What's a Delmer Look Like?

Posted by delmer at 9:32 PM | Comments (4)

July 28, 2007

2Girls1LuckyGuy

As I mentioned yesterday I flew into Philly Friday morning. Thursday night I had hoped I'd get to bed fairly early, get a full night's sleep, and be bright-eyed and bushy tailed for the trip to the City of Brotherly Love.

As it happens, I was shopping until 11 p.m. on Thursday and got to bed around midnight. We had thunderstorms overnight that kept me up and would periodically wake me up during those periods I did sleep. As the night wore on I'd awaken with the fear that, right around 6 a.m., I'd fall into a coma and miss my 9:45 flight. To keep this from happening I climbed out of bed at 4 a.m.

I was at McDonald's at 5:06 and at Columbus International Airport in the neighborhood of 5:45.

I'd gotten an e-ticket and done the web check-in the day before but had little interest in waiting around for four hours to catch a flight so I went to ticketing to see if I could get on something earlier.

"I'm a bit early for my flight," I told the ticketing agent. "Do you think I could get on something earlier?"

"I'm afraid we're booked solid," she said as she looked at my boarding pass. "It probably comes as no surprise to you that people try very hard to get out of Columbus whenever they can."

"I hear that!" I said.

As she handed my boarding pass back to me she paused, "Delmer?" You're not the Hilliard-Ohio famous Delmer of What's a Delmer Look Like."

I blushed a bit. (It's so embarrassing when things like this happen.)

"Yes I am," I said with some genuine modesty.

And then the keyboard clacking started.

"I've just bumped the snotty bitch who checked in a few minutes ago. The flight leaves at 6:40." With that she gave me a big smile, a boarding pass and told me to have a nice day. When she asked if I wanted her to call for transportation I thanked her but declined. A little bit of exercise is good for a person in the morning.

I walked the 50 steps from the ticketing agent to the security line and thought about how cool it would have been had that really happened as it would have saved me the $25 change-of-ticket fee.

Still, twenty-five bucks for four hours of not having to wait in an airport isn't bad.

A young woman, and I mean she had to be in her twenties, and her two boys (8 and 7) were behind me. The boys and I talked a bit about where we were going and how they would much rather be taking a one-hour flight rather than the two-hour flight they would be taking. About 1/2 way through the line I figured I'd better get a feel for which gate I was leaving from: A, B, or C.

My ticket suggested I was leaving from Gate F.

As I was not in line for Gate F security, I turned and gave the boys a quick line about being more attentive travelers than I am when they got older and dashed off to find my gate. It wasn't far away, and the security line wasn't terribly long, but I'd gone from having 40 minutes to catch my flight to having 25 or so.

I took my shoes off well ahead of time, had my laptop in it's own tub, my iPod, camera, and Palm TX were in a tub, and I had my fluids split between a Zip-Loc bag and my bladder.

Of course, my car keys were in my pocket.

(I set the alarm off but once, and you have to do it a couple of times before they drag you off and wand you.)

The plane was loading when I got to the gate and I was in Philly well before I would have originally been.

I'm not always sure how to post pictures that don't feature me unless I have permission. The following photo is posted without permission for three reasons:

1.) I can't imagine the guy in the photo would complain about it.

2.) It shows the internationalityness of the Backgammon Event. (The young lady on the left, Wolfin, is Canadian and the moderately-young lady on the right, Lady Penelope, is British.)

3.) A lot of people find WADLL by browsing for porn and I've named this photo 2Girls1LuckyGuy trying to bring in people who Google for Gold Star Chili sex.

Posted by delmer at 2:20 PM | Comments (5)

July 27, 2007

Philadelphia on a bit more than Ten Dollars a Day

Today I flew off to Philadelphia to — well, I'll go on about the 'to' more in a later entry. Today, we'll just talk about travel.

And, first, Time Travel. Yes, I know, this entry has a Friday date, but you can't help but feel it was written sometime after that. It was. Sunday evening, to be exact. I tried something new this vacation … I didn't turn my computer on until today, and I didn't drag my cell phone around everywhere I went. Once in a while I need to be away from technology.

Anyway, getting to Regular, Jet-Airplane-Based, Travel.

I was scheduled to fly out of Port Columbus at 9:15 a.m. Friday morning. It's not too early and not too late. I figured that if I climbed into bed Thursday night at midnight I'd still get plenty of sleep. It was my intention to climb into bed closer to 10.

However, 10 o'clock found me at a store looking for OSU memorabilia. I wanted to make sure I had OSU shirts for some of the people I'd be meeting in Philly (Dutch Jack from Holland and Lady Penelope from England, whose name is really not Penelope) and I was having trouble finding just the shirt I wanted (Something in a green, not the typical red or gray stuff you normally find. And I'm kidding about that; most OSU shirts are going to be Scarlett and Gray.).

You know, I can already tell that this has the potential to drone on and on, so let me finish with a single story so I can dash off to meet people for dinner.

Last night the group was going to meet for a more-formal-than-jeans dinner. Most of what I own are jeans so on Thursday I had to find a pair of something less casual. Lo and behold, in the closet on a hangar, were a pair of black pants I didn't recognize. However, they fit and I thought they'd do nicely. And then I thought about it and decided the material might be too heavy.

I shot off to Target.

While I was there I picked up a new shirt for the dinner, some underwear for the trip and new socks. I figured buying new stuff would mean I'd have less to dig up and pack at home.

I found a pair of pants I liked and tried them on. They fit, they were black, I liked them, I put them in the cart. And then I started thinking a bit about them. They seemed very similar to the pants I had at home that I didn't recognize. Since I do a lot of shopping at Target, and there was a chance that was where those pants came from, I thought I'd call my mother (who was at home with my boys) and ask her to read the tags that were in the mystery pants at home.

Yes. I was getting ready to buy the same, exact pair of pants I'd had on at home thirty minutes before.

So now I have two pair.

No I don't. I put them back and went with the pair I already own.

(We'll get to Regular, Jet-Airplane-Based, Travel when I'm sitting at home typing and I've unshunned technology.)

Some photos:

In this first one, I've been in Philly for about an hour.

In this photo I've been in Philly for three days.

Posted by delmer at 5:13 PM | Comments (2)

July 26, 2007

4th of July (sorry for the tardiness)

As you know, the 4th of July was several weeks ago. In the United States it is a time we celebrate our Independence (thus the Independence Day title given the day) from tyrannical British Rule.

To show our independence we do what most youngsters do when they first find themselves out from beneath their parent's thumbs. We party. We load the fridge and coolers up with beer (and only the domestic stuff, dammit to hell!), we break out the hot dogs and burgers, and we throw down some apple pie. If there's time, and we live out and away from nearby neighbors, we pee outside. Yessiree, nothing says I'm independent like urinating outside.

The Brits celebrate our independence in much the same way. They call the day something else, however. Something quaint. Not "so glad to be free of them day," so much as something with more of an empty nester's feel to it. Wait, I'm wrong, I think one of the Brits at work used to call it Insurrection Day. He still took the day off, and I'm guessing he had some beer (imported — that'll show the Yanks! — that I'm sure he'd taken out of the fridge the night before so it would be at the perfect British-beer-drinking temperature), but I think he probably passed on the outside urination (it wouldn't be proper).

Oh yes. And we have parades.

Hilliard's parade went for over 90 minutes. I wish my kids could have seen the 1969-era 4th-of-July parade in Franklin, Ohio so they could appreciate just how big this one is. A couple of years ago my boys got so much candy that Haydn yelled to one of the candy-throwing Firemen to hold on to what they had, "we have enough."

When I was little you were lucky to get one or two pieces of something.

To see more photos you can click the one above. Or this link.

Posted by delmer at 12:11 AM | Comments (2)

July 25, 2007

Feel My Pain, People!

UPDATE: The Astounding Eye Drops have done a nice job clearing up the eyes. Does anybody (and you know who you are) know when I'll be able to slap the contacts back in? Does contact lens solution kill pink eye germs?

I'm going to Philadelphia Friday and wanted to take a minute to give you some Super Incredible Travel News…

I have pink eye. Yesterday morning I woke up with glow-in-the-dark eyeballs and didn't think anything of it. I thought I was tired and I thought the weeping from the right eye was due to not wearing vision correction and it trying to focus too hard. I thought my contacts felt like shit due to tiredness. I thought the itching was due to brand-new allergies that I'd developed overnight.

The most surprising bit of this all is that none of my children have pink eye. Fortunately one did a short while ago and I have Astounding Eye Drops that seem to cure the problem in pretty short order.

Above I say Pink Eye ... in fact, I have Pink Eyes. Both of them.

(If I stare too long at a single spot on my LCD monitor I can see burn-in starting. I'm going to have to type faster and edit less.)

Had one of my children looked at me, yesterday, with eyes (that) were like mine, I would have known he had pink eye. When it happens to me, it's puzzle.

