DWI checkpoint

Bad idea maybe?

I was driving home from Midnight Mass....thought about whether or not any DWI checkpoints would be going on. Would "Police Navidad!!" be the wrong way to greet an officer?

More strange was that only 608 hits came up on Google for the phrase "Police Navidad"....I can't possibly be one of the first to invent this phrase, can I?

Anyways, no drinking was actually involved, and the fog caused by a foot of snow warming to 50 degrees in the rain should have scared actual drunks off the road....

a day in the life (overrated beatles song)

tree guy was supposed to come to uproot my dead cedars, mulch 'em or cut them into firewood. I think there was an ice storm with the freezing line 20 miles north of here or so, so he musta gotten called to do emergency work. Anyways, I took a day of for nothing, and it just rained all night. (it's begun to look nothing like Christmas)

i wrapped some christmas presents, oh boy....tried to call the post office about mailing carbon dioxide tanks, but the post office moved last week and the new phone number didn't show up online. i'll do that tomorrow, my brother's getting a soda machine so I can mail the box with all the stuff in it down to florida tomorrow....assuming the USPS allows tanks in the mail.

watched some christmas videos, first "santa claus is coming to town" and then "emmet otter's jug-band christmas". Before that I had the price is right on, and drew carey sucks ass as a host. is he even trying?

defrosting some ground beef....plan to do a patty melt for dinner. always a kick-ass meal choice.

my 10-foot tree (tall and wide) wrecked 3 tree stands, so I had to cut it in half (it branched like a Y a couple of feet off the ground) and use one of the 8-foot branches as the trunk of the now demi-tree in place. the angel's head shattered on the fireplace last weekend when the tree fell over fully decorated. like sleepy hollow, so that had to be replaced.....I still want the Pope to move Christmas to the spring. Had to put on a bunch of replacement ornaments when about 10 of the balls shattered.

will probably order more crap online tonight. will amazon ship scotch tape and to/from tag stickers?

Revenge

So,
I had friends over last weekend for drinking and some croquet games on the front lawn. I fried a turkey, made corn on the cob, and mashed potatoes with garlic, rosemary and thyme. Plus, a spice cake with homemade pear ice cream.

One guy showed up bearing a watermelon that was yellow instead of pink. It tastes the same as pink, and makes just as much of a wet mess.

Anyway, I thought this was sort of yellow's "revenge" on pink for stealing pink lemonade. Call it even.

Don't lick the shiny salt

Cute tale from one of my new clients, a salt mine in New York. Apparently a miner was sitting on a bench having lunch while a tour of the mine went through a quarter-mile below the surface. A little old lady was enraptured by a shiny hunk of salt emanating from the wall of dirt, so she went over to lick it. She claimed, yup, tastes like salt. Apparently the salt rock was shiny because it had been recently peed on -- the stream must have eroded some of the peripheral dirt....

So we have a new phrase to accompany "don't eat the yellow snow"....

Counterintuitivity

Two things run counter to intuition....Here goes:

1. There are 3 places in the town where my softball league plays. A big park with lights on the field, a smaller area in the middle of nowhere, and two fields at the high school. So what's the only place where they don't monitor to prevent us from being able to drink beer after a game? The high school, of course!

2. A lot of times when people have allergies, conditioned air is the best way to reduce the threat of the allergens. (Like, don't open a window to invite hay fever, as an example, I suppose.) We had a guest cat over this weekend in our basement, and I think the air conditioning system in the house actually circulated more allergens to me. I sneezed horribly for a couple of days, and my vocal chords are actually a bit shot and need rest. Point is, had we just opened windows in the house instead, I'd probably have been fine.

Irish twins

Today my brother turns 36. Same age as I am (for a few more weeks).
Nice goin', mom. Giving birth twice while you're 25.

Driveway

So we finally got our new driveway. A couple of weeks ago they came in to put some dirt and crushed stone down, nice and flat with one of those flattener doo-hickeys that they drive and nobody wants to be run over by. But then it's been raining every afternoon, so they haven't been able to finish. They came by yesterday, and somehow must have realized that the forecast of late-day thunderstorms was not going to come to fruition, because it was indeed dry.

My basketball hoop is on order, of course, now that the driveway is paved. The question now, is whether my wife will get pissed if I use actual paint instead of chalk to mark the court.

