I'm Dreaming of a Wet Christmas

Here's a little parody I wrote about Irving Berlins famous Christmas carol "White Chistmas" to fit with our dry Christmases in South Texas. To hear the "White Christmas" music while you read my words here, open a new window and copy and paste this URL  http://www.carols.org.uk/white_christmas.htm to the new window. Minimize that window and read the words here.


I’m dreaming of a wet Christmas

Don’t want to hear no Jive bout snow.

With lightning and thunder, we’ll stand under

Drizzle on the mistletoe.



I’m dreaming of a wet Christmas

Extended summer's all we get

So I’ll sit in my lawn chair and sweat

Wishing all your Christmases are wet.



I’m dreaming of a wet Christmas

Down here in Texas it’s so dry

The Lone Star Nation, needs precipitation

Soon even winter weeds will die.



I’m dreaming of a wet Christmas

A few mud puddles I won’t fret

I hope Santa won’t forget

That I’d like this Christmas to be wet.

Merry Christmas Everybody!

Goodbye March!

It’s time to say a cheerful goodbye to the month of March. A lot has been said about March. In like a lion, out like a lamb. March Madness. Somebody is always marching on something but it’s not always in March. As far as Birthstones go March has a nice one. Aqua Marine. There have been some pretty famous people born in March. A quick Google search harvested more names than space and time permit here but I’ll list a few of the most notable ones.


Rex Harrison

Ed McMahon

Osama Bin Laden

James Taylor

John Sebastian

Johann Sebastian Bach

Shemp Howard

Wyatt Earp

Harry Houdini

Eric Clapton

Vincent Van Gogh

Jack Kerouac

Mary Ann Vilim

Aileen Vilim

Cathy Woitena

These last three may not be famous, well they weren’t famous until they got their names in Snappybob’s Blog, but they’re famous to those that know them and that’s the best kind of fame. Ask some famous people and they’ll tell you the same.

March is always a very busy month for me and this March was no exception and actually a busier March than usual. We had relatives from the Pacific Northwest come for a visit. Always good to see them as they don’t get to come for visits that often. There was much merriment with Shrimp boils and Bar BQ’s and family gatherings. I ate too much, drank too much and slept too little but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The next weekend was the Gem and Mineral Show. This is an activity that I am involved in throughout the year but one that comes to a finale on the 3rd weekend of March every year. I arrive at the venue around noon on Thursday and don’t finish until around 8 or 9 pm Sunday. We raise a lot of money for a good cause and I look forward to it every year but it IS exhausting. For some photos you can visit our Facebook page here. Southwest Gem and Mineral Society Facebook If you’re interested a link to our webpage is here. Southwest Gem and Mineral Society Homepage

March is also Spring Break time. For some folks anyway. I’ve never gotten one. I think they have Spring Break too early. You always see advertisements for Spring Break events that include laying on the beach or Toobing down the river. I live in south Texas and I rarely feel like jumping into the water in March. Maybe a hot tub but not the river or ocean unless it’s waaaay down south. Like Cancun maybe.

Of course, the Battle of the Alamo came to a conclusion on Sunday morning March 6th 1836. Battle of the Alamo

Being an avid, some probably say compulsive gardener, March is a busy month in that respect also. It really starts in December when I plant tomato and pepper seeds in the house. I fuss with them and worry over them for about two months. The week after the Gem and Mineral Show is the week the garden needs to go in weather permitting. If the weather is too cold or too wet, it can set the garden back to being borderline too late. But it’s the only window I have in March. This years spring garden will consist of:

  19 Heirloom Tomato plants
    8 Pepper plants
    2 Eggplant Plants
    2 Zucchini Plants
    2 Tatume Squash Plants
100 Onions
A 24 ft row of beans and probably some more stuff as some more space becomes available.

So, as we wave goodbye to March as it marches off into the sunset we can look forward to !!!FIESTA 2010!!! Aye! Carumba! I can feel my brain cells running for cover.  Fiesta 2010 San Antonio



Adios!

