Man we had some pretty bad weather come through the area Sunday morning. When I went to bed Saturday night I noticed that we were under a Tornado watch but the skies were pretty clear and it certainly wasn't raining.

We signed for the Weather Channel's call alert or something like that. Basically when threatening weather is coming your way the bald dude from the weather channel calls to let you know you might be fucked. At least his recording does, but I like to think they are making him get out of bed at 2AM just to call my ass...

So we started getting calls at around 2AM Sunday morning. What a coincidence. We got a total of three I think and it was a pretty rough storm. I didn't get much sleep after that. We moved the girls downstairs to sleep on the living room floor in case me had to make a mad dash for the basement or anything. Surprisingly enough we only lost power briefly, for less than a minute. That's lucky considering some of the folks in Bowdon still don't have power. Bowdon is south of me. From what I've seen we didn't get too much damage north of I-20 but there was quite a bit in Carrollton and Bowdon. Although two people died here in Georgia, nobody was killed in my area, thank goodness. At least six tornadoes went through the state but they don't have a final number yet.

There are a ton of pictures in a couple of galleries at WSB TV's web site if you want to check some of them out. There was quite a bit of damage to the Bowdon area. Two of my morning waitresses at the Temple store live there and luckily they were alright. I heard from one of the pretty early Sunday morning but the other couldn't get to a phone until that afternoon so we were pretty worried about her.

All in all 24 people died throughout Georgia, Oklahoma, Missouri and Alabama and we are still trying to get stuff cleaned up.

I understand that Macon was also hit pretty hard. A bunch of the upper management from my company went down there to work today. I guess since there were so many people without power they were very busy. My Area VP called the see if I could send anyone or go myself but I wasn't able to get things staffed to get out of my stores or else I would have gone.

I got off on sort of a strange tangent yesterday morning. I have been pretty tired the last few weeks, working my ass off and I guess I just sort of got well away from what I had originally planned on posting. That's what I get from putting in the title first, although I've had some pretty decent entries after sitting down with only a title.

Anyhow, lately I have been getting more than my share of spam comments and MT isn't catching them all with the settings I have, so I end up manually deleting them (after flagging them). The same thing goes for trackbacks as well. I hate spam. There are some other options of course but I did away with the captcha because it's a pain in the ass and I don't plan on putting them back in, nor do I want to go to registrations being required. It's a fucking quandary I suppose.

I thought that I might have some free time yesterday to work on getting some new pictures online but it didn't work out quite as planned.

I had a pretty tough day at work but I did manage to get out of there at a decent enough time. Went straight to the gym and worked out with the weight machines for an hour or so. I'll tell you what, I can certainly feel the difference. I can't see it yet, although the wife says she can.

Once I arrived home I got sucked into watching Independence Day. No matter how many times I've seen that stupid-assed movie, if it comes on I will sit down and enjoy watching it. By the time it was over supper was almost ready. Man, that was good. Pan-fried fish dipped in corn meal, broccoli and green beans cooked in garlic butter and fried potatoes. Probably not so good for the cholesterol but it damn sure tasted great.

I just pretty much surfed the web after that. There were several things I wanted to write about, like the fact that nasty old global warming has caused Montana to get 16" of snow. In fucking May. 16". What's up with that shit? I though even in the rockies heavy snow was over early last month or even in March. Or how about the fact that Obama thinks we have 57 states in the Union. He must have missed the day on geography. I'll bet he thinks Chicago is the capitol of fucking Illinois too. That's something you should know without having to look it up.

Speaking of weather, we have had some pretty crappy stuff moving through west Georgia the last few hours. That's probably the only reason I got out of bed in time to post this prior to going to work. Most of the northern part of the state has been under a tornado watch all night and for a while the thunderstorms got pretty wild. What was possibly a tornado moved through my county, but south of here and heading toward Atlanta. It seems that the worst of it has passed through now. The power went out for a short time and I made sure to get clothes together for the girls in case we had to get in the basement quickly. They got to make pallets on the living room floor last night, which they enjoy doing.

