How Did I Get Here?

Quote of the Day: “Computer games don’t affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music.”

(click to watch cartoon!)

As most of you know, I am retired.

And one of the things I was supposed to do BEFORE I retired was to get with the VA, as I explained in a recent blog post:

I had mentioned that I made an appointment with the VA.

It was today.

CORRECTION: It was SUPPOSED to be today.

At 7:00 AM (I still refuse to use military time), I got a voicemail from the lady I had an appointment with that said that she was sick and could not make the appointment.

You know, if you think the bad reputation and the clichés are unfair, such as dealing with the VA akin to having a quadruple root canal performed up through your ass, then maybe you should stop reinforcing it.

OK, yeah, people get sick. I get that. But today? After waiting so long to get an appointment. And now I have to make another one for the undisclosed future? Do they not know my tendency to procrastinate such things, evidenced by waiting 6 months to do it in the first place?

Well, whatever the cause, my appointment was cancelled which left, let’s see, …. Nothing on the agenda today.

Hmmm, nothing. I can DO nothing. Nothing it is.

Seriously, on my Outlook calendar where I put everything ad nauseum, it is completely blank other than VA appointment/ quadruple root canal performed up through my ass.

Oh well.

Free Advice for Today: “When you are angry with someone, write a letter telling him or her why you feel that way — but don’t mail it.”

Quote of the Day: “I’m a godmother, that’s a great thing to be, a godmother. She calls me god for short, that’s cute, I taught her that.”

Here ye, here ye… OK, everyone gather around. I have an important announcement to make.

AS OF TODAY, THE 25TH DAY OF JANUARY, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD TWO-THOUSAND AND TEN, THE COMPANY I WILL RELUCTANTLY UTTER FROM MY LIPS FOR THE LAST TIME, PETSMART, WILL NO LONGER EXIST IN MY REALITY AND WILL RESIDE ONLY ON MY SHIT LIST FOR ALL OF ETERNITY.

There, I feel much better.

Here is what happened.

I was not in a good mood to begin with. No particular reason, I just wasn’t. So TheStoreThanWon’tBeNamed (TSTWBN) picked a bad day to perform their jackassery. It cost them my business from now until the Sun swallows up the Earth, and a few eons beyond.

I took Buster in to get his nails clipped because now that he is old and decrepit (welcome to the club, buddy), he doesn’t take as many walks that used to keep his nails filed. Now we have to have it done to the tune of about $11.

So I drive there with Buster in the back seat like I’m Driving Miss Daisy, and get him to the back of the store where all the “Pet Stylist Professionals” were.

OK, first, you clip dog hair, you idiots. You are not “Pet Stylist Professionals” just like housewives are not “Domestic Engineers” or male airline stewardesses are not “stewards” (they are ALL stewardesses.)

You clip nails. You shampoo dogs, You brush their teeth. Don’t make it more than it is.

Anyway, I bring Buster in and the first warning sign I see is a woman shaving some poor little lapdog and she kind of yanks his head sideways and says “Stop it!”

Man, I hope Buster doesn’t get her.

Here is how the conversation went:

“What is your dog’s name?”
“Buster.”
“What breed is he?”
“Half Rhodesian Ridgeback and half pit bull.”
“Have you been here before?”
“Yes, quite a few times.”
“What do you need today?”
“I just need his nails clipped and grinded.”
“I don’t see you in the computer. Have you brought in his records?”
“Well, he has had his rabies shot but we prefer to have him muzzled anyway so since you guys muzzle him without the record, I never bothered to bring it in.”
“Oh, OK, … um, how old is he?”
“About 10.”

Up to this point, it was a friendly conversation. She seemed to be interested in Buster which I thought was a great sign since she would be clipping his nails soon so I thought nothing of that last question.

“We can’t muzzle him.”
“What?”
“Company policy, if they are 10 years or older, we can’t muzzle him.”

OK, the conversation just went from zero to asshole in nothing flat.

“You just did it like a month ago.”
“Sorry, company policy says…”
“Yes, I heard you the first time but it makes no sense.”
“I’m sorry…”

It was at this point that I walked out of there and was so mad, I vowed never, EVER to return.

