I went up to Provo today to hang out with some friends, and every place we used to hang out 3 or 4 years ago is closed. Cyber Assault, the laser tag place, had closed shop, and The Rock Garden, where we used to climb, was also closed. We ended up just going to Chili's for lunch, then to the Nickelcade, where $5 is enough to have fun for several hours. I just had to play Final Fight, and pass it, plus I passed some shooting game, but I had the most fun at the thing that has a spinning turntable with candy on it, and you hit a button that swings an arm across the turntable, and if you're lucky, it knocks something off and into the receptacle thing. I probably spent 50 cents just trying to get the only package of Nerds in the entire thing.

Is it just me, or is this site getting stale? I'm starting to think I need to change something, but I don't feel like doing a new layout, and I don't really have much of importance to say--at least not of importance to me. For the last little while, I've been posting just to post, but not necessarily because I wanted to say something. :(

Hmm...I can't seem to find a consensus on how to make jello shots. Every website I've found has a different recipe, and I'm sure they all work pretty well, but there's gotta be a single generally agreed-upon recipe that most people use. I'm only looking for something simple, with one package of jello and something simple like vodka or rum. If you have a preferred method of making jello shots, please leave a comment. =)

I hate using computers other than my own. I'm at my brother-in-law's apartment now, surfin' the web while my wife and her sister-in-law are out shopping (or something). I'm wishing I'd brought a book to read, but I wasn't planning on waiting here at all.

I washed my car today just before I came up here, and a huge chip of paint came off under pressure from the sprayer. There was already a very small chip in the paint, but I thought it was bird shit or something and held the sprayer really close, when a chunk about as big as a silver dollar just came off. Luckily, there's still red paint underneath it, so it's not too noticeable.

Eh, not much goin' on lately. Xmas was pretty normal, nothing much to report. I spent a couple hours today trying to put a new windshield washer fluid reservoir in my car. My car was totaled in a wreck a couple years ago, and whoever rebuilt it must have forgotten that one minor detail. The fender inside which the reservior is supposed to be is welded on, so I can't fit a stock replacement in there. Not that I can find one, though--it's nearly impossible to find a Nissan 240-SX at a junkyard, and on the rare occasion that you do, it's completely stripped. And there's no way I'm paying $200 for one from the dealer. So I yanked one from a Stanza or a Pulsar or something like that, and it's been hell trying to get it to fit. I finally found a place for it to go, but I can't seem to work out the wiring. I can't find the original wires for the pump, and I can't seem to trace the wire from the switch through the steering column, so I just bought a push-button switch and I'm wiring it to the pump. I got almost everything done today, except I need to get some tubing to run from the pump to the nozzles.

Hopefully it doesn't snow on my way up to Provo tomorrow. I've lived with this car for 1½ years without washer fluid, but I've never really needed it. Traci has a doctors appointment tomorrow, after which we'll have to go up every two weeks for another appointment. I'm going up again on Saturday to hang out with some friends, then again on the 7th to say farewell to a friend who's leaving for a couple years. If I'm not already sick of driving up there as often as I do, I'll be really tired of it in a couple weeks.

Damn, that sucks ass that the Raiders game wasn't on TV. It wasn't a nail-biter or anything, but it would have been nice to see 'em romp on the Panthers.

On my way up to my grandpa's to open presents, the weather turned really nice, meaning that I could barely see and had to go 25 mph most of the way there. It was the first time I'd driven my car in really bad road conditions, and it was fun. :) It was cool following my mom home and watching her take corners skidding sideways. Hopefully it'll be as bad tomorrow.

Hopefully this xmas will be as nice as thanksgiving was, with minimal contact with the in-laws. I only have to go over there on xmas morning to open presents, and that's it. I'm going to my grandpa's tomorrow evening to open presents with my family, and I'm eating dinner at my mom's the next day.

