We adopted a dog from the pound a few years back he is cute but not the smartest dog I ever had. After a few years he just suddenly started wasting away. We took him to the vet and after a bunch of tests we found out he has Addison’s disease. Despite having to give him steroids every day he has been a normal dog. That was until yesterday, I awoke to a house covered in barf and poop and a listless dog. I figured he had gotten into something he should have and since he was not tossing his cookies anymore I would just watch him and see if he recovered. After renting and using a carpet cleaner to get our home back from the wasteland I noticed the dog continued to go downhill so after I watched him pass blood I decided it was time to visit the emergency vet. Well after going to the vet twice and getting home at Eleven pm with my pocket-book a few thousand dollars lighter; I really started to wonder the sanity of having pets! Besides the black hole of cash that pets can be, having to clean up after them when something goes wrong, paying for treatments that may or may not save the critter and the fun of having to deal with the end of life just suck! Just when you get really attached to them they go off and get hit by a car or eat something that they shouldn’t, and then you have to decide to put my kids through college or save the dog. Luckily this dog made it through the crisis but my kids will have to change the cafeteria meal plan.

This Friday has for some reason has me pondering things that don’t always make sense. There are those things in our lives that we have lived with for years and yet maybe don’t understand. Examples maybe why we still have tires that go flat on cars? You know they know how to make them where they never go flat so why do we still drive around with tires that require me to fill them with air? I also can’t stand that the gas stations either don’t have air anymore or charge me $2 to put air in my tires.

Since I am on the subject of cars, when I go to the gas station I know that my car has a fifteen gallon gas tank. Many times when I fill up it will stop a little past fifteen gallons. I figure there is some room in the pipe or whatever. This morning it stopped at eighteen gallons. What is the deal, should I look under the car or am I being ripped off!

Another thing I don’t get is bicycle seats. When I was a kid we would get on our bikes in the morning during the summer and ride them all day. Now I can’t ride for longer than a few minutes and I feel like John Wayne getting off of a horse. Are the seats harder or have I become some delicate flower that can’t ride anymore? With all the technology we have can’t we create a “no more tears” version of a bike seat?

I just did a horrific thing. I wonder if you have ever taken your keyboard, one from a desktop computer flipped it over and tapped it on the desk? I would like to say that I should have expected it but what came out was not good! A mix of skin, hair, and food fell on to the desk, scrambling me to get a bleach based wipe and swab the whole desk. Some of the clumps resembled items from the periodic table, while other appeared to be of unknown origin. Yes I eat at my desk most days so I shouldn’t be shocked by the food but it always amazes me to see how much skin and body leftovers come out. Skin and how our bodies works is amazing to me. To think that I type away little microscopic organisms attach themselves to me and the keyboard or that pieces of me fall off by the pound filling my keyboard, bed and chair blows my mind. At the average rate of one million cells a day we are like a dump truck of skin leaving parts of ourselves everywhere. The process of losing and making new cells every second of every day means at some point we have replaced our entire shell with a new one. Too bad I can’t control that and have it make a little less in some areas.

Today I am going to make a few men mad. Some will call for the return of my man card! The reason is I am going to give away some our secrets. To the women out there they may not be so secret but they are key to a man’s success in marriage. First off we are not stupid, we are lazy. There is a huge difference in this because we play stupid but it is how we get you to do the things we don’t want to do. Putting all your delicates in the washing machine with jeans and then putting it on hot and super wash may seem stupid but you have never asked us to wash anything again. If we ruin a load or two of laundry we know you will just do it yourself after that and we win. We also know putting a bowl full of hardened oatmeal in the dishwasher then stacking it among the clean dishes still full of caked on food will get us out of that chore as well. You don’t have to teach us how to do these things, we know how, but our master skill is not laundry it is getting out of laundry. If you really want us to help with these chores you are going to have to outlast our tom foolery. It is not of question of whether you can teach us to do something it is a matter of will. Like a game of chicken the winner is the one who doesn’t flinch, and frankly we men are good at chicken!

I am in a mood today! I am about ready to get in my jeep and go run over prairie dogs and squirrels. I have had just about enough of trying to keep dumb people from doing dumb stuff. I tell them, you don’t want to do that or you really need to do that right now. And what do they do? The exact opposite! What happens when they don’t take that advice? I have to do a bunch of work to fix it. Look, I am a nice guy, this is probably why working for myself doesn’t always work. I do things for people without charging them I go above and beyond the call of duty and what does it get me? More free work! I need to get tougher about not working for free, it will be less frustrating and more squirrels will make it across the road as I drive by. I am no genius, I don’t follow good advice on a regular basis, but when I do it I have to pay someone to fix it. I know I am just ranting today but I guess blogging about it is better than running over small furry animals! So to those who shall remain nameless today, do the right thing or the squirrel gets it!

