The 2020 Do-it-Yourself New Year's Resolution Template

So many of you needed to use my DIY Christmas letter this year that it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if you’ve also failed to plan ahead for your New Year’s resolutions. Have no fear. I’ve got you covered, hopeless slackers.

Just choose one entry from each column to construct your new resolution. If you are super ambitious and want more than one resolution that you can abandon before the middle of January, just repeat the easy four-step process.

Now, get to it. There’s no time to lose.

COLUMN 1	COLUMN 2	COLUMN 3	COLUMN 4
Stop	cooking meth	after	running a 5K
Step up my	meditating	while posting about	crying uncontrollably
Keep	singing loudly	during	weightlifting
Envision	talking back	in the middle of	making love
Start	ignoring the pain	while livestreaming	disinfecting the hookah
Avoid	making painful small talk	prior to	vaping
Quit	drowning my sorrows	while filming strangers	dialing 911
Try	talking to the voices	before	working the crowd
Practice	increasing my swagger	while	sifting through the wreckage of my life
Effort toward	hot-tubbing	when I’m done	babbling hysterically
Continue	winking	while shouting at people	smoking hash
Work my way into	screaming	in addition to	buying burritos
Begin	making an impact	immediately before	running from the cops

There you go. Now get out there and make those resolutions stick. You got this!

No need to thank me, it’s just what I do.

Happy New Year!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

The Roar of the Antioxidants

I know what you did on Sunday night. No, not that. The other thing. Yes, on New Year’s Eve you declared to yourself and the rest of the party guests that you had a resolution. Some of you may have even remembered what it was the next morning.

This is the year you’re finally going to eat healthy.

You fool. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. Sure, healthy eating sounds great and all, until you really hear it. It made me deaf.

I was like you once. All full of New Year’s resolution, ready to kick those junk food habits and eat clean. It was going to be great. A few years ago on January 1^st I fired up my new healthy diet. And what’s healthier for breakfast than a fruit smoothie? Answer: nothing.

Bananas, apples, peaches, cherries, blueberries, strawberries, and even some spinach thrown in there. How could I go wrong? Just toss it all into my wife’s Vitamix blender and flip the switch.

Holy horsepower, Batman, this thing could blend a brick. And wow is it loud! I mean, I’ve made my fair share of margaritas over the years, but those old blenders never sounded like this. Even crushing ice with the “frappe” button when the Oster was switched to “high” wasn’t half as loud as this Vitamix just chopping up some fruit.

Sweet mother, I’m only at 7 on the 10 dial. What the hell does the “high” switch do? Oh, it makes the blender sound less like a NASCAR engine and more like one of the jets on a 737, that’s what.

Wow! This thing is insane. Our antioxidants are going 400 mph. I just made a fruit smoothie in 2.6 seconds. I love this blender!!

Turbo smoothies became a morning staple, and eating clean was going great until one night a few months ago my whole family started getting agitated and walking around the living room saying things like, “Where is it?”, “Who has it?”, and “Is it in the couch?” Everyone was annoyed but me, and I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about.

“What are you looking for?”

“The watch!”

“What watch?”

“You don’t hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“You’re joking, right?”

Now they were all staring at me incredulously instead of looking for some watch.

“You don’t hear the watch alarm going off in this room right now?”

“What watch alarm?”

“You have to be kidding.”

“Here it is,” said one of our boys, finding the offending digital watch under the corner of the couch. He held it up. “Hear it now?”

“Hear what?”

At this point they all can’t believe what they’re hearing (or more to the point, what I wasn’t), and I think they’ve all conspired against me in some half-assed and altogether idiotic plot to make me think I can’t hear anything. Then they handed me the watch. Holding it in my hand, I was still convinced I was being punked. But when I held it up to ear – literally pressed against my ear - I could finally hear the beeping. Faintly.

Hmm… that can’t be good.

A few weeks ago I took the boys to their annual check-up visit at the doctor. As part of the initial tests, the nurse put headphones on them and checked their hearing. All three boys laughed and told the nurse that I was the one he should be checking. He offered to check my hearing when he was done with them, so I put the headphones on and prepared to raise my hand when I heard the beep.

It was a long time before I ever raised my hand.

At one point, I stopped and told the guy I thought the headphones weren’t working. He assured me they were working fine. He knew they were because everyone else in the room could hear the beep coming from the headphones – located ON MY HEAD – and I still hadn’t raised my hand.

