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[idiottantrum-blog]

RV's Are The Fu$*ing Worst.

I was having some trouble deciding how I was going to start this post; a bit of writers block if you will. The introduction for a post really sets the tone for how the rest of it will read, you know? I tried a couple of different variations on opening paragraphs and ended up scrapping them as they just didn’t really capture the essence, the feel of what I’m going for. It got to the point where I even considered starting this post the same way a class president begins his graduation speech, before waxing poetic about the monumental accomplishment of passing 12th grade without getting pregnant or maid of honor opens her toast, before proceeding to ugly crying through a story about the summer she and the bride spent discovering themselves in Spain; by quoting Merriam Webster’s Dictionary.

Yes. I know. I’m the worst.

However, as I wallowed in a puddle of my own self loathing whilst typing ‘Recreational Vehicle’ into the search bar at the top of merriam-webster.com and considered throwing myself into a reservoir, I was saved at the last moment. I was saved, not because Messrs. George and Charles Merriam and Noah Webster had anything particularly enlightening to provide on the matter; they define recreational vehicle simply as “a vehicle designed for recreational use (as in camping)”, which is exactly as boring and shitty as expected.

No, the gem proffered up by merriam-webster.com came not in the form of their definition, but from the ‘Recent Examples on the Web’ section by way of this headline:

There it is. That’s what I was struggling to capture in my introductory paragraphs. The thing that exactly captures the true essence of RVs and sets the proper tone that I want this post to follow; A news article from Texas about a drug felon stabbing a police dog in the face.

If you were somehow unclear on my feelings about RV’s up to this point we aught to be on the same page by now.

But just to be really, totally sure I’ve been clear enough: RV’s are stupid and suck, there is literally no reason you should ever consider taking a trip in one. If you are thinking about renting an RV to take a road trip in. Don’t. You would be much better served doing an activity that has at least an outside possibility of a positive or enjoyable outcome; such as performing unnecessary abdominal surgery on yourself with dirty kitchen utensils.

I didn’t have a benevolent and wise blog writer to warn me before I made the mistake of taking an RV trip, but you do. Listen to my tale and live a fulfilled remainder of your life not going in an RV.

My tale begins in the long ago year of 2018. A simpler time. A time of innocent wonder and unspoiled joy. My wife and I decided we- actually hold on.

This is bothering me so lets sort something out here; I went back and read that article. The police dog that the drug lady stabbed is fine. Turns out the stabbing was done with some sort of a plastic handled eyebrow trimmer. Officer McBarker (my name for him, not theirs) was treated for minor injuries and returned to duty the following day. Frankly I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate for the rest of this story without knowing if the dog was alright.

Right, now that we’ve covered that, back to my story.

For our summer vacation in 2018, my wife was fretting a lot about spending too much money on a trip plus having to make arrangements for our dogs while we were away. My cousin who lives in Florida was going to be getting married in July, so we figured we would combine our vacation with that. Originally we were looking at Universal Studios in Orlando, since they’ve got that Harry Potter world and f*#k you if you don’t think waving wands at stuff and going to Diagon Alley the best way to spend your week off if you are a 30 year old man. Because of the aforementioned cost and dog separation anxiety however, we were getting nowhere fast with making any firm plans.

That is, until I had the idea that will haunt me to my grave. Fresh off our previous year’s camping extravaganza which you can read about in I Pooped in the Woods, I thought perhaps we could do something new and different for our vacation this year. It is at this point that I would really have appreciated the sage advice of some a#@hole on the internet to tell me and my ideas to f*#k right off. I didn’t get that though, which is why I proposed the idea of renting an RV and road tripping it down the east coast and back for our vacation.

It’ll be more inexpensive than dealing with airfare, hotels, resorts and boarding the dogs I thought. It’ll be a cool opportunity to see some of the country I thought. It won’t be the living embodiment of my worst nightmare set to the score of five hundred podcasts in a row, all while a tiny horned devil stabs me over and over again in the bank account, I thought.

As clearly neither of us is a sane person who can recognize a sh*t-turd of an idea when it’s dancing in front of us in an unbuttoned trench coat with it’s shriveled d*ck waving in the breeze, my wife was all about the RV idea.

We found a site that works kind of like Air BnB for Recreational vehicles in that people that own them can rent them out to vacationers. You pay a security deposit, then you pay a cost per-night to rent the RV and take it around camping and whatnot. Seemed simple enough, and most of the ones available were pet friendly, which meant we could take the dogs with us no problem.

Enter the harbinger of my doom. The 2009 Coachman Prism.

This is the RV we ended up renting from a private owner, lets call him Charles. We’ll call him that because that’s his name. Things started out innocuously enough, all of the preliminary things you might expect went without incident. We had a meetup with Charles to do a walkthrough of the RV so we’d know how everything worked and so he could explain the various ins-and outs of our rental agreement with us. Nothing out of the orinary: (x) amount of miles per rental day are included and anything over that is a few cents per mile, bring it back clean, bring it back with the sewage and grey water tanks empty to avoid extra fees, you have comprehensive insurance through the rental agreement and complimentary roadside assistance, so on and so forth.

Before the appointed trip we plotted a course that looked roughly like this, booking stays in RV campgrounds down the East Coast:

We rented the RV near our home, but we would start the actual road-trip out in York PA after attending a wedding we had out that way on the front end of the vacation. Two weddings, one on either end of our vacation? Yep. we’re at that annoying age where everyone we f&ing know is getting married and for some reason expects anyone else to give a sh!t about it.

(If you are one of the people who’s wedding I attended at some point in the recent past I of course don’t mean you. Your wedding was magical and unique and is the exception to the rule. It wasn’t a huge inconvenient chore and I didn’t hate every second of having to shout over the f*#^ing music in order to make small talk with a table full of strangers for three hours. Your wedding was a treasure.)

Our first official stop was Shenandoah National Forest, then we would make our way south visiting Virginia Beach, followed by a place in the middle of some insignificant woods in a town called Moncure North Carolina because it split the travel time up on the way to the next stop and North Carolina contains nothing of value to society. Charleston South Carolina, Savannah Georgia, Another State Park near the Georgia/Florida border, and then the gulf coast of Florida for the wedding to finish the trip south and a straight shot back home to round out the vacation.

Guess where we made it to on that blue trip outline before things turned to sh*t?

The first day of our trip just happened to be the hottest day of the summer and apparently in all of recorded spacetime history because it was 110 degrees outside from about 9:30 am on.

By the time we pulled in to our campsite around 4:30 in the afternoon we had been out of range of any cell service for at least 40 minutes and it was so hot we were concerned there was a real possibility of the dogs getting heat stroke. We plugged in, hooked up and connected all of the do-dads for the RV and tried to get the AC going to cool it off. After about an hour of the AC running full tilt the inside of the RV had gotten down to about a cool and comfortable 185 degrees Fahrenheit which led us to become become convinced that in our infinite stupidity we must have been doing something wrong that the vehicle wouldn’t cool down. Since it was just as hot outside as it was in the vehicle, our concern for the dogs continued to grow until we packed all the sh!t back into the RV and drove towards civilization until we could get cell reception to call Charles to figure out what we were doing wrong.

Charles’ response was to comfort us with the fact that “it’s just like that” and to get the RV to cool down all you have to do is wait for it to not be so hot outside. Well f*#$ing thanks, Charles. Glad we' drove an additional hour and a half for the sage advice that we should just stew in our own taint sweat until the sun goes away so it won’t be quite so hot.

Maybe my expectations for the level of comfort in an RV were not set appropriately, and that’s on me. Maybe I was expecting to hang out in a comfy 71 degrees indoors even if it was roughly the same temperature as the sun’s surface outside and that was unreasonable; but the casual nature with which Charles informed me that if it was hot outside it was just going to be sh!tty and hot in the RV when my wife was fretting over a pair of dogs so overheated they looked like partly deflated beach balls sort of pisses me off.

By the time we got finished with traveling, setting up and then disassembling the RV, driving back to cell service and turning around to go back to the campground we had exactly enough time to cook dinner in the fire pit and turn in for the night. In other words, day one of the RV road trip and things were shaping up to be a real party.

We had just enough time the following morning explore the campground and take a roughly 30 minute hike along the river. The campsite was nice, if sunburnt older folks with their shirts off, unleashed dogs and combination clothesline/satellite-dish/barbecue grill with underpants hanging all over them is your aesthetic. We lasted that 30 minutes before the heat and approximately 1,294,234,121,853,000.2 bug bites from mosquitoes forced us to pack it up and head on to the the next campsite.

On day two we traveled to our second stop, a state park near Virginia Beach. Upon arrival at the campground while I was going to check in to our spot at the ranger station, another couple of RVers checking in informed me the muffler on our vehicle was hanging kind of low. After we parked I called Charles and sent him a picture of the muffler and he confirmed that it didn’t look right and that I should call the roadside assistance that comes with our rental.

It was at this point I discovered that what they mean in all the information they give you about your “total coverage” and “free roadside assistance” is that you are totally covered and completely free to call their hotline and have a lovely conversation with someone about your broken down RV. If you want someone to actually f*#@ing DO something about it you are responsible for covering that out of pocket.

After about an hour on the phone convincing the people that, no, I could not make a service appointment at a local garage and bring it in to look at because I was on vacation in a rented RV and was supposed to be travelling five hours to North Carolina the following morning they agreed to send a service truck out to deal with the issue. We made an appointment for 10 A.M the the next day for them to come out since we were scheduled to be out of the campsite by 11 sharp and on our way.

At 11:30 the next day the service person called me to tell me they were fifteen minutes away. I told them I’d meet them in the parking lot outside the visitors center since we needed to vacate our campsite. This was when we started the RV up and one of the tire pressure gauges informed us one of our tires was mostly flat… F*#k. At least we already had a service truck on the way.

One hour and 80 dollars later we pulled out of that parking lot with both issues solved. Sort of.

First, apparently the muffler had been replaced fairly recently, but not done properly. Basically, it was suspended from the bottom of the vehicle by nothing more than a metal peg, rubber grommet and wishful thinking. the peg didn’t even fit all the way into the rubber grommet anyway so it was double sh*t. Here is a diagram:

Since he couldn’t actually do anything to properly fix a muffler installed by an incompetent donkey while in the parking lot of a campground, he just took a bunch of mechanic’s wire and strapped it on there to keep it in place for the duration of our trip.

As for the tire, he was pretty sure it was probably not punctured anywhere. He pointed out to me that there is a cover called a wheel simulator that goes over where the lug nuts are on the wheel. Its just a hubcap looking thing that protects the wheel. The one on the tire that was low on air was missing. This, he said, allowed the stem valve to wobble a bit and the cap to come loose, letting air out of the tire. He put air in it and sent us on our way.

Remember the bit here about this mechanic telling me that the wheel simulator was missing. Remember it forever. Burn it into your memory so that when you close your eyes and lay down to sleep tonight the last thought you have before drifting into the sweet embrace of unconsciousness is that in the summer of 2018 in the parking lot of a national park near Virginia Beach a mechanic pointed out that the cover was missing from one of the wheels of the RV that I rented from a man named Charles.

Here’s that map again, just so we’re all on the same page about the progress we’ve made on our adventure so far:

Any wild guesses as to how far we made it before we had problems again?

Go on, guess. I’ll wait.

By the time we got to our next campsite and gave the tires a chance to cool down, the tire pressure had dropped by about 10 lb from where it had been that morning after the mechanic inflated it.

So now we’ve confirmed for sure there is for sure something wrong with one of the tires and I’ve got to start the process over of making the 100% Free™ phone call for our comprehensive coverage roadside assistance team so that they can do us the huge favor of calling a local mechanic for us who we are then responsible for paying to fix someone else’s RV. I don’t know what portion of the fee that this RV rental site takes goes towards paying the salary of a person who’s job is to type “roadside mechanic” followed by a zip code into google maps; but it’s too f*@#ing much, I can tell you that.

Oh, and did I mention that on this, our second breakdown in two days, by the time we got through the process of getting roadside assistance it was 9 pm on July goddamn 3rd? Because by the time we got through the process of getting roadside assistance it was 9pm on July goddamn 3rd.

A mechanic got there at about 10:30 and determined that the stem valve for that tire was old and dry rotted, causing it to crack which was letting air out of the tire.

