Notival

It's July 3rd. And Im off work tomorrow for the holiday.
I nearly let the week go by without posting anything. Not because of a lack of desire, but rather I have been so busy this week that when I have time to relax and post, Ive forgotten that I was planning to.

Going to cook hamburgers tomorrow for any of our friends that happen to still be in town. Most folk are out of town for the long weekend. Ninsi's mother is in town and has been staying with us since last Saturday, so we're staying here. Last year, we cooked burgers and planned to watch the fireworks from Lone Star Park, but managed to miss them. But our neighbor put on a good show. With any luck, he'll do the same tomorrow night and we can just watch it all from our balcony.

We are going to the horse track tonight for a while. Just to hang out in the muggy heat, mostly, I think. Maybe bet a few dollars on the ponies.

Happy 4th.

Fourth of July has come and gone. We did not do much for the holiday. Went to the horse races last Thursday. And a couple friends came over on Friday and I grilled burgers and hot dogs. Then we sat out on the balcony and watched the fireworks from around the metroplex, as well as the fireworks from the street in front of our house. Some of the neighbor kids were setting off mortars in the street. A clear violation of city regulations. No one cared. A cop even drove by once, but did not even bother to stop.

The burgers I grilled turned out very good. They were very juicy. I didnt realize until last night, however, how much burger goo had dripped into the bottom of the grill. Ninsi and i made pizza, and decided to use the grill to heat it up. But I had a hard time getting the temp to stay at 350, because the stuff in the bottom of the grill ignited and burned for a solid 20 minutes. So, after we had eaten our smoky pizza, and the grill had cooled off, I took everything out and scrubbed it down. Then turned it back on to try to burn off anything that was left.

The next cooking experience on it should be much better. Reptile will actually be using it this weekend to grill corn. It would have been funny had I not cleaned it, and the corn caught on fire, but since Im planning on everyone eating the corn, it would not have been in my best interests.

I bought a nineteen pound turkey yesterday. I'll let it start thawing out tomorrow. It should be ready for cooking on Saturday. We still have to go buy one more gift for the Dirty Santa exchange. We have one already from the Somethingstore.com. And it is indeed a winner...

Im getting lax about posting, it seems. I try to put something up 3 days a week, but I think Im averaging only twice a week for a while now.

I think it is six weeks til Ninsi and I and most of the people we know here in Dallas fly off to Atlanta for DragonCon. We haven't been in a couple years, and it appears to have grown significantly in size since we were there last. And when we were there, it already completely encompassed two hotels. Now it has four, at least.

That will be over Labor Day weekend, as it always is. Im sure we will return with a few thousand pictures. Not too many of us, mind you, but thousands of everyone else. Not a hard feat considering there will probably be 40,000 people in attendance total.

I have one good costume for it. Ninsi wants to 'party with the Pirates' so I am going to try to put together a good piratey costume over the next month as well.

Im a cool guy. Ninja coo. All of the time. Except for some of the time, when I'm not quite. One of those instances happened last night.

I made pizza. I've done it before, I'll do it again.
All was going well. I had cooked my sausage, and pre-cooked my crust and the pizza itself was actually done and on my plate.

I grabbed the crushed Red Pepper from the cabinet, took off the lid, and began it shake some out on my pizza. Instead of shake out, it came out in a pour. And it wasn't red pepper. It was Cinnamon.

Yes, I had just covered one piece of pizza in cinnamon. Im not sure why it was in the spot where i was expecting pepper.

Undeterred, I put the cinnamon up, and grabbed the crushed Red Pepper, took off the lid, and began to shake it out on top of the cinnamon. Instead of shaking out, it came out in a pour. And it wasn't crushed red pepper. It was ground Cayenne pepper.

So, not only did I fail twice to put Crushed Red Pepper on my pizza but it was now super-hot and super-cinnamonny. About the time I finished cursing myself out for this Fail, I heard a piercing scream behind me that did not stop. Ninsi was hopping around on one foot because she had dropped a piece of steaming hot pizza cheese on her toe and it was apparently eating through her flesh. Once she finished screaming, she even said she probably should have kicked it off her foot sooner.

