Black Canary Barbie

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not “into” Barbie’s and all things about Barbie, but this one made the local news. Black Canary happens to be a DC comic super hero. A scantily clad one at that. Seems the people at Mattel decided to have a Barbie Loves Pop culture collection, and Black Canary Barbie is on the list. Along with the Addams family, the Wonder Woman Barbie, the 30TH anniversary Star Trek Giftset. The list is almost endless. The web site for colleting Barbie is fascinating. I “get it” why people are a bit upset with Black Canary, but they must have skipped over “Cabaret Barbie with RED hair”.





How about Pirate Barbie?


That lends itself to some imagination.



How about the “French Maid” doll?


Oh-la-LA!!!

Sort of sad to see some of the Barbie’s discounting their services.

So, people are all upset about Fishnet & Leather, S&M, Biker Chic Barbie. Please alert me when we get Crack Whore Barbie, Pole-dancing Barbie, the Naughty Nurse, Cat Woman……….

Don't you just love being on hold so long???

I was checking on one of our credit card balances yesterday and noted a $34.99 automatic charge for a web site that we (used) to own. It was for a band I played in for about five years. A year and a half ago, the band broke up. My Web-master-wife, removed the content and notified the domain to place it into a "hold for future use" type status. They were to charge us $9.99 a year for this. We actually have three of these. The band site, a drum building site that I never used, and a political campaign site. So what was up with this $34.99 charge? My wife logged onto the provider, whose first letter is a Y and who's last character is a punctuation character, and found an email from a month back, notifying us that the $9.99 went up to $34.99 a year! Except she also noted that the band site, was NOT due for renewal until two more weeks, so why were they charging us already? Oh, and she fully cancelled all three web sites! She then got on the phone to get to a person at the company and attempt to reverse the charge. It took ONE HOUR before someone came on. As my wife said, "you know you are in trouble, when the music tape starts OVER!". At least the company representative was able to reverse the charge. And spoke English.

22 inch rims on a Caprice

I didn't have my camera the other day and wished I did. But, getting a photograph would have been difficult, as I was in traffic. What I spotted was an older Chevy Caprice with the gansta' 22 inch rims on them. I don't know about this. Back in my day, we'd never customize a four door car. But, seems common now. Well, this Caprice was about 10 years old, had some dents, rust, lots of primer, and these 22 inch rims with the tires that look to be rubber bands. All rims. Like somewhere in Oz, a train is missing a set of wheels. Except this car was listing, and listing like a drunken sailor. Down in the front passenger side and down bad. And driving about 18 miles per hour, which was probably a good sign. Then, he went through the intersection and I saw why he was "down in front". Seems one of the tires had gone flat. At least he had the sense to get out and change it. Except all he had for a spare was one of those emergency spares!


That was two days ago and I'm still chuckling at the thought.

But while searching for a representative photo of "spare tire", I found this.....scary.....

Goodbye old landmark

We’ve lived in our house for 22 years. We back up to some city property and one of the original water storage facilities for the town. It was the first water tower in town. And according to our neighbor, was supposed to have been a ground level storage tank.

Well, the city has had to build several new water towers and they have wisely placed them on city property along a rail road line in the city. That rendered the old tower in our back yard, obsolete. The city property also had the fire department and police, both of which moved to the new city hall and city fire building, which just opened. Because of all these changes, the old city property will be reconfigured to be a senior center and also a brand new city utility and works building. But first, they had to remove the water tower! Looks like it will be removed start to finish, in two days!

We used to tell people to watch for the water tower as they navigated to our home. I would tell them, "aim for it. From our back yard, you can throw a rock and hit it". Looks like we won't be able to tell them that anymore. We are sad, but happy in that our home sell appeal, just went up.

Oh my aching back

I’ve had a bad lower back since about 1978. I was young and foolish when I first hurt it. I’m careful about it and we have a Sleep Number bed, which is great. During our vacation, I was waking up every day with a back ache. It wasn’t a very good bed for our backs, as the wife also had back issues. Well, we’ve been back a week now and I’ve still got a back ache! I’ve been on a prescription pain medicine during the days, and take a muscle relaxer and some Tylenol PM at bed time. Walking is a great thing for the bad back, so the last three days over the July 4 holiday, I’ve done five miles each day. I’ve decided that every hour at work, I need to spend five minutes and walk to the other end of the building.

vacation

So after the funeral for my mother-in-law, we packed up the truck and headed to Corpus Christi Texas. We've done this trip about 10 years. We've been staying at a very nice condo for the last three. Island House. We take an evening stroll down to the Bob Hall Pier. It was nice and relaxing. And too short. Except I was a bit tired of the sand, too much sun burn, etc. Some views from our patio and of the pool.

Surreal

That's my only explanation. Two weeks back, my mother in law collapsed. She'd had her first stroke about 14 years before. This latest one was fatal, she passed on a Wednesday. Somehow, we had the visitation on Thursday, the funeral on Friday and we left for a few days vacation on Sunday!