TRASH TALK

Howdy!  That's what I used to say, and now, living again in Texas, it's common.  Perhaps my heart has always been here?

Does it seem to you like many internet sites are becoming like Times Square with way too many distracting ads?  I realize their goal is to monetize, but go to rense.com for example.  It's so trashy!
I'm losing interest in such sites.

It almost parallels radio, where there might be eight minutes of commercials in a row, and not 8 x 1 minute, either.  There could be 5s, 10s and lots of 30s along with the odd :60.  I simply can't listen to radio.  It makes me crazy.  I want to fix it.  I want to ban the inane "liners" and all the pushing to the web.  I hate to hear it in the state it's in.

And the commercials are mostly awful.  I read many and audition many more and you'd be amazed at the missing verbs, wrong tenses, missing WORDS.  When's the last time you heard a commercial that made you emote, laugh, or resonate in any way?  Or maybe even remember it.

DOOFUS

Yup.  It's me.  I wish I had a video to share, but I was moving too quickly to get it.  here's THE STORY:

I was shopping at the supermarket and passed their display of appliances (these stores sell much more than food.)  As I rolled my cart by, I noticed blenders.  I lost mine in the divorce - no big deal - haven't needed one until NOW as I am trying some protein rich smoothies.  And Lo!  It was an Oster (brand name) at $19.95 and there was a coupon for $10 off!!!

So I was just using my $9.99 blender, mixing some milk and yogurt and powder, trying the various control buttons... and suddenly there's a mess happening.  But the top is on tight.  Yet the mess was spreading quickly.  I killed the power and discovered that the darn container-thing comes apart at the bottom - I guess for cleaning - and the stuff was squirting out the bottom, even with the power off.

No harm.  I cleaned the puddle up and continued with my day...

...reminds me a little of the time long ago when I sucked out the fireplace ashes with the canister vacuum cleaner, not realizing some of the ashes were embers.  I turn around and the machine is blowing smoke big time as it burned through the bag or dust bunnies and whatever else was in there.  Looked like a pro fogger.

MORE STUFF YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE

But Raj, you cannot take an elephant through a carwash.  It just isn't done!  Now how do you propose to get him unstuck?

Sadly, Sarah turned to her constant companion, siri, and asked her to find what she could on suicide.'
Instead siri returned a search for siding, which saved the moment.

"I've been a capt'n on the seas for most of my life," he continued, as the parrot changed shoulders.  "I've seen calm and I've seen the god-awful furies and everything in between."  The seaman then screamed sailor's curses as the parrot tore off his right ear.

"Our company policy is, as a matter of fact, that we must deny your coverage as your qualifying clauses contain a prohibition which, in this case, applies.  There's nothing I can do.  I do hope you can find a way to remove the cement and truck from your pool."

RAMBLE WITH ME

It's beginning to look a lot like spring.  What's on my mind?  Getting some good gigs for the ol' Voicework. (NOT EASY!!  Lowballers and competitors!!!)  I've watched a few of the recent awards shows and even in my microscopic small way, feel a sense of comradeship with the men and women who are actors we all know and sometimes love (in our minds.)  I think of myself as a voice actor.  Why VOICE and not stage or whatever?  Bad memory.  I had such a hard time learning/memorizing the Latin responses I dropped out of Altar Boy School.  Certainly no brain diminishment back then, though I did play with a vial or mercury I had... I'd roll the stuff around my palm and just marvel at how it felt.  Got it from my Dentist.  Nowadays, the house I lived in would be razed and hazmatters would declare the neighborhood unsafe.

I would have done much better in school if I had a better memory.

These days Alice would go into the looking glass and instead of a mad hatter would find hazmatters.

Where IS wonderland these days?  Vegas would have you believe it's there, but I know it isn't.  And "America's Finest City" (San Diego) is subject to vast disparities in wealth. I saw for myself that people were living in camps of cardboard boxes in the valleys behind $600,000 condos... and that was in the 80s!  And traffic.  And coming: debris from Fukushima.  Maybe a little radiation for a few decades.

Has my point of view dulled?  I don't think so, I am just making a conscious effort to be a more open person, not feeling the need to crack wise at every opportunity.  This could be wisdom, maturity, or that subdural hematoma. Or an after-effect of meditation.

It doesn't always work.  Sorry to admit I unloaded on Time Warner locally today since the "truck roll" (in person tech visit) Friday, left me with exactly the same problem I had before the "fix" was applied. ABC and CBS... mostly unwatchable.  Audio and video dropouts.  I can even show on a signal strength meter that those channels are way down compared to the others.

Enough for now.  I frankly felt the Christmas letter below was largely unseen and a flop, so I haven't wanted to try to write.  But I will.  It's part of me.


 

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Winter in central Texas.  It’ll put a hoot in your boot.  Excited by the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar,  maybe I’ll buy a bolo tie.

Even though we are now officially divorced, I bought Terri a Taser for Christmas so she can fend off the fendables.  It will also put a nice crisp carmelized top on crème brule.

