Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

"I gotta show you something," Dad said, and got up from the sofa so disappeared from the camera. My mom was left looking boggled; she didn't know what he was doing. There didn't seem to be anything in the conversation -- about them decorating their house for Christmas, I think -- to hint even to her what he was thinking of.

He came back quickly, with a big white fuzzy teddy bear. The bear was wearing a blue knitted scarf and something I couldn't quite see on his forehead that might have been ski goggles or earmuffs. Dad was waving a white fuzzy paw at me. It was the cutest damn thing.

He explained about how he saw it in the window of the local secondhand store a few times, and that the bear was asking my dad to bring him home, so one day he just went and bought it. He said it didn't cost much.

"I'm trying to think of a name for him," Dad said. "I'm calling him Bob for now but that isn't quite right." Mom asked if I had an idea for a name, and honestly my mind had immediately gone to Bernard but I think that'd be too fancy for them. Dad mentioned Frank which I like a lot; reminds me of my old pal from a volunteering group who's retired even from that now; a lovely old blind guy called Frank with a guide dog called Ronnie.

Frank, or whatever he's going to be called, lies on what I think of as the guest bed but my parents call "my" bed because they think the guest room is my room. (For a long time, my mom was calling the basically-theoretical bedroom in the as-yet-unfinished basement "Chris's room" which...makes my head hurt just to think about. I think now that the basement is finished it's being called just "the bedroom downstairs," which is a vast improvement.) "Your dad had been wanting to get a bear for your bed for a while," Mom said, which again is a strange sentence.

But Frank is lovely. Even when Dad put him back, his black quarter-zip was covered in fuzz from the bear. It was very cute. It's really heartening that he continues, in his dad way, to just get Ideas in his head and do these little whimsical things that my mom can only humor him in; it's one of the few things my parents don't share.

A transgym friend has shared this most delightful link in the groupchat and we all told each other what animals we can move with different exercises.

D is chest pressing a mature wombat! G can leg press a fledging Pacific walrus and chest press a female emperor penguin! I am chest pressing a Spotted Serengeti Hyena and my shoulder press is a Young Male Puma! F can lift a Svelte Wilderbeast with his legs!

I love this, it's so whimsical -- it's not about lifting a goose or a horse or any "normal" everyday animals and the specifics are adorable: a fledgling walrus, a female penguin, a mature wombat!

And it's a fun way to share without anyone knowing exactly what numbers anyone else is talking about which makes it so much more safe and accessible and not about gainz or orthorexia or whatever other failure modes we regular gym-goers are prone to.

And it's not as if it's without aspiration! I was told "Keep it up and soon you'll be picking up a Desert Bighorn Ewe and putting it down with authority"!

My parents showed me a picture of their new garden gnomes. They found one playing the drums first and got it, and then my mom found these others to make the rest of the gnome band.

My dad pointed to each one and told me, "Bucky the drummer, and the singer is his brother Benny, and then there's their friend Dwight." He's so funny, such a quiet guy but he comes up with these goofy things sometimes. Mom was mocking him for this. He just went along, telling me the names of "all my gnomes in the backyard, Paul and Tessa together. And I can't remember what the other two names are..."

I didn't know they had any gnomes, and it turns out they have a whole crowd now! With names!

Today for work, I saw someone spell fisticuffs as "fisty cuffs" and a) that is adorable and b) it also makes me realize what a strange word fisticuffs is!

So naturally I looked it up.

c. 1600, fisty cuffes, from fist (n.) + cuff (n.) "a blow", with the form perhaps in imitation of handiwork.

Well! That's such a boring etymology, but... nice to see the spelling returned to something more like the original!

I said this on fedi and a friend's response has been delighting me ever since:

I always misread it as fishticuffs, so always had an image in my head of some kind of betta fish boxing, complete with gloves over fins

That made me giggle. They're an artist so I asked if they would draw this some time. I am wondering how a fish gets boxing gloves on its fins...

I need a desk fan for the room I work in. V is kind enough to use their skills in online shopping for me, and ordered one the other day to arrive today.

So this afternoon they said "Oh, Erik, I think your fan is on the way," and I presume they got a text about it or whatever.

But a visiting friend heard this, no context, and said she thought they meant, like, an admirer of mine.

It'd be so funny if someone came around just because they liked me.

Meanwhile, I'm so unbelievably tempted to write "A fan of Erik" on the fan. It's in a room full of sharpies. I could so easily do this.

I know that D has been reading an internet thread that includes references to "The Cask of Amantillado," so I wasn't that surprised when, as we ate our lunches in companionable quiet, he asked me all of a sudden "What would get you bricked up in a cellar?"

I was like, "My entire personality?"

He had to explain that he meant like what would lure me in there. I was thinking "What about me would make someone want to brick me up in their cellar."

"Oh, lots of things," I said matter-of-factly. Like there's no suspense about this.

The first thing that came to mind is "I have a stack of boxes of all the Lego NASA stuff and you can have them all if you get them out of the basement," like that'd do it. (You can open the payload doors on the space shuttle and there's stuff inside!)

Just that and the ISS and the Saturn V would be enough probably. I'm a simple man.

I'm also a ball of want, I want so many things.

D is like "You know you can just buy the Lego ISS, right."

Around the last mouthful of my food I replied indignantly "Fortunato coulda just bought the amantillado!"

Anyway apparently you can't even buy the Lego Discovery any more. Aww. See, I'd have to just get it from someone's basement! (D helpfully pointed out that Artemis is just a click away.)

I asked my fedi friends this question and I'm so happy I am surrounded by my people.

