All posts tagged with "my-stories"

Yesterday, I went to one of the normal places I go for coffee in the morning. I set my bag down on a table outside, and then I noticed that there was some dried up jelly on the table. I went in, paid for a coffee, and asked the lady for a towel to wipe the jelly. I expected, "Oh, I'm sorry. Let me come wipe that for you," but instead, she just handed me a damp towel.

While we were sailing, we were also schooling. One of the things we did with Kolya is poetry. And of course, poetry starts with Haiku.

It's been a month back in Baton Rouge and back to real life, and for the most part, it has sucked. We knew we were coming back to some boat maintenance, but our house was a disaster area.

We found an interesting meat market.

I encountered a technology this week that I haven't come across before. Normally, that would be a source of great joy for me, but this time, not so much.

Every year, I create a big photo book from our activities over the year. It's mostly of the kids, with some other family portrait or maybe one pet picture. I print off three copies, and those get given as gifts to both of the grandmothers and to Mrs. theskinnyonbenny.

A couple of weekends ago, we headed out for the annual cutting down of the Christmas tree. We drive out in the parts of rural Louisiana that are in the hour or two from Baton Rouge, and there's not really another time that we get to these parts of the state. I forget from one year to the next that rolling hills of East Feleciana Parish are kind of pretty. Even more so with the little bit of changing leaf color that we see up there. It's not New Hampshire in September, but it's prettier than you would think.

There are a lot of upcoming changes to the site, as I still try to get all of the old stuff re-posted. Not much here, other than to report on some planning that we've done, as well as some info on what site stuff is coming up. We finish up enumerating how immensely popular theskinnyonbenny family is this week.

A bunch of nonsense about getting a drink at Circle K and then going to work from the library. I had a couple of run ins with odd people. Also, I love the new checkout gadgets at Circle K.

I went to look for hurricane coverage this morning and found to my surprise, that Hulu live has The Weather Channel now. I hope the damage from this one is minimal, and that the loss of life is limited to unloved assholes. I thought this one would be too far east to affect us, but we're having a "way west of the hurricane" days, where there's a good breeze, lower humidity, and sunny skies.

I have a new morning routine that puts me in the line of fire for parking tickets. Today was the first time that it became an issue.

It's been a lot of driving lately. Coming back from Maine was two really long days. Camp pickup wasn't until 10:00. We left from there and drove until the wee hours. 11 states, and it was all bumper to bumper traffic from Maine through New Jersey.

We got off later than usual, but we're on the road again this summer. Here's how the first week+ of our trip has looked.

Back before the days of blogs and digital images, Mrs theskinnyonbenny and I got married and took a follow-up trip to Ireland. We toured around for a bit and happened to end up in Dublin at the same time that then-president Clinton was in town. You young uns won't remember, but back in the day, terrorists would occasionally blow up buildings in Ireland...

Your author discovers his disgust index and has some thoughts on the matter.

Marathon, boat related, beer drinking, swim meet. This post is just a disjointed mess of small things that have been going on.

Every time that one of my teams plays for a championship -- an experience that I may or may not ever have again -- I get better at how to do it. Here are my championship stories and how I get better at it every year.

A few guilty paragraphs about not posting more, a funny text message, and a video from New Year's that made us laugh.

Parts of our house haven't been updated since the house was built, which has been a little bit. Take a look at what it looks like behind one of our outlets. Scary.

Recap and pictures from the Kidder & Schultz third annual Oktoberfest.

There are a lot of reasons to take the city planners in Baton Rouge to task. Here's one of very little importance.

Driving a Jeep is great, as long as you don't mind rain dripping on you while you're driving, the check engine light being permanently alight, and if you want a consistently working stereo.

This is really short but funny. Not adding a spoiler here -- just go read the whole post.

The Louisiana Marathon — or as it's officially known in my skull, the Louisiana Marathon of Mimosa Consumption — was Sunday. I got up early and hauled a small tailgate party's worth of chairs, tables, and music out into the driveway so that I could collapse exhaustedly into my chair and nurse my breakfast alcohol as healthy people who had already run 23 miles (23!) that morning passed.

