My wife and I were sitting in bed one night and she turned to me and asked “What are you thinking.”

I gave my usual answer of, “Absolutely nothing.”  It’s not a lie; I usually keep a pretty blank mind!

The problem is, a wife can only hear that so many times.

Long story short, I was challenged to think of something to say.  For whatever reason, the only words my mind could piece together were “Banana Jam”.  I immediately had a sick taste in my mouth.  Taken literally, the thought of jam made from banana sounds disgusting.  Taken as a euphemism (as I often do), it’s even worse.  It’s become kind of a horrible joke between my wife and I, almost a marital meme.

Anyone else have any of those?

My wife has sort of gotten me onto the whole American Idol kick.  I realize the show has gone on for eight years now, and so I’m a little late to the party but I really don’t care.  After sitting with her through all of last season and hearing some of the awesome performances (as well as the more miserable ones) I’ve come to understand that the show might actually have some merit to it.

Then we have last night’s “Country Night”.  Some people moved up, some people moved down, and some people stayed right where they’d been for awhile.  One person in particular had done an incredible job in previous rounds and I really found myself rooting for him (even if he has ridiculous emo hair).  Last night, however, I was honestly waiting for lightning to come and strike him down.

Now, this isn’t the normal sort of thing I blog about.  It isn’t very “geeky”, has nothing to do with our normal topics, and is relatively short.  Just the same, I felt it important to come out and say what was on my mind.  Having said that, I propose that a special level of hell be created for people who rape Johnny Cash songs.  I’m not even a country fan, and I think the guy is a national treasure.  That crap may fly over in Russia (or wherever) but over here we take our ‘Man in Black’ seriously.

• WordPress updated to a new version today.  I of course instantly upgraded.  I of course did not back up the old installation.  As a result, when we realized that no matter how cool the new admin menus were, they didn’t mean much when we couldn’t write anything, we also realized we couldn’t go back to the old system.  After maybe an hour of looking around online, we found that another plug-in the site uses was conflicting with the new back end, and all was cleared up.
• I think the most convincing argument that Tab and Diet Coke both taste horrible is that it seems to be the drink of choice for chain smokers.  When I was 14, I had my very first girlfriend.  Her mom smoked like a chimney.  Walking towards their house was much like walking through Chernobyl, in that your would randomly hit pockets of tar flavored air and know that your life had just been shortened by it.  She drank Diet Coke like she’d die without it.  Since then, I’ve noticed that if a person has a Tab, or a goes through a great amount of Diet Coke, chances are good that in their other hand is a cigarette.  How else could you stand that flavor unless all you can normally taste anyway is ash.  And for anyone who says they need to drink it because they are trying to lose weight; it’s not the sugar in the soda that’s fattening, it’s the soda in the soda!
• I’m beginning to think that Carl has been in every Star Trek related comic online.  It’s actually a little eerie.
  

  Carl denies the Borg

Now, to the uneducated, those words sound like they had to be created by some Halo players and managed to be sneaked into the common vernacular, but in actuality the opposite is true!  It’s just that many of these words have fallen out of use by the general public and have now become associated with geeks.

The inspiration for this post’s subject came from a rather unexpected place: maxi pads.  No, I’m not kidding.  While watching TV, the commercials came on and my brain stopped paying attention.  Right up until one word was uttered in the weirdest context.

The world’s first pad of its kind, Always Infinity offers women powerful absorbency like never before. It’s made with an über-absorbent material called Infinicel that has the power to absorb 10x its weight, yet remains amazingly light.

Yeah, it’s uber-absorbent.  It also has l33t-wings to help you move on with RL.  Gratz!  Your menstral block has hit lvl 60! W00t!

I don’t know why this bugs me so much, but it does.  Every time the ad is on, that single word just grates on me!

This is normally ok, as I’m often right and can figure out the basics and go from there very quickly. This is how I learned how to build computers, service furnaces, maintain a car, rewire circuit breaker boxes, reassemble a clothes dryer, crimp networking cable, and troubleshoot Microsoft Windows. It does, however, leave me with an end product that is a little less than polished: the laptop I’m using now has no fan so we have to use it in short bursts, I’ve electrocuted myself more times than I can count (or remember), and never use a grounding strap when building computers.

In my quest to fix all things mechanical around the home, I noticed that our washing machine was leaking, and decided that I would come to its rescue! I’ve taken apart major appliances before, but evidently they have decided to make more of them tamper proof (probably because of people like me). After calling up a buddy of mine who used to work in an appliance repair department, we finally figured out how to take the thing apart. From there it was a quick inspection to find where the leak was coming from; the discharge hose from the pump has been nicked and was leaking water every time the pump kicked on.

