I miss blogging

I miss blogging. I miss chatting. Seems like I've had very little free time to either this long weekend. With the notable exception of on Thanksgiving day itself, when I got to chat with Granny, who I taught how to take pics of people's webcams, one of my favorite pastimes!!! So, Kabila's help desk got some action, so to speak. By the way, she's got a new home at Blogger, if you hadn't noticed. Time to do a little more upgrading on my faves page!!!

Thanksgiving was pretty good. We had free range turkey at my sis's house. Not much fat on a free range turkey. We played balderdash for quite a while after that, until it was time to go. If you're not familiar, it has a bunch of cards with bizarre words on one side, and the definitions on the other side. You read the word aloud, then everyone does a secret ballot with a definition on it. They all are read aloud, along with the true definition, and then everyone votes on what they think the true meaning is. You learn a lot of words this way, but after all the different definitions, you're lucky to remember what the real meaning was!!! A few that I remember:

Flapdragon = a game of plucking flaming raisins out of flaming brandy and eating them (at the risk of being burned). Its played around Christmas time, so now you have a fun, pyromaniac activity to try out!!!

Mecock = A henpecked husband. Sounds like it, huh???

Zarp = A South African Policeman. This was one of mine, and I zerped everyone with it!!! It was funny, because everyone on the previous two rounds had been putting in African this and that's, and I read the real definition and no one was buying it!!! My nephew came up with my favorite definition for this one: Slang word used by welders to refer to an arc. Sounds just like it, huh??? Also, reminded me of zerp!!!

Mundungus: Second rate tobacco. I like the sound of that word. You smokers commit that one to memory!!!

My sister also had pumpkin cheesecake for dessert, that was greatly enjoyed by all!!!

Every night except last night this weekend I've fallen asleep uncharacteristically early, and woken up fairly early too. Unusual for me.

Yesterday I tried to participate a little in the black Friday festivities. Staples had a 200 gig hard drive for $29.99 after rebates. I went there after I woke up on my own, ended up being around 9 when I got there. They were already sold out by then. I had to exchange the rental car, too. Got the exact same kind of car again, only silver this time.

Did quite a bit of yard work yesterday, then my parents came up with my niece and nephew, children of my sometimes homeless sister. She was absent at Thanksgiving dinner, first time I remember that ever having happened. She's been on rants with my parents fairly constantly these days, calling them up COLLECT and yelling and screaming at them, making death threats and stuff. My dad wants to update their will to include a Menendez clause, not a bad idea. No telling when that will happen, so I made a voice recording of him stating that this is his intention.

We took all the kids to see the DWP's Light Festival in Griffith Park, an annual tradition for us, but my parents and niece and nephew had never been. We had my nephew spent the night last night, he's always wanted to do that. I hope it was everything he hoped for. I've got to take him back later on today. I'm hoping I can stop by and visit with my good friend Sammy a little while I'm down there. We hardly ever get to hang out any more. This morning I updated my wallpaper page, and now here I am updating my blog. Hopefully I'll be able to chat some tonight!!!

Amazing Gourd!

Since the trend of late seems to be "theatre of the absurd", figured I'd post this picture I took over the weekend. My aunt grew this wild gourd, and gave it to my mother. Why is it that gourds just put you in the mood for Thanksgiving???

Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends!!!

Enough Said

I have no idea...
What do you think?

The Snowball Effect

Well, I got the flapper to fix up my toilet downstairs today anyway. Put it in, and all was good... except the water was flowing VERY slow into the tank.... nothing unusual, but I figured while I was there I'd see if I could do anything about that too. Bad idea. I went to see if I could crank the valve for it open some more, and twisted the pipe right out of the damned wall!!! Way inside the wall. Of course, I couldn't find a proper wrench to shut the water off in a hurry. I ended up with a very moist floor down there once again.

Not having the tools or inclination to attempt the repair myself, I called Nate the plumber. He was on his way to another call, but said he'd come over as soon as he was done, probably around 4. At 5 I called him again, and he was on his way. Within 30 seconds, he showed up. He busted the wall open, and everything wasn't too corroded in there, so he was able to get it fixed fairly easily. Well, easy for him!!!

After that, I came back in and turned this on and discovered that Granny had been attempting add hyperlinks on her blog. Shout outs for Kabila's help desk!!! At first it was kinda messed up. We messed with it for a while, and got her code all cleaned up. I don't know why it gave her such a hard time, but it wouldn't let her post it once it was corrected. Something about not having a properly closed hyperlink. After much messing around I finally sent her a copy of Frontpage Express to do her linkin' in that instead. She was going "what, I could have done it like that from the beginning???" I replied, "well, if you didn't HAVE Frontpage Express, no!!!"

Happy Saturday!!!

Happy Saturday!!! Once again, I had an amusing time with Lilly and Granny, as well as Pearlie and Bob and Joey last night in chat!!! Lilly was getting a lot of shit about how her webcam had a lot of glare because she's so, well, lilly white!!! She came up with a way to take some of the glare off with a bit of heavy make-up. Daps (her baby boy kitty) was just a little leery of her with that on her face. He usually lets her kiss him right on the nose, but he wouldn't let her with all that on her face!!! See the picture where he's pushing her away??? That cat has such a personality!!! While we were chatting, Lilly got a phone call from Suzanne from Cat Shit Mountain, VA. That is always entertaining!!! While Granny was taking a piss, Bob made up a sketch of her nether regions!!! I swear, we're such a bunch of crazy asses!!! Granny is on a whole bunch of new meds, so she was a little out of it, much quieter than normal. As long as it works for her, that's good. As you can tell, I was clicking away with the old print screen key!!! The only thing that was kind of a bummer was that everyone went off to bed kind of early. And I'd gotten my drink on already!!!

Its really nice weather here. Quite dry, so it dries out your lips and sinuses, but very pleasant. I don't have a lot of plans for the day, but I think I'll do a little yard work, as well as picking up a new flapper for the basement toilet. My wife wants to go out to get some meat at a restaurant today, she's doing that Atkins diet. She was doing the Sacred Heart diet with some results, but then she changed to this one. She goes on about how much she's losing, but I notice that when I get on the scale, it weighs me about 20 pounds lighter than what I weigh at the doctor's office and the freight scale at work!!! Oh well, as long as she's losing, its all good. There's a party for one of the guys at work tonight, but I don't feel much like going really. I'd rather hang out with my crazy ass 'net buds!!!

I've already done some of my normal weekend stuff. I updated my weekly Wallpaper page, did the sudoku puzzle in the paper, and am listening to Handel on the Law on the radio. And, of course, I'm making a post (mostly about nothing) on my blog!!!

On My Own Time

I got to thinking today about how my attitudes about time have changed. My work always runs two shifts, from 6 AM to 4 PM, then 4 PM to 2 AM. Four days a week, Monday thru Thursday, although it often is more than that. I've gotten into the bad habit of hitting that damned snooze bar too many times (usually after staying up too late blogging or some damned thing) and by the time I hit the road, the freeways are pretty clogged and I end up even later getting in. However, I haven't had much of any negative feedback about it, they don't seem to care so long as I get my hours in. Usually I end up with around two hours of overtime most weeks.

Just about a year ago I broke the middle finger of my left hand. Its still not back to its full strength and flexibility, but its healing. While my hand was in a splint I couldn't wear a watch. Up until that time, I'd worn a watch most every day since I was in school. Suddenly, I found I was having to look around for clocks. Of course, my phone has a clock built in, so I can usually fall back on that if I care. Thing is, I don't!!!

After years of having to be somewhere at sometime, I've largely began running on my own schedule. I have very few obligations that absolutely NEED to be at a specific time for. I eat when I'm hungry. I go to bed when I'm tired. I wake up when I'm tired of listening to the damned snooze alarm. I find this to be very liberating, and has reduced the stress that I've felt in the past where I've felt like I'm rushing all the time.

My body rhythms seem to run towards the nocturnal. I could probably get them to let me work something like noon until 10 PM, but I'm not sure I'd like that too much either.

I realize that I'm fortunate to be able to live my life like this. While I look forward to getting a better paying job in the future, I dread having to go back on a regimented schedule, as well as having to work five days a week.

There are some of my recent thoughts. Here's another picture of my baby. She's a goodurn!!!

Getting as Serious as I Get, Part 2

Know how I made mention here about how if I was going to get serious about photogging I'd have to get a tripod??? Well, I didn't do THAT, but I did remember I had a fairly versatile base I'd made up for my dad that he didn't end up using that he gave back to me. It has a spherical part about the size of a handball, on a square base. It has a knob on the side that you can loosen and rotate a shaft on the top, or rotate, or tilt up to 90 degrees. I had mounted it to a larger wooden base, with a rubber pad on the bottom. I took that and my camera into work today, because last night there was a pretty nice sunset and I'd wanted to take a pic. I snapped several on the drive in, some of which came out semi presentable. Well, when it got to be sunset time, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and therefore no dramatic sunset. I guess its the old watched pot syndrome. Later on I went out, and the near full moon has a thin wisp of a cloud looped lazily around it!!! I took a ton of pictures, messing with all the settings with it set on the roof of my car. The picture doesn't really do it justice, but you get the idea I think. The stand or whatever you call it worked quite well. Likely a conventional camera would have been able to get better results. I remember last month when the moon was at this stage... Ah, memories!!!

