I *will* say this........

Had a great weekend last week.....this week kinda busy but I will say this.

My wife's macaroni and cheese is kickass.

That is all.

Windows 7 is the dog's balls

Not sure where that saying comes from but I have a friend that uses it all the time to denote that he likes something.

I have Windows 7 running on a 4 year old Pentium 4 laptop with one gig of RAM and by golly....it runs pretty darn good.

till later.

What a weekend.......

When you work retail....you get used to working weekends, holidays and weird shifts. I was pleasantly surprised last week to find out I was off Sat/Sun/Mon/Tue.

Been working retail for most of the last 35 years...this is the first time I can remember having off 4 days in a row-whatever, I'll take it.

The whole family helped out with some gardening this weekend.



What was I doing?



Taking pictures of my toe and getting my cocktail on.

I was out of Seagram's 7 so I had to go liquor store shopping...there are lots of different kinds of booze. I go into a liquor store maybe once every 2 or 3 years to get a new bottle of whiskey...I decided to buy the cheapest whiskey I could find.

9 bucks bought me a bottle of some brand I never heard of-it's all good, I can't taste it anyways after I dump in the Seven Up. Maybe because I don't drink much....but why is there 50 different brands of whiskey?

I did manage to get my lazy ass outside and I seeded some bare spots in the lawn and did some yardwork. I always manage to go out in the middle of the day when it's 90 degrees-I ain't the smartest knife in the drawer.

Hell, I even rode my bike some....it was only 5 miles but ya gotta start somewhere.

Since my knee operation and my return to work- my knees haven't been doing the greatest. I have arthritis in both of them to start with and having the one operated on didn't really help matters as I began to favor the "good" knee and that one started to give me major problems.

In the last couple weeks-I've turned a corner and they've been slowly improving. To be honest, I am totally paranoid about overdoing the exercise thing and screwing them up again. Ain't no way I wanna have to live with the constant pain I've been through the past few months.

I've gained a few pounds so I really need to get back on the horse, just don't want to screw up my progress.

Dick Cheney is just killing me. For 8 years you didn't hear shit from the guy and now he can't shut the hell up. I more apt to listen to this dude more then anyone else in the Republican party....just sayin'.

Well, I've touched on politics in this blog post....may as well hit religion while I'm at it and piss off the other 50% of my readers. Don't blame me, I just post the links.....

This guy pretty much sums up Memorial Day for me...as do these guys.

Refrigerators....ours is pretty much average.

28 years of marriage down the poop chute because Mel can't keep his penis in his pants. Lovely, I'm sure his 7 children are proud.

Saw this on the way to taking our son to school this morning.....I'd be willing to bet that the driver was talking on a cell phone. That's the second time that house has been driven into.

Overkill.

till later.

Never.........

Never and I mean never underestimate the power of stupidity in large groups of people.

Idiocracy is gonna be here sooner then later.

My new favorite website..........

Dear God.

Huge........

I'm in the middle of a huge project for a new client......redoing several laptops, several desktop computers and a server. Also installing a bunch of new software, hardware and learning Windows Mobile 6 so I can synchronize the clients phones to his desktop and vice versa.

Kinda busy, not much time to blog.

When it rains it pours.

I'm not complaining.

till later.

I'm serious.......

......about my ice cream.

How to be a baker..

Wow, I didn't know this video of me was still around....

I looked pretty good back then....

Worst job ever.....

I don't know how much this person makes a week....


...but it ain't enough.

Cat_invisible_pet door

Cat_invisible_pet_door

Poker time.....

To be honest....I don't have lots of extra money to throw around but my son and I love going over to my buddies house on rare occasions to play a little poker.

How'd we do?

Well I still suck, but I lasted longer in the tournament then I did last time and I lasted longer then my son.....that hardly ever happens.

Do I win Dad of the Year taking my son to a poker game?...on a school night?

Hell yes I do, it's a fairly family friendly game with some ground rules...no losing your temper or you are asked to leave and no foul language. I figure he gets to meet new people and I get to meet potential clients....and we were home by 10:30.

We only play every 3 or 4 months so it's win/win as far as I'm concerned.

I love this.......

Now what?

I made someones day....

I was introduced to a client by one of my other clients at the bank today while I was making a deposit.

They had a dead portable hard drive and wanted to know if I could get the data off of it. I said I'd give it a shot.....took the thing apart and disconnected it from the logic board and hooked it up to my laptop....yay! Success!!!

It sure is cool to be able help folks out-they were pretty darn desperate and were sure they lost all their data-lots of family pictures and all their financial stuff.

I asked for my normal fee and they gave me a very nice tip on top of my fee....it's all good. They're happy and Dan and I have enough money to go play some poker tonight.

Wish us luck.....

till later.

A good week........

Wow, I sure did pick a good week for a vacation. Since I normally sleep in the daytime- this week woulda been a challenge.

One neighbor is getting a new driveway, that entails 4 or 5 different vehicles with back up beepers constantly going off.

Another neighbor is having an addition put on the back of their house...that entails constant hammering.

I'm just happy to sleep like a normal person for a week...it's nice to have a window open at night and listen to the crickets at night and the birds in the morning.....things could be worse.

till later.

Told ya it was long......

Done for a couple of weeks.....

Computer diaster averted.........

The best feeling in the world is when one of your hard drives shits the bed and you realize that you have 2 backups of the dead hard drive. Remember kiddies, it ain't "if" your hard drive is gonna die....it's "when".

