Archives 2003

I have seen the American Idol Christmas special advertised for a few weeks now. This means it was probably shot in October. It was on tv last night. First off it is absolutely ridiculous to me to have Christmas shows on before Thanksgiving. Makes no sense. Regardless we decided to tune in. It was dumb. It looked like good ole Rueben was sucking on a green lollipop before the show because his toungue had huge green spot on it, very funny. I just wasn’t into it. Halfway through I told Ali that this was dumb. She agreed and we flipped over to watching another hilarious I Love the 80’s episode on the Tivo.

Down here it is a little tough to get your mind around the idea that it is the holiday season. The warm sunny weather makes it very hard to shift into a holiday mode. Not that I’m complaining but it is one of the minor trade offs you make living in the sub-tropics. The idea of seasons becomes very distorted. Up north when I worked for Entre/Ameridata/GE this was a very special time of year. For the last 2 months of the year I would take off every Monday. 3 day weekends till the end of the year. Also the day before Thanksgiving we would normally slide out at 12 and then participate in a company touch football game. It was always a blast and I always came out of it with some sort of injury. One year a pulled groin, one year a concussion from gettin spiked in the head, it was always fun.. Some of my favorite memories of working there came from the Thanksgiving football game. Who can forget the moment “heartpunch Kliney” earned his nickname by punching would be tacklers in the heart to momentarily stun them? Or when Paul Hulmes almost got into a fight with one of Tim’s friends over excessive rough play? Or one of my all time favorites, when Emmett dances around loud mouth Monty making him look like a complete boob. Thanksgiving was definitely one of the things that was a lot more fun in PA. Down here the day before Thanksgiving means we get to wear jeans, woohoo.

A plus of my job is we get the day after Thanksgiving off as a paid holiday. Our 4 day weekend has no major plans. I feel an urge to attack tiling one of the bathrooms but I am going to resist filling my holiday weekend with hard work. Instead we will do some casual house work, may take my mom downtown to see it decorated for the holidays, possibly take Nicki to the dog beach to run around and a generous dose of doing whatever I damn feel like doing. I may try to do some Christmas shopping, I have done absolutely zero to this point. Have a nice holiday.

When I lived up north, I had a goal of being able to run a 10k(6 somethin miles) race. I was up to being able to run 5 and a half miles. However, the knee injuries I had prevented me from hitting that goal. My knee has felt good for awhile now since I scaled my volleyball playing back to next to nothing and have been taking my flaxseed oil for at least a year now. The other day the idea popped back into my head about doing it. I’m not getting any younger. So last night at the gym I decided to hop on the treadmill. I walked a quarter mile, stretched a bit and cranked the speed up to 7. I sweated and huffed through a mile and a quarter, slowed it down and walked a half mile to cool down for a total of 2 miles. Ugh, I have a long way to go. The good news is my knee felt fine but the muscles in my calfs and hips are sore from using them in a way that is foreign now. I’ll keep at it and see how it goes. It bugs me when I set goals that I don’t hit so hopefully I can check this one off in the next few months. At this point being able to run for an hour straight seems like a very daunting task.

As I get older I notice differences in my face, the skin thins out, the lines you only saw when you made faces seem to now leave permanent remnants across your countenance. In a ridiculous attempt to help the situation, when I shave I apply the shaving cream to areas of my face that have no hair, like around and under my eyes. It looks like I have a shaving cream mud mask on. Silly huh? My thinking is shaving cream has moisturizers and shit in it so it can’t hurt right? It’s only going to get worse…….

Friday night while my wife was at some art show that her hair dresser was in, I decided to flip through the pay per view stuff on the satellite. I found that Phone Booth was on. Cool little flick! It was pretty amazing how someone being stuck in a phonebooth could make a good movie but it really was good. An interesting study in human nature. Thumbs up.

We also caught ELF in the theaters this weekend. It wasn’t as funny as I had heard but still it was a cute holiday film, just not a side splitting funny movie.

The weekend itself was rather lowkey. I had half of my to do list done before Ali rolled out of bed on Saturday. We took my mom to look at a place that is for rent. It is owned by my buddy Mike’s brother-in-law. It is in Naples Park which is 5 minutes from my Mom’s job and about 5 minutes from the beach, a great location. It is an older duplex, nothing fancy but cute. It has nice mature landscaping, it is cute inside and a perfect size for mom. On the downside it needs some TLC on the outside. The neighbor is paid to mow the grass and keep it looking decent but it appears that he only quickly mows the front and ignores the back. Anyway, I think it could be a nice fit for her, hopefully it works out.

We went on a mini spending spree at Sam’s club. We got a NEC LCD monitor for Ali and a no contract pay as you go cell phone for Ali as well as some other goodies. The LCD was to complete the plan of making the new server serve double duty as Ali’s workstation. As a side result I know have a slimline Sony laptop that I will keep “just in case”. The cell phone replaces Ali’s old phone that harldy kept a charge and didn’t work half of the time. Ali didn’t bother to keep it on most of the time so it served us no good if I wanted to reach her. This new phone allows us to just pay for what we need, no contract and is a new phone that works. Ali doesnt call out much so it is a great fit for us and will save us a few bucks each month.

The Eagles had another strong showing. Again my Eagles garb wearing good luck charm has continued. The only concern is the defense has been giving up tons of yards, especially on the ground. I figure that will catch up to them sooner or later.

I got some more Call of Duty time in. Like I said before, it is super realistic, if you want to get a taste of what is is like to be a WW II soldier, give it a try. A very good game.

