Friday, August 29, 2008

Our 13 year old, taught me a new word.....



I cooked one of our thirteen year old's favorite meals last night. Chicken breast, Lipton chicken rice, and cooked carrots with brown sugar. We add barbecue sauce to the chicken.


She enjoyed it with some milk with about a cup of Nestle Quick mixed into it.


Flash forward to about 9:45 PM. She's almost ready for bed, when she headed out to the garage and the refrigerator out there. We keep drinks in it. She has ICB creame soda, root beer and Canada dry ginger ales. We tell her to drink milk and not sugar drinks at bed time. She then informs me that she needed the ginger ale to settle her stomach. Seems she had just had a burp. Except she had a new term, at least it was to me. "Dad...I need the ginger ale because I just burped and it was BABY BARF"


I started chuckling. I've not heard that term before.



Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Next time, I just open the door

Here at work, they have us stacked like cord wood in the cubes. There is zero privacy, so everyone lurks in the stairwells to use cell phones. Or, they head outside. I prefer outside for very private conversations, but weather can present an issue. About twice a day, I head outside to walk about the parking lot. On this mornings exit, there was some person pacing fast right outside the exit doors. He was having a very, VERY animated conversation in some foreign language. There were arms waving everywhere. I went for the right hand door. Nope, he was in front of it. I went for the left door, nope he was there. I pause 1.3 seconds in hope that this ping-pong person, and I would be out-of-step and I could exit. Nope, he’s to fast for me. I finally just pop the door open an inch. He screeches to a dead halt and then GLARES at me. He then went back to yelling and waving. I guess it was the new iPhonepodcamTVtoothbrushcombtissue model and the other person must have been able to see all the gesturing.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Number Ten envelops – a new aggravation


I get home from work and tackle the mail. I do this as I’m watching the early news and changing into non-work cloths. I try and handle all mail only once. Junk mail goes straight into the trash can, which is the shredder also. Bills get reduced to just the return slip, which I then use to set up the electronic funds transfer. I shred the rest. Statements and such get stapled together for filing. Some of the junk mail solicitors seem to have started a new trend in the number ten envelops they use. Regular number tens have the fold over flap to the rear. That way, you place the stamp, return address and address on the front which has no fold on it. These new junk mail envelops, have the sealed flap on the front. I guess the mailing machine doesn’t have a problem printing the address on the front and then sealing it and running it through their automatic stamping machine. What I get annoyed at is that I’m programmed to glance at the return address to see who is sending me something, and then flip it over to tear open the flap and remove the contents. With this new junk-mail number ten, I find myself turning it over and then searching for the flap. And then turning it back over, where the flap is on the front. I might just save myself another three seconds and forget opening it. Just tear it in half and toss into the trash can.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

You can always tell when school is about to start up..

Today is Sunday, August 24, 2008. The last day of summer break for the school district. Kids are in a total "bummer" mode. On the way to church this morning, we drive through an upper middle class neighborhood. They have a fountain.











At least they didn't dump in the blue dye and shoot for the full Tidy Bowl look.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Chupucabra – the Goat Sucker of Texas in our back yard?


I should submit this grainy photograph to the local news and let them flood the AP news lines with it. Recently, there was a video of the famed Chupucabra, or Texas Goat Sucker, in the news. Our house seems to attract wildlife. I think it is the gallon buckets of water and dry cat food my wife insist on leaving out. We have a skunk family. We have a few armadillo’s, several possums (those are one ugly creatures…) and for the last few years, a FOX. Yes, that grainy photo isn’t a chupucabra, but a fox. Between it being 9:30 PM at night and the fox was being rather skittish; the photo didn’t come out well. I wonder if the skunks weren’t about either. The fox probably wants no part of the skunks. I didn’t use flash either, as that would have frightened it off. The fox has managed to frighten a 13 year old out for an early morning jog. He thought it was a coyote, which we also have about. Another neighbor, a hunter, breathlessly rang our doorbell one Sunday. He and his daughter had noticed the fox at the house next to ours, and watched as it went through a hole in the fence into our back yard. I think the neighbor was disappointed when I replied “Oh, yeah, the fox. He’s been around a few years. He sleeps in the bushes back there. Our cats and he seem to be friends. The crazy squirrel hates them all”.
A few weeks back, I was in our back yard trying to get some water on our bushes. That was when the temperatures were 107! I noticed Mr. Fox, trot across our back yard. He saw me, paused, and then kept going. He went under one of my trailers and then laid down to watch what I was doing. Following Mr. Fox was one of our cats. The cat made it to the shade, but not under the trailer. The cat then decided to show the fox, that if you roll around on your back, on the concrete driveway, that you get a nice scratch, maybe the human will pet you, or, better still, FEED you! The fox had a look on it’s face of “what is that cat doing?”
Maybe we should sell tickets to the zoo in our back yard.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Olympics - Bob Costas or ???

