Babes and Beer |
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Drinking beer, being married, and raising kids.  A Nosuch affiliate. 
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Thursday, October 31, 2002
We got the old fridge moved out of the kitchen. Now we want to buy a new shelving unit for the microwave and re-arrange things, hopefully we can do that this weekend.
Here's some Halloween pictures of the kids in costume. A friend has been having issues with his bathtub not draining. He's sure there's a wookie's worth of hair clogging the drain past the P-trap, so he's planning on crawling into that nasty spider-infested crawlspace and snaking it out this weekend. He was looking for volunteers, he calls it "Operation Balls Nasty". Tuesday, October 29, 2002
I stayed home today to get ready for the delivery of our new 'fridge and chest freezer. Having fun with the kids, getting a lot of work done from home too. Amazing how much telecommuting a computer geek can do. Monday, October 28, 2002
Ok, so here's my idea for a short story:
A) Naturally occuring Nuclear reactors in present-day Gabon were active 2 billion years ago. B) 3.5 billion years ago Earth had primitive one-cell organisms without a nucleus, (protokaryotes), but 2 billion years ago the first living cells with a nucleus appears (eukaryotes) and 1.8 billion years ago multicellular life appeared. Idea: Those naturally occuring reactors were alive. They reproduce by mutating organic sludge, kicking off a chain of evolution that eventually results in sentient life building new nuclear reactors. heh.
Gah!! My Huskies just plain suck. No question about it. They are 4-4, with the teams they beat combining for a 11-22 record, the best team we've beat is San Joser St with a 4-5 record. Bah! We're looking down the barrel of the first losing season in over 25 years. As my oldest brother Johnny would say, in a gravelly smoker's voice, NOT GOOD.
Corey bought a car at the auction, but he was freezing so he didn't wait for the cop cars and bought a '94 Ford Taurus SHO. Mmm, 220 horsepower sedan! Burt bought that split-window bus. White and electric blue, lowered, it's a serious pimpmobile. He loves it. While I don't mind daylight savings, babies hate it. It's got their schedule all messed up, we're trying to move them back to their normal times. On Saturday we bought a new side-by-side refrigerator/freezer. Our current one was 22 cubic feet, we needed a bigger one. The new one is 26 cubit feet, about as large as they come, plus it's got an icemaker and water in the door, something I haven't had in the 16 years since I left home. It was a scratch-n-dent floor model, with the fridge side handle broke off, but we got it for half price plus a 5-yr service contract throw in free. As soon as we set it up we'll call the service guy to replace the defective handle. While I was buying it the sales dude asked if I wanted a chest freezer, he had a floor model of that too. This one had nothing wrong with it, but it had an asking price of $142 when the new ones were $150. He offered it to me for $100 so I took it too. Now we'll have plenty of freezer space, something that's been driving us mad. I was in the laundry room under the kitchen climbing through the spiderwebs between the furnace and the furnace chimney back where the water heater lives figuring out where I can tap into a cold water pipe to feed water to the new fridge icemaker, and I accidentally flipped the switch that turns the furnace off, but failed to notice. Wooo boy howdy it was chilly this morning with no furnace! I hate climbing into nasty spooky narrow tight web-infested dirty dark corners, but it's not like I would make B do it, plus I'm the one who knows how to plumb. We went to a Halloween party on Saturday, but it ended up being slightly lame, only a dozen guests. B and I had the most horrifying costumes she could come up with, I dressed as a Coug fan (shudder) and she dressed as a Husky fan. I felt unclean. She looked great. Saturday, October 26, 2002
Had fun last night, some of Bridget's baby-group friends decided they wanted to start a 4pm "happy hour", so we went over there and had a drink, then we had to leave at 5 so we could head over to another friend's house for dinner. They have a baby a few weeks younger than Isabel and the two girls love playing with each other. Very cute, Libby was showing Isabel all the "no no" spots in her house. "Now this is the knife drawer, it's locked but we aren't allowed anyway, and this is the fireplace, look you can knock the screen over as long as you say NO NO loudly... "
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Looks like it's the weekend for new vehicles. My one friend is going to an auction this weekend, he's looking for used cop cars, preferrably a mid-90s Chevy Caprice 9C1 LT1 . The 9C1 is the cop-car option, with everything beefed up, and the LT1 option is the 5.7 liter 260 horsepower V8.