Chester and I do a pretty good loop in the morning.  Altogether , since we moved, we’ve walked about 500 miles.  We see deer, dogs,  joggers,  bikers, a lady on a Segway, cars, trucks, cats, squirrels, chickens, horses large and small.  And sometimes vultures.  Only two moving snakes.  And a few flat ones.

When the weather people go full hype in front of a polar cold front graphic, we can usually expect a few days of chill.  Snow fell maybe twice or three times over the past 8 years.  This is proof that my anti-snow ray works.  I am writing this part on Black Saturday and it's 61 degrees with overcast skies at 4:20PM.

I should mention the marvel that came with the house: a state-of-the-art septic system.  First of all, they placed it very close to the front door – I have no idea why.  It has 6 protruding manholes with handles on top (now covered with really big really Hollywood fake rocks).  There are four chambers and three sprayers.   Everything flushed or drained goes into chamber one, where the solids are treated somehow.  Then the broken-up material flows into chamber two where hungry crap-pihyranna bacteria pretend to be pac man.  Then chamber three where something else happens.  Then chamber four where air is pumped night and day and chlorine is added.  After that, when it gets dark, the sprayers come on at three places in the lawn and spray the treated remains on deer legs and whatever else is around.  You can tell it works by seeing the circles of oddly colored grass.  The grass lives in a near-death state.

I had a 20 x 25 foot deck put onto the back of the house.  Now when anyone says ‘I ain’t playing with a full deck,’ I can deny it.  I AM playing with a full deck, and I have the receipt to prove it.

Happy to report I have 100 consecutive wins against Chester at scrabble, though we do seem to be missing a bunch of tiles.

I saw Chester poop a word.  Mystery solved!

Time to catch you up on the kids and the rest of the extended family:  Sarah is a flight attendant on a small regional airline which apparently doesn't know where all the little bottles are really going.  She got into a little trouble by pulling a rubber snake out of a life vest.  She didn't think anyone watched the safety demonstration anyway.  Probably Snakes on A Plane hysteria.  She says you wouldn't believe what people leave behind, from food (which she says is sometimes really good!) to jewelry to intimate things.  (Which she says are sometimes really good!)  The pilot's union has had no comment on the lavatory episode.  I guess the airline either doesn't know or care about what the employees do: water balloons in the overhead racks; oxygen masks smeared with pepper, that kind of thing.

Uncle Earl was shopping for a special Christmas Card for Nora, because that's about all she was getting.  Well, he’s got to read ‘em all - you know Earl, Mister Inquisitive.  So he's got a soda in one hand and in the other he's reading card after card.  There sure are a lot of them!  Well, finally he hits on a laugh-out-loud funny one, and that causes him to nose spray Dr. Pepper all over the rack of cards.  In the excitement of laughing, spraying, snorting and all, he ran out of breath and collapsed, so they called the paramedics.  You know they wouldn't let him out of the store until he paid for all those cards?  So he got the ambulance ride to the ER and when he told his story there was quite a lot of laughter and they discharged him.  $800 for the Ambulance ride, though, thank you very much.  This infuriated Earl what with his hair trigger temper and all.  Earl mouthed off.  Then he shoved a cop.  Then the cop arrested Earl.  Then they put him into the squad car.  On the way to the lockup, there was a big accident right THERE and they had to help.  Well, before they get out of the car Earl is doing some powerful whining about taking a whiz, so they unlock one cuff link and let him go behind a big fat pine, which, as it turned out, hid from immediate view a pretty fast running deep creek.  When the cop remembered to look behind the tree, Earl was already long gone downstream at a pretty good clip.  Then his dangling handcuff caught on an underwater branch and Earl couldn’t get it off due to the water pressure and he drowned.

Elvis is our town mascot.  He’s an American bald eagle. And he’s tame in that he can be loose in the park and no problem, he’ll come back on command.  At Rodeos and Football games he’ll fly around the stadiums and like that – very patriotic.  He’s been taught to pull an American flag.  Elvis’s technical “owner” is Kevin Trousdale.  He’ll do baseball games and golf tournaments.  No tennis, though as Elvis tends to go after the balls.  Catches them too.  Well, Kevin was actually charging civic boosters per appearance and with the economy and all, Kevin started taking some less than grand choices, one of which was the opening of Fabric Town in the Fashion Mall.  Turns out one of the many patterned fabrics on display freaked the bird out, so he leaps into the air and tears around the room. Talons extended, eventually ripping a snuggiebear right out of a kid’s hands, then he flies into the mall corridor, which has a pretty high ceiling and skylights.  Ol Elvis, he went full speed into the skylight.  Bonked big.  Spun to the floor.  Mallgoers screamed.  Somebody pulled the fire alarm.   But after all, there are a lot of feathers for cushion, so Elvis was just dazed and likely confused by the indoor gig with the make-you-insane fabric.  You know how malls will do themes in their corridor?  Farm week.  Shoe days.  Whatever.  Well as Elvis came to, it was a big Thanksgiving display.  Elvis picked his spinning head off the floor and somehow thought something sexual about one of the turkeys on display… and went for it.

