Well today I’m not sure if I’m suffering just allergy symptoms or I have caught a summer cold.  It has been a year since my last allergy symptoms, but you would think that after years of having them, I could remember exactly what they were.

But today I have a slight fever and sore throat.  Yes, the sore throught could be the result of the allergies, but I don’t ever remember the fever.  This could be the result of lack of sleep last night, even when I was ‘sleeping’, my rest was not very restfull.  Full blown Sinus headache this morning…  Oh well, such is Sept in Ohio for me.

I have been drinking a lot of Orange Juice and had an orange today.  Both seemed to feel really good going down.  I’m not sure if the vitamin C is helping, but the taste of orange hit the spot today.

While eating my orange at lunch, I remembered that there is no English word that rhymes with orange.  Then I got to thinking if there were any other such words.  I recall that purple has very few rhymes, and they are words from the British Ilses.   So Purple has no American English rhyming word.  Then there are the words Silver and Month.  I found those in an internet search.  If you can find or think of more words or find a word that rhymes with any of the above, my curious nature would be sated.

Three colors in this post, but the post color is still orange….  3 more to go for the box of eight.

For the month of August, I thought I was going to get away with an easy allergy season. Usually my allergies start around mid-August. Right on time, I had the itchy eyes, but no other signs of my fall allergies. Yeah!!

All was good until the 10th of Sept. I woke up with the runny nose and heavy sneezing in the morning. That kept up all day to end with full sinus congestion. Ouch…. My current medications don’t seem to be doing any good. I realize that we just got some rain in the past few days, so I guess that is what really set the pollen and spores going.

Sinus headache is keeping me awake right now. I was sleeping, but someone sent me a text message and my phone kept beeping. Now with the sinus headache, I may be up for awhile..
I’m going to have to have the phone people turn off my text messaging, since I don’t use it anyway, and I hate to pay for messages, I will never reply to.

On another note, only 4 more colors to go, and I have a box of Kindergarten crayons… I’ll have to dig out the big box to see what colors there are now.

Anybody else see a theme forming… And this topics color is black..

Has anyone seen some of the headlines about the new Super Collider? Bunch of doom and gloom coming from somewhere.

Things like “Fear Looms”, “Doomsday machine to start”, “Collider triggers end-of-world fears”, “Black Holes may devour the Earth”, “Will Collider destroy the Earth”, “Giant wild goat kills thousands”.. Ok, I made that last one up. I understand that this is cutting edge science that very few people understand, but does the media have to make the stories so out there. The chance of something like this happening is very small, almost non-existent. The only reason it isn’t non-existent is that nobody really “knows” what will happen when they finally get a collision. There are some very good ideas, but nobody “knows” yet. They haven’t done the experiment yet.

Tomorrow there is a chance that the collider will create mini-black holes that will swallow the Earth. Tomorrow the Sun could explode and fry the Earth. Tomorrow a big rock could hit the Earth and send us flying out of orbit. Tomorrow a space ship (that’s no moon, it’s a space station) could blow us to bits. Tomorrow the Sun could rise, and then set and the day will be normal. I have an idea of which of these things will happen, but I don’t “KNOW” which one will happen. I’ll check tomorrow just to be sure.

May the Force be with you when that space station decides to blow the Earth to bits. We aren’t even part of the Imperial Senate….

I’ve been working on Windows machines since the existence of Windows, and I always hated the dreaded blue screen error. It has been quite a long time since I’ve had one of those, but today I had one. This machine has been fairly stable, the only additions were an extra gig of memory and my cell modem. No programs added or new hardware, except a Windows update yesterday.

The problem with this blue screen was that it flashed and went directly to reboot. Not a chance to read the screen at all. Not that it would have helped, but maybe it would have given a clue. I actually had to cancel a reboot to start from my last known good start. Grumble….

Now back to that blue screen. Back in the day when you could actually tell what happened (early dos for you folks that don’t know) it wasn’t the terrible trouble it seems to be now. When Windows 3.1 finally rolled in and you could actually do some multi-tasking, the blue screens ominous tone. Since you were multi-tasking, you weren’t always sure what task caused the error. Most of the time it was running the multiple tasks that caused the error in the first place. Windows became known for its blue screen of death. For a long time this prevented windows from being used for important functions (think payroll). It took Windows 2000 to finally start getting Windows machines that were fairly stable. I sometimes wonder where computer networking would be today if the early windows machines would have failed with more precise error messages. Would the world of Linux and Unix file servers have taken off as they did. Would Apple have any opening in the corporate world? I really think the downfall of the early Windows machines was that blue screen of death. Even the color made the machine seem ‘toy’ like. And the messages, well lets just say it took a lot to be able to get anything out of them. If a stable Windows environment existed from the beginning, would we even have the Virus writers/hackers of today?

