Bob At Large - another blog no one reads...

Trying it here...

2011-07-04T13:00:00.002-05:00

Memo to some parents on my block this 4th of July...

2011-07-03T21:46:00.002-05:00

I realize that it's July 4th and that boys like to shoot off fireworks. I, myself, blew up my fair share of them when I was a kid continuing through my teenage years. Hell, I even blew off over 80 dollars worth last night when me, my father-in-law and a relative pitched in, so I'm not against it.

What bothers me is that today, as I was driving down the street to get home, I encountered four of your kids standing in the middle of the road and lighting off fireworks. Never mind that the middle of the street was so littered with firecrackers and assorted fireworks that you could barely see the road. What did bother me was that instead of looking to see if a care was coming, your boys proceeded to light off a cone firework.

I figured that once they saw me in the road that they'd move aside or at the very least, one of you would yell at them to get the hell out of the way! They finally saw me and walked rather slowly to the middle of the road. That's right, they barely moved and I was forced to swerve around them.

If this was me and my Dad was watching, he would have yelled at me good. So my advice is simple: Tell them to get the frak out of the way if a car is coming! It's not that hard....

My 40th Birthday party playlist songs 61-70

2011-03-30T22:59:00.002-06:00

61. Save It For Later by The English Beat

62. Heat of the Moment by Asia

63. Destination Unknown by Missing Persons

64. Run Run Away by Slade

65. One Thing Leads to Another by The Fixx

66. Peace Sells by Megadeth

67. Space Truckin' by Deep Purple

68. Pressure by Billy Joel

69. Here Comes Your Man by The Pixies

70. Since You're Gone by The Cars

My 40th Birthday party playlist songs 51-60

2011-03-30T22:46:00.002-06:00

51. Legal Tender by the B-52s

52. You've Got Another Thing Coming by Judas Priest

53. Hyperactive! by Thomas Dolby

54. Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap by AC/DC

55. Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood

56. The New Style by The Beastie Boys

57. Keep Feeling Fascination by The Human League

58. Genius of Love by Tom Tom Club

59. Let's Go Crazy by Prince

60. Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie

My 40th Birthday party playlist songs 41-50

2011-03-30T13:53:00.003-06:00

41. My Philosophy by Boogie Down Productions

42. Games People Play by Alan Parsons Project

43. Love Missile F-11 by Sigue Sigue Sputnik

44. Close to the Edit by Art of Noise

45. Finest Worksong by REM

46. Homosapien by Pete Shelley

47. Up the Creek by Cheap Trick

48. Super Cool Wagon by Sons of Freedom

49. Can't Hardly Wait by The Replacements

50. Freedom of Choice by Devo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVGINIsLnqU

My 40th Birthday party playlist songs 31-40

2011-03-29T12:27:00.003-06:00

31. Fall on Me by REM

32. Rock the Casbah by The Clash

33. Pop Muzik by M

34. Life in a Northern Town by The Dream Academy

35. My Ever Changing Moods by The Style Council

36. Behind the Wall of Sleep by The Smithereens

37. Shock the Monkey by Peter Gabriel

38. Nothing Bad Ever Happens by Oingo Boingo

39. Abracadabra by Steve Miller

40. Rock Box by Run DMC

My 40th Birthday playlist songs 21-30

2011-03-29T12:24:00.003-06:00

21. It's My Life by Talk Talk

22. Big Beat by Billy Squier

23. Boom Boom by Trio

24. Don't Bring Me Down by Electric Light Orchestra

25. Bicycle Race by Queen

26. All That I Wanted by Belfegore

27. In My Dreams by Dokken

28. Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes

29. Crybaby by Utopia

30. Good Times by INXS

40th Birthday Party playlist songs 11-20

2011-03-29T11:50:00.003-06:00

11. Words by Missing Persons

12. House of Fun by Madness

13. New Song by Howard Jones

14. Goody Two Shoes by Adam Ant

15. Pump Up the Volume by MARRS

16. Turning Japanese by The Vapors

17. Renegade by Styx

18. Is There Something I Should Know by Duran Duran

19. Turn to Stone by Electric Light Orchestra

20. I'll Be You by The Replacements

40th Birthday Party playlist songs 1-10

2011-03-29T11:37:00.003-06:00

At my party, I created a playlist with songs picked by Bill and I that were a few of our favorite songs growing up. The playlist was shuffled. Here's the order that they played.

1. Saved by Zero by The Fixx

2. Ah! Leah! by Donnie Iris

3. Dead Man's Party by Oingo Boingo

4. Atomic Boms by Kix

5. Put the Message in the Box by World Party

6. Der Komimisar by After the Fire

7. Bring on the Dancing Horses by Echo and the Bunnymen

8. Big Time by Peter Gabriel

9. Say What You Will by Fastway

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpUCznIaFlw

10. In a Big Country by Big Country

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vhebiuuLqU

Watched Paranormal Activity 2 or as I like to call it...

2011-02-13T23:03:00.002-06:00

Parasnoremore Activity 2.

Laura and I saw the first one in the theater. For me, it was okay. For Laura, she was freaked out by it. Admittedly, it was a little creepy sometimes, but I think that was more the effect of seeing it in a theater full of people. Laura grabbed at me several times when something would go bang, so she was interested in seeing the sequel.

We rented it and watched it this afternoon.

If you haven't seen either Paranormal Activities, the story goes like this. Both movies are presented as if they are found footage of real events, but actually actors portray the real people. The first movie centered around Katie and Micah (pronounced Mee-cah), who were being disturbed by some sort of ghost in their house. Micah is, of course, skeptical, but he buys a video camera and sets it up in the bedroom to film themselves sleeping. You see time lapsed videos of some weird stuff going on, like Katie getting up and standing by the bed for over two hours.

Spoiler Alert....

The first movie ends with Micah getting killed by a possessed Katie. In the second film, the action takes place a little bit before the first movie's events. Katie's sister, Kristi, who has a one-year-old boy, along with a husband and a step daughter, is being bothered by some strange events in her house.

It's a pretty expensive house with a pool so when someone breaks in and trashes the house, but only takes Kristi's necklace that her sister gave her, the Dad does what any rational person does, he has a whole house DVR surveillance system installed. Logic would tell you that a normal person would probably get a surveillance system that is only tripped by movement, but these babies film 24 hours a day!

So things start to get a little weird, but my God does it take a long time to get there! You see multiple shots every night of the front yard, the pool area, the living room and the upstairs baby room.

Every night goes like this:

(Cue quiet noises of the house and outside)

The front yard camera (nothing happens)

The back yard camera (nothing happens)

The kitchen camera (nothing happens)

The living room camera (nothing happens)

The baby's room camera (nothing happens at first)

Then something weird will happen like the baby stands up and looks at something that isn't there, or a door will open, or the dog will bark at something that isn't there.

After a while of this, I almost fell asleep with all the soothing sounds of night.

The movie has a "script", but you could tell a lot of the dialogue was improvised. I mean, some of the Dad's dialogue is awful. He's told about some weird stuff going on, but he doesn't believe it. He always says things like "That's the last I want to hear on the subject!"

Their live-in nanny, a Hispanic old lady who can understand English, but doesn't speak it for reason, senses some bad spirits in the house, so she starts praying and making signs. The Dad is not down with her burning some strong incense to keep spirits out of the house, so he fires her.

All the while, weird stuff is going on and I'm practically yelling at the screen, "Why in the hell did you install that whole house DVD if you're not going to use it!?"

Finally, the teenage daughter shows her Dad some of the footage of weird stuff happening, but even after that, the family checks the DVR sporadically. If this was my house and weird things were afoot, I would be checking that puppy every freaking day!

At one point, the daughter shows her Dad some of the weird stuff. She asks him, "Now do you believe me?" Even after this, they still miss a lot of the weird stuff. The plot takes a rather odd turn when one of the members of the house gets possessed and there is something about a deal with the devil that would mean that the first born son would be taken. Even after these details, no one things to call in some paranormal investigators.

All in all, it was an okay movie with about 2 whole minutes of some freaky stuff. I don't think that's worth the 90 minutes of improvised dialogue.

Playing Video Games With Dad Builds Better Daughters

2011-02-06T21:57:00.000-06:00

Here's an article about how girls that played video games, especial with their Dads, were better behaved, felt more connected to their families, felt less aggressive, and demonstrated decreased levels of internalizing, which can lead to depression. Granted, the study was for girls ages 11 to 16 and Julia's been playing for two years now, but it's time well spent!

Playing Video Games With Dad Builds Better Daughters

I can understand that, but...

2010-12-05T22:33:00.001-06:00

I’ve had a lot of jobs in my day. I’ve been a dishwasher, cook, delivery driver, maintenance worker, welder, sports reporter, video game tester, book warehouse worker, book buyer and probably a few other ones I’m forgetting, but the worst job that I’ve ever had was my telemarketing job.

My stint as a telemarketer only lasted five weeks, but it was five of the worst weeks of my life.

It all started one day when Bill and I were working at the Captain’s Table in the kitchen, which is now the Garden Cafe. It was discussed that him and our friend, Brian, would be applying for this job at a new company in Grand Island. I had no idea what the job involved, but when I heard that it paid 6 something an hour, I was intrigued. Since I was earning around minimum wage at the time, I immediately took notice.

Bill and Brian had already landed their jobs, but I didn’t want to get left out, so I headed down to the telemarketing place and applied. I was taken in to talk with the manager, who was the mother of a classmate of ours, but whose name eludes me. She talked to me about the job. It would involve calling people and offering them a service let’s call Traveler’s Rebate, which is basically the extent of the service. TR would give you a five percent rebate on all you travel expenses if you sent them in to them. Our job was to sell the service.

I had never had a sales job before, but it didn’t seem like it was hard. We ran through a script where I pitched TR. Then we went through a part of the script where the interviewer acted like she had doubts, so then I read a rebuttal that started with “I can understand that, ma’am, but...” followed by another pitch to convince her to take our glorious product. She said, “Great.” and I had the job!

When my brother, Bill, told our Dad that he had taken a job at the telemarketing company, my Dad said that he was fine with it, “As long as you don’t call me.”

I told my boss at the Captain’s Table that I was quitting. He told me that he could keep my position open because “I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

I insisted that I probably would like it. It had to be better than getting all sweaty and greasy in the kitchen, right?

I probably should have listened to him. He was right about that and another thing in my life. I once told him that “I’ll be listening to heavy metal until the day I die!”

He said, “I don’t know. I think your tastes will change. You’ll be listening to something else.”

“No way!” I said.

Of course, he was right, but he was wrong about other things like when he told me that punk music would rot my brain, which it didn’t, although some people that know me may disagree.

So back to job. Here’s what I thought the job would entail.

I thought I would be wearing a nice shirt and tie. I’d be shown to my office where I would sit behind a desk and make some calls to people that were already interested in the TR service I was offering them. I pictured them saying “yes” to my sales pitches followed by big pay checks that I already had money spent. I pictured steady, calming work free of stress.

What I got was far from that. Like all the way in BFE far way.

Bill, Brian and I started on the same day. We went through several days of training in a nice office conference room where we talked about the job, went through scripts and discussed how to be successful in telemarketing. I honestly don’t remember what any of those tips were, though. The only thing I remember about that week was that I got paid, it wasn’t stressful and we got to watch a video of Geraldo Rivera getting smashed in the face with a chair.

Out of the blue, our trainer asks us if we’d seen it. He then showed it to us. It was a pretty good video that you can find easily on you tube if you haven’t seen it.

That was the highlight of the week that is still etched in my brain. Otherwise, I’ve pushed it all out.

Then on the last day of the week, we were ushered into the call room, or what is often referred to as a boiler room, which is a room full of salespeople on the phone trying to sell questionable goods or services.

There’s a good movie called The Boiler Room that does a good job showing this. There’s also a documentary called Anvil The Story of Anvil where the lead singer of this band, Anvil, takes a telemarketing job to earn some extra money. The guy who hires him is a fan of the band, and his company sells sunglasses over the phone. I cringed at that scene because he felt like I felt.

It wasn’t like I had pictured it at all. There were sectioned desks that each had a phone in them. It looked like a long table with mini walls to block the person from the left and right of you. We sat down in one and shadowed a person in the fine art of the script we were given. After a while, we switched and then I had to do it.

To say I was nervous was an understatement. I was really nervous. I hate talking to people I don’t know as it is, even when I’m calling them to have them help me for something. But it suddenly dawned on me that I would be calling total strangers from across the country.

Up to that point, I had never experienced telemarketing. My Dad usually answered the phone when it was a telemarketer. You could always tell when they called. He’d answer the phone with a loud, “HELL-O!” Then he’d just stand there and listen. Quickly, he’d get a irritated look on his face. I’d soon be facing people like my Dad.

I don’t remember the exact script we used, but it went something like this.

“Hello, my name is Bob, and I am calling about Traveler’s Rebate. May I please speak with So and So?”

(Wait for affirmative)

“Hello, Mr or Mrs. So and So, I wanted to talk to you tonight about Traveler’s Rebate. It’s a service that gives you five percent off of all your expenses when you travel.”

(Right here, there would be some more information describing the service and its “benefits” and then)

“So now that I’ve told you about the TR service, I’m offering you a 30-day trial to TR during which time, you’ll pay nothing and you’ll be able to use the service for all your travel expenses. If at the end of the 30 days you decide you don’t want it, all you have to do is call us and we’ll cancel it for you. Should I sign you up for Traveler’s Rebate today?”

(I waited for a response here. If Yes, we’d go to the part of the script where I turned on a tape recorder and got the mailing address for the sucker, I mean, customer.)

(If No, I asked the following question: “May I ask why?” then I used the following rebuttals)

“I Can’t Afford It”

“I can understand that you are concerned about the cost, but it’s 30 days free to try. After that it’s only (some amount) a month. So can I sign you up for the 30-day free trial?”

“I don’t travel much”

I can understand that you don’t travel much, but...

“I’m not interested”

I can understand that, but I would hate for you to miss out on this opportunity.

And there were other rebuttals for anything the customer would argue against.

From the start, I knew that I probably wasn’t going to like this job. I stumbled through my first attempt at the script while impatient people, who I had interrupted during their supper or TV time, were waiting on the other end.

I don’t think I sold any that night. You could chalk it up to nerves or you could chalk it up to that fact that I just didn’t have what it takes to be a telemarketer. Very quickly, I started to notice the qualities that one needed to succeed.

1. A great phone voice.

I don’t have a great phone voice at all. It’s not bad, but not great. If you were to call me, you might accuse me of sounding aloof or disinterested. Maybe you’d think that I sound bored. Other times, I’ve been accused of sounding rude. You might be right on all counts. What was so very frustrating about this liability was that a lot of fat people around me (not really exaggerating) were hauling in the sales night after night. I firmly believe it’s because of their phone voice.

Every night, the company would put up some prize to those who sold the most that night. I shouldn’t have even bothered to keep track of my paltry totals because I got no where near to competing for the prizes. I’d be stuck at 2 sales after 2 hours and a lady at the end with a great voice would be sitting at 16 sales! 16! I think the most I ever got in one night was about 5. That’s it!

2. No fear

It’s very true that showing fear is a sign of weakness that all forms of life can detect. If you are petrified that the people you are calling will answer the phone, that’s another sign that you shouldn’t be a telemarketer. Every number I would dial would be like a shot to my self esteem. The phone would ring, and I would dread the inevitable pick up. Not getting an answer was nice because you didn’t have to speak to anyone. The bad news was that the less people I talked to, the less likely it would be for me to have a good sales night.

The best nights were when they’d hand me sheets of people they couldn’t get to answer the phone. Most of the calls would go unanswered with me having a great night with very few people yelling at me.

We had a process that we could go through if the caller not only didn’t want the product, but had been called before and now TR wouldn’t leave them alone. If they asked to not be called again, we could take them off our lists and they’d be put on a Do Not Call list. Usually, people would ask us. Or if you were like me, you would pitch it to them.

Usually, those calls would go like this:

Me: “Hello Mr. So and So, I’m called on behalf of TR and... (insert sales pitch here).

Customer: “I know about the TR service. I’ve told them several times that I don’t want it. I just wish you guys would stop calling me!”

Me: “Well (with a huge sound of relief) I can help you with that! I can take you off of our calling list if you’d like!”

Customer: (Sounding much friendlier) “Oh yes! Could you!”

Then we’d have a nice 5 minute chat of verifying information followed by thanks galore by the grateful customer. This felt great! Then I hung up. This was followed by the crushing realization that I would have to start the whole process over again as I looked at the next number on my sheet and proceeded to dial.

3. Personality

Some people have natural personality on the phone. I do not. I tried and tried to sound cheerful and confident, but failed at every attempt.

I was fairly miserable in this realization until a classmate named Joel got a job there. He was confident and cheerful. Plus, he had the balls to stray from the script. We’d sit there and hear him yucking it up with a customer with phrases like “What I’m going to do is send out this packet to you. You can take it, look it over and if you think to yourself, ‘Hey! this isn’t what I want!’, then you can just call us up and we’ll cancel it for you. No problem!”

This was similar to the script, but it in no way was close to the script’s cold delivery. We were always told to stick to the script, so I reminded Joel of that.

“We’re supposed to stick to the script!”

I was always a little anal retentive. Besides, if I was miserable, he should be miserable, too!

4. No shame.

It’s hard to be a salesperson when you have shame. If you feel bad when you call someone, that should be a very good sign that this may not be the job for you.

As I was reading my pitch, I would think to myself that if there was no way I would ever pay for something like this service, then how would I expect another person to buy it?

I would start my script and try to sound cheerful, but I couldn’t keep it up. I knew they’d probably say “No” and I knew that it was a crappy product. So I was resigned that they would say no and then die slowly inside when I’d have to flip to the rebuttal section and try to change the customer’s mind when I didn’t have the heart to get them to change it.

I think it would be different if it was a service that I believed in or was easier to sell. I remember running into a guy who was a telemarketer in college. He loved his job, which was getting people to sign up for a credit card. He said people just jumped at the opportunity to get the card. Must have been nice!

The people we called ran the whole spectrum of customers. Some were nice. Some a little angry. A few were really angry. Some would just hang up. Some would just set the phone down and then walk away. Others would tell you that the person in question was “not home right now” and “could you call back later”? I’m sure that a lot of these were just people that didn’t want to talk, but we were just going to keep calling them back at another time. Why not just tell us not to call?

Besides the customers, what made the job even more stressful were our managers. I’m sure they were under pressure to get more sales from us, so they would often listen in to our calls. You could always tell when they’d start listening because the line would suddenly have an echo and a delay on it. You’d start talking and hear “I-I-I can-can-can understand-understand...” in your ear, which made trying to make the sale even harder.

As one of the least productive employees there, I had to talk to the managers a few times to work on my sales technique. If they offered anything instructive, it obviously didn’t stick because I don’t remember any advice except for when I told them that I sometimes affected a southern drawl when calling people in the South.

You’d get these sheets of names, addresses, and phone numbers every night. Usually, you’d stay in the same area all night. I noticed that a lot of times, I’d be stuck in the South where I’d hear a definite Southern drawl. After a while, I started to talk with a slight drawl to fit in. When I told the manager this, his response was “Well I hope you’re not making that too obvious.”

At that point, I really didn’t care what they thought.

I mentioned the “Nice” people I sometimes got. In almost every case, they were nice because they didn’t want the service, didn’t need the service or couldn’t afford the service.

I talked for what seemed like 15 minutes to a nice Southern elderly black man who sounded interested in the service, but he already took bus tours. I tried and tried to get him to see my way, but he’d argue back to me about how great a deal he was already getting. He would make his point and argue, “You can’t get better than that, can you?” I finally had to concede that his deal sounded better. He should have been selling these deals.

Then there were the people that liked the service, but didn’t need it. I pitched to a man that sounded pretty interested, so interested that I started to lean forward to hit the record button on my tape recorder so I could record the sale. He said, “That sounds great!” I leaned forward even farther to hit the record button. “But I’m a student and I don’t travel!”

Rats...

Then there were the people that didn’t need it at all.

You’d pitch and hear, “I’m unemployed.” Sorry...

“I’m in a hospital bed and can’t travel.” Oops...

“We’re dealing with a death in the family right now.” Ouch...

I’m not making those up. They all were responses to me.

My brother, Bill, was actually one of the better sales people, but he hated it. He told me that he lost ten pounds while working there because he wasn’t hungry and his stomach always rumbled with acid at the thought of calling people.

Bill averaged about 5 sales a night, which was good enough for a promotion of sorts. This didn’t involve any pay, though. He was recruited to start selling a new product that didn’t involve the traveler rebate program. He doesn’t remember the full extent of it, but he said it was similar to Amway where you’d have to order your goods through a catalog, but you had to pay a fee to have the right to order through the catalog.

It was much harder to sell this service.

Bill said that after several nights of not selling anything, he called a woman that clearly didn’t want the service. When he asked, “May I ask why, Ma’am?”

She said, “Because I don’t want it. It’s Christmas and I’m trying to watch a Christmas special, and I can’t because you’re interrupting me!”

At this point, Bill said he felt his stomach gurgling with stomach acid from nerves.

Bill quit a day or two after that. Our friend, Brian, quit almost at the same time. Surprisingly, I was the last man standing, but I quit a day or two after Bill left. The paychecks were nice, but the stress was just too much to handle.

A friend of ours in college told us he worked a summer at a telemarketing place. He really hated it, but instead of quiting, he just reached a point where he started messing with the customers. If they gave him more than one excuse, he’d go through the rebuttal script for each excuse until it got to the point where people were screaming at him. You’d think people would hang up at this point, but some people just don’t like to hang up on someone, even if it’s a total stranger that you will never meet.

You would think that I would have sympathy towards telemarketers because I’ve been there and done that, but the opposite is true. It’s because I had this experience that I have no patience for them. I know when I get a pitch, that I’m going to get a rebuttal if I try to give excuses, which kind of irritates me. I know that they are just doing their job, but I know it’s something they probably don’t believe in. I have trouble pitching things people actually want, like Julia’s Girl Scout cookies. I sometimes feel bad when people give me money and they actually want the cookies!

I’ve just resorted to “I don’t want it” and hanging up if they try to give me more than one rebuttal.

Years ago, I was pitched AOL, which I didn’t need because we got free Internet from our apartment building. After getting a few “I understand that, but...” lines, I finally said, “Look I HATE AOL ok?” That finally did it.

I don’t think I’ll ever get a job involving a phone again unless it’s a job where people call YOU and want YOU to do something for them. That I can handle. I was so scarred by my telemarketing experiences that I put off learning how to answer phones at Pizza Hut when I worked there in college until finally a manager forced me to answer the phone. It’s amazing what a difference you get in attitude when the “customer” actually wants to talk to you.

New story to come soon...

2010-12-01T23:07:00.002-06:00

I'm putting the finishing touches on a story that Laura may indeed call long winded and rambling, but I hope you'll like it. It's about my stint as a telemarketer when I was in high school.

I had been working on it for many weeks. I was looking through my old archives and didn't think that my writings were as good as I remembered them. So I'm attempting to take my time and write something that has more depth and takes more time.

I would have finished this earlier, but this past week has been brutal with travel, car problems and other headaches.

The car problem occurred when Laura decided to take my car to work since it does better in ice and snow that her Mazda 3. I got into her car and the damned thing wouldn't start. So I convinced a neighbor of mine to use her husband's tow tether rope to pull the car to the auto shop, which was only 1.5 miles away.

After a few missteps on tethering the car to her SUV, we finally got going. I told her to go 15 to 20 on the street. She went at least 25 to 30 miles an hour. Considering the car didn't have power brakes at this time and the tether was insanely short, all I could think was that she was going to hit the brakes too hard and I was going to slam into the back of her SUV. That stretch was the scariest 60 seconds of my life as I white knuckled the steering wheel and rode the brake for all it was worth. Thankfully, we got to the intersection, which was also thankfully on a slight hill. And in another stroke of good luck, the light was red. I opened my door and yelled at her, "Please slow down!!!! Only go 10 miles an hour!!! I don't have power brakes!!!"

We turned the corner and she indeed only went 10 miles an hour down the next street. The ride ended shortly after that and I heaved a huge sigh of relief.

Hopalong...

2010-10-28T00:33:00.002-05:00

I’ve written about my childhood before, and it’s caused some tension in the family. Some have accused me of highlighting the bad stuff to make it look like I didn’t have any fun when I was a kid. I did have fun, but as anyone that has older siblings can verify, you are sometimes subjected to things that border on cruel and unusual punishment.

I can laugh about these things now, but at the time, they didn’t seem so funny. So when I write about these things, I’m not trying to throw a pity party, I am merely conveying how bad I had it when I was beaten on by my older siblings. I mean, I am just trying to say that I may have been subjected to some bad things, but it doesn’t mean that I want sympathy now or that I hold it against the people involved.

With that said, here’s a story about how my oldest brother almost crippled me for life... :)

My older brothers weren’t the most predictable siblings to get along with. For 10 good times with them, there were the times that weren’t so good.

For example, you’d just be standing there and then, for no good reason, they would slug you in the shoulder. Hard. It would sometimes get to the point where they wouldn’t even hit you. They would slug you as if they were going to hit, but hold it back so that you’d flinch. I think that was more enjoyable for them.

You never knew when the next hit was going to occur, but it would inevitably come. I’ve written before about how my older brother, Paul, asked me to put my nose to the screen door. When I said no because he’d hit me, he said he’d pay me five dollars if he did. So I put my nose to the screen door and was promptly punched. Some blood and crying (both from me) later, I was five dollars richer after my Mom made him pay me.

Another incident occurred the summer of 1980 I believe, and I was just a innocent young boy when I was injured by my brother, Joe.

Every weekend of the summer, we would pile into the van and head to Clarks, Nebraska for a weekend at a place called Bucktail Lake. It was right next to the Platte River. We had a trailer that was yards away from the river, so we had some nice scenery and access to the river. The river access was nice when it was low because you could go out and explore. When it was high, you stuck to the lake in front of our trailer, which was Bucktail.

There were about 40 trailers at the time. My Uncle Bill had a trailer about a dozen trailers down from us. We would walk over there to see what our cousins were up to. Or we’d just swim there for something different to do. Like a lot of trailers there, Uncle Bill had a dock in front sitting in the water. Docks were nice because you could jump off of them when you were swimming.
I was standing on my Uncle Bill’s dock one day that summer when my brother Joe came up behind me. Without a word, he picked me up and threw me off of the dock. I don’t know why he did it and if you asked him now, he’d say that he doesn’t remember doing this, but I remember.
I hit the water and felt a pain. I swam towards the shore, but something felt wrong. When I kicked, it didn’t feel right. I got to the shore and started to walk up. I gasped, fell down and screamed. My left foot was on fire.

Joe, being the helpful brother that he was at the time, tried to pull me out of the water, but I screamed again when my foot hit the ground. I sat down on the shore and held it.

He said, “You’re okay!” in that tone that parents say when their kid is exaggerating a trauma. As a parent, I’ve found myself saying this to my daughter on more than one occasion.

I cried, “I broke my foot!”

I have never broken a bone in my body, but I’d seen enough kids with casts on at school to know what it means to break a foot. Clearly, my foot didn’t feel the greatest. I looked at the evidence, although at the time, probably not this rationally. My foot hurt. It hurt even more to stand on it. I couldn’t walk on it. Plus, it seemed to be growing in size as I was looking at it. It was no longer slender. It had grown a big lump across the top. It throbbed.

Joe still tried to insist that it was fine, but I protested that it was not fine. To his credit, he could have left me there, but he believed me and carried me all the way back to our trailer.
I was taken to the hospital by my Mom once it was determined that my foot was possibly broken. The Homan family and some of the residents of Bucktail Lake have had a few visits to the hospital. There was the time when my brother Joe injured his leg trying to jump all the way down a sand hill and into the water. He only made it to the shore. Then there was the time when my brother Paul burned his arm by picking up a homemade M80, which blew up right before he picked it up.

A quick story about that. Bill and I had heard about making an M80 by combining a ladyfinger firecracker and another firework. Bill and I had tried it by lighting it in our driveway. Sure enough, it was a ear-splitting explosion. We told Paul about it. He lit it. Nothing happened. I was on my way to go pick it up to see if it had maybe gone out, but Paul stopped me. He then went over himself to pick it up. So on one hand, he was smart to stop me from doing something stupid, but then proceeded to do the stupid thing himself.

Now that I think about it, it’s a wonder that we didn’t injure ourselves more at Bucktail Lake. We would often run around with just shorts and no shoes on 3-wheeled ATVs or Motorcycles, which resulted in more burns on hot exhaust than I’d like to remember. Or we’d swim in the very deep lake with just a life belt to keep us afloat. Nowadays, 3-wheeled ATVs are banned because they were dangerous and kids are practically required to wear life jackets when swimming.

But back to my injury...

When we got to the hospital, the doctor of course pushed and poked at it with me wincing all the time. The x-ray had some bad news for me, though. It wasn’t broken. The problem was that the bones in my left foot had separated, so they rolled some tape around my foot, told me to stay off of it for three weeks and sent me on my way.

I protested this.

“Do I get crutches?” I asked.

I had seen kids at school who had broken a leg with crutches. Surely I could get some crutches, too? If I can’t walk, how would I get around?

It was explained to me that they thought that I might hurt myself more by giving me crutches if I was to slip and fall. It was true that I was and still am uncoordinated, but I wasn’t sure how they knew that.

It was suggested that I either crawl or hop on the other foot.

I did both, but it wasn’t without a lot of mocking on the part of my older brothers.

I even had a nickname, Crip, which was short for cripple.

“Hey Crip,” my brother, Paul, would say to me all the time.

If I had to get anywhere in the house I’d have to put one arm on a wall to guide me and just hop along. Getting upstairs was an adventure at first, but I got quite good at hopping upstairs one stair at a time without stopping.

One good and bad thing was that I was allowed to rest for three weeks. The good news was that I could sit around and watch television or read all day long, which I did. The bad news was that I had to sit around and watch television or read all day long.

I remember watching the movie with Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. This movie was someone’s bright idea to have the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, both the biggest artists at the time, to do a whole movie based on songs from the Beatles. I loved the movie. In my defense, I was a kid and now that I have one of my own, I can confirm that kid’s have lousy tastes in movies.

After a few days of seeing it every time it came on HBO, I got kind of tired of it.

I loved going to the library, but seeing as how I couldn’t walk, that was out the window.

