As you read yesterday, my man-cub has now become a man, or at least in the legal sense. His 18th birthday means one more thing I made sure we took care of…

Selective Service.

For those of you that need a little help here, as improbable as it may seem, 18-year-old American men still have to register for the Selective Service so that if there is a draft again (highly doubtful), well, there is a pool of able-bodied men to fill the ranks.

This brings me to a subject that has been asked of me for many many years: how would I feel if my son wanted to join the service.

Normally, this question was brought up during a discussion about young men wanting to join the service and the worry caused to the parents. My answer has always been what it is today:

I’d be all for it.

Do I cringe at the thought at my son facing danger? Hell, yes I do. I once told my wife she would be a wreck for three months if he went to bootcamp and she countered without missing a beat by saying “No, YOU would because you would know what he is going through.”

She was and still is, right.

But my argument has a few facets.

I firmly believe freedom is not free. We enjoy a standard of life that most people can only dream of and to protect that, young men and women must defend this Nation. Leaving it to someone else’s kids reeks of hypocrisy.

Secondly, I have seen what the military can do for young men and women. Not only as a leader of many “reformed” delinquents but even more close to home. The Marine Corps took a young kid living on his own with nothing more than the clothes on his back and enabled him to have a 22-year career, a family, and education up to the graduate level.

With all that said, I do not support the draft. I think we as a country learned our lesson in Vietnam that conscripted soldiers an effective force does not make and I think our all-volunteer force has done just fine the last few decades. A draft is not fair to the unwilling nor the professional force that has to spend 90% of their efforts to keep them in line.

But, the law of the land says that my son must register so that’s what we did. Call it the sign of the times that we did it right over the internet as opposed to the historical process of going to the post office.

They even have a searchable database you can look up if you are registered. And it works too because sure enough, I found out I signed up on 4/9/1987.

Just one more thing me and my boy have in common. Welcome to adulthood, Son.

Free Advice for Today: “Add Art of the Western World to your videocassette collection.”

……………….18 years …………………………………………………>>>>>>>>>>

Today, my boy becomes a man. Eighteen years ago this very day, my only son came into this world via C-section and now he takes his rightful place next to me as a man.

I couldn’t be happier.

We thought about what we should do to commemorate this auspicious event and here is what we came up with: Whirly Ball.

What is that, most of you ask?

Well, it’s kind of like playing lacrosse with bumper cars. You use trackball racquets and a trackball to try to hit a target at each end, scoring points for hitting the center which has a sensor. You have two teams and ride around passing the ball and shooting for the goal.

It is:

- a blast
- quite expensive
- something that can be done with a large group of people like our family

- something we’ve done as a family for decades
- the best present we could give Alex since he is so family-oriented

I’ve discovered I might be professionally quality at this game and am thinking about turning pro.

OK, maybe I am mediocre but that is the beauty of the game: it can make anyone feel athletically superior (or as athletically superior as one can feel while driving around a bumper car and smashing into loved ones.)

Oh, and for awhile I thought this day was going to be a milestone of another kind: for the first time in the years I have had my GPS, it could NOT find an address. It simply did not have it as a choice no matter how many times I looked and cussed profusely.

The bottom line was this: the main thoroughfare I’ve known since childhood goes by many many names: Highway 99, Pacific Highway, Independence Highway, “99”, “Pac Highway” but I have never heard/seen/nightmared that it would ever be called “State Route 99.”

Sons-of-bitches!

OK, today was not the day to get all pissed off at the world (even though there were some tense minutes on the way).

After we were done and came back, my bro-in-laws had snuck over to our house and filled Alex’s room with black balloons, multi-colored balloons (which I about earned a hernia blowing up last night), and crete paper.

They also made signs and a big “18” made of small cones in the front yard.

This is just how my wife’s family rolls.

As you all know, today wasn’t just about my son’s birthday. For most people, it was Super Bowl Sunday so what we worked out was perfect: we would all go play Whirly Ball as a family and then move the party to our house where we would host a combination “Alex’s 18th Birthday Party” and a Super Bowl party.

What could be better?

It was a day of a full house and rowdy sports watching complete with food, fire, big screen TV, and more food.

What can I say about the game?

I wanted to see Favre go and we all know THAT didn’t happen and then I put my saddle on the Colts’ horse (see how I did that?)

And got crapped on again.

It was a good game and very enjoyable to watch to include the commercials. That the Saints won pulled out of me a hearty “eh” and the whole New Orleans imploding in an orgy of celebration was, to me, maybe a little excessive. But hey, they gotta cling onto something since they got wiped from the map a couple of years ago.

Go for it.

One interesting moment came when one of my nephews decided to get in a contest of wills with me and the fact that his age is in the single digits, you can imagine how that turned out.

It all centered around me telling him it was time for him to get off of the trampoline. He kept jumping, informing me that his father had told him he could stay on (which I knew to be false since I had just been talking with said father).

Well, it took me three times to tell him to get off of the trampoline, the last one combined with a stepping out of the sliding glass door toward him which, as we all know, is the international sign that a grown up is just about to roll a train no kid wants to be a passenger on.

His reaction, when he saw the look in my eye and the tone in my voice, was the wrong one.

“Fine. I hate you!”

Oh, no he didn’t.

“What?”

He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“What did you say?”

Still no look as he got off the trampoline.

I met him at the sliding glass door, froze him with a stare and said “You got something to say? If you have something to say, look me in the eye and say it to my face.”

He didn’t.

Instead, he ran inside and then upstairs to hide. I walked over to my bro-in-law and explained exactly what had happened and we spent the next few minutes looking for him upstairs.

When we found them, I let me bro-in-law handle it and it wasn’t until we were eating about an hour later that Scott carried over a struggling young boy and Scott said “Say it!”

“I don’t want to!” as he struggled.

Strike two, young man-cub.

His father carried away the struggling boy for what I assume is yet another explanation of child-adult relations.

It wasn’t until much later that he came to me and apologized. I hugged him, told him I loved him, and left it at that.

I remember.

I remember dealing with a young, impulsive man-cub and it seems like yesterday. Now, mine is 18 years old and officially a man.

In a way, I am very proud. He is a fine young man and I am honored to call this man my son.

In other ways, I remember this.

And in my heart, he will always be that boy.

Free Advice for Today: “Learn to eat with chopsticks.”

It’s no secret that I’m a softie when it comes to my kids. And that I’ve fallen into that inevitable situation where the kids gets older but I still see them as toddlers.

Normally, this is reserved more for the mothers of this world but in my family’s case, it’s me. I am constantly referring “back in the day” when my daughter either had tight curly hair on her tiny head…

… or no hair whatsoever.

And back when my son would toddling around his mother’s feet in the kitchen, throwing Tupperware willy-nilly.

Never mind that they look like this these days.

I still see this.

But every once in awhile, I get to go back and frolic in the yesteryear in the form of nieces and nephews. Once again I get to pick up and swing around little beings to the sound of great delight and requests of “More, Uncle Jason, again!”

Today was one of those days. My nephew Nate came over and the little guy is just about the cutest thing you could ever imagine.

Oh, and your own kids never look so big as when they are playing with toddlers. It’s a crashing together of two worlds: the reality of grown children with the representation of how you see them in your heart’s eye.

Next stop: Grandchildren.

Bring it on.

Free Advice for Today: “Write a thank-you note to your children’s teacher when you see your child learning new things.”

I have written a few times about going hiking up Squak Mountain but today, I was not alone.

My bro-in-law, his wife, and their two kids wanted to go so they called me up and I was more than happy to join them.

I figured that with two little kids, we wouldn’t do the whole 1:15 up and 45 minute run down routine but it was a good break from the training I’ve been doing.

The similarities were pretty spot on between my kids at that age and the two munchkins along for the ride this time.

We had one that blazed trail and one that, well, didn’t.

And the genders held true: the girls are the trailblazers and the boys were the ones who needed help in the motivation department at certain points.