You don’t understand, when someone wrongs a Grose male (and it takes oh so very little to do so…), it is like a vendetta that tattoos right to the bone. Middle Eastern tensions will sooner be smoothed out before a Grose male ever forgives such mistreatment.

What I should have said was one of two things that probably would not have worked anyway and set me more on fire than I was already.

1. “OK, he’s 8. Now clip him.” : although there is no proof either way of his age, I would have put her in a very awkward situation where she would be forced to deny me service because I had said that he was 10 a few moments before. That would have probably ended with me yelling an explicative and storming out.

2. “Look, he has had his rabies shot. You muzzled him last month. He’s not even actually 10 until July. Can you just clip him and I will make sure that when I come in next month, I will bring his record. I just don’t want to go all the way home right now since I have him right here.”

That second one might have worked but I was too pissed off to think clearly and instead, just walked out without a further word and declared that TSTWBN will never ever ever ever ever ever ever see me bringing Buster in again for anything. I will not purchase ANYTHING from TSTWBN and don’t care if I receive a flyer offering everything in the store free of charge.

TSTWBN, you are dead to me.

So it is said, so it is done.

Dead.

Free Advice for Today: “Call three friends on Thanksgiving and tell them how thankful you are for their friendship.”

Quote of the Day: “Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”

Today I did what all red-blooded males on such an occasion would do:

I went to my brother-in-law’s house, sat on my ass for something like 7 hours, watched football, ate sub sandwiches and pizza, and drank a beer.

A few notes about this wasteful, glutinous existence:

– Scott has a high definition big screen TV

- We watched both playoff games

- I ate a foot long sub (6 inches of turkey, 6 inches of ghetto Cold Cut Trio)

- I actually skipped on the pizza after the sub gut-bombing

- I had a total of one beer because I’m just not a real man, I guess

More notes about this wasteful, glutinous existence:

- Watching pro football in high def, while cool, can show you some things you don’t really want to see. Sweat is not a pretty thing especially when you can actually see the pores it’s coming out of.

- I could give two shits about the Colts and the … whatever the other team was. But I wanted the Vikings to win only because I like Favre and wanted to see him against Manning in the Big Game.

- I am going on record by saying I think Favre will come back next year because I don’t think he can leave it as his last professional play as a quarterback resulting in an interception to lose out on going to the Super Bowl.

- There was like 11 things that, if any ONE of them would have gone the other way, the Vikings would have won.

- I did not share in the whole Saints celebration, first Super Bowl, place still devastated by Katrina, blah blah blah … just white noise to me. It’s not that I don’t care…OK, maybe it is. Things are tough all over, people. And I especially don’t get into the whole French Cajun culture thing. I find it annoying, although I have had some pretty cool supporters of me and my blog, who I figure I will hear from but don’t be too harsh on me. You can hate the coffee-swilling, earth-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing techno-geek grunge scene of Seattle, I will not be offended.

- Scott bought the subs and I had not had a Cold Cut Trio for a long time. I used to buy them when I was strapped for cash but once I realized they contained the lower-end meat my mom used to buy (I’m looking at you, bologna!) when I was a kid and we were broke, I dubbed them “ghetto” and snobbingly ordered the Subway Club exclusively from then on out.

My son, Alex, joined us after the first game and we all hung out at Scott’s house until the evening. It was a great time with Scott and Alex.

It looks like the Colts are playing the Saints in this year’s Super Bowl. As much as I wanted to see Favre play, I guess it is only right that these two should square off against each other since they both went undefeated for most of the season.

And OK, I guess I can give a little love to the Saints. I remember when I was a kid and living in Denver with my mom and my brother when the Broncos made their first appearance at the Big Table. Although they lost to the Cowboys, I will always remember the “Orange Crush” insanity of the city, even though I was really young.

So, OK, OK, OK, congratulations Saints.

I hope Manning hands you your Cajun asses.

Free Advice for Today: “Carry a small Swiss Army knife on your key chain.”

Quote of the Day: “Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.”

I was supposed to do a 10 mile run this morning with a group of people but after a late night last night, it kinda didn’t happen.

