Sickening Fun

So I started feeling better by the middle of the day and after dinner the family decided to go for a little thrill ride excitement. We wanted to try the Skyscrapper. If you can't tell from the picture, you are strapped into your seat that is only attached to a bar and some protective screening, it then swings you into the air and you go round and round. About halfway through it stops at the very top, you sit there for a second or five and then start going backwards.

To be honest it was a lot of fun. The first ride I went with my niece and we laughed the entire time. She thought it was funny when I let out; Shit! Sorry Morgan! A couple of other family members rode the ride and all thought the same thing, that is was a lot of fun. I though, got a little too brave, and wanted to go for a second time. This time I went with my sister Amy (her second as well), it all started out fun till we hit the backwards part. I guess that large ice cream wanted out. I did not throw up, but my stomach was not sitting well. I kept count the revolutions and praying the end was soon.

It took another hour and a half before my stomach started to settle down. Would I go on the skyscrapper again? Yes, two times within an hour? Not if I had recently left a buffet restaurant.

This is Not How I Wanted to Start My Vacation

With the last few weeks being, well, pretty crappy I was looking forward to a vacation. Luckily, one was right around the corner. The Parents are celebrating their 50th anniversary in the Smokey Mountains. I love the mountains and this is a great way to caste off the sucktitude that I have been dealing with.

All things started well. until oh, the drive out here, I am suffering from a cold. This sucks, but I hope it will go away soon. I've started taking every kind of remedy out there, I'm one step away from looking for leeches... I am in Tennessee, there has to be a place that sells them. I just hope it doesn't ruin this trip. After the golf outing I may try and sleep it off. Must get well, must get well.

Wackiness

I've had a long week and at times it I thought the pain would never stop. The only thing to get my mind out of this crappy sucktitude youtube, more importantly Sifl & Olly. If you are too you and do not remember the show it was two sock puppets that had their own talk show. If it sounds strange, it was, but it does not come near to the brilliance of the show. If you could look into my brain, it would probably look a lot like Sifl and Olly. Most people will not like the show and that probably why it was on for only two seasons. My favorite segments were a word with Chester. Chester was a friend of Sifl and Olly, who would appear to have had one two many acid trips. His comments never really made sense, but it was funny.

The above video is, well about ninjas... need I say more?!?! The below video is all about the wackiness that is Chester.

Cash Flow

After the last baby name post there was a flurry of activity, but for the last few days no votes. If I do not get to 50 within a week I am calling the race. With 45 votes already in Cash has the clear lead with 24 votes (53%) a majority but two votes. Nathan at 10 votes (22%) is struggling to break away from the force field of J Dog's mighty 9 votes (20%). Then you have Englebert who got one pity vote and another from myself (4%). I don't know why, but I thought it would be a race between Nathan and Englebert not J Dog.

Since Cash is hanging on to the majority, if Nathan and J Dog force the percentage under 50% I may have to do a run off. There has to be a majority here. This will be the only way I believe Nathan can win. I am calling it the Clinton strategy. This could be it folks get the votes in or the race is over and we have a new baby name.

NEW STUFF: OK, the poll hit the 50 mark so the new mark will be 60 by the time I get back from vacation August 4th.

Tired of Dead People

In the news business, you get to cover a lot of fun stuff like people being killed, AWESOME! For the most part, the deaths we cover are generally spaced out, but lately I have had to cover 4 high profile murders and it is starting to take a toll. I am tried of it, it's not fun and you have to be serious. Day in and day out we have covered these local deaths with very little breaks. Being on nightside it is magnified, because 11pm producer wants something new. I don't blame her, it's just we have a limited number of night side crews and with the luck of the draw I'm covering one of the deaths.

You joke around about it, you try not to think about it, yet it is still there. Today I covered a vigil almost three hours away from the station. All the people there did not even know the girl, she didn't even live there. The only connection was she was found there. After four weeks of death I need a long break from it. Luckily, I have a vacation coming soon and hopefully after all the death stories will have passed

Take Me Out to the ER

I like sports, but generally I'm not very good at them. I want to be good, but years of laziness has caused any sense of skill to diminish.

So what do I do? I agree to play softball... in the dead of summer... in North Carolina. Luckily the team is full of either early thirty somethings and older 20 year olds so we are in the same injury range. I was just looking to get some exercise and some friendly interaction.

I did not HORible, but pretty close. My first at bat, I swung and missed the first two pitches (You only get three total in an at bat). I made contact in the last pitch, but it was reminiscent of Willy Mays Hayes at bat in Major League. I kind of half swung and got it near the hands. I squeal led internally and started to run. I got my first base hit. It almost ended in the same way, only I was picked off when the short stop made the catch and I was half way between first and second.

My second at bat was fair, but I hit it straight to the third baseman and I had no chance of getting to first. We lost 13-7 but I had fun, or I went delirious from heat... either one could be true.

Handy Man

We have been in the house for three weeks now and things are slowly getting back to normal, yet there is still a lot of work to be done. I've started taking up a few projects to make the house a little better.

