- Today, for the first time in 15 years, Irish Woman and I did a major part of a project together and not only did we do it without having a spat, we had a rather enjoyable and smooth day of it.
- Driving a fifteen foot Uhaul truck with a blind spot big enough to park my pickup in was rather nerve racking, but there weren’t any close calls as we made our way to the wilds of Southern Indiana and back to pick up the new counter tops and cabinets.
- Well, no close calls that I’m aware of.
- I didn’t think that moving a twelve foot piece of counter would be complicated, but I was wrong.
- Tonight, I decided that “You can have two of these a day” means I can take an extra anti-inflammatory before bedtime.
- Gentlemen, the correct thing to say when your wife points to a detour sign and says, “Is that where we’re going?” is not “I know where I’m going, dear.”
- In unrelated news, the Indiana Department of Transportation is wholesale ripping out entire interchanges on Interstate 65, including one that I just used a couple weeks ago.
- We may have a good fruit year. The peaches and nectarines are loaded with blossoms, and the almond tree looks like it was flocked with petals. The apples and cherries should be busting open soon, and the bees are already hard at work.
- This spring, I’m going to do an experiment to try to figure out which is best at choking out its neighbors – honeysuckle, spearmint, or crab grass.
- The other option involves gelled gasoline under pressure, but that would cause Irish Woman to get “the look” on her face. It would, however, be glorious.
All posts in category Thought for the day
Musings
Posted by daddybear71 on March 21, 2016
https://daddybearsden.com/2016/03/21/musings-185/
Musings
- Note to self – Get to the Pinewood Derby a few minutes earlier so that Boo can do a couple trial runs before checking his car in. A wheel that’s on just a tad too tight is going to make for a very slow run down the track.
- Boo was a good sport about it, but he definitely wasn’t happy about the situation.
- Two words to not use when talking about my life are “allow” and “grant”. Remember, kids, the default setting in my kernel is “yes” when it comes to “Can DB do something, without harming someone else, without the government or nosy busybodies sticking their noses into it?”.
- Irish Woman and Girlie Bear are down with the crud. I am not known for my bedside manner. To quote a doctor that Irish Woman used to work with: “If you want warm and fuzzy, get a puppy.”
- I help with illnesses, not feelings.
- If you write a program, and your variables are, literally, $firstVariable and $secondVariable, then I will have wild fantasies about hunting you down and flaying you with a broken Corona bottle.
- Tonight, the final pieces come out of the kitchen and I start repair and prep work for the new cabinets and fixtures. Please do not expect me to be capable of much more than picking up a small pencil tomorrow.
- There are fewer things more frustrating to me than looking at process documentation that I wrote months ago and finding a rather ignorant mistake in one of the commands.
- When other people tear stuff out of an old house, they find bottles of bourbon, maybe the proceedings from a bank job, or possibly a first edition Mark Twain novel. What do I find? Decades-old mouse nests and the fuzzy, greasy, horror from under the cabinets.
Posted by daddybear71 on March 14, 2016
https://daddybearsden.com/2016/03/14/musings-184/
Musings
- There is nothing that helps my tolerance of other human beings like sitting in the Social Security office for two hours just to be told that I’ll have to come back with Girlie Bear to get her a new social security card.
- Apparently her birth certificate and my driver’s license wasn’t enough to prove that a) she exists and b) I’m her father.
- Today for lunch, I indulged on something meaty, salty, and greasy.
- I chose a double cheeseburger over just chomping down on one of the annoying twits I dealt with this morning.
- Of course, Girlie Bear’s high school hasn’t posted last semester’s grades to her university. It’s only a few thousand dollars worth of scholarship. Nothing important, if you think about it.
- No, no, that’s OK. Park your car in the left lane of the freeway at rush hour, during a torrential downpour. I always like devoting 45 minutes of my life to sitting in traffic and listening to podcasts.
- By the way, speaking of podcasts, inviting in a journalist who writes for the modern equivalent of TASS to discuss why she likes Bernie Sanders is uninformative and not newsworthy. Get me someone who works for a Fortune 500 company and used to be part of the Young Republicans, and it’ll be interesting.
- Our next door neighbor moved out of his home of 70 years the other day. It’s going to be strange to not see him every afternoon when I get home.
Posted by daddybear71 on March 10, 2016
https://daddybearsden.com/2016/03/10/musings-183/
Musings
- Kitchen demolition is a lot easier when you stop trying to be delicate and start using large muscle groups and foul language.
- Whoever put our kitchen together used more hardware than the assembly lines in Detroit used in a ’54 Buick.
- Somebody needs to tell the Postal Service that it makes the Baby Jesus cry when they lie about delivering my new toaster oven.
- If you’ve read Escort Duty, I’d appreciate a review up on Amazon. It helps to know what I’ve done right and wrong.
- Another batch of hard copies went out on Saturday. If you’d like one of your own, drop me an e-mail.
- The 20 foot dumpster arrives on Tuesday. We have it for a week. It has a maximum weight allowance of six tons.
- Challenge accepted.
Posted by daddybear71 on March 6, 2016
https://daddybearsden.com/2016/03/06/musings-182/
Musings
- Love – The ability of a married man to walk past a new-to-him gun store so that he can go into an appliance store to buy the stove his wife found on sale for the new kitchen.
- Most of the kitchen is in the dining room. Most of the dining room is in the living room. I don’t get to live until the kitchen project is over.
