Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in okbanlon's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, June 27th, 2009
11:48 pm	Brilliant Idea (No, Really!) OK, here's the scenario. You've journeyed to a scenic destination, taken a bunch of pictures, and then your Offspring asks to borrow your camera to take more pictures. What are you going to do? Are you really going to say, "No, I'm sorry - you're an idiot, and there's no way I'm going to hand over a $300 camera to you just so that you can drop it off a cliff." No, no, no - you hand over the camera, carefully position the wrist strap, and watch helplessly as Offspring twirls the damn thing around and dangles over the brink while shooting dozens of blurry pictures of dirty index fingers. If you're lucky, several interesting shots will be taken before Offspring drops the camera in a public toilet. "Oops!" Easy, easy - there are laws against beating children to death, believe it or not. Here's the fix. It's easy - so easy that you will kick yourself for not thinking of it first. If I get organized, I'll post a page on my site with photos and diagrams. You need to study the camera's wrist strap, and then you need to find something (a craft bead, a washer, maybe a spring) with an inside diameter that is about 2/3 the size of the doubled-up width of the camera strap. Find a string or thread that is strong, but much smaller than the camera strap. Use the thread to pull the end loop of the camera strap through the bead, washer, spring, etc. There you have it - an adjustable wrist guard for your camera strap. When you're confident that there's no way the camera strap will fall off a wrist, you just shove the bead/washer/whatever up towards the camera and it's out of the way. When you hand over the $300 camera to the Offspring, you cleverly slide the bead/washer/whatever down tight and turn 'em loose with confidence - and they won't drop it. They may smash it against a convenient rock, but it will stay attached. Like I said earlier, I need to write this up in better form on my web site. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
11:14 pm	Father's Day! Church this morning was good - I checked in with my buddies, and we were all good. Noon-ish, we drove over to Famous Dave's for some barbecue, only to find that everyone else had the same idea. What a zoo! As usual, Better Half was way ahead of the game. We drove home, she worked her magic on a huge ribeye steak that she had put out to thaw the day before, and I tucked in. Ohh, yes. I ate myself round, demolishing that steak and a tasty salad. Ahhh - all I needed was a tree to climb and some sunshine, and I'd have slept away the afternoon like a satisfied leopard. Mid-afternoon, Eldest provided invaluable technical assistance in solving an intractable iTouch software upgrade problem. She's quite handy with this sort of thing. We got the call, then rolled out to the church to meet the returning youth mission trip just in from New Orleans. Younger Two were full of tales and laden with luggage - we loaded up the truck and brought everybody home. They got some good work done, made new friends, and are keen to show me pictures and video of the whole operation. Called Dada, shot the breeze for a while - he's rocking along, working on various projects, having a good time. He's a pretty cool dude. If you bake brownies, give him the corner pieces. All in all, this has been a very, very good Father's Day. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 13th, 2009
11:24 pm	Cajun cooking, PC follies, and the DESK OF DOOM Apparently, the Younger Two launched early this morning on a week-long mission trip to New Orleans to strip houses and render aid to neighborhoods still reeling from Hurricane Katrina. I really couldn't say, as I was sound asleep at the time. I vaguely recall signing some release forms, if that counts. By the time I woke up and got dressed, I was starving. So, naturally, we went out to eat. We went to Lucile's (one L, thank you!) in Longmont. O, Lawdy - that was GOOD. I'd throw you a link, but for the fact that I want to keep this secret to myself. Ohh, yeah - {growl, purr} - very, very nice. {hmmmm} Later in the day, I drafted Eldest to help me take apart The Desk. You know the one - the one that I collected one night after Better Half claimed it on the recycling email loop. We got the top off, then horsed it down the stairs and reassembled it. Anyway, we put it back together after I sawed an ugly cable port in the back. Then, I drafted Eldest (again!) to download the latest anti-virus software. I scraped the older AV code off the box, installed and updated the latest, and regained some small measure of confidence in the home box. We'll see. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
