And we’re back!

God bless my family. They’re great, but after a few days with them in one house I have to wonder how my parents actually did it. How did they raise us to maturity without one of us killing the other one?
The weekend was good, it was the typical turkey day mixed with a little white trash but that’s ok I guess. The one big shocker was that my older brother, whom is more left leaning, far, far, far far far more left leaning that anyone else in my family actually bought a shotgun. My other brother happened to mention that he had just bought a shotgun and thought it would be fun to go do a little trap shooting out in the fields behind his house (for those of you wondering, yes, he lives in a very rural part of Idaho and this sort of thing is just another day in that part of the country). Having not done this myself since High School I thought it sounded fun. A little too fun it turns out, evident in the resulting gun purchase by a left wing democrat.

I can’t say too much myself as it proved that when the next gun show comes through town,

God bless my family. They’re great, but after a few days with them in one house I have to wonder how my parents actually did it. How did they raise us to maturity without one of us killing the other one?
The weekend was good, it was the typical turkey day mixed with a little white trash but that’s ok I guess. The one big shocker was that my older brother, whom is more left leaning, far, far, far far far more left leaning that anyone else in my family actually bought a shotgun. My other brother happened to mention that he had just bought a shotgun and thought it would be fun to go do a little trap shooting out in the fields behind his house (for those of you wondering, yes, he lives in a very rural part of Idaho and this sort of thing is just another day in that part of the country). Having not done this myself since High School I thought it sounded fun. A little too fun it turns out, evident in the resulting gun purchase by a left wing democrat.

I can’t say too much myself as it proved that when the next gun show comes through town, Wife and I will be purchasing a shotgun of our own. This won’t be our first gun purchase. A few years back Wife and I bought a little .22 caliber rifle and have done some target shooting here and there.

Either way we can’t get past the whole propaganda machine touting that Obama is going to take away our guns and as such gun sales are up and now the one brother I never would have thought to be a gun owner is. Sweet justice…

and I will be purchasing a shotgun of our own. This won’t be our first gun purchase. A few years back Wife and I bought a little .22 caliber rifle and have done some target shooting here and there.
Either way we can’t get past the whole propaganda machine touting that Obama is going to take away our guns and as such gun sales are up and now the one brother I never would have thought to be a gun owner is. Sweet justice…

Drive time

Well I’ve made it through the week and am now facing an 8 hour drive to my brothers house for the holiday weekend. Needless to say I’m not looking forward to this at all. 8 hours of stressed out jackasses on the road all trying to make it to Grandma’s house in time for turkey. I’m just hoping that the economy has more than a few of them scared off of the roads and into staying home. After all Grandma can heat up that hungry man and celebrate just fine with you.

So to those of you lucky enough not to have to drive or fly somewhere this weekend, bless you. I just hope we don’t run out of liquor before it’s time to leave…

Merry Xmas

May your Holiday Season be a Blast!!!

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Whyyyyyyyy?

I plug my ipod into my computer and up comes that nasty message “itunes has detected an ipod in recovery mode. You must restore this ipod before it can be used with itunes” Why me? I think it does this on purpose. It’s one of those little things that Apple has written into all their software that makes their products self destruct after so many months, ultimately requiring you to repurchase your music or go without. Thank God I learned so long ago to back up my itunes, but the problem is is that I have nearly 5000 songs and 28 gigs of the 30 used. Yeah it’s going to take me like 3 days to re load that back up. Bastards I tell ya, bastards!

Don’t they know that I’ve been putting off cleaning up my itunes library for oh so many months now? I mean come on guys…do you know how many duplicate songs I have in there thanks to the penchants of itunes to duplicate rather than move songs after you’ve selected like 80 of them. Yeah, great idea there guys. Like I have the time to do that and restore my ipod. It’s not like I’m a web designer or system administrator or some other bull shit job that doesn’t require any real time focused to it. It seems that my employer gets pretty uptight when I decide to stay home and have a second or third cup of coffee while monkeying around on my computer. I have a real job it seems…I knew I should have finished my degree, but noooo I had to join the real world and pay my bills. If only I had stuck to it, I too could be one of those bastards that does nothing all day but sit in my pajama’s in front of my computer screwing around and calling it work. Bastards!

And before I start getting the hate mail, yes, I’ve tried resetting my ipod, several times in a vain attempt to keep from having to face the truth that it needs to be restored. At least it still works in the car so the inevitable restore can be schlepped off for a few more days…

Well

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to head back to northern Utah and work with my former company on how to improve one of the departments of my current company. It was definitely beneficial, and should result in more than a few changes.

