It's the Future.

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In case anyone was wondering, and I know you were, quite a bit of time and energy goes into the creation of those longer form stories like The Laptop Charger, Night of 1000 Dog Farts, or Star Wars. 

It can take weeks to complete one depending on how many pictures I have to do. Part of the reason the process is so arduous is that I do things pretty low tech.

For posts like the ones I mentioned above, the process of doing one drawing from start to finish goes something like this:

First I do an initial sketch.

 
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Next I take that sketch, clean it up and trace it onto a new sheet of paper, getting it just the way I want it.

 
 

After that I ink the drawing and put in the shading.

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Next I use a scanner to scan the inked drawing onto the computer, to get a .jpeg format image.

 
 

After that I have to crop it to the proper size and upload it to this site which has a few rudimentary tools for editing images. I mess around with the brightness and whatnot to get it as close as I can to not looking like it's a scanned piece of paper.

 
 

If at any point I mess up my lines, get a stray mark on the paper, or the scan comes out kind of funny, it usually means going as far back in the process as re-drawing a new version from my original rough sketch, then doing the whole process over again.

It's kind of a pain in the ass. Not to mention I go through mechanical pencils, micron pens and pads of sketch paper like crazy.

BUT NO MORE!

The future is here and it is in the form of thing I bought called a drawing tablet. 

It's basically a device that lets you draw on it with a stylus and use a program like photoshop to create illustrations. That means I can do my drawings for this site right on the computer and not have to deal with the 432344562 steps it takes to do everything by hand. PROGRESS!

It's a pretty weird experience using the thing as you see what you are drawing on your computer screen instead of under your hand. It's kind of like having to re-learn how to draw. Actually, a better example might be if you remember art class when you were a kid and they did that thing where you have to draw a picture without looking down at the paper? Sort of like that.

 There are about sixteen million features to learn how to use, but it's a lot of fun and at least I don't have to scan two dozen pictures by hand for every post anymore. So yay. 

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  And hey, color!

Freempf

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Have you ever had a mundane experience where you thought, "Huh, That is the first time this particular event has ever happened to me" and feel like it seems super weird that whatever the thing was has never happened to you before that moment?  

For example: one time I looked down at my feet while I was walking and I saw my shoe come untied. I literally saw the exact moment it happened.

You may be thinking to yourself what a stupid example that is, but consider, have you ever seen the exact moment your shoe comes untied? Like, the EXACT moment it happens? Its not like you go around staring at your shoes all the time in the off chance your laces are about to do something slightly more interesting than hold your sketchers on your foot.  I bet its it's only like, 40 people in North America. My 39 associates and I should start a gang. With Jackets. Or top hats. And jet packs.

Not so smug about my example now, are you? My top hat-jetpack gang turn our noses up at you. But I digress.

Believe it or not, I was going somewhere with this and it had nothing to do with shoelaces. That was just a happy little detour down wishful thinking lane we all just took together.

Where I was going with this was that on more than one occasion I've had the distinct feeling that I'm experiencing something completely run of the mill for the first time ever. Furthermore, after that first occurrence it's as if some cosmic switch was flipped and that weird random thing happens like, twelve times in a row. 

This whole idea kind of seems like one of those hyper-specific feelings that should have its own suspiciously made up sounding term. If you don't know what I'm talking about google "words for really specific feelings" or something similar. Buzzfeed is sure to have at least one list of them that you "won't believe".

It would be like Schadenfreude for pointless life occurrences. The Germans have words for everything, right? Someone call the Germans and tell them to get cracking on this one. Something like Fraufingazen or, Blintzengruben, or Freempf.

I had a pretty Freempfy week this week.

I had a stranger stop me in a parking lot and ask me to help jump his car on Monday. Nothing weird about that in and of itself, but it did occur to me that I've never had a stranger ask me to jump start their car before.

