I'll sleep when I'm dead..

That's pretty much my normal mode of operation. I generally operate on about 5 hours of sleep tops. See I work 10 hours shifts that run from 6am to 430pm. I have about a 45 minute drive to work. That means if I push it, I have to be up by 5am to be out the door in 15 minutes. Now if I followed the 8 hours of sleep thing.. I would have to be in bed by 9pm. By the time I get home from work, go to the gym, do dinner and games with the boys, its already 8pm. If I went to bed at 9.. I would feel like I didn't have any time. So I end up staying up til 1130 or 12.. sometimes later even.

People tell me I'm crazy, but it's what I do. I did some research on sleep and most credible sites say that an average adult needs 7-8 hours, but that it can vary by person. I am also finding that contrary to what a lot of people say, your body CAN build up what they call sleep-debt. It can catch up to you. If you are interested.. check Here and Here. Both articles talk about sleep debt and that your body will try to balance that out.

Most days I do just fine, but things do catch up to me on occasion. On Wednesday, Gabe was sleeping over at a friends so it was just Brandon and I. We made some dinner and decided to play some Rock Band together. As we were working out way through an 8 song set with him on drums and me on guitar, I realized I had just failed out. Brandon saves me.. I start playing again and a minute later, I fail out again. I realized that I had actually fallen asleep.... while playing RB! I figured that was a pretty good sign that I needed to go to bed early that night.

We managed to finish out the last song and I spent a short time talking to my girlfriend who was feeling under the weather and was tired too and we made it an early night. I went to bed at 830 and got up at 530 the next morning. 9 hours of sleep and I felt pretty good. I think the traveling, time changes and general business of being back in the thick of things after 11 days off had finally caught up with me.

I thought about things, and decided the world would be a much happier and relaxed place if we could all just follow what our bodies were telling us. Not tired yet? Stay up a while. Not ready to get up at 430am.. sleep til you are not tired anymore. How much happier would you be if you could just get up when you were done sleeping? No alarm clocks. No "be at work by 6am" nonsense.

I realize there would be rediculous logistic problems if everyone did that. But the question is.. would it be worth it? Would you be frustrated and want things to go back to the way they were when everyone went off clocks and you had to be places at certain times, but could count on the grocery store to be open from 6am to midnight? Me.. I'm just not sure. I think I could deal with intermittent service availibility if it meant I could sleep when and where I felt like it and didn't have to use an alarm clock. Sure there would be times when I wanted to go to the store and I'd be pissed that no one was there, but I would get over it when I could go to bed at 2am, get up at 10am and roll into work at 11.

Maybe I will just sell all I own and move to Jamaica and fish enough to live off of and be a beach bum the rest of the time. Of course there are some annoying things like the fact that I don't really like to eat fish or even like fishing for that matter. Those pesky hurricanes down there. My enjoyment of regular bathing and high speed internet. And air conditioning. Sweet, glorious air conditioning.

/Sigh....alarm clock it is. I will say this though.. the guy that decided it was ok for someone to be up at 430am needs a swift kick to the junk. Then, as he is bent over double clutching said junk, maybe a follow-up shovel to the cranium! That would make me feel better about being up when its still dark out.

This song gives me a mellow beach day vibe.. and so I share it with you today on a nice relaxing Friday.

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I understand now..

I have to apologize to my parents. They are wonderful, loving, caring, supportive, fun, amazing people. They are also just a bit crazy. The crazy part I realize now, I am largely responsible for as are my two siblings. Let me explain.

See, growing up, I was a "good" kid. I didn't drink, smoke or do drugs. I didn't stay out til the wee hours of the morning very often and seldom broke curfew. Straight A student for most of my school career, national honor society, and graduated with a 3.92 GPA. Was a varsity swimmer and did photojournalism for the yearbook. I am not trying to brag about accomplishments in high school as they are really quite irrelevant, but trying to paint a picture of how I was back then. I was pretty square, or as my girlfriend would say, "preppy". Now I wasn't a total nerd or anything. It's not like I was in BAND or anything. But I was a good, normal, well-adjusted kid. For the most part. :P

Now I am sure you must be thinking to yourself, what a fabulous child! I wish my kids had been like that or will be like that! Its like every parents dream come true! Yet my parents and I still had our run ins. I still got myself in trouble. I still got grounded. I still drove them crazy. I didn't really understand it back then. How they could get upset over the little things that we didn't see eye to eye on when I was a good kid and didn't do all the other stuff that a lot of parents were having to deal with with their kids? I mean shouldn't they just be happy that I wasn't shooting up heroin and sneaking prostitutes into my bedroom at night?

