Just for fun, here’s a picture of Zoe Christmas morning, getting the present she wanted the most:

I’ve had a Harley at the top of my Christmas list for years now. Anytime someone asks me what I want for Christmas, the answer is simple: “Harley. Road King Classic. Vivid Black. Leather Tour Pak. Thanks.” This year I even started telling people that giving me a Road King for Christmas would earn them a “get out of jail free” no-gift card from me for life — they’d never have to give me another gift for the rest of their lives.

So me wanting a Road King is a Christmas tradition. But you already know that, you remember two years ago when my family actually gave me a Harley for Christmas — a Harley telephone. It’s in Zoe’s room now. She loves it. Me? Still riding the Yamaha Road Star.

Well, guess what? This year the family heard me. This time they knew I really wanted a Harley and that while the Harley telephone was funny, it wasn’t what I really wanted. So this year it’s Harley time. Literally:

Sigh…

This time last year I wrote about how Santa was on his last legs around here and posted what I said was Zoe’s last letter to him. Well, the jolly old elf is resilient as hell and we’ve gotten one more year out of him. Here’s Zoe’s note to him this year:

I’m pretty sure she’s onto him, though, and is playing along for one last year, either out of nostalgia and not wanting to grow up (let’s face it — believing in Santa is better than not) or to work us for more and better gifts. I think she knows because of the tags she put on the presents she wrapped for two of our pets tonight:

and

Notice in both cases that she’s signed them from “Santa.” This from a kid who still believes in Santa. Yeah, right.

We went over to Beth’s dad’s house tonight for our traditional Jewish Christmas celebration (lox & bagels and Christmas presents). He lives in Santa Monica overlooking the beach. Here’s a picture of Zoe on the bluff across the street from his condo with the Pacific Ocean in the background. (I know it’s pitch black — trust me, it’s there.) This is one of the perks of living in Southern California: shirtsleeves on the beach on Christmas Eve.

Oh, and just so you know: “Santa” is bringing her the I-Dog she asked for.

Beth’s excited voice rang out across the house Sunday morning: “They’re here! They’re here! Honey, they’re here!!!”

“They” were the delivery guys from Great Indoors, delivering Beth’s new washer and dryer. She’d been shopping and coveting and obsessing and thinking and talking and planning and wishing and dreaming and wanting a new washer and dryer for months, and we had finally pulled the trigger and bought them. And Sunday was D-Day: Delivery Day. She was so excited she was fairly squealing.

Of course there was a problem, though. Doesn’t there always have to be for any dream that comes true, some little bit of tarnish on the gleam of heavenly perfection? Our glitch was that they’d brought the wrong dryer. We ordered the gas model, they delivered the electric model. So back to the store with the wrong one and re-deliver the right one — today, if they are to be believed.

But Beth had been waiting for this day too long to be denied. She may not have had the new dryer, but by God she had a brand new washing machine and she was going to do laundry! (Cue snowstorms in Hell.) And so she did. This is Beth and Suki watching the magic of the new front-loading washer through the handy front-loading viewing port. Beth’s only regret is that it doesn’t have an internal light. Fortunately, she had a flashlight.

It’s a Girl and Her Dog … and Her Washing Machine.

It’s been awhile since I posted a real entry here, hasn’t it? And y’know what? I’m okay with that. Usually I start feeling guilty when I haven’t posted for awhile, I start feeling pressure to write something, to put up an entry. And I guess I am this time too, only this time it’s just to post about how I’m not posting.

But there may still be a few of you checking in to see if I talked about you post-Journalcon. So I’ll wrap that up like this: I met a lot of people that I liked, was exposed to a lot of journals I hadn’t read, I got to see people I haven’t seen in a long time, and I really don’t have anything bad to say about anyone. Yeah, even I’m disappointed at that. And I’m sorry to damn anyone else by omission, but for me the high point of the whole thing was meeting Xeney-Beth. I think she rocks. So there’s your J-con wrap-up.

