Since It's Daily

This post serves no other purpose than to maintain my daily updates. Nothing interesting happened today. Slept in, went shopping for food and played video games. Whooptie-shit. Tomorrow, I have to be at work at 6:30am to meet the regional manager of my company so we can drive down to Galveston island and deliver and sort a bunch of gear to a new hotel we're apparently moving into. So, another long day for me. I had better get to bed. So long.

Late Nite Update

Sorry for the late update, loyal Observe-O-Ramers, but I just got off after a long day of work. No, wait. That sounded bad. I just got off OF WORK after a long day. There, that's better. I Worked from 2pm-1am tonight, and I'm not afraid to tell ya, the dogs are BARKIN'! Most of the night, however, consisted of waiting for the event in the main ballroom to finish so we can get in there to strike our set. Luckily, we have a TV in the office and we watched part of Stigmata, a really bad movie from the late 90's that was on cable. Later on, we saw a little bit of Independence Day, another really bad movie from the late 90's that was on AMC. Yeah, I know. 'American Movie Classics.' Since when do stinkburgers like "ID4" qualify as classics? I think any movie with smart-ass initials like "ID4" or "M2M" (Mission to Mars) should receive a new classification. I really don't know what to call this new category, yet. Maybe "Crap" or "Garbage." Perhaps "Lousy" would fit nicely. Could you see those signs on the shelves at the local Blockbuster's? Drama, Comedy, Action, Horror, Shit, Family Favorites and so on. At our local Blockbuster's, there's actually a section called "Community Favorites." That's where the lady behind the counter told me I could find Chasing Amy a few days ago. It's also where they keep all their Queer as Folk and other homo-gay titles. All the boy-boy and gir-girl stuff goes there. I thought it was amusing because "community favorites" has that family friendly sound to it. That's why I wondered if she was looking up the right movie. It could be because that Blockbuster's is a few blocks away from Montrose, Houston's gay/counterculture community. Montrose is actually one of the coolest areas around here for all of its neat shops and good restaurants. It still doesn't hold a candle to Chicago's north side or Wicker Park, though.

At This Very Moment

Right now, I'm sitting behind a MACKIE 1402 14-channel mixer here in the hotel ballroom maintaining mic levels for a group of clients. Their keynote speaker up there is Drayton McLane, owner of the Houston Astros. Should I screw up his mic levels? Maybe cause loud feedback? He's pretty old and he might have a heart attack, thus, perhaps, changing the dynamics in the NL Central. Nah, that'll just empower them.

Vegging Out

Spent the evening doing nothing but some serious video gaming. Katrina struggled with the Lost Levels on Super Mario All-Stars while I played Meteos on the Nintendo DS. Guess you can say we enjoy the active lifestyle! I'll make up for it for the next two mornings when I have to get up at 6:00 am for work.

A Swayze Kind of Evening

Rowdy Herrington's 1989 classic, Road House, was on TV tonight. Rather than attempting to view this masterpiece on basic cable, I went to the DVD shelf and pulled out my copy to show Katrina what a marvelous piece of filmmaking it is. Having never seen it herself, I felt obligated to show her this movie so she can continue her development into a perfectly well-rounded human being; to help her achieve a new level of personal completeness. So far, I think it's working. If you haven't seen it, I suggest you do. Trust me, If hearing Dalton (Patrick Swayze) tell his rag-tag group of bouncers at the raucous Double Deuce that "it's my way or the highway" doesn't send shivers of fear tinged with a hetero sort of excitement up your spine, then I'm sorry for you, my friends. I truly am.

Quickie...

How 'bout just a quickie, baby? Nothing much to report other than receiving the Mr. Bean series DVD's, The Whole Bean in the mail today. Can't get much better than that, can it? Tomorrow, however, has me going to the auto mechanics to show them the funny noise Katrina's car makes when breaking. I hope it's just the breaks and not the suspension. I also hope I don't have to wait there all damn afternoon.

USELESS CRAP FILES: Non-Vintage Star Wars Stuff

I've recently realized how much useless crap I currently have in my possession. Granted, it's not as much as some people, but it still has the potential to get out of hand. Luckily, my acquisitions have slowed in recent years. I still thought it might be interesting to list the things I have that are Star Wars related, alone. The sad, sad part of it is that NONE of it is vintage. I was young when the movies came out and any Star Wars stuff I used to have got tossed. Still, here goes:

The Food:

Nothing helps a kid get excited about his Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Corn Pops more that dreaming about ruling the Galaxy! I know this because I bought these for that very reason. Admittedly, these will soon no longer be part of the collection. Use the Spoon, Luke.






I actually found these folders and notebooks on the clearance shelf at a Filipino food market. They were very cheap and had that musty Filipino market odor to them. Again, they're not vintage. They're also not from the 'new trilogy' era, either. The copyright says 1996!

