White Lightning Axiom: Redux

Going lazy again today. The kids were home all day yesterday, driving the Mrs up the wall. We skipped swimming and TSD so that they could go out in the slush and play with the Cybernetic Mastodons. What a mess. Nothing like being chilled to the bone and getting a snoot full of 'Wet Dog Cologne' while trying to make a slush-man. Then, getting smacked in the back of the head with a partially frozen slush-ball. Sweet. The whole matter makes no sense though. The roads were not all that bad and it would not be a great effort to get the Tyrants to their Higher Education Facility. Today, they have an open house that I will be attending ... in the same classrooms where I teach Sunday School every week. There will be no great surprise, but to support the moral and emotional well-being of my offspring, I'll be there.

Other mundane news: I got a haircut yesterday. It was getting a bit long so I stopped by my favorite barbershop over by the Airbase and got shorn. Those old Italian guys really can do a top notch job with a 'flat top' cut. What else ... hmmm, selling girl scout cookies for Attila and doing well with that. Moving a box or two every day. Oh, and I tried to set up a bunch of network components for the Mrs. She got four 1tb networks disks and when I tried to hook them up to a hub, they were unresponsive. I plugged one into the wireless router's hard-line ports and it sprang to life. I'm guessing that the lousy 8 port 10mb hub is just not going to work for this application. I'll probably surrender and get a 24 port 100mb switch. Home networking can be such a challenge sometimes.

Technorati Tags:Networking | Swimming | Karate | Children | School

Labels: Children, Karate, Networking, School, Sunday School, Swimming

Word of the day: Turgid

Not much else. Standard day in the manor. No piano yesterday though. The instructor is on vacation at Disney World. Good for her, because this ice storm is making a real mess about here. Thought we might have a 2hr delay ... but that did not happen. Called the hot-line at 0545 sharp and the cancellation notice was already up. So, I lit the fire in the wood-stove and got my big old rear on the road. Took twice as long as it should have to get to work, but that was expected. The POS Super Saturn (of Doooom) handled ok, which is more than I can say for some of those high performance AWD beasts.

I'm not sure if TSD is going to be open tonight, but we'll give it a go. Have to make sure the Tyrants are sufficiently tired every night before they go into their meditation chambers!

Technorati Tags:Ice Storm | Swimming | Karate | Children | School

Labels: Children, Ice Storm, Karate, School, Swimming

Interesting interpretation ...

Technorati Tags:Blogging | War | Internet

Labels: Blogging, Internet, War

You Are 85% Conservative, 15% Liberal

Social Issues: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal Personal Responsibility: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal Fiscal Issues: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal Ethics: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal Defense and Crime: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

Technorati Tags:Meme | Blogging

Labels: Blogging, meme

Yesterday went pretty much as expected. I did find that my mental faculties were less than 100% though. For some reason, I could not seem to get my last form correct and I was flopping about like a half dead carp on some of my earlier forms. Gha! I was embarrassed to even call myself a practitioner of the ancient art (Way of the Open China Hand). Foppish, effete and ineffectual. Hopefully, I'll do significantly better today. With that said, I have only a few days to clean up before the Black-Belt pre-test. The Tyrants are closing in ... triangulating ... plotting. They'll most likely get their first stripe on their red-belts and that puts them 6 months away from their 'Cho-Dan Bo' (phonetically spelled). That means they are about 1 year and 3 months from their black belt. Right about the time they have their 8th birth-day. Fear it, the coming apocalypse!

Technorati Tags:Karate | Children

Labels: Children, Karate

Not much new to report. I did not get to do many of the chores I had hoped to get through this weekend. I spent way too much time using blasting caps to get the mountains of canine fertilizer off the frozen tundra of the back-50. There was all the usual stuff too. Outside of the mornings getting gobbled up by services and sunday-school, it seems that Sunday is all to short. So be it, I've got bigger eggs to fry right now.

Technorati Tags:Weekend | Chores | Dogs

Labels: Chores, Dogs, Weekend

Here I am in the boys locker room, doing the 'Security Duty' for the Swim Meet. Basically, my primary task is supposed to be making sure that no kids get molested or harassed while they are here. Secondary is the prevention of vandalism or injury from horseplay. So, sergeant at arms is probably the best classification. I've pulled this honor for the last two meets, mostly because I'm one of the few who took the training. I needed it for the work I do with the children in Sunday School and Cub Scouts as well so I'm in high demand for this sort of thing. Most of the time I just sit here in the swampy heat waiting, watching, and giving stern looks of disapproval when one of the boys do regular boy-type stuff. No harm comes of it since it never goes to far. Story of my life: Sheepdog.

