Toasted

Do you have fond memories of your grandma?  I have fond memories of my Grandma Martin who would make me toast as a child that was based on a form of non-nutrition called ‘white bread.’  To further increase my chances of not getting any nutrition she would slather it with margerine.  It was salty, buttery nothingness that was probably as useful for me as rice cakes, but I won’t get into rice cakes.

Then, one year my whole family got sick with some sort of flu/cold thing and the only thing that tastes good to us was toast.  We used real butter, but I’m sure that we used lots of it and it tasted fantastic… and we could keep it down.  My mom made a lot of it, though my brother and I tried as well to make some.

As you can tell the important women in my life had a toast making knack.  Jessica however, did not start out making me toasted bread.  Instead she would try to make me pecan pies, because that is what I wanted to eat.  Unfortunately those toasted as well.  or underbaked, or overflowed, or sideways slipped into the trash can because she was fed up with them.  Fortunately many of them turned out and slid onto my fork and into my mouth down into my quickly expanding belly.

And as you may have surmised, pies have a crust, which needs to be baked, which is a lot like toast.  So I’m glad to have had toast in my life, it has had special sentimental value that rice cakes have not.

Next time I may share about my other Grandma having carob energy drinks and soy nuts – those are also sentimental but completely unrelated to toast.

Upgraded

I have upgraded my WordPress install finally to the latest 2.0 release.  I have Akismet enabled and we’ll see how much spam I get blocked due to this nifty tool.  If you have any problems since the upgrade feel free to email me or leave a comment (unless the problem is with the comments 🙂 )

You’re All…

Remember when, like, people would, like, make fun of, like, Valley Girls? Like. And so we’d say, “You’re all… She’s all… He was, like…”? OK, well this post has nothing to do with that.

Last night I saw a birthday card that just cracked me up. It showed a group of doctors and nurses standing around the phone cracking up as the receptionist spoke on the phone: “Urology Department. Can you hold?”

Sure, its simple, but it amused me greatly. I think that the people around me were concerned when I had a very loud laugh-fest by myself. They were further concerned when they noted there was no blue-tooth headset on my ear causing an explanation for the loud laughter. Apparently cards are not supposed to be that funny.

Breath and Taxes

There are two things that are certain in my life:

  1. If I eat anything Jessica will ask me what on earth I ate
  2. Death and Taxes
  3. I am horrible at math [and sometimes spelling]

This last weekend I finished up our taxes and mailed them off. And purchased a roll of stamps. I was careful to not put them in Jessica’s possession because in my mind she always loses them.

Ironically… I have no idea where that roll of stamps is. I could have just spent $37.00 on a roll of 100 stamps and used exactly $0.72 of it.

Update: Robin pointed out in the comments that stamps have gone up in price. They’re now 39 cent stamps. The United States Postal Service is not selling us stamps at discount prices no matter how cute our girls are.

Knock, Knock

Abby’s been trying to develop her humor skills over the last several months. She’s been doing knock, knock jokes. Only she doesn’t know any knock, knock jokes. So she’ll say “Knock, knock.” To which I’ll reply, “Who’s there?”
She’ll come up with some random word and then just bust up laughing. Its precious in a painful sort of way because the humorist inside of me goes, “No, that’s not how to do those!”

As if there’s actually a really sophisticated knock, knock joke that I’ve developed over years of finely tuned stand-up yacking. Given the quality of some of the humor on this site, I should probably be taking lessons from her. Or maybe lessens 😉

/me will now be trying to think of the best knock, knock joke ever for days.

Happy Resurrection Sunday Day!

Today is the day we commemorate the empty tomb. The tomb a rich man purchased for a Messiah who came to save a people who rejected Him because he wasn’t wearing Armani, healed people on the Sabbath and rejected their extension of the law to a point where love was not practiced and faith was rejected for bloodline. He fed many, he healed many, he corrected many and loved the children. He wasn’t a politician, He wouldn’t go along with the system. In many ways Christ was the rebel that people would have rejected on the onset because the culture had departed from the pattern God had set. His rightouesness was obvious, but infuriating, His words true yet hard for folks to understand because they had long rejected what God had spoken for newer ideas. To quote Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), “God created man in His image. Man returned the favor.”

In the end the empty tomb is not our focus – the resurrected Son of God is our focus, and He’s seated at the right hand of God now… and those who believe? They are hidden in Him:
Colossians 3:3
For you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

Frogger: Senior Edition

Do you remember the arcade game Grogger from back in the days of 0 bit graphics? OK, so maybe frogger was 8 bit graphics, but it was an early game. The object, for those of you who read this blog but are too young to recall, is to get a frog to jump across multiple lanes of traffic without getting hit. You could move the frog several directions if I recall correctly, but in the end, it wasn’t an amazing game by today’s standards. You can read more about it at Wikipedia.

Well, last week Jessica and I were driving down a busy road here in Aurora (Iliff on Google Maps) and we saw a man in a motorized wheel chair trying to cross the street. I commented that he would be best off getting to a cross walk and waiting for a light to allow him to cross safely. About a quarter mile later we saw a man who had narrowly crossed the same street with a walker! It was like Senior Frogger championships or something only the drivers of the cars did not know. When I get old enough to need assistance to be mobile, and I hope my girls read this and show it to me if I resist, please require me to be safe by going to intersections designed for pedestrians.

Oh, and if you happen to see old people doing dangerous things, try to get some footage of it, because I can totally see this as a reality TV show.

From the News: Used Up Italian Porn Star Tries to Compete with Heavenly Virgins

When reality is this twisted, it must be blogged. An Italian Porn star offers herself to Bin Laden if he’ll stop the terrorism. First she’s not the young spry thing that she once was, so when you see her picture it won’t remind you of the photoshopped/airbrushed pictures of most every other person on the cover of any magazine (not just the naughty ones) – so the physical allure of her offer is definitely lacking. Secondly if Bin Laden gets killed in action as a martyr he’ll get free virgins in heaven according to Islam.

Apparently this gal doesn’t know her world religions very well.

Linux for the Weekend

This weekend I ended up installing Ubuntu Linux onto an old machine that was choking under Windows XP. Wow. I ended up Remote Desktopping into Windows from Ubuntu to do Windows only things and spent the rest of the weekend in Linux, including finishing up my handout for the Sunday School class that I had to teach yesterday morning. It even connected to my network printer without issues [Yes, I had to configure it a tiny bit, but it wasn’t hard]. If you haven’t tried Ubuntu, there are ‘live CD’ images available. You just download the image, burn it to a disk, and then reboot your computer. Ubuntu looks good, works fast, and makes the old Pentium III 1 Ghz 256 MB or RAM feel like a screamer.