wow

This really makes you think. Here is an amazing 12 year old creates inspired paintings.

down for repairs.

I called in sick today at work. I really don't like to do that, but I just feel awful. But now I am going stir crazy. I am stuck at home, and can't work on the deck or anything else. I have been going at it for so long, that I feel really uncomfortable just sitting down for a while, much less a whole day. I hope that I feel better by tomorow because this sucks.
-I had the song Red Barchetta in my head today as I was toasting an english muffin for breakfast. I wondered exactly a Barchetta looked like and googled it. I wound up at wiki and it mentioned that it was inspired by a story published in Road and Track. I followed some links and found out that Neil tried to contact the author, but could not. The guy who wrote it eventually hooked up with Neil and rode with him between concerts recently. Turns out they both rode the same BMW bike. Here. Read it your own damn self.

Well today is a bust. I felt really sick all day at work and so there is NO way I am going out into the heat and work on the deck. Man I would really like to get that done. I think my neighbors would too.
-Here is the funniest best man's speech ever. Kind of long, but worth it.

Sunday

Just because you are the CEO of an airline, does not mean you are smart enough to understand e-mail.

-Pointless but cool

-WTF? So you have this company. They make .mp3 players called i.beat. Very imaginative. Your naming protocol is such that you have made the i.beat cebrax and the i.beat organix. So now you make a smooth black one. So the logical name for it is I.BEAT BLAXX? Did nobody in the company say the damn name out loud before they went into production. Crap. Here comes Al Sharpton.

If you have not seen the ZunePhone yet here it is in all its glory.

How cool is this...

Mary noticed that there was a slip on the door and UPS tried to deliver a package to us. I had no idea what it was, but it said it was from MN. I thought maybe Stove sent me a CD or something but it said it was 14 lbs. They were closed by then, so I looked it up online. It said it was delivered to Coralville. WTF? Then Mary noticed the name Gunder on it. He is our next door neighbor. So I grabbed his ladder that I borrowed and went over. He was coming out the door with a package for me. We traded. I opened it.
It was a friggin XBOX 360.
A friend of mine at work gave me a ton of Pepsi caps with codes on them and I entered them a while back. It has been quite a while and I assumed I did not win anything. I guess I did.
Tim has a first gen Xbox in his room but the damn thing ate most of his disks. That is a bunch of crap. For some reason it scratches up the disks (at $50 a pop) when you play them.
So we went to Wally to get some games and another controller. I was amazed to find a kid there that not only knew EVERYthing about gaming, but was really exicted to talk about them.
We were going to get guitar hero, but he suggested we wait a couple of weeks and get it for the Wii. He said the Xbox guitars tend to break. He also said the Wii guitar has a wah-wah pedal and you can download your own tunes into it and play them. He also said to bring in the other Xbox and he would fix it. That was really nice to ask some kid at one of those stores a question and not find out that I know more about it then he does.

-Every once in a great while, the ACLU actually sticks up for somebody that should be helped. Sadly nobody takes them seriously since 99.325% of the time they are full of crap.

-I first saw a video of Terra Naomi on Youtube a while ago. Something about her really caught my attention with her song Say It's Possible. She had played the coffee houses and such around the city and decided to stay home and host a "virtual tour" hoping to get noticed. She did. I just saw that she played Live Earth at Wembly. Good for her. The break at 2:40 into the song is really intense. There is something very honest about her music that I just really dig. Another song of hers that I really like is The Vicodin Song.
In is great how the interweb is changing how we can access music and decide who WE think is worthy.

-I guess when you are the president of France , you get your love handles Photoshopped out when the photo gets printed in your friend's newspaper.

-Deezer streams TONS of songs to your computer fast and free. Kind of cool for here at work.

Monday

Back to work today. *ACK* It is supposed to rain all week so the deck is on hold for a while.

-This is pretty interesting. Tear apart a one dollar batter and you will find $40 worth of smaller batteries.

-I really hope THIS was not a real Cobra. Still a damn shame even if it isn't.

Thursday

Your tax dollars at work. The gubment paid almost a million dollars to ship 2 washers. Somebody goin' to jail.

