The Time of Legends

The Tammy Faye Baker possession

Mon, 21 Jun 2004 02:58:10 GMT

My daughter came into my computer room today with a curious design on her face. I see that she's got pink on her eyelids all the way up to 1/2 inch above her eyebrow. Okay, I thought, she's got her play makeup and she's putting it on while falling down the stairs or something. Note to self: find a female that can explain that less is better. In fact, none at all until she's older would be fine with me.

Then I notice her lips. Blue (BRIGHT blue), with blue smears of it up to her nose and cheeks. Odd, I don't remember any blue lipstick in her Christmas present. I inquire as to the source of her lipstick, to which she responds, "Blue raspberry Baby Bottle Pop, ya silly dad." Of course! The one left over from last week's KC Dopefest. How could I have forgotten that she'd squirreled it away in her room and just now found it again? Silly Daddy.

It was a lazy Fathers Day today. My wife had to work today so it was just me and the kids. We watched Harry Pothead and the Prisoner of Azk...Ashka...Ashtray (I think). I mowed our lawn while my kids taunted me with fun stuff like kicking the soccer ball around and riding their bikes. We just got back from the park I'd promised them I'd take them to. We played Big Bad Daddy The Tickle Pirate, which mostly consists of me chasing them and tickling to the point of peeing their pants any child who comes within my grasp. We stayed late enough that the fireflies came out so we chased them for a while, then I sat back and watched the ponies chase some more. Heh, they're all tuckered out now, and I can have some peace and quiet.

Who's the silly dad now?

Gotta be a suitable userpic in here somewhere...

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 09:11:03 GMT

Just ran across this site a few days ago: http://www.humandescent.com

Damn, but DAMN, some of these pictures just give me the willies. Very cool Photoshopped human/animal hybrids.

Check out the gallery if you dare.

And to whet your appetites (and stretch my n00b image linking skillz):

Here's PenguiCat and Dogilla!

The KC Dopefest aftermath

Mon, 14 Jun 2004 20:11:28 GMT

Yep, it's over and what a time it was. Big raspberries go out to those of you that missed it.

I enjoyed meeting those that have gone before, like SkipMagic, auntie em, sperfur, Erika, Mirror Image egamI rorriM, and Baker, as well as new folks, such as Dragon, LadyDragon, HeyYou, Whammo, MamaHen and her friend "Tagalong", beanshadow, and Fierra. All of you rock, and shoulda come to The Levee with us Saturday night! Rain doesn't do anything but get you wet.

And now my KIDS are looking forward to the next Dopefest, especially so my daughter can see her new boyfriend "Clay", aka skipmagic. You make quite an impression on 5-year-olds, don't you tiger? I wonder how the next group of people at the picnic shelter liked our body outlines on the concrete with disturbing messages written on them? Next time we need to bring crime scene tape.

In other news, I delivered the dishawasher that sperfur bought from my friend chcoco (who, last week, purchased sperf's car). I'm sad to report that sperfur's house is STILL not dishwasher enabled. Next time I'm up there I'll get it done, promise.

What else? Oh, I finally got my state gaming license (after a couple of nail-biting weeks waiting for the KBI to finish their background investigation) so I can continue to be employed at the casino. Our new guy that I picked out from the job interviews is scheduled to come to work next week (and gets me closer to working normal hours so I don't have to rely on my sister for babysitting). I never got to the Ameristar casino to get the Doobie Brothers tickets so I have that yet to do.

There's more, I just need time to sort it all out in my head.

Suspicion confirmed...

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 04:39:52 GMT

horseflesh's LJ stalker is skipmagic!

skipmagic is stalking you because they have nothing better to do with their time. They are also stalking you in real life. Look out!

And I'm supposed to meet this guy on Saturday at the KC Dopefest. *shudder

If you don't hear from me again, search the Shawnee Mission Park for fresh dirt mounds....

Hey, Mr. Taliban!

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 23:27:26 GMT

...Tally me illations, Dogma come and me wan' go hoooome. Staaaay-home!!

I had a rousing arguement with a coworker of mine about appropriate attire for married women today. The result of our continued disagreement on the subject earns him the title in the Subject line up there. Harry Belafonte would be proud.

