Moody

Enough said.

Wendi's Question

1. Do you like blue cheese? no.
2. Have you ever smoked heroin? No. I'm not an expert, but I don't believe you smoke heroin.
3. Do you own a gun? Nope. We have state champ and her Jahng Bong for protection.
4. What flavor do you add to your drink at sonic? never been to a sonic
5. Do you get nervous before doctor appointments? I don't go to the doctor.
6. What do you think of hot dogs? Grilled good, boiled bad.
7. Favorite Christmas movie? Love, Actually
8. What do you prefer to ????? I think this question is missing......
10. What's your favorite piece of jewelry? Any ankle bracelet worn by SC
11. Favorite hobby? Going on vacation
12. Do you have A.D.D.? No. Wait, what was the question?
13. What's one trait you hate about yourself? I married someone who can never seem to sit and relax...
14. Middle name? Michael
15. Name 3 thoughts at this exact moment: I have to get up in 6 hours, I can't wait to drive to Cleveland and Columbus tomorrow, So that's how they make snowshoes!
16. Name 3 things you bought yesterday...Nothing. SC does all the buying.
17. Name 3 drinks you regularly drink? iced tea, root beer, water
18. Current worry? My inability to think of something to answer this question.
19. Current hate right now? HGTV
20. Favorite place to be? Zion National Park
21. How did you bring in the New Year? I don't recall.
22. Where would you like to go? Bora Bora
23. Name three people who will complete this? SC, SB, Me ;-)
24. Do you own slippers? Nope.
26. What year would you go back in time to? 1944
27. Can you whistle? yes
28. Favorite color? red
29. Would you be a pirate? Arrrrrrgh!
30. What songs do you sing in the shower? I don't take showers.
31. Favorite girl's name? Anastasia or Rhiannon
32. Favorite boy's name? 'Geno'
33. What's in your pocket right now? Lint.
34. Last thing that made you laugh? The Colbert Report
36. Worst injury you've ever had? Bit through my tongue.
37. Do you love where you live? No-PA sucks
38. How many TVs do you have in your house? 5
39. Who is your loudest friend? I have no friends. I just mooch off of SC's.
40. How many dogs do you have? Two - a Beagle, Molly, and a Samoyed, Tundra
41. Does someone have a crush on you? I'm pretty sure I do... ;-)
42. What is your favorite book(s) Lots of them.
43. What is your favorite candy? Not a big candy person
44. Favorite Sports Team? Penguins.
45. Your favorite meal? Filet Mignon
46. What were you doing 12 AM last night? Filling out this questionnaire
47. What was the first thing you thought of when you woke up? Wow, it's quiet downstairs considering there are 7 boys down there!
48. Do you have any odd habits? Everything I do is completely normal and not remotely odd...

Juicy

This word was an easy one. Although Geno has an ever-increasing vocabulary, the word he says the 2nd-most frequently after 'mommy' is JUICY. From the second he gets up in the morning until after he is in bed at night, he is on a constant mission to get more 'juicy'. He also has a tendency to lose the cups of juicy that he does get so some days he goes through 10 or more cups. I took this picture of him cuddling his precious juicy in the car on the way to Alex's Alaska picnic in Mt. Lebanon. It got rather windy and rainy at the picnic, but it was still nice and the kids had fun. The best part was watching one of the other kid's fathers fall flat on his back and slide down a steep grass-covered hill right after it rained. This happened about 5 minutes after I convinced Aidan to use the sidewalk instead since the grass looked wet and slippery. At the time, I think he thought I was ruining his potential fun of running down the steep hill, but that other guy was nice enough to demonstrate to him how sage my wisdom really was.

Venting

After to somewhat mushy post below, I now feel the need to vent. After getting Geno ready for bed while SC was taking the picture on her page of Alex and Andy brushing their teeth, I went downstairs to see what was on TV while SC did whatever it is she does upstairs for half an hour every night when the kids are going to bed. As usual, we have 300 channels and there was nothing worth watching on any of them. I did however find an interesting show on History International talking all about exactly how nuclear weapons and sarin gas and VX gas kill people. It was terribly informative and frankly I think it is just good sense to have knowledge of that kind of thing. You never know when you might need to know these things. Anyway, once SC finished whatever the heck she was doing, she, as usual, came downstairs, grabbed the remote and immediately started looking for something else to watch. She didn't even pause to see what it was that I was watching. She just assumed 1, that she wouldn't be interested in it and 2, that I wouldn't care if she just changed the channel after I had already invested 25 minutes in this hour-long program and they were just in the middle of a very graphic discussion of the effect of VX on the human nervous system. To make matters worse, after searching through the program guide for 5 minutes, she switched to HGTV and put on house hunters. Since this is what she puts on every night, I have no idea why she bothers wasting 5 minutes looking through the guide. Also, since she watches it every night, there is rarely an episode that we haven't seen already. She somehow never remembers seeing them before though so it is only me constantly annoyed by having to watch the same annoying episodes over and over. Of course, she isn't even really watching. She is busily posting to her blog and just has it on as background noise and as soon as she is done posting she goes up to bed. So to recap, she comes down, changes what I am watching, doesn't watch what she changes to and promptly either goes to bed or falls asleep on the couch. If at some point in the future SC is found sealed up in a wall, this daily behavior will be a big contributing reason why ;-). Oh yeah, and when I become emperor there are going to be changes and one of the first is going to be outlawing HGTV. It is pure evil.

