Brian in Oxford

History is a series of conquerings....

2010-06-19T12:02:00.002-04:00

Isn't that really the world in a nutshell?

People in Arizona are afraid of being "conquered" by Mexicans crossing the border. And it's not necessarily a military "invasion", but they're probably scared of their way of life being overtaken. Probably unfounded, so although I'm anti-the immigration bill they got going there, I can at least sense some sort of big-picture reason as to why they enacted it.

Anyway, here's another simplification of the world: Someone once said that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money to spend. I like that....but it's equally arguable that the problem with capitalism is eventually someone ends up with ALL the money. Like the cards in a game of War. Actually, the biggest issue is that nobody in America wants to be on the bottom. Well, SOMEBODY'S got to be on the bottom. That's why jobs are shipped overseas, because THEY will gladly take being on the bottom, apparently.

Oh well, I'm no economist.

Airline food?!

2010-06-06T21:38:00.002-04:00

I was on an airline today!

Southwest, from Hartford to Nashville to Jacksonville (insert snarky, "which of these cities SHOULD have an NHL team?" comment here...

Anyway, the first leg provided me cinnamon Honey Maid graham snacks. The second leg provided peanuts.

Both tasted just fine...

I'm in Jax now, at a resort on the Atlantic Ocean for two days. No time for fun though. If I stay for extra days, I have to pay extra in lieu of the corporate rate, which my employer picks up. So screw it....

What? It's been so long!

2010-06-03T20:41:00.001-04:00

I'm gonna drink beer and let whoever cares know about it:
Check it out.

And what's the deal with airline food? Just kidding....

DWI checkpoint

2008-12-26T16:23:00.002-05:00

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)

2008-12-12T15:08:00.002-05:00

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

2008-08-16T18:56:00.003-04:00

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

2008-07-28T17:58:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-15T18:58:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-09T07:42:00.001-04:00

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

2008-06-28T12:01:00.002-04:00

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)

2008-06-28T11:41:00.002-04:00

....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 :)

I didn't die....

2008-06-26T00:23:00.001-04:00

...but actually, it coulda been close this morning. A lady cut me off trying to pull into a diner. My 2004 Nissan Sentra got smashed up pretty bad.

I'm okay. More fun blogging soon....I think!

Two poo points

2008-05-13T17:37:00.003-04:00

First, when a woman cleans out her hair brush and throws the pile of hair in the toilet, but doesn't flush....it creates a sort of nest....a Poo Nest, if you're willing enough to go lightly next time.

Ewww....

Anyways, then we have the topic of the Loch Ness Poo.

This occurs, obviously, when the water level of the bowl can't contain one's doings....doo-ings....heh heh, I'm amused like Beavis.

Okay, sorry. Back to your regularly scheduled program.

What would happen if....(5/3 edition)

2008-05-03T12:58:00.003-04:00

...someone came up with Powdered Bagels? I have always kinda dismissed bagels as nothing more than bread-flavored donuts. I did make bagels once about 4 years ago. Some plain, some cinnamon-raisin, and some jalapeño.

(Oh geez, I forgot I have a Mac at home, and tried to do ALT+0241 to get a spanish N, instead of just using the option button with my N.)

A couple of the bagels came out okay, a couple of them were kinda, shall we say, thick. Dense....not light and fluffy to serve as a vehicle for butter. That's right, I don't eat bagels often, and I don't toast them. I microwave them in plastic wrap so that they get chewy, and drench them in butter. Cream cheese is not my friend.

For a while, I kept forgetting that Al Roker's wife was Deborah Roberts, not Cokie Roberts, although both Roberts work for ABC as reporters. Go ahead and wikipedia them, you'll see the difference! (And yes, that's me using wikipedia as a verb, like google.)

Here's an amusing idea....enhance the border fence for Texas. But on the NORTH side of Texas, so that they go back to being part of Mexico. (ha! burned!!)

ZIP Code poker. I used to live in Bridgeport, where the ZIP code was 06606. A full house! That ties for when I lived in Vernon, Connecticut, as a very small child. There, the ZIP is 06066. Can anyone beat a full boat, sixes over zeros?

On my way to work I saw a sign in someone's driveway advertising "seasoned" firewood. This means that it's old wood, that's dried out and will actually catch on fire well. However, I thought it would be extremely amusing to make a little sign that reads "Italian-" in front of the word "seasoned". You know, like firewood with basil and oregano in it. Anyway, soon after an American flag was stuck in the yard next to the sign, so it would have to be American seasoning. But I'm not sure what counts as American seasoning. Salt and pepper? Cajun seasoning is American, but not identified as endemic to the whole country.

After my shoulder surgery, I was advised that Vitamin E would be good for reducing the scars' appearance on the front and back of my shoulder. This is similar to when I broke my kneecap back in 1994. However, back then I had a bottle of vitamin E capsules. And I had no idea that the actual vitamins were INSIDE the gelatin. I actually tried rubbing dry gelatin on my knee for a couple of weeks. Apparently, I was supposed to break the capsules open.

I'm not a salad fan. I don't like tomatoes, onions, green peppers, or lettuce. I will eat salad when they start making it out of better-tasting stuff. I can eat spinach, carrots, and cucumber slices just fine. However, if fruit salad is identified with the fruit in front of it, why can't salad be referred to as "vegetable salad"? Like, if I'm offered salad, I should ask, "fruit or vegetable?"

One of my friends works for a company that designs packaging for consumer products. I signed up to do some consumer surveys for them online, and one of them was about all things ketchup. Ketchup is cool in that I grew up not liking ANY of the ingredients in ketchup, except for corn syrup. Tomatoes, vinegar, onion powder, other spices...no thanks! But somehow ketchup worked. As a kid, I would eat American cheese with ketchup on bread. My cousins mocked me deservedly.

Finally, although "moral support" is a common term, "immoral support" is not. Like, encouraging a surgeon to drink heavily before performing an appendectomy.

Come on, you can do it!!!

Signs of spring

2008-04-19T21:30:00.002-04:00

Women's toes....(ladies, casual Friday should not allow me to see your feet via open-toed shoes!)

Motorcycles out and about (I'm cool with the freedom, but hate the noise....hey, how about a hybrid bike? That would get like 500 miles to the gallon, no? And a silent electric motor would be amusing.)

Dogs left out at night (again, HATE the noise....)

Allergies -- a new reason to sneeze, instead of a winter cold, I suppose (pollen....I can't wait!)

More kids playing b-ball at the park while I drive home

Female pedestrians showing off their shoulders....usually for the better.

Calves on farmland out with their moms learning to graze

No more shoveling to get to the grill on our deck

And the one time of year where the grass grows before the crabgrass takes over, so the lawn looks nice-ish

----------

A little side note on my "#5" thing. At an old job, my dad's company was a client. And so I was in charge of writing our year end letter to review the company retirement plan. I accidentally left two number 5s on the itemized list of about 15 things to go over. Nobody really noticed, except me, when I went to write the following year's review letter -- we'd often use the prior year's report as a template and make changes as appropriate. So the following year, I had for point number 5, "There is no number five this year." Obviously the kind of thing you can get away with only if you have it in good with the client. And so they ended up with one number five per year, on average.

What would happen if...(4/12 edition)

2008-04-12T09:13:00.002-04:00

...I took too long to post my thoughts, so that I had no idea what the note I took meant? I mean, really, I've got written down on a sticky note, "MBA = Hanson!" and I have no freakin' idea what that means. Usually, I think of something funny at work, and since I don't blog from work any more with the new job, I write it down to use later. I assume it's got something to do with mmmmmbop, but I've got no idea.

I enjoy the idea when people say something like their poop smells like roses. I offer Axl Rose and Pete Rose, as two Roses I wouldn't brag over the smell of....

A good suggestion for photos is to aim the camera down a bit from above the forehead....check out your high school yearbook, the pictures of even the less hot girls can still look halfway decent. I suppose aiming the camera up just shows off the nostrils.

I want the job for making up the pronunciation of acronyms. Specifically, ones that don't have an obvious phonetic reading to them. For instance, in 2001 there was the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act. EGTRRA....most people figure out that this would be called "egg-truh"...but every once in a while you'd get an "Egg-Tray" or "Erg-truh" by someone really not noticing the spelling. One of the newest acronyms in pension-land is the Qualified Automatic Contribution Agreement (where your company signs you up for your 401(k) plan without your permission). QACA. I cringed at the pronunciation of "quacka" because there's no U in the acronym. I prefer pronouncing the Q like a hard Middle-Eastern word (scrabble favorite QAT, for instance). And just having it sound like "ka-ka" (poopie reference). So that could be my job.

With my sneakers, I don't run the laces through the last pair of holes, and so the laces are pretty long. Occasionally the loops will get caught under the wheels of my work chair. That sucks! Because the wheel has a plastic castor covering it, so you can't just pull the thing out. I actually have to take off the shoe and pull the loop apart and figure out which way to pull the lace out from under there.

On my way home I saw a field of cows, and instead of mooing at them, I yelled, "Ruminants, unite!" (The revolution is a grass-roots movement, after all....)

Okay, one more that I sort of forget the specifics on. I believe what it was, is that my lips were chapped, and my wife, who was driving, had to pee. It was one of those things where both statements were announced sort of one right after the other, as we were on our way home from somewhere. I thought about how both problems could be solved at once and quickly said, "Those birds....die separately."

(ya know, like, one stone isn't gonna kill them...)

ok, the end. David has probably sent some of you guys over to read this, so I'm working feverishly to provide new material!!

Tales from rehab

2008-04-12T09:01:00.002-04:00

So, rehab's not hideous. Three nights a week....here's a typical night:
a. heat pad to the shoulder for 10 minutes
b. 10 minutes on a bike -- no pedaling, but just the back and forth with my arms
c. dangling, pendulum-like motion while holding a dumbbell. (up to 5 pounds at this point!)
d. alternate shoulder rolls and curls (10 pounds in each arm, I assume for symmetry)
e. reverse curls, alternating sides and front (4 pounds)
f. a couple of weight machines....these are like 80 pounds that you have to pull towards yourself
g. thick rubber bands to pull on, stretching the upper shoulder ligaments
h. an overhead pulley to help my shoulder stay yanked over my head
i. manual contortion of the arm by the therapist. (I asked if the positions were stuff even my right arm was normally capable of, and apparently so.)
j. ice pack for 10 minutes and head home.

The place doubles as a workout gym for a few, so the single-digit weights do seem a bit emasculating. So the left arm is getting stronger, while the right arm is just the normal sore you get when you haven't worked out in a while -- tight elbow ligaments, for example.

On the bright side, my wife had similar surgery a few years ago and is familiar with everything I'm doing.

Croquet this weekend....the swinging motion could be good.

It's a labRum, dad....

2008-04-02T19:32:00.003-04:00

Apparently Dad thought I had torn something else....even though I do have a left and right labrum. (Hint: replace the R with an I, and you get a girl part!)

Anyways....ya know how they tell you to count back from 100 for anesthesia, and you never get even to 98? Well, I started counting back at 100 a little at a time when I got to the hospital during the 2.5 hours of check-in and prep. By 9 am I was down to about 11. While wheeling me down the hall to the OR, I did 5-4-3-2....they told me to wait, none of that counts yet. So what happens? they knock me out in the operating room without telling me, so I never did get down to 1. Oh well.

Turns out I'm allergic to reglan, an anti-vomiting medicine they tried to give me in my IV so that the anesthesia wouldn't make me puke when I woke up. I got ridiculously itchy and weak-feeling, like my butt cheeks were infested with ants. Not fun.

Other than that, I've been okay. Percocets are the painkiller of choice. Physical therapy starts Friday. Pain has been intermittent. However, it's been a bitch being in a sling for stuff like typing, writing up reports right-handed....and tonight I had the labor of transferring 5 gallons of beer from one vat to a glass carboy.

And no driving until next week. Ho hum....it would be great for the drinkfest planned after work tomorrow, except they say that alcohol and high concentrations of acetaminophen (as in Percocet or Tylenol 3) will practically make your liver dissolve inside your body. So I get to play it dry, if not loopy from the medicine. What better way to celebrate the 30-year anniversary for a woman at work, who's a big Brett Favre fan, than to get doped up on painkillers, right?

Me gusta March Madness

2008-03-21T15:20:00.003-04:00

So, I get 15 right out of 16 games the first day...only to find the VP of my department (I don't think of her as my boss, although I suppose she does have that authority) is 16-0.

I looked good for 19 out of 20 until that Western Kentucky 3-pointer at the buzzer fell...but I don't mind....sometimes ya gotta trade a perfect bracket for the excitement of the upset.

My next home brew will start tomorrow. It's my favorite beer -- Hop Devil. Oddly, though, the "clone brew" version that I'll be following the recipe for comes in at 6.3% alcohol instead of 6.7% that the real stuff is listed at.

I went to Dartmouth, and so sometimes I hear stuff, like, "that's a great school". Well, yeah, it is....but that really only means I performed really well in high school....Once you get into the good school, all ya gotta do at that point is graduate, which isn't as hard as it sounds.

I've been pulling dead cedar trees out of the side of our property by the neighbor's property. They were dwarfed by bigger trees, and so it's like dead tree carcasses....then they fall over (cedars have week bases for some reason) and they stand at 70 degree angles until I go in there and pull them down. At some point I've gotta hire a tree guy to run all these things through the woodchipper.

The guy who plowed our driveway this winter pushed a lot of the crushed stone (I sooooo wish we had asphalt so I could play basketball in the driveway) into a pile. But that was actually good, because the crushed stone by where the driveway reaches the garage had worn away -- it's like a 2-3 inch bump up to drive into the garage under our kitchen.....so having a pile of loose stones was convenient for me to take with a big spade and move to flatten out the approach in.

I went to lunch today with the Mrs....oops, I mean the Dr......and they screwed up my order. I wanted fries, I got a mixture of fries and onion rings. I wanted bacon....instead, I got a seared tortilla chip underneath the burger. What the hell? Ewwww! So they took the meal off the bill. I don't claim to be good at yelling at waitresses....so that was a positive accomplishment.

What would happen if....(3/13 edition)

2008-03-13T18:05:00.002-04:00

....there was a sci-fi movie with the following premise: You know how they have that "international star registry" where for some amount of money, you can have a star named after someone? What if Earth was invaded by people from that star (or a planet in that star's system)? How would you like to be THAT guy? It's kind of a lame-enough gift to get, oooh, a billion light-years away there's my star....But then all of humanity is in serious trouble, and people are going to blame you! And really, it's not like you can become this "Earth ambassador" -- the natives to that system don't know who you are and aren't about to want to meet someone who thinks THEIR homeworld is named after him....

So now they have Roth 401(k) contributions, kinda like Roth IRAs....I vote to name the more traditional "pre-tax" contributions as "Hagar 401(k)" contributions. Hey, if Sammy wants to be remembered for *anything* 30 years from now, he should play along, too.

At work we have these RSA security tags, that flash a random 6-digit number every 60 seconds that we have to enter when we log on to one of our Internet-based systems. Now I've come up with a poker game for it. At a fixed time, everyone reveals the poker hand formed by their numbers. Best hand wins. Actually, with a six-digit number, you're more likely to have 2 pair, than no pair.

I saw a book on sale called "A Child's First Bible". And the idea of "a child's first...." is common enough. But how about "An old-timer's LAST Bible"? I mentioned this at work and someone suggested highlighting some of the passages that deal with the impending afterlife. (I simply suggested very large print.)

Lance Armstrong kinda looks like Anderson Cooper.

I like to play cribbage with the stated intent being to make the OTHER person end up with more points. Play to 61 instead of 121, since points can be scarce if you try. Nothing like unearthing a 12-point crib when you LAST want it.

Some people don't like to work on an empty stomach. How about working on an empty liver? Keep that flask in your drawer, ha!

Every once in a while, a couple of peanut M&M's are like siamese twins. However, other occasions have it where the candy coating is compromised. Then there's a peanut you can see, like an exposed brain from a bomb going off near a head.

I used to like chewing on muffin and cupcake paper. Get all the stuff off the inside.

Hey NASCAR....try having one race where they go around the track in the opposite direction. What would they have to do? Maybe re-pave the pit area, since you don't wanna have to do a 120-degree turnaround to approach pit row. It's akin to golf having the random match-play or modified Stableford scoring one week.

Lastly, I was asked to verify some personal questions to change a password. I was asked for my "favourite color".
That seems political....one word spelled British-style, the other American-style. So now everyone's pissed off!

Not a rib tickler...

2008-03-06T17:39:00.002-05:00

Ugh.

Friday night....pickup hoops, some guy I've never seen before goes jumping into the pile with the score tied 8-8, I catch a knee to the left side of my ribs, and down I go. Apparently he missed the shot, everyone stood around, he put the rebound back in. About 30 seconds later I get up wondering if I can get a foul called for that. First of all, who the hell calls an offensive foul, right? But DAMN, it f-bomb-ing hurt. The next group of guys was on to play anyways....some clown claimed my own guy hit me (bull feces on that one....)

Anyways, they were sore, but I was able to play the rest of the night....and my Sunday league game went fine.

Sunday night, though....achoo!
I musta cracked 'em then. That's when it really really hurt. Like as bad as anything I've felt in a while. Can't cough, can't sneeze....I feared for pain in bowel movements, but that's been painless at least (imagine...HOPING for diarrhea to avoid having to push)

The doctor on Tuesday said an x-ray wasn't worth it to prove they were broken or not, since the treatment is the same....time, and pain medication (tylenol 3 for me -- the stuff mixed with codeine). It's working somewhat okay, but usually if I do have to cough, I brace my side against a wall to push back against the force. A muffin crumb caused an involuntary cough and that freakin' hurt.

So anyway, the doctor said if I needed it for a legal issue....hmmm, could I sue the town for not enforcing the "residents only" rule at the school where we played? probably not...of course, this past Monday there were rumors (I wasn't there -- I'm on the shelf for a couple of months, I suspect) that the park and rec lady was going to actually check IDs....wonder how that turned out. Maybe instead of 35 playing, we'd have only 15. that's what happens when a new high school opens with a shiny gym -- people from out of town show up.

As long as the ribs don't interfere with my left torn labrum surgery in a month, I can have them both heal together, I suppose.

What would happen if....(2/29 edition)

2008-02-29T17:50:00.002-05:00

...you were late getting home from work but you lived at the South Pole? Could you argue to your wife that you had to "run around ALL DAY"? Geez, it's worth a shot.

I saw a headline on Yahoo! that said "Bobby Brown agrees to community service for cocaine". I'm sure he figured that's a pretty good deal, no? I'm sure lots of people would do a day of Habitat for Humanity in exchange for a dimebag of weed, too....

One phrase that seemed popular in college that I never hear any more is the "hot beef injection". Google only had 23,900 hits for it. I wrote the "HBI Song" with a buddy in college...typical E5 chords no-skill riff rock.

When a company changes its fiscal year, it will often have a "short plan year" -- say, from July 1 to December 1 if they want to change their tax filing from June 30 to December 31. This comes up with a company's 401(k) plan, too -- same idea. The IRS prohibits what I'd like to see -- a "long plan year". You can't go 18 months with only 1 return to the IRS, apparently.

Now that my new job comes with its own office for me, I've begun debating how this affects me should I have some smelly farts. For instance, by being alone in my office, I have the privacy and confidentiality that nobody will know what I've done. However, if someone were to walk IN my office soon after, well then I'm busted. Nobody to blame it on, unlike a scenario where there's a room full of cubicles.

As someone with Type 1 diabetes (the "real" diabetes, as I like to put it -- the kind you can't help getting), I sometimes wonder when I'll end up retiring, or how long I can escape death. So I wonder how much I should be saving for retirement. Will I get the typical 25-30 year long retirement? Or would I have to retire at 40 to pull that one off? If I work until I'm 65, I could have lots put away, only to die within 2 years if I'm lucky, on the other hand.

Kinda weird, I don't picture myself ever being retired....and I remember getting yelled at by my dad because it took me two weeks after I turned 16 before I got my first job....back when you had to be 16 to work. Then they changed the work age to 15 and my little brother got a job like a month later.

This being 2/29, it's obviously another 4 years before this day rolls around. I remember when my long time dentist's son died in his 40s....the obituary happened to show that he was 44, and listed his birthday as Feb. 29th of whatever year it was. And immediately, I thought...wow, only 11. Well, 11 birthdays, although the 44 years would be accurate.

