Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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The Great Solstice Baked LEGO Diary Disaster of 2022

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Gather ’round, readers, for a tale of unfortunate diary explosions, precarious Wellington roads, and one very ill-advised decision to put a LEGO set in the oven that nearly ruined Solstice.

For the record: Do not put your LEGO set in the oven. If you take nothing else away from this story of disaster and triumph, please take to heart this single important lesson. Do. Not. Bake. Lego.

Believe me.

Little did these poor, innocent elves know what Solstice would have in store for them.

Picture it: It’s the morning of Summer Solstice. There are a pile of presents under a tree acting as symbol of multiple different holidays. We’ve just finished having a delightful breakfast of gingerbread muffins and have opened all of the windows because it is the hottest day of the season so far.

(December holidays can be very confusing in the Southern Hemisphere for a Philly kid used to wishing for a White Christmas, which is why we have leaned into celebrating the change in seasons like Pagans with a Saturnalia festival spanning from Solstice to Christmas.)

(Yes, we also celebrate Winter Solstice.)

It was an ideal holiday morning. The kid had just opened her first gift, which was LEGO’s special 2022 free holiday gift set: a diorama of a pair of elves in snowy landscape.

We picked it as the first present not only because she loves LEGO, but because it was part of our Saturnalian theme. No, not human sacrifice. You see, because I am an obsessive dungeon master who can only celebrate things like Bachelorette Parties if I turn them into day-long, city-spanning alternate realty games, I can’t just put presents under a tree with normal “To / From” labels on them.

No. That takes the mystery out of things.

Instead, our Solstice gift-giving is a double-blind process. Every time anyone in the family wraps a present, they reserve a random number for that gift on a shared spreadsheet. Then, starting on Solstice and continuing through Boxing Day, we periodically reveal gift numbers to each other and it is the kid’s job to play Holiday Elf and find said numbered gift in the ever-decreasing spread of presents and deliver it to its intended recipient

The LEGO was a commemoration of her official role of Holiday Elf. It was the kickoff gift to our whole holiday festival.

And that’s where things started to go wrong.

The kid had dumped her LEGO into the middle of the floor to begin working on bag #1. I had made myself a peppermint milk in my home sippy-cup, because I am disaster-prone and cannot be trusted with an open container even in my own home.

(As will become evident in a moment.)

I attempted to hopscotch through the splayed-out LEGO to take a seat closer to the tree so I could watch the assembly process. During my incredibly graceful leaping, my grip on my sippy-cup slipped upward towards the lid. Unbeknownst to me, I hadn’t lined up the lid with the threads of the cup, so the connection between the two was tenuous at best. The combination of holding the cup by the lid and my hopscotching sent a half a liter of peppermint milk plummeting to the ground, where it struck DIRECTLY in the middle of the brand new LEGO kit like a minty dairy bomb and spread to cover the entire carpeted path to the tree.

This sent various family members springing into action. Well, the kid mostly sprung into whinging, which was totally justified based on me dunking her entire first gift as if it was a holiday Oreo.

(That joke wouldn’t work for a New Zealand audience, because they don’t dunk their cookies in milk here, but that’s a whole other post entirely.)

I bustled across the house to find supplies to begin the long process of making sure our carpet wouldn’t smell like spoilt milk for eternity. Meanwhile, E and the kid attended to scooping all of the milky LEGO into a fine strainer to whisked away to be rinsed off in the kitchen sink.

By the time I was done with my extensive soaking up, soaping, soaking up again, and-dehumidifying process there was no resumed LEGO-ing but the kitchen was suspiciously quiet. I poked my head in.

“Are the LEGO still drying?” I asked

“Yep,” E replied.

“Cool. It’ll probably take a while for the water to drain out of all the little nooks and crannies.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I put the LEGO in the oven.” [Read more…] about The Great Solstice Baked LEGO Diary Disaster of 2022

time, see what’s become of me

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I am making a New Year’s resolution.

I haven’t made any resolutions for over two decades. I’ve always believed that resolutions are intentions to fail.

Or, as I said back in 2001, “You can’t really resolve to do anything except for those things so explicitly under your own power that you could and should be doing them anyway.” A decade later in 2011, I added, “Why should 1/1 be any different from 4/5 or 6/6 or any other day of the year?”

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In January 2004 I said I was not resolving to do three things, but that I’d like keep my focus on them throughout the year. They were:

  1. Know What I’m Spending
  2. Be Aware of What I Eat
  3. Use Time Smarter

Even as my life got more complex in the following decade, I hewed closely to those non-resolves and they served me well. As I said in 2007, “even if I went on a bender of money or time wasting, or food devouring, at least I knew it was just a bender.”