I suppose that's about it this morning. Since I am running a bit short on time today I am just going to add my Green Thumb Sunday to this post :)

Maybe it's cheating but it's certainly expedient...

Join

This is one of the Bougainvillea vines that lives in my backyard. When I get home from work I'll see about posting a better photo than this one. I tokk quite a few pictures the other day and some video of the baby birds under my back deck as well. I just haven't moved them off of the memory card in my camera yet. Depending on what time I get home from work today perhaps I can get some of them online.

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

This weeks PhotoHunt Saturday theme is ANY Photo I want! Since I've been posting pictures from the Ren Fest off and on I thought I would put it up. I may have already posted this one, can't really remember...

Right before the wife shot the picture I asked the overgrown Ewok which one of us was ugly enough to break the camera. Thus the pointy finger. He did take offense to being called a giant ewok though for some reason...

Unless something comes up over at CNN that I want to post about I am getting ready to hit the sack. I just realized however that I had not taken the time to post about getting my blood drawn this morning.

Having my blood drawn seems to have turned into a full-blown goatfuck ordeal over the last few years.

The last few times I have gone they have had to stick me several times and after four or five times digging around in my arm with a needle they take it out of my hand. Shit, they can stick one right in a vein and no blood comes out.

Guess I am actually dead and just don't know it...

Anyway, I made sure to drink a big glass of water prior to going to bed last night and then drank two or three more when I got up this morning so that I wouldn't be dehydrated when they went to poke me.

Fuck all, it still took three times. Here's this woman digging around my fucking arm with a big old needle saying "tell me if it hurts". Shit, unless you rip something loose I'm not saying a damn thing, just get the blood.

She finally stuck one in the top of my hand and it came right out.

Either I need to go in and just slash away with my pocket knife to help them out or start drinking water like a week before hand. My arm is still sore where she jammed the gottdamned needle into my arm.

All to get my cholesterol checked so my Doc can renew my prescription next month. What a damned dog and pony show.

....

So I am still fighting the smoking. I cut down to almost nothing and finally quit for a couple of weeks and then started having one or two here and there. I have had a pretty hard month at work. Not an excuse but I guess working 17 days straight kicked my ass because I have purchased cigarettes twice.

Haven't had one in two days now and it sucks quitting again because I am going through the same damned withdrawals I went through last month. Doh!

I am starting to seriously consider getting hypnotized but I am afraid that I will come out of there barking like a chicken or whatnot...

Oh by the way...since Eric's out of town I stole the keys to his site and managed to cross-post this over there as well...

It's funny some of the things people search for on the Internet. Fortunately when you come here a record of your search terms comes along as well and I get to see what brought you here! Some of the things make sense and some don't. Here is a smattering of the wonderful searches that brought folks here over the last hour.

Ajax Foster Care Numbers - While I wouldn't be searching for foster care this is a completely normal thing that I might find myself looking for. I usually start out by searching for "so and so home page" and normally the address and phone number are listed there. So why did they come here? Fuck if I know. I have posted in the past about Ajax, as in Javascript and I have also posted about foster care as in the FLDS but how the heck did they find my sight with that search and actually get off the right track. Apparently in Google Canada I am number 6 on that search. The township of Ajax and phone numbers is #1 but the article I wrote on the FLDS children must have been more attractive than their initial search.

Single Moms Looking to Date - Oh hell yeah. I don't have them beating down my doors but if they are looking for a date I can find them one for a nominal charge but I get to take pictures...Believe it or not I am #1 at Google for this search. Sweet. Gotta keep that one.

The next two were from Blogcatalog and someone going through Google to translate one of my entries on Brianna Denison into Italian.

The Doll Palace - I wrote a review of this site that my daughter uses well over a year ago. Nothing particularly amazing.

Brianna Denison - Obviously I wrote several posts about Brianna and quite a bit of traffic from them.

Funny Interests - Funny interests? Not I apart from my goats...

