No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. I’ve just been busy. Busy doing a hundred detail items on the house, busy working on another plugin, busy working on a family calendar… you know, BUSY. Here’s the rundown:

Call me slow – I know I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. But while I was reading on Michelle Malkin’s blog, I learned a new acronym: BDS. And if you follow the link, you’ll learn it too. Isn’t that cool?!

These are kind of like the old Arsenio Hall Show feature “Things That Make You Go HMMMM”. (Am I dating myself with this reference?!)

• Can you cry under water?
• How important does a person have to be before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered?
• Why do you have to “put your two cents in”.. but it’s only a “penny for your thoughts”? Where’s that extra penny going to?
• Once you’re in heaven, do you get stuck wearing the clothes you were buried in for eternity?
• Why does a round pizza come in a square box?
• What disease did cured ham actually have?
• How is it that we put man on the moon before we figured out it would be a good idea to put wheels on luggage?
• Why is it that people say they “slept like a baby” when babies wake up like every two hours?
• If a deaf person has to go to court, is it still called a hearing?
• Why are you IN a movie, but you’re ON TV?
• Why do people pay to go up tall buildings and then put money in binoculars to look at things on the ground?
• Why do doctors leave the room while you change? They’re going to see you naked anyway.
• Why is “bra” singular and “panties” plural?
• Why do toasters always have a setting that burns the toast to a horrible crisp, which no decent human being would eat?
• Can a hearse carrying a corpse drive in the carpool lane?
• If the professor on Gilligan’s Island can make a radio out of a coconut, why can’t he fix a hole in a boat?
• Why does Goofy stand erect while Pluto remains on all fours? They’re both dogs!
• If Wiley E. Coyote had enough money to buy all that ACME crap, why didn’t he just buy dinner?
• If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, what is baby oil made from?
• If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
• Do the Alphabet song and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star have the same tune? (And why did you just try singing the two songs?)
• Why do they call it an asteroid when it’s outside the hemisphere, but call it a hemorrhoid when it’s in your butt?
• Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog’s face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him for a car ride; he sticks his head out the window?

That’s right. It’s Saturday night and I’m just finished with another of the home improvement projects. This one really is a nice one, though. I started with two shelves and a library table. Together they looked like this:
   
So earlier I had bought some unfinished oak faced cabinets at Menards and I’ve been applying urethane and sanding between coats. Also, I’ve painted the exposed parts of the bottoms blue (left over from the house trim) and I’ve also had to buy some oak 1×4 lumber and rip it into two “halves” so that I get the proper spacing. I have 15 1/4 ” deep and 57 1/2 ” long to fill with cabinets. The countertop I ordered through my sister-in-law (thanks, Sue!) as she works at a place that manufactures kitchen and custom countertops. I also had to buy a little bit of oak veneer plywood to cover the open face of the lower cabinet. Here’s the result:
   
I like the way it turned out, and more importantly, so does KC. I’ve still got some trim to run and I’ll probably end up repainting the wall to cover up where the old phone plug was. Also, I’ve got to put on the door handles. But I’m done with the hardest part. Whaddya think?

Happy Birthday, Michael!

Well, the blond jokes anyway. (I’ve got a “Canonical List of Blond Jokes” text file I gleaned a few years ago that is over 60K and has nearly a thousand of them.) For those of you easily offended, you can skip this post; for the rest of us who can enjoy a laugh and realize that it’s just for fun with no harm intended:

A blonde and a guy were out on a date and they ended up at ”Lovers’ Cove” where they were making out. The guy thought that things were going pretty good and maybe he would get lucky tonight, so he thought that he would ask her if she wanted to go in the back seat.

”NO!” yelled the blonde.

The guy just figured that she wasn’t ready yet. Things got pretty hot and the guy thought he would try again.

”NO!” the blonde yelled again.

Things got even hotter and the blond was down to her bra and the guy even had her pants unzipped.

”Do you wanna go in the back seat yet?” asked the guy.

