An Arizona Cheesehead's Thoughts

There are some sports teams that inspire raging loyalty or intense dislike. The kind where the fans are literally depressed if they lose and their detractors ecstatic. I submit to you that the New England Patriots are one of those teams. While I personally don't hate them with a fiery passion, I kind of a get a kick out of it when they lose. They may be blessed with a bionic QB but they're also cheaters. There, I said it. Fight me. This love/hate was clearly seen with the Facebook series of photos I took a few months ago. The quick story is that my friends who are uber-Pats fans couldn't get in to their hotel room yet so they stashed all of their gear in mine. When they cleared out, they left one thing behind. I posted this picture with the caption, "Anyone have a blow torch?" Most of the resulting comments were, well, let's just say not from Patriot fans. Proceeding from there, I posted this next set of pictures ...

Ever since I moved into my new house with its huge kitchen, I've been trying to figure out something to host that would take advantage of the space. That thought kernel and my obsession with The Great British Bakeoff, including the holiday specials, led me to the decision to host a cookie decorating day. Cue Cookie Monster with your earworm for the day. Because I'm me, I went way overboard. Nothing succeeds like excess is one of my favorite sayings and it was truly excessive. I bought lots of supplies. Not shown:  extra piping bags, gel colors, food pens, more toppings that a friend brought, plastic bottles, new cookie cutters, cooling racks, and a partridge in a pear tree. I did limit the group to just six because I wasn't sure how much space we would need for our flowing creativity. That was my only reasonable action in this whole experience. I offered to bake the cookies ahead of time and spent one Sunday night with the oven using an old family recipe ...

We had a “Welcome to the team” lunch for our newest colleague and I was in charge of the icebreakers per usual. One of the questions I asked was, “What’s your dream job?” The caveat is you can’t pick your current job. That’s just a suckup move anyway. Two people answered they wanted to work with horses (ugh), one said police officer, two said chefs of some sort, another said electrical engineer and one said the answer I had prepared. Writer. Which is laughable in a way because the only writing I’ve done is for our newsletter and (small) pearls of wisdom emails from the President (that’s me) of Parrot Heads in Paradise. I started thinking about what was stopping me from doing any real writing. I couldn’t come up with any good reasons. Oh, I had reasons, of course, but not good ones. Can you legitimately say you want to be a writer when you don’t actually write? I might have well have said I wanted to be an Olympic athlete. Both seem just as likely when you’re making zero effort. I also...

Universal questions. Where did I come from? Who were my people? Am I lost royalty because I certainly feel like I should be? I decided to do a DNA test to answer those questions. I went with MyHeritage because I'm lazy. My Dad's brother had already built a big family tree there so it was easy to glom on to his work. I sent off my sample and eagerly awaited my results with the highest of hopes that something exotic would pop up. There might still be some Romanovs around (I choose to believe) and maybe I am one. That's exotic, all right! I skimmed my results and saw Nigerian. What?!?! So awesome! I imagined some distant ancestor making his or her way to Great Britain and joining our family tree. Of course, it might not have been a pleasant journey for him or her, all things considered. Before I booked a flight to Africa to research in country, I looked at the rest of my results. Greek? 11.4%? That didn't seem likely at all. However, it did make me wonder. ...