A Happy New Year Ramble

Yeah. I know. I’m a bum.

I’m tired of writing about my sorry life, so I haven’t written anything, as you can plainly see.

We had a good Christmas. Then Lovely Wife got sick the day after Christmas, and I caught whatever creeping crud she has this weekend.

So we both now sound like 90 year old men with croup, and that’s about the size of things around here. This is the second year in a row I got sick the week after Christmas. This year Lovely Wife and I are both sick.

I’ve been reading some science fiction by Jack McDevitt, whose books are human based in a future with faster than light travel. His characters are much more deep than many other science fiction writers that I’ve tried. I’m getting into science fiction lately, having gotten bored with the usual spy/thriller type novels I am attracted to. But it’s tough finding new authors, the ones that are listed on the internet as “great” and “instant classic” I’ve had to put down out of sheer boredom or flat didn’t like the way the author wrote. You know, when you have to slowly churn through each and every paragraph because the author writes in grandiose words and sentences? Plus, I have a feeling that some of the authors were not American and I was just too ignorant to be able to follow their slang and the way they expressed thoughts.

Fiction shouldn’t be hard to read, it needs to be fun, otherwise, what’s the point?

And I got my Les Paul rewired. Jeesh, what a nightmare. And me being me, I would try to rewire it in the most complex way possible, and my first stab at it didn’t work out too well. So after those hours of patient soldering, I had to undo each and every solder joint, clean everything up, and start all over. Plus with my screwed up back, I couldn’t sit there forever and the whole process ended up taking three days.

But in the end, I have a wonderful sounding instrument with all new switch and volume and tone potentiometers. It had a short in it before that I knew I needed to fix. So I just waited until I could buy all new innards and, well, it’s now a much more versatile guitar than it was before. It has the ability to switch in and out and combine and disconnect various bits of the electronics that now allows this one guitar to sound very close to several different types of guitars.

In case there's a lone guitar geek out there who cares, my guitar is now wired like the Jimmy Page Les Paul model guitar that Gibson produced in the late 90's for an incredible $5000 each. Of course, mine's not that purdy, but it sounds fantastic. I found a reputable shop in California that will do this mod on anyone's guitar, but they charge $200, including parts. The quality parts that I bought and used cost me $70, so even with all the effort, my guitar came out in great shape and I saved $130 plus shipping to CA and back.

I know, boring, but it’s exciting to me.

In further news, Lovely Wife has interviewed with a local company and will be moving from her part time job as our church’s secretary to a better paying full time job with a mortgage company.

We’re hoping that this won’t be a really long term thing, but we’re running pretty close to the bone every month on bills and some extra money will allow us to stop treading water and actually pay off bills and get a bit ahead.

We have a cold front coming late Wednesday night that is actually supposed to take the temperatures here down to freezing or a little below that. Amazing. I don’t think it’s actually gotten below freezing more than two or three nights in the 11 years we’ve lived here.

We’ll just have to wait and see if that actually happens. At any rate, we’ll finally see some cold weather. I’ll have to dig out my hoodie. I know it’s here somewhere, but I haven’t worn long sleeves in a year.

I was going to add a couple of neat photos that I took, but I'm getting lots of bad attitude from SmugMug, the online photo place I use. It's great overall, but sometimes it is incredibly slow. Grrr.

I'll post them over the coming days, after I try to come up with Seven Things About Me from a tag. That might be difficult. I've pretty much spilled all my life's guts here on this blog at one time or another, but I'll try.

Thanks to all who have visited and left comments. It means a lot to me. I hope to be able to get back into the swing of posting and visiting and commenting on all of your blogs soon.

Happy New Year!

Jesus, Mary and Joseph Attacked By Wild Dogs!

Yesterday when Lovely Wife got home from the grocery store and I went out to help her get the stuff from the car, all four poodles made a mad dash past me out into The Forbidden Zone, otherwise known as the front yard.

For the first few seconds they were just running and jumping in the nirvana of just being out there instead of the back yard, but then Rosie and Lilly noticed intruders in our front yard that were not there the last time they got to run around the front yard.

The only thing that separates us from Ebeneezer Scrooge is the fact that we have a three piece plastic nativity scene in the front yard.

Rosie and Lilly, after the first taste of freedom had died down, noticed the unsuspecting Joseph, Mary, and the Jesus/manger module just sitting there like STRANGERS.

Of course, we don't have normal poodles, ours are vicious attack miniatures. Don't let the curly hair and otherwise cutie-pie looks fool you, they mean business Buster!

Rosie and Lilly ran over and while Rosie barked, growled and snapped at Joseph, Lilly did the same on the other side to Mary.

It was a classic pincer maneuver that General George S. Patton would have been proud of.

Thankfully the Jesus/manger module was left alone, and Joseph and Mary wisely stood perfectly still, probably from extreme fright, but still, it was the right thing to do.

Since the three intruders just sat there like bumps on a pickle, our lap dogs highly trained attack/guard dogs finally realized that this family was no threat and came running quickly inside due to the promise of a bite of cheese.

But for a minute or so there, the Holy Family was in dire straights, but tragedy was finally averted.

For this year anyway.

This is Rosie;

and this is Lilly.

Is it any wonder that those poor people were scared stiff when these two brutes went after them?

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Have a Merry Christmas everyone! And watch out for marauding poodles.

Christmas Eve, 2007

The Christmas Spirit finally descended upon me today. (That's Younger Brother and Me there. Dig my paisley shirt and my bangs. I think this was 1972)

Lovely Wife went into work today at our church and helped them prepare for tonight's service. Since she left there, she's been at the store buying a few last minute things for tomorrow's Christmas dinner.

We're having Roast Beast, just like the Whos down in Whoville.

The lamps that she wanted for Christmas arrived via UPS in the nick of time. (no pun intended)

I was able to get them out and wrap the two boxes and put them in an out of the way place to add to the suspense. (That's Big Brother and Me on our new bikes in 1970)

When she asks if UPS has shown up yet, I just tell her that the UPS guys usually show up at our home in the late afternoon. That's a true statement, and it allows me to avoid telling her that for once UPS showed up at noon and that her lamps are already wrapped and over beyond the love seat and pretty much out of the line of sight, unless you happen to walk that far into the room.

So all the presents for this year are here and wrapped, except for the dog's toys that she is getting at the store.

The roast beef dinner is bought by now and probably on the way home. I'm watching for her out the window as I type this. (No Christmas is complete without taking a gander at this old pic of Big Sis with her new Bobby Sherman album. Yes, THE Bobby Sherman.)

We're having Louisiana Christmas weather in Florida this year, it's 64F(18C) and raining slowly right now. Almost exactly like many Christmases of my childhood.

I hope that all y'all have a merry, safe, fun, and blessed Christmas this year.

God Bless all of you.

Picture Post, Sunday December 23, 2007

I don't really have any new stuff that's worth posting, so I went back through some of my old stuff, just looking and came up with some nice, pretty Florida-ey shots.

Any of y'all dealing with snow and cold might appreciate them about now.

We're hitting 78-80 degrees every day, with mostly sunshine so I don't think we'll even have semi-cool weather for Christmas. (Darn that evil George Bush and his administration's policies that caused Hurricane Katrina and this hot weather! At least we'll have dramatically higher sea levels soon, us Floridians will drown and be out of our misery. I know this because Al Gore says that's what will happen.)





I love these amazing looking and incredibly twisted trees in front of these folks' house.

Aimless Ramble #944

'Cause if there's one thing I'm good at, it's aimlessness.

This is turning out to be one of those Christmas seasons that I seem so dead inside; as in not "feeling" all Christmasy. They happen from time to time, and this is one of them.

I've long suspected that I have Seasonal Affective Disorder, where the short days wreak havoc with my emotions. In my case I tend to be robbed of my emotions. We watched the TNT version of A Christmas Carol with Patrick Stewart as Scrooge the other night, one of my all-time favorite movies, and I didn't get all teary-eyed even once and I didn't get all fired up about straightening my life out with all kinds of positive self-talk like I usually do when I watch it. That may be a big yawn for y'all, but that's a warning sign for me that something's amiss.

On a related note, I found and hope to buy pretty soon, one of those alarm clocks that gradually lights up over 30 minutes and reaches full brightness as the time for the alarm to sound. I have a tough time waking up, and maybe that'll help.

I would also try one of those full-spectrum lights that you sit under for helping with bad attitudes due to the shortened days, but those things are, like, $250. A little too steep for me. But I like the idea of it. Maybe I should just get in a comfy chair and go sit outside a while each day. I walk around outside at work most days, just to have a break, but that hasn't helped my attitude any.

What I really need is a spine transplant.

Whenever I take some of my pain medicine and am at home, I'm all of a sudden in a good mood and joking and laughing. The other day Lovely Wife remarked about me acting like my old, silly self, but I had to fess up and an tell her that I had taken some medicine and that she'd caught me in that short window of opportunity where I was barely hurting and could feel and act normal.

It's times like those that bring home to me just how life changing chronic pain is.

I'm supposed to go see a pain specialist in January, and he's a guru at placing TENS units into the spinal cavity, or also he does morphine pumps that are internal and release small doses of the morphine right at the site of the pain.