I'm gonna sleep very well tonight. My friend Mikey called me yesterday to see if I wanted to go rabbit hunting today, and since Ty and I were already planning on going out target shooting, it worked out perfectly. Mike came down from Salt Lake this morning with three of his friends, and my brother-in-law came along too, so there were seven of us out there hunting. I would have pitied any rabbit we came upon, but there were extremely few rabbits to be seen. For some reason, we always ended up splitting up into two groups: Me, Ty, Mike, and Jaysen in one, and Mike's friends in another. We went out by Airport Road the first time, and only saw one rabbit, which nobody could hit through the trees. We shot a ton of beer bottles that I had been saving for just such an occasion, then we all went back into town. Ty had some stuff to do, so I dropped him off at his house, then we all went and got something to eat. We headed out to Pinnacle Peak after that, and started hiking around again. My group hiked up a winding creek bed, while the other guys just walked up the road that went through another canyon. We only saw one rabbit, and peppered it so full of holes. I probably walked just under ten miles total, mostly through snow or mud. I know that's not too far, but I'm really out of shape. I know when my head hits the pillow tonight, I'll be out in an instant.

I desperately need a new computer. Lately for work, I've had to use WordPerfect 5.2, Word 2000, Excel 2000, Folio BoundViews, and HotDocs all at once, and it totally slows my machine down. Something is also creating a memory problem, 'cause I have to reboot at least two times a day to keep running as smoothly as possible. When it happens, most of the icons on my desktop or in Explorer are screwed up, like .txt files show the IE icon, or .xls files show the MS-DOS icon. I know it'll be a long time before I can afford a new machine, though. :( With the baby coming in a couple months, things are gonna be especially tight around here.

He's definitely no girly-man. =)

Is it Friday yet? This week seems to be dragging by. Usually when I go into work on Tuesday or Wednesday, it sorta breaks up the week and makes it seem shorter, since I actually really enjoy going into the office once a week. But even though I went up yesterday, it feels like days ago.

My wife and I got adventurous this evening and fixed dinner, which is a rare thing around here. =) Usually each of us just throws something fast and easy together, often something that takes 3 or 4 minutes to fix. But tonight we broiled some red snapper with lemon pepper & butter, sauteed some mushrooms in butter and lemon juice, and battered and deep fried some more mushrooms. It sure beats hamburger helper.

All the women in my wife's family are phycho to one degree or another, including my wife. They like to pretend that all the minor disputes they get in are far more important than they really are, and they live out the drama to the fullest extent possible. They thrive on the drama. They're also the most manipulative and conniving bunch of people I've ever had the displeasure of knowing. My wife's sister is the worst of them all, and they all learned from the master, my mother-in-law. They treat their own family worse than they would a stranger they've never met.

Of course, there's a whole long, drawn-out story about why I'm saying this, but I doubt anybody cares. Suffice it to say that if I never saw any of my in-law's again (with the exception of my brother-in-law), I would be a veryvery happy man.

I find myself trying to get my wife to cease all contact with her family, which is ridiculous of course, but under the same circumstances, I would disown my entire family and never speak to any of them again. While I never have any problems with my mom, both of my sisters are pretty fucked up. When they moved away from home, they were each unmarried, pregnant, and on welfare within just a few months. And even though they fucked their own lives up, at least they don't drag me into it. They're paying for their own mistakes, while my wife's family makes everybody pay for their mistakes, and when my wife gets dragged into it, I end up getting involved--and pissed off--too.

Argh...it sucks not having any way to vent except through my website. The more I talk to my wife about it, the more tension it causes between us, which is the last thing I want to do.

The White Ty Affair has moved to twta.org. Go check it. =)

Oh yeah baby, it's cold outside. Last night, one of the headlights on my truck went out, so I got two new high-output headlights to replace the old ones. I can't see worth a shit when I'm driving at night, but the headlights on my truck are damn bright, and the new lights I got are even brighter. I'm sure it pisses people off, 'cause they're aimed a little high and they're bright as hell, but at least I can see. =) Anyway, I just spent 45 minutes out in the cold replacing the lights, 'cause the screws were rusted badly, the heads were stripped, and one of the plugs was messed up. I'm chilled to the bone, and nothing seems to make me feel any warmer.