I have an episode guide to the Simpsons....from 1997. Kinda incomplete at this point. Anyways, the Futurama movie Bender's Big Score that just came out was pretty good -- a little too "let's make sure we include every minor character in this somehow" to be great, but still a good deal. I believe there are 3 more movies in the pipeline, so that's encouraging.

The Red Sox start in an hour....I'll be off playing basketball, so I can come back and watch around the 8th inning -- when absolutely nobody in the game will be familiar. If they're losing, I blame the post-White House visit hangover. And who hasn't had that before, right?

mild pet peeve

2008-02-19T19:10:00.001-05:00

Hey, the numbers on an adding machine....or numeric keypad part of a computer keyboard:

They are not in the same order as one would find them on a phone. The 1-3 and 7-9 switch places.

In the words of TV's Cliff, "what's up with that?"

so much for that idea...

2008-02-10T14:18:00.000-05:00

Ugh, what a crappy football game. Close, but not exactly well played.

And then the spice of the ribs combined with the...um....cheapness of the Red Dog to do a number on my intestines, too.

I enjoy a good Sunday crossword. I do the Boston Globe one, as I get the Sunday paper only delivered to the house. It's amusing that most of the sports scores from the night before are too late for the obviously early edition that gets sent out to Connecticut. So I get relatively good info from the notes sections, but nothing too up-to-date on last night's games.

Anyways, with the Globe one I always get fewer than 10 letters wrong, but almost NEVER a perfect score. This week's was amusing, and also seemed to follow to this odd theory. The harder it *seems* at the start, the better I do. (For instance, one letter wrong this week....the Q in "Chatauqua" in New York, which combined with Qui, the Italian word for here. I put a G, not knowing either word.) I didn't seem to be working at too briskly a pace, and yet...only the one wrong. Other weeks I fly along, and end up with 6-8 spots (usually in the same area of the puzzle) empty (or actually, mis-guessed at).

Spring training starts next week! Yee-hah! And March Madness is just around the corner.

Super Bowl's a-comin...

2008-01-31T19:20:00.000-05:00

Okay....

I hate the phrase "The Big Game". I realize that "Super Bowl" is trademarked and may not be used commercially. ESPN's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column mentions how the NFL thought about trying to trademark The Big Game. Why is it that NOBODY just refers to it as the NFL championship game?

I gave in to one of my guilty pleasures tonight. I bought a 30-pack of Red Dog. This stuff is pissy American beer, and only $11.99 for the 30-pack, too. And yet, when I need to buy cheap beer, it's what I get every time. Even if that's only once or twice a year, as I switch gears from the "good beer" I tend to purchase.

I'll be making ribs. I often do chicken wings, but I want to stay away from too much stuff fried. Leaves more room for Red Dog. (ha....)

I predict 41-13 for the final score, Patriots over Giants. This will mean NOTHING unless I'm right. But if I am successful in pulling these numbers out of my butt, then hey, it's here in print before the game.

Lost is back on tonight. I like the idea of watching that! And hey, if the writers' strike limits them to only 8 episodes this year, then that means the last 40 episodes will be more compactly aired in just a 2-year window in future seasons, right?

Of course, as much as I like Lost, it's really only my second-favorite show titled Lost, ever. Back before 9/11, NBC started showing a reality show where three pairs of people got blindfolded and flown somewhere. First ones back to New York win. They could walkie-talkie with the producers with fancy phones, and if they guessed where they were, they'd get some cash that was in a safe in their backpacks. They were in Mongolia, of all places. The best was the team that called up and guessed they were in Czechoslovakia. Um, not a country any more, guys....try again. Anyways, the show was getting really good, when 9/11 hit, and all shows were pre-empted for like 3 weeks of news coverage, and so they edited the last 4-5 shows down to 2 hours and it wasn't as good and eventually faded from memory.

Nut ranking

2008-01-27T12:20:00.000-05:00

almonds
pistachios
peanuts
macadamia nuts
pecans
cashews
filberts (hazelnuts)
walnuts
brazil nuts

and please, no testicle jokes...

IPA in a can?

2008-01-21T18:53:00.001-05:00

That seems weird. It was made by the New England Brewing Company of Woodbridge, CT. Usually beer in cans is mass-produced piss. This stuff wasn't the best India Pale Ale ever, but highly amusing, nonetheless.

I like Venus Williams better than Serena. Maybe it's the "older sibling" thing in me. She beat a rather hot Polish woman in the 4th round today. I found that woman's website, and the server was overloaded, my access was denied because others were using up her allowable bandwidth. Ha!

Couldn't they play the Super Bowl somewhere halfway between Foxboro, MA, and East Rutherford, NJ? Like, Southington, CT? Somewhere close? Oh screw it, the Patriots play better in warmer weather like Arizona. They could easily put up 50 with no wind or cold. Of course, the Giants might put up 30 or so of their own.

Two of my favorite comments from Futurama: The "third and third and third" as something to add to coffee in the year 3000....plus "Admiral Crunch" cereal.

Peanut butter is good with various fruits. I enjoyed a peanut butter and banana sandwich for lunch. What's also good is peanut butter and raisins. Of course, you need to spread the peanut butter on both slices of bread, to keep the raisins from falling out.

Ever go to make grilled sausage links, and realize you don't have any oblong rolls? I had bratwurst this weekend, and without the right roll, I had to cut open the casings, and pack the meat into a patty like a cheeseburger.

ESPN2 has UConn-North Carolina women's basketball on. Occasionally they'll talk about how the UConn home crowd stands until the first basket is made. The women's fans stole this from the men's fans. (Of course, it's really the same businesspeople attending these games.) Anyway, the MEN's fans stole it from Syracuse. They were doing it first and UConn stole it from them, after which the UConn women stole it further.

Parmesan Goldfish crackers....extremely good, but they do not hold even a candle to the best of the goldfish -- Xplosive Pizza....

My wife and I were thinking of doing one of those open mike nights...we'd be like the Eurhythmics or something. This was going to be our set list -- me on guitar but NOT singing...

Love Song by Sara Bareilles
Love will keep us together by Captain & Tenille
Look What you've done by Jet
Zombie by the Cranberries

The hardest part was learning Love Song, and then trying to convert the piano-heavy song to guitar as sole accompaniment. (It's like re-learning it, actually.)

steak-umm

2008-01-14T19:48:00.000-05:00

The pride of Pomfret, CT. That one surprised me. There's not much between the UConn campus and Providence.

Of course, they're not real good meat. But ya know, a little american cheese, and you got a ridiculously easy sandwich in 2 minutes. and somehow it works.....

And to wash it down. Hop Devil. The greatest beer ever.

ESPN just showed the 20th anniversary of Jerome Lane shattering a backboard on one of the first ever Big Monday games. I regret, I had the game on in my bedroom and wasn't looking up when it happened. Stupid homework.

here's something weird...

2008-01-13T18:38:00.000-05:00

NFL Network is advertising with scenes from "Joe's Diner", where a couple of dopes argue football at the counter of a diner staffed by Joe Montana.

The stupid thing is, they show a list of "homemade pies" available....and the last one on the list is EGG NOG.

What the hell is egg nog pie? Anyone?

Good vanity plate

2008-01-13T14:53:00.001-05:00

My wife's just gotten a vanity plate in coordination with her new job. The best vanity plate I think I ever saw was

BQQBIE

because the Qs look like nipply boobies.

Yes, I feel about 14 years old saying that.

Another beer review

2008-01-08T19:16:00.001-05:00

This one is called "cold hop" from Boulder Colorado. Makes me think Coors. But it says "Boulder Beer Co." Anyway, it's what they call a British-style ale. I like it, though. Very IPA-ish. I also got a beer called Raison d'etre....sounds French, huh? It's by DogFish, they of the 60, 90, and 120-minute IPAs. This one was funny, because they said it's brewed with golden raisins....which made me think the name of the beer was spelled wrong. Anyway....the two things in this world that give me gas more than anything are:

1. Raisins
2. Beer

So why WOULDN'T I buy beer brewed from raisins, huh?

Anyway, some gas...not the exponentially-ridiculous amount one might expect.

But here are the grades:
cold hop: A-
Raison d'etre: B-

This is kinda gettin' ridiculous..

2008-01-02T20:12:00.001-05:00

Let's see....MTV shows soap operas
Now VH1 doesn't show music either
ESPN shows poker
TV Land shows movies
American Movie Classics shows an original TV show
Cartoon Network had something live-action the other day
ABC Family shows the 700 club

Can a network be sued for false advertising? That would be amusing, if unrealistic.

it's just like grape juice

2008-01-01T14:49:00.000-05:00

Happy new year to everyone using the popular solar calendar.

So last night I had some shiraz, a full-bodied red wine. My dad used to tell me that wine was just like grape juice that had gone bad. This became noticeable this morning....grape juice used to sometimes have a green coloring effect on stuff (hint hint if ya know what I mean...), and let's just say the wine had the same effect.

Hey, they're playing hockey outside while I type! Sweet deal in Buffalo, an NHL game in the snow!

nope, not dead

2007-12-26T18:47:00.000-05:00

hellllloooooo everybod-eeeee!
(sorta like Christopher Mad Dog Russo on the radio...)

anyways, what the hell have I been doing in neglect of the old blog.

Let's see. Beer Review: Sam Adams 12-pack for Christmas. Let's just say this about the cranberry lambic. I love beer and hate cranberries. My wife loves cranberries and hates beer. We BOTH hated this one. Luckily, their idea of a 12-pack is only two bottles each of 6 different kinds. Unfortunately, what we'll call "plain" Sam Adams shouldn't count as one, but it does. Not that Sam is bad, but if I wanted plain Sam, I coulda bought a 6 or 12 of that by itself. The best in the bunch was "Old Fezziwig Ale", a medium-dark offering.

My family does a Yankee swap every year, and we're required to home-make the gifts. If I'd been smart, I'd have saved a 12-pack of my own award winning beer and just put a bow on it. Instead, I went for a ginger-flavored cheesecake with a crust made from gingerbread cookies. Not too bad, but because I wanted a disposable container for it, I bought a cheap foil pan at the store, and the cheesecake cracked. So I put an "IOU" with the gift of 12 of my NEXT beer. Which I tried to cover up the fact that it doesn't exist yet. Anyway, mom ended up with the cheesecake and served it after dinner Christmas Eve. I have amused my daughter into suggesting we call it a "Red Sox Swap" instead.

Mom gave me a gift card for Dick's Sporting Goods, to get a new backboard and rim for the yard. We were going to have our driveway paved, but didn't have any funds available for the project. So it may wait, unless I want to play on crushed stone. Might not be so bad, especially since when I was 8 I shot at a rim bolted onto an oak tree....no backboard at all. (That was actually rectified only a few weeks later.) Anyway, the lesson here, is that Dick's website address is the FULL www.dickssportinggoods.com, for reasons that may or may not be obvious unless you try to guess, um, something different.

Work is pretty good. My new job has already had 2 Christmas parties (one luncheon, and then drinks after work the next night), and I got a couple of presents from the establishment there. Follow that up with two straight three-day workweeks. Of course, the obvious lack of bonus that comes with switching jobs in December sucks.

My wife's cat pees as I type. At least it sounds like pee. This morning I got to hear the diarrhea squirting out of her ass in the litterbox. Yup, it's pee this time.

The Patriots are 15-0. I fear they shall lose in the playoffs, however. They're definitely not a cold weather offense. Oh, and lest I forget to thank Mr. Brady for the clunker that got me eliminated from my fantasy football playoffs. Never mind finishing 13-3 when nobody else was more than 11-5. I lost the wrong week.

We have an electric pump to drain water that settles on our pool cover through a garden hose. However, it's currently submerged in ice. Oops. We need one of those three-day stretches of temperatures around 50 or something. The cover's starting to get pretty weighed down.

Tomorrow I see the doctor for the results of my MRI. I hope I don't have to become right-handed for a couple of years to let my shoulder heal or whatever....

Beer Review

2007-12-05T19:26:00.000-05:00

Here's a good use of the blog....

Roxy Rolles. Made by Magic Hat in Vermont. I normally hate Magic Hat....especially their signature "Number 9" beer. But this one is actually pretty good. Full bodied "foretaste"....oh yeah, a couple of times I've had a 365 beers calendar, and they'd have such flowery descriptions using goofy descriptions like that. So then the hops take over at "midbottle" and I'm left with a slightly bitter aftertaste.

My grade: B

Women and Children First!!!

2007-12-05T11:35:00.000-05:00

I could have also called this post, Led Zeppelin III.

Namely, two relatively lousy albums by two really good groups. My point being, a band forms, they've got about 20 songs that they're good at, and they all go on the first two albums. Then it's like, uh oh, we gotta come up with something now from scratch. Obviously both bands recovered just fine -- Zep's 4th and Fair Warning are both awesome.

So that brings me back to this. Most of my snarky comments on the universe in general have been used up. I don't really wanna re-post "cash is like a gift certificate, redeemable ANYWHERE", although it's appropriate at Christmas time, I suppose. And turning this into a diary certainly doesn't appeal to me, either. Like, Oooh, I was invited to play "Talisman" this weekend for the first time. I actually think it's good to use a diary format to launch into decent discussions, but really, the last few weeks -- I got nothin'.

Yeah, my new job starts Monday. Posts will be less frequent -- I'll actually have co-workers to discuss things with -- as the blogosphere tended to be the equivalent of a water cooler at times for me. (Comment on the interesting ones, but get back to work in a couple of minutes.)

Here's a story. One that my daughter was able to re-tell at school in their unit on family traditions/backgrounds, etc. When I was two I was up in Maine, crawling on the kitchen table and noticed a plastic salt shaker. I proceeded to drink the salt straight out of the shaker. Then I threw up all over the place. My mom had to clean it all up. Like she needed another reason to dislike going up to her in-laws' cabin in the middle of nowhere, huh? It's especially enjoyable in that whenever I'm back up there, such as this past summer, the same salt shaker is still in use, I believe.

Anyone ever have almond butter? I bought a jar before realizing it was like $11. Certainly it takes a back seat to peanut butter, but it was still pretty good on Ritz crackers. The company also makes a cashew butter, but I'm not the world's biggest cashew fan.

Good ad campaign?

2007-11-21T13:37:00.001-05:00

So, Sunday night I was watching the Patriots blow out the Bills. Around 9:15 or so there was an ad for Subway featuring Peter Griffin from Family Guy rambling on about the food behind him on-screen. So that reminded me, whoa, I was missing Family Guy at the same time....I should switch back and forth during the commericals.

So I hit the remote for my local Fox station, and right on cue, there's Peter Griffin....puking all over the floor on screen.

Nice job, Subway. That's not exactly how you wanna draw it up in the ad office, huh?

Bored on friday

2007-11-16T12:02:00.000-05:00

Okay, ten artists with my favorite song by each (not the same as when I posted my 10 favorites all by the Beatles a month or so ago).

Van Halen with Dave -- House of Pain
Van Halen wit Sammy -- Source of Infection
Metallica -- Blackened
Led Zeppelin -- When the Levee Breaks
The Eagles -- Life in the Fast Lane
The Doors -- Peace Frog
Pearl Jam -- Jeremy
Nirvana -- Breed
Soundgarden -- My Wave
Smashing Pumpkins -- geek usa

I usually would have arguments with a friend in college, he liked all the right bands, just not the right songs.

maybe I'll pick 10 more next week or something...in the mean time, i suppose you can argue one way or another about these....

how to deliver this...

2007-11-13T09:56:00.000-05:00

okay, had a pretty good idea for a joke, not sure on how to nail the delivery.

The premise is along the idea of "I'm thinking of a number between one and a hundred", only in this case, we're talking fingers.

I want it to come off like, I'm thinking of a finger between pointer and ring...obviously it's a way to verbally give an f-u to someone. I think the delivery's got to be kinda deliberate to set it up right....say it too fast and excited, and it doesn't sound as funny.

Thought...

2007-11-12T16:16:00.000-05:00

I don't think the real issue with

Toys Я Us

is the fact that the R is backwards. (And that's what supposed to be there in that line above....I found a Cyrillic letter in the Arial font on my computer to use for it, and that may not work on others' screens.)

Anyway, we have a predicate nominative here. So the pronoun in question should be "We".

Toys Я We

It's like breaking up....

2007-11-08T11:10:00.000-05:00

Neil Sedaka, right? I should know, all the car trips as a kid with my dad blasting the oldies station.

Anyways, I found it interesting in that I've had a couple of major break-ups this week.

First, it was time to tell my dentist from the last ten years that his office is too far away to keep going to him. I mean really, 60 miles....it was one thing when I lived in various towns no more than 10 miles away. Besides, this is the guy that's found cavities. I had one dentist for the first 20+ years, and never had any teeth issues. With this guy....had my wisdom teeth pulled, and two fillings (and maybe a third, but he left it as a "watch" on my records for whoever I transfer to). An amusing story, I saved the wisdom teeth after the specialist he sent me to pulled them, and 2 years later (when I'd remembered to bring them), this dentist was able to not only identify which tooth came from where, he could point out where some decay had started that was the cause of the whole "you should have these pulled" conversation.

Okay, breakup number two. My job. I waited and waited six months at a time for my boss to replace my assistant. So now he has to replace two employees. Which were his only employees. So good luck with that, I'm going on to a bigger company. On the bright side, he can't exactly show me the door and be completely unstaffed for 3 weeks....there's some leverage. I even rejected an offer of a pay raise and the possibility of working from home to avoid the God-awful commute on I-95. (I actually don't believe the telecommuting one....he's got lots of "ideas" that never amount to anything. It took me 3 years to get business cards. And I've been waiting since month 1 for him to buy the required server upgrade so that we're not 2-3 versions behind on our software.) I guess that's what happens when you have a bunch of businesses and you consider one of them to be an afterthought....

I'm not big on "let's compare the stress between the break-ups" but some people might make that into a college psych paper....good luck with that.

On a completely unrelated note, my favorite teams are probably better than your favorite teams. Therefore, logically, I must be a better person than any of you, huh?

Slow-roasting a chicken all day in the Crock-Pot "BBQ Pit" thing on the counter. That's dinner, and there's peanut butter cheesecake for dessert.

A tale of two bands

2007-11-01T17:48:00.000-04:00

The way the blinds are hanging at the window beyond my desk at work, I can be blinded temporarily for about 5-10 minutes at sunset each night, this time of year. (In the summer, I go home long before sunset, and in the winter, sunset's while I'm still working.) Anyway, the sky is pink with purple stripes of clouds. A bit freaky, but a change from typical blue/gray or even orange.

Last Sunday Duran Duran debuted their entire new album in a concert at the Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford, CT. (Yeah, yeah, it's now the Chevrolet Theatre, whatever.) Let's see....lots of forty-something overweight women in droves. The songs were so-so. Some were good, some were not, but most of all, nobody really wanted to hear them. That's the thing when old bands re-unite. People wanna hear the same 15 songs at every show. In the parking lot, some guy walked past us getting in our car and asked where Rio and Hungry Like the Wolf were. I almost yelled back at him, in your record cabinet, dickhead. But yeah, after the new songs, they did a few old ones. My wife was a full-fledged fan back in the day, and she said she only recognized 5 songs. What was good was that the arena only seats about 3000 or so, and that meant being pretty close -- 20th row, center stage.

Now, Van Halen in Boston was a different story all together. Sold out and LOUD. All old stuff, and after 20 years of Sammy Hagar, I get the feeling they were glad to be able to play this stuff live. I knew every song, and could pick out random bits and pieces from Eddie's solo -- like some of Girl Gone Bad. There was a couple in front of us engaging in doobage, but it's not like they passed it around. Anyway, isn't VH more of a being drunk band, versus a being stoned band? A buddy of mine was kinda drunk, so he starts trying to put his arm around me during songs he liked. (Apparently he tried this with my dad who I gave my Stones ticket to a couple of years ago, and my dad had to keep pulling his arm off and telling him to cut the shit.) Wolfgang, on bass instead of Michael Anthony, pretty much "knew his place" -- you're the chubby 16-year-old kid who's new, just play your lines and don't draw attention to yourself. (One exception, they put a big Red Sock over the end of his bass to appeal to the crowd.) If nothing else, he certainly looks more in place height-wise than Anthony, who always seemed on the short end amidst the other band members. I'll be curious to see if they actually do a new album themselves. (Or if Eddie kills Dave instead.)

The cool thing about being in Boston is that it was also the day of the "rolling rally" parade for the Red Sox. (speaking of doobage...) But what this did is make getting a table at a restaurant an hour-long wait on a Thursday night. All the folks in the city for the Sox, overlapped with concertgoers. (My dinner: Veal parm sandwich from Four's Grille.)

