Print or Die!!!

I rolled into my office this morning at 6:55 a.m. I had about twenty minutes of paperwork to do, and then I was headed to the gym to blast the crap out of my delts. I left my office at 10:00 a.m. I hate printers. Why can't they just print? 90% of the stuff I am forced to print is in a pdf format, and for some reason the printers like to play games with pdf files. They print each page as its own document and then pause. It's a quirky idiosyncrasy when I only need two or three pages printed, but I was printing life insurance illustrations and applications. It was for a couple so there was two of everything plus one joint application and policy. Our office printers aren't your run-of-the-mill inkjets. They're diesel powered giga-printers. They spit out word documents like a wood chipper spits out mulch, but Word isn't as web friendly as Adobe Acrobat so nobody uses Word. I spent three hours doing twenty minutes of work, and I missed my workout. I can't hit my shoulders until Saturday.

Fortunately, I was able to take out some of my agression on John. John is the pumpkin I carved for Halloween -- my first. Carving the pumpkin is one of the many new duties that have become mine as a new dad. MJ dressed up as a sexy witch. It wasn't the look she was going for, but she just can't help it. LMJ dressed up as a mermaid. And I dressed up as a knife wielding knegro -- a sexy one, I can't help it. I don't know why we didn't get many trick or treaters? I call the Jack O'Lantern John because only his friends call him Jack, and he doesn't have any friends. It was supposed to be a cautionary tale for the trick or treating youngtsters, but it's something better said than written. Kind of like, "The Force is with you young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet." That's only special because of James Earl Jones and Dolby sound. Charles Nelson Reilly couldn't pull it off. I did a much better job on John than I expected to. I assumed that precision stabbing required some skill but it doesn't. Not like hacking up the corpse of a Wendy's drive-thru guy who gave you Diet Coke instead of Mr. Pibb like you asked, and getting it to fit inside a suitcase. We all know how much work that can be. I used the Lucy van Pelt method of outlining where I wanted to cut and commenced to carving with a big carving knife. Pumpkins are a big waste of space. What's the point of a hollow fruit? I am looking forward to next year though because I'm going to have a 17 1/2 month old assistant, and yeah she gets to handle the knife.

College, Young Love, and Autumn

I was sitting in a professor's office at FCCJ North Campus today and I could see out into the quad where there was a nice young couple engaged in a thirty minute hug. When I got home and told MJ about it she commented that college kids think they're busy but don't really have a frickin' clue. This is so true, but what I took away from it was an emotional reaction that ranged from nostalgic to highly annoyed. I was nostalgic for the time in my life when I had hours of free time in the middle of the day to do nothing but complain about how much I had to do. I was taking twelve hours and not working. It was so hard going to three classes in a day. That was almost three hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays that it was suggested I might want to show up someplace and pay attention. That's so much pressure. I also miss that I could spend most of the day trying to sell MJ on the idea that there were better things we could be doing than studying -- like the male youngster out of the professor's window. I was highly annoyed because I was jealous and I'm old. I was thinking about these kids not taking full advantage of the third best library in the city. I was thinking "get a room". I was thinking, "Buddy, this doesn't look like it's going anywhere, and you could do better anyway." I was wondering why this professor was so pompous. It's Florida Community College at Jacksonville, not Harvard. You may be teaching some smart hardworking students, but none of them is going to figure out cold fusion. Don't get me wrong; I spent nine years at FCCJ before matriculating to the Oxford of St. Johns bluff, and I haven't figured out cold fusion. I think my reaction had to do with yesterday and today being the first days since last March that I couldn't smell hot asphalt, but I could smell the weird mix of trees, books, and under twenty fascination with cologne that screams college campus. I would say that this made me want to go back to school, but I thought I was young five years ago when I hit the Florida State student union, and was shocked back into the truth that thirty is not -- and will never be -- the new twenty.

