Sunday October 30, 2005

Garden of the Gods.

We took a trip to Shawnee national Forest today and visited the cliffs called "The Garden of the Gods." It was The Brat's first time there and she really enjoyed climbing all over the cliffs and bluffs. It kinda' made Dad (i.e. me) sweat a little when she would go jumping around though.

The Brat flashing a smile.	The Camel. One of the most famous rock formations.
The Brat after climbing down some rocks.	The brat and her Grandpa Owen, my father in-law.
Cold chillin' on the cliffs.	Another view of the Camel formation.

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Thursday October 27, 2005 My So Called Life - Remixed? This morning was filled with surprises as Her Majesty and I made the journey to my daughter's educational institution for what is known as "Parent/Teacher conferences." Let me prelude this by saying that my mother is a highly regarded teacher, so I grew up around the folk. I realize that they are normal people, not vast warehouses of stored information. They have flaws and memory lapses just like us non-teaching folk, so I don't expect them to be the epitome of all knowledge (such as the Swami Monkey is). Let it also be know that I, myself teach a graphic design course for the local college. So believe me when I tell you that I don't expect all teachers to be perfect. I DO however, expect The Brat's teachers to be perfect. (Ohhhhhhh.......settle down, I am just kidding.) There weren't any surprises in our meetings with her teachers, except that two of them looked incredibly young. Perhaps I am just an old codger now, but I don't ever remember having a teacher that was too young to be my parent. At one point, I was momentarily taken back, when I saw how young they appeared. One in particular didn't even look old enough to drive, let alone twist my daughters malleable mind with the NEA's liberal agenda. I was like "Wow! My daughter never mentioned that Claire Danes taught her English this year." Again, I am not saying that the teachers are to young, quite the contrary. Perhaps I am getting to old. Yep, an old conservative man......that's what I am.

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Wednesday October 26, 2005

Just for the record.....

Just to show you how important my family's account is to one of our many credit card companies, they sent us a bonus "cash back" rebate check. Her Majesty was so incredibly amused that she set it on the counter for me to see once I arrived home for work. Truthfully, it amazed me to even find that we had a card which granted us a cash back bonus. I don't ever think that we had received a check before, so naturally I was as excited as a dog in a buttsniffing contest. Until I read it that is.......

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Saturday October 22, 2005

The Monster Mash

Yesterday was The Brat's annual Halloween party and Her Majesty and I are worn out. You see, we make a big ordeal of the party and this year we decided that our kid could invite thirty or so of her friends and have a Halloween dance. Since our house wouldn't hold that many children, and not to mention the incident where we had kids going through our things last year, we decided to hold the event in my cousin's Karate Studio. It's a HUGE building (about 50 x 50) and took two full days to decorate. I even took Friday off of work to get a jump start on the decoration! It was tough making the old building with white walls into a spooky old place, but we finished up merely hours before the party began.

Somehow a spontaneous game of Red Rover broke out midway into the dance.	The Brat and three other party goes taking a break to smile for the camera.
The girls rocked the house while the boys went outside to be boys.

Friday October 21, 2005

What I need........

Okay, so sometimes I tend to follow the bandwagon. Case in point: today's post. I finally got around to doing the whole "What I need" trick that has been floating around on the net for quite some time. What you do is google your name such as "Josh needs", or "Dan needs", etc. and see what the first 25 listings say. Apparently it is an old trick, but it was so friggin' funny that I had to post it. And here goes, according to google.......

Derek needs a dated list of TV Comedy shows
Derek needs our mojo
Derek needs a woman
Derek needs to save this book
Derek needs YOUR help
Derek needs heartworm treatment
Derek needs to earn the trust and respect of this group
Derek needs to access the internet
Derek needs a vacation!
Derek needs to consider testing environments
Derek wants and needs an iLife
Derek needs to toughen up
Derek needs to become more familiar with the source code
Derek needs to get back to his blues roots
Derek needs no introduction for all of you
Derek needs to tell people who she is!
Derek needs Casey to take over the business
Derek needs to be broken down even further
Derek needs to learn how to restrain himself
Derek needs to raise enough money
Derek needs to get out of here for a while
Derek needs to build on the skills he has developed
Derek needs a bubble wand too
Derek needs to be more conservative now that he's married
Derek needs to compete or match Warren's efforts

Amen.

Tuesday October 18, 2005

The legend continues........

