Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday Bill Paxton
Happy birthday to you!

Bill is 57 today. Me, I’m 48. It’s getting to the point where I’m no longer bummed about another birthday but rather damn happy I’m still around to have one.

I got an iPhone for a present and I love it. I’ve been posting pictures and box scores of Brenden’s baseball games to Facebook. He’s on a team this year that wins more often than they lose (8 – 2) so it’s more fun to watch. Brenden plays right field and bats 7th. He has actually watched a few innings of Braves baseball with me this year and maybe some weekend we can take him to Turner field.

There hasn’t been much posting because there hasn’t been much happening. We have finally settled on a pool builder but haven’t signed any contracts or anything.

I did get to see The Avengers at the movie theater. I really hate going out to the movies. The seats aren’t comfortable, the concessions are way overpriced, and I don’t particularly like the idea that I just paid 9 bucks and am now sitting through 20 minutes of commercials before the movie begins. Then about 90 minutes into the movie my knees hurt like hell. And 3D sucks.

Oh, the movie? Awesome! And funny. Joss Whedon finally made some money for somebody so here’s hoping we see more of his projects.

I desperately want to see Prometheus but I’m really not up to going to a theater again any time soon. And to think I used to enjoy going to the movie theaters every week. I’m gettin old.

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My mother turned 73 yesterday. Holy crap, and Happy Birthday, Mom!
I did call her, and I bitched to her about what has to be a classic First World Problem (which amused her) – Jon and I are planning on building a pool at our new house but the amount of decisions we have to make is stressful.

Yeah, I pretty much want to slap me too.

But the pool building process will be something interesting to blog about so maybe I’ll actually update this thing more often.

Step 1: Getting a HELOC meaning we’re going back into debt for this. We’ve been approved so there’s that.

Step 2: Finding a Pool Builder. We’ve talked to a couple of people – we are in the process of figuring out what type of pool we want, what size, and how we’re going to fence it in. I’ll write about that in more detail later.

What I’m Watching / Reading:

I saw Thor. It was fun! I’m looking forward to The Avengers, featuring Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, and a couple of others. Joss Whedon directs!

Immortals: A retelling of the story of Theseus and it’s not worth your time. It tries to be pretty and mesmerizing like 300 is but only succeeds in being silly. By the way: Mickey Rourke is still very ugly.

Walking Dead Season finale: wet! Thank you, Rick – Shane needed killing. And thank *you* Carl, ZombieShane needed killing too.

Justified FX show in its 3rd season about a Kentucky Marshall (Timothy Olyphant) and a very interesting cast of characters in a small Kentucky town, many of them criminals. I don’t completely know what is going on, but I really am enjoying it. Neal McDonough, who played Buck Compton in Band of Brothers, is just scary awesome as a polished upscale (and totally psycho) carpetbagger bad guy. He had a scene in a bar with Olyphant last episode where they threaten to kill each other. In lesser actors’ hands it would have been a laughable testosterone-laden hoyay festival. Instead I just wanted to hide behind the couch before they started ripping each other’s faces off. Good stuff! I need to rent the first two seasons.

The Hunger Games: No, I haven’t seen the movie but I read the trilogy. It’s actually worth reading – I was pretty well gripped by the story which I won’t describe. Writer John Scalzi pointed out in one of his columns that the 3 most successful series of books in recent times – Harry Potter, Twilight, and the Hunger Games, have been written by women. Their books are all being (or have been) turned into highly successful movies, too. No point, just saying. I can’t bring myself to read Twilight (just not my cup of tea) but I think that factoid is pretty nifty.

Saturday Brenden and I got into a conversation about toy guns, and I showed him this picture. He said “Hey, that looks like me!”

I lol’d. But Sunday we had gone to Target to buy him some clothes and I let him pick out a few things. One of the shirts he picked out had (Lego) Darth Vader and some Storm Troopers on it. I told him I love Star Wars, ever since I was a kid (13, if you do the math, but close enough).

His response? “Hey, stop copying me!!”

We had a long argument about how I could have copied him when I did it before him but he was pretty adamant that I copied him. I wanted to point out that he has a few unfortunate habits / personality quirks which I have retroactively copied as well but I wanted to keep the argument fun. I won’t get into those to protect the guilty.

Oh, yeah. His beautiful blue eyes are changing and becoming more hazel. Both his dad and I have retroactively copied him there.