• my firend who's obsessed with laserdiscs and wants to start a laserdisc museum says "if someone said anything related to laserdiscs and all 'hey i got some cool laserdiscs in the basement yeah keep going back', i am so there. doesn't even have to be 'here's a rare laserdisc' it's just 'hey would you like to see my very common laserdisc' i'd be all YEAH LET'S GO!"
• "oh no, that one would catch me, too. Lego of any kind with 'you can look through it and put it together' would get me, honestly"
• "Listen, I'd do it if they said there was food down there. Like not even fancy food."
• "i think 'do you want to see my cool cellar' might work on me"
• "rocks, plants, weird collections of stuff, a problem to be solved, black raspberries… I feel like it’s a long list and I’m surprised I haven’t been trapped in a wall yet"

Literally did the Distracted Boyfriend meme this morning. The glaring girlfriend was D trying to tell me how electricity generators work, and the girl I was distracted by was a HUGE cactus just on the side of the road

It was much taller than me, looked like it had lots of fingers growing up out of the ground, I wanted to touch it so bad but I didn't know how prickly it was.

D of course didn't notice this at the time but, when he found out about it, said if we see another one he'll tell me if its too prickly to touch. Aww now that is good accessibility support.

Gary has never really had a "birthday," I have no idea when he was born, so the last couple years we've sorta defaulted to Wolfenoot as a day to spoil him in a similar fashion, it's cute.

Of course he's so spoiled now in his old age anyway that it's not easy to do so more than a normal day, ha.

Wolfenoot can be celebrated by eating meat and/or food shaped like the moon, by being extra kind to dogs, by donating to wolf conservation efforts and/or by howling at the moon tonight.

I had a pizza, which is round like the moon. And this is the one time we get the popcorn chicken for Gary and he doesn't even have to wait until we're done eating to get it, as he usually does (he does still have to share it (he'll have had like one bit, with the coating removed tonight and similar for the next few days), but he loves nothing more than sharing food with his humans so that's part of the treat!).

As a remote-working team, mine likes to have a quick catch-up every morning. Today me and one other person were the only ones who joined it. And I can have good chats with everyone I work with, but this may be my favorite teammate.

A fact illustrated by the first thing she said: "I did have a non-work question for you. Do you know about teenage mutant...." and before she finished the questions I said "I LOVED Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a kid."

Delightful silly conversation ensues.

When I was tidying up my open browser tabs later in the day, I was very amused to find that I still had the Wikipedia page for Raphael brackets ninja turtle there. I'd started by trying to search the details of a movie I saw the trailer for when we went to see Barbie (ah yes, the two genders of my 80s childhood) and I ended up on this Wikipedia page reading out

The origin of Raphael's anger is not always fully explored, but in some incarnations appears to stem partly from the realization that they are the only creatures of their kind and ultimately alone, while also bothered by the injustice the helpless and innocent suffer.

Lots going on there!

The rest of our conversation was silly and giggly as we tend to be -- there's a costume party, the change of the couples costume idea by the friend she's going with who's worried that being a sheet ghost might have made her look too much like a KKK member on a bus (in Cambridgeshire...) and the resultant accidentally-sexy ninja turtle costumes... It was a much better start to the work day than I was expecting.

Most of my sponsored ads on Facebook lately are for surveys.

Sometimes they're, like "tell us how worried you are about your pension, old person!" but if they are at all relevant to me I do them. I told car people that I'm not going to buy an electric car. I told bike people that I don't know or care about brands of bike stuff. I told "men's beauty" people yesterday that I like to smell good and that diversity is important in representing masculinity. I've got one academic research survey waiting for me about anxiety/stress symptomology and sleep health and another on "Cognitive Processing of Stressful Life Events in Individuals Having Migrated to the UK."

I love surveys. I do policy and I'm interested about the kind of information people want to collect.

So a week or so ago I got asked to do a "big pet census" by a pet charity called Blue Cross.

I just wanted to tell you that it has some of the most charming questions.

Does your dog(s) 'smile'?

Mine absolutely does.

How often do you talk about your dog(s)?

It made me laugh that the first option is "Every hour." I will always think of D's sister, when he and I joined them all for a family get-together, marveling at how much D and I talked about Gary when he wasn't even there. Well, that's partly why! We missed him! She's used to D's other sister, who has dogs but never talks about them. I've met them repeatedly and couldn't discern their personalities or anything to distinguish the three of them from each other. They're a status symbol for their owner. So very different to how we relate to Gary!

What makes you laugh the most about your dog(s)?

I've been thinking about this ever since. I think it's his cuteness, but it's difficult to describe exactly how or why that makes me laugh. It's related to the Dogs Are So Good feelings/moments. I wonder if it might be related to cute aggression?

How long would you have to be away from your dog(s) before you really start to miss them?

They know me so well! The first option was "A few minutes."

Do you have a social media account for your dog(s)?

Not any more! Though he does have a hashtag on Mastodon, but that's better anyway: all three of us can and do easily contribute that way.

How many pictures do you take of your dog(s) each month on average?

I just guessed but this would be such an embarrassingly large number.

Do you talk to your dog(s)?

Do people not?! Sometimes I can tell who's awake/where people are in the house just by hearing them talk to the dog.

How often do you wonder what your dog is thinking about?

Not only do we wonder about this, we regularly talk about wondering about it. I've been known to call him "Gary the Wonder What's Up With You Dog.

If you could ask your dog(s) anything what would it be?

I was totally stumped by this.

What is your dog's favourite word?

Well now the question I want to ask him is what his favorite word is!

What is your favourite physical feature of your dog(s)?

This one I just wanted to share because of the lovely options:

• Their soft fur
• Their expressive eyes
• Their wagging tail
• Their cute nose
• Their playful ears

I was really torn here because all of these things are great ("his expressive eye" in his case, but it is very expressive!) but I had to go with his "playful ears".