Only the comparative ages were flipped: my trailblazing girl is the younger sibling while Scott’s trailblazing daughter is the eldest.

I was even more impressed that my niece wanted to run starting about halfway down and kept right on my heels the entire way to the bottom. We might be seeing a budding trail runner at work here.

By the time I got home, I got showered and then took care of some errands before my appointment today.

If you remember, I had made a VA appointment only to have it cancelled by the counselor because she was sick. That wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t take 2 weeks to get another appointment which then took two more weeks to get here: today.

I had all my paperwork ready and was happily driving the 5 miles to get to the appointment when terror hit.

SHIT!

I grabbed my iPhone because a thought had struck me that made me break out into a cold sweat.

I pulled up the calendar (almost wrecking in heavy traffic) and I saw what I most feared.

Here is what happened.

My original appointment was at 2:00. When I made my new appointment two weeks later, I just dragged the reminder from the old date to the new date on my Outlook calendar.

The problem was, the new appointment was at 1:00 and that is what was tickling my memory as I headed to the VA office, at 1:30.

SHIT!

I called the counselor but only got her voicemail and left a somewhat edited version of what had just happened. I then told her I was more than halfway so I would just come in and hope.

You know what they say about hope.

Hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which filled up first.

Sure enough, the receptionist said he had talked to her when I didn’t show up at 1:00 and she told him to have me call her to reschedule.

Again.

First time was her fault.

Second time was my fault.

You would think that would make us even.

But recall, it took 2 WEEKS to even get her on the phone after SHE cancelled our first meeting and 2 more weeks to get another appointment.

Now that it’s my fault, I might be eating tapioca pudding and shitting my pants by the time I can get in another time.

Or maybe even longer than a month!

Free Advice for Today: “When babies are born into your family, save the newspaper from that day. Give it to them on their eighteenth birthday.”

I had a dream last night.

I dreamed I was still back in Saudi Arabia and I was talking to someone, telling them that I couldn’t wait to go home. Specifically, in my dream, I was imagining the feeling of the cold air conditioning of the airplane I was just about to get on as a symbol that I was going home.

It was vivid, as were my feelings of wanting to go home.

The next thing I was aware of …

“Jason, are you getting up to take Steph to school?”

That sentence was coming from my wife, half asleep next to me.

I had forgotten to set my alarm and overslept by about 15 minutes.

What is further bizarre is that I was tired, cranky, and listless all morning. You would think I would be on Cloud 9 after waking up to the scenario I was fanaticizing about in my dream.

But no.

I’m a freak.

Free Advice for Today: “For an unforgettable adventure, float the Gauley River in West Virginia.”

I guess it’s time to weigh in on the don’t ask don’t tell situation. What I DON’T want to happen is to get into a huge back-and-forth discussion because that has been done to death over and over. I don’t think I could bring anything new to the table other than my opinion so here it is.

I support repealing DADT.

100%.

I think it was a stupid law that played the monkey hands over the mouth, ears, and eyes game.

With that said, I don’t support gays in the military.

Yes, I think they should repeal the DADT law but that is not to say that I think they should allow gays in the military. I think they should go back to expressly forbidding them to serve.

This is different than most of the arguments you hear because most people who argue against repealing the law want to repeal it and let the flood gates open. Mine is to repeal the law and close the gates altogether.

How have I formed this opinion? I submit to you my 22 years of active duty in the Marine Corps. On that level, I think I have the creds to at least weigh in.

Let me start with an experience I had over in Saudi Arabia and wait for the tie in at the end.

The Saudi Arabian Marine Corps is not what you would call awesome. In fact, after advising them for a year, I can say they are substandard as a fighting force. This is a result of many factors I will not go in to right now but one of them is their short history. They simply have not had a long time to develop into a viable fighting force.

If you ask any of them, they would probably think they were really good. In fact, their common, if not humorous, belief is this:

- If I have the weapons and equipment used by the United States Marine Corps, I am as good as the United States Marine Corps.

- If I have the training used by the United States Marine Corps, I am as good as the United States Marine Corps.

They truly believe that if they have these two factors, they are on equal footing as the United States Marine Corps.

Therefore, they buy our equipment (or similar types) and hire a few of us to go over there and teach them how to use it.

And they think this is enough.

It is not.

There is one ingredient they lack. And, ironically, it’s the most important ingredient that makes the United States Marine Corps the most effective fighting force on the planet.

It goes by many names: espirit, professionalism, verve, cockiness…

But it boils down to one thing: the fighting spirit imbued to every Marine from the moment they enter the service.

To those of you that served, you know what I’m talking about. To those that have not, it’s hard to precisely define but it is that mentality that we are the best at what we do and we will win any fight we get into. Period.

This is the ingredient that the Saudis lack and, in my opinion, will never attain. Therefore, I don’t see them ever becoming what they say they want to be: a true Marine Corps on par with the United States.

OK, now, with all of that said, let’s get back to gays serving in the military. As I’ve stated, the arguments have been horse-beaten over and over so I don’t want to debate this. Just take it for what it is: my opinion.

When you allow gays to serve, their very existence in a unit eats away at that special ingredient. The vitality and combat effectiveness of a unit is anchored in the relationships between the individual Marine of the unit, be that a squad, a platoon, or higher. If that relationship of trust, respect, and yes, even love for your brethren does not exist, the unit is weakened if not completely ineffective.

These units exist. There are weak units because of many factors. The leadership has failed to forge the unit and something has gone wrong with the dynamic and as a result, that unit creates a danger to itself and to the units around it. The weakness, borne out of anything from distrust to outright personality problems, translates into real danger on the battlefield.

If you allow gays into any unit, the very concept that makes that Marine unit good would be removed. You would introduce mistrust and that is a cancer that cannot be allowed to decimate a unit if you want it to perform to the standards that make it what it is: a fighting force to be reckoned with.

“But why should I care what a Marine does on his off time as long as he fights…”

That is assuming he is only a Marine during “working hours.” Guess what, a Marine’s working hours are 24 per day, every day. We are Marines not by trade but by belief system. We do not shed the uniform, put on earrings, or moonlight as scumbags. Or homosexuals. It’s simply counter to everything we believe in. Is that so hard to understand?

“This is the same argument as they used to try to keep black people out of the ranks.”

Big difference. Being black or any other race is not a choice or a behavioral factor. I would not question being in a communal shower or curled up in a foxhole with anyone from any other race but if that person was a homosexual, he would join a long list of other people I would have a problem with in similar situations.

How would America swallow the knowledge of throwing their daughter in a communal shower with a bunch of male Marines?

The unfortunate comparison above puts me and other heterosexual males in the role of the daughters because, think about it, the scenario describes victims who are attractive to a population.

So if we expressly forbid men (attracted to women) to shower with women, why should we be OK with men (attracted to men) to shower with men?

That is, of course, hypothetical because we all know what would happen. The gay man would be beat to shit and then you would have a legal nightmare which, predictably, would wipe out that unit.

Before long you would have the following exiting service:

1. The beat-to-shit gay man

2. The perpetrators

3. The Officer in charge

But there is a few other populations you would lose:

1. Marines who either resign or don’t reenlist since they don’t want to put up with being forced to accept serving with gays

2. Potential Marines who don’t enlist or apply for a commission for the same reason

And if you think these numbers would be small, you would be wrong again. Marines, more than any other service, depend most heavily on their reputation to recruit and retain. If you decimate that allure to “Be a Marine,” then you have gutted your best fighting force.

It comes down to a simple question: does America want a Marine Corps?

If the answer is “yes” (and it is), then you must allow an environment exist that is capable of creating and maintaining the kind of units it takes to have a good Marine Corps.

If you start tinkering with that proven formula, you will break it.

A Marine fights and wins. He does this with his fellow Marines who fight just as hard and these bonds are the strength that protect all and give the American public what they expect from a Marine Corps: checks in the winning column.

If you let gay people into that formula, the bonds will break down.