I understand now. My kids are "good" kids too. They excel in school. They participate in sports and drama and choir at school. They are well behaved. I can take them anywhere and know they can be trusted to behave and make a good impression. Yet there are some things that we still don't see eye to eye on.. and they constantly do, or don't do when they are supposed to, that drives me insane.

Thinks like leaving their wet towel on the floor in their room after a shower. It needs to be hung up in the bathroom again. Even if they disagree on that point.. I told them to do it every day, so when I come home and there are the towels on the floor still, it drives me insane. They leave their radio on in their room. It doesn't matter if they are are home or not. It doesn't matter if they are in the living room on the computer with headphones on .. the radio in their room is STILL on. It doesn't matter how many times I tell them to turn it off when they are not listening or leaving the room.

When I was growing up .. there were two things I remember driving my mom insane. One was having drinks in the bedroom. I didn't agree with this policy. We were in a desert.. it was important to stay properly hydrated! So.. instead of listening and complying with this reasonable request from my parents, I snuck cans of soda into my room fairly often. Being the genius that I was, I didn't sneak the cans back out very often, so there were times my mom would stumble across my stash of empty cans.. and if I really think back.. I think I could actually see that level of crazy raising just a little bit more each time.

The second thing I remember driving my mom insane was me having the cieling fan on in the winter time. Now there are arguments for and against this.. circulating the air etc. My thing was I just liked the noise and the cool breeze. Even in the winter when the heat was on in the house. I am still that way to this day even living in WI. It could be -40 outside, I have the heat on pretty high, three blankets on the bed, just my eyes and nose peeking out of the blanket mummy wrappings I have made for myself, and I will still have a fan blowing right on me. For some reason though, I think just the though of a fan on in the winter time made my mom cold and thus drove her crazy when I would repeatedly turn it on all winter.

I am sure my parents could tell you many other things that drove them crazy that didn't seem a big deal to me and thus I didn't listen or follow what they said as often as I should have. Don't get me wrong, I did my fair share of stupid things when I was younger, I am just saying in general I was a good kid, as mine are today. Yet they still drive me crazy at times... sometimes over simple things.

So to my amazing parents, I am sorry for the crazy I caused. I understand now. The "I hope you have kids that act just like you" curse is apprently working. I hope you are happy :P

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Trauma in the bathroom...

If you read yesterday's post, you will know some of the crazy happenings at the bar we were at. The story I left out originally I will share today. I didn't want to bring up any recurring mental trauma for my girlfriend until I made sure it was ok with her. I mean from my point of view.. it was amusing, but I know had I gone into the men's room and encountered a similar situation.. I may have just insisted it was time to go home.

So my GF excuses herself to go use the restroom and when she returns a few minutes later she has this kinda freaked out, deer-in-the-headlights kind of look on her face. I was concerned.. thought maybe she got sick or something so I asked what was wrong. She proceeds to tell me something along these lines:

"I went to use the restroom and there was this chick was in there .. naked other than the midriff shirt she was wearing (with no bra mind you). That was wierd enough, but then she asked for my help..."

Well now I am intrigued. Apparently it was hot enough that the woman in question had borrowed scissors from the bartender and was trying to turn her jeans into way too short cutoffs.. you know the kind that leave most of the ass hanging and lets you know right away if she grooms that area. I am not entirely sure if she needed help because it was a job that needed more than two hands or because she was to drunk to safely use scissors.. but there she was, mostly naked in a bathroom in a dive bar, trying to modify her clothing.

I had to know who she was talking about now .. and so she pointed out who it was. I shuddered.. and realized why the experience was so traumatizing. It was one of the friends of the pteradactyl-sharpei faced lady .. and she was just as old and trashy-sluty. I could tell by the look on my GF's face that the "peach" was past its prime and not something to be admired but was more along the lines of:



Did I mention that this fine piece of work was also the chick who later on decided to ass-buff the mirror and then display her sweet dance moves with SBSC? Oh yes, it was disturbing all around .. but at least now she had shorty-shorts that she was wearing commando along with her braless half shirt. In the right circumstances, on the right person, that outfit could have been hot instead of nauseating as it was that night. Know your limitations people. It's like the guy at the beach with enough body hair to closely resemble a sasquatch but still rocking the banana hammock. No one wants to see that. Just because you are a female and most guys want to see every T&A they can, we have our standards too. If you are 55, trashy and nasty wrinkled from way too many days tanning like a rotisserie chicken.. keep it covered mmmmmmkay?

This reminds me of another story with clothing impaired super drunk individuals. My Ex and I had gone up to a small town on the shore of lake Michigan to go fishing with some friends of ours. The first night we got up there, the weather was too bad to put the boat in the water, so we got setup at our camp site and then went back into town to get some dinner and have a few drinks as the local bar. It was busy and loud, but there was one louder than the rest.. always shouting for another shot of PATRON! He was quite drunk when we got to the bar around 730 or so. He was doing shots of tequila the whole time we were there.. and was ordering another around 1130 when we left the bar.

