Goals of Fitness are Obtainable…

Would you be willing to work out on a regular basis (3 times a week) if I told you there was a well-lit, clean, and fully-equipped fitness center waiting just for you? Treadmills, elipticals, stationary bicycles, weight benches, stair steppers, you can choose the area you wish to work on and work out to your heart’s content! (Not to mention it’s overall health!)

If I told you the facility was open from 9:00 a.m. until 9:00 pm six nights a week and for eight hours on Sunday, and had a huge stock of towels that are thick and soft and ready for you to use, would that further nudge you into the direction of a lifetime of fitness? What if I told you you could get all of this – completely free?

The only stipulation is, you have to keep this place a secret. If you tell too many people, then all of these ammenities will surely be lost. I’ll tell you where this place is if you promise to help keep your followers to a minumum. I found it purely by accident while out shopping and running errands today, and as I walked past it, it occured to me that it has been right there all along; I just had never really noticed it. Still skeptical? You can check it out for yourself at: []

The Commitments

I wrote this as the movie was playing. If you plan to see it, I don’t think even with the detail given that anything will be spoiled; since I fell asleep about thirty four minutes into the movie. This is not a direct reflection no the film in any way, as I had been awake for over 24 hours and I was obviously more tired than I originally thought.
* * * ~ ~ ~ * * *
I don’t know what this movie is about. it was the only one on the shelf I had not already seen, and since everyone else has retired for the night (as early as ten p.m.) I decided that since I was not tired I’d watch a movie on my laptop.

I know this movie is about music; how exactly it is about music is not clear yet. I am not certain that I will make it through the entire film. I also know suspect that the movie has something to do with heroin. I am only drawing that conclusion because one of the photos on the cd case depicts some members of a band are standing on stage beneath a large hand-lettered banner reading “Heroin Kills”. Right now there is a very not so good band on stage at a wedding. The previous scene was guy walking through a street market. I still have no idea what this movie is about.

Back to the wedding. the entire receoption hall is applauding the band. I suspect it is because of the announced break and not the talent itself. I guess considering the fact that I have to keep the volume to a minimum – while watching a film that I know is something about music was not exactly brilliant on my part. So far what I can hear of the music in the film – the minimal volume is actually a good thing. I’ve turned on the subtitles.

The characters so far are apparently Irish, and they’ve said fook about forty times (eight minutes into the film). I have now learned that it’s about Soul Music. I am almost tempted to start it over and actually count the fooks as they are spoken. (Now we have an attempt at an Elvis impersonation.

This is starting to get semi-interesting. People are coming to this guy’s door to audition for his Soul (Irish-soul?) band., and most of them are very very bad.

Now we’re at a pub. the first appearance of the word WANKER has made its appearance. And we’ve now met the girl the group of guys all admire. No doubt they will fight over her at some point.

They are watching or studying James Brown on television to learn more about the showmanship of soul peformances. More bad Elvis impersonations. This guys dad ahs a picture of Elvis hanging above the picture of the Pope.
Slowly this guy builds his ‘band’.

They’ve now named the band. (which is the name of the movie. I saw that coming.) They are on the elevated train and they are singing along with a song on the radio. They sound better than they have when they were singing earlier. (Must be practicing?)

So far this movie has worked as far as making me tired; but in the same light — it’s like an accident I can’t stop watching. (I fell asleep with the computer on my lap while watching.) I don’t recall anything else.

Some of the slang terms they’ve used: “bollocks”, “tosser” and “poxy”

No Signal Detected…

J’s parents live in a house on a “court” (also known as a culdesac) in an upscale neighborhood in Washington state. One might assume that in an area such as this, that it would be relatively easy to detect and connect to (random) wireless access points.

No such luck. Not even a signal with encryption (which I would be unable to connect with – without a lot of time and some illegal packet capturing) or a very good wild assed guess at a password. I am finding it hard to believe there are no networks in range that I can connect with.