And you will not have a Marine Corps, or at least one that does what a Marine Corps is supposed to do.

So if you do this, do not call it a Marine Corps.

Because it will not be.

To show you that I have not lost my sense of humor while way up here on my soapbox, I did have to chuckle at this that I got from The Reluctant Optimist who noted the improvements if DADT is repealed:

The Army might finally get some uniforms that look good.

The Marines might finally get rid of those ridiculous onionskin PT short shorts for fear of fraternization.

The Air Force might look more macho.

The Navy… well, pretty much status quo there.

Free Advice for Today: “When you race your kids, let them win at the end.”

Today, most people celebrate Groundhog’s Day.

I do not think that a stupid forest creature coming out of his burrow and seeing (or not seeing) his shadow has anything to do with weather.

To me, this day means something much different.

It’s my Grandma’s birthday, who passed away a couple of years ago.

To her, I am reprinting the eulogy I gave at her funeral. I was in full Marine Corps Dress Blues.

Happy birthday, Grandma.

For those of you that don’t know me, I am Jason Grose, and this is my grandma. You wouldn’t know it looking at me but grandma called me her “Silly Rabbit” She had nicknames for all of her grandchildren and somehow I got stuck with that one. OK, Silly Rabbit it is. My Marines would kill for such information.

As I look out today, I see something I know my grandmother would have cherished; a gathering of the people she loved. Each one of you have your memories, your stories, your details of why my grandmother was special in your lives.

This is a couple of mine.

120 miles.

It’s 120 miles from Oklahoma City to my grandma’s house. And when we would make that trip, for two hours my brother and I had our noses pressed up against the car door glass in anticipation of arriving.

When we did, Mom would not even have a chance to stop the car as my brother and I flung open our doors and jumped out of the moving car, leaving the doors wide open and a very concerned mother back in the vehicle.

We so loved coming to see our grandmother and it’s a testament to her love that her home was a sanctuary for us despite the lack of what you would normally consider a place that drew children. There were not big toys and few small ones. There was a TV but most of the time only with a smattering of channel offerings, few of them that would keep a child’s attention.

We had no neighborhood friends here, no computers, no video games. But what we did have made us long to come back and stay for as long as would be allowed.

Mexican food!

Actually, food was just a fringe benefit. The love that was showered on us from grandma was the actual draw. Her attention was more desired than any diversion, any game, any entertainment and she gave it to all of us freely and in copious amounts.

When it was time to leave, tears rolled down our faces even after we had passed the city limits. My brother and I cried unashamedly, heartbroken that we had to leave our grandma.

That is my classic example of what my grandmother meant to me and my brother but if you will indulge me, I want to share one more important realization I had recently.

60 miles.

Perry Oklahoma is only 60 miles from Oklahoma City and when I was a kid, most of you will remember the enormous family reunions we had there. We would take over the block with the kids running every which way, through the ditches, and roaming in and out of every house. The women would be in all the kitchens cooking, talking, and laughing. The men would either be in the living rooms or outside talking politics, smoking, and yes, arguing.

Music was in the air, as well as the love we all shared for “The Family.” People were dancing. Only peals of laughter broke through the blaring Mexican music.

But I have to admit. Since my grandmother was one of 13 children, I was not all that sure who some of you were. Our family tree has so many branches that I was lucky to pick out even a small portion of any of your actual relationships to me.

But that did not matter. What I did know was that we were family, I was related somehow to all of you, and I was loved.

I was recently telling someone this exact story and it was at that time that I made a sudden realization. I realized it as it was coming out of my mouth and I almost felt like an audience member hearing it for the first time.

The reason I loved this family so much was simple. The reason I felt comforted and loved by the mass of you sitting in this room stemmed from a single source.

I loved all of you because you all have aspects of my beloved grandmother. Some of you bear such a resemblance to her that it’s hard to look you in the eye today. Many of you talk like her. Many of you have the same mannerisms as her. And yes, all of you exude that unconditional love I so valued from her.

So I guess you could say that my grandma was a collection of everything that is good in those of us gathered here today. I love my grandma and I will miss her deeply for the rest of my days. But I can take some comfort in knowing that she is not gone. She is just spread out evenly among who I see today.

I stand before you a Major of Marines, proud of my 20 year career and the two decades of wearing this Cloth of our Nation. I have been to war and I have forged men of steel to defend this great nation. At my unit, I am simply known as “The Major.”

But I hold another title in higher regard than any of that.

I AM a Silly Rabbit and I AM the grandson of Sanjuana Candelaris Terronez Garcia.

Free Advice for Today: “When someone tells you they love you, never say ‘No, you don’t.’”

I thought thse were funny enough to post. They are dedicated to my father-in-law who is the master of bad puns.

(Hat tip to Theo Spark)

50. Act naturally
49. Found missing
48. Resident alien
47. Advanced BASIC
46. Genuine imitation
45. Airline food
44. Good grief
43. Same difference
42. Almost exactly
41. Government organization
40. Sanitary landfill
39. Alone together
38. Legally drunk
37. Silent scream
36. British fashion
35. Living dead
34. Small crowd
33. Business ethics
32. Soft rock
31. Butt head
30. Military intelligence
29. Software documentation
28. New York culture
27. Extinct life
26. Sweet sorrow
25. Childproof
24. “Now, then…”
23. Synthetic natural gas
22. Christian scientists
21. Passive aggression
20. Taped live
19. Clearly misunderstood
18. Peace force
17. New classic
16. Temporary tax increase
15. French bravery
14. Plastic glasses
13. Terribly pleased
12. Computer security
11. Political science
10. Tight slacks
9. Definite maybe
8. Pretty ugly
7. Twelve-ounce pound cake
6. Diet ice cream
5. Rap music
4. Working holiday
3. Exact estimate
2. Religious tolerance

And the NUMBER ONE top Oxymoron

1. Microsoft Works

Free Advice for Today: “Add The Book of Virtues by William Bennett (Simon & Shuster, 1993) to your home library.”

Doesn’t count!

I never really noticed it before but it makes sense, even though it disgusts me.

The “Pro Bowl” is a weak sister excuse for a professional football game.

Logically, I know why this is:

- God forbid that a high quality player should get hurt while playing what amounts to an exhibition game.

- Performing in the Pro Bowl is not the big goal here: it’s GETTING to the Pro Bowl so that forever and a day, the player will have the “Pro Bowl player” tacked on to his name.

- There are not really two teams: there are just a bunch of good individual players which means the game is going to suck.

Now, I am a mid-level fan, as opposed to a hardcore, paint-your-face and curse your existence if your team doesn’t win, fan. And even to ME, the reality that the football season is coming to an end brings a certain desperation.

The Pro Bowl, normally played AFTER the Super Bowl, is that last morsel of football before many long months without the pigskin being snapped.

This year, they moved it, squeezing it between the playoffs, or what I like to call the Blood-Letting since big, mean dudes are throwing themselves around wrecklessly and creating violent Gladiator-style entertainment that is almost unparalleled, and the Super Bowl.

So right off the bat, they pumped the pooch. Yes, yes, they threw us a bone between the playoffs and the Big Game but speaking for myself, I would rather have that little nugget AFTERWARDS when I’m staring down the barrel of many barren months without football.

Second, the lameness that is the Pro Bowl performances are somewhat overlooked when the game is the last football to be seen in months. When you move it between between the arguably most intense played games of the year, it makes the Pro Bowl seem like the soap-dropper.

On top of all this, they moved it to Florida.

I don’t know how I feel about that so I will split my personality on this one:

Con: the players always use this as a free trip to Hawaii each year, upping the spoils of getting to the Pro Bowl. After many months of long, arduous schedules, the family gets to reconnect in the paradise that is Hawaii.

Pro: Cry me a river, you rich bastards. You earn MILLIONS so use some of that to go to the friggin’ moon, as far as I’m concerned. I’m sure one trip for you and your family to Hawaii isn’t going to even show up as a blip on your financial radar. And you are allowed to be in the PRO BOWL, and forever be known as a PRO BOWL PLAYER. You haven’t the room to bitch, my friends.

But since I do have male chromosomes, I watched the game because it is football and the party will soon be over.

How disappointed I was.

They were hardly hitting each other! They were helping each other up, smiling, and patting each other on the butt.

On one extra point attempt, they didn’t even make CONTACT!!!!!!

It is sad to watch defenders give up at the end of plays, rushers give half-assed efforts to get to the QB, and to see the general lethargy. Why even play the damn game? I want to see the blood, violence, and career-ending injuries I’ve come to love and expect from professional football.

Sheesh, what is a violence-addicted gorilla to do?

Free Advice for Today: “Watch a video on CPR and emergency first aid with your family.”

Today, we watched our niece and nephew.

OK, my WIFE did most of the watching.

It’s nice to have a household again. To have a place where you can have family over. To have a place where family can drop off their kids and go do stuff.

We have waited so long for this. We have been travelling around for a couple of decades and the last decade or so is when we feel we’ve really missed out. Our nieces and nephews are edging toward their teen years but we still have a few left before hanging out with their cool uncle is no longer cool.

And our place is the cool place.

We always have all kinds of good treats.

And we have a stupid dog that most of the kids aren’t afraid of.

And we have a trampoline.

We have 3 different video systems.

And best of all, we are the cool aunt and uncle who let the kids pretty much run wild as long as they stick to the most basic rules of good behavior.

If I were a kid, this is the place I’d want to hang out.

And isn’t that the ultimate test?

Free Advice for Today: “Offer to say grace at holiday meals.”

As long as there have been kids and parents, there has been the debate about spanking.

But I don’t think anyone could fault me for the following sentence: my daughter’s basketball team got spanked once again.

I won’t assign blame because it is a team so a loss is a team loss just like a win is a team win.

But I WILL bitch about the refs. Not that I would ever want to do what they do because they are almost universally hated. Some of them take it in stride and then some of them, well, seem to feed on this and take on an omnipotent self-image.

As the announcer, I have to stay neutral and call the game fairly. This becomes more difficult when my daughter is actually playing but I manage.

What tends to irk me though is this attitude coming from some of the refs. Yes, you are in charge but you don’t have to act like, well, God.

Maybe this is just a reaction to my deep seated rebellion against authority which is strange since I spent 22 years in the Marine Corps, more than half of it an Officer.

Probably, but the conversation I had with one of the refs before the game didn’t help matters.

They have different refs for the JV game, which is played first, and the varsity game. Normally the refs for the second game show up in time to see some of the JV game and this is what happened tonight.

Before each game, I go to the refs and get their names because announcing there names is part of the script I read in the introductions.

When I talked to the ref tonight, he pulled me aside and asked me for a favor.

This is not good because when a ref “asks you for a favor” it’s usually an attempt to politely assert some authority over you. As you can imagine, he couldn’t have known who he was dealing with.

He said he noticed I had done a lot of announcing while the players had the ball and asked if I could minimize that.

Now first of all, the JV girls never get the benefit of an announcer since most schools only do that for the varsity teams. I do it because I enjoy it, my daughter’s on the JV team, and the JV girls get their game treated like a “big game” instead of just feeling like they are allowed to play before the varsity team.

Second, I do my best to make it sound like a professional game, calling names of players coming in and out, calling names of shooters, etc. I think it means a lot to the girls and the parents to hear the names.

I also try to summarize the score and time remaining between plays so I can keep everyone up to speed on the game situation without interrupting the game. My goal is to keep the announcements within the confines of “between plays.”

And I think I do a pretty damn good job at doing this.

His specific “request” is that I don’t announce while the ball is in play.

While the ball is in play? You mean you want me to identify the player number, look up her name, and call out her name all in the time it takes you to recover the ball and have the opposing player throw it in?

Not to mention trying to squeeze the score in or the time left in the quarter.

Have you ever HEARD a game being announced?

Normally I try to get my announcing done before they get to mid-court so it doesn’t interfere in too much of the offense (unless they are full-court pressing when I try to scale it back a little more).

So you can imagine I was both a little amazed and upset that I was having my announcing curtailed. I could see if I was being obnoxious or blatantly for one team or the other. But I was innocent on both accounts and the result was that the girls would have their game announcements all but neutered.

I guess I just will never understand some people. It’s a shame when those in charge can ruin something so potentially good for the sake of exercising a little power.

I will add power-hungry refs to my list of offending personalities. They aren’t all that way and some I really respect. But others… (see graphic at top of this post)

Free Advice for Today: “Pay attention to pictures of missing children.”

Well, it happened again. Despite having about a trillion little projects waiting in the wings, I found something else to eat away my time like moths in a wool coat.

What is it this time?

Programming.

My programming history goes something like this:

1987: working on TRASH80s in my beginning programming high school class. I could make my name scroll down the screen in green letters in an infinite loop. Yeah, look out Billy Gates.

College: I attempted to go computer science but after a few months in the freshman “weeder” programming class using ADA and a bit of FORTRAN, I was effectively flushed out with the rest of the CS-wannabe turds.

It was also at this time that I started working with HTML which is a pseudo-programming language. To those that care, it is considered a markup language and thus not really programming.

At some point after this, I taught myself how to work with Access databases and unknowingly, was teaching myself Visual Basic.

Graduate School: along with the required classes for IT, I took all my electives in programming including VB and C++.

Since then, I have not had a lot of formal training when it comes to programming so before I went to Saudi in 2008, I picked up a very basic programming book with the intention of using the hours, days, weeks, months with nothing to do over in the KingDumb to reinvigorate my nascent programming skills.

Well, um, I DID take the book but did I actually open it and do any programming?

Well, see, there was this … and I… the time just … OK, I didn’t do jack over there and I have no viable excuse why I didn’t do the programming, or read the stacks of magazines, or the cases of books, or watch the stacks of movies… OK, I think we get the picture so if you are done putting me on trial, we can move this blog along.

So I grabbed the book a few days ago and decided I should fulfill the promise to myself and do the work. My approach was simple: I know the general concepts (variables, arrays, loops, etc.) so I could just brush up on how to do the actually programming.

The book uses a simple programming language that I had never heard of: Ruby. Just like any other language, you have to learn the syntax and use it to make the program do what you intend. The asshole computer only does exactly what you tell it so, obviously, pisses me off to no end.

Now here is where it gets real. Consider you have to use a language to do the coding so there are really two things to learn: the language and the logic. Once you are fluent in the language (like profressional programmers), you can concentrate on the harder part: the logic.

If you know the language, you can code at the speed of thought. Just like when you speak, you don’t have to think about the words you are using (unless you are learning the language or are Paris Hilton).

Needless to say, I am not conversant in Ruby so I have to not only do the heavy lifting of the logic but also worry about the syntax, which really sucks when you are beginning.

So let’s talk about this logic. What most people don’t realize (ok, maybe just me, or I just forgot) that the most difficult part (and what makes really good programmers good), is coming up with the way to solve the problem you are faced with.

When you are learning programming like this, you read the chapter which introduces some concept and then you are given a series of word problems and you use what you just learned to write a program that solves the problem (AKA executes as expected based on your programming.) Then you build on that in the next chapter.

Now here is another level of detail you might not realize: there are almost an infinite number of approaches you can use and you might be happy, in the beginning, to just program something that works. While you are struggling with the language and trying to find that stupid comma you forgot that is derailing the entire program, this might be good enough.

But these “good ‘nuff” solutions are very inefficient (one of the Programming Deadly Sins) and akin to walking around the world to get to your neighbor’s house.

The order is tall:

- Learn the language as you go
- Figure out a solution
- Code that solution
- Make it efficient and graceful

Sometimes I get paralyzed because I know how to solve something but I also know there is a more efficient way tha I have not thought of. So should I just brute-force it and work inefficiently just to come up with a solution that works, albeit ugly and wrought with “spaghetti code”?