Fast forward to the next morning. We were waiting to borrow a truck to put the boat in the water and so we went back to the bar around 1100 in the morning to meet the people with the truck. We had an hour to kill so we went in and were hanging out. Much to my surprise.. Patron, as I have come to call him, is there again.. or still there? I don't know, but either way, he is there and still ordering shots of Patron. At this point, he is just staggering drunk.. no shirt on. No shoes on. No belt on his pants which were too lose and I'm not sure if he started the night commando or lost his underwear somewhere along the way, but he was sans undergarmets at this point. So yeah, he was basically naked other than a pair of jeans that were too loose and falling off him.

Patron notices us sitting there and decides he needs to have a conversation. For whatever reason, he decided he needed to tell us a story about how he went to a nude beach when he took a trip to the carribean. He proceeded to tell us how awful the experience was because there was no hot drunk chicks, instead it was all old ugly ladies. Now I couldn't make up what he said next and some of you might just want to skip down. You have been warned..

Patron said "It was so gross.. these chicks were so old their lips were all streched out (indicating to his crotch at this point). So when they walked they flapped against each other and I swear I could hear them kind of clapping."

At this point he actually demonstrated..he put his wrists together at crotch level and proceeded to clap while doing some wierd crab like walk. Yes.. it was quite disturbing. But he finished his story, adjusted his "unit" again and then hiked up his pants again to head back to the bar for another shot. I was hoping we were done with him at this point and that the truck guy would be there soon. I was not so lucky.

For those of you who know me, you know I lack hair on my head. This was prompted by nature, but is mostly by my choice. Anyway, Patron for whatever strange reason wanders back over to the table, looks at me and says something along the lines of "Dude, can I touch your head?" I politely refused. Not only does this guy have more alchohol than blood in his body right now, he is rocking the commando look and has been touching his junk non-stop with said hands. I doubt this guy made any really wise choices in regards to partners in the last day or two and all I could think about was "Can you get an STD on your head?" I wasn't taking a chance.

Patron was upset that I would not grant his request.. he kept asking. I kept declining. Finally in a desperate move he tried to bargain. He said "I will let you punch me dead in the face if I can just touch your head once" Again, I had to repsectfully decline his generous offer as I didn't want my skin to touch his even to punch him in the face. Eventually he gave up when he decided he needed another shot and found someone at the bar to latch on to.

Remember one thing people.. if you choose to get THAT drunk.. do it at home or make sure you have a semi-sober friend that will keep you from making the BIG mistakes. And really.. wear some underwear. Guys commando is never cool.. and the chafing.. oh the chafing. Girls without panties.. well that can be sexy in very specific circumstances, but again.. know your limitations!

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Waiting for the cartwheel...

Back to work today.. fun stuff. Always tough getting up that first morning back to work after a vacation. I was off 11 days.. 10 of which I spent in sunny CA with my girlfriend. It was a wonderful trip.. a bit warm for my taste towards the end, but at least it never got Arizona hot. :P

One of the nights I was there, L got asked to sub for her friends pool league team that had a match that night. She doesn't really play, but they were desperate to fill the spot so they didn't have to forfeit so she agreed and away we went to this old dive bar for some drinks and some pool. We got there and I met all the people and they were waiting for the other team to all arive so they could get started. We grabbed a few drinks and were just hanging out and talking and I was doing what I always do in a bar.. people watch. I was not dissapointed.

At the far end of the bar where the two pools tables were was a group of mostly women playing pool and enjoying the music. Obviously drinking pretty heavily and doing their best to prove that "white people don't have rythym" stereotype to be true. There was a chick with long dirty blonde hair that was really into it. She had a pretty nice ass and was wearing very tight jeans and dancing like she was auditioning for a Whitesnake video. All that was missing was a car hood for her to slither across. She started to make a spin move .. and what I saw next still gives me the chills now when I think about it.

