Well, I have decided to start another blog. My life is rather boring and I was finding it hard to come up with topics to blog about without running into issues with the fact that I cannot write about the largest part of my life…..my job.
My new blog is:
This blog is related to Disney and it’s relationship with me.
Well,
The year 2007 marks the tenth year my wife has been out of high school. We found out a week before that a reunion (of sorts) was going to be held at Hugo Lake in Hugo, Oklahoma. This is where my wife would’ve graduated from high school if her dad’s job hadn’t moved her to Southern California in the middle of her Junior year of High School.
Since, she had a greater attachment to her high school in Oklahoma because she lived there most of her life, she decided that is which reunion she wanted to attend.
Fortunately, Nancy was able to get her scheduled shifted so we could get a Friday and Saturday off to drive down there for the reunion.
I took a half-day off of work, we shipped the “kids” off to the “puppy hotel” and hit the road to Nancy’s homeland.
For the entire time I’ve known Nancy, she has gone on and on about the Indian Nation Turnpike and how it is absolutely horrible. From a scenery standpoint, it is 10x better than the drive down I35 S to Houston. But it has one major detractor. Somewhere between Tinker AFB and Shawnee we lose our cell phone signal and we don’t get it back until we get to the same point. So the entire time we were gone we’d be without a cell phone.
Well, half-way down the turnpike, we noticed the car was starting to drag and pull when trying to go up hills. It was behaving like my motorcycle does after winter.
Immediately, I just assumed that we got some bad gas. I recently switched to the low octane gas under the insistance of friends who told me I was wasting money by purchasing the middle-grade gas. I was just hoping that we got to Nancy’s dad’s house (where we would be sleeping) before it died.
We got there alright and Nancy’s dad and I went to the gas station to put premium gas in the tank and a bottle of STP. We hoped that it would make the problem go away.
The next morning was the day of the reunion. As the day went on the car just got worse. Our biggest problem was that since we didn’t have cell phones we had no way to stay in touch with the other people in the group. So we kept trying to stay with them despite the car running like crap.
Eventually, the “Check Engine” light came on. This was the final straw for me and I insisted that we went to Nancy’s dad’s house and stopped driving the car before it died for good.
We got to her dad’s and he was nice enough to swap us for one of his rather new vehicles where we were able to catch up with the group at the Hugo Rodeo that was going on at the same time.
Well, it was decided that we’ll leave the car in Hugo and borrow one of her dad’s cars to get home. Nancy had to get to work the next day. Someone was going to take it to the Toyota dealership for us and we’ll return with the borrowed car when our car was fixed.
Well, we got a call about the vehicle the day after it was dropped off. Here is where it gets interesting.
Apparently, when we took the car into the shop a year ago to get the 100K mile service, the spark plugs were changed. Whoever did the work left the socket for tightening the plugs in the engine. It took a year (about 14K miles) for it to do it’s final damage. It trashed the sparkplug which resulted in one cylinder not firing anymore. It was a simple fix. But, while they were trying to do the inital determination they found a leak in the head gasket. This was very expensive to fix ($450).
Needless to say, we had to make the trip back the next day and I had to take another day off of work. But, we have the car back now and it’s running like a champ.
Well, it’s 12:23AM and I’m sitting in front of the TV switching between network channels. We are having tornadoes once again dropping all around me.
So far, I’ve been lucky and they are not close enough to me to warrant the tornado sirens to go off, but I’m afraid to go to bed or risk sleeping through the siren (it’s awfully faint from this location).
I haven’t even had a chance to hit the showers after my 45 minutes on the treadmill because I didn’t want to get an uninvited guest while showering.
My wife just called from the hospital to inform me they have announced a Code Black because tornadoes have touched down real close to them and they need to be prepared for potential victims.
I told her that I’d take a hurricane any day over this. This is the 3rd night in a row of this crap! At least with a hurricane you know which way it’s headed and you can get out of the way and pray that it turns. Here, it’s like Russian Roulette.
Well, Nancy and I were out eating dinner at TGIFriday’s and decided that we wanted to see how the property looked at night.
We knew that Mustang was a tad more rural than Oklahoma City and when we had been at the property during the day noticed that there weren’t a lot of streelights visible. Those street lights that were visible weren’t very tall. So we were interested to see how dark it was and how much light pollution was present. We were kind of wanting it to be dark.
Plus, because it had been raining we didn’t really think and work would’ve been done.
We pulled up and circled around so we could get a better look at the lot and see how dark it was. We got out of the car and was going to walk to the center of the lot and look at the sky.
I took 3 steps into the lot and almost fell on my face. The ground suddenly dropped by 3 feet. Apparently, some work had been done. The two trees that were directly in the front of the lot were gone and they started grading for the foundation.
Needless to say, there wasn’t alot of light pollution or I would’ve seen the pit I fell into.
