The wife and I are extremely white. We shop at the Gap, we watch the Food network, we read design blogs.

The neighborhood we live in, according to city-data.com, is not that white (slightly less than 20%). Which is fine by us. But I can't help but feeling that sometimes we stick out like sore thumbs. The other day for example:

"What are they staring at?" the wife asks as we drive past a stoop full of people staring.

"We're two white people in a Prius listening to Billy Joel," I tell her.

You can't argue with that.

Let's cut to the chase: Hollywood is out of ideas. You think they made Spiderman 3 because they thought it was a good idea? No. It's because they couldn't come up with anything better.

But in the past few years Hollywood has moved beyond making sequels that didn't need to be made and gone one further: Completely remaking movies that were fine, if not better, as they were. Did Halloween need to be redone? What about Fame? Well I'm about to do Hollywood one better and ruin a beautiful memory from your youth in the process.

The Breakfast Club: Back 2 Detention! Bam!

As you can see in the above poster, I've even done all the legwork. James Pattinson as bad boy Bender, Michael Cera as awkward nerd Brian, Zac Effron as the emotionally tortured jock, Kristin Stewart as the shy girl Allison and Taylor Swift as preppy Claire. And because Hollywood can't just ruin a classic, but has to defecate all over it, I'm sure they're going to want to cast someone like Russel Brand as the principal.

From there you just throw in some references to Twitter and Facebook, add in a sly "C'mon dude! This is real life, not a John Hughes movie!" line of dialogue, and maybe write in a gratuitous sex scene, because hey, why not.

Seriously Hollywood, why haven't you called me yet?

Last night, while making the wife a mojito, I unknowingly muddled a spider in with the mint.

"Dude, there's spider in here," she tells me. We both stare at the tiny, broken up pieces of spider for a second and then try and get it out, her with her fingers and me with a spoon. While we're scooping I suggest "Maybe this is how you get your superpowers." She laughs and we continue scooping.

When we're done we head to the living room, and as an afterthought she tells me, "Oh, and earlier today I microwaved a fruit fly with my coffee."

"Dude!" I yell, "You're totally getting superpowers!"

The other day the wife and I stopped by a thrift store in our new neighborhood. She got a beautiful old cabinet that we devoted our weekend to, stripping the layers and layers of paint off of (we're still not done). And while she found beautiful furniture to enhance our home I walked around looking at the crap.

It's nice when you can get all the clothes that your group needs to be the Village People in one place, isn't it?

You might have noticed this on the first photo, but for some reason they keep writing 'Obama' on all the price sheets. If you have any clue what this is about please share the knowledge.

And then there was this beauty. Boy, oh boy, do I hope they were just abbreviating jewelry box. [Places index finger into collar of shirt, pulls exaggeratedly, flexes neck, makes unsettled noise.]

While I would by no means consider myself a small business consultant, more and more my job has found me working with small businesses as they get their start. Working with places like restaurants, bakeries and bars you get a sense of what works and what doesn't. The other day I went to check out a new coffee shop a few blocks from my apartment that opened a last week. Unfortunately I don't think the place is going to make it.

For starters the place has "24/7" it it's name. Which is not bad, except for that fact that it's only open from 6 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon. That's more like 9/7. It doesn't have outlets. It doesn't have wifi. It doesn't have tea (iced or hot) which I greatly prefer to coffee. On top of all that (and this is just a matter of personal preference) it plays the smooth jazz station.

It's businesses like this where I want to take the owner aside. I want to sit him down over a cup of tea (or, in this case, coffee) and tell him everything he's doing wrong. I want to let him know that shoving a sofa up against a far wall and throwing a blanket over it doesn't give it a "coffee house vibe", it makes it feel like a basement kids hung out in during high school.

I want to tell him that he needs to invest in things like wifi if he wants people to become regulars, and he needs to buy more than just one brand of sugar (Sweet & Low). And I want to tell him not to spend his money on unnecessary things like the thick, fancy napkins (which, sure, are nice, but not as nice as the internet).

I want to say all this to him, but more likely, the next time I stop by the coffee shop it will just have a sign on the door that says something like "Closed for remodeling" and never open again.

Sometimes before bed Kitty goes a little nuts. For (seemingly) no particular reason she'll start taking laps around the house, darting in and out of rooms, and giving crazed looks before shooting off like a rocket. The wife and I refer to it at Night Crazies. It's just what Kitty does.

Yesterday, while talking with Byron, he tells me that lately he's been getting really hyped up just before bed. He'll bounce on the bed and want to jump around, full of energy, slightly irritating his boyfriend. "I don't know why it happens," he told me, "I just get this burst of energy." He suspects it may have something to do with playing video games right before bed.

"Eh, I wouldn't worry about it," I tell him. "Our cat does the same thing. We call it Night Crazies."

Byron nods. "I have Night Crazies."

There's a resemblance, no?

Last night while looking for new coffee shop options down in the loop I came across the ING Direct Cafe. Yes, you read that right. ING, the bank, has a cafe.

