Saturday, January 31, 2009

I've always wanted a scattergun

But it's a little early to be planning HannahC's wedding.

This is the time of year when we have to go through the annual ranking and rating process at The Company. This is an especially fun year because they have said that there will be no raises or promotions due to the economic situation, but we still have to go through the whole process anyways as a way of "fairly managing and tracking performance." I assume that means that when they eventually decide to start laying off engineers, they'll have some recent performance write-ups to use to pick who to fire.

A few years back, they downsized our division and they said that the decisions were not performance-based so much as they were "matching skillsets to the needs we anticipate having in the future in our evolving business environment." After seeing who got the axe then, being the keen observer of humanity I am, I noted, "If your skillset is screwing stuff up, it seems they've decided they don't need at much of that skill any more."

People still quote me on that. I'm pithy.

But anyways, I had to do little writeups of 9 of my coworkers. Bosses are required to solicit the opinions of the coworkers as part of the review process, and each year a surprising number of people seem to value my opinion. Surprising given my potentially deserved reputation as a complete yahoo. I wish that I could bang these things out like I bang out so much tripe on my mnay blargs. But here, nothing I write has any real consequences (other than that on occasion The Mrs. or some member of her mountain-people clan will get mad at me for my too honest candor). In these little co-worker writeups, I can't simply dash off a "This guy is a prick-and-a-half who, despite thinking he is god's great gift to engineering, wouldn't know his head from his asshole if it weren't for the stink," or "This person is the most breathtakingly incompetent person with whom I have worked in my 14 years with The Company."

OK, that second one I actually did write this year in one of these mini-reviews. But, I stared at it for a hour and decided that it didn't really accomplish anything. Plus, I got to thinking how I was only for sure able to place this person in the top five of breataking incompetence. So I rewrote the whole thing to discuss what I though was specifically lacking in this person's knowledge base that was preventing success at the moment, but if learned, could lead to success.

I find it very painful to write these things, because when someone's carreer and reputation is on the line, I don't want it to be colored by something like a personality conflict, but I'd like it to be based in concrete fact. So I end up digging through presentation that the person has given over the year and meeting minutes and the like to make sure my recollection is correct.

And, for the first time, I actually sat back in the middle of it and said to myself, "Self, this is the kind of time when I really wish I were a Democrat, because then I wouldn't have to do all this time-consuming, fact-based writing. I could just jot down how I feel about this person, and then call anyone who disagreed with me a racist. It would be so great to be so completely unthinking. I feel that global warming is a threat. I feel that driving an SUV is evil. I feel that this person is incompetent. I feel that the government is the most competent beauracracy to run the health care of everyone in this country just like they run the post office - I almost always get my mail."

I'm not making that up. I actually had that conversation with myself. Though I guess it's more of a monologue than a conversation.

But talk like that is what I like to call "crazy-talk" because, as a rational person, I'm not a Democrat and thus I do not believe that my feelings are sufficient to establish fact. So I needed some other kind of distraction other than fantasizing about how easy life would be if I stopped thinking and just started feeling. And what better way to snap you out of such a funk than gun shopping!

I must admit, I have been lax. Obama has been president for over two weeks, and I haven't bought a single gun in response. Given that I've put the boat purchase on the back burner for a while, I've freed up quite a bit of my bonus cash for the purchase of firearms. Now, I know that the gun I should really buy to stick it to the pinko in charge is this one (available right now from our local enthusiasts' shop), because it has absolutely everything that is considered evil - thumbhole stock, polymer frame, 30-round magazine (with a 50-rnd available), and the dreaded "armour-piercing" 5.7x28mm cartridge. But, honsetly, I'm not really one for esoteric firearms, especially ones that use an odd cartridge that is sure to drive ammo costs through the roof.

No. I decided to get a shotgun. Why? Well, I don't own any. Shotguns and revolver are pretty much the only broad catergories of firearms that I don't have any of right now, and a bunch of the guys at work like to go shooting sporting clays. So, you know, what the hell. I spent the last couple days at work writing reviews of my coworkers interleaved with shotgun research. It made life a lot more pleasant.