11:51 pm	Superbolt and FIVE tornadoes! There I was, sitting at the dining table, eating a Subway sandwich - suddenly, the entire house lit up like the inside of a flashbulb, followed instantly by one of the loudest, longest peals of thunder I've ever heard. As the echoes died away, half the people on the street (including me) walked out into the street, trying to figure out where the lightning bolt hit and whether any of our houses or trees were on fire. After a few minutes, the car alarms were turned off and the sirens started - best I can figure, the bolt struck within a half mile of my house, off to the northeast somewhere. This was no garden-variety stroke of lightning, I don't think. I'll scrounge around tomorrow for any news reports. I think this was one of those bolts that can blow the end off a house or reduce a 100-foot tree to smoking splinters. It's not every day that you get a big fat channel of superheated plasma delivered to "occupant" in your neighborhood. The lightning bolt took back seat to the tornadoes, though. We had a total of five in the greater metro area, one of which chewed up a shopping mall fairly impressively. One of the five was about a mile from my house, which is about the closest one has ever come in the 20 years I've lived here. It wasn't very big, and it didn't do a lot of damage compared to the monsters that routinely hit Tornado Alley, but it was way, way too close for comfort. We were still reeling from the lightning bolt when Middle came up the stairs and gravely informed us that "tornadoes were going by." "Where?" I asked. "Here, dude - D said on her Facebook status that a tornado went by, and she's got debris in her yard. She lives right over there, you know," she said, pointing over the back fence. The odd thing was, there was almost no wind at our place at the time - we got a good shower of pea-sized hail, but the air was calm. The weather folks are still trying to figure this whole thing out - they're talking about up-slope this and unstable that, with the wind blowing backwards and inversions and God knows what else. Sunspots and methane pockets and weather balloons, probably. The upshot was that we went from a fairly leisurely Sunday morning to a shockingly energetic and unstable Sunday afternoon, all in the space of a couple of hours. The entire atmosphere was suddenly and most emphatically pissed off all of a sudden, if you ask me. The good news, I guess, is that most Colorado tornadoes are zeroes or ones on the Fujita scale, at least up here where I am. The clouds get their knickers in a twist, pop out a little tornado that zips along for a few minutes and scares the socks off everyone, and an hour later we're looking at clear skies. We don't get the F-5 monsters (5, because there is no definition for 6 that doesn't involve serious damage to the space-time continuum) that rumble through Oklahoma, and that's just fine by me. We did have a cute little waterspout that danced across the Boulder Reservoir a few years back, but the consensus was more along the lines of "How could a waterspout form in the first place with so little storm energy available?" rather than "We all gonna DIE!!!". Forecast for tomorrow? No idea. I suspect the working draft reads something like this: "Unstable conditions may result in widely-scattered encyclopedia salesmen, moderated later in the day by patches of Unitarians. Locally heavy insect plagues may be followed by Sousa marches in low-lying areas, so keep your badgers and quantum entanglements indoors to avoid complications. Lightning can be a real bitch, especially for mounted knights. Stay tuned to HURRR.COM for continued team coverage of all kinds of weird crap that nobody here understands in the slightest." Yee-ha. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
11:08 pm	The Camera Never Lies... Oh, boy... Well, well - I had a Thought. A random Impulse, if you will. After dinner, I went into a State. I flung off my shirt, re-dressed all in black, whipped on my Shades, and pulled on my Long Coat (with "Black Tie"). Youngest and her camera were pressed into service, and within minutes we were deeply involved in a Photo Shoot. I was looking for a sort of film noir comic-book villain look, and I must say that Youngest nailed it completely. We may have scared the socks off all our friends... ...but, hey - why not? Let's GO! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
11:35 pm	Birthday! We celebrated my birthday tonight (time-shifted a bit, due to scheduling concerns). I am old, and full of days. We went to Famous Dave's - a barbecue joint - and ordered (among other things) the Feast. The Feast is served in a (clean) garbage can lid, for historical reasons. It's HUGE. Ribs, roast chicken, pulled pork, brisket, muffins, fries, a mess of beans, coleslaw - the works. Six kinds of barbecue sauce. Sweet Baby Moses in a chariot-driven sidecar - that was GOOD. I fear that I cannot adequately express how good that meal was in sufficiently polite terms - this is a family newspaper, after all. Hoo, boy. I ate myself ROUND - and we've got leftovers that will serve us well for a week (unless I get the Munchies late at night, which I probably will). When the bones stopped flying and the pace slacked off a bit, I felt like an African leopard. I had stalked smartly, eaten well, and climbed a tree to stretch out and sleep in the sun. Ahhh... {stretching, cracking bones} ...it's good to be King. Anyway, I cleaned up pretty nicely in the presents department. Fascinating art work, a T-shirt that I have devious plans for, a shoot-em-up PC game, a "ZZ Top" 'black tie' (mandatory for any Sharp Dressed Man), the latest novel from one of my favorite authors, and a Nintendo Wii game box. Yep, yep, yep - life is good. I drafted the whole crew to assist in the Wii setup, and we were playing tennis in short order. Soon after that, we were playing Guitar Hero. I really do love all of you very much, and this really has been one of my best birthdays ever. Thank you! (Comment on this)
