The decorating frenzy...

As promised, here is an account of Sunday's holiday activities. My entire day in timeline form.

07:00 - Got relieved from my 12 hour shift at work. Got into car and drove straight to church.

10:00 - Church commenced.

11:40 - Church ceased. (short service for some reason)

12:00 - Got home, changed clothes and proceeded to untangle 9 25-foot strings of lights to go on the gutters and roofline.

13:00 - After spending an hour untangling and testing above mentioned lights, I determined that four of the strings needed all the lights on them replaced due to weathering reducing them to basically clear glass. Also realized that since there are 25 lights on each string and replacement bulbs come in packs of 4 for 99 cents, it was cheaper to buy 4 new strings of lights at 5 bucks apiece. Entered car and proceeded to hell, or Wal-Mart, whichever you prefer.

13:30 - Searched for C7 lights for 20 minutes and finally found them with the assistance of a slightly ugly, MONUMENTALLY stupid employee of hell. Paid for lights and headed home.

14:00 - Proceeded onto roof of domicile with wife on the ground to feed me the lights to clip to the gutters. First clip snapped in half. More to follow.

14:45 - Finally completed the gutter lights. Should have taken 10 minutes but since every other clip broke and I had to change them out as I went, it took 45. Whee. At this point I'm ready to end all life on the planet.

14:50 - After lamenting over the clip situation (by lamenting I mean cursing at the top of my lungs from the roof of my house) I proceeded to start adorning the roofline with 5 more strings of lights.

14:51 - Black & Decker Powershottm staple gun jammed. More to follow.

16:00 - Completed lighting duties and did final test. Apparently, five bulbs that were working before they were put on the house have decided to take the rest of the holidays off. Back to the roof.

16:05 - Bulbs changed out and all are burning.

16:15 - Placed and secured a very retarded looking inflatable snowman on the lawn and plugged him in. Unfortunately, it worked.

16:30 - Decorating complete.

I could go on with the rest of the day and evening's activities but I'm already too tired from typing this. Let's just say I went to the new club to see it and wound up building it.

Good times.

Blue (Big) Thanksgiving...

Thanksgiving has come and gone yet again and I spent it the same way I've spent the last 7 Thanksgivings. I enjoyed dry turkey, store bought side dishes, vile "homemade" desserts and a movie on a laptop. You guessed it, I was at work.

Since beginning my relationship with IBM 7 and a half years ago, I've both gained and lost many things. OK, I've basically lost. The only thing that I managed to come out ahead with was more pay. I've given up a normal work schedule, most holidays are spent without my family, there is absolutely no chance for advancement and the sheer volume of stupidity that I deal with on a nightly basis is nothing short of biblical. I soldier on.

Back to the subject. This year's Thanksgiving feast was completely underwhelming. The menu consisted of a pressed pork loaf masquerading as a ham, a turkey so small it probably could have been passed off as a large chicken, dressing for the mini turkey that had the consistency of a Hunt's Snack Pack, and mashed potatoes that tasted a lot like neoprene. The spread was capped off with a homemade dessert that one of my coworkers who is not originally from these parts brought in that was affectionately referred to as "milk turds". While dinner was a bust I did, however, watch X-Men III which contains a wonderful scene starring a completely naked Rebecca Romijn with all her naughty parts strategically obscured with carefully positioned arms and legs. Yum!!

So another holiday has come and gone and I've spent it at work. IBM has kindly agreed to allow me off on Christmas Eve and Christmas this year which is a real rarity. Oh wait. They fall on my normal days off this year. That's right, they aren't letting me off, I'm off anyway. And in case you're wondering, yes, that's the ONLY reason I'm off.

Should I do it? HELL YES!!!!

Liberals sure are touchy...

If you saw Saturday Night Live last week, you saw one of the funniest SNLs in recent memory. Alec Baldwin hosted and it was jam packed with celebrity cameos. Anyway, to the point. The show opened with Kristen Wiig addressing the nation as Nancy Pelosi. It was probably one of the funniest things I've seen on SNL in a very long time. Here it is.


