Flashback Friday–Dude Write style

This is an entry to this week’s Dude Write contest where your supposed to tell an embarrassing or funny story that happened to you or that you witnessed in under 1500 characters.  For the record, I’m not looking forward to counting my characters.  My Windows Live Writer counts my words but not my characters.  Maybe I should type each sentence into twitter so it counts for me.  Being as this is a past story and it’s Friday, I decided to make it a Flashback Fridays post as well.

When I was a teenager and was going to church, I always sat upstairs in the balcony.  We (my friends and I) were sitting in the front row and the congregation was just finishing up singing a hymn and I went to close my hymnal when it slipped and fell towards me, no problem right?  Wrong.  I went to catch it, and in turn it slipped under the railing and fell down to the lower level.  So just as everyone stops singing and it’s very quiet, everyone hears a loud “thud”.  I lean forward and look downstairs and everyone, including the pastor, is looking up at me.  I did the "shrug my shoulders while mouthing, sorry" look.  Then I looked directly below me to see where the hymnal landed.  Had I dropped it a few feet to the left, it would have landed on a baby in a car seat/carrier.  Luckily, it just landed on an empty pew seat.

For future reference, you can type this out at http://www.lettercount.com/ and it counts the characters.  Thanks to my lovely wife for suggesting I Google it.  Of course, that was after I tried counting it and screwed up at the end.  This came in at 832, the original was shorter and I bolstered it when I realized I have more characters I could use.

WWW Wednesday #7

To play along, I’m supposed to answer 3 easy questions.

What are you currently reading?

Early to Death, Early to Rise (Madison Avery #2) by Kim Harrison

I’m a big fan of Kim Harrison so this was an easy choice.  I’ve read the 1st of the Madison Avery series and I have the last one already downloaded on my Kindle.

What did you recently finish reading?

The Devil’s Deep by Michael Wallace

This was actually a better book than I was expecting.  You never know what your going to get with a free book.  From a psych ward to the coasts of Costa Rica, this psychological thriller keeps a steady pace of What the hell is going on?  These are the books I like, the ones that I can’t quite figure out till the end.  I figured it out before the complete end, but it was close to it.

The main character takes a job at the hospital to be close to his brother who has had mysterious bruises show up but ends up getting in the middle of a whole lot more.  From the doctor’s and nurses to his own family, he starts unraveling the secrets of the past.   After a trip to Costa Rica to find out what really happened to his uncle on a diving trip a few years ago, it all starts to come out and leads to the thrilling end.

What do you think you’ll read next?

The author has asked me to review some of this series after I reviewed the first one (Sunset (Pact Arcanum #1).

If you want to join on WWW Wednesdays, click the logo on top or go to http://shouldbereading.wordpress.com/ and leave a comment.

Randomness #8

I mentioned before that I took the time to go through my Google Reader and update who I continue to read.  After taking all that time to do so, the very next day, I log in to the GR and get a nice little note saying that Google is going to discontinue the reader as of July 1st.  I posted on my Facebook that I was in search of one and that my only requirements were that I could use folders and that it has an Android app.  I then went and searched for a new one to use.  The best one that I could find was FeedDemon so I spent hours setting it up to how I wanted.  It wasn’t as good as GR and it didn’t have any mobile apps.  Then Carl, a friend of mine, had posted a link to an article on LifeHacker that was specifically for those GR users that were being left high and dry.  I went through other RSS feeders and gave positives and negatives on each one.  I read the one for FeedDemon and it said it was very comparable to GR, but since it fed off of GR, it was also going away on July 1st.  So I read up on the others and have switched over to Feedly.  While it also feeds off of GR, it says they will have a smooth transition onto it’s own before July 1st.  It also has a Android and Kindle app so it was exactly what I wanted.  I’ve used it for a few days and I don’t like it as much as I do GR but it will do.  The main negative is with the apps, I can’t set it to read the oldest first.  I can on the online version, just not the apps.  But I can deal with that and I’m guessing with all the people jumping ship from GR that they will update the apps soon.

While I’ve only got 1 post finished for the A to Z Challenge, I do have the other 25 ready to be started, sort of a template for each so now all I have to do is type them out.  I’m not sure if having the kids pick the words was the right thing but I’m sticking with it.  Like I said before, the purpose of doing this challenge is just getting me to blog more again.

I mentioned at the beginning of the year that I was starting to watch the Original Star Trek series after dropping the kids off at school and while Cheri slept.  I haven’t been doing a very good job at it since I keep coming home and crawling back in bed.  But I am slowly getting there.  I am closing in on the end of the first season.  I only have 2 more episodes left before I start the 2nd season.  I have work the next couple of days so I might get to watch those on Friday morning.  It depends if Cheri stays in bed or not after I take the kids to school.

