- Remember how I felt good and productive yesterday? It was a temporary condition.
- As I pack for my trip tomorrow, I remind myself just how much I hate flying and airplanes.
- This is not a good thing for a guy who works for a large airline.
- I’m definitely going to do my best to get to the range next weekend.
- I need the practice
- I need the recoil therapy
- I need to spend the time with Girlie Bear.
- I need to get somewhere where the cellphone doesn’t work.
- Whoever ordered the climate from southern Louisiana and had it delivered in Louisville, I hate you.
- It’s never good for my outlook on life when I start looking at real estate listings back home.
- Know what will put a whole new spin on your day? Try finding a relatively expensive piece of electronics in the pocket of your pants as you’re transferring them from the washer to the dryer.
- Oh well, I’ll just have to make the trip without my backup battery pack.
All posts in category Thought for the day
Thoughts on the Day
Posted by daddybear71 on June 27, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/27/thoughts-on-the-day-144/
Thoughts on the Day
- I was actually productive and in a good mood all day. It felt….. odd.
- What’s that you say? The effort you made me work on a Sunday to get you ready for isn’t going to be finished for almost two months? No problem, I’ll just put the clean-up work I need to do off for another month. Thanks so much.
- It is amazing how fast people, who normally move at speeds that would piss off snails, move when there is a big black thunderhead rolling toward them and they have a long walk out to their car.
- For once, the drivers in Louisville acted like sane, rational people while driving through a rainstorm. Again, it felt….. odd.
- If our green beans keep growing up their trellis at their present rate, I’ll be climbing them and bringing down a singing harp sometime in the next few weeks.
- Our first baby tomato is doing well, and we should have our first cucumbers and bell peppers in the next few days.
- Of course there’s a 40% chance of thunderstorms in Norfolk this weekend. All I’m going to be doing is standing out in the middle a big concrete pad next to a big aluminum airplane.
- Irish Woman didn’t seem upset when I told her this. She may have finally figured out how much life insurance I carry.
- When making and canning applesauce in June, it is a good idea to crank the kitchen ceiling fan to “Turbo” and open a couple of windows.
- Then again, who doesn’t like a nice schwitz?
- I love the way a thunderstorm and heavy rain sounds.
- Moonshine, however, feels the need to protect the family from whatever is making all that noise.
- A dog barking at the sky at 10 PM is not optimal.
- The whole house smells of apples and cinnamon. I ate a huge dinner, but I’ve never had such a case of the “Feed me!” before, at least not in June.
- Thanksgiving doesn’t count, because if the smell of roasting turkey doesn’t make you hungry, then you need to see a doctor.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 26, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/26/thoughts-on-the-day-143/
Thoughts on the Weekend
- I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – we take entirely too much stuff camping.
- We had a first – We set up for camp, had a good weekend together as a family, and broke down camp without any of us needing psychological counseling afterward.
- To the people who camped around us all weekend, I am sorry from the bottom of my heart.
- Those pop guns I bought for Boo to play with make a sound that really carries, don’t they?
- Quote of the weekend, by Girlie Bear: “I’m not a smartass. I’m just being sarcastic. And I am your daughter, aren’t I?”
- The cost of firewood is too damn high!
- First they tell us to not bring our own firewood because we’ll spread pests and diseases.
- Then they start selling firewood to us at the state park, 5 or 6 pieces of wood to a bundle.
- It cost me $10 for the two bundles of firewood it took to hold a frankfurter roast and a marshmallow toast.
- The choice – Contribute to a gouging government monopoly or risk spreading diseases that could wipe out whole forests.
- Taking the kids blueberry picking on Friday was ingenious, if I do say so myself.
- It gave them something to do other than hang around camp, and they actually seemed to enjoy themselves.
- Boo ate so many blueberries right off the bushes that I gave the cashier an extra $5.
- If the image you have is of five bears of varying sizes foraging, you’re not too far off the mark.
