Two bags of jelly beans, a ten-year old and a Tilt-A-Whirl.
A thirtysomething living in the Armpit of America, New Jersey. With a wife, a house, a four-legged bullet named Maggie and a child on the way.
Everything the Comic Book Guy on the Simpsons isn't.
Good computer parts cheap.
Mictlan
Politics from the President Elect
Pongomania
The Blog I'd Like to be.
The Wikipedia of Music: if it ain't on here, it's not worth listening to
Victimless Pranks by the Bucketload
Where Mags came from (Best. Shelter. Ever!)
visited *loading* times
37 weeks and counting. Things could go at any minute, so you'll know when you know. Thanks to everyone for gifts, diapers, homemade onesies, baby shower planning, diapers, fluffy cutesie little clothes, helping paint the nursery, diapers, Milliken's Legato carpet tiles, my wife and diapers. Not my wife in diapers, just that diapers seem to be the easiest and most straightforward thing to buy. You know the kid will grow into whatever size you buy (unless you grab something in a 38 waist) and you know they'll be put to use, even if it's only to shammy down the car with. New ones, not used.
Ladies and germs, I give you the coolest party game since horseshoes. Behold, YARD SCRABBLE!
(Don't worry about telling me the misspelling of KWYJIBO, some other Simpson's geeks already tagged me on it.)
While I cannot lay claim to it's actual creation (someone on Freecycle was giving this away), I do have to say that this is one damn cool and well thought out idea. The board is a 6 foot canvas drop cloth painted with deck paint for durability. The tiles are half inch pine drawn on with a marker (point scores in the corners, too) and the stands are also pine with small sections of closet rod to hold the tiles in place. Granted it's not overly portable (those two trash bags in the upper right are the extra tiles) but the idea of taking what is normally a semi-private game between 2-4 people and turning it into a group outing for a party is just too cool.
I'm thinking I need to set up a barbecue soon just so I can trot this thing out.
I turn 32 tomorrow. I don't know why this one burns me a lot more than turning 30. The big 3-oh wasn't big and didn't have much "oh" neither. Thirty deuce is the one that decides to whip my hide. Go figure.
Anyhoo all toys, winning lottery tickets, sacks of cash and property deeds can be sent to me care of this website.
(Sung to the old Spider Man theme song) Sushi Day, Sushi Day Is anything better than Sushi Day? It’s raw fish served with rice It looks slimy but taste’s real nice Look out, today is Sushi Day!
I have an addiction. I feel I should post this to let people know what’s been going on with me. In a way this will be rather cathartic for me to just come out and say it instead of trying to explain all the years of lies and covering up my actions. I have come to a point in my life where I am ready to accept whatever Fate has in store for me. Okay, here goes (deep breath).
I am a chocoholic and I have a problem.
Revile me, shun me if you must, but I am working to improve myself. Having been born to a chocoholic mother, I later discovered that the condition is largely genetic. In other words if you were born to a chocoholic parent, the odds favor that you too will succumb to the fruits of Theobroma cacao. I had secretly hoped that I would follow in my father’s footsteps; chocolate holds no sway over him. He has even openly shunned it in favor of some other non-chocolate dessert. Coffee and cigarettes are his drugs of choice. As for me, I expect to find myself years from now in a five dollar flop house, half clothed and muttering incoherently while Cadbury egg wrappers fall to the floor like foil snowflakes.
With a baby on the way, I realized I had to put this… this urge to rest. Can you imagine the shame if I was caught speedballing a bag of Toll House morsels? I couldn’t let the child see my weakness, I just couldn’t. I took it upon myself to not eat any chocolate for Lent (40 days before Easter in other words). So, how did I do?
The first weeks were the toughest. It seemed like everything chocolate was talking to me. Leftover holiday candies, cocoa powder, even freakin’ Ovaltine just seemed to mock me from every corner. “C’mon, have a hit, just one itty bitty hit. It’ll make the day go faster. People will like you more. Besides, new medical reports say it’s good for you.” I stayed strong and, strangely, developed a huge appetite for raisins. Yeah, raisins. Dole if you can get ‘em.