The first project was changing a door lock. Mind you, I have very little experience at fixing things so I'm doing a lot of this for the first time. For some reason there is a door in the bonus room that we could not lock because we didn't have a key. We searched the house and never found a working key so I had to replace the locks. Truthfully, it was pretty easy. A lot of the parts already in the door worked so I just needed to change the lock part. After 15 minutes we had a working lock and now we don't have to worry about people being able to walk in. I'll be honest I was quite happy with myself.

The next on the list were shelves, and I mean a lot of shelves. So far I have put two more shelves in the storage area, a cabinet and shelf for The Wife's area, and four more shelves in the office. I have done shelves in the past, but it generally ended up slanty or with extra holes in the wall. Since I now own the walls and shelves I thought I might want them to be done right. I got the leveler out and even measured at least twice. I did have a couple of problems. Once shelf bracket does not want to stay in place, it keeps fall out. I got it to stay, but I don't think it's 100% secure, but it will do for now.

Hopefully by next week The Wife and I can get the boxes out of the office so we can start to hang pictures. That's when the house will feel like its done.

Come On!

Last night Boston Stevie and I were sitting in a live truck waiting for a press conference when he got the idea to look at the competitors websites. We did find any new info on our story, but we did find this story. If you don't want to go to the link, the quick version is this old woman took an insurance on her grandson worth $100,000. Come to find out she has done this in the past to her other husbands and now they are looking into see if she killed them for money. Boston Stevie saw that she has a connection to Ohio and immediately thought that she had to be from Ironton.

Back in June he did a blog post on a rock from the Ohio River and the man who dug up the rock just happened to be from my home town. I wrote a response about how every time something news worthy comes out of my home town. He thinks this is funny and did a search using only these three words: Ohio, Woman and Insurance. The first item on the list was from the Herald Dispatch with this title Ironton native with 5 dead spouses 'obsessed with cash.' CRAP! Why did she have to be from Ironton? Boston Steve went into hysterics and I started down a shame spiral... yet again. How can this continue to happen, you never hear about Van Wert, Loveland, or somewhere like Versailles it's always Ironton. Why not national coverage on our Memorial Day parade? Ironton needs an overhaul and has to stop getting all this bad press. I'm probably blowing it out or proportion because I'm from there, but twice withing a month is way too much bad press.

Grin and Bear It

Today is one of the two days out of the year that I do not enjoy... I had to go to the dentist. This is sort of one of necessary evils in life. I know I don't have to go, because I didn't go for six years and the only issue was one small cavity. Yet I'm getting older and I don't want to end up like The Wife's brothers... toothless. This cleaning did not hurt as much as my first one a year and a half ago, but still, I have sensitive gums and all the poking and prodding hurt like hell. That's when I realized that most of the dental tools have not changed since the middle ages.

Oh sure you have the X-ray and some fancy computer, but look at the tray of picks and sharp pointy objects they use. How can they not have some kind of laser, nanobots or something to clean your teeth? Are we not in the 21st century? If you make tools for the medical field you need to come up with something that was not used during the Spanish Inquisition.

I'm glad I no longer have to do that awful tasting fluoride mouth piece thing. If you do not remember or do not know, back when I was a youngster way back in the early 80s, they had a mouth piece and they would fill it with this.... ooze and put it in your mouth. It was full of fluoride and suppose to help keep cavities away. It tasted awful, and they tried masking the taste with crappy flavors. The first was grape and I hated grape, but they thought all kids love grape. So I had this nasty substance in my mouth that had a hint of grape. I wanted to throw up every time I saw that stuff. As far as I can tell that's the only improvements in the dental field in the last 50 years.

Maybe the next time I visit they will have created something less painful, who am I kidding it'll still hurt.

Cashing In

It's been nearly two weeks since my last baby name update and somehow I am still getting people to vote. I will admit the number of votes has slowed down to a trickle, but there has been a total of 34 votes so far. Baby Cash has taken a majority lead with 18 votes (52%), then you basically have a battle for second place. Nathan has 8 (23%), but J Dog is right there with 7 (20%) and bring up the rear is Englebert with 1 vote (2%). Finally someone voted for Englebert, I mean what a great name for a baby; you can call it Bert or Eng or Engle... the options are countless but I guess it's not cool.

When I started this there was talk about Melissa's family possible coming in and swamping the vote to make Nathan/Nathaniel the clear winner. Well, I guess not, I guess everyone is coming around to the awesomeness of Cash.

I'll keep this thing going till I can go a week without getting a vote.

Cleaned Up

So many of you are probably wondering if the gnomes made the trip to the new house. All I have to say is YEAH! Most even got a little touch up in the paint department. The oldest one, second from the left he was so faded that he was nearly white. Wilson the Gypsy Moth catcher need some extensive work as well, but everyone else was just a touch up. Gilbert got a little dinged up on the San Antonio trip so he's back in form. I also have received a new "welcome" gnome that is added to the group. I don't know what the neighbors think of them, but no news is good news I guess.