A woman that works at our company was wearing what he thought was too "sexy" attire for a loyal married woman. She was wearing a tight shirt that showed off her breasts. In his opinion that means that she's out to find male company other than her husband. His "50 years of experience" is what backs up this claim.

What it really amounted to was that he couldn't take his eyes of her breasts whenever she walked by, so the problem is hers, not his. My response to him was that if her dress was within company guidelines he's got nothing to bitch about. It's her clothes and her body, if she wants to show it off, more power to her. If he can't handle it, his only recourse is to look the other way.

I could NOT make him see my reasoning on this. Apparently his point of view is that once you are married you should dress down when not in the company of your spouse, and that it's okay to let yourself go to pot because the need to be attractive is over. I drug this out of him when I asked how a man would achieve the same affect she was having on him. His response was "Oh, a guy would get a haircut, wear cologne, get in shape, wear nice clothes....". Ah! By this reasoning, the military is trying to get all of it's soldiers laid by making them keep their hair short and stay in shape.

I just shake my head at this kind of outdated thinking. And it surprises me coming from a guy that was a free-lovin', drug-using, rocker dude from the 60s. His Victorian-Christian outlook is really annoying. He even agrees in principle with some of Fred Phelps' doctrine on homosexuality. Grrrrrr. Don't even make me go there.

I'll be posting more on philosphical disagreements with Mr. Taliban later.

Saturday is the KC Dopefest! In the midst of all the fun I will be purchasing tickets at the Ameristar Casino for the Doobie Brothers concert on June 26th. Woohoo!! They're on the expensive side, but I have no idea if I'll ever get the chance to see them in concert this close to me again.

I will be taking pictures of skipmagic's defeat in the Arena of Shrimp at the Rockford Brewery on Saturday. If you've never seen full contact, naked, mixed martial arts seafood fighting, you need to come out and watch the shells fly.

Lessee, what else have I been up to? Oh yeah, the birthday party.

I was invited to a birthday party on June 9. I got there late of course, around 11pm. Nearly everyone was 19-22 years old, with only 2 other close to my age. I'd forgotten what happens when 30 kids get together and drink lots of alcohol. Fights and tiffs galore. Not physical fights, but the in your face, you-touched-my-boyfriend kind of bitching and crying. I stayed out of that and hung around outside a lot. I did do a keg stand at the birthday girl's insistence. I only lasted 13 seconds, whereas she felt obligated to go to 21, since that's her new age. I wish I'd paid attention to the time though. By the time I heard the grandfather clock chiming and trying to count the chimes and failing, then looking at my phone to figure it out, it was 5am! Ugh. I got to my sister's house by 6am, but was in no shape to pack up my kids and take them home. I crashed right there on her couch.

Nothing bad really happened there, but things did get a little wild at times. Let's just say if the Black Rock Victorian Prude Team had been there, there'd be a thread about it in sdmb_anonymous...

Work has been a bitch lately...we've had no less than a half dozen software/hardware vendors here to assess our area or install equipment. And guess who the contact person is for each one of them? And my boss wonders why I don't get any of my regular projects done. I think Friday will wrap up most of the vendor related stuff. Ugh. My head hurts.

Sorry little girl, you can't join the Bikini Car Wash Team right now... and R.I.P. Stuart

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 00:53:26 GMT

Yesterday I remembered right as I was headed out to pick up my son at Colette's house that the local sports bar I frequent was having a car wash fundraiser. I had my 5-year-old daughter with me and figured we'd pick up some McNuggets and fries at Micky D's and watch the bar waitresses scrub down my van in their bikinis. My daughter got such a kick out of watching them wash the van and squirt the hose at each other (and seeing a little girl her age, one of their daughters I think, in her swimsuit and having a ball) that she wanted to go get her bathing suit and help them wash vehicles. The bar manager said she'd hire my daughter when she turned 18 if she wanted to work there, but Kala wasn't buying it. She's going to be a professional girlfriend I think.

Today my wife informs me that she and Kala finished their 'secret mission' and showed me proofs from JC Penney's of the photos she just had taken. I'll post pics of them when I can, they really turned out great with her new spring-y purple dress.

