Things that aren't around anymore but should still be a thing

Starburst California Fruits.

Not Baja.  Just California.

It was quite possibly the greatest combination of Starburst flavors ever.  Wild Cherry, Strawberry-Watermelon, Raspberry, Plum Passion.  It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about the delicious juicy-ness.  Admittedly, it wouldn't be amiss to replace wild cherry with mango melon or kiwi banana (speaking of delicious but culled Starburst flavors...), but really.  How do you even try to improve on that bit of awesomeness?  It's like a fruit-flavor all-star list.  This team would win the candy world series!  And no one remembers that it was ever a thing.  How?  How did that happen world?

I remember writing them a strongly worded note about 10 years ago about how Starbursts fans around the world were falling into a state of depression without their California fruits.  Clearly mine was the only letter they received.

But I still remember you Starburst California.  I keep alive the flame of faith that one day Mars Corp will bring your flavors of deliciousness back to store shelves everywhere.

Stay juicy my friends.

Time Out for Art!

It's an important thing.  Using a different set of skills than the ones you use everyday not only expands your horizons, the variety sharpens your senses and makes you better at the things you normally do.  The brain is an amazing thing.

These are the mugs Tyler and I designed and baked!  Hooray for craft night!

Irrational Fears

Happy Return from the Holiday Season post!! [Because in my world, the holidays go from Thanksgiving to President's Day.]

I am constantly on the hunt for a good solid reason for hating monkeys.  Because I really, really don't like them.  It is borderline irrational.  But I feel like there has to have been some sort of bad experience that I can blame it on.

Oh you think they're awesome and cute 'cause they're furry and vocal and groom themselves and have hands and feet with opposable thumbs?  Wrong.  Monkeys are the worst.

Most likely candidates for why I really, really don't like monkeys:

The flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz.  I loved that movie.  Watched it over and over again as a kid.  My mom would always threaten to turn it off because she would come in and I would be hiding behind the couch... but I'm pretty sure what really freaked me out were the winkie gaurds... not the monkeys.  Those guards and their chant gave me nightmares for years.  I guess the flying monkeys are scary, but probably not the main reason I hate monkeys.





The Monkey King from Big Bird in China.  I used to watch this movie every time I got sick, which if you know me at all, means I watched it a few times a month as a kid.  The monkey king would make me nervous.  He had some cray-cray makeup on, and he was always popping in-and-out of the frame because he was magical.  And he didn't move like a normal person.  Probably because he was trying to be a Monkey King.  It didn't matter that he was theoretically a good guy, trying to help Big Bird find the phoenix bird, giving clues and such.  He was always mild-to-moderately creepy.  A strong contender.




The movie Congo.  Have you seen this movie?  Because this movie was not appropriate for small
children... and I saw it several times as a small child.  They lure you in with the sweet talking gorilla at the beginning,[they outfit a quasi-domesticated gorilla with a device that converts her sign-language into speech]  then the researchers decide they need to take the gorilla into the Congo to see how wild gorillas would react to a gorilla that speaks.

Spoiler alert:  It doesn't end well.

Cliff Notes: Dogs Decoded

And, this is totally seasonal because the National Dog Show is always on at Thanksgiving... not that I ever watch it or anything.

[Dogs have been happening for a while now.]

I was watching an episode of Nova last night called Dogs:Decoded.  It was so amazing!  Basically, it was about how geneticists, anthropologists, and archaeologists are beginning to recognize the important role dogs had in progressing humanity out of the hunter-gatherer stage.  They have begun conducting experiments and gathering data evaluating things dog owners have claimed for years; namely, that dogs and people can understand each other.

The data was fascinating.

On the human side, most people seem to be able to understand a dog's basic emotions.  When given audio of different kinds of barks, people can accurately identify the emotion or situation the dog is trying to convey.  Curiously, wolves (the dogs direct ancestor), bark very little.  They make occasional sounds in order to convey danger, but the sounds dogs make seem to have originated solely as a method of communicating with humans.  Which makes perfect sense.  If you assume a dog has an intelligence level similar to that of a toddler before it begins forming words, many of the comparisons become clear.  Any parent can tell you their child understands words and meanings, and communicates in their own way, before they learn speech.  Why not a dog?  In fact, further research indicates that when a human is petting a dog, both experience a jump in oxytocin levels, the same hormone that helps generate the bond between a mother and a newborn.  It's no wonder we bond with them.

