Dick – Page 25 – Everyday Normal

July 6, 2009

A Day at the Lake pt.1

I had pretty low expectations for the day as I climbed into my friends beefed up mustang. It was red with a big spoiler and some ground effects panels. My friend Blake had a nice sound system in there and a very powerful engine. We were headed with a big group to Lake Colorado City in Texas to go water skiing, tubing and such. Just riding to the lake in Blake’s car was enough fun for me and could only be improved upon if he let me sit on his lap like a 4 year old and move the steering wheel back and forth while driving. We got to the lake and a group of friends loaded into the boat and went out water skiing. Those of us that rode in Blake’s car just stayed and waded out in the water a little, just hanging out.

When the boat came back my friend Clint told us a bummer of a story. He was on the other side of the lake all set up in the water with skis, holding onto the rope, when he realized that he still had his keys in his pocket. He yelled to a friend on the boat and told him to catch his keys when he threw them to him. The driver of the boat did not hear him. Clint reared back and threw the keys just as the boat took off. Our friend on the boat watched as the keys, which were headed toward him, sank into the lake. Clint found a phone and asked his mom to drive an hour and a half or so to bring him some spare keys. As Blake heard this story, he reached in his pocket for his keys but they were gone. He retraced his steps and figured that his keys swam out of his pocket while he was just wading around a little in just past waist deep water. A bunch of us lined up to search the bottom of the lake in the spot where Blake had been when he lost his keys. As we got out where the water was waist deep some guys started to give up Blake kept searching until the water was at face level. I was taller than everyone else and went a little farther. No one found anything at all. I decided to give up too.

Now what happened next is a big reason for my belief in God, as it was a miracle. As I began to walk back to the edge of the lake where Blake was I felt like someone had slapped my brain. I suddenly knew that I was going to find those keys and I turned around. I swam out well past where the water was above my head and in an instant I felt that I should dive down at the spot where I was. As I went down in the brown, snake filled lake I reached out my hand. With my hand stretched out it felt like I was diving for a minute, but it was really a couple of seconds as the water was only eight or nine feet. When my hand hit the dirt at the bottom I felt something around my middle finger that felt like, oh I don’t know, maybe a key chain. I realized that I actually had Blake’s keys and I think I yelled out for joy under the water. I pushed off of the bottom at an angle towards shore and emerged from the murky water with my arm extended over my head holding the keys yelling like a lunatic. As I was running and yelling I saw Blake on the edge of the water. He turned toward me and when he realized what was going on he ran out into the water. He jumped up and I caught him. We then jumped around like Rocky and Apollo at the end of a training montage. (By the way Carl Weathers rules so he will represent me in the video.)

July 1, 2009

Running Out Of Time – Join the Fight

I wrote this a while ago and have been trying to get as many people to join with me as I can. I tried in 0,1 and 2 but no one seemed to want to join up. Now there are some more people joining the fight:

Some time ago, let’s say last August, I was called in to sign something at a doctors office. Next to the signature was a space for the date. I wrote 8/6/7 in the date space. The woman who gave me the paper looked at it and then said, ” I think you have to put 8/6/07.” I then asked, “Should I put 08/06/07 or 008/006/007 ?”

It will be nice when this decade is over and I will no longer face the persecution for not wanting to put a “0″ in my abbreviation for the year. A person should be able to abbreviate a date as far as they can without confusing others. I saw an ad on TV the other day for the Olympics and it said to watch starting on 8/8/08. I thought, “What a shame. It would be cooler if they had 8/8/8.” My family had a reunion on July 7th last year and everyone kept saying that it was going to be on “seven, seven, o’seven”. I think by now it should be clear that I said, “seven, seven, seven”.

It is a strange phenomenon that people cannot mentally depart from placing 2 digits in the year column. Most of anyones life who lives in a single digit decade and lives longer than 20 years will be lived in years with double digit abbreviations and this leads to peoples inability to drop a digit for ten years. Most months are written numerically with one digit and people have no problem switching between one and 2 digits. Once we hit the year column people feel a need to use 2 spaces. In an effort to out-smart-alec me some of you may think, “What did you do in the year 2000?” Don’t be stupid, I used “0″, as I needed to denote the year.

