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| | Well, I m officially living two lives now. A tale of two cities. Less the guillotine thing. OK, hyperbole aside, things are progressing well at the house. Drywall is hung, carpet is laid, closet is in place... the place actually is starting to look like a home. Pretty good feeling, I must admit.
Also took the first step in home security. Took the AK down Friday. Having a loaded assault weapon leaning in the corner of the kitchen garnered plenty of attention from Kristyn s visiting relatives. The Kalishnikov security blanket. Gotta love it.
We also had our kitties arrive on Saturday. They re very cute. Agamemnon and Othello. Aggie and Otto for short. They re little hellions. But they re cute so it s OK. So now we have our little family in our little home. All I need is a white picket fence and I ll be living the dull suburbia life!
Only thing that sucks is having to come back to Harrisburg. Granted I really like it here in central PA and if not for Kristyn I probably woulda been content staying here forever (I know, lame, but true) but I am loath to leave the house. I find it very exciting just being there. Master of your domain thing and all... and not in the Seinfeld way.
Tonight was Booster Draft Night at the Guild. It s sort of my baby. I ve nurtured it along through humble beginnings. Had our biggest turn out yet tonight. Twelve people, and that was despite four regulars being absent. Usually we only have about six. Lots of fun. There are some regulars that are just great fun to play with. Makes it all worth while. Don t worry, I m not gonna become a Magic head though. I never be interested in playing in any kind of constructed format. That s no fun. Booster draft and sealed deck represents the game at it s purest if you ask me.
Well, enough ramblings. Nice long one to make up for my lack of posts lately.
-bampf | | 6/21/2002 9:49:08 AM Thank you, father Deutschland | Comments (4) |
| OK, my aryan master race brothers have finally dispatched the US soccer team. Thank God. Can we now get back to caring about real sports. Men s sports. Granted, it was fun to see how pissed off Mexico got when we whooped em in a sport we never cared about, but enough is enough. Soccer is boring. Period. Granted, so is baseball, but at least baseball accepts that fact and inundates fans with statistics to take up the dead time. Soccer thinks it s exciting. It s not. Realize how long a game lasts? Realize how many goals and scoring opportunities occur in that stretch? No wonder every other game results in a riot! The fans want some excitement! The Simpson s take on soccer rings ever so true. Europeans need to stick to rugby. There s a sport everyone can embrace. Note how in rugby every time a player nudges another neither falls down acting like they were just clubbed nearly to death. How sad is that? That s the lasting impression I got from the World Cup... in the immortal words of Jay, touch em and they "start sobbin like a little bitch with a skinned knee."
Women playing soccer is cool. It s a women s sport. Men need to move onward and upward. Rugby and American football evolved from soccer (in that order), let s make the great leap out of the Dark Ages of sports, OK?
Nuff said.
-bampf | | | All right. I ve been promising more rants and not delivering for quite some time now. It s certainly not for lack of angst... I got lots of it... I m just missing the time and ambition to actually write them. So here goes rant number 2 (faithful readers will recall AIDS research rant as being the premier). The rant du jour: Why aren t we bombing Palestine into the Stone Age?
Wasn t it made clear by George W that all terrorists and harborers of terrorists would receive the brunt of our anger. Seemingly that edict needs ammending: If you harbor terrorists that deign to attack Americans you will feel our brunt. Otherwise terrorism perpetrated on non-Americans is a valid political strategem!
The Palestinians send a suicide bomber into Israel on a near daily basis, and all of a sudden we re talking about establishing a Palestinian state! What the hell is this? What kind of message are we sending? These are the people who were dancing in the street in the aftermath of 9/11... the only reason they aren t terrorizing us is our lack of proximity. We should be bombing these people into the friggin Stone Age! Sure it ll piss off the rest of the arab world... news flash... they all already hate us. Who cares? Why do we need to kowtow to these totalitarian extremist regimes? Open up our Alaskan oil reserves and they got nothing on us.
The thing I really don t understand, is how these arabs have garnered such support from the left wingers! The muslim world are paradigms of everything the left normally rails against: rascism (antisemtism IS racism, y know), misogyny (hard to find better examples of state mandated denegration of women), religous extremism (come on, most muslims make baptists look tame!), class duality, traditionalism... everything the leftists hate! Yet, the Palestinians play the "we re being oppressed" card and the pinkos go rallying to their banner. Bizarre.
I m all in favor of solidifying a pact with Israel and turning Palestine, Iraq, and Iran into one big parking lot. After that... Saudi Arabia, Egypt, who ever complains next gets the same. At the very least, we should at least dethrone some of these totalitarian governments. I m of the opinion that if any of these countries had any kind of freedom of the press, their opinion of the western world wouldn t be nearly so skewed.