You know those women you see from the back.. or from a distance and you think she's pretty hot and then you get a look at her face and you are visibly shaken? This was one of those times. When she turned there was a collective gasp from the bar as we realized that it was not a woman at all.. but an alien life form that had tried to fit in with humans best it could by matching its body type to an in shape 30 year old woman. The head however it failed to research completely and so it ended up with what looked a lot like a cross between a sharpei and a pterodactyl. It really was quite traumatizing. Imagine thinking there is this kinda hot chick and then she turns and you are gazing into the face of terror:



It took a few beers to get past that. In the meantime I was enjoying the antics of the super drunk 45 year old woman in the peach dress. She had obviously been there a while and it was apparently DTYAS day. For those of you not familiar, that is "Drink Til You Are Stupid" day. Its not a set day, but rather shows up at different times for each individual person. It was definitely her DTYAS day however and she was feeling it. She was dancing with anyone that was willing including the ShortsDressShirtCowboy who will henceforth be known as SDSC for ease of typing. This guy was in grey shorts, a striped button down shirt and a rockin cowboy hat. He was also quite drunk. Drunk enough to forget that he dances like a semi-retarded monkey that just spent 5 minutes being spun around in a dryer and is trying to regain his equilibrium. It might very well have been DTYAS day for him too.

Anyway.. these two had some moves. They cleared some people out of the way so they could kind of dance in the isle and it was stunning. Not in the "damn these two can dance" kind of way, but more like the "I wish I had a video camera so I could put this on YouTube for the world to enjoy" kind of stunning. I couldn't look away.. couldn't stop staring as they made up there own genre of dancing. It was like some strange interpretation of the electric slide line dance mixed with a dash of the chicken dance everyone does at weddings, a pinch of the macarena and just a tiny bit of some stripper pole dancing for the peach dress woman. SDSC like to toss in some of that brim grabbing on his cowboy hat and occasionally doing the "take my hat off, move it around with my hand some and then toss it back on my head" move. It was just .. well... stunning.

Peach dress chick after tiring of dancing with SDSC starts going up to each person sitting at the actual bar.. trying to find someone that will talk to her.. and probably by her another drink. She notices this guy picking songs at the jukebox there and decides to go talk to him. Well it started like she was going to talk to him, but very quickly she went from talking and doing that drunk woman super laugh thing to sliding in between him and the jukebox and showing that she had probably at one point paid her way through school by stripping. She should have gotten a free drink from the bar owner for polishing the shit out of that jukebox with her ass. The guy at the jukebox was trying to figure out if she was for real or what.

We are all just kind of watching this display and when she tires of polishing the jukebox she starts heading back towards the bar area. At this point I lean over to Lisa and jokingly say "I am just waiting for her to launch into a cartwheel or something!" Lisa chuckles at that idea and the we just happened to look back to see her waving someone out of her way and I shit you not.. she takes a couple of running, stumbling steps and knocks out a cartwheel like she was Mary Lou Retton. She nailed it too. I was just in shock. I was pretty sure I had basically whispered that to L, but apparently I had yelled it through a bullhorn. Either that or in her drunken state her ears had improved to bat-like hearing to compensate for the dulling of all her other senses. I don't know what on earth possesed her to launch a cartwheel not 5 seconds after I joking whispered that, but damn if I didn't feel like Nostradamus all of a sudden. Wanting to test my new found powers, I immediately said "I am just waiting for Ed McMahon to show up and hand me a really big check for 10 million". Alas, it seems my powers were limited and temporary.

After that.. I am expecting pretty much anything, but peach dress chick left early and I was trying to avoid looking at sharpei/pteradactyl woman. It seemed like things were settling down. The pool matches started. People were playing music on the jukebox and the booze was flowing. As the night progressed, someone put on 4 Brittney Spears songs in a row. This got one of sharpei chick's friends feeling like she needed to get her freak on. She was feeling it apparently and was in the groove.. or something. She is going to town with herself in one of the big mirrors on the side of the bar where the pool tables are. Again.. it was impossible to look away.

Most of us are watching this display. She was just lost in the moment with herself. It was at this time however that SDSC noticed she had "it".. and was dancing alone. He decided to compliment her with his own stellar dance moves. It wasn't long before the two were putting on a display of dancing that was just mezmerizing. SDSC was doing all of this with a lit cigarrette hanging from his mouth, I think because it completed the look he was going for. However, when you are doing those complicated dance moves, you have to make sure you are aware of the fact that you have a object that is on fire in your mouth. He quickly forgot and it tumbles to the floor.

I would have been impressed if he had used a sweet dance move to stomp it out and just keep in the groove. What happened though was far more amazing. Realizing he had dropped his smoke, he spun the drunk chick away from him, did a spin himself into a dip move in which he managed to pick up his smoke and in one grand sweeping gesture, return it to his mouth and then the hand continued up into the super cool sweep across the brim of my hat like it needs to be straightened move. I wanted to give him a standing ovation. The improvisation, the finesse, the degree of difficulty... amazing! If I had pen and paper in hand, I would have given him a 9.8. He would have gotten a perfect score had he spun the drunk chick just a bit harder and sent her right into the wall for my amusement.

All in all, it was a fun night. You just never know what you are going to end up with when you mix people with enough alchohol. It's usually pretty entertaining though!