As for the blog… Well, hmm… I’ll keep it going, certainly, but for right now I’m just not feeling the love for it. I’ll keep posting the View From Here series because I think it’s fun, but the writing of clever entries (or the non-clever ones that try too hard — or not hard enough) just isn’t there for me right now. And I’m okay with that. I’ll post ’em when they hit me, but I’m not going to worry about it when they don’t.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not retiring the Lunchroom. I’m just not thinking about it as much lately. Most of my creative Internets-type energy lately is going into my No Soap Radio podcast. That’s where you should go for your Chuck-fix. And as an added bonus, you’ll get a Beth-fix there, too.

And maybe that’s why the Lunchroom is taking a backseat to No Soap: because I’m doing it with Beth. As much as I love playing with new gadgetry and geeking out over new Internets technologies and listening to the sound of my own voice, I think it’s the talking with Beth that I enjoy most about doing the podcast. After ten years of marriage, we’ve gotten very comfortable with each other, to the point where we maybe take each other for granted a little, maybe spend time together by proximity but not necessarily by contact. But doing the podcast… We sit down and we talk. We spend time with each other. We make each other laugh. We’re together. I really enjoy that. It’s an unexpected bonus, but it makes doing the podcast far more fun and rewarding than the geekery of it all that I had in mind when I started.

I’m having fun talking with my wife. Who knew?

So come on over to No Soap Radio and check out this whole podcasting thing. Stick some Beth or Chuck in your ear and enjoy.

First we did journals: Stitches in Time and chuck’stake.
Then we did blogs: Diary of a SubUrban Housewife and the pie-filled lunchroom you’re currently enjoying.
Now we’ve gone podcast with No Soap Radio.

Would there be any content on the internets without us??? I think not.

Anyway, check it out. You can subscribe to the feed here, or you can find us in iTunes.

Woo.

A few entries back I talked about how I am the Computer God for my family. I am, however, a god who gets no respect.

I should preface this by saying that what I’m about to bitch about doesn’t just happen with my family. But it happened with my family this time. Hence the bitching.

Listen up, computer neophytes. When I bestow my blessed wisdom upon you, what the fuck are you thinking when you question me? When you decide you’re smarter than me? When you try to second guess me? Are you out of your tiny little pea-brained minds???

Time and time again, it happens: Someone needs help installing something or moving something or copying something or de-oopsing something or doing some dirt-basic bit of computer usage that is light years beyond their personal capabilities. And they call me for help — but never just when the problem happens, when they’re at their computer, with the error on the screen. No, they have to wait until 10:30 at night, when they’re in the car on the way to a I Don’t Know What The Fuck To Do meeting or something and they simply don’t have time to talk right now but could I tell them how to fix it in 30 seconds while they’re only half paying attention and trying to change lanes while looking for a CD in the back seat? And I do tell them in 30 seconds or less how to fix it, and they hang up, and then they call me 10 days later with the problem still unaddressed but wondering if maybe this other brill-fucking-iant idea they came up with all by themselves to fix it a different way (that won’t even come close to working and will in fact fuck things up even worse) will work.

Because, you know, maybe I — the guy they call every time they’re having computer trouble, the guy who always fixes their messes, the guy who talks them through whatever the issue is when they call when I’m having dinner, the guy they acknowledge as being the family Computer God — maybe I lost my fucking mind and went stupid and they know better than me after all. And they’re running their I-know-better-than-you idea by me, the guy they know better than, to see if they really do know better than me!!!

Un-fucking-believable. I help them and they turn around and question me. The fools are tugging on Superman’s cape. They know not what they do. Pearls before swine. Etcetera.

Sometimes I just want to smite them.

I took the family out for dinner tonight at Johnny Rockets because Zoe’s been asking to go there and she’s off to sleep-away camp for a week tomorrow and she’s a little nervous about it and so I wanted to do something nice for her on her last night at home.