Head Shot

I was about to do a post on the gnomes at the new house, instead I shall embarrass my nephew. This is Devon, for some reason he wanted to dye his hair blue for the second straight summer. Only one problem with this idea, not enough bleach, he was warned and wanted to proceed; the above picture is what happened. Of course he is 12 and everything is a big deal and is very upset about his hair even though he is over 10 hours away from anyone he knows. The Wife and I tried to make things better, but that didn't work so I went for the next fun option torture. He hates having his picture taken and he really didn't want those pictures taken. While all this is going on he dared me to put it on the blog... something you should realize, don't dare me to do something stupid, I generally will do it. Sorry Devon, I though you needed at least one more reason for therapy later in life.

Moving In

OK enough of the bad stuff at work, how about something good like,

WE FREAKING MOVED INTO OUR HOUSE!

I tell you what, buying a house is one of the scariest things and yet one of the happiest moments in my life. We are now in debt more than ever, you don't realize it till you see the mortgage papers and that number that has six digits. Then I have to be in charge of making sure everything works. I no longer can call a super and have him fix it... I am now Snider! Then there is the one good thing. It's my freaking house! I don't have to deal with attached neighbors, because we don't have any. We don''t have to worry about being kicked out because the owners got an itch and want us out. As long as we make our mortgage payments we are golden!

We signed on Friday and I started moving boxes that day, the only problem for me was, it was FREAKING 96 DEGREES that day. Since we only had one dolly and not enough room in my car for a lot of boxes with the dolly, I had to lug out boxes from Fried Chicken Drive to the car by hand. I could usually get three big boxes and two medium boxes and five small ones in one trip so that meant I had to make six to seven trips by hand. After five round trips to the new house I had to sit for a while, then lay down and pass out for 20 minutes while Lucy tried to figure out what was going on with this new place. Saturday went a lot smoother, well except for UHaul giving me the wrong truck, We had about 20 people helping us and we got everything in the house before 11:30.

The biggest thing I have found about buying a house is all the things we need. We have faux hardwood floors so the floors hurt our feet if we go barefoot for more than 20 minutes. We had to buy a couple of floor rugs to solve that. We needed more shelves, temporary blinds, curtains in the bedroom (don't want to give the neighborhood a show). Then we have the outdoor stuff, I bought a lawnmower and a weed eaters. I could have bought one off craigslist, but I'm not mechanically inclined so I have no idea if someone is trying to sell me a lemon so I just bought a new one. Even though I have spent more money this week than I have ever spent, we only put the lawn mower on a credit card.

Even after a week we still have boxes everywhere, but the house is starting to look nice. The Wife did a good job in the living room and bedroom and I'm slowly getting things organized in the office. I feel like I'm now forced to be a grown up, I own land and I guess I have to be responsible and stuff. Who am I kidding, I'm a dork and always will be one

Pregnant Military People Might Want to Stay Away from North Carolina

For the second time within a year I'm covering a pregnant military person being killed. The first was Maria Lauderbach the Marine that was allegedly killed by Cesar Laurean in his house near Camp Lejune. Now I'm covering the death of Megan Touma in Fayetteville, NC near Fort Braggs. Both murders were creepy and oddly enough have a lot of similarities:

• Both were pregnant


• Both were from Ohio (Lauderbach Dayton area and Touma Cincinnati area)


• Both were having affairs with married men (Touma may not have know that)


• Both murders were grizzly in nature (one was burned and barried in the back yard the other was found rotting in a hotel room)


• Both murders happened in North Carolina


• Both outside predominate military bases


• Both had gone missing and no one reported anything


• Both families contacted the military wondering where their children were

Then there are the strange outside events like the fact that The Serg and I have covered each event and were forced to stay over night.

This latest murder has me a little creeped out, after the murder a note was sent to the Fayetteville Observer by someone claiming to be the killer and he in fact has killed in other states and is taking on the call sign of the Zodiac Killer, there was a symbol of the Zodiac Killer supposedly in the hotel room. For the most part police think it is not a serial killer, but a well crafted rouse to pull them away from the real killer.

Then the military is keeping REALLY quite about this one. It's not like we normally get a lot of info out of the military to begin with, but it's even worse. They actually called a press conference to say they can't say anything. The reason I used "person of interest" earlier is that no one is allowed to use the guys name even though every media outlet has it. I think the Laurean/Lauderbach case got to the military and they would rather say nothing and hope that everything will go away.

Fayetteville police are stuck in the middle here, they have to deal with the military so they can't give the media any information on tape, but also they don't want to have what happened in Onslow county and have to do a presser every 3 hours. Instead the investigator will give out "some" info but has to stay tight lipped a little. He's got a tough job, dealing with hundreds of us media members calling or camping out waiting for any piece of information we can get and trying to get answers to a murder.

While covering these stories it gets a little nutty for us. We get so close to it and we have to joke around to keep out sanity, I Won't go into them, because people will chastise me for being insinative, all I will say we are going to burn in hell for some of the jokes we are saying. I'm just hoping that another murder like this will not happen and if it does that it is far away from North Carolina or has zero Triangle connections.