Now we had Elvis and a Turkey – might have been a Tom – going at it with flying feathers, with hissing and squawking from hell and here comes the fire department.  Now Norbert Hill, one of the volunteer firemen, is also a farmer.  He sees what the commotion is all about and he grabs a CO2 fire extinguisher and extinguishes Elvis’s ardor and Tom Turkey’s mania.  We all know from Mister Wizard that CO2 is carbon dioxide.  Norbert really blasted the birds, and birds do breathe in short rapid breaths, and the CO2 basically took out Elvis back into passout land.  A woman, seeing this all, and Elvis down for the second time, tries to give Elvis some kind of mouth-to-beak resuscitation – you had to see that!  Well, Elvis wakes up and almost takes the woman’s tongue off.  Got some of it.  Lotsa blood.  To make a longer story shorter, Elvis is OK, the woman talks funny, Tom died and was later eaten.

Marcy and Vito went out west by car.  They said there’s like a couple hundred miles of nothing on Highway 10, and you are so bored, it’s just scrub and the scene doesn’t change.  All of a sudden Vito lets out a whoop and grabs an exit to see the Reptile and Viper Zoo.  It’s full of big snakes and little ones too; lizards, you name it.  The scarier the better, because, it turns out that the owner of Sammy’s Snake, Reptile and Viper Zoo also owns another building you have to pass to get back onto the expressway: Sammy’s Shoot A Viper.  And what it is is he sells admission and ammo.  The guns are rigged to miss, the background is camo, the snakes are hard to see, and apparently some of them are actually rubber.

I call them HiJinx but the police call them felonies.  Jake, that knucklehead, pulled another of his brain-dead scams.  Pretending to be caught in an escalator at the mall, he actually became stuck somehow... with his mullet-hair in the moving handrail.  Well, it made all the local TV.  The scalp really bleeds like a special effect!  He needed a haircut anyway.  He looked like as escapee from the 80s!  The news is making Jake out to be a saint when he just screwed up scamming the place.

Aunt Mary was arrested.  You remember she had these warehouses she inherited when Bud died?  Well, she had turned them into a grow operation.  A pot grow.  They apparently caught her early on as her electric bill soared what with the stadium lighting they were using.  Actual stadium lighting they found at some old broken stadium; cleaned ‘em up with new bulbs and it was “Don't look if you don't want to be blinded!”  bright.

Now for some mush:  Merry Christmas.  May all your dreams come true.  Except the ones where you are naked at the front of the classroom, or on stage, or are being chased, or falling, or fired, or on the air with no music and you thrash around under the covers like a landed fish and shred the sheets with your overdue-to-be-cut toenails.

And, reminded as I am about the baby Jesus born under disco lighting and maybe a couple rooftop flasher racks from police cars as seen in the display across the street, let me wish you happiness for the birth of new opportunity on a horizon of possibility aka 2014.

 Bob

Christmas 2013

 

And thank you all for the many birthday wishes I received today!

TOMORROW THE DIVORCE IS FINAL

Sad but happy.  An end of a long run.  We remain friends, but are better apart.
We are going out to dinner to celebrate the good times. No, not at Luby's (cafeteria) but at a nice steak place.

Catching up on stuff below: some grass grew.  I started a second patch.  It grew.  But now they forecast frost and I will stop as it should go dormant or die.  I figure at least ten patches to do, one at a time, for watering purposes.

I was having bad keyboard lag, where my typing gets ahead of the computer screen.  Replacing the keyboard seems to have solved that despite the other failed remedies I tried.

Bought a new smoke detector to replace the one which I feel was responsible for the falsing, perhaps due to dust. Now I have to go way up the ladder and try to make it fit... it's high on a high wall.

Received the Moose Antlers I bought to cut down for Chester.  The first cut was apparently too large for him, too wide.  I just cut him a smaller piece and he's liking that one.  For a dog that chews as much as he does (with such dedication) he has happily avoided the furniture or anything like carpet, etc.  Good dog!

Starting to plan a Christmas letter (posted here, not sent through the mail) - this might be the latest I have started to write.  Without Terri to please I can go a little farther into fantasyland.  Stay tuned.

GRASS SEED n ME

Well, we had a cool snap and that prompted me to plant the grass seed I'd been saving.  I had raked and put down new super soil.  Today I loosened the dirt, spread the seed, and turned on the sprinkler, which is like a golf course thing.  Fup Fup Fup Fup Fup  tsss tss tss tss tss tss.  I suspect it's defective but have messed with it quite a bit and it may do. 

I would make an adjustment while it was running.  This would allow it to spin and get me in the face.  Seemed no matter what setting, I got got.

This is the first of many patches I have to do.  Likely I'll run out of time before its too cold.  I will continue in the spring.

