It’s not too late

  • by Drew

I’m still accepting Christmas donations to the annual Gifts for Drew fund. High-end electronics, Sferra sheets, restaurant gift certificates…any big ticket items will do.

Just kidding. I have everything I could want. Seriously. Sometimes with that third kid you start thinking you have even more than you deserve…or want…or can handle. But baskets in front of orphanages is so 20th century, I guess we’ll just stick with what we’ve got.

Christmas was lovely, full of surprises for all of us. So, delighted kids, delighted spouse, delighted me. It has been an all around lovely holiday season.

Still…I am so glad the kids are back in school today!

Happy New Year

  • by Drew

Happy Happy Joy Joy. Ren and Stimpy has made a recent reappearance on TV and my kids are now watching the show I was watching in college. I remember when Billy West spoke at UMass in the early 90s and he had a standing room audience. I had a ball making a PSA cart for good old WAMH announcing the event. All my life’s a circle indeed.

I can even whip out my Christmas with Ren and Stimpy CD from back in the day. Or maybe I’ll wait until I have grand kids – you know it will come around again. Twice by then. Of course, by then CDs will be long dead, I’m sure. All the standard media will be gone – discs of all sorts, usb drives, even mass printed paper I bet. By the time my grand kids are wandering about I’m sure they’ll just get the personal bar code on their wrist scanned, payment will be deducted from their bank balance, and the media will be uploaded directly into their cranial storage drive.

Then again, bar codes? We’ll be way beyond black and white parallel lines by then I’m certain.

But I’m not here to talk about Ren and Stimpy or the holidays or being the Production guy for WAMH in the early to mid 90s. I’m here to talk about food shopping on New Year’s Eve. Yup. That’s my topic. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

I was at Shop-Rite picking up a couple of last minute treats on Friday morning (New Year’s Eve). As I left the store with my frozen cheese bites and avocados (the wife makes a mean guacamole) there was a family entering. It was a large family. Both in terms of size and density. There were many of them and they were all large. As they entered, one woman read the announcement by the door that said the store would close at 10pm. At the time it was about 9:30am…just for context.

So I listened to the ensuing discussion and pieced together the complaint of this family. They were here to purchase treats for their New Year’s festivities, which was fine. Their consternation came from the fact they did not feel they had adequate storage to purchase enough food and drink, and were planning to come back closer to midnight to lay in supplies for the duration of their partying – surely to last well into the morning. The thing was, they were concerned that they would have to come as earlyas 10pm for their last call of snack and bev.

This is not a big-people-eat-a-lot point. It’s the holidays – we all eat a lot. The only reason I mention the size of the family members is that they must have a homestead of reasonable size to accommodate 8 large people. But…not enough food and or beer? I mean, it was cold out. Let Mother Nature chill your Bud Lite for a couple hours. How much do you plan to consume between 10pm and 1 am that you are upset the store will be closed? I mean…damn.

Finishing

  • by Drew

I’m working on my basement…finishing it if you will. I want to get some walls up so I can hang stuff on them. I also want to get some flooring down so the baby can walk down there. I mean, she can walk down there now, but there’s something so unwholesome about raw concrete…I don’t know. A lady needs tile and throw rugs when she’s toddling, don’t you think.

I’m making good progress, but I have one ridiculously huge challenge I am actually losing sleep over. There are four support columns in my basement. You know, those metal poles that are full of concrete that hold up the center beam of your house? I don’t know what to do with these things.

I don’t want to paint them. They were painted in our old house, but they have this awful tendency to rust up under the paint and sort of grow tumors. Apparently you can treat the metal with vinegar or something, but I really don’t think the douche and paint approach is for me.

There are some products out there to sort of wrap the poles, but before I could buy them at a ridiculous $40 a pop (not including top and bottom trim work) they just jacked the price to almost $80 a pop. Screw that.

I could spend about $20 each in materials to build square columns around them, but I was hoping to avoid creating corners. My boys…well, adding 16 sharp corners to the basement is a sure recipe for an Emergency Room visit.

I’ve thought of all kinds of weird stuff like coiled rope or glass mosaic tile or some sort of textured not-exactly-paint-finish I came across…I don’t know. Too much time and effort and expense for any of these options. I’m at a loss. Ultimately I will have to end up building some weird ass thing to cover this, but really – why hasn’t someone come up with an affordable solution for this nonsense?

And just in case you were speed reading this entry, or not really paying attention acouple paragraphs ago, I have to say I think calling a vinegar treatment on the metal columns the “douche and paint approach” was flippin’ hilarious.

Santa 2.0

  • by Drew

You know the Santa I took the kids to see, the one I was just telling youabout? He had all the cool gadgets. He was really running an elf free shop. Is this just a sign of a new, improved, more tech-saavy Santa? Or is it just another layer of impact caused by the current recession? I don’t know, but if unemployment lines are clogged with elves, I guess we’ll have to start pointing fingers somewhere.

Maybe the television newsmedia can help us identify the villian…or grinch…in this situation. Surely the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of the Internet. After all, TV douche bags have been demonizing the Internet for more than a decade.