Only problem is, that I really hate to take the step of having a morphine pump installed into my back. Any narcotic stops being as effective the more you use it, so I'm always walking a tightrope with my Lortab, which works wonders for me short term, and I know that switching to morphine is a big step.

I have a couple of weeks to think and pray about it, but I'm already nervous because it's as if by having set up the appointment with the pain specialist, that I've already taken a turn down a long and difficult road. The whole idea of a pain specialist is to get pain relief, but…

Sudden Swerve!

We've done most of our Christmas shopping. It's a really lean Christmas for us financially.

The girls are grown, more or less, and the things they tend to want now are specific books and DVDs so the lion's share of the shopping was done online at Amazon.com.

Lovely Wife has been wanting some arts and crafts style lamps to go with the furniture we bought this year, and the other day she found some she liked that were on sale for a great price, so I ordered a couple of those for her. They are due to arrive on Christmas Eve, so we'll see if that actually happens and therefore gives her a "big" gift to open this Christmas.

I have a Gibson Les Paul Studio electric guitar that I bought used from a friend at work several years ago. He had made some changes to the electronics, which I then changed back to be more like original, but in all that changing, some of the pieces-parts don't work all the time. It's no big deal, I just play the guitar at home, but just knowing it's easily fixed, but not fixed, bothers me.

So for Christmas this year I ordered "from Santa" all new parts for the switches and the four volume and tone controls. As an electrical engineer I find it impossible to go the easy route, so I simply waited until I could order the parts I needed to really do a job on the electronics. The changes I plan to make are ridiculous, but will allow me to get several different sounds from the guitar as opposed to simply leaving it how it works from the factory.

Yeah, I know that's as boring as watching paint dry, but it's exciting to me. Normally, guitar electronics are easy to work with, so I'm going to try to rig up my own version of Jimmy Page's customized Les Paul he used during his Led Zeppelin years. (My wiring will be a variation of this diagram) If I get the electonics switched out with the new stuff, and my wiring system works like I plan, and if there are no parts left over (always a possibility with me) I'll have had hours of fun and a more reliable and more versatile Les Paul to boot.

I'm also getting a set of locking tuners (those things in the picture up top that you twist to tune the guitar), because this guitar goes out of tune pretty easily and I think a set of high quality tuners will help.

The latter half of next week should be pretty loud around the Masters' home if my nefarious plans for my Les Paul work out, because I'll then have to crank my amplifier to 11 to test the guitar out properly. Rock on!

We live such exciting lives around here.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

For those who believe that petroleum is evil, and that ethanol provides an exciting and more ecologically pleasing alternative to gasoline produced from crude oil, you ought to read this:

U.S. corn boom has downside for Gulf

By HENRY C. JACKSON, Associated Press Writer Mon Dec 17, 4:02 PM ET

JEFFERSON, Iowa - Because of rising demand for ethanol, American farmers are growing more corn than at any time since World War II. And sea life in the Gulf of Mexico is paying the price.

The nation's corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, it makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to a growing "dead zone" — a 7,900-square-mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs and shrimp suffocate.

We have more crude oil in US territory than we could possibly extract and burn in 100 years and environmentalists put up such a fuss when any attempt at drilling is put forth that the oil companies neither drill in these places nor create new refinement facilities.

We now have the technology to extract oil from shale for example, and there are massive KNOWN deposits within the lower 48 states that they are not drilling for.

THAT's why we're paying $3.00+ per gallon of gas, not because of OPEC.

Our own US citizens are why gas prices are so high; it's not because of greedy oil companies, but radical environmentalism.

I don't want to destroy the environment, but at the same time, there has to be a bit of balance.

No new refineries in over 20 years? Can't drill in many locations where there is know to be oil?

That's not balance, that's stupidity.

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As a counterpoint to all of that nastiness, here's one of my all-time favorite photos of the Gulf of Mexico.

The Weather Channel Says

According to the Weather Channel (and we know they're never wrong) it's only supposed to get up to about 65F (18C) in this here part of Florida today.

Now we really know how them folks up north feel with their cold weather and snow and whatnot since we're in the midst of a cold snap ourselves.

So we'll be prayin' for y'all, since we're in the same boat, so to speak.

Sunny and 65 degrees for the high, I had to think for a spell this morning, trying to decide whether to wear a long sleeved or short sleeved shirt.

I went with the short sleeves because when it gets cold like this the knuckleheads at work freak out and crank up the heater and those of us with lots of "natural insulation" almost suffocate.

Plus, it's been so long since I've worn a long sleeved shirt, I'm not sure I have one that isn't coated with dust that I could wear to work.