So, I've got it down to basically one gun, although there are a number of variants of that gun sold under two different brand names. I'm thinking a Browning Silver Lightning. It's also sold with a slightly different finish as the Silver Hunter, and with a different stock altogether as the Winchester Super X3 Classic Field (and in 18 other variations between the two companies, but these are the ones I like best). The dimensions of the Browning and Winchester differ slightly (by 1/8" on some key measurements), so it may come down to which feels better.

Now I just have to figure a way to sneak away for the purchase without The Mrs. finding out about it. She doesn't like when I do Man stuff.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

We all find our inspriation in obvious places

Now, as you all know by now, I am not a particularly religious guy. The Mrs. is the religious wack-job in the fambly, and after her fairly recent revelation that her favorite sect has been taken over by radical leftists (like Obama and Co.), even she has tapered off the whole organized religious bent. So, you very rarely see any kind of spiritual post here at Me, CherkyB. Unless you consider lawnmower and snowblower love to be spiritual.

However, I was today going to post a heartwarming little entry about how my recent conversion over to country music has inspired me to try to be a better man. It would have been very poignant and heart-string pulling, and all you womens would have gone, "Golly, I sure do wish even more than I normally do that I was married to someone as perfect as CherkyB," and then The Mrs. would have started yelling at me about why only womens leave comment on my blog even more than she normally does.

But, lucky for all of us, but particularly for your poor husbands who are really tasked with quite a monumental effort swimming upstream just to try to keep up with the evolving perfection that is CherkyB, something crossed my desk today that completely changed what I was going to blog about.

And that, dear readers, was this.

That's right. Read it and weep, suckers. I'll be off working on my four drinks a day. But I'll be doing it for The Mrs. because I'm such a selfless, giving person.

I'm a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

HannahC, A chip off the old block

Though The Mrs. will probably find some way to be mad at me for calling her an old block. Our weather alert radio sounded an alarm tonight. This got me to singing.

Me CherkyB: [singing] "Ooooh, the weather outside"

HannahC: [not singing] "is frightful."

Me, CherkyB: [singing] "But the fiiiire is so"

HannahC: [not singing] "You are such an idiot."

You are going to get our children taken away

The Mrs., ever supportive of my parenting style.
Me, CherkyB: [pouring a glass of Beaujolais] "Hurry up MaxieC - the commercial is almost over."

MaxieC: "OK, Dah! I'm gonna get a soda from the basement!"

The Mrs.: "What are you guys doing?"

Me, CherkyB: "We're playing the House Hunters drinking game."

The Mrs.: [glare]

Me, CherkyB: "Uh. I mean, we're playing a game."

The Mrs.: "What are you teaching him?"

MaxieC: "See, you watch House Hunters, ya see, and every time someone says, 'nice,' you take a drink!"
The Mrs. was not impressed.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Let's forget about Momma

The Mrs. is on her deathbed today. Being Monday, I had to take HannahC to her once-a-week school-for-homeschoolers in the morning. We pass by a place called "Surgical Center of Fort TomCollins" on the way there, and HannahC noted, "Isn't it funny how every time we go by this place, MaxieC asks, 'anyone need any surgery today?'"

I also had to pick up HannahC to bring her home - a task that is normally The Mrs.'s, but on account of her being on her deathbed I skipped outta work early to do it. On the way back, a little farther east, we pass a place called, "Plastic Surgery Center of Fort TomCollins."
HannahC: "That place is a plastic surgical center."

Me, CherkyB: "Yup."

HannahC: "If Momma were a different person, she'd be there all the time."

Me, CherkyB: "What do you mean?"

HannahC: "Well, I don't mean if she were a completely different person. I mean if she was the same person only different in the brain, then she'd go there all the time."

Me, CherkyB: "..."

HannahC: "Like, if she was the kind of person who really cared how she looked."

Me, CherkyB: "..."

HannahC: "Like if she needed to be perfect, I mean. If she was the kind of person who needed to look perfect, then she'd be there all the time."

