Another "How NOT To Start Your Day"

My Wednesday morning got off to a terrible start, and for those cruel people who like to laugh at my misfortune (no names mentioned of course *cough cough Nicole cough cough*) I'll tell you all about it.

I had a nasty head cold a couple or three weeks back that ended up staying with me in the form of a hacking cough from Hell. I'm talking the kind of cough that leaves you curled up on the floor in a ball drooling all over yourself and wishing your ribs and stomach didn't feel like you'd been beaten with a baseball bat.

Finally I give in and go to the doctor. I get two antibiotics and two prescription cough suppressants. Well, they don't work so I go get chest x-rays to see if it's pneumonia. Fortunately, it's not. Since the x-rays came back negative I was sent to an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor, and that is where the fun began.

The first thing that bastard did was to squirt some nasty tasting concoction straight up my nose with no warning. When I commented on the taste he said "That's nothing, wait til the next one". He wasn't kidding, the next one was just plain vile. After that he left for a few minutes, coming back when my sinuses "should" have been numb. Guess what? They weren't, as I found out when the sadist grabbed some scope thingamajig on an eighteen inch fiber optic cable and rammed it up my nose, through my sinuses and down my throat. Holy Christ that hurt! It was the kind of pain that brings tears to your eyes no matter how hard you resist.

So I started my morning in a lot of pain with tears running down my face and snot running out my nose, pinned to a chair by a sadistic bastard while gagging and retching from this damned scope thing in my throat (which served to remind me once again that I'd never make it as a gay man). All of this before I even got to work. The next doctor who tries to send me to one of those twisted "specialists" is going to get smacked!!

So, how was your morning?

Boring Sunday At Work (a day late)

So, I'm working Sunday, minding my own business when I realize that something is a bit different outside. I kept seeing cars stop, their occupants get out, then a minute later get back in and drive off. As soon I got the chance I wandered over to the door to have a look. The cause of the commotion quickly became obvious, after all it's not every day that you see a $270,000 Lamborghini Murciélago parked on the street. People were stopping their cars to photograph the thing then continuing on their merry way.

   

It seems local boy Bam Margera was back in town, I guess visiting his family for the holidays. If you don't know who he is, he's part of MTV's Jackass show, and he has his own show called Viva La Bam. He's also a fairly well known skateboarder.

My terrible celebrity photo

Are You Listening, George? hahahahahaha!!

The people have spoken and their will has been done. King George's regime has lost control of both Congress and the House. Finally, America might be able to begin repairing the damage done to it by the power hungry, amoral, criminal hypocrites who were previously running the show. 

Now the Bushies may actually have to tell the truth sometimes and do what's best for the US instead of what's best for their pockets. They are going to absolutely hate that!! They might even have to *gasp* start trying to protect the planet! Oh horrors!!

As an added plus Donald Rumsfeld, architect of a failed war, has resigned. Despite all his refusals to resign and Bush refusing to toss his ass out he resigns anyway. Good riddance. His incompetence is directly responsible for the death of 4,800 of our soldiers and over 120,000 innocent civilians plus 32,000 injured US military. We'll probably never know the true scope of the psychological damage to our military and their families. Rumsfeld, I hope your nightmares are haunted by the ghosts of every single one of them you lying, murderous bastard. 

Finally we may have some people in charge who understand that when you invade a country, occupy it for years, tamper with it's government, destroy it's infrastructure and decimate it's population in an illegal war of aggression which was based entirely on lies, the people of that country are going to get pissed and start doing their best to get back at you. People who identify with them (like a few million Arab Muslims in this case) will also get pissed and want you destroyed. We'll see what the Dems do, short of handing Osama bin Laden a nuke and a plane ticket to New York it can't be any worse than what the Bushies have done.

Now there's  a chance that some much needed hearings and investigations may occur, I'd love to see Cheney squirming in front of Congress as he gets called to explain lie after lie that he and his war machine fed the American people and the rest of the world. 