I've also, quite surprisingly, been watching a lot of football recently. I've never been much of a sports fan, but I've been a Raiders fan for as long as I can remember (you know how we all tend to take after our parents, and mine are both from so-cal). =) Normally, each year I only tune in for the last part of the Super Bowl--if that--but this year I think I'm gonna actually keep up with everything, and cheer for my team.

I have a new personal hero, and a new favorite TV show besides. I've been watching O'Reilly for the past couple evenings, and now I even miss Friends to watch him. I've never been much interested in news or politics, but O'Reilly's show has gotten me interested in both.

People suck. I'm project leader for a project my team is doing at work, and we're almost finished with the QC process, which means we should be sending a CD off to the duplicator in a couple weeks. Then today, I get an email from one of the legal editors in another office, and he's decided to add several more forms to the project, which will add at least another 2 or 3 weeks to the gold date. And of course, since the higher-ups in the company know nothing about the process by which we work, they'll be questioning my manager and me about why we're behind schedule.

This legal editor is completely removed from the management chain above me, yet he still has a lot of control over the projects I work on. So when he says to do something, I have to do it, yet I'm the one who gets stuck explaining to my manger (and his manager and so on) why the project is late. It just makes me look bad.

Gahh...BlogVoices is down now, causing my site to load excruciatingly slow. =( I got up at 7:00 this morning to put some vegetables and a beef roast in the crockpot--it's gotta cook for ten hours. There was a nice blanket of snow on the ground, so after I got the roast all ready, I went for a little drive. =) I'm surprised that a lot of idiots who live here still don't know how to drive in snow. I saw several people who just didn't realize how early you must begin to slow down to take a corner, and went sliding past the intersection instead. Too bad nobody got in a wreck. I couldn't find any parking lots suitable for doing donuts in, so I went up a dead-end street that had a big wide spot at the end, and no houses near, then proceeded to rip shit up in third gear.

I don't know about you, but I generally tend to unwrap first, then whack, rather than the other way around. =)

Wow. I found LordOfTheRings.net indirectly through EOD, and while the thought of somebody making movies (besides the cartoon ones) out of Tolkien's books got me a little excited, the fact that Sean Bean will be in it is damn cool. He is One Badass Mother Fucker^®. The first time I saw him act was in the "Sharpe" series of shows on PBS, and ever since he's been one of my favorite actors. I don't think I've been this excited about a movie since John Cusack's real return to movies in Grosse Pointe Blank.

This pisses me off. It seems to me that Jesse Jackson truly believes that black people have absolutely no control over their own destinies, that it's the white people who are responsible for anything adverse that happens to blacks.

If I spoke out against blacks, claiming I was a victim of racism, that would be as close to joining the KKK as I could get without putting on the robe and hood. It's perfectly ok for blacks to have such things as the NAACP and the Negro College Fund, but if an all-white college fund was created, or a society for the advancement of whites, you know damn well riots would break out big time.

Blacks are different from whites, both physically and culturally, but they're not so different as to be just as capable of racism as any other race of people.

After spending a lot of time looking at 3+ megapixel digital cameras, I've finally settled on a somewhat lesser quality camera (2.1 megapixel), the Canon PowerShot S10. And I'm definitely getting at least a 340 meg IBM Microdrive, which will hold about 240 hi-res pictures. And this baby has a digital video output, so it can double as a webcam. I should have it by the end of the year, so y'alls can see my ugly mug when I wake up in the morning and stumble in here to turn on the computer for work. =)

Phew. My wife and I were going to stay up late the night of the election to see who won. I'm glad we eventually went to bed. =)

I am a happy man. My basement is finally finished, and it's 100% better than it was before. =)

The carpet guys are finally here, and though I have the door to the downstairs closed, every time the furnace kicks on it brings with it fumes from the glue they used on the carpet pad. If this goes on much longer, I'm going to be floating up near the ceiling. =)

It's been snowing lightly most of the morning, but not enough to stick. It's snowing pretty hard up in the mountains, so I decided not to go into the office today. With the noises the hubs on my truck make when I lock them in, I don't trust it to get me through a blizzard intact. The problem is either with the hubs themselves, the axle shafts, differential, or the driveline, so I haven't wanted to try troubleshooting it until I get a lot of spare time.