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Indiana Jones and thanks for all the fish!

Yes I am sure most of you have already seen the movie and this is old news, but I got to go see it yesterday and overall I really enjoyed it. There were several parts though that were just a bit over the top that really took a bit away from the movie in my opinion, but not so much that it wasn't still good. It's Indiana Jones after all! Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade still remains my favorite out of the series.

I have gotten to see a few movies I hadn't seen before this past weekend as well. Most of which I really enjoyed. One of the ones I saw for the first time even though its been out for a long time and is based off a book which has something of a cult following was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It had some very funny parts to it. It had a very emo, Eyeore like robot which was voiced by Alan Rickman. During the movie its mentioned that humans are actually the third most intelligent creature on the planet. Dolphins are the 2nd. The most intelligent? Well I won't ruin the movie for you if you haven't seen it. It's worth checking out for sure if you like a good sci-fi based comedy.

So I leave you today with a blissfully short post and a video with a rousing music score from the Hitchhiker's movie... So long and thanks for all the fish!

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Victory!

Last night.. right before I had to drop the kids off, we managed to finally make it through the Endless Set list on hard difficulty in Rockband. I was playing drums, my older son was on vocals and my younger son on guitar. If you are not familiar with the Endless Set List, it is all the regular tracks and the 9 bonus tracks that come with the game right out of the box. Thats all 58 songs in one set list. Gabe and I had done this set list previously, but only on medium difficulty. This time there were 3 of us and we took it up a notch. The songs are varied and so there wer songs where the vocals were a struggle or drums or guitar, but with the ability to aid each other with overdrive and saves when needed. There were a couple of songs we had to do more than once to get through, but better planning on saving overdrives for the second time through took care of that.

We were almost done with the set.. had just finished song 56 out of 58 and the song I was dreading came up. It's 'Run to the Hills' by Iron Maiden. Not a bad song in general, but absolutely horrid to try and play on hard drums. I am stuck on the hard drums solo tour because of this song. It is redonkulous. Absurd. Frustrating. But here I'm thinking, with two people to boost me with their overdrives and toss a save if it gets ugly, we should be fine. Yeah.. not so much. Here is a video of what hard drums looks like on this song. If you have played RB at all, you will quickly realize how much of a bitch this song truely is:



Anyway.. when you fail a song on the tour, it tells you how many fans you lost. On average we were losing about 13K fans per failure. We had maybe 5 failures total up to that point where we had to redo a song. When we got to RTTH, it took us probably 20 tries over two sittings to finally get past it. There was much rejoicing. I figured we would still come out way ahead. 25 retries for 58 success, we shouldstill be up about 33 songs worth of fans on hard difficulty. So the set ends, we get our gold medal tags for our rocker names and then it gives us our summary. We earend about $24K each.. and gained.. ZERO fans. Apparently you don't get fans for doing the endless set list. At all. But you can lose them. We started with about 560K fans. When we ended, we have just over 14K fans.. W T F. So now a whole bunch of stuff we had unlocked that is based off of fan count is now greyed out.

I know its not the end of the world and we can earn them back pretty quick, but mighty frustrating to put all the effort into beating it on hard and finding we had lost basically all our fans on ONE song. Granted I am no expert drummer or anything, but I can play every other song in that game and make it through on first try usually with maybe one save on the really hard songs. That song I needed both saves and every overdrive possible just to finally squeek through. I mean I like a challenge and all, but don't make a required song for that kind of set to where only a professional drummer has a real shot at it. I know people who have played through the solo drum tour on expert and still have not managed to complete that song on hard.

While I generally like Iron Maiden's music. I would like to give them a friendly middle finger right now and politely tell them to DIAF. Not that you all care, but it was quite an accomplishment for the boys and I and we had fun doing it together. Here is my gamercard and you can click on it to view my achievements and go see that I am now a Gold Artist meaning we finished the endless set list on hard.



Guitar Hero 4 is slated to come out this fall. Previously GH was just that. Guitars only. After seeing the wild success of RB however, they are now making GH4 a full band setup as well. They have learned from a lot of mistakes that were made with the equipment and gameplay from RB and I am really looking forward to this game. The drum kit will have 3 pads in the center, bigger than the current RB ones and then two elevated 'cymbol' pads, making it a little more realistic and they have gone to great lengths to make the whole kit more stable and durable, not wanting the problems harmonix has had with massive returns and repairs of the drum kits. The pads will also be velocity sensative, allowing a real feel to the drums and giving you the opportunity to play louder or softer depending on how hard you hit them making it possible to more closely recreate the song.

