A Hell of a Mess...

January in review

Since I wasn't here for the remainder of January, let's see how I can best summarize it.

1)  In the entire month of January, I had three days off.  These days were January 1, January 7, and January 14.  In fact, January 14 is the last day that I've had off of work, period.

2) The donuts are a month old.  I promised last time that my next post would be pictures, and I'll make that promise again (since I'm not keeping it this time).

That's more or less the month of January in my world.  Exciting, isn't it.

Tomorrow is Day 1 of the 74th Regular Session of the Nevada Legislature.  It also begins the countdown to Day 120, the last day which the session can run, pursuant to state law.  The last three sessions, if I recall correctly, have been followed by a special session.  I'm hopeful that streak can end this time.  That, or if it doesn't, it has nothing to do with my committee work or my tasks.

Needless to say, this will occupy much of my time for the next four months.  It's already occupied my time for the past few weeks -- considering I haven't had a day off since right before the Martin Luther King holiday.  There are good parts about it, though.  I'm not on salary -- meaning I get overtime for any time I'm there beyond 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week -- and I also get the occasional half day off.

Like today.  So I could watch football.  Maybe I could have occupied myself a little sooner than now with pictures of donuts.  Oh well - hopefully, I'll get to that sometime in the next day or so.

I hope.

Not a fluke...

Anyone happening to watch the Fiesta Bowl right now will notice that Boise State University of the Western Athletic Conference is beating the University of Oklahoma of the Big XII Conference right now -- in fact, BSU is winning 28-17.

Anyone who follows Boise State or WAC football should know that this is no fluke.  Keeping this in mind, I venture the following opinion:

Division I-A football needs a playoff system, like Division I-AA has, and like Division I of NCAA basketball has.  Teams like Boise State or Central Michigan (the champions of the Mid-American Conference, who got to celebrate their postseason by beating up on someone in the Motor City Bowl) should have as much of a shot (however remote) at winning the national championship as those in the so-called BCS conferences. 

Hopefully the people watching this game who have the power to affect change will take note -- that good football isn't what you see from the huge programs.

Happy New Year

To everyone east of Chicago or so, that is.  (That includes you, too, Newfoundland.)  The year is going to end on a pretty good, note, I think -- except for my alma mater losing by a point in the MPC Computers Bowl.  (Not that I was expecting them to win or anything, but one can be hopeful, I suppose.)

2007 is going to be an interesting year.  I hope that the first six months of it goes by quickly, because it's going to be a hard six months for me.  Regardless, I hope everyone's 2007 is better than their 2006 -- irrespective of how well (or crappy) 2006 was.

End-of-year observations

Or, at least, observations from the last week or so.

1) Christmas was rather quiet around my house.  That doesn't mean it wasn't uneventful, though.  My brother got sick and didn't fly down from Portland.  My grandmother (who lives with my aunt, north of Seattle) fell on Christmas Eve and broke her hip.  And my new XM satellite radio doesn't get reception at all in my office, and the signal fades in and out on my commute.

2)  Our major holiday purchase - an HDTV to replace our dying TV - is all well and good, except for the fact that the cable company is currently out of HD cable boxes.

3)  Rest in peace, Gerald Ford and James Brown.

4)  If you're going to steal a car, make sure and do it in a neighborhood you're familiar with so you don't get lost.

And last but not least, I have to remember to begin a science experiment on Monday.  Details are to come.

Emotional upheaval

I'm back from the cross-country experience.  We'll suffice it to say that the Bob Seger show was one of the three best concerts I went to this year.  (Those of you who know me, of course, know that I only went to three concerts this year.)

I've actually been back from the cross-country experience for a few days now -- I flew back into Reno on Monday night.  The following morning, it was back to the airport, to go down to Las Vegas for a day of work.  It was an okay trip, despite my hatred for Southwest Airlines.  (And fortunately, it was only for the day.)

The other thing that I've had going on is a bit of decompressing, which I always have to do after coming back from Michigan.  I only lived there for a little over four years, and I've been back in Nevada for seven.  And yet, whenever I go back, I have to deal with some aftereffects for a little while.

They're not as bad, fortunately, as they were four years ago.  The first couple of times I went back, I was dealing with a lot of unresolved issues -- dealing with feelings and emotions that were still hanging on from the time I did live there -- and it was really hard.  In some ways, it's still hard -- I would really prefer my friends from there to not live two thousand miles away, but I don't think any of them are going to move west on my account.