He then proceeded to fire up an air compressor that was roughly the same decibel volume as a medium sized aircraft taking off and use the worlds loudest pneumatic impact drill to remove our tire, take everything apart, install a new stem valve and replace everything over the course of about an hour during which time apparently every other resident of the RV park called management to complain that someone was doing their best impression of constructing a fly by night carnival in the dark.

Despite the fact that the entire process disturbed an entire campground of people by being so loud that we had to peel out of there at 6 am the next morning rather than face any of the other residents, that mechanic deserves a f@&ing medal for coming out that late on the eve of the Holiday, being super cool and then proceeding to charge me $35 for the whole thing. 30 bucks for the trip out, 5 bucks for the valve he replaced. In addition to his fee, I gave him a 6 pack of beer because I couldn’t risk giving him any more actual cash in case I needed it to keep paying mechanics for fixing this six wheeled recreational sh$t wagon.

I did some extensive googleing to weight the pros and cons of a few options we had at this point. It turned out to be too cost ineffective to just turn around and drive home, then buy a plane ticket to fly to my cousin’s wedding. The other option was to put a brick on the accelerator and drive the RV into a ravine. I figured it would at least be cathartic to see how well the comprehensive full total insurance policy that came with our rental handled the RV being destroyed and in a ravine. It seemed risky though; the available data suggested they would likely just call a place that sells RVs and offer to give them my credit card and social security number to help me out in purchasing the replacement.

It seemed the only option was forward.

The next four days passed without incident, and I mean that in both the sense that the f*#@ing RV at least didn’t break down again for those four days, but also in the sense that as it turns out an RV road trip just consists of Driving an RV for several hours a day and then being in a place with nothing to do except be in an RV for the rest of them

We made it to Florida and attended my cousin’s wedding, spending one night in a a pet friendly hotel since we couldn’t leave the dogs in the RV while we were at the event. It was, perhaps the single bright spot amidst the otherwise desolate hellscape of sh*t that was the rest of the trip.

Our return trip was to be a single shot straight up the coast and back home, with the option of breaking somewhere for the night if we determined it was too much to do all together. It should have taken us 17 hours to make the trip. It took 25.

Apparently when you’re in a turd bus that gets 12 miles to the gallon and have to fill up every fifteen minutes you don’t make great time.

By about hour 16 it was one in the morning and we were somewhere in one of the Carolinas. I had sent Emily to bed, insisting I would settle in for the long haul through the better part of the night. Fueled by rage, energy drinks and downloaded podcast episodes I was plugging my way north when a car comes speeding up behind us, pulls up alongside me and starts flashing their lights and honking.

Guess what didn’t hold up until we made it home? If your guess was THE F*$#ING MUFFLER AGAIN, YOU WIN!

I was not waiting at one in the morning on the side of a highway for someone to come a deal with this godforsaken disappointment on wheels one more time. I drove that f*$#ing RV five miles an hour in the shoulder for 1/4 of a mile to the nearest exit dragging the muffler on the ground until I could get into the parking lot of a closed down gas station where I proceeded to crawl around under the RV on my back and reattach the stupid mechanics wire to get the muffler back in place. I then drove in silence through the night and into the day for another nine hours listening for the sound of a muffler falling off and hitting the ground.

By that point, If I had seen even a slightly steep wash out on the side of the road that had aspirations of being ravine-like I’d have driven that b#tch right into it and ended it all. I did not though, so we arrived back at our house at about 10:30 the day after we left un-ravined.

One would have thought that the endless nightmare of the RV trip would be over once we finally got it home. Not so. We had to bring the vehicle back to Charles to fill out all the paperwork and do an inspection.

Charles, who not only did not show the slightest sign of empathy, or acknowledgement that he rented us an RV with bits literally falling off it. Charles, who agreed to deduct the costs of the roadside repairs I had to make to his improperly maintained vehicle from our bill as if he were doing us a huge favor. Charles, who hit us with every additional fee possible, several of which were incurred exclusively because we had to alter our itinerary because of the breakdowns.

Charles. Charles, who walked around to the tire that I’d had to have looked at twice and replaced at 11 at night on July 3rd and asked what happened to the wheel simulator and then insisted one of the mechanics had removed it and forgotten to put it back on and I had not corrected this mistake. The stupid cap that the first guy had specifically told me was missing. The cap that was pretty clearly missing in a picture we took of that side of the vehicle before the trip. The cap that will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my natural life. That cap. He held our security deposit and then billed us $200 for a new one.

So yea. Charles.

At this point, you might be saying to yourself “We’ll, alright. You rented an RV that turned out to have a bunch of problems. Thats not indicative of the RV experience in general.”

Fair point, reader. Here are the other highlights of our RV trip with the breakdowns excluded:

Stopping for gas every 2 hours

Not being able to use any of the appliances because they trip the breakers in the RV.

Eating 80% uncooked potatoes for diner because you spent one of the nights in a place that doesn’t allow fires and as previously mentioned, the electrical system can’t run any of the appliances.

Hitting your elbows 400 times a day when trying to shower in a coffin with the water pressure of a dehydrated pervert trying to spit on you.

Sweating even while indoors.

Silence because your wife is asleep, since being unconscious is better than the living hell that is driving this f*@#ing RV and you can’t both sleep, so at least someone should get some reprieve from the suffering.

Camping, except shitty because instead of actually camping your in shitty RV surrounded by 400 other people who are either late middle aged couples with an aversion to shirts and a love of turquoise jewlery and not showering or families with twelve children under the age of 6 forcing you to question whether or not its biologically possible for a woman to have two euteri.

Road-tripping except shitty because your driving a bus sized living room that runs on diesel and tops out at about 60 and instead of something cool your destination is an RV park.

Touching a literal sh*t tube every day or so so that you can insert it into a hole in the ground that 1,235,243,676 other people’s sh*t tubes have touched since the last time anything resembling sanitation was conducted.

Sleeping on a pull out bed so bad it’t literally convex at a 45 degree angle in the center

Being ten feet from a toilet which is little more than a plastic covering over an open pipe to a sewage tank that you can smell from anywhere in the vehicle at any point in time.

Campfires

Even if the RV hadn’t broken down a bunch of times on us. An RV is nothing more than a combination of camping and staying in a hotel where you make a big pro and con list of both things, throw out all the pros, mash all the cons together and then take a sh*tty trip where everything is a worse version of the regular version.

Camp or don’t. There is no acceptable inbetween and anyone who tells you differently is wrong and should feel bad about their dumb incorrect opinion.

If you were ever considering taking an RV trip, you’ve now been adequately educated. You’re Welcome.

P.S

Charles came after us for a 4 dollar toll that apparently the EZ pass had missed about a month after we had settled all of our bills. And then just charged our credit card without waiting for me to respond to his message about the toll.

That’s how I found out from the review section of his rental page that a person who had rented the RV the weekend after us posted a low star review and commented, warning people to take pictures of everything on the outside of the vehicle before their rental, and wishing they had thought to do so.

Now, I’m not saying that’s proof that Charles knew full well about that wheel cover and is scamming people, who don’t notice it’s missing ahead of time and keeping party of their security deposit. But he’s definitely doing that and I hope someone drives his RV into a Ravine.

[idiottantrum-blog]

Gaming Table Build Guide

For the past year and a half, once a week I have a bunch of friends over to my house for a weekly game night where we all get together and play Dungeons and Dragons. Because we're fucking cool. Our group us fairly large, at least in terms of a typical number of players for a D&D campaign, with seven players and myself as the dungeon master (I know, I know, hes a dungeon master for a weekly D&D game? Tame the pitter-patter of your fluttering hearts and calm the rush of blood to your nethers, I'm taken). With such a large group, we need quite a bit of space, which for the past 18 months has meant my dining room table.

While everyone does fit around this table, it gets a little elbowy with all seven people with all of their books and notes and stuff taking up positions around the table. That's before you even account for me with all of my DM shit taking up a chunk of surface area. While that's mostly bearable, the main thing is that between my source books, miniatures, campaign binders, props (yes I have props, I run an immersive game, fuck you), and other assorted things; when the table is not being used for gaming I have to move approximately 180,000,000 lbs of shit out of there if I want to use the room for anything else.

I decided that it was for the best if I actually set up a space to be a designated game room. We've got a room downstairs in our house where we've been steadily moving all of our hand-me-down/thrift store furniture as we replace it with newer, less decrepit things to the point where it's become this weird hybrid room with a junky dining room set, a couch and chair from 1992 and a terrible rug. Also I accidentally painted it basketball orange so. . .

If we got rid of the garbage furniture, repainted the walls and furnished it with stuff that made some semblance of sense, we could have a really nice game room/place to entertain. The centerpiece and focal point of this room, would of course be the gaming table.

I had an idea what I wanted, which was a fairly simple table, preferably kind of rustic/taverny looking that had removable table top slats to reveal a gaming pit underneath so that the piece could do double duty as a normal table when not in use for D&D. With my general vision in mind I did some shopping around online, finding that unless I wanted to spend upwards of $1,000 dollars I was out of luck. On top of that, the options I found that were remotely reasonable in cost were not what I was looking for aesthetically speaking.

Now, I won't name any companies specifically, but I'll just say that if i'm going to get a gaming table that is to be considered in any way ultimate, it's sure as shit not going to be some Ikea looking piece of crap. If I'm going to have a shit gaming table, I'll spend 200 bucks and make it my goddamned self.

The following the process of building my custom gaming table, with notes and descriptions of what I did, in case anyone reading is interested in building one for themselves:

The first thing I did was search around on the internet for plans for a gaming table build. Like I said, I had a general idea that I needed a fairly large, rectangular table with a gaming pit set down into the surface and panels of some sort that could be put in and taken out to convert it to a regular table when not in use, no break down of my game setup required.

I found a set of plans that seemed fairly popular for people doing home builds of tables, which I will link to at the end so you can use that as an additional resource if you are trying to recreate this build. The only issues I had with the plans and walkthrough video that the original creator out together was that they were a little vague about certain details, missing measurements in some places and the table he was building was only 4X4, and had a monitor mounted in it. Needing a larger table and not really being a digital map/computer screen kind of DM, some modifications would need to be made, along with a fair bit of just fucking winging it. I never claimed to be a competent carpenter, I think it's important that you remember that.

I went through his plans, watched his walkthrough a couple of times while taking notes, and assembled my materials list based on what I thought I'd need to build his same style table at the dimensions I wanted. Here is what I came up with:

(2x) 1"x8"x8'*

(2x) 1"x6"x6'*

(4x) 1"x4"x6'*

(3x) 3/4"x3/4"x6' quarter round

(4x) 1"x4"x4'

(10x) 2"x4"x8'

(5x) 1"x8"x6*

4'x6'x3/4" plywood

*try to get the higher quality, smoother, straighter cuts of lumber for these items as they are the parts of the table that will be visible, and it's important that they not be warped. It will save you a lot of effort sanding and prepping as well if some of that is done for you.

My additional materials list included these items:

Wood glue (large)

Wood filler (stainable)

(8x) 2 1/2" lag bolts

1 5/8" screws

2 1/2" screws

finish nails

120 and 220 grit sandpaper

wood stain (color of choice)

wood pre-stain

Spar-Urethane (1g)

I got all my materials and set everything up in the garage. I had an old desk in there that I used to place the plywood on while building the table, but if you have a couple of sawhorses or some other flat surface to work on, whatever will do.

The first thing I needed to decide was exactly what size the table should be. Based on the size of the room I wanted to put it in, and the number of people I needed to comfortably sit around it, I settled on having the play area be 3'x6' with the total dimensions of the table being closer to 4'X7' with the added length and width of the area around the gaming pit that would have cup holders and dice trays set into it

I cut my plywood down to 3X5 with s circular saw. which is the size it is in the picture above.

The basic plan from this point was to build a framework on the underside to make sure the table was nice and sturdy, and then build up and out off the edges of the plywood on the top to create a raised frame around the center.

Next the framing/support for the bottom using 2x4's. In the original design, there was a cutout and mount for a monitor smack in the center of the plywood there, but I wasn't planning on doing that so I added a third support right in the middle to make sure it was nice and sturdy.

The two sides of this 'ladder' looking thing are the exact same length as the plywood, while the horizontal supports are 24 inches and spaced evenly, using the center one at the exact middle of the table as a reference.

WIth everything centered lengthwise and widthwise, I took a pencil and marked the outlines where the supports were and removed them.

I took my drill and pre-drilled holes where the supports would be attached to the plywood. I always try to pre-drill, as it reduces the risk of splitting the wood, or stripping a screw half way in. Especially since I was going to be using 2 1/2" screws for this part the last thing I wanted to do was spend twenty goddamn minutes unscrewing a stripped screw from the board with a pair of pliers.