The Folders:





The Notebooks & Ships of Star Wars Notepad:

I'm sure by this time you're all getting pretty jealous. You should be! So far, this collection is worth an estimated $7.00!! But wait, we're gettin' into the real money now!

The Games:

Pictured here are a couple SNES Star Wars games. I still need the 'Empire Strikes Back' game, of course. I got 'Rogue Leader' the same day I bought the Nintendo GameCube and acquired this demo for 'Rebel Strike' at the EB Games in Southlake Mall after putting a few dollars down to purchase the game once it was released. I didn't like the demo, so I asked to put the money towards another game. "Not our policy," they said. What's the use of playing a demo? I finally got the manager to comply, and I kept the demo for it's cool retro 'Star Wars: The Arcade Game' which is included on the disc as a bonus.

Here, you see the Tiger Quiz Wiz Star Wars set (1997). 1001 questions of electronic trivia sunshine.

The Obligatory VHS "Special Edition" & Star Wars DVD's:

















Okay, this is where it begins to get sick. Like my good friend, Alan, I was a little disheartened to learn that the original trilogy would never again be released in a digital format for us to enjoy. Sooner or later (or already) the VHS that were available in 1996 would begin to deteriorate in picture and sound and would be annoying to view in later years. Luckily, a laserdisc player was passed down to us by the older generation of relatives. That naturally led to this purchase:

The Laserdiscs (old and new):



Well, there it is. Nice, huh? Stay tuned for future USELESS CRAP FILES where I might discuss, you guessed it, more useless crap!

Leisure Activities

Today was an entire day spent enjoying leisure activities. After waking at 11:00 am and enjoying a restorative bowl of Lucky Charms while Katrina had leftover pork katsu, we set out with the bikes to hit the local bike trail. It's a nice twisty trail which, at some moments, has you in the midst of midday traffic near downtown, and five minutes later finds you surrounded by trees and insects who live in the local bayou with no buildings in sight. There are lots of hills to ride up and down which I like, but I always seem to have to wait for Katrina to walk her bike up them since she lacks the lower body strength (and that sporting Keene spirit) to make it up even the slightest incline. I guess it's because she's a girl. Heh, stupid girls. So, due to the 90º+ heat and 237% humidity, we became severely dehydrated, almost to the point of seeing spots (despite that sporting Keene spirit). We decided to take a swim after the ride in the pool here at the building. After that, we retired to the a/c cooled apartment and watched the US Men's National Team beat Panama in penalty kicks to secure the Gold Cup championship (0-0; 3-1 p.k.). For dinner, it was Mexican night here at the homestead. We made tacos and a particularly lemony guacamole of my own design. I don't mind, I think it's good with extra lemon flavor. Want my recipe? This serves two:

2 avocados
1/2 cup diced tomato
1/2 cup diced onion (red onion for color)
Juice of 1/2 lemon or 1 lime
Salt to taste

Just make sure to completely mash the avocado and dice the onion and tomato very finely for that hot dipping action. And always choose the darkest and softest avocados since they are tastier and easier to mash. I sure learned that the hard way. Boy, lemme' tell ya. If you can, let them sit out until fully ripened, not unlike bananas.

Okay, back to the blog entry. After dinner we watched the baseball game. Cubs won in 10. I noticed that at every commercial break, ESPN ran the new ads for the Chevrolet dealerships. The ones advertising the new "limited time employee discount for everyone" for buying a new Chevy. This just sounds like a load of crap. Is it really that much less than your average year-end sale? I think it's just creative marketing language designed to fool the more gullible buyers. "Wow an employee discount? FOR ME??" It's playing to everyone's inherent jealousy of people who can get real discounts. And besides, if I were an actual Chevrolet employee, I'd be like "yeah, so I guess that makes me, like, chopped liver then, eh?" Okay, that's if I were a Canadian Chevrolet employee.

Wedding Crashers, etc.

When I wrote that I'd try to offer a review for a movie, I may have misspoke. I'd never want to "review" a movie like Ebert, Maltin, or any of those guys, but perhaps just offer a simple recommendation. For instance, tonight we saw Wedding Crashers and I thought there were lots of great moments and funny situations. In fact, I thought there were enough great moments and situations strung together to constitute a pretty good film. So there you have it: My Recommendation.

I saw Vince Vaughn interviewed on Charlie Rose last week, and he mentioned how funny movies were more than "funny lines" or "funny situations." While that's part of it, there has to be some solid scriptwriting to make the audience believe that these situations would actually arise within the reality of the movie. The audience has to be walked through the story in a very specific manner to make it believable. Actually, I can't remember how Vince put it, but it also sounded pretty vague when he said it, too. I think what he meant was that there has to be some "down to earth" moments in the film. Real connections need to be drawn between the characters we're supposed to care about, and I think Wedding Crashers succeeded on that point. It's what made the movie better than I thought it would be. Charlie Rose mentioned the real meaning in a good "buddy flick" was the love story between the two buddies. It's what made White Men Can't Jump such a good script. And please don't forget K-9 and Turner & Hooch.