Posted by delmer at 7:39 AM | Comments (2)

July 24, 2007

When Anarchy Reigns

Some of the people I work with are bona-fide geniuses. Many of them are so genius-like that I won't even pretend to be able to possess words adequate enough to describe their level of smartness. Let me just say they are at least twice as smart as you are and, aside from the people I work with, you are the smartest person I know.

The picture below is an arrangement of plaques we have that show just of few of the patents the company, and many of the smart people I work with, hold. The United States Patent Office thought our patents were such good ideas that they actually had them engraved in brass before giving us the okey-dokey to do with them whatever it is we do (in a protected manner).

I wish you could have seen the surprised looks on everybody's faces the day Karl Rove showed up to hang the plaques. Sure, we could have done without all his this-community-service-shit-sucks conversation, but in the end we had to admit he did a nice job. Especially for a giant asshole.

Where was I?

If the world were to be on the verge of coming to an end I'd certainly want one of our engineers to be in the group of survivors I was in. Their addition to the group would ensure we had heat, light, television, you know, and things of that nature; my group would be able to make electricity out of almost anything. Of course, this assumes most of us had died off due to disease or something and that there's some sort of societal niceness left in the world. If the end of the world brings with it a post-apocalyptic-Mad-Maxness with it, I'm tracking down one of the dads from our Cub Scout troop. We had a guy in Pack 872 that I'm pretty sure could survive in the wild with nothing more than a nail clipper. (And I'm thinking he has something more than that on his person 24 hours a day.)

But, barring total anarchy, I'd hang with one of guys I work with.

Engineers. Non-engineers. Just plain dudes. There is nothing they can't do.

Well, wait. I've typed to soon. There seems to be but one or two things one or two of them have trouble with.

As smart as the people I work with are — and I mean the men — some of them have the hardest time figuring out how to make this item work.

I know what you're thinking, "Goddam! What is that?! A Rubik's Cube?" No, but you are close. Here's another photo.

It's the toilet paper holder in the men's bathroom. And it is as complex a piece of equipment as you will ever encounter.

I know it looks very simple. One might think that there is a small black button just behind the paper core that one might have to press to simply swing the left-hand arm out to change rolls. One might think the whole process would take three seconds had one timed the process multiple times. One would be right.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why a person would go this far in the toilet-paper-roll-changing process and then skip the last step. I'd considered that maybe the person having trouble with this was one of our Mechanical guys. Not because he didn't know how the TP hanger worked, but because as he got involved the in the process of changing paper he couldn't help but design and redesign the complex piece of equipment that holds TP in the men's room and at some point he got lost in what he was doing and strolled out before finishing the paper hanging. Also, our mechanical guys are very delicate and there's a chance, if it is one of them, that he got a paper cut as he unwrapped the sanitary paper from around the new roll of TP and had to rush out of the stall before they bled out.

Mostly, I'm pretty sure it isn't a mechanical guy.

Another puzzling piece of equipment we have at work is this item:

You'll notice in this photo there is coffee in the pot. And that should always be the case. It takes about 10 seconds to dump the old filter, put in a new one, dump coffee in it, reseat the filter holder, and press the 'brew' button. I realize 10 seconds is a long time when your head if full of money-making ideas and you need to rush back to your desk to see if anybody else has thought of them and posted videos of them on YouTube, still, it would be a nice gesture to keep at least one pot full. Or partially full. Or at least not so low the coffee burns and stinks up the building.

If you don't, what you're saying to the world is, "I want a cup of coffee now. Now is the perfect time to have a cup of coffee. I am so lucky that someone was thoughtful enough to think I might want coffee now. However, ten seconds from now is not a good time for a cup of coffee, so I won't make any more."

You know, now that I think about it, it might be people visiting the company that are TP and Coffee slobs.

Posted by delmer at 6:07 PM | Comments (3)

July 23, 2007

Dreams and Guns and Money

The following is one of the things I wrote, saved as a draft, and then almost lost. I went to the .xml file it was saved in and did a cut & paste here. This is a dream I had, and as I reread it I find I remember very little of it and that it makes no sense at all.

Anyway, presented for your pleasure…

In this dream I was driving around and on my way to Columbus from Franklin, although I was still in Franklin. I can't remember why I needed to get to Columbus, but there were some people after me and they thought I had a big wad of money (it would turn out to be $10,000) and they wanted it.

I was driving a Karmann Ghia convertible. At some point I was handed a bag. I'm pretty sure it had the money in it and when I stuck my hand in it I felt something that I thought was a .38. It had a lot of heft to it and I slowly pulled it out of the bag. It was, in fact, a revolver and it had two bullets in the cylinder.

Twice in the dream, and these episodes were separated by my driving around, I spoke with a relative of mine. Or someone I think was a relative in the dream. In real life the guy was Cesar Romero. I can't remember what was said the first time I spoke with him but the second time our conversation led me to believe he was behind the plot to get the money from me. It should be noted that I did not have the $10,000 originally and wasn't sure how I was going to get it when the bad guys demanded it (over some sort of radio I had). Then, of course, I was given the money and the gun.

It may have been that point that I started heading out of town toward Springboro and eventually the interstate. As I drove by an area that doesn't exist in real life but that had on-street parking in my dream a guy hit a parked car with a baseball bat and due to some sort of odd acoustics thing (or, quite possibly a narrative comment by a voice in my head) I heard that the guy had gone to great pains to match paints. This meant, I knew, that he was trying to transfer paint from the car he was hitting to my car and he did this by hitting that car with the bat and then slinging the bat into my car door. I knew I was being set up and decided to head to the Franklin Police Department.

I made a left and turned around in the driveway of what I believe to the Franklin Masonic Lodge parking lot. I drove back by the guy with the bat, yelled at him, and headed toward the police department. I didn't make it to the FPD, however. I ended up going to my parents' house and going there, more or less (it was a dream after all) via 4th street. I don't know why I went that way, I'd been on 2nd and it's a straight shot.

As I parked the car I tried to find a way to hid the gun in the springs under the front seat. It didn't work and I decided the money and guy would be OK in the car. I don't know why I didn't keep it with me. Maybe I didn't want anybody to see the gun. I went in the house and made a call. When I came out a woman was getting back in her car and I knew she had the money. Somehow I wasn't surprised this had happened as I'd known "they" were tracking me.

Some blurry dream stuff happened and I was back talking with Cesar Romero. I questioned him about the money and how it was that the more-than-one criminal organization behind the scheme trusted each other. "After all, fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money," I said, trying to screw with Cesar a little bit.

The dream totally changed and I found myself sitting at the bottom entrance of mom and dad's old house. Someone was sitting to my right which limited my vision there. We were kind of like contestants on a game show, maybe a talk show, something. Cesar Romero was doing the interviewing and we were talking about dating. A question about preparing a meal for a date came up and I mentioned that "unfortunately, I'm a slob" the point being that preparing a meal in my home might not be the best thing to do to impress a woman.

"What phrototek do you use when you cook?" asked Cesar. And this was in the context of "does the essence of the things you do in your daily non-cooking life carry over into your dating/cooking life," that is, "just because you are typically a slob, does that mean you couldn't throw a meal together without making a mess?" That's what he meant … again, what he said was, "What phrototek do you use when you cook.?

I replied, "Ribbed," going for the condom joke.

Everybody laughed, including the bikers who were sitting off to the right.

And then I woke up. And not a moment too soon.

Analysis:

Man there's a lot to look at.

.38 revolver: I've been reading a lot of Stephen Hunter lately. Guns play a big part in his books.

Masonic Lodge: I live behind the one in Hilliard. I snapped a photo of the one in Mechanicsburg. I saw National Treasure on TV the other night.

Cesar Romero: I think he's Hispanic (The Latin from Manhattan) and lately I've seen a commercial for something on TV with Jimmy Smits in it. That guy from Desperate Housewives is in it as well. For the record, the Cesar Romero in my dream was the Cesar I've seen in a short clip of some movie in which he's walking through the jungle or something. He's wearing a white shirt in the clip (it's a B&W movie, as I recall; I wonder if it's The Lost Continent and if it was something I saw on Mystery Science Theater) as he was in my dream.

Karmann Ghia Convertible: I've been wanting a convertible and there's a VW Beetle convertible for sale up the road from me. It isn't one I'd buy but as I walked past it the other day I thought that maybe a Karmann Ghia would be fine.

The Guy With the Baseball Bat: I'm pretty sure was Matt Damon.

Posted by delmer at 5:45 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2007

Paint Shop

Haydn has reworked this photo:

And turned it into this.

He wanted you to know.

Posted by delmer at 9:56 PM | Comments (5)

It was 6:15 a.m.

And I was awake. On a Saturday.

Why? You ask with a sigh in your voice.

Because they're building something across the street from me that is very complicated to put together. How do I know this? Because there have been days when workmen have roused me from bed through the clever use of not-normal morning noises, which I assume is some sort of signal that a building process is about to begin and continue throughout a fair portion of the day. And then at the end of the day I'd come home, take a look at the site, and wonder "What the hell do they do after I leave?"