I started to worry that I was never going to leave the house again.

On top of that, showering and bathing became a huge hassle. Seeing as how I had bandages around my foot, either I had to take a bath with my foot hanging over the side or I could take the tape off and try to retape it every time. Showering was out because I couldn’t exactly stand on one foot in a slippery shower.

I didn’t think my foot was ever going to heal, but finally I was able to put pressure on it. The only lasting effects is that my left foot has a slightly pronounced hump to it, so when I tie my shoes, the left one bulges out slightly.

Even with incidents like this, I look back fondly at the days at Bucktail Lake. Granted, there were bad things about it like no cable tv, no shelter from storms, sweating at night in the trailer when it was hot or shivering in the trailer when it was cold, sunburns from being in the sun all day, rashes from crawling on inner tubes, stepping on stickers, getting pierced by fish fins, getting hooked by fish hooks, bitten by fish, sleepless nights when it was storming, bad dreams about storms and various other things.

Although getting injured does tarnish good memories, it was nice to have a place to be able to explore, to swim, to ride ATVs and to just have fun.

Got bored and watched Species II...

2010-09-27T23:46:00.003-05:00

So I was bored the other night and was flipping through the cable guide when I noticed that Species was on the new Epix channel we have.

I first saw Species in the theater. I was working at Pizza Hut at the time and I kind of oversold certain aspects of the movie. I was amused at the amount of nudity in the film by star Nastasha Henstridge. She spends an good amount of time in the film in a bra or topless.

I noticed that after Species was its sequel, Species II. Both films star Marg Helgenberger of CSI fame and Michael Madsen of a lot of violent movies fame. Nastasha Henstridge also stars as Eve, a clone of the original Sil.

The movie was released in theaters, but has the look and feel of a direct-to-video movie. Helgenberger is fairly solid as Dr. Laura Baker, but Madsen, whom I read thinks the movie stinks, looks like he's in pain most of the time as Press Lennox. I don't blame him.

Species II has a lot of nudity, too, but it didn't help the box office. The movie bombed when it was released, yet has spawned two more Direct to DVD sequels.

The movie starts with a mission to Mars. One astronaut goes to the surface to collect soil samples and apparently that's all, because after traveling months to get to Mars, all NASA is interested in is a 2-hour Mars walk to get 3 tubes of soil samples. Why spend more time there studying the planet? Time is money people!

So they are ready to leave after storing the soil samples. One tube warms up and a gray ooze falls out to the ground, which appears to infect the crew. No communication is available for 7 minutes, but then everything appears fine. So the crew makes it back to Earth, given a quick check over and sent on their merry way while being reminded that they are "quarantined" and NOT to engage in sexual activity for a few more days.

I have a question here... Wouldn't you keep the astronauts there for a few days while evaluating them? They just spent almost a year in space, which can affect your bone density for one thing. Wouldn't you run through a lot of tests?

So one of the astronauts, Patrick, the one who walked on the surface, starts to have all sorts of unprotected sex. In one scene, he sleeps with two women in a hotel room one after the other, which apparently was in those new sound proof hotels that can muffle the sound of two women screaming at the same time because after Patrick has sex, the women he impregnates each immediately give birth in a rather grisly fashion to a kid the size of a four-year-old.

Soon Patrick is amassing a large brood of alien creepy kid offspring in his father's shed at an old summer home as he has continued to sleep with women of all sorts. Dr. Baker explains that soon, the offspring will go into cocoons and transform into adult aliens so time is running short to find them.

Meanwhile, Eve offers to help find Patrick. She's given radiation to awaken her alien mind (of course) to link to Patrick. While linked to Patrick, Press Lennox and the other uninfected astronaut, Dennis, race to stop Patrick from impregnating another woman that he's kidnapped in the grocery store they've just entered.

I say "race" loosely here because it's more like a casual stroll. They hear a scream and are told which way Patrick has dragged a woman and stroll that direction as if they are checking out an art museum walking tour. He's gaining ground while they casually stroll into the back of the store, glide down some stairs, meander through the basement and lope up the shipping driveway to the parking lot where Patrick has forced the woman into a van and is attempting to procreate. Meanwhile Press and Patrick walk even slower past the van to a van that's already rocking, which turns out to be some teens. They tell them to buzz off and then still show no signs of haste to find the alien, which we've established has just kidnapped a woman and is in the process of trying to make another creepy alien!

Patrick gives himself up when he senses Eve's existence. He's taken to the same lab where Eve is. They make hot glass faces at each other. He escapes again while they try to keep him away from Eve. Eve then breaks out to go and have some sex with Patrick.

The movie is filled with a lot of stiff and eye rolling dialogue. A good example of this is when Eve escapes, she steals an Army hummer and drives away with it.

Someone asks, "I thought she didn't know how to drive."

Dr. Baker says, "Her favorite show is the Dukes of Hazard!"

I watched that a ton when I was a kid, but I didn't really have a sense on how to drive. Besides, she didn't jump across the hood and slide into the door through the window. She also didn't jump a gorge, but I'm sure if it was there, she might have attempted it.

They follow Eve to the location of Patrick's brood of kids. While she runs off to have weird alien sex upstairs, they spray the cocoons with a mixture of Dennis's blood, which they figure out will kill the alien because Dennis has the sickle cell gene and the aliens won't mate unless the host is disease free.

In the end, the aliens are killed, even the brood of creepy kids. The ending predictably sets up a sequel, but good luck getting me to watch it.

It was an okay movie though. I'll probably never watch it again, unless the Riff Trax guys make a commentary track for it.

We used to communicate so well...

2010-09-06T23:25:00.002-05:00

We used to communicate so well...

It goes without saying that as a twin, Bill and I are on a higher plain than everyone else around. Because we spent so much time together growing up, there is a bond between us that was pretty strong. We could have conversations in half sentences, and we wouldn’t be the wiser.
Growing up, my Dad told us at an early age that we were going to have to start talking right because no one could understand us. I never really noticed it until, once when we were in college, Bill and I were engrossed in a conversation when our roommate stopped by to listen in. He started to chuckle and said, "Are you guys talking in your secret twin language?"
While talking to other people, we don’t exactly finish each other’s sentences like you often expect thanks to television and movies. Rather, it’s a fight over who can tell a story the best.
It’d usually go something like this.
One of us starts to tell a story, but start to falter or the other twin doesn’t feel he is telling it right.
"But..." the other twin interjects.
The one telling the story waves a hand away.
"Don’t forget the part..." interjects again.
"Oh. Just let me tell it!" the other twin finally yells in exasperation.
Lately, it seems like Bill and I are starting to lose a bit of our communication skills with each other.
For example, I was telling Bill about an article in the Onion’s AV Club that listed shows that had characters that stopped the show’s plot to a halt. That is, an annoying or bland character that the writers of a particular don’t know what to do with anymore. An example of this would be Dwight Schrute from The Office. The article reasoned, and I agree, that for the first few seasons of The Office, Dwight didn’t get act like a control-freak jerk just for the hell of it. In later seasons, it seems like they make Dwight be Dwight just to give him something to do.
I told Bill about one episode that I watched where Michael Scott, the boss, had a suspicion that his girlfriend was cheating on him. So he had Dwight go and spy on her. Dwight proceeds to go to the gym where she’s working out and rather than dress like he belongs there, he works out in his suit pants and undershirt while getting way too up close and personal to her. I felt it was too exaggerated and was an example of just using Dwight Shrute because they could, not because it made any sense.
While telling this story to Bill, he misunderstood a key part of the description. Instead of cheating on him, he thought I had said, "Michael Scott thought that his girlfriend was peeing on him, so he has Dwight spy on her to find out.
Bill said "Why would he need Dwight to tell if she was peeing on him? Wouldn’t that be easy to figure out?"
I thought Bill said "cheating" so I asked how that was easy.
"Cheating? Oh! I thought you said that she was 'peeing' on him!" Bill exclaimed.
"What?" I asked laughing. "That wouldn't make any sense!"
"I know!" Bill said. "I was thinking that would have been hard to talk about on network television."
A week or so later, and Bill and I are talking about shows that we’ve watched, which is a thing we do often. We'll call each other up and ask if we've seen a certain show or movie yet. If the answer is 'Yes' then we'll talk about our favorite parts and favorite lines in what we watched. Laura calls it "reminiscing". I sometimes try to "reminisce" with her, but she usually shuts me down before I can start as she says, "I'm not Bill."
So that night I mentioned to Bill that while Laura was out exercising, I had turned to How I Met Your Mother, which is a show she can’t stand. Mainly, she hates main character, Ted, who she says is a giant douche. She feels that it’s hard to root for him to find love when he’s so unlikable.
Also, Laura doesn’t like me watching the show because of the character of Barney, played by Neil Patrick Harris. Barney is a walking libido that lives to get women to sleep with him. Because of this trait, Laura doesn’t think Julia should watch the show. Julia has seen a few episodes and loves Barney, but the shows she watched were tame in the sex talk, so she doesn’t understand why we won’t let her watch all the time.
So that night, I turned on How I Met Your Mother.
Julia said, "Daddy, I don’t think I should be watching this."
I said, "It’s okay, Julia."
Julia said, "I really don’t think I should be watching this."
I assured her that it was fine by saying directly, "It’s fine."
I held up a hand to accentuate this point.
The episode was one I hadn’t seen before. It was about the gang crashing a high-class party where everyone is bored except for Ted, who is douching it up with academic big wigs.
The next day, I tell Bill that I watched the show. I mentioned that Laura doesn’t like Julia watching it.
"But she likes to watch Barney" I said.
"Why doesn’t Laura let Julia watch," Bill asked.
"Because Barney always tries to sleep with women."
"What?" Bill asked.
"You know," I said. "He’s always talking about sex."
"What are you talking about?" Bill asked.
"What do you mean 'What am I talking about?' You know. Barney likes to have sex and talk about sex."
I was taken aback. I didn't understand what was so confusing. We were talking about the show, How I Met Your Mother, which has a character named Barney. Barney is a single guy that lives to sleep with as many women as possible. What was so confusing?
"What?! Are we talking about the same thing?" Bill exclaimed while laughing.
"I’m talking about How I Met Your Mother. What are you talking about?" I asked.
"Ohhh!" Bill exclaimed while laughing harder. "I thought you were talking about Barney the dinosaur."
"How did you get on Barney the dinosaur?" I asked. "We were talking about How I Met Your Mother." I retorted.
He laughed again.
"Well you had said 'Julia likes to watch Barney' and I thought you were talking about Barney the Dinosaur," he said.
"No," I said. "I wasn't talking about Barney the Dinosaur. I don't think there has ever been a Barney the dinosaur show where he talks about sex and sleeping with women. That'd be a really weird show."
"That's what I was thinking!" Bill laughed.

More basic, the routine begins...

2010-08-18T00:15:00.003-05:00

After the fiasco of my opening night jitters of Basic Training where I sighed at the Drill Sergeant, we were all ushered towards our Drill Sergeant’s office, which was conveniently located near my bunk! There he outlined his expectations and what to expect. I was still uneasy, but it wasn’t the constant yelling that I had seen in movies about Basic.

He knew that we were all from Nebraska. We were all to write our names, age, and leadership experience, if any.

The other Drill Sergeant, Knight, said not to write as he put it “Stupid shit.”

The first few days involved getting used to the routine. If called somewhere, we were to get there as fast as we can. You were to ‘move with a purpose’, which was not walking to at a leisurely stroll. Believe it or not, this would happen. We’d all be in our formation and someone or some people would stroll from upstairs towards the formation. This would quickly result in them getting “dropped” for push ups. Other times, we all were dropped as punishment.

In another surprise, the first week of Basic wasn’t the hardest. It was some of the easiest. We were taught the basics, which was marching, or Drill and Ceremony. We learned to line up in four columns next to one of our four squad leaders, who were chosen the first night. For several days, we marched to various hard surfaces to learn the ins and outs of Drill and Ceremony.

The routine went like this.

We woke up at 4:45 in the morning. Wake up wasn’t really until 0500 because the line up for PT (fitness training) was at 0530. That first night of Basic after squad leaders were picked, it was decided that we would wake up early so we could have enough time to get showered, shaved, the floor swept, the bathrooms cleaned and our beds made before we left for PT so we’d have plenty of time to get it done before we had to leave for the day.

That first morning, we were already up when our Drill Cadet from West Point was walking through the door banging a metal trash can and a lid together to wake us up. He grinned when he saw us already up. I think he was a little disappointed that he didn't get to scare us out of bed.

Most every morning, we would march down to the PT fields, which was a giant track with a wood chip field in the middle of it. We would run around the track and the switch to push ups, sit ups, jumping jacks and various other physical exercises.

After that first week, things took a turn as we went to different training every day for our basic soldier’s training. Plus, we would run in formation on the street and only go to the PT fields every other day. It was during this time that Drill Sergeant Remington discovered that Bill and I were not as fit as he'd liked. Within a few days, Bill and I were given the most sacred duty of the running formation, we were given the road guard uniforms. This meant that Bill and I had to run in front or behind the formation and then when an intersection came up, we'd have to run up to the intersection and block it while the formation ran by. Then we'd have to run back to the front of the formation, or behind it, until the next intersection came up.

The different training days were meant that we'd have to hurry up to be on time to leave for class and then wait for a while until the trucks came to take us to the class. If it was close enough, we'd fast walk on the side of the road to the class. Depending on the Drill Sergeant leading the march, it could be just as brutal as the PT runs.

One day, we started out at a fast walk, then we were jogging. Then we were literally running. Picture a bunch of us running with equipment on the side of the road for miles. I had know idea why we were running, but was not about to question it. It turns out, the Drill Sergeant leading the march had such a large stride that it became almost impossible for those behind him to march. They had to jog to keep up. Those of us in back not expecting it ended up running.

Georgia is pretty humid, so when we got there, we were all soaking wet with sweat. A fellow soldier who had sprained his ankle rode with the equipment and when he saw us he asked if it had rained.

I had mentioned that we were part of the Nebraska "Buddy Platoon", which was that we were all from Nebraska. Well so many kids signed up for the "Buddy Platoon" that they had 1 and 1/2 platoons full of Nebraskans. First platoon, which I was in, was all Nebraska. The second platoon was half Nebraskans and half every body else.

At first the familiarity of everybody being from Nebraska was nice, but then it quickly grew tedious.

Bill and I knew each other and that was it. Everybody else knew at least five other people that they went to school with or were in a unit together. Because of this, it didn't take long for favorites to emerge. Need someone to do a chore? Grab someone you don't know, like me. Need someone for KP (kitchen duty)? Have someone else do it. We had figured it out. You weren't supposed to have KP more than four or five times during Basic because there were enough people to do it. Some of us, like me, had to do it at least 8 times. Some guys had it over ten times. Why was this? Because some of the guys who were friend with the squad leaders didn't have to do it once.

I'm not saying Nebraskans are annoying. I was born and raised here after all. I'm just saying that it might have been nice to have met some people from around the country. There were a few in other platoons that we met that were nice and had some interesting stories. Instead, we were treated with the comings and goings of party life in small town Nebraska. You've heard one story about a skank that someone had sex with then you'd heard them all.

Maybe I just don't like people.

That might be it. I just don't like other people that much. When it's other people, you tend to get annoyed fast. Like the kid that sang the Army Life song that was in a MASH episode. He'd always sing "Gee Mom, I want to go home." almost every night while he was at his bunk. Thankfully, it was close to mine!

Then there was the guy across from me who couldn't stop bragging about his girlfriend and how much sex he'd had with her. She sent him his walkman tape player one day with their song in it, "Feel Like Making Love" by Bad Company.

I didn't care for that song before Basic, but now I really freaking hate it.

He was homesick for his girlfriend, so he'd sit there and listen to the song over and over. Wait... Did I say "listen"? I meant that he sang it out loud in a mumbling cadence. Did I mention that this was at night when we were trying to sleep? Yes. It WAS at NIGHT when we were trying to sleep. After what seemed like hours, but was probably 15 minutes, I asked (maybe asked/yelled) for him to please not do that.

I was met with a "Shut the fuck up!"

But now that I think about it, most of the guys were all right. Now one is going to get along with everyone.

Ironically enough, I ran into Bill and I's squad leader at a Walgreens a couple of months ago. I mentioned this to Bill who said, "Oh yeah. I remember him. He said that I had a bad attitude and was going to report me to the Drill Sergeant."

"And I did," he added quickly with a laugh.

Yeah, Bill had a rougher time in Basic than I did, but that's another story.

Sometimes, it had its benefits. Because we were all going to go into college, we were a platoon of pretty smart guys. We won a few of the competitions, like the map reading/navigating skills one, and came pretty close to getting the Honor Platoon award, but a few failed inspections (lost because the same kid kept forgetting to lock his locker 5 times) and not as many points in the PT competition (because we were the youngest and got weighted less than the older guys in another platoon) did us in.

Another benefit were the care packages. At first, these packages were a nice treat for us as someone's parent sent a box filled with cookies and candy to share with the rest of the platoon. The soldier would get handed the box and we'd line up to get some of the box. After a few weeks of handing out two or three care packages a day, the Drill Sergeants got really tired of it and just shoved the boxes at you and walked away. Most people kept these stashes in their lockers. Bill and I had our music sent to us around this time. Thank God for walkman tape players to drown out our fellow Nebraskans!

At training sessions, the Sergeants in charge of that day's training will make small talk while there was a lull, like if it was raining and we were waiting under the bleachers. Frequently, we'd be sitting there if there was a heat advisory.

One Sergeant asked one of us, "Where are you from?"

Nebraska was the response.

He asked another one with the same response.

After a few more times of this, he finally asked, "Are you all from Nebraska?"

"Yes, Sergeant!" we yelled.

"No shit?!" he exclaimed.

"No shit, Sergeant!" we yelled back.

More Basic stories to come. The next one should be the time Bill and I switched places for a while.

Sighing is never a good thing to do in Basic Training...

2010-08-01T23:40:00.003-05:00

Seeing my nephew, Taylor, graduating from Army Basic Training in Fort Benning, Georgia reminded me of my time in Fort Benning.

It was the spring of 1989 when Bill and I signed up for the Army National Guard. My Mom kept suggesting it, but Bill and I were resistant. I guess it was because we knew it would suck and we tend to not like to do things if they suck. Besides, the thought of spending the summer of our senior year before heading to college in combat fatigues didn't really sound like a pleasant thing.

Long story short, we signed on the dotted line for the Army National Guard. We were stationed in Beatrice, Nebraska. Being from Grand Island, it was thought strange that we would join the Beatrice unit. We had never been to Beatrice in our life, but how we got recruited there is another story.

The running in joke in our Beatrice unit was that as soon as our enlistment became official, we turned to the head guy and asked, "When do we get out?"

Bill and I were part of the promotion to increase the National Guard's numbers, which was to be in the 'Buddy Platoon', which is to have a whole platoon of kids from Nebraska to be in the same platoon. I think they thought that since Basic Training was a scary place for most kids coming out of high school, it made sense that you could endure all the yelling and push ups with someone you knew. This was all well and good in theory, but since I only knew Bill, and he only knew me, it didn't really work out to our benefit, but that's another story.

The day to go to Basic Training came. We ended up on a chartered flight from Omaha to Fort Benning, Georgia. I fully expected to get off the plane and be yelled at from day one, but that didn't happen at all. We got off the plane and waited and waited and waited for a few hours until finally, we were picked up and taken to the reception area where we were to be given shots, given a hair cut, given orientation talks and given our equipment and clothing.

The clothing part was interesting to me. You see, I have a rather large head. I think if I was to have a hat size, it would be 8 1/4. We were given a duffle bag and walked down an assembly line of clothes where we were given our socks, underwear, t-shirts, and the rest of the fatigues. When it came time for the hat fitting, you had to stand in front of a man with some hats. He'd look at you, slap a hat on your head and pull it down your forehead to make sure it fight right. When it came to be my turn, he slapped the hat on me and pulled. Then he pulled some more. He started to chuckle. He grabbed another hat and tried to pull it down my forehead. He couldn't even reach the forehead. This resulted in a lot of people being shown by humongous cranium with the resulting laughter. Finally, I was fitted with two custom fit hats.

All in all, those few days there weren't bad at all. It was pretty boring for the most part. Then the day came to be tested to see if we were physically active enough to go on to Basic. I had done push ups at home, but when it came time for me to do the push ups, I faltered. My arms wobbled and felt like jelly. I don't remember how many of the 13 push ups I was supposed to do, but when I landed on the mat after the last one, all I remember was the words 'F. T. U.' being uttered by the drill sergeant testing us.

He then informed me that I was to report to the Fitness Training Unit to get in shape for Basic Training.

I said, "Thank you, Drill Sergeant" even though I was shaking.

"Never thank a Drill Sergeant", the Drill Sergeant said.

I was freaking out about being assigned to FTU. We were on a tight schedule as it was. We were supposed to start Basic on a certain day and finish up the Friday before college was starting. If I had to go to the FTU, it would delay my return and I would start college late. Plus, I would be without my brother, Bill, beside me.

I was really down. So were some of the other guys who failed. It was then that we were told the secret of getting out of the FTU. The advice given to us by a Sergeant was that when the man came to take us to the FTU, he would ask who was supposed to go to FTU. When that happens, we just don't stand up.

I was dumbfounded. That was it? Surely, there was more to it than that?

I asked, "Don't they have my name on a list?"

"No." is what I was told.

I asked more questions about this 'avoiding the FTU' strategy until finally the Sergeant said, "Will you shut up. You're starting to really piss me off." which I took as a signal that I should shut up.

The next day, I was supposed to ship off to FTU while the rest went to Basic. Sure enough, a man came and called out for people that were assigned to FTU. I instinctively started to stand up. We had all been sitting on our duffle bags. As I started to rise, some of the guys I had met whispered urgently not to stand up. So I slumped forward as if I was tying my boot. The man who called for FTU assignees went away.

I couldn't and still don't believe to this day that it was that easy. The fact that they didn't have a roster of names baffles me. Maybe they've tightened up the process since then.

In case you were wondering, I did get stronger and I did manage to pass Basic Training by passing the push up part of the fitness test.

So it was off to Basic Training...

We waited a little more. Then semi trucks pulled up hauling cattle cars. We all piled into the trucks. I was sweating already because I had mistakenly put on the winter set of uniforms. Plus I was worried that I had committed a court martial by avoiding the fitness training unit. I tried not to worry about it and settled in for a long ride.

In what seemed like barely a minute later, the truck stopped, the door opened and a not unkind voice said, "Good morning, welcome to Fort Benning, Georgia."

"YOU HAVE EXACTLY 10 SECONDS TO GET OFF OF THIS TRUCK!"

Guys started piling off the truck.

"10!"

I tried to move towards the front.

"9!"

The swell of panicking people all around me was literally taking me off of my feet.

"8! 7! 6!"

I was almost to the door!

"5! 4! Screw it! EVERYONE OFF OF THIS TRUCK RIGHT NOW!"

I hustled with my duffle bags as I hit the ground. I did not want to mess this up. I knew that all you had to do was to do something wrong or say something wrong to get in trouble in Basic. I had seen Full Metal Jacket and was using it as a reference in my head as I lumbered into position.

We were told to get into rows, which I did. It was then that we stood at attention while the drill sergeants walked up and down the rows yelling their heads off at people. They were asking where we worked before this and where we were from.

I almost burst out laughing when a kid was asked where he worked before this.

He yelled, "Hinky Dinky, Drill Sergeant."

To which the Drill Sergeant responded with "Hinky Dinky! Hinky Dinky! What in the hell is a Hinky Dinky!"

Suddenly, I had a Drill Sergeant in my face. He yelled where was I from.

I yelled, "Grand Island, Nebraska, Drill Sergeant!"

He replied, "What in the hell is in Grand Island, Nebraska!?"

I yelled, "I don't know, Drill Sergeant!"

It was all I could come up with. Thankfully, it worked. The Drill Sergeant walked away.

Finally, after what seemed like a lot of war faces, screaming, yelling and some crying, we were separated into platoons. We were to rush upstairs and wait by the locker they told us.

I got upstairs and waited.

Our Drill Sergeants came up. I was still in the 'Don't mess up' mode.

We were issued all sorts of instructions like empty our bags and then repack them. I'm a little foggy on the details, myself.

The head Drill Sergeant, which I believe was Remington, came by my bunk. He asked me a question that as of now I don't remember. I think he was asking me about my duffle bag and why all my stuff was dumped out of it. I was just thinking that I had been asked to dump it out, but didn't remember if they told me to put it all back.

Out of frustration, I sighed.

Drill Sergeant Remington paused for a second.

Then he sighed. And sighed again. And sighed a few more times.

Then he yelled, "Get down!"

I got down.

"Get up!"

I got up.

"Get down!"

Down.

"Get up!"

Up.

"Get down!"

Down

"Get up!"

A few more times of this and I'm standing at attention. Drill Sergeant Remington leaned in close to my face and instructed me to get my shit together, which I did from that moment on.

I think I sighed because I was just frustrated with how the whole experience had gone so far. I had tried to get through the day without causing trouble and had failed. I had failed my fitness test. I was wearing winter uniforms, which were causing me to sweat buckets. I had finished that up by sighing at the Drill Sergeant.

Thankfully, I got through that night and Drill Sergeant Remington and I got along well from that day on. He could have held out a grudge on me, but I think having Bill along helped. Seeing as he had twins in his platoon, he'd often grab us and introduce us to friends of his in other parts of the complex. Whenever he'd do his morning inspections of us, whenever he'd get to me or Bill, he'd turn with a stern look on his face, but he'd always break into a grin because we'd be smiling back at him, which isn't someone Full Metal Jacket recommends, but it worked for us.

Apparently, you can't knock on your daughter's window without scaring the living crap out of her...

2010-07-11T00:07:00.002-05:00

Thursday night, I had just said good night to Julia and turned off the light. I decided that I would walk to the corner and get our mail from the community mail box tower thing there.

I grabbed the mail key, unlocked the deadbolt of the front door, opened the door and pulled the door knob. As I was pulling the door shut, I noticed that the knob wasn't turning, which meant that while the dead bolt was locked, the knob was locked, but not latched. In my haste to shut the door behind me, I didn't have time to register that the knob wasn't unlocked.

So locked outside, I thought I could either get the mail and then try to get back inside or just start knocking now since I had literally had left just a minute earlier. Surely Julia would let me in

I started knocking. First I knocked lightly. Then I knocked persistently.

No action inside.

I started knocking again. This time, I tried to vary my knocks so it sounded like a code.

Knock! (long knock) Knock-Knock! (two short knocks)

I tried this for a bit. Still no action inside letting me in.

I walked over to Julia's window through the shrubbery and knocked. I tried knocking a few times. Then I walked over to the front door and knocked some more. Still no action inside!

Finally, I started to ring the doorbell.

Nothing...

I rang the doorbell yet again several times.

At last, I saw Laura appear in the doorway of the master bedroom. Finally! She'll let me in.

"Bob!" she yelled. "Answer the door!"

I rang the doorbell again more persistently.

"Bob!" she yelled again while walking forward. At this point, I tried waving my arms.

"Bob! Answer the door!" she kept yelling.

This was getting ridiculous. Surely someone inside would realize that the only person who would be knocking and ringing so persistently when it was this late in the evening would have to be the world's worse burglar or a family member who had locked himself outside. It seems they were thinking it was the burglar.

Finally, Laura walked over to the front door and answered it.

"What in the hell are you doing?!"

"I was locked outside," I said.

I looked over to the staircase to downstairs and noticed Julia creeping up the stairs looking nervous.

"Are you insane knocking on her bedroom window?" Laura asked with some force. "You scared her half to death! She ran to our room yelling, 'Someone's knocking on my window!'"

"I thought she would know that it's me since I just went outside."

"Well, you thought wrong!"

"How else was I supposed to get back inside?" I asked.

"I don't know," Laura said. "Maybe you should have thought of that before you locked yourself outside."

"If I had thought about it," I said. "I wouldn't have locked myself outside."

I tried explaining how I locked myself outside, but she cut me off.

"I don't want to hear it. Your daughter is scared half to death. It's your fault so you put her to bed."

Julia chimed in with, "You really freaked me out, man!" sounding like Tommy Chong.

I put Julia back in bed. I apologized for scaring her and told her it wouldn't happen again. If I was to lock myself outside again we devised a few strategies.

1. Knock on Laura's window.
2. Ring the doorbell
3. Use a secret knock. I tapped out a knock that would be my knock.

If I ever lock myself outside again and I use the secret knock, I just have to hope that Julia still remembers what my knock was.

The next day, Laura took joy in telling people at work what an idiot her husband was for not only locking himself out of the house, but scaring our daughter by knocking on her window. I'll admit it. It was pretty stupid, but as I protested. Even when someone stupidly locks themselves out of the house, there has to be a way of getting back inside.

Audiobook: Breathers: A Zombie's Lament by S. G. Brown

2010-06-30T23:48:00.003-05:00

I just got done with this audiobook called 'Breathers: A Zombie's Lament' by S. G. Brown.

It's my first attempt at zombie fiction and it was pretty good for the most part. The story centers around a zombie named Andy, who woke up after a horrific car accident killed him and his wife to find that he's now one of the members of the the undead. In S. G. Brown's version of zombies, the undead are shunned members of society while the living, referred to as breathers, retain all rights as citizens.

Andy lives in his parents wine cellar doing nothing all day but watching cable TV and drinking expensive wine that gives him no pleasure. He spends his nights at the local zombie support group run by a recently deceased therapist. Andy can't talk because his mouth was sewn shut. One arm is near useless. Also, his ankle is broken so he's slow moving.

Getting to and from the meetings is dangerous as breathers take sport in pelting zombies with food, ripping off zombie appendages or just killing them for sport. His zombie friends of Jerry, a 'dude' speaking guy and Rita, a beautiful woman who's constantly applying makeup walk with him to and from the meetings.

I almost gave up on this book because it got long winded. Andy is constantly whining about how he doesn't understand why he can't just walk down the street without being yelled at or vandalized or why he can't sit in front of a fire without fear of being thrown into it.

The book picks up steam when Andy and his friends meet Ray, a zombie who they initially mistake for a breather. He introduces them to a treat of venison he calls 'Ray's Resplendent Rapture'. The meat is beyond delicious. Soon Andy starts to feel rebellious and is arrested by Animal Control, who polices the zombies, for trying to protest for zombie rights. Then he notices that he's starting to heal. Andy and his friends start to realize that Ray's meat may not be venison after all.

