Go West Young Man

I'm back after my little 2100 mile jaunt across the west.

Several of y'all have asked so here is a run down of my road trip.

Jennifer, the boys and my mom struck off last Sunday evening. As part of my upcoming conversion to Catholicism I attended a ceremony with all of my fellow converts within the diocese Sunday afternoon. The car was loaded so as soon as I shook hands with the bishop we were off.

We got on I-40 here in Amarillo and headed west at precisely 5:00 PM central time.

I took this shot not long after we crossed into New Mexico.

We drove to Gallup, New Mexico that first night arriving at 9:30 PM mountain time.

Day 2 we made several stops in Arizona ...


... to see the painted desert ...

 ... and The Petrified Forest.

The areas littered with petrified wood were cool ...

... but my favorite section of the national park was an area called Magazine Rock.

Here is some info (stolen from the park's website, but condensed for my purposes) about the petroglyphs carved into this rock.

Thousands of prehistoric petroglyph sites are scattered throughout the southwestern U.S. . These images are composed of petroglyphs (rock carvings) and pictographs (rock paintings). For the vast majority of sites, the meanings and functions of these drawings have been lost. During the last 16 years, Bob Preston working largely in Petrified Forest National Park, has shown convincingly that many of these sites were used as "solar calendars" to track the yearly movement of the sun across the sky through the interplay of sunlight on the petroglyph. As long as time has not altered the alignments or surfaces of the rocks involved, these solar calendars function the same today as they did when they were created almost a thousand years ago.

Most petroglyph sites in the park date from about 1000-1350 A.D.

  
I find it fascinating to think my eyes are seeing something created that long ago.

From the Petrified Forest it was on to Vegas.

This was the boys first ever stop in Vegas so we took in the sights ...

Ate hearty ...

and had a dam good time. 

 

I'll post pics of the Grand Canyon and our return trip another day.

Don't Wake Up The Crabs

The birds are chirping. The tulips are blooming. The wife and kids are out of school. That's right folks it is spring break time here in the Texas Panhandle so while I am away from the computer spending time with my beloved and the fruit of our loins please enjoy these posts you may have missed the first time around. 

Monday, July 20, 2009

Cracking Up

The world is full of things I simply don't get. I've blogged about a few before such as those fluffy toilet seat covers, eyebrow pencils, and coffee enemas. I like to categorize these items under the Riddle Me This grouping.

Today I'm taking a random approach and adding two items to the list. Two totally unrelated items I might add.


1. Wake Up -- A common enough phrase. Heard at home, work and even the radio.

"Billy wake up, it's time to school."
"Hey Idiot, wake up and smell the roses."
"Wake me up before you go-go."

But riddle me this. Why must we always wake up? Just once I want to wake down. Or wake sideways. After all we don't say time to sleep down. I suppose you can shut down you mind, though in my case my mind seems to go into hyper thought when I get I bed for the night.

A person can lay down. I get that. And they can get up. But can they really wake up? I think not.

2. SpongeBob SquarePants I do not like Sponge Bob. My boys however love the show. Who do I not like it? The reasons are many. The porous protagonists nerve-wracking voice and laugh. The fact nary an episode goes by that one or more characters is shown in their underwear. (Why didn't they call it Sponge Bob No Pants?) Then there is Mr. Krab. The cantankerous crab that owns the Krusty Krab and sells Krabby patty's.


His name is Krab. He has larger red pincher's so I think everyone will agree that SpongeBob's boss is a crustacean. A crab.

Mr. Krab has one child. A daughter. Named Pearl. Riddle me this if Mr Krab is a crab, why is his daughter a sperm whale?


Far as I know there has never been mention of Pearl's mother. Maybe Mr. Krab and her had a one night stand and the baby was dumped on the doorstep of his restaurant nine months later. Maybe they are divorced and Mr. Krab is so miserly because he pays a hefty child support. Here's me theory. Pearl's mom is dead. She was also a two-timing whore.

Why you ask. Follow me as I deliver the evidence. It doesn't take Jerry Springer or a DNA test to unearth the fact Mr. Krab's is not Pearls real father. That means Mrs. Krab's sold him a bill of goods. It's rather obvious she stepped out one night and got drunk. Maybe Mr Krab's was away at a Small business owners convention and she simply got lonely. Who knows. But it is obvious she and a whale got busy.

