Blog.amhill

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Posts Tagged Married with Children

Scrapbooking for men

Dec 3

Posted by Aaron in Musings | 1 Comment

Late this afternoon, Melissa was sitting on the couch, looking at some things we had picked up from Jo-ann Fabrics earlier: a 2″ thick package of scrapbooking paper, and extra plastic insert pages for the wedding scrapbook we had purchased a few weeks back. She and I both thought it would be a good idea to put the various sentimental items and as many cards as possible into a scrapbook so that a few years from now, when we’re browsing the phone books for hitmen, we can refresh our memory about why we got together in the first place.

“This scrapbook stuff is so GIRLY!” she exclaimed, somewhat exasperated.
“Well, scrapbooks are kind of meant to be geared towards girls, aren’t they?” I replied, “I think doing a scrapbook for our wedding memorabilia is a great idea, but it’s definitely meant to be angled towards women.”

Imagine, for a moment, the man’s scrapbook. It would contain the following:

  • A table of contents, quite possibly with colored tabs to denote the various sections and organizational layout.
  • vital details about the bride and groom and their families (name, gender, height weight, birthdate, etc.)
  • the number of people attending, the length of time it took, and quite possibly the minutes of the event.
  • The text would all be in some kind of serif font, quite likely typed or laser-printed and affixed with staples on 8.5 x 11 paper, so that it can fit in manila folders in a filing cabinet.
  • A printout of the weather from that day
  • a map of the facilities used (a very nice Quaker conference / retreat center, in our case)
  • A detailed line-item breakdown of the budget and expenditures
  • A breakdown of wedding gifts, by category, with a matching pie chart and correlative-demographic line graph.
  • the direction and route numbers used by each guest to arrive at the wedding. (Thanks Aunt Jane :)

You may think I’m joking… but ask a few guys about what THEY would put in a scrapbook if they were to make one.

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What the hell is going on in America right now?

Oct 1

Posted by Aaron in Rants | No Comments

Ok.. first off – Check this out. It’s from CNN, “the Cafferty File”. Apparently there’s a bill in legislation right now (I HOPE it hasn’t passed yet) that has, buried deep in it, an exculpatory clause that pardons the current administration for ANY and all instances of liability concerning torture, detention, and atrocities committed since Sep 11 2001. GTMO, the Iraqi prison scandal, all of those. Wiped clean.

Pretty effed up! I really hope this doesn’t pass.. next thing you know, he’ll be trying to get immunity for breaking the law with his signing statements!

Next up on the chopping block: the MPA has shut down OLGA and other Guitar Tab online archives. This is ridiculous. The RIAA is the epitome of money-grubbing dogma, clinging to an antiquated business model, and throwing red herrings at the public news media about why their sales are slumping. I haven’t purchased a CD from an RIAA-affiliated company in over….3 years. (The last CD I bought was directly from a band, who is on an Indie label). I found a very informative and active coaltion called DownHill Battle, they are at the forefront of a movement to help breakup the monopoly of major labels. It’s worth checking out, they have a nice site. Rants aside, I really am sick of the RIAA and their bullshit. Ick.

*deep breath*

Ok. In *other* news, Melissa and I are doing well. The baby is slowly hardening into a fetus that you can feel from the outside. I was touching her stomach this morning and it was really amazing to think that the lump under her belly button is our baby. Really mind-blowing. Her next OB appt is next week. We’re having some difficulty with Medicaid right now, and are still kind of up in the air on the logistics of how to get the baby from the inside to the outside, but we’ll get it figured out.
The house has been kind of on hold right now — I want to finish painting the kitchen and hang some things up on the walls, perhaps we can do that tomorrow.

