Goodbye Dear Swingset

RIP gentle swingset.

My Maternal Great-Grandpa's Business

Please Keep an Eye Out

LuLu's Girl Scout vest is missing. I'm sure it's somewhere in the house and we'll find it sometime in 2016 when looking for the remote, but the fact is it has about a gazillion irreplaceable badges sewn on the back. If you accompanied her on a field trip with the Scouts, or hosted her overnight, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE double-check to make sure that she didn't leave it behind. Thanks!

Smiley's Thoughts Today

Smiley's quote of the day, spoken out of the blue: "All it takes is one zombie to wreck the whole world"

Flooding

23 years ago my first job was working for a land surveyor. His day job was working on the Deep Tunnel project, and I remember him telling me it would end the city's sewage and flooding problems. Fast forward to 2013. Today's awful storm flooded the streets from the midpoint of the park to two blocks east of my street, as well as most of the side streets in my neighborhood. Meanwhile, my basement, once prone to routine flooding, survived without a drop, courtesy of the french drain I dug in 2010. Maybe MMSD should call me for some tips.

Neat!

A Present for Smiley

I just bought Smiley a Christmas present "officially licensed by the U.S. Army" - 'cuz you know, 99% of all toys for boys must train them to kill on the word of a Washington fatcat - and guess what the back of the box says? Quote: "Designed and built in Canada and Germany".

He's hard to buy for because he doesn't want toys that kill....ridiculous, he's 8 - Lisa 

Ward-Gatti

Yesterday I watched all three of the epic Micky Ward-Arturo Gatti fights. The first one totally lived up to the billing, as did the rubber match, when Gatti fought on after breaking his hand. Match 2 was lopsided and a disappointment all things considered, but round 3 . . . man, round 3 was beautiful. Hollywood Worthy, and arguably The Best Round of Boxing I've ever seen.  They're worth a watch.

note:  I sat Lisa down to watch the 3rd round of the second Ward-Gaetti fight. Oddly, she did not find it as moving as I do.

Brrr

It is damn cold in this house. Mayhaps I should turn on the heat, or at least pull that last window air conditioner . . .

My Boy Quasi

My Day

Lousy snow. The first of the season and I'm already wishing it was spring. Anyone who likes this stuff should check themselves in at County.

Anyway, I'm at Marquette School of Dentistry getting LuLu an exam. 

Later:

Now shopping at Goodwill

Quasi the Pleco

A (Giant) New Pleco!

A productive day. I waterproofed the back porch - and the handprints of the kids we made in the cement back in '07 - then fixed the latch on the back door. Meanwhile Lisa went grocery shopping and made a great chicken dinner. And to top it off, confident that the Ich was gone, Smiley and I went shopping for a new pleco. 

We found one. But instead of the 1" version we had, we went home with a giant 8" beast that looks like an aquatic dinosaur found its way into our tank. Heck I was scared to even hold the bag when we left the store. 

The best part is, we paid only $4.99 for him. His spine is permanently bent, and so he's gone unsold and unwanted for weeks. It was his disfigurement that sealed the deal, just as GusGus's glaucoma ridden eye made me snatch him up. Yes, I felt sorry for a pleco :)

But, there was more to the adventure. On the way home Parker and I stopped at a store, and when we came back out I noticed the car was leaking onto the pavement. My first thought the radiator went, but no: the giant pleco bag had broken, flooding the backseat and pouring out the door! We managed to save just enough water to cover the pleco and hightailed it back to the pet store, with Parker holding onto him and talking him through the ordeal. 

We made it, and this time when we left the bag was securely sealed in a box for transport!

A great day

A good day overall, and a happy opposite to Friday's misery. Dance in the morning, then a nap, followed by Mass (the priest led off the sermon with a discussion about Aaron Rodgers' injury), then dinner with the family and two of Lu's friends. :)

The End of An Era

The final issue of (Milwaukee based) The Onion will hit newsstands on December 12

Phone Problems and the Ick

My phone is acting screwy: text one contact, and another contact replies. I'm sure it's a fluke that can be fixed if I remove the battery, but as a testament to my laziness I'm not about to trouble myself with removing the case just yet. IOW don't count on a text conversation this evening.

Meanwhile, the outbreak of Ick seems to have been arrested in our aquarium, in no small part to my Awesomeness, even in the realm of fish doctoring. We've lost no one in 3 days, and all appear well except the goldfish, who no longer exhibits signs of the disease but never bounced back properly. If there's no further losses before Sunday, I'll start rebuilding the population.

Adorable!

This was taken July 1st at the Domes

Why? You ask?

Why all the hate towards Blockbuster? 

a. they were a monopoly, and the worse kind: a monopoly that used that status to sit on the status quo and treat their customers poorly

b. a barbaric rental fee structure that was properly slammed by the Courts

c. ignorant employees who didn't know their product

d. a lame 'by mail' attempt to compete with Netflix - too little, too late

e. by virtual of their size they drove mom and pop stores out of business. Normally I'd say "eh, free market" but in this case they drove them out WITHOUT providing better prices or service

f. Tre liked them. :)

My Little Girls

 

Changes at Marquette

 Today Marquette took a concrete step towards eliminating the part- time evening program ( I'm grandfathered in). So if you're a working adult hoping to get a law degree, you have only a year or so to apply and get in the final class.

My Opinion on the Packers

Lets be clear: whatever losses come in the next few weeks can be traced not only to Aaron's injury but the arrogance of the suits. If they hadn't di**ed around on the backup question and cut everyone under the sun before deciding on a has been/ never was, maybe our panic level would be more manageable.

A-Rod Update

The A-Rod story is heating up again. It turns out - and this is in the NY Times and verified by police records - that a car belonging to an employee of BioGenesis was broken into and that medical records were stolen from the vehicle. A prime suspect interviewed by the police? Gary Jones, a man working with MLB , a man whom all parties agree provided the stolen records to MLB. 

Want more? Again, in the NY Times and supposedly verified by private voicemail messages: a MLB investigator initiated a sexual relationship with Loraine Delgadillo, a nurse at Biogenesis, in an attempt to procure documents and statements from her against A-Rod. 

Still more: another witness claims he was pressured into false allegations against A-Rod after (he says) MLB harassed him and his family endlessly, even going so far as to follow his family when they went on vacation overseas. 

And literally hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on 'payments' to various witnesses by MLB. 

You may approve of Selig resorting to Hoover-esque strong arm tactics. You may not care that all the 'evidence' in the case is, at the very least, fruit from a poisoned tree. You may be willing to put aside justice and due process because of your emotional dislike of Rodriguez. 

I am not. MLB and Selig need to end their witch-hunt. 

And A-Rod, in the words of one baseball commenter, needs to "slit MLB's bloated belly and see what spills out."

First Year Law Student

Dad- thought you would enjoy this, considering you're a big smart law student, too. :)  - YaYa

My Boy :)

We nicknamed him well. 

Blue Eyes Like Her Momma