Christmas Card Sweep for Lakeview Coffee Joe!!!

Saturday I was able to take down another wall in the shower, which means that part of the bathroom is all demolished. Next up, the other side of the bathroom. Think I should take the towels down yet?







Every year, about this time, my parents have the kids over (and grandkid) and we display all of the Christmas cards they have received that year and vote on the best one. The winner is sent a letter of acknowledgment and the card itself is framed on hung in the hallway referred to as the Christmas Card Wall of Fame. This tradition has been taking place since 1973. A few years back I even created a story for This American Life on NPR, but didn't submit it as my potential contact there left the station.

For 34 years, my entry has always failed to win. A few times I made it into the finals....maybe the final five or so, but have never won. My sisters have won, multiple times even, an ex-girl friend has won, even my (now 8 year old) niece has won!!







But this year, I finally won! It was a close vote. In fact, we had to re-vote once as it was tied at 4-4. Someone changed their vote in the final tally to make it 5-3. (An even number of votes is a problem if I don't have a significant other there, and MWrigley wasn't feeling well and had to work.) This is my entry, which didn't photograph all that well. It is a pretty card though.












This is what I was up against, my niece's card. By the way family, I think she picked her OWN card in the first round! We all know that's not allowed. Anyone else remember it that way??









Here is the third place card, submitted by Bee actually. While you might think it only ends up being the family in the finals, it doesn't happen often actually. We do try harder to send a nice card than most people though. Funny story about this card Bee, Ma was going to send the EXACT same card out this year before you sent it to her!! Ha! Too funny. It really was a nice card and now Bee is bitter about her loss.


Several years ago, after she got married some time I believe, my sister Sue carried on the same tradition in her house with the Christmas cards her family received. My entries have had much better luck in her competition and today I had the winning entry for her competition as well!




Here's my entry. Again, looks better in person with some of the snow shimmering and such. I call it "Rosebud". If I'm not mistaken, it's the first sweep of both competitions!!











This card was the runner up and I had actually picked it as one of my two favorites in the first round of voting (when you aren't allowed to pick your own card). A very nice scene.

Exhausting day.

On Fridays during Lent, I get up early and go to 8:30 mass at my church. There are many fewer people there than on Sunday (which I still go to as well) and due to construction during the week in the main church, we use a much more intimate setting in the basement of the church. I was literally 10 feet from the priest almost the entire mass. So that was kind of cool, but the getting up early was definitely NOT cool. After a late night on Valentines Day over at MWrigley's, it was tought to get up at 7 a.m. for church and as a result I was exhausted the rest of the morning.

At 4:00, I had my first personal training session with the guy who worked with Ricardo last year, Joel. He's a good guy and was even singing in my church's choir for a while. No, he's not gay. In fact he told me he had a date with a woman last night who has a great body and is a teacher (and is into slam poetry, which I think is the work of the devil).

Anyway, as expected, the workout pretty much killed me, though not in the ways Joel expected. Normally his students don't use their big leg muscles enough and when he works them out, the people crumble or experience a lot of pain the next day. But in playing softball, I know that my legs are key to my game (especially at my age) and have always worked them out pretty hard anyway. So today, my triceps are killing me, but everything else is ok. I'll probably hit the gym tomorrow if I can and then my next session is on Tuesday.

Still no contact with FTD. I've been on hold for another 20 minutes today. Ugh. These people suck.

FTD and why I hate them!!!

For all you "under rock" dwellers, yesterday was Valentines Day. I feel the need to point this out because apparently not everyone is aware of it. Even some people who are in the BUSINESS of delivering flowers for the holiday. That's right, I'm convinced FTD had no idea yesterday was Valentines Day. Two weeks ago I ordered a beautiful bouquet of flowers for MWrigley to be delivered on Thursday with some Godiva chocolates. I received my email confirmation that the order was received on the site and then on Wednesday received an email that gave me a tracking number with Fedex.

Great, everything was on schedule. And fortunately so because MWrigley was cooking dinner for us....and WHAT a dinner. I'll go into that in a minute. So noon rolls around and still no flower delivery and MWrigley informs me that she's going to the other building for a meeting as she has to do on every Thursday (unbeknown to me). Great. Now, even if the flowers DO come, she won't get them until Friday.

