Norm MacDonald is awesome...

Listening to Norm MacDonald is one of life's simple, yet very funny pleasures. I'm sitting in my Juab County house right now at 3 AM, enjoying the not so great side effects of jet-lag. Like being wide-awake at 3 AM.

To back up: I am in Utah for a few days by myself while Agi hangs back in Budapest giving the kids a few more days of 1-parent living before handing them off to the grandparents. I have some winter corporate training to do with my job, followed up by an executive Christmas party over the weekend. Agi is joining me for that. As this is our first invite to this particular party, we get to look forward to a hazing of Christmas karaoke in front of a hooting audience of my peers up at the Sundance ski resort. Yeehaw! I'm sure Agi is thrilled at participating in this once in a lifetime special occasion... :-)

Back to jet-lag. And Norm. I crawled back to the house last night, took one look at the mess I've made in unpacking, and fell asleep at 6 PM, Just woke up. I have 4 hours to kill before heading back up I15 to my office, so I had a couple of choices--either clean the house at 3AM, or finally get around to doing another blog-entry. Guess which one won out... I do need to get to the cleaning though. The house currently looks like Jed Clampett's, what with my wet laundry hanging out to dry all over every available chair, light fixture, and table. Typical me. I went out and bought a washer and dryer set for the house last summer without checking on the type I needed to buy. Now I have an electric dryer gather dust in the garage while the GAS DRYER stub pokes out of the wall, all useless and alone. Of course to save money I bought the thing via classified ad. Good luck getting my money back on that one. Anyone need a good electric dryer?

I digress. Where was I? Flight, jet lag, dirty laundry, Clampett, blog, radio, oh yeah--Dennis Miller & Norm MacDonald.

I've become quite enamored of the Dennis Miller radio show, which cranked up over the summer. He is an absolutely underrated talent, someone I've enjoyed listening to since his weekend update days at SNL. HIs brand of conservative-libertarianism is probably closest to my own political leanings. Anf he's hysterical funny. And brings on guests like Norm and Dana Carvey.

Norm is my favorite comedian. I just love the dry pithy sense of humor. If I was a coffee drinker I would have spit it out my nose at this last joke he kicked out a couple minutes ago:

"Ted Kennedy recently received an 8 million dollar advance to pen his memoirs. When asked if he would cover Chappaquidick, he indicated--'I'll crash off that bridge when I come to it'".

Somebody give this guy a TV show.

I had a great weekend! As is my yearly tradition now, I spend my birthday alone in Utah, thanks to the vagaries of my corporate travel schedule. IT always seems to be right at this time of the year. This year I decided would be different--since my bro Jared's birthday is almost one month a way from mine, I thought it would be cool if he came to SLC and we'd party hard over the weekend. And by "party hard" I mean PARTY HARD! AS IN 'HARD-CORE!" Like, watch BYU lose to MSU in the Energy Solutions Arena! Crash a Walmart at 3 AM looking for socks and Hanna Montana DVD's! Trash the after-party at the Panda Express! and top it all off-- watch Glenn Beck bear testimony at once to both the truthiness of the gospel and the inanity of HillBilly Clinton! WHOOHOO! Nobody can accuse these Palmer Boys of going soft. When we party, we PARTY! One omission--we actually topped it off by having dinner with the family at Kari's house, gabbing up a storm, and playing Nerts around a card table. And by "playing nerts around a card table", I mean snoring in a beanbag chair while others play Nerts around a card table. Awesome end to an awesome weekend.

In all seriousness hanging with Jared this weekend was awesome. We need to do it more often. That pesky distance though, between Budapest & San Diego makes it a liiittle difficult to do. Ah well. Grab the moments when you can. Glenn Beck is lucky he got to be a part of our weekend.

In other just-as-important-if-not-more-important news, the kids in Budapest are doing OK. If by "OK" one means still alive. They have this talent of really getting on Agi's nerves as soon as I leave town. The second I leave, their usual complaining turns into full-blown Doug-and-Wendy-Whiner mode. Agi gets to call and vent, and I get to do some awesome disciplining-by-phone. Not going to lie--there is a bit of a power rush that comes from making a kid apologize to his mother, do his homework, and then send him to bed at 4 PM. ALL OVER THE PHONE! Agi si awesome. She does all the heavy lifting in this department. I am called on, when needed, to use my outside voice and send the kids scurrying for the corners as the occasion calls for.

Seriously, kids are doing very well at school, Hungarian language and all. Andrew reminds me of me at that age. Lazy as sin, yet just smart enough to skate by at school with B+'s and A's. All while spending more effort at avoiding homework than actually doing it. That talent bit my in the arse later when I realized at the university that "holy crap! I do have to study! Now how exactly is that done?"

I fear Andrew will fall into the same mode if he doesn't get the study habits down now, need them or not. This is all the more impressive as we are in Hungary, where the school curriculum makes US curriculum look like Dora the Explorer-level course work. Andrew is in 7th grade and is already tackling chemistry, physics, and "themthar maths that uses the letters!" SO. Agi and I have a never-ending struggle at getting Andrew to study and finish his homework on time.

Now I am just rambling. I am going to sign off now and get about to more important tasks. Like making this place look presentable for Agi when she gets in tomorrow night. I am sure there is nothing she'd rather see, after spending 16 hours on flights fending off the lecherous advances of fake-sleeping drunk germans (you just have to ask her about it...) than a messy house decorated with my semi dry laundry. I should probably also go through the fridge and toss out all the expired mayo and yoghurt. Took me awhile to find the source of the smell.

Happy holidays everybody. And by Happy Holidays I mean Merry Christmas and by everybody I mean the three of you that read this blog. Including Agi.

Love, Aaron. Who is 36 today, and doesn't act a day over 14.