THE LEFT SPEAKER IS LOW

Let me set the scene.  In setting up my stereo, the guy I hired to do it right (he's a local dealer) uncovered a problem.  He narrowed it down to the (Classe) amplifier which was still just barely under warranty* but had to be shipped back to its home in Montreal.  Via Buffalo.  The amp weighs 92 pounds nekkid.

Weeks fly by.  The clock behind the counter in c movie diners dances...

The AMP is back (*about $400 later.)  The local guy is here.  I have also invested in new wiring.  So we hook it up and it's right.  A Great Relief, because I tend to be not trusting in these things.  But Classe says they had 'er going for days and it passed every test. More'n once, said the fella I spoke to at Classe.  French accents are cool.

And then my local guy notices it's fading again on the left.  Measurements confirm.  The exact thing I sent it in for the first time.

Testing continues, all of a sudden there's a horrible otherworldly sound just shrieking like high James Brown, but electronic.  Really loud.  You can't shout over it loud.  We run around... no smoke... not in the attic, not outside or in any room.  Squealing reveals itself to be the sound of ten smoke detectors firing at once all over the house, and, right where we were.  At first we were pulling plugs and flipping switches, then realized it wasn't the stereo gone batshit crazy.

This house has several electric panels and I am pulling all switches.  The sound continues.  He's got his fingers in his ears.  When I checked the attic I swiped a pair of my cutting the grass muffler/headphone and threw them on.   Kinda a mild " You've got the suit on so you'll have to be the one to enter the reactor..." feeling.

Last night, before sleep, I noticed the smoke detector flashing red more often than I ever noticed.  On a whim and a ladder, I "demounted" the detector... and they all stopped.

So where were we?  My local guy knows somebody up there in the company that through its holdings owns my amp manufacturer. 

BTW there's no local service.  But I guess you know that from the story.

I gotta get ten new batteries for the smoke detectors.  Looks like they were about a year old.  Seems about right.

FACEBOOK SUCKS MY CREATIVE SPIRIT IN SMALL SUCKS.

I blame FACEBOOK for why I don't feel the need to have a voice, even if only a handful of audience.  I have programmed radio for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of weekly listeners.  It's full circle. My inner artist must be creative.

My writing has had compliments for many years from many people.  So here I am.

I just found out I'm a sixteen-year old girl.  Here's how:  As part of an ITunes/IOS updates, I get iradio.  I can't listen to radio radio, because I end up judging it and then being upset since most stations are just horrible, and if they aren't, their commercials get me from a voicework perspective.  Anyway, here's a station called PURE POP and I LIKE IT.  Because I can't listen to radio, the artists are mostly unknown to me.  "Who's THAT?  I LIKE HIM.  Wonder if there's a CD?"

The score is 3 and 3.  3 songs I thought were great and three I don't.  I'm a big fan of pop production too, so I don't mind hooks galore.  I hear the splices, the comps sometimes.  It sounds good on my studio monitors.

Well, I am fickle. I had even written down the name (DRAKE) of the singer I liked a lot.  Now I find a DRAKE station.  Or it's all Drake.  Radio people will enjoy the irony of Drake iradio.  Drake was an architect of the popular style of top 40 in the 60s.

Fickle again.  Too much rap on DRAKE.  I don't understand the words easily anyway.

I like Justin Timberlake. 

16 years old.  Girl.

SUPER SUPERMARKETING

Here's the future of supermarketing.  I can see it.  Let me share my vision:  First of all, it's all computer driven.  This allows the consumer to always make the best choices.

There'll be an app for this, where you enter a store's site and then specify all the parameters, example:  choose bread loaf by brand, by size, by cost, by freshness?  Well, you load the answers under your account and it can have price limits set by you, a whole bunch of parameters more easily finished than this sounds.  You can change any of it but you can also suspend certain things already entered  (don't want bread this order).  Bread on  Bread off.  Computers are networked, and the master brain can follow profit second by second.  In a real life lab store (one where they experiment with placement, color, what have you) the computer could be instructed to pull prices down here or there to see what stimulates people, to look for how that can extrapolated.

It's the future.

Commodity trading could be instantly reflected.  I should mention that all pricing is on little readouts.

Carts ride the aisles and using a system of magnets, items chosen flip into the basket.  You just pick it up and pay.  Or they deliver but I don't see this in my vision. As you drive up, just use the app to trigger your cart.  So there's this lineup of filled carts - which one's yours?  (There's your name on a readout but you are too far to read it) well the app actually will beep as you approach your cart, more beeps when you get closer, steady tone when you're there.  I think it's an rfid deal.

This system gives the marketer many variables to work with, even in real time, chain-wide.
 "Show me sales ranked per aisle and by placement on that aisle"  Are there undiscovered hot spots?
"Now let's look at it by high dollar shoppers," and there you go into the rabbit hole, but there are profits in that hole. Which is why it could happen.

 

CATCHING UP

The final CT scan as interpreted by the Neurosurgeon is I am 100% self-cured.  Nature took its course.  No surgery.

