Anniversaries and Surfboard Fins: The Year That Was

What a great year. What a wild year. What a fantastic and crazy 365 days, all strung together like super-charged Christmas lights after one too many mocha lattes. Dizzying. Merry Christmas 2008, you were a year to remember — one I won’t soon forget. How could I? So many things happened. Celebrating my 10-year wedding anniversary, and days later impaling my thigh on a surfboard that left me on crutches for 5 weeks and nerve-damage to this day. My 3-year-old started sewing words together into elaborate and complex sentences that sometimes went somewhere, and other times didn’t. One minute she sounds like a genius and the next you wonder if maybe the oxygen isn’t reaching the top floor. Either way, the girl doesn’t know how to use a period — she’s one long run-on sentence. We had two 10-year anniversaries, as this year also marked a decade with a little black mongrel of a dog named Chase. Ten years of a dog who sheds hair like a 4-month-old Christmas tree.

Continue Reading

The Tale of the Christmas Kahlua

“What are you making?” my wife asked as she walked into the kitchen one morning earlier this week. Her nose was twitching and her eyes were squinted like she was looking straight into the sun. I had taken the week off to attend to odd jobs around the house and general pre-Christmas festivities with my daughter. This little morning project in the kitchen was one of those odd jobs — part of a Christmas present idea I had for the crew in my office. Why buy them something meaningless when I could offer them a gift from the heart that I had labored over — a sign of thanks for all they do. And if it didn’t kill them, all-the-better. On the stove was what could only be described as a simmering pot of crude oil that gave off a strong aroma not quite recognizable. Assorted bowls, containers and spoons lay around the cutting board. This was the scene that my wife was trying to make sense of that morning. By the look on her face I figured it best to just avoid her question altogether and go about my stirring. Exercising the Fifth Amendment is one of my favorite Christmas traditions. “Kahlua?!?” she finally said to break the silence. “You’re running a distillery and it’s not even 8 a.m.?”

Continue Reading

Getting Wild at Kiddie Parties

[podcast]https://www.nutshellcity.com/wp-content/uploads/podcasts/attack.mp3[/podcast]I don’t know what it is, but the minute I get around kids, something in my brain snaps. I lose touch with sanity. I lose track of how old I am. And I definitely lose my pride, my dignity, and the respect of friends, who all start suggesting various medications I should look into. I can’t say why it happens — a longing to be a child again? — but I just get in the mood and go a little nuts. And it’s fun … or at least until I start losing teeth. We have some good friends in Jacksonville whose son, Jack, just celebrated his fourth birthday. They had one of those inflatable bouncies that are about the size of the White House, and invited over enough kids of various shapes and sizes that they could have launched an assault on a mid-size country. It started out calm enough — me playing with my three-year-old daughter in the bouncie, kicking a soccer ball around, calling a couple of kids “cootie heads” — you know, the normal stuff for a birthday party. And then, clear out of the blue, I heard, “Tackle him!” They meant me! I hadn’t done ANYTHING. Yet, all of a sudden they came swarming after me like a heard of buffalo, a mighty cloud of dust roaring up into the sky behind them. I made a run for it, and did a pretty good job eluding them. I zigged and zagged, dodging and weaving through the […]

Continue Reading

Craziness in the Kitchen? Must Have Been Thanksgiving

It’s not Thanksgiving unless there’s a calamity in the kitchen, and in most cases it involves fire. Or knives. Or flaming knives with a highly toxic, salmonella-ridden turkey. How festive. My family went to my mother’s house in Tampa this Thanksgiving. I got the holiday rolling the night before when at dinner I said to my mother, “So obviously you heard about Scott (my brother) breaking his foot while riding his motorcycle.” Apparently it wasn’t so obvious. She hadn’t heard. “What?!?” she yelled. “Why doesn’t anyone tell me anything?” I know how to start things off at family gatherings. My brother came in the next morning hobbling on a crutch with a big black boot on his foot. I thought my mother might break his other foot. So began a typical Thanksgiving at my house. But that wasn’t the cause of the fire. The flames didn’t come until closer to lunch. I actually missed it. My aunt had forgotten the wine and we were dispatched for alcohol while food was hitting the serving trays. If Thanksgiving dinner isn’t so cold that it induces frostbite when you eat it, then you know you’re doing something wrong.

Continue Reading