Me, CherkyB: "Momma's not perfect?"

HannahC: "[sigh] Look, let's just forget about Momma, OK? Remember the episode where there was that comedienne whose boobs hung all the way down to her waist, and they fixed that? That was cool."
HannahC. Knows when to walk away. Knows when to run.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

It started innocently enough

I was on my deathbed, suffering in quiet, dignified silence, when in charged The Mrs.
The Mrs.: "I gave MaxieC a choice."

Me, CherkyB: "Well, bully for you."

The Mrs.: "[sigh] I told him he had a choice between a birthday party and getting his very own pet."

Me CherkyB: "Grate."

The Mrs.: "Yeah. He really wants his very own pet."
Now, this is certainly true. He has been whining about how many pets HannahC has, and how she never lets him play with any of them, and so he needs his very own pet. Though, that very morning we had gotten up to find Tiny, the leopard frog, splayed out on a rock and moving remarkably little for a frog that is still a member of the living. We laid her to rest in a nicely-lined (with paper towels) cardboard mail-order contact lens box which we unceremoniously tossed into the garbage can in the garage because HannahC decided she didn't want to go through all the bother of burying her, since she was dead.
Me, CherkyB: "I thought you had said he was too young to get his own pet."

The Mrs.: "We'll find something that he could have. And I really don't want to organize a party."

Me, CherkyB: [clearly delirious from all the death-bed-lying] "I saw in the paper yesterday that the humane society had a two year old guinea pig named Elvis available. Guinea pigs are pretty sturdy."

The Mrs.: "Yeah, but how long do they live? Like two years?"

Me, CherkyB: "I dunno. Lemme see...[sound of typing google search]...five years."

The Mrs.: "Woweeee!!!!! Soooper Dooooper!!!!!!! Do you think they still have him? Do you think they're open? Do you think they have any other guinea pigs? What are their hours? You're well enough to do this today, aren't you?"

Me, CherkyB: "[type type type] Here's Elvis on the web page. Says the info was updated 10 minutes ago. And they have two female guinea pigs named Fluffy and Cinnamon, too."

The Mrs.: [bouncing up and down like a kid waiting to see Santa Claus] "Oh oh oh oh! Get ready to go!"

Me, CherkyB: "OK, but I'm not driving. I'm sick. You can drive your own minivan, right?"

The Mrs.: "[gasp] But it might snow! I hate driving in the snow!"

Me, CherkyB: [looking at the sky, noting absence of threatening weather] "If it snows, we'll take the truck. And I'll drive."
I took a shower and got dressed, cuz being in your deathbead is stinky work. Then we headed off to the humane society. When we got there, they had the rodents all set up right in the reception room by the front door, and we learned that Cinnamon and Fluffy were a "bonded pair" and could only be adopted as a pair. But the lady assured The Mrs. that guinea pigs are much happier in pairs than alone.

So we sat in the greeting room and played with Elvis for a while. Then we played with Cinnamon and Fluffy, and HannahC claimed Fluffy as her very favoritest in the whole world. MaxieC, however, preferred Elvis because he was a boy. The Mrs. preferred the girls because girl rodents are easier to deal with than boys, plus they do beter in pairs, plus if we got only one, it would be clear that HannahC would never let MaxieC play with it. So we spent the next 20 minutes trying to convince MaxieC that he wanted two guinea pigs instead just the one.

And we failed.

So then we said to bring Elvis back to us one more time, and Elvis refused to come out of his cage. He hid inside a little Habitrail tube. So they brought the tube with Elvis inside and handed him to us. He refused to come out. So we pounced. "Look, MaxieC. He's not very friendly. If you got him, he'd never want to play with you. The other ones came right out and were a lot friendlier. Do you want a pet that won't let you play with it?"

I'll let you guess which is Cinnamon and which is Fluffy.


Clowning around with his new pet. The one HannahC lets him play with.


One of the troubles with Fluffy is I can never tell which end is which. You can see in this picture that there's a triangular ear kind of in the middle of the hair at the top end. If there are ears, that's the head end.



