My brother-in-law is a crafty fellow. He is ever so crafty, so when my sister and him learned that they were expecting, they wanted to break the news to my parents in a crafty way. My parents are lovely folk, but craftsmen they are not. Often Tyler will perform an Amazing Feat of Mental Agility and it will be completely lost on them. This is to no fault of their own, of course, as they aren’t used to dealing with crafty underlings. Whenever one combines Tyler’s feats with my parents, however, the result is often humorous.

An example would have been during my sister’s wedding ceremony, when Tyler asked for the bride’s parents’ approval for the marriage, and my parents completely forgot the script and just sat there staring at him. There was an awkward five second pause, after which my mother and father suddenly popped up and hurriedly spoke their lines.

But it was too late. The priest laughed, my sister doubled over laughing, the whole congregation burst into laughter. It was such a classic Petersen moment that you can’t help but smile looking back on it.

So, when it became apparent that Greta and Tyler were going to have a bundle of something-or-another arriving next summer, they wanted to break it to my parents in a clever way. Since they live a mere 250 miles from the folks (compared to my 1,700 miles), G&T were able to cook something up and play it on my parents over Thanksgiving.

So. They got my parents some Christmas ornaments for Thanksgiving presents, and told them that these would be some especially appropriate ornaments to put on the tree this year. The ornaments were storks, and since babies are not dug out of the ground or grown in vats of goo but delivered to households via stork, one would reasonably conclude that my parents, upon receiving these ornaments, would realize that the stork may be paying a visit to my sister and brother-in-law.

Well. My mother opened the gift and thanked G&T for giving them such beautiful ornaments of great blue herons. We have great blue herons all the time at the cabin! How wonderful it is that we will have great blue herons on our Christmas tree this year!

Herons. Great blue herons. Soon enough the misconception was cleared up and everyone understood what was going on, but now my curiosity has been piqued. What if their baby does indeed arrive via great blue heron? What sort of child would a great blue heron bring? Would it be a girl? A boy?

Whatever it is, all I hope is that it doesn’t have tentacles. I’m okay with a girl or a boy, but man, if that kid has tentacles, I’m going to have a real tough time being uncle.

And so another Turkey Day TO THE MAX comes to pass. As with last year, I spent the day with my mountain friends Shane and Erin, the only difference this time around being the minor detail that we all live in the same house.

Well, I suppose there were a lot of differences. This year we’re living in Erin’s brand spankin’ new house in a nice neighborhood of angry dogs and ADHD children, across the street from goats and chickens. Our new kitchen has tons of counter space, which was incredibly useful when it came to making homemade rolls, pumpkin pie, mud pie, mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey and three gallons of stuffing. I had to chop up five yellow onions for the stuffing, and the little fellers were so vicious that I needed to wear ski goggles to keep my face from melting.

My old roomie Erik the Great came over, bearing a lean an’ mean green bean casserole. As we stuffed ourselves silly we tossed out quips from Blazing Saddles, Invader Zim and all that, followed by long periods of silence as everyone focused on eating as much food as possible. After the meal everyone crashed hard, really hard, and we all dozed off on the couch watching Smallville and Mission Impossible.

Erik took off shortly thereafter, as he had to be up at 3:00 the next morning to open up his coffee shop for the 4:30 rush of professional shoppers. I haven’t heard from him since, so I will assume that he drowned in a human sea of bargain-seeking violence. Quite a shame, too, cuz he was a neat kid. I’ll never forget the stories… the one about being attached at the neck to an albatross, or the one about an apple at the end of an heron.

An blue heron.

Which is another story. An different story altogether.

This one goes out to Dave Adams, a good friend and a fellow Spontaneous Combustian, from back in my good ol’ Duluth days.

A number of years ago I was rambling incoherently on my website. This was back in the days when I was still resting on a server somewhere at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and using the internet for purly narcissistic and exploitative purposes. Not much has changed since then, except that this site is now hosted in Pennsylvania. I’ve never been to Pennsylvania. I’ve never even been through Pennsylvania. I have friends in Pennsylvania, but as far as my experience goes, the state of Pennsylvania could just as well be in Cuba, or be lost under the sea, or be a really big basement in some guy’s house.

Unlike now, back then I was babbling. I was babbling and eventually I got bored with it, so I wrapped up the day’s entry with a picture of a clown. I said, “And here is a picture of a clown,” and then there was a picture of a clown.

I didn’t think much of it. It was late and I was bored and tired. But Dave “Jazz Cramps” Adams thought it was so funny that he made the clown the desktop background on a computer at work. Dave worked at the UMD Bookstore and many people thought he was a bit off, because this computer was right at the cash register, would occasionally double as the cash register, and was in plain view of anyone walking by in the hallway.