In this decade I have not found another person who is taking part with me in this “Decade-Crusade”. I have found people who agree, but I have never found anyone else who marks the year column of dates without a leading “0″. I only have another year and a half before this issue is irrelevant for 90 years. I would like to find other individuals who feel as I do on the matter. If we can stand up and be counted I bet, ironically, we will still be in the single digits. So far the tally is “01″.

Update: The tally is reportedly close to double digits now.

June 30, 2009

Ending a Bumper Sticker Battle

I do a lot of reading while in my car. Most of it is, of course, bumper stickers. There has been one bumper sticker that I have always thought was pretty stupid. It is the ” My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student” sticker.

That’s terrific. Let’s inflict bodily harm on someone who has worked hard and has made their parents proud. It has never seemed funny to me, not even when I was a dumb kid. And, no, I was never an honor student.

Now, I have had the perfect answer to that bumper sticker for a while. I cannot remember if I came up with the idea or if one of my friends did. I have not seen this bumper sticker on any cars yet, so here it is.

Maybe if your kid wasn’t wasting his time beating up other kids he could have studied and been competent enough to keep that job. Or he could have gotten along with others and not been fired. I blame the parents.

June 26, 2009

Update For a Year Old Post

UPDATE – I didn’t win the contest from last year:

I saw an ad on TV the other day for a Captain Morgan Pose contest. This is my entry. I think it is a real winner. “He’s got a little Captain in him”

Too bad the prize is going to a party with a bunch of idiots.

June 25, 2009

I Will Beat Your Face In

I just had another nephew born yesterday, so I thought I would put up a poem I wrote after my daughter was born and offer congratulations to the proud parents. If you think poetry is stupid or wimpy, I refer you to the title of this post. A few of my friends have also recently had children, so this one’s for you too. Here it is:

So few things gentler than another’s beginning,
Though, as I see, my own time’s thinning.
How many others have thought this before me?
Fathers and Mothers, a line drawn through history.
Were they full of greed-selfish, or noble and kind?
For us it is mystery, these lives led behind.
Countless were born, and then have old grown.
Soon disappearing, to the world they’re unknown.
Ours is not, to finish the race,
But set another’s beginning at a better place.

If you don’t like my rhyming skills, I also refer you to the title of this post and invite you to take part in it.

June 18, 2009

Zombie Reminder

Since I have recently moved, I have been forced to re-evaluate my zombie plan; after which I will come up with a fire escape plan. I am debating whether or not to post my new zombie plan since when the zombies strike, any brain-eater with a computer can look up the details. But I think I will post it anyway when I solidify the specifics. Right now I am hung up on whether I should take the underground or top floor approach. For now you can look at my old plan from this old post:

As an Eagle Scout I find it very helpful to “Be Prepared” for any situation that may arise. When looking at a place to live I check the usual things such as, “Are the showers low flow?”, “Are there any strange noises when I step anywhere or lean on something?”, and “Could a zombie easily access windows?”. I myself, have had zombie plans long before it was popular.

Step 1 – Prevent Zombie Entry

Right now I am renting the top part of a duplex which provides a pretty good zombie defense system. My back door has a rickety old stairway that I could fairly easily knock away from the house if I were to suddenly come under seige by the leagues of the undead. My front door will be blocked by several strategically placed pieces of furniture which will jam it shut against the stairway that leads up from it. With the doors properly defended the windows of the second story duplex now become a great asset. I can see what the gathering hordes of pale brain-eaters might be plotting or I can use them to assist me with step 2. If I were on a ground level floor I would need a lot more plywood to feel secure with my windows. Being so high up I only need to worry if Spud Webb is in my neighborhood and has been captured and converted. But let’s be realistic, Spud Webb would be the hero of such a situation and those rotten-fleshed ex-humans would never catch him.

Step 2 – Take the Offensive

The measures you take to kill zombies depend highly on which movies are correct in their mode of zombie execution. Some popular beliefs about how to send zombies to the afterlife include:

Cutting off their heads.
Blowing their brains out.
Burning them.
Some believe that you cannot stop them but would have to render their bodies useless, while avoiding the still moving limbs.
Killing them as you would a normal human is a popular choice too (Preferred).

In a dream scenario my gun toting brother would be at my house with his arsenal of weaponry when the zombies strike. But most likely I would have to craft my own means of destruction like MacGyver. When killing so many zombies you must be careful to watch how high the bodies are stacking so they don’t reach your window level, but other than that, happy killings.