Watching deleted Youtube Videos - I always get hits from this. It's the 10th and 12th most searched for term that brings people here.

Americans are Uneducated - Apparently someone has been spending too much time here dumbing themselves down. I am apparently #1 on this Google search, resulting from a post I wrote entitled Sevenload Thinks Americans are Uneducated LAST March responding to their comment on my site about Guantanamo Bay and the execution of Saddam.

Last but not least is the latest search which was Stuff People Stick Up Their Ass...Now there's someone after my own heart. I used to get nasty searches for Beef Curtains and other stuff quite often but lately they have all pertained to murders and missing people, which of course I have been writing about. It's nice to see there are still degenerates on the Internet. I'll bet the bastard was looking for pictures too!

Just in case I don't get to post one later this weekend, this is my open track-back post for the weekend of May 9th-11th which also happens to be Mother's Day weekend! Happy Mother's Day!

If you don't know what a linkfest is go over and check out the link above. Basically the way it works is that if there is a post you want folks to see, maybe something you are proud of, important news, or just pictures you want to share, you send a trackback or linkback to this post. All of the sites that have linked to it are listed below along with the title of the entry they want you to come see. It's a great way to share your work with other people and can help build traffic to your site.

Here's the deal though, if you aren't really a blog or are just spamming me with trackbacks I will remove it.

There are plenty of folks that participate in Linkfests and there are even a couple of different blogrolls to join. You can find them linked on my blogrolls page.

It's pretty funny how this stuff comes around. I mentioned earlier about Casinos and then realized that back in September I had written about a site catering to the Mac crowd. It's not specifically just for Mac users but does lean more toward them. The site is Mac Poker Online. Since I visited the site last fall there have been a couple of updates and there seem to be a bunch of new links. That's pretty cool.

Pacific Poker still looks pretty cool to me although I was reading a bit about Fulltilt Poker, which seems pretty neat as well. Fulltilt Poker offers a bunch of the standard games such as Texas Hold'em, Hi/Lo, Omaha, Seven Card Stud and Razz. There are tournaments to join as well as private games if you are an affiliate or VIP.

Several of the casinos linked to from Mac Poker Online offer Online Casino Bonuses for signing up and most of them allow you to check it out without making any kind of upfront payment.

As I mentioned last September, if you are checking out a site linked to from Mac Poker Online make sure that they welcome U.S. players as quite a few of the online casinos don't allow you to play if you are in the United States.

Sorry about no Thursday posts. I completely missed the thirteen and the thongs :( I wonder how pissed they would be if I combined Thursday Thirteen and Thursday Thongs? You know, Thirteen Thursday Thongs...

Sounds good to me anyway.

I mentioned the other day that I was going back through my music library and culling out the duplicate tracks and the ones that are corrupt. I ended up with something like 8100 songs. Of course some of them are still duplicated. It's amazing how many times a song can show up on 'greatest hits' albums for bands like Aerosmith among others. I ended up deleting about 20 gigs worth though, I had somewhere around 30k songs at one point. That means that 22 thousand songs were duplicates, corrupt, cut short, or just crap I wanted to get rid of. Most of the CDs are in my basement, if I ever want them back I can dig them up and listen to them that way I suppose. I am still tempted to go back through and delete even more, although some of the stuff that the wife enjoys I might not, and vice versa.

Except for messing with the music I spent the entire day yesterday sleeping. The last three weeks have kicked my ass. Having two days off hasn't fixed the problem but it certainly went a long way toward helping it out. I napped for a couple of hours this afternoon as well (exciting life ain't it?) but I tried not to overdo things today.

I'll be back online a bit later. I have to go pick the girls up from school. I had blood drawn earlier and once again they had to stick me several times so I need to vent about that later.

Except for when I went to Las Vegas and got thrown out of Caesar's Palace about 23 years ago for being underage (and you really can't count that) the only time I have been in a casino is when we visited Nassau back in February. We had a blast. The wife even won a bit of money. I think we probably broke even between our two trips there. No doubt I will go back at some point but it's just a matter of taking enough money that I'm willing to lose because really, unless you are a professional gambler you aren't going to win much unless you are just really lucky. Game rules generally favor the house and not the player.

