SchadeBLOG

My iPod Video is now officially obsolete.

I knew this would happen, so I’m not surprised. But I thought I had at least a year before it would happen. I bought my first iPod back in November, and another one for my wife for Christmas. Now what am I supposed to do? “I want one” is not a good enough reason to give my wife for spending $400.00 on a music player. What I’d like to know, though, is what gives with the storage limitations? My iPod cost me $250.00 and included the ability to play video and a 30 GB hard drive, which I have yet to come even remotely close to filling up. The new iPod Touch comes with a paltry 16 GB at most? And costs $150.00 more? I’m not sure I follow this logic.

Your wait is over

Microwave Popcorn.

Watch out for the Butt Cam!

I would like to take the opportunity now to announce to the world that on August 8, 2007, my newest son was born to our family.  Adam Keith is his name, and the world better watch out because he’s here to rock. I don’t have a lot of time right now to tell his entire birth story, so I’ll be brief.

No, wait, there’s not time for that.  So let me sum up.

Basically, Adam had decided to arrive about five to six weeks early.  Our little town’s hospital is not equipped to care for babies born at that stage of development, so Mrs. Schadeboy was sent to Tucson Medical Center in - get this - Tucson, Arizona.  She got to ride in the helicopter for this (color me jealous).  I drove, so it took me about an hour longer to get to the hospital.

The short end is Adam was born at 9:35 AM on 8-August-2007.  Being early meant he might have had lung development issues, but he’s breathing well now and looking incredible.  He is 4 years and 1 day younger than his oldest sister, Monkey (this will make birthdays fun, no?).  He’s a trooper, and I will give more details about his very adventurous first day on the Earth later.

I did manage to peak at his diary, though.  Yesterday’s entry said “Day 1 - still tired from the move.”*

-Schadeboy

*My apologies to Steven Wright

I’ve said it before on this blog, and I’ll say it again; I absolutely love ketchup.  It’s the world’s most perfect condiment.  It magically improves the taste of a lot of foods in which taste was sort of left out of the mix (eggs and potatoes, for example) and it gives an extra kick to foods that don’t necessarily need it, but benefit from it anyway (macaroni and cheese, pizza, etc.).  In the opinion of this blog, you can never have enough ketchup.  And so it goes that when I saw this article in the Times Tribune, I knew that it was time to plan a family road trip.

This is exactly why us guys don’t stop to ask for directions.

All I can say is, there’s a guy involved with this column somewhere.

This is pretty sad, to be honest.  I mean, this woman  writes in for some good advice, with a legitimate problem, and what is she told?  She’s told to make sure her vacuum pipes are properly clipped to her inlet manifold and that maybe her fuel pump is faulty.  What editor would allow this to get through?  This really hurts the integrity of this paper.

I mean, she’s not even told what to do to get the fuel pump fixed!  And everyone knows that there’s no such thing as vacuum pipes, let alone that they would be clipped to the inlet manifold.  Geez!  American news media has really gone down the tubes, lately.

And it’s all me…

Warning - this is really stupid.

Okay, most of you by now know that I’m running a little bit of a side business over at Twilight Teez. The truth of the matter is this little business has taken over a lot of my spare time, which is why this blog doesn’t get updated as often as it used to. But it’s taken over a little more than just my spare time. It’s taken over my house. So I had to go buy a new play thing - my new shed.

Actually, it’s not my shed, per se. The company paid for it. It’s just sitting in my back yard. Technically, since I own half of the company, and I own a goodly portion of my backyard, I own half of the shed. My half is the outside of it.

Mrs. Schadeboy gets the inside. Mainly because she’s the one who takes care of most of the administrative duties for the company, including the fulfillment of everyone’s orders. And because she gets the inside, it turns out that’s the most important part. But because I’m the technical part of the company, I get to be the one to build out all of the upgrades we’re making to it.

Now, strictly speaking, there’s nothing particularly impressive about this shed. It’s got a floor, four walls, a roof, two vents, and a window. From an outsider’s perspective, if I were to show it off most people would say, “and…?” But this is not just a shed, but a much needed storage solution. Until this thing is completed, our inventory and order fulfillment center is, quite literally, my living room, family room, and portions of a small storage closet. We have boxes all over the place, and this doesn’t make for a very comfortable environment to entertain. Or even function as a family. A typical conversation in our home lately has gone something like this:

Mrs Schadeboy: Can you hand me that box over there?

Me: Which one?

MS: The one by the piano.

Me: There’s six of them by the piano.

And so on. Needless to say, this kind of conversation gets old very quickly. So it became more than apparent that we needed an actual place to put our inventory. Thus, the shed was purchased.

Now the hard part comes in. It’d be one thing to simply have a water-proof place to put all of our inventory. But we also want a place that can be out of the way to fold the shirts and pack them for shipment. Which means someone will need to work in the shed. And that someone will most likely be Mrs. Schadeboy.

I’d like to remind you that my home is based in a Sunny Sierra Vista. A lovely small town in southern Arizona with a population of approximately 42,000 at the base of a very large mountain range called the Huachucas (you can see their outline in our logo). The problem is, if you know southern Arizona well, you know that we are also right smack in a desert. The word desert is a combination of two Latin words; des which means “place”, and ert which means “that is hotter than Hades.”* In other words, it’s very hot here. And hot plus uninsulated, non-climate-controlled shed equals heatstroke in a matter of six seconds.

All of this to say that my new project with the shed is to get it insulated and wired for air conditioning. I’m also putting in some lights, a phone line, and a data connection. That’s what I did most of the weekend. I had some help from my beloved brother-in-law (who happens to know a thing or two about electricity) and we wired the place up for all of those things. This included digging a 15-foot-long trench from my electrical box to the shed.

Again, I remind you, we are in a desert. Desert not only means hot, but when combined with the word Arizona, means “hot and full of hard dry ground that will cause you to have a heart attack if you try to dig through it.” I was fortunate. I did not have to dig through our famous Arizona Caliche (pronounced cuh lee chay). According to dictionary.com, this stuff is “a surface deposit consisting of sand or clay impregnated with crystalline salts such as sodium nitrate or sodium chloride.” That makes it sound so nice and soft, right? When talking about caliche, the word soft would be like saying that Kevin Federline was a talented musical genius. And I mean that only in the best way possible. Caliche usually resides mere inches under Arizona soil. This stuff will eat you for lunch. I am delightfully surprised that I did not hit a single inch of it. But digging that (naughty word) trench is probably going to be the death of me anyway. I am not anywhere near the caliber of someone like, say, Dog.

So that’s where we stand. We have to wait for the inspector to come by and - I am not making this up - inspect it. Then I can finish off with insulation and drywall (or wallboard, gypsum board, or whatever). Then we can move our inventory into it and then things will really be rocking. Until then, we have to suffer with “hand me that box over there” type of conversations.

*It would be very wise not to use SchadeBLOG as your sole source for word definitions.