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The hardest thing I've ever had to do...

...is tell you... "you smell like cheese."

That's funnier if you sing it... really.
...

My dad's 60th birthday is tomorrow. He's been overweight for as long as I've known him (and that's a long time). I was talking with him today and he mentioned he's on the Nutri-Sweet Diet. While I'm trying to figure out what a Nutri-Sweet diet would consist of he goes on to say that most of the meals are pretty good, but their scrambled eggs suck. PING! That's Nutrisystems diet, right dad? Oh, yeah, Nutri-SYSTEMS!

I love my dad. He has always had these little quirks like this where he's talking about something, but has the name slightly off so that at first you think he's talking about something else. But if you just keep listening you'll get enough clues to figure it out.

My mom has a similar problem, but her's is more to do with pronunciation. She has a terrible time with some brand names. Most recently was IKEA. The funny thing is that when I first told her about it, she repeated it back to me ok, but once I sent her to the web site and she saw it spelled out, she started mispronouncing it. But she got it straightened out. In fact, I think it's now one of her favorite stores.

They also just got a new puppy. A few years back they had a Shar-pei named Brenda. They really loved that dog. Brenda developed some kind of cancer and they ended up driving that dog to Dallas (150+ miles one way) several times for chemotherapy. I have no idea how much money and time they spent on that dog, but I'll bet it's more than most people would be willing to.

After Brenda died, they swore they wouldn't get another Shar-pei because it would remind them too much of Brenda. My dad was especially heart-broken when she died. However, a few weeks later, my mom called and asked me if I could drive up to Sherman to look at a puppy for her. So we ended up buying them a new Shar-pei puppy named Sima. That's not the puppy I'm talking about here.

So I'm talking with my mom a while back and she mentions that she's trying to find a plane to put the dog on.

...

Me: What dog?
Mom: Didn't I tell you we bought a dog?
Me: No.
Mom: Oh... We bought a dog.
Me: Why does the dog need to get on an airplane?
Mom: Because she's in Vancouver and it's too far to drive.
Me: The dog can drive?

Yeah. My mom bought a dog from another freakin country! Which is good because we don't have NEARLY enough dogs here already.

This particular puppy is a lilac Shar-pei. That's right, it's a purple dog! Ok, purple-ISH.

You know this dog wasn't cheap. Then consider the cost of flying a dog from Vancouver to Houston to Dallas and my parents driving their Ford Expedition (15 MPG) 300+ miles at $3 per gallon. That's $60+ on the gas alone!

Sigh. Anyway, the new puppy's name is Gabrielle (Gabby).

Me? I went to the North Richland Hills Animal Shelter, found a sweet little Schnauzer/Terrier mix and broght her home for $60 (plus her first vet visit - but that's another post).

I am a Rat

...big nasty motherfucker with balls THIS BIG!

Watched The Secret of NIMH with Dee today. I was afraid it might be a bit scary for her, but it wasn't as bad as I remembered and she seemed to enjoy it.

If you're not familiar with the story, it basically revolves around a mouse who's husband has recently died who must enlist the help of some genetically modified escaped lab rats who can read, work with electricity, plumbing and even magic to move her house and save her sick son before the farmer's tractor plows the whole thing under.

I had also been unaware that Wil Wheaton voiced one of the mice (the bratty one).

Now... about that mouse's husband...

Don Bluth and his crew made this movie right after they escaped left Disney to start their own enterprise. In fact I think it was this movie that prompted that move because Disney thought it was too dark to make any money.

But have you noticed this theme among Disney films? It sure seems that a lot of them seem to start with the death of a parent or at least imply the death of a parent. Let's see...

1. Snow White (1937) - Wicked step mother - implies the death of her natural mother
2. Bambi (1942) - Bambi's mother shot by a hunter
3. Cinderella (1950) - Wicked step mother - again implies the death of her natural mother
4. Treasure Island (1950) - Haven't seen this in a while but the general concensus among some of my friends whom I polled by IM is that Jim was an orphan
5. Pollyanna (1960) - Both parents (missionaries) dead
6. The Sword in the Stone (1963) - Arthur's an orphan
7. The Jungle Book (1967) - Mowgli's parents died in a bizarre canoeing accident (there was probably alcohol involved)
8. The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) - The kids were orphans
9. Escape to Witch Mountain (1975) - [SPOILER] IIRC these kids start out as orphans but find their parents at the end of the film. (so this one probably doesn't really count)
10. Pete's Dragon (1977) - Pete's an orphan on the run from abusive adoptive parents.
11. The Rescuers (1977) - The kidnapped girl is an orphan.
12. The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979) - Kid's parents still dead.
13. The Lion King (1994) - Simba's dad gets trampled to death by stampeeding... what were those things anyway? Wildebeasts?
14. Tarzan (1999) - Tarzan's parents die in a treehouse.
15. Dinosaur (2000) - We even have an orphaned dinosaur.
16. Finding Nemo (2003) - Nemo's mom and about a thousand siblings die in the first five minutes.

There's probably more that I'm missing or can't find info on right now. Granted this is a very small portion of the films Disney has made over the years but I also didn't count a lot of the movies where the kids have a single parent and no mention is made of what happened to the other parent. Additionally, a lot of the stories for these films is not original Disney material either and "orphaned" by no means that the parents are actually dead.

Anyway, just thought I'd share. If you know of any I'm specifically missing, please let me know.

I am a fish

OK, maybe not so much a fish, more like a fish-like animal that walks upright and breathes air, that kind of thing.

When I was a kid (not the goaty kind) I was both a good kid and a bad kid. It really depended on who you asked. For example, if you asked the leader of the girl scout troop that we shot the bottle rocket at, she'd probably say that I was a bad kid. However, if you asked... well... um... OK I can't really think of anyone other than my grandmother who might say that I was a good kid and I'm not sure her opinion really counts for the simple fact that she was my grandmother and therefore biased.

The point of this is that my daughter has been something of a pill lately. So much so that my wife went out and bought a bunch of books about handling difficult children. One thing became immediately evident from those books... it could be much worse.

Contrary to her father, most of the people who meet Dee comment on how good of a kid she is and how polite she is. I sincerely hope that this continues to be the case as she grows up.

When she's disobedient and obstinate I try to keep in mind the kind of kid I must have been at her age. Of course, that's not necessarily a good thing. One day I may hear myself say, "you better straighten up and fly right young lady otherwise you're going to turn out just like me." If that doesn't scare her straight nothing will.

Blog moved... Done

Got all of the old entries ported from PHPNuke over here. There were a few entries that needed some editing due to the way Blogger handles tables and such. Basically I needed to cram all of the table code together because the system interpreted each CR as a new line so there was a huge amount of white space before my tables.

Anyway, got that done.

On the home front...

We have a rule in the house that Dee gets to put any loose change we find into her piggy bank. She really like to put money in her piggy bank. Normally when I get home I hear "DADDY!!!" as soon as I walk in the door and she runs up and wants hugs. Yesterday, however, she yells "DADDY!!!" and runs up to me, pats my pocket, hears the jingle and starts saying, "change? change? change? change?" So now it looks like I'm gonna be patted down and frisked when I get home instead of hugs.

On the blog front...

In the process of moving the blog over here I had to make lots of entries one after the other. After a day of this, the system apparently decided that I might be a spam blogger. A spam blogger is an auto blogger that simply posts lots of links to the spammer's website in hopes of driving up traffic and google scores.

Anyway, once the system made this decision it added a "Word Verification" step to my posting page. You know the type that shows you a string of characters in a wacky font and asks you to type in the letter you see. Apparently this is because the spam bots won't be able to recognize the letter and therefore will be blocked from spam posting.

However, I'm sure that there's someone out there close to hacking this and having a program that can read these letters. So then to admins will have to come up with somethign more elaborate to tell the human posters from the machines. Eventually this will escalate to the point where you're gonna have to take a psych test every time you want to post an entry...

"You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?"

Moved the Blog :-P

So... evidently PHP Nuke had some security holes.

After getting my site hacked about once a month for the past coupel of years, I've decided (at the suggestion of a friend) to move my blog over here to Blogspot. We'll see how this works. Hopefully it'll be a bit more secure.

I've also been playing Guild Wars. For some reason I felt the need to dive into a MMORPG but didn't really want to pay the monthly subscription like World of Warcraft charges. So far I'm pretty happy with it. The basic game has a pretty large world and there's already two expansions out for it. But, like other things, I don't know if I'll stick with it long enough to even bother buying the expansions.