Freaky Friday

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
sex (8x) kill (7x) hell (4x) dick (3x) shoot (2x) death (1x)

I'm not sure where all that sex came from. Hell and dick sure, but sex? Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese had sex. And I've complained of not having sex, and quite a while back there was the sex list post, but that's about it. I think the rest of that stuff came from the Cloverfield review.

It has been all about Cloverfield this week. I'm going to switch things around a bit today and put the Cloverfield searches at the end of this post after the top twelve keywords. I hate spoilers, and I think that discussing the Cloverfield searches would count as a spoiler. If you want to read my review, click here.

We had a lot of Rudy's BBQ fans this week. Searches include calories in Rudy's barbeque, rudy's bbq nutritional, rudy's bbq coupons, rudy's bbq nutritional facts, rudy's bbq nutritional info, rudy's barbeque, rudy's barbeque calories, rudy's bbq nutritional value, and rudy's bbq nutritional facts. There are 30 to 35 calories in two tablespoons of sauce, and that's all the info I've found so far. Okay, I'm not going to get all serious like last week, but for the most part bbq still isn't diet food. It just isn't. If you want to lose weight you'll need to eat a lot of stuff like broccoli. But if you happen to be near a Rudy's, maybe you should try the turkey. If you don't drown it in sauce, and you don't eat too much of it, turkey is good for you. So while you're at Rudy's ordering a sandwich, maybe get some extra turkey to go. And maybe eat it with a side of broccoli.

Somebody was looking for an Enik costume. I made an Enik costume for Halloween 2006. I think that I wore it for about twenty minutes. It was just too hot and uncomfortable.

Other people were searching for 31 inch wide refrigerator, 31 inch wide refrigerator in stainless steel, and clean outside of black refrigerator. I thought that last one was odd. Are black refrigerators supposed to be cleaned in a different way than white ones? I know that there's now special laundry detergent for black clothes, but surely you don't need special cleaners for black refrigerators.

Someone Googled I don't feel like I'm an alcoholic, to be followed by I'm an alcoholic too. Well, I'm not an alcoholic. I'm about as anti-alcoholic as you can get. And I said so, here. Probably not what they wanted to read.

Someone Googled central market olive salad. I think the olive salad I bought was Boscoli, which they do have at Central Market. But I lucked out and bought mine at the surplus store.

A fellow fan of the knitting machine was looking for bond-america.com discount coupon. I don't have any such coupon. But Micheal's and Hobby Lobby often have coupons, and I once used one to buy the knitting machine.

Now we come to the beverage searches. I usually have a lot of those, but these week there's only diet drinks the truth and calories for glass of ginger ale. Unless you want to count beer in a tree. That's a Christmas song. "On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, a beer...."

There were a couple of Google searches for selling my artwork on a blog, how much money made selling art, and how much do I charge for my art and craft. I don't actually sell much of my art, cause I have so much trouble figuring this stuff out. I think that many years ago I sold a couple of painted eggs and copies of a few sketches, and now I've sold a ceramic tile and a Harry Potter scarf. Mostly, I like my art and want to keep it. If you want to buy something, you have to give me enough money that I don't feel bad having to part with it.

Someone Googled truth in Star Trek Show. I'm not sure what that's about. I'm not even sure how someone would find me with that search. There's going to be a new Star Trek movie with all of the original crew recast with younger actors. Maybe someone was trying to find if that's true. It is.

There were three searches for freaky sluts blog, a search for slut husband blog, and two searches for freak friday party. Okay. The freaky sluts who blog are in England. Or, at least, the ones I had problems with are there. There are others in other places, like New York, but I don't know anything about them personally, I just read the blogs. As for slut husband blog, well, I don't know if that's what I'd call him, but he does blog. And I may know some freaks, and it is Friday, but I'm not going to a party.

There were a lot of searches involving popcorn. Two searches for eating out calories in popcorn, two for calories in movie popcorn, and air popped popcorn diet. This isn't much of a diet, but you're welcome to it anyway. And I don't know the calories in movie popcorn, but it's probably a lot. The other odd search was t.o. eating popcorn. That's a reference to one of the Dallas Cowboys, but I didn't write about him, and I don't even like football.

Someone was searching for eBay posting not listed. Should I be relieved that I'm not the only one with this problem?

There were searches for bath and body works wallflowers and sick dogs, and wallflower bath and body works isn't working. Poor dogs. I hope that they didn't swallow some fragrance oil.

Someone Googled truth of inlaws. I don't like my inlaws, and that's the truth. There's only two that I have contact with now, neither lives in town, and one doesn't even live in Texas.

There were a lot of searches that found this post I wrote after I heard that other people didn't like the new Terminator series as much as I do. Sarah Connor to meet Reese in series--well, the way the show is going, she might. Other searches were Sarah Connor Chronicles theories, Sarah Connor chronicles computer class, grandfather theory, and Terminator theories. They all got to read a bit about time travel theories in general, and about theories used in Terminator movies specifically. Unfortunately, only my regular readers left comments.

Other searches for the week were big seashell sculpture, everyone is going to hell, and pop-tart factory. I don't even know anything about the pop-tart factory, other than someone mentioned it in a comment. The big seashell sculpture was a ceramic project that spent most of November in a museum. And I just don't feel like getting into the everyone is going to hell bit today.


Thanks to everyone who played the game of please use Homewrecking-Slut in a sentence earlier this week. If you did not get a chance to play, click here, or just leave a comment below.


Okay, here's this week's count:

Cloverfield--21

Rudy's--10

Penis--0

People going to hell--1

Sluts--4

Buckets--0

Diet Drinks--3

Refrigerators--3

Vasectomies--0

Popcorn--6

Bath & Body Works--2

Terminator/Sarah Connor--4

Alcoholics--2

The top twelve keywords are: costume, penis, the, dick, rudys, going, giant, hell, bbq, texas, diet, for

SPOILER ALERT------------------------------------

Searches about the recent movie include cloverfield incident, truth cloverfield, cloverfield marlene dies, cloverfield what happened to marlene, cloverfield which building beth lives in, what happened to marlene in cloverfield, cloverfield truth government win, cloverfield end bit fly over, cloverfield marlene bite, did anyone see the spaceship in cloverfield, clovefield marlene we've got a bite, cloverfield explanation, cloverfield marlene turn to monster, what happened to the girl who was bit in clover field truth, cloverfield beth and rod at coney island, beth's apartment rich cloverfield, shutup rob cloverfield, attack hud smaller monster, was there a spaceship that crashed at the end of cloverfield, cloverfield blood out of her eyes, and cloverfield very end explanation. Here's my review about the movie. From what I've read elsewhere, what the guy whispers at the end of the movie is "It's still alive." And there might be a spaceship crashing into the ocean in that clip of Coney Island that was recorded a month earlier. And my theory about what happened to Marlene is still an alien parasite, but maybe I've just seen Alien too many times to see it as anything else. Unfortunately, no one left me any comments sharing their theories, but to be fair I don't remember leaving anyone else comments about this movie either. By the time I read a post, someone else had already left a comment that basically said the same as I would have written, so I didn't bother repeating it.

Post 297

Nearly the end of another week of getting nothing done. Well, almost nothing. My first art project looks pretty good so far. I have made a 18 inch tall pylon shape, and now I have to decide if I should leave it the way it is or cover it with leaves and vines and maybe flowers and a few lizards and frogs. I still can't make up my mind about the second project. I would like to think of something to do with the red stoneware leftover from last year, so that I don't have to buy anymore clay for a while. But I'm afraid that I'd get halfway done with something and then have to go buy more red clay, which would then just leave me with another half bag of red clay and wondering if I shouldn't do something with that. I also have most of a bag of white stoneware, which might be better, but I was thinking that I'd make some raku stuff with it later.

I hate being broke and having to give this much thought to buying a ten dollar bag of clay.

I took home a bunch of dried out clay last semester, and I was supposed to recycle it over the break. But of course I'm only just now getting to it. There's a bucket of white modeling clay, or at least what will be clay after it dries out a bit and is kneaded. And I had twenty-five pounds of what I thought was white stoneware, but now that I have it out it feels too smooth for that. I'm about halfway through that, and when I'm done with it I'll ask the professor what it might be. I also have a small bit of porcelain to recycle. I've never worked with that before. Then I have another twenty pounds or so of white modeling clay, which is what I'm probably going to need the most of, and there's still tons of red clay to recycle, which right now I'm not even sure if I have a use for.

And then there's the stuff that I got out of the backyard, which is terra cotta, but there's something wrong with it and it tends to crack a bit.

My back and legs hurt from lifting heavy clay. It isn't fair that I have all these little aches and pains. It's a lot like I used to feel after having a lot of sex, only without the sex.

Anyway, except for washing dishes and recycling clay, very little work is getting done around here. It's strange that the little errands I used to enjoy now seem like so much work and wasted time. I had to go to Irving today. That usually means I also have an excuse for going to several stores and perhaps a dollar movie. But going to the stores knowing that I can only buy what is absolutely necessary just isn't that much fun, and after that took most of the afternoon I didn't really feel like seeing a movie.