- Irish Woman is preparing 16 pounds of fresh blueberries with almost the same diameter as a quarter as I speak.
- I see a lot of pancakes, jam, and muffins in my future.
- My venison stew turned out rather well.
- It was mentioned that it would have been more appropriate for late fall, but everyone who ate it cleaned out their bowl, so I guess they liked it.
- There is nothing like waking up to the sound of birds chirping, the feeling of dew on the grass under your feet, and the smell of ganja from two campsites over as your neighbor enjoys a little wake and bake.
- We took Boo swimming for a while, but he still doesn’t understand that it’s not a good idea to not drink the lake water.
- Entirely my fault. The boy swims almost exclusively in pool water that’s cleaner than the stuff that comes out of the tap.
- No dysentery so far, but we’re keeping an eye on him.
- When the temperature dropped 10 degrees in an hour and the sky darkened, we battened down the hatches.
- I’m proud to say that neither the new tent nor the screen tent had any problems in the winds and light rain that hit us.
- Saturday night I found myself in a bidding war in a silent auction with a 10 year old girl over a toy microscope.
- I’m not going to say that I corrupted the process by buying off the competition, but it was cheaper than family drama.
- On Thursday, Boo was “The Young Prince” to his mother. By Sunday morning, he was “That Boy”.
- Maybe we had a little too much family togetherness.
- Mental note – Do not use the term “Martha Stewart bullshit” when describing Irish Woman’s efforts to notch the top of the omelets in a bag so that people could tell the difference between ham, sausage, and bacon.
- We had neglected to bring a permanent marker.
- No, I hadn’t had coffee yet. No excuses, though.
- The theme of breakfast on Sunday was “Do not cook what’s right; cook what’s left”.
- I hate bringing food home from a camping trip.
- We continued the age-old family tradition of driving through cloud bursts after packing all of the dry camping gear in the back of the truck again this year.
- Now I just need a day or two of dry weather to set up the tent.
- Moonshine and Bluegrass were very happy to see me when I picked them up from the kennel today.
- If Moonie is a little calmer by this time next year, he’ll start going camping with us.
- It is rather difficult to drive a standard transmission on the truck when you have an 80 pound dog cuddled up in the crook of your arm.
- It is also difficult to drive in traffic when he won’t stop licking your face.
- I won’t even talk about trying to drive after he licks your eyeglasses.
- Answer to the “Dad, I’m bored” comment from Girlie Bear today – “Go clean your room and then do some pushups”.
- Later on, she complained that it was impossible to go for a walk in our little town.
- Guess who packed up his daughter after making sure she had her phone, music device, and water bottle, dropped her off at the far eastern side of the nearest park, and told her that she’d be picked up in two hours at the playground on the far western side of said park?
- If beer counts as a carb in your diet, does hard cider count as a fruit/vegetable?
Posted by daddybear71 on June 24, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/24/thoughts-on-the-weekend-31/
Thoughts on the Day
- The tent dried out nicely and is packed and ready to go camping this weekend.
- There was a bit of water to be bailed and mopped up in a couple of low spots on the floor, but seeing as how we got over 3 inches of rain last night, with strong winds, I’m happy with it.
- Irish Woman decided to damp mop the floor of the tent because I’d tracked a bit of dirt in.
- Apparently I’m the reason we can’t have nice things.
- The people who wrote the reviews for the tent all said that we’d never be able to get it back in the factory bag, and Irish Woman thought we might have to put it in one of my old duffel bags.
- I am happy to report that the tent is not only in its original bag, but has more room in there than it did coming from the factory.
- Don’t tell me I can’t roll up a tent nice and tight, yuppie scum. A decade in the Scouts and a decade in the Army made me a level III tent folding master.
- The new dishwasher is in and running.
- I will be having a chat with our feline contingent. It is unacceptable to have mouse nests behind the dishwasher, even if they are abandoned.
- Preparations are underway for the annual Hoosier Roundup.