Monday, May 18th, 2009
11:44 pm	THIRTEEN traffic lights! BOO-ya! On the way home from work today, I hit thirteen (count 'em - THIRTEEN!) green lights in a row. One more, and I'd have driven the entire distance from my office to my home without stopping ONCE. Heh. Flushed with success, I strode downstairs to find Better Half fiddling with the DVD recorder thing-a-ma-jig. I waited for an opportunity, then seized it. The thing has a function that will let you title a DVD - an utterly useless feature, in my opinion. Nevertheless, I saw on Opportunity - and I went for it. I named the hapless DVD that happened to be in the drive Tits McGee, The Wonder Chimp. Why? {you might ask} Because I can. So, THERE. Some other disk in the set is named "Ramone". I'll probably name the others in a suitably obscure fashion, one of these days. You are not expected to understand any of this. Current Mood: quixotic (Comment on this)
Friday, May 8th, 2009
11:35 pm	Star Trek movie Well, I went to see the Star Trek movie today. I probably wouldn't have shelled out my own cash to go, but this turned into a team-building exercise in which the Brass bought the tickets and we all went and sat in a dark room for a few hours without speaking to one another. To be fair, I did join the group for lunch beforehand, and we had fun swapping stories and bonding with one another. I'm told that is a Good Thing™ I have to say - going in, I expected to be disappointed by the movie. I'm a cranky old Star Trek fan, and I know what I like. When we finally got past the endless commercials and promos and trailers and whatnot and actually started the movie, I mentally strapped myself in tight and did my Yoga breathing exercises, telling myself "anyone can stand anything for a few hours." For about the first half of the movie, I took pride in the fact that I was able to refrain from flinging various fruits and vegetables at the screen. Tomatoes, zucchini, Toyotas, grenades, etc. Then, it started to come together. I was as startled as the next guy - despite the obsession with lens flare, never mind the over-the-top fight scenes - however unlikely it seemed, the thing dug in and started to gain some traction. So, yeah - I'd give it 1.5 thumbs up! Go see it! There is one brief bit where Young Kirk gets enthusiastically horizontal with a green-skinned Academy cadet - so, if you've never seen a young Human male butt before, prepare to close your eyes for about four seconds. For what it's worth, I thought that bit was unnecessary and extraneous. I'm no prude (testify!), but come on - that was just pathetic. Anyway - as odd as it was, I think it worked. It's very, very different in many ways from what anyone would expect from the Star Trek canon - and, yet, it works! (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
11:54 pm	Mexican Flu, and a trip to the museum Museum trip first - man, it was AWESOME. I took half a day off work to accompany the Herd, and we had a blast. It was nice to just switch off all my work worries and poke around among interesting things. I like things that make me say, "Hmmm!" - and there was no shortage of interesting things this afternoon. The single most interesting thing I saw (among many) was a round table-like thing in the "Space Odyssey" section. It's a novel user interface to a huge GIS database - you spin it one way to zoom out, the other way to zoom in, and tilt it to "fly" from one point on Earth to another. I dialed it out to Earth orbit, flew it over Colorado, then zoomed in and found my house. It's like the Eye of God - now, all I need to do is build one that hooks up with real-time imagery from NRO satellites... "I see what you did, there." Watch "Enemy of the State" with Will Smith, sometime - hehehe! MEXICAN FLU! OMG, O LAWDY - WE ALL GONNA DIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE! OK, one thing, right off the bat. This is not 1918, and (oddly enough) we're a wee bit better prepared to deal with a pandemic these days than we were NINETY YEARS AGO. Yes, this flu strain looks pretty nasty. Yes, international travel exacerbates the vector calculation problem. Yes, more people are going to die. No, I don't think this Mexican Flu will wipe out the human race. I expect we'll have a tailored vaccine within six months, and I further expect that the whole crisis will have blown over by then. After 9/11, I rather suspect that every nation on Earth has a neat little three-ring binder on file that details containment strategies in the event of biowar - and, Brothers and Sisters, NOW IS THE TIME. I wouldn't give a plugged nickel for Mexico's chances on the world economic stage for the next five years, though - not that they had a hell of a lot to crow about before this latest uproar. So, friends and neighbors - treat this like any other flu season - WASH YOUR HANDS after contact, and try not to let anyone sneeze on you. Prime Directive - the more virulent the pathogen, the shorter its lifecycle. Step back, be smart, and watch it burn itself to the ground. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
