So it goes...

It's poor-man's blog again. (MS Word on a disconnected network.) I could get used to this laptop thing. Of course having an internet connection would make the deal even sweeter, but alas. Maybe when I get big I can get a laptop. When I get real big. The sweetest part of the whole deal is I can watch the Bears lose while I blog. Of course, watching the Bears lose while doing anything makes it better. The Pack seems to be for real this year. There isn't a person on the planet that would have picked them to start out 9-1. I would have guessed they'd be 3-7 at this point. It's a long road to the Super Bowl, but is sure would be saweet ! Why do they bother making a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid? Why do dogs roll in stink? These are the questions that run through my head. We took Toby to the Dog exercise area today and he ran like a dog possessed. He had a blast with Yoshi the French Bulldog and with Coco the poodle mix. He was covered in dog slime by the end of the 40 minutes and ...

Now here's a new twist on the old blahg. I'm actually composing this on a laptop in my living room. No, it's not quite what you think. I'm not composing this online using a wireless network. I'm using the poor-mans blog technique of using MS Word and, once complete, I'll cut and paste it into blogger. I've always said I'd write more if I had a laptop, so I guess I'm living the dream; or maybe "dream-lite". Hey, at this point, I'll take what I can get. I figure I'm one step from typing it on a typewriter, scanning it and then doing a cut/paste. Whatever it takes to put pen to paper. The laptop I'm writing on is actually a happy story. Donna has a friend who was told that it needed a new hard drive. Desperate for any help at all, and wanting simply to save her pictures, she asked Donna if I would look at it. I said sure and figured what is there to lose. When I started it up on Wed. night, it would freeze instantly after the deskt...

Ben is having a friend over tonight for a sleep-over, and so I managed to steal away while they're watching a movie. We got new phone books the other day. Is it just me, of does this seems to happen about every 3 months now? I really don't know. I don't remember getting phone books this frequently as a kid. Of course, back then we had 2 books, yellow and white. Now we have "Waukesha Yellow", "Waukesha White", "Milwaukee and Surrounding Yellow", "Milwaukee and Surrounding White", "Business to Business Yellow", "Upper Midwest Yellow", "Planet Earth White". It's sheer madness. So, I'm left wondering why we seem to be getting so many books. Is it that I'm getting old an unaware of how fast time is passing? (This is the one I'm hoping to answer No to.) Or perhaps it's that the phone companies are making too much on advertising and can afford to spend it on publishing books before the last o...

Wow, I just got a good look at the photo on yesterday's post. Wooo , scary stuff. I needed to add it to my post in order to be able to add it to my profile. So from this day forward, I'll look like a man who's just seen a ghost, or discovered he left the baby on top of the car when he gets to work. The picture reminds me of the old joke that if anyone actually looked like their passport photo, NO country would let them in. Part of the reason I look so scared in this photo is because it was clipped from one of my Canada pictures where I'm holding a 32" northern. In other words, I am a bit scared in the picture, actually. Not of the fish's teeth particularly as much as whether it is ready to flop at the moment or not. If you know Northern Pike at all, they're slimy fish to begin with. Throw into that mix the excited/nervous energy resident in the "catcher" and it makes for a tenuous mix, at best. Picture two grown men thrashing around a boat trying...

A beautiful day in Milwaukee today. Mid-50's and no wind. Not bad for the 11th of Nov. I'm trying to dream up some trivia questions for my 3rd grade Boys Club gym activity this coming Tuesday. I'm in charge of games and have come up with an "intellectual" relay. Combining physical strength and speed with team-based trivia question answering. It's not dodge ball, but I never professed to be a gym teacher. The kids would likely prefer bashing each other in the heads with dodge ball anyway, but we're discouraged from falling back to that every week. So trivia racing it is! I do love leading Boys Club, but it really is one of the most functionally disorganized organizations on the planet. There was a classic case of this last week. I heard nothing about what we were doing that week. The schedule we were handed out at the beginning of the year had what we were supposed to do, but we had done that the week before. So, thinking logically I figured we would be doi...

Ever wonder why it is that every time I go to the blog start page and sign in, I click the "remember me on this computer" box under the password, but it never does remember me? What's even weirder is that I continue to click it. Like it will magically fix itself and actually remember me. They say a sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Well, I'm no Pavlov, but... As I'm walking the dog tonight I'm thinking, you know I'm interested in the people driving by, what they look like, the cars they're driving, but you know what? Toby doesn't care about any of that. He only cares about the residual dog smells on trees, tasty leaves and trash tidbits that tend to be in his path. He cares nothing about the tricked out Chevy Impala SS burning by, or the ghetto-mobile blaring hip hop/rap (what's the diff?) Dogs are so shallow that way. It's my daughter's 12 th birthday tomorrow. She's having a...

Just wanted to post for post sake. Ben is reminding me that I am "past due", so will keep it very brief. My Small Life: I had to "charge" an .88 cent cup of coffee today at PDQ using my debit card. I thought I had a couple bucks in my wallet, but alas I'd been pandered of that the night before at church by my daughter for a couple of sugar cookies. Needless to say, I didn't make the poor clerk punch my free cup card because I figured she'd already cost the corporation a good chunk of change sending my .88 cent charge to Visa and back. Moral: Never travel with at least 1 dollar in your wallet. This I learned in kindergarten and have since forgotten. Gotta go. Jim

Well, I'm currently organizing Donna's trip pictures, burning disks, listening to Pandora, http://www.pandora.com/ ) listening to Ben try and guilt me into playing web-games with him and blogging, so as I see it you have at least 20% of my attention tonight. This whole multi- tasking thing is a bit exhausting . Kind of like the spinning plates, without the cleanup. Why do we do this to ourselves? It used to be that if I went to work for 8 hours and stopped to pick up dry cleaning, I needed a nap. Now, we're expected(?) to do 3 or 4 things at a time and not leave the baby on the roof. All of this reminds me of the story of Toby a few weeks back. I was taking dirt to the dump in my van. (Yes, that is a lunatic story unto itself. Suffice it to say that a Plymouth Voyager is not a dump truck, yea, nary a pickup truck. It's really a van and nothing more. Even with the seats taken out...Yep, still a van.) So, I'm taking the dirt to the dump and am very focused on finishi...

I hope to get back into writing on this blog, at the urging of my lovely bride, so...here goes. Check back frequently if you like. At a minimum, I'd like to get to it on weekends. More if my kids let me on this 'puter. Yeah right. I had to run out to get gas, return a movie and get dog food and milk. So I'm at the gas pump today and I do it all using a debit card. I get to the end, and of course I'm in a hurry and it beeps and says "Print Reciept?" I click yes and it reads out "Printer Error". I thought it was funny because I really didn't need another receipt flopping around the car to go with the other 3 old receipts, the peanut M&M wrapper and the 37 cents and two capless pens floating around the console. So to the poor lackey who made a crappy printer for the Speedway pumps, I say "thank you". So then, I get to the grocery store and that's always like a kid in a carnival for me. I used to go shopping with Donna as our "...