Last item to bring up is the sad demise of Stuart, the mythical mouse brother of my son. About a 2 years ago when Stuart Little hype was hitting the Horsehold, Nathan said he had an inivisible mouse brother named Stuart. He and Stuart had many good times, got into trouble a lot (always Stuart's fault, and how do you punish an invisible mouse anyways?), but eventually Stuart ran away. My wife found a dead mouse in the garage, presumably laid before us by the mighty hunter that is my cat Pepsi. I laid Stuart to rest in an empty McD's chicken nugget box and closed it up. No mouse could be more diginified than to be entombed in a McGrave.

How much for that McAss in the McWindow?

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 00:53:41 GMT

While we were at the car wash in sperfur's town looking for the car mats she'd misplaced, we spied a McDonald's and decided to get my heathens something to put in their mouths. Food generally quiets them down. So we drive past the drive up window to circle around the building to the order kiosk, when I notice a girl sitting in the window facing into the fast food joint, her ass hanging outside.

I thought to myself, "Hmmm, haven't had one of those in a while. Wonder how much they cost?" sperfur dared me to ask when we pulled up to the window, and me being the shameless beast that I am said, "No problem". We made our order and pulled up to the window. These two young women must've been sharing a brain between them because they COULD NOT get the drink orders right. One would have the brain and hand out a drink, then go slack-jawed and limp while the other one used the brain to retrieve the next drink from the dispenser, then SHE would slump against the cash register while we received yet another incorrect drink order from the first McBorg.

After trying every form of English I knew (l33t speak, IM acronyms, jive, ebonics, Southern drawl, Cajun pigeon-French, Fargo, and New Yawk-ese), I decided that if I asked for a McAss that it would only draw blank stares and more drool. We took the least offensive drinks the kids would imbibe and drove away before they sucked us into their hive mind.

My friend's roommate purchased the car from dear sperfur and other than it dying twice when we first took it for a spin, it had no problems on the 3 hour drive back to Topeka. It even has a CD player with a removeable face plate!

It's missing floor mats, though.

I was thiiiiiiiis close...

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 02:57:26 GMT

I was in our soft count room today (where they count/sort the paper money for you non-casino types) working on their computer. Not five feet from me was over a million dollars bundled and stacked on a clear plexiglass table. I glanced over at it several times, thinking how I'd love to rip off all my clothes and take a money bath in 20, 50, and 100 dollar bills.

Of course, after the bath is over the second best part of the fantasy is extracting the money from various body cracks and crevices. Reminds me of my days as a stripper...

Minor setback to success (geek-style)

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 00:32:04 GMT

Fiddlesticks. The memory we bought to fix Colette's computer isn't compatible with it. We took the whole PC to the computer store to see if they had any memory that would work in it. As soon as the tech guy saw that it was an HP Pavilion he informed us that HP fiddles with the voltage and only certain brands of memory would work in it. He suggested Crucial.com as a place to start. So off we go to order memory online now.

I sold the toddler bed, two Power Wheels monster trucks and the kids' highchair at her garage sale and made $40! Then I blew $20 on a 15-speed bike that she was selling because my wife's been wanting one and I didn't want to spend a fortune on it.

Tomorrow we head to MO to look at buying a used car. We'll have 3 mini-heathens total so I hope my TV/VCR in the van is working okay. I plan on banishing them to sperfur's backyard while we talk business. Gotta remember to bring yard toys for them to play with like frisbees, soccer ball, lawn darts and a rabid rabbit.

Only 9 days to the KC Dopefest! Boom, baby! Who do ya love? This should be a fun one as lj loser="skipmagic" and I have challenged each other to a shrimp-off, the loser having to give up their life as a human and live a year in the ocean as a crustacean. A day at the Nelson before that, then a pic-a-nic and hiking the next day. My ponies will be worn out, but at least they'll go to bed when they're told.

Have you ever...

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 00:59:48 GMT

...walked down the hall at work with that extra-wiggle-and-slightly-quickened-pace-not-because-you're-trying-to-be-sexy-but-because-you're-clenching-your-buttcheeks-together-and-trying-not-to-think-that-the-bathroom-is-still-another-30-feet-away-and-OMG-there's-your-boss-whatthehelldoeshewantnow kinda walk?