- Posting’s going to be slow to non-existent this weekend.
- Our menu this weekend is going to consist of foods I don’t have to work hard to make.
- Yeah, it’s not haute cuisine, but few have been killed by a diet of hot dogs, ketchup, potato chips, and roasted marshmallows.
- I am, however, going to try to make a decent venison stew for dinner one night.
- While getting all of the camping stuff out of the basement, I came to the conclusion that we take altogether too much stuff camping.
- Good thing I didn’t cancel my flight for next weekend. My trip is back on.
- Say what you will about Walt Disney, but the man was a genius when it came to entertaining children.
- Boo has been watching 60 and 70 year old Disney cartoons on Netflix lately, and he’s more interested in them than he has ever been with the dreck that’s on the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 18, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/18/thoughts-on-the-day-142/
Thoughts on the Day
- It’s summer. Why does the boy get up as soon as the sun rises? Does he have solar cells or something?
- It never fails. I found out that I probably wasn’t going to be making a business trip 5 minutes after I bought my non-refundable airline tickets.
- To the people driving on the expressway this afternoon:
- We got over two inches of rain in the hour it took to drive home, with driving winds and hail.
- Slow down. No really, if you see a line of us going about half the speed limit with our four way blinkers on, slow the hell down.
- Turn on your bloody lights. If your windshield wipers are on, your lights should also be on.
- If you think you need to drive less than half the posted speed, pull over and read a book until the rain calms down.
- If there is a relatively thin, but long, branch blocking your lane of traffic on a two lane road, do not try to pull around it in a rain storm. Get your butt off the driver’s seat, move the stick, and stop being a hazard to everyone else on the road.
- If you look in your rear view mirror and see Mr. Big Flashy Firetruck coming up fast, pull the heck over. Someone’s life may depend on it.
- The new tent was still up when the storm hit.
- We got a little rain yesterday, and I wanted to let it dry out today and put it away tonight.
- The winds and rain pulled out a few of the stakes, and that let the wind fold it in half and lay most of it on the ground.
- Irish Woman was almost in tears when I got home. She thought our new tent was horribly broken.
- A couple of guy lines pulled tight, a couple of flexible tent poles unbent, and the tent popped right back up. No damage.
- I’m impressed. Half the tent was down in a driving rain with the rain fly pulled halfway off and loose, and there were only a few small leaks in the tent.
- Dear Weather Channel – 20% chance of showers, my ass.
- Our nightmare of taking a few minutes every evening to work together and talk quietly is almost over. The new dishwasher will be installed tomorrow.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 17, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/17/thoughts-on-the-day-141/
Thoughts on the Weekend
- Yesterday was not my day to exercise my rather limited people skills.
- I’m married to a saint, have I ever said that?
- We put up the new tent on Saturday so that we could figure out how to do it and to give it time to air out.
- Remember the Weasleys’ tent in Harry Potter? It’s about that size, only orange.
- The queen size inflatable bed that Boo and I used in the central room looked small on that floor.
- I scoffed at the “Sleeps 10” label, but you could probably fit a few more than that in this thing if they liked each other.
- Boo and I slept out in the new tent last night.
- He wanted to stay up late to watch out for ‘mean bears’.
- Little does he know…..
- We apparently did have a visitor last night, because Irish Woman found a half eaten bag of hot dog buns up in the backyard tree. I’m guessing raccoon and a trash can.
- He wanted to stay up late to watch out for ‘mean bears’.
- We took the kids to a ‘couples shower’ yesterday at one of the local fish and beer establishments.
- I was amazed. We can never get Boo to eat fish of any kind, but he ate an entire catfish filet on his own.
- The place was really hopping. Our party didn’t have to wait in line with the rest of the patrons, but by the time we got our food, the restaurant was 90 minutes behind on orders and was suspending new orders.
- Yes, I know all that fried food is going to kill me someday, but I eat it maybe twice a year and it is soooooo goooood.