2 1/2" screws securely drilled in from below, using my pre-drilled holes as a guide, I flipped the table over to get to work on the top portion.

The next step here would be to put on the first piece of framing, what would essentially create the border around the play area (plywood surface).

The original plans recommended a 2 1/2 inch lip above the play area so that there would be enough room to place a tabletop over it without having to remove miniatures and stuff, so I marked 2 1/2 inches on the 1X4's that are used for this part. 

This took some figuring as it was poorly marked on the original plans I had, and the walkthrough video didn't cover it, but this framing is done by cutting the two pieces on the long sides of the table so they extend past the end of the table, while the pieces on the short sides sit inside.

You apply a bead of wood glue, line up your 2 1/2" mark with the top edge of the plywood, and secure it with finish nails to hold it in place. You then go back though with 1 5/8" screws and secure it firmly to the plywood.

It looks like this when it's done:

The thing that tripped me up was figuring out exactly how far out the two side pieces needed to stick. What I ended up doing was attaching the two short pieces to the plywood first, since I knew they were exactly the width of the plywood. I then set it on the ground and laid pieces out to mock everything up so I could measure. Essentially, what you are starting here is the framework that the top piece with the cupholders and stuff sits on, the short piece that was just secured being flush with the 1x6 that creates that top.

Long story short if you use the inside corner of the short 1x4 (corner of the plywood) as your starting point, the long board needs to stick out 5" off the end of the table, so that when another 1x4 is later attached flat with the protruding pieces it creates a frame that is 5 1/2 inches wide to fit flush with the 1x6 top piece. (Actual measurement for a 1x6 is really 5 1/2 inches wide, probably for some mathematical reason that makes sense, but I don't understand, so I'm just going with because wood is stupid)

If that was confusing, sorry. It confused the shit out of me while I was building the thing, and STILL confused the shit out of my trying to re-explain it after I've already done it. Hopefully the pictures going forward will help you understand how it all goes together.

The next thing to do is cut out all these little nubbin boys here. They are made by taking 2X4's, cutting them once to make 5' pieces, and then cutting those lengthwise to shave off about and inch.

These are going to be the braces that go all around the frame we have put up and become supports to make the outer area nice and strong, since that's where people will be leaning. I made 12 of them, and arranged them like this:

The long sides got four each, while the short sides got two. You can kind of see now how those long pieces create two additional supports on the corners. I probably messed this up a little bit with my placement on the long sides with these. I probably should have spaced them out more so that the corners had a support down right at the end just like the short sides do. It all went together fine and seems sturdy, so I guess it's not that big a deal.

To secure these, i put wood glue on the end, pressed it to the 1x4 with the bottoms of both pieces flush with one another then hammered a finish nail in from the inside of the frame to hold it in place and followed it up with a 1 5/8" screw.

This is where stuff started to get a little tricky for me in particular as I didn't have a nice table mounted miter saw for making 45 degree cuts. I was working pretty much exclusively freehand. My hand circular saw did angle to make a 45, but I pretty much had to rely on a steady hand to make it even.

In other words I was fucked at this point.

Using the long pieces of the interior part of the framework as a guide (the shorter edge of the angled cut lined up with the end of the other piece of wood) I made the two of those with the 1x4s and attached them so that I could set my shorter pieces on top and mark where to make my cuts.

I attached these at this point, but you SHOULD NOT. The next step I outline, should be done before you put these pieces in place. It will make your life much easier.

Here it is assembled. The angled pieces get slapped onto the outside of the framework we've created out of our long inner boards and 2x4 nubbies. Two finish nails go into the board at the site of each support with wood glue to seal it all. I also put two nails in each corner to help pull them more flush. Like I said I was freehanding that shit, so it didn't come out as perfect as I'd have liked.

Next I put in the quarter round pieces that will serve as a lip for the tabletop to rest on when covering the gaming area.  Like I said, I should have done this before attaching the 1x4 to the outside of the frame because it was a nightmare to attach these. I couldn't get a hammer at a correct angle or with enough force to drive finish nails in, so I ended up having to pre-drill holes with my drill, and then hand screw in 1 5/8' screws doing my best not to punch out of the rounded side if I went to far.

The next step was to cut the 1x6's at 45 degree angles across the width to create the top of our outer border. Again, here a mounted miter saw with a swivel would have been nice, but I did it freehand by making a 45 degree angle line in pencil and following it as steadily as possible.

Here it is with three of the four places in place. You can finally tell what the finished thing is going to look like here. with the raised area for players to lean, write and place their drinks on, and the lower portion down below for miniatures and maps.

You can also see here I started tracing my cutouts for cupholders. 

It was around this time that I changed my mind on putting dice trays in, as I felt they would take too much of the surface area away and leave players feeling a little cramped. With such a large interior play area it would be easy enough to roll in there.

I traced the rim of the cupholders so that I'd be able to cut out the hole with a jig saw slightly smaller. The hole didn't need to be particularly pretty, just wide enough that the cup holder could slip in there and rest on the lip.

The cupholders I got off Amazon, they are the same ones the guy used for his original design. A link to them is in the description of the youtube video I'll put at the end.

Here it is all assembled. I attached the tops of the arm rest portion by putting a bead of glue all the way around the 1x4 frame that I created and setting the piece down before securing it with finish nails. I went in after that with wood filler and patched over my nail holes as well as the seams at the corners where my aformentioned lack of proper tools and general shittiness at carpentry had left it looking slopy.

Next I made the legs.

These were pretty simple 2x4 legs. Each one is made by cutting lengths of 2x4s and screwing them together. One piece is longer, and gets cut to whatever the height you want your table to be is. I went a little higher than the original plans, but you could easily go higher still if you wanted a bartop height gaming table. Whatever you cut the longer piece at, you gut the other part of the leg 3 1/2 inches shorter so that it can slot right up against the ladder shaped frame that was done in the beginning.

Rinse and repeat until you've got four identical table legs, then pre-drill and secure the two halves of the legs to each other. I used three 2 1/2" screws for each leg. 

I wouldn't recommend attaching the legs to the table yet, as it will be a lot easier to attach the bottom shelf to them after you make it and then put the thing together in it's final home at the very end.

Next I created the slats to sit inside the lip of the table and create a smooth surface for when it wasn't in use for gaming. I had originally intended to make them horizontal but a friend suggested they would look better as long vertical planks instead. Due to the fact that he was right and also doing long vertical planks meant less cutting I decided to go with that. Whoever said laziness and aesthetic appeal didn't go hand in hand?

To get the 1x8's to fit properly I did still have some cutting to do though, so first I cut them all down to 6ft so they would fit lengthwise. The math wizards in the group might be saying "Hey, isn't that opening 36 inches wide? 8inch planks aren't going to divide evenly into that amount of space".

The math wizards are correct. Five 8' planks, which we all know are really 7.5 inches across because wood is stupid, to fit into the 36inch opening I left four of them alone and cut the fifth piece down to six inches wide using a table saw and set this in as the middle piece.

It's hard to see here, but I cut a hole in the center of that thinner piece so that it could hooked with a finger and lifted out of the center when you were trying to take the cover off.

At this point I wanted a change of pace from measuring, cutting and building, so I decided to leave the bottom shelf for later, and go on to sand stain and finish the parts I had already built.

I used the 120 grit sandpaper to smooth down any rough patches and then switch to the 220 to give everything a once over to get it as smooth as possible, I have an orbital sander, but after doing all of the cutting freehand I had some stupid idea that Id forsake the power tool and sand it all by hand. I do not recommend this it was tiring and took forever.

I used a lighter colored stain, with just a hint of amber tint to it, because I was going for a rustic, well worn tavern table look to go with the D&D concept of the table. It took two coats of stain to get the color the way I liked it.

For the finish I used the Spar-urethane because I did some research, and short of actually building a framework around the table pieces and doing a resin pour, that was the best finish to give that thick glassy bartop look I wanted. 

The urethane took three coats to get it nice and solid. I had some trouble with the slats after the urethane went down as the layer added just enough extra size and friction to make them not want to fit. I had to further shave down the center plank little by little until it fit in.

Once it was all dry I popped the cupholders in to see what the finished tabletop would look like. I opted not to secure the cupholders, as they fit in there fairly snugly, and I figured if anyone ever spilled or anything they'd be easier to clean if I could just take them out.

The bottom shelf was surprisingly easy to make. It's just a frame of 2x4s screwed into each other with 2 1/2 inch screws  then planks get attached to the top with wood glue and finish nails.

I measured the distance between the insides of the long supports on the underside of the table and made the shelf that exact width and 62 inches long. For the top I used pieces of leftover something I had picked up at some point that was not the size I thought it was (I think they were 8 inches wide by 1 1/2 or something) It turned out I had just enough to perfectly fit the frame I'd made, and the pattern of the alternating depth wood looked cool so I wen't with it. It was either that or go buy more wood, and once again, laziness and aesthetics are not mutually exclusive.

I sanded, stained and finished it the same as I had done with the tabletop and legs, attached the legs to the corners of it from the inside with 2 1/2 inch nails and it was all done.

I attached bottle openers to the four corners of the table top so people could open their beers while we play, and it was all ready to go except for getting it moved inside, assembled, and finishing the play surface on the interior.

I did bring it inside at this point and attached the top to the bottom. For the play surface I decided to use cork. I thought felt would look bad if I tried to put it down myself, and that 5mm craft foam that you see used a lot didn't seem like it would hold up, so I found a roll of 4ft by 6ft cork sheeting that I could cut to size and super glue to the play surface.

If you were following along, doing your own table build, you could call it a day at this point if you wanted to. The table has everything it needs to be a completely low tech solution for your tabletop game. As I said, I'm not really a computer maps and mounted monitor kind of DM so for the most part a nice looking table with some minor bells and whistles pretty well covers my needs.

I did however get a little ambitious with some ideas for some slight upgrades to add a little bit of tech flare to my setup. If none of this other stuff appeals to you, feel free to stop at the above point, but here is a breakdown of a couple of add-ons I made:

The first thing I added was these color changing LED strip lights that I found around the interior border. The lights I found have a little remote control so I can switch them to different hues so I can play around with mood lighting. Red when the party fights the dragon in it's lair full of magma flows? Green when they walk through the sunlit forests of the elves? Pink when the bard starts playing Barry White in the tavern to seduce wenches? You get the idea, I told you I run an immersive game and anyone who says otherwise is a lying son of a bitch.

I secured them around the interior lip of the play area and drilled a small hole through which to run the power cable out of the table and down the leg. 

Last, I decided I wanted to create a piece that would give me (or anyone DMing) extra space at the head of the table for all the assorted stuff they need, so I took a scrap piece of the plywood I'd cut off the table and made a single horizontal plank about a foot wide that I stained and finished. Plywood doesn't really take stain properly the way a normal piece of lumber will so I don't typically recommend it. For me it was the only spare piece of wood I had that was large enough and it was a combination of wanting to make use of what I had if I could and not caring all that much about the appearance since it was only there to get hidden behind the DM screen anyway. Sometimes laziness and aesthetic appeal are in fact, at odds. 

If you wanted to do this, it would be a simple matter of getting another board at whatever width you felt was suitable for the DM area.

Here is the finished product, all the bells and whistles added

I put two chairs on each side for the picture here, but it easily fits three to a side with two on each end for a total of eight people comfortably around it. Eventually my plan is to make a pair of benches for the long sides and get a few interesting looking chairs for the ends. Until then, I'm just using chairs from wherever in my house..

All in all I'm pretty happy with the way it came out. It's very sturdy, looks pretty much how I envisioned it, and will suit my gaming needs perfectly.

Now I just have to do something about the rest of the room around it. . .

Link to the youtube video with plans that I followed: here

These can also befound in the description of the video:

Link to the cupholders: here

Link for bottle openers: here

Link for LED's : here (note here: They cost me 24 bucks of a supposed original price of $138. They have an expiration timer on the sale, but it said the same thing when I bought them three weeks ago, so I think it's just bullshit to make you buy them faster.)

[idiottantrum-blog]

Experts Announce: The Last Fucking Thing Now Has Its Own Festival

Over the weekend, a report was released by top data analysts in at the Bureau of Street Festival Census Collection stating that, with the creation of the 'Flip-flops and Socks festival' in southern Rhode Island this August the last fucking thing there was now has it's own festival.