The gameplay looks to be more solid overall, especially for online play. Supposedly you will be able to do an internet band and do a world tour. This is not available in RB. You can do quickplays where you just pick a song and play with others on xbox live, but you cannot actually progress through a tour and earn rewards or anything. Was my biggest drawback. While its fun to hop on and play with other people, I would love to be able to create a band with friends or family and whenever we got a chance to play together to be able to do our tour and actually play different set lists and move through the content and earn fans and rewards together. GH4 will also supposedly have a battle of the bands mode where your band can compete against another band via XBL. That should be very fun when you have enough people for two bands.

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Focus

I know everyone has a thing or two that distracts them.. grabs their attention no matter what is going on and makes them lose their focus on what they were doing. Some event that triggers a memory maybe. Say you are walking out to the mailbox to get your mail and you notice a hot woman out for a jog and suddenly you are mezmerized by the bouncing... and you think back to the early days of Baywatch and the opening credits which was really nothing but a T&A show with hot women in swimsuits running down the beach. Ahh.. the sweet memories of adolescense. A minute later you are standing perplexed in your driveway wondering what happened and why you are outside in the first place.

It's all about focus. Can you manage to get through your task at hand without falling victim to the distractions around you. Or if you do get sidetracked, do you have a way of getting back to the original task quickly and efficiently? For my boys, the answer to those questions is an emphatic NO. Nuh-uh. Nope. Not a chance.

My son's being the overworked child labor force they are, have a couple chores. One does dishes for the week and the other has a couple minor things like refilling the water bottles (yes I'm cheap and refill water bottles) and making ice. Tough stuff. As they are off for the summer, this stuff is all supposed to be done during the day. Before I get home. Its actually supposed to get done before they sit down to be lazy for the day. Thats the theory anyway.

So yesterday I get home from work and there is my younger son standing in the kitchen filling the few water bottles that needed it. He is about halfway done.. has a few filled and about 3 to go. The water is running. I see that he is doing what should be done already, but I let it go and ask him to get the mail and pick up his shoes when he is done. He says OK.

5 minutes later I come out of my bedroom having gotten changed to go to the gym.. and there is said child sitting at the computer with his headphones on, listening to music and playing some flash based game on the net. I call him 3 times in a progressively louder voice until such time as I have outdone the volume on the headphones. He looks at me with that "What now Dad?" expression. I ask him why he is on the computer and what did he forget to do? He thinks for a minute, looks around for a clue and grabs his shoes and goes around the corner and tosses them into his room from the doorway. After which he promptly sits down again and goes back to playing.

Again I have to get his attention. "G! What ELSE did you not do yet?" He thinks again.. and the lightbulb turns on. He runs out to the mailbox and gets the mail and brings it back and tosses it on the counter. He looks at me with the "Is that all?" look for a minute and when I don't say anything. He sits back down and gets comfortable and starts playing.

Now I could have said something when he was looking at me with the 'is that all' look, but honestly I was irritated enough at that point that I invoked the parents right to be obnoxious and make life as annoying as possible for their children who have irritated them so. I get his attention for the third time and make him get up. I steer him into the kitchen where the water is still running. Where the water bottles are in the same state of half filled as they were when I walked in the door. I point to them and he remembers again! He proceeds to finish this 90 second long job of filling the 5 water bottles that were on the counter and puts them back in the fridge.

He starts back for the computer again, but I have to know. Which time was it when I dropped him as a baby that caused this kind of short term memory damage? I ask him why he didn't finish any of the items I asked him to do AFTER he finished water bottles. He said he had to go to the bathroom and that when he came out he forgot about the other things. So did the flowing water he was using to fill the bottles distract him with a sudden need to make his own personal waterfall? Maybe the better question is.. did the data that was cached in his short term memory get removed via this waterfall and flushed? Is the bathroom some kind of mind altering portal? One has to wonder.

This is a common occurence. The computer, the TV, the Xbox, music, the thought of dessert, a comment from a sibling. Any of these and more can wipe their heads clean of any current task and change their focus. My older son was mowing the lawn yesterday. He came and I asked if he was done. He told me he wasn't and that he just wanted a drink of water quick. So he got his drink. About 10 minutes later I go out to the kitchen for some water myself.. and there he is standing with his hand on the garage door ready to go back out.. apparently unable to do so as his brain has been sucked in by the Star Wars movie that his brother is watching. Maybe that tractor beam they use in Star Wars movies works on the brains of children as well. He was like a deer in headlights. Transfixed.. seemingly unable to move. I had to get his attention to break the enchantment.

I suppose we all have our distractions.. the things that take us away from real life. Maybe that is what growing up is about? Learning how to get things done despite the distractions. Getting things done that need to be done despite the fact that we would rather just sit and watch some TV and forget about all that stuff looming over our heads like a piano being suspended with dental floss.

I don't want to grow up.. I'm a Toys 'R' Us kid.

