Tag Archives: Personal Blather

A simple thing to bear in mind: When the guy who shows up to repair your furnace has no eyebrows, it’s probably a bad sign.

I sometimes wonder if there’s an unwritten rule for businesses mandating that you must have at least one incompetent person on staff who must be sent out on service calls at least once a month. As has been related elsewhere, the furnace at the condo has been acting up and it took several visits from several people to get it up and toasting again.
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Songs which are funnier, though less romantic, when, in the title and lyrics, the word “Love” is replaced with the word “Pants”:

A Groovy Kind of Pants
Addicted to Pants
All You Need Is Pants
Bye Bye Pants
Endless Pants
Hang on to Your Pants
I Want to Know What Pants Is
Pants in an Elevator
Pants Shack
Pants Will Find a Way
Sea of Pants
The Power of Pants
To Sir With Pants

Just got back from running Rob & Joanna to the airport to catch their flight out to Egypt. They were supposed to fly out last night, but their flight was delayed for a day due to mechanical problems… For them that just meant a complimentary car ride home and another day to pack last minute stuff, but there were a lot of unamused people for whom Detroit was just a connection. They wound up getting shuffled into hotel rooms for the night. And a happy Valentines day to all of them…
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When you were a kid, and you had a vacation, you spent a lot of time doing nothing. As an adult with vacation time, I’m finding it hard to fall into that old pattern. There’s always stuff to do… For example, I’ve already gotten the week’s shopping done. I’ve got a crock pot going with dinner for tonight. I’ve replaced the ceiling light fixture in the kitchen, and I’m getting ready to put together a set of shelves that just arrived.
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So, I got a nice little e-mail yesterday from the section administrator… I’m over the maximum number of allowable vacation hours. Unfortunately, around these parts vacation is a ‘use it or lose it’ commodity. My wife and I have honeymoon plans for this summer which should clip a couple weeks off my total, but until then I need to start taking at least two vacation days every month, just to keep even with the rate at which I’m accumulating it.
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It’s interesting to me to see what sort of things crop up in the access log for search terms. One of the hardier perennials has got to be the Poloris Dental Poultice that I found in my bathroom wall while doing some remodeling. Every two or three months, I get people asking about where to find them. As far as I know, they’re no longer commercially available. In fact, the only listings I’ve found for them, other than this site, have been on sites that sell antiquities and dental ephemera.
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Sometimes I worry that I’m a little bit of a packrat. On the other hand, it’d take a lifetime of work before I got to be as bad as some people.

I think I’m going to go home tonight and start throwing stuff away…

Found a link on DECAFBAD to a site that generates random cinematic names for various Kung Fu strikes and forms… Here’s a random sample from the 500 or so names that it generated for me:

mighty snake punch
(Mmmm…. Snake punch…. Mighty tasty!)

dreaded chopstick neck-snap
(Yep. Sounds pretty dreadful to me…)

dreaded wind maneuver
(Well I’m sorry, sometimes spicy food does that to me.)

screaming rat shield
(I certainly wouldn’t want to hit someone hiding behind some screaming rats.)

impossible cat twist
(I’ve seen that! Usually when one of the wierdos falls off the couch…)

emasculating hawk somersault
(Ow. Just… ow….)

drunken buddha rebuke
(Listen, Buddha, we’re your friends, and we need to talk about your drinking…)

naughty zodiac pose
(Hey now! It’s not that kind of movie!)

I’ve got a bit of a video project in the office right now… I’m digitizing a video from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety called “Otto the Auto – Rachel in Space.” It’s a tape from one of those movies that you used to watch in school. It was always kind of cool to walk into the classroom and see that things were set up to watch a film. All the blinds would be closed and the teacher would thread the film into the strange mirror-box projection system set up in front of the desks, smelling of greasy dust and hot projector bulbs. There’d be a rumbling “BLAAAAT!!” sound from the speaker, the film would start, and the enthusiasm would drain right out of the room as we watched “Living with Leeches” or “Your Friend the Mollusk”.
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