NotTheRock Musings

It's Better To Burn Out Than to Fade Away

2010-04-02T08:00:00.000-04:00

I've always liked that line. It suggests that whenever "it" ends, it's much better to do so with gusto and to make a grand, noticeable exit rather than to just limp off quietly. I used to think I wanted that line featured prominently at my funeral. Now I've decided I'd rather just not die.

The concept of "NotTheRock" started almost eight years ago now, in 2002. I wanted an outlet for the ideas rattling around in my head, and I figured that a Web site was a good repository for my nervous energy. I'd prattle on about things, I figured, and maybe entertain a person or two in the process. It might also be a place where I could direct people interested in seeing my writing.

I created way too many sub-categories. While not all THAT many, it was clearly more than I could keep up with. I did a few movie reviews, I put up a couple of op-ed pieces, etc., but I didn't do it with any regularity. And as anyone who writes -- especially in blog form -- knows, the biggest key is consistency. Write, write, write and then write some more. I even created an offshoot wherein I provided review and commentary of every episode of the TV Show 24, mainly because it was my favorite show and there was nothing like it on television.

Nearly everyone who read NTR was a friend who knew me, so I kept the info on there as anonymous as I could. I didn't want any of it to be about me -- I wanted it to be about my writing. Launching the blog portion in January 2003 was a way for me to pop my occasional thoughts on the world around me into a central location without the effort of publishing pages, editing html, etc. I started with Xanga, because it was one of the easier-to-use blog formats of the day. Before long, though, it became the MySpace of blogging, overrun with children and a feeling of complete immaturity. Yes, even more immature than me.

I was pretty good about posting all the time in those early years of the blog. I put up content nearly every day, hosted the Movie Quote Guessing Game, told stories of obnoxious people in my grad school program, etc. Eventually, a few things happened.

In November 2006, I co-launched a sports Web site primarily focused on Purdue athletics. Boiled Sports started small and humble (like me) but has grown to be fat and far-reaching (also like me). Last month, BS had more than 70,000 hits. Small-time in the world of big-time Web sites, but for a targeted Web site written by Purdue alums, it's pretty fun. And a lot bigger than we ever expected it to get.

In June of 2007, I got married.

In December of 2007, we moved to Texas.

In December of 2009, we had our first child, our son, Jack.

In addition, Facebook (and social networking in general) came about and changed things even more. People who spent time and effort on blogs were no longer unique. MySpace and Facebook allowed people to post their myriad thoughts (to their audience's detriment, in many cases) very easily, as well as share their photos and adventures and keep in touch about each other's lives. Blogging was no longer unique. While it wasn't the exact same format, it was pretty damn close.

I switched the site over to the Blogger platform in March 2007, thinking it would lead me to more frequent posting. It didn't. While I've always liked the statement that is the headline of this post, I think it's fair to say that NTR did wind up fading away, rather than burning out. And that's okay. Other ventures have burned out plenty to make up for it.

Writing online via NTR, however, has helped lead me to other online writing gigs at places as far reaching as Deadspin, Ranger Fan Central, Four Magazine (now defunct, but I got to do a cool interview with an aspiring Chicago photographer!), Melt Your Face Off and Sport Projections, to name a few.

As you likely know, I also write and edit professionally, which tends to take up a fair chunk of time. I've also had several book concepts rattling around in my head for a while, one of which I actually turned into an outline that I feel pretty good about. Sadly, it has languished (like this blog) in a folder on my hard drive for, literally, years. And now I've begun talks with someone to potentially ghost write a book for them. No word on yet as to whether this means I have the write the book with a flashlight pointed upwards at my face the whole time.

What does all this mean? I don't know. It's not to suggest that NTR couldn't continue living on. Just a fact that my life has changed in big ways. I'm not the same 26-year-old bachelor doofus sitting in my one-bedroom apartment watching ESPN all hours that I'm not at the office. Life changes, things happens, and so forth. It's a good thing that life moves along. Otherwise, it'd be pretty boring.

For those interested in the minutiae of my life, visit me on Facebook (or Twitter, for those so inclined), or you can always check out our family site (if you know it; if not, send me an email for the link). Or if you're simply interested in my brand of scathing sarcasm, you can also continue to check out Boiled Sports for the foreseeable future. Of course, if you're not a fan of Purdue, that might be a bit boring for you. Obvious solution? Become a Purdue fan.

Let's see, what else? Oh, the site name.... yeah, so I've always liked silly, 80s comedies (who among us who grew up then doesn't like them?) and one of the most quotable (and still very funny if you go back and watch) was Spies Like Us. Well, my friend Greg and I got into the habit of, when someone didn't understand what we felt was something simple (moms, sblings, friends, etc.), we'd say, "not the rock..." in honor of this clip. (Go to 3:10 into it.) And as for the tagline, "Instead of a stream of consciousness, more of a babbling brook," well, I always was proud of that. I thought it was pretty clever.

As you may have gleaned from this post, this is the end for NTR. I still see things all the time that could be turned into a post for this site, but it simply doesn't happen anymore. Whose fault is that? Mine. I always hated seeing half-assed Web sites or blogs that hadn't been updated in months or years. Well, while I've certainly not stopped writing in general, I have neglected this site, which is my original Web outlet. And while it's likely that nobody even cares anymore (only a few of you read this and you probably are connected with me on FB at this point, anyway), another thing many writers enjoy is providing some semblance of closure. And so this is mine.

If you've read my drivel from the beginning, well, thank you kindly. There aren't many of you and I think I know who you are. And if I don't know you, but you've been lurking/reading for eight years, well... hello, weirdo. You'll have to find someone else to stalk.

Sometimes when things end, people get sad. Whether it's a vacation, school, a job, a home you live in, or anything else -- even a silly Web site -- the end is only sad because it was fun. All of these things in our lives -- including our lives themselves -- are fleeting. You appreciate things more because they end. If they never ended, there wouldn't be anything special about them.

It's been fun. Thanks for reading.

One of My Favorite Games

2009-07-21T12:32:00.003-04:00

One of the joys of being married is that you always have someone to antagonize when you're bored. There are many immature, idiotic things I like to do (setting alarm clocks and kitchen timers to go haywire in Bed, Bath & Beyond has always been a favorite of mine) to make my wife's eyes roll, but yesterday I did another of my favorites. It's very simple, but it produces hilarity (at least to me) every time.

We men like to grab asses. Clearly, this is not news. But what I like to do is the surprise ass-grab. Even better is when you can get somebody else in trouble for it. We had to go to a store and so she said I could wait in the car. I waited until she was inside and then went in, saw he standing in line and sneaked up behind her, grabbing a handful. Of course, the reaction was an instant spin-around, and then the realization that it was me. Fun.

But it's even better in a crowded place. I used to always love doing this at Yankee Stadium or Madison Square Garden, where anyone who grew up going to those places knows everyone is edgy and reader for a fracas, especially if you start to eyeball Vinny's girl.

One of my favorites was when wifey was in the beer line at MSG and there was a stranger behind her. A male stranger. I had gotten something elsewhere so she didn't know I was approaching. I cruised by the line and pinched her ass-cheek on the opposite side that I was passing on, thus causing the involuntary turn to that side. And I just kept moving, but kept an eye on the situation. She spun around and looked at the guy behind her. His face was priceless. And it wasn't necessarily the "Crap, I didn't do that!" face... but more a face that most of us males would make. Kind of like a chagrined, "Well, if I knew I was going to get in trouble for something I'd enjoy doing anyway...."

It never gets old.

Bustication

2009-07-20T12:23:00.000-04:00

I don't want to hear bitching about it being hot where you are. I just don't. Because unless your car almost explodes simply from sitting in the heat, you don't know what I'm dealing with.

Sure, sure, I always make the point that our trade-off is worth it here in Tejas -- that wearing flip flops and shorts while Christmas shopping is rather awesome, and highs in the 70s and 80s on Thanksgiving is neat-o. And I stand by that. Our A/C bills are insane-o in the summertime and stepping outside at 6 AM to let the dog out feels like walking into a blast furnace. And that you find yourself seriously considering figuring out a way to mow your lawn at night because it's still 104 with 90% humidity at 5:30 PM. But I can deal with all that. I rather enjoy it, actually, in a weird way.

But what pisses me off is when things like my car can't handle it. Look, car, you get to live in a warm climate. You don't have to deal with snow. Or salt. If you were in the north, you'd practically decompose underneath because of all the road salt. But no, we live here in Texas. And what do you do? Well, you sit in the heat at the airport for a few days... and then when I return and leave to head home and have the temerity to spritz my windsheild to clean the dirt/dust off that accumulates there when in an off-site parking lot, what happens? Yeah, that's right, the damn windshield makes a pop sound like I ran over an aluminum can. But instead of being an aluminum can it's my windshield springing a huge crack.

The fun doesn't end there, though. Each day, the crack grows. It's like a little game each day when I come out to the car after work. How far will it have grown and in which direction? Which pre-existing chip will it head towards?

The crack now exists from below my inspection sticker diagonally up to a chip in right about my line of sight, and then it forks off into two different directions. Neat-o! This will continue all summer, I would imagine, and eventually I'll be accused of a hit-and-run because it will look like a human has been smashed against my windshield. Which might happen as I get angrier.

Please Stop Singing

2009-07-15T17:58:00.003-04:00

Let's get right to the point -- I hate "Happy Birthday." Not the act of wishing a happy birthday, but the song.

There are multiple theories on who actually wrote the lyrics, and pretty much all of the people who are potentially responsible are long since dead, so I don't have anyone to beat to death with a lead pipe over this. But I really hate Happy Birthday.

I think it's mainly because I feel like it's a song for children. Children enjoy birthdays and having the song sung to them, etc. Adults don't. Or they shouldn't, anyway, if they're really adults. It's a childish song, and having someone like my dad singing to you is just.... weird. It's always an awkward exercise, made especially so when your mother-in-law or co-worker is singing to you. Where else might this happen? I mean, seriously, when else might Jenny in the next cubicle be singing to you? (Well, get a few drinks in her first, maybe...)

I think what also bothers me is that it's a stupid tradition that has turned into something of a superstition to people at this point. You have to sing "Happy Birthday"! You just have to! This was basically the explanation my lovely wife gave me when I was bitching about it one time and asking why it's necessary. She really didn't have an answer... just that it's what we do. Even when it's just a group of adults in the room? Come on.

If it's a little kid's birthday, then by all means. Let's sing. I'll even participate. But if it's my birthday? Ah, no. I'll be 34 effing years old this year. I'm not a toddler. I don't need a song sung to me on my birthday.

In fact, what I want for my birthday more than anything is a moratorium on singing that infernal song.

I Continue to Hate Stupidity

2009-06-26T15:59:00.002-04:00

It's hot in Texas. Like 105+ hot lately. And when your A/C in the house is set at 75 degrees, it seems reasonable enough. Until you realize that it means that it's thirty degrees warmer outside and thus the A/C has to pretty much constantly work to keep the temp from approaching furnace levels. This leads to rather, let's say, high electricity consumption.

Normally, I'd just set the programmable thermostat to allow the temp to go up during the workday, but then it only allows a M-F setting and a Sat-Sun setting. Why it can't be programmed to coincide with my day planner, I do not know. But when Lovely Wife is going to be home on Mondays and Fridays, I can't exactly have the M-F setting allowing it to be 85 while she's there. Though it does sound amusing.

So the point is we consume electricity at an alarming rate. And our house isn't even that big for our area. But in the summer, our electric bills can be $400+. Yeah, I know.

We got our last bill, which was the usage through somewhere in mid-June I think and it was about $300. Yeah, and it's getting bad now and we're not even into July. My money-saving wife went and found out that if we lock into a deal with our current energy provider, we would not only get bonus Continental miles for every dollar we spend, but we'd also reduce our rate by almost.... get this... 50%. Five-oh percent. Jiminy Christmas, why didn't we do this sooner? Because we're idiots.

So I called on Wednesday and told them I wanted their 12 month lock-in guarantee extravaganza whatever plan. They agreed, set it up and let me know that there's a $150 cancellation fee if I jump ship before 12 months are up. Okay, fine. She tells me it'll be effective with "the bill that includes my July usage." Why not just tell me the date? Because they're sneaky f-cks, that's why.

The Wife performs her usual inquisition when I tell her it's done and I admittedly don't have all the facts. It sounds like it'll be effective in July, I tell her. Which wasn't very convincing. And nor should it be. And being married a couple of years now, I've learned it's fine to just admit it when it got too confusing for my brain. I asked the girl when it would be effective, she sort of answered and I asked again and she said more jumbled answers... and well, I gave up. Which is what she wanted me to do.

So the wife calls Thursday and learns that, no, it actually won't go to the new, better rate until July 24. She flips out. They say sorry, that's the deal. She suggest we cancel. They tell her that'll be $150, because I locked into a deal the day before. A deal that we don't get for a month. Yeah, that sounds fair. They also tell her it's because of billing cycles that it doesn't become effective immediately. When does the next billing cycle begin? Why, on July 12. So why can't it be effective that day? It just can't. Solid.

So they, as you can imagine, the hammer has to be brought in. I'm the hammer.

I call and explain to Yolanda that I was misled and that I obviously wouldn't have locked myself into a plan that doesn't start until almost the end of the 1st or 2nd hottest month of the year. She advises me that they did explain this ("Not clearly," I point out) and that this has to do with billing cycles.

I ask: "If I was a new customer and signed up for this plan today, wouldn't it be effective immediately?"

Yolanda: "Well, if you were a new customer today, we couldn't turn on your electricity today. It'd be more like next week."

Me: *head hits counter*

She does acknowledge that a new customer would get the good rate as soon as things began.

Me: "So we're being punished because we're loyal customers who want to stay with you?"

I'm loading the chamber with these two points when she puts me on hold:

(1) If the rate doesn't begin until July 24, how can the cancellation fee be in place before then?

(2) If we'd normally pay $400+ and a 50% reduction (which we could get from a competitor plan, too) would lead us to roughly a $200 bill, the $150 would still allow us to save $50 in one month alone.

I actually speak these points while I'm on "hold." I say it that way because there was no hold music, no hold commercials, no "we'll be right with you," no nothing. I think I was just on mute. I used to work in a call center and sometimes we'd mute calls instead of put them on hold, for a variety of reasons. One of the sneakier reasons was that you could listen to what they were saying to others in the room. I know.

After about a ten minute hold, during which time I also said, "For this kind of wait, there better be good news on the other side," she came back and -- presto -- our new rate was effective immediately. She made sure I knew that it wasn't even her supervisor who did it -- their manager had to sign off on it. Sign off on giving me the rate you were advertising? Okay. I bet you could make one of your newfangled computers do that for anyone who signs up for that deal. But hey, I'm no expert.

So in the end, because we were the squeaky wheel, we probably saved over $200 next month alone. It feels good, but whenever I have one of these victories, I still feel irritated for the non-complaining, diligently-bill-paying customer (who I usually am): they're getting the screw job while I get the sweet deal. Not cool.

Canceling Is Fun

2009-05-14T14:17:00.003-04:00

I got DirecTV last weekend. Which meant I had the distinct pleasure of calling my shitty cable company and canceling with them this week.

Me: "Hi, I'd like to make changes to my service with you."

Rep: "Oh, certainly, what can I do for you?"

Me: "I want to go ahead and cancel my cable. I have phone and Internet with you also so I don't want to cancel everything -- just cable, the $125 portion of the bill."

Rep: "Oh. And can I ask why?"

Me: "I'm not sure you really want to hear all the reasons... but I got DirecTV this weekend --

Rep: "Oh, I see."

Me: "-- and besides, I think your rates are obscene --"

Rep: "Uh-huh, I see."

Me: "-- and the cable went out a lot --"

Rep: "Yes, yes, okay, well --"

Me: "--and the DVR skipped and failed to work sometimes --"

Rep: "Okay, well --"

Me: "--and the programming wasn't very good or offered what I want."

In hindsight, I shouldn't have immediately said I'd gotten DirecTV because once she heard that, she was far less interested, probably knowing there was no hope to keep me.

Rep: "Okay, I took care of that for you and you can return those boxes and remotes..."

Me: "Thanks, so how does my bill work now? I mean, I've canceled cable so I obviously don't owe for the whole month."

Rep: "Well, you can just go ahead and pay the whole amount since you have other services with us and then next month you'll have a credit."

Me: "Yeah, I know I COULD do that, but why would I? How about you tell me what my bill should now be?"

I wasn't going to let this lazy ass off that easy. She was going to have to work and prorate my bill for me.

It was so much fun. It'll be even more fun next month when I call to cancel phone and Internet after I get THAT hooked up through a competitor of theirs.

You Twit

2009-04-29T11:29:00.002-04:00

I'm now on Twitter. Have been for a few months, actually. It's stupid. That's all you need to know.

However, Twitter mania is sweeping the nation and we're more and more looking like sheep for how we all flock to the same things. Celebs use Twitter! We better use it, too! I'll be just like John Mayer and we'll be "friends"!

No, you won't.

One of the fastest-growing age groups to use Twitter is the over 40 crowd. You know why? Because they (think they) can understand it. It's uber-simple. 140 characters. That's all. You know the status update part of Facebook? That's all Twitter is. Just that. Nothing else. No pictures, no sharing, nothing. Just stream-of-consciousness babble.

Sure, if you're utterly hilarious, your Twitter stream will be interesting and entertaining. And some people are just that. But they're diamonds in the rough. Most people, including the famous ones, are pedestrian and boring. And those who use Twitter to schill a product or themselves? Ugh. Go away.

One thing I've maintained for a while is that Facebook -- and now Twitter -- draw attention to people's ability to be creative, interesting, funny, thoughtful, etc. And if you're not any of those things, social media exacerbates it. If you're not very funny, you can probably hide that in regular social circles. But on a site like Facebook or Twitter, you're fully exposed. Things move fast, and to be funny/entertaining, you need to have new material all the time. Recycling those jokes you read in this month's Playboy just won't do. You need to be clever and you need to be quick on your feet. If you're not very bright, have zero mastery of the English language, or type like you've got a pirate hook instead of a hand, you're going to look dumb.

Going back to Twitter, though... it's not set up in a way that facilitates easy communication. The reason people love Facebook is because you can easily track multiple conversations and anyone who wants to read up on the comment stream can easily do so. On Twitter, you need to search for the comment responses. And if you're "following" a bunch of people/entities and don't get on Twitter for a few hours, those responses/comments get buried way down the page. Everything on Twitter comes to you in a single stream -- this is infuriating and illogical. Of course, it's "easier" for the old folks in the sense that they just have one place to go rather than multiple pages to click through like on Facebook. Easy as FB is to navigate, it's confounding to someone in my mom's Internet skill zone.

But the older generations are convinced that Twitter is "what the kids are doing." That's why college football coaches are Twittering and why senior-level people at all sorts of companies are incredibly impressed with themselves because they're Twittering with the other hipsters. Or so they think.

The other thing I've decided about Twitter is that it's ideal for people who are self-impressed. If you're one of those people who loves to just talk and not really listen to anyone else... well, then you'll love it. Go start Twittering. Because it's basically the equivalent of 75 million people standing on hills with megaphones shouting things. If you specifically want to hear one of them, you can strain to do so... but it's hard and I know I lose interest fast. But if you're just up for shouting things out and being "followed," well, it's the site for you.

And while I still think Facebook is dumb in general, it's got its redeeming qualities -- especially as compared to Twitter. Leaving aside the romantic notion of "reconnecting" with old friends (as I've said before, 95% of these reconnections are with people I never had any interest in connecting with in the first place), it allows people with my kind of sense of humor endless opportunities to make others laugh, or to at least entertain them. I see it as my goal in life to make friends of mine laugh -- or to bust their balls to entertain myself and anyone else watching. Facebook offers this. I view FB as the equivalent of all of us hanging out in a friend's basement, drinking beer and harrassing one another. As I said to a friend of mine, it's like being on the golf course with your buddies, ripping each other every chance you get. Ideally, in a good-natured way.

Naturally, this leads to hateful comments, as there are endless limp-wristers out there who have loads of Internet courage. Facebook was an awful place to be last year during the Presidential campaigns. And certain topics will still evoke angry, intolerant comment streams. But that's life and it goes hand-in-hand with FB. People are knee-jerk reactionaries in many cases, and when all it takes to react is to click and type, people will do that and feel better instantly. So be it.

Twitter will flame out soon enough. It's growing in a suddenly exponential way and it has pretty much already jumped the shark. Sportscenter is Twittering, for example. Come on. The unique nature of it is gone. It gets talked about in celebrity magazines and we're supposed to be impressed that Ashton Kutcher, who has yet to say anything interesting from what I've heard, reached a million "followers" first. Who cares?

Obviously, I'm not trying to be a wet blanket. If you enjoy Twitter, go for it. I think that's what's important here. But the next time someone tells you something like how Twitter is "going to revolutionize how we communicate" (I seriously heard someone say this recently), you should point out that it's not really any different than hitting "reply all" on an email with everybody in the world copied.

Their Goal Is Lunatic Customers

2009-04-14T18:01:00.002-04:00

I took the Acura in for service last week and got an email today asking me to take a survey about the experience. And, admittedly, they are good. One line in the email struck me as particularly amusing:

Your feedback makes a difference. Our goal is simple, to develop "RAVING" customers who are comfortable referring friends and family to us.

They capitalized AND put in quotes the word "raving." Isn't raving, when in a bolder context, usually reserved for describing crazy people? Like, a "raving lunatic"? Or "Stark, raving mad"? I like to envision completely insane people going into Acura, so pleased with the experience that they've turned into screaming, smiling zombies.

I know, I know

2009-04-13T17:58:00.000-04:00

Yes, yes, I know. I've gone completely off the rails. We're closing in on two months since I posted. But hey, I'll go in and do some retroactive posts so that you really can't tell. Not fair, I know.

P90x ended two weeks ago and I remain less fat than three months ago but still not at my goal. The journey continues....

We went North for Easter. But if you read this then you also read my Facebook page and, thus, don't really need NTR anymore. Pity.

James Bond will return....

There's Less of Me

2009-02-24T18:13:00.002-05:00

To go around, that is. As of this morning, a mere seven weeks into our P90X regime, I'm down 15.6 lbs, standing at 204.2 (started at 219.8 for you math whizzes).

I'm not sure the last time I was this low, but it's been a few years, to be sure. And the last time I was under 200 was probably in early 2004, a few months after I hit my low of 181.

Of course, I was 140 at this height when I graduated high school so I'm still 60+ lbs heavier than back then. Yikes.

Anyway, I'm less than ten pounds away from my goal weight of 195.

Gotta stay focused.

Less Fat

2009-02-20T11:26:00.005-05:00

First off, my apologies -- again -- for becoming that guy. The guy who updates his blog once a month and expects people to give a rat's ass about it. I used to literally write 3-5 times a week, minimum. Oh well.

In the two years since I switched my site over to Blogger, I've only posted about 125 times. Contrast that to Boiled Sports, where we've collectively put up almost 1200 posts in a similar time frame.... and, well, I guess my point is that I'm still writing -- a lot. Just not for those three of you who read this one. Sorry.

Anyway, the P90X madness is still going pretty well, actually. We've slacked here and there, but by and large we still work out and we definitely haven't fallen off the wagon when it comes to diet. We eat WAYYYY better than we used to and very rarely veer into the things we shouldn't be eating. Plenty of protein, few carbs, veggies at every meal, nothing fried. Yeah, it's not as fun as eating mozzarella sticks and you can bet your ass I'm going to celebrate eventual success with the program by gorging myself on things I haven't eaten in months, but overall I'm proud of our progress and very happy with how it's going. I don't feel deprived -- I actually feel more healthy and every time I eat a salad instead of a cheeseburger, I'm proud of myself. Because if you know me, you know how little willpower I have when it comes to the "bad" things we're not supposed to eat.

Anyway, we're about 47 days into P90X and this week I was down to 206.4 lbs. I started at 219.8, so that's officially 13.4 lbs down. The goal remains 195 so I'm more than halfway there, with 43 days of the program to go. If nothing else, it's nice to have a wider array of pants choices since almost all of the ones in my closet now fit... you know, rather than just like two pairs.

Six Years

2009-01-25T06:22:00.000-05:00

Today marks the six-year mark since I began this little web endeavor. Six damn years. And just twelve comments in that time. No, no, I kid, I kid.

As I've said in recent weeks/months, it's getting (obviously) harder and harder to be a reliable poster here. So it has definitely been on my mind how to end this whole thing. Do I do some kind of big thank-you, send-off post? No, that would seem a little self-serving, as though anyone would care if this site shuffled off.

Do I do a "best of" to wrap things up and go out with a bang?

Or do I just stop posting and not tell you anything.... like most sites peter out.... and how this one probably should.

Six years is a long time to do anything. And it's a long time to be confined to one medium.

So while I haven't figured it out yet, I have to say that the end is near for NTR as you've come to know it. Shed not a tear, though, as I'll always find ways to entertain you.

Over Two Weeks In

2009-01-21T18:17:00.002-05:00

We're over two weeks into our 90-day challenge and as of yesterday, I was down to 210.2 lbs from a starting weight of 219.8. So 9.6 lbs in just over two weeks. Not bad, though I do expect that kind of weight loss in these early stages. I'm feeding my body just enough calories to have what it needs and I'm severely limiting carbs and going much higher on protein. This was actually the only weight-loss method that ever worked for me (back when I lost 46 lbs in 2003), but now I've got a wife making sure I actually eat fruits and veggies, too. Oh, and I'm also working out six days a week so that can't hurt, either.

One of my buddies is convinced I won't lose a lot of weight but rather will "move the weight around," meaning I'll bulk up and tone muscle. While I agree with this to a certain extent, I still do have weight to lose -- so I think there will wind up being some medium ground where I would lose more weight with diet and cardio work alone, but since I'm also building muscle it will be somewhere in the middle.

God, this is exciting, isn't it?

You Know I Don't Like Resolutions

2009-01-04T17:57:00.000-05:00

Welcome to 2009. If you know me at all, you know I think resolutions are stupid. Yet I seem to have some semblance of them every year. The truth is, though, I just know my fitness and motivation and general patience all are tested in the last couple months of the year and so it's time to start fresh.

This year, the same issues abound. I'm fat, and it's time to do something about it. I joined a gym when we moved down here but once my wife and I started commuting together, I had a convenient excuse not to go in early to the gym. Plus I like food.

So when a couple of our friends here saw tremendous success in getting into the best conditions of their lives via a workout regimin called P90X, a larger group of us decided to do the same. So we all begin the 90-day lifestyle change on Monday, January 5, and it will continue for 90 days. Unless some of us bail out. You work out six days a week in varying workouts, and follow a typically strict but reasonable diet. At the end of the 90 days, for those who stick to it, you'll no doubt look and feel amazing. I'm a believer, having seen what it did for our friends. The question will be sticking to it. But the thing is, none of us are getting any younger and if we think it's hard now, it's nothing compared to how it will be in a few more years.

And so off we go. I'm beginning at 219.8 lbs, so we'll see where we wind up. Updates to come.

It's Always Longer Coming Back

2008-12-31T13:38:00.002-05:00

Fortunately, we had no incidents with the local constables on the way home. What we did experiences, though, was more about how seedy Louisiana is and how freaking long a trip this is.

We left NJ at 3 PM on Monday, knowing we wouldn't have a real long day of travel. We made it to Roanoke, VA by about 10:30 PM and decided that was a good place to stop for the night. It also meant we had a hell of a lot left to go -- when you look at a map, NJ to Roanoke looks like you've barely left.

I set the alarm for 6 AM and hoped to hit the road by 7, which is 6 central time. I did this because by the time I went to sleep I had it in my head that we could get home in one more day, rather than having to stop a second time.

Well, we awoke at 7:20. Whoops.

In the end, we were on the road about 8:30, Eastern Time. And we plowed ahead. The rest of Virginia, then into Tennessee, touching the corner of Georgia and then on into Alabama.

Alabama's a big state. And so is Mississippi.

I drove until about 3 PM and finally needed to be relieved and so my darling wife took over. I tried to rest my eyes but didn't sleep much. Truthfully, though, even being awake but riding shotgun is better for you because you're not using your brain as much as when you're driving and making however-many decisions-per-second.

Lovely Wife finally ran out of steam after about 350 miles, in which she drove us through most of out Alabama portion and all of Mississippi. After seeing the "Bienvenue a Louisiana!" sign, we found a seedy place to stop (there's no other kind in Louisiana, it turns out) and switched. Maya got to take a walk in a dark, murky field next to the gas station that had bottles and old car engine parts strewn about it. Lovely. And every person who walked past the car my wife was waiting in looked sketchier than the last. Time to go.

So at this point we had about 400 miles left. Seems reasonable when you're on a 1700 mile journey (or, 3700 miles, if you count the miles driven since we'd left Houston). I was ready to roll. We got some dinner and I had my first energy drink ever. Full Throttle, I think it was called. I had no idea if it was going to have some effect, no effect or make me go clinically insane.

I felt okay for a while and we talked to friends on the phone for more than 100 miles. But those last 200 or so were brutal.

The good news is we got home to our beds (at about 1:30 AM Central) and were able to sleep at our own house and wake up on New Year's Eve at home without more travel ahead of us, and I think that was worth the 18 hour day in the car.

In total, we left Houston the morning of 12/20 and:

-Used ten tanks of fuel
-Drove 3700 miles
-Got one speeding ticket (thanks, Virginia)
-Celebrated Christmas
-Introduced Maya to snow (she's not a fan; clearly a Texas dog)
-Brought Maya to seven new homes she'd never peed in
-Set up my parents' home computer network (they're amazed by wireless Internet and video chatting blew their minds)

We also saw more than thirty different state/province/gov't license plates on our trip, but I don't care to list them here.