Made decent progress on the second tool today. All the metal I'd ordered yesterday was going to be ready first thing this morning. I told our crack shipping department yesterday, and he said no problem. He was also going to pick up a board we'd had made in a rush last Thursday, which was ready that afternoon. Big rush, and they can't get someone out there to pick it up!!! Anyway, long story short, I didn't have material to start in on the latter part of the tooling until after 4:00. I only have a little more to do on my part tomorrow, and the other guy still has ALL of his part to do!!! Better him than me!!!

Of course, the machine they're putting in to run this job still isn't quite ready to go. I'm guessing most of tomorrow to go still.

I took a few pics of my machine running, too. I like this one of the control panel!!!

Surprise!!!

Ever notice how when you go to leave a message on someone's phone your IQ seems to drop to about half the normal level??? I wonder if that's because when you're actually talking to someone they reply before you can get too stupid??? There's my random rave for the day...

I had a couple surprises today at work. Remember how I kept going on about the tool I made last week not having a machine big enough to fit it??? Well, when I got in today, there was a different machine in the place of the first one!!! It looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Of course, it was nowhere near ready to start making product on yet. A bit later, I was talking to one of the machine operators (I think the only one still there from when my old company was bought by these jokers 5 years ago) and he asked "isn't that the machine you guys used to have at the old place???" Yes, that was it!!! The owner of the old place had picked it up (probably for next to nothing, she is a very shrewd businesswoman) and it was sitting in our plant for probably 4 or 5 years, never got hooked up or anything. Only thing it got used for was when one of our lines would break down it would get parts stolen off it. I spoke briefly to Sloppy Joe AKA Messy Marvin and made mention of that to him, and he said yea, it was missing a lot of parts. Ironically, they yanked a bunch of them off the line that they took out.

The next surprise came a while later on. The plant manager came up to me while I was taking my break and tells me they want to make another tool, exactly like the one I made last week!!! I thought he was joking at first, they aren't even running the one I made!!! No, they're actually going to have another company start to form the parts too!!! It amazes me that we can actually pay someone else to run our jobs and still make money. Even more amazing is that the customer we're selling it to is doing a little processing on it, then selling it to the actual customer, and from there it goes to retail!!! A lot of fingers in that pot, tell you what.

Interestingly, I had a dream this morning where my wife had gone into business selling frozen foods, and that's pretty much how she was doing it, buying from a supplier and selling to a retailer. I was asking her how could she possibly be making much doing that, and she was showing me the figures. Guess I've been around that kind of thing long enough to see plenty of people doing just that. All you need is a phone, a warehouse and a calculator with a markup key!!!

Got another hit on Wheres George, putting my numbers at an interesting place. I have 333 bills that have been hit, and, with multiple hits on bills, a total of 369 hits. I thought that was pretty wild.

The Handy Man

Its been a busy day for Aye!!! No, not really busy, but I did get alot done.... I installed sound cards on three computers today and now the place is full of sound!!! The one I put in mine is a Creative Media Sound Blaster 512 that I picked up on Ebay for just a little more than that!!! None of them seem any different than the other, but with that number I had to have it in my computer!!! After that I went down to the basement to work on some backed up plumbing down there. It was the strangest thing, the only thing that would cause it to leak was running water in the kitchen sink. That would cause it to back up through this broken T that used to be for a sink in the bathroom down there. Its in a bitch of a spot or I would have the wall torn out there and replaced it by now. I tried the shower stall down there, and it was draining real slow too, so I figured it was blocked around there. I used this amazingly effective little tool made by GT Waters, called the drain king. You screw it onto the end of a garden hose and shove it down the drain pipe a ways. It blows up like a balloon and lodges in there, then it does a bunch of high powered pulses of water down the pipe. It opened up the shower drain in no time, but the kitchen sink still backed up the pipe and overflowed at the break. I had to go in through the clean out plug outside and shove about 8 feet of hose down it. Turned on the juice and the drain king did its thing. Problem fixed!!! Only thing is the hose and the drain king were filthy with black greasy slime when I pulled them out, I had to spend a while cleaning it off. After all that I got out my pruners and bypass shears and trimmed back growth by the street. My oldest helped cutting stuff back by the driveway. We mostly filled up both of the greenery trash cans.

Back to my computer, and I had offline messages from Granny, calling out for Kabila's Help Desk!!! Apparently Lilly, who's been house and cat sitting for her sister must have had too much fun with us all last night on her sis's comp, cuz when she went to start it up today it went into one of these continuous re-boot loops, and it'd run but the video comes on but wouldn't stay on and all kinds of stuff. It wouldn't boot in safe mode, wouldn't come on in BIOS setup modes, nothing!!! I've seen this kind of thing before, most recently with my son's comp. I also at one point saw the same problem with Granny's comp. I strongly suspect a fucked up boot sector, and of course its not booting far enough that it'll even hit the CD drive so you can attempt to re-install. My suggestion was to format a hard drive (I'm pretty sure Lilly has at least one extra viable hard drive around she could do that with, but naturally it was back at her place) and do a clean install on it. After that, put the original back in as a slave and copy off all the illegal music and movie downloads you've got on it, as well as all your porn. If it works. I give it a 68% chance of working. Kabila's Help Desk, where we're not really that much help!!! If that doesn't work, probably a new motherboard and processor are in order. Of course, at that point its probably a toss up between doing that and just springing for a new comp to replace a four year old one. Likely more money, but a lot less headache!!!
That was Granny last night!!! LMAO!!! We had a time, so we did!!! I also got to reunite with an old friend from back in the Pow Wow days!!! That was very cool. East side was up until 2, and I blogged a bit after that and played some Runescape until I was up after 2 myself!!! Granny was falling asleep on us at the end, I buzzed her and she woke up looking around, "huh??? What what???" It was a lot of fun. I discovered something pretty cool, I can connect my MP3 player to my comp speakers and use it to DJ while I've got my headphones plugged in. The headphones plug in to the USB port, and while they're plugged it it defaults all the sound through them. I did that to play a song or two, and it just kept rolling the hits!!! Oh, and poor Lilly had gone out with her friend to go to a club, and they wouldn't let her in because she was wearing tennis shoes!!! It was good that she had fun with us when she came back from that anyway. Then she has the troubles with her sis's comp and can't even play with us tonight... Hope your weekend had some other bright points that I just haven't heard, girl!!!

Get out and take your damned Sacajawea dollars witch ya

I failed to mention, I bought gas after school last night because the station by the college has it fairly consistently for about eight cents less than everyplace else. I'd bought a little a couple days before cuz I was getting low, so it was still half full and didn't take that much. When I went in for my change, the guy gave me two fives and two Sacajawea dollars. Not that I'm opposed to Sacajawea dollars, but you can't enter 'em on Where's George, one of those things I do (I've entered more than $25,000 there since I started in April 2003, and had 368 hits so far; 9.25% rate in case you wondered) Oh well, not a big deal to me, but the mere fact of getting those Sacajawea dollars reminded me of a Simpsons episode. Homer and Comic Book Guy are going into Moe's, and Homer is telling him that if he wants to make friends, Moe's is the friendliest place in the rum district. Immediately following that, they enter and Moe has a shotgun pointed at a customer.

Cue Moe: "Get out and take your damned Sacajawea dollars witch ya. I'll give you till three" (he cocks the shotgun as the guy starts to run). "One." (he pulls the trigger)

LMAO, the things I remember!!!


In other interesting developments, after my post I did two ago "What do you do? " I read this as my horoscope for the day:

Study your setbacks, as embarrassing as they may seem. Everyone has made mistakes - at least yours were made out of the goodness of your great, big, trusting, naive heart.

I just kind of tripped when I read that!!! I've yet to have a chance to beg forgiveness again on that, the time I tried it was not well received, as you may have gathered from reading that blogstrosity. Granny, it wasn't exactly that a case of 'I'm Sorry' just doesn't seem to be enough for some people so much as it wasn't well received, as though there was doubt to my sincerity. Thats why the wording of that particular part of that post. I appreciate both of ya's words of encouragement regarding that, by the way, thanks.

Oh yea, sorry about the word verification bullshit, but I've about had it with the blogspam comments some ppl put up there. I'd grant you an exemption if that were doable. Please don't let that discourage you from commenting.

I am, however, enjoying modifying words with blog!!! Blogfoolery, blogstrosity, blogspam..... could you call Haunted Beauty's blog a fuckblog??? Feel free to if you like, but I don't think so exactly, but its got some of that in there. I do like her style!!! Come on, you know me, thought I wouldn't???

Up A Foot!!!

Upon my arrival at work this morning my good friend Sammy greets me and asks "how's it hanging???" Now, what is an appropriate response to such a question??? Without missing a beat, I responded "up a foot!!!" You do the math. It had the desired effect, Sammy looked at me as if I'd lost my mind and had no idea how to respond, much less what I was even talking about!!! I went into the office right after that to make a copy, and one of the office girls says, "good morning, how are you doing???" I was THIS CLOSE to using the same response on her!!! Decided that that would be completely inappropriate!!!

I had a pretty decent today, I think I might be feeling a little better after my last posting. Therapeutic, in a way. I just hope my apologies are accepted, you know what I mean if you've read it.

I had worked 13 hours yesterday finishing off the tool I've been making all week, and it almost came out good... I had it flipped over drilling vacuum holes, and on the last one of 147 something went awry... I have no idea exactly what happened, but it broke the drill bit, drove it out the other side of the tool, and the drill chuck kept coming down until it was embedded about 1/4 inch into the tool and the motor had overloaded. Well, that's what epoxy is for I guess, but that kind of bummed me out.

Now, on to more blogfoolery!!! There's my contribution to the English language, and once again, if you've read some of the stuff out there I'm sure you know what I mean!!!

I was cleaning up the tool and drilling the rest of the vacuum holes on it today and I thought of a pretty lame joke that only a machinist type would get: What did the machinist name his daughter??? Colette!!! OK, dialing 1-800-WHY-THATS-FUNNY for all you non-machinists, on mills the part that holds the cutter is called a collet... OK, that's pretty bad.... OK, what did the machinist name his son??? Chuck!!! OK, if you didn't get that, re-read the last part of 2 paragraphs up... I told Sammy both of those, with an interval of a couple minutes in between, and it elicited a rollen of the eyes!!! Mission Accomplished!!!

Lilly, I didn't have a comment at the time you did you Australia post, but now I have a down under connection to throw out for ya!!! Steve Irwin was in town the other day I hear (after the fact, of course!!!) discussing that he will make an attempt at snagging Reggie the 'gator from Machado Lake this spring. I know its very close to where I work and I should have made it by there to rubberneck some, but so far I haven't. Well, if Steve Irwin is going to be out there, just let me know when the media circus is in town!!! Also, I had gotten to thinking I should grab my parents photo album of their Australia trip and scan some of the pics. My father is quite the photog, too.

Speaking of photogging, I took some shots tonight. It was supposed to rain all day yesterday, but it only did a little. Then, it was supposed to rain hard and heavy all day today and tomorrow (later today???) but it was actually a beautiful day most of the day. By the time I got out of class, the rain had started to fall. (There was a crew out in the parking lot running a backhoe in the rain. You know what a backhoe is??? A ho that take it in the back doe', LMAO!!! Blogfoolery) I didn't rain in any serious fashion, and by the time I got home the moon was shining through the clouds, and it was looking good!!! I broke out my cam and took several shots. Never thought I'd be saying this about my point and shoot digital camera, but I think I need to get a tripod if I'm going to keep doing this kind of thing.


Speaking of taking pictures, that reminds me of the first time I saw Niblet. After reading Lilly's recent post and Granny's comment, I remembered my first impressions and confusion, and I can say that I don't really understand much more!!! Pretty funny, though, and quite amusing!!! My initial impression of Niblet (link removed per Lilly's request) was something like this: " I've never gotten the whole story straight on 'em, but apparently he's Lilly's bastard child , and Granny has been raising him, this being the actual first time Lilly has actually seen him since his birth. Granny left him there for Lilly to raise now. Did I get that right, ladies??? Having only fragments of the whole story is SOOO confusing!!!" You're not really missing much, they weren't exactly great pictures of Niblet... had some fairly decent ones of Lilly and Granny, though.

What do you do?

What do you do... when you do something for someone with the best of intentions, from the heart, no ulterior motives... but without actually using your head and thinking things through and realizing that it really wasn't the best idea???

Apologize, beg forgiveness. Yea. Talk is cheap. Even if you mean it, it may not SOUND convincing to them, and maybe even not to yourself.

Feel remorse. Of course, if you've thought things through after the fact it probably led to your remorse. And if you've apologized, and mean the apology, it probably stemmed from your remorse.

Ponder the error of your ways. Dwell, obsess, whatever you call it. I try not to do this one so much, because it is largely a futile exercise. But usually you are powerless to completely avoid it.

Try to come up with a way to make up for it. Great idea, doesn't always work tho. Not truly effective either, because it does nothing to undo events that have transpired.

Go onward wiser, and learn from your mistake.

If, ever in the future the planets align in such a way that you are in the same situation again, use your head for a change and do the right thing this time.


OK, Y'all take a picture, this is about as serious as I ever get on here yo

My Abbreviated Weekend

Take a look at that plant!!! Isn't that wild??? Have you ever seen a plant with square leaves like that before??? Looks like something Dr. Seuss would come up with or something!!! What possible advantage could there be to having square leaves like that??? We've had the plant for maybe 4 months or so now, and it just recently sprouted the flowers on the ends of the stalks. I really like that plant cuz its so weird, and it does well with very little care. I was out doing yardwork today and decided I needed to share some pictures of it here, so you can all love my crazy square plant!!!

Work went well enough for having to work on my day off yesterday. 5 1/2 hours of overtime. The owner came up and asked me if I could work today or tomorrow, too. I politely declined. He's stressing about the job that we have no machine tooling to mount it to. I made mention of that to him. I finished off the top half of the tool I was working on. The results were completely satisfactory. Now all I have to do is flip it over and have my baby drill 216 holes in the bottom, then machine a simple vacuum manifold into it. Already have the programs written. Did I make mention that I generated the programs for the next tool while I was at school the other night, using Surfcam!!! Looks like the code came out clean and tight compared to the bullshit that Bobcad comes up with.

Got up this morning and was wanting to do a post on here, but it didn't seem to be working. Updated my Wallpaper page instead, a little tie in with Lilly's first reading post that she had a week or so ago, which if you didn't catch, you've missed. Then, while I had my HTML editor open, I messed around with re-doing my home page. I have a little HTML page of my favorites links stored on my hard drive that I've got set as my home page. Needed to update it because I've got all these blogs that I have bookmarked that I needed to add to it!!! My old home page had a kind of bright background with pale polka dots, and I changed it to a darker, lightly gridded background with some purple squiggles. Fancied up the text colors on it some, too. I'm pleased with the results.

I'm amazed at how well my youngest has done with his potty training!!! It doesn't seem like its been that long since we started with him, and he's really almost got it completely perfect!!! The part that really amazes me, though, is that he is staying dry all night now!!! We weren't even working on that with him, but he seems to have picked it up anyway. My oldest is just barely getting to that point himself. I blame genetics, I was a bed wetter until I was much older myself. Still have an accident occasionally, come on, who doesn't??? LOL, no, not really.

Meet Marvin

We have a new maintenance guy at work. His name is Joe, he's an older guy and seems at least semi-competent. Only thing is, he leaves crap all over the place, wherever he's been working, which is mostly the whole plant!!! Just about everyone has noticed this and commented on it. While I was working the other day, I was thinking about him and remembering that old commercial that had the kid 'Messy Marvin'. Later on that night Sammy came in to do a little change over on a job, and we went out for some tacos at our normal place (there's a funny story I'll have to share about the first time we went there sometime). I told him how I was thinking about that, and that Joe's new nickname could be Marvin. He was amused by the idea. The next day I was looking for Joe and I asked Sammy if he'd seen Marvin. He knew exactly what I meant. Today Sammy came up to me and tells me "We've been overlooking the obvious, we don't need to call him Marvin. 'Sloppy Joe' is perfectly fitting!!!"

Sammy went for his first flying lesson last Friday. He did quite well, and was pretty buzzed about it all the way through until at least Monday. That's pretty cool.

I was cutting my next tool on my CNC today. Using the Bobcad software I've got on my machine tends to make a somewhat fucked up tool path. Oh well, gets the job done, and I'm learning a lot more of actual editing of the code this way. The owner came by and was watching it go. I asked him what he thought, and he replied that it beat doing it manually. I agree. Then I asked if he didn't think that I was deserving of a raise since I'm now a CNC programmer, set up guy, and operator. He said "we'll see". It's been a while since I've gotten anything, so I suspect that I will be seeing something anyway. Probably less than I'd really like, but half of something is better than all of nothing. At any rate, I just am glad that I'm doing this type of work now. I'll just get some time of experience in then take my mad CNC skillz elsewhere, hopefully with a less hellish commute, if I'm not reasonably compensated. He asked if I could come in tomorrow, he's stressing a bit about a couple of jobs in the works. One of which we have none of the necessary equipment for the machines to actually produce parts off. Not my concern!!! Not especially looking forward to going in, but it should be an easy day *knock on wood* as I've got the whole job already programmed. All I have to do is feed the program in and baby sit it while it does the hard work. I'll carry my phone with me and play games and text people while I'm sitting. Not that I ever get replies to my texts, but oh well. No love for Aye. Double-Ott slugs, no love, straight thugs.


Got a different rental car again this week. There was some sort of safety recall going on with the Maliboomer, so they wanted it back. Now I'm rollin in a Kia again. A lot nicer than that first piece of tin shit they rented me at first. It's an Optima with a V-6, I think the same powerplant as the Hyundai had, but the whole car seems a bit smaller all around. It has 4 wheel discs and a few power doodads. No remote entry, no power antenna, no driving lights, no sunroof.... but those are the only things that seem to be missing. It has a great color, a deep cobalt blue. So far I like it. I've got to get some legal going on this, it's taking far too long.

No Rockstar for me tonight. Being as I have to work tomorrow, I got a different drink tonight. Its called Fuse, and it has all kinds of vitamins and minerals in it, but not all the caffeine and amphetamines that Rockstar has. Fairly tasty, I could drink it again. I still feel fairly awake, but I know I must get my ass to bed.

NOW I'm a PIMP!!!

I went to my parents house after work today to take the boys trick-or-treating. Around our house isn't good for doing that, because its a lot of steep grades and almost no sidewalks. I don't think anyone gives out candy around here. Anyway, I got there and my mom had a surprise for me, a purple pimp hat with leopard skin print band and brim edging!!! I love it!!! I wasn't going to do much dressing up, I had a glittery wig I was going to put on, but that was it. Well, with this bitchen' hat I had to do a little more. She had a wild print shirt, and of course some gold!!! I would have liked to have some proper shades to go with it, but the ones that I had there were too dark for going around at night in. Last year I had a gold tooth cap that I wore around all day, but I don't even know where it's at now. Oh well, I was just thrilled to pieces to have the hat!!!

