Gail's off to Tampa today. Actually, she's already in Tampa, she just called me from the motel they are staying at. The place they are staying at sound pretty nice, and they (they, being Gail and her friend Marcia) rented a Mustang Convertible.
Sounds rough. No kids, hot car, sitting by the pool. I'm sure she's just going to hate it...uh huh.
So it's the kids and I this week. Gail was apprehensive about leaving us. It's not like I can't take care of the kids all by myself. I mean hey, I can make a mean PB&J Sandwich when I put my mind to it. And no one makes a better bowl of cereal than I. And laundry? Heck, I used to live on my own, I can do laundry. Although, I have to say, since I've been married, none of my socks or underwear are pink anymore...
I've started working out again. Helps when you have someone to go with, so my friend Heidi and I are going during lunch now. It's a good time to go: It's not crowded, and I feel energized for the rest of the afternoon, which is when I'm most likely to start feeling drowsy. We'll see if I can keep it up this time. I managed to do the elliptical machine for 45 minutes today. Wish me luck!
Now, how stupid is that? At first, I thought it was a joke, and perhaps it is. But this person speaks with such conviction that I myself am not all that convinced. It's amazing what happens when stupid people have a medium for expressing themselves. Granted, everyone has that right, but geez man...why pick on something as harmless as masturbation?
You know, maybe if this guy yanked his crank a time or three, he wouldn't feel so uptight.
And mom, if this offended you, I apologize (Though I really doubt it did anything of the sort. She's probably laughing her ass off)
We had an "MDA Poker" night this past Saturday. Basically, you came to play poker, but all the money you put in went to the MDA. However, we had some nice prizes to give away, like a $25 gift certificate to Macaroni Grill, $10 and $5 gift certificates to Blockbuster, and some fun stuff, like a bin full of Ring Pops and Tootsie-Roll Pops.
We had a good time. Bill-a-bong was the big winner for the night, and he took the Macaroni Grill certificate (Thanks Deb!)
Other than that, we spent the weekend as your typical suburbanite yuppie couple might: did housework all day Saturday, and did yard work most the day Sunday. Blah. Didn't get to go riding at all. Double-Blah. The muscles between my thumbs and forefingers are all sore from raking. Triple-Blah. Blah Blah Blah.
Ok, enough blahs. Gail's going to Tampa for a few days, for work related reasons. However, she and her partner in crime managed to score a nice hotel, and a convertible rental. Supposed to be mid-80's down there all week. They're going to be lovin' it. As long as I don't see them on the news jumping into a canyon like Thelma and Louise, then I won't worry.
Last night was Cody's play, titled "Bugs". In it, Cody played a firefly. All the first and second graders were there, all dressed up as various bugs. It was very cute. When it came time for their song, they broke out with the flashlights, and the lights were gradually dimmed as the song went on. By the end, they had turned out every light, and it was just a bunch of flashlights up on stage. It was really neat.
Cody did very well, both Gail and I were really proud of him. He had a line in the play, and when his turn came, he stepped right up to the mic without a hint of stage fright, and said his line in a perfectly clear, understandable voice. He even added some emphasis right were is was need. Hrm...perhaps the next Harrison Ford?
Baseball has also started for Cody. He's on the Mariners this year. This should be an...interesting year. Cody's coach told us the first day of practice that he wasn't going to be there for most the season. So it's fallen onto my, and other parents shoulders to coach this team. sigh
Other than that, things move along. Gail and I figured out we owe over 10k in taxes. Bleah. I have a poker run on Saturday. Hooray! And time keeps moving on and on and on and on...
I'm sitting here at her desk at her work, waiting for her to come get me. The original plan was for her to drop me off here, I was going to update a computer here, and while I was doing that she was going to go to an art supply store and get some clay. She called about 45 minutes ago, saying she had gotten lost, but was on her way back finally. Then she called again about 5 minutes ago. She'd gotten herself even more lost, and was hungry and grouchy. I'm sure it didn't help I was laughing at her. At least the kids were asleep.
So I'm sitting her at her desk, using her computer to update my journal. At least she has a net connection here.
Thought it was supposed to start getting warmer as the month progressed, not colder! I think I did more riding in the month of January than I have in the month of March. That's messed up.