I remember when “having a late night” meant I was out drinking but these days, at 41, it means I was over at family’s house and we just hung out until 2:00 in the morning. Since when did a late night that caused morning plans to go awry NOT involve alcohol?

I guess when you get old.

So what did I do today? Well, a whole lotta nothing.

Saturday used to be all about the cartoons. I would be the first one up in my family, grab my terrycloth blanket, and sit in the dark in front of the color test pattern with the sound way down waiting for the Bugs Bunny Road Runner Hour to start.

At that was just last year!

Actually, that was when I was a kid. Every Saturday, the same thing. The entire morning shot watching Bugs Bunny back when it wasn’t on 24/7.

In later years, I would still be getting up early but that was to get my papers delivered. Yes, I had a paper route…

… and every weekend morning was the same: wake up, deliver the papers, come back and eat junk for breakfast, and then go back to sleep until noonish.

As my life progressed, Saturday mornings turned into the “Long Run” day. I would spend a good portion of Friday night getting everything set up for the morning so I would be motivated to get my butt out of a warm, comfortable bed in the wee hours of Saturday morning, knowing the rest of the world would be enjoying many more hours of sleep. It wasn’t worth it until I was way out in the middle of nowhere and witness to the morning beauty and solitude only a long distance runner can truly appreciate.

I am trying to get back to those days of getting up for the run on Saturday mornings but lately, they have resembled the sleeping-in variety than anything else.

So since I don’t have much of anything else for you today, I will give you two damn-near-retarded finds from the Web. Happy giggling:

Paranormal Cattivity

Disco Curser

From Tosh.0:

I saw the above image on The Daily What.

…and I did. I did “join in.”

I moved my mouse on top of the picture. And I danced it around.

I did this, I’d say, for a solid 45 seconds. And at that moment, like achieving the highest level of enlightenment in Buddhism, I realized my life is inherently meaningless.

Free Advice for Today: “Contribute something to each Salvation Army kettle you pass during the holidays.”

Quote of the Day: “If you can count your money, you don’t have a billion dollars.”

My daughter had a basketball game tonight and while I know all of you know that I love my daughter dearly, I have to say, our team sucks.

“A” for effort and all that but the JV girls have a lot of work to do. It just gets depressing to go week after week and see the girls make the same mistakes and get a beat down.

Tonight, there was an extra twist to the beating. We had a chance to win it.

This is not really a testament to the girls’ improvement but a statement on how utterly bad the other team was. I don’t say that to disparage because I support my daughter’s team as one of the few parents who even bother to show up.

I say that because I don’t see a lot of improvement as the season progresses. It’s just sad to see and I guess I can be thankful my daughter even gets to play since this is her first year on a high school team.

But back to tonight’s game, the ending was extra heart-breaking. I’ll set the scene…

End of the 4th period.
Time has elapsed.
The clock shows 0:00 and the buzzer has sounded.
But the opposing team fouled during the last-second shot.
Our player gets two foul shots.
We are down by 1 point.

If she makes both, we win.
If she makes one, we tie.
If she makes none, we lose.

All the players were cleared from the floor so it’s just the girl and the referee.

She misses the first shot.

I am torn between the thought that no one should be subjected to this kind of pressure, especially a young teenage girl and the thought that this is what sports are all about.

She puts up the second shot….

And misses.

Ouch.

I guess if there is going to be the thrill of victory, there must be the agony of defeat.

Poor girl, I just wanted to go and hug her. But I refrained.

“Steph, why was your dad hugging me?” she asks after talking to the nice police officers.

After the game we went over to my brother-in-law’s house and then we all made a trip to Godfathers Pizza, home of the best taco pizza this Earth will ever see.

I learned that the Auburn Godfather’s is not the only one left, as I thought it was. They say there is one down in Federal Way so now I have a back up if the Auburn one shuts down, or gets flooded out like I thought it was going to (and still might!) But now, I have another stay of execution before my beloved taco pizza joins the big Godfather’s in the sky.

You have no idea how important this is to me!

Later on when we returned to his house, I asked Scott about how I would go about installing a connection so I could play my iPod in my car without having to depend on the piece of shit FM transmitter gadget that I’ve been using. Seems I can’t get a usable signal worth a crap so I asked him what it would take to run a connector to the sound system.

