#Shezzaday 6- highlights from #BlackFriday

Because being left alone to our own devices is a very rare thing around here.

I'M GETTING THE HANG OF THIS
click to see I suggested @bonenado download a kid screen lock app like mine, but did he look for the happy alligator? NO. He downloaded something different without checking it out first and promptly got stuck inside his new locked screen for over 20 minutes. We couldn't tell if the writing was Chinese or what, but finally got a popup that asked if he'd like to be kind and share the app, at which point we kinda picked up it's probably someone's homemade app, and if he gets charged for it I'm going to lightly mock all over again. I say lightly... By the way, my Samsung Galaxy S6 trumps his Turbo for navigation options when you get stuck in a locked screen app in another language. Don't know this from experience, just couldn't believe how much more difficult his phone was to work with than mine. This is probably what he's like at parties click for gif
You have 29 days left from right now to stream the official rerun via BBC. Just click this snip. GO! Couple pieces of pie sitting around and ice cream in the freezer and @bonenado and I fought over the broccoli and cheese, because it was THAT GOOD. Yes, we fought over a leftover vegetable dish. I claimed and then found out later mr sneaky pants got into it behind my back.
Yes, #BennyDepp. It was awesome. There's no telling how long this vid will manage to stay up, others were actually being shut down again within the same hour of upload. That's right, you're looking at a #BennyDepp sammy right now. CLICK IT. :edit: I am now replacing it with the official Graham Norton vid.
Yes, I went there. What gets thrown into the Pond, stays in the Pond. No, it won't click. If you don't know what the Pond of Death is by now, your loss. Aspienado wants to live there. Pinky says no. If anyone has a problem with that, well... I keep walking. No one hasta tag along to keep up, just stop jumping in my way like a pet for me to trip over. All my actual real pets learned real fast not to do that because I step on them. On purpose. Except for my chickens. I will totally stop for chickens and spend half my day hanging out, but that's beside the point. Anyway, I'm not fond of setting fires, and this is a really bad time of year to do it, so it's more like I'm trying to decide whether to smoke or pickle my tongue before I thinly slice it into a savory bechamel and pour it over some kind of fancy curly pasta with a grate of aged gouda. I may hafta cave and super stream my hootsuite. I dunno. I wanna keep things simple, and maybe the simplest thing right now is put the phone down and stay off social media for awhile, but I'm trying really hard not to disappear like I did last year.
People keep telling me I'm nice. I'm not nice, I'm kind. Big difference. The reason I am kind is because I don't know if someone talking to me (or trying to talk to me) might be dealing with a giant hole in their life after someone died, or if they're in shock after finding out they have cancer, or maybe lost a child or has a child in a hospital. I hid all my real stuff for years. No one ever knew, and I was treated pretty badly on the internet sometimes just because someone else was having a dumb day and dumped on me. I don't believe in dumping on people. The most famous incident, if you can call it that, was MegaCon. No one ever knew how sick I was that weekend, and that over the next couple of years I really did think I might die, and I disappeared off the internet. People in the older fandoms never saw me cry over a child being lost in my family, never saw me cry why me to the heavens when I was too sick to dress myself for several months, never knew the anguish I was in watching my mom fail in super slo-mo. During all this, I built fansites, and I know from this level of dedication that most of the beautiful and wonderful things on the internet come from people dealing with anguish. We write, we create, we design, we build, we entertain because we need something to hang onto, something to help us live through unimaginable pain. Because of this, I am kind. That does not mean I am a rug to walk on, a stuffed toy to bounce on, a kindred spirit to be pals with. Yes, I do have friends. They know me. Some of them have been getting to know me for several years, some of the deeper lurkers have known me for a decade or two. If you wanna be my friend, too, get in step. Learn where your place is with me, because it's not front and center in front of my face. I run with a solid pack, I love them very dearly, and I will love you dearly too if you take a little time. p.s. if you dig conspiracy theories, here you go, in case you're bored or something.

Me and facebook/twitter irl. This is me not disappearing after Thanksgiving, yo.

booger bacon- because I'm the only person on the planet who'll use a title like that

I know, it's been a week since I posted. A lot can happen in a week.

First of all, let's just get this out of the way- yes, jeans, t-shirts, tennis shoes, and I once tossed a grown goat over a fence. Don't worry, she landed on her feet. Goats are like cats.

Bacon enthusiasts went crazy over this one, but did you know this goes back to 2008? Total carbs 3.1 for those of you going paleo. (There is a nutrition chart in that 2008 link.) The pic clicks to the runaway tweet, but you can see more pix here.

My dad met burrito on Thanksgiving. No matter where he was, wherever the light came from it seemed to wash out the picture. I told him he was glowing. Not sure what it portends, but I'm pretty sure it was real. It was really hard to get a good picture of him inside my house with my phone. I kinda wonder if my own aura was interfering a bit, I was really glad to see him. Burrito took to him immediately and couldn't stop running to him and climbing on him.

