howard’s life

well it’s actually july 3rd today but you get the idea.

this means (at least to me) that it’s the time of year i start paying a little more attention to baseball. this weekend has a yankees/red sox series and that’s always fun to watch. yesterday i watched tampa bay and boston. i think tampa bay is NOT going to fade. and i don’t care how much the red sox win, i do NOT think Francona is some great manager.

yesterday’s game was a perfect example. tampa bay has a lead after Delcarmen and Hansen suck and can’t get a single out between them. but boston’s coming back in the ninth. they’re only down by one run and Youkilis had just taken Weaver to the warning track. so the sox have one out and Lowell on first. this is a GOOD place to be when you’re trying to come back.

so what does Francona do? he puts on a hit and run play. Lowell’s got what? ONE stolen base all year? and Varitek is at the plate. you would be hard pressed to find a WORSE guy to make contact. What did he have last year? over 120 strikeouts? and he’s going at a better pace than that this year with over 60 strikeouts so far and barely a .300 on base percentage. Lowell gets nailed at second by a mile. Varitek completely misses the ball with a terrible swing. and Varitek follows up by striking out to end the game. the sox would have been better off with NO manager. Jeez. doesn’t the guy even know his own players?

i like tampa bay. no stars really except a hurting Percival but they come through when they have to. Garza was a good pickup and a couple young guys are playing very well (like Longoria…i think he looks like a real nice young player…especially after watching him when he has a day like yesterday). i would not count them out anytime soon. they look like they believe in themselves and that’s a big deal.

i’m also going to give my opinion (once again) on alex rodriguez. i don’t blame him at all for skipping the home run derby. it DOES fuck up your swing just like he says. i like watching it but here’s a guy who is the best player on his team (easily). he’s hitting 321/406/621, which is a better than average year for him, a great year even in the steroid era, and if he thinks the home run derby will fuck with his swing, i’m inclined to believe him. he’d just be causing harm to himself and the yankees by participating. and btw, if he wants to sleep with Madonna and get a divorce, that’s his call too.

speaking of calls, call us at Bay City Blues Phone Sex somewhere in between burgers and beer while your holiday barbecue is going on and nobody’s paying good attention. My recommendation for this week’s phone sex call is the All-American Amy, who can help raise my flag any time she likes.

Later all

howard

[Show as slideshow]

click on the picture for a nice large version.

i thought i would share this picture since it looks pretty cool. i got it in email, so it’s probably been circulating and a lot of you may have already seen it. but i like it anyway. it’s marked that it was taken at the north pole with the moon at its closest point, and that you can see the sun below the moon. i don’t know if it’s real or photoshopped or what, but i think it’s pretty neat.

when you’re done, go check out the world’s finest Phone Sex, brought to you by Sexy Tonya and her hand picked phone sex experts!

howard

hi everyone. just checking in.

you’ll notice i added a link. Chef Crush brings you cute chefs from the Portland metro area, and i wouldn’t be surprised to see the area covered continue to grow. everyone knows food is special. here’s the special guys who deliver the goods, as chosen by one special group of crush girls (crushers?).

nice day today. beautiful outside, so we took a ride to the coast and got to eat clam chowder at Mo’s. if you haven’t been there, i recommend it.

i managed to tear myself away from the golf tournament. i really wanted the guy to beat Tiger and win, but it was like you KNEW that no matter what he did, Tiger would find some way to beat him. Mediate made it interesting but didn’t surprise me by coming up just a little short.

Don’t forget to visit my honey’s site at TonyaJoneMiller.com, and then don’t forget to call her or one of our other hot phone sex ladies at Bay City Blues Phone Sex.

later all.

howard

At work, Bay City Blues, we have a page we call “Suggestion Box,” where callers can leave us suggestions for things they might like us to include.

So yesterday I start getting these notes in the suggestion box “oh your so hot” “oh you prabably even look hot on your way to work” and so on. Complete with misspellings. Well they’re cute but I have no clue who the person thinks is hot or why they bothered. (Mind you, this happens a lot. The suggestion box collects a lot of crap.)

Anyway, after a few of these, the dispatch phone rings. It’s a kid. No sign of his voice changing yet or anything like that. Cough, cough. Tries to make a deep voice. “Hello. I’d like to hook up with suggestion box please.”

I couldn’t even bring myself to be mean to him. Unrequited lust is practically as bad as unrequited love if you’re 12 years old.

Later all!

howard

ok i see. the tags are all screwed up. or to put it more accurately, they’re kind of gone.

i’m going to have to change the tag cloud to a different plugin. but i seem to have lost all my tags from previous posts.

oh well.

i’ve been so busy that i haven’t had a chance to write much of anything in here recently.

i figured out how to use nextgen gallery and even installed the smooth viewer which was kind of like installing a plug in for a plug in.  i used this site to test it.  you can see how it works at the Philately page. I put in a random group of covers. You can see it working at Tonya’s site too. I don’t think, however, I can call the smooth gallery viewer from within an “album.” So if i wanted to have multiple galleries i think i have to use the regular nextgen viewer. that’s what i used in helping make a couple of galleries at work. don’t click here sydney and melanie.

i feel badly that jim is upset with me. i loved lois a lot. i’m sorry he thinks i’m somehow being…hell i don’t know…bad in some way to her. i just try to deal with it truthfully. i don’t know if her family ever even admitted to people that she committed suicide. at her funeral they didn’t. i don’t know what they did later. i’m sorry her parents passed away too. i admit i have problems with stuff they did, and that i think they caused a lot of issues for bill and lois and…well for others too. but they were good to me in their way. especially her dad. and i’m sorry for jim and his mom and everyone for their loss.

i’ve been busy with the stamps too. it’s actually very rarely stamps. it’s mostly covers…envelopes that have been used. we do a lot with air mail covers too…ones that were on early or special flights or have good stamps ON them. those are fun. we buy ‘em too so if you have something, send an email.

my brother’s been away so i’ve just been plugging away at my part of it. but when he gets back i think we’re going to have some interesting work to do. time to look at material i think. and i think we’re going to see if we can make something good out of the website. we got offered a decent looking storefront and setup with a shopping cart and easy item control and so on. it looks super easy to naviagate and to use from both our side and customer side so i think we’re going to talk about that when he gets settled. i hope he has a good time. he’s stressed out and i don’t blame him. hope her bags showed up too. they had been there a couple of days already and her bags were lost somewhere…aren’t airlines fun…

i’m going to actually go away from the computer for a little while now. if they let me. if i come back maybe it will actually be to look at a new beer recipe. it’s time already. or maybe a new barbecue grill…..

later all

it’s easy to get worked up about loss of privacy when you can blame someone like the government.  oh they’re taking away our privacy they’re snooping on us they’re listening in they can search whenever…and so on.

but i’ve started to consider the changes…and loss of….privacy which we are bringing upon ourselves as a culture through our own choices.

i keep a blog.  i feel this desire to share things and i want to be ’someone’ i guess in some way or why would i write it at all?  it isn’t just about advertising something.  not for me anyway.  indeed too much of that in this blog can mess with things in all kinds of ways.

i went back to new jersey this past week and saw my dad and my brother.  i’m working more with them now and truth is i’m excited about it.  but i don’t feel comfortable talking about it in any kind of detail out here.  family interactions are always complex.  i don’t want to lay them out here in detail for the world to pore over.  it just isn’t everyone’s business.  and it wouldn’t be helpful to me in any way i can figure.  and it doesn’t really matter if our family interactions are great or terrible or interesting or whatever.  they’re complex.  like most of the world.  so i’ll leave it out.

if i write too much about Bay City Blues then maybe I upset my sister in law or brother because their kids might read it. and it doesn’t matter if i think they’re right or wrong or sideways. it’s their call. and i don’t want their kids banned from reading my site. plus if i talk about plans or things going on at work maybe i’m handing stuff out to competitors or moralists or who knows what. so i’ll cut that way back.

if i talk about our business with the stamps maybe i invite people from the other business world to come and give me a hard time there. well who needs that? so i’ll skip over that.

well suddenly i’m leaving out all these big parts of my world.

i can tell you how much i love Tonya. there’s a hot flash for you. but truth is i don’t want to bring you into our private lives any more than you would want to talk to ME instead of her. if you know her from that perspective. so i love her. and i’ll cut it right there for now.

and now i feel as if *I* am doing something wrong because i’m not telling everyone about my life. here–i’m too busy to run the radio station. there aren’t enough hours in the day. so i cancelled the broadcast package for now. i need a new cell phone. the girls suggested the LG enV. i might get it. i’d like to walk more frequently. we’re talking about forcing ourselves to do so. i’ve eaten fruits and vegetables and organic food for a couple days now and i’m still here so i guess i’ll keep trying.

but i’m not really spewing my private life out here, am i? and i don’t intend to. so why do i feel as if i’m somehow shorting anyone who might read this? assuming there are more than four or five of you. i think it’s some societal thing that says i’m SUPPOSED to spew my life out there. like that moment of truth tv show. come and tell your deepest crap and destroy people so you can win. at least they get money. here i am feeling guilty and nobody’s gonna pay ME for messing people up.

i can see feelings like this changing from the simple act of me feeling guilty about a failure to lay myself open. I can easily see them becoming expectations on the part of others that we will ALL do so. followed by disapproval of someone’s failure to do so. and the history of people who do things in america which are disapproved of by the majority is not a spectacularly pretty one.

i think maybe it’s time to consider that privacy isn’t always taken away. sometimes you give it away. i think maybe it shouldn’t be given away so easily. to a government or to a cultural pressure.

there’s my mood for today. take it for what it’s worth.

howard

been a long time since i wrote anything in here so i’ll sit here a little while and let things come to mind. right now i’m watching clemson try valiantly to catch north carolina. don’t think they’re going to get it done though.

vacation was great. i needed one and i’m glad Tonya got to go on one finally too. for a bunch of pictures and a much better description than i could ever write, visit her site at www.tonyajonemiller.com. i got to read five books and have no phone and no computer and be alone with my honey and i couldn’t have been happier. i kind of forgot how much i like visiting different places.

i’m a lousy traveller. grumpy in the airports and uncomfortable on planes (not afraid. just uncomfortable. at least i don’t seem to get motion sickness much anymore). impatient everywhere else. but once i get to places i love it. i hadn’t gone anywhere in almost five years and now i just want to go go go. i don’t think we’d go back to jamaica again anytime soon, mostly because it leaves a bit of an ick taste after you see how poor most of the people are and compare it to the money you KNOW is coming in, but it’s a big world out there and there’s plenty of places on our list now.

oh by the way we have a new promotion going at work in honor of ex governor Spitzer and his prostitution hobby. i myself can think of worse hobbies to have. but our country’s morality clearly isn’t up to me. hehe indeed i guess they’d ideally reinstate stocks and flogging and punish me in public if we let the puritans continue to decide stuff for us. for our promotion, you can go directly to www.baycityblues.com/promos.htm. If you just want to visit us, (shameless link and plug follows) come on in the front door at Bay City Blues Phone Sex. For those of you interested, that’s called anchor text…the words that you click on there…and it’s supposed to catch the attention of search engines. though i’m beginning to wonder if the thing that catches the most attention is advertising (or being wikipedia, the obvious source of all true knowledge. sigh.)

i just discovered that i somehow managed to miss the latest highlander movie. though it’s out on dvd and…there you go…i just asked Tonya to add it to the netflix “queue.” good word. queue. much fancier than uh…list? anyway now i want to see it. i’ve seen not just all the other movies, but every (not kidding) highlander tv show made. i owned (damn i wonder if i still have it. i doubt it.) the highlander chronicles on dvd. this was cause lois just loved the damn show. she actually went on a highlander CRUISE for crying out loud. made friends with the amputee dude..man now i have to look up his name…Jim Byrnes…who played Joe Dawson the watcher. i can’t imagine how adrian paul is not going to look older. he ages terribly for an immortal but what do i know. anyway maybe i’ll finally find out WHY there can be only one. i always wondered why there couldn’t be two..or three…sigh.

i’m going to be real busy soon with the stamp business i think. we have a lot of material and a lot of potential but it’s going to take some real organization and setting up to make it grow. and both of us (my brother and I) enjoy it and want it to grow. we need to hire people now i think. among other things. i started a site (though i don’t like it and it’s going to change) but there’s a lot of stuff to do and some of it is going to require running back and forth across the country.

i knew clemson would lose.

i have a bunch more to say i’m not even done with the stamp story but we’re hungry and my honey’s ready so i’ll be back later. i PROMISE.

me

tomorrow night there will be a total lunar eclipse which will be visible in all of the continental united states. the west coast will miss the beginning of the eclipse but will still get to see totality.

the next total lunar eclipse will be on december 21, 2010. and that won’t be visible from north america. the next one you can see in north america will be on december 10, 2011. so if you’re at all interested, it’s worth remembering to look up tomorrow evening.

a lot of information about it can be found at http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/LEmono/TLE2008Feb21/TLE2008Feb21.html.

take pictures. they can come out looking really neat.

later.

i’m thoughtful at the moment because anger is not the proper response.

bay city blues started because of one particular night when i was dealt with in what i considered a very incorrect manner.  this was at a place which at the time was successful.   and i said to myself well if that’s how they work i can do a better job.  i was looking for something new to do anyway.

and we never did that to anyone. 

until tonight.

it isn’t going to happen again.  but it means i have to reconsider what Tonya and i have here right now.  and we have to discuss what we are going to have.

the anger that i have is at myself.   bay city blues will never again do what we did this evening.  i can’t have that.  it won’t work for me. 

forget me.  i won’t have such actions associated with Tonya’s name.  that’s more important.

only one person is still here who remembers the story.  maybe that person forgot.   i will remind that person.  Tonya knows the story but only as a story.  there are people not affiliated with us who may know it.  i’m not sure.  perhaps it’s only important to me.

but it will not ever happen here again.  it caused the place to exist.  now it’s going to cause it to change.  and if the change needs to be dramatic, so be it.  i lived through a lot of crap to get to where i am now.  i can tolerate a lot more than i used to be able to tolerate.  i cannot tolerate this.  and it is going to cause me to rethink what we are and make a new plan with my honey. 

sorry if it’s cryptic.  but the truth is this blog is for me.

howard