Step 3 – Make an Escape

You must always come to the realization that you are running out of food, or that the zombies are slowly becoming more clever and will get you soon, which will be evidenced by the large human pyramid of zombies approaching your window. When this happens you have to make a break for it. Hopefully you have access to a car that can easily drive over masses of dead bodies, but you must make due with what you have. My garage is, unfortunately, not connected to my house so I would make the standard distraction while my loved ones and unbitten neighbors headed for my Jeep, armed with knives and broken mop handles. They would then drive under the part of the house that I am dangling from and I would drop on top of the car and kick zombies in their faces. We would then drive around looking for the nearest zombie-free military evacuation zone or the like.

Some Other Things to Keep in Mind

1. If the zombies are standard zombies then my plan is sufficient, but if they are zombies a la “I Am Legend” I am in huge trouble. The massive army of undead, super-fast spider men is a force to be reckoned with. Hats off to Will Smith, he made it a long time.

2. In the future I would really like to get a flame thrower extension put onto my house gas pipeline.

3. If perchance I am captured and bitten I could find that being a zombie is not so bad. Zombies have a strong sense of community and as a white American it would be nice to finally have a “Community” to belong to. I also recently started educating myself about zombies, so I am not so ignorant about them. Watch these videos and remove your bigotry.

June 15, 2009

This Can’t Be Real

Who has a backside that requires an extra 18 inches of reach to get to? How much did they pay the big guy? What are the advantages of being a big guy that he spoke about? Who can wipe their rear with dignity? Can my friends use mine too? What is being done to address the age old dilemma of running out of toilet paper? Oh and lastly, What the…?

Just wait for the next product, the Super Soaker bidet.

June 9, 2009

Fresh from the Dentist, Again – Dentofresh

I was looking through a bunch of the stuff I have put up over the past year and thought that a second look (or first if you came in late) might be a welcome thing. So I may re-post old material for flashback value. This time we will revisit the dentist office. I still can’t believe Sean Connery and Tracy Morgan helped me out with this video. Dentofresh

June 4, 2009

Worst Vacation Ever

I didn’t want to go. I had made it perfectly clear several times that I was not going to enjoy a family trip to Atlanta during spring break. In spite of my efforts I still had to go. The actual vacation was pretty uneventful. The only slightly enjoyable thing was going to Stone Mountain which apparently has a disturbing history.

After being lugged around town for a week, I was finally excited to go home and get back to school. But wouldn’t you know, something went wrong with our old Dodge Ram 15 seater van. We spent a good portion of our last day in Atlanta sitting next to a Pep Boys while they took a look at our battery. All they did was charge it up and send us on our way.

The next morning when we left to go home we drove for about 45 minutes and then the car died. We sat around again while we got a new battery and then went 45 more minutes down the road. Oh guess what, the alternator is bad. We played in a swampy Alabama forest while the hard working gents at Sid’s Chop Shop fixed the alternator. When they were done it was time to stop for the night.

Then again, the next morning we headed out and we made it a little further down the road. This time we weren’t as lucky in our breakdown location and had to push the Megavan about a mile up the freeway to the next town. We waited for a tow truck at the mini-mart and then had the van taken to a dealership. My Dad rented something like a Suzuki Samurai to cram 10 people into and drive around town. At this stop the car broke because the bad alternator had blown the computer chip in the van. The part wouldn’t arrive until the next day so we stayed another night in Alabama.

In the morning we made much better time and made it into Louisiana. While heading through a swamp I felt like the van was shaking from side to side as we went along. I knew that it was a sign that a tire was going bad and told my Dad and brother that we should check it out. We didn’t check it out and continued down the road. A short while later there was a loud bang and our van swerved out of control. Luckily we got over to the side of the road without rolling or hitting any other vehicles. We got out and started playing in the swamp again while my Dad tried to use a puny car jack to lift the Megavan. The jack broke and we were left without any means of changing the tire. A tow truck happened by and lifted the back end of the van so we could put a spare on. We headed into town to buy another tire but all the tire places were closed. We spent the night there and got a new tire in the morning.

After we got the new tire we headed back into Texas. It was smooth sailing until we got near Abilene. There came a very loud grumbling from under the van. Oh joy, we get to stop again. The place we stopped said it was a bad catalytic converter and we all just jumped back in and headed home with the loud noise.

Not only did the vacation take up my spring break but I missed a few days of school and had a lot of make-up work to do. If any vacation ever tops that one as my worst it will most definitely be my last vacation.