So from there it's easy to arrive at the fact she's dead. If, and this is a mighty big if, Mrs. Krabs survived the actual deed. I'm saying that because .. well let's face it, a sperm whale and a Krab don't exactly fit together like fish and chips. There had to be some residual damage from the actual deed, but back to that if. If Mrs. Krab's survived the deed I gotta think a crab giving birth to a whale is gonna do more damage than a fat guy at Red Lobster with a pair of these.

Still Nutty

The birds are chirping. The tulips are blooming. The wife and kids are out of school. That's right folks it is spring break time here in the Texas Panhandle so while I am away from the computer spending time with my beloved and the fruit of our loins please enjoy these posts you may have missed the first time around. 

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Nut Very Smart

Do you read FailBlog.org? If not you should. It is hilarious. Until now I've resisted the urge to copy and past things from failblog to share with y'all but this one begs to be commented upon.


Where o' where shall I start?

Maybe with his decision to skinny dip in big blue. Mario. Dude. Have you never seen all the stuff that lives in the ocean?

Crabs and lobsters with big claws just made for grabbing a hold of your junk.


Eels, jellyfish, and sting rays are lurking below the surface all too eager to zap Mr. Squid. Haven't you ever heard of the Crocodile Hunter?


Sharks, barracudas, and a myriad of other toothy fish are swimming about and everyone of them would like a worm to snack on.


Yep, Mario swimming in the ocean while freeing willie was mistake number one. Oh, but you weren't punished for it, so you hop out of the chilly water and despite being the victim of shrinkage you don't feel the need to don clothes. I'll applaud you for the self-confidence as most dudes prefer to only be seen at their best, but Mario wasn't content to simply let little Luigi go about pale and shriveled. No he decided to camp out on a slatted deckchair. In the warm sun.

Now I've had a few nasty sunburns in my day so no way am I going to dangle my bits about and risk becoming the subject for a new version of chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Not to mention the long term chance of skin cancer. A bit of melanoma on the ol' Manitoba would not be a pretty sight.

And then he dozed off. I know lots of people sleep in the nude, but doing it in the safety and confines of your own bedroom is one thing. Hanging it all out at the beach while you are unconscious is another. Ants, bees, biting flies, stray dogs, kids with a Frisbee, the list of hazards are endless. As Mario's fate proves it's simply not healthy to let things roll around unattended.

And man oh man would I have hated to be on that maintenance crew who had to come saw the chair in half. I'm pretty sure that was not in their official job description. And poor, poor Mario. No one since Bill Buckner, has done as poor a ball handling job, but I do feel a bit of sympathy for Mario. Any man with a set of his own would have to. Having you guys hanging about in the presence of a whirling saw blade is far from a situation any man wants to find himself in.

Why Boy Happy Faces Smile

The birds are chirping. The tulips are blooming. The wife and kids are out of school. That's right folks it is spring break time here in the Texas Panhandle so while I am away from the computer spending time with my beloved and the fruit of our loins please enjoy these posts you may have missed the first time around. 

Friday, February 27, 2009

Smiley Face

My wife Jennifer is a Montessori Pre-School teacher. How she has the patience to handle a classroom full of three and four-year-olds is beyond me. She often tells me funny stories about things the kids said or did and today I'm going to share one of them with y'all.

While learning to draw circles one little girl made a huge happy face that covered her entire sheet of paper. She turned to me wife and said, "Miss. Jennifer, is this a boy happy face or a girl happy face."

My wife responded with, "Do you want it to be a boy or a girl?"
The little girl emphatically said , "A girl."
"Okay then make it a girl," answered my wife.

Seconds ticked by and yet the girl did not add to her drawing.

Finally Jennifer asked," What's wrong?"
To which the little girl said, "I don't have enough room to add in her boobs."

It's A Sweater!

The birds are chirping. The tulips are blooming. The wife and kids are out of school. That's right folks it is spring break time here in the Texas Panhandle so while I am away from the computer spending time with my beloved and the fruit of our loins please enjoy these posts you may have missed the first time around. 

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Straight From My Brow

Sweat.

It's not something people inspire to do unless they happen to be exercising at the moment.

Sweat stinks. It's nasty, and even if you are at the gym working, covered in your own sheen of perspiration the last thing you want is to find some stranger's sweat pooled on a piece of equipment you wish to use. Outside of the gym sweat is rarely looked upon with favor.

Heck, we spend countless dollars on deodorant and antiperspirant just so we won't draw flies.

