Back after Many Many Moons

Wow, it has been a long time. To be fair, this is at least the third time I have started a post since the last one. I think I even finished two of them. Blogger and I have had issues.

I put together a summary the past few times about every thing that has happened in the number of months. I have given up on the summary. However, in July, my little sister and her fiancé Joe were married. Then in December 7th, my older sister had her first baby. Quite a few other things have happened as well but these two are exceptional events that warrant mention.

Now to the present. It is winter. I don’t know if I would call winter my favorite season. I am pretty sure fall wins out, but it does allow for my favorite pastime…..Snowboarding. I first discovered snowboarding over a holiday vacation to California in ’98. I went for a few hours to Big Bear Mountain outside of LA and fell in love with the activity. The sport has brought me countless hours of happiness. Ok, done with the history of my snowboarding life.

I try to get out to the mountains at least once a year. This year the time came last week. I headed up to Denver with ernie last Monday to visit my sister, my brother-in-law and my new nephew. It was great seeing all of them. Jack is adorable. He was well behaved while we were there and even made it through a dinner out with all of us.

After two days in Denver ernie and I caught up with the rest of our group and drove up the mountains about 5000 feet. In a good bad type of situation, the roads on the way up to Breck were total crap. We had near white-outs, ice and snow packed roads. On the Brightside of things, this lead to a nice 12 inches of powder our first day out. All in all there was close to 4 FEET of snow during the week we were out. FOUR FEET!!

It was absolutely wonderful. Breck for a day, Vail for two and then finished it off in Breck one more time. We had a nice group of 11 people. No one died. No big injuries. Maybe some sore and tired legs. Sadly I was the only snowboarder for most of the week. I had one partner in crime the first day but the board was traded in for a set of skis. Lucky for me, Ernie is a skier who is willing to tow stranded snowboarders on the flats. She did a great job dragging my big but around the slopes for four days.

The group was great. It seemed like everyone had a great time. And I hope we can get everyone together again sometime.....maybe even for another trip next year.

I would like to mention how great of a deal you can get on condos out there if you go by owner. This is the second year I have done it that way and the rate was great. We stayed here. It fit all 11 of us quite well. It was a short walk to the lifts and had its own hot tub. The owner Jeff was great. Sorry to play the saleman here but I just wanted pass along a great place to stay.

Well I'll try be better about updates. Maybe I will be able to squeeze in more than every 9 months. And who knows, maybe I will start the story time thing one of these days.

One last thing. It is time I try to whore myself for a free ipod. About a year ago I signed up for this movie club to start my quest to get a free ipod. Since I first signed up I bought one. But I am trying to get a new one though this sincec I started the effort. I only need two more people to help me out. So take a look. Maybe some random person surfing the web will find this link and help me meet my ipod goal. If anyone is thinking about joining Blockbuster Online, there is a link on here that you can sign up for on the site. If you do sign up...many thanks to you.

You too can be smart like Tom Cruise (or The History of Psychology)

Tom Cruise. Wow, he has lost it. Or maybe he lost it a long time ago but someone was hidding it well. But I wanted to know how I could be enlightened. Anyways I thought I was only fair that I educated myself on The History of Psychology. So I went to go learn. You can too. Right here.

So next time you are munching on your french toast and Tom Cruise says you don't know The History of Psychology, well you can respond yes I do! Speaking of history of things.

I think it is important to look at both sides of things. That is why I watch Fox and CNN. Hell I watch MSNBC just becasue I feel sorry for them too. So if you want to learn about Scientology take a look at their site. But be sure to swing by here too just to get a fair view.

Ok, now it is time for me to think of a start to my story.

Jon Stewart on Crossfire (Old news but still funny)

I am a hug fan of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. About a year ago he was on the tv show Crossfire. I happened to be looking for something else today when I came accross the transcript of that show. I thought it was funny when I heard about it last year and reading through this I laughed quite hard.