Well, they didn't come on Thursday and they didn't come on Friday either! I spent all day trying to reach FTD, but have not been able to get through. Once I was on hold for 20 minutes, but gave up. I've pretended to be placing a new order, checking up on an existing order, reporting a problem, even calling the number for international residents to call (non-toll free). Nothing worked. Even as late as 7:00 today I was not able to get through. Bastards. Use someone else in the future!!!

Now for dinner. Flowerless, MWrigley STILL wanted me to come over precisely at 6:00. At least I wasn't late, oh and I did bring wine and chocolate covered strawberries. She had candles on the table and two brand new place settings all set out (yes, brand new dishes just for the evening!). I was not allowed in the kitchen and basically just had to sit at the table and pour wine.

For an appetizer, we had a thinly sliced baguette with blue cheese, pistachios and drizzled with honey. So simple and so very delicious! The main dish was a rolled chicken stuffed with chopped olives and garlic. Very tasty. On the same plate was asparagus and pasta with a simple and flavorful tomato sauce. For dessert, she served a strawberry shortcake of sorts in a glass. The cake portion was actually pound cake soaked a little with amaretto. The strawberries actually were soaked in some balsamic vinaigrette. It wasn't even really noticeable, but the whole dessert was fantastic!!! The chocolate covered strawberries that I brought were horrible, at least the chocolate was. Ugh. Nothing I did was going right, but we still had a great night.

So I guess you don't HAVE to send flowers on Valentines Day, but me thinks I'll still try to get some to her in short order.

A few well placed swings with a hammer.....

....and progress is made. Tuesday I decided to make some more progress on the demolition of the shower and guest bathroom. This "before" picture doesn't show the wall above where the tile was, but that's where I decided to start. I basically made a line of hammer holes across the top of the wall so I could take the tile down below the line.


Then I did essentially the same thing with the wall on the right in this picture: a bunch of hammer holes creating a perforated line across the wall and the entire wall came off with basically one big tug. Pretty cool. Then it was just a matter of breaking up the wall into manageable pieces so I could throw it away incognito. Normally, when doing renovation work of this size, you should rent a dumpster and have it picked up by a service. I opted for the City of Chicago service!


Here are the after pictures from today.




The last part of this wall got stripped down.
























These two pictures are of the wall to the right as your looking into the shower. It's opposite the shower head on the left. I took this entire wall down in pretty much one piece from the tile down.
















This is the top portion of the wall in the picture above.









I've figured out a nice little routine for doing the demolition. I put on my ripped jeans, throw on a bad t-shirt, an old baseball hat, my goggles, my face mask and hiking shoes. Then I grab an old garbage can, close the bathroom door, turn on the exhaust fan and go to work. Once I get done what I want (several bags full), I pull around to the front of the building one of the city cans which has wheels. Then I only have to get the bags outside and the rest is easy. It's all about the process baby!!

There's Charlie Trotters and then there's Sapori Trattoria

Good news for me and my business and pleasure travels! As a Starbucks frequenter and AT&T user at home, it could help with my enjoyment of life on the internet.

Monday night, MWrigley and I went out for Valentines Day. Yep, Monday. A restaurant that I went to last summer, Sapori Trattoria, sent me an email advertising a Valentines Day dinner special on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. MWrigley was busy the other two days, so I booked Monday. Our table had rose petals on it and there was a piano player and a singer for ambiance. The pre-set menu was pretty amazing. I can't even begin to describe it, so I brought it home and scanned it for you. Each course had it's own bottomless glass of wine!





Hopefully you can read the menu if you click on it. The antipasti was pretty tasty with three kinds of meat and two kinds of cheese. MWrigley really liked the octopus. I liked the prosciutto. Good stuff. The pastry puff was really very tasty too. The wine served with this was by far my favorite....as reflected in my consumption of at least three glasses!!









The tortelloni was really delicious and the truffle sauce was fantastic. The risotto was tasty though I have to admit, when they first brought it out I thought it smelled like ass. Seriously, I'm not even joking...ass. It must have been the taleggio cheese we decided. Unfortunately it was delicious too, so after we each had a portion of both, I had the waiter wrap up the extras to take home. We still had two more courses AND desert to eat!!!

The ossobuco was amazingly tender and just flaked off the bone with a fork. The quail was good, but seemed a little dry to me, which might be normal for quail. After everything else being so wonderful though, I wasn't going to force it down.

