DWI checkpoint

Bad idea maybe?

I was driving home from Midnight Mass....thought about whether or not any DWI checkpoints would be going on. Would "Police Navidad!!" be the wrong way to greet an officer?

More strange was that only 608 hits came up on Google for the phrase "Police Navidad"....I can't possibly be one of the first to invent this phrase, can I?

Anyways, no drinking was actually involved, and the fog caused by a foot of snow warming to 50 degrees in the rain should have scared actual drunks off the road....

a day in the life (overrated beatles song)

tree guy was supposed to come to uproot my dead cedars, mulch 'em or cut them into firewood. I think there was an ice storm with the freezing line 20 miles north of here or so, so he musta gotten called to do emergency work. Anyways, I took a day of for nothing, and it just rained all night. (it's begun to look nothing like Christmas)

i wrapped some christmas presents, oh boy....tried to call the post office about mailing carbon dioxide tanks, but the post office moved last week and the new phone number didn't show up online. i'll do that tomorrow, my brother's getting a soda machine so I can mail the box with all the stuff in it down to florida tomorrow....assuming the USPS allows tanks in the mail.

watched some christmas videos, first "santa claus is coming to town" and then "emmet otter's jug-band christmas". Before that I had the price is right on, and drew carey sucks ass as a host. is he even trying?

defrosting some ground beef....plan to do a patty melt for dinner. always a kick-ass meal choice.

my 10-foot tree (tall and wide) wrecked 3 tree stands, so I had to cut it in half (it branched like a Y a couple of feet off the ground) and use one of the 8-foot branches as the trunk of the now demi-tree in place. the angel's head shattered on the fireplace last weekend when the tree fell over fully decorated. like sleepy hollow, so that had to be replaced.....I still want the Pope to move Christmas to the spring. Had to put on a bunch of replacement ornaments when about 10 of the balls shattered.

will probably order more crap online tonight. will amazon ship scotch tape and to/from tag stickers?

Revenge

So,
I had friends over last weekend for drinking and some croquet games on the front lawn. I fried a turkey, made corn on the cob, and mashed potatoes with garlic, rosemary and thyme. Plus, a spice cake with homemade pear ice cream.

One guy showed up bearing a watermelon that was yellow instead of pink. It tastes the same as pink, and makes just as much of a wet mess.

Anyway, I thought this was sort of yellow's "revenge" on pink for stealing pink lemonade. Call it even.

Don't lick the shiny salt

Cute tale from one of my new clients, a salt mine in New York. Apparently a miner was sitting on a bench having lunch while a tour of the mine went through a quarter-mile below the surface. A little old lady was enraptured by a shiny hunk of salt emanating from the wall of dirt, so she went over to lick it. She claimed, yup, tastes like salt. Apparently the salt rock was shiny because it had been recently peed on -- the stream must have eroded some of the peripheral dirt....

So we have a new phrase to accompany "don't eat the yellow snow"....

Counterintuitivity

Two things run counter to intuition....Here goes:

1. There are 3 places in the town where my softball league plays. A big park with lights on the field, a smaller area in the middle of nowhere, and two fields at the high school. So what's the only place where they don't monitor to prevent us from being able to drink beer after a game? The high school, of course!

2. A lot of times when people have allergies, conditioned air is the best way to reduce the threat of the allergens. (Like, don't open a window to invite hay fever, as an example, I suppose.) We had a guest cat over this weekend in our basement, and I think the air conditioning system in the house actually circulated more allergens to me. I sneezed horribly for a couple of days, and my vocal chords are actually a bit shot and need rest. Point is, had we just opened windows in the house instead, I'd probably have been fine.

Irish twins

Today my brother turns 36. Same age as I am (for a few more weeks).
Nice goin', mom. Giving birth twice while you're 25.

Driveway

So we finally got our new driveway. A couple of weeks ago they came in to put some dirt and crushed stone down, nice and flat with one of those flattener doo-hickeys that they drive and nobody wants to be run over by. But then it's been raining every afternoon, so they haven't been able to finish. They came by yesterday, and somehow must have realized that the forecast of late-day thunderstorms was not going to come to fruition, because it was indeed dry.

My basketball hoop is on order, of course, now that the driveway is paved. The question now, is whether my wife will get pissed if I use actual paint instead of chalk to mark the court.

