Handyman

One of the things that we did last weekend was my Mother-in-Law, Nana gave me the rest of her late husband’s (Boompa) power tools. I was glad to get the stuff of course but it was very sad because she bought all of the tools for him over the years for Birthdays, Christmas, Anniversary, and just because. He wasn’t the greatest handyman in the world but he took great delight in all his tools. Anyway, it was sad for everybody that day. Sweetie went through his office and that was was also very sad and brought back lots of memories.

Saturday night we drove home and I piled all the stuff in the garage. Sunday, after church I came home and looked at it. I absolutely hate a sitation where I can’t park my truck in the garage. The Cowboys weren’t playing until 3 and I put it on the DVR.

It was a lot of stuff. Really good stuff. I wanted to keep it, and we don’t have any extra room and so a lot of existing stuff had to go.

Getting rid of stuff is liberating. After I’m done getting rid of stuff I feel great, like coming home and taking a shower after a two night camping trip.

We have some really heavy duty steel shelves. I took everything off of them and then removed a shelf from one of them to handle the taller tools.

To make a base for the tools I used some particle board left by the contractor who built our house (8 years ago). So I pulled out all the stops. I had my table saw, a hand held rotary saw, and a jig saw. I was out there making very loud manly noises (power tool noises, not passing gas noises) that sent my only son screaming into the house covering his ears.

All this produced two boards, about 15″ x 34″ in dimensions, notched in the corners. Pretty impressive huh. Give me enough time, I could build a house, er maybe a bird house. Maybe.

So, my new stuff now has a home. I’m so proud.


Then the fun started. In order to keep the same amount of stuff I had to throw a lot away. Things I had not used in 20 years. I just chucked it. Sweetie came out and joined the party and started chucking bunches of her stuff. It was great. We filled up our large Home Depot garbage can and 7 large garbage bags.

After we were done then I put all the remaing items away and the only thing left to do was sweep the saw dust out. That was a job for SuperPizzaBoy. He rejected his dumb old Dad’s instruction and did it ‘his way.”

Pull In!

Push Out!

Repeat.
My father is probably laughing his head off.
Oh, I think its time, its time to pour a cold one. switch on the DVR and watch the Cowboys lose to Washington.

Blog Ministry

I haven’t blogged in a few days. I hadn’t really felt like it. Last Friday night I received a registered letter from the state (is it just me or does no good news ever come by registered letter?) that informed by that I was losing my dweeb certification, oops, I mean Professional Engineer’s License because I had not passed an audit on my continuing education hours.

I was dumbfounded. I had sat through numerous seminars hearing about the poetry of subcooled reflux, the music of advanced feedforward control systems, and art of molecular sieve regeneration, all for the only purpose of grabbing the little CE certificates that they pass out at the end of the seminars. I had saved those certificates, and made copies just in case I lost the originals and scanned those and saved on two separate computers. Because you have to have those for the random audits the state performs. I was about the only person I knew that had not been audited yet so I knew it was coming and I WAS READY, BRING IT ON!

They did. I got a registered letter this past summer telling me that I was being audited and what I needed to do. So I put my stuff together, gathered up all my certificates and even included little notes on the certificates indicating what CE log entries they corresponded to. I sent it off to them and didn’t give it a second thought until last Friday.

Then Friday the shock. I don’t really understand why they didn’t take the stuff but I’ll deal with it. I couldn’t do anything right then because I had to take SuperPizzaBoy down to Southeast OK to meet up with Sweetie and her Mom, (SPB’s “Nana”).

Saturday, wasn’t a great day either. I’ll just leave it at that.

We drove back home Saturday night. Sunday morning, we had an issue with SuperPizzaBoy. Not a real big deal but he kind of escalated it by not taking responsibility for what he did. That didn’t help the outlook. Then the poor child said he wanted a friend to come over, we told him that we had a lot of stuff to do and that maybe he could help. Then he said that he wasn’t going to do “woman’s work.” That got everything going again!

