Stormfront, Meh

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It’s funny how after living someplace for a while, you sorta get complacent about things like the weather when there’s a storm brewing that could potentially blow your recently purchased and hopefully adequately insured new house halfway across town…

😕

It’s kinda crazy to actually sit back and do the math, but I guess I’ve technically been living here in Florida for 9 years now – nearly a third of my life! – so much in the same way that up in Michigan when “the blizzard of all blizzards” was coming in off Lake Michigan and we simply shrugged it off as an excuse to try out our new shovels, now here in the middle of “hurricane season” I find myself not so much scrambling around for canned goods and batteries as do wishing that I’d have taken Cleo out for her walk before it started to torrential downpour that will likely last for the next week and a half!

I honestly don’t think that Isaac is going to have much impact on us here in the Tampa Bay area at all, aside from some rain and wind, anyways.

I will admit that I do find it a little amusing that threat of the storm may upset the Republican National Convention that’s taken over downtown for the next week … hey, at the very least those guys deserve to get a little inconvenienced after the floods of ridiculous bullshit coming from their own mouths that we have to wade through the rest of the year!

32nd Birthday Recap

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Good birthday!  :mrgreen:

Yesterday Sara and I ended up going over to Disney World for the afternoon – we’ve been ridiculously exhausted after moving, so we didn’t really make much of a rush to get over there and probably walked in the gates of Blizzard Beach around 3:00pm, but we still managed to go on a good number of the water slides and also spent some time floating around the lazy river to try and decompress. Looking forward to maybe going back sometime next month to actually take some pictures and try to catch the ones that we didn’t get the first go around…

Afterwards, we enjoyed an incredible dinner at the California Grill on top of the Contemporary … I won’t go on about it here because I should have a proper review of the whole night up over here by the end of the week, but I will say that the food was pretty much up there with the best that I’ve had at Walt Disney World, which I think says quite a lot!  All in all, aside from a few random bumps it was a pretty great way to spend number 32.

I don’t necessarily know if I feel any older at this point, but maybe that’ll change once I’m able to get caught back up with life once again and have a chance to take a quick breath… 😉

View from the observation deck at the California Grill where we watched Wishes over at the Magic Kingdom – a unique perspective that I’ll be sure to include in my dining review as well!

A Midnight Birthday Cake for #32

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Doesn’t it seem a little odd that you typically always end up eating your birthday cake mid-day on your birthday???

Being a night owl myself, I’m honestly a little embarrassed that it took me 32 years to figure this one out, but technically just like how Christmas really starts at 12:01am (assuming you can drag your parents out of bed, which you can’t…), one’s birthday just the same officially kicks off at the stroke of midnight and as such, it’s really just poor resource management to allow a perfectly good cake sit there all morning, afternoon, and possibly even evening long before you finally gather everyone ’round to go through the whole song and dance that ultimately results in your enjoying the chocolaty fruits of becoming another year older and so on and so forth!

Mark my words – this is not a mistake that I will allow myself ever to make again… 😛

P.S. Kudos to my wife for the yummy cake. Note that the toothpicks aren’t necessarily to help the cake ward off predators or anything – if that was the case, then an after pic would certainly show that they failed at that particular goal! I guess they were to keep the cellophane from sticking to the frosting and yanking it all off – also a noble goal, indeed!

Muppet Performer Jerry Nelson Dies at 78

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(news via People magazine; author of this great image unknown)

This is sad – Muppet performer Jerry Nelson passed away yesterday.

In addition to playing The Count on Sesame Street, he also performed Gobo from Fraggle Rock, Floyd from the Electric Mayhem, Emmet from Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas, Kermit’s nephew, Robin, and one of my all-time favorite Sesame Street characters, Sherlock Hemlock.

He first started working with Jim Henson and The Muppets in 1965.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95GJ-kJ-Nzc

Egad – the world has lost an amazing detective, indeed…

Creationism vs. the Kids

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“Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children”

I’ll admit that the title of this video kinda bothers me because I don’t necessarily think that it’s the best way to summarize what Bill is saying, but I still agree with the dialog itself because sad as it may be, it often seems like even merely harboring ideas like creationism tends to hold back society and the last thing future generations need is to find themselves held back by these stubborn beliefs of their forefathers who simply refuse to accept the factual evidence on the wall.