Burrito got her own baby turkey. Yeah, she thought I was crazy. And she does NOT like cranberry jello salad. She ate about half that sweet potato, though.

I completely missed the parade and football, but we had such a good time visiting that it didn't matter. I showed my dad an episode of In Search of Aliens and we yapped like crazy old people for hours. Not a lot of people can brag about being raised by a Mennonite who includes UFOs in his religious studies. The convos get pretty wild.

The next day burrito mutated into a booger being, dragging us into a snotty pajama party blur while mama got great Black Friday deals on everything from cool burrito stuffs to new tires. You guessed it, we're all booger beings now.

Just in time for the ice storm moving through.

I'm currently doing a fan video search per request "that had something with lexx in it and really cool Russian song", which seems like an awesome way to start a Monday. Get your Monday on like a Divine Assassin and GET TO WORK.

Unorthodox Arch-Nemesis of the Chocolate Indoctrination

You guys need to go check this out. I'm always amazed at how many ways this wonderful woman can find to raise money for various charities, and this one is so cute and fun that you won't be able to help jumping into the community hot tub with the rest of us. Yes, click the pic. It explains the title of my post today.

THIS.

I regularly go through microwave fear and scour the internet about once a year to make sure our 1980s Montgomery Ward monster microwave is still safe (because the internet knows, right?), and here is today's perusal in case you like scaring yourself silly and feeling calmed down by lengthy discussions in old forums and jaunting off into distraction.

Turtlenecks and Ugly Couches: The Montgomery Ward Catalog of 1978 (yes, kids, I am this old)

Hilariously Ambitious Cookbooks from the Dawn of the Microwave (this was awesome)

How safe is it to use a 20-30 year old microwave? (it's so hard to tell, because my 80+ dad has his jury-rigged and it still takes 5 minutes to heat a cup of water, BUT he's still alive so it's obviously not nuking him- this is pertinent because it's identical to my microwave, which is in way better shape)

4 Ways to Check a Microwave for Leaks (easy, cool, erroneous- according to the next article)

microwaved- microwaves resolved (Scott, I'm gonna put the netbook with our network on it into the microwave for a sec, ok? Your fantasy teams might freeze up.)

'reducing the life expectancy of the magnetron'-Does this happen? (I find comfort in techy yap by real engineers, and they seem pretty cool with my microwave without even having seen it, so I'm good now and can move on with my morning.)

One week till Thanksgiving!!!!! I had the most wonderful luv fest live tweeting the Macy's parade on twitter last year, laughing my head off at the tweepers who grumped about it clogging up their timelines, all the hilarious stuff my beloved fellow Americans were saying about floats and commercials and the commentators and the crowds, and when you've had as much hot chocolate as I had that morning (spiked with way too much real vanilla ~wink~), it becomes a float fest in more ways than one. This year I'm going to take a pre-burrito pain pill and a xanax and really float. I have watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade nearly continuously since I was tiny. Five decades, people. I've missed maybe 5 years, tops. Y'all know KISS is in the lineup this year, right?

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving was awesome because we played games all day, sometimes with cousins all over the place. I really miss that. I have adapted to Thanksgiving football since I married Scott. The best parts for me are the tailgating competitions (Guy Fieri is my fave!), the commercials, the decor on the commentary sets, and the awesome fans out in the crowd that go all out smashing turkey cosplay into their regular team spirit craziness. My party pretty much goes on all day, starts at dawn, goes into the night.

AND- we get burrito while mama starts Black Friday shopping, yay! Last year Scott went with her and tag teamed, they were popping in and out of stores and I was updating their locations on twitter and facebook like I had a stopwatch. They scored one place in ten minutes flat. I remember when I worked retail, whole families came in and fanned out with walkies, maps, and instructions, like cool real time scavenger hunts. I loved it. I wish we'd done fun stuff like that when I was a kid, but back then no one shopped on Thanksgiving or lined up around stores all night to shop the next day.

I grew up in a family that never went out on Thanksgiving unless it was to someone else's house. No one ever drank, and the only thing we kids did was play games, watch the parade, and eat turkey while the grownups talked about politics. I got in trouble for something nearly every time we wound up in other people's houses, like nearly stabbing my thumb off and blood everywhere, or throwing up on the carpet (yes, I got in trouble for being sick), knocking my drink over all over the nice tablecloth... Always something. Experiences like those solidified me being much more laid back as an adult myself. Stuff happens. The harder you try to make something perfect, the more realistically the world (or a kid like me) proves to you that there is no such thing as perfection. Pictures in magazines are just pictures. Chillax. I always had more fun at the kids table, anyway. I miss that.

Look at me wasting time, it's nearly 7 a.m.! Here, study this so you know what NOT to do next week when crunch time is on (like, invest in a real pan...)