As  for the house and the renovations, they continue but we are down to the fix the fixes stage.  Little niggling things, but right is right.  And Mister Stereo is due to set up the speakers.  Most people can't understand why I'd hire a guy to come position the speakers.  Well, they need to be uncrated (are HEAVY) and the crates need to go away into Garage-exile when empty.  These speakers cost a LOT.  If you can't see hiring someone to find the exact placement (he sells them) you'd never buy the cost originally.  I've been an audiophile for a long long time, so trust me, this is a necessary step.

Last night I did something I've never done.  Pay per View.  On this particular movie's website I saw that they released it into theaters and certain ppv websites on the same day.  I was about to go to a theater when I explored the capabilities of my new DVD player and sure enough, it accesses ppv sites and the one which carried the film.  I believe the NY Times critic gave it 4 of 4 stars.  I gave it 1/2 star.  Oh well, at least I saw it (Europa Report).  Blah.

I'm back, Jack

I see I am up to one follower so will use my adrenaline rush to resume blogging.  A lot has happened beyond getting my follower.

Terri left last November.  Wasn't happy.  Much to my surprise, I wasn't either.  Ok, not really a surprise.  Anyway we now live about 12 miles apart, not far from the old home which sold to a nice couple with cash.  We hammered out a win-win but didn't tell them about the ancient Indian sacrificial area of the lot.  Divorce is coming.  Too bad I'm not still in country radio!

I like this house better than the one we had built and I don't know why.  Maybe because there's usable land... Used for grass cutting, rock removal, deer grazing.  I think it may be the trees.  We had trees before, but I have 37 oak trees in the front yard alone.  Not alone.  And apparently up to 16 deer.  I have a burn pit for I guess whatever I want but I've only done leaves, sticks, car tires, and branches. It gives me an excuse to play with gasoline and fire.  I am careful, believe me.  The county is in a burn ban or I'd torch the four foot pile I have waiting for an opportune time.  This won't be subtle.  At the bottom I have a bunch of tree stumps.  Yeah, THAT big.  It'll burn for a week, the sweet smell of cedar (stumps) perfuming the deer.

The other night there were three bucks remaining after the others left... With impressive antlers. I thought they'd look good smoking cigars.

One other deer was mad I think as it stood stomping, but not very close, so Chester and I just watched it stomp and fingerpop.

So I bought this house and in the gap between leaving the old place and finding my new place and then in closing process, I had time in Terri's rental while she was away (We remain friends.)  then a two story condo at a golf resort.  I don't golf but it was nice to see Chester find so many balls, which I placed through the community, in places you wouldn't quite expect to find them.  I'm easily amused.

The rental bedroom was very dark, and when I got up to go to the bathroom, I went through the wrong door (not wearing glasses). Whoops, head first down the stairs.

and then weeks later I had three spells of not being able to say the words I wanted to... And six times my right arm went numb.  I think it went this way.  Doctor.  Specialist, Hospital 1, Ambulance, Hospital 2, Tests.  Neurosurgeon, neurology, medical staff.  And they have to agree before you get discharged or you leave without medical say-so, and insurance won't cover you and in my case, wouldn't be able to drive for a year. Subdural Hematoma, apparently from my stair flight, though weeks later. CT scan.  Surgeon is pleased.  Get another.  As  I write this, it's now.  But then isn't it always? I've been absolutely fine since about May.  It was only for a week.

Next time I'll have more pictures.  I had a lot of work done here at Rancho del Woodo and its all just about done.  Two more weeks I'd guess.  It's really a big deal to move your life.

ITCHGASM

I have dry skin.  When the humidity drops to a certain point, the dry skin starts to itch. I know not to scratch it.  When I scratch it, it only itches more.  So I hold off.  Until I slip.  Fall off the wagon.  Scratchhhhhhhh!  It feels so good. Then it itches more, then I scratch more.  And more and more.

I call it ITCHGASM.  Sometimes, almost as good as the other gasm.

MIRACLE

I was reminded it's been a while since I have blogged.  True.  So here goes.  I am going to tell the story of a miracle.

At first I thought maybe I had a cataract, or a stroke, but darn if the big 60 inch Hi Def TV was actually dimming from time to time.  It'd drop down a noticeable notch and was still viewable, but something clearly was happening. Quality suffered.  I blamed the local cable provider, because they suck so badly.  Or maybe the actual TV station because they suck technically so badly.  Example: cloudiness or blur to pictures.  Bad audio.  Gee, even the Grammys were pretty screechy.  Of course I could blame my beloved TiVo too, as everything routes through it.  Or the Denon receiver, a major, MAJOR hassle and most user unfriendly device made to date.

I investigated.  Turns out nobody I could find online complained about this brightness issue.

Our set is a fairly thin rear screen projector.  At the time, maybe 5 years ago, it was state of the art, almost.  Now they are thin, THIN, but when it works the picture is pretty good.  I had it professionally calibrated too.