Or do I try to use brain cycles to come up with a better solution that might never ever ever ever work because I can’t figure out a way to do it without going all the way around the world?

It gets… well, frustrating.

Oh, and I have a double-edged sword situation going on too. You see, I found a blog that has all the solutions. This is good because I have a resource if I get completely bogged and also I can see how the author coded a certain solution.

But the other edge of the sword is the knowledge that it is there. The best motivation to come up with a solution usually comes at that point where you want to pull your hair out, throw things, and curse loudly. These are the worst of times when you hate coding, you hate the world, you hate kittens and puppies. But those are the exact moments that teach you how to code and make the solutions memorable since you nearly lost your mind finding them. It is a brutal reality.

So if the solutions are there for the picking, you never have to hate kittens and puppies but you also never get the lessons seared in to your cerebral cortex.

And one more point: most of you know me. I am very prone to vendetta. So if a program is kicking my ass, I make it a life and death situation to find the solution if it takes until the sun blows up and swallows up this cruel and dark world.

I find it difficult to give in and go to the solution in defeat.

I also find it difficult to appreciate even a clever solution I came up with because by the time I find it, I’m ten kinds of pissed till Sunday.

So my family, to include the dog, is not too happy with my programming as of late. And I don’t think I could do this for a living unless I wanted to spend the rest of my days in a white coat with really long sleeves.

Free Advice for Today: “Learn to paddle a canoe.”

Four words I hate to hear: The tires need rotated.

OK, there are many many worse four-word combinations but the concept of paying someone to do the old tire switch-a-roo a great day does not make.

Almost as bad as getting new tires altogether which, to me, is a lot like a rectal exam. A big pain in the ass, the BEST you can hope for is not much difference before and after, and it costs me a lot of money now that I’m out of the military.

But the wife told me it was needed (yes, she’s the nearest thing to a mechanic in this family) because if it was up to me, I’d let them wear down to the rim and then mystically discover one day what all those sparks were all about.

So I looked up the nearest BigO Tires and called up to make an appointment.

“We don’t make appointments, just bring it in and we can get you out of here in 20 minutes.”

Fine, but I really don’t believe you.

My mechanic/wife told me to have them balanced and rotated but not to fall for anything else because they will try to tell me that the flux capacitor will need changing. I knew better than that, at least. I mean, I had them change the flux capacitor LAST time.

When I got there, the BigO Tire Gal, (lovely moniker, don’t you think, and what is it with women knowing more about cars than me? OK, well, yeah, it’s not a very high bar) took me outside to look at the tires and instantly pointed out there was uneven wear and that was an indication that it was out of alignment.

I knew, she knew, and my wife knew the same thing: the tire rotation and balancing were free since I bought the tires there. So what they try to do is charge you up for anything else they can like flux capacitors and alignment.

For the low, low price of $78, I could get it all aligned which, obviously from Tire Gal’s eagle eye, it was in desperate need.

And not only that but that pesky (and FREE) tire balancing was not needed, according to Tire Gal, because I wasn’t hearing excessive road noise.

So, you are telling me the FREE work is not necessary and the COSTLY work is paramount?

Well, I just had one thing to say to this obvious shyster…

“I gotta call my wife.”

After all was said and done, I made her check the balance of each tire and authorized the alignment. Hell, I’m made of money, right?

While I was waiting, I wandered around Fred Meyer (which I like to call either “Dread Meyer” or “Dead Meyer” because I have to make up names for everything, usually not even that clean). I felt like some kind of perv for some unknown reason. Maybe because I hadn’t taken a shower, needed a shave, and was wearing old wrinkled jeans, wandering around Dead Meyer in the middle of a weekday.

There is only so much cheap crap and office supplies one can look at so I left there on foot and wandered over to Wendy’s (Skindies … hey, I never claimed they were all gold) and had a couple of small burgers for lunch.

Then it was over to Starbucks (The Keeper of the Excelsior of Life), bought a small coffee, A.K.A. “My brown liquid ticket to sit my ass on your couch for as long as I want and read the paper.”

When I finally got tired of that, it had been well past the 45 minutes Tire Gal said it would take and my phone still had not rang. So I showed up and, of course, was greeted with “I was just punching your results in the computer and was about to call you.”

Yeah, and I was just pulling blue monkeys out of my ass and teaching them how to work at BigO Tires.

My question was “Did you balance the tires?”

“Oh, I don’t see that on the sheet, let me ask Julio.”

Julio looked like he spoke as much English as I do Klingon and just about as happy.

I could only see/hear Tire Gal’s side of the conversation…

“Hey, did those tires on the Honda need balancing?”
“…”
“Which ones?”
“…”
“All of them?”

When she turned to me, she seemed a bit embarrassed, as she should be because I think we both remember our little conversation where she tried to talk me out of getting them balanced.

HA! CAUGHT YOU! SCORE ONE FOR THE GROSE MAN!!!

Then I realized I was celebrating the fact that I was paying these people almost $100 for rotating my tires.

Rectal exam complete.

And what’s all this blue fur?

Free Advice for Today: “When visiting a state and national parks, take advantage of all tours and lectures given by park rangers.”

(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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Since my sister is in town, most of the day was dedicated to spending time with her.

And by “spending time” I mean going and getting her from her friend’s house, bringing her to my house, stuffing her full of Mexican food, playing games until the middle of the night, and driving her back to her friend’s house.

Now, a few comments as the day progressed…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: any place there is a Martin Luther King Blvd, no matter what city, it is usually not the “Beverly Hills” of the city.

It was that way in every place we lived while traveling around in the military. Except 29 Palms and Yuma. There were no MLK streets there. I guess the desert folks aren’t real keen on the whole Civil Rights thing.

But here, as in most places we lived, if you find yourself around MLK, it had better not be for long if it’s after dark. Kind of a sad legacy for a great leader, if you ask me.

My sister’s friend lived in such an area and on the way to get her, every person we saw walking along the streets looked like young thugs. Baggy pants, baseball caps on sideways, all holding cell phones.

Once we got back to our house, it wasn’t long before my brother showed up with his dog Sam.

A few things you should know about Sam:

- He is the most gentle black lab you will ever meet
- He is the most well-behaved dog you will ever meet
- He gets along great with Buster

- Chris has had him for about 10 years
- He is welcome at any time at our house
- He loves the get his rump scratched
- He makes sounds like Chewbacca when this happens
- He gets “Spooky Eyes” every time you take his picture
- He is gay

Hey, I’m not calling names or judging. He just prefers bastards instead of bitches. So my nephew-dog is an old queen, what of it?

Carrie made a Mexican feast consisting of tostadas, not “Mexican pizzas” as my sister liked to call them.

They are tostadas.

If you want Mexican pizza, go to Taco Hell.

She also made sopa fideo, not “sopa bendejo” as my friend Brent prefers to call it (and hence, he gets to enjoy it so infrequently.)

Later in the night, I was roped into playing board games which, if you know me, is a bit like dragging a snail to the Salton Sea.

The entire Grose side of the family loves games. Carrie’s entire family loves games. I seem to be the only odd duck in this situation and just choose to bow out every chance I get. But my sister wanted me to play so I buckled. Pass the salt…

The first game was Oodles. I’m not going to go through the rules but there is a timer and it has to do with memory so even though I despise these games, I won. I’m glad that meaningless trivia and a master’s degree can come in handy somehow.

The second game was Taboo which lists a bunch of words you CAN’T say when describing the word you have to get your teammates to guess.

I did not win this because I was not alone.

Just kidding, but it IS a team game. We decided to go boys against the girls to split up the kids.

I still think I can use the word “man” even if one of the taboo words were “seaman.”

See, this is why I don’t play. I am a monstrous jackass when I get in the thick of the battle with these games. I give no breaks, no recourse, and no gray area when it comes to these games. It has rules, I follow the rules, and I expect everyone else to do so. And I will not stand idly by and let the rules be ignored. If you can’t accept this, don’t ask me to play because I guarantee you, I will not volunteer to play.

