Saturday night, my friend and I went out for a bite to eat and to hang out for the night.  We went to a new brew pub near his place.  The area is also not too far from where I grew up, and not too far from a few high school and post high school hang spots.  As we left the pub, we talked about it and joked about one place we used to frequent named " ( Read more... )

I've written a couple times about how I don't think George Ryan will spend a second in jail (unless it benefits him somehow) even though he was convicted of some pretty heavy stuff and his sentence will likely be for the rest of his life.  Last night's news brought that subject up again.

It was reported as "a last ditch effort" to stay out of jail ( Read more... )

My son is a fairly new reader, but he's doing pretty well so far.  He just doesn't have much interest in reading to us.  My wife recently initiated a scheme of giving my son rewards for reading books.  She created a list of little rewards he could win by reading a certain number of books (for the time being, it's 5).  Her system also includes a ( Read more... )

Ganked from OakParkGirl -

BIG FULL MOON:  This week's full Moon (Oct. 25-26) is the biggest full Moon of 2007. It's no illusion. Some full Moons are genuinely larger than others and Thursday night's will be as much as 14% wider and 30% brighter than lesser full Moons we've seen earlier this year. Check http://spaceweather.com for the reasons why.

( Read more... )

There's a new show on TV called Reaper.  The basis of the show is that some dude's parents sold his soul to the devil before he was born and now he has to work for the devil as a bounty hunter to bring escapees from hell back to hell.  The show is decent and funny, but I like the overall question it addresses.  That's this ( Read more... )

The reliability of power in our neighborhood has been terrible.  In the past 16 months, we have had more than 13 outages that have lasted more than one minute. That doesn't take into account the number of "blips" that last less than a minute.  I'd bet we're in the 20's of those.

The most recent notable outage was during a large storm and lasted 15 ( Read more... )

I had an eye exam on Monday.  It was the whole work up - dialation, pressure check, etc etc.  After it was all done, I went to pay the bill and the lady told me the doc instructed her to give me a 20% discount and the final total was $28.  We have piss poor eye insurance, so I thought that it was a great deal.  She swiped my card and I signed the ( Read more... )

Right now, the most viewed, most popular, and most emailed piece of news on the Yahoo! News site is "Seniors balk at ban on free doughnuts "

I've got nothing against free doughnuts, but I would think this article would warrant A LOT more attention:

NY Times says discount for Petraeus ad was mistake  
New York Times said on Sunday it made a mistake in ( Read more... )

No one was willing to put the effort into securing an anonymous way to run a "dead pool" at our office, so we didn't.  Last Friday, we were told of yet another departure.  This time it was someone a little closer to me and I'm really bummed she is leaving.  If we had run a dead pool, she would not have been on anyone's list.  I'm sure of that ( Read more... )

Over Labor day weekend, my sister hosted an entire houseful of guests.  Here's who stayed at her house:  Me, my wife and 2 kids, my mom, my brother (and his dog), my cousin, her hubby and their 2 kids.  That's in addition to my sister, bro-in-law, and their 3 kids and their dog.  So there were 10 house guests on top of their normal 5.  Her house ( Read more... )