As for today's other activities, they included doing a "clean sweep" of the apartment (as Katrina puts it), grocery shopping and going to the Japanese market to get our next month's supply of rice and other snacks like Pocky and dried wasabi peas. There was a Japanese restaurant next door, so we went there for dinner. I had the tempura combo and an order of salmon maki while Katrina had the pork katsu and California maki.

Staying In On Friday Night

Get this, I was all about going out tonight, but Katrina was happy just staying home to watch baseball and go to bed early. So we ordered a pizza and called it a night. I quite liked it. We'll probably catch a movie tomorrow night. Which movie? Either Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Wedding Crashers. This means we'll have to go to the more distant and expensive theater since the ones nearby show only independent/foreign films. Not that I'd ever complain about that. It's easier and cheaper to see better movies from where we live, and that's usually what we do. Typing about this sure makes me miss my beloved Town Theatre in Highland. Where else can you go to a small town privately owned single screen and see independent movies for less than six bucks? And get free coffee and pastries during intermission. In fact, where else can you enjoy intermission? I like intermission. It's like the seventh inning stretch and gives you a chance to discuss the film and perhaps catch some points you may have missed. Anyway, if I feel prepared to be impartial and accurate, I'll try to offer a review of whatever we watch tomorrow night.

Mmm, Beefy.

As you will soon realize, this new practice of updating the blog daily will mean that not every post will be as interesting as one might hope. Case in point:

Today featured an exceedingly mediocre dinner consisting of two grilled cheese sandwiches and a can of Chef Boyardee™ Beef Ravioli.

You see what I mean? Have you ever heard a duller sentence? Some days, this is all you have to work with. Well, another thing was us configuring our wireless modem to communicate with Katrina's new work laptop. It's nice to be able connect from the living room couch. Even if you have to do it through the corporate firewall installed on that machine, meaning many of the cooler sites out there are off-limits. I could try to bypass it, but who knows what they would do if they discover it having been tampered with. Damn porn haters. Actually, it sucks because Katrina can't connect to friendster.com, her most favoritest website EVER. Most gaming sites are out-of-bounds, too. So is apple.com. In fact, you know what? Screw that stupid-ass computer.

Stuff...

I'll try to get back to my original plan of updating this thing daily, even if it means there's nothing really interesting to talk about. Today qualifies for the "nothing interesting" category. Had the day off. Work's been slow lately, what with it being summer and people like to plan vacations around July. But I did get CC'd in an email exchange between my boss and the regional manager recognizing us for the show we did up in Dallas over the weekend. My co-worker, a technical director for the company, and I both logged about 32 hours each in a day and a half span. That included one 22 hour stretch on Sat-Sunday. We loaded up the gear into the rental truck here in Houston on Friday morning at 8am, and took the 4.5 hour trip up to Dallas, stopping at various other hotels where our A/V company have offices along the way to pick up more equipment to set up for a show on Saturday morning. We finally get to the location, a very gaudy looking Hilton, and guess what? We can't get into the ballroom until the next day at 5am. So for the next hour we drove to our hotel in the middle of a spectacular thunderstorm and checked in. Avoiding the Denny's across the street, we drive around for an hour and a half to find a place to eat. Evidently, while there are approximately 2,355,437 places to buy liquor and 4,658,412 places to purchase adult videos in Dallas, restaurants are in limited supply. I guess we were in the wrong part of town because near the hotel where we were doing the show, there was every manner of Chili's, T.G.I.Fridays, and Benniganses. So with heavy hearts, we settle on Denny's. That's the thing about Denny's. They strategically situate themselves near hotels as if to say "come on, just eat at Denny's. We have big color photos on the menu. What more do you need?" It's the ultimate cop-out eatery. So, after a particularly dry cheddar burger, we go to our rooms for the night. I only managed about 4 hours of sleep and was up again at 4:10am. We get to the hotel set up and tech the show (basically, seminars for a new Multiple Sclerosis drug) until 6pm and strike our set. We begin the drive back to Houston at about 8:30pm, stopping at Wendy's along the way. We finally arrive back at our Hyatt here in town and unload. It takes over an hour due to the fact that we couldn't get into the loading dock due to a U-Haul truck being parked there. There was a very lavish Hindu wedding reception going on in our ballroom, and there were Hindu people and Hindu vehicles everywhere. Loud eastern Hindu music and there was a strange Hindu set up on their stage. It looked like some sort of elegant Hindu living room set up with nicely upholstered Hindu couches and chairs. I'm not sure why that is. I guess so they can have Hindu scenes like what you see here. Anyway, we finish at around 2am, dropped the rental truck off and I'm home by 2:30.

