Why #5 Wants a Fake ID (a Christmas post with pictures)

CC and #1 got up early on Sunday, December 11 and drove up a mountain to a place where you can cut your own Christmas tree.

All around the Christmas tree farm are posted signs that read No pets allowed. We have all kinds of wildlife in New Jersey. This is the only place besides a zoo that I’ve ever seen a bear. Not to mention the Jersey Devil (in fact, I’ve never seen one of those in a zoo. Hey, there’s an X-Files episode about that). One might think ahead about these things and know that when going up a mountain to chainsaw down a tree, it may be a good idea to leave your pets at home.

Or not.

At the Christmas tree farm on top of the mountain, the SUV in front of CC and #1 stops at the caretaker.

Yuppies in SUV: Hey, we have our golden retriever. Is it okay if he comes with us?

Caretaker, rolling his eyes: Keep him on a short leash, look out for animals and don’t let him pee on the trees.

CC stops at the caretaker: So I brought my mountain lion. . .

They came back with a truly perfect Christmas tree and the house smells all good and piney and Christmasy. I bet you thought this was the part where I tell you about how the yuppies with the golden retriever got attacked by bears and carried off by the Jersey Devil. Yeah, that didn’t happen.

We go to work decorating.

#5 (running back from the tree to get another ornament): Hey. Can you get a job decorating Christmas Trees?

Me: You mean me, personally? Or do you mean you?

#5 (runs to tree with ornament): I mean me!

Me: When you’re older.

#5: Awwww. (runs back for another ornament) Hey.

Me: What.

#5: Can you get me a birth certificate that says I’m older so I can get a job decorating Christmas Trees?

Me: Dude. I am not getting you a fake ID so you can get a job decorating Christmas Trees.

#5 (runs to tree, places ornament, runs back for another): Well. When you put it like that, it does sound extremely illegal.

The tree looks fantastic when we’re done. And then, inexplicably, all the white lights go out. Not the colored ones. Just the four strands of white. I have to confess that troubleshooting Christmas lights is not high on my priority list. The reason for this is that I spent the past five Christmases doing exactly that. I kept all the stupid fuses and extra bulbs because I figure, hey, I’m technically an electrician and I should just fix these.

Except that they’re all made in China by little girls who are forced to work on their birthdays and don’t celebrate Christmas anyway and so they have the last laugh by making it, frankly, not that simple. So I don’t troubleshoot lights anymore. I buy new ones.

I was fully prepared to strip all the ornaments and non-working lights and reload the tree with working lights and redecorate it. But I went to four stores and nobody had any lights left. Well, no lights that I would use: seizure-inducing strobing color LED’s, gold lights on a gold cable, three five-foot strands of blue. I should have known the stores here would be cleaned out. This is suburban New Jersey and in my neighborhood, on Thanksgiving Day people replace their giant inflatable yard turkeys with giant inflatable santa-hatted penguins, and then wrap lights around their roofs, bushes, pillars, lamp posts and bomb shelter doors. All lights were gone by the time December 1 rolled around. Ah well.

I’d like to share some pictures with you.

Secaucus Junction, where I catch my train in to work, is a post unto itself. Suffice it to say for now that it is a great representation of corruption in my fair state, and one of the very unimportant results is that it has no electrical outlets. They decorate and can’t light anything up. They are afraid to pick a side in their decorating too, which is odd, because around here pretty much every town center throws up at bare minimum a Christmas tree and a Menorah. In Secaucus they have these:

Donuts? Spare tires?

Oh.

They’re so. . .~~festive~~ green. And red. And unlit. As if somehow by not lighting them, they become non-offensive. Also, they’re fake.

From one extreme to the other, here’s a house in my neighborhood.

Sorry it’s blurry, but there’s a damn lot of blinkity-blink happening here and I was trying not to look like a stalker standing on the street taking pictures. Though really, they’re asking for it.

Here’s the poor tastefully decorated house next to it:

I think you need a closer look.

If you need me, I’ll be in the bathroom, bleaching my eyeballs. Merry Christmas.

Because I’m posting from work.

One night I was putting #5 to bed and, as always, he was talking.

#5: Hey guess what.

Me: What.

#5: I know why all those great inventors weren’t very nice people to work for.

Huh. Not what I was expecting him to say. The statement begged a thousand questions but I asked only one. Well, more of a prompt than a question.

Me: Oh?

#5: Yeah, because they were so busy inventing things that they never got enough sleep.

I looked at him for a minute.

Me: Are you saying that because Daddy and I get cranky when we don’t get enough sleep?

#5: Yes.

And there you have it. This conversation came back to me recently because I’m halfway through serious-badass-Nikola Tesla’s biography by Margaret Cheney Man Out Of Time, and among all the many other mindblowing things I read, there was a bit about the AC/DC (the current, not the band) wars.

So you have your Thomas Edison, by anyone’s standard, a great inventor. He’s a proponent of Direct Current and is actively working to make it our country’s electrical standard. Then you have Tesla, kind of a whippersnapper by Edison’s standard, but a brilliant inventor except no one remembers who he is today because he was a terrible businessman and also didn’t get around to patenting most of his inventions. He saw the flaws in the DC system and developed a better, stable Alternating Current system. The war was on. Edison began a smear campaign to malign AC. Tesla couldn’t be bothered. He just kept inventing stuff and making his AC sexy.

I live in New Jersey, as did Edison. Edison, as part of his smear campaign, was paying school boys to kidnap puppies basically in my neighborhood, and then he would electrocute them with alternating current, to prove how dangerous it is. Not in secret, publicly. Because we’re both New Jersians, I believe I am not out of line when I call him a douchebag. I mean, thanks for the light dude, but. . . yeah.

I have to conclude, based on this conversation with #5 who gets his information from perhaps the same genius realm as Tesla or else bacon-and-video-game-induced trances, that Edison was seriously sleep deprived.

Hey, so Christine at Quasiagitato took one of my posts and we did a Mad Lib with it. It totally cracked me up and you should go look at it. I refrained from using “boobies” for every plural noun, even though I wanted to. Click here for her post.

Fiction Guest Post By #5.

I have a special treat today. #5 has agreed to do a guest post.

Me: I have a favor to ask you.

#5: What?

Me: Will you do a guest post on my blog?

#5: Mmm. Maybe. How much work do I have to do?

Me: Nothing. You did it already {I held up the story he had written}. You just have to say yes.

#5: Okay. Can I play on your iPad?

It’s a good story. Thrills, suspense, danger, bacon. Lots of monsters. We’re both quite proud of it.

On this day of giving thanks and counting blessings I always try to take a moment to remember maniacal and implicitly undead yet tasty breakfast meats . Enjoy!

One dark, dreary Halloween night, me Ethan, Hank, Brandon, Paton, and Chucky walked into a creepy haunted house in a cemetary with our candy. Giant black spiders were crawling everywhere. That completely explained why there was absolutely no girls there. A giant, greasy, delicious looking piece of bacon walked up and invited us in. We walked in terrified as a sharp, deadly blade shot out of the wall. I saved us all except for the bacon, because then I knew it was a trap. Grease was splurting out of the bacon.

As a prize for saving us from them, they let me eat it. I devoured the bacon. Everyone was amazed by how fast I ate it. It was terrific bacon, and the best bacon I have ever tasted. I started to wonder who made all of the bacon. We tried to run for our lives, but the huge, scary door slammed closed with a quick squeak before we had a chance to get out. We all screamed louder than we have ever screamed before.

We tried as hard as we could to open the huge, scary door. We were trapped!

We friendly tip-toed up the creepy, broken stairs. The stairs broke even more and squeaked every time we took a step. When we finally got to the top of the stairs, we tumbled straight into a trap door. We tried to jump out but it was way too high. Another problem of getting out, is there were scary bats everywhere. Then, big army ants came out and tried to kill us! The army ants ate my pants, but luckily Chucky had an extra pair incase I wet myself, which also happened. We ran trembling. We stopped at the corner. They almost killed us when a big, blood sucking vampire swooped by and flew us back out. He told us “The evil bacon is finally fighting back, and they going to eat all of you and me. After that, they are going to take over the world. They are go also going to eat me too because they called me a trader!” I asked, “who makes the bacon?” He said, “An evil devil!” The bacon heard us talk and came out and chased us. We all screamed, and ran for dear life.

We bounced trough the scary house screaming the whole entire time. A big, spooky ghost came out of the wall, but we rushed right through his stomach and he disapeared. A big, bloody zombie jumped out of a coffin. I got a hold of Eathan and was about to eat him when I noticed an ax was on the wall, and I chopped the zombie’s bloody arm off. The zombie was completely bleeding. We sadly all lost all of our candy in the spooky, deadly haunted house.

We almost got out, when we relized the evil, wanting victorious, deadly bacon was going to still take over the world and get their victory. So, we ripped out the sords and knives that we forgot about and used them agenst the bacon. We had the fight of our lives while stabbing, cutting, chopping and devouring all the bacon. The evil bacon sadly ate Paton and he was digested and never heared from again but the rest of us happily destroyed the evil and got out safe. We all had a party/funeral without a body. We all cheered for saving the world, but we were sad Paton got eaten. Luckly we were happy enough to wash the sadness away though.

The End.