”For the last time, NO!” said the blonde.

Frustrated, the guy asked, ”Well, why the hell not?”

Do people say that any more? Well, I do. One of my biggest pet peeves (that is, things that piss me off but I really can’t do anything about it) is people who use acronyms and then use the word that represents the last letter of the acronym. Here’s a short list (most are computer terms):

• ATM – that’s right, it’s just ATM, it’s not an ATM machine. ATM stands for Automatic Teller Machine. It doesn’t stand for Automatic Teller Machine machine.
• NIC – again, it’s just NIC, not NIC card. NIC stands for Network Interface Card and most computers have at least one; they do NOT have Network Interface Card cards.
• DMZ – It’s used in both computer terminology and war-time terminology. It means De-Militarized Zone. In computers it means an area that is accessible to both your LAN and the internet. It is NOT a DMZ zone; that’s right, it’s not a De-Militarized Zone zone.
• CPU – Please to not call it a CPU processor. CPU stands for Central Processing Unit. DUH!
• RAM – While a misnomer, RAM stands for Random Access Memory; please don’t call it RAM memory!
• DIMM – It’s not DIMM memory, DIMM means Dual Inline Memory Module.

So are there any that you can add to this list?

It all began Friday night. We went out with some friends to a local restaurant called The Button Factory Woodfire Grill (kind of like Applebee’s only better food and better service and better atmosphere… well maybe not like Applebee’s?!) to plan a future camping trip. It should be a lot of fun! After a few beers there and a nice meal we went home as KC was to volunteer at the Mississippi Valley Blood Center on Saturday morning. While she was there I went out and did the groceries thing – YES I do shop for groceries!

After a quick and uneventful trip to Des Moines, we met up with ZDog and J at their new house after a quick stop to pick up KC’s mom Helen. (Breezomatic is living at home but couldn’t go as she had to work on both Saturday and Sunday.) I had brought over some tools and a USB wireless NIC. ZDog and I busied ourselves with “fixing” his garage door opener. I had helped him put it up, but had made only one flaw: it was backwards. When you adjusted the “Up” movement it actually adjusted the downward movement and when you adjusted the “Down” movement it actually adjusted the upward movement. Big mistake when some one or some thing (like their dog Token) when in and broke the safety beam and the door immediately shut! Later I installed the USB wireless NIC on their computer. They used to have a long cable going from one bedroom out in the hall to another bedroom where they have their office; now with the wireless NIC they no longer have the long cable running to their office!

Also, Saturday was our anniversary and we had planned on Helen, ZDog and J out for dinner that night. Well, ZDog and J (I think mostly J) had other ideas. They had called KC’s brothers and all that could met us at the Olive Garden for dinner that night. After we had sufficiently stuffed ourselves with some great Italian food, J had them bring in a cake that she had ordered from Dairy Queen – yes, that’s right… an ice cream cake (and it was yummy!). Lots of visiting and a good time was had by all. Oh yeah! We also stopped at a hardware store as Helen’s toilet had some flushing problems as the internal workings had “broke”. I got a Fluidmaster Flush Kit and installed it and now the toilet works fine. I’m such a handy man…. if you can’t be handsome you can at least be handy! (Or so Red Green says!)

Sunday saw us at Baker’s Square for a brunch before saying our good byes and coming home. It was a real whirlwind!

I’ve received this email many times (and I guess this time was the “final straw”) and it’s always attributed to Bill Gates. Well, Mr. Gates did NOT make a speech making these points. I checked it out at Snopes and found that according to them, it was a part of the book by Charles J. Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write, Or Add. While the source is quite a bit different, the message is worthwhile. It’s called ‘Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School’, and most of the emails circulating leave off the last three rules.

1. Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teen-ager uses the phrase “It’s not fair” 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1.
2. The real world won’t care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It’ll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, kids complain that it’s not fair. (See Rule No. 1)
3. Sorry, you won’t make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won’t be a vice president or have a car phone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn’t have a Gap label.
4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he’s not going to ask you how you feel about it.
5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren’t embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend.
6. It’s not your parents’ fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of “It’s my life,” and “You’re not the boss of me,” and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it’s on your dime. Don’t whine about it, or you’ll sound like a baby boomer.
7. Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.
8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t. In some schools, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped, lest anyone’s feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life. (See Rule No. 1, Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 4.)
9. Life is not divided into semesters, and you don’t get summers off. Not even Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don’t get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. While we’re at it, very few jobs are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you find yourself. Fewer still lead to self-realization. (See Rule No. 1 and Rule No. 2.)
10. Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston.
11. Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.
12. Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you’re out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That’s what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for “expressing yourself” with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.
13. You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.
14. Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You’re welcome.

Ah, yes. Words to live by. For those of you who don’t think all of these rules are true I have some eye-opening news for you.

Happy Anniversary to KC and me. Wow, where does the time go? It seems like just a couple of years ago we got married. Then I check the calendar and see it’s been 28 years. Wow. Like I said, it seems like just a couple of years. Then I see ZDog and Breezomatic and remember all their time growing up, I see the house and all the memories of objects in it, or remember ZDog and J’s wedding, and I realize that it really has been quite a few years. But what glorious years.

Happy anniversary, KC. I love you.

One new employee couldn’t log in to her new computer account and asked me for help. I asked all the routine questions, and finally came around to the “old reliable”:

Me: “Are you sure this is the right password?”

Her: (exasperated) “I’m sure it’s the correct password. I typed in the one I saw (another co-worker) use to login to her machine.”

Me: “And what password was that?”

Our season wrapped up last night as we won the league tournament for the upper division. Our church slow pitch softball league is divided into an upper division that is a bit more competitive and a lower division. Both profess to promote fellowship, sportsmanship and participation. Of the teams we played in the tournament, we were the only team that played women and high schoolers. Even though it’s a co-ed league, we were the only team in the upper division who had regularly played women. One is our regular second baseman and the other alternates at catcher and right field. We’ve also played other women during the season. As far as high schoolers, we played five regularly (one of these was also one of the women). It was just really fitting to beat teams that don’t (and probably wouldn’t) play anyone but men aged 20-35.

We had won the “winner’s bracket” last week on Thursday. Monday night, the first game was between teams to determine the winner of the “loser’s bracket”; the second game was to play us. We were demolished. The other team came out and scored 10 runs in the first inning and we never recovered; heck we didn’t score until the third inning. We ended up losing by 12 runs, but it wasn’t even that close. We were simply outplayed. That gave us our first loss in the tournament, so we had to play the same team again the next night. What a difference one day makes. The next night, instead of 10 runs in the first inning they only scored 3. We answered with 4 in the bottom of the first, and the game was afoot.

It was actually a fun game; the blowout games are never fun for me. The lead changed pretty much each half inning. I know a number of the players on the other team (JD, Chad, Kevin, Santos, Buddy, Doug) and we needled each other all night; complimenting each other on good plays and razzing on bad plays. It was all done in fun, at least on my part. I played shortstop, as I had all season, and made a number of plays. I committed one error on a hot liner hit at me that caught me on an “in-between” hop. I did make a nice double-play turn at second and ran down a couple of pop ups. Austinator (my nephew) played third and made a couple of very nice plays in the field. I also went 3-4 at the plate, scoring two runs and driving in four, including the tying run in extra innings where we eventually won.

All in all, I thought it was a very nice win. Our team has played all year with one thought in mind – to have fun. We didn’t have the best regular season record and were seeded fourth in the tournament. It was really nice to see all the folks on the team play well at tournament time and come through like they did. And the church really backs the team. There were church members there who do not have kids/spouses on the team; they just showed up for the fellowship. The only drawback to the entire night (and season) is that it isn’t my home church; my home church has lost membership recently and we don’t have enough to field a team. I play on a different church’s team thanks to Rick, who initially got me on the team. Still, that is a minor drawback as we all had a great time!