I brought home a clay relief of Anubis. I don't like it as much as I thought I did, and I don't know what to do with it. Also, the house is overrun with plaster castings of dragons, and I don't know what I'll do with them either.

My husband is going to be stuck in the same place again for a third week. Normally, staying in one place like that is relaxing, but they aren't making any money at this place. Three weeks in a row, out of town, with the extra expenses of being out of town, and no money coming in. It sucks. There's going to be ice on the roads here tomorrow morning, which won't matter that much to me since I don't have to go anywhere. The bad weather is moving east, towards where my husband is. I wonder if there will be ice on the roads Saturday night. He should probably stay over for the weekend, but then there's that whole bit about not having any money. Staying over would cost just over a hundred dollars, if he didn't eat much. We tend to like eating.

Sunday I have to go to this meeting for people who live here. We don't do much. We have to elect a dozen people for a nomination committee so that we can have the election for board members in June or July. Anyway, I really don't know any of these people, but we need a dozen or so for this committee. About fifteen people usually volunteer for the thing, so picking the twelve isn't too hard, even if you don't know anybody. Someone usually practices saying "I make a motion to close the nominations and accept the nominee by acclimation," and that makes things go a lot faster.

Anyway, to convince people to attend this boring bit of business, we have turned the meeting into a potluck lunch. BBQ is provided, and we all have to supply the veggies and desserts. I forgot about it being this weekend and haven't even decided what to bring. Again, it sucks being broke. I usually buy something instead of make something. This year I might have to make something.

I am ready for this week to be over.

Post 296

Well, next week I should be writing my 300th post. And I think that I'm finally going to do what I had threatened to do for the 100th post (and then again for the 200th). If I don't come up with something better, I think that I will write something to homewrecking sluts.

I keep saying that I'm going to post this thing, but then I don't do it. I'm just going to go ahead and post something. That way there won't be this draft that I keep thinking I should work on. I don't think that it's perfect, but I think I will feel better if I set myself a time limit and get it over with.

I should think about more pleasant things, like ceramic class. I'm pretty sure that this will be my last class for a while, unless I win the lottery or something. I'm trying to put some thought into my projects, because these might be the last I get to do. What do I really want to make? What items do I really want that I wouldn't be just as happy making later of non-ceramic materials?

Mostly what I've come up with are dishes for the Halloween party. I'll make those for the third or maybe the fourth assignment. The first assignment is 18 inches tall and will start with stiff slab construction. Which means that I will have to wait a while for the slabs to be at that stage where they are not quite dry but not soft either. I keep changing my mind on the second project. I should get started on my third or fourth project, except that they require rolling out more slabs, and I really don't have any place to put them. The fifth project is a relief sculpture in two or three pieces, and I haven't given that any thought yet, and again there's no point since again it would require rolling out another slab. The sixth project is a fool the eye sculpture, and I haven't given that much thought yet either. In the past two semesters I have copied a big seashell and a pumpkin. I can't think of much else that I would want to copy right now.

There is a seventh project group project that the professor likes to do when he has enough students, and there are eight of us and I'm afraid that's more than enough. I'd rather not participate. And what's to be done with the group project after we're finished? I mean, who gets to take it home? And the group project is usually big, so even if you wanted to take it home and the other students don't mind, where do you put it?

There's another returning student who is just taking the class for fun. And she can throw pots. I am quite jealous. She just walked unnoticed to a wheel and came back a bit later with about a 10 inch by 10 inch cylinder. She didn't quite like it for some reason, but I was impressed. I wish I could do that. And I think that whatever it is that she doesn't like can be fixed in the trimming stage.

I had all but forgotten about my second attempt at the glass sculpture. It turned out really nice. Not perfect, but I'm really happy with it. Unfortunately, I'm not going to have it fired a second time to give it a glossy finish. Two other students tried that, and their sculptures broke in half. I don't think that I'll risk it.

Today I spent a long time doing dumb stuff like smoothing out my slabs and making about a quart of slurry. Slurry or slip is water mixed with clay that is used to sort of glue pieces of leather hard clay. We have these big bins of water and clay scraps, and we usually get stuff for slurry out of these bins. Only the bins dried up over the break, and they'll take a while to soften up again. Anyway, it's a big mess, and I spent the morning playing with mud.

Yesterday my husband had to go out of town again. He spent last week at this place. And I thought that he would have been better off just staying there a bit longer rather than drive all the way here and then pretty much have to drive back where he was a day and a half later. But he wanted to come home. You'd think, isn't that sweet. But I think it has to do more with him not liking that motel and missing the computer. This week he's staying at a different motel with an Internet connection, so I'm sure he'll be much happier with that.

There's a guy on the news saying it's not to late to get a flu shot. I didn't get one this year. Not a conscious decision on my part, I just forgot to get one. I'm thinking at this late date I'll probably skip it.

Today is cold. Maybe not so cold as last Thursday, but still cold. Somehow, it didn't seem that cold when I left this morning, but it was cold at school, and it is still plenty cold now. Probably not the best day to play with mud. But there are more craps of clay here too, so I will probably spend some time trying recycle some of it. The clay at the school bookstore is cheaper than at Trinity, but free is still better. But what I would really like to do is skip that and skip all the errands and such, and just get a blanket and go back to bed. I could maybe watch last night's Sarah Connor over again, but that's not a productive way to spend the day. I have the house to myself again, and I should spend my time doing something constructive.

But I have to go run at least one errand before I get back into bed. We somehow forgot to make the December car payment. If we miss this one too, it could get ugly. So I'm off to the bank.

Monday Morons--Problems with links

Okay, so if you've been reading for a long time you already know about the Homewrecking-Slut, and possibly you also know about the Bimbo's Friend. They started out as bloggers who read my husband's blog. According to my husband, Bimbo's Friend was the interesting one. The other one decided it was okay to go after my husband and break up our family just because he asked for her email address. I don't think that this is normal. Hundreds of people have asked for my email address, and I have asked for the email addresses of a lot of people, and I can only think of maybe two who have gotten into their heads that I'm supposed to have sex with them afterwards. If I were expected to have sex with everyone I exchanged emails with, I just wouldn't have time to breathe. (And of course I only have the email address of one person with whom I have had sex.)

A bit after all of that, I started this blog. To be honest, I started blogging a.) to annoy the Homewrecking-Slut, and b.) to get my husband to see how hurtful it was to me that he continued to blog. The bit about annoying the Homewrecking-Slut didn't work out the way I'd planned, because as soon as she saw what I was going to do she made her blog private.

More than a year ago, I wrote this post about someone hacking into my husband's eBay account. It was a bit annoying, but since I really didn't want him doing the eBay stuff anymore, from my point of view it was actually a bit funny. My husband didn't notice it at first, because he'd almost given up the eBay stuff anyway. Later, I wrote this post, after someone hacked into my husband's blog. Again, we didn't notice the problem at first, and from my point of view it was more funny than anything else. I figured that either the Homewrecking-Slut (or someone working on her behalf) must have done the hacking, at least on the blog. It didn't make sense for anyone else to have done it, unless it was for a joke, and you'd think that someone else would have taken credit for it if that were the case. My husband has few friends, and we can't think of one who would have found that funny.

So the Homewrecking-Slut either doesn't have a blog anymore, or at least the one that she had is no longer open for public viewing. Bimbo's Friend also has a blog. In fact Bimbo's Friend had her blog first, and probably the Homewrecking-Slut just got a blog to copy her friend. Bimbo's Friend still has a blog that the public can view, though she doesn't do much with it anymore. They both just seemed to lose interest in blogging after the incident with the Homewrecking-Slut. Neither of them apologized our anything, they just didn't post very much after that.

But I kept reading when they did post something, just in case they posted something that I needed to know. That's only happened a very few times, but then I guess I kept reading just to keep up with the soap opera.

I somehow got it into my head that Bimbo's Friend was a nicer person who had better morals than the Homewrecking-Slut, and it seemed like for a while she had interesting things to write about. Or maybe I had it in my head that she had more morals just because she didn't go after my husband, and maybe I just thought she had something interesting to say because my husband thought she was more interesting than the Homewrecking-Slut. Anyway, there's not much interesting going on now. Mostly it's just the "nobody cares what you had for lunch" type stuff. (You know, dumb stuff like I write when I'm not writing a regular feature or something more interesting, minus the regular feature and more interesting stuff.) People have all but stopped leaving comments, so maybe I'm the only one still reading the soap opera. Well, that's to be expected, since she did let the star of the show go. She brought him back for a bit, but by then most of us has switched to a different soap opera. (The other soap opera I was reading has recently been canceled, or is at least on hiatus, but that's another story for another time.) She occasionally blogs about threesomes with her ex, and now threesomes with strangers, but somehow it just isn't the same.

Anyway, a very few times Bimbo's Friend has just sort of waved at me in her blog. She just sort of says, "Yes, I'm reading your blog, and I don't like it." I'd thought she wasn't reading my blog anymore, that she had better things to do, but I was wrong. I mean, reading her blog became part of my routine for a specific reason (though to be honest without the soap opera aspect I probably wouldn't check it as often.) So a while back there was a wave. She's read my blog and mentioned something about it that she doesn't like. Other times when she has done this it mostly has been to address something I said about either her or the Homewrecking slut. But this time it had absolutely nothing to do with her, she just mentioned that she didn't like it, and she doesn't know why anyone would put something like that in their blog. So last week she started her post by describing the Freaky Friday feature and saying that the blogger who writes it is an idiot, etc....

