We went to Ikea for the Swedish meatballs

in

Last night, Amanda and I made a pit stop on our commute home at Ikea. We’ve been shopping around for a storage chest for our bedroom and an island for our kitchen. Ikea’s wealth of everything at reasonable prices made it a worthy consideration. The risk you always run with a place like Ikea is that you tend to leave with more than planned, or you leave with everything that you weren’t planning on buying at all. The store is designed that way, a maze of neat room ideas for every part of the home combined with the ease of shopping via pencil and paper so that you can’t feel the weight of your purchases until you hit the self-service register. There are no carts here, just a utilitarian shopping experience with a cafeteria in the middle.

Somehow, Amanda and I made it halfway through the maze without picking up or writing down anything. Compared to past experiences this was a remarkable feat! However, at 7 p.m. we couldn’t resist the fragrances offered by the cafeteria. “Cafeteria” is a probably the wrong word because it surfaces memories of a high school lunchroom and Salisbury steak. Cafeterias by European design are more “Café” than “teria.” I patronized many of these during my European travels, and Ikea keeps true to form in its Swedish presentation. It’s no gimmick, but they do sell Salisbury steak.

The signature entrée at Ikea is the Swedish Meatballs, for something like $3.99 you get a small mountain of meatballs, mashed potatoes and lingonberries (basically cranberries). Amanda and I went for them. When in Rome, right? We also bought some very traditional Swedish Fish to keep the entire meal authentic. Amanda has requested that we go out to eat more often, and boy did she get her wish!

We sat at one of the cafeteria tables and dug in. The food was good enough for a total $11 meal. I couldn’t help but fast-forward 50 years and imagine Amanda and I sitting across from each other in a very similar environment, eating cafeteria food at some futuristic retirement home. That’s really what the experience felt like – a Wall-E-esque future when everyone becomes passive and automated and I sit to eat in a too clean dining room only pleasing to obsessive compulsives, which is everyone by 2060.

It was a little scary to think of a corporate, ubiquitous future like that, but then again the Swedish meatballs weren’t half bad. Wherever my kids put me up, I won’t complain if the food is OK.

We finished our meal and walked the rest of Ikea with our wallets unscathed with the exception of a small houseplant to replace the dying one in our kitchen that we bought from Ikea last year. Everything’s a cycle.

My stomach bloated with Swedish meatballs, we headed home where the scene isn’t so sharply perfect, but it’s a little more comfortable and the Italian meatballs taste better.

When wasps attack!

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You never want to learn the hard way that you have a wasp hive growing in your yard. Four quick stings later, I have learned that I have a wasp hive growing in my yard. I guess I'm not allergic either.

Those suckers are vicious! I was raking up grass near where the hive must be, and then out of nowhere I got stuck on my elbox - and then my ankle - and then they went for the kill. I got two stings high up on my inner thighs. Not only were they protecting their hive, they didn't want me to reproduce either -- a smart tactic to avoid my seed's future potential for destruction of their world. Queue the plot for The (Ex)Terminator.

I ran my best sprint time in years around the corner of my house and jumped through the front door, calling for Amanda to follow me in. I ripped off everything I was wearing, and a wasp flew out of my shorts. He had crossed enemy lines. No longer outnumbered and on my own turf, I decided to take on the wasp. I learned from Dane Cook that all you have to do is punch the wasp in the face.

The wasp was much faster than I was - already flying circles around me. I clenched my fists and took a fighter stance, looking for a pattern in flight so that I could punch the wasp in the face. Keep in mind that I had taken all of my clothes off, so I was dangerously exposed in just boxer briefs. I looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport, and the floor had been raised. Let that image sink in.

I swung. Miss. I swung again in combination. Miss. Miss. Miss.

Finally I ran into the laundry room frantically and shut the door behind me, whining. The stings hurt, OK?!

I came out when Amanda said the coast was clear and she fixed me up with Cortizone-10 cream.

The wasps may have won the battle, but I have a secret weapon that will end the war tomorrow - wasp spray. I'm dropping the bomb like Truman.  I am going Van Damme on their asses!

Wine, pool and Prosser

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I cannot believe that it has been three years since I last visited Prosser, WA. I went to visit my college roommates' hometown and check out the Prosser Wine and Food Fair -- probably my first large-scale wine experience (meaning that I was exposed to a lot of wineries at once, not that I necessarily drank a lot of it like Moos did). Here I am with J.Jo and Moos in 2007.

Since that time, the Prosser Wine and Food Fair has only gotten bigger and relocated to the Washington State University Experience Station (insert college experimenting jokes here). It was probably a good idea to move the intoxication-by-wine event from the local high school football field, where I had last attended. Don't want to send mixed signals to the kids, right?

This time around, the event was bigger and my group was hotter as I was joined by the Wives and my wife. Trust me, nothing looks better than rolling with three beautiful girls to a wine event. I'd rather take three dates over limo service any day. Here was the entourage.

