Welcome to Planet Earth Hawley Peterman

My niece Hawley [pronounced Holly, it’s apparently a family name in Shari’s family] Elizabeth Peterman was born this morning at 10:20 PST weighing in at a slight six pounds seven ounces. She’s nineteen inches long and is apparently doing well. When my brother Ed called he was just excited and emotionally in the same place I was when Abby was born. This is most likely a good thing 🙂 I hope to get pictures today to be able to post for all to see.

Super good news!

Brennan and Hawley
Brennan and Hawley Peterman photo taken by Pete Leonard.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

So last night I watched this movie with my friend Brian, it was a really freaky movie along the lines of Memento, and possibly sort of like the Matrix if you just count the philosophical parts and no action and no special effects, though there was some special effect work done. It had Jim Carrey being serious, Kate Winslet not hanging off of the front of a boat, and Elijah Wood standing the same height as everyone else. It also had the main male role from 13 going on 30 as well as Kirsten Dunst whom we all know from Spider-Man one and two.

This movie is really weird because they play part of the end at the beginning, and then fill inthe middle, play past the part they played in the beginning and then finish the movie with the end. I appreciate a movie with an ending at the end, it makes a sense of completion possible. I will warn you that Jim Carrey is not overtly funny in this film and that the language, while being English, is full of words that parents don’t want their children to hear or use, and that if used any more than it was in this movie falls over the line of bad script writing. In other words, there’s a lot of prophanity in this movie and you shouldn’t see it if hearing it throws you into a fit of vomitting, temporary memory loss or back pain. Women under 30 should consult a physician before taking this… whoops! I got way off track.

I really liked the moral of the movie because it was that if you’re meant to be with someone you’ll be with them no matter what. However, 95% of the people who leave the theater, or finish watching the DVD, will not be thinking that. Carrey is serious in this movie. Really. Don’t come looking for an Ace Ventura, Bruce Almighty, or The Mask. Don’t come looking for The Majestic either, because this is not filled with the feel good stuff at the end.

The idea behind the movie is that a doctor in the area can erase memories from your mind. By the end of the movie a lot of memories are erased from a lot of minds leading to catastrophe. However, a majority of the movie is played out in Jim’s mind where he [some description that would totally spoil the movie if you were to watch it].

So, how do I rate this movie after rambling on so long with great discontinuity? On a scale from 1 to 13, with 13 being the best, I’d give it a 9. It’s above average, but due to some graphic scenes, vulgar language and silly kissing from Kursten Dunst, it can’t be a 13.

Windows Annoyance

So Windows Update triggered this morning to fix more problems with Internut Exploder as well as wanting to install some Anti-Virus type software. Well, the update finished (sans AV, which I’ve already got) and now every 10 minutes I get a little popup telling me to restart the computer. What the heck is up with that? Can I please reboot at my convenience? Sure Windows XP takes less time to reboot than Windows 2000 did, but why annoy me? I’m so going to switch over to Mac when I can.

Dental Update

As I know that many of the readers of this blog sit around thinking, “I sure wish Randy would spell check his posts,” or “Do my hands smell like bleu cheese?” I want to let you know that it turns out that my mouth is in much better shape than I had anticipated. Or the people at the dental office I just visited lied to me so that in about 3 years they’ll be able to say, “Randy, we need to replace your face, and we figure that since you don’t have dental insurance, it’s going to cost around $5,000,000,000.00.” However, I think it is better rather than worse there sense the staff is either really friendly or inhaling laughing gas between patients. I have no cavities and they really thought that the only way to get more money from me would be to use this technique called invisiline to straighten out my lower teeth and manipulate my upper teeth. In short the Dr. in charge of invisiline nirvana at the office told me it would be a mere $4,500 for the trays with a $500.00 initial ‘seed’ payment. So, if I want straight teeth I can go to the Orthodontist or the Dentist now, and I can pay a lot or pay a lot. Or, because I don’t care about how my lower teeth look I’ll go in every six months and have them clean them.

Thanks for asking the tough questions 🙂

Lessons in Swimming

Well, we had swimming lessons yesterday and quite the time of it, too. Apparently when you swim there’s this thing called ‘form.’ The idea is to have a consistant motion that propels you through the water. The instructor gave us tips on a swimming stroke called ‘Free Style.’ When it was my turn to show him my free style swim when I surfaced he said, “Good!” Then, in typical teaching fashion he kindly told me that every part of my stroke, movement and activity in the water was slightly to severly off with two exceptions: I didn’t sink and I didn’t drown.

