Bruce was making a cake for his wife’s birthday. He’d secretly taken the day off, gotten up early, made a big pot of coffee, and was pulling the bag of flour out of the cupboard. The cookbook was propped open on the counter, and he carefully scooped a cup of flour into a measuring cup, dropped it into the bowl, and was digging out a second cup when the scoop bumped something hard. He stuck his fingers into the white powder and pulled out a big, fat diamond. Its facets shone in the low morning light streaming through the window over the sink.

Where the hell did this come from? Bruce furrowed his brow. He certainly wasn’t a rich man. A mid-level debt collections manager certainly lived comfortably, but not comfortably enough to buy a jewel of that size! She must be having an affair.

Slipping the diamond back into the flour while he thought, he continued making the cake. When his wife came into the kitchen with a big, shiny knife because she thought that the thumps in the kitchen were a clumsy burglar, her salty tears melted the icy glare that she’d worn.

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A man was stopped on the side of a road in the desert. He stood before his radiator, which belched great white clouds of steam into the dessicated air. An overheated lizard lay on its belly beneath the man’s car, pleased to find that its prayers for shade had been answered, although slightly perturbed at Reptilion, God of the Reptiles, for supplying a sweaty, swearing monkey along with the shade, but Reptilion must have his reasons.

The man kicked the car, accidentally casting dust over the lizard. The lizard smiled inwardly. Mmm, thanks Reptilion. That’s what the cranky monkey was for. A shade-cooled dust bath is just what I needed.

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Spent Christmas at the bed and breakfast that I mentioned in my previous post. We arrived a bit after seven on Christmas Eve and me, being the mastermind that I am, not only didn’t make reservations but also didn’t check to see if any restaurants were open. Luckily we not only found an open restaurant but they

• were open
• had several tables available
• were in walking distance and had a good beer selection
• were shockingly good

All in all, I feel like this experience validated my shitty planning skills.

On Christmas Day, which is also my wife’s birthday, we had an excellent breakfast and then farted around watching HGTV (I never want to see someone with a $500k budget for a vacation house complain about money ever again) and TLC (some sort of wedding dress shopping show). We intended to go see a movie that evening, but I’m brilliant and ALSO DIDN’T PRINT OUT A MAP TO THE THEATER. We ended up having a brief recap of our days living in the Northwest suburbs. We drove around on snowy streets and almost got rammed by tiny dicks steering big cars. We ended the evening by stopping at a 7-11 and getting some snacks to go along with our Christmas chocolates and wine.

Unfortunately, the big old house wasn’t haunted by anything other than some critter that skibbled through the ceilings in the middle of the night, but I did accidentally take a ghost picture of myself.

My ass is a ghost and it's haunting my ass

Tomorrow is Christmas and so I don’t feel like it will be a good day to give a Moral Example. If you’ve been bad, Santa and his CCT (Closed Circuit Telepathy) know it so there isn’t much to be done. Maybe next year if you actually use these Moral Examples as a guide to your behavior, you’ll get that set of Fondue forks that you’ve always wanted. Next year.

My wife and I are dodging the entire Christmas bullet and spending her birthday at a bed & breakfast. I have a pile of Christmas chocolates and she has a few bottles of wine. We each bring something to the table. I don’t believe the B&B has an internet connection available and I definitely don’t have a laptop. The plus side of not having an internet connection is that I’ll be able to catch up on some reading. I’m partways into Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and Travis got me a copy of the Dragonlance Annotated Legends. I’m looking forward to it because I understand that there is very little Tanis involved.

Happy Holidays!

Erwin was a peasant, just barely a man by modern standards but he’d been mucking slop across the fields for over a decade, though his scruffy beard put him more towards the death-and-tribute-to-his-lord end of the spectrum. One fine spring day, when the air was still cold but the ground had already thawed, Erwin was clearing stones out of a field that the family would be farming this year. After jamming a pry bar underneath it, he grabbed it to steady himself. It felt hot to the touch.

A great bellow came from the sun. Or rather, from the fuzzy blobs of purple in his vision where the sun had overloaded his eyes. A large shape emerged out of the blobs, all wings and talons and scales, descending out of the sky and landing with a sticky thud into the boot-high muck. The impact had buried it up to its scaly knees.

“How dare you sully the egg of a dragon!” it announced.

Erwin mumbled.

“Speak clearly when addressing a dragon!” the dragon boomed.

“Are-you-gonna-eat-me?” Erwin asked, louder this time. “I’m-good-at-working-I’m-the-only-one-who-works-these-fields-please-don’t-eat-me.”

The dragon appeared to consider this. “I will not eat you at the moment. But tell the peasants that a dragon has laid its egg in this field, and that any caught here will be eaten in their sleep and digested as they awake. And you, sir, who have already infracted, owe me. Meet me here tonight at twilight.”