I leave you with a video, because unlike my slacker siblings, I like to enrich your lives with more than just my eloquent and poingnant prose. So let the enriching begin!



Mmmmm.. Yasmin. I don't know about you.. but I feel enriched!

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Slacker Eh?

So apparently due to the fact that I seldom update my blog when I am not working that day, it makes me a slacker. To those inclined to think that, I encourage you to do check the actual volume of the posts. Sure I could toss up a blog about how I don't have time to blog, but let's be honest. That is just padding your post count! Each one of my blogs is about ten times the length of my prolific poster sibling. So when you really look at things.. I win. Since I have started blogging in Feb. I have put up 51 posts including this one. Even being conservative at 4 times the length of an average post by my sister, that means she would have had to have blogged 204 times to match my blogging output. Has she matched that number? Let's check the numbers. 54 posts since the beginning of Feb. Judges ruling? Yes, I WIN! Get owned C! My other sibling is not even in the running so I didn't even bother to put up his numbers. :P

Not that I am competative or anything.

So.. to the real post. This weekend my girlfriend and I were playing a game called Everquest 2 with the boys. It's an online MMORPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game for those unfamiliar with the acronym. The 4 of us geared up and headed into a dungeon called The Wailing Caverns. We were having a good time fighting through the dungeon together and joking around on vent. You know how there are things that adults will get a secondary meaning too based on choice of words and tone of voice that you know or at least hope are going over the heads of the kids present? Well this is one of those times.

As we moved through we passed a little side room with what looked like treasure chests in it. My younger son, being very fond of loot and treasure, immediately asked if we should go get the boxes in the room. We informed him that those boxes were not actually treasure chests, but monsters called Strongbox Deceivers. He was dismayed. The boxes actually break apart and feet pop out the bottom and a tube like head/neck pops out the top filled with teeth. Here is a picture of what the look like when agitated:



Now, me being me, my mind went to the gutter as it does whenever I think about a box being angry and wanting to hurt me. But there were kids present so I had to pick my word carefully so that L would get what I was trying to say, but my impressionable kids would not. So I said, "You never want to mess with an angry box." The boys didn't pick up on that, but L and I started tossing those kind of comments back and forth. Comments about not wanting to go near a box with teeth and being nice to the box so as not to make it angry etc. The boys just assumed we were saying that those mobs were tough to fight and to leave them alone.

All of a sudden my younger son decides he wants to get in on the joking about the angry boxes and says this. "You don't want to mess with a box with teeth because when you reach in to get your toy out, it could bite your hand off!" I am glad they had their headphones on so they didn't hear me laughing. I couldn't help it. He had no clue about the second meaning possible from that statement, thankfully. I am so not ready for them to be getting that kind of innuendo quite yet. Still, what he said and the way he said it just made it priceless. L was typing to me and telling me she was not talking on vent for a minute because she was still laughing too hard over the whole thing. Ahhh.. good times.

There used to be a show called "Kids say the darndest things" with Bill Cosby and some guy named Art Linkletter. It was the same kind of thing as the above experience, although it was usually less dirty. Here is a link to a clip from that show. Make sure you listen to what the little boy says at about 1:49. Priceless.



Oh.. and Sis.. this made me think of you and my darling nephew that keeps you on your toes. Much <3

http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp06022008.shtml

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No more elementary school.

Today is the last day of school for my boys. Not only that, but it is the last day one of my kids will be in elementary school. Gabe is graduating from 4th grade today and next year he moves up to the middle school with his older brother.

I often wonder where the time went. I know .. its cliche, but as I thought back in a previous blog about the silly things they did as little kids, I have to wonder where did it go? Seems like such a short time ago they were stashing french fries in their car seats and now my younger son is almost 11 and heading into 5th grade. My older son will be 13 this winter.. and the teenager in him is already starting to show.

Some days I miss the little kids. The ones that wanted to sit with you and watch teletubbies for the 147th time. Or that would curl up next to you on the couch and fall asleep. The ones learning and exploring and discovering things for the first time. Those were great times.

While I can look back fondly on those memories, its amazing to see the young men they are turning into as well. They never cease to surprise me with the questions they have now and the conversations they can hold with you. They are doing all sorts of fun activities. They are a blast to just hang out with now. Everytime they are over its like having 2 friends to hang out with. Sure I still have to be Dad some of the time, but a lot of the time we just hang out together. We play computer games, Rock Band, basketball or even just watch a movie together.

I think fondly on their younger days, but I also enjoy watching them grow and mature. I like where they are headed .. well most days anyway :P

Congratulations Gabe on your graduation from elementary school. I'm proud of you my son.