However, I get the sense this morning that swimming is good for me and something I should pursue as a physical activity because I’m really sore in more parts of my body. I’m most likely going to join the Recreational Center so that I can get going and practicing my strokes, build large muscles and generally turn myself into Colorado’s next Gubernator.

In other lessons in swimming Abby had a nightmare last night and so came to be in our bed. We let her sleep in our bed for a bit so that she can rest and relax and fall back to sleep. Stupid. Why? Because Abigail was practicing her free style swim between Jessica and I. Arms flailed, feet flew about kicking both of us and her body writhed against us. The tough part is that she was asleep while all of this happens. I couldn’t be mad at her for intentionally kicking me in the kidney if it was an accident. So at around 3:30 as we started the second round of her swimming practice I carried her into her own bed to practice in a solo session.

Tips on Playing Doctor

My two year old, dearest Abby, loves to play doctor. Wherein she insists on shoving a fake plastic thermometer into my mouth. Wherein I refuse and get in trouble with ‘Dr. Abby.’ However, it’s safer that way because I know that she has no concept of what sterility is, cleanliness is and generally no sense of hygiene. I love to play with her, but I have to draw the line somewhere because just like working 168 hours a week you might be able to do it, but it would eventually come back to bite. I might actually have to go to the real doctor to fix the ailment that I got from the two year old doctor.

So, I recommend the following:
Over react to everything you pretend have. Make a big stink about being sick
Don’t let anything actually get into your mouth.
Don’t actually take any of the pills that a young doctor might try to cram into your face
Above all fake the intake of the item, whatever it may be. If it looks like you got it into you, the world is a better place.
Lastly, don’t play doctor too long, come up with other things to do together, like playing stuntman who jumps out of tall trees. Then, when you get injured you can really go to the doctor.

Bleu Cheese

I’m just full of confessions today. I’m about to confess something that no one else knows right now, so get ready:
my hands smell like Bleu Cheese. I crumbled some on my lunch today and now no matter how many times I wash my hands they still smell like Bleu Cheese. Since I have to go to the dentist Monday I’m considering taking a large bite of that and some fresh red onion so that I may set a new record for the stinkiest breath ever to be blown in the face of a dentist’s face [that’s a joke, I love dentist, or so I keep telling myself]. I figure that it will match the condition of my teeth in general: poor. I haven’t been to the dentist in some time because frankly I don’t trust them. Not that all dentists are untrustworthy, but that the dentist I went to last seemed so shady that I couldn’t go back and have the tooth drilled and filling installed. The guy’s office was so creepy that I couldn’t handle it.

Worse still the job I had before Alt-N was at a dental supply place that put me in contact with a lot of shifty individuals. Pretty much all dentists fall under two categories for me, the honest and the crazy, cheap, that may be a cavity so lest fill it just in case variety. Sure, I’m a pessimist when it comes to this sort of ‘medicine’ but I’d much rather go to a chiropractor and have them adjust my molars. Of course that won’t help with cavities, but I wonder if they could do that instead of going to an orthodontist. Probably not but it would make for a great movie. Much better than Ballistic anyway.

OK, I’m going to go wash my hands again.

Swimming Lessons

I have been able to be buoyant in the water for some time. But when I ‘swim’ it usually involves way more splashing than is necessary. In fact, I wish that I was only wet while in the shower so that I could not embarass myself with my, “Holy Cow! That man must be drowning!” approach to swimming. I’m not drowning, really. I’m just moving through the water with the gracefullness of a cow being eaten by piranas.

However, tomorrow I’ll be starting swimming lessons. My goal, and I’m not making this up, is to be able to swim in the pool and not get noticed. I also hope to get some cow-print speedos. OK, I’m lying about the speedos.

Please, Dear Frontier Not PDF

Dear Frontier Airlines,
I have written several times about your extra-ordinary customer service. Y’all have really done quite a good job. Except I found one thing that makes me scratch my head: Emailing me my receipt as a PDF. What is the reason for that? When I open it up it contains only text and one hyperlink to your web site. Why not HTML, why not just a plain text document? I placed my order online where I used an HTML browser to get the tickets, I opened up the email which could have displayed plain text or HTML email (preferably both for email clients that don’t handle HTML), and lastly, I didn’t want to open up the glut of a program known as Adobe Acrobat. If I was using an Apple I would have without question enjoyed the PDF because of OSX’s great real time rendering of PDF, but I’m not, currently I’m on a Windows machine and I’m terribly frustrated by the slow performance of Adobe on this machine, which has one gigabyte of RAM.

Thank you for your time and consideration of bandwidth, end user friendliness and customer service.

Regards,

Randy Peterman