Everyone Else Does It...

Blog once or twice a week that is, if that! I may start doing that myself, who knows, I really just blog when I feel like it, not sure why I do right now, but I do, so who knows? Maybe I should apply for a government grant to do a study on what makes people want to write stuff that the entire world can see? Hmmm... I almost think I could probably get it, I'll put that on the back burner...

How about the bus that drove straight off the freaking ramp near where I work and the six people that died?? What a tragedy! Sorry to say, I was kind of irritated this morning that it took me over two hours to get to work because they shut down I-75, but the moment that thought entered my mind, I was like, "Hello Matthew, you are alive, aren't you?". Sad really, I've seen the video, and I know the section of Interstate well, and it looks like the driver was not paying attention, and literally thought he was tooling down the highway, and literally just drove the bus off the ramp and crashed to I-75 below... I guess no one will ever know what happened really though, because he died in the accident.

Changing the subject, when it's your time to go, that's it! Could happen in any number of ways: bus driver doesn't see that the lane ends; filing papers on the 88th floor of the World Trade Center and a Boeing hits you from behind; tornado tears through your school without warning; on and on I could go. The only thing I hope everyone did was, make sure they are ready to go! I'm not sure what anyone else thinks about when they hear about people dying, the thing that immediately enters my mind is, I wonder if they were saved? My thoughts then go to people who don't believe there is a heaven or hell. I think to myself, well if they didn't believe in heaven or hell, they must have gone to hell, what is the thought process there? I recall the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man obviously had thought processes in hell, he begged for just a drop of water. That could probably be a post in and of itself, I'll save that for Daniel, he does good with posts like that! (Excellent post today Daniel, I'll comment after I have thought about it for a second... :)

Anyway, just a few thoughts, I'm busy trying to get two rooms ready for carpet installation... :)

The Average Consumer...

Is an idiot! I've been planning the entertainment center I'm about to build, in my mind of course... :) So I thought it would be rather cool to have a plasma TV in the middle on one of those TV lifts, so it could be raised or lowered... I started looking at lifts, and all the places I looked at only sold to wholesalers. I finally e-mailed one and asked if anyone in Atlanta sold them. Of course he sent me back a few links of companies that build the furniture with the lifts in them. I e-mailed him back and told him, "I am building my own furniture, does anyone sell the lifts?" He obviously didn't understand, but then I'm sure he's a moron as well. Of course once I e-mailed him back, he then responded with a, "Hey Matthew, Sorry for the confusion, here is our price list, and here are the instructions to get setup as a wholesaler"... I guess he thought that I was going to be building more than one of them. I'm not! The lifts are two thousand dollars and up! Are you kidding me? I could build one myself for FAR less than that! It lifts a TV up and down?!? $2K? Whatever... The technology required to lift a TV up and down is so simple, I would think that the stupidest of people could grasp the concept... So I'm still looking, oh, I'm NOT your average consumer, therefore the title... :)

Yeah, I Know...

We are having new carpet put in, and I didn't realize how MUCH prep work I still had left to do... I 'forgot' that I still had to replace the trim on seven doors... So I took the day off, ripped off trim, then decided the walls could use another coat of paint, and one thing led to another... Wow! Luckily I was able to get Tanner to pull the nails out of all the trim I tore down so I can burn it, I was going to save it, but I'm just over it... I'm about halfway ready for the carpet, luckily they won't be coming for a few more days... Anyway, that's what I've been doing... I'll post pics though once it is done... :)

So then I was thinking we needed an entertainment center for the living room... Carolyn and I have seen some, but they are WAY too expensive... So I thought, why not just build one, it's not like it's a complicated piece of furniture to build... I came across this copy of 'The Family Handyman', and I'm going to build that for our entertainment center...



So what I'm going to do is build two of those bookcases, and then build a center piece between them for the TV, surround sound system, DVD player, VCR, etc... Doesn't look that complicated, mine actually might look better as I ALWAYS improvise when copying others plans... :) I'll be sure and post pics once it's done... :)

Tree...

So I'm about to have some grading work done in the front, and the tree right in front of our house had to go. I didn't want to cut it down myself because it leaned heavily towards the house. So my neighbor said he would cut it down, he used to do it for a living. I was like, okay, why not, it will save me about a thousand dollars off the work I'm having done in the front.

