Forgot to post it last night, but I found this on Digg over the weekend – funny, albeit also hitting entirely too close to home… 😛
25 Signs You Have Grown Up
http://www.divinecaroline.com/article/22322/35339-twenty-five-signs-grown
weekend catchup
Antsy About RSVPs
So it’s officially been a week since we sent out invites for the wedding and already we’re getting very antsy about getting the RSVPs back! As of today, we’ve received a whopping three of them – two online, one via mail – and needless to say, we’re just very excited to find out who all is coming down for the big day! Granted, a bunch of them are for immediate family who we know are coming, but still, it’ll be nice to have them down as official on our list! I’ll be curious to see how many more people actually take advantage of being able to RSVP online – I’d have thought it would be a cool option, but now I’m getting the feeling that most are going to come back via mail simply because people won’t want to waste the stamped cards that we provided for RSVP. Oh well – just hurry up, peoples… 🙂
Weight Loss in July
Believe you me, I’m getting as tired writing about it as you are reading about it, but basically we’re starting over again. The last couple of weeks I hit a bit of a roadblock – a combination of never getting home early enough to make it to the gym and eating out almost every single day because we didn’t go grocery shopping “because we didn’t have any money” (even though fast food is more expensive in the long run, go figure!) – so here we are, going into July and only three months away from the wedding, and I need to start taking this a little more seriously. I don’t expect to get down to my ideal weight at this point, but dropping off 20 pounds would at least be a few steps in the right direction!
My goals this time are regular, 30 minute exercise routines 3x per week coupled with eating right … I know, technically the same thing I’ve been trying to do all along, but I am trying some different techniques with the gym this time around and also being a bit more aggressive with the food. Namely, any day that I eat three meals, one of them has to be a salad, which will actually probably be for the better because it opens up my options for lunches at work, and sadly the other idea, no chips for a while. I love ’em, but it’s just too easy to bust through an entire bag in two days, so until I start putting some pounds behind me and I can better portion my food, I’m sticking to rice cakes and other snacks that I can get away with eating more of without taking such a huge calorie hit.
I’ll elaborate more if/when I start seeing progress – here we go again!
The Bucket List
This evening Sara and I watched this over cheap Chinese food, and it was really pretty good. Morgan Freeman plays such a great honorable man – it reminded me of his performance in The Shawshank Redemption, which I watched up in New York a few weeks ago. Definitely need to add this one to the list to pick-up on DVD some day.
Stupid Bugs
I got stung by a freakin’ wasp today in my office – not flying around the room, mind you, but just one that was walking around on the floor. Apparently I bumped him with my foot, and he didn’t really like that, so he opened fire. I promptly desecrated him with a nearby kleenex box, but the anger of how many bugs we find wandering around this house still burns strong … as does the venom circulating in my foot! Really need to look into how much it would cost to have somebody come out and spray – the stuff available at Wal-Mart / Home Depot / Lowe’s just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore…
Battlestar Addictica
I’m on season three right now, and frankly I’m pretty proud of how I did over the weekend – only went through two discs, which I believe was about seven episodes total. And it’s a little scary simply because that means that I’ve really only got about another 20-some-odd episodes between these DVDs and the ones that’ve aired from season 4 before I’m completely caught up with the rest of the population! Still, it’s been an awesome story so far – after Friday, I had a new favorite episode, that being the one where the Galactica came back to rescue the rest of the population on New Caprica and Lee made a super-cool save at the last minute … it beat out the first part of the storyline when the attack first happened, which is pretty impressive! Luckily there still seems to be a bit left before the show is done for good, and I read something online just this weekend about possibly making a couple more straight-to-DVD movies, which would be very cool.
30 Days Not So Great
I did catch up on the one episode of 30 Days that had been sitting on the DVR for a while, but unfortunately it just wasn’t as good as so many other of the episodes have been throughout the whole series. Basically meaning, whereas most of the people end up being at least somewhat enlightened midway through the 30 days and get a lot out of it, the lady featured in this one didn’t change a bit. For this episode, they took a very religious woman who believes that gay and lesbian couples shouldn’t be able to adopt children and stuck her in the home of a gay couple who was raising four adopted children from foster care. And I’ve seen people get a little defensive in these shows before they really get into it, but this lady was defensive and argumentative pretty much throughout the entire experience, even storming off camera several times because she felt like she was being attacked. It was funny because all of the gay people were the nicest in the world – they said that it was ok for her to have a differing opinion, but their problem was that she wanted to make it illegal for them to have their own opinion (i.e. laws to ban gays adopting children), and she just saw it as if allowing the adoptions were undermining her own beliefs, instead of letting them do as they wished while she opposed it in her mind.