Home sweet home.

Nearly Unscathed

2008-12-22T09:39:00.002-05:00

We completed the bulk of our journey to the Northeast last night, pulling into Virginia at about 6:30 PM, Eastern.

Over 1400 miles to get here, and throughout the Southern states, the nice thing was the posted 70 MPH limit and the lack of traffic. The roads were largely empty as we cruised through Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. In Virginia, things got a little more hairy as the traffic thickened, but was still moving.

At about mile 1450 of 1457, I was on our last stretch of Interstate highway, I-66 approaching Washington, DC, where radar detectors are illegal. Of course, they're illegal in all of Virginia, which means when we entered the state from the Southwest corner, the trusty detector was taken down and put away. No need to chance a fine for using one.

Anyway, as we were approximately five miles from the exit into the neighborhood we needed to wind up at, I evidently blew right past a Virginia state trooper who was sitting in the darkness of the median. He came out, chased me down and, as he approached, I said to my wife, "Gosh, I hope he's not coming for me."

He was.

I looked down as he approached and I was doing about 70 MPH. I really wasn't sure of the limit, though I-66 is a four or five lane wide highway and most of the highway time in Virginia had been at a 65 limit. So maybe I was going a little fast, but at least it wasn't super-high.

He came up and was very polite and seemed pretty relaxed. I gave him my info and he asked if I knew what the limit was.

"Ummm, 65?"

"No, sir, it's 60 here."

Well, shit.

"Did you have any idea of your speed at all?"

He made it sound like I was doing 120 MPH.

"Well, I just said to my wife that as you approached, I looked down and I was doing 70 MPH."

"No," he replied, "You were doing 79 MPH.... all by yourself."

All by myself? As opposed to what? Drafting off of someone else?

"Any particular reason you're going that fast?"

Um, the fact that all the traffic is? The fact that 79 MPH on a wide highway isn't very fast? Because my car can do it? Because I wasn't doing 89? Any of these are legit in my opinion. But I went with: "Well, we're about 1400 miles into a 1450 mile trip." (It was actually closer to the end than that, but I was thinking as quick as I could.)

He then asked me if my record in Texas was clean and I said it definitely was. He had me wait that long time where you know he's doing more than just checking your record. When he came back to the window, he had a ticket for the full 79 in a 60 and a lecture, wherein he reiterated no less than 3 or 4 times that I was one MPH away from it being 20 over, which is automatically reckless driving in Virginia. And, to top that off, would have meant I would be required to come back to Virginia to go to court. Yeah, like hell, Smokey.

Like I said, he kept telling me that.... to the point where you almost want to say, "Yes, but it wasn't one more MPH, so give it a rest."

I also wanted to ask him why he asked me if my record was clean in Texas -- if you're going to write me for the full ticket anyway, with no break at all, then just go do it. I resisted asking that because it would probably do me no good, but I couldn't resist essentially making him admit it was a speed trap.

"Hey," I asked, "Is it 60 MPH all along I-66 here?"

"No, it was 65 back a mile or two and then it dropped to 60 and now it'll drop even more up ahead."

"Oh, okay."

Yes, so you basically sit right there where it drops to 60 MPH, an oddball limit, and pick people off who might be doing 80 leftover from the 65 and 70 zones further south.... and when they're doing 80, you get to not only give them a hefty ticket, but you get to tag them with an asinine "reckless driving" summons. Great work, Virginia.

Take Your Time

2008-12-19T12:03:00.003-05:00

This week I decided to bring the Acura in for a once-over at the Carmax service department (I have a warranty through them so why not check them out?). I've had the car since January and have put 18,000 miles on it but have done nothing but change the oil. No tire rotations, no tune-ups, etc.

So I brought it in and asked for those two things, plus a check of my brakes. I never like to ask for this because I always think they think "ch-ching" when you talk about brakes. So I said I felt a "slight" pulsing when braking hard. In actuality, the car was like the one Fletch drives in Fletch Lives -- "If you want to stop, you have to plan ahead."

I dropped it off Monday night with the help of my lovely wife and they had me scheduled for an 8:30 am appt, meaning they'd get to work on it right away so I could pick it up that night.

The Carmax guy, whose name I'll magnanimously withhold (let's just say it rhymes with "Freg") calls me up early because he needs my address. Are you shipping me the car?

"I bought this car from you guys," I tell him.

"Yeah, but departments don't talk to each other," he tells me."

Great, so I give him my address and he proceeds to tell me HOW they're going to test the brakes. Terrific, pal, I don't care.

He calls me back a little while later to say that yes, indeed, I do need new front pads and rotors, of course. But the rears are fine. The price is actually reasonable so I say fine, go for it.

He calls me back in the early afternoon to tell me that while working on the car, they discovered a valve was leaking. How they discovered this when working on brakes and tire rotations, I don't know.

He proceeds to tell me that the good news is it's covered under my warranty and do I want to fix it. I asked him if anyone's ever said, "No, don't bother fixing it even though it's covered. I'll take my chances." We have a laugh and we're buddies.

Day goes by and I never get another call. My friend from work takes me down to the Carmax, we walk it at about 5:45 (they close service dept at 6) and I ask for my car. His response?

"Are you gonna need this car tonight?"

No, I was just here to see how you were doing, Freg.

"Uh, yeah, that's why I'm here."

"Well, the part for the valve won't be in until the morning," he tells me.

"Didn't you get like ten calls today describing every single step?" my now-irritated friend asks.

Freg then offers to let me take the car and bring it back once the part is in. Which is in the morning. Why would I do that?

He then says there's another option.

"I take your car home?" I ask.

Instead, he offers me the option to rent a car, which I initially scoff at. Then he tells me it would be covered under my warranty. So I perk up. Then he tells me that I can't get the rental car at Carmax and so I'd have to get a ride to the rental car place and then, of course, have help from someone to drop it off. So I scoff again.

He helpfully tells me it will be done in the morning. How early, I ask, thinking my wife can drive me there in the AM and I can get it.

"Oh... maybe 10:30."

Not convenient.

"The guy who is working on it gets in around 9...."

I don't care.

And as my friend then said to me, "He won't begin working at 9 -- he's got to eat his bagel and have his coffee first!"

So I leave and basically have now disrupted my day, my friend's day and my wife's day (normally I take her to work) all for nothing.

The good news is the car was actually done the next day and was immaculate. I mean, my hiney was sliding off the leather seats they were so clean and shiny. Of course, we'll now trash it over the next two weeks, but it sure was nice to get into a car so clean it looked like it was out of the showroom.

Has NTR Flatlined?

2008-12-16T11:39:00.002-05:00

Experts everywhere are asking themselves this question... has NotTheRock finally run its course?

Sure, back when it started in January 2003, it was a good outlet for me. And it was a way that my friends (those who knew about it) could hear my inane ramblings and be mildly entertained by it all.

But since then I've started the sports site Boiled Sports with a couple of friends and it's done really well. Sure, we're not millionaires yet, but I have a good feeling about 2009.

Plus I use Facebook now which, like anything else, will also fade from popularity and I'll abandon it, just like I abandoned the juvenile MySpace (which I only joined when a friend who is OLDER than me pushed me to do it).

Of course, Facebook has my real name on it and so when I bash things or people, I have to deal with the repurcussions. And who wants to be responsible when they slander others? Not me.

And so NTR remains valuable to me in that I can write things here that are about my life and yet are somewhat separated from who I specifically am -- thus, I am really writing to write and not just arrogantly posting updates about my life, as though anyone cares (see my rant about Facebook a couple posts down).

The thing is, I used to post a number of times a week, at least. Going a week without writing was unheard of. Now I go a month at a time. This is simply unacceptable, and I admit it. Those few of you who DID come here regularly did so because you expected at least something to feed your desire to read drivel on a daily (or near-daily) basis. So again, I'm sorry I'm failing you in this way. I have ideas to figure things out and improve the situation but they'll have to wait until after the new year. Until then, you're stuck with my scattershot, poorly distributed approach.

So what has been going on?

Well, our dog is still cute.

We went to Mexico for Thanksgiving. That was rather awesome.

We're driving back to the Northeast for the holiday this year.

Back when we were making our plans for the end of the year, we made the official decision to drive home. When we went up to NJ in July, we probably spent $1200 just on travel. I think our plane tickets were close to $500 each, plus the dog was another $200, plus we had to rent a car to get to the 'rents beach house. I didn't want to spend like this again and travel through two of the busiest airports in the country during Christmas week. With a dog. A dog that really doesn't fit into her travel case anymore. Have you ever tried to put an unwilling dog into a small duffel bag? (A live one.) It's not easy when they don't want to go either a result of fear or obstinance.

So we just said, hey, a road trip will be fun. Note we don't have kids yet. Not that air travel once we have children will be any more appealling. I think that that point, we'll just host all Christmases until our kids are 21 and then we might consider going elsewhere again.

Anyway, we decided to drive home. And then just last week I looked at plane tickets for the dates we're traveling.

I shouldn't have done that.

$258 per person, round trip. Come on.

But at least gas is a hell of a lot cheaper now, too. Even with the cheaper flights, I think gas will only cost about $270 for the whole round trip. Plus we'll have our own car with us for jaunts around the tri-state area.

My Acura has never made this journey before, to my knowledge. If it snows and the traction control has to function, I imagine the car will have another light come on that says, "Are you serious? I'm a Houston car."

So anyway, we're off this Saturday morning. I would love for us to hit the road super-early so that we get a long day of driving in and have a shorter day on Sunday. Sunday our destiation is my sister-in-law's place in Virginia. Then on 12/24 we'll journey up to NJ to spend a few days at my parents' place. Some other visiting in NJ and NY will follow and then we'll hit the road again and head back around the 29th or 30th.

We'll travel east out of Texas into Louisiana and then catch I-59 North, which runs Northeast (how fortuitous!) up diagonally through Alabama and into Tennessee. I hope to get to Tennessee after day one. That would leave us just 500-ish miles to our destination in Virginia. We shall see.

So that's enough rambling for today. See you next month!

Just kidding. Sort of.

Maybe.

You Had to Be There

2008-11-14T13:59:00.003-05:00

You ever get into weird games with your spouse? (No, not those kinds of weird games, you pervert!) Like you just start going back and forth, either verbally or via email or, in our case, via text?

That's what happened with Lovely Wife and me the other day. See, she walks through this maze of underground tunnels to get from her office to my building and then we walk together to the car. And she always sends me a text when she's leaving so I can time my shut-down procedures and meet her in the lobby. Usually it's just "Leaving now," to which I always reply "ok." But on Tuesday it got silly and so I thought I'd document it here. Each line is a text, alternating between us, with her going first.

Leaving now.
Roger
rabbit
bunny
honey
bee
wax
on wax off
daniel son
of a bitch
fight
to the death
do us part
and parcel
service
center
point
taken
lightly
salted
nuts
sack
of potatoes
salad
tossed
cookies
n' cream
in your coffee

Yes, something's wrong with us. This was all in a 15 minute walk to my office. Then we argued about who broke the "rules."

No competitiveness here.

Timing is Everything In Life and In Politics

2008-11-05T14:15:00.002-05:00

Whether you like Obama or not (and I don't, especially), we're about to see him get credit for a lot of things he will have had little to do with. Everything is cyclical in this country, especially with regard to economics. Driving home yesterday, on Election Day 2008, regular gasoline was down to $2.09 a gallon near our house. Remember, this was nearing $4.00 just six weeks ago. So that's on it's way down.

The housing market has more or less bottomed out. Oh, sure, there could be some further drops, but it's not like it can possibly get much worse. It's not getting better in a hurry, but it's probably not getting worse, either.

The economy is also in crisis. But it's been recognized and a bailout was passed and things will slowly recover, as confidence increases and people see that investments are not always doomed to fail.

The war in Iraq is at its lowest monthly casualty rates in years and is also winding down. The troop surge worked and it was going to end one way or the other in the coming year or two.

All of these things would have happened regardless of who got elected, yet it is Obama and the Democrats who will happily take the credit and convince clueless Americans that they're the reason things got better.

Barack Obama is a new, hopeful voice for the black community, and that's a very, very, VERY good thing. He gives those who have forever suffered racism and less advantages based upon their race a hope that anything is possible. He's educated, well-spoken and intelligent. And he's going to be the leader of the free world. This is good for the black community for so many reasons, not the least of which is that they can now begin to phase out rabble-rousing racist dunces like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Obama should not let either of them within ten miles of the White House. They are divisive and that's not what we need, and it's not what Obama has claimed to stand for. I hope he lives up to it.

Which brings me to a point a friend of mine has made before -- regardless of who is President, you should be rooting for the United States and hoping for success and prosperity. I know I am.

Ask Jeeves

2008-10-28T16:32:00.002-04:00

Do you think Acura drivers have a certain haughtiness to them? I don't think so. I think Acura drivers are people who like the reliability and user-friendliness of Hondas but don't want something as generic as a Honda, so they step up to the luxury division. But maybe I feel that way because I own one.

I need new wipers desperately. Mine are squeaking and streaking and the right one is doing that shredding thing where it looks like it's one or two swipes away from disappearing and scratching across my windsheild with the metal arm.

So we stop at Wal-Mart on the way home last night to remedy this situaiton and I go in there figuring they'll have a computer at the auto area and will be able to tell me which wipers I need, size-wise. Well, that desk was closed. So my lovely wife manages to find one of those little books near the wipers that supposedly has every make and model car so you can do it yourself. We study the book and learn that the earliest pages are tattered and the soonest car, alphabetically-speaking, that we can find is "AM General." Acura would come before that, for you slow-learners.

Shit.

So I go back out to my car and dig out my manual and head back in, lipping through the index looking for wiper info. I find the pages for windsheild wipers and turn there (in my 300-page manual, by the way). And do you know what's there? Step-by-step retard directions for changing the wipers, including how to pull the arm away from the windsheild, but nothing about the size. I check elsewhere and there are two pages on, I kid you not, the wiper control stalk.

Seriously? Nowhere are we going to tell people the size wipers they need to buy? Is it expected that Acura owners will simply take the car in -- or have the butler do it or something -- and let the blue-collar service people handle it? So frustrating.

I wound up searching Google via by blackberry and found a page for my car that said the size was 600MM. Of course, here in America, they're generally measured in inches. So I bought the inches equivalent, 24, and headed home.

And they were wrong. Both of them. One is 22 inches and the other is 19.

I'm an idiot.

Take It Easy On The Stapler, Milton

2008-10-23T17:01:00.002-04:00

You know, I took a better position at my company to move to Houston last year and one of the trade-offs, minor as it may be, was that in our Houston office, I no longer qualify for my own office. Back in Jersey, the rules were different and you got one a lot earler. So I'm in the unique position of having been promoted to a better job, with a more senior title, paid more.... and yet had to give up my office.

It honestly doesn't bother me much, and not at all from the ego perspective. So what if I don't have an office -- I can just work hard to get to the next level and then that issue is resolved. What does bother me is the lack of a door to close when everyone begins pissing me off. Which is frequent.

There's a woman diagonally from me who, for one thing, is a 40-year smoker and sounds like it. It truly sounds like she's got a fishtank for lungs. If she laughs at all, it immediately descends into a garbly, liquified-sounding, choking cough.

But the thing that's also annoying about her and motivated me to write this is the fact that she's frail as hell and that is the only thing I can think of to explain how she uses a stapler.

You know how most of us normal, sentient beings put the ball of our hand over the stapler and press down to staple things? Well, she doesn't do that. For some ungodly reason, she slides the paper into place and then -- WHAM -- pounds down on the stapler to complete the transaction. Completely unnecessary. And far more likely to break her brittle old bones, weakened by years of nicotine intake.

It sounds minor, I know. But if you've worked in a cube farm in your life, you know exactly what I'm talking about with regard to those little habits that make you want to punch someone in the face. Unless you are that person with the idiotic habits and the lack of self-awareness. In which case... punch yourself in the face for me.

Facebook Is So Stupid

2008-10-22T14:03:00.003-04:00

And yet I use it.

But I do think "social networking" sites like MySpace and Facebook are, by and large, a terrible idea. People will tell you that they're "addicting." I'm not so sure about that. I think they're kind of silly, honestly. Sure, I play around with my Facebook page, but I don't see how people find them addicting. If Facebook ceased to exist tomorrow, I think that'd be fine and I'd adapt without a problem.

What I do like about it is the fact that I can send little digs at my friends, the way I normally would via email or in person -- but it's very easy to fall out of contact with friends and for months to go by. Facebook, to its credit, does allow you to pop in and see what's going on with people's lives -- assuming they actually provide updates.

What I don't like, among many things, is one of the things I've heard many others say is so great about Facebook -- that you'll be reconnected with people you haven't talked to in 15 years. Like that's some kind of good thing.

"I got befriended by Herman from 7th grade! Remember Herman?"

Well, sure I do. And I hated him then, so why would I possibly want to be connected to Herman in any way now?

But if Herman befriends you, you can always reject him -- which is kind of a dick move, but satisfying nonetheless, especially if you're a dick like me. It's those in-betweeners, though, that are the tough ones. Like when Jane from accounting at work befriends you. You don't want Jane seeing your weekend pictures from beer pong or some dude you barely know at work seeing your wife in a bathing suit. And sure, you can censor your photos, but then it becomes more work than it's worth and you probably shouldn't be on Facebook anyway.

So you wind up either accepting the friend request just to avoid any preponderance of conflict (and don't get me started on how 8th-grade-ish it feels to even conceive of "conflict" as a result of Facebook) or you reject it. I have only rejected one actual friend request thus far, and I'm up to around 110 "friends" (of which, maybe 30 or 40 are actually people I'd call friends). The one I rejected was an girl I dated briefly a few years ago. Seriously, why would I want someone like that being able to peep into my personal life or how I interact with my friends? I'm sure some people are so eager to up their friends count that they would say yes to anyone -- but not me. I'm a trailblazer like that (not the Chevy kind, though -- their transmissions are weak).

Another option -- and I like this one, too -- is to simply ignore the friend request. If you don't accept or reject it, they have no idea what you're doing and can only twist in the wind. Fun, again, if you're a dickhead. Like me.

And yet another fun option is to accept someone as your friend -- especially if they have a lot of friends themselves -- and then at some point go in and delete them from your friends list. They'll get a note when you accept them but they won't get a note when you drop them. So they'll either never know, or they're go nuts trying to figure out who dropped them. Fun all around.

What else do I hate about Facebook? Glad I asked.

I hate it when people write updates that aren't clever.

"Bill is working."

"Chris is tired."

"Mary is watching TV."

Seriously, who gives a shit? I do all those things, too. Those are leftover brainless ca-ca from the early days of AOL Instant Messenger. That was a decade ago, people. Don't tell me you're at work -- we're all at fricking work! Tell me you have gas or you are having an affair or you just killed a guy and left him in a dumpster on Louisiana Street.

And don't try so hard to be profound. I saw a status update a few weeks ago that said "...thinks there's something sublime about making a child's lunch."

"Sublime"? Who do you think you are, J.R.R. Tolkien? And sublime means "noble: lofty" or "inspiring awe." If making lunch is that awesome, I'll take two PB&Js every morning, weirdo.

One thing Facebook does allow us to see is those who lack creativity. It can't hide on Facebook. It's a lot like blogging in that you're expected to update frequently, with little to no filter and you're expected to be interesting, or else people aren't going to stop by your page. One of my friends from high school has always been one of those people who latches on to something funny that someone else does and then beats the joke into the ground until it's completely unfunny. At one point recently, he had a status up that said "...is still trying to figure out why we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway."

Wow, solid. What's next? A joke about why we can't make entire airplanes out of the black box material? Because that's pretty hilarious, too.

This same unfunny dude also had up a status that was a direct lift from a line in the movie Ten Things I Hate About You. Now, I know that movie because my sister thought it was hilarious and it kind of was -- but it's about high school kids and is from about 8 or 9 years ago. Sad, really, that a 30-something dude is stealing their lines.

Something else endemic to Facebook is the online bravery that occurs. It's not quite the same as an anonymous post on a message board or blogsite, but it's close. People will post antagonistic things -- these days almost always political -- and then if you choose to question it, you'll often be publicly told you're a retard. Why are we on these sites again? To keep in touch with narrow-minded friends? DELETE.

And what's with these "Groups" on Facebook? You join a group and then.... nothing. You can talk about that topic. Whoop-dee-doo. I don't need to join a New York Rangers fan group to talk about the New York Rangers, but okie dokie, here I go.... baaaaaaaaah! (That was my sheep noise.)

There's also all the little add-ons you can do on Facebook, most of which are apparently non-Facebook-sanctioned. Some are kind of amusing, but most are ridiculously stupid. You'll log on and see that "Jim threw a pie at Margie using Facebook Pie Throwing." Uh, what?

Or "Melanie gave you a fine of $500 in Facebook Parking Ticket Wars." Really? Who cares?

I want one that allows me to send things like, "J gave you a donkey punch in Facebook Rough Sex Games."

So I guess that's my rant of Facebook. Overall, it's a mildly entertaining and a fun outlet for the kind of wise-assery I enjoy. There are a few friends I have on there who share my kind of humor and we definitely enjoy posting silly things, commenting on each others' statuses (stati?), and so forth. But overall, I think Facebook is a bad idea.

I'm just glad we didn't have online counters adding up our number of "friends" when I was growing up. This makes me think about what this must do to the high school loner's psyche -- those people had to always wonder about friendships they didn't have or how they got where they are. But now it's counted there in a little number that adds it all up for them -- and when you're a teen, sometimes a number like that goes a long way to determining your self-worth. Scary thought, at least to me. It also allows for a lot more bullying, but I'll leave that to the Today show to cover when one of their kids gets involved.

Yes, I'm Alive

2008-10-07T15:23:00.005-04:00

Well, I'd say this is the longest I've gone without posting and updating everyone on our lives. And there's a pretty decent reason for that -- well, for at least part of the past month I've nearly gone without saying a word here. And that reason is Mr. Ike.

Hurricane Ike bore down on the Gulf Coast and forcefully came ashore the night of September 12. And we stayed here for it. And it was one of those experiences. People now tell us we've been initiated. The kind of talk about how we "don't understand" and all that always made me scoff. People here get scared of rain, and when it falls below 65 degrees, so I figured they were being dramatic. I've lived in the Northeast and the Midwest and so unless your storm is also bringing 15 inches of snow or a tornado that might rip my house from its very foundation and turn it into a bunch o' splinters, spare me.

Well, turns out when a Category 2 hurricane hits your city pretty much directly, it's kind of scary and can lead to unimaginable disaster. Yeah, yeah, I know... you knew that already. But this is my story.

Early the week of Setpember 8, there came warnings of Hurricane Ike. He was way, way, way, WAY offshore but there was a chance he could hit Houston. Sure, just like there was a chance Edouard could. We got a day off from work for that, and it was so meek it was gorgeous out by 5 PM and the wife and I went for a bike ride.

Well, Ike continued approaching and decided to set a course for Galveston and then Houston. By Thursday, it wasn't just news anymore -- it was time for action. The city mandated people in two "zones," Zone 1 and Zone 2. (Houston is zoned for disasters, so that they can say "Zone 1, you must evacuate! Zone 3, you stay where you are!") We live in Zone 3, and were being told to stay put.

Thursday many offices began to close early to let people tend to things or to get the hell out of town. And, you know, because many of their employees lived in places with mandatory noon evacuations. It was starting to feel real.

I mapped out back road routes to San Antonio, Dallas and Austin and put them in my car. That way, if we had to go, I wouldn't be among the other 3 million people all entering the same Interstate highway at once. The stories from Hurricane Rita three years ago were all horrific and all the same -- taking 12 hours to drive across town, etc.

Our office, and nearly all others, decided to close for Friday as it was now expected that Ike would make landfall between Friday evening and Saturday morning. I went home and we had a very normal Thursday night, aside from the panic on the news and the calls from relatives asking what we were going to do.

By Friday, full-on freaking was happening. Our offices were closed, so we prepared the house and got ready for what now appeared to be a sure thing -- Ike was going to crash right into Galveston and proceed the 50 miles up to Houston. We live in Southwest Houston, less than 45 miles from Galveston.

I taped each and every window in the house so that if they did blow out, the glass wouldn't go everywhere. I brought in all objects from outside. Patio furniture, gazebo, hammock, chairs, grill... everything. I'm not sure a hammock could become a flying object, but winds were expected to be 110 MPH+ at landfall. Not taking any chances with that.

By Friday evening, we had done all we could. Some relatives were incredulous that we were staying put, but the press conferences specified that people in our county should "shelter in their homes." If you were told to evacuate and hadn't yet, they were warning people to write their SSN on their arms in sharpie so that when they were found later they could be identified. As one official put it, "This isn't a matter of 'riding it out.' If you live in the evac areas, your home will be gone."

They were now evacuating a town that we enjoy visitng and having dinner in... and a town we almost bought a home in when we moved here. And it's about 15 miles from us. We began paying closer attention to the news.

As the evening wore on, we realized we weren't going anywhere. Nobody in our neighborhood seemed to be, either, although a few had boarded up all of their windows. I felt this was a bit excessive. After all, if it was 110 MPH winds at landfall, there's no way it would sustain that as it crossed 40-50 miles of land. Usually they lose steam fast over land. How wrong an assumption that turned out to be.

By the late evening, we'd started just hanging out with our neighbors and drinking beer. I was in the neighbor's driveway across the street as the night wore on and Watersyne was inside one of the houses with the ladies. Eventually, the girls came over there, too, and we had on music and talked and had all of our dogs there, too (ours plus the neighbors' made three of them).

It began getting really windy around 10 PM and continued gusting as the night got later. Around 11 or so the rain began and we moved our chairs into the garage and continued our pow-wow.

The music was good, the beer was flowing, and the company was good. We were making the best of it.

At 11:55 PM the electricity went out, abruptly as it always does.

It's even weirder when you're looking outside at a neighborhood of tightly packed houses and everyone's lights, including garage sconces, all click off at once. It's very silent and very eerie. With only the moonlight to show us the way, we were happy to have made sure we had flashlights at our sides for this very moment. I will admit, I didn't think the power would go before midnight. In preparation, we had set our central air unit down to 70 degrees (normally it's at 75), which made our house feel like a meat locker. But depending on how long the power was going to be out, the house might actually stay cool for a little while.

We went to bed around 1, with the wind at even higher levels and the rain steady but not torrential.

At about 3 or 4 the storm came with a fury, screaming winds, driving rain, enough to uproot huge trees and tear down large fences in back yards. I was exhausted and beginning to get a head cold so I actually slept through most of it. I only remember waking up when my wife said, "I think I hear the dog crying." I just prayed a window hadn't broken out in the living room or something.

In the morning, I got up and took some video, noticing that our neighbors both had trees down, while we had some leaning considerable. Even some of our lower-height bushes were leaning and almost uprooted. As it turned out, the hurricane maintained its nearly Category 3 status and plowed through all of Houston with 110 MPH winds.

Downtown was severely damaged and much of it was impassable for days. Around us, not only was all power out, but traffic lights were also completely missing in many areas.

We drove through the neighborhood and immediately felt lucky. Despite minor foliage damage and no power, we hadn't suffered anything severe. We weren't hurt, we had no property damage... so we were lucky.

Others were not so lucky. As you've no doubt seen, Galveston was essentially leveled. Hundreds of houses are literally gone, and who knows how many people missing. In our development, one house in particular had one tree fall on their house and had another fall on their car. Yikes.

Friends of ours had trees on their house, enough to cause a leak in their master bedroom, chasing them, their little girl and one of their moms out into the living room. That had to suck.

We weaved through the area taking pictures and simply feeling, as I said....lucky.

Our offices were officially closed for most of the following week. Each night we spent outside with our neighbors and all of our dogs and kids. We cooked out every night with whatever we all could cobble together. My very kind neighbor let us plug a fridge in our garage into his generator so we could at least keep some things cold and also run a power strip to my workbench where we could charge cellphones, blackberry, ipods... you know, the essentials. Heh.

The storm had knocked out power at 11:55 PM on Friday, September 12. On Wednesday, September 17, we still had no power and a friend called me. He'd obtained a small generator and asked if I wanted to buy it from him because he managed to actually get two. The smaller one is only 1000 watts, which means it can maybe power one medium-sized fridge and not much else. I felt it seemed like one of those smart investments in case this situation happened again. When you have electricity, buying a generator seems like a silly idea. But when you don't have power for days on end.... well, they become lifesavers.

So I bought it and got it running. It's small, very compact and runs pretty well. When you plug in the fridge it sort of bogs down for a few seconds but it comes right back. I ran it for the evening on Wednesday and then left it off all night with the fridge closed tight until morning. First thing Thursday morning, I re-started it and it ran all day long on a tank of gas. When it ran out around dinnertime, I decided to give it a rest and then planned to re-start it after dinner and run it into the evening.

Thankfully, while we were outside and eating an italian pasta feast cooked up by my lovely wife, the power suddenly came back on. You could hear people throughout the neighborhood cheering, and at one point two power company guys came through the street in a pickup truck and everyone cheered for them. (Although taking a week to get the power back on doesn't seem applause-worthy, we were just happy to have it.)

So that's our story from the week following Ike.

Hopefully, regular posting will resume here shortly.

Riley the Dog -- July 1997 to September 2008

2008-09-09T10:29:00.004-04:00

You know, it's funny how life works. Just yesterday, I was thinking about posting here (yes, yes, I know, it's about time, right?) and what I was thinking of writing about was how good my life is and how lucky I am. I have a terrific wife, a good job, a beautiful house and great friends. We have caring families and a happy little puppy. Life feels good.