It was nice getting back to Northern Utah. This time of year there is actually one of my favorites. The air is cool and the town is still sleepy and slow. It’s the time of year that the locals get to be local. Hang out at the double E for breakfast and coffee, hit Davanza’s for a slice at lunch and then on to one of the many great restaurants on main street, no reservations needed, just walk right in. On our last night in town we were able to hit The River Horse and ended up as one of maybe a half dozen tables that I’m sure they had that night. The food was still excellent, and the atmosphere was great. I’m not regretting the move to southern Utah, but I do miss the atmosphere that northern Utah had. I miss its restaurants, its liquor stores and the relaxed pace during the off seasons.

The trip also served as a follow up for the cabinet job at my former property. I was able to verify my measurements and make sure that my ideas for the area will work. So now that that is out of the way it’s into production in a mad rush to get it completed and installed before the 15th of December. Yeah, the next few weeks are going to suck.

Ben Harper: Homeless Child

Nerds Beware

I couldn’t resist writing a comment about a story I read on Reuters about a nerdy couple that met online and are now getting divorced due to an online affair, based in Secondlife. See the story…UK couple in real-life divorce over virtual affair

Common lady…first you met him online, second you’ve already caught him having nerdy animated hooker sex for play money online and third, he’s having nerdy animated play sex online. What the hell did you really expect from him? I mean really, the sticky mouse and keyboard should have been your first inkling that something was up. But to hire a cyber private eye…now that takes the cake.

By the way, how do I become a cyber private eye? Do I get to stake out nerds having fake sex online? WOW what a life’s ambition.

Argument 3.0

Wife and I seem to be at odds over what time we should be hitting the gym. And no, I haven’t gotten my fat ass there as planned, here, and here, and I’m sure somewhere else but I’m sure you get my point.

The fact of the matter is that I love sleep and the early morning is when I love sleep the most. All warm and snuggy with those sweet dreams of topless women, brilliant I tell you, absolutely brilliant. So the thought of getting ripped out of those sweet, sweet dreams by the screeching alarm clock at 5am just doesn’t twist my crank. But where we have yet to attain that lofty goal of being in debt to no one and being the masters of our own destinies we can’t just roll out of bed and hit the gym at 10am like so many other stay at home mothers. This leaves us with the evenings after work, or what I like to call slime time.

Slime time is the time frame between noon and about 7pm when the gym is packed with those guys that really aren’t there to do anything but watch your crotch, their crotch, everyone’s crotch in the mirror. You know the guys I’m talking about. The ones that are generally found lurking around the free weights, looking like they’re staring at themselves in the mirror when in reality they’re staring at your wife’s crotch while she’s on the kegelsizer thingamajig. Or better yet when some unaware female enters the free weight area and runs through her routine while getting mentally raped by the slimers doing pseudo curls across the way. Don’t get me wrong here, women aren’t the only victims of the mental rape. I’ve seen a fair number of men checking out other men in the same fashion…it’s just creepy.  But I think my absolute favorite is the home boy slimer. You know the one, it’s teen age/twenty something kid that’s there in his best “g” wear of baggy pants hanging around his ass and a tank top with a baseball cap on backwards. I swear the last time I was at the gym it was during slime time and I saw this kid that totally looked like he had just rolled in from his Friday night dressed in those half pant half shorts, you know, the ones that are too long to be shorts but too short to be pants…and his very best homie button down black shirt with ghost flames on it, gold chains and complimentary backwards baseball cap. What was he doing? lifting free weights…yeah…you tell me he’s not there in an effort to score some action. But honestly from the look of the kid the only action he was scoring was the redbull he fingered from the local 7-eleven. Slime time is chalk full of those guys that when trying to pick up women at the gym use that classic line of, “hey, you work out?”

Rocket scientists I tell ya, rocket scientists!

So I guess that leaves me one choice…get my fat ass out of bed and away from those bouncing boobies in my dreams and go to the gym…sucks!

Waiting

Well, I’ve decided to wait on the redesign of the site until another day. There’s just far too much on my plate for me to focus on a redesign just yet.

It turns out that I have landed a few bids for the wood business and as such will be giving it my focus over the next few weeks as it’s paying me, and well this site just isn’t rolling in the money as of yet. I do think that Wife is going to be posting up the latest and greatest of the gallery for the business though and that should be a huge improvement.

