Have Some More Headlines

This is a bunch of my Facebook status that didn't make it into longer blog posts, enjoy! I no longer do Twitter or MySpace.

Date Range: ? to ? (approximately now back to some time in the foggy past)

The top two ads that Facebook customized for me today are:
"Sick and Tired?" and "Daughter Getting Married?"
Ummm, NO! Sorry, no daughters, don't need any wedding insurance.
Wedding Insurance?!?!? Never even heard of such a thing before.
I think a more interesting ad would have combined the two:
"Sick and Tired of Your Daughter Getting Married?"

Okay, now I'm waiting for the teleBision commercial where three spiders are eating in a fancy restaurant and the middle spider sets his cellular telephone on the table with a picture of a human on the screen and then the left spider goes berserk and then the right spider saves the day by smashing the telephone. Where is my commercial?

Sometimes sister-in-laws are a bit devious: "Ern, will you go outside [in the rainstorm] and bring in the 'Open Flag' ? [with the METAL pole]"

Happy Birthday, Neptune! It's been one Neptunian year—or about 165 Earth years—since astronomers first observed the most distant planet from the sun.

"Honey, do you know where my RAIN is, I can't find it, I have looked everywhere for it, and can not find it"

We just got directions to a rural customer: "He's out in the middle of nowhere, on the left"

After discussing the non-merits of prairie dogs, my wife gave me her impression of the aforementioned animal: an extremely wide tight smile with clenched teeth and I can't even begin to describe her audio, well, lets just say, high pitched funny. She even repeated it for me because I missed the first time while driving. I'm sure she'll share it with you, just ask.

The Wifey is cooking pork chops, and I tell her, "I love you, Honey". 

[-No response-] 

I repeat, thinking that the frying pan and kitchen stove vent may have drowned out my ~quiet~romantic~ words. 

"Oh, I thought you were talking to the dog" 

"No, Honey, he has about 14 terms of endearment and nicknames, but 'Honey' is not one of them"

After just rescuing one, I don't think that a "smart phone" should be called "smart" if it is capable of being lost; it should detect its master leaving it behind in a strange place (i.e. Starbucks restroom) by GPS and audibly start yelling, or even crying, the cyborg version of "MOMMY!!!!!!" or "DADDY?????"

OUT ON THE HVAC TRAIL: Today a client gave me a glass of tea. After drinking the tea I returned the glass to her kitchen. My mentor Eddie told me that the glass was a gift, and she said, "it's one less thing I'll have to move" (when going to her new home soon). So now I'm the (proud?) possessor of a Santa-Snowman-Gingerbread Man Glass, thanks to The Turtle Woman of Fritch Texas.

I had a dream that I took my dog Cooper with me into our business attic while doing an insulation job. Hah, he won't even go into a dog house much less let me pick his 90 lbs up and carry him up a set of squeaky springy spongy stairs. He does a good job pulling weeds around the tomato and grape plants, but I don't know how good of an insulation installer he would be, it wasn't part of the dream.

Thank you Ace Hardware for my tiny side cutter pliers. Sometimes wild mustache hairs appear and must be trimmed immediately to avoid an onset of insanity and you also would think that being married to the finest hair stylist in town would mean that there is always a pair of scissors nearby, but you would be wrong.

This is an ACTUAL "news": A utility pole about a mile south of Kinston, North Carolina, has attracted attention in the last week or so from people who say the kudzu clinging to it resembles the image of Jesus on the cross.

I think Jesus said "I am the vine, you are the branches" - I am not sure if he ever got around to saying anything like, "I am the weed, you are the gullible"

Secretly, in my mind I am dancing right now. Groc stores have a way of inducing that behavioral response some times. [Don't tell anyone, itz our lil secret]

Later I found out they had NOT stopped carrying ground buffalo in the meat market as I had been told was going to happen, now there is a reason to dance, baby, dance! I got 'em TWO packages.

Today's New Word: Humans have 'escalators' and fish have 'pescalators'. While studying pumps today I found out that special large screw pumps are used to safely move fish in places like hatcheries.

‎"I wish it would rain"

"Maybe you need to do a 'war dance' (smile-giggle)"

"Honey, don't you mean 'rain dance'?"