And while the news we got last night isn't something that's crushing, it's still very sad for me. My parents' dog, Riley, an eleven-year-old Irish Setter, had to be put down yesterday. She'd been having serious disc problems and had become incontinent and unable to control her poops, too. She was leaving messes everywhere and the meds the vet prescribed for her back only made her more thirsty, which led to drinking more water, which led to more peeing. One wonders if maybe her kidneys were failing, too.

Riley was a purebred Irish Setter, whose mother was a show dog and whose father appeared in print ads for Brooks Brothers, among others. So she was of fancy stock. And she was a priss.

The previous Irish Setter my family had was Bridget. She was raised from a puppy to six years old by former neighbors of ours who, when they had their first child, decided they didn't want a big, goofy dog bounding around the house, so they gave her to my mom. Bridget was an old-fashioned work dog -- she was always eager to please and to serve her master. She had been hunting before and knew how to bring back prizes, usually birds, mice, etc. She was afraid of nothing and would eat anything.

Riley, on the other hand, was the polar opposite. She was a priss, as mentioned, and she was afraid of everything. From day 1 until she died, she almost had a heart attack whenever a vaccuum cleaner was even in the room, let alone turned on. I remember walking her in her early months and when a car or truck went by on the street, she about turned inside out trying to climb into my pocket. I've never seen a dog so afraid of a moving car. My current puppy runs towards them. Riley was afraid of new people, too. When my parents have their Super Bowl party, Riley would say upstairs and bark at the doorbell from a safe distance. Thanks, guard dog.

Riley also had the most sensitive stomach I've ever seen in a dog. Beef made her puke. And I mean, any semblance of beef. If she ate a piece of food that had some juices from a steak on it, she'd vomit within minutes. It was surreal. A large dog, a carnivore, who can't eat beef. She had to have very precise foods, otherwise she was sick or gassy.

But Riley was a gorgeous dog. Whereas Bridget, the previous one, was kind of rough around the edges, with lopsided eyes and improper dimensions for a purebred Setter, Riley was perfect and of show dog quality. She even had that prance that you see show dogs do when they run somewhere. Rarely was she in a full-out sprint -- she usually just pranced along in a very dignified, I'll-get-there-when-I-get-there-but-don't-want-to-muss-my-hair kind of way.

She was also one of the sweetest dogs you'd ever meet. From the very beginning, she was always so passive and well-behaved. Sure, that had something to do with her skittish nature, but she was just a doll. Where a lot of dogs growl if you interfere with their eating, Riley would simply back off, sit, and watch you, as if to say, "Well, okay, take what you need, but let me know when you're done so I can get back to it."

Funny thing was, though, despite being very sweet, we also often described her as "aloof." I don't think I ever got a single doggie kiss from her. Most dogs want to lick your face off. Not Riley. You could get right in her face and she'd close her mouth tightly and turn away, just like the girls I used to date. Prude.

She loved attention and contact, though, like so many dogs, and she'd purr like a gigantic cat when you scratched her chin. She liked nothing more than to lie on the floor in the room where any of us were watching TV. But it was funny when Riley decided it was time for bed -- she would just get up and head to the room she was sleeping in (either the laundry room at my parents' house or their bedroom at the beach house). And it was always kind of pointed, like, "Okay, I'm going to bed, see ya." No hesitation, just would get up as though she'd had enough waiting for the humans and she'd head to bed.

I remember once Riley stayed at my little house in NJ over New Year's, while my family was out of town, and she just loved bunking in at my place. Her bed was in my room and so she got to sleep at the foot of my bed. In the evenings, though, while I was watching TV, I let her hop up on the couch -- something she never got to do at my parents' house -- and snooze there. I remember how happy she seemed simply getting to be spoiled a little bit and being nearby one of her family members. As I said, she was never a licker or an overly hyper dog (after her puppy days, anyway) but she'd show her appreciation by nuzzling into you with her snout and doing that contented sigh and the purr I mentioned. She was huge, warm, loving and easygoing. Kind of like I strive to be.

You feel silly when you feel sadness and mourning for an animal -- and yet almost all of us do. They're a family member and a regular part of your life. We got Riley in the fall of 1997 -- I was in the midst of troubled times in college, unsure of whether I'd be going back to Purdue after dropping out after the spring '97 semester. My life has, obviously, changed so much since then and Riley's been there while I've grown up. It won't be the same at Christmas without her there, curiously tearing open our presents as she has done for years.

One of the great things about dogs is that they love you unconditionally -- it doesn't matter if you're in a bad mood or you're stinky or sweating or you've got bad gas. They love you the same anyway and just want to be near you. It's a great feeling and it's always so hard to let them go. My mom was crying a little when she told me about things and she said she felt like she'd kept her around too long because she was selfish and didn't want to let her go. Riley's tail hadn't been "up" in months -- it had been curled under her, probably in pain because of her disc issues, for a long time.

The hardest part about putting a dog down is when they're like Riley -- still sweet, still loving, still nuzzling. Too often their bodies give out long before their heart and capacity to love do -- and so you feel like you're putting down a life that still has more to give. The truth, though, was that the most humane thing to do for Riley at this point was to let her go chase tennis balls where her back doesn't hurt anymore.

She gave us eleven terrific years and, for that, I am very thankful.

Riley and her pal, Lucy, in better days.

99 Holes of Golf In A Week, 99 Holes of Golllllllf...

2008-08-13T15:14:00.003-04:00

Yes, so that was the most golf I've ever played in a week. And you know, the theory that you have to play a lot in order to get better was tested and I have to say I agree with it. While my hands were getting raw (insert masturbation joke here) by the end of it, I definitely was hitting the ball more consistently and working out some of the kinks. I even shot a 44 on the front nine of my dad's course on Saturday which is by FAR the best I've ever done there.

The reason for all this was that I played in an invitational event at my father's club this past weekend where we played against other teams in our "flight" of six teams. This meant five, 9-hole matches. So we did a practice round on Thursday (18 holes), then three 9-hole matches on Friday (27 holes) and two more 9-hole matches on Saturday (18 holes). Plus, I played 18 with some buddies on Sunday before leaving NJ. Oh, and I had played 36 the weekend prior to this on my course in order to stay sharp. So that's 99 holes in about a week. Not sure if I'll ever duplicate that.

I even walked 45 of them on the weekend... 18 in the Thursday practice round, 9 on Friday and all 18 on Saturday. I expected to be ready to collapse or to be sore as can be... but aside from some normal stiffness in the ol' back and legs, I felt great. Going out and playing another 18 on Sunday -- and playing well -- only made me wish I could do this every week.

After the event at my pop's club, there is a raffle for some really nice prizes. And I never win raffles of anything. Well, I'm in the locker room after my shower and I can hear over the PA the names being pulled and there's my name as the winner of a driver. Holy crap. My dad and I had already won some cash and a crystal bowl for finishing second overall in our flight and now I had a new, $500 driver! And five minutes later, as they're pulling names for 3-woods.... it's me again! Now I'm up to about $700 worth of equipment.

I also bet on a guy (there's a fair amount of semi-illegal betting going on) to win his flight because I knew and liked him and almost nobody else did.... so I won $166 on a $10 bet. I also took home four golf shirts, a hat and a wind jacket, all as prizes, raffles or gift bag items.

All in all, a terrific golf-related week. I guess I'll keep playing.

Here We Go Again

2008-08-04T10:11:00.002-04:00

You know, when I used to live in the Northeast, I used to make fun of the way people freaked out about snow there. It never made sense to me -- it snows plenty, so why is it always a panic-inducing event?

Well, it's gotten sillier. Here in Texas, when there's a chance it's going to rain hard, they freak out similarly. Right now there's yet another storm in the gulf (and yeah, the overhead highway signs this morning said "STORM FORMING IN GULF") and I thought, okay, big deal, it's barely a tropical storm. On the Today show, Al Roker showed a map and explained it's heading towards the Louisiana/Texas border. That's like 3 or 4 hours from here. Then they throw it to the local weather and our local clown -- err, weatherman -- shows it tracking, yep, you guessed it, right at Houston! Everybody panic! It's going to raaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiinnn!

Seriously, I know hurricanes and tropical storms are nothing to laugh about -- well, except when they're funny -- but come on. Everyone here is still guyshy because of Katrina -- which didn't impact Houston at all (save for the thousands of people who moved to the Astrodome for a while) and then the following storm, Rita, which began the over-excessive panicking. When Rita was on her way, everybody fled and it was one of things where people were running out of gas on the highways and it took 13 hours to get across town, etc.

So why don't we settle down a bit? Is Houston that afraid of being like New Orleans was? I guess the answer is yes, because our office is talking about closing early so people can go home and "prepare."

Oh, and the storm is expected to get here at about 7 AM tomorrow morning. So, yes, by all means, we should head home early today to batton down the hatches!

Signage

2008-07-23T11:59:00.002-04:00

Below I told you about the signs warning us to keep our tanks full. Well, as most of the country has heard, there is a Category 1 hurricane hitting the very southern tip of Texas. South Padre Island is where everyone's reporting from -- spring break might never be the same. Bo-ring. And what's funny to me is that they're reporting from there because if the storm was just a little more south and was hitting only Mexico, nobody in America would care one bit. But hey, it's going to graze Texas so Al Roker gets to lead the Today Show!

Anyway, the signs changed the day after my post below and were then not just telling us it was hurricane season and to keep the tanks full, but now:

"STORM FORMING IN GULF. FILL YOUR TANKS."

Goodness. It's almost like they're trying to incite panic.

Everyone Panic On Three... Ready?

2008-07-21T10:38:00.003-04:00

Here in Houston, those fancy overhead electronic signs over the highways normally indicate how traffic is flowing. Like, you'll be on a highway and you know it intersects with another major highway a few miles ahead and it'll say, "6 minutes to I-610 at 4:53 PM" -- so you can look at the clock and have a pretty reasonable and accurate idea of when you'll be getting somewhere. That kind of thing. The signs also, of course, alert people to accidents and Amber Alerts when necessary.

However, yesterday and again this morning they had a very simple message for everyone:

"HURRICANE SEASON IS HERE. KEEP YOUR GAS TANK FULL."

Yes, that sounds reasonable. Thanks for the tip.

Is That An Open Competition or Is It Invite Only Like the Masters?

2008-07-17T09:15:00.004-04:00

Who says the British are uptight? According to this story, nine British women were arrested on prostitution charges "for taking part in an oral sex competition" in Zakynthos, which is some island off of Greece.

First of all, if you can't get freaky in some remote holiday island off the coast of Greece, where can you? They likely figured, "Hey, nobody knows us here."

And second, it's a contest! Someone likely challenged them! And we all know you can't back down from a challenge like that. They needed to objectively determine who was the best. I think I'll challenge my wife this evening.

According to the story...

The women, who came to the popular resort on holiday, had been paid to take part in the competition, which was video recorded and was to be posted on the Internet, police said.

Um, where, exactly on the Internet? Just curious.

Sand Between the Toes

2008-07-15T10:35:00.005-04:00

We're back in the heart of Tejas after our ten day adventure to the Northeast. And less than 48 hours ago, I was walking in the surf on the beach on Long Beach Island in NJ, getting my last feel of the water and the beach for at least a year, I figure.

As I strolled along for the last time, I had all sorts of thoughts back to those same walks each summer when I was a kid. Heading up to the beach one last time to say goodbye to the ocean and the beach for the season. And I felt the same wistfulness, about how much I love it there and how much I truly feel relaxed there.

Sitting on the Southern-style front porch of the beach house, drinking the morning coffee, hearing the crashing of the ocean and feeling that sea breeze.... it's just something I will never tire of. I imagine living in San Diego or the beach communities of L.A. could provide something similar, but if you're doing it every single day, it stops being special.

My trips to my childhood beach area always bring back awesome memories and continue creating new ones. And no matter how many times I walk on that beach, it just never gets old to me.

This time around, my lovely wife's sisters and their kids (and mom) came along for the week. So it was a bigger group but the best part was that it was all new to them. They'd never been to that community or experienced the things we all love about it... and they couldn't stop talking about wanting to come back to the same place. You never run out of things to do but at the same time it doesn't feel sleazy like the boardwalk locations in Jersey (Seaside Heights, Wildwood, Pt. Pleasant, Belmar, etc.). It's a family atmosphere, but with fun nightlife, too, should you decide to check it out.

We'll possibly try out other locations in future years as a growing family.... possibilities include Ocean City, Maryland and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. But I know that I will never tire of heading back to my favorite vacation place along the southern coast of New Jersey.

Sometimes It's Cool How Things Work Out

2008-07-03T13:39:00.000-04:00

We're taking a flight up to Philly tonight to kick off our week of vacation at the world-famous family beach house. Yes, traveling North to go to the beach. Trust me, it's worth it. Sun, boat, beach, better water.... more pleasant climate. It's all great.

But on of the coolest things -- at least for a history-oriented dork like me -- is our flight number for tonight. We're traveling into Philadelphia, remember, home of the Liberty Bell and all that wonderful American history.... and it's July 3, landing almost late enough to be July 4.... and it's flight number 1776.

How neat-o is that?

Beginning to Get A Bit Heated

2008-06-24T13:26:00.003-04:00

On Friday I shared the fact that our upstairs A/C unit had decided to call it quits randomly that morning. Well, being in a new house, we have a lot of things covered for a fairly good period of time. As it was, it was the first day of summer and I found it an interesting coincidence that the A/C failed on that day. I also was concerned, given that it hasn't even gotten to the normal summer heat levels we have been told to expect here in H-town.

I called to let my contact with the builder know about the problem at about 11 AM. He promised to get an A/C specialist out to our house. And that did happen, after several more phone conversations and the upstairs rising to 91 degrees. At 5:30, a nice guy showed up and inspected everything, from the breaker box to the outside unit to the unit in the attic. He concluded that we had a weak breaker since he tested the A/C unit and it all was working fine. He said if it happened again to call the emergency number and they'd send out an electrician. Fine.

We went away Saturday night and got home Sunday evening. It was 93 degrees upstairs. And that's not where I set the thermostat, just so we're clear.

I called again yesterday morning and was less pleasant this time, since now we would not be home. I asked my neighbor to look after things and let anyone in who needed to be in. My builder contact told me he'd send out an electrician. And he did. At 3 PM. And my neighbor reported that they inspected things and didn't really fix anything, determining it was "probably the A/C unit," and simply turning the breaker switch back on.

Hey, thanks, guys! Show me how to do that... because I couldn't possibly turn on a f-cking breaker switch! Idiots.

So to recap: the A/C guy says it's the electrical. The electrician says it's the A/C unit. And the "solution" both times has been to reset the breaker. In a six-month-old house.

I can see this is going to be fun. If this happens again -- which it will, there's no doubt -- I will let me contact at the builder know that he's going to get a phone call each and every day this entire summer until this problem is fixed. And fixed does not mean, cross your fingers and hope it doesn't happen again.

People piss me off.

Carlin

2008-06-23T10:15:00.002-04:00

Some people loved him -- others hated him. I happened to think George Carlin was a brilliant comedian. Sure, sometimes his stuff felt a little tired or overused. But when you consider he was a top-draw comedian for over 35 years, it's pretty impressive.

I often wondered how long he'd last, what with all the drug use, constant smoking, obvious drinking, etc. George never really looked healthy. In fact, if you look back at his 70s performances, he looked old then. And so it was that old cranky George Carlin died yesterday at the age of 71.

Some of my favorite jokes and one-liners came from George Carlin routines... here's a sampling, many of which old friend Xtrosity and I still use all the time...

On air travel:

"Here's one they just made up: 'near miss.' Two planes narrowly avoid hitting one another... they call it a 'near miss.' It's a near HIT! A collision is a 'near miss.'"

"'Please check around your immediate seating area for any personal belongings you might have brought on board.' Well.... I might have brought my arrowhead collection. I didn't.... so I'm not going to look for it!! I'm going to look for things I did bring on board! Would seem to enhance the likelihood of me finding something, wouldn't you say?"

"'...for any personal belongings...' What other belongings are there... besides personal? Public belongings? Do these people honestly believe I might be traveling with a fountain I stole from the park?"

"'The captain has turned on the no smoking sign.' Well, who gives a shit who turned it on? It's on, isn't it?"

On needless words:

"Too much use of this prefix, 'pre.' Place the turkey in a preheated oven. That's ridiculous. An oven can exist in two states only -- heated or UNheated. Preheated is a meaningless fucking term."

On little things that make us all the same:

"Do you ever look at your watch, and you don't know what time it is? So you look again, and you still don't know... so you look a third time, and somebody says, 'what time is it?' and you say, 'I don't know!'"

Anyway, I thought I'd post a clip on, naturally, death. There are tons of YouTube clips floating around out there by George and this one mocks the idea of heaven but it's still pretty funny unless you're too sensitive. Which was really the way all of Carlin's routines were. Funny, unless you were too sensitive.

Okay! Uncle!

2008-06-20T15:04:00.002-04:00

You win, house. I'll move from the office we have set up on the second floor down to the kitchen table on the first floor, as I sit here working from home on this typically warm June Friday.

And why will I move downstairs? Because the upstairs zone of the A/C has decided to quit working. It's now 87 degrees upstairs. And I don't care how many fans you turn on, nothing's going to make that feel like anything but an attic.

The good thing is that your A/C breaking down in Houston is considered an "emergency" and you can call your home builder's emergency number if they don't answer the regular one. It hasn't come to that yet, but I'm a bit sticky right now.

Phoning It In

2008-06-06T11:19:00.003-04:00

Well, it's time again for me to upgrade the old cell phone. I know we all have those "can you believe it?" conversations about technology and our increasing reliance on it, but hey, I've always liked cool little gizmos. Granted, I rarely can operate cool little gizmos, but cell phones for some reason have always been something I'm pretty good at.

I'm currently carrying around the Motorola Razr V3, which I've actually really enjoyed having. Battery life isn't very good but I don't think any phones are anymore since they're all getting slimmer and slimmer, thus reducing battery size and, apparently, capacity. My Razr locks up like a bad Windows application from time to time, but overall I like it because of how slim and light it is. I can slip it into any pocket -- even my really tight Jordache jeans that show off my ass -- and it's never in the way the way my Blackberry often is.

So I was looking for something to mimic that convenience while being a little bit newer technology. And since I'm up for my bi-annual $100 credit, it was the time. So I perused the selection and I decided on the Samsung Alias SCH u740. Not sure why it needs all those qualifiers in the name but it does. It's actually slightly less "tall" and a bit narrower than the Razr, which I find amazing. It's fractionally deeper, but only like by a couple tenths of an inch. And it has a neat-o feature where it's a clamshell phone but also has the full "qwerty" keyboard.

Here is is:

I also love the fact that the clock on the outside is analog. We've gone away from analog clocks in the past couple of decades and they're definitely coming back now and getting popular again. And having one on the cell phone just looks classy to me. Sure, when you open it it looks like a jubilee of buttons, but you only use the traditional phone buttons when you're using it as a phone... when it's a message center, etc., then you turn it and it all looks normal.

So that's my technology update. I do feel like a dumbass having a cell phone from Verizon and an AT&T blackberry with cell phone service, but these are the requirements of being in the professional BSer world I am in.

Ciao!

2008-06-04T17:36:00.005-04:00

Okay, so Italy was amazing. We only visited Venice on this trip since we only had a fews days and decided the "big" Italy trip will have to wait for an anniversary or when the kids are grown.... and can send us on it. Or something.

Going back, we spent a few days in Paris, where I had a work obligation for a couple of days, which meant that Watersyne was on her own for the most part. She did pretty well, actually, and ventured around Paris more than I think she would in most other cities -- even American ones.

After my client obligations ended, we hopped a plane from Paris to Venice, which was about an hour and twenty-five minutes. It's one of the few times in my life I've flown from one country to another with neither being the United States. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

After landing in Venice, we had a car service from the airport to the hotel, which was provided gratis by the hotel, all thanks to Watersyne's hotel points. Which, as mentioned a few posts back, also got us four free nights at the hotel -- in a suite, no less. We're really not the high-rollers we appear to be. Honest. We shop at Target, for pete's sake.

The hotel was not an quaint little Venetian place, but actually a global chain. But so what? We were there.

We actually had a 25 minute train ride to get into Venice, which was interesting by itself since waiting on the train and riding it, etc., was very reminiscient of Metro North or NJ Transit back in the NYC area.

We rode into Venice each of the three days we were there, and on the first day, we rode in, saw a some of the city as we cruised in, and then exited the train station... which opens up right out into Venice and the Grand Canal. It's kind of breathtaking. And my darling Italian Princess was almost in tears at seeing the motherland for the first time.

We then spent those three days walking around Venice. It's probably the most unique city I've ever visited in my life. Sure, Paris is cool and New York is amazing, etc. But there's nothing even remotely similar to Venice. It's all water, just like you've heard. There are absolutely zero cars -- because there are zero streets. The "streets" are actually just walkways and alleys, etc. The main arteries of transportation are more canals. Water, water, everywhere. Side streets are just side canals. You walk the city and are constantly walking over little footbridges over small canals. When you need to cross the Grand Canal, you have to walk to one of the three major bridges over it, or else you need to take a boat.

The traditional and cool way to cross is on a Traghetto, which is an old-fashioned gondola, rowed by two gondoliers. There are maybe a half-dozen Traghettos along the canal and it's just 50 cents (Euros) to hop on and be rowed across. Usually about 5-10 people hop aboard and ride over, with natives standing on the short ride. We sat.

Another water-traveling method we used was the Vaporetto, or "water bus." And it's just what it sounds like. All along the Grand Canal are Vaporetto stops, and there are tons of different "lines" -- the 1, 2, 51, 52, 3, etc. Different lines went in different directions and made different stops, just like real buses or subways. And you're riding on a large boat with standing room as well as seats. They kind of remind me of a ferry in New York. Those passes can be bought in daily, two-day, three-day and seasonal varieties. And it's rare that someone checks to make sure you're legit to get on the Vaporetto. It's largely on your honor. We never cheated, but we easily could have.

And what a way to see the Canal. You can ride it from top to bottom (of the Canal) and then out to Lido, a long, narrow island where Venetians go for R&R. We went there, too, and walked on the beach and in the water. Watersyne collected some awesome seashells that we can display in our house. Until the animals living in the shells crawl out and go, "Wait, what the hell? Where are we?"

We ate well, no doubt. But I have to say honestly that I've had better pizza in New York. Maybe I'm picky because of where I grew up... maybe if I'd grown up in the midwest or here in Texas I would have been blown away by the pizza. But I wasn't. It was good, but not mind-blowing. Same with the pasta -- very good, but nothing I would say I've never had anything better than. My theory is that Venice might not be the best place in Italy for Italian food -- it might make sense to reserve judgement until we get to Rome, Florence, Sicily, Capri and the Tuscany Coast someday.

The gelati was great, too, by the way, and very plentiful. Seemed we were always walking by an ice cream place. Not a bad thing. Especially for a fat guy like me.

Speaking of that, the exercise was awesome... tons of walking, to the point where we were truly exhausted each night.

All in all, an awesome place to have seen.... incredibly touristy, but still amazing and it's great that we were there.

Click for mucho size. (Thinking of having that tattooed on my penis.)

En France

2008-05-27T18:49:00.002-04:00

Ici nous sommes en France. Ce soir nous avons eu un beau repas à un restaurant appelé "Le Grande Colbert" -- je pense que j'enverrai la carte professionnelle à Stephen Colber de Comédie Centrale!

Un de nos amis soutient dans Texas a envoyé un message de texte qui nous "doit faire un bébé français" pendant que nous sommes ici. Pas sûr nous ferons un bébé, mais pratiquant pour faire si sûr est amusant.

Oh, l'attente, j'ai remarqué juste je fais cette entrée entière en français! La bonté, je suis très drôle! J'apprécie aussi les bains d'éponge.

Si vous avez compris cette entrée, vous êtes un francophone ou vous êtes un espèce de menteur dégoûtant qui a utilisé un service de traduction libre le calculer hors.

Airborne Virus

2008-05-22T11:37:00.003-04:00

It's amazing to me that a survey was needed to know that people don't want to listen to self-important a-holes yammer on their cell phones during plane rides. Frankly, I'm amazed that the number (74%) of people who don't want to hear phone-talking wasn't even higher. Anyone who has traveled on any form of transportation knows how damn annoying this is. And I know I've always feared the day when we would be able to talk on airplanes, too.

It's awful when you ride a bus or train with someone who does this. I always wonder, when I'm on a super-early train or bus, "Who is this self-important asshole talking to?" I mean, seriously, you're doing business at 6:30 AM? Or are you on a social call? Because if one of my friends called to chat at some ungodly hour of the morning, they would cease to A) be my friend, and B) live, if they were within driving distance to go and strangle.

I guess it's cool that several airlines are rolling out wireless features that limit talking. Texting, email and gaming will likely be allowed very soon. And that's fine. But I also think it will make us wistful once again for the simpler times when we couldn't check email on an airplane. Actually, airplanes are the one remaining sanctuary where we're not "connected." You have to turn off your cell phone and your blackberry and your computer can't (or shouldn't) pick up wireless signals so your only email obsession-feeding is via your archived mail.

You often hear people make comments like, "What did we do before cell phones?" It won't be long before it's, "What did we do before we had wireless access on airplanes? We had wait until we got where we were going! Imagine!"

And what irritates me to to no end is the phone calls that do happen once you're able to turn your phone back on, twelve seconds after your plane is on the ground. Listen to those around you who can barely wait to get their phone back on and stuck to their ear -- the conversations are all exactly the same.

"Hey, it's me. We landed."

"Still on the plane."

"I said, we're STILL ON THE PLANE!"

"Okay. Well, I gotta go to baggage claim. Okay. I'll see you then. Bye."

Was that necessary? Or could we all agree to just meet at baggage claim ahead of time? Like we used to.

Fine, so I'm becoming a grumpy old man.

Also? Get off my lawn.

Italia

2008-05-21T13:37:00.003-04:00

Last year, my job required me to go to Paris for a couple of days, similar to in 2005. So I checked into my frequent flyer miles and, despite the fact that we were less than two months before our wedding, Watersyne tagged along and got to see Paris for a mere 100,000 frequent flyer miles. Not bad, when you consider my flight and the hotel are paid for by the company. We had a great time and saw all the touristy sights -- which is good, because that's fun to do in Paris, seeing the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Siene River, Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral, etc. We loved it.

Well, turns out, this year I have to go back again. So this will be my third springtime visit to Paris since 2005. Which means I've seen enough of Paris. I'm beginning to know the subway system better than I know New York's. Don't get me wrong, I do like the city and it's a great city to walk in and to sit at sidewalk cafes and drink wine. But since I'm going back, we thought maybe we should look into a way to make this kind of an early anniversary trip.

So now, after three days in Paris, we're hopping a flight over to Venice and we're staying there for four nights.

I know, I know, how posh of us. Spending the weekend in Venice!

The best part of it is the way it's working out financially, so I just have to share.

Obviously, my round-trip flight to Paris is covered by work. As is our hotel in Paris. Watersyne's round-trip to Paris is going to only cost me 75,000 miles this time, despite being further away. Then we pay for our hour-long flight over to Venice from Paris. However, my lovely wife has several hundred thousand hotel points because of all her hotel stays as part of her old job in New York, so we're staying at a Crowne Plaza for... nothing! Just reward points! We felt like our luck was kind of incredible. Essentially, all we're on the hook for is our $370 round trip flights from Paris to Venice.

So what does this mean? Well, we're doing Paris and Venice for less than $800. Of course, we'll more than make up for it in restaurants in Venice, methinks.

The Great Veggie Experiment

2008-05-14T17:36:00.004-04:00

I'll be 33 years old this year. But anyone who knows me (or has tried to get a nicely-posed photograph out of me) knows that I am more like, well, an infant. Or maybe a misbehaved -- and kind of disproportionately large -- toddler.

Never is this more evident than when my eating habits are called into question. Oh sure, I have a good routine established for most days -- a Kashi peanut butter bar for breakfast, a frozen WW meal for lunch along with some fat free Pringles and WW yogurt, and then whatever happens to be made for dinner by my lovely wife.

But that's the thing. She's getting more confident in the kitchen and she really likes veggies. She has this weird thing where we absolutely must have sides with every meal. If there aren't sides -- or enough sides -- she has mini-freakouts.

"Mmmm, hon, this steak is marinated so well. It's gonna be great."

"I don't know what we're going to do about sides!"

This sort of exchange plays out more than you might think. I don't get it. Who cares what's on your plate as long as you're full at the end? I mean, this is not to say I think you should eat a bowl of potato chips for dinner. Far from it.. I think there needs to be a hearty, main course-ish thing to eat. Such as steak, chicken, fish, sandwiches, pasta, eggs, etc. Whatever. But not without sides. In fact, I think my wife should write a move for the Lifetime Network entitled, Not Without My Sides.

So naturally, this has led to what J will and will not eat. And the "will not" list isn't as lengthy as everyone thinks. But once people think you're "picky" or "fussy," the label never -- never -- goes away. My idiot cousins still think I won't eat meat lasagna because one time when I was a kid I said I preferred cheese lasagna b/c that's what my grandmother (and mother) used to make. I absoultely loved their cheese lasagna and still do. So my mother assumed, in her early-onset dementia, that meant I hated all other lasagna. While I probably made a face about veggie lasagna, I never claimed to not like meat. And she knows this, because whenever she -- or anyone else in a 50 mile radius of my nose -- makes meatballs, I eat as many as possible. Yet a couple years ago, when I was about 30 or so, my cousins came to my parents' house for Christmas and brough two fucking lasagnas. One for everybody except me and one without meat because, "J doesn't eat meat lasagna." The hell?