Gregory Dermond, spokesperson for the SFCC had this to say:

"That's it. There is literally not a single fucking thing in existence that doesn't have a goddamn shitty street fair associated with it now that those ass-backwards cockwads in Rhode Island started a festival in honor of wearing socks with flip flops."

Experts had long been concerned with the finite quantity of subjects upon which a poorly executed street fair could be focused by small towns with no other possible draw for outside sources of commerce.

"The last good concept for a street fair happened around 1997 and it's just been downhill from there. Around 2010, we really started seeing things take a turn for the worse as all of the good foods already had festivals in their honor somewhere in the country." Dermond laments "These fuckleberries started creating festivals for stuff that was a side ingredient to actual food at best. It's like someone in the idiot community released a memo that said if you can make a fucking shit flavored ice cream out of it, you can have a festival for it. Thus we started having to deal with shit like Pickle festivles, mushroom festivals and so help me fucking Christ Kale festivals."

It seems it wasn't until the last few years that street festival subjects really started to get bad or even downright disturbing in some cases, as the available number of topics dwindled increasingly lower.

"2016 was the year that everything in America really went to shit" Dermond tells us "The good stuff, hell, even most of the bad stuff was taken, so people started really deep diving into the depths of their shit filled, garbage imaginations for festival ideas. I remember, that was an expensive year with that 'Gasoline and Lit Matches' festival in Utah burning down most of the town. Luckily it was Utah, so who gives a shit, but even that wasn't as bad as the fucking Halloween ones we had to deal with that year."

"It's not surprising. It's like everywhere you turn somebody is throwing another festival about something nobody gives a fuck about. I actually had to move after I got trapped in my house for seven weeks while my street was closed for twenty four consecutive street fairs last summer." Said one woman when asked what she thought of the fact that the very last thing in existence now finally had it's own associated Street Fair.

A different perspective perhaps is held by Meghan Waters, a crafter and regular exhibitor at street festivals who makes scarves for dogs and humans out of recycled glass shards. When asked to comment on the Socks and Flip-flops festival she said "Thank God they've finally gotten them all. It was touch and go there for a while, but there are finally enough Street fairs that I don't have to get a real job."

What do you think of the official last street festival topic being taken? What festivals does your town hold? How do you get to work with 15-20,000 people on motorized scooters in the streets every day? Let us know! 

[idiottantrum-blog]

Fart Torture Story

I use Squarespace to host this website, and every now and again they roll out some new feature that people with significantly greater understanding of how to properly run and grow their sites undoubtably find extremely useful.

The newest thing I've received an email about is Google Search keywords as part of their analytics services.

While I mostly don't concern myself with site traffic, search engine optimization and other such things that are important if you're trying to monetize your site or fuel a desperate need for validation I suppose that's I'm sure it's a pretty handy little resource, and I'm at least curious enough to play with it once.

Let's take a look at what key terms Google thinks I should be using to really get my content out there. What is it that the people of the internet want to see?

Here are Google's top ten reccomendations for key words and phrases I should use to increase my website's visibility:

Google. . . What the fuck.

Internet. What. The. Fuck. 

Clearly somebody is doing something very wrong in this scenario and frankly I'm not sure who it is. Either it's me, and I need to take a long hard look at the content of my writing and possibly my character as a human OR it's Google and they need to get someone to review the code for this analytics thing.

The third option, of course is that the real fault here lies with the society who psychologically damaged a generation of people so badly that a computer which learns from our search history, having all of humanities collective curiosity at it's disposal can only come up with Horse Fart Fanfic.

Its official, we've run this one into the ground, time to start a new civilization. 

Before I go I'd just like to quickly address all of the folks currently reading this who stumbled in here on accident while looking for fart torture fanfiction. Hey, hows it going? Welcome to my website.

Before you click away let me just apologize that the title was a misdirect and that you came here looking for tastefully written short stories presumably involving someone being forcibly held down and farted on (with or without horses) but instead got nothing but lightly mocked. It was nice to have you in any event, I hope you find what you're looking for at the next website you try.

And hey, maybe once you finish up masturbating or whatever come on back and take a look around, maybe you'll find some of my posts here pretty funny. After all, according to Google my content is pretty well geared towards the fart fetishist demographic. Who knows, maybe you'll expand your horizons and you'll be able to use the internet for two things from now on, neat!

[idiottantrum-blog]

I Pooped in the Woods

There are outdoor kids and there are indoor kids. Outdoor kids spend their childhood doing things like hiking, camping, fishing and other general outdoor kid activities; tying various and assorted knots, maybe? Whittling? Some sort of thing involving rocks and sticks, maybe with a name like Sticky McRockball? I don't know. Indoor kids are only comfortable between the temperatures of 70 and 71 degrees Fahrenheit are plagued by ailments such as hemorrhoids from playing Ocarina of Time for 18 straight hours. Guess which one I was? 

Now, I was in Boy Scouts for a period, but only until about the third grade. As soon as being a Boy Scout required learning any actual skills or going camping that was the end of that. What I'm saying is my 'scouting experience' more or less amounted to my dad tolerating taking me to about half the meetings and the pinewood derby every year. The pinewood derby, if you aren't familiar is a thing where all the kids get a block of wood and are supposed to craft it into a little race car to race each other down a sloped track. Ostensibly this is to teach young boys a lesson in working with your hands and friendly competition. In actuality it taught us a lesson in who's dad was a cheating son of a bitch when one kid came in with a perfect replica of fucking Night Rider complete with working lights and everyone else had a jacked up vaguely car shaped piece of shit covered in paint, hot glue and thumb blood. Personally I think they could really punch things up at the pinewood derby if they let the winners throw the losers cars into a wood-chipper, but this is a story about camping and I'm getting off topic.

So, firmly established that things within the perview of my outdoorsmanship ability include owning pants which zip off at the knee to become shorts and having watched a documentary about bears one time it only follows that for vacation this year, I insisted that Emily and I take a trip out to Colorado and go backpacking in the Rocky Mountains for several days. 

Before you get all "You don't just go walk out into fuckall nowhere in the Colorado Rockies and camp for four days if you don't know what your doing asshead, that's how people get ate by a bear", I'd like to point out that my brother-in-law lives in Colorado and is an avid outdoorsman. As far as I'm concerned it was all taken care of; we'd all go camping together and he'd spend four days leading me around like the useless manbaby I am keeping me from doing stupid stuff that would result in plummeting to my death on some rocks or angering a swarm of moose.

We flew out to Colorado and had a day in Boulder to prepare and get our packs together before the actual camping portion of the trip began. I learned quite a few things about camping during this prep phase. First off, when you backpack camp everything you need for the entire duration of your trip has to be carried in and out with you, so weight is extremely important. How important you ask? Apparently  important enough that we had to unroll and re-roll all of our fucking toilet paper to get rid of the little cardboard tube in the center.

According to my brother in law, those are critical ounces of weight, and you need to cut down for space however you can. I strongly suspect he is full of shit and possibly also a liar who told me that just to watch me sit there and wind toilet paper rolls for twenty minutes.

Shown above is a de-tubed toilet paper stacked on top of it's unaltered counterpart. I think we can all agree that the empirical evidence here supports my theory that unraveling your toilet paper for camping is fucking bullshit.

Another thing I learned is that when you go for real camping, you have to put all of your food as well as anything else that that has a scent into something called a 'bear canister', which is essentially an indestructable cookie jar that prevents bears from being able to get your shit. Get fucked, Winnie the Pooh.

There were other important camping rules that I'm sure I was supposed to learn, but to be honest I was so caught up with the fucking toilet paper I don't think I really absorbed much else. 

We got all of our crap packed into giant camping backpacks and were all set to go. Being that we had flown in from out of state and also I don't own any camping shit, my backpack and just about everything in it was borrowed; I did bring my own underpants though.

The morning of, we all showered up with strict instructions not to use shampoo or put on deodorant because I guess bears can smell an Irish Spring from five miles off and will come kill you. Emily, myself, Andy and his girlfriend Heather loaded into the car and made the hour or so drive to the national park making sure to breath through our mouths, enjoying the last time when we wouldn't all smell like a hot foo for the next several days. Camping was going to be fun.

See? Here I am having fun.

We entered the National Forest on the first day of our trip and did about a six mile hike up to an elevation high enough that I was warned I might get winded walking fifty feet and I'd probably get a bunch of spontaneous nosebleeds. I get the last laugh though because I get winded walking fifty feet at sea level so I was pretty sure nobody would be able to tell if I was struggling with altitude or not.

Naturally it rained shortly after we arrived at our campsite, and due to the aforementioned lack of my own equipment, I had this rubber ducky-colored poncho instead of a real raincoat of any type.

I guess when you are up that high, rain typically isn't all that intense, and doesn't last that long, as within twenty minutes things had cleared up. Our campsite was at the side of a small lake nestled way up the mountain, one of those ones where it's made entirely from snow-melt so the water is completely crystal clear.  It was honestly one of the most naturally beautiful things I've ever seen in person. If I were say, a blogger with a desire to showcase an amazing experience to my readers through sensational photography of my trip, I might have gotten some really gorgeous shots for you.

However, I'm shit, so here is a dumb picture of me standing up to my knees inventing a game called "Touch the Log", in which the challenge is to go into the water and touch a log.

In fairness the water was cold as fuck, so it was more challenging than it seemed.

The rest of the trip was quite lovely, involving hiking, looking for wildlife, checking out views of nature, and doing various camping things, a lot more of which are solely about not attracting bears to kill you than you might think. Turns out camping is mostly just being outside and not doing things that make wildlife try to murder you. Who knew?

Here are some other shots from the trip:

A nice little waterfall on the trail. The red dot about halfway up on the right is Emily who climbed up there for a picture. White people amiright? Not shown here is the roughly 37 families with their children also taking pictures of the waterfall.

Hahahaha look at how fat that chipmunk is. Stupid fat chipmunk, maybe do some cardio instead of sitting on that rock being all fat all day long. Burn.

Here Emily plays Touch the Log.

Here Emily follows my instructions to sit and look contemplatively out over the lake so I could take a dramatic photo. Also, the challenge log makes an appearance as a guest star in this photo if you look closely at the water.

Obligatory trail action shot. Am I jealous that my brother-in-law can pull off a mountain man hat and carry a walking stick whereas if I tried it I'd look like a huge douche? Fuck you.

I bet at this point you're saying: 'I was led to believe this was a story about pooping in the forest and you just tricked me into spending four minutes looking at your shit vacation photos. I came here for shit vacation photos but in a way more literal sense than what you've delivered. I want poop related storytelling and you are really letting me down right now.'

First of all, that's gross. Second, I was getting to that part.

The first thing my wife asked before we departed for our multi-day back country backpack camping extravaganza was "What is the pooping situation out there?" I've never been more proud, the woman knows what life's important questions are.

Turns out in the particular neck of the woods we would be staying in, they have pit toilets, a.k.a a big fuck hole in the ground that they place a child's first training potty over top of and if you are super duper lucky there is some sort of flimsy privacy barricade or other natural cover so that you don't have to shit while making eye contact with anyone in a 500 foot radius.

My wife was less than thrilled by the concept, but was at least comforted by the fact that it wasn't a scenario where you have to pack it up and carry it out with you. I however like to think I possess an adventurers spirit. To go forth and poo in the wilderness. Maybe share a knowing glance and a nod of companionship with a nearby woodland creature as if to say 'We are the same. Let the adjacency of our respective poops unite us as one in the great heart of the wilderness.' IT'S THE CIRCLE OF LIIIIIIIIIIFE. . .

AND IT MOVES US AAAAAAAAAALLLL, THROUGH DESPAIR AA-AAND HOOOOOOPE, THROUGH FAITH AND THROUGH LOOOOOOOOOVE,

TIL WE FIND OUR PLAA-A-AACE, ON THE PATH UNWINDIIII-II-II-ING, IN. THE. CIIIIIIIRCU-U-UL

IN THE CIRCLE OOOF LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFE. 

Speaking of people who are not garbage like me and have a legitimate talent for capturing beautiful images of nature, you can check out Andy's photogrpahy blog with his images from the trip. They involve an order of magnitude fewer images of me with my pants down, so it's worth a look. Check it out here.