Really, to be fair, I can't take credit for having the idea of the Freaky Friday posts. I saw something like it on someone else's blog, and I just thought that it was really funny. He didn't seem to mind that I stole his idea, so I kept doing it. And some of my readers thought it was funny, so I maybe kept doing it sometimes when I wasn't really in the mood and didn't have the time and energy to write anything particularly funny.

So about a week ago I noticed some problems. For one thing, the tracker seemed to stop working for a while. Now I know that whenever something goes wrong like that I shouldn't automatically assume that the Homewrecking-Slut or her friend had something to do with it (except that it does appear that they've done other stuff like that before). And it wasn't my first thought, or my second thought, or even my third thought. But then on Bimbo's Friend's blog, there's that mention of the particular thing that I am having trouble with, right at the same time.

Anyway, a more likely explanation is that I've somehow caused the tracker problem myself. I recently tried to make a few changes to my blog and add some links and such. Some of the links don't seem to work. In fact, for a while there very few of the new links seemed to work.

So that sucks a bit.

Like I said before, I did originally start this blog to annoy the Homewrecking-Slut, and to show my husband how hurtful his blogging was. The first part of the plan didn't work out the way it was supposed to after the Homewrecking-Slut made her blog private. As for my husband figuring out how hurtful it is, he still doesn't get it, and now I don't care enough to try to get him to understand. I have a few readers who are amused by my blog, but mostly I don't write much of it for them. There's stuff that I wrote in the blog but never published, and there's stuff that I did publish but buried it somewhere that my readers would be unlikely to find it. But I mainly kept the blog going for me, to have a little fun, to let a friend know what's going on around here, and just to sort of keep track of things. So it's a bit frustrating when I add some links and try to make the blog better for me, and then it doesn't work the way I hoped it would.

As I write this, my husband has all but ordered champagne because he was mentioned on something called Fark. I have no use for anything like that, but is it too much to expect that links actually work? Possibly it was a simple error on my part and maybe it can be fixed.

So while I'm not getting my blog to do what I want it to do now, maybe I can go back to getting it to do what I wanted it for back then. I'm told that my blog used to be the number one Google search for Homewrecking-Slut. Seeing that I have not had time or interest in writing about her recently, I have slipped so far from the number one spot that I am no longer even on the first ten pages. Maybe I should write a post using "Homewrecking-Slut" a hundred times. Or maybe I can ask all of my readers to write that in the comments.

Interesting that "Homewrecking-Slut" does not get counted on the blog-rating site. I think maybe it just doesn't recognize the world. Just regular sluts get counted just fine.

Cloverfield is what is it is, so shut up already

I hate spoilers. About a week before the movie is going to come out, my husband tries to tell me something about the movie, like a spoiler. And I hate that. And he knows better.

But I went to see the movie anyway, hoping that whatever he was trying to tell me wouldn't ruin it for me. Either he didn't know what he was talking about, or I misunderstood what he said. What he was saying didn't seem to have anything to do with the movie.

Okay, so if you've heard the movie described as The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla, that's pretty much it. If you don't want to see The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla, then don't go to see this movie. Don't sit there in the theater and whine about wanting your money back. And don't go out in front of the theater and yell about what a bad movie it was.

Either you like that sort of thing, or you don't. It just so happens that I like it once in a while. If you don't, then stay home and quit bothering the rest of us.

This is sort of like if the Spielberg/Cruise version of War of the Worlds was filmed with someone's home video camera, only it isn't his camera and he didn't have time to learn how to work it yet. There is a lot of scenes of buildings damaged or destroyed, and a lot of people running around, and a lot of military people firing weapons that don't do very much against whatever it is.

Okay, now I think that it's time for a spoiler alert--------------------------------------------------









































The film starts with a test pattern, like you used to see back when TV stations actually shut down for the night. This actually caused some people in the audience to start swearing. They actually thought that there was a malfunction and that the movie theater had gone "off the air."

Then there's some numbers and such, and a bit about the film being government property and that the film was about the Cloverfield incident. It was found it what used to be Central Park.

The next five or ten minutes is to set up the characters and their relationships. I think that if the government ever had reason to copy someone's home video like this, that this part would have been skipped over. There's a guy sneaking up on a sleeping girl, who appears to be his girlfriend. He's just decided to film their day together. He takes her to Coney Island, cause she's never been there even though she lives in New York.

Then it's a month or so later, and there's a different couple with the camera. This guy is the brother of the first guy. They are getting ready to give the first guy a surprise going away party. He's going away because he's going to be vice-president of a company in Japan. Maybe that part is supposed to be a joke, cause these people look barely out of college and not old enough to be vice-president of anything in Japan. But he is definitely going to Japan.

So the guy who is going to Japan is Rob, and when Rob gets to the party he's looking for Beth, the girl we saw him with earlier. Only he and Beth are just supposed to be friends. Jason, Rob's brother, gave the video camera to another guy, Hud. The guy with the camera is unknowingly recording over Rob and Beth's first and only date. He meant to keep the tape, but Hud is recording over it.

Once in a while we see little bits of the original tape. We see Beth being happy. We see them start to have a serious talk about Japan.

Beth comes to the party, with a date. Rob is very unhappy about this and makes some very rude remarks. Everyone at the party is told that Rob and Beth had sex once. Beth and her date leave. Hud tries to get a date of his own with Marlena.

And then it seems that New York is hit by an earthquake. And we see the power going out. Only I guess that either didn't last very long or wasn't supposed to mean that everyone's power went off, because they all go into the living room and watch the news. There appears to be a ship that toppled over or something. They all want to go up on the roof and try to see something.

And then they see an explosion and run back inside. Then they get scared and run downstairs and go outside. Something attacks the Statue of Liberty and takes her head off. It lands in the street near Hud. Everyone takes out their cell phones to get pictures.

Then there's a lot of running, and the cops and some military guys try to get everyone to go across the bridge and get out of Manhattan. Jason, his girlfriend Lily, Rob, Hud, and Marlena are trying to get across the bridge. Rob stopped to try to talk to Beth on the phone. Jason tries to climb up on something to get a better look at whatever is going on.

And then the bridge is attacked and collapses. Jason dies, but the rest of the group gets safely off of the bridge. They hide in a store from whatever it is. Rob tries to call Beth again, but his cell phone needs to be recharged. He sees some looters in an electronic store, so he goes to steal a new cell battery. Then he learns that Beth is hurt and trapped in her apartment. So the group tries to get to Beth instead of trying to get out of Manhattan.

While the group is in the electronic store, we again get a glimpse at the news. I guess that none of our group was paying attention to it. Besides the big whatever it is that destroys buildings, there are a bunch of smaller monsters that were attached to the big monster, but they decide to venture of on their own and attack people.

Rob finds his replacement battery, and they all head towards Beth's apartment, even though that seems to be the most dangerous area. The battery is the only thing that anyone took. It doesn't occur to anyone to get a flashlight or a gun or anything like that. A gun wouldn't have done anything against the big whatever it is, but that might have been a good thing to have against the smaller monsters. So they are walking towards the danger with only a cell phone and a video camera.

The really big monster comes, and they hide in a subway station. Rob gets a call from his mother, and he has to tell her that Jason is dead. Then he lies to her and says that he's safe and with the military, and that they'll soon be evacuated.

After looking at a map of the subway, they figure out where they are in relation to Beth's apartment. They figure that if the subway were running that they would just take that to a place very near Beth's apartment, but since the subway isn't working it should be safe to just walk through the tunnels to that other station. That probably would have been a good idea if they had flashlights, and it probably would have been a really good idea if they had lots of flashlights and guns. But they don't have that. All they have it the light on the video camera.

Anyway, the tunnel seems safe enough, and they start walking. Then they see some rats. Then they see a lot of rats, all running the same way. Now, this is the universal signal for get the hell out of here. The rats know something you don't. Don't try and figure it out, just run. But no, they don't do that. They stand there for a bit, cause they think they can switch the camera to night vision and see what the rats are running from. And then Hud sees three of the smaller monsters coming toward them, but I think that the monsters were on the ceiling. Now everyone is running, but it's too late, and the monsters attack. Marlena finds a pipe and beats them off, but not before one of them bites her.

They get out of the tunnel and hide in a room with vending machines. They break into the vending machines and get water to clean Marlena's wound. They decide that they can't sit there forever, and no one wants to go back into the tunnel. They decide to go up.

Before they get outside they are surrounded by military guys with guns. The military guys decide they're okay, and then they walk to another room with more military people and doctors and a lot of injured people. They try to get someone to help them rescue Beth, but no one will stop what they are doing to try to rescue one woman who is probably already dead anyway.

And then Marlene says that she doesn't feel so good, and we see blood coming out of her eyes. All the military people yell "bite" and drag her away. And then there's a lot of blood and she dies, but we don't see what happened other than there's a lot of blood. I've seen Alien too many times not to imagine what that was about, but we don't really see and no one explains. There was so little explanation that I really thought that we would see this later in the movie and get a better look at it, or at least be told what happened, but no.