Don't think I've ever been so far behind on yard work. I have the grass in the front yard cut and trimmed, but we have lots of flower beds to redo and quite a few bare spots where the grass is dug up from last years tree work.

The back yard?

I haven't touched it up to this point. The grass is over a foot long in places, maybe I can let it go back to it's native state...it's kinda pretty.

Who doesn't like coupon? I'm putting this link in here because my lovely wife reads my blog and she saves us a a ton of money with coupons. I think I've mentioned before how she is the better half....yeah, without her- I'd be a lonely 49 year old living in a rusty travel trailer somewhere....

Spam hot dogs? Yuck. The best hot dogs ever? Hebrew National hands down.

I could do this.

till later.

Yay.

Takin' a week of vacation.............not much planned and plenty of time to goof.

Today's post is courtesy of Hank.......

My buddy Hank sent me this and I thought I'd share it with ya'll.............

This is from Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist & Author


All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief.

I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like.

Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once poured over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used.

But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout.

One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit- up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome.

To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active.

I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China Next year he goes to college.

He can talk just fine.

He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the 'Remember- When- Mom-Did ' Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs.

The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, 'What did you get wrong?'. (She insisted I include that.)

The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons.

What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs.

There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night.

I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less. Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life.

When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.

The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top.

And look how it all turned out.

I wound up with the three people I like best in the world who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity.

That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.

Way cool huh?

till later.

Brother, can ya spare 500 dollars?

I think I'm in love.............

Too much info Ernie

He does look good for being 91 though....

Face transplant......

I don't know much about medical stuff...but this is seriously cool.

Lawn care ain't my specialty.....

With our weather forecast (rain for most of the next week).....you might not be able to see our house from the street by the time we get our lawn mowed. As I write this, it's a rainy afternoon (and the forecast is for rain all week) and I'm just chilling out watching some TV and browsing the web.

Currently, I'm watching a Discovery Channel show called Meth Nation. Holy crap, Meth is some seriously scary stuff. Now when I was a kid...I wasn't a choirboy all the time, but I never messed with stuff like meth. That's a truly scary drug.

Scary stuff? Howsabout this. Wow, I never realized there was that much sugar in some of those foods....especially ice cream. Yikes.

This guy likes watermelons.....a lot.

My son and I never had our festival of pork yet.......my lovely wife made me a huge pot of chili. I'd probably eat chili for most every meal if it was available.

Gov Palin goes big bore. I'm all for gun rights....but damn, that's an ugly looking gun.

This article will piss a lot of Republicans off. Me? I'm think abortion is horrible, horrible thing but what someone else does with their body isn't mine or the governments business.

These parents (in my humble opinion) need to both go to jail or get sterilized.

Wow....just wow.....yes, people are that stupid.

Newt likes to hear himself talk....but then again, what politician doesn't?

If I had stupid money.....this would be in my garage. I'd probably just stare at it.

Fiat and Chrysler together....maybe all the other shitty car companies can join up with them and all go out of business at the same time.

This is a fun site to poke around in. Not really a fan of McDonald's, but it's cool how they take you behind the scenes in some of the videos.

Honestly, I gotta admire the guy for being so damn honest....if Ridge runs for the Senate-I'm voting for Tom.

I love me some Failblog....more fail here.

Best ad ever.....

till later.

9000 bucks........

If you add up my sick pay and all the doctor bills for the 3 weeks I was off for knee surgery....the total comes up close to 9000 bucks. Money out of my pocket...40 dollars for 2 office co-pays.

I've said it before, but my company has pretty damn good benefits.

Our daughter will be home for the summer in about a week....this will be the last summer she's off before she graduates in 2 years. Her P.A. program starts to get even more intense then it is already....I haven't talked to her for a couple weeks, but I'm betting she can hardly wait to dig in. Look up the word motivated in the dictionary and I'm pretty sure her picture is there.

Our son is counting the days until summer break, he's wishing he was turning 16 in May instead of August so he could go out and get a job.....he likes his leisure time just as much as anyone else, but the boy loves money even more.

Daniel and I are going to have a pig flu luncheon tomorrow afternoon.


I think we're gonna make sausage, bacon, egg and cheese biscuits covered in pork gravy. We have several hours of yardwork to take care of Sunday...so we'll have an appetite worked up.

I think our grass is over a foot high in some places...all we need now is a rusty 77 Trans Am with the wheels removed and up on blocks in our front yard to complete the picture. I'd also like to get a small ridey ride in but we'll see how the knees feel after yardwork.....I am dying for a ride, but the grass needs cut first.

Chrysler shits the bed. Not good....I wonder how long it will be before GM follows them down the same path. I think back 10 years and wonder what the hell I was smoking when I decided to buy my minivan from Plymouth.

Till later.......


Don't text and drive like this formerly employer bus driver.

Swine flu..........

Our daughter sent us a link to this blog. It's a good read.

I'm lucky in the fact that I work by myself most of the time and since I quit smoking 10 years ago.....I don't get sick nearly as much. I do think the media is blowing shit way out of proportion...but that's what media is good at-so no shocker there.


I had a can of Moutain Dew Throwback last night at work. As a rule, I rarely drink sugared soda, but I wanted to try it......yum. I think I'll buy a small bottle and mix it with some Seagrams 7 for a cocktail on my night off next week.

So much crappy news out there.....how about some good news?

till later.