CityDeals is kinda nice

If you're thinking about getting gift cards for people for Christmas, you should try CityDeals. We just got an awesome one for Simply Sushi--we paid $11 for a $25 gift card. Seriously, you should check it out. (And if you click the links in this post, I'll get some kind of referral rewards. That'd be a nice Christmas present from you to me. Just sayin'.)

--UPDATE--Dear family: there is a CityDeal for Rodizio. You can buy a $25 gift card for $20. I know it's not super great, but hey, buy two and save ten bucks on our brother-sister Christmas dinner. Just click on one of the links above (or this link), and type "Rodizio" in the field where it says "All Categories."

Surviving the zombie apocalypse

So the blizzard coming has got everyone all riled up. Not unnecessarily so, but there is definitely a lot of talk about it--ok, mostly lots on the news and on facebook, but what else is there?

The blizzard had Hayley worried, and again, rightly so. At one point today, she even said to me something like, "I'm getting ready for the blizzard to come, and to live like I Am Legend is real!" Which made me laugh and say something snarky like, "Yes, we should definitely prepare for the zombie apocalypse!" Which lead to various facebook statuses and comments, and now this blog post (Hayley is also doing a post, but I'm not going to read it until I've written mine, just to keep our opinions unaffected.)

So I give you, How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse (with comments on what my zombie survival rules really mean)

1. Make sure you have plenty of food (With Thanksgiving coming, Mikey is still not able to travel very far in a car without screaming his guts out, so we're not going to be able to travel to Richfield with my family. Instead, we're going to crash the Williams's Thanksgiving and have it with Hayley's sister's family. And we're bringing a couple food items, so Hayley had to get them before the storm came in.)
2. Prepare for power outages (Hayley did so by doing 4 loads of laundry, doing the dishes, and vacuuming the floors. Because if we don't have power, we'll still need clothes, dishes, and clean floors.)
3. Make sure your car has gas -- you may need to make a quick escape, and full tank will ensure you get where you're going (In case we lost power and heat, and needed to get somewhere where there is heat [family or friends around], we needed a full tank. Hayley went to get it before the storm came in, to be safe. Oh, as an added bonus, she mentioned if we lost power, we could put our frozen goods outside to keep them frozen. She thinks of everything!)
4. Board up your windows! You don't want the zombies getting in (We actually got some of those plastic, shrink-wrap window insulators for Mikey's room, because it is the coldest in the house. The windows are drafty, and we now don't have to worry that he catches his death in his own room at night.)
5. Make sure you have a year supply of candles and batteries (Hayley got a little worried that if we lost power, we didn't have any candles because we have Scentsy. I reminded her that I still had a zillion votives from when I proposed. We have a couple flashlights and plenty of batteries. After we had been talking about zombies for a while, she told me she picked up a year supply.)
6. In case of power outages, make sure you have a method for cooking food (After letting me know we could put our frozen goods out on the lawn, Hayley said we could bring the grill inside and cook with that if need be. And she even picked out a place in the kitchen where we'd put it, because on the carpet just would not do.)
7. Check in on your friends (Hayely kept calling and checking on a few friends that are travelling today and tomorrow. She kept saying to one in particular, "Why am I so worried about you! Just be safe, ok?" 

And that should do ya. Well, if it's the ACTUAL zombie apocalypse, you'll need a shotgun and plenty of shells, too. But these seven rules should keep you safe.

Love you, Hayley. :)

Have you read more than 6 of these books?

I totally stole this from someone on facbook. I don't know if the BBC actually put this list together, but I was very intrigued. I also know that many of my friends are book readers, so I wanted to know if my theory that most of you have read more than 6 of these books is true. So please do this yourself, because I mostly posted it because I'm curious about you, dear reader. Let's call it a competition. Whoever has the most books read gets a prize! Maybe this is my first prize give-away... hmmm...

Anyway, if you do repost on a blog or facebook or something, leave a comment and let me know. If you don't, just take count of how many books you've read and leave a comment. Seriously. I'm interested.

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this list. Bold those books you've read in their entirety; italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or just read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 The Divine Comedy
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Posession -- AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

My final count: 22 read, 9 started but not finished. How did you do?

Not looking forward to my business trip next week

Mikey says hi

Shots

Poor Mikey. He got shots on the day he turned two months old.

Even though it was the saddest thing in the world, I wanted to get a picture of his giant tear. Poor guy.

Luckily, he only showed signs of discomfort the day of the shots, and he slept pretty good that night. The next day, he had two little red spots (even though there were three shots), but no apparent tenderness or fussiness. Such a tough guy!

Herbs and friendship

Ok, so this morning, Hayley and I were going to go to Red Rooster Waffle Company, because we had a gift card. We got there an hour after the place was supposed to be open, but there were no signs of life inside; all the chairs were on the tables, no lights, and the doors were locked. Crap-a-la-crap-fest... And since we were out for breakfast already, we decided to go to IHOP...

While we were at IHOP, we had the wonderful experience of sitting next to two older, single women. I didn't WANT to eve's drop, but suddenly I hear the older woman say something about a group she gets together, and how sometimes they just talk about herbs, sometimes about friendship, and how it's casual and fun. Of course, I wanted to blog about it, so I wrote down the title of this post on a sugar packet so I wouldn't forget. Hayley asked what I wrote, and before showing it to her, I warned her with a very intense look not to say it out loud. We both kind of smiled at each other and suddenly, we were given a special peak into the lives of these two women.

The not-older-one started talking about a book she was reading, and how it made her think of the older woman's group, and so she started reading a passage. I wasn't snoopy enough to find out the name of the book, but the passage had something to do with how the women of her time were brainwashed by Disney tales like Snow White, because if the mirror had just told the wicked step mother something like, "Who cares who the fairest is, you're great, you're confident and strong, you're great at sorcery, so why bother with comparing yourself to other women!?" then Snow White would have grown up with a strong mother figure, not had to rely on her looks alone, and little girls everywhere would be more confident.

While I agree with women being strong, self-reliant, and having strong female authority figures, this conversation went into how great "The Secret" is (a huge load of crap, in my opinion), how powerful herbs are, the wonders of the feminine mystique, and the value of wearing crystals. (Ok, the crystals wasn't true, but I would not have been shocked to hear it.) All this seemed very funny, and something I would associate with the IHOP crew. Then I looked around.

There was a table of construction workers, one with denim shorts he had rolled up, another table where a woman with a femullet and her husband were ordering vegetarian omelets with holandaise sauce on the side, a large family of hispanic folks, and there we were, un-showered, me with my pretend beard, and our little guy in pajamas. My thought was, "These are my people." We're all a little scruffy, weird, and tired, but we want someone else to make our breakfast today, dangit. It was a funny little setting.

Oh, and don't worry, we kept eve's dropping so bad that Hayley and I had to force ourselves to talk to each other. Great breakfast.

...yeah, that was short-lived

I shaved off the beard today. I just couldn't get past the super itchy, irritated stage. I've tried it before with the same results. I should just remember how much it hurts. And you can tell that a battle was waged between my razor and my stubble, leaving the terrain of my neck meat looking like a scarred, old battle ground. But I do feel better now that it's gone. I'm sure I'll give it another go in three or five years... I'm kinda smart like that.

Bullets

I haven't posted in a while, so here is a bulleted list of things crossing my mind lately.

• Mikey was 8 weeks old on November 6th, 60 days old on November 9th, and 2 months old on November 11th. Aren't 8 weeks, 60 days, and 2 months all supposed to be the same thing?
• Mikey keeps changing. Every now and then, I'll really notice it. I'm excited to find out how much he's grown after his 2 month check-up today.
• I really love Hayley.
• We haven't been to a movie in so long, I don't even remember what the last one was. It was before Mikey was born, but probably weeks or months before that, even. That's a long time for movie lovers not to see a movie. Thank goodness for NetFlix! (I'm fairly certain we'll be in the theater for the new Harry Potter movie, however.)
• We finally got all of our leftovers eaten. We had lots of soup, salad, sandwiches, cake, jambalaya, and more for a while. I get a little sad when we waste good food. After last night, we now  have a pan of enchiladas as leftovers. I'm excited for those.
• Thanks to my friend, Jason, I'm going to try to be thankful. But you don't get to know what I'm thankful for until Thanksgiving day. The rules were to keep track of one thing I am thankful for starting on October 31 all the way to Thanksgiving day. I may not write something every day, but I'll have enough items for each day.
• I might be growing a beard. I've never done that. Partly because it itches my face off, and partly because I have not been able to do so. I still have tiny little spots where the mustache doesn't really meet up with my chin scruff, but I might see how this goes. For a little while, anyway.
• I often want to blog, but don't.
• I'm watching Avatar tonight (right now, actually) with Hayley.