The book goes unconventional for a long time, but then kicks into zombie movie territory near the end of the book, which almost ruins it for me.

Overall, I liked it. The narrator's lamentable delivery (call back to the subtitle) means that when the jokes come every now and then (like the one where Andy is offered a finger and he says that he never liked finger food), that I was groaning a lot at the corny jokes.

Saw Toy Story 3 - Laura cried

2010-06-20T01:03:00.002-05:00

Laura sometimes has some trouble with Pixar movies. For the longest time, she wouldn't watch Toy Story 2 because of the scene were Jessie the Cowgirl is telling her story of being loved and abandoned by a little girl who grew up.

As a parent, it's hard to sit through those kind of things and not think about the inevitable day when your kid will grow up and shun the very things that they used to love. It's sometimes welcome and sometimes sad.

When Julia was just two or three years old, we watched Monsters Inc. on DVD. At some point in the movie near the end, which may have been the time when Sully says goodbye
to Boo, the girl from the human world, I looked over at Laura to see her bawling like a baby.

I laughed and asked, "What's wrong?"

She said through tears, "This is why I hate Pixar movies. They just SUCK you right in and make you cry!"

Laura eventually got over those two movies's sadder moments and now can watch them with no problem.

However, Laura knew Toy Story 3 was going to be a problem when a co-worker who had seen it mentioned to Laura that it was a great movie and that it was sad.

"Am I going to cry?" she asked.

"Yes."

So Laura was going into the movie expecting it to be sad and expecting to cry.

The movie starts off the bat with a downer of a premise. The toys are in the toy box and have been there for years it seems. They are all that's left of all of Andy's toys throughout the years. They even mention losing some toys, like Bo Peep, who was voiced by Annie Potts in the first two movies, to yard sales. Funny!

Then it's discussed that Andy is going away to college. His Mom is giving away his room to his little sister, so he has to decide what to do with his stuff: take to college, put in storage or trash. He puts Woody in the college stuff and puts the toys in with the attic stuff, but when the toys accidentally get put on the curb with the trash, Woody acts to save them. In the confusion, they end up in the daycare donation stuff.

When they get to the daycare, it looks like all their troubles are solved. They are told by Lotso, the purple bear that leads the daycare, that they'll have a never ending stream of toys to play with, but then things quickly turn for the worse when they are locked in the wing for toddlers, who are much rougher on the toys in the bigger kids room. The toys then have to break out of the day care, which is run like a prison at night.

Eventually, it all culminates with Andy having to say goodbye to his toys as he's leaving for college.

I looked over at Laura while this was happening and she was wiping her eyes. She knew I was going to be looking over at her and she laughed while crying and muttered, "Stupid Pixar."

All in all, it was a pretty good Toy Story movie. I wouldn't call it my favorite. It was pretty funny, but the scenes near the end were rather bleak. Maybe repeated viewings will spruce it up. It still ranks up there with the other ones though. It has a lot of great performances from Lotso to Ken, who spends a lot of time insisting that he's not a girl's toy while trying on tons of outfits.

How Bill and I sound to others while on the phone to each other...

2010-06-10T00:38:00.002-05:00

"Yo!" Bill said to me as he answered the phone the other day. He was with some people who were kind of listening to the one-sided conversation on his end. When he got off the phone, he was asked who he was on the phone with.

"My brother," Bill said.

"Yeah, I figured," one of them said. "I can always tell when he calls because you talk to him like an asshole."

I had to laugh at that because we've often been accused of doing nothing but arguing when we're together. It sounds like we're having a row, but that's just the way we communicate sometimes. We once rode in a car to Chicago with my wife, Laura to try out for a trivia show on VH1. We were all on the same team. After the trip, Laura stated emphatically that in no way would she ever ride with us on a trip again. It was all she could do to drown our arguing out.

That same week as my call to Bill in which he was considered rude by those listening in, Bill had called me from where he was on a business trip after he had gotten in for the night. I had just watched one of our favorite shows the night before, and we were discussing it. This usually involves a lot of "Remember the part when?" with one of us describing the joke and us laughing at it.

Laura calls is "reminiscing" about a show. I've tried to do this with her, but she doesn't have the whole twin link, so it usually bombs.

As I'm talking, I hear from the bedroom from Laura, "Why is she still up?"

I told Bill to hold on and walked over to the bedroom.

I told Laura that Julia was in bed and that I was talking to Bill on the phone.

She laughed and said, "Ohhhh! I thought you were talking to Julia because it sounded like you were talking to a child."

Is it free? Are you sure?

2010-06-08T23:49:00.002-05:00

Trying a new strategy. Shorter blurbs of my life.

Today, we had a free lunch for those of us who worked on a new project. At first, I wasn't going to go to this lunch because I didn't realize that it wasn't just a lunch where you had to bring your own, but a free lunch, which I almost never turn down. You got to save money where you can these days...

So me and some other guys near me decide to go down to the free lunch. We stop at a co-worker's desk I'll call Ted.

"Are you going to go down to the lunch?" I asked.

"Umm... I don't know," he said skeptically. Ted isn't exactly keen on getting dragged to things he'll have to sit through.

"There's a free lunch..." I say slightly enticingly.

"What are they having?"

We said we didn't know, but I offered to call him at his desk once we got down there to tell him what it is.

We get down there. I open up the warming trays and survey the pickings. I pick up the phone and call Ted.

"It's fajitas. Chicken or Beef."

"And it's free?" Ted asks.

"Yes."

"Are you sure?" he asked skeptically.

Well I hadn't looked around, but I was fairly certain that there were no cash registers hidden to surprise us once we got our food and sat down.

"Yes, I'm pretty sure."

"Okay." He hung up.

All that trouble and he didn't even come.

I realize that's a pretty simple story....

It's Only a Movie by Mark Kermode

2010-05-03T22:54:00.001-05:00

I was skimming the new releases at Audible when I came across a book, It's Only a Movie, that looked interesting. It was a memoir, which I like if they are humorous. This one seemed to fit that bill. I find out that Mark Kermode is a movie reviewer, but one that I had never heard of before. Still, the sample was pretty funny, so I took a chance on it.

Even though Kermode isn't what I would call famous, although he does work for the BBC. I thought his book was a very interesting and very funny listen, not that being famous is a qualification for a good memoir.

Kermode talks about his love of film throughout his life with criticism of films that entered his life and peppers this with stories from his life. For example, his chapter on the first time he was ever on radio was so funny that I had to listen to it twice to get the full details because I was laughing so hard. Same for his chapter on going to Russia in 1992 to cover a movie shoot there. What starts as a fun idea turns into a nightmare that doesn't surpass any movie about troubles in traveling, but it certainly tops them all in the laughs department. Kermode and a writing partner have to endure smelly trains, cramped cars and harrowing plane rides all for the search of a film crew that seems to be everywhere that they aren't while dealing with post communist society that doesn't have any of the conveniences that he is used to.

All in all, if you like movies, or talk of movies, then this book is a good start.

Laura is tired of me writing about her...

2010-05-01T22:46:00.002-05:00

I was kind of jazzed to write a new story about Laura. It involves Laura yelling at me for taking her covers when I came to bed even though she was hogging them and I had none. It also involved me protesting and her responding with a "I don't know what you're talking about! I don't have any!" when she clearly did. It was going to be a funny story because she doesn't remember saying it. She was talking in her sleep.

I mentioned that I was going to write about this, but she said that she's getting tired of me writing about her. So I'm left with a problem. What do I write about when I've run out of subjects to write about. I could write about Julia, but sooner or later, she's going to realize that I've been writing about her from time to time, which will probably coincide with her teenage years. I'm sure she'll have no problem with it. She'll probably have a little chuckle about embarrassing moments posted on the internet for the whole world to see, but was probably read by dozens if I'm lucky.

The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens

2010-03-15T23:00:00.000-06:00

This book released last year is one that I was sure that I'd love. As a fantasy geek growing up, I gravitated towards the books that were slightly humorous. Those were in fairly short supply, but there were a few here and there.

I never really got into the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, though. My brother, Bill, bought the second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, because of the title and while it was funny, because we hadn't read the first book, we were kind of lost.

Years later, I've listened to the first three books of the series and I really enjoyed them. They were funny, witty and thought-provoking.

It's inevitable that people will compare The Sheriff of Yrnameer to the Hitchhikers' series.

It's set in a futuristic space where oddball alien characters exist around every corner. Where jaywalking will get you a lecture, a quiz and then a ticket. Where kicking up dust will produce an advertisement. Where computers that gain awareness are deprogrammed if they answer wrong to the question: "Do you like humans?" until one computer finally answers "Yes".

The book involves the exploits of Cole, a poor criminal, who is trying to get out of town to avoid his brain becoming a bounty hunter's incubator for the hunter's alien spawn. Along the way, he has to overcome getting beaten up multiple times, losing his girlfriend, stealing a very famous ship, outrunning the bounty hunter, avoiding zombies and someone becoming the sheriff of Yrnameer, the last untouched planet in the galaxy.

I thought it was a very well done audio book, too. The narrator does a fine job with the various voices. Plus, there are vocal effects galore to simulate the many song jingles, radio voices and various alien sounds in the book.

Converting Star Wars for my WD Media Player

2010-03-15T21:47:00.002-06:00

I'm converting my three Star Wars movies to put on my Western Digital Media Player, which is an awesome little box that we watch every day. It has a lot of our favorite movies and shows on it already, but I have to redo a lot of them because my first attempts with a different program were mediocre.

Currently, I'm converting Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I'm going to name them Star Wars 1 - A New Hope, Star Wars 2 - Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars 3 - Return of the Jedi.

"But Bob!", you might say, "Star Wars 1-3 are for the prequels!"

To that I say, "Feh! When I saw them they were 1 through 3. Why should I have to change because the suckfests called the prequels showed up to tear out my heart and stomp all over it? They can be 0.1 through 0.3 for all I care."

I buy the Guitar World Hero band kit from a stoner

2010-02-06T11:53:00.000-06:00

Julia got the game Band Hero for Christmas, which is basically the Rock Band/Guitar Hero experience with pop songs. It includes several of Julia's favorite songs. She had originally asked for a karaoke machine, but I didn't feel like those were very economical. This game does have a karaoke mode, so that takes care of that. I also wanted something I could play along to with Julia.

The Band Hero kit with the microphone, guitar, drum kit and game costs a whopping 199 bucks at most stores. I wasn't really ready to part with that money. I had noticed that the Best Buy in Grand Island was selling the Guitar Hero World Tour band kit for 100 bucks when I was there. That would be great to get because it includes all the instruments that you'd need, plus you'd get a game with rock songs to go along with the new pop songs on the Band Hero disc (once I bought it).

I'll often check Craig's List to see who out there is willing to part with their goods for a song. I'm pretty lucky at finding those things. We had our 20 inch Insignia TV start to go on the fritz in that it was showing a green tint over the screen off and on while we tried to watch it. It was getting a little annoying, so I did a search on Craig's List and found a guy who was selling his 2004 Phillips 20 inch TV for just 40 dollars. It works great.

I thought that I might have some more good luck again. I searched for Guitar Hero World Tour. I saw a listing that didn't make much sense. A guy was selling the game and the instruments for only 60 dollars. I emailed that I was interested and within a few minutes, I got a reply. The guy, or Seller as I'm calling him, gave me his number to talk it over.

I dialed the number, which started to ring with one of those Ringback tones that plays you a song while the party you're calling is getting to the phone. His Ringback tone was "Poison" by Alice Cooper.

He said that they had got it the Friday before Thanksgiving for 100 dollars, but they didn't really play it so he decided to get rid of it. That seemed a little fishy. To cut in here... I bought the game from Seller the last week of November...

I agreed that I would probably buy it. I told him, "I'm going to leave work a little after 4 p.m. I should be there at 4:20."

At this point, Seller laughed. I didn't realize then why he thought that was funny. He had said that he'd be around all day, but was that too late? Did he think that it was funny I mentioned such a specific time? It was only later, when I was exercising that I groaned at the realization at what was so funny. For those ignorant on drug lingo, 4:20 is supposed to be the perfect time to get stoned. I'm not sure why and I have no idea if it's true. The stoner's new year is celebrated on April 20th. It's kind of stupid, but hey, to each their own.

Seller lived over in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which a lot of us refer to as Council Tucky because it's kind of a dump over there. So when Seller told me that he lived in Council Bluffs, I joked to my co-worker that if I didn't come back that the address I was heading to was on my notepad on my desk. He laughed.

Note to Council Bluffs people: I'm not saying you all are hicks. My aunt lives there, but let's be honest. There's a portion of the town that looks like it was populated by people hanging around a bus station that happened to be located next to the homeless shelter. You know what I'm talking about.

So anyway, Seller told me directions and mentioned how there's all this "crazy" construction going on by his house, so he told me to turn at a certain street. I trusted that Map Quest would steer me in the right direction, so I looked at those directions instead. Turns out that Seller was right and Map Quest was wrong. There WAS some crazy construction going on. So crazy that I ended up driving several blocks past his turn trying to find a way around the construction. It was as if the city planners thought it was a genius idea to just cut a neighborhood in the middle with a blocked street so that people on the west or east sides of it couldn't get across unless you went around a 2 mile detour.

I ended up driving over a bridge and after calling Seller again with his "Poison" ringback tone to entertain me while I waited for him to answer, he told me the correct street again.

I pulled up to his house. What awaited me didn't really surprise me. He looked like Jesus, if Jesus was a stoner with a hoody. He had thin, long black hair that went past his shoulders and a short beard.

Seller said, "Hi' to me and I followed him inside. We walked through the closed porch. Before he opened the door to the porch, he said, "Don't mind the mess."

And by a mess, he meant an absolute shithole. The porch was cluttered with papers, boxes and assorted items that all looked like they should be put in their proper place: the trash can.

I walked inside to find a house that wasn't that different from the porch. The front door opened to the kitchen and every single square foot of the kitchen counter was covered with opened boxes, closed boxes, bananas, containers, appliances, measuring cups, clean dishes and dirty dishes.

It looked like he had a wife and kid as they were standing in the living room.

Seller opened a door for me and said, "Down here."

He urged me to go first so that he could close the door behind me. I assumed to keep his dog out.

As I walked down the narrow and steep stairs, I was met with a very familiar smell having been around it at concerts and various houses. I also encountered it while delivering pizzas and was reminded of the various stoners you'd encounter on the job.

Usually, you would see a few different behaviors while delivering a pizza to a stoner. You'd always smell the grass, but how people acted when I came to deliver a pizza was interesting.

- 'See No Evil' houses - These were the houses where there'd be three guys.

Guy #1 was the 'Acting Sober' guy, who would answer the door and act all sober and upstanding. That is, until you handed him a complimentary coupon, to which he'd exclaim, "Whoa!"

Guy #2 was the 'Not Moving, Not Talking' guy, who would just sit there on the couch without seemingly moving a muscle. He wouldn't speak or even make an acknowledgment that a pizza was being delivered. He sat there like not doing so would cause the world would end. Maybe he was paranoid about Guy #3.

Guy #3 was the 'Coughing Fit' guy. There would be no pipes around, but you'd have this guy sitting there and convulsing with raspy coughs as if he'd just inhaled a big lung of smoke in that miraculous way of not having a pipe to do it with.

- The 'Let's All Answer The Door' house. Then there were the houses where every person would get up and answer the door. It was kind of weird. The door would open and there would be every guy in the room at the door. It's as if they were saying, "Don't mind us dudes. We're just ALL answering the door as if nothing's wrong. Later, we'll all be going to the bathroom together."

So back to my story...

I started walking downstairs when suddenly I found myself sliding down the stairs on my back. One of the steps near the bottom was so loose that when I stepped on it, it tipped forward and sent me sprawling. I imagined it must be a nifty way to break your enemy's neck.

"Whoa!" Seller said. "Watch your step!"

Too late...

"I keep forgetting to tell people about that step!"

I wonder why...

So the basement consisted of a piece-of-shit couch that faced a computer desk with a Monitor with an Xbox 360 on it. Seller showed me the Guitar Hero World Tour game and all the instruments. He popped in the game to show me that it worked. I sat behind the drums while his friend opted to play the guitar. Unfortunately, his friend was freshly high so when it came time to select the options on the game, it took about 10 times longer than it should have.

In the game, you hit the green button to signify that you are playing the song. If you want to sit out, you don't hit anything.

I hit the green drum pad to lock in the Drum set controller. We waited.

"Hit the green button, Dude," Seller said.

The previous screen appeared. The friend hit the red button instead of the green button, which was the 'Back' button.

"Dude! What did you hit?" Seller asked.

"I... don't... know..." the friend drawled.

I hit the green button again to lock in my controller. We waited again.

"Hit the green button, Dude," Seller said.

Still nothing.

"Oh, I think I just hit the blue button, Bro. Sorry."

Seller walked over to the friend and hit the green button for him.

After a few more times of this because his friend kept hitting random buttons, we were finally playing a song.

I started doing my adequate drumming to the song. I noticed right away that there were no guitars playing. I glanced over at the friend and he was just sitting there, not hitting any buttons.

Oh, so NOW he doesn't want to hit buttons? Just in time for the song to start, which means that you're very soon going to be hitting buttons.

I called it good even though I didn't hear the guitar working like it should, but I wanted to get out of there.

Long story short, I got a cheap video game and the stoner got some money for his next stash (I'm assuming).

Bill is torn between me helping him in his attic or competing in a soup contest

2010-02-05T00:03:00.003-06:00

Tomorrow, I'll be helping my brother, Bill, in Lincoln with some work on his attic. Bill is in the middle of a multi-year project that will end with his attic being turned into a master bedroom. This project was started a while ago.

I've helped him on a few occasions during this process to help Bill string wire down from the attic to the floor below so he can have some electricity up there for outlets and stuff.

When he called me this week, we had to haggle over some dates. We had originally settled on Thursday, but Laura and I had a thing to do with Julia, so I had to scrap that. I was free Wednesday, but Bill couldn't do it that day. He suggested next week, but I'll be busy next week.

I asked, "What about Friday?"

"I can't do it Friday."

"Why not?"

"Well, every year my work has a soup cook off and I was going to enter my famous Black Bean Chili in it."

"Let me get this straight," I asked. "You're going to forgo me helping you on your attic so that you can enter soup in a cooking contest?"

"Yes." he said a little sheepishly.

It took a bit of persuading to get him to change his mind. At one point, I called him to see if he'd made a decision and he said that he was still thinking about it.

"So you're going to give up labor in favor of the adulation from your co-workers?" I asked. "You know, you COULD just take your chili in before it starts. You probably don't have to be there all day, unless you crave comments."

I pictured Bill walking around people rubbing their bellies, licking their lips and patting Bill on the back for a great recipe.

"Wait a minute..." I asked. "What's with this 'famous' recipe? Isn't this the same recipe that girl you knew gave you?"

"Yes, but I've tweaked it a bit and made it my own."

That may be, but I still don't think it's enough of a big deal to shun cheap labor.

'Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs' movie reminds me of my Dad...

2010-01-14T23:31:00.000-06:00

I forgot to publish this story from months ago...

Last week, Laura, Julia and I went to see 'Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs' an animated movie loosely based on the children's book of the same title. The movie was also shown in 3D, which we went to and I loved.

The movie centers around a young inventor named Flint Lockwood. He's stuck in the middle of a small town off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean whose only export is sardines, which is a problem because, as Flint puts it, "Sardines are gross."

Bored with the mundane food choices in town and wanting to invent something that actually works the way it was intended, Flint invents a machine that transforms water into food. A freak accident sends it up in the clouds, which causes it to rain hamburgers and various other food items. Eventually, the town starts to use it's raining food occurrences to better their tourism. The greedy mayor, played by Bruce Campbell, keeps asking Flint to up the ante on the types of food. Before long, things get out of hand and the food machine looks like it may end the world with a flood of food unless Flint can stop it.

It's here where I'm reminded of my Dad. Throughout the movie, Flint is trying to earn his Dad's respect. His Dad, Tim, played by James Caan, runs a bait shop and wants to have no part with Flint's crazy inventions.

In a small spoiler alert, Flint is trying to take out the food machine, but the computer program he's trying to use to destroy it gets wiped out, so he calls up his Dad to get a back up of the program and email it. This is simple enough for a novice, but Tim has never used a computer before.

Flint tells him to move the mouse to the top of the screen and click on a certain button. Tim moves the mouse, not on the desktop, but up on the screen itself. It's a very funny scene.

Where is reminds me of my Dad is that my Dad had never used a computer before until he was 61 or 62. His employer had been bought out and were trying to upgrade everyone's workspace and ways of doing things. This involved getting everyone trained on how to use the new computer software. Learning how to use a new software program is not exactly easy for a novice, but for a total beginner, it's probably damn near impossible.

Up until that point, my Dad, who bid on construction projects as part of his job, used good old fashion desktop calculators to get his figures that he needed. Apparently, that wasn't good enough for the new employers who wanted computer records of some sort. I guess my Dad's notes and calculator receipts weren't good enough for some reason.

Of course, I'm kidding. It's not unreasonable to have an employer expect that of their employees, but I think it was a bit much to ask my Dad.

I would have given anything to be in that classroom while my Dad was taking computer training.

Think about it. He had never had to turn one on. He had never touched a mouse before. He probably didn't know which button was the primary one. He probably didn't know how to open programs, find files, print documents, save files, delete files and various other computer activities that we all take for granted.

I remember asking him how it was going.

He had grumbled that it was useless, but that he was giving it a shot. He, of course, was confused and lost. He told me that one young guy next to him showed him a couple of shortcuts that the teacher hadn't shown him.

My Dad asked, "Why doesn't he teach it if it saves time?"

I'm not sure if my Dad understood that there are move than one ways to do things on a computer.

So to end this story, my Dad ended up retiring a few years later. I think I recall that he never did use the computer. He continued to use his calculator.

"What are they going to do? Fire me?" he asked me.

Smart Phone with a projector on it

2010-01-14T23:03:00.003-06:00

Laura and I saw a commercial tonight for a new LG phone. A guy walks into the break room and casually asks, "Hey, have you guys seen the new Avatar trailer?" Then he proceeds to whip out his phone and projects it on the wall with his phone that has a projector on it.

Laura asked, "Who in the hell would need a projector on their smart phone?"

I replied, "Someone that's trying to show off."

Reading Harry Potter books to Julia...

2010-01-13T00:35:00.002-06:00

I've been reading the Harry Potter books to Julia. She seems to really enjoy them. It took us over 6 months to get through the first one, mainly because I put it down and forgot to read it to her for months. We finally got around to finishing it a week or so ago. We then rented the movie, which she loved.

So I'm in the middle of the second book, The Chamber of Secrets and she keeps asking this every time I read and the character, Wood, says something.

Julia: "Who's Wood?"

Me: "He's the captain of the Griffindor Quidditch team. You ask me that every time he's mentioned."

To be fair, by the end of the series, there are over 100 characters to follow. I try to liven it up by using voices for different characters when I can. Julia says that she really likes that.

Saw A Christmas Carol in 3D with Julia with both of us bored with stomach aches...

2009-11-15T23:32:00.004-06:00

Now where was I? I haven't had much time to write this blog lately. I've had a pretty brutal release coming up and have been working late a lot.

Laura had to work today, which she normally doesn't do, so I decided that Julia and I should see a movie.

I had seen the trailers for the new movie, A Christmas Carol, and it looked decent. I was even thinking that I would see it when it came out since I love 3D movies, but decided against it once I read the tepid reviews. It's getting a 58 percent positive average rating on the website rottentomatoes.com, but some of the bad reviews highlight what I didn't like about it.

I had read words like 'lifeless' in the reviews and was scared about that so I decided not to see it. A Christmas Carol was never my favorite Christmas story. I only really liked the comedy versions of it like the movie "Scrooged". Also, I still fondly remember the HBO production of it with Rich Little playing almost all the parts. I'm sure it's awfully dated now, but it was pretty funny. In that version, Rich Little, the comedian, plays as W.C. Fields as Scrooge, Richard Nixon as Jacob Marley, Humphrey Bogart as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Peter Falk as Columbo as the Ghost of Christmas Present and Peter Sellers as Inspector Cluseau as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. What I remember most about it was his choice to play Tiny Tim as Truman Capote.

That special was in my mind as I was watching this movie today because I was wishing that I was seeing that one. I almost felt sorry to drag Julia to see it, but I thought she should at least see it to have a background in the play since it's a classic and often referenced in shows and pop culture.

The previews and even the movie trailer seemed to suggest that this is a modern retelling of A Christmas Carol with more comedy seeing as how Jim Carey plays the role of Scrooge, but that's not the case.

I could not believe how dark this movie was. It was so dark and quiet in the parts leading to Scrooge's ghostly visits that I was worried that they didn't have the projector bright enough. But then when things started to happen, it was all bright and noisy, which I guess was the point.

Robert Zemeckis wrote and directed this adaptation. Maybe Robert is manic depressive because that's how this movie feels. At some points, it's dark, gloomy, quiet and humorless. At other points, it's so loud and silly that you wonder if you're watching two movies. The movie also faithfully uses a lot of the lines of dialogue from the book, which made it hard to follow. I had to explain to Julia what some of the things meant as they really weren't explained well. Some parts felt rushed. Others took forever.

I was so disappointed that they didn't make a more humorous adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Since they didn't, I'm wondering why they even bothered making an animated movie about the story of Scrooge.

I asked Julia what she thought of the movie was and her response was that she liked it somewhere in the middle. It was okay for her, which is my sentiments, too.

One last thing, Robert Zemeckis committed what I think it his greatest sin from The Polar Express in that rather than have several talented people voice the different characters, he had Jim Carey and others voice several characters. Not only is Carey Scrooge, but he's all three ghosts of Christmas. It's pretty obvious during the ghost of Christmas Present sequence because he laughs a lot, which sounds exactly like Scrooge's laugh. It's distracting for me to hear that, just like it was to have Tom Hanks voice multiple characters in The Polar Express. It's a minor gripe, but that's just me.

My daughter is so much like my wife, it's scary...

2009-10-06T23:14:00.002-05:00

They say that the mother's curse is that you will have a child that will act just like you did when you were a child. In my case, there are a few things that Julia does that it totally me. Like my inability to get out of the door without a prolonged getting dressed process that involves me taking an insanely long amount of time to get ready.

Julia seems to have that ability in spades. The speed that this kid moves is scary in that now I know how my Mom and Dad must have felt to watch me move so slow. You don't know how often I have to restrain myself from vocally urging her to move faster. I end up taking a deep breath more often than not and then, after a few more moments of inaction, I'll vocally urge her to move it or lose it.

Laura goes nuts trying to get her ready because Julia is the exact opposite of her getting ready. She'll moan at Julia to hurry up and then point at me as if to say, "This is all your fault. She got this from you!"

Julia also has my love of all things electronic. She's a gamer. She started by just watching me play video games. She would sit there and watch me play the same game, Rayman 2, over and over. I got so good at the game that I could play it while watching TV.

Unlike me, she's a girl, but besides that she seems to be a mirror image of Laura not only for facial features, but with her attitude as well.

I think, if you've ever read my notes here, that I've mentioned that my wife, Laura, is rather direct and strong willed. She's not afraid to stand up for herself or vocalize her true feelings, which sometimes gets her in trouble. That happened a lot more in the past when she was all young and spirited. Now that she's older, she's mellowed a bit. Thank God... Just kidding, honey!

Laura say that Julia is learning bad road rage habits from me as I'll voice my displeasure at the various stupid people that cut me off or are being slow. I counter back to Laura that there have been many times when we'll be behind a slow person in a parking lot. I'll mutter, "Come on!" Julia will add, "Honk at him!"

Now I'll complain, but I never honk. "She didn't learn that from me!" I retort.

Laura smirks at this.

Recently, Julia went to play with a friend at the park. I told her to be back by sundown, but she walked through the door about 15 minutes later. She looked upset. I asked her what was wrong. Apparently, when they had gotten to the park, Julia's friend decided that she wanted to play another game with some other friends. Julia didn't like this. She's very much an alpha female when it comes to playing. She generally likes telling kids what she wants to do.

Julia vented about not wanting to play the game by adding, "I came over to the park to play with her. I didn't come to the park so she can play that stupid game with other kids. She needs to understand that!"

Suddenly, Julia had an idea, "I'm going to take Mommy with me to the park and we're going to tell her what's what!"

I had to work hard to not laugh. That reminded me a lot of Laura.

Saturday, we were at the mall. We at at the food court. Julia went to Burger King. I went to a Japanese grill. Laura got Taco Del Mar.

Julia and Laura had to wait a long time for Julia's dinner of chicken nuggets and fries. I was already starting to eat when they showed up. Laura left to go get her dinner while Julia ate hers.

Julia grabbed the bags and opened the kid's meal.

She looked inside and muttered, "Thanks a LOT lady! She dumped my fries all over the bottom of my bag!"

She sighed, shook her head and added, "That is NOT very nice."

I have heard many horror stories about Laura's teenage years. We feel that we are in for an entertaining teenager.

My daughter doesn't take checks...

2009-09-14T22:58:00.003-05:00

Julia gets paid on Sundays. We decided to give her an allowance a few years ago at an huge two dollars a week. I thought she'd scoff. She was thrilled! Then she was even more thrilled when I upped it last year to four dollars a week.

Her allowance is dependent on her doing chores and cleaning up after herself. On the weeks where she makes no attempt to clean, I tend to forget to pay her. If she remembers, I'll make her clean.

Yesterday, she had cleaned up a lot of toys and had even gone through some old ones to put into storage or to give away. Laura told me to pay her.

I looked in my wallet. All I had was a twenty dollar bill.

I said, "I can't pay you."

Julia's face sank.

"Unless you have change for a twenty?"

She shook her head.

"I could write you a check?" I asked.

I was kidding, of course. Being eight, she doesn't have a bank account. I'd have to cash it for her anyway, so it would be redundant to cash a check that I wrote in my credit union when I could just withdraw the money when I'm there.

Julia wrinkled her nose and said in a very serious voice, "I don't take checks."

"Oh, you don't?" I laughed.

"No. It's cash only. Or I'll take change, too."

She's young, but she has her priorities.

Laura was the main character in my crazy dream...