My youngest brother is looking at buying this '65 Split-window VW bus from a guy in Victoria, BC. My brother currently owns a '65 splitty 21-window ragtop bus, but while it runs OK it's in need of a lot of restoration work, all the window glazing needs replacement and it needs repainting. He bought it in the spring with the intention of restoring it, but a week after he got it he got a girlfriend and his free time went bye-bye so now he's planning on selling that one and buying a bus that doesn't need work. Isabel has been hilarious lately. She often knows when she's soiled her diaper, toddling around saying "poopy poopy". Bridget will pick her up and give her a quick sniff to verify, and then one of us takes her to be changed. Yesterday Bridget was on the ground playing with Harry and Isabel walked over, grabbed the waistband on the back of B's pants, and sniffed, saying "poopy poopy". Ah, you gotta love a 16 month old checking to see if her mom needs a diaper change! Wednesday, October 23, 2002
Sometimes I'm amazed that anyone reads my blog. I mean, I'm a nearly-middle-aged happy married computer geek. How can I be interesting without angst? My problems are trivial, like the boy keeping us from sleeping. (Note to boy: grrr!!!)
I'm also amazed that after a year and a half I am still blogging regularly. I know for a fact I wouldn't be writing like this if it wasn't for the audience, so I have to thank you all for reading and commenting. Biking in today I thought of a funny event from college. Fortunately the statute of limitations is long since past, so I can write about it. Late one day during spring quarter of freshman year, some friends and I were sitting around, thinking of scams. One of us said, "Man, it'd be really useful to have an untraced mailbox." From that comment we came up with the idea of just adding a mailbox with a bogus address to one of those lines of mailboxes you see in suburbs. We moved back to Spokane for the summer and were living with our folks, and found the ideal location for our box. We set it up on the end of a row of about 8 mailboxes, put a fake address on it, and sent a letter to it. A few days later sure enough, the mailman had delivered it. I went to the local library and went through the entire magazine collection, filling out subscription cards under various bogus names, checking the box "bill me later". A friend started signing up for 8 CDs for $1 from Columbia House, using money orders paid with cash from 7-11. Pretty soon we were getting a flaming metric buttload of mail every day. I mean, the box was crammed full, sometimes with a bundle left on the ground next to the box. It was insane. We got a letter from the mailman asking where the house was? We wrote back saying, "We're in the basement of the house across the street. Happy Lettercarrying!" but didn't mention which house. Of course, we were only checking the box late at night, and it was located near an arterial so we could do an easy drive-by looking for anything before checking. Sure enough, well before the summer was over, there was an unmarked police car parked down the block from it. We never again went near the actual box, but they had it staked out for at least a full week. My friend had netted almost 50 CDs from the event, but a few years later his apartment was broken into and they were all stolen. It's amazing how morally flexible teenagers can be. Of course, it helped that we felt like we had nothing to lose, and were invincible, and took adequete precautions. Tuesday, October 22, 2002
Man, that slimebag "sniper" in DC drives me crazy. It's just totally bizarre. What the hell could he be thinking? I can't believe they haven't caught him yet. A picture in the paper of a police officer in riot gear pointing an M16 into the back of a pickup at a roadblock freaks me out. The last time I had a gun pointed at me at a roadblock was in Mexico in '95, the time before that was in Saudi Arabia in '91 during Desert Storm. It's a weird feeling. I can't imagine what the locals are doing, there's no way I'd let B or the kids out of the house if it was happening here. I'd feel weird about my commute to work except I basically never have to stop, so I wouldn't be a target.
The media also drive me crazy. Describing him as a "sniper" and saying the police were checking with the Army sniper school to see if any might have gone wacko. C'mon. This nutjob is taking people out from 100m away with a rifle. That's point-blank range for a rifle. That doesn't take any skill. I mean, cripes, in the Marines they taught us to hit a man-sized target 500m away 9 times out of 10 with iron-friggin' sights! 500m would be an easy shot with a scope and a bipod, and from that range he would have left even less evidence, so obviously he isn't a great shot. What a crazy situation. Monday, October 21, 2002
What a fun getaway. We went to Ocean Shores, WA. It's kinda strange to think, since Seattle is right on Puget Sound which is saltwater and connects to the ocean, that it takes a 3-hr drive to get to the actual ocean. We had a great time, walking on the beach, flying my kite, (which I had to sneak out of the house or she'd have known we were going to the beach), using the pool at the hotel, and playing mini-golf. The hotel had set up a 9-hole minigolf course in an otherwise-vacant conference room, it was pretty funny.
