Not Necessarily Interesting News

Ok, it’s Cedar Fever season here in Central Texas. That means heading down to the local Walgreens to stock up on Sudafed. I dropped by this morning to do just that and found out what a pain it really is.
On the shelves they stock something called Sudafed PE or something. I wanted real Sudafed because that’s what works for me. As I was looking for it an employee walking by asked if I need help. I told her what I was looking for. She told me I had to take a little slip up to the pharmacy counter to get ‘real’ Sudafed. WTF?
I did as she said and the pharmacist had to stop filling a real prescription to get my what used to be OTC drugs. I then had to produce my license and he wrote down the info in a little book, how much I was buying, and had me sign it. I mentioned that ‘this is a total pain in the ass’. He told me ‘I couldn’t have said it better myself’. I said next time I was in I’d stock up to avoid the hassle before I thought about what I’d said. He laughed and told me not to get too much or I’d have black helicopters following me around. He’s probably more right than I know.
Ah, the ‘War on Drugs’, you’ve gotta love it. Thanks all you tweakers out there for making everyone else’s life a little more joyful.

Wow, I didn’t get much at all done this weekend.
Ok, we did get up before dawn to go on our annual pilgrimage to Wimberly Glassworks for their annual 2nds sale. All the glass they’ve blown all year that wasn’t quite good enough for the showroom floor is saved and they have a huge sale the first weekend in January. We have been first in line every year but one since their first sale. The owner, Tim, expects us to be there and we stand out front before they open catching up on the year. I look forward to the trip every year. We have lots of glass we’ve gotten there over the years. Our prized possesion from them is a great lamp we have in the living room. After that we dropped by the giant Cabela’s store in Buda and browsed to waste time while waiting on our son to get done with his Young Marines drill day. That evening I played poker and had a really good start to the night. The books I’ve been reading have really improved my game. The last 2 hours of the game I could not catch a hand to save my life. I coasted from my dominant chip lead into the money and was eventually blinded out. Such is life. I did make enough to cover my entry so I guess it was just a free night of BSing with friends and playing poker.
Today I tried to fix our broken garage door opener to no avail. Time for a new one. 🙁 When I gave up on that I noticed that sitting in the garage was our new pressure washer I hadn’t yet tried out. I fired it up and washed the siding on the front of the house. Damn, where was this thing all my life? Between that and the vinyl siding on the side of the house it made for quick work. I’d rather pressure wash vinyl every year or so than paint wood siding every 10 years. I also did the sidewalk out front. You think you’re looking at a freshly swept walkway and when you hit it with the pressure washer it’s like night and day. I also cleaned up a Dogloo that we’re storing for a friend of ours. I was walking past it and hit it with the jet and my eyes about popped out. By then I’d screwed up and was dedicated to cleaning it. I planned on working on the dead truck but between my allergies and asthma the coughing/sneezing fits were going to make working under a truck very difficult.
This evening after a nice dinner with the family we headed down to see the UT Tower all lit up to celebrate UT’s winning of the Rose Bowl and BCS Championship. It’s awesome seeing it all lit up orange with the giant #1 in the windows. Definitely something every Austinite should see. I am still pissed at myself for not bringing my film camera and tripod. Next year. 🙂

Got a call yesterday from my old job. Said they worked something out with my contract and that I could come back immediately. They basically cancelled the paperwork that ended my contract. I came in this morning. Same office, same desk, same pay, slightly different job. It sure as hell beats unemployment.

I finally caved and went to the doctor for my nagging cough. They had me do an airflow test. In that test you blow into a tube and it tells them how much air you’re moving. Apparently I scored pretty low. She had me do it again and same thing. Of course, doing the test threw me into coughing fits. They next did a blood oxygen test and that was also a bit low. After listening to my chest the doc said I have asthma brought on by an infection. Oh Boy! He hooked me up with some sample antibiotics he had in his closet-o-goodies to save me money and gave me a script for an inhaler.
I picked up the inhaler at Walgreens and took a couple hits off it like I was told and, wow, I could breathe again. Amazing. It also gave me a decent buzz. If this lack of air thing is how it feels to be asthmatic I’m glad I’m not. It sucks getting winded walking to the mailbox.

