Adler Speaks...

Remember the Warner Bros cartoons with Michigan J. Frog?

For those of you not familiar, basically in each cartoon someone finds this frog that can sing and dance.  The catch is that every time they try to show this singing/dancing frog to anyone else, the frog just sits there making everyone look stupid.

Sometimes I feel like that chump when it comes to Adler (who is almost 2).  He's a smart boy who chooses when he decides to talk.  I assure you, the kid knows how...he only does it when it's convenient.

There are times when he says things that surprises me:

But before I can confront him on it, he just smiles and calmly walks away

I'm not the only one he's done this to either.  My mom recently had an encounter such as this with Adler:

After several months of this, I finally decided to ask Adler to come clean with this little ruse of his.  This is how it went down:

So there you have it.  Looks like it may be a little while longer before Adler starts having conversations with most people, but at least it's good to know there's nothing wrong with him...maybe?

As always, I close with a couple of internet pics to keep you going:

Don't get me wrong, I am living the dream as a director of an implementation team, but there are days when I miss working in the service industry.
-Cheers!

Messin' with M

For those of you who have been here recently, you may remember M taking a vacation with some friends.  For those of you who don't know the full story, here it is (in bullet form):

• I took almost two weeks off of work so M could go up north to a friend's cabin
• With M gone on her vacation, my vacation consisted of watching the kids
• Since I was home alone with the kids, I never got to sleep in (one of my favorite hobbies these days)
• M returned with three days left before I had to return to work and promised me that the last three days were mine to spend how I wanted

Yeah, but then this happened:

Sorry, but anything before 8am is not considered sleeping in (according to most people)

Oh, I'm sorry...8:30am is NOT really sleeping in either.

Lousy farmers and their stupid daylight!  For the record, this does not count as sleeping in.

Needless to say, I didn't really get a chance to sleep in the entire time I was off of work.  I had to get revenge!

So I did what any good husband would do - I played it right back:

After starting small, I decided to play it up a bit...if M's brain starts thinking, she'll never get back to sleep. 

Then, just to push it a little further, I added a little worry to the confusion:

I originally wasn't going to add this next one because it was almost too over the top, but then I did anyway:

And of course, for the big finish, I pulled in the kids for a crazy-funtime FLASHMOB!

So there you have it - the final days of my most recent time off of work and some sweet, sweet vengeance on the beloved who made it all happen.

Thanks Baby!

Before we go, as always, I'd like to share some pictures I've discovered while perusing the internet lately.

First one is how M felt after the flashmob:

The second is for Greg/Sarah and Regular Cinderella who both just recently had themselves some babies:

Congrats on not having a velociraptor!

And of course, for the rest of you:

Words to live by...

I guess...

-Cheers!

Evil Chris

Once upon a time, there was an evil guy named Evil Chris:

Evil Chris was so evil, he would kick puppies and expose mall Santas as frauds:

Evil Chris even tried to corrupt his own family:

But one day, as Evil Chris was in the midst of doing something evil, a portal to another dimension suddenly opened in front of him and a very familiar voice echoed through from the other side:

Before Evil Chris could react, out stepped...Regular Chris!

The two bitter enemies engaged in epic combat!

In fact, the intensity of the battle was so epic that I don't have the artistic skills nor a good enough version of Photoshop to capture the awesomeness that was this epically-awesome battle of awesomely epicness!

Instead, please enjoy a picture of a pissed-off kitten that is pondering the death of it's owner:

Fast forward to the end of the epic battle, and Evil Chris was defeated!  Regular Chris picked up the broken body of Evil Chris and threw him into the portal:

With the portal closed and Evil Chris on the other side, it was time to exhale (and thanks to Regular Cinderella for the pillow farting idea - hilarious!):

The End?



Mom - There has only been one person in my life that has always accepted me for the weirdo person that I am and shown me unconditional forgiveness in my many shortcomings.  Thanks for being my mom!

Happy Birthday - I love you!

-Chris

The Future of Pharmacy

As a white male in my 30's, I have a good idea which products are being marketed for my demographic and which ones are not.  As I was cleaning the kitchen the other day, I noticed that M picked up a new dish soap:

For those of you who can't read the smaller print on the bottle, this product boasts "overnight soaking power in 5 minutes".  When I first read this on the bottle, my initial reaction was this:

Let me reiterate a previous statement:  I have a good idea which products are being marketed for my demographic and which ones are not (this is why M does most of the shopping).

If you read a any of my recent posts, you remember our ongoing bouts with random sickness in our house lately.  First it was the flu, then everyone came down with colds, followed by some good-time fun ear infections.  Well, now we're on to the latest great adventure:  pink eye!