And as I finish this up, the sky is all purple (Prince reference?) with a couple of yellow streaks in the horizon.

Pats-Colts this weekend. Should be good. (I'd be amused there WERE a cheap shot on Brady with all this anti-Pats stuff....because Peyton would invariably go down on the next series, kinda like a football version of a beanball war.)

Good pizza...

2007-10-26T08:33:00.000-04:00

Here's a shot of the trees changing in our yard from last weekend. The colors that look best are rusty red, and for some reason, salmon. The worst color is a sorta pale yellowish-orange that is not only too common, but unappealing, and hideous when juxtaposed with trees still green.

Now, on to the pizza.

This was a stuffed-crust monstrosity I put together Saturday. Here's what you have to do. Prepare 2 large pizza crusts. I used a bread machine to knead the dough, as it comes out better than when I try to knead by hand. Then you coat a cast-iron pan with some extra virgin olive oil and put down the first crust.

The filling is made from seven kinds of meat.
Bacon (about half a pound)
Hot Italian Sausage (3 links' worth)
Sweet Italian Sausage (3 links' worth)
Diced Ham (about a quarter pound)
Chicken (one breast)
Pepperoni (two layers)
Ground Beef (another half pound or so)

There was about 4 cups of sauce mixed in with the meat (which you cook ahead of time in order to drain off some of the grease -- don't worry, there's plenty of heart attack risk still in there). We had some homemade sauce to use that used some of our garden tomatoes. Also about 3/4 cup of grated parmesan cheese.

Once you spread out the filling, top it with about 3 cups of shredded mozzarella. Then attach the top crust, and poke some holes in it for steam to escape.

About 20-25 minutes in a 425-degree oven. (220 Celsius, for those overseas)

Beer fest

2007-10-21T21:31:00.000-04:00

Okay, first of all, Poison's "Nothin' But a Good Time" should not be sung by a choir of children, either in general, or for a commercial.

The beer fest was very good. My amber brew won the best amber, so I got a beer glass with a pewter inscription for Best Amber 2007. Of course, while walking out to my car to put the prize out there, I had it fall out of the box from Things Remembered. Luckily, I gave it a quick kick about six inches from the ground, so the only damage was a little scrape at the top. Rather that, than a full shatter. Sheesh, nice freakin' box.

Dinner was the venison steaks. Nicely done. All day we'd been eating -- shrimp platter, tons of buffalo wings, and my cousin made an impressive vat of chili. We had football games on two TVs. There were several pies for dessert. I had blueberry made by a cousin's wife.

And of course, we're all encouraged to take a care package home from the excess beer. So I get a random assorted 12-pack to put in the fridge.

Movie recommendation

2007-10-19T16:55:00.000-04:00

I saw BeerFest last night while drinking Sierra Nevada's Fall Hops something-or-other special beer. The movie is hysterically immature. I recommend it to all who enjoy stuff like that. Now, because my dad's beer party is meant for the appreciation of beers, rather than mass chugging, none of the games in the BeerFest movie ever come into play. Somehow, they made it look okay for 30-somethings to play frat basement games.

One pretty cool thing I saw once in the fall was in college. A building on campus was covered in ivy (it is an Ivy League school, after all), and when the colors changed for the fall, the ivy was still green at the base of one wall, and then yellow, orange, and red at the top, for a kind of rainbow effect.

I need to check out hockey schedules around here. Connecticut's got a couple of minor league teams (and that's AFTER the Whalers left 10 years ago....sigh.) where $15 or so gets you in. Hockey season starts way too early. Even Canada doesn't have snow and ice yet, right?

The chicken fingers at my cousin's wedding last weekend weren't very good at all, nor the fries. But I still made out better than getting one of the adult meals. I didn't like what was served to the grown-ups. The best part is when a Saturday wedding counts as going to church for the weekend. The goof-offs in our pew didn't get out of the way for communion, though....so they took our seats and we ended up between some of them who did go up for communion and those who didn't.

If it stops raining, it'll be pumpkin-buying time tomorrow. I'm not much of a good carver. I make the same old triangle-eye, 3-tooth mouth design.

Maybe the Red Sox will win the pennant this weekend....that would give me something to do Sunday night.

Random hits....

2007-10-16T09:47:00.000-04:00

I started to watch a Ren & Stimpy DVD last night. Apparently "adult" episodes. Well, definitely...like cartoon nudity with rather pornographic overtones. So they weren't exactly funny, like the old "Space Madness" classic. And I'm just about sure they won't be back on Nickelodeon any time soon, either. Oh well.

I had a homemade beer last night. It was good. It seems as though different individual bottles got different levels of the priming sugar -- I had a relatively flat bottle the other day, this one had a normal head on it and bubbly.

I got a shoulder injury this summer. It manifests itself in basketball mostly when I try to rebound, the strength to knock the ball loose from others isn't there. Oxford's new high school gym hosts pickup games on Monday nights. The court is pretty nice....the school only has 9th and 10th graders this year, as I suppose it would have been bad to have residents come back to a new high school just for one/two years, if they're already established at out-of-town high schools. I think my high school did that in the 1960s....started with just a freshman class in 1961 and kept adding to it.

In the valley of the forwards, the one-eyed point guard is king. I'm like one of four people in town, apparently, who can run an offense. Watching a fast break from the other end of the gym is an eyesore, and sure enough nobody seems to know what they're doing. I don't claim to be Steve Nash....but if the ball runs through my hands even ONCE on a possession, our odds of getting a hoop increase dramatically.

I get it, when announcers say something like, "that was a big out" in a baseball game. But I want announcers to say, "that wasn't really a big out," some other times. 10-1, ninth inning, a pop-up to start things off. That wasn't a big out, although probably good to get.

I tried making my own buffalo sauce. I screwed it up, though. I'm not sure I needed to heat the ingredients, and the butter separated. Also, I sliced the cayenne peppers that I'd grown, but I would have been better off grinding them to a powder. It still tasted okay, but wasn't really any good.

We've got a few bald trees, and yet plenty that are still all green. Not a lot of in-between so far this autumn.

Scottish vegetable

2007-10-12T08:30:00.000-04:00

One of my kids said she went to one of these a few years ago with me. It was actually a "Scottish festival", where they do all sorts of stuff to celebrate Scotland. I went to one last weekend.

For food, they had bridies and Scottish meat pies. A little heavy on the onion flavoring, but I suppose that counts literally as a Scottish vegetable. Also a haggis puff roll or something like that. I guess when you're several generations removed from riding the boat over to America, you lose any real desire to connect THAT far.

I'm Scottish on my dad's side, Irish on my mom's, so it's interesting enough to go to one of these things every few years. They have "highland games", which of course is highlighted by tossing the caber. For kids, they could have a try throwing a cardboard tube -- probably something that carpet was rolled around at a store at some point.

There were some musicians doing folk songs, and a few bagpipe marching bands from around Connecticut. Everyone's dressed in kilts, men and women, with the knee-high socks with tassels. Girls were doing highland dancing in very colorful outfits.

I thought one of the better reasons to go is to check out the clan-specific merchandise. Every clan's got a tartan -- their own specific plaid pattern that identifies the family. So if you want to buy a scarf, a tam, or a kilt, you can buy your family's. I've already got plenty of stuff in my particular plaid. I was actually surprised not to see anyone with what I've got -- tartan ink. There were a few Celtic designs on various men and women there, but nobody else seems to have a plaid tattoo. Guess I'm unique there.

And when you look for "scottish tattoo" on Google or whatnot, usually you get references to a "military tattoo", but I don't think that has anything to do with needles. I'm not really sure why they call it that.

And it was almost 90 degrees out....the previous time I'd gone, it was like 55 and raining. Freakin' October.

Bottling takes a while

2007-10-08T15:01:00.000-04:00

52 bottles of beer on the floor,
52 bottles of beer...
take one down, pass it around....

blah blah blah.

Here's the thing, if you ever make your own beer. You have to save bottles from beer you've already drunk at the house. And they've got to be the kind that aren't twist-offs....you need the good kind of beer bottle, because they've got to be able to be re-sealed with a new cap.

So the process involves this....preparing a disinfecting solution. This is easy....a heaping teaspoon of some chlorine-containing chemical to two gallons of water. Then you rinse out all the bottles. Having done this before, I've learned the key is to rinse out the beer bottles once you're done drinking from them. If you leave any beer at the bottom, or worse -- the natural sediment that a non-filtered beer will have in it, then you're going to have to deal with more mold growing at the bottom. It's nothing that the chlorine can't kill, but sometimes it's very hard to scrape the gunk out with a typical bottle brush. And also, you'll want to change the water you use more often in the rinsing out. The chlorine solution dries in about half an hour or so, which is fine since it takes about an hour to wash out 50-55 bottles.

Next step is priming the beer. If you drink what's been fermenting, it's going to taste okay, be room temperature, and flat. So you need to do some priming -- add fresh sugar to the beer to give the yeast something new to feed on. The sugar comes in the form of powdered malt extract, dissolved in water. It's very easy to have the water boil over while you heat it to dissolve it. And it sucks to have hot caramelizing liquid on your stove. My stove is flat-top electric, which is probably better than a gas range would be for such an accident. Add the priming solution to the beer, and start bottling.

This is easy enough, with a siphoning hose started by a small hand pump. It's advisable to leave a good inch of space from the top of the bottle to avoid caps blowing off from the built up carbon dioxide. Even though the tube's got a spigot on it, it's easier just to go quickly from bottle to bottle. At the bottom of the 5-gallon glass carboy, there's usually grain sediment that you won't want to try to siphon into a bottle. But if you want to strain it into a bowl or something, you can try for a buzz from the flat runoff.

Capping is slow. My dad's bottle capper probably comes from the 1970s, so I have no idea if capping technology or whatever has been increased. All I do is put the open cap into a magnetic holding spot in the capper, and place it over the bottle, and slowly pull down the handles of the capper, kinda like working with a corkscrew. If you're out of alignment, you can break the bottle, though. (A reason to wash more bottles than you might need, too....just pour the beer from the broken bottle into an extra.) It seems like the leverage is best when having the bottle on the floor, so working from a chair can save wear and tear on your knees.

In a couple of weeks, the beer's plenty carbonated enough, and then you can stick it in the fridge. Just remember not to drink it from the bottle -- there's always sediment from the grain at the bottom that shouldn't be re-mixed into the beer. Pour it into a glass and rinse out the bottom quarter of an inch or so. (especially if you plan to reuse the bottles another time, to avoid excess mold) And I'm told aging the beer improves the flavor, although I usually just drink them until they're gone in lieu of buying beer at the store.

Anyway, the flat room temperature stuff was promising....should be a worthy entry in my dad's Octoberfest in a couple of weeks.

Frogs are next

2007-10-06T09:23:00.001-04:00

I am pretty sure that the Yankees losing last night was due to a literal plague of insects. God's mad.

Spam by phone....

2007-10-04T13:25:00.000-04:00

So I just got a call at work. Picked up, and a recording says my auto warranty has just expired. They've sent me warnings by mail all along. Please press one to continue. Uhhhh....yeah. I could tell it was a recording because she didn't react to me reciting "bite me, bite me, bite me" into the phone. How'd she even know I had a car?

I started playing Zelda -- Four Swords Adventures. This thing looks like something for the original 1986 Nintendo, not a Gamecube. Lame, and easy so far. We'll see how it goes. I think they just wanted to show off the fact that you *could* play it by hooking the Gamecube up to a GameBoy.

My beer is fermenting in the kitchen. Another week or two until bottling. There's a pain in the ass task -- rinsing out beer bottles to prep them. They get sanitized with a diluted chlorine rinse....just enough to kill anything in them. But when they've last been filled with unfiltered beer, sometimes there's hard-to-clean scum off the bottom. A bottle brush sorta works, but any bottles that are too hard to clean just get sent back for the deposit money. You have to remember to rinse the bottle out right after you finish the beer or pour it in a glass, generally, to eliminate the buildup.

October 15 is the last major deadline of the year in the world of 401(k) plans. And it's always the biggest clients that use every last day to finish off the 2006 reporting for the government.

Ten Beatles Favorites

2007-09-28T13:37:00.000-04:00

I've got iTunes here at work, and I successfully took all my tapes and converted them to MP3 by running wires from my tape recorder to the sound in port on my Mac. So I've got a folder that's all Beatles stuff. I grew up with the American albums, so I once entered "Beatles '65" as my favorite album in an online poll, and was told not to choose American versions! Anyways, so I've got twelve minute "songs" that represent entire album sides. I can't pick out "Michelle" at random, I've got to open up "Rubber Soul Side 1" and then scan for it. The only changes I did were if, the tape didn't have the same song sequence as the record. I grew up with my dad's records, so I subconsciously always have a certain "next song" queued up when one finishes. Well, on the tapes, Capitol was concerned with keeping the side lengths approximately equal. So on Abbey Road, for instance, Come Together is on side 2 instead of Here Comes the Sun. I took the time to splice anything like that I could think of apart, and re-sequenced them "properly". (Of course that's in quotation marks, since all the pre-Sgt. Pepper's stuff was packaged so differently for the US.)

In any event, I think that everybody probably likes at least one song by the band. Even if you don't like them in general, for most people you can find *something* they'll like. I bought a book called The Complete Beatles Scores, which spells out every song, every instrument, as close to the albums as they could come up with. Try playing keyboard parts to Revolution 9 and see who notices.

Anyways, I tend not to like the "obvious" songs by my favorite groups anyways, and the Beatles are no exception. These 10 are probably my favorites:

Tomorrow Never Knows
Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey
Sgt. Pepper's....(Reprise) -- at the end of the album before A Day in the Life
The End
I'm Looking Through You
Helter Skelter
I Me Mine
Things We Said Today
Wait
I Wanna Be Your Man (gotta pick a Ringo song, huh?)

So the real question is, which will vary with commenters' ages....who know all of these songs?

What would happen if.... (9/26 edition)

2007-09-26T14:36:00.000-04:00

...New Orleans or something got its own cable channel entitled "NO". A bit of a quirk, considering there's a cable channel called "YES" that shows New York Yankees games. Are you watching TV? Umm...yes and no.

Ever detect a weird smell and try to put it to something, then realize it makes no sense? Yesterday morning I opened the door to the stairwell at work and was grossed out. I thought to myself it smelled like...."old lady breath". I can't explain what it is, or why that phrase would come to mind upon the smell. Later in the day, I thought I smelled the combination of hair spray and gum....so again, who knows.

I used to think there was a simple chain among the candy bars 3 Musketeers, Milky Way, and Snickers. I assumed Milky Way was just 3 Musketeers plus caramel, while Snickers was Milky Way plus peanuts. The nougat's different in Snickers, though. Lighter in color. Also, the outside chocolate shell of a Milky Way is definitely thicker than it is for Snickers.

Let's say you're flying east to west, so that you almost get time to stand still for you -- at 4 pm you're in Los Angeles, and an hour later, you're a full time zone further west, so it's still 4 pm your local time in the sky. In theory you could probably get all the way around the world, if you fly fast enough (and at a narrow enough band around the earth -- maybe not LA, but perhaps Alaska). So, what happens if it's holy day. A Jewish guy in the office was out last week for Yom Kippur....I wondered if he'd gotten on a plane at sundown Friday and kept heading west, from the start of the international date line all the way around, then it would have been roughly Friday at 6 pm for 24 straight hours. Then he'd cross the date line at 5:59 pm Friday, and it would be Saturday at 6 pm. He never would have experienced Friday night at all, and so he wouldn't have to fast or whatever observations are undertaken.

Six of an item is often referred to as a half dozen.
I want 3 of something referred to as a "quarter dozen".
The New England Patriots have started the season with a quarter dozen wins.
Donuts, two dollars for a quarter dozen, $3.50 for a half dozen, $5.00 for a dozen.

Genesis was okay, but they obviously targeted their show last night to the long-time fans, rather than people who know of them from MTV like myself. Oh well....they were good, I just didn't recognize any of the ten-minute "progressive rock anthems".

There was an old saying that the "moral majority" was neither. I always liked to insist that "classic rock" was neither, as well -- just to piss off a friend for whom music stopped when he was in junior high school.

Let's try this again...

2007-09-21T16:05:00.000-04:00

No, I'm not alluding to a famous quote from Daffy Duck. (Do you want to shoot him here, or wait till you get home?)

I'm saying this because my wife has gone to an online ticket re-seller and purchased us 2 nosebleed seats to see Genesis at Madison Square Garden Tuesday night. (I like how on Futurama, they have Madison Cube Garden.)

Anyways, Suldog is promising a story from his life as a dishwasher. But while he stalls, I've got my own story as one.

In college I worked for dining services, and was a really good worker in the dishroom. I sometimes would do the 4:30 to 7 shift -- early dinner -- a lot of putting away the last of the dishes run from lunch, and clearing the crap from trays of early eaters. We had a pretty big industrial dishwashing machine in there. It was a twenty-foot conveyer belt on which you could load the plates and stuff....two foot square racks for silverware...wire frames for drinking glasses...or you could also put giant roasting pans on there from the kitchen itself. Sort of like a big automatic car wash that you drive into.

There was a steady crew of 3-4 "townies" who worked full time in the dishroom, along with a crew of 2-3 students. My friend Brunel and I were working one night, along with the only young townie on the crew. A guy named Danny....probably about 20....maybe he finished high school, not even sure. He was an all right guy. Once we discussed the operations of the conveyer belt....could one ride it from beginning to end? Perhaps, if we turned off the spray hoses. Well, we talked Danny into going for a ride, and he certainly seemed up for it. He knew the machine itself better than we did, so he had turned off the spray hoses. He turned on the conveyer belt and crawled on.

So he's going along at the leisurely pace of the belt...it would take a minute or so, I guess from entering the washing tank to the exit. And he was fine, since the sprays weren't on. One problem, right at the end. He didn't turn off the water at the rinse bar. This was not only the last shot of water the dishes would get, but it was the hottest. I think we were told 180 degrees (F). So we hear him scream and start scurrying down the belt to get out of the tank. So he's not only soaking wet, he's burned. Second-degree burns, if I remember correctly. I think the top layer of skin was bright pink and peeling.

So sure enough, Danny was fired after that night. The funny part of the story was that there was a section outside the dishroom, where the line for students would form, where people could put "napkin notes" -- informal suggestions for specific cold cereal, or "fewer pot roast nights" or whatever. We thought it would be cute to put an anonymous note up there asking for Danny to be reinstated. A couple of days later our napkin note was responded to (right on the napkin, actually). Something to the effect of, the risk that our friend Danny posed to both himself, and the machinery, made it so that he would not be appointed back to his position.

And so we never saw him again. But the tale has lived on for years in what we'd call "dishroom lore." In the same way songs by Winger and the Cult were known as "dishroom music" for their popularity around 1989.

What would happen if.... (9/19 edition)

2007-09-19T10:29:00.000-04:00

...I ordered the kid's meal for myself at my cousin's wedding next month? Actually, that is what I've done. It was either beef tenderloin (I hate beef when it's baked), Chicken Oscar (I "just say no" to stuff with chives in it), the vegetarian entree (yeah, right!), or the kid's meal (chicken fingers and fries!). This didn't take much thought. My mom said my aunt was going to call me and tell me I couldn't do it at first. I guess that if you order a kid's meal, it's one less person that they charge you for at the open bar. Now that wouldn't be fair...."you can have the kid's meal, Brian, but you'll be chasing it down with chocolate milk all afternoon."

I'm sure the folks who designed the World Wide Web didn't INTEND to choose the one polysyllabic letter in the alphabet for its abbreviation. There's no good way to say WWW really fast. The PBS show "Zoom" (2000s version) referred to it as "triple-W", but that's still a mouthful. Even one W is a mouthful, let alone three.

There ought to be a minimum slicing setting for cheese at the supermarket. I like my ham really thinly sliced. But cheese HAS to have some minimum thickness -- maybe an eighth of an inch? Because what good is it, if the cheese is so thinly sliced that it sticks to itself? I had to try to pry the slices apart with a sharp knife.

My younger daughter followed the older into the bathroom at a restaurant last weekend. Apparently girls learn early to go in pairs or something.

I started to watch Hitchock's movie Rope the other night....I've already seen it, and it's good. It seems impressive that the entire movie plays out as one very long scene -- there are no changes in the angle to "camera two". Of course, it could also be seen as just a fancy videotaping of a live play, in that regard, too. (That at least makes the memorization of such a long stretch of lines only slightly less impressive.)