So stay tuned, improvements will be coming down the pike but just not for a few weeks.

One More Time

I’ve decided that there’s a great deal more that I’m looking for out of the sight and am just not in love with the current design. Even when I finished with it last month I was left feeling that there was so much more that it needed and that I wanted. The color scheme really wasn’t what I was looking for and just kind of fell into place based off of the dark header/logo.

So what I’m trying to say is that I’m undertaking yet another redesign. At the same time I think I need to work with Wife on getting the business site up and running with an updated and modern version as well.

So stay tuned for what I hope to be a more matching site to my personality. In the mean time I’m pulling the thematic site as I’ll have to change a number of default files to accomplish my goals and I’m sure the rest of you don’t want to watch this or that piece change over the next week or two.

Yellow Sticky Notes

This is a very cool animation by Jeff Chiba Stearns.

Metisse: Boom Boom Ba

Where was this last week?

Came across this today while surfing through YouTube. Absolutely priceless…even Big Foot votes Democratic…tree hugging jackoninnys

glub glub

What the hell! What…The…Hell!

The economy is in the crapper so what do credit card companies do? They jack your rate to force every last penny out of you in order to keep sending their executives on retreats to Cancun. Total BULL!

Wife just informed me that our American Express just made an astronomical jump to 24%. WHAT THE FUCK? 24% why not just bend me over and take it straight out of my ass. Thank God our credit isn’t as bad as it had once been. Nor are we currently tied down to a mortgage so unlike the majority of credit card holders out there right now, I don’t have a HUGE debt to income ratio so lets jack my rate. Yeah egg heads that totally makes sense. Let’s jack the rate of those that have the money to pay for things with cash and discourage them from using our services, that’ll keep us in business. Makes complete sense to me too.

Slumpy

Feelin kinda slumpy today.

Donno what that really means other than it has just been one of those blah days. Works been non stop though, maybe that’s why. I think it also has something to do with the time change and my rearranging my work schedule so that instead of the weekend being 1 day away it’s now 2…I hate working Saturdays, but it is what it is and that’s what it takes to get the job done.

On the plus side I should have a bid going out tonight or tomorrow for 2 flat screen cabinets and an electronics cabinet back in Deer Valley. That would give me some extra cash flow for either Christmas or even better…the beach in January. Mmmmmmmmmm beach…. The only problem is that pricing has increased a fair amount on materials and I’ve already bid this job once and lost it then due to budget but they’ve come back to me a year later and the pricing has only risen since. Hopefully they’ll go for it because the current setup they have is U G L Y. It looks like a blind monkey installed things and for the level of hotel this is going to go into they definitely could do better.

Now if I can only find the time to produce it before I’d have to install it in December…guess I’ll worry about that if I get the job…

I hate to say it but there are dark dark days on the horizon for the American public. It’s never a good thing when one party has a majority in all branches of government. You thought the past 8 years have been a wild ride, just wait for the next 4. (Yes I understand that the senate majority isn’t great, but it’s still enough to cause havoc on the system as a whole…)

Before you begin sending me hate mail you should know that I’m not a registered republican or democrat but an independent so my stance is pretty neutral. I don’t care about this party or that party…I just want the damn thing to work for once and my vote goes to the individual who I believe will accomplish that…nothing more and nothing less!

What the general public seems to have forgotten in this election is that balance in government is good. It means that no one specific faction can control the direction of the country to meet their personal beliefs. That balance has now been thrown out the window because everyone has been absolutely blinded by the media rather than looking at the actual underlying facts and stories. All anyone saw and heard was that President Bush drove the country into the ground but any fourth grade student in a US civics class could tell you that the President doesn’t have that power. It was driven into the ground with all branches of government (republicans and democrats alike) sitting at the wheel. But Americans are fickle and none of us want to take the blame so we follow what the man on tv tells us and he tells us that it’s Bush’s fault so it MUST be Bush’s fault. We then sit back and wait for the media to spoon feed us the answers rather than form an opinion of our own and this round the media was all over the democratic party. They’re the saviors, they’re the ones with the answers and they’re the guiltless ones that didn’t want to go to war, or allow the economy to drop or a million other things that have drug the country down. It’s the Republicans fault, they’re the ones to blame for everything so we have to remove them from that balance and turn the country over to the democrats…they’ll save us…won’t they…at least that’s what the man on the tv said…