He's Not Gay He's Just British

This is a warning. Cora Spondence is blogging for the next thirty days and I have decided to be her blogging partner, so quality may give way to quantity and a darker sense of humor may slip thru the self-editor. Ye’ve been warned.

Apparently, Albus Dumbledore was a queen. I guess you have to take J.K. Rowling at her word, she wrote the character, but it screams of a revisionist shock value attempt. It doesn’t bother me if Dumbledore hated to see Snape go but loved to watch him leave, but after roughly 3,000 pages I got the sense that the professors were asexual for all intents and purposes. I never thought about McGonagall’s relationship with her wand, even though she was all alone since Dumbledore was a friend of Dorothy. Rowling dealt with all of the kids’ sexuality in a strictly 1950’s kind of puppy love style – lots and lots of “snogging”, no “Don’t worry Ginny, you can’t get pregnant the first time. I promise.” But now, seemingly out of nowhere, Dumbledore liked assless chaps and show tunes. I guess my problem with it is that the revelation of Dumbledore’s taste for wet butt doesn’t do anything for the character or the story. It seems to me that it was Rowling’s farewell tweak to her religious zealot critics – a Wiccan homo. If this is the case then she should have gone the whole nine yards and made him a gay, transsexual, black, non-worshipping Jew, basically a cross between Sammy Davis Jr. and Little Richard. I don’t know if she would have sold fewer books or if the demographic of her audience would just have been a little bit different. Everybody else would be in their wizard robes, but the headmaster (giggle, giggle, snicker, snicker) would be in a belly shirt, daisy dukes, and jellies. He wouldn’t have the long hair and long beard. He would have a Quo Vadis with hi-lites and a goatee to match. I’m sorry, but I can’t think of any other borderline bigoted homosexual stereotypes right now. Please feel free to add any prejudiced comments you may have that I have missed.

365 Days Since El Gato Primo Called it A Life.

Mr. Kitty was by far the coolest cat ever. He hit all the typical cat highlights. He was smart enough to solve problems; dumb enough to get stuck in places too small for him to fit, he approached everything in life with a berserker blood lust while at the same time remaining aloof and uninterested, and not quite asleep for eighteen hours a day. If Arnold Schwarzenegger could have pulled off Sean Connery’s James Bond in Dr. No cool with Nat King Cole’s voice, that would be Mr. Kitty. He was a fourteen pound badass tom in his prime. And like 007, he was always dressed to the nines. We didn’t get him fixed until he was almost two years old, so he had a chance to develop the tough tom cat skin and hyper tom cat aggression, but he left the psycho stuff at the door. MJ handled him like Elmira from Tiny Toons and he never scratched or bit her on purpose, at least not out of anger. If she was slow giving him something he wanted, generally off her plate, he would “remind” her that he was waiting. A feline polite clearing of the throat if you will – or even if you won’t. He did everything with a sense of dignity. He would hear me open a can of tuna from his post in the bedroom, but he wouldn’t come running, he would walk. It reminds me of the young bull looking down into a valley of cows and saying to the older bull, “Hey, lets run down there and f*^k one of those cows!” and the older bull schooling the young bull, “No, let’s walk down and f*$k them all.” That was Mr. Kitty’s vibe. In the pantheon of cool there’s Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, and Mr. Kitty. No one else can hang.

Delusions of Grandeur

It’s 5:00 in the morning and I can’t sleep. I’m channel surfing and I see that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Demi Moore’s The Scarlet Letter is on. I read was assigned The Scarlet Letter in 11th grade, and while I would rather listen to Japanese dudes sing Garth Brooks karaoke style than read this boring piece of crap, I think it’s funny that high school drop out Demi Moore thought she could do a better job than Nate did 150 years ago. I guess silicone and education are the same thing. I can’t wait for Pamela Anderson’s Hamlet.

