Tonight, VH1 ran an ersatz awards show called Big in 03, which celebrated things that happened in 2003. Kathy Griffin was on to introduce - what else? - the Really Big Reality Star category. The coolest thing for a Reality TV fan was that she introduced the cast of many shows (some had only 3 people, some had what looked like the whole damn cast), so it was a hoot to see - on one stage - the casts of: The Amazing Race 4, I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here!, Who Wants to Marry my Dad?, Survivor: The Amazon, Big Brother 4, Boy Meets Boy, Average Joe, Joe Millionaire, American Idol, Temptation Island 3, Last Comic Standing, Fear Factor, Paradise Hotel, Extreme Makeover, Race to the Altar, Mr. Personality, For Love or Money, and Cupid.

Oh, the winner of the category? Evan Marriott.

Carol & I were lumps today. We did nothing. (OK, I went out to Chipotle for some Burrito Bols for dinner, but that was it).

We're still recovering from yesterday... and work. Actually, I'm working on an inventory spreadsheet for work so that I know what machines we have staged and sitting in the warehouse for deploy.

Still nothing happening, just crash time... Oh, and it's friggin' snowing outside... the salt trucks have gone through the neighborhood, but nothing is sticking to the ground...

The best laid plans...

I had the intention of getting my video together for my little Blog-A-Turkey "thing" while I was actually barbecuing and then after dinner sometime. Well, that didn't happen. Somehow, the time wasn't there (let's just say that things got a little out of hand and the party didn't end until almost 11pm - way longer than Carol & I wanted).

Oh, the turkey really turned out good this year - juicy as always but everyone was raving about the taste... and I didn't do anything different!!!

I'm having problems with the MJPEG codecs in Adobe Premiere, so it wouldn't decode the AVI files that my Canon S230 PowerShot produced. I decided to try Windows Movie Maker that comes with XP. For a cheapo product, I was really pleased with how easy it worked.

I was disappointed with two things, however - The first is audio. The Canon camera records the audio and a weird-ass frequency rate that's not standard at all. Movie Maker doesn't handle the conversion well, and I sound like I have a lisp!

Secondly, file size. The project was rendered into a 36Mb file for 12:27 running time, at 320x240. When I added titles to some scenes, the file size jumped to over 51Mb!

Oh, I guess there's a third complaint - it's rendered in Windows Media Video format - WMV.

I need to fix Adobe Premiere.

So, here it is - the final video of Blog-A-Turkey 2003!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Well, last year's Thanksgiving Blog-A-Turkey showed, in detail, how I barbecue my turkey. This year, well, here's a little video tease for you! (Sorry, it's only in Windows Video format). Hope you enjoy!

Hope you have a great Thanksgiving!

Update: Here's the full video on how I brabecue my Thanksgiving Turkey. Running time: 12:27 Size: 51.1Mb!

It's always a great day when you get out of work at 1:30 as an early start to the Thankgiving weekend and get paid for a full 8 hours! Wooo Hooo!

Traffic has been light this week - obviously due to the short work week. We're having some oddities happen at work - we've run out of data to stage machines for users. I guess this doesn't normally happen at other bases, so we're hoping that something will come along to keep all of these people busy. Fortunately, data came through for another 120 machines just before 2 o'clock, so at least we have something to work on.

THEME

Do you remember cute little Elisabeth Filarski from Survivor: The Australian Outback? Well, here it is about two years later. Elisabeth designed a shoe line, hosted the show "The Look for Less" on the Style Network, and married Washington Redskins Quarterback Tim Hasselbeck.

Now she's probably the first Survivor contestant with a "high profile" job - today she became one of the new co-hosts on ABC Daytime's The View.

I happened to TiVo today's show and it looks like she's going to fit in well. Elisabeth beat out some familiar faces - Rachel Campos (from MTV's "The Real World: San Francisco") and Erin Hershey Presley (who played Alison in the cancelled ABC soap "Port Charles").

