My Life as a Degenerate Criminal

Well, as usual, it's been a while since I've posted anything to my blog. On the other hand, life has been anything but normal lately. With the holidays and all, everything is a little "up in the air" at the moment.

Let's see, where do I start?

Last Thursday (a week ago already, geez), Liz and I packed up and made the drive back to Sheboygan. We spent the night there and then spent Christmas Eve with the family. We got to watch the first half the the Packer game but then had to go to church. Not to my surprise, there weren't many people there for that service. ;) Also not to my surprise, the moment the service ended, everyone in the Church knew that the score was tied with less than a minute to play. I don't think a grass fire could spread that fast. We made it to the truck just in time to turn the radio on and hear Favre take the final knee to kill the remainder of the clock before Longwell's game winner.

We spent the rest of the night with the family - we had a nice dinner and opened Christmas presents. Liz's folks got me started on my new computer with a new case, DVD drive and floppy drive. Liz got herself a jacket exactly like the one I got her (and she was wearing at the time). *sigh* Ahh well, at least she likes it.

Christmas morning, we packed everything back in the truck and took off toward Clintonville. There was some snow falling so the drive wasn't particularly enjoyable, but we made it home ok and it didn't take much longer than usual, surprisingly.

I entered the house to cheers and shouts of joy - not because Liz and I were home, but because the TV wasn't working and the repairman had apparently arrived. (Kinda makes you wonder if the three wise mean were really just heating/cooling repairmen - mangers are drafty, ya know.)

Mom had bought a nice HD TV and had it delivered on Thursday. The poeple that delivered it hooked it all up but, because the TV had been cold, they told her that it would have to sit for at least 3 hours to warm up before it could be turned on. So, the installation folks took off without ever testing it out. Guess what? Yeah, no kidding, they didn't hook it up right. When I showed up, everyone was watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation with no sound. *sigh* It took a couple hours and a jigsaw, but we got it working, to the delight of everyone, who could now listen and laugh at those unfortunate Griswalds. I have just two acronyms for you...ESPN HD. I miss it already.

We spent the rest of the evening having a nice dinner and opening presents, as usual. Gavin spent the day with hsi face plastered to a TV screen watching Dora the Explorer. I'm not actually kidding, in most cases, his face was actually pressed against the screen. I see this as a good thing - he was obviously counting pixels trying to determine the screen resolution and aspect ratio of the TV so that he could later compare to the new high definition television to ensure that we were getting the highest possible quality we could get. He's such a good kid.

Saturday night, we packed up (again) and headed for Appleton to see the amazing Natron. It was pretty late when we got there, but we soon found ourselves driving around town looking for a store that was open on Christmas so that we could get some food. Apparently, Nate the bachelor eats out a lot. ;) We then crashed at the Nate-pad for the night (I really mean it - Liz and I zonked out on the couch while Nate was sitting next to us playing video games).

The next morning, we sat around at Nate's place playing games and watching football. Mr. Lucht, himself, even made an appearance that day. It was nice to see him again - it had probably been almost a year since I last saw the guy.

I found myself totally frustrated that, while the football games all included a constant ticker that told about the life and times of Reggie White (who passed away this weekend, although I'm sure you all know about this because it was all over the news), there was not a single word mentioned about the tsunamis in Asia that have now claimed the lives of over 100,000 people. Funny what is considered news worthy and what isn't, don't you think? Nick summed it up best as we were sitting around talking about it. "All those people in Asia...combined Super Bowl rings? 0." Apparently, that explains a lot. I was just very frustrated.

With regards to the disaster on the other side of the world, my heart really goes out to those folks. I'm sure I should feel worse about it than I really do, but I just have nothing to compare this to. What's your frame of reference for 100,000 people being killing in an instant? That's essentially saying that Green Bay was swallowed whole my Lake Michigan.

In addition, I'm not sure if I'm upset about the whole situation or if I'm just upset at Bush, but, after not once vetoing a spending bill over the last 4 years, Bush says that all he can come up with in terms of relief aid is about $35 million dollars. Maybe the numbers are just too astronomical for me to understand, but that seems like a rather paltry amount considering what has happened. Of course, I'd like to see more money sent to Asia in terms of aid, but I don't know where it would come from. Bush has already put us into a ginormous deficit. Grrrrr....

Well, enough about that - the whole situation just makes me upset.

Sunday night, Liz and I traveled back to Clintonville to have Christmas at my sister's place with my dad. As usual, we had a nice meal and opened presents - Liz and I were getting pretty good at eating and tearing wrapping paper by this time.

Finally, Monday morning, Liz and I packed up (one last time) to make the trip back to Rochester. Snow was falling again and the roads really weren't any good. There were a number of vehicles in the ditch and a jack-knifed semi along the highway. Once we got West of Wausau, life got easier, but it was pretty touch and go for a while. I hate driving in that stuff. Nonetheless, we made it home safely, even if it took us a while.

Tired and stressed, Liz and I took the rest of the day and watched the extended version of "The Return of the King" in the mcglone-a-plex. Life is good. :)

So, I've been back at work this week while Liz has taken then entire week off. She has spent the week painting the basement (which I got to help with last night after work). Hopefully, it'll be finished soon and the mcglone-a-plex will be, more or less, complete. I'll try to get pictures of it once I'm finished, but I'm remarkably lazy so it may never happen. We'll see, I guess.

Tuesday night, we got an unexpected visit from a cable "repo man." He came to tell us that we hadn't made our cable payment and was there to either collect a check or cut off our service. Of course, all of my records say that we've been paying our bills, but that, apparently, is not what their records say. After talking to the guy that came to our place for a while and a woman back at Charter even longer, it became apparent what had happened. A couple months ago, I had the service changed so that we'd have a higher bandwidth and be able to connect to our work machines from home. Apparently, when they did that, they changed our account number. The checks that I send to Charter each month, however, are transferred electronically through my bank and still had the old account number on them. So, while one account had missed payments, the other one had a credit of $100+ on it. Once they figure out what they had done, they were very apologetic and left. Funny how they'd go out of their way to send someone to our place to collect $42 in late payments but they wouldn't even pick up the phone to tell us that we had payed $130 too much on a different account.

Just after that guy left, Sarah stopped by on her way back to Mankato. She hung out for a little while and had some dinner. We chatted for a while and, eventually, she decided that she should start her 2 hour drive back to Mankato. It was about that time she realized she couldn't find her keys. You guessed it...locked in her car...staring out at her from the passenger seat.

So, I had the wonderful task of trying to break into her car with a coat hanger. Fortunately, it wasn't too cold out that night. I managed to get it open, eventually. Now, if I can just cut down the time it took me by about 15 minutes, I could become a professional thief. Nonetheless, I'm well on my way.

This weekend, Liz and I will be making a trip up to the cities to celebrate New Year's with Andy Lagatta and fiancee. It's been a long time since I've sene Andy, too, so I'm looking forward to that. He's had a New Year's party up in the cities the last few years running, but Liz and I are usually back in Wisconsin for New Year's so this is the first year we're actually going to make it. It should be loads of fun.

So, have I typed enough yet? If you've made it this far, congratulations, you don't have ADD (unless of course this is the 5th time you've had to read this to get this far, then maybe you do). Catch y'all later.

Take care,
Corey