Oh, and because apparently not everyone has seen this.. I had to share again. MUUUCKLUUUUCKS!

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Rambo and the Chipmunks

While we were out and about this weekend, I splurged and rented a movie as Rambo had just come out on DVD and I had been wanting to see it. My younger son was with me and he really wanted to see Alvin and the Chipmunks. Wanted it badly enough to offer to pay for it with his own money even. So home we go with movies in hand.

Rambo was pretty much what I expected. A highly trained yet reluctant killing machine makes a small connection with someone who then gets captured and must be rescued. He gives up his peaceful simple existance to do things he swore he would never do again to save the woman and a few of her friends. I like a good action flick and this definitely fell into that category.

Rambo was very bloody / gory however and those that avoid that kind of stuff should really just not watch this one. There is a .50 cal sniper rifle that is used to basically decapitate people in a couple of scenes. Rambo rips one guys throat out with his bare hand. Towards the end, he hops up on the back of a jeep with a .50 cal machine gun on it and quite literally chowders 50+ soldiers. When these rounds hit, they blow holes in bodies or rip limbs right off. There is tons of blood and they aren't afraid to show what happens as the bullets rip through the victims.

After watching the movie, I watched a bonus feature they had called "The Weapons of Rambo" where they talked about the selection of the weapons for the film. Originally they were going to have Stallone carry and fire the .50 cal machine gun. The gun weighs over 120lbs and while he could lift it, there was no way he was going to go running around with it and fire it. So they mounted it in the back of the jeep. Thing was, the first time they fired it, the kickback ripped it right out of the jeep. They had to go back and reinforce the back of the jeep and the mounting points with 1/2 thick steel plate. I was thinking to myself, if that gun has THAT much recoil to it, it would have been amusing to see a video of Stallone trying to shoot that while holding it. :P

My son LOVED Alvin and the Chipmunks. He kept telling me I had to watch it. Despite several warnings that it was Jason Lee's "sellout" movie, I decided to give it a go based on glowing reccomendations from both my boys. I can honestly say that it was a horrible movie. Jason Lee has done a number of movies that I enjoy along with the TV show 'My Name is Earl'. To see him do this was really quite sad. The movie was overly predictable. As if the annoyance of the chipmunks singing in that high pitched voice was not bad enough, most of the characters in the movie were extremely pathetic.

Even if I had gotten past all that, the movie was comepletely destroyed with one line. Those of you that know me well will remember my love for the Die Hard movies. John McClane (Bruce Willis) in that movie has a famous line after being called a cowboy repeatedly by the villian in the movie Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). At one point he says "Yippe ki yay, Motherfucker". I have heard this line bastardized several times. The first was when I saw an "edited for TV" version one afternoon and they changed it to say "Yippe ki yay, Mr. Falcon" which was completely random as there was no Mr. Falcon in the movie. Anyway, towards the end of the Chipmunks movie, one of them is running down a hallway and yells out "Yippe ki yay, Mamacita"

Mamacita means "little mother" in spanish. I don't think there were even any women in the scene, much less anyone that could be considered a 'little mother'. This line made a bad movie much much worse. It was a crime that shall not go unpunished. Directors, script writers, editors, producers... someone should have stopped that atrocity. There are many people that need to be hit in the face with a shovel apparently.

If I had my way, I would make a combination of the two movies and call it Rambo and the Chipmunks. Jason Lee's character Dave is replaced by one John Rambo. The chipmunks are annoying with their singing and dancing. Eventually Rambo threatens to take them out and so they go running away down the street while Rambo shoots at them with a .50 cal machine gun mounted in the back of his truck. First Theodore takes one in the backside. He is the slow chunky one, so he gets picked off quickly. Simon then loses his glasses while running and when he stops to pick them up, a projectile as big as he is tears him apart. Alvin.. the fastest of the 3.. is running and dodging. Just as he's about to round a corner and be out of sight, he stops. Turns. Looks into the camera and says "Yippie ki yay, Mamaaa SPLAT!" Ok.. he doesn't say 'splat'. That is just the wet, squishy noise he makes as his small furry self disintegrates as several .50 cal rounds tear through him. Ahh.. what a much better movie that would have been.

I would probably have cast Snaggletooth in Rambo and the Chipmunks as well. She could be the obnoxious neighbor who takes random machine gun fire to the face as Rambo shoots up the area going after the chipmunks. We could film in slow-mo as her head was ripped from her body. At this point the audience would all be on their feet in a standing ovation. I would probably get an academy award for actually making her look better than she ever has before. I could get Rascall Flats to do the soundtrack and have them do a cameo in that scene and have them get picked off by stray fire as well! The final credits could roll as the camera pans over joyous carnage.

Ahh.. I'm all warm and fuzzy inside now.

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