Month: March 2015

Safety Poster

Forest Gump Safety PosterThis morning I was cleaning out some of my old files at work. Tossing out stuff from the previous century that were one-time things, stuff for people who have since retired and others that I can’t image I would be using as a template in the future.

About three year’s ago the Valve Store’s(tm) Ocupational Nurse held a little contest for employee suggestions for a new safety poster. So I worked up this cute little idea based on the movie poster for Forrest Gump and submitted it. I don’t remember what won, it wasn’t mine, so I’m sure it was fairly lame. 🙂

The only thing I can think of is they were afraid of a law suit from the legal department of Paramount Pictures. Or maybe the then nurse was smarter than she looked and saw through my sarcastic twist on the Forrest quote of, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1466

Why We Shouldn’t Lie

We were dressed and ready to go out for a dinner & theater evening. We turned on a ‘night light’, turned the answering machine on, covered our pet parrot and put the cat in the backyard. We phoned the local taxi company and requested a cab.

The taxi arrived, and we opened the front door to leave the house.

As we walked out the door, the cat we had put out in the yard scooted back into the house. We didn’t want the cat shut in the house because she always tries to get at the parrot. My wife walked on out to the taxi, while I went back inside to get the cat.

The cat ran upstairs, with me in hot pursuit. Waiting in the cab, my wife didn’t want the driver to know that the house would be empty for the night, so she explained to the taxi driver that I would be out soon. “He’s just going upstairs to say good-by to my mother.”

A few minutes later, I got into the cab. “Sorry I took so long,” I said, as we drove away. “That stupid bitch was hiding under the bed and I had to poke her butt with a coat hanger to get her to come out. She tried to take off, so I grabbed her by the neck. Then, I had to wrap her in a blanket to keep her from scratching me. But it worked, I hauled her downstairs and threw her out into the backyard. She’d better not crap in the vegetable garden again!”

The silence in the taxi was deafening.

Go Baby Part II

Last week I updated this blog’s NextGEN gallery software. After installation captions disappeared and thumbnails went all wonky. I downgraded to the previous revision, but the damage was done. Then I found a plugin called NextCellent Gallery that promised backwards compatibility with NextGEN. Once installed the caption issue was solved, but the thumbnails were still all wrong aspect-wise. So I have spent the last few days updating the 1,570 thumbnails in my 50 galleries.

Yesterday, in a brief respite from regenerating thumbnails, I did a couple loops of the neighborhood on rollerblades. While passing a middle-aged couple walking in the opposite direction from me, the woman smiled and said, “Go Navy!” I immediately flashed back to that moment in 2006…