Had some problems earlier this month removing the swimming pool cover. As in, it got waterlogged and I had to dump the top of the cover into the water because I couldn't lift it out. So the pool was green and filled with lots and lots of dead leaves. The whole leaves aren't the problem, it's the decayed leaf powder that doesn't stay on the bottom of the pool to be vacuumed up. It's about 90-95% cleaned up, and the water is clear and algae-free, though.

This is the time of year crabgrass starts up. I sprayed some WeedStop on it, and it does work pretty well. But it's like green grass with big brown spotches of dead crabgrass. I suppose that's fine.

So Monday I took my car in for its 100,000 mile tune-up. No real problems, got new front brakes but everything else was okay...except the radio, which apparently was faulty and thus not the speakers' fault for the lack of audio in the car. About $750. Wednesday, my insulin pump wasn't hooked up right, so I ducked out around 11 to go home and re-attach it. That's when I got smashed into. The lady tried to cross two lanes of traffic to pull into a parking lot for a diner. The left lane was all stopped at a traffic light, about 10 cars deep, so someone must have given her a gap to go. The right lane, the turning land for the onramp to the highway, was clear, so I was still moving at about 20-25 mph approaching the light. So she didn't look for me, and I didn't see her until she cut me off ("failure to yield", a 14-242 apparently). No injuries at such a slow speed. Just a real hassle. And of course, maintenance costs aren't usually reimbursed by an insurer -- her Geico is going to give me $300 to offset that a little. But anyways, the car's being totaled. I had to go retrieve everything from the body shop they towed it to -- license plates, my E-Z Pass tag, sporting goods, sunglasses....the only thing left at this point might be to try to siphon the 2/3 tank of gas into a portable container that we can use for the lawn mower. I'm amused at referring to her as an "old lady", as she's a few weeks younger than my parents.

What would happen if....(6/28 edition)

....instead of cinnamon buns, you could order nutmeg buns? Oregano buns? Cardamom buns? Really, I got a whole spice rack, but bakeries tend to steer us, the consumers, towards cinnamon.

So, my Boston Celtics won the NBA title this year. Okay, not MY Boston Celtics, regardless of what the dopey PA guy may say. Probably just another case of "cheering for laundry". Anyways, with the Red Sox and Celtics being reigning champs, and the Patriots getting, um, pretty close, I feel it's worth pointing out to the Boston-hatahs out there that the Bruins finished dead LAST in the NHL playoffs.

Here's how this works. They lost to Montreal, who lost to Philadelphia, who lost to Pittsburgh, who lost to Detroit. So if we were to assign a binary 1-0 to each team based on how they did and their competition did, the Bruins would be a 0000.

One of my clients at work asked that next year's reports have the Social Security Numbers masked, a la xxx-xx-1234 to prevent identity theft. I almost wrote back in my email, "Not a problem, Mr. 041-46-7679." (That's not his actual SSN, but woulda been amusing nonetheless.)

Here's a pet peeve. People who don't check to see if they've just put a piece of paper with Wite-Out on it down on the copy machine. So then I come around a few minutes later and get 20 copies with a small splotch in the same spot of each page. Just scrape the thing off the glass, please?

ESPN is not required to have a "national" point of view. They're located in Connecticut, and that explains a lot of their Red Sox - Yankees bias in reporting news stories. Cable companies in Idaho do not HAVE to carry them, if people complain enough. I don't find the Fox Sports networks' west-coast slant particularly endearing, so I avoid them most of the time. Simple enough.

I hate the concept of the "fun size" candy bar, often given out at Halloween. The fun size is small, and thus there is nothing "fun" about it. Just for fun, I typed in "fun size bullshit" on yahoo or Google one time, and sure enough, I was brought to a link that I totally agreed with.

I was listening to the Orioles versus the Blue Jays on the radio, a baseball feed. Okay, not my radio, but rather my cell phone, which can stream the audio for any game being played -- great at work for day games when we're not allowed to use the company Internet connection to stream the data. Anyways, the Orioles announcers referred to their team as the Birds, which is a normal nickname employed for Baltimore, but not exactly descriptive in a game against the Blue Jays....or Cardinals, either.

Why are men's and women's shoe sizes different? Apparently my mom had a pair of men's jogging shoes when I was a kid, size 7. I remember it when years later I decided to buy her new shoes for her birthday, only to find out that her women's size is like an 8½ and the shoes I'd bought were too small? Of course, shoe sizes go wacky by country anyways, you'd think it'd be something easily made uniform....like the metric system :)

I didn't die....

...but actually, it coulda been close this morning. A lady cut me off trying to pull into a diner. My 2004 Nissan Sentra got smashed up pretty bad.