What got me to thinking about casinos was that I visited one online (didn't play) and was checking it out to see if it looked like fun. How big a difference is there really between an online casino and a "live" one. My personal opinion is that I would much rather go in person and play, even if I were just playing the slot machines. That's all I did in the Bahamas but I really enjoyed it.

I suppose there is something to be had out of the online ones though. The daughter of a former employee actually makes a living out of gaming online at a couple of casinos believe it or not. She also used to work for me back in the nineties and she's making enough to feed herself and her some. That's something I suppose.

I guess when I think about Casinos I get James Bond, fine looking women, sipping whiskey and tailored suits in my head. I guess I could always don a tux before sitting down at my PC but somehow it just doesn't fit :)

Literally.

Party Casino claims to be the worlds largest online casino and most likely they are. I don't know how they measure size on the Internet though. Number of visitors? Web pages? Anyway, they do seem to have a pretty large selection of online games and are regulated by the government of Gibraltar as well as their gaming commission so everything should be on the up and up. They are also listed on the London Stock Exchange, so this is a company that's not just up there to rip you off and close the site. Party Casino plans to be online for the long haul so if you want to play, head on over and check it out for yourself.

While it may not be Wednesday in your part of the world anymore it still is here, just barely. Today is my 17th day of work (straight) and I just dragged my sore and tired butt home. I do get the next two days off provided all three of my managers show up for work, thank goodness.

This week we are up to the letter "P" and P is for...

The Redneck Riviera or Panama City!

It had been several years since I had been to Panama, so the changes down there amazed me when we took the kids in August of 2005.

We hung out at the pool...

We hung out at the beach...

And it stormed for awhile so we hung out at the hotel.

On the way home we had to stop and play a couple of rounds of putt-putt...

But finally, like all good little mermaids we had to return home...

The quality of the photos isn't all that great, for some reason we were stuck with cell phones all weekend. I thought I had a bunch I took with my camera but apparently I burned them to CD and they are offline right now. It's really just the memories that these bring back anyway. The pictures don't have to be great because once I see them I remember what a great time we had.

If you want to play ABC Wednesday, head over and check out the rules!

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.
We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.

RePete wrote a letter to her brother the marine and addressed the envelope herself. Repete is five, oh by the way.

Apparently the messiah has been and gone and missed him. You can find him though, in a New Mexico state police jail cell for sexual contact with a minor as well as contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

I suppose as far as God is concerned, sticking your dick in a child isn't a problem. Just ask the old men from the FLDS. Wayne Bent aka Michael Travesser, the leader of Lord Our Righteousness Church (Strong City) took a page from their book.

There's a twist though. Wayne is the Messiah. No, really. God told him in 2000 he was. Probably around the same time he told him it was OK to fuck little kids. Perhaps we should be glad he wasn't whispering 'helter skelter' in Wayne's ear. The photos certainly remind me of old Charlie.

The Strong City cult has a blog as well. That's because the lord is going to blog himself back into importance. Go check out some of the bullshit if you get a chance.

I am obviously a bit snarky this morning. For that I apologize. Today is the last of 17 days straight without a day off.

If I have time this afternoon I'll get my Wednesday meme posts up. Right now it's time to go to school with the girls and have "Pancakes With Pops"

Damn.

This dude must be on prozac to have 21 wives. Of course the nice pliable women of the FLDS don't have an original thought in their head so I guess Wendell Loy Nielsen doesn't any issues with it.

In addition to his 21 wives he has 36 children ranging in age from 6 months to 21-years-old. Dude gets around don't he?

CNN and other news stations have been reviewing some of the documents from the church including what's called the Bishop's List. Basically it's a list of all the members of the Yearning for Zion ranch, their ages, marital status, children and addresses.

Some of the documents that have been released suggest some questionable family relationships as well.