I'm also glad that a lot of the unresolved issues aren't there -- or as prevalent -- as they were in 2002 or before.  Having my family here helps.  Having a job that I'm good at and is glad to have me helps.  And today not withstanding (because it was a tough day emotionally), I'm happier here than I was at any point while I was there.  But there's the part of me that really wants the best of both worlds -- the life I have here now, as well as my friends being here, too.

If I hit the lottery and bribe them, maybe they'll all move here.  Yeah, that'll work.

Cross-country misadventure

In a little less than forty-eight hours from now, I'll be leaving Reno and flying to Detroit.  I do this at least once a year (this trip, in fact, will be my third this year), to visit friends and whatnot.  And while I'm doing this to visit with friends for a day or two -- one of my last breathers before the onslaught of the legislative session -- my primary reason has less to do with them, and more to do with a concert.

Yes, a concert.  I'm flying over two thousand miles to go to a concert.  In Cleveland.

The concert in question is Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, who I've been waiting to tour for about a decade now.  And he chose now to do it.  The sad part is that the tour dates that worked for me (and that weren't already sold out by the time I made arrangements) were all in the Eastern time zone.  So I was able to make plans, organize a few friends in Michigan who wanted to go, and we're roadtripping down the turnpike for a rock concert.  (Watch out, Ohio.)

There is a part of me that probably should be ashamed to admit that I'm going to this length to see a concert.  What's worse, though, is that this isn't the first time I've done something like this.

• My wife, stepson, and I centered a summer vacation (a roadtrip through ten states that lasted about two weeks) around Dr Pepper from Dublin, Texas.  (If you've ever had it, you probably know why.)
• I flew to New York City a couple of years ago, so I could see a hockey game and visit Grant's Tomb.
• I flew to Michigan in April for the sole purpose of delivering a birthday present to my friend Trisha.  (I should also note that she didn't know I was coming.)
• I flew to Washington DC for a weekend in September, so I could watch a baseball game and see a museum exhibit that was closing the following week.  (This part will be chronicled in an upcoming feature that I am tentatively calling "The Summer of Death.")

I'm certain that, by Friday morning, I'll be asking myself why I dare go through this.  By that point, though, I'll have endured a redeye flight to Chicago, and I don't sleep very well on planes.  In the end, though, it'll be worth it, I think.  I'll get a couple of days off of work -- the calm before the storm.  I'll get to see a concert I've been waiting a long time for.  And I'll get to spend a little time with friends that I wish I got to see more than a couple of times a year.

For that, I suppose the effort of the misadventure is worth it.

Lessons in hockey

From about the age of 10, I've been a hockey fan.  This was sort of hard to do from the confines of northern Nevada, but ESPN was always good about giving some exciting midseason matchup between the Quebec Nordiques and the Hartford Whalers.  Of course, all that was made easier when the NHL brought hockey back to the Bay Area, meaning that I had a team I could root for.

This blog has nothing to do with the Sharks, though.  It has to do with the art of fighting.

In the so-called "new NHL," fighting is supposed to be something of a lost art.  The days of the designated goon are starting to fade in some circles, but there are enough of them around to indicate that fighting hasn't completely lost its role in the game. 

What I recently found interesting, though, was a fight involving Georges Laraque, the heavyweight for the Phoenix Coyotes.  This was interesting, not only because it was televised (and therefore, shows up on YouTube), but the Fox Sports crew who covers the Coyotes put their microphones on him before the game.

Needless to say, the crew played the on-ice microphone from just before the fight. It shows up in the latter part of the video below.

"Good luck, man."  Priceless.

And lest I forget, my number one Steinman song.  No fanfare or introduction necessary for backseat sex gone horribly wrong.

If Lindsay Lohan could spell...

...she would have told Robert Altman's widow to "be adequate."

To be adequate.  If you look in the dictionary, you'd find that the word "adequate" means, more or less, to do just enough to get by.  This is the part of Lindsay Lohan's condolence letter to Catherine Altman that I'm going to take issue with.  Not the spelling, or the grammar, or the Blackberry excuse.  It's that she told a woman, in her time of grief, to just be adequate.

Is this all we strive for anymore?  I'll grant that just getting by was a good enough excuse for me for a few college classes, but I don't think it's the mantra that we want to teach our children.  (Hopefully, the mantra we teach our children doesn't include drinking binges, either, but I digress.)

