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8 year old adults

We just returned from the reception for David Fisher. His son Ben was obviously upset but was just being such a man. He held his composure better than I may have been able to do myself. The service was open casket and Noah handled himself very well. He became somewhat upset and tucked his hands deeply into his pockets refusing hugs and definitely refusing to step up to the casket with either Ben or myself. Ben was thrilled at Noah’s presence. When they saw each other Ben lit up. Noah did a good thing tonight and it was hard. He is such a good child!

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Driving Test Question

Trick Question (note: this is psuedo-safe for work but unlikely to be safe for guys to view it while sitting near your wives and/or girlfriends. Also, if your workplace is super-uptight about today’s sexual harassment overkill you may just want to wait until you get home to click this link..of course, if that’s the case, then they probably are equally as uptight about blogging and reading blogs online which means you are in trouble already anyway and you just might as well click the link.)

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Evening Choas

All adult focus now turned toward preparing for the receiving of our recently passed friend. The children’s focus is torn between screaming for the adults, singingly loudly and repetitive to drown out the screaming, and being totally self-absorbed in video games and telephone calls. Sprinkle on a little anti-cleaning and you understand our moment in time.

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Come back here!

Ok. My skin is crawling off my skelton right now. Can you imagine what it would feel like to have a thousand ants crawling over you. Yeah.. that’s me right now. And I haven’t even overdone caffeine today!

I think I should take a 7 minute juggling break and finish it with a glass of decaf hot tea.

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Goals

a) met with “barter” client DONE

b) finish Home Depot app DONE (took forever!)

c) clean kayak and complete sale

d) cold call realtors

e) answer a Good Samaritan

f) answer news paper ads (dry one this week.. maybe the sales section) In process

g) post resume on The Perfect Job

h) update LinkedIn.com profile

i) David Fisher’s receiving DONE

j) create http://templates.sidesigns.com for reselling html templates on an affiliate program. These are the templates that will be applied to the content management system

k) apply for online sales coordinator position DONE

l) Prepare call list for tomorrow so I can hit the ground running on sales

m) Prepare script for making calls tomorrow

n) investigate Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Do we qualify?

o) Investigate Temp Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Do we quality?

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Not Business

The legal firm collecting for the TSAC student loan called me today to tell me that despite my request the autodraft couldn’t be stopped and will go through today or tomorrow. He strongly recommended finding a way to “not bounce a check to the federal government.” The statement was funny because if you read the full meaning into it the read should be “don’t bounce a check to the federal government but bouncing checks to other people is ok.” I don’t want to bounce checks to ANYBODY!

So I dropped in on my “barter” client and learned that he really wants to only do barter and only if its not terribly expensive.

Maybe I can get some cash for the kayak today. I’ll miss my outtings on the lake more so now that there is no hope of returning to them but we do what we have to do. One day I’d hoped to take that kayak down the intercoastal water way but if that were ever to happen I should be in a state that I’ll be able to afford a new kayak anyway. Of course dreams like that and hiking the Appalachian trail are things that should be fulfilled when you are single and in your 20s anyway. I am not certain I could enjoy a 6 month adventure unless my family was with me.

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Killing Animals

My brother reminded me of a bird incident.

My father, whose degree was in biology, taught me to respect animals with certain exceptions like moles (in my early teens I was asked to go check the mole trap and usually that required putting a shovel through the wriggling creature). Snakes you never kill. When I was 12ish, once in the woods with a friend we came across a snake and stomped it dead. We received no punishment over a slight scolding because it was a Hog-nosed snake and we had to deal with the stench the whole way we carried it home.

The bird. So, I’m near 14 years old and moving. My best friend and I take my bb gun out to the woods (in New Orleans, Kenner actually, this amounts to roughly a field of 12 feet tall weeds with bike paths) and we are shooting at rabbits and dragon flies. I don’t mind the rabbits because they just run away. Dragon flies were cool to shoot because they were so abundant you didn’t feel like you were killing something. It was akin to swatting a mosquitoe. Of course, dragon flies were color coded too. The green ones were easy kills. Blue a little tougher. Orange very hard. Red near impossible to get. Shooting at the birds bothered me. It’s my turn to shoot and we see a black bird up in a dead tree. At my friend’s urging I draw a bead on it. I aim true and then decide I’ll miss on purpose and just scare it off. So I raise the bb gun so that I’m point above its head. I breath in then with a slow exhale I squeeze the trigger and thwack! As you’ve probably guessed, I nailed it! The bird goes from sitting upright on the branch to hanging upside down. Its wings fall open to look like this black upside down cross with what looked like blood flowing from both wings. It hangs for what seems a long time then it falls bouncing on every branch in a way that would have made the Warner Brothers (someone should tell them their home page does not work in Mozilla) proud. It was a horrific scene. I tell Dad the story and he explains to me that it was a Red-winged Black Bird and is a protected animal. I felt badly.

Red winged black bird in weeds
Red winged black bird in weeds

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A New Day! Let’s start the day off with a PayPa…

A New Day!

Let’s start the day off with a PayPal donation link:

This Morning

I stayed up for a bit after getting home and watched the end of Star Trek – Nemesis thanks to video on demand so this morning I really wanted to stay in bed longer. Today shall be interesting.

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Ye ol’ babblings

First off, running 70 mph (112 km/h) through the mountains on a 25 mph (40 km/h) road is exhilarating and I can understand why I used to do that in college. However, I don’t need that thrill again any time soon. Thank goodness a deer, bear or ranger didn’t jump out and get me.

Seeing the vulture was definitely a highlight of the evening!

The mock casino went well and although I had to throw back to my thespian vocal training and spend the whole night talking “from the diaphragm” to overcome the noise I managed to maintain my voice. Turns out the mock casino was for some cemetary organization (I joked that the party would be dead). And I about died when their fearless leader gets up on the microphone and says “if you run out of money, you can buy $25,000 more fake dollars for $25 real dollars.” Every so often one of these fake casinos has the misfortune of becoming a “real” illegal casino when handled in such a way. The leader of the company that puts on the casinos was very quick to jump to the microphone and make some corrections to the rhetoric to make our casino legal again. They haven’t done an auction in sometime. I miss those. It was fun cracking jokes with the audience and pretending to be an auctioneer.

On the way back I pulled over at one of the lookouts to observe the mountains, the near full moon, the fire flies and the somewhat distinct smell of bear. When the area around you resembles the aroma of a petting zoo, tis best to get back into the car.

The drive home was leisurely. I resisted the urge to do more white noise (audio blogging).

Time to whisper appliance descriptions into my wife’s ear.