well known that I am not always there when it comes to skills in the kitchen, if I had to cook for Fat Albert he would end up as some sort of anorexic that was one day away from starving to death. I fully understand the idea of nasty food, I was at Cuzco Peru and ate a wonderful rotten fish dish that made me throw up and actually see the meals I had eaten the month before but this time I had a great idea. It seemed quite simple, bacon and lots of it in a cake.... this means bacon in the cake, bacon in the icing and bacon as the decoration.

I have a wonderful wife, she is sexy, beautiful and smart, in this case smart might not be an attribute. I had a friend on Facebook that had the gull to post on my wall a picture of a chocolate cake with bacon on top of it. I thought that since I was not only a guy but a real he-man kind of guy that I could out do any photo of a simple cake with bacon on the top.

Judy, the love of my life, explained to me that I could make my  dream cake if I could follow a couple of rules... 1. I had to put it together outside (mix it).
2. I had to cook it outside.
3. I had to find someone else totally as insane as I was that would help me with the creation of this Frankenstein dessert.

This was no problem to me, I could easily mix a cake out side and of course I am king of grilling things outside so the only problem was finding a person who was insane as me. I have a business partner and friend who lives next door to me and while the best of friends she even thought my latest idea was simply insane. The nice thing though is she has a daughter who when I broached the idea of a bacon cake cooked outside thought it would be lark to give it a try.

Judy, while I love her totally, was not happy that I was able to complete each of her requirements, so with her reluctant blessing I was off to cook the wonderfully ignoramus cake that I so desired. Simply put, it was great, bacon, vanilla and sprinkles cake with bacon and chocolate icing with a bacon smiley face as decoration on top.

Elsie (my equally insane neighbor) and I have decided to create a bacon and chocolate cheese cake next. The funny thing is that now there are a few more people who want to work on this endeavor. I guess after all the work to get people to even try out the bacon cake (then they loved it) I have now set the trend for modern food.

Elsie and I are the masters of bacon dessert but there is always room for the up and comers in the world of bacon.

In case you wonder, the date on the photo is totally wrong. :-)

Stinking Coon

I just saw something I have never seen in my life and if I had not moved to the "civilized" land of the North Shore of the Boston area I would have simply missed something in my life. It was never on my bucket list of things to see or do before I died but it was something to remember for the rest of my life. This event ended with a very large stinking coon.

Judy and I stepped out into our backyard to enjoy the wonderful New England spring evening, we were talking under the star lit night like boyfriend and girlfriends have done since the beginning of time (by the way, we are married but she still is my girlfriend). Then the air was pierced with a sharp and loud cry from our next door neighbors backyard. I was not sure if it was a human, animal or a New England Bigfoot so I jumped up and ran to the fence to see if I needed to save someone from being beaten up or maybe help someone beat up a Bigfoot.

I did not know what to expect as I peered through the darkness of my neighbors yard but what I saw simply amazed me. It was a raccoon and a skunk having a fight both screaming and yelling at each other. The skunk finally ran off but left the pleasant smell that only a skunk can leave.

The Raccoon looked victorious at first till it realized that while he had won the battle he now stunk to high heaven and simply had lost the war.

Kate (my neighbor), if you are reading this then please know that I did not stink up your house..... it was the stinking coon that caused the stench.

Bear Jerky

Sometimes people forget how grand it is to have parents that are great people. My mother and father are headed up to the wild and wooly Boston coast line to visit Judy, me and the girls. I am excited about seeing both of them but it put me into a mood of thinking about why I adore them. I know, the simply way to answer this is to say that they are my parents so I have to honor them and love them but there has to be more to my feelings then that.

The thing I am most thankful for with my mother is that she did not kill me when I was just a lad. Letting birds loose in the house, putting a HUGE snapping turtle in the tub (we only had one bathroom by the way), letting 100+ crawfish loose in the garage to crawl into little spaces, die and then stink up the whole house, digging up our backyard and stocking a small pond with catfish, bringing home a 5 foot snake I caught..... I think you get the type of kid I was... yet she never killed me. As an adult I am pretty sure she must have thought about it for a split second several times but thankfully she is an even tempered Christian woman.

My father was the toughest man around, at least to my eyes as a child. I never saw him in a fight, I never saw him scream at people, I simply knew that he could whip anyone and anything if he had to. I was positive that when he and I were out climbing mountains that if we ran into a bear that he would not only fight to protect me from the varmint but when it was all over we would be walking back to the camp site eating bear jerky.

This brings me to the value as an adult that I have found with my father. He taught me that you can be tough, a REAL man and not have to go around fighting every fight. I never saw my parents in one of those screaming arguments with each calling the other names. He simply showed me how to be a man, how to treat my wife and how to love my kids...... thanks Dad!!!

By the way Dad, when you get here lets go hiking and try to bring some bear jerky home with us.