Wouldn't it be funny as hell if Bush and Cheney suddenly disappeared, whisked away in the middle of the night with no warning, no rights, and no legal representation only to end up as cellmates in a nonexistent CIA secret prison where they had to endure acts of torture which our country doesn't use? Film of that would be number one at the box office for months.

The neo-con plan for world domination has just been dealt a serious blow. Cheney the warmonger lost a large chunk of his power. Rumsfeld the architect is running away from his failure and Dubya the dummy is sitting around trying to figure out where it all went wrong. All I have to say to the three of them is "Welcome to the real world. I hope you hate it as much as it hates you."

I almost forgot, Rick Santorum lost! Happy happy joy joy

Election Time!

Finally, a chance to get rid of some of our "leaders" and "representatives". I use these terms loosely because so many of them are neither. In my state for example, we have Rick Santorum as our US Senator. This man is a sheep, voting with Dubya about 98% of the time. He votes how his party and it's leaders tell him to vote.

He's a follower, not a leader. He does this while "representing" a state which voted against Bush in both the 2000 and 2004 elections, and against Bush's political party in general in 1996 and 1992. I hope his political career as a "representative" of the people of the State of Pennsylvania is about to come to a screeching halt.

For the rest of you out there in the US, use your heads and think for yourselves when you step into the booth. Voting along party lines went out of fashion when Communism fell and America became guilty of war crimes. You have a brain so use it to vote the man or woman and the issues.

Kickbacks, bribes, security leaks, theft, illegal sexual conduct with children, manipulation of facts and Intelligence reports to suit private agendas, blatant lies, mass murder, torture, illegal war, crimes against humanity, turning a blind eye to genocide, the alienation of our Allies, hatred of America spreading around the globe like wildfire, attempts to rewrite our Bill of Rights, the repeal of Habeas Corpus (a standard of Western Law for over 800 years), shifting the wealth of the nation to the richest while shifting the tax burden in the opposite direction, the steadfast refusal to start protecting our environment before it's too late, the complete and utter failure of our government to protect and rebuild New Orleans during and after Katrina, these acts and more have been committed and/or orchestrated by our current "leadership".

The millionaire's club running our country (into the ground) does not care one little bit about you or I, it never has and it never will. It's one and only concern is itself. It's high time that America stood up and showed these jackasses that this crap won't fly anymore. A government chock full of inept amateurs would be preferable to what we have now. At least then the mistakes would be honest, a word our current collection of criminals knows nothing about.

I now step down from my soap box, go vote!

Halloween Is Too Short

Ok, somebody needs to make Halloween last longer. The best damned holiday of the year and the fun only lasts about an hour and a half, maybe two hours at best? That's just wrong!!

It was another good year, I scared the crap out of a bunch of kids, a few teens, even a couple of parents. Nobody cried and nobody fell down the steps in their hurry to run. Best of all, I even had some candy left over for me! A great big "Thank you!" to all the kids that were too scared to come to the porch and get candy, those Snickers bars were tasty!

Now I have to start planning next year's scares, I've already got the idea, I bet the kids will absolutely LOVE a rotting corpse clawing it's way out of a half buried coffin and reaching out to grab them. Now I just need to make it work. Details, details, details. But first, I hear half a bag of Snickers bars calling my name and I've no choice but to heed their call. I'm weak like that.

Even Bigger F YOU!!! to HP

Okay, maybe I was a bit hasty to judge HP in my last blog. So to make up for it, take all the bad stuff I said about them and multiply it times ten, that's about what I really think of them. Today I almost found out just how far I can throw a computer. 

The piece of junk lost it again for no apparent reason. So again I give in and run the recovery discs (3 of them) which took over four and a half hours. Then I had to wait almost that long again for it to mirror all of that data to the recovery partition. This would be the same worthless, waste of hard drive space recovery partition which wouldn't work last time, causing me to waste hours of my time (again).

What douchebag engineer thought up that concept? Then I had to wait yet again until it finished installing everything at which point I could begin set-up, then the never ending list of downloads, installs and updates. Finally, some 12+ hours later I have a computer that works again. Yay me, hoo effing ray.  *yawn*

I would sooo love to shove the overpriced birdhouse straight up the overpaid ass of an HP corporate officer, then make them suffer and wait while a repetitive, ineffective and nonfunctioning "easy repair tool" takes 12 hours to get it back out. I bet none of the smart HP employees use an HP.

