Dolphin's Dock
Small Splashes
The Downside
November 26th, 2007
to a four day weekend is that you’ve just gotten used to NOT going to work, then you have to go back.
Or Your Money Back?
November 20th, 2007
Every time I think the Bush Administration cannot sink to a deeper low, they prove me wrong.
The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.
Seriously disgusting1.
- via Tiny Cat Pants [↩]
Akismet
November 14th, 2007
Does anybody know if Akismet just automatically deletes comments that it’s absolutely positive are spam? I’ve noticed since I started this blog my captured spam count is alot higher than the comments I’ve been asked to verify. I check it daily so it’s not that it’s deleting things because they’ve been sitting in the filter too long. As of right now Akismet has capture 121 spam comments, yet I’ve only had probably 15-20 in the spam filter for me to verify. Anybody have experience with it?
Main Posts
A Meme
Lee at Digital Nicotine tagged me for a meme. See it below.
1) Link to the person that tagged you, and post the rules on your blog.
2) Share 7 facts about yourself.
3) Tag 7 random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs.
4) Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
—
1) I hate calling people. I don’t mind talking on the phone (though I’m not big into that either), but for some reason I get all panicky when I have to make a call. Even with people I know. Every weekend a conversation like this is heard in my house:
Me: What do you want to do tonight?
TheBoyfriend™: I don’t know why don’t you call So-and-So and see if they want to get together?
Me: Uhh, yeah, well… Let me check and see if they are on IM.
2) I have the most extreme “Hitchhiker’s Thumb” I’ve ever seen. I can extend my thumb backwards at the joint to a full 90° angle. I used to occasionally entertain myself as a child by slamming my hand down on the table in front of others, then squealing as though I’d broke my thumb prominently displaying my reverse-bent thumb as evidence.
3) My skin crawls when I hear someone mispronounce “coupon.” It’s “koo-pon” not “Q-pon.” It stems back to my freshman year in high school in which the English teacher had a list of words you were not allowed to mispronounce in her class. I think that I’ve since seen that both pronunciations are now considered acceptable, but I still cringe at “Q-pon.”
4) I know an insane amount of useless trivia. I know everybody says that but I’m well known for it among my friends. The funny thing is that it’s all stuck in my head and I can’t pull it forth on demand, only when something I hear reminds me of a strange fact. At that point I feel absolutely compelled to share it with the room.
5) I’m always the youngest in the room. Ok, so not always but I do tend to always have older friends. My senior year in high school sucked because nearly all my friends had graduated by the time, I started my senior year. Hasn’t changed. Almost all my friends are 2-10 years older than me.
6) I have no enamel on my teeth. As an infant I contracted spinal meningitis. I’m glad I don’t remember if because I’m told at it’s worst, blood began to seep from the pores in my hands. Anyways, the medication they gave me saved my life at the expense of causing my teeth to develop without enamel.
7) I like making desserts. I don’t like to cook “food-food,” but I will bake pies, cakes, cookies, etc. The strange thing is I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and so I really don’t particularly care to EAT my creations, just to make them. I’m always excited when I’m invited to a party or something and need to bring a dessert. I make a mean cheesecake and at our recent Halloween party I made up my own thing by baking sugar cookies, adding a dollop of vanilla pudding and sprinkling it was hand-picked raspberries. They were a BIG hit.
—
Ok, I’m supposed to tag seven others, but honestly the only people I read regularly are the folks on my blogroll (just because of times sake, not because there aren’t plenty of other quality blogs out there), and two of them have already done it, I’m pretty sure two won’t, so I’ll just leave it open for anybody. If you do it as a result of seeing this post, leave a comment and I’ll link to you in this post.
Two Peas in a Pod
Conservatives like to hate on Hugo Chavez like he’s the anti-christ (wouldn’t surprise me to find that some have outright made that accusation), and much of their criticism is absolutely valid (even a broken clock is right twice a day). I wonder if any of their feelings will change now that he’s pulled a page from the GOP playbook.
President Hugo Chavez warned his supporters on Friday that anyone voting against his proposed constitutional changes would be a “traitor,”
There’s no way anyone can condemn this action of Chavez, if they supported our President and GOP congressmen who have done the same damn thing, without exposing themselves as the worst kind of hypocrite. On the other hand, there are those (like myself) who have no problem condemning such statements whether they come from American or Venezuelan, left or right.
Happy Thanksgiving
Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving. I’ll be heading to my parents as soon as I leave work today. I’ll have my computer with me, but whether or not I’ll be posting while I’m there remains to be seen. Hope you and yours have a good one!
Night on the Town
I don’t think I have what it takes to be a trendy sophisticated socialite. A friend of ours was playing with a jazz group at some little swanky jazz club about an hour away (our city wouldn’t have enough potential patrons to support such a thing), so we headed out there. It was a fun night and the music was superb, but this place was trying way too hard.
It was decorated beautifully with a sorta chic industrial/modern look. You know, exposed aging brick walls, with everything else super sleek and loads of brushed metal. I dug the look of the place until the first trip to the bathroom which took the look to the point of being a parody of itself. Seriously, they had metallic tiles running halfway up the way up the wall to meet a series of mirrored surfaces divided by rectangles of brushed metal. The two pieces of artwork were long skinny photographs that were close-up of eyes (because the bathroom is really a place where you want to feel like you’re being watched?), and the sinks were those kinds with the plateaus in the middle that look real nice until you go to use them and find that it’s impossible to wash your hands without splashing water all over the counter.
