Silver And Gold

Am I the only one that thinks this tree is the ugliest thing I've ever seen?

It Just Needs A Little Love

Somebody brought in a really cool bit of Christmas decoration to work today.

I thought it was cute when he would say, "It just needs a little love," each time he showed the tree to another coworker.

Rampage!

Oh my God! Just saw the trailer for Rampage the movie. There's a Rampage movie. It looks terrible, the monsters are super-realistic and gross, and, of frickin' course, it stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. When a movie stars The Rock it is a dead giveaway to me that I won't like it. Somebody who actually goes to see this will have to tell me how it was, cuz I ain't wasting that money.

I used to like playing the video game when I was a kid.

But the video game was just a silly send-up of King Kong and Godzilla movies. Now you want to base a movie on it? It makes me think of The Producers movie that was based on The Producers Broadway play that was based on The Producers movie. Are you kidding? How do things like this happen?

Elementary Thanksgiving

Just went to a thing at my kid's school. A Thanksgiving lunch that all the parents can attend, and eat with the kids. It cost $4 to be able to sit and eat elementary school cafeteria food with my son. It was fun, but I have to say I'm glad my mom always made me a peanut butter sandwich to take to lunch when I was a kid. I remember I used to be jealous of the kids that got hot lunch. Unless the quality of lunches has decreased extremely significantly over the past 30 years, then they should have been jealous of me.

The worst part was, I looked around and saw that a bunch of people had brought their own lunches, or stuff from Subway, or Whattaburger or whatever. I didn't know that was an option! I figured you weren't invited if you weren't paying the $4 and eating the cafeteria food. That experience could have been so much better.

Timon

Saw a news story where an adult man was being interviewed, and I was horrified to find out that his name was Timon.

Someone please jump in and tell me that Timon is actually a common name in Africa and that the story writers from Disney did a lot of research in preparing that movie so that I'll feel better about the fact that someone named their child after a character from a Disney movie.

But then I'll have to tell you that the guy was white.

So, hopefully, at that point, you can jump in and tell me that there are lots of white people living in Africa and that it's perfectly normal for a white dude to be named Timon.

I could really use having this conversation right now to restore my faith in humanity. What I could really do without is someone telling me that their child is named Pumba, or that they know someone who named their kid Eeyore.

Deep Impact?

I broke my phone and now it can't charge. I'm at 65% and when it gets to 0% its done forever. I wonder if this is what it will be like as we all wait for the asteroid to come annihilate us all...

Dishwasher Blues

Unbelievable. We've been living without a dishwasher for months now. Our old one that came with the house stopped working. So, we bought a new one. I was forced to install it, and when I was done, it didn't work either. We bought a volt meter and discovered there was no juice in the wire leading to it. So, we had to get an electrician out.

We waited way longer than we should have, as we always do, because repairmen are usually expensive. But finally, we got one out this morning. He looked for a few seconds, then said, "did you know your dishwasher is on a switch? This light switch here turns the power on and off to the dishwasher, and it's turned off."

So, we've been living without a dishwasher for months, and even bought a whole new one which wasn't cheap, because the switch that didn't seem to do anything had turned our dishwasher's power off.

What Are You Doing?

I was talking to Rish on the phone the other day. He was coming back from winterizing his family's cabin. He told me this story about how they'd found a dead skunk near the cabin, and went to bury it, but the ground was too frozen to get the shovel in. So, they had to just leave it out for the wolves and coyote to come pick over.

"What're you doing?" He asked.

"Oh, uh, we're on our way to the beach. It's 81° (27° c for y'all outside the USA). My wife wanted to watch the sunset from the beach."

"Oh..." was his only response.

I miss home a lot, but there are some advantages to living here in Houston, I guess.

That's a weird picture of me. My stupid phone automatically puts a smoothing filter on any pictures I take from the front camera so I look like I have perfect skin, but also my stubble turns into some kind of paste I spilled around my lip and chin. I can handle growing old, camera, just take a picture of reality, please.

Somebody Dropped By

Look who I ran into at work today!

In case you don't know, that's Carlos Correa, shortstop for the world-champion Houston Astros baseball club. Kind of cool to have someone like that show up at work on a random Tuesday.

Lex And Taylor Or Taylor And Lex

Maybe others won't find this as hilarious as me, but I complain about names a lot. 

We had two dancers on our show today promoting their touring show. They were Lex and Taylor, a guy and a girl. When they went to interview them, the director said over the RTS, "wait, who's who? Which one is Lex and which is Taylor? Does anybody know?" 

She had supers for each one, but didn't know who to use them on. I suppose that problem will be more and more frequent as people continue the proliferation of neutral names, but I'm just an out-of-touch, grumpy old man.

Before You Go...

Before we put these away, I had to have fun with them one time.

Reclaimed By Nature

Yikes, Houston eats a pumpkin fast. It's been less than a week since we carved this one. Inside it was truly frightening, and it was swarming with fruit flies.