A Little Less Sandy

Man, I’m lame! I went the entire month of February and didn’t post? Lamey lamester.

So – Brenden won 3rd place among the 1st grade Science Fair entries. The theme this year was ‘Under the Sea’ and his entry was on how coral reefs are made. I’m kind of ashamed because I know how off the top of my head so all he had to do was write what I told him to. But hey there’s a free Blizzard for him in the deal so I’m not sweating it.

If the year’s theme had been ‘Zombies’ Brenden would have won first place all by himself by writing about the best method of eliminating a zombie horde.

Ok so I FAIL at writing more blog entries. I am happy to say that I am sticking to my diet and exercise new year’s resolutions. I’ve lost 16 pounds so far and Jon has lost 27. We are both very happy about our progress.

One thing I am doing is eating more protein ( I try to hit at least 100 grams a day, more if I exercise) and lifting heavy weights. You can’t really gain muscle on a calorie-restriction diet, but from what I’ve read, you can minimize muscle loss by doing the things I just mentioned.

I think that logic is correct because Sunday I tried on a pair of pants that were fairly snug when I weighed about 135. I weighed 140 when I tried them on and they fit comfortably.

I tried on my boardshorts from the picture above which would definitely be snug if I weighed 135 (the picture was from 2007 and I was in the low 130′s). They were loose!

So deadlifts, squats, and shoulder overhead presses for the WIN!

So much for blogging more. And staying away from beer, but I am losing weight and exercising more so there’s that.

Other than waiting for the wet Winter to end, all that has been going on at the moment is Jon has put a new toilet (almost) in our main bathroom.

To rewind a bit: Jon noticed watery ick around the toilet a few weeks back. He discovered that the toilet was leaking, and it had leaked under the linoleum. When he took the toilet off / pulled up the linoleum, he discovered rot and mold. And a wonderful new stench.

He decided to replace the whole toilet with a wall-mounted toilet, photos soon come. There are two nice advantages to wall-mounted toilets: 1) you can sweep / mop underneath, and 2) no disgusting wax rings to deal with.

So we spent a vacation day a couple of weeks ago extending and removing various pipes and walls, and I did a lot of scraping to get linoleum glue off of the floor boards. We replaced the floorboard that had gone around the toilet because it had the majority of the mold on it plus it was just plain disintegrating.

So some drywall / mudding / painting later, last night we laid down some new linoleum. Tonight we should finish installing the new wall-mounted toilet.

I was going to rant here about how the American with Disabilities Act discriminates against short people by making toilet height requirements too high but foot stools are easy to come by.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: better than it should have been.
Cowboys and Aliens: not as good as it should have been.

To be more precise: Considering how shlocky the original is and how awful the Tim Burton remake of The Planet of the Apes is I was thinking Rise would have sucked. Well it doesn’t. It is actually quite earnest and despite my dislike of “Humans are Bastards” stories I kind of had to agree with the themes of this movie (one of them being “just because you mean well doesn’t mean it’s a good idea”). Also I’d have to agree with John Scalzi in that Anthony Serkis deserves some kind of special Oscar for all the awesome motion-capture performances he’s done and Ceasar the chimpanzee is one of his best ones (Gollum and King Kong are his other two – if you wonder what the hell this guy looks like watch 24 Hour Party People where he plays legendary producer Martin Hannett but I’m digressing again).

I actually enjoyed Cowboys and Aliens somewhat and I had to think about why I felt letdown at the end. I think it was because it started with all kinds of amusing Western stereotypes including the badass Mysterious Stranger, the Evil Rich Cattle Baron, the Goodhearted Preacher / Doctor, the Milquetoast Bartender who Needs to Grow a Pair, the sheriff who locks horns with the Evil Rich Cattle Baron because ERCB’s son gets drunk and shoots a deputy so the sheriff tries to Do What is Right…

Seriously. All that was missing was the Pretty but Somehow Asexual Schoolmarm arriving on the stagecoach.

So when the Evil Rich Cattle Baron shows up in town with some of his men and threatens violence to free his son, all of a sudden aliens attack!

Yeah that’s fun, so the movie takes a 90 degree turn but doesn’t do much with the characters it has. They still all act like they are in the middle of a Very Familiar Western. With Aliens!

Hell, at the end of the movie the Evil Rich Cattle Baron and the Sherriff who Tries to Do What is Right even talk about the Railroad That’s Gonna Be coming Through! And guess who rides out of town (presumably Into the Sunset)? Meh and I don’t use that word lightly.