When playing Scrabble under various influences (coconut rum, for instance), it's perfectly acceptable to play "PQRSTU" as a word. Any five-or-more consecutive letters of the alphabet, actually, are allowed, I believe. In fact, the same board also had "VWXYZ". Yes, it was on the triple word score, but the aforementioned influences preclude the actual tallying of points.

Vanilla ice cream is as popular as it is, in my opinion, only because it's pretty much white and "plain" looking. If vanilla ice cream were blue, or brown, it would sell much less. But because it looks natural, it's a popular flavor. I'm not playing the race card on this.

Was the Legion of Doom modeled after the Superdome amidst the Louisiana swamps?

If you carve your name in a pumpkin, you have to be wary of any letters that have holes in them. For instance, and "o" won't look like an o without some creative carving, as it would just be a hole.

In college on a calculus exam, I had to draw a picture of a duck. And then for more points, compute some line integral around the duck. This required me to erase the eyeball inside the duck I had drawn, because, of course, this prevents the line integral from automatically being equal to zero.

I saw a paperback version of the first Harry Potter book last night, and was stunned by how skinny it seemed. I thought perhaps it'd been divided into smaller books (part 1, part 2, etc....).

Is the Genesis concert next weekend?

2007-09-17T14:42:00.001-04:00

That's what I was asked this morning while showering. The answer, of course, is
FUCK!

It was last night.

Oops. That's $150 I'll never get back. Not only did both of us completely forget, but I lost two sets of tennis (6-8, 7-9) to a friend of mine when I should have been driving to Hartford.

And...we were discussing concerts coming up....my friend is one of like 20 million people in the lottery trying to get Led Zeppelin tickets. I mentioned going to see VH next month....and never did it occur to me that I had Genesis tickets for a show starting in about an hour and a half.

I'm "cloning" a brew called Fat Tire Amber Ale. The brewmaking store puts together all the ingredients you need to make famous and not-so-famous beers, so you don't have to work too hard on ingredient-buying. I have no idea if this beer's any good. Each raw ingredient is awful, of course, so hopefully it'll all come together in the end. I had to run out to buy cheesecloth to make a homemade grain bag -- the first step is to steep the grains in water like a giant tea bag. I thought about using an old sock, and actually until I found the cheesecloth at the store, I almost bought a mesh ironing board cover to use.

I could definitely envision someone marketing a beer called "Old Sock"...

Apple season

2007-09-14T14:27:00.001-04:00

Apple picking should commence this weekend. The wife makes a f-tastic "Dutch Apple" cheesecake. Our friends coming over the following weekend will be well fed.

Picking fruit at an orchards or farm always takes way less time than it seems like it should. I think hey, a nice trip outside and stuff, but really, you have all the apples/strawberries/blueberries you could ever need in like 15 minutes. So then it's off to the farm stand. I often go to this local place to pick them. They sponsor what is supposed to be a great Sunday breakfast, but I don't know anyone who's gone to it.

My dad is resurrecting his annual Octoberfest beer party this year. It'll be held at my cousin's house, since my parents downsized their house. Usually people hit wherever they find a bunch of microbrews, and we bring them over, try them all, and then judge the best, worst, weirdest-tasting, best label, etc....winner gets like, a beer-a-day calendar, or a mug. Dad cooks up a spread, and we all watch football. (Except for my dad's brother, who's relegated to the basement to watch NASCAR. I don't understand how my dad's brother can be from Alabama when everyone else in the family is from Connecticut.) I always like to be dropped off/picked up. Otherwise, I gotta loiter around the house to sober up, which means my mom comes home from her day of exile before I've left...which of course leads to at least the second degree, if not the third.

I may whip up a home brew to enter this year. I should go buy ingredients this week to have it ready within 5-6 weeks.

I got Seattle right in my suicide pool last week. This week, a certain team from a certain Midwestern town that starts with a C, ends with an O, and in the middle has "HICAG". (Da Bears.) Actually, I never liked the George Wendt episodes of the Superfans as much, compared to the original one with Joe Mantegna. Although there's nothing like Polish sausage substitute to ward off that fourth heart attack, I suppose. (And don't get me started about them trying to use the same bit with the Bulls.)

Wednesday of this week I was promised a new printer either that day or yesterday. I'm going to wait this one out and see how long it takes for the boss to come through. I got an old, used HP LaserJet 4 to use here, and I think it's just about out of toner.

What's better?

2007-09-12T17:50:00.001-04:00

Laughing at the phone ringing, because I'm not going to pick it up? Or rather, being pissed and giving the phone the finger while it rings?

Anyway, I've been swamped at work and I hate it.

We took the kids to Old Sturbridge Village just over the Mass. border from Connecticut over the weekend. It's a re-enactment of a New England village in the early 1800s. Farm animals, a blacksmith, a cooper (barrelmaker, apparently), a one-room schoolhouse, a meetinghouse, old school printshop (the guy there was a jerk when Erika pointed out the plasma TV on the wall for educational stuff, how it didn't seem so old-fashioned), so it's like a museum. History of lighting, dresswear, and guns from the era. Actually the corsets and guns were in the same building. Hmmm....

Closing up the pool. Added the chemicals, but the water level didn't drain fast enough before dark last night -- very slowly....so that the pipes and stuff don't freeze and crack from expansion over the winter. If there's any daylight when I get home, I'll tie the cover on. (And work has me thinking about tying one on, of a different sort.)

TiVoed (This is a verb, even if you're using a generic digital video recorder, I suppose...) the Patriots on Sunday, watched it in an hour....every play, none of the crap in between. It saved me from some of the announcers' blah-blah-blah. Wow, Phil Simms sounds stupid in small sound bites. And of course, I overheard the score at my aunt's birthday party that afternoon. I was then told you're supposed to announce upon arriving, that you are taping the game for later, because it's not their fault for not knowing. Knowing the score probably saved me time, less to be worried about while watching the game in progress...

15 people in my suicide pool at work, and after one week, it's already down to 11. Seattle was a good pick, I suppose. Haven't looked at this week yet, though.

Anyone remember Bang Tango? I've got the Psycho Cafe album on MP3 playing now. I thought they were pretty good "back in the day"...you know, for what was essentially a hair band.

The bitter end...

2007-09-07T10:50:00.000-04:00

9-7. Stranded on second base in the last inning as the final fly ball out floated to center field behind me. Their lineup did more damage than ours did. I had probably my best defensive game of the year, with 3 really good catches (2 on dives, one on a full sprint) plus a couple of others....tracked down the bombs over others' heads to keep the batter from scoring an inside-the-park homer. But every error in the infield got compounded in such a big game.

Afterwards, ten of us went out to a Tex-Mex restaurant. I had chicken enchiladas in molé sauce. I really like molé sauce....this one wasn't spicy enough for my liking though. And the Bud Light in the pitchers was flat. (Molé sauce is tomato-based with chili peppers and unsweetened chocolate.)

I paid my $20 share of the bill with some of the bet money on our office suicide pool. That's an NFL contest where everyone chooses some team to win one game this week. If the team you pick wins its game, you keep playing. If they lose, you're out. The winners survive to next week, where you pick another game, with the caveat being you can't pick a team you've already chosen. This makes it so that you can't ride the best team in the league all season long. After 5 weeks, the field of 12 or 13 will most likely be down to 2 or 3. We'll see. I have Seattle to beat Tampa Bay on Sunday.

David, is there anything comparable in the Aussie rules leagues?

The best part about running the pool is having spending cash over the length of the contest....I can always later write a check to the winner, or make a single trip to the ATM to make up the cash I've used on stuff like lunch.

Tim Wakefield of the Red Sox pitched last night, and because the game was decided after he was removed for a substitute, he was neither the winning or losing pitcher last night. The first time all season he wasn't credited with either. This is a statistical rarity for a pitcher to go this far into the season without a "no decision".

Anyway, I bring this up because when I was living at home doing some graduate school at UConn, I used to use a 4-track tape recorder to make some homemade music with my guitars and synthesizer (with built-in drum machine). Sometimes I'd take the time to write well-structured songs, and other times I'd just mess around and layer stuff on top of it. One such song I wrote was called "Clemens got a No Decision" which was based on a Red Sox game I had on in my room at the time. Roger Clemens left the game down a run, but the Red Sox tied it up before losing later (I think they lost 4-2 to Detroit, although baseball-almanac.com doesn't support that.) Anyways, lyrics have always been optional, an afterthought at most, to my stuff....so I started rambling on one of the tracks that although Clemens got a No Decision, that you shouldn't get a no decision -- like me the singer suggesting people make up their minds in their life -- make a decision, one way or the other. Anyway, not one of my best songs. I think the song after it featured me saying stuff backwards, like Stairway to Heaven -- just f'ing around with the tape recorder.

practically fall

2007-09-04T08:47:00.000-04:00

Okay, the equinox isn't upon is yet...so I'm leaving the sweaters packed away for now. One good thing about wearing sweaters in the fall is that it's less ironing to do. Shirts with nothing worn over them need to be ironed....anything under a sweater can be "as is".

Haven't gotten to see too much of the US Open....back in 1994, I had knee surgery and was laid up for a month, so I watched it every day, and so I usually watch at least one night every year, almost to say thanks to it for giving me something to do as a freakin' invalid that year. (I flew off an ATV and cracked open my patella upon landing....two stainless steel screws are still in there...yes I had a helmet on my head but I guess that wasn't the important spot....lastly, everyone who sees my scar wonders what ligament damage I had -- none, and also why the incision isn't straight -- it is, but the skin break from impact wasn't straight.) A couple of years ago I got tickets to a day session the first week in New York. First, ALWAYS buy the tickets ahead of time online, so you can save an hour in line. Second, if you have a softball playoff game later than night, try to leave early enough to get home. We saw almost a full match, and got to walk around, but we only got to enjoy about 2.5 hours. After the US Open, I convinced friends to drag me out mini-golfing, pretty much hopping around on one foot. And by late October, I was beating them at one-on-one basketball again.

We won the softball game in the 10th inning, and then won the division championship right after. The overall league/town championship is this Thursday.

My mother-in-law's chain saw was brought out to take down some dead trees in our front yard, but it only started up once. We had to call customer service to get a replacement user's manual emailed to us. Probably something stupid, but who knows. Anyways, this meant more work with an ax. The handle to the ax is now split a bit...it seems cedar trees have pretty hard wood. It's interesting enough to smell the cedar as I build up a pile of dead wood in the back of the house....cedar's supposed to be a moth repellent, no? So no moths in the yard then? Anyway, one tree is still suspended from the bittersweet vines above, so it's just kind of leaning in the yard. That's going to be a problem. Once most of the trees are down, I plan to rent a woodchipper or something and mulch them all up.

Flipped on the TV Saturday night to see the new Red Sox guy Clay Buchholz with a no-hitter through five. I would have kept it on, but since the Sox had gotten no-hit through 5 and 6 innings earlier in the week in New York, I just assumed Baltimore would have gotten a hit soon enough, too.

What would happen if.... (8/29 edition)

2007-08-29T10:13:00.000-04:00

....private delivery companies (such as DHL, FedEx, or UPS) got sued by the United States Postal Service for their perhaps "unauthorized" use of ZIP codes for routing packages? Doesn't the USPS have some sort of intellectual property claim to the numbers as used to mark regions of cities?

There was a very funny sketch on the old Laugh-In show back in the 60's making fun of ZIP codes when they first came out. They went digit-by-digit showing how it allowed the post office to find exactly where the letter was supposed to go, starting on a countrywide basis and slowly zeroing in until the last digit -- Cincinnati, Ohio. And of course, they pointed out that the city and state were written pretty clearly in large letters on the envelope itself, so why was this fancy number system needed?

[On a side Laugh-In note, they would do "news of the future" bits where Dan Rowan would read the news from 20 years in the future....1988...and he starts "President Ronald Reagan...blah blah blah" The audience is hysterical, but I was watching it on a Nick at Nite rerun IN 1988....so I was totally floored by it.]

One thing we have here at work in the kitchen is an instant-hot water dispenser. Good for tea, I suppose, but I use it also for hot cocoa. You know, for those days where they run the air conditioning even though it's only 61 degrees out. And, not only is it good for making the cocoa, the hot water is the only thing that can dissolve the dried-on sediment from the previous mugful. It can be a couple of weeks in between servings, so the bottom of the mug (which I keep at my desk, a 24-ounce Scooby-Doo "mystery brew" model) gets brown and gunky.

I'm so bugged. I got tickets for Van Halen in Boston for 10/30. I don't mind the drive up, but sure enough, yesterday I get an email that they've added a show here in Connecticut on the fifth of that month. So it would have saved an hour on the ride to the show. The CT show is a Friday, so being out late isn't a big deal...it's a weekend my kids are with their mom....and finally, as my friend has mentioned, who knows if Eddie and Dave will have a big fight and cancel the rest of the tour at some point -- the sooner you can seem them live, the better.

One of my favorite things to do when a spell-checker is turned on is to right-click and view suggestions from the program. For instance, Scooby in the paragraph above is underlined and I'm given four alternatives: Booby, Booby's, Jacoby, or Jacoby's. I can just imagine the porn possibilities of a character named Booby-Doo. Oh, and the alternatives for "Doo" are Dew, Du, Doro, too, or coo. Hey Blogger, wouldn't "Do" be a legitimate word one might *accidentally* type for Doo? Assuming, of course, that I didn't actually mean Scooby-Doo.

Speaking of porn possibilities, one evening a few years ago my ex-boss and I were waiting to start a poker night at the office. Instead of going home, we had a couple of hours to kill....so I suggested a sort of "Internet Mad Libs" -- where you take turns picking a word and going to the site "www.that word.com" and seeing what comes up. Kinda like, first one to end up at a porn site loses. He lost with "gentleman" as apparently www.gentleman.com is a porn site. But you can go on for a while with random words. www.orange.com www.dishwasher.com www.bandana.com....let me know what you can find.

We had our fantasy football draft last night. I actually got first pick. So that means LaDanian Tomlinson is destined to rip up his knees very soon in order to curse me, I suppose. Yahoo's site ranks players, and a very futile exercise while waiting for my turn was to go to the bottom of the rankings and work my way UP the list until I found a name I recognized. Believe me, the fourth- and fifth-best players on really bad teams aren't exactly "household names."

My job requires me to review companies' census data -- names, dates of birth and hire, etc. It's always interesting to see some names....especially when they're obviously ethnic names which, when read in English....well....there was a guy, perhaps Vietnamese, whose last name I'll leave off, but had the first/middle name combo of "Fuk Yue". This perhaps can never be topped.

The parent trap!

2007-08-27T09:16:00.000-04:00

First, on the vegetable front. We harvested our lone cucumber. Nine inches long and pretty fat. We're going to see if any others take off, now that the one big one is no longer hording the nutrients absorbed by the plant. We've called off the corn as a bust. The stalks' growth stunted at about 4 feet tall a couple of months ago. We found some two-inch ears with kernels on them...they looked both water-logged AND shriveled....so there was no hope. I've harvested 4 cayenne peppers...one of them is in my snack bag of Cheez-Its, a subtle flavoring perhaps -- or they'll get soggy over the course of the day before lunch. Of course, the most important thing is to wash my hands thoroughly after handling it. And we have three watermelons, but right now none bigger than a baseball. My guess is that the plants will have to be brought inside to mature before the first frost comes. (probably 6 weeks or so for that, so we'll see....)

My older daughter had a sleepover Saturday night -- first time at my house, so that was fun. Three additional eight-year-olds, along with my two kids. Five screaming girls! Keep 'em fed, and you keep 'em quiet :) Really, we made homemade pizza Saturday night, and then there was cake. It was a muddy cake -- chocolate with chocolate-mint frosting, with gummy worms buried in the cake and popping their heads out. Nightcrawlers, anyone? Sunday morning was waffles for breakfast and then hot dogs for lunch. Only one kid tried Erika's favorite topping -- crunchy peanut butter on a hot dog. (It's really good, actually! Especially if the dogs are a little on the burned side from the grill.)

The kids did a lot of swimming, and also some croquet and some soccer. Two of the girls are twins. Freckle-faced cherubic twins -- they both look like Lindsay Lohan, in her pre-skank days. One of those things where you want to say to the father upon dropping them back off, "Your girls are sweet. You may want to steer them clear of cocaine before it's too late!"

One last tale. I am currently navigating Erika through The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. She plays, I tell her where to go....a practice I mastered with my brother on Zelda III for Super Nintendo all those years ago. I actually won Zelda 2 on the old Nintendo system, but the more complex the controlling mechanism, the worse I do. The mind, however, remains sharp :)

It ain't over 'til....

2007-08-24T09:58:00.001-04:00

...well, I'm not sure.

Softball playoffs started last night. Top seed, 11-1 DataEase versus fourth seed 5-7 Urban Roots. We get there, and again the town of Trumbull has neglected to care for the field. A good 2 inches of rainwater pooled up in the right-handed batter's box, plus another inch or so just in front of second base. So, as was the case a couple of weeks ago when we played this team in the regular season, one of their guys scurried over to his parents' house to get two shovels and a rake so that we could groom the field and make it playable. If nothing else, it would be good and soft for sliding into 2nd base, rather than dried-out hard dirt.

We went down 5-0 in the first inning. We shoulda gotten out of it unscathed, as the LARGE woman on their team who plays 3rd base decided to try to score on a ball that bounced away from the first basewoman on our team. I don't remember who threw it to home, but the ball went over the catcher's head, and so she was safe. A similar play two batters later -- the pitcher getting in the way in front of the catcher, and the shortstop overthrew both of them amidst the confusion. Just awful.

Anyways, we got it back to 5-2 in the bottom of the first after a RBI singles for me and the woman behind me, but then I was stranded at third. We got single runs in the next couple of innings, gave up one more to have it be 6-4, and then tied it in the 6th, I believe. We play 7 innings, so at that point, all we had to do was "win a one-inning game". In the 7th we had a runner at third with one out....kind of a slap hitter up with a fly-ball hitting woman after him. I was coaching third and I sent the runner on contact. It was a grounder to shortstop, they threw home and their pitcher actually grabbed the ball instead of the catcher (like our team, we trust the guy pitcher to catch it cleanly, rather than the woman catcher) and made a swipe tag about 7-10 feet in front of home. I don't care if I got yelled at for sending him, I think it was the right play. Anyways, the woman up next did fly out to left, end of the 7th.

Eighth inning, I lead off after we hold them. There was no way I was putting one over their heads, they were very deep in right field (almost to a one-ton blocking sled that the high school's football team left waaaaaay out there that was too heavy to move, but also too deep to really be a problem getting in the way). I hit a line drive on one hop deep to the second basewoman....and beat the throw by almost a full step. Now I'm excited, because I'm one of our fastest runners. But I start hearing my team say I was out. Honestly, I'm like, "no I'm not" and I return to first base ready for the next hitter. The other team starts yelling at me, and finally the old coot umpire makes an out call. WHAT?! Needless to say, we had the bases loaded with TWO outs later in the inning (and I'd have scored before THAT to win the game if I'd been called correctly safe), and the next guy up hits a screaming liner that their left fielder jumped up to catch just above his head.

Ninth inning, they get the bases loaded with 2 outs, but I catch a liner in the gap to end the threat. Our left fielder starts jumping up and down all excited for the catch, but I'm still pissed about the out call at first. I go back to coach third again -- even though I got the guy thrown out at the plate in the 7th, I'm very good at making sure the runners hear me. With one out, that same guy hits a single to right and runs to second as they bobble it. I yelled at him to come to third, but I think he peeked back and thought not to. (I thought maybe he'd been afraid to trust me, but I found out later he had trouble in the soft dirt in front of second, which slowed him down.) Why is this important? Because we get another short single, so it's first and third with one out. Next guy pops up to the shortstop, 2 outs. Then the woman who I said always hits fly balls (as in the 7th) hits one to left....the left fielder breaks back at first, but then scurries forward and dives. And did NOT catch it. The umpire didn't say anything, which is what he's supposed to do -- you yell "foul" if it's foul, but otherwise just point inside the foul line for a fair ball. The left fielder had trapped the ball and then held it up to make it look like he caught it....and the old coot bought his story.

At this point, the woman who coaches our team is screaming at the umpire, who answered with something like, "what do you want, I can't see out there?" as it was getting quite dark. This was returned with, "if you can't see, then call the game!" and the always mature, "okay, it's called!" followed that.

