The sign by the door leading to the outside patio at Wegmans in Dewitt warned that the door was armed. I think the sign should say the door is alarmed and said as much to the girl at the checkout. She said no and insisted that the door was armed – packing some serious heat. It seems the door will shoot to kill with no warning shots fired. I guess you should stay off the patio. It is getting very close to my departure for Florida and the Hukilau. I am getting excited and a little anxious as well. While I love travelling and being on vacation I always seem to get a little frazzled by the preparations. I always end up wishing I had just a little more time to get my affairs in order before departure. Of course as soon as I have left all those worries and cares seem to melt away; as they should.

2011/06/09 17:00 I started the Hukilau 2011 page. I will be posting to the new page all this weekend.

2011/06/07 23:00

The CNY home of the Evil Empire looms in the background and casts its shadow over the revelers at the Taste of Syracuse as they enjoy food, drink, and live music.

2011/06/04 11:30 Here is something that I don’t understand. You are taking a trip and you’re on the Interstate Highway system and you stop at a rest area to use the bathroom. In the bathroom stall someone has taken the time to write the most vile and disgusting stuff on the wall. And there are pictures. Pictures of sex acts involving caricatures of anatomically incorrect people and the whole thing looks like some perverted cave scratchings. I figure that’s about the mentality; something pre-Neanderthal. And while I don't understand that what is even more bizarre is that last night when I was at the Taste of Syracuse event and using the port-a-potty I saw that the cavemen had been busy defacing the plastic walls of the portable bathroom. These mobile facilities are small, cramped, and never smell good. Who sits inside one of these primitive lavatories and feels the need to put their pathetic artwork onto the plastic walls. I had a rough night sleeping last night. I pretty much have a cast iron stomach for the most part and I don’t suffer from indigestion very often. But last night I guess all those dollar samples from the Taste of Syracuse were too much. On top of the indigestion I had a reaction to the Niaspsan that I take. I have a reaction maybe once every couple of months and last night was the night. Brego and I went outside to get some work done this morning. I am working to get the pool open and functional and Brego ate a tree branch. I am convinced now that this mutt is part Pointer, part Great Dane, and part Beaver. The dog is a chew-monster. I try to rake the lawn and I have to rake all hunched over because the stupid dog ate the top foot and a half of the wooden rake handle.

2011/05/29 9:00 Each of us has our own way of dealing with our problems. Our own way of coping. And we all have our problems. While we may acknowledge that the problems of others weigh more than ours, and consider ourselves fortunate, we still need to deal with our own problems. One of the ways I have been coping lately is by pretending to be what I want to be. The thing I really want to be right now is retired from the company I refer to as the Evil Empire. My job makes me very unhappy and causes me a lot of stress. On Saturday after coffee at Tim Horton’s Karen and I were shopping at Target. I walked through the store and pretended I didn’t have to go back to work on Tuesday or ever. I started thinking about how that made me feel and the thoughts made me happy. I also have gone back to the tried and true where I buy scratch-off lottery tickets and then don’t scratch them off. The scratch-off lottery tickets are only losers when you scratch them off. Until then they might be big winners. Sometimes I walk around with what might be hundreds of thousands of dollars in my pocket. I’ve said it before there are very few problems in life that can’t be solved by large amounts of cash (or the application of large amounts of high explosives – but that’s never practical). While I was at Target I was looking at deodorants and body sprays. Karen always says I get the wrong scent. She never says what the correct scent is but I always get the wrong one. So, one of the scents available was Fiji. I guess you can smell like a small island in the Pacific. Whatever that smells like. I like your new scent, you smell like an island. Yeah, I felt like a change. I used to smell like a peninsula. It is halfway through the Memorial Day weekend. It was supposed to rain yesterday but I don’t believe it ever did. It is warm and humid this morning. I mowed my lawn yesterday and it looks pretty good. All that rain was good for growing some grass. The lawn looked like a war zone after this past winter. There were big ruts where we had parked cars all winter. The dog dug holes. It was bleak looking. I filled in the holes and the ruts and put down some grass seed and it rained like nobody’s business and the lawn looks okay now. Thursday night Karen and I went with Michelle and Trevor to the Wise Guys comedy club for dinner and a show. The evening was a benefit. I really had a good time and I enjoyed the show. The comedians were funny and I got some pretty good laughs in. My daughter Adison would have loved the show. I think we’ll have to get her out for an evening. On Friday night Adison and her boyfriend and I went to see the movie “Hangover 2”. I thought it was funny and I enjoyed it. I didn’t think it was as funny as the original but Adison thought it was funnier than the original. This past week and so far this weekend Karen and I have been working on the Ikea shelves project. Karen bought this Ikea shelf system on Craigslist for twenty bucks. The thing is massive. Truly a good deal. A lot of work has gone into making a home for the shelving system. The work never proceeds fast enough for Karen who sometimes has the patience of a gnat. We have to get the china cabinet that we acquired at an estate sale out of the back of the van because we have an appointment with someone from Craigslist to pick up another Ikea system. After the Craigslist work is done we are going to Sean and Tina’s for a cookout.

2011/06/01 09:00 First day of June. June is the first summer month. Woo hoo! There were 236 page views of the website in May. That's quite the drop in readership. The numbers show a twenty two percent drop in interest from my fans. I guess I need to be more exciting. Or less boring.

2011/06/03 23:00 After work today I met Karen and Adison and we went downtown to the Taste of Syracuse. First we did our Craigslist business which for today involved picking up a new rug for the Tiki room. It was an awesome Friday night. Dollar samples. I had empanadas, Jamaican patties, chicken riggies, seafood chowder, spring rolls, pulled pork sliders, and firecracker shrimps.

2011/05/22 20:00 What is the point? Seriously. Does anyone else ask themselves these kinds of questions? What the hell am I doing and why am I doing it? I just ordered some Chinese food. I have been coming to the same Chinese restaurant for a long time. I mostly get Chinese food on Sundays. The girl that used to wait on me on Sundays doesn’t work on Sundays anymore. Her daughter now takes my order. I can remember when the daughter was nine or ten years old and she played behind the counter while her mother worked. There is some comfort in the familiar. Routines can be comforting. Getting Chinese take-out on Sunday makes me happy. If it doesn’t take much to be happy why do we strive for more? I think sometimes the pursuit of more is the thing that makes us unhappy. Simple things sometimes are what we need.

Really?

2011/05/22 11:00 Still here!! The world didn’t end as foretold by the wackos. They are wackos now that they are wrong but it would be a different story if they had been right. That’s funny. So, I am still here and it’s Sunday morning and I am at Tim Horton’s with my lovely bride having our morning coffee as usual. Great day to still be here. We had a nice break in the constant rain yesterday and it looks like today is going to be okay as well. Forecast for the coming week shows more rain on the horizon. Maybe we can get all the rain over and done with so that Memorial Day weekend can be nice. Lots of work to do today. I love working on projects at the house. Tristan and I painted some posts in the back yesterday. He loves to help out. He mowed the lawn with me. I painted the posts on my back lanai with a white primer and I am going to paint some designs on them next. I bought some mats at Wicker World yesterday and I will be putting those on the wall in the Tiki lounge today.

I had a tuna sandwich and a raspberry snapple while I watched the rain pound the parking lot. It has been a great week if you were born a duck.

I try very hard not to take the weather personally but sometimes I do. Actually I mostly do. Sometimes I suspect that cosmic forces do in fact align to rain on me. Last night I was working on the kitchen table. I was going through some very old magazines and brochures that I have collected. Karen thinks I am crazy and she was inquiring as to what I was doing. I have the February 1961 issue of Escapade magazine. This is a magazine that is fifty years old and it has an article with pictures of the legendary Mai Kai in Fort Lauderdale. I am scanning the article and pictures and will put those on my Mai Kai page. I also have the April 1964 issue of Argosy magazine, which also has an article and pictures from the Mai Kai. Those will also soon be found on my website on the Mai Kai page. I told Karen that what I was doing was building one of the best Tiki websites on the planet. She kind of scoffed at that. There is a time and a place for humility but sometimes it is okay to acknowledge your special works. Ha! I’m full of it tonight.

2011/05/21 11:00 I made it to another weekend. I worked hard to get here. I put up with a lot of excrement dished out by the Evil Empire in order to arrive here at this weekend. I made it to the weekend intact albeit bruised and sullied. Some people are saying today is the End of Days. I am going to be very upset if that’s true. I put up with a lot of crap weighing me down that I could have done without had I believed the world was ending today. It promises to be drier this weekend than it was last weekend. I have a lot of stuff to accomplish this weekend.

2011/05/19 19:30 It was raining again today. Actually to be more accurate I should say that it is still raining. It has really been just raining and raining for the last few days. It has either been raining, just finished raining, or about to rain. Everything is wet and damp and sometimes even more damp. I ate my lunch today in the van while it just poured and poured.

Shopping Thursday night at Wegmans with Tristan. He wore the paper hat he made in school and took his bubble stuff – just in case.

2011/05/15 23:30 There was even more rain today, Sunday, than there was yesterday. The rain was relentless. It was a heavy, soaking rain that just seemed to go on without any relief at all. Tristan went to the store with me. I didn’t wear a coat and bending down to buckle him into his car seat the cold wet rain ran down my neck and soaked my back. When we got back from the store Tristan and I went outside and stood in the rain while we bar-b-qued. For some reason I enjoy standing by a fire in the rain. I think Tristan does too. We cooked some hot dogs and some pork chops. I cooked some rice in the microwave, opened a can of beans and a jar of apple sauce. We sat in front of the TV and ate our dinner. A little while ago I ordered the complete first season of “Jonny Quest” on DVD from Amazon. I got the DVDs to watch with Tristan. Tristan had been enjoying watching “Scooby Doo” and I thought he would like “Jonny Quest”. The cartoon “Jonny Quest” was like nothing seen before when it debuted in 1964. The cartoon was shown in prime time and boasted realism and an edginess that hadn’t been seen in cartoons. The show was an action adventure tale with a little science fiction thrown in. Inspiration for the gadgets came from places like “Popular Science” and “Popular Mechanics’ with their visions of what the future would be like in ten to fifteen years. Storylines involved spies and characters that could have come out of a James Bond movie. Tristan ate his whole hot dog and finished his rice, beans, and apple sauce. At one point he looked up at me and he said, “Pop Pop, this is the best dinner ever”. It’s pretty hard to argue with that. (Note: if you’re interested in watching “Jonny Quest” only the first season from 1964 and 1965 is good. They tried to remake it in the 80s and again in the 90s but those efforts were crap).

2011/05/14 11:00 It is another rainy day. Saturday morning, my day off, and it’s raining again. I survived another week of service to the Evil Empire; a week that included a Friday the 13th. In the news Lord Browne, former chief executive of BP, may be taking over as top evil overlord at the Evil Empire. Lord Browne was chief executive of BP and in that capacity he oversaw the poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico. Lord Browne may now replace Sir Parker as chairman of the board here at the Empire. I had a lot of fun last night. It was the season end party for the ‘Gutterflowers’ bowling team. After work I went to Dinosaur Bar-b-que and picked up the take-out. I ordered the take-out and then sat at the bar and enjoyed a Middle Ages Wailing Wench on tap. I bought a growler and had it filled with Wailing Wench to go. Now that I have my growler I can stop and get it filled anytime I want.