In looking for this video, I found quite a few message boards that were filled with liberals and Democrats who were blasting it as inappropriate and unfunny. Apparently, Dems and libs don't have a sense of humor. I'm not a card carrying Republican but if you saw the ballots that I've cast in every election since I turned 18, you'd see a straight party vote that was shaded red. For many years I've watched SNL lambast the current president and I've laughed my head off. It's called satire you morons. Get a clue. I'm sure you don't mind at all when W. is made fun of but God forbid (that is if you believe there is a God and my apologies if I offended you by capitalizing God) if one of your own gets lampooned. You can't even be graceful in victory, let alone your sourpuss whining when you lose. Get a life and laugh when it's funny. You'll feel better.

Too early for Christmas?

I am deeply in love with my wife. I love her so much that I would lay down in traffic for her if need be. I would give my life for her in an instant without even giving it so much as a second's thought. She is, however, insane.

Today is November the 17th. That makes yesterday November the 16th. My wife began decorating our home for Christmas yesterday. I can only guess that she's wanting to get a jump on the department stores who have yet to whip out their holiday fare.

I can forgive her wanting me to clean out the garage on a whim and then wonder why I'm ready to dig my eyes out of my head with the corner of a Boston Stone brick because I'm so tired from working all night the night before that I'm having hallucinations of The Muppets beating the almighty hell out of the Care Bears with tire irons and then feeding their flesh to each other in a psychotic orgy of gore. I can let go the fact that on a daily basis she makes me want to chew glass every time she asks me to take the trash out since she has packed it so full that items of filth are spilling over the edge of the can and onto our 3 cent a square foot linoleum and has not had the sense to remove the bag and simply replace it with an empty one that she can then proceed to fill up to the point of complete garbage saturation again. I'll even let slide the insane habit of reclining the BACK of the recliner without extending the chair to the full reclined position and then LEAVING it that way with the remote for the cable box shoved so far down into the innards of the chair that I have to flip it over like a beached whale to retrieve it.

I can overlook a lot of crap. But putting up the Christmas a tree a week before THANKSGIVING is just too much. Don't get me wrong. I'm as festive as the next guy. I love the holidays and everything that comes with them. Working on Thanksgiving is always one of the highlights of the season that I so enjoy. That, however, can't possibly hold a candle to the yearly Christmas Eve trip to her Aunt's house that doubles as a homeless shelter so I can spend the evening staring at the deranged occupants of said house while the kids that are present who aren't even school age yet are still able to tell everyone how many teeth my wife's Aunt actually possesses. You don't have to be 4 to be able to count to it.

Anyway, as I said before my wife started to display the Christmas knick knacks yesterday and started to unpack the tree this afternoon. Tomorrow I'll be able to enjoy an entire day of nothing but work that is disguising itself as holiday cheer. I'm sure that before the day is over I'll be up on the roof of our humble abode, stapling string after string of multi-colored C7 lights all over the friggin thing until I can't move due to what will surely be massive, unrelenting pain in my lower back caused from bending over down slope on the incline of our roof so I can spread just a little bit of Christmas Joy. This, only after a couple of hours driving from store to store to find the right size rain gutter clips to replace the ones that I broke last year while ripping the lights down off the house in a blind rage on my day off. Felize Navidad!!

I'll let you know how it goes.

Xenu and you...

Just in case any of you have any questions about your reality...

Gastrointestinal bubbles and my Uncle's metaphysics...

I have gas. Not only do I have gas, I'm letting it out without any regard to the people around me. Best part...I'm at work.

I'm not sure if the change in my diet has caused this excess flatulence, but it's quite a thrill for someone who enjoys sophomoric humor as much as me. What is it about the base human bodily functions that appeal to the funny bone of so many people? I've thought about this at length and I've decided that it's the fact that the action of passing gas is one of the few things that every human being on the face of the planet has in common with everyone else. We all fart and deep down inside in places that some of the more uptight people won't admit to, we all find it hilarious.

Think about it. How many times have you been with friends and one of you let's a cheek flapper rip? I bet you went blind laughing about it. Some of my fondest memories involve blowing ass. Allow me to share one.

Last new year's eve, my wife and I were at Mitch's house with some of our friends ringing in the new year. We had been drinking a little and I got the brilliant idea to light a fart. Mitch was only too eager to oblidge as neither one of us had ever witnessed such a thing. We pile into the bathroom along with two of his brothers and what was seen by all was nothing short of a miracle of nature. A small, orangeish yellow flame curled up the crack of my ass causing all of us to fall to the floor in hysterics. Childish? Yes. Stupid? Yes. Waste of time? You bet. Would I do it again? In a friggin heartbeat. The splendor of the action adds to the experience had by all.