So then I did my morning routine, used to be I made the coffee and opened up the paper. Now, the paper can wait, I read Baloney’s blog and then play her daily trivia quiz. Sunday she had a few kind words to say about me. Of course as self centered as I am that made my day. The other stuff is still there but things brightened up for me with her comments. We all like scratched behind the ears every now and then, right? Baloney is kind of like that I think. She just passes out electronic noogies left and right, brightening up everybody’s day so I’m beginning to think of her blog as a blog ministry.

She might need counseling in the area of appropriate photography in bathrooms, bathtubs, and dressing rooms, her love of “bad photos” and the use pictures of naked and practically naked people on the internet but we all have our challenges. Plus I’m still kind of confused by the slacks underneath dresses type fashion phase she went through but as Sweetie would tell me, those who live in glass houses…”

Anyway, her few words brightened up my day and I was able to even get through Dallas losing to the Redskins without breaking anything.

She had awarded me one of seven awards to other bloggers. So I get to proudly display the accompanying logo. I don’t really know 7 bloggers, so I am going to award one and hold the other six and dole them out as time goes by.

The rules of this award are:

1. The winner can (and should, really) put the logo on their blog.
2. The winner must link to the person from whom they received their award.
3. The winner must nominate at least 7 other blogs for an award.
4. The winner must place links to those blogs on their own blog.
5. The winner must leave a message on the blogs of the people they’ve nominated.

Drum roll please.

I make my one award to my niece Dana who is living and working down in Australia. She doesn’t post very much (hint to you Dana) but what she does say is very interesting to me. She is one of my top three nieces and the oldest as well as being one smart cookie. Dana and her two sisters, Mary, and Jillian are all smart as whips and are sweet as can be, most of the time, at least when they are around their dweeby uncle. Of course I’m prejudiced, but I’m also right.

South Tulsa Running Route #1

Last Wednesday I got a kitchen pass from Sweetie to go running after work. I generally run on Wednesday but this summer we changed it up and we had a lot of fun biking after work. School has started though and it is getting dark so no more biking. Plus the Tulsa Run is in a month.

The Tulsa Run 15K is the run I look forward to all year. I have run 14 of them. This year will be my 15th in a row. A couple times I’ve run the race, skipped the complimentery beer, ran home, changed and raced to the airport to catch a flight. Once to go to a friends 50th birthday party in Houston and the second time to go to my parents 50th Wedding Anniversary celebration in Scottsdale.

Anyway, back to the task at hand. The race is 9.3 miles long. The longest I’ve run lately is 5. So I have to start increasing the mileage at least once a week.

I was going to run on the Arkansas River trail after work. I went to the parking lot where I change and notice I didn’t have the right shoes. 10 years ago I would have just gone ahead with the wrong shoes. I have put about 10,000 miles (no lie) on my feet since then. So now, I go home and get the right shoes.

I didn’t want to drive all the way back to the river so I ran my favorite route in South Tulsa but went a mile further than usual. Its the route I run in the morning. It is pitch dark at 5:15 in the morning so it was kind of neat running it when I could see it!

Tulsa has got some great trails. Most people think all they have is the Arkansas River trails. Not so, there are other trails that are relatively new. I try and tell people about them, and most don’t believe me. I think only about one person in a 100 knows abut them.

Below is where I start, at a community college. See how nice the trail is?

Below is a half mile further south.

This is under an overpass. In the dark, this is pitch dark. For some reason the story about the trolls and the tolls comes to mind here. I’m leery of bike riders shooting through taking the corner wide.
I love this bridge across the creek. Before they put it in I had to hop across rocks in the creek. SuperPizzaBoy and I have a geocache near here. Not many people bother to look for it. Too bad for them. Its on several people’s favorites list.
SPB and I have seen several good size snakes near here. Were they poisonous? You go see and then we’ll both know.

I love fountains and water features.
Another water feature.

Underneath one of the overpasses a geocaching friend has a cache. I had looked for it but it is kind of hard in the dark of the early morning especially in snake country. Plus it is under the overpass. The GPS doesn’t work! That means I have to look!

I found it tonight! Here is a picture.