The kids made quite a haul!!! A lot of people were giving out full sized candy bars. Someone had gummy eyeballs, and something I'd never heard of before, inside out reeses cups!!! A lot of the places went all out with the scary decorations, too.

Happy Halloween!!!

What a weekend!!! I swear, I need another one just to rest up from this one!!! Spent most of the weekend pretty much as I thought I would. Took the youngest up hiking on Friday, rebuilt my comp and my son's on Saturday, and took my mom out for her birthday today. I got some pretty good pictures on the hike, one of which I used on my wallpaper page. I didn't get a chance to do that until this evening, so my halloween themed wallpaper page only gets one actual day. I had planned to do pumpkin carving on Friday night, but that didn't happen. I don't even remember what I ended up doing, but that didn't get done then.

First thing I did on Saturday was to tear into my comp project. The hardware part went fairly quick and easy, but my old operating system didn't like the new motherboard slipped under it!!! It would do a reboot every time it got about halfway started. That's kind of OK, it had a couple things broken on it anyway. I used the hard drive I got from Granny when I had rebuilt her comp so I could pull stuff I wanted to save off my "real" hard drive afterwards. It took a while, but I got it handled. The only part that didn't work right was the onboard audio. I swear, I have more problems with that than almost anything else!!! Solved that by throwing in an old PCI sound card I'd picked up a couple weeks ago and disabling the onboard sounds. A lot of good it does having six channel audio when it can't even get one to work!!!

While the operating system was installing I did some work on my son's. Once again, it went fairly easily, except for operating system problems!!! I had a copy of Windows 2000 I'd wanted to put on there anyway, but it didn't want to install the way it was for some reason. Ended up having to re-install 98, then put 2000 over that!!! Oh yea, it was able to work all the drivers for everything on his, except for the onboard sound!!! Wish I'd been able to pick up a couple more of those PCI sound cards!!! I imagine they're not too expensive. I originally had picked that up for my youngest's computer, his sound won't get straight either!!!

Took my mom to Polly's Pies for lunch, that was some good chow!!! Got home tonight and carved our pumpkins. And that was my weekend.

I Love Thursdays!!!

One of the main perks of my job is that I do 4 ten hour days (although they're never only ten hours!!!) then get Fridays off!!! So, my Thursday is my Friday!!! Of course, by the time I've gotten through three ten-plus hour days, I'm pretty beat, and I do have school on Thursday nights. However, by the time I get home from that, and knowing I don't have to get up early the next day, I can usually go for quite a while after that, its a good feeling!!! Tonight I got myself a Rockstar energy drink before class so I wouldn't fall asleep in class. It worked rather well!!!

I'm taking my youngest up to Millard Campground tomorrow while the older is in school. He keeps wanting to go camping with me now. He's kind of young for it still, but I think we'll do an overnight in spring when the temperatures aren't getting down into the freezing 5o's overnight!!! Gonna hike up to the waterfall, I think he'll have just enough of it by the time we're done. Its been cloudy and feeling like it could rain at any time, but weather.com says its going to be clear most of the day. We'll see. Don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows revisited!!! Which reminds me, that looks like an amusing movie, maybe I'll check it out sometime. Or buy a bootleg DVD of it in a week or so. I've been wanting to take the boys to see the Wallace and Grommit movie, maybe that'll happen this weekend. Stream of consciousness brought to you by Rockstar... I could go all day and night and then some!!!

I got a new motherboard and processor the other day. AMD 64, baby!!! I'll be rebuilding my PC this weekend. Hadn't made mention here, but last weekend I had an incident with my PC, the video cut out, and I couldn't get it to come back for a while. I tried all kinds of things, swapped hard drives, stole my son's video card, finally swapped my hard drive into his box and tried that. Kind of worked, then I touched the heat sink on the CPU of mine and realized that it was burning up after being off for around 45 minutes!!! I'm thinking the fan on it is going out, it has been making some funny noises. Still haven't gotten my son's working right, I'm not sure wherein the problem there lies, but I'm fairly confident that swapping in my old motherboard and memory will fix it just fine!!! My new motherboard supports 8x AGP video, which should help my performance. I currently have an 8x video card, but the motherboard only supports 4x. Still works OK, but they say doing it like this can inhibit performance. It also uses PC3200 DDR memory, so I've picked up a 512mb module to go with it. All together, it cost $125. They had a full computer in the same ad for $269 with a DVD burner and Windows XP operating system. I had been thinking for the difference in price I should just get that, but then got to thinking it doesn't have an AGP slot, only onboard graphics, so it'd never do for all the games my son plays. That, and it only comes with 128mb of memory, its gotta be a dog!!! I can't even imagine trying to burn a DVD with only that, bet it would about choke!!!

I have dreamed of a black car that shimmers and drives

I have dreamed of a black car that shimmers and drives
Down the length of the evening to the carnival side
In a house where regret is a carousel ride
We are spinning and spinning and spinning...

That was one of the songs Counting Crows did last night, entitled St. Robinson and his Cadillac Dream. Interesting choice, and cool that they did it, that song has been stuck in my head for the past couple weeks!!! Here's the set list they did:

1 Round Here
2 Recovering the Satellites
3 Amy Hit the Atmosphere
4 Mr Jones
5 August and Everything After
6 Children in Bloom
7 Ghost Train
8 New Frontier
9 Black and Blue
10 Goodnight Elizabeth
11 St Robinson and his Cadillac Dream
12 Rain King
13 Chelsea

I've heard August and Everything After before, its something of a rarity, but I managed to download a recording of it, quite possibly from the very show I saw them perform it at when I first heard it. It was done with quite a bit of drum this time, different that what I'd heard before. Almost like a march is how it sounded.

Another point of interest is in "Rain King" they inserted portions of "Someone to Watch Over Me". They often put other songs in there, second time I saw 'em they put "Oh Susannah" in there, it was pretty amusing.

On the whole, most of the songs were changed, at least subtlety, from the album versions. A lot of the songs were, in my opinion, a little too much on the band and not enough orchestra. Not complaining, tho, I really enjoyed it!!!

I've got to go on a bit about the venue, too!!! This was my first time going to the Disney Concert Hall, excepting the trip I made down there to pick up the tickets. It's an impressive structure from the outside, and its even better inside!!! The walls and seats climb steeply, and it looks like most of the seats are good. The acoustics are excellent, as would be expected. The seats I had, I was concerned that wouldn't be that great. They are called "orchestra view" seats, meaning that they are behind the orchestra. Mine were on the very end of the fifth row. Doesn't sound too promising, does it??? Well, the conductor was positioned off to the left side of the stage and a bit back, and Adam was in the middle. He spent most of the show turned around facing the conductor to watch his cues, so he was facing right towards us!!! The crowd (I heard someone saying the place only holds 2,000 people) was a bit loud for the first couple of songs, but Adam told everyone that they just needed to chill and let the conductor be able to hear what was happening, and for the most part everyone did.

Oh yea, as I said in my previous post, I did manage to record the whole thing. Even the part at the beginning where they do an announcement that recording at this venue is prohibited!!! Still haven't figured out what to do about those pesky codecs but I have an idea of another way to deal with that problem. Its not the best recording, but its all there, and my latest version of Nero has some mixing and clean-up utilities I'm gonna try on it. Of course, it came out to be something like 87 minutes, so it can't all fit on one CD. I can probably edit a lot of the talking between songs out and get it shortened down enough to do that with.

Awesome Show!!!

Just got back from seeing the Counting Crows playing a concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra!!! This is the fifth time I've seen them live now, and it defenetly ranks in the top five!!! Really, though, it was a great show!!! I may put more detail about it here later, but its late. I recorded most all of the show on my new MP3 player and was mostly wanting to get the tracks out of there and into my comp, and hopefully onto a disc. Looks like the disc thing isnt going to happen, at least right away. Neither my Nero nor the Windows Media Player will support burning them for reasons of unrecognized codecs. Come on now, they're just WAV files, what's the problem here??? If anyone has a clue about codecs, please pass it along.

The High Cost of Ink

I don't know what the catalyst for it was, but today my wife declared that she wanted to get another tattoo. A butterfly for her other ankle, only with its wings open on this one instead of a side profile. We were already going to be out doing some shopping today, and one of the shops was going to take us right by In The Skin where both my good friend Sammy and I had gotten out nipples pierced. I suggested we stop in and check what they have and how much. Turns out it costs $125 and they could do it fairly quickly, so she went for it. I think it came out great, and I really like the colors!!!

We did go to the wax museum yesterday, it was pretty cool. Everything it the gift shops was 50% off, and we ended up spending more there than we had on admission!!! There were a lot of people there, I imagine if it was like that on a consistent basis they never would have needed to close down!!!

This needed to be shared!!!

I was watching the news this evening when I got home, and I saw a story that just needed to be shared. Apparently a new lingerie shop has opened up, and the display in the front window has a mannequin lounging on her side. It is wearing a short kimono or wrap or some damned thing, and a see-through thong below that, and is facing ass-out towards the window!!! This apparently is causing an uproar among some people who are offended by plastic mannequin ass!!! Someone even called the mayor about it, and they had him on the news saying there really wasn't anything they can do about a mannequin!!! So there you go, now you know....

