Category Archives: News

Things, Goings On, and Stuff I write

This is Your Itch Speaking

So whilst camping I was skinually harrased by Mosquitos. They bit me a few times though fortunately the DEET helped scare them away. However, my right calf (no, I don’t have cows) has a bite that just makes me want to “Beat It” like Michael Jackson and a law suit. Actually, I want to beat it until I can’t feel it any longer, but you get the idea.

There are things to stop the itch but my favorite method is the cheap method: time. I’ll wait it out. The mosquito is probably dead by now anyway – I win!


By the way, in case you didnt’ know it there is an acronym element or tag surrounding the DEET acronym above (and that last one, too). In case you didn’t know what those do, it allows you to hover your mouse over the acronym and a tooltip will be displayed that shows the fantastic expansion of said acronym. Unless its an acronym I’m going to make fun of, in which case it will reflect something else… it should be pretty obvious normally that its not the real meaning. DEET however is not your typical acronym and maybe its an abbreviation… actually it doesn’t feel like either, but you can pick what you want to call it.

Off’ing My Wife

Camping was lots of fun except for the part friday night where Abby threw up in the tent. Oh, and the outhouse stench was low on the ‘fun’ list. I would also rank the mosquitos as an annoyance [thus the ‘Off’ bug repelent play-on-words for the title]. But that is the short list of negatives.

I got some incredible photos that I’ll post once I get home. The cell phone reception was incredible up in the mountains and we actually kept in touch with various parties using them. Yeah, I know, it’s sad.

Poor Italian Girl Totally Gets Blown Off

So there’s a commercial on TV for some sort of low carb pasta that comes on with this mother and daughter going into a store. The store looks so expensive that I would probably have to take out a small loan or donate some organs to afford to shop at… once. In the background the commercial has some Italian opera music. I don’t know what the guy is singing about so I often join in with an English translation that I can only assume reflects the intents of the original lyrics in my native tongue.

However, the middle of the commercial shows this girl lifting up one of the pristine boxes of noodles that the competition sells. Since the mother is health conscious and wants the rest of her Italian family to live the Adkin’s lifestyle she shakes her head, ‘no,’ and holds up a box of [marketed brand name here] noodles. Then, they show the woman lifting a noodle on the end of a fork into her mouth. The camera changes angles and she actually ‘chews’ a noodle. Or so it seems. Actually showing anyone masticating like that is not sexy, therefore they show this part from a great distance (which shows that this family has some serious cash since their kitchen can handle a distant shot panning around the room).

Then, to further insult us they show a family of four: a man, the woman, the girl, and a boy all sitting at the table eating some sort of pasta dish. However, these must be droid children because the fact that the sauce is so sparse on the noodles makes it look like they’re just eating a plate of these low-carb noodles with bits of tomato for decoration. No United States of America born child actually eats noodles plain, they drench them in so much sauce that the noodles become a medium for the sauce. In most homes it probably looks like a Tomato based soup with noodles in it.

I still insist that the opera words go something like this:
A woman and her daughter
Love to buy noodles
The daughter is skinny
The Mom is anorexic
[it should be noted that the words don’t rhyme because this is a direct translation, word for word].

The mom is on Adkin’s
Please put it back kid
I’m the boss
Don’t mess with me

She looks so sultry
Eating the noodles
Look how her fork glimmers
In her sexy hand
[Those Italians know sex sells]

The family is eating
Smile or a beating [that rhyme was not intentional]
We’re so stereotypical
It makes you want to throw up

Coffee Ice Cream Review

So last weekend we made Coffee Ice Cream using Craig Kaes’ fantastic Espresso and real live (dead) Vanilla Beans. It was quite tasty with the exception that it had maybe 2 table spoons too much sugar so the richness of the coffee was lost just a little bit. I would have eaten it all myself but I think that would have resulted in several things:

  • Obesity on my part
  • Diabetes for me
  • Death for me as the others would have certainly mauled me to a point where I would have died

I would recommend getting espresso as the coffee flavoring and refrigerating all of the pieces for the 6 hours like we did. We also froze the ‘soft serve’ ice cream out of the ‘maker’ longer to solidify it more. We had to leave before the ice cream was really firm, but it was quite tasty. I imagine that if the Kaes still have any it tastes good, too. I would also imagine that they don’t have any more 🙂

Going Camping

We’ll be going camping starting tomorrow morning. You can expect blogging to be extremely light during that period unless I am able to send smoke signals to the Internet, or I can use rocks, some trees and some tin foil to construct a basic CPU and find some open network out in the woods to post entries with. Of course I’ll need to find something for a display…

Bird: Feeders and Poop

So we got a bird feeder a couple weeks ago and the birds didn’t touch it. Mostly because we got a song bird feeder and the song birds apparently run the same circuit and our house was not on the map. Then one day a bird, who was lost and didn’t want to go home anyway, found our bird feeder. He and a few of his buddies, being the kind of gluttonous birds that birds can be, started singing songs in our neck of the woods for food.

So we bought more bird feeders.

Dumb.

Now there is bird poop all around the feeders and I have to ask the birds to keep their language clean so that Abby doesn’t pick up any fowl mouth stuff**.

** I so crack me up.

Lord, Forgive My Fleshly Desire for This Video Recorder

It may be a couple years until this is in my price range, but this little device will rock the consumer cam-corder market: JVC Introduces Hard Disk Camcorders. This will make transferring video from your computer to DVD or the Internet nearly instantaneous since the clips are stored as seperate files (one for each recording session), they’re stored in MPEG-2 format, which is the typical DVD format – and when you translate them into Quicktime or Windows Media format they’ll have a quality starting format.

This is on the top of my Christmas wishlist for 2010, when they’re cheap enough.

Realer Mexican Food Found Near Denver

Since moving from Texas, where Tex-Mex is so prevalent that quality is a must if you want to stay in business, we have found the Denver area to be deficient of what we would call ‘Mexican Food.’ However, thanks to the keen taste buds of my Chiropractor (and her mom!) we found Los Dos Potrillos (Flash Encrusted Web Site with Authentic Mexican background music). The service was a bit lacking, but I think the gal who was serving us was a bit overwhelmed. The food was good and I finally tasted something that resembled Mexican food, again. There is hope for us here after all 😉