The Last of the Mohicans

New That Gets My Goat on the new Star Wars.

Find it on the podcast feed now, or right-click HERE to download the episode, or, alternately, you could just click the play button on the player below.

Bumblebee's Last Ride.

No question mark. A period. Bumblebee's last ride, period.

I went out to the auto body shop today because I found out (through back channels, not from the worthless people at Allstate insurance company, who have still yet to tell me anything at all) that my car, Bumblebee, has been declared a total loss. I was already worried that such a thing might happen, and I really didn't want it to. I don't know if it's a specifically American thing, but I kind of fell in love with this car. I really, really like driving it. The way it handles and responds is just phenomenal. It's a beautiful machine. I love its style, shape, paint job, and on and on.

At the body shop, they told me I needed to go out and clean all my things out of the car. I went out to where it was parked, and almost wished I hadn't. This is my car when it was in its prime:

This is what it looked like when I dropped it off at the shop:

But this is what I saw now:

They'd taken the whole thing apart. It felt like arriving at a viewing and seeing the corpse of a friend sitting in the casket. I was worried that Bumblebee and I had gone for our last ride together, but upon seeing this, it was certain. They weren't putting Bumblebee back together again. She was gone for good.

There was this time back when we moved out of the house that my kids had grown up in. My oldest son was really broken up about it. We'd moved in when he was four, so he didn't remember living anywhere else. I'd lived so many places by this point that I couldn't even remember them all, but this was all he knew. My wife told me that the two of them had gone to the house to make sure that every last thing had been removed, and after taking care of everything, she went to leave, but couldn't find my son. She called his name, and he didn't respond. In the end, she found him down in what had been his room, crying. He'd gone down to walk through the place one last time, and let the memories he'd made there wash over him, and he couldn't hold back the tears.

I had a hard time understanding his feelings at that time. It touched me, but I couldn't muster any feelings like that myself. It was just a house. The people were what made the memories, and all of those were going with us. We weren't even moving out of the neighborhood, so he wouldn't be losing a single friend.

Seeing Bumblebee all naked and debased kind of made me feel a little like he did that day, I think. We would never drive together again. The old girl had served me so well over the years. She didn't deserve an ending like this. It makes me wish I'd taken some time on that very last drive we had together to think about what was going on, and really lived in the moment. Our modern, rush-everywhere-we-go lives make it hard to actually be present for any particular moment in our lives, and then, before you know it, it's over.

Sadly, I didn't even stop to feel something even as I removed all my personal items from Bumblebee's lifeless corpse. It wasn't until the chance was gone that I thought maybe I should have said goodbye.

Anyone Binge Like This?

There was this ad on my Roku home screen today:

Binge on the first chapter? I'm not much for bingeing, but I do at least understand the concept, and you can't binge on just one chapter. Get a clue, CBS.

Somebody Didn't Get The Message

The names have been blurred to protect the innocent, but I saw this in the Wal-mart parking lot today:

It's possible that this guy started his business a long time ago, because they didn't remove Pluto from the list of planets until 2006, but it seems to me like it's more likely that he didn't get the message, so he named his business like it was the next planet out.

Struck me as funny, but probably isn't very funny at all. Cheers, folks!

Water Wall and Williams

I've been trying to get to know my new city, and see the things there that are cool. So, yesterday afternoon, I took a couple of my kids (half of them refused to leave their video games to come along, but I was fine with that considering how the last attempt had gone), and we went down to the Water Wall.

Aptly named, the water wall is a great big wall that water pours down from.

It's a sort of man made waterfall in the middle of a park.

It's pretty neat.

It even acts just like a waterfall. If you get close enough, you get all wet from the spray. Which wasn't particularly pleasant. It may be Houston winter, but it's still winter. It'd probably be amazing in the summertime though.

The Water Wall is on one end of a small park. On the other end of the park is this building:

This is the Williams Building:

I don't know if this marks me as a bumpkin or something, but I'm a little bit obsessed with this building, all the tall buildings in Houston really, but this one especially.

This building is the third tallest building in Houston. Wikipedia says it's 901 ft. tall (274.6 m. for all you imperials), which makes it the 200th tallest building in the world, and the 4th tallest in Texas.

It is, however, the tallest building in the world not located in a central business district.

Houston has a downtown, that I took pictures of and posted here to my blog a few weeks ago. But it is a bigger city that just that. Similar famously large cities like New York, there's a downtown as well as an uptown...and a midtown I think too. So, the Williams Building is in Uptown, or as it is more commonly known, the Galleria Area. And the reason I'm so obsessed with the building is just this fact. The building is HUGE, and it sits in the middle of an area that only has average-sized buildings. Here's the picture of the Galleria Area's skyline from Wikipedia:

By Henry Han - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Notice how the building, over on the left side, towers above everything else around it. The buildings on the right side look like they're comparable in size, but don't be fooled. That's just a trick of perspective. It's enormous, and nothing else anywhere near it even compares. It's still in the middle of a really big part of town. Uptown is comparable to the downtown of Denver or Pittsburgh. But again, the buildings around it are pretty average-sized.

Every day, as I drive past the building going to and from work, it jumps out at me. Especially at night. The building has a spotlight on the top of it that circles the sky all night long. Looks like this:

By w:Flickr user Bill Jacobus - http://www.flickr.com/photos/billjacobus1/125073346/, CC BY 2.0, Link

And whenever the beacon is circling in a cloudy sky, it totally reminds me of this:

I suppose that's the main thing behind my obsession. At least now I can say that I've been to the heart of Mordor and I came away alive and well.

So, to finish things up, here's a low angle picture that turned out to just be a shot of my crotch. Be careful of low angles, they can be more dangerous than the Nazgul.

Another Party

Remember that post a few months ago about there being tons of food and treats for my birthday? Yeah, I mean, for the other guy in the station who actually matters and has the same birthday as me? This was the spread they had to celebrate ME...and him.

Okay, so maybe the party wasn't for me, but it serendipitously fell on my birthday anyway, and the best part was that I was going to be able to look forward to a spread like that every year on my birthday.

Well, it wasn't to be. They had another big party for that guy at work today. Turns out he's retiring, and he'll never waste another birthday at this job again. No more parties for me...and him. Looks like I'll go back to being anonymous and ignored as usual. It was fun while it lasted, I guess.

Ninjabread

On the day after Christmas, I was at Wal-mart, looking at their 50% off stuff, when I saw a box of gingerbread cookies. But they weren't your average gingerbread, they were ninjabread! I couldn't turn it down, and at 50% off, why would I?

They came with four cookie cutters, icing mix, cookie mix, and a few candy pieces.

Today, when there was a lull in the afternoon while my wife took (another) nap, I busted out that box, and me and the kids made some cookies.