2009-09-07T23:26:00.003-05:00

The comedian Daniel Tosh said in his stand up CD "True Stories I Made", which by the way is highly recommended by me if you are not easily offended and can stand jokes that go on a stream of consciousness where you're not sure how you got to his end point.

Wait... I forgot to mention what he said. He said something like on whether or not it's possible to describe a dream without sounding mentally challenged.

I had one about Laura the other night that was so vivid that I actually remembered most of it. Usually, a lot of my dreams involve crazy action that never resolves itself. They seem so real and disturbing, but when I wake up, I realize that I can't remember what was so disturbing in the first place.

My dreams usually run through several incarnations.

- The 'tornado' dream - This type of dream happens a few times a month. In this dream, I or my family and I are stuck out in the middle of nowhere while tornadoes on every side of us/me are closing in. I/we take shelter, but usually in some place inappropriate like a basement with nothing but windows. The dream never resolves itself and I usually wake up anxious to get out of weather that isn't there. This particular dream started when I was a kid when my family and I would stay every summer weekend in a small trailer that was centered perfectly on both sides between the Platte river and the small lake in front of us. There was no tornado shelter, so if the weather hit the fan, there was no place to go. My dreams then usually ended with our dinky trailer getting picked up and chucked in either the river or the lake.

- The 'new location' dream - In this dream, I am in a mystery city living in a mystery house. In this dream, I'm usually by myself without my immediate family, although some people I know inhabit the dream.

- The 'I'm Rich!' dream - In this dream, I hit the jackpot! This is always followed by the crushing realization that I am not rich when I wake up. That sucks.

- The 'I'm getting fired!' dream - In this dream, I do something really stupid like steal from my employer, surf porn at work, or piss everyone off.

- The 'I'm naked' dream - Good God is this one frequent. It's not that I'm totally naked, just usually naked from the waist down. It's either at school or at work.

- The 'what the frak?' dream - A dream that defies all description and logic.

This dream I had the other night seemed like a 'what the frak?' dream, but it actually made a little sense.

So here's what happened. My wife, Laura, was planning a heist on a department store. For some reason, she chose to rob the Scheels sporting goods store. I'm not sure why she chose this, but it seemed to make sense to her. My brother, Bill, was also in on the heist.

Each day, we'd drive down to Scheels to stake it out. On the way, we'd pass a stretch of road where we'd see a cougar just walking along the road. Each time we saw the cougar, Laura would have me take the wheel and she'd get out her rifle (which she doesn't own, by the way) and start shooting rounds at the cougar. Each time, the cougar would scatter and so would all the people in the neighborhood.

I'd chastise Laura for this reckless behavior because 1. I'm pretty sure shooting a rifle in a crowded neighborhood is against the law and 2. it's not exactly being on the down low for staking out a robbery target if you're firing rifle shots on the way there.

Because of the constant firing of Laura's rifle, Bill and I decided that we needed to go in disguise. So of course, we decided that we would dress up as Jedis from Star Wars. I was dressed up as the Liam Neeson character from the God-awful Phantom Menace film.

One day, Laura hit the jackpot while on the way to our stake out. She saw the cougar again and decided to act. She pulled out the rifle and fired at the cougar, which was just about to pounce on a man and his child. The cougar dropped dead and the man thanked Laura profusely.

Because I had been worried about being caught, Laura had to rub it in.

"See?" she sneered. "I didn't get caught. The guy even thanked me for shooting it!"

It was right about this point in the dream where I decided that I couldn't go through with the heist. For one thing, I was worried about getting caught. If both of us went on this heist and we both got caught, who would watch Julia? Besides, why Scheels? Did they have a massive amount of cash on hand?

Laura was sure of the target because they didn't have security guards. I was thinking more of the security cameras and silent alarms.

I backed out. I told Laura that I couldn't do it.

She asked me, "What are you, a pussy?!"

That's about when I woke up.

Laura loved the dream by the way.

Hot Rod and Space Chimps...

2009-08-31T23:27:00.003-05:00

I just finished the movie starring Andy Sandberg called "Hot Rod". In the movie, a guy named, Rod, has always been trying to do stunts to emulate his deceased Dad, who used to set up stunts for Evel Kenieval. He rides around on his moped in a stunt suit wearing a fake mustache and generally fails at every jump he tries.

All that changes when his step-Dad, Frank, who Rod longs to beat the crap out of, is stricken with a heart defect diagnosis and needs a transplant, which the family can't afford. Rod resolves to do a big jump that even Evel couldn't do to raise money for the operation so he can get Frank better so he can kick his ass.

The premise is funnier than the movie. To be fair, it has some hilarious sequences that make little sense in a logical movie, but feel at home here. Like when he finds out that Frank is dying before he can kick his ass, he goes to his 'happy place' in the forest and proceeds to dance verbatim the Kevin Bacon construction site solo dance from Footloose. Things like that are sprinkled through this movie.

The movie stars Sissy Spasek as Rod's mother. Bill Hader and Danny McBride appear as his two buddies. Will Arnett plays a rich jerk that is dating Rod's secret crush, played by Isla Fisher of Wedding Crashers.

I was asking my brother, Bill, if he had seen this movie, but he had not.

"But I've seen Space Chimps!" he said, which also starred Andy Sandberg as the voice of the lead chimp whose grandfather had been the first chimp in space.

I laughed because Space Chimps is not awful, but it's really kind of embarrassing to watch. It had some definite potential, but it's as if they stopped trying halfway through and just tried to shove it out in time for Summer. Want proof? Rent the movie. You'll notice that the first part of the movie, which takes place in the space training camp for the chimps is fairly detailed and had some good jokes. Then there is the second part, which is set on a distant planet. It's one of the ugliest planets that I've ever seen. It's as if the programmers showed the pre-rendered version of the planet's surface and when told how long it would take to render with effects like textures, shading and what not, the producers on the film balked and told them to cut some corners. That is how ugly the planet looks.

The "villain", and I'm using that term very loosely here, is voiced by Jeff Daniels. Yes, that Jeff Daniels. He's hardly recognizable playing the incredibly annoying, effeminate and high-pitched alien, Zartog, who finds a piece of space equipment that made it to his planet and is using it to torture and terrorize the residents of the planet. All of whom look like squishy, shiny aliens crossed with gummy bears. The chimps make it through space and apparently the last bit of rendered graphics and make it to the ugly planet. Once there, they encounter a helpful glowing creature that screams a lot and looks like a running boob. And when I say a boob, I mean it looks like just that.

I saw this the first time at our really crappy dollar theater on West Center. I took Julia to it and was treated to a constant buzzing from the arcane speaker system. The movie looked like absolute crap because it was grainy and scratched from the constant showings. Turns out, DVD does it no justice. It looks bad...

Top Story: Chinese food befuddles old couple. News at 11.

2009-08-25T23:36:00.000-05:00

A new chain restaurant just opened in our neighborhood, Panda Express. When we first saw it being build, Laura thought that it would be a Wendy's because it had a Wendy's color and shape. Soon it had a sign up announcing the new Panda Express restaurant.

I had been meaning to try Panda Express, but I just hadn't had the right opportunity because Laura generally doesn't go for Chinese food and Julia has never tried it. So if I want it, I have to go and get it alone.

The other night provided a perfect opportunity for me to get it. Julia and I had been coming home from a school function, and Laura was at work, which provided me the opening I was waiting for.

I told Julia we'd get her meal at Burger King after I got mine, so we stopped at Panda Express first. The drive in wasn't working yet, so we had to run in. Immediately, it was as if I hit a brick wall decorated with indecisive old people.

There was a couple there that appeared to be in their early 60s or late 50s. Either way, it was clear from the start that they had never ever set foot in a Chinese restaurant before. The woman behind the glass was explaining the process which is simple enough. If you order a 2 dish entree, you choose one of four "sides", which include fried rice, steamed rice, noodles and something else. Then you choose two of the main dishes to go with it.

They were startled by the myriad of choices in that they had never seen any of these dishes before. The next several minutes consisted of one or both asking, "What is this?" or "What does this taste like?" Pretty much any and all dishes had to be explained to the couple. I tried not to look at them. Instead, I was just looking slightly up and sometimes back at the menu board.

I looked down at Julia, who was clinging to my leg and placing her head on my stomach in utter boredom. She said, "Let's go!" in a whisper.

I explained that I still hadn't ordered and that she was just going to have to be patient.

It was at this moment that the wife turned and said to me, "I'm sorry that you have to wait for us."

I smiled and lied, "Oh, it's no bother."

Finally, they had decided that they were going to get started, but soon enough, there was a snag. The wife had just told the woman behind the glass that she wanted rice for her side. Just as she was scooping up steamed rice and placing it on her plate, the husband asked incredulously, "Since when is rice considered a side?"

Now I can understand maybe why he was confused. To be fair, their use of the term 'side' is more like calling it the bed of the dish. It's generally what the Chinese food rests on in most restaurants.

Finally, they started to get going, but when I finally got my say in my first side, I had hit another snag. The couple was stuck in the second half of the food tables. They again started to ask what every dish was like, what crab rangoon was, and what egg rolls were.

Julia at this point was about to exit this world from boredom that was fatal. Again she asked to leave and again I had to remind her that I had not yet gotten my food. She sighed and moaned, "I'm so hungry!"

"Well, if you only ate Chinese food, we'd be in the right place."

I got to go around the couple since they were holding up the whole line. I paid and motioned for Julia to come.

"Finally!" Julia exclaimed.

Watched 'Zach and Miri Make a..."

2009-08-20T23:05:00.004-05:00

I just watched the newest Kevin Smith film called Zach and Miri Make a Prono. I'm purposely misspelling the title so it doesn't get stopped by internet filters. A lot of chain stores stocked it with just the title of 'Zach and Miri', which is shown above.

Kevin Smith is the guy who directed Clerks, Mallrats (loved it), Chasing Amy (meh), Dogma (loved), Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (loved) and Clerks II (very good).

His movies are generally dialogue driven with a lot of character back and forth. Usually, there's a lot of cursing and a lot of vulgar discussions. In Zach and Miri, Zach, played by Seth Rogan, and Miri, played by Elizabeth Banks, are two friends who, on the eve of their high school reunion (in the middle of winter for some reason), find their utilities turned off. In danger of getting thrown in the poor house and realizing that they haven't done anything of value, Zach gets the bright idea to shoot an adult movie to pay off their debts due to the fact that all the people they went to high school would probably buy it.

They scrap together a coffee shop co-worker as the producer, a hockey goalie as the camera man, and get some enthusiastic locals to be in the picture with them. The original idea is a Star Wars rip-off, but bad luck occurs the night before shooting and they are forced to shoot in the coffee shop.

The main conflict in the movie is 'Are Zach and Miri going to follow through on their love scene?' and 'Will it ruin their friendship?'

It has some big laughs here and there, but I would only recommend it to people that are not offended by some very raunchy humor in places.

Water world

2009-08-15T22:59:00.000-05:00

Water World in Denver was pretty fun. It's the largest water park in the country and features many speed slides and raft rides.

On the web site for Water World, you could rent a cabana for the day. The cabana has a table and chairs, free wi-fi internet if you have a laptop, a cooler with ice and two sun chairs.

Laura insisted, for her sanity since she hates crowds, that we rent one. For an extra 99 dollars, you could also get the deluxe cabana purchase, which included 5 rental tubes, a fan, some meals, 10 drinks and various other things. I crunched the numbers and opted not to get the deluxe cabana since you are allowed to bring your own drinks in as long as they are sealed, so that was covered. I then checked the prices of the food stands next to the cabanas and they weren't that expensive either.

When we got there, we were met at our cabana by 'Bill' and 'Ted', our cabana boys. 'Bill' was our main cabana boy, but 'Ted' was tagging along until 2 in the afternoon. It was immediately funny to us that they both looked like unshaven stoners, which was quite the contrast from the rest of the staff, which were shaven at least.

'Bill' told us the basics of the cabana, which wasn't much, and handed us a "menu" of five items.

He said in a stoner droll, "You can order these off the menu, and I'll bring them to you. Or... you can just walk over there (points at the food stands across the way) and get it yourself for a lot cheaper."

We opted to walk across and get it ourselves.

Laura spent some time sunning herself and reading while Julia and I did some rides and reported that she was quite entertained by 'Bill' and 'Ted' walking by periodically to check on the cabanas.

The first slide we went on was just up the hill from us. It was a pretty conventional slide that was fairly tall with several hills. I went down first. I was moving so fast by the time I hit the home stretch toward the bottom that I was literally afraid I wasn't going to slow down in time before I ran out of room at the end. Thankfully, it did.

I got up to watch Julia's plummet and kind of laughing to myself about it. She was NOT going to like this.

She slid down. I could tell that she was trying to slow down because she had her legs spread wide. She got to the bottom, got up and said, "I am never going on that again! It's so scary!"

So for the rest of the day, Julia, Laura and I settled for rides that were fairly benign. Usually, they involved getting a small inner tube and going down a fairly speedy twisting and turning water track. We went on those quite a few times.

The first time we went on a tube ride like that, we didn't know which way to start from. We thought we saw where to go, but when we got to where the ride started, we saw no inner tubes. Instead, we saw a kid standing under a sun shade guarding some red inner tubes. We didn't see any other people walking toward the ride with red tubes. They were carrying tan inner tubes.

I asked the girl there, "What are these tubes for?"

"These are our valet inner tubes. You get a wrist band when you buy the valet service and you don't have to carry a tube up the hill."

"How much does that cost?" I asked.

"22 dollars."

Ouch.

Most people looked like they opted to save the money and just carry up the inner tubes.

This wasn't as easy as it looked.

We walked back down to the start of the line, if there was one, and picked up an inner tube. It was fairly heavy. I consider myself decently strong, and yet I was having a hard time carrying these things up the hills. A lot of the time, it was just me and Julia. Considering Julia is only 8 years old, I didn't get a lot of help out of her. I started to sing slavery songs as I was carrying the tubes up the hills to get to the top of the ride.

I started to think that they were wasting some good free labor at Water World. They could stop people who were walking up the hill anyway and make they carry something else up to the top.

By the end of the day, I thought my calves were going to fall off. For days, the very act of walking became an ordeal. I thought I was going to scream every time I stood up.

Julia really enjoyed Water World. She especially liked a ride called "Lost River of the Pharoahs", which was a multi-person raft ride in the dark with all sorts of ancient Egyptian-like effects and decorations. We also liked one called "Voyage to the Center of the Earth" which has the story of a construction crew accidentally poking a hole in a big warp in the Earth's crust that leads to dinosaurs. It had some decent thrills, especially when the strobe lights hit and I couldn't tell which way we were sliding.

One of the things we tried was "The Wave" which was a dual 30 mile per hour wave pool that simulated surfing on a body board. I saw some people trying it and it didn't look that hard to me.

You take one of the body boards and you kind of fall into the wave from the top. You can either enter on your stomach or you can enter on your knees. I chose to enter on my knees. The next thing I knew, I had flipped over and was thrown around the wave to the end. I felt like my body had been twisted in several different directions.

I got up, pulled the wedgie out of my bottom and looked up to see Laura laughing her head off at me. Even Julia was laughing at me.

I decided though, that I wanted to try it again. I walked back with the body board to the top of the wave and the life guard said to me, "This time, I think you're going to want to lay on your stomach."

"Thanks," I muttered.

I managed to get through this try without wiping out.

Later, Julia said that she wanted to try it. She was pretty nervous trying it out. A few of the surfers who had basically camped out there all day were giving her tips. One man was telling her to hold onto the sides tight. Some teenage girls near the ride were yelling encouragements of "You go girl!" and "You can do it!"

Julia fell into the wave on her stomach and managed to get ride the wave without wiping out.

The teenage girls cheered for her. Julia was excited that not only had she made it without wiping out, but she also loved that the girls cheered for her.

Before we left that day, we all applied sun screen. I had urged everyone to put it on every 90 minutes or so, which Julia and I did. Laura, on the other hand, refused because she wanted to get some sun.

I tried to reason with her because we go through this all the time. Laura has very fair skin, and it doesn't take much sun for her to turn from shiny whiteness to shiny redness befitting a boiled lobster.

When she refused to put on the sunscreen, I said, "Here's how this is going to end. 'I hurrrrt! Owww! Rub some Aloe on me!'"

I mimicked Laura every time she gets too burned. It looks bad when she finally gets out of the sun and then it starts to get worse and worse as it reddens even more and then gets blisters on part of the skin, which I'm sure is very healthy for her.

When we left Water World, it was with this same problem. We got back to the hotel and Laura felt sick. It was as if she had a fever. She had the chills, but at the same time felt hot and begged me not to turn off the air conditioner.

I kept saying to her, "Gee, who was it that was predicting this was going to happen? Oh yeah, it was me!"

"Shut up!" she moaned.

I didn't escape unscathed, either. I had some mysterious rashes in several private places. There were the two long red rash streaks on my inner thighs from all the walking. Also, there were squared shaped scabs from where my mesh-lined shorts had constricted. It looked like I had been punched in the trunk by someone I was so bruised. To top it off, my back was burned. I didn't think I was burned because of my front, but when I took a shower, I felt the burn.

The day ended on kind of sad note, though. A man drowned in the large wave pool that Julia and I had swam in several times that day, which was right in front of the cabana area.

I had walked over to the locker room at 5:30 to change close before the park closed at 6 pm. As I walked out of the locker room, there were medical personnel running around and lifeguards were ushering people away from the wave pool area. I walked around the area to get back to the cabana and noticed that there were people huddled around the other side of the pool from our cabana. Laura informed me that while I was in the locker room, the lifeguards had pulled a man out of the water. She said the man's face was gray and when they turned him on his side, water and foam oozed out of his mouth. They performed CPR on him for a long while before the ambulance took him away. We found out a few days later in the paper and on several Colorado news web sites that the man had died.

Watched the Ruins....

2009-08-13T00:17:00.003-05:00

Maybe I'm just jaded. Maybe I'm just so desensitized with horror films that I just can't get scared anymore. There are exceptions to that rule, of course. I remember seeing the Ring and getting freaked out. The first Grudge picture had some moments. I do remember getting so freaked out by the movie Witchboard when I was in college that I had to turn on every light in the house until someone finally came home. The Exorcist really freaked me out because it gave me the impression that I could fall asleep one night and wake up possessed. The Amityville Horror kind of freaked me out because I kept expecting to see lights go on by themselves and voices yelling at me to get out. The getting-shot-in-your-sleep way of dying shown in the movie freaked me out. I think I have a phobia about things happening to you while you sleep.

I'm not really sure what The Ruins had in mind in terms of scares, though. The film starts with some pretty people (Note to Hollywood. Enough with the pretty people in these films! I find myself hoping they die after enduring their spoiled-kid acting. Also, let's not make them so spoiled.) There are two women, the pretty blond and the kind of complaining, slightly nerdy brunette. The two guys can be narrowed down to the guy who wants to be a doctor and the guy with the beard. They meet a German guy, who suggests they all go on this hike to meet up with his brother, who was checking out some Mayan ruins. He hadn't heard from him in a few days. Spoilers are ahead, but you probably won't care.

So of course, they go to the Ruins. This is part of the problem. It's supposed to look like it's in the middle of a remote part of the jungle, but instead, it looks like it's right behind a well-traveled road. They get to the ruins, which looks like a small pyramid covered with vegetation. The brunette starts snapping pictures while everyone starts arguing with a local that's yelling at them. Anybody with a brain would be able to tell that he's trying to get them away from the ruins, but they get closer until the brunette steps on some vines. Then guns are drawn, their guide is shot and they are forced up the ruins.

Up top, they find the camping gear of the German guy's brother and his friends, but no one is there. They hear what sounds like a cell phone that sounds like the German guy's brother's cell phone. They hoist the German guy down a rope, but it snaps half-way down. The blond is sent down to get him since the rope crank takes two strong guys to turn. She has to jump the last 8 feet, but ends up hurting her knee. They get the German guy up on a makeshift gurney with the help of the brunette. The two women look for the cell phone sound. To their surprise, it's not a cell phone at all! It's the flowers mimicking the cell phone! The vines start to lash at them. They run out and get hoisted up to the top while killer vines try to grab them.

Long story short, they all die one by one as the killer vines prey on open wounds and panicky actions. The blond gets vines in her body from her leg wound, which drives her crazy to the point where she's cutting herself to get them out. The German guy gets his legs cut off by the would-be doctor in the only shocking scene in order to save his life since the legs were infected. All for naught though as the vines drag him away soon after, the guy with the beard pipes up, "Good thing we cut off his legs."

That's just what I was thinking.

All the while, they are held at bay by the locals that won't let them leave because they are keeping them quarantined since they've touched the vines. But as I was watching this go on, I kept thinking, "Well, I only see them guarding the one side. Why don't they try to leave on another side?"

I had to stop watching when Julia walked in after playing outside (didn't want to freak her out). Even though the movie up to this point was lame, I had to see how it ended. I saw the ending and thought, "Well, that was stupid."

This brings me to some quick rules of thumb for college kids/young couples in movies.

1. If you are in a foreign country or strange city, odds are pretty good that you will die.
2. If someone offers to take you or suggests you visit some exotic locale that's off the beaten path, turn it down because you will die.
3. If you're at this locale and people start disappearing, don't wait. Freaking run!

There is a new movie out this past weekend called "A Perfect Getaway" about a young couple that's on their honeymoon. They, of course, are hiking in a remote part of Hawaii. The movie description says this: "But when the pair comes across a group of frightened hikers discussing the horrifying murder of another newlywed couple on the islands, they begin to question whether they should turn back."

You think? They need to study my rules above.

The Denver Trip - Part 2 - Casa Bonita

2009-08-09T22:50:00.000-05:00

I just realized I need to finish by recollections on my trip to Denver.

When we got into Denver two weeks ago, we stayed at a Marriott hotel that specialized in 'suites'. That is, every room had a "kitchen" nook and a couch with a pull-out bed. It was relatively inexpensive considering the other options.

When we got there, we noticed that there were quite a few Nebraska license plates in the parking lot. Turns out, there were a bunch of 14/15 year-old kids there playing baseball. They were all from Millard, which is where we live.

The first night there, we went to the Casa Bonita, a themed restaurant that takes all the charm of cafeteria food and combines it with a theme that can only be described as Mexico if it were in an underground cave.

I went there when I was a kid and didn't remember much about it except for a few things.

1. A long line to get our food. It wasn't exactly super long, but when you're a kid, every thing is magnified. When we got there, we got in a long line and were handed paper menus. When we finally turned a corner, it was to tell the cashier our order and then we followed another line. We get cafeteria trays and are handed random plates by workers from the "kitchen". We then took them to our table.

2. Black Bart's Cave. They have an attraction that's a haunted cave. It's not really scary, but it's filled with lights, buzzers and other things that cause a commotion. Casa Bonita was featured in an episode of South Park and when Cartman, the fat kid, walked through Black Bart's Cave, he went, "Ooooh! Scary!" This is what Laura and I said before we went into the cave. Right away, after we had passed a skull on the wall, a loud scream erupted and the skull lit up. Julia wanted to leave right now, but we couldn't as there were people behind us. She clung to me as we walked through the cave. When we got out, Julia said, "That was really scary!"

3. Hot salsa and refried beans. I think Casa Bonita was where I first tried refried beans. It was not unpleasant. I had never had them before and I liked them. The salsa, on the other hand, was a wake up call. I had never tried it before and it was like a volcano erupted in my mouth. I was in pain and I think it scared me off salsa for years. Julia stuck to her tried and true chicken strips and fries. We did get her to try a sopapia. though.

4. Cliff divers. I vaguely remember this from my visit. Every 15 minutes, they have a mini show where someone or some people will dive off the man-made cliff, have a gunfight, juggle fire torches and various other scenarios. This visit involved elaborate scenarios of pirates kidnapping damsels or a good guy/bad buy shootout. All non-cliff diving segments seemed to end in someone diving off the cliff. Even the fire juggling had diving in it. When I was there, all I remember was some guy in a speedo diving in the water. That was it. This visit had a lot of audience participation. Julia loved the shows.

5. Posing for a wanted poster. They have a mini jail where you can pose for photos in which you are part of a wanted gang from the old west. All of us kids had posed for this picture when we visited, but the photo is lost to the ages. We had fully intended to do this with Julia, but the photo was $12.50. We didn't think it was worth it. The jail wasn't big at all and it didn't look as impressive as I remembered it.

The problem with going to Casa Bonita on the first night was that Julia was so enamored by the restaurant, which she called, 'The coolest restaurant ever!' was that she wanted to go back every night. We insisted to her dismay that it was going to be the same thing every night and that it was too expensive to go again. She grumbled at this, but she lived.

http://www.casabonitadenver.com/index.htm

Julia gets a job and wants to quit it...

2009-08-04T23:46:00.002-05:00

For Julia's birthday, we gave her a Nintendo DS. It was either buy her a few presents like we always do that total up to that amount or buy her a DS.

I noticed that she always seemed to be playing the neighbor kid's DS when we'd pick her up after school. We borrowed one for on the way to Denver and it kept Julia engrossed for the most part.

We gave her a pink DS with two used games and one new one, which is called Animal Crossing. There is an Animal Crossing game on the Nintendo Gamecube that she really liked. In that game, you create a character who moves to a new town. You choose gender, too. In Julia's game, she moved into a house and set out to live. In the original game, you could dig holes in the ground to find items, get a job to earn money, pay off a mortgage, send letters, design clothes, catch insects for a museum, catch fish to earn money and many other activities.

The DS Animal Crossing is a bigger game with more to do. Julia moved into a house and then had to get a job to pay off her mortgage when she decided to build a second floor.

She took a job at the local store run by an animal named, Tom Nook.

Julia asked me a few times how to quit the job, but I wasn't sure.

Then she suddenly burst out a while later, "Now he wants me to TALK to the customers?! Augh! I'm going to quit this job!"

Laura and I had to laugh at that. She's learning a good life lesson. Work can certainly suck.

I want to go home...

2009-08-01T00:23:00.002-05:00

Julia likes to sit up at my work cubicle and play on my computer (my personal laptop) while I work. She's always wanted to do this. I think that she thinks that she's working like me because by the casual observer, it looks like I'm just surfing web pages when I'm actually running QA tests.

I've brought her up for the last several years every now and then. Thursday, I brought her up after lunch because I had some work to do and Thursday isn't her usual day at the summer day camp.

After about two hours of working, Julia taps me and asks me to read the board.

I turn around to read on my white board: "I want to go HOME! RIGHT NOW! I'm bored."

Steven King gets a new neighbor...

2009-08-01T00:00:00.002-05:00

The Denver Trip - Part one, The ride out there

2009-07-26T21:10:00.001-05:00

We weren't really going to take a vacation this year, but we had an opportunity to take a short vacation relatively cheaply. So we decided to drive out to Denver for a few days to do several things: go to Casa Banitas, go to the Water World amusement park, go to the Rocky Mountain National Park and go to the Denver Natural History Museum.

Laura was afraid that Julia would be impatient in the car, so it was decided to split up the trip into three legs.

Leg one was to drive from Omaha to Kearney and stay the night, which we did.

Leg two was setting out for Imperial, Nebraska.

Imperial is where Laura grew up from second grade on. She has said on many occasions that she really loved growing up in a small town and misses it a lot. She has also said that she would move back there in a heartbeat if she thought we'd both be able to live there with jobs. I, on the other hand, am very ambivalent about moving to the middle of BFE.

I grew up in Grand Island, which isn't exactly the mecca of awesomeness, but it did have a lot to do. It had seven screens of movies. There were two malls, a roller skating rink, many parks, an arcade, bowling alleys, and many more things to do.

I've been to Imperial before and not to knock it, there wasn't much to do. I'm sure if I had grown up there I'd be fine with that. But I didn't, so I'm biased.

Laura had me take pictures of the fields as we were approaching Imperial. She said she missed the scenery.

As we got closer to Imperial, I mentioned to Julia that her Mom said that she'd love to move back to Imperial.

Julia looked a little dubious at this.

"Does it have a Burger King?"

"No," Laura said.

"Does it have a Target?"

"No," Laura said.

"Does it have a Walgreens?"

"No," Laura said.

"Does it have a Walmart?"

"No," Laura said.

"Does it have anything?!" Julia exclaimed.

Laura laughed, "Yes! It has a Subway and a Pizza Hut."

Julia still looked a little dubious. I thought about giving her the impression that we were going to move there, but didn't want to scar her.

We stopped and ate at a local eatery that was pretty good.

Laura warned me not to post this on Facebook because a lot of Imperial people are on Facebook. My feeling on this is that it's not my fault that she and others lived in a town that was so soul-crushing boring that they're that sensitive about it. Just kidding!

As I mentioned before, Grand Island isn't exactly good time central. It's all based on what you're used to and what you missed. I regularly mock my home town.

I wouldn't exactly be against moving there if we had that rare opportunity to do so, but I've said only on the condition that we have a big acreage with plenty of room to do stuff on. Not sure how realistic that would be.

The third leg was to drive from Imperial to Denver, which wasn't as easy as it sounded. Julia and I finally had to prod Laura away from Imperial. We were very impatient to get back on the road and get to Denver.

Paper Chase - What Should We Do With Your Body? (The Lightning)

2009-07-17T00:17:00.001-05:00

New song by one of my favorite bands, The Paper Chase, who make music so weird that you'll either love them or hate them beyond belief. The album is supposedly about natural disasters, so keep that in mind when listening to this song with is subtitled, the Lightning.

http://www.thepaperchaseband.com/WhatShouldWeDoWithYourBody_TheLightning.mp3

Harold Ramos talks about Ghostbusters 3...

2009-07-15T23:13:00.000-05:00

http://makingof.com/filming_now/media/ghostbusters-3/harold-ramis-on-ghostbusters-3/63/231

Recent movies I saw...

2009-07-14T01:50:00.003-05:00

Last week, I watched a movie called The Room. If you've never seen it, you're really missing out. It's one of those movies that is so bad that it's good. It's kind of gained a cult following for the midnight movie crowds. Kind of like the Rocky Horror movie set, people talk to the screen, throw things and dress up like characters from the movie.