Friday night was ok. Kids ate their lunch so they were entitled to 5 minutes in the hot tub provided they did their piano practice, finish their homework and eat all of their dinner (of course, busing their dishes afterwards as well). They fulfilled the requirements so they got some bubbly time. On the way to the pool, they get a treat in the POS Super Saturn of 6 little smokeys of the 'cheddar wurst' variety. They just love 'em. Gobble them down and we get going on our laps. Three laps each of breast stroke, back, crawl and butterfly. They get some pointers and then we play for the rest of the hour. It's can be a pretty good time, mostly. If either of them have had a rough day, it can be a real bear. From there, we have a 10 minute drive to TSD practice where they eat a hard boiled egg on the way. A little death-ninja training mixed in with a bazillion pushups/situps (they cheat horribly on these) will get them a bit tuckered out. On Mondays and Thursdays, they'll go from the karate studio to another 1.5 hours of swim practice where they mostly goof around. That's fine by me ... the Tyrants already got enough 'coaching' (read: drill-sergeant admonishment) for the day. The Ever Beautiful Mrs picks them up for that activity most of the time. If she has her own late-night engagements, I'll take over. Every other week is Girl scouts so she'll take Attila to that and I'll escort Genghis to the practice. On the way, they'll get either crab/lobster chunks (Jakers) or Mandarin orange slices (Alexis) and a packet of string cheese to tide them over. On the way home from that, it's a treat of a 100% fruit drink and a packet of sugar wafers. So riddle me this: why have they not gained a pound in
a year!? Must be the Asian influence.

The Grandparents made a trip down and occupied the Tyrant for a bit while the Mrs and I got some much-needed sleep this morning. Of course, since I failed to get my coffee at 0600, I started the day off with a good old withdrawal headache. Since then, I've been sucking down the brown elixir of alertness like it's going out of style. In between, Gramps and I worked on the pine-wood derby cars for the Tyrants and restocked the firewood brackets. I've got about 1 more month's worth of firewood stacked up next to the manor walls and 2 weeks inside the 'stove' room. I think we'll do ok for the rest of the winter. It's been colder than an Alaskan plumber's wrench in January around here of late. Gotta talk to Mr Gore about that ... Need some of that new-fangled global warming! Tomorrow, I've got to get the family to the 8am mass so I'll have time to do some brunch with them after I finish up with Sunday School. Weekends ... ever since we started the family some 6.5 years ago, my free time has been anything but! If I can slice out a few hours tomorrow, I'm going to try to clean some of the refuse out of the flower beds and put a few bulbs into the ground. It may be to cold though, I wish I had finished that nonsense in the Fall. If it's too onerous out there I'll just spend the time cleaning inside and prepping the meals for the week. That's a lot of sandwiches you know.

Technorati Tags:Weekend | Swimming | Karate | Children

Labels: Children, Karate, Swimming, Weekend

So here I am at the Log College Middle School swimming pool, waiting for the kids swim practice to begin. Toasty as all get out! It would be nice I suppose if I were not sitting here in a sopping wet do-bock (Korean spelling mangled). So, it's the perfect time to sit down with the laptop, find ZERO wi-fi signal (not even an encrypted one, and just pound out a rough doc.

It's been some time since I've had a chance to fill ya'll in on the going's on around the Haupertonian Manor. There has been illnesses and broken digits. The illness has been distributed among the clan with equality and the snapped tendons, digits and such have been reserved for my enjoyment. My pinky toe looks like a bloated purple grub at the moment. That should be a wonderful when I go through my black-belt pre-test in a couple weeks. Oh yessss .... I'll be gimping it up in prime form! The Tyrants will be going for their second stripe on their red belts so they are only 6 months behind me at this point. Tough little buggers, they are. The force is strong with these ones! Their midi-chlorian count is off the charts!! (Geeky Star Wars Ref here)

Let's see ... a synopsis of all the other mish-mash that makes my blessed life so durned interesting ... Christmas was off the charts ... we had everyone down at the manor this year and the 100 foot tall tree looked FANTASTIC. The piano/keyboard lessons are going well and they are really shaping up to be a couple of Mozarts. I tried to keep up with their lesson plans, but my wretched fingers are too well trained to be at home on the computer keyboard. Alas, no late life shift for me to take up a lounge act with the Tyrants and the Mrs as a sultry swooner. Hmmm ... massive layoffs at work that somehow spared me but left me with an excessively truncated list of available victims for the support phone duty. Not good for me, but I'll still get paid. No bonuses, no raises, not 401k matching ... but I never had that before so I'm not too sore about loosing those perks. Like I said, I'm not picking up shell casings in a war-zone to sell back to some dubious buyer so I really am in a pretty good place.

Oh, and for Christmas, Hero Dad and Super Mom bought the Mrs and I a new kitchenette set and a new Refrigerator. The table and chairs are really nice and sit very high so I don't wreck my back leaning over the Tyrant's homework. The fridge is VERY quiet and having the freezer on the bottom is so nice. I could never find anything because it was stored at a level that would require me to have eyeballs in my knee-caps. Now, I can pretty much locate that frozen pleisaur roast that I made last week with no difficulty. I moved the old fridge to the garage where it now serves as a back-up for milk, eggs, broccoli and beer. Happy-happy!

Oh, and how about those gas prices! Jeeze, what a roller coaster ride.

Technorati Tags:Gas | Swimming | Karate | Children | Piano | Christmas

Labels: Beer, Blogging, Children, Christmas, Grandparents, Health, Support Phone, Swimming, Tang So Doo, Winter

I'm getting closer to actually posting something. My life was su full that something had to give. This was it. Now that various bits of my anatomy are healing, I'll try to be a better netizen.

Technorati Tags:Blogging