The cause of all this frustration and wasted time? The power went out. No surge, no flickers, no rapid off and on, just a simple power failure for a couple of minutes. Even the ancient relic which I built by myself out of old parts was tougher than that. I'm oh so happy to see that technology has advanced so far in the years since. I think HP stands for Heaping Pile because that's about what it is.

Great Big F YOU!!!! To HP

I've added Hewlett-Packard to my list of companies with products I will never buy again. If you are in the market for a computer and someone tries to sell you an HP, specifically a Pavillion a1420n, run. It's been nothing but trouble. The product is inferior, they misrepresented the Operating System version (by three years) and their version of tech support is worthless.

HP are traitors, they eliminated jobs here and outsourced their tech support to India. Instead of reaching someone you can understand and who knows the product, you end up talking to someone whom you must continually ask to repeat themselves and knows nothing about your computer aside from what he's reading from the screen in front of him. I'm sorry but the ability to perform a keyword search and read from a screen is not tech support by any definition I am aware of.

As soon as it was out of the box and running the trouble started. Every time I tried to open a web page or connect to the internet the computer would freeze completely, requiring me to turn it off and restart it. I spent close to an hour and a half on the phone with their "Tech Support" trying to fix the problem. Most of that time was wasted by me asking the poor clueless slob to repeat himself because I couldn't understand him through his heavy Indian accent. I gave up in frustration, then had it fixed myself within a few minutes of hanging up the phone. It was actually pretty simple but the "highly trained" tech couldn't figure it out.

Then came the day when I tried to assign functions to the supposedly programmable hot keys on the keyboard. These are the keys which let you open a program or go to a specific web page with just one push of a button. The option tab which would allow programming of these buttons was nowhere to be found. 

So again I call HP customer service. Once again I am on the phone for over an hour. Once again they couldn't tell me how to get it fixed. At the conclusion of the call I was informed that this was a known issue. Seriously? If it was "known" then why the f*** didn't they say that at the beginning of the call before I waste over an hour of my time? They claimed it was actually Microsoft's fault and there would be a patch released by Microsoft by the end of that month. That was 3 months ago. Can I program those buttons now? No.

Actually I can't do anything now, the computer has been reduced to nothing but an expensive paperweight courtesy of HP tech support. Even killing the computer entirely took them over an hour, I could have done it myself in seconds. It was running when I called them, dead when they were done with it. After talking with two computer techs in my area I learned that most of what I was told to do was absolutely wrong. The error message I was receiving was quite common and could be easily fixed within seconds if you aren't being directed by an incompetent twit.

Bottom line, I have to pay someone to try to save the files I need from my hard drive, losing everything they can't find or copy. Then I have to wipe it and waste an hour and a half while I reinstall the Operating System with the recovery discs, Then I can spend hours updating, downloading and installing. 

Do these stupid assholes not know that I have addictions to feed? HP refuses to reimburse me or replace the computer, claiming it was operator error that damaged it even though it was running when I called but was dead after I followed their instructions. HP had income of 86 billion dollars last year, I think they could afford to honor their warranty and do the right thing by replacing their defective junk. I hope those bastards are in the part of California that breaks off and sinks into the ocean after the next big earthquake.

Screw you HP, you can kiss my ass. I hope you get bought out by Sony you traitorous, junk peddling, worthless sons of bitches. Thus concludes another rant. Thanks for listening (or reading, whatever). I feel better already.

The Lesser of Two Evils

Which is worse, acceptance of circumstances you deplore or harboring deepening resentment toward the person responsible for the aforementioned circumstances? Can the first one exist without directly causing the second?

Acceptance seems like you're selling yourself out, or is it just a necessary compromise to help preserve the greater good? I'm sure there's a line drawn somewhere which differentiates the two but I've no idea where that line is. I sure wish I did though.<

I think resentment has it's own inevitable conclusion especially when it's been accumulating over a fairly long time. That conclusion is usually an ugly one. Sooner or later, out it comes!

