Frog and Goat

Don Knotts and Darren McGavin? A dark day for fans of 70s and 80s teevee.

Speaking of teevee, yesterday I turned on the Olympics (no, I can’t let it go about how worthless the coverage has been) and I had to sit through commercials and then the Olympics resumed. Only there was ABSOLUTELY NO Olympic competition just talky, talky, talky. And, then they went back to commercials. I turned the channel.

Last night we watched Shaun of the Dead and were highly entertained. I suspect it’s because there’s nothing quite as wonderful as a zombie movie. Shaun was our second choice but OnDemand was having problems serving up one of their channels (Damnation Alley with George Peppard and Jan Michael Vincent was our first choice-I’m sure that would have been greatly cheesy).

This morning I woke up from a pretty strange dream. We were on a city bus headed to the airport. A woman and her young daughter were sitting in the seats in front of us and the woman was working her way through those mini bottles of booze you get on airplanes. As it turns out, we were traveling through a completely weird part of town that’s no where near the airport. I’m not sure why I wasn’t confused about riding the bus in the first place since this is never an option for us.

I looked down at my huge digital watch and realized it was 12:47 and we had just missed our flight. I was exasperated and yelled out to the bus driver that thanks to his poor choices we just missed our flight. Everyone around me gave me a sympathetic look, but when we rolled up to the airport no one let us get off first. I guess they figured we’d already missed our flight. As we were trying to get off the bus, I realized the woman and girl in front of us left most of their stuff on their seats, including some of the mini booze bottles which were rolling around on the floor. I picked up their stuff and called to them. The little girl turned around and acted like she’d never seen that stuff before. Perhaps, they were zombies.

The best ever song (at least the best ever right now) “Rain in the Summertime” by the Alarm is on the radio. This song was spun over and over and over again in college. It’s also a great song for riding around in the summertime with the windows wide open going nowhere fast.

For the last few weeks at work, I’ve been restructuring an existing course so it can become an online course. I got a phone call today about the course from one of the online folks and the first words out of her mouth were something along the lines of “I’ve just been reading 500 years worth of child welfare history”. I started laughing and asked her if her soul died a little bit. That portion of the course was an existing piece and I worked hard on cutting down pages and pages of material into a handful of paragraphs for each historical section. I told her the version she ended up reading could have been much worse. I shared with her how I had already argued about the ridiculousness of telling anyone what happened in child welfare back when the Earth was flat.

With both of us expressing our dislike of the depth of the history lesson, we’ve worked out a compromise that will give history nuts a little bit of happiness and the rest of us a more contemporary slant.

As we were hanging up, the online person remarked that she’s glad she can be so candid with me. Amen to that. It’s a course at my job-not the end of the world. My job is the thing I do to make the money to spend on the stuff I really like to do. As much as I like working there (and I really do), it’s still just a means to an end.

Yesterday the better-half and I played hooky from work and went to Charlottesville. We don’t do tourion stuff when we go to Charlottesville. We shop.

We went to Crutchfield’s to buy a stereo for the better-half’s truck. The factory-installed radio died late last summer (how he’s been driving around without a radio since then is one of those things I just can’t understand) and so we purchased a new one, got an install kit and then installed it late yesterday afternoon. We’re crafty like that. Plus, nothing makes the kitchen smell better than a little bit of soldering.

A few doors down from Crutchfield’s is a JoAnn Fabrics and since the buttons are falling off a leather jacket I have, we went in to get a leather needle and some heavy-duty thread. We were standing around the counter waiting to be checked out and a frazzled looking hippie woman cut right in front of us and dropped her rickrack on the counter. I turned and gave the better-half a WTF look. The cashier walked up and started to ring me up first. Thank the lord. Then the hippie woman turned and said oh excuse me and tried to join in on the conversation about the weather–whatever line-cutter, I’m not going to bend over backwards to make your rude self feel better.

We also went to Whole Foods and loaded up on some exotic meat (ostrich, duck, venison, but, sadly, no penguin) and as we were checking out the cashier said something about a special occasion. We just said something lame about being in Charlottesville for the day. What we should have said was this stuff is contraband in Richmond. We managed to not clear out Harris Teeter of all of their Genesee since we can now find that sweet nectar locally.

We’ve been watching some of the Olympics and I’ve decided to add my worthless opinion on why NBC is losing in the ratings to nearly every other show. Here’s the reason why…when you run 6 minutes of Olympics and 2 1/2 minutes of commercials it tends to wear a person down. And if there’s nothing but watching a similarly dressed man bounce around on a mogul hill and flip in the air, well maybe, there’s a reason I can’t wait to remote my way to another channel.

This morning I woke up after having a very disturbing dream. I was trying to protect my child from a maniac who was hacking up victims with an axe. I didn’t want the child to get hacked up and I was also trying to shield the kid from seeing the carnage around us. I have no idea what brought that on. My entire torso and part of my neck are so sore today that I can only assume I spent a great deal of time in that dream and that I was tensing up the whole time.

The better-half said that I’m sore from where he came to bed last night, stood on the foot board and then belly-flopped on me and gave me a couple of good rabbit punches. That guy, always telling a funny one.

Tomorrow night we’re making a simple version of Paella. I had to buy a bag of frozen green peas. If that one purchase doesn’t prove my love, nothing on this earth will.

We can send a man to the moon but we can’t predict weather a few hours a head of the actual event. Why is it that the people in the weather-prediction profession get all manner of expensive equipment and then SHOVE that equipment down our throats every chance they get (Quadruple Doppler radar with an attachment that juliennes fries!) but when it comes to predicting snow they can’t even come close?

It’s OK if you tell me there’s going to be a big snow storm a day in advance, but when it is obvious that the storm didn’t track anywhere close to where it was predicted, then put on your big boy and girl pants and change the forecast.

I may as well have stood outside with my finger in the air and predicted the storm. If I can still see my driveway that’s not five to 8 inches of snow. Turn in your quadruple Doppler radar, you don’t deserve it.

Calling All Cars, Calling All Cars
Grandpa and Grandma are headed east on Interstate 64 towards the Tidewater area and they are considered dangerous. They are driving a green mini-van recklessly.

Seriously, Grandpa was in the AIRPORT ONLY lane (clearly marked for miles and miles but people are so damn dumb they stay in that lane until, like, oh my god, this lane is for the airport and then they careen out into the middle lane) speeding along and then got into the lane right behind me. I couldn’t see the grille of his car because he was so close to me, traveling faster than I was and he just missed my bumper as he hauled ass over into the fast lane which, no surprise, is where he should have been in the first place. Perhaps he and granny were late for their double funeral. Because they are seriously not going to live much longer driving like that.

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I am on a committee at work where we have to watch 5 web-conferencing software vendors present their wares and then we decide which company gets our business. We’re looking at it from a distance learning perspective so you can hold a class and people from all over can join the class. In yesterday’s presentation the presenter was in Canada and we had people online from our Qatar location. Everything about that presentation was great. There was no real sense of delay in video or audio. I was impressed. Today’s presenters were Frick and Frack and I have no idea if their software is worthwhile because their presentation was so horrible. I was pleased to fill out my evaluation sheets on both. One to praise and one to flame.