Christmastime always drills home the fact that American consumers, myself included, produce more trash unwrapping our crap than we probably do throwing the crap away at the other end of the craptispan.

    We succeeded, primarily, in convincing relatives and friends that our daughters would rather have clothes than toys this year, but even so the wraptermath was dismaying*.

    Piles of nearly unrecyclable and glossy four-color print boxes, tough and deadly pieces of twisted plastic blister-packaging, wee little metal twist-ties, and paper! Paper! PAPER!

    There has to be a better way, man. Like, why not have just one pretty display box per item of crap at the store and then just put the crap–a Microsofe Zune**, for instance–into a burlap sack at the check-out counter? I could re-use the burlap for a thrifty business-suit or several sets of underwear. Or, at least, I could use burlap for underwear easier than I could wear a razer-sharp fragment of the Zune’s plastic blister-packaging after I’ve torn it apart with a pair of depressed, short-lived scissors.

* only glossary hoverers will note the redundancy.
** I do not now, nor will I ever, own an actual Zune***.
*** Unless one is gifted to me, after which I will unashamedly sell it on eBay or something.

60 Degrees on Dec 27? Why the heck not?

    Note the piles of startled ice and snow converting to airborne water vapor in embarrassment.

    Three days ago it was, literally, 1 degree Fahrenheit (-18C).
    Cold enough that no amount of bundling could make a man feel cozy.

    This morning I woke up and it was 60 degrees Fahrenheit (16C).
    Warm enough for me to go outside clothed only in a toddler and a pair of sweatpants.

    Whoever knew that signs of impending doom could be so amusing! Its as if Buddy Hacket had assumed the role of grim reaper in tonight’s production of “Death and Dismemberment in The Age of Enlightenment*”

* Not an actual play but, you know, it should be!

My daughter. Beautiful, but about as calm as a your average robo-hampster.     Nice coat, you say? Yeah, grandparents are good for that sort of thing.     Bona-fide “Hannah Montana” merchandise, the coat signifies Sam’s enthusiastic endorsement of a fictional persona adopted by a real manufactured celebrity who is herself the offspring of a manufactured country “star”.
Miley and her alter-ego, the only slightly less real Hannah.	The 90% synthetic pop-country singer Billy-Ray Cirus. As of this posting there is no direct evidence that he has an alter-ego named “Harvey Montana”.

For further reading on the topic of Country Music, please see
Toxic Equivalency
Friday Night at the Pops Country

This is a 230lbs (105kg) SafeTinspector photographed cavorting in water with his eldest SafeTspawn in the summer of 2006.     At this time he wore pants with a thirty-eight inch (97cm) waistband–and when he did, he found that they were a bit on the snug end of the belt spectrum.     As recently as August of 2008 he was still 215lbs (98kg).     Note the prominent jelly-rolls, mound of back-fat, moobs*, and the protective barrier of flesh artfully concealing the waistband of his swimming trunks.

Now, here is a 183lbs (83kg) SafeTinspector in mid-November, 2008.     The waist of the Inspector is now a full five inches (13cm) narrower than in the above picture and he can very nearly bench-press his former weight. He last saw this low a body weight 19 years ago at the age of 17. And since he had no muscle to speak of during that bygone era, he is actually in much better shape now than at any time in his life.     How did this happen? Simple. Inspiration and perspiration.**

I realized that my dream of being the star of a 1978 pornographic cinema feature could never happen in my current state. My naturally hirsute nature was ideal to please the pubic shrubbery acclimated public of the time, my wacky eyes and practiced sneer fit the task of gentle misogyny perfectly. But the flab needed to go if I wanted even the slightest chance at being an adult film star in the 1970’s.     I’d succeeded in shedding the coagulated lipids and man-curd from my belly meat, and had already posed next to this trendy dream catcher when the fatal flaw in my plan finally was revealed:     I don’t know the way to 1978 and my GPS says its not a location in the continental United States.     EIther I need to purchase a new map-pack from Magellan or it is back to the drawing board for ShapelyInspector.     Regardless, the weight was lost the old fashioned way: diet and exercise. Diet: I cut out the junk food stopped eating out so much started eating a lot more fruit cut down my portion sizes reduced animal flesh to a minimum*** took one multivitamin a day (just in case my diet was missing some vital nutrient or another) Exercise: Increased the frequency and length of time playing DDR for my lower-body and to provide aerobic exertion Dusted off and began to actually use the fine set of olympic free-weights in my basement to build up my upper body and to provide anaerobic exercise.     Once upon a time, in 2001, I was able to get myself down to about 185lbs briefly through near-starvation. I was not exercising at that time in any meaningful way and the weight piled back on as soon as I started eating again. I can hope that I’ll be able to keep it off this time; it’s really neat being able to wear “medium” shorts and “large” shirts (as opposed to “large” and “extra large”) and I would love to make this a permanent development.     I’d hate to finally figure out how to get to 1978 only to find that I’m too fat to make it in the skin trade.