Full disclosure, I may have had a moment where I tried to figure out how a stranger asking me for a jump in the crowded parking lot of a Shop-Rite could potentially be a trick to rob and/or serial murder me, but it all turned out fine. All said and done I felt good about helping somebody, I got the pasta sauce and craisins I had been dispatched to retrieve and there was 0% robbing or murdering.

The weird part is that after having my first experience jump starting a stranger's car, it happened twice more over the next three days.

I went from a 26-year streak of never having had a stranger ask for a jump to having it happen three times in a week. Granted, a good chunk of those 26 years doesn't count, as at no point in my early life did I ever find myself in a hilarious driving-baby type situation. 

The ability of babies to work jumper cables aside, it seems super weird to me that this week was the the first time it's happened and then it happened three times in a row. The first two times it happened, the person who needed a jump had cables in their vehicle.  The third time, which was in the parking lot of Wal Mart, the couple asked if I had the cables, which I did not. 

After telling them I couldn't help them and going into the store, the combination of feeling bad that they were stuck and super weird about the fact that I kept having people ask me for a jump prompted me to purchase a set of jumper cables with the intention of catching them on my way out and giving them a hand. Much like in the story of how I ended up with a box of pulled pork and an avocado, this plan also backfired. 

When I came out of the store, the people who had needed a jump were no longer at their car. The spot in front of them was open, so I moved my vehicle into place so that If they came back I could give them the jump. They didn't reappear though. I figured I'd wait a few minutes, thinking maybe they went in to buy jumper cables themselves and I'd just help them when they came back out.  

After about five minutes, when they didn't return I got super uncomfortable that it would seem really weird that I had purchased a set of jumper cables and then just sat in the parking lot near their car for them.

At eight minutes, paranoid of seeming like a complete creep, I bailed. 

And now I own some jumper cables:

At least it seems purchasing the cables was what it took to break the cycle of Freempf. I haven't been asked to jump anyone's car since getting them.

Moral of the story. Sometimes weird stuff happens. And Jetpack Tophat Gang is awesome.

Happy Easter

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With today being Easter, I felt it appropriate to share this picture of my wife my mother-in-law sent me.

Dear sweet zombie Jesus, where does one even begin? I can't decide what the best part is. Is it the Easter Bunny's red, possessed demon eyes? Is it the oversized jean jacket?  The bowl cut/mullet combo that is just perfectly lopsided enough to prominently display some sort of random head wound is a pretty strong contender.

The yellow and white circus tent wallpaper behind them really pulls the scene together in just the right way to complete the nightmare aesthetic. Everything in this picture is point-for-point exactly what what you would expect a serial molester to pick out for some sort of creep wall vision-board in his basement.

 The longer I look at it the harder I laugh. I just can't decide who seems more likely to appear in a meth addicts fever dream hovering over their bed with a ball gag and a scalpel.

Candidate 1:

Or candidate two:

I honestly have nothing else to write about this. There is no post here, it just makes me so happy.

In the spirit of fairness, if I'm going to share this childhood horror of Emily, here is this little gem of me when I was a youngster. Apparently I was Sylvester the cat for Halloween one year.

Happy Zombie Jesus Day.

Night of 1000 Dog Farts: Part 2

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This is the second part to Night of 1000 Dog Farts: Part 1.

When last we joined our intrepid hero, he was elbow deep in dog excrement and begrudgingly playing a game of 'find the feces' in the living room.

The foster dog, Riley, had escaped from her crate using a combination of dog ninjitsu/ Nightcrawler style teleportation and eaten her entire body weight in Olive's special fish diet chow. She then shat on every surface in the house until I came home and found her.

Upon booting both Riley and Olive out of the house I had just completed my search for all of the dog messes. 45 minutes, 2/3 of a bottle of Resolve and an entire roll of paper towels later I believed I had found all the Lincoln logs there were to be found so I let the dogs back into the house.

