Saturday Funnies (they still have those, right?)
Posted by Richard Mankhey
It’s a beautiful Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at my computer with the curtains drawn Googling the potential house mate interviewees that are coming by today to check out the soon-to-be-vacant room. Why are the curtains closed, you asked? To add to the sinister atmosphere of my Google-abetted privacy invasion, naturally
But that got boring, so I threw open the sash and visited my favorite websites looking for some humor and wanted to share a couple of my favorites:
From: icanhascheezburger.com
How flippin’ cute is this? I think the one on the far right is wise to the shenanigans of dressing cats up like Mexican food.
From: nataliedee.com
This is HILARIOUS because I was JUST listening to “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” on NPR and Paula Poundstone was on and was asked a question from the recent news involved some animal wearing clothes and she said (jokingly) Hamsters! Ha!
From: toothpastefordinner.com
I LOVE this guy (Drew, author of ‘Toothpaste For Dinner”)! Could he get any funnier?
Meditation, yoga, Magic Grow Ancient Dinosaurs…and other methods of relaxation
Posted by Richard Mankhey
In these times when technology has the ability to make our lives easier yet simultaneously give us more time in which to do things and thus surpass anyone’s threshhold of sanity, the importance of relaxation, unwinding, and ‘unplugging’ cannot be stressed enough.
If you’re like me, however, you rarely get around to thinking about, let alone doing something that sounds so antithetical to the breakneck pace that has become your life. That isn’t to say I’m super-amazingly busy or anything, because I’m really not; I just feel hardpressed to find a place to fit something so foreign into my schedule.
There are countless ways to take as a step back from the world and find a place (for both your body and your mind) to be alone with yourself. Some methods are active, some passive, but all of them have the goal of reconnecting your mind and body and strengthening them against the strains of living be they physical, mental, psychic or otherwise.
I have tried all sorts of techniques and find some like yoga and controlled breathing to be quite effective, but sometimes I can’t get in the right state to make it a valuable exercise. So I do not underestimate the power of acting like a child to refresh and reboot my adult self. Some of my favorite ‘children’s activities’ include:
- Coloring Books (who doesn’t LOVE the smell of crayons?)
- Scultping, kneading, eating Play-Doh (this stuff smells pretty good, too)
- Reading a children’s book (one of my favorite’s is Benjamin & Tulip by Rosemary Wells)
- Playing a board game like “Candy Land” or “Life” but NOT “Chutes and Ladders“, thank you very much. I have killed all those who beat me at that game.
- Reading Calvin & Hobbes or Garfield comics
Thanks to an impulse buy while doing my grocery shopping at Giant Grocery tonight, I reconnected with another childhood favorite I’d not seen in a long time. MAGIC GROW ANCIENT DINOSAURS!
I don’t know about you, but I love these things. For some reason, a gelatin capsule stuffed with a tiny replica of a dinosaur that takes FOREVER to emerge when plopped into a glass of hot water is just fascinating. So I picked up a pack tonight and regressed with my housemate Annie.
The wait begins. (make sure it’s dang HOT water too, or you’ll be waiting for MONTHS for it to open)
Fast forward about 30 minutes to something resembling a fetus.
Ta da! I have unleased an Iguanadon on an unsuspecting world!
It was a cathartic 30 minutes or so of pure fun, tainted only a little when I recall a prominent childhood memory associated with these dino-capsules. I loved them SO much as a kid that I decided to shoplift them from Rightway Grocery store when with my mom on a shopping trip. I think I was about 3 or 4 years old. Please note that this was my first shoplifting experience and one of the three times I’ve actually been caught doing it.
But I didn’t get caught by Hometown Grocery Store security. No. My mom found me after having tossed the whole lot into the barn cat’s watering dish and saw through my story about them having appeared out of nowhere (well the package DOES say they’re MAGIC). So she marched me back to town (drove, actually) and forced me to confess my theivery. Which I did.
So the purchase of these Dino-capsules proves that I am officially over the trauma of that entire experience. Now I can work on my crippling fear of tornadoes. Wish me luck!