armlessbear.com

Something to remember

When biking to work, it is important to remember to bring breakfast.

I am starving and thirsty and have no money for the vending machines and forgot to bring a lunch.

Summer Storms and Hints of Autumn

The other night we had a huge storm in the area. In some places winds were up to 70mph. I don’t know how strong the winds were in our neighborhood, but they were strong enough to take down a fairly large tree in our back yard. When the tree went down it made a huge CRACK noise that sent us running for the living room Windows to see if our cars had been hit by one of negligent neighbors old, dying trees.
The next morning we found the power lines to our house on our driveway. Our same neighbors’ other old, old tree shed a very large branch onto our garage, which pulled at the power line attached to our house and caused the lines and the PVC pipe they were in to pull away from the house and land on the ground. The wet, wet ground. Miraculously, we still had both power and cable. I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon at home waiting for electricians and MG&E to come fix the mess in my driveway.

Virgin Mega Store in Chicago

I smell a road trip.
There’s a Virgin Mega Store in downtown Chicago.
Woohoo! It’s not Times Square, but then again, maybe it will smell slightly better outside.
Very exciting.
WooooT.

I’m now going to have to plot out an entire shopping trip to Chicago now.

Ikea
Container Store
Virgin Mega
Outlet malls(?)
Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Only 132 miles from Madison to Schaumburg. If this wasn’t July 4th weekend, I would be out the door tomorrow morning.
Good thing it is, otherwise I’d be spending money we don’t have (yet).

You'll Laugh So Hard You'll Cry

There is this column called On Balance on WashingtonPost.com. It’s a column about motherhood — stay at home, working moms, working dads and stay at home dads.
Today she asked for people to write funny stories about parenthood.
This one, written by a guy who calls himself Father of 4 is hilarious. Seriously. I laughed so hard, I cried.

It was around the time when my first daughter was 10 months old. I called my wife from the office. I noticed that there was a different hello message on the answering machine. First I noticed a “bam, bam, bam” then my daughter cooing, babbling and drooling all over the answering machine a few inches away, and in the background, I could hear what sounded like a porn flick. I thought to myself, “What the hell is going on here? Why would my wife change the answering machine’s message to something stupid like this?”

Random Musings

I coined a new word today. Or, at least, I think I did. Maybe I should Google it first.
Damnit.
Someone already thought of Pregzilla. It isn’t very original, so I’m not surprised, but I still thought it was pretty damn funny.
Musevia is (finally!) engaged and starting out her year+ long journey of wedding planning.
It’s exciting and mind-boggling all at once. I don’t mean that particular engagement, just weddings in general. Volumes have been written about planning for weddings and wise people have written books about planning for your marriage. Still, I’m glad that it’s something I’ll never have to do again.

Why I'm glad I don't live in Tennessee

Today, the following message (edited to remove identifying information) came through on the notification list at work

Subject: Emergency Maintainence Notification


	
Location: XXXXXXX, TN

Event to take place: Replace fiber span between XXXXX, TN and XXXXX, TN

Reason: Someone has shot through the cable at this location

That’s some fancy shootin’, Tex.

Music Recommendation (Guilty Pleasure)

The other night we were watching the season finale of Scrubs which has managed to introduce several good songs to me. As an aside, once again Scrubs won’t start up again until January, damn you NBC.
Anyway, there was some little subplot about a Neil Diamond concert and they played a Neil Diamond song that I’d never remembered hearing before, but I really liked.
Yep, you heard it here first. I actually enjoy Neil Diamond’s music. So today I googled the show and Neil Diamond to find the song. Apparently last year he released an album called 12 Songs which includes a track called Delirious Love. I previewed the rest of the album on iTunes and decided to buy the whole album.

Random Funny Fark Quote

I am a geek.
This made me laugh out loud.

Star Trek 11 – Brokeback Enterprise
Star Trek 11 – Brokeback Spaceship

Spock: “Captain, logic dictates that I should know how to quit you. Yet, I do not. Fascinating!”

Springtime in Madison

Well, we’ve all been here in Madison for over a whole week now. Adam has settled nicely into his daycare and has picked up a cold and delivered it straight to his parents.
I feel like someone has beaten me with a baseball bat and then inflated a balloon in my head. Everything hurts — Adam tries to tickle me, it hurts. I roll over in bed, it hurts. I’m home from work today, but am working sporadically using the lovely VPN.

The shame of all of this is that our house is still mostly unpacked and boxes, packing tape and bubble-wrap are in every single room. We at least have a functioning kitchen now and can eat food that hasn’t been delivered to us.

Sleepy Ears

This morning, as with all weekday mornings, the radio goes on with NPR. During one of their sponsor announcements for some fuel company the announcer said “corn and seed oil to make biofuel”
My brain (and Mike’s) heard “porn and seed oil.”
Later on a news story about cloning I heard “An Afghan town blah blah blah… first cloned dog” I wondered briefly how a country that is barely held together by warlords and previously run by the Taliban, which seems anti-science to me, could have sophisticated cloning facilities. OOOOOOOH, Afghan HOUND.

I think I need more sleep.