My Dinosaur Bar-b-que growler partially filled with Wailing Wench (it used to be fully filled with Wailing Wench).

Kate and the little wild man.

"That's some good pizza!"

2011/0508 11:00 Yesterday, Saturday, Karen and I went to Jamesville with our trash and recyclables to the recycling center. As usual I had the stickers I needed but I still stopped at the entrance booth, rolled down the window, and said “hi” to the attendant. Karen said I don’t have to stop or roll down the window since I don’t need to purchase stickers. I argued that the guys are happy to see me each week and they enjoy our little chats. Karen said that I think I am way more important than I am. Maybe so. The guys working for the County at the recycling center seem a happy bunch. They are working on Saturday and still seem to be quite cheerful. It is very obvious to me that they don’t work for the Evil Empire. One of the guys this week asked me how it was going. I said, “great”. He smiled and said, “it’s like Mr. Rogers says; it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood”. Yes it is! After we offloaded the trash and the recyclables we picked up Tristan for an outing at Chuck E. Cheeses. We met Kate and the little wild man Jake there. We had pizza and played games. We bought tokens for the games but both Tristan and Jake seemed content to play without the games even being on. Too funny.

Demonstrating proper etiquette for serving sake in Korea. Don't know why. We weren't in Korea and it wasn't a Korean restaurant. I must have just been showing off that I knew the proper etiquette for serving sake in Korea.

My new friend Marc Ramos.

2011/05/07 11:00 It is Saturday morning and another week of servitude at the Evil Empire is just a bad memory; the stuff that nightmares are made of. On Friday morning Karen asked if she could switch vehicles and take the van because she was getting stuff she had found on Craigslist and her car was already full of stuff she had found on Craigslist. She thinks I have an E-bay problem. I think when she asked to take the van she didn’t realize it was full of stuff, mostly clothes, from Adison’s apartment. Adison is moving back into her old room and she’s got a lot of clothes. On Friday after work I went to the Blue Tusk downtown to help celebrate Tony Sardina’s escape from the Empire and to wish him well in his future endeavors. After the Blue Tusk, Michelle, Trevor, and my new friend Marc went to Namu’s for sushi and sake. I haven’t had sushi in years and a good time was had by all.

Friends.

Weather statistics from the 2011/04/30 Post Standard.

I complained a lot about the relentless Winter that we just endured. It seems it was all worth it now that Parade magazine this morning has crowned the City of Syracuse as the snowiest in the country. Woo hoo!!

We got a lot of snow this winter and Parade magazine says we won! Karen and I are at Tim Horton's having our Sunday morning coffee. My website had 304 page views in April. That's the most ever.

2011/05/01 11:00 Trials and tribulations. Sigh, sometimes things are a pain. Yesterday I was getting some steaks to grill. Friday night I had told my youngest son, Michael, that I would cook him a steak Saturday night. I was at Home Depot looking for a lawn roller. After I finished shopping at Home Depot I decided to stop at Aldi's. Aldi's was on the way home. I said to myself I will stop and grab some ribeyes; Aldi's usually has a sale on their ribeyes. I parked the car and when I got to the door I was told that the store was closing for the evening. No problem I will go to Wegmans. I got to Wegmans, parked the car, and was met at the door, "I am sorry sir but we are evacuating the store". Steaks were now becoming a quest of near epic proportions. I went down the road to Tops and got some thin cut NY strips.

Dewitt fire department and the evacuation of Wegmans. No steaks for you.

Last night was the first bar-be-que of the year. Usually this would have happened sooner than this but it has been raining non stop. We did officially break the record for rain this April. The previous record for rainfall in April was 8.12 inches in 1976. April this year 8.45 inches.

2011/04/30 09:00 And then the rains came. Wow. We had some serious rain in the month of April. I am pretty sure that I read we had the rainiest April on record ever. I’ll have to check into that and make sure that’s a true statement but regardless it was a very rainy April. Today is the last day of April and tomorrow is May Day. May Day basically started as a pagan celebration. May Day is a cross-quarter day. A cross-quarter day is a day falling roughly halfway between a solstice and an equinox. The summer solstice is midsummer. May Day marked the end of the un-farmable season in the Northern hemisphere. Pagans were very much in tune with the seasons. They were very much in tune with their physical surroundings and the movements of the sun and moon. May Day, the Celtic festival of Beltane, celebrated the start of the farming season and was cause for raucous festivities. I went to the gym last night. The YMCA where I go is very popular. I wish I could go right after work but it is just too crowded for my tastes. I go around 7:30 PM and things are starting to thin out then. I try to time it so that I start on the treadmill about 8:00 PM. The show “Bones” is on and I watch the crew from the Jeffersonian solve crimes while I log about three and a half miles. I do some weight training before and after the treadmill and then I finish up on the stairmaster. I have worked up to 45 floors. I think the most expensive clothes I own are my shorts. I am content to buy most of my clothes from the Rescue Mission or the Salvation Army but there is no skimping on cost when it comes to work-out shorts. Mine are by Nike, loose fitting with a liner, and I can rack up miles and miles in a week with no discomfort. Last night this girl gets on the treadmill in front of me with really tight bike shorts on. They are so tight that every two minutes or so she has to awkwardly try to pull them out of her crack as she’s running. Besides being extremely unattractive it looked to be a little painful as well. The gym on a Friday night is not very crowded. Especially near closing time. My theory is that most people have something better to do on a Friday night than go to the gym. Sadly, that’s not the case for yours truly. After my workout I got out of the shower and went into the locker room to get dressed. The locker room is a pretty good size with one hundred and seventy five lockers. There was only one other person in the locker room. He said, “your locker is the one right next to mine isn’t it?” That seems to happen fairly often. We had an interesting conversation on the subject. With almost two hundred lockers it would seem statistically unlikely that you would end up in a locker right next to someone else while in reality it seems to happen all the time. We chalked it up to just being one of life’s little mysteries. I had to take Brego to the vet this week. She had cut the pad on her front paw. Not sure how she did that. Brego doesn’t behave well around other dogs. She is the berserker dog around other dogs. At the vets there are two waiting areas. One side is the cat waiting area and one side is the dog waiting area. Brego is so bad that all the other dogs went and waited with the cats in the cat waiting area. There was peace among the cats and dogs in the now integrated waiting area on the other side while Brego, the pariah dog, and I waited by ourselves, alone in the berserker dog waiting area. I had my own medical appointment on Thursday. I had a nuclear medicine stress test. This was my fourth stress test and the third since I had the heart attack. The only thing that kind of bothers me when I go for these tests is that I am always the youngest guy there. This time there was a guy that I would guess to be about 70. And he looked to be in really good shape. In fact as I was looking at him I thought, I bet this guy could kick my ass. If you saw this guy and me in a cage match and you bet on the old dude I wouldn’t be offended. In fact I’d probably take some of that action. The nuclear stress test pretty much kills the whole day. They start an IV; in my case that’s always a chore since I seem to be constantly dehydrated. Then they inject the radioactive die and you have to sit in the waiting room watching “The View” or “Rachel Ray” while the die circulates. I think that might be the real stress in the stress test, watching “The View”, and not the treadmill part. After the die has circulated they take ‘pictures’. You lie on your back on a very narrow table for a half hour while the MRI like machine rotates around you. Then it’s time for the treadmill. With all kinds of leads and wires attached to you it is time to run on the treadmill until you get your heart to the target rate and then they inject more radioactive die. Off the treadmill and back to the waiting room until it is time for the second set of ‘pictures’. I get the results of the stress test this coming Wednesday. Of course, I did survive the test which is always a good thing. This last week there were some serious tornadoes down south. There were about 300 people killed I think. That’s the most since the 1970s. Lots of destruction. There are floods in the Midwest and more floods to come. Wildfires rage in Texas. Japan is still reeling from the massive earthquake and tsunami and the world waits to see the extent of the nuclear disaster there. Wars rage and people peacefully demonstrating are gunned down in the streets by their own government. I am truly fortunate to be sitting on the sidelines for all this chaos and destruction. Makes the things I complain about seem small and petty. Doesn’t mean I am going to stop complaining or ranting about stupid shit but deep down I do know how fortunate I am. Peace out.

2011/04/20 23:30 Blogs aren't cool anymore. I know this from watching the "Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson". Craig said, "No one has a blog anymore... Blogs are for people who can't get it all into a Tweet. I've got too much to say. Oh really, how about you get over yourself and get it under 140 characters".

2011/04/21 12:00 Apparently we are going to skip right over Spring, Summer, and perhaps Autumn, and just get right back into winter. There were snow flurries this morning. The weather really really stinks. Tomorrow is Friday and it is Good Friday. Years ago, at the Evil Empire, we used to get Good Friday as a holiday. The Empire no longer recognizes Good Friday as a holiday; it is just business as usual. Well, not completely business as usual because our computer system, that was programmed years ago, still thinks that Good Friday is a holiday and so there will be no new work generated for me. It is a skip day for the computer and I get some time to catch up on stuff. A lot of the workers here at the Evil Empire still take Good Friday off and so it is a kind of quasi-holiday. That means it should be a fairly easy day for me tomorrow. And it is Friday after all. Woo hoo!!

The El Dorado 12 year old rum - on the rocks.

Brego on the ride home from the Heart Walk. She was plum tuckered out.

2011/04/19 23:00 The weekend is over. It was nice to have a short respite from the Evil Empire. Sunday, Michael and I went to the gun show at the New York State Fairgrounds. I bought an extended magazine for my Beretta 92SB and a tin sign. The tin sign is diamond shaped. I don’t have any diamond shaped signs. The sign is a replica of a sign for an old airfield. I will put it up outside once the weather gets a little nicer. Last night, Monday, after work I met my friend Michelle for cocktails and conversation at Chili’s. It was fun. Michelle ended up scolding me for not having broken into the El Dorado 12 year old rum. I was a little ashamed because I was guilty as charged. I had made it my New Year’s resolution to taste and drink more rum this year. Like most resolutions, and the good intentions that inspire them, they are sometimes more difficult to keep than we anticipate. Still, it’s best not to get discouraged by our stumbles but to just forge ahead. To that end I cracked open the El Dorado tonight and I am enjoying a little on the rocks. Just the rum. It’s a nice sipping rum. El Dorado rum is a product of Guyana, specifically from the Demerara region. The Demerara region of South America is located around the lower courses of the Demerara River. The El Dorado 12 year old special reserve is a dark brown rum distilled from fermented molasses. The rum is aged in used whiskey and bourbon barrels. El Dorado rums are blended from different batches or ‘vintages’. The youngest batch is at least 12 years old while some of the blend may be older than that. The tropical climate of Guyana has a great impact on the rum. The high humidity and steady temperature speeds up the ageing process. The 12 year old El Dorado has a maturity that is more like a 20 year old rum produced in a colder climate. Guyana has a rich three hundred year old history of quality rum production. The rum is delicious. You can smell the brown sugar, vanilla, hints of cinnamon and a little citrus. It has a nice clean finish. My collecting has taken me many places. At the present I am pursuing rum. Do you know who was a great collector? Thulsa Doom. In the 1982 movie “Conan the Barbarian”, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and written by John Milius, James Earl Jones played the character Thulsa Doom. He tells Conan, in that wonderful voice of his, “It must have been when I was younger. There was a time, boy, when I searched for steel, when steel meant more to me than gold or jewels.” He searched for steel. I search for Tiki mugs and rum. That’s all we have in common; we’re both great collectors. Thulsa Doom was ruthless and evil – me not so much.