Mexican Seinfeld Moment

From time to time things happen that I think are somehow note worthy. Maybe they aren’t huge “Alert the Press” type stuff but enough to give me pause, make me chuckle to myself or maybe just piss me off. Some of these things might not even be worth mentioning at the dinner table or at the bar over a beer. Of course after a few beers anything seems like fodder for entertaining conversations. If nothing comes to mind some folks start making things up. Not me though. Be it a curse, a gift or a luck of the draw, I don’t have to. I usually just tuck these things away in my brain until I remember to tell someone or I forget all about it whichever comes first. They usually don’t make for a long enough story for a blog entry so I thought I would string some together until I had enough.
(Weeks later)

Oh well, I guess I’m either going brain dead or lazy or both but nothing worth writing about seems to have happened lately. So, I’m going to throw this one out there anyway like a school kid who neglected to do the weeks assignment.

Here "tis.

This one happened one Tuesday morning. I was contemplating what I was going to have for lunch so I called the Mexican Food Restaurant down the street from my work to check the daily special. The following is a loose transcript of the conversation.

Restaurant Lady: Hello..... Mexican Restaurant.

ME: Hi, what's  your lunch special today?

Restaurant Lady: We have the Chicken Fried Steak with mash potatoes and green beans or we have the Chicken Fidel

Me: Chicken Fidel? What’s Chicken Fidel?

Restaurant Lady: It’s chicken with noodles covered with Fidel.

Me: What??? Covered with what???

Restaurant Lady: Covered with Fidel Sauce.

Me: What’s Fidel Sauce?

Restaurant Lady: You know, it’s sauce that…..it’s Fidel Sauce.

Me: Fidel is a man’s name.

Restaurant Lady: No it’s not.

Me: Yes it is! Fidel is a man’s name!

Restaurant Lady: It’s not any body’s name I ever heard of.

Me: How about Fidel Castro?

Restaurant Lady: Nope, never heard of him.

Me: Fidel Castro?….The leader of Cuba for like fifty years?

Restaurant Lady: Nope, sorry, I don’t know him.

Me: OK, never mind that. What’s in this Fidel Sauce?

Restaurant Lady: It’s a spicy sauce of tomatoes and onions.

Me: That sounds pretty good. I’ll come down later and try it.

I felt like had just been in a Seinfeld sketch.

Well after all of this they could have told me the lunch special was horse piss in a hub cap and I would have had to go down there and check it out. Anyway, I walk into the place and immediately look at the lunch special board and see that it says Chicken Fideo. I still didn’t know what chicken Fideo was so I gave it a try. Not bad. Not bad at all.
 
Bye!!

Twofaced Faceless Facebook Facelift

A short time after I started this blog a friend of mine suggested that I start using Facebook. I actually already had a Facebook account although it was pretty much empty. Or was that MyFace or Spacebook or SpaceCaseFace or something like that. Anyway I was always having to get on some kind of social path networky thing in order to find bands that I wanted to check out. It was getting to where nobody had websites anymore. A place with all of their info, stuff like where they were playing, projects they had in the works or whatever. I found it very annoying. If I could find them at all their ‘page’ was usually filled with so much unrelated info from the page owners and or other social networking nitwits that you could never tell what was real and what was just posted up poop. Anyway, my friend went on to say how he ran into this guy and that guy and these folks who were doing this or that and how he was having so much fun talking to all these folks he hadn’t seen and so forth so I decided to give it another look. The first thing I noticed was my ‘profile’ didn’t have picture. It just had a silhouette of a human head. Kinda like a standard issue Facebook bag to put over your head so nobody could recognize you. Just like the unknown comic.

