Coming right Up....

Tonight, I am off to work the late shift.

But coming up this week:

The lesson of the brown chair.

Starving for the good of mankind.

and why Up makes us all cry.

Baseball Memories

Summertime always makes me think of baseball. When I was growing up in Nebraska, our summers were defined by hanging out at the swimming pool and playing ball. And playing baseball even trumped the swimming pool. On game days we weren't even supposed to go to the pool.

Here are some random baseball memories:

Before we moved to Nebraska, my dad would take us to Dodger games. We even stood in line at the mall one time to get Steve Garvey's autograph.

I started in with T-ball. They made me a pitcher, which was silly, because the pitcher didn't pitch. It was more of a very close fielder position. But, since it was t-ball, a bunch of hits actually came to me.

I played catcher in the first tier league and switched to first base when my growing knees started to bug me.

One year, the coach chose his son as pitcher and we often would stand around as one kid after the next walked or slammed line drives into our week outfield. He just wouldn't let anyone else pitch.

One game, the coach had me play center to try and cover all sides of the week outfield. Someone hit a line drive to right field, I caught it and gunned it home as Jeff Mays tried to grab a point from third base. It would have been an awesome double play if the catcher, Derek Judd, hadn't tagged him a little too aggressively. Derek had a reputation for being too rough and after he made the tag and Jeff grabbed his neck in apparent agony, the umpire called Jeff safe and the other team got the point. Fortunately, Jeff recovered on the spot after that call was made.

In another game, left fielder Billy Hanke ran by our dug out on the way to take the field and taunted us with the prediction that they were going to "shut us out". I was next up to bat and hit a home run that went about 4 inches over his glove and sailed over the fence. Ha Ha Ha.

After every game, we got some sort of credit at the snack bar and went to load up on those little stick things that you dip into a sugary powder, big league chew, candy bars and soda.

Whenever he had time off, my dad was always around to help coach, catch balls and help us hit.

Link to local losses.

Forty-one service members from Southern Arizona have been lost in the conflict in the Middle East.

Observing a Preview....

We just took the fam to see Night at the Museum II. It was really funny. Go check it out.

I noticed something while watching the previews. We went to see the new Star Trek Movie which also had a couple of the same previews, one for Land of the Lost and one for Transformers. When we saw the previews before, they included some boobie references and sexy looking girl scenes. When we saw them for this movie, those references and scenes were excluded.

I guess if you see those movies after you have seen Night at the Museum(where the previews are innocuous), they are safe and appropriate for the whole family. However, if you see them after seeing Star Trek(where the previews include the references above), they are not.

Since I have seen both movies, I am not sure what to do.

Can You Spot Me in This Picture?

The picture is from the local paper, and here is the accompanying article.

Feed The Birds........

Our dog got her mouth on a poor pigeon in the yard yesterday. Diane thought it was done for, so she asked me to finish it off. I forgot about it for a little bit, then went and looked at it. The kids said they thought it was dead, so I was grossed out and left it alone.

Diane then put it in a box, warmed underneath by a heat pad and gave the thing some water. When I got home from work, she thought I should put a listing on Craigslist. Who would respond to something like that? However, in an effort to maintain marital bliss, I posted this ad:

Injured Pigeon Needs a Home (East - Central)

A dog got a hold of this pigeon and it couldn't fly away, but it doesn't seem injured enough to put down. If you can help, call XXX-_ _ _ _.

Someone called within about an hour and they just picked the thing up, after offering their opinions on it's injuries and giving the thing some antibiotics and some sort of nutrients.

Diane says I should call it the bird, or girl birdy.....although she was the one who was offering her opinions on the best method for dispatching it. I thought smashing it with a shovel would work best, but she recommended the neck twist ala chicken in the barnyard.

Glad we didn't do that. The people that picked it up were really nice. They drove from Red Rock (not pictured above), about an hour away, to get the .......girl birdy.

On another note, I believe every state in the union has a town or area known as Red Rock.

Don't worry about doing the dishes. It's your birthday. You can do them tomorrow.

You may not know this, but Sunday was Diane's birthday. Some of my friends expressed concern's that I might make her cook her own dinner, etc., etc.