Brego and I near the end of the Heart Walk. She's a fine looking beast. Not too well behaved around other beasties but I still love her.

The path of the 2011 Heart Walk was littered with umbrella casualties. The wind was too much for many a poor umbrella.

It was a cold and rainy day.

The start of the 2011 heart Walk.

2011/04/16 23:00 It was a full day today. It was a good day. Karen and I went to the Heart Walk in the morning. The weather didn’t cooperate much. It was cold and rainy. It was a blustery day. When we started the walk the raindrops were heavy and cold and more like sleet than rain. The wind was strong and the rain hitting your face stung. We both wished we had worn gloves. Karen said she was glad to be walking with me as a survivor rather than walking in my memory. That’s pretty hard to argue with. We brought the dog and she was a handful. She wasn’t too well behaved around the other dogs. As soon as the walk started she took a dump (the dog did, not Karen). Luckily Brego did her business off the path and not right in the way of the oncoming crush of walkers. Karen was picking up the droppings and putting them into a bag when a big gust of wind blew her bag into the path of oncoming walkers. She rushed to get the bag and in doing so dropped the droppings onto the path in front of the crush of oncoming walkers. I had a nice time walking with Karen and Brego. It ended still wet but not quite as cold. In the early evening Karen and I went to St Joseph’s hospital to see our new granddaughter; Alice Penelope. When we left the hospital we had a quick bite at Red Robin. I just had a salad and Karen had some soup. We talked and I enjoyed spending time with my wife. Karen is my wife but she is also my best friend. I know how lucky I am.

Picture of the “Gutterflowers” at the bowling banquet at the Spinning Wheel restaurant. I am the thorn amongst the roses. Karen isn’t as drunk as she appears. It was a fun evening. We went to the Lakeside in Brewerton after the banquet. While we were at the bowling banquet we got the news that Alice Penelope had been born. She is my second grandchild and my first granddaughter. Karen and I will be going to the hospital today to visit.

2011/04/16 13:00 Yesterday at the Evil Empire about half of the minions had fled early to get a jump start on the weekend. One of the overlords came into the room where I work, looked around, and said, “It’s just you girls left here this afternoon?” Amy, a girl I work with, seemed to take offense on my behalf and said, “Scott’s here!” I explained that it was okay; that I could be one of the girls. Actually, after I got laid off for the second time in 1995 I went to work part time in an office that was predominantly female. Karen went back to work as an operator to get us benefits and she worked in a department that was predominantly male. We always joked that we should switch jobs. After I was able to flee the Empire for the weekend I went to my bowling banquet. I am the only boy on an all girl team. The team is called the “Gutterflowers”

2011/04/15 11:00 It is Friday at the Evil Empire. Most of the minions, including this one, get a weekend furlough. I have a busy weekend ahead. Tonight is the bowling banquet. It should be a fun night at the Spinning Wheel restaurant. Tomorrow morning is the Heart Walk. Karen and I are planning on taking Brego. The Syracuse Gun Show is at the NY State Fairgrounds; Saturday and Sunday. Michael and I will go but I don’t know which day yet.

2011/04/12 23:00 I was at the gym today on the treadmill. This cute little blonde comes and gets on the treadmill in front of me. She looks to be nineteen or twenty years old and she can’t weigh over 98 pounds. She starts running and the sound is deafening. I have never heard anyone make so much noise on the treadmill. Close your eyes and you would swear the Marvel comic character Juggernaut was there. She sounded like she weighed 350 pounds and was in full armor with steel combat boots – bang, bang, bang!! I bet she’s going to have foot problems if someone doesn’t teach her how to run. The weather has taken a turn for the better; there have been a couple of nice spring days.

Photo from the NY Times.

A Mai Tai.

Photo from the NY Times.

Tiki Adam's collection of Tiki stuff. Mine's bigger than his.

Photo from the NY Times.

Adam Kolesar aka Tiki Adam and his home bar.

Brego was plum tuckered out after the party. She had a good time.

2011/04/09 20:00 I came across this article in the New York Times, written by Frank Bruni, that was published 2011/03/31. It is about a NYC resident Adam Kolesar and I found it very interesting:

"There have been many changes in Adam Kolesar over the years, starting with his facial hair, to which he devotes an agitated, overzealous attention described less aptly as grooming than as absurdist art project. He has made geometric patterns with it. He has dyed it blue. In its current, uncolored form it crawls in five bands, separated by shaved skin, from his cheeks to a point just a few inches below his jaw line. It’s a stylized but scraggly marvel. He loves and listens regularly to music but arrived late at an appreciation of country, an evolution that has caused his wife, Susan, a corporate lawyer, even more dismay than his beard does. “Had he told me when we met that he would become a fan,” she said dryly and without any obvious sarcasm, “we would not be married.” But the most surprising transformation, or at least the one with the most thorough impact on their lives, concerns what and how he drinks. On their first date 11 years ago Mr. Kolesar had a solitary beer, then switched to iced tea, having exhausted his minimal interest in alcohol and surpassed his usual quota for the month. Today, at his behest, the living room of their apartment in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn is dominated by one of the most eye-catching and elaborate home bars I have ever seen, a gleaming aluminum approximation of the rear end of an Airstream trailer, complete with glowing red taillights and mock license plate. It is outfitted with four stools; equipped with every kind of mixing and fizzing and grating and straining apparatus imaginable; festooned with kitschy swizzle sticks; and stocked with 50 different spirits. That’s just what fits. Elsewhere around the two-bedroom apartment are additional bottles of booze, bringing the total to more than 150, including at least 60 varieties of rum, which are essential for his particular passion: tiki drinks. He makes highly specialized, utterly obscure ones for the friends he frequently invites over. He goes on the hunt for classic tiki — that’s the pretend Polynesian genre epitomized by Trader Vic’s and Singapore Slings — around the country. In certain New York cocktail circles Mr. Kolesar is known as Tiki Adam and considered to be one of the great characters of the city’s bar scene, not least because he didn’t care at all about cocktails until shortly before his 40th birthday. He’s 47 now. As soon as I heard tell of him, I hunted him down, determined to use this column on occasion to introduce drinkers of eccentric note. We first met at the restaurant Prime Meats, also in Carroll Gardens, whose bar he visits at least twice a week, usually between 8 p.m., which is just after he has helped put his 4-year-old daughter to bed, and 11, when his wife, working on her laptop at home, calls it quits. It wasn’t tough to spot him. In addition to the beard there are the tattoos. They cover his arms and include detailed likenesses of two of his five motorcycles. Other people search in vain for a hobby to embrace. Mr. Kolesar has scads. He hunts (sober), fishes (less so) and plays bass guitar in amateur punk bands, one of which was called Johnny Bubonic & the Black Death. It’s hard to see how he finds any time for work, but he has a profession, and it’s as unusual as the rest of him. “I’m a feeding therapist,” he said, clearly anticipating and then enjoying my baffled expression. Feeding therapy, he explained, is an offshoot of speech therapy, and it’s for young children, usually 2 to 4, who have trouble moving past soft, puréed foods or eating anything that isn’t the same bland color. They need to be coached to branch out and sometimes even to chew. He has a private practice devoted to that. In college at the University of South Carolina Mr. Kolesar majored in theater. But when you’re contemplating a career as an actor, he said, “there’s an apprehension about having some measure of control over your destiny.” He talks like that: in formal cadences and with elevated diction that seems to contradict the biker-dude aesthetics. He’s one surprise atop another. He did graduate work in speech pathology at South Carolina, postgraduate work in childhood development at Georgetown University and later made his way to New York, where he met his wife. She was, he said, “a referral from a mutual friend,” meaning a fix-up or blind date. She was also pivotal to the birth of Tiki Adam. In her vision of courtship and married life, she and her beloved would frequently linger at a restaurant table over a slowly disappearing bottle of red. But Mr. Kolesar had seldom bothered with alcohol. Not drinking, he found, made him more of a curiosity than drinking. It suited him. He recounted that first date this way: “She’s thinking, ‘I have a lifetime ahead of me of ordering wine by the glass.’ She’s horrified. But I’ve got just enough game to keep her in play.” That’s one way of looking at their progression to a second date. Another is that she trusted her powers of eventual persuasion — rightly, it turns out. In recognition of his affinity for ritualized, poorly understood traditions, her Christmas gift to him in 2002, shortly after their wedding, was a class on rum punches that Dale DeGroff, a noted cocktail historian, was teaching at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Mr. Kolesar went, learned how to make a proper zombie and a dignified piña colada, and was hooked. Not on the booze and not on the high, but on the chemistry, cosmetics and back story of the cocktail culture that bloomed in the economically flush period between World War II and Vietnam. Tiki was a particularly fanciful flower. “Drinking isn’t about the drunk for me,” he said. “It’s about creating the taste profile of an era I romanticize and care about.” His wife put it another way. “He’s painfully geeky,” she said. “You are talking to a lawyer, and I’m pained by his geekiness, and that takes a lot.” Bit by bit Mr. Kolesar delved deeper, researching tiki, rounding up recipes, collecting every implement and arcane tincture he might need to make them. He traveled to Tiki-Ti in Los Angeles and Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale because they are some of the high churches, and he had become a worshiper, well on his way to priesthood. “It’s pretty amazing, the knowledge he has,” said Damon Boelte, the bar director at Prime Meats. “He’s definitely in the top five in the country.” Mr. Kolesar has become a close friend to Mr. Boelte, and also to Brian Miller, one of the principal mixologists at Death & Company, in the East Village, which isn’t a tiki bar but makes tiki drinks exacting enough to meet Mr. Kolesar’s approval. Along with Prime Meats, it’s one of his five favorite places to drink in New York. Two others — Lani Kai in SoHo and Painkiller on the Lower East Side — are relatively new and reflect a tiki resurrection in recent years. A final one, Dram, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, doesn’t specialize in any one genre. Mr. Kolesar appreciates most any finely made cocktail, especially if it harbors a rare ingredient, and he gets around, though not as much as he’d like. He’s a family man after all. That’s why the Airstream comes in handy. He can wallow in tiki while keeping an ear out for the kid. “My wife cried when she first saw it,” he said of the aluminum extravaganza, because she realized that her proper living room was no more. But life with Mr. Kolesar is like that: a series of trade-offs. You tolerate the beard. You take the tiki. In return you get the red-wine partner you always wanted. About once a week, over pizza or pork chops in a favorite neighborhood haunt, they linger over a bottle of Valpolicella, their daughter growing sleepy beside them."