I noticed many Facebook residents were using pictures of their dogs or cats or something just to personalize themselves without actually putting a photo of themselves online. I don’t blame them. Putting my picture out there on Facebook where anybody in the world or, I guess, even beyond can see just sounds kind of dicey. What if there was somebody from elementary school or something that always wanted to kick my ass but couldn’t find me, forgot to do it or just never had the time. Now he’s retired, has plenty of time, sees me on Facebook and says “There he is, that’s him. As soon as I get out of the foot doctors office I’m going to find him and kick his ass.” He’ll probably send in a friend request to me and invite me to my own ass kicking. If you’ve read my previous blog entries you’ll know that this is the kind of thing that can happen to me. So I put up a picture of something that many people will relate to me. That seemed safe enough and it has been. So far. I have run into lots of people that I haven’t seen in decades and it’s been, for the most part, a positive experience. I even have Facebook friends that I have never met, nor never knew in the 3D world. I don’t know how that happened. Those are the kind of things that happen on Facebook. A few month ago I got a friend request from a guy I used to know a long time ago. I remembered him all right. He stole my drums back in the 80’s and took them to Houston and pawned them. His name was Mike. He knows what he did. Somehow that dried up turd rattling around in his skull made him believe that since this is Facebook it’s not the real world. This is one guy that definitely should have said no to drugs. NO MIKE, not even on Facebook will you be my friend. As many people as he has conned and stolen from, HE has his real picture on Facebook. Unbelievable! There are a lot of things you can do with your friends on Facebook. You can go farming with you friends at Farmville. You can play something called Mafia Wars. You can look at their pictures. Write on their wall. You can send them gifts. You can even Poke your friends. I haven’t quite figured this last one out yet. I wonder if you should send them a gift before or after you poke them. Is there some way to avoid being poked. Lately I have been getting strange things from friends posted on my wall. It’s always something like they tagged a picture of me or they are asking something about me which requires me to click on a link. When I do I see this.

Gee Facebook, I don’t know. Kind of a vague message for me to risk it. I almost sounds like I am going to allow Facebook to hang my Internet underwear out online so to speak. Sometimes I wonder about Facebooks motives. On this one I always decline. The other day I got on Facebook to find that they did a face lift. I still can’t find anything. These website designers always have to be jacking with something just to be jacking with something. Anyway stop by sometime and give me a holler, if you can find me.


Ta Ta!

It's Complicated

Why is everything so complicated? It seems like everything I do these days is way more complicated than it should be. Am I getting stupider or is everything around me getting more complex? Even creating this file was more complicated than I imagined it would be and that was when it was only two words long. I saved it as a word file but forgot to change from the default name. So I had to attempt changing the name three times and finally close the program before I could change the name and proceed with what I was doing which was writing a blog called “It’s Complicated”. The problem is, that doesn’t surprise me at all.