Dessert was the wide, fried, puffy pastry sticks in some powdered sugar for lack of a better description with chunks of dark chocolate and raspberries. Yowza, very tasty stuff.


Since everyone in the front of the restaurant had the same meal, there was one seating at 7:00 and everyone was served the same dish at the same time. We didn't finish until 10:30! That's longer than my meal at Charlie Trotter's!!! One person near me said it reminded her of being in Europe, which made me cringe a little as it reminded me of an annoying long meal I had in Paris.

The cost for this extravaganza? Only $75 per person. Pretty sweet deal.

When in Orlando, visit the Walmart.

My weekend wasn't just softball in Orlando. I completely forgot to talk about what we did on Sunday after we were eliminated from the tournament.

Since most of the team is in their early 30's or younger, most of them stayed up almost all night on Saturday night/Sunday morning and then slept in Sunday morning until 11ish. As they all headed out to the bars on Saturday night, I headed to the most obvious place.....the Walmart. Yeah, that's right, the Walmart. It was 11:30 on a Saturday night and I'm shopping at a Walmart in Orlando. Sounds a little pathetic doesn't it?

Here's the deal though, I was really tired from getting up before 6 a.m. and then playing four games during the day. So going out to the bars was not a great option for me, plus the team would have been looking for me to drive the van I rented and I didn't want to be herding cats at 2 a.m. when the bars close AND having to be sober to drive everyone back to the houses. No thanks. So why go shopping?

Well, on the flight in, Southwest opened one of my zippered pockets on my luggage and all of my chargers were lost: toothbrush charger, cell phone charger, DVD player charger....all gone. I was hoping that Walmart had some sort of universal charger that would maybe charge up at least the phone and DVD player. And they did! That enabled me to watch 3:10 to Yuma on the flight home. A good movie by the way.

Sunday, after a leisurely cup of coffee at the local Starbucks while the younger folks slept, we all headed to this boardwalk type of touristy area. There were carnies and rides and shops and bars, so a little something for everyone. They also had go karts which 10 of us rented and had a blast running into each other while going around this vertically oriented track (think parking garage structure). Then two other guys and I bought these little plastic bb guns and ambushed the team coach in cross fire. That led to many more exchanges of gunfire throughout the day and some drive by shootings from the cars. Good times.

Orlando update

First and foremost, it was 70 degrees warmer in Orlando that it was in Chicago yesterday. When we landed last night (almost the entire team took the last flight out of Dodge), it was -2 in Chicago. We were wearing shorts and t-shirts in Orlando all day. Ugh.

Why shorts and t-shirts instead of softball uniforms? Well, it's because we lost twice on Saturday. We also won three games and won a forfeit on a fourth so we ended up 4-2 and probably finished around 20th out of 40-50 teams. Now that our team has experienced success, we don't even consider it a moral victory of any kind unless we at least make it to Sunday of a tournament. We had some things going against us this trip, but we just hit very poorly. From my recollection, we had maybe 5 people hit over .500 (myself being one of them) and that's just not acceptable. You need almost everyone to hit over .400, 80% to hit over .500, maybe 5-6 to hit over .600 and then one or two guys to hit over .700 if you're going to have a successful tournament. I don't think we had but one person hit over .600. Ugh.

The problems we had were mostly of our own doing. Three of our starters/regular contributors didn't make the trip, but we still had good depth so this was just a minor problem. The association that governed this tournament allows stealing and we don't have great team speed, but this also wasn't a deciding factor in our demise, just a contributing one. Friday we were supposed to have practice, but couldn't find a field. This really hurt us I feel. A good practice could have allowed our swings to be better the following day. For the tournament you might only get 10-15 at bats (due to player rotation in and out of the games), so each one has to count. Finally, the houses we were staying at (not a hotel as I would have preferred), were 45 minutes to an hour away from where we were playing. That was just stupid. Even with a 9:00 a.m. first game, we had to get up before 6 to get everyone ready, grab food at McDonald's, drive the hour, and then check in. Just stupid.

The victories and one defeat were all very close games. We won each of the games by one run and lost the last game by two. Our first lost, to a team from Georgia, we were crushed 19-2.

So all in all it was just a mediocre weekend from a softball perspective. It's a good group of guys though and the bonding experience can't be overlooked. Hopefully it will pay dividends as the season heats up in a few months.