The article contains references to bars in NY city that I would love to visit. I have been reading a lot about Painkiller and I would love to go and check that out. I would like to get a trip to NYC planned and executed.

Photo from the NY Times.

Adam Kolesar aka Tiki Adam.

Girls night out. Cocktails before dinner.

Brego was waiting patiently for the guests to arrive. She was very excited about the upcoming festivities.

My makeshift bar set-up in the kitchen. I was set up to make daiquiris, dark n stormys, and I had wine, beer, and champagne on hand. The girls turned out to be lightweights this go round. Last time they were over and I played bartender they drank me out of limes. I was ready this time. Now I have a whole bag of limes left over. They blamed it on 'getting older'.

2011/04/09 10:00 Last night, Friday night, was Karen's GNO (girls night out). The girls came to our house for cocktails and some small foods before heading out to the Bonefish Grill. I got to play bartender. I took a half day vacation to get ready. Karen and I cleaned up a little. Tidied up. And I got my bar stuff set up in the kitchen. We were waiting for the guests to arrive when Janet called and asked Karen to check and see if I had an acetylene torch. I don't but I was immediately intrigued as to what they would need the torch for on a girls night out. Maybe they were planning a heist and were going to use the torch to open a safe or something? I had Karen ask what the torch was for and Janet said it was to make creme brulee. Karen's friends include some serious foodies but using a torch that burns at over 6,000 degrees for creme brulee seemed a bit extreme. The flame burns so bright you need to wear protective eye gear; usually a welding mask. Using an acetylene torch to make creme brulee would seem a stunt not even to be tried on something extreme like "Iron Chef". It turns out Janet was just looking for a propane torch. Using the propane torch on the creme brulee later that evening seemed a bit of a let down.

First fire of the season in the Tiki Fire Bowl.

2011/04/07 23:00 I love listening to NPR (National Public Radio), it is very informative and sometimes what you learn is useful. What I learned today would not fit into the useful category. They had a marine biologist on talking about the kinky sex that goes on in the ocean. My favorite was lobster sex. The male lobster builds himself a nice little den. A bachelor pad if you will. The female lobster cruises around looking for a nice den and when she sees something she likes she squirts pee into it. Female lobster pee is like love potion number 9 to the male lobster and he says, “come on in baby”. Now, the female lobster’s girl parts are not accessible. They are covered up by the lobster’s hard shell; kind of like a crustacean chastity belt. So, she has to molt, or shed her shell, in order to get ready. Once she’s all nice and naked the way the male lobster likes her then they get down to business. After they are done with the dirty deed the female, without her shell, is very vulnerable and she can’t leave the den for around four days until her shell grows back. Awkward. Sponges don’t really get together. They are ‘broadcasters’. The male sponge kind of does his own thing solo and squirts sperm out into the water. Later on a female sponge passing by will suck up the sperm and fertilize herself. Sponge sex is not so much fun. Parrot fish have transgenders. A parrot fish stud will collect himself a nice little harem. If something happens to the male then one of the female fish in the harem will step up and grow a pair (literally) and become the new parrot fish stud in residence. Lastly, I learned about the conch. The male conch has a penis that accounts for half his body weight. That’s pretty big. But it has to be that big because he has to get it out of his shell around his girlfriend and into her shell. Conch sex can last for hours. The big downside to conch sex, for the male anyways, is that apparently conch penis is very tasty. Sometimes an eel passing a conch couple in the throes of passion might just help himself to dinner. Ouch! But in the miracle of adaptation if the male conch loses his massive manhood as a result of a dinner party he can just grow another one. I finished up another soul crushing day at the Evil Empire. There were a couple of days last week that I felt I got out of there with small pieces of my soul that weren’t completely crushed but that was, it turns out, just an aberration. The Empire was back to full strength and was busy grinding crushed pieces of soul into oblivion. On a more positive note I have been going to the gym on a regular basis for a couple of weeks now. I really enjoy the exercise and I do feel like I have more energy throughout the day. I am also watching what I eat in an effort to get down to a size smaller than whale before I hit the beach in Fort Lauderdale for my birthday. The weight loss has been somewhat disappointing. I have been losing weight but not as fast as I did the last time I undertook a major transformation. After I had the heart attack I started a gym regimen and changed my diet and I lost forty five pounds. I felt great. Then, like an idiot, I stopped going to the gym and slowly over the next two years I regained the entire forty five pounds plus five more for good measure. When I reached five pounds over my heart attack weight I decided to get serious about making some healthy changes. I really love watching the cooking shows on TV. I like Giada, Guy Fieri, Ming, and Ina, among others. For some reason being on a diet I seem to want to watch them more. It seems to show a masochistic side don’t you think? Two days ago I watched the show “Dessert First” and she made this stuffed French toast with strawberry syrup. The French toast was stuffed with mascarpone cheese, chocolate, and orange zest. I think once I hit twenty pounds lost I will allow myself some stuffed French toast. Tomorrow is Friday. One more day of service to the Empire and I get a full weekend pass.

Today is Saturday and the second day of April. There were April showers yesterday. Although to be accurate it was more of a drizzly day than a rainy day.

2011/04/03 08:30 I have been getting up early every morning for a very long time now. For about as long as we have had the new dog, Brego. And that’s not a coincidence. The dog sleeps in Michael’s room and then about six or seven she starts banging on the door to be let out. I get up and let her out, she races down the stairs (sometimes falling the last two or three as she is not the most graceful beast), and I put her on a tie-out so she can do her business. This morning was no different except that when I went to put her on the tie-out it wasn’t there. Last night she must have gotten tangled around the bush by the bottom of the stairs. Michael is the one that brought her in and he went and got her but he left the tie-out tangled at the bottom of the stairs. I put the dog on a leash and walked her out to the tie-out, untangled it, and hooked her up. I was in my bathrobe but I was only going to be outside for a couple of minutes, right? No, because the door had locked behind me. The dog and I have one thing in common in that the first thing we need to do in the morning is pee. The dog is a little more frantic than I am so I let her go first. So, I am outside in my bathrobe, locked out of the house, and I really have to use the bathroom. I began the process known as ‘waking the dead’ which involves pounding and pounding on the front door until one of the sleepy heads in the house becomes annoyed enough to come and investigate. I said that Brego sometimes falls down the last few stairs because she is racing so fast. She is not very graceful at all. Sometimes she will be sleeping on the couch and she will roll over and fall right on the floor. A couple of days ago I watched as she tried to get her tail. She reached back over her right shoulder, couldn’t get it, and started chasing her tail faster and faster. As she spun in a circle she drifted over and banged her head on the coffee table. That didn’t work so she tried a different path, this time going over her left shoulder. She spun in a faster and faster circle chasing her tail in the opposite direction until she drifted over and – bang – hit her head on the coffee table again. Last night Adison and her boyfriend Michael came over. I am going to start calling Adison's boyfriend Tinti in my blog from now on because it is probably confusing to the reader for me to have two Michaels in my life. Adison and her Mom went to Home Depot shopping for paint colors and Tinti and I went out back to start a fire. Yes, it was the first fire of the year in the Tiki Fire Bowl. I made Dark N Stormys. The first part of my Dark N Stormy experiment was concluded last night. I have had Dark N Stormys with the Gosling's Black Seal rum and three different ginger beers. Last night Tinti and I had one with the Barritt’s ginger beer and one with the Saranac ginger beer. We both agreed that we preferred the Saranac. The next step in the experiment is to compare the Cruzan Blackstrap to the Gosling’s Black Seal. We had a pretty good fire going when Adison and Karen returned from Home Depot. We sat by the fire for a little while as Karen wandered the backyard searching for things to burn. She’s got a little fire-bug in her. When the fire burned down we came inside and watched the movie “What’s Up Doc?”. I was at Big Lots last week and they had a bin of three dollar movies and I picked up this comedy classic then. The 1972 movie was directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Buck Henry was one of the screenwriters and it starred Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neil, and Madeline Kahn. The movie was just as funny as I remembered.

2011/04/02 11:00

Tikis in the wild. Karen and I went to Pet Smart after I picked her up at work on Tuesday and we saw these Tiki toys for dogs.

2011/03/31 23:30 Sorry honey it’s Thursday. Today would have been a great day if it had been Friday. But it wasn’t Friday. One more day until the weekend. I took a few hours vacation on Wednesday so that I could take Tristan to school. I went to work in the morning and then left about 11:30 AM to drive to Fabius so I could pick up the little dude. The plan was after school I would go back to work so that I only burned half a vacation day. After school Tristan and I were walking out to the van in the parking lot. Considering the weather we have been having it wasn’t that bad a day. Tristan said to me, “Pop Pop, I want to play on the playground. Can we?” I said no because I had to go back to work. But, I thought to myself – that’s exactly what I want to do. I want to play on the playground. For over twenty years I have been a loyal minion serving the Empire. I have always done what I have to, never what I want to. I want to start doing what I want to. I want to play on the playground anytime I feel like playing on the playground. Today is the last day of March. Tomorrow is April one. April Fool’s Day. April showers bring May flowers and all that good stuff. My website had 289 page views in March. That’s the most traffic since I started keeping track. There was only one entry in my guestbook for March though. Last Sunday night Adison, her boyfriend Michael, and I went to the movies to see “SuckerPunch”. The movie was directed by Zack Snyder, who did “300” and “Watchmen”. The film got pounded pretty badly by the critics. I know Adison didn’t like it and she said Michael thought it was ‘ridiculous’. I must have been in the right frame of mind because I was thoroughly entertained. Sure, there were holes in the plot. But, I liked the feel of the film. The main character is a girl trapped in a mental institution. Her vivid dreams provide a measure of escape from a harsh and cruel reality. My favorite dream sequence was the one that happened in a World War I setting. The Nazis (okay the Nazis were World War II, not World War I, but we are in the imagination of a twenty something young girl and maybe she didn’t pay much attention in history class) the Nazis have re-animated their dead soldiers and made a zombie army. The zombies are steam powered and the whole sequence has a ‘steampunk’ feel to it. ‘Steampunk’ is a science fiction sub-genre of alternate history and speculative fiction with anachronistic technologies. The girls kick glowing red-eyed Nazi zombie ass with fully automatic M16s, flintlock pistols, and Samurai swords while bi-planes and dirigibles battle in the skies. The stylized violence is set to music and for me the whole thing rocked. Last Saturday night Karen and I went to a party at Sean and Tina’s house, It was an ‘Ugly Sweater’ party. I didn’t have a sweater, not one that fits anyways, so I wore a Hawaiian shirt. Sean and I made plans to go to California. Next summer we are going to take a cross country road trip to California and back. Karen and Tina can fly out to California to meet us. We’ll spend some time together in sunny California and then the women can fly home and us mens will continue the road trip.

2011/03/25 07:00 My friend Michelle suggested on Facebook that the reason we are still having this crappy Winter weather is that Old Man Winter isn't getting enough lovin' from Mother Nature. If that is the case then Mother Nature needs to be gettin' busy with Old Man Winter pronto quick because I want my Springtime!

