A New Game

While it's fresh, I thought I would fill you all in on our New Years Eve activities. I warn you, this story is not for the fainthearted. It involves tastes, the like of which, you wish you had never tasted, and the use of substances, illegal in the United States of America, and a pair of striped pyjamas.

It really all began with a trip to the Jelly Belly factory, a day before New Years Eve.

 

We didn't do the tour because there was no production going on and the line was out of the door... so, we just sampled :) 

Thanks to the geniuses at Jelly Belly who, inspired by Harry Potter and the goodies found at Hogwarts, provided us with jelly beans that were so disgusting to the taster but so hilarious to those watching the taster grimace in horror, we just HAD to make a game out of them. This is what we played during the last hours of 2010.

"Puke-phrase" (inspired by that instinct all children have to mix the most terrible concoction ever and make their siblings drink it for their own amusement)

Equipment needed:

One game of Catchphrase

Two boxes of "Bean Boozled" jelly beans

Begin with a normal game of catch phrase, except, when the buzzer ends on a player and the round is lost, that player must be given a bean from the packet of Bean Boozled. They must eat the bean while the others look on and determine the flavor of the bean. The bean must be kept in the mouth for at least 10 seconds before spitting out.

Now, to understand the challenge that the players face when found holding the catchphrase disk on the losing buzzer I think you need to understand what kind of "flavors" they were up against.

 

*Canned Dog Food  *Barf  *Baby Wipes  *Rotten Egg  *Centipede  *Booger  *Pencil Shavings  *Moldy Cheese  *Toothpaste  *Skunk Spray

 

The fun thing about the "bamboozled" packets though is that they have two identical looking beans in each color and one of them is delicious, like peach or strawberry, and one of them is disgusting, like barf or centipede. You just don't know which is which.

Biting into a jelly bean that could possibly taste like skunk spray and finding out it is licorice is such a relief. In fact, it's positively delightful. But biting into a jelly bean that you've never tasted before and finding out it tastes like rotten egg. Having that taste/smell fill your nose and spread throughout your entire mouth, the stickiness of the jelly bean making sure the flavor gets stuck into your teeth for as long as it takes you to lose another round and gamble another jelly bean to replace the flavor... well, it's pretty bad.

Here's how it played out for D&H:

Hayley: Moldy Cheese, Barf, Rotten Egg, Centipede,

Derrald: Skunk Spray, Booger, Rotten Egg, Barf, Canned Dog Food, Pencil Shavings

Derrald definitely got a lot more "toothpaste" (I never got a single one) and the first person to sample the "canned dog meat" (CDM) was Mum. Brendan is the one who gave her the bean and because we'd been playing for quite a long time without ever coming across a CDM he looked at the red color and thought it was Strawberry Jam or Centipede (which we'd had quite a few of). Mum was chewing away and confusedly said "It tastes like meat". "Strawberry Jam or Centipede" we repeated to her. "But it tastes like meat!" she cried. "OH!!" Brendan looked at the box - sure enough... Mum had just chowed down on a jelly bean that tasted like canned dog meat. The smell of her breath confirmed it. Nasty.

     

Okay. I know I promised you a tale involving striped pyjamas and illegal substances but that part of the story will have to wait for next time. I would like to end with a shout out to the Kuhns for introducing us to Catch Phrase in the first place and to Jelly Belly for being so incredibly accurate with their disgusting flavored jelly beans.

Christmas Beard

We LOVE traditions. We started about a million so-called "traditions" during the year 2010, and only time will confirm whether or not they live on to be actual traditions, but I have been trying to convince Derrald that the "Christmas Beard" should be one of these traditions that live on through the ages.

It would work like this: Every year, on Thanksgiving Day, Derrald will let his beard grow in and keep on growing it until New Year's Day when he will shave it in a grand ceremony symbolic of the incoming new year and starting things fresh with a clean face... I mean, slate. This year he failed to make it to New Years... but we also failed to sit through the entire length of Handel's Messiah (another tradition we are trying to start)... so it's no biggie. I still managed to get a picture.

Think about how much those kiddies (that's right... one day, against all protests the public may wish to make, we will spawn some ninja children) are going to love it every year? And when it goes white? HULLO Santa. Santa Derrald.

It's going to be awesome.

This is what it looked like this year (drinking $4 hot chocolates from a little old hotel in the middle of Danville...)

Christmas Movies

 

So, I've been getting a lot of stick for wanting to watch cheesy hallmark Christmas movies but when your only other choices are the one's your husband has laid out for you and they include "Munich", "Sin City", "Monsters Ball" and "All the Kings Men", I'll take the hallmark. At least they are happy. Totally predictable but in a way that can be so satisfying. Your brain doesn't need to work for a second. You can just relax and enjoy the ride.  And who doesn't like laughing at other people for being silly?