Using one of the 621413057129371823957 plastic grocery bags that my wife compulsively hoards in our kitchen drawers, I gathered up all of the paper towels and other disjecta membra from my cleaning spree and took them out to the garbage can. A process which takes roughly 12 seconds to complete.

 
 

I considered writing a warning before continuing on to the next bit of the story but I figure if you've made it this far, you're in to the end. Strap in, it's about to get gross up in here.

When I came back in from depositing the trash outside, I discovered that like a poo seeking missile, Olive had located a giant dog poo I had missed near a lamp in the den and was in the process of devouring it like some sort of a lumpy brown afternoon snack.

I tried to stop her from polishing off the poo by yelling at her to get away from it while I rushed over, to no avail.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

As thoroughly disgusting as this was, it was merely a brief glimpse of the horrors that would soon begin.

You may recall from Part 1 that I mentioned Olive is on a fish based diet because of a food allergy to poultry. An innocuous detail at the time, but I did say that it would prove to be important later.

Later being about an hour after the last of the cleanup and the poo eating took place. That's when the farts started.

At first it was just Riley. Her system was not prepared for Olives's special fish diet at all, so the fact that she had ingested a weeks worth of completely foreign chow over the course of an hour meant there was a battle raging in her intestines. The gurgling coming from that dog's stomach was audible from across the room and within minutes of the first warning signs, a full scale olfactory assault began.  

 
 

As everyone knows there are all kinds of different farts; regular farts, silent but deadly farts, church farts, meat farts, jogging farts and so on. Usually though only human farts get their own special titles, typically our canine friends have their malodorous emissions relegated to the blanket category of "Dog Farts."

The putrid expulsion of gas that started coming out of that dog was far and away too vile and reprehensible to share a classification with something so innocuous and hilarious as a dog fart. These were not the type of farts that smell for a second and then fade away into a fond memory memory of Fido tooting himself awake. No, these were the kind that settled in the air and lingered like a heavy, deadly fog. They clung to the furniture and burned the eyes. There was  no escape from it.

Ever smelled something so bad it coated your tongue and you could taste it for the rest of the day? It was like that. The smell was so bad it was basically like being suffocated  by a hitman wielding a rag soaked in liquefied rotten eggs that somebody pulled off of a river corpse.

 
 

As if it weren't toxic enough, about twenty minutes into Riley's intestinal emission torture Olive started farting as well. That giant goddamn turd I couldn't stop her from eating had apparently created some sort of bowel movement Trojan horse situation and carried whatever biological warfare was taking place inside of one dog over to the other.   

 
 

The Symphony of death farts was like a woodwind ensemble comprised entirely of anuses playing instruments making a mockery of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9.

It literally stunk up the entire first floor our our house. When Emily came home from work a few hours later, entering at the opposite side of the house from where the dogs were she said, and I quote "As soon as I walked in the door it was like getting punched in the face by a wall of farts"

Whatever interior distress these two dogs were going through was apparently not planning on resolving itself in any sort of timely fashion. A continual stream of stomach gurgling and dog farts carried on well into the night making the entire house smell vaguely of rancid meat and death.

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By around 11:45 we were ready to go to bed, so upstairs we all went, two furry butts crop dusting the entire house on their way to the bedroom where we put them in the large crate that had their beds in it. The only problem was that what had been a neigh unbearable stench when there was a large open space for it to dissipate over became equivalent to tear gas when confined within the bedroom.

Besides not being able to breath or sleep, it was getting to the point where the stink was so foul and the two dogs looked so bloated, we were worried they might fart themselves to death. Emily called one of the vets she works with at  about 12:00 AM to explain the situation and ask what we could do about it.

The answer? Go to the store and buy an anti-gas medicine. Those pills where the commercial is various people looking really uncomfortable while watching a sports game, going on a picnic or having a job interview as tuba music plays in the background? Those.

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Apparently its cool to feed those to dogs in case you were wondering. 