Apparently, as kids we are supposed to be able to hear sound frequencies between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. Your standard middle-aged man can hear between 20 and 16,000 Hz, and an old man should be able to hear between 20 and 8,000 Hz.

Normal conversation happens at 4000 Hz and below, which is good news, because I could hear the beeps below 4000 Hz. It’s above that where my problem lies. I seem to be just fine from 20 – 4000 Hz, but severely iffy between 4000 and 5000.

Above 5000 Hz I have the hearing of a grapefruit. Nada. Zip. I max out 11,000 Hz below my own age group, and old-timer grandpa can hear 3000 Hz more than me.

Drastic measures need to be taken. Hearing aids? Of course not! Hearing aids are for old people. I’m just going to stop using the Vitamix. Fruit smoothies have obviously destroyed my hearing, so fruit smoothies must go before I start hobbling around with a cane saying “Eh?” to everyone I meet.

Be careful what you wish for. Eating clean has been proven to be incredibly dangerous. That’s why this year my New Year’s resolution is to get back to my old habit of eating Oreos for breakfast. Oreos are silent. Oreos can’t damage your hearing. It’s science.

Happy New Year,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Mule Svelte

It’s the New Year, so roughly 99.9% of us are currently “trying” to lose weight. I put trying in quotes, because really about 15% of you are actually trying with an actual plan and a measurable amount of willpower, and the rest of us are just talking about how we’re going to lose weight, and then eating fudge-dipped brownies.

At some point here I’m going to have to put the fudge brownie down and actually do it, though, because unlike most of you “I’d like to be skinnier” people out there, I’m the one that has to ride a mule.

In June I am supposed to get on a mule and ride it down a crack in the wall of the Grand Canyon. If I am even an ounce over two hundred pounds fully dressed, with shoes and underwear and everything, presumably the mule’s legs will fail underneath it and we’ll both plummet to our deaths, and naturally, seconds later you’ll all be able to watch the footage on Twitter and Instagram.

I think the mule tour company is trying to avoid that kind of bad viral publicity, so they won’t let me even get on the mule if I’m not under two hundred pounds. I don’t think they’ll even let me talk to the mule.

If I can’t go, then my mother-in-law won’t go. If she won’t go, then my son can’t go. If my son can’t go, I will never hear the end of it from my wife, and if my mother-in-law won’t go, she might make me pay for it – both literally and figuratively.

Basically, I NEED to get below two hundred pounds.

I can’t really start losing weight in January, because I still have Christmas cookies in the freezer that I need to finish off. We had too many around the holidays, so I wisely froze the extras. And they’re next to the tamales from the various youth sports fundraisers that I purchased, so I’ll need to polish those off too. Then there’s the seasonal holiday beers left in the fridge. You can’t serve those in the spring, and they’re not going to drink themselves.

With the chips and seven-layer dip at the Superbowl party, the Valentine’s Day candy, and the tamales I couldn’t get through in January, February is pretty much shot as well.

So it will be March before I can really commit to eating healthy again. At that point I will only have three months to lose the weight, so I’ll have to get back to eating mule salads for lunch. Mule salad is simply a bowl of iceberg lettuce topped with despair. I can’t wait!

I was at a party a few weeks ago - drinking seasonal holiday beer and eating a giant ham sandwich - when one of my friends suggested I join their team for the Tough Mudder race this year. The race is being held in June, the weekend before we leave for the Grand Canyon trip, and I was seriously considering it as a motivational aid to lose the mule weight. I was seriously considering it right up until the next morning when the effects of the seasonal holiday beer wore off. Then I remembered that I had done the Tough Mudder once back in 2011, and I don’t like throwing up. So that’s out.

I have been out running a little bit over the holidays, just trying to offset as much of the cake and pie intake as I can, but after forty years old, running comes with a price. Let’s just say if there are any calories in Advil, then that’s really working against me.

Before Halloween – the official start to the holiday eating season – I was trying to get a jump on the mule weight. I had implemented the mule salad lunch routine and lost about fourteen pounds, along with most of my will to live. Around that time I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in over a year, and he told me I was looking svelte.

That’s when I knew I had more work to do. Svelte is one of those slightly complimentary terms. People use it as a sincere compliment, but no one ever uses the term “svelte” to describe someone in really great shape. Fitness models are not svelte. They are ripped. Svelte means, “Hey, you’re not as fat as you were the last time I saw you.”