The slush has turned to ice.

The last few days have been messy with heavy wet snow falling and most of it turning to slush due to temperatures hovering in the 32-35 degree range. Last night though the temps fell into the 20's and everything turned to ice. Ugh. Driving is a pain. Walking is a pain. This weather is a pain!!!! I'm fine with colder and no snow. I'm so tired of cleaning off my car every time I stop for more than 5 minutes!!

Ok, enough bitching about the weather. It's Chicago in February, deal with it Sutton.

Tomorrow I head to Orlando for my softball tournament and won't have my computer with me unfortunately. As I don't return until late Sunday, a Monday morning post probably won't be available. Be sure to check back though as I'm bringing my camera and should have some interesting things to write about. (a nice change huh?)

Good news on the coughing front! Yesterday morning I made an appointment with my ENT just to make sure I didn't have an upper respiratory infection or something similar. No fever. Check. Blood pressure normal. Check. Pulse normal. Check. Use stethoscope. No wheezing, no gurgling, nothing to indicate abnormality in my lungs. Check and mate. So my doc just prescribed this super duper cough medicine which I can only take one teaspoon every 12 hours. That's right, one teaspoon. I guess the stuff goes up into your brain and inhibits the coughing function temporarily. Man does it work!! Crazy. I still cough sometimes, but I can talk several minutes without coughing and I don't have the spasmatic fits of coughing that I had before. Since my cough was "unproductive", I'm not concerned about turning off the coughing switch in my brain. Pretty cool.

See you all on Monday!!

Heart Attack Snow

That's what fell in our area this afternoon: heavy, wet snow. Just shoveling a little bit from around my parking space was quite the chore. It's a complete mess outside with slush everywhere. It's much, much worse north and west of the city though. I heard they have white out conditions and 10 inches of snow!! To my Amsterdam readers, at least we get to see the sun periodically!!

Went into Starbucks today as I do every day and saw the new Jack Johnson CD on the counter. He sings a song that I like (though it's not on the new album) and so I picked it up to look and see if the song I like is on there. Nope. Down at the bottom was note though. It said: "This CD was recorded using 100% solar energy." You gotta be shittin' me. Really?? EVERYTHING was solar powered about it? From his website I found out that it was printed on 100% recycled paper as well. Good for him. That solar energy studio has to be pretty sweet though. You almost always see solar powered facilities actually using electricity from other sources and it's just supplemented by solar energy.

Monday I came home and had several messages on my answering machine. One of them was the following: "Hi, I'm Jack Darin, Director of the Illinois Chapter of The Sierra Club and I'd like you to consider voting for Dean Maragos for the Water Reclamation Board." Yadda, yadda, yadda. The thing is, Jack Darin and I went to school together!! In fact, he lived in the house behind a buddy of mine and we used to hang out periodically. What are the odds of that??

There's Amy Freeze again with a weather update. Every time I'm writing my entry, she seems to pop up on tv!

One last thing, I forgot to mention that last weekend MWrigley was over and we decided to order a pizza from Gino's East. It's my favorite deep dish pizza in Chicago, not that I've had all the varieties offered. So we order a pepperoni and giardiniera pizza. Spicy huh? Well the guy delivers it an hour later and it's a pepporoni and green pepper!! Only we don't realize it until we bit into the first piece. We're starving so we each eat a piece, but I'm also pissed that they got the order wrong (it was $25 with delivery and tip), so I call them up and they send over a new pizza with the right toppings. Now we had lunches for almost a week!!!

Just a mish-mosh

One of my readers sent this link to an ESPN story from a few years back that is now on YouTube regarding Rollen Stewart, the rainbow-afro-wig-guy. It's a good piece.

Read in the paper the other day that we had 9 inches of snow last year in Chicago and this year we are around 42 inches. That's the kind of winter it's been. Ugh.

Today I read that Yahoo!, in order to pay off it's $20 billion in debts, needs to fire 4,500 employees or 31% of their workforce. Doing the simple math means that each employee was saving them $4.4 million! Holy shit! Why aren't we all working for Yahoo! ?? Then the article said that in addition to the layoffs, they would have to sell $12.5 billion in investments. Oh, well that makes the number more reasonable right? Nope, it only drops the per-employee cost to $1.67 million. Now, you have to figure that some of the people are only making $50,000 a year right?? I mean there have to be SOME employees in that range. So for each one of those that there is, there's another employee making $3.3 million!!! Sure, the article is looking longer term than this year, but the numbers are still huge unless you're going out 10 years!!