My wife is a very busy person at work and routinely brings work home to do at night. To get this work done she needs to be online. This tends to complicate things if I also have to get online to do anything at night. Her employer thoughtfully agreed to purchase her a laptop to have at home to alleviate tying up our home computer. This should help to uncomplicated things. Right? Well, now we needed something called a wireless router to make all of this work. OK, they bought the laptop, we can buy the router. Why, I don’t know, our home computer worked just fine without a router, but whatever, it’s no big deal. So we go buy a router at the neighborhood router store. When I get it home I call my friend the computer guy. He does a lot of IT work. I ask him if setting up a wireless router on my home computer is going to be complicated. “No” he says,”just hook it up, follow the instructions, accept the defaults and it should be fine.” I hope I’m not getting to techy here but bear with me. The first thing they tell me to do is to unplug the ETHERNET cable on my modem and plug it into the router or something to that effect. The thing is, on MY modem I’m not using an ETHERNET cable I’m using a USB cable.  Ya see, on MY modem, when we first got cable Internet years ago, the ETHERNET thing wouldn’t work but the Time Warner guy said “no problem we’ll just hook it up with a USB cable and see if that works. And it did. But now I have router and there is no place to hook up a USB cable on my router. So here I am years later with this ETHERNET thing biting me in the ass. So…I look through my drawers and finally find the ETHERNET cable that was left over from the cable hookup. (Just to clarify, I looked through my DESK DRAWERS not MY drawers. This should be obvious but in these complicated times if guys can run around with bombs in there underpants, I guess it’s not to far fetched to think Snappybob carries spare ETHERNET cables in his underwear. We’ll save that for another blog). Anyway, so I hook my modem up with the ETHERNET cable just to see if it will work now since this is not the original modem. No dice. It still don’t work, but by now I have my IT buddy over and he says it all points to a bad modem. Great, now I need to drive to the Time Warner Saturday Afternoon Flying Circus and swap out my modem. After standing in line for 30 minutes listening to the counter lady scream like a prison guard “NEXT,... PAYMENT ONLY…….NEXT, ...EQUIPMENT ISSUES ONLY…..NO RUNNING PLEASE. I finally swapped my modem for a brand spanking new one. I take it home, hook it up, YES, we have Internet and, with an ETHERNET CABLE. GLORY BE TO GOD ON HIGH. Not so fast, Even though I have Time Warner digital phones, for some reason, I have to have my old analog phone line plugged into the modem or my phones don’t work. So I look on the back of the modem and guess what? Can you guess? I don’t see any place to plug the STUPID PHONE LINE!!!! I call my IT buddy since he went home when I left to go to TW and he says to look real good on the left side of the back of the modem. I see a sticker that says something about telephones and some other techy nerdy stuff I don’t understand. I pull off the sticker and underneath is phone jacks. Two phone jacks. Of course they don’t work. Two phone jacks that don’t work. So, I know what I must do now. I need to call my old friend Rusty, Rusty works for Time Warner at their help desk, he lives in Pakistan. He has a part time job at Fruit of the Loom sewing bombs in jockey shorts. Nice guy. Anyway after about half an hour of Rusty amusing himself by having me perform cable switching stunts under my desk where my PC sits he decides it’s break time and maybe he needs to just schedule a service call. Perhaps I’ll have my phone service back in a week or so. Oh well, we still have the cell phones. Let’s just get the router thing working. Remember the router? So I hook the router up just like the instructions say following the step by step program on the supplied CD. Of course the router doesn’t work. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that this thing was going to work right out of the box for me. OK, so I look this company up on the Internet, Cisco BTW, and see that they have this live tech chat help line. When I get hooked up with the chat line it says that they will be with me shortly, I am #29 in line. At this point I think, good, and I go and get a beer from the fridge. When I get back I see that now I am 27 in line. I sit there for about an hour chill’in an watching my number gradually decrease. At one point I look at the screen and see that I am #7. Getting close! The next screen I see says “Sorry, but chat tech help is not available at this time. Please check back later.” Nooooooooo! Nooooooooo! This can’t be happening!. I get back in and try it again. Now I am #29 again. Just then, I heard a harp playing in the background, a miracle has happened. On my screen I see these words. “ Hello my name is Chad, how can I help you”. CHAD! CHAD! IS IT YOU! I sobbed like an over melodramatic soap opera star. Me and Chad chatted back and forth for two solid hours. I would chat to him, he would chat back to me, I would holler to my wife. “Are you online now?” “No, still nothing.” We chipped away at it diligently changing codes and changing settings until finally we were online via a radio signal emanating from this wireless router. It just substantiates what I already knew. What’s ‘plug and play’ for most folks is going to be ‘beat and pound’ for me. I have seen this scenario played out over and over in my life. Things rarely go any other way. That’s just my life. It’s Complicated.



Bye

South Texas Winter

It looks like we are in for another winter blast in a few days. The local media will make a veritable circus out of it. THE 2010 WINTER BLIZARD EVENT. The ice, the snow, the sleet, the sand on the freeways and all of the ICE RELATED freeway accidents. Don’t forget the THREE P’s. Plants, Pets and Pipes? How about Paranoid, Preposterous and Pandemonium? I heard the weather nerd on TV talking about how much snow we might get. He had that same look in his eyes as that guy who used to sell Sham-Wows and Mister Microphones on late night TV. I never expect it to snow around here because the only time it DOES snow is when nobody sees it coming. Around here if it gets cold enough to snow it’s because the skies are clear and if it clouds up enough for precipitation it stays just above freezing and we wind up with that ugly sloppy mess that is typical south Texas winter.