I guess we will never know, until the next computer revolution.

By the way, I really think my latest blue screen was caused by the update Microsoft/Windows decided to make yesterday evening.

I’m not exactly sure how I did it, but I volunteered to put up some new ceiling tiles for the theater. That isn’t much of a problem, but I do remember telling someone I would put them up if someone else painted them. Well, earlier this evening I was using some brown paint to paint all the new tiles before they go on the ceiling.

It wasn’t fun at all. The tiles were like sponges and just kept absorbing the paint. I couldn’t put it on to thick, because the tiles would have fallen apart under the paint load. Then all the little crevices and crannies in these tiles didn’t want to take any paint. So this took about twice as much paint as I guessed and twice as much time. I certainly hope they go up smoother than the paint job did.

Next week, ceiling tiles will be put in there place. Wish me luck.

Boy did I have a strange dream last night.  Normally, I don’t remember them, but this one was long, involved and memorable.

***** Dream cloud surrounding the following narrative.  Comments are in italics ****

I was sitting on the porch of my house and a mid-sized red car comes up the drive. A lady I knew stepped out of the car and asked if I wanted to go someplace with her. She was very sorry for coming out to the house without calling, but really wanted male a companionship for this outing. I was more than willing to go, since I was thinking of asking this lady out for some time. I hadn’t been asked out much during my life, and I liked the feeling….
In reality, I have no idea who this woman was and the house porch I was sitting on was my parents’ house, and it was sold to my new neighbor almost 5 years ago. Yes, I do like the feeling of being asked out.

Before I could even step into the house to get my wallet and keys, a LifeFlight helicopter was landing in the front yard. Now I had no idea why they were coming here, and the life flight nurse was sure that this was the place to pick up the an emergency patient. I tried to explain that the only two people there were the two they saw now. Then a school bus comes barreling through the woods, not on the road, but right through the woods, and over the swamp. This is when I told the LifeFlight crew that this must be the person/people they were waiting for. While talking to the crew, the school bus turned into a tanker truck. Helping the people out of the tanker and unto the copter took so much time that my date and I were too late to go to her function. So we made plans to get together at a later date.
Ok, this just happened very quickly in the dream. The lady in question (I sure wish I would have had a name associated with this dream.) The next section of the dream occurred in the blink of an eye.

I was sitting at a table of a park lodge with the lady of my dreams (I like the way that sounds!) and someone fell off a speed boat on the lake in view from the lodge. Leaving my date behind I run and swim out to rescue the person. Coming back into the lodge, I ran into my father-in-law. He was giving me a thumbs up sign on my date. I then went into a restroom (straight out of a Harry Potter Movie) to change my wet clothes. My brother-in-law came into the restroom to make sure I put on the suit he brought me. He wanted to make sure I was ready for the wedding. What wedding, I was here on a date?? Anyway, I get dressed and step out of the restroom to tell my date about the wedding. Instead of finding my date, I find my late wife. She said “Hurry up, we can’t miss this wedding.” I’m going, “Wait, you aren’t supposed to be here, you died years ago.” She said, “I know that silly, I just couldn’t miss this wedding. Come on, let’s go.” I said I had to explain it to my date. My wife said that this was already taken care of. Me, I’m wondering how she took that.

The gorilla ushers took my bag (where did that come from?) and we took our seats. The wedding was over before it even began
Yes, this was surreal. Even in the dream it had a feeling of weirdness. I’m not sure who the wedding was for, but all but 1 daughter was in the dream.

After the wedding, my dear wife said she had to be going. I wanted her to wait, but her time was at an end. Then I went looking for my bag. (Why not the date?) I couldn’t find the gorilla who took it. In fact I couldn’t find any of the gorillas. The girl at the lobby desk told me she would go through the security tapes to find the gorilla that took my bag. I was watching it with her and saw the part where I came out of the restroom. I saw me talking, but I was talking to nobody. My wife was not in the video. Then I remember my date. Did she know why I was gone, did I ruin another date? I find my date, and she was still waiting for me. I told I was sorry for being gone so long, and she said it was no problem. She had a nice talk with some lady who told me I had to be at a wedding at the lodge. She was told I was surprised and didn’t know about the wedding. Hmm, how did that work out. She then said a gorilla gave her my bag.

******* Here the dream ends….. *******

I’m not what was going on in this dream, but after telling it to my youngest, she reminded me of a dream I had a bit ago. In that dream I had a date with a raven haired psychic. This lady in my dreams, also had raven hair, but I don’t recall the face of either lady. Hmm…. But then again, I’ve always liked dark haired women. Just a weird dream I remembered today.