I'm okay. More fun blogging soon....I think!

Two poo points

First, when a woman cleans out her hair brush and throws the pile of hair in the toilet, but doesn't flush....it creates a sort of nest....a Poo Nest, if you're willing enough to go lightly next time.

Ewww....

Anyways, then we have the topic of the Loch Ness Poo.

This occurs, obviously, when the water level of the bowl can't contain one's doings....doo-ings....heh heh, I'm amused like Beavis.

Okay, sorry. Back to your regularly scheduled program.

What would happen if....(5/3 edition)

...someone came up with Powdered Bagels? I have always kinda dismissed bagels as nothing more than bread-flavored donuts. I did make bagels once about 4 years ago. Some plain, some cinnamon-raisin, and some jalapeño.

(Oh geez, I forgot I have a Mac at home, and tried to do ALT+0241 to get a spanish N, instead of just using the option button with my N.)

A couple of the bagels came out okay, a couple of them were kinda, shall we say, thick. Dense....not light and fluffy to serve as a vehicle for butter. That's right, I don't eat bagels often, and I don't toast them. I microwave them in plastic wrap so that they get chewy, and drench them in butter. Cream cheese is not my friend.

For a while, I kept forgetting that Al Roker's wife was Deborah Roberts, not Cokie Roberts, although both Roberts work for ABC as reporters. Go ahead and wikipedia them, you'll see the difference! (And yes, that's me using wikipedia as a verb, like google.)

Here's an amusing idea....enhance the border fence for Texas. But on the NORTH side of Texas, so that they go back to being part of Mexico. (ha! burned!!)

ZIP Code poker. I used to live in Bridgeport, where the ZIP code was 06606. A full house! That ties for when I lived in Vernon, Connecticut, as a very small child. There, the ZIP is 06066. Can anyone beat a full boat, sixes over zeros?

On my way to work I saw a sign in someone's driveway advertising "seasoned" firewood. This means that it's old wood, that's dried out and will actually catch on fire well. However, I thought it would be extremely amusing to make a little sign that reads "Italian-" in front of the word "seasoned". You know, like firewood with basil and oregano in it. Anyway, soon after an American flag was stuck in the yard next to the sign, so it would have to be American seasoning. But I'm not sure what counts as American seasoning. Salt and pepper? Cajun seasoning is American, but not identified as endemic to the whole country.

After my shoulder surgery, I was advised that Vitamin E would be good for reducing the scars' appearance on the front and back of my shoulder. This is similar to when I broke my kneecap back in 1994. However, back then I had a bottle of vitamin E capsules. And I had no idea that the actual vitamins were INSIDE the gelatin. I actually tried rubbing dry gelatin on my knee for a couple of weeks. Apparently, I was supposed to break the capsules open.

I'm not a salad fan. I don't like tomatoes, onions, green peppers, or lettuce. I will eat salad when they start making it out of better-tasting stuff. I can eat spinach, carrots, and cucumber slices just fine. However, if fruit salad is identified with the fruit in front of it, why can't salad be referred to as "vegetable salad"? Like, if I'm offered salad, I should ask, "fruit or vegetable?"

One of my friends works for a company that designs packaging for consumer products. I signed up to do some consumer surveys for them online, and one of them was about all things ketchup. Ketchup is cool in that I grew up not liking ANY of the ingredients in ketchup, except for corn syrup. Tomatoes, vinegar, onion powder, other spices...no thanks! But somehow ketchup worked. As a kid, I would eat American cheese with ketchup on bread. My cousins mocked me deservedly.

Finally, although "moral support" is a common term, "immoral support" is not. Like, encouraging a surgeon to drink heavily before performing an appendectomy.

Come on, you can do it!!!

Signs of spring

Women's toes....(ladies, casual Friday should not allow me to see your feet via open-toed shoes!)

Motorcycles out and about (I'm cool with the freedom, but hate the noise....hey, how about a hybrid bike? That would get like 500 miles to the gallon, no? And a silent electric motor would be amusing.)

Dogs left out at night (again, HATE the noise....)

Allergies -- a new reason to sneeze, instead of a winter cold, I suppose (pollen....I can't wait!)

More kids playing b-ball at the park while I drive home

Female pedestrians showing off their shoulders....usually for the better.