I can't decide if acceptance is preferable to resentment, or not. While I know that harboring feelings of resentment will sooner or later come back to bite me in the ass I just can't bring myself to let go and pretend nothing's happened while happily accepting the way things are. Maybe that's a shortcoming of my own which I need to work on.

Some Stuff

Yes!! First I want to say I am happy as happy can be. That frigging stone is gone, I got rid of it this morning. Mostly I'm happy because all you doom and gloomers out there telling me it was going to hurt even worse then my night in the ER were wrong. I didn't feel a thing. Like rolling a marble through a firehose baby, plenty of room to spare! Okay, enough bragging now. I see a doc in a week to get the thing analyzed and find out what my chances are of having to go through that barrel of laughs again.

Next, garden pictures. Yes I've been slacking. Sue me. I think I screwed around and missed a few plants but now that August is almost here I finally got around to putting up some pictures from June. Same deal as usual, making the rounds of the yard with closeups following the wide angle shots. The combination of winter damage and a bunch of nasty storms has left some gaping holes but all in all it's not looking too bad. Most of the damage was to bigger plants and they are starting to come back, they won't be much to look at this year but there's always next year. Grow dammit, grow!

Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, I have now entered into the politics of my little town. I am the Iron Fist of the Borough on the Zoning Appeals Board. Soon I will realize my political aspirations and become Ruler of the World, muahahahahahaha! Scary, no? King Jeff? Hmmm, I don't like that one. Your Lordship? His Royal Highness? I don't like them either. Grand Poobah? Hmmm, this is tough and I haven't even started yet! *sigh* I can already hear the sarcastic comments. Bring it on, I can take it. Just remember that one day I will be your King, or something.

How NOT To Spend Your Morning

Last night was just chock fkn full of excitement, unfortunately it was the kind I could do without. It started a few nights ago, I had awoken at some ridiculous hour by what I thought was just some serious back pain, probably just from sleeping in an odd position. I mean serious pain as in "take your breath away, holy fuck that hurts please make it stop" serious. I got up, moved around, did some stretching and it went away. Problem solved. Or so I thought.

Last night I was having trouble sleeping so I went out for a late night swim, I came back in around 3am or so. Before I could fall asleep the pain came back, even worse than it was a few days ago. This time it didn't go away. I took about 30 minutes worth of it then caved and had the wife drive me to the Emergency Room. I've no idea what was in that IV but it sure did make the pain go away. It also took away my ability to think or to make any sense whatsoever when I attempted to speak, lol. Eventually they gave me a CAT scan, it ended up being a 2.5 millimeter stone causing a blockage resulting in a backup of urine. No wonder I felt like someone had repeatedly kicked me in the kidney.

I finally got home at about 10am and fell into a drug induced and much needed sleep until 5pm when I woke up for dinner. Now I feel totally drained and still groggy, but at least no pain *crosses fingers*. Hopefully I pass the stone, and soon. I do NOT want a repeat of all that.

My Fourth of July

Well, the Fourth has come and gone and I've recovered. Finally. It took a while.

A few too many beers, Cow, chicken and pig piled on the grille. Not a little, I cooked a freaking farm. I ate far too much, figured I may as well go overboard with the food so it matched the drink. I got all wrinkly in the pool, then capped off the evening watching fireworks.

The end result of all this? Lobsterman! Serious sunburn, but I'll survive. All in all it was a very good day

Another Year Older

Another birthday come and gone, 42 and counting! Thank you to everyone who wished me Happy Birthday, even the ones who sent mean cards. *sniff sniff*

I hope all my Canadian friends survived their Canada Day activities, happy hangover day! Happy 4th of July weekend to my American friends, enjoy your hangovers, full bellies and sunburn. I can't leave out the Aussies, Happy ToDay!!, lol.

Where's Noah When You Need Him?

 Rain rain go away come again some other day!