[idiottantrum-blog]

DRUNCOT

One of Walt Disney World's Parks, Epcot features something called the World Showcase. The World Showcase makes up the back half of the Epcot park and is a big loop which circles a lagoon and features eleven individual stops, each themed after a  different country. Each stop contains buildings which have been given facades resembling classical architecture from their respective countries which contain shops, restaurants, shows and even some rides themed around the culture of the area.

Specifically, one thing you can get at each of the World Showcase's eleven stops is an alcoholic drink or cocktail native to that country. Because this is America, and when we are presented with anything even remotely resembling a gauntlet of culturally stereotypical bullshit and drinking, we roll up our sleeves and get ready to represent ourselves poorly to people of other nationalities, an immensely popular custom known as Drinking Around the World exists.

Drinking Around the World is a time honored tradition where you go to Epcot and attempt to get one drink at all 11 countries in sequence within a single day.

The last time I was at Disney world I was maybe 17 and thus not old enough to participate in the challenge unlike my cousin, who at the time was also underage, but managed to get a beer at the Germany portion of the showcase by hitting on the native speaking server in fluent German. Though only technically a drink at one stop, he was at least participating in the spirit of the occasion by doing something which objectively speaking is morally questionable but is kind of awesome. Returning as an adult I decided it was time to undergo my rite of passage as an obnoxious American, and get tremendously drunk at Epcot on overpriced culturally thematic alcohol. I was going to drink around the world so that my wife could photograph it and I could write about it later.

Thus Druncot 2017 was born.

MEXICO

It was at the very first stop of the day that I discovered I had made several key mistakes in my drinking around the world preparations.

Mistake number one: I had gotten so used to paying for everything with the braclet they give you to charge things to your room that I had neglected to bring my wallet to the park that day. If I wanted to even attempt this, I was now going to have to force my wife to buy my booze for me like a delinquent teenager. Not off to a great start

 Mistake number B: By the time we finished with the various other Epcot attractions and got to the World Showcase it was already 3:30pm and we only had until 6:00pm until our dinner reservation, meaning due to poor planning, I had inadvertently given myself about two hours to complete all 11 stops before we had to start walking to get to dinner.

Mistake number the third one: Apparently it is quite traditional for challengers to the World Showcase to accessorize for the event. There were dozens of groups there wearing matching shirts that said things like "Drink, Drank, Drunk" or "Bippidy Boppidy Booze" on them. I did not come into this event with the coordination or pre-preparation of these other people. While they had a color matched support team of co-participants all I had was one disapproving wife that was annoyed she had to buy my drinks for me. 

It was at this point that a decision would have to be made. Realistically, I had come with no I.D, had given myself about a third of the time I should have, and was woefully unprepared in the insufferable t-shirt department. The smart thing to do would be to just write it off as a poor job planning and enjoy the rest of the day at Epcot as normal rather than spend a ton of money and likely make myself sick. It really made the most logical sense to just forget the whole thing.

Or...

Fuck it; frozen strawberry margarita in Mexico and we're of to the races. 

I got massive brain freeze because they don't allow you to ride the Three Caballeros boat ride with a full beverage for some reason and I had to chug the last 2/3 of it.

NORWAY

A the second stop, Norway, I came to the conclusion that due to how short a time period I was trying to cram this world tour into, volume might become an issue. It was going to get real gross if I had to drink something around 12oz of liquid at every single stop. To conserve space, I decided to get a shot. Because I'm smart like fox.

This was a liquor from Norway called Linie Aquavit. I saw it described as being similar to vodka. I clearly am no type of expert on alcohol but it was urine yellow, tasted like eggnog and went down like fire which is distinctly noting like vodka in my experience. Considering that it's a drink for people who live in longhouses and are vikings* I guess it was fine.

*I know nothing about Norway

CHINA

In China, I had a Tsing Tao beer. Tsing Tao I believe is Chinese for "Tastes like generic beer". That was culturally insensitive and I apologize. The fact that I'm an unsophisticated piece of shit doesn't mean I should be disrespectful to the language.

(The beer was mediocre though)

GERMANY

Up next was Germany. By this point I was starting to feel the first three hit me. I was feeling pretty good, but doing the math and realizing I'd only made it about a third of the way through I was starting to get a little worried that I'd misjudged how much time I was going to need to make it through all 11 stops.

Still more concerned with the volume of liquid I was putting into myself rather than the alcohol content (because I'm smart). I decided to get a shot here too. We were on a schedule here people. Mix those alcohols up in the stomach and get a move on.

This was some sort of honey flavored bourbon from Germany and it might have been the best of the drinks I got that day. I got too drunk to remember to write it down so I could look it up later though.

ITALY

  Ah, Italy, the home of my people. I do of course use that phrase loosely, unless they open an exhibit in the world showcase for the People's Republic of New Jersey this is as close as I'm going to get.

You know what is a great follow up to mixing a bunch of different beer and liquor in your stomach over the course of an hour? Sangria. They had nothing but wine at the drink pavilion in Italy and I hate wine, so I settled for wine Jr. I don't know if it was the alcohol I'd already consumed continuing to hit me, the addition of more alcohol, or the infusion of yet a third ingredient in the devil's mixture I'd already put into my system, but things started to go off the rails in Italy.

First, I waited about ten minutes to get in and take a picture in what I think was supposed to be a glamorous pose, sprawled lavishly across the base of this fountain of Neptune. The result, as you can see looks more like I'm the worlds shittiest mime, pretending to fall in slow motion into the fountain while also drinking something that tastes like dish water. After that I decided that I was getting too drunk and needed to soak up some of that alcohol. Positive that it was well known that cannoli are the best absorbents of alcohol to help slow the decline into ruin I insisted on getting one in order to do damage control, I guess?

It was a good cannoli, though ineffective.

AMERICA

America. Land of the free, home of the Atlanta Braves and producer of some of the shittiest shit beers on the planet. By the time we reached America, the halfway mark for the World Showcase I was in rough shape. I had consumed a margarita, two shots, a beer and a glass of sangria between the hours of  3:30 and 4:45 and was nearing a tipping point. 

By tipping point I am not referring to a physical limitation of my body to consume alcohol, I mean a point at which I would no longer be able to maintain the composure to pass off as a sober, casual attendee of a theme park where people bring their small children. I don't condone dangerous binge drinking, I was never going to drink an amount I felt was unsafe, but we were in Disney goddamn World, I also don't condone drinking to a point where you become a sloppy piece of shit that everyone around you has to deal with. Especially when there are about twenty four year olds who just saw Donald Duck for the first time and don't need that shit ruined for them by some idiot stumbling past yelling in a bad version of the accent native to whatever country he just came from.

Perhaps it was fate that interceded on my behalf that day, because as it would turn out, one of the kiosks at America was closed; the kiosk that sold a selection of craft beers from breweries around the country. This, meant that my only option for drink in America was Coors Lite. Coors lite is to beer as a bunch of pool noodles tied together with shoelaces is to a high end speedboat: Sure it's technically in the same category but the only situation in which you choose one over the other is if the alternative is that you die at sea.

I may have decided to try and go for a few more stops, if anything even remotely enjoyable had been available at America, but that Coors Lite defeated me. There was no way I'd make it to the end with only one more hour to go and retain enough composure not to become an embarrassment to myself and my poor wife who was dutifully putting up with all of this like a trooper.

That trash water drained me of any remaining resolve I had to continue the Druncot challenge, much as I imagine it drains millions of other Americans of their ambitions on a daily basis. The unrivaled shittiness of that Coors had me asking "What's the point?" Indeed, what was the point of anything? If beer could be this terrible, was there really anything right in the world? Probably not.

And so, after six stops on the World Showcase, Druncot 2k17 came to an unsatisfying and anticlimactic end.

While my shot at Druncot glory may have been cut down in it's prime by poor planning and the ability of the good people at Coors to make and distribute the worst beer known to humans, it just means that for the future, I'll be armed with the lessons learned in my first attempt.

Some day I will return to Disney World as a Magnificent Conqueror and on that day I shall write another shitty blog post about it. 

Authors note:

Because I feel like it should be included; The above was done for fun, and written about in a joking manner, but at no point would I have allowed myself to go beyond a limit where I would have put myself or someone else in danger. 

The entire reason I stopped in America was that it would have been irresponsible to continue on just for the sake of having a complete adventure to write about later. I stopped well within my limit for conducting myself appropriately and I would never condone anyone doing something unsafe.

In short, alcohol is for people who can handle themselves like adults. Don't be an asshole.

[idiottantrum-blog]

Man vs Machine. The Quest For 10 Bucks.

While we were at Disney I somehow found myself signed up for an interactive scavenger hunt as part of the new Avatar themed section of Animal Kingdom that they opened up. This scavenger hunt was orchestrated through Facebook messenger by an auto-responder bot that was going to donate ten bucks to a conservation cause of my choosing if I participated.

Never one to turn down a good old fashioned ten bucks, I figured cheating the system while we ate lunch in the park was a worthwhile use of my time. Let it not be said that I didn't get a free ten bucks when it was offered to me. In the immortal words of Lemony Snicket; 'free', dear readers, is a word which here means in exchange for access to my personal information which was promptly turned around and sold to advertisers for a small profit.

I they're going to sell all my internet habits to an advertiser I figured I could just beat the system, pretend I was finding all of the stuff they wanted me to find and get them to adopt a South American Tree Frog in my name or something.

I'm not entirely comfortable that this chatbot has the ability to lie but it's 2017, I'm no robotist. Fitagami Bangarang clearly didn't feel comfortable admitting she was a computer program to me, who am I to call her out?

Challenge accepted Fluttershy Baccarat. And by challenge accepted I mean I'm not going looking for your weird wicker art project. I'm going to use my superior human abilities of deciet to make you think I found it and donate that sweet sweet ten bucks for orphaned sea urchines or whatever.

Clever girl. Demanding proof of my successful scavenging and or hunting. Spoiler alert I didn't actually go find the thing you wanted me to find.

Fisty Barberra was not going to let me bullshit my way out of finding that prop. My mere human brain was no match for her synthetic powers of deduction. The only thing left to do was to come clean and hope she didn't call down an orbital strike to vaporize me for my deception.

Ok, I'll admit things went a little off the rails at the end there. At least I still got my 10 bucks. 

I think we can all agree that my master stroke of AI trickery was worth it in the end. Looks like I've single handedly saved the coral reefs. You're welcome ecologists of the world. Your welcome.

[idiottantrum-blog]

Didney Worl

Where do you go on vacation when you are a grown man with maturity of a seven year old? That's right, you go to the happiest goddamn place on Earth. Disney World.

Disney World is a pretty polarizing place in my experience. Either you completely buy into the whole schtick they are selling, or you don't. If, like me, the Disney thing works for you, as soon as you set foot in the resort you instantly become a little kid again and your childhood comes to life before your eyes. If it doesn't, Disney is like the DMV banged commercialism and their offspring is 27,000 acres of standing in line for hours on end in 114 degree weather while having your wallet gouged by a cartoon mouse. 

Like I said; whatever corporate sorcery Disney has woven into the fabric of every aspect of that place, it locks on like a homing missile to the one bright spot in the deep dark parts of my otherwise cold, dead adult heart and pumps me full of molten nostalgia. We walked into that park on the first day at exactly the right moment for a full on parade to come cavalcading down the street as if it had been put on just for us. Standing in the midst of that parade and looking at that statue of Walt Disney and Mickey holding hands I got legitimately emotional. A thousand goddamn strangers in the street around me and I'm trying to pull it together so some poor six year old girl doesn't forever associate Mickey Mouse with a grown man crying at a fucking statue.

You know what though? Coming from a person who thinks parades are the worst form of entertainment invented by mankind, that parade was fucking magical and I'm glad we saw it. 

The next four days were spent park hopping, going on rides, eating ice cream shaped like Mickey and generally doing all the things you do at Disney. Here's the highlight reel in picture form:

It's a small world. Famous for being complete shit and sort of culturally insensitive. A ride that literally everyone rides ironically when they come to Disney. A ride that is in fact kept running by Disney ironically at this point. A ride that my father-in-law fell asleep on when in 1995 when a four your old Emily made him ride it over and over again. In keeping with tradition I grabbed a quick nap while sailing through the darkness as a hoard of terrifying child robots screamed a song at us.

Another Classic, Pirates of the Caribbean. I am, apparently in the midst of some sort of deep, intellectual contemplation at the moment this picture was taken. But more importantly, look at that photogenic son of a bitch in the row be hind us. Kid just got on the ride all by himself, and took his fucking class picture for next school year in the middle of a boat ride through a dark tunnel full of animatronic pirates. 