So now I think we're supposed to play next Thursday, resume the game in the top of the 10th inning. I'm sure the other semifinal is finished, so we have to work out all the logistics of where will we play...
a) Do we finish on the same field? If so, there might not be time to get in the second game against the winner from the other semifinal.
b) Do we play on a field with lights? Do we resume the game on a different field? OR, do we finish our game on the same field, and then the winners drive across town to the field with lights?

In any event, we were supposed to play the championship game on Tuesday, but now there's talk that we'll play next Thursday instead (which will just push the season later into the year, after school starts up, and daylight hours get shorter and shorter)....On the bright side, we may not have to reschedule my fantasy football draft after all (previously scheduled for 8 pm on the internet Tuesday night).

I know this....if we hold them in the 10th, I'm going to chop a slow roller at their large 3rd basewoman and dare her to bend over to pick it up and throw it across the diamond to throw me out. Oh right, I wonder if we'll have the same umpire, too.

Stats for the season:

28 for 39, 20 runs scored, 22 RBI (.718 average, 4 HR)
3 for 4 in the all-star game with a triple
1 for 4 (really 2, except for that damned call!) so far in the playoffs -- I hit a hard liner that was caught, and then had a bad at bat where I grounded out...the dreaded "thinking at the plate instead of just swinging" problem.

Let's compare that to my men's league team: 22 for 44, 7 runs scored, 7 RBI (and considering 2 were HR -- that means I only scored 5 runs on my 20 other hits....and that's while hitting 3rd in the order)....God, that team was so bad.

What would happen if.... (8/22 edition)

2007-08-22T11:16:00.001-04:00

....Siskel (RIP), Ebert, or Roeper (the new Siskel, really), were double-jointed like Carol in the UK? This would make their modus operandi of movie reviewing more trifurcated. Thumbs up, thumbs down, or the rare thumbs sideways!!

A popular concept at work is for somebody to unload leftover food in the company lunchroom. These leftovers are usually in the form of extra Halloween candy.....large sheet cakes that were half unfinished from the weekend....or a tin of cookies. I say, let's incorporate a broader range of choices. I want to see somebody bring in the uneaten half of a steak. Perhaps some hot dogs that didn't get finished up. The key, really, is to make sure they don't look picked over. Cut the steak cleanly with a sharp knife, so it looks like it was a properly unserved piece of meat, suitable for being picked over in the lunchroom, after all. How about a bowl of chicken wings? Meat doesn't seem as common, on the list of foods you find in the lunch room.

Anybody who's ever watched cartoons on TV is familiar with the dreaded rolling snowball down a hill. The protagonist runs as fast as he can to avoid it, but the snowball gets bigger and bigger. Nobody EVER steps to the side and lets the snowball pass. Not only would the character avoid becoming incorporated into the snowball in a horrific crash, but it would offer the opportunity to interact with the audience, lauding his own knowledge of three dimensions.

I just heard Merv Griffin died this past week. He created Wheel of Fortune for TV. A couple of times on this show, I got the puzzle with NO letters, just by the shape of the words before anyone had spun. The first time I did this was for a place, District of Columbia. Anyway, the categories are becoming more and more bizarre, as though they're afraid to ever use the same "phrase" or "person" again that they might have used 10 years earlier in an episode. One odd category that I sort of like is "before & after" where you might have to solve for something like "The Battle of Bunker Hill Street Blues". That's not as good as the one I came up with a few years ago -- "Microsoft Word To Your Mother". Now, aside from the fact that the lexicon of Vanilla Ice isn't particularly popular any more....I wonder how one submits puzzle ideas to the show, and if they would pay someone $100 for it. That might be a good idea for the producers, actually.

Alice in Chains blew Velvet Revolver off the stage last night. If nothing else, I hope Scott Weiland realizes how lucky he is not to be dead like Layne Staley. We all lost ten years' worth of AiC tunes thanks to Staley's drug-infused death....and Stone Temple Pilots kinda had some of the same problems for a while there with Weiland. Yes, we might still all be listening to grunge! :) oh wait, no smileys allowed in discussing grunge...that's not happy music.

One website I use for work a lot apparently requires me to change my password every 36 days. I have no idea why that number, but I've kept a record the last year as to when I'm prompted to change it. My favorite workaround? Change it, and then use the voluntary "change password" option to change it right back to the regular one. I know some places track your password history and won't let you re-use an old one. Not these guys, though. (It's actually a "Fortune 100" company, I've overheard.)

That reminds me, I love hearing when things are praised for being "Top N" in a category, where N is a bizarre number like 15 or 30. (As in, one of the top 15 golf courses on the east coast.) Clearly, the actual ranking is probably N or N-1 at best. If you were ranked number 4, you would describe yourself as one of the top 5....not one of the top 20, top 50, or top 100, right? And you might not say "one of the top 4" because with such an un-round number such as 4....you're not fooling anyone that you're anything BUT number four. So I'm guessing that the "Fortune 100" company above would NOT qualify as a "Fortune 50" company.

If the government had any forethought about computers, they would not have allowed ZIP codes and social security numbers to start with 0. Yes, you can format the Excel cells to show the leading zero, but that's more work than would be necessary if they'd started them with 1. Some of the best ones are SSNs from Vermont, which start usually 008- or 009-, so you have to watch for two extra zeros. If left in numeric format, those zeros just go away.

When my original dentist retired, my records were transferred to another guy in the same town. I'd never had a cavity, but the first time I see the new guy, he finds one on my partially-erupted wisdom tooth, and suggests I get them pulled. Sure -- stupid wisdom tooth, ruining my perfect oral history -- get out, and take your friends with you -- the old guilt by association idea. Anyway, after they're pulled by a dental surgeon, I kept them and wanted to bring them back the next year to have him identify the cavity. I forgot them, so it was actually 2 years later before I brought them to him. Gotta give him credit, he knew exactly which tooth was which, and where the cavity was. He said that in dental school, the students would have to walk around a table of random teeth and identify them all -- including the red herrings of animal teeth thrown in there for fun.

The Connecticut "shore"

2007-08-20T08:38:00.000-04:00

Okay, so my mom and dad are renting this house at the beach for two weeks, and mom really wanted us to come down a day, so we did Saturday night.

First things first....as you can see from this picture, Connecticut isn't exactly known for its beaches. Sure, there's about 100 miles of land along the Atlantic Ocean, but since Long Island sorta "blocks" the real ocean from abutting the state, we pretty much get a 10-mile wide bathtub. Waves are generally very small....and wow, lots of rocks. Not exactly the white sands of Aruba, let's just say. And the water never gets up much past 70 degrees (21 for you metrickers) so it's not anywhere near as good as say, a swimming pool.

The other reason I don't really like beach-vacations is the crowdedness. The shoreline was jammed tight with little lots each with a house on them....so there's no privacy, and you're lucky if you can drive in 3rd gear for any stretch. I much prefer going to a lake, like Maine or Vermont. The seclusion is better, and swimming in fresh water is better than salt water....except it's easier to float in salt water. I'd rather look out the windows and see mountains and nature, rather than rows of houses. That's too much like being at home!

Anyways, we missed our chance to go to a clam shack because they only took cash, and my dad didn't notice that the 2nd clam shack we passed DID take VISA. So we ended up going a little inland Saturday night for dinner to a regular restaurant. I had angel hair pasta with white clam sauce and shrimp. Totally floored my mom, who'd never seen me eat seafood in 36 years. Of course, three hours later all I could taste in my burps was the garlic. (Of COURSE an all-fried dinner woulda been cheaper, but hey, they were paying anyways!)

The little "beach association" had some sort of gala Saturday night on the water....a cheesy DJ playing gunk like the Macarena, and a bonfire that smelled like whatever had been loaded on the wooden pallets that they used to feed the fire. P-U. The some fireworks a little further inland....but not much further, wow were they loud. Tried to get some pictures, but who needs to see a bunch of blurry colored dots amidst a black sky? Not exactly moment-capturing. Oh well.

What would happen if.... (8/15 edition)

2007-08-15T10:25:00.001-04:00

...the prophet Muhammad made a Mini-Me version of himself, and then this Mini Muhammad gave birth to a college football player? (This is a joke, because Darren McFadden, star player for the University of Arkansas, is the son of a woman named Mini Muhammad.)

Many people know that horrible drivers from Massachusetts are, um, affectionately referred to as Massholes. A friend of mine came up with the term FRID to describe "F***ing Rhode Island Drivers", and then another friend topped that with CRUDs -- "Connecticut's Ridiculously Unskilled Drivers". This is very accurate, I've noticed, after doing some out-of-state driving. The biggest problem with CT drivers is that they don't KNOW THEIR LANE. Too often there are slow cars in the fast lane and fast cars in the slow lane. It shouldn't be that hard to get out of the way when someone's on your tail....I know I do. Of course, part of the problem may be that Connecticut's highways have a lot of left-side exit ramps, which requires slowing vehicles to be on the wrong side of the lane layout. Connecticut often adds a third lane on the right for "slow moving vehicles". It's really for trucks on hills. Not only do they not use the lane, but I've found it a great way to get by not only the trucks, but the people that go left to pass the trucks, but don't really build up enough speed to pass the trucks and therefore cause the passing lane to jam up. And my all time favorite is when I'm minding my own business in the middle lane of three....a car gets on the highway and then for no reason at all moves into the middle lane, when there was nobody for them to pass from the right lane...AND they aren't going as fast as the cars currently IN the middle lane. Like there's some STIGMA to being in the far right lane they can't deal with.

I heard the Eagles' song "Take It to the Limit" the other day on the radio. Two of the lines are:
"You can spend all your time making money.
You can spend all your love making time."
I say, complete the cycle....you can spend all your MONEY making LOVE....at least if you go to the red-light district in the city! :)

I think, technically, that when sugar is added to lemonade, that counts as an artificially-sweetened beverage. I know people will make a point of decrying the use of aspartame or acesulfame potassium in food/drinks as "artificial sweeteners". But here's the thing. Unless the drink is marketed as a sugar-flavored drink, then adding the sugar artificially sweetens it. Naturally sweetened lemonade should mean relying on the sugar in the lemons themselves....of which there's not very much, obviously. How about coffee? Coffee isn't sweet -- however you make it sweeter, it's done by artificially introducing a sweetening ingredient. Again, naturally-sweetened coffee should mean the sugar in the coffee bean itself (good luck).

For the last four summers, I have used MLB.tv's subscriptions to watch baseball games on my computer at work during the day. The past couple of years, they have put up an MLB logo over where the local broadcasters' advertisements would be. I'm sure they don't want some furniture store in Kansas City getting free worldwide advertising just because the game's being streamed over the Internet. The big problem with this is that if you start streaming the game during a commercial, you have NO idea what the sound level is until they game resumes and they resume the broadcast feed. The volume of the feeds vary greatly from game to game, so I alternately have to quickly turn the volume down (oops, sorry!)....or crank the thing up just to hear it at all (which of course, affects the level if I switch to a different game).

We harvested the one carrot from our garden that didn't dry out this spring....it didn't do too hot, either, because our thriving cayenne pepper plants kinda took over the spot. The carrot was green in a couple of spots, and also had a 45-degree bend in it. The part furthest down in the soil was orange and very yummy, but only about one bite's worth. And of course, last night I forgot to REALLY wash off my hands after eating some of a cayenne pepper....and then went to remove a contact lens.

New York City has five boroughs....and yet, it seems like only addresses in Manhattan are written out as "New York, NY 10001"....otherwise I mail stuff a lot to "Bronx, NY 10455" or "Staten Island, NY 10314", etc....I never put "Manhattan, NY" on an envelope. Nor do I put "New York, NY" for address in Queens....seems like I should be able to, as long as the ZIP code is right.

Here's a good topic for a book to arouse ire and anger: Someone should examine the world's major religions, and then perform the following analysis: What's the probability this particular religion is "correct"? Each chapter could dissect some different faith....Chapter one, how correct is Judaism? Chapter two....the Hare Krishnas....Chapter three, the ancient Greek gods -- what are the chances that following THEM is the "way"?

There's a brand of long-distance shipping trucks that just have the big word YELLOW spelled out on the truck...but the truck appears to me to be orange. I should take a picture next time I see one, and put it up for debate. I used to get into arguments over whether a rug at the home-decorating store I worked in was more BLUE versus being more GREEN. Could be the same thing here....I used to debate with my ex-wife whether Winnie the Pooh was yellow or orange, at least the particular stuffed one in our house. Perhaps we see the same color and just interpret it differently -- like, where do YOU draw the line between yellow and orange? Like a line of demarcation on a rainbow to distinguish where yellow ends and orange begins.

And with that....back to the grind....

Was that English?

2007-08-14T11:21:00.000-04:00

I hate phone calls at work. In part because I'm stuck with MassMutual's phone system that doesn't have caller ID on it. And I've been blindsided too many times by our clients' employees just calling up randomly because their HR person gave them my number....asking stuff I can't answer.

(The worst part is that I'm NOT a MassMutual employee. My boss is, but I manage his side business for him, and the deal is that I have to work in this stupid insurance agency surrounded by a bunch of Willy Loman types pestering people on the phone to be their financial planners....)

Anyway, another reason I hate the phone is when you get somebody that doesn't speak English well, or natively. Through no fault of their own, I am absolutely ABYSMAL at trying to parse together broken English or English with thick accents when it's spoken to me. If you want to write down your message, I'll figure it out, no problem. But I'm awful when someone stands there and tries to say something with a thick accent.

For instance, one of the back-office people from MassMutual's headquarters is a nice little old lady from Russia. And when she calls me, I panic, because I'll understand about 40% of what she says. So almost all the time, she emails me, and it works great.

Today, a woman called, and I think she says she's trying to fill out the paperwork to get her just-died husband's 401(k) money paid out to her. I had her repeat full sentences. The phone line was crystal clear, but I swear, I had no idea what she said. Maybe it's a learning disability on my end or something.....I certainly tip the scales heavy in some other categories on the good side, this could be something to balance me out?! Because I was tempted to say, "Was that English?" I had no reason to think it was bad grammar....she certainly sounded confident in whatever the chirp-like quality to her voice was explaining to me. So it wasn't like she was fumbling for words -- I had no idea what the words were, that's all.

So how does this manifest itself in me? Maybe a slight trepidation towards phone calls -- although that's mostly the blindsided-by-angry-people-without-warning effect. The real effect is that even though I got straight A's in Spanish classes four years in high school (and a couple of courses in college), I will do anything to avoid actually trying to speak it. I would be too ashamed to sound as incomprehensible and wrongly-accented in their language, as others sound in mine.

I always have thought that I'm going to vacation somewhere that speaks Spanish, and I'm going to bring along a pad of paper to write all my requests in perfect grammar, like some sort of mute. Anything that shows a weakness in my own person, must be avoided!

They used to call me Crazy Joe, now they can call me Bat man.

2007-08-10T09:57:00.000-04:00

Down Under David has been inquiring what exactly was being delivered to the house, a birthday present from my brother in Florida.

Turns out I got a baseball bat. Sure enough, it's not something I'd want to get hit in the head with. It's kind of a blackish-green color, so that's cool. I have to take the sticker of Todd Helton off it.

Strange present choice....I don't think it's legal for the softball league I'm in -- bats for that have to be approved by some softball governing body, I believe. The handle's thinner than the softball bats I use, too....So this might be one I save for going to the batting cages with the automatic pitching machines.

For my tenth birthday, my mom bought me a wood bat in Little League, an official Rod Carew model. (You may know Rod Carew from either his 7 American League batting titles, or from the Adam Sandler song, since Carew, and not OJ Simpson, is a Jew -- "he converted".) Anyways, I still have that bat, but it's too small to use as an adult. Of course, as a kid it was too heavy for game use, and then we all started using aluminum bats around that time, anyway. So I still have it and actually had to break it out for a softball game last year when nobody else on the team even brought a wooden bat -- which we're required to use to restrict distances on balls in flight.

Yesterday I had a doctor's appointment, he took an ultrasound of my shrinked up thyroid -- I take synthroid pills to overcome that. Anyways, since it's the same gel and stuff that pregnant women have for ultrasounds, I asked him if it were a boy or girl thyroid. After having to explain to him the joke about the sex of my thyroid, he said it was a boy, as he could "see a small penis." Let's leave the "and where was he looking, again?" jokes to ourselves, thank you all.

Hopefully the rain will go away for the weekend, I have to spend my Home Depot card on stones and put in the rest of our front walkway.

Nichole's questions...

2007-08-08T10:44:00.000-04:00

Normally I don't get caught up in the "pass it on" type blogging fun some others have. I tried tagging people a few months ago....yeah, how'd that turn out...

Anyways, I signed up for what Dr. Nichole referred to as "Krystyn's questions." Simple enough rules:

* Leave a comment saying anything random. Something totally out of the blue. Whatever.
* I'll then post five questions for you. Customized!
* You post the answers to your questions on your blog.
* Include these rules and offer to ask participants questions.

Ok, birthday boy. Here are your questions:

1. What's your favorite food?
A bacon cheeseburger on a fresh poppy-seed roll. Cooked medium....still pink and very juicy without feeling raw and gross in my mouth. The cheese may be either cheddar or American (which one Canadian friend has taught me, isn't a real cheese, but just a processed cheese).

2. What was the best birthday present you got?
Probably a fifty-dollar gift card to Home Depot from Mom and Dad. It's been a couple of months since we worked on our front walkway. This should get us the rest of the stones we need to finish...assuming they've not been discontinued. The style is "bellacobble buff". Erika says there's something good she's buying for me, but it's not arrived yet! My brother says what he has sent from Florida (also not here yet) is something I don't want to get hit in the head with.

3. How much did you spend on your haircut and in what type of establishment did it occur? (that's only one question)
I went to a place called "Colton Joshua Salon", which is a remodeled former "Family Haircut Store" that changed ownership a few months ago here in Fairfield where I work. I paid $15 for the cut and left a $5 tip.

4. What kind of outdoors-y type games did you play with your friends when you were a kid?
Lots of wiffle ball. We had a great fenced-in yard for it. Kept track of all the statistics via tally marks after every at-bat. And real ball....run the bases, ghost runners....not just "you hit this far, it's a double" baloney. Then we'd do write-ups on the games and stick them on the refrigerator....next to the statistics like a real sports section to a newspaper.

5. Did you get any cheap lobster when you were in Maine?
I do not like it in a house. I do not like it with a mouse. Actually, I was a very fussy eater as a kid (or as my dad used to quote George Carlin, a "big pain in the ass at the dinner table"). They offered me baseball cards if I tried some when I was 12. I said okay, and had spasmic reactions every time I tried to swallow. Looking back, I wonder if it was an allergy thing....but I ended up spitting it out after a minute in my mouth. My parents gave in anyways (rare for them) for putting forth the effort. I re-tried lobster a couple of years ago, and didn't like it again.

So there's the deal...Feel free to leave a comment and then I'll get to make up questions for you.

The rain in Maine stays plainly as a pain...

2007-08-07T10:07:00.000-04:00

One thing that Maine is known for is its blueberries. Here's one, from a single bush that grows along the lake shore amidst large rocks.

More importantly, though, is where we were. The lake is Upper Sysladobsis Lake in eastern central Maine. My grandfather built it (the cabin, not the lake!) in the 1950s, I believe, after their older cabin burned down. There's no electricity, but most everything runs on gas. There's a fridge and stove/range that haven't changed in fifty years, easily. Gas lamps that you have to be careful lighting, not to blow out the glass mantles. A couple of years ago Erika tried to make me a cake in the oven but it didn't cook very evenly. But it's easy to fry stuff up on the range part. I made bacon and eggs and pancakes Saturday and Sunday, for instance. Something about being at camp lets you say, "screw eating healthy!" although I did bring some fruit and nuts for snacks.

This year's birthday cake was finished off in Connecticut, but by the time she'd frosted it, it was like 9:30 pm, and the kids were in bed because we were getting up around 1:30 am to start driving. We took off around 2:10 from home and stopped in Augusta, Maine, at around 6:30 for breakfast at Friendly's. We got up to Lincoln, Maine around 9:30 or so and hit the grocery store for some last-minute beer. It takes about 45 minutes from Lincoln...the first 15 or so are regular road, but the last half hour is on unpaved dirt roads. It was dry up there, so even though I was in a little Nissan Sentra, I had no real issues with clearance over some of the rocky parts. A couple of loud bumps on the bottom of the car, but at 20 mph, they don't do any real damage.