Nothing is as unpredictable as spring time in the Rockies. Saturday morning I went running on Pikes Peak, there was snow on the ground as I got higher up but it was still beautiful. Sunday it kept changing from sunny to flurries and I couldn’t figure out whether I needed a jacket or just a sweater to go to church. Today when I woke up I had two inches of snow in my yard and it took twice as long to get to work. Tomorrow is supposed to be sixty-five degrees. Nothing, other than my brain is as scattered as the weather around here during this time of year. The weather man in my old home town in southern California only had to tell us if it was going to rain or if we were having a smog alert, which was every day during the summer. They probably didn’t even have to have a degree in some weather related field, just read yesterday’s numbers and you wouldn’t be far off. In this town you need a PhD to even get close.

I like to read the book before I see a movie. I read the Hunger games trilogy before those movies came out and I think it helped me understand some of what was going on. Even the Lord of the rings movies had things in them that I would not have understood had I not made the effort to get through them. Tonight I am going to see Divergent with my daughter. I hope that this movie is better than the book. I read it but didn’t think it was all that great. Most of the book was waiting to find out what divergent meant and when it came to the action stuff, it was over really quick. It doesn’t have to be my favorite book for it to be a good movie. I have seen great movies from bad books, but I have also seen the opposite. It doesn’t take much to ruin a movie; the acting doesn’t have to be that bad it can be just the wrong actor in a role, Val Kilmer as Batman comes to mind. Whatever the case I go to fewer and fewer movies these days so when I do I hope they are worth the $9.50 plus surcharge I just paid. Maybe I should have picked the Muppet movie, at least at that movie I know what to expect.

I get that websites are going to have ads. Since it is hard to pay for your website I see the need to use advertising to offset the cost. I also get that depending on the service you are using to show those ads on your site you really don’t have much control over the content of those ads. What really gets me are the really inappropriate ones. I went to a page this morning and an ad about breast-feeding was on the side, the picture was of a baby firmly attached to his mother but looking directly at the camera, Awkward! I don’t want to see an ad about breast-feeding, Cialis or anything on the page I am viewing. When I am looking at something or when I am trying to share with someone else an article about something important it makes it really awkward when the site has half-naked women down the side or in a banner at the top. At least with Cialis they are in separate bathtubs. Targeted ads make sense since things I might actually buy show up on the screen, I am never going to click on the ad for Depends, or anything else that is that embarrassing. If I need any of these products I can Google them or go to the product site. I can even look through my junk mail for a Canadian pharmacy that is willing to send them to me , or better yet just talk to my doctor. By the way, I also know better than to click on an ad that says “what every man should see”.

I have not put much thought into what is a proper punishment for some crimes. I am sure some spend a lot of time figuring these things out. I am not so sure all punishments fit the crime, but there are some people who I think are in need of some old fashion punishment for the dumb things they do. These are a few of my favorite criminals and what I think we should do to punish them.

1. Some guy in the south found out the bank made a mistake and put thirty thousand dollars of someone else’s money into his account. So he goes and buys a car and other things until he blows all the money. They showed his mom on the news and she says the kid shouldn’t be in trouble it is all the banks fault. For this winner and his mom we should bring back putting people in stocks in the middle of town with a large sign over them that reads “stupid in pubic”. Optionally I would leave a paddle next to them so random people can swat at them as they walk past. This would not only deter them but others who are “SIP”!

2. The woman who was getting fifty thousand a year for being disabled. She claimed she could not leave her house but a quick look at her social media sites showed pictures of her in multiple countries around the world. Since she claimed agoraphobia I think a little up close and personal with a mob as they tar and feathers her would give her a new perspective on fear of the public.

3. One on my recent favorites was the girl who sued her parents to pay for her college. While she is back with her parents, I find that to cruel and unusual punishment for the parents. This girl should be made to live with a family in sub-Saharan Africa for a year. Maybe after she has scratched and clawed for mere existence for a while she will come home with a little more thankfulness for what she already has!

This is the funniest thing I have seen in a while! The reason it is funny is because I have been in this meeting with a customer and felt the same frustration. I am the Business Analyst who has to go to the customer and try to get them to give us real requirements for a project. They always have wants, what is hard is to get the customer to boil down to what they need! Sometimes they have been told by someone that software will do everything their hearts desire, when in reality it will only meet half of what they need. Some sales man came in promising the world and I have to explain that the world is not possible or really what they need. The only time they will back off of having to have something is when they finally get the price tag for their dream. Then I have to step in and tell them what they can get. What a fun job!