September 2007 Archives

You can tell we're in between paychecks when ...

• We use a lot of bowls because all there is for dinner is cereal.
• The dog (a 50-pound Border collie) can sleep in the food pantry because it's empty.
• Butter is a luxury item.
• We're outta money!

OK, so it's not that dire. I get paid every other week and the Petite Filet gets paid once a month, the last week. The problem is that some of our heftiest expenses are carried by my mid-month paycheck. While it's not a lot, nor is it a little, our bills scarf it like a hungry shark gnaws on a ham-scented surfer. The bowl thing was fairly true this week, as much because of our dwindling funds as our hectic schedules lately.

So I went shopping yesterday on my day off. To Wal-Mart, Home of Low Prices and Lots of Good Good Times. Bought a ton of food and half a ton of sundries. I also bought a new beard and mustache trimmer. I'd replaced the battery in it a few years back, but seeing as it was more than 10 years old it was time to upgrade after it died this week. I can now corral my goat a bit better and also indulge in a bit of creative facial hair when the mood strikes.

I tell you about that purchase because the Dreaded Shoplifter Beeper of Doom caught me at the exit. I paid for all my purchases, but the trimmer had one of those alarm doodads in the box that wasn't property deactivited during my self-scanning. So the greeter lady stopped me politely and scanned my receipt. She sent me out the door with a smile. Now, all of this wouldn't really be worthy of a mention except that ...

Add one new camera, plus two very adorable children, and it's a recipe for having waaaay too many high-resolution photos of said adorable children. Whoever said kids are the hardest subjects to photograph never met my dog.

The trick with taking pix of the wee ones is to let them be themselves and be ready with an itchy shutter-button finger when the time is right. The digital age, alas, means that we are but wasting time and cheap disk space. Life must've been hard on my parents, what with their Polaroids and 35 mm film habits.

On a side note, the Riblet is becoming just a hair harder to frame with the lens. He'd been scooting backward for weeks, but this past weekend figured out how to crawl to an object or person. He usually comes when he is called, which can't be said for the dog (who comes when he's not called). To add to our canine's confusion, his name and the Riblet's given name sound similar in dog ears.

Enough of my words. Here's some pictures ...

According to a study released this week from Texas A&M University, the Dallas-Fort Worth area (yay! where I live) ranks fifth in the nation for the number of hours drivers waste stuck in traffic. Drivers waste an average of 58 hours a year going nowhere fast. What's worse, in the past 25 years, nowhere has gotten worse than DFW (in 1982, drivers wasted 10 hours a year).

Only Los Angeles (72 hours), Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Atlanta (all 60) rank worse. Even Houston, one of the most-populated cities in the country, is No. 6 on the list.

As we were driving back from Okla Homer, we hit gridlock (on a Sunday) in I-35W because of a wreck. It added nearly an hour to our trip, confirming that we need to move further from a metro center in the near future. In the meantime, our commutes are shorter than most, but we still need ways to maintain our sanity.

Pancakes
I love pancakes, especially restaurant pancakes. There's just something about eating breakfast out. In our case, it was actually almost lunchtime, but whatever. Yummy pancakes! We were on our way to Okla Homer for the weekend to visit the Petite Filet's fam, and it was time to eat.

A Cautionary Tale
When you enter the restroom with a baby, diaper bag and purse, make sure you leave with all three. Don't leave your purse hanging there by the changing table, then remember where you left it about an hour later. Note that I don't carry a purse, so this isn't about me. Also note that I didn't notice said purse was missing when we all got back into the car and took our pancake-filled tummies back onto the open highway.

A Cautionary Tale, Part 2
This doesn't go just for traveling, but I recommend cleaning out your wallet or purse (if you are so inclined to carry one) so that all unnecessary credit cards, flotsam, international secrets and family recipes are not at risk of being intercepted by someone other than you if you lose/have your stuff stolen. Pare your cards down to a bank debit card, gas card and maybe emergency card. And keep all super-secret numbers (Social Security, bank accounts, gym locker combos) in a safe place at home or in your brain. If you insist on carrying everything with you, keep an inventory of what you've got somewhere handy (car glovebox, bottom of shoe) so that you will know what you've lost and what numbers you need to call to cancel the cards. Unfortunately, this might also include writing down your account numbers on a dangerously easy-to-lose piece of paper, but that's why you keep it in your shoe, right?