Getting new pets at the humane society is just the start of the investment. $200 later, we're all set up.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Odd

Today, The Mrs. bought something that I never expected she would buy.

A bale of hay.

More to follow.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

CherkyB - A Profile in Courage

It is with heavy heart I deliver this message to my loyal readers.

I am now close to death. What started out as me thinking I had a bit of a cold has now ended up to be something far more serious, and the normally cheerful an irreverent CherkyB that you all know and love is gone. Perhaps forever.

Before you shed too many tears, know that I have lived a pretty good life, all things considered, and the suffering I now go through will not outweigh all the good times.

I never expected it to happen to me. But, today my cold was so bad that I had to stay home from work. At first, I tried to keep up appearances: logging in to work, phoning in to a 9am meeting, reading and responding to emails, even fielding some work-related IMs and a cell phone call. But now, I realize my precious strength is gone. I am reduced to lying in bed where I have just suffered through "My Name is Earl" and "Kath & Kim." Dear God, I can feel my soul escaping.

My only hope, the last shred of hope that I cling to to keep me going, is that "The Office" and "30 Rock" prove to be somewhat restorative. On "The Office" they are having a debate as to whether Hillary Swank is hot or not. I had to google her as, after meeting The Mrs., I have no eye for any other women.

On a lighter note, when I crawled downstairs from my bedroom prison for lunch, The Mrs. had really great news.
"I hate to tell you this, but the dishwasher appears to be leaking."
Grate.

I checked the door seal, and it looked just fine. So I started it up and sent MaxieC for a Philips screwdriver. Upon MaxieC's return, I removed the toe-plate and took a gander underneath. And Lo! Water poured forth from a spot on the bottom of the tub from whence water should not be pouring forth.

I found this odd, as it was not a broken/loose connection or ruptured hose. It appeared to actually be some rupture in an otherwise nondescript spot on the bottom of the tub. So I had the dishwasher pump itself out, and I peeked inside.

Right in the spot above the leak, there was an odd clump of scorched something right next to a deep divot that appeared to breach the outside of the tub. Something had clearly fallen on the heating coil, heated itself up quite a bit, then fallen off and burned through the tub.

This is why you should always get a dishwasher wait a stainless steel tub, not a crappy plastic-tubbed model. But, like the oven that died last year, it was installed in the house when we bought it, and you don't replace things that are working just fine simply because there might be a better model available. Unless, of course, you're the government.

The Mrs., always cheerful with my money, chimed in, "OK, I guess we should go out and get a new dishwasher today."
Me, CherkyB: "But I'm home sick today."

The Mrs.: "You don't look that bad."

Me, CherkyB: "I took some Dayquil, and it's helping."

The Mrs.: "Well, I guess I could wash dishes by hand until we can replace it."

Me, CherkyB: "[stifling a chortle] I think I can fix this with epoxy clay."
Epoxy clay is what you laypeople know as Miracle Putty from the wonderful Billy Mays infomercials. I use QuikSteel brand because, after trying a few different brands, I found that I have the most success with this one. The local Ace stocks about 5 brands, and they're all within pennies of each other in cost, so it's not obvious which is best if you're just standing there.

I got a bit of QuikSteel, slapped it on the hole, and then ate lunch. Afterwards, I started up the dishwasher, and the leak was gone! It was like a Miracle! I also checked all the local Lowe's, and the earliest I can get the dishwasher I want is Feb 8, so it's a good thing I got this working, because I don't know if we have enough towels to cover up the big pile of dirty dishes that would accumulate if The Mrs. "washed dishes by hand" for two weeks.

And we have a lot of towels.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Tales of Woe

I'm sick again. Not sick in the head, like some of you (OK, most of you). Sick in the lungs. I just got over my head cold, had about a week of good health, and was immediately stricken with a chest cold.

I'm sure this has something to do with the fact that it's 65 degrees out, but I don't know what. The bitter irony of me getting over 50 hits a day to my snowblower review, and yet having used it but twice this season, both times with less than 3" of snow. Some expert I am.