Anyway, I'm digressing. Point is, people think I'm picky and more picky than I actually am. When in reality, it's simply that I know what I like and I like to have what I like a lot. You know? I'd eat the same five or six meals in rotation every week for the next thirty years if it was allowed. But if you do that, people look at you like you're a four year old who only eats chicken fingers, hot dogs and mac-n-cheese. (Three staples I'm not ashamed to admit I find delicious.)

Okay, digressing again. The whole point of this post was to share the fact that my lovely wife wants to be able to make veggies with dinner on a nightly basis. She loves veggies. Eats them like snacks. She'd eat a box of edimame or frozen green beans as a snack. She's weird. But she's hot, so I let her stay.

Me, I like me a main course and if I have to have a side, I choose a starch. Nice, fattening, carbohydrate-laden starches. Potatoes, rice, pasta. Whatever. Hell, I married an Italian woman, one would think I'd get a bowl of pasta at the start of ever meal followed by some codfish and then a main course of meat. Those Godfather movies were full of shit.

So I agreed, as I have in the past, to eat -- or at least, try -- anything my wife puts in front of me. I want credit for this, because I rarely say, flat-out, no, I'm not eating that. I'll try it or I'll at least tell you I once tried it and don't like it. At that point, you should back off. I'm 215 lbs and I will hurt you if you continue to press your luck. You can only force me to put things in my mouth if you let me put things in your mouth. Which leads us to my wife.

Wait -- well, you know what I meant.

What this agreement meant was that I'd be eating veggies on a semi-regular basis for the first time since my youth when my mother would withhold dessert from me until I choked down some broccoli. I remember the table being cleared and me still sitting there with a few stalks of broccoli or cauliflower or something else equally disgusting. And the Welsh Farms ice cream sitting there in the freezer, like a glorious finish line.

Anyway, I've already been making progress in the past year. I eat salads occasionally now, and that's all due to my wife. The first time my mom saw me eating salad I think she almost fainted. Or maybe she thought I liked salad all along. It's not meat lasagna after all.

So a week or two ago, I had some squash. It was okay, kind of reminded me of a sweet potato. A yellowish sweet potato. And it didn't taste like a sweet potato. But other than that, it was wonderful. I loaded it up with Smart Balance fake-butter and salted it and gobbled it down. It didn't bother me that much so I was pleased with myself. And Watersyne was thrilled also.

Then the next one was green beans. Now, I hate most green veggies. Which, I admit, doesn't leave much. But as I said earlier, I'd eat the same thing every night so this shouldn't be a problem. But my wife doesn't want to eat the same thing all the time and also doesn't want to make me special meals, so I have to branch out. So I ate a half-dozen green beans with dinner one night. I admit, it wasn't a large sampling, but I ate the damn things and my critics should be happy with that.

Then a couple nights ago it was pepper time. I cooked red, yellow and orange sweet peppers on the grill along with shish-ke-bob steaks and away we went. I ate several pieces of each color, not particularly enjoying them but also not vomiting. I felt like I'd done a good job and then Watersyne put the same number of pieces I'd just eaten onto my plate and said I should finish those and she'd be happy. So I did. I love her. What can I say? I'll eat salad, peppers and green beans for her.

And there doesn't even have to be Welsh Farms ice cream waiting for me at the end.

Yeah, This Shouldn't Further Cement Jersey's Reputation Or Anything

2008-05-08T14:15:00.005-04:00

Periodically, I'll go onto the website for the local paper I used to subscribe to in NJ and check out what's going on.

Today, I learned that the sterotype about New Jersey being famous for chemical spills, traffic and shopping malls was being neatly furthered in one single piece of news.

A tanker truck overturned on the highway, spilling 600 gallons of a chemical, forcing a major commuting highway to be closed for about 18 hours. Splendid.

"It's hard to keep track" of how long the traffic jam lasted, said Maria Stehle, a Knoxville, Tenn., resident on her way to Massachusetts. She guessed it had taken about two hours for her move a couple of miles.

Roger Perry of Texas said it took him, his wife Linda and their dog Roy about three-and -a-half hours to travel three miles. Like Stehle, the Perrys were also on a long trip, from Texas to Rhode Island.

"We've got to get there sometime this year," Roger Perry quipped. His wife Linda said waiting in such bad traffic gave her a feeling of extreme, numbing boredom.

"Complete nothingness," is how she described the experience.

How is it that they managed to interview people from Tennessee and Texas for a story about a traffic jam in New Jersey?

The sight of the emergency crews tending to the stricken truck attracted some onlookers who got a good view of the scene from the nearby Riverdale Crossing shopping center, which overlooks the accident scene and remained opened during the incident.

What, no mention of The Sopranos?

Oh, wait, a police raid on the Gambino crime family, with the top dog being from my county... there we go.

Deep In The Hearrrt...of New Jersey!

2008-05-07T12:04:00.002-04:00

Last week, I went back to NJ for the first time since I left it in my rear-view mirror on December 26. More than four months away from my home state, which is the longest I've been out of New Jersey since my last year of college in 1999. And even then, I'm not sure I ever went four months without being back.

Watersyne had gone up a week earlier so Maya and I had the run of the house to ourselves. I chose to be a good husband and spent the entire weekend without my wife working on our garage -- it's finally in some semblence of an order, with shelving up on the walls, hooks holding our random softball, golf and ski bags, and almost all tools and bins in their proper places. Having no basement means we still have a lot of crap that prevents us from getting two cars into the garage, but we're getting a lot closer.

So last week, I went up to NJ on Wednesday night and stayed under Monday morning. On Thursday evening, I got to see the Rangers lone win in their second-round series against the Pittsburgh Penguins. And, yeah, New Yorkers are still obnoxious. I found myself being my old impatient self as I pushed through the crowd of people at the Garden and in Penn Station. The NY experience didn't end there, as on Friday night we went to Yankee Stadium for perhaps our last official visit. I don't know if I'll get a chance again this year and it's the final year for the Stadium, so it had to be done. Of course, it was 45 degrees, windy and drizzly on our night, but it was still fun. I was sent looking for knishes by Watersyne -- something we know they sell there -- but I was utterly unsuccessful.

I had smashed my knee on a metal thingie on the train on our way into the city earlier, so hoofing it all around Yankee Stadium searching for knishes was rather...irritating. Every clown I asked told me to go to a different place and none of them were right. It made me want to go back and punch each of these mouth-breathers in the face. Eventually, I got a text message from my buddy who was there with us that said, "They have knishes at Shea." Nice.

After the game, we rode the subway back to where my friend's car was parked and headed home. So we got our fill of NJ Transit trains (from which my knee still hurts), NYC subways, NYC people, and NY sporting events for one weekend. I think we're good on those for now.

On Saturday, we had a communion to attend and then Sunday was our last day in town. We're now back in the heart of Tejas and enjoying the 82 degree weather.

That's the update. It's kind of like a rental car: It's not fancy, but it's all you get.

Our Dog, Houdini

2008-04-25T16:12:00.001-04:00

Yes, she's an escape artist.

When we brought her home, and she was tiny, we set up an old cabinet door across the opening of our kitchen so we could keep her contained. My parents keep a 60 pound Irish Setter and a 20 pound Cavalier contained with even less blockage than that. So we figured we were fine.

On her first full day with us, she decided she wanted to get to Watersyne and hopped up and scrambled over the blockade. Fantastic.

So we went out and purchased a legit baby gate, with the twisty pressure mounting so it would stay firmly in place. And it's a good thing, too, because Maya crashed into it at full speed several times, testing her boundaries. We'd be in the living room and hear, scurry-scurry-scurry CRASH! The little mutha was trying to knock it over.

She's been getting bigger in a hurry and her leg springiness is ever-increasing. The dog can seemingly just levitate off the ground from a standstill -- it's incredible. She's at that perfect age where she's got young little legs with strong muscles and she's still only 8 pounds so she's able to hurtle herself into orbit at her whim.

So naturally, she's now figured out how to get past the damn baby gate. Mind you, I have trouble getting past the baby gate, frequently catching my foot on it and tumbling into the kitchen. But Maya has now gotten springy enough -- and wise enough -- to simply run up to the gate and spring herself up so that she can grab her front paws onto the railing. She then scrambles with her rear legs and gets over the damn gate. Incredible.

But that's not all.

We put her in doggie day care yesterday b/c Watersyne was traveling and I was at work. Well, 45 mins after leaving her we get a call from a laughing employee to tell us that she's escaped from the holding area they put the dogs in day care! It's surrounded by a metal fence that must be over four feet high. She someone has found a corner where there's a brick/cement wall on the other side of the fence, and she's used that to get traction, then up the fence she goes and then slips out the top and is free as a bird.

I imagine we'll start getting charged more as she teaches the other dogs -- many of which are bigger than her, don't forget -- how to do this. If she ever learns how to open the pens of the dogs that are in their little pod areas, then we'll know the animal revolution is upon us.

Video of our magician will be up soon and I will share.

J vs.The Cheese Danish

2008-04-14T10:03:00.003-04:00

[J enters office kitchen]

Cheese Danish: Heyyyyy!!! There's my boy! How ya doin'?

J Money: Leave me alone, Cheese Danish. You're not winning today. I just got up here from the gym.

CD: Sure, sure... I understand. Good for you, buddy.

JM: Don't mess with me today, Cheese Danish. I know your tricks.

CD: No, no tricks... Getting some coffee, I see... mmm, you know what goes good with coffee? Me.

JM: Dammit, I knew it. Leave me alone, Cheese Danish!

CD: Ohhh, but we were meant to be together. You and me, fat guy and cheese danish.

JM: Screw you. [pause] You do look delicious, though.

CD: Oh, yeah... and I'm only 70 cents. And I bet the Combos in here that I would get selected first. Come on, buddy... help me out.

JM: You guys bet on who gets eaten first?

CD: Yeah, to pass the time on weekends.

JM: Do you ever bet against the gum?

CD: The gum? Seriously, have you ever seen someone buy chewing gum out of a vending machine like this? Use your f-cking head, J.

JM: Hey, take it easy, you congealed, month-old pastry.

CD: I know, I know... I get a little wound up sometimes... but look at me... I'm deliciously naughty. Just look... come onnnnn... loooook over heeeerre.

JM: I know... the combination of sticky, who-knows-how-old cheese that's been under a light in a dusty vending machine for several weeks is somehow strangely allurring to me... and I just cannot ever figure out why. But no! I went to the gym! The few calories I actually burned will be used up by half of you!

CD: But think how happy you will be as you eat me... you know you want to... fatty.

JM: Grrr. Screw you. I'm getting my coffee and leaving.

CD: No! Wait! Come back! Noooooooooooooo! I miss you! We belong together!

[J leaves room]

CD: Arrrrgh...

CD: Hey, Snickers Bar, you feeling lucky? 2-to-1 I go before breakfast tomorrow.

Ode To Fatness

2008-04-11T16:26:00.003-04:00

I went back to the gym this morning.

It was the first time I've officially worked out in a gym since I was laughingly preparing for my wedding by going to the gym to be in shape for my Hawaiian honeymoon. What? You didn't realize I did that? You don't remember me going all the time and getting trim and fit and devastatingly handsome to wow the polynesian ladies of Maui?

Yeah, I don't remember it, either. But I'd say it's been roughly a year since a set foot in a gym.

I had to hitch a ride in to work today with a friend of mine here and he goes in at ungodly-early hours to work out at a gym connected to our office building. So I decided I was officially out of excuses and that I should just go with him and work out. Rather than, you know, pretend he was just giving me a ride in and that getting to my desk at 6:45 AM was normal.

I remember the sensation of working out... and it kind of sucks. And I only feel really good about it during the hour or so after I shower and head into the office. I feel energized, I don't feel like a slug and I feel productive and focused. And then, a short time later, my body remembers that I got up at 5:30 in the morning.

I'm certainly not "old" by any means, but a am a decade older than a person I manage... and can a decade make a difference in your ability to do things? Sure. The mind can achieve what the body can concieve? Not necessarily.

I remember pushing myself at the gym back when I actually used to go... maybe 2002 was the last time I went with regularity. And I turned 27 that year. I don't think I necessarily pushed myself real hard this morning, but the sad (very sad) part is that.... well... you know how normally after a hard workout, your body really "feels it" the next day? Well, I felt it by about 11 AM.

My muscles hurt, my legs and arms are achy. I imagine I will need my wife to pull me out of bed tomorrow morning.

I hope to continue with this, though, because, really... being fat is funny sometimes and makes for good jokes when I get together with my co-editors at Boiled Sports... but it's no way to go though life. Dean Wormer told me that.

When Office Life Is Not Mundane

2008-04-08T15:24:00.004-04:00

It's sad, but there's such a fear of people flying off the handle and losing it that places don't take chances anymore. Get aggressive on an airplane? Expect to be gang-tackled and tied up with duct tape. Are you a third-grader with a plan to kidnap your teacher? Be ready to be expelled. And so on.

So today, while busily at work in our happy little American business office, a little drama broke out. It, naturally, involved administrative staff, since they are always looking for the drama.

Apparently, one of the admin assistants was not pleased with her job here anymore. She always seemed nice to me and was friendly in our limited interactions. But I guess she was fed up with the way her boss was treating her, because this afternoon she decided to quit and simply said, "You know what, I quit," and began throwing things from her desk into a box.

Of course, her boss had to poke harder: "You're not allowed to take company property." (I figured she was probably taking a stapler or something but was later told she had some kind of company-sensitive material in a folder that she tossed into her box.)

This, of course, led to the quitter telling her boss, "Get the fuck out of my face!"

Whoops.

Never a good idea to respond with vulgar language and aggression. The next step our intreped boss of the secretaries took was to call HR and confirm she could handle this immediately. She did this from an open office near where I sit. Maybe so anyone within earshot could hear... or maybe she just wasn't bright enough to close the door. I don't know.

Next thing I know, though, is we're hearing the squawk of police radios and security and a real, live po-po officer are escorting Miss Poopy Mouth out of the office. One of the scrawny guys in the office actually was hanging around the area, reportedly "in case there was a physical confrontation." Never mind that this guy looks like the admin would beat him up.

So a bit of drama in an otherwise typical office day. Always interesting when people are put into situations they aren't used to.

Back to filling out our TPS reports now.

Early Houston Learnings

2008-03-20T15:36:00.002-04:00

So we're three months into the Houston experiment and it's going well. What have we learned? A few things...

Things move slowly -- As in, the pace of life. Sure, it's not really "the South" here, but that whole pace of life thing is not what it is in the Northeast... where else is it like that, though, really? Thing is, it sneaks up on you. Houston is the fourth-largest city in the country and there are lots of companies headquartered here... lots of business and industry, lots of young people, a transient population, etc. And yet, if you want to get your car washed, put aside 30+ minutes at the car wash. Nobody's in a hurry.

Speaking of Car Washes -- Seriously, if anyone's looking to open a chain of car washes, do it here. People pay whatever is asked and they wash their cars constantly. It's mild weather here in the winter but it does rain a lot, so people constantly "need" to get their vehicles prettied-up. Plus, with as much hot, sunny weather as we get, you just feel that urge to go make the car look nice. The places are always packed, and a basic exterior wash is typically around $13.

No Dunkin' Donuts... yet -- Starbucks sucks, yet since it started in the Northwest and DD started in the Northeast and Starbucks is more of a virus, it's gotten to Houston first. There are Starbucks stores every-damn-where. And in fact, if you go to Dunkin' Donuts' Website and do a location search, you'll learn that there is one -- ONE -- in Houston. And apparently it's in the ghetto. Rumor has it, though, that DD is building a couple dozen stores in H-town. I heard this rumor from two sources and then when I was in Dallas two weeks ago on business, I saw one in the Dallas airport that wasn't there on my earlier visits. So maybe, just maybe, we'll get that sweet nectar back in our lives. Because Starbucks is like drinking dirty sewer water through a filter of dirt.

Toll Roads Are El Sucko -- I used to complain about tolls in NY/NJ. It was murder to cross the Hudson and then there were two toll roads in NJ and the NY State Thruway in NY. However, I hadn't lived in Texas yet. NJ gets a bad rap for being littered with tolls, but to go the 80+ miles down the Garden State Parkway to my parents' beach house costs something like $2. For the full 80+ miles. To go the eight mile stretch of the new Fort Bend Toll Road here in H-town, it costs... $2. To go eight miles. And it's $2....each way. That's not cool. So I, like many, now find ways to avoid toll roads at all costs. And there are tons of them here... another one cost $1.50 at each booth and there were three booths in a 15 mile stretch.

It's Hot -- It's only March and yet this Sunday we're going to a friend's house for Easter and their invite said "it might be warm enough to swim!" Which is an understatement. It "might" be warm enough only by Houstonian standards. For those of us up North, anything over 70 is swimming weather, right? It's supposed to be mid-70s this weekend and it was mid-80s here last weekend. I do wonder what it'll be like from June-August. Answer: hot. I've been repeatedly warned about leaving my car in the sun. Dangers include paint bubbling; metal parts of seat belts becoming 200 degree branding irons; leather being so hot your legs fuse to it; the car simply exploding if windows and sunroof aren't cracked... you know, those sorts of things.

The Marketing People Would Never Go For That

2008-03-05T15:08:00.002-05:00

I park in downtown Houston every day for work and, like any major metro area, this costs moola. I found perhaps the most reasonable monthly parking area that's reasonably close to my office. (Hey, what am I going to do? Walk? Get exercise? Get real, people.) It's quite a bit less than the garages, mainly because it's a surface lot. That's fine right now but I imagine when it's 105 degrees in July it might be a problem. It becomes a bigger problem if I forget to crack my windows and the car explodes or my dashboard melts. (Or if, you know, I forget to take Maya to doggie day care and her brain fries like a egg.)

Anyway, they seem to be fairly on-the-ball but they're a little bit of a one-horse operation. There's one guy who patrols the lot, checking out who has a tag and who doesn't and who is paying the daily rate, etc. And there's one woman who works in the office and handles the paperwork, monthly billing, etc. And one might think that if your job consists of something related to parking cars, well, you might know a little something about... cars.

Apparently, I was half-asleep the other morning when I parked. I thought I was in a row that my tag is good for and so I went about my day. But it turns out I actually parked in a "reserved" spot. One that's not reserved for me, that is.

So I get a call from "Hilda" and she says, "Hey, I think you're in a reserved spot." I told her she must be mistaken because I think I know where I parked (I turned out to be wrong but that's not the point -- me being wrong is never the point). She then says, "Whoops! I brought up the wrong account! Sorry!" No problem.

Five minutes later she calls back and says, no, it is my car -- they think. I said, okaaaay. She then attempts to prove it's my car by asking if it's mine.... and she says this:

"Well, do you have a..... Honda Acura?"

I wasn't sure what to say. It was obvious it was my car in question but it would be more fun to be difficult.

"I don't know what that is," I said. "I think those are two different kinds of cars."

"Well, that's just what they told me," she lied. (She had to be lying because Gary, who works the lot in a knit cap when it's 70 degrees out, has to know cars.)

I said, "Well, I have one of those... which is it?"

She then confirmed my plate number and the jig was up. But I think I'm going to start telling people I have a Honda Acura. Let's just cut to the chase, you know?

Success!

2008-02-21T19:14:00.001-05:00

Now, I don't want to celebrate too soon, but our little Maya suddenly decided to sleep through the night rather than wake up ever few hours to whine and cry until we took her outside. And when people were like, "oh, the puppy stage is only like a year," well, that phrase kept echoing in my head when I was walking around our soggy backyard on a rainy night at, you know, 2 AM.

But starting on Monday night, Maya became our little angel. I think it helped that we suddenly stopped being idiots and took her food and water away after a certain hour so that her little fuel tank wasn't overly full during the night. We started regimenting when she gets to eat and, not surprisingly, her body started getting on a pee and poop schedule pretty quick. The upshot? Solid sleep.

The first night she was good was Monday night and I probably slept worse that night than I have been sleeping, mainly because I kept wondering if she was alright. After three nights of whining and crying, I figured she must have died to be so completely silent. Or maybe her head was stuck in the bars and she was suffering. Or maybe I had yanked her leash too hard and broken her neck. Who the hell knows.

So I kept waking up and worrying... I finally heard her stir at aout 5:45 AM -- I had been planning to get up at 6 anyway -- and so I went out there and she hadn't made a mess or anything! Amazing. Full praise and love was given.

Then Tuesday night, same story. Of course, we were dog tired (no pun intended) and so we crashed at about 10:30. I commented to Watersyne that we were pushing our luck putting her down at that early hour and expecting her to last all night, but what the hell... we were tired. The good little girl lasted, again, until 5:45 AM. I was thrilled. Seven hours of sleep, give or take? A deal I can live with for sure.

Then this morning... it was a little weird. Again at precisely 5:45 AM, Maya began whimpering, after being silent all night long. Did one of us leave a watch in her crate, I wondered? Has this dog learned to read the digital clock on the microwave? Do I have a genius dog on my hands? I've been leaving the kitchen TV on to give her some white noise... maybe she hears the time on the early-morning news and decides it's time to get up. I don't know.

I realize it sounds like I'm joking around but somehow this dog is like clockwork. However, this morning when she cried at 5:45, I ignored her. She must have figured the time change happened early so she went back to sleep for another hour.

Well, This Is Fun

2008-02-18T17:26:00.005-05:00

For anyone who's had a puppy before they've had kids, you understand what we're dealing with. We got little Miss Maya on Friday and we really are smitten with her. She's just so adorable and truly does the cutest things, like bounding -- all puppy-like -- across the yard, attacking toys with vigor, giving constant little puppy-kisses, and snuggling into you for a nap in a way that melts your heart.

She also does less cute things, such as shitting in the house, peeing in random places and crying through the night.

I realize she's a dog and this will eventually pass (or I'll pop her little head off in a fit of sleep-deprived rage at 4:15 AM one morning) but it's definitely a daunting thing to think about when you're on your patio at 2:45 in the morning saying, "Go potty. Go potty. Go potty. Go potty. Come on, Maya! Dammit! Stop eating the grass!"

This dog likes to eat grass. And mulch. And dirt. And cement. I swear, I think she would have eaten our barbecue propane tank if it wasn't attached to the grill.

We've only had her a couple of days and she's already had good moments and bad moments. She's had times when she'll go into her crate voluntarily and flop down for a rest. Other times, when we have to put her in and close the door, she's been an angel, whimpering momentarily and then settling down to rest. Then there have been times that she took a dump in her crate. And then freaked the hell out about it.

People have said to us, "You'll be able to tell when she's just crying because she wants to come out versus a distress cry when she's peed or pooped in her crate." Well, I think this is true... the freak-out cry is insistent and ongoing. And after we've cleaned up her accident(s), she's very happily gone back into the crate and gone right to sleep with no fuss or whining. Problem is, she's only eight weeks old and has a hard time holding her bodily functions for very long and she also doesn't really ever want to do anything for, say, six straight hours, especially not sleep in her confined crate. So we're still wrestling with getting her scheduling down to the right intervals so that her little tanks are emptied of pee and poop and she's ready to sleep for a while. Then if she cries, we'll just ignore her until she gives in and understands we aren't coming out until morning. Oh, that day will be a wonderful one. We'll see how long it takes.

In the meantime, don't be surprised if I give you a call at a weird hour because I'm up with my damn dog.

Picking Up Our Puparoo!

2008-02-15T17:09:00.004-05:00

Well, the decision has been made -- her name is going to remain Maya.

I know this kept a lot of you awake and you were constantly tuning into Entertainment Tonight much like you would in anticipation of a celebrity baby naming. Hey, we could have named her Apple but thankfully good taste prevailed.

Truth was, there wasn't anything else that we both truly liked enough -- that wasn't already in use by other people, dogs, etc. -- and so we kept coming back to Maya. We kept referring to her as Maya and kept buying things and saying, "Well, another toy for Maya." Not "another toy for the dog." So in the end, just as I suspected, we are keeping her name.

Anyway, tonight is the big night. We head to the breeder to pick her up in a just a couple of hours and then, well, then it's puppy stage time. Watersyne had a very valid question the other day, asking me whether she'd be able to hold her peepee for the whole night (Maya, not Watersyne). And no, of course she can't. She's got a bladder the size of a grape. So my wonderful wife researched this and learned that at 8 weeks (which she is), they can hold it for perhaps four hours. Outstanding!

So I guess I'll be back to my staying up late to watch Sportscenter and then I'll be letting the pupper out. Then maybe one middle-of-the-night visit to the backyard and then, well, early in the morning as soon as I get up. Then she's Watersyne's problem when I head to work.

This is gonna be good training for kids. Of course, I already knew once we had kids that we wouldn't be getting any sleep -- I had just hoped to sleep plenty before that day came. So much for that.

What's On Everyone's Mind On Valentine's Day

2008-02-14T15:13:00.000-05:00

I hope to post more and more hilarity from YouTube since it's the lazy blogger's best friend. But in honor of Valentine's Day, let's hear what Jane Skinner, this very attractive anchorwoman at Fox News has on her mind.

That's right, cock.

I do enjoy that she knows full well that she's headed to YouTube.

And, of course, what do the guys want today? Yes, that's right... we'll let Fox News tell you that, too.

And I'm not sure... but is that the same dude in both videos? If so, no wonder he's so pleased someone else made a mistake.

Valentine's Day Is Tomorrow

2008-02-13T16:16:00.003-05:00

You know, one of the many perks of being a married man is the fact that, while there are still expectations on Valentine's Day, the stress largely evaporates once you put a ring on her finger.

See, Valentine's Day is stupid, made-up holiday cultivated by Hallmark and 1-800-Flowers, or so I would imagine. I tend to agree with those who ask why we need a special day to tell those important to us how much they mean. To me, it's kind of like celebrating your life on a birthday or the new year on 12/31 -- why only celebrate those things on those specific days?

But I'm digressing, as usual. The best Valentine's Days for me are happening now and will continue to happen. You know why? Because I only need to make one woman smile on Valentine's Day. I don't have to worry that some girl I might sort of possibly have a thing with is expecting flowers to arrive on her doorstep. I don't have to deal with the pressure people put on about getting engaged on that day. Those sorts of things.

I remember last year, we went on a Circle Line Cruise around Manhattan. It was dinner and dancing and alcohol... and there was no stress because we were already engaged. Watersyne and I even enjoyed looking around to try to find the nervous guys about to propose. Not us! Just out for a fun dinner!

I remember back in college, I used to send out cards on Valentine's Day the way most people send cards around Christmas. That is, I would send a Valentine's Day card to every girl in my life that could have potential, did have potential, once had potential, etc... you get the point. I distinctly remember shopping for literally like a dozen cards and then writing out each one thoughtfully and then sending them off to all these chicks I thought I had a chance with. To be fair, I probably did have a chance with a good number of them.... I mean, who among us hasn't strung a girl along at some point in their lives? And what better way than being "thoughtful"? I mean, she could be writing you off, but then she gets that thoughtful card with handwritten thoughts... and boom, you're back in the game. Sure, it's a little shady, but let's all remember that we are all shady when we're college-aged. Especially dudes.

But I mean it when I say the best Valentine's Days for me are happening now. No more wondering if I'm going to be alone for this stupid, meaningless holiday. And no more wondering if I made the right choice of "dates" for Valentine's Day. Nope, there's just one woman for me on V-Day and we're contractually obligated by the laws of the state of New York to be with one another.

And hey, if I don't get her a nice gift, what's she gonna do? Go out with someone else? I don't think so.

Oh, Hey, About That Daily Posting Thing...

2008-02-08T11:28:00.000-05:00

You know what I realized yesterday? I realized that not long ago I said I might try an endeavor where I post here every day for a solid month. And I figured that February might be the best month, given that it's the shortest, there's the least sports action to distract me and, well, I don't know why else. And then I realized on February 7 that I sort of missed the boat on that one. Oops.

In other news, we made our first trip to Petco as expectant puppy parents and we didn't know where to begin... or end, as it turns out. Our puppy, who has yet to come home or even be officially named, already has a half-dozen toys, three different containers of treats, two leashes, a collar (with pink in it, of course), cute ceramic bowls ("that match our kitchen!" --Watersyne), and a divider gate that doesn't fit in the space we envisioned it in.

We still need to get her a crate for home as well as at least one travel crate. And given that she's so small, I think I might see one of those duffel bag, over-the-shoulder kinds of travel bags in her future as well. My wife might look like Paris Hilton. In the carrying-a-dog-in-a-bag way, not the exposing-her-privates kind of way.

Did I need to make that distinction?

Here She Is

2008-02-05T06:23:00.000-05:00

Well, here's a picture of our new little girl, Maya. At least that's the name the breeder gave her. And we kind of like it. And it's a good thing we liked Maya and not, say, "January," because then we wouldn't have a good name built-in.

So what is she? She's a cross between a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and a Havanese. In a perfect scenario, you get the demeanor and loving nature of the Cavalier mixed with the hypo-allergenic, non-shedding features of the Havanese. But how often is the scenario perfect?

Truthfully, though, Maya is a good find. She's mostly black, which we really liked. And she has that cute little Cavalier face... yet, as the breeder showed us, her coat is the texture of the Havanese -- that is, non-shedding. She's sure that Maya's not going to be a shedder. We'll see, I guess, but there's no doubt that even if she does shed a little, it won't be what a typical dog does. So that's good.