At least at my mom’s, a person with a compatible computer and a “cantenna” one can sit in the back yard and aim the cantenna towards the far left corner of her yard and pick up an open network (sometimes two).

I thought since I am unable to sleep, I would spend a little time attempting to write something. Usually, I have to sit around typing random thoughts until a topic develops. Sometimes this happens, and sometimes not. Either way, everyone else is trying to sleep. A few people are still milling around downstairs wrapping gifts or stuffing stockings or other tasks related to tonight.

I was a good guest, and did not arrive empty-handed. I brought wine (both red and white), a carrot cake, two bags of gits and my overnight bag (which is a small duffel bag that holds 3 changes of clothes and my boots). I brought my laptop (which goes everywhere I do anyway) and the dog.

The dog was on good behavior, and friends of J’s family, who joined us for dinner loved him. They kept remarking on how well behaved he was. Their small dog kept yipping and nipping at poor Pablo; any time he ventured into HER space or got too near HER people. Each time she did this he looked at her and shamefully relocated himself. He happily wandered from person to person, staying with each of them just long enough for a few pats or scratches before he moved on.

At one point he wandered into the kitchen (as we were serving food buffet style to take into the dining room). I said, “Pablo, get out of the kitchen,” with an even-tone in my voice. The dog backed up until he was off of the tile floor and completely on the carpeted area. This impressed everyone. They left this evening under the delusion that my dog is very well behaved at all times. (ha).

This is the same dog that (I think it was) two years ago helped himself to the one-pound bag of spree candy, and when he was a guest at my mother’s house he managed to use his front paws to work a bag of beef jerky off of the counter and onto the floor, ate all but one piece and then proceeded to get sick all over her living room.

It’s very warm in here. I’ve been offered extra blankets four times and I haven’t used the two extra blankets that are on my bed. But, should I need them, they are in the closet directly across from the room I am in. (I’m quite sure I won’t need them, but it’s good to know they are there.)

The dog is at the foot of my bed, snoring. I am afraid that if he has the freedom to roam the house al night, we will find that during that time he will have eaten all of the peppermint canes from the tree and some of the presents; and possibly helped himself to the stockings stuffed with sweets. (Which have chocolate and that would be a very bad thing in very many ways). He is snoring so loudly that I’m afraid they will all hear him and think it’s me. I guess there are worse things in this world they could think.

I am fairly bored, I transferred two pages of rants to the new css style but I didn’t feel up to working on it at this time. I will have to work very hard over the next week to get it done (or try to get it done) by my self-set deadline of the 31 of December. I am starting to think I won’t make it.

I suppose I should try to get some sleep; there are children in the house that will no doubt rise before the sun is up, and I don’t want to be the Rip Van Winkle of Christmas. After gifts are exchanged and opened and we have breakfast, J and I head back to visit my mom, have an early dinner with her, exchange more gifts and then Christmas Night I work. I’m sure I’ll be wiped out by the time the morning of the 26th arrives. I’ll post this some time after I get home, possibly after I’ve slept a few hours.

Then for a week I can pretend life is back to normal, until New Year’s Eve, which will surely be busy. Can you believe how fast this past year went?

Good Tidings and All…

Hoping your holiday season is a safe and warm one.

NORAD – Tracking Santa for 50 years

Nope. Still Not Feeling It. (Negativity Advisory)

The Spirit of Christmas has still not arrived for me. Every day something else comes up that I have to take care of; yet another relative’s name pops up, (oh yes, he’ll be here too what did you get him), or I discover that I am out of something, which means that I have to run to the store to get in a few minutes (since the stores will soon close their doors for the remainder of the holidays). That is the one thing that is annoying me “right now”.

I was at the grocery store yesterday, grabbed all of the stuff I have to take to the homes of the hostesses’ (would that be Hostii??) homes for Friday, and Saturday (and SAVE ME for Sunday now too, thanks to another last minute change in plans that I cannot control. (Back on track here…)

Anyway, I was in the crowded busy grocery store yesterday but managed to overlook the fact that the cat needs litter for his crapbox. Litter, something he goes through a lot of because he is such a pig. (Not that he can help the fact that is is a large cat.) Right now I’d just as soon check him into a pet hotel for 3 days because he keeps botherning me when I’m sleeping.

