One of the pumpkins at my sister-in-law's house.

Celebrity Spotting

John Lithgow(sp?) at Pier 1

Martina Navratilova Dressed In Our Hotel Room

I work up in our hotel room to the sound of voices. Several young women were there, putting on jewelry and doing their hair for a party. I turned to look around and saw one was wearing a very low-cut open back dress. She bent over to reach for something in a dresser drawer and her dress, which I guess wasn't fully situated, drooped in the back and I believe I caught a glimpse of her anus. I quickly looked away and said "Hey, watch that!" Everyone giggled about it, including my wife. When I looked away, though, I saw a program or guest list or something on the night stand, and seeing her name on it I realized the woman in the more-revealing-than-intended dress was Martina Navratilova. I looked back to confirm that. She was looking over her shoulder at me, smiling, and dropped her dress again even more than before. I groaned and dropped my head back to the pillow and covered it with the blanket while everyone laughed.

After they were all gone, and my wife with them, I grabbed my phone to post a quick blog entry about it, figuring you all would be interested. I had managed to key in "I think I just saw Martina Navratilova's butthol" when some guy walked right into the room, looking confrontational. I quickly, but a bit fumblingly, cleared the message and closed my phone so he wouldn't see what I was doing. He got up into my face and warned me about the possibility of crazy people getting into my room. Well, no shit!

When he left I locked both the hall door and the door to the adjoining room (where the women had come from) and called the front desk. They sent a guy up, along with the maid. I complained to them about the poor service and slid out a drawer to reveal that it was actually a cooktop, which had several Popeye's style fries strewn about on it. Several were stuck together, though, so I suspect they were from a frozen bag of them and never cooked. I complained about the maids not doing a thorough job of cleaning up after the previous guests. The man apologized.

At that point I realized it was all a dream and woke up. I felt very disappointed that my celebrity encounter hadn't been real, and that all I'd be able to post here for your reading enjoyment was a recount of a dream. Oh well.

Willie Nelson Follow-Up

Well, I'd like to be able to tell you that Willie Nelson saw my previous blog and was amused, but I haven't heard anything from him or his people and seriously doubt he's even aware if it.

Instead I'll just share this song that's been going through my head since posting about the dream. It brings back some memories for me besides the obvious.





If you like it and don't have the CD yet, I encourage you to go out and buy it right now. (Hopefully if Mr. Nelson stops by he won't make me take this down now. :) )

Last Night's Dream

I had an unusually extended dream last night. It started with my wife and I driving home. On our way along the main road we take an airliner swooped down overhead and landed ahead of us on the road, but I guess it hit too big of a bump because one wing broke and fell down, sparking an explosion of the fuel that was in it. I recognized the plane as belonging to Willie Nelson, and was distraught at the prospect of the world losing his music. I called 911 and told them that Willie Nelson's plane had gone down near us and asked them to send help quickly to save the music. After that I grabbed a laptop out the back seat and sat by the side of the road, intending to blog about what was happening and get a scoop on everyone. The first thing that came up, though, when I booted up was a chat site dedicated to Willie Nelson, on which he himself had just posted that his plane was going down. I was even more upset by losing the scoop than him crashing.

At that point my wife woke me up with a snuggle, and our real day began.

I'm not what you'd call a Willie Nelson fan, but I don't dislike him and I have enjoyed his songs when they play. All in all I'm glad he's not dead. If the events in the dream were to happen in real life, it would probably go about like I described, except I would post with my phone, and I would be much more freaked out and saddened by his post than upset about losing the scoop. (If you're reading this, Mr. Nelson, may all your landings be happy and safe.)

Hard Target

Really, is there anything more majestic than Wilfred Brimley on horseback with a bow & arrow? Is there? There is? Oh, ok.

Well anyway, I just watched, or glanced at actually, bits and pieces of Jean Claude Van Damme's movie Hard Target. It was set in and around New Orleans, from what I saw, and they really seemed to play fast and loose with the geography. The opening scene was of a man being hunted by a mish-mash group of incongruously calm and sophisticated-looking sickos and dark-helmeted motorcyclists ("bikers" would be a misnomer) in the French Quarter. Cut to the same man running from same sickos and motorcyclists across the river on the west bank, making his way over the levee, supposedly to reach the safety of his small boat on the river. He is shot down with a crossbow. (IIRC, crossbows were big in the early 90s.) In the next scene, a woman is driving from the west bank (the side where the guy was killed) to the east (the side where the French Quarter is) and the gondola towers left over from the '84 world's fair can clearly be seen. Perhaps the guy eluded his pursuers by crossing over on the cables. It would be quite a feat as there were no gondola cars in sight.

At this point I was absorbed in installing Visual C++ 2005 Express (a free download from MS along with other programming languages) and the Windows Platform SDK so I missed most of the movie. I guess.

