This is why we can't have nice things. (Spoiler Alert: My wife is pretty much the most awesome person ever.)

Last year, I took my wife to New Mexico for her birthday. It was awesome, and you should be like nine kinds of jealous. On the last day we were there, we went to the Rattlesnake Museum in Albuquerque.

Look how cute she is! I am also in this picture.

They have more types of rattlesnakes there than you probably knew existed, unless you're some kind of herpetologist. A lot of them are actually snakes that they've rescued from different horrible fates at the hands of hordes of people who think that they're evil and terrifying just because Salazar Slytherin was kind of a dick. Thanks a lot, J.K. Rowling.

Anyway, the whole place is awesome, and they also have a gift shop where you can get the Single Greatest Mug in the History of Ceramic Beverage-Holding Devices (As Seen on TV!):

Not only does it hold 16 gallons of your preferred beverage, it scares most of your coworkers enough to keep them from ever stealing your drink. Or basically anything you set it on top of.

She came to work with me all the time, and drew compliments nearly every day for most of a year, because she was made from pure awesome that was mined from the earth and forged in the fires of Mount Some Kiln in New Mexico, Probably. She even dressed up for Halloween.

She went as Nagini. The finger belonged to Charity Burbage.

Last Friday was a horrific day. It was my seventh consecutive day of work, because I'd worked the previous weekend. It's summer, which means the exact opposite for libraries as it does for most other places because when school lets out for the summer, guess where everybody drags their hordes of hellspawn children... One patron came up to me at the desk and demanded that I open the plastic case her gas station sandwich came in, because MLS now stands for "Master of Liberating Sandwiches." Another called to complain that she couldn't figure out how to get an ebook because the catalog said "borrow" instead of "check out." Someone tore the "Property of Local Public Library" label off of the latest issue of Guideposts because this apparently wasn't the issue where they discussed the Seventh (or Eighth, depending on your particular version of the Decalogue) Polite Suggestion.

That afternoon, she posed for a picture titled "Installing Java Update."

Version 2.0

On Fridays, I usually take her home so I can give her a proper bath. This week, after I pulled out of the parking garage and was heading down the street, I heard this horrible thumping along the top of my car. At the exact moment my exhausted brain finally figured out what was happening, my eyes shot to the rearview mirror, and the world went into slow motion as I saw her falling forever before shattering on the ground.

The whole way home, I kept telling myself "you're 31. It's just a mug, it's ok," but it wasn't, really (it's possible that this was also exacerbated by depression). I called my wife, practically on the verge of tears, and told her what had happened. She understood completely, because she's awesome. By the time I actually got home, she had already called the museum and had them ship another one, because she's seriously amazing.

We'll probably see her sometime next week. I'm thinking of calling her Daenerys.

What the Fuck Just Happened in Texas: TL;DR Edition.

You may have noticed that the interwebs have been blowing up over the past 24 hours or so with stuff about the Texas Senate and hashtags like #standwithwendy. Amidst all the tweeting and tumbling, I've noticed that there have been a few people who have no idea what's going on, probably because they couldn't seem to find anything about it on the news. I know that a lot of people don't have the time to wade through hundreds of posts on multiple sites  to piece together the whole story, so I've compiled a quick tl;dr guide to get you up to speed. You're welcome.

So, it basically started when Governor Dick Perry called a special legislative session and gave them last-minute instructions to pass an anti-abortion bill that would shut down all but five clinics in a state that's close to 800 miles across in both directions.

Here's what the bill looked like:

So Senator Wendy Davis announced that she intended to filibuster:

They told her that meant that she had to speak—without stopping—for 13 hours, and couldn't sit, lean, eat, take a drink of water, go to the bathroom, or stray from the topic:

She was eventually told to sit down after 11 hours because talking about sonograms (which are required to have an abortion in Texas) wasn't "germane to the discussion":

Every major news outlet while all this was happening:

Except CNN, who were all:

MUFFINS!

Then Senator Van De Putte called out the President of the Senate for ignoring parliamentary procedure and refusing to recognize her because he was trying to force the vote and didn't want to:

"At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?"

The President impotently tried to quiet the cheering crowd after that burn:

But the entire gallery was like:

They tried to vote on it anyway:

The vote was too late to be legal, so they tried to change the journal to say it happened before midnight:

Just kidding. Those assholes aren't nearly cool enough to be the Doctor.

But the entire Internet already had screenshots:

So they had to concede:

The End.

P.S. I'm sorry for all of this.

Apparently my day wasn't exciting enough for the Gamemakers.

I don't actually keep a written list of all the things that I don't expect to happen to me on any given day because it seems like a really weird waste of time, even for me, but if I did, I'm pretty sure that "getting hit in the face with a giant fireball" would probably be way the fuck up at the top of it every single day. Today, though, I would have been wrong.

The whole thing started when I was like "hey, I should grill stuff tonight because food tastes like awesome when you cook it with fire." When my wife got home from work, I had already started the grill, and was inside getting everything ready to go on while it heated up. Normally, the next thing that happens here is you open the lid, put stuff on the grill, and then take it off and eat it once it reaches the desired level of fiery deliciousness. Today, however, something went awry.

It could be some freak coincidence relating to the foil that I put on the grill to keep the asparagus from falling into the fire, but probably the NSA agents who are assigned to watch my life got bored and wanted to make things a little more interesting. One of them pushed a big red button somewhere, and when I lifted the lid, this happened:

I really wish this were an exaggeration.

By some kind of miracle, the casualty list only includes a little bit of hair and the ends of some eyelashes. My glasses stopped it from hitting my eyes, and somehow I got to keep both of my eyebrows. It did manage to burn out pretty much all the cilia in my nose as well, which means that, for just a second, there was fire INSIDE MY HEAD. It also means that I'm pretty much constantly smelling burnt hair, which is fucking fabulous. I've showered twice already, but I can't get the smell to go away because it's literally in my nose. Somebody get me a silver parachute.

How to love a Yankee Candle.

I bought a Yankee candle for my mom a little while ago, and they put these little instruction cards in the bag because apparently they don't understand that the type of people who need a six-step set of instructions on how to use a candle are exactly the people who shouldn't be allowed to use them in the first place.

Today I found one of the cards at my desk at work, and actually bothered to read it, and then I just broke down in a fit of hilarious what-the-fuckery because I'm still twelve years old. The title is "How to love a Yankee Candle." It only gets worse when you read the instructions.

Keep going until you've tried them all!

Anyway, this isn't a real post. I should probably start putting these warnings closer to the top of the post (*snicker*...yep, still twelve). You should probably just forget this ever happened and try back tomorrow. Sorry.