So good news and bad news. Good news is we can give the dogs some of these fart pills and it should stem the tide of their murder poots. Bad news is I have to go out to Walmart past midnight on a Tuesday to purchase said fart pills.

Going to Walmart after midnight on a weeknight in order to purchase fart medicine is probably on my top list of things I never, ever want to do. Right behind fighting a wolverine with my bare hands and having Donald Trump lightly brush his cotton-candy-made-out-of-urine hair against my face.

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First of all, the Walmart crowd can be rough at any time of the day but nobody goes to Walmart at midnight on a weekday for any normal reason. I was not looking forward to the parade of sweat pant wearing zombies buying-thirty five cans of wet cat food and a pair of Dora the Explorer child's rain boots I was about to be exposed to.

Second, the thought of having to go into a store and look a cashier in the face while I buy fart medicine is mortifying enough. The fact that I have to do it at midnight makes me want to light myself on fire.

To make matters even worse, for some reason my wife decided she needed cranberry juice since I was going out anyway.

This is my nightmare. It's going on 1 a.m on a Wednesday, I've waded through a sea of super high people looking for industrial sized Doritos, and probable murder-molesters to get my items and am now standing in front of a cashier who's pissed because not only does she have to work the bullshit 1 a.m shift, now she actually has to deal with somebody because here I come with my fart medicine and cranberry juice.

 
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In my head it's like I've walked up to this stranger and announced I've got a case of the butt rumbles so severe that I had to leave my house at ONE IN THE GODDAMN MORNING to get medicine for it.

"How d'yo do ma'am? Just here to pick up some fart medicine in a desperate attempt to stem the explosive propulsion of methane that has been and may currently be firing out of my back end. Also, all this farting has made me thirsty and I've got a real hankering for some cranberry juice." 

Horrified at my predicament, I desperately needed to figure out a way to naturally slip it into the conversation that the medicine was for my dogs, not myself.

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It went poorly. I'm not even sure what I said, but there isn't really a normal way to just drop in that you are buying fart medicine at 1 a.m. for some dogs completely unsolicited. 

I'm pretty sure I just convinced her more that the fart medicine was for me because of my weird excuse dropping, but she didn't say anything so I just got out of there as fast as possible.

In the end the fart medicine took care of the dog farts and everyone was able to get some sleep. But the house smelled for like two days afterwards.

Also, the cranberry juice was good.

The end.

Eyebrows on Fleek

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Sometimes I see things on Facebook and have thoughts.  

I saw this thing on my Facebook a while back as I was just nonsensing around, scrolling through stuff:

All I could think was this:

 
 

I bought and ruined a pair of those glasses with the nose and moustache for this...

On the bright side These bold brows did make my beauty look better. I'm fierce AF right now.

Just Some Stuff That Was On My Phone

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Sometimes I take pictures of stuff on my phone, you know, as one does. But then sometimes I go back into my phone later and I'm like "Jesus crap, what the hell is this picture?" and "Why did I take fourteen pictures of the dogs sleeping on the sofa?"

I don't like clutter on my phone, so I pretty regularly go through and delete pictures and things off my phone to save space and keep everything nice and tidy. Folding and putting away laundry is like having hot nails driven into my kidneys, but I don't mess around when it comes getting rid of the clutter on my devices.

Besides pictures, I also regularly purge stuff like text messages, voicemails, and other junk that builds up over time. I'll be all like "Why the hell do I have six different workout/meal planner apps, a dice rolling app and an app that just makes fart noises?" DELETE!!!!

I mean obviously the fart noises app stays but the rest of that shit was just taking up space and needed to go. Cherished life moments and meaningful conversations be damned. Papa needs storage space. Plus lets be real it was 99% texts with Emily trying to figure out what we are going to have for dinner and talking about when the dogs pooped last.