So today we decided to drop it, he hooked up all the ropes and the come along and started cutting. Then he decided we needed another come along, so I went to Home Depot to get one. Got back, hooked it up, then the wind started gusting. So now it's like, hmm, there is about a 50 - 50 chance the tree could now fall towards the house. So he told me to go pull my vehicles in the garage, that's when I was thinking, hmm, maybe that thousand I 'thought' I would be saving is going to be like peanuts compared to the costs of repairing the house, because I'm not sure, but if you cut a tree down in your yard and it falls on your house, I doubt the insurance would pay for it...

So anyway, finally about two hours later we got the tree down, and it fell right where we wanted it to. The kids are ecstatic and are now climbing on it... Luckily, my house is still in one piece! :)

Tree, right where we wanted it, whew!

I'm sure the kids will be climbing on that thing until I cut it up next weekend... :)

Neighbors...

We all have them, some like their neighbors, some don't... I happen to like my new neighbors, they have a girl Taylor's age and they play together ALL the time. It was nice when they moved in, because previously Taylor had been the only girl playing with 5 or 6 guys who are over ALL the time playing with Chance and Tanner.

Anyway, earlier in the week, my neighbor called me and asked if I wanted to come over Friday night for pizza and a movie. I said, "Okay." Turned out that I had already seen all of the movies he had rented: "The Departed", "Babel" and "Flags of Our Fathers". I don't normally watch movies that much, but I've been on vacation all week and had watched them all. "The Departed" was a good movie though, so we decided to watch that one. I'm not one to watch movies 'again', unless it's "Swordfish", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" or "The Patriot", maybe a few more...

I went and got the pizza from Jimmy's Pizza (Nate's parents own the joint, Chance and Tanner's friend) and went over to watch the movie. Of course we started talking, and saw half the movie. It ended and in went Babel, we still continued talking.

I'm not sure where the conversation turned to Creation, but it did. My neighbor was flabbergasted that I believed in it. I was flabbergasted that he didn't. The conversation took an interesting turn from there. He told me, "You're an intelligent person, you don't really believe that crap do you?", to which I replied, "Of course I do!". It went on and on for several hours...

At the end of the night, I went home with him wondering if I was putting him on or not, he kept saying throughout the night, "You're putting me on right, you don't really believe that crap do you?". To which I would always reply, "No, I'm not 'putting you on', of course I believe in Creation!".

Afterwards, I was thinking to myself: "I wonder what it would be like living your life to not believe in God and Creation?". To believe that we just exist and then die? How miserable of an existence would that be? I would not want to live like that. I'll have to work on him!

I do have a HUGE tree in my front yard that he is going to help me cut down tomorrow, so maybe I'll bring it up again. I was going to pay someone to come cut it down, only because it's huge and is leaning towards the house, otherwise I'd cut it down myself. He used to cut trees down for a living, he said he'd do it, so I'll let him... :)

That's a whole new post in and of itself, maybe after the tree is down I'll post it... The reason the tree has to come down that is... :)

Okay, Gross!!

So Chance and Tanner saved their allowance and ordered some air pellet rifles... Not long after they had arrived, I went outside, and their friend's brother Zach had just killed a squirrel. I asked Zach what they were going to do with it, and he said he was going to go skin it and cook it. I was mildly surprised, okay, not mildly, I was like, "You actually eat them??" He said, "Oh yeah, we love eating squirrels." Gross!

Home Alone...

No, not the movie... I'm home alone, for the first time in years... The boys went to the movies with Nate and are spending the night over at his house, Taylor is spending the night at her friend Sarah's house and Carolyn is in Knoxville... Hmm. I wonder what I'll do? Probably nothing, we'll see though... :)

Cameras...

So I had to take Taylor back to that Pump It Up place today for a birthday party for one of her friends, I dropped her off and didn't stay this time... Of course then we had two hours to kill, so the guys are like, "Let's go to Sparkles!"... Ugghh! The type of people who hang out at the roller skating rink are a class of people in and of themselves... So needless to say, I DIDN'T skate, but sat there for an hour or so and watched Chance, Tanner and Nate skate... I did however take a bunch of pictures while standing there... I had that same crappy camera with me that I had taken ice skating, out of all of the pictures I took only ONE was even viewable! I can't believe I even bought the thing to be honest, I even used multiple different settings, thinking, maybe it's the whole 'automatic' thing... Nope! This is the only picture that turned out, and it's not very good:



So if anyone ever tries to sell you a Kodak EasyShare CX7430, don't buy it!

Ice Skating... Again...