When I next looked over my shoulder, there was Wilfred Brimley, not yet on horseback, taking aim with his bow and arrow. He shoots, narrowly missing the lead antagonist, but hitting his intended target: a can of whoop-ass in the form of bottles & jars of highly volatile & flammable liquids that ignite on the impact of the arrow. BOOM! Bad guys aflame. Lead antagonist shows he's a nice guy in an evil sort of way by mercy killing a flambe'd bad guy. The the dynamite goes off and Brimley takes off on horseback after taunting the baddies and attracting a hail of pitifully aimed automatic gunfire and one grenade or rocket or something that hits a convenient shed. The picture above is the best I could find. It does not do justice to the scene, which includes a slow-motion shot of Brimley bouncing on his galloping horse towards the camera as the Convenient Exploding Shed explodes behind him.

Then I returned to my task of configuring VC++ to use the platform SDK. Maybe if I actually get around to learning to program in C I'll blog a bit about that.

More Found Images - Bald Britney Photoshopped

My wife frequents this forum where she found this thread.

The participants post photoshopped versions of the recent photos of Britney Spears with her shorn head.

Here are the two best images, in my estimation...

Britney as the unmasked Darth Vader:


What really happened to her hair:

Fever Dream

I'm getting this down while I remember it. I have no idea what time or even what day I had it - this has been a little disorienting and I'm amazed more time hasn't passed.

Most of my time since my last post has been spent in bed with the covers alternately on and off and a damp washcloth on my forehead while I occasionally sip ginger ale and water. The dream started with me lying down like that, with all that stuff around me, but I was lying on the ground at the edge of a sunny field watching a pickup softball game. The grass seemed dry where I was, but must have been damp where they were playing because they kept slipping and making mildly spectacular errors and saves. One heavy-set batter fell immediately upon making a hit.

As it happens in dreams sometimes, I rolled to my feet and found myself in my old room at my parents house. Nobody else was home and I somehow knew my parents and wife were out shopping. I shuffled over to the bathroom and opened the cabinet to get a fresh washcloth. (I'm not sure why. Maybe the first one had grass & dirt on it.) As soon as I opened it a hurricane lamp chimney fell out and broke on the floor. I went off to get a broom and dust pan to clean it up. While I was grabbing them it occured to me I should get a vacuum too to be sure to get up all the slivers, since folks are often barefoot in bathrooms. I went outside to get it, since it was naturally in a case in the trunk of the car.

As I pulled out the case from the trunk, a woman walked up to me and started talking. It was Zsa Zsa Gabor, except she looked to be only about in her mid-40s at the oldest and her hair was in a more modern style. I'm not sure exactly, but as I took out the vacuum and tested it I think she talked about a vacuum cleaner she used to have. I recall thinking she didn't look too bad and that if I weren't married I might have made a play for her.

We said our goodbyes and I headed back toward the house. When I got to the door I found that instead of being on the bathroom floor the broken glass was embedded in some tar on the driveway. The tar was a navy blue instead of the usual black, but though I noted that as unusual it didn't surprise me at all. I sat down with a putty knife and began prying up the pieces and feeding them into the nozzle of the vacuum. At that point my father showed up and began helping me pry up the pieces. We had to break up a few of the larger ones to make them fit in the vacuum nozzle.

I don't remember any more of the dream beyond that, if there was any more. I guess I woke up then.

Anyway, I'm starting to feel a little weak, so I'm going to grab a pill and get back to bed.

We're back! We're Sick!

We're back from our New York City trip. We had planned on doing a morning tour of the harbor on the Circle Line, but we both woke up with colds after our adventure on the tour bus. Take my advice: don't ride an open-top tour bus when there's a thunderstorm in the forecast. I plan on posting some select photos, but haven't decided whether to put them in an album on the front page or post them one at a time in the blog. Anyway, here's a rundown of the trip, with Google Maps links where I can find the spot:

Day 1: Worked a bit at the shop to get a last few orders out then drove to Gettysburg. Spent a bit more time than anticipated in the museum and weren't able to complete the CD-guided driving tour. What we did see was interesting and I got some good pics dispite the rain & mist. After grabbing a quick bite at the KFC just outside the park, we drove on.

We didn't start looking for a hotel until around 9:00 PM and didn't find an affordably priced one until around 11:00. I think we were driving through some sort of golf resort rich section of New Jersey. We went out to get a bite before bed and ended up driving for half an hour without finding anything but night clubs, high-end restaurant, and one closed Burger King. They did have some nice holiday lights in the town square, though. My wife had some crackers and we went to bed.

Day 2: The hotel served a free breakfast (and for $120/night it better) that was pretty good. They had a cook there making omelettes to order and a waffle station where you could make your own fresh with premeasured cups of batter. They were fresh and delicious. Out in the parking lot I took a pic of a couple huge houses neighboring the hotel. We were definitely out of our element.

Driving on we made our way to New York, or rather to the hotel near Palisades Park New Jersey. It was still early so we dropped off our luggage at the desk and, on the advice of the desk clerk, took the bus from the Vince Lombardi Park & Ride to the New York Port Authority bus terminal.

We walked towards Times Square and once there bought a two-day ticket for the tour bus but talked them into giving us three days because of the rain in the forcast. (The tickets are sold by agents on foot near each stop, and seemingly everywhere else.) We waited a bit for the bus and went on the downtown tour. (Here's a map of their downtown & uptown routes.) We saw lots of neat stuff and I got lots of pics.

We hopped off in Greenwich Village to get some lunch. (You can get on and off at any stop for the duration you pay for.) We ate in a little pizza joint on a corner and who should walk in for a slice but John Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls. If I had a camera phone I would have taken a pic while making a fake call, but all we had was the regular digital camera and I didn't want to be too touristy. We just finished our lunch and left without making a big deal of it. I'm not sure, since I didn't get a good look, but I think another band member was with him. The pizza was really good, but for the sake of the band's privacy I won't post the name of the joint.

We hopped back on the tour bus and saw lots of other sites, including a glimpse of the World Trade Center site through the churchyard of the Church of St. Peter as we passed by on Broadway, and our best view of the Statue of Liberty as we swung around the tip of the island, the United Nations buildings, and Rockefeller Center where they had lit the tree the night before.

After cleverly pretending to be guests to use a hotel's lobby restrooms, we took the uptown tour, seeing many sites including Central Park, several museums, the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Grant's Tomb, and a few mansions & churches. We also passed the site of the shooting of John Lennon, in front of his home by the park. Unfortunately, the bus was moving just a little bit and the pics I got are a bit blurry.

After the tour we met up with my wife's family and ate at Planet Hardhollyrockwood, or whatever it was, by Times Square. (Actually, we ate near Darth Vader & Chewbacca costumes, so I guess it was Planet Hollywood. At my sister-in-law's insistance, no doubt.) The food I had was decent, actually, but not as good as that pizza from lunch.

After that we headed back to the hotel. The Port Authority was hot as hell, and we had just missed our bus and had to wait a while for the next one. I think switching the thermostat there must be a union job.

Day 3: After a late start, due to much socialization with the family over breakfast in the hotel lobby, we headed into town again. We started off by hopping a tour bus and jumping off at the American Museum of Natural History and seeing the Cosmic Collisions show in the planetarium. After the show we wandered around the museum, mostly in the vertibrate evolution exhibits. I got some nice pics in there, including some nice ones of the grounds, Central Park, and the city out the windows. It was rainy out but nice and comfortable inside.

The only glitch was when we were watching an orientation video in a large darkened alcove furnished with several wooden benches. I spotted something moving in the aisle. Turns out it was a mouse. The kids there seemed quite amused and tried to chase it.

We lost track of time - there's no way to see all if the museum in a day - and missed the last uptown tour bus so we had to take a taxi back to Times Square. It was a wild and weaving ride, but very smooth for all that. I gave the driver $15 on a near-ten-dollar fare. Was that too much?

We debated a bit on what to do next, and decided on doing the city lights tour. It looked like the rain had stopped, but as it turned out it wasn't quite done.

We toured around the city a bit, stopping at Lord & Taylor's store to walk past the window displays and popping inside to see the interior decorations. (Got pics.) The tour map doesn't indicate very well the route of the city lights tour. It turns out it includes a trip across the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn. That was an interesting drive at night from atop an open-top tour bus. Very windy. We stopped at a nice little pier under the Brooklyn Bridge (I forget the name) for some pictures of the skyline and an ice cream cone for my wife.

It started to rain so we headed back to the bus where they handed out cheap plastic ponchos. I had my coat with a hood so I put mine over our bag. The heavy rain naturally hit us as we started back across the bridge. All we could do was hunker down and try not to let our hoods blow loose. One woman ahead of us had an umbrella that kept blowing inside-out. Another tourist next to us had an abandoned poncho blow back into his face. There was much laughter.

By the time we got back into town the rain had stopped so we continued with an abbreviated tour. We did pass by Rockefeller Center again. The place was lit up beautifully. A nearby building was lit up in blue floodlights woth projected white slowflakes falling down its side. I didn't take any more pictures, though, for fear of a sudden downpour hitting the camera. The tour guide said we could take the lights tour again the next night if we wished, but we were planning to leave anyway.

After that we headed back to the hotel, by chance meeting up with my in-laws as we waited on the bus platform. My MIL is a bit freaked out by busses. She doesn't like not seeing the road as they go over bridges & overpasses. She had her eyes closed for much of the ride.

Day 4: The next morning we both woke up with colds. We had planned on taking the morning cruise of the harbor, but decided that we couldn't take the 40-degree temperatures and packed up to go home. Fortunately, without extra stops a direct route home is an easy half-day drive.

So here I am at home, sick in my jammies & robe. I'll post pics later this week, possibly over an extended period.