A Merry Chewie Xmas!!

My girl sent this to me and made my day!

Have a very merry and a happy new!

The Heat is OFF!

With no roommate at the moment, I've been looking for ways to cut expenses. This led to a brilliant plan to keep my natural gas bill down by turning the furnace completely off for the winter. After all, I don't run my AC in the summer, so the opposite only makes sense.

There is just one problem with cutting off the furnace... my apartment gets COLD!

Yes, I live in southern California, but before you spam me with hate mail, keep in mind that it gets pretty cold at night in the desert. Sometimes darn near freezing. And without a lot of sunlight to warm the place up, my bedtime pj's often consist of ski pants, wool socks, and a hoodie.

There are, however, some positive benefits to this budget buster... The morning after the recent absinthe party, for example, I awakened to find I'd lazily left the party's finger foods out overnight in the living room uncovered. Amazingly, everything was refrigerator fresh. Veggies for dipping were still crisp and none of the dips had skin on the top! Needless to say, this brought on a wonderful breakfast, as well as the realization my FTD centerpiece seemed to be as fresh as the day it was bought, some four and a half weeks ago.


As the colder, damper part of the year progresses, I'm discovering cheap and more ingenious ways to keep warm. Tealight candles, for example, are an inexpensive way to take the chill out of the air (though I really need to be more careful with where I toss a used Kleenex -- that or else take the battery out of the smoke alarm again). A single stick of incense is also great for warming the hands while surfing the web. It certainly beats typing in mittens, which I don't recommend.

It's only December, so my new life without heat has really just begun. But I'm already starting to wonder about some of these other bills. Imagine how much I could save by turning off the electricity. I mean, all we really need is the internet connection, right?

Absinthe Minded

Several months ago, while downing a pitcher of margaritas, a plan was hatched by my friend Neil to introduce me and several of our mutual friends to absinthe.

What is absinthe you ask? Well, I'd never heard of it myself. A couple of internet web investigations later and I had the whole story. This 70 to 85 proof alcohol (banned in the US) must be savored and not consumed quickly, so as to not disrupt the liquor's "full-body high."

So now, this past Saturday night, my apartment provided the location for Neil's party. A variety of absinthe was served. The anise supplies the beverage its licorice flavor, which runs from light to obnoxious, depending on the selection.

While Neil, seen here, performed an appropriate reading from Oscar Wilde, another reader gave a nod to Edgar Allen Poe with a reading of "The Raven." These authors were known for their appreciation of the spirits, including absinthe.

But the highlight of the evening's essays was probably Carrey's reading of Joshua Tyree's "The Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor." I'm guessing the essay was probably not written while intoxicated on absinthe, but it's still proof positive that even though you can move the geek out of the basement and give him an upscale illegal fru-fru liquor, he'll still ponder the logic of compacting trash when you're just going to eject it into space anyway.

All in all, the small party was a huge success. But most of the absinthe drinkers, including yours truly, found the ceremony and pomp of absinthe immensely more fun than its deleterious effects.