Last month for my birthday I received one of the best gifts ever, a 60GB iPod Video. Since then I’ve been putting anything and everything on it. I’ve found a couple of great tools for converting most any video format to the MPEG4 required by the iPod. None of these are Windows tools so if that’s what you need you might as well look elsewhere.
(Read on …)

For the last week or so I’ve had a cough from hell. It started off as a cold, fever, nagging cough, you know, the works. All the other symptoms are gone except the cough. Nothing controls it and I’m constantly wheezing to the great annoyance of my wife. Sleep has been non-existant. I’m sure it’s bronchitis and I should go see a doc. Therein lies the problem.
Docs cost money. Unemployment means little money. I know he’ll want to do X-rays and all kinds of tests when all I want is a good Codine based(oh, how I love that Codine 🙂 ) cough syrup. I’m going to go tomorrow to make the wife happy but I’ll tell the doc to go easy on the tests to keep costs down.
Why does this stuff always happen at the wrong time? Now I’m forced to choose between not dying and a new clutch for my Defender that’s been sitting in the garage for 3 weeks. The clutch died the day before I was laid off in a bit of good fortune.

In 2005 we:

• My son joined the Young Marines and went to ‘Boot Camp‘.
• Went to New Hampshire for a week on a job search(still want to move and waiting for the right job to come up)
• I joined the Texas Land Rover Club and became V.P. of the local chapter.
• Took the truck to North Texas for some real offroading.
• Took our son to the Blue Angels for the first time.
• Tried to go to Iraq.
• Went to Louisiana after Katrina to help out survivors. Weirdly enough both the best and most depressing time of the entire year.
• Spent a few weekends on Padre Island. One of my favoritest places around.
• Brushed up on my home improvement skills by installing a kitchen in a friend’s house.
• Took a trip to Disney World with friends and family for my 35th birthday.

And finally, got laid off the week before Christmas. Ruining what was, I think, going to be one of my best years alive. I still say it was one of my better years. Now, if I can manage to find a job in the next week or so and we’ll try again this year.

Well, I brought home my meager belongings from work today. As a contractor you learn not to bring too many personal effects to work as you never know exactly when or how you’ll be leaving. I’ve seen some contractors escorted out the door without a chance to go near their workspace and, as in my case this time, get 2 weeks notice. Everything I brought home would easily have fit in a shoebox. A small hologen lamp, my personal mouse, a small Geomag set, and some hand sanitizer. That’s it. When we moved offices last month my officemate and I, another contrator who was also laid off this week, were able to fit our entire office minus computer and monitor into one standard moving box. Some regulars needed as many as 10-12 boxes to move all their stuff.
You also learn to not keep anything there that is irreplacable to you. No photos, nothing too personal because you may not get time to retrieve your belongings before you’re escorted to the door. It makes for a really fun work environment. All the regulars have photos and toys and such all over their desk. We have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse plus maybe a coffee cup and one small toy we aren’t too attached to. Also, you never know when the hammer will fall. My office mate and I were feeling pretty good about our positions. At the begining of December we were told that our positions were fully funded and approved through the end of next year. Three weeks later we’re told our positions were cut in the semi-annual re-org they seem to do.
On the bright side, I did have a second interview today with a company I really want a position with. I interviewed with them before and was upset not to get the job. They brought me back for another round of interviews this week so that’s a good sign. The only problem is that I have a bad cold this week. I had to do a technical interview on the phone yesterday and I was high on DayQuil and Robitussin. Same with today’s face-to-face. I didn’t give the best showing through the drug-induced fog and stumbled for some answers. When asked what I’d use to schedule jobs in Unix I couldn’t come up with the word cron. I mean, geez, it doesn’t get much more basic than that. I hope they understood. Without the meds there was no way I was even getting out of bed between coughing fits. They are in a big hurry to fill the position by the end of next week so I hope to hear something Tuesday or Wednesday. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Seeing as I have a bit of free time on my hands next week, I’m going to start re-tiling our entry way and then move on to remodelling my son’s bathroom. Luckily we have most of the supplies so it’s going to be pretty inexpensive. Without a job I can’t afford too much.