Historic

Okay, so you may not believe it, but I will admit that this picture was not taken today as per the rules. However, I got nothing from today so this will have to do. Yesterday was a historic day for SC and myself as it was the 20th anniversary of when we started dating. I have to admit that I don't exactly recall what we did on July 18th, 1988, but I do know that's when it all started. The picture above is not from that day, but it was the closest I could find in the 2 minutes I bothered to look. It was taken in SC's parents' living room before the Norwin Homecoming Dance in September of 1988 which was the first of many of these delightful events we attended together. You have to admit that's a pretty impressive volume of hair on SC. I'm not sure exactly how we got to the dance since neither one of use were old enough to drive at the time. I do feel the need to point out that I remembered this particular anniversary yesterday while SC did not. She was so excited about the it that as she has already related, she promptly fell asleep on the couch last night.

Stuck

I don't know what the word of the day was, but I didn't get much of a chance to get a picture of anything except the traffic I was sitting in for an hour and 45 minutes this evening on the turnpike. It appeared a tractor trailer rolled over on the big curve right before the New Stanton exit coming westbound. It happened a little after 4:00. At around 5:30 I hit the resulting traffic jam about 3 miles past the Donegal exit. Of course when I passed the Donegal exit, there was nothing there to let you know that the road was about to become a parking lot even though the accident had happend an hour and half earlier and there was already a 12-mile backup as a result. God forbid the Turnpike commission or the state police should actually do any work like suggesting that people get off at Donegal if the don't have 2 hours to wast going 12 miles. Instead they put up a sign a mile or so past the exit letting you know that your journey was about to come to a screeching halt now that you had no other option to avoid it. As I type this, the largely computer-illiterate SC is in my office swearing at the computer. She broke her email on Tuesday and couldn't send anything until I fixed it last night and tonight she somehow broke her Internet access. Of course, since I didn't spring from my seat the instant she started whining about it, when I did go in to see what her problem was 5 minutes later she was all surly and told me to go away. I think I'm about ready for some more sparring clinic at home...

Fun in the sun

I took this picture out my window of the plane before we took off for my flight back to Pittsburgh this afternoon. At least it was my window until some guy asked me to trade seats with him since his wife and small child in a car seat were sitting in the row behind me and his seat was 3 rows up on the other side of the plane. Since it was an itty-bitty regional jet and all the seats are window or aisle and because I'm a swell guy I readily agreed. The fact that I had visions of the kid kicking my seat and sreaming for most of the flight may have had something to do with it too, but it was mostly because I'm a wonderful person. This type of thing seems to happen to me more frequently that I would expect. I'm always tempted to ask the people why they didn't bother to book themselves seats together in the first place if it is that important, but then I remember that I don't really like talking to people, so I just move.

Anyway, this hard-workng gentleman in the picture seemed to be having all kinds of fun in the sun that was beating off the maccadam as he hurriedly drove his little luggage cart around. You can't make it out in the picture, but he had a huge smile on his face. I can only assume it was due to some new and unique ways he was thinking of losing/mangling/rummaging through all of our luggage.

Framed

So I'm not entirely clear on whether the word of the day thing is applicable to just the varsity special forces or if those of us in the men's auxiliary are allowed to participate as well, but since I seem to be incapable of thinking of anything at all to say on my own I figured I would give it a shot today. I am in Boston today for work and we went down to the harbor tonight for dinner. I was keeping my eye out for anything that fit the word. I wasn't terribly successful. The picture at the top is of the control tower at Logan airport FRAMED by some ostentatiously large private yachts in Boston Harbor. Unfortunately, the only camera I have available is the .1 mexapixel one on my cell phone so it's kind of hard to make out. Since that is the case I also took the middle picture which is my dinner of crab cakes and Legal Sea Food framed by my glass of water and my 2nd or 3rd Corona. The bottom picture is from after dinner of the moon framed by some mooring piles on a pier in the harbor. I think those white things are rocks, but they kind of look like bags of trash. Alas, with my exceptionally poor picture quality we may never know. I know all three are pretty poor. I couldn't decide which one to use so I just posted all three. I was really looking to get a picture of me framed by a couple of hot babes, but since I'm returning home to the state sparring and weapons champ tomorrow I thought that may ill-advised...

I also feel driven to point out the inaccuracies in SCs posts and comments from yesterday when she felt she had free reign because I was out of town. I do not in fact have a spreadsheet of every movie I have ever seen. I do have spreadsheets of every movie ever nominated for an Oscar for best picture and every movie that has grossed more than $100 million with notations of which ones I have seen and which ones I own, but that is obviously completely different. And there's nothing wrong with lining your books up by height, that just makes good sense and makes everything look nice and neat. Maybe if I put my books on my shelves randomly SC would not be making me turn my office into Alex's new bedroom and take a whole week of vacation to stay home painting and moving furniture around amongst 4 rooms...

So after spending much of the last few days listening to State Champ giggling while looking at her laptop on the other end of the couch and interrupting my enjoyment of the Discovery channel, I decided to check out what all the excitement was about. Like Nocturnal Grand Master, I sense the need for some infusion in yin into this discussion to balance out the current overabundance of yang.

After reading just a couple of state champ's posts, it is clear that a second source of information is required to insure fair and balanced reporting of events.

As the first example of truth in reporting, I feel compelled to clarify that I requested a change from my original nickname, but did not specifically request that it be changed to Capt'n Tight Pants. However, since she seems to have settled on that and I am such an agreeable guy, I can go along with it. After all, my whole life pretty much revolves around State Champ's hopes and desires... ;-).

Plus, I figure this type of activity meshes well with my naturally overly outgoing and gregarious personality.

Like NGM, I can't say how often my muse will compel me to contribute original material, but we'll see how it goes.

We'll see if ES and BS now start to feel the peer pressure and succumb. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated...