Along with 2011, our Christmas vacation is also drawing to its end. Was a good time -- meat puppies being the new tradition, along with old favorites like loud music and incessant bickering (da chimpz take care of that end of things).

I did work down some of my reading list, but not much. Back-issues of magazines mostly. Forget the books; my attention span cannot handle the strain of... whatever.

But we did make time for some creative exploits. A colleague snagged me a groovy Taj Mahal on his recent trip to India, so my home crew had to have at it. I think the resulting image captures perfectly just how things would turn out if the Mastandreas ever trekked to a major tourist site.

Why do I look so triumphant? Because it's Halloween: that night of mirth and mischief when my young sons pound the pavement to accumulate candies that I will shamelessly steal from them until they are all gone.

I'm like the government that way!


I should-a pulled down the gorilla mask for this shot. I'm gonna go grab another chocolate bar right about now.

Y'know, this blog needs an update. Perhaps some photos:

Yeah, we've changed.

Gotta get back to blogging now that the holidays are closing in. Facebook is so blowjhinski.

Meat Puppies. Sort of a cross between meatloaf and hush puppies. Not sure why we had to do this but as I drove with Da Chimpz to the mall yesterday we decided we needed to cook something different for dinner. Corndogs were too hackneyed a concept, but the idea of them made me want to deep fry something. We considered batter-frying a whole meatloaf but that seemed, er, impractical. And we weren't going to make a meat-block gingerbread house like that guy on Youtube ("Is this heaven? It's snowing bacon.")

So, a compromise: many miniature meatloaf sticks dipped into a cornmeal batter and browned in a peanut-oil jacuzzi.

Yeah, looked very alarming in the batter bowl; but once plucked from the hot oil we knew it was going to be tasty. Rammed each one with a wood skewer (everything tastes better when you put it on a stick) and even had some veggies on sticks roasting down below.

Dinner on sticks. Yum.

After that we did some Monster Truck racing on the Wii -- the new version is very difficult. So we put that aside pretty quickly and got back to the work of viewing every video available in the Netflix database.

The stockings are indeed hung. What a busy week, and today no different. After a last-minute trawl through the Kmarts I headed around the corner so we could properly deck the halls of our neighborhood. Take paper bags, sand, votive candles, and a whole lot of Christmas cheer, then mix it all together; the result is a West Bridge neighborhood standing tall as the star rises in the east.

Sweet.

But that's not all! We just dined on the almost-traditional fish feast of Christmas eve. "Almost" because we only did three varieties (not the seven that proper compliance with protocol would require). Would have been four but the salmon stayed in the fridge. And Da Chimpz liked the octopus -- bonus. And lemme tell ya: you put garlic, fresh parsley, and some sweet onion in a food mill then dump it out into a pan that is searing scallops in hot butter and you will come close to performing a feat of magic. I totally have to make that more often.

The third fish was tilapia -- just a couple of filets I got as a fall-back in case Mojo decided he didn't like anything else. But that little maniac is full of surprises. To say the least.

As is Cookie. He was singing along to a carol yesterday, inserting his own words (I hate when people do that):

"Happy Holiday in Cambodia..."

Santa better get here soon. I'm just sayin'.

We're getting into vacation mode here at Berea Rose. Christmas vacation. Got the tree lit, the boys home, and the inflatables down from the attic. Right now the Grinch is standing tall out front and the creche is dominating the living room. Alane can't stand the thing.

What a busy week. New job for Alane, holiday prep, lots of life maintenance projects to tend to (some vacation -- I'm busier than ever). But all is good. Well, unless you count the food at Golden Corral which the boys seem to love but which I found to be... wow.

Anyway, more later on our Christmas marathoning.

Woke up crazy early so I went downstairs and got the meatballs and gravy going. It's simmering now on the small back-burner, with some big beef ribs thrown in to melt away their bony goodness over the next few hours.

Still dark around here -- it's getting to be that time of year when the sun doesn't get over the horizon until around 7:30 which still seems eerie to me.

Went to the shopping center yesterday -- the outside stores, not the mall itself. Wasn't as crazy as I'd feared. As usual, the overly helpful staff at Beast Buy interrupted my product-browsing no less than three times to offer me assistance in finding expensive electronic products. One guy thrust a clipboard at me to review my deferred payment options. It turns out I could have that sweet blu-ray home theater system that isn't really worth all that money -- and not have to worry about paying for it for 18 months.

Heh. I thought consumers couldn't get credit these days. Or people were learning to live within their means. Or whatever the newspapers are speculating these days. No matter: the merry-go-round is apparently still turning, tickets still being sold. On lay-away.

Decorating for Christmas has begun here at Berea-Rose. It's a gradual process. Naturally, the music is one of the first things to come out. Then lights. That back room is pretty damn festive now. And from there it just gets bigger.

I'm watching the news on the local Fox station. The news-readers are so glum. Maybe it's because Cuyahoga County has no chance of cleaning itself up.

The local phone company knocked on my door today wanting to sell me their broadband TV service. I said I wasn't interested and they asked why. I said I don't get cable TV. That's a great way to end a conversation because it's a statement no one ever expects to hear.

Hey, at least Da Chimpz read books. When they're not eating the Halloween candy. Got heaps of it strewn all over Berea-Rose this week.

This pitcher, Lincecum, he looks familiar. I want to say he sat next to me at the Rush concert I went to in 1982 at Radio City, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't born yet. The other guy warming up in the bullpen has a Billy Mays beard. Pitch-man, indeed.

I'm also starting to think Berea-Rose is in some sort of electromagnetic vortex, as I can watch a game for about an hour with decent reception and then, blink-blink, it's all stutters and pixelation. Same thing happens with AM radio -- morning and evening the reception gets crappy.

Uh oh, stoner boy let two runners reach base. Time to break out the Oxi-Clean.

It was pretty damned cold this morning, so I decided to drive Da Chimpz to school. I was the humanitarian thing to do, considering that Cookie was in his gym shorts -- having forgotten all his sweat pants in his locker last week).

Anyway, we got out to the car and I realized just how cold it was: the windshield was iced. Didn't require scraping, but soon enough it will. I hate the cold, but summer is clearly over.

Oh, and another recent hint of things to come: last week I was in the kitchen hustling the boys into getting their breakfast and getting them off to school. Before I could ask Cookie which cereal he wanted he reached up to the top of the refrigerator to take down the box of Frankenberry. Scary. Not just the unnatural pink glow of that particular cereal. Moreso how big Cookie is getting.