Dark days my friends, dark days…

This election should prove the absolute need for a reform of the election laws, the electoral college needs to be scraped and there needs to be a cap on fundraising and donations allowed. It’s time that the process was returned to the average joe american. It’s time that our voice is heard, not the media’s voice and definitely not the top 10% of the wealth in the country. Those are the voices that need to be curtailed so that the rest of us can have a say for once. If this election hasn’t proved that, then the last 4 sure have…

It’s also proven that anyone can buy their way into the presidency. Enough money will buy you any position you like. Rather than doing good with the SICKENING amount of money wasted by both candidates we chose to look the other way and allow them to continue without issue. How many mouths could have been fed from Palin’s wardrobe? How many homes could have been saved from Obama’s infomercials? How many Americans should be outraged by this? How can we sleep at night knowing that rather than do some good with those funds they were flushed down the toilet. The next time you think about donating that $1.00-$10,000,000.00 to your political party, take a look around you, where should that money really go? What good could you do and how many lives could you change by giving that money to something that really mattered?

At the very least we should be allowed a none of the above vote…what’s the percentage of American voters out there that wasted a vote on someone that they don’t support because they had to choose between the lessor of two evils? I know I did…

Dark, dark days…We all should be ashamed of ourselves…

Longing

I hate daylight savings. It does absolutely nothing but throw my system out of whack and effectively make me tired for the 2 weeks following the change. I understand where it came from and why we needed but we’re no longer chained down by the amount of daylight we have at our disposals. I think it’s time that we abandon this weird shift in time and allow the country to progress as God had intended.

I mean really…here I am still in my office and it’s 4:30 and the sun just set behind the ridge effectively throwing us into twilight for the next hour and a half. IT SUCKS!

On a lighter note I was cruising through the pictures of San Diego on my iPhone while eating lunch and came across one I completely forgot

I took this as we were heading off the beach in Coronado as the fog was rolling in. Being a mountain boy it was amazing to sit there and watch it roll in off the water, across the beach and up and over the buildings. Too bad the iPhone doesn’t have a zoom yet, this picture could have been far more amazing, but it’s still not that bad.

Oh how I long for the beach!

Beach Good

We’re back to the real world now and it S U C K S! I’ve found myself over the past day or two daydreaming of the beach and San Diego.

We got into town a week ago last Friday and could immediately feel the energy of being that close to the ocean and in such a great town. We picked up the rental car and immediately got lost on our way to the hotel. That’s ok because we were in no hurry and who really cares. We eventually found our way, thanks to the mighty iPhone and it’s GPS…yeah thanks really goes out to the California department of transportation for their superb upkeep of the road signs in the area. If you’ve never been to the area make sure that when you do visit, that you arrive before dark as the signs are so old and weathered that they’re no longer reflective, effectively rendering them completely useless in the glare of a cars headlights. Yeah…that was great…thanks.

Saturday however delivered the eye opener that we were looking for. We had an idea that the view from our room was nice but we had no idea the view of Mission Bay would be absolutely amazing. Every morning and afternoon was awesome. Watching the sail boats and rowing teams while sitting on the beach just feet from our room was the best.

We hit the typical San Diego sites, Hotel Del Coronado & Coronado, Imperial & Pacific Beaches, Old Town, The Whaley House, Highway 101 up to Carlsbad, Sea World and Kobeys Swap Meet. I would have loved to have been able to stuff more in but between my conference and a few foggy days I think we accomplished quite a bit.

One of the coolest things we did was to tour though the Whaley house. It’s supposedly the most haunted place in California, blah blah blah, I think most of it is bunk and  the number of pictures that they’re touting as showing some sort of paranormal activity to me shows nothing more than just bad photography. Either way it was still pretty cool. The house did give off some quirky vibe and I could see something lurking around it’s dark corners, but when they’re touring 25+ people through every 15 minutes I don’t think much is going to be happening. It might be worth getting a group of friends together and renting it out for a night and seeing what decides to pop up.

I think this trip may have given us the kick in the butt that we’ve needed in order to begin planning our vacations and taking some time for ourselves rather than waiting for something to force us into going. It’s funny that Wife’s old boss sent us on our first beach vacation and now we can’t seem to get enough of them. What’s even more funny is that I never thought that I would EVER be a beach kind of guy, but every time we get there I absolutely love it. Like I said in my last post, I would eat dirt on a daily basis if it meant that we could live on the beach.

Yeah…the beach ROCKS!
The best part of the trip? Seeing that South Park has finally given me something totally topical again.
I mean really, they ARE everywhere!

The best part was the rendition of “my heart will go on”…
It was so cultural…