Happy Thursday!!!

Well, it's Thursday anyway, don't know how happy it really is. I'm currently in class, and decided to blog some since I can't get the next part of my project to work right. Besides, I must since I complained in my last post that no one was blogging!!!

Granny, on the left hand side of your blog there's a box towards the bottom that says "who gives kudos" and how many from whom. Hate hearing that you're suffering, but good to hear that you got your musicmatch working right for a change. One of these days I'm gonna make up a page to show ya how to make up an audio CD. Watch out for impending hurricanes down there girl!!!

Lilly, sorry to hear you had a rough day. Get yourself to bed early tonight and have a better one tomorrow!!! *Sending you good thoughts...*

Work today was largely uneventful. I got a chance to run my CNC today, but all I was doing was drilling holes. Actually that was pretty cool, I made up a fixture and was able to just undo two clamps and slap in fresh plates. Did ten of 'em like that. Oh yea, I worked on a program for a really cool project I've been wanting to make. My first G-job on a CNC!!!

No major plans for the weekend. There's a half price day going on at the junkyard, but don't really need anything there. My dad is going I think, maybe I'll go just to hang with him, but I doubt it. The wax museum is closing down at the end of the month, and I haven't been there for probably 25 or more years, so I'd like to do that before it closes. The admission is reduced to $5 I hear. I've got that TV I trash picked a while back that works fine, except the RCA inputs for the DVD don't seem to be contacting right. Maybe I'll open that up and see what I can see. Guess I've got a copy of Windows 2000 to try installing on my firstborn's computer, too. Damn, this sounds like it could be a very busy weekend!!!

I sure wish I was back on my vacation, I had SUCH a great time!!! Oh well, I'll just have to look forward to the next one!!!

Where Have All The Bloggers Gone???

Gee, I leave for a few days and I don't see any new postings when I'm back!!! Come on, what have you all been doing???

I had a great extra long weekend, with a bit of rain falling excepted. Damit, it wasn't supposed to rain this weekend!!! Oh well, I didn't get too terribly wet, except a couple of evenings in there. I'd love to do it again soon!!!

More Fun With Big Balls

I was going to get to bed at a decent hour tonight, but I had to share this, it's too funny!!! We have a customer in Arkansas who produces nail products. One we did recently was a kit that had a cuticle pen, a bottle of some sort of nail conditioner, and a couple of nail fizz balls. The girl from the company calls me up today and says she needs to discuss this package, and we're going to have to make some changes. She tells me that I'm going to laugh when I hear the problem, and proceeds to tell me that their balls are getting bigger!!! I was laughing, and I told her I can see why she said that I'd laugh!!! She proceeds telling me their problem is that when they're packing them out, their balls are getting busted!!! I'm silently laffin' my ass off and taking it all in, picturing the production guy who had to come in and bring it to her attention, etc. Had to share that with you, I was very amused!!!

I Just Can't Look!!!

I worked a 13 hour day today, and on the way home I caught a little of the Steelers game on the radio. At the time, they were up 7 to 0. Good start!!! Just before I went to get in the shower I checked again, and they were down 21 to 22 with only seconds of play left!!! I couldn't watch!!! (I had to get into the shower LOL) Checked it out after I got out, and they'd gotten in a field goal to take it!!! Whoo hooo, way to go!!! Then there was the game everyone was watching, the Angels taking out the Yankees... I don't have any especial loyalty there, but they are something of a home team, and there is that rally monkey, so I was pleased by that too!!! For a guy who doesn't really follow sports, it was a good night in sports!!!

Kabila's Help Desk

Just read and replied to Granny's comments to my last post and realized I typed about as much for a reply as I normally do for a post!!! And I don't know, but kind of don't think, that when you reply to a comment it doesn't tell the commenter that there's been a reply to the comment!!! Soooo, thought I'd make a little post here and when Granny reads it, then she'll know for sure!!! How's that for chopped liver??? Oh yea, and now I have a slogan:

"Kabila's Help Desk, where we're not really much help at all!!!"

Or maybe I'll change it to:

"Kabila's Help Desk, where if we can't help you, you could be beyond help."???

I don't know, I'll put it up for suggestions!!! Love to hear your suggestions!!!

Good Day, Lazy Day

Now this is what a weekend day is supposed to be like!!! Woke up pretty late, and made a crock pot full of chicken chili!!! Sammy didn't make it up here, so that was kind of a bummer, but oh well. I got most of my stuff together for next weekend because usually I don't have any time during the week, so got that taken care of. Set my tent up in the yard and swept it out. Sprayed it down with fabreeze too, it was smelling a little ripe last time I used it. Did just enough yard work to not feel completely useless!!!

This evening was even better, got to chat with my ladies Granny and Lilly (or should I refer to Lilly as my GIRL??? LOL you had to be there) as well as Bob for quite a while, always fun. After they all went off to bed I tried my chili, it came out very good, but more soupy than the last couple times. The chicken meat came out REALLY good!!! Strangely enough, I wasn't too terribly hungry, but it still tasted like more!!! After that I updated my Wallpaper page, a decent one, but not one of my most inspired picks. At least I did something there to keep it fresh. I was tempted to use one of Steven Pinker's images, but I want to pace myself on using his stuff!!! Do just a little blogging and looking around (looked at ~DoOmEd To WaLk EaRtH AlOnE's~ page and blog for the first time in a while, Lilly, good restraint shown by saying nothing about her opinion of her father!!! LOL, not that I think you are of the same opinion or anything) I'm looking forward to more of the same tomorrow!!!

Oh yea, I heard today that my homeless sister is pregnant again... I don't even know what to say...

Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows

Been trippy weather the last couple weeks here. It usually happens like this towards the end of September where we get a little "Indian Summer" where it gets quite pleasant after having cooled down some. Towards the end of last week, tho, it heated up viciously, largely due to Santa Ana wind conditions (I don't remember their being a lot of those so far this year). Contributed to the many fires we've had out here. I could tell even before the weathermen said a thing about it because it messed up my sinuses. The first day I had some sneezing and a runny nose, but the next two days I woke up with terrible sinus headaches. Got better for a few days, then came back for the end of this week, too. The instructor of my class had taken an antihistamine and it had made him really sleepy. Better today though. Hope decent weather holds for a while, I'm taking a few days at the beginning of the week after this one and getting outta town!!! Gotta get my money's worth out of my wilderness pass. I'm really looking forward to it!!! Wonder if they're going to remember at my work that I've put in for vacation those days???

Lilly, thanks for sharing your "serious" blog with me!!! I think you're doing a good job with it so far, and I'll keep checking it out. I checked your ID number from that on Cool Numbers and it came out with a Universal Coolness Index of 96%, pretty good!!! Not that will come as too much of a surprise to you though, huh???

David Gray was on Letterman last night, and I recorded his performance of The One I Love. It was pretty cool, but my recording isn't the best, has a lot of static noises in the background.

I'm going to make more chili in the crock pot tomorrow. Got chicken this time for it, should be good. Sammy was talking about coming up tomorrow, that would be cool. He was talking about showing me how its done with the chili, guess we'll just see about that!!!

Must Be Sick

Yea, I must be sick. I woke up this morning at 4:10 and was done sleeping!!! This almost never happens to me, I'm usually dragging my ass into work late, and consider "morning people" to be sick in the head!!!

They're having me make that 4-up tool that was the first one I made again. They want to make the whole thing about 1/8" deeper, so I'm able to just make some mods to my programs and re-do the whole thing. I'm also cutting it in a 3/8" thick plate instead of 1/2" this time, and I finished all the cutting today. I'd taken my new mP3 player in yesterday to show it to Sammy and Rafi, and ended up listening to it while the CNC was doing the hard work. I was glad I had it with me!!! Brought it again today. Gotta get some new 'phones for it, it came with these little plastic discs about the diameter of a dime and slightly less comfortable!!! Interesting, I cut 4 cavities 10" square by 3/16" deep, plus all the detail and vacuum channeling on the back.... I took a bit more than half the metal out of it!!! It's amazingly light now!!!

Reggie the reptile in the Harbor City lake is in the news again, they just did a story that T-bone the gator wrangler from Louisiana said he's getting him TONIGHT!!! We'll see. Guess he finally got that liability insurance squared away. He had a group of Cajun musicians doing a song for him, it was pretty entertaining. There was an article in the weekly Outdoors section in that yellow rag I get, the L.A. Times about how if he wasn't caught soon, and didn't eat anyone's chilluns or beloved family pets, it would actually be good for the lake. Thin the ranks of non-native species in the lake and the overpopulation of ducks.

Lilly, don't worry too much about not being able to get your other blog working, ain't too much going on there. I keep posting there, exact mirror of the MySpace one, and it doesn't get the attention there. I get comments there, but they all seem to have links to other sites built in. Here's one of my favorites:
"I definitely don't have all the answers, but I know that as long as people keep sharing ideas like this, the truth will eventually reveal itself and maybe it can make a difference somewhere.
I think this blog rocks! Keep up the good work, I've bookmarked it and will definitely swing by again soon.
Feel free to pay a visit to my Canada immigration site. (linked, I didn't link it find it your damned self if you're that interested) It might not be your "cup of tea", but it covers Canada immigration related topics."
OK, I'll keep that in mind in my search for the truth and make a diffrence while on my life quest to immigrate to Canada, eh???