So, I put on my Red Green hat and went to work!

• Can I tape over the hole?  Nope, water still gets through.
• Can I superglue the hole? Nope, doesn’t work.
• Can I superglue AND tape the hole?  Double no!
• Can I cut off a section of hose leading up to the hole and reattach the remaining hose to the discharge?  Well, yes.  And it worked right up until a heavy load unbalanced the drum, snapped the hose off, and emptied the whole load of water onto the floor.
• Can I just run to Home Depot and get some more hose?  Yup, only it’s the wrong diameter cause the guy didn’t know what he was talking about.
• Can I return it and get the right size?  You bet, only the vinyl tubing I got was too stiff to bend around the drum and get back out of the washer.
• Can I return it and find something flexible?  Yup.  Except now the corrugations in the hose allow water to shoot out again.

At this point, I was fed up with trying to fix the thing.  Having now flooded the washer room four times, I called it a night.  The next morning I called an actual appliance repair center a few miles away and asked if they had the part from the manufacturer.  They said no, but to bring in the old hose and my model number, and they’d find something close to it.

It took them a whole 5 minutes to find exactly what I needed, and it was half the price of anything I could have gotten at Home Depot.  I went home, installed it, and it’s been working perfectly.

So, while I may still consider myself a handyman around the house, I think there’s something to be said for just giving up early and going by the book.  I’ll probably stay drier that way, and I know the wife won’t get so frustrated!

BECAUSE I HATE THIS SONG!!!

Now, you can argue all you want that Paul is a musical genius, and I won’t argue you.  But even Einstein had problems with math at times!  I have my own gripes about Christmas music playing too early in the year, but you live with it (I mean, you can’t really avoid it).  My wife is notorious for loving Christmas and everything about it, but even she can’t stand this song.  It’s only annoying in short bursts, but it seems that department stores have some sort of special 35-minute torture version that they play overhead.

When can we finally retire this sad, sad song?

Schmidty: “I dunno.”

Zuke: “You suck.”

Schmidty: “Your mom!”

I hadn’t really meant to copy this idea from them, but as I thought of ideas to write about I noticed how many of them are things that I wish people would stop doing.  Therefore, I was creating my own list of things that must go.  So, here I go:

• No-talent hacks who write jingles for background music in shows and TV ads who can’t do anything original and so take a popular song and change 3 notes.  It’s not like we can’t tell who it is you’re ripping off!
• People who can’t grasp the oh-so-difficult 4-way stop.  It’s not really a hard concept!
• The same people named above who also can’t handle roundabouts!  Just don’t drive!
• In America, we speak English.  I totally understand that you may be new to it, or don’t speak it at home, and I’m not going to rag on that.  But if you work at a MEXICAN restaurant, you should still understand what I am trying to order!  You WORK there!  The menu is in YOUR language!  There’s only ten options!  How could you (repeatedly) get it wrong?
• The morons leaving “white powder threats” at LDS temples.  OK, you might be upset about Proposition 8.  If so, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the best move for your cause.  You could also just be a douche; I don’t have any suggestions for that.
• Dell Schanze.  One of these days, I just KNOW that whack-job is going to do something that gets himself noticed on a national level (hey, it happened to Palin).  Then everyone is going to look at the rest of Utah like we’re just as crazy.
• All the “free to play” MMO banners that are on other gaming websites.  Look, we know your game sucks; that’s why we’re not playing it.  Not because you don’t have enough banners!  Maybe if you instead made the game fun, exciting, and stopped selling players email addresses to spam lists, more people would play!
• VH1 reality shows.  Most of these shows now just recycle the same contestants over and over and over.  It used to be these people would just be on an episode of Jerry Springer, but now they get airtime for multiple seasons.  How much do you get paid for having no intelligence or dignity anyway?  We have money to pay for that, but have to bail out the auto industry?
• American car companies.  Do you know how many models Lamborghini has out right now?  Three.  That’s it.  Each one has different variants you can get for it, and each model is updated a little bit each year, but in the end it’s only three models and they are doing just fine.  Now, I understand they are more expensive than a Ford Focus, but they also sell a LOT fewer of them!  Stop bringing out new car models every other year and retooling existing models every 6 months like we need it!  It’s your own fault for going broke and, unlike the housing industry, you can’t blame it on people not paying their loans!  You make total crap anyway and overcharge us for it in the process.