Sometimes it doesn’t even get cold at all. We go from hot, hot summer to springtime / fall for about 5 months and then back to summer. Here lately with no rain in all that time either. I can always predict Texas summers. Hot and dry, then dry and hot and then it gets hot and dry again for a while. Predicting winters? I gave up. I’ve sat in deer blinds in November and hosed myself down with insect repellents mixed with sweat and then a few weeks later had to break the ice on the water troughs so that the cows could get drink. I’ve skinny dipped on Padre Island in October and shoveled snow out of my driveway in January. OK, I only shoveled snow from my driveway once in my lifetime and probably will never have to do it again as long as I live here but I DID do it once. I had the most fun on my surfboard that winter day than I ever had on any summer day.

I don’t know about you but I’m going to be packing in supplies for this weekend. I need to bring everything it takes to make a big pot of Chile and a weekend supply of hot toddies. But I didn’t just step off the bus into south Texas yesterday. I’ll also be sure to get some ribs for the BBQ and some Bloody Mary and Margarita mix and we’ll see how things go. So Old Man Weather, what’s it going to be? Are you going to have the chills or a fever?

Ya’ll Keep your Mittens handy just in case.

Bye

Happy New Years

I can't believe the "0X's" are almost gone and we're already starting on the "1X's". I still haven't cleaned out my Y2K bunker. That SPAM is still good right? I was thinking on reflecting back on New Years Eves of the past but, for some reason I'm having some trouble remembering some of the details. Like where I spent them and what I did. A sliver of remembrance pokes through the fog here and there but surely that's some fantasy that my subconscious mind fabricated just to shock me. That couldn't have really happened, could it? New Years Eve falls on a Thursday this year. That's great. It gives me Friday to recoup and Saturday and Sunday to have a normal weekend before the first Monday of 2010. As usual, there are more festivities going on than I can could, or should, possibly attend. The crew here at work wants to kick things off Wednesday evening with Wings and Beers, then later that night an old friend is having her annual Night before New Years Eve Birthday Bash at a club she manages, Then on New Years Eve Night there is a New Years Eve Jam with some picking buddies. That should be a Hoot. My phone just rang a few minutes ago. It was another old friend that has a construction yard out in the country. He was inviting me to a New Years Eve party out there. He says the festivities there will be fairly unlimited. I was told you could bring guns  or bombs or whatever struck your fancy. Sounds interesting to say the least. I think I'm going to try and round up a half dozen or so suicide bombers. At midnight we can light those guys off. They seem to like that kind of thing. I don't know if I'll make all of these events. Next year I probably won't remember if I attended all of these or not.

Many people make New Years resolutions. They're going to lose weight, stop smoking, stop drinking, get a job, get married, get divorced, lower their cholesterol, raise their awareness, write a book, read a book, I've heard it all. Me, I'm not going to promise any of those things. Not even to myself. I'll be lucky to be able to keep doing what I'm doing. Which, I guess, ain't much.

I lost a lot of good friends in 2009 and not in the usual way. These died. As a matter of fact in the middle of the last paragraph I got a phone call alerting me to the passing of another old friend. Over my lifetime I've amassed a great number of people that I consider friends. The reality of that is that as we all get older, the number of them that are lost every year tends to increase as the years go by. A balding old man once told me that as he gets older he spends much more time at doctors offices and funeral homes and much less time at the barber shop. I guess that's true.

As I look back on 2009 it seems fairly uneventful. At least for me personally. Could this be true or do all the eventful things just lose their shine after a while, like tarnish on a new piece of brass. Of course there were a lot of powerful and meaningful things that happened, in general, in 2009. I won't get into that, we'll hear enough of that in the days and weeks to come until the media settles into 2010 or something else happens for the talking heads to cackle about.

This will be my last blog for 2009, unless something happens and I find something else to cackle about. So everyone, be safe, be happy and be careful out there and I hope to see you all back in 2010.

Happy New Year

From

Snappybob!