Giant Spider Web
Giant Spider Web
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From FoxNews...
Entomologists are debating the origin and rarity of a sprawling spider web that blankets several trees, shrubs and the ground along a 200-yard stretch of trail in a North Texas park.
Click here for the article.
A spider?? or a Spider MAN??
Who's the child
This is my father with Megan (4) and Emily (5), his two granddaugthers, while we were on vacation earlier this month.
Megan, Emily, Poppa Larry
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Megan is my sister Lori and her husband Craig's child and Emily is mine.
August 28, 2007
Cat breakout
Cats escaped
For the past couple of months, our cats have been confined to the basement. One of them, the younger one, was going to the bathroom on stuff in the main living areas. So as a sentence, they have to do time in the basement. It’s actually a pretty good place for them I think. I am down there most of the days when I am not traveling since my office is in the basement. There are things to play with, and plenty of places to sleep. They might miss the kids but who knows, cats are indifferent and aloof anyway.
So a couple of weeks ago I built a screen for the basement window. This way, I can open the basement door, open the window, and get a cross breeze. The cats sit on the window sill and look at the world passing by.
Last night I went downstairs and I heard a cat fight. In the old days, when we just had Finley, the older male, he would get out and get the crap beat out of him by a street cat that patrols the neighborhood. Last night I heard the same thing.
So I looked over and the screen fell out of the window, allowing both cats to get away. My first thought was “Good, we have no cats”, but then I saw poor Finley getting pummeled. I ran outside, saved him, and brought him back to the basement. I fixed the window and looked around for the calico, Orla. She was no where.
I went outside and searched in the darkness. Nothing. I kept looking out the front and back door, and she was still not around.
This morning I got up early and walked around. Nothing. I checked again when I went for a run. Nada.
After my morning run, I walked back and saw Orla sitting in the basement window sill, on the inside. My first thought was that she was just hiding in the basement. But not the case. It turns out that Patti heard her crying after I left this morning, and went in the backyard to find her in a tree, pretty high up. Patti went to get a ladder but realized she could not manage getting the ladder by herself. So she got a piece of cheese, slid a large child play structure we have in the yard under the branch, and climbed on top to get the stupid cat.
After grabbing the cat, Orla apparently tried to get away. I told Patti she should have let her go. I like Finley much better anyway, and who knows, maybe Orla wants to run free around the woods by our house. Let her go I say, run wild with the feral cats. Have fun. Send a card.
But nope, Patti is a better person than I, and she put Orla back in the house. It was a little like Steve McQueen getting out for 24 hours in The Great Escape. Orla was brought back and is probably planning her next escape right now. Who knows, maybe I’ll help her.
Thought I'd share.
August 18, 2007
iPod, Washing Machine, Bad
I put my iPod in the washing machine and guess what? It doesn't work anymore. I blame it on the cats, those filthy arogant usless rodents.
August 15, 2007
Nando Parrado
Nando Parrado - aka Ethan Hawke
For some reason I’ve always been fascinated by the story of a Uruguayan rugby team that crashed in the Andes mountains in South American in 1971. The survivors of the plane crash stayed alive for over two months in the harshest terrain on the planet. In fact, it was the only time a plane crashed at cruising altitude and at cruising speed with any survivors (the pilots thought they were flying in a pass in the mountains and crashed at 22,000 feet). Survival experts say that it is easier to stay alive in the dessert or on a raft in the middle of the ocean than the Andes Mountains in the middle of winter.
I read the book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, written by Piers Paul Read in 1974. I actually read the book 5 or 6 times and couldn’t put it down each time I read it. Last year a new book came out by a survivor called Miracle in the, Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home, that I bought and read within three days of its release. And there was a movie made in the early 90s that stared Ethan Hawke that I have on VHS.
