PhoneBoy Says

Sitting together. Not bickering for a moment anyway. :)

What were you afraid of as a child that seems silly to you now?
Submitted by navelgazer.

The "Paramount" logo (and associated music) at the end of television shows. Particularly the ones with the red background that zoomed into a white square with the Paramount logo. The music was downright frightening to me. Heck, I even had nightmares involving the red, scary logos. Watching these closing logos today (and you can thanks to YouTube), I am reminded of how scared I really was. Even to this day, the old Paramount closing logos give me the creeps.

There were, of course, other scary logos, but none of them held a candle to the Paramount ones.

As I posted earlier, we are going to postpone our annual Thanksgiving feast with my in-laws owing to the fact they aren't really eating much right now due to some sort of sickness. It turns out our realtor and my wife's friend who helped her look at houses today is also not doing anything special for Thanksgiving. As a result of that, it looks like we are going to look at some houses tomorrow--on Thanksgiving. We will look at three houses, two of which she's seen already, and one she hasn't that is right across the street from a house we looked at earlier (and loved the neighborhood).

If that doesn't work for some reason, there's always the movie theater. Who knows, we may end up doing both anyway. But there won't be any home-cooked turkey consumed tomorrow. Not until Saturday at least.

Tomorrow's going to be a busy day. Our house is getting it's weekly cleaning, a new garage door opener is going in (fingers crossed), and my wife is off to go look at some houses a little further south with a friend of hers, who as a non-realtor seems to have done a much better job locating acceptable houses than our realtor. Too bad she can't get the commission on one of those houses if we do end up buying one of them. Jaden is also coming home early tomorrow since it's the last day of school before Thanksgiving.

After all that, I may want a nap but who knows what will happen.

My in-laws got food poisoning yesterday. Since we tend to cook Thanksgiving dinner with them (we cook parts, they cook parts), it looks like we may be delaying our Thanksgiving meal a day or two. Wonder what we will do on the proper Thanksgiving instead. We'll have to see…

Depending on where you are exactly in the Puget Sound, you've seen a lot of rain this November. In fact, in some places, it's broken records. Seattle proper has broken records, but not all places in the Puget Sound. Perhaps the most telling is this tucked away at the end of this article on KOMO-TV's website:

BREMERTON:
This month: 22.82" ** this is not including November3rd. Unfortunately, Bremerton's data from that date is corrupted, andit was a really rainy day, so we're not sure how much rain they havethis month. It's likely around 24".)
Highest previous total: 20.08" (January 1953)

Bremerton is the next town over, and I'd say 24" of rain is a pretty accurate assessment of the rain we've been getting here. And, of course, the month isn't over yet so some records that haven't fallen yet could very well fall.

Have I mentioned I hate the weather here lately?

There are two projects we've been trying to get done for a while now--getting a new DVD player in our minivan and replacing the garage door opener. Both of these things have had unexpected problems.

Last week, I took the minivan into Magnolia to swap out my antiquated VCR for a DVD player--we already had a screen. Several hours pass by and the bad news comes up--namely that the screen is tied too closely to the VCR in order to work separately. That meant buying a new screen, raising the cost of the whole project by 150%. The good news is that they wouldn't charge us for the work they've already done and we could use the already-paid money. But it meant rescheduling, which with Thanksgiving coming up, well.. anyway that should be done tomorrow, fingers crossed.

Today was the day we were supposed to get a new garage door opener. Our opener works fine. What doesn't work fine are the remotes and, unfortunately, there is no source for the remotes other than Wayne Dalton. Yay, they suck. So a new opener was purchased at Lowe's along with installation. Getting an installation scheduled took a week because their contracted installer was unavailable. I had gotten the install scheduled for today.

Today, the guy shows up, takes one look at my garage door opener and says "you know, the part I need to do this, I used my last one of those at the previous job I just did. We'll have to reschedule." He was just at Lowe's and had he known, he could have picked the part up. He chalks it up to Lowe's not asking enough questions beforehand to ensure he was prepared. I believe that. Anyway, we're scheduled for Wednesday morning.

And of course to make life even more interesting, house hunting is occurring once again. The wife has looked at a couple of places and is scouring MLS to find a nice place at a price we're willing to pay. The politics of this neighborhood are getting too much. It's not the people but rather "behind the scenes" stuff that few people are privy to, but end up affecting the entire neighborhood. The latest I heard this evening about drove me ape$^!+, but not terribly surprising.

The new road behind our house, which finally opened up earlier this week, is so far proving to be a non-issue. Not much road noise so far. Because the weather has been so wet, Gracie hasn't gone outside too much, thus not taking off for the road. She did go outside briefly this afternoon between storms, but didn't stay out too long, given how cold and wet it is outside. Maybe we'll move before the road and the lack of a fence becomes an issue, who knows. Hope so anyway.

Makes me not want to back to the McDonalds in Tacoma where this sign was.

I really wish the overlords at Vox would allow us to add our Twitter timeline onto our Vox page somehow. It's an insanely useful service that just begs to be part of Vox.

Show your support for this idea by tagging your own post with Twitter, marking this post "this is good," and by all means communicate directly with the Vox folks and let them know.