A Really Ugly Purse
Once we knew it was gone, the PF called the restaurant and had them check the ladies room to see if her purse was still there. Oddly, the restaurant only employs blind people because she couldn't see it in plain sight. The PF left her cell number in case it turned up. Thankfully, a few hours later, someone turned it in (with everything left unmolested, apparently), and so the manager called to say it was in the safe. She told him we'd be back in town Sunday afternoon to retrieve it.

She hung up and confessed that while she was describing her purse – to make sure that was the one turned in – she realized how ugly it sounds. Even though she is carrying it around this week, she has promised to sell it in our next garage ("garbage") sale. Not only is it hideous, it smacks of "bad luck," even if you don't believe in luck at all.

Hi, I'm Texas T-bone's new camera (the one on the left). Here are some of my new friends, his Canon Elan II film camera with his 100-300 mm (4.5-5.6) USM zoom; the Canon Digital Rebel (6.3) with its kit lens (18-55m, 5-5.6) that he has used for work the past three years; and out in front, the Olympus OM-1 his grandmother gave him years ago after she didn't feel like using it anymore (with 50mm 1.4 lens). All of them, including me, were purchased or acquired with some professional duty in mind.

The photo was taken with us all lined up in front of a mirror, and my shutter was tripped using a Canon RC-1 mini remote. With the magic of PhotoShop, the image was reversed so that you would have no doubt what T-bone's preferred camera brand is.

I've got to go. T-bone is busy chasing after this little guy ...

It's crazy how little things can make life that much brighter. During the weekend, we went to Lowe's to pick up some odds and ends for one of my ill-conceived, never-ending home-improvement projects, and we bought a new kitchen trash can to replace the dingy one we'd been using since we got married 8.5 years ago.

We combed through the house looking for things to throw away just so we could use the new can. Good times.

I realized recently that to have a side business/hobby taking pictures, it's best to have a camera. This is most important because we've*** already got a wedding on the sked for October. The bride, apparently, didn't appreciate my joke about using my Polaroid to capture her special day.

So today I ordered one of these ...

Long before e-mail became the staple du jour of public-relations queries, unsolicited correspondence and brazen sales pitches, there was the fax machine. Rather than the click of a mouse, faxes may be discarded into the circular file with the flick of a wrist. They are more obtrusive in their paper form, piling into my physical desktop inbox in a tipsy tower of crap faster than a fast-food hamburger expands the nosher's waistline.

If you've ever wondered how people got your e-mail address, that thought has likewise crossed my mind about the fax machine, too. However, I do work at a newspaper, and there are listings aplenty where the number - established sometime during the mid-1980s - is published and dialed often.

The best spamfax that's hit my desk recently is on it now (at least until I finish typing this post). The tite, "Should a sex change be tax deductible?" It tells the tale of a woman who was a man until a 2003 sex-change operation. She is suing the IRS because it disallowed a $5,000 tax deduction that she claimed as a medical expense.

The fax is mainly a story pitch to interview an attorney who specializes in IRS-related cases. He's written a book, which makes him an Expert. Thankfully, we cover news local to our immediate area and I can easily toss the pitch aside. It's not for us because all our news is local.

As for said surgery being tax-deductible, that would depend on whether you believe God makes mistakes by putting men inside women's bodies, or women inside men's bodies. That debate only applies, obviously, if you believe in God and that He made us in the first place. I'm getting dizzy just thinking about it all.

Now, without getting into the moral, psychological and tax code end of it, I can tell you that the only sex change I would like is to have it more often. But that, my friends, depends a lot on my better half and how soon the kiddos fall asleep, not to mention whatever kind of week we're having.