A first glance at the menu revealed no prices (which seems to be the startling new trend), but upon closer examination the prices were there only it seems the dollar sign has fallen out of favor so everything was listed like “Shrimp Noodle Soup /15″ (instead of “Shrimp Noodle Soup - $15.00″). Of course the numbers following the slash tended to be predominantly more in the 25-60 range, that’s per plate without your beverage (in fairness, this place did boast of a 5-star chef so their prices were not bizarrely high for restaurants of that caliber, just bizarrely high compared to the places we usually eat). Before the slash, it seemed they had had trouble deciding if their menus were going to represent a fine dining establishment with formal description of each dish or a more trendy coffeeshop-like feel with some clever Web 2.0-ish remark, and they frequently switched description styles from one menu item to the next.
Needless to say, with those prices, we chose to skip dinner. We did find out that if we ate, we didn’t have to pay the cover and the desserts were only $2 (or should I say “/2″) more than the cover charge so in a sense we could each get a dessert for 2 bucks. I got the cheesecake. If we’re operating on the assumption that (by ignoring what I would have paid as cover) dessert only cost me $2, then I’d say I paid about a buck per square inch of cheesecake. That didn’t stop them from bringing it out a 15″ plate though. TheBoyfriend™ got sorbet which came in four scoops (each about the diameter of a quarter and in flavors such as “Apple Cider”), and another friend who was with us got some little golf-ball sized cube of chocolate cake with some kind of cream drizzled out to the side (presumably for no other purpose than to at least appear to be using the foot long rectangular plate it was served on).
We didn’t dare risk a cocktail lest we have to take out a small loan, so we opted for the (surprisingly free) “filtered tap water.” It was all I could do to keep from laughing hysterically as waiter brought out a bottle of tap water and momentarily presented it to us as if it were a fine wine before gingerly pouring it into our glasses.
Despite the waiter more or less ignoring us after it became clear we weren’t gonna spend half a paycheck on one meal, it really was a fair bit of fun but I can’t imagine (other than for the music) going there for any reason other than to laugh at the pretentiousness of it all.
Feline Friday
Happy Birthday Hobbes! I don’t know the precise date on which Hobbes was born since he was born feral, but having counted backward from his estimated age at the time I got him he would have been born sometime in the middle of November. That means he’s 3 years old this month! It simultaneously seems like I just got him yesterday and have had him forever. A look back (sorry the quality is low, I didn’t have a decent digital camera at the time so these are cellphone pics):
Could Have Made a Worse Choice
I’m not one for celebrity gossip. I neither know nor care what Brittany Spears is doing this week to ensure that she’ll NEVER get custody of her kids back and I don’t know which stars are hooking up or divorcing nor who’s been arrested lately. So it’s therefore not too often that I even notice who People Magazine names as their “Sexiest Man of the Year” (though if there were to be a bit of celebrity gossip I would keep up with, the “sexiest man” would probably place pretty prominently; I’m just sayin’). But scanning the headlines, I couldn’t help but notice that this year the honor went to Matt Damon.
Celebrity gossip aside, that’s interesting to me. Now, Matt Damon wouldn’t have been my choice. I think Matt Damon is alright-looking but I can name any number of stars who I’d put much higher up on the list (not to mention that I think Brad Pitt still has a few good years of sexiest man left in him). No, this is interesting to me for one reason and one reason only: about once a month or so, somebody tells me that I look like Matt Damon.
Fatherhood
I had always seen myself as one day being a father. Even after realizing that I was gay (and what that meant so far as actually producing a child), I knew I wanted to adopt or perhaps have a child through a surrogate or something. I very distinctly remember on cold night, when I was about 13, carefully wrapping our new puppy up in a small blanket to carry it outside which caused my mother to break down in (happy) tears over how good of a dad I’d be.
Yet, the reality is adoption by a gay couple would be a difficult (but not impossible) thing to accomplish in a conservative state such as mine. What little bit TheBoyfriend™ and I had discussed the matter (and we didn’t discuss it alot because until recently it seemed like it’d be a long way off before we could even consider it), it seemed that by the time we were really ready, we’d be too old. It wasn’t until last year when a good friend of mine asked if we had thought about adopting, that it dawned on me that I’d finally grown to accept the fact that I’d probably never have children. I think consciously, prior to hearing the question, I still had just taken for granted that one day I’d have a kid or two, but when forced to actually voice the intention one way or the other it occurred to me that it simply might not be in the cards. Further, for the first time when thinking about such things, I found myself ok with that. Not thrilled, but not upset either.
Well here lately, TheBoyfriend™ (who is currently counseling children for a living) has been making little comments like “…almost makes me want to adopt” or “if we had a child…” but never really going much deeper than that. The other day I walked into the office and he was looking at the website of an adoption agency. Just seeing what the process would be like “were we to think about it someday…”
Truth is, I don’t really know what to think now. It’ll be at least until we get into our new house, no matter what, but it’s taken me by surprise (which is surprising in and of itself). I’d finally just gotten comfortable with the idea of not having kids, and now it looks like I might end up with at least one after all. I’m not opposed to the idea, so why is it scaring the hell out of me even in these very preliminary stages of discussion?