In the spirit of not everything being forever lost to the digital abyss (Digital Abyss would be a sick band name) here are a few of the things that were in my camera roll:

Murder horse from a western themed restaurant near us.

 
 

I feel like I should explain. There is a restaurant near us that has a western thing going on. One of those places that nailed a bunch of cowboy and indians junk to the wall and called it a day. The food is really good though so we eat there sometimes.

We've been there a bunch of a times before but the last time we went was the first time I noticed this thing in their foyer. His creep-ass dirty doll hair, along with his inexplicably lumpy deformed body aside, its really the eyes that are the worst part.

 
 

Sweet buns on a baboon those eyes are nightmare fuel. What is wrong with them? Why does he have the eyes of a human serial killer? What does he want from me? Does he want to cut off all my skin devour my soul and then steal all of my hair to add to his own suspiciously lifelike tufts?

Looks like we're never going back to that restaurant.

This Cat.

This cat hangs out around our house. I'm pretty sure he sleeps in our garage. We've had a lot less mice in the house since we started seeing him so I figure he's hooking me up. Since hes pulling his weight I figure he's cool to chill out. I call him Muffin.

Thing is, Muffin isn't usually keen on me getting near him. Whenever I see him he runs off and watches me from a safe distance until I go away.

Except this one time when for some reason he was super friendly. I came home from the gym one time with a Pizza I was bringing home for dinner and he was just chilling on the table by our side lot. I went over to him and hopped down to check me out. He let me pet him and stuff and I gave him a little chunk of Pizza, it was pretty awesome.

After that one time he went right back to running away from me. What happened Muffin? I thought we were bros. Maybe he just wanted me for my Pizza.

The best goddamn thing that has ever happened involving a piece of string getting on a shirt of all time.

 
 

This is a shirt I own. It is a kitten attacking the empire state building like King Kong. It is awesome and if you think otherwise you have no sense of fashion. 

The other night when I was brushing my teeth I looked in the mirror and noticed the greatest thing I have ever witnessed in my life.

A piece of string got on my shirt in this exact placement:

 
 

This is the conversation that took place following this discovery:

Matt: *runs into room with toothbrush in mouth* Oh my god, look at where this string went on my shirt!

Emily: *reading her book in bed* What?

Matt: The string! Look at it, it's not part of the shirt, it just got on there in that position.

Emily: Okay...

Matt: Isn't it funny? It's like right there. It's like he's playing with the string.

Emily: ....

Matt: ...

Matt: It's a kitten, and it looks like he's playing with the string.

Emily: Okay... you're cute, go finish brushing your teeth.

Matt: No, it's funny though! Just look at it

Emily: *Goes back to reading* I saw it already.

Matt: You have no appreciation for the cosmic beauty of this situation.

Seriously guys. The string just ended up there on it's own. Just like he was playing with it. JUST LIKE IT.

 

PSA: A Fate Worse Than Death

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Hello there. I'm here today to deliver a very important message. Countless people each year and their loved ones suffer from a terrible affliction. According to science, every single person on Earth either suffers from, or has at least one direct relation to someone suffering from this condition. However due to a troubling lack of awareness, many are not even aware that this condition exists. Sadly, many people will go their entire lives unaware that they are suffering from this insidious blight, never understanding how their problem is destroying those around them. I am here to tell you that in these dark times, there is still hope.

The condition I am describing is of course, Uncontrollable Compulsive Plastic Bag Hoarding Disorder or U.C.P.B.H.D.

U.C.P.B.H.D. is a condition afflicting 82% of women and 15% of men worldwide in which the afflicted individual suffers from an unstoppable need to save every single plastic shopping bag that enters their home and stuff them into spare cabinets.

Doctors recognize several subsets of the condition which often go hand in hand with U.C.P.B.H.D. involving the hoarding of other similarly unnecessary items. Many distraught loved ones of sufferers have found themselves buried under a haphazard avalanche of saved birthday and Christmas gift bags, tissue paper and department store clothing boxes. Others lament their fate while wading elbow deep through a heap of cleaned out and saved cool whip, cottage cheese or 'kind of fancy' plastic take out containers, most without the accompanying lid, all saved for an undefined and largely unnecessary reason.