If you follow my WWW Wednesdays posts, you know I give a short review of my thoughts on the book.  A few weeks ago I had mentioned that I started Sunset (Pact Arcanum #1) by Arshad Ahsanuddin and that it wasn’t growing on me but there was a storyline that had me intrigued.  Well, the author had read that and sent me e-mail asking which storyline I was enjoying.  We emailed (through GoodReads) a few times and discussed his book and writing and he gave me the opportunity to read the rest of the series and review it.  I thought it was pretty cool that he even messaged me for my opinions.  So he emailed me the review copies and it took me a few days how to get them to my Kindle.  The kindle has an email address that you send to and it goes to your Kindle but I couldn’t get it to work.  I email them and they never showed up.  Come to find out, I have to email them from the address I registered my Kindle from, but it took me a few days to figure that out and I started another book so I’ll review his once I get that one done.  You’ll see the second one under the “What are you reading next?” heading on tomorrow’s WWW Wednesdays post.

Not my thermometer.

I’m certainly not planning on heading outside any more than possible today.  While it says that it’s 22° out, it also says that it feels like -2°.  There is no snow on the ground nor was my windshield frosted over but yet, my doors were frozen.  It took a little tugging to get it open.  I had to take the kids to school, and I’ll have to pick them up yet, I just wish that was all I had to do but Trevor has his lego league tonight so I’ll have to drive back out to the school again later.

A to Z Challenge

Well, I did it.  I went and linked up to the A to Z Challenge so in April you’ll actually get 26 posts.  Maybe more because I still have my WWW Wednesdays posts that I’ll still throw out there on Wednesdays.  I wanted to do this challenge but was afraid I wouldn’t know what to type about.  Then I had this genius idea, or at least that’s what I’m calling it.  Since one of the hats I wear on this blog is a daddy blog, I asked the kids to write down the letters A to Z on a piece of paper and told them to write one thing for each letter.  So through April, I’ll be blogging about what comes from the minds of a 10 year old girl and an 8 year old boy.  I had them do this list today, and it may have backfired, but I’ll make it work.  Here’s their lists.

Hmm!  I guess since I don’t know all their school friends, I’ll have to make stuff up.  And T will be interesting since Trevor put theEx’s name down.  I have lots to say on that subject.  It’ll be different and it’ll be fun.  Maybe I’ll even add another word as my letter and have 3 times the fun, we’ll see how it goes.

Blogging Blues

I’ve had the blogging blues as of late and I think I might join the A-Z Challenge in April.  Everyday except Sunday’s, you blog, but on the 1st your post is about something that starts with an A, on the 2nd, a B and so on.  I’ll be honest, the only reason I haven’t signed up yet is because I’m afraid I won’t make it through the whole month.  Even during my last month of so of the Blogging Blues, I’ve had stuff to say, just haven’t taken the time to sit and write them out.  Just usually kind of feel blah towards it.  I’m thinking if I join it, it might actually force me to blog and maybe get something going.  It might just be the kick in the ass that I need.

I planned on typing more than the above paragraph, but I’m having issues concentrating.  After I got through the above paragraph, my computer has gone to sleep twice before I even got to this paragraph.  Definitely having some issues blogging.

My Kind of Humor #8

This post is long overdue.  There were all posted on my Facebook page awhile ago so join me there to get in on the fun.  Your mainly getting this post because I’ve been very lazy on my last 2 days off and now I need to go back to work for 3 days.  I’m thinking about joining the A-Z challenge just to force myself to blog a bunch because I’ve been having issues sitting my ass down to blog lately.

This is definitely me, I hate that stupid icon.

So true, if I drank coffee, this would be my mug.

This is an ongoing battle, it must be ran by windows because I can never find the give a fuck that I’m looking for.

This is a great idea, let’s highlight all the stupid people so we can avoid them.

Let’s pray that this fad isn’t the end of us and they eventually grow up.

This happens a lot, not because I’m smarter than everyone, but because I have kids.

They think they invented everything that they bring back from the 70’s and 80’s.

So simple and so true.

No more complaining about headaches, and I have the perfect way to get the tylenol into your system.

Is this where ex-wives sell the balls they have in their jars after the divorce?

WWW Wednesday #6

To play along, I’m supposed to answer 3 easy questions.

What are you currently reading?

The Devil’s Deep by Michael Wallace

I’m just about done with it.  It’s pretty good, it’s not my usual genre as in there is no supernatural storyline.  But it’s probably labeled a mystery/thriller.  I used to do the thrillers all the time, but I rarely read them anymore.

What did you recently finish reading?