2011/03/23 20:00 Film legend Elizabeth Taylor died today at the age of 79. As they say they don’t make them like that anymore. When I was growing up my family enjoyed our evenings at the drive-in. We didn’t have a lot of money and it was a cheap Friday night. My parents could go out without the expense of a babysitter. And no expensive concessions for us. My parents would pop popcorn and fill a brown paper bag from the grocery store. They would fill a big thermos with lemonade and we were off. I can still remember the popcorn bag with the grease stains that got bigger as the night wore on. In those days there were cartoons first and then usually a family film before the feature presentation. We went in our family station wagon with the seats in back folded down. The kids could watch the cartoons and the family film but come time for the feature we were supposed to settle in and sleep in the little nest made of pillows and blankets behind the front seat. In 1963 Elizabeth Taylor was the biggest movie star on the planet and she was starring in the biggest most expensive movie ever made. If you adjust those 1960 dollars for inflation it might still be the most expensive movie ever made. I am of course referring to “Cleopatra”. I was about six years old and I don’t remember what the cartoons were or what the film was before “Cleopatra” but I remember watching the movie furtively over the front seat. My parents would on occasion catch me and make me lie down. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. If there ever was such a thing as cinematic royalty it was Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth Taylor was a child star. She was brought to the attention of the public in “National Velvet” and she made the transition from child star to the movie star that she became with a grace that tortured souls like Lindsay Lohan could learn from.

The above was in the Sunday Post Standard. Apparently Mother Nature didn’t read the paper or she didn’t get the memo about Spring starting. I don’t know where the breakdown occurred but it is a nasty-ass Winter day today. Where is my Spring?!

2011/03/23 18:00 In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan the country continues to struggle with problems at their nuclear plants. The levels of radiation from radioactive iodine in the drinking water prompted Tokyo to issue an advisory that infants and small children not drink the water. I never understood these types of warnings. Why would anyone want to drink water that is too radioactive for children? I wouldn’t even want to shower in it let alone ingest it. It’s just like the fish ban in Onondaga Lake. The levels of mercury in the fish are high enough that children and women who are pregnant or might someday become pregnant shouldn’t eat the fish. That’s appetizing. I used to be pro-nuclear until I worked in a nuclear power plant for seven years. Having an organization with a profit motive in charge of something so incredibly dangerous is just plain wrong. “We’re going to have to make cuts to save money and increase our profits but don’t worry you are safe enough”. The company actually said that. Safe enough. The argument was made, by sane and rational minds, that cuts in the operating budget to increase profits would decrease safety. Don’t worry, the company said, you will be safe enough. I guess before the cuts to the operating budget we were too safe? Over-safe? There was an excess of safeness that could be sacrificed for the sake of corporate profits. After all, I guess, the only real downside is the potential for a complete meltdown that could kill hundreds of thousands, cause birth defects in the children of survivors for generations, and make vast areas of the Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. No point in being too safe when we can pay some CEO a couple of million dollar bonus with the savings. After my toils for the Evil Empire were done today I drove home through a fairly ferocious snow flurry. It was ferocious enough to make a mockery of Spring. The snow continues to fall and we may get an accumulation of 2 to 3 inches.

Ginger beers awaiting experimentation.

2011/03/18 16:00 Yesterday was St Patrick’s Day. Where Karen works, at Bristol, they have a long standing tradition of celebrating St Patrick’s Day at the German restaurant Danzers. I think last year was the first year I joined them. This year I went and brought Marguerite as my “date”. You can get a great corned beef sandwich on St Patrick’s Day without waiting in a long line. I started this website on St Patrick’s Day in 2007. So, yesterday was the four year anniversary of Khan Tiki Mon’s Bar and Lounge. Hard to believe. I sometimes find it difficult to fathom just how fast the time passes. The news of late has been tough to watch. Maybe it really is the End of Days. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and out of control wildfires. If the natural disasters weren’t enough we had the BP oil spill, nuclear reactors are melting down, and there are wars underway and wars starting. Still there is famine and pestilence and there seems to be no end to reality TV on the horizon. Yes, it may very well be the End of Days.

2011/03/19 09:00 Karen had a sleepover last night. Her friend, the little wild man Jake, spent the night. He tried to drink my beer, then he spilled a full pint on me, I slept on the couch while Jake slept with my wife and peed in my bed. The kid knows how to party.

2011/03/16 19:30 My life did not totally suck today. The weather was nice; very Spring-like. I toiled for the Evil Empire as usual and after this hump day was over I didn’t feel like my soul had been completely crushed. It feels like there are small pieces that are still intact. Then I went to bowling after work and bowled a 153, 148, and 155. That’s pretty good bowling for me. Maybe I should play the lottery? I am going to conduct a Dark N Stormy experiment. The Dark N Stormy is a cocktail made with rum and ginger beer. The Dark N Stormy is called the national drink of Bermuda. The official Dark N Stormy is made with Gosling's Black Seal rum and ginger beer over ice with a wedge of lime. The Dark N Stormy is popular with the sailing community. I have three different kinds of ginger beer. I have Barritt’s Stone ginger beer from Bermuda. I have Saranac ginger beer which is brewed nearby in the foothills of the Adirondacks. And last I have Gosling's ginger beer that I am not sure where it is made. The Barritt’s is advertised as having pure cane sugar while the Gosling's is made with high fructose corn syrup. Not sure about the Saranac. I have Gosling's Black Seal rum and I am going to compare that to the Cruzan Blackstrap. I have really been enjoying the Cruzan Blackstrap of late. With two rums and three ginger beers I have six possible combinations to check out. I will be reporting on my preferences.

Tiki-Kate's Hukilau 2009 mug.

2011/03/11 19:00 I got a very special delivery today. I received a Hukilau 2009 commemorative mug in the mail. But not just any Hukilau 2009 commemorative mug. The mug I received is from the collection of Tiki-Kate. The first Hukilau I was able to attend was in 2009. I wasn’t able to get one of the limited edition mugs; only 300 made. The mug was made by Munktiki from a Kevin Kidney design. I had depleted all my fundage in just getting there and I had to pass on the mug. I returned to the Hukilau in 2010 and got the 2010 commemorative mug but there was a hole in my collection where the 2009 mug should be. Tiki-Kate was an online friend. I never had the pleasure of meeting her in person. We traded e-mails and PMs on mugs and such. I enjoyed reading her posts on Tiki Central. She was an inspiration and I got ideas from her. We had a lot of common interests. I feel that if we had lived closer we might have been real friends and not just online acquaintances. Kate visited my website and she had kind things to say about it. Kate lost her battle with cancer and passed away 2010/09/22. I purchased her Hukilau 2009 mug from her estate. Having the mug is bittersweet. I wish Kate were still here to keep the mug safe but I am honored to watch over it in her place for a little while.

My newest Tanuki Bear mug. You can check out all my Tanuki Bear mugs on the page Mugs - Orientalia and Benihana (4).

2011/03/10 19:00 Many books have been written on differing management styles. For example one book purports to show you how to manage like a samurai. I think where I work, at the Evil Empire, they have adopted a Stalin like approach to management. For those of you that don’t know, Josef Stalin was a ruthless dictator that rose to power during World War II and its aftermath. He was known for his ‘purges’. Periodically there would be a ‘purge’ or reorganization of the government. The workers would be taken to a cell in the basement and would either get a new assignment or they would be shot in the head at close range with a sidearm. The masterminds at the Evil Empire, the evil geniuses if you will, must have looked at the Stalin business model and thought it looked pretty good. It got good results in the short term certainly. We don’t have cells in the basement here at the Empire but a special conference room has been set aside for our current reorganization. Employees will be taken to the room and will either get their new work assignment or a symbolic ‘head-shot’. Termination means all access to company systems is immediately denied, nothing personal (it actually says that in the memo – nothing personal), and then you have five days to pack up your personal stuff and get off the property. I am going to apologize here. I am starting to bore even myself with my continued writings about work. I am going to make a serious effort to stop dwelling on the negatives and I am going to try to embrace the positives. I have big plans to attend my third Hukilau in June. I will spend my birthday in Fort Lauderdale at the Hukilau and the legendary Mai Kai. The weekend after the Hukilau I am going to Ohana on the Lake in Lake George. I can close my eyes and think about how warm it is going to be in Florida. I think about the super delicious cocktails at the Mai Kai. I can hear in my mind the wonderful live music that will be playing. Here in central New York, a land of sometime ice and snow, the weather will soon break. The walks on the canal with the dog will become more frequent. Karen’s flowers will start to bloom. I will have my first fire of the year in the Tiki fire bowl, and as I sit by the flames listening to tunes and sipping a Dark n Stormy, peace will certainly come. It doesn’t take much to make me happy. I am tired. My soul is tired and I need to rest a little, that’s all.

2011/03/09 23:30 I got a new Tanuki Bear mug in the mail today. I now have four different and distinct Tanuki Bear mugs. One is Orchids of Hawaii, one is Benihana, and the other two, including my new one, have no markings on them.

2011/03/09 16:30 Hump day has rolled around once more at the Evil Empire. I thought yesterday was stressful but that was before today. I feel drained. The weather doesn’t help. I just feel helpless and overwhelmed sometimes. I know I need to adjust my attitude. At Tristan’s pre-school the teacher was explaining to the kids the difference between a fiddle and a violin. She played a tape of a violin and then a tape of some fiddle music. It was funny because I had just heard a joke on the Prairie Home Companion on NPR the week before and I shared it with Tristan’s teacher. “Question: What’s the difference between a fiddle and a violin? Answer: Practice”. She laughed. She is nice and not anything like any pre-K teacher I ever had or remember my kids having. She has a tattoo; the kind they call a ‘tramp stamp’. She’s pretty goofy and the funny thing is I think she acts goofy even when the kids aren’t looking. Karen has been working on putting up some pictures in the hallway upstairs and she wanted a ladder to put on the stairs. Yesterday when I got back from my walk with Brego, the dog and I went out into the backyard and out to the shed to get the ladder. The snow was deep and came to my knees. Tristan came upstairs and saw the ladder. He said, “Pop Pop, can I have a ladder?" I said maybe his Bamma would let him use hers. Then he asked where the ladder came from. I told him that Brego and I had gone outside to get it. He thought for a minute and then he said, “Brego can’t carry a ladder. Her doesn’t have any hands.”

2011/03/08 19:45 e-mail to Caitlin: Hey Caitlin, there are updates on my website for you to peruse. Please make sure to check out my Q and A page if you haven’t already. Thanks for visiting my website and I am happy to provide entertainment.

The small church in Minoa Landing as seen from the canal path.

Thumbnail moon shining down on the canal path.

Twilight on the canal. Some say twilight, that small window between night and day, is the only time that true magic can occur.

2011/03/08 19:00 I endured a particularly stressful day in service to the Evil Empire. I began my toils early and so I was able to escape the grasp of the Empire earlier in the day than usual. The days are getting longer and there was still daylight when I got home. I got the dog and headed to the canal for an evening walk. Walking the canal is a great natural stress reliever. I chose a section of the canal that isn’t used much and so the only souls on the canal path were Brego and I. The air was fresh and clean with the only sounds being the crunch of snow underfoot. I rested up my soul and now I should be able to wade through all the fresh excrement at the Empire tomorrow with ease. I find it funny, in a gallows humor kind of way, that as we outsource more jobs at the Evil Empire and more people are facing the pain of unemployment they are encouraged to seek help from an employee assistance program that has been, you guessed it, outsourced. I’m anxious that my job may be contracted out so I think I will feel better if I talk to the contractors that replaced the people that used to work in the employee assistance center.

Using the animals for a blanket works out pretty good because the animals are very warm. In the Australian outback they would bring dogs into the tent for warmth. The more dogs needed the colder the night was. If it was a really cold night it was a "Three Dog Night" (the name of a popular band back in the day). February is over. I had 287 page views in February.

2011/03/06 22:00 The weekend draws to a close. I walked the dog on the canal Saturday but not Sunday. Saturday afternoon we went to see my parents and we all went to the Elm Street Cafe in Tully for lunch. Karen and I were there with son Michael, and Adison and her boyfriend Michael were there as well. After lunch we went back to my Mom and Dad's house for an ice cream cake to celebrate my Mom's birthday. I felt like going to the movies Saturday night. Michael, my son Michael, said he would go with me. There was nothing I really wanted to see so I picked "I Am Number Four" as the least objectionable looking film. I didn't have high expectations and I was quite pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed it and I thought it was a very good picture. Tomorrow it is back to work in service to the Evil Empire. A huge winter storm is predicted.

Brego on the canal Saturday morning.

2011/02/28 13:30 The youngest of my offspring is now 21 years of age. That doesn’t make me feel too old. Karen and I went to Chili’s last night for dinner and drinks with Adison and two Michaels. A good time was had by all.

2011/03/01 21:00 Karen came home from work very tired. She fell asleep on the couch. Not even an episode of her favorite program, “Intervention for Crack and Meth Addicted Teen Moms Who Hoard Cats and Other Debris and Who Suffer From Bizarre Eating Disorders”, could hold her attention. You have got to love the WTHAIW Network (What The Hell Am I Watching?!!).

Panels from the cartoons "Adam at Home" and "Mallard Fillmore".

2011/02/26 11:00 It is Saturday morning. It is the last weekend in February. We got a little taste of a winter storm yesterday and last night. It was more than enough to remind us that Winter is not done with us just yet. I am truly ready for some nicer weather. There is a half-price sale at the Rescue Mission Thrifty Shopper today and after our coffee at Tim Horton’s Karen and I will go thrifty shopping.

The gift of rum is always much appreciated. I also got my new Marina the Fire Eating Mermaid tee in the mail. The tee is personally signed by the Medusirena herself. I will most likely be sporting this shirt while at the Hukilau and the Wreck Bar this June.

I got my Sophista-Tiki print framed. The photo doesn’t do this print by Dawn Frasier justice. The colors are so much better in person. This print is one of the new favorites in my art collection. Now I need to find it the proper spot in the Tiki room.

"Sunrise Lair" print by Dawn Frasier aka Sophista-tiki.

Panels from the cartoon "Dilbert".

This is where I work. This is the company I work for.

Three day weekend ahead. Monday is President's Day. I got a little bit of a jump on the long weekend by taking a half day vacation on Friday. Friday the temperature went up into the 50s and a lot of the snow and ice melted. It might have seemed like Spring however it is still February and so last night the temperature plummeted and we got about four new inches of snow. I have been starting to feel a little better; not as congested and my cough isn't as bad. So, Brego and I hit the canal path this morning for a walk. The path hadn't been groomed yet and with the melting and re-freezing and then new snow on top the path was difficult to maneuver easily. Despite all the frozen ruts we still had a nice walk and it was still a big adventure for the dog. Trevor met Karen and I at Tim Horton's for coffee after the walk. We had a nice little chat to go with our coffee. As Trevor was making his exit Adison called and said she and Michael are headed here. Karen and I are just going to chill here waiting for them and then we will have a little lunch.

2011/02/23 18:00 Hump day seemed to arrive early at the Evil Empire this week. I am sure that is because Monday was a holiday. This relentless winter is beginning to show signs of weakness. The sunlight seems warmer as the rays of the sun take a more direct path to the Earth. There is still snow but it is slowly receding. A couple of warmer days where the sun can really get to work and the snows will vanish. For sure we will get one or more snow squalls before it is over. We may even get a blizzard in March; it has happened before. But all in all this relentless winter is on the way out. I spent a lot of the long weekend on the renovations to ‘Scott World’. Once complete I will post pictures and update the ‘Scott World’ page. I got some cool stuff in the mail over the weekend. My brother Darren sent some rum. This past Thanksgiving, while I was visiting my brothers and their families in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we looked for some Seven Tiki rum. I had some cocktails while at the Hukilau in Fort Lauderdale last year, made by Jeff “Beachbum” Barry, where he used the Seven Tiki rum. I couldn’t find it in New York and was equally unsuccessful searching in New Mexico. My brother was in California on business and found the rum there. He also picked up some Trader Vic’s rum and sent that as well.

2011/02/14 08:30 It is Monday morning and it is Valentine’s Day. I had a most unsatisfying weekend because I was sick. It makes me very unhappy when I get sick on my days off. If I have to get sick I prefer to be under the weather during working hours. Despite being sick and feeling like crap I did manage to get the rest of my floor tiles installed in ‘Scott World’. I couldn’t finish the baseboards but I can do that after work this week. The plan is for me to take Friday off this week and then next week Monday is President’s Day so that will give me a four day weekend. The forecast is for two to four more inches of snow later today. This morning it was warm enough that the snow was actually melting. Pretty soon the accumulated snow will melt leaving everything wet and muddy. I can’t wait for Spring.

2011/02/19 12:30

2011/02/13 09:30 This relentless winter continues to be, well, relentless. I tell myself that there are only a couple of weeks left in February and we should be getting some relief soon. After all Punxsutawney Phil's prognostication was for an early spring. I have always wanted to go to Pennsylvania for Groundhog Day. Maybe next year I'll make the road trip. I did quite a bit of work on my Pulp Fiction page. I added about fifteen books. I don't have the formatting quite where I want it yet but it's close. I also started a new page for my magazine collection. I made some entries on the Q and A page as well. I started feeling poorly on Friday and by Saturday I had a full blown cold or flu or something. I have felt like crap this whole weekend. I didn't walk the dog on Saturday and I probably won't today either. I think the super cold weather would be too much on my sore throat and while the dog can poop by the canal I can't. Talk about too much information - I can't be very far from a bathroom in my current condition. I did manage to power through my ill feelings and get some more work done on the renovations to 'Scott World'. I am planning on putting the last of the floor tiles down today. In preparation for putting the new vinyl tiles down I paint the old floor with a primer. When I did a large section a few weeks ago I told everyone in the house I was painting the floor and to be careful. Certainly don't let the dog donstairs. Well Karen let the dog downstairs and it was a mess as the dog ran through the wet paint and then tracked paint everywhere. So, last night I said that I was painting the last section of the floor and to be very careful. Karen took offense at my warnings, saying it was a one time mistake and that I should let it go. I think you can see where this narrative is heading. You are correct in assuming that, yes, Karen did let the dog downstairs to run through the paint again. She did assure me that it was not as bad this time because she and the dog are getting better at cleaning paint off of paws as they get more experience.

Adison and her Dad enjoying brews at the brewfest.

Welcome to the 15th annual Central NY Brewfest.

Kona brewing Fire Rock pale ale with my tasting glass.

2011/02/06 12:00 Last night I went to the 15th annual Central NY Brewfest with Adison and her Michael. It was my first time attending. I sometimes worry about being the oldest dude at a function like this. I had asked my buddy Sean to go which would have guaranteed that I wasn't the oldest dude. He thwarted those plans when he was unable to attend but it worked out okay as I wasn't the oldest dude there anyway. The weather on the way there was absolutely horrendous. Rain turning to heavy wet sleet and then humongous snow flakes was the menu for the evening. The brewfest was in the horticultural building at the NY State fairgrounds. I sampled quite a few beers including a beer from Scotland that was aged in old rum barrells. I'm going to count that beer towards my New Years resolution, which was to drink more rum. It's a little bit of a cheat but drinking more rum has proved not as easy as I first thought when I committed to the resolution.

Brego on the canal.

There is a creek that runs near the canal and the moving water has kept it from freezing over. There is ice along the edges and in a thaw some of that ice must have broken free. I’m guessing the ice probably breaks off in squares or rectangles but then as it floats in the swirling water, where the creek turns, the corners melt first. The result is round floating pieces of semi translucent ice that to me look like frozen lily pads. When I got back from walking the canal with Brego I was surprised to see Karen was up. We made it to our Saturday morning coffee at Tim Horton’s very early for us. Probably a record.

Floating ice 'lily pads'.

Elsie and Brego slowly forging a 'peaceable kingdom'.

2011/02/05 09:00 Brego and I were on the canal path at 7:30AM this morning. The air was crisp. The forecast is for temperatures to rise to 30 degrees later in the day but this early in the morning it was probably 15 to 20 degrees. We were only about 10 minutes into the walk when a whitetail deer broke from the brush to the right of us. The deer crossed the path about 20 feet in front of us and ran across the frozen canal. The deer went up the bank on the other side, jumped the guardrail, crossed the road, and disappeared into the woods. Brego went berserk. If she wasn’t on the leash she would have been right behind the deer. We walked on. The snow everywhere is a bright white and everything looks so clean. Then up ahead I could see the path stained red. I thought this must be a crime scene. Something ate something else. But as we got closer I could see it wasn’t blood but rather it was berry juice. The birds had been eating berries in the trees above and the juice was dropping onto the path. In the trees I saw a cardinal pair.

2011/02/04 20:00 I had 268 page views in January. February is well under way. The last couple of weeks have been an emotional roller coaster at work. For a while I was convinced I was getting an early out. Then that ray of hope vanished with the news of involuntary layoffs. While I am safe from the layoffs many of my friends will end up being cut. No one knows yet who is going and who is staying and the uncertainty is making for a very tense setting. Peace appears to be close in my little animal kingdom. Elsie and Brego seem to be getting along better. There are still frantic chases and some altercations beneath tables but they are happening less often.

Elsie, the Cow-kitty, blocking the heat vent in the kitchen. As long as she’s toasty that’s all that really matters. Most doctors’ waiting rooms today seem to have television sets and they are probably supposed to make waiting easier. I just wonder who decides what the program is going to be. I hate “The View” and that seems to be a popular waiting room show. Today I am captive to “Rachel Ray”. They just said Karen is done.