Um, me neither.

Now tell me what you think of me:

1. Who are you?
2. Are we friends?
3. When and how did we meet?
4. Do you have (or have you ever had) a crush on me?
5. Would you kiss me?
6. Describe me in one word.
7. What was your first impression?
8. Do you still think that way about me now?
9. What reminds you of me?
10. If you could give me anything what would it be?
11. How well do you know me?
12. When's the last time you saw me?
13. Ever wanted to tell me something but couldn't?
14. Are you going to put this on your LiveJournal and see what I say about you?

Success!! Geek-style

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 05:46:05 GMT

I finally figured out the problem with my friend's computer after 5 friggin' days of working on it! Though I was given the bogus error message that NTFS.SYS driver was missing or corrupt, the hard drive would work fine when plugged into a different computer. That told me it was a different piece of hardware but I wasn't sure if it was CPU, motherboard, or memory.

I researched on the web for similar stories and found a few people that described the exact same thing and said bad memory was the culprit. I swapped her memory out for some I, uh, "borrowed" from work and Victrola! It booted fine. So tomorrow we head out to by a 256MB stick. Take THAT, Best Buy and your stupid, overpriced, "extended warranty" that you tried to push off on her when she bought it. A $40 expense vs. $150 and a whole lot of heartache.

Tomorrow I also take over some kids clothes, a toddler bed, high chair and a few assorted infant accoutrements to sell at a garage sale she's having, so maybe I'll have a bit o' money to put towards the Doobie Brothers concert I'm trying to go to on June 26th in KC. Woohoo! Maybe I can sell off a kid at 0.49/lb. Or do they go by length these days?

Today I also managed to get two rather odd pieces of equipment on our company network: an electronic keybox and a hand scanner to go with it. Our first biometric toy! I would have preferred one that took blood samples and a mouth swab but it's a start.

Today also marked the day that my step-grandmother moved out of her house and into a home where people can take care of her. Sort of like a nursing home, but just run out of someone's house. Her kids got together and divvied up her foodstuffs since she wouldn't be needing them anymore. It was odd seeing that take place...it almost seemed as if she passed on and they were dividing her estate. Her furniture will be passed along to the family or put in storage as well. I received 4 loaves of bread and a bunch of hamburger patties. At least it's something I know how to make.

On Saturday, my friend, her roommate, and my kids and I head out to MO to see about buying sperfur's car. I hope it's worth the trip.

A bloody nose, Achilles, a wedding, and a dead computer

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 03:01:53 GMT

Sunday I went over to a friend's house to work on her computer. Bad mojo in her drivers when it boots (Win2K); NTFS.SYS seems to be corrupt. The big problem is that her computer refuses to boot from the Win2K cd I brought with me. She just has a wonky motherboard I think, the cd works fine in all other computers I've used it in. So it looks like I'll be uprooting her hd and taking it to work (or home) and trying to reload Windoze from there. Fun, fun stuff.

Hey, I got a great steak dinner out of it. And I ain't even finished yet. I should prolong this as much as I can to keep my rumbly tummy full.

Yesterday, while taking a break from my friend's uncooperative computer, I was sitting on the couch and watching TV with her daughter Emily (8 years old). She had this stupid plushie snake that I'd been trying to snag from her for an hour. She finally loosened her grip on it while watching TV and I got it. Ha! Mine! Then she went in to kick mode, brought her knee up to bring her foot back down on me, and wound up smashing herself in her nose with her own knee. I didn't think she'd hit that hard, but she began to cry and blood began to gush out. Whoa! I run to the kitchen, hurridly explain the situation to my friend who's now making dinner, and run back out with a washrag full of ice cubes and some paper towels. Man, her nose bled like it had something against her. It finally stop after about 15 minutes, but the aftermath of paper towels looked like a small town massacre had occured in the living room.

Today she told me that she had to blow out a bunch of "blood boogers". Heh, she's gonna be fun when she grows up.