Sunset (Pact Arcanum #1) by Arshad Ahsanuddin

I mentioned that I wasn’t into this one but I was into one storyline in my last WWW Wednesdays.  The author hooked me with the beginning by starting in with some action and the introduction to 3 different metahuman races.  That was the storyline that hooked me, the mixing the other races with humans.  That got me but the middle of the book was kind of losing me because it was mainly the storylines of how the metahuman races came about and who they are and about the main characters relationships.  Which were essential to the story but it was a little tough to follow.  But the author made it up at the end.with a thrilling finish with some twists.  Made up for me enough that I put the rest of this series on my wish list on Amazon.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Early to Death, Early to Rise (Madison Avery #2) by Kim Harrison

This is the next one on the kindle and I generally read them in order that I downloaded them.  I’m a big fan of Kim Harrison’s Hollows series and I’ve read the first Madison Avery book awhile back.  I’m getting to the part in my Kindle where I used my Christmas gift card and actually paid for some books.

If you want to join on WWW Wednesdays, click the logo on top or go to http://shouldbereading.wordpress.com/ and leave a comment.

Facebook tolerance

Facebook is really starting to get annoying now.  It always has been, but certain people have made it more annoying to be on there.  I have one friend who posts about 10 things about gun control, a day.  Every freaking day!  He’s a classmate and I don’t socialize a lot with him, haven’t actually seen him in over 20 years but we have had interactions on Facebook so I keep him in “My Current Friends” list.  For the most part, I just breeze past them.  But he posted on one of them about how he wasn’t going to listen to a certain artist anymore because she had come out about feeling the opposite that he does.  That struck a chord with me.  I’m thinking your allowed to have your opinion, why can’t she have hers?  I even created and posted this e-card

with him specifically in mind awhile back, and he liked it.  I don’t ever say anything because I like to think that I’m tolerant of other’s opinions.  If he wants to feel the way he feels, more power to him.  Personally, I think you can put more time and energy into things that you can make a difference on.  Posting crap on your Facebook isn’t going to make a difference in any issue.  I’d say there’s a slim to none chance that you will even change any of your friend’s minds.  I thought it would go on for a little bit when the issue came up and then go away.  Like the election crap he posted did, but apparently not.

I also have another friend who posts vague status’.  Do these annoy everyone as much as they do me?  He’s left stuff like “Do you ever wish a decision you made 4 years ago never happened?????? Right now it's eating me alive! :/” or “Come on let's get this show on the road!!!!”  Just basic stuff but you know they are posting them to get someone to ask what’s wrong or what’s going on.  Those status’ just tell me that your needy.  If you want people to comment, then say what’s going on, not leave something vague because you want me to ask because guess what?  I’m not going to ask, if you want me to know, then tell me.  If you don’t tell me, I assume you don’t care if I know.

I know all my status’ aren’t want everyone wants to read, but I also post maybe once or twice a week.  I don’t even plug my blogs.  I did when I first started getting serious with it, figured after a few weeks, if they haven’t bookmarked or liked the Facebook page then they don’t give a crap about my stuff either.  So I let it go, I don’t keep posting over and over.

I’m just bitching to be bitching.  I don’t expect either one of these people to change.  I just wish people would actually believe in tolerance.  Everybody preaches it but nobody really follows it.  My tolerance is not pointing out what the people do on Facebook, even if they do think different then I do.  It may not be a lot, but it’s a start.  I’m pretty tolerant of anything as long as other people aren’t getting hurt.  I think it’s a philosophy that if it was more worldwide, it would make this world a better place.

Getting caught up

Well, I finally did it.  It took a couple of days but I have finally gotten through my Google Reader.  No, I’m not caught up on all the reading, I finally went through everything that gets fed there and got rid of a lot of stuff.  I’ve posted before how I am no longer allowed to use my Kindle up on the line so I just keep getting further and further behind on my reading so this has been coming for awhile.  I started with 727 things being fed to it.  The majority of those are blogs with some instagram accounts and other websites that I keep up on.  Now I have it down to 470.  The majority of those are sports or sports card related.  I would guess probably around 300 of them are, and a lot of those I just skim and look at the cards.  I pretty much kept all the sports cards blogs as long as they’ve posted in the last year or so.  I deleted a lot of the mommy blogs, not all, but most.  I found out that most of them I was just skipping anyways.  I also deleted most of the blogs that I have to click a link to go to their site to finish reading them.  It’s just annoying but there were a few of my favorites that I left even though they did that.  Although off the top of my head, I can only think of 2 that stayed.  I also deleted most everything that hasn’t posted in over a year.  I even created a folder that I put blogs that haven’t posted yet this year but did last year, just in case they come back to blogging.  There were quite a few blogs that didn’t exist anymore.  You would think they would at least post a Hasta La Vista post before leaving but for the most part, they just disappeared.