11:52 pm	HDTV ANTENNA! The antenna I ordered a few days ago arrived today, and Eldest and I rigged it up tonight. I scrounged the Parts Department for relevant items, sacrificed a perfectly good FM ribbon antenna and a balun, and piggybacked the UHF (excuse me, "HDTV") feed onto the downstairs coax cable. We now have a signal-gathering antenna array in the attic that should pick up emissions from nearby star systems. Initial test results are encouraging - more so, if nearby stars are broadcasting soap operas in Spanish. DTV channel acquisition times have dropped sharply, and I can now see many more Spanish-language UHF channels than before. I think the new antenna is working. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
11:17 pm	iHURRR I have a(n) "iPod Touch" {hold your applause, please} I didn't buy it - it was a gift. Anyway, I've loaded it up with songs, and it's a cool little music box. I put it on "shuffle" at work. It's cool. I also downloaded a few free games. It's a racket, I know. The trick, apparently, is to offer a few levels of an interesting game for free and then rook the marks into paying for the super-deluxe version. Today, all my free games stopped working. They would show all or part of the initial setup screen, then - *poof*. I consulted with T, my personal friend and technical advisor, jumped through some hoops - and was rewarded with a hot bowl of NOTHING. "Phoo," said I. I often say "Phoo" when confronted by inexplicable proprietary software failure of this nature. It's a quirk - one among many, sad to say. I did a little web searching, then downloaded an entirely irrelevant free app from the iMinistry of iTruth, just to make the gears turn and iNsure that I was iNoculated with the latest iMunnosupressant iNanites. Wonder of wonders! After clicking through several pages of crap that no doubt sold my soul to the iAlmighty, my games worked again. Yep, yep, yep. [I say "Yep, yep, yep" when I acknowledge that I'm being screwed - just a sort of program note, as it were] Huh. [this is much more serious - the "Huh" is almost always followed by some form of Jihad.] I don't particularly care for parasitic personal technology that follows its own agenda. I may have to look into code that can convince me that the device answers only to me - or I may need to apply my sledgehammer to the toy. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 25th, 2009
11:24 am	Lazy day... I rode downtown to the chiropractor's place and got myself thoroughly cracked - man, it's nice to be able to breathe deeply and turn my head without hurting. From there, we went to the library. I picked up a few books. We had a coffee and/or a chai. On the way home, we stopped by the Army/Navy surplus store. I bought Eldest a couple of pairs of BDU pants, and a pair of shorts, and a shoulder strap for my work bag, and a horrifically offensive T-shirt {what IS that color, anyway? "Nuclear Chartreuse?"} Hehe - I have plans for that shirt. Hehehe... (Comment on this)
Monday, April 20th, 2009
11:47 pm	Well, well, well. Jesus wept. So, should I stick to the pace at work that's been killing me for months, hoping that today's news is the first step towards a brave new future that will finally reward me for all the scut jobs I've done and all the asses I've kissed over the past four years, or should I just throw up my hands, scourge the Temple, and starve under a bridge while trying to rub two sticks together and burn transcripts of Obama speeches to keep warm? My "stress" gauge goes to 11. Currently, the best estimate we have from the finest mathematicians in the world puts my stress level somewhere in the vicinity of 42. This is only an approximation, you understand. The math gets real hairy, real quick - irrational expressions and imaginary numbers are starting to crop up with alarming frequency, and sometimes it's hard to distinguish the apples from the inside-out fractal tarsiers who respond to every stimulus by belting out "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" in Swedish. Hey - nobody said math was pretty. OK, well, your Home-Ec teacher might have said that, but she was focused on balancing checkbooks and multiplying the "Frito Pie" recipe by six for the Thanksgiving reunion. To their credit, they're quite good - the tarsiers, I mean. They should go for a recording contract, at the very least. You wouldn't think a nocturnal prosimian primate could do justice to a Rod Stewart song, but you'd be wrong. I think they're working under an unfair disadvantage - if they were in Los Angeles instead of Southeast Asia, they'd be at the top of the charts. Anyway, enough about vegetarian entrees. The real point, here, I think we'd all agree, is bacon. Can I get an "AMEN!" from the choir? Ahhh, bacon. Is there anything it can't do? (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 18th, 2009