The Room centers around a man named Johnny who seems to have everything. He's a "banker", which he mentions a lot. He has a "beautiful" girlfriend, which is mentioned a lot. He has a pseudo-son that he's putting through school. Everyone seems to like him. Then without warning, his girlfriend Lisa decides that he's too boring, even though she never seems to leave the apartment they live in, and starts sleeping with his best friend, Mark. You know Mark is his best friend because he says it all the time. Lisa's in the "computer" business because that's what she says even though she doesn't seem to own one. People come and go at odd times and some characters are never introduced. The football is tossed several times and not in the 'go deep' kind of way, but in a 'let's-stand-five-feet-from-each-other' way.

I recently got the Riff Trax audio for The Room. Riff Trax is a commentary joke track you can add to DVDs to watch alongside the actual movie. It's pretty funny.

I also watched, Choke, a movie based on a Chuck Palaniuk book. He's the author of Fight Club, which is one of my favorite movies. It stars Sam Rockwell, who you might have seen as Guy, the extra crew member in Galaxy Quest. Choke concerns a man who is a sex addict and funds his psychotic mother's nursing home stay with money from people who have saved his life. He deliberately shoves food down his throat so a kind-hearted stranger will save him. They in turn give him money every now and then because it makes them feel good. He also works at a real-life colonial villager that's like a living museum.

I really wanted to like this movie more, but it's not that funny. I wouldn't recommend it unless you really really liked Fight Club.

Lastly, we saw the movie Public Enemies last week. It's directed by Michael Mann, who directed, Heat, Hancock, the Aviator and other bigger than life films.

Johnny Depp stars as John Dillinger, the notorious bank robber. Depp plays him very well as a low-key, muted gangster with a swagger. From what I've read, this is like how Dillinger was as he'd blend into crowds due to his not-so-unique features. Christian Bale plays the man that's tasked with bringing down Dillinger. Bale does a decent job with what he's given.

The movie was pretty good. It had good action scenes, but the movie gets run down by the slow scenes in between. Near the end, I forgot who one major character was supposed to be, so I had to ask Laura to remind me. That's not a good sign. It's a fine picture if you like seeing films about the Great Depression era. Otherwise, I'd probably stay away.

Metric - Sick Muse

2009-07-14T00:40:00.001-05:00

Good song by the band, Metric. Kind of Garbage-like, which is obvious, but I think they have their own style.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEz8N8AT-yo

2012: It's a Disaster!

2009-07-13T01:41:00.001-05:00

This is someone's response to the 2012 movie trailer that I posted a while ago. It's as if it's a 70's disaster movie!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW2qxFkcLM0&feature=player_embedded

My secret shame...

2009-07-12T08:00:00.001-05:00

When I worked at my last job, which was a suit-and-tie place that had really strict rules, I had an incident that I always refer to as 'My Secret Shame'.

When I got laid off from my dot com job, I basically had to take any job that I could get. The SATP (suit-and-tie place) was my only option. I went from a place where you could not only wear what you wanted, but you could pretty do much anything as long as your job was getting done. We would even play touch football in the courtyard every day.

At SATP, I had to deal with a litany of rules that would make any military academy proud. You were supposed to be at your desk by 8 am and you couldn't leave any time before 5 pm. You couldn't have food or drink at your desk. You had to keep chit chat to a minimum. You couldn't walk on the grass. You couldn't lean against any walls. There were no microwaves or refrigerators, so you had to either bring a cold lunch or leave for lunch.

My friend from the dot com place, let's call him Hank, also got a job at SATP.

Lunch was a problem for us. Eating your lunch at your desk was not doable at all. The closest I had ever gotten to eating lunch at my desk was casually reaching into my bag to pull a chip out of my ziplock bag full of chips. Then I would try to silently as possible munch on the chip.

Because we were bored and because we had nothing better to do during lunch, we started eating lunch at Hank's house. Hank lived fairly close by, so it was pretty convenient.

Sometimes we'd sit and eat and talk. Other times, we'd surf the Internet for something we both were interested in. We even had a short-lived attempt at playing a collectible card game of a famous cult television show. After several boring attempts at trying to play a game, we decided that it just wasn't our thing.

One day, Hank mentioned that he had a game that we could play. It was a game that he and his friends used to play years ago, but they all kind of stopped playing it and they gave him all of the cards. He said that he would divide the cards up into 'packs' and we could all start building decks to play.

The game was the collectible card game, Shadowfist. Just to brief you, collectible card games are games in which you have a basic deck of cards, but then you are encouraged to buy booster packs to fill you deck with better cards. Think of it was boosting up a regular deck of cards with super jokers and wild kings.

Now my only exposure to collectible card games was the game of Magic: The Gathering. During the summer when I was in college, I would hang out at some friend's house and him and his roommates would play it. I attempted to play a game with them with one of their decks, but all I knew was that I didn't understand it and I got my ass kicked.

Magic was played with an array of cards that allowed players to generate magic, or mana, and then attack their enemies with a variety of magic creatures.

Shadowfist is of a similar nature. Let me try to explain it simply. In Shadowfist, you lay out sites to generate power. Think of it as a power plant that generates a piece of power every turn. From there you bring out characters and attack your enemy's site to take control of it. After you take control of 5 sites you win the game.

That's basically it... Well, you can bring out many characters to attack other characters. Or you can defend your sites with your characters. Or you can join in attacks when someone else attacks. When a site is taken it is burned for victory... Or burned in general... Or burned for power... You can also put out non-character cards like Edges, which grant special powers. Or you can play events, which can perform a certain one-time action like removing a player from play. Or you can put weapons on characters.

So once a player starts attacking you can defend with your character, or someone else can defend you... or you can play an event card to stop the attack... or you can use your sites to send the attack to another target... Did I mention that sites do more than just generate power? Well, they can...

Sites can generate power, cause damage, absorb damage, cancel events, cancel characters... basically anything!

So the game was difficult to learn. The instruction booklet was over 100 pages long in and of itself.

We started collecting cards and playing the games at Hank's house from that day on. There in lay a problem: Hank's house.

Hank's house was not exactly a mess, but it was not immaculate. It looked like a house lived in by people that do a lot of activities. The whole family had a lot of activities which left them little time to clean. Because of this, it was Hank's job to make sure that the trash was taken out and the dining room/living room/kitchen area was clean. Seeing as how Hank was a guy who did not dress that neat (neither did I), the house was usually in a state of disarray.

When we'd come to play, we all took turns microwaving our dinners in Hank's kitchen. Usually, there were dirty dishes in the sink and on the counter. To combat cleaning a lot, Hank had resorted to buying a lot of bulk plastic silverware. The household seemed to have no formal silverware of any kind and if it did, it was hidden.

Also seeing as how the trash can was usually overflowing, us stuffing our dinners into it left an even larger heap that I'm sure didn't look too good when his wife came home.

So every day, we'd hang out at Hank's house playing Shadowfist. Most games took several days, so we resorted to putting our cards on pieces of cardboard so we could just pick them up and put them out of the way so we could start where we left off from the last game.

This system seemed to work out just fine until someone, that person being me, ruined it all.

One day, Hank's wife was home during lunch. One of the guys said something like, "Don't mind us. We won't make a mess."

Then I said something that was meant as a slam on Hank, but it didn't come out that way.

"Yeah, if we really wanted to shock you, we'd clean up the place."

As soon as I said it, I knew it was the wrong thing to say.

"Whoa!" someone piped up.

"I'm sorry," I said quickly. "I meant it as a slam on Hank, who is supposed to clean. Sorry."

The damage was done. The next day, Hank informed us that we could not play at his house anymore. So we resorted to playing in the break room at SATP, which wasn't ideal, but it was better than nothing.

Things were going along fine until I got busted for playing the game by Laura.

Now Laura is certainly prone to geek tendencies. She loved the X-Files and even watches Heroes and Fringe, but she also seems to think that she's above geeky things.

After the incident below happened, Laura said almost sadly, "I didn't know you were such a geek. What happened?"

When I got busted for playing Shadowfist, there was no talking my way out of it. I was busted worse than the VCR Bill and I bought in junior high for an ungodly $330 back in the mid-80s. We had just bought this VCR and was fiddling with it on the shelf when it flipped over and smashed to the ground. Oh sure, the VCR still worked, but the front was now cracked and the auto-eject window didn't flip up when a tape tried to eject. You'd have to put your finger into the slot, flip the window up and grab the tape in one sweeping motion. It still played, but you never looked at it the same way again.

That must be how my wife saw me that day...

This incident occurred when Julia was just a toddler. Like most toddlers, Julia was into everything. She'd pull stuff off of tables, counters, couches, you name it. It was annoying, but you just got used to putting everything away. I guess I didn't realize that my work bag would be a target to incriminate me, but it did.

Julia was playing on the floor and was pulling things out of the side pockets. She had reached into one of them and had pulled out a metal Band-aid container. Julia opened the lid and pulled a card out of the container.

My wife strolled over and asked, "What do you have here, Julia?"

Laura took a look at it and her eyes got wide. She screamed at me, "OH MY GOD! ARE YOU PLAYING MAGIC!?"

I was busted, but it wasn't Magic the Gathering card game that I was playing. Just as geeky, but not Magic.

So as if I was having to explain to my wife that I was living a secret life as a con artist. I tried to explain why we played the game, but apparently, 'We were bored' wasn't a convincing argument.

I also tried to explain that I've always had these geeky tendencies, but when she started dating me, I was full on into my trying to be cool phase. I was trying to grow my hair out, trying to work out and just in general trying to be a cooler guy than I actually am. I also pointed out to her that when I first met her, she loved alternative music. I thought I was starting to date a full on alterna-chick. Of course, now she listens to country music a lot, a music for which I have a huge disdain for.

She couldn't let it go.

"This is really worrying me. I mean, you really are freaking me out right now," Laura calmly said.

"Would it help if I started to put up pictures of women in bikinis on my wall and computer desktop?" I retorted.

"It might," Laura said.

In the end, we compromised. Laura demanded that I get rid of the Shadowfist cards, and I agreed to keep them out of her sight and pretend that I had gotten rid of them. I put them all in a box that was hidden in our crawl space, which she'd find if she only would open the crawl space, which she never did, and reached for a box just to the side of the door, which I knew she wouldn't.

That night my secret was discovered, however, we had company coming over. My friend, Jeff, and his wife were coming over.

"You're not going to tell Jeff about this are you?" I asked.

"Hell, yes I'm going to tell him about this," Laura exclaimed.

"You better not! I'll never hear the end of it!"

"Oh, all right. I won't tell him," Laura said.

Cut to later that night when Jeff and his wife were over. Barely 30 minutes went by when Laura said, "Oh. Wait until you hear what I caught Bob doing?!"

"You promised!" I exclaimed.

She proceeded to tell them the whole sordid story. I guess promises aren't easily kept.

So to end this story, I promised Laura that I would give the cards back to my friend, which I didn't, and stop playing the game, which I didn't.

What's funny is that I may end up playing another collectible card game because now Julia is into Pokemon cards, which baffled me at first because I couldn't believe they were still around. Julia and her friends don't play the game, though. They just look at them. Weird...

Minesweeper: The Movie

2009-07-12T01:29:00.002-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs&feature=player_embedded

My devious Harry Potter plan

2009-07-09T23:34:00.001-05:00

I'm a fan of the Harry Potter books. I was a late comer to the book series when I started reading them after the fourth one was already out. I was skeptical at first, but got drawn in to the world. I finished the first book in a day. Then I devoured the next 3 books in just a few weeks.

They're for children, of course, but considering their length, they have some definite appeal to adults. The plots in some of the books are very involved. Sure the author, J K Rowling, tends to fall back on the familiar outline of Harry is unhappy before school starts, school starts and something weird happens, and then the plot is resolved right about the end of the school year. You can be sure that certain characters will be mean and some will be his friends. By the end of the series, J K Rowling had introduced a mountain of characters, most of which she manages to carry through to the final book. While the books are for kids, there are deaths in pretty much every book. There is suspense and some scares.

In addition to reading all the books, I've also listened to all the audio books, which includes the UK versions. The US versions are narrated by Jim Dale, who has done a lot of voice over work for TV and movies here. Most recently, he was the narrator for Pushing Daisies. He does a pretty good job. While he's good at varying his voice, some of his character voices are rather grating. Voldemort sounds too whiny and hissy. Hagrid sounds like he's a rejected pirate. Draco Malfo is supposed to talk in a drawl, but he's too drawly (if that's a word). Stephen Fry does the narration for the UK versions and he's very good. Pretty much every character sounds like you'd think they should. It's a personal preference for the most part and I prefer the UK versions.

Harry Potter world is going to be opening next year in Orlando and in anticipation of that, I've decided that I'm going to read the books to Julia. I think she thought they were too old for her, but then I pointed to the sign at the bookstore. They were in a section that said "Ages 7-12".

My devious plan is to get her hooked on the books, so that she and I will be begging Laura to go to Orlando. I'm not saying I need to go there the first year it opens, which might be packed, but sometime after that.

I started reading the other night the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (aka Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in the UK). I'm doing my best to vary my voice when characters speak. It's not as easy as it sounds.

After four days, I'm through 50+ pages. I keep asking Julia if she likes it and she enthusiastically nods her head. At times, I wonder if she's paying attention since she lays her head on a pillow by my lap, but each night when I've attempted to stop at a certain point, she'll urge me to go on. Tonight, she asked if we could rent the movie. I said that we would after we read the book.

I guess I don't mind reading the books, but it's going to be a haul to get through the last four books in the seven book series since they are rather long.

Fourth of July weekend - restless sleep, an okay movie and in-laws...

2009-07-06T23:17:00.002-05:00

This weekend, we went to spend time with Laura's Mom and Dad, who were watching Julia for the week. The week was filled with all sorts of fun and activities for Julia, but it was starting to take a toll on her when we got there on Friday.

Maybe it's because she doesn't like sleeping in a strange house by herself or because she was off her usual schedule, but she insisted that someone sleep with her. Grandma slept with her for a few days, but because she wasn't sleeping well with Julia's squirming and how hot Julia is to lay next to, the duty went to Laura.

Laura thought that Julia had fallen asleep, but soon after she left the room, Julia came bounding down the steps wondering why Laura had left.

So I was tagged and told to lay down with Julia. I grabbed my Zune and resolved to listen to one of my audiobooks while she fell asleep. About 40 minutes later of tossing, turning, requests for water, complaints of being hot and all around not sleeping, I resolved to just act like I was falling asleep so she'd fall asleep. I closed my eyes.

The next thing I knew, it was 4:30 in the morning. I had to go the bathroom bad. I got up and went, but I decided to go to where Laura was sleeping, which is a much comfier bed. I laid down and tried to sleep, but Laura was breathing heavy and had this soft snore going on. I couldn't sleep. I went back to Julia's bed, but still couldn't sleep. It was 5 am and my stomach was growling, which was part of the problem why I couldn't get back to sleep. I left the house and drove to McDonalds. I got there just as they were unlocking the doors and ordered a Bacon, Egg and Cheese McGriddles meal.

I got back and chatted with Laura's Dad for literally 3 hours until finally Julia got up. I then went back to bed and slept for 3 hours. When I got up, Laura announced to me that she was going out with her Mom and I was to get some cake pans out of the oven. I was warned not to forget. I didn't.

She also said that she was going to go see A Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian with some family members. I suggested that I could go see The Hangover while they were at the movie. I had no desire to see the second A Night at the Museum movie. It looked rather unnecessary to have a sequel.

Well on the way to the theater, Laura strongly urged me to see her movie. I refused. Then she said that I was being selfish. I said I wasn't. She accused me of isolating myself from her family. I reminded her that I've talked to her Dad more than she had this weekend. She said that I was being an asshole. I protested that I was not. With rising vocals, Laura said that I would be viewed as a rather selfish bastard (not in those words) if I went to see a movie by myself while She, Julia, Her grandma, her Grandma's sister, her Aunt, her Aunt's husband, her cousin, her uncle, and her nephew went to see A Night at the Museum 2.

I sighed and relented. Jeez, it's as if you can't make a selfish choice during a family weekend without crap coming down on you!

So we saw the movie. It was okay. It had some funny moments, but for the most part, it's what I thought it was going to be. The movie centers around Ben Stiller's character from the first film no longer a security guard, but an infomercial pitchman. He's successful, but his absence leads to the exhibits being shut down and sent to the Smithsonian for storage. They call him for help (not sure how they managed to get a hold of a phone, let alone his number). He shows up and steals a security badge from a guard, dresses up as a guard and attempts to save the living exhibits and the Egyptian artifact that keeps them alive.

Along the way, he encounters some new exhibits like General Custer and Amelia Airheart, played by Amy Adams.

I guess what got me through this mediocre movie was wondering about the plot loopholes. He manages to infiltrate the Smithsonian and no one notices that all the exhibits have come to life. I kept thinking, "Where are the guards? Shouldn't there at least be video surveillance?" At several points in the movie, giant windows are busted through. No one thought to turn on the security alarms, I guess. After all, it's only the most important museum in America with lots of priceless artifacts and memorabilia.

After the film, it was time for people to come over. With that many republicans in the room, I was treated to a lot of Obama conspiracy theories and general complaining about the state of America and those idiots that voted for Obama. I am always under strict orders not to argue with Laura's family. Seeing how I value my life, I never get in arguments with her relatives. It's amazing how much you can tune out when you fear reprisal from your wife.

It wasn't bad, though. It never is. I like my in-laws and look past their views. I'm sure they know mine and look past them as well as I'm quite the catch.

The fourth ended with me lighting off a mountain of fireworks bought by Laura's uncle.

Julia was ordered to take a quick bath, while I was ordered to get some benedryl to try and knock Julia out. I gave her two of the chewable kind.

At 9 am the next morning, Julia was still not up. Laura's Mom asked us, "Jeez. How much did you give her?"

Finally, Julia walked out groggily at 9:30 in the morning.

"I'm up!" she announced.

Music: Phoenix - 1901

2009-06-30T00:28:00.002-05:00

Good song...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBR_FVBED4w

This looks like an interesting movie...

2009-06-29T23:54:00.003-05:00

Since 2012 is coming fast upon us, it's only natural that movies about the latest end of the world date would be coming out.

For those of you that don't know, the end of the Mayan calendar is December 21, 2012. It's believed that the world will either end, change drastically followed by a rebirth or machines will turn against their masters.

Here's a trailer for a new film starring John Cuzack coming out in November that explores the second idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mktuxQLWrSs&annotation_id=annotation_279660&feature=iv

Julia masters the art of picking locks...

2009-06-29T23:46:00.002-05:00

Thursday, I was home with Julia. I was working from home downstairs while Julia was upstairs reading, playing and watching television. I locked the pantry door because if I don't, Julia will take that opportunity to just mindlessly eat whatever is in the pantry.

I came upstairs at one point to check out what she was doing.

There she was trying to jimmy open the door lock with a bobby pin.

She saw me and tried to hide the bobby pin behind her back.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Nothing..." she said.

"Are you trying to pick that lock? I'd like to see you try."

I was sure she wouldn't be able to do it. The lock seemed a little more complicated than the ones we had on our doors as children. Those were easy to jimmy open. All it took was a nail and you were in.

These doors in my new house take a special key.

She rooted around some more and not 10 seconds later, she had it open.

"Aha!" Julia exclaimed. "They don't call me Julia Lockpants for nothing!"

I thought, "People call her Julia Lockpants?"

Had to ground Julia tonight...

2009-06-24T22:21:00.002-05:00

So Julia was out with BFF tonight. We had told her that she was supposed to be home at 8:30. We had her put on a watch to make sure she was aware of the time. She did show up a little late, about 8 minutes, but at least she showed up pretty much on time.

When she got here, she asked me if BFF could stay and play. I did say she could stay for a bit, but then about 30 minutes later, I told her that BFF had to go home.

BFF asked Julia if she wanted to go to the park with her.

"Sure!" Julia said and started to head upstairs.

"Whoa!" I protested.

"What?" Julia asked.

"Get back here! I didn't say you could go to the park."

Julia gave me a sad face.

Then proceeded a few minutes of pleading (on Julia's part) and lots of "No"s (on my part).

Finally, Julia asked if she could just ride with her home.

I said okay as long as she was back in 10 minutes.

...

40 minutes later, I hopped in my car and went around the neighborhood to see where she was. I checked the park she usually hangs out at (about 4 blocks away). She wasn't there.

So I went down to the other park (4 blocks from the first park). This time, I spotted her. She was with BFF.

I rolled down the window and declared, "You're in trouble."

When she got home, I told her that she was grounded because this wasn't the first time that she told me one time and then proceeded to come back at another time. Each time, she says she's sorry, but this time, I felt I needed to make a statement.

The punishment was one of two choices: no TV or video games all day tomorrow or no BFF tomorrow.

Surprisingly, Julia chose no BFF.

Laura and I are no strangers to getting grounded. I've even gotten the no TV grounding. I'll have to save a grounding story for another day, though...

Audiobook - I listened to the New Testament...

2009-06-24T22:19:00.001-05:00

I didn't actually listen to the whole New Testament, but just the first four books, which chronicle the story of Jesus. The reason why I did this is because I'm preparing to read a book called, Lamb, which satirizes the years between when Jesus was 12 and when he reappears at 30. There is no record in the New Testament about that.

The book's full title is Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. It's by one of my favorite authors, Christopher Moore. He's done many a satirical book. There was Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, which centered around a newly minted vampire and her human love interest. A Dirty Job centered around a second-hand shop dealer who finds out that he's been chosen to be a death merchant, a person that collects souls, on the same day that his wife dies after giving birth to his daughter, who may or may not the Illuminati. Those are just two of his books. All are funny.

Like I said above, I was listening to get myself better acquainted with the life of Jesus before I listened to Lamb. I had, of course, heard a lot of the stories before like the walking on water, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the tempting by Satan, the miracles, the last supper, the betrayal, the crucifixion and the rising from the dead after 3 days. But as I listened closely to his teachings, there were a few things that struck me about Jesus.

For one thing, divorce is viewed rather harshly by him. He says that divorce should only be allowed if it's because of infidelity and that if you marry a woman who is divorced then you are committing adultery. This means that a whole lot of people, especially those family values politicians on the right are directly going against the word of Jesus.

For another thing, Jesus' followers seemed to be pretty dense sometimes. Time and time again, he would perform great miracles, but then when a challenge came along that was similar, they were amazed as if he had never done it before. At several points, Jesus gets frustrated with them by asking how they can't believe. If that was me, I'd be like, "Dude! You've seen me do this before! Stop being a dunderhead!"

In terms of plot, several parts of the New Testament are rather stilted. It's as if it was patched together from tales told many years apart (kidding). For example, after one miracle, he tells his disciples to go on ahead in their boat while he prays, but then has to walk across the water to get to the boat when the water gets too rough. Better time management might have helped or they could have just waited for him.

As for the crucifixion, I am reminded of the beating Jesus took in the Passion of the Christ. I kept waiting for the prolonged whippings and beatings in the New Testament, but there were few mentions of it. At one point, he's given a crown of thorns and it then dressed in purple after they've mocked him. I guess I'm confused as to where the prolonged beatings were added.

The version I listened to was very good to listen to. Each character was voice by a different person and there were sound effects of crowds and weather to add to the story. If you were going to read the New Testament by just listening to it, I think I would highly recommend it. It definitely seems to save some time and enhances what's going on.

Single Frame - Exact Copy

2009-06-17T23:07:00.003-05:00

Another song I like. The rest of this band's album? Not so much...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNGQYwXN0H8

I get a physical and am reminded how much I hate needles...

2009-06-17T22:38:00.002-05:00

I went to a new doctor on Friday morning because I had been meaning to find a new doctor and a health fair we had on Thursday got me into high gear. Since my Dad died, I've had this cough that won't go away. We all got colds when we all got together for my Dad's passing. At the health fair I mentioned, a breathing test confirmed that I may need to see a doctor. The lung function was a little low.

I kind of skimmed my health insurance's web site for doctor and health clinics close to my house and chose one that didn't look too expensive. The one I chose is right next to the local hospital.

I went to this doctor and got a physical, which I hadn't had in about 18 months. My new doctor did the usual checking eyes, ears and listening to my breathing. I was then instructed to go down to their lab to get my blood drawn.

I joked, "Hopefully, they can find a vein in these."

I held out my arms to the doctor elbows down to show my lack of visible veins.

The doctor said, "Oh, they do this all day long. They're experts at drawing blood."

I wasn't very confident about that. I've had a lot of bad luck when it comes to my veins.

There was the time when I was in college that we all went downtown to the plasma center that gave you 20 or so dollars for giving your plasma. The workers there would stick a needle into your arm, which was attached to a machine that sucked out your blood, spun it around various tubes, removed the plasma and inserted it back into your body.

Most people just relaxed and did homework while they sat there with the robotic Dracula sucking out their life. I tried to do that, but noticed something wrong. My arm started to hurt. It felt like a giant vacuum was trying to suck at the bend in my arm. I asked for assurance from the assistant that this was normal. She looked at the machine and tried some settings or whatever, but it continued this way. She left and returned with a doctor. Pretty soon, I had three doctors around me rubbing their chins thoughtfully and nodding. They would take turns twisting the needle in my arm to see if it would get the machine to go. They explained that the machine was starting and stopping because it didn't have enough blood to keep going, so it would shut down and start up again until it had a steady flow of blood.

One of them explained after a while that it appeared that my vein was constricting to a needle being placed in it.

I asked if I could quit, but was told that 'No', I had to grin and bear it because the machine would quit when it was done.

Three and an half hours later, I walked out with my sore arm and my cash.

Everyone at the dorm asked what had happened to me because they had all left hours ago. Apparently, the procedure is only supposed to last 30 minutes. My brother, Bill, told me that he had noticed that there were doctors huddled around someone, and he was wondering what was going on with the poor guy over there. Then one of the doctors moved, and he saw that the poor guy was me!

I swore I'd never give plasma again, which I didn't.

However, I did attempt to make some cash later in college when I tried for the latest medical experiment from the local lab that used college students as test subjects. I was a little distressed when I went in to the test to see if I was eligible when the lab assistant informed me if I got into the experiment that they'd have to draw my blood every hour on the hour for over 3 days!

Then to make matters even worse, they had to draw two large vials of blood to test against to see if I qualified. The assistant managed to get one vial of blood drawn, but then found a lot of trouble with the second vial. The vein just seemed to shut off, so no matter how much the assistant gently pulled, twisted and prodded, no more blood was coming into the vial.

The assistant tried the other arm, but could only get about one fourth of the vial filled with blood. Finally, they took a small needle and pulled the rest out of a bulging vein in my hand, which tickled let me tell you.

I didn't make the experiment, which I secretly thanked God for.

Back to Friday, though...

When I got to the lab, I was ushered to a seat with large arm rests for when the technician draws blood.

The lady asked me which arm I wanted to have blood drawn out of.

I chose my left arm.

She tied that elastic band around my arm and looked for a vein.

I again joked, "Good luck finding a vein."

She smirked a little because I'm sure she hears that all day.

I closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable prick. Finally, I felt her swab my arm, which was followed by pain.

I winced.

There were a few pricks of pain. Then it stopped. Relieved, I sighed and opened my eyes. Much to my horror, the technician had not drawn any blood at all! She was moving the needle around in my arm.

"Hmm... Having a problem?" I asked.

"Oh, I can't seem to get into this vein. It's there, but it's not cooperating."

I closed my eyes again and braced for it to end. Suddenly, pain shot through my arm as if she had stabbed me there.

I yelped and screamed a little.

I looked at my arm. She had not drawn any blood at all!

"All of that pain for nothing!" I exclaimed while laughingly nervously.

The technician didn't seem to think it was funny. She switched arms and got it done pretty quick.

I told Laura this story, but instead of sympathy, I got mockery.

"God, you're a wuss," she snorted.

Yes, I am.

If All Movies Had Cell Phones...

2009-06-15T23:07:00.003-05:00

This is a good video that explores the concept of if all your favorite movies had cell phones in them. I noticed that as we've advanced in this immediate technology that movies have either compensated by allowing the characters to go beyond today's technology (CSI with their 'enhancing' of video as an example) or they go out of their way to explain that something is blocking the transmission.

This video explores something that I think about from time to time when I read a book. One of my favorite books, Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp by C.D. Payne, was written in the early 90s and set during that time. As a result, a lot of the book revolves around outdated technology road blocks. The main character, Nick, a horny teen looking to woo a girl he meets during summer vacation, is constantly has roadblocks. His girlfriend sends him letters, which are torn up by his Mom. He accepts a lot of collect calls that run up several phone bills. He and his friends have to speak in code to avoid prying parental ears.

If the book was set today, there are cell phones, which he might not have automatically. He does have a computer in the book, so instant messaging would be a natural work-around.

The movie based on the book is coming out this fall staring Michael Cera, so it'll be interesting if they set it in the present, which might actually speed the story up because a lot of it is Nick anxiously waiting for a letter or a phone call.

Dad's Eulogy...

2009-06-10T23:02:00.002-05:00

As many of you know, my father passed away on Wednesday, May 20th. It seems like yesterday that I was talking to him. Now he's gone, but his memory remains. I think about him all the time.

Here's the eulogy that I wrote. We gave copies to people when they came to his celebration of life.

MEMORIES OF A MAN, MY DAD

My Dad was born Richard Joseph Homan. He was the youngest of four siblings. He is survived by a wife, five children, 12 grandchildren and one great grand child. He is also survived by four refrigerators; one deep freezer; seven televisions; eight phones; an old ice maker; 4 rain gauges; hundreds of drill bits; 1 machete; 1 plastic Michelin man; 11 peanut jars of odds and ends; over 100 jars and cans of nuts, bolts, nails, screws, washers, hinges, latches, brackets, wires, and other metal pieces; 9 9/16 wrenches; 7 7/16 wrenches; 3 cowbells; 2 iron horses; over 50 bottle openers and 39 lag bolts.

My Dad was well-rounded man. He liked to bake cookies, to make salsa, to grow tomatoes, to watch birds and to watch football (especially Nebraska football).

There didn't seem to be a Sunday that would go by where my Dad wasn't baking his chocolate chip cookies. The best times to get them were before they were baked and right after they came out of the oven. He'd scowl if he'd see you sneak some of the cookie dough, but I don't think that he minded that much.

He started dabbling in salsa when I was in college. He'd make tons of batches of the stuff. He thought it was pretty good, and I knew that a lot of people liked it. He'd give away jars of the stuff whether you wanted it or not. He ran into some snags with it early one, like the batch that wasn't red enough for him, so he used red food coloring, which turned the salsa pink.

He started his bird watching later in life. He had several bird feeders and a bird bath. I gave him a couple of bird watching guides to help him out.