The kids have been wanting to go back to the ice skating rink, so we decided to go today while Carolyn was at school... I quickly checked their web site and saw that public skating was from 10:00 - 12:00, we loaded up in the van and off we went. Of course we had to stop at Wal-mart to get gloves for everyone (not sure what happened to the gloves I JUST bought them the last time we went)...

So we got to the rink right at 10:00 and go in, she was like, "Public skating doesn't start until 12:30.". To which I replied, "The web site says 10:00." She just kind of looked at me, and I realized she probably didn't even know what a web site was, so we decided to go eat...

The skating participants... One of my favorite places to eat btw as well, but we don't go that often because Carolyn doesn't much care for it...

Well, that killed an hour, we had another hour and a half to kill... We went to Brandsmart, that killed another 30 minutes, then just drove around for 30 minutes before heading back to the rink... Outside the rink they had huge piles of fake snow, so the kids played in that for a while throwing snowballs at each other, then we headed in to skate...

Taylor had the hang of it this time, the last time we went, she wouldn't let go of my hand, this time she didn't want to hold it at all. I think that likely had more to do with the fact that her friend Sarah was there skating by herself, so of course Taylor was going to as well... :)

I think Tanner had just fallen, but a few minutes later he was skating around again with Chance and Nate...

Tanner was taking a few pictures...

I didn't really get that many good ones of Chance, of course I took that piece of crap camera with me, I wasn't going to take the chance of crashing on the ice and destroying my good one, so not sure why I actually EXPECTED any good pics... I was probably secretly hoping to fall and destroy the one I did take, which is evident I guess because I let Tanner use it out on the ice... :)

Babel...

Anyone seen the movie? I watched it tonight. Yeah, I'm on vacation, but am not doing anything, literally... Anyway, I watched the movie, was kind of slow starting, but it wasn't bad. I do know one thing, there aren't many people I would leave my kids with, and I certainly wouldn't travel to another country without my kids. There are like four people I would leave my kids with, Titus, Petra, Timberly and Joshua... I guess if I had to branch out, there might be a few others, but I like to know where my kids are. The movie though I thought was a semi political statement, and probably a just one. Most Americans think the world revolves around them, and it doesn't. The sad thing is, most Americans are so stupid they couldn't identify the location of any other country in the world if you gave them a map. It will be our downfall I might add...

Polling...

How accurate are polls? Have you ever been polled? If so, did you answer 100% the way you really feel? I've never been polled myself, I guess possibly a few have called, but after the "Hello, I'm with XYZ Marketing company" I say "I'm not interested, thanks!" and then hang up never listening to whatever the response might be. I would think that you could do a poll and make it say whatever you wanted it to. Yet they claim that they are 'scientific' and the margin of error is +/-3 or 4 or whatever...

Says who? If you ask 1,000 people a question, how can you be within a margin of error of +/-3? Hello! There are what, 300 million people living in this country? There are companies though that make fortunes by 'providing' the polling data, Zogby comes to mind, Rasmussen as well. What makes their polling data so 'scientific'? I say just about any poll you read is skewed to the leanings of whoever ordered the poll. Maybe I'm misinformed, I doubt it though, maybe someone can enlighten me...

Mitt Romney...

Yeah, I know, I said I thought this guy was it... I'm now taking that back... His Mormon religion will cost him the Presidency... If he wasn't a Mormon, I'd say he would have it...

Some nut job, Joseph Smith came up with the whole Mormon religion, I'm not real sure of all the details, but here are some... So apparently Joe had some sort of theophany in his early teens, or the 'first vision' as the Mormons call it. From what I understand about the whole Mormon religion, he saw a light that appeared in his room, then a 'person' appeared and told him that God had a work for him to do, the work involved some gold plates that contained the account of the 'former inhabitents' of this continent (maybe the whole world, the story I read said continent), and also something about silver bows that would act as 'seers' to help him translate the story, or something (I've not studied it that much, I don't care that much about lunatics)... It just so happened that the 'plates' were only several miles from his house... Anyway, he retrieved the plates, then proceeded home, was attacked several times, yet managed to thwart his assailents (while carrying over 200 lbs of gold tablets according to his dimensions and the weight of gold)... So imagine for a moment, finding golden tablets weighing over 200 lbs, then leaping merrily the three miles home, fending off three various assailents, quite a feat...Whatever... Then there were more visions, the angel took the plates, so no one could verify them, and this guy had his own religion... A lot of people drank the kool-aid... I'm tired of reading about the story, kind of reminds me of Scientology, where Hubbard was the 'only' one who had the privilege of 'seeing' what happened with Xenu and the resulting thetans... Wow... People that say Romneys religion won't be an issue just need to wait... Wait until the videos of Joe secretly getting the 'golden plates' from the 'angel' and then dancing merrily through the woods while fighting off assailents carrying 200 lbs worth of gold, then the angels taking the 'evidence' and Joe passing out the kool-aid start showing up on YouTube... Oh, and the video will end with Mitt drinking the kool-aid... Yeah Mitt, you have an issue...