NEW TOYS!!!

Well, one new toy anyway!!! I picked myself up a little MP3 playa today after work. It was on sale for only $49.99, and had the one function that was pretty high on my list, the ability to record. It's only 512mb, but 512 is cool with me!!! It's tiny, just a little bigger than a bic lighter, and has a bunch of cool stuff it does. If you have a .lrc file to go with your MP3 or WMA file, it'll display the lyrics to the song as it plays. You can store any type of file on it as a flash drive. You can make phone number and address lists to display on it (in case you lose all the info in your cell phone, I guess). Took me a while to figure it out, because the one forward-backward slider it has also doubles as a push button. I'm very pleased with it, now that I've got it figured out tho. Main reason I'd wanted to get a recorder of some sort is because of the Counting Crows and Hollywood Bowl Orchestra concert I've got tickets for near the end of this month. I also picked up a network card there too, because they were only 99 cents, and you can never have too many network cards. Well, actually, I guess you could. In fact, I'd only need about 2 or 3 more to have too many!!!

They had a guy come in and work on my CNC last Friday, and he replaced the inverter bleed element that had heated up the one time the power had gone out, and declared everything to be fine. I turned it on when I got a chance this morning, and the screen still came out blasted with pixels. Seems like the guy had it running, he got the table all centered up and everything. I kept messing with it, but had no luck. The other CNC operator went in and moved things around inside later and got it going. He says to just not shut it down, just turn off the video and activate the emergency stop button. Seems like the wrong way to deal with it to me, but we'll see.

Oh Yea

I forgot in my post (as if it wasn't long enough) I did my typical weekend thing and updated my Wallpaper page this morning, and I know I always say this, but you GOTTA check it out this week!!! It's an AWESOME picture!!! I found it while I was looking for some clouds to use as a background for the flying page I was making for Sammy, and found it. It was taken by Steven Pinker from Harvard's Department of psychology. He's got a bunch of pictures posted there, and tell you what, that boy has some mad photog skillz!!! I highly recommend you check the rest out, if you are a photographer or enjoy great pictures!!!

The Latest and The Greatest

It's been an eventful few days, and boy have I missed my blog!!! LOL!!! Thursday I went back to work and tried my machine, still busted. I ended up cutting the final cut with a manual mill, it came out OK (which reminds me, I took a couple pics... now I'm gonna have to post 'em so you all can see) Installed it on the machine it's going on, and it went on like it was made for it!!! LOL!!!

Anyway, I was feeling pretty good about it, the parts fit in nicely and stuff. Then I started fixing the machine up (it was missing the wheels off the trays) and cleaning them up some (the whole thing was filthy) and put the sealing jigs on. Well, surprise!!! With the wheels on it, they're too tall to fit the parts under the head!!! Actually, they'd make it under BARELY but then they'd get stuck in the clearance holes!!! So I'm looking at it, and the maintenance guy is fixing the timer (the head would go down and not go back up) and decide to make a spacer under the cylinder to boost it up a little. Trying to take it apart, I see that it's got a sleeve that threads up into the cylinder, so I start screwing it up in there to shorten it up. It doesn't work, I don't know why. The customer they'd told he could pick it up at noon. I kept saying in response, "that's interesting" LOL!!! He showed up and saw what was happening and says he'll go for lunch and come back in a couple hours. Oh yea, the day before the owner had given me a drawing that he needed modified, he wanted by afternoon the next day. My bud Rafael found me at some point in there and says the owner had been looking for me about the drawing. I told him to tell him so sorry, its gonna be Monday. About 10 minutes later the owner and the sales guy come over and starts going on (nicely) about how he really needs to get this drawing to the customer. I (grubby up to my damned elbows) tell him, OK, you take over here!!! He gets a look at the situation and sends me away to draw. About 10 minutes later the salesman comes over and asks me to go take a look at what the owner's doing, cuz he didn't think he was doing it right!!! LOL!!! I was very amused!!! Anyway, I got back to the machine a while later, and end up deciding we need to extend and boost the whole top end up, and make up these adapter plates and bolt 'em on. The customer comes back, and he's helping out, too. He was just about the nicest guy, and he needs to get it back to their plant in Mexico so they can pack out 4000 pieces for in the morning. O yea, I learned a new word in Spanish, "Chiconada", which is doing something improperly but so it works, I think it's a similar connotation as "nigger rigging". I was taking off these springs and ended up launching the wrench about five feet in the air!!! We were trying to slide the jig trays under the head at one point to put things back together and activated the cylinder and kinda smashed the side of one of my fingers, and got the middle finger of the customer bad enough to bust his fingernail. Anyway, ended up not getting out of there until after 9 at night, missed class. But I did manage to get the machine going right!!!

The next day was Sammy's birthday, and as I said here before, I took him flying with my nephew. He declared it his best birthday ever, so I guess you'd call that a success!!! I got him some memory for his comp and installed it, he's now officially a 512'er!!! I took a bunch of pics, and put them on his computer, then re-sized some of them and uploaded him to his newly opened geocities site, and tried to put together a page for him, but the MS Frontpage it comes with is nothing like the one I'm used to. I could have done better just text coding it!!! I took and made a page this morning and mailed it to him with explicit instructions on how to upload it, but so far he hasn't. So, I uploaded it to mine because you all gotta see it, you can check it here. I wrote it from his perspective, but I think it's pretty accurate. After that, we went, along with his brother, to the go-cart place we'd gone to for my birthday. But, when we were signing in the desk guy asks Sammy if he's been drinking (guess the smell tipped him off) and he answered honestly, so the guy sent us packing. We went bowling instead, three games. We played for 5 cents a pin, and I ended up taking the first game, think I got 119. That's close to my best score!!! I shall not go into detail of the next two games, but suffice to say my game went downhill. It was a really fun day!!! Sammy kept going back and looking at the pictures, he was just beside himself. He wants to get his license now!!!

Granny, you gotta check out my response to Lilly's Saturday post, I'm sure you'll be amused!!! You have such trouble with your colors!!! Don't take it so hard!!!

What a Day!!!

Indeed, what a day!!! I'm so glad to finally be home!!! I got to work today and started in on machining a head for a sealing machine. I wrote a program for it yesterday, but it was too big to fit in my CNC's meager memory. I tried to DNC (I think that stands for direct numerical control) feed it the program, but it wasn't working right. First attempt I've made to do that. Well, this morning I wrote two new programs for it, only cutting half at a time. They came out small enough to work, around 1,300 lines each, which isn't really that big of a program. By way of contrast, this very page probably takes up more kilobytes than the simple text program I'd written. Cut the first half, and it came out smashingly!!! I was pleased. Then, with the help of the other (guess you'd call him the senior) CNC programmer-operator, tried DNC'ing the second half. Didn't work. I loaded it in the memory and started cutting it, and it came out good, too. Oh yea, it still does the
INVERTER FAULT
INVERTER FAULT
INVERTER FAULT
INVERTER FAULT
INVERTER FAULT
INVERTER FAULT
INVERTER FAULT
INVERTER FAULT
INVERTER FAULT
thing if you don't shut down and re-start the machine in between. Wrote two more programs to do final clean-up cuts on both cavities with smaller cutters. Other CNC guy remembers something else on DNC'ing and we tried that, once again it doesn't work. I cut the first one normal, then try to do the second one. The tool changer goes to change to the appropriate cutter, and it sticks in the changing position!!! Keyboard and everything freezes up. I re-start it again, and now my video screen doesn't come on right, its all blasted with pixels. Shut down and pull the video cards and re-seat 'em, and it works, tool changer retracts, all seems well.
Except
It thinks that it has tool 1 in the spindle, when I can clearly see it's got tool 2 in there!!! I pop tool 2 out, and give it the command to change to tool 2, and the changer crashes the spindle into the side of tool 1 that's really still hanging in the changer!!! GRRRRRR!!! Eventually I got it straightened out, after I took a break and ate some lunch, and let everything cool down. Cut the final cut and was happy once more. Flipped the plate over to cut a little groove in the back, the final finishing touch, and once again the video won't work right!!! Messed with it for a while, then left it cooling once more and came back around an hour later. Still didn't work. Fuck it, that's enough for the day.

Left just a bit after 7, and I swear traffic was worse tonight than last night when I left at 5:30!!! Bunch of assholes out on the road, of course, too. Had 2, almost 3 cars change lanes as if I wasn't even there!!! Maybe a white car is just too invisible. I'll keep you posted.

Got another hit on Where's George when I checked my E-mail. Always cool when that happens. This one was from Nacogdoches, Texas, one year and 79 days after I'd entered it. That makes 347 total hits!!! Lucky number 347!!!

SAMMY'S BACK!!!

Actually, he never left, but you all gotta see this!!! He's been feeling flu-ish for a few days, so his mom applied this ancient Asian remedy, you may have heard of the stuff (I had), Tiger Balm. If you haven't heard of it, its similar to Vicks vapo-rub. The part I hadn't heard of is this method of application. Apparently, you take a coin (or they sell a coin-on-a-stick implement for this) and vigorously rub it into the skin, and it helps to open the pores and draw out toxins and stuff. He showed me this morning and I was amazed!!!

WOW!!! He also had some on his chest, you can check that here. Guess it worked, he said he was feeling 100% better this morning. Purely psychosomatic, I'm sure.

