Danger! Offensive comments ahead!
day to day life
A lot can happen in 4 months…
Jan 3rd
Like, the cat you thought was eaten by a coyote can end up at someone’s house, they can call your vet because of the rabies tag, and you can get notified that your cat still exists. After 4 months! Holy crap that’s a long time for a cat to go missing and then magically turn up.
Laptop is broken
Dec 28th
After two days of drying, we tried to power up ryeth’s laptop and it has very serious screen artifacts. If I attempt to fix it myself, the warranty gets voided. If I send it in, it’s on our dime. She’s screwed. We’ll probably send it in since once they fix this, they will honor the rest of the 310 days of warranty (according to the tech support person I talked to). Probably gonna be expensive though. We’ll see when we send it off 
This computer incident reminds me of the time…
Dec 26th
ryeth wanted to go somewhere one day. This was about 13 or so years ago. I had been up all night working on computer stuff for work. I was dead tired, had only had about 4 hours sleep, and the car battery was dead in her 280ZX. So, she comes in and asks me instructions about how to jump start the car. I give her some quick, very groggy, instructions about look for the red wire coming from the battery to the car and hook the red jumper cable up to it, and ditto for black. About 30 minutes later she wakes me up again. This is what transpires:
Her: “Doug… Sorry to wake you again, but I’ve been charging the car battery for about 30 minutes and it still won’t start.”
Me: “Does it even crank over?”
Her: “No. And there’s smoke in the car.”
Me: “Shit! What the hell!”
So, I go outside, and there isn’t a red and black cable coming from the battery. They are both black. And since they are both black, she took a stab in the dark at hooking the jumper cables up right (as opposed to either looking for the + and – symbols on the battery for the positive and negative terminals, or coming in and asking me for clarification). She got them backwards. After 30 minutes of repolarizing the battery to the wrong electrical output, she tried to start the car, and she promptly let all the magic smoke out of every electronic item in the car: the main computer, the ignition system, the fuel injection, the radio; all deader than shit.
I’m just saying….this laptop incident wouldn’t be the first magic smoke she’s set free if she indeed did so this morning. If she comes to your house sometime, you might want to hide your electronics 
Sometimes…
Dec 26th
For those of you that read both mine and ryeth’s journal and are wondering why she might be off-line for a while…
Well, she’s been feeling kinda sickly the last few days. Scratchy sore throat, cough, that sort of thing. General cold or flu. This morning, she takes a sip of her coffee, and then immediately gets one of those totally unexpected and uncontrollable coughs and spits coffee all over her laptop. We are going to need to disassemble it and clean it out to keep it from shorting and being destroyed. We’ve got it unplugged and the battery out right now, but there were some artifacts on the screen by the time we got it powered down And this is on her laptop that was an early Christmas present a month or so ago. Sometimes, you just wanna tell someone to TURN YOUR HEAD WHEN YOU COUGH! (Ok, I didn’t need all caps, but it looks better that way
Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay
Jul 31st
OK, not really much in the way of spoilers here. I just thought I would point out that the unrated version on DVD is *really* unrated. Lots of times you see a movie and you can’t tell what they had to remove to make it go from unrated to movie theater acceptable. Not with this one.
In this one, the unrated version has a scene where Harold and Kumar arrive at a friends house in Miami. And he’s busy having a bottomless party. Evidently, he thinks topless parties are too cliche. So, it’s basically one guy and about a gazillion girls….all bottomless. Lots of beaver shots, that sort of thing. Then, they one guy stands up out of the hot tub, and you get full on penis shot. Only he’s got so many pubes, the joke is either Harold or Kumar telling him that his pubes around his penis looks like Bin Laden’s beard. Laughed my ass off. Funny as hell. And my parents were watching this with Jessica and I.
Parents that are cool enough that you can watch this sort of thing and everyone laughs their ass off for the win
I’m making myself very hungry…
Jul 8th
But it’ll be about 8 hours before I can eat. Jessica picked up a pot roast yesterday, and last night I was flipping through recipes and ran across one that sounds absolutely wonderful. So, today I went and got the ingredients we didn’t have and I’ve got the pot roast in the slow cooker, with about 8 hours until it’s done. I’m actually mixing two distinctly different recipes into one and I hope it turns out. Here’s what I’m doing:
First, lightly oil the inside of a slow cooker. Then, in the bottom of the slow cooker place 1 bag baby carrots, about 5 medium potatoes quartered, 1 onion quartered and separated, and about 12 ounces of beef stock (save the other 4 ounces of beef stock in the fridge until the end). Mix all these together well and then level them out so they form a flat surface to place the roast on.