* Moobs: man-boobs. And now you know.
** This marks the end of the third-person portion of the posting. Sorry about that.
*** But not entirely. I’m not a vegetarian, I’m a meat-minimalist

    In the last month I’ve had not one, but two rounds of a toddler disease known colloquially as “Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease”. Not to be confused with “Hoof-and-Mouth”, a fatal bovine illness to which I am immune due to not technically being a cow or horse at this time. The symptoms are as follows:

• Initial stage (lasts one to two days) fever and splitting headache.
• Stinging, itching sores on your hands.
• Stinging, itching sores on your feet.
• A large assortment of exquisitely painful sores inside your mouth and throat.

    The first time around I found my various boo-boos interesting from a purely intellectual standpoint: I’ve never had an illness cause sores on any part of my body before. I worried at the little bumps on my hands constantly, counting and re-counting their number on a periodic basis.

    Within a few days, however, the fascination gave way to annoyance as the skin on my hands and feet began peeling off as if I’d been sun-burned. Perhaps I was molting; I thought to myself as my epidermis slaughed off like an Ikea-manufactured surgical glove. To be on the safe side I measured my hands to establish a bench-mark in case they were going to become slightly larger after the molting process completed.

    I was disappointed to find that while my hands were pink, soft and fresh, they never hardened and were, as far as I could tell from the readings I’d taken with my my crude plastic Smurf ruler and fabric tape-measure, the exact same size as they were before my ordeal.

    A couple of weeks went by, marked by nothing much, and I seemed to have made a full recovery. Then, last Thursday I noticed that I was starting to get the chills and began to get that same headache again. Something seemed amiss. So I was not exactly surprised when I received a call from Riley’s day care telling me that we should not bring her in to school on Friday as it appears that she has contracted Hand, Foot and Mouth again.

    The headache wasn’t as intense this time, and I never got any sores on my hands. Fortunately I’d taken Friday off of work on account of Samantha having a piano recital in the evening and arrangements had to be made.

    A piano recital is a sort of mass exhibition of rudimentary skill followed by cakes and coffees. Friday was the assigned day. for it, and the cakes and coffees were unlikely to spontaneously manifest. So Riley spent the day with me, at least two hours of which were taken up by a trip to the family doctor for the two of us while far less time was spent obtaining cakes and coffees.

    Doc Fortune said there was nothing to worry about, its only contagious during the first stage (fever and headaches, in case you weren’t paying attention) and that we should drink plenty of fluids and take it easy. Oh, and please pay the $50 office-visit co-pay on your way out, thank-you-very-much.

    Home I went, a bit poorer for the experience and lighter in the wallet area. And while I d been spared the sores on the hands this time around, I was plagued with a massive number of sores in my mouth.

    I tried counting them but gave up around twenty. A veritable constellation of tiny, white, prickly little pin-points with two or three super-novas of exquisite agony thrown in for good measure, my mouth was such a disaster area that I sucked down an entire package of anesthetic lozenges and started administering shots of Chloroseptic three times an hour.

    I survived on a diet of warm coffee mixed with instant-breakfast for the weekend, with the only solid food I was able to consume being a bowl of tofu-laced rice and vegetables at a mediocre sushi shop in Toronto, Canada.

    Did I mention I went to Toronto on Saturday?

    She continually asks to see Jews, which is pretty strange since she hasn’t been to any comparative religion courses and we’ve yet to discuss the various monotheistic cults humanity has developed.

    The first time it happened, I scribbled a Star of David on the blackboard in the kitchen, pointed at it and asked if that’s what she meant.

    ”Star!” she said, which seemed to confirm her knowledge of the ancient symbol.

    ”That’s right, RIley. It’s the Star of David. But we’re lapsed Lutherans, so it doesn’t really apply to us. Our cult symbol is supposed to be a cross. Can you say, cross?”

    ”Jews!” and then, more plaintively, “JEWWWWWWS!”

    Oddly enough, we later discovered that the only way to get her to stop asking for Jews is to give her some apple cider or lemonade.