Adler came down with a case of pink eye which of course requires him to get some eye drops and us having to quarantine/neutralize everything he's come into contact with since birth.  This also meant a trip to my local pharmacy.

Now before I go any further with this post, let's acknowledge something (welcome to the disclaimer, that's right, the disclaimer...)  -  I work for a company that administers pharmacy benefits (if you'd like to know more about what I do, check out one of my earlier posts here).  The company I work for also has a mail order pharmacy that is considered a direct competitor of retail pharmacies such as CVS, Rite Aid, and that W place (which shall NOT be named).  These retail pharmacies have been pressing our state and national government officials to pass laws limiting the consumer's exposure to utilize a mail order pharmacy.  Their reason:  It's causing the retail pharmacies to go out of business.

Um okay...so does that mean that Best Buy can go to Washington, DC and say, "Amazon is taking our customers.  Do something government people!"  Or could Microsoft go to their state officials and say, "Google Chrome is out performing our Internet Explorer due to JavaScript and websites not utilizing HTML 5.  Pass a law or something that makes people use more HTML 5!'

Kind of whiny and asinine right?  Well that's just what these retail pharmacies are doing right now in Washington, DC.  Folks, I have to say, the downfall of retail pharmacy is not being caused by mail order prescription options.  The retail pharmacies are basically choking on themselves by using a simple business killer known as over-saturation. 

There are over 60,000 pharmacies in the United States.  Is that high?  Low?  About right?  You tell me - in comparison, let's take a look at some of the top ten food franchises in the country today.  If you combined all of the McDonalds, Starbucks, Pizza Huts, Burger Kings, Wendys, Taco Bells, Kentucky Fried Chickens and Dominos currently in our country, that equates to how many pharmacies are also in business in the US. 

For those of you that prefer pictures, I made one for you:

Think of it another way:  By doing a search online, I found over 20 pharmacies within a 5 mile radius of my house (19 of them were in my preferred network).  So when I am craving a burger, pizza, burrito, fried chicken or a chai latte, I have several options and a variety to choose from.  When I need to get antibiotics for one of my kids, I have over 20 pharmacies by my house that ALL DO THE SAME THING .  So while retail may never like mail order, the problem isn't a different model for dispensing medication.  The problem is the constantly growing number of pharmacy chains in America.  With our population, overall economy and the government cracking down on fraud, waste and abuse in our pharmacy system, there are only so many prescriptions that need to be filled in a day.  Yeah, let's blame mail order...good luck with that!

Anyway, on with the post.  So as my family uses mail order for our ongoing medications, the one time doses of things like antibiotics are typically picked up through a local retail pharmacy.  To help convince people to stay at their local retail pharmacy, some chains are pushing the importance of the "pharmacist experience".  Now I have been going to the same pharmacy for years.  Every 2-3 months, we need some sort of prescription for one of the kids.  No one from my "trusted retail pharmacy" knows my name nor could they tell me which medications my family have taken without looking it up in their system first. 

Now don't get me wrong, the job of a pharmacist is not easy.  It's basically their role to make sure your overconfident doctor isn't trying to kill you because they have no clue what they just prescribed for you (try not to think about it...you'd be surprised).  They also do a lot more than that, but I'm not here to educate you on the multiple roles of a pharmacist (use the internet for something educational for once and find out for yourself).

So with my already biased opinion of the "retail pharmacist experience", the following was my latest encounter at my local pharmacy (NOTE:  Due to legalities, the name of the store has been withheld...let's just call it "Giant Red Dot Store with a White Circle On It").  So as I am picking up Adler's eye drops, I am told that I cannot leave (and be given the medication) until I have a pharmacist consult. 

To which the pharmacist pulls out the box of eye drops and reads the instructions to me:

First of all, we're just trying to get rid of some pink eye...we're not trying to prevent the zombie apocalypse here.  It's eye drops that go into the eye (still with me?), you need to make sure you keep using the drops or the problem won't go away, and for God's sake, wash your fricken hands!  It's not that hard.  If anyone out there needs to be advised on how to do this, you really should look into some sort of assisted living...preferable one with a shuttle service.

For those of you who don't know me very well, I tend to not have a filter on things when I get irritated (or angry/sad/happy/ambivalent/drunk).  So when I was asked if I had any questions, I responded with the following:

If I were wearing my "smart ass" socks , I would have come up with a much better response, such as:

Or even:

But the more I worked on this sketch, the more I realized that these poor pharmacists are required to do this simply because some dumbass did something like the following:

So there you have it - the value of retail pharmacy.  I hope you leave this post feeling humored and a little more educated (and some of you will probably be irritated...sorry about that...not really).

Before we go, I leave you with another conundrum on the theme of reading labels:  Is it important or no? 

I leave the judgement up to you...

-Cheers!