This is what he does for a living so with his mouth watering, he hopped on his computer to see how much the kit was. He assured me he could get it 40% cheaper at cost.

It looked like I might have to give something up to make the connection. I have the single disc player connected to the stock radio so I didn’t want to lose that. And Carrie wasn’t about to give up the 6-disk CD player we have it in.

After discussing a few options, he noticed I had a stock tape player and he suggested that I try an adapter that looks like a cassette. You pop it in and then plug the other end to the headphone jack of your iPod or iPhone.

I thought, surely, it can’t sound all that great. I mean, come on, it’s taking an electrical signal and running it through a mechanical medium via a tape deck. I couldn’t imagine this would sound anything short of shitastic.

How wrong I was.

Scott is one of those guys who has a ton of various electronic flotsam hanging around his garage. He installs high end systems so he ends up keeping leftovers to the point that he has boxes of “stuff.”

Need an old VCR player? He’s got it.

Need an adapter that connects this to that? Here it is.

Need a 400 disc changer with its own power supply and hard drive? Over here.

So I was a little surprised when he couldn’t locate the adapter but he remembered he had loaned it to a neighbor who ended up not using it so he called him up and we went over and got it.

We plugged it in to my iPod, slid the cassette into the tape deck, and what came through my speakers was absolutely unexpected: crystal clear, loud music.

The bass thumped.

The high end came through clean.

It sounded better than the radio or a CD.

I would have never believed that you could use a cassette adapter to get that kind of sound but now I’m all set. And I didn’t even have to buy a kit or beg my bro-in-law to install it.

The only minor flaw was that the cord it used was white and Scott suggested to make it less noticeable, I should use a Sharpie pen to make it black. Personally, it doesn’t matter to me but he being a professional installer, the asthetics made a difference to him and he brought me a Sharpie.

“Really? This is how the pros do it?” I mocked him.

“Dude, you would be surprised how many times something like a Sharpie has saved the day on a high-value installation.”

So I spent the next hour coloring a white wire black. It was surprisingly difficult to get every tiny part of it and took me about 10 times as long as I would have guessed. I had to do one little section at a time and kept twisting it to get every little angle. The Sharpie would dry out and I’d have to get it flowing again.

When I was done, it looked, well, like a black cord.

I might have found my calling.

Free Advice for Today: “When you move into a new house, plant a rosebush and put out a new welcome mat to make it seem like home.”

Quote of the Day: “Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better.”

I Squaked today.

That means I ran up and down Squak Mountain.

Well, OK, I hiked up it and ran down it, if you want to split hairs.

It took me 1 hour and 11 minutes to hike up it but take into account that I had to stop many times to clear branches from the path. There has been a lot of wind here lately and I suspect I might be one of the few people who have wandered up Squak Mountain for awhile.

Either that or those other lazy bastards didn’t bother to move the fallen branches. 10% of the people doing 90% of the work holds up in the civilian sector too, I guess.

You know, two things always happen whenever I start this hike/run.

1. I feel some odd confidence that I am going to hike up with no effort and not feel like the mass of my lungs have collapsed and fallen down to my ass.

2. It feels like the mass of my lungs have collapsed and fallen down to my ass.

There is one particular spot that is really steep and I lunge toward it as some kind of twisted tradition. This particular tree is about as thick as my arm and splits at the base, creating a “V.” I stop there, place both hands on either branch as I heave air in and out, look downhill into the thick foliage below, and say “Hi, V.”

Every time.

I also look for it on the way back when I’m shredding my quads trying to keep from falling down the steep downhill and trying to keep my footing.

“HEYVEE….” as I shoot by.

Again, I don’t know why this is. It just is.

There were not very many people around, as I stated, but I did run into a lady, her kid, and a dog on the way up and then two ladies toward the halfway point. I always announce my presence as far away as I can so I don’t frighten people by running up on them in the middle of nowhere. Especially women. A big, lunging, heavy-breathing man with his collapsed lungs in his ass cannot be too comfortable to be surprised by (that is the most passive-voiced, effed-up sentence I’ve written in awhile.)