Calves on farmland out with their moms learning to graze

No more shoveling to get to the grill on our deck

And the one time of year where the grass grows before the crabgrass takes over, so the lawn looks nice-ish

----------

A little side note on my "#5" thing. At an old job, my dad's company was a client. And so I was in charge of writing our year end letter to review the company retirement plan. I accidentally left two number 5s on the itemized list of about 15 things to go over. Nobody really noticed, except me, when I went to write the following year's review letter -- we'd often use the prior year's report as a template and make changes as appropriate. So the following year, I had for point number 5, "There is no number five this year." Obviously the kind of thing you can get away with only if you have it in good with the client. And so they ended up with one number five per year, on average.

What would happen if...(4/12 edition)

...I took too long to post my thoughts, so that I had no idea what the note I took meant? I mean, really, I've got written down on a sticky note, "MBA = Hanson!" and I have no freakin' idea what that means. Usually, I think of something funny at work, and since I don't blog from work any more with the new job, I write it down to use later. I assume it's got something to do with mmmmmbop, but I've got no idea.

I enjoy the idea when people say something like their poop smells like roses. I offer Axl Rose and Pete Rose, as two Roses I wouldn't brag over the smell of....

A good suggestion for photos is to aim the camera down a bit from above the forehead....check out your high school yearbook, the pictures of even the less hot girls can still look halfway decent. I suppose aiming the camera up just shows off the nostrils.

I want the job for making up the pronunciation of acronyms. Specifically, ones that don't have an obvious phonetic reading to them. For instance, in 2001 there was the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act. EGTRRA....most people figure out that this would be called "egg-truh"...but every once in a while you'd get an "Egg-Tray" or "Erg-truh" by someone really not noticing the spelling. One of the newest acronyms in pension-land is the Qualified Automatic Contribution Agreement (where your company signs you up for your 401(k) plan without your permission). QACA. I cringed at the pronunciation of "quacka" because there's no U in the acronym. I prefer pronouncing the Q like a hard Middle-Eastern word (scrabble favorite QAT, for instance). And just having it sound like "ka-ka" (poopie reference). So that could be my job.

With my sneakers, I don't run the laces through the last pair of holes, and so the laces are pretty long. Occasionally the loops will get caught under the wheels of my work chair. That sucks! Because the wheel has a plastic castor covering it, so you can't just pull the thing out. I actually have to take off the shoe and pull the loop apart and figure out which way to pull the lace out from under there.

On my way home I saw a field of cows, and instead of mooing at them, I yelled, "Ruminants, unite!" (The revolution is a grass-roots movement, after all....)

Okay, one more that I sort of forget the specifics on. I believe what it was, is that my lips were chapped, and my wife, who was driving, had to pee. It was one of those things where both statements were announced sort of one right after the other, as we were on our way home from somewhere. I thought about how both problems could be solved at once and quickly said, "Those birds....die separately."

(ya know, like, one stone isn't gonna kill them...)

ok, the end. David has probably sent some of you guys over to read this, so I'm working feverishly to provide new material!!

Tales from rehab

So, rehab's not hideous. Three nights a week....here's a typical night:
a. heat pad to the shoulder for 10 minutes
b. 10 minutes on a bike -- no pedaling, but just the back and forth with my arms
c. dangling, pendulum-like motion while holding a dumbbell. (up to 5 pounds at this point!)
d. alternate shoulder rolls and curls (10 pounds in each arm, I assume for symmetry)
e. reverse curls, alternating sides and front (4 pounds)
f. a couple of weight machines....these are like 80 pounds that you have to pull towards yourself
g. thick rubber bands to pull on, stretching the upper shoulder ligaments
h. an overhead pulley to help my shoulder stay yanked over my head
i. manual contortion of the arm by the therapist. (I asked if the positions were stuff even my right arm was normally capable of, and apparently so.)
j. ice pack for 10 minutes and head home.

The place doubles as a workout gym for a few, so the single-digit weights do seem a bit emasculating. So the left arm is getting stronger, while the right arm is just the normal sore you get when you haven't worked out in a while -- tight elbow ligaments, for example.

On the bright side, my wife had similar surgery a few years ago and is familiar with everything I'm doing.

Croquet this weekend....the swinging motion could be good.

It's a labRum, dad....

Apparently Dad thought I had torn something else....even though I do have a left and right labrum. (Hint: replace the R with an I, and you get a girl part!)

Anyways....ya know how they tell you to count back from 100 for anesthesia, and you never get even to 98? Well, I started counting back at 100 a little at a time when I got to the hospital during the 2.5 hours of check-in and prep. By 9 am I was down to about 11. While wheeling me down the hall to the OR, I did 5-4-3-2....they told me to wait, none of that counts yet. So what happens? they knock me out in the operating room without telling me, so I never did get down to 1. Oh well.