On the plus side, The Mrs. and I have been tag-teaming being sick, and she has moved into the guest room so as to prevent the one of us who is sick at the moment from keeping the other up all night with coughing and hacking. And, I gotta tell ya, it has been a really really long time since I've slept so soundly. This may largely be because, while there is room for The Mrs. and Me, CherkyB in our king-size bed, there really is not room for The Mrs., Me, CherkyB, MaxieC, and FreddyC, and somehow about 3am that's how it always ends up.

On top of that, I'd forgotten to apply my gin-n-tonic cold remedy. It may or may not make your cold go away faster, but it sure is good at keeping your cold from mutating into malaria. And believe you me, a cold is a hell of a lot more fun than malaria. At least, I am told that. See, being as I lived in Kalifornia for 11 years, I met a lot of people from third world countries who were here to steal the high-paying tech industry jobs that Americans don't want, and believe it or not, a lot of them had had malaria despite the fact that they came from big-government socialist paradises that they reluctantly fled in order to join the capitalist pigs in silicon valley.

So, I had mistakenly applied the vodka-tonic remedy, mainly cuz I had it on my mind after recommending it to Paula's husband over on her blog. Except the damned vodka-tonic remedy is a weight-loss remedy and has nothing to do with curing the common cold. Duh. Thus, I have suffered needlessly and have potentially come dangerously close to a case of malaria.

I think I lost a couple pounds, though. But that may have more to do with all the Olestra in the Pringles.

Saturday was a day of fabulous excitement. We headed down to the Big City to see one of their annual shows. I know what you're thinking: Oooo, National Western Stock Show! But, I would caution you that just because you are a bumpkin doesn't mean that everyone else is as well. I know we've never met in person, but just take my word for it.

You'd probably get along great with my wife's hillbilly brother, though.

No, no stock show for us. We went to the boat show. And it was very exciting. There were a lot of boats. Everywhere you looked, boats. However, very few bass boats. In fact, I found a grand total of two bass boats and one crappie (which is supposed to be pronounced croppie, but I just can't help calling it crappie cuz it's so fun to say) boat, which is basically a stripped down bass boat for people who are willing to admit that their fishing skills pretty much stop at putting a worm on a hook and throwing it over the side.

The fambly, naturally, made a bee-line for a pontoon boat. A big one. Something like 26'. Oddly, on exhibit from a boat store that I drive by every day on my way to work. So we went all the way to Denver to look at boats from a local place. The Mrs. spent quite a bit of time discussing pontoon boats with one of the dudes from that place, but eventually admitted that we were there because I wanted to look at "fishing boats". Of which he had exactly one on display - an 18' deep-V walleye boat. This is very much not a bass boat.

However, he helpfully noted that I should expect to spend the majority of my time fishing my childrens out of the lake after they fall overboard if I were to put them in a bass boat. And, given that all our water is in mountain reservoirs, it is prone to sudden wind and 2' chop which is largely incompatible with bass boating. He said he didn't stock bass boats, but could order me one if I really wanted it and have it in 4 weeks.

Now, that is true about the wind, but I filed away in the back of my head that he may have just been telling me a story to stear me to what he had in stock.

We spent a long time going around looking at various fishing boats (and a lot of skiboats), and what I would note is this: pretty much every store displaying boats had decided that the deep-v walleye boat was the way to go, and pretty much every deep-v walleye boat looks the same. You get to choose between 17' and 18', a Mercury vs. a Yamaha engine, and welded vs. riveted hull, but other than that they are largely indistinguishable.

I did finally find a guy who had one aluminum bass boat and one aluminum crappie boat (having previously only seen a $40k pro series Nitro) as well as a bunch of walleye boats. I got chatting with the dude there whilst MaxieC explored the bass boat to find the livewells, batteries, and rod storage (MaxieC had it pretty well figured out at this point that every boat had these, but not all in exactly the same place) and The Mrs. and HannahC were finishing up lunch. It turned out he was a professional fisherman that was sponsored by that marina, not a salesman. So I axed him about where you'd take the bass boat around here, and he said, "Oh...you do not want that boat with your son. He'll be in the water within minutes," and he pointed me to the 18' deep-V walleye boat and said, "That's the boat I take my son on. He's about the same age."