I got back into the car and we decided to take a quick spin around the neighborhood and see what has improved. We passed the security guard who was asleep in his car.
Well, as we were pulling out of the neighborhood, a police officer came pulling in pretty “hot”. The car pulled a U and came in right behind us. I turned to Nancy and indicated that most likely they were there for us so let’s just pull over. Nancy pulled over and just sat there.
I’m sure this confused the heck out of this fine person that we pulled over befor his lights were on because it took forever before he walked up to our car. We rolled down the window in anticipation. He slowly peeked into the window with his high powered flashlight blaring in.
As soon as his flashlight hit the “to go” container with nancy’s leftover salad that was sitting in my lap he broke out in a big ole smile.
We told him that we purchased a lot in the neighborhood and that we just moved up from Houston and we were just curious on how dark it was because we were hoping for dark.
He told us that the security guard runs a tight ship and calls the cops everytime a car pulls into the neighborhood after dark. We told him that we were going to appreciate that.
He was about to turn around and leave when he stopped and said, “Oh by the way, welcome to Mustang”. He smiled, waved and sent us on our way.
Well, I just got my first Tornado scare……
The siren went off, then the radio did it’s Emergency Broadcast sound, but this time it wasn’t a test. We were being told to take shelter.
I scrambled to grab my laptops because the information contained within are crucial for my company and my personal finances. Fortunately, my home office is right next to the bathroom that serves as our storm shelter.
I went to go try to grab the dogs which I knew would be a challenge when the warning was lifted. The tornado had already touched down…..15 minutes down the road from where I was.
I called Nancy at the hospital to let her know I was alright to find out that the hospital had already called a “Code Black” and she didn’t know why. I told her that a tornado touched down on a highway and took some cars out.
She’s in for a long, long night in the ER and hopefully I don’t have to do this hokey pokey again and try to get my butt into the bathroom/storm shelter
I am still playing around with Google SketchUp.
This is my latest foray. Nancy spent and evening measure things and drew up a plan with dimensions and I transfered it to Sketchup.
The stereo components and TV you see are from the available components you can grab out of the repository of objects users upload to Google’s Sketchup page. In fact, someone created a 3D model of my Samsung DLP TV and I added it to this model.
Well,
My brother, Impwerx, has struck again. This time dabbling in the world of portraits and not coloring other people’s line art. This is pure Impwerx original. Here is what he said:
A brief stint into the world of portrait work. Something about this piece really appeals to me, yet strangely I don’t know what it is exactly. About 6 hours or so in photoshop. Standard default brushes, and the texture is the concrete near my house.
~imp
I was at the gas station filling up the car with gas. While I was pumping the gas, a local police officer pulled up in the lane across from my car. We started chatting. I was mainly pumping him for information since Nancy and I are new to the area.
Well, I like to use that little feature of the pump that allows you to not need to hold the handle the hold time. I normally have it set to the slowest setting, but I was getting antsy waiting for my 20 gallon tank to fill up. So I grabbed the handle to set it to a faster speed when I guess there was a spark because my arm suddenly burst into flames (I was wearing my sweatshirt).
The cop noticed this as I hit the ground trying to put my arm out. He jumped over and started smothering the flames with a blanket. After the fire was out he threw me up against my car and started putting handcuffs on me.
I was shocked and shouted to him what had I done. It was an accident. He threw me in his car and told me that I was under arrest for carrying a fire arm….
<groan>
This was a nod to the cheesy joke Kuri posted on his blog
Well, Nancy and I have done it. We have taken part in the Oklahoma Land Rush. Granted it is only 118 years late, but we did it.
We firmly planted out stake down on a nice 1/2 acre of prime Oklahoma red clay with a smattering of cedar trees.
As the lady at the title company said, “We know own land with the promise of a house.”
This will be the first of hopefully several blog entries documenting the development and construction of our new residence
Well, my brother has managed to eek out some coloring time and has posted another piece on his deviantART page.
So i tried to knock some rust off my coloring talent. As suggested before I tossed some names into my kangol and pulled one out. It was Randy Green’s Hell Girl piece that got the magic touch. Anyone can see the pro talent if you look through his gallery. There is a high level of control and style he consistently exhibits. I highly recommend looking through his work, as there is a wealth of information for would be pencillers to digest.You can just never go wrong with a hellboy, or in this case a hellgirl theme. The series itself is moody and inventive. I came at this piece with a theme. Heat. Everything about this idea of hot, and heat haze is where i was going. Looked at a camp fire the other night to get the idea for the BG. It is entirely self made, which represents a bit of achievement for myself as like most, I tend to pay little attention to the background and instead focus on the main element itself. I tried to get it all in balance to my satisfaction, without sacrificing any of the imagery.Linework : Randy Green : link
typos and grammar fumbles free of charge.
~imp
You can view the original deviantART page here