So the kids changed out of their PJs and into their bathing suits. They have life vests that keep them afloat while swimming. I don't think they NEEDED them, but they don't have to worry about the depth of the lake or the gunky mossy bottom of the lake touching their feet that way, either.

On Friday the kids and Erika swam about a third of a mile and back with vests on to this island at the top.

Anyways, I had to help with yard maintenance. The original septic tank has rusted out, so there was a sinkhole that needed to be filled....a few trips in my uncle's pickup to haul dirt from a nearby quarry-like spot. In addition, I was finally instructed how to operate a chainsaw, as I was in charge of slicing up a cedar tree that was impacting the ability to pull down the driveway, and may also affect where the replacement septic tank goes once the permit is obtained. (I'm not sure how much of the operation is impacted by the Penobscot Indian sovereignty in the local areas. My uncle seems to be in okay with them.)

Anyways, we were all exhausted most of Thursday, so the good part of vacation started Friday. My uncle left, with instructions for cleaning up and locking the place. I took the boat out on the lake....there are a couple of clusters of cabins in spots, but mostly only a few isolated ones, or none at all. Very peaceful. There was a loon in the lake, I only got a half-decent picture of it....its song greeted us each morning. Friday evening, thunderstorms rolled in and rocked the place. The skies kept changing color from bright orange to purple to gray, and then once the really dark clouds came in, they opened up. High winds led me to need to bail out about 6 inches of water (mostly waves crashing in, rather than actual rainfall) the next morning.

Saturday we did a little day trip to Bangor. In part to re-load on things we needed -- paper towels, dishwashing soap -- stuff we didn't know that the camp was out of. Also, to see how much rain had collected on the dirt roads. Several puddles of varying sizes that required me to swerve back and forth on the roads....A guy on my fantasy baseball team who lives in New Brunswick and I had discussed meeting for lunch, but Canada had a three-day weekend, so he'd made other plans. Still, we got to see Stephen King's house in Bangor. It's nice, but very centrally located in the city. My camera batteries died out the first time we swung around the block (the master of horror strikes!!!), so we did swing around again and take a shot from my new cell phone. Erika was surprised someone of his stature chooses to live in a non-secluded area. I say, good for him! Between the two of us, we've read all his books. I read his book "Faithful", a running dialogue with the co-author about the 2004 Red Sox, and Erika's read everything else :) -- in fact, she's just re-read 1408 after seeing the movie.

Sunday was mostly cleaning, and we left around 11. One of my contacts had ripped Thursday, so I spent the rest of the weekend with my glasses on. That meant no sunglasses for the drive back west. Interstate 95 is also a nightmare in southern Maine and New Hampshire on Sunday afternoons, we learned last year. So my bright idea was to cut through northern Maine on back roads -- Route 2 from mid-Maine west through New Hampshire and Vermont, to cut down Route 91 south as the sun was setting. Much less traffic, and since the last 4 hours would be south, the sun wasn't an issue. All that was true, except the lack of a high-speed freeway added 2 hours to the middle of the trip! Ugh. Anyway, home around 9:30 for a well-needed shower and bedtime....and slice of birthday cake!

La policia!

2007-08-01T10:08:00.000-04:00

We saw the Police last night. They were great. I didn't realize that Sting's actually pretty good on the bass. Only the trio, no backup musicians...that was also cool, although hearing no piano on "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" was a bit odd.

Parking was 15 bucks....cash only. There was a supervisor taking our $, and he was a prick about it, told us to do a u-turn, and they'd stop traffic to let us out when we told him we only had nine dollars in cash plus our checkbook. Well, they direct us out, and next thing you know, we're in another lane leading to a different parking area, where people have ALREADY paid. Serves the s.o.b. right!! :)

Too bad it took 50 minutes to get out of there after the show. It was at UConn's football stadium....several towns away from the campus, of course, because they only went division 1-A (Bowl subdivision) so that they could make money, so they put the stadium near Hartford instead of near the students. Almost entirely bleachers. Beer was expensive, of course.

So anyway, what a great show. They did pretty much every song you'd expect, and I don't think there was any Sting solo crap. Andy Summers looks a little bit like the hairstylist from "What Not to Wear" (the American version, Carol!) Sting was buff, and Stewart Copeland had a gray mop-top...and odd look for someone that old, but at least it looked like they were having fun.

Next time, though? I park somewhere else in East Hartford (I grew up in the next town over, so I know all the streets) and walk to the stadium.

This game is.....

2007-08-01T09:55:00.002-04:00

Bonkers!

This was a game that I loved as a kid in the late 1970s. And unbelievably, my wife had a full copy of it when I met her! So now we force the kids to play it, instead of Monopoly, to the chagrin of my older daugther.

Here's a recap of the rules. You roll the dice, move, and then play a tile on the spot you land, that'll say something like "ahead 4" or "back 2". Then you do that instruction. You try to aim yourself to the scoring pods. There are also "lose" spaces on the board where you'll lose a point. First to 12 wins.

Because you can't go below zero, Erika's favorite thing to do, even more than winning, is to set traps. If she ends up on the Lose space, she'll deliberately play cards that lead people BACK to Lose. Roll a 5? Then she plays a "back 5" card and you lose another point. (Unless you're at zero.) Click on the picture of the board to see how whatever you'd roll from the Lose space would get you stuck BACK at the Lose space, except for only a couple of possibilities on the dice.

It's also fun when the cards instruct you to go to spaces that have OTHER cards.....Back 5 could lead to ahead 10, which then says back 15, which then says back 4, and you finally get a Score point. If the scoring pod is occupied, you also get to roll again, so you can possibly continue to accumulate points.

Here is the song from the commercial way back when, printed on the bottom of the box. (Courtesy of boardgamegeek.com.)

All right, I gotta pack. We leave at like 1 am tonight. What's that, 4 pm your time, David?

...one of those mornings...

2007-07-30T10:40:00.000-04:00

So, interesting weekend. I beat my daughters at a six-hour Monopoly game. It took forever, as we each had one of each color group. Except me, I had all the yellows. So I had hotels on there, after which point my daughters decided to trade between themselves to try to mount a united front of some sort. Anyway, the 6-year-old didn't last long after that. Eventually, I got it so that I had hotels on Mediterranean, Baltic, Oriental, Vermont, Connecticut, Atlantic, Ventnor, Marven Gardens, Pacific, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. My 8-year-old only had the reds covered with hotels, but had like $5,000 in cash. Of course, I had NO cash, or "operating capital", you might say. And sure enough, I kept hitting the reds and she kept missing mine. I'd pass go, and either hit Income Tax, or land on Reading (she owned all 4 railroads, too). Everything else I had was mortgaged. Luckily, I'm well-versed in the Law of Large Numbers....the more rolls, the more likely she'd start hitting mine. Eventually she started having to pay up....and then I accepted her two oranges in lieu of the $1150 rent on a yellow. There weren't any more hotels, so I loaded those up with 4 houses each right away. Finally, she landed on one of them, the rent was $700. She had already sold off her hotels/houses the time before, so she mortgaged her properties, counted up her cash....$699. Oh, sorry, thanks for playing!! :)

Then it was off to my mom's for birthday presents! $50 from home depot so we can buy stones to finish our front walkway....when we last left off in May there was no crabgrass all over the place, however. Also some audio CDs on the history of baseball, a Red Sox - emblem set of serving platter and bowl (why? why? why? really? to serve turkey and mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving?) Also, a bag of Popnots brand popping corn, which will deliberately only half-pop so it's extra crunchy. (I highly recommend these things to popcorn fans.) Dinner was steak, potatoes, corn on the cob, and Italian bread. Fantastic! Completely made up for the store cake....plus the hideous vanilla ice cream that Hood thought would be good to color with annatto -- the same orangish dye that makes cheese look stupidly orange, now makes vanilla ice cream look peachy.

Anyways, the "one of those mornings" parts. I was assigned to take Erika's car in for a tune-up so we can drive it on the dirt roads in Maine. She needs to pass emissions testing for the state of Connecticut, and her "check engine light" needs to be fixed, too, as that was part of why she failed the testing a couple of months ago. So I was ready to go, and suddenly the corn and bud light I had last night decided to give nature a call, if ya know what I mean. The funny part there is that we use Charmin toilet paper in our house...and the wrapper mentioned that it was a 6-pack of MEGA rolls, which are 4 times the size of "regular rolls", apparently. Then, the button on my pants for work fell off, the threads were a bit worn, so I had to rummage around upstairs for my sewing kit to put THAT back on...have I mentioned how lousy I am at threading a needle? Luckily, Erika had some pretty good-sized needleholes. Next, I forget Erika's car keys in the house after setting the alarm, so I have to go back in. THEN, I can't start her car.....and in attempting to find the phone number where she worked, my phone found me a business with the exact same name, only instead of Monroe, CT, it was Monroe, NC. No help. Anyways, apparently you have to really slam the clutch pedal all the way down to the floor, and I wasn't pushing it in far enough. So she's asking me if I'm pushing the clutch pedal in, which sounds kinda obvious and patronizing, and sure enough it starts right up. GRRRrrrr....and to top it off, an old lady cuts me off up hill, pulling out of her driveway and failing to notice the traffic moving at 40-45 mph.

A couple of quick "random hits"....

Carly Simon's "Anticipation" song was used in Heinz Ketchup ads years ago....but really, no constipation remedy thought of using it? If "Anticipation" is "making me wait" according to the original lyrics, then really......

Also, please remember that as a present, cash is always good. I have sorta trademarked this phrase: "It's like a gift certificate, redeemable ANYWHERE!"

What would happen if.... (7/25 edition)

2007-07-25T12:35:00.001-04:00

...if I gave in to Down Under David's request for before and after pictures of my haircut. (Sorry, I still haven't put the knee-high socks back on for a picture yet.)

I'm working with an accountant on a common client whose initials are KJY. I simply HOPE that the J does not stand for Jelly.

So, yeah, I got the haircut last night. Is "barbress" a word? I want to say that I tipped the barbress five dollars. I could say stylist, but really, does it LOOK like my hair was done by a stylist???

My wife was born in Virginia and moved to Staten Island when she was like eight. So while most of the drawl is gone, she still will say she waits "on line" (the NYC way) instead of "in line" when she is queued up at the Department of Motor Vehicles. (Or as it's known in Connecticut, Vehicals.) Just one of those weird regionalisms that freaks me out when I hear it. Waiting on line, to me, is what you do when your Internet connection is freaking slow.

I wonder if HBO would try to sue, if the Emmy awards restricted their categories to over-the-air broadcast channels only. It seems odd that cable shows go up for the same awards. I haven't had HBO for 20 years, I have no idea if their shows are any good.

I enjoy taking a Friday off, and then coming back on Monday and finding an overnight-express envelope (like FedEx) in my mailbox. Gee, I hope that wasn't a RUSH job that I wasn't around to act upon last week....

I'm not a big fan of poker games with "community cards". I would like the World Series of Poker to feature Dealer's Choice rounds. If someone wants "day baseball with rainouts", then that's what gets played. (By the way, I'd like an informal poll of which readers know how that game is played.) Then the next guy wants 5-card draw, jacks-or-better, progressive....spice it up a bit, huh?

I've ordered my Maroon 5 tickets for October. Apparently, though, the trick is not to be first logging into Ticketmaster right at 10 am when seats go on sale, but to be late by a couple of minutes, as earlier people's seats become available after their Internet connection screws up, or they botch the word verification. (you know, after waiting online....)

I would like Dan Mega to host a version of ESPN's "Who's Now?" competition among our fellow bloggers. Because he is just SO Now.

Roasted pistachios are awesome. It's a close race between them and roasted almonds, except almonds come already out of their shells, whereas sometimes pistachios are hard to open. I've been known to slam my stapler on my desk here to try to pry one or two open.

(I knew I used up my best thoughts yesterday.....)

Next week I'll be in Maine Wednesday to Sunday...so no list next week.

Random hits....

2007-07-24T15:45:00.000-04:00

So, I have poison ivy forming on my right leg, right at the top of where my knee-high socks reached just below my kneecap.

I have two screws in my left kneecap, a bad accident trying to learn to ride an ATV. Some day....the full story.

My boss took me to lunch today. Check it out. I had a dog with chili and cheese, and another with bacon and cheese. Only 25 cents for bacon....the same amount the deli next door adds to a sandwich for a dollar.

Tonight, I should be getting my hair cut. They said they had just closed up early yesterday afternoon when I asked how long the line was. Perhaps some before-and-after pictures? I did take a before shot this morning, just in case.

I heard on the radio that Michael Vick's attorney's name is Billy Martin, which obviously is an ESPN cross-promotion for The Bronx Is Burning mini-series they're showing on Tuesday nights.

I never fancied myself an animal person, but even I know better than to treat dogs like that. Sheesh.

Would it be wrong of me to solicit tips from our clients? We prepare government forms for them, signature-ready, among our various roles as third-party administrators. Too bad they don't come to our office....I could put a tip jar directly on my cubicle.

College football is nothing but minor-league football. And yet it's shoved down our throats like it's just as good as the NFL. Phooey.

I think Family Guy should do a Hong Kong Phooey parody. Peter as the chief, Lois as the secretary, Brian and Stewie as Phooey and that cat.....

Uh oh, better save some for tomorrow....

The poison ivy tree!

2007-07-22T19:37:00.000-04:00

So, we went attacking the oriental bittersweet again....

We have some small trees that aren't alive, having been dwarfed now by taller trees between the street and our front yard (makes for good privacy). But they give the bittersweet something to climb up to get to the live stuff up there.

We were cutting and pruning evil growth today, Erika in long pants (despite the 85 degree weather), and me with knee-high white socks to cover my legs. Groovy, eh?

So I see a hairy poison ivy root scaling one of the dead trees....I also see some leaves and berries on the tree, but they don't match the type of tree, and sure enough I see that they are GIANT poison ivy leaves. I swear, I thought they were elm tree leaves. The giant root has actually branched off the dead tree trunk, and put out its leaves just like a tree would. I almost got hit in the face with them, they were at eye level and higher.

We'll know at the end of the week whether or not we've contracted urushiol-induced contact dermatitis....if ya know what I mean.

We will have to sacrifice some privacy once the trees are taken out. My cousin's husband does that stuff for money, so he's welcome to come and grind it all up. At first I was like, hmmm....mulch made out of poison ivy. That can't be good. But really, who's going to be walking barefoot on it? Or throwing mulch at other people? Mulching up the poison ivy probably will be okay....maybe the urushiol washes away after enough rain, who knows?

What would happen if.... (7/18 edition)

2007-07-18T13:43:00.000-04:00

...fans of baseball who gripe about the designated hitter were instead treated to this: the person put in the lineup to hit for the pitcher, also had to stand right behind the mound and FIELD for the pitcher, too? That way, the pitcher doesn't have to worry about covering first base or backing up behind home -- this new fielder would stand right behind the pitcher and take on ALL fielding duties as soon as the pitch as thrown. That also stops old lousy fielders from playing "half the game", as DHs are accused of.

On my way in to work today, one of Connecticut's Department of Transportation's portable electronic signs on the side of Route 8 in the Shelton area warned of Slow Moving Vehicals. WHAT?!!!!! You see, my web browser even underlines Vehicals as a misspelled word. Good grief!

When I was a kid, the only non-peanut butter sandwich type I would eat was: American cheese with ketchup. I was mocked often by older cousins. Looking back, it's like a burger without the ground beef in it, though. And yet, I have no interest in eating such a sandwich any more, and it's probably been 25 years since my last one.

I work in a building with offices on floors 2 to 5, and parking on the ground floor and basement. I work on the top floor. I will take the elevator when it's resting on G when I walk in....but really, to walk up 4 flights of stairs, is quicker than waiting for the elevator to come to my floo

DAMN! I'm mid-Webex and the presenter keeps taking her window to the front of my screen!

As I was saying, why wait for the elevator to come to G, and then ride it up to 5? Or worse, sharing the elevator to stop at 3 and then 5. Walking is faster for that few a number of floors to travel along. The worst is when I got on alone, someone doing maintenance called for the elevator at 3, rode it to 4. At that point *I* got off because it's faster to walk the last floor than wait for the doors to close and ride up to 5. There's a "door close" button inside, but it never makes the doors close quicker. It's a tease!

When my brother was a kid, he used to ask for chewing tobacco on his list to Santa. Carlton Fisk of the Red Sox used to do Copenhagen ads. Needless to say, Santa didn't come through. (Yes, Dan Mega, Fisk played for the Red Sox long, long, ago....)

During this WebEx, the presenter is displaying her Internet Explorer window, and her Yahoo! Toolbar says she's got one new email. Should I bug her to remind her to check her email? :)

Nerf Herder was a band who did a song called "Van Halen", a cute little ditty about how they went to hell with all their infighting. I think Van Halen should do a song and call it Nerf Herder...maybe tell them to mind their own business! Actually, I've BEEN waiting for Madonna to do a song called "Lady Beatle". See what I'm going for? Not like rap feuds, but more amusing ditties.

I had to post this...

2007-07-17T13:52:00.000-04:00

I left this as a comment on my last entry, but I want it more prominently displayed, because I feel kinda smart for asking it. It's a take-off on an old George Carlin bit, and he probably didn't invent the original question either....

Anyways....

Can God create a kidney stone so big that even He can't pass it?

Thanks, and remember to tip your server generously. I'll be here all week, followed by two nights at Chuckles in St. Louis next month.

Busy schedule this week!

2007-07-16T16:34:00.001-04:00

4 games this week. 3 for the hideous "Team formerly known as SCRUBS". And then one for my good team on Thursday. Last Friday my arm hurt throwing, so I played first base. No errors....one miscommunication, though. A ball was hit in the hole between first and second, I couldn't get it, but the second baseman could. The pitcher yelled about who was supposed to cover first. Um....ball hit to the right side, that would be YOU, pitcher! Actually, we lost when our manager got thrown out at the plate with what would have been the tying run. It was his 2nd time in the game getting tagged out at home. Doesn't matter, though....we only had 6 people show up and borrowed some extras from the other team. I'm sure we'd have had to forfeit if we'd actually outscored them. 4 for 5 with two dingers, though. I like that!

I was scheduled to play some tennis last night with my friend Rob. We went over to the courts at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, CT, where he lives. It's a ritzy prviate school, apparently where JFK went to high school before Harvard. The storms were threatening, and in the first set (me, up 6-5) the rain started. I thought, hey, here's an idea, plunk the serve over the net by about 2 feet to make him scurry on the wet pavement. It worked for a couple of points, but then the next point he got there faster and suddenly I was stuck unable to react on the wet ground. I did close out the set, and then we stopped playing. We eventually left, after about 20 minutes of waiting, and as we were driving back we noticed it wasn't wet as we'd driven about a mile down the road to a different part of town. So we went to a park and it was, indeed, dry. After warming back up with slightly damp balls, we started the second set. Got to deuce, I believe, when it started to pour at THIS court, too.

(One funny thing happened before the rain -- I hit a return that hit some crabgrass growing in a crack in the asphalt, and barely bounced up. If you think the half clay, half grass court was weird for Federer-Nadal a few weeks ago....they shoulda tried something like that! Different surfaces within the same side of the court!)

Okay, so tennis was over, we went to dinner, and as we looked outside it had dried up once again....we were too full to play again, but God made sure we didn't change our minds, by having it start pouring AGAIN as we walked through the parking lot back to the car.

another reason to love wikipedia...

2007-07-13T14:06:00.000-04:00

So, I was listening to some VH on my iTunes here at work, and went to check on rumors that the reunion tour with Dave is back on.

That started at the wikipedia page for VH, which then led me to click on the article on Eddie's "Brown Sound", the way old VH guitar parts sounded.

At the top of that article, it had some disambiguity language --
"For the defecation-inducing sound, see Brown note"

So OF COURSE I had to look....and now, so must you....

Here comes the weekend again...

2007-07-13T08:40:00.000-04:00

Nothing makes me look forward to a Friday than when late on Thursday afternoon the boss mentions he won't be in the next day...

My co-ed softball team won again last night, so we're 7-0. I actually drew a base on balls during the game. That's pretty tough to do, because I like to hit and I'm not too fussy about where the pitches are. But if you can't reach the pitches, you do what ya gotta do. The weird thing in our league is that if a guy walks, and there's a woman next in the lineup, she gets a free walk, too -- to avoid the idea of intentionally walking men to try to pitch to the easier-to-get-out women.