11:39 pm	Noah's Flood The blizzard started on Friday, and it was epic. By quitting time, I was seriously concerned about the drive home - near-white-out conditions, quarter-mile visibility, the whole bit. I got home, we got everything sorted, watched TV and movies for a while, and that was that. Saturday morning, I got up to find that the blizzard had turned to rain and that we had water in the basement. I sounded "General Quarters" and called out "All Hands On Deck", and all of us spent the next few hours mopping up water. Thank God for Sham-Wows - that's all I can say. On impulse, the other night, I drove halfway across town for the specific purpose of buying a box of Sham-Wows at Costco. Today, they were worth their weight in gold. The Offspring are to be commended, by the way - when I declared an emergency and started shouting orders, they snapped to quite nicely and worked together to get things sorted out. Various offspring laid Sham-Wows down to soak up the water, and Honored Sire (moi) used his Kung-Fu Grip to wring them out into a mop bucket. We pulled gallon after gallon of rainwater up off the floor, dumping the bucket into the downstairs toilet. In her bedroom, Eldest soaked up water from her carpet and emptied bucket after bucket of water down the toilet. We worked for hours, got the situation under control, broke for a very late lunch, came back, and did it again. At this hour, we think we're past the worst of the flooding. This was not a run-of-the-mill rainstorm, folks. We got about a month's worth of rain in 24 hours. The back yard is still awash, with as much standing water as I've ever seen in my twenty years here. The pond by the public library is dumping excess water down the spillway at full howl, and there's at least that much water spilling over the south bank and threatening to rip out the grass. The good news, I suppose, is that the deluge melted most of the snow from the blizzard. The streets are wet and/or frankly flooded, but the snow is not a problem. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
11:39 pm	Blizzard 2009! Holy Moses - I got up this morning and went through my usual routine and drove to work, despite the raging blizzard that was developing. My first clue that things were out of the ordinary came when I saw that I could park right up close in the Upper Lot. The campus was a ghost town, and it slowly sank in that I was one of a very few idiots that made the attempt today. To my credit, I finally fended off some emails from Sunny California and got the hell out of Dodge. The drive home was a bit tricky at times, but nothing I couldn't handle. When I got home and listened to the radio, I learned that the entire metroplex was in a state of unadulterated panic. Cars off the roads right and left, cops everywhere, horrific wrecks on the Interstate, the whole bit. Yeah, well - when I got home, I just parked the truck and went in the house. We watched "Gone With the Wind" on DVD, I made Cajun Chicken for supper, and that was that. Tomorrow, I'll shovel a foot of snow off the front sidewalk and go to work. Saturday, the high temperature should be about fifty. I'm just tired, people - and it's going to take a lot more than a March blizzard to get my attention. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
9:07 pm	LIFE! We just played a game of Life - well, most of us, anyway. Eldest sat this one out. Youngest was in a fair state, wanting as many children as possible but consistently skipping past the spaces that awarded children. So, we all got in the habit of using the "Revenge!" spaces to send her back ten spots for another shot at children. Middle taunted her mercilessly about being "barren," while everyone called her "Octo-Mom" for wanting so many kids so badly. Youngest was virtually broke and past almost all the offspring spaces when Middle hit "Revenge!", and then a curious transaction ensued. Youngest begged Middle to send her back ten spaces, but Middle knew that she could sue me for $300,000 instead. Middle was definitely in the hunt to win the game with the most money in the end, so she stood firm. She was bound and determined to get her $300,000. So, I loaned Youngest $300,000 so that she could bribe Middle to exercise her "Revenge!" and send Youngest back ten spaces. Youngest finally got a pair of children, and we played on. Middle and I and Better Half did pretty well as we played, but poor Youngest seemed to hit every misfortune on the board. She paid me back $100,000, but from that point on she was more or less perpetually broke. As the game wound down, I began to get concerned about my $200,000 exposure in a sub-prime loan, but my piteous cries for a government bailout to purchase the toxic loan were met with jeers of derision and accusations of socialism. I considered hiring a foreign army and engineering a coup, but my spiritual advisor warned me that such an attempt would be a really bad idea. It was too late in the day to try and whip up a Ponzi scheme, too - oh, well. I got to the Day of Reckoning