Had some problems earlier this month removing the swimming pool cover. As in, it got waterlogged and I had to dump the top of the cover into the water because I couldn't lift it out. So the pool was green and filled with lots and lots of dead leaves. The whole leaves aren't the problem, it's the decayed leaf powder that doesn't stay on the bottom of the pool to be vacuumed up. It's about 90-95% cleaned up, and the water is clear and algae-free, though.

This is the time of year crabgrass starts up. I sprayed some WeedStop on it, and it does work pretty well. But it's like green grass with big brown spotches of dead crabgrass. I suppose that's fine.

So Monday I took my car in for its 100,000 mile tune-up. No real problems, got new front brakes but everything else was okay...except the radio, which apparently was faulty and thus not the speakers' fault for the lack of audio in the car. About $750. Wednesday, my insulin pump wasn't hooked up right, so I ducked out around 11 to go home and re-attach it. That's when I got smashed into. The lady tried to cross two lanes of traffic to pull into a parking lot for a diner. The left lane was all stopped at a traffic light, about 10 cars deep, so someone must have given her a gap to go. The right lane, the turning land for the onramp to the highway, was clear, so I was still moving at about 20-25 mph approaching the light. So she didn't look for me, and I didn't see her until she cut me off ("failure to yield", a 14-242 apparently). No injuries at such a slow speed. Just a real hassle. And of course, maintenance costs aren't usually reimbursed by an insurer -- her Geico is going to give me $300 to offset that a little. But anyways, the car's being totaled. I had to go retrieve everything from the body shop they towed it to -- license plates, my E-Z Pass tag, sporting goods, sunglasses....the only thing left at this point might be to try to siphon the 2/3 tank of gas into a portable container that we can use for the lawn mower. I'm amused at referring to her as an "old lady", as she's a few weeks younger than my parents.

What would happen if....(6/28 edition)

....instead of cinnamon buns, you could order nutmeg buns? Oregano buns? Cardamom buns? Really, I got a whole spice rack, but bakeries tend to steer us, the consumers, towards cinnamon.

So, my Boston Celtics won the NBA title this year. Okay, not MY Boston Celtics, regardless of what the dopey PA guy may say. Probably just another case of "cheering for laundry". Anyways, with the Red Sox and Celtics being reigning champs, and the Patriots getting, um, pretty close, I feel it's worth pointing out to the Boston-hatahs out there that the Bruins finished dead LAST in the NHL playoffs.

Here's how this works. They lost to Montreal, who lost to Philadelphia, who lost to Pittsburgh, who lost to Detroit. So if we were to assign a binary 1-0 to each team based on how they did and their competition did, the Bruins would be a 0000.

One of my clients at work asked that next year's reports have the Social Security Numbers masked, a la xxx-xx-1234 to prevent identity theft. I almost wrote back in my email, "Not a problem, Mr. 041-46-7679." (That's not his actual SSN, but woulda been amusing nonetheless.)

Here's a pet peeve. People who don't check to see if they've just put a piece of paper with Wite-Out on it down on the copy machine. So then I come around a few minutes later and get 20 copies with a small splotch in the same spot of each page. Just scrape the thing off the glass, please?

ESPN is not required to have a "national" point of view. They're located in Connecticut, and that explains a lot of their Red Sox - Yankees bias in reporting news stories. Cable companies in Idaho do not HAVE to carry them, if people complain enough. I don't find the Fox Sports networks' west-coast slant particularly endearing, so I avoid them most of the time. Simple enough.

I hate the concept of the "fun size" candy bar, often given out at Halloween. The fun size is small, and thus there is nothing "fun" about it. Just for fun, I typed in "fun size bullshit" on yahoo or Google one time, and sure enough, I was brought to a link that I totally agreed with.

I was listening to the Orioles versus the Blue Jays on the radio, a baseball feed. Okay, not my radio, but rather my cell phone, which can stream the audio for any game being played -- great at work for day games when we're not allowed to use the company Internet connection to stream the data. Anyways, the Orioles announcers referred to their team as the Birds, which is a normal nickname employed for Baltimore, but not exactly descriptive in a game against the Blue Jays....or Cardinals, either.

Why are men's and women's shoe sizes different? Apparently my mom had a pair of men's jogging shoes when I was a kid, size 7. I remember it when years later I decided to buy her new shoes for her birthday, only to find out that her women's size is like an 8½ and the shoes I'd bought were too small? Of course, shoe sizes go wacky by country anyways, you'd think it'd be something easily made uniform....like the metric system :)