So it looks like the dreams of a bass boat are being shattered. And the deep-V adds about $10k to the price, which puts it above the "what I wanted to spend" threshold. Though the pontoon boats remain price-competitive.

Please, somebody shoot me if I buy a pontoon boat.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Someone Watches Too Much TV

MaxieC: "Hey Dah, can you open this for me?" [hands me a fruit-by-the-foot bag]

Me, CherkyB: "Sure, Bud."

MaxieC: "Wow, Dah. How can you open it so easily?"

Me, CherkyB: "Well, it's because I'm big and strong. But don't worry, you'll be big and strong some day, too."

MaxieC: "You know what, Dah?"

Me, CherkyB: "What's that?"

MaxieC: "There's two kinds of strong: strong, and Army Strong™."

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Tactical Nukes

From what I can tell, that's the only thing that will kill white water mold in your hot tub.

Well, we've lost another blogger on the blogroll. Ellie has decided to hang up the gloves on her fitness blog so that she can concentrate on her 300 new friends on Facebook. I don't actually know what Facebook is, other than it is something that was originally designed for teenagers to gossip about their friends but that actually is being used largely by middle-aged people to gossip about their friends. That's about all I plan to learn about it, as Twitter is now all the rage, with both blogging and Facebook being soooo last year.

Twitter, from what I can tell, is like blogging except for people with really, really short attention spans, or possibly people who are crippled by not having a slide-out keyboard on the phone on which they compose their blogs. I won't have much time to investigate this Twitter thing for a while, though. At least not until you can sell ads on it.

It's not often that you go out to fetch the mail, and the street two houses up is swarming with cop cars. Well, it's not too often in this neighborhood. In our first house, we used to pray that the police would finally catch those guys at home (though they never did). And then, it's sad to dash back in the house to grab your po-lice scanner (a tenth-year anniversary present from The Company), only to realize it is still programmed for San Schmose frequencies, not Fort TomCollins frequencies.

So, lest you get caught unprepared again, you spend some time programming it. That involves just doing blind broad-range frequency scans and storing any frequencies that hit.

This, of course, will drive your wife into an absolute frenzy because she has not given you permission to make any noise whatsoever, and she has very specifically instructed that you are not allowed to use the gift your loving The Company gave you in exchange for wasting ten years of your life on a so-called "career". But, you know, as an adult, you don't need permission from your wife to program your own po-lice scanner. So you do it anyways. And then you teach your boy how to work it and let him wander all over the house with it.

And then, naturally, she has to get even with you. So she waits until you're sitting quietly and surfing the web, then she sneaks up behind you and starts wadding up paper into balls as loudly as possible right behind your head while yelling, "Yeah! Yeah! You like this right? You like just mindless noise at random intervals, right? Yeah! Yeah!"

And, really, this is quite annoying. You should never underestimate the ability of a woman who is the product of a broken home and thus has no idea how a husband and wife are supposed to interact to come up with the most mindless and petty ways to intentionally annoy her husband. As I have heard tell, during her formative years, her mother decided to embark upon a course of behavior that was specifically designed to try to annoy her father enough that he would finally divorce her. And, unfortunately, this is really the only parenting by example she ever got.

So I don't really blame her so much as I pity her.

And myself.

After a few minutes, she managed to goad me into a reaction, during which time I said that the next time she was sewing, I'd stand behind her and make really loud sewing-machine noises, since that's clearly what she liked. And then I did my impression of an enraged sewing machine, which, if I do say so myself, was dead nuts on.