After I rested a bit at the top (re-inflated my lungs, ate another GU, reset my iPhone and watch, reveled in the thought of running downhill for 40 minutes), I headed down and expected to see the two hikers coming the way I had just ran by on the way up.

I didn’t see them. They must have taken a side path. But what I did see was not pretty.

On the way down, I have to keep my head down a little to watch the path. I am running downhill so I have to watch where my feet go and am usually concentrating about 10 feet in front of me to pick a path that won’t twist my ankle. I am literally thinking about 5 steps ahead.

So when I first glanced at this hiker in the distance, I took in the general situation.. backpack, hiking poles, high-tech hiking clothes, not the same person I saw coming up. And then it was head back down to watch my path and I didn’t look up again until I was right up on her, ready to give a quick “good morning” as I ran by.

When my head came up, I got a glance at an elderly woman pulling up her hiking trousers over old-lady underwear and an embarrassed, old, grizzled face looking at me.

Luckily I ran by quickly before I could take in too much of this unfortunate scene and before the embarrassing moment could linger.

But what has been seen cannot be unseen, people.

As much as you would like it to be, the fact remains.

Luckily running down a mountain requires constantly shifting attention and I did not linger on what I had just seen, making it down to the bottom of the mountain in about 40 minutes.

Me, of all people, know that there are certain biological necessities out on the trails. Hell, I piss in the woods all the time and yes, there have been a greater need on occasion (tip: always bring TP with you if you don’t want to end up running back with only one sock (tip within a tip))… but at least go off-trail to take care of the business. Even when shitting on snakes.

Especially if the business includes dropping trou and you are like 100 years old. I mean, you have the entire woods! Walk out 5 feet and you are covered so was it really necessary to subject me to visions not even the strongest mental floss can erase and make me feel like some kind of AARPervert?

I’ve seen the future and I repeat, what has been seen cannot be unseen.

I’m going to go finish my 100th set of dry heaves now…

Free Advice for Today: “Buy an inexpensive Polaroid camera. Sometimes you don’t want to wait even an hour to see the pictures.”

Quote of the Day: “Reality continues to ruin my life.”

I was right!

I would be paying for the leaf-collecting bend-over-rama I foolishly participated in yesterday.

And what form of payment would that be?

I looked like an Allen wrench for the majority of the day.

See what I get for wanting my lawn to look good? As Sir Phil was always so fond of saying, no geed deed goes unpunished.

This, of course, didn’t stop me from going to the gym and getting a treadmill workout in but it did result in me spending most of the day and night doing what I am guessing most of you assume I do every day: lay on my couch with remote in hand.

Even so, I did accomplish some things:

I finished the 3rd season of 24. if you are keeping score, in the end…

- Both Salazar brothers, dead (shot and blowed up).
- The gorgeous Ms. Salazar, dead (shot)
- Gael the Agent, really dead (deadly virus)
- Alan the Wheelchaired Spinmaster, dead (heart attack)
- The Adulterous Ms. Milliken, dead (self-inflicted shot to the head)
- Sherry “The Bitch” Palmer, dead (shot)
- Ryan “the Bastard” Chappelle, dead (shot in the head by Jack)
- Stephen Saunders, dead (shot by Gael’s widow)
- Michael Amador, dead (blown up in car)
- Nina Myers, dead (shot by Jack)

Who DIDN’T die was Kim Bauer which I was terribly upset about. I would have liked to see her die by a combination of EVERY method above.

I also got a chance to catch up on two shows I watch that I’m not exactly proud of:

1. The Biggest Loser: Why am I such a sucker for this? I keep getting stuff in my eye when I watch the back stories on these.

I also tend to root for the people who people that know me wouldn’t think I would like. Case in point, the big fat Italian guy. I like him. Don’t know why. He’s loud, obnoxious, and has a selfish, lazy streak.

And the same “character” I hated when one showed up on American Idol.

But this guy on The Biggest Loser (Michael) just cracks me up. On his weigh in, he lost some ridiculous amount of weight and was celebrating by saying “Oh my God, can you see my abs?”

