A Long Winter
Earlier this week, I saw the biggest snowflakes I had ever seen. No kidding -- they were the size of half-dollars. It was beautiful, but enough is enough. I can hear the birds, and I went out once or twice without a jacket in between flurries. We still have a mound of ice on the back porch shielded from the sun (it almost reached the back door window for months), and I had to chop some of it out of the way so we...
UCF: Abstract Messiah
Now that it's no longer a secret from my daughter, here's the news: I was in a movie. Yes, it was nearly no-budget and to be released straight to DVD after showing at one or more film festivals, but I finally did it. Unlike Christina, I never did Drama Club or school plays, but always wondered what it would be like to do theater of some kind. My friend Bryan Patrick Stoyle from the North Ridge Staw Wars fan club...
Old Furnace, New Furnace
Thursday night, our furnace started making noise without making any heat. It's may have done that once or twice before, and turning it on and off fixed the problem. Not anymore. I called an associate from the Professional and Businessmen's Association, Robert Nowak of R. A. Nowak Heating and Air Conditioning, who came over almost immediately and diagnosed the problem. The ball bearings were shot in inductor fan,...
A Dream Come True
After hearing family stories of holidays yore, I always wanted big family get-togethers myself but my Father was an only child and most of my relatives also have small families, spread out thin. Yesterday, I held my 25th "Little Christmas" party, a tradition I started in high school to have a holiday celebration with those close to me outside my immediate family -- mostly those who are family to me by choice. ...
2010 Recap
The big event this year in my life was the passing of LadyBug. It hit me a lot harder than I would have imagined, and still does. I did a lot more writing this year, almost all blogging based on Facebook discussions, which I spent quite a bit of time on. As written earlier, I used firearms for the first time, made my first snow angel at Parkview, and braved data crashes like never before. I also got my first...
A long end of the year …
The holidays were great, excepting my battle over the stresses of the ridiculousness of recent politics and lamenting various other injustices. (I really should stop reading the news.) But the last couple months were much more trying. When my hard drive first crashed, I was quite grateful that I had an online backup of my system. It was a physical hardware failure, so there was no way to recover any data without...
You gotta love Socialism … or not.
Excerped from an article linked from a forum I belong to: "[T]he division of the world into rival nation states, A BASIC CHARACTERISTIC OF CAPITALISM, stymies any rational and systematic international cooperation. " {emphasis mine} It's not only amazing when people quote editorials as authoritative, but when they are from a source so far from center as to be more a source of guffaws for people with a basic...
No, it’s YOUR fault, LOL
I thought this was amusing, after the Gulf oil spill and all. "You Are Responsible For Spills" ... maybe someone elft the oil rig unattended while they all were busy buying cigarettes and snacks? {Side Note: I don't believe BP had anything directly to do with the disaster, but they took the responsibility once the press latched their teeth onto them.}
13 Years, A Lucky Number for Us
The last few weekends have been a wonderful "Anniversary Month" for Merry and I. We went to the Ellicottville Fall Festival and took a detour on the way home to Pumpkinville, where they based the helicopter rides we were seeing all day. We ate a bit too much early on to run the gauntlet of food stands at both, but we bought gourds (since only one was harvested from our own plants), and looked extensively...