"OH!!!, yes, 'rain dance' (more giggles, bigger smile)"

Oh wOw, I just saw a picture of a Great White Shark jump completely out of the water going after food. As a person who wishes to remain a non-food item for as long as possible, I guess my days of paragliding at the beach are over. No wait, I've never started paragliding yet; its just like the GWS to go messing up my plans all the time.

My dog Cooper was so funny yesterday morning during our play episode of "Sock The Dog". It had been a while since we played this game and his growl sounded fake and very rhythmic, like an old car starting roughly, cranking, then I noticed that he hadn't moved his front paws off the floor like his normal bucking bronc rodeo routine. Tamie chuckled, "silly dog".

Work has been interesting today. I haven't had a PPAAH (pink-pig-as-a-hat) induced giggle session in quite a while. No wait, soRRy, that was a first.

I told my wife that the touch screen on her laptop computer doesn't work very well. She frowned perplexedly and said, "What do you mean? It doesn't have a touch screen" I said, "Precisely, that is my main problem." I have non-iPadness sadness.

At the restaurant I was leaning sideways onto the empty chair, tired at day's end. The Wifey mockingly leaned onto her side chair and asked me, "Should we just go ahead and sleep here? (giggle)". I told her, "It will be interesting when the police show up", this induced another giggle from My Girl.

WHAT?!?!? Its supposed to be 106 F today. Grrrrrrr.....eat - somebody left the kitchen eXhaust fan on after supper and so I woke up in a too warm bedroom (its 86 outside at 3 AM) but I won't mention any names since she was kind enough to cook supper. At least our kitchen is chilly, think of all the $$$ we are saving on reduced electricity consumption to run the refrigerator in The Arctic (my new name for the kitchen)

[106 will be close to an all-time record for this day of the year for our location]

When my wifey came home I asked her if it was still hot outside. She didn't know. I asked her if the sun had gone down yet. She replied, "a little bit".

SO, in the middle of this drought I discovered that Olive Garden apparently drowned (KILLED) two of their plants at the front of the Amarillo restaurant .... I will post a photo later.

My half of a conversation with my wife:
(initiated from an email notification today from the US govt)  
 Honey, there's a chemist job available in The Department of The Navy, but its in Atsugi JAPAN. So if you want to get rid of me, I have to let them know by June 20th. Don't worry, its our navy. $60,274 to $78,355

One of my friends asked (obviously wanting to get rid of her husband as well) if they needed history teachers.

My Response: To teach the history of chemistry in Japan to American sailors?

I decided that I want a T-shirt that says, "Half Ninja - The Other Half Ninja As Well"

My friend responded with a web site of interesting T-shirts, but I won't include the link or name of the company due to amount of non-G rated material.

My response: The one I found that struck me as odd was the one that had the single word "Helvetica" on the front of it, and I thought to myself, "hold it, thats not a Helvetica font" - (sad, yes I know, thats a really sad geekness moment - I confirmed it, it's not Helvetica)

Our drought has been so bad that it makes you invent new ways of finding the good in things, no matter how small or how meager. I have cardboard box lids on the ground near my tomatoes for controlling ground humidity and temperature. The "RAIN" we just had was so light that it only made about 10% of the cardboard surface area wet with spots. So that rain was a "Ten Percenter".

My main goal for this afternoon is to take a nap very soon and then be alive at the end of that process. Most of the time that task is quite easy, but today feels eXtra eXTra eXTRa eXTRA Extra special.

I just realized that the word mustache has "must" plus "ache". That is ironic because that is the one thing, the only thing on my body that has never ever ached.

Add Vice: The next time someone gets irritated (or pick another negative word) with you and utters something like, "What is wrong with you?!?!? (..why are you behaving this way.. etc)", just respectfully reply, after a fake moment of contemplation, thoughtfully and slowly, "Because .. I'm .. a .. carnivore(?)"

Pair-Annoy-You: I get an e-mail letting me know that Apple has a new Mac OS called Lion coming in July. I open the web page to read about its improvements on my Apple iPad. It takes forever to load. Then after I start reading, a few minutes later the whole browser crashes on my iPad. Their slogan is: "The World's Most Advanced Desktop Operating System Advances Even Farther" - duh! We can hope.

I met someone who was afraid of prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) simply because they have the word "dog" in their name, and thought they were potentially viscious. If you are less than 2 inches tall and unarmed then I could see how this could be a real problem.