A quick 3 day week followed by a 4 day holiday weekend, perfect. Instead of laboring through intensive Thanksgiving preparations we are going to treat my mom to a turkey day dinner out (like we did last year) It was quite enjoyable not having to work so hard for a 15 minute meal. My memories of Thanksgiving are very traditional, we went to my grandparents, watched football, had dinner with grandma’s “fancy” gold plated utensils and my grandpa would say quick grace. I don’t remember specifics about the prayer except the last line always was “without you lord we’re nothin…” I haven’t had grace at Thanksgiving since he died.

I have made quite a few holiday flash animations over the years. This year I did one for Keener’s fantasy football league. Check it out if you like, be warned there are some dirty words in there. 🙂

Last night Rupert got kicked off of Survivor. That was really a bummer because he was probably the best contestant that Survivor has EVER had. I can understand why people wanted him off because he was a shoo-in to win if he lasted much longer, still it bums me out and makes the rest of the show much less interesting for me.

Nothin spectacular on the weekend schedule. Housework, football, maybe catch a movie, ho hum.

Thanks to Joe for trying to explain the Matrix to me. I dunno if I buy all of his explanations but it was more than I got. Maybe I do need to watch number 2 a second time. Read his explanations here.

This is cool. You can watch flights take off and land at airports! Zoom out to the 80 mile view and be amazed at what is in the sky!

Nothing overly interesting things to report just some funny stuff. Last night I wanted to rush home so I could get a chance to fly my Cessna with the navigation lights at dusk. Actually it is Mike’s Cessna, he gave it to me before he moved to Colorado. It is a painstakingly hand built model. Way beyond what my patience would allow me to build. Anyway, daylight is fading fast. I get home and have to let the dog out, she stayed home all day. She is very excited to see me, I take her out to go to the bathroom. She is so excited that she crouches like she is going to crap, and then remembers she only has to pee so she switches to a squat, she pees and then kicks dirt back on it like she took a crap. Funny dog.

It’s really dim out now but I am determined to fly with the lights on the plane. I get it up in the air, it looks COOL! I’m sure I freaked out some people driving home, wondering what the hell the lights in the sky were. But after a few minutes I was under severe attack from mosquitos. I tried to walk around the yard to keep them off me but it did little good. You can’t swat mosquitos and fly planes at same time. I had to bring it in for a fast landing and ran back inside for shelter. Hate mosquitos.

I finished Max Payne 2 Monday night. A good game, the level where you are protecting the guy in the cartoon suit is on of my favorite parts, very funny. I started a new game, Call of Duty. It is another World War 2 first person shooter. It is very immersive. After my first couple missions I had to bag out cause I was all stressed up. Felt like dudes were shooting me for real. Looks like a fun game though, I’ll work through it.

Last night I was back in the bedroom and I hear my mom yell SHAWN COME HERE! She is outside her bathroom pointing. There is an adult, full sized tree frog sitting on her toilet seat! What the hell? I netted him up and returned him to the wild. I am having a hard time determing how he got there. Did he navigate the septic system, run in through an open door, come in through a vent? I have no idea. More wonders of living in the fringe of the Everglades.

This morning I took Nicki out for her morning bathroom trip. She did a number 1, normally she will do a number 2 a little later. We went back inside. As I was sitting down at the puter with my bowl of cereal, Nicki is in there with me looking distraught and looking like she was looking for a place to dump! Woah! I drop everything, run to the back door, she runs with me, we go outside and she lets loose. Crisis averted!!!! Joys of dog ownership. 🙂

My second beta fish died. I feel partially responsible. He was sick like the first one was but I treated him and he was coming around slowly. I thought he seemed very bored and lonely so I researched what sort of fish can co-exist with male betas. With this info I purchased a small Platie on friday. I set him up in the tank and he was just sort of hanging out. I came in Monday and Whitey seemed very sluggish, not good. I just figured I needed to treat him some more. Late in the day I noticed the Platie was bugging Whitey. I took a closer look at Whitey….. his top fin was totally gone! The little bastard must have eaten it off of him. I immediately separated them with the tank divider and started intensive treatment on Whitey. Sadly this morning he died. I took him out and put him in my lunchbox for burial. I felt like killing that little bastard fish that attacked whitey. I told Ali about my plans for murder. Just a little bleach in the tank, she pleaded for me to not kill it. It is still alive for now. No more fish, I don’t like the dying part.

Hehe more sillyness from ebaum.

The gym is not only a great place to get in shape, it’s one of the best places for human behavior observation. Todays safari spotted a guy wearing floral pattern surfer shorts and a tank top that was 2 sizes too small. His furry beer belly poked out. The guy was decently strong but it was funny watching him on the decline chest machine. On this piece of equipment, the weights rest on rubber stops. This guy was bouncing each rep off these pads hard to enable him to do more weight than normal. I mean we all do that from time to time, throw form to the wind in order to do a heavier weight. But this was so blatant it was comical. His big belly hanging out from his too tight tank top, while he bounces heavy weight off the rubber stops. In one of those pointless acts of one upsmanship, I got on the machine shortly after him and did slightly less weight, 12 times without bouncing the weight like a pogo stick. I made sure he saw it. Ah the stupid little things men do. I now understand why an old man at the gym a long time ago grumbled “fairy” under his breath in my direction the one time I decided to wear my floral vball shorts to the gym. It just looks dumb.

I engaged some Green Bay friendliness at Wal-Mart over the weekend. We were checking out. Our girl was giving us the all too typical silent checkout routine. You know the one where the first words you hear are how much the total is? Well I surprised her by blurting out “How are you doing, you look tired, has it been a long day?” She warmed up, smiled and was nice to us throughout the rest of the transaction. This shit works. 🙂 Ali looked at me like WHAT THE HELL? When I explained to her I was using Green Bay friendliness, she scoffed I should use more of it at home. Hmmm I wonder how they handle disagreeable wives in Green Bay? 🙂