It was almost as if my kids were putting the building together. They'd start very early, to make sure I was awake, and then when I left for work they'd take an 9-hour break. Now, I'm guessing that things were actually going on, no union is so strong that absolutely nothing can get done during the day, but for the non-construction savvy driving by in a minivan it looked like nothing at all was happening.

One day I remember coming home from work and seeing some PVC sticking up out of the ground; "There's something," I thought.

There were days though, honestly, when I thought the project had run out of money.

Meanwhile, about a mile and a half from me, an entire field has been turned into condos.

During the noisy mornings I normally just piled out of bed whenever I was awakened as it was typically time to get up for work; this would make it 7:15 a.m. or so. If it was a Saturday, I'd wake up, acknowledge the noise, and then go back to sleep as I can sleep through anything short of a jet engine in my ear.

Sensing this, the construction team bought a jet engine with them this morning. Actually, it was a series of jet engines they rolled in one at a time.

At one point I remembered thinking, "this will stop in a minute and I'll go back to sleep." When it didn't stop, well, it stopped while they changed out the jet and then restarted … twice … I took a look at the clock. It was 6:15 a.m.

So I called the police. I figured there had to be some sort of rule about when you could and couldn't land Harriers in a subdivision.

I apologized for being a crybaby-man to the officer who answered and explained my curiosity. Fortunately, as I was speaking, he could hear the noise from across the street through the phone. (At one point there was a high-pitched whining noise which caused the officer to pause and ask if the construction crew had acquired missile lock on me. Of course, I just made that up.)

Oh, I keep saying it was a jet, well, it was concrete truck after concrete truck that kept coming and going. How the hell could a concrete truck make this kind of noise?!

The officer told me that construction is prohibited between the hours of 7 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. So these guys had gotten a 90-minute jump on their day. (In preparation, I'm assuming, for a big, long, lunch.)

I told the officer I was going to walk across the street and talk to the guys. He told me if I needed anything to give them a call back. I'm pretty sure that I heard him cock and lock his gun just before I hung up; it was hard to tell with all the background noise.

I brushed my teeth, threw some shorts on, and walked across the street.

The reason the concrete trucks were making so much noise is that they were pumping the concrete out of the truck and up and over the steel frame they've assembled. It would be a pretty impressive thing to watch during normal business hours or maybe on TV with Norm Abrams pointing out the subtle nuances involved in pumping concrete. (It looked like they were using a General Electric GE90 to do the pumping.)

And really, even at 6:30 a.m., with a severe case of grumpiness working, no coffee in me, and 5 hours of sleep under my belt (I was up late screwing with the iPod again), it was pretty impressive. I mean, you've got a bunch of guys, up early, on a Saturday, working. The women readers have certainly got to be able to appreciate that.

The way the pumping worked is that a concrete truck would back into the pumper and a hose would be extended to where the Sidewinders normally hang. (You know, I think Sidewinders would be a good slang term for testicles. This would allow men to work missile lock into their foreplay conversation. This would have to be a bigger turn on for women than "Let me pee first" is.)

Actually I'm not sure how the concrete truck interfaces with the pumping gizmo. I know there's a really tall boom (btw, it is now 8:45 a.m. and the noise just stopped) that goes up and over the steel frame of the building. At some point a rigid tube becomes a flexible hose. And there's a guy controlling the boom with a remote-control device hanging off his chest. The concrete comes out of the flexible tube that is moved, by hand, side-to-side where a bunch of guys with various tools spread and smooth the concrete.

I found the foreman and expressed my concerns. We chatted. We were both polite. I suggested I was most concerned with avoiding any more very-early-morning awakenings. (Had I had the power to, and I know I didn't, I wouldn't have shut down what was going on as they were just making too much progress and it would have been one hell of a mess.)

I don't have the ability to stay angry too long. And when you combine this with the fact that the foreman had good people skills and was a nice guy about the whole thing I became less upset in pretty short order (not that I have the ability to ever be rabidly angry). I finally told the foreman that if he'd let me put my initials in the concrete I'd be good with the whole thing.

I strolled back across the street and started writing this. I received a sympathy call from TDHG (people are quick to call and offer sympathy when you send mail out containing vague references to being on the phone early in the morning with the police and they have yet to read blog entries detailing their Twister parties), I went to the convenience store and bought a banana and some Diet Coke, and I sat on the back porch to enjoy the weather and the noise.

(Ah. TDHG had gotten up before I had in order to run someone to the airport, so I'm not sure I received all the sympathy I might have normally received.)

As I sat on the back porch the foreman came over and gave me coupons for a restaurant. I accepted them but told him that he really hadn't needed to do that. I put the coupons aside and we talked a bit more. I asked if he had to deal with a lot of complaints. He told me he'd had a few in his day but the most troublesome encounters were the ones in which guys showed up and wanted to fight right away. (Why would a person want to fight a bunch of construction guys? Especially guys pouring concrete. Have these people never seen an episode of The Sopranos?)

Later, in the house, I moved the coupons from the counter to the table. I had assumed the foreman had a bunch of these in his truck that he kept on-hand for grumpy men whose sleep had been interrupted. When I looked at them closer I noticed that not only weren't they coupons, (they were gift cards) but that he'd purchased them after my visit to the site.

And they were for an amount of money that sent me right into feeling-guilty mode. I felt guilty enough that I thought I might have to spend some time actually helping put the building up in order to feel better about the whole thing.

Instead — and if you've ever seen me with a hammer or a power tool you'll agree that this is a better solution for all involved — I tracked the foreman down again to thank him once more.

Posted by delmer at 12:06 AM | Comments (2)

July 21, 2007

Harry Potter and the Kroger

A month ago, or more, we pre-ordered whatever the new Harry Potter book is for Haydn.

Today we made a special trip to the mall to retrieve it. We paid something like $23.00 for it.

Tonight, while shopping for groceries, we passed a whole table of whatever the book is. It was something like $23.00.

Posted by delmer at 7:58 PM | Comments (5)

My Exciting and Glamorous Evening

I am currently sitting in a recliner, watching Psych and writing an e-mail to the dark-haired girl.

Whenever I e-mail TDHG I always try to make my life sound very exciting and glamorous. It is my intention to drive home the fact that whatever it was that TDHG was doing (without me and while I was doing my exciting and glamorous thing) pales in comparison.

(I also like to use the expression "drive home" whenever I e-mail TDHG. Not only do I think it gives my e-mail a Cars sort of feel, but I think there's something subliminally suggestive about the phrase. I don't know what it is exactly, I just know that when I typed "drive home" something subliminal happened to me.)

Tonight I happen to know TDHG is with 14 or 15 of her friends. They're having one of those sex-toys parties that are so popular today among sexually frustrated hot soccer moms with good senses of humor.

Naturally, I jest. Tonight is their Twister night.

Anyway, I was just wrapping up the e-mail detailing my exciting and glamorous evening (I spent over two hours sitting at the bar in Movie Tavern, waiting and drinking Diet Pepsi, while my 13-year old was on a date) when one of the characters in Psyche mentioned a place called Taco John's.

The Taco John's reference took me back to Myrtle Beach, circa 1980, when my buddy Roy and I were on Spring Break. There was a commercial on the radio for Taco John's and in part of the commercial there was a chant that went "taco, taco taco." This was followed by a chant that when "coupon, coupon, coupon" (and coupon was pronouned "coo-pon" instead of the more traditional Ohio "cue-pon"). As I recall, in the commercial it was suggested you take a piece of paper, cut it in a circle, and fold it over like a taco (taco, taco, taco) to make your own coupon (coo-pon, coo-pon, coo-pon) that you could use at Taco Johns. I think you had to write coupon on it too.

Whenever, and this rarely happens, I hear Taco John's mentioned, the chants taco, taco taco and coo-pon, coo-pon, coo-pon, run through my mind.

And this is how watching Psyche reminded me of probably the most exciting and glamorous thing that happened this evening.

While I was at Movie Tavern one of the owners stopped by and gave me a coupon for a free appetizer.

It's not exactly Twister with 15 women, but it isn't bad.

Posted by delmer at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2007

You're An Eight

Tonight I noticed something odd about myself. I'm not sure that it's an oddity unique to me and, in all fairness, I've noticed it about myself before. I've noticed it for years and, for years, I've wondered why I do it and why I don't do something to change it.

Tonight we went to Movie Tavern. I had a grilled chicken salad (and, while it was very good, I was worried a bit about what a woman might think of a guy who has eaten a salad with grilled chicken on it each time they've had dinner together; fortunately this worry would be flushed from my mind by the oddity that I'd notice later).

Flushed from my mind. With a little work, you've got a salad joke in there somewhere.

