So I was saying to my wife, "Wife, I'd love to take our flower vases with us when we go shopping today, but dammit, they're just too clunky and take up too much space."

Problem solved. And not a minute too soon.

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How my son spent his summer vacation, pt. #1

Come on, boy! We're burning daylight! Ain't got time for you to mug for the camera - got three more acres to till!

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Don't all the girls all get prettier at closing time?

Yes. Yes they do, Mickey Gilley.

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There's a phrase that needs to die, and with your help, we can eradicate it.

All I need you to do is physically harm anyone who uses the following turn of phrase:

"Best [any noun here] ever."

Or anyone who uses this doubly offensive written usage:

"Best. [any noun here]. Ever."

But be discreet about it. I don't need the law showing up at my house.

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Gratuitous life update #2: The State That I Am In

It was a warning shot across my bow, and I count myself lucky that I have an opportunity to fix it before it's too late. Now to follow through!

***

At the urging of my betrothed, I paid a visit to my doctor - - -

Wait, wait, wait. Ever since ol' Doc Beemblossom passed on some years ago, I haven't really had a doctor to speak of. Even so, it had been about. 17 or 18 years since my last visit to someone I could call my family physician. I had gone to various walk-in clinics or ERs since then for a cornucopia of maladies, accidents and hypochondrial heart scares, but as far as a doctor that I know and trust, who knows about me and my bodily quirks and foibles, no.

Anyway, I set about acquiring a new family doctor and found one. (Again, at my wife's urging. She's been on me for years to see a doctor, just to make sure all is as it should be as I cross into the backside of 30.)

(... the short side of time ... Back on the bottom, with no hill to climb.)

(I don't care what you say, I'll put John Conlee up against any of those early '80s country singers any day of the week. "I Don't Remember Loving You," "Rose Colored Glasses," the just-quoted "Backside of 30" ... mmm. About the only real clunker he did was "Common Man," a trite, cliched piece of pablum about being - you guessed it - a common man. [Who drives a common van. His dog ain't got a pedigree. Et cetera.]

(I would imagine that he closes his shows with it these days.)

(Let it be known that, on the date and time of this post, this is the first time in the short history of blogging that John Conlee and Belle and Sebastian - in the title of this post - have been intentionally quoted in such close proximity to one another. Someone call the Guinness Book.)

It took random smoking-related numbness to finally convince me to go (not to mention "get me to quit smoking"). So I went and answered all the questions and got signed up for some blood work. He congratulated me on putting down the cigarettes - how disappointed he would be to see me now, as I guess the rules of quitting smoking don't include "continue to smoke a pack a day."

The results of my blood work came back a short time later. Several of my irrational fears, chief among them being diabetes, did not come to pass, so I was thrilled about that.

But.

"Your cholesterol is moderately high." The nurse practitioner rattled off a set of numbers regarding bad cholesterol, good cholesterol, LDLs and whatnot, none of which I remember save for the overall number of 236.

I can't say that it was a total shock to my system - I've known for years that my diet is pretty lousy. I love my fried foods and my red meat and my Long John Silver's and my McDonald's. I've convincingly faked an allergy to vegetables. So, yeah, the numbers weren't surprising.

But my eyes were opened when I went to my follow-up appointment.

I had a choice to make: did I want to go ahead and get on a cholesterol-lowering drug that I would have to take every day for the rest of my life? Or did I want to make some lifestyle changes and see where we stood in 6 months?

Obviously, I opted for the latter. I'm not ready to start considering "the rest of my life" yet. It seems so finite, and yes, it *is*.

But right now, at 33, I feel like I'm still within the reach of "limitless possibilities," and when you put a punctuation mark on that, it tends to limit the limitless.

Maybe that's just the irrational optimist in me talking.

***

Irrational optimist that I am, I nevertheless moped around the house for a solid week afterward until my wife finally got pissed off about it and let me have it.

There are two types of people in this world:

The first is the kind of person who it can be said, "If he/she ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." It's not that that person is a black cloud, it's just that the sheer force of their personality leads people to do whatever they can to keep them happy.

The other is the kind of person who it can be said, "If he/she ain't happy, then everybody's happy." If you read my old posts about Doom, then you know that that's the kind of person he is. The ludicrousness (is that even a word?) of what comes out of their mouths when in a state of unhappiness is comic gold.

My wife, on the other hand, falls into the former subset of the population. I ended my pity party before the cake was even served and got to the task at hand.

***

So, now what?

I used to joke that the only two things in my house that I didn't read as much as I should are food labels and The Bible.

So I'm reading food labels now and, while I'm still eating a lot of the same things as previously, I eat them much more in moderation.

I've been drinking those little 3-ounce shots of Promise Activ. Phytosterols and all that. Tastes like a tiny smoothie, so I can deal with that.

Spending much more time outside with the boy, planting trees and trying to get a garden in the ground, though the monsoon season in Indiana hasn't allowed for much progress on that end.

Stopped eating donuts. (Like with most things, it's pretty easy if you don't buy them.) Replaced with Cheerios.

All of this with an eye toward October. That's when I have my next round of blood work. If I can get my numbers down where they should be, or at least make significant progress - how hard is it to knock 40 points off your cholesterol in 6 months? - then I'm good to go for a couple of years.

And if not, then I'll have an idea of what "the rest of my life" will entail.

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What is this "beer" you speak of?

Sometimes the simplest product additions are the best.

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It's not a cardinal - I know this much - so I will call it a sand piper. Who the hell knows.

The reason that a little sand piper yelled at me the other day for walking across my own friggin' driveway? These eggs she is nesting.
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I'll say it again.

Fuckers.

Get a little better anal rape (tm). Only at BP.

And Neil Cavuto - normally a sane, respectable business journalist - defends those indefensible fuckers. Sad.
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Fuckers.

No, seriously. Fuckers.
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Gratuitous life update #1 - politics

"So," you say, "six blog posts since April started. What the fuck, man? I mean, what the fucking fuck?"

It's a number of things, most of which I'll lay out in due course, but thank you for your concern.

Ever since I turned 30 - which this year can be measured in old-style Olympic years and not just human years - there's been a steady undercurrent of "What the fuck am I doing with my life?" that's made itself apparent in everything I do. That feeling has only become more prevalent in recent months.

I ran into a very dear friend at the dollar store the other day. She said that she still checks out BT to see if I've said anything about the election or anything else.

(That, my friends, is probably a 21st century definition of a friend - someone who still checks your blog even though you haven't posted anything worth reading in a month of Sundays.

(Which is, incidentally, a very 20th century expression.)

Anyway, my thoughts about the election, since A asked:

1. Senator Ted Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. I'll set politics aside for a moment and ask that you send up a prayer for him and his family.

2. I took great pleasure in not voting for He Ain't My Man Mitch in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Unfortunately, he ran unopposed, so he still won the party's nod quite handily....

I had figured that the fact that the only positive things I had heard about Daniels came from his advertising meant that there would be a whole slate of Republicans to at least split the vote and send Daniels a message. Everyone I know has a laundry list of complaints about Daniels' list of accomplishments - I raise hell about him every night when it's 9 o'clock and I can't get my son to go to bed because it's still solidly daylight outside. So of course there would have been a handful of disenchanted Republican folks on the ballot, right?

No such luck. So now he has a mandate from the party. Bully for him.

3. I'll grant that the GOP primaries have been, for all intents and purposes, done for several months, and John McCain came out on top. OK, fine. He's our guy. Count me less than impressed - for that matter, count me less than impressed with the whole field of Republicans that ran.

It's saddening, as much as sites on my side of the aisle like RedState, et al., like to pump him up as our best shot against the Democrats in the fall, that McCain is currently the GOP standard bearer. He was the best we could put forth? Really? We're the Republican Fucking Party, and we put a RINO on the general election ballot? What, Lincoln Chafee and Chuck Hagel weren't available?

(In my primary, I voted for Romney. I held my nose, too.)

Still ...

4. Just because I'm not voting for McCain doesn't mean I've had a full-on Obasm. Sorry, I can't take part in the Barack worship. Which, to hear some of his supporters tell it, makes me a racist.

I'm not a racist, I just vehemently disagree with everything he says.

It's scary to me as an American when a man who could be the face of the nation for the next 8 years says things along the lines of, "You can't drive your SUVs, eat what you want, and heat your homes to 72 degrees and expect other countries to just say OK."

In other words, a President Obama is going to get the OK from other nations to determine how much I can eat, what I can drive and what temperature I can set my thermostat to. "Change We Can Believe In," indeed.

(Perhaps I'm just bitter.)

Hillary's not off the hook with me, by the way - but she does get a pass for dragging out the Democratic nomination process, hopefully all the way to the convention.

One other thought on #3 above: Who is the leader of the conservative movement now? I think the GOP is so rudderless right now because we don't have any strong leadership from someone with solid conservative credentials.

Just my $.02.

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Yay

I guess the below test worked, except replace all mentions of "below" in the text with "above."

Gratuitous life updates forthcoming.

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Sunflowers sprouting

Testing to see if I can send pics from my BlackBerry directly to BT. If so, consider the below a mere sample of the miracle of plant life. We've gotten 7 or 8 inches of rain since these were planted, packing down the tilled dirt into a homogenous sodden clump. Yet these sunflowers - there are about 25 or 30 sprouts overall, most unseen below - still pushed their way up out of the dirt to eventually stand tall in the coming weeks. Wow.
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Wasn't he in "Baby Shitheads"?

Did I ever tell you about the time I killed a bird that looked like Jonathan Lipnicki?
With a softball?
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My new hero ...

… is Ozzie Guillen.

 

Although I’m not clear on why he meandered off into “Ol’ Ozzie needs the money.” 

 

Still, he’s right. 

 

Especially about the Cubs. 

 

Which is why he’s my new hero.  Bleep the Cubs, indeed.  I’ve been beating that drum for years.

It'll blow your mind - get it? Ho ho!

Here's a thought that I can let depress me real easy:

The kids who were born when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came out will be graduating high school next year.

Back to your regularly scheduled nothing.

----------------
Now playing: Mother Love Bone - Heartshine
via FoxyTunes