Before I go, I am attempting to calm down and not be too Grinchy, and finish the cup of coffee I poured myself right before the cat decided to clog up his Littermaid automated cat box and that is when I had to stop what I was doing (preparing breakfast) to deal with that and then re-sterilize my hands in order to enjoy a simple cup of coffee.

I know that “it’s Christmas” and I should be happy and loving and spiritual and whatever. It just isn’t going to happen this year I don’t think. If it is, it wil hit sometime late Christmas Eve, or perhaps the twenty-sixth.

Oh! A few evenings ago, the guy across the street with the (uh…) decorated house and his wife droped by to hand out Christmas cards. I suppose this could be perceived as either cheap, or “more personal”. Either way I stepped out to speak with them breifly and aplogized for not letting them in, using the overly excited to see company dog as my reason. (Good dog).

The husband looks around my porch, and then states the obvious: “You didn’t decorate this year.”

“You’re right. I did not decorate this year. I have been working too much, and haven’t really had time.”

He then looks at me and grins (so big of a smile that his small head looks like it has more teeth than a person should). “I decorated my house!” he said.

“Yes I noticed that. You have a lot of stuff going on over there.” They had other homes to visit, so they were on their way after that.

Despite my negative mood, I hope all of you have an ideal holiday season. I’ll see you in a few days.

Texture Sensitivity Issues in Food Consuption

My food issues are probalby do deeply rooted that even electro-shock therapy cannot help me overcome them. This morning I was halfway through my bowl of oatmeal and burried beneath the steamy oats, hiding and waiting for me was a piece of hard… something. It was like a shell of a pecan, sharp and in my opinion – not meant to be eaten by myself or anyone else. Immediately upon placing the spoonful of oatmeal into my mouth, I detected its presence. With as much grace as possible, I worked the piece of something to the front of my mouth and removed it as one would a fish bone (when done with proper etiquitte). Unfortunately for me, this also meant my breakfast was over. My throat tightened and I was unable to continue eating.

It didn’t help that recently, a friend of mine shared a (horror story) in which he was at a diner, happily talking to friends and eating oatmeal. One of the people he was with told him to “look down”. He looked at his oatmeal and said it was full of bugs. Now, I don’t know, and probably don’t WANT him to elaborate on this with more details. This morning, it was all I could think about. A bowl of Oatmeal half full of bugs. I ended up scraping the remaining oatmeal into the garbage disposal in my sink.

Other types of food that I have similar issues with could be broken down into categories and would include:

Texture: Tomato skin that is tough, stems in my green beans (or spinach, or other vegetable), pieces of hard gristle or bone in my ground meats, rind membranes from citrus that doesn’t chew easily and fish bones and egg shell, or crab shell, or lobster shell pieces in my otherwise soft textured dishes.

Visual Defects: Wilted lettuce, green spots on potatoes, dark flakes in fish meat that is light in color, fish skin, chicken pieces with the backbone not cut off (something about this just looks really disgusting to me if I’m supposed to eat it).

Many other things related to my food issues can be found in the following stories:

food issues

99 things about me specifically, (#s 75-89).

Ah that will take too long…. here are the google results.

there are many many others, but until Blogger adds a category feature, I guess they won’t be THAT easy to find.

(I am sorry but some of the linked stories may not be in the new page format yet. I’m still working on it behind the scenes.)

Tea (and Toast)

It is possible that the end of the world is upon us. I have allowed it to happen. Everything is my fault.

I have been a slaker slacker lately, and now I am out of coffeee. There is not even one bean in the entire house. I have the tea kettle on the stove. I am not a big tea drinker, but I need to at least satisfy some of the senses that make coffee one of my favorite food-things on earth.

But, It’s just not the same.

Early ‘blogResolutions – Two Double Oh Five

(I can’t belive I actually used the word ‘blog. I haven’t done that in a long time.)