We settled on her this past Saturday on our visit to the breeder 70 miles away. This is not the other one I mentioned that pissed us off so many times. We'll get to them another time. The breeder we used was so professional, helpful and knowledgeable. She's a Vet Tech who loves dogs and, despite there being many, many dogs in her home, the place didn't look messy or even smell doggy. That's quite impressive, considering many homes with only one dog end up smelling funky sometimes.

As for the name, as I said, we kind of like Maya. It's cute and we're already kind of used to referring to her by that. We had a conversation one night, though, about the fun of random names. Like naming a tiny dog "Butch" or "Killer." I actually thought it would be fun to name a dog "Cat."

"This is my dog...Cat."

Wateryne laughed but vetoed my idea. I thought it was brilliant.

Of course, once we settled on her, Watersyne began working on me.

"Are you saying I can't ever dress her in a cute outfit? Or put something in her hair?"

I can just see it now. I'm out walking my 10-pound dog while she's wearing a pink sweater and barrettes. How gay will I look? Very gay.

We expect to pick her up next Friday, 2/15.

Gosh, Mother Nature, That Was Hilarious

2008-02-01T12:45:00.000-05:00

This morning, after moving down here and bragging to everyone about how nice and mild the winter weather is here, there was actually frost on my car. Now, I've noticed some minor icing earlier this month, but it's usually nothing more than that -- minor. Once I'm in the car and moving, it's nothing but moistute. Not this morning.

No, this morning, there was true frost on my windsheild. And the best part? I don't have any idea where our scrapers are anymore. I've been down here a damn month and we've already turned into Southerners who haven't a clue how to handle ice. So I drove slowly down my road with the defroster blasting and trying to de-ice the windsheild with my non-de-icing washer fluid. I looked like what my dad used to refer to as "tank drivers" -- those people who are too lazy to clear their windsheild in the winter and instead just clear a hole to look through and thus are like driving a tank.

Of course, within a few blocks, it was taken care of and it's going to be 70 tomorrow.

Hee!

Oh, Lost, How I Detest Thee

2008-01-31T17:40:00.000-05:00

Those who know me are aware of how much I hate the abomination of a television show known as Lost.

And it's back tonight on ABC. And my dilemma is that I loathe Lost but I love my wife. And she sort of kind of likes this show. She doesn't get it, either, mainly because it's f-cking stupid and nobody gets it... not even the loyalists.

She even admits it's ridiculous and all over the place and it's impossible to really know what's going on.

However, with this writers' strike, it's about all we've got. I've heard that ABC didn't get the whole season done and only has like 8 or 10 episodes in the can and didn't really want to put it on without being able to finish the season... but then they must have realized, "Screw it, nobody ever really gets pissed no matter what the hell garbage we do with this show. Run it!"

And so it's back tonight. And my lovely wife has a class at her gym tonight so I have to actually, willingly, consciously choose to DVR this terrible, terrible, horseshit television show.

Hey, guess what! I bet there are a bunch of unexplained mysteries! And "backstories"! Ooooh, how exciting! I just can't wait to find out what happened to Jack three years ago that makes him such a handsomely brooding young man!

Blech.

Travis

2008-01-29T15:23:00.000-05:00

This is Travis. No, we don't own him. Let's just get that out of the way first.

You may or may not know that my darling Watersyne and I have been planning to get a doggie for a while now. We were married last year and our lives were a whirlwind and we knew that between our lives and our teeny-tiny house it just didn't make sense to have a dog yet. But when we got to Texas, oh, then that would be the time.

I suspect getting a dog is a little like getting pregnant in the sense that you're never perfectly ready for it so you might as well just pick a time and do it. There will always be reasons not to so just stop looking for them. So we agreed when we got here that we wanted to get serious about it. (Puppies, not babies. At least not yet.)

We had pretty much settled on the breed we want, too. My parents have two dogs, an Irish Setter and a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel. The Cavalier is a wonderful dog, smallish in size, with a terrific temperment and personality. However, they -- like so many dogs -- are hairy and shed a lot. Watersyne does not like shedding. It messes with her neat and orderly new house. You understand. (What she will do if our child has hair, I don't know.)

So the conventional wisdom is to get a poodle or something mixed with a poodle so that you get the hypoallergenic beneifts of poodles. That is, non-shedding, in most cases.

So the next question is, do they mix Cavaliers and Poodles? And they do. They're known as Cavapoos. Travis is a Cavapoo. And he was at a breeder in, of all places, Texas. I found this breeder online back in November and sent Watersyne Travis' picture and she fell in love. In fact, Travis has been her wallpaper ever since.

Obviously, we realized we wouldn't be getting Travis since we weren't going to get a pup until we got here. So when we got down here right before the New Year, I contacted the breeder and told them our story.

They were responsive and answered our questions and asked me to fill out a puppy application. They were located about 200 miles away but I knew we'd make that trek on a weekend to check the selection out and ensure we weren't dealing with a puppy mill.

So we tried to arrange a time to visit them the first weekend of January -- 1/5 or 1/6. And we heard nothing back. So I called the owner of the place (I had been dealing with her assistant via email) on Sat, 1/5. We had a lovely talk and she told us she has Lupis and her husband travels a lot so they're a little wary about people coming to their home.... but that she understands people's fears about puppy mills and she of course wants adopters to meet the pups and the mother, etc. So she said she'd check into her availability the next day and call us back.

Later that night, I get an email from her assistant that Sunday 1/6 won't work but how about the following weekend? I say, uh, sure, Sunday 1/13 works for us.

I try to follow up later in the week and get no answers. I leave messages Friday and two on Saturday, 1/12, trying to not only confirm plans, but also learn where I'm going. No response.

I get an email finally on Monday apologizing and telling me they had a new litter of puppies on Friday and that caused chaos and that's why they didn't get back to me but that they'd like to reschedule for the following weekend. I replied and said I could understand that, but that the professional thing would be to pick up the phone for 3 minutes and explain. Or answer one of my calls. Or email before the weekend was over. This was now going to be three straight weekends we were going to be making ourselves available without success. Kind of irritating.

I got no response to my email. So Watersyne gave a call and left a message. No response.

So we're more than a little pissed off. I'm withholding the name of this place -- temporarily -- just in case we can get something worked out. But if we don't, I'll be bashing them here so that perhaps Googlers will find out the truth about them. My only hesitation is that no matter how hard I search, I find nothing bad about them. They seem to be the go-to source for Cavapoos. Weird.

So Travis -- the idea of Travis -- remains in flux. We could always visit local shelters and give one of those deserving pups a good home... but I also don't feel bad about getting the breed we know we want. They're supposed to be great personalities, good with kids, easy to train, etc. So we'll see how it goes. There's another breeder outside of Houston, but she breeds Cavaliers to Havanese. We might go see her and maybe we'll fall in love with one of them.

To be continued, I am sure.

Big-Ass TVs

2008-01-28T12:52:00.000-05:00

So despite all the bitching for not posting, I get a lot of content up there and I get one positive comment from NicHul (thanks!) and one about my wife's ass (nice!) ... and that's it? All that work? What do you think I do this for your entertainment? Or maybe that's all that's reading. Probably, actually. Maybe I should start letting more people know it exists. And then get fired.

Last week, I finally went to buy our new TV for the Texas house (yes, since I still own the NJ house I have to specify -- you'll understand when you're a high-rolling, multi-homeowner like we are) because, well, it's time. We were still watching the 32-incher that was in the living room of the dollhouse we lived in up in NJ and it was just silly. The 32 looked ludicrously small in our big living room here. In fact, my mom came to visit for the weekend and when she came in and saw it, she couldn't believe it was the same TV from home. And we found ourselves laughing at how silly it looked. So there you go, it was time.

So I went to this Houston-area electronics place called Conn's (heh, insert own joke here) because we'd heard their prices were unbeatable and we keep getting flyers from them in the Sunday paper. And, well, their deals are hard to believe. And I don't think this stuff fell off a truck because, you know, this isn't Jersey.

I went in there saying I wanted between 46 and 52 for our living room and I preferred LCD or DLP -- not plasma. Sorry, plasma loyalists, but when your TV burns out in five years, I'll be laughing at your asses.

I ended up settling on a 46-inch Sharp Aquos, which is just a terrific television. Of course, once you're in the giant store and you see 58, 61, 65, 70 and 73-inch TVs, you begin to second-guess yourself and think that maybe 46 isn't big enough.

Oh, it's big enough. I can't even imagine what those other sizes would look like in our house, but I do plan to find out. The 61 and 65 inch DLPs were actually less money than the 46-inch LCD Aquos, but there are all sorts of legit reasons for that (LCD costs more, better viewing angles, more features, etc.). I can't tell you how close I came to getting both the 46 and a 65 incher for our upstairs bonus room. But then I wasn't sure I wanted to come home and explain that decision to Watersyne. She's very understanding -- and she, too, wants a big TV upstairs -- but even so, we had agreed to do one at a time and if I came home with an order sheet for two deliveries, I probably wouldn't be allowed to go out and shop alone anymore for these kinds of things.

Anyway, so I resisted the huge temptation and got just the 46. And it looks amazing in the living room. And so now, the downstairs living room is only missing an end table and a coffee table and once that's done, it'll be pretty much completely set. The bedroom furniture is finally being delivered today and so the downstairs is coming together nicely. The guest rooms upstairs are even done (minus wall-hangings, but that's true everywhere in the house) so the next steps are making the garage have space for our cars and then, on to the bonus room/media room.

Sweet.

Catcher of Flak

2008-01-22T18:04:00.000-05:00

So I recently have been catching some flak for not updating this site enough. And yes, I know, I know, I've fallen into the bad habit of never updating. And boo hoo for you. But to be fair, I do spend my creative energy when not doing my new job or unpacking or performing various other marital obligations (wink wink) updating another site, Boiled Sports. However, that's just me (and two other dudes) spouting sports opinions. And I know those who come here do so to read up on my life. Because it's just soooooo interesting.

And the funny thing is, I was emailing with NicHul, one of my few loyal readers recently, and I realized that she doesn't know much about what's been going on because I haven't posted much. And Xtrosity is in the same boat. Me not posting means my friends actually have to talk to me and, honestly, who wants to do that?

So, you'll see below that if you haven't visited recently, there's a lot of new material up. The truth is, I file stuff away and begin many posts and just never get them out of draft mode. So I finished a few and pledge to you to continue to do so. You'll get some time from me several times a week going forward. In fact, I'm even thinking of making February my post-a-day month. I've been wanting to do this for a while -- years now, even -- where I just pick a month and make sure I post every single day, mainly just to see if I can do it. And February is usually the month I want to do because it's the shortest month on the calendar.

The problem is, my life isn't interesting enough to write about every single damn day. But still, I've got things to ramble about and stories to tell and so I think I'm going to do it. And then you'll see just how boring this thing can get. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Of course, the other thing to realize is that those few who do read this are simply doing so to pass time at work and when that's why you're surfing the Internet, a good test pattern will entertain you. So maybe my drivel can pass for a test pattern. We'll see, I guess.

I'm back, bitches.

Goodbye, Prince of Darkness Car

2008-01-14T17:29:00.000-05:00

That's what one of my friends in New York called my car. It was a 2003 Nissan Altima 3.5 SE, in "Super Black, with tinted black windows and nice rims and I just loved it. It had the 245 HP engine and could do 0-60 in 5.9 seconds, so it was what I love -- a sneaky-fast car. It's basically a souped up family sedan that could hang with most sports cars. So much fun. My car has been mine for five years as of January 11 and 113,200 happy miles. And she decided on the way down to Texas that, apparently, she's had enough of my abuse.

On the way down here to Tejas, the Altima's "Service engine soon" light came on for perhaps the 6th or 7th time in the past 14 months (all beginning in Oct '06 on my way to Xtrosity's wedding -- thanks a lot, X). A couple times they've claimed it was a code that said the gas cap wasn't tightened but more often than not it's been a warning that my car is quite low on oil... like several quarts low. And each time, the service people at Nissan come out and give me their best, condescending, are-you-a-chick-or-something voice and say, "Son, when was the last time you changed the oil?" Like, you know, I was going to go, "Ga-ga-ga-zoinks! Oil? Change? Wha?"

This particular instance, it was less than two weeks earlier when I put $1100 into it to make it road-worthy for the journey down here and, hopefully, to last me my first year or so here. Oh, and in addition to the light being on, my left headlight would go out intermittenly... A good whack on the side of the headlight always brought it back, but I figured they could change the bulb for me since it was clearly failing. This, of course, began literally the night before we were to leave NJ for Texas.

So let's start there. I ask them to check the headlight and replace the bulb. No, it's not just the bulb. It's the whole assembly because of a "bad ground." Okay, so more money, but not tons, right? Well, sure, except to change the Altima's headlight assembly, one has to remove the frickin' BUMPER first. And in the end, you're talking $300-$400 in labor to change out the headlight. So they advised me to bang on it to get it to work until it doesn't work anymore. Solid. Solid solution.

Then the oil issue... well, since there was no oil leakage anywhere visible -- not on my driveway, not all over the engine, etc... they didn't know what that meant. Other than that there was no doubt something faulty within my engine. And I said, well, what do we do? And she tells me that to diagnose it, they'd have to begin taking the engine apart and the labor involved could well reach into the thousands by the time they figure things out. So just check the oil every week and add some. OUTstanding. Just the answer I wanted.

So then I asked if they ncould do my Texas inspection...because here in Texas, you can't even get a license until your cars are inspected and registered and tagged. Weird. But whatever. So she says yes, it's $39 at Nissan. Perfect.

Wait, not perfect. She comes back out with MORE bad news. My engine computer is still wigging out and the car won't pass Texas emissions. So she suggests I drive it for 60+ miles to "reset the computer" and then come back. Okay. I drive it about 200 miles and come back in later in the week. They hook it up again; it fails again. She comes out and shrugs and says they don't know what else to do. Seriously. Don't know what else to do. Because they don't recommend the thousands of dollars option on a car with 113,000+ miles. Outstanding. So how do I register my five year old car here in Texas? Especially considering all the jalopies I see driving around without engine computers fouling up things. She thinks for a while and then says she'll "call some people" and then call my cell. She hasn't called yet and I don't expect her to.

So I begin deliberating. I have a car that won't pass Texas emissions and clearly has some kind of significant internal problems. And a $400 headlight issue. But for now the service engine soon light is off. And it's still running as good as the day I got it. I'd just keep driving it, except that I know it's eventually going to be a huge headache and, you know, I can't register it here. And that's sort of an issue since my NJ registration, of course, expires at the end of January and the inspection expired last month.

So I go to Carmax to see what they will do. They do a full inspection/appraisal and offer me $5500 on the spot for it, which is less than Kelly Blue Book says it's worth... but then again, I imagine KBB assumes a car without serious problems about to occur. So I left and continued deliberating, since my offer from them was good for one week. After thinking some more and discussing with the wife, I then just bit the bullet and went back on Saturday and took their offer and applied the cash to a new used car.

I'm now the owner of a 2003 Acura 3.2 TL Type S. Sure, it's the same year as the Altima I traded in, but this car has only 49K miles on it and it's basically a Honda, as far as reliability. Or so I hope. It is silver with black leather... and it's the Type S. For those wondering, it's the last year of the previous body style. Basically, it looks just like this (color and all).

I really wanted the Type S since that was a more exclusive version of that car... and it's 260 HP instead of the standard '03 TL's 225 HP. And we all know how I like speed and power. And plus it's a step up from the 245 my Altima had... obviously we can't downgrade.

Parting with the Altima after all those many happy miles was definitely not easy. I was a little sad as we cleaned her out and walked away for the last time. I never stopped loving that car and enjoyed driving it every single day. It was fast, sleek, and never looked out-of-style at all, something I think Nissan does very well -- none of their old cars look truly old and clunky. You see a ten year old Maxima and it still looks nice.

But alas, it was time to part ways. 113K was a good amount of time together, especially for someone like me who gets a craving for a new car every few weeks. I took delivery of the Altima on January 11, 2003 and I sold her on January 12, 2008. 1,827 days. And on the way down here, we passed her likely birthplace in Mississippi. Kind of neat.

So off we go with the new vehicle. We'll see how this partnership goes.

On The Road Again, Part III

2008-01-01T14:59:00.000-05:00

We stopped for the night on Friday night, 12/28, in some podunk location known as McComb, Mississippi. We stopped because there were hotels. Basically, between Memphis and McComb, we hadn't had to slow down. I'm not even kidding. Mississippi is another of those states where you just set the cruise control and lock in. Interstate 55 just runs straight for a couple hundred miles with the only variation being slight uphills and downhills.

We passed through the capital of Mississippi and the only "major" city they have, Jackson, and there's honestly nothing there. I was kind of shocked. I mean, I know it's the South and I know their cities aren't what we're used to in the North but, come on... there was nothing there. Basically, it was like passing through one of those areas on an Interstate in the middle of nowhere where a bunch of chain restaurants and hotels spring up and there are all those mile-high signs that look like trash. So I guess that's all there is in Jackson. Chain restaurants and hotels. It's basically a glorified truck stop. How depressing. And to think, the kids who grew up in McComb think that's the "big city."

So we got up on Saturday morning, 12/29 and away we went. We were both craving a Waffle House, which are prevalent in the South, so that's what we began looking for. The nearest one was twenty miles but it was in the direction we were heading... which is to say, even further South.

We found the Waffle House and Watersyne felt like she should turn her diamonds around to the inside of her hand because she was truly afraid. And she probably is the wise one between the two of us because I'm kind of oblivious and just sit down and enjoy myself wherever we are. I like to pretend I blend in with the people but I'm not sure we really blended well with our tinted out, NJ-plated car in a random burg in Louisiana.

Ah, yes, Louisiana. One of the more interesting places to drive. We got about as far South as the Interstate would take us without running us into New Orleans and then we turned Westbound on I-10. I-10 takes you all the way across the country to Los Angeles, I believe. And, well, building the interstate there in southern Louisiana was clearly a trick. See, it's as much of a swamp as you've heard and a lot of areas are simply names "Something something" swamp. Like "Jackson Swamp" or something like that. Only most of the names are creole/French-sounding and it looks like the kind of place you'd catch malaria if you ventured outside your car. And then, before you know it, the interstate becomes an elevated highway. Have you ever seen the seven mile bridge to the Florida keys? Well, that's sort of what it reminded me of. The highway is literally just on stilts about 40 feet above swampwaters. It's kind of gross and eerie. I mean, a bad wreck and you're off the side... fortunately not a long fall, but you land in muck that probably would suck you down. And God KNOWS what lives in that shit. Good lord. And that's the way back to New Orleans so whenever we do that road trip, we'll get to see it again. I can only imagine how lovely that muck is in the summertime heat.

After a while more in Louisiana, we finally hit the Texas border. And you get a grip on how large Texas is when you see the first mileage sign that says, "EL PASO 880." 880 freakin' miles to El Paso. Want perspective? You can drive from New York to Chicago... in less!

So we pulled into the immediate welcome center and took some goofy pics in front of the "Welcome to Texas" sign and met other people doing the same thing. The welcome center was actually one of the nicest ones I've ever seen. And then it was back into the car for the final haul down to H-town.

We finally rolled into town at about 5:30 that evening and our journey was over. And as much as I like road trips, I'm not sure if going that far is worth it unless you're moving like we were. I kept thinking that if we came home for a longer period sometime -- like two weeks or more -- that I'd drive it so we would have a car there and could bring whatever we want, etc. But 1,800 miles is a long-ass haul. We'll see what happens.

So we're back, and we're getting settled into our beautiful house that we love. Stay tuned for more "Tales from Texas." And in the meantime, enjoy our picture show below.

Don't tell Pennsylvanians... but we're all independent. And how perfect is it that there's a pickup truck in this shot? Too bad it's not also in the left lane doing 50 MPH.

If you can't read it, the West Virginia welcome sign says, "Open for business." Well, good to know. I guess they're really eager for everyone to know they're not closed, so come on in! I can just imagine how this came about: "Wait, why is everyone leaving? Wait, come back! Hey.. hey! Hey! We're open for business, I tell you! Wait, I've got it! Put that on the welcome sign and watch 'em flow right in!"

Maryland keeps it simple. "Enjoy your visit." Okie dokie. As long as your troopers don't stop me, I'll have enjoyed my visit. Now go away.

"Virginia welcomes you." Really? That's kind of broad, isn't it? What if I'm a complete prick who plans to commit crimes in your state? Does Virginia still welcome me? Speaking of which, Virginia is one of two places in the U.S. where radar detectors are illegal. Thus, I do not welcome Virginia.

Tennessee welcomed us, too. And they're the volunteer state. I don't have any jokes to make here.

Mississippi: "It's like coming home." Um, if you live there, I guess. And, you know, haven't realized you're allowed to leave yet.

This was the cool "Welcome to Louisiana" sign but we couldn't get a clear shot. The fact that I was doing 85 MPH probably didn't aid in the photography. But trust me, it was cool. And it had the welcome message in French right underneath it which is kind of neat. Not that I want French influence in our country, but the fact that there is still a gutteral form of French spoken in Louisiana is kind of quaint.

We took this one at the welcome center so we had one in focus. It'll do.

We've made it! The Welcome to Texas sign says "Drive friendly - the Texas way." On the back it says, "...or we'll shoot you dead."

Home sweet home.

On The Road Again, Part II

2007-12-31T12:35:00.000-05:00

So there we were, in Memphis, Tennessee.

The morning of 12/28, we took our time getting moving and headed over to Graceland at about noon-ish. And the lines were already there. It was like freakin' Disneyland. And Graceland falls into that category I spoke of in my last post of things I would never make a point to go see unless I happened to be passing through town. I mean, seriously... Elvis' home?

To be fair, though, it was definitely a cool experience and I'm glad we did it. Considering that the King died when I was not even two years old, it was interesting to see his incredible legacy and the impact he had on America. I mean, this guy was a true icon and it seemed like everything he touched turned gold (or platinum, to make a pun).

Every album or appearance was gobbled up by the public and he was outrageously famous from the '50s through his death in 1977. And he was only 42 when he died. Granted, he looked like hell, but can you imagine if he'd lived longer? I couldn't help but wonder how he would have altered his act for the '80s. It probably would have been pretty cool to see. Who else transcended music in the '50s, '60s AND '70s, all while kind of reinventing his image each time and adjusting to the times? I think that's what made him as cool as he was -- he was loved by many generations and he didn't just sit on what had made him famous. He kept reinventing himself and I respect that.

The car museum, with a collection of Elvis-related cars, was quite cool. It had his famous pink Cadillac, as well as Priscilla's favorite Mercedes, a gift from Elvis. Very cool stuff.

We also saw his private plane and THAT was nifty. It was, obviously, all customized and gaudy as hell. It was from the '70s so I guess that made sense, but even the seat belts were trimmed in gold.

As we walked through, Watersyne says to me, "Can you even imagine the drugs they were doing while partying in this thing?"

And it's true... I mean, this was like being on an early version of Air Force One. Everything was customized with sofas and tables and private rooms, etc. Elvis could play any music he wanted through the system and, of course, near his favorite chair was the control panel for everything. He had a phone to the cockpit, of course, but he also had a telephone that could call anywhere in the world. I know that sounds simple enough, but think about that for a second. This was in the early-to-mid-1970s. Calling anywhere in the world... from an airplane?? That was truly incredible and all of this plane stuff gives you a rough idea just how rich this guy really was. He couldn't burn through his money if he tried. And it sure seemed like he was trying.

Another cool thing was the fact that Elvis helped so many local Memphis charities. Many of his thousand-dollar donation checks are on the wall in the mansion. The guy continually gave a thousand here, a thousand there and he really spread it around. There were dozens on the wall and apparently that was just a sampling and it was something he did every year with little to no publicity about it. So that's good.

The mansion was pretty neat, too. And it was kind of surprising, honestly, how modest it actually was. Sure, there was a lot of gaudy, '70s shit and parts of it looked like the Brady Bunch house... but it wasn't as extreme of a home as you might expect, especially after seeing his plane.

The kitchen in particular was modest and had those old green sinks and appliances that everybody seemed to have in the '70s. Apparently, Elvis bought the place early on in his career and never wanted to leave. So while he built some additions to it and added many features, the home remained relatively modest, as I said. It's certainly a mansion by 1950s Memphis standards, I'm sure, but you know what I mean. The pic of the yellow room is a shot of Elvis' rec room. This was redesigned in the '70s -- in case you couldn't tell -- and had three or four TVs (also from that era) built into the wall. Back then, even the richest guys had nothing more than 20-inchers. Heh. Suckas.

He also had a stable for his horses and an expansive run of land, which he used to like to race around on golf carts, leading friends and family and acting like a kid. It's kind of cool sounding and it must have been nice to be Elvis.

We also saw the gravesites of his parents, his grandmother and him. It's very sad, of course, because the guy would only be 73 today. He predeceased his father and even his grandmother. And I didn't know this little factoid, but Elvis was actually a twin but his brother died at birth. I'm sure true Elvis fans know all of this but it was news to me.

After leaving Graceland, we headed into downtown Memphis to find a place called Rendezvous, which was recommended to us for really good ribs. We each got an order and, yes indeed, they were good.

So after stuffing ourselves on ribs and getting heartburn (God, we're old), hit the road again, barrelling South into Mississippi and the "deep South." Yee-haw. Good thing we were white. Although I'm sure the Jersey tags wouldn't do us any favors.

On The Road Again

2007-12-29T11:12:00.000-05:00

I love roadtrips. I'd always love to drive rather than fly anywhere. I don't mind long hours in the car, especially when I'm driving. I love seeing the countryside and seeing more of America. And I've long contended that one of the best things about driving places is that you see things you'd NEVER see unless you drove. Things like, say, Mississippi. I have no earthly idea why anyone would voluntarily go there unless they had to. Or if Mississippi was between them and their destination and they weren't flying. (And, presumably, didn't want to go AROUND Mississippi.) But I'm digressing.

Watersyne and I decided together that driving back to Houston from NJ would be fun. Or, "fun." Most people we told gave us a weird look and some encouraged us with comments like, "Why would you do that?" It was quite nice.

So Christmas came and went and we planned to depart from NJ on the morning of 12/26 and the rough plan was thus:

12/26 - Drive from NJ to Ashville, NC, where my Aunt and Uncle live.
12/27 - Drive to Memphis.
12/28 - See Graceland, then drive South and stop somewhere in Mississippi or Louisiana.
12/29 - Finish the drive to Houston.

So we had a plan. And as my good friend Xtrosity always likes to say (especially when I come up with a plan), "Custer had a plan."

The morning of the 26th, we awoke and loaded the car. My parents kindly made us a nice, greasy breakfast, which, ordinarily, I love. And I scarfed it down, as per usual, and then felt... lousy. I felt sick. But I figured it was because I just was getting old and heavy, greasy breakfasts don't go down as well anymore. So off we went.

Things started out okay, but as we drove South I began to feel more on-and-off queasy. We had Dunkin' Donuts coffee on the way (since we weren't going to be able to get it in TX much - more on that another time) and I intermittenly felt okay... and then queasy again.

We went from Jersey into Pennsylvania and then through a small part of Maryland and into Virginia. By about 3 PM, I couldn't drive anymore. We stopped and I asked my lovely to take over for me because I felt like maybe a nap would help me feel better. Well, it's a good thing we switched when we did because by about 3:30, I was a violently ill, vomiting mess. And it was bad. It was one of those stomach bugs that just overcomes you and you are unable to stop being sick. Every rest stop, we pulled in so I could A) throw out my latest puke bag and B) visit the pooper. Thank God Virginia has nice rest stops -- they're even manned by someone who hangs around just to keep things working seamlessly. And the bathrooms are the cleanest I think I've ever seen on the road. So thank you, Virginia, I am eternally grateful for that.

So after being violently ill for about two hours, we checked our mileage and realized we had at least another two hours until we'd make Asheville. I decided I just couldn't handle it anymore and I needed a bed and so my sweetie found us a Holiday Inn near Roanoke, Va. I was shuddering a shiver I've barely ever felt before. In fact, the last time I felt this way was the last time I was sick and I remember it vividly -- December 2004, almost exactly three years earlier. It was the same kind of overwhelming stomach bug that debilitates you completely. Anyway, I felt like I was dying. My body was shivering SO hard as it tried to stabilize my body temp... it was so bad I could barely talk or get my hotel keycard to swipe through. I was getting a little nervous because we kind of knew where we were, but not real well. What if we needed to go to a hospital or urgent care center?

Anyway, I slept it off for a few hours and by about 10 or 11 that night was beginning to feel better. I watched Purdue win the Motor City Bowl and that, of course, improved how I felt. My sweet Watersyne took care of me all day and night and made sure I had fluids and kept my fever down with Tylenol.

By morning, I was able to eat again and suck down Gatorade and we were off again. However, my Aunt was scared she was going to get sick so she actually begged off having us come by for lunch or whatever. The unfortunate thing is, you know, how often does one actually get to Asheville, NC? Well, I'll tell you... the last time I was there was when Xtrosity and I were passing through town on our way to Florida for Spring Break back in March of 1997. So, by that timeline, I guess we'll next try to visit sometime in 2017.

Regardless, Asheville actually would have been somewhat out of our way so we continued Westward out of Virginia and into Tennessee. We contined heading West and realized, hey, Tennessee is a long-ass frickin' state. We made it to Nashville by dinnertime and decided we'd try to find a good place to eat in Nashville and then continue on to Memphis, which was another 210 miles away.

Ah, yes. We realized how far we really were from Memphis earlier in the day. However, in trying to be proactive, we'd used Watersyne's platinum hotel status to book a room that morning over in Memphis. We figured getting there would be no problem. But when we realized we might not feel like driving the full 650 miles, we tried to call and cancel the reservation. It was, after all, before 6 PM.

