The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for September 2008

Signs That Your Relationship is Doomed

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One of my great pleasures in life is providing people with tips and useful information that they can use to improve their lives. Our current topic is how to recognize signs that your relationship with your significant other is doomed.

If you have a disagreement about dirty dishes and engage in any of the following activities you might consider looking for a new place to live.

  1. Biting
  2. Smashing picture frames across your partner’s face.
  3. Attack them with a sword.

Any one of these actions is probably a good indication that things are not good, but if you hit the magic trifecta of all three you can pretty much kiss him/her goodbye.

Inspiration for this post comes from the good people at MSNBC.

I Talk In My Sleep

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A bit after midnight I heard noises coming from my son’s room and wandered over to check things out. The door was closed, but I could hear him speaking. For a moment I stood still and listened.

Two thoughts were going through my mind:

1) What the hell is he doing up. He’ll never be able to wake up for school.
2) If I find a stranger in there I am going to gouge his eyes and dislocate both of his shoulders.

And now a comment about comments that I will probably receive about this. Yes, I know that the gun is the great equalizer, but I also know that shooting someone is not going to be as satisfying as inflicting debilitating pain upon them with my hands. And believe me, if someone breaks into my home I am going to send them out of here in a wheelbarrow.

Raise your hand if you think that I am overprotective. Ok, put your hands down, you look really silly holding your hand up in the air. Besides I can’t see you.

All I can tell you is that watching or reading the news late at night is not conducive to dreaming about pink bunnies and rainbows.

As I stood outside the big boy’s door I broke into a huge smile. He was calling out for his friends and laughing. He talks in his sleep. That is ok, I do it too. If you ask my parents they’ll tell you that I have for as long as they can remember.

To the best of my knowledge it is not something that happens every night. Some nights I entertain everyone with my impression of a chain saw. Most of the time I am told that I speak in fragments that do not necessarily make sense.

I have a very graphic imagination. Usually when I remember a dream the fragment that sticks with me is quite vivid. Sometimes I’ll have the occasional nightmare and scream or yell in my sleep.

I understand that last night I punched the pillow and spent a solid two minutes swearing. I can’t say that I remember exactly what it was about, but I suspect that I was trapped in cleveland.

My paternal grandfather had his own sleep peculiarities, but the one that sticks out is that sometimes he would fall asleep with his eyes open. As a child it used to crack me up. For a long time I used to wonder if he was trying to play a trick upon me. I used to wave my hands at him or grab various objects and swing them in his direction.

If he didn’t respond I knew that he was ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ, especially if he was snoring. That was a really big clue.

But as he got older I have to admit that it began to make me worry a bit that he had died and wasn’t really asleep. So I’d creep up to his chair and listen to his breathing and watch his chest rise.

I remember one time he called out to me and asked me to step in front of him so he could see me. As I stepped in front of the chair he gave me a quick wack in the side with his cane and said “I am not dead, stop bothering me.”

And then with a soft giggle he went to sleep.

Indoor Rock Climbing- Or Yikes, The Ground is Awfully Far Away

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This afternoon Little Jack and I headed out to do a little indoor rock climbing. If you are not familiar with it you can click here and enjoy a virtual tour of the joint.

I climbed the wall in the canyon area and learned that I am not 20 years-old anymore. Before you start guffawing about how this must mean I am out of shape let me clarify that I clambered up the wall like a monkey. Moving up that wall wasn’t hard, what was hard was looking down.

In my youth I spent all sorts of time climbing up trees, buildings, mountains and all sorts of odds and ends. I was fearless about it. If I decided to go up, well that was what I did. I went up and down and never stopped to consider the consequences of my actions.

Apparently in my old age the fear gene has begun to function. I haven’t any problem saying that when I made the mistake of looking down I suddenly began to wonder what it would feel like to fall from that height. Now mind you I was in a harness and was belayed.

However, I didn’t totally trust the rope to hold my weight. Intellectually I knew that it would be fine. There wasn’t any reason to be concerned that it was going to break. But thirty feet up I wondered if it really would, or what would happen if the guy down below somehow lost his grip.