Next, in a bowl mix up 1/4 cup chopped parsley, 1/4 cup chopped oregano, 1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary leaves, 1 or 2 teaspoons of minced garlic (I actually take the minced garlic and run it through a garlic press to release more of the garlic flavor), and 1 tablespoon oil.
Then take a 2 or 3 pound roast, rub salt and pepper into the roast, place the roast on top of the veggies in the slow cooker, then press the herb mixture into the top and sides of the roast.
Next, open a package of thick sliced bacon and wrap the bacon slices over the top of the roast, tucking the ends under the bottom edge of the roast. The recipe called for 6 slices of bacon, but the package had 9 so I just used the entire package of bacon, overlapping each slice slightly so they would all fit on the roast.
You cook that for 8 to 9 hours on low. When it’s done cooking, you remove the roast and the vegetables from the slow cooker, pour all the drippings into a skillet, mix the 1/4 beef stock you saved in the fridge with 2 tablespoons corn starch (mix thoroughly to make sure there aren’t any clumps), then add the beef stock/corn starch mixture to the skillet and cook on high heat until it thickens up to the consistency you would like, then use this as a gravy to use over the meat and/or vegetables and/or mashed potatoes should you choose to make those to go with this meal.
I’m telling you…the waiting is the hardest part…
Hehehe
Jun 10th
Saw my orthopedist today. He was supossed to assign me to physical therapy today. As he was going over my chart, I asked him “Do I really need to see anyone about P/T?” His response: “P/T is really for people that aren’t that active and need some help getting things working again after surgery. If anything, you need someone to hold you down.” Needless to say, I’m not going to any P/T
Been lazy with posting lately…a few updates.
May 24th
First, my arm is much better. I have full range of motion now in the shoulder joint itself. After the doctor told me I could move it as long as I kept to a 1 lb weight limit it had a few ways that it didn’t like to move. After a couple times of reaching for something and having it pop rather painfully, it was suddenly able to move through the full range of motion and the popping quit and totally went away. I’m happy
The only thing still wrong with my shoulder is that the pin keeps the collar bone from moving as freely as it should be able to move. Things like I can take my left hand and move it over my right shoulder and actually place it on my back. My right arm can’t do that. About the time my hand reaches my left shoulder, the pin in my collar bone starts putting pressure on the bone itself (which doesn’t feel all that good). So, shoulder joint itself moves fine, collar bone/shoulder blade junction it limited in movement by the pin. All in all, I’m happy with the recovery.
Work this week was less productive than I wanted. I had to deal with lots of email that kept interrupting my ability to get things done. On top of that, the laptop I’ve been using was OK for email and things like that, but it was too wimpy for real work. That meant I had to log into other machines to do real work, and they weren’t always available. So, today I’m trying to get some real development work done. In order to make that easier, I went to Circuit City Thursday and bought a new laptop. The one I have now isn’t one of those small, light laptops, it’s a beast! But, it kicks ass performance wise. It’s actually quite a bit more powerful than my desktop machine at work (which is a couple years old now). The laptop I got is a p4, 2.4gHz, 512MB DDR 2100 RAM, 40gb disk, dvd/cd-rw, ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 video (which Linux supports rather well, thank God) w/32MB video RAM, and the best part is the LCD panel on the laptop does a native resolution of 1400×1050 so I have *tons* of screen real estate 
Between Thursday night and last night I managed to get it installed and working the way I want so that I’m ready to actually get to work on this thing now. My one bitch about it? It’s got a full sized keyboard. Between that little Vaio I was using and the keyboard I was using on my computer prior to my accident, I’m *tired* of readjusting to different keyboard sizes and layouts. Typos suck…
One of the things I did with this laptop is to finally track down the software I need to make full use of the things I own…I can play my mp3s and dvds on this thing under linux even though rh9 doesn’t ship with software to do that. Sshhh, don’t tell anyone that I like to be able to listen to and watch the shit I’ve paid for. RIAA can kiss my ass, fair use doesn’t mean shit to them.
Finally caught up with email…
May 19th
It took forever, but I’ve finally got my email widdled down to a reasonable level. At one point in time I had over 800 emails in just one folder waiting to be read. It was a work folder too so I couldn’t just delete them all, I actually had to read them looking for information I might need or things I needed to respond to (there were several items that I had unique knowledge of and that needed my input). Anyway, now I’m all caught up on email. If you had an email in my Inbox and I didn’t respond to it, then resend your original email in case I deleted it (I deleted a lot of older emails that no longer looked relevant or important).
Warranty work is so much fun…
May 16th
Last year we had a contractor do some work on our house (ok, maybe that’s a bit of an understatement, they were here for something like a month and completely stripped all the covering off the outside of our house and our roof and put on cedar shake siding and a new roof). Part of the work was done wrong and we called them back in under warranty. So, they showed up today supossedly to do the work, but once I fully showed them what I wanted, they ended up leaving without doing anything so they could come back at a later time (when it was more dry).
Well, at least when they come back I won’t need to be here since I showed them how I wanted it fixed today.
Maybe that was a bit excessive…
Apr 28th
It’s hard to believe, but Ryeth and I finished off 3 bottles of wine yesterday just between the two of us, and we aren’t typically drinkers. It took from about 6pm until midnight, but it was still enough to make Ryeth wake up feeling a bit hung over at 7am this morning
We first had a bottle of Toad Hollow Amplexus. This is a sparkling white from Toad Hollow. The joke about this wine is that they snuck the bottle label past the wine bottle approving agency (whoever that is). Amplexus is the biological term for mating frogs So, the label on the bottle shows two frogs stepping out of a reed stand, suppossedly just after having amplexus The wine itself is a fairly dry white with a bit of an aftertaste or twang to it. I only give it a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10 since I don’t necessarily like that aftertaste.
The second bottle was Henry Estate Oregon Gewurztraminer. Again, it was a dry white with a bit of an aftertaste. Not the greatest in my books. I give it a 6 also.
The third was a Moselland ArsVitis Riesling. This one was much better. No aftertaste, lightly sweet but not so sweet as to start tasting syrupy after a few glasses. Much easier to drink. I give this one a 9. It’s the second bottle of this wine that I’ve had and both times I thoroughly enjoyed it. Last time I found it was at World Market. I’ll have to go back and look for more. I keep intending to keep a bottle around as a decorative item because it has a really pretty artistic painting on the backside of the bottle that is meant to be viewed through a clear spot in the glass on the front of the bottle with the wine acting as both a magnifier and a color adding agent, but I keep drinking it instead
Ryeth woke up feeling slightly ill, I felt fine. Hmmm…wonder if she got more of that Riesling than me or if I just had more stamina I’ll have to try and count glasses of that Riesling in my mind to make sure I didn’t get shorted. Although, I guess my slight weight advantage helps me out here too.
Getting up is a bitch…
Apr 28th
Man, it was hard to get up this morning. I had to have someone talking to me and making me a latte just to get me to pry my eyes open. Maybe Ryeth should have gotten out a Zest bar and held it under my nose to see if that really works Household science experiments can be fun…
Healing sucks…
Apr 25th
You know, they had to make an incision in my shoulder to do the surgery. In the process, they cut the nerves that ran to the downside of the incision (just the local ones running through the skin, not any big bundles of nerves or anything). Now that I’m healing, the nerves are getting reconnected differently. The sensation of touch now doesn’t feel anything like touch. Weird.
South Park…
Apr 25th
I’m so pissed. I love South Park. It is the most irreverant comedic program on TV today, and it routinely has up to date episodes that talk about things you just saw on the news a couple weeks earlier. It has respect for absolutely nothing (which is great in my mind since I have respect for next to nothing myself 
) Aside from being more funny, there is a very important reason why I appreciate South Park’s lack of respect for typically inshrined institutions in America. If you have some sort of ingrained respect for something, you tend not to look at it in an objective manner. It’s the same reason I think at least some of the theological courses in college should be taught by atheists. If you have Catholic priests always teaching you how to read the bible, they tend to perpetuate the mistakes in interpretation that they made in their lives on in the minds of their students. The Bible is, after all, the worlds largest andmost complex instruction manual, and it doesn’t come with a cross reference, an index, an easy to follow table of contents, or sidebar explanations of what things mean. That implies that a person who truly wishes to try and follow the Bible has to read different parts of it, commit them to memory (not necessarily the exact verbage, but the sentiment behind the words), then try and apply all applicable portions of the Bible to the question at hand. If you have 3 different places in the Bible that talk about some particular thing, then a life-long christian will likely have already been told how to think about that thing and will fit what those 3 places have to say to their idea of how things should be. A person with no indoctrination at all will instead apply those 3 portions of the Bible more objectively and sometimes come up with a different answer. So, getting an objective look on things is often very enlightening. In the same vien, not being reverant about things gives the same kind of fresh, objective perspective. That’s what I love most about South Park.
Now, to the reason I’m pissed. They have over 100 episodes done now and I only have about 48 on DVD. I also own every DVD they’ve put out so far. I want to know where the rest of the episodes are and when they are coming?
Hi ho, Hi ho, It’s off to work I go…
Apr 25th
Geeze….I am *SO* far behind on work. I’m basically a full 3 weeks behind on everything at work. Now I’ve got to start trying to catch things up. Then, on top of that, I’ve still got mounds of insurance paperwork and stuff like that to take care of so that all the hospitals and ambulance drivers and other people get paid for my health care. I think I need a vacation from being beat up…