This leads into a short story of mine about Dad trying to protect his birds.

A year or two ago, my Dad had it up to here with the squirrels. Apparently, the squirrels in his backyard were eating the bird seed that he used in his bird feeders (naturally) and he was doing something about it.

A previous bird feeder problem occurred when black birds moved in and were eating all his food and scaring the smaller birds away. Undaunted and a little aggravated, my Dad did what any reasonable bird lover would do, he bought a pellet gun and started shooting them.

Now before you think my Dad was cruel to animals, you have to understand that he wasn't intending to kill these birds. He was merely trying to scare them off... and scare them off he did. He'd sit in the garage watching the bird bath. A black bird would fly down to the feeding area, my Dad would cock and pump the pellet gun, and he'd fire off a pellet. Usually, it'd whistle by the bird, who would then be so startled that it would fly away. A few times, I think it hit a small part of the wing, but then was still able to fully fly away.

My Mom kept telling my Dad that "one of these times, the animal control people are going to see you!", but he kept on at it. After a while, the black birds got the message and stopped coming.

The squirrels were another matter. We were over at my brother Bill's place for his daughter's birthday. My brothers and I started talking to my Mom. One of us asked, "How is Dad doing?" It was a common question because you never knew what was happening with my Dad. Seeing as how my Dad was retired, he had plenty of time to spend as he put it 'watching the world go by', which also meant that he had plenty of time coming up with new things to obsess about.

For example, my Mom told us that my Dad had jars upon jars of nuts and bolts that he took from my Grandpa's barn before it was torn down. My Dad had been sitting outside and sorting through the nuts and bolts. We guess that he was sifting out the 'good' from the 'bad.' To my Mom, they are all bad and she admitted that she'd been systematically throwing a jar away every now and then. "But he'll never notice," she had said.

Knowing my Dad like I did, I thought, "He probably does notice." Sure enough, barely a day after she told me that, my Dad suddenly complained, "Well, your mother keeps throwing away things I'm trying to save! She's throwing out my jars of bolts!"

I suppressed a smile and said nothing.

The squirrels had him at his wit's end, I guess. He'd seen the squirrels out there eating all the bird seed that he had left for the birds. At first, he had tried to hide the food from the squirrels. While that was semi-successful, they really ticked him off by biting through his sun room's screen door and pillaging the food from the bucket it was stored in.

Seeing what his options were, my Dad decided to do the most reasonably humane thing he could think of, which was to capture and relocate all the squirrels.

He set out to do this by getting an animal trap, one of those cages that allowed the animal to walk in, but closed before they could walk out. He finally got his first victim and instructed my Mom to dispose of the critter by the ball field by her work. She took it out there, opened the cage, and set it free. The squirrel shot out of the cage, turned around to look at her once as if to say 'thanks' and took off for the nearest tree.

Dad managed to trap yet another one, but my Mom started to put her foot down on this behavior.

"People are going to think that I'm weird!" she scolded.

The success of trapping tapered off rather quickly, though. When my Dad had still only caught only two squirrels several weeks later, he threatened to take even more drastic measures.

My Mom said, "You're going to be fined for cruelty to animals, you know!"

Dad snapped, "It's a small price to pay for my happiness!"

My Dad wasn't necessarily a cruel man. He just wanted the thoughtless animals from eating his food that he left for other animals.

Our Dad was also one of the toughest men that we knew. My brother, Joe, remembers being at the old family farm doing some work in the barn, when a large beam fell and hit Dad squarely in the chest. Joe said that he shrugged it off and continued working all day as if nothing happened.

I had heard stories about fights that Dad had gotten into. One that we talked about was when Dad went to the liquor store and encountered two guys giving a guy he knew a hard time. Dad took both of them on. His excuse to Mom was, "They were messing with my friend. I had two fists. What was I supposed to do?"

I can verify that Dad hit hard. As one of five kids that frequently got into trouble, Dad would have to spank us once to make his point every now and then. You did not want to be on the receiving end of one of those open-palmed spanks. If memory serves, it felt like his hands were made of solid rock. You still saw the brute force of those hands from time to time. One day when my brother, Bill and I were around 12, we heard some yelling upstairs, followed by a commotion of chairs, followed by a stomping of feet downstairs. My brother, Paul, zoomed past us with a whimper followed closely by Dad. Paul slammed the door to his room in time for my Dad to punch a hole through the first layer. Apparently, Paul was smarting off to Dad, which was not an uncommon occurrence in our house and Dad had had enough that day. I thought to myself, "There is no way I'm going to mess with Dad when I get as old as Paul."

I had no idea what set my Dad off that night, but my brother, Paul, and my Dad laughed about it years later like it was a planned prank.

Growing up with my Dad was like growing up with Tim Allen's character on Home Improvement if instead of rewiring things, he built things. My Dad always seemed to have some solution to a problem by merely using nails, wood (paneling, plywood or real wood) and some elbow grease. At our old house on First street, Dad built a bar with a sink, a kind of sitting booth, an insert into the wall for a TV and inserts for fish tanks. The summer when I was in kindergarten, we moved to the current house on Anna street. It's a three-bedroom house. When we moved in, Dad constructed walls downstairs to make three more bedrooms, a laundry room and a bathroom. When one of the rooms wasn't big enough, Dad moved two of the walls a few feet over to make more room.

He was always trying to improve his set up. He'd build a shelf within a desk and then he'd build mini shelves that would go on the bigger shelves. On his shelves were every type of container either store bought or re-used from its previous life as a cigar box or a wine container.

Dad was also a scavenger. If he saw something while driving that was being thrown out, he'd come back later to claim it. One of our mini-closets for our downstairs was a rolling rack that was being thrown out by a store. Dad saw it and came back for it later.

It was often that we'd be riding with our Dad on the highway when he'd spot something on the side of the road. He'd hit the brakes, pull over to the side and drive backwards all the way to the item he spotted, which might be something like a bungee that someone had dropped. If it still looked like it worked, he'd pick it up.

You could always count on my Dad to help out. He was always willing to help us move in and out of our homes and apartments.

When Bill and I moved into our first apartment off campus while we were in college, we opted for one that was a fairly large two bedroom apartment. My Dad showed up with our stuff that we had packed into a horse trailer. He showed up at the apartment in a fowl mood. For starters, it was far from campus. Then he had issues with the apartment itself in that it was on the second floor.

"Couldn't have gotten one on the ground floor?" Dad asked.

"We didn't really have a choice, Dad" one of us tried to explain.

Dad scowled. That was late summer of 1991. Even then, Dad was starting to show the signs of his years of smoking. He huffed and puffed up the stairs with our stuff. It was a hot August day and he was pouring with sweat.

When all the furniture was off loaded. Dad brought up a fan for us to use. It was a metal shop fan that was round like it was some sort of stool. He turned it on and showed us the various speeds that it had. It started to rattle a little.

Dad said, "Oh that's normal. If it starts to rattle like that you just give it a little kick like this."

Dad kicked the fan. The rattle stopped.

"See? Just kick it."

Sure enough, we started kicking it whenever it rattled.

As Dad was leaving, he turned to us and said, "You guys are never going to be able to afford this."

Thanks for the vote of confidence Dad!

Dad was a Nebraska Cornhusker fan. He didn't go to many games, but he'd gladly buy tickets for us kids. He was just glad to do it because we were fans.

He was a big optimist about the Huskers. The year that the Huskers went 7-7, he boldly proclaimed that they'd win the national championship. I don't think he ever missed a game that was on television.

My Dad was a Bud man through and through. That is, until he switched to Busch Light, but for decades, he could be counted on for being a loyal Budweiser customer. My Dad didn't drink pop, so it was only natural that we'd see him with a Bud in his hand. That is not to say that he had a problem though. If he was somewhere and was offered a beer and they didn't have Budweiser, he'd just go without. Now that's loyal!

He was also prepared. Whenever the weather report called for some severe weather, he'd go out and buy a few more cases.

One time, I was visiting from college. My Dad met me in the garage and asked me to take his beer out of the cooler and put them on the shelf in the garage. I complied, but noted that he had six cases in the trunk.

I mentioned this to my Mom, whose reply was, "Six? He usually buys nine!"

He drank out of a Bud koozy. Our various dwellings were scattered with various Budweiser coasters, commemorative bottles, clocks, beer signs, fridge magnets, and other Budweiser memorabilia.

His other drink of choice was coffee, which he drank a lot.

I'd see commercials for those Mister Coffee machines and think that Dad would enjoy that, but he was an old-style percolator man through and through. There wasn't a day that didn't start with coffee. Sometimes, he'd forget to buy coffee filters so he'd have to compromise by using toilet paper or Kleenex. He'd really let Mom hear it if the only thing available was colored, scented tissue paper.

He never took sugar or cream. Even with the popularity of gourmet flavored coffees, iced coffees and cappuccinos, he never once tried them. It was black or nothing.

For food, Dad was just as simple. He was a meat and potatoes man, that is until he discovered that he was allergic to starches, then it changed to just meat. He loved chicken, especially gizzards and livers. He enjoyed eating his home-caught catfish when we had a summer trailer.

Dad was a very well-liked man. He got that way by being himself. He was always generous to other people. Even in his last days, he would have us stock his snack stash with cookies and snack cakes, which he'd often give to the nurses.

Dad very rarely was out in public in a fowl mood. He'd always have a kind word to say to people when they walked in when he was at his usual place, at the end of the bar: behind it. He'd stand behind the bar so he could see who was coming in and to say 'Hi' to people. If the people working behind the bar minded, they didn't say so. That's just where he stood.

I guess you could say that he was an optimist... for the most part. He never talked about being 'Stressed”. Speaking of the word, 'Stress'. My Dad hated that word. One time, I made the mistake of saying to my Dad that I was 'stressed out' because of college. He immediately scoffed by saying, "I don't believe in stress. It's a made up word. What do you have to be stressed about anyway? I bid on multi-million contracts every day. If anyone can say that they're stressed, it's me!"

From then on, I made sure to use the word, "pressure". He didn't mind that one.

But as much as he was personable towards people he knew, he was very much against giving out your personal information.

For example, one day my Dad and I went to Radio Shack to get some batteries. Normally he didn't go to Radio Shack, but we were at the mall for some reason and he said he needed batteries, so I pointed to Radio Shack, which was the nearest store.

We walked in and sure enough, there were batteries. He grabbed a pack and set it on the counter. He pulled out his wallet.

The man behind the counter asked, "Can I get your name and address, sir?"

Dad asked, "Why do you need my name and address?"

"I just need it to complete the sale, sir."

"But I don't want to give you my name and address."

"I'm sorry, but I need it."

"But I just want to buy these batteries."

"Well I'm sorry sir," the man persisted. "But I can't open the register unless I have your name and address."

Dad eyed the kid a little.

"So you're telling me that you can't just let me pay cash for these batteries?"

"That's right."

"What do you need my name and address for anyway?" Dad asked.

"They use it to send out a mailer to you." the clerk explained.

"But what if I don't want a mailer?" Dad asked.

"I'm sorry. But like I said, I can't open the register without your name and address."

Without a word, Dad put his wallet back in his pocket and left the store without buying any batteries. For the rest of the day, everyone he talked to was treated to that story which ended with the phrase: "And I picked my money up and walked out the door!"

Being a teenager, I was like "You sure told them, Dad!" Well not to his face. I thought it. I may have been young, but I wasn't crazy.

Because he didn't like giving out any more personal information than he had to, he had a card by his phone that had written on it every magazine subscription he had with the expiration date and every donation that he gave and the day he gave it. That way, if he got a call from a telemarketer telling him that his magazine subscription was about to expire or he last gave a donation at a certain date, he'd whip out the card, check it and tell the telemarketer that his subscription still had so many months left or that he gave at a date different than they had told him.

I don't know what grand plans Dad had about how he'd live his life, but I know he probably didn't want to spend the last several months of it in hospitals or stuck at home. Even so, I'm so glad that he lived long enough to enjoy several years of retirement.

He said to me on several occasions that he was just sitting watching the world go by, which is what he was reduced to for the past year or so. He lamented about that once. He said, “We thought we were all invincible.”

If he were here today, well he'd probably be cursing us out for throwing away a lot of perfectly good tools, wire, bolts, nuts, nails, screws and various things he needed that were in his garage and study. But he wanted me to make sure and tell everyone, “Enjoy and have fun.”

So Dad, here's to you: “Enjoy and have fun.”

I save a life with the power of my anecdote...

2009-06-08T23:53:00.002-05:00

I have the habit of telling people anecdotes about my life. Something will remind me of something else and I'm compelled to give people the gift of my life lessons. It's my way of paying it forward... or maybe I just like to talk...

An example of this is when I got a toilet the other day. I had a work friend help me with it off the shelf. As I was looking at it, I pointed out the rating of the toilet by an independent study. I told him that when they test this stuff, they use a paste that they make out of a soybean soup mix that resembles the consistency of the average fecal matter. They then give it a rating based on how many grams it can flush.

He replied that he knew that because I had told everyone on my work team that... while we were all eating lunch one day. I guess some people are just touchy about what you talk about at lunch.

I said, "Oh... That doesn't sound like me at all."

I was kidding, of course.

So today, I was calling my neighbor, Michelle, because Laura had seen a set of furniture sitting on one of our neighbor's driveway. It was an older-looking night stand, dresser, tall dresser and various pieces of furniture. We couldn't tell if it was out on the driveway because they wanted the garbage men to take it, it they're being picked up by the goodwill or it's out there for sale. When we saw it on our way to work, Laura got excited.

She liked the furniture and wondered if we should ask if we could buy it. I pointed out that when my Dad was in his prime, he would spot furniture like that on the street and then come back when it was dark to retrieve them if they were still there. I suggested that we could do this.

So when I called Michelle to see if the furniture was still there, she said that she didn't know because she hadn't been home since yesterday.

She then started to tell me that she had been thinking about me and one of my stories.

Apparently, her son had what she thought was the flu. Weeks before, something got me to tell Michelle this story about a time when my Mom thought I had the flu.

It was a Sunday night when my appendix ruptured all the way back in the Fifth grade. We had just watched the new Marty Feldman movie that was on HBO called In God We Tru$t. Marty, if you recall, played Igor in Young Frankenstein. He was also in a few goofy movies. The movie was okay, but I remember that I didn't feel so hot when I went to bed. Then I slept a restless sleep filled with bizarre dreams about that movie.

When I woke up, I was hot and I had thrown up, so I stayed home from school. I felt horrible. The day came and went and I was still sick, so I stayed home the next day, too. I started throwing up more and more. My Mom would yell at me because I wouldn't even get up to go throw up. The problem was, I was too weak to get up.

Finally, by the third day, my Mom started to suspect that this wasn't the flu. My brother, Joe, carried me upstairs and put me on my parent's bed so Mom could keep an eye on me. The TV in my parent's room had no cable. The fact that I laid there staring at soap operas and I didn't complain once sent up red flags to my mother pretty quickly!

She rushed me to our family doctor, who saw me immediately. He did some poking around my belly. I winced at a place by my belly button. They drew some blood and tested it for white blood cells. The count that returned was so high that it rivaled a leukemia patient's count. It was determined that I had a ruptured appendix. I was rushed to the hospital by my Mom, who informed me on the way that I was going to have to have an operation. I was too sick to even argue although I did whimper that I didn't want an operation at least once.

Long story short, I spent ten long and boring days in the hospital recovering from an appendix that burst behind my liver. I had a tube down my throat and some tubes sticking out of my abdomen. They even left my incision open for a day to let the infection seep out.

My Mom felt horrible. She told me that she felt like the worst mother. She felt a horrible guilt for yelling at me for throwing up because she just thought that I had the flu. I came damn close to dying.

So I had told this story to Michelle. She had this story in the back of her mind when her son got sick two days ago. When he wasn't getting any better, she took him to the emergency room. She asked them if this might be an appendix that ruptured. They did a CAT scan and sure enough, they saw that the appendix had indeed ruptured.

Michelle thanked me for telling her that story. So Mom, my funny anecdote about you feeling guilty during this time probably helped save this kid's life.

Well, maybe not his life, but it got the doctors to catch it before it got too serious. He'll be out of the hospital in a few days. Oh and that furniture is still there...

Auto-tune the News #3

2009-06-07T20:23:00.003-05:00

The news set to a beat with the Auto-tune effect on the pundit's voices.

My daughter tries to bribe me...

2009-06-06T01:23:00.003-05:00

Julia has been hanging around with a girl that I like to call, BFF (best friend forever). I don't actually call her that, but for this story I will since I don't like using real names of people without knowing them too well.

So Julia and BFF have been hanging out with each other a lot. There have been several sleepovers. I mentioned the one on Saturday where she came back smelling like a bunch of wet puppies...

This Tuesday she decided that she wanted to ride her bike over to BFF to hang out. Well she'd been really tired for those first two days of summer camp and didn't want her to get even more tired.

Julia didn't see that logic. All she knew was that she wanted to see her friend, BFF.

She kept pleading and pleading. I kept telling her no.

Finally, Julia pulled the Ace in her sleeve. She ran into her room and came back with money.

"Daddy, I will give you two whole dollars of my own money if you'll let me go over to BFF's house."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"Are you trying to bribe me with my own money (money I gave her for her allowance), so you can go to BFF's house?"

"Please, Daddy. I'm serious. I'll give you to whole dollars."

"No!" I exclaimed. "I'm not going to take your money!"

Julia could see I was a hard sell, so she upped the price.

"I'll give you three whole dollars if you'll let me go to BFF's house."

I stared at her. While the money was certainly tempting. I didn't want to start a bad trend.

"Put your money away," I said. "I'm not going to take your money no matter who much you try to give it to me. You can go to BFF's house to see if she's home, but if she's not there, you have to come back."

She ran out the door only to return 10 minutes later because she wasn't there, but in that absence, I could only shake my head. I could not believe that my own daughter had tried to bribe me. It's not like I've ever tried to do it myself, let alone in front of her. I rarely keep cash on me!

Maybe she gets it from Laura...

June 3rd - Stretching...

2009-06-04T23:12:00.000-05:00

Today I went swimming with Julia after work. Laura worked out while we smam. She's apparently got it into her head that she's going to sign up and run a 5k, which is about 3 miles. She also took great pleasure in rubbing it in how she's in the best shape of her life and how I need to get back on the ball since I've gained a lot of weight since last summer.

I grumbled, "Oh, you're just loving rubbing this aren't you after all my years of suggesting that you start running."

"That and the 'you need to stretch' stuff that I've been hearing."

I've been urging Laura to stretch because she doesn't. I keep trying to tell her that not stretching is going to lead to problems, but she doesn't listen. She periodically will pull a muscle, which requires her to ice and take pain killers.

I try to point out that if she goes to a doctor to complain about the muscle that a doctor is going to ask how it happened and when the cause is diagnosed, the doctor will show her a series of stretches to perform before and after working out to get rid of it and prevent it from happening again.

Laura scowls every time I tell her to stretch.

I replied, "Well, it's true. And if you're going to run a 5k without stretching, you're asking for pulled muscles, shin splits and Achilles tendinitis."

Audiobook - Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz

2009-06-03T23:06:00.002-05:00

I just finished an audiobook for 'Odd Thomas' by Dean Koontz. Dean Koontz is like the poor-man's Stephen King, which is a little unfair to Dean, who after all was publishing for years before Stephen first got published.

There are major differences between a King and Koontz book. Whereas King likes to take his time moving into the plot, Koontz generally hits you over the head with it. They move fast usually.

I've read 'Phantoms', 'Intensity' and 'The Bad Place' by Koontz, but I wasn't so much a fan that I wanted to read more.

I saw that he was branching out into a series with the Odd Thomas series, which is on its fourth volume by now.

The series centers around a man called, Odd Thomas. Go figure. Odd is his real name and he has the unnatural gift of being able to see the dead. The dead appear to him when they need him to help with unfinished business. He works with the police chief in town, who knows of the gift, by leading him to the killers of murdered people.

This is all turned on its head when Odd notices a man who's being followed around by dark shadows that usually appear when mass trauma is about to go down. He follows the man with the shadows and sets in motion a series of horrifying events that changes the town he lives in forever.

It's a pretty decent listen. The narrator is just right to play the very simple Odd. It does have its share of horrifying scenes, but not so much to turn off the non-horror fan. It's also a little humorous at times.

June 2nd - Waterparks, Ghostbusters and I Don't Care...

2009-06-02T22:57:00.000-05:00

Earlier today, I went out for a run. I'm trying to get back in the swing of running. Since winter, I've gained about 10 pounds. Normally, even with my extra gut weight, I'm in better shape than Laura. After my pitiful performance while hiking Saturday, I can see that I'm in need of getting back in the groove of running. I had quit last year because I started getting massive pain in my Achilles heel. It turns out that I have Achilles tendinitis. After a months of icing, stretching and strength exercises, the tendinitis may never go away. It's a lot better but still there somewhat. I decided to just be cautious and stretch a lot before and after. That seemed to work. It wasn't bad. I ran/walked for about 37 minutes.

While running, my mp3 player was on shuffle. It came across the new Fall Out Boy song called, "I Don't Care."

I had to smirk a little because I joke with my brother, Bill about his parenting skills. There's the 'Hey! Stop that!' technique which is invoked when the older child does something naughty. Another strategy is the 'I Don't Care' technique, which is invoked when the older one is being slow and giving excuses for not doing what Bill wants. When this happens, Bill is all 'I DON'T CARE!' and 'LOUD NOISES!' while trying to get his point across.

So I pictured Bill screaming 'I DON'T CARE!' every time it was mentioned in the song.

For example:

"(Bill's voice) I DON'T CARE! what you think as long as it's about me. The best of us can find happiness in misery."

There's also a section that goes,

I said I DON'T CARE!
(I DON'T CARE!)
I said I DON'T CARE!
(I DON'T CARE!)
Said I DON'T CARE!
(I DON'T CARE!)
I DON'T CARE!
(I DON'T CARE!)
No, I don't

All to the tune of Bill's voice. I wish Bill would consent to me recording him yelling like that so I can create a mash-up, but he probably wouldn't do it.

We may make a quick trip to Colorado for a three-day vacation in late July.

I stumbled across a water park called 'Water World', which is north of Denver and sits on 64 acres. My original plan was to take my brother's fold-up camper and save on hotels, but Laura nixed that plan.

"So you're wanting me to spend all day getting sun baked and wind blown at a water park and then top that off by sleeping outside without air conditioning? I don't think so."

The problem is that Laura showed the park's web site to Julia, which is something I wasn't even going to do. Now Julia is insisting that we spend every day there. It's still not set in stone, but I'm just thinking a day at the park would suffice.

We'll also be hitting the Casa Bonita, which I've been to once. It's a huge Mexican restaurant with cliff divers, wild west shootouts, wild gorillas and various other oddities. You can also go into a treasure cave and dress up like an outlaw to get your picture taken. It's about the only thing I remember about Denver other than my Dad's friend's son freaking me out about rattlesnakes when we went on a hike. He made it sound like they could snatch you by jumping at you from 20 feet away. Needless to say, I steered clear of any possible rattlesnake hiding places.

Ghostbusters was on AMC. They were celebrating the 25th anniversary of the film. When that was announced between commercials, Laura said, "Jeeeezzzzz!" while cringing.

It's really something when you realize how old you are in relation to things that you liked when you were a kid. I was about 13-years old. Laura was about 9-years-old. This happens to me more and more.

I like to freak Julia out by telling her how old some of her favorite songs are.

"Do you know the song, "Somebody to Love" by Queen?"

"Yeah" she'll say.

"Well, it's over 30 years old."

"Whoa!"

June 1st - Summer camp and a super-sonic toilet.

2009-06-01T22:52:00.004-05:00

Julia started her first day of summer camp, which is run by my employer. They have a day care facility and run a summer camp for the older kids.

Julia has been a little weird that last few days. When spring break ended, she almost refused to go back to school because, "No one plays with me at recess." We tried to reason to her, but she wouldn't take our reasoning. Then we remembered that she had pulled the same arguments at the end of fall vacation and winter vacation. When I opted to have her teacher talk to us and give reports on it, which we had done previously when Julia had complained about recess (Her teacher was baffled at the complaint. She assured us that Julia plays with a lot of kids), Julia back peddled and decided that she wanted to go to school after all.

She cried off and on the last few days of school last week because she said she loved school. She declared that she was never going to see her teacher and her friends again. She was also distressed that another year had come and gone. Julia is sad that one day she's going to leave us. I assured her that she could live with us while she goes to the local college. She excitedly agreed.

I'm going to hold her to that!

So this morning, Julia was marginally excited. When I picked her up, Julia was pretty tired. By the time bed time rolled around, she declared that she was "soooo tired!"

I mentioned yesterday that I wanted my super sonic toilet. Well I picked one up at the local hardware super store. It's an Eljer Diplomat. While it's the economy purchase, it was rated at a 10 on the flushing scale. An independent water research group tests toilets using a paste that they mold into fecal shapes. The paste is made of soy beans. My new toilet can now flush up to 1000 grams of fecal matter in nothing flat!

I was going to install it tonight, but Laura put her foot down.

"For the love of God and my sanity, just please wait for the weekend!"

I guess super-sonic flushing will have to wait until then. She also threw a monkey wrench into my plans. She is insisting that we put it in the bathroom by the front hallway near Julia's room. I think it's so I'll be forced to not use that one and not the one in our master bedroom. The other benefit is that if we have people over, we no longer have to worry about the toilet backing up.

I know I'm kind of weird about this stuff, but I look at it this way. Last year, we spent about half the amount on an umbrella for our deck along with an umbrella stand. But because our deck is high off the ground, we had many problems with wind gusts. More than once, the umbrella would just soar out of the crappy base and fly off into the yard. Then it snapped in two one day just by the wind knocking it back and forth! This was only after one month of use! Plus it didn't really help with the sun's glare because we'd try to use it near dusk, but the shadows were past the deck, so it was like we never even had an umbrella. We also spent a lot more on shrubs and flowers that died!

At least with this toilet, I'll know that I'm going to get some worry free, quality flushing in!

May 31st - Sleeping in, puppy smell, movies, toilets and Dad...

2009-05-31T22:27:00.000-05:00

I woke up late today at about 9:30. Usually, I have to get up with Julia since Laura insists that she needs more sleep, so I am up at about 7:30 or 8. I should go to bed earlier, but I feel like I'm wasting valuable time if I go to be earlier.

Last night, I watched the movie Sleepaway Camp, which is a slasher film from the early 80s. It's very low budget, but has an interesting twist at the end. It's not something I'd recommend to someone though. I just wanted to see it since it's considered a cult classic.

Julia spent the night at a friend's house last night, which is why I got to sleep in. Before she left, Julia smelled like a wet puppy from her day's playing. When she got back at 11:30 this morning, it was obvious that she hadn't bathed because she absolutely reeked. It was like following Pig Pen from the Peanuts gang around. She thought we were joking, because Laura was waving her hand in front of her nose and going, "Julia! Oh God! Get in the bath tub!"

Julia was like, "I don't need to take a bath."

"Oh, yes you do!" Laura said.

Julia reluctantly walked to the bathroom. All the while, Laura was waving her hand in front of her nose as she followed Julia.

"Man!" Laura said.

Later, we went to see the movie "Up", the new Pixar movie, which is in 3-D. I've mentioned my love of 3-D movies, so I opted to see the 3-D version instead of the 2-D version. There were some really cool 3-D trailers for movies, including a live-action movie about these hamsters that are genetically engineered spies.

Up was pretty good. Like all Pixar movies, it has a good story with a good heart, but unlike past ones that were 20 minutes too long (Cars and Ratatoille), this one was just the right length at one hour and 36 minutes long. There were good laughs, especially when the dogs that have collars that let them talk appeared.

After the movie, we went home and I used the bathroom, which normally wouldn't be anything to write about, but I have had it up to here with my toilets in the house because you severely run the risk of clogging up the toilets every time you use it for... bulky deliveries. I used to keep tabs on who was clogging up the toilet more (since it happened about once a week). I'm not going to say who was winning that contest because I'm under orders to keep the results confidential. Promise kept!

This last time was the last straw as even though I flushed several times during the 'bulky delivery', it still clogged and I had to plunge the bowl.

Super-powered toilet, here I come!

Ever since we moved in, it's been my fantasy and my mission to replace our toilets. Our builders installed what have got to be the cheapest toilets. I had to replace the hardware inside them less than a year after we moved in. They clog at the drop of a hat, which I've mentioned, so I'm afraid to have people come over lest they leave an unwanted bulky delivery behind.

Last night was the season-finale of Breaking Bad, the AMC original series about a chemistry teacher who starts cooking crystal meth when he finds out that he's dying of cancer. Well since the show it doing quite well in the ratings, it's been renewed for a third season. Coincidentally, Walt, the teacher, has had his cancer go into remission after miraculous progress from the cancer treatment. The finale was excellent as Walt's calculated lying for the past 19 episodes all seemed to collapse. His wife laid into him in her most calm voice, which made it all so great. Walt could only stand there speechless.

I ended the night by listening to a few mp3s I made of my Dad. I have a couple of phone calls from 2007 that I taped when I was sort of planning on writing a book about my childhood. The plan was to interview Dad, but it felt weird interviewing him without him knowing. I was thinking of asking him if he'd let me dictate family stories, but we felt that he might have been insulted. But I'm glad that I have these two phone calls. There are pretty funny in parts, especially when he talks about Hillary Clinton.

He said something like "If I lived with her, I would sleep with one eye open because she'd kill you in your sleep."

I'm glad I have them to remind me of Dad. I'm going to post the eulogy later this week after I edit it some more.

Trekkies bash film

2009-05-23T09:28:00.002-05:00

I've seen the new Star Trek movie twice now. I wasn't really enthused to see it before it came out because I wasn't really a fan of the series or movies. I then saw the movie. I liked it, but a lot of Star Trek fans that I work with didn't think it was so good. Here's a video from the Onion that reminded me of it.

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Print media gets a lifeline....

2009-05-19T00:00:00.005-05:00

What with the newspaper industry slashing jobs left and right, this video shows what happens when a blog hires some old-timey newspaper workers. Pretty funny.

More music...

2009-05-17T22:39:00.003-05:00

The Doves - Kingdom of Rust

Mid-tempo melancholy rock from the UK. If there was any justice, these guys would be big in the United States, but they're not...