Right now the debate is between:

My choice: Recipe for a perfect Christmas. 

Derrald's choice: Bill & Ted's Bogus Adventure

 

When I asked if "Bill & Ted's" was at all Christmassy, I got "Um, YEAH, have you even seen it?!?!?!"...Um, no. I haven't and I feel pretty okay with that. However, marriage is compromise and next year I will be able to say "um, YES, I've seen it, and NO, we can not watch it..ever again".... I can say this because we are watching it. Sigh.


Merry Christmas Everyone!

The story of Derrald and the Horse

I know it's Christmas and I promise I will write another post to commemorate this time in all it's merriness, but I have a story to tell that can not wait. The story of Derrald and the Horse.

First of all, I need you to watch this commercial (pay particular attention to the end):

Not only is this commercial brilliant, it was the inspiration for Derrald's first "ride" on Tiny.

Tiny is a horse. My dad's horse. He's white, kinda like the one in the commercial. Tiny is not tiny at all. Tiny is big. He looks something like this:

Tiny likes carrots. And apples. And luckily, Derrald had both. So he could win the friendship of his steedy pal. A good start. What was to happen next was relatively simple:

Mount the horse.
Smile.
Stay on the horse.

Derrald thought he could do it. So he climbed the fence. Threw his leg over the animal and enjoyed the feeling of one-horse-power.

All was going merrily (as makes sense for the season) and Derrald even decided to impress us, calling on the aforementioned commercial... "ladies, i'm the man your man could smell..." and then it happened, just a small motion really, but Derrald's backside started to slide.

He was sliding bum first off the massive animal. I wish I could say it bucked him. I wish I could say it reared up it's front legs and it was a struggle between horse and man, a fight for the life. But it wasn't. It was Tiny being a perfectly normal and Derrald's bottom being unusually heavy and slidey.

"Ladies, I'm the man your man could smell liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike".

 

Mud.

Derrald has only ridden a horse twice in his life. Both times he's fallen off. Derrald is NOT a good horse rider but he's a very good horse fall-er. And darn, if he didn't smell SO bad all the way home. We climbed in the car to get that boy to a shower and he uttered "Ladies, what you are smelling right now is me". I was going to describe it but it's Christmas. So I'll save you. Suffice to say it was BAD.

Huh-larious. Maybe next year will be the year Derrald doesn't fall off a horse? 6 days and counting...

Update from Derrald

Blog friends,

I have been absent too long from the blog. I've been in dissertation world, and I've scrambled to start getting materials together to try and get a job. Early this week I went to Miami to present (briefly) my dissertation and meet other candidates graduating this year. It was a good time but oh so much work. Hour for hour it would be easier to shovel coal in a mine that schmooze with random accounting geniuses. I had a suite in a nice hotel to myself, awesome for about an hour. I should have listened to Hayley and smuggled her in.

So, sorry that I've been missing. Poor H has had to carry the blog load for too long. Hopefully things will start coming together in the coming months and I can blog it up a bit more. And hopefully I can start cashing in some of those accounting checks to come visit you all. I want to trip it up, I'm getting very excited for the change in scenery that going to SF over Christmas will bring.

One final note. I just made silver medallion status on Delta. This meaningless distinction has made me happier than words can describe.

Love,

Derrald

We're the producers?

I came across this footage the other day and I couldn't help myself. I thought it'd be fun to share. Such foolishness. It's Lisa Vampa and myself after finding out we had secured some funding to make "Finding Marilyn". We were so excited and so happy and so... silly. Haha. Neither one of us had any idea what we were doing or what we were getting ourselves into... but we were certainly going to give it our bestest and try to have fun with it ;)

Enjoy.

Wingman

Every girl needs a wingman. You know, for those special occasions, like, when she has a film festival to go to and she needs someone to sit through 28 short films over the period of 6 hours with her. 

Derrald is the best wingman. 

As previously mentioned, my short film "Finding Marilyn" screened at the Carrboro Film Festival this past Sunday and it was so much fun. The festival itself was a huge success. There were some great films made by local artists and it was such a pleasure to get to meet some of these folks as well as watch their work.

We had a full house.

 We had Q&A with the filmmakers. That's me. Far right.

And then possibly the best part of the evening, awards time!! "Finding Marilyn" did exceptionally well for it's first festival, taking home the awards for excellence in cinematography and for best film by a professional/emerging artist. I wish that other members of our cast and crew could have been there to enjoy the day and the validation that comes with being recognized.

Making a film, even if it is only 15 minutes long, takes a lot more work than you might think. It didn't help that I decided to create a production that involved artists from all over the world... where they were still located all over the world... but from conception to finish it took two years. Many people, friends really, gave their time willingly and FREEly. It would have been impossible without them.  You know who you are, THANK YOU.