Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

WhyTF is there that huge blank space at the bottom of the page? Am I missing a bracket or table tag somewhere?

Came across this picture by random surfing. It’s part of a Photoshop contest, this one designed around patriotic WWII posters. I almost wet my pants.
You know, I’ve been thinking about putting a giant moose in the front yard for a long time.
6 degrees of separation – for real.

I want to do a weather vs. pain blog. My wrist (and hub’s knee) hurt when there’s a change in the weather coming. To be effective, it would need:

– pain index
– whose pain, mine or hub’s
– daily weather inc. high, low, conditions, and highest humidity
– mitigating circumstances (i.e. out of town)

Ideally it would be some sort of database where I could crunch the numbers and make a graph of pain vs. weather change.

Anyone have any thoughts (besides telling me I’m anal and/or insane, which I already know)?

Top 25 IRC quotes, laugh-out-loud funny
How close are you to nuclear waste?
Enter the Google Challenge
Why not to use Earthlink.
More weird crap washing ashore.
Guess I gotta learn to sew, if I don’t want my 3 year old to look sexy.
What a surprise… CPS runs amok, removes kid from house for 2 years because he was spanked once.

Mystery website, where the point is to find out what the point is.
Text Twist, an anagram flash game.

I can not believe that I got a hit to my site from someone searching for beheading fetish. I think I’m missing some part of the sexual revolution (or perhaps I’m missing the point – if you have a beheading fetish, you cut down on potential partners rather rapidly, don’t you?). Between the girdle thing and the beheading thing, I’m a little concerned for the future of the human race. At least there was one person who got here via a search for nice hot girls. That seems like a safe choice.

At least I’m feeling a little more human now.

We went to Dallas yesterday to visit a friend. She’s not from Dallas, she’s from Ohio, but was in town for a convention. Since it’s a hell of a lot closer than driving to Ohio, we went up to see her while she was in the same state.

And we took the 9 month old and the 2.5 year old.

If you have children, you are shaking your head at this point and saying “What were they thinking? That’s crazy-talk.” And you’re right.

We had stayed in another location of Staybridge Suites once and it was really nice, what with the high speed internet access and kitchen and stuff. I booked us a room at the one in Dallas and we had high hopes. Well, when we checked in they told us that the net access was temporarily down and they were working on it. That was fine, we had dinner plans and they would have plenty of time to work on it while we were out. It never got fixed. And our phone was broken so we couldn’t call out.

We headed over to Pappadeaux and had a really excellent meal and the kids were fine and it was loud enough that if they hollered, nobody could really hear them. Then we headed over to downtown Dallas to see the skyline, since it’s one of my favorites, especially at night. I love the skyscraper that has the green neon all down the sides. While we were there we decided to look for the Grassy Knoll�.

(pause blogging for a moment while I go upstairs to make some dinner for the 2.5 year old and the fridge breaks and one of the shelves falls and a bottle of Frank’s Hot sauce shatters on the floor and I use the F-word about 50 times)

If you’ve ever been to Dallas, I’m sure you were as underwhelmed as I at the JFK memorial. I took to calling it the Non-ument. It’s this granite slab in the ground surrounded by concrete slabs, and it is singularly ugly. We were woefully unprepared for the foray and didn’t know where the School Book Depository building or anything was. We stumbled across it by blind luck, then decided to go back to the hotel.

Still, the kids were doing well, no major blowups. The little one crashed out. It was only a matter of time. The 2.5 year old had not taken a nap all day, and she refused to go to bed. Nuclear wasteland ensued. Around 2 AM she went postal, complete with snot, spit, tears, blubbering, hysterics, screaming, the works. Past experience has shown that people staying in hotels do not appreciate wailing kids at 2 in the morning. She spent the next hour and a half crying. At 3:30, once things had calmed down, I climbed into bed and proceeded not to be able to sleep. I kinda sorta vaguely drifted off a little bit and then the little one woke up at 5:30, hungry. She went back to sleep and woke up at 6:30, hungry. She fell asleep and all was well.

Until 8 AM when the hotel fire alarm went off.

We canceled our visit to my cousin’s house and headed home. The kids were positively filthy from the carpet in the hotel room. It looked like they had been playing in a coal bin. And they refused to nap during the 3.5 hour drive.

Next time we go out of town, we’re dosing them with Benadryl.

Googlewhacking for tonight:

zerbert boob
mirliton vomit

That stupid freaking clock up there has suddenly decided that it’s going to be 6 hours ahead of my system time. Is it working right (i.e. does it show the system time on your computer or something else) for anyone else?

Famous people I have met, known, or stood within 20 feet of:

Dean Dittman, a good friend of my mother’s.
Sam Donaldson, got his autograph at the Republican National Convention in 1988
Ronald Reagan, sat on the floor about 10 feet from his podium at the RNC
George Bush, ditto
Anne Richards, came and shook my hand at a party in Laredo, also the aforementioned restaurant incident
Sting, was in an elevator with him in New York City
Richard Simmons, busted me coming out of a cookie store in O’Hare Airport… (of all the luck, sheesh)
Jimmie Walker, stayed on my floor at a hotel in Las Vegas and we were stranded waiting to go to our rooms when the fire alarm went off
Douglas Adams, at a booksigning in Austin
Don Henley, ditto
Alton Brown, ditto
Carl Anderson, backstage at the Jesus Christ Superstar reunion show in San Antonio (he told me I was impeccably dressed *melt*)
Dan Ackroyd, passed by him on a sidewalk in Reno
Sleepy Floyd, (from the SA Spurs) frequented the same bar
Bob Stupak, passed him in the hall in a Las Vegas casino
Jerry Tarkanian, (former UNLV baskeball coach, looked like Uncle Fester and always bit towels) ran into him at the Las Vegas airport
Bruce Campbell, got a response to an email I sent him
Ted Nugent, ditto

I’m sure there’s more but I can’t think of them at the moment.