Captain's CornerLove is a cabin in the middle of nowhere.

Let me tell you a story…

Unethical Mortgage Brokers make some really bad loans because they know they’re going to sell them to big banks and not have to worry about. After they sell their loans, people who couldn’t afford their houses, quit paying on them. When the big corporate banks don’t get their money, they kick people out of their homes. The banks don’t really want to diversify into real estate, so they decide to sell off the homes at rock-bottom prices and right off the loss. So they sell off their homes in my neighborhood for 50-60% of their actual value and now I get an appraisal on my house for a ridiculously low amount and can’t sell it unless I walk into closing with SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. So now, my only legal recourse is to become a landlord, and every night I go to bed telling myself that it’s both illegal and immoral to burn down my house. At least I can sleep at night knowing I’m not as evil as 90% of mortgage brokers.

The American Dream has become a farce due to greed and the erosion of morality. Home ownership is an undue burden that we have taken upon ourselves because we believed some bullshit marketing and some idyllic image of a world that doesn’t exist.

So, this is how I feel today… Thunder Kiss ’65.  Not necissarily the words of the song… but the general mood/attitude…

… and I mean HATE, vein popping out on my forehead straight up HATE…

1. When someone comes to me with a problem and I tell them how to fix it, and they ignore me. Now, I’m not talking about some kind of grey area, morality type problem or something someone would like advice for… I’m talking about my area of expertise, there’s a problem with getting a camera working or a piece of software is wonky… I tell them what’s wrong and how to fix the problem and they just deal with whatever it is not working because they’re too lazy to fix it… That bugs the ever loving snot out of me… especially if I have to clean up the mess.

2. When I give a direction – an order if you will – in regards to something I have authority over, and it gets ignored. Now I don’t have authority over much in this world, and I’m okay with that. But when it comes down to one of the few things I have been placed in charge of and I don’t give options when I hand out instructions… there’s usually a good reason… Once again, this is only exacerbated by the fact that I usually end up cleaning up that mess too.

Aren’t you guys proud of me?? I just vented without swearing once!

Normally I’m more elegant when I try to describe a movie… but not this time. In fact, I won’t even waste the time to tell you how absolutely God-awful the movie was.  Here’s a snippet of a review by Sean McBride that pretty much sums it up.

The slight premise, coupled with some very bad performances by the cast as well as a screenplay filled with ham-fisted dialogue makes for a film that’s not scary and borders on being ridiculous at times. The bottom line is that “The Happening” just isn’t happening, and makes you wonder whatever happened to M. Night Shyamalan’s once lauded directorial skills.

Every local station has canceled their prime time shows this evening to give us (up until now) over an hour and a half of news coverage on severe thunder/hail storms and a potential tornado…

Really?  You can’t just put a bug in the corner of the screen and run a ticker on the bottom with the info?  Really?  Because that’s whatever everyone else in the world does, especially places that have whole seasons of tornados.

Yet another reason Texas sucks sometimes.

When you say something like:

Celine Dion is my idol. I listen to her everyday. She gives me warmth.

Okay, in the wake of a couple of mass murder shootings and now a couple higher profile armed robberies (one last week near a mall in PA, and one today in the New Orleans area), the morons are crawling out of the wood work.

The premise of their argument is simple, though fatally flawed. They stipulate that the reason there is so much violence is because of access to weapons. In fact, they maintain that if you ban all the weaponry that private citizens own, violent crime will stop. Does anyone else see the flaw here? People who have determined to commit violent acts are already determined to break the law. Why would ANOTHER LAW stop them? By this reasoning, (that weapons are the problem)no one could possibly have committed any violent act before weapons of any kind were invented.

Look at any other country that has banned guns, knives, etc. and see if they have a violent crime rate of 0… I’m guessing that’s not the case. In fact, the European country with the least amount of violent crime arms it’s citizenry with a fully automatic “assault rifle” and demands that they keep 50 rounds of ammunition on hand to defend themselves until they can report to base. Switzerland has for years had this policy, demanding military service and arming it’s general populace.