U.C.P.B.H.D. is a silent killer, it destroys the lives of those unfortunate enough to cross it's path. Due to under-reporting, exact figures are difficult to pinpoint, but it is believed that roughly 40 million drawers in the United States alone are rendered useless due to plastic shopping bag crowding. The number of lives destroyed is beyond count.

It is up to you, the trail of broken and shattered homes left in the wake of this terrible, terrible condition can only be ended by raising awareness. Help is out there, it just takes the courage of loved ones to open the discussion about the realities of U.C.P.B.H.D.

If you suspect you or someone you love may be suffering from U.C.P.B.H.D., I urge you to ask yourself the following questions:

How many drawers are there in my kitchen? How many of them are devoted entirely to plastic grocery store bags?

Are there more containers in the cabinets which are the cleaned out containers that some other thing came in than actual tupperware?

Is there a closet in my home that I do not open under any circumstance because that's 'the wrapping paper closet' and the last time I went in there it took twenty minutes to stuff everything back in place?

Do you have a 'crammin' spoon' in your kitchen? (A sturdy wooden spoon used to jam down plastic bags so drawers will shut properly.

If you answered yes to any of these questions it is possible that you or your loved one is suffering from U.C.P.B.H.D. This can be a serious condition for some, and often may require professional intervention.

If you think you may be living with an individual suffering from U.C.P.B.H.D. but you are still not sure or not sure of the severity of the issue, here are a carefully designed series of questions that you may ask in order to gauge the extent of the problem.

  1. Do you really feel you need to save ALL of these (plastic bags/Tupperware/gift bags)?
  2. Why do you feel the need to save all of these (plastic bags/Tupperware/gift bags)?
  3. What do you use these (plastic bags/Tupperware/gift bags) for?
  4. How many of these items do you think you have saved total?
  5. What percent of that amount do you think you have ever or will ever use?
  6. How many cabinets and closets in the house to you think have been rendered unusable because they are stuffed full of shopping bags?
  7. Are you aware that we already have bags in the house which we purchased and keep specifically for trash and things?
  8. Are you aware that we already own a significant amount of nice Tupperware which is regularly sized and stack-able for neat, organized storage as opposed to having to throw things into the cupboard and slam the door as fast as possible so it doesn't all come out?
  9. Are you aware that they sell wrapping paper and bags at a number of different stores for relatively little money, and that these items can be purchased as needed for gifts?

See how your loved one responds to these questions. Did they react reasonably? Did they react with Anger? Complete Denial?

The road to healing may be long and filled with strife. Many have been suffering for years with U.C.P.B.H.D. and will find the transition to a normal, healthy, hoarding-free lifestyle difficult. They will need your love and support during the coming hardships, but remember, you are not alone. Resources are available to ease the burden of a recovering bag hoarder and their families. Do not be afraid to seek help.

This has been a public service announcement. I hope that it will help you or someone you care about deal with the horrors of Uncontrollable Compulsive Plastic Bag Hoarding Disorder. Please, if anything you have seen here reminds you of someone you know. Share it with them. Encourage them to seek help. You may just save a life.

   Paid for by the Foundation for Husbands Who Wish Every Drawer in Their House Wasn't Full of Goddamn Shopping Bags.

So Close...

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The other day I passed a store called Canal's on my way home from an errand. The sign on the font of the building was a large set of illuminated letters that said Canal's in red. One of the letters was burned out on the sign.

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A burned out bulb one letter off, and a hilarious mishap worthy of the internet never happens. Fate is a fickle mistress sometimes.  

 
 

People Who Take Their Dog to See Santa Are A-holes.