Zoe finally pushed back after eating half a burger, quite a few of Beth’s fries and my onion rings, and most of a Oreo Cookies & Cream shake, saying she was stuffed. And I started lecturing her on how she had to eat everything on her plate if she wanted to grow up to be big and fat like her dear old dad and didn’t she want to grow up to be just like me, she could be bald and have a white goatee and hairy arms and fart on command and…

And that’s when Beth leaned in and interrupted me, telling Zoe, “Just ignore him.”

I tell you, I get no respect.

I don’t really have a point for this entry, I just wrote it because I can because I’m in the bathroom keeping Zoe company while she takes a shower. And let me point out that although I’m sitting on the can while blogging, I’m not taking a dump, so settle down all you nancies.

I am the Computer God for my family.

First, here at my house, I have blessed us with the miracle of wi-fi. I would have done it sooner but I didn’t need it. Now that my new job has hooked me up with a laptop with a wi-fi card, well now it’s time for the home network (another of my many blessings upon the household) to go wireless.

Secondly, there’s the tech support for sex racket I’ve got going with Beth. She sleeps with me, and in return I fix her computer when it breaks and set her up with webspace and blogging software and make sure her PC is protected from virii and spyware and generally do all things technical around here.

Thirdly, my mother calls me frequently for tech support. Her email won’t send or she can’t get online or her porn won’t download — it’s always something with her. And always it’s “Do you think it’s a virus???” So she called me the other day to announce that her computer wouldn’t boot up, that it kept getting “some kind of error about a system disk.” So I went over there to check it out (because putting eyes on my mom’s computer problem du jour is the surest way to know exactly what’s going on) and I told her to “go make it do whatever it’s doing” so I could see exactly what she and it was doing. And voila, it booted up just fine. Because I am the Computer God and her computer feared me.

Fourthly, tonight, my sister-in-law with her PC vs Mac iTunes issues. She ripped all her CDs — hundreds of them — on her Windows XP PC, which naturally ripped everything into WMA. Then she became a Mac convert and now she A) can’t play her WMA files on her Mac iTunes, and B) can’t move them from PC to Mac without burning them to CD, which takes for freakin’ ever. So I hooked her up with my old ethernet hub (now unneeded because I have blessed myself with wi-fi, as noted above) and instructions on A) how to connect the PC to the Mac so she can move the files and B) import and convert them into iTunes.

Fifthly, I help Zoe play her Nick Jr. games on her computer and set up her iTunes and download the new Gwen Stefani mp3s for her and generally make sure she’s the wiredest little kid in class.

And finally, my brother, the oddly enough not-gay musical theater composer, and his ongoing issues with converting his MIDI compositions to mp3 so he can share them with his collaborators, but his ancient 486 PC can’t handle the load and is so kludged up from his attempts to “fix” things by deleting files that are mysterious and strange to him that he’s lucky it will boot up without exploding, let alone actually run any kind of application at all. So I hooked him up with a probably-hot Dell Latitude laptop running XP Professional that I bought for $300 from some guy on Craigslist that I don’t need it now since I got a spanky Mac G4 from work. The Dell is light years ahead of the computer he’s been using and so his head might explode from the sheer excitement of A) having a computer that doesn’t take 20 minutes to start up and B) having a pristine, blank canvas of perfectly configured strange and mysterious operating system files that he can delete with blissful ignorance of what these files are actually for and what impact deleting them might have. Which means that in about ten days I’ll start getting calls from him about “Dude, I deleted this extra file I found called “command” or something like that and now I’m getting a weird error message that I can’t remember but I think it said something about “fluffy-puff marshmallows” or something and now my computer is playing everything backwards. What should I delete to fix it?”

I am the Computer God for my extended family. And fortunately for them, I am a benevolent one.

Beth is in Santa Cruz right now, at Grace’s BlogHer Brunch. The girls up there apparently logged on, checked out the mess in my last entry, and then started placing odds on whether I had cleaned it up or not. My wife, Chuck booster that she is, apparently was firmly in the “There’s no way in hell he cleaned up, he doesn’t even know how to turn on the vacuum cleaner” camp.

Bzzt! Wrong.

You can apologize at your leisure, honey. In print.