"Laughter is the smile of the world"

I took the family to the library yesterday. As part of the summer reading program they're doing special events every Friday, and yesterday they were doing balloon hats for the kids. I pictured something totally lame, along the lines of someone making 'em up and going "here's your damned hat kid, now scram!!!" It was actually pretty cool, they had the balloon guy there, and he had movies and slide shows and stuff. He's been all over the world (except for Australia and Antartica) and, well, makes balloon hats. To be educational he discussed world, national and local geography. Who would have thought you could finance your world travels doing balloon hats??? Wonder if the government if paying him somehow for that??? Anyway, they had a segment where they asked indigenous people that he had made hats for, what is laughter??? One of them was a young zen Buddhist monk (I think it was) and his answer was "Laughter is the smile of the world". I liked that, and made a note so I could pass it on to yall!!!

I'm making chicken chili today. For the first time I actually didn't make too much stuff to fit in the crock pot!!! Usually I make it in my 4 quart pot, but have too much and end up making close to a full pot in my 2 1/2 quart one. Good thing I didn't make too much, because my wife broke my 4 quart one a few months back. I got up this morning and started prepping the stuff and putting it in. Of course, when I'm dumping it in and adding some beer I had to take a couple sips. It tasted so good I had to open another one to wash it down!!! I usually don't drink this early in the morning, but today I made an exception!!! I tried this beer back last time I was making chicken with a beer can shoved up its ass (thanks for the recipe Sammy, I'd never even heard of such a thing, but it makes for a great visual effect and a tasty chicken!!!) because you want something with a lot of flavor to cook with, and I think I have a new favorite!!! Heineken dark lager, if you haven't had it, you should try it!!!

I updated my wallpaper page this morning. I did some stupid-shit-at-work editorializing on there that I decided would do as well on here, since I already had it all typed out. If you've checked it out already you can ignore the rest of this paragraph except the last line. I made mention on my blog last week of having to work late hours. One of the projects I was working on had been a package for a DVD burner. The customer (well, not the real customer but the damned middleman who was no doubt jacking up the price and generally fucking things up) took the measurements for a cardboard insert and made it up while we were making the tool. He also had the drawing it was based on. Well, the dumb motherfucker did nothing to account for the corner radii, and couldn't be bothered to pick up a sample between the Wednesday I made it and the end of Tuesday, the day before the day he wanted production. Naturally, he gets there and sees it and declares it will not work, and he will not re-make the inserts, so I have to make mostly completely new tooling, naturally at no cost to the customer, wasting a bit more than a full day of my time. I was reminded of a sign that I'd gotten at the place I worked at before it was bought out by these no-business-sense clowns. I have it prominently displayed in my area, but after this I decided I needed more, so I made this up in Paint Shop Pro and set it as wallpaper on my work comp. Not that anyone ever pays attention, lack of planning on other peoples parts always makes for an emergency on my part, justified or not. I'm sure several of you can relate. If you're reading this after I have changed it, you can see the image here or just know it says "The lack of planning ON YOUR PART does not justify an emergency ON MY PART".