They have a system where you scan a RFID bracelet and automatically get sent your pictures. The lighting on this ride must have been weird, because if you look closely, the picture I was sent of Emily and I riding the Buzz Lightyear ride looks a lot like an asian man and his two small daughters. Weird.

We ate at a restaurant called Be Our Guest on the first night. It's a restaurant in the Magic Kingdom themed around Beauty and the Beast. This is my wife's favorite Disney movie of all time, thus dining here was a requirement of our visit. We had to make the reservation for this place four months in advance because it's so popular.

Turns out there is a reason it's so popular. It's spectacular. You walk in to the dining room of this place and it's like you're in the movie. My wife cried a little bit. They nailed it so hard with this place I was surprised a candlestick with a corny french accent didn't take our order. Everything about the dining experience at this place was spot on, right down to the complimentary "grey stuff" they gave us for dessert because we were celebrating our Anniversary, which was in fact, delicious.

No big deal, nothing to see here, just a a bunch of fucking Stormtroopers marching through the streets.

Tower of terror is one of my favorites, though I don't believe Emily cared for it. The empty seat next to that guy in red was a lady who noped right the fuck out of there about two seconds before the ride because she got too scared. 

On our second night we ate at T-Rex, which Emily picked out out of a sense of fairness. I believe her thinking was if I she got to eat in the princess ballroom of her childhood favorite movie and experience the magic of seeing Beauty and the Beast come to life in front of her eyes we should probably go to a restaurant for children full of robot dinosaurs and sound effects for my benefit. Altruistic dino-themed reservation making aside, apparently her ability to tolerate me does have limits. Limits such as when I get a 14 dollar beverage served in a fun glass that you get to keep afterwards.

 That picture just about sums up what it's like to be married to me, I think. You can really see the years being drained off her life in this photo.

Epcot is where we got the second best ride photo of the trip while riding Test Track. A ride where you rumble around in a little car and then they fire you at 60mph around a loop.

The greatness of this picture has nothing to do with either of us, but rather because of that lady in the row behind us seriously not giving a shit about anything.

This may be the record for the least amount of fucks given while on a roller coaster moving at sixty miles an hour. Is she not enjoying her time at Disney World? Does she professionally drive those land vehicles that break the sound barrier and thus is not impressed by this ride? Is she just having absolutely none of whatever that white girl is doing in the seat next to her? Who knows? All I know is that when there are fucks to be given, this woman is fresh out.

An unfortunate naming cooncidence I guess.

$32,000 crustal model of Cinderella's castle anyone? And speaking of Cinderella. We ate at the restaurant in that castle. . .

. . . where they force you to take a picture with Cinderella herself before you can go in. Which is fine if you're a family with children but super weird and uncomfortable if you are two adults there by yourselves.

The interlocked arms was Cinderella's idea by the way.

The inside of the restaurant was cool and the food was good, except the schtick at this place is that throughout the meal all sorts of Disney princesses come out to a bunch of fanfare and spend the meal going from table to table interacting with the guests. Personally I found it extremely difficult to focus on eating or having a conversation with my wife while constantly worried that I was going to get ambushed by fucking Snow White the moment I put a hunk of steak in my mouth.

I mentioned the picture of She Who Gives No Fucks on test track was the second best photo of the trip. I've saved the best for last; An example of the diametric opposite of not giving a shit while on a roller coaster. This is in fact the perfect embodiment of giving all of the shits. This is a ride called Everest in the Animal Kingdom which we rode in a torrential downpour so bad you couldn't even lift your head during the outdoor portions of the roller coaster because the rain hitting you in the eyeballs at 150mph was so brutal.

A combination of terror at the roller coaster and the hilarity of how goddamn hard it was raining broke my wife and gave me the greatest gift I could have received at Disney. 

Perfection.

Glorious.

[idiottantrum-blog]

Gaze Into the Iris

[idiottantrum-blog]

Ellipses and You. . .

We need to have a chat, people writing internet comments.

On behalf of many good and decent citizens out there in the world, I would like to take a moment and educate you on a fun little punctuation tool called the ellipsis. Why, you ask? Well to put it simply it's because you're using it so fucking wrong it makes the rest of us want to go to your house and smash your keyboard over your hands until there is nothing left of either but a pulpy soup of letter keys and metacarpals.

The insult to people who weren't raised by jackals that is ellipsis use in internet commenting has gone on long enough. You don't need to put 8 dots after every complaint about millennials you cobble together under an article about avocado toast you didn't actually read, Sharon, you heinous shrew. They are called commas and periods, fucking learn when to use them.

I am not claiming my mastery over the written English language is impeccable, I'm like 80% certain I misused a comma before the name Sharon in a paragraph belittling a hypothetical woman for not using punctuation correctly. However, I do make at least a marginal attempt not to type like I'm slipping in and out of a coma between every sentence and want the reader to experience what that feels like through my use of punctuation. I don't think it's too much to ask that others do the same.

In case you are not familiar with the terminology, an ellipsis looks like this: ". . ." Three dots each separated by a single space. There is a lovely source you can check out here, which explains in what some might describe as excruciating detail exactly what the ellipsis is and how it is used. The TLDR version is as follows:

The ellipses in it's formal use is a punctuation mark that is used to annotate where something has been omitted from a quote. The informal or colloquial use of an ellipsis is the one with which we are going to be concerning ourselves. It is used to indicate when a thought trails off before it is finished, or that there is otherwise some marked pause or hesitation which requires something with more punch than your standard comma provides. It's like the pause for dramatic effect mark.

Here is an example:

"Six ellipses in three sentences is worse than. . . UGH!"

What is it worse than, person being quoted? Hitler? Adult-onset chronic swamp ass? Nickleback? We don't know specifically because of how you appropriately trailed off, leaving your thought incomplete before changing gears, but goddamn if we don't understand the emotion of helpless frustration you are currently feeling over some pigeon-toed jackanapes not knowing how to write like a civilized human.

So! Now that we all understand how to appropriately apply ellipses to our everyday internet commentinglet's look at some examples of people who are single handedly responsible for ruining society for the rest of us.

Let's start with our friend from the beginning of the post, why don't we?

Perfect example of somebody who doesn't know what the fuck he is doing around a keyboard but isn't going to let that stop him from trying to make people feel bad on the internet.

Sir, you wrote four sentences and ended three of them with ellipses. Why? Were you trying to give the reader ample time to recover from each of your fucking burns before continuing on to the next one? Am I supposed to be like "OH FUCK A RON WHITE ONE LINER FROM 2004 THIS GUY JUST SLICED MY FUCKING NIPPLES OFF WITH HIS RAZOR SHARP WIT HOW CAN I EVEN CONTINUE READING. . . Oh, thank God, he's incorporated some convenient dots forcing my brain to take what feels like an inappropriately placed pause while reading his comme-OF FUCK MY WAFFLES JUST AS I WAS RECOVERING FROM THE FIRST ONE HE JUST HIT ME WITH SOME FORREST GODDAMN GUMP SOMEBODY GET A MOP BECAUSE I JUST SPILLED MY GIBBLETS ALL OVER THE FLOOR FROM THE INTENSITY OF THE GUT PUNCHERS THIS GUY IS THROWING OUT ONE AFTER ANOTHER."

The only guess I can take as to why people use ellipses this way is that they think it gives each sentence more gravitas, not understanding that all it does is make the reader think the author is slightly less literate than a fourth grader who only scored in the 20th percentile for not writing like a fucking asshole.

In fact, the only sentence this person DIDN'T end with an ellipsis in the comment above was the last one which is in fact the only one he fucking wrote where it would have made sense! Not only did he select that particular sentence as the only one that somehow didn't need drama dots added to it, he didn't punctuate it at all. There are nine periods in that sentence you corndog, you couldn't have spared one more for the end of your thought?  You've failed me, guy who is apparently mad at a person or group of people he considers stupid. You've failed us all.

Alrighty, you used the correct form of 'their' so credit where credit is due, but I have a lot of problems with this next one. In no particular order:

You shouldn't be allowed to make your profile picture a sweet adorable puppy and then start herniating yourself yelling about fake news and democrats, it's false advertising. I don't like being lulled into a false sense of security by that 10/10 good doggo only to get purple-nurpled by the fact that the comment appearing next to it was written by a butthole.

Demwits is a pretty ok burn, but the fact that they emphasized it demWITS instead of DEMwits the way they should have ruined the wordplay. Like, the part of the word dimwit that you replaced with 'dem' from democrats is where you place the stress when you make the pun, get it together, we're trying to have a society over here.

One of those ellipses has four dots instead of three because apparently they weren't satisfied butchering their comment with the use of poorly placed pauses, they had to be inconsistent about it.

While those are bad enough, I could overlook it all if it weren't for this part:

Let me explain why this is an abomination through use of a visual aid representing exactly what "...LOL..." would look like:

Take heed lest you too should ever be inclined to write . . . LOL . . . in the fucking middle of a thought and come off as if you were kicked in the head by an emu at a petting zoo when you were a child.

I could go on for ages about how abusing ellipses in your internet commenting makes you sound like a half-assed Captain Kirk on a mission to boldly go where no one with at least a sixth grade reading level and any sense of self respect has gone before, but instead I'll leave you with what to me is the most perplexing question I find myself asking in all of this:

Why is it that you see ellipsis abuse used almost exclusively for the purpose of ranting about politics by far right people over 40 years of age?

 I don't know if FOX news has some sort of weird subliminal messaging that makes people misuse punctuation but goddamn if it doesn't seem like 90% of the people I see do this are Gen X/ Baby Boomers typing their little fingers down to stumps, about liberal snowflakes beneath some Tomi Lahren video. Think about it. Have you ever seen this comment?

"The Large Hadron Collider is a marvel of science and technology.............. CERN is really pushing the boundaries of how we understand the universe around us.......who knows what we might learn........... from their research....Higgs Boson.....Amazing"

 I certainly haven't. It seems like it's exclusively some red-in-the-face white person telling libtards to go fuck themselves beneath an article about how they made it legal to shoot endangered baby seals in the mouth because it will somehow help oil corporations oppress Native Americans or something. Always. 

Hopefully we've all learned a little bit about how to use ellipses today and a whole lot about each other. Namely that there are a lot of us out there who are just the worst. Go forth now my children. Go forth and spread the gospel of being slightly less of a trash bag full of used bandaids. Do it for me.

Do it for us all........................................................................................ 

[idiottantrum-blog]

For My Wife

You put up with my bullshit. And for that, I love you.

Because it really is a lot of bullshit. Happy Anniversary.

[idiottantrum-blog]

Google Maps Is Ruining My Life

Because of Google maps I keep having to have this conversation with people:

Me: We are going to drive up to [insert literally any place in the known universe that a person might drive to] this weekend for a family thing.

Other Person: Oh, that sounds like fun. What route do you usually take to get there? Do you go Hergleflergen road to route 324567890 and then take the turnpike over to. . . [insert the sound of blood rushing in my ears while all of space-time passes before me as the names of roads and directions are rattled off]

Me: . . .

Me: . . . . . . . . .

Me: . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Me: Yes?

Here is the thing. Because of GPS I don't know how to get anywhere, I don't know the names of any roads and I don't know where anything is in relation to anything else. The problem is I don't know how to politely get out of the conversation with people over the age of 50 I keep having to have where they want to talk about driving directions and I have to employ every trick of conversational ninjitsu known to man to make it seem like I am following along instead of thinking about how full body sized hand driers would save a lot of time after a shower.

It's not like I can just hold up a hand and be like "Lemme stop you right there Todd. I haven't learned what exit I get off at on any highway since  2006. I'm going to put the name or address of my destination into my phone and then play a game of follow the colored line for the next two hours until I get to where I wanted to be. You trying to discuss route information with me is about as useful as explaining the best way to cook a steak to a militant vegan. Neither of us are getting anything out of the exchange and the more you talk the more I hate you."

Even worse is if someone has to give me directions somewhere and they don't have an actual address or searchable business name but just insist they can explain it to me. News flash buddy; you can't. After the first one or two turns into the directions I've given up hope of actually reaching the intended destination in any amount of reasonable time. God forbid they toss a cardinal direction in there. Oh, just drive over to Chestnut lane and head east? We'll tell my wife I loved her and that it's ok to remarry because I'm going to fucking die in the wilderness trying to find the location of this christening.