Unfortunately, after this holiday eating season, I’d give my left roasted chestnut to still be svelte. I found a vast majority of that fourteen pounds I’d lost, so I’m pretty much back to square one. Or in this case, round one. Svelte has left the building and won’t be back until early May.

Maybe I should call the mule tour company and give them the recipe for mule salad. If they can start working on getting my mule a little more “svelte,” maybe come June we can work out some sort of mule/rider combined weight average deal.

Or maybe I should skip the chips and seven-layer dip this year.

Naw... let’s not start talking crazy!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Parental Guidance Suggested

My wife and I are experiencing some parenting challenges lately. Not the standard kind of challenges involving the kids being unruly, but the really annoying kind where we are finding out we just suck at parenting. We try to be good parents, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out.

Our recent problems have all involved movies and their ratings, however, so I think Hollywood might really be to blame.

It started a few months ago when we had a family movie night, and my wife found a copy of Gremlins buried deep in the stack of movies we had forgotten we owned. The case said it was rated PG, and it had been a really long time since either of us had seen it. Our recollections of the plot were the same; the gremlins are cute until you get them wet or feed them after midnight, then they multiply and/or turn naughty and cause harmless mischief.

I guess my wife and I had both blocked out the traumatic experiences of our youth when our parents accidentally let us watch Gremlins, too. We had forgotten that the “naughty” gremlins were a little more than naughty. They actually killed people. We had also forgotten that the mom killed four of them using a fireplace, a knife, a microwave, and a juicer.

We shut it off right after the juicer, but the damage was done. Two of the boys hid all their stuffed animals in the garage and had bad dreams for a week, and the third one spent that week begging us to let him watch the rest of the movie. One of our boys is a little off.

 

Fast forward a few months, and it appears we have not totally learned our lesson. I just finished reading The Hobbit to the boys, and Son Number Two just finished reading the first book in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Cool, we thought. We can get them The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies for Christmas. That was the extent of the planning. Three minutes later they were on order with Amazon Prime. They arrived two days later and were promptly hidden away until it was time to wrap them.

“Time to wrap these movies. Were these going to be from us or from Santa?”

“Let’s make them from Santa, since we need more stuff from him.”

“Cool.”

This is where we suck at parenting.

Did we read the box where it said PG-13?

No.

Are any of our boys thirteen?

No. One of them isn’t even half of thirteen yet.

They tore the movies open on Christmas day and were thrilled by Santa’s generosity and gift-giving skills.

“Can we watch them tonight?”

Hmm, we thought, finally reading the posted ratings on the movie cases and reliving the Gremlins catastrophe one more time in our heads.

“Mommy and Daddy will watch them first to make sure they’re OK.”

We started with the first Hobbit movie. Uh, this movie has orcs. There were no orcs in the book. Not only were there no orcs in the book, but there was certainly no giant white orc with a steel hook for a hand. Gollum was creepy enough on his own without adding scary-ass hobbit-eating creatures that weren’t even in the original story. The kids won’t sleep for a month if they see this.

We tried the first LOTR movie next. More orcs, more Gollum. Forget it.

“Well, boys, we watched the movies and they are a little too scary for you right now. We’ll have to wait a little while to watch them.”

Then the question we were dreading:

“Why would Santa bring us movies that you won’t let us watch?”

What I said:

“Well, I’m not quite sure, Son. I guess he just forgot to check with us.”

What I meant:

Well, Son, sometimes Santa is drunk with Amazon Prime free two-day shipping power and just isn’t thinking straight. Sometimes, after reading a book, Santa foolishly assumes that Hollywood will stick to the actual story instead of adding a bunch of stuff to make it much, much scarier. The bottom line is that sometimes Santa just doesn’t do his homework. I blame Mrs. Claus.

In a classic case of too little, too late, a few days after Christmas I stumbled on an internet article titled “PG Movies that Probably Shouldn’t be PG.” The list included classics like Jaws, Poltergeist, and Indiana Jones, and topping the list was Gremlins.

Well that’s just great. Where were you guys a few months ago?

Like I said, I blame Hollywood.

So this year, our New Year’s resolution is to not suck so much in the parental guidance department. We don’t expect any help from Hollywood, so we’re on our own. As with all of our previous resolutions, however, we’re not going to put any measurability into it, so we expect great success.

Happy New Year, everybody. See you at the movies.

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Resolutions, Part II

Traditionally, I have never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, but since my 2011 resolutions went so well, I was happy to start 2012 with some goals. I gave it a lot of thought over the holidays and finally decided on one main resolution: To get better educated.