Also yesterday, I ran home to get my copy of Win2K to see if it would work any better on my friend's computer. My son decided to rearrange my entire collection of CD's and I had no idea where it was. So I decided to bring Troy (movie) over to watch since I'm a real sucker for movies about ancient times, like Ben Hur, Gladiator, Spartacus, etc. And no, I don't know what they say about guys who like gladiator movies. :-P Anyway, I call this movie "mine" because they named it after me. Brad ArmPitt plays Achilles, a freelance mercenary with his own little platoon of badass minions that try to take the beach like a bunch of jarheads...ahem, "Marines". Brad's just an awful actor, IMO. He looks like he worked out for this movie, but I think I'd rather have seen an unknown play the part. Achilles wasn't the hero of the story, he was the villian, but they didn't write his character like that. The movie stays more or less true to the original, kind of like the LotR movies stayed true to J.R.R. Tolkien's classic trilogy; characters and subplots blown up in some parts, damped down or chopped in others. All in all a decent ancient battle movie with a Romeo & Juliet romance glazed on top.

Today, Memorial Day, I attended what my mom described beforehand as a "dedication ceremony". Supposedly two people commit to each other much like a marriage, but with no official of the state or clergy present, just friends and family. My mom rings us at 10:30 this morning and asks if we're coming; it starts at 11. Whaaa? She'd told me we were invited but we'd received no invitation we knew of. I knew about this ceremony, just no date and time. So finally about noon my wife rouses me out of bed and informs me that not only is my godfather "having a BBQ/picnic", as my mom told her, but we're already an hour late. We scurry around and get there in the middle of what is now a full blown wedding (seemingly changed a few days before). Okaaaay. Here I am with my crew and we're dressed for an outside BBQ, not a wedding. Oh well, at least the food was good.

Some background on my godfather and the events leading up to this occasion: His wife died of brain cancer last July. An incredibly sweet and loyal woman, and they deserved each other like no other couple I'd ever met before. About 6 months later I find out he's "dating" (he's about 60 years old I think) my friend's mother, who's husband died of brain tumors about 4 years ago. This woman is normally a very cranky old bat, but she's been like a second mom to me my whole life. They see each other until around April, where he disappears from Topeka for about two weeks. During this time my friend's mom discovers he's been seeing other women at the same time, possibly as many as 3 more besides her. She emails him frantically, trying to find out where he is and what's going on. He finally returns to the city and emails her a Dear Jane letter, and does the same to 2 of the other women. It seems he was in Paris with his granddaughter, who got homesick after one day (!!!) and wanted to go back to the US. He changed his flight plans and returned to Chicago, where he put his granddaughter on a bus back here and stayed there to do whatever it is he does.

I asked him today how he and his new wife had met. He told me it was on a blind date in January (about a month after he'd started to see friend's mom). I never took him for a player. He's still a very handsome guy, well off, and incredibly funny to boot. But the whole time I was there at his wedding I kept thinking, "It's Memorial Day. Shouldn't he be putting flowers at his dead wife's grave site instead of getting married?" But that's him, not me. I won't judge the guy who was more a father to me my whole life than my bio or step dad. Good for you, George. I hope you find the happiness you deserve.

Checking out a livejournal client

Sun, 30 May 2004 15:05:29 GMT

It's called Semagic. Let's see if this makes the coding ~~any~~ easier. horseflesh

[EDIT UPDATE]
Hmmm, seems to work okay. Posts for you and e'rything. I'll try it out for a few days.

Time to take a shit in my journal

Sun, 30 May 2004 14:43:24 GMT

Pardon me while I rant about a couple of things that have crawled under my skin and begun to fester.

Festering Boil #1: Friday night at work I'm tasked with getting a computer ready for a director at my company. I'm told he's brought his old computer from home, and I'm to transfer his data and add-in cards to a new computer from a batch that has just come in. Alright, I know that there are departments that need computers desperately in new offices that have just been built as part of our massive expansion, and here we are giving a brand new one away to someone for personal use at his house.