Friday I head down to Orlando for a softball tournament and return on Sunday night. I haven't been playing much over the winter, in fact not at all, but I played last Saturday and did well so I'm expected good things. Next week I start my training sessions and am looking forward to it! Best case scenario is that I lose about 10 pounds over 12 weeks and maybe add some muscle mass. We'll see. The weight isn't a huge issue, but it should happen organically.

Well, the cough is definitely improving, but I still have some spasms when I try to have elongated conversations. Yet another reason to keep my mouth shut I guess!!

Rainbow Afro Wig Guy John 3:16...oh where art thou?

Not too much to talk about today. My day was relatively short after sleeping in to see if I could kick this cough (didn't work) and going to the gym to see if I could work out the cough out. Though I had a decent work out, the cough lingers, though to a lesser degree. I was also tired still from Saturday night when I had an 11:00 p.m. softball game in the burbs about 45 minutes away. I didn't get to bed until after 1:30 and then had the big Super Bowl day to tire me out further.

There were some good commercials during the Super Bowl. Did you have a favorite? Here's one top 5 list that I sort of agree with, except in reverse order. The Doritos mouse trap commercial would be my number 5 probably instead of the Audi-Godfather commercial. Will Ferrell's was probably number one in my book. That was funny stuff. Chris Kattan's Pepsi Max commercial was good too, but I'm partial to SNL folks and his Night at the Roxbury movie.

Here's an interesting follow up story about that guy with the rainbow afro wig who always held the John 3:16 signs at sporting events. Wow.

Super Bowl Sunday

Another Super Bowl, another winning bet! Hopefully you took my advice and snagged the Giants and 12 pts. If you did, good for you!! None of my Super Bowl squares came through, though I was just 2:35 away from winning $400! Damn.

We got dumped on with snow during and after the game (looks like another 4+ inches), so I'm sure the roads were just a nightmare with all the drunks out there. I had to drive MWrigley home through the mess. Ugh.

Speaking of which, we had a nice day today with me cooking and MWrigley consuming. Actually we both consumed, but I did all the cooking. We also had pina coladas in the afternoon as we watched the pregame shows and I prepared my chili.

Here are a few pictures:





Here are the pre-game ingredients. All the chili fixin's, a bag of marinating water chestnuts and a bag of marinating pineapple chunks. Mmmmm.












These are the bacon wrapped pineapple chunks. They were marinated overnight in sweet and sour sauce. Good stuff!! A first time creation for me.











The pina colada in a freezer Bears mug along with the second batch of bacon wrapped items: water chestnuts marinated in teriyaki sauce, figs and prunes (yes, prunes!).










A close up of the finished goods.












I'm sure you're thinking a few things: Why pina coladas?? And why prunes?? Well, MWrigley and I have been trying to figure out a warm weather vacation spot and I thought it might be fun to set the tone and whip up some pina coladas. Plus I have some leftover pineapple juice from draining the pineapple chunks.

The prunes are completely out of left field. I had dates too, but ran out of bacon so I opted for the prunes. Fresh prunes are really very juicy and I've always liked them so I thought they might be similar to a fig to some degree once wrapped in bacon. Success!! They were very, very good!!

Chicago + Snow = Postal Holiday

We got dumped on here in Chicago, looks like about 12 inches or so. Yowza! As it turns out, apparently, if there's too much snow, the postal employees unilaterally can decide to not deliver mail. Can't blame them too much though. Here are some pics from today:







Out in front of my house.












The first car in my outdoor parking lot. Cool how the snow has sort of melted away and such.









Just wanted to go on record as saying the Patriots will win on Sunday, but if I were a betting man, I'd take the Giants and the 12 points. They should be able to keep it close with that running back tandem they have. By the way, both players were available when the Bears took their two running backs, Ced Benson and Garrett Wolfe. Ugh.

For the big game I'll be making chili and various items wrapped in bacon (water chestnuts, dates, and pineapples).

The List

On the radio this morning, Eric and Kathy (from the 101.9 The Mix), they were talking about this list which I found really interesting. I think all single women (and many married ones) would benefit from reading it and thinking about it. Mind you, I don't agree with ALL of them (for instance #1 isn't true for me at all and #12 might be a little true, but it's pretty insignificant), but that's pretty good out of a list of 25 truths. Not bad at all.