[Clearly the happiest dog ever.]

On the animal side it gets even more interesting.  Dogs have become adept at learning non-verbal cues.  Not only are they capable of understanding hand signals--such as pointing or other information providing gestures, they are able to understand them as a rule, and not as an exception.  Even small puppies are able to follow the direction of a pointed finger.  While other animals, such as chimps, do theoretically have the ability to learn and understand hand signals, it takes a significant amount of training and does not seem to be a universal trait like it is in dogs.

Even more importantly, dogs can read our emotions.  In multiple studies,  it has become clear that dogs use the same method of facial tracking that humans do to read emotions.  They are the only known animal that does this.

[How is this not the most adorable thing you've ever seen?]

So three-cheers for the dog owners.  Turns out they were right all along!  (But maybe still you shouldn't have long conversations with your dog like you expect him to answer.)

I'm told I have a dark sense of humour

[The other denizens of the workplace jungle watched in horror as the stress of Fiscal Year End Crocodile claimed another victim. March and April would never be the same.]

It's not all our fault: Exhibit D

Exhibit D: Captain Planet

"We're the Planeteers, and you can be one too!  'Cause saving our planet is the thing to do.  Looting and polluting, is not the way.  Here's what Captain Planet has to say..."

"The power is YOURS!"

A theme song so catchy that 15-20 years later I can still recite it verbatim, hear all the character's voices in my head, and even remember some of the episodes.  Now THAT is some good marketing.  Especially when you consider that the message they were selling was that we all have the ability and the duty to protect the environment.  So what did we do?  Our generation flocked to cities like Seattle, Portland, San Fran and Denver as soon as we were able so we could spend our days driving electric cars with bumper stickers that say "My other car is a bicycle" and buying range-free organic free-trade vegan gluten-free everything.  And also make plastic illegal.  Literally.  When I go into grocery stores outside of Seattle and see the stacks and stacks of grocery sacks, a part of me cant help but gaze in confused sort of awe, wondering if I'm allowed to use them.  We only want to work for companies that prove their environmental conscientiousness.

We want to save the world.  And we believe we can.  Thanks Captain Planet.  And probably Dic.  I seem to recall basically every 90s show ever was produced by Dic.

Also.  I heard a rumor that Sony is going to produce a live-action version of Captain Planet.  Can we talk about how totally amazing this is?  I am completely geeking out over here.  I may or may not admit that I will probably dress up as Linka for the premier (she was always my favorite... and now that I'm thinking about it, maybe the source of my life-long obsession with all things former-soviet).

Magical Narnia wardrobe? Nope. Just regular type.

Our new apartment has next to no closet space.  And we both have enough clothes to fill the one closet we do have single-handedly.  So we've been looking for options.  Mine mostly consisted of going to IKEA and buying a new wardrobe, but Ty thinks spending so many monies on something we might get rid of in the next year or two is absurd.  Logic.  Weird.  So yesterday we decided to go check out some consignment stores to see what we could find to fill in the storage gaps.

First of all, we found some awesome consignment stores.  Armadillo was closed, but I could see all kinds of mid-century awesomeness from the window.  I'm very excited to go back.  And when we went to Mosaic, FIRST they had a labrador that likes to follow you around the store.  10 points to Gryffindor.  And as we were pulling up I could see the most gorgeous cabinet just sitting on the concrete being offloaded from a van.

me-I want that one.
Ty-But it's in pieces.
me-but I bet it is beautiful when it's not in pieces anymore.