Seeing that the military people have no intention of helping them rescue Beth, Rob says that he's going to try on his own and that no one can stop him, unless maybe someone wants to shoot him in the back. No one threatens to shoot him, but someone does warn him that if things don't change by six in the morning, the military will destroy Manhattan rather than let this thing get away and attack somewhere else.

When they get to Beth's apartment, half of it has slumped over onto another building. Since Beth's apartment is on the 39th floor, above the damage, they walk up the stairs of the other building to the roof and then walk across and then down to Beth's apartment.

There is a hole in the side of Beth's apartment, and Beth is stuck on the floor with a bar sticking up out of her. She's unconscious. When she wakes up, she seems to be okay, except for this bar that's sticking out near her shoulder. Since the bar is coming out of the concrete under her, they lift her up off of the bar.

They go up the stairs to the roof of Beth's apartment and cross to the other building. Beth has been unconscious most of the night and thought that there had been an earthquake or maybe a terrorist attack. She hasn't seen the monster til now. And while climbing down the stairs, she gets to see one of the smaller monsters too.

When we first saw the smaller monsters, I assumed that they were offspring of the big monster. But after seeing them a couple of times I don't think the look much like the big monster. That doesn't prove that they aren't offspring, since they could go through different growth stages in which they change their appearance, but I'm thinking that they are more like remora to a shark.

So they get away in time to be evacuated by helicopter. There's not room for all of them in the first one, so Lily goes first. The other three get in the next helicopter and fly over the monster and get a good look at an attempt to destroy it with missiles. The missiles are a direct hit, but somehow it doesn't kill the monster, that just makes it mad. It hits the helicopter. The helicopter crashes. Hud, Rod, and Beth get out of the helicopter and seem okay, but the monster finds them and kills Hud. It leaves and Rod takes the camera. Rod and Beth hide under a bridge and then tape their goodbyes. And then they hear the planes and the missiles, and the bridge falls on top of them. The end.

And that's the end of the recording, and there's some more stuff that says it is government property. There's never anything more, except I think that someone says something at the very end of the closing credits, but I couldn't hear what it was. There was never any explanation of what the monster was or where it came from or anything. I don't know what year the video camera was found in what used to be Central Park. I don't know if the government is still fighting the monsters. There was never any explanation of anything.

A lot of people in the theater are saying stuff like "that sucked" and "is that all" etc.... My husband didn't actually say any of that, but he seemed to be thinking most of it. He had really been looking forward to this for a long time, and somehow it wasn't what he was expecting. We've decided that it was too soon after seeing The Mist. The Mist looked a lot different, but it was another movie about people running and hiding from monsters, but at least in The Mist we got an explanation of what the monsters were and where they came from.

So after all of the stuff you read on the Internet about this movie, whatever you're expecting to see isn't in this movie, unless you just go expecting to see The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla. There's no secret government lab. There's no spaceship. There's no plot to turn people into monsters after they have more than six Slusho drinks. So if The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla isn't what you want to see, stay home.

Freaky Friday

Well, it's Friday again, so you know what I'm going to post about. Some people don't like what I post about on Fridays. More about that later, maybe on a Monday.

Today's first Google search is--Rudy's barbeque nutritional information, and then there is also a search for Rudy's BBQ coupons and Rudy's coupon. Here is my review of Rudy's. Now, it has been said that I rarely have anything important to say about the Google searches, so why bother mentioning them? Well, really it was just supposed to be fun. But okay, let me say something important. I like BBQ well enough, and when I have BBQ I'd prefer to get it from someplace I know has good food like Rudy's. But I don't just really live for the stuff. My brother doesn't feel the same way about BBQ as I do. A few years ago, he took one of these online tests, and he got a life expectancy of 44 or 45. This did not cause him to get off his a** and do something about it. So I guess when I get around to my tenth year of blogging, I won't have a brother anymore. That's what happens when "adults" make bad choices in their lives. Fortunately, my brother's bad choices probably won't really hurt anyone except him; he's not a homewrecker, a drunk driver, someone who intentionally spreads STDs, an Enron executive, someone who makes babies and then doesn't take care of them, a drug addict, or someone who cheats on his taxes, etc... I hope that was important enough for everyone. Now I'm going to get back to having fun.

The next Google search is for Vernors caffeine. Vernors is a ginger ale, and it does not have caffeine. Also there was a search for cocacola no calorie truth. I have heard that no calorie sweeteners are actually allowed to have up to four calories, while a serving of plain old white sugar has sixteen calories. So sometimes I wonder if my regular Coke has 140 calories, does that mean that some of my diet drinks really have 35 calories instead of 0? For more about beverages, you can read my review of diet drinks.

Someone was looking for the Sluts R Us store. Okay, the store is not really called Sluts R Us. I believe it is called Electrique Boutique, and it is located in Lincoln Square in Arlington, between the Half Price Books and Olenjack's Grille. Also, people find my blog after Googling Nylons R Us. It seems like a lot of those people are from the UK, so I think that might be the name of an actual store there.

Then we have someone looking for 31 inch wide refrigerator and refrigerator clearance sales. I recently posted about buying a frig, but unfortunately it did not come from a clearance sale. In fact, we ended up paying extra for one of those service contracts.

Some Googled airlock scene cold sunshine, which I'm sure really doesn't seem to make sense to most people. But if you went to see the movie Sunshine, then it makes some sense. I wrote a review of the movie. I thought that the film was pretty good until Freddy Krueger showed up. After that...well...maybe the people making the movie ran out of money? ????

Someone found my blog by Googling timing of annual physical results. I don't know what they hoped to find, but they were directed to my post about getting my annual exam.

Someone found my blog after Googling Terminator Sarah Connor Chronicles. So far I really like it. Here is a post about time travel theories in the Terminator movies and other stuff.

Someone has again found me after Googling Bath and Body Works wallflowers house fires. Okay, I love Bath and Body Works stuff and I love shopping in their stores, and so of course if you do a Google search then you'll eventually find me. But I do not have any special knowledge of whether or not wallflowers will cause house fires. Someone was nice enough to leave me a comment about the rumor. I haven't had any fires because of them, but then I've only been using them for about a year. And of course if they do cause problems, other similar products from other companies would pose the same risk. I would think that the ones with lights would be more of a problem than those without, and I bought one with a light but ended up not using it because my husband wants total darkness at night. Also, according to the rumors that my mom heard, the really dangerous products are made by a different company and are the kind that allow you to still use the electrical outlet while you are using the plug-in. But again, I do not have any special knowledge of such things, and those are just the rumors.

Most of the perverts went somewhere else this week. We only have a search for how to make a mould and how to mold a penis. Oh, and one search for the tricky dick costume. The post about the costume is here. As for the penis mold kit, I have learned that it costs about ninety dollars, but I don't remember where I found that, so I can't include the link for it. Sorry about that. Maybe later.

But then we did have someone looking for the vasectomy reversal billboard. I wrote this post about it. If you'd like to see what the ad looks like, click here. If you drive to Houston, you'll probably see it, but it turns up other places too.

There were two searches for Campo Verde black bean soup. They were directed to that meme post about favorite eating places. Campo Verde a cute place in Arlington with a miniature train and a lot of Christmas lights. But I'm guessing that the people doing the searching were looking for recipes. I don't know where one is. However, I have tried to copy the stuff myself, so maybe next time I'll pay attention to what I'm doing and write it all down and then come back and post a link to it.

Someone Googled Enik the Altrusian. The searcher was sent to my post about getting ready for a Halloween Party. I wish that my fellow fans of Land of Lost might stop and leave comments. How am I supposed to know where to find the cool people who Google that sort of thing if they don't leave comments?

Okay, here is someone who Googled see all walmart phones. Now I don't know what that is about, and I can't even find the link that directed that searcher to my blog, so I don't even know which post was read. Sorry to say that I have nothing to say about it, but what else can I say about it? Get over it.

Now the last Google search of the week was for "I'm going to bed" "and he does". I do not know what this person was looking for, I can only know what images come into my mind from those phrases. I don't write much of that sort of thing, but if you're really interested you can check out the sex list. But the searcher instead directed to this post explaining why the eBay stuff was still not listed. Now, this wasn't a Monday Morons post about my husband, but if I'd have waited a few days and punched it up some, it certainly could have been.







This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

kill (5x) hell (4x) dick (1x)



Here's the count for this week:

Penis--3

Rudy's BBQ--3

People going to hell--0

Sluts--1

Buckets--0

Diet Drinks--2

Refrigerators--2

Vasectomies-1



And the top twelve keywords are: costume, penis, the, dick, going, giant, rudys, hell, texas, bbq, diet, state

Writing a program for Intro to Computers

Many years ago, not quite back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, "people" did not have computers. Not that there weren't people with computers, just not a lot of people. "People" were not expected to have a computer at home, many "people" worked in offices that did not have computers, and most "people" did not even know how to type.