I can still whine about my situation. I have still been treated badly by the company I work for, but… things could always be worse. The relentless winter season grinds on. Schools were canceled today. I am going into work late because I have taken Karen to her colonoscopy appointment. I am writing this in the waiting room while Karen undergoes her procedure. I had a little trouble getting the van out of the driveway this morning. We got a fair amount of snow. I tied the dog out while I shoveled and she just ran around trying to get hit with whatever snow I was throwing. Seriously, she loves getting hit with a shovelful of snow. The cat is not so fond of the winter weather. She usually goes outside but when it’s cold and snowy she just stands at the open door and looks pissed. She then stays inside and uses the litter box. When she goes outside she poops in the neighbor’s flower garden which is probably rude but then we don’t have to scoop the litter box as often. When it’s cold outside the cat hangs around the house lying in front of heater vents blocking the warm air.

2011/01/30 12:30 Tomorrow is the last day of January. Only the month of February will stand between us and the spring month of March. While I admit that the month of March has delivered some wintry surprises in the past it is still Spring for me. This Winter season has just been relentless and Spring will be a welcome sight. I walked the dog this morning. We walked a new section of the canal. We were in Minoa. Walking the canal with the dog is very relaxing. I love being out and enjoying the natural world. I feel very peaceful when the walk is done.

2011/02/02 09:30 I am still in the frying pan but there seems little chance I will be cast into the fire anytime soon. I cannot afford to retire today without a financial incentive; a package. I need to be at least 55 years of age before I can retire. That’s the tipping point for me in the pension system. I also can’t afford to be laid off, not before I reach 55 years of age. Being laid off at this point in my life would be devastating. The company I work for announced the most massive involuntary workforce reduction in the history of the company. I am safe.

2011/01/29 12:00 I woke up later than intended this morning. I was on the canal path with the dog, Brego, by 9:00. Last week we were walking closer to seven in the morning and the big difference is the number of people on the canal path. At nine there are many more peoples walking, cross country skiing, and snowmobiling. Karen and I are enjoying our coffee at Tim Horton’s and soon we will make the trash run. I am looking forward to working on the renovations to “Scott World” this afternoon. I got the newest addition to my mug collection in the mail yesterday.

Trader Dick’s was one of the Tiki bar ‘trader’ restaurants that sprung up after the success of Trader Vic’s. When Trader Dick’s opened in 1958 in the Nugget in Sparks, just outside Reno Nevada, the founder of Trader Vic’s, Vic Bergeron, sued for copyright infringement and lost. This piece for my collection seems particularly apropos since I am currently pursuing a burgeoning interest in rum.

2011/01/28 22:00

"Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,

And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,

But there is no joy in Mudville - "

   from the poem "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Thayer.

"No soup for you."

    the Soup Nazi from TV's "Seinfeld".

I had to hear some very disappointing news today. I was forced to swallow a very bitter pill. There will be no package for me. My dreams of an early escape from the tenacious grip of the Evil Empire will bear no fruit. No soup for me. It is back to the original plan. I will retire in 866 days. I went to the Suds Factory after work today. There was a happy hour for Jeff Cole who is moving on to a new job in the company. I met my friend Michelle there and I had a good time. After happy hour I walked over to The Sound Garden and browsed the used CDs and I picked up a couple of CDs. Despite the bad news life goes on and things will be okay. I am still going to have a great weekend. I will take the dog for a walk in the morning, Karen and I will go out for coffee, we'll do the trash run, and I will work on the renovations in "Scott World". I will sleep with a clear consciense and the sun will rise and shine.

2011/01/2620:00 Once again it is hump day for the unfortunate souls that toil in service to the Evil Empire. From here it is downhill to the weekend. Rumors of ‘the package’ continue to circulate and the minions anxiously await confirmation of an early release.

2011/01/25 23:00 It was freezing toaday and it was like a heat wave. How is that possible you ask? Well, it was freezing today; the temperature was right around 30 degrees. While it was in fact freezing it was also thirty to thirty-five degrees warmer than yesterday. It continues to be winter.

2011/01/24 22:45 Wow! I thought it was cold yesterday morning when I took the dog for a walk around Green Lake. Turns out that was nothing compared to this morning. It was cold this morning. I mean it was very cold this morning. Finished up another day of work for the Evil Empire and when I got home after said service I was pleased to see that the US Postal Service had delivered my print from Dawn Frasier aka Sophista-tiki. It is very nice and I need to get it framed pronto. I've been thinking about starting another page on the website. I am going to start a Question and Answer page. You can ask Khan Tiki Mon anything. You can ask about things on the website or about things that aren't on the website. You can ask about things Tiki or about things that have nothing to do with Tiki. You can ask about politics, religion, sex, or money. No subject will be taboo. If I don't know the answer maybe I will find the answer. If I don't know the answer maybe I will make something up.

Morning light on the lake.

That little splash of red in the center of the picture is a cardinal. Not a great picture. I heard a lot of cardinals yesterday down by the canal but I didn't see any. I saw this one today but I need a better camera for these kinds of shots.

The only ones enjoying the beach on these cold and frigid days are the geese. It makes we wonder though what happens to all of the goose poops. I know they don't melt like the snow does. It makes me think twice about wanting to go lie on the beach at Green Lakes in August.

2011/01/23 23:00 I finally got my hair cut today. My wife, Karen, has been after me for weeks to get my hair cut. It's true that I have been looking a lot like 'Grizzly Adams'. Karen says I look kind of scary when my hair and beard get too long; like a terrorist. My best friend at work, Marguerite, suggested I get my hair cut as well. Karen doesn't read my blog much because she says I am too boring, Good thing because I wouldn't want her to think her weeks of nagging weren't as effective as one comment from Marguerite (haha). I went to Supercuts for my hair cut which is where I always go. I had never seen the girl that cut my hair before today. She was young and had a pierced lip with lip ring and some visible tattoos. She seemed quite nice and we chatted. She asked me what I was going to do after I got my hair cut and I said I was going home to watch football. She asked who I was going to be cheering for. I said I liked the Jets, especially since they had beaten the Patriots. She said that was really too bad for me and it seemed kind of ominous the way she said it. I said, "so, I assume you are a Steelers fan?" She lifted her shirt and pulled her pants down a little to show me a tattoo of a Pittsburgh Steelers helmet on her hip. I thought, oh crap, I'm getting scalped. Too funny. She did do a nice job on the haircut.

2011/01/23 11:00 It was colder than a witch's tit this morning, to use an ancient colloquialism. Not really sure just how cold any part of a witch's anatomy actually is but I'm sure it's not as cold as it was this morning. I can't say in absolutes because I didn't have a thermometer but this morning I could feel the sting on my cheeks and my fingers were getting numb even in the gloves. That didn't happen yesterday. Brego seems totally impervious to the cold. Last Saturday and Sunday we walked the canal. Yesterday we walked the same section of the canal. This morning I decided to mix it up a little and we went to Green Lakes and walked around Green Lake. I could definitely get used to this routine; walking the dog every morning. Once I get my package and the Evil Empire releases me from active duty it will be the plan.

Cruzan Black Strap rum with ginger ale and a wedge of fresh lime.

2011/01/22 22:30 Karen and I went thrifty shopping tonight at the RM Thrifty Shopper in East Syracuse. I was finished before Karen so I went outside and waited for her in the van. I listened to the joke show on the "Prairie Home Companion" I love the joke show. "Where does the one legged waitress work? - IHop." I added a new page to the website tonight that I am calling "Khan Tiki Mon's Rum Diary". The page will be all about rum.

Ice ice baby!

2011/01/22 10:30 It was bitter cold this morning but the snow that was threatened hadn’t arrived. Maybe it got dumped farther north. There was a dusting of snow on the vehicle windshields like powdered sugar on a doughnut but that was it. I was taking Brego for a walk on the canal but first Karen and I were switching vehicles. Karen let Brego loose when she was transferring stuff from her car to the van. She doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of not letting the dog through doors. Last week she let Brego run through my wet paint on the floor in “Scott World”. Brego is a runner and she took off across the parkway and through the neighbor’s yard. Karen and I were in hot pursuit. The dog crossed Pam’s deck and then went down the other side and across the road. I started down the three or four un-shoveled steps and my foot slipped under one of the steps and I pitched forward right into the snow. It could have been a serious fall but the three feet of snow I fell into cushioned my fall like a big soft pillow. A very cold big soft pillow. I had to thrash around in the snow to get my foot and ankle free and then to get my feet under me so I could stand. I’m sure I looked like a big beached whale, but in snow instead of sand. I got the dog and we headed over to the canal. We walked as far as we did last Sunday. It was bitter cold when we started but it seemed to have warmed up considerably as we finished. Last week we saw no one on the canal but this week we saw two girls cross country skiing. Brego was curious but she was very well behaved. No barking and no lunging. We also saw three snowmobiles. Brego wasn’t as interested in the snowmobiles as she was the skiers. Karen bagged me for coffee at Tim Horton’s this morning. She got a better offer. She went to Central Square to babysit the Beardsley spawn and she took Tristan with her. I took Brego to Tim Horton’s with me but since she’s a dog she can’t come inside. If she was a helper beast she could go in but she’s not a helper beast. We went to the drive-thru and Brego got a free Timbit just because she is so cute (for those of you that haven’t been to Tim Horton’s a Timbit is a doughnut hole. Dunkin Donuts calls them Munchkins). I have a busy day ahead. I will have to do the trash and recyclables by myself while Karen is playing with her little friends. Then it’s back to the house and more work renovating the downstairs. I might take a nap too. I am going to start a new page today here on the site that I am going to call The Rum Diary.

2011/01/21 17:00 This winter season to date has been relentless. Maybe I have just been spoiled by how mild the last few winter seasons have been. The last couple of years it has snowed but then it would warm up, the snow would melt, and there would be green grass for a time. This season, since the first snows in December, there has only been maybe two days that there wasn’t snow on the ground. We set a record for the snowiest December on record. It has been cold in addition to the snow. This winter season has been relentless. And it’s only halfway done. We still have all of February on the way. Typically February is the bleakest of the winter months. Probably it seems the bleakest just because by the time February shows up you are just tired of the cold and the snow. On a more positive note it is Friday and the weekend is upon us. Another week of toil in servitude to the Evil Empire is now just a painful memory. This week everyone has been talking about the rumors of an early retirement offer. I am trying very hard not to get too excited with thoughts of freedom. I know that I am probably just headed for more disappointment. Still, one can hope.

2011/01/21 18:00 My only New Year’s resolution this year was to taste and drink more rum. I am sad to say that three weeks into the new year of 2011 I have yet to taste or consume any rum. Good thing I didn’t make a more serious resolution that on the surface would seem to be more difficult to keep. I am definitely going to drink some rum this weekend. I am writing this while I wait for pizza and wings. I am bringing pizza and wings home for dinner and then I am not going outside again because it is just so damn cold out. All week I have been planning on taking Brego for a walk on the canal Saturday and Sunday morning. Now, the forecast is for up to two feet of snow overnight. Am I adventurous enough to head to the canal tomorrow morning? We will have to wait and see. I watched the TV program “NCIS Los Angeles” last night. It wasn’t the original air date. I watched it on TIVO. The episode was called “Archangel” and originally aired on January 18th. There was a character on the show, a soldier, who was “good with numbers”. He applied repeatedly for a deployment but was denied time and again because he was too valuable where he was. They wouldn’t release him from his current duties. I could identify with that. Just because you are good at something doesn’t mean it makes you happy to do it. He ended up getting killed. Sometimes I get discouraged. Sometimes I feel so uninspired.

