My Dog Maggie...

My dog Maggie is the cutest dog alive.



My dog Maggie is a big fool.

My dog Maggie loves me unconditionally.

My dog Maggie has so much puppy energy that I have to walk her 3/4 of a mile every day.

My dog Maggie has so much puppy energy that walks have been replaced by skateboard trips with her pulling me down the road



My dog Maggie must be in contact with my feet whenever possible.

My dog Maggie snores when she's asleep and does the doggie twitching and high pitch 1/2 woofs.

My dog Maggie did not know how to play when we first got her, but she caught on really fast and now lives to play.

My dog Maggie sings every morning when she wakes up and when she wants to go for a walk.

My dog Maggie leaves her toys all over the place.

My dog Maggie is amazed I manage to make it home time after time.

My dog Maggie likes DQ soft serve.

My dog Maggie has THE MOST PRISSY BARK I've ever heard

My dog Maggie is an excellent car passenger

My dog Maggie always gets a drink from the shower in the morning when I dunk my head

My dog Maggie is now asleep under the coffee table, no wait under the side table, no wait by the steps....

I love my dog Maggie very much....

Tired...

Can you catch up on sleep? I wonder. My Dad always said you could not. I'm starting to believe he was right. I pulled some really long hours this week. 10 hours Monday, 20 hours Tuesday, 17 hours Wednesday, and only 8 today! Why did I do this you ask? Well there's no "I" in team so if I didn't complete my piece of this project I'm doing, my teammate would have had to work on the weekend. I hate working on weekends, and if I can help it I try to make sure none of my peers needs to either. So have you ever seen a sleep deprived Asian guy? It's wacky!!!!

But it all works out. A good night of sleep tonight and I'll be good to go!!! I have a tee time at 10:50am tomorrow!!!

My Good Deed for the Day

So the doorbell rang at about 3PM. One of my neighbors asked if I could come change a flat tire. Now my neighbor "Ms. B" is a single Mom who recently separated from her husband. She's pretty nice and is conveniently a dog groomer. Yep, Maggie spends time over her house every two months or so. So being the manly, man I am, I lowered my voice a few octaves and said, "Sure Ms. B no problem I'll be right over." Change a tire? No problem. I've done it lots of times. I'm pretty good at it.

So I went over and found the spare, and the tire jack no problem. The tire was the passenger side front one. Yep it was flat. Flat like a pancake. The car was basically resting on the tire rim. So I walked back to the house, grabbed my mini compressor (Yes. I have a mini compressor that can inflate up to 175LBS/IN) and went back to try and blow up the tire. Well it looked like it was working to a point, but then it just would not inflate anymore. Now Ms. B's driveway that the car was on is on a 30 degree grade. Now I know what you're thinking, but "No" folks sorry. I didn't pull a Homer Simpson and jack the car up on a 30 degree driveway and then watch it roll down the hill into someone else's house. D'OH!!!!!!



I do stupid things sometimes, but I have moments of "common sense" every now and then. I inflated the tire enough to drive it a small distance, so I pulled it out of the driveway and onto the nice flat, level street.

Ms. B has a Volvo station wagon. Volvo makes really weird jacks. I've never seen anything like it. Instead of a diamond shaped jack this one was a "V." And the other thing is that the Volvo only has one jack point per side of the car. See most cars have 4 points where you can jack it up. This thing had 2. One on each side. OK, I thought it was strange jacking up an entire side of a car to change one tire, but I guess that's how Volvo's are. So I loosened the lug nuts on the tire and jacked up the car. No problem. I took off the tire then went to put on the little donut spare on. BAMMMMMMM!!!! The freakin jack failed, it fell to the left and the car came down. Fortunately I had the spare partially on so I didn't smash up Ms. B's car, and fortunately I was able to get my hands clear when it slid to the left.

Unfortunately the car pinned the jack to a point where I needed to lift it up in order to pull the jack out. CRAP!!!!!! S0 being the ingenious person I am I went back to the house and got my Toyota Matrix jack out of my car. I jacked up Ms. B's Volvo and pulled the Volvo jack out. I lowered the car and figured I could swap out my jack for hers and try to put the donut on. WRONG!!!! My jack was stuck to Ms. B's underside jack point. So I went back to my house and picked up my hammer. I knocked my jack off of Ms. B's jack point and then I slid the Volvo jack back under the car. I jacked up the car again 1/2 way and took a look to see if I could figure out why the jack had failed in the first place.

Turns out that Volvo designs really crappy automobile jacks. Whoever their supplier is should be shot. Any lateral movement sends the jack off balance and because you lift an entire side of the car up it makes matters worse. So I went back to my house and picked up a couple of 2x4's to put behind the car tires so it didn't move. You know as I was going through all these motions I was thinking, "HOW IN THE HECK COULD YOU CHANGE THIS CAR'S TIRE ON THE HIGHWAY????!!!!!!!!"

So I was able to get the donut on, put the lug nuts back on and bring the car down. So I was pretty happy until I looked at the tire. It was FLAT!!!!!! I could have just cried right there. Right in the street, 50 feet from my house, with all the world watching. So I used my little mini compressor, which thank GOD I have that, to inflate the tire up to what it should be. That worked!!!!!!!!! I rang the doorbell and told Ms. B it was fixed and that she should get a new tire ASAP. I walked into the house at 5:05pm, kissed Sharkey, took a shower and then laid down for a nap...... SIGH.....

Nothin Much...

Just have some random things.

The Shutters....