The cacher’s name is Jeff. His geocaching name is “Captain Crash and the Beauty Queen from Heaven.” Jeff is Captain Crash and his wife is the Beauty Queen. They sign their caches and logs “CCATBQFH.”

Before he got married Jeff was JPENN. He and SuperPizzaBoy are friends. SPB calls Jeff his “Arch Nemesis” and is plotting his revenge.

It is a long story involving a “Fear Factor Cache” that had snakes, tarantula’s, hissing cockroaches (I’m not kidding) that Jeff talked SPB into opening. SPB screamed and ran a quarter mile down a road (again I’m not kidding, SPB had an audience and he played it for all it was worth). So they bonded.

Jeff is president of TAG, the Tulsa Area Geocachers. They meet once a month. They love SPB. With soccer and scouts we don’t make many meetings but SPB gets a warm welcome when we show up, “Hey, its Pizza Boy!”

They get him.

They have no idea how that makes me feel.

TAG is having their Fall Fest in a few weeks at Western Hills State Park. We’ll be there.

To finish up, I come across the tracks shown below. They are pretty sizeable. Is there a Den Mom or somebody out there that knows what made the tracks? They don’t match anything in SPB’s Cub Scout Book.


Geocaching on the Sly

Sometimes when the family has a busy schedule and there are lots of chores to do and you want to go geocaching you have to sneak in one or two as you can.

Last week I was at an industry function near Tulsa. They had a scramble golf tournament. I didn’t play very well. I’m a miserable player on my best day, on an off day, it is kind of ugly. Oh well. I finished. I was all hot, dirty, and sweaty anyway. So fire up the GPS and lets go find a few caches.

I found three including the one below. Very cool. It is at a model airplane airfield in East Tulsa. The club has their own cache off in the woods.

Last Sunday I went on an errand to the ToysR Us in East Tulsa to fetch a WiiFit. We’ve been wanting one bad. The store close to the house at zero. The East Tulsa store has 16.

Picked it up, turned on the GPS. Hey there is a microcache in their parking lot. Found it, check one. Hey there is one at a detention pond on the way home. That is the one below. Off to the right is my GPS on the ground. Check two. Turn off GPS, have to go to another store for batteries.

As an aside, both of these caches use “parallel stick camouflage.” I use it myself. Not very effective.

On the sly is how I find most of them these days. I’m ok with that. I would have to drive a ways to go find a bunch since I’ve found almost all of them in town. Cachers call hunting for mass caches a “cache machine.” They will go find maybe 50 in a day. Too much like work. The most I’ve ever found in a day was 15. A couple years ago the family found 10 in a few hours at Skiatook State Park on one of those sunny warm winter days we get every now and then. Sweetie is good at spotting caches. My brother in law and I found about a dozen or so in a few hours one day in Idaho a couple years ago.

PS: On the WiiFit. On the initial evaluation my Wii Age was -8. That made me pretty happy.

Gadgets

To be a true geek you have to have lots of gadgets. Plus you have to know how to use them. You also have to be very self absorbed. This post proves that for me.

The collage below shows just a few in our household. My latest is a weather station in our backyard. It is solar powered and has a wireless connection to a console in the house. It measures temperature, inside and outside, rainfall, wind direction, barometric pressure. The whole deal. I’m always giving Sweetie updates on the weather. She acts like she doesn’t appreciate them. But I know that she does. The next step is to tie it to a computer and have a weather station on the internet at www.weatherunderground.com. I’m going to use the old PC upstairs for that.

I have a Palm Treo. So when I’m out of town I can see how Baloney and “Curt is Hot” are kicking my butt in Baloney’s online trivia game. And of course I have my laptop and SuperPizzaBoys’ alphasmart that he does his homework on.


I’ve got lots of other stuff. My Dell Digital Jukebox and my ipod. I’d die without my tunes. I have several progammable calculators. I know how to use them to. I have actually used them to design stuff and to troubleshoot problems in the field.

I have a calculator that will solve symbolic equations. You put in a quadratic equation for example and it will solve it. Don’t ask me what I use it for. I don’t use it for anything. I just have it and it makes me happy having it and knowing how to use it. Hey it will do three dimensional graphs also.