Preferably to a place where you're really needed. Day 5 of the rain, while the last 4 were on and off it's been pretty constant today with some pretty torrential downpours. At least there's only been one bad storm cell with 50 mph winds. Large sections of the garden are trashed, mulch is all over the yard and a lot of plants have been broken off, blown over or just plain washed out. The work never ends.

Getting around is getting to be more difficult because more and more roads are getting closed due to flooding, even some of the major routes have standing water on them. It's fun to come out of a curve at 40mph and slam into 9 or 10 inches of water on the road. Damn near gave me a heart attack!

My pool has overflowed, I already had to go out and open the drain plug on the filter pump so I could drain out a few hundred gallons just to get it down to it's maximum fill level.

Along with all of that mess, my absolute favorite thing has happened, my basement is flooding. I can hardly wait to stay up all night dealing with that then rowing my truck to work tomorrow!!

I hope your week is off to a better start than mine.

I'm baaa-aaaack! Woot!

I have a new computer now. This one works so it's way better than the compucorpse I just trashed. I guess technically this means that I'm back.

I guess now I'll have to resume writing stuff here. Great, now I'll have to be thinking again. Oh the pain, the agony!!
*convulsing while writhing around on the ground in pain*.

Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week.

R.I.P. Computer

My computer has officially committed suicide. Something internal causes endless cascades of system failure error messages, if I can even get it to boot up at all. See ya eventually.

Gardening Time

Spring has sprung and my plants are growing like mad already. There's not been much to speak of in the way of flowers yet, but they're coming.

Since I seem to always be working in the yard or garden I figured I may as well show everyone some of what's in it. I'll try to keep the photos organized chronologically so you can see it as it progresses. There's a few in the Garden album now if you wanna see the real early stuff.

Just remember that I have an ancient relic of a digital camera, and the wind doesn't always cooperate and let everything stay still when I'm trying to photograph a plant. Bottom line .... some inevitable poor quality pictures. Send me a new 13 megapixel digital with 20x zoom and I'll be happy to take better ones. And a tripod too! Maybe some lights while you're at it. Some other lenses would be good too. Yep, I'm greedy.

Of course, this probably won't make a bit of sense since I copied this post here from another site and there are no photo albums here.

Yay, Excitement! zzzzz.......

Well, I just learned that you need to be really really really careful what you wish for sometimes. It's been kind of dead at work, normal for this time of year, and I was getting pretty bored and wishing something exciting would happen.

Well, it did. Our ceiling collapsed. There had been an ongoing plumbing leak on the floor above us which had been soaking the extremely old plaster ceiling over my head until it finally got so heavy and so soft that it just couldn't hold on any more. CRASH!! Fortunately there were no injuries and little damage to anything but the ceiling. It sure is one hell of a mess though, there's plaster dust everywhere.

On the bright side, my weekend just went to about a week long! I suppose most of that will be occupied with maid duties though, oh well. Add in a few small projects around the house and my long weekend just vanished. C'est la vie.

State of the Union Address

Did anybody watch the talking chimp's bs speech? What a crock! I managed to watch about 45 seconds of it then I got so irritated I had to turn it off. I really hope the world doesn't think that King George is an example of the typical American. Really, we're not all that stupid. What the Hell are nucular weapons anyway?

Here's how the State of the Union address should have gone. "My fellow Americans, I'm here tonight to tell you that you are fucked. Completely and hopelessly fucked for generations to come and it's all my fault but I don't care because my friends and I are getting oh so very rich. Screw you all, and goodnight."

How sad is it that impeachment isn't even worth considering? President Cheney? Umm no, I'd pick up an accent, learn to say "eh" and move way North. Molson isn't a bad beer, I could deal with it.