Aside from the "people" who did not have computers and did not care about computers and never suspected that they would ever get a computer, there were the select few that did care about computers and had even been allowed to use a computer and even planned to someday buy a computer. Some of these select people had computers forced on them by their employers, but then later they decided that computers were good things. But most of these select people were people who just always liked computers. They were Trekkies and/or guys in the chess club. The wore glasses and/or pocket protectors. They had heard rumors of people called "girls", but most of them didn't have enough time to go find out if the rumors were true.

These people were nerds. More specifically, they were computer nerds. They would soon become a well-liked group of people. Soon they would be seen as gifted people with skills that many would need but few would possess, but not yet. At the time the only people who liked these nerds were their moms, other Trekkies and /or guys in the chess club.

My brother and I got to go to a computer store with my dad. The store was not full of regular sales people, but with these nerds. These nerds didn't try to sell you anything; they just liked to show off their expensive toys, mostly to fellow Trekkies and /or people who played chess. They were so totally unconcerned with the actual business of selling the computers that they would often let you stay in the store with them after hours and play chess and video games.

Unfortunately, my dad did not buy any of the expensive toys at this computer store. He played chess, watched Star Trek, wore a pocket protector, carried a calculator, and could even boast of having won awards in something called slide-rule competition. These were his people, and this was just the kind of thing that he could get into. But the particular computers in this store were out of his budget. What he was looking for was a bit more basic. Soon after this he ordered something called a VIC-20, and if I remember correctly it cost him about three hundred dollars.

So while I was not one of these computer nerds, I certainly knew people who were. I was around computers before most "people." I even learned how to type.

Almost ten years later, he bought something called a PC. Some sort of IBM clone. It had a word processor called WordPerfect. I was going to be a writer. And I was very happy.

Soon after I had learned to use as much of WordPerfect as I cared about learning, I found out that my plan to graduate from community college with an associate degree (the "transfer degree") was not going happen on schedule, because I was short two classes that were not required at the university I planned to transfer to. One of those classes was Speech 101, and the other was Intro to Computers. So I signed up for both of them, and still tried to keep my part time job and everything else in life pretty much the same as it was. I didn't think that two classes would take up that much time.

And mostly, that was correct. The reading assignments and tests and such for both classes were reasonable. Unfortunately, the speech class required me to talk in front of other people. About half of my grade was based on speeches a few other exercises that required me to stand in front of the whole class. I didn't like that. I didn't like that at all.

So school was going fine, and I was getting an A in both classes, but that was all about to change. I had the first of two major speeches coming up. The speeches were each worth twenty percent of my grade. And I figured that if I did not do well on the first one that the second one would be even worse. So I had to really do well on that first one, or I would screw up about forty percent of my grade.

In the computer class we were told that we would be writing this little program, but not to worry about it too much. It would be something really small and if we were paying attention in class we should not have a problem with it. Later, a bit before we were to do this assignment, the teacher told us about the program and what it was supposed to do. I tried to write down what he said. The program would be about football. It would figure out a players total yards and average yards and what was the most yards the player had in a game and how many touchdowns a player had, etc....

This is already a bad sign. I know nothing about football. I care nothing about football. I don't think that there is time to pretend that I care about football and learn anything useful about it. I'm worried that my lack of knowledge about the game will keep me from being able to write this program. The teacher tries to tell me that this is not the case, and that starting next week most of the class time for the next two weeks will be about how to write this little program, and then the assignment would be due the following Tuesday. But it should all make sense long before then.

After I went home and looked at my notes, I realized that the computer program was due on the same day as I was scheduled to give my first speech. I would have to do the computer assignment, and then five minutes later be prepared to give a speech. I did not want to do that. In fact, I had been planning to leave computer class early so that I might brush my hair and put on lipstick and all of that so I would look nice for my speech. In fact, I'd really thought that the best idea would be to skip computer class that day so that I would feel calm and relaxed before the speech class.

After looking over the notes and the syllabuses for both classes, I figured out that the little computer program was only worth four or five percent of my total grade in computer class. There was no way that skipping the entire section could cost me more than ten percent. Even a perfect grade worth four to ten percent of the total grade of computer class was not worth the risk of ruining the speech and the twenty to forty percent of the total grade in speech class. And I did not expect to get a perfect grade anyway.

I decided to skip the computer program assignment. And since that was all that he was going to talk about for the next two weeks, there was no point in my attending computer class during that time. I would still keep up with the reading assignments, but I would not write the little football program, and I would have extra time to devote to geting ready for my first speech.

I was able to do my work on the speech and get lots of practice in. And at some point the teacher of the speech class asked if anyone who was scheduled to speak on that Tuesday would like to go early and speak the Thursday before. And I was ready, and I got my speech over with Thursday, and then went to work as usual after school on Thursday and on Friday.

After work on Friday, I realized that I had a whole three days to figure out how to write a little computer program about football.

My dad knew a thing or two about computers and understood the general idea of how to write programs in Basic. My new husband also understood the general idea. And both men knew about football.

As for the programing in Basic, there were a lot of commands, some of which were math related. And "go to" was written a lot. And from the notes I had I knew that all the lines of code were to be numbered, but rather than number the lines 1,2,3,4, etc...they should be numbered 10, 20, 30, 40, etc.... That way, if you forgot a line that should have been written between the first and second lines, you could now just add line 15 instead of writing in a second line 2 and then renumbering all the lines after that.

I got about five lines done before I was seriously frustrated with the thing. Then either my husband or my dad came and made suggestions. I'm sure one of them did the major work when I encountered my first problem. I was able to do more of the work myself after that, but there were still problems.

After a while I started to get the hang of it. There was a lot of stuff to "go to" something that I had already written, or places to copy something I had already written and then make minor changes. Three days later, I had a program that did about eighty percent of what I thought it was supposed to do. I never did get the touchdown thing worked out. Touchdowns do not seem related to yards. My dad and my husband didn't have any helpful advice on that one. It seemed like that would have to be a totally different program, and I was out of time.

But I went into class happy. I think my program was two or three pages long, and I had it both on two disks and two hard copies. If you gave me the names of football players and their yards for a number of games, I could print out the all the players' names and statical information such as a player's total yards and the player's average yards and the number of games a player played in and the number of yards on the player's best game and everything that you could possibly want to know about how well the players did in the games, except for the number of touchdowns.

And then we went into the computer lab, and I thought that the teacher would hand out copies of the sports page or something like that with the relevant information. But instead there was something that was either already on the computer or on a disk. And we were told to print out a piece of paper with the information he asked for and we were given a time limit. And everyone printed out a page with the information on it, no problem. Everyone except me.

They didn't write a real program at all. They wrote a merge file. He'd already done the program. They wrote like ten lines or something, and I'd written a whole program. And my program didn't work with his program. The first thing that my program did was count the number of games. There was no place where the games could be counted, so my program printed out total nonsense based on the information from the other program.

I could not think of what to do, and I quickly gave up and left. I calmed down enough to go to speech class and hear the other students give their speeches. Not that I was in a calm enough state to really listen, but it would have been rude not to go to class after the rest of them had to sit through my speech, and maybe there were points off if you missed class when someone else was scheduled to speak.

Later, I realized the solution was to go back to his program and add a bunch of zeros to his information. That gave my program something to count, and it mostly printed out what it was supposed to after that. It was too late to get any credit for all of my work, but I turned it in anyway, just to show that I could do it.

I ended up getting an A in speech class and a B in computer class, because I got good scores on both of my speeches but a zero on that computer assignment that was worth five percent.

The students who took classes from this teacher after Intro to Computers all bought T-shirts saying which classes they survived. I have no such T-shirt. And I have no desire to ever get one.

I like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, so get over it (Or, a light discussion about time travel theories)

Earlier I had mentioned to someone that I was going to post about my attempts to write a computer program is part of a school assignment many years ago. Well, I didn't actually promise to post that today. I think it can wait.

I am going to put in my two cents about the new Terminator series. I had just assumed that everyone else was liking it as much as I am. I've been told otherwise. Apparently, there are a lot of people complaining that the series doesn't stick to the movies.

In my opinion, the movies didn't stick to the movies, so what is the big deal?

I'm going to make a few comments. I'm going to make a few comments just from my own memories of the movies, and I'm not going to look up anything. And I'm not going to get into the possibility of different dates being mentioned in different movies and the possibility that some of the math doesn't work.

Okay, so there's all kinds of theories about time travel. They probably all have names and have been talked to death by people who are a lot smarter than me. I don't know what the names are. Maybe if you do, you can send me a list. Not having such a list, I make up my own names once in a while.

There is the Grandfather Theory, which says something like time travel is impossible because you might then go back in time and kill your grandfather before he actually becomes your grandfather. If you kill off one of your ancestors and you cannot be born, then you never existed, and therefore you can't have gone back in time to kill the ancestor.

In Back to the Future, they try to get around the Grandfather Theory by having a sort of delayed reaction. Marty changed the time-line in such a way that his mother did not fall in love with his father when she should have. So the time-line is being erased, and Marty is being erased with it. But Marty isn't being erased all at once, so he has time to try and fix things. Also in Back to the Future we have a theory that something very bad with happen if you meet a past or future version of yourself.

There is what I call the Bill and Ted Theory, which says that if you have a time machine that you can do just about anything, as long as you eventually use the time machine to make it all work later. You can go and buy an expensive car that you shouldn't be able to afford, because there will be money in your account, because after you buy the car you can go back to last week and give yourself yesterday's winning lottery numbers. Now that theory is a bit silly, but it works in a movie, as long as you pick the one theory and stick to it.