The company that recently bought out my ISP has been advertising their internet services a lot through the local cable company (the commercials are asbolutely horrible, btw), and they have been touting their "fast, friendly customer service." Well, the same company also bought out US Worst in this county, so now I'm stuck with them for phone and internet service. Anyway, I got an email saying they are going to consolidate my internet and phone bill, and I wanted to know whether or not my internet bill would still be charged to my credit card. So I sent an email to the address listed for billing questions, and after no response in five days, sent another email to somebody else at the company. Finally, after 19 fucking days, I got a response that basically said, "We're not sure."

I could seriously go off for hours on how bad this company is. The quality of their TV commercials is horrible, with as many lens flare effects as you can shake a stick at (whatever that means), and people reading poorly-written scripts at a 5th grade (or worse) reading level. I can only connect to their supposed 56K dialups at 28.8, with extremely frequent disconnects, which can only be blamed on them, as I replaced the phone line from my modem to the box, and they recently acquired the rest of the line from US Worst. Technical support is almost nonexistant--when you call with a problem, they make you go through the settings on your computer, even when it's obviously a problem with their equipment. There have been times when I was dialed in and connected to the internet just fine, when I lost all connection to the outside world through ICQ, email, http, ftp, AIM, and any other internet clients, though I still maintained a modem connection, and the uneducated people at their office insisted that it was a problem with my computer, even after verifying my settings (which haven't changed in almost a year) and rebooting.

I've known for quite some time how uneducated and inefficient 99% of the people around here are, but now that some of them have enough money to start running local businesses and buying out equipment and service from huge corporations, it's getting scary. Oh, and if I suddenly lose internet access and my site disappears from this server, you'll know how much they liked my criticism. =)

Hmm...it's snowing damned hard outside right now. And it's actually sticking, despite it being 40°.

It's lookin' like it might snow today, but I'm sure it won't. Or if it does, it will all melt and there will be no trace left of it by this evening. There's an inverted U-shaped mountain range surrounding Price, and it seems like storm clouds always skirt the other side of those mountains, leaving us dry.

When I went down to submit my insurance claim to the city yesterday, the woman I talked to said she needs an itemized list of everything the contractor did, so I'm waiting to get that from him before I can go back down and finalize the claim. She gave me a simple little claim form to fill out, and I feel much better after just talking to her...I expected some kind of hostility from the city for some reason. I'm no longer quite as worried about getting screwed as I was a couple days ago.

Yo, Sloppy Rage is back, with Cake again at the wheel.

And You Know Who is back with Down. And I'm very happy about that.

Mmmm....MGD. =)

The .cx nic is only allowing Christmas Island residents or entities to register a .cx domain name now, so Ty's site is down. You can still see it here, but his domain name won't resolve anymore. Time for him to get a .com, I guess. =)

Update: I guess I spoke too soon. His site is back up, and I don't know why it was down. Probably just 'cause his webhost sucks monkey balls. =)

Well, tomorrow is the day I finally submit my claim to Price City. The bill for the repairs to the house came to over $11,000, and all the personal belongings come to about $5,300. It's really nerve-wracking, wondering if this is all gonna work out. I just keep thinking they're gonna try to fuck me over somehow, and I'll end up getting stuck with part of all of the bill.

I think when this matter is completely resolved, my life is going to be way less stressful. Then I can go back to having a somewhat normal life.

Getting older sure is starting to take its toll on my body. It really sucks having a waist size bigger than my inseam. I'm only 24 years old, and the physique I had when I was a teenager is long gone, and it's been replaced by that of a 40-year old man. I've taken to buying pants that are two inches too large in the waist, 'cause it seems that past few years I've grown out of my pants before they wear out. Ugh...I'm not looking forward to the beer-gut I'm gonna have when I am 40.