Saturday, October 19, 2002
Isabel is SO excited. After she went to bed last night, Grandma arrived, and brought with her a cheap plastic kitchen set from Kmart. Isabel woke up to both her Grandma *and* a huge new toy, she's all grins this morning. Grandma is watching Isabel this weekend while B and I go on our anniversary trip. The destination is still a secret, I'll tell ya all on Monday. Harry has to come with us cuz he's still on boobjuice. Next year will be a lot more fun when they can both stay home!
Ugh, B rented "Murder By Numbers" with Sandra Bollock. The IMDb review said it best, it's like watching paint dry. I'd give it a 0 out of 10, nothing about it was believable, PLUS it was boring and excruciatingly long. Oh and the editing was terrible too. We're about to leave, I'm very excited. Fun fun fun fun. I love going on trips with B. (ok, this is more like a trip-lette.) Friday, October 18, 2002
I finally got off my butt and made plans for our weekend getaway, although it's only getting away from Isabel. I had two friends call up this afternoon trying to get me to bag out of work early, one wanting my help to buy a car, the other wanting to hit a local pub for some afternoon India Pale Ale. (BigTime Bhagwan's Best).
The friend who wanted car help has gone without a car for over 10 years since his 88 1/2 "Pony" Ford Escort died. After all that time, he wanted to exercise his right as an American to buy a car NOW NOW NOW. No research, just go out and buy something. Gah. Hopefully I talked him out of that. Thursday, October 17, 2002
Warning: Talk about food ahead: Damn, last night's dinner kicked serious ass. We'd seen an episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown on FoodTV that featured tomatos, and he'd taken some cherry tomatoes and made a BLT, but in the form of a salad. Crusty french bread chopped into inch cubes, lightly toasted, thick smokey bacon, lettuce, and fresh cherry tomatoes from our organic produce delivery, and we had an awesome BLT salad. (I'm trying hard to not drool like Homer Simpson right now... "64 slices of american cheese, I think I'm blind...") The entree was chicken and brocolli in a cream sauce over tri-color rottini. Mmmm!
I didn't get to play poker cuz half the poker guys have some form of lung crud. Bleach. Instead I went down the street to my brother's house to help him wire up an new electric outlet in his upstairs hallway. He'd had the oven running for hours baking up stuff for the Tonasket Barter Fair that he is attending this weekend, so the house smelled awesome. I helped him a little chopping nuts, but you would not believe his nut grinder, all the blades have been smooshed so that it's almost completely worthless. Anyway, we climbed up into the attic, found a circuit we wanted to tap into, flipped breakers until we found the right one, added a junction box in the attic, wire-nutted the wires together, ran the new romex cable through the attic and down the wall behind where we wanted the outlet, fished it out the bottom, and installed a new outlet. Everything went well, only took about an hour. Now he's got a new outlet on this built-in phone shelf so he can use a cordless phone there. I guess this is my week for electrical work. Wednesday, October 16, 2002
Boo hoo hoo. I still can't believe how butched my beautiful trees are. I'd spent a day each spring pruning them properly, they were finally looking good after their last butchery, to have them butchered again is hard.
I read an article linked on Fark yesterday saying that Led Zeppelin was going to reunite for a concert tour next summer. Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and having Jason Bonham play drums, replacing his deceased father. Wholey Glub. I like Zep, but I'm not a hard-core Zep-head like some of my close friends, but this is the tour we've been talking about for nearly 20 years. In college my one geek friend took a postscript file of the Led Zep Zoso logo, and tweaked the postscript to make it print out over 49 pages instead of just one. He pieced the 7x7 array of pages together, carefully trimming them, until he had a giant 5' by 6.5' poster-sized version, which he put up on the wall next to his bed. Led Zep tour Last night we ended up watching a lot of TV. First we watched one of the 3rd season episodes of the Sopranos, we're borrowing the DVDVDVDVD set. I'm not willing to pay $15/month for HBO, no way. After that we watched a TiVo'd Gilmore Girls, god I love skipping ads. Finally, we watched Comedy Central's first movie, Porn 'N Chicken a movie about Ivy league college students who start a club about eating fried chicken while watching porn. "Fried chicken cuz it tastes good, porn because it's video of people having sex." They get busted by the Dean, but decide to make their own porno movie. It had it's moments, but mostly it wasn't very good. I'd had TiVo record it in case it was funny. There would have been no way we could have watched it without TiVo, towards the end of the movie Comedy Central was playing two minutes of movie then ads then two minutes of movie, etc. (shudder) Tuesday, October 15, 2002
Sigh. My Seahawks played on Monday Night Football last night, and after allowing the Niners to get a 10-0 lead, they came back to take a 14-13 lead at the half, and a 21-20 lead at the start of the 4th quarter, but lost 28-21. Sigh.
The two London Plane trees in my front yard got absolutely BUTCHERED by the city powerline folks. "Proper arboelogical procedures" my left anus. Fuckers. They basically whacked a huge V out of the top of the tree. The poofs down the street had a problem with some new electric outlets by their flaming-geyser pond. The two outlets were both GFCI, but one was supposed to always be hot and the other was switched from inside, but when the switch was thrown the ground-fault circuit interrupted, killing the power. I offered to help, and after 45 minutes of figuring out what the heck was going on, determined that they were indeed wired wrong, and figured out the correct wiring. They'd spent 4 hours on it earlier Sunday, so they were very happy that I fixed it. I love it when my problem-solving skills work. Monday, October 14, 2002
Fun weekend.
On Friday night we held our annual Scotchtoberfest party. Lots of tasty single malt whiskeys were sampled. My older brother Steve was in town to go to the Husky football game on Saturday. We played Arizona, and a 80-yard touchdown pass with 2:03 left in the game gave the Huskies yet another come-from-behind 4th quarter victory. Sat night B rented National Lampoon's Van Wilder, funny movie. Sunday I visited some close friends who just had their first baby on saturday. 6lbs, TINY compared to what I'm used to. Very sweet little guy. Friday, October 11, 2002
One funny thought yesterday: A year and a day ago, on our third anniversary, we had one cute baby and no idea B was pregnant. One year later we've got a 5-month old baby boy. Uff. Let this be a warning, a lot can happen in a year!
Had a busy evening last night. Both babies are sick, and they whine like nobody's business. It's heartbreaking to have Isabel pawing at the front door, crying "Home, home". Poor girl doesn't feel right and wants to go home, but she's already there. She doesn't understand why she feels terrible. None of her normal comforts helps, and she just doesn't understand why a hug from mom doesn't make her feel better like normal.
After the kids were in bed we finally got to make a tasty dinner for our anniversary, going out having been ruled out by the kids' illness. Big juicy t-bone steaks, baked taters, cresent rolls, and a ceasar salad. Mmmm! I was planning on giving my review of the two "30-yr-old travels back in time to relive high school" TV shows on, and what do I see this morning? After two episodes ABC has already given "That Was Then" the boot. Ha! That doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Ok, "Do Over", which airs on Thursdays I think, on maybe WB, (check listings, with TiVo you lose track of that crap) is a half-hour comedy. A 30-yr-old paper salesman who hates his life gets shocked in the head and wakes up 14 again. It's definitely a comedy, and I find it pretty funny. "That Was Then" (ABC, Fridays, now cancelled, ha!) is an hour-long semi-creepy drama. A 30-yr-old loser gets hit by lightning when listening to a particular song, then wakes up when he's 16. However, whenever he hears that song, he gets yanked back, so at the end of every episode he's back at 30, seeing how his actions effect his future. The biggest problem I have with TWT is they use a 24-yr old to play both him at 30 and at 16, and he in no way looks 16. Do Over uses a 14-yr old actor, who very much looks 14. The creepy part of TWT lies in the fact that this loser has been in love with the same girl for 16 years, and she's friggin' married to his brother. Ewwww! Let me repeat that, ewwwww! What kind of freak obscesses about his brother's wife for 16 years?!?! Crickey. Anyway, he's constantly fucking things up and then goes into the future to find out he's fucked things up, then he goes back to try to fix his fuckups. End result, I won't miss TWT, and while I enjoy Do Over, I doubt it'll last more than this season. It's only saving grace is it doesn't take more than 3 monkeys watching a WB show to make it a hit, so who knows? I should check it's rating. Thursday, October 10, 2002
Today is my fourth wedding anniversary. Wooo! It's been a great four years. Let's see, in that time, we've gone on a fabulous honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean, had a blast in Hawaii, and had a great time in NYC. We've bought a new house and rented out my old one. We've been pregnant three times and have two cute babies.
I love my life. I've got a new video of Harry, but the full-size one is 165Mb, probably too much for most people to download, and I haven't figured out how to make ti stream (aka play once it has enough, not waiting for the whole thing). Happy Naked Baby (1.7Mb) Monday, October 07, 2002
B got motivated and took some digital video of the kids, and took some still images from that. I posted 'em for her.
Baby pictures! Warning: They're just 640x480 and graining cuz a DV cam makes good video and crappy still images. I should post more video, it's not like I don't have the resources. Sigh.