There are a lot of areas in my life where I would like to become smarter and more well-rounded, so I plan to pick an area to focus on, give it laser-like attention until I know everything there is to know about it, then move on to another topic. Now, please don’t misunderstand. I am not looking to become the world’s foremost scholar on the Peloponnesian War, or to become a fountain of knowledge about fruit bats. I want to focus on useful things in my everyday life, where I already know enough to get by, but really should know more.

It was at a holiday party this year that the first subject in need of mastery became perfectly clear. Beer.

I have been drinking and enjoying beer for a long time now, and I considered myself to be very knowledgeable on the subject. That is, until someone at the party mentioned that they had just seen a TV show that had tackled the question of the differences between Porter and Stout. It turns out there is no major difference between the two. It’s really just a naming preference. I didn’t know that! Then we started wondering about Amber Ale versus Brown Ale, and if they might be the same thing also, and again, I had no idea.

Well, that was just unacceptable, so I am now going to become an expert on beer. I have always believed that the best way to learn about something is to go out and do it, not sit for hours reading about it. Why on earth would anyone want to read about beer, anyway? I think learning about beer should be done the old-fashioned way; by the pint. Off I went to the local specialty beverage shop and bought one bottle of each different style of beer they had to offer. Two-hundred and forty dollars later, I came home with a trunk full of beer. It turns out there are a LOT of different styles of beer! I haven't even started drinking yet, and I am already learning. To keep it all cool I had to completely remove almost everything my wife had foolishly stored in the top half of our refrigerator, like the milk and chicken breasts and cottage cheese, but I’m sure she won’t mind. I’m about to be much, much smarter.

I figure I should go from lightest to darkest, much like wine tasting, so I'm starting with a plain old American lager.  Mmmm. It was good.

Now on to a pilsner. Did you know that it's called pilsner because the style originated in the city of Pilzen, in the Czech Republic? I just read that on the back of the bottle. It's amazing the things you can learn if you take the time to read the labels. It's good too, and has a sharper, cleaner finish than the lager.

On to the ales, I'm starting with the lightest of the category, known as a blonde ale. It has a much different taste than the pilsner, leaving sweet and fruity hints lingering on my taste buds after each delicious sip. It's a medley of different complex favors, offsetting and contradicting the lager and pilsner with far less sharp carbonation. This beer has a slightly heavier feel than the lager, but a much smoother finish than either of the previous two delightfully different styles. This first ale went down really nicely. Yum-o!

Next up is a hefeweisen. The label says that hefeweisen is an unfiltered wheat beer, commonly served with a slice of lemon, and apparently, it is known as "Germany's breakfast beer." Those Germans are so lucky, man! They get to drink beer for breakfast! Maybe they drink it in the morning because it looks like milk. Man, this stuff is cloudy! It's pretty good, though. Sure doesn't taste like milk. Dang, I forgot the lemon slice. Oh, well.

On to the pale ale. Wooo-doggy! this is bitterer than that cloudy breakfast beer! I would not drink this for breakfast. This is much more of a steak and potatos beer. Potatoes? Why does potato have an e on the end when there's more than one? It should be potatoe. Good beer!

This one is an India pale ale. Was it brewed in India? IPA is all it says on the back and some long sentence about a river. I hope it's not river water. This sucker is even bitterer than the pale ale! Apparently it has to do with hops, from what I can read hear on the label's bottle. They must have had something go wrong with the bottle printer, because the words are pretty bluury. Who cares about the printing, though, because that beer was GREAT!

Oh, all right! We're at amber ale. This one was one of the reasons for me wanting to no more about beers. I should get the brown ale out two and drink them together alternatively. That way, I can figure out what the two is between the difference. Hang on.

jhdbfvjhdbh ..m  Whoops. I just knocked the keysboard off the desk. Sorry about that. Saved the beer thow. I couldn’t find the brown ale, so I braut back a Irish stout instead. I’ll just compair the amber stout with the Irishale. The Irish is pretty dark, but yummmy. The amber is dark and yummy to, but not as stout as the dark was.   when I mix them together they make a superdark superyummy superbeer.

Märzen is the next beer I’m drinkin. It has those funny dots over the a. You wood not believe how hard is it to find those dots on my keysboard. I think their called umlats.        thats a funny word.      Märzen is delicioso!