A huge snowstorm is hitting Chicago today, tonight and tomorrow. I've heard anywhere from 3 to 10 inches. Ugh. I hate snow. This is the fourth snowiest winter in the last 25 years and this snowfall could push us up to third. Enough already!!

Today I signed up for a personal trainer for the first time in my life. This guy is the trainer Ricardo used last year about this time and so that's how I know him. He's a good guy who has moved to a gym that's actually closer to my condo than my current gym. The rate is about $60 an hour, which is a bit less than I thought I would have to pay but right about where I wanted to pay. We'll see what kind of shape I end up in after 12 sessions. I consider it off season softball training....plus I need to look good for MWrigley!!

Recipe for disaster: one part hacking cough, two parts heatless office.

Check out this link: a drunk driver stalled his car on the Metra train tracks in Hinsdale. It gets hit by not one, but two trains!!

This morning, despite my annoying cough and general lethargy, I headed for my office at Hooker and Halsted. It was something like 2 degrees and -15 wind chill, which, needless to say, sucks. But I had a client meeting this afternoon so into the office I went. Upon my arrival, Ricardo told me to keep my coat on as it was 45 in the office and the heat wasn't working yet. Again, no heat. Our damn thermostat is a programmable beast that takes about 15 minutes to reset every time something goes wrong with it and you're never really sure that you've done anything to get it working anyway.

Finally today, Ricardo went off on the maintenance guy (Curious George) who came into the office and replaced the programmable beast with a manual basic thermostat. Unfortunately, but exactly in line with our expectations of Curious George, the thermostat was a heat only thermostat instead of heat and air conditioning. He swears he'll come back and change it. Sure, right.

My meeting was at 2 in the afternoon and by the time I got back at around 3:30, the office was back up to 72 degrees.

So, needless to say, my cough isn't much better today. :-(

Tomorrow is the last day you can vote early for the primaries! I'm going to head over to the advance polling place in my neighborhood and get it out of the way.

What do you do when you're illin'? Rip up the bathroom.

Since I'm still a bit lethargic and under the weather, I watched the Super Bowl highlights of the Bears/Colts game last year. These half hour synopsis are shown every year around this time on either ESPN or the NFL channel. It just kills me to watch Grossman's inept performance. The fumbles, the terrible, terrible throws. Ugh. His two picks in the second half were both terribly, terribly under thrown. One was returned for a touchdown. In fact, over the last 49 minutes of the game, the Bears offense was outscored by the Colts defense. That's brutal.

Now to my main topic: my guest bathroom. Unable to concentrate much, but wanting to accomplish something, I decided now was a good time to start tearing up my guest bathroom. Here are some pics!!





















Here's the shower door after it's been removed and the stand up shower.





This is as far as I could go today as it filled up the garbage can. Not a bad start though.













The floor was already partially ripped up. Obviously much more to do.














The "before" picture of the wall that's going to be ripped out. Behind the frames on the left is a walled up window! I'm going to open it up and put in glass block. Should be cool.

Politics suck, but the weather was nice today!

I watched the state of the union address tonight....well, at least most of it. Full on homemade soup from MWrigley, I fell asleep towards the end. But how could I not?? Bush said little that was inspiring, but what could he actually say? The economy's in the shitter and nothing we can do in his last 350 days will change that. We're stuck in Iraq for some time, certainly longer than the next year. We're making no progress on getting bin laden. Pakistan is getting uppity. Gasoline prices, by all accounts, will hit $4.00 a gallon this summer. And there's too many dollars chasing too few resources.

Then the governor of Kansas gets on and starts talking about the President joining the Democrats to "get things done." Well why don't the Democrats join the President? And why didn't she actually offer solutions to anything? All she called for was unity, which won't happen unless the Dems win the White House. Instead of saying join the Dems to make the tough decisions in Iraq, why not offer what you think those tough decisions should be? I was very disappointed.

OMG, I just saw a clip on John Stewart of Mitt Romney with a group of black people saying, "Who let the dogs out? Who? Who?" You've gotta be shittin' me. That guy's a douche.

Temps hit in the mid to upper 40's in Chicago today! It wasn't sunny, but at least the temperature was nice. Most of the snow has melted. Sweet!