Damnit. I specifically turned the computer on to post something here, then I got distracted for a few minutes, and now I can't remember what it was I was going to say. Oh well, it couldn't have been that important.

I added two new links to the site today: Moronic.org and DNews/DNotes. I never got around to re-linking m.o when they came back, mostly 'cause I'm lazy. I also did a new layout for DNews, so be looking for it in the next couple days.

I got the layout for udink.org done, and it definitely looks pretty good. I look at it a couple times a day just to make sure I'm not going to be sick of it by the time Solo gets his linux server running, and I've made a few tweaks since I did the original design. It's a little more complex-looking than most layouts I've done, but it's really pretty simple. I put about an hour into it, rather than the usual 15 or 20 minutes that go into my layouts.

Ahh...after stopping typing just now for five minutes, staring at my monitor blankly, I remembered what it was I was going to say. My back has been hurting the past several days, and my doctor prescribed some medication (vicoprofen and carisoprodol) to me for it over a year ago, and I just found it hiding under some papers on my desk yesterday. I took some a couple hours ago, and while my back still hurts, I feel much better. =) I've been considering taking a little more than the recommended dosage, but I'm not sure how that'll affect me. Maybe I ought ask "Jake." =)

Q: How many Utah Highway Patrol officers does it take to issue a ticket?

A: Three, apparently.

A UHP storm trooper pulled over a chick in a big-ass Bronco across the street from my house a while ago, and apparently either he didn't know the law well enough to know whether the lift on the Bronco was higher than state law allows, or he just didn't have a tape measure with him. So he called for reinforcements, and about 20 minutes later (yes, really 20 minutes), another storm trooper showed up armed with a tape measure. They measured the height of the lift, then stood around talking about it for another 5 minutes, during which time another storm trooper showed up. I'm not sure if the first storm trooper actually gave the chick a ticket, or if he was just handing her driver's license back to her, but she was finally allowed to leave. Then the 3 troopers stood around bull-shitting for another 10 minutes (no doubt discussing what time to meet at Market Express for some donuts) before one of them left, then the remaining 2 kept chattin' for another 5 minutes before they both left.

Now if the entire premise of hiring jackasses like that to do nothing more than harass people and eat donuts isn't a waste of taxpayer money, I don't know what is.

Well, this weekend went by way too fast. All I remember doing is sitting around the house, either reading a book or watching movies. It seems like such a waste of a weekend, seeing as how that's all I do on weekdays anyway (when I'm not working, that is).

The first time I drove my truck on the highway after getting repairs made to the front suspension, it was vibrating like hell, so I figured the tires were out of balance. The whole drive to Provo last week, I kept wondering what in the hell could have caused that to happen. But on my way back home, I realized there was probably mud on the inside of the rims. When I brought my truck down to get fixed, it was covered in so much mud you could barely tell what color it was. But the dealer had washed it for me, and didn't get the undercarriage all that well. I finally got around to looking at the rims yesterday, and all four of them have about 1/2 in of mud caked on the inside, so it looks like I'm gonna have to spend a few quarters getting it off.

I love the paycheck I get at the end of each month. Since most of my bills are due around the first of each month, the paycheck I get in the middle of the month goes to pay all of them, including the dreaded house payment. But I have this paycheck to do with as I please, for the most part. So after being almost broke for the past couple of weeks, I think I'm gonna finally get some more beer. I drank my last Budweiser about a week and a half ago, and I kept wishing I had more. A month or so ago, I was over at Ty's, and he offered me a beer, and put ½ a lime in it. Now, I'm not a huge beer fan, but this was a damn good beer. I practically guzzled it as if it were Dr. Pepper. :) So ever since then, I've been drinking much more beer, but with only ¼ a lime in it. I wonder if lime will do the trick with cheap beer...

/me is Solo's bitch.

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