Watersyne, however, got the runaround and was told we'd be charged for cancelling. Which is utter bullshit, especially since she's a platinum member for all her hotel stays (insert own joke here), but they stonewalled us and said they couldn't change it. We felt that was ridiculous. But it obviously motivated us to finish the journey.

So we swung into Nashville at around 6 PM and found an awesome steakhouse, the name of which I cannot remember. But we now have favorite steakhouses in places like Nashville and Edmonton, Alberta. You know, just in case.

After our delish meal, we hit the road again, knowing we had 210 miles to cover before we got to rest again. Of course, on the dark, open highways of Tennessee, one can set their cruise at 80 MPH and practically never turn it off. We made it to Memphis in two hours, 45 minutes.

And that was through Day 2.

Merry Merry!

2007-12-25T23:05:00.000-05:00

Yes, it's that time again. It's kind of hard to believe it's rolled around this fast. Why, just this time last year, I was proposing to my lovely Watersyne and asking her if she's please marry me. Then, poof! A year has gone by, we're married with three kids and a labrador. Okay, well, not quite, but it has been a nutty year and now we're living in Texas!

Happy Holidays to you and yours and check back soon for updates on the drive to Tejas.

Final Air Travel of 2007

2007-12-21T11:00:00.000-05:00

Thanks to all my flying back and forth to the great state of Tejas (not to mention my trip to Gay Pair-ee in April) I was able to attain "Silver Elite" status on Continental. What does this get me? Well, I get to go to the priority lines for check-in, security and boarding. Of course, between Houston and New York almost everyone is Elite because it's apparently a very common jump to make... so it doesn't get me much.

It's also supposed to get me complimentary upgrades to first class. That hasn't happened yet and it can't happen for both me AND my lovely wife (she's not Elite and I'd need to be Gold Elite to upgrade my spouse, too) and we're still newlyweds so it's not like I can upgrade and leave her in coach. I've heard that's kind of poor form.

So anyway, this morning was our final flight of 2007. And we had to leave our home at 3:45 AM to get to the airport in time to make our 6:40 AM flight. Delightful. And now I get to work on a day when everyone just wants to goof off because it's the last day before the Christmas holiday.

Me sleepy.

The Weather INSIDE Is Frightful

2007-12-20T07:18:00.000-05:00

I've never had a central air system at my disposal before. Oh, sure, I've been in homes that have it, but I've never owned one or really even had an apartment that had one. So our dual-zone system in our new house is pretty nifty to me.

Last night, in fact, we had nothing turned on (no heat or cool) because it had been 75 degrees here and so it wasn't needed. However, as we worked into the night on our house and on unpacking, etc., and all that goes with it, we got warmer and warmer. At one point, I checked the thermostat and it was 76 degrees in the house and feeling stuffy. So I went in to where Watersyne was picking through a huge box of bathroom goodies and I said, "I know this is crazy in December, but I think I'm gonna turn on the A/C." Sweatily, she just nodded. (You know, if you only picked that sentence out of the middle of this post, you might think it was about something else entirely.)

So I switched on the "Cool" setting and set the temp at 74, simply so that some cool air would blow and circulate, etc. You know the drill.

At about midnight we finally quit for the evening and went upstairs to our guest room where we're currently sleeping until we get a bedroom set in our downstairs master bedroom. The upstairs zone was also on and I set that one at 73. Basically, I just wanted the place not to get too hot and to circulate some cool air while we slept. Off to dreamland we went.

When I got up this morning and padded downstairs at 6:45, it was quite an odd experience. First, it felt like, as I went down the stairs, that I was entering a really cold swimming pool. I could literally feel the cold air right at ceiling level as I descended the stairs. I looked around and the windows were all wet with significant condensation moisture. What the hell was going on? It was freezing!

I went to the thermostat and looked and it was.... 57 degrees on the first level of my home.

Times when 57 is nice:

-outside in December
-at night in the summertime
-when it's a Merlot

Times when 57 is not nice:

-when you're in an ocean at that temperature
-if your coffee dips to this temp
-when you're in your boxers and need to shave and are somewhat confused about things

I couldn't figure out what was going on until I checked the setting of the A/C...

What had happened was the upstairs zone had continued to obey my commands and kept the temp at 73. The downstairs one, for some reason, made the unilateral (and unauthorized) decision to switch to it's "program" setting... you know, where you can have it be warmer when you wake up and cooler when you're gone, etc. However, nobody had ever set the program temps. Do you know what the default program temperature is for the air conditioning system?

50 degrees. Yes, fifty. That makes perfect sense, right? The default should be twenty-two degrees below room temp...? I'm sure an engineer decided that.

So for some portion of the night -- most of it, I would assume, judging by the fact that my shaving gel was almost frozen -- the downstairs system was trying to makethe house 50 damn degrees, while it was no lower than 65 outside all night. It's definitely a weird feeling to realize that on December 20, it makes sense to open the front and back doors and let the outside air in so your inside air will be semi-normal again. I'm not even kidding -- I opened the back door and went outside and it felt warmer and much more inviting than my living room. Ridonkulous.

I can see now it's going to be a battle of wills with the thermostat. It better not disobey me again. You know what happens when brainless object disobey me.

Movin' On Up, Part II

2007-12-19T07:42:00.000-05:00

Where was I? Ah, yes, our things were on their way to Tex-ass in a big-ass moving truck. I had selected $200K-$225K on the insurance declaration sheet when asked to assess our possetions, so there was a part of me (most of me, actually) that wasn't at all concerned when an ice storm hit the midwest. Hey, maybe the truck would overturn and destroy all our old crap. I'll take a check for $210,000 and be on my way, thanks. It'd be a shame to lose all those Target dress shirts and $11 khakis, to be sure, but I think we'd survive. And the best part of only being married for six months is that if our crystal or china was broken, well, it's not like it's so old we can't replace it!

Alas, though, there were no problems with the truck and he arrived as scheduled this past Monday, and then proceeded to fill our new house (2700 sq ft) in a way that makes it hard to believe it all fit in our old house (800 sq ft).

Ah, yes, our new house. That brings me to the closing.

We did our walk-through last Monday, 12/10 and during the walk-through they told us how when we got our keys at our closing on Weds, 12/12, to come to the house and use the keys in every door. This would trip something in the lock which would make their "builder's keys" no longer work. This was important since many people had the keys -- painters, laborers, random illegal immigrants, etc. They said after we signed off that everything was cool during the walk-through, that they'd lock the doors up and nobody would be in it again until we came after our closing.

But, wait, with a two-day window between walk-through and closing, what about all those people with the keys to our house then? What if they decide nice stainless steel appliances would be nice at their houses? Or on the black market? Nobody really had an answer to this question. I probably should have declined signing the sheet but they said I couldn't close without it. Had me by the beans there, I guess.

So on Tuesday, 12/11, my plan was to go get our bank check for the closing on Weds morning, which was scheduled for 10 AM. On Monday, I had transferred $5,000 from our ING savings account to our Bank of America checking account to make sure I had more than enough in there to have the closing check drawn from it. Only when I went to get the bank check on Tuesday afternoon, the $5,000 wasn't showing in the BofA account, which left me about $1000 short of what I needed. Ruh-roh.

I went online and confirmed I had made the transfer from ING. I had the confirm number and everything. Now in a panic, I called ING and explained I wanted to know where my effing money was.

"Oh, yes, sir, I see the transfer request, but it takes 1-2 business days to process."

"To process?" I asked.

"Yes, sir," she said, not offering any more help. "It's in Bank of America's hands now."

"But I am looking at my ING account and the $5,000 is gone from there and it's not showing even pending in my BofA account," I tried to point out, and I think I had a legit point here. I mean, if it's not in either account, where the hell is it?

"Yes, sir, it should take 1-2 days to process."

"To process? That's ridiculous. Also, I made the request on Monday at 3 PM and the confirmation says I made it on Tuesday morning. That's not right."

"Yes, sir, the transaction date is always the next day."

"But that's not when I made the transaction. That's incorrect."

"Well, sir, the transaction date is always the next day."

"Okay, thanks, you've been really helpful," I said bitterly.

So now it's about 5 PM on Tuesday and our closing is the next day at 10 AM. Bank of America doesn't open until 9AM and, of course, I'm HOPING that the funds will be showing there at that time. Seems a bit close to call for me. So I call the title company people and, fortunately, they're able to move the closing back to 1 PM.

The next morning, fortunately, the money was showing in my BofA account and so disaster was averted. And I have to say there are few things more frustrating than that -- to have the money you need but not all in one place. Irritating.

So we went to closing at 1 PM and things went reasonably well. We got our keys and after a quick stop at a furniture store where a salesman wouldn't shut the f-ck up about his life that we really didn't care about, we headed to our new home.

We excitedly pulled into our new driveway and went to the front door. I was all ready to carry my bride over the threshold of our new house, so I put the key in the front-door lock.... and the lock wouldn't turn. No problem, we got four keys. I tried the next one.

It didn't work.

Neither did the next one. Or the last one.

At this point, I was about to ease our entry to the home by putting a rock through the front window and I think Watersyne could sense this and so she gently took the keys from me and suggested we try the back door. We mucked our way through the soggy lawn and, fortunately (for the door), it opened. Watersyne ran back around front and I went through the house and we completed the carry-over-the-threshold tradition.

As I mentioned, our things then arrived on Monday and we've been digging out ever since. Although last night, we did dig out our dinky little artificial Christmas tree (supposedly 6 feet, but I don't think it's more than 5 1/2) and strung some lights and a star on it, along with one ornament. We also located our stockings and got the living room pretty much situated as far as furniture goes. So at least that looks good. And if it gets down below 70 degrees again, we might even put on the fire when we exchange our presents.

Movin' On Up

2007-12-18T15:05:00.000-05:00

I don't think I can keep disappearing and then coming back with a post that says something like, "Hey, remember when I used to post here?" Because that's reusing my old material and no good comedian does that. ("Oh, this is supposed to be funny?" you're now asking... yes, yes, you're hilarious.)

But I suppose it's fair that I get back on the horse that I was so good about riding in the earlier years of my blog instead of allowing my involvement in our little sports endeavor keep me from horse-riding...um, er... okay, I ruined that metaphor.

So we've pretty much officially moved to the great state of Texas. Or Tejas, as I've begun calling it. I think that's Spanish for "Texas." If it's not, I might be saying something that really offends someone.

Anyway, here's how it's gone...

Almost two weeks ago, two dudes showed up with a full-size moving truck in front of our house in NJ. Never mind that the moving company assessment guy who had come two weeks earlier wrote down clearly that there was no way a semi was gonna fit up my street. And even if it could fit up my street, it most certainly wasn't going to be able to turn around.

A few days before the movers came, however, a guy drove up with a full-size car carrier and picked up Watersyne's SUV. We have many pictures of her being loaded up and sent on her way, as well as pics of said SUV arriving at our home in Texas.

Apparently, word spread across the country that trucks could indeed get up my street. The movers decided to try it. Maybe they just didn't feel like loading things twice -- once into a box truck and then shuttling it to the bigger truck elsewhere and loading it again. I can't say as I blame 'em, but when it came time to leave, there was no way Watersyne and I were going to miss this show.

He began by backing down my street. It's a very narrow, residential street with very low-hanging tree branches. Several of those branches are longer an issue, thanks to the 30,000 pound tree-trimming device provided by North American Van Lines.

He backed up about 20 feet and proceeded to catch a power line on the back of the truck and nearly tear it free from my next-door neighbor's house. (No, it wasn't the neighbor with the criminal children -- I wish it had been.) Once he got untangled from that -- and announced he had no idea who to call and basically left the issue in my lap -- he continued backing down my street towards the semi-busy but also-quite-narrow cross street.

Once there, he made several attempts to back out onto the street, jackknifing the truck in an attempt to not run over anyone's lawns, cars, kids, etc. At one point, it looked like he almost had it and then he suddenly threw it back in forward gear and drove back onto my street. Just as we were wondering why, we heard sirens and saw a firetruck and ambulance race by. Sheesh, as though he wasn't under enough pressure.

Eventually, he got the trailer out onto the street but couldn't get the cab out there. So what did he do? He did what anyone would do in this situation. He uncoupled the cab from the trailer and left the trailer in the middle of the busy road while he drove the cab around the block and then backed it up the street to the trailer. I can't imagine the lunchtime traffic was all that pleased with this.

Then he took off, taking our worldly possetions back to Michigan where he was from and where he had another Texas delivery to pick up. So our things sat in a truck in his driveway for about a week. Nice.

More tomorrow...

Would You Prefer One Angry Mob Or Two Angry Mobs?

2007-11-19T22:07:00.000-05:00

A logical person would probably say the fewer angry mobs the better, and would thus choose one. Continental Airlines does not fall into that category.

Last week I was working in Texas for the week and I began in Houston and then headed to Dallas for some training. I set my travel itinerary up to have me come home from Newark from Dallas on Thursday evening after my training ended. I had an appointment at 9:30 on Friday morning to have all four of my wisdom teeth out. My flight out of Dallas was scheduled for 7:30 Thursday evening.

The first sign that something was wrong was that the 5:40 PM flight to Newark was still not boarded when I approached my gate.

However, they were saying the 7:30 was still on time, which got me thinking both flights might get to Newark at the same time. Silly, silly me.

They came over the PA and announced that a part that the 5:40 flight's plane needed was on its way from Houston and would be there by 8 PM. I kind of chuckled, thinking how unfortunate for them that they were on the earlier flight and will end up getting home later. Suckers.

Time went by and they announced that the 7:30 flight passengers should head to Gate E10 (instead of E8 where the 5:40 people were). So we shuffled over there and I began reading my book. Soon, they had the 5:40 people boarding and our flight was, predictably, a little behind schedule. No big deal, this always happens heading to Newark.

After the 5:40 people were gone and nobody appeared to be manning Gate E10, a few of us became suspicious and sauntered back over to Gate E8 to see what was going on. Now the board there said our flight on it. So sending us to E10 was apparently a distraction technique. Nothing like a little misdirection and espionage mixed with your air travel.

Soon they came onto the PA and announced the part that our flight was waiting for was not there yet and we were delayed.

Um, excuse me? Our plane wasn't broken. Unless.... oh, no they didn't... Yes, yes, they did.

They gave our plane to the 5:40 people.

Mothers.

Now we were a bit pissed and I kept asking those around me why they'd now want two planeloads of pissed off people being late rather than just the one flight. Nobody had an answer. But the flight from Houston had to be there soon, I figured, so this wouldn't last long.

Until it turned out the part wasn't coming from Houston anymore. Did they forget it? Did they drop it out of the plane? Your guess is as good as mine, but the Houston flight got there and there was no part. So they "looked around" for one in Dallas -- which isn't exactly a small airport, mind you -- and then came back and dashed our hopes again: no mysterious part in Dallas. It would have to be flown in.

At one point, I made the "Maybe it's a fetzer valve" joke, but nobody got it.

So where are we going to get this part? The clock is ticking away, of course, as it tends to do, and it's now approaching 9 PM. I had spent 20-30 mins on the phone with Continental trying to find a new way home and they came to the conclusion that sticking with my flight -- whenever it might leave -- was going to be my best bet. I asked at the counter what time the first flight in thr morning left. I figured, maybe I should just sleep a few hours and come back. There's a 5:30 AM flight from Newark to Houston so maybe there's an early one out of Dallas and I could still make my oral surgery at 9:30.

The first flight out of Dallas to Newark is 7 AM. Seven? Where the hell are we, Italy? The earliest flight on a weekday is 7 AM?? Ridiculous. It didn't matter anyway because all the flights to Newark the following day were already booked solid with many people who had already bailed on the 7:30 flight ever leaving. Which made me nervous. What happens if the flight is eventually cancelled? Hotel rooms might be scarce. I asked this very question out loud and one of the frequent travelers said, "Then you sleep on the floor over there." Nice.

Finally, they came on to tell us that the part was on its was to Dallas.... from Newark. Outstanding. And that flight wasn't getting in until 11:27 PM. Central time. Then it would be a 30 minute fix and we'd be on our way. Which, you know, when you're already going to be four or five hours behind schedule, I'd just as soon you not rush a mechanical fix.

And when people didn't hear the announcement clearly -- and it's understandable why people were confused since we were getting a different story every ten minutes -- the gate woman actually had the balls to say something along the lines of, "Okay, I'm going to say this one more time..."

Check your 'tude, missy. You're getting paid to stand there.

They then announced they'd be giving us "food vouchers" since we were going to be so inconvenienced. The food vouchers had a whopping $8 value, whieh we all know goes a long, long way in an airport. And Terminal E was completely shut down already, including the Continental Presidents Club Lounge. So many of us took the tram over to Terminal D, which was much nicer and still had some open restaurants, including an Irish Pub that was absolutely rocking. I had a bite to eat and two vodkas and was feeling rather smashed. They were delicious. I was told to be back at the gate by 11:15 PM and the bar began shutting down at about 10:20. Stellar. What do I do now? Nothing was open anymore. Apparently, unlike the NY area airports, things do shut down in Texas.

I meandered my way back to Terminal E, having to very carefully read the tram signs in my slightly hazy state. We boarded up around 11:30 and got off the ground at 12 midnight. I had nobody in my row and I was sitting by the window, planning to eventually stretch out. But I nodded off.

When I woke up, there was a big bag in the aisle seat that said "Lavatory supplied." Ick. I nodded back off.

I woke up again and there was a black gentleman smiling at me in the aisle seat. Was I hallucinating? Was I already under anaesthesia? I nodded back off.

When I awoke, he was now laying in the two seats next to me and way too close to me. Dammit. This is hell.

We apparently broke the speed limit up there because we landed in Newark at 3:45 AM, just 2 hours and 45 minutes of flying time. When taxiing in, they stopped and said we caught them off guard. Gosh, imagine if we'd gotten in four hours earlier like we were supposed to. They woulda been really flummoxed then.

I got off the plan and headed to baggage claim around 4 AM. It was weird. But the McDonalds and another couple of food joints were actually open in EWR. Passing the security area was weird because there were people in line to come in. And it took me a minute to process that if you had perhaps one of those 5:30 AM flights out, that you might be at the airport a little after 4 AM. Weird.

Got my bags and headed to my car, which said 4:25 AM as I got in. Drove home and walked into the house and heard the TV my lovely wife had left on in the bedroom. It was on NBC and it was exactly 5 AM and Today In New York was coming on. So weird!

Three hours of sleep and then off to the oral surgeon. What a wonderful couple of days.

Uh, I Can Give You A Solution

2007-11-07T07:49:00.000-05:00

So, according to this story, there have been a couple instances of motorcyclists surrounding passenger cars on the highways near St. Louis and then terrorizing the drivers. They not only surround the driver but they also throw things at the car, kick it and generally just act very dangerous and unruly.

One guy quoted in the story repeatedly asked 911 for help but they acted rather incompetent. And I have to say, even though I have a motorcycle, if I found myself in this guy's position (bikers damaging my car, my daugher crying, etc.) I do believe I would remind myself that I hold a slight weight advantage in a vehicle versus vehicle comparison.

The minute someone began kicking my car or throwing objects at it, I do believe I'd swerve sharply into them and then, if the police got involved, I'd point out what they were doing and report that they lost control.

Oopsie.

Giddy Up!

2007-11-01T04:51:00.000-04:00

So what's the news? For those of you who actually drop by here to read up on me... well, the few of you who do probably already know this. But Watersyne and I are officially on the move. We'll be moving over the next couple months to the great state that thinks it's its own country -- Texas.

Some people I highly respect at work came to me and asked me to take on a new role in Houston, one with greater responsibility and the potential to vault me forward in my career. It was the right opportunity at the right time in my life. Oh, and they also agreed to pay me more. And promote me. And it doesn't snow there and we could afford a much bigger house. With that, Watersyne was on board.

I went and checked things out in August and then my lovely sweet pea came down in September. We enjoyed ourselves and decided it was something we could do. We went back a few weeks ago and looked at endless houses and ultimately settled on one larger than we were even looking for. But it's brand-new (still being built, in fact) and so we'll be the first owners. Kind of exciting, going from a 75-year-old shanty to a zero-year-old beautiful home. So for those who've made fun of me for having a house the size of most people's garages, well... I'll think of something witty to say.

Downsides of Houston include the fact that it's often in the path of hurricanes. Of course, they usually only destroy Galveston and then are downgraded to tropical storms or less by the time they march the 50 miles inland to Houston. It's also hellaciously hot in July/August in Houston -- but really, the average temp is only like 93 at that time of year which isn't a whole lot higher than here in NJ.

Speaking of average temps, the average high in February is 67. For those of us from the Northeast, that sounds almost impossible. And I'll truly believe it when I see it and don't have to wear a jacket when I head out the door each day. Oh, golf game, you had better improve. No excuses anymore!

Other perks include the aforementioned golf game -- we'll be living about a mile from the golf course that I plan to join. Will I play more than my 10-15 rounds per year average? Hell yes, I better. With a brandy-new house that doesn't need constant home projects, I think I'll be feeling like a retiree. Oh, well, except for the sixty hour work week thing. There's always that.

We'll also be living in the suburbs of the fourth-largest city in the country. Did you know that? Houston is fourth, following New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Pretty cool. Houston is also known as the most air conditioned city in the country, according to Wikipedia, so you know it's true.

I found it interesting that nobody has basements in Houston. I wondered about that until I learned that the city is about 45 feet above sea level. Oh, I see. That wouldn't work so well now, would it.

It's smoggy like LA but not nearly as overcrowded or obnoxious. It reminds me of a place like Atlanta -- nobody's from there. It's not what you think of when you think of Texas: gun racks, cowboy hats, etc. That's Dallas. Houston is a very transient city with lots of young people and and amazing amount of things to do. We're really pretty excited about it.

So that's the news from our end. This move and huge flux in our lives has prompted my lovely wife to consider launching a blogsite of her own. I think that would be outstanding and I hope she does. Lord knows she'll probably post more frequently than I do. Or maybe that will change as we'll have all sorts of new stories to talk about.

Either way, onward and upward.

The College Experience

2007-10-22T07:35:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned, I was back at Purdue this past weekend, seeing old friends and the Purdue-Iowa game. Good times, as always. Usually, though, I don't stay near campus overnight. This time, however, I did stay in a nearby hotel with a couple of friends and we went to a couple of the campus bars we used to frequent about a decade ago.

Some random things from being back on campus...

At one point, I was driving down an alley heading to a friend of a friend's house for a post-game cookout. As I drove slowly down the alley, a student dressed in a weird, perhaps Scottish-style golf outfit with huge sunglasses kind of flagged me down.

"HEY!" he greeted me.

"What?"

"Have you see my FUCKING golf shoes??" he asked with a grin.

"No, man, sorry, I haven't seen them," I answered him, in a serious voice.

"Shit!" came the eloquent reply.

Later that night, as we were walking around the village area where there were tons of students milling about and five or six bars all within feet of one another, another student -- who appeared already drunk -- stepped on the back of my shoe as we walked. He quickly said, "I'm sorry, sir."

My friend Christy noticed the "sir" and I saw her hide a smirk.

Then later we were in a crowded bar and as another student tried to get past me, he gave me a "Excuse me, sir."

Back in college, that would have been "Excuse me, man" or "'Scuse me, dude." This time, Christy couldn't help by laugh at it.

Later on, I was at the bar waiting to order a couple of drinks for me and my friend Zac. When the bartender finally got to me, I told him, "Crown and diet; and a Grey Goose and 7Up." This caused the student sitting to the right with his back to me to turn around and give his loud approval of my ordering decision.

"Yeaahh, man, nicely done!"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, that's a serious drink order."

When I got back to Zac I told of this exchange and he reminded me of our college years... and asked if we would have ever considered buying drinks like that -- hard liquor was usually too pricey and top shelf was kind of out of the question. But that's fine because you haven't acquired a taste for good liquor at 21 years old, either, unless you've got a serious drinking problem.

One thing that I have always loved in the few times I've gotten back to college bars since I became somewhat gainfully-employed is the fact that what's an expensive Saturday-night price for collegians is a bargain for me. I ordered those aforementioned mixed drinks and, being used to NY/NJ pricing, gave the bartender a $20 and didn't expect a ton back. And I got back $13.25. $6.75 for two top-shelf well drinks?? Not too bad.

All in all, a good trip. And for as much as it sounds like I was sensitive about being a decade older than most of the kids, I didn't feel that out of place. I think that'll come when somebody asks me if my kid goes there or something.

Prepared To Be The Old Guy

2007-10-17T07:24:00.000-04:00

This weekend, I'll be doing my annual visit back to Purdue. Some years I get back there twice in the Fall but, on average, it's just one visit a year. Tim and I get season tickets each year and I wish I could go to every game but it's just not feasibly from 800 miles away.

Anyway, this weekend, I'll be heading to Indianapolis on Friday afternoon and then to the Purdue-Iowa game on Saturday. After the game, I'll be meeting up with some other friends and we're tentatively planning on a flashback to our youth with a night out at the Purdue bars. And yes, I'm fully prepared to be carded and have the doorman being younger than me and somewhat bemused that I'm ten years older than most of the other patrons. Whatever, fathead. I bet I make more than them, too.

There's nothing like college bar specials. We used to go to -- and I'm not making this up -- Penny Beer Night at a bar called TA Tom's. You paid $5 to get in and you got a huge cup that they just kept filling up, theoretically for a penny a fillup (according to legend, it's illegal to give away beer, so they had to charge a penny). It doens't sound like a moneymaker, but Tom's was a place that was usually down the list of people's preferred bars. It wasn't a bad place necessarily, but it was older and had less cache than some of the other bars. So they offered gimmicks like penny beer night and Breakfast Club. Ohhh, Breakfast Club.

On football game day mornings and other big Saturday mornings, several bars will open at 7 AM for "Breakfast Club." People come out, often dressed up like it's Halloween (not sure why), and start boozing. Or continue boozing, in many cases. Since not many college students can get out of bed at 6:30 on a Saturday morning, the majority of Breakfast Clubbers simply don't go to bed on Friday night, leave the bars at like 2:30 and head to a diner or other party. Then they change and head to Breakfast Club. Oh, God, to have that kind of energy again.

Hey, Remember When I Used to Post Here?

2007-10-10T16:32:00.000-04:00

Good times, good times. I used to even post a few times a week, pretty much with regularity. Could it be that my life is just too busy? Wait, everyone says that... hmmm, well within a month, I'll be at three more weddings, bringing out total in the past year to somewhere around a nice round TEN weddings, including our own. Or maybe it didn't include ours. I can't remember.

Another excuse I have for not posting much here is that I post pretty frequently over at Boiled Sports, my joint venture with two other Purdue alums.

However, there will be some exciting changes coming in our lives soon. No, not nearly as exciting and tumultuous as Mr. Pacman being thrown away... but, really, what is that tumultuous?

And no, we're not pregnant.

Harder-Edged and Newsy

2007-09-19T07:50:00.000-04:00

This article reports that there's a new executive producer of Katie Couric's debacle of a news program and that under his watch, the program has become "much more harder-edged and newsy." Wait, what?

I think it was in about fourth grade that we all learned that something could be "more hard" or it could be "harder," but it certainly couldn't be "more harder." And it certainly can't be "more harder-edged." And "newsy"? That's not even a word!!

But hey, since we're talking about television and since I got asked to talk about my thoughts on the upcoming TV season (something I've done in the past for those who've been reading a while), let's have at it, shall we?

What I'm Watching (Tolerating) This Year

The Office (NBC) -- One of the funniest shows on the air, if not the funniest. The Office consistently outdoes itself and seems to cross further and further over the line every week, yet doesn't seem to jump the shark. If you've worked in an office, you know people like those in this show. If you haven't been watching, you've missed a lot. However, NBC has so few decent shows that it has decided to completely hitch its wagon to The Office, ordering up THIRTY episodes (instead of the normal 22 for a full season) this year. Ought to be interesting.

Scrubs (NBC) -- I've been loyal to Scrubs for a while now and we're approaching the end of the line. This is the final season for the oddball show that has never quite caught on the way its loyalists feel it should. It's quite funny, though getting a little silly as it ages. Much like me.

24 (Fox) -- Alright, so this isn't on in the Fall, but it'll be back in January for its seventh season. It can't get much crazier, can it? It's only a matter of time before Jack Bauer is battling aliens or something. But it's still my favorite show just because it pulls me in and doesn't let go, even in the weaker seasons. It's one of those shows that gives a wink to its loyal watchers by having characters recur from years gone by and things like that.

Back to You (Fox) -- One of the few new shows that my darling Watersyne and I will be adding to the DVR this Fall. This one has Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton as news anchors. We just like both of them and hope it'll be funny. My friends in the media business tell me it's not, but I imagine it'll be just humorous enough to keep watching.

Nip/Tuck (F/X) -- Another favorite, and one that I got Watersyne into a couple of seasons back. It's like a soap opera in terms of how outlandishly ridiculous the storylines are but somehow it's engrossing. Excellent acting, amazing sex scenes (for basic cable) and plenty of them. Oh, and the show is ostensibly about two plastic surgeons from Miami... although last season ended with them deciding to take their practice to L.A. It premieres in October.

Family Guy (Fox) -- As much as I love this show, it's not as hilarious as it was in its early seasons, but I'm still watching. The fact that they'll make fun of anyone and anything and the fact that, while not as funny as it was, it still makes me laugh out loud at least once per episode. And shouldn't a comedy actually do that?

What I'm Not Watching (Wanting to Torch) This Year

Big Shots (ABC) -- I have to believe the concept for this one was called "Desperate Husbands," because it's such a pathetic attempt to capitalize off the waning popularity of the atrociously overrated and unfunny Housewives that I can't even watch the promos without rolling my eyes hard enough to scratch my eyeballs on my eyebrows. Ugh. Puke. A bunch of dick-swinging, unlikable, rich assholes and the messes they make of their lives. No thanks.

The King of Queens (CBS) -- People who watch this concern me. It's such low-brow humor, they might as well just have any ol' fat guy farting and burping and it'd be at about the same level of creativity. I've bitched about this before, but this kind of show is just so lazy because it's employing the same formula as the old, 1950s sitcoms like the Honeymooners. Fat, dolt husband who always has a "plan" that backfires is tolerated by inexpicably hot wife. Hardy fucking har har. Burn this crap, please.

Moonlight (CBS) -- I just put this one here for fun because it's not like I have to tell you not to watch it -- nobody will. But here's the blurb for the premiere on 9/28: "When a series of vampire-style murders plague LA, immortal investigator Mick St. John sets out to find the culprits and re-connects with a woman from his past at a crime scene." Yikes. A love triangle, vampires and immortality... it's TV gold, I tell ya!

Journeyman (NBC) -- Uh-oh, another time traveler. Wasn't time travel kind of chic in, like, 1989? Back to the Future, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Quantam Leap, that sort of era? This one will suuuuuuuuuck. I predict it's one of the first ones cancelled.

Grey's Anatomy (ABC) -- Screechy, unattractive women (but the kind that the media wants you to think are gorgeous) babbling on about men and how hard their lives are. Yeah, I remember Ally McBeal and other such baloney from the 90s, too. This show isn't original, it isn't creative, it isn't breaking any new ground and it's pretty unwatchable if you're male. I mean, the one saving grace of a show like this for guys would be hot women -- yet Ellen Pompeo is no where near as attractive as she's made out to be, Sandra Oh is outright unattractive (but again, there seems to be this push for her as some hottie) and the one saving grace, Katherine Heigl is absolutely impossible to listen to for five minutes without wanting to put your foot through the TV. So, uh, yeah, thumbs down here. I'll move on...

Train Wrecks You Might Not Be Able To Look Away From

Cavemen (ABC) -- As bad as this might turn out to be, I'd watch it 100 times out of 100 over Big Shots.

The Bionic Woman (NBC) -- Wait, wasn't this done, like thirty years ago with Lindsay Wagner? Oh, okay, right. Yikes!! It only lasted from '76-'78 then, but it was really sci-fi back then... will people be more into bionic legs in 2007? Maybe, considering how many sci-weirdo shows have had considerable runs recently (like the inexplicably Heros).

By the way, these lists are by no means exhaustive... there are lots more that I will stop and watch and lots, lots, LOTS more that I hate.

The Day Our Lives Stood Still

2007-09-11T14:05:00.000-04:00

It's hard to believe it's been six years since the worst terrorist attack our country has ever experienced. I'm sure today there will be a million things that will be written, posted, published and spoken today about people's experiences that day, much as there were for weeks and months afterwards. But it's one of those events in history that we all need to discuss, to talk about, to remind each other of. It's not something we should "get over" or "put behind us." It's something we should never forget or even let fade in our memories. I know it's not fading in mine.

Never on any of the five previous anniversaries of this awful day have I resminisced about how my day went and the absolute roller coaster of emotions I felt that day. But I thought maybe this year I'd do it.

The previous night, September 10, 2001, I had stayed up late watching Monday Night Football because the Giants and Broncos had played (Giants lost). Like a lot of Giants fans, I was getting a slow start to my day on September 11. I lived only a mile from my office at the time, in the town of Fort Lee, NJ. Fort Lee is the last town in NJ before you cross the George Washington Bridge into New York.

I remember getting my butt out of bed a little after 8 AM and taking my shower, then heading downstairs in our two-story rental home to put on the Today Show, make some coffee, and iron my shirt for the day... a typical routine for me.

As I stood there ironing my shirt, the Today Show cut to helicopter footage of the World Trade Center... burning. They said details were sketchy, but it looked like a small airplane had hit the tower. It seemed odd that somebody could accidentally hit the tower, but given how different the world was up to that morning, nobody for a second considered that it was anything but and accident.

Some clown who was in the area got on the phone with NBC and stated, matter-of-factly, that it was indeed a "small, commuter plane." Well, we know now that certainly wasn't true.

My mom then called me for some reason... I can't remember what. And I asked her if she had NBC on. She didn't, but put it on and we both watched and said how awful and I'm sure some people died in there. As we were watching, the second tower was hit. However, the angle we were watching from (New York's NBC affiliate had their chopper hovering) was the opposite side of the towers from where the massive jumbo jet hit. So all we saw was the side of the second tower blow out and that's where it got a little scary. What the hell was going on here? If I had to pinpoint when it began to seem like more than an accident -- at least to some people -- it was at that moment. Those that saw the second plane knew it wasn't an accident. And minutes later, somebody had called in to NBC to have them rerun the tape of the second tower blowing out, and they said to look at the tiny space betweeen the two towers on our screen. And sure enough, between that space, you could see the second jet blip past right before exploding into the second tower. (Incidentally, on the footage I linked to there you can hear the newspeople, mostly from morning shows in New York, realize what is happening and it's just so odd to hear the lack of composure. Nothing drastic, just the gasps and "oh my gods" coming from newspeople who are trained to report what they see without much emotion. It's amazing and really brings you back to that morning.)

The timing after that becomes blurry for me. I didn't even attempt to go to work. I must have stood there in my living room watching for quite a while, as it began to dawn on everyone that the United States was coming under attack. Before long, we learned that the Pentagon was hit and to hear the newscasters show us those pictures, well, you could hear the shakiness in their voices as they simply tried to process it all.

Then we all heard the varying reports everybody remembers:

There might be more targets. There are planes unaccounted for. Another one is heading towards New York. Others are aiming at the White House.

And along about this time, the United States military snapped into action and realized we were literally under attack -- maybe not the kind of attack they were used to preparing for, but an attack nonetheless -- and as all commercial airliners were being grounded for the first time in air traffic history, fighter jets were being scrambled into the air above New York and Washington, D.C. And people cheered as the jets screamed over New York.

Realizing how serious things were getting, I (like most of the country) began thinking about who I might know who could be affected by this. The fact that the hijacked planes were cross-country flights meant that families from both the East and West coasts would be affected. People in New York, people in D.C., people from Boston, New Jersey, L.A. and San Francisco. And many places in between.

Cell service was spotty at best as everyone tried to locate friends and family. I went to my computer, which was always humming in our dining area along with my roommate's computer (she was a techie and had us networked so we both had high speed access), and sent a few emails. I emailed a group of work people and told them the following at 9:57 AM:

I have gone back home. Nobody can get near the city and the news is saying to avoid the entire area. Thisis my home email. Hopefully, some of you are there toreceive this.I tried calling but all circuits are evidently down atthe moment. If the bridge is reopened, I will be in.

The first one to respond was one of my project managers, who was known to be a hard-ass at work but who had a softer side. She immediately said "Stay home."

By mid-morning, the bridges and tunnels into and out of New York city were closed. One of my roommates also worked for my company and she and a few others made their way to our house simply to get out of our high-rise office building, which was the first building on the NJ side of the GW Bridge.

With an extra four or five people at our house, we brewed some more coffee and kept watching.

As everyone knows, before long, the first tower collapsed. I remember watching it and not actually believing it was happening. And I remember the reporter -- it may have been Matt Lauer -- saying something like, "And now it... looks...like one of the towers has collapsed." And just the way he said it summed up how many of us felt. It collapsed? How is that possible? It just had a hole in it. Buildings like that aren't supposed to go down like a house of cards. But as the dust cleared, we saw that it had. And I'll never forget my first thought: Wow, now there's only going to be one tower. That's going to be hard to get used to. Even then, it didn't occur to me that the second one could go down. It just didn't seem possible.

And then it did. Suddenly, as we all watched from TVs or across the river or from the streets of New York, the ground thundered as the tower crumbled to the ground. The towers were down.

I emailed my co-workers again and was the bearer of bad news at 10:13 AM:

One of the towers is down altogether. It collapsed.

I look back at that email and it all comes back to me. I can see the disbelief as I write the words very simply and straightforward. Basically, if they hadn't seen it yet, I didn't want it to be unclear.

My co-worker replied again and asked what other building had been hit since that rumor was swirling. At 10:26 AM, I sent the following back:

they rescinded that statement. it was actually thetower collapsing. It's totally gone. Also, the State Dept was just hit in DC, according to NBC.

An example of the misinformation that was flying around. NBC had no idea what to do and heard something was hit in DC. They thought it was the State Department but it turned out to not be true.

One more email from my co-worker, saying the following:

they say there is another hijacked plane on route to Washington, DC. Is it true?

Not sure how she thought I'd have more credible info, but I have to believe this was the doomed Flight 93 that eventually went down in Pennsylvania. But remember, there were a lot of rumors about planes unaccounted for or not responding and the possibility that the President would have to authorize fighters to shoot them down. More fright to an already scary day.

Sometime in the middle of the day, I happened to be at my computer instead of in front of the TV and I had my AOL IM online, as I always did back then. My best friend, known on here as Xtrosity, sent an IM.

Hey, please respond to this. I know you'll respond to this if you're okay.

It was the first time I realized people might be worried about me. I also got a call from my college roommate, Tim, who had been trying to page me all morning... but I had left my pager in my office the night before. I had left the office late on the night of September 10, and figured nobody would need me between 9 PM and 9 AM the next morning. Turns out by leaving my pager at work, my pages were going unanswered and the people trying to get me to call them began to worry more. Oops.

I assured Tim I was okay -- not far from the action, mind you, but okay. He then reported this info back to our group of college buddies who had continued to keep in touch over the years. When I eventually saw the back and forth (on my work email) of them asking if anyone had heard from me, and then Tim confirming that he had.... well, I was again overcome with emotion, knowing that people were worried about me.

I got worried about my family, too. I confirmed that my sister, in college in Rhode Island, hadn't decided to do a spur of the moment trip to NYC the night before (hey, you never know). After it taking me many tries to get through to leave her a message, she got back to me, confirming in as cheery a voice as she could that she was okay and for me to be careful.

I emailed my dad, whose office was letting people go home. He was staying, as per his usual (probably the only one working like nothing was happening that day). On occasion, his NJ-based company would have board meetings in NYC and I confirmed he wasn't there. He was in NJ. His email response to me was classic, former-military, gruff dad:

Be alert.... , be careful..... who knows if GW bridge may be a target

Gotta love it. Still the Lieutenant at heart.

Sometime in the early afternoon I had looked at my watch to figure out what the date was.... "September 11th," my roommate Mike said, "I think it's a date we'll all remember for a long time."

My friend Jamie, a girl I'd been friends with for years, managed to get in touch with me at about 7 PM that night. She lived in Boston and knew of at least one co-worker who'd been on one of the planes. When she heard my voice, she sounded relieved and said that once she realized her co-worker was on one of those planes, she began to worry about who else in her life might have been lost. I told her I wasn't going anywhere just yet and I heard my good friend break down and cry. A lot of us did that on that day.

I have other scattered memories as I tried to collect myself long into the night. I remember in subsequent days there being steelworkers there from as far away as Pittsburgh and Cleveland to help go through the rubble. I remember there being police officers from Los Angeles standing there when the mayor was speaking at the site. LA! How cool is it that LA sent some of their cops to help out in New York? (Can you imagine them trying to get around? Had to be confusing for those boys...)

I remember when baseball finally resumed, Larry Bowa, who was managing the Phillies (and is currently the Yankees third base coach), standing there during the national anthem, with tears running down his face.

I remember something that still chokes me up from the Boston Red Sox fans... fans and a city that hates the Yankees and pretty much New York in general. During their first game back, during the seventh inning stretch, they played New York, New York, (with the fans loudly singing it) and there was a huge banner sign that said, "Red Sox fans love New York." I still get a little misty thinking about that and how that was yet another example of nothing mattering except that we were all Americans and, thus, all attacked. We put down our differences... Boston-New York, LA-NY, NY-NJ, Midwest-East, political parties, etc. It didn't matter. We all were hurting and everyone cared. It was both a terrible time and an inspiring time.

I don't think we want this stuff to heal or to go away. As I said at the beginning, we need it to feel fresh and we need it to hurt. It still hurts me to think about that day. You know that question people sometimes pose to one another when having a getting-to-know-each-other kind of conversation.... "What was your worst day and what was your best day?" I never really knew for sure how to answer that.... well, September 11, 2001 was my worst day ever. I've been able to say that definitively for six years now. And I remember thinking it that night -- that I had never felt that awful in my life. And I wondered if it would ever change... it has...slowly. But it's never gone away and nor should it.

Sorry for this long-ass post and thank you for humoring me and allowing me to spill out my random thoughts on that awful day. I'll sign off with the line I signed off on my late-night email to my friends on September 11, 2001:

Be safe, be proud, be Americans.

Oh, But Wait, There's More

2007-09-05T07:35:00.000-04:00

Following up on the below story regarding how disgusting old pillows that have become frayed and threadbare must be thrown out, I'd like to share part 2 of the story.

Just a few short days later, while my lovely wife was partying like a rock star in NYC at a bachelorette party, I was doing some womanly things around the house, like cleaning up and doing laundry.

Ah, yes, laundry. Being the good husband I am trying to be, I, of course, included all of our laundry as I plowed through the many loads that needed to be done. Laundry is a simple task when you're a bachelor -- it gets considerably more complicated when a wife is involved. Or maybe just when my wife is involved. Either way, now there are panties introduced to the mix. And goodness, those are just the tiniest things ever. Thongs. We all have happy memories of thongs, usually stemming from the first time we slipped them off an unsuspecting, passed out female at a frat party.*

Well, thongs are far less fun when you need to wash, dry and -- yes -- fold them. But there I was, dutifully doing laundry and folding load after load (as my wife partied away in Manhattan), when I came across two thongs that really stood out.

They stood out because they were far more trashes than my poor Pac Man pillow. They were fraying, threadbare, coming apart... and yet they were still in circulation. Now, come on, if I have a pair of boxers that goes threadbare and rips so that my beanbag hangs out, I'm required to dispose of them immediately. Right? Aren't we all? So why are these two thongs still in circulation?

I asked that very question once my wife was sober and coherent enough to discuss it the following day.

"Those fit me just right," she explained, "and I don't want to stop using them because they're comfortable."

Really. Kind of like a favorite pillow. I mean, I'm just saying. But like most of my points, this one was dismissed and away she walked. I had lost again.

I'm sensing a double-standard here.

*Note: Implication of sexual advancement while under the influence of alcohol meant solely as a joke.

End of an Era

2007-08-28T06:24:00.000-04:00

Over the recent weeks and months, my wife has slowly been moving into the house and getting things in order. Yes, we moved her stuff in a while back, but getting the house situated and putting her touch on things takes time. Lots of time.

Among the things she spent some time on was our bedroom. And in the bedroom, back when it was my bedroom, was my pillow. A Pac Man pillow. Yes, I was kickin' it, old school. It was a Pac Man pillow, not unlike the one pictured here, and I got it when I was probably somewhere around 5 or 6 years old.

Because I'm efficient and not wasteful, I had seen no need to purchase a new pillow over the past twenty-five years, give or take. I was still using Pac Man. He had seen me through puberty, high school, college, my career, and into my 30s. I had some of the finest sex of my life with that pillow as my support -- literally.

Granted, Pac Man was beginning to get a bit flattened, threadbare, and faded. But he was going strong and I had no need to replace him.

My mother and sister began putting the idea in Watersyne's head a while back that my beloved pillow was "disgusting" because it was so old. They reasoned that it had "dust mites" living in it and, well, once my lovely wife heard that, all bets were off. It was going to be her mission to take my pillow away from me. She brought it up whenever Pac Man peeked out from his pillowcase -- so I did my best to keep him hidden and out of her sight.

Well, two weeks ago, when I came home from work one day, Watersyne had done wonders to our bedroom. There were snazzy curtains up, a new duvet cover, nice new shams, and the room was cleaner than ever. She had also been working on one of our many plastic storage bins and after gauging my mood, she led me to the storage bin, and showed me what was at the bottom.

My Pac Man pillow.

There he was, squished under several other pillows and blankets that were "going into storage," much the same way your parents sent away your 14 year old golden retriever to "live on a farm."

"See, we're not getting rid of it," Watersyne reasoned.

I didn't really expect to win the argument. And even though I felt like I made pretty good points, I still don't expect to ever see my Pac Man pillow again. Truth is, I never really thought I'd have it forever -- I knew this day would come. Women like to find the things you use over and over.... and trash them. Like your favorite flannel shirt or your best faded jeans or your most trusty workboots or your comfy old college sweatshirt with the salsa stains on it.

"Why must you take away the one thing I use every single day?" I asked, as patiently as I could.

Her calm composure dissolved after just one question from me: "It's gross! It's disgusting! It's so old there are dust mites in it!"

"Oh, you and my mom and sister and the damn dust mites! What did you replace it with?"

"One of my pillows from my apartment," she replied.

"How old are they?"

She paused. "Maybe ten years." (Which means at least ten years.)

"Okay," I slowly answered, kind of enjoying this, "So my twenty-five year old pillow is disgusting and unacceptable for use, but your ten year old pillows are safe and clean? Do I have this right?"

I was proud of myself because I was clearly making good points. This wasn't just me wanting to hold onto something for the sake of resisting change -- no, I was enjoying this not because I couldn't give up my pillow, but because her logic for doing so was something I simply felt like challenging.

She lost interest in the argument just as I was gaining steam and simply closed the lid on the bin and rejected my appeal.

Bye, Pac Man. It's been a good run.

Uh, What?

2007-08-27T13:11:00.000-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Miss Teen South Carolina:

Somebody Is Effing With Me

2007-08-21T07:42:00.000-04:00

Okay, so someone is clearly messing with me and, well, it's quite funny. Though I'm not sure I will really enjoy all the spam mail I'll probably end up with as a result.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from "Culver's ButterBurgers and Frozen Custard" offering me a free value basket with the purchase of... a value basket. Now, I'm not familiar with this establishment, but damn, a ButterBurger washed down by frozen custard quite simply cannot be bad. Especially twice.

The Web site claims it's the "#1 Burger Chain in America," which is also interesting, given that I've never heard of it. But what amused me about this email was that it wasn't just regular old spam. No, somebody signed me up because it had my first name along with my wife's last name -- spelled incorrectly, I might add, helping to lead me towards who the culprit might be (poor spellers are easy to trap).

So then today I get another email -- this one from "Cat Lovers." The body of the email says, "Welcome to Cat Lovers" and gives me a Login ID and temporary password. I'm actually kind of worried about what I might find at a site with security passwords and the words "cat lovers." Yeesh.

Either way, somebody knows how much I like cats and decided to add this to my list of places. Which is fine. Because I will find you. And you really will wish you'd stopped this sillyness after signing me up for Culver's.

Some Schmuck Pulled the Drain Plug in Lake Michigan

2007-08-17T06:35:00.000-04:00

Uh-oh, Lake Michigan is draining. Seriously, according to this article, a "man-made drain hole" is "slowly emptying Lake Michigan."

You're probably thinking, "Holy hell! How much time do we have?"

Well, I don't know if this prognosis is good or bad. On the one hand, the Canadian study responsible for this story claims that Lakes Huron and Michigan combined are losing 2.5 billion gallons of water each day. (Of course, it's a Canadian study and they use the metric system so they don't know what the fuck a gallon even is -- can we really trust them?)

Lake Michigan's water level has declined "nearly" two feet. Wow, that's significant, you might say. Except that it's declined "nearly" two feet.... since 1970.

At its deepest point, Lake Michigan is 923 feet deep... so 37 years ago, it was 925 feet deep. At this rate, by the year 2118, Lake Michigan will only be 919 feet deep at its deepest point.

Somebody call the Kentucky Headhunters -- we need to organize a benefit. Somebody get Al Gore on the phone. I bet he could do an entire movie about how we're destroying our environment. Oh wait.

But really, getting back to the article, what are we to take from this? What's the point? Why is this news? What's the real issue here? Well, the article doesn't tell us anything more than I've shared here. It's Fox News, after all.

They report. You gotta decide.

Completing My Musical Wishes

2007-08-16T07:21:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, I definitely liked music. However, for some reason, I was never into going to concerts. Part of this was probably that my parents were rather protective of us and as a result, we didn't go to concerts, Great Adventure, Action Park, etc. Whenever something bad happened at one of these places and it was reported in the newspaper, this only served to further cement the rules.

I don't really remember for sure when the first concert I attended was. I do know that in 1992, Genesis was touring after the release of the "We Can't Dance" album and my good friend Xtrosity had a ticket available for me. Alas, I was a sophomore in high school and had an exam the next day (this was June, I guess) and my dad simply wouldn't allow it. And then Genesis more or less disbanded. Well, shit.

Well, they've finally decided to tour again and they'll be in NYC at Madison Square Garden on September 25 and Watersyne and I will be there.

Another band I loved as a kid and grew to love even more when I was in high school was Def Leppard. I always had said that the top three bands I wanted to see in concert were 1) Van Halen, 2) Genesis and 3) Def Leppard. I managed to see Van Halen (with Sammy) a few years ago as well as the tour in 2002 when Sammy and Dave managed to sort of co-exist enough to collect millions of dollars and sing Van Halen music to us without anybody really named Van Halen backing them up. And as I said above, we'll be seeing Genesis in about a month.

Last night, we managed to see Def Leppard (who also brought along Stix and Foreigner) and it was pretty damn cool. Sure, they're old and don't quite sing the songs the same way anymore, but hell, DL formed thirty years ago and some of those hits were chart-toppers in 1983. So it was pretty awesome. Pour Some Sugar On Me was, of course, among the best-received songs since absolutely everybody knows it, although Photograph was also very highly revered. I was actually a bit disappointed that my favorite DL song, Let's Get Rocked, wasn't played. Weird.

So just this morning, I decided to check out Pollstar to see, by chance, if there was any news about Van Halen touring again someday. It's often rumored but that's such a dysfunctional band that you never know. Well, amazingly, this past Monday they agreed to reunite -- with David Lee Roth -- and tour North America starting in late September. They'll even be in the NYC area right around my birthday.

Hell yeah. Party like it's 1984, yo.

"Keep Money You Would Have Kept Anyway" Isn't As Catchy

2007-08-15T07:10:00.000-04:00

Okay, listen Bank of America. I like you. I like you more than most ginormous, near-monopolies deserve to be liked. In general, your customer service is good (for a bank) and I enjoy the ease of accessing my account information online.

That said, knock this shit off with "Keep the Change." Every single morning, while I have the Today Show on, I invariably hear your stupid commercial about "if all the loose change out there banded togerther." Yeah, if all the loose change in my pockets, my desk, random cups in my house and office, my car door handle, my nightstand, my wife's nightstand, my dresser, my jackets, my computer backpack, my suitcases, my sofa, my carpets and so forth... if it all "banded together," yes, I might have a nice chunk of "found money." I get that. But to equate that with your stupid "Keep the change" program is insulting, annoying and just plain false.

For those that don't know, Bank of Amercia's "Keep the Change" program works like this:

You have a debit card attached to your checking account. You use that debit card to buy an item or items -- let's say the total charge is $25.32. Bank of America, in this example, then charges you another 68 cents and then -- get this! -- deposits that 68 cents into your savings account for you. Thus you have "kept the change."

But wait, you say, wouldn't I already have that 68 cents whether I was involved in this "program" or not?

Why yes, you would.

"So I'm not gaining anything?" you would then ask.

No, no, you are not, I would respond.

Then I'm not doing that, you'd conclude... because you're a reasonable, salient, moderately intelligent human being.

Yet they continue pushing this stupid "feature" like it's something special that you're getting for being a Bank of America customer. In a nutshell, you're being charged a markup (albeit small) every single time you use your debit card and then... it's being given right back to you.

What's the point here? Forced savings? I guess so. I guess this is for the people who think that when they underreport their dependents and then at the end of the year get a big, fat tax refund, that they've somehow made out well and taken money from the government. When in reality, no, you've just given the government an interest-free loan that they made interest income on. Well-played, genius. Go save another twelve cents on your next trip to A&P.

Get Your Banjos Out

2007-08-07T07:16:00.000-04:00

As you may have recently heard about, the Duggar Family from Arkansas just had their 17th child. (From Arkansas! I know! Can you believe it??)

They were featured on The Today Show Tuesday morning and, WOW, is this a freakish situation. One commenter on the above story didn't pull any punches, referring to them as a "cult" in the making. I decided to research a little bit to see if there was anything to that and learned that he might indeed be right. The kids don't get much, if any, outside influence; they don't interact with people outside their immediate family (they're all home-schooled in their 7,000 square foot compound -- err, house); they have a rigid hour-by-hour schedule almost like a, well, cult; and each night they all gather around daddy for bible time. Wahoo!!! Sounds like a ball. For the complete daily schedule, check this out.

What I think is also interesting is that these brainwashed clowns used to use birth control! So they're hypocrites! Now they use nothing and see children as "gifts from God," which is of course a fair thing to think.... but is it fair to these kids to overpopulate like this? Are they trying to field two full softball teams or four basketball squads? What's the ultimate goal here? I think the idea of it becoming a cult is a pretty decent theory. And that they're from Arkansas and the patriarch's name is Jim Bob doesn't help this bias I'm feeling.

You can also call their house directly or drive up to the compound and see if you get shot. Phone and address information is here.

Kudos to loyal reader NicHul who pointed me in the direction of the photo you see above. Good stuff.

Minnesota On My Mind

2007-08-02T07:35:00.000-04:00

As everyone must know by now, the unthinkable happened in Minneapolis last night, as a major bridge suddenly collapsed into the Mississippi River as well as onto other pavement below (it didn't only collapse over the water).

It's kind of funny how the blogging community works. I'm not a super-frequent commenter on other blogs but I do read a number of them throughout the week when I have some downtime (or even when I don't have downtime and just want to procrastinate). Many are sports blogs but a few are personal blogs, like this one. One in particular, which you'll see over to the right, is called Velcrometer. The guy who writes it is hilarious and writes reviews of my favorite TV show, 24, over at Television Without Pity. Anyway, he's a terrifically funny writer and even his weekly musings about life are enough to often make me laugh out loud. I don't know this guy at all but I've read so much about his everyday life that I almost do feel like I know him, his wife and his son. And they all live in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I hadn't been reading his site lately, mainly because I've just been too busy to keep up on anything. But you can bet the first place I visited this morning was Velcrometer. And isn't that just weird? Why do I care about someone I've never met? I guess it shows the power of the written word and how galvanizing a silly little once-underground community like the blogosphere can be. It turns out that he and his family are fine and I actually felt a little bit of relief, that this one person I don't even know is okay.

Weird, I tell you.

Vocab Test Today

2007-07-25T07:18:00.000-04:00

Well, American Heritage Dictionaries has released a list of 100 words (well, actually they did this back in June but I never finished this post) that every person graduating high school this month should know. It also takes a little dig at the parents of this generation by saying that the parents should know these words, too. Well, okay then.

I looked over the words and, well, I'm not communications expert but some of them are kind of tough. Wait, no... I am a communications expert. And I'm fairly sure the majority of high school graduates in this or any other year would have a tough time accurate defining even half of these words. Don't get me wrong, though: they're good words to know.

As a public service, I'm going to provide a definition to each one of them here. These definitions may or may not be as precise as American Heritage Dictionaries would like.

abjure - something to do with my abs

abrogate - a gate through which a man of color walks.

abstemious - where my abs grow from

acumen - accurate males.

antebellum - the opposite of a bellum.

auspicious - even higher than "delicious" when complimenting your mother-in-law's cooking.

belie - another word for your stomach.

bellicose - as close to something as your belly is to you.

bowdlerize - to make people want to bow to you.

chicanery - acting like a chicken.

chromosome - some amount of chrome.

churlish - sort of curly.

circumlocution - electrocution in a circle.

circumnavigate - reading a map in difficult circumstances.

deciduous - something that needs to be decided.

deleterious - acting like a runaway delete key with a mind of its own.

diffident - not the same.

enervate - to enable nerves.

enfranchise - to award a city a sports franchise.

epiphany - Similar to "Tiffany" in the 80s, a name for girls you want to grow up to be strippers.

equinox - two oxen of the same size.

euro - one of the Disneys.

evanescent - shitty euro-band.

expurgate - vomit.

facetious - very much about faces.

fatuous - proper spelling of "fatass."

feckless - without freckles.

fiduciary - one who employs douchebags.

filibuster - a bomb that blows up Philadelphia.

gamete - small legs.

gauche - like quiche, only tastier.

gerrymander - Gerry Mander, a guy I went to elementary school with.

hegemony - the cost for having landscaping done.

hemoglobin - globetrotting.

homogeneous - smart and gay.

hubris - a spice similar to paprika.

hypotenuse - ten very hyper uses for something.

impeach - a peach's evil twin.

incognito - within a cognito.

incontrovertible - a convertible automobile where the top no longer works.

inculcate - the opposite of calculate.

infrastructure - opposite of outfrastructure.

interpolate - precedes a description of what the guys at Interpol ate for lunch.

irony - metally.

jejune - stammering when naming this month.

kinetic - ethics of your kinfolk.

kowtow - dragging a cow on a trailer.

laissez faire - French for "let's fart."

lexicon - a six-way sexual encounter.

loquacious - a person made entirely of liquid.

lugubrious - heavy.

metamorphosis - to become a member of the New York Mets.

mitosis - what you say before you describe what your toes is. (ex. "My toes is itchy.")

moiety - between wet and moist.

nanotechnology - how my iPod works.

nihilism - being like a guy named Neil.

nomenclature - a women-only pottery class.

nonsectarian - no secretaries allowed.

notarize - when you want to show off how pretty your eyes are, you say this.

obsequious - SO obvious.

oligarchy - a salad dressing.

omnipotent - the highest sperm count in your graduating class.

orthography - the class you take after Geography.

oxidize - to make someone strong as an Ox.

parabola - two bolas.

paradigm - two dimes.

parameter - two meters.

pecuniary - more strange than "peculiar."

photosynthesis - taking pictures at the same time as someone else.

plagiarize - to frequent someplace.

plasma - a kind of TV.

polymer - many mers.

precipitous - raining.

quasar - a TV brand.

quotidian - someone you can quote.

recapitulate - to capitulate again.

reciprocal - to ciprocal again.

reparation - to parate again.

respiration - to spirit again.

sanguine - North of San Diego.

soliloquy - A good name for a hooker.

subjugate - to make two jugates.

suffragist - someone who enjoys suffering.

supercilious - very, very silly.

tautology - the science of being taught.

taxonomy - the art of cheating on your taxes.

tectonic - technical mixed drink with tonic water.

tempestuous - very tempting.

thermodynamics - a really cool (dynamic) Thermos.

totalitarian - completely.

unctuous - someone who used to be rambunctious but isn't anymore.

usurp - to vomit.

vacuous - very raucous.

vehement - exhale furiously.

vortex - how to enter the Matrix.

winnow - an upside-down minnow.

wrought - a kind of iron fence.

xenophobe - someone afraid of xylephones.

yeoman - the way to holler to a buddy who is walking by.

ziggurat - an expert in Zagat ratings.