The movie version of Lost in Space did not follow this rule. The movie was really good until the part where Will and Dr. Smith walk into the future. At that point, the movie seems to switch to a different theory than was used five minutes before that, so it just didn't work.

Okay, so in the first Terminator movie, we have a time-loop story. Sarah Connors is living her life and minding her own business, and then out of nowhere a robot is trying to kill her and a nutcase named Reese is trying to save her. She is told a completely insane story about time travel and her being the mother of the savior of mankind. There are a lot of explosions and people getting shot and a lot of chase scenes. Eventually, she decides that maybe the insane story is true, but she really doesn't get it through her head what it all means. She decides that it's okay to call her mom even though she's told not to. And she decides that she has time to have sex with Reese. There really isn't time for that, but Reese doesn't know that, because he doesn't realize that Sarah would be stupid enough to call her mother after he told her not to. So then there are more chase scenes and explosions, and Reese dies trying to save Sarah. Sarah has a few broken bones and such, but she does live. Then she finds out that she's pregnant and figures that Reese has to be the baby's father.

Kind of the opposite of the Grandfather Theory that says time travel is impossible because you might change something that has already happened, which would then alter the present, which would then prevent you from going back in the first place. In the time-loop story, time travel has to happen because someone from the future already did make something happen in the past. You can't change the future, or the past won't happen the way it did, and then your present won't exist the way it does.

The time loop story doesn't quite make sense, unless you bring in God or another higher being or something like that. Sarah is going along minding her own business, and then God creates Reese out of nothing just cause God wants there to be a time-loop. Or God created all of time all at once, with the time-loop already in place, and there really isn't a past or a future except in the way that we perceive things. There's no changing anything that God put in the time-line, including this time-loop. It is the way it is, you can't mess with it, so don't even try. Sarah gets a gun and a dog and heads south, where she's going to find a safe place to hide and train her son while the rest of the world destroys itself.

But then comes Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah didn't stay south in her safe place. She decided to make trouble for computer companies and blow up factories and such. Maybe if she blows up the right building judgment day won't happen. And there is now a second time-loop in the time-line. This doesn't totally screw up things as far as time-loop stories go, cause God can make a second time-loop in the time-line if he wants to, and God can also send Sarah running around blowing up buildings if he wants to. Sarah can run around trying to change things as long as nothing actually gets changed.

But then in T2, someone does change things. Dyson destroys his research and blows up a building. And just to be on the safe side, nice guy terminator has to be destroyed too. The time-line is changed. Skynet does not come about because of Dyson's research based on technology discovered because of the first time-loop.

So now enter the Alternate Time-line Theory. Possibly with that comes the Alternate Universe Theory. Still, this is mostly okay.

God can make alternate time-lines if he wants to. And he can make alternate universes if he want to. He's God. He can do that kind of thing. Cool.

There's some alternate endings and deleted scenes from T2. We won't get into that.

Next we have Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. We are now firmly in Alternate Time-line Theory. Dyson did not invent Skynet. Judgment Day did not come on whatever date Sarah has spent most of her adult life worrying about. Sarah gets cancer and dies, but she dies happy thinking that she finally defeated Skynet. But she leaves John a bunch of guns and such, just in case. And John goes off the grid and becomes totally lonely drifter guy who no longer has a purpose in life. He doesn't really think that anymore robots are going to show up, but you can't be too careful about such things. Besides, the police might still want to talk to him about some blown up buildings and such.

In T3 we have a third time-loop and hints at an original time-line that happened before the events of the original Terminator movie. John meets Kate. Only they have met before, and they liked each other in eighth grade. Kate's father is an important military guy working on a secret project that involves computers. When Kate's dad realizes that there's a serious problem with Skynet, he sends John and Kate to hide in a bunker that no one has really cared about since the seventies. Maybe that was the closest one that they could get to. Or maybe the newer ones already would have been filled with more "important" people. It makes sense that Kate would survive Judgment Day, because her father was able to save her. John survived just because he happened to be the guy with her at the time, or he would have died along with most of the other people.

Maybe in another time-line, someone named John Conner is saved because he has a relationship with Kate. Maybe in the original time-line Sarah doesn't meet Reese. The jerk she was dating really did try to make it up to her the day after he broke their date. Sarah got pregnant and had a son named John Connor. Maybe he is a different John Conner than the one we know. Or maybe Reese was never John's father. Maybe Sarah was already pregnant when she met Reese, but she just thought that Reese was the father because they neglected to go to the drugstore.

In the original time-line, Sarah was a good mom. She and John had a normal life. They did not worry about robots and blow up buildings. John met Kate, and they became close. Kate's father sends John and Kate on a little trip to see the old bunker, just cause he has a bad feeling that something might go wrong with Skynet. Maybe he'd already had the place stocked with Spam and Ensure, just in case.

Now we can have all kinds of alternate time-lines happen. Now the time-loops and such can all happen without direct intervention from God. Don't worry, God isn't gone, but he has better things to do than make sure that Sarah and Reese get laid.

So now in the original time-line, Kate and John get married, and John leads the fight against the machines. Or, at least, John is the one that gets Skynet's attention. If Skynet just didn't have to deal with John, Skynet could deal with these other people. So a terminator was sent back in time to kill Sarah before she has John. And then someone had to be sent back in time to help Sarah deal with the terminator. Perhaps that someone just happens to be Reese.

What follows after that is not what we saw in the first Terminator movie. The John Conner who grew up with a normal life and got involved with Kate did not fight the Skynet that Sarah was warned about by Reese in the first movie. That John Conner had a regular mom, and he was not raised by the legendary Sarah Connor who moved south and learned how to blow up buildings. When that first someone goes back in time to save Sarah Connor, there is no reason to believe that there is anything special about Sarah or that she will lead the fight against the machines or blow up buildings or anything like that. She's just John's mom. Maybe she just goes south and hides, and maybe someone from the future hides with her. Maybe they get away from the terminator at the club and run and keep running and spend years running and never see it again. Maybe this sort of thing happens several times before we get to the events of the first Terminator movie. But at some point in one of these time-loops, Sarah destroys the terminator and then teaches her son to fight, and parts of the terminator are given to Dyson so he can invent that version of Skynet, and John sends Reese back to save his mother. And all of that has to happen at least once before what we see in the first movie. The Reese that we see in the Terminator grew up in a world destroyed by a Dyson version of Skynet, and he heard stories of the legendary Sarah Connor, and possibly John was trying to do a bit of match-making by giving Reese a picture of Sarah.

And now we have so many alternate time-lines that it doesn't matter if the new series exactly matches anything in any of the movies. So we can all quite worrying about that too much. We can just sit back and watch the show and then decide if we like it or not.

Getting Bored Now

I know. I know. If I've got so much time on my hands that I'm getting bored, I should get off my a** and clean something.


My husband went out of town yesterday. I have the place to myself for about a week. It takes a day or two to get used to. I don't have to schedule things around another person. I can eat lunch and dinner whenever and not wait around for him to come home. I could go out if I wanted, but that would just tempt me to spend money, which I am trying not to do. And I have the computer all to myself for the first time in almost a month.


I guess that is the boring part at the moment. Normally when I have the place to myself like this I would maybe watch a bit of TV, do a bit of cleaning, check messages and read a few blog posts, and then repeat the whole process. But as far as the blogs go, there just doesn't seem to be much going on.


Now, my friend up north is still posting, and some other people are still posting, but a lot of people seem to be taking a break. It is understandable. One of my readers spent most of last week in bed, and not in a good way. Two of my readers have recently broken up with their boyfriends, and to say that they broke up with boyfriends really makes light of their situations. I have just learned that one reader is having to deal with an ailing parent. Some of my readers have children, and no doubt at times the children get sick or have other problems. People take breaks from blogging once in a while. They have real life to deal with.


Still, it does seem unusually quite out there. I try to keep up with a few blogs in England, but there's barely anything going on there since maybe Wednesday. Possibly a meteor hit England and killed the bloggers in question? Probably not. Maybe the Internet is down for the whole country? No, that isn't it either, as I checked another blogger from there and she is still posting. And she didn't mention any meteors. So they just all seem to be busy at the same time.


There's a few blogs that I tend to read, not cause I'm friendly with the writers, but just to keep up with the soap opera drama of it all. One of them has decided to stop blogging. She was nice enough to warn her readers that she probably wouldn't be writing anymore. We all stopped by to wish her well, and some of us stop by again and again to see if maybe she's changed her mind.


A message-board that I used to be very active on shut down for a bit. It was supposed to upgraded and running again about a week ago, but so far it isn't.


I finally got some chat room time with a friend yesterday. But other than that, it's all been a bit dull.


I wonder if some of it has to do with New Year's resolutions. I think that some of us resolve to quit spending so much time on the Internet. And if your resolutions had nothing to do with the computer, maybe getting them done takes up some of your time, and that equals less blog time.


Okay, that's enough whining. Back to work.