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There are many Holiday traditions that I simply don't understand. One such tradition is taking your dogs to go have their picture taken with Santa Claus.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against Mall Santas or anything like that. When you are a kid, going to the mall to see the ACTUAL Santa Claus and tell him what you want for Christmas is a completely awesome experience. (I of course am the exception as I distinctly remember being pant-crappingly terrified of going anywhere near Mall Santa as a child. Apparently my general dislike of strangers even included Father Christmas himself).

I love the Idea of taking kids to see Santa when they are young. It's an experience parents can treasure, it creates a memorable moment for the kid, and its all around a good bonding experience for everyone involved.

You know who gives exactly zero fucks about Santa Claus though? Your dog.

Our furry family pets have no concept of Christmas, Santa, or generally anything besides wanting to eat food, nap and lick their own butthole. In fact,  in my experience they are downright against the idea of being taken to a strange place to be plopped on a chair with a large, scary bearded stranger, and then screeched at by their owners and yet another stranger with a camera trying to get them to look in the right direction.

The entire ordeal seems generally confusing and upsetting for them. The exercise of taking the dog to see Santa is clearly entirely for the benefit of the owner without consideration for how dog feels about it.

In fact, here is a short list of things I've comprised that you can do for your dog that they will appreciate more than being taken to see Santa:

  • Give them a dog treat
  • Take them for a nice walk
  • Throw a ball or a stick with them for a while
  • Literally just do nothing and leave them alone to do whatever it is they are already doing
  • Take them for a ride in the car (to a place where they aren't going to be manhandled by a festive stranger)
  • Give them a nice belly rub

Further, here is a list of things you can do with your dog that they may not appreciate necessarily, but will cause them less displeasure and confusion than being trundled off for a strange and uncomfortable holiday experience.

  • Read a complete Shakespeare play to them start to finish
  • Register them to be a wedding officiant on a shady internet site
  • Show them a series of artistic photographs of Cantaloupes
  • Make them a fake ID
  • Pretend you are a character on Cheers and shout "Norm!" at them every time they enter a room before returning to whatever you were doing.

When it comes down to it, I just don't get the appeal of dragging a creature who has no concept of Christmas to take a picture with Santa Claus, an experience which is clearly not enjoyable for them, purely for the sake of my own gratification.

Or at least that's what I thought about it before this:

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My wife decided she wanted to take the dogs to see Santa. I articulately and clearly explained why I disagreed with the practice. I then packed the car up with two dogs and a pair of Christmas hats at 8.am on a Sunday because as it turns out I do not get a vote and therefore can shove it.

Now, I still believe all of the things I said above are true, but goddamn if watching that man in his fake beard struggle to hold my two dogs still long enough for the photographer to snap a picture as they flailed their little asses off trying to get away from him was not the best thing I've ever seen.

They hated it. They hated Santa from the top of his red hat to the tips of his pleather faux-boot shoe covers. They hated the stupid Christmas hats we put on them and they hated the noise of everyone trying to coax them to look at the camera. They are pretty well trained dogs, we constantly get compliments in public abut how well behaved they are but they were simply not having one bit of Santa.

Now, while my dogs hated this, I on the other hand could barely stand I was laughing so hard while trying to convince the photographer to take the picture when Olive  was a blur of kicking feet and Griff was halfway off the chair making a break for it while Santa desperately held on to his back legs.

In the desperate confusion of writhing dogs and flopping elastic-bound Christmas hats the photographer actually managed to snap the above picture in the .5 seconds the two of them were holding still and looking in the same direction. Personally I'd have much preferred this years Christmas card to be a picture of them being maniacs, but you can't win 'em all.

If you take your dog to see Santa Claus you, like me, are totally an A-hole. You know what though? I'm alright with that because someday those  four-legged little mongrels aren't going to be around anymore and you'll always have a hilarious memory and a potentially epic photo to remember them by.

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Happy Holidays, A-holes.