WTF?!? This guy makes upwards of $80K a year and he can't afford to go to Best Buy or online and get a much better computer on his own? Plus (this is the kicker), he's the former IT manager (right, MY former boss) and the reason he wants a new one is because he can't get his current computer working right. This guy gets away with taking stuff from the company that he thinks they won't be using any more (that's another story entirely) and using/selling it for his own benefit. And to put that into perspective, our General Manager ($250K a year!) also has a new company computer at his house for personal use, but he goes the further step and makes the current IT manager his personal onsite technician, settting it up, running phone and network wires and taking up his time when it could be spent actually working for the company. I can't believe he thinks this is the best way the company IT manager could spend his working hours. Where's that rolleyes smiley when you need it?

Fine, whatever. I fumed about it for a while, then got it done. I took my revenge in small ways by delighting in the fact that his old modem won't fit into the newer computer and picking at random what personal documents I transferred over.

Festering Boil #2: That same night I found out that my son told my wife that my sister, who had been babysitting for us on the Saturday I was at ChiDope, had taken both my kids to a bar at 10pm. I couldn't even comprehend that she could think this was an appropriate thing to do. I've been to this bar; it's a dive. Nathan told my wife that my sister sat there and drank a few beers while he and my daughter sat somewhere and watched cartoons (which my daughter thinks makes it okay).

I confronted her about this when we got back from Lansing prison, where I had driven her so she could visit her "boyfriend" who's still in for another 25 days. She said she was sorry, that it wouldn't happen again. I told her that it shouldn't have happened in the first place and that her judgement is seriously skewed when her desire to go to a bar is involved. She's addicted to bars, whether she drinks or not. She hasn't worked in 5 years and most of the time depends on the little Social Security money she gets (she's deaf, btw, so it's for her disability) or on friends to buy her drinks. If she can't afford that, she'll just sit there and drink water or soda.

I knew about this "addiction" and thought that if she was watching my kids she'd have a reason to not hang out at a bar all day. Lesson learned, Horseflesh. Even family can't be trusted with your flesh and blood. I will be so glad to get my 8-5 M-F shift started and I won't have to depend on her for anything.

There. I flushed twice so this should be fit for viewing by the public.

It seems I've created a livejournal...

Fri, 28 May 2004 23:31:13 GMT

..and I'm not afraid to use it! This is my first entry into this thing. Now I have to go out and do stuff so I can write about it!

Hmmmm. Well, this morning started out kinda early with a call from a state gaming agent doing a background check on me (my state gaming license that allows me to work at a casino is about to expire and I put in for a renewal).

He was asking about the court case between us and Discover. I explained to him that we had contracted with a debt negotiation company (DebtCo) to get ourselves out of debt in a few years. The way this company works is: 1) you stop making payments to your creditors and start paying DebtCo a monthly payment that they put in an account for you; 2) after a period of time (about 6 months) they call and start harassing you; 3) DebtCo sends you some form letters telling them to back off and they will negotiate a settlement deal for so many cents on the dollar of your total debt.

Basically you play hardball with the credit companies by having another company with millions of their dollars on your side. Not a good way to do it if you don't have the stomach for it (which I don't). Discover bypassed the nasty letter altogether and sicced their lawyer firm on us. DebtCo said they don't do courts and stepped aside to let us handle it as best we could (with one free call to a lawyer firm they contract with for advice). I negotiated a deal where we paid 60% of what we owed and that would resolve the court case. It was dismissed. Yippee!

18 months of this shit and we're credit card debt free (of course, our credit history looks like shit, which DebtCo then sends more letters out challenging practically everything on your report in an effort to get it cleaned up).

So I explained all this and the other two credit matters (Visa and HRS) to the agent, who grunted, scribbled it down and hung up. Hopefully this won't delay my license or July 6th my company will let me go when it expires.

Next up was a trip to K-Mart to help my friend chcoco pick out an MP3/CD. I'd raved about the cheapie one that I bought and was a great replacement for my futzed out in-dash CD player in my van (which my estranged wife then proceeded to somehow break on her trip to Iowa).

We picked up an RCA model that was marked $10 down to $48 and some change. I told her we'd try it out in the parking lot to make sure it worked (having learned from sperfur's trial and error the week before). True to form, the first one didn't work right; the display didn't work, though it played CD's okay. Back inside, trade it in, back outside, try it out. Success! Now she's got tunes all the way to Omaha for tonight and tomorrow.

Then I went to work in Hell's Basement where I was stabbed with pitchforks and given flaming enemas all day.