On Christmas morning, I went in for my morning deuce, and found that there was about three squares of toilet paper left on the roll. I had been in both of the other bathrooms the day before, and I knew that this was the extent of toilet paper in our house.

A couple of weeks ago, I somehow picked up a bit of a ringworm on my right calf. It sounds like I'm a filthy animal, and I am, but it's just a skin fungus that's easily treated.

It's been like a year and a half since I got photos posted to this web site in any sort of manner that is timely enough to share. Until now. We kicked off spooky weekend number one with a visit to a "haunted corn maze" out in the middle of nowhere. It ended up being a really big corn maze that I suspect looked very little like its map picture:

A couple of weeks ago, I had an external hard drive go bad. That's bad news for me, because it's the one I use for both my main laptop's backups and also my music/movie file storage. Not a huge deal -- I always keep two copies of everything -- but I definitely need it back in service.

This is just three totally unrelated short little posts about what's been happening around the theskinnyonbenny house.

Last week, Mrs. theskinnyonbenny and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary. I'm not nearly old enough to have been married twenty years, just as I am not nearly old enough to have a younger sister who dotes on grandchildren, yet here we are in a weird parallel universe where both things are ture.

As I've mentioned in this space before, I'm an old man now. It's time to start publishing my gripes.

I keep hearing something that is turning me into a deranged, foamy-mouthed lunatic. I'm not sure if this has just started, or if I've just started noticing. But I keep hearing people say "bolth" instead of "both." Are these maniacs stooges for the "L" lobby? Also, comments on a podcast, some journalism, and a sailboat electronics installation. It's not as disjointed as it sounds.

A double post, first going into how I'm older than shit, and then followed by some cute daddy-blog crap.

A big nerdy reflection, a little Three's Company content, and then an out-of-the-blue joke that really hits.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, we went to get our Christmas tree. The specific criteria we had made it hard to find a place to go:

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I feel bad for little Blossom. Last night, Lili detected some creature in one of our bushes, and did her beagle bark (BARROOOOOOOOOOO!!!) for about fifteen minutes. I dragged her into the house, but she just went back out the door and started up again. Blossom is her faithful sidekick, and hung out outside with the crazy beagle.

Last Friday evening, I dropped Mrs. theskinnyonbenny off at the airport. A quick "be careful, love you, yada yada," and I peeled out of the airport loading lane, free for a day and a half to myself.

Like most people, I detest Monday mornings. But it isn't that I dread getting in the car and handling a commute; my commute is only seven minutes. And it isn't getting to my desk and dealing with whatever comes my way. In fact, there has been a crisis each of the past few Mondays. Perhaps I'm jaded, but the client crisis doesn't get me too worked up any more. Sure, I'll try to address the problem right away, but it's not something I sweat. Or dread.

On the Wednesday the week of my Las Vegas trip, I checked out of the MGM (work trip) and into Caesar's (my trip). I had just gotten up to my room in the newest tower at Caesar's when my cell phone rang. It was Sharples. "Hey, what are you doing?"

It was recently brought to my attention that I have a reputation among the neighbors as a peeping Tom, and I know exactly how that reputation originated. Two summers ago, I was doing the finish work on the Regal Beagle, the grill/bar area in our back yard. It was August, and scorching, searing hot outside.

I think I mentioned once that Auburn fans think that the LSU fans smell like corn dogs. I had heard this through word of mouth, and then at the Auburn game last year, I actually heard an Auburn guy walking around LSU's campus say, "It sure does smell like corn dogs around here."

I noticed a trend in television this week that I doubt any others will point out. In the course of one week, I have witnessed no less than three realistic-looking vomitings on scripted television shows. I can't remember which show started the trend (Lost maybe?), but it was followed by last week's episode of Huff, and then capped by a multiple Tony Soprano puking last night.

Over the few years I've been doing these posts, I imagine that I've told a number of stories where the principal theme is some boneheaded thing that I did, which lead to odd consequences. This one should top all of the rest of these.

