Some­time last week “Fight the Fututre” pre­mired on FX and has been shown about 12 times already. Came in part way today and watched all the way until Mulder’s lit­tle trip to the Antarc­tic to save Scully. The mid­dle part of the movie plays like a TV episode, which is fine. The last hour is like Hol­ly­wood blockbuster/action pic with big spe­cial effects, yeck. When Mul­der climbs around inside this sup­pos­edly cav­ernous alien space­craft it never seems big due to the crappy light­ing and the hang­ing by his fin­gers thing just seemed so tossed in.

The TV show ended a few weeks back and of course coin­ci­dently there was an arti­cle in that week’s TV Guide about the show. Some­where in the arti­cle some­one men­tioned that they were think­ing of doing another movie — please spare us.

Thank’s Lewis for explain­ing yes­ter­days ques­tion of the day, “What’s the half cir­cle mean under the bas­ket?” It’s an offen­sive foul amnesty zone. They can’t call an offen­sive player for a charge in that cir­cle, it is always going to be the defen­sive player’s foul no mat­ter if he has been stand­ing there for weeks.

Big ass thun­der­storm rolled through Aiken tonight about din­ner time. I yanked the plug on the com­puter, both power and phone line and it may have been a good thing I did. While eat­ing din­ner a really close light­ning strike! seemed like right in the front yard, every­one jumped. The TV in the liv­ing room went silent. Uh-oh. Went over and tried to turn it back on and noth­ing. So I started check­ing the other stuff in the enter­tain­ment cen­ter. VCR — dead. Receiver — works. DVD — dead. Pulled the DVD player out and opened the cover to see if a fuse had blown. The fuse was fine, but power wouldn’t come back on. The same was true for the VCR, fuse good, but it wouldn’t come on. Didn’t try the TV, it is a 32″ and weighs about a 120 lbs and I fig­ured I would get the same thing. Must have been like a nuclear explo­sion, no power surge, just a kick-butt Electro-Magnetic Pulse.

For the heck of it tried some other stuff around the house. Donna’s mom’s 3-way touch lamp as on and that is all it do, no chang­ing lev­els or even turn­ing it off. The 19″ TV in our bed­room (it was off) is dead. But the 13“TV/VCR combo her mom watches works fine. No TV so we were bored, Donna sug­gested we head out to Wally World and shop some prices. Guess what? The garage door opener got fried too, we had to go out the front door!

The dam­ages are adding up. I won­der how State Farm deals with this, we have a $500 deductible.…

If you read last night’s rant you know that we lost a bunch of stuff to a light­ning storm. Called my insur­ance com­pany today and they bounced the ball right back into my court. I have to get a repair per­son to come look at the dam­aged goods and give an esti­mate on repair or replace­ment cost. Got in line for a garage door repair per­son, might get squeezed in tomor­row or might be next week. I am about 20 down the list for the sprin­kler repair per­son. TVs, VCR & DVD are another story, nobody makes house calls any­more. Have to get it to the shop or they will come get it for $20. Gonna take the sec­ond option. It will be worth the money not hav­ing to try and get that big tube somewhere.

Spent last night at the Hol­i­day Inn Express right around the cor­ner because of the insec­ti­cide spray­ing to kill fleas. We nor­mally don’t watch much TV on a Fri­day night, but we fig­ured, Woohoo! HBO!” Big dis­ap­point­ment, “Young Guns” was the Fri­day night movie at 8. Chan­nel surfed for a while, read some, show­ered and went to bed early, around 10. The alarm jan­gled us awake at 5:15 AM. We of course had never set the alarm, the chuck­le­heads who spent the night before had and either acci­den­tally or on pur­pose set it to go off the next night. We rolled over and went back to sleep. Woke again, on our own, a 7:30. See­ing as we went to bed early enough we got up and headed down to the lobby for our “free” con­ti­nen­tal break­fast. After eat­ing we went back to the room, packed our stuff and walked the mile to home leav­ing Donna’s mom to take her time and enjoy the break­fast. We got home and the clock read 8:15! When we left the motel, the clock in the room read 9:00. So, not only had they set an early alarm, but had turned the clock back an hour to make it even ear­lier. I am sure there are a few pos­si­ble inno­cent expla­na­tions for the clock SNAFU, but hav­ing been a smart ass when I was younger, I doubt it.

Got our Tar­get card in the mail today. When we went out last week to replace some of the light­ning dam­aged elec­tron­ics we went shop­ping at Tar­get. While check­ing out with our TV, VCR and DVD player the cashier asked if we wanted to take 10% off our pur­chases, all we had to do was fill out an appli­ca­tion for a Tar­get Charge Card. What the heck, I’ll use it this once pay off the total when the bill comes and never use it again. Well I thought it was a charge card for use in Tar­get stores, nope, it is a reg­u­lar Visa card with pretty tar­gets all over it. Don’t need another Visa card. That is OK, the plan is still in place, never use it again. Tomor­row the card goes to work and takes a trip through the indus­trial pow­ered shred­der to be reduced to confetti.