Round objects, round objections. Somebody just put their mouth around a cluster of unripe wanna-be grapes and got in TROU-ble, and wisely chose a basketball to gnaw on instead. After a short break he switched to round bugs. He doesn't know it yet but he is fixing to get a round bowl of milk. Yea! Liquid pre-cheese!

Wow! 49 cents in one day! After earning $1.04 in a period of 47 months writing my blog, I suddenly get half a dollar in one single day from Google ads. Bizarre.

The evil elves at Keebler have been naughty - shrinking the size of my cookie package while creating a new fancier prettier container. Thanks. Thanks a lot, oops, I mean, Thanks a less.

IF you don't know what Paul Revere did, you DON'T need to be president, of ANYTHING, eXcept maybe your own fan club. (maybe)

I need a burqa!!! I have one pesky housefly that was continually bothering me, until I found the perfect solution - my Dyson DC25 vacuum cleaner. It is called the 'Animal' version, and a fly is an animal.

On my phone this morning the #2 "NEWS" story from CNN is dated March 9th (circa early June). At least it was from this year.

Strange Dream: My friend Kim was at the beach with a load of laundry. I walked over to her basket and poured a bucket of water on the clothes. She said, "what did you do that for?!?!?", and I replied, "your plants needed water" - I blame this dream on the recent rain.

Letting the Ethiopians give us coffee? Good idea. Letting them invent their own calendar? Not such a good idea.

Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_calendar

Ah, ... finding one more piece of candy when you thought you were completely out!

Yesterday evening my wife commented that it seemed like it was starting to cool down outside once the sun was right at the point of dipping belO0o^%=_w the horizon with the air conditioner finally working again. I commented after checking the official current value, "Yes honey, its gone from 103 down to 102", she laughed.

Its the wrong side of 4 AM.

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Buying Smaller Clothes! *smile* *happy* *yea!*

Pre-supper was quite interesting yesterday. Two female out-of-town strangers, one from Arkansas and the other from Points Unknown USA, very very geriatric elderly women decided that I needed to be cheered up before I could get into the restaurant. They finally forced a smile out of me, but they had their work cut out for them.

We just finished watching a pair of doves battle for position on the teleBision antenna. The loser came a little tOO close when he landed near Cooper getting a little eXtra eXcitement he hadn't planned on.

I saw an interesting picture: someone [in Poland] wrote "Nirvana Forever" in the snow

I checked the spelling, and it was 4ever instead of forever, so that changes everything, slightly, maybe to the left about four inches, and down one.

Actually, there was an implied level of eXcitement too, because the letters were uppercase and I left off their eXclamation mark, so "4EVER!".

Q: Do you see the world as half empty or half full?

A: Oscillating between 51% full and 51% empty using a discontinuous sine wave function at 1 Hz

I think the decision to move anywhere should be based on the answer to the question: "Is there Dr Pepper there?"

Just when Arnold S. thought his political career might be over and have to go back to being a movie star, it now appears he is qualified to be the head of the IMF.

Today's major activity was digging post holes for our small vineyard. I had to use water to soften the dry hard dirt/semi-rock. As I was making the rounds I noticed something strangely shaped in the water. Cooper had put a chew bone in hole #1 and then later I noticed one right beside hole #3 on top of fresh dirt. I don't know if he thought I was helping him bury dog treats.

Don't bother me right now, I'm busy learning the proper etiquette for labeling Pie Diagrams! (Can you sense my level of eXcitement?)

The alarm went Off On my phOne fOr the secOnd time sO I suppOse I shOuld get Out Of bed, yawn. (in case you are a bit slow this morning, all the O's are uppercase to indicate a yawn situation in progress)

Actually, the only-est thing that I figured out is when you have an exterior label for a pie chart segment then the connecting line/arrow back to the pie segment from the label should make contact at the middle of the arc of the pie piece. Well, no, there were two other things, the first is to start the rotation at a consistent positon, say "3 o'clock" and the second is to shade from dark to light in the rotation of the segments going clock-wise, preferably with a sorted largest to smallest segments. But really the fourth thing I figured out is that these design parameters are only for picky pi people who prefer perfect pretty perimeter pie pieces.

CNN Headline today:

"Cuba Studying Ways To Allow Residents To Travel Abroad"

Here is my suggestion: A Ticket, A Door, A Ramp, & An Airplane

Oh, its worse than I eXpected, they aren't yet "studying", they are still stuck at the "planning to study" stage.