So by the end of the night, it was time to say goodbye and as it always seems, the time to say goodbye came too quickly. I am lucky to see my sister even once a year and I hated to say goodbye, even though she beat me at Taboo.

I’m not sure but I think she might have cheated a little…

And in the final “bad call” of the night, we decided to snap some pics right before she left. The result is that it was the middle of the night, I was very tired, and the picture shows it. I also look fat. What’s up with that?

Free Advice for Today: “Buy a flashlight for each person in your family to keep in their bedroom.”

(with Chris and me)

I did it!

I went a whole week in the gym without flaking out!

Monday: legs and shoulders
Tuesday: treadmill routine
Weds: back and biceps
Thursday: treadmill routine
Fri: chest and triceps

Like I wrote about yesterday, I am rocking the morning routine. Good eats, good workouts. What a way to start off the days when I am out of work.

At least I’m not sleeping in, playing video games while getting high, swilling beer, and eating junk food all the day long.

I have quite the visual of the average person out of work these days, don’t you think?

The big news for the day is that my half-sister (we have the same father) came in to town to visit for a couple of days. She lives in Minnesota and decided to come visit her Seattle friends and family here where she used to live.

At midday, I dragged my son along (for carpool goodness) and we picked her up at the airport where I became horribly confused at the parking situation. It didn’t help that I was talking to my son during the time it was imminently crucial to pay attention and ended up missing cool-guy short-term parking and ended up on the 5th level of loser-idiot way-the-f#%$$#-out-there parking.

We found my sister at the baggage claim where she retrieved her pink duffle bag. It seems that not only do bags fly free on Southwest but they also get soaking wet.

Welcome back to Seattle, Sis.

My parking skills were once again put out on Front Street when I failed to bring my parking stub with me on our way into the terminal.

Now, who’s with me here? Has it NOT been the routine since parking garages were invented that you leave the stub on your dashboard? I mean, come on, isn’t that been the universally accepted move? Leave it on the dash. Everyone knows that.

Oh, no, my friends. SeaTac Airport requires you to BRING the stub so you can put it in the little machine and pay as you enter the terminal.

That’s fine and dandy if you know that but to the rest of the human population, and a few sub species, that are silly enough to go with decades of psychological and behavioral reinforcement, we leave it on the dash like we’ve been programmed to do since forever.

Thinking I can’t be the only idiot, I figured there was an alternative procedure which, call me crazy, seemed to be that there was one of these payment kiosks somewhere near one of the exits that I could just pull up to as I was trying to get out of the labyrinth that is the parking structure.

Not only was this apparently a retarded assumption but to get out of the structure was like Jack Nicholson running through the hedge maze in The Shining.

I never did see another kiosk and when I finally found my way out of Neverland, there was a row of cashiers but all of the signs said “Credit or Paid Ticket.”

OK, what the #$%$#@ does that mean? I know I don’t have a paid ticket but does that mean I can use credit? Or does that mean I can use that lane if I have a credit? A parking credit?

People, I have a master’s degree. I consider myself at LEAST equal if not above the average biped in the general population so if I am confused, how do you expect the majority glue-sniffers to hack their way through all of this?

Luckily, my eagle-eyed sister spotted one lane that accepted cash which told me that not only did I have an out in this situation but there must be more than just me humping this football on a daily basis if they have the ability to pay as you leave, like every other #$%@#$%#$ airport in the #%$^@#$^% world.

After escaping the airport confusion, we took my sister to a Mongolian Grill near where I live but the one time my son decides to eat without us bugging him is the one time I failed to tell him that we were going out for lunch. So he was not hungry and got to watch me and my sister eat (what every teenage boy loves to do instead of parking in front of his computer.)

We hung out at my house for the rest of the afternoon before heading to my daughter’s school where she was playing a basketball game. In fact, the school was having a “quad” which means all the teams were playing (JV Girls, JV Boys, Varsity Girls, Varsity Boys).

Since I announce all the games, that means I was there from 3:00 PM until almost 10:00 PM.

Yes, seven hours on a hard high school bleacher seat, leaning over to talk into a microphone.

I think my butt and my lower back were competing for the “Most Debilitating Pain” award for the night.

But truth be told, I love announcing the games. I have an occasional moment of massive retardation here and there but for the most part, I get a lot of positive feedback for calling the games the best I can.

I got home late, watched some TV, and fell into a deep sleep. Nothing going on in the morning so the sleep was that of a flavor of not having to wake up for any particular reason. Pure bliss.

Free Advice for Today: “Carry a kite in the trunk for windy spring days.”

As most of you know, I do not have a job yet. Which is OK, the situation is temporary and will end soon. When it does, I know I will yearn for these carefree days where my schedule is dictated by whims and routine.

And that is what I want to talk about today: routines.

They can be good or they can be bad. I think it has a lot to do with momentum. If you get in a bad routine, such as sleeping until 10:00 AM each day, changing that to a more respectable hour can be rough. I have firsthand experience with this. It was blissfully slovenly until I couldn’t stand it any more.

I was in such a rut while my daughter was on winter break but now with the new school quarter starting, it helps that she leaves at 7:00 because I get up with her to drive her to school.

Now when we started this a couple of weeks ago, I made this ambitious plan to map out my entire day starting with an early wake up to eat breakfast before I take her to school and then hit the gym rather than going back to a warm comfortable bed.

For the most part, this morning routine has held and I wake up, make eggs, scoatmeal, and fruit for the both of us and then I take her to school, swing back by the house to pick up Carrie, and we head for the 24-Hour Fitness.

I’m happy that part has held because no matter what, I know that I get up when I should, I eat what I should be eating for breakfast, and I get a workout in everyday (even if I have to put up with Freakin’ Awesome Gym Stud).

But that is where it falls apart. I have a big gap of time between the time I get back home and have any other responsibility which is picking Steph up at school. Yes, it’s a perfect time to get things done and I do, here and there, but the lure of the nap looms and I usually cannot resist a bit of a snooze in the quiet, calm hominess of our abode.

So I was thinking today, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You have made progress. You have your early morning routine in motion. Be happy about that.”

My next goal is to fix that mid morning to early afternoon nonsense. That, I will be filling with the job search. The way I see it, I will have a few hours in the morning, a break for lunch, and a few hours in the afternoon.

I think that an afternoon run to end that process and then the rest of the night can be used for computer, blog-writing, family time, and then my almost-required watching of 24 with Jack “Crack” Baur. An hour of reading before I go to bed should round out the night nicely.

I used to think that when I was looking for a job, it would be a daily 8-12 hour ordeal but I have come to realize that is not feasible. If I don’t incorporate exercise and an actual life into it, I will be miserable. I don’t want to come to hate the process of looking for a job.

All of this begs the question: how will this change when I am working?

Obviously, I will be working from about 7:00 AM to about 6:00 PM (I’m including commuting).

So this leaves a morning period, maybe a lunch period, and a night period.

If I am doing some hard training, I could wake up at 4:00 AM and get some kind of exercise done. I don’t see that happening for extended periods of time but maybe leading up to a big race.

The lunch one is tricky. I always ran at lunch when I worked in the Marine Corps but I had a lot of leeway with a “lunch hour” which normally went closer to an hour and a half. I don’t think I can get away with that in the civilian world.

On the one hand, I don’t want to eat a big nasty meal and then be tired for the rest of the afternoon but I also don’t want to get all sweaty and stinky in the middle of the work day. I guess that’s the eternal conundrum.

I know me. If there is a gym nearby, I’ll likely hit that. If not, probably a run, especially if there is a good trail or road route.

The night routine, again, could involve some exercise. That one is tough though because I have never been a night exerciser. Like everyone else, I am tired by the end of the day and I’ve had all day to talk myself out of the workout.

So with that said, I think the night routine will always be the computer, blog-writing, family time routine and that means I have the morning and the night routine in place already.

This is good news.