Well, enough ranting for now, I think you get my point. Feel free to throw in your comments. Vent.
-bampf | | | So the house is getting better and better as I type, thanks to the diligent efforts of Kristyn and her mom. Meanwhile I sit idly by here in central PA. Preety sweet deal, huh? Of course, I d like to be there. Kinda sucks buying a house and then not being able to enjoy it. Soon though... soon.
This weekend promises more maddening labor, but I m excited for it none the less. Just being in our home is exciting. Giant warm fuzzy abounds.
Need to get a suitable gun for the house though. I don t really have a small handgun appropriate for home defense. My Tec-9 is the smallest I have, but it s marked unreliability makes it a poor choice for a weapon that may really be needed in a pinch (although it does look bad-ass!). I d take one of my fine Kalishnikov s but I use them at the range a lot. Hmmm. A shotgun is decent for home use, but I ve been shooting a lot of clay birds lately. D'oh. We ll see... Basehore had a .40 he was looking to sell a while back... maybe he still has it. It s suitable for shooting skinnies and crackhead neighbors! Weee!! Won t that be fun?
My blood lust cannot be sated...
Well, enough gun talk, this is only gonna get worse...
Later all,
-bampf
PS Charlton Heston is my president | | | Well... lo and behold, I am a home owner. Funny, I don t really feel any different. The rush of exaltation, wonderment and despair I was expecting never really came. It was just kinda cool. A feeling of accomplishment and relief. It was... neat.
Love the area. Much good food. Much good shopping. All manner of need or want is a mile or two away. Yahoo! Our street is pretty decent. Friendly neighbors save the one right next to us... it s cracked out couple right out of a COPS episode! No kidding! They have like seven kids they never attend to and look like total coke heads. One of the other neighbors warned us about them already... they are indeed COPS fodder... super. Next priority is to get a gun down there.
Well, there was much Bob Villa-ing over the course of the weekend. Demolishing walls, framing a closet, hanging dry wall. The whole shebang. Place should be pretty friggin awesome by next week. We love it. Of course, like a moron, I forgot the digital camera so you ll have to wait til next week for pics.
Only problem... space is gonna become a real issue. Kristyn s got a lot of stuff... already running out of space for it. And I have even more stuff which will be moved in over the coming months. We ll be fighting over whose crap gets relegated to the basement in no time! Well, enough for now. More house ramblings tomorrow.
-bampf | | | The big day is rapidly approaching. Two days til settlement. Nerves are frayed. Stress levels sky-rocketing. Anxiety abounds. So much crap, so much paperwork. So much money. What have I gotten myself in to?
Of course there is tons of excitement too. I ll have a house. Sweet. Just need to work on that job thing and all will be set. Wow.
Also, Kristyn is not moving in alone. We re getting kitties! I haven t seen em yet, but Kristyn assures me that they are first rate felines (despite being overpriced and sickly). I think we ve settled on the names Agamemnon and Othello. Aggie and Otto for short? I m glad to have cats again. I miss having cats. It s been two years since I was last a pet owner. Let s just hope they don t crap all over the place. In which case I shoot them. That ll learn em. That ll learn em raht.
-bampf | | | At the behest of several loyal readers I changed the photo on my main page. It s a much more current one. Oddly its a low res pic from my web cam (rather than from my awesome 3.2 Mpixel digital camera). But I kinda like the picture... it s just me. Plus it s got some nice highlights and shadows, and some interesting lines in the back and foreground. One of those shots that accidentally created a neat composition.
I figure I ll write a script to cycle through different pictures. Feel free to visit my images page and make recomendations. I m slowly uploading more and more pics that I ve been accumulating on my hard drive.
-b | | | Eventful weekend of hanging out with Kristyn and her parents. Several functions to attend. Kristyn, Kathy and I have mastered the art of social event introversion. We huddle in a corner and do our best to look inconspicuous. Works fairly well, on occasion we are cornered into some kind of petty small talk with a fellow party-goer. The horror. We re just way too content to stay at home in our own little world... it s so much more pleasant there... devoid of forced meaningless conversation and platitudes. When are people going to realize that with the invention of the internet, social gatherings have become obsolete, a primitive relic of by gone times. As long as I have a PC, DVD player and some books, I see no reason to leave the house for anything other than work and food. Has technology made us lazy? Nah... just pragmatic.
This coming week is super-daunting. We settle on Friday. Egad. Big scary step. We re very excited though, too. It s such a great place and a great location. As comfortable and happy as I am around here, I m growing more and more anxious to move down there. I can t stop thinking about the sammiches... blessed Philadelphia hoagies! They shall be both my blight and salvation. The next couple weekends will be spent remodeling and such. Mostly minor stuff. Painting and such mostly. The only significant job is moving a closet from the master bedroom to our little study. Luckily, Kristyn s dad is uber-handy. Should more than make up for my ineptitude in that department.