PG pron - Roadside Assistance

2009-05-17T22:34:00.003-05:00

Here's part of a series of videos where they make pg-friendly adult movies. It's mostly safe for work save for a little bad language.

PG PORN: Roadside Ass-sistance | Celebrities | SPIKE.com

Music I'm liking as of now...

2009-05-10T23:22:00.003-05:00

Silversun Pickups - Panic Switch

I once described this band as sounding like a shoegazer band that drank a bunch of red bull before hitting the studio and then cranking up the vocals. It's a sort of harder rocking dreamy-sounding rock.

Passion Pit - The Reeling

My Mom was scanning my Zune and started listening to this band. She said that she liked it. Well, Mom, here's their new song from their upcoming album. I guess you would call this synth pop with more melodies.

Audiobook - Rant by Chuck Palahniuk

2009-05-06T22:17:00.005-05:00

Chuck Palahniuk is not exactly one of my favorite writers. In some ways, he is new and exciting in that he has some pretty out there ideas for a plot, characters and dialogue. His books also have the weird humor in them that I find funny, but not in a rolling-on-the-floor way, but in appreciative way. In other ways, he can be predictable in that many of the characters in his books have weird fetishes of some sort, spout endless tidbits of information on various subjects and seem to sound the same. Also, almost all of his books have a really interesting start and then die a slow death as it meanders to an unexpected conclusion. While the conclusions are usually never in the direction that I anticipated, they are disappointing in that they don't draw you in like the beginning does.

Chuck Palahniuk is best known for his book called 'Fight Club' in which the main character of the book, whose name you never hear, has insomnia and finds a way to sleep by going to various support groups for people dying of various diseases. Along the way, he meets Tyler Durden, a man almost his opposite. Whereas the narrator is unsure of himself, Tyler seems to know it all about everything. Together, they start Fight Club, an underground club where guys fight bare knuckled. As the Fight Club culture grows, so do Tyler's ambitions and the narrator is drawn into an even more underground club where corporate mayhem is the game.

I saw the movie first and it's one of my favorite movies of all time. It's very dark and slyly funny, but it's a definite guy's movie for the younger set. The book is not as good. I liked it, but liked the movie's interpretation of it a lot more.

Rant is the oral history of Rant Casey as told by friends, neighbors, co-workers, bosses and enemies. It's a series of recorded statements. I think as a text, it would be a little frustrating to read, but in audio form, it's great. Each character is voiced by a different voice actor, so it's easy to tell who the character is before they finish their name.

Rant is not easy to explain. It's the story of a boy, knicknamed 'Rant', who grows up to be the carrier of a deadly rabies plague. As a boy, he became fascinated by the rush he would get by getting bit by venomous spiders and animals. Some of these animals were rabid. Rant became immune to rabies and started a small outbreak in his small town. Then in the city, a much larger outbreak was started that almost ground society to a halt. In between this, Rant gets involved in a group of people called 'Party Crashers' whose main goal every night is to drive around in the night's costume (like a wedding party or student drivers) and crash into other 'Party Crashers' to earn points. The world also deals with virtual reality brain porting and time travel.

All in all, it's a very different audio book that worked for me. Not sure who I'd recommend it to, but if you liked Fight Club and appreciate movies like Pulp Fiction and the Big Lebowski, then this may be for you.

Listened to Duma Key by Stephen King and it seemed to take forever...

2009-04-26T10:00:00.000-05:00

I used to listen to the Howard Stern radio show all the time. So much so that Laura would yell at me to get the headphones off and 'engage' as she put it. I don't know why, but listening to every second of that show made me feel better and made the time pass when I was doing house work a lot faster.

So I started to listen to audio books starting with the Harry Potter series. I listened to both the US and British versions of the books more than once. I've also branched into other books, mostly on the humorous side.

But I also started listening to books from Stephen King. Back when I was in high school and wasn't working every single day, I had time to read his books. Now I have little time to sit down and read, let alone write. So I've started listening to books that I've wanted to read of his because of the lack of time.

One of them is one of his most recent books called Duma Key. Duma Key centers around a guy named Edgar Freemantle, who after getting injured in a horrific accident in which he loses an arm and suffers major damage to every part of his body after a crane backs over his truck on a job site, loses his wife to divorce and most of his friends. He leaves his hometown to get away from it all and ends up at Duma Key in Florida.

Once there, he takes up drawing and then painting. He also starts to rehab himself by walking up and down the beach. He finally meets up with a man named, Wireman, who is damaged like himself from an accident in his life. He and Edgar bond. Wireman is taking care of an old lady named Elizabeth, whose father owned most of Duma Key.

It's right around here where Duma Key starts to go from interesting to tedious. Because we're dealing with the narration of characters that are an old southern lady and a hispanic man, it really slows the book down. The whole audio book is over 22 hours long and boy does it feel like it. Wireman constantly calls Edgar "Muchacho" and "Amigo", which really got on my nerves. I mean Wireman was a great character and I grew to like him, but every time he used those two works, I wanted to scream.

Also, the narration of Elizabeth is done rather slow in that southern drawl, but only slower. I got tired of the slow pace 6 hours in and edited the file so it was 10 percent faster, which brought the total time of the book to under 20 hours.

After that, the book literally flew by!

What was irritating about the book, even with the speeded up voices, was the tone and pacing. For the first 3/4th of the book, the plot is a little weird, but not weird enough. Edgar paints like a genius, but it's not overly creepy. The book needed more strange stuff happening to him. By the time weird stuff does start to happen to him, I think most impatient people might have given up. I almost did!

The first half just felt like the Shawshank Redemption in the Florida Keys, but the second half suddenly ramps up with the undead, ghosts, giant frogs, a bouncing lawn jockey, murderous paintings, possessed people, blood, vomit, salt and sand.

It was a decent listen, though. I guess I'd recommend it if you like Stephen King and have the patience.

My favorite Bea Arthur moment

2009-04-26T00:21:00.002-05:00

Bea Arther died yesterday at age 86 of cancer. While I wasn't a huge fan of hers, I had seen her many times on television while Laura was watching the Golden Girls.

My favorite moment of hers was when she was on the panel of roasters for the roast of Pamela Anderson. In this not safe for work clip, she reads excerpts from Pamela's recent fictional book.

We get outed as the Easter Bunny...

2009-04-18T00:56:00.003-05:00

There was an episode of a show Julia watches called the Fairly Odd Parents that was about lying and it made me lie to her.

The show is a cartoon about a kid named, Timmy, who has two Fairy God Parents. They grant his every wish, but most often, his wishes go horribly wrong and he has to scramble to fix the messes he made before finally wishing that everything was back to normal. One such episode featured Timmy realizing that his parents had lied to him. He asked them, "Have you ever lied to me?" after wishing that they couldn't lie to him anymore. Of course, they had to answer 'Yes'.

He storms out all upset at his parents. Feeling guilty, they decide to go through all their home videos to write down all the times they lied to Timmy. Right off the bat, the very first tape has Timmy asking, "Where did I come from?"

His Mom answers, "The stork."

"Wow!" his Dad says. "That didn't take long!"

While watching this, Julia turned to me and asked, "Dad, have you or Mom ever lied to me?"

I gulped, paused and said, "No, of course not."

I thought to myself, "Unless you count just now and all the other times I lied to you."

Parents have to lie to keep their kids happy. You have to lie about tons of stuff on Christmas by telling them that an old man will enter your house while you're asleep, leave presents and fly away with the help of his magic flying reindeer and weighted down by a bottomless sack of gifts made by elves.

Then they lose teeth and you have to tell them a magical fairy is going to break into your house, steal your tooth and leave you money.

Along comes Easter and a bunny breaks into your house, doesn't shit in it or chew anything up, but manages to leave you eggs, candy or whatever gift he feels like.

One time, we actually forgot to leave money for Julia's tooth. I woke her up for school and she looked at me like I had just spit in her face.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

She flipped up her pillow and said, "The tooth fairy didn't come for my tooth."

Doh!

We assured her that the tooth fairy must have been very busy. Sure enough, the next morning arrived with a note apologizing for the busy night and double the money. Crisis averted!

Friday, like a Dateline episode about a guy living a double life, our lies caught up with us.

I was Spring Break for Julia's school. I was at working from home on my computer, so Julia was fending for herself.

She asked me to come upstairs and help me get an Easter basket she saw on the top shelf of the closet, which I did. Later, Laura came home to find that basket and a bunch of Easter eggs scattered all over the floor. These were Easter eggs that we were going to have the Easter bunny give Julia.

Laura asked, "Where did you get these eggs, Julia?"

Julia said, "In the closet in the guest bedroom."

Laura checked out the guest bedroom and found her worst fears confirmed, that Julia had found the stash of Easter goodies that she was supposed to get from the Easter bunny, which also included a package from Build-a-bear.

Laura called me from upstairs.

"Umm... Bob! Can you come here? We have a little problem!"

I ran upstairs and found her in the guest bedroom. Julia was sitting on the bed near hear.

"Julia found the Easter stash, which includes the Build-a-Bear."

I looked over to Julia, who was trying not to smile too big, but you could sort of tell that she was caught halfway between excitement and dread. I think she was waiting for a punishment of some sort.

"Julia," Laura asked. "Did you find see what's inside the Build-a-Bear box?"

Julia said, "Yes. I did. I saw it in the closet and I was like 'I wonder what's in there?'. When I saw that it was a Build-a-bear, I got really excited because I love Build-a-bear. So then I was thinking 'I wonder if they're going to give that to me for Easter'. So are you going to give that to me for Easter?"

Laura said, "Well, yes. You were going to get that for Easter, but it was supposed to come from the Easter bunny."

"Uh huh."

"And who do you think the Easter bunny is?" Laura asked.

"Umm... You guys?"

"Maybe. Are you okay with that?" Laura asked.

"Sure," Julia said.

Laura frowned at me. I could see that she seemed a little sad that Julia no longer believed in the Easter bunny. I didn't feel bad at all. She is almost 8 after all. And I don't think that I even believed in the Easter bunny when I was growing up. Santa Claus? Sure. But a bunny that hops along, manages to get into your house and leaves without waking everyone from all the hoping he does hiding eggs? I didn't quite buy it. Besides, Easter wasn't really that big of a holiday for us. Yes, I got a small Easter basket, but I never got presents. Nowadays, kids get a gift, which boggles my mind.

Later, we're driving in the car on the way to the YMCA.

I started asking a few more probing questions.

"So Julia. When I was working downstairs did you start exploring because you were looking for something to do?"

"Yes."

"And that's why you stumbled upon the Easter stuff?"

"Yes."

"Oh," Laura retorted. "You mean Daddy ignored you while you were upstairs by yourself all day?"

"Yep" Julia responded way too quickly for my taste.

"Hey!" I exclaimed. "I had to work!"

So we still have the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus to fall back on.

As luck would have it, she lost a tooth that same day. She was obviously expecting her pay out from the Tooth Fairy. Seeing as how we screwed up once before, I'm bound and determined not to let it happen again. I insisted that she put it on the desk next to her bed. I explained that it would be easier for the Tooth Fairy to get in and out. Thankfully, she bought it...

I'm having a GREAT time being a kid...

2009-03-18T22:24:00.002-06:00

So here I am again apologizing to the handful of people that actually read this blog. Again, I'm sorry that I have no motivation to post because I keep thinking of other things to do and feel that I don't have time to keep up with this blog. I was also thinking that it was only two weeks since I last posted. I didn't realize that it was almost four weeks!

So anyway, I do have some things that I'm working on, but in the meantime, here's a quick one.

We've been trying to appeal to Julia to eat something that isn't popcorn chicken, chicken nuggets, chicken tenders or chicken strips. We do occasionally get her to eat ham, though. Now in the other food groups, we do get her to eat watermelon, grapes, strawberries, oranges, pineapples, green beans, corn and broccoli. So I guess that we could complain about more.

I think that Julia just likes to be in control, so whenever we've tried to get her to eat something, it usually involves a lot of tears on her part and anger on our part. We try not to be angry, but it's so irritating for her to not even try something.

So Laura was trying to appeal to her kid nature.

She said, "Julia, are you going to be eating nuggets when you're a grown woman?"

"I don't know."

"Well, you could be eating things that kids eat like spaghetti, pizza, hamburgers. I want you to eat these things while you can and have a good time being a kid."

Julia looked at her and said, "Listen, I'm having a GREAT time being a kid."

Mini Laura rocks and rolls without studying...

2009-02-21T01:10:00.002-06:00

Julia is in first grade and as such, she thinks that she now knows everything. I think the success has gone to her head. She recently got a certificate from her teacher proclaiming her a dynamite speller. I think that has gone to her head, or she's just starting to figure out the politics of school.

You see in her class there are two lists for the students. They all take List A as the pretest. If you do well on the pretest, you have to take the much harder List B words at the end of the week. Julia grumbles about that big time because they are much harder.

Last two quarters of school, Julia was diligent about studying her list of words for the Friday test, but I've noticed that she's been a little lax about it.

Last night, I asked her at dinner how she did on her spelling test. She got an 8 out of 10.

I asked, "Eight out of 10? Didn't you study?"

I mean, not to put any pressure on her, but she usually always gets 10 out of 10.

Julia sighed and said, "Look Daddy, I don't need to study because I rock and roll better on the spelling tests without studying."

Laura had to suppress a laugh at that.

"You 'rock' and 'roll' on the spelling test?" I asked.

"Yes!" she exclaimed. "I'm good at them. And I don't have to study."

"Well, I got news for you, kid. The spelling words are just going to get harder, so you have to keep studying so you know how to spell correctly."

I forget what she said next, but I'm sure it came with an eye roll and a sigh.

Mini Laura loses a tooth...

2009-02-21T00:59:00.005-06:00

Laura tells me that at work, they call Julia, Mini Laura, or Laura's Mini Me because she has a lot of the same mannerisms as Laura.

I've kind of noticed that myself. For a seven-year-old girl, Julia talks rather grown up sometimes.

The other night, Julia was messing with her loose tooth. It's one of the top, front teeth. I suggested that I try to yank it out, but she wouldn't let me near it. Finally, she relented, but when my big tug didn't pull it out, she screamed and forbade me from trying again.

The next day, it came out when she was at our after-school care provider's house. Michelle, the provider I mentioned, told us that Julia was playing with the loose tooth and offered to pull it out for her.

Julia told her and I quote, "Listen. You don't understand. I have an issue with this. I don't like pain."

3-d movies

2009-02-12T00:57:00.004-06:00

I have a soft spot for 3D movies. I remember the first time I went to see a 3D movie, it was for the third part in the Friday the 13th series called Friday the 13th 3D.

I was handed my glasses and sat with my brother, Bill. We were just in 5th grade and were tagging along with my older brothers to this R-rated movie. The screen went dark and the first sequence where the credits came out of the screen in a 3-D shadow effect blew me away. The letters seemed to be coming out of the screen and I could almost touch them.

Throughout the movie, various objects came out of the screen: popcorn, a tv antenna, a pole, a spear, a knife, an exploding eyeball and various other objects. Besides the gratuitous violence, I was hooked on the 3-D effect. We went to see part 4 of the movie series with some friends when we were in junior high, but it didn't really have that same excitement as the 3-D did.

From that point on, Bill and I made a point to see pretty much every 3-D movie that came out. Some were memorable. Some were so unforgettable that I can barely even muster a few seconds of recollection.

Treasure of the Four Crowns - I would describe this plot, but I can barely remember the film. The only thing that I remember was the constant barrage of 3-D effects that came at the screen. There were so many of them that you could barely keep up with the plot, which had something to do with a missing treasure. Basically, it was a bad Indiana Jones rip-off. Plus, I remember that the 3-D effects were subpar. There was a sequence where all these birds flew at the screen and the effect split as it was coming off the screen, which ruined the 3-D.

Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone - I would describe this plot also, but I can barely remember seeing this. All I remember was that nothing flew out at the screen, it had Molly Ringwald in it and it was boring as hell.

Jaws 3-D - The movie that broke the back of 3-D movies for those of us in small town Grand Island. After this one, we didn't get a sniff of a 3-D movie for years. Bill and I had seen Jaw and Jaw 2 and liked them, but what really drove me to see Jaw 3-D was that it was in 3-D, of course. Were we ever disappointed. Again, there seemed to be a lack of things coming out at the screen, which seems to be the whole point of a 3-D movie. When it finally did, when the shark seems to come out of the screen, it was so brief and fake looking that I almost laughed. I was really disappointed. Besides the fact, the story was horrible and made no sense. So these are the kids of Brody from the first film, one of whom was just a kid and now he's in his 20's less than 10 years later? Oh and a giant shark can practically hide in a Sea World-like place without anyone catching on? Right...

Honey I Shrunk the Audience - It wasn't until December of 1994 that I finally got to see another 3-D movie. This time, it was at Disney World's Epcot Center. This movie still plays today and it still looks good, if not dated since the film is over 15 years old now. The short film centers around Rick Moranis's character, Dr. Wayne Szalinski, from the film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids getting an award for scientist of the year. It's hosted by Eric Idle of Monty Python fame. When the award show starts, Wayne isn't to be found, but then he shows up in a hover craft. He soon loses control of the craft. Through a series of thing that go wrong, the audience gets shrunk. Then while tiny, a dog sneezes on you, a snake hisses at you and the ground shakes. It's a great film, but I wonder how much longer it's going to last. I've seen it about 5 times now over the years.

Muppets 3-D - This was another 3-D movie that we saw at Disney World. It's very dated, but it's still pretty good. The 3-D isn't nearly as good as current movie technology, but it's still cool. Laura and I saw this on our honeymoon and again when we went again when Julia turned 6.

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over - This is the third movie of the Spy Kids franchise. I hadn't seen the first two films, but considering that I love 3-D movies, I had to see it. It really wasn't that good, though. The plot made no sense and you had to watch the whole thing with the red and blue glasses, which gave the film a redish-blue tint through the whole thing. I was baffled that they would use the old red/blue glasses, but I was even more baffled by the plot, which didn't make any sense. It was painfully bad.

The Polar Express 3-D - I saw this one at the Imax theater at the zoo in Omaha. I wouldn't have gone to see it because it didn't interest me, but since it was in 3-D, I suggested that Julia and I see it. Julia enjoyed it and I thought the 3-D effects really enhanced the movie. For example, in the beginning when it was snowing, you could see the clear separation of the snow flakes. As for the story, I was not blown away at all. The movie involves a kid that doesn't really believe in Santa until he's whisked away on a train called the Polar Express that takes certain kids to the north pole to see Santa off before he starts his Christmas Eve run. It was okay. There was some typical Hollywood detours where the kids get lost at the North Pole and have to circumvent a bunch of stuff that would kill somebody if they were to fall, but it seemed tacked on to make the movie longer. Also, the kid that doesn't believe gets the right to get the first gift from Santa over the poor kid that has never had a Christmas present. I was like, "WTF? Why does the spoiled non-believer get the gift?" Also, Tom Hanks does three of the voices: the train conductor (which he's good at), the train's hobo ghost (which he good at, but it's like 'Oh, now Tom Hanks is the hobo) and Santa Clause (which he's okay at because it's like "Okay... now Tom Hanks is trying to talk like an old Santa). I'm not sure why they thought that Tom Hanks had that much range, but it was distracting for me.

Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D - I saw this one by myself when both Julia and Laura were out of town. I've had some neck and back problems over the years, so I have muscle relaxers for those times when I feel my neck start to tighten up from hours of staring at a computer. I wanted to relax for the movie so I took one muscle relaxer. When the movie started, I didn't really feel it kick in, so I took another one. So I remember a lot about the first part of the movie, but the second part was a blur. I remember it ending, but I couldn't tell you what happened from the middle to the end. I drove home in a daze threw off my clothes and fell asleep. 10 hours later, I woke up with all the lights on upstairs and the bedroom tv blaring. Here's a tip: Don't take more than a recommended dose of a muscle relaxer until you are sure how you'll react to them. You just might miss something. So I bought this movie when it came out on 3-D and it is pretty good. Granted, the home edition is with the red/blue glasses, but that's the only way they can release 3-D movies now.

Bolt 3-D - Julia and I saw this. It's a pretty good movie. I thought it would be a lot funnier and the plot bothered me. The premise is that this dog thinks that the show he's on is real life because they do everything in one take, but then I started thinking that this would be absolutely impossible considering the show that they are trying to shoot is a massive spy adventure type show with tons of chases. Then again, I didn't have a problem that the animals can talk to each other and think like humans, so I guess I need to take it with a grain of salt. The 3-D effects were awesome, though.

So this brings me to My Bloody Valentine 3-D, which is a sort-of remake of the original, which wasn't in 3-D and made in Canada. It was one of those slasher movies jumping on the bandwagon after Halloween and Friday the 13th hit it big. The original movie was pretty decent for that type. I remember it shocking me when I was a wee lad of 11 and it was on HBO. The new movie's premise is a little similar in that a guy dressed as a miner with a gas mask is killing people, but that's about it. I'd go into the plot, but it's filled with cliche'd characters: the bitter ex-girlfriend, the rich kid that hasn't been seen for 10 years since the first murders, the young sheriff in over his head, the shady deputy, the grizzled old sheriff, the new sheriff's pregnant lover, and a whole cast of fairly pretty people. I'm serious. For a mining town, the people there look like they've been primped and preened like they were getting ready for their publicity stills. Every scene includes extras that look like they were pulled out of a casting call for the other characters. So the plot, which I said I wouldn't explain, starts 10 years after the insane miner escapes from police custody after coming out of a coma and kills a bunch of people. Now people are dying again. Most of them seem tied to the old cases. Because it's 3-D, there are a lot of things being thrown onscreen at you: guns, eyeballs, other body parts and lots and lots of pickaxes. And because it's a slasher movie, there are a lot of red herrings and people too dumb to call the police instead of running and trying to escape out windows. One scene in particular has two people trying to barricade themselves in an office, but fail to call for help on the office phone and then they finally trigger the security alarm. I commented to Laura, "Oh, now you pull the alarm?" All in all, it was a decent 3-D movie. It was on the new all-digit theater complex here which I read has a special silver screen for 3-D and movie is shown at 100 frames a second to achieve the crystal clear 3-D effect.

It's called '101' because it's tricky...

2009-02-02T22:16:00.001-06:00

Julia and I were at the YMCA the other day. Laura was working out while we swam. It's a normal routine thing. I don't mind it so much because I can swim a few laps. Julia even joins me on some of the laps. She recently has been taking some swim classes and has gotten a lot better at swimming. It's a welcome change from when she was deathly afraid of going into the deeper end of the pool.

Usually when we swim, we'll have races to see who can get to an underwater object the fastest, she'll swim under me like I'm a bridge, she'll ride my like some sea horse around the pool and various other games.

I thought that I would try to teach her the game Marco Polo. I've never played it, but I think I got the hang of the rules.

One person who is "It" swims around with his/her eyes closed and yell "Marco!". The other people in the game yell, "Polo!" and avoid getting tagged. I attempted to teach Julia this game.

"I'll go first," I said.

I closed my eyes and started swimming.

"Marco!" I yelled.

No response...

"Marco!" I yelled.

No response still...

I opened my eyes. Julia is just staring at me.

"I said 'Marco!'" I exclaimed.

"I know." Julia said.

"Then let's play it," I said.

"It looks too hard."

So that was it. We started swimming around again, but she didn't seem to want to do it.

"I've got a game!" Julia exclaimed happily. "It's called '101'"

"How do you play it?" I asked skeptically.

"OK... You swim around, OK?"

I nodded.

"Swim around with your eyes closed. And you try to find me," she continued.

"Wait..."

"And the mushroom (the spouting water fountain in the pool) is base."

"Wait a second... I'm supposed to swim around with my eyes closed and look for you?"

"Yes," Julia said.

"How am I supposed to find you though if I can't see? Are you going to be making any noise?" I asked.

"No!" Julia exclaimed. "You just have to find me!"

"Why is it called '101'?" I asked.

"It's called '101' because it's tricky. So come on! Let's play!"

"Oh, all right..."

"You go first."

So I closed my eyes and started swimming around. I grasped around the pool area in front of me. I felt a leg and grabbed at it.

"Gotcha!" I exclaimed.

"No!" Julia retorted. "This is base, Daddy. And you can't get me when I'm at base."

"What's base?" I asked.

"Base is this (pointed to fountain thing that she was sitting under), the ladders and the slide."

"Oh... okay." I said.

I closed my eyes again and started swimming around. I swam until I thought I heard her. I swam faster and felt her close. I lunged forward and grabbed her.

"Aha!" I exclaimed.

I opened my eyes and saw to my horror that I had not grabbed Julia, but I had grabbed another little girl about her age.

I muttered a very hurried and apologetic, "Sorry! Wrong Person" and looked around for Julia. She was all the way on the other side of the pool by the ladder to the water slide.

"Julia!" I yelled as I swam over.

"Why aren't you over there where I was?"

"Because I was hiding from you!"

"Well, you weren't where I was and I ended up grabbing someone else that wasn't you!" I explained.

I looked around and saw the girl that I had grabbed. I started worrying that someone had saw me grab her and totally saw me as some sick, twisted child predator that used his daughter as an excuse to grab total strangers. Being the paranoid person that I am, I also started to worry that someone was calling the cops as we spoke because the creepy guy with the beard was stalking other people's kids. It's not a pleasant thought picturing yourself trying to explain to the police that you weren't purposely trying to grab other kids. I didn't want it to be like a scene out of Little Children where the former child molester is dragged from a pool for swimming around kids because he wanted to cool off. I pictured myself getting dragged away screaming, "I was just playing 101! It's very tricky!"

So even after that incident, Julia still wanted to play 101.

I told her, "No."

"Because," I told her. "I don't want to be swimming around with my eyes closed looking for you when you're going to be no where near me and then I grab another strange kid again. That could get me into a lot of trouble. People might think that I'm a weirdo."

Julia wasn't buying it because she started moping. She really wanted to play the game that she had made up.

When Laura showed up after her workout, Julia told her that she was mad at me, of course, but when I explained why she was mad, Laura was on my side.

The next time we went swimming, I groaned when Julia said that she wanted to play 101 again.

"No!!" I exclaimed.

"Come on!"

"No!"

"Please!?"

"Oh," I started to give in, "All right."

Julia smiled.

"But... You have to be it first. I'll go hide while you swim around."

She agreed.

I got as far away as I could and waited. She started swimming and swimming around the pool, but didn't find me.

Julia finally gave up, opened her eyes and swam over to me. She said, "Okay, Daddy. Rule change: You can open your eyes."

I guess 101 was too tricky for her...

Danger all around in Nebraska...

2009-01-24T10:38:00.000-06:00

My brother, Bill, sent me this link.

http://www.trutv.com/video/speeders/dont-listen-to-her.html?link=truTVshlk

Lauraism #2 - If I'd known that I'd be freezing my ass off, I might not have lost all this weight.

2009-01-24T10:31:00.002-06:00

Laura is on a diet. She's lost over 50 pounds as of now.

The difference is striking. We were looking at photos from last Christmas. The ones of her look like a different person.

Her response to me?

"Why didn't you tell me that I was that fucking fat?"

Yes, Laura can make a sailor blush with her salty sea language sometimes.

My response to her question?

"Yeah, that would have gone over well. (Me talking like it was last Christmas) 'Heffer, you've got to lose some weight.'"

So the last few winters Laura has tried to freeze me out. She hardly had any blankets on her and even had a fan pointed at her while she slept because she'd get so hot.

Meanwhile, I was freezing my ass off so much that I started to sleep with two fleece stadium blankets on me.

This winter, however, the tables have turned. Now she's the one freezing and I have hardly any blankets on me. We now have a space heater going in our bedroom while Laura is huddled under her blankets up to her neck.

She said at one point, "If I had known that I'd be freezing my ass off in the winter, I might not have lost all this weight. I would have stayed fat."

Laura-ism #1 - That's how I roll...

2008-12-26T01:52:00.002-06:00

I told my wife I was going to chronicle all the great sage advice or words of wisdom she gives me.

On Monday, I was off of work, which I am the whole week. The night before, Laura said to me about the coming morning.

"Oh by the way," she said. "I normally sleep in on Monday mornings (she goes in after lunch on Mondays), so don't wake me up."

She said this last sentence with a flair of her hand.

"That's how I roll..."

I puke all over myself: A touching holiday story...

2008-12-26T01:46:00.002-06:00

When I was in college, I worked for Pizza Hut as a delivery driver. I first started there as a cook, but after a few years of toiling in minimum wage hell while my brother, Bill, lavished in tip heaven, I was finally allowed to deliver pizzas (once I had gone two years without an accident).

Delivering pizzas was a pretty sweet gig. We drivers would stand around, fold boxes and wait for deliveries to come up. All you had to worry about as a driver was knowing which way to go, bringing everything the customer asked for and getting there in a timely manner. This is pretty simple, but not as easy as it sounds. Often, you are so swamped with deliveries that you have to decide the best multi-stop route and hope that you didn't forget anything at the store that the customer wanted. Then there are the things that the customer asked for, but didn't make it on the ticket, getting lost, getting stuck behind a train, wrong address given, wrong address typed in by the phone person, slow traffic, the weather, losing your first born, or any other problem.

In the winter, not only did you have to deal with all of that, but you often had to do your job while you were sick.

This brings me to my story for today. It was a very cold December, kind of like this one, in which I had been struggling with a bad cold. I was coughing a lot, but trying not to do that in front of the customer. Usually, I would try and hack up some stuff prior to getting out of my car and delivering the pizza to the door. Or I'd suck on a cough drop while driving.

I was working all day, as I usually did on a Sunday, and I grabbed some lunch at Taco Johns. Since it was Christmas, I thought I would try the Nachos Navidad, which is Taco Johns' annual Christmas special. It's basically just the same old nachos they always serve, but with red and green nacho chips. After all, those are the official colors of Christmas, so it's only natural that you'd want to stuff your face with things of that color.

I ate them at the little break table and coughed a bit while I was doing so. I had a little tickle at the back of my throat, and it was driving me crazy.

I started delivering again. It was cold and windy. I had three deliveries to take. The last one was several miles away and near the edge of our delivery area. I looked at my car's clock and noticed that it was overdue by about 15 minutes. I sped up a little. I finally got to the driveway of the townhouse that wanted the pizza. I stopped the car in the driveway. I coughed. I felt that tickle in my throat again. I coughed again. It was a quick rasp followed by a BLECH! Regurgitated Nachos Navidad streamed all over my jacket, all over my shirt, all over my pants, all over my seat and all over my console.