Ah, before I forget, we went to see License to Wed. It was pretty good and funny enough. That guy from The Office (two of his costars make appearances as well) who has a Johnathan-Silverman likableness about him was in it. The biggest movie surprise for me, and I don't think this falls into a spoiler category, was the scene in which Robin Williams was in the shower; based on his forearms I thought he'd have a lot more hair on his back and chest. Maybe he waxes.

After the movie was over I needed to make a pit stop in the Little Male Movie Goers Room. And this is where I noticed the oddity.

I stand too far from the urinal when I start peeing. And not just at urinals, the toilet at home as well.

Normally I just pee without giving it too much though. Once in a while I'll notice what I'm doing — my urination idiosyncrasies — and put a little bit of thought into the process.

And what is it that I do?

I approach the toilet, plant my feet firmly on the tile (just in case I experience some sort of super-duper-high-propulsion urinary stream … in 45 years of peeing standing up this has never happened but it always pays to be prepared), pull out the urinary equipment, and start peeing. Toward the end of the process I'll take a step or two toward the toilet due to the fact that if I don't I'll end up peeing on the floor as the pressure decreases.

Most times I do all of this without thinking.

Sometimes, like I said, I notice what I'm doing and wonder why I don't change my peeing style. Tonight was one of the times I noticed.

And tonight was special in and of itself. Not only did I notice what I was doing, but I realized that every once in a while I'll notice my peeing technique and this led me to wonder what it was that would make me notice something like this periodically.

I think I figured that part of the puzzle out.

What caught my eye tonight was the guy three urinals down. He was one of those pissers (and I say pissers because pee-ers comes out as peers or peeers) that thrusts his hips so far into the pisser that you've got to wonder if he isn't using his penis to scratch his initials into the back surface of the urinal.

Men, you've seen this guy and you know what I'm talking about. Maybe you are this guy. (And if you are, don't you get a lot of pee back splash all over your hands? Yes, I said hands with an 's.' What? you're able to get by using a single-handed grip? I guess that would explain the deep-urinal thrust.)

Where were we?

I started peeing. There was the deep-urinal thruster. I realized I've spent my life taking one or two steps toward the toilet at the end of every pee and wondered why I didn't change. I wrote most of this blog entry in my mind and spell checked it twice. I took a couple of steps forward. I shook twice, put the equipment away, zipped up…

… and washed my hands (with an 's').

Posted by delmer at 12:01 AM | Comments (10)

July 19, 2007

Vanilli, Milli

My iPod is sucking the life out of me.

I resisted the urge to get an iPod. I wasn't sure I needed one as I already had a couple of MP3 players that did most of what I wanted an MP3 player to do. This past winter I went so far as to buy a new MP3 player so I could make use of folders … and then I never bothered to do anything folder-like.

So how is it I have an iPod?

Well, Jack, the middle child, really really really (you recall the rule about three reallys, don't you) wanted a Wii. He kept saying things like, "When I save enough money …" and really, that's all the quote you need to see. He's 12; he has no money-saving skills — it wasn't going to happen as long as new Yu-Gi-Oh cards were being printed.

Jack, as it happened, had a 30-gig Video iPod. On it were the two songs I put on it for him the day after Christmas. One was some sort of child-friendly rap song and the other was Ted Ginn Did Everything by The Dead Schembechlers.

(Maybe you remember the conversation I had with my brother about Ted Ginn.)

Despite the dearth of music on his iPod, Jack spent an hour or so listening to it one night. I'm not sure if he programmed song order or if, preferring to be surprised, he had it on shuffle.

Then, grade cards came home, Jack had a disappointing grade, and he was put on electronic-gadget probation. No computer games, no video games, no porn, and no iPod. And, of course, we hung him from a gibbet in the cellar for a few hours.

Nine weeks later new grade cards came home, Jack's grades were up, and he was taken off electronic-gadget probation. He went back to the games, I made the porn thing up, he never touched the iPod again.

So it sat in a drawer up to the point Jack asked about getting a Wii.

I figured I'd buy the iPod from Jack and use the money to get him a Wii. Perhaps I'll tell you about the Great Wii Hunt later, right now we need to get into how the iPod is sucking the life out of me.

I've had the iPod for two weeks, I think. Thus far I have a bunch of Podcasts on it (NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and HBO's Bill Mahr). I have a whole bunch of music to put on it but I refuse to do any syncing until I get everything sorted just right. In the past I was a little sloppy about how songs were ripped. Some of the song titles have a format similar to: 05 Ted Nugent - Great Gonzos - Stranglehold and some are formatted like Gold - ABBA - Dancing Queen.

I know what you're thinking. Ted Nugent and ABBA would be a great double bill. Especially if they did a couple of songs together. I can almost hear Frida screaming dog, dog … dog eat dog as I type. Oh, and how about a super-group duet: That Nadine, what a Dancing Queen, she lookin' so clean, especial'y down in between, what I like … (ooh baby).

EDIT: This just came to me! They could do the wang dang sweet poontang part in Swedish (or Dutch or German, whatever the hell ABBA is) that way it would get American air play. And it's all about making it in America; New York, specifically, for you Nugent-Sinatra Supergroup fans.

(It's got legs, people!)

Anyway. There's a part of me that really wants all the file names to have the same format. That want lasted about 5 minutes. The want that every song has a good IDTag has lasted hours. And hours. As has the want that songs are grouped right.

I know iTunes will do some grouping (and probably a whole lot of stuff I don't know about yet) but a problem I've had is that, for example, a CD I have of 80's New Wave Hits was grouped by artist. iTunes created 10 folders, one for each artist on the CD, and then a subfolder with the album name in which the one song from the CD was placed. I have a number of CDs like this which led to a multitude of artists being listed with a single song in their folders.

(Another problem is that sometimes groups like The Who are stuck in folders named The Who and Who depending on the CD. Bruce Springsteen was put in Bruce Springsteen and Springsteen, Bruce while Milli Vanilli was put in Milli Vanilli and Vanilli, Milli. (I made the last one up.))

Now, there may be a smarter way to tidy things up (and I'm in no mood to hear about it now after all the time I've put into this), but I've spent hours moving things around the way I want them.

The most awesome thing about this whole exercise is that, 1) I will probably never look at the iPod display while it plays so IDTags are mostly useless to me, and 2) I will probably keep the iPod on shuffle all the time. There is not a person on earth for whom folders will be more useless.

Yet, I felt the need to sort things.

Posted by delmer at 12:32 AM | Comments (2)

July 18, 2007

When you need a donut ... you need a donut

The other night as I came out of McDonald's I noticed a hot air balloon floating overhead. When I looked around I noticed several more.

I'm not sure what they were up to, though there's a chance they launched from the Franklin County Fairgrounds where the fair is in progress.

When I took this picture (and I apologize for the quality) I noticed the crew was working the flamethrower pretty hard. I don't know much about balloons and thought this might be part of the standard ballooning procedure.

And it might be. Maybe they were trying to set the balloon down and didn't want to hit the ground too hard. In any case, they landed at the Tim Horton's across from where I was parked.

I think the crew did a pretty good job of landing in the Tim Horton's parking lot. So much of the area they were in was not a parking lot of any type.

The really deserved a free dozen (creme filled, not just glazed) for all their hard work.

Posted by delmer at 5:38 PM | Comments (2)

July 17, 2007

The London Luke

I use Ecto to post blog entries. Twice in the past I've had several entries pre-written and saved in draft mode and then had the program (or my computer) crash and had Ecto revert to "Welcome to Ecto Mode" at the next program start. You know, the mode a program starts in for the very first time when you have to set it up.

Both of those times I'd lost the pre-written entries.

A week or so ago, and this was during the time in which I was controlling the world, I noticed I had several things saved and wondered about the possibility of Ecto crashing. It never crashed. And yet, one time I started it up and there I was in "Welcome to Ecto Mode."

BUT! I had learned form past mistakes and was able to save the pre-written entries. One of them follows. (By the way, I love Ecto. It's great. The version I'm using is several revisions out of date. I'm not saying I'm suffering from some sort of program bug. I'm just making an observation. I'm pretty sure Ecto recently burped due to my thinking it might burp.)

This is something I thought I'd posted before. I checked; I haven't.

The Dream

The other night I dreamed that I was driving through West Virginia. Somebody was in the car with me, but I can't recall who it was. In the dream we merged right onto a ramp that would have taken us to another part of the highway. Halfway around the ramp, and just as we went around a rather large hill that had been obscuring our view, we saw the London Eye.

We were not surprised to see it there.

What was kind of surprising was the way the London Eye was set up. I'd thought it was a big Ferris Wheel with large, glass, fully-enclosed cars like you'd see on a regular Ferris Wheel. Sort of. Think of one of those Plexiglas balls you might let your hamster run around the house in, but make the glass clearer, the ball not so round, and give it pivot points. Mount these on your typical Ferris Wheel arms and make the whole thing a lot bigger. (I've obviously seen the London Eye before as my thoughts of what the cars looked like were similar to the picture here.)

