Hanging With The Cool Kids

The other day, I got invited to hang with the cool kids and talk Star Wars Bounty Hunters on the Delusions of Grandeur Podcast.

You can check it out over at Marshal Latham's Journey Into site.

Is it a coincidence that Delusions of Grandeur is abbreviated as DoG, and they're talking about Bounty Hunters? I think not.

TGMG 214: Stan, The Man

If you haven't seen it yet, we did our tribute to the life of Stan Lee on That Gets My Goat the other day:

 (EDIT: This one was on the Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine feed. Now that the feed is gone, the only way to hear the show is over on the Dunesteef Podcast YouTube page, which I am embedding below). 

Black Friday

Didn't do any shopping on Black Friday this year, except a little of it from my computer while sitting in my jammies. I know most people look at the melee like something any sane person should avoid and many other see it as some kind of horrible indictment on our society's addiction to consumerism, but I actually find it kind of fun. The few times I've ventured out were all enjoyable adventures, and resulted in great stories to tell. Of course, I have never been shopping at one of those place where violence, beatings, shootings, or Mortal Kombat erupted. Maybe I'd have a different impression...although it did come close to that the one time I tried to get my son a video game.

This year, however, I used Black Friday for its even more traditional use. It wasn't Black Friday, but instead The Day After Thanksgiving, which is the traditional day that you decorate your home for the holiday season, just like New Year's Day is the traditional day you pull all that stuff back down. Last year, I posted about going shopping on Boxing Day...which with a name like that really ought to be the day that violence, beatings, shootings, and Mortal Kombat erupt, right?...and finding some good decorations on for half-off. I had to stuff them in a box and leave them for a year, but now I can finally bring them out and see how they look.

The tree that I bought in an effort to soothe some of that burning nostalgia inside me finally got to see the light of day. Here is how it turned out:

What do you think? Does it look anything like this one:

I don't know how well it matches, but I still love it. Now I just need some more of my mom's homemade decorations to fill out the rest of the room...but I don't think I'm going to do that. I was thinking more along the lines of a Wampa cave for Christmas...What do you think?

I did a bunch of stuff like that. I think I'm going to do a show about the whole process. Watch this space!

I spent the day decorating, and it looked like this when I was done:

Nice and cheery. A perfect place to spend some time with a mug of cocoa and significant other to snuggle with. I probably ought to skip the cocoa, though, and my significant other doesn't want to support my toy habit unless my toy habit can support itself somehow. So, I guess that's not going to happen. Ah, well. If only I liked my cat, because she is always curled up on top the overstuffed chair in my den...leaving great wads of cat hair all over it...

The Thing In The Woods

Oshay McGrogan asked me to help him out with his new show called Lurking Dusk. It is the first episode, in which we first visit Graniville. His show description says:

Graniville is a town filled with urban legends and conspiracy theories. Some old, some new. Benny Paulsen has made it his duty to uncover them one by one.

You can listen to the show at this link. Looks like you can also find it on YouTube, so you can listen there as well.

Check it out...if you dare!

Hit By A Bus

I was almost to work the other day, just about to take the last turn before pulling into the parking lot, when I heard a crunch from my right. A big, green stage-lines bus had decided that it needed to be in my lane as well, and either didn't know or didn't care that my car was already there. I looked to the right, and saw what amounted to a 15-foot tall brick wall closing in on me. I freaked out, and yanked my steering wheel to the left to get out of his way. I think that he saw me...or heard the noise or felt the bump that resulted from sideswiping my car...and he pulled back into the lane he'd just vacated.

I let off the gas; I was pretty rattled. I kind of coasted along for a moment as I approached the intersection that I was headed for. The bus driver must have been on some kind of a tight schedule, because he didn't slow much at all. Only just enough to take a left turn just as the light was turning yellow. He went on through the intersection, and kept on driving, disappearing from my sight, because I didn't make the light before it turned red. I was too busy, unlike that bus driver, slowing down and acting as though I'd just been in a traffic accident.

I stopped at the light, and several of the people in the cars around me who had just witnessed the accident were catching my eye, then shaking their heads and throwing up their hands as if to say, "What the heck was that bus driver doing?"