I had just vomited in the driveway of a customer, and I hadn't even delivered the pizza yet. I looked at how late it was on the clock again. I surveyed the mess all over me. It reeked of nachos covered with bile.

What in the hell was I going to do??

It was already pretty late delivering the pizza. I momentarily thought about turning around, which is what I should have done, and changing clothes at the store. I'd be clean, but the pizza would really be late by then. Also, I was afraid that I'd walk in and have to explain why I had puke all over myself, why I was suddenly wearing a clean uniform, or why I had to go back out to deliver something that I should have dropped off a while ago.

Panicking, I looked around for a stash of napkins that I kept in the car. I had them because there were many times when people would ask for them. Having them on hand almost guaranteed a tip. But on this day, I only had a handful. I grabbed whatever I could find and started wiping off my shirt and jacket. I looked down at myself. I didn't look cleaned up. I looked like a guy that had just vomited all over myself. Now I was starting to get paranoid that the person inside the house had noticed that I was there and was wondering why I had been just sitting there when I should have been delivering the pizza.

I decided to get out of the car. I zipped up my hooded windbreaker to cover up the stained shirt, but the jacket had its share of unsavory stains. I examined it trying to think of a strategy. Then a really dumb idea hit me. The left side of my jacket was clean because I had puked all over the right side. Why didn't I just ring the doorbell and stand there with my left side toward the customer? That way, I could get the money and hand off the pizza without the customer knowing the wiser.

It seemed to make perfect sense to my panicked brain, but the execution was not that smooth.

I rang the doorbell and turned with my left side towards the customer.

A lady answered the door. She took one look at me and got a shocked look on her face. I'm no reader of faces, but it seemed to say, "What in the hell did this guy just roll in to look like that."

Getting paranoid, I decided that I had to get out of there as fast as I could.

I handed the pizza to her. She reluctantly handed me her check (Thank God!), which I'd normally tuck into my waist pouch, but seeing as how I'd have to turn to do that, I just clutched the check in my hand and took off for the car. I jumped in the car and drove back to Pizza Hut.

I obsessed on the way there about how stupid that was, but now I had another problem. What was I going to do with my uniform?

Pizza Hut came into view and I resolved to avoid coming back if other drivers were back. No way in hell did they not notice that I had something all over my front.

Thankfully, no one was there. To my great luck, no one was at the front as they were at the back making a pizza. I sprinted inside and downstairs. I looked in the uniform stash and found a new uniform shirt. I ran into the bathroom and changed.

I came outside to cash in my orders. The shift manager came over. She took a look at my new uniform and asked, "What happened to the shirt you were wearing?"

I shrugged.

"I had to change it because it got dirty."

I try to make salsa...

2008-12-04T23:15:00.000-06:00

A Friday night in August was Julia's birthday, so we invited my brothers that live nearby and my Mom, who couldn't come. I didn't want to make a big deal about it, but seeing as how my brothers are within 40 minutes of driving from me, I thought I might as well invite them.

On Independence Day, our Hispanic neighbors brought over soft tacos served traditional style, which entailed shredded pork, corn tortillas, cilantro, onions, red salsa and limes squeezed over the taco meat. It was a big hit. Laura wanted to find out how to make it, so I asked. Turns out the pork was from Famous Dave's (where the husband works), but the salsa was homemade.

The salsa recipe was to get several roma tomatoes, a hot pepper and a clove of garlic.

For the pork, I decided to try it myself using my brother Paul's famous (among our family) seasoning, some mesquite powder and sea salt. At Famous Dave's, they smoke their pork for eight hours, but I didn't have access to a smoker. So I put the pork with the seasonings in the slow cooker and let it go for about seven hours.

I then started the salsa. The recipe called for me to roast the tomatoes and pepper under the broiler until the skins can be peeled off, which I did. I then took my head of garlic and peeled the whole thing. The garlic I stuck in a blender with the pepper and blended. Then I added the tomatoes to the blender.

What was produced was very strong in the garlic department. It was good, but it was like garlic took over the flavor brigade. I think if you look closely in the above paragraph, you can easily tell where I went wrong with the salsa recipe.

I made the same mistake when I made chili one time. I had recently come up with a chili recipe that I modified from one in a cookbook. The recipe called for real garlic, but for the first two times I made it, I used dry garlic from a jar. At work, we were having a chili cook-off for charity so I decided to one up myself by entering my recipe. Then I got cocky and thought about using real garlic. The recipe called for two or three cloves of garlic, so I bought two whole heads of garlic, peeled them, cut up all the pieces and cooked them with the ground beef, as per the instructions. I was immediately done over by the intense garlic smell that smothered the room. I finished the recipe and took a taste. I was met with the most intense garlic tasting chili I've ever tasted.

I thought, "Is this right?"

I added more tomato sauce to try and dilute the taste, but it wasn't helping much. I put the chili in the freezer anyway and decided to test my luck at the cook off. That day came and karma dealt me a huge hand by allowing me to completely forget to bring my chili that day. By the time I remembered, it was two hours until the competition started. Seeing as how I lived 30 minutes away and the chili had been frozen when I made it a few days before. I knew there wouldn't be enough time to retrieve the chili, defrost it and warm it up again. So I gave up my chili table at the cook-off, which as you read later, was a very good thing. Unfortunately, I had made two large pots of it and had to finish it myself.

The problem was, every time I ate the chili, Laura would kick me out of the bedroom. She's very sensitive to garlic and can always tell when I've eaten it. Normally, she just groans and says, "You've been eating garlic haven't you?"

This time, she said as I neared her, "Jesus! What in the hell have you been eating? A garlic patch?"

I assured her that I was not.

"Well whatever you've been doing, you REEK of garlic! It's like it's oozing out of every pore and orifice!"

I would try to kiss her and she'd shy away with a "Aaaggghhh!"

I hate to waste things, so I tried to doctor the chili up some by draining out the juice and replacing it with plain tomato juice, but even that didn't help.

Each time I ate it, Laura would groan and kick me to the other bedroom. One time I managed to talk her into let me sleep in the bed after a bowl of chili, but I was jettisoned in the middle of the night when I turned over and breathed on her. That was too much for her to take.

"Out!" she exclaimed.

As I was walking out the door with my pillow, she grumbled, "And throw out that damn chili!"

So I did...

Back to the near past...

So my twin brother, my two older brothers and their wives came over.

Being a little paranoid about the salsa, I put out two different store bought salsas for the pork taco meat I had made, but if they had any qualms about the salsa, they didn't say anything as they ate it heartily. I barely had any left.

The next day, I was talking to my neighbor who had given me the recipe and I asked her if one clove of garlic meant the whole thing or just one piece of the garlic.

"Oh no!" she exclaimed. "Just one of those pieces."

So instead of putting in one of those pieces, I had put something like 10 cloves of garlic into the salsa, which obviously accounted for the major garlic taste.

I called my brother, Bill, the next day to tell him about my mistake. He told me that when he got home and when he got within smelling distance of his wife, she took one whiff of him and exclaimed, "I don't know what you ate, but I want you to get away from me! It smells like you took a job at garlic factory."

She also said, "In fact, if this was our first date, there would be no chance I'd call you back with you smelling like that."

So it took me 37 years to learn that a clove of garlic means just one piece of the garlic and not the whole head. Now I just need to learn what in the hell oleo is and I'll be set.

Now... where's that crowbar?

2008-11-11T22:11:00.000-06:00

There are lots of offers lately for home security by several companies. The commercials for these services seem to imply that whenever you're alone, or whenever it's dark, or alone when its dark, criminals are going to get you!

I'm not sure if it's just one company or if all of them do this, but the ads can certainly scare the crap out of any tentative person out there.

One commercial shows a man kissing his wife goodbye as he's leaving the house to go to work. As he's backing out of the driveway, he passes a man who's jogging. Inside, she closes the door and turns on the home security. Just then, the jogger stops jogging, puts up his hood and kicks down the door! She screams, but he's startled when the loud alarm goes off. She gets a call that asks her if she needs help.

So apparently, if you live in the suburbs, criminals are going to kick your door down in broad daylight immediately after someone leaves their house. Wouldn't they try to see if the door was unlocked first? Wouldn't the criminal try to get in without force? You know, by knocking on the door and asking to use the phone because their car broke down? That's how it usually seems to happen on the news.

Another commercial shows a family getting startled out of their sleep by a hooded criminal with a crowbar that has broken a side window and is trying to get in. The family panics, huddles together and breathes a sigh of relief when the burglar runs away and the security company calls them.

Yet another commercial shows a teenager's parents leaving for a night out. She tells them to have fun and right when she arms the house, she hears a noise. Thinking that her parents have forgotten something, she starts for the door when 'CRASH!' a hooded figure with a crowbar is crashing through the window and starting to climb through when the alarm scares him away.

A few things I notice here. In the suburbs at night, criminals are very prone to breaking into houses with visible activity as opposed to those houses that are obviously empty with the occupants out of town. It must be like flies to a bug light. They can't help themselves but to break in. I'm sure the security sign out front was also like bait for the burglar. They see the sign and figure that it's a house that has a lot of stuff to steal, so they take a chance to break in with as loud a noise as possible.

When our family had a break in when I was growing up in Grand Island, it was not a result of having a security system that we had just armed. Rather, it was a direct result of us not locking our doors. It was at night, but rather than crashing through the nearest large glass window with a crowbar, the burglars seemed to sneak in because we didn't hear them. It was only when morning came that we noticed that something was wrong when the sliding glass door to our patio was wide open. That and the television being gone seemed to send that red flag up. I guess they didn't read the stereotyping manual.

For sure, there are reports of home invasions and of people breaking down the door, but like I said, those seem rarer than a silent break in.

Also, one flaw with all home security services is that if your alarm goes off, they call you first to see if you need help. Now if your door has just been knocked down and the loud alarm doesn't scare off the intruder, are you really going to take the time to answer the phone?

It is a kind of odd way to advertise your product, by showing potential customers the worst case scenario.

Also, one of the things that they tell you when you're pitched by the security companies is that one of the biggest deterrents you can have for a home security system is to have a sign out front that tells the whole world that you're protected. That'd actually be a nice commercial...

I can picture the pitch meeting at the advertising agency. One guy gets up and tells about a commercial that shows a dark street with a family sleeping peacefully in their beds. While the camera pans through the house, a burglar is slowly walking down the street. He keeps seeing the security signs in the front yards of potential houses. He stops in front of our potential victim's house. He sees their sign, thinks twice about it and keeps moving. Meanwhile, the family inside sleeps soundly.

Then you have another guy stand up who says, "Picture this: A family gets the living shit scared out of them by a burglar in a hood crashing through their window with a crowbar! It's only the loud alarm and the security company calling to see if help is needed that saves the family!"

Some people say, "Good one!" and "I like it!"

"The message is: get our security system or your family is going to die!"

The president of the ad agency smiles and says, "Let's run with it!"

I guess it would be too boring to show scores of houses not being broken into. Kind of like having an advertisement for a casino that only shows what's more likely, the people inside losing their asses while gambling. Instead, you only see scores of people jumping for joy at all the winning that's going on.

Two things...

2008-10-26T21:26:00.000-06:00

We were at Carlos O'Kellys, a Tex-Mex style restaurant, the other night with Julia.

Julia went to the bathroom, which is not an uncommon occurrence I realize.

When she came back, she sat down and said, "Two things. One, the bathroom smells like the pool at the YMCA. And two, the hand soap in there is dark blue."

I'm not sure of the significance, but we laughed at the interesting observation.

People sometimes do bad things, and here's a perfect example, Julia...

2008-10-18T22:19:00.000-05:00

We went to the Children's Museum one Sunday, Julia and I.

After the museum closed, we decided to grab a drink at the local gas station near the interstate exit.

I pulled in, got out, and motioned for Julia to join me.

Julia asked, "Can I stay in the car while you get it?"

Sometimes, I will leave her in the car, but only if I'm parked in front of the windows, so I can see her. I was not parked in front. More importantly, it was a gas station in a not-so-good part of town. It's not that bad really. I sometimes eat at the Burger King next door, and I often go to the Walgreen's across the street, but you can definitely see where people might get nervous based on the shady-looking characters that sometimes frequent the area. Laura can't believe that I go to either the Walgreen's or the Burger King there.

"There was a gun fired at the bus stop there! Did you know that?" she asked as if to say, 'What are you thinking? Dumbass!'

I shrugged and said, "I've never seen anything like that. It's not like bullets are flying all the time. I've never had to duck while running into a store around there."

So today when Julia asked if she could stay in the car, I said, "No."

"Why?" Julia asked. "Someone might take me?"

"That and the fact that this isn't a good neighborhood."

"Why isn't it a good neighborhood?" she asked.

"Well, sometimes people do bad things."

"Like what?"

"For instance, did you see the glass in the parking lot? Sometimes, people break things," I said.

"Why?" Julia asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Sometimes they do."

We rounded the corner and walked inside. It was as hot inside as it was outside for some reason. I realized very quickly why when I looked towards my right. There was a guy there scooping big chunks of glass into a dustpan. There was a lot of it to clean up because the right front window pane was busted completely.

To top it off there was a truck outside of the shop that had its front end bashed in a little bit. There were assorted fluids draining from truck in a multi-colored pool.

I pointed to the broken window and said, "And here's a perfect example."

"What happened?" Julia asked.

"I don't know," I said, but it looked pretty obvious that someone had run their car through the front window.

I heard some people asking the front teller, who filled them in on the story.

Of course, I had to find out, so I asked the teller what happened when I was paying for our snacks.

The story went like this. The guy driving the truck lost control for some reason, sped through the parking lot and crashed into the front window of the store. He stumbled out of the truck, walked into the store, grabbed a diet soda, paid for it, went back to his truck to retrieve his stash of whatever drugs he had on him and ran off.

To top it off, the guy was bleeding from several cuts including a cut from a tooth that protruded from his up lip. That didn't stop him from stopping to get a refreshment.

We got back in the car and I said, "So you see. This is why I don't want to leave you in the car... because people sometimes do bad things."

Boris runs away and returns...

2008-09-30T21:53:00.001-05:00

Whew! That was a long vacation!

Sorry about the long delay in my blog my faithful readers, all three of you. I've been absolutely swamped at work.

Here's a story about our cat, Boris, running away...

Boris runs away...

I've written about our newest cat, Boris, the one that's really lazy, that belches, that has chin acne, that isn't that bright, that is a bed hog and so on. Actually, I only wrote that he's quite lazy, but add the other stuff to that.

Boris lived on the streets for months before being picked up by the Humane Society. When we got him, he'd shown some interest in going outside, but we didn't want to start that habit. Our old cat, Moe, used to go outside on a leash in the front yard, so we tried that with Boris. He enjoyed it so much that he'd throw a hissy fit if he didn't get to go outside.

At first, he'd walk around and occasionally get wrapped around our tree in the middle of the front yard. Then he started to get more and more adventurous that he started chasing bugs, which usually congregated by the rose bushes right next to the house. I would come outside and find him wrapped in figure eights in the shrubbery. I'd have to unclip him and untangle the rope once or twice a day. It started to get old.

One day, I came out to get him and I found the rope frayed with no collar or Boris attached.

Panicked, I ran around the corner of the house and found him halfway to the back yard. I grabbed him and threw him inside while I tried to fix the rope. It was at least 10 years old and very weather frayed. I got it tied, but knew I had to replace it with a chain, which I did when I got a dog chain at the pet store. It's the kind that's steel encased in plastic with metal clips on each end.

I was pretty satisfied with this setup for a while because it didn't snag on the shrubbery like the rope did.

I should say that I WAS satisfied with this setup until the other night when I walked out to retrievehim. I followed the rope in the shrubbery to the end clip and found no Boris. He must have tugged on the end and it had enough give that he was able to pull himself off the clip.

I ran to the backyard and found no trace of him. I ran around our house a couple of times. No Boris. I got a flashlight and walked around calling his name. No dice. I got in my car and slowly drove up each street looking for flashes of him, but he was gone.

I broke the news to Laura that her replacement cat for Moe was missing and she took it pretty bad. She had just gotten over Moe and now this new cat disappears. In the morning, Julia broke down crying because she was so worried. I stayed home and put out fliers and drove around the neighborhood a few more times, but still found no sign of him.

I tried to cheer Laura and Julia up by telling them that I had a cat that had ran away when I was in college. In the same scenario, she had gotten outside and didn't came back. I walked around for a couple days all depressed because I didn't think she was coming back, but then late on the second night of her being gone, she showed up all dirty and hungry. I still had a little hope that he was going to return like my old cat had, but it was obvious that Laura had given up hope. I think the fact that she said, "I don't think he's coming back," several times led me to this point.

That second night here came and Laura got more depressed. She had just gone to bed when the doorbell ran.

There on the front porch was our neighbor and he had a struggling Boris in his arms. Apparently, he had found Boris walking around their back yard.

So all's well that ends well, right? Well, there is a small funny footnote to this.

The next night, Julia and I went out to eat while Laura was away at a bachelorette party. My phone rang. I checked the number. It said 'Private."

I answered it.

"Did you put up signs that you lost your cat?" the called asked, referring to my Lost Cat signs that I had taped up all over our subdivision.

"Yes, I did. But he came back last night. I need to take those signs down. Sorry about that."

The caller continued, "Is there a reward?"

"Ummm... No. He came back last night."

The caller hung up. I shrugged and hung up.

I started to wonder what that was all about. Who calls up someone before they found their lost pet asking if they are looking for that pet?

Maybe I was going to come home and find that he had been stolen. In his place would be a random note asking for his reward.

Maybe he's a wanted cat and a bounty hunter was distracting me while he broke in and took Boris.

He was still there, but it still strikes me as weird. Finding a cat and calling someone if it's theirs I can understand, but to call before finding said cat?

The kid sounded like a teenager, so I started to picture a kid like Encyclopedia Brown, a young amateur detective profiled in a book series of the same name. The kid must have been walking around the neighborhood with his trusty side kicks. They see my sign and jot down my number. This probably sounds like the perfect case for them. They probably called it "The Case of the Missing Cat." He calls me up and I hire him to find my cat. He does some searching around, but ends up finding nothing. Then a break in the case! He realizes that there is a secret cat stealing operation with the criminals sending the cats overseas for some secret laboratory experiments. He'll get caught while trying to save Boris, but get away through his ingenious McGuyver-cunning in which he cuts through his binds by using his glasses as a magnifying glass to harness the sun's power to cut through the ropes. He'll get the cops to come, the day will be solved and I'll get my cat back. But because I had already found him, he won't have that chance. Shame...

Laura almost runs a red light and then blames me for it...

2008-08-25T23:51:00.000-05:00

I've written a few times about Laura and I driving together. To sum up those past stories, Laura fears that I drive like a grandma, and I fear for my life when I see every car around us slowing down while our car seems to be going faster. To say that Laura is an aggressive driver is doing her a disservice. She brags that she got trained on the road warrior-like freeways of California, and that's how she's going to drive from now on.

I ask her sometimes, "What do your co-workers think of your driving?"

She's admitted that the responses have ranged from a ride in a runaway taxi (not surprising) to a ride in a race car (not surprising either).

Usually, I drive us to work when we carpool, but I talked her into driving the other day. We took her car, the Mazda 3, which Laura refers to as 'awesome' and much better than my 'no balls' having Santa Fe. She got a car that does what she wants. It takes off on a flash and gives her the ability to zip in and out of traffic. When she drives, I've taken to just reading magazines because if I was to watch what was going on the road, I'd have a heart attack. We've gotten into a few heated discussions when I've criticized her tailgating and delayed braking times after I've almost shoved my feet through the floor boards as I'm trying to will her to stop the car in time.

So the other day Laura drove us to work. Julia was with us because she was going to the summer day camp that my employer runs. I picked up Laura, with Julia in tow, at work and we switched drivers. She pulled away, turned left and headed the three blocks that leads to the interstate exit. We started talking. She was telling me something about work when I noticed that the light ahead was red. I anticipated her slowing down, but noticed that she was not slowing down. Laura kept talking.

I go, "Ummm...."

Still no stopping...

"Uh! Stop!" I yelled at the last minute.

"Oh!" Laura exclaimed and hit the brakes. We skidded to a stop just outside of the crosswalk.

"I didn't think you were going to stop," I said.

Flustered, Laura said, "Well... you were distracting me by talking!"

"Yeah, thanks a lot, Daddy!" Julia quipped from the back seat.

"How is this my fault?" I asked.

"It is because you and Julia were yapping in my ear when you should let me just drive."

We got on the interstate, and I started making a few suggestions about Laura's proximity to cars ahead of us. Laura sighed.

I should point out now that Laura is notorious for pointing out at great length how much distance I need between me and the car in front of me, how fast I should accelerate, which lane to take at any moment, which cars to pass and which way to go. If I deviate from that or don't anticipate what Laura would do, I get the inevitable questions of why I'm not doing all the things Laura would do. I often tell her that I'm going to get a bracelet that says WWLD, which means 'What Would Laura Do?"

We got further along in our trip home and I suggested that she switch lanes. Apparently, that was more than enough for Laura. She whipped around towards me and said, "If you say one more thing about my driving, just one more thing, I am going to stop this car and let you out. Then you can walk home. Don't believe me? Just try me."

I smirked and started to open my mouth.

"Feeling lucky?" Laura asked. "Go ahead and try it."

I smiled and closed my mouth.

"That's what I thought," Laura said.

I pulled out my magazine and spent the rest of the journey home trying not to look up when I saw the inevitable rush of a car's rear end coming towards me.

Later that night, we were getting ready for bed and watching a show about surviving car crashes, which of course featured lots of clips of cars crashing. One of the crashes involved a guy running from the police in a pickup truck. The chase ended when he ran a red light, and the truck he was driving collided with another car.

I said without looking at Laura, "Hmmm... I think that guy must have had his passenger and someone in the back talking to him for him to be distracted like that."

I could feel Laura's eyes bore on me as I heard her let out a long angry sigh. I closed my eyes and started giggling hard for about 10 seconds and said, "I'm sorry! I just had to say it."

"Uh huh! You're really enjoying yourself over there! You must REALLY want to sleep somewhere else tonight," she said.

An All-American... ummm...

2008-08-10T21:57:00.000-05:00

Laura reminded me of this story the other night when we were watching the Daily Show on Comedy Central. The segment centered on Denny's revamping their late-night menu in an effort to draw in the teenagers. Suddenly, Laura started laughing her head off. After that, she reminded me of this story...

Years back, my friend, Jeff, was moving to Wahoo in an effort to be closer to Omaha so that his commute wouldn't be that long. As it turns out, he could have moved to Waverly or Gretna and been just as close to Creighton University, but that's not my problem in that's what Laura suggested to Jeff...

We loaded up the U-Haul truck with all of Jeff's stuff from his apartment. To show us his thanks, Jeff took us out to lunch at a place called the All-American Buffet. Now I don't really remember much about the lunch that day. It wasn't that bad, but Bill seems to remember it as being particularly awful.

Jeff took his car. I think I followed in a car (so I could get back to Lincoln with Bill). Bill drove the truck. Jeff and I get to Wahoo within minutes of each other. Then we waited with the others at the house for the truck to arrive. We waited. We waited some more. And we waited some more...

Finally, Bill showed up with the truck.

"Where were you?" Jeff asked Bill.

The buffet food didn't agree with him, so he had to make a pitstop on the way.

"Oh, I had to stop on the way to take an All-American shit!" Bill explained.

Hey, I've got that shirt, too...

2008-08-10T21:52:00.000-05:00

Last Friday night, Laura and I went to The Dark Knight movie.

As we were walking in, we noticed some teenagers sitting against the window of the movie theater complex. They were probably waiting for their ride from the parents as the theater in our neighborhood doesn't allow teenagers under 16 past 10 p.m. I think they instituted it because they were tired of the damage to their theater, but that's not important to the story.

Seeing as we're going to see a pop culture event movie like the latest Batman movie, I decided to wear a quirky shirt that I had gotten at Target the other day. It's a brown shirt that looks like a skeletal ribcage, but instead of bones, the ribcage is made up of records, record player arms and cassette tapes. It's one of those shirts that supposed to look retro and hip.

As we're walking past the teenagers, a boy with the group says, "Hey man! I've got that shirt, too!"

I smile, raise my eyebrows and give him a small thumbs up as I pass him.

After we buy our tickets and walk past the counter, I say, "Wow. That makes me feel old that he has the same shirt that I have."

"Maybe he thought it was 'retro' and 'hip'?" Laura asked.

"Maybe..."

I thought about it for a minute while we were waiting for the previews to start. Yes, it looks like a young person's shirt, but I'm not that old. I'm only 37-years-old, which would have sounded ancient to me had I been as young as that kid. He sees an old dude walking buy with a belly and a graying beard. To him, I might be the lame old guy trying to act hip.

"You know," I said. "I probably have more of a right to wear that shirt than he does. I grew up with records and cassette tapes. That'd be like me wearing a black leather jacket and greasing up my hair."

I make a motion like I'm styling my hair like Danny Zucko from Grease.

She thought I was referring to the Fonz.

"Aayy!!" Laura said with her thumbs up.

Don't even think about it

2008-08-02T15:00:00.000-05:00

The other day, a married co-worker, let's call him Pat, was getting a little weary of work. He sighed and said, "We should all just skip this afternoon and see The Dark Knight", which is the latest Batman movie.

While this was certainly possible with minimal work repercussions seeing as we have very flexible work hours (within reason), I knew Laura really wanted to see it.

"I would, but I can't. Laura wants to see it." I said.

He nodded and said, "Yeah, my wife wants to see it, too. I supposed I could go and not tell her."

"Oh! Don't do that!" I said. I have a good reason.

When you're single, you are the master of your own domain. You basically can call the shots and do whatever you want, whenever you want, to a certain degree. As a single person that's also a twin, you have that luxury of doing those things with your twin, like seeing a movie, but it's also your responsibility to ask that twin if they want to see it with you first.

Most of the time, Bill and I would see movies together, but occasionally, he'd surprise me by saying that the had an opportunity to see a movie without me (because I was working or wasn't around) and so he did. I never came out and said it, but I was always a little disappointed because now I'd have to find someone else to see a movie with me. Usually, this wasn't a problem. Sometimes, it was another friend who was bored. Sometimes, it was Bill, who agreed to see the movie again with me. And to be fair, I would also do this from time to time with a little disappointment, but no long-lasting repercussions.

Seeing a movie that you know that your friend or brother may not like is of no consequence. If they agreed to go, you assume that he was on board and willing to see it. If it was great, you rejoice that you picked the right movie. If it sucked, you could agree that the movie sucked without trying to figure out who actually suggested the movie.

If you drag your significant other to a movie that sucked, you'll proceed to hear about it until the end of time. Laura will usually say something like, "That was a great! (sarcastically)", "Nice suggestion! (sarcastically)" or "Well that sucked! (not sarcastically)."

When we were first dating, I dragged Laura to see Escape From LA, which is the sequel to Escape From New York. Both movies involve the convict Snake Plissken, who was played by Kurt Russell. In the first film, Snake is recruited to rescue the president of the united states from New York City, which had been turned into a city-wide prison in the not-so-distant future. I loved that movie growing up and had high hopes for the sequel, but it sucked so bad that I almost walked out of it. Laura was almost ready to leave with me, but I just had to see how it ended, which was horribly by the way. I apologized a lot that night and was reminded a few times by Laura on how just how bad it was.

About a month later, a movie called Two Days in the Valley came out. Laura wanted to see it. I was up in the air about it because it looked like it was trying to be like Pulp Fiction, and I was afraid that I would be comparing the movie to Pulp Fiction. Laura won out and we saw it. The movie was about a hired killer who likes to give someone a a minute on a stop watch before he kills them (James Spader), his girlfriend (Charlize Theron), a woman who hired the killer (Terry Hatcher), two undercover cops (Jeff Daniels and Eric Stoltz) and various other stars that all intersect in lame plot lines for two days of story. Halfway through, Laura leaned over to me and whispered yelled, "This is dumb! I want to go!"

I shook my head, "I want to see how it ends."

I've never walked out of a movie on purpose (save for when Julia demanded we leave a kid's movie because she was scared), so I just wanted to see how it ended on principle. It was an okay movie all in all, but certainly no Pulp Fiction by a long shot. The ending was okay. As we were walking out, I turned to Laura and said, "We're even."

So back to what I was just talking about earlier...

Laura and I have had this understanding that if one of us says that we want to see a movie together, then it behooves the other person to not see that movie.

I slipped up once on this rule, and I still hear about it.

That was ten years ago...

Ten years ago, I was on a book-buying trip for the Nebraska Book Company. I was one of those guys that would buy back books from the students on college campuses. My trips would occur in December and May to coincide with the end of the campus semesters. Before I left in May of 1998, Laura noted to me that she wanted to see Deep Impact, the movie about a comet that is going to hit Earth unless some astronauts can blow up it up first.

While on the trip, the guys that I was on the road with all said they wanted to see a movie, which was Deep Impact. So I made the decision to just see the movie and act like I hadn't seen it when I got back.

So I saw it on the road. It was a decent movie. I then came home and saw it with Laura. When the movie was over, Laura said, "That was pretty good." What I should have said was nothing, but what I did say was, "Yeah, for the second time that I saw it."

I smiled. Laura did not.

"You've already see this?" she asked.

"Yeah, I saw it on my trip with the guys."

So you would think that this would be the end of that, but now almost every time a movie comes out and she wants to see it with me, she usually reminds me that she doesn't want to me to see it like I saw Deep Impact without her.

She reminded me of this just recently when I said that I wanted to see The Dark Knight, which I was thinking of doing when she was gone in Kearney visiting her parents. She said, "I want to see it. Don't see it like you saw Deep Impact."

"Are you always going to hang that over my head?" I asked.

She walked away and shrugged as if to say, "Hey, you're the one that messed up. Not me."

So back to me talking to Pat, I said, "I still get grief for seeing that crappy movie without her and that was 10 years ago!"

Weezer - Pork and Beans

2008-07-10T00:03:00.000-05:00

Hard to believe that there might be no one left that's not seen this video, but here it is if you must.

Weezer - Pork And Beans
by Weezer

Also, here is a link to a site that has embedded videos of all the videos referenced in this song.

The Weezer video explained