- There are few things more blood-chilling than hearing the sound of your wife’s voice saying, “Honey, where’s the reciprocating saw?”.
- If you’re ever feeling good about how well you clean your home, take an hour or so and clean out the dryer vents and the area under and behind your refrigerator. Boom – instant humility.
- A Cub Scout pack committee member shirt and patches costs a little more than a case of ammunition. That’s before I buy the hat, belt, pants, socks, and jacket.
- Give a Scout a pack, and he will fill it with semi-useless doodads and junk food unless you give him some very focused advice.
- Irish Woman found a novel approach to cleaning out deep cabinets that we are going to rip out anyway – rip off the side of the cabinet to get access to everything quickly.
- There is a fine line between “pick up the Legos” and “play with the Legos.” Boo has yet to find it.
Posted by daddybear71 on March 1, 2016
https://daddybearsden.com/2016/03/01/musings-181/
Definitions
Here are a few phrases that I think need better definition:
Catholic KP – Working in the kitchen during a Lenten fish fry, or volunteering to work in the lunch room at your son’s Catholic school.
Catholic Kosher – Going to a Lenten fish fry when you are really craving a rare steak.
Self Control – 1. Not strangling your co-worker for sitting in their cube and chewing with their mouth open for an hour each day starting at 1:13. 2. Not strangling your co-worker when you learn that they made a significant error in a work request that will require you to have to ask your boss to talk to his boss so that you can fix it, on the last work day before you implement.
Stroke of Genius – That moment at your desk when you forget the awesome idea you had for a story while you were driving this morning.
Traffic – The phenomenon whereby I lose all my stored-up stress by screaming at other drivers, while getting all new stress to replace it.
Personal Fitness Plan – The lie I tell myself every morning when I walk up a flight of steps to get more ‘exercise’.
Canoodle – That thing the governor of New Jersey does to Democrats, be they from Chicago or Manhattan.
Posted by daddybear71 on February 26, 2016
https://daddybearsden.com/2016/02/26/definitions-2/
Musings
- I was thinking about the election the other day, and it occurred to me that this is probably the last time that a member of the post-World War II Baby Boom will have a decent chance of winning the presidency.
- The best thing I can say about a movie is that it ages well. Boo watched Raiders of the Lost Ark tonight for the first time, and we both enjoyed it, even after 35 years.
- The pre-order for Escort Duty is going well. For a while there, it was #36 on the Amazon short story sales list. Of course, #34 was titled “Light His Fire: Paranormal BBW Dragon Shifter Mail-Order Bride Romance”, so my ego didn’t have much time to inflate.
- I love living in the Ohio Valley. There’s nothing better for seasonal allergies and arthritis than having to sweep snow off the walk on a Sunday and wearing a tee shirt with the windows open a week later.
- I took Boo and Irish Woman out for lunch today after a Cub Scout meeting. Boo has finally hit the age where the kids menu just isn’t cutting it. My little man, who has precisely zero extraneous body fat, ate an adult lunch, half a basket of tortilla chips, and was eyeing my lunch hungrily. Guess we’re going into a growth spurt.
- Dear vendor – If the simple solution to my problem is to read a piece of documentation that is not available to anyone outside your company, then maybe you should make that documentation available to those outside your company.
Posted by daddybear71 on February 20, 2016
https://daddybearsden.com/2016/02/20/musings-180/
Thought for the Day
Am I the only one that thinks Hillary Clinton could enhance her image with African American and female voters by changing her name to “Hillary XX”?
Posted by daddybear71 on February 3, 2016
https://daddybearsden.com/2016/02/03/thought-for-the-day-230/
Cynical Musings
- Our new snow shovels arrived today. You may thank me now for the mild winter we will now enjoy.
- Last time I bought new snow shovels, we didn’t get a shovel-worthy snow fall for two winters.
- If you refer to yourself as a ‘lone wolf’ seven times in three minutes, then you may indeed be an isolated creature, but I very much doubt that you are the alpha.
- Apparently a few thousand people had the same idea I did to get around the massive backup on the freeway.
- It should not take over two hours to drive across Louisville.
- I was informed today that I am not allowed to install a door bell that plays “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead!”. I never get to have any fun.
- With all the talk about the new ‘correct’ Barbie dolls, I’m wondering when they’re going to ‘correct’ GI Joe. We could have the “Married a stripper and adopted her kids” action figure, the “Alcohol and Drug Control Program NCO who OD’s on heroin” action figure, and of course, the “Been in long enough to have debilitating arthritis, nicotine stained fingers, and a raging problem with alcohol” action figure.
- I hate high school politics. If Donald Trump is unable to stand up to a reporter in a relatively friendly debate environment, how is he going to survive the debates in the general election where the game is visibly rigged against him? For that matter, how is he going to handle the first time a foreign leader scores points against him in a face-to-face, televised meeting?
- On that subject, I will vote for the first candidate to hand Candy Crowley a candy bar during a debate and ask her to eat it because she becomes a loathsome political hack when she’s hungry.
- My first thought when watching this was “Wow, they’ve really improved the roads in Russia!” My second was “Wow, they really haven’t improved the drivers!”
Posted by daddybear71 on January 30, 2016
https://daddybearsden.com/2016/01/30/cynical-musings-4/
Today in History
January 28, 1986
Posted by daddybear71 on January 28, 2016
https://daddybearsden.com/2016/01/28/today-in-history-13/
DaddyBear
DaddyBear’s Den 