So now that I got those cut down, I’ll see if I can’t actually stay caught up.  You know, after I get caught up.  Of course, I’ve also added a few.  I have a cousin who is apparently starting a blog, he’s only posted once and it sounds like it’ll be a religious blog so if that stays I’ll only be skimming it.  He’s family, so I’ll follow along regardless if I like the content.  Unlike most of my family who don’t read anything I write.  I also have a friend who started a blog about his goal of getting in shape.  He’s posted daily (I think) for a week now.  It’s torture, because I’m jealous that he has the motivation to keep working out and doing what he needs to do.  I’d plug it here but I’m not sure he wants it public or not, he posted it on his Facebook page but those are all people he knows.  If he reads this post, he can let me know if he wants me to plug it for him.

Track – So What

Artist – P!nk

What the hell is that?  A Track of the Day, it’s been awhile,  I’ve had some of these saved up and just forget to throw them up.  So here you go.  Pink or P!nk.  I didn’t realize she used an exclamation point until recently.  My wife got me into listening to her, and I’ve gotten to like a bunch of her songs.  Plus, she’s kind of has a bad ass hotness to her.  Which is kind of what this song is about.

Home life and buying

As you can tell, I still haven’t gotten back into the swing of throwing some posts out.  I tweeted this over the weekend, while at work.

I’m pathetic.  While I’m standing around at work, because we aren’t that busy, I sit there and think – I could be home blogging right now or I could be home organizing the cards I’ve recently purchased.  Which I imagine we all probably do while we are at work.  The problem is, I’ll get some days off and I just sit on the couch and not be able to get motivated.  The bad thing is, I’m so behind in my blog reading because of the new rule at work to where I’m not allowed to use my Kindle on the line which is where I did the majority of my blog reading.  Which in turn, puts me behind on other things like finding funny pictures and cartoons for my RTFARG Facebook page.  Of course, I can’t really blame myself for just being a vegetable on the couch doing nothing, because I have gotten into one thing on my computer.

I’m haven’t gone overboard with the playing time or anything, but it’s my “go to when I’m bored” now where I used to read blogs to try to stay caught up.  The courses are very realistic, and even my putting sucks so it makes it feel very real.

We have been looking at houses, as I’ve said before, and we’ve found one we really want so we had a meeting back with our lender today.  My credit scores are all up and close to where they need to be, (highest I’ve ever seen) but of course, the last thing I needed to pay off (which we did a few weeks ago) hadn’t cleared yet.  Cheri had asked him for a timeframe on when he thinks our credit will be ready and he said he really didn’t think it would get done till later in the summer so we can probably kiss the house we want goodbye.  We’re hoping it stays on the market long enough for us but the way my luck runs, it won’t.

Regardless, we drove out to the place that we paid that last bill off to get a letter stating it was paid off to send to the credit score places to get it cleared.  The lady we talked to basically said that nobody let her know that it was paid off so they hadn’t reported it yet.  I love how these places don’t hesitate to report you when you don’t pay but when you want them to do something for you, yeah, screw you.  So now it should get reported in the next couple of weeks and get cleared.

We also got a secured credit card to establish more positive credit so once that comes, we are supposed to charge everyday stuff and then pay it off right away.  The plan in our heads at this moment is, we will use it to put gas in the vehicles.  So once a week on Cheri’s and once every 3 weeks on mine.  Her gas mileage sucks.

When we finally did get home today, we picked up the mail and there was a letter from HUD, when Cheri first moved up here and we combined our families we were receiving aid from the government to help us get by until we could get disability for Cheri.  Technically, we still get it.  They’ve been paying $31 of our rent every month.  We were up for renewal at the beginning of this year, we didn’t bother with it.  All the paperwork and hassle of filling everything out wasn’t worth it so we just ignored their letters about renewing and then we received the letter from them today saying that our aid was officially cancelled.  It’ll crush us losing that whopping $31/month but we’ll manage (insert sarcasm icon here).  But there was one line that confused us, it said “You must vacate your unit by April 30th, 2013”.  Um, what?  I figured it was a screw up, how can they say we have to leave it we are still paying our rent to the apartments.  So I took the letter down to the office and asked them about it, they pretty much laughed along with me.  Best we can figure is most people receiving assistance are receiving a lot of assistance so when they lose it, they can’t afford to live there anymore.  They said I have nothing to worry about, which is good since I can’t quite buy a house yet.

Nothing else really happened today, kids came home from school where Samantha is doing ISTEP testing so she didn’t have any homework where Trevor isn’t taking the tests yet so he did.  So I played Samantha in some chess again, they both seem to enjoy the game.  Samantha is a little better than Trevor because she has learned that you have to sacrifice pieces to get to the end.  Trevor is all defensive and trying to keep all his pieces.  Like I said in my last post, it won’t be long before they start beating me.  I’ve always enjoyed the game but was never all that good at it.

We’ll see if they even go to school tomorrow because we have been getting hammered with snow.  There are all kinds of school closings already but the kids school tend to wait until the last second before cancelling.  I already shut off their alarm so if it gets cancelled or at least delayed, maybe they’ll sleep in a bit.  But I doubt it, they don’t know how.