Yesterday I was driving home from work and passed a ranch that’s near my house. As I cruised past at about 65MPH I caught an image out of the corner of my eye. Occasionally you’ll see one of the ranch hands out riding the fence. Yesterday I saw one riding along at a slow clip. The best part was he was on a cell phone. By the time I got turned around to try to get a picture he’d turned down a path into the ranch and all I got was his back. I’d have probably been able to make money selling a photo like that. Maybe next time.

Seeing as I lost our whole trip report I’ll just do a quick summary of the high and low lights. It’s taken me a while to write this as I was so upset after our trip that I couldn’t sit down to finish it. Disney really screwed up our trip for us.

One thing that made the whole trip suck was the fact that the national cheerleading and Pop Warner championship was in town the same week. I know Disney had nothing to do with this one but it might have been nice to be told on the phone at reservation time that there’d be hordes of screaming girls running wild. Oh dear Lord, do I have a new found great hatred of cheerleaders. There were about 11,000 girls or so in town ranging in age from 10-16ish. Everywhere you went you were subjected to their screaming and shrill voices. The worst part was their parents/chaperones encouraged it. There were also supposedly 25,000 boys in town for the Pop Warner finals and we never had a problem with them. My wife and son were riding a bus home from one of the parks and got stuck with two cheer teams who decided that the bus was the place to hold an impromptu competition. They were yelling cheers back and forth. The bus driver asked them to be quiet and they didn’t stop. The parents were even yelling along. If I’d have been there there would have been problems.
On another bus there were a bunch of girls in the back and they decided that it was a good time to sing bad Christmas carols. Another girl on the bus that seemed to know them asked them to be quiet and I yelled in agreement. They quieted down and my friend and I started talking to other passengers about how annoying they were. We also started bad-mouthing the cheerleaders, recalling days when they had to look good and have talent. Unlike today where if your parents have the money for cheer camp, you’re on the team. We also noticed that there seem to be a lot more ‘chunky’ cheerleaders than we remembered back in the day. Unbeknownst to us we were standing next to a ‘Cheer Mom’. She got a bit indignant and went off, ‘it’s a big honor. They work hard. Blah blah blah’. We turned our backs and ignored her.

On the second day we visited MGM at night to see the Osborne Family Spectacle of Lights. It’s about 8 million lights on the New York backlot section. It’s absolutely amazing. It was even ‘snowing’ on the street. Ok, it was tiny, tiny bubbles but the effect was actually pretty decent. It was also the most crowded of anything we did. Everyone wanted to see the lights. I do recommend checking them out if you’re ever in Orlando near Christmas.