Turns out I'm allergic to reglan, an anti-vomiting medicine they tried to give me in my IV so that the anesthesia wouldn't make me puke when I woke up. I got ridiculously itchy and weak-feeling, like my butt cheeks were infested with ants. Not fun.

Other than that, I've been okay. Percocets are the painkiller of choice. Physical therapy starts Friday. Pain has been intermittent. However, it's been a bitch being in a sling for stuff like typing, writing up reports right-handed....and tonight I had the labor of transferring 5 gallons of beer from one vat to a glass carboy.

And no driving until next week. Ho hum....it would be great for the drinkfest planned after work tomorrow, except they say that alcohol and high concentrations of acetaminophen (as in Percocet or Tylenol 3) will practically make your liver dissolve inside your body. So I get to play it dry, if not loopy from the medicine. What better way to celebrate the 30-year anniversary for a woman at work, who's a big Brett Favre fan, than to get doped up on painkillers, right?

Me gusta March Madness

So, I get 15 right out of 16 games the first day...only to find the VP of my department (I don't think of her as my boss, although I suppose she does have that authority) is 16-0.

I looked good for 19 out of 20 until that Western Kentucky 3-pointer at the buzzer fell...but I don't mind....sometimes ya gotta trade a perfect bracket for the excitement of the upset.

My next home brew will start tomorrow. It's my favorite beer -- Hop Devil. Oddly, though, the "clone brew" version that I'll be following the recipe for comes in at 6.3% alcohol instead of 6.7% that the real stuff is listed at.

I went to Dartmouth, and so sometimes I hear stuff, like, "that's a great school". Well, yeah, it is....but that really only means I performed really well in high school....Once you get into the good school, all ya gotta do at that point is graduate, which isn't as hard as it sounds.

I've been pulling dead cedar trees out of the side of our property by the neighbor's property. They were dwarfed by bigger trees, and so it's like dead tree carcasses....then they fall over (cedars have week bases for some reason) and they stand at 70 degree angles until I go in there and pull them down. At some point I've gotta hire a tree guy to run all these things through the woodchipper.

The guy who plowed our driveway this winter pushed a lot of the crushed stone (I sooooo wish we had asphalt so I could play basketball in the driveway) into a pile. But that was actually good, because the crushed stone by where the driveway reaches the garage had worn away -- it's like a 2-3 inch bump up to drive into the garage under our kitchen.....so having a pile of loose stones was convenient for me to take with a big spade and move to flatten out the approach in.

I went to lunch today with the Mrs....oops, I mean the Dr......and they screwed up my order. I wanted fries, I got a mixture of fries and onion rings. I wanted bacon....instead, I got a seared tortilla chip underneath the burger. What the hell? Ewwww! So they took the meal off the bill. I don't claim to be good at yelling at waitresses....so that was a positive accomplishment.

What would happen if....(3/13 edition)

....there was a sci-fi movie with the following premise: You know how they have that "international star registry" where for some amount of money, you can have a star named after someone? What if Earth was invaded by people from that star (or a planet in that star's system)? How would you like to be THAT guy? It's kind of a lame-enough gift to get, oooh, a billion light-years away there's my star....But then all of humanity is in serious trouble, and people are going to blame you! And really, it's not like you can become this "Earth ambassador" -- the natives to that system don't know who you are and aren't about to want to meet someone who thinks THEIR homeworld is named after him....

So now they have Roth 401(k) contributions, kinda like Roth IRAs....I vote to name the more traditional "pre-tax" contributions as "Hagar 401(k)" contributions. Hey, if Sammy wants to be remembered for *anything* 30 years from now, he should play along, too.

At work we have these RSA security tags, that flash a random 6-digit number every 60 seconds that we have to enter when we log on to one of our Internet-based systems. Now I've come up with a poker game for it. At a fixed time, everyone reveals the poker hand formed by their numbers. Best hand wins. Actually, with a six-digit number, you're more likely to have 2 pair, than no pair.

I saw a book on sale called "A Child's First Bible". And the idea of "a child's first...." is common enough. But how about "An old-timer's LAST Bible"? I mentioned this at work and someone suggested highlighting some of the passages that deal with the impending afterlife. (I simply suggested very large print.)

Lance Armstrong kinda looks like Anderson Cooper.

I like to play cribbage with the stated intent being to make the OTHER person end up with more points. Play to 61 instead of 121, since points can be scarce if you try. Nothing like unearthing a 12-point crib when you LAST want it.

