Proper colored socks
Brine made and at the ready
Thanksgiving, let’s roll
A Haiku For Preliminary Thanksgiving Prep
Polka Dots Via Folk Rock
Had a hard time picking a pair of socks today. You want to start out on a Monday with something flashy and on point, but then you can’t find anything that screams, “Yo! Pick me!” Especially when the rest of the week has a pretty exciting holiday line-up at the ready (well, for socks, anyway).
Luckily, white and gray polka dots with blue accents are always a solid option. And really, it all comes back to the advice given by modern day sage Stephen Stills back in 1970: if you can’t be with the socks you love, love the socks you’re with.
Err, that might be a slight paraphrasing, but you know, it’s pretty close. I’m fairly sure socks were mentioned somewhere.
Close enough for a Monday, anyway.
Several Hundred Frozen Turkeys And A Lot Of Teamwork
Not everyone digs my Minion socks, but I had to wear a pair of them today. One of the things we do as a family each year is to volunteer to help with a local food drive for Thanksgiving. It’s not a big charity association event or anything, just done by a guy we know who’s a friend of a friend, who collects as many donations as he can. Then, on the Sunday before the holiday, we shop for as many meals as possible based on the donations, assemble them all, and give them away. It’s probably the most rewarding 4-5 hours I spend doing anything all year.
It’s also teamwork at it’s finest, which made these Team Minion socks perfect for today. And now I’m going to fall asleep, because lugging around 20-lb frozen turkeys for 200 meals is exactly as exhausting as it sounds.
Domo Arigato, Mister
I wasn’t sure what I was going to say this morning about the robot on my feet when I put these on. But then I spent the day working on the office and then doing more than just a few things at the house to make the Puddinette happy. After getting home, I didn’t even have 5 minutes to sit down until 8:40. Five minutes later, I had to go and play Uber for Princess Puddinette.
In other words, I was a machine today.
And now I’m tired. But I have a fire at the hearth and I’m in my PJs, so all is well. I hope your Saturday was just as productive, and you’ve had a chance to finally chill yourself.
Have a great weekend, kids, and try to stay warm.
Foxy Friday
Sorry, kids. I’m not sure what you were expecting, but in my life, “foxy” ain’t what it used to be.
This is handsome red creature on today’s pair is Foxy, the third and last of the Five Nights at Freddy’s character socks I’ve acquired over the course of the 2018. While Youngest son always seemed annoyed when I had to ask him who was on my feet each time I wore one of these pair, I could still tell that he secretly liked it, deep down, in the way of kids who are slowly becoming too old to be enamored by their parents nonsense, but haven’t gotten there yet.
In that regard, I wouldn’t mind having a few more pair of socks with characters I didn’t recognize, to be honest. Because the kids all get older day by day, eventually outgrowing most of even that occasional, secret, deep down enjoyment of parental nonsense. Especially, on days like today, when Oldest turned 16 and he wasn’t the only one hitting a significant life milestone, it’s nice to have a Foxy or something of the like to help me feel not quite so left behind.
Have a great weekend, kids, and, uh, try not to set the place on fire.
Responsible Cocktails
Apparently it’s a thing now to wake up one morning in the middle of November to find the world covered in ice (literally encased in most instances), even though by my count, winter is still technically more than month away. Yet, even after hearing stories about school buses sliding into downed tree limbs, your kids are expected to be at school, on time.
Is drinking Bloody Marys an appropriate response to icy, out-of-place storms on a workday? In a perfect world, maybe, but this isn’t a perfect world, and most employers frown at that kind of thing. So instead, today I went with my next best option, Bloody Mary socks.
Which, let’s face it, with a layer of ice covering everything in sight, the socks makes a whole lot more sense than early day drinking like it’s your great aunt’s brunch.
Camps Of Least Resistance
These are camping socks. No, not socks FOR camping, but rather socks about camping. Sock for camping are, like, uniformly plaid and composed of thick woven wool. These are neither. They aren’t keeping anyone’s tootsies toasty during a dark blustery night in a tent, nor standing up to the elements on a long hike.
Which is good, because “standing up to the elements” means, for me, fighting a fire demon for XP in the way to my character’s next level. And, hell, if I stood up, I could almost see my tooties through these.
Definitely not what you want if you’re trying to stay warm.
Thing is, I did just about all the camping I really feel I needed to do in my life by the time I turned 15. That was…some time ago. So now I’m just happy to have socks that reference camping, which I can take a picture of in front of a warm fire and my 60″ TV. I don’t know who else these socks were made for, if not specifically for “middle aged sock aficionado who wants to make a camping reference but, sweet gods, while sleeping indoors.”
So, basically, these were made pretty much just for me.
A Haiku For A Busy Month
Building much this month
Apps, stories, warm fires, too
Glad I have good tools
Because Gondolas Don’t Have Windshields
The one productive thing I did yesterday in the midst of watching the Bengals get embarrassingly trounced at home was to prep the garage for winter. See, I don’t park the ole Middle-Aged Man Sedan in the garage during the temperate months because there’s bikes and sportsing gear and swimming accessories, and, well, a vast array of stuff that needs the space.
But now that we’re on the backside of our annual cursory week of autumn and the temps have matched the stock market’s dive, morning often comes with a side dish of scrapping ice off windows like the worst breakfast addition ever. Accordingly, today’s high of 46 F is apparently going to be the balmiest of the week and this evening a chill rain began falling lazily as the great prophet, Axel of the Rose, foretold in the great year of my Commencing, 1991.
Anyway, now that the Sedan is getting nightly garage time and my kids have started hoping that every forecast of precipitation comes with mention of the S-word, I was hard pressed to come up with a reason NOT to wear these socks today, which feature what I assume are canal boats in Venice. Yeah, maybe I don’t know what the weather is actually like in Venice this week (because I’m too lazy to ask an app to tell me), but I’m perfectly content to assume it pretty much always looks like it did in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
They may have had rats to contend with, but I don’t remember Indy ever scrapping ice off the windshield at 7 AM.
Sports Are The Best Punishment
When I put today’s socks on this morning, in knew one of two things would happen. Either my Bengals would rise to the occasion (for once) and make it a game against the Saints — who many are saying are the best team in the NFL — or, more likely, considering the state of their defense, they’d lay a gigantic egg and lose in an way that embarrasses the entire city.
So, yeah, I wasn’t wrong.
Luckily I got to play hockey tonight too, and we didn’t embarrasses ourselves, for once. We ended up playing the other guys to a 2-2 tie (because, honestly, our goalie is better than we deserve) and then won in shootout.
In other words, yeah, my Bengals got punished, but then my goalie punished the opposition tonight for thinking we’d be an easy win.
Point is, when the Bengals let you down (which they do all too often), it’s nice when you find a way to do something yourself.