Last night I turned all on with my iPhone app, yet the screen didn't come on.  Usually there's a little delay.  No, this is no little delay.  Then, a red light I've never seen before flashed on the bezel: under it in tiny letters it said "Change bulb."

Happily I had ordered one a few weeks back.  Superbowl lighting wasn't only dim in NOLA.

Here's the deal: I, Bob Wood, unhandy with some things, would take apart the TV and change the bulb: sitcom and fireworks fodder.  The bulb came with zero instructions.  Bravely, I soldiered on.  I put on cotton gloves, lest some finger oil get onto the bulb, which will blow it up.  I could tell where the bulb went because that's the side of the set where it looks like that scene in ET where the light is shining around the door edges.  Panel, off.  And ooooh, another hidden panel under the first one.  Off with it.

Now, how to remove the old dead bulb assembly?  Yes, as I found when I opened the box,  the light is within an assembly.  I pulled, then wiggled and wobbled it... all the while believing that alignment must be perfect or you don't get a good picture.  Boldly, I yanked with more pressure.  And out it came like an abscessed tooth!  Here it is.

12 billion candlepower  (I imagine.)

And just for fun, it sits at an angle.

But here's the miracle:  I got the new unit installed, forgot then remembered the inner (secret) panel, fired it up... and...

Old guy on the news.

CHRISTMAS LETTER 2012

Another year flies by.  And next week the world ends (Mayan calendar. Dec 21st)  But just in case it doesn't, here's the annual letter.  No cards this year.  But for a good cause.

Everything is sooo big!

Back in February we flew in this little 12 pound ball of fluff from Kentucky.  Now he’s 45 pounds of mostly muscle, teeth and fluff.  His name is Chester.  Born on the day we had to put down 15 year old Jessie the Cocker, he’s about a 2/3 scale Golden retriever. Lighter fur than Donald Trump.  He’s a rare breed.  Way back in the day, a certain poodle was put into the bloodline as the breeder played Genetics. Dad was a shrimp.  Not seafood, short.  Mom was a beautiful white Golden.  Or White-en.  She should have been named Betty, but was DameMutworthUptail  or something ASPCA friendly. As a pup, Chester’d eat anything.  I found a light cord where he chewed through and bared both wires.  Somehow he survived.  And the house didn’t burn down.  I haven’t been able to teach him to speak English, but I swear he whined “Rigatoni” once.

I love rabbit poop!

I own the world.

Mrf mmrrrf mrrrrr.

Chester, earlier in puppyhood, would eat any plush toy we gave him.  It wouldn’t take but a little chewing, OFF goes the leg, OFF goes the head, stuffing being swallowed like cool whip.  Of course we’d try to carefully monitor him and when the stuffing became exposed, we’d trash that little piggy or ‘coon or hedgehog or whatever.  So Chester gets better at it – faster – bigger sharper teeth.  Pretty soon he’s swallowed a squeaker.  It’d be funny if he’d fart a squeal, but more’n’likely the squeaker would plug his intestine, and we’d face serious surgery.  After a quick consult with his trainer, we took him to an emergency vet (of course it was the weekend) where they induced vomitage. Somehow they had an old Madonna movie... said it works every time!

BANG! We were hit by lightning.  It scared the beejesus out of us.  There was beejesus all over everything.  Again, no fire, but damage included both computers (Compu-Toast!), an air conditioner controller, the pool equipment master control board, and other fun repairs. No hole.  Metal Roof.  It was like being on the inside of an exploding bubble of light and concussion, but very very fast.  You don’t say, “Were we hit?”  You say “Where were we hit?”  One of my mirrored hard drives was dead, the other iffy.  Both computers were later replaced.

Taking this as an omen (not really), we put the house up for sale (really.)  Selling these days is mostly via building an internet presence.  We are very present and very internet, and have had a few nibbles but haven’t hooked a buyer.  After a showing, one realtor left a door open.  Not to negotiation – she left a door open.   I see no critters appearing yet, but that’s sloppy realtoring.  If the doorknob is a challenge, then I’d expect a buyer’s contract in Crayola.

So where will we go?  Don’t know.  Austin, yes.  Roof, yes.  Running water, yes. Toilets, hopefully. Why are we selling?  Downsizing.  We are at some sort of crossroads.  Life.  It’ll getcha.

By the way, when warranties expire, things break, die, or stop working.  In my experience that's in 7 years.  We have been here 8.  Have seen a lot of repair people lately.  One day we had 12 guys working.  You can't sell a broken house/waterheater/refrigerator/stove - you name it.  Heck, back in Minnesota the house sold with a new AC and heating system, new floor, new roof, new driveway, new landscaping and more.

About Christmas, whatever happened to tinsel?