Oh boo hoo hoo. My poor Huskies lost to the Cal Bears this weekend. First loss in Husky Stadium since 1999. First loss to Cal since 1976. Stupid loss, too. The refs were not calling pass interference so Cal figured it was OK. WAY too many penalties in the game, which dragged it out. Stupid clock management on our part, down two touchdowns with 8 minutes left, we burn up six minutes on a TD drive. Gaaaa!!!
Anyway, we're now 3-2. Sigh. Gonna be a long season if we can't beat teams like Cal. On Friday my brother Dan invited me to a party he was going to. It was down near Fisherman's Terminal, underneath the Ballard Bridge. Apparently someone he knows bought this old WWII minesweeper, a 137' derelict wooden boat. He's got the seven staterooms rented out, basically covering his $1200/month in moorage. Apparently the ship hasn't moved in a decade. Most access to different levels was on the outside, and half the railings were gone. Access to the engine compartment was through a small hatch and down a ladder, where three giant diesel engines and a smaller one sat rusting away. Bizarre to see a wooden hull like that, and amazing that it still floats. I climbed all over that thing checking it out. Some of the remaining internal electronic components still have vacuum tubes. Uff-da! They had a band set up on a flat space outside behind the bridge, and Dan and I climbed up the smokestack to install Dan's disco ball over the back fantail and to install the band's bubble machine up there too. Bubbles were going EVERYFREAKINGWHERE, I saw them flaoting away easily 200' or more. They also had a DJ set up in the living space inside. Pretty funny party. On Saturday I watched my poor Huskies get their tails kicked, then in the evening we went to a wine and cheese party hosted by one of Bridget's baby group friends. We had to bring some cheese, so we stopped off at Whole Foods, a hoity-toity grocery store that is expensive as hell but they have top-notch food products. I can't afford to shop there so I hadn't been in almost two years, but holey crap was that place packed at 7pm on a Saturday. I mean there were easily 10+ people waiting at every cash register, it was a madhouse. I even met a lesbian couple from work. Crickey. Anyway, we got some tasty marinated mozzerella, and headed over to the party, which was less than 30 blocks north of us. There were maybe 10 couples at the party, most of which had kids under 2, but we were about the only ones who brought a kid. We'd left Isabel with her grandma at home, but Harry needs to be fed so he's stuck with us. Fortunately he's a well-behaved party baby. The hostess has a 2-month-old little guy, all bald and weighing only 14 pounds he seems so tiny to me. I had some great converations with some of the people there, one was a Boeing machinist who is on mandatory overtime, forced to work 10 hours a day on weekdays, but they take it easy on him and only require 8 hours a day on saturday and sunday. 66 hours a week, I'd go insane. After much plotting we decided if we had to bury a body, we'd do it someplace *besides* our own yard, but we'd put in a new slab of concrete in the backyard to throw off investigators. Let 'em dig it up and find nothing. Heh. Of course, now that it's posted in my blog the idea is ruined, but then again, I seriously doubt I'd ever have to bury a body. I spent half of sunday at a friend's house, they'd due to have a baby anyday and part of their frantic nesting is they are finishing off their basement, and needed help installing a prefinished laminate wood floor. We got almost 200 square feet installed, which is maybe half the basement. I had to take a break in the middle of the floor install, there was a neighborhood ice cream social down the block that B wanted to attend. It was nice meeting a bunch of the neighbors, and amazing to discover there are about 20 or more kids on our street alone, about 3-4 in each age bracket up to about 6 or so. At least a third of the houses on the block have come up for sale in the past three years, and were mostly bought by people like ourselves, mid-30s couples with kids. (Well, we bought ours before we had kids, but we knew we were going to be having them soon.) Wednesday, October 02, 2002
B signed us up with a company that delivers a box of organic produce every week for $30, and we got our first box yesterday. It had a ton of stuff in it, it'll be nice having a wider variety of produce than we normally get from our local safeway, and I prefer to support local farms when I can.
We recently borrowed the Sopranos 3rd season DVD set from a friend, and have seen the first two episodes so far. Fun. Not fun enough to subscribe to HBO, but worth watching. Tuesday, October 01, 2002
I had a blast last night at my monthly investment club meeting. After the meeting one of the guys who's a lawyer told an absolutely hilarious story about how after his mom died in a car crash when he was 15 he got an immediate sense of his own mortality and being 15 and male, started obscessing that he could die any minute, and he was still a virgin! He ended up losing his virginity a few months later to a hooker in Hawaii, but the story was so damn funny.
Heh, here's some Lego dudes rollin' a fattie I miss having my brother Lance around. |
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