Some people don't like to work on an empty stomach. How about working on an empty liver? Keep that flask in your drawer, ha!

Every once in a while, a couple of peanut M&M's are like siamese twins. However, other occasions have it where the candy coating is compromised. Then there's a peanut you can see, like an exposed brain from a bomb going off near a head.

I used to like chewing on muffin and cupcake paper. Get all the stuff off the inside.

Hey NASCAR....try having one race where they go around the track in the opposite direction. What would they have to do? Maybe re-pave the pit area, since you don't wanna have to do a 120-degree turnaround to approach pit row. It's akin to golf having the random match-play or modified Stableford scoring one week.

Lastly, I was asked to verify some personal questions to change a password. I was asked for my "favourite color".
That seems political....one word spelled British-style, the other American-style. So now everyone's pissed off!

Not a rib tickler...

Ugh.

Friday night....pickup hoops, some guy I've never seen before goes jumping into the pile with the score tied 8-8, I catch a knee to the left side of my ribs, and down I go. Apparently he missed the shot, everyone stood around, he put the rebound back in. About 30 seconds later I get up wondering if I can get a foul called for that. First of all, who the hell calls an offensive foul, right? But DAMN, it f-bomb-ing hurt. The next group of guys was on to play anyways....some clown claimed my own guy hit me (bull feces on that one....)

Anyways, they were sore, but I was able to play the rest of the night....and my Sunday league game went fine.

Sunday night, though....achoo!
I musta cracked 'em then. That's when it really really hurt. Like as bad as anything I've felt in a while. Can't cough, can't sneeze....I feared for pain in bowel movements, but that's been painless at least (imagine...HOPING for diarrhea to avoid having to push)

The doctor on Tuesday said an x-ray wasn't worth it to prove they were broken or not, since the treatment is the same....time, and pain medication (tylenol 3 for me -- the stuff mixed with codeine). It's working somewhat okay, but usually if I do have to cough, I brace my side against a wall to push back against the force. A muffin crumb caused an involuntary cough and that freakin' hurt.

So anyway, the doctor said if I needed it for a legal issue....hmmm, could I sue the town for not enforcing the "residents only" rule at the school where we played? probably not...of course, this past Monday there were rumors (I wasn't there -- I'm on the shelf for a couple of months, I suspect) that the park and rec lady was going to actually check IDs....wonder how that turned out. Maybe instead of 35 playing, we'd have only 15. that's what happens when a new high school opens with a shiny gym -- people from out of town show up.

As long as the ribs don't interfere with my left torn labrum surgery in a month, I can have them both heal together, I suppose.

What would happen if....(2/29 edition)

...you were late getting home from work but you lived at the South Pole? Could you argue to your wife that you had to "run around ALL DAY"? Geez, it's worth a shot.

I saw a headline on Yahoo! that said "Bobby Brown agrees to community service for cocaine". I'm sure he figured that's a pretty good deal, no? I'm sure lots of people would do a day of Habitat for Humanity in exchange for a dimebag of weed, too....

One phrase that seemed popular in college that I never hear any more is the "hot beef injection". Google only had 23,900 hits for it. I wrote the "HBI Song" with a buddy in college...typical E5 chords no-skill riff rock.

When a company changes its fiscal year, it will often have a "short plan year" -- say, from July 1 to December 1 if they want to change their tax filing from June 30 to December 31. This comes up with a company's 401(k) plan, too -- same idea. The IRS prohibits what I'd like to see -- a "long plan year". You can't go 18 months with only 1 return to the IRS, apparently.

Now that my new job comes with its own office for me, I've begun debating how this affects me should I have some smelly farts. For instance, by being alone in my office, I have the privacy and confidentiality that nobody will know what I've done. However, if someone were to walk IN my office soon after, well then I'm busted. Nobody to blame it on, unlike a scenario where there's a room full of cubicles.

As someone with Type 1 diabetes (the "real" diabetes, as I like to put it -- the kind you can't help getting), I sometimes wonder when I'll end up retiring, or how long I can escape death. So I wonder how much I should be saving for retirement. Will I get the typical 25-30 year long retirement? Or would I have to retire at 40 to pull that one off? If I work until I'm 65, I could have lots put away, only to die within 2 years if I'm lucky, on the other hand.

Kinda weird, I don't picture myself ever being retired....and I remember getting yelled at by my dad because it took me two weeks after I turned 16 before I got my first job....back when you had to be 16 to work. Then they changed the work age to 15 and my little brother got a job like a month later.