Maroon 5 tickets go on sale soon. I found that there's a show at Mohegan Sun on October 12. It was weird, the Ticketmaster list of shows didn't mention it, only New York on the 10th and Boston on the 15th. But amidst the pre-sale special offers, there was mention of one promotion that applies to only four shows, one of them being in the budding metropolis of Uncasville, CT. (I think Uncasville is actually part of Montville....but the point is, it's where the Mohegan Sun casino is.) My wife is a big Maroon 5 nut, so maybe I can get some early Christmas shopping done!

WFAN in New York just had its 20th anniversary, so they were doing a retrospective a couple of weeks ago -- they started playing songs from July 1987. One of them was the underrated "Jammin' Me" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. And sure enough, not only did I know most of the lyrics, I sang the same WRONG lyrics I sang as a teenager. There's a line about "take back Joe Piscopo" and I always would sing it as "take back your basketball"...and sure enough, I screwed it up again 20 years later.

I was supposed to have my bloodwork drawn for my regular diabetes checkup, and I forgot that they wanted me to do it "fasting" -- don't eat breakfast! Of course, two things. My blood glucose level was on the low side when I woke up, and I didn't read the paperwork for the lab specifically indicating not to eat....so it wasn't too long before it was too late -- a hideous frozen bagel from a bag of them that my wife bought but rejected....followed by the last slice of homemade poundcake made with strawberry yogurt instead of sour cream -- Erika had made it for strawberry shortcake last weekend.

What would happen if.... (7/11 edition)

2007-07-11T12:53:00.000-04:00

...the UFC (ultimate fighting championship) people decided to stage tag-team matches? Now, I'm pretty sure boxing as tag-team would be stupid, but maybe the octagon would have some interesting matches. Or would it carry the stigma of pro wrestling, and detract from the legitimacy of the sport?

Most parents of small kids, and perhaps bored college students, know the song "We just figured out Blue's Clues.....etc." from the TV show on Nickelodeon. I think it's very easy to substitute "Booze Cruise" for "Blue's Clues" and make your own lyrics. (I thought of this BEFORE hearing of Jenny's tale on the boat this week....)

With the summer humidity, my piano isn't sounding great....it always seems a bit muffled in the dense damp air, perhaps. I've been converting guitar music on the fly to play such silly stuff as "Smoke on the Water" on the piano. I did a paper in college about music chords, the wave equation, and harmonics, that sorta explains why songs like that SUCK on the piano. I'll spare you the details, I'm sure anyone can imagine the lameness involved.

Some people complained about the 4th of July being celebrated on a Wednesday, because, oh boo hoo, it doesn't lend itself to a three-day weekend. That annoys me to no end. If it's that big a problem, don't celebrate it. I feel there's too much of a sense of entitlement for some folks. Just you wait, everyone....somebody will try to make Christmas a "Monday" holiday....move it to the 27th instead of Saturday the 25th, so that you don't lose a free day off from work. And by "somebody", I think I mean George W. Bush.

Why are cable channels called networks? Aren't networks supposed to be different stations linked together? Like NBC, there's a couple of hundred channels all showing the same shows around the country. That's a network. CNN is one channel. What's being networked? The Cable News Network is really the Cable News Channel.

I also hate when people refer to stations by their cable number. They'll say the game's on channel 6....when it's really channel 61 over-the-air, and the cable company just happened to assign their number 6 to that channel.

There's a sign on my street advertising the college students who are painting a neighbor's house. However, the house itself is set back from the street and the driveway runs down hill a couple of hundred feet. I've never actually seen the house from the road. So although I appreciate the idea of the contractors advertising what they do, they certainly don't have the opportunity to show off whether or not they're doing a good job.

At my church Sunday, they asked to congratulate "Gene and Fran" for being named Eucharistic ministers. Or perhaps it was "Jean and Fran". No indication who was who. It was an old married couple in their sixties. I thought for sure that they were going to get to debut by handing out some Jesus during Mass....but they weren't even utilized. Seems to me if they're going to make a point of calling them out, then they ought to put these new skills to use.

One last thing, I guess. I was a big fan of the old Hartford Whalers. Their logo was pretty lame at the time, but now I kinda think it's got some erotic lendings to it. Maybe not to the extent of Joe Camel's nose looking phallic....but certainly either some cleavage or butt crack.

And on that note....back to work :)

Oriental bittersweet

2007-07-09T09:29:00.000-04:00

Anyone know this stuff? It's a woody, vining plant that will take over the vegetation in the area. Our yard has this stuff. I went to search the internet for it once, and the very first hit off of Yahoo was a page sponsored by the Town of Newtown, CT. That's less than 5 miles from Oxford, so it's most likely a local phenomenon.

Of course, if you ever want to see it in action, travel down I-84 between Waterbury and Danbury, and then hit I-684 in New York down to the city itself through Westchester County. The bittersweet sends out new growth in pairs, the 2 shoots intertwine themselves for support, and go up, up, up the nearest trees, and then spread over to more trees up at the top. Then the vines choke those trees to death, and move on. Last fall along both of those highways we saw what looks like giant nests of the bittersweet vines all at the top of the trees. Small trees have no chance.

In fact, last summer we first noticed the bittersweet crawling up our house onto our deck (elevated off the kitchen, above the garage in the back), and taking over a young 12-foot tree. We had to pull all the vines down, and then noticed this stuff was responsible for a lot of young trees being fallen over in the immediate periphery of the wooded area between our house and the neighbors'. So it's been an ongoing fight. Part of the problem is that the bittersweet gets buddy-buddy with poison ivy. In fact, we misidentified large poison ivy roots as bittersweet, and Erika had to go on prednisone late last fall.

This year, the bittersweet is much less, and we do enjoy seeing new growth turn brown as we identify the roots on the ground that it's sprouting out of, and both cut it, and then spray it with concentrated poison ivy killer (what is that, triclopyr?) However, the dead vines from last year are twisted around trees and accumulated about 30 feet off the ground, so it's not always possible to pull them all down. We may need to rent a cherry-picker or hire a tree service. If we didn't have poison ivy, it would be easy to just ask them to mulch it all and spread it around the back yard, but really, who wants mulch that makes you break out in an itchy rash, huh?

What would happen if.... (7/5 edition)

2007-07-05T08:06:00.000-04:00

... somebody named Bob worked at my client, the Juran Institute? Oh wait, one does. When I get an email from him, I am inevitably haunted in my head with the chorus of "Bob, Bob, Bob...Bob Bob - Juran". (Think Beach Boys, and the melody should come to you.)

Shea Hillenbrand used to play for the Red Sox, and whenever he'd hit a homer, I wanted the announcers to say "Shea ralphs one over the seats in left," because that would pay homage to Shea Ralph, who played women's hoops for UConn back around the turn of the century.

The Spanish words for "wet floor" are "piso mojado", and I often see a bilingual sign in the aisle of a supermarket where there's been a spill. The funniest thing to do here is start singing Janis Joplin -- "Take it! Take another little piso mojado, baby! You know you got it, and it makes you feel good!" (Really, I'm only 35 -- it's just that car trips with my parents subjected me to a healthy dose of music from the 1960s.)

Blog reader Jenny had an interesting post about the Shocker. This made me think of two things. One was the way my wife makes the symbol whenever the song "Shock the Monkey" comes on.

The second thought has to do with animals like birds which have a cloaca. Having a veterinarian for a wife teaches you all sorts of stuff....like how some animals have a cloaca, one all-purpose hole for both reproductive and excretory functions. This, of course, makes the Shocker an interesting undertaking....of course, those animals don't have opposable thumbs anyway.

This is prime nectarine season now, and nectarines are my favorite fruit when they're ripe and in-season and juicy. None of the dry ones that I take a flyer on in the winter -- those are awful. Anyway, about 15 years ago I was having one as a snack at work, and the pit was freestone and partially opened. So I didn't have to crack it open to see that there was a small nut inside for the seed. It looked just like an almond after you crack one of those open, so I gave it a small taste. And sure enough, it actually tasted like almond flavoring. You know, like Amaretto or "toasted almond" flavored stuff. Eating almonds themselves NEVER taste like "almond flavor." But this nectarine seed tasted just like Amaretto. I mention this to my dad, and he says that nectarine seeds are a natural source of cyanide. Yikes! (I've since read up that there is cyanide in there, but generally not at fatal levels. Nevertheless, I've never had another nectarine seed again.)

What's the probability that a pitcher will pitch well on any particular day? I mention this as a student of mathematics and probability. Let's say that 85% of the time, a pitcher will do well. Well, if you're a manager and you make 4 pitching changes, then the probability that all 5 pitchers do well would be 0.85 to the 5th power, or 44%. My point is this: The more pitchers you bring in, the more likely one of them is going to suck that day. (I think most major league pitchers should be able to get most hitters out, and leave it at that.)

If we were at war with China, would the US Government discourage fireworks, having been a Chinese INVENTION (whoops, not invasion)? Would we call firecrackers "freedom crackers" or something like that? (I just get annoyed by clowns in the neighborhood setting off stupid loud noises.) Like, too bad they weren't invented in France -- that would cut down on the racket! :)

540 rubles

2007-07-02T09:41:00.000-04:00

So, Erika hooked me up to this Russian website which hosts a bunch of MP3s. Cheap, too. They used to bill my credit card in American money, like $20 or $30 at a time, and then you could buy songs for like 10 cents. The price per song has jumped to 15, and now 19 cents each, but that's still pretty good.

Actually, now they're not in cents, but rather these "c.u." which may or may not stand for "customer units". But whatever. The thing is, the prices are now being dictated in Russian money. I went with the lowest re-load amount they offered, which was "20 c.u." for 540 rubles. Unknowingly I just went ahead and clicked for that choice. Then it hit me, what's the exchange rate? Yikes! Well, it turned out that 540 rubles was $20.97, and then I had a 21-cent (one percent) fee for the international transaction.

Let's just call it "coulda been worse...."

As for the MP3s? I still have about 25 out of my 250 audio tapes that haven't been re-done as MP3s. At first, I used to run a wire from my tape player into my Mac, and made mp3s that way. The quality wasn't always the best, depending on how worn the tape was. All of my Beatles stuff sounds great that way....one reason I did that is because I was raised on the American albums -- so to hear the original British CDs is weird, because my mind cues up the next American song in my head, only to have it be something different playing next on the disc. (Each side of an album ends up being a 15-minute "song", rather than me splicing apart the 6 songs into separate files -- that's why it's important to keep the as-in-my-head order.)

So I did a Tesla album from '91....filled in missing songs from Def Leppard's Hysteria, and then took some greatest hits from Eddie Money and George Thorogood and put them on one CD. (Neither of these guys have enough famous songs to really issue an album completely of hits, anyways -- songs on the original tapes that weren't famous to begin with, and not worthy of being included.)

One last weekend bit....our on-demand is working again from Comcast, so we bought Stranger Than Fiction last night -- Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman. I give it a B- to a B, but no higher than that.

freakin' scary

2007-06-28T09:23:00.001-04:00

ok, not sure anyone knows that I'm type I insulin-dependent diabetic. The "real" diabetes, as I like to call it. Where it's not your own fault you have it, but rather a genetic thing. (Maybe with mom telling me not to eat a spoonful out of the sugar bowl as a kid, because I'd get diabetes, I should have listened.)

Anyway, I'm on an insulin pump, which works really well. It's hooked up via a skinny tube to an "infusion set" on my stomach, and I just have to rotate the site for the hookup every 4 or 5 days -- as long as the reservoir of insulin lasts. I get a steady-stream "basal" rate, and then I give myself a "bolus" whenever I eat food -- more food means more sugar in the blood which means I need more insulin to get that glucose to the cells in my body. The main thing is that there's a relatively consistent ratio between the amount of carbohydrates I eat and the amount of insulin needed to "cover" the increased blood glucose level.

So a couple of days ago, I'd had a blood sugar level of about 160 in the morning. Not as good as a normal level of 100, but not the worst thing in the world. Usually I'm between 80 and 130 over the course of the day. Well, the temperature was in the 90s a couple of days ago and I went down to Dairy Queen....got a large chocolate cone dipped in cherry. Now, I'm not sure exactly how many carbohydrates are in that, but I know enough about ice cream to figure out something close -- and hey, I use a machine to test my blood sugar level, and if it were too high, I just take more, and if it drops too low, I get all hypoglycemic feeling and I can eat something else to bring the glucose level back to normal. Plus, I figured another couple of units of insulin would incorporate bringing the 160 back down to 100, not including the extra for the ice cream.

Well, something screwy happened. My blood sugar level shot through the roof. Like, 450 (I think it's milligrams per deciliter of blood). I can also tell hyperglycemia because I get a faint ammonia-like smell from ordinary surroundings. So I panic, and take some more insulin....no help, it's now 520. I keep giving myself extra booster boluses (the pump just feeds more insulin through the tubing into my body subcutaneously at the infusion site, like a needle would). Still nothing all afternoon. I hit 582 on one reading, the highest I've ever had. And I can't figure out why it's not coming down. I tried gagging myself to puke up the rest of the ice cream, but of course, ice cream that's been in your stomach a couple of hours just is all gooey and doesn't puke up when you'd like it to.

Eventually I gave up, hysterical, around 3 pm, and drove home. By the time I was home I was back down to 429. I took out one of my old pre-pump needles and gave myself a shot in the butt of even more insulin, then went for a walk (okay, I mowed the lawn, but that's walking). By 5 it was down to 303, and I cooled off swimming in our little pool. A couple of hours after that it was down to 130.

So THEN, I figured I was okay to have dinner, which was just some vegetable soup -- not a lot of carbohydrates there. I did over-bolus myself just a small bit there, but that was because hey, no insulin had been working. I had taken out the infusion set, to move it to another spot, just in case the fatty tissue where I'd been hooked up wasn't absorbing the insulin right or something.

Well, that might have had something to do with it, because the rest of the night I was hypoglycemic. Readings of 47, 64, 51, 71, etc. All the while I had to eat a bunch of peanut M&M's (aw, poor me, right?) and drink almost three-quarters of a bottle of sugary root beer. Somehow I think the exercise of the late afternoon freed up all that insulin that was in my system all at once. I scarfed a bunch of cheez-its and went to bed, and woke up yesterday with a normal 88 reading. That shouldn't have been so hard.

The worst part was that when I was removing the old location's infusion set (the connection point for the insulin tube) it seemed that it wasn't secured in place right....and then I smelled my shirt the next morning and it smelled like insulin from the bottle (it smells like the latex of a freshly-opened band-aid)....which makes me think that part of the problem was the insulin at the point of connection. (The infusion set has a twist-off feature, that allows me to disconnect and re-connect the tube from the pump, so that I can take a shower or go swimming, with just a cover to the point of insertion. I think I wasn't twisted back on properly and insulin was going through the tube and leaking out instead of entering my body.)

The worst part is that next week I have to have my regular bloodwork for my 3-month checkup. They say that the blood test measures a three-month overall average of my blood sugar level based on hemoglobin. But there's no way having a 582 for a few hours won't skew my results even a bit higher than they would, had I not forgotten to go for the bloodwork last week like I should have.

And so now I have to explain this to the doctor in a couple of weeks. If my lab results are too high, he won't buy the excuse that one bad day skewed the whole three-month average!

What would happen if.... (6/27 edition)

2007-06-27T10:11:00.000-04:00

....Elvis had a telephone instead of a TV nearby when he shot out the screen? I've thought about that at work. Unfortunately, shooting the phone doesn't convey the anger toward the person on the other line, if you haven't answered it yet and shoot it while it's ringing.

It's often suggested one wash his hands after peeing. I've always considered that it would be more beneficial to wash your hands BEFORE going....at least from a guy-at-a-urinal perspective. Where are there more likely to be germs? On my hands, touching everything on my desk over the course of the day and stuff? Or on my urine-removal-organ, which has remained in my clean undies over the course of the day, unfazed since showering? Now I grant you, if you tinkle on yourself a bit, that DEFINITELY needs to be washed off your hands. But I think the germ path is more likely going to be hand-to-penis rather than penis-to-hand. (Fine, slow thought week, shoot me.)

If margarine is such a recent invention, why did they decide to name it something so similar-sounding to marjoram, the herb?

When I was 17 I had a blind date for ice cream with a girl who was described as a junior in high school. Or so I thought.....she was in *junior high school*. Okay, everyone, have a good laugh. Nothing came close to happening in a Ben & Jerry's scoop shop anyway.

I mowed the lawn for the first time last night. My wife's old mower had one of those power-assist things to help it get moving. That broke last year, and so she whined that the yard was too hilly for her to push, and so she insisted on getting a riding mower. Of course, if you open a new Home Depot credit account, you can get 10% off. So I was "forced" to open an account and get a two thousand dollar lawn tractor. Which I refuse to learn how to use. I use her $20-floor-model-clearance-from-KMart mower. I don't care if it takes me an hour longer than it takes Erika. I'd prefer to have that extra two grand to pay for more important stuff. Plus, it's fun to use the pool to wash the sweat off afterwards.

I think a good trade-off, in the absence of an umpire, is "no called strikes" for "no walks or hit-by-pitches". Especially at wiffle ball.

Money experts claim that you shouldn't take a loan against your 401(k) account because you pay double taxes on the money. Technically, you only pay double taxes on the interest, because the principal of the loan is really tax-free income while you've got it.

What's the world's record for stretching mozzarella cheese off a pizza, anyway? Is this measured for the Guinness book?

There's a "cigarette discount store" across the street from here, and one time I saw the proprietor go outside for a smoke break. Now, I'm anti-smoking at least as much as the next guy, but of all the places that it probably should be allowed to smoke in public, a cigarette store would seem to be okay in my book.

Velvet Revolver

2007-06-26T10:38:00.001-04:00

Anyone get the new album yet? I like these guys, they're the music of GnR with the singing from STP. I saw them at Jones Beach on Long Island a couple of years ago....made me think Axl was rolling over in his grave.

(A tip of the keyboard to Diff'rent Strokes on that one....Mr. Drummond's batty old sister saying if their ancestor had been alive today, he'd be rolling over in his grave. I LOVE that line.)

My softball team continues to suck. I think 5 hits last night. I promised in the 7th inning that we wouldn't get shut out. So I do that same, slap it to the shortstop since they can't throw me out crap...a cheap single...then the next guy hit one off the LC's glove, so we had 2nd and 3rd with one out, and another single scored us both. So we lost, what, 12-2? I'd rather have a team of non-hitters than non-fielders, though. (Of course, I've got both. This will be my last year on this team.)

I have a picture from my daughter's first communion that I went to put in a frame here at work, and it was a 5x7 frame for a 4x6 picture. Oops! I have used a clean fancy napkin as matting behind the picture -- that's better than using the old picture it's replacing! I need to update my other pictures, they're all from 2005. The best one, I think, is my younger daughter after we got a book on balloon animals and stuff. She looks like a soldier of fortune with headbands and straps formed by long skinny balloons all wrapped around each other. And of course, she was 4.

Let's see, what else....with the Sox on the left coast, I had to get my baseball from the Mets-Cardinals. I sorta liked the Mets as my "favorite NL team" as a kid...but then they turned into pricks in the mid-80s, and so only lately have I watched them without all that animosity. Shea's still a dump of a stadium....but I'll still take any free tickets my boss wants to give me.

The yellow weed flowers in the field outside my window are making a comeback. It's supposed to be 94 today. (34 for you in metric-land, which I suppose is....oh, everywhere else in the world.) I may swim tonight, we have a small outdoor pool that had gotten cloudy over the weekend, but some chemicals fixed that right up. The pool is near a lot of trees, though, so we get plenty of leaves in there. Vacuuming must come first, I suppose. At least the water should be warm enough not to scare off Erika from going in. I do have to find my bathing suit, though....I lost it over the weekend and had to settle for floating on a tube "sunny side down" Sunday afternoon.

Late at work on a Friday.

2007-06-22T17:13:00.000-04:00

So Carlos Zambrano is pitching to AJ Pierzynski....
Think they're discussing their mutual hatred for Michael Barrett?

I missed a pitch in the all-star game last night. The left fielder was 100 feet off the line and I tried to aim my swing. After that debacle of an at bat (grounder back to the mound), I got 2 singles and a triple, so not too bad. Everything was just "off" a bit for me, though. I slipped on a throw to the plate, and because of that it had to be cut off by the pitcher, whose relay was *just* late. Also had trouble on a deep ball over my head, it landed just off my glove because of the bad angle I took. But I made up for THAT mistake with a nice sliding catch. Our team won, 12-8.

Coors light and its friends are now referred to as "supermarket beer" in my lexicon. Always good to have even a cheap beer at work on a Friday, though :)

It's finally quiet around here. But one other person's here, so I can't blast the audio. So I'll keep a White Sox - Cubs game on instead of iTunes.