If GPS navigation were to disappear forever while I was on a car trip out of state I've come to terms with the fact that I'd just have to start a new life in Kenton Delaware and hope everyone I've ever known or loved is happy without me back home.  I'm basically the personification of how technology has ruined my generation and made us all completely worthless as adult humans and I'm fine with that, but the anxiety of having to fake my way through conversations about directions might be giving me an ulcer. Either I have to wait it out until everyone born born before 1965 dies or I've got to figure out a strategy to get out of discussions about 'what the best way to get around the city at rush hour' is that doesn't involve actually learning where I'm going.

If anyone out there has any ideas please contact me. I am open to ideas involving smoke bombs and strategically hidden trapdoors.

[idiottantrum-blog]

Duckling Roundup Rodeo

Sometimes I spend a long time trying to think of how I am going to turn something into a post. I'll get hung up on if I want there to be some sort of message, or what angle I want to take on something, how to make it funny and a lot of time I just give up on an idea and tell myself "there's no post in this".

Other times I realize I have a bunch of pictures of baby ducklings and nobody gives a shit what I have to say if there are pictures of adorable peeps to look at, so I should just shut up.

With that in mind. Here are a bunch of pictures of ducklings for you to look at. Enjoy:

We found these little guys outside our house when my wife spotted a couple of them sitting on the side of the road near our mailbox. It turns out their mother got hit by a car leaving them to wander around and get separated from one another.

By the time we found them they had gotten spread out so that some of them were on either side of the road, wandering around in the underbrush peeping little distress calls. Normally, the rule is that you don't go messing with baby animals since it's easy to cause more harm trying to help them. In this case, since we knew for sure they had been orphaned, we decided to try and catch as many of them as we could to bring them to a wildlife refuge since without their mother they would just get picked off by predators or die from starvation/exposure.

If you've never chased a week old duckling through a bunch of underbrush and leaf litter as he waddles his little butt of trying to get away from you, be thankful. It took us over an hour to chase down and catch these five assholes and get them all put in a plastic tub to take to the rescue. 

We got them all packed in the car and took them to a Wildlife Refuge near us called Cedar Run. With our five ducklings: President Mallard Fillmore, Captain Quack Sparrow, Duck Dodgers, Duck Norris, and Jeff in tow we made the thirty minute drive to drop them off where they will be raised until they can be released back into the wild.

Turns our our little ducks are wood ducks, which are a little more uncommon in our area and require some special care in order to raise them, but they should all grow up to be healthy duckkos with duck families of their own. 

[idiottantrum-blog]

Archived Post: Ask a Husband #3: Bed Etiquette

This is the third and final post from the original Ask a Husband section of the site from back when I first launched in 2015 that I have been reposting to get them out of the digital graveyard. If you haven't seen the others number one is here and number two is here.

Ask a Husband #3: Bed Etiquette

Originally posted August 8th 2015

Got a few questions all along the same theme for this one:

“How can I get my man to stop farting atomic bomb level farts in his sleep.”

— Courtney W.

Well Courtney, I've got a couple of thoughts.

Solution 1: Go to the store and purchase industrial strength gasX or another similar product. Begin crumbling it up and sneaking it into his food daily. This is a great option for those fussy significant others who won't take their pills, and it's a lot less fattening for your man than rolling them up in slices of cheese.

Solution 2: A wine cork is probably just about the right diameter.

“Why do I have to share my feelings if she won’t share the blanket?”

— Dave M

You're right Dave. how can you be expected to open up emotionally when you're exhausted all the time from not getting a good night sleep because your partner is pulling a burrito on you every night?

I recommend investing in one of those  mummy sleeping bags. It will solve both your problems. In bed, you'll never have to worry about getting the covers yanked off you, as you'll be enveloped in a nylon and synthetic papoose of body heat trapping goodness. 

As for your issues with emotional vulnerability, just keep the sleeping bag on. It's swishy embrace will simulate the safe space of your mother's womb allowing you to get in touch with your emotions in a way you never thought possible. 

In fact, just keep it on all the time. Live your life as a gigantic manarpillar, inching around on the ground, constantly swaddled in your own personal security blanket. Flop through life as a limbless invertebrate until the day comes for you to encase yourself in a gargantuan human sized cocoon made from stitched together parts of other sleeping bags in order to undergo a glorious metamorphosis from which you will emerge reborn.

On second though, you'd scrape your face all up inching around all the time. Just buy a flat sheet and comforter for the next size up to the bed you have the extra width will make it so that there is plenty of extra on the sides to protect you from a severe covers hog.

— Exhausted

  Well, Exhausted... You might think to yourself, "Hey, this is probably the sort of question that would have been better posed to some sort of medical professional."

It just so happens you are in luck. Seeing as this is the internet...

As you can see by my completely real medical license I am in fact 1,000% qualified to help you with your problem.

Anyone who knows anything about modern medicine knows that snoring is caused by what is known as T.A.G syndrome. T.A.G is an acronym for the three combined causes of snoring. Built up toxins in the body, an out of balance Aura, and excessive amounts of undigested gum.

In order to cure your partners snoring you should follow these medically proven steps:

First you need to hard boil a dozen eggs and then leave them to soak in a pot full of vinegar and mayonnaise (actual mayo, not miracle whip. Don't be an asshole). Set that in your basement for two to three weeks depending on how severe the snoring is.

Once the eggs have had time to properly soak, have your snoring partner eat two a day for six days in the morning and night. (The vomiting and diarrhea are normal that's the toxins leaving the body.)

After the sixth night of the egg purge load up a pair of white tube socks with cinnamon applesauce. Have your loved one cram their feet on in there and get into bed.

If all of that fails, you can always resort to the cork method as proposed in the response to our first reader's question. (It is strongly recommended that you use a different cork.)

That's all for this installment of Ask a Husband, hopefully I've helped a few folks out there with some sleeping arrangement issues. It warms the heart to know there are some good folks out sharing a bed like champs thanks to my sage advice.

Until next time, my friends.

[idiottantrum-blog]

Archived Post: Ask a Husband #2: The No Spouse Rule

This post was originally put up on a portion of the site that no longer exists. The content that was on there has been archived for the past few years, but I decided to put it up rather than let it rot for eternity. This is the second of these archived reposts. You can start from the first one here.

Ask a Husband #2: The No Spouse Rule

Originally Posted July 20 2015

Spouseless writes:

“A few months ago, when planning a group event with about 6-7 people one member of the group laid down the “no spouses allowed” rule meaning it was a night for just us friends to get together.  We all agreed although we noted that, at the time, he was one of the only single people in the group. Recently, however, at a similar group event where the rest of us had again followed the “no spouse” rule the same person who had been adamant about this rule for all get togethers brought his significant other along.  How can we speak to our friend about being hypocritical and rude to our significant others without attacking him? Sincerely, Spouseless”

Inviting or excluding significant others is always a touchy subject. It starts when we are teenagers, waiting all day to hang out with our best friend after school, only to be devastated when he brings his new girlfriend along and you spend the whole day uncomfortably trying to play Halo as they dry hump each other two feet from you in your parents basement. It's like f&k you Steve, I wanted to beat The Maw on legendary today, not spend four hours avoiding eye contact with the boner lump in your sweatpants.

Even into adulthood you run into it from time to time. My wife gets invited to weddings without a plus one every once in a while even though we're married presumably because the couple to be is trying to keep head count under control. If we're being honest in this situation, this is fine with me as I have no interest in attending Janet the HR person's wedding so that I can spend three hours at the weird leftovers table with someones socially awkward work friend Peg, the bride's asthmatic cousin Barry with the lazy eye and sweating condition, and a suit jacket that sits by itself on an empty seat all night because whoever was assigned to that spot did the smart thing and got the hell out of there.

I guess what I'm saying is that in all stages of life, sometimes there is going to be friction over when you do or don't bring along significant others.

That being said, this seems like it is much more commonly going to be a dating conundrum than a married person one. Married couples tend to have integrated into each others respective groups of friends, so it becomes less of an issue as opposed to when you are just dating someone, especially if it is a new relationship. Even so, I get the appeal of the no spouse rule on occasion for everyday social situations. Sometimes you just need a night with your friends minus significant others, it's healthy.

Now, it seems in your particular situation we're looking more at boyfriends and girlfriends as opposed to spouses. When you throw significant others into the mix with a group of friends, especially a 'new' significant other where they don't know anyone besides the person they came with it changes the whole dynamic of the group. Sometimes that's fine. In the sage words given to us by the Spice Girls "If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends". If a significant other is going to be around for a while, they've got to become familiar with the group at some point, otherwise you end up with that friend nobody sees anymore because his new girlfriend or boyfriend is dominating all their time. Still, sometimes you just want to go bowling or something with the old gang.

I don't know any of the people involved in this situation, so I can only speak in the most general of terms and operate on some basic assumptions. 

The first basic assumption that I am making is that your friend is pretty much a good guy and not a raging self-centered douche scooter. With that assumption in mind, I don't see the request for the no spouse rule at the first gathering as totally out of the blue. As I mentioned, sometimes it's nice to just hang out with the old gang, and really nobody wants to be the only one at Applebee's who can't order the 2 for $20 because he's by himself. Is it maybe a little selfish to institute the no spouse rule if the rest of the group isn't really down for it? Sure, but I can sympathize with being socially uncomfortable as the odd man out. I feel for the guy, so I can't get too bent out of shape over it.

Now the second get-together is maybe a little harder to justify. To play devil's advocate, I guess I can understand after having been the only single guy in the group and now finally having a boyfriend or girlfriend to bring along he was excited to show them off to his group of friends. It's mildly annoying but really I guess it depends on the fit of this new significant other in to the group. If they turn out to be awesome and get along with everyone, no harm no foul for the most part. If they are an insufferable mule that makes everyone want to slam their hands in a car door so they have an excuse to leave early not so great.

As for how you proceed with this friend, I'd like to introduce you to a philosophy by which I try to live my life. A philosophy that I believe keeps me from being an insufferable piece of garbage in many situations where folks tend to take the aforementioned human garbage route. I always ask myself "Is the aggravation of pressing this issue worth the potential reward, versus just letting it go?" 

Let me give you a few examples from my own life of the application of this mantra:

I used one of those photo printing kiosks you see in drug stores or Walmart to print up a few pictures that my wife wanted to frame. On one of the pictures, the printer screwed something up and left a black ink smudge across the center of the photo. I could have gone back to the store, shown the incorrectly printed photo to them, asked for a refund and had the pictures redone. Or, I could eat the $2.14, not have to fight with anybody, and just reprint that picture. I did not consider the reward of maybe $2.14 and some sort of pointless moral justice for my screwed up picture worth the inevitably awful interaction I would have had to have with an employee. I just reprinted the picture.

An additional example: Once something malfunctioned with our cable and took out our TV and internet service. I spent an hour on the phone with customer service troubleshooting before it was determined that a technician was going to need to come out and replace hardware. When it was all said and done, by the time they were able to get someone out to us, we were without TV or internet for three days.

I love my wife dearly, but there is no reward too small for her not to go through any amount of headache in the pursuit of justice. She insisted that I call our service provider and demand a refund for the time we were without cable.

To break that scenario down, I would have started this process by spending a minimum of an hour on the phone, most of it likely listening to hold music as I resisted the urge not to bite through my tongue and bleed to death rather than listen to another second of a synthesizer rendition of "I'm sailing away". Once I finally reached someone I would then have to petulantly demand that I be reimbursed for my inconvenience. I would be making this demand to someone who has likely already had this conversation approximately eighty-seven times today and gives exactly zero fucks. After all of that, presuming that I don't walk away empty handed and get I my reimbursement what have I actually won? If I pay $140 bucks a month for cable, I'm paying roughly $4.60 a day which would come out to a whopping $14 reimbursement for the days we were without service. Thanks, but I'll take not ruining my evening for maybe getting fourteen dollars or maybe getting politely told to go fuck myself by Verizon's customer service associate and have the recording of it immortalized for quality assurance purposes.

Now, apply this principle to this trouble with your friend. You may have a different barometer for your hassle/reward ratio than I do, but were I faced with this situation, at least where it came to the two get-togethers already passed, I would just let it go.

At best it goes well and you have a decent conversation with them about it, but still ends up being a whole thing. You can't get away with just texting them "Hey Ur GF can't hang with us anymore LOL!" and be done with it.

At worst they get offended and defensive and everyone gets dragged into a fight about it. A poorly handled no spouses rule violation helped break up The Beatles, don't let it happen to you and your friends too.