Monday Morons--He was just trying to be nice, and isn't that what we're here for

As you probably already know, I am in a Star Trek fan club. We get together and talk about Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Stargate, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Red Dwarf, etc.... The club started out as part of Starfleet, but we like a lot of other stuff besides Star Trek. If you want to talk about the latest film version of I Am Legend, no one interrupts and says "hey, this is a Star Trek club and we're just here to talk about Star Trek."

Or, at least, that's the way it usually works.

A while back, one of our members tried to tell us about a British show. I'll call this guy Mr. Baker. Besides being a Trekkie, Mr. Baker is your average law-abiding and tax-paying citizen, a voter, has a steady job, knows a thing or two about computers, and makes really good desserts when there's an occasion for it. He's been in the club for several years. He's not an idiot. He doesn't need to be the center of attention all the time. He has the occasional party that has nothing to do with Star Trek. He's a pretty good guy.

So he's trying to tell us about this British show that he likes. I don't remember the name of the show. I think he described it as the British version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Maybe he was talking about it because it was about to come on cable. I don't have cable, so I didn't write down the name of the show.

So maybe I wasn't just terribly interested in what he was talking about. But it was odd that no one else seemed interested in what he had to say. And it wasn't like he was just saying stuff that everyone already knew and was tired of hearing about. He found this cool show, and he says that some of us might want to check it out.

Now the really bizarre thing happened when as part of the description he mentions that the show was on for a few seasons but has now been canceled. Someone else then said something like "then why would we want to watch it?"

Well, let me see. We're all in a Star Trek fan club. Star Trek was on for a few seasons and then canceled. More than forty years later, this hasn't stopped anyone from watching and enjoying the show. So why would anyone care say that we wouldn't want to watch a show just because it's been cancelled? And it's especially puzzling that someone would make such a comment at a Star Trek fan club meeting.

I want to say that a lot of people were being rude to Mr. Baker, but rude isn't quite the right word, and I'm not sure what is the right word. It was just so weird. "Why would we want to watch it?"

Mr. Baker says "cause it's a cool show."

I mean really, that's what the club is for, isn't it? So people can get together and talk about cool stuff. So Mr. Baker is telling everyone about this cool show that they've probably never heard of, and all anyone can say is why would we want to watch a show that's been cancelled?

It's not like he said the Rama book series was a really fun read, but can't really recommend it to anyone cause the ending sucked, so don't waste your time.

So that was odd.

Lately I've been home a lot and my husband has been home a lot, and there's been no new TV. So we've been out to watch a few movies, and we've downloaded some stuff and watched Dexter and such. And we watched a show called Odyssey 5. And I thought that I'd look for Mr. Baker's British show, but I didn't remember the name of it.

So we Googled--British version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer--and were eventually directed to a show called HEX.

So I don't know if the show Mr. Baker liked was HEX, but I've watched the first season and so far I like HEX. I haven't seen Mr. Baker in a while, but if he's at the next meeting I'll ask him about it. And then if it isn't HEX, I'll have another show to look forward to seeing, even if it has also been canceled.

????

Freaky Friday

Before I get to the Google searches, I'd like to remind everyone that there's some new TV on now. Ghost Whisperer, Moonlight, and Numbers are all new episodes tonight. But perhaps more importantly, the new Terminator series starts Sunday night.

The first Google search of the week was for Dennigers Foods. I never wrote anything about this place, and so far as I know I have never been to this place. But one of my readers left a comment mentioning it, so someone was led to my blog by mistake.

Some unhappy person Googled my family did not get my kids any Christmas presents. Well, that's sad isn't it.

Another person found me after Googling legs r us.

Someone was looking for drive-thru wildlife north texas. That person was led to one of my posts about jobs I didn't like. I used to work for International Wildlife Park, but that location isn't there anymore, and hasn't been for more than ten years.

Fans of Rudy's BBQ Googled green chile stew at Rudy's and Rudy's BBQ nutritional values. Once again, let me remind the readers that BBQ doesn't have any nutritional values and is to be eaten just for the taste. And while I am on the subject, let me say that I went to a place in Hurst yesterday called Danny Ds and did not like it at all. We were supposed to go to Colter's but discovered it was closed. We found another coupon for this Danny Ds in the same area, so we decided to try that instead. The meat was way too dry, and almost burnt.

The perverts Googled homemade penis mold a couple of times, and also making a mold of penis. Again, I haven't tried that yet. Though I have learned that the kit costs about ninety dollars.

Next we have the question--do Baptists believe everyone that is not Baptist is going to hell? Well, we believe that everyone who is not a Christian is going to hell. And, the further away from being Baptist you are, the greater the chance that you are not actually a Christian. So the short answer would be--almost. Here is the original post.

Someone found my blog after Googling Superbowl 2011. This led to a post about the idiots scheduling a game at a place that isn't even built yet.

Someone Googled eighties soloflex informercial. I never wrote anything about soloflex. I don't know anything about soloflex. But, again, someone left a comment about it.

My review of diet drinks is still getting read. This week people were looking for pepsi calories fountain drinks and calories in diet big red.

Here's an interesting one--sluts wear turtlenecks. Really, I suppose sluts wear all kinds of things, but I wouldn't think that turtlenecks would be their first choice. I realize I use the word slut quit a bit here, but not in relation to turtlenecks. The turtleneck bit was because of a post I wrote after listening to an audio-book called "I Feel Bad About My Neck." Still, my blog comes up second in that search.

Someone was looking for charity fast food. Unfortunately, this person was led to a post about having trouble with a guy in a wheelchair who accompanied the club to a charity thing.

Someone was looking for Haunted Granbury. This led to a post about a haunted house that I liked. But that was several years ago and I don't think that it's around anymore.

And there's another person looking for a Vorlon costume. Unfortunately, these people do not stick around and leave comments. And for the record, I do not have a Vorlon costume, but I did post about meeting the guy who wore it in the show.

Here's a search for sample annual physical forms. I don't know what that person was looking for, but the search led to my post describing my annual exam.

And another person wants to know about 5 gallon buckets stuck together. Well, that stuff happens, doesn't it.

This week I am number one for the Google search--my inlaws are morons. For the record, I did not actually say that my in-laws are morons, but that probably applies as well. But my post was about my husband being a moron, and that he doesn't help me with Christmas stuff, so I'm glad that we don't do Christmas stuff much with my in-laws anymore, cause I don't have a clue what to get for them.

Someone was looking for Jimmy Dips in Fort Worth. That was a wonderful Chinese restaurant, which unfortunately has been closed for ten or fifteen years now.

The last search for the week was about 31 inch wide refrigerators. I had some drama with that just last week. But I think that my problems with the kitchen are about to be over.





This week's rating was for using penis three times, crap two times, and dead once.


Here's the count for this week:

Penis--3

Rudy's BBQ--2

People going to hell--1

Sluts--1

Buckets--1

Diet Drinks--2


And the top twelve keywords are: costume, penis, the, dick, going, giant, hell, rudys, texas, bbq, diet, state

More drama with my mother

Earlier I had blogged about dreading a certain conversation that I expected to have with my mother. Only when I called her back she didn't mention that anything was wrong, and she didn't put a lot of pressure on my to help out with grandma. I was greatly relieved that wasn't what she wanted. I thought the subject was finally closed.

But, no. Last week she called very upset, saying she didn't know what to do, and wouldn't I please consider....

No, I would not consider taking a job helping out grandma. I'm sure that sounds very mean, but I don't think it would be a very good idea. I don't think that I would be that much help anyway, and it would just be a distraction for me. And not a good distraction like an art class. Just a distraction that would upset me and keep me from making any progress with my own problems.

Besides, I had agreed to do this more than two years ago. I didn't want to do it then either, but I thought that I really needed the money. But then when I agreed to this "job", I was told that there wasn't actually a "job" yet, and that they would have to talk about it some more, etc.... So for me, that was the end of it. I'm still quite upset over that part of it.

When I mentioned this to my mother, she didn't even remember what I was talking about.

I can't help but wonder if I'd had this "job" when it was first offered if the events of the past few years would have been totally different. Maybe if we'd had more money, my husband would have been happier and wouldn't have gotten it into his head to do what he did. Or maybe he would have still would have done what he did, but maybe if I'd had a job at the time I would have just made him get out and stay out. Or maybe it wouldn't have made any difference at all. Or maybe I would have tried this "job" for a couple of weeks and it wouldn't have worked out and that would have been the end of my mom asking me to help out.

But mom doesn't remember offering me a "job" that didn't really exist, and she doesn't understand why that would upset me anyway. I didn't upset myself further trying to explain it. I just stayed on the phone and listened to her be upset and try to ask me the same thing from different directions.

The answer is still no.

So I thought that was finally the end of it. But, no, she called again yesterday. I'd thought maybe she'd called to see how I was doing and make sure that I wasn't mad at her for the call last week, or maybe she was going to tell me that they decided to do instead of hiring me. But she actually asked me again. I guess that when she'd asked before I shouldn't have tried to sound polite and say stuff like "I don't think so" and "probably not" and "I'm really not comfortable with that." I should have just said "no." But having said flat out "no", I wouldn't have thought that she would be calling back to ask again. No means no.