So about two weeks ago I was at a conference in San Fran and guess who the guest speaker was? Yep, the guy that was portrayed by Ethan Hawke and who wrote the book that came out last year, Nando Parrado. Nando had a sister and his mother on the plane who died. He was also the leader of the group and main force to find their own way out since the search was called off after 8 days. One thing they had to resort to so they would stay alive was to eat the flesh of those who died. Horrific but necessary. If you haven’t read any of the books and like real-life stories, I recommend it.
There were about 600 people in a large ball room. We were in there for about 2 hours listening to executives from my company speak and everyone was pretty tired and restless. Nando Parrado got up there and spoke for another hour and 45 minutes and not a single person moved. There were 600 sets of eyes wide open and glued on his every word. He showed some short videos and pictures to illustrate the chain of events, but for the most part he spoke for almost two hours. It was probably the best speech I have ever seen and 75% of the people had wet eyes when they gave him a standing ovation at the end.
My company gave out copies of his latest book and he stayed and signed the books for 2 hours that evening. I got to talk to him for a bit since I knew he was a motorycle rider and I have a small interest in bikes. Nice guy but more importantly he made all of us realize that making quotas and attending cadence calls and dealing with work issues is nothing compared to life and death decisions.
I have to admit one thing we did in poor taste. The next night a bunch of us were out having a drink. Standing in a circle, I pointed at the heaviest guy there and said “If we get into a plane crash, I am eating you first.”
Pictures of the plane.
August 14, 2007
Sarge from Cars, with Lead Paint
This little toy is Sarge from Cars, a kids movie that my son, 3, loves.
We gave him this car along with a bunch of other characters from the movie for his birthday last week. His first response, after he took a bite out of the paint, was that it needed more lead. So I ordered a Polly Pocket and some weird looking super hero thing in a green suit, and let him eat that. Now I think he is fully leaded.
This entire thing kind of reminds me of an old SNL skit about dangerous children toys. Mainway Toys, makers of fun playthings like Pretty Peggy Ear-Piercing Set, Mr. Skin-Grafter, General Tron's Secret Police Confession Kit, Doggie Dentist, Johnny Switchblade, and Bag O' Glass.
Now I'm off to the toy store to get something with asbestos and maybe some mercury.
Marlon Sims
I was in San Fran a couple of weeks ago and went to a very nice restaurant with some colleagues. I was sitting there and our waiter came up and starting describing the specials and stuff.
I looked at him and said to myself "no way, it can't be him".
Someone else took drink orders, someone else brought bread, etc. The waiter came back later after a few minutes and I stared at him.
"No way it's him. Nuh uh".
So about 20 minutes later, he walked by and I said "Are you a fighter in the ultimate fighter championship?"
True enough, he was. For about 99.9% of people, they have no idea what the UFC is. It's a pretty barbaric form of fighting that is trying to become more mainstream. In fact, it's now more popular than boxing and has instituted a number of rules and weight classes to make it more legitimate. The fighting enterprise has a reality show on TV called the Ultimate Fighter, now in season 5, that takes 16 fighters, puts them in a house, breaks them into two teams, and they compete over a couple of months until there is one winner who gets a large contract with the enterprise.
So our waiter, Marlon Sims, was one of the fighters on season 5. He got kicked off the show for fighting one night in the house with another guy, which I guess is against the rules. Sims is also known for being a tough street fighter.
One other person at the table knew who he was but to be honest, I am probably one out of a million people who could have spotted him out of nowhere.
His profile is here. He was a really nice guy, very personable, and someone I would definitely NOT want to be angry at me.
Just thought I'd share.
Bad Delta, bad
I'll try to make this brief, although as Mark Twain once said, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one".
I love Delta, usually, but they did a very bad thing to me a couple of weeks ago.
I was supposed to fly from Minneapolis to Boston at 8:30 AM on Monday, July 30, with the wife and three kids. We were to go through Atlanta and get in around 6PM. Remember, my kids are 5, 3 and 18 months.
I called Delta Sunday to see if there were open flights to fly more direct. I was told that I could be on a 7:30AM through Cincinnati and get in around noon. I had to call three hours before, so around 4:30 in the morning, to confirm. I decided to get up at 3 in the morning to get my fam and all of our crap to the airport.