I haven't updated my site too much lately, and there are a lot of reasons for that. First off, I've been busy at work, and there are three things that make it hard for me to post about my work life:

As I predicted in this space on Friday morning, my bracket crashed and burned spectacularly. I followed up my 14-2 Thursday with a 6-10 Friday, and of the 6 I picked correctly, 3 were a 1 seed beating a 16 seed. So really, you could call my record 3-10 on games that were questionable. It's perhaps the most unimpressive day one can have when picking basketball results.

Jim Holt's billboards are everywhere in this city, and I do mean everywhere. On at least one route that I can take on my 5 mile commute to work, I can see this photo on two bus stop benches and on one large billboard. I've even seen this image pop up during the pre-preview advertisements at the movies.

I was just recently talking about all of those ghost shows on late night cable TV. I had been watching one about a bar that was haunted by a former bartender who had blown out his brains with a shotgun in the back room. It was one of those shows where actors play the parts, and then they switch over to the actual people for little interview segments.

Our largest and most festive Mardi Gras parade is almost certainly the Spanish Town parade. It's also the most rowdy and raunchy. I saw in a local magazine that they were cordoning off some of the route for "family viewing." I thought it was amusing.

Well, winter finally arrived to Baton Rouge this weekend. By winter, I mean that on Saturday, there were only a handful of hours during the middle of the day where it was warm enough to wear shorts, and even then, only because the hatred of long pants outweighs the discomfort of cold legs in my book.

Overall, I get too much email. I went back to a regular week from last October and counted the messages in my various email accounts.

Last Summer, I noticed an odd new mole on my shoulder. It was skinny, and it stuck up enough that you could wiggle it back and forth. When Summer ended, I started wearing a shirt more often, and since it was at the base of my neck where I couldn't see, I forgot all about it. Heck, it might have gone away altogether.

I have the damnedest problems with this one particular landscape light in the front yard. The thing's either not lit, or burning dimly as a candle. Each time I clean things up and get it fixed, something else goes wrong.

I'm having the damnedest time making a decent pot of coffee at my house. Sunday morning, I woke up early. Mrs. theskinnyonbenny was out of town, so I had the house to myself. I decided to make a pot of coffee.

Remember Garanimals? They were a brand of kids clothes from when I was young. Every item had some little animal visible, giving 1970s parents across the nation the misguided notion that their kids would look as cool as those kids wearing genuine izods. Their gimmick was that every piece of clothing with one animal on it would match every other cloth with that same animal. It's a very good idea (I could certainly use such a system as an adult), but one that was doomed by stretchy cheap polyester as the material of choice.

I started to make up a phony version of one of those photocopied Christmas mailings that you get from people this time of year. The idea was that I could make a big deal out of everyday, mundane shit that happens to everyone, and it would be funny.

I find it damned near impossible to keep my garage and shop clean. Some -- including the other resident at my address -- will blame my scatter-brained nature, or my disorganization. But the truth is that my own organizational genius is to blame. Allow me to elaborate.

On Sunday morning, the air was cool as we motored down the Red River. Not so cool that you were uncomfortable, but just cool enough to raise a few goose bumps when the sun went behind a cloud. The banks were devoid of houses, so for a couple of hours we had just seen hills, trees, and birds. "ARE YOU CHECKING FOR LOGS?"

When my nephew was around 6 or so, someone dropped off some wet and stick on tattoos for him. He wasn't around when they were received, so I decided to take one of the tattoos and put it on an ass cheek. The idea was that when he came to proudly show off his new tattoo, I could say, "Wow, I have one just like that!" Then, I could drop my pants and get a big laugh. Everyone knows that six year old boys (and I) find butt cheeks amazingly funny.

When I turned on my computer this morning, a program that lives in my task bar took the initiative to go to the internet, find some particular server, and ask it the temperature in Baton Rouge. It then changed its stock graphic to a bold, black number: 39.

It's a damn shame, trying to eat a forkful of rice, and not being able to get your mouth open far enough to prevent the upper lip from shoving rice off the fork and onto your shirt. That's been just one example of how my mouth has refused to work for the last few days.