Quote the Lauer (in my little fantasy here): Santa’s elf ranks are depleted…but why? Could it be the proliferation of online offers with free shipping? Could it be the incredible attraction of shopping for gifst without smelling, hearing, or being bumped into by all of fleshy humanity? Is it the fact that there are Amazon grill tools and Redenvelope.com cuff links and customized Dell laptops only a click away?

Maybe I’m stretching here.

Belief

  • by Drew

Did I tell you about the Santa we visited this year? He was in this really dead strip mall in Poughkeepsie. His North Pole setup inhabited a Hallmark store that recently went out of business. He had a few decorations and wrapped cartons to make it feel sort of festive. And he was a one man shop – pretty cool actually. He had his digital camera all set up on a tripod, and he triggered it with a remote. When we paid, he swiped our credit card through an attachment on his iPhone. Santa has all the coolest new gadgets.

He was a good looking Santa too. No hat, but real hair and real beard and all around very convincing look. And he spent a lot of time talking to the kids, chatting with them, telling them to behave and such. He wasn’t a real “Ho HO HO” sort of Santa. He was way more mellow.

Waaaaay more mellow in fact. I mean, no freak vibes, and probably not running a hydroponics setup in the back room or anything, but if you told me Santa hit the chronic before starting his day at the satellite Poughkeepsie office of North Pole, Inc. I would totally believe.

Airing it out

  • by Drew

Lately my little girl has been all over the place with her clothes. She peels off her jeans and jeggers and leggings and diaper and runs around. At other times, however, she starts grabbing extra shirts and pulling them on. Sometimes she’ll run around with four or five shirts (and occasionally sans pants). With all those layers she gets puffed up and looks like some chubby dude trying to remove belly fat with an astro-suit or something. It’s nutty, but it is definitely cute.

By the way, speaking of random exercise, I just saw a Total Gym commercial and I have two observations. First, Christie Brinkley looks fantastic. Second, Chuck Norris looks freaky. He has had so much plastic surgery, he doesn’t blink. Seriously, check him out if you get a chance. Chuck Norris never blinks.

Eeeek.

Parade

  • by Drew

Speaking of holiday spirit, this past weekend we went to the Sinterklaas parade. It’s a Dutch thing, and a really big deal in Rhinebeck. And you know, it is a load of fun. The only drag is the schmucks from Manhattan that come up for the weekend. They crowd the streets with their stinky cigars and their froo-froo mini-dogs, their fur hats and giant boots. Now I know and love a lot of people from Manhattan. It’s certainly not a Manhattan trait. It’s an unfortunate trait shared by a handful of middle aged people who happen to own weekend homes in our area. With their scrupulously detailed Land Rovers, zuo furniture and soy milk. 

The problem is that several of these people have no problem stepping right in front of little kids so they can take iPhone pictures and videos of every single puppet or costumed grumpus in the parade. It’s a shame, because it is a parade for kids and you’d think the adults could at least step back and look over the heads of the children rather than pushing the kids back and standing in front.

Maybe it’s just me.

Joy Joy Joy Joy Down in My Heart

  • by Drew

Down in my heart indeed. The season is upon us, and the American consumer is full of its spirit. Try shopping…anywhere at anytime for anything. You’ll encounter the true spirit of the holiday season in the hearts, souls and actions of your fellow citizens. Enjoy jousting for parking spots. Thrill to the race to the next open cashier. And if you’re lucky like me maybe you’ll encounter one of those particularly delightful souls who wants to browse the spot where you’re standing with your three kids.

It happened to me the other day. It seemed that wherever I went there was this one chunky woman who wanted to be shopping where I was. Modern office furniture, cheese popcorn, action figures…it didn’t matter. It was like she was following us. And every time she did the same thing: she pointed her cart at us and waited with a nasty expression. Talk about passive aggressive. And its only just beginning.

Damn.

Spotty II

  • by Drew

I’m all spotty again. Maybe not as bad as last Summer, but man, I’ve got freaking spots all over me. I look like I need a full body acne treatment, but it ain’t no acne kids. When I had a killer upper respiratory infection a couple weeks ago I went to urgent care and the doctor was flabbergasted. He was an older Asian man with a fairly rich accent and he repeated several times that I should go to a skin doctor. It kind of made me laugh. Partly because he never said dermatologist, but mostly because he kept saying “you need go skin doctor!” rather forcefully. It was kind of funny.

Big Furry American Cars

  • by Drew

I took the kids to the Mall to do a little shopping for Christmas. We were looking for something for their Mom. While we were there we saw one of the great creatures of the holidays, out of her cave for some shopping. She was around 70, draped in fur, desperate for a weight loss affiliate program, and she cut us on line. Yup. I was the guy with a cart, two boys and a baby in my arms, but she needed to get in front of us and our 2 items with her cart full of crap. And out in he parking lot? She was driving a Hummer. A Hummer. Seriously. What 70 year old needs a Hummer? Of course, the fur overcoat was pretty unnecessary too. It’s kind of sad, really. No matter what she spends on coats and cars, she’s still one sad, ugly, old broad.

© 2026 Drew Bancroft. All rights reserved. Totally.