Well, it's not supposed to be here for another month, but today is the first Day of Winter in my book. It was 21 degrees with snow flurries when I got up. The wind howled all night and the wind chill was 13 below. The snow wasn't sticking but it was blowing around, collecting in tiny piles against walls and other objects. Driving north on the tollway, it was actually getting difficult to see with all of the blowing snow. It was cold enough that I actually had to get out my winter jacket, which I have been putting off for a while. I mean, the weather has been so erratic and unseasonably mild... until today.

The sleeping situation hasn't gotten any better. I'm not getting any, and Carol isn't either, though we may have gotten a tad bit more last night than the night before.

Today's weather, though 61 degrees, is miserable due to rain. Today is my mother's 74th birthday, so Carol & I went to her house and picked her up to go to... the cemetery. It was time to lay Christmas wreaths on the family graves, so I piled 6 wreaths into the trunk and we went for a quick loop around the cemetery, pausing briefly to get out in the pouring rain, run through the grass dodging goose poop, plant the wreath and get back in the car.

OK, here's my little contribution to the Blogosphere.

Last year, just for the hell of it, I decided to blog about my Thanksgiving Day Turkey preparation. It's boring, but it shows you how I barbecue my turkey. I do this every year and it always turns out really nice.

Now, yes, I realize that my blog gets virtually no traffic. Yes, there's nothing really here to draw you to visit on a regular basis. But to those out there that read this blog and have a blog yourself, how about telling us - OR EVEN BETTER, SHOW US - how your prepare your turkey - or whatever your main meal is - for Thanksgiving Day.

Call it a "Blog-A-Turkey" and - if you want - put a link in the comments to this post to show what you're doing.

Not only is Thanksgiving a time for giving thanks, it's also a time for sharing. Reach out and share your turkey with the blogosphere!

Pass the word!

So both Carol and I had a bad night trying to sleep. Don't know why, we just didn't sleep. Carol went to work this morning (it's her busy season). I got up and just hit Blogshares for a while. I had errands to run today and I was putting it off for a little bit. My internet connection has been a little "iffy" the last couple of days - I think there's a router inside the Comcast infrastructure that's a little flaky, causing some connectivity issues every 5-10 minutes (at least that's what it looks like on a tracert). So, manipulating my Blogshares account takes a hell of a lot longer than I wanted. I caught up on my TiVo viewing while hitting refresh in my browser for a few hours.

When I went out, it was foggy & misty. I had to go to Home Depot to get lightbulbs (the lights on the front of the house are out) and find some hickory chips for this week's turkey adventures (I barbecue a turkey every year - you can see it all happen in last year's blog entries).

I pulled into the parking lot and saw that the PETsMART next door to Home Depot had a dog rescue group running an adoption day. I git what I needed at Home Depot and then went over to check out the dogs - all mutts, but all look just "sweet". Inside there was a dog training session going on with all puppies. Not real young puppies, but older puppies (definitely not older dogs). Everyone was just sitting in their chairs, not saying a word and not moving, and the puppies are all interacting and chasing each other and just having a grand time.

Since Carol was working, I grabbed a soup and sandwich at Panera. That's when I realized that no matter how gloomy a day it was outside (it was dark along with that fog and mist), the people here were genuinely nice. Not that forced-customer-satisfaction-nice, this felt real. There was this young female worker that walked by me while I was waiting for my order. She was getting some water at the fountain area and she asked me how I was doing today. She had this great smile on her face and it took me by surprise and made me smile and I realized that I all of a sudden felt better about my day. I was tired as all hell, but emotionally I felt better. Sounds weird, but I'm glad I went to Panera for lunch!

I realize that perhaps many of you out there may not have been around 40 years ago. I was. I remember I was in first grade and the principal was playing the radio over the P.A. system so that the school could hear what was going on in Dallas. I remember going home early from school. I don't remember much else, except watching the funeral cortège on our TV a few days later. I guess when you're 6 years old, you don't have a good grasp of the enormity of this event. Hell, I barely understood what a President was.

I have a tendency of believing that conspiracies exist in some situations. Sorry, people, I don't believe it about this one. Yes there's some oddities about what happened, but I think there was a lone gunman.

I wonder, around this time every year, what would have happened if the event in Dealey Plaza never happened. How much different America - and possibly the world - would be?

