Whatever

Easily Distracted

Last night we went to Kroger to stock up on some more restaurant gift cards. There were two reasons for this, one, no kitchen, so for the next couple of weeks we will be dining out fairly often and two, they were offering 4x fuel points. So the $100 spent equated to 400 points or an additional 40¢ off a gallon of gas above what we normally get from our weekly shopping.

A big disappointment was that they didn’t have any DD cards, because we eat there at least twice a week we burn through those $15 cards pretty quickly. As we were checking out I suggested that take out twenty in cash too as I only had two dollars in my wallet. Donna agreed. As I was going through the motions of checking out, Donna asked the employee manning the area did they have any Dunkin Donut gift cards in the back or somewhere. I paused and waited until the attendant got back, empty-handed, to finish checking out. I gathered up the gift cards and their accompanying bits of paperwork and we left.

This morning when we got to work Donna asked for a dollar so she could go to the machine and get a hot chocolate. When I opened my wallet to give it to her all that was in there was just two dollars. Uh, oh, I instantly knew what happened. I was so caught up in the DD card process that I never grabbed the twenty out of the dispenser. Dumbass!

Donna saved the day by calling the store, and lucky us the cashier noticed the lonely twenty dollar bill and turned it in to the service desk. Retrieving the money after dinner this evening was quite an adventure and if I get around to it, a post in of itself.

Shores Of Tripoli

The Marines, the few, the proud, America’s premier fighting force, were not afraid on the shores of Tripoli nor the Halls of Montezuma but they cower before the specter of Beyonce.

Earlier today Master Sgt. Kristin duBois,a spokeswoman for the U.S. Marine Band, said the band was notified at the last minute that Beyonce would use a pre-recorded voice track.

Later in the day, Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Gregory Wolf statement included this line, “Regarding Ms. Knowles-Carter’s vocal performance, no one in the Marine Band is in a position to assess whether it was live or pre-recorded.

Monday Musings

We have a BCS Bowl Pool at work. All 35 bowl games were used, starting with Arizona vs. Nevada in the New Mexico Bowl on December 15th and culminating with the Discovery BCS Championship Bowl in Miami pitting Alabama against Notre Dame. We include the point spread as published before the first game and don’t adjust it. And if the spread is an even number, a half point is added to the underdog to eliminate ties. We have 36 people playing and with just tonight’s game left my wife is in the catbird seat. If the Tide rolls she wins having picked 23 of 35 correctly. If the Fighting Irish win or lose by less than 10 points she will be tied for first and can do no worse than getting 2nd place money, if the tie breaker doesn’t go her way.

We have a MMC event this weekend, so in preparation the Emperor got a sponge bath this evening. By the time we get home from work these days it is too dark and too chilly to be getting out a bucket of sudsy water and a hose, so I opted for the soft towel and Meguiar’s Quik Detailer option. He is a small enough car and not too dirty that it didn’t take too long. I also put the top up and washed the windows. Tomorrow or the next day I may go ahead and give him a waxing in the garage as well being sure that I do wheel it outside in the daylight at some point to ensure I get all the dry wax buffed off.

We have a cache over in Augusta that we didn’t find when we first looked for it, so we put it on a watch list. This means that every time someone does or doesn’t find that cache we get an email letting us know what happened. Tonight we got a couple of emails telling us that some folks from Canada had found it. Somehow the mundane log of “Found with so & so. Thanks for the cache.” sounds so much more exciting in French, “Trouvé avec Pascal70 et lolo001. Merci pour la cache.”

The bank called this afternoon, the home equity loan is ready, so we meet one last time with the contractor tomorrow and then on Wednesday it is back to Lowe’s to talk with the cabinet guy to iron out the final details. Looks like this thing is gonna happen.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1189

Gangster Squad

Doesn’t look like my kind of movie, but after seeing the trailer I can’t be the only one who thinks they are trying to channel Jessica Rabbit through Emma Stone.

Out With The Old

We’re spending a quiet, well inside at least, New Year’s Eve at home. No parties requiring bean dip for us. Me in front of the PC watching a fuzzy ESPN stream of Clemson vs. LSU from a European server and Donna on the couch reading a Daniel Steele novel with the movie Enchanted on as background.

With the Leaf antenna screwed into the dedicated UHF port on the preamp and the rabbit ears connected to the VHF port over the air free TV was just fine watching the NFL on the 3 channels that it shows on. Including the previously pesky FOX54. The real test will come next time we are in the middle of a rainstorm.

The End Zone Entourage League’s season finished up yesterday. I made the playoffs with my mediocre 7-6 record because unlike last year when only the top 4 teams got in, this year everyone got in. I’m pretty sure that the owners of the top four regular season teams are not happy with me as Commissioner because one of the changes I made was that all 12 teams made the playoffs. Those top 4 did get a bye-week, but three of them promptly lost their first game to the underdogs. And the underdogs had their day in the Championship game as the 4-9 regular season #12 seed beat the 5-8 #10 to take home the coveted Trophy To Be Named Later.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1188

A Holiday Message From The Life Of Brian Staff

Christmas Lights

Please accept — with no obligation, implied or implicit — my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable tradition of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your preference.

In addition, please enjoy a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2013.

Who Knew?

All,

Last year after Christmas we picked out our Christmas cards for this year, sue us, we’re frugal. We found them at Kroger and there were 4 different sized cards in each box all with the same style. Donna sat down as she does every year writes out the cards and I place the stickers and stamps on each envelope.

Turns out there is a minimum size envelope that can be run through the automated sorter machines at Post Offices and one of the four sizes we mailed was too small. So over the last 4 days, we have gotten your cards returned to us with various notes attached on the envelopes from “This is too small and undeliverable” to “Additional 20¢ postage required.”

Instead of trusting the additional 20¢ we opted to buy regular stamps and place your cards in regular sized envelopes, so sorry for the lateness of our Christmas greetings.

We got back 9 cards and we think there was a total of 10 of the small sized envelopes. The missing one might have gone to Canada where we hope the natural politeness of the Canadians applies to their postal service and it will get delivered anyway. If it ends up going to somewhere in America, someone on our list will be greeted by a USPS delivery person ransoming the Christmas card for 20¢

Merry Christmas,
Brian & Donna