-It is raining today so I am sitting inside. I loaded up some of the CRAPPY composite lumber I bought at Menards to take back. I bought 36 of them and about 12 are junk. I was in a big ass hurry to load the stuff because I thought they closed at 6 on Sunday and I had to load $1,800 worth of lumber on a trailer in 1/2 hour and nobody would friggin help me. I finally pulled out my cel-phone and was going to call them and tell them to send somebody out and the answering service told me they were open until 7:00. By then I had thrown on the 20 foot long composite decking. They were about out and there was not much to choose from anyway. The best part is that it looks different every time they get some in, so I will probably have the top deck in a two-tone.
-Here are some photos of the deck.

Here is how not to launch a 1.5 million dollar yacht. Great photos, though.

Monday..

I had to work today and stopped by Menard's on the way home. Got some screws and stuff. Then I was getting ready to go out and work on the deck when I started thinking about the total. $70.. hmm.. I looked and she charged me for 2 boxes of screws when I only got one. It was an $18 box of screws, so I will have to go talk to them about that one.

I don't know if anyone besides Stove will find this as funny as I do, but it is very well done.

Sat.

Well back to work today. Went in at 5:15 and left about 12:30. Came home and .. you guessed it.. worked on the deck. I got the last of the decking onto the lower deck today. Man it feels good to get something completed. Tomorrow I have to work so same deal. I hope to get the stairs put in to the upper deck.
I had originally put in for this vacation time right after my birthday in June. As it turns out the weather was perfect then. It was in the upper 70's and we did not even run the A/C most of the month. But I got denied. So had to wait until the hottest damn time in history to do this. I put in for 3 weeks knowing that I would have to work this weekend. So when I left 2 weeks ago I was off for the 2 weeks posted. Today I went in and noticed that I have to work Monday as well.
Crap.
So after the stairs go in I am hoping to get enough of the upper decking on to be able to set the door.
Right now I am just tired. Good night.

Monday

Man it was hot today, but I got a lot done on the deck.

-The story goes that this video was made by a MS employee who was fired as soon as they found out it was on the web. Funny though.

Sunday..

How many of these 80's commercials do you remember?

Saturday

Well it rained most of the day so there was not much progress on the deck monster. The good part was that since it was raining, I sat inside watching Carrie's team win the state championship.
After it cleared out I got the tops of the posts notched out and the rest of the ledgerboard onto the house. We are extending the old deck also. The new 2x8' joists are fatter then the old ones that they extend off of so I had to notch them out on the bottoms where they sit on the beams to match up. That sucked, but it is done.

Sports stuff..

A big CONGRATULATIONS (!) to Carrie (formerly Harbach) Wieland. She took over as coach of the Highland softball team a few years back and Sat. at noon they play for the state championship. Good for her. I bet she is a great coach. Well.. duh. They are in the finals.




If you have never seen Travis Pastrana ride, then you are missing out on some amazing stuff. Here is one of his rides. And, yes he landed the jump in the photo above.

Jake Brown had one of the worst crashes ever on a skateboard at the X games. The top of this silly ramp is 27 feet tall and he was almost 20 feet above that when he lost it and fell onto the flats. Amazingly he walked away with some help, but he is in the hospital with liver and lung injuries and a fractured wrist. They say he will make a full recovery. Man..

day... hell i don't know.

I was going to post a picture from the end of each day. But the end of day 3 looked like the end of day 1 from pictures, so I have not bothered.
We ran into all kinds of problems but are starting to make progress. The first problem was the retaining wall. I needed to sink a post by the wall and was going to do that but then I wondered if they counted the 42" from the top elevation or the bottom. Turns out they count the bottom, so we would have had to dig a hole about six feet deep. Yea... right. So we worked around that by moving out the wall. I was going to change it so that the wall was farther away from the hole and it would not effect the frost line of it. But as I was digging I found the foundation tile from the house right where I needed to dig. Hell. Bu then I got to thinking that I could run a post up from the od deck to the new deck to support that corner. SCORE! But that was another trip to the building permit place.
Anyhow, today we got some done. The posts are all set and I hope that it will start to look like we are doing something.

this made me smile.

What would you do if you had 2 big ass tesla coils? Well naturally you would program them to play the Mario Theme. Too funny.