I read this article in Sunday's New York Times. My first reaction was, "What crazy people. Who would behave like this at someone else's wedding?" Then I remembered that at a close friend's wedding reception, the groom's father got into an angry shouting match with the priest who presided, and threatened to drop an ass-kicking on him. I'm pretty sure alcohol was involved there.

I suppose that some of you noticed that I haven't posted a damned thing in a long time. It turns out that I needed a little hiatus. "Hiatus" is a fun word, don't you think? Say it out loud right now. I dare you not to laugh. Anyway, we have a lot of catching up to do. This will be a long post.

I would like to meet the person who came up with, "Thank you for not smoking," just so that I can call him a pussy to his face. Think about it. Better yet, read it out loud and slow: "Thank you for not smoking."

When I left work yesterday, there were obvious storm clouds to the west and south. This isn't too unusual for 6:00 in the summertime. But I had no sides or top on the Jeep, other than a small rectangle over the driver and passenger seats to keep the sun off me during the day, so I knew I had to hurry home. It's only a five mile drive home, but at mile one, it was dark enough to turn on headlights. At mile two, it started to rain. Thirty seconds later, I was in a downpour.

This is just a quick post to make sure I understand this advertisement, which I pulled out of a major national magazine this week. (I kind of like that you can see where I dog-eard the bottom corner of the page so that I wouldn't lose it.)

I went on a fishing trip last week. We went out to a marsh in the middle of nowhere Wednesday evening, and spent the time fishing off the dock, grilling steak, and drinking beer. On Thursday, we took a guided charter out around barrier islands and caught fish all morning. It's a good way to spend a day and a half.

My buddy Guido is the king of the grand scheme. You could give him a pile of six week old dog turds, and he could dream up a way to get rich -- or at least to make a decent profit -- from said dog turds. Guido was a year ahead of me in the Electrical Engineering program at LSU, but he finally found his true calling a year or two ago as a slumlord in New Orleans. It's a perfect fit. Where you or I would see a property that should be bulldozed he sees a decent home for poor people.

The other day, I came in to work, and was told that I look "snazzy." From my perspective, I looked like I always look, but there must have been something different that day. I like the thought of "unintentionally snazzy" being a phrase to describe me, though.

I woke up at 2:30 this morning, and within ten minutes, it was clear to me that I wasn't getting back to sleep. This happens to me from time to time. Usually, it's nice to have a quiet dark house. I have enough reading to catch up on and enough hobbies to occupy my time that it usually isn't a problem. But today, I just wanted to watch TV. Here's what I did between the time I woke up and the time I went to work.

If you know me, you know that I am in the process of building a canoe in my garage. You probably also know that this project has been going on since the Carter administration. It hasn't really been that long, but I did start cutting out forms the day that LSU played in the Cotton Bowl. So that would put me two years and four months into the build.

Dry eyes, nosebleeds, itchy skin. You guess it! It's time to go to Las Vegas. I imagine that I will spend a good percentage of my time in a sports book. I've spent a lot of time in them over the years, and I've yet to find one that meets all of my criteria for an "ideal" sports book.

I've been begged by this guy before. He's usually after fifty cents or a couple of bucks. Fairly friendly. I wonder why I can remember people who beg from me three times in a year, but I can't remember to take out the garbage on Thursdays. Tonight, he wanted a ride to Tom drive. It was real close, so what the heck.

I woke up yesterday morning at around 5:00. I'm not sure why I was up so early, but I was fresh and ready to start the day. I went out to the living room where the gas fire still warmed the air. I watched most of Sports Center and a little bit of the news on CNN. Then I took a shower and went to work early. It was a normal start to a day that would end very abnormally.

Shelly Williams may have the foulest mouth that I know, but she can do research. Last time I saw her, she gave me a pack of dice and a laminated copy of the official Three Man rules (so spilled drinks don't ruin the page). I hereby reprint those rules for posterity.

We all know how the late fees work at every video rental place in the world. You rent a few movies, keep them too long, they charge the late fees to your account, and then you pay those the next time you rent movies. This is the unwritten agreement between all movie renters and rental places that was established right from the infancy of the video rental industry.