The car rental company called me yesterday. They wanted their Hyundai back. That was really a nice car!!! I especially enjoyed the sunroof, I had it open most of the time I was driving it!!! Now I've got a Malibu, I'll give my full report on it later, but so far it seems pretty good. The engine is snarlier, and has more torque I can tell, and it has a couple of other nice touches the Hyundai didn't. One I especially like is the radio continues playing until you exit the car, very cool!!! The timing was pretty good too, I was preparing to send a certified letter to Infinity insurance asshole adjustors' supervisor, now I've got another receipt to send along. Next stop after that will be the courthouse, I think.

Seems like there was something else I wanted to blog about, but damned if I can remember it!!! Oh well!!!

Home Again

Back already from my camping!!! It was good. Could have stayed another night, but I had to get back to my blog!!! I want to camp some more, fortunate I bought the annual wilderness pass so I'm good to go. Bonehead move, I forgot to bring flashlights and coat hangers for marshmellows!!! Fortunately my dad and nephew came up, late but not too late, and they had extra flashlights and marshmellow forks. We hiked up to the falls today, then up a fire road.

A really good weekend so far!!! And I got to come back and shower off the camping yuck feel, and catch up with my loved ones online!!!
Life is good!!!

Hey everybody!!! I gotta get going but I had something exciting happen this morning!!! My youngest took his first dump in the toilet!!!

There he goes!!! OK, see if my HTML junk works OK in here or what, I've noticed mistakes before and have yet to figure out how to edit stuff on here.

I also updated my wallpaper page this morning. Pretty cool picture from the L.A. Times, I used yellow text to go with their yellow journalisim!!! Last night at class I set Highway None, a previous selection, as my wallpaper and the teacher came to help me with printer problems and was tripping on it.

Damnit Lilly I wanna play wit you and Granny while you're all 12-packed up!!! I'd head back tomorrow night early enough to catch yalls, but sounds like you'll be at a kid's party. Oh well, I'll have fun with you later on, and I'll have some fun of my own anyhow!!!

Let the Weekend Begin!!!

Today was a pretty good day. Woke up kinda late, but still managed to get in my 40 hours this week, even leaving kinda short today to get to school. I kept busy enough at work, but not too busy, but not to where I'll be getting behind. I wrote a little simple program for a collet holder tool, not even a hundred lines, and cut it out. Basically a big hole cut all the way thru a block of aluminum, with an even larger hole stepped out halfway through, and a couple of slots cut in either side. I came out great!!! The owner is going to call a guy to come out and give my baby some love, hopefully fix the inverter problem its having, so that's good news.

Class went well tonight, except we were having a lecture to start out with tonight, and I was having trouble staying awake for that!!! Funny how I'm having no such trouble now. Sammy was going around all tired all day today, and didn't come tonight. I think he's flaking out, but hey, that's his prerogative.

taking my firstborn up camping for sure tomorrow. My dad is going to pick up my nephew and bring him up, too. Not sure if we'll just stay overnight then hike to the falls the next day and come home, or if it'll be two nights. We'll see how it goes.

No Cure For Blog Addiction

Well my ladies Lilly and Granny are getting their MySpace pages all done up nice now!!! I hadn't even realized Lilly's tiger is named "Pisspot" until later!!! Maybe if I'd noticed that before I wouldn't have poked him in the butt with my cursor so much!!! Very cool that I was able to finally check out Granny's stuff. Interesting tho, that the comment she posted for me to check it out was attached to a blog post I did back on August 31st!!! Just maybe she hasn't gotten EVERYTHING quite figured out...

I got in touch with my nephew yesterday and scheduled for us to go flying around for a while on Sammy's birthday, a week from this Friday. I gotta get him something else too tho, after how he did it up for my birthday. Ironic that the very day after I get that set up there's a Jet Blue flight that has a landing gear malfunction and has to make an emergency landing. At LAX, no less, an airport that they don't even fly out of!!! One thing I hadn't thought of, all the seats on Jet Blue have DirectTV screens on them!!! You could watch your flight going down in flames!!! Fortunately, the pilot did an excellent job sticking the landing, didn't even buckle the front gear as most commentators thought would likely happen!!! Good job!!! I like Jet Blue a lot, I think its the best airline I've ever flown on. I just wish they had more routes and flight times.

Another interesting thing in the news about the Harbor City gator Reggie, they had a guy who'd been displaced out of the swamps of Louisiana here who said he could get him. They sent him packing tho, due to his not having liability insurance. Ummmm, isn't a gator in your lake something of a liability already??? Anyway, he called the boat that the other gator wranglers from Florida had "retarded" LMAO!!! That was yesterday. Today in the paper the wranglers from Florida were reported to be heading home. Apparently they took offense to their boat being called retarded!!! No lie, that was the gist of the article!!!

I can't believe I forgot...

Yesterday was talk like a pirate day, and I didn't once use the catch-all pirate phrase "AYE!!!"

I had a hard time getting out of work tonight, some asshole had parked in front of the driveway. Took three different numbers before I finally got in touch with parking enforcement. They said they were sending someone out, but 20 minutes later they hadn't gotten there. Shortly after that asshole took off, so all's well that ended well. I wouldn't have been so pissed if I'd still been on the clock :Þ Next time that shit happens I'm breaking out the forklift!!!

I tried to see Granny's page and see if she had any new stuff on her page or blog, but it said it was undergoing maintenance. WHAAAAAA!!!

Is there such a thing as blog addiction???

Avast, Me Mateys!!!

Yarrrrr!!! I heard on a couple of the radio stations today that today is 'talk like a pirate day'!!! I thought that was so appropriate on the day after I added the "what kind of pirate am I?" quiz on my MySpace site!!! Unfortunately, there are not enough responses to find out yet. Shiver me timbers!!!

It was a stupid day at work. I finished the tool I've been working on since two Fridays ago this morning, and I'm quite pleased with the results. I was even able to plot out the die line for Sammy to cut. OK, hold on, this is where things get stupid!!! We don't have the material in stock to run it!!! We'll have it towards the end of the day, OK, no biggie. The pressure box we have isn't the right length. More of a biggie. The trim station top is too wide to cut against.... not a huge problem, but one more thing that must be done. The bottom trim station doesn't have the proper size legs. Fairly major problem. This job has been in the works ten days that I know of, I'm positive at least one more than that, and it takes until NOW to take a look at these minor details???

When I got home from work tonight there was a Sunday New York Times in my driveway. I had to wonder why anyone would get the New York Times in L.A.??? Less yellow journalism and media bias??? Not likely.

I just went outside and turned the sprinklers off, and wouldn't you know it, its RAINING!!!

My oldest's comp has gremlins. On Thursday I found out he's got some kind of boot sector failure. I put in a different hard drive (couldn't find the one he used to have in there that may or may not have had a workable operating system on it) and ghosted a clean operating system onto it. I updated it on the microsoft site, and now the damned internet explorer doesn't work right. And it spontaneously reboots, although I've gotten that problem largely reduced. Major pain in the ass, now I know why people hate microsoft!!!

I'm glad to see Granny is figuring out how to do stuff on MySpace. I see she has a video and a kitty on there now. Way to go, girl!!!

New Theme Music For ÃÝË!!!

Well, if you read my last post here and were wondering, no, I did not end up going camping today. After therapy I had to go and get a wilderness pass (I paid $30.00 for the one year pass, I intend to camp at least one other time this year) and then to Fry's Electronics cuz they had McAffe virus scan plus firewall for free after rebates, and by the time I made it home it was 6:00 and starting to get dark. We'll go next weekend, right after school gets out instead. My virus scan has been reminding me for the last 6 months or so that it's expired. Don't know why I buy it, I use the free online scanners at Trend Micro and Panda, as well as using Ad Aware and they all seem to catch and clean stuff as well as or better than McAffe's does. Guess it's because it's been pretty much free to update it ever since I got my first comp in '99.

Hey, if you looked at my profile on MySpace, I figured out how to do cool stuff with it!!! If you noticed, its sinister now!!! (Sinister being from the Latin meaning "left handed", just something I learned from watching The Simpsons. Educational as well as entertaining!!!) I found this Site that easily generates the HTML to change your shit around. All I was really looking for was WHERE to insert the tag for the background color (you know, grey is my favorite color) and I found it. Apparently all you have to do is put your HTML tags in the "about me" place on your profile edit. But, that site you can change alot of stuff up, so I did!!! Another thing I found is a site that hosts a bunch of music videos to paste into your music area. If you noticed, I've got "Mr. Brightside" in there now. Love that tune!!! My new theme song, huh??? That one and "Sugar We're Going Down" by Fallout Boy, but they didn't have a video for that. Mmmmmm, going down..... "Wishing to be the friction in your jeans" YEAH!!! Rock on, Fallout Boy!!!

I finished up cutting the tool I was making at work. It came out great, but my machine is indeed fucked up, most likely from our power outage. The owner filed a claim with the LA DWP over it, but probably they won't do anything. I was able to manually edit my program and cut the time it took to cut in half!!! I'm really getting the hang of it now!!! Anyway, the fuckup of which I spoke is the inverter that I mentioned in my last post. I have to shut down the machine (manually with a big knife switch, seems so wrong to shut down a comp, albeit a rudimentary one, like that!!!) after every spindle shut down. $6000.00 for a replacement inverter. My poor baby needs some LOVIN'!!! We'll see if our guy can handle fixing it up first. MAINTENANCE!!!