Here in our little community of about 150 homes, there seems to be a holiday decoration race.  CREWS are at work making spirits (if not streets) bright.  They line the roofs, the gardens, wrap trees, and it’s not even cold yet.  I remember doing it myself as a kid on two of our overgrown shrubs, hanging the good lights – the big bulbed ones, on the coldest day ever.  It seems a lot of the Christmas Deco-dollar has landed on giant inflatables of the jolly old elf, be he in a helicopter, 18 wheeler, or beer truck.  This year, due to Chester, we won’t risk tempting him with a tree and decorations just right for clogging intestines.  He’s a smart dog, but still a pup.  He can hear the big cats (Lions and Tigers and Panthers) Oh My! from the local ‘rescue zoo’ a few miles upwind.  He always give me the look that says, “That’s not right, Bob.”  Feeling completely scrooged we are skipping cards again this year, but will donate to water.org instead.  Sorry, post office. Water.org is very worthy.

You KNOW about the Mayans and the predicted end of the world on December 21^st?  It’s an earlier version (or later) of Y2K.  If somebody doesn’t run an end of the world sale – “put it on the credit card!” – then the advertising community will let us all down.  If you were going to end the world imagine the show you could put on.*  Of course there are billions of stars with billions of planets so you know they come and go.  Our hubris makes us think it won’t happen here.  Hey – wait – don’t mean to bum you out.  Just saying…  

*If I was to produce the end of the world it'd be commercial free, that's certain..  I'd reunite the Beatles.  They'd seem huge, spread across the sky, backed up by some crazy Grateful Dead lightshow.  They'd do a medley and maybe even a new song or two, then,  The End.  As they finished, luminescent flakes would fall all over the world, like snow, even indoors, but when they touched anyone they'd have an orgasm and pass.

...meanwhile we dance with danger at the fiscal cliff.

Fiscal Cliff Santa

The Family Crest

Looking forward to the new album by The Family Crest, a band we fell for in San Francisco and have subsequently seen in a house party here.  Helped fund it on Kickstarter and even though thousands of people kicked in too, it’s so nice to be able to help a creative venture, especially when the talent is so good.  The best way to describe their music is cinematic, visionary meets pop.  I know, it’s special.

Well, not so much biting sarcasm this year, so no ointment will be needed now.

Happy and Merry!!!

FLIGHT

We went to the 3:30 showing on Sunday.  That (crowded) audience didn't make a single sound for the entire film!  It was that engrossing, but, as Denzel Washington said on some interview I saw, "The stuff in the preview isn't what it's about."  It's not.  The rest of the story is triggered by the crash.

It's really an exploration of rock bottom.

Not entirely realistic, but easy to have empathy for the character played by Denzel, and in the end, it depressed me.  I'm not sure why.

NOBODY'S HOME

This is the halloween story of the christmas grinch.  We don't welcome kiddos tonight.  We used to, in Minnesota, where the neighborhood was larger and closer.  We'd even give out full size bars of A list candy.  And I'd eat what was left.  One year we had 70 kids.  I think the word got out.

My job was (and would be) to hold the dog back.  Terri would say nice things to the kids.  I'd lurk and feel like a perv if I went to the door myself.

So here we just turn off the lights and try to stay below the windows.  Terri gets some special things for the kid almost next door.  And that's it.

Tonight I am going out as a restaurant patron.  Wearing a white shirt.  To the Italian Restaurant.  If I make a mess I can always claim it's blood.

STATIC

Random half sentences and things:

"like claiming "the cigarette lighter fell out and started a seat fire" could be the best defense for erratic driving..."

My dog has big teeth.

It hit me at a low level, like being ankle pecked by ducks.

He had a look like you'd expect on a constipated man.

Her hair blew in the breeze like spun cotton candy.

The remote control was so hard to understand, nobody would ever know when the thing stopped working.

A wooden clothes pin is the thumbtack to the past.

Did they tune the sound of a strike?  Did they figure a way to make that hit on those pins to sound so fulfilling, like a brief orgasm?

I would like a job where they pay me to do this all day.

The vulture actually landed on his car's hood and its talons scratched right up.  That's the moment when he started to believe the voices he'd been hearing in his head.

LIGHTNING STRIKES1

Thursday the 13th we had rain. Rain has been rare here and last year we were in mid-exceptional drought. That's the worst category. This year we are over the running average but it hadn't rained in about 6 weeks, so the rain was welcome. The lakes that feed Austin water are still up to 30 feet below their average levels. Feet, yes.

Terri and I were standing in the kitchen, enjoying the sound of rain on the metal roof, and the break in a long string of sunny hot days. We hugged and as we had heard a few rumbles of thunder throughout the rain shower, I joked, "I'm taller, so I will get hit by lightning before you do." As we parted there was a flash and bang all at once. I didn't see the bolt but did see sparks fly outside the window. It didn't hit me, but something on the roof was zapped.

Immediately there was a loud hissing noise from somewhere in the house. I knew right away that we had been hit by lightning and that it was a direct hit. Since the house was hit and we were in the house it was like being within the explosion somehow. Was that hiss a propane leak? I headed for the noise : my powered computer speakers were blasting static. The computer was dead.