Sunday night I tried to call Delta but no luck, the phone was busy. I wanted to see if the earlier flight was still open. I was on hold twice, once for 45 minutes, the other for over an hour, before giving up.
Around 10:30 I noticed a missed call on my cell phone from an 800 number. I called the number back and it was Delta, but I couldn’t get through. No message was left on my cell from Delta.
Around 11PM Sunday night I checked the status of my flight and it showed that I was now on a 5:30AM flight, meaning I had to get myself up at 2:30AM, and the kids and wife out by 3:00AM.
Around 11:15 I got an email from Delta that my flight was cancelled and that I was rebooked on TUESDAY at 5:30AM, a little detail I overlooked 15 minutes earlier. So instead of going home at 8:30 on Monday, I was going home on Tuesday. A day later. Ugh.
Since I had to fly to San Fran from Boston at 7AM on Tuesday for work, and my new flight was going to get us in at 1PM, I had an issue. I was going to miss my work related flight. Plus, Ethan had to be home on Tuesday morning for his last day of a school he had been going to for the past year. They were going to have a party for him. Plus we all wanted to get home.
I tried to call Delta starting at 11:16 but was on hold for hours, never got through.
I woke up at 2AM, took a shower and got dressed, packed the car up, finally go through to Delta at 3AM.
Since there were 5 of us traveling, and I didn’t have expensive business tickets, I got the low end of the stick. Nothing they could do other than move my flight to San Fran to later that night on Tuesday. So instead of getting in to California at 3 in the afternoon, I was getting in at 3 in the morning. Great. And they did not do a thing to get us out on Monday and told me I was out of luck. The phone customer service person could have cared less about me, she was a jerk on the phone. She told me to NOT head to the airport because I would not get home. So I went back to sleep around 4 and woke up at 6 with the kids.
Delta did not apologize, or offer any compensation, since the plane could not get out of Atlanta on Sunday due to weather. Since weather delay, they do not compensate, or say sorry, and the passenger has no rights at all. It’s incredible that they, or any airline, can use that excuse. So there was rain in Atlanta and I got stuck with an extra day on the rental, possibly a hotel bill, missed my business meeting, and could have spent the day at the airport. Delta was wrong here I hate to admit.
Thanks Delta for looking out for us Platinum members. When I travel for work, you care about me because I have an expensive ticket. But when I fly with my family on a cheaper ticket, I am just another criminal to Delta that they can treat as they wish. To take things to the extreme, Delta could have pushed me and my family off for a week before flying us home. In fact, I think if the flights were all full, they would have pushed us back until Wed or Thu. Most any industry has a governing body to regulate how customers are treated, and regulation mandated by the government on rights. But the airlines can do whatever they want and we are stuck. It’s just not right.
To make it worse, we had to split up on one of our flights home on Tuesday. Patti and the baby near the middle, me and the two older kids in the last row. AND I had to buy a headset so my kids could watch a movie. I usually love Delta but this time they messed up.
August 09, 2007
Greetings from Lake George
Hello from vacation (sort of). Two weeks ago it was Minnesota, then San Fran for work, and now I am in Lake George on vacation with my family, my two sisters and family, my parents and my wife's parents. Great time and a lot to tell, especially...
a crazy travel story,
how Delta is now the devil,
a laptop meltdown,
Magic Forest and cheap tourist scene,
one crazy night out in San Fran,
a fun hat party,
Delta is in my penalty box,
meeting a UFC fighter,
and Nando Parrado,
lakeside pictures with my wife's extended fam,
6,000 flow miles in one day across 5 cities,
the Country Meadow Inn in McGregor, MN,
missing local sports pulse of Red Sox Nation,
cabins in upstate NY.
I will post when I come up for air next week.
Post card - Weather is here, wish you were beautiful (thank you J Buffett).
- Dave