Be The Pigeon

Here's a little pet peeve. Have you ever gone somewhere and been interacting with others for a while, only to go into the bathroom and learn that you have some nasty piece of half-eaten food stuck somewhere in your teeth?  Smile! Happens to me all the time! Come one, people.  If I have half a picnic stuck in my teeth, tell me!  How else am I supposed fix the problem?  Instead, you like to ignore the whole thing, silently thinking, "He has almost a whole picnic stuck in his teeth!" the entire time.   Some of us are genetically prone to what I am dubbing "picnic tooth."  It's not our fault!  I'm sure we could get government protection as a disability class.  I could probably even get a handicapped parking placard, a special box to check when I do my taxes, and certainly a discount on my hefty medical premiums for the whole thing. My only saving grace is that I work from home and rarely actually interact with real people!

If there's something in life that I just HATE doing, its climbing on the roof to shoot and kill wasp nests!  It's right up there with puke cleaning .  Yesterday, I emptied 2 1/2 cans of spray on a couple new nests--which, incidentally are always in hard-to-reach places on the 2nd story--and found that the very resourceful beasts have now found a way into the eave near our master bath.  I have nightmares that they get into the attic, build huge nests, and take over everything.  After shooting all of them that I could,  I took some spray foam to fill the gap they were using, and it was obvious that the ones I didn't kill were kinda ticked at me the rest of the day for filling in their hole. Another fun mental image.  Last year, I ran out of spray one day, so I took my pressure washer up on the roof to make battle with the beasts.  Afterall, you gotta use the tools you have, and it seemed like the proper tool for the job.  I could not bow away from the call of battle.  I can i...

So often these days, we try to do multiple things at the same time. I routinely hear people, both at work and outside, say that they're multitasking. The funny thing is that we humans are single-threaded beings and are pretty much incapable of such behavior. In non-computer terms, we can only do one thing at a time physically (unless you count breathing and blinking in there). Any yet, we all live under this myth that we can actually do a bunch of things at once. The younger generation is even worse. They like to listen to their iPods while watching TV, surfing on their laptops, while eating dinner, (and probably painting toenails!) With blackberries and such all the rage today, it gets even worse. People try and do all these things driving down the freeway (not that I ever do it, you know!) I've even been in bathrooms (usually at the airport) where the guy next to me is on a phone. Can you say L-O-S-E-R? That, my friends, DOES NOT QUALIFY AS MULTITASKING!!! In my ...

I don't normally wax political here, but with local happenings, I can't refuse the bait... So the Democratic National Convention (DNC) comes to Denver this week.  Yay.  Not!  The paper tells me I should be happy because it'll do great things for Colorado.  However, the only great thing I've encountered so far is that they'll be closing the freeway when Obama does his speech, making it impossible for locals to get around their own town.  Oh yeah, it'll be great.  My cop friend also tells me that professional protesters are all coming to town to disrupt anything they can for the week.  Oh yeah, I'm sure glad they chose Denver.  Thanks, leaders! I don't really understand why, in an age where we complain about spending millions of dollars a day on the Iraq war and we have record prices at the pump, we get to also pony up $40 million for events such as the DNC (or, for that matter, the RNC which will be the following week in Minneapolis), for what is really n...

Jo mentioned our elation at the kids going back to school. I thought I'd show you the commercial she mentioned. It's old, but hilarious. Totally captures our attitude. So what are your favorite commercials? We should create a compilation of the funniest ones.

11 years ago, Jolayne and I were married.  Amazing how quickly the time goes.  The other day, I asked Jo what the traditional gift for an 'eleventh' anniversary was.  Without so much as a stutter or hesitation, she quickly replied 'diamonds.'  Way to go, sweetheart.  Should have married a sugar-daddy.  Oh wait, I do like sugar, dang. As diamonds were just slightly beyond my budget for the oh-so-special occasion, I bought the next best thing for her.  What's that, you ask?  A  Ped-Egg, of course!   Nothing says I-Love-You like a callous remover that's shaped like an egg!  Wow, I'm good! I know, I'm just such a romantic. Seriously, I am so fortunate to be able to share my life with Jolayne .  She is probably the most amazing person I've ever met.  Here's just a few things about her that contribute to her Super-Awesome-Great Sweetheart status: She doesn't know how to sleep in.  Not even on vacation.  Really. She exercises countless hours each w...

