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!