Sure, men can get away with sweating on occasion, yet in true double-standard fashion proper ladies are not allowed perspire.

Trust me, I think this is all going somewhere, but just for clarification here is my summary thus far ...

sweat = bad

Do we all agree on that?

Okay good. Let's move on.

So why do we name countless articles of clothing after something society frowns upon? Sweat socks, sweat pants, sweat suits, sweat shirts ... and my least favorite -- the sweater.

My wife has this sweater fetish where she has to buy all these holiday sweaters. She has Halloween ones with ghosts, goblins, and witches. Fall ones chocked full of colorful leaves, cornucopias, and such. Christmas ones with elves, twinkling lights, and dancing penguins. Heck, I won't be at all surprised when she comes home on February second wearing a sweater adorned with a smiling groundhog.

To me the whole holiday sweater phenomenon is goofy. I prefer clothes that I can wear all year, or the very least all season long. Not some tiny little window of time that coincides with a particular selection of Hallmark cards. And besides that, I consider sweater to be an asinine name of the utmost in bad marketing. Call them warmers or toasties or something to convey the snuggle not chilly way they are supposed to make you feel. But not SWEATers. Who wants something that produces an unwanted bodily function?

Do we have pants called gassers? Cosmetics called pimplers? Bran cereal called Poo-poo Puffs?

No we do not, and nobody would buy them if we did. So why do you women ooh and aah over SWEATers?

Sure back in the days when girls didn't wear thin, see-through t-shirts everyday of the week the tight sweater was a thing all us guys could appreciate, but even then the name was stupid. I am officially adding sweaters, especially cutesy holiday sweaters, to my list of things I do not approve of including (but not limited to) these below items ...


All forms of lettuce
Fluffy toilet seat covers
Sarah Jessica Parker
PETA
Precooked Bacon
Form Rejection letters on a requested full manuscript
The BeeGees
Patchouli
Vegetarian anything
Those who shun reading
William Shatner


However, I will make a concession and offer my approval of the vintage tight sweater of yesteryear because who am I to knock history. Also I will say the sweater inspired one of my favorite movie scenes of all time. Every Christmas, I at least once, mimic this great clip from the fine cinematic masterpiece, The Three Amigos.

Jimmy Recracked Corn and I Still Don't Care

The birds are chirping. The tulips are blooming. The wife and kids are out of school. That's right folks it is spring break time here in the Texas Panhandle so while I am away from the computer spending time with my beloved and the fruit of our loins please enjoy these posts you may have missed the first time around. 

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Cornarchy!

I consider myself an intelligent fella. I am quite capable of following a string of logic and coming to an understanding, provided there is actual logic behind that said string.

For instance, I get the fact that the more corn we use for the production of ethanol, the less we have for the other, more traditional uses of those little golden kernels. I grass supply and demand economics. I buy the reasoning behind cattle feed going up and there for beef prices rising. I am not baffled that the Green Giant must charge more for his frozen packs of Nibblers.



And, I even understand that the price of popcorn has exploded. But here is where things get greasier than your fingers after eating an entire bag of eight-dollar popped gold at the cinema.

Movie tickets might take hit from exploding popcorn prices

That headline comes from a USA Today story that theater owners are planning to raise ticket prices by as much as 30% because of the escalating price of popcorn. According the the story, ticket prices are subsidized by the sale of concession stand goodies and the higher popcorn is the less people buy it so the less the theater makes. There are more holes in that theory than gray hairs in Indian Jones's stubble.

If I go the counter and see that a tub O' cholesterol now cost me more than Nick Nolte spends on bail money then I'm going to change my snacking selection. I'm just as happy munching on Sugar Babies and Junior Mints as I am on digging kernels of popcorn out of my teeth for the next few hours. As a fat guy I will go on record as saying I don't care what I eat. It's dark and my focus is on the screen. Give me chocolate covered ants, or deep fried grasshoppers and I'll probably never even notice unless the movie is total crap. I say the theater owners should get inventive. Tell the National Popcorn Society to go to hell and feed us something different. Unless your name is Orville Redenbacher you can probably sit through Pirates Of The Caribbean 18 -- The Curse of Jack's Kracken Bones without a barrel of butter drenched, air-infused corn. And if you can't well then you tell the kids there will be no Christmas this year and go ahead and break out the credit card at the concession stand.