Sunday October 16, 2005

Letters, we get letters........

Just so you know that I don't post only the favorable emails that I receive, I thought that I'd post one that wasn't favorable. Isn't it kind of ironic that his last name is harass 'em?

While your campaign may be amusing to some I'm certain those who climb telephone and hydro poles in your area do not appreciate the messages you attached to poles. When climbing the spurs used can easily slip on staples/nails causing the climber to fall. This can also tear clothing or cause injury. Others I work with have experienced this firsthand. For this reason, the posting of such material is prohibited in many areas.

Dave Harasym - California (email withheld because I am a swell guy)

Sorry Dave. Let me assure you that I shall not put our city officials at risk like that again. I had no idea that staples presented a such a danger when placed five feet off of the ground. I was under the assumption that clinging thirty feet off of the ground by only steel spikes and a belt as you work with electrical lines was dangerous. My bad.

Friday October 14, 2005

My pages got hit more than Tina Turner after happy hour!

In case some of you hadn't heard, somehow one of my Halloween project pages was posted on several link site yesterday. This tutorial "How to make a Head-in-a-Jar" has been on the net for a year now, yet somehow it seemed to explode overnight. I typically get between one and two thousand hits a day on this pathetic little site, so you can imagine my amazement when I checked my Stat-counter this morning to see that I had over a thousand hits before 8 am. I was ecstatic! "Cool!" I thought, "Surely I will break my record of 3500 hits!"

Little did I know then just how much traffic I would get. By the time that I got home, I had over 200 emails in my inbox wanting more information about making the Head-in-a-Jar. So I made up a HUGE mailing list and answered them all in one big honkin email that took hours to write.

The graphic below shows my daily stats and how they compare to my "usual" stats for the day. I had an ungodly sixty-thousand hits on my site yesterday. INCONCEIVABLE!!

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Wednesday October 12, 2005

Ode to a friend.

My good friend Aaron no longer works with me at my place of employment. He started as a graphic designer, and then moved on to photography, and has yet again moved on for greener pastures. For the next week, as a tribute to my good buddy, I will post all weblog entries late. We miss him so much that I even composed a Haiku for him. It is called, Fallen Homie.

Derek:

Why Fallen Homie
did you leave us on Tuesday?
We'll miss you beeotch.

Superfan John Schaljo, also a friend of the fallen one, composed his own haiku. His poem even refers to another alumni of photography as well.

John:

Aaron Friggin Zane
Now, you and Lisa Tebbe
Can say you were canned.

Superfan John Schaljo, forwarded this haiku along with one from Aaron Zane.

John:

The haiku below
Came to me from a dear friend
Who ain't with us now

Aaron

HA HA! Too funny!
I like that you write Haiku
in my memory.

Sioux:

That maketh me sad,
thank you for sharing with us,
oh great one with chips.

Derek:

Jobless he now is.
And sad am I that he’s gone.
Bastard owes me cash.

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Tuesday October 11, 2005

And this weeks "What the F@#k Award" goes to........

Okay, just when you thought Anjelina Jolie was the epitome of Hollywood freakishness, someone comes out and proves you wrong. Last Tuesday, Nicholas cage and his wife had a baby boy and named him Kal-el, after the Kryptonian birth name of Superman. Yes, Kal-el, complete with the hyphen. Do they have any idea the teasing that the child is going to go through? I mean, even when he is grown to adulthood, people will be going "hey, there's Kal-el. I wonder if he flew here." or something like that. And do they not realize that everyone who plays Kal-el ends up dying horrible deaths? George Reeves committed suicide, Chris Reeves, well you know about him. What about Dean Caine and this new kid - whats his name, on Smallville? Well, Dean Cain is now hosting Ripley's Believe It Or Not, so he might as well be dead, cause he can't get a serious acting job. And the Smallville guy will undoubtedly meet a horrible end too. Its the curse of the Supermen.

The pic above shows Cage and his wife Alice preparing to launch their son toward a distant planet in his custom built rocket. Good luck Kal-el!!!