Christmas break was relaxing and too short. I lost my favorite pillow in Arkansas, though. That’s all I have to say about that.

We drove out to Oklahoma to my dad and Ilu’s place where it was cold but not too bad. The weather didn’t stop us from going four-wheeling all over the place. While Brenden is too young to go by himself he got to do all the driving on one with his dad except when his thumb got to hurting from holding down the throttle all the time.

So we spent Christmas with dad and Ilu, and brothers Andrew and Jonathan, and Jonathan’s girlfriend Niko, whom I like because she likes Oblivion and Skyrim as much as I do. She’s also nice and played with Brenden.

We ate too much and all around it was a good time. Among my loot I got the first 2 seasons of Community on DVD, which is hilarious and creative so too bad NBC is trying to get rid of it, damn their evil asses.

It was a very nice Christmas.

Here’s my traditional Year in Review:

January: Snow! Oh, yeah we deciced to buy a new house.
February: We bought the house, moved in, and sold the airplanes. That was great timing.
March: Disney Cruise! I never thought I’d like cruises but there’s something to be said for floating hotels.
April: TORNADOES. They missed us but we lost power for a week.
May: Nothing occured. Nada.
June: St. John vacation. Yay!
July: We sold the old house. HOORAY!
August: I turned my son into a gambling addict by introducing him to Chuck E. Cheese’s.
September: Big Fat Kitty went missing. That sucked.
October: We found Big Fat Kitty but he was hurt and died from the infection the next morning. That really sucked.
November: I memorized the table of elements. It was kind of a slow month. For the record I can still recall all of them.
December: Christmas in Oklahoma! Yay!

Actually it wasn’t a bad year except for losing that lovable tub of fur.

So what am I going to do in 2012 except wait for the Mayans in their flying saucers to come and blow up the Earth?

I have the same old same old new year’s resolutions – eat less and exercise more. Added on top of that – I’m going to cut down on my drinking to virtually nothing.

I am going to try to make it all the way to May 17th without any alcohol. But I expect to have a Guinness or 4 for my birthday. I can’t see any other way of facing 48 except with a little liquid courage.

And as long as I’m on vacation somewhere other than home I don’t see why I can’t have a beer. Other than that, though, I’ve had enough.

PS: I’m not finished with Skyrim (after 109 hours logged!), but I do plan to update this fracking blog more often.

So I should post an update.

We spent Thanksgiving in Atlanta over at brother Ed and Jen’s house and ate many tasty noms. Brenden lost the second of his two upper front teeth on the way, and he has a pretty funny lisp at the moment.

After putting up with shoulder pain for the last year, Jon had outpatient surgery on his right rotator cuff last Wednesday. He’s on the mend and seems happy with the results so far.

Brenden has a stomach bug which started Saturday night. He has discovered he does not like puking.

I am playing the crap out of Skyrim and I blame it for my lack of updates. I *could* spend several paragraphs telling you how much fun it is to Shout bandits off of bridges and high mountain passes but you’ve already clicked away, haven’t you?

Currently I’m reading Richard K Morgan’s The Steel Remains, his 2nd book in a fantasy trilogy. I prefer his science fiction but this book is pretty good. Talk about a crapsack world, though! The hero rescues a bunch of slaves because he’s after a particular slaver. Then he runs away and the slaves get recaptured and are made examples of. Fun for everyone!

I may put it aside because my Kindle just downloaded Brandon Sanderson’s latest – The Alloy of Law, a new Mistborn novel (yay!). Also Stephen King, who TOTALLY LIED about retiring (not complaining, just saying), just released 11/22/63 that also is on my Kindle. And a new Sandman Slim novel – trashy urban fantasy. So I have plenty of wordage to wade through.

Also, Skyrim, a new video game from Bethesda Softworks (also responsible for Oblivion, Morrowind, and Fallout3, some of my favorite games ever), is coming out on 11/11/11. Hooray!

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In totally irrelevant news I recently read “Moonwalking with Einstein”, a fascinating book about memory. I finally learned what a memory palace was and just for kicks, I memorized the table of elements. Seriously, all 118 of them, from Hydrogen to Ununoctium.

Holy crap I wish I had known about memory palaces in college! I don’t think it’s easier to memorize things than if you tried to memorize by rote, but it’s a hell of a lot more entertaining!