Which brings me to my point. Wouldn’t MORE, RESPONSIBLE armed citizens curb these violent outbreaks? Who would attack a mall if they knew that their victims were armed? Look at the Colorado shootings.  The perpetrator killed two people at the first location and escaped.  However, once he arrived at his second location, an responsible and armed VOLUNTEER stopped his rampage through force and decisive action.

What do you guys think?

So that’s the weather right now in the city I work in. Guess what most of our staff is doing today… We’re setting up for the CHRISTMAS PARTY that we’re throwing for our volunteers. Now don’t get me wrong, most of the time I enjoy the climate here in Texas, but it just ain’t Christmas if I can run around in cargo shorts. Is it too much to ask for just a light dusting of snow, God? C’mon… for this displaced non-Texan?

By the way, when I first opened up my dashboard to grab the above screen shot this is what greeted me:

It almost got my hopes up… then I realized that when I got my new hard drive this week and re-installed my OS, it interpreted my location (I entered: Dallas), as Dallas, PA. Oh well… Enjoy the snow Pennsylvania!

So when did Thanksgiving become “The Day Before We Get to Be Greedy and Mean to Each Other”?

There are stores that opened at 4 a.m. this morning. Some malls opened at 1 a.m… Are we really in that big of a hurry to buy a lot of crap that we don’t need for people who won’t appreciate the gift as much as they would if you’d just taken your extra day off today to spend time with them? Is it worth the stress? Is it worth the way we treat complete strangers when we get there before them, or worse yet, when they get there before us and take what is rightfully ours? Is it worth the millions of retail workers in this country not being able to spend the holidays with their friends and family because they had to be at work at midnight this morning?

Here’s what I’m doing today:

That’s right, nothing. I’m staying at home, relaxing and spending time with the 2 people in this world that mean the most to me. Actually they’re both sleeping and I’m playing Madden ’08 on the Xbox, but when they wake up, I’m spending the whole day with them… doing nothing.

Well there’s floodin’ down in Texas
All of the telephone lines are down…
Well the dark clouds are rollin’ in
Man I’m standin’ out in the rain

Well, thanks to a record-breaking amount of precipitation this June, I finally understand what Stevie Ray Vaughan was singin’ about there (on a much sadder note, I have long understood what he’s actually singing about, but that’s a different story). We walk through what can only be described as a swamp when going in and out of our new apartment. The landlord/lady, who has to this point been notoriously lazy, has also stopped coming out to mow because it rains so often and it is never not-muddy. That would almost be fine except for the fact that there is grass between where we park and our stairs… meaning that there is now thigh-high grass (I know, it’s the most fun usage of the term “thigh-high”) in addition to the ever deepening mud. I am now convinced that what has actually happened is that whilst sleeping one night I was moved to the Pacific Northwest and some is playing an elaborate and insanely expensive prank on me. I swear I keep seeing Ashton Kutcher out of the corner of my eye…

Anyway, not much going on here. Lilybeth is awesome and seems to take up most of my time… so that’s why I’m blogging about rain… well, that and the fact that I like Stevie Ray Vaughan…

So, when I got home this afternoon I decided to ask my wife a series of loaded questions. They went something like this:

Me: Hey honey, how was your day?

Ann: Fine I guess, I haven’t done much yet… just been resting and taking it easy.

Me: Hey, umm… did you almost get run off the road by some jerk off who was road-ragin’ pretty bad?

Ann: Ummm… no… I’ve been home all day.

Me: So, did you, shortly thereafter almost get in a knife fight because the same crazed idiot followed you into the Home Depot parking lot and try to run you over with his truck and then get out to finish the job?

Ann: No… did something happen?

Me: Well, you’re day hasn’t been nearly as exciting as mine!

Today has just been one of those days. You know the kind… nothing seems to go right. So we (the wife and I) wake up a little late, enjoying sleeping in. Then we decide to go through all the stuff titling and registering our vehicles in Texas. So we hop in our cars and drive to get our inspections. Of course the check engine light comes on on the truck on the way there. So there’s something to worry about. I go ahead and have it inspected, just so if there’s anything else wrong I’ll know up front and get it all taken care of at once. Pay attention, here’s the one thing that went right today…