The Israeli Formula

Last Christmas my brother Troy and I went to the mall by our house to look for Christmas presents. As we were walking around checking out the high school girls, we got stopped at one of those booths that they have for businesses that aren't going to last long enough to pay rent. This girl at the booth started telling us about all of these useless accessories that they make for cell phones. I probably wouldn't have listened to her, but she was so hot. She had dark hair and skin, and she had a hip style about her. She had this great accent, too. (We found out that she was from Israel.) Troy and I were totally hypnotized.
After flirting with her for about 20 minutes she convinced me to buy a microphone that clips on to the cell phone so that you can have it play over your car radio. A pretty handy thing, right? I bought three of them.
So this weekend my dad was in town visiting, and we had dinner at University Mall. My dad got stopped by a large breasted woman with pretty eyes at one of the booths. She had a pretty accent, so my dad asked where she was from. Israel. She convinced him to buy some nail care products even though he was embarrassed to be seen holding them. He bought three sets.
The moral of course is that if you have some product that can't sell itself based on its usefulness then all you have to do is put it in the hands of an Israeli girl and someone will buy it. You can at least count on the Casteels.

Bubble Boy

I drove to Colorado with my Dad. It takes a lot longer than when I drive myself, so I had a lot of time to kill. I blew my first bubble with bubble gum. There's not a story behind it, I'm just proud of myself.

Chinese Buffet

There's this restaurant in Lakewood (CO) called the Great Wall. It's a buffet with Chinese, Mongolian, and Japanese food. It's sick (and I don't mean that the way that the snowboarders say it). They have all kinds of exotic foods like crawfish and sushi and frog legs. I think food that exotic can't possibly be good if it's offered at all-you-can-eat quantities.
For some reason my dad and his wife think this place is great, so they go there every time there's a reason to go out. We went there for Father's Day. I pretended that I didn't mind even though I got sick the last time that we went there. I just ate the beef on-a-stick and the rolls. That was safe enough. I did put a crawdad in the urinal, though.
On a side note, Troy's fortune read, "Genius is nothing but an aptitude for patience." I think that makes him mildly retarded.

Snowmoboard

Thanksgiving report:

1. Ate dinner with Dad's in-laws. It's kind of weird to spend time with those people, not because they're weird, but just because I barely know them and we still act like we're family. The nice thing about your own family is that they love you despite the fact that they know you so well.
2. Bunked up at Snowbird with the Jackman's and the Dubois's. I have multiple surrogate families now. That's kind of neat. And these ones even know how big of a jerk I am, and they still like me.
3. The snow this weekend was so good. Based on the amount of snow that I had to dig my car out from under (literally: I used a shovel), I'd say we got about 3 feet over the weekend. Saturday while we were skiing it was snowing so much that we'd do a run and then by the time we got back to the top the same run had fresh powder again. I think that's what heaven's going to be like.

I think the best part about being a guy (besides peeing standing up) is fixin' stuff. Its especially nice that you don't actually have to know how things work to fix them.
So my dad's new wife (which is working out great, she's making the house not look like a dump anymore and keeping my dad in line) fried the microwave while cleaning it. That should be a lesson in and of itself. Anyway, my dad and I decide that we're gonna fix it, so we just start taking the thing apart. We don't know how microwaves work, or what's wrong with the thing, but we're just goin' for it. So we get the whole thing apart and we actually find the problem: the circuit on the keypad got fried and there's an open. So we (ingeniously) take fibers out of some wire layin' around and patch the open circuit, and it was working, except there were still some connections not complete, so we thought maybe the connecting cable back to the circuit board was messed, so my dad sanded the connectors to try and clean them, but it turns out that they were just made of a thin film of metal over plastic, so the sanding took the metal right off, and basically ruined the cable.
So, we can (kind of) fix things without knowing how they work, but we can kind of break things that way, too.

So, my dad gets married tomorrow. Whenever I tell people that he's
getting married, they get all nervous because they don't know if I'm
going to be happy about it or upset, but I'm happy. I went to a dinner
tonight with all of the various family involved, and I saw my uncles
that I haven't seen since I was like 8. Its weird meeting family that
you talk about all of the time but that you don't actually talk to.
I didn't know if I was supposed to hug them or give handshakes or just
throw a guy nod or two around. I opted for the handshake.

Well, I went to the new sister's wedding and reception yesterday. It was very nice (and everything's cool with my dad: we kinda have the same temperment, so even though we got mad for no good reason, we forgive eachother easy, too). Weddings are weird, man. It makes me feel kind of hopeful, but freaks the $#!% out of me, too. I think I'll get a dog so I don't ever have to get married.
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So, I went to class today. You'd think that'd be a good thing, right? Well, my almost-step-sister had a dinner tonight because she's getting married tomorrow. The dinner was at 7 and I got out of class at 6. So I call my dad when I get home from class to see how I'm supposed to dress for this thing and he gets all mad that I haven't left yet and makes this big deal about how I can't be late to this dinner, and I'm all like, well do you want me to come or what? and he just yelled about being late, so I hung up on him. So, I didn't go to the dinner.

So, my car won't run and I don't have any money to fix it and I have to somehow get it up to Ogden so my dad can help me with it. Also, I learned new things about girls today. There are two possible outcomes of me liking a girl. (A) If she's the kind of girl that lots of boys like then she'll never go out with me because she has so many better options. (B) If she's not overwhelmed with suitors, then she won't like me because I'm the kind of guy that would like a girl that is overwhelmed with suitors. Don't worry if that doesn't make any sense, because I don't get it either. Although, it seems like it makes sense to everyone but me. The point is, I suck.