If I could sum it all up, I think it comes down to a few facts I need to keep in mind:

- My routine is not as bad as I thought it was
- I need to get and stay motivated
- I have kept a working schedule with lots of race training in the past
- I am a good organizer and planner
- I love routine

And all that points to this:

I need to get back to my planning, work towards implementing that plan, and put my feet on the carpet each morning with a motivation to tackle what I have planned to do WHEN I planned to do it.

See, easy.

Free Advice for Today: “Record the birthday heights of your children on the kitchen doorjamb. Never paint it.”

Since I’m now addicted to Failblog.org, I have to write today’s blog in that spirit (although for those of you that have been reading my swill for years know that the whole FAIL! concept was always a large portion of my writing without any outside influence.)

Today’s fail is “Gym Stud Fail.”

You see, I was just trying to get my back-and-bicep workout done today and in swaggered Gym Stud.

How did I know? As I said under my breath while smirking and shaking my head “There always has to be one..”

Now before you all throw heat my way, let it be known that I don’t look down upon the less-than-stellar that attend my gym. Fat Housewife is at least there trying to do something about it.

Even Wheelchair Guy is cool if only because, hey, he doesn’t take up any of the leg machines.

And the advanced aged, or “The Cocoons,” mostly keep to themselves in the activity room doing, am I am not kidding here, group exercise in chairs.

No, the only one that really irks me is Gym Stud.

Let me tick of the qualifiers which this Super Gym Stud nailed:

- Overly developed upper body = works only the “show muscles”
- Spindly little stick legs = why would you work legs when you can work on chesticles?
- despite early 20s, thinning hair thick with gel = “settle down ladies…”
- Thinning hair pushed up into some kind of fauxhawk = “THAT’S RIGHT, I’m dangerous!”
- Pencil thin facial hair outlining jaw = “I Wanna Sex YOU Up. Yeah YOU!”
- Walks out of the changing room with weightbelt and gloves already on = “Time to walk the walk, Ladies.”
- Walks toward the free weight area with a swagger = “Behold, ladies, because you are looking, and I know you are, at something FREAKIN’ AWESOME!

OK, so obviously I hate this guy from the moment I laid eyes on him. But I can’t seem to get very far from him because we seem to use machines near to each other.

The final straw was when I was on a flat bench and I heard the tell-tale sound of someone lifting for show: heavy dumbbells thudding on the floor.

Look, Mr. Freakin’ Awesome, if you can’t handle the dumbbells, don’t pick the bigger ones up. And by “handle” I mean setting them down after doing chest presses (of course) without dramatically letting them do their best to get to China the hard way. We don’t want to hear the bell tower ring every time you lose control of the weight you obviously can’t manage.

Oh, and one more thing, we don’t want to hear your animalistic grunts. Yeah, we know you are working your freakin’ awesome pecs and you are really straining some short-shitting weight (because we hear you dropping the dumbbells after each set) but nobody cares. Really. You have a fake, gelled-up Mohawk, a pin-striped, Color Me Badd face wanting to Sex Everyone Up, little underdeveloped stick-legs, and you are making a spectacle/ass of yourself while you strut through the gym with your weightbelt and lifting gloves on because you are FREAKIN’ AWESOME!

Just … go away and take your testicle starter set with you. Thanks.

Speaking of sadness, I saw Ringo Starr on The Daily Show and he sang.

Aren’t you the Beatle who they turned your mic off while you drummed?

It was really a sad sight because along with your complete lack of vocal ability and even greater lack of front-man dancing (awkwardly shifted his weight back and forth to each leg), you are one-fourth of the greatest band that ever performed and one-half of the ones still alive. Yet still you get up and sing “With A Little Help From My Friends” which you never had a vocal part and you leave us with this weird “Well, he IS a Beatle but that was not even close to the Lennan/McCarthy classic sound” taste in our collective mouth.

And just to show I’m an equal opportunity ridiculer (wow, that didn’t even pop up a misspelling! Did I install a Jasonbonics add-on to my Word dictionary?), Ringo was joined by a guy named Ben Harper who, in my mind was, oh yeah the lead singer who sang “Brick” until I realized that was Ben Folds Five.

You would think I was done dinging on people but there was the second American Idol on last night and I just can’t pass something like that up.

Of course the big news is the 67-year-old vet who sang “Pants On The Ground” which instantly set the blogosphere on fire and I have no doubt it will be everywere very soon. He may even get a 15-minute “William Hung” celebrity status out of it.

Funny story, I saw a Facebook friend had posted “Lookin like a fool with your pants on the ground…LOL” and was utterly confused why a Christian mother and wife of a good high school friend would post this.

It wasn’t until hours later that it made sense because she lives in the Midwest and had seen the show a couple of hours before I did.

I weep for my generation.

(Note: I troll Google Images and shamelessly steal what I find for these blog pics and I want to announce, I was subjected to an inordinate and disgusting amount of gay porn while researching the pics for this entry. I will now attempt to swab the short-term memory area of my brain with an acid-soaked Q-Tip.)

Free Advice for Today: “Visit the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina, during the spring tulip festival.”

Last night, it began for a 9th time.

And like every year, I must throw a blog its way to appease the American Idol gods.

And do some explaining.

I’ve explained this before so I will bulletize the main points:

- I never intended to watch American Idol because I loathe reality TV

- Some years back, I started watching the first few episodes because it was a wholesale idiot parade.

- One year (2006) I got sucked into the vortex by watching the snake’s eyes just one episode too long and have been hooked since.

- That same year, I met the top ten when they came through San Diego.

- I am not proud of any of this

I have written about:

2006: Nerding, BBall, and American Idols

2006: Idol Americans

2006: American Idols and Heroes

2007: Are the American Idols Stalking ME?

2007: American Idol Again

2007: American Idol Yet Again, 6th Season

2008: Here We Go Again: American Idol Revisited for a 7th Time

With 2009, I was in Saudi and had my wife tape them and send them to me. Like most things, I got behind about halfway through and never fiished actually watching the season, even though those tapes are currently sitting under my bedroom TV waiting to be watched.

I’ll get to them!

Meanwhile, I sat down last night with my family and together, we watched the 9th season begin in Boston.

I thought since they got rid of Paula Abdul (thank the God above!) that Ellen Degeneres, who I can stomach, would be sitting in but then I was informed that she is not showing up until Hollywood week.

Instead, they are going to have a parade of stars sitting in and the first one was Victoria “Posh” Beckham who, by my very scientific calculations, needs to gain 50 pounds to be considered attractive.

For now, she is a broom stick with make-up.

It’s also the last year that Simon will be a judge. Makes sense considering he has more money than body hair (and that is saying something) and WAY too much of both to put up with the constant flow of deluded idiots he must screen each week.

Like I expected, the idiots were in full “duh” and like every year, they only showed either the very good or the very bad.

And the bad were baaaaaaad.

Take the Michael Jackson effeminate with facial hair.

This kid was only 18 which means after he gets the shit slapped out of him, some slapping needs to be reserved for his parents. No, make that all out beatings.

Needless to say, he didn’t make it.

There was the over-the-top Bambino who everyone seemed to love but I thought he was just one big meatball cliché, to include kissing his fingers and opening them when describing his mother’s meat sauce.

Unfortunately, he made it.

Then there was the guy everyone hated but I loved.

He looked like this…

Which I thought was a dead ringer for Michael Ian Black who was a character comedian on Reno 911 and did a lot of those hilarious VH1 Where Are They Now commentary.

Anyway, this guy showed very little patience in the waiting room and by the time he was sent in, he was one big ball of frustrated semi-passive aggression.

I can relate to this guy.

What I THOUGHT was going to happen was that he would piss off Simon, blow completely apart, and get thrown out by security over a hailstorm of obscenities and broken Clark Kent glasses. It looked like he was well on his way but backed off a little to get to the singing.

Well he was better than bad but not good enough to be mediocre. It really didn’t matter because he had already sunk his boat but that is not what surprised me.