Nation Building in Iraq...

Why it isn't working...


Likely a large part of the reason I would say...

Birthday Parties...

Ever take your kids to them? I personally think they should be outlawed... :) The kids seem to enjoy them though... So first we had to go buy a present, then back home. Chance didn't want to go, so he stayed home with Carolyn. Off we went to take Tanner to his friends party. Of course the intention was to drop him off then Taylor and I would go kill two hours, then come back and pick him up. It didn't quite work out like that... We go in to drop Tanner off, I was like, "So when should I come back and get him?" They were like, "Oh no, you guys stay, Taylor can play too!"... Uggh! Taylor wanted to stay though...

The place was called Pump It Up, and they had a bunch of these blow up slides, etc...

Taylor coming down one of the slides...

Tanner playing air hockey...

Getting ready for the cake...

Just when I thought it was finally time to go, they were like, if the kids want to, they can go back in for a while... Luckily we finally got out of there shortly after... The sad thing is, Taylor's friend has invited her to another birthday party at the same place on Thursday... :(

Richard Dawkins CNN

We should live this life to the fullest, because there is no other... While I agree that we should live this life to the fullest, it is but a vapor... Stunning!

How True...

Sadly, that's about how it works...

Been There...

I came across this today, and thought it was great! It's AMAZING the people who look down on others, not sure if it's true or not, but I suspect it is...

Post here...

It irritates me greatly when I see people at work who look down on others for ANY reason, as if they think they are better... Yeah, I know, people might say, but you talk about how stupid people are all the time... Sure, but it's merely an observation! I'm nice to everyone, and I'm nicer to the people who are taking out the trash, serving the meals, and cleaning the place than I am to the pompous asses who occupy the offices who somehow think that they are better than everyone else... They are not!

Tanner...

Today being Valentine's Day, I had to go to all three of the kids classes at school... Which is a haul, each of their classes is near the end of three separate LONG hallways... So I dropped the bags of candy off at Chance's class (We're the room parents if you don't remember :), then off to Taylors class to drop her off, then Tanner's class was having an 'event' for the parents, so I ended up there last...

Then on my way to work I got pulled over, the cop asked me what I thought the speed limit was, I was like, "55?", to which he replied, "Well, that explains why you were going 60 mph, the speed limit is 45!" So I got a ticket, so that'll be a waste of $100... All in all though, it was a pretty good day...

Happy Valentine's Day Carolyn!

Surprises...

Carolyn and I don't buy into the whole commercialization thing that goes on... I didn't even think that was a word actually and had to look it up... Tanner however does buy into it... He came to me a few minutes ago and wanted to know what I had gotten Mommy... I told him I didn't get her anything... He was shocked... He told me, "We have to get her something"... Off to the store Tanner and I went... When we got back from the store, no one had realized we had left.. Stealth mode... :) We got some flowers and other stuff for Carolyn... I still think it is the most commercialized holiday going... Idiot born every minute...

One Of Those Days...

So I got up this morning like I normally do, about 6:00 AM, made coffee and turned on Imus... Woke up the kids on my way to the shower about 7:00 only to discover that Taylor was 'sick'... Carolyn had school to go to, so I logged onto work and IM'd my boss to tell him I had to stay home today to tend to a sick kid, but that I could work from home if he wanted me to, he said screw it, take a personal day... I turned on my out-of-office and logged off and haven't really done much since... Ever have one of those days? I don't think I really did anything today... Surfed the Internet, went to the store a few times, but other than that, I have done absolutely nothing... Now I'm about to order pizza (well, pizza for me, everyone else wants wings and garlic knots) and watch The Departed, so I doubt I'll get anything done... So that's it, I did absolutely nothing today, and I must say, I should do it more often... :)

I might add that as soon as I got back from taking Chance and Tanner to school, Taylor had miraculously recovered... So I guess she was in need of 'one of those days' as well... :)