Since my pal jamiahsh mentioned my $8.00 putter, I guess now is a good time to tell how I happen to own said putter. I am not a golfer by any means. I’ve played maybe 2 games of golf in my lifetime. In both games, I did lousy. My drives were short, but straight, my short game was all over the place, and putting on a real green, forget about it. The one thing I do reasonably well with a golf ball is miniature golf, especially the par 2 Putt Putt courses. I’ve played on a few, and while I’m nowhere near to being a Putt Putt pro, I usually can break or make par on these courses after a round or two to get used to it. As with any sport, somedays you just don’t have it, so I don’t always make par.

Anyway, on to the story of my $8.00 putter. A few of years ago (was it really so long??, yes, it was during our magic show) a group of us were invited to have a day at the nearest Putt Putt / Go-Cart place. I got to the town a little early and we stopped at a local sporting goods store. I’m not sure now if I stopped with the thought of picking up a putter, or just saw it when I got there, and had the idea, but anyway C is a slightly competitive person, and his friends know this about him. Me, I’m never beyond trying to set someone up for a joke, so knowing about his nature, I wanted something to play games with his mind.

So I picked up the cheapest putter available at the sporting goods store. For 8 American dollars, I picked up a putter that was much better than the clubs at the local Putt Putt. And it gave me a wonderful joke to play on the rest of the gang. I arrive at the Putt Putt with putter in hand. Now everybody thought that I was a serious putter. I saw fear in their eyes. (not really but it sounds good doesn’t it?) I did have a really good game that day, having quite a few holes-in-one and ended up in first. I was lucky my putter worked. I may have looked a fool if I didn’t have a good game. After that I don’t think too many believed that I just picked the putter up that day. They can comment if they remember. But I think my youngest convinced them.

So now, I always have that putter with me during the summer months. My youngest and I frequent the putting places often, and I’ve grown used to my stick. Sometimes, like today, it brings out the fear in my opponents…. Ha ha ha (how do you write an evil laugh???))

I was just curious at a picture I saw on the web tonight. My question is why would anybody take a picture of the shoes that the candidates are wearing? I don’t think I can recall any other shoe pictures. I may be wrong, but I remember a lot of Pant Suits, Power Ties, body surfing, hunting, fishing, and of course hand shaking pictures of any other candidate in my lifetime, but not shoes. Was there really anything stunning about either pair of shoes? The red pair did remind me a bit of the ruby slippers, but that is because of the color. Just wondering?

And then of course during this I also found this picture:

Is this making a fashion, religious or political statement? I’m not really sure. Interesting effect though. I may want to try to get a few of those for me. Could they put that on my driver’s license? Should I use something like that on my blog? Should I use it for my pic on a dating site? (nah, too over the top for me…) Maybe I could just print up some ‘saint j’ cards.. I could give them out to all my friends…

Then again, if we can get that effect with lighting, and actual naked eye seeing, a red light in the background could set the tone of something in our haunted house. Or we could go with the dead guy in the corner. Yes, that is really a dead guy in the corner.

Oh well, I guess that’s all the good pictures I found. Unless I include some of my own. Just one uninvited guest at my daughter’s wedding last year.

Now he would be a good addition to the haunted house. A 6 foot gator on the prowl could get people a little jumpy.

While surfing for stuff to put in our haunted house, I came across this site that has a lot of FX that we may be able to use. Fake hands, heads, zombies, and some other cool stuff.

I wasted a good bit of time just checking out the FX. Most can be done on our short budget too. We have the wood, but we would need some of the other items to make molds and finish off the projects.

So any of the people working on the haunted house, check this out. I will be adding different sites to this blog if I find anything else we can use.

Well, I am no stranger to trying new and, what for some would be, exotic foods. I generally enjoy trying new things to eat, even when I don’t enjoy the taste. There have been a large number of foods that I really like, that if I had failed to try, I never would have known the taste sensations.

From A (for Ants), to Z (normal zoo animals — Hippo and crocodile), I have tried many different foods. Other than zucchini, I can’t really recall any Z foods, maybe someone could enlighten me. After the extreme recycling I wrote about I didn’t think I could see an article about food that would just turn me off. But I found one. The problem for me is that I have tried almost everything else, why wouldn’t I try this. I have eaten bugs, so why not rats? I guess that would be one way to make sure the rat population stays in check. They would no longer be just pests, but a food source. Maybe I’ll have to try some… Can’t be any worse than squirrel can it? After all a Squirrel is just a rat with a fuzzy tail right?