One week to the Super Bowl. In the past, I've had groups of people over to watch the game, but this year I think I'm going to be more reserved. Why? First, my basement is still half torn up from my August flood. Second, I still haven't bought a replacement television for the living room upstairs, so I'm down to two watchable tvs. Finally, I've had this really, really annoying cough that just won't go away. Last thing I want to do is annoy people during the commercials!!

Finally an end!

I'm a few days behind on the comics, but the lame-ass Dick Tracy Halloween night story line (yes, ONE night) is finally over!! Almost three months later, the story has finally ended, as disappointingly as it started and with no meaningful resolution based on the duration and absurdity of the story line. I've only been reading it to see how long the cartoonist would steal from the many newspapers who syndicate his strip. How he sleeps at night, I'll never know.

Since there's no football this weekend, I've been catching up on Tivo. Sure, I could have done something productive around the house, but what's the point in that? Anyway, one of the shows I Tivoed is March of the Penguins. Some interesting facts about Emperor Penguins:
-There are many more female Emperors than males.
-Emperor Penguins walk and slide nearly 70 miles (taking 2 weeks of almost constant movement) to the mating grounds.
-Females that can't find a male, simply return to the see.
-After laying her egg, the female passes it to the male who will incubate the egg at 95 degrees (on top of his feet and under his fat, for nearly two months.
-The female doesn't hang around after passing the egg. She bails and heads back to sea, having lost almost 1/3rd of her body weight.
-Only 66% of eggs will hatch in any given year on average.
-When the storms come in, thousands of males will huddle together and slowly rotate who is on the outside of the pack and who is on the inside, thus insuring as many eggs as possible survive.
-When the male finally leaves the hatched egg (by passing it back to the mother who returns after feeding), he marches back to the sea with only about 1/2 of his original body weight in tact. They think this is why there are so many fewer males; many perish on this return trip to the sea.

It's a good movie by the way. Very informative.

Stroke identification

I received an email today and instead of forwarding it to 10 people, I thought I'd post the information here on my site.

A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke. The trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.
Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke

Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions (STaR):
S Ask the individual to SMILE.
T Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE
(Coherently)(i.e. It is sunny out today)
R Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.

If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call 911 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

Another stroke indicator is to ask the person to 'stick' out his tongue. If the tongue is 'crooked', if it goes to one side or the other , that is also an indication of a stroke.

The Moment of Truth

Yes, the long awaited game show, The Moment of Truth, finally debuted last night on Fox. Here's the deal: you answer 50+ questions while hooked up to a polygraph before the show starts. Then the show takes 21 of the questions for use during the show, but you don't know which 21 nor do you know if you answered them truthfully (based on the polygraph at least).

At first, you have to answer 6 questions for $10,000. If you get through those, you have to answer 4 more for $25,000. It continues like that until you play for $500,000. You can stop before any question is ASKED and leave with what money you've earned. Once a question is asked though, you have to answer and answer it truthfully (based on your polygraph test).

To add stress to the matter, they bring in a friend, your spouse/significant other and possibly someone from work or a relative.

While I said I would totally do this show in a heartbeat previously, now I'm not so sure. The questions they ask are really tough and possibly hurtful. This guy had his wife of two years sitting 20 feet away and the question was, "Have you put off having children with your wife because you're not sure she is going to be your life partner?" Ugh....he said yes. Double ugh. The polygraph confirmed that he was telling the truth. Triple ugh. She was crushed. Oddly, the three people watching can stop one question by hitting this buzzer. The host will read another question, which could be worse. She chose to hear that question. Needless to say, she wasn't particular warm towards him at the end of the show.

The next guy, we found out, belongs to the Hair Club for Men (actually no surprise, it's a terrible weave), has had perverted thoughts in church, believes he has a gambling addiction (he works at a race track!), has looked through his co-workers personal items without them knowing it and that he has padded his underwear to look more well endowed. Unbelievable. They really struck it rich with this clown. In the next show, it appears, his son asks him (not the host) if he has ever gambled away one of his children's college funds.

So no thanks! I thought it would be an easy $500,000, but now I'm not so sure.

Hey, there's Amy Freeze on Fox32 again! Yay!

Just found this video clip on Youtube. The guy has a series of them and he's very funny. It's sort of like Wallace and Grommet if you're familiar.