When the light turned green, I took a left, and drove on down the road to see if the bus driver had actually not meant to abandon the scene, but instead had pulled over down the street and was waiting for me. It was not to be. He was gone, gone, gone.

So, I went to work, pulled into the parking lot, and surveyed the damage. My side mirror seemed to have taken all of the damage of the encounter. When the bus hit it, it moved on the joint that side mirrors have, and flattened against the car. I had to pop it back into position.

The plastic of the reflector was cracked, and a portion of it had fallen off. The plastic housing of the mirror had split apart a little, but it was holding together.

And that seemed to be the whole extent of the damage. I couldn't see anything else in any other areas.

Either my jerking the steering wheel to the left or possibly the bus driver's move back to the right had saved my car from sustaining any real damage. It all happened so fast that I couldn't really say exactly what happened. I want to say that when I jerked my car to the left, it jumped up the curb onto the sidewalk for a minute, but now that I think back on it, I don't think it did. That probably would have resulted in some big damage to the car, because they have steep, straight curbs all along the sides of the roads around here. They always say that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and in this case, I definitely believe it. Because my eyewitness testimony is definitely garbage.

But, even though it was a hit and run, everything turned out okay. The damage is minimal, something I'm not even going to bother trying to fix. I've done worse damage to my own side mirror in the past when pulling out of my parking spot (Rish Outfield can attest to it, he was in the passenger  seat), and I didn't fix that either. So, I'm definitely not fixing this. And nobody got hurt. All's well that ends well.

I did see this scratch on the car when I was examining it for damage, but for all I know, it was already there. I wouldn't be surprised if it came from some other event--a door ding in a parking lot or something like that.

Who can say they got hit by a bus and fared so well?

Happy Halloween

The weather guy told me that Halloween was probably going to be wet and miserable...again. I had to work last Halloween, but my wife told me that they only trick-or-treated down half of one street because it was so miserable. My six-year-old, who was dressed as a teen wolf-looking werewolf in jeans and a flannel shirt, had to quit because his pants had gotten so wet from the rain that they were giving him a rash scratching against his legs.

I was determined to give him a better Halloween this year. I took the day off so that we could trick-or-treat together. And then the weather guy told us that it was going to rain again this year. We just finished having the best weekend weather in a month, but a storm was coming in, and it was going to be a big one. Severe storm warnings for the whole area. I was super irritated. Shouldn't we only get rainy days on Halloween once every few years? That seems only fair.

All the weather people did say to get out early and get your trick-or-treating done as soon as possible, because it was going to get worse as the night wore on. So we did. At 5:30, we were out the door. It was already drizzling. We took the umbrella and tried to stay together underneath it.

We got to about six houses before the rain really set in.

But my six-year-old ninja wasn't interested in going home. I kept trying to convince him that we could go home and have some dinner, put his costume in the dryer for a while, and wait for a break in the rain to go back out again. When he said no, I was willing to keep going, because I truthfully expected that there might not be any break in the rain at all. If we went home, we might never go back out. I didn't want that, and neither did he.

But it kept raining, and getting worse. I stole these two frames out of a video I shot of us walking around. Look at how full the gutters are:

It was a mess. At last, he relented, and we went home as quick as we could for some dinner and a tumble dry low.

We were home for about fifteen minutes, still waiting for dinner to be ready, when the weather changed. The rain slowed, and then all but stopped. Afraid we'd miss our chance if we didn't go right away, we pulled his costume out of the dryer, grabbed the umbrella and headed back out. The funny thing was that for the next two hours, the weather was almost perfect. It barely sprinkled, and the temperature was completely pleasant. Those stinking weather people who said to get out and trick-or-treat early were totally wrong. If we'd only ignored their advice and waited, we could have had a completely dry Halloween, instead of a waterlogged mess.

Also, we could have waited a little longer and had some nice hot dinner. Since we ran out the door when we did, we didn't get any dinner until 8:00 when we finally called it a night. By then, the food wasn't nearly as good. It was Navajo tacos, which are great when the scones are warm, not so great later when even the chili is cold.

It was a trade off I was willing to make though, because me and the kid had a great time trick-or-treating. He got a super-full bag of candy, and a big smile out of it. Of course, after the candy rots out all of his teeth, his smile won't look nearly as good, but for now, we're happy.