The Mrs. disappeared for a while, and then she showed up with a camera and was literally waving it around in my face, and she asked what a sewing machine sounded like. After enough of this, I said something that would be considered nasty if one were to just hear that and not the story leading up to it. And with a great, "Ah HA!" The Mrs. announced that she was using the moovie feature on the digital camera, not the still photos, and she had captured me being mean to her, and she insisted I put it on my blog so the everyone else who reads my blog would know how mean I am. So I did, only I did a small edit at the end later because Ellie was horrified after seeing the unedited footage that this video showed me being mean when I am actually a most wonderful and caring person who sometimes can't take the constant nagging and lashes out. (I may be paraphrasing a bit there.)

And that is the back story from the previous post.

Upon reflection, The Mrs. was clearly feeling like her gratuitously nasty behavior needed some kind of explanation. Not an apology, mind you, but an explanation. So she used her favorite don't-blame-me-I-come-from-a-broken-home excuse: "My stepfather had a police scanner."

I now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.

Friday, January 09, 2009

The UnLove

My "loving" wife accused me of plagiarizing some of the work on one of my too-numerous-to-count blogs because it seemed too good for me to have written. Now, she is bent on annoying me. She wanted me to upload this video that it shot while I was trying to compose a post so that, "All the women on [my] blog," could see what I'm really like.



The real problem, of course, is that The Mrs. is sick and blames me. Oddly enough, when I was sick, she also blamed me for that and spent days telling me how unhealthy I am because I don't eat properly like she does. Then, wham, she's sick, and suddenly it's not because she's unhealthy, but it's because I am a mean bastard who gave her the cold.

Well, whatever.

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

I'm not much for poetry

But, damn, Angry Thespian has a knack. It almost makes me worry about the future of the free world.

Though, I guess, Reno 911 is one of my favorite shows. So no worries, aye mate?

To day for me was one of those days that I was really really busy all day at work, but I didn't actually do anything. All talk. No action.

Like prom night all over again, as they say.

Surprisingly, I ran in to Cavitation at work. Surprising, given he lives in Costa Rica. He snuck in to town on some personal bidness, but also came in to work to meet with a whole bunch of people with whom I work, but he decided to keep it a secret from me and my crew. I would have been offended except, as I always end up recalling later after being offended for a while, we're not actually friends.

But, on the bright side, I found his little Uhaul out in the parking lot when I was going home - the one he claimed he'd be too busy returning to have a beer with me - and it was unlocked and empty. So I peed in the back of it.

Go luck with that cleaning deposit, old pal.

Research on the bass boat continues, despite the economic downturn. I'm thinking I might like a Triton instead of a Tracker because the Triton is all aluminum, and the Tracker has plywood casting decks. Some people have reported that the deck hatches for the compartments under the deck are pretty flimsy on the Tracker because the plywood is too thin.

I did not do any reps on the erg today, despite having more than one blog.

Saturday, January 03, 2009

Mail Call

Today, I finally felt up to doing something that was on my list of "things to do on my vacation" - shred the mail that I had piled up on the kitchen counter that wasn't technically "junk" but that I did not want. The material went back to June '07.

Things like old utility bills, old credit card bills, old transactional statements from the health insurance that get sent every time someone goes to a doctor or dentist. Plus a very large pile of old paystubs that I'll never need because who needs all their paystubs ever? I've switched to electronic delivery of an awful lot of this stuff now, so I don't actually have to shred nearly as much.

The shredding took almost three hours, with both childrens helping most of the time. I had to open each envelope, make sure I didn't want it, and then put it into a bin. Then MaxieC would unfold the papers and hand them to HannahC, who would in turn run them through the cross-cut shredder. We managed to overheat the shredder once and had to give it a half-hour break, and we almost filled our big, giant garbage can. Probably about 35 gallons of volume of shreds, though the actual papers that were shredded were maybe 1/8 that. I'll probably have to pack it down a bit.

It seems like what I really want is a 17ish ft. aluminum hulled bass boat with about 50hp. The fiberglass stuff I had been looking at is way too heavy and expensive and easily damaged. I got a Bass Pro gift card for Christmas (Thanks to the Queen Moother), so I'm almost all the way to a Tracker Pro Team 175 TXW. I figure, after my birthday, I'm there.