Ty is learning that sometimes the best defense against my irrationality is to not respond.  Responding encourages me.  It makes me fight for the crazy, and only serves to convince me further that I really want whatever it is until I become so entrenched in my delusion that every rational argument in the universe can't convince me I'm wrong.  Probably luckily for both of us, he stopped at this point.  Because when I can debate things out in my head,  usually rationality is allowed to happen.  But I did let myself wallow in the idea of the 1920s English dowel-construction solid wood wardrobe with mother-of-pearl inlay and some Jacobean influence.  We walked around the store for a while and made friends with the owners (you can never be too good of friends with the owners of a vintage/consignment furniture store) and looked at all the other offerings.  And came back to the cabinet.  It was too big.  And didn't have the right sort of compartments.  And was missing some beadwork.  And was probably too much money.  And.  And.  And.   It was beautiful.  And we could have made room for it somewhere. right?

Wrong.  Reality prevailed.  We walked away.  But at this point, the dream of getting all our piles of clothes off the floor was so close we could practically taste it.  So we drove over to Goodwill.  We've found good things here before.  In an episode a few months ago that I still feel bad about, I wanted to think about a cabinet Ty wanted to buy and when we went back for it the next day it was gone...  But we learned that good things disappear quickly.  So that was a good lesson.

This time we found a kind-of awesome probably TV cabinet.  And it was only $35.  Thirty-five.  That's like practically free.  But it was a gorgeous red-stained solid wood cabinet with some subtle Japanese influence in the details.  The idea was we would get a rod and bolt it inside the main compartment to hold hangers, and put all my sweaters in the drawers.  There was even a moment of excitement when I realized that I might could put hooks inside the doors to hold all my necklaces and belts.

This is very exciting people.  No more necklaces hanging on the knobs of my dresser.  And all the doors of the house.  And laying horizontally on every empty surface.  And living inside the individual compartments of a pill case (on second thought, those will probably stay there.   It is so convenient to take on trips!)  We were getting excited.  When we realized why it was $35.

Clearly this was a "custom" cabinet.  They had drilled sections out of the shelf to put vents.  Actual louvered vents you would normally see in your carpet.  And they had jerry-rigged fans to run behind the vents.  And then they lined every seam in the cabinet with foam weather-stripping.  Everything was secured by hot glue, duct tape, finishing nails, AND adhesive.  Because one method just isn't enough.

I have no clue what they were insulating against.  The vents and fans would imply some sort of server system that overheated easily.  The insulation implies the opposite.  And I have no clue what the giant hole through the top means.  In retrospect it's not unlikely that this wardrobe was involved in something illegal.

But we just wanted to buy something and move forward.  So we did.

ADVENTURE TIME!!

Because when we left our house at 5 that afternoon, neither one of us was actually prepared to purchase anything.  Certainly nothing that would require manual labor and tie downs.

However both of those things were needed.  Because after realizing that the cabinet was way too huge to fit inside my mariner, Ty and I took a trip to Fred Meyer to buy some winches and a rope.

Now, you have to understand.  My father gave me unrealistic expectations about my ability to use a winch.  I have seen my Dad tie down anythings so many times that I assumed it was one of those things we could do with out training or instruction.  No You-tube videos required.  Like some sort of instinct or urban-survival-of-the-fittest technique.  This was Darwin.  We would open the package and thread the straps through and winch that wardrobe up that a champ!  And all the people dropping off and picking up at Goodwill would be awed by our prowess at tying things down.  They could only hope to be as awesome and handy at tying things down as we were.

Turns out.  Although I have figured out how my Dad ties knots in ropes... winches are only simple if you know how to thread the strap through the mechanism.

Ty and I do not know how to thread the strap.

So after it took three grown men to lift the upper portion of the cabinet to the top of my car, we started trying to tie it down.  The rope worked great.  The winches... were more decorative than anything else.  I plan to have my father give us remedial winch training at his earliest convenience.

By the time we got it home, we realized that there was Ty... and me.  And together we count strength at maybe 1 1/2 grown men.  And that's only because Ty counts for 1 1/4.

Through no small amount of effort and the creative use of our all-purpose LPT, we managed to get both halves of the unit up to the second story of our building with minimal damage to it or ourselves.

Ty did demo, and I removed insulation adhesive like a bandit.  Then we just bolted a good solid rod to the interior, and some hooks on the door.

Et, voila.  Precisely what we needed.  A tv/weirdo storage cabinet that had been designed to look like a wardrobe... that we re-purposed as a wardrobe.  So back to its roots really.