Doppelbock in the house!!!  This badboy has an alcohol comtent of 8 percent. Boccledop is strong!  Thatz way more then the other ones was. Whoooohooo, this is some goooooooooood Dobblepock.

Oatmeal stout is up next up… Is this another breakfas beer? Oatmeal wood be good right now. I’m gonna save this keep it for in the morning tomorow… I’m a lot beerer about smarts four shure now… fhsd;jkvnas’oi

(ZZZZZzzzzz)

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Resolutions

My wife had been after me all week to tell her what my New Year’s resolutions were, and apparently, “I don’t have any,” was not an acceptable answer, so I was forced to find some. I did some quick internet research and came up with a list of the most popular resolutions in America. Not wanting to appear like I was slacking off, I have adopted all of them. Bring it on, 2011!

Spend more time with family and friends
Since the only two things I do are work and hang out with my family and friends, the only way to accomplish this resolution was to quit my job. Done.

Go to the gym more
OK, let’s not start talking crazy. I modified this one slightly to fit my lifestyle. I resolved to drive past the gym at least twice a week. If I go the long way to 7-Eleven, I can go by the gym on my way to get my 94-oz soda. Baby steps, people!

Lose weight
I am all about this resolution. I have been keeping my eye on the new MacBook Air, and I think it’s time to pull the trigger on that bad boy. That should get rid of about five pounds compared to my old Dell.

Quit smoking
I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this one, and frankly, I really don’t understand why I need to. I mean, what’s better than ribs? Answer… nothing. Still, I guess I could rotisserie more chickens or something like that. I’ll have to think about this one some more.

Enjoy life more
Uh… hello? Didn’t they pay attention to the first one? I just quit my job. This one is kind of redundant, don’t you think?

Quit drinking
No problem there. This one requires no action on my part. I only drink beer, and everyone knows, beer doesn’t count. It’s more of a food group than a beverage, really. They can’t possibly mean beer, can they? I mean, what would I drink while I was smoking? Or rotisserie-ing?

Get out of debt
This one may be a little tricky, since I just quit my job, but I have at least resolved to stop taking payday loans to cover my gambling losses. That should help. I will, instead, borrow money from friends and relatives. That should cut down on my principal and interest payments significantly.

Learn a new language
I have actually been meaning to do this for quite a while, so this resolution thing should really be the boost I need. I am going to learn to speak Number Three. I am constantly having to ask Son Number One and Son Number Two what the heck Number Three just said. Everyone in our house can understand our youngest son, except me. My wife will really appreciate it when I finally crack the code! It should also really help him when he’s trying to tell me stuff like, “My head is stuck,” or “You’re sitting on me.”

Help others
This one sounded like a lot of work, and appears to involve talking to other people, so I decided to modify it slightly. I have resolved to give my sons 30% fewer smart-ass answers to their questions. That should help them learn more actual facts, and should satisfy this category.

Stick to a budget
Budgets have never really worked out for me, and since I am unemployed now, the idea just seems silly. I mean, how can I have a budget when I don’t have a paycheck? Hello! So, I have modified this one to be “Stick to a system.” Namely, my horse picking system at the track. I figure without any future paychecks, I will need to really buckle down and get serious at the track if I’m going to feed the family.

Find my soul mate
This one required some modification. For starters, since I already have a wife, finding my soul mate might involve a messy divorce. Plus, one of the main reasons I got married in the first place was so that I could stop dating. In light of these considerations, I have decided instead to find my soul mate of beer. My beer mate, if you will. Yes, that one perfect beer that compliments everything in my new and improved life. I don’t expect the search to be easy. On the contrary, I think this quest may take a lifetime, but I’m willing to put that kind of time in for such an important resolution.

Find a better job
Again… hello? I just quit my last job. Don’t they even pay attention to their own lists? I have found a better job; namely, no job. Duh!

Be less stressed
Let’s see, here... I’m an unemployed guy on a quest to find his beer mate. This one should not be a problem.


On second thought, when I presented this list to my wife, she looked a little stressed. That sometimes has a way of coming around to bite me, so the “Be less stressed” one might be a little more difficult than I thought.

She keeps muttering something that sounds like, “You quit your what?” and her face seems a little redder than normal. Maybe she should think about quitting her job and going on a quest to find her wine mate. I’ll suggest that to her. That might get me some extra points in the “Help others” category, too.

I can’t figure out why she seems so upset. After all, this was her idea.

See you soon,
-Smidge


Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen


Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?
Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!