My birthday was Tuesday and I had a few things I wanted to do. I wanted to go to the Boatwright restaurant at the Riverside resort and have their amazing Sweet Potato Pancakes. If we hadn’t made reservations we wouldn’t have gotten in. This would be a recurring theme to our entire stay.
After breakfast we headed for the Magic Kingdom to ride all my favorite rides. Our first stop was Guest Relations to pick up a ‘It’s my birthday’ button. That button made my entire day so much better. If a cast member sees you wearing it they say Happy Birthday. By the end of the day I’d had literally hundreds of people say Happy Birthday to me. Even complete strangers standing in line would say it. If you ever get a chance to go to a Disney park on your birthday I recommend it. We rode all my favorites, Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Carribbean, Space Mountain, Thunder Mountain and more. The great thing about going in the off season, even with all the cheerleaders, is that lines are short so you get to do so much more in the same time. The longest we waited was about 5 minutes for Thunder Mountain. It lets you get a day’s worth of riding done in about 4-5 hours.
After Magic Kingdom my wife and I rode the Monorail over to Epcot to see about dinner. We got to ride in the front of the train with the driver. A little known thing is, all you have to do is ask to ride up front and as long as it’s not already occupied you can ride there. Some other family was going to but when they saw my birthday button they let us ride up front instead. Normally I wouldn’t have accepted but they said they’d already ridden up there this trip.
At Epcot we went to my favorite restaurant in all Disney, Akershus in Norway in the World Showcase. It was completely booked for the entire week. Even worse, Disney converted it to a ‘Character Dining’ restaurant. You know, meet a princess BS. No more quiet dinners there. Outside were dozens and dozens of strollers. When I go to dinner I don’t want to be surrounded by screaming, out of control toddlers. It used to be you could walk up without reservations and get seated right away, no matter what time of day or night it was. Now you have to book weeks in advance. They ruined one of the best things in Epcot. I had been looking forward to eating there on my birthday all year. 🙁 Instead we ate over in Japan. We had some decent sushi and a couple of bottles of sake. I love sushi so it wasn’t a total loss on my birthday, just not what I was looking forward to.
For my birthday I received The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, a hardback collection of every Calvin and Hobbes strip ever printed, and a new 60GB iPod video. I’m still pissed at the giver of the latter gift even though I love it and am using it at this very moment. 🙂 All in all it was a great birthday even though I didn’t get dinner at my favorite restaurant.

The next day we went to MGM and rode Tower of Terror and watched the new stunt show. That is a must see if you’re at MGM. The driving is amazing. Here’s a 12MB video of some of the driving. And that’s the tame stuff. That evening we decided to head over to Pleasure Island to go hang out at the Adventurers Club. This is where our whole trip went to hell. We swiped our cards through the reader at the door and were denied entrance. WTF? We were supposed to have Park Hopper Plus tickets that let us into all the properties. I even called 6 weeks before our trip to confirm that very fact and was told that’s what we had. We went back to the hotel and I talked to the front desk. They said that, no, we do not have Park Hopper Plus tickets and to get them we’d have to pay $300 extra. Even for just the last 2 days of our stay. Needless to say I wasn’t happy but seeing as it was late there was nothing else the front desk could do. I’d have to call in the morning.
I called Reservations first thing in the morning and spent well over an hour on the phone with them trying to figure out where they screwed up. Our tickets said Park Hopper on them when we got them and that’s why I called 6 weeks ago. When I called I was told I had Park Hopper Plus tickets so I thought nothing more of it. While talking to MaryBeth on the phone she kept telling me that I knew what was on the ticket and I shold have said something. I kept telling her that I did say something when I called and what more should I have done. We went back and forth for nearly an hour and the best she could do was upgrade our tickets for $300 more. As we were leaving in two days I told her that was outrageous. She finally got frustrated enough and said she’d comp a few tickets to Disneyquest for us and that they’d be waiting at the window. Not really what I wanted but I was sick of dealing with it and my breakfast was getting cold.
That night we went to the Adventurer’s Club and instead of being $10 to get in as MaryBeth had said on the phone it was $21. Way to go Disney. That night cost us over $100 once you include child care. And we didn’t even eat or drink anything. I wasn’t happy.
The next day we went to a couple parks and we went to Downtown Disney that evening. I decided to check on those comp tix at Disneyquest while we were there. Surprise surprise, they had no record of me or any tickets. I was so upset that I had to walk off before I made a scene. I decided to cut my losses and enjoy my last day there. We caught the fireworks at Epcot which are amazing with the holiday finale.
We had a good last day there and said goodbye to our friends who were flying home the next day. Disney apparently screwed up their return shuttle and they barely made their flight.

This was our 4th trip to WDW in 5 years. It’s my friends’ 17th trip to a Disney property in 18 years. Both of us had never seen such incompetence on Disney’s part. Over all I’d give Disney a 4 out of 10 for their service on this trip. Our days in the parks were great other than the cheerleaders and not being able to get into our favorite restaurant.

Disney did a great job of souring us and our friends on WDW this trip. It’ll be a long, long time before I subject myself to that kind of abuse again.