Here's is what we did. I took her to Phoenix. Granted, it was almost unbearably hot and we were going to deliver a guinea pig and Phoenix is probably our next to least favorite Arizona town (Ajo probably being a least favorite. I am, incidentally, going there this weekend.).

But, we got to hang out with some other friends up there. This guy and his wife and kids and some other friends were around to help us sing Happy Birthday, since we went to their house. We had some pizza and some delicious chocolate brownies with cream cheese frosting.

So there, what could be better for a Birthday than being serenaded by professional singers and hanging out with some friends. You could almost even hear them singing a couple of notes even tho the the kids and I were really trying to drown them out.

I hope you had a good B-day Diane. You really are the love of my life.

Now What are we gonna do?

I just discovered that the library we go to is going to be closed for renovations from this July until July of 2010. I really didn't think it was in that bad of shape.

Not to worry tho, they are opening a temporary one up just south of the mall on Wilmot road. Still within easy traveling distance.

The local libraries are currently run by the County(my current employer), so I believe these renovations are in lieu of any sort of raise I would have otherwise gotten. So, I plan on using the hey out of the new library. I might even live there. That would save me some money.

Here's a visual aid for you.

I had to take a class this week entitled "General Instructor School". The General Instructor School is the basic class you need in AZ Law Enforcement to qualify you to teach other cops and recruits.

Some of the class was on liability issues, how the state says we should organize the objectives of the class and stuff specific to the career field. A good portion of the class was on general presenting to an audience.

We also had to do four separate presentations to the class, ranging from 2 minutes to 15-30 minutes. Since my classmates all prepared their own lessons and we had about a half dozen several hour topics presented by the instructors, I saw about 537,000 power point slides.

I used a Powerpoint (Actually, I used the openoffice.org equivalent, which is compatible, free and on my computer) presentation for one of my presentations, talking about the accidental deaths that have been reported at Disneyland. I figured, when in Rome..... Besides, the evaluators needed to know that I could do Powerpoint if I had to.

For my final presentation, I was sick to death of pp slides. I think it is wayyy too overused anyways(See this guy's brief interview). So, I created my own visual, using pen and paper. The topic I picked was Cultivating Long Term Relationships, so I spent a little time talking about the importance of unity and carefully included my masterpiece, pictured above. The only drawback was that it took a few minutes for the laughter to subside so I could continue with my talk.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Oh, and here are the five perspectives on unity, as illustrated above

The Big Fish Idea: I am more important/powerful/capable than you, so I will swallow you up, we will go with my idea and than we will be unified.

The Good Fences Bring Us Together Idea: If you stay in your area and I stay in mine, we should be able to work together.

Overlapping Agendas: We agree on a couple of things, so when we are together, we will try to ignore the things we disagree about.

The Desert Island: we are stuck together, so we may as well try to work together.

Common Goal: We are working together to accomplish this task and moving in a common direction. Our differences seem less important than the common task. This idea really does work the best.

This is what happens when you pick a movie based on what is the next one to start

I went to see the Nicholas Cage Movie "KNOWING" last night with my wife and some friends. We went to eat and decided to see what was playing at the cheap theater and saw that this Nicholas Cage movie was about to begin. It looked intriguing and when is a Nicholas Cage movie ever bad? (The answer to that is: Wickerman and The Weatherman were definitely bad, and a few could be considered mediocre at best).

This movie started out feeling like a horror movie with a weird little elementary school girl putting a weirdly scrawled series of numbers in a time capsule. This was probably the best part of the movie. Fifty years later, Cage's son happens to get the letter she wrote when the capsule is opened. Cage is, of course, some sort of science professor with religious/determinism/random chance issues whose father is a Pastor (why this is a plot feature, I do not know) and whose wife died a year before in a disastrous tragedy.

He can somehow piece together the numbers and realizes they are dates of and references to disasters, including the one that killed his wife and several upcoming ones. He tries to warn people and help them, to no avail. We get to see a plane crash, complete with burning bodies and a subway crash, complete with people being crushed. As exciting as this sounds, even those scenes are overdone.

It sounds strange, but sort of cool until you hear about how the picture winds down. It doesn't matter if I give it away, because you should not go see this movie. But I will just say that it features space aliens, more death, destruction and mayhem and the fiery end of the world. I think the ending earns it the title of one of the worst movies I've seen in a while and on the list of Cage's worst.