2011/01/21 21:00 While I was getting pizza and wings for dinner Karen had stopped at Target to get soda for Michael to have with his pizza and wings. I came home with the pizza and wings and Michael and I ate the pizza and wings while we watched "Modern Marvels: The Bomb". When that was over we watched a hilarious episode of "Archer". When "Archer" was over we watched "The Mentalist". We did all this with no root beer because Karen hadn't gotten home yet. Now that she was a couple of hours late I started to get worried and I called to see if she was alright. She was and she was still at Target. She came home with the root beer and ten pairs of shoes. There were shoes for her, shoes for me, slippers for Robert, shoes for Tristan, shoes for Theresa's daughter Danielle, shoes for Katie's son Nathan, and shoes for Alice (who hasn't been born yet). The shoes for me are too small and so Karen will return those and get bigger sizes and she won't come home with any additional pairs of shoes. Not!

2011/01/21 22:00 Karen says I have to stop talking about my "package" or I am going to drive her insane. See, that's funny because it's a double entendre - the "package" I am talking about is the early retirement offer that I may or may not get and "package" can also refer to a certain part of the male anatomy. It's also kind of funny because when Karen says she's being driven crazy we all know it's a short trip - haha.

It really was a beautiful Sunday morning.

2011/01/16 09:00 I got up earlier this morning than yesterday. I was up at 7:00AM and Brego and I were at the canal by 7:20. Yesterday I had to coax her into the van but this morning when I opened the door she leapt in. I took that to mean she approved of the walk yesterday and she was looking forward to the one ahead. There was a pretty good snow flurry going on when we left the house. There was a good 4 to 5 inches of new snow on the trail. We walked at least four times as far as yesterday. What a difference a hat and some gloves can make. All I need now are some boots. The new snow had blanketed the trees and it was quite pretty. We weren’t too far into the walk when I saw four cardinals perched in the same tree. There were two males and two females. The tree was white with the snow and underneath everything was some shade of gray. In the early morning light It looked like a black and white photo with two splashes of color from the male cardinals. It would have made a great photo but by the time I got my camera out the birds had flown. If I was retired this is a daily routine I could get used to. I feel so good after I come back from my walk. Rumors are rampant at work that the Evil Empire is going to offer some kind of an early retirement incentive. I am trying not to get too excited. Brego has calmed down and she is sleeping on the couch next to me. Or at least she was. She just jumped up to bark at the snow plow. Last night Karen and I went to Scott Hay’s house for a pot luck dinner. I made a lasagna. It was a pleasant Saturday night. I am just hanging out on the couch now with Brego waiting for Karen to wake up and then she and I will head over to Tim Horton’s for coffee and the Sunday paper.

Tristan had a lot of fun in the snow and so did Brego.

After we got back from the canal outing Brego and I waited for Karen to wake up. Once Karen was up she and I went to Tim Horton’s for coffee. We had to abort the coffee trip early because Karen had left her cell phone home and she was afraid no one at work could get in touch with her if needed. I worked awhile in “Scott World” installing some trim molding. Then Michael, Tristan, and I ventured outside. We haven’t been able to let Brego run in the backyard because the fence is not complete. Michael and I put a temporary patch in place where the fence isn’t done. We used the pieces of the kennel that I took apart last summer. We put them together in a line and tie-wrapped them in place. It will have to suffice until spring when a more permanent and aesthetically pleasing fix can be completed.

Somehow on the way to the vet and back the dog got shotgun and I was relegated to the tiny sliver of what passes for a back seat in the trucks crew cab. How is the dog going to figure out that I’m the Alpha if she gets shotgun? That brings us up to the close of TGIF for this week.

2011/01/15 23:00 I got up fairly early for a Saturday. Actually, I used to get up much earlier on a regular basis but lately I have been sleeping in more often than not. I got up early because I was excited to be taking the new dog, Brego, for a walk on the canal. It was cold. The canal itself was frozen but the path was well groomed. We walked about half as far as I wanted to because I neglected to bring gloves. Nothing else was bothering me in the frigid temperature but my fingers were getting too cold. Brego absolutely loved the walk. We will do it again tomorrow but I will bring gloves.

View from the backseat.

Brego Sayen on an outing to PetSmart to get some dog food.

2011/01/14 23:00 I just finished up a busy week. Monday night Michael and I went to see the new movie “Season of the Witch” starring Nicolas Cage. Before seeing the movie I read an interview with Nicolas Cage. The interviewer asked him why he had done this movie and he said, “I need the money. Don’t you read the papers”. I thought that was pretty funny (Cage was making reference to his financial problems that have been covered extensively in the tabloids). The movie was actually entertaining. I enjoyed it. I wouldn’t call it a classic but I wasn’t sorry I spent the money to see it. The last movie we saw before this one was “True Grit”. That was an awesome movie. I was disappointed to see the buzz for the young actress, Hailee Steinfeld, who played Mattie Ross for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Clearly she was the star of the movie and she carried the picture. She deserves a Best Actress nod. On Tuesday night Karen and I went to dinner at Texas Roadhouse with Trevor and Michelle. I hadn’t been to the Texas Roadhouse in a long time and it was fun. On Wednesday Theresa decided not to bowl. I think the weather was too bad and she didn’t want to drive in from Central Square. I subbed for her last minute. It was the first night bowling for the team this season. I really bowled very badly. I mean really bad. I didn’t break one hundred the first game and that hasn’t happened in probably five or six years. On Thursday Michael and I took Brego for her first vet visit at Shop City Animal Hospital.

My Ministry of Rum coffee mug on my desk at work.

We have a small refrigerator at work tucked under the desk in an empty cube.

I added the sticker to the fridge.

2011/01/09 12:00 We gained a new member of the family yesterday. We got a new dog. She is a rescue dog. She is about seven months old. She came with the name Sayen, which is Mohawk for 'lovely'. Michael has decided to call her Brego. Brego was the name of Aragorn's horse from the movie "The Lord of the Rings". Sayen will be her middle name. Brego Sayen and Elsie the Cow-kitty are getting used to each other. Brego took a big dump on my new tile that I just installed a few days ago in the area we call "Scott World". She has gone out to pee and has only had that one accident - if it was indeed an accident?

2011/01/03 19:00 I saw a bumper sticker on a truck in the Wegman's parking lot that I really liked. It said: " I started with nothing and I still have most of it ".

2011/01/04 23:30 Today Tristan is four years of age. I was at work late and Karen called me and said, "When are you coming home?" Tristan was waiting for me to open his presents. When I got home he was sitting in the window.

The little dude was very excited.

2011/01/07 19:00 TGIF. It is the first Friday of the New Year. This week of toil in servitude to the Evil Empire is over. On the weather front all the record breaking snow we had accumulated in December had melted this first week of January. The only snows remaining were those piles left by snowplows or from shoveling. The green didn’t last long. There was a coating of the white stuff today when I woke up and the flurries on the way to work made for some slippery driving. We have had some pretty cold days and some pretty cold nights. Last night Karen and I put the heated mattress pad on the bed. That’s going to be pretty nice on the cold nights ahead. I continue to count down the days until my retirement. As of today it stands at 887 days. Of late I have become very interested in Rum. To me it seems a natural progression. I love Tiki. Tiki is a subject of great depth. It involves history, cultural anthropology, urban archaeology, art and design, music, and the consumption of super delicious cocktails. The basis for a lot of those cocktails is Rum. If there is any one liquor that is Tiki it is rum. And the history of Rum is fascinating. It is a spirit that has changed history time and again. I have resolved this year to learn more about Rum and to taste more Rum and to drink more Rum

Today is the first day of the New Year. The brand spanking New Year. It's a clean slate, a blank canvas, tabula rasa. The new century is now a tween. They grow up so fast don't they? Here's to the year that was and here's to the year ahead! Karen and I spent a very pleasant evening ringing in the New Year at Kathy and Phil's house. We slept in a little this morning and now find ourselves enjoying coffee at Tim Horton's. Adison's Michael joined us for coffee this morning while Adison is at work. I had 260 page views for December which is the most I have had to date. Three people signed my guestbook in December - Dawn Frasier aka Sophista-Tiki, who is a very talented artist, and Caitlin and her boyfriend Gus signed the guestbook.

khan tiki mon's rants and rambles v.5.00

What is going on?? This is never going to end is it?

This latest iteration of my rants and rambles I am keeping with tradition and starting the page on the 1st of the year. The key components will be unchanged. There still may be too much information shared and I am still most definitely weird as all get out. Being fair warned please read at your own peril. Last year for Rants and Rambles V4.0 I let the page get too big. So, this year look for a Rants and Rambles V.5.5 - I will probably split the page around mid-year.

2011/01/01 11:00

Cartoon panel from CartoonParade in today's Parade magazine.

Hey! I resemble that remark.

2011/04/24 13:00

Tristan was plum tuckered out by the end of our walk. Karen and I took turns carrying him back to the van.

There were plenty of things to explore. What was living inside of that of old hollowed out tree?

We weren't the only ones to take advantage of the break in the weather. The short little bursts of sunshine come and go without very much warning and you need to enjoy them when they happen.

Running and running on the canal. There was a lot of running done.

2011/04/23 09:30 It is Saturday morning. Some days I feel like the best thing I could have done all day would have been to stay in bed. That I should have spent the whole day under the covers. That’s how I felt yesterday by the time I had quit the Evil Empire for the week. The funny thing, in an ironic sense, was that yesterday was a pretty nice day weather-wise. We have been having some pretty crappy weather lately but yesterday was all right. This morning, when I have a day off, I woke up and I could hear the rain pelting the roof. Looking out into my backyard there is, once again, pools of standing water. The new dog has been making a mess of my front yard and all the holes she’s dug are now filled with water. I woke up this morning and Karen was lying in bed next to me. Nothing unusual there, except that as I started to focus I saw that her hair had huge white splotches in it. I kind of freaked out for a minute trying to figure out what kind of accident, perhaps involving some really strong bleach, could have caused such a thing to happen. Then as I became more awake I realized the cat was sleeping on Karen’s pillow right next to her head. The cat has never done that before. That was pretty funny.

2011/04/24 09:30 Yesterday turned out to be a pretty awesome day. While it had been raining pretty hard when I woke up the sun made a brief appearance in the early afternoon. Karen and I took the trash to Jamesville after she got out of work. After the trash run we picked Tristan up and he wanted to get ice cream. We went to Friendly's in Manlius and, after ice cream, we were driving home by the canal. It just looked to be a really nice day all of a sudden. We went for a walk on the canal. I have to say that watching Tristan have fun is a whole lot of fun for me. Later that evening I helped Adison and Tinti rescue her TV from their apartment. That's a story for another entry. While we were on the rescue mission it was, once again, raining pretty hard.