Suffice it to say that it did a good job of scaring me. However, it didn’t scare me enough. I want to do this again. I want to do it a bunch of times so that I gain complete confidence in the equipment. Once I have that I am going to want to scramble up the walls again and again.

Side note. Little Jack watches me put on the harness and then starts to giggle. I ask him what is so funny and he points at my crotch. I look down and he is snickering about how it must be squeezing my nuts. I smile and tell him that it must be great to be almost eight.

He looks at me and asks me why my voice sounds normal. I ask him why he asks and he tells me that everyone knows that if your nuts are squeezed your voice changes. I explain that this is not really true. He seems disappointed.

I remind him that some of this conversation is better left for us to discuss in a private setting. He tells the woman standing next to us that she needs to move because his father needs to talk about how the harness is squeezing his nuts.

Is it any wonder that I am losing my hair.

Later on he and I are driving home and he decides to ask me to explain exactly what they do, the nuts that is. He can’t say it enough. He and his friends are at that age where body parts and bodily functions are the height of hysteria.

I mull over an appropriate response to his question and am about to answer when he hits me with a new question. When you are making a baby, do your nuts go in as well. Great Googly Moogly, that is a loaded question.

Now, the big guy and I have discussed this on a couple of occasions so I had kind of expected that for the time being this sort of thing was handled. But the question was there so I opted for the standard, “what do you think” reply. Which was far better than making a crack about tying stick to your, well if you know the rest of the joke you can just keep it to yourself.

Anyhoo, there was a long pause and I steeled myself for some sort of off the wall comment. As the silence grew longer I looked into the rear view mirror and noticed that he had fallen asleep. Ah, the pleasures of the mighty 101 freeway and it is gentle caress.

Saved by the snore, so to speak. Although if he stays true to form I’ll get a chance to answer the question a bit later this week. In the meantime I am going to wrap this tale up so that I can get a bit of shut eye.

See you in the A.M.

A Tale of 3 Browsers

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an unwitting victim...bwahahhahahaa

Old Jack is relatively computer savvy. That is a semi-folksy way of saying that I know my way around PCs, Macs, toasters, microwaves, new cars, digital watches and all sorts of other modern technological crap.

In simple terms, I know enough to be dangerous. I can make most of these things do what I want them to do, even if it means forcing the circle into the square hole. It is not elegant, but it is functional. And function is what brings us to our tale of three browsers.

A short while back the lords of the computer declared that it was time to bring my HP home to meet its maker and I was forced to migrate from Windows XP to Windows Vista. XP worked just fine, but Vista has some idiosyncrasies, or at least that is what it seems like to me.

Firefox has been my web browser of choice for a number of years now. On the whole I have been pleased with it. A short time before the old computer went to visit the great computer in the sky I downloaded Firefox 3. On XP it worked just fine, but on the new unit it has had a consistent glitch.

For some reason it has a habit of dying on me. I’ll try to load a page and it will just hang, the page never does load. Eventually you get the ever so pleasant message of “Firefox is already running, but not responding. To open a new window you must first close Firefox or restart your system.”

That just irritates me. Why, oh why does this happen. More importantly why can’t I control-alt-delete and use task manager to close it. Why do I need to restart the whole thing. In the days of dial-up I didn’t care if it took 15 minutes for the page to load, I was so damn happy to have the nifty net. But not now, instant is the word.

And so I switch to IE 7. On the whole I don’t really any major complaints with IE 7, other than I am a creature of habit so I prefer Firefox.

That is two browsers, time to bring in number three. A couple of weeks ago I downloaded Chrome, Google’s wacky offering. I can’t say that I am particularly impressed. It is not bad, but it is not outstanding.

Not to mention that I have been partially influenced by a few things that I have read that have bad mouthed Chrome and the data that Google is pulling from it. Truth is that between IE and Firefox I haven’t really had much need for Chrome, so I can’t say that I have spent a ton of time using it. Who knows, maybe one day I will change my mind.

Just to be thorough let me add that I think that Safari is terrible. Whenever I am forced to use a Mac I make a point of downloading Firefox as it seems that Safari just gets lost in the jungle that we call the web.