Dave and I had a tradition that we called “Friday Afternoon Loiters.” Friday afternoons were pretty dull on campus, because UMD was a school for slackers and by 10:00 am Friday most people had already left for the Twin Cities for the weekend. Thus, Dave was left working in a ghost town, under a boss that expected him to act busy up until the bookstore closed. As soon as I would get out of fiction class every Friday afternoon, I’d go to the bookstore and spoil the ruse by completely wasting Dave’s time.

Now, neither Dave nor I have a knack for subtlety, so there was no question that we were completely goofing off. I’d grab the price scanner and shoot at people walking by in the hallway. Dave would crack jokes. Occasionally I would get thrown backwards in great peals of laughter, and run into innocent bystanders. I would apologize profusely, and as soon as they were gone Dave and I would fall to the floor laughing. If the Bookstore boss wasn’t present, Friday Afternoon Loiters could last an hour. If the boss was there, we’d typically fit all our antics into a concentrated fifteen minutes of dirty looks and zaniness.

Whatever. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a Friday Afternoon Loiter, and these days I am so over clowns. I do not have any more pictures of clowns. The clowns and I are so done. No clowns.

And here is a picture of an awesome shirt:

I think I’m going to try something new for a bit. Every evening (and by every evening I mean every once in awhile) I’m going to scan my referral logs for search strings, and write an entry about whatever crazy words brought a person to this website. Because I mean really, a lot of them are rather hilarious, and there’s no sense in keeping them all to myself.

You have five seconds to guess tonight’s topic.

I don’t have a lot of luck with smoke detectors. When I lived in Duluth, we called our smoke detector our “smoke and laziness detector” as it would go off whenever we burned something, or whenever it felt like too many of us were spending too much time in the apartment. I also recall having another smoke detector that would beep at peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

One day my roommate Ryan burned an entire pound of bacon. Not only did it set off the smoke alarm, it jammed the smoke alarm and blew the circuit breaker. If that wasn’t fun enough, it just so happened that we lived in a two story apartment, and my squalid bedroom was located directly above the stove. Needless to say, my room tasted like burned bacon for a week. I couldn’t sleep at night because I would wake up choking on grease vapor. It was one of the most horrible things to happen in that apartment.

…well… a lot of horrible things happened in that apartment. One day I got too excited and started acting like a penguin. One thing led to another and I put my head through the wall. Ultimately we made up a lame excuse so we didn’t have to pay to get it fixed, but in retrospect I think we should have just told the RAs the truth, that a resident thought he was a penguin and put his head through the wall. I mean really. What else is going to put a hole in the wall?

Another time I melted a tea kettle to the stove and it wouldn’t come off. How do you melt a tea kettle, you may ask? You put some water on to boil and you forget about it for three hours. Of course, water doesn’t burn per se, so the smoke alarm doesn’t go off and you will never know how horrible a cook you really are until it’s too late. When you come back downstairs to run to class, your tea kettle will be bright red and fused to the stove.

The degree to which I am being pulled in multiple directions is currently at a level that I haven’t experienced since college… and a search of this website on the term “anti college” will quickly explain how much I enjoyed the stress of those years. Honestly, I feel like I am being atomized by my existence, forced to split my molecular structure at the sub-atomic level just to make sure that I have everything covered.

I mean, it’s exciting. There’s so much to do and a lot of the stuff is reasonably stimulating, but at the same time I only have so many particles, and I am only able to do so much.

Something somewhere has to give to make room for all this stuff. My room is a mess of unfinished projects, and is a fine reflection of my mental state. My Halloween costume is sitting in a box, waiting to be folded nicely and stowed away. I haven’t completely unpacked from my San Francisco trip, even less from Hood River this weekend. I shattered the LCD screen on my new digital camera the last time I was in Hood River, and I sold my old camera to my roommate, so I currently have no photographical outlet. My new camera is in pieces on my night stand, and half the screws that would put it back together are lost in the carpet.

If I process photographs in the late evening I don’t have time to write in the late evening. If I write I don’t have time to read. My latest reading materials include php programming, database management, economic/social/moral/political philosophy and small business management, though I’m making little progress on any of them. Julee said that she’s had a lot of success in reading graphic novels, and I think that would probably be a really good idea.

My to-do lists conflate such reasonable goals as “pay car insurance” and “buy notebooks” with unreasonable requests like “climb highest point in 50 states” and “rule humanity.” I know that these lists are counterproductive and merely contribute to my frustration, but I am so bored with the mediocre and ordinary that I am unable to filter out the difference between short-term goals and life-long dreams. It would appear that the only projects I’ve managed to finish lately are all these bottles of Black Butte Porter.