One of the conversations that I have with my wife a lot is how we’ll raise our future children with regards to both honoring and respecting each of our own religious beliefs – namely, she’s a Christian and I’m not. And it’s still troubling to me sometimes because although I have every faith in her that she won’t let my own views be cast to the wayside so that her own can flourish, I feel like I can’t say the same thing for other people who they’re going to eventually encounter, be it at church or school or the grocery store or whatever. An instructor at Sunday School may be less inclined to say, “Yes, what your Dad believes is different from what we believe and that’s ok…” as much as, “Anyone who doesn’t believe what we say is going to hell, blah blah blah…”

I’m all for freedom of speech to express your own beliefs, but what happens when at its core, continuing to harbor absolute, unfounded beliefs like yours is what’s holding back our society from taking another step forward in its evolutionary course?

Is it actually dangerous to have your kids around people of faith like that until they’re old enough to take things at face value and consider the other side of the coin???

Kids are pretty impressionable the younger they get, so what would be the right age to expose children to religion to ensure that they’re able to honestly consider it with an objective view instead of merely parroting what they’re being told by some who refuse to consider anything relating to science or fact in the same realm as the almighty one?

CLEANING END!!!!!

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It felt like it would never come, but the day is finally here – gave the keys back to our rental last night, so we’re officially moved out of the old house and into our own home!

Granted, it’s probably going to be a long, long time until we actually unpack everything in our new place, and it doesn’t help that a week from now we’ll be leaving on vacation already, but right now, it’s nice to know that at least one giant load of stress is finally officially behind us.

My last view of the old house yesterday before closing up and pulling away – it was a nice place to live, but our new place is even better because it’s ours! 😉

Look at my food! LOOK AT IT!!!

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I just discovered this new website the other night, but I think it might be kinda awesome.

…at least to other people like me who enjoy taking pictures of their food, anyways!

Foodspotting is basically a social food sharing site – I guess the idea is that even a step beyond reviews of restaurants, why not check out actual pictures of the dishes that you might enjoy, as taken by other obsessive Internet sharers like yourself?! You can subscribe to different foods that you’re particularly fond of – pizza and peanut butter, I’m following you! – and all in all, it could be a neat way to sample a new restaurant before even setting foot inside the door and committing yourself to a full meal that might otherwise end up looking terrible!  😯

What can I say – I find it amusing simply because it seemed like another unique opportunity to share some of my fun food pics with the world, and if I happen to stumble into a new dish that I enjoy myself along the way, then all the better.

I’m still trying to figure out the ins and outs of it, but feel free to follow me or whatever and we can gawk at each other’s meals like perfectly normal Internet people!  :mrgreen:

P.S. This was my very first post … not bad, eh?! Gotta come out the gate strong…

Dexter – season 7 trailer is out

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since the last twist already, and also that we’ve only got two more seasons left to go before the show itself comes to an end. I wasn’t super crazy about last season, despite being a fan of both Edward James Olmos and also Mos Def, although the final moments of the finale managed to setup a great cliffhanger for next season, as usual.

I honestly kind of like that they’re planning the story out right and ending the series while it’s still in its prime rather than doing something like The Office and waiting until the series has been all but driven into the ground before finally calling it a day. Clearly the unique nature of Dexter’s world can’t exactly go on forever, so it’ll be interesting to see where everyone’s favorite serial killer finally ends up over the next 24 episodes…

For starters, it looks like a good portion of season 7 will no doubt be dealing with Deb learning who her brother really is!  😯

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NzpnjVmuCA

 

My very own virtual Springfield…

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I never really got much into The Sims, but I’m kinda curious about this new iPhone game that I downloaded earlier called The Simpsons: Tapped Out which finds you having to rebuild Springfield after Homer accidentally blows it up by paying more attention to his iPad (err, I mean, his myPad) than the controls at the nuclear power plant…

The graphics are really nice, and the story so far is pretty entertaining because apparently a lot of the writers from the show participated in the making of the game. My only real concern is that because this app follows the freemium business model, there seems to be an inclination for in-app purchases to get all of the coolest Springfield icons for your own version and honestly, I’d rather just pay $4.99 or $14.99 or $29.99 for access to everything all at once than random charges of $9.99 so that I can unlock Moe’s Tavern or Professor Frink’s Lab.

The currency in question that you seem to have to buy is donuts – you get a few each time you level, but I have a feeling that if a more reliable source than my wallet doesn’t appear shortly, the game’s gonna get old kinda fast. Too bad because again, it is a really sharp looking game, but perhaps the concept of freemium just isn’t for me-(ium)…