That hooked me.

Trivia I didn’t know: Jillian was a fat teenager who had anger issues.

Anger issues? Yeah, I can see that but fat? Wow, that’s weird.

The final mystery though is why I always tend to be eating the most fattening, disgustingly high-calorie dinner or snack when I’m watching this.

2. American Idol:

This show was in Chicago and had the normal collection of freaks you see in the first few episodes of each season. It had some guest judge who I can’t remember and am too lazy to look up.

Anyway, the important moment of the night came when I finally got sick of a fly buzzing our family during the entire night. It was a big, fat bastard but my son couldn’t get it with a newspaper so I found my trusty bug zapper that looks like a small tennis racquet. It was a gift from a friend (Hi Chris!) in Saudi and was a definite asset there in the insect-infested KingDumb.

Turns out, it works just as well here.

I almost took out a lamp and yes, I left a scrape on the ceiling but I got the bastard and it fried for a good long time before I dumped it’s crispy carcass in the trash. Kind of like I wish Kim Bauer …. nevermind.

The sense of accomplishment was palpable.

I lead a sad life these days, folks.

Free Advice for Today: “Find a creative florist and give them all your business.”

Quote of the Day: “Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.”

A friend sent me a link to Loop’d which is kind of like a Facebook crossed with sponsorship for my running.

I spent a little time filling out my past race results and some other information on the hope that, well, if they want to sponsor my running, let’s do it!

So far, I was offered a 40% discount on all SteelMX/SMX optics.

I guess that’s the way most of these “sponsorship” offers go. They offer you discounts on their stuff but unless you were already going to buy the stuff, I think it’s just an advertising set-up for these companies. Time will tell but the fact that I was offered a sponsorship before even applying specifically to their program makes me think they are not all that picky on who they “sponsor.”

In two other related situations, the weather let up for a couple of days and thus there has been a strange lack of rain up here in the Pacific Northwest. I decided I should do something about the rest of the leaves that have been blowing around my yard since autumn and broke out the rake and the mulch bin after my workout today.

An hour later a couple of facts emerged:

- Raking up damp leaves embedded in the lawn is not fun
- My obsessive personality is not pretty when applied to yard work
- Because of #2, I switched from a rake to bending over and using bare hands to pick up individual leaves.
- My lower back and hamstrings are going to hate me tomorrow.

By the time I was done, my back felt like a few baseball bats had been broken over it.

Being 41 sucks.

Speaking of getting old and physical abilities starting to expire, I called the VA today and made an appointment.

This is something I should have done a long time ago and most people will tell you to take care of it before you get out of the military.

In my defense, I was overseas in the Middle East my last year in the service and the only place I could have seen the VA was in Germany and they were not going to send me on a boondoggle Hammerschmidt-style just for that.

But OK, I should have taken care of it prior to being out for 6 months but stop nagging me, sheesh.

It works like this: when you get out of the military, you make sure you have every physical problem documented in your medical record. Then you go to the VA and you tell them if there is anything wrong with you that they should consider for VA benefits.

You fill out a cubic butt-ton of paperwork, send it in, and they come back and tell you if you rate monetary compensation for your service-related injuries.

They can say one of three things:

1. No, sorry, go pound sand.

2. We will rate you at 0% which means that we recognize you are jacked up in some way but not enough for us to pay you for the rest of your life.

3. OK, you’re all jacked up. We will give you 10%, 20%, 30% (or whatever they decide) to make up for us breaking you. Thanks.

You might be wondering why #2 is important and I’ll tell you. Because even if you have a 0% (you get no money), you still “get rated” which means that you get special consideration on things like jobs that give extra points for being a disabled vet.

You cross a threshold of being rated or not rated. Even with 0%, you are STILL RATED and can claim benefits set aside for veterans with injuries.

I’ve also heard that those benefits also exists for my kids when they enter college. They might get extra consideration if I’m a rated vet with injuries.

I have not confirmed this but I will.

So I’ll see what they say. To tell the truth, I thought just about the only thing I would be even close to claiming is my back. During the Christmas I came back from Saudi, I had my back MRIed and they found a slipped disk. I don’t know if they will give me any money for it but hopefully that will get me at least a 0% rating to “cross the threshold.”