Well, regardless of the weather, it was a nice weekend. Gail and I went to the Opera on Friday night and had a good time. Then on Saturday night, we went to an Italian restaurant called Maggianos. Damn, talk about good food. I think I have a new favorite restaurant.
Other than that, it was a quiet weekend. Jeff and I are starting to plan for our Sturgis trip in August. Can't wait!
I was working on getting the forum up and running on my Harley site. I'm changing everything over to PHP, but somehow, while uploading one of my pages, I killed the webserver. No problem, I can restart that. Restart it, go and check the url, that works fine. Go to load a php page, and it hangs. Back to the main index page. It hangs.
whoops.
Seth's in London right now, and I think it's a good thing. See, I'm hosting my Harley site, as well as this one, on his machine. So I break something, he's likely to be upset with me. Hopefully, when he gets back (or reads my email) he'll be able to show me what I did wrong.
Cold ride in this morning. Yup, back on the bike. Was supposed to go on a poker run this weekend, but that was cancelled. Riding to our meeting point early on Saturday morning, it was cold and way foggy. Because of the chill, I ended up getting some chaps. Now I have warm legs. Hooray for me.
Spent yesterday washing my bike, then my buddy Jeff and I took the kids to Best Buy. We picked up some network cards, and some cables, and hooked my two machines up together. Now we can play Starcraft!!! Hooray for us.
Today, I'm going to try and get my voting script and my forum working on my Harleyroads site. We'll see how that goes. I imagine I'll end up banging my head in frustration more often than not.
Welp. It's been awhile. I was hosting my personal site under the Harleyroads.com domain, but in December I let that lapse because I didn't want to pay another 100+ bucks.
My brother Seth said he was going to be able to host my site(s), so I just cancelled the service and waited. I created a new look for the site while waiting, and while there's still some stuff to do, I like the layout and look, and can hopefully stick with this one for awhile (I'm really bad at sticking to a layout...)
Now hopefully I can get back into the habit of using Blogger to write my thoughts down.
Ok, I guess I forgot to make sure it works in Netscape. I'm really beginning to HATE Netscape. Don't know why I'm bothering to put a link to it here.
Someone get them on the phone. I want to tell them what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit their product is! Hallelujah! Holy shit, where's the Tylenol.
For those that are wondering, that's from National Lampoons Christmas Vacation. I thought it fit well, with a tweak here and there.
OK, now to back up that little tirade with some comments.
They state that the new 6.0 browser complies with W3 standards. Which is just fine and dandy. But when your browser has gone from a majority of the market to something like 16%, you have to be willing to do more. Look at Microsoft. I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, but the browser is far superior to anything Netscape has come up with. IE support table backgrounds, CSS1 and CSS2, tables are MUCH easier to deal with in IE than they are in Netscape...ARG
The picture, by the way, is what a part of my page looks like in NS6. Sure didn't look like that in MSIE 5.5.
I'm just freaking fed up with the stupid thing. I could go on and on about problems I've had with it. The Java plug-in for the Linux platform doesn't install properly; the preferences were obviously not tested fully when using different themes; even their tech support sucks. I wrote asking about the prefs problem, and 3 weeks later (3 weeks!), they wrote back and said:
Dear Valued Netscape Customer,
We thank you for your inquiry and appreciate your patience. We are receiving a much greater than anticipated volume of interest and apologize for any delay in response that you may have encountered. We realize that you may have sought out other sources of support. If you continue to experience problems with Netscape please reply to this message with a brief synopsis of the problem as well as any new behavior you may have noticed from the problem. Upon receiving your response a Netscape technician will respond to your request in the order in which it was received.
Netscape Technical Support
Now that was helpful. Notice the "a much greater than anticipated volume of interest"? Translated, that means "Holy shit, we didn't expect this much mail about our crappy product!!"
And another thing: This has been touted as a browser for "Core Internet Users"...and what does it do? Sends you to shopping channels on every third click of the button, or so it seems. Yeah, as a hardcore Internet user, my main purpose is to shop. Isn't everyone's?
OK, I think I'd better stop ranting and see about getting my layout to play nice with Netscape. Besides, I have a headache now.
The preceding has been a public service announcement from Shad, and it's his own opinion and nothing else. So don't sue me Netscape or you'll just piss me off more.