On the bright side, we saw it with some friends and we were all able to ridicule it together. One of our friends, this guy, walked out for the last ten minutes and waited for us in the lobby.

Related to this, our friend Brea is freaked out by Nicholas Cage. Sort of like some people are freaked out by spiders. I always thought it would be fun to invite him to a party that she comes to.

Well, when you put it that way.....

"Two rudes don't make a polite.", said Diane when I was driving.

Different

I was just thinking how my kids lives are quite a bit different than mine were when I was a kid.

When I was a kid, I would go spend my days at the pool all summer long. Now, when kids go swimming, it seems to be a big production....they need to get all their stuff together, you have to drive to get to the pool and it is another big production to get them out and back home again. And what parent wouldn't post a gaurd on their kid to keep an eye out for the creeps that seem to hang around the pools?

When I was a kid, if I wanted to go somewhere, I would hop on my bike and go, all over town. Now, the kids all have bikes, but need supervision, helmets, bike paths. And who is really going to let there kid ride their bike all over town. Have you seen some of the people they let out in public these days?

When I was a kid, we all played baseball in the summer, football in the fall, followed by basketball. If you wanted, you could throw soccer in there too, but only if you made way for the main sports, baseball, football and basketball. Now it seems that every kid has their own thing going and requires to be driven all over the world, dropped off so mom can go take the other kid to their thing and picked back up again.

I do think that video games are better now tho. Lucky little kids.

Star Trek

Diane and I went to see this today with our friends, Gannon and Rebekkah.

As far as reviewing it, I don't have much to say. I wouldn't consider myself a fan of Star Trek, although I have always enjoyed watching it. Well, with the exception of the episode from the original series that I saw last month...."Spock's Brain". In that episode, some alien chick comes on board the Enterprise. Everyone goes to red alert, except Kirk, who is captivated by the hot alien chick. Then she steals Spock's brain and the episode is all downhill from there. Maybe it was just to much to see all the expressions, mannerisms and quotes that the original series os now famous for. Oh, and I never liked "Deep Space Nine" at all either.

This new movie is very fun to watch. Some of the expressions, mannerisms and quotes seem almost a parody, but it is still enjoyable. Scotty canna do any more, Bones is still saying #*@#%* Jim, I'm a Doctor....it really is fun. Plus, we saw it at the new Harkin's theater...it is a very nice place.

So, if you want a real review, go here. But, if you want to see a fun movie, don't overlook Star Trek. If you were ever a viewer of the Star Trek movies or have seen more than three episodes of the original series, this is not to be missed.

If you ever saw the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture, please erase that from your memory and ask the Lord to forgive you for having squandered that time.

Pandemic

Following the first World War, the flu swept across the world like one of the Plagues of Egypt. Conservative estimates have the numbers starting at 20 Million killed by the Spanish Flu virus. This virus was actually worse on the bodies of the young and healthy, as it caused an overreaction of the immune system. Thus, the stronger your immune system was, the greater effect it had on your body.

Current concerns over the swine flu have everyone starting to get riled. Should they be?

According to the CDC, the U.S. has some 30,000+ flu related deaths annually. While one could argue the figure, since the deaths are "flu related", which seems to me to be ambiguous. Nonetheless, it can be argued that death from/by/associated with the flu is still significant enough to be a concern.

This year, the swine flu, so named because it has proteins that emulate the flu found in piggies, has been responsible for one death in the U.S. While one is too many....well....one, thirty thousand....one.....is it really more disconcerting than the general flu?

Some say we should close the borders to stop this pandemic from spreading here, since it is primarily found in Mexico at this time. Since it is primarily found in Central Mexico and most legal border crossers come from Northern Mexico, that may not really help. Maybe stopping the illegal crossers, a great many of whom are from Central Mexico, it could make a difference.

However, I am still not convinced that it is an epidemic of Biblical proportions just yet. I am waiting to see the rivers of blood and the swarms of locusts and the murrain on cattle before I become alarmed. Unfortunately, I am not certain I would recognize a murrain if I saw one. Maybe it is one of those once you see it you will know what it is sort of thing.