    According to my lovely wife, Heather, we have paid the final payment to the birthing center where we exchanged her distended stomach and ~$10,000.00 for a small human named Riley.
    The expensive, tiny, useless and quivering thing has slowly inflated with flesh and has been gaining new powers and abilities day by day. Above, you can see her kicking cute little shoes while bearing a glowing, wide open smile and twinkly little eyes. And now that she’s paid for–free and clear–I no longer feel a bitter edge of regret while fighting the urge to hug her and kiss her widdle cheeks.

    in actuality it was like a scavenger hunt with Riddler style clues and puzzles. Each team was given a bag of clues, riddles and questions which required you to drive all around northern Macomb and Oakland counties visiting various business establishments and communicating with humans. It was quite fun, and our team of four came in fifth. (I must admit that for some of the more difficult 1980’s trivia riddles I enlisted the aid of DaveCat, ZipGun, and goshou through the technology of cellular telephone talkery)

    Good, clean fun, right? The catch was that throughout the ordeal we would be expected to wear the fashions of the 1980s, hideous as they may now seem to we modern humans.

    I turned 18 in 1990 and therefore possessed an adult-sized body for about three years of that decade, during which time I accumulated but a meager collection of clothing that matched the styles of the time.
    Alas, my Z Cavaricci knock-offs are long gone, I never owned any Reebok Pumps and no one ever gave me a friendship bracelet. I was generally un-hip in any case; no reproducable photos reveal mullets, skinny ties or Jordache jeans on my person at any time.

    Nevertheless, I searched my closet and produced the pictured assortment of mixed eighties stuff. Note the reversible belt with my initial prominant on the tiny chrome-and-gold belt buckle. Also observe the “Ducky-style,” paisley, silk shirt (bought for me by my biological father in 1989 and worn for the first time in public in THIS PHOTOGRAPH). Lastly, check out the cloth windbreaker, which was an Aeropostale knock-off (complete with biplane on the back) purchased for me by my mom when I was 13… from K-Mart, for chrissake!

    The pants and shoes were purchased recently. I happen to like wearing Converse All-Stars, especially when playing DDR, though I only discovered them for the first time about a year ago. The pants were TIGHTER than any pants my fat, 36-year-old ass has any business wearing. One beneficial side effect is that it made me look really well endowed and demonstrated to the world the quality of my thighs. The overriding negative side-effect, however, is that my big ‘ol butt was… well… big and old. Since it wasn’t Jordache I had Heather write “Jordache” across my right ass-cheek. Not certain this fooled anyone, though…

    The result was bizarre, out-of-style, but perhaps not immediately period evoking. Well, I tried. Heather, however, did it right.

    First, let me tell you that Heather is a very self-conscious woman. She’s totally hot, in my opinion, but is constantly being camera shy and attempting to cover herself up. For instance, if she wears a mid-thigh miniskirt she is constantly tugging it down in a vain attempt to obscure her pretty legs and she’ll usually wear a t-shirt or tank-top under any shirt that might show cleavage just to frustrate inquiring eyes.

    So I was quite happy with her little shorts, see-through leggings and off-the-shoulder flash dancer look. Less thrilling to me was the hair-spray and eye shadow, but I’m sure she wasn’t thrilled with my man-of-the-day moustache.

    As I mentioned at the beginning, my team ended in fifth place. As for the other participants’ costumes? The gamut was run from Nike track suits with mullet-wigs to a tall blonde who actually had her long hair crimped for the occasion. Gnarly.

    Sing it to the tune of “Everybody plays the fool,” and you may giggle just a little. Under your breath. Provided you are an idiot like me.

    In the meantime, let me tell you how much it sucks to be married to SafeTinspector:

    First, SafeT gets the flu on Sunday, so you end up with no assistance with the general production of proper parenting during the all-important second half of the weekend. Production schedules are off, backlogs grow long, and shareholders threaten you with lawsuits if some quality nurturing doesn’t get made RIght Now.

    Second, both your daughters get sick on Tuesday, with the toddler being so pitiful that you can barely catch your breath from going, “Awww….” all the time. And, of course, by this time SafeT is back at work so you get to tend the flu-ridden without his assistance.

    Cap this off with the near absolute certainty that you, yourself, will soon be afflicted with the flu (probably just in time for the weekend) and we have the orgasmic bliss of SafeTmarriage. Hats off to you, Heather!

The picture above was taken with Heather’s cell phone and sent to me with the caption, “I don’t feel good, Daddy!” I felt bad, but I still smiled.

Heather Whited, my wife, is 29 today! Happy birthday!

Sappy alert:Continuing on will expose you to sappiness.
Heather has been a mother for almost four years. My wife for over five years. My lover for ten years. And has been a part of my life for 16 years. She puts up with me, and can kick my ass. So here’s to the Chief Probation Officer of MIchigan’s 38th district court! Happy birthday! I love you.
(here is Heather with my Daughter, Sam, on Mother’s day.)