Terri's computer, plugged in in another part of the house was dead.

The upstairs air conditioning/heat controller was off. The upstairs AC wouldn't run.

The pool equipment also stopped. That controller was also dead.

We lost phone, Internet, and phone service via Time-Warner. My router was fried.

Insurance (Encompass) has been helpful. Their inspector saw no roof damage. Everything else will be handled by replacement value and receipts less the thousand dollar deductible. We brought in a computer repair guy who held brief ceremonies over the bodies of our fried computers. Over Terri's, he said it would cost more to fix than replace. Subsequently, we ordered one which is less powerful but should fill the bill. Mister Repair will be back to try to transfer all from her old hard drive to the new one from Newegg.

My computer was a custom build - my first. The replacement will be built by Tigerdirect and then Mister Repair will try to get data off my hard drive. One of the twin hard drives was dead. The other appears to be sick but he thinks he can get the data. Yes it had an expensive surge protector on it. No, it didn't save the day.

If you are a techie, my new one will be an i7 series 3 processor with 16 GB ram and two mirrored 1 TB hard discs. Mister Repair will be sure all is well. Some issues I must admit, I don't understand, especially getting info from one to the other... Those transfer cables never worked for me completely, which he verified.

We will hike through the weeds of permissions, serial numbers, drivers (many lost), etc. as we attempt to get them operational to the state they were once, or even better.

Meanwhile the days have stretched to very very long spans of time with nothing but my iPhone to use. Our iPads are wifi only and we await a new super whiz bang router as the former was fried too. This new one is said to have better speed and range, and it should, since it cost twice++ of the one I lost. Technology leap or false advertising?

Mister Repair says you can't trust some of the reviews on the more common review sites since they are "salted" with reviews from those who would benefit from them. Just what the world needs now: more mistrust.

I can't audition or record with no computer. Happily, my recording rig was unplugged as was my stereo. And some device appears to have saved the TV, TiVo, Receiver, BluRay, etc.
Time Warner came 5 days later to get us phone and tv. Internet would work if we had a router.*

As I write this to put onto my blog down the line when I can access it, I just found out the phone is out again.

The pool guy aka The Pool Doctor has been unable to repair the controller.

The ac guy did bring us back to an air conditioned upstairs. The transformer and controller was blown out. So was the deductible on our insurance.

Speaking with some neighbors I know that three of the houses I can see from here, one just across the street, have been hit by lightning in the last 8 years. One bolt started a fire as it hit a gas line under their punctured roof. Another blew out $60,000 worth of gear. And that house was hit a second time after the repairs. For another 60k!

Terri brought home a cold and now I have it. So I couldn't audition or work anyway.

I would have thought the addiction to computer would fade with time. It hasn't.

Our new computers have shipped and we will bring back the man who hopefully can rescue the data from the dead. If he succeeds we will build a chapel on the spot out of junk computers, a router, several control boards for air conditioning and pool equipment.

Sent from my iPad

* update:  Mister Repair did get us up and running.  He also had an argument with Time Warner's Mister Fixit as TW had wired the system improperly and the new modem was acting like a limited router.  Mister repair came back to fix THAT too.  The new router does go faster and farther than the old one.  And man, is it ever encrypted!

We are up and running.  I am powering through 1000 emails+ and wanted to get this, which I had written and stored on my iPad.

976

This is number 976 blog posting on this blog.  Some day I will go back and read from the beginning.  As the song goes, "I was older then, I'm so much younger now."

Stuff happens: On Labor Day Chester swallowed the squeaker in a plush squeaky toy. Vet, vomit, done. BTW: Martha Stewart Plush Pets are stuffed with children's hair cut off while they cried.

Stuff 2: I backed my car into our wall in what you'd see is a parking area.  UNLESS you try to see it all via the backup cam.  No excuse.  Should have paid more attention.  It'll be a whole assembly replacement as there's holes in it now.  Remember when bumpers were for bumping?  Whatever happened to bumping?  It's lost, that's what.  Bumping was once part of who we are - or were - as drivers of America.

CHROME SWEET CHROME
I miss it.

I saw a Fisker.  There's automotivation.  It's like a swoopy Solstice had a baby with a Corvette.  It looked wide and long, but I only got a quick look.  I like the look of the new Lexii and still favor Audi for good looks and good everything else.

There are more trucks in Texas than in the whole country of Truckmanistan.

It's the 5th of September and the temperature is 96 in the shade.  Not complaining, but I long for a good long rain and thunderstorm.   Happily, Chester doesn't freak out at all over thunderclaps.  I've been recording thunder (last storm about 2 months back) which is easy on the iPhone app I have as when you see the flash, roll record.  Seldom is there no time to push the button to get the bang and on those times I find you record a lot of swearing.  "#### that was ####ingCLOSE!"

Somehow Spotify snuck onto my computer.  So far so good.  (It creates music streams based on your opinion of songs it presents as it gets to know you.)