- I’m glad neither of us drank last night. There were a lot of very inebriated people at the beer garden before we left, and I counted six police cruisers on the road between the restaurant and the highway.
- I showed Girlie Bear how to change the oil on my truck this weekend.
- She was amazed at how dirty used oil is. Said it looked like chocolate syrup.
- That is no reflection on the condition of the truck. The oil wasn’t that thick, and I’m right on schedule to change it at about 6000 miles.
- She new believes that one of her life goals should be to buy an old truck, tear it down to the frame, and do a rebuild on it. It’s so good to work with someone whose soul hasn’t been crushed by reality yet.
- She was amazed at how dirty used oil is. Said it looked like chocolate syrup.
- Going against my wishes to not get anything but a card for Father’s Day, Irish Woman got me a gift card to the new Cabela’s.
- I spent it on toys for Boo. That’ll show her.
- The store was absolutely packed. I’m guessing I wasn’t the only dad who got a gift card today.
- Their new gun section was well stocked with just about anything I could think to look for.
- Prices were a bit steep. A Remington R1 1911, which was retailing new for between $700 and $800 in early 2012, was priced at $1300, and that was pretty representative of the lot.
- They do have a very nicely stocked used gun section.
- Wartime production Mosin-Nagant 91/30’s were priced at $169.
- They had both Yugoslav and Chilean Mausers available.
- They had one Enfield Mark 5. I had never seen one of those in the wild before.
- I saw no 8mm or .303 in the ammunition section.
- If you’re looking for rifle ammunition or shotgun shells, the drought is over.
- Remington 00 buckshot for $139 for a case of 100 shells.
- .270, .308, and .30-06 were plentiful.
- No .22 at all
- An ammo box of 500 cartridges from PPU, marked as “.30-06 for the M1 Garand”, was going for $409.
- Some 5.56 was available. 20 XM193 were priced at $13.00.
- Pistol calibres are still in short supply. The only common caliber I saw that seemed plentiful was .40 S&W.
- There were a lot of rarer calibres available that I don’t see on store shelves too often.
- 10mm
- 7.62 Nagant
- .41 Remington
- Also some odd manufacturers. Anyone have any experience with Herter’s or Geco?
- Reloading supplies seemed to be plentiful, but I saw no primers or powder.
- The douchebag who called the 5.11 and Blackhawk shorts I was checking out “Shoot me first pants” didn’t like it when I asserted that psychos don’t discriminate based on clothing, rather that they choose their victims based on combovers like his.
- They make bunkbed camping cots. I did not know that.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 16, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/16/thoughts-on-the-weekend-30/
Thoughts on the Day
- Listened to The Squirrel Report on the way to and from work.
- From his description of what happened to the squirrel who got zapped on his light pole, I wouldn’t be surprised if Weer’d Beard didn’t read a lot of David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers series.
- I didn’t expect to hear the words “singed the flag and the Virgin Mary” this morning, but there it was nonetheless.
- I don’t do anything to confuse or overwhelm any system that’s monitoring my emails and such. I believe in the power of SQL to filter out such noise if someone is willing to put the time into coding it properly.
- I group firearms training into several groups: Basic Safety and Marksmanship, Personal Protection, and Specialized.
- Everyone needs Basic Safety and Marksmanship.
- Most everyone needs Personal Protection.
- Specialized should be for either job training or for fun. If you’re thinking you want to be a sniper, a door kicker, or just a general professional gun guy, then getting training in those disciplines is a no brainer. If it’s for fun, have fun, but don’t forget that you’re still a computer nerd.
- Of course, do research on your trainer. If he or she is dangerous, ignorant, or just plain whacko, it won’t be hard to find evidence of that on-line. Especially avoid those who say they can train you on anything and there’s no need to train with any one else.
- I love working with people who have a devious mind.
- It’s Flag Day, Army Birthday, and National Bourbon Day.