Carol & I and B & B have had on ongoing "joke" that came up while we in Las Vegas last time (which now seems such a long time ago...). We like going to the same hotels/casinos and sometimes the same restaurants. We always kidded my Mom for doing the same thing - saying that she was in a rut. When we do it, it's not a rut - it's "tradition"! I guess it's just the way you look at it...

I guess that even expands into your everyday life as well. Carol and I go to a Chinese buffet every once in a while. I always get the same stuff from the buffet? Why? A rut? Maybe. Maybe we go there because we know what's there and we know what we want.

So tonight, when they threw some curves at us at some of the buffet stations with different food, I felt "Hey! Where's my stuff!" But I tried the new stuff and liked it a lot, even changing my choices and not getting things that I normally do. It was different, almost "new" in a way. Maybe you just need just a little change every once in a while to make things feel new again, even if it's just food choices...

65 degrees. One of those days you had to go out for lunch, just to be in the sun and warmth, because you just know this isn't going to last.

And to top-off the nice day, when I was driving home tonight, all 6 lanes of Golf Road are open. All that's left is landscaping, lighting, and some road markings (oh, and permanent traffic lights). Looks like our 3-year nightmare of major road construction in the neighborhood is over.

OK, I know that Vodka is the official drink of the former Soviet Union, but according to a Reuters article, people died drinking mass quantities in a contest. The prize? 10 liters of vodka.

THEME
Holy crap! The Fab 5 are back with a vengeance this season! GREAT jobs on tonight's show!

It's been raining hard since midnight. There's flood warnings everywhere around us. the upside is that it's 61 degrees and hardly any wind. The drive to work was just a little slow, so it wasn't all that bad. Had a guy cut in front of me when I was in the left-hand lane on the Northwest Tollway. The traffic was creeping, but at least it was still moving. The guy in front of me takes both hands off the wheel to brush/comb his hair. The car then veers to the left, going over the yellow line, as the guy drops his hands, jerks the wheel over and goes back to using both hands to do his hair. I haven't seen women do this on the road (I've seen makeup and maybe one-handed hair, but never two-handed hair), and this guy is just grooming away. It's brush-brush-brush - *jerk* - comb-comb-comb - *jerk* - brush-brush-brush - *jerk* - comb-comb-comb as he sways back and forth outside his lane. In the rain. Idiot. He stops that and then he starts playing with stuff on his passenger seat, not paying attention to traffic ahead of him. I couldn't tell what the heck he was doing after that since I saw him over the yellow line a couple of dozen times but he seemed to be looking forward. All I know is that I got the hell away from him and got on the Tri-State Tollway northbound...

On the way home tonight, I was punching buttons on the radio trying to find something to listen to. Now, again, here it is November 18 - a week before Thanksgiving - and I find a station playing all Christmas music. This is way too early for this. So I keep punching buttons, and I find another station playing all Christmas music!

What the hell is going on???!!!???!!!

The whole Chicagoland area was socked-in with dense fog this morning. Visibility is just a few hundred feet in some areas. Midway can't get any arrivals, and O'Hare had 1 hour delays. I love driving in fog, especially during the daytime. I found it interesting that even though it was that foggy, the drive time to work wasn't really any different, though there were patches of bad fog and patches of no fog. Fun.

OK, we're coming home from dinner at Mom's this evening. We listen to NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me during the drive and Carol scopes out the houses as we pass by while we're still within the city. On a Sunday night, many people are home with their lights on, making it easy to become a Drive-By Peeping Tom.

That's when she saw it.

It's Sunday November 16.

Someone had their Christmas tree up. And it was lit.

It's not even Thanksgiving yet.

This is ridiculous.

Barry and Buffy came over this afternoon. We caught the 3:30 showing of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World at the AMC South Barrington 30. The theater was packed - I should have realized that it had great buzz and it had just opened yesterday. thank God for MovieTickets.com!. For once, I almost felt like complaining over the amount of Trailers before the movie (now, don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Trailers, but there were more Trailers before this movie than there are in E!'s Coming Attractions show!) Everyone raved about this movie. It was spectacular on the big screen (I would consider this a MUST SEE on the big screen), but I'd give it 3 stars, not 4. It ran 139 minutes and - to me - it felt it. Now, don't get me wrong, this is a wonderful movie to see, but I just wasn't "sucked-in". Don't know why. Wonderful to watch, though. The ships, the sea, the storms, the battles, the details. Wow.