In the dream the London Eye had a Ferris Wheel look but instead of the glass-enclosed cars mounted to arms you had a different setup at arms-end. The enclosures were glass but they looked more like inverted iron maidens and the occupants were in them upside down, as if they were hanging by gravity boots. The pivot points were right around where the ankles would be and there were four inverted iron maidens side-by-side at the end of each arm.

WHY?

West Virginia: Not long ago I drove through West Virginia with my sister. I noticed that the Welcome to West Virginia signs no longer say "Wild, Wonderful, West Virginia" but "West Virginia, Open for Business." I noticed one of the signs in Die Hard 4 the other day. Also, my kids had left that day (with my parents) to visit my brother in Williamsburg; the folks and I had looked the route over in the atlas.

Iron Maiden: I just picked one up at a garage sale. It had barely been used. No, really, I've no idea. I am reading a book in which a guy spends some time in a cell that is centuries old. There's no mention of an iron maiden, however.

(Pre-posting edit:I was going to link to a picture of an iron maiden. As it happens an iron maiden is not what I thought it was. I was thinking of one of those cages made of banded steel that are person shaped and that you always see hanging in dungeons in horror movies and British films).

The London Eye: Your guess is as good as mine. I'd been talking about Ferris Bueller earlier in the day with a couple of guys. I'd also been talking with a British friend. There's that mascara commercial where the woman says, "Get the London Luke" at the end; this always leaves me wondering if the typical "London Look" is a scary woman of the night.

(Another pre-posting edit: I have recently been advised that the scary British streetwalker I've been seeing on the tele is Kate Moss.)

Posted by delmer at 10:15 PM | Comments (6)

July 16, 2007

This was awesome!

Only because nobody got hurt. Otherwise, it would have been tragic.

I rode the bike to work today and at lunchtime I took The Mighty Schwinn out for a spin. Toward the end of the ride there is an overpass on Davidson Road that goes over I270. I was traveling west on Davidson and had just reached the top of the overpass when a big wrecker passed me on the bridge. Just as he got ahead of me I heard what sounded like a shotgun blast, which naturally startled me, and I thought that maybe the wrecker had backfired (though it didn't sound exactly like that).

As I hit about midway across the bridge a big chunk of tire came flying over the overpass and the fence that was on the north side of the bridge (you know the fences, the ones that are put up to keep idiots from throwing stuff off bridges). The tire chunk easily cleared the fence, continued south, cleared that fence, and went back into southbound traffic.

It was a dump truck tire that had exploded, and I think if the guy could have timed it just right he might have been able to catch the rubber chunk in the back of his truck.

The last I saw of the dump truck he was pulling over and it looked like part of the tire was still on the rim flopping around.

After the explosion the wrecker pulled into the left turn lane (as if he were going to turn onto Lyman) and sat there with his flashing lights on. I turned on to Lyman and as I passed the wrecker, still on Davidson, I noticed the guy was out checking his tires. I gave him a yell to let him know what had happened and he said he'd been afraid that maybe he'd hit me.

As you know, he hadn't, but I'm thinking (and Myth Busters will back me on this) that had that tire chunk hit someone on its way across the bridge, it might have messed them up pretty good.

Posted by delmer at 8:50 PM | Comments (12)

July 15, 2007

More Baseball and Old Gals

I popped out of bed early this morning, dressed, stopped by Micky D's for an Egg McMuffin and Fruit & Yogurt Parfait, and then shot off to one of the Worthington High Schools to sit with Roy and Lois and watch their oldest son, Dusty, play baseball. Following that game I met Roy and Lois at the Ohio State Baseball field for the championship game.

In the end Dusty's team would win it all. The final game was very exciting and in something like the 5th inning the Flames (Dusty's team) scored 8 runs to go ahead by one or two. The end of the game would find them ahead by two or three.

All told, over the last two days I watched about 10 hours of baseball. This is more baseball than I've seen in the last 20 years if you don't count games my kids have played in.

I then went to work for a bit, and then I went to Donato's for pizza. Which is when things got really exciting.

When I walked into Donato's there was an older lady (like 75+) walking toward me and another older lady. The first older lady had one of those metal canes that spreads out at the bottom so that there are four legs to it. As she walked by me and toward Older Lady 2 she said something about her food choice like, "I decided," or "I'm going to order," or something else that led me to believe she'd already ordered. As she was saying this I politely said, "Excuse me," and twisted sideways to go around her.

It was maybe six steps from where we passed to the counter … where another older lady was standing.

As I lined up behind Older Lady 3, Older Lady 1 passed me, sort of. She'd been beside me the whole time, I think (and moving very well for a woman with a four-legged cane) though I hadn't seen her due to her lack of tallness. (It was, most likely, her low center of gravity that allowed her to move so swiftly and so noiselessly.)

She said, "Pardon me," stepped in front of me, and said something to the Older Lady 3 (the older gal at the counter).

Technically, Older Lady 1 had gotten out of line and, technically, she'd cut in front of me.

Honestly, I didn't give a shit, though her "Pardon me" had lacked the genteelness I expect from Older Ladies and had an air of what-do-you-think-you're-doing that I didn't care for.

I was fine with Older Lady 1 retaking her place in line. She was obviously with Older Lady 2 and Older Lady 3 (And you know Older Ladies are at their most dangerous when they travel in packs. Especially when they're hungry.). She'd seemed to know what she was going to order. She was old and could have died at any moment.

There we stood. Older Lady 3 at the counter, Older Lady 1, and me. Ahead of us was the young lady order taker who was standing beneath the giant, readable-from-anywhere-in-the-restaurant menu.

Older Lady 3 had a coupon. Probably. It was hard for me to tell from where I was standing, though, in all fairness to me it was hard for her to tell from where she was standing and she was holding the item in her hand. (As I've suggested before if you leave home with what you think is a coupon you really need to read it before you get to wherever you're going that you think it might be accepted. If what you think is a coupon is blank on one side, has lines on the other, and is roughly 3 x 5 inches in size, it may be nothing more than an index card.)

As it happens, Older Lady 3 did have a coupon. You'll be happy to know that it was good, as the woman had hoped, for a few cents off a Mariachi Beef pizza.

Bravo!

Older Lady 3 moved to her seat and Older Lady 1 took one step forward to the counter. It was at this moment that she noticed the gigantic readable-from-any-point-within-the-restaurant menu.

And she read it. And then I believe she translated it into Latin, Spanish, Hebrew and French. Nothing else could possibly explain how it could have taken her so long to order a salad that was sitting in the cold case right in front of her.

I, as you know, am making fun of this just for the sake of making fun. I never really got worked up by what was going on. It was sort of comical.

The women did not seem to be suffering from any sort of dementia past the type that afflicts so many as they try to make fast-food choices; had they been I never would have mentioned this. They all seemed, based on the parts of their conversations I overheard, to be big fans of A Rod and his nice, tight ass.

I do honestly wonder why a person would wait until they got to the counter before they'd read a hanging menu or form any sort of idea about what they'd want to eat. I knew what I wanted before I left home (an Individual Works pizza with green olives instead of green peppers and a side order of wings with no sauce. Geez, I know about how many calories are in what I ordered: the pizza was about 760 calories (Googling comes up with 715) and the wings have about 80 calories each.)

And what were these women doing out at 6 p.m.? Did they miss an Early Bird somewhere?

Posted by delmer at 9:20 PM | Comments (2)

July 14, 2007

Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and The Mighty Schwinn

I have known Roy for 30 years. He was 16 (probably) and I was 17 when we met.

We had dinner last night, for about 4 hours, following a baseball game his son played in.

Today I rode the Mighty Schwinn to a local high school to watch another of the games (it's a tournament, and by the way, the round trip was 23 miles) and then I drove to a second game this evening. It was during the evening game that Roy told me about a football game his son had played in.

I may not be dead-on in my description of events, but this is how I remember it.

During the game his son had taken a physical beating; he's the quarterback. Toward the end of the game the son was running the ball and crossed the line of scrimmage and found himself in front of a linebacker. All he had to do was step out of bounds and the play would be over. If you're not familiar with American football this is a tactic teams often use to keep their quarterbacks from getting hurt — if he's running the ball and it looks like he's about to get creamed he'll either go out of bounds or drop to the ground to end the play.

So, all the son has to do is step out of bounds and he'd be safe from possible harm. Instead of doing this, he lowered a shoulder and rammed right into the guy and both boys went down. "The linebacker popped up and trotted off," said Roy, "Dusty got up and his shoulder was hanging at an odd angle."

As it happens, Dusty was fine.

"What were you thinking?" Roy asked his boy. "All you had to do was go out of bounds!"

Dusty said he realized that. He was just tired of getting beat on and wanted a piece of someone.

"Sometimes, son," said Roy, "Brains are the better part of valor." And that may not be exactly what he said but his point was — and I'm explaining the point for clarification sake and to give the people who know Roy and who know what point he was trying to make a chance to recover from the spitting-laughing fit they're having — his point was, sometimes you have to do the smart thing rather than the thing you want to do.