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Monday October 10, 2005

An anonymous letter from Poe

A concerned citizen sent this in regards to the Personal P.R. campaign listed in yesterdays post:

You may have the other fooled but not me. Do you actually expect me to believe that this Mr. Schaljo is A-OK? Am I just supposed to take your word for it? I don’t think so! I have no idea who this person is, for all I know he could be a truly evil man (I still don’t know who stole my bike in the third grade). They say the Anti-Christ will come to earth in the final days. Now I’m not saying this guy is the Anti-Christ, but you seem awfully eager to make everyone like him. Do you perhaps have an agenda to which we are not privy? For now I'll reserve my judgment of Mr. Schaljo (if that is his real name), but rest assured, I'll be watching.

Yours truly,

A citizen for the betterment of stuff that needs to be better.

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Saturday October 7, 2005

Updating like a madman

I am trying really hard this weekend to get some updated material for the site. Unfortunately, both September and October are very hectic months in our household, full of birthdays, parties and trade shows.

So even though it was a month ago, I finally wrote about a little lunch-hour activity that Aaron, Sioux and I did for one of our unsuspecting friends. Be sure to check it out by clicking here.

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Friday October 6, 2005

Some typoes typos are worse than others......

An email conversation with Lisa, one of my photographer friends:

Me: Hey, have you ever shot piss under a black light?

Lisa: What?

Me: pics, not piss.

Lisa: Oh

Me: LOL. That typo was hilarious!!!!!!

Lisa: No doubt - I was like oh shit he's surfing porn!!!!

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Thursday October 6, 2005

Do The Zombie Stomp!

Halloween is drawing near and our annual Fright Fest is only two weeks away. Now is the time where I start getting ancy about finishing all of the homemade props and decorations. Today I finished designing the invitations so that The Brat can hand them out tomorrow. This year is going to be crazy since she is going to invite 30 people, where we previously only allowed 12. The new invitation design is shown below.

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Wednesday October 5, 2005

Find it on ebay.

Just for fun, I Googled some strange stuff to see if it was available at Amazon.com or ebay. Low and behold, look at the results!!!! If you get any wierd things listed on ebay, take a snapshot of it and send it in. If I think that it is funny, I may post it.

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Wednesday October 5, 2005

Never was a story of more woe.

I thought that I would pass this info along. This morning I was greeted with an email from my friend Kim regarding the two dead deer described in the September 23 post. The email was as follows:

Went to my Dad's house last week...
was sittin there visiting with him and he says,
"did ya see my arm?"
Shows me his right forearm,
slightly swollen, narrow 6 inch gash running down it.
I said "hmph! whatd'ya do to it?"
Then he tells me he got hit by a deer!

Seems that he and his work crew driving Rte 45 going to Norris City the other morning.
Just tooling right along with all the windows down and their arms on the window sills.
When TWO deer run out in front of them.
Jim (the driver) hits and kills both of the deer
(one of which gouged Dad's arm with his hoof.)
They then get out of the car and pull Romeo et al off the road into the grass!

I bout blew a fuse when he told me that.
He almost didn't believe me when I told him that
I'd seen a picture of those very deer on the internet that morning!

Too hilarious!
Just had to share.

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Monday October 3, 2005

Modern Mythology

Anyone who has a doubt to the depths that popular culture influences America got an eye opener this week with the discovery of what scientists say is a new, 10th planet. In July of this year, Michael Brown and his crew of scientists from the California Institute of Technology discovered a new planet, larger than Pluto within our solar system.

They named this rocky, Icy planet Xena, after the warrior princess of television fame. Whats even stranger, is the announcement of CIT’s discovery of a companion moon orbiting the planet, which they appropriately named Gabrielle. (After the annoying little blonde sidekick of Xena from the television series.)

It seems that the popular culture of TV has invaded our society and even impacts the scientific community.

Monday October 3, 2005

Update!!!!!

After pondering over this post, I have changed my opinion on this subject. The heavenly bodies of old were named after the Roman mythologic legends of the past.

Mercury - The divine messenger
Venus – Goddess of Beauty
Uranus – God of Proctology (okay, so I made that one up....)
Pluto - God of the Dead
Jupiter - King of the Gods
Neptune – God of the seas
Saturn - God of Agriculture
Mars - God of War

So why not name any additional celestial bodies after some of the mythos of contemporary society? After all, the story of Xena was set in the age of the gods (albeit the Greek counterparts of the Roman deities). So, in retrospect, I whole-heartedly agree with CIT's naming convention! Pretty cool really, I bet Lucy Lawless is getting a thrill out of it. Lesbians of the world, this is your day to celebrate!!!!

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