My first order of business was to go through my medical record and see if there was anything else. I didn’t think there would be but after 22 years, you forget a lot of stuff. It took me an hour to go through it, reading all the criminally bad handwriting, and making notes on all the injuries I had over my career.

And BTW, my medical record is like a small phonebook and I had a relatively low amount of medical problems while I was in, compared to most career Marines.

The lady at the VA told me that if there was anything I think I could apply for, to go ahead and include it because the worst they can do is say no. And her reasoning was a very interesting and sobering explanation:

If it is documented and I can get even a 0% rate on even something I don’t consider serious, it could help me down the line.

The perfect example is my ankles. I have twisted them so many times over the years that the elastic bands that give me lateral stability have been stretched out like so many old rubber bands so that they hardly provide any support at all.

Later in life if when I develop arthritis in them, if I have a 0% rating from the VA about my ankles, I can get the medical costs covered by the VA.

If I have not identified the problem and had it covered by the VA, and I develop problems later on because of it, well, tough shit. I have to cover the medical expenses myself.

So I am going to try for a litany of medical problems I have had over the years and see what I can get covered. I’m thinking back is a sure bet, ankles are a pretty good shot, and a couple of others are a possibility.

And to think all the crap I put my body through running marathons and ultras and the only injuries I have were service-related.

Oh, the irony.

Free Advice for Today: “When travelling, carry the phone number and address of your destination in your wallet.”

Quote of the Day: “Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons.”

Yesterday I talked about my son and his ability to dig out moronic content out of the internet (I know, like trying to hit water with a rock from a boat in the middle of the ocean).

Today’s example is not a video but a song.

I knew it would come to this.

In other news, I buckled down today and reignited my obsession with personal productivity and spent more than a little time with my Remember The Milk tasks.

If you haven’t dabbled in something like this, I highly recommend it. I capture all the little and big tasks of my life from the mundane (“Buy more Body Glide”) to the long term (“Get a doctorate”).

If you are interested, start here.

Anyway, I cleared out my tasks, did a weekly review, and rededicated myself to using this system to get my life back on track and where it should be: knocking down taskers everyday like bowling pins.

Currently I have a total of 211 tasks and I track them using my personalized webpage. It is even connected to an iPhone app so I can track them on the go too.

Here is what my page looks like (click it for detail view).

Note all the different tabs (blue ones are Smart Lists that change as my I tag tasks with different tags).

Anyway, there it is and yes, I have excuse to let things slip through the cracks. I have organization and I have time. Now all I have to do is mix in a little motivation and we are off to the races.

Free Advice for Today: “Ever wonder what it takes to become an astronaut? Receive the application package by writing to NASA, Johnson Space Center, Attn: AHX Astronaut Selection Office, Houston, TX 77059.”

Quote of the Day: “I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.”

What better way to usher in a Sunday than Death Metal Rooster?

My son is taking college courses as a senior in high school. He is free to set his own study times and has free roam of all the vast educational benefits the internet has to offer.

And what does he bring me?

Death Metal Rooster.

“Dad, you have to see this….”

Really? This is the sum total of my boy’s educational acumen up to this point?

I think it’s a combination of a couple of different factors here. He likes to see my reaction to these kinds of things and takes me back to the days when he and his sister used to giggle endlessly at my reaction to Spongebob Squarepants and the like.

(Believe it or not, I couldn’t find the original intro on YouTube!)

Basically I look at it in utter shock, confusion, disbelief, and a just-under-the-surface fury.

I’m his Squidward in such situations.

So I am hoping that this will be a regular feature in my future blogs: Alex’s Trolling of the Internet To Find Utter Imbecility.

Some past examples that just made me shake my head (Warning: Most if not all of the following people/animals/characters need a severe ass-kicking.):

Muffins!!!

Sad Muffins Knockoff

Taking the Hobbits to Isengard

Sad Taking the Hobbits to Isengard Knockoff

Kitty Cat Dance

Charlie The Unicorn Part 1

Charlie The Unicorn Part 2

Free Advice for Today: “Teach a Sunday school class.”