So, Roy is telling me this story and gets to the "brains are the better part of valor" statement and I, in an instant, think of about a dozen things he'd done 28 to 30 years ago that seem to run counter to this advice and I say, "When you tell Dusty things like this do you have trouble getting the words out of your mouth without tripping all over them?"

When I said that Lois, his wife (I've known her for about 25 years) looked over and said something like, "I'm glad you said something. I couldn't believe you were going to let Roy get away with saying that."

Anyway, the games went well. At one point, in the later game, the team we were cheering on had eight runs and four of those were RBIs Dusty had and one was the run he scored crossing the plate.

The weather could not have been better and I tried to convince Roy and Lois that the weather was like that here all the time and that Columbus was the San Diego of Ohio. They weren't buying it.

Some photos:

Weight Watcher's Plaza. I remember when this used to be a full-fledged mall. The program really does work!

The concession booth. I had two hot dogs (with mustard) and two Diet Cokes.

Warming up.

Warming up a little more.

They have a runner on first.

Posted by delmer at 10:57 PM | Comments (4)

You Can Wear The Yellow Jersey

As you know the 2007 Tour de France (pronunciation guide: Tour de Fronce everywhere except the USA where it is called, Tour de Fr-aaants. NASCAR Fans may know it as "That big bicycle race that the guy with one ball kept winning.")

Where were we? Ah yes, The Tour de France recently started. Stage Two kicked off today (Monday, July 9).

To celebrate I'm giving What's a Delmer Look Like readers a chance to win an Yellow Jersey. A Yellow Jersey that is very much like the one worn by stage winners in the TDF; similar, that is, in its yellowness.

"Winning" is really too harsh a term here. If anybody would like to have an XXXL (that's three exes and an el people!) Nashbar Essential Jersey send an email to: yellowjersey@delmer.com. Include "Yellow Jersey" as the subject line.

The jersey is pretty light and will fold into a padded envelope which will make it easy enough to ship just about anywhere. I've checked rates for Great Britain, Norway (Wasn't Thor from Norway? He was pretty big), Australia (some of the guys from Mad Max had some size to them), and China (Yao Ming … though he's more likely a tall than a XXXL).

Oh, the point of that bit above is that I'll pay postage. Domestic and foreign. It's all about recycling. The jersey is a bit big on me and I'll never wear it again. Rather than have it hanging around I'd like to pass it on to someone else.

How will it fit you, you wonder. Well, in the photo below I'm a smidge over 6' 4" tall and currently bounce around on either side of 230 pounds (16.4 stone, 104.3 kg). I wear 34 inch jeans with a 34 inch inseam. I'm a Virgo and I enjoy walks in the park, sunny days, and, if I win the crown, I will put all my energies into ending world hunger (right after I get a pedicure.)

The jersey has been worn once. It was washed yesterday and hung out in a field of daisies to dry.

(This entry will remain at the top of the blog through Saturday or until someone requests the jersey. In the case of multiple requests I'll honor the one that came in first based on when the mail arrived. While I don't expect a big run on this item, it is important that folks know it isn't my intention to tick anybody off.)

Posted by delmer at 7:54 AM | Comments (9)

July 13, 2007

I'll bet you stuff like this never happens to women

Yesterday morning, as I stood in front of the toilet, taking my first pee of the day, I noticed a small butterfly in the bathroom. It was very close to my face and as it flew further away, and as my far-sightedness kicked in a bit, I noticed it changing shape. It changed shape to the point that just before it hit the toilet, a bit above the water line and a hair to the left of where I was causing the water to bubble form a head boil roil, it had turned into my contact lens. The left lens to be exact.

What to do?

I gave it a flush. It was a disposable lens and was overdue for replacement anyway.

And then I thought back to the trip to Williamsburg of a couple of weeks ago. During a rest break and as I stood above the toilet in a gas-station bathroom I noticed a fly buzzing around. He eventually flew into my stream which, powered by several liters of various fluids consumed over a couple hundred miles and aching to get out of me, drove him into the toilet.

"That's freakin' awesome!" I thought. "What are the odds?" That had never happened before, and I've been peeing for years.

My excitement was short lived however. The fly popped out of the toilet and then proceeded to buzz around the single-toilet-and-sink-sized restroom as I did my best to make sure he didn't land on me somewhere. I'm not a big fan of having dry flys land on me; a wet fly would be more than I could stand.

Unfortunately, by the time I'd thought of turning the water canon on him I was running low on pressure.

I'll bet you stuff like this never happens to women. It's my guess that this is where a whole lot of that penis-envy stuff comes from.

(In other news, last night I was watching a recorded The New Adventures of Old Christine and there was a bit where her brother makes a crack about grandma having taken salt shakers from restaurants when he'd eat out with her. This reminded me of something I hadn't thought of in years. When I worked at Lottie Moon's in Oxford, Ohio we would periodically lose condiments to thieves. Once two women were eating in and one of them put the A1 Steak Sauce in her purse. Women! In their late 30's or 40's! Not students! The server noticed right after the women walked out the door … where they paused to chat … so she walked to the door and gave them the "I know you stole a bottle of our A1" evil eye. The women noticed her, gave each other a nervous look, and scurried off.)

Posted by delmer at 7:17 AM | Comments (4)

July 12, 2007

Several Days in Review

Last night I dreamed I was hanging around at David Letterman's house with him and his boy. The dream started with his son flying a red or orange model plane. Letterman and I were both wearing button-fly jeans and his were a darker blue than mine. I've no idea where this dream came from; Letterman went to Ball State which is in the MAC, like Miami (which I blogged about yesterday), but that seems like a weak link.

This morning while I was at the McDonald's drive-thru a noise caught my ear. That noise was, "I'm in a hurry," and it came from the woman sitting ahead of me at the pick-up window. She was in a hurry but not so much of a hurry that she felt compelled to get her food and drive off — no, she got her food and then asked the window worker several questions that led to pointing at the drink carrier a couple of times. I knew which coffee had creme and which one had sugar after the second explanation. The woman in a hurry needed to be told one more time. She also needed an extra sugar, just in case.

She then pulled her car forward far enough so that I could get my food and then, using her inferior-driving skills, she stopped. I was not in a hurry (I don't usually make stops if I'm pressed for time) but I was still put off by the fact after I got my food I wasn't going to be able to get around her without some superior-driving skills (as I've explained before, my driving skills are second only to yours).

Before we go any further, I'll say again. She stopped in the drive-thru lane. I was blocked. Everybody behind me was blocked. She was in a hurry — but, certainly, nobody else could be. She seemed to be piddling with something on the seat (maybe the extra sugar) although for a while she sat straight up in her seat with her hand out the window like she was drying off her palm.

I bumped her just a little bit and then, drunk with power, pushed her right out into traffic.

No. I did one of those things where you backup just a little to get more swing-around room and I swung around her as I tossed a Fruit and Yogurt Parfait onto her windshield and kept an eye on her to make sure she didn't decide to goose it as I pulled in front of her to make my left (she was in a hurry, after all.) As I completed my left I saw her in the right-turn lane leaving Micky D's. This meant 1) She had not been waiting for an employee to bring her something — there hadn't been time from the moment I swung around her to the moment she was making her right, and 2) she should have pulled to the right as it would have been easier for the rest of us to get around her (of course, pulling forward would have accomplished the same).

Yesterday, while I was at the local bike shop (which is also a big garden center) I overheard a woman exclaim, "Ah what is that? Vomit?! I almost killed myself."

She had stepped in something that had a vomity look to it. In the end it would turn out to be cat vomit, which I think puts it in the hairball category.

I can't say that I'd want to step in cat vomit, especially if, like this woman, I'd been wearing thongs (those inexpensive, little sandals).

However, had I stepped in cat vomit I really don't think I'd have made as big a deal out of it as she did. She went on too long about how she'd almost gotten killed and how she could be getting free flowers for life (due to the garden center part of the building, which is like 90% of the place). I couldn't help but think that the closest she was likely to get to being killed today was by bitching too much and pushing me to the point where I picked up a potted fern and beat her senseless with it.

The President of the United States is wiping bird poop off his own suit (and you know he has people to do it for him). Certainly, this woman could handle a bit of cat vomit.

Finally, and this is a word to the wise for everybody. If you are in a car at a stop light and the person in the passenger seat is giving you a happy ending (and gender and type of happy ending doesn't really matter here) and there is a guy on a bicycle behind you, he can see everything that's going on through the rear window. Most likely better than a person in a car would be able to. After all, the guy on the bike is standing, so he's looking down a bit, not straight through like a person in a car would be and the roof of you car isn't obscuring his view like might happen if he were in a truck.

The guy on the bicycle might have several more miles to pedal before reaching home and bike shorts are pretty tight. Please show some restraint. (At least keep the windows up so the screaming isn't distracting.)