first, and I decided to ride it in and count my money rather than take the one-in-ten odds of becoming a Millionaire Tycoon and winning the game outright. Middle chuckled evilly and started counting her money, and everybody started calling me "AIG" as the clock ran out and it was obvious that Youngest was never going to pay me the remaining $200,000. Youngest bet it all and lost the farm on the Day of Reckoning - a shame, since it would have been poetic justice for her to pop up and blow us all out of the water on her Day of Reckoning. I wound up winning, but only by about $400,000 - so it was a little closer than it would have been without that big loan. We all had a big time, though, harassing each other at every turn. We had one horrible car wreck that spilled precious offspring all over the board, and one of the husbands vanished entirely (never did find that little blue peg), necessitating a replacement husband that was drafted on the spot. Fortunes were made and lost, and a good time was had by all. Work is pretty quiet, although there's one 'dead cat' that's going to become a problem pretty quickly if someone doesn't step up and deal with it. There's a person in the company who knows how to solve that puzzle, and we've asked him for help twice to no avail, so we're probably going to escalate the request to his management pretty soon. That should be interesting. We're supposed to be hit by an enormous storm over the next 36 hours - the weathermen are screaming about one to two feet of snow, but I'll believe it when I see it. The longer we go without a big storm, the more wound up the weather people get, and at this point I think an inch of rain would be hailed as Noah's flood. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
11:45 pm	Yep, yep, yep... The latest Dead Cat Puzzle presented a new wrinkle today (yes, I know, EWWWWW!) Speaking as the Heir Apparent to all past and future Dead Cat Puzzles, I can vouchsafe that I stepped up smartly, did my analysis, and presented the Powers That Be with a Choice. Do it ugly, do it clean, or refer it to closed-door hearings in the Chamber. They're the officers, and I'm the Enlisted Man. Whatever the outcome, my pay is the same. It ain't MY cat, after all. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 13th, 2009
11:46 pm	Major PC Surgery I cracked open the Wintendo box tonight, whipped out the screwdrivers, and fired up the soldering iron. I dug through the Parts Box, hauled out a 12V box fan, scrapped a 3.5" microfloppy drive for a power connector, read the diagrams, and wired that bad boy up. I pulled the CPU fan off the heat sink, removed an astonishing layer of funk, replaced the CPU fan, and screwed everything down tight. Very scary. I thought I'd have to zip-tie the new rear fan into place, but then I saw that I had a nice neat set of pre-drilled holes for the (smaller) replacement fan. After driving all over town to buy a roll of electrical tape, I buttoned the whole rig back up. It now sounds like an F-16 on takeoff, but, by God, it's moving air across the heat sinks. Ye gods and little fishes - I am tired of screwing with this machine. It has racked up fourteen out of three strikes. One of these days, Alice - one of these days... (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
11:09 pm	Well, we've decided. Middle Child and I have a plan. We need to get Better Half elected President, so that we can be the First Family. While the Momma is busy dealing with Afghanistan and North Korea and Narnia and all that stuff, the kids and I will just "kick it" (as Middle says). I could go for that - I'd have hot wings and pizza delivered by a Navy helicopter, I'd sit out on the White House lawn in shorts in a yard chair with a cooler, the whole nine yards. After Momma whupped up on the press corps, I'd shoot pool with them. I'd wear tie-dyed shirts with camo pants, just to watch the fashionistas explode. I'd wear white shoes after Labor Day, whizz over the guardrails into the Grand Canyon, and ask the Pope for directions to the nearest synagogue in Vatican City. "There goes Ol' Weird Oscar - AGAIN - " would be a recurring theme on every news channel. Golf cart races on the deck of an aircraft carrier - CHECK. Spending an afternoon eating ribs in a shack in the South, surrounded by Secret Service - CHECK. Playing croquet on the White House lawn - CHECK. You just never know what Ol' Weird Oscar might get up to - but when you see his trademark manic grin, you know it's time to hang on tight and brace for the unexpected. Yep, yep, yep - it would be good to be King. Or, "First Man". Wait - that sounds odd, eh? "First Spazz"? No, no - wait - I've got it: "Funk-master General". Ohhh, yeah. That's it - "Funk-master General". Ha-HA! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
11:58 pm	Ups and downs... On the up-side, I think I've cracked a nasty nut for the Sustaining people. Time will tell. On the down-side, I think a routine maintenance action in California may have screwed my California operations beyond recognition. Le Sigh - I'll deal with it tomorrow. Middle Child is progressing nicely, thanks for asking. (Comment on this)