The med­i­cine I’m tak­ing is doing its job. Yes­ter­day I was 120/80 and today it read 120/82. This after­noon after walk­ing around the work park­ing lot, once by myself and then again with my wife for a total of 1/2 mile, nearly right after­wards it mea­sured 118/78. Go fig­ure, it should have been higher.

Still no clue as to why it went higher all of a sud­den. All that is really left is the stress/echo test next week and then it will have to be chalked up to a mys­tery of life. This is appar­ently the rule though as only approx­i­mately 5% of high blood pres­sure can the cause actu­ally be found. This is called sec­ondary hyper­ten­sion. Here is a good arti­cle I found on the web about the causes. It seems like my doc­tor has taken the right steps, I’ve had the blood work to test if some­thing bad is hap­pen­ing, I’ve had a CT Scan so they can look for the other stuff and the car­di­ol­o­gist to look for cir­cu­la­tory issues.

I may have to stop writ­ing about this “prob­lem.” Seems as with the med­ica­tion my BP is going to be right around the “Gold” stan­dard for BP’s 120/80. Was at the doctor’s office this AM to get the script for the drug whose sam­ples they gave me that seems to be work­ing well (after a cou­ple of week adjust­ment period.) The nurse took my BP and it was 118/74. Later that day I had the com­pany nurse at work take it and she got 122/84. When I asked the P.A. why do I have HBP all of a sud­den. She looked back in my chart and started read­ing off num­bers:
10/10/94 120/72
5/17/95 130/70
8/15/95 150/84
9/25/97 120/80
9/22/98 154/82
12/15/98 156/84
10/11/99 146/90
5/24/00 142/80
4/08/02 146/82
Looks like the upper num­ber has been high already for the last 4 years. Hmmmm. As to what caused the spike? Who knows, doesn’t seem to be any­thing major.….

After Pho­to­point started charg­ing a few years back I went look­ing for another site to host my online pho­tos for free. A brief stop was made at Club Photo. They turned to pay as you go about 6 months later. The hunt resumed. This time I ended up at Ofoto (a Kodak com­pany) I fig­ured the had the bucks to keep it free. It is still free but I noticed they have taken the first step down that slip­pery slope. Used to be you could share your pic­tures with any­one. Now, for peo­ple to view your pic­tures, they have to become Ofoto mem­bers. It is still free for me to keep pic­tures there and still free for oth­ers to view them. I hasn’t hap­pen yet but I think it is only a mat­ter of time before we see some­thing about Ofoto in The End of Free. I’ve no one to blame but myself, all these sites make money by sell­ing reprints of the dig­i­tal images and I’ve never done it.

Went out to din­ner this evening after run­ning the Miata Club newslet­ter through the postage meter at Rader. Damon’s is right across the street and we love ribs, so over we went. It was early, the place was pretty empty so when we and asked for a booth in the No Smok­ing sec­tion, we fig­ured that would be no prob­lem. When the host­ess turned right instead of the usual left we ques­tioned her. She said, “This is no smok­ing.” We said, “But it is right near the bar/smoking sec­tion. Could we sit over there instead?” She said, “That sec­tion is closed, besides there isn’t any one here yet, so…” That is when we stopped lis­ten­ing, turned around and left. There is a Tony Roma’s a cou­ple of miles away. We have been in too many, there is no one here sit­u­a­tions before. Invari­ably just as we are eat­ing our sal­ads, every­one in the booth on the other side of the lit­tle wall will light up. No thanks, there are just too many places to eat out to have to gam­ble on hav­ing our meal spoiled by the stench of cigarettes.

We spent last night in a brand new Hol­i­day Inn Express in Ander­son, SC. They put us in room 315. It wasn’t until we were leav­ing the next morn­ing that I noticed that the room next door was 311. In this place all the odd num­bered rooms were on one side of the hall and all the even num­bers were on the other. That means we were really in room 313. Would they have got­ten com­plaints about stay­ing in that num­ber room?
Tonight and for the next 3 nights were are stay­ing at the Hol­i­day Inn Choo-Choo Hotel in down­town Chat­tanooga. Our room num­ber is 1015. In this build­ing all the rooms are on one side of the hall and are num­bered con­sec­u­tively. The room to our left is 1014 and to the left of that is 1013. Go figure.

Who does she work for? Braves — Red Sox have been play­ing a week­end series and I’ve been lucky enough to catch some of the games on TV. TBS has tele­vised Fri­day and Sun­day while Fox did the Sat­ur­day game. I vastly pre­fer the TBS ver­sions even thought they are more Braves-centric over Foz’s usu­ally over­done graph­ics and announc­ers. On TBS they used to just read off the scores of other ongo­ing games, but now for some rea­son feel the need to break away peri­od­i­cally to a blonde, tan, pearly white toothed Erin Andrews for updates. Each time we break away there is a flashy EA Sports (a game con­sole game maker) logo video ani­ma­tion, Erin intro­duces of clip of some ball player smack­ing a home run, she tells us the score, we get the EA Sports thing again and we are back to the Braves game. Does Erin work for TBS or EA Sports? Hard to tell.