Next week I'll be back in ceramics class. Not that ceramics class actually fixes anything, it just makes me feel better for a while. And this might be my last class. I have no further agreements with my husband to take more art classes, so I shouldn't take anymore until after I find a job. I rarely take summer classes, and I've decided that art class in the fall doesn't leave me enough time to do Halloween stuff and Christmas stuff, so I plan to skip the next fall semester. Which means that after this class I probably won't have anymore school until the next spring semester, and that is just too far in the future for me to consider right now. I hate that I've made absolutely no progress in resolving my situation since last spring. It will be really sad if in another year I am still in this same place yet again.

The $600 refrigerator costs $912.65

Well, we had this little trip just before New Year's, and I went to the club New Year's Eve party after that, but except for that it hasn't been that great around here. For one thing we had this fight. The fight didn't last long. Not cause we decided to kiss and make up, but just because I don't care enough to keep fighting. There's no point in fighting, because he just doesn't get it. It's not the kind of fight where anything gets resolved. Nobody wins the fight. Nothing get accomplished. I tell him that there's a problem and how I feel and what needs to be done about it. And he tells me that there's nothing to be done. This is like two minutes after I've just got through telling him what can be done. And then he tells me that everything is going to be okay, cause he hasn't heard a word that I've said.

Whatever.

While that sort of thing goes on, the rest of life still happens. After coming home from the New Year's Eve party, I put some things away, and I put some stuff from the party into the refrigerator. And I was dimly aware that the refrigerator light wasn't on. Well, once in a while you have to put a new bulb in the refrigerator. But it doesn't have to be done in the middle of the night, and I'm sure that there's no place to get a replacement bulb at that time anyway, so I went to bed.

The next day it occurred to me that it wasn't just the light-bulb that had gone out. The refrigerator was silent. A good working frig doesn't make a lot of noise, but it does sort of make a slight humming sound. There was no humming sound. This is a bad sign.

After doing a little bit of math I figured out that we've probably had the frig for more than fifteen years, and we should have known that it soon would be time to get a new one anyway. But somehow, it was a surprise.

Luckily, New Year's Day is just another day for most stores, so we were off to the mall.

I don't really want an ice maker and all of that stuff. Besides, the person who lived here before us didn't have all that stuff, so the kitchen isn't set up for that. And we don't want to pay anyone to do fix that now. So we were just shopping for a plain ordinary frig with no ice maker and no water dispenser on the door or anything like that. I had an idea that it would cost somewhere around five or six hundred dollars, though it's been a while since I've paid attention to such things, so I wasn't sure.

So we go to Sears, and there's a black one for about five hundred fifty. And I suddenly think it would be cool to have a black refrigerator, though the idea had never seriously occurred to me before. So I try not to look much at that particular frig, cause I'm afraid that I'll pick that one just because it's black.

Well, it turns out that a lot of them have the option of black. Black costs like an extra twenty dollars, which is not too bad. Some of them also have the option of stainless steel, which my husband liked, but stainless steel is an extra hundred or even two hundred. So we decided not to get anything stainless steel.

So we're looking at the refrigerators, and mostly, they all just look like refrigerators. We stand there and try to figure out why two refrigerators that look almost the same have different prices. At first we thought that some of the price difference was because of the stainless steel or the different colors, but then you read the labels and find out that the price on the refrigerator is just for a white refrigerator, even if the particular frig you are looking at is another color or stainless steel. Getting a different color or stainless steel is almost always an extra charge. And usually the ice maker is also an extra charge, so that isn't it either.

We finally start to figure it all out. Two refrigerators that are the same size and look almost identical from the outside look slightly different on the inside. There may be a price difference of fifty dollars or a hundred dollars or perhaps even two hundred dollars because one has more lights or more adjustable shelves or both.

Okay, now that we've figured that out, I'm mostly looking at four of them that are priced between $450 and $600. And I don't even have to have those. There's one that seems a bit smaller for $429, and there are much smaller ones for even less that I would take if my husband says we really can't afford the ones that I'm looking at. But mainly, he's looking at the one on sale for $600. It's just over 20 cubic feet, and it's just like the one next to it for $500, except that most of the shelves are adjustable, and it has a light in the freezer part.

Are more adjustable shelves worth an extra hundred dollars?

Probably.

Could we pay the extra twenty dollars and get it in black?

Sure, why not? If we're going to spend $600 anyway we might as well spend $620 if you really like it that much better.

Okay.

Now I've noticed some little prices inside of the refrigerators, and I'm not sure, but I think they're the prices of the service contracts. So I think that we should decide whether or not we want a service contract before we talk to a salesperson. Probably, we should have discussed this before we ever went to the mall. If you don't firmly decide you do not want to purchase a service contract before the salesperson mentions it, then you usually end up buying one.

But right then a salesperson appears, and my husband asks if they have this model available in black. So the salesperson goes off to see if they have any in the store that we could have tomorrow, or if not there's probably one in the warehouse that we can have the day after tomorrow.

So we don't really discuss the service contract before the salesperson comes back, and we end up paying another $150 for a three year contract. And then there is sales tax and delivery fees and another ten dollars to take away the old frig. So the refrigerator that was on sale for $600 dollars ends up costing just over nine hundred, with twenty dollars of that being because I suddenly got the silly idea that I wanted a black refrigerator. Still, that is just twenty dollars of it. I guess we would have spent almost nine hundred anyway if we'd just got the white one.

It was a great relief to get that part of it over with. We walked around the mall for a bit and then went home.

The next day I figured out that I would have to move a piece of furniture that was right next to the door. If the door is open all the way and actually touching the wall, the door opening is about 31 inches wide. I'm guessing that is a standard door size. While this piece of furniture is next to the door and prevents the door from being opened like that, the door itself makes the usable width of the doorway opening somewhat smaller by about an inch and a half. The refrigerators mostly seem to come in sizes that are either 31 inches wide or 31 inches deep and only barely squeeze through the doorway if the doorway is completely open and clear of any obstructions, including that bit of the door itself that is normally in the doorway when the door is open to its normal ninety degree angle to the wall.

Just before all of this had happened, I'd decided that it was a good time to clean out the kitchen cabinets, and had removed everything from about half of the cabinets and put the items on the floor. I hadn't finished with that project yet, so I left the items on the floor.

We got a call to confirm that we were expecting a delivery and given a two hour window during which one of us had to be there to accept delivery of the refrigerator. It then occurred to me that while I'd just assume that most of the stuff in the old frig be thrown away, I should probably do that myself in the morning just before the delivery. The old frig would be too heavy to move if I left the spoiled fruit and a bunch of half empty bottles inside.

So I threw away a bunch of stuff, and I put a bunch more stuff like bottles of mustard and such on the floor. Does mustard spoil? I don't know. I thought maybe if I got some of the stuff into the new frig soon that maybe it would be okay. But I didn't clean the frig itself like I usually would if I were throwing out stuff like that. I don't think that I need to clean something that's about to be hauled away.

The delivery came at the late end of the two hour window. And then there was a lot of drama trying to get the old frig out and the new one in. I'd gotten the main door to open all the way and touch the wall, but I'd forgotten that I couldn't do the same with the storm door on the outside because of the little thing that forms the flower bed. So that was annoying.

The whole thing with moving refrigerators is always annoying. But most of us don't have to deal with it very often. If it isn't your job to move refrigerators, you probably only have to deal with it about once every ten years. In the last ten years we've had to now deal with it four times, because in addition to buying this new frig we've moved three times.

Anyway, life would be much easier if they'd make refrigerators just and inch or two smaller. So why are most of the full-size ones 31 inches?

So much for my reasoning that I should not have to clean a refrigerator that is just going to be hauled away. The delivery guy won't take it until I've cleaned it. So it was just left sitting in the driveway. If I'd known that I was expected to clean it I would have done so when I first learned I'd be buying a new one. I'd have cleaned it while it was still indoors. It's not that cold outside, but it is quite uncomfortable to be out with your hands in soapy water. So I do maybe five minutes and then come back in. This takes a long time.

The people that were supposed to come back and get the old frig cannot come for a few more days. So the frig is just sitting in the driveway waiting for an accident to happen.

The old frig was finally hauled away Sunday morning.

The floor of the kitchen is completely covered with either stuff that I took out of the cabinets, or stuff that came out of the old frig. I have decided that mustard and such probably does spoil, and I don't like much of that stuff enough to risk my health. I'd put a few things in an ice chest that is probably okay, but the rest of the food is just being thrown away. I figure that I'll empty a bunch of these bottles and wash them and keep them for craft projects and such, but I only do a few at a time. Soon I'll probably give up on the idea and just throw the rest away. Then I'll be able to walk through the kitchen and deal with the rest of the stuff that goes in the cabinets.

I do like the new frig, but now I'm not sure what made me suddenly want a black one. The washing machine and stove are both white. Even the microwave is white. So it doesn't match the other appliances. And those were all bought in the last few years and are not going to be replaced anytime soon. I have this idea that I'm either going to cover the frig with my husband's black and white photos or maybe put a bunch of chili pepper magnets on it. But that's all a bit silly isn't it? And it's hardly worth the effort seeing how rarely I find time to actually do anything in the kitchen. I should worry more about putting food in the frig rather than waste time thinking how the outside of the frig looks.