I just started my new job on Monday. I like it — I get a cubicle, I have a three-monitor display, my co-workers are all real nice, and the pay is great (twice my last salary!). My only complaint is that I have to deal with .NET. Granted, it IS C#, but even so, I have to program it in Visual Studio. Microsoft has this habit of wanting to do everything THEIR way — the idea of “compliance” is completely foreign to them. (case in point: Internet Explore v.7, which was JUST released, is only ~20% compliant with CSS 2.0… wtf?) My biggest complaint about VS.NET though is that it distances the developer greatly from the code itself. When I program in PHP, I manually type out every single line — I am aware of everything my code does; If it burps, it’s because I told it to, if it crashes, it’s because I made the typo or logic error. VS.Net is all about the point-click-drag model of development. You just drag widgets into the “designer screen” and then pseudo-HTML is rendered from that. (I say “pseudo” because .NET uses ASP objects, which then render HTML entities upon serving the page) I’m sure it has its place, and for people who were developers first and are now doing web development, it’s probably right at home for them — but it’s UGLY. It’s like using an F-14 Tomcat for Deer hunting.

I suppose a lot of my frustration is coming from the fact that learning new languages is difficult, and I’m merely transferring my frustration at myself onto the cause, but even so! I’ll learn it eventually, and I’ll probably be better for learning it, but I think I will ALWAYS prefer PHP to .NET for web development.

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Bit-boosh,Bit-boosh,Bit-boosh,Bit-boosh…

Sep 13

Posted by Aaron in Friends, Family & Pets | 4 Comments

We woke up at 7:30am. Melissa was awake before I was, and was already bathing by the time I rolled out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom. For some reason, I feel more comfortable sitting down (even if it’s just #1) when I first wake up. I think it’s because my legs aren’t used to all that activity just yet.

When Melissa finished bathing, I assumed her spot while she got dressed. She started blow-drying her hair as I stood up to get out of the tub, and a blast of hot air from the hair-dryer hit me in the face. I immediately flashed back to my childhood: My mom drying her hair in the bathroom, me brushing my teeth or getting ready for school, and I always liked feeling the hot-air from the blow-dryer, especially in the cold mornings. I think I just like being warm.

Still groggy, I barely remember pulling on yesterday’s pants, unearthing a shirt and boxers from the freshly folded laundry, leaving a note for the contractors, and grabbing my cellphone from the wall-charger. I made a peanut-butter sandwich on wheat bread because I wasn’t entirely sure I would get to eat anything else today until after work. Satisfied that we had everything ready, we were ready to go.
“Can you drive?” she asked me. I responded, half-mumbling, that it would probably be better to drive separately, since I only had 1 hour of comp-time and a 1 hour lunch. She said ok, and we started our respective cars and drove across town.

I parked in my building parking lot, which was catty-corner from the Wayne County Health Clinic. She advanced to the next block and parked in their lot. I quickly walked over, thinking that I didn’t want her to think I was chickening out. She had asked me before we left if I was sure I wanted to go, and I said yes. We met inside the clinic and she checked in. I looked around at the reading material. Finding nothing worthwhile, I resigned to sitting down on one of the chairs and gazing at the almighty color television.

We didn’t have to wait too long, one of the nurses brought us back to a checkup room. She proceeded to ask Melissa a bunch of questions about her history — generally about genetic diseases, health-risks, and other such questions pertinent to our genetics. There were a few questions I got to answer in the same line of questioning. Melissa signed off on a consent form for the blood-work as well as the pelvic exam, and we were escorted over to the testing-center, right down the hall, where she was to provide a urine sample. Read the rest of this entry »

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Fluffy White Clouds

Nov 3

Posted by Aaron in Personal | No Comments

One of my mismatched socks has a huge fucking hole in the toe of it. And the heel. It looks like the type of sock hobos always wear in movies and old films. Just give me a ratty dark brown jacket, a busted up top-hat, and all my belongings in a little sack on the end of a stick, and I’ll be ready to hitch a ride on the next train out of hear and eat canned beans over a bonfire.

I can’t sleep tonight. I have too much on my mind. I was practicing spinning tonight (that means “DJ’ing using vinyl records” for those not in the know…. I wasn’t literally rotating myself in circles or anything) and I realized I’m crazily out of practice. This is kind of a crucial realization given that I’m spinning at my friend Rai’s birthday party next wednesday. That’s going to be an interesting night… between Jerry, myself and Cramer, we’ll be DJing from 9pm to about 3am. And somewhere in there I’m supposed to get drunk with Rai. I’m not sure that I’ve ever spun while intoxicated, that’ll be interesting. Drinking on the eve before a workday….scary thought. Read the rest of this entry »

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