Leftover Candy

Last week, M16 brought in a LOT of leftover Halloween candy. He started handing it out to everybody.

P-Ziddy tried to refuse. "Yeah, because none of *us* have any leftover candy." M16 ignored him and kept shoveling out mounds of little unwelcome fun-sized nuggets.

"I brought leftover candy of my own," I said, glaring. M16 left me alone. But everybody else got candy piled on them.

Later, M16 wandered out of the office for a few minutes. K2 and P-Ziddy looked at each other. "Are you thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?"

They returned all the candy to M16's desk. Some was in a desk drawer. Some in his chair, some in his tissue box, and one on top of his monitor, where it instantly started to melt.

M16 was stunned. "OK, OK, I won't hand out anymore."

P-Ziddy wasn't done. "Did you find the ones under your keyboard?" M16 looked. "Ah, here they are."

"Did you find the ones behind your stapler?" "Sheesh, guys."

"Did you find the ones we stuck in your jacket pockets?" "Oh, c'mon..."

My turn. I grinned. "Did you find the piece they stuck down the front of your pants?"

Eyes wide. "No way!"

The best part is, he nearly looked.

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Halloween Paper

Halloween was fun this year. I saw a kid dressed as a Rubik's Cube, another as a Vampire Pirate, and I even saw a middle-aged man toilet paper his neighbor's truck.

I'm not making any of that up.

Late in the evening, one of my neighbors walked over to say hi. "Got any candy left?", he asked. "I do, but your costume stinks so you're not getting any." Everybody had a ha-ha.

A few minutes after he wandered off, my wife and I saw him come back outside with a roll of toilet paper. He wandered over to the house next door and started papering the truck.

"What are you doing?!?" Neighbor Guy just smiled and pointed at the house. "He didn't hand out candy this year, so I figure he deserves this."

My wife and I deliberately loitered as visibly as we could under our porch light, so it would be obvious that we were not involved. "Is he gonna guess who did that?", my wife wondered. Neighbor Guy grinned and replied. "He'll know. I'm gonna text him!"

Neighbor Guy wandered off, chuckling. "I've still got a half a roll left!"

"Keep it," I advised. "You may need it later tonight."

About a minute later, there was a shout from inside Victim Neighbor's house. He ran outside and started shaking a fist in the general direction of Neighbor Guy's house.

I love my neighbors. I'm also very glad I parked in the garage.

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Starfury Model... COMPLETE!

That's right, true believers! I finally got around to finishing the thing.

I lost a lot of enthusiasm for the project after I saw how horrible the paint job was turning out. The decals fared a little better, although they are much more impressive if you don't look at them very closely.

With that in mind... uh... here's a close-up.



Yikes! Sorry about that. I should mention that all of these pictures are clickable for larger versions. That said, I don't recommend clicking that first one. The blur only gets worse.

The one smart thing I did was to start on the underside of the model. I wound up re-gluing that decal later and it's better, but the ones up top were done after I kinda figured out what I was doing.

Speaking of the top, here's a progress shot...



I gotta say, those long narrow decals were not fun. I thought the itty-bitty tiny little ones were a pain, but those long ones were a special kind of wiggly pulling breaking re-gluing challenge.

And now, two logos...



There's the main attraction, the "Black Omega". And the top-side version of that Earth Alliance logo, much better attached than the one on the underside.

Here's a nice overhead shot of the model.



Try not to notice how off-center the decals are, OK? :)

I think Starfury's were meant to be seen from one side or the other. It gives a better sense of how the ship moves through space. Plus, it also nicely obscures how imperfect those decals are...



So, there you have it. The Starfury model adventure is complete. I now have my very own Black Omega Starfury, which is not quite fit to see the light of day. It looks alright from a distance, but up close it looks like it was assembled by a tipsy ten-year-old. :)

Even so, it was fun and I'm glad I did it. I'm also very, VERY glad it's done.

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Santa's Deer Stand

Today is Halloween, so it's a perfect time to start decorating for Christmas.