All in all, it was a pretty tiring, yet, interesting weekend. It was my first time in Dallas. And one noteworthy thing about the show we did was that one of the speakers was David "Sqiuggy" Lander from Laverne & Shirley. It was a little sad, though, because the guy has trouble walking and received help onto the stage as he has been afflicted with M.S. Still, he was a very funny and engaging speaker. I was this close to getting the chance to mic him up with a lav, but missed it. He hung around and signed copies of his book. Interestingly, he has a new career as a professional scout in MLB baseball.

Well, I've typed enough for one evening. Goodnight.

The Bass is Strong With This One

That's no moon

If you're going to incorporate a subwoofer into your system, you might as well make it the least inconspicuous subwoofer ever. There's currently an auction over at the UK eBay for this monstrosity. Audio geeks with wives/significant others (or anyone doesn't hate girls, for that matter) beware; I believe there's an SAF* reading of -23.55 on this one.

*spousal acceptance factor

Uh-oh...

There's a scary storm moving over Houston right now.

This is as up-to-date as this blog will ever get. Here's a view, albeit a dark and scary one, from the front door of our apartment for those of you who haven't seen it in person.


I'd like to take this moment to thank the fine folks over at The Weather Channel.

Back in Houston

Here's a quick post to announce my return to the humid and sticky climate of south Texas. I was back home in Chicago and Indiana over the weekend (Friday-Tuesday) to attend a friend's wedding and see family and friends and even squeeze in a baseball game, "Chicago style," in that the Cubs lose. But a good weekend to be sure. We rode planes, trains and automobiles. Chicago weather in June/July is great. Today in Houston, it's raining and STILL hot and humid.

A funny thing happened on the way back to the car from the airport last night. On the day we left for Chicago, Katrina went to work in the morning and, like everyday, parked her car in the parking garage of the Wyndham Hotel which is directly adjacent to her building. I took a bus to the part of town where she works and we caught yet another bus to the airport a few miles away. Upon our return, Katrina felt she had it on pretty good authority from the Wyndham that though we're not Wyndham guests, it was cool to take the free Hotel shuttle from the terminal back to the Wyndham where we were parked. We got off the plane and ten minutes later the shuttle arrived. Katrina climbed in with the smaller bag, and the driver, William, loaded the larger carry-on into the back. Now seated in the van, we pull away and we're off. I figured the less William knew about us or our fragile non-guest arrangement with the free shuttle ride, the better off we'd all be. He begins by making small talk and pretty much goes straight for the throat:

William: So, what you guys in town for?

Katrina: Oh, we LIVE in town!

She answered him so darn fast, I had no chance to come at him with a story about how we were just visiting friends, or going to some convention or something.

William: Oh, okay. But you know only guests can ride the shuttle.

Katrina and Myself: (in unison) Oh yeah. No we were - I mean, uhhh...

I tried to cover up her remark by spinning some cockamamy yarn about how we were meeting friends at the hotel and were paying for their rooms or something like that. He really wasn't listening anyway as he was already starting in with his whole "just take care of the driver" routine.

William: Now the shuttle is for guests ONLY. But I ain't got no beef as long as you take care of the DRIVER. The taxi cab is about twenty-three dollars, but we ain't got to go that route. I'm just sayin' take care of the DIVER.

He repeated his "take care of the driver" mantra so many times; even the most vigilant Buddhist monk would have rolled up his mat and caught the next flight out. By this time, we were scrambling to come up with some cash, but were pretty well cashless. I felt kind of bad because I would have liked to tip the guy even if he wasn't trying to extort money from us. Still, here we were - utter stowaways. I remember thinking that this was something straight out of one of those Bertie Wooster stories. I needed someone like Jeeves to "cluster round" and come up with some brilliant solution. So, using a combination of stunted whispers and telepathy, we pretty much settled on telling him, once we arrived, that we were assured it was okay to take the shuttle since she worked at the ExxonMobil building right next door. Katrina even had an ID if it came to that. But once we pulled up to the hotel, Katrina grabbed her bag and buzzed off towards the hotel entrance like one of those frightened caribou you see on those nature programs. William unloaded my bag from the back and I thought, "Screw it; I'll just do the same." He threw out his arms out to the side and did a "where you going" take. Never changing my flight path towards the hotel, I weakly explained how we're parked upstairs and that she works next door and so forth. He said he didn't care and that if it was him, they'd call it "stealing" and he'd be "in handcuffs." I know he just wanted some money, so he gave up when I mentioned the hotel said it was fine. He didn't want to get in trouble and we just wanted to go home. After I finally caught up with Katrina and we had a pretty good laugh over the whole thing.

End of story.