For a couple of weeks now, I have failed to mention my fight with a four year old over pajama-bottoms. No one has ever accused me of being the most mature grown-up in the crowd, but I proved over the Labor Day weekend that I can be as childish as, well, as a real child.

This was a mean little thing that I did, but also funny. Sorry about the offensive title.

I have really put this out of shape body through too much in the past week. Monday was one of the most sore days that I've had in several years. Today isn't a lot better, to be honest. I'm not really old enough yet to sit here an enumerate all of my aches and pains. (Although I could see getting to that point in 20 years or so. Won't that be exciting!)

The novelty of me shaving my head has finally worn off. My hair actually grows back quite quickly. It's hard to keep a good Charlie Brown look going. As you might imagine, showing up after lunch with your mane lopped off leads to some good reactions. I wish I had thought to set up the video camera to catch the expressions of passes by.

Brent and Crystal have raised good kids so far. Annika and Jake are tough, active little ones. No one ever stops to whine over a bruise; they just pick themselves up and keep moving, no matter what happens. On the other hand, I've heard Jake scream loud enough to blast paint off of a wall when he was put to bed. And I've heard him keep this up for 30 minutes or more. So keeping them for a weekend was certain to be an adventure.

This morning on Sports Center, we got a three-second snippet on the Rock-Paper-Scissors national championship. Yes, there is a series of people who go to a big city and compete in Rock-Paper-Scissors. Naturally, I'm intrigued, so I've endeavored to find out more. One thing to know about me is that I think mathematically and logically. And with that thinking, Rock-Paper-Scissors is a fair game of chance. It should be as predictive and as fair as a coin toss, or cutting for the higher card. Try as I do to believe that this is the case, my real-world experience with RPS proves this to be false.

I know a lot of people hate "lists," but don't count me among them. A couple of weeks ago, I started making a list of the 10 worst smelling spots in Baton Rouge. Every time I try to write down the list, I come up with two really legitimate entries, and some random lame filler entries.

I moved to Baton Rouge in the fall of 1989 to start school at LSU. Ever since then, I've never been more than a few minutes from the lakes that frame the campus. I've walked, driven, and cycled around the lakes countless times. I've seen them smooth as glass and frothy with whitecaps, teeming with wildlife, and covered with rotting dead fish. These little lakes can give you anything.

As I was looking through the refrigerator this evening, I picked up a bottle of food off of the door. It's funny how all refrigerator doors are full of the same bottles and jars of stuff. You never even see the things until you happen to want a pickle, or you wonder if there are any of those spiced beans left that you bought to put in Bloody Marys.

I'm planning to post many web log entries from Thailand during my trip over there in the next two weeks. There is only one problem with that. Every time someone looks at pictures or wants to talk about my last trip there, they get hung up on one particular story. It was actually Heather who was pretty insistent on getting to see the filthy side of Bangkok. We packed in a lot of activity, and I can honestly say that we could not have experienced more cultural oddities than we did in such a short time. Thai smut is just one piece of the big puzzle.

You know, this really is probably the best time of year in Louisiana. Consider all of this:

As you've guessed by now, the Baton Rouge St. Patrick's Day parade was this weekend. This is certainly the best one that we have in town. It always takes place at 10:00 on a Saturday, and the weather always cooperates. This year was no exception: enough clouds to keep it from getting too hot, but plenty nice enough to be outside.

I am surprised that I have managed to go this long without telling any of you about my Las Vegas trip. There are a few stories to share, but not too many. Before I get to the point on this one, I'll mention a star-spotting.

Yesterday was the final day of the Mardi Gras season, and as some of my regular readers might guess, I like to catch a parade or two during the month. I admit right now that I had a crappier parade-going schedule this year than most. We had pretty consistent cold rain in February, except for the final weekend, when we were in Las Vegas.

Here's an interesting question for the married men readers to consider. This came up in a conversation at work about a year ago. I can't remember how it worked its way into the conversation, but whenever I think of it, I can't help but laugh.

It started with an email last Wednesday from Shelly. Yes, we went to see little people wrestling. It's as problematic as you're thinking it might be.