It was Kara, one of the judges, that instantly exploded with so much hate for this guy that even Mr. Semi-Passive Aggressive cowered. I thought he’d be the one to go into hysterics but it was Kara, at one point yelling at him that he needed a spanking.

He looked at her in confusion and then a small smile crossed his lips as he looked side to side and mumbled “A spanking?”

He left in a state of utter confusion as Kara continued to fume.

Wow.

Season 9 is off to a roaring start.

Free Advice for Today: “Attend family reunions and be patient when aunts and uncles want to take your picture.”

Monday blues.

It seems it hit everyone since the blogosphere seemed to be quiet all day.

No calls.

Not much email.

It was rainy and overcast most of the day.

And I have absolutely no reason no complain because as I pointed out to someone who wished it was a 3-day weekend, it has been a 180-day-and-some-change weekend for me.

But I was in a funk anyway. You don’t always need to have a reason to be in a funk. You can just be in one.

Short term funks are allowed.

And the reasoning “You’ve had it worse” is not the universal acid that neutralizes the funk base. I mean, yeah, if it goes on, I can think back to my year over in Saudi away from my family or my other long deployment to that God-forsaken wasteland back in 1990.

Or CAX.

Or double CAX.

Or OpsO at HQSVC BN.

I can remind myself that I am back in Washington, with my family, bringing in a retirement, and as of now, I set my own schedule which starts in the gym every morning.

Yeah, it’s about time (maybe past time) to start seriously getting my butt into Microsoft but for today, I need to let this funk take its course and bounce back strong as I always do.

I did feel better when my mother-in-law came by and we drove to Foster High School to watch Stephanie play basketball. The JV had a great game and beat the Foster Bulldogs. Then the varsity took the court and did the same.

The day didn’t end with a bang but more of a sputter as I knocked out a few chapters of “Microsoft Secrets.”

It’s considered required reading but it was written in the mid-90s so the technologies they are talking about (and “future” technologies) are a decade old and seem ridiculously outdated.

I have another book called “Microsoft 2.0” sitting on my desk that is probably pretty much the modern follow-up but I have to finish the old before I get to the new.

Cool Techno-Update of the Day: iPhone and Facebook decided to bump electronic uglies and connect my Facebook “Friends” list with my iPhone/Outlook contacts.

What happens now is when someone calls me, their Facebook pictures appears on my iPhone.

Rather cool, if you ask me.

Random: I found myself contemplating if I should get another Masters degree or a Doctorate. Still don’t know what in with either case.

And then it turned into “I will still have to get my Doctorate if I go for the second Masters so maybe I should knock out the Doctorate first and then finish up the second Master’s afterwards.”

It hit me that anyone listening to this mental conversation would think I was either bragging or out of touch with reality.

The funny thing is that, truly, neither.

Somewhere along the line, it was decided somewhere up in the twisted wetware in my skull rather matter-of-factly not “if” but “how.”

Maybe with a Doctorate and two Masters I could get a job. Weirder things have happened.

That’s it. Boring blog. Be thankful I even wrote anything.

Funkily Yours,

Vipe

Free Advice for Today: “Plant a couple of fruit trees in your backyard.”

Hey look, I’m a sports guy.

Well, not really, that would be my brother. He can spout off just about anything you want to know about football but I just catch the wavetops and most of the time, not even that.

But big news here in Seattle even I heard about: Jim Mora, the head coach of the Seahawks, just got canned after only one year.

Earlier in the season, most notably when my brother and I attending a shellacing administered by the Buccaneers, I summoned all of my analyst abilities and determined the Hawks needed three things:

1. A new offensive line to stop just about any opposing team and probably a Brownie Troop or two from handing Hasselbeck his lunch every play.

2. To send “HasNoSack” to wherever NFL quarterbacks go to die (ESPN)

3. Tell Jim “Markey Mark” Mora thanks but buh-bye.

I stand by #1. Our offensive line has let more men pass than Paris Hilton’s undies.

I reconsidered #2 and am on the fence because if they fix #1, maybe HasToSack is not the crumbling mess he appeared to be every Sunday.

Also up there on the fence was my thoughts about #3. I mean, the guy inherited a big steaming pile of Seahawk butt-spew and only had one year with no offensive line and a QB that ended up on his back more than the aforementioned Ms. Hilton.

But when I heard he got canned, I felt kind of bad. I read how he was from the area and it had been a dream of his to coach the Hawks since he was a kid. I had not considered how much of a slap in the face it would be to dump him after one year until it happened. I mean, hell, even the President gets 4 years to fix things no matter how broken they are.

But then I read he still gets $12 million so you know what, Jimbo? Just whip out a hundred dollar bill and wipe your tears away. The mighty dollar isn’t everything but 12 million of them can soothe like you read about.

Today’s entry for “Things That Piss Me Off” …. Phishing spam.

I know, I know, it’s here to stay and everyone hates it but it’s not even the fact that I get it. It’s the fact that it is so bad at what it is trying to do.

In the last two days, I have received email that borders on retardation.

One informed me that a card was intercepted by the US Post Office with a million dollars on it and that I had to fill out some form in Spain to release the card. For a fee of only $139, I was assured the card would be released and sent to my home.

The spelling was bad. The verbiage and grammar was way off. Plurals were omitted. They even gave an “official email contact” that was a GMail address. Then it gave a “Secure Email Address” which was the SAME GMail account.

I try to imagine a scenario where someone would actually believe this, get all excited, and send money, information, or whatever these numbnuts were phishing for.

The other email was just as stupid and had a subject line of “YOUR FUND HAS BEEN SENT.”

You mean my fundS?

So to believe any of these, you have to think along one of these lines:

1. OK, someone ACCIDENTALLY sent me a million dollars. They obviously think I am that person so if I keep this ruse going, they will send me this money from another country, I will get it, and no one will be the wiser while I wipe my ass with $100 bills for the rest of my life.

2. Someone wants to get a sum of millions into the US and wants me to be an intermediary. They want to deposit it into my bank account and then somehow send a portion of that back to them. For my troubles, I get to keep a cool million. Sounds plausible and completely legal to me!

3. A soldier came into possession of a large amount of gold or other valuable antique while fighting in (insert country we are currently kicking ass in) and needs my help to get it back to the states. This is obviously pillaged from some other very bad person so there is no moral dilemma for taking it off their dirty hands.

I could go on but what is the point?

Well, as horrendously stupid and poorly executed as these set-ups may be, they would not continue if there were’t some nimrods out there swallowing the hooks along with the lure made out of hooks.

Oh, one more item popped up on the idiot radar:

Fucktarded: it seems some people are challenging the law that says inmates can’t vote.

Fucktardeder: they are invoking a voting law that prevents disenfranchised minorities from being denied the right to vote.

Fucktardedest: They are putting this together by saying so many black men are incarcerated that denying them to vote is breaking the law.

WH….AAAAAT?

Ok, first of all, my God, where do I start.

Well, allow me to point out that seems pretty racist in itself. Men are in prison because they broke the law, not because they are black.

Second, NO prisoner should have the right to vote. You break the law, you have given up your right to participate. Voting is a privilege, one that is TAKEN AWAY when you break the law of the land and end up in jail. Period. End of debate.

Third: Are they saying ALL prisoners are black? No, they are not. And guess what, those non-black prisoners don’t get to vote either. The voting laws prevent the right from being denied based on race or color. But once you break the laws seriously enough to land your law-breaking butt in prison, well, I don’t care if you are animal, mineral, or plant. You ain’t votin’!

This seems like a no-brainer but I’m starting to believe there are no such things. That we must even debate this is mind-shattering.

What’s next, are we going to consider letting pedophiles work in daycares?

Do what you want, I got a million bucks coming my way after I send this $136 money order out, Suckas!

Free Advice for Today: “Before buying that all-important engagement ring, find out all you can about diamonds by calling (800) 340-3028. The American Gem Society will send you a booklet that will answer some of your questions.”