I love how the reindeer is hiding under the penguin's binoculars.

What? Too soon? Oh, OK. Since it's Halloween, here's a pic of our pumpkins.



Stay tuned, because Friday I'll have an update on thing that I haven't had an update on in quite a while!

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Click... Click... Click...

Every once in a while, to promote good heart health, I like to climb up on a ladder and do righteous battle with a ceiling fan. It keeps me young.

This time around it was our living room fan, which is happily way up high on a vaulted ceiling. The fan was clicking so loud that we could hear it over the movie Battleship. Think what you will of the movie itself, but there's no way we should have been able to hear a ceiling fan clicking over all that noise.

We hit the internet. That mighty repository of all knowledge and lore told me that I should identify which fan blades were out of whack and tape pennies to them. So up the ladder I go.

It's a tall ladder and I'm a tiny, terrified nerd. Still, I had a mission. I picked a couple of fan blades more or less at random and taped 6 whole cents worth of my life savings to them.



And the clicking STOPPED. Holy buckets!

I did a little happy dance and then went back up the ladder. No way I'm gonna leave pennies lightly taped to those blades. Can't you just imagine my ceiling fan launching off a whirling copper rain of destruction? I'd blog it, but I'd be unhappy about it.

So I taped the pennies down nice and firm. Still no clicking. I put the ladder away, and ... wait for it ... the fan started clicking again. Of course it did.

Off to the store we went. I bought a ceiling fan balancing kit. Then, the ladder came back out. Up I go. I took down the pennies, then turned on the fan... no clicking.

The balancing kit was unopened. The fan was whisper-quiet. I looked at my wife. "I've found the solution," I told her. "The ladder fixes it. We can't put the ladder away."

"I don't think that's ideal," she replied. "It's no problem," I said. "I'll put some 2x4's across the lower rungs so it'll double as a coffee table."

She made me put the ladder away. Thankfully, there's still no clicking.

Anybody need a ceiling fan balancing kit?

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Leftover Mug

So, there's a coffee vending machine at work (up one floor from my office). It blurts out little paper cups of the perfect percolation. All very normal.

There are multiple trash buckets in this break room, one of them only around 10 feet away. Even so, lazy people frequently drink their paper cup of coffee and then leave it on top of the vending machine. It is a rare day that there's not at least one paper cup sitting up there.

Last week I saw...



Hm. That's not a paper cup. Is that?...



Oh my. Yeah. It's a mug. Somebody actually left their mug up there.

How nasty must that mug be for somebody to want to pitch it? The inside of that thing must be awful. Even better?... the person probably drank out of it, *then* gave up on it and put it up there. Yummy.

I thought about pulling it down and wrapping it as a Christmas present for somebody, but there's nobody I hate that much.

FYI, last week was a "blah" week for me. You can tell because I'm leading off on Monday with a presumably moldy coffee mug. I'd say I've hit a new low, but my regular readers know better.

Anyway, because of my abundance of a lack of things to write about, this will be my only post this week.

Enjoy!

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PAC vs DSP

At work, some of our systems are being upgraded. The new toys are going to be pretty nice.

There was a conversation going on about the upgrades. "Instead of having to [techie nonsense], we'll be able to [techie delight]!", M16 shouted. "I can't wait!"

"Yeah, this will be nice because [techie BS]," I said. I like to pretend I know what's going on around me.

P-Ziddy, of course, cut right to the point. "So you're saying that we're getting a Performing Arts Center instead of a dirty stripper pole?"

A Barber's Pole. Because I am *not* going to do an images search for a stripper pole. :)

The stunned silence lasted almost 5 full seconds. Then, Big Dawg started to choke.

"No!," he shouted while coughing and pawing at his head. "I need to un-hear that! Pour bleach in my ears!"

Somehow we got Big Dawg calmed down before he pulled off his ears.

P-Ziddy is an urban poet and a workplace hazard all rolled into one.

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