The boss is on vacation next week. Insert your own commentary here, I suppose.

My daughters are at their grandparents' house on Cape Cod for the week. So I'll be sleeping late the next couple of days.

the good, the bad, and the ugly

2007-06-20T20:00:00.000-04:00

The good...

My co-ed team is 6-0, and my teammates voted me as the male representative for our all-star game tomorrow night.

The bad...

My men's team has lost like 5 or 6 in a row.

The ugly...

I got one hit tonight for that men's team. The other 8 guys in the lineup (yeah, 8....after having 13 in the lineup Friday, we only had 9 tonight) had ZERO.

I broke up the no-hitter in the 4th inning. They had a shift on for me, being a lefty pull hitter....so I Ichiro-slapped a single to where the shortstop shoulda been. Kinda like bunting late to break up a no-no. The next inning the pitcher hit a bomb over my head in left that kept rolling and rolling for a homer....yeah, I had it coming.

What would happen if.... (6/20 edition)

2007-06-20T10:25:00.000-04:00

...the last person in the All-Star Home Run Derby, down by one, decides to "run out" his last fly ball, claiming an inside-the-park homer while the 10-year-old kids they let in the outfield struggle to return the ball to the infield?

My softball league is having a home run derby tomorrow night, and there's a $2 ante, with the winners splitting the pool. Now THERE'S a way to spice up the all-star shenanigans.

Is "shenanigans" an Irish word? I'd have a couple of pints at a pub named Shenanigans if there were one around!

After my trip to Ireland back in '03, I finally developed the taste for Guinness, which I hated in college. This does not mean I will eventually like coffee, though.

There's an office in the building here at work, and there's a quotation taped to the door. It talks about how excellence is the result of hard work, not luck. The quote is attributed to "Arthur Unknown". So apparently, excellence is irrelevant in the spelling department.

I think it's mundane for sportscasters to refer to Atlanta as "Hot-lanta". I prefer my own term, in honor of Ted Turner. Ted-lanta.

My wife and I are sixteen episodes into the DVDs for "How I Met Your Mother". What exactly is Barney's job? The guy played by Doogie Howser. If nothing else, he gives inspiration to dorky smart kids everywhere that their lives CAN turn out cool! :) (Just stay away from snorting coke off hookers, like in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.)

I read that you never see cashews in their shells because they contain the same chemical as poison ivy.

If you accidentally put a DHL package in a FedEx drop-off box....and they're side-by-side....will the FedEx guy be nice and put it in the right box, or will they steal the package, to end up lost forever?

Plinko was the most overrated game in the history of The Price Is Right. The Race Game was my favorite. And one time, I think a contestant should have expressed more disappointment to get stuck in a really crappy game like "double prices", where you just have to pick which of the two prices is the right one for the hot tub. Lame!

I was probably older than I should have been before I realized the edible part of the pumpkin is the shell.

I recommend that you steer children towards separate kindergarten teachers, so that you don't get re-runs when the younger kid makes all the same stuff an older one made! (I have nearly identical homemade paperweights now after Fathers' Day this weekend.)

Ever yank a golf shot onto the wrong green, from an adjacent hole? Because you're required to putt the ball off that green before you can chip it back onto the correct hole. Grrrr....

Birthday cake

2007-06-18T08:40:00.000-04:00

My claim to fame with my younger daughter is that I always include the age number into her cake. Her first cake was blueberry, so I made a ring of blueberries around the top frosting, and make a big number 1 in the center with the blueberries, too. For 2, it was a chocolate cake with a peanut butter 2 on top. Three was a doll cake, so I had to put the 3 on the front of the dress. (Someone else made that cake -- you bake it in an oversized measuring cup, and then invert it so it looks like the bottom half of a dress. Then you put a new Barbie doll or something inside down to the waist.) I may have to dig for pictures of the 4 cake, I can't remember it off the top of my head. Last year, 5, was like the blueberry cake, except I used lemon drops to ring the circumference and make a 5. This year, Sarah wanted vanilla cake with peppermint frosting. Um, okay....Well, I also crumbled some white chocolate chunks on top, garnering a comment that it looked like feta cheese. Anyways, for the 6, I really cheated and just used a black licorice shoestring wound up into a 6. One of my cousin's kids ate that, I think.

(Not sure why my picture didn't upload from home....but I've since driven to work and don't have the picture available to enclose here.)

Back to the Rack...

2007-06-14T14:03:00.000-04:00

Okay, where to start.

No matter how extensive a list you think you've made when you go camping, you always forget something. Or at least, think of something you'd wished you'd brought. For instance, a wine bottle opener. It certainly wasn't on our list, but after buying a couple of wines from North River Winery up in Vermont, you realize it's going to have to wait until you get home. We got one bottle of Vermont Harvest (apple with maple syrup and spices) and one bottle of Rhubarb.

Other fun places to go are Ben & Jerry's headquarters in Waterbury, and Cabot cheese headquarters in Cabot, VT. Obviously they're just tourist traps, but fun enough that they take you through their factories. Both places feature short 10-minute intro videos telling "their story". The B & J's one is funnier because they've been bought out by Unilever, so the founders are "off doing their own thing" at this point. My highlight was seeing the people on the floor watching the tour go buy upstairs, looking out windows at them. I made eye contact with a relatively pretty woman about 30 years old, and flashed her. She laughed down on the floor, and I could see her telling her co-worker...but no flashback, unfortunately (which my wife said would have been funny!). The Cabot factory tour is on the same floor. The guy closest to the window had lots of tattoos, including "KILL" on his knuckles. Erika *dared* me to flash him, but I'm not freakin' crazy. Their store had tons of good cheeses, and the pre-requisite maple syrup. It's a law that every business in Vermont must sell maple syrup, I believe. Actually, we found some there that were infused with other flavors....Erika got vanilla chai maple syrup, and I got habañero maple syrup. Can't wait to try those.

Let's see, what else. The alpine slide at Pico isn't open yet until June 29. That sucked, because alpine slides are awesome. The campsites were all good -- Emerald Lake, Silver Lake, New Discovery, and Thetford Hill. I actually did my student teaching at Thetford Academy fifteen years ago. That place was too small, though, because we couldn't get a campsite away from other people. At New Discovery, we might have been the ONLY ones there Monday night. We rented the first six episodes of The Office. The original British version. Holy bleep, that show is hysterical. And it's funny, because I really like the American version, so we were trying to compare/contrast the shows. Even if it IS 2 versions of the same thing, they're both worthy. Like, you kinda wish the two shows could somehow co-exist in a crossover "parallel universe" thing -- like what if Dwight and Gareth were switched, or something?

Thetford's so close to Dartmouth that we stopped by the campus to sorta point out some stuff to Erika about my school, and have dinner. Of course, her school just had a mass-killing a few weeks ago, so a trip with her to Va. Tech. might only be kinda depressing.

Anyways, we had an appointment at her accountant's yesterday in Arlington, MA. Left at 4:10 to get back for a softball 6:30 game in Oxford. Got there just in time, a testament to the lack of speed traps along routes MA-2, I-95, I-90, and I-84. Went 4-for-5. Just missed a spectacular Willie-Mays catch in the first inning, and then suffered through a 10-inning nailbiter. We blew a 9-3 lead in the 6th. It stayed 9-9 through the 7th, 8th, and 9th (even though they left the bases loaded with none out), into the 10th, before the outfielder next to me let a single go through his legs and the guy at first raced home with the winning run as I tried backing it up.

As for now....catching up at work. I should be able to comment on everyone else's blogs tomorrow, for anyone concerned about my absence.

Still on vay-cay

2007-06-13T14:16:00.000-04:00

Sorry I hadn't gotten the chance to write more. I've been in Vermont where cell phone coverage is few and far between. Now I'm at my wife's accountant's ofice in Arlington, MA...not exactly on the way home, either! I'll write more when I get home tonight, Down Under David!

You take the good, you take the bad....

2007-06-07T23:11:00.000-04:00

Sorry, not a "Facts of Life" homage...

Just a quick update on softball. I went 0 for 4 Wed. night. We lost, 10-7. First two times up, blinded by the sun. 3rd time up, the right-center fielder went all Jim Edmonds on me....a fantastic diving over his head catch. Grrrr.... Then a line out to end it. Apparently by making the last out, I owe the beer next time. Hopefully we'll be back from camping in time for the game next Wed. night. I already have to miss Friday and Monday. I fielded just fine....unlike, say, the right side of our defense. Oh well, I suppose.

Tonight, though...much better. 3 for 3, all infield singles though. It helps to run hard every time. Fielding was awesome....I keep feeling like I'm being reminded as to why I LOVE playing. First inning....guy hits a BOMB to left...the left fielder and I are sprinting....but neither of us can call it because it's right between us. Left fielder reaches....and it pops off his extended glove....and I snag it with my bare left hand! Sweet! :)

Live update...A-Rod grand slam...guess I HAVE to watch basketball at this point...

Oh, and I also started a double play on a running catch, the runner at second was too far off. Although the shortstop snagged the ball I threw to the second basewoman, we still doubled up the runner. The next batter grounded out, and so no outs, bases loaded led to 0 runs. Yay! (We won, 13-1.)

More interesting stuff tomorrow, I suppose. Perhaps a tribute to pistachios. (burp!)

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

2007-06-06T10:41:00.000-04:00

....the makers of vending machines installed the "TILT" technology in pinball machines? Your candy gets stuck, so you at least *try* to rattle the machine....only for the TILT lights to go on and the machine goes dark with the exit-tray closed off or something.

Are we familiar with the term "smash-mouth football"? That's where a team never throws the ball, and simply runs up the middle, and is happy with the modest 3-4 yard gain. ("Three yards and a cloud of dust.") It's more physical to run the ball right at the other team rather than try to pass or run to the sideline, etc. Well anyways, one of my friends plays a sort of "smash-mouth golf." All his shots are about 90 yards, even off the tee. But they're straight, and he's on the green in 4, at least as well as I am, who'll spray balls much further, but in much more of a random direction. So he gets a 6 and I get an 8, despite being 125-150 yards further ahead after our tee shots.

When I was a teenager I thought it would be a genius idea to market instant coffee that already had dried cream crystals in it. I was mocked by my friend's dad. Later, this idea was explained to me as "General Foods International Coffees", which have other flavors built in with the coffee and (most likely) non-dairy creamer.

I hate that my phone has no caller ID, but that calls come directly to my desk. I have no idea who's calling, and so sometimes I'm reluctant to pick up out of fear of being "ambushed" by one of our clients' employees asking me stuff they should have posed directly to their HR people. And yet, sometimes I'll stare at the phone and eventually pick up on the 3rd or 4th ring...and I'm never lucky. If I pick up on the first ring, it'll be a legitimate client call. The longer I wait, the more likely I'm going to regret not letting it go directly to voice mail.

I'd like to see a league patent its sport. Imagine if I invented a sport and started a league. I could control labor costs, because it would be illegal for the disgruntled players to try to form their own league to play a game I invented!

I like to tell people I earn seven figures. Unfortunately, two of them are after the decimal point.

In college I was mocked for being a New Englander, where the states all use the same town names. Like Manchester, in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. I wonder how states as big as California can even FIND names for thousands of towns.

I took Spanish classes in high school and college, and I still read it pretty accurately. I enjoyed skimming Yahoo's TV listings for Spain, because I looked to find US programs being translated to Spanish, and sure enough, found "Me llamo Earl." The best part is the description of the episode, where everything is in Spanish except the character names, which remain English.

There's an open field outside my window. Last year they tried planting grass, without too much success -- just lots of weeds. This year, suddenly, the whole field last week was awash in bright yellow flowers. So it's lots of yellow spots amidst a green background. Kind of like a TV screen when you get "snow" for the reception. Except this would be.....yellow snow. (Which we're all taught to avoid)

I like the woman from the E-Surance auto insurance ads. The cartoon woman who's really athletic and seems pretty smart in escaping danger in the world. The pink hair's a bit odd. Usually women with bright pink hair are associated more with the performing arts, rather than athletic travails or the insurance industry, no?

I have no memorabilia

2007-06-05T10:51:00.000-04:00

So the DanWagon is discussing sports memorabilia we've collected over the years. Being a rather prudent spender, I've got none. I did have some Marian Hossa bobbleheads I gave the girls after a trip to Ottawa back in 2001, but I'm sure my ex-wife has long since thrown them out. Heck, he plays for Atlanta now anyways.

The closest I ever got to something from a game was at a Pawtucket Red Sox game back when I was like 12. I was using the scorecard in the program to keep score, and asked my dad to fill in for me while I had to go to the bathroom. When I came back, he'd started doing the 3rd inning, but filled it in under the 2nd inning's column, right where the last batter had left off. So I was in the process of erasing and moving the scorekeeping into the right column, when a foul ball came back over our heads. It hit the old wooden overhang -- I know McCoy Stadium has been renovated, but this was back around '83 or '84 -- and dropped straight down onto the wooden seat next to me and bounced away. I only barely noticed it out of the corner of my eye as it flew away another 20 feet to be gobbled up by someone else. And that's as close as I've ever come. I will go to minor league games with no more than 1000 people in the stands, and I still can't get a ball. And now I'm getting to the age where if I do get one, I'll feel guilted into handing it over to a 5-year-old with a glove. I say, I gotta get myself one first, and then any subsequent ones can be turned over to snot-faced tykes!

A big heaping bowl of chemicals

2007-06-04T13:08:00.000-04:00

I wish I could remember what that line is from. Like SNL, or WKRP....
Anyways, it's what our above-ground pool became this weekend. All sorts of stuff like shock, algaecide, and minerals to soften and alkalinize the pool. We were given clearance to swim in it Saturday, though, which was cool! Except for having to go buy a bathing suit for Lindsey. Sarah still has hers from her birthday last year. And it STILL doesn't fit her. We had to safety-pin the waist of the bottoms. She's pretty skinny, all right.

Went to City Steam brewery/restaurant for my friend Steve's 38th birthday Saturday night. They do a 90-minute comedy show after dinner. The guys were somewhat local, and none of them really were great, although certainly *some* good spots for a couple of them. Nothing memorable to share, though. The beer at City Steam is good. No, it's not as good as the Victory Brewing place in PA that I mentioned last week. But still a good place to try out new beers.

It's amazing how little network TV I watch any more. I think hockey's on tonight, though! That'll tide me over until Futurama at 10:30.

random variance

2007-06-01T12:17:00.000-04:00

So, I follow up an 0-3 with a 3-3....each game featuring a sacrifice fly in the 1st inning. Yeah, that's a cheap way to not hurt your batting average and get an RBI. We won our men's game Wed. 11-5 and co-ed game last night 22-4. We also had 3 new women come to fill Erika's roster spot. There's nothing worse than not being in the field for a softball game, or having a 12-person batting lineup. At least I didn't have to sit -- maybe my inning off would have been one that was wiped out by our mercy rule win -- we didn't play the 6th and 7th innings. The random variance comes into play both with my batting lines, and the number of women apparently showing up for our game.

Men's league in Oxford: We're 2-1. I'm 7 for 12 with 5 runs scored and 1 RBI. (Yes, that's 7 hits out of the #3 spot in the lineup with no RBI other than the sac fly.)

Co-ed league in Trumbull: We're 3-0. I'm 7 for 10 with 7 runs scored and 5 RBI.

All singles so far, though. Eek, gotta cycle up for the summer! (That's steroid talk, so I hear.)

I've gotten smarter, and now I keep a list of good ideas at my desk here at work to save for my "what would happen if..." column on Wednesdays. I wonder if my cell phone has a voice recorder in it for notes-to-self. It should, it's got all sorts of stuff I haven't figured out yet.

Also, Erika and I have narrowed down our campsite destinations for 4 nights in Vermont in a couple of weeks. Cheap and easy, that's the way to take a vacation. Or, save money on lodging, only to spend it at small shops all over. We'll see.

What would happen if.... (5/30 edition)

2007-05-30T10:09:00.001-04:00

...if someone were to try to market dairy products made from human milk? Forget goat cheese, Nichole! I think I'd be interested in at least seeing in a store, a line of blueberry yogurt or some sour cream.

When I was a kid, I used to eat American cheese with ketchup sandwiches. Really, it's not much different from a hamburger without the beef, is it? Anyways, that's a trip back to the 70's.....it's left my menu, the same way as the full combination of peanut butter / jelly / AND Fluff. At least with those, it was just too hard to apply the 3rd ingredient to either of the other 2.

If terrorists drove a small plane into the green monster at Fenway, would the Red Sox try to re-build it? Or would they petition the city to put a regular left field out there? And could they, with the space limitations?

What's a better episode of WKRP? The one with the turkeys being thrown from the plane at Thanksgiving? Or the one where Les reads the emergency procedures manual....replacing "communists" at every spot with "tornadoes"? The godless tornadoes!!!

If a town (like, say, Wilton, CT) doesn't want an interstate-esque highway to disrupt its rural character, can't the state legally close the state roads by erecting jersey barriers outside the city limits? You think Route 7 as a highway's bad? Try having NO route into town, ya upscale snots! Believe me, nobody's going to be getting off in Wilton, anyways....you ignore us, we'll ignore you on our way to Danbury or Norwalk, thank you very much.

I once found out the hard way that if you want to carve your daughter's name into a pumpkin at Halloween, names with full circles in them (like d) are a bit tough. An s is actually easier, despite all the twistiness.

What the heck are all the yellow flowers that took over the empty lot next door? It's freaky....you can't even see the green weeds anymore.

I wonder if amusement parks could install EZ-Pass type stuff onto their better rides....like you get what you pay for...6 trips on the roller coaster costs more than 2, and they give you a bill at the end of the day, based on a bracelet you wear all day with a sensor.

Is there anything better than a brewery tour that has a restaurant with it for when the tour's over? Like this place in Pennsylvania. Factor in that we had a cab ride all set up for heading back, and that's pretty darn good!

The good thing about the written section of the national spelling bee is that at least then, everyone's spelling the same words. I'm reminded of the old Far Side cartoon where someone gets "cat" and the next caveman's dreading getting stuck with "Australopithecus".

What would it take to start a new music television channel, to show videos and concerts 24 hours a day?

When I was like 10 or 11, ESPN came in over the air in my bedroom one afternoon. I had a small black and white TV, and there was the snowy feed of an auto race on channel 11. Now, 11 was the number on the cable for ESPN, but I definitely didn't have cable in my room. I grew up close enough to Bristol to pick it up over the air, but that doesn't make any sense, either.

Greg Oden, future #1 NBA pick, recently said he wanted to be a dentist when he was a kid. Combine that with his obvious misfittedness at being 7'1".....and I think we've found Hermey the Elf in his new life.

Being King for a Day should get you the best HMO in the kingdom

2007-05-29T10:14:00.000-04:00

Now we're talking....

4 for 4, 3 runs scored....including sprinting home from 3rd on a sac fly to win, 8-7. All singles to right, except for the one in the ninth, which was an infield hit up the middle to beat the throw from second base. (A guy named Frank I know from pick-up hoops....I'd forgotten his name, called him Larry earlier in the game....realized it later, apologized and he said "I'm Italian, do I *look* like a Larry?" good-naturedly.)

So the slide into home, along with an earlier slide in the game, gave me 2 big strawberries on my shin and back upper thigh (okay, butt). Erika had bought for me for Christmas (stocking stuffer) some antiseptic wash and spray-on bandage. (Apparently it's aerosol krazy glue, practically.) Well, on my Thursday night game, she lent it to a guy on my co-ed team who scraped up his knee. That's all well and good, but she didn't put it back where she found it. She had dug through my sporting-goods store of a car trunk to find them, and decided to put them back in the car's first aid kit. A place I've never ventured. So it took until the next morning to really get them tended to, although I did fill the entire shower floor with dirt cleaning those wounds off later that night.

Saturday was my family's annual cookout/campout at my uncle's house. We were the only ones to camp out, most everyone else went home. We had hot dogs (with crunchy peanut butter on Erika's and mine -- her secret topping of choice) and we also went to a nearby petting zoo in the back forest of Chaplin, CT. There were 4 of us in a small tent, because I didn't realize the box with the other tent did not contain that other tent. Combine that with a slow leak in the air mattress....ahhhh. I did get to try my new phone in the morning to check on how the Red Sox did, though. That was cool. My uncle made us pancakes the next morning. Here's a link to my aunt's studio:

As for the rest of the weekend....lots of spring cleaning.