So, looking back over the past few days, let's see what would have happened if people had decided to just be adequate:

• A 94-year-old woman in Centralia, Washington -- who happens to be legally blind -- would not have bowled a 244.
• Scientists wouldn't be able to levitate small insects via ultrasound.
• An 11-year-old Florida boy wouldn't have come up with the idea of selling ad space on his head, with the proceeds dedicated to helping other cancer victims.

I'm sure that there wouldn't have been any research into cures for cancer or AIDS in the past few days, either.  After all, that's what happens when you just do enough to skate by.

Again, however, I digress.

Number two in the top 5 Steinman songs is "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" by Bonnie Tyler.  I may have ranked it number one, but I still can't figure out why Brighteyes was supposed to turn around.

Adventures in Pain...

I appear to have been slightly remiss in my blog updating.  I think I had a good excuse, though.

About five years ago or so, I was diagnosed with gout. (This after having been in excruciating pain for about three days.)  It didn't pop up too often after that - maybe once every six months or so.  Until this year, that is.

In the past few months, I've had about half a dozen attacks.  Some have been worse than others, and the end result is that I'm taking mediaction to help deal with it.  The problem, thusfar, is that it really isn't helping.

Thanks to Thanksgiving dinner (either caused by the turducken or the ridiculously rich gravy), I had yet another flareup that is still yet to completely go away.  My anti-inflammatory meds weren't really helping, and the end result was me limping around work for a few days over the weekend and the first couple of days this week.

The end result of this has been adventures in homeopathic relief.  Namely, in the form of cherry juice.  My research (since everything you read on the Internet is true) found that certain types of cherries have enzymes and the like that are effective in treating gout and preventing future attacks.  I bought a bottle of 100 percent black cherry juice and drank it the other day -- in about five minutes.

The end result?  I'm feeling considerably better than a few days ago.  I've been through three bottles of this juice, and while it tastes awful, the pain is just about gone.  My foot is still swollen, and I'm learning the hard way about the laxative effect of cherry juice, but I'll take that over the horror that is a gout flareup in the joint of the left big toe.

When we last left off, I was going through my top five Steinman songs.  I got to number 5, and fell off the face of the earth after that.  For today, we'll do numbers 4 and 3.

Like 5, 4 is an instance where the artist would probably never make another of my "best of" lists.  (Unless, of course, we're talking about the hottest singers from Quebec, because she's certainly hotter than Corey Hart, Aldo Nova, or Gino Vannelli.  But I digress.)  Thanks to YouTube (again), I can bring you Celine Dion's version of "It's All Coming Back To Me Now."

Number 3 is the first of two Loaf appearances.  This one is where he'd do anything for love, but he won't do that.  (And no, don't ask me what "that" is.)

Speaking of things one would not do for love, I recently learned that, of all people, Screech was the second former cast member of "Saved By The Bell" to do revolting things on film while nude. 

Of course, Elizabeth Berkley was the first, and it involved shit -- that is, the entirety of the movie "Showgirls."  The sad part about Screech's film is that it, too, involves shit.

In my absence...

...several things happened.

1) I got sick, then well, then sick again.  (Actually, I was sick and on my way back to well a week ago, but the relapse began over the weekend.)

2) I wore a poppy to work last Thursday. 

3) I went to Phoenix this weekend with my wife, Megan.  She stayed there, and I flew home.

And last, but not least -- I bought the new Meat Loaf album. Like locusts coming back every seventeen years, so comes another Bat Out of Hell album.  And the only thing I really can say about it is:

Not enough Jim Steinman.

Sure, this album has Loaf covering the Steinman song that Celine Dion recorded back when she wasn't a Vegas lounge act.  But Bat Out of Hell III isn't the wall-to-wall Steinman that the first two were. And to me, that's disappointing, because Loaf with Steinman is considerably better, by and large, than he was without.

As a completely random feature, I'll chronicle my top five Steinman songs over the next few entries.  Keep in mind that these are not all Loaf songs - in fact, there is less Meat here than non-Meat content.  Number five (which, thanks to YouTube, is provided below), "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All," may be the only time I ever put anything done by Air Supply in a "best of" list.

(Unless, of course, I do a list of top 80s videos featuring singers with afros that glow red under proper stage lighting.)