I have even more stuff. GPS systems for my geocaching and running. My satellite radio ( more tunes!). Heart rate monitors for running. Lots of stuff.

What do I like the most? The GPS. I am addicted to geocaching. What can I say.

What do I hate the most? Computers. They break my heart. They are fragile and overly complicated. Why do they have to reboot every time you turn them on? There is no reason why they can’t just turn on and run. Your car has computers in it. You don’t have to wait for them to boot up when you start your car. Your television has a computer. It doesn’t have to reboot when you turn it on to watch something.

I may be a nerd, but I know how to use my technology.

Death Magnetic Review

Metallica has a new album out, “Death Magnetic.” The first album (not counting cheesy “Live Albums'” they have had in a about 8 years.

I’ve had the album about a week and a half. I’m a “friend” of theirs on myspace. I got on their page to see what their other friends have to say. Their were over 800 comments on the day the album was released. This erudite group’s opinion was basically, “Your cd kicks ass, you guys &%*#$&^ rock!”
I think that is well put so I’ll leave it at that.

Bottom lines for me is the album has 10 tracks. Two of them, “Broken, Beat, and Scarred” and “Cyanide.” are outstanding. Two of the others, “Suicide and Redemption” and “My Apocalypse”, are not all that good to me. The first is an instrumental song. I’m old school, “Wipeout” is the only decent instrumental rock song. The other song, I just didn’t care for. The rest of the songs are worth listening to.

Sweetie swiped my Eagles CD, so I have to listen to this over and over.
Metallica is coming to Tulsa in November. I’m not going. Nope, one guy I was listening to on XM Radio station “Mandatory Metallica” said that at Metallica concerts he checks his ears periodically because he could swear that he could feel them bleeding for the volume of the sound.
Not for me.
Besides they are sold out.

Don Quixote

Sweetie and I went to the ballet Saturday night. I scored some tickets to Don Quixote by the Tulsa Ballet. The plan was to get a sitter for the boy and then Sweetie and I would have dinner and go to the Ballet.

You see, our 19th Anniversary was last week but we had some civic duties to perform. At least she did, I was support. So I thought that we would have a late celebration.

The babysitter was supposed to show up at 6 pm. At 6:10 Sweetie called her friend Karen. Help! We packed SuperPizzaBoy up and dropped him off. He was happy because he would be with his friend “N.” Not too happy once he found out the family was going to dust Saturday night. Oh well.

For dinner, Sweetie and I had some of SPB’s pizza. Hey the baby sitter not showing up saved us a lot of money.

The Ballet was great. I’ve seen a little bit of ballet, especially when we lived in Oklahoma City, but I don’t know the first thing about it. So to poor old hick son of Forest Ranger me a ballet is great if I enjoyed it. I enjoyed this one. It was over before I knew it.

The music was great (at least it was live), the costuming was very colorful, the set was great. The emaciated long necked women dancers (“elnwds”) danced gracefully. The lead ballerina especially was probably the best I’ve ever seen. She stole the show in my opinion. She is the Michael Jordan of Tulsa Ballet! The underfed but muscled up male dancers did their best lifting the elnwds effortlessly and doing what few moves they were assigned.

We really enjoyed it. We left a little early to pick up SPB. He was very tired.

I’m determined to take Sweetie out to dinner to celebrate our 19th! The force is trying to prevent us.

Views at Work

When I started this blog I promised “Views from work.” I haven’t done any except for an extended business trip last month.
I work for an old school type company. I like them but they have a few quirks. One of the quirks is that no cubicles can face a window. I guess that it is to be fair since lots of cubicles face other cubicles. Another rule is that no woman can be in a cubicle within two cubicles of a men’s restroom.
Anyways, cubicle farms are just they way it is corporate America and in my line of work they are handy because our Account Managers have to be aware of what their peers are doing. Plus we don’t have staff meetings. We have all day all week staff meetings.
Plus we know the state of each other’s marriages, how the kids are doing, medical conditions and all that other stuff.
Anyway, a few years ago my boss at the time said that he would try to get me and another manager cubicles with a view if we wanted. What a deal so we two have the only cubicles with a view in the company.
I’ll give you a tour!
The Beautiful New BOK Center.
Metallica is coming in November,
They are already sold out! Sorry
The City County Complex. The high rise in the middle is vacant, City Hall is moved across downtown.
The Doubletree Hotel and various apartment buildings.
The building at the bottom is the downtown YMCA.
It will be gone in three years.

