Published writer, compulsive reader, Old School Whovian, Match Game enthusiast, NKOTB fan, data hoarder, and - surprisingly, given that list - married with four kids. Welcome to my take on life, fatherhood, entertainment, and whatever strikes my fancy. Enjoy!
I'm going to start the long drawn out tale of our first home purchase. What will follow is the introduction, if you will - basically everything that preceded our first walk-through and the begining of the 100's of photographs.
Ignore or enjoy, as you wish.
Nothing of importance to say today, other than the stairs from my bedroom to the first floor are BRUTAL when you first wake up in the morning.
I think I might install a slide this weekend.
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I also would like to say that I wasted a decent portion of my life this year reading Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters and a small portion of Methuselah's Children. In a long-ago past post I listed Heinlein as one of my all time favorites, due fully to my memories of the books I read in my teens.
If the trite dialogue and overall crappy writing is indicative of his catalogue, then I kindly rescind my recommendation.
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A sincere thank you to my Dad for coming over close to midnight to show me how to relight my hot water heater and furnace. I'd shut off the gas to the house to complete some work on the dryer (more on that later) and hadn't realized it killed the appliances until my wife stepped into a cold shower hours later.
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My knee hurts. Did I mention those stairs suck in the morning?
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We upgraded to standard cable yesterday, which is a big move for yours truly.
For years we went with broadcast TV, but reception became so poor over time that we moved to 'basic' cable. For $12/month we got the local stations, a host of Christian channels, and a home shopping network or two.
Eventually they added Bravo, the Food Network, Style, and National Geographic - thereby rounding out our viewing experience.
Well in the latest move none of the Big Four showed up, with the cable company claiming - bait and switch if ever there was - that none of those stations should ever have been on our line in the first place.
So we went with a bundle. Road Runner Lite (aka AOL), our phone, and standard cable for a bill a month, which is just a MOCKERY of every ideal I hold dear.
$48/month for TV? Ugh.
So now we have Nickelodeon, ESPN, and God help me, HGTV.
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True tale: we had the cable company out three times for this installation, never getting it done the way we wanted it because, as the tech said, "We aren't magicians. We're cable guys."
The yahoo said this like a rosary, over and over again. When my wife heard the back door close she said, "Typical a**h**e cable guys. 'I"m not a magician my a**"
Thing is, I'm the one who had closed the door. The cable guy was still there, and I spent the next hour wondering how badly he was going to maim my house in retaliation.
So I missed Tuesday's Angels-Indians game because of other obligations, and yesterday's because of the snowstorm. I still intended to go tonight, only to pop on MLB.com and find the final game in progress while I sat at work. I hadn't realized it was a day game.
Damn.
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Over at Inc.com Leigh Buchanan composed a very entertaining and well-written piece denouncing emoticons aka smileys. Her means of destroying them: substitute language for the smiley until people are sick enough of it to stop. An example:
Picture if you will a colon: one tiny, perfect dot poised above its brother. Now imagine that colon transformed into a pair of eyes, bright and sparkling with mischief. From between those dots extends a hyphen. Yet screw up your eyes and…do you see it? A nose! Yes, a nose! Patrician in its straightness it dips toward the generous curve of a closing parenthesis. That parenthesis is a mouth, corners up-tilted in mirth. Viewed in sum, these marks compose a face whose expression of gentle amusement suggests the good humor intended in the previous remark.
You can find the article here.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, here's a disturbing bit about Keith Richards.
In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine.
"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.
"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."
Read the rest here.
You know, on the first day of spring my wife and I saw a robin in our backyard. The first robin of the spring, on the first day of the season. How poetic.
Today, April #@&^ 11th, I am staring out the window at a swirling, nasty SNOWSTORM that is threatening to dump up to a foot of snow here in Milwaukee.
My junior year in high school we had a blizzard in May, but that was a rare exception . . or so I thought.
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I've never listened to Don Imus, and could care less if he has a job or not. But I think that in a culture where profanity and mockery are commonplace, and African American comedians/musicians use the word left and right, that the use of 'ho's' shouldn't get the man fired.
Talk about a double standard - not only do comedians and rap artists adore the word, the very 'politicians' who oppose Imus are guilty of perverse [reverse] racism of their own.
My opinion? Imus is an idiot, mainly because his use of the term was offensive to WOMEN. That's my strongest objection to it, and even that isn't enough for me to take away a guy's bread and butter.
In other news, charges were dropped against the Duke lacrosse players. Something stunk about that case from the get-go; a DA mad for publicity, it sounds like.
Now a woman had her reputation dragged through the mud front and center, college players were wrongly put through hell, and no doubt the city will be stuck with lawsuit settlements for years to come.
Sigh. What a bleepin' world.
On my Mom's 60th birthday (April 5th) and the morning after our first night in the new house, we took both of our girls to view the 20 wk ultrasound of the baby.
LuLu was squirmy and noisy, but YaYa behaved herself - purely a matter of being 20 months older, I'm sure.
Still, I'm glad they both had the opportunity to see their sibling in utero, and even at her worst LuLu was still better than 80% of kids would have been.
They couldn't determine the gender, even after some intense searches . . guess he or she wanted to surprise us. It'll be the first 'surprise' birth for us, tho' the safe money is on another daughter.
Here's one of two ultraound pics from that day. I'll try to add the second at a later time.
News today on mlb.com that the three game Angels-Indians series scheduled for Cleveland this week will be moved to Milwaukee due to winter conditions in Ohio.
Well, hot dog! A chance to see two AL teams compete, and I don't even have to leave Milwaukee? If I can arrange my schedule, I'm there!
One of the reasons I'm so eager is the presence of future Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero.
That got me thinking: in my years of watching baseball, how many Hall of Famers have I seen on the field?
[warning: this list will almost certainly be expanded over the coming months as my memory improves]
Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, and Rollie Fingers for sure.
Don Sutton almost certainly.
Big Mac (should he make the Hall) I saw on Sept 10th, 2001, if not at other times.
I saw the '04 Yanks and White Sox in Chicago, which means I saw A-Rod, Mussina, Jeter, Posada, Giambi, Shefffield and Rivera. At least three of those are HOF.
I've seen Griffey, Bonds, and Kent.
Frank Thomas (man, did he inspire fear!)
I've seen Rickey Henderson and Dennis Eckersely at the old County Stadium.
I saw Cecil Fielder, and his son Prince.
I've seen Pujols (yawn), Sosa, and Edmonds.
With reasonable certainlty of memory, I've watched Maddux and Ryan pitch.
That's not a horrible list, considering I started watching the game regularly only in '92. I'm sure I shorted myself by a score or so, but it'll come in time.
With yesterday being Easter and all, I figured it wasn't the right time to go ahead and post a tribute to a guy who committed suicide (officially at least).
Anyway, here's a link to an article I wrote in '05 about Kurt.
To quote my '06 entry: The tribute I wrote last year [2005] strikes me as a little too dramatic and formulaic in retrospect, but the sentiment holds true [and what I wrote in the comments sections is some writing I'm pretty proud of, imho]
RIP Kurt
Hey guys, I'm still around.
In the last three months (while I've been ignoring this blog) we've: had two Xmas concerts, had Parker turn two with a great party, had YaYa lose her first tooth, gained back all my weight in return for quiting smoking since November, bought a house, completely remodelled said house from the foundation to the gutters, moved, had a tooth pulled, got into a car accident on the highway, pulled LuLu out of school, blew a transmission twice, became enchanted again with Lost, had a second ultrasound that could not conclusively prove gender, and generally just lived a high stress/no relaxation life as of late. . .
I've thoroughly documented everything with our camera, tho' I'm LOATHE to modify and upload the hundreds of pics I have to show the transformation. I'll get started soon enough.
BTW - Thanks Astaryth for the birthday card for Parker :)
Oh, and a Happy Belated 60th Birthday (on the 5th) to my Mom! Love You!
Just wanted to get in a quick post congratulating Little Big Man on his second birthday! We love you!
Ratings be damned, I think the first few episodes of the "2nd half" of the season have been superb. That being said, my wife has dropped out of this house's Lost fan club because of the same complaints you hear in the press: the storyline has become too convoluted.
Well, I disagree.
But . .
Tonight's episode SUCKED. I'm bitter as all he** that ABC spent the week promoting this as the week we get 'answers'.
Answers to what?
That the Others didn't kill the captives outright?. Uh, I never thought they did. Why bother going to the trouble of kidnapping them if you're only going to kill them?
Other than that slim revelation, I can't think of a single question, big or small, that the episode answered.
Oh, my bad. It told us how Jack got his tattoo.
Whoopee.
Be careful Lost. It isn't the episode so much as the false promo, but with me you're on shaky ground, thin ice, ready to jump the shark, etc.
Pick your cliche - they all apply.
Tags: Lost