We went back to our house afterward. Caught a showing of Dinner for Five on IFC. B&B have never seen the show before and this was a good one to catch. They seemed to enjoy it (we always do, though sometimes there are people on that are not our favorites) and hopefully they'll catch it on a regular basis. Carol made a dinner of orzo and shrimp with a salad and garlic bread. We talked about everything as we always do. Then we tried to find something to watch on TV for the night and it was slim pickings. We wound up watching Don't Say a Word, which Carol & I have never seen before. A much better movie than the advertising pitched.

It's great having friends over for dinner and movies...

Huzzah! Hoo-ray! Woooo Hoooo! and whatever else you say. The construction along Golf Road by our house is finally completed, and is now 6 lanes wide (instead of 4 lanes). Now, if the excitement over the opening of 6 lanes of traffic is a plus, the negative side is that the left turn lane from Golf Road onto Gannon has a turn arrow (as before) but it's now a left turn on a green arrow ONLY. Bummer. I hate having to wait for a left hand turn when there is no oncoming traffic for most of a traffic light cycle.

audblog audio post

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Shocking! Simply Shocking!

You know it's windy outside when the water in your toilet bowl is either pulsing or gone. The wind gusts right now are 43mph and the Weather Service says to expect frequent gusts over 65mph. Yow! Had a nice experience on the way to work - the Lake Forest Oasis had free coffee and Krispy Kremes! Wooo hooo!!!! Then the parking lot at work is official half done, as they were asphalting the piece that they didn't do a week or so ago. I walked across it and it was still snapping and crackling from the heat of the steamroller (whose driver waved me into a parking place). Well, even though we lost our recycling bins to the wind (though we found two others and claimed them), I'm hoping the house will stay intact during the winds tonight.

The base was closed for Veteran's Day today, but the Staging team was still working, so I came in as well, Got a spot in the parking lot! Of course, there really wasn't anybody there - I could have had an entire row. In the morning, on request of one of the techs, we all paused for a moment of silence at 11am to remember all those that have left us defending the country. This is my first experience at a military installation and that moment of silence seemed important. One of the techs is a Marine reservist - he may get the call to duty this week. Since he's a Marine, you know he'll be going to Iraq and not in just some little support role. I've only been there about four weeks, but I like the guys and the job. It's been odd hearing that one may have to leave to serve his country.

Carol and I were watching TV tonight and saw a commercial with Amazing Phil (as in Phil Keoghan, host of the smartest Reality TV series in production - The Amazing Race), who is producing and hosting a new series for The Discovery Channel - No Opportunity Wasted. In a nutshell: Seventy-two hours. Three-thousand dollars. And a chance to realize your dream — on national TV. Is there something that you've always wanted to do? This could be your chance!

Pulled into the parking lot at work today (well, not exactly the parking lot but a small parking area next to the mess of parking lot construction) only to see small piles of snow everywhere. Crap. Snow. I saw something today that I never want to see again during the length of my contract: This afternoon, one of the warehouse guys was taking a palette of 20 Dell Optiplex desktops that the team had completed staging back to the warehouse. He was trying to pull the palette through the dock door with a palette jack. They guys didn't have any shrinkwrap with them to wrap all of the CPU boxes, so the boxes were all loose. Sure enough, he pulled and the entire palette of 20 machines crashed to the floor. I hope to God they work when we plug them in at the users' desks. Other than that, not too much unusual happened today... until this evening...

Went to my mom's for dinner and found out that my sister is taking knitting lessons! She was either doing the Chicago Tribune Magazine crossword or knitting the entire time we were over. I just know she's going to try to knit something for the dogs...