Posted by delmer at 7:08 AM | Comments (7)

July 11, 2007

Dreams and Boneheaded Remarks

Last night I dreamed that I was on a mission to destroy the ice making machine in one of the women's dorms at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) . For whatever reason I'd been on one of the top floors and had to make my was to the basement where the ice-making machine was.

And what a machine. The door to the room it was housed in looked like a normal dormitory door but when it was opened a person found that the floor of the room was about 1/2 up the front of the door. So, you had to climb up to the floor level. This probably had something to do with the amount of machinery that made up the unit; it took up most of the basement.

The only other notable part of the dream was that a part that I removed, from some sort of horizontal rods in the floor, was the same color of blue as replacement rollers for an HP LaserJet 4050 Printer (and I'm guessing other HPs as well).

Also, in the dream I had to make several trips in and out of the room and once accidentally stepped outside to find myself locked out and the mission over. I believe the dorm was Tappan Hall.

The Why I Had This Dream Analysis:

One of the engineers was wearing a PIKE or TEKE shirt yesterday, which may be the college link. Also, I've recently had to explain to a European how Miami University could be in Oxford, Ohio (keep in mind, Miami was a University when Florida still belonged to the Spanish). Jack and I saw Transformers last night and they keep Megatron on ice for a while; as he was thawing I noticed that chunks of ice fell off of him and admired the special effect. Also, a week or so ago I saw Die Hard IV and there is a scene featuring cooling towers and a bit with some horizontal rods with big teeth on them (the rods lacked any HP parts that I was able to identify). Finally, once in college some friends and I sneaked back into what had been my Freshman dorm to steal ice from their ice machine.

A dream I had the other night, and this is one of the racy ones I wasn't going to mention, featured a woman I knew back in college (and a bit before that). At one point, when I was a freshman in college, we were together in a private area. We had known each other for years but weren't what you would call close pals though we were friends. (She was one of the girls who always dated older guys in high school).

For the life of me I can't recall how we ended up where we were. (And it wasn't anyplace scary, or odd. I just feel better being vague.)

At some point she said, "I wonder what you look like naked."

I made a dismissive remark along the lines of, "Not all that much," to which she said something like, "You probably aren't giving yourself enough credit."

Anyway, the other night I dreamed about her and in the dream she knew exactly what I looked like naked.

The Why I Had This Dream Analysis:

Lately I've been thinking about the boneheaded things I've done involving women and I think this might be one of them. I imagine a smoother guy would have said, "Why don't we find out." I simply changed the topic.

Speaking of boneheaded things:

Have I blogged about (or have I just replayed in my head, over and over) the night I had a female ask me more than once if I was sure I had to leave? We had been sitting on the couch rubbing noses.

You see, I knew I should go based on the time — it had been dark for several hours — and I said as much. And I was sure she wanted me to go so she could get to bed. It only made sense. Even though she asked me, several times, if I was sure I had to go.

It wasn't until the next day that it hit me, "She wasn't trying to get rid of you. She asked you to stay. Several times! What a blockhead!"

[That story seemed to fit with the bit above, so here it is.]

Posted by delmer at 4:50 PM | Comments (5)

July 10, 2007

Greet and Meet

Today we'll start with some dream pre-analysis. It'll make me feel better about where this ends up.

Once in a while one of the local radio stations will sponsor a fundraiser in which the women from one of the Gentlemen's Clubs will wash cars. The fundraiser is called Toys for Ta Tas which would make it something that is held to collect toys for children at Christmas.

That's the only thing that makes sense as a lead up to the following dream.

The boys and I were in the car. The Wife at the Time was there too, in the backseat with Haydn and another of the boys. I recall Haydn was in the backseat as he would eventually have a question and I'd turn to hear him.

We were driving through an area with stops here and there and at each stop was a porn star. It was like a Meet The Porn Stars event.

All the stars were dressed.

We pulled up next to Peter North and chatted with him briefly.

In the dream the guy we spoke with was really not Peter North. And in all honesty I don't think I would know Peter North if he walked into the building (maybe if he had Jenna Jamison hanging off the front of him I would) but if you were to line up several guys and say, "One of these dudes is Peter North," I might be able to pick him out.

In the dream we didn't say much aside from, "how are you."

"How's it hangin'" would have probably been more appropriate.

(In the way of more analysis, yesterday I read that a porn star had died. He may have taken his own life.)

Posted by delmer at 7:26 AM | Comments (6)

July 9, 2007

A Broken Spoke

Yesterday I thought I'd ride out to London, Ohio for some chicken gizzards. I figured the round trip would be about 50 miles but about 10 miles into it I realized that would have been via the most direct route. The route I was taking had been part of the 100-miler I did last year and I know it contained some bonus miles at the start.

Not to worry. Gizzards have magic healing properties and if the ride went 60 or so miles I knew I'd be OK. (The KFC in London is the only KFC I know of in the area that sells gizzards.)

About 13 miles into the ride I passed Roberts Road, which is about 4 miles away from where I live at it's closest point.

About 16 miles from home I slowed for a train and noticed an odd feel coming from the rear wheel. I crossed the tracks and pulled off into a field-access drive next to a 'lost tortoise' sign.

I could tell the rim had gone out of true and when I checked the tire it had an odd look to it — sort of like a steel belt had shifted on a radial tire. I assumed the odd look the tire had was due to the rim problem.

I also assumed I had a broken spoke; none of them, however, were dangling.

A smart man would have simply turned the bike toward home and gotten there the shortest way possible. I, however, had a set of tools with me and thought I'd take the tire off. (Nothing sucks the 'smart' out of a man like having a set of tools nearby.)

Have I mentioned it was 92 F (33.3 C) today and very humid (wet) today?

Removing the wheel involved getting a lot of dirt and a bit of grease on my hands. I was wearing a brand-new yellow jersey and had a bit of concern about getting it greasy. Fortunately, Americans are litterbugs. Horrible litterbugs. Such litterbugs that many countries refuse to grant us entry and we find that the only way are able to visit to admire their beautiful mosques is to invade. I found a discarded roll of paper towels in fairly short order.

Actually, we're not all that litter-buggy, but I was able to find a couple of sheets of paper that I used to wipe my hands on. (In the end I'd only get two grease smudges on the new jersey. In the very end, I'd use a water bottle to wet my hands and take one of my socks off to wipe and dry them.)

I let the air out of the inner tube, removed the tire, gave it all a serious look, and decided, "Yep, the rim is out of whack." I put it all back together and limped on home.

And limping is an exaggeration. After a little bit of doing 14 mph I decided I could probably pick up the pace … which I did for the 12 miles it took me to get to Donato's where I stopped for a small Chicken Vegy Medley Pizza (green olives instead of green peppers) and some wings (no sauce). It wasn't gizzards, but it wasn' t bad.

I found the broken spoke while I was at Donato's.

And then I started thinking which, as you know, is rare enough. A couple of rides ago, and I think it was toward the end of the 50-miler, I'd heard a noise of some sort and at the same time I felt a vibration through the horn of my seat into the bottom part of my manly region. I almost blogged about it when it happened but I figured you'd heard enough about my testicles. (I know I know I know. Can you ever really hear enough about my testicles?) Anyway, had I blogged about it then I'd have been a bit more clear about when in the ride I'd heard the noise and how it hadn't sounded like anything I'd heard before and how I would have expected a noise like that to continue (like a bearing going bad).

When all the math is done, it looks like I rode with a busted spoke for about 55 miles or so.

Anyway, more photos.

A portion of the Heritage Trail Bike Path. I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing and accidentally went off the path into the grass. In order to make anybody watching think that I'd veered into the grass on purpose I had some water and took this photo. Of course, anybody watching might have had the thought, "I'd have slowed a bit before leaving the pavement."


Beach Road Bridge


The creek that flows under the Beach Road Bridge. I really should know the name of this. It almost has to be Darby Creek.


Someone has lost a tortoise.


The jersey on the left is a XXXL Nashbar Essential Jersey. The Jersey on the right is a XXL purchased from Aero Tech Designs. As comfortable as the one on the left is, it is just too freakin' big and doesn't look good. I'm going to vote for XXL's (the Nashbar XXL fits about the same) for folks my size (6'4", 230 pounds). Aero Tech Designs makes a taller jersey, but I don't think I'm going to buy one. Please note, in the photo on the right that bit that looks like an extra-large love handle (again, not the ears) is, in fact, one of the three back pockets. (Sorry for getting all girly on you.)

Posted by delmer at 12:20 AM | Comments (1)

July 8, 2007

I'm trying to change

Today I tried three new things. (Um, yesterday technically. I posted this just after midnight.)

First, rather than pedal off into the great void that is rural Ohio I pedaled off to Dublin which was a great void not all that long ago but, today, is fairly well populated. A friend had entered his car in a car show and I went to check it out.