OK, here's a new conspiracy for me to rant about.  Upon returning home after a nice, uneventful drive through southern Wyoming (which, by the way, is far prettier at night!), we stopped for groceries and I picked up some ice cream.  Something seemed wrong, however.  Either I had become an amazing specimen of muscular masculinity since previously purchasing ice cream or the ice cream container had gotten far smaller and easier to lift.  Sadly, it was the latter. Notice exhibit A.  On the right is the ice cream I purchased a month or two ago.  It is 1.75 quarts (since a "half gallon" of ice cream is obviously 1.75 quarts and not 2.  Probably a previous conspiracy I somehow missed).  On the left is today's ice cream, on sale for $3 (so no cheaper), and now a lovely 1.5 quarts.  Looks smaller than that to me, so I'm sure the conspiracy goes even deeper.  I might have to Call 7 for Help on this one.  It's so heinous!   Sad proof that, in addition to the price of p...

I've loved mountain biking for years, but I haven't exactly done a ton of it. I'm looking for someone who lives nearby who's into it, since I'm not comfortable going by myself. However, this week while in Utah, I've been able to do a few great trails with a couple of Jolayne's brothers. They go a couple times a week. Makes me jealous. Mitch helped me adjust the derailleur to stop skipping finally (apparently the $100 I paid for a tune up to the Longmont bike shop last summer was so they could look at it really hard without actually doing anything useful) and it's now finally a fun bike to ride. That's good, cuz I was ready to throw the thing out and get something else, so now I can save some money for a couple more years. There are tons of great trails within a 30 minute drive of Jo's brother Brad's house. How nice that would be. Tonight, just before sunset, we went up American Fork canyon (very nice shots here) and did a nice 4 mi...

Q : How do you tell a crazy Mormon from a sane one? A: The crazy ones will go clean dumpy alleys in town on a 100+ degree day! Yesterday was the "Colorado Cares Day" and our Stake (the collection of local congregations for our church) was asked go help clean up a section of Longmont. Probably 300+ Mormons showed up on what was supposed to be the hottest day of the year to cut weeds, pick up garbage, and shluck trash. Thankfully, it clouded up even sprinkled abit, dropping the temp 10 degrees. We separated into small groups and were each assigned an area to clean. Our area must not have been too bad, because the worst we found was a Walmart shopping cart, a pallet, a mattress, and a few I-don't-want-to-know-what-it-is items. Other groups, we saw later, found old toilets, bbq's, and more. At the end, we rode back in the flatbed one of the guys had brought. One of the things I learn from these events is that it really doesn't matter how unpleasant the task is w...

I'm white trash. I admit it. I'm comfortable with it, even. How liberating to proclaim! As promised, I took a group of dads and their kids to the county-fair Demolition Derby. It was so much fun! I had never been, and really had no idea what to expect. After a lengthy trip to Burger King for some nutritious dinner (took 15 min to get the first order served, so be very careful at the Ken-Pratt location if you're in any sort of hurry), we made our way over to the fairgrounds. Parking was a disaster. Without nice little white lines to guide us, we are apparently a fallen society. People were parked pretty much everywhere, usually with about 7 feet between cars, just so there wasn't room for another car. I wound up parking in the race-team pit area. But once things finally got started, WE HAD FUN! You all obviously know that the basic tenet of such an event is for the cars to cream one another. But, come to find out, there are actually rules to the whole thing! ...

As a kid, one of my favorite things to do on Sundays was to bake treats. It started with my mom when I was pretty young, and progressed from there. I actually got pretty good at it at one point, and picked up a reputation in our family as " the pretzel maker ." Years before, my mom had come across a recipe in a school newsletter, if I recall, which showed a simple method for making soft pretzels. These are more like the kind you get at the mall than the kind you get in a frozen box at Costco. When we were married, I forgot how to cook. Really. Still can't remember much! One thing I've managed to pull from my childhood memory banks, though, is how to cook pretzels. And now, my kids love baking them with me. During the last school year, Amy had to take treats a few times. She tells me that her class always told her to bring pretzels after that first time when she did. Today, when I got home from church, I was greeted not with "Daddy! You're home!...