Honestly, this is probably my biggest problem with religion, and yes, God and the Bible were cited for all of her beliefs because she thinks that anything outside of man and woman is against God’s word, but regardless, it just bothers me that not only do so many deem it ok to hate based on the word of God, but they also want to see fit that anything other than the word of God is illegal, attempting to ban everything from gay marriage and adoptions to certain kinds of language, other forms of expression, and even sex toys! If you don’t believe in something, then don’t engage in it, but as long as no one is getting hurt, just leave the rest of us who don’t have a problem with it alone. And maybe that’s the problem – even someone getting hurt could be subjective, as several times this lady cited that it wasn’t right for the four young boys in this episode to be raised by a gay couple because it solidified that being gay was ok. Because loving another man is disgusting, but hating your fellow man on behalf of a heavily-debated word of God is completely acceptable. Frankly, if there is a Heaven and it’s filled with hatred and bigotry like that, I don’t want to go there anyways…
4-Day Work Week
And would you believe that Sara’s even off on Friday with me?! I think we’re going to go down to the Florida Aquarium in the evening to watch the 4th of July fireworks over Channelside, that is, unless we find out that someplace over at Disney outside of the parks is doing a show, too. Aside from crazy neighbors setting off bottle rockets nearly everywhere I’ve lived down here, I don’t think I’ve been to an actual 4th of July fireworks show since I moved (2003), so I’m kinda looking forward to it!
one other thing…
Of course, this also hits a sore spot because as also mentioned in the article, Disney is going to take the opportunity to fill the area with more non-Disney dining vendors, meaning that the Disney Dining Experience (20% discount) won’t be accepted. This is a loophole that needs to be corrected because the number of restaurants that don’t accept it because they’re outside vendors seems to be growing quite rapidly. As far as I’m concerned, if they can take the dining plan, which I’m almost certain all do because it’s an easy $$$ source for Disney because people will line up 6 months in advance to drop the cash, then they should honor the discounts too.
Now I’m even madder having made that connection. 🙁
Disney to Close Pleasure Island Nightclubs at Downtown Disney
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/tourism/orl-disney2808jun28,0,2367595.story
Well, this is a bit of a surpise and admittedly, a bit of a disappointment even though I’ve yet to visit any of the actual clubs myself. Apparently Disney announced yesterday that three months from now, it’ll be closing its doors on the remaining six nightclubs at Pleasure Island to make way for a more “family-friendly” experience.
The article (and attached video) make point to mention that they’ve been getting requests from the guests for more shopping and dining accommodations at Downtown Disney, but I have to wonder if this is another case of not so much the masses asking for more places to spend their money as a few outraged guests who don’t think that nightclubs belong anywhere within Walt Disney World. And yeah, I’ll admit that I’ve passed some ladies wearing some rather provocative attire when passing through the area to get from the Marketplace to the West Side, but just because it isn’t my cup of tea doesn’t mean that I don’t think that there shouldn’t be a little something for everyone at the Resort. Sure, it wasn’t exactly an area that the entire family would go to spend an evening, but not everyone who goes to Disney World brings a family and I’m guessing that a balance was made of deciding that it would be worthwhile overall to lose the nightclubbing crowd to other establishments to install more gift shops and high-end dining to milk that family vacation pocketbook.
It just seems to me that Downtown Disney already has plenty of shopping and dining capacity – I don’t really know what else they could add, and I’ve got a feeling that anything that they do add is going to be more along the lines of shops for looking, not for buying (i.e. the guitar shop, the super-expensive movie memorabilia shop). Odd because the other part of me thinks that this is totally a money play, which doesn’t make sense unless the clubs really weren’t doing as well as they’d have liked us to believe. I’m also intrigued because with a second shopping area opening up on the west end of the property and such an unstable economy due to energy costs right now, I’d have assumed that the last thing Disney would be doing would be making changes like this that weren’t just absolutely obvious in benefit.
I suppose this means that if we ever want to experience the comedy club and the Adventurer’s Club, we’d better make a trip over soon, eh?
Crab or No Crab?
Am I “being a crab” if I get angry when I come home to find SUVs and mini-vans parked the entire length of our front yard along the curb, including blocking our mailbox?