In all reality probably the best thing you can do is let what is done be done and take a proactive approach for future outings. Knowing that this friend has a history not quite getting the memo just realize you've got to be extra clear with them on expectations going forward.

If you do find yourself in a situation where this person is the dissenting voice in the group on if significant others should or should not invited along, avoid terms like "hypocritical" or "rude" even if they may be fitting. If you put someone on the defensive, they often shut down and you get nowhere with them.

Demonstrate that you understand their point of view and offer them your alternative. Try to make your points focused around the group as a whole rather than singling this person out as a problem. If you can win them over to the rest of the group's way of thinking without making him feel like you lectured him or hate his partner's stupid face it'll make life a lot easier for everyone.

If the group is looking for a "no spouse night" let him know that you all still like his significant other and would love to plan something soon for everyone, but that tonight other folks have already worked it out with their own significant others and you'd like to keep to the plan this time.

If its the other way around and he's pouting about significant others tagging along, make it clear that there will be plenty of opportunity to have a "just the gang" night, but it's important to welcome the partners of members of the group into the fold as well. 

As I said before, this all operates under the assumption that your friend is not a rabid uppity twit and is capable of being reasonable like an actual person. I don't know him, so maybe he is in fact a giant bag of assholes. If that's the case my advice is the group just tells him to jog on.

Good luck, and may all your future outings be trouble free.

[idiottantrum-blog]

Archived Post: Ask a Husband #1: Joint Finances

So back when I first started this website, I did a few installments of this thing where I took some general relationship questions that people sent me and wrote a post in a mock Dear Abby sort of advice column. The few of them I did ranged in how serious the advice I gave was. This one despite being largely about cat sweaters and discontinued cereal (you'll see) I felt actually addressed the question that was posed. Others were far less helpful. 

I eventually stopped these as I didn't really enjoy doing them. I took that part of the site down and it's been buried ever since. I came across the posts while digging through some old stuff though and remembered I did actually think some of them were kind of funny, so I decided to re-post them on the main site. I'll put them up one at a time over the next few weeks, and possibly even post one that never saw the light of day in the first place. We'll see.

Here is the first ever Ask a Husband. Perhaps 'Ask an Idiot' would be a more apt title now.

Ask A Husband #1: Joint Finances

Originally posted July 19 2015

For the first ever installment of Ask a Husband, I'm going to discuss a question that I got a few times. That topic is "Joint Finances"

“A newlyweds guide to managing finances together.”

— Paula S.

“How to make his and her money “our” money while both still being able to spend as wanted!”

— Ashley M.

One of the big things that must be dealt with as a newly married couple is figuring out how to make the transition from maintaining separate bank accounts to managing your finances as a joint entity.

Before I begin dishing out advice on this topic, let me start with a disclaimer. On this matter, there really is no single correct way to do things. You and your significant other are going to have to talk things over, figure out what is going to work best for you and go with that. If you're having a tough time coming to a consensus you can always point them to this site and tell them "Hey, when that guy isn't writing stories about farts and giggling about unintentionally phallic objects he has a few thoughts on joint bank account management you should look into." That should pretty much seal the deal that I'm a totally credible source of information.

It's a whole new experience sharing your finances with someone

The prospect of someone else having access to all your financial information, as well as your purchasing habits once you get married can be unsettling at first. Who want's to face having to explain to their angry spouse why they bought a forty dollar box of Rice Krispies Treats Cereal on Amazon? Certainly not me. (Because they're goddamn delicious and you can't get them in stores anymore FYI) 

Going from having complete and total control over how and when you spend your own money to managing everything with another person can be stressful, especially if you end up feeling like your unable to have any 'fun money' to spend on the occasional frivolous item for yourself.

If this resonates with you, perhaps the same method of managing finances that works for my wife and I will fit you and your partner. We organize our finances so that we cover some things together, whilst still maintaining a portion of our incomes independently.

The Future is now!

First I'll say this. I love the continued progress we are making in the world towards not having to interact humans for basic services. When the inevitable robot apocalypse occurs and humans are overthrown as the dominant life form on the planet by the new master race of robo-murdertron 9000's and I'm hunted down and pulped to make some sort of battery recharging slurry my last words will be "At least for a while I was able to do my banking without having to talk to anyone".

Setting up multiple accounts with your bank and managing them from your computer or phone is awesome. In our household, we've got all our accounts at our fingertips and can move money around at will. It makes maintaining multiple checking and savings accounts which we've designated for different purposes a snap.

I highly recommend if you are not already doing so, get yourself set up to do mobile banking with accounts you both have access to. It will help massively with managing your budget and keeping you both on the same page with your finances. 

Getting your budget in order

Before we get to the part of managing your finances together where you get your own money to blow on headphones for your cat or something, you should make sure all of your other affairs are in order.

In other words, the order of importance of figuring out where your money is going looks something like this:

Bills and essentials

Savings

Cat Headphones

Seems simple but it's really easy to forget that you need to make sure you've got all your bills payed and you're putting something away for later before running out to buy a new gadget. Especially if you're younger and just starting out. Way too many times have I heard things like It's okay to be broke now, your just starting out, you're supposed to be broke. You've got time to save later. As justification for spending on things you really can't afford. A word of advice: It is okay to be broke, and it is okay treat yourself, but do so responsibly. Always be putting at least something away for later. Even if it's just a few bucks a month at first. Even if it just means going out to dinner one less time that month, that's twenty bucks more than you had before and it adds up over time. You may be glad you've got a few hundred or a few thousand bucks in reserve down the road in an emergency.

How We Do It

What we did for our money management was work out a system where all of our recurring bills are payed from a single joint checking account that we set up solely for that purpose. We each contribute 50% towards bills like rent, utilities, food, cable, ect, while putting in 100% of the cost towards any recurring bills we felt were individual responsibilities (things like student loans and individual car payments).

This works for us as it has all of our money going out from one account for easy tracking, and in a situation where my monthly expenses are much higher than her's due to my student loans and the fact that her car is payed off already, it doesn't put that financial burden on her. Everything is nice and even.

Once we had the bills covered we each took whatever was left from each of our monthly incomes and split it up in several ways. These boil down to: Long term savings, incidentals, and fun money.

Long term savings is money we put aside in addition to what we are each already contributing to our respective 401k and retirement funds. This is money that we don't touch, but have readily available in an emergency. (Like if one of our jerk dogs breaks through two secured gates, gets into the kitchen and eats seven ears of corn and needs emergency surgery, to provide you with a highly specific example).

Incidentals is for the various things you inevitably need to purchase that aren't  covered in the monthly budget. We move a certain amount of money to this account each month and use it for the random purchases we make throughout the month (like 95% of it being the twelve consecutive trips I end up making to Lowe's every time I try to fix something stupid around the house like the outside hoses.) As we are still in the process of furnishing our house we periodically try to let it build up over a while and then make a large purchase like a piece of furniture. (We never buy anything we can't afford to pay for then and there. Credit card debt is the writhing spawn of Satan's housekeeper Norma.)

Now onto my personal favorite: Fun money. We have together fun money, and we have individual fun money. Each month after we've moved the designated amount of money for our bills, incidentals and long term savings, we take whatever is left over and put it into the fun money accounts. We have one that we share, which we use primarily to save for vacations, and we each have a separate account that the other person doesn't have access to.

With the bills paid and some money being squirreled away for a rainy day, the money in this personal account is considered ours and ours alone to do with as we please. If I want to buy a 40 dollar box of cereal on the internet, I can do so entirely guilt free. She loves getting her nails done, if she wants to go do that, great! If I purchase a sick cat sweater, we have a talk about being embarrasing in public but hell if that's not my money to spend on cat sweaters if I want! Having that little bit of money set aside each month that is entirely yours to spend on whatever you want is, in my opinion, a healthy way to maintain that balance between "his and her" money and "our" money.

The other benefit to managing things this way is that it forces you to be more responsible and deliberate with your purchasing. If I want to blow all my money on Cat sweaters and Cereal, I'm free to do that, but I only put so much money in my fun money account each month. If I spend it all, there is no dipping into the other pools of cash, I've gotta wait. If I want to buy something more expensive, I've got to be happy with the sweaters I already own, and whatever bran flavored box of disappointing adult cereal we have in the house for a couple of months. Ultimately I find it makes purchasing that new laptop or expensive gadget all the more rewarding because the anticipation of saving up for it made it that much more sweet when I actually got my hands on it. 

Bottom Line, have boundaries set and stick to them   

Now before you run off and buy a purebred Welsh Corgi which is genetically proven to be a 99% genetic relative to the Queen of England's third favorite dog and name him Colonel Stuben Crumplebuttons, or roll out to the gentleman's club and make it rain singles on a dancer named Cinnamon who's "just working her way through nursing school", realize that while fun money is meant to be for you to spend on things that make you happy, you are still in a relationship. 

Don't go pointing the finger at me when your significant other is pissed that you got a dog without consulting them or come home smelling like glitter and broken dreams. "The cat sweater and cereal guy said I could spend this money on whatever I wanted!" is not going to fly, I promise you that.

Make sure if you are purchasing something that will affect the other person, you consult with them before doing it.

Like in all things in a marriage, you can usually avoid conflict by talking things out with one another and being on the same page with your plan. That goes not just for how you are spending your fun money, but for setting up your budget and establishing how any leftover money is being handled after the bills have been payed in the first place.

As I said before, the plan I outlined is just how my wife and I handle things. That's what works for us, but it might not be what is best for you. Figure out your plan for your finances and once it's in place, stick to it. Before you know it you'll be rolling in all the cat sweaters and cereal you could ever want.

[idiottantrum-blog]

My Patronus is a...

Somebody sent me this quiz where you answer like, ten questions about what kind of ice cream you like, what picture of a beach most matches your personality and what character from Friends you think is the most dateable (Gunther, because he's eager to please and seems like he'd be a gentle lover) and it tells you what animal your patronus takes the shape of.

In case you are pop culture illiterate and don't know what a patronus is, it's more or less the Harry Potter metaphor for jerkin' it. It's basically where you close your eyes, squeeze your magic wand real hard and think happy thoughts till a milky white thing comes shooting out of the end.

You're welcome for the visual, internet.

Anyway. I took the quiz and got something like an Otter or a Fox or some other equally likable and/or adorable creature as my result. Just out of curiosity I took the quiz a bunch of times answering differently each time to see what kind of stuff you could get. Predictably, there was a small handful of different results based on your answers and they were all pretty much the kinds of animals you would expect; Stag, Wolf, Fox, Otter, Terrier, Doe, Eagle etc. etc.

Of course, it's an internet quiz designed to generate webpage clicks for ad revenue so they just threw a handful of animals people like or think are cool as possible results, job done. It got me thinking though; not everybody can possibly have a cool or interesting patronus, right? All I know is that there are 7 billion people on this planet and a finite number of cool, likable animals. I don't mean to burst anybody's bubble, but we're not all soaring eagles or majestic lions on the inside. 80% of us are like, a sea cucumber or something; most of us are getting screwed.

Sure, I'd love to take an internet quiz and be all like, "My patronus is a cool timber-wolf because I'm an aloof loner, but I'm also strong and loyal", but the realist in me is like, "Bitch, you a tubby beagle AT BEST and we both know it."

You know who is a guy I don't want to meet? The guy who has the worst patronus. Objectively he exists out there somewhere, right? Congratulations Greg, you got a Blobfish. Of all the people in the world, you're the one who's got a loogie with a face for a patronus. We all voted; you're officially the worst, now please leave because it's making us sad to look at you and if we're being honest, creeping us out a little.

Is there even a rule that says it has to be an animal? Can a patronus just be some random object? What if the thing that best represents my inner soul is like... a desk lamp? Or a half-eaten roast beef sandwich?

Maybe I ate a really delicious roast beef sandwich in 2004 and when I'm old and grey I'll cast my spell and that fucking sandwich appears and my wife will be next to me in our twin rocking chairs like, "Even after all this time?" and I'll be like "Always."

All I'm saying is the Harry Potter universe has not been clear on the intricacies of patronus forms. I think they've left room to speculate here and that could leave some of us in real trouble.

"No, Mrs. Stevenson, I swear I don't know why it looks like that." says the guy who's patronus takes the form of a dumpster full of prosthetic legs when the topic comes up at dinner with his significant other's parents.

Anyway. Here are some of my thoughts on real world Patronuses. Leave a comment on Facebook with your own ideas and maybe I'll draw some of the ones best ones.