What happened to the cinnamon pizza? I ate it. I felt it was proper punishment for such a huge fail. I wont say it was good, I will say it was full of taste.

It's mid-July now, and we just finished our Fourth Annual mid-July thing wherein I cook a bigass turkey and we exchange gifts. Reptile and his wife got the worst of it, I think. He was the recipient of the things we got from Somethingstore.com. Almost feel sorry for him. Almost.

With the conclusion of the turkey fest, Ninsi and I now have pretty much nothing left to do until we head to DragonCon at the end of August. I will probably make a trip up to OK sometime before then, but outside of that, i think that our weekends are totally open. Which is really kind of nice. Normally I would look forward to getting some stuff done around the house on those days, but I really dont have a lot to do. So I may start looking into that wet tile saw some more. It's about time I bought myself a new power tool anyway, and the saw would fit the bill nicely.

Of course, I also need to build a deck railing. I should do that before I start tiling the bathroom.

Dark Knight starts tomorrow at midnight. Probably wont make the midnight show. Getting too old for that.

I found this funny.
I read a story about PETA this morning, and in the story it had a link to their latest commercial about spaying and neutering your pets. I clicked the link.

They have web filters here at work, and this is what I got back:
"The Websense category "Violence" is filtered."

Apparently PETA = violent.
That's just too funny.

I really need to win the big lotto sometime soon so I dont have to bother with work anymore. Because it is really cutting into my 'me' time. It might help if I actually bought a ticket once in a while.

Went and saw Batman: The Dark Knight last night. It is very good. Everyone should pretty much go see it.

Ninsi and I went to the Dallas Museum of Art last Friday. She bought a membership for the year so we can go anytime. We've already got our tickets to King Tut in November. On the third Friday of every month, they stay open til midnight and do a movie and random stuff. So it is actually rather neat. We watched about half of Giant. I wasn't really in a movie-mood, but I think we should rent it to watch the rest of it.

The rest of the weekend was spent mostly cleaning house and doing yardwork. I had been letting the yard slide for a couple weeks. Time to get back to it now. I planted some more ivy that will hopefully take hold and eventually cover the wall. I dont think it will do that well though. It grows better in shade, and the last 50' of wall is in the sun all day. So I will be surprised if the ivy last through the week with every day being 100+ degrees.

DCon - 5 weeks, and counting.

It's been over 100 degrees for a while now. I was rather hoping that Dolly would move a little further inland and push some rain our way for a day or two. But it petered out a bit too soon. So the excessive temperatures will continue for a while.

Sunday is the final day of horse racing for the season. They will do Quarter Horse racing in a couple months, but that is no fun to go to. Ninsi and I have a half-dozen passes to get into the races without paying. So, we might go just to do something. We have nothing else on our dance card until next month.

Ive been saying it for three weeks now, but maybe this weekend we will go see Wall-E.
Or not.

So, sometimes I run. I run from the house, up to the park, and around the mile track there a couple times. Then come home. Because it is so very hot outside right now, I do not run the whole time. I run some, then walk some, the run again. Mainly so I dont give myself a heat stroke. And there is no real reason for me to try to run the whole thing.

The problem comes in with all the other people that are out walking or running as well. Especially later in the evening. There are a few dozen other people on the track as well. I have issues walking when other people can see. I'm there to run, so they shouldn't see me walk. This makes me run more than I really should, given the heat. And it also makes me run faster than I really should. So it takes considerable effort for me to stay with my schedule and walk part of the time. But the whole time Im walking, Im annoyed at all the people I perceive to be staring at me. I mean, they are walking slow, or pushing baby strollers and shit, so it's not like they are actually caring what I am doing. It's just all in my head. And it is probably going to cause me to have a heat stroke because Im going to wind up running too far, too fast, when it is way too hot.

My competitiveness is my albatross.

Ive been meaning to blog.
Seriously.

I've just been overloaded at work, and have not had time.
Do it when not at work, you say?

Nah, I dont see that as an option.