Still surfing. I found Enter the Dragon. You have offended my family and you have offended the Shao Lin temple. They’re re-examining Bruce Lee’s corpse and it looks like he didn’t die of a bad reaction to a drug. It looks like he over-badassed (OBA). It’s not healthy to be that much of a badmuthaf*&ka all day, every day. Chuck Norris mitigates the effects of this rare affliction by growing facial and chest hair. Chuck Norris is the only man in history to lose his virginity before his father. How much wood could a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could Chuck Norris? All of it. When Chuck Norris goes swimming he doesn’t get wet. The water gets Chuck Norris. Okay, that’s enough.

The Dog Faced Gremlin

It’s 4:30 in the morning and I can’t sleep, so it’s more sleep deprivation than actual psychosis. A snook is a type of bass. I haven’t felt like finding out why I had to pay extra to keep one if I caught one since I didn’t catch the fishing bug when I went a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t catch anything else on the trip either – not even a buzz. I don’t understand the allure of fishing. I understand the allure of drinking beer in a boat and if one needs to bring some rods and reels so the spouse will let one out of the house then OK, but actually getting excited about fishing is something else. I’ve known fisher freaks and freaks is exactly what they are. One freak I know majored in meteorology so he could fish better, and to his credit he’s a much better weather tout than the local TV weathertards (It’s a word. I just wrote it). The only bad weather to him is when the wind gets too strong and he can’t fish. He goes up to 40 miles offshore and he also fishes his local creek. He not only watches that national bass tournament on ESPN; he bets on it. At least the sound of NASCAR races will help you have the best nap you’ve ever had, plus there’s going to be a crash and most likely a fight.

I think NASCAR should get back to its bootlegging roots. Instead of having the occasional road races – as opposed to track races – to show that the racers can actually turn right, they should have moonshine rallies. The teams would have to distill their own white lightning, load it in the trunk, and drive it from Daytona to Texarkana. It shouldn’t be legal. It should be televised – The Buford T. Justice Memorial. They will get points for time, how much of the haul makes it to Texarkana intact, and how good it is. If the judge goes blind you lose points. If he dies the team is disqualified. No shootouts with local law enforcement, but it’s vale tudo with the ATF and any other federal agencies/bureaus.

This guy is on a school board in Georgia. This isn’t a Georgia joke. It’s a fact.

I believe the children are the future.

Stuff

I have no idea what the hell is going on. I told MJ that I wasn’t going to blog anymore and she told me she would gouge out my eyes and piss in my dead skull, that I had just f*&^ed with the wrong teacher or something. It may have been about me leaving my coffee cup in the living room, I don’t know. I think the big problem right now is that it’s football season, and so football consumes my thoughts. I have 32 teams in the NFL I have to keep tabs on and 24 college teams. It’s an addiction, and even if there was a 12-stepper I wouldn’t be interested. It’s not as bad as it could be. Both the Jaguars and Seminoles are playing better than I expected, so I’m not up at night wondering how two men who do nothing but coach football can be so utterly clueless about it.

I’ve tweaked my weight lifting again – variety is the spice of life. I’m now on the Gym Jones schedule, which is completely different than the standard bodybuilding program I’ve been using. I heard about it from a friend from New York. He fell in love with the movie 300 and found out how the actors got in such great shape. I’d heard they were digitally enhanced, but that isn’t true. They did some ridiculous routine – that I’m now doing – for 3 months. It combines big man exercises, like dead lifts, with little man exercises, like pull-ups, and finds an efficient frontier for maximum performance. It all depends on what the individual wants to prepare for. Right now I want to be able to finish the River Run in under an hour while and bench press 225lbs 25 times. I figure I can do that best if I am as strong as I can possibly be weighing about 190lbs. This is different than a bodybuilding approach, which is to get as big as possible then diet down until you’re happy with how you look. Right now I don’t care how I look on the beach; I want my body to perform at its limits.

We went to Tampa this past weekend and LMJ met her folks on her mama's side. They are a bunch of really nice people. The men -- including ya boy -- went fishing while the women fawned over LMJ. I didn't catch anything and I didn't drink very much beer -- I had to help drive home -- but I did get a fishing license that's good for a year.