Erwin trudged back to his hovel. His mother was stirring pottage over the fire, a thick boiled mixture of both food and things that looked like food after they’d been boiled for six hours.

“Ma, a dragon says not to use the west field.”

“Okay,” Erwin’s Ma said. She stirred the pottage. “Pa ain’t going to be happy,” she said.

“Pa can suck an egg,” Erwin said.

“What can I suck?” said Pa, emerging from the shadows where he’d been crouching.

“An egg, Pa. Out in the west field. A big old dragon egg. Or you could’ve, until the dragon came around. It’s probably watching the egg now.”

“Convenient!” Pa roared, and hid back in the shadows. He had always thought that he was a vampire, or at least that was the reason he gave for never going out to work the fields.

Erwin went out into the west field at twilight after he had a bowl of brown pottage the same color and consistency of the field that he’d been working. The dragon came to light upon a boulder that Erwin hadn’t yet moved.

“I told them,” Erwin said.

“Did you bring any food?” the dragon asked.

“No. We haven’t had any meat but a little salt bacon, and that’s long gone.”

“But do you have…pottage? I can smell it on your breath.”

“Sure,” Erwin said.

“May I have some?”

“Okay,” Erwin said. He led the dragon back to the hovel. The dragon couldn’t fit inside, so it made do by sticking its head through the door.

“May I have a bowl of pottage?” it asked Ma.

“Of course you may not!” Pa shouted, leaping from the shadows and throwing a length of thick rope around the dragon’s neck. “Laying eggs in my field! A field that Erwin’s gotta work! I’ll kill you!”

The dragon bit Pa right through the middle.

“Ha!” announced Pa, “I’m a vampire! Your teeth can’t hurt me!”

“But I am an old dragon, and I have wooden teeth!”

“Shite!” bellowed Pa, before disappearing into a wisp of oily smoke that smelled of black peppercorns and lemon zest.

Ma served a bowl of pottage to the dragon, who ate it, bowl and all.

“And it is because of those wooden teeth that I cannot eat meat. That and my sworn vegetarianism. Thank you for the pottage.”

The Moral: Always keep your house clear of any vampires in case you don’t have any pottage with which to placate a dragon.

John Paul Peters lived in a hermit villa on the side of a mountain. He was a hermit, but he wasn’t an ascetic – the word villa should clue the Dear Reader into the living conditions that John Paul Peters enjoyed. His bathroom alone cost more than buying a dozen votes on a municipal council. Refrigerated sconces held duck fat candles that were in a constant balance between melting and congealing. Tigers dressed in golden capes with platinum-plated teeth roamed through a paddock that wrapped around his villa, helping to keep John Paul Peters a hermit.

One day, his doorbell rang. Most hermits don’t bother with doorbells since they’re about as useful to a hermit as a book is to a bigot, but John Paul Peters needed another place to spend money so he installed the system. The ringer was an egg-sized ruby. John Paul Peters walked to the door, a gold-plated shovel in his hand to scrape whatever the tiger’s hadn’t eaten off of his porch (platinum-plated teeth caused gum irritation and made the tigers cranky).

A massive man stood on the porch, with a hefty backpack slung across his back. He looked whole – no tiger-sized chunks were missing.

John Paul Peters opened the door a crack and glared out of the slit. He hadn’t taken any vow of poverty, but he had taken one of silence.

“Sir! Is the lady of the house at home?” the big man asked, his voice booming. No human speech had been issued in or around the villa in two decades. No radio stations or TV stations broadcast this far into the mountains. Not that it mattered, because John Paul Peters owned no TV and no radio. He didn’t have a single piece of electronics in his entire house, save for the little robot that automatically vacuumed the massive hallways. He hadn’t seen it in weeks, but that wasn’t unusual considering the size of the villa. Occasionally in his evening strolls through the marbled hallways, there would be the faint echos of it bumping into a wrought iron table.

John Paul Peters opened the door slightly more, so that the man could see him shake his head no.

“Then may I speak with you?”

John Paul Peters shook his head.

“Before you say no,” the man said, unslinging his pack, “let me show you some of the wonderful vacuum cleaners produced by the We-Don’t-Blow Eletric Motor Company!”

John Paul Peters understood why this mountain of a man had gotten the job. His pack was a triple-reinforced lattice of steel cable and heavy canvas, designed to hold what looked to be hundreds of pounds of vacuum cleaner. He unpacked three, and laid them on the porch.

“This one is a wonderful model, its motor is one of the-”

The man never finished that sentence. Or any other sentence, for that matter. John Paul Peters heard the crash of breaking glass moments before an enormous and priceless vase from one of the upper bedrooms fell and pulverized the salesman’s head. He also heard a faint whir.

The Moral: robotics laboratories are more dangerous than tiger paddocks.