And it is amazing. $1 for a large coffee. $1 for a large tea. Free refills. Free internet. Lots of seating. I'm in awe.

They even have ING representatives on hand in case you feel the sudden urge to open an account.

Granted, I'm not about to switch to ING, but I does make me me wonder, "If my bank is so great, why don't THEY have a cafe?"

A lot of people know Sunday as a day of rest. Somehow, in our house, it became a day of making pretzels.

And, well, rest for the pets.

One of the biggest changes in moving to the south side is that now I take The Train. Not the el, which was the normal, getting around the city train that I used to take. No, now I take the train that shuttles city employees back to their suburban homes. This is the type of transportation that made a name for itself in the 80's song My Baby Take the Morning Train. I am now that baby. I take the morning train.

And unlike the el, which runs every 5-10 minutes, give or take, The Train usually runs on the hour, or half hour during the rush periods. So when my timing goes awry I have some time to kill. Like yesterday.

I was sitting in the waiting lounge at the station, getting a little extra work done on my computer as I watched people dashing by, trying to make their train. Next to me a kid sat down. He was about 16 with dreadlocks and glasses, still his school uniform. "Mac or PC?" he asked, even though I was clearly working on my Mac. "Mac," I told him, and he tells me he thinks they're harder to use. I shrug and tell him I grew up using a Mac and I'm used to it. Plus I'm in web and graphic design and we're expected to use Macs. "I'm going into graphic design," he tells me and immediately I begin imaging that I could become this boy's mentor. I could teach him about guide lines and vectors, and we could make InDesign shortcut jokes with punchlines like "And then I told him, I don't care who your father is, once something's been done it's not like you can just Command-Z it!"

But after a few minutes of talking to him I realized that this kid would probably end up breaking my design heart (known in the design biz as including large bleeds). "Yeah," he told me, "graphic designer should be a good career. But I've been though plenty of careers before." "Plenty of careers before?" I asked. "How OLD are you?" "16," he replied and sighed like a world weary traveler as I tried my hardest not to roll my eyes.

I couldn't help but ask him what other careers he'd previously decided on. And he told me. Are you ready?

Doctor, car designer, airplane designer, video game designer, martial arts expert who would choreograph fight scenes in action movies, and (I kid you not, these were his actual words) business tycoon. I nodded and told him (not entirely un-patronizingly) that those all sounded like very ambitious careers.

By then we'd talked for about 20 minutes I had to get to my train but I gave him my card and told him that if he ever had any questions about the graphic design or the field in general to send me an email. Though honestly, by next week I assume he'll have moved on to becoming an astronaut. And that is one thing I'd probably (but not definitely!) be an awful mentor in.

In the Tribune a few weeks ago they ran a piece about researching family trees, titled "Getting to the Roots of Your Family Tree". Har har. Roots. Tree. Get it?

Moving on...

Above the title they had a giant photo of the descendants of Thomas Jefferson with the caption:

"Decedents of Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings, pose for a photo at Monticello. A genetic link was found between some Jeffersons and Hemingses - but for most families, researching ancestors is easier, and less controversial."

Really Chicago Tribune? That's what you're putting in the caption?

So you're telling me that if I researched my family tree it'd be less complicated and controversial than the research done by children who came from a President and his secret slave lover?

Whoever wrote that caption should either win a Pulitzer or get a slap on the back of the head. I'm unsure which.

One year ago today the wife and I moved in together (well, she wasn't the wife then, she was still just the metallurgist). And tomorrow we move again (which I'm sure you'll be hearing about more in the future, once the tornado of moving has died down).

In the past year a lot of stuff has happened, both in my personal and work life - far too much for me to recap here.

Instead, here's the last year shown with a few choice photos.

I was doing work in Argo Tea today when Ira Glass's doppelganger walked in. What's that, you ask? Why yes, I did get photos. ...If only the guy had styled his hair up

I'm right, right?

Yesterday two of the wife's magazines arrived in the mail: Glamour and Game Informer. Yes, they're both hers. "At least she's diverse," I thought to myself, setting the mail on the counter.

Then this morning she emailed me. "What's the name of that gaming magazine I get?" she asked. I wrote back that it was Game Informer. "I don't know why I always think it's Game Enforcer," she wrote back. "Like I'm some sort of armed commando."

And that's when I got the idea for creating a style/armed commando magazine for her called Glamour Enforcer.

You're welcome.

Warning: If you watch True Blood and haven't seen the latest episode yet, stop reading now.

For those of you who are still reading, it was sad when Godric burned on the roof of the building, wasn't it? But while watching him burn I couldn't help but think that it looked like True Blood was recycling the special effects from a certain early 90's TV show. A little bit like, oh I don't know, Godric was starting to leap from life to life, putting things right that once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.

I was even half expecting him to turn around to face the sun and go "Oh boy."

Alas, this did not happen. But I'm still holding out for a holographic vampire named Al.

Government programs that weren't quite as successful as Cash for Clunkers:

- Bucks for Bitches
- Cents for the Senile
- Funds for Nuns
- Riches for Rockclimbers
- Money for Martin Lawrence