There were a couple of reasons for going to the car show aside from supporting my buddy. I'm trying to keep to myself less and, inasmuch as I'd tweaked my back yesterday, I thought it might be better to take a shorter ride rather than end up 25 miles from home with crippling back pain. (I'd end up doing 23 miles total today and the exercise seems to have fixed my back.)

The second thing I tried today was smiling in a photo. It didn't feel incredibly natural, but you'll see it below.

Finally, this evening I went out with a friend of a friend. We had dinner with the intention of seeing License to Wed following. As it happens, License to Wed was sold out and she was kind enough to suggest Die Hard.

There. That's three ways I've changed in just one day and I'm not even dizzy. (I'm not sure the smiling-in-photos thing is going to stick.)

Photos from today:

Just 4 days past the 4th of July and this corn is way past knee high. Years and years ago this field would have been filled with corn stalks that had sprouted from seed. Growing corn is a lot of work and the people of Dublin, Ohio found it was easier to mow it all down and replace it with cobs pulled straight from the asses of prominent Republicans. The ear I'm standing by has a little plaque on the back that says Dick Cheney on it. (You'll notice I'm smiling in this photo — I'd just thought up the Dick Cheney line; it was funnier among the corn than it is here.)

That's a brand-new jersey. It's an XXXL and is a Nashbar Essential Jersey. It's a bit to big (for you jersey shoppers out there, I'm 6'4" and 230 lbs in this photo).

Cornhenge

This was a corn field, or soy bean field (Google crop rotation if you need to) last year. It's condos now. It's just over a mile from where I live.

This about 1/2 mile from the other field. Again, it was planted last year and this year a retirement community is going in.


My buddy's Nova.


An Amphibicar.


An old hardtop convertible.


A Nomad.


An old car of some sort.


More old cars.


Old Fords


Old Ford.

Posted by delmer at 12:37 AM | Comments (3)

July 7, 2007

Things that have Shaped Me: Thing II

I mentioned yesterday that today I'd be blogging about why I'm afraid of women.

Really, that was sort of a joke. Women don't actually scare me, at least not the ones who keep their nails filed short.

I should also point out that no person is shaped by just two things. We're affected daily by the things around us and the things that happen to us and are constantly being shaped and reshaped if only on the tiniest scale.

There are, however, two things that I often think of that had they not happened might have led me to being a different person today than I am right now. When you look at them and compare them to genuinely horrible things that might have happened, they're really not bad things at all.

I'm not comparing anything that happened to me to anything that happened to you. And there have certainly been far more tragic things that I've been around since I was an adult that seem to have screwed me up less (though I always lock my doors now and want to know when people close to me expect to be back home).

Anyway.

When I was in first grade (1966-1967) I remember being your basic, normal little boy who would chase little girls around the playground.

One day in class I had a note passed to one of the little girls that said, "I love you." I'd seen other notes passed, and it seemed like a normal thing to do.

Well. The little girl I had my note passed to ratted me out to the teacher. I was humiliated. I don't remember if the teacher read the note out in class but I do remember her making the comment that at our ages we were too young to know what "love" was so the class certainly had an idea what I'd written (though, I think the teacher probably read the note to the class).

To say something like that could have a lasting impact may be saying too much. Maybe I'm genetically predisposed to being shy around women when it comes to asking them out. I know when my friends say they have a female friend they want me to meet I normally shoot the idea down. I don't want the mutual friend to hear from the female that she didn't care for me due to Reason A or Reason B etc. (You know, and a lot of times you have to buy a new shirt or something. And I don't like to shop.)

I believe I went about 18 years without telling anybody I loved them. Wait! That isn't true. I have a memory of my sister hugging me and telling me she loved me and I honest-to-God, choked when I told her I loved her back. It was very uncomfortable.

When I was in my early 20's a girl I'd gone out with called me at home. I was talking to her on the phone in the kitchen (this predated a cordless phone in our house) and some adults were in there and would have been able to hear the conversation (technically, I guess, I was an adult too). I was very uncomfortable. When the call ended my mother asked if I was upset with the girl. When I explained I wasn't she said I sounded kind of cold. I hadn't wanted to sound overly interested just in case it didn't work out; I wouldn't have wanted my mother to feel sorry for me.

At some point I started dating the short red-haired girl. After a while we were having that how we feel about each other conversation and I told her I liked her a whole lot. She said she thought she like me more than that which I thought was a lead-in to having me say, "I love you." So I did.

She said, "This seems awfully soon."

Aaaak! Twice in 18 years! How could this have happened.?! At least she didn't run off to tell one of her college professors.

Anyway, the next day she loved me back and all was well. (That is up until she ripped my heart out and left me the hollow shell of a man I now am. Hollow shell of a man? Hollow husk of a man? Which reads better?)

After that I was able to tell other people I loved them. My mom and dad, my sister. My brother and I took a little longer to get around to it, but, we're guys. I tell my boys, daily, that I love them. If we're on the phone and nobody can hear him Haydn will tell me he loves me back. Samson always says it and Jack does mostly (depending, like Haydn, on the audience at his end of the phone.)

I don't let the boys tease each other about girls and they all seem to have pretty healthy (as if I'm a good judge) and hopeful attitudes about girls. Oooh … as cool and clinical as that sounds, what I mean is they don't seem to be terribly shy. They'll also tell me about little girls in their classes they think are cute. I never would have told anybody anything about girls I thought were cute when I was younger.

And maybe I never would have regardless of any note passing. Maybe I'm the way I am just because that's the way I am. Who knows?

Posted by delmer at 11:38 PM | Comments (1)

July 6, 2007

Things that have Shaped Me: Thing I

Let's start off with a little bit of sympathy for the blog writer. I tweaked my back yesterday when I got up from my desk to go pee. One of the engineers saw me hobbling around and when I told him what happened he told me I should say, "I tweaked my back when I was taking a pee." He assured me that would sound more impressive; he's one of our mechanical engineers and I'm guessing he'd be able to explain the mechanics surrounding lifting things at the urinal and back tweaking.

I'll have to remember to use my legs more next time I whiz. Wait, I wasn't peeing when it happened, I was merely getting up from my desk. Hmm, I almost had myself believing the lie.

You know what's interesting, if you tweak your back just right, and the initial shock of pain is severe enough, it will cause you to pee a little bit right on the spot. That didn't happen yesterday, it was sort of a mystery tweaking. One of those things I had to think about (did I just tweak my back?) that eventually turned into a lower-back-muscle-tightening extravaganza. (I did stretching exercises right off the bat.)

But that's not what today's entry is about, today we'll discuss things in my life that have made me what I am. And today we'll discuss why I never smile in photos while tomorrow we'll discuss why I'm afraid of women (and that goes way back to 1966 and does not involve nuns). Tomorrow I'll also drone on about how I should be a big boy and get over this stuff … well, we'll leave that until tomorrow.

I was in fourth grade, so that would make this 1969 or 1970, and I was standing in the lunch line with Gordon L. As Gordon and I talked I could tell he had something on his mind and asked him what it was. He said "nothing" time and again as I asked him, time and again, what it was. Finally, he said, "You have lips like a ..." and then he said the "n" word.

Let me say right now that I love all people and try not to treat others differently based on race, creed or color. And I was very happy when my middle child was introducing his mother to classmates in Kindergarten and did so thusly: "This is Mark, he wears glasses, this is Sean, he has red hair, this is Molly, she has a brown face, this is Tim ..." He recognized people were different from one another (glasses, hair color, skin color) but it wasn't anything to make special note of. It's how we raised the boys.

Anyway, in the late 60's early 70's things were a bit different.

Maybe not.

Well certainly they were, but I never looked at Gordon's comment as it applied to race. When I was younger I never looked on that incident and thought "I have lips like a black person," I always looked at it in the light of "I have lips that are not like everybody else's. They are bigger. And that's not good."

When it came time for pictures I remember not smiling as smiling would not have allowed me to pull my lip in and make it as thin as I could have made it. And then I just never smiled in photos.

And when I got older smiling so that you could see my teeth sort of felt odd. Which is why you are much more likely to see photos with my mouth wide open and my eyebrows up as I try to accommodate anybody who is telling me to smile than you are to see me smiling like a normal person would.

I would have the last laugh. Today people are paying to get lips like mine and they don't always have the best outcomes.

Maybe that should say, "I would have the last smile…"

Anyway, the picture across the right side shows me throughout the years though there is nothing earlier than college. I seem to be smiling in the photo with the red shades; that was probably a spontaneous shot and if you look closely you'll see my mouth is open. In the picture below that I am actually, at Samson's request, growling. Toward the bottom I'm smiling (again it was not a situation in which someone said, "smile," and if you were to see the whole picture you'd see a short redhead with me.) I seem to be honest-to-god smiling in the Elf Hat.

(I recall being in 7th grade getting school photos taken and the photographer telling me to smile. I didn't and when he said something about it I was concerned he'd think I was trying to be a tough guy. I was neurotic about my neurosis.)

Posted by delmer at 7:21 AM |