What's the point you ask? I don't have one. I just love that story.

Public humiliation...

As I wade through this wonderful thing called existence, I have become accustomed to the occasional mishap, hiccup, faux pas, and various assorted brain farts. Last Saturday night was one of my most bothersome events in a never ending string of uncontrollable situations resulting in huge amounts of embarrassment perpetrated on my person. AND AWAY WE GO!!!

My fellow homies and I (see Stone Down link to the right) were booked into a wonderful establishment in Arlington Texas called The Phoenix. Having played this particular hole on two previous occasions, we thought we had a pretty good handle on what to expect. WRONG!! This was one of those evenings where nothing short of divine intervention was going to turn the crapfest on stage around. As most of you know (who am I kidding, there might be one person reading this) I play an electrified bass guitar in the little group known as Stone Down. On this particular evening, my gear, which has never let me down in the past, decided to take the night off. Halfway through our opening tune, my bass starts to cut in and out. No problem, I'll just give the input on my guitar a little tap. No dice. After two more songs spent pounding on my guitar, one of my fellow brothers-in-arms from another band went backstage and produced his bass for me to borrow. Problem solved. Not. Still having the same intermittent response. Well, it MUST be my wireless rig. I know, I'll switch to a cord. I guess I should have specified that I wanted a cord that actually worked properly. My mistake. How stupid of me. Switch out the cords, junior. Well I finally discovered a bass, cord, spot on stage combination that seemed to be working, only now we've only got two songs left and I'm terrified to move since apparently I'm perfectly aligned with Jupiter while Neptune is in it's fall equinox at the same time that light that left star LX127-H 3286 years ago is reaching the infared scope on the Hubble. And this is just a description of the problems that I had.

Let's play a game called "Retardedly Obvious Answers to Amazingly Simple Questions". Here we go.

Question: You are a sound man working for a club. What is your primary function?
Answer: Run sound.

Question: Do you need to physically be in the room where the sound is at to properly engineer said sound?
Answer: Yes.

Can you tell where I'm going with this? The sound man at the club decided that he could run sound telepathically so he simply vacated the room. WHAT THE HELL?!!! If you're cooking a meal do you leave the kitchen? No, because if you do, something is gonna burn. In this case, it was OUR SHOW!!! After asking an apparently invisible sound man for monitor adjustments twice, we finally decided that we just weren't going to get anything we needed. Our beloved manager proceeded to then hunt down the magical powered sound man so he could end his life but, alas, the show's promoter found him first and prevented bloodshed. After switching out Bam's microphone, the show proceeded to do a complete 180, only going the other way in this instance was even worse than the direction we were headed to begin with.

Thankfully, the suckfest was almost complete. We're ending our second-to-last song which ends on a huge progression that is completely overdriven and jamming. KMO accidentally stepped on his footswitch and changed over to his super happy fun clean sound. That made for quite a raucous ending to what is normally one of our most well received songs. At this point we're all so far out of the zone that nothing was going to pull us back. We cut our last song short and then loaded out as quickly as humanly possible.

I must say that I haven't been that embarrassed in quite a long time. But hey, good news is that we've got plenty more shows on the horizon and any one of them has the potential to top this one on the turd-o-meter!!

Well, well, well...

It's been a while. Exactly how long is a while? About 6 or 7 months I'd say. I deleted my previous blog as it had spiraled downward into a sea of self loathing and bad puns, but now I'm back. Much has happened in the meantime. Let's review.

I am, apparently, still alive.
I am still fascinated with my bowel evacuations.
I have purchased two vehicles. One new, one new to me.
I still have two dogs that I despise.
My son has started the second grade.
I'm still clinging to my youth. www.stonedownband.com
I still can't stand my job but I am still glad I have one.
Democrats took over the House and Senate.
I've lost 20 pounds.
I've had sex 27 times. (That's a rough estimate and probably pretty liberal.)
I took the first step in repairing my relationship with The Mom.
I have not cut my hair.

Details will follow. It's good to be back.