We were impressed by the reds - Merlots, Cabernets, Sangioveses - but were dumping out the too-sweet whites - Rhubarb(?!), Viognier, Chardonnay, Petite Verdot. Yuk. Vin du Lac and Heaven's Cave Cellars and Columbia Crest were the standout winners for me. The weather was too hot for prolonged red wine drinking so we quickly transitioned to beer and enjoyed what Horse Heaven Hills Brewery had to offer, including a kickass apricot beer. We threw down two pitchers of that in no time.

We attended a post-party at one of the two "hot" bars in Prosser where you basically pay a $5 cover to sit in a restaurant featuring bright lights and loud music. God help this town. The entertainment for the night was a way-too-drunk girl sitting near us who couldn't keep the tattoos on her chest from falling out of her dress. It was sad but well worth the cover price.

During our mornings in Prosser we were able to crash at Moos' aunt's backyard pool, which was amazing. Sorry guys, but I have to abide by the no-swimsuit-photos policies enforced by wife and Wives (though anything can be bought for a price).

Amanda is a natural amphibian, so she and I spent the most time in the water while the Wives worked on their tans. I don't think we've had a chance since our honeymoon to just sit and do nothing.  It was so relaxing. We also got some more down time when traffic was delayed by 90 minutes(!) on the way home, but all-in-all it was a great weekend.

Oh my poor, inhaler-toting seed

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Based upon some clear precedent, I know that my children (who will come to this world many years down the road) will be awfully nerdy and given no chance to be anything else.

When I realized that I wanted to marry Amanda, I accepted that I'd have some 2-year-old with toddler glasses that everyone would call "Harry Potter." That's cool. I like wands. Amanda and I have both worn glasses for way too long and no matter how many carrots that kid eats in utero, he/she/it is going to be half-blind.

But I didn't expect this. Amanda is in her third decade on this earth and in a sneaky, 4th quarter move, she pulled a fast one on me.

My wife has an inhaler.

All of this time I thought I dodged that bullet for me and my seed! But nope, after never using one before, Amanda came up with this weird cough over the last couple weeks and the doctor said that she had developed asthma and would need to use an inhaler.

Now she begs for it, insisting that she can't cook/clean/do laundry without it. (She's also developed a strange affinity for tea lattes - again for the cough.) Obviously this is a problem.

I'm not entirely convinced that she has asthma and she's going back to the doctor next week to see if symptoms have improved. But now that Amanda has been told that she has asthma, everything is a placebo for an asthma attack. She chokes on her food - asthma attack. She has phlegm - asthma attack. The gas tank is low - asthma attack. She needs to go shopping - to avoid an asthma attack. Apparently security stops asthma at the front of Nordstrom.

I'm glad that she's found some solace in the inhaler as she certainly does have a bad cough right now. I just wish it wouldn't so formally predict the future of our children. The poor kids are probably going to be wearing rec-specs in gym class, sucking on inhalers at lunch and struggling with dating through high school and college as they blame us for the awkward qualities of their youth, only to find love in adulthood on some online dating site.

At least they'll be happy.

Goodbye new camera, farewell youth

in

Last week I bought a Canon 7D – a marvel of a pro-am SLR camera and one that I really wanted to purchase since its release. It offers better picture quality than my current camera and shoots high quality HD video. And not your average HD video either. TV shows have been filmed with this camera. It’s serious like that. It also came with a serious price, which is why I decided this week - after a good trial with it in Chelan over the weekend - that I should return it.

The problem isn’t that I can’t afford the camera, it’s that I can’t afford the camera AND the fence that I have to build this summer AND the new front door that I need to buy and install sooner than later. I’m not exaggerating about the urgency of these home fixes. My fence is literally falling over and looks like broken teeth. I can feel a breeze through my window-less, solid wood front door.

The camera, on the other hand, can wait. I have a camera that works fine, but I just wanted the next best thing that takes superkillersweet video. It’s the same feeling I had before I purchased the Macbook Pro or my current camera or those two external hard drives on Black Friday. The geek needs to be fed.

What really strikes me as different and (gasp!) mature about this camera decision is that I’m prioritizing and seeing necessities over shiny objects. Before today, if I had needed to pay for a major dental procedure or fix my car, I would have most definitely bought and kept the camera, rationalizing that I needed to document those serious circumstances at the highest fidelity – not for me but for future generations so that they could understand where they came from. I’ve always been thoughtful about the future of America like that.

This fundamental reprioritization is monumental. Like the previous sentence crammed a lot of syllables into few words, I suddenly feel like I need to pack my many, growing financial responsibilities into neat, manageable categories. For now “Saving for camera” isn’t one of them.

With that, some rebellious, spontaneous part of my youth must have died. No amount of clapping brings that back. I don’t know if it’s the copious amounts of wine that replaced PBR or a job where I work with grown-up adults, but part of me that “invested” in baseball cards and CDs and spent thousands of dollars with a Best Buy discount in college has been laid to rest like Ken Griffey Jr.’s baseball career – without much celebration and far too late.