This is the equivalent of strip clubs raising their cover prices because the cost of glitter has skyrocketed. I say we all put our foot down and start sneaking in bags of microwaved Pop Secret. Women use your purse, and guys, just cram it under your shirt. Sure you'll look fat and lumpy and you might even get a few grease stains on your clothes, but sacrifices have to be made. Besides, chicks still dug Elvis right up until the end and that same description could have been used to describe him.

Dudes and Their Drives

The birds are chirping. The tulips are blooming. The wife and kids are out of school. That's right folks it is spring break time here in the Texas Panhandle so while I am away from the computer spending time with my beloved and the fruit of our loins please enjoy these posts you may have missed the first time around. 

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Zoom, zoom

Booker T. Washington said, "Character, not clothes make the man."Mark Twain claimed, "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Travis Erwin says, "Ask most men what they'd rather have - a nice suit or a sweet ride, 99% will pick the car every time."

Guys tend to think of their vehicles as an extension of themselves. Consciously or subconsciously. The choice of dream wheels depends on the man.

An outdoorsmen will demand a 4X4, maybe with a lift kit, a gun rack, a front-end winch or even a wench, depending on his state of loneliness.

Others want to go fast. They tend do fantasize of things that are sleek and curvaceous. Okay, all of us men fantasize of things that are sleek and curvaceous but I'm talking cars here. Porsche's, Ferrari's, Lamborghini's.

Others drool over pure unadulterated horsepower. Trucks that can pull mountains, and growl like a sixty-year-old, chain-smoking Waffle House waitress. The kind of truck that simply cannot pass a service station without stopping.

No man, I repeat no man. Dreams of driving a mini-van.

That does not mean sacrifices are not made. A real father will trade in his cherry-red Camaro for the sake of getting his kids to soccer practice.

But he won't like it.

Sure his buddies will tease him and toss around terms like henpecked, ball and chain, neutered, and maybe even the dreaded P.W. But he'll take the abuse and dream of the day he can get rid of the mini-bus and once again show what kind of man he really is.

Now the advice.

Most of my readers are female but some of you are guys.

Regardless of your gender, please pass this message along -- Guys DO NOT try and make a statement anyway. DO NOT say I am going to make the best of a bad situation. DO NOT over compensate - for anything. Regardless of what your shortcoming are.

I've typed all of that to tell you two stories. One new, one old.

The NEW

Yesterday, I'm sitting at a stop light. I glance over and notice a guy about my age . He's wearing a ball cap and a blue mechanic-type shirt. The kind that usually has the wearers first name sewed on. Really nothing out of the ordinary.

But then they catch my eye.

By they I mean ... Flames. Big green ones, painted down the side ...

Of his black Dodge Caravan.

Dude, it's still a minivan. 

The flames didn't suddenly make me think ... Wow! Now that is one cool minivan. 

No, I thought there is a guy who lost an argument with his wife. A guy that should've invested in a TV long ago to stay busy doing something other that creating kids. I thought there is a guy who didn't want to trade in his Harley for a vehicle capable of holding car seats. A guy desperately clinging to something he has obviously already lost.

DUDE! Face the music. You are Fonzie no more. 

Welcome to Richie Cunningham land. You may be cool again someday, but DO NOT highlight the fact that today, ain't that day.
The Old
This story happened a few years back but I consider it one of my wife's wittiest moments, and she has a great sense of humor so that is going some. Of course anybody willing to marry me had better have one heck of a funny bone.

We were on the way to a friend's house. Driving through a residential area when we came upon a giant red truck. I'm talking the bottom of the door was a good three, three and a half foot off the ground. The wheels were huge and had aggressive off-road tread. Painted on the tinted back windshield in bold red letters were these words ... NO FEAR
And standing at the bumper was a wee little fellow that belonged on the back of Secretariat, or guarding a pot o' gold beneath a rainbow. He had his arms folded across his chest. The ball cap on his head was cocked a shade to one side, and the smirk on his face said, "Napoleon had nothing on me."

I was about to open my mouth and say something about the sight when my wife held up her pinky finger and said, "Big Red Truck, small pink weenie."

So let me hear the most ridiculous cars that you have seen. Not necessarily the ones trying to be ridiculous like those who paint their van to look like The Mystery Machine, or paint a rebel flag on the roof in Duke boy fashion, but the ones that say look at me and then when you do the only reaction is a chuckle or a cringe.