Well, time to get to bed. Look for more rants in the coming days.
-bampf | | | Mah baby returned to me tonight. She s got one year of her five year undergrad degree finished. Then she ll have law school after that. Eventually... eventually... she ll be done and we can enjoy a lavish DINK lifestyle for a while. Luckily her co-op program will allow her to earn a decent income half of the school year so we won t be in total poverty whilst enjoying that higher cost of living Philly life.
We were able to hit Angies for a sweet sweet cringo. We are full of grease laden goodness. Unfortunately their was no daily Patriot in the newspaper machine- precluding us from our normal cringo, coffee, and crosswords alliterated ritual. Two outta three ain t bad though.
Looks like she s forcing me to watch Harry Potter (again). Damnation. So I suppose I should be going.
Until next time, adieu.
-bampf | | | OK, so I m looking at an old family photo kept by my bedside. It s my mom, dad, brother and myself circa 1980 or so... bad 70s hair... bad 70s cloths... giant butterfly collars... polyester... the whole nine yards (mom s sense of fashion has always been a bit suspect... I partially blame my siblings and I s complete lack of social skills on the way she dressed us in our formative years). Anyway. It dawns on me that I am now older than my dad was in that picture. Incredible. There he was, married with two kids. By that point in his life he had a home and had been providing for a family for five or six years. He was already weary from life... visible in his eyes. Incredible. I can t imagine doing that. I have a hard enough time tending to myself. My greatest financial consternation is deciding if I wanna splurge on DVDs or games in a givin month... he was worried about how he was gonna feed three hungry mouths in case an asthma flare up caused him to miss a couple days of work. I don t know how my parents managed. I have the utmost respect for them. And through it all they always kept a caring and loving veneer for my brother and I. Wow. Sometimes I forget how good I got it.
I remember talking with Chad about similar topics. How our parents always warned us about how unforgiving and difficult life is. How we need to brace ourselves for the harsh actuality of being an adult. We realized that we would never face those grim realities our parents faced. A little interspection really puts things in perspective every now and then...
Well, that s enough of this deep musing from me. I apologize for the morose tones... June is a very somber month for me. More light hearted fare next time... I promise.
-bampf | | 6/3/2002 12:21:31 PM Weddings, Jedi and other musings | Comments (2) |
| Another eventful weekend devoid of Blog updates. I really need to martial myself better when it comes to updating this thing. Anyway, since my last entry I did finally see Episode 2. I fucked my D&D group in doing so (that s a whole other story). I must say I was pleasantly surprised with the film. I am loath to admit I may have even liked it. It had that near-mystic Star Wars feel that Ep 1 completely lacked. The acting and directing were pretty poor, but that s to be expected. Although I thought Ewan MacGregor was excellent. The effects were much better this time around and the battles scenes were very impressive. The cartoon aspect so prevelent in Ep 1 only really reared its head in the laughably silly battle droid factory scenes. The C3PO bits were horrendous, but I think it s pretty clear that Lucas will insist on embarassing himself and the Star Wars identity at least a couple times in each new film he makes, so that s unavoidable. The plot was almost cogent. Unfortunately this may be about as good as it gets. I am kinda anxious to see how Lucas handles Ep 3. How is he going to end the most storied series in history on some kind of high note? To maintain continuity he s gonna have to kill off all but two Jedi, turn Anakin completely into Vader, reveal Palpatine as the tyrannical emperor we all know and love and kill off Amidala. Quite a tall order.
I also managed to see Insomnia over the weekend. Excellent movie. Chris Nolan is en route to becoming a cinematic god. With a couple more fine opuses and he ll establish himself up there with Gilliam and Fincher. Viva intelligent cinema.
Saturday was Vinny s wedding. Pretty much ate up the whole day as he got married in the middle of no where! It was a fun time. Got to see one of the most botched receptions ever... and the worst DJ imaginable! It was still very pleasant. A happy affair in spite of itself. Of course it was impossible to attend without thinking about Kristyn and I s wedding. After hearing Vinny lament all the ardors of wedding logistics, Kristyn and I were very glad to be having those things taken care of by a cruise line wedding coordinator. All we have to do is dress ourselves and show up... oh yeah... and convince the Captain to say "Yar" at least once. Looks like the post wedding reception will be at Wanda s. Should be really nice. I fought for the pig in a pit... but alas was eventually overruled by Kristyn and her mom... fascists.
Well, time to get back to work... more updates later.
-bampf |
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