Went over to B&B's tonight. We haven't seen them in over a month and we just needed to get together! We talked for hours, had drinks, snacks, dinner (steaks!) and they picked-up the DVD of Bend It Like Beckham . Not only a good movie, especially for such a "small" movie, but I've fallen madly in lust with Parminder Nagra! That face, those eyes, that hair... (why oh why did she cut it for ER????) We discussed her at length about how gorgeous she looked. Anyway, a much better movie than I had expected. Oh, and then... tiramisu for dessert!!!

Everyone at work is start to sneeze and sniffle. Not good. Even though the room that we're in is pretty big, people can pass stuff pretty quick in that environment.

It was 28 degrees this morning, going to be 20 overnight. Damn. I hate this time of year.

Time for another Friday Five...
1. What food do you like that most people hate? Raw ground sirloin (ground beef) sandwiches with salt, pepper and onions
2. What food do you hate that most people love? Anything with liver (including paté), broccoli, asparagus, celery
3. What famous person, whom many people may find attractive, is most unappealing to you? Sarah Jessica Parker. I just don't see it.
4. What famous person, whom many people may find unappealing, do you find attractive? Wow. I don't know... I've got to think about it...
5. What popular trend baffles you? Where do I start? How about those stupid, baggy, usually too long stovepipe jeans that are falling off the body, usually with some strips or chains or other things attached to them. Facial piercings of any type (though I'm tolerating tattoos... some tattoos depending on location, size, and quantity...). Is the overuse of the word "dude" finally going away???

THEME
What the...? - PART 2

A cold, but crystal-clear day. This morning was one of those days when you're sleeping and the alarm goes off, but you're really comfortable in a really good position in bed and you just had a pleasant dream and all you want to do is get back there again... but you have to get up and get to work.

Still no change in the parking lot situation at work. I think they haven't done a damn thing in a few days because of the rain. It'll be weeks before this is finished. What will be done first - the parking lot of my contract?

Remember the blonde brunette that started last week? Well, I just felt more hair fall out, the others turn grayer, and arthritis settling into my joints. I'm feeling old because I just found out that her mom is 42...

I left tonight after sunset, but the sky was still clear and te colors so vivid that i was compelled to try to take a picture of it from a moving car... which is never a good thing. Not that I couldn't handle the car, it's just that you can never be still long enough to get a good shot without blurring the image.

Yesterday's rain was the precursor to a cold front coming through. this morning it was 39 degrees. Looks like we turned a corner and it's downhill from here. No more Indian Summers - fall and winter are here.

Well, the Sox made a decision - one that a few people find surprising - former shortstop Ozzie Guillen was named Manager of the White Sox. A few things I remember about watching him play - he has heart, intensity, he never wanted to walk (I always saw him go after pitches - and make contact - that were all over the place), and had this odd little "goofball" side of him, always working hard but having fun in the process. The downside? No management experience - though he was Third Base Coach for the Champion Florida Marlins this year. I hope this works out...

Over the past couple of weeks, the parking lot at work is undergoing renovation. They tore-up half of the lot, removing the asphalt and digging up the dirt, putting in a better base of gravel and then resurfacing. The lot is barely large enough to fit the cars for everyone that works in the building. Having half the lot gone means we have to park in the base exchange next door and walk over. Well, the started asphalting over the weekend - but it's only half done. The other half of the asphalt is blocked-off, and the old part of the lot is now being chewed-up, so the lot is about a quarter of the size it used to be. It's a mess. It's a bit of a walk from next door and, even though the weather has been OK, it's going to make for a lousy walk if the weather changes (which it should over the course of the week).

We had a nice family get-together at Kathy & Al's to celebrate some fall Birthdays in the extended family. The party started at 2 and we had a Wolves game that started at 4, so we stayed as long as we could, but people were still coming over and I felt really awkward leaving. I mean, it's family and we just don't see everyone as often as we probably should. So, we went to the game, watch the team lose, and then I decided we should go back. We arrived in time for cake and lots more conversation (even though we only saw 2 periods of the game, it still felt that the pace of the game was quick and we were out of there in no time). Everyone seemed pleased we came back, and I felt better, too. So we had some lasagna and great cakes, all made by Myrina. Missed all of the opening of presents, though.

"Rabbit, Rabbit!"