Let It Go

I got an odd e-mail today, well yesterday actually since it's now 3:42am, a mass forward that looked like the rantings of what seemed to be a combination of several different types of people all wrapped up in one. An illiterate, drunken Southern Baptist preacher who had authored cheesy self-help books and was filling in for Ann Landers or Dr Phil and had just done too many bong hits. That'd be a good way to describe it. After reading it several times and filtering out the nonsense I noticed that the meaning of it seemed to hold especially true in regard to internet based friendships. If I paraphrase, cut and paste, and throw in a bunch of my own words I think I can give you the idea behind what was said along with a shitload of my own rambling. Here goes:

"There are people who can walk away from you. When people can walk away from you, let them walk. Your destiny is never tied to anybody that left. People leave you because they are not joined to you and if they are not joined to you, you can't make them stay. If it takes too much sweat you don't need it. Stop begging people to stay. Let them go!! It doesn't mean that they are a bad person it just means that their part in the story is over. It's like that old 'Reason Season Lifetime' thing that went around forever ago. (google it ) You've got to know when someone's part in your story is over so that you don't keep trying to write a chapter that can never be finished."

I've got the gift of good-bye. I believe in good-bye. It's not that I'm hateful, it's that I can usually sense when someone's part in my life is over and understand what that means. There comes a time when you just have to let it go. I can do that. I don't always like when I do it, and tonight was one of those times. I may wonder if I did the right thing, was I too hasty, etc... but it's done. The goodbye was said even if it was not said literally. That's the second time in a week that I've felt I needed to do this, another goodbye in a long series of goodbyes that I thought would never be said. It's ironic that the very people whom you think are the ones that you'll never say goodbye to are invariably the ones you do say it to.

Internet friendships can be tough. They require (in my opinion) a few things that are not always easy to accomplish. Respect, not just for a person but for their thoughts, opinions, beliefs, lifestyle, etc... Just because you live or think differently doesn't mean they're stupid, wrong or anything else. Do what you have to do to be sure that a respect issue does not become a bigger issue, then let it go. If someone does something which offends you while trying to respect you and themselves at the same time, understand the big picture and let it go. Honesty is another big one. Not total, complete, unerring brutal honesty either, that's rubbish and it rarely if ever happens. Everybody tells little white lies. It's the big ones I'm talking about. Who or what you are, what someone else is to you, major changes in your life, these are important. If you can't be honest about those, you'll lose the third and probably most important requirement, Trust. Damaging this trust can take a long time and a lot of work to repair. Losing it altogether usually can not be repaired.

In no way am I claiming to be perfect here, I'm sure I've screwed up several times along the way. These are just observations, my opinion be it right or wrong. With that, I will end this ramble, it's taken an hour for me to put my thoughts into words, see what happens when I think?

Being Lazy Is Good!

My almost unheard of three days in a row with no work is almost over. What have I done to make constructive use of all this free time? Nothing!! I've been lazy as can be and I'm liking it. I think the earliest I got out of bed was 11am, thank God for having no kids. I think I've now overdosed on sleep. I so love getting out of bed all stiff and sore, that'll teach me.

Now before you go bitching at me, I have to tell you that I wasn't totally lazy, I did get a few things done, little odds and ends that had been escaping my attention were taken care of. Oddly enough, while I was being lazy I took care of a couple things that I'd been too lazy to do lately. How's that for not making sense?

On a sad note, during all that free time I finished up all the rest of the cookies, no more huge white chocolate/macadamia nut cookies to eat. I may shed a tear. It's probably a good thing they're gone, I can't even begin to count how many dozens (yes I said dozens) of those things I've eaten in the past month. Hellooooo belly!! lol

Back To The Daily Grind

The annual year-end holiday hoopla has finally gone away. The vacation hours are all used up. The turkeys are slaughtered and eaten (for which I sure give thanks .. yummy!). International Hassle Day has come and gone, the gifts are all opened, played with and forgotten, some exchanged or even broken already. The New Year has been rung in with excess celebration. Resolutions are made and already broken. Too much food and drink have been consumed for weeks and everyone's bitching about their weight gain. Ahhhh, ya gotta love this time of year, lol.

All that shit is over now, so get your lazy ass back to work!! You've got 11 months to plan out next year's festivities (for lack of a better word) so get to it! Don't be hurting yourself on the exercise machines either while trying to work off all the cookies, chocolate, and excess food. You've got months before you need to squeeze back into that bathing suit or ass hugging pair of shorts, so go easy!

Oh yeah, before anyone accuses me of being overly Scroogified .....
Happy Friggin' New Year!!