- I took part in all three, as a true patriot.
- ‘Murrica
- $279 plus tax and shipping for the parts to fix the dishwasher. $279 plus a small fee to install it to get a new dishwasher.
- Guess we’re getting a new dishwasher.
- Update – New dishwasher will be installed next week.
- Irish Woman plans on buying a super-huge pack of paper plates so that we may survive this scourge.
- Girlie Bear is going to be learning an old, lost skill because of this – washing dishes by hand
Posted by daddybear71 on June 14, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/14/thoughts-on-the-day-140/
Thought for the Day
Posted by daddybear71 on June 12, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/12/thought-for-the-day-196/
Thoughts on the Day
- Quote of the day – “You teach that dog how to talk, and you’re both going to be sleeping down in the garage.”
- It never fails. We dress Boo somewhat nicely for vacation bible school, and he finds the only mud puddle on the driveway to jump in.
- If I drink just a few more cups of coffee, I’ll be able to smell colors.
- Girlie Bear came back from JROTC camp today.
- She was only slightly pink, and had only a few bug bites.
- She was sporting a few new bruises, so apparently she had fun.
- She’s happy to not be sharing a bedroom, a toilet, and a shower with a couple dozen of her closest friends.
- Today was not my day to multi-task. Tomorrow’s not looking good either.
- I guess Boo enjoyed the first day of vacation bible school. He fell asleep within about 3 minutes of me closing his bedroom door.
- One good thing about sending him to Catholic school is that he gets to spend part of his summer at the school so he knows it a bit before going to Kindergarten.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 10, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/10/thoughts-on-the-day-139/
Thoughts on the Weekend
- We really should have named Moonshine MoonMoon.
- This morning, he chewed up the garden hose (again), destroyed all of the buckets that Irish Woman uses to harvest from the garden, and pulled out and chewed up one of our 10 year old grave vines.
- No, he’s fine and perfectly safe. He’s lucky he’s so affectionate and entertaining.
- Strawberry and cherry harvesting continues.
- The cherries will be done in a couple of days. Cherry cobbler is in my immediate future.
- The early strawberries will probably be done tomorrow. In a couple of weeks, the ginormous June berries should start rolling in.
- It’s never a good sign when I think I need a cup of coffee at 11 PM on a Sunday night.
- Then again, I’m getting paid to watch paint dry, so it’s not that bad.
- Reading from fast storage, then writing the extracted data to slow storage takes a lot longer than reading from slow storage and then writing the extracted data to fast storage.
- Apparently Girlie Bear went rappelling today. Since she’s afraid of heights, that had to be interesting.
- Note to authors – When you put a book into e-book format, especially one that is a compilation of your short stories, please put in the extra time to get a working table of contents in before you put it out on Amazon. Some of us don’t enjoy wading through the entire book to find that particular part we want to read.
- I’m going to suggest that my ranges either sell or rent inexpensive high-necked tee shirts to ladies who come to shoot with low-cut blouses. Or heck, even guys who have an open collared shirt for that matter. Seems to me that they’d be just as necessary a piece of safety equipment as eye protection on the firing line.
- It appears that my cable company is switching over its systems to those of its new owners, causing random outages of television and/or data service at odd hours.
- This is an inconvenience to most people, but when you’re trying to work remote from the office in the late evening/middle of the night, it’s a royal pain in the butt.
- I spent precisely 0 minutes this weekend working on home projects, and it was very nice.
- It’s amazing how political differences are (temporarily) forgotten when everyone’s bulls are getting gored at the same time.
- Between the IRS, AP, FoxNews, and the NSA things, I’ve seen so many people, who normally wouldn’t agree on the color of the sky, singing the same song it sounds like a Coca-Cola commercial.
- Now if we can just get a powerful Democrat senator to play Goldwater to Obama’s Nixon, we’ll see some real progress.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 9, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/09/thoughts-on-the-weekend-29/
DaddyBear
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