A view south along Cheyenne.

The river is in the middle distance.

What do I see when I turn around?

Pretty messy uh?

You should have seen it before I decluttered for the photo!
I’ve got a refrigerator and a coffee pot.
I have people come by for my Atomic Fireballs,
SuperPizzaBoy loves them.
People ask if they are free. I tell them only if you don’t take them out
of your mouth.
They are $100 each otherwise.
Only about one out person out five of survives the challenge.
Nobody has paid up yet though.

Book Review “Strip Tease” by Carl Hiaasen

I picked up a paperback copy of this book to take on vacation. I usually take library books but I wanted to cut down the weight. I didn’t get around to reading it until just now.

I like Carl Hiaasen and have read and enjoyed several of his books including his young adult novels like “Hoot.”

“Strip Tease” is what I call a “Corner Chucker.” A Corner Chucker is a book that is not so bad that you can just put it down. You like something about it but don’t want to continue reading it. So years ago, before I discovered free books at the library, Sweetie and I would be in bed reading at night and I would just launch such a book to the corner of the room, startling Sweetie and scattering our various dogs and cats. It was my way of pyschologically separating myself from the book.

I wanted to like this book but I chucked it at about page 238. I didn’t like the last 220 pages. The book is about a nude dancer named Erin who works at a bar called the Eager Beaver trying to earn enough money to pay a lawyer to get custody of her child back. She gets involved in all sorts of escapades. The book has no sex scenes, just lots of naked dancers and a whole bunch of leering adolescent jokes and asides. Meanwhile the story didn’t go anywhere and many of the events taking place didn’t make sense.

So I chucked it.

I give this book one star out of four.

I’m reading “Loving Frank” by Nancy Horan now. I hope that I finish it. Its not a library book. I hope that I don’t have to chuck it also.

Book Review “Children of the Lamp” by P.B. Kerr

One of the things that Sweetie and I have done right is reading to our son SuperPizzaBoy. He had a story read to him the day he was born and every night at bedtime his entire life. He has not missed 10 bedtime stories his entire life. We have done the gamut from “Goodnight Moon” to “Treasure Island” to Bible Stories to “Hank the Cowdog.” . The only thing that I have refused to read to him is Bionicle and Pokemon stories.

When he was younger I read to him maybe 80% of the time. Now its about 40% of the time. He seems to prefer his Mom reading to him. I’ll admit she is much sweeter and better smelling than I am. Still he lets me read me read to him some. It is one of the highlights of my day.

Our most recent book is “Children of the Lamp, the Akenaten Adventure.” I read about 60% of it to him, Sweetie some, and SPB read a lot of it on his own.

I think that has made him a reader which will always serve him well.

It is about two kids, John and Philippa, who find out when they have their wisdom teeth pulled that they are genies (djinn in the book). They learn how to grant wishes, and spend time in bottles, and all sorts of other mystical powers.

They soon find themselves in Egypt dealing with the balance of power between good and evil in the world and the evil ghost of Akhenaten. I don’t want to spoil it but their is plenty of adventure in here for kids and it is written well enough to keep Dad interested.

This book is excellent for reading aloud. The voice cues are appropriate. One of my pet peeves is dialogue that reads “Lets get out of the cave, go down the road, and cross the bridge”, he whispered. So that you find out you are supposed to whisper the line when you get through reading it. Drives me crazy. This book lets you know up front how to read such lines. I just believe that when you are reading to a kid you have to sell it. The more over the top the reader is, the more SPB likes it.

I recomend this book highly for kids who love adventure. I give it four stars out of four.