The re-design is approximately 35% complete. In all honesty, that number was just pulled out of thin air, because I don’t actually know how close it is to being finished. While I was deleting unnecessary tags and applying the new style sheet to my existing pages (there are 101 total if you are at all curious), I noticed that I neglected to write any “rants” the entire year (2004). Technically, some of my word-ier posts probably should have been filed away there, rather than in the weblog; but I didn’t add any new rants. This made me feel somewhat guilty.

A few days ago, friend asked me why I was not waiting until the redesign was finished before tossing it up on the server. He wanted to know why I didn’t do all of the construction off line and then upload the COMPLETED PROJECT. That is actually a very good question, and I think I have a very good (or at least feasible) answer. As usual, I will give you the long version, because it contains details that I feel are needed in order for you to really understand.

This is my fourth attempt at re-designing the site. I started the rebuild project in November 2003. Yes, that is over a year ago. The three previous versions never made it to completion. At one point I had a mastermind plan to convert everything over and export it all to MovableType. Sometime before I finished, I heard (and this may or may not be true) that MT restricts a (free account) user to one author per account/weblog. This would not do, since from time to time Tim decides to post on my behalf. I was disheartened and the project lay cold on my hard drive for many months. Recently, I grew tired of the inner-guilt I felt about abandoning the project. Even if the only person it really affected was myself.

The 2003 design worked on browsers (even Opera), and I really had no burning issues that had to be resolved… except for the fact that since the design was my first attempt at CSS and it was a hybrid of inline and linked (external) styles and that would mean changing the colors and layout on all 101 pages. That would not be as easy as CSS was supposed to be. Especially since I would have to do this again and again with EVERY design or color change in the future. Once again, I made the decision to re-build. I vowed to design the source to be as compliant as possible (within my realm of knowledge, which is relatively small — I think). My primary goal: to design it correctly so that when I did decide to change the color scheme, it would work as it was destined to and I would only have to change one file. – rather than a hundred.

So, my reason for re-designing in plain view, where the people that read this site can watch as I sift my way through 100+ pages of source code is, because this way, I will feel obligated to finish it. This time, I can’t bury the work folder deep on my hard drive and allow myself to forget it exists just because CSS and php have annoyed me to the point that I want to pull my hair out.

Thank you for your patience, I am working on it. Along with the visual changes, I am adding a few new features that I hope will amuse you; and I hope to continue to post observations and theories in good humor and trace amounts of sarcasm in the year to come.

Behavior’s Dogs

Who is the genius who enabled the “auto-correct” option in my spell-checker? While I am sure that it serves a purpose in some alternate universe, it has no place in my life.

While applying the new style-sheet to my DVD Collection page, I noticed that a few movies were not listed. These are movies that I’ve had for some time.

I am not sure what happened… these titles simply never got added to the list.

That realization caused me to print out a copy of my database listing, which is sorted alphabetically.

It is difficult to inventory a wall of movie cases and mark a list at the same time, so I called on Tim to give me a hand. He marked off the titles as I sorted through the movies, called out and re-organized the titles on the shelves.

“Reservoir Dogs”, I said, waiting for his ‘yep’ or ‘got it’ or ‘roger that’ reply.

Tim starts laughing. He looks at the list and says, “Behavior’s Dogs! Yes it’s here.”

“It really says that?” I asked straining to see for myself. He held the list out to me and pointed at the tiny, 5 point text.

“Be-hay-v-your’s Dogs.” he repeated, “and it’s also listed under “R“.

I grinned, and said, “Damn spell check auto-correct. Now I’ll think of that everytime I watch or talk about the movie.”

Show Some Spirit

Throw Some Lights on Your House! Literally just stand on the street and THROW the stuff towards your house and let it land wherever it lands!


This is the festivity that surrounds the house across the street and one to the left of mine. This brings tears to my eyes. I realize this picture is out of focus. Trust me, I did you a favor not using a tripod to take this picture.