For anyone that is not familer with the daily show it is the best fake news out there. Sadly they do a better job of reporting the news than some real networks. One of the things the Daily Show really takes shots at is the media and their coverage of politics. On Crossfire, he really has some fun. Here is a great excert from the transcript:

(CROSSTALK) CARLSON: I do think you're more fun on your show. Just my opinion.
(CROSSTALK) CARLSON: OK, up next, Jon Stewart goes one on one with his fans...
(CROSSTALK) STEWART: You know what's interesting, though? You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show. (LAUGHTER)

Read up and enjoy.

What the hell is story time???

Well I had this fun idea a few months back. That I could throw a photo up online and start a story. Hopefully others would find it fun to add their part of the story as well. I had hoped to pull a random photo every so often and start a new story or at least have the new photo change the course of the story. Well I wrote up this great post about how I did stuff like this when I was a kid and how I missed the creativeness I was able to use. I also think there was something in there about how I feel like the creative part of my brain pretty much gets pushed to the back these days. I don't really remember all of it. Well long story short (or at least shorter than it could be) blogger blew up twice after I put the whole post together. So it never posted explaining the photo thing. Well as the last post said, things got busy, blah blah blah. So I will try to kick off the story in the next few days or if someone wants to get it going go for it. I had some rules that I put together before but I have long forgotten them. So until I remember then, it is a free-for-all. Enjoy.

Return of Blogsultant

Well it has been a long time since I have last posted. It is really a combination of a number of things. The original dropoff from the updates came from work really picking up in March. I was coming to the end of a project and with that came longer hours and less time back at the hotel for internet time. Once I was done with the project I have been project hopping ever since. I have found my way down to St. Pete, FL, Hicksville, NY, Chicago and now it is time to head west to San Diego.
In all this project hopping my access to the internet has been quite limited. In Hicksville it was close to a month before I could do anything besides dial-up. And that was shared in a conference room with one or two other people.
So what have I done with my time away from here? Well many updates to my house. Besides the initial move in I had very few major changes to the house before this spring. If you want to take a look at some good before (and a few after, with more to come) take a look at my yahoo photos.
I ended up giving up on my dream of painting my entire house on my own and broke down to hire a guy. It all turned out great. My bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room were all freshened up. It was a big improvement over the old wall paper and a nice step up from the post wall paper removal bare walls.
In my bedroom I ended the month long trashbag for window blinds with my purchase of new blinds. The living room and all the bedrooms are all sporting new window fixins. All thought the neighborhood peeping toms were disappointed overall the improvements have been worth while.
Well now I am sure most of you could care less about my house updates it has been the big thing for the time being. I will throw another post up here in a day or two with some of the fun happenings of the past few months. Will that make you happy, huh, would it?

Story Time! 

ernie's lab

Here is someone that I think i a rather cool person. Check out her blog @ ernie's lab

It is now later....and I still hate charter

I go back and forth here. I actually want to get Charter Pipeline. However the only reason for this is that SBC, and in particular SBC Yahoo! is just downright pathetic at my place. Not that I have high hopes for Charter, but in the past they were better speedwise. This guy sounds like he has delt with Charter before. It turns out I hit a good night with only a 20 minute wait. Ofcourse I only had billing questions. Ok, Ok, I know all these ISP are crap and that almost all cable companies are worthless when it comes to customer service. I just needed to vent. I am done now. G'night all.

Why I hate Cable Services

Charter cable is the company that has control of cable in my area. For those of you know familiar with Charter, from what I hear they are like any other cable company you may have in your neck of the woods but much worse. Charter last year won a great award. They managed to get customer service ranking lower than the IRS. I am on hold right now. It has been about 2o minutes. It is actually my second wait on hold. About 2 mins into my first call my cell phone drop.....Another great telecom company I could go on about.....but maybe another day. Anyhow, I learned today that Charters system of "first notice" is to get your service yank. Mine was for a non-payment. I know I am a bum. Oh wait, I paid this over 3 weeks ago but for some reason my payment did not go through. No a perfect world these things happen. BUT I was never told that I was about to get my service pull because I had not paid. Again, tried to pay but did not work. Ok, time to talk to the charter CSR. I will rant more later.