(A decade ago I tried to expanded those three goals to 10 Commandments. They were an excellent set of commandments that would be terrific to live by, but they proved to be too many things to keep in mind all the time. Three is a magic number, after all.)

After I had those three rules in place, instead of making resolutions I began to focus on goals. Goals aren’t ephemeral ongoing vows. They are tangible, doable, accomplishable things, like “get my driver’s license” or “record 10 songs.”

I liked to set a large amount of goals in January and then see where the year took me. I thought of them as the corporate balance sheet of the business of me. I’d grade myself at the end of the year, and it could be as revealing to score well as to score badly. As I explained 2010, “The goals were good for something else, too – they let me know what wasn’t important. If I cannot bring myself to tag the last 800 posts from CK’s first three months even with my grade hanging on the line, it’s just not gonna happen.”

In 2014, I claimed even those goals were getting overwhelming, and I was going to strip down to a simple flowchart. I think that had less to do with the goals being a bad idea and more to do with having an infant human to raise and an infant start-up team to grow, plus two adolescent bands to lead. I needed simplicity.

Then, all of those non-resolutions and goals trickled away. I kicked off both 2015 and 2016 without mentioning them at all. January 2017-18 & 20 were consumed with comics posts. I didn’t even post in January of 2019 or 2021-22.

Something interesting happened in those intermediate five years other than just moving to New Zealand. To put it plainly: my life went from the simplest it has ever been to the hardest I’ve ever experienced. [Read more…] about time, see what’s become of me

Happy New Year (from the future)

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I am writing this message to you from the future.

Unless you are reading this from New Zealand.

Image by TianaZZ from Pixabay

(Or if you are reading this from Fiji, parts of Republic of Kiribati, French Wallis & Futuna, or US Territory of Wake Island, but I don’t think I have any readers in those places. Say hello if that’s you!)

Yes, this is a joke about the International Date Line. New Zealand is one of the first places to experience a new day, which means it’s also amongst the first places to celebrate a new year.

I thought perhaps these International Date Line jokes would be old by now – over five years into living in New Zealand. However, people (okay: Americans) keep being surprised, confused, and delighted by the time difference between us. Especially when it comes to setting meetings. So, I keep getting to make jokes about living in the future.

I don’t make the rules, okay. (Except that I do.)

The strange thing about living so far into the future compared to the majority of my existing world of connections in America is that when I’m very focused on a specific day – like New Years or a birthday – that day lasts forever. That’s especially true while we’re in summer time here in NZ. I get to I live all 24 hours of the day here in New Zealand, but when I go to bed the US West coast is only three hours into their version of it. (And, Hawaii is just one hour into it – hello, J!)

That means the day lives on for another 23 hours beyond when I’m first done with it for the people I know and love. I get 47 hours of birthday, 47 hours of Christmas, and 47 hours of New Year’s Day.

I like it. It means I get to experience the joys of these days first, but also get most of them out of the way before all my loved ones in the US wake up. They might have questions about how their birthday will go or if it will be a Merry Christmas, but I already know.

That appeals deeply to my spoiler-loving self.

If you are wondering, I’d say 2023 is relatively calm so far. I only have this first 30 minutes to go by, but aside from a few sparse fireworks in our suburban cul de sac it has been quiet. I didn’t hear any banging of pots and pans. (We did that the one time I stayed at my father’s for New Year’s Eve.)

The one problem with living in the future is there’s no one ahead of me. I’m always the one with the toes on the edge of the diving board. I don’t have the luxury of not jumping – the rest of the world is lined up behind me ready for their turn.

Every new day is a high dive into the unknown. I know New Year’s Day isn’t really any different than any other of those days, but it feels like a higher and more exciting dive to me.

Happy New Year from the future.

after these messages, we’ll be right back!

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Just a quick note to say I am alive and don’t plan on ending my active streak writing about comics and drag and everything here on CK. I needed to devote my time and my brain to some other topics this week, but I’ll be catching up with you all shortly ?

happy birthday to this

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Today is the 22nd anniversary of Crushing Krisis.

This site began on 26 August, 2000, as a blogger.com-powered blog, hosted on Freespeech.org, launched in my final days living in a summer dorm room at Drexel University before moving into my first college apartment in West Philadelphia

I had no idea what I was doing and no plan.

I knew I loved to write and I wanted a home on the internet where my writing was the entire point.

I couldn’t have possibly imagined then who (and where) I would be 22 years later or that Crushing Krisis would still exist. [Read more…] about happy birthday to this