It's true. I get to look at this all day long as I work.

No, seriously, listen: I keep hearing from my family and friends how Oklahoma keeps getting blizzard after blizzard, and all the while we’ve had the barest dusting of snow malingering barely visible at the bases of the grass shoots. And it’s not like I’m pining for snow or something; I mean, look, let’s face it, our lives are easier the less snow there is, for the most part.

But we didn’t come hear for easy winters, people. I didn’t. I mean, I’m not saying we moved here just so I could engage in some sort of he-man v. weather competition with myself; clearly the abundance of sausage was a tremendous factor as well. But it’s just nice to get some ferreal winter in while we’re eligible, and frankly when it comes down to brass tacks, it’s not that much of an inconvenience. We got these plows here, see, for the snow, and they’re pretty effing vigilant, so driving really isn’t a huge obstacle for the most part. The four-wheel drive on our beloved ’99 CR-V allows us to parallel park with ease in the worst of conditions.

And, um, well. I guess there’s also the fact that I’ve been working from home lately, too, which is to say I haven’t had to leave the house today, and have only had to snap the occasional picture of snow as I sit in the back room ruminating on content management systems, site structures, and whether I’ll have to leave the room due to the shit Smudge took 10 minutes ago in the cat box one foot from my desk.

Whatever. Snow, people. This was the day we got all this snow.

That’s right, people. This is A Major Award.

I love this town.

A momentile consists of a single image, defined only by the date it was published. That’s it. Void of explanation and free from context, a momentile is pure visual communication. There’s something special about observing an interesting moment from a complete stranger, without any message other than the one you interpret yourself. This is, at its very core, the reason we created momentile.
To interact with others by observing the interesting, obscure, and mundane moments of everyday life.

I am, of course, really into the mundane, and the open secret of beautiful moments we encounter as we shuffle around doing whatever the hell it is we’re doing around here, so the whole thing seems kind of tailor-made for me. It also doesn’t hurt that they’ve got a sweet iPhone/iPod Touch app that makes it incredibly easy to keep up with the whole picture-a-day process.

That’s the other thing I like about it: It’s very much in keeping with some recent ideas I’ve had about not being so comfortable with letting my life slip into a muddle of undistinguished days. That, and the whole idea of doing something or making something every day is kind of nice, even if it’s just a bunch of goddamn pixels that whoever’s in charge of the Internet could accidentally erase.

So yes, I think you should sign up and get your Momentile on. It’s free, there’s little to no advertising, and it’s refreshingly free of social networking-type horse shit. These people had a great idea, and I support them unsolicited, and I think you should too.

Oh, and P.S. — As you’ll note in the right sidebar, there’s totally a Momentile plug-in/widget for WordPress! The hits just keep on coming, I tell you.

Among other things, the question I keep coming back to is “Where the fuck did they get these male models?” These guys look like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite, for cram sakes. At least the unrealistic double standards once at work in modeling now apply to both sexes, leaving us with a universal unrealistic standard.

It occurs to me that we’ve got all these damn photograph-type-things lying around and we’re not doing a thing with them. So! Here’s a picture of Trucky with a frog on him. Enjoy.

UPDATE:

This one here, the cute one? With the fuzz and the whatnot? This morning at 2:45 he decided the other two cats had suddenly become The Enemy, and would NOT STOP YOWLING AND GROWLING AT THEM FOR LIKE AN HOUR until I made the executive decision to put him in the bathroom and shut the goddamn door, thus isolating him from the (apparently perceived) threat of Gus and Smudge.

At 7:00 when I got up, I went to, how you say, “pee.” The bathroom door was locked. At first I thought it was stuck, but it was sure acting locked. The thing is, it’s just got a deadbolt in there — the house is 90 years old, and it’s the original door. Removing the doorknob was A) impossible, and B) wouldn’t have helped, probably. Thank the Earl of Gloucestershire that Erin was able to discover a glaring security problem with our bathroom window, climb inside, and beat the shit out of Trucky; I was thinking we’d have to call the fire department to do it for us.

She climbed out after that and shut the window. We know how to get in now, in case we ever need to beat the shit out of him again.

TURDS. ALL OF THEM. TURDS.

Well, let me tell you who was most enthusiastic about our yuletide flair: My Mother. My Mother has two Christmas trees; one is traditional-ish, it has those few surviving childhood ornaments, and some ribbon or something. The other one is totally tricked out with hundreds, nay, thousands of dollars worth of Hallmark keepsake ornaments, with a heavy focus on star athletes*, Star Trek–all incarnations, and Barbies.

Many years ago, my Mother decided that I was going to collect Barbies, so she started buying them for me. But then I got kinda thick into collecting Barbies. I even went to a show/convention kinda thing in Dallas once. It was off the chain, I saw this tubby woman arguing with a gay man in high and tight jeans (no belt) about a possibly apocryphal sighting of a Swirl Ponytail Francie.**

Well, after a while the Barbie collecting fizzled out and they’re now all in boxes at my Mom’s house, where, upon her death, they, along with all the other insane shit in my Mom’s house, will go up in a ball of flame when my sister and I torch the place Gilbert Grape style.

Now she just buys the Hallmark ornaments. Last Thursday I received a box of approximately 25 assorted Barbie Christmas tree ornaments. I have given four away to deserving souls. The rest, I hung on my goddam tree.

* My step-dad went through all the athlete ornaments and culled those who had been brought up on ‘roids charges. Their asses are fucking benched from the Christmas tree this year.
**Francie was only available with a bubble-flip.

Back during the halcyon days of our collective unemployment, the wife and I took a day trip to our fair city’s delightful Field Museum, taking in its exhibit on maps and a bunch of other fascinating crud they’ve got there. Here, a record of this trip.

On Monday of this week I was officially turned down for the job that I was kinda counting on getting. Not the south side job, this other place that I was freelancing for. That rejection set off a 3 day no showering binge that really put me over the top. So when I learned that we would soon both be unemployed, I figured it was time to step up. And what better way to do that then to dye my hair.

When I went to brush my hair, I found that the whole under part had matted into one of those semi-circular travel neck pillows. The brush was not at all penetrating this hedgerow on my head. I have officially reached the point in my depression that I am no longer concerned with taking care of myself. Just as I started to panic and reach for the deep cholesterol treatment, the whole mass gave and I knew I had to go for the vigorous brushing.

Don’t worry, it all turned out fine; there are no bald patches. It did force me to realize that I need to pull myself together. I’m not entirely sure what I need to do in order to scrape myself out of my chair.

Smudge’s Carmen Miranda costume is coming together nicely. Those tiny bananas are quite possibly the cutest fruit ever minted. Seriously, they’re really tiny bananas.

Here, more pictures of Henry. Don’t say I never do nuthin’ nice for you. Oh yeah, these are from his birthday, like a month ago. Look, I’ve had a lot going on. I don’t judge you, people.