My one weak spot was the Polar Bear Plunge (sorry, no photos of it this year). We had our usual home celebration and without thinking I had a square of my sister Martha’s famous grasshopper brownies (made with real grasshoppers!). Only after I plunked down my fork did I realize what I had done. I chalked it up to poor blood circulation and vowed to be stronger.
I stayed up late the Saturday before Easter so I could consume some of the sweetened wonders that I kept myself from. I half slept, half meditated over the wafer of Ghirardelli dark just after midnight. Fantastic.
Now on the tail end of it, I have not conquered my demon, but at least moved him into a nice cage with weekend pass privileges. My intake has gone from just about every meal to a single Dove dark chocolate egg, melted on the tongue. As for chocolate itself, I have this much to say: most of it is utter crap. The pawed over cases you find in the local checkout is not chocolate, just something brown and sugary. Like everything else, it’s worth paying a little more for something of better quality. A local chocolate shop would love for you to become a regular, even if you only buy a piece at a time. Commercially made items also work, but you have to be choosy. Ghirardelli, Dove, Hershey if there is no other alternative. Reese’s only saving grace is their peanut butter (that’s for another Lent), while Nestle should be dragged out into the street and shot. And, since I am from the home town of M&M’s, CAN’T YOU FREAKIN’ PEOPLE MAKE ME A DARK CHOCOLATE M&M?! Were crunchy M&M’s really such a fantastic marketing leap? And how many meetings did it take to create that unholy amalgamation you call an Amazing Bar? I call it amazing only in that anyone would eat them!
Sorry, sorry, just lost my cool there. I think I’ll head down to the vending machine to settle myself…
I held my child for the first time yesterday. Sorry folks, not in real life, just in a dream. Freakish how detailed it was though.
All I remember was the Missus holding the baby as we walked around some building and went down a flight of stairs (maybe a new house we were moving into?). I commented that I hadn't had a chance to hold gender pronoun yet and she handed gender pronoun over. All I remember was this tiny moon face and pale blue eyes staring at me. The baby had my hair (or lack thereof) and looked a lot like my side of the family (round face, ski jump nose, bright eyes). That and gender pronoun seemed so incredibly small to me, like holding an eggplant (we don't do small children on my side of the family). Borrowing from Dream Moods:
Baby
To see a baby in your dream, signifies innocence, warmth and new beginnings. Babies may symbolize something in your own inner nature which is pure, vulnerable, and/or uncorrupted. If you dream that you are on your way to the hospital to have a baby, then it signifies your issues of dependency and your desire to be completely care for. Perhaps you are trying to get out of some responsibility. Babies may represent an aspect of yourself that is vulnerable and helpless. If you dream that you forgot you had a baby, then it suggests that you are trying hide your own vulnerabilities; You do not want to let others know of your weaknesses. If you are pregnant, then a more direct interpretation may simply mean that you are experiencing some anxieties of making it to the hospital when the time comes.
Which generally means bupkus to me.
Also, an idea. It' still in the formative stages, but I think I may have hit upon something that will make a fine blog and be relatively easy to write. Something along the lines of Preshrunk, but not quite. I'll fill you in once I get the groundwork laid out.
And thanks for the positive comments. It's more appreciated than I care to say.
Because I said I would, so there. The wee one, in case you were wondering. And no, we're not telling you what it is. 
I'm back, but briefly. Finally found a slack space of time at work to provide a few updates. Plus, I need your input on something.
I've been seriously toying with two ideas: either bag the whole blog bit (the house one would stay, if only for reference material) or move to another location (nothing personal Howard, I just want to see what else is out there) . I just can't seem to summon the time or energy to write and when I do, it sounds like the endless pablum of a thousand other blogs out there. I still kind of like the haiku site (even though I'm likely the only one who understands any of it) (oh, it's been reopened, in case you cared) but I can see it's more schtick and less originality than I had first thought. I have found a few blogs I truly like (Go Fug Yourself and Preshrunk are my current faves), but I can't seem to hit upon one item that has an endless supply of linkable material and will hold my interest. Or that hasn't been done already.
Comments on this would be greatly welcome at this time. (cue Clash "Should I Stay or Should I Go")
Favor to ask. Does anyone have a good site to track down IP addresses? Getting tired of trying to look up unlogged visitors via Google searches.
The haiku site is down for the time being. I'll explain later.