Since we didn't get to camping tonight, I made up a little camp fire in my old barbecue and we all toasted marshmallows over it. It's a really good night out, not too cold, clear, and a full moon!!! It was my youngest's first time even seeing a camp fire, and having toasted marshmallows, and he really enjoyed it.

Blackout Revisited

I didn't make mention here of the famous L.A. blackout on Monday. It didn't affect me a whole lot, or so it seemed.... The power at work was only off for less than I minute I'd guess (as opposed to by my home, where it must have been out for 15 minutes or more. My youngest boy is potty training, and he enjoyed sitting in the bathroom with a candle going, I hear) I had my CNC on, but not running when the juice cut out, and just a bit after it came back on Tom (Sammy's dad) notices there's smoke coming out of the top of it!!! I bust ass over there and cut the power, and get a look at where its coming from. On the top of the back panel there's a punched metal enclosure, and it looks like a rod like a heating element in there. Its glowing red, and there's even a little fire burning on one end. After it burns itself out I look inside the panel, and there's only two wires going up there, and the closer I look the more it looks like a heating element!!! I was leery of turning it back on, so I called tech support and asked 'em what the heating element on the top of the thing is. Turns out its some kind of thing to dissipate the charge in the power inverter that does the speed control for the motor. They said to go ahead and turn it back on, and if it doesn't work I'm gonna need a new inverter. I turn it on, and everything seemed fine. I finished writing the proggie I was working on, and ended up running it yesterday (typical stupid shit at my work, this is a priority job, yet I didn't end up getting the metal to cut it into, ready since Monday morning, until after 4:00 yesterday!!! Don't come bitching to me....) Anyway, yesterday night I ended up cutting nearly half of the tool, the first actual milling that I've done on CNC, a big thrill for me!!! I was very pleased with the results. Got in today and finished the half I was working on today, moved my fixturing around and roughed the other half. I'd been thinking of a way to clean up the program and speed things up, so I stopped at this point and modified it. Afterwards I went to run it, but I ended up getting an error message:

INVERTER ERROR
INVERTER ERROR
INVERTER ERROR
INVERTER ERROR
INVERTER ERROR
INVERTER ERROR
INVERTER ERROR
INVERTER ERROR
INVERTER ERROR
INVERTER ERROR
INVERTER ERROR
INVERTER ERROR

Damit!!! Strange that would happen after working fine for more than a day...

I went over to my parent's house after work today to get sleeping bags. I'm planning on taking my firstborn camping this weekend. The street in front of their house has been tore up for a few weeks, because there was a low spot in front of their house that was always wet, and usually green and scummy. Perfect place for west nile mosquitos!!! Anyway, they're putting in all new curb and gutters. My dad had the driveway widened some time ago from 2 cars to 3 cars, but he didn't have the ramp widened, having to go through permits. Well, he kept asking them about it, and they ended up making it 3 feet wider each way!!! I tell you, that's a good looking driveway ramp!!!

Last of the Mohegans

Got into work today, and Sammy told me that they'd fired Gab's ass. He was the last of five other employees who came to work at this dump when our company was bought out by them in 2000. He was always saying to me "we're the last of the Mohegans!!!!" He came in later, and I heard a quite different story from him, but oh well. He had been getting quite lackadaisical with his work, think it was time. I'm surprised he stayed on that long, he lives way the hell out there, I think around 60 miles or so.

I did as I'd wanted and got those tickets that I desired over the weekend. I've just been feeling ecstatic pretty much ever since!!! I'm SO looking forward to this!!!

It's late. I must play runescape for a bit and go to sleep.

Hey, where's my day off???

I ended up going into work today again. I miss my 3-day weekends when I do that, but it seemed like a pretty good day today anyhow. I went in and wrote a program for this tray tooling that I'll probably be making next week. Only thing is, the coolant in my Fadal needed cleaned out. Its been in there for something like 3 years or more, and it was pretty rancid. That's how I spent the later part of my day. The stuff was pretty nasty, it had a layer of oil on the top, then under that it had what looked like the skin that grows on old pudding, only slightly less appetizing. Gotta do just a little more clean up on Monday morning, then fill it up and I should be good to go.

Picked teams for he regular football season pool the other day. I stayed with my pick from last year, the Steelers. Pennsylvania has been good to me. I don't follow it that close, but I have a general idea who's got a decent team. They already beat the Patriots in pre season play, and I like their schedule for regular season play. If Ben Roethlisberger has a year like last year, I should do well. I hope. Is 2 years in a row asking too much???

Went to school last night, and I'm learning well. Sammy and I didn't want to carpool this time, because he didn't want to end up waiting if he finished earlier. Oh well, it makes for a little quicker trip going home, not that I mind getting home a little later. He's wondering why he's going, I don't think he can picture himself programming or running the CNC. He's doing well in class so far, but I think he's wanting to punk out. I tell him its always good to have extra stuff like that in your resume, even if you don't use it.

They caught "little Reggie", the second gator of which I spoke in my last post. Didn't need the "gator rustlers" that have been trying and failing to capture the big one, just the animal control people put out a net, and then as he worked free from that the fire department snared him with a net off their big ladder. One down, one to go!!!

The Counting Crows are doing a concert with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall near the end of October. I'm considering checking out ticket prices, I'm sure it will be a great show. I can definitely picture a lot of their songs done to orchestral accompaniment!!! I made mention to my firstborn, and he expressed interest in going, too. Only thing, its on a Tuesday night, starting at 8:00. Why do they always do that??? I swear, every time I see them its on a week night!!!

There Goes The Neighborhood!!!

I heard news about the Harbor City gator today for the first time in a couple weeks. As I figured, the wiley gator is still at large (its a good sized lake) but the news is another one has been spotted in a river that feeds into the lake!!! It would appear that we have an infestation!!! Of course, it makes you wonder now, are they breeding in there or what??? As it's often said, must be something in the water!!!

I had not made mention here yet, but I made chili on Monday in my new birthday crock pot. First time I've used it. I opened up the box and checked it out when I first got it, because the box was pretty beat up, but I didn't take it out of the plastic wraps or styrofoam. I was just making sure the lid and pot weren't broken. Well, getting a better look at it, it's all dented up on the outside!!! One of the stamped feet is a little collapsed, pushing up the inside, and the sides are wrinkled on the back. But the stoneware still fits down inside fine, and it works fine. I tell ya, every time I make it it comes out better!!! This is the best chili I've ever made, and I said the same thing last time, too!!! This time was better!!! I think it has a lot to do with cooking it with Heineken Dark beer, it has a great flavor when you drink it, and I think that translates well into the cooking too. I think it's my new favorite beer, I just wish it didn't cost so much. Well, I guess you get what you pay for!!!

Holy Guacamole!!!

I discovered something very cool today. I was out doing some of the constantly required yardwork, and my youngest comes up to me with this dried up seed pod looking thing and asks me what it is. I tell him its a seed pod of some kind. Just a bit after that I found another one, only it was split open, and I could see the seed. Turns out to be an avocado!!! I've known that I had an avocado tree since I moved in, but I thought it needed a fertile branch grafted in so it would produce. This is the first time in the 10 years I've had this house that it's ever produced fruit!!! I picked 9 more. I'm going to have to top and shape it some now, I think. Well, maybe after this season is completely over. It had been cut down in the past, and it's grown a new tree out of the stump of the old one, so maybe it was just still getting over the trauma of having been cut down. My wife had just been saying how she wished we had an avocado tree that produced, and I was saying I think ours needs fertilized. Anyway, I see guacamole in my future!!!

Speaking of yardwork, I found the receipt for that piece of shit Toro weed eater last week. (if your not familiar, you can click here to read about it) I didn't think I had saved it. Just for kicks, I took it back to home depot to get my money back, already thinking I'd be wasting my time. After standing in line for too long I got my turn. I put it on the counter, and I swear, the bubblehead chick running the return desk looks at the 4 or 5 pieces and then at me, and asks me, "what's wrong with it???" I was nearly speechless!!! She had to call a rep from the garden area, who wouldn't OK the return, so I had to talk to a manager, who also wouldn't OK a return. It would have been OK with them if I'd exchanged it for the same one.... ummm, I don't think I'd take one of those pieces of shit if you gave it to me free!!! Of course, I might could get that and return it in a couple weeks.... I do have intentions of making a pain in the ass of myself over it, at my convince, of course. I knew I had to share all that with you when it happened!!!

Has Anyone Else Made This Connection???

All the talk and images about Hurricane Katrina keeps triggering one of those thought-association thingys with me. Does anyone else remember the one-hit wonder "Walking on Sunshine" by Katrina and the Waves???

The hurricane has spawned an amazing amount of people saying idiotic things along with all the misery and destruction. One of the most off the wall comments was one I heard from a pastor at one of the AME churches, where they were having a rally about the "police brutality" suffered by Tony Muhammad of the nation of islam. I wish I knew who said it so it could be properly credited here. The pastor was asking if anyone had made the connection that the hurricane had a sista's name, and it occurred 50 years after the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi. He pretty much said that it was the spirits of all the mothers of slain black youth come to wreak vengeance. Yea, sure, that's it!!! That's why it only caused death and destruction of whitey and his property, huh???

Another prime example was by New Orleans Mayor Ray C Nagin, who, during an otherwise very lucid speech on CNN, was talking about the looting and lawlessness. He claimed that it was being committed by "a very small majority". Point taken, but hey, Mr. Mayor, contradiction in terms!!!

OK, now that I've shared some stupidity for your entertainment, CLICK HERE TO DONATE!!!