THE DAY AFTER THE BLIZZARD OF THE CENTURY OF THE DECADE OF THE DAY

(NOTE: May not be actual image from 2009 Oklahoma blizzard)

So for the last week or so, the dudes with ties who tell us what's going to happen with the weather (mostly The Weather Channel, Gary England and this other dude who a guy in the break room was saying got kicked out of school and just has the job because his dad owns the station, or something else weird like that) never could get their stories straight regarding the weather Thursday. (Christmas Eve, duh) First, it was rain on Wednesday, followed by a slight chance of snow. Then, we were totally getting a white Christmas, maybe. THEN, it was something like a sixty percent chance of rain on both days. Then, it was "oh hey, we're totally gonna get some snow Thursday, right on." But then, some time in the morning, right before we were headed off to gay-work, it had changed into:

So yeah, with ominous warnings fresh in our minds and promises of six to eight inches of snow on out TVs and radios, we headed off to work like the damned fools that we are. And God, who has no use for damned fools and has tried to do me in on several occasions, decided that we could fuck right off, ripped open the sky, and dumped fourteen inches on us. Of snow. Coming at us at a sixty freaking miles of hour, like little daggers from hell, which is what it might as well have been. Of course, with States of Emergency being declared, roads getting so piled up with snow, ice, abandoned vehicles, and hordes of the screaming undead* that every highway in the state had been shut down, and only complete idiots even attempting to leave their homes, my workplace stayed the hell open, only letting the out-of-town folks go around 1:30 or so, by which time it was already damn near unthinkable that they'd actually get to where they came from. In fact, I had to stay there, pacing around a mostly customer-free store, cursing every living relative of Sam Walton (peace be upon Him) until 5:30 in the PM, and the store stayed open for possibly as long as two more hours after that. Yeah, those bloodsucking bastards just had to squeeze out the profit equivalent of a really slow, late-month Tuesday, even while this was happening about twenty feet from my front door:


By this time, my car was a total loss as far as getting home was concerned, and I had to get a ride from another dude whose car was pretty much unburied, despite being almost right next to mine. After a harrowing trip home that involved some shithole in one of those giant pickup trucks whose four wheel drive capability apparently gives them magical ice-driving capabilities passing us going about fifty and walking the last half-mile or so, because my street was a wreck and I didn't want to strand the dude over here, I got home. Eventually, I thawed out and took pictures. Here are some of them now:

In addition to death and destruction, this storm apparently had the ability to turn people into Eskimos and dudes from Chicago who were getting punched in the face by The Invisible Man.

Them feets is buried, yo.

Snow drift against one of the buildings here. Coming from a flat place such as I do, I had a lot of instances of "oh daaaaang, look how high that one drift is - Oh wait, that house is on a hill."

The view down my street. This is AFTER the snow plows came through.

The winds we got were strong enough to rip one of the window shutters right off the side of my building...

But where it landed was almost completely free of snow or ice, despite nothing being there but the neighbor dude's motorcycle. Christmas miracle?

Meanwhile, across town in a place where toys are apparently Us, Sarah's truck remained where it had been abandoned the day before, with a good three feet of snow serving as a big middle finger to us all. This was the only snow drift in the entire parking lot, almost as if the forces of nature were conspiring specifically against us.

Eventually, it was freed, after we shoveled away enough snow for me to lift the truck over my head and throw it to safety.*

Back home, Dusty held a silent vigil for our safe return.

But we returned, and all was well. But I have to warn you - Yellow snow DOES NOT taste like lemons. Don't ask me how I know that. Just... don't.

That's about all I have to report for now, at least until I figure out how in the hell I'm supposed to get to work tomorrow. So until next time:

FEAR THE SNOSQUITO

*that part might not have actually happened

BLIZZARD OF THE CENTURY OF THE DECADE OF THE DAY

More news, notes, and photos from the planet Hoth coming tomorrow.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas

Issued by The National Weather Service
Oklahoma City, OK
4:17 am CST, Thu., Dec. 24, 2009

... WINTER STORM WARNING NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 10 PM CST THIS EVENING...

THE WINTER STORM WARNING IS NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 10 PM CST THIS EVENING.

* TIMING: ALL OF TODAY AND THIS EVENING

* MAIN IMPACT: HEAVY SNOW AND STRONG WINDS. NEAR BLIZZARD CONDITIONS AT TIMES. SNOWFALL WILL AVERAGE 4 TO 8 INCHES... BUT SOUTHERN OKLAHOMA MAY RECEIVE 8 TO 11 INCHES... GENERALLY BETWEEN LAWTON AND PAULS VALLEY.

* OTHER IMPACTS: THE CHANGE FROM RAIN TO SNOW WILL BE DELAYED THIS MORNING IN CENTRAL AND NORTH CENTRAL OKLAHOMA... INCLUDING OKLAHOMA CITY... GUTHRIE... STILLWATER... AND PONCA CITY. A MIX OF FREEZING RAIN AND SLEET... POSSIBLY HEAVY AT TIMES... WILL CREATE VERY SLICK AND HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS BY MIDDAY. HEAVY SNOW IS THEN EXPECTED DURING THE AFTERNOON.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW... SLEET... AND ICE ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. STRONG WINDS WILL ALSO REDUCE VISIBILITY TO NEAR ZERO AT TIMES... WHICH CAN BE DISORIENTING. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY HAZARDOUS OR IMPOSSIBLE. THIS IS A LIFE THREATENING STORM.

Keyboard Cat

Is at the keyboard.

So I had this dream...

No, not THAT dream...

So last night, I'm all crashed out hard asleep, and I start having this dream. Now, I don't remember the beginning or middle parts, but they're not in any way pertinent to this story I'm about to unfold here, so I'm not too worried about that. What I can remember is that it was one of those crazy, twisted dreams that takes you down some winding road of unrelated events that all seem perfectly related to each other, because it's a dream, and everything in dreams makes sense. Like the ones where you're eating spaghetti with Morgan Freeman or whatever, and you somehow end up fighting a dragon with a railgun in a totally different time and place about ten minutes later, and it all somehow makes perfectly fine damn sense. You know, that kind of dream. But once again, that's not the part of the story that matters.

So anyway, somehow, I end up playing outside linebacker for the Chicago Bears. And it's in an actual, by-god NFL game, but for some reason, it's being held in what I'm pretty sure was a high school gymnasium, like on a basketball court and everything. Don't ask me why - It was a dream. It was apparently taking place this year, because I totally remember that Hunter Hillenmeyer was lined up in the middle, indicating that Brian Urlacher was all arm-crippled off to the side somewhere. It might be the only time someone's dream of NFL glory has in any way involved Hunter Hilenmeyer. But I digress. I can't remember who we were playing, but I'm assuming it was the Vikings, because I remember that the other team had a really good running back that I was all nervous about having to go up against. And sure enough, the one play that happens in this game, they hand off to that dude. And he's all heading outside to my left, and I manage to come over from the opposite side of the play, put a big hit on him, wrap him up in textbook fashion, and drop him with a perfect form tackle, and all this is crazy, because when I actually played in high school, I only played offense, because I couldn't tackle for shit. But I made the tackle, dammit, and the fame and glory were mine.

Or they might have been mine, had I not woke up like immediately following the play.

Imagine this, but in a high school gym, and from the perspective of the dude next to this dude.
And possibly involving Morgan Freeman and some dragons.

You see, back in real-life, three-dimensional world, where I work at Walmart and don't fight that big, gold wolf-dude from Power Rangers with a sword that shoots tornadoes or whatever other kinds of crazy crap happens when I'm in brain-screensaver mode, I was still all crashed out hard, and Sarah was in a similar state about a foot away. And at that final, intense moment where I laid the hit on the dude I'm assuming was Adrian Peterson... Well... I kind of, sort of, in a way... laid a half-speed, from-a-laying-down-position version of the same hit... on her. I fucking tackled my girlfriend while she slept . Like imagine a sleeping dude laying on his side who just kind of lurches forward and lays some bizarre sort of clubbing blow on a woman sleeping right next to him. That's basically what happened. At the moment of impact, I woke up instantly, frozen in horror, realizing that I just unknowingly used my special lady friend as some sort of twisted tackling dummy, and fortunately for me, she never actually woke up to realize what had happened and just sort of went "mmmmmm" and kept right on sleeping. Thinking as quickly as anyone who had just committed domestic violence in his sleep could think, I just held my arm there where it came down, like it was just a thing I meant to do - Like I wanted to get all snuggled up, but I wanted to get all snuggled up RIGHT NOW, GODDAMMIT, so instead of just scooting over and draping my arm over her, I kind of jumped over (flopped, really) and gave her a big hammering forearm of the same kind that Big John Studd might have given to Hulk Hogan. In hindsight, I'm just glad that I wasn't laying a few inches further away in a couple of directions, or I'd be not typing this right now from one of those computers they don't let you use when you've been thrown in jail for forearming a sleeping woman in the throat.

Anyway, I've never really been into the whole dream-interpretation thing, but somehow, deep down, I think this all really means that it's time to fire Lovie Smith.

Well, that's a load off my mind

Taken today in Lexington, OK:



This might seem silly to you heathens out there, but the healing powers of The Lord are well-known:



Meanwhile, on a less cheerful note, we also drove past this one today, just outside of Ada:



Now, don't pay attention to what the words say, because that's not the focus here. Or, if you're way into The Lord, by all means pay attention, but then focus elsewhere once you're done reading. WHAT IN THE NAME OF CRAP IS WRONG WITH THOSE HANDS? They're like some sort of awful, twisted claw-hands.



I mean, just look at that. Look at it. Can you do that with your hands? No, because you don't have claw-hands. But you know who does? Scorponok.



WE HAVE TO SAVE JESUS FROM SCORPONOK BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

Past, present, future websitery

Hi. You might not remember me. I run a website. This one, actually. Crazy. I don't think anyone actually comes here anymore, but to the seven or eight of you who still do, I'm sorry I haven't done anything on here lately. I mean, I'm sure the internet is ablaze with furor about updates on the health and quantity of my aquarium fish, but updates regarding anything else have been sparse lately. As in maybe two in the last six years or so. Sorry, my bad. On the other hand, I suppose you can't complain, because aside from the one or two people who sent me five bucks back in 2004, (thanks dudes~) it's not like you're paying for this or anything. But you see, that's the thing: I AM paying for this thing. I pay like thirty bucks every three months for this, (actually, about 45, when I forget and pay on the fourth month...) and lately, I really haven't been giving myself my money's worth.



And the course this website has taken is, by any standard, absolutely retarded. It started off in 1998 as a free 10-megabyte Geocities page , (which I eventually outgrew, and with visions of taking the internet by storm with my musings on Mr. T and the newest GWAR album or whatever, I signed up with ChamberGates abandoned Geocities or Tripod or whoever I was using at the time, and Websurfnicaragua.com was born. Looking back, I wonder what would have happened if the internet's shopping capabilities hadn't gotten me fully exposed to Sacred Reich's back catalog around that time. Thinking about the way smaller size of my CD collection at the time, there's a chance this could have been named something like "www.thistoiletearth.com" or "www.selftitledsuicidaltendenciesalbum.com" now, or something else along those lines. In retrospect, I should have just registered something like "sextits.com," and made it a blank page full or banner advertisements, and I probably would have spent 2006 through 2008 typing this crap from a mansion in Hawaii, instead of a leaky shithole on Eufaula Street. Live and learn. But anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah -



I started this thing as a free website that I updated constantly, then turned it into a paid-for website that I never update at all. And to make matters worse, it's now mostly just a placeholder for this here blogger.com blog-type page, which is actually something that you don't fucking have to pay for. So I pay 120 bucks a year to put a fancy address on a free-ass blog that I don't even use. This makes no goddamn sense. But to make it make even less sense, I actually have been typing crap for the internet - on someone else's dang blog. You see, I was disturbed at how Chicago Bears-centric that this website had been getting, so when Raven Mack or Mike Dikk or whoever it was got all "hey, who wants to type up hopefully-amusing stuff about your chosen NFL team," I was all "okay, sure," and have spent the last year or so as somewhere between the first and third best Chicago Bears contributor to Armchair Linebacker. I think we've only got about ten teams covered now, but the Falcons dude plays it too straight and the Patriots dude is an absolute homo, so I would ask you, the gentle reader, if you'd like to try your hand at that sort of thing, but I'm too low on the totem pole to make that sort of decision, and if I know the internet, it's full of people who want to write things but suck at it, so not to be impolite, but screw y'all.



So I got a free website, started paying for it, stopped updating it, then started updating someone else's crap. What sort of maniac does this? Holy crap. So yeah, I now fully announce my intention to actually do some crap around here. What it will actually be is a whole 'nother question, and I'll figure out something eventually. Maybe something about how the country of Japan and jazz music need to be eliminated, or a 15,000 word essay on how the Maniac Cop films have changed my life. Who knows. I know every other time I get ~BIG PLANS~ for this thing, I tend to get hit with at least eight months or typist's block, as shown by this website title image thingy I was going to use in 2008, but just never got around to redesigning the site, and is now being seen for the first time ever in public:



Hopefully, this time, it'll be different and I can come up with something amusing. As some sort of empty gesture to fool my mind into thinking that I'll actually update a website that belongs to me from time to time, I just signed up for a Twitter account, and if you sign up as a follower, you'll get a tweet every ten months when something drops. I also went ahead and got a personal type one, and if I've learned anything from Facebook and Myspace, it's that I'll probably never, ever touch it again, but you an go ahead and follow it if you want to. I'm not gonna say what it is, because you internet types scare me, and I've already had to protect it, because I got two porn spam followers I had to delete within ten seconds of creating the account. It frightens me deeply to think of what the unprotected website one is going to get. Especially considering that back when I still had my web statistics turned on, it turned out that most of the people who come here from search engines show up looking for incest photos or something else along those lines. And it's funny to think about, because I'm sure this very post will get at least one person searching for that sort of thing. So to that guy - YOU ARE MESSED UP, DUDE. But yeah, to anyone else who wants my real Twitter account, (which I'm assuming will be my mom and maybe two or three other people) just ask me for it somewhere other than this website, or you might be able to find it on there searching first and last name. (and it's under the actual FIRST name, and not the middle one) Anyone else who doesn't know my real name or can't contact me through other means, be it phone, email, other internet social type crap, or just coming up to me going "dude, what's your username" can probably fuck off. Not saying that you ALL can fuck off; just the vast majority of you. You internet people are usually terrible.



Summing up, I haven't been updating, that's weird, I've been doing some stuff at Armchair Linebacker, I'm hoping to do stuff on here, I got a website twitter thingy you can follow, I got a personal Twitter thingy that most of y'all need to stay the hell away from, and you've probably spent like five minutes reading a post essentially about nothing. Wow. I feel kind of bad now. Here's a dollar:

Things Sarah and I find at the store

Have you ever fought with the idea of taking the time and trouble to fix a sammich or make some hot dogs, when there's a part of you that just wants to chew some dang gum? WELL NOW YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL:



Yes, bubble gum shaped like tiny bologna and tiny hot dogs. If Walgreens ever gets tiny bread bubble gum and some sort of mustard candy paste, we are fully in business.

But going from false meat to true metal, Kerry King having his own clothing line was one thing, but this is just taking things way too far:



Just the perfect thing to serve your favorite dips and sauces at your next sadistic feast.

ONWARD

TO VICTORY~!

HARD TIMES

"He put hard times on Dusty Rhodes and his family. You don't know what hard times are daddy! Hard times are when the textile workers around this country are out of work. They got four or five kids and can't pay their wages, can't buy their food. Hard times are when the auto workers are out of work and they tell em' go home. And hard times, are when a man works on a job thirty years, THIRTY YEARS! They give him a watch, kick him in the butt, and say hey a computer took your place, Daddy! That's hard times! That's hard times! And Ric Flair, you put hard times on this country by taking Dusty Rhodes out. THAT'S HARD TIMES!!"

- Dusty Rhodes (the wrestler)

Hard times are when Dusty Rhodes has to seemingly pee out half his body weight out to get rid of all the excess glucose, but the urinary tract infection keeps it from happening so easily.

Seems like ever since we took in this cat, all I've been hearing from people is how sweet a cat he is. "Oh, isn't he a sweetie" and such. And I suppose this is true, in the definition generally used to describe Feline Americans. Dusty is pretty much the most laid-back, loving cat I've ever been around; he doesn't mind being picked up, he runs to the door when he hears it opening, and he even comes running when you call his name. It's always seemed that he is a creature born into the diabolical and devious body of a cat, but with the pure soul of a dog. Doesn't matter who or what you are, to Dusty the cat, you're all pretty much alright by him.
Thing is, the more scientific reasoning for him to be termed a "sweet" cat is because his bloodstream has so goddamn much sugar running through it. It all started kind of innocently. One day you notice little things, all, "say that cat sure does eat a lot." "Say, he sure drinks a lot of water." "Wow, that's the second time we've had to buy litter this month." At first, you chalk it up as some weird character flaw or some cute little thing he does. Then, you wonder if he hasn't stopped growing yet, and that you might have some sort of 75 pound cat-beast on your hands someday. But once we found out what the deal was, it wasn't weird, or cute, or funny. It fucking sucked. Dusty started lazing around a lot more, even by cat standards, and the intake and output of fluids escalated from curious to impressive, and finally to absolutely frightening. After things progressed to rapid weight loss, we finally figured out that something bad was going on and took him to the vet. And on August 28th, right around the same time another Dusty, Dvoracek, was being pronounced out for the year for the fourth straight season, Dusty Rhodes (the cat) was officially diagnosed with feline diabetes.
As of right now, we're a little over a week in, and it's been an uphill struggle, to say the least. Dusty's been up and down, behaving almost like the July 2009 version of himself for a while, then laying down under the table for an hour with a sad look on his face, followed by drinking water as though such a thing were about to be made illegal. We've had our own struggles as well, fudging up his first insulin injection and going through about five of the little lancet thingies you use to poke a hole in his ear to get one little blood sample. (For use on a glucometer, by the way, which was provided for basically nothing by some fine folks who have made it their thing to help out broke-asses like us who have found ourselves as the owners of sugarcats.) But we're getting the hang of it, (Or to be more accurate, Sarah is, because she's been doing most of the work relating to cat illness. I did do the dishes the other day, though.) and Dusty's in relatively good hands, I would say.
On the other hand, I'm really starting to lose faith in our vet. My inner cheapskate already had doubts when the neutering bill came to $280-something, (It only cost about $70 to spay my other cat at a different vet, and that's a wayyyy more invasive operation) but lately, i think my problem is this weird pathological thing the people up there have with always having to be right, while we always have to be wrong. When Sarah first took Dusty in and inquired about the diabeetus, the immediate response was "well, I had suspected that," I guess hoping that no one would think to go, "then why didn't you test him a month ago, asshole?" Today, after a pretty scary episode last night where Dusty's blood glucose reading was 440 before his shot and 360 after (what you want is something in the 100-200 range, and there shouldn't be that huge a difference within an hour or so) and Dusty seriously squatted down and peed for over five minutes, until the litter actually couldn't hold anymore liquid and the stuff just pooled up around him, the vet was called again. And rather than concern, Sarah was greeted more with hostility, being all but condemned as a charlatan and a fiend for such a sin as home blood testing, and the machine itself was immediately deemed "wonky" and inaccurate. Mind you, this is a week after they sent us home with about six photocopied pages about why it's important for people with diabetic cats to test at home, but why should they let a detail like that get in the way of a good opportunity to make someone feel bad? And when Sarah raised concerns that Dusty's insulin dose was too low, the vet seemed to immediately suggest that such an idea was so wrong, so insane, that they'd more than likely end up actually decreasing his dosage when all was said and done. Furthermore, the excessive peeing was attributed to excessive drinking, which was attributed to diarrhea, which was in no way related to insulin or glucose, so we were wrong again. You know, aside from that whole thing where diarrhea is pretty much a basic symptom of feline diabetes getting out of hand, which I guess they figured we didn't know, because they had just assumed we don't have the internet or can't read or something like that. Needless to say, we were sent home with instructions to increase his dosage of insulin, and with the vet kind of looking like an ass.
Anyway, Dusty's got a ways to go before he gets back to something truly resembling normal, but he's relatively fine now, and he was kicking it on the corner of the bed behind me, but he took off somewhere, because he actually moves around now that his shots have been closer to what he's actually needed. I'll update you, the internet, on any future developments, and someday, I might even update this damn thing with something other than an update on all the dang animals around here. We did just get a hamster though, so I promise nothing.

R.I.P. Dusty's Rhodes's Balls

So yeah, yesterday, we took the new cat to the shop to get his sexy parts removed. It came in at a cost of roughly $231 more than any previous cat neuterings I had known of had cost, but eh, Dusty's a good cat, and worthy of only the finest in ball-removal. He was pretty much wiped out for most of the day yesterday, but he's back to normal now, albeit a few grams lighter.



Meanwhile, Crackhouse still don't cotton to him none, so she's getting the run of the rest of the house, while Dusty stays locked up in here. We gotta try to get her claws capped pretty soon, but that's a terrifying proposal, so we're dragging the shit out of our feet on that one.



Meanwhile, there's fish-related goings-on, but first, a horrifying look into the world of the currently fishless 14-gallon tank. (Once again, R.I.P., two nameless otocinclus catfish) The other day, along with pulling out two fairly large Argentine swords (or were they Amazon swords? Or was one Amazon and another Argentine? God damn it.) for use in other tanks, (more on that in a second) I trimmed out this much dead plant material, plus a few handfuls more that went either in the kitchen or bathroom garbage cans:



And after all that, the damn thing still looks like this:



Off the top of my head, that's got one (massive) Amazon sword, one Argentine sword, three dwarf lillies, one absolutely goddamn gigantically huge aponegeton, (when I pulled it out to trim it, it was a good three feet from root to leaf tips) and an assortment of aponegetons and an anubias (I think that's what it is) tossed in as reclamation projects from other tanks, past and present, that don't have whatever sort of voodoo plant-growing magic that this tank has. Gotta be something in the water.

But yeah, the big stuff. Sarah finally got a couple of her underwater friends over here from the old homestead in Ada.


First, there's this five-gallon tank, featuring Boris the crowntail betta:



This picture doesn't really do him justice, because he is the goddamn craziest-looking fish I ever saw. He looks like something from one of those old 80's heavy metal album covers, all flying through the sky with lightning around him. Like he's something Dio would have to sword to death in a music video.



Yeeeeah. But anyway, he pretty much acts like he looks. He is like GODDAMMIT: The Fish. Like all he does is thrash around and eat worms and HATE. It is insane.

But the real coolness is this; a scheme that Sarah hatched months before we were all chillin' up in the same crib, but has finally come to fruition, with the addition of her two gallon tank and my shelves:



THE BETTA SHELF. Constructed from a bookshelf, three two-gallon tanks, one of those grow light things from Walmart, a handful of screws and tacks, and a chunk of that black cardboard backing that used to be attached to the back of the bookshelf. A finely tuned engine of animal husbandry if ever there was one.



On the left is Picasso, my damn-near year-old regular veil-tail betta, who's shown up in a few posts before; just scroll down, because I update like once a year, so if I last spoke of him in September, it should still be on the page. He has a little bulldog-face and is awesome.



On the right is Maurice, (The Fightin' Frenchy) Sarah's half-moon betta she picked up here a while back. He's awesome and looks like a watermelon under certain conditions.



In the middle is a brand-goddamn-new fish that Sarah got me as an early birfday present, Rufus. That's not a really good picture of him, because he's turned hella-pink ever since we got him out of that cup he was in, but I'm tired of messing with fish photos, so that's what you people will have to live with. But yeah, you better listen to this dude, because he knows what he's talking about. And remember to wind your watch.



In other news, I got an absolute shitload of photos and happenings over the last few decades that I've been meaning to throw up here, but never have. If I can ever figure out how to add one of those "click to read the rest" links to a post, I'll do some sort of massive clearinghouse sort of thing. Until then, I'll leave this with no explanation: