Tom’s Rant

In the 80’s I traveled to Rome, Italy when I was stationed in Germany.  During the trip, we were walking back to the hotel from sight seeing.  A taxi whipped to the curb in front of us, and one of the folks on our tour stumbled out laughing.  She asked us if we’d ridden in a taxi yet.  We replied that we hadn’t .  She said, “oh you have to ride one.  Even if you’re not going anywhere in particular.  It’s like a roller coaster!”

Bogota reminded me of that trip, but it was Sandra’s Dad who was driving.  He drove busses in and around Bogota for 30 years, so he knew what he was doing.  That helped me feel safer and also added to the fun.  He had the mad skilz to out-maneuver anyone and did it as a matter of course- things that would end up in someone getting pummelled due to road rage here barely incite a horn blowing in Bogota.  Over there, you expect crazy driving.  Here it’s pretty rare.  If you’re reading this thinking, “you must not drive around where I live, buddy,” trust me, whatever you think is crazy driving where you’re from (if it’s in the U.S. anyway) forget it.  You ain’t seen nothing.

I have a small example of what the motorcycles will do out on YouTube. I tried to embed it here, but that didn’t seem to want to work, so you can view it by clicking this link.  Here’s another one that shows even more. 

The motorcycles are pretty cheap.  You can pick one up at the local Exito (think Super Wal-Mart) for about $1500.00 U.S.  Riders are required to wear a vest that shows the license tag number of the bike they’re on.  Sandra told me that this is a result of all the killings in the late 90’s by the drug lords- they’d show up on motorcycles, do their thing and take off- no one could ever get the license tag because they’re so small on the back of nimble bikes.  Now they’re very obvious. 

Here’s another amazing thing:  If you live in a big city in the U.S., you’ve seen the window washer guys- they run up with a spray bottle at a red light, spray your window, wipe it with a rag, and then look expectantly for payment as if you’d asked for the service.  Well, Bogota has the same type of thing, but there’re more and it’s a bit different.  I saw the window washer guys- they had the same routine with one difference- they asked if the person in the car wanted the window clean.  That’s huge because rather than trying to guilt you into paying something, they negotiate the transaction.  Roads in Bogota were very dusty and cars get dirty quickly, so I’m sure business was brisk.  Sandra assured me that these guys would not show the same courtesy (asking first) to a woman, but in all cases that I saw (a whopping total of probably 5 minutes of observation time through the course of my trip) that never happened.

Ok, here’s the other difference between the panhandlers IN the streets of Bogota and the ones in the streets of Atlanta or pretty much any other major U.S. city.  In Bogota, you can buy a dang meal right from your car at a red light.  There are guys carrying around all sorts of stuff to sell and they walk right between the cars, whether it’s a red light or not.  I couldn’t believe it.  Here’s a picture:

The variety of things they had to sell was pretty cool.  They have pretty clever ways to attach all that stuff to themselves as they maneuver through traffic.  Amazing.

On 15 September, I married my sweetheart Sandra who is from the country Colombia.  She came here in 2000 when things were really bad there.  I met her on E-Harmony and, well- she couldn’t resist my amazing charm and rapier wit- not to mention my chiseled body.  Actually I was taken with her from the first time she ribbed me about an excruciatingly long e-mail I sent her.  Her relaxed humor was the first of an avalanche of attractive features that had me chasing her around like a puppy.

Skip forward to October of this year.  We went to Bogota, Colombia to meet her parents.  When I mentioned to friends that I was going to Colombia, they were all startled- “what?  are you sure you can go there?  Have you checked the State Department website to see if it’s safe?”  Well, frankly, I was a bit worried myself.  I told Sandra jokingly that I wanted a kevlar vest and a rifle when we went, but Sandra assured me that since I was with her I’d be fine. 

The State Department warning about Colombia is pretty foreboding, though, so I was quietly worried.  I wasn’t sure how it would be- my mind had me attacked and kidnapped minutes after getting off the plane.  My dark fantasies weren’t helped by my reading Killing Pablo(great book, though!).  I tried to dampen that and just look forward.  Her parents and her younger sister live there- they’re fine- I’ll be fine too. 

 By the time we left I was ready.  Heck, I wanted to experience Colombia as a Colombian.  Eat all the local food, take the local public transportation (the bus system is WILD there) and whatever else is typical to Colombia.  What the heck, right?

 We flew out of Atlanta in the late afternoon on 8 October.  I boarded the plane with a mix of excitement and apprehension.  At this point, I’d gotten over my fear of going to Colombia.  Now I was worried about what her family would think of me.  Somehow, I had lost that age old worry when I was wrapped up with the idea of where I was going.  Now I was focused on WHO I was going to see.  Oh boy.

I don’t speak Spanish.  At All.  Sandra’s parents speak zero English.  Ok, so that’s issue one.  During the summer I tried to ask for permission to marry Sandra on the phone with her father.  She said the words and I repeated them.  The problem was, he did not reply simply with “si” or “no.”  He said something.  To this day I don’t know what it was.  He didn’t sound mad, so I just assumed it was a general “yes” or “what the heck” or something like that. 

So that was weighing on my mind.  I’m usually pretty talkative, but would Sandra be able to translate what I said?  What if she goes off with her Mom and I’m sitting there with her Dad?  Oh boy.  I had spoken (sort of) briefly with him on the phone.  He was very terse and to the point (whatever the point was- I didn’t understand it).  I had seen pictures.  Although he was always smiling in his pictures, I sensed a look in his eyes that said, “get your gringo hands off my daughter, boy.” 

As we flew, we looked at the flight path on the little tv screen on the back of the seats in front of us.  We passed directly over Medallin and I looked around to see if anyone on board looked like a Cali drug lord (Pablo blew up an entire plane trying to kill one).  That moment passed without incident and we proceded quickly into Bogota. 

Customs was a quick and painless.  I was getting more nervous by the minute, but I didn’t have time to think about it too much.  Suddenly we were standing before Sandra’s family.  She exclaiming and hugging, everyone hugging and shaking my hand and me not understanding a dang thing that was being said.

 I decided just to nod and smile.  That seemed to work.  When I ended up nodding at something I probably should have shaken my head at, Sandra would intervene with a translation.  Poor Sandra was a trooper.  In a moment where she wants to lose herself in conversation with a family she hasn’t seen in a year, she was very careful to make sure I was included- at least peripherally.

So, we loaded up her Dad’s little Chevy Spirit and her sister’s car and headed off into the cool Bogota evening.  All of my apprehension and fear drifted out the window as I stared at the sites of one of the oldest South American cities.  Bogota was amazing to see.

more later…

Wow, I was looking around for a picture of someone running around like crazy or a chicken with its head cut off for this post and I found a true story about Mike the Headless Chicken. 

A skillful blow was executed and the chicken staggered around like most freshly terminated poultry.

Then the determined bird shook off the traumatic event and never looked back. Mike … returned to his job of being a chicken. He pecked for food and preened his feathers just like the rest of his barnyard buddies.

So, back to your regularly scheduled program.  I’m trying to buy a dadgum house but the VA appraiser, who should be working on my behalf, is being a total pain in the butt.

 My back yard…check that…the back yard that will hopefully be mine today has a shallow gully that is caused by run-0ff about halfway between the house and the back of the yard.  It is nowhere near the house and is only about 1 foot deep.  He calls it dangerous and says it must be filled in before he’ll sign off.

The lender did not bother to read the appraisal and I found it yesterday when they sent me a copy.  So I went out there yesterday with a pick up truck full of dirt.  It’s funny how dirt looks very voluminous in the back of the pick up truck, but once it’s on the ground it looks like someone just threw a bag of potting soil in there. 

So, today I’m waiting for a company to go out there and dump a dump truck’s worth of dirt in the hole.  We’re trying to get the appraiser to go out there and sign off on it even if it’s not all spread out yet.  That way I can get the keys and move in.

On top of that, the 2 kids I was going to pay from church to help me move can’t do it.  A buddy who told me yesterday he could help has now backed out.  My roommate is going to help me even though he has 50 gabillion things to do this weekend.  AAAAAGH!

 Here’s the point I’m getting at:  I just sat down to breathe a little bit before starting to get things packed and down to the garage preparing for the move tomorrow.  I turned on some music- specifically Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat.”  Peace just washed over me.  It’s amazing what music can do to calm me.  You know, it’s just a bunch of coordinated noises.  What is it about it that affects us?  I don’t understand it, but I love it.

Ben is sitting here at the table with me.  He’s drinking coffee and I am too.  Yeah, my 7 year old is drinking coffee with me.  I’m living on the edge.  Get this:  We’re about to go to church too.  That’ll be a challenge- both kids have a whole cup of coffee and then an hour and a half of church.  Oh yeah.  I live dangerously.

So, Ben said that an egg shell (I had a boiled egg for breakfast) feels like “plastic glued together.”  That’s how my knee feels right now.  Not the plastic that is tough and resilient- I’m talking about the kind that they use to make 88 cent toys out of at Wal-Mart.  The kind that you drop and it shatters worse than glass.

Thursday I started a church softball league.  So far it’s very cordial and considerate- like you’d expect fine upstanding church folks to be- not like “Church League Softball Fistfight” by Tim Wilson (if you haven’t heard it, click on the title and then click “view it” on the screen that comes up- it’s hilarious).  We’ll see, though.  If my knee keeps looking like a pumpkin the next day I might become a bit ornery.

 Heading to practice today to try and overcome my tendency to hit the ball into the outfield. 

“What’s wrong with that,” you ask?  Well, it’s a little known fact that the outfield includes that area behind the plate where the catcher is.  if you manage the difficult task of popping up just enough so that the catcher has to stick his hand in the air (not even unbend his knees) to catch it, then your hit is definitely in the OUTfield.  Yeah, that was a lame joke.  Heck, you should’ve seen the hit.  I was swinging for the fences though, by-golly.

I’m sitting out on the porch with the laptop just watching the sun go down.  Well, I’m actually watching these letters go across the screen, but every now and then like riiiiight NOW! ……. I stop and look up at the sky and the budding leaves on not quite fleshed out trees.  There’s smoke hanging in the air.  It reminds me of years ago when a friend of mine’s house burnt down.  I mean it burnt to the ground.  It was a beautiful night, but there was tragedy right in the middle of it.  It’s weird to consider, sitting here on this deck with the fading light of a glorious Spring day.  Something bad is happening right down the street somewhere. 

Getting kind of morose, aren’t I?  There’s just stuff like that going on all the time.  I remember when my Dad died.  We were at the cemetery, standing there as they lowered my Dad into the ground.  I looked up to see cars passing down Ponce DeLeon avenue in Clarkston.  There they went.  They had no idea what was going on.  I had an incredible urge to run out there and stop them.  “Hey!  Don’t you see what’s happening here?!!!”

It did hit me, though, that those folks were either moving away from the same event I was at or approaching it.  There’s nothing new about it, and hey, it’s coming.  Know that.

“You can’t stop what’s coming.  It aint all waiting on you.  That’s vanity”

So, that’s why, for this minute- this one right here- forget the ones I’ve wasted before, forget the ones I’m going to waste later- this minute is being savored.  It’s a good one.  It’s getting darker quickly now.  It feels like every minute or two, someone turns down the dimmer switch a little more.  You can see it get darker in chunks.  The sky to my right is orange through the trees.  It’s not an awe-inspiring sight, but it’s well worth looking at.  There are a few bugs zipping through the little strip of pale left over there.  I can hear a bird chirruping in the quieter parts of the song I’m listening to on my phone (yeah, it’s not a total nature scene, ok?  I’m a geek after all). 

Thank you God for good moments like this- especially when I can wake up to them. 

This is what balances what those folks are going through down the road with the burning house.  They’ll be here and I’ll be there at some point in the future, I guess.  The good thing is, in moments like this, it’s hard to imagine anything bad happening.  I’m blind to it.  Ignorance truly is bliss.

I love taking pictures of the food I prepare.  I don’t know why, my kids think it’s weird.  OK, most people think it’s weird.  However, I find it fun.  I don’t have my pictures up online right now, so you can’t see them, but I have TONS of pictures of food I’ve cooked.

I think there is beauty in food.  Fresh picked tomatoes sliced and laid out with a dusting of salt and pepper, or hearty rosemary - olive loaf with a dark brown crust torn open and steaming from the oven- eating good food like that is not the only part of the experience.  It’s nice to see it too.

Here’s last night’s dinner (I pulled the skin off the chicken of course ).  The carrots have cinnamon on them, btw…

…and speaking of hearty olive loaf:

Colin and Ben are in the foyer playing Battleground: Crossbows and Catapults.  After his first shot, Ben exclaimed, “See?  That’s why I love this game:  There’s a whole bucketful of destruction.”

LOL- that’s my boy.

Meanwhile, my arms feel as if they’re going to fall off.  I had a pretty good work out today.  I have not been making it to the gym as much as I was before.  I’ve been keeping up with at least twice a week (this week I made it 3 times), but that’s  been pretty much it.  Soccer season is on, so Saturday morning is out, and I can’t go Saturday afternoon when I have the boys unless my roommate is here.  No biggy, I’ve been getting in there fairly regularly.

I’ve grown kind of  bored with the cardio regimen.  The elliptical machine is pretty boring.  I’ve got to download some more music to my phone.  That seems to keep it interesting, or at least make it so that I’m paying more attention to the music and less to the elliptical.

  I wore out the blankety blank $130.00 blue tooth stereo headphones I had in less than a year, so  I’m back to wired headphones.  What the heck.  They sound better anyway.  They do tend to fall out of my ears if I bounce too much while I’m on it, though.

Man, my arms hurt.  Did I mention that?

So, I’m on Weight Watchers Online for Men now.  Not sure what’s different about the “for men” part of it, but whatever.  Maybe they have stuff on there like “kick @ss salads” and “tough guy tofu” or something.  Haven’t read through the recipes too much. 

I’m doing the core program which allows you to eat certain foods - all you want of them- and you get 35 points per week to use on stuff that’s not on the list.  The list is pretty good too- any chicken as long as it’s skinless, pork as long as it’s trimmed, etc.

Well, I’ve been keeping an honest list of what I’ve eaten.  This week, I’ve gone 96 points over my limit.  Yep, that’s after counting the 28 points I got back from working out and the 35 points that I was allotted to begin with.  Less than stellar beginning to be sure.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though.  I’ve been eating PLAIN oatmeal for breakfast, and sick as it is, I like it.  My brother told me that he liked it once, and I had to work hard to prevent my sausage egg and cheese biscuit from coming up for an encore visit.  Still, I figured, a little vurp action with my morning fat bomb would have been preferrable to PLAIN oatmeal- even if I only had to taste it going down.

Well, lo and behold- I ate it every morning this week for breakfast.  Plain oatmeal with a light dusting of raisins, a pinch of granola and 2 or 3 dried dates (ok that’s not exactly 100% plain, but whatever) and I’m good.

For lunch, I ate veggies almost every day.  All veggies.  No meat.  Yeah, I know.  One day for lunch I even ate tofu.  It was manly tofu, though, complete with grill marks and enough spices to make me sweat, so back off.  Then, I was in the grocery store and found these bags of veggies that you can just throw into the microwave and heat.  You don’t even have to bother to poke holes in the bag.  Man, that is right up my lazy alley.  Open door, toss, close, punch buttons, open door, rip, dump, eat. 

BUT, the raisins dates and granola cost me points.  Not many, but a few.  I guess the thing that probably got me was Wednesday night when I ate a complete Large Papa John’s Tuscan Meats pizza.  That came to 90 points.  Yeah, that wasn’t such a good idea.  Then last night I ate 3 breaded chicken patties on 4 slices of bread.  Multi-grain bread mind you.  Ok, I was out of buns or those bad boys would have been on buns.  I skipped the mayo, though- that counts for something, right?  LOL

So, the battle rages on.  I’m at least seeing what I eat.  That is a good thing. 

Ok, I’m new to the wonderful world of WMI.  I work with HP’s uCMDB, formerly known as Mercury Application Mapping.  We discover Windows servers with WMI.  We have a situation where the service pack information we have in our database is incorrect.  I’m trying to determine if this is a problem with MAM or a problem with WMI.  I know how to get into WMI (wbemtest), and I know that I use that little query language that is like SQL, but I don’t have a clue what the column name for service pack is, or where to find it.

I have searched on the MSDN site (using Firefox because IE crashes everytime I go there- go figure) and haven’t come up with anything useful yet.  Lots of stuff that dances around what I want to know, but I haven’t found the mother lode yet.  I know it’s out there. More later on that and other MAM stuff too.  It’s a great tool, but it has some frustrations, lemme tell ya.

Well, so far I have a crappy little logo over there.  I gotta work on that some.  This is the third iteration of TomsRant.com.  I exported the last wordpress blog I had and tried to import the database, but GoDaddy said it’s too big.  I tried to find a program that will split it for me (i.e. freeware) but I haven’t had any luck so far.

 So, I’m getting antsy to start blogging and here goes.  If I figure out how to load those other posts, I’ll do it eventually.  Heck, it took me so long just to get back around to getting this site set up that who knows when that’ll be.

 I still have some more things to do on the site like fix the logo, add a blog roll, etc.  I’ll get around to it eventually.

When I started this earlier today, I was all in the mood to blog.  Now I don’t really have much to say.  At least it’s all set up. 

Can anyone guess where my little tag line comes from?  A Bucketful of Pride to the person who guesses that correctly.