Want To Hear Something Funny?

2007-07-23T15:25:00.000-04:00

Once you get married, then comes all the fun things about being married that you never knew existed. Like getting phone calls in the middle of the day from your rather stressed-out wife.

Today was like any other day here... I was busily churning out widgets or whatever it is I do here... and my phone rings. It's my wife and the first thing she does is tell me about her mood.

"I'm in a terrible mood," she announces.

"Well, terrific," I cautiously respond. "I can't wait to see you later, then."

Why is she in this mood? Well, for one thing, she's packing up the remainder of her things from her apartment and bringing them to our house. And it's pouring out today.

"This weather is ridiculous," she informs me.

Yes, indeed. Who can we talk to about that?

But this isn't the best part of what's aggravating her. No, the best part is that while she had the door to her upstairs apartment's sunroom propped open (to bring things to the car), a bird flew in the door, up the stairs and was now loose in her sunroom. The sunroom, it should be noted, has windows on three sides. She informs me that she and her mom cannot get the bird out.

"Well, have you opened the windows?" I asked.

"We opened one, but he won't go to it."

I do like the innocent nature of my wife. I think it's cute that she thinks animals are like the ones in Disney movies, with coherent, rational thoughts and the ability to reason. The only problem with looking at animals like this is that you end up in these situations where you can't figure out why the bird doesn't a) go out the one lone window you opened for him, or b) go back down the stairs and out the door.

"Honey, the bird can't tell which window is open. That's why they fly into glass all the time," I try to explain.

I continued, heading her off, "And he's not going to fly down the staircase he flew up because he's not smart enough to think of that."

"Well, yeah," she answers, "My mom was trying to call him to get him to go that way... saying, 'Here, birdie, birdie, birdie.'"

Her mom, I should mention, works a lot of overnight shifts and doesn't sleep enough.

When I asked why they didn't just open all the windows to increase their odds, she told me she was afraid he might attack her. Unless it was a hawk or something, I didn't think that was likely and I asked what kind of bird it was.

"A small bird," was the country girl's reply.

She then told me about how she tried to spook it back in the direction of the aforementioned door (at the bottom of a flight of stairs) by putting a box on her head and using a broom, but she freaked and tripped over a dishwasher that was recently delivered and sitting on the porch.

I wished I could have seen this play out, with my wife flailing at a tiny bird with a box on her head while her mom shrieked in the doorway.

High comedy.

Sabbatical is Over, Bitches

2007-07-16T07:56:00.000-04:00

Yes, I took a month off from my personal blogsite/lifejournal/shrink-alternative. And I didn't tell you about it. I'm a bad, bad host. So be it. Of course, for the three people who regularly read this site, I think you were all present at the glorious event last month that caused me to unplug from this and plug into something (someone) else.

I got married a few weeks ago and then spent eleven glorious days in the fiftieth state (that's Hawaii, for those of you who didn't pay attention in Social Studies). We then flew back directly to Maryland for another wedding in which I got to be a handsome groomsman. We're now back in the motherland and in the process of moving my wife into my teeny, tiny house. Since she's not completely moved in yet, she has had spend a couple of nights at her old apartment without me so she can make the most of her time packing. So there have been a couple of days of feeling like we're back in the dating phase, talking on the phone at night and going to bed without each other. I don't especially like this, although I can watch the 2 AM Sportscenter at any volume I choose (or, in last night's case, a WWII kamikazee show on the History Channel) and not worry about disturbing anyone. I can also pass gas and scratch my balls as liberally as I choose. Oh, wait, I'm married now. I can do those things anyway. And she still has to have sex with me. By law, or something.

So yeah, I'm back. And I hope to be back on the more regular posting schedule. We even may be investing in a new home computer so when you couple that with my current state of serious insomnia, you might have more posts that you could ever want to read. Of course, one post from me could be more than you'd ever want to read, too, but that's neither here nor there.

One Week

2007-06-15T07:29:00.000-04:00

Did you ever see that movie, Deep Impact? It came out the same year as Armaggeddon and was the same basic story; a massive asteroid is hurtling towards Earth and mankind is trying to defend itself. Well, during Deep Impact, they would occasionally put up on the screen a reminder of how much time was left before humankind was going to be obliterated. Something like:

"August 6: Eight days to impact."

Well, that's kind of how I'm feeling these days. I feel like on a day like today, when I get up in the morning, there's a little digital readout beneath me and it says:

"June 15: One week to impact."

(I suppose it would be obnoxious of me to say something like "One week to detonation." Hee.)

I imagine people get very nostalgic and introspective during the final days and weeks before they get married. But I haven't had much of that. Fact is, I've been so balls-to-the-wall nuttily busy, I can't think about much beyond when I get to sleep next. Work is blowing up like crazy, we have all those typical last-minute craziness details to do, plus we're always in the process of improving my house... so really, I've not had time to think too much about things.

I had to sit down and carefully do my personal vows the other day. I had started them several weeks ago and had to get that wrapped up. And I wanted to make sure it wasn't, like, during a break between to work-related things I was writing. You know, probably wouldn't be the right frame of mind as I rushed through it, making sure to use the writing style the Fremulon Insurance* prefers.

I also think that it's interesting that some people freak out right before they get married. (Or maybe that's just years of TV and movies making me think that.) I mean, if you haven't flipped your shit by this point, why would you once you've got the tux on?

I was talking to a friend about this a while back and I commented on that fact. And how it felt more like a committment when I bought the diamond ring and when I asked her to marry me. From that point on, I felt like we were more "committed" than anything that happens on the actual wedding day. My friend pointed out that, no, I was committed a couple of days earlier when I spoke to her father about his permission. Point taken.

I go to pick up the wedding rings today and that's pretty cool. I love what we designed and am looking forward to us wearing them. Another thing I'm looking forward to? Our honeymoon. Nearly two weeks of fun in the sun, relaxing, snorkeling, eating, drinking, swimming, maybe a little hiking, parasailing, etc... I mean, the idea of going away and NOT having to be concerned with the next step of wedding planning is simply a heavenly thought. It's funny how you get to a point where, even in a short engagement, you simply can't remember your life before you were planning this grand event. I mean, really, our lives must have been so much easier then. They didn't necessarily seem like it, but they do now. Just like when you have kids, you wonder how much simpler your life must have been before them.

We make our final payments to the reception hall on Sunday, along with delivering all the things that have to be at the reception (centerpieces, favors, cameras, etc.). After that, we're actually hoping to be able to take a breath and sort of enjoy the final week. We have a few more payments due but for the most part, we'll have the big things (and most of the small things) squared away.

One of the things we feel like we should do is create at least some semblance of a list for our photographer so that when we're asked what we want pictures of, we don't just stare blankly and say, "Uhhhh, I dunno." So I've been doing some Web searches for wedding photography checklists. Some have been way more than we would need, some have been less. But one is kind of haughty looking and kind of vague in its suggestions, which isn't helpful at all. And then there's this little gem:

Tip: Ask your photographer to take some shots using a slow-shutter speed so the
movement blurs the image a little. See the example to the left.

The example to the left? Well, go to this link and take a look at the blurry, piece-of-shit picture they use as an example of artsy photography. It's purely awful. And it's kind of funny. Haven't we all known someone who thought they were a lot more artful than they actually were? Well, this Website appears to take it to a higher form. Fun.

Anyway, no matter how much you prepare, you still end up feeling like the host of the event for the entire weekend, making sure people are on time and comfortable and having fun. And I think that's actually normal but we sometimes forget that. I mean, you are, after all, having a reception, which means you're receiving people. So yeah, we are the hosts. And we think it's going to be a hell of a good time.

One more crazy week to go.

*Not the real name of one of my clients.

Red Zone -- Under Three Weeks

2007-06-04T07:37:00.000-04:00

You know how people often joke about eloping? Well, they're probably not joking.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I want a real wedding. I want all the fun that goes with it. But I also completely understand right now why so many couples who are getting married get to that "let's get this over with" stage long before their wedding day actually arrives.

Something I would advise people not to do is think about what you could be spending your money on if you weren't putting on a massive party and buying dinner for 200 people. Because, really, it's kind of not fun to think about how much cash you spend.

Yet there you are, making budgets and trying to keep a handle on everything so you don't go completely out of control. And then you've got parents offering to help out and so you really do have to figure out exactly what everything is costing. And, just like buying a house, eventually you become numb to it.

"Oh, that's $2,000? Oh, okay, let me write you a check."

Also like buying a house, I feel like this becomes a full-time job in and of itself. You have things like booking a reception hall, booking a church, finding a photography location, finding a photographer, finding a DJ, finding a videographer, locking in a block of hotel rooms, making dozens upon dozens of phone calls, managing budgets, determining centerpieces, determining bouquets, making pocket squares, making favors, making invitations, making invite lists (for engagement parties, showers, bachelor/bachelorette parties, rehearsals, weddings, etc.), monitoring those invite lists, following up with people who don't reply, registering for gifts, tracking who sent what, sending thank-yous, returning gifts you registered for but once you have them wondered why you ever wanted them in the first place, deciding on rehearsal dinner location, deciding on engagement party location, deciding on consummation location, finding a dress for the bride, finding dresses for the bridesmaids, finding tuxedos for the groomsmen, making sure the groomsmen get measured (for their tuxes, that is), finding the bride a place for hair and makeup, agreeing on a honeymoon, planning a honeymoon, designing wedding rings, ordering wedding rings, deciding what gets engraved in wedding rings, deciding on menus, deciding on cocktail food, deciding on dinner food, deciding on song lists, getting the stupid marriage license that you can only do on weekdays and with a birth certificate, making a seating chart, filling out placecards.... and well, plenty of other things.

It's actually been a fun process and we can't believe we're now under three weeks to go. Of course, we're now into the mission critical stage where we really are out of weekends to say, "We'll get to that..." The truth is, most of this has to be done by next weekend because the weekend after that it all has to be delivered to the reception hall and final payments need to be made. Hooray. Then it's a fun week leading to the wedding (stressless, I'm sure), then the wedding and then off to Hawaii to do nothing for almost two weeks.

I'm not sure we'll know how to cope with not planning this blessed event once we're done. Not that it's over at that point since we'll have all those thank-yous to write. I guess we'll need something to do on the ten-hour flight. Besides join the mile-high club, that is.

No Word Yet On The Golden Pooper

2007-05-30T07:05:00.000-04:00

Have you ever tried to move a bathtub? I have. I have a claw-foot tub that I removed from my bathroom when I bought my house and put in the basement. With three other guys and a hand truck. Yeah, it's still sitting right where we left it. My point? They're not easy to move.

Yet somehow, some sneaky Japanese magician made one simply "vanish" from a hotel recently.

This reminds me of Austin Powers response to Ivana Humpalot saying her name: "Yeah, well I want a gold-plated toilet..."

This is an 18-karat gold bathtub that weights 176 lbs and was located on the tenth floor of the hotel. According to the story, the tub is only available for a few hours a day "for security reasons."

The story then goes on to reveal that the tub wasn't riveted down to the floor, there are no security camers, and they have no leads.

Yes, security is indeed tight.

The Finals -- Even I'm Not Watching

2007-05-28T11:45:00.000-04:00

So normally I rail against media-types who mock hockey by saying nobody watches it and nobody cares and it's fallen behind poker in terms of popularity and TV ratings... but still, I can't argue the fact that I'm not paying attention one bit at this point. I haven't watched a hockey game since the Rangers were eliminated.

However, I'm still interested in telling you what's going to happen so that you don't need to watch, either.

Last round, I did say the Anaheim Ducks would make the Finals but I also said the Buffalo Sabres would get there, too, after taking out the Rangers. I was very wrong about that. Apparently, Ottawa is better than anyone realized.

Anyway, so here we are in the Finals and I'm ready to get on with making my pick.

Anaheim Ducks (2, West) versus Ottawa Senators (4, East) -- Well, as I said, Ottawa is clearly better than anybody realized. They took out the upstart Penguins to start the playoffs and then totally manhandled the Devils in the second round and then amazingly plowed through the Buffalo Sabres, nearly sweeping them in the conference finals. It's truly been an impressive performance for them. And now, they'll pretty much have all of Canada on their side since the country to the North tends to pull together when one of their teams makes the Finals. And on that subject, this is not a bad run the Canadian franchises are putting together. This marks the third consecutive Stanley Cup Finals that has featured a Canadian franchise. Given that there are only six teams left in Canada (Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal), this is not too bad. Granted, Calgary and Edmonton have lost the last two Finals, both in excruciating seventh-game fashion, but still, it's good for Canada to be so well-represented. At least the league is flourishing in one country.

As for Anaheim, they were one of the consistently best teams all season long. They had a stretch where they came back to Earth and actually were overtaken by Detroit for the #1 seed in the West, but they've simply been dominant in the playoffs. They've taken some lumps from some good teams but have managed to hit right back and assertively make their way to the Finals. I thought from about February on that the Finals would be Anaheim-Buffalo and I turned out to be half-right.

Anaheim is just too good, I think. They have two of the best defensemen in the NHL in Pronger and Neidermayer together on the same team. It's very hard for any team to deal with this, plus Anaheim's opportunistic scoring and lockdown goaltending from Giugere.

Sadly, I think it's going to be another "almost" Spring for Canada, as the Sens are going to be overtaken by a simply better team. It's not that Ottawa's going to lose, I don't think; I just think Anaheim is that much better.

Ducks in 6.

30 Days Out

2007-05-23T07:40:00.000-04:00

Well, as of today, we're officially thirty days away from wedded bliss. Or our wedding, anyway.

Why did I use the picture to the right? Well, if you only glanced at it, look closer -- this is one of those examples of things you just don't consider when planning a wedding. See, if you choose to do it on a beach somewhere, this is always a possibility: fat, topless tourists from Alabama. So plan accordingly.

Last night, we had our final meeting with our Pastor and he declared us fit for marriage. It made me wonder what he would say if we had totally half-assed our sessions with him and so I asked. He said he definitely would tell a couple he doesn't think they're ready to be married and that he has serious reservations about it. Evidently, he has no such reservations about us. Good to know.

We've gotten our gifts for our wedding party. We've had our final meeting with the entertainment company, which includes DJ, photographer and videographer. Watersyne has further fittings of her dress. The girls are all getting their dresses altered, where necessary, at this time. The guys.... well, as far as clothing and game-day preparation are concerned, our only responsibility is making sure we don't get so fat we can't fit into the suits we were measured for. Oh, and confirming when picking it up that it's the right tux.

We have to have final conversations with our harpist for the ceremony music, the limo company for the day's details, the reception hall for how we want things set up, set up final payments to multiple vendors, decisions about reception favors.... We're beginning to fully realize why most couples are extremely ready for their honeymoon by the time the wedding day is approaching. Oh, and on that subject, we still need to officially choose our excursions for that.

It's a full-time job, folks. But most of you reading this already know that.

A Talladega Wedding

2007-05-16T07:11:00.000-04:00

Something that's sometimes said about blogging is that there are rules around what you should write about and there are lists of things people think it's taboo to write about. Some of those things involve your pregnancy, your children, your dog, your cats, things like that. Because, really, who wants to hear about how amazing your dog is?

One of the topics that I recently read is to be avoided when it comes to writing your own blog is your wedding. Well, I guess I can understand that, but I don't really care. As you may recall, I make the rules around here.

Last night, Watersyne and I had our meeting at the entertainment company that's handling our DJ services, photography and videography. That's all well and good and we got accomplished what we needed to get done. On the way out, we saw a picture of a reception hall, set and ready for the party (whether it was a wedding or not, who knows). And, you know, if we were having any trouble deciding on the theme for our wedding or what colors to use or the centerpiece that should be on each table... well... maybe this picture answered all of it at once.

I think this might be a winner in so many ways. Yes, that's right, the centerpieces are fucking stock cars. I'm sorry, but... really? Have we gotten to this point with NASCAR's following? I mean, I love hockey but I'm not making each table a team-themed table with a giant puck as the centerpiece. (Although that would be cool....)

"I don't think it's a wedding," said Watersyne hopefully, clearly not wanting to believe it's possible that someone would do this.

And it would definitely make more sense as.... something else. Like a birthday party. But how many birthday parties are so organized? I mean, this is a hall of some sort, ready to host an ostensibly formal event. I mean, except for the giant stock cars overhead.

I also like that they didn't just stop with the massive cars that are a tad big for centerpieces, I think we can all agree. No, they decided that if they were going to do this they were going to go all the way. The checkered flag tablecloth and napkins... the overhead banners for the various drivers. I can almost picture the fistfight between the two hillbillies who both want the last seat at the Tony Stewart table.

God, I Love Hockey!

2007-05-10T07:05:00.000-04:00

Jesus saves... but Pope John Paul II puts in the rebound!!

Okay, that's enough tempting the heavens to strike me down for one day. It's been a while since I posted here, and in that time a lot has happened. We'll keep this post specific to hockey.

The Rangers finally exited the playoffs after giving us a hell of a lot to get excited about this Spring. They bounced the Atlanta Thrashers in four games in the first round and then put up a great fight against Buffalo, the best team in the NHL, in the second round. The series was 2-2 after four games and in Game 5, the two teams battled scorelessly until about 3:16 was left in the game and Marty Straka made it 1-0 Rangers. This would have been huge, to hold on to that lead. Winning Game 5 in Buffalo's building would have finished them, I firmly believe. Lundqvist was already in their heads and if he'd held on to that shutout, Buffalo would have then lost three in a row while scoring a total of two goals in those three games.

Alas, the Rangers getting the breaks did not continue in Game 5. With under eight seconds to go, the Sabres tied the game up and then won it in overtime on the power play. Series over.

I had said after Game 4 that if the Rangers won Game 5 that I thought they'd win the series but that they'd have to do it in Game 6 and not allow the series to go back to Buffalo. And that if Buffalo won Game 5 it was probably over. Game 5s are always pivotal but this one felt even more critical. And then to lose it that way, well, you just knew it hit the Rangers right in the gut.

It showed in Game 6 back at the Garden. The crowd was bonkers but Buffalo had their legs back and their confidence showed. They put five goals past Lundqvist and held on the furious Rangers rally, as New York kept coming back from two goals down, eventually succumbing 5-4. As far as series that don't go the full distance are concerned, this was a very good one. And the Ranger fans repeated last year's classy send-off by staying in the building at the end and saluting the Rangers one more time, even getting the player salute to the fans one last time for a great season. There's a lot to be proud of and this team is definitely heading in the right direction. How much longer the Jagr window is open is a matter of some concern, though. Look for the Rangers to re-sign Shanahan and Nylander and maybe pick up one or two more proven guys to make a serious run next season. I can't wait.

As for my prognosticating, I'm doing pretty well. After getting seven of eight series correct in Round 1, I had all four right in Round 2, bringing me to 11-1 in picking series winners correctly. Too bad I had no money on any of this. I'm an idiot, for the record.

So how about those conference finals?

(1) Detroit Red Wings versus (2) Anaheim Ducks -- The Duck franchise's decision to lose the "Mighty" from their name seems to have worked wonders. This team got off to a blistering start at the beginning of the season and kept going strong in the talented Western Conference all year long. They've now plowed through the first two rounds of the playoffs and it doesn't look to me like many teams even have a shot at stopping their outstanding top defensive guys, Chris Pronger and Scott Neidermayer. Those two are just the anchor of a fantastic team. Teemu Selanne up front is still the sniper he always was and J-S Giguiere in net is on absolute fire this postseason. As for Detroit, most people picked the Sharks to upset them in the second round and the Wings were indeed down 2-1 in the series before winning three straight to close out the teal boys from San Jose. If Dominik Hasek is focused and not playing possum, the Wings are near-impossible to beat. They're well-coached, have talent, have solid defensive players and, as mentioned, have an all-world goalie. Only problem is that goalie is 42 and the Wings lost one of their top defenders for the playoffs in Matt Schneider. As a result, 45-year-old Chris Chelios will be getting even more ice time and there's talk of him playing the power play for the first time in probably a decade. While I admire the Wings focus and I think they have one of the best home-ice advantages in all of hockey, I felt since midseason that the Western Finals representative would be Anaheim. Not enough has changed to make me rethink that. The Wings will be tough but in the end they won't have quite enough to overcome a more healthy and equally talented Ducks squad. Ducks in 7.

(1) Buffalo Sabres versus (4) Ottawa Senators -- These teams hate one another. They had one of the best (worst?) brawls all season just a couple months ago. That fight included the goalies going at it, although the Buffalo goalie that night was the since-traded Marty Biron. However, as I said, they hate one another and the bad blood remains. Thing is, this is the playoffs and I think they'll be a little more focused and less interested in taking runs at each other. If the series or a specific game get out of reach, then you'll definitely see some cheap shots. As for the teams, Buffalo just punched in the mouth by the Rangers but remained committed to their game and was able to recover. Ordinarily, I'd say I would be worried about their resolve after seeing how losing those two close ones at the Garden clearly rattled them. However, as I mentioned above, the Sabres seemed to regain their poise, confidence and swagger in Game 6 and took care of business the way championship-caliber teams do. Ottawa, though, has also been methodic in putting away upstart Pittsburgh and perennial power New Jersey. The New Jersey series was particularly interesting since the Sens have a history and reputation of choking in the playoffs while New Jersey is usually a steady winner in the Spring. The Sens seem to have chucked their choker label and are clearly as focused as they've ever been on the big prize. And this is a good year for them, not being the 1-seed, not being expected to win it all. Maybe it's that ability to be under the radar that's helping them. Regardless, I think their ride ends here. The Sabres are just too good and too complete a team. I think they got their one scare in this past round and that they'll run over Ottawa on their way to the Finals. As I said about the Ducks, I felt the Sabres were destined for the Finals months ago. It's an easy pick for me. Sabres in 5.

We're Beginning to Believe

2007-05-02T07:51:00.000-04:00

Well, holy hell, those were two amazing playoff games at Madison Square Garden. While the two home games against Atlanta two weeks ago were fun, they weren't nearly as suspensful or "playoff hockeylike" as these past two against Buffalo.

The Rangers had come in against Atlanta up 2-0 and simply dominated their two home games, sweeping the Thrashers and making us fans deliriously happy with a playoff winner to cheer for. Then, of course, our beloved Rangers drew the top-seeded, tops-in-the-NHL Buffalo Sabres in the second round by virtue of being the lowest seed left and we all felt, well, it was a good season.

I'm not suggesting Rangers fans gave up -- never! But we're also a realistic bunch and we know that last year was a huge leap forward with a terrible finish (being swept by the Devils). And then this year was another step forward in making the playoffs again and then advancing. Losing to the best team in the NHL wouldn't be the worst thing and we'd still be proud of our boys.

But what's funny is that the Rangers themselves didn't seem to be just happy to be in the second round. They wanted to win. They played a tough first two periods in Game 1 before getting sloppy and losing to a team they aren't fast enough to play a fast style with. Then in Game 2, they let 2-1 in the third before allowing two late goals to let one slip away. They must have believe they should have won that game (and they should have) because they came home ready to outhustle and outplay Buffalo. They had 46 shots in the double-OT game on Sunday to make the series 2-1, Buffalo, and then they controlled the play for most of last night's 2-1 win as well.

Now, suddenly, it's 2-2 and it's almost difficult to believe. We're not used to the Rangers handling adversity this well. And as I said, nobody could blame them if they lost to the Sabres who, when you watch them, you can't help saying, "Wow, this team is good."

But the Rangers clearly have a game plan and it's working. They're playing physical with the less-brutish Sabres, they're not letting them get set up on offense, and they're playing good defense and not letting the Sabres rush up and down the ice. Sure, it means you almost have to play Devils-style hockey (score a goal and hope for a shutout by your goalie) but they seem to have determined that this is the only way to win this series. And do you know what? We're all starting to believe it can happen.

Last night, the Rangers managed to take a 2-0 lead with about 12 minutes to go in the third period an we went bananas. A 2-0 lead with as well as Lundqvist is playing in net? We felt a lot better than the tenuous 1-0 lead. Well, we hadn't even stopped celebrating when, 33 seconds later, Buffalo broke through for a goal to make it 2-1. And then they kept the pressure on and several times nearly tied it up.

The most notable time is evidenced in the picture above, when Henrik Lundqvist had to make an amazing stop on Daniel Briere with less than twenty seconds left in the game. The play went to review because the Sabres thought it went in and the officials weren't sure. The review went on for quite some time, with all of us remaining on our feet as we had been for the final two minutes of this incredibly suspenseful game. As the review dragged on, more and more people began calling friends who were watching on TV. My sister texted me and said it looked like a goal. We heard the same thing from others. We began to think that it was a tie game and we could be looking at another long overtime.

Then, suddenly, the Rangers caught a break. The replays showed the puck almost crossing the line but there was no camera angle that actually showed the puck completely over the line. The screen capture below is what was looked at the most, I think.

You can see the black smudge that is the puck right on the goal line and right against Lundqvist's right pad. That pad continued sliding out from the net and so, for that reason, I think it's possible the puck was never completely over the line. Either way, the officials saw they did not have conclusive evidence to overturn the no-goal call on the ice and gave the signal that it was indeed, no goal.

And the place, once again, went ballistic. I haven't cheered for hockey like that in many, many years. I said to my dad that the whole last ten minutes of the game felt like the Finals in 1994, as the Rangers desperately tried to hold off a furious attack.

So now, as I said, the series is 2-2 and it's now a best-of-three series with Game 5 Friday in Buffalo, Game 6 Sunday back at the Garden and Game 7, if necessary, next Tuesday night in Buffalo.

I did actually say that I thought this would be the case after four games, although I thought each team would split at home while instead each team has held serve at home. This, of course, doesn't bode well for the Rangers since they'll now have to win at least one in Buffalo and then win another home game, too. But it's not nearly as daunting as being in that 0-2 hole to start the series was.

And another interesting thing to me was simply how downtrodden the Sabres sounded after both Games 3 and 4. Admittedly, those are tough games to lose, one in OT and the other on a disputed goal (both 2-1, nailbiters). However, if you're that team you need to look at it as having been so close it could have gone either way. The Rangers coaching staff seems to get the Rangers to believe they can win no matter what the odds are and this is evident in how the team plays and how focused they clearly are. The Sabres just sounded defeated in the locker room after both games and even their coach, Lindy Ruff, has repeatedly said things about how they "have to get [their] feet moving," and things of that nature. It almost sounds like he isn't sure what to do. All season long, the Sabres have rolled four lines successfully, yet in last night's game Ruff changed that and only had three lines going for much of the game. Does this shift in approach impact fatigue? Does it show some minor panic on the Sabres part?

Anytime you lose consecutive games in the playoffs you have to panic at least a little bit since there's so little time to have slumps, but you really shouldn't let your team, fans and, most importantly, the opposition, see that panic. And I think the Sabres are beginning to wonder why their dynamic offensive team is having so much trouble. And maybe Henrik Lunqvist and his stellar play is starting to get into their heads a little bit.

Buffalo is a disciplined team and, unlike Atlanta, isn't letting the Rangers physical play goad them into penalties or stupid mistakes. They appear focused as well but, as I said, a little more nervous than they were when they were up 2-0. If you want to get all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals, you have to be able to overcome this kind of pressure. The Sabres, if they want to advance, need to stop acting and sounding like they're losing this series. They lost in the Eastern Conference Finals last year and felt they got a raw deal and were actually the better team. Many agreed that they were but that it just didn't happen for them. In this series, there's no doubt in anyone's mind that they're the better team once again -- but right now they're showing signs of being mortal.

Stan Fischler said on the Rangers post-game last night that he fully expects the Rangers to win this series now. Some of the other guys were kind of surprised at how confident Fischler now was in the Rangers and he said he thinks he sees it in how both teams are playing and that he thinks it won't matter who has home-ice. That's mighty bold and even I am not willing to go that far.

However, I've said enough for now. Game 5 is Friday and if they can pull out a win in Buffalo, they'll be back home on Sunday playing to move on to the Conference Finals. Just knowing it's a possibility is awesome.

I love hockey.