So the 2008 Olympics are a happening in China. It's been fun to watch. This past Friday night, we took some Papa John's Pizza over to some old friends home. Their son has had a very rough patch, with a collapsed lung! While sitting and talking, we were also half watching the Olympics. Bob Costas kept coming on and talking. The lady of the house, mentioned that "something is just not right with that guys hair". I had "one of my moments" as my wife calls them. And I blurted out "Yeah, He's working on that Herman Munster look". About five minutes later, the laughter died down.

You be the judge.

Add some bolts and a scar......

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Funny and surprising video about guitar books and the chord charts.



Lets see. Mark Knopfler of Dire Straights doing Money for Nothing.
Lemmy Kilmister of MotorHead doing Ace of spades
David Gilmore of Pink Floyd doing Another Brick in the Wall
Mark King of Level 42 doing Listens in Love.
Gary Moore doing Parisians Walkways.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Records! We got Records!


I've been working on setting up our new (Free) entertainment center. I set all the stereo equipment first. CD player, cassette tape player, receiver, record (as in 33 1/3 LP and 45) player. I went ahead and hooked in a Peavey sound mixer also. I used to mix in my electronic drums, so I could "play along" with songs. The mixer can be very handy, as you can run eight inputs into it, and mix as you like.
Once that was all set, then we could start placing our LP record collection back into the other cabinet and also the DVD collection. We don't have that many DVD's, and they fit nicely into one of the drawers. I placed them there and then started moving the records. The records were mostly in alphabetical order when we started a week back. But then they were all moved, twice. Once into the den, and then back into the new entertainment center. So they were quite mixed up. I'd put them into place one evening last week. When I returned from work on Friday, our eldest had moved them again! She must have decided that the antique LP’s should be hidden away. She'd moved as many as would fit, into a part of the cabinet, where they would be out of sight. She'd moved the DVD's into the glass faced cabinet so we could see the DVD's. So, all the records got moved a third time!
Sunday afternoon, it was another Texas summer afternoon. Read that, as 106 degrees! I decided to work on putting the records back in alphabetical order by artist last name, or group name (Beatles before Kansas).
It was fun to sort it out. There are some blended LP's. Most of the stuff was mine from before we were married. Think mid-1980's. There was also a fair amount of Cheryl’s records and a lot of duplication. Most of the duplication was Beatles. She still tells people, she only married me because I had a COMPLETE collection of every Beatles LP released in America. Not true, but very close. I point out, that while I had them all, she had the ORIGINALS! 1964 Beatles albums. Classic stuff.
Cheryl had some classical stuff. Barry Manilow. Bee Gees!!! Lots of Elton John.
I had some stuff, I don't even remember. Krocus? I also have Led Zeppelin, Fats Domino, BB King, Rush, Beatles, Asia, Atlanta Rhythm, Who, Rolling Stones, Heart, Huey Lewis and the News, Blues Brothers, Timbuc Three, Tom Petty, Kansas, Toto, David Gilmore, Pink Floyd.......... Three shelves worth. Probably a few hundred LP's. Not counting the 45's NOR the old 78's! Yes, got some of those from the 1920's and 1930's. And a working victrola.

We also have some Twisted Sister.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Something is cooking....

And it smells. At work most days, someone will make a snack of popcorn. Today, someone made some, probably wandered off with it set to Full-Nuc and 5 minutes. Yep, burning popcorn smell is wafting through the building. I think the buttery flavoring actually caught fire.
Actually, it smells better than what was cooking at lunch time. I think someone was microwaving pig sausage filled with dog poop. MAN, it stunk like a port-a-toilet!

Monday, August 4, 2008

It's 107 degrees, work got you up at 4:30 AM, Let's MOVE FURNITURE!


Sunday morning at 4:30 AM, my work woke me up with a production problem. Just one of the many hazards of working in data processing. Except this was a big problem, 30 million rows of data, screwed up. It took until almost 6 AM just to get it recovered. And I then had to get the original job started back up with some changes, and hope it worked! By 7:30, it was past the prior blow-up point, so I decided to head on to church. I was planning to return from church, eat lunch, head to the mall to purchase a birthday gift for the wife. And then NAP away the heat of the afternoon. But then our high school daughter called up with a deal that was too good to pass up. Her boyfriend's family was giving away a solid oak entertainment center, with the 64 inch big-screen TV included! The catch? It was upstairs AND it needed to be moved that afternoon. How hard could it be? Surely I'd still get to nap around 4? Right? I can set the oven to come on by itself and start the potato's and meat loaf planned for dinner? Right. Moving all that furniture down their THREE landing staircase, and then into the 107 degree heat afternoon. Oh, and we needed to move our OLD entertainment center. The one with 200 records (33 RPM's), the one with about 50 car show awards stacked on it, the one with 50 CD's stacked on it, the one with our 1981 Sony Trinitron on it (the broken one). At least daughter and her boyfriend volunteered to move all that! So, it took five of us to get this stuff down and loaded into three pick-up trucks and over to our house. By then, it was almost 5 PM. I hooked up the cable box and the TV and decided to sit and stare at it.
I felt like the Blues Brothers movie when Elwood (Dan Aykroyd) says "It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses." "Hit it".
Really do thank the family for letting us have this stuff.
I think I'll watch the chase part of Blues Brothers.....