Funny, the HOA paperwork that I have states that there’s no parking on the streets at any time, and there’s two or three empty spots available in the driveway of the person who’s hosting all of these people … am I a jerk because they’re the ones not following the rules???
Politics is disgusting.
McCain Disavows Aide’s Comment About Terrorism
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080624/ap_on_el_pr/mccain_terrorism;_ylt=AkhuVvVJcDs1NfzJJDscfcKyFz4D
“A top adviser to John McCain said another terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be a ‘big advantage’ for the Republican presidential candidate, drawing a sharp rebuke Monday from both the presumed GOP nominee and Democrat Barack Obama.”
Kudos to McCain for speaking out against his own advisor to distance himself from the comment, but just the fact that we have people who actually think that way to advance their own political careers sickens me … especially in a country where The Patriot Act serves to turn all sorts of activists into criminals. Does the same not apply to politicians???
George Carlin Dies at 71
(borrowed from javawombat)
This is sad – he was one of the great cynics of all-time…
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/2008/06/22/2008-06-22_comic_pioneer_george_carlin_dies_at_71.html
Also also…
I think I may have just fixed our refrigerator!!!
I may or may not have posted a while back about our refrigerator’s horrible grinding problem – on and off, it’ll make this increasingly loud grinding sound … sometimes so bad that you can hear it across the house with doors closed in between. We tried to schedule a service guy to come out for it after it consistently made the sound for about a week, but right around the time when I started making calls, it lessened up and I just knew that it would’ve ended up being one of those cases where they come out, it doesn’t make the noise so they can’t do anything, and I end up getting charged $90 for nothing.
Well, it started making the sound again tonight, but shortly thereafter stopped. Nonetheless, when I was getting a snack later, I couldn’t help but notice that some ice cubes from the dispenser were falling back into a place where it really didn’t look like they belonged. In removing the ice bucket to get them out, I uncovered a huge freakin’ chunk of ice that had built up in the back of the freezer, presumably in the vicinity of one of the big fans back there (it encased a few different things). About twenty minutes later, with the help of my trusty hammer and makeshift chisel/screw-driver, I had this:
It’s hard to tell from the pictures, but that’s several chunks of ice totaling roughly the size of my hand, with each piece being at least an inch thick. Funny how as soon as I dislodged the first huge chunk, I heard a fan start purring that I’ve never heard before! My best guess is that the fan was actually frozen in it’s place inside the freezer and the loud noise would be it trying to break free until eventually the fridge either decided that it didn’t need the fan anymore or just gave up trying to start it.
So I honestly don’t really even know if I actually did anything useful here, but I like to think that I totally saved the day and now I won’t have to hear that horrible grinding sound again from the refrigerator for a very long time! If I had three inches of ice stuck to my back, I know I’d appreciate it if someone else removed it for me…
Also…
We went and saw The Incredible Hulk tonight.
Not a whole lot to say about it, really – it was a solid movie, way better than the one from five years ago, although admittedly that’s not really saying much! But Edward Norton and Liv Tyler were both great and even the special effects turned out pretty sweet. It was certainly no Iron Man, but I honestly didn’t expect it to be.
Just a couple of beefs:
A) I thought the whole S.H.I.E.L.D. thing at the end of the flick this time was really lame – it was a cool, little teaser at the end of Iron Man, but here it just wasn’t done right at all. And mind you, I don’t really know any of the backstory behind it from the comic books, but it just seemed like a blatant plug for the next movie when there were clearly other places where the story was left open for a sequel already. I really hope that that type of ending doesn’t become a standard for Marvel films because as far as I’m concerned, it’s old already…
B) And more on a general comics level, what’s with all of these superheroes having archenemies that are basically evil versions of themselves? Hulk vs. The Abomination, Iron Man vs. that other dude who made a bigger Iron Man suit, Spider-Man vs. Venom, Wolverine vs. Sabretooth – the list goes on. I mean, here are some of the most creative minds ever – they come up with these vast universes and plotlines and far-out superpowers, and then what? By the time they got to writing the bad guys, they were just plum out of ideas?! Maybe it’s a point towards the idea of the fine line between good and evil, but … I don’t know. Magneto, The Green Goblin, The Sandman, Dr. Doom – those were creative villains … why stop there?!
Happy Shipping Day!!!
After several trips to and from the car, on a rainy Saturday afternoon even, wedding invitations … among other things … have officially been sent!
I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much on postage in my life… :O