This being 2/29, it's obviously another 4 years before this day rolls around. I remember when my long time dentist's son died in his 40s....the obituary happened to show that he was 44, and listed his birthday as Feb. 29th of whatever year it was. And immediately, I thought...wow, only 11. Well, 11 birthdays, although the 44 years would be accurate.

I have an episode guide to the Simpsons....from 1997. Kinda incomplete at this point. Anyways, the Futurama movie Bender's Big Score that just came out was pretty good -- a little too "let's make sure we include every minor character in this somehow" to be great, but still a good deal. I believe there are 3 more movies in the pipeline, so that's encouraging.

The Red Sox start in an hour....I'll be off playing basketball, so I can come back and watch around the 8th inning -- when absolutely nobody in the game will be familiar. If they're losing, I blame the post-White House visit hangover. And who hasn't had that before, right?

mild pet peeve

Hey, the numbers on an adding machine....or numeric keypad part of a computer keyboard:

They are not in the same order as one would find them on a phone. The 1-3 and 7-9 switch places.

In the words of TV's Cliff, "what's up with that?"

so much for that idea...

Ugh, what a crappy football game. Close, but not exactly well played.

And then the spice of the ribs combined with the...um....cheapness of the Red Dog to do a number on my intestines, too.

I enjoy a good Sunday crossword. I do the Boston Globe one, as I get the Sunday paper only delivered to the house. It's amusing that most of the sports scores from the night before are too late for the obviously early edition that gets sent out to Connecticut. So I get relatively good info from the notes sections, but nothing too up-to-date on last night's games.

Anyways, with the Globe one I always get fewer than 10 letters wrong, but almost NEVER a perfect score. This week's was amusing, and also seemed to follow to this odd theory. The harder it *seems* at the start, the better I do. (For instance, one letter wrong this week....the Q in "Chatauqua" in New York, which combined with Qui, the Italian word for here. I put a G, not knowing either word.) I didn't seem to be working at too briskly a pace, and yet...only the one wrong. Other weeks I fly along, and end up with 6-8 spots (usually in the same area of the puzzle) empty (or actually, mis-guessed at).

Spring training starts next week! Yee-hah! And March Madness is just around the corner.

Super Bowl's a-comin...

Okay....

I hate the phrase "The Big Game". I realize that "Super Bowl" is trademarked and may not be used commercially. ESPN's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column mentions how the NFL thought about trying to trademark The Big Game. Why is it that NOBODY just refers to it as the NFL championship game?

I gave in to one of my guilty pleasures tonight. I bought a 30-pack of Red Dog. This stuff is pissy American beer, and only $11.99 for the 30-pack, too. And yet, when I need to buy cheap beer, it's what I get every time. Even if that's only once or twice a year, as I switch gears from the "good beer" I tend to purchase.

I'll be making ribs. I often do chicken wings, but I want to stay away from too much stuff fried. Leaves more room for Red Dog. (ha....)

I predict 41-13 for the final score, Patriots over Giants. This will mean NOTHING unless I'm right. But if I am successful in pulling these numbers out of my butt, then hey, it's here in print before the game.

Lost is back on tonight. I like the idea of watching that! And hey, if the writers' strike limits them to only 8 episodes this year, then that means the last 40 episodes will be more compactly aired in just a 2-year window in future seasons, right?

Of course, as much as I like Lost, it's really only my second-favorite show titled Lost, ever. Back before 9/11, NBC started showing a reality show where three pairs of people got blindfolded and flown somewhere. First ones back to New York win. They could walkie-talkie with the producers with fancy phones, and if they guessed where they were, they'd get some cash that was in a safe in their backpacks. They were in Mongolia, of all places. The best was the team that called up and guessed they were in Czechoslovakia. Um, not a country any more, guys....try again. Anyways, the show was getting really good, when 9/11 hit, and all shows were pre-empted for like 3 weeks of news coverage, and so they edited the last 4-5 shows down to 2 hours and it wasn't as good and eventually faded from memory.

Nut ranking

almonds
pistachios
peanuts
macadamia nuts
pecans
cashews
filberts (hazelnuts)
walnuts
brazil nuts

and please, no testicle jokes...

IPA in a can?

That seems weird. It was made by the New England Brewing Company of Woodbridge, CT. Usually beer in cans is mass-produced piss. This stuff wasn't the best India Pale Ale ever, but highly amusing, nonetheless.

I like Venus Williams better than Serena. Maybe it's the "older sibling" thing in me. She beat a rather hot Polish woman in the 4th round today. I found that woman's website, and the server was overloaded, my access was denied because others were using up her allowable bandwidth. Ha!

Couldn't they play the Super Bowl somewhere halfway between Foxboro, MA, and East Rutherford, NJ? Like, Southington, CT? Somewhere close? Oh screw it, the Patriots play better in warmer weather like Arizona. They could easily put up 50 with no wind or cold. Of course, the Giants might put up 30 or so of their own.

Two of my favorite comments from Futurama: The "third and third and third" as something to add to coffee in the year 3000....plus "Admiral Crunch" cereal.

Peanut butter is good with various fruits. I enjoyed a peanut butter and banana sandwich for lunch. What's also good is peanut butter and raisins. Of course, you need to spread the peanut butter on both slices of bread, to keep the raisins from falling out.

Ever go to make grilled sausage links, and realize you don't have any oblong rolls? I had bratwurst this weekend, and without the right roll, I had to cut open the casings, and pack the meat into a patty like a cheeseburger.

ESPN2 has UConn-North Carolina women's basketball on. Occasionally they'll talk about how the UConn home crowd stands until the first basket is made. The women's fans stole this from the men's fans. (Of course, it's really the same businesspeople attending these games.) Anyway, the MEN's fans stole it from Syracuse. They were doing it first and UConn stole it from them, after which the UConn women stole it further.

Parmesan Goldfish crackers....extremely good, but they do not hold even a candle to the best of the goldfish -- Xplosive Pizza....

My wife and I were thinking of doing one of those open mike nights...we'd be like the Eurhythmics or something. This was going to be our set list -- me on guitar but NOT singing...

Love Song by Sara Bareilles
Love will keep us together by Captain & Tenille
Look What you've done by Jet
Zombie by the Cranberries

The hardest part was learning Love Song, and then trying to convert the piano-heavy song to guitar as sole accompaniment. (It's like re-learning it, actually.)

steak-umm

The pride of Pomfret, CT. That one surprised me. There's not much between the UConn campus and Providence.

Of course, they're not real good meat. But ya know, a little american cheese, and you got a ridiculously easy sandwich in 2 minutes. and somehow it works.....

And to wash it down. Hop Devil. The greatest beer ever.

ESPN just showed the 20th anniversary of Jerome Lane shattering a backboard on one of the first ever Big Monday games. I regret, I had the game on in my bedroom and wasn't looking up when it happened. Stupid homework.

here's something weird...

NFL Network is advertising with scenes from "Joe's Diner", where a couple of dopes argue football at the counter of a diner staffed by Joe Montana.

The stupid thing is, they show a list of "homemade pies" available....and the last one on the list is EGG NOG.

What the hell is egg nog pie? Anyone?

Good vanity plate

My wife's just gotten a vanity plate in coordination with her new job. The best vanity plate I think I ever saw was

BQQBIE

because the Qs look like nipply boobies.

Yes, I feel about 14 years old saying that.

Another beer review

This one is called "cold hop" from Boulder Colorado. Makes me think Coors. But it says "Boulder Beer Co." Anyway, it's what they call a British-style ale. I like it, though. Very IPA-ish. I also got a beer called Raison d'etre....sounds French, huh? It's by DogFish, they of the 60, 90, and 120-minute IPAs. This one was funny, because they said it's brewed with golden raisins....which made me think the name of the beer was spelled wrong. Anyway....the two things in this world that give me gas more than anything are:

1. Raisins
2. Beer

So why WOULDN'T I buy beer brewed from raisins, huh?

Anyway, some gas...not the exponentially-ridiculous amount one might expect.

But here are the grades:
cold hop: A-
Raison d'etre: B-

This is kinda gettin' ridiculous..

Let's see....MTV shows soap operas
Now VH1 doesn't show music either
ESPN shows poker
TV Land shows movies
American Movie Classics shows an original TV show
Cartoon Network had something live-action the other day
ABC Family shows the 700 club

Can a network be sued for false advertising? That would be amusing, if unrealistic.

it's just like grape juice

Happy new year to everyone using the popular solar calendar.

So last night I had some shiraz, a full-bodied red wine. My dad used to tell me that wine was just like grape juice that had gone bad. This became noticeable this morning....grape juice used to sometimes have a green coloring effect on stuff (hint hint if ya know what I mean...), and let's just say the wine had the same effect.

Hey, they're playing hockey outside while I type! Sweet deal in Buffalo, an NHL game in the snow!