Sharkey thought it was a good idea to take our outside shutters down to paint. They were a bit faded, I have to admit. I thought, "sure how hard would that be?" Well, our 2nd story is about 20 feet high. So I borrowed the neighbor's extension ladder. I was able to remove the shutters, but on the ladder, it started to do the shifting thing. And when you are 20 feet off the ground that's not so good. So shaking profusely I came down. I thought there has to be a better way to put them back up. My thoughts were this: "Hey I worked for Habitat for Humanity last year and they use scaffolding. I'm going to use scaffolding."

So off to the Home Depot we went. The rental guy asked us how high we were going. I said 20 feet. He said, you know instead of assembling, disassembling scaffolding you could probably get the job done with a 14 foot "A" frame ladder. We thought sure we'll give it a try and maybe that'll save us some money. Anyhow, here's how it worked for us:

It was too darn short!! I could only reach the bottom holes easily and the middle drill holes only by stretching. Lesson here is that a 14 foot ladder doesn't get you 14 feet in the air. It's more like 11-12 feet. So $50 later, we returned the ladder and picked up some Home Depot scaffolding 2 days later. Sure this entire folly cost us $200, but the money I spent wouldn't even have touched my medical deductible. And hey, I didn't die in a 20 foot fall from putting up painted shutters! BONUS!!!!

My Fight with the lawnmower....

So I was cutting the grass on Saturday and noticed one of the wheels was the wrong height in the front of the mower. So I shut it off then I proceeded to adjust the wheel from the side. Unfortunately I forgot that the mower's exhaust port gets extremely hot. So I have a really nice burn on my right wrist. It was amazing how quickly it happened, how stupid I felt when I did it, and how many colorful metaphors I was yelling in the back yard!!

How's This for Big Brother...

So when I bought my MacBook I decided to take advantage of Apple's financing package of 90 days same as cash. No problem, I have a great credit rating so I applied for the account in the store. Well you provide the normal stuff: name, address, employer, annual income, checking accounts, homeowner/renter, etc. So I filled that out and went to the next application screen. To confirm my identity, the next screen asked me questions about my oldest brother. Where he lived, how many kids he has, and what industry he's employed in. They were multiple choice questions, but I thought to myself, "HOW IN THE HECK DID IT LINK US TOGETHER!!!!" Think about it. Based on the information I gave it, there's some database that tracks my relatives and their families so it can ask me multiple choice questions about them. WHOA!!!!!

Apple's new Shuffle....

I'm a technogeek as you know. Yesterday Apple had a media event where they announced new products for this year. Check out the new Shuffle. I might have to get me one of these....

Where's That Slap-O-matic When I need it?

Today was a fun day at the job. I had to explain to a person on my team how our processes work and how the timing of things needs to happen. Mind you this person has been on my team for 2 years now. Can you say, "C L U E L E S S ! ! !" The worst part is he's so freakin' unaccountable too. That's a bad combo. Clueless and not accountable. This is especially bad when you are a project manager. My one regret about turning down the manager job was I could of gotten rid of him!!! I totally had to step away from that situation before I blasted him today. Where's that JP Slap-O-Matic when you need it?? Actually, I may have a new invention for this type of person, the JP Boot-O-Matic.

Anime and YouTube

OK, those Anime things I've blogged about before....(yeah Suzie, they are CARTOONS I know) But I was messing around on YouTube and I found these...

Star Blazers: Here's the opening from the original Japanese show:



Robotech: Original opening to the US Version show:



Inuyasha: Japanese opening:

Flex Girl

No matter how many times I see this, I just say the same thing.... DAMN!!!

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggidy Jig!

Sharkey and I arrived home from Minnesota today. We stayed overnight in "scenic" Toledo both to and from the Twin Cities. It was nice though that Texas Roadhouse was right next to the Marriott Residence Inn we stayed at though!!!! We put a total of 2,660 miles on the car for our vacation road trip. Here's the route we traveled:

The drive wasn't bad at all. You had to watch for the State Troopers though. We counted around 50 cars pulled over from start to finish. We fortunately were not one of them. According to the Garmin GPS we also averaged 72MPH for the entire trip. Sharkey and I listened to some tunes and watched "The Sound of Music" DVD on the way home. OK, she mostly watched, I mostly listened and occasionally glanced over to get a peek at the scene. Maggie was also very good on this trip! She is a traveling dog now. She slept most of the way but it seems that she likes (ok, tolerates) the JP/Sharkey road trips. It was interesting to see how closely she kept an eye on us where ever we went so we wouldn't leave her behind. Gotta stay with the pack you know. And it seemed that she was way more relaxed this time around than on our first trip out to Minnesota in December. I think the other amazing thing to her was JP and Sharkey eating in the car ("Hey guys...{pant} {pant} that looks good, can I have some?)

Everything was great! We went to the fair 2x. Mind you 1x would have probably sufficed. I was able to get two rounds of golf in and some range time. We did some shopping at the Mall of America. We were able to visit with friends and family in Minnesota and Chicago. We also were able to spend time w/ Sharkey's grandparents, the Bud and the B, and do some shrub trimming for them. They can tell everyone they had a Japanese gardener do their landscaping (hahaha!!) And because we went to the fair I finally answered a question that I've always had, "What's my blood type?" I found out I am O+. I can cross that one off the list. And now I suppose I should become a donor. It was a pretty good vacation overall and "SCORE!!!" tomorrow is Labor Day so no work to do tomorrow either!! Can we plan it or what? =)

It is good to be home and not on the road, and also not cramming any more deep fried food in the mouth, but it really did not seem like this trip just blew by in a flash. It also does not seem we've been gone for an eternity. I think that means the time we were away was just about the right amount of time. But this concludes our long distance road trips for this year. Any more trips to the land of 10,000 lakes will be in the form of MidWest airlines travel.... yummmmm....fresh baked warm cookies.... =)