Flyover Blog

Funny stories

Ok here's some funny stories I've heard lately...

A guy I work with usually has some funny stories about his girlfriend who is a caregiver. Recently she was leaving a senior center that cares for those with Alzheimer's disease. They all loved her there and decided to throw a going away party for her. Most of the seniors there were confused as to whose birthday it was. So they all lined up and she explained that she was leaving and that's the reason for the cake and ice cream. Lot of tearful goodbyes as she hugged each one and explained to them what was going on. By the time she got to the the end of the line the people at the start of the line asked "whose birthday is it?". After wiping her eyes, she said "oh it's John's birthday" :)

Another guy at work has a dad who starting to suffer from Alzheimer's and recently got upgraded with a new television set. His son worked with him on how to work the remote to make sure he doesn't forget how to use it when he wasn't there. So one day he gets an angry call from his dad complaining that all they have on tv is spanish speaking people. He said he called Fox TV and complained that the last time he checked the United States was an English speaking country, why must they keep airing spanish speaking shows! His son calms his dad down and said dad you must have pressed SAP on your remote and turned on spanish audio. He starts telling his dad how to change it back. He says ok dad press this button and tell me what you see on the screen. To which he responds angrily I don't know all the words are on in French!!

Since we're on dads here I have a funny one about my dad. When I was young I would ride with my dad during the day as he made the rounds of checking up on the buildings he was building. He loved wearing what were called shooter's sunglasses. They were large with a gold tint on them. He always had them on during day while outside. Anyway he stopped off to submit a building permit and I told him I was gonna hang out in the car and listen to the baseball game on the radio. About 15 minutes later he comes walking back across the parking lot with one of the lenses of the sunglasses missing! I started cracking up since he looked so .. wrong I guess is the only thing I could describe it as. Imagine these big bronze glasses with a whole lens missing. I said dad what happened to your sunglasses? He says what's wrong with them? I said one of your lenses is gone. He takes them off and says holy geez no wonder all those people were looking funny at me.

The guy with the girlfriend in the first story told me his dad sends his emails always typed in caps. He said he's tried to explain to him that typing in caps means you are shouting and it's not friendly to write that way. So he goes home and the next email is sent correctly in mixed case. Then he slips back into the all caps mode. I said maybe he doesn't know it but he's hitting the caps lock key. He said no I doubt he is aware there is a caps lock key, he's probably holding the shift key down the whole time. In fact he was so sure of it because he has to explain to his mom anything complicated about the computer since it just doesn't seem to stick with his dad. He said he got a call the other day from his day complaining that the computer is messed up again and can he fix it. So he say well have mom fix it, I showed her how last time. His dad pauses and says well your mother is afraid of the computer, she won't help me. He said what? What do you mean she's afraid of inanimate object, surely she's not afraid of things like that. His dad pauses again.. son your mom is afraid of the VCR too. To which he responds point taken.
 

Sticky keys suck

Who was the moron at Microsoft who decided to enable the sticky keys feature on Windows anyway? Anybody in their right mind puts specialty features of an operating system in a corner that needs several keystrokes and mouse clicks in order to enable it. The stupid thing is that there's a place to turn off sticky keys yet it stills comes back if you press a key too long. Total crap. I say we find out who this pinhead is and send him or her off to Greenland to live out the remainder of their sorry ass life.

Oh and in case anybody gets stuck in sticky key hell, just press both shift keys at the same time to turn it off.
 

Stories take one

Ok here's some stories I've heard lately --

My friend Gregg (who seems to have a deep well of stories) has a collection of robot figurines. He's been collecting them for quite awhile and displays them on bookshelf. Some you would recognize right away such as the robot from Terminator and others not so much. The one robot he's been wanting for a long time is the one from the TV series Lost In Space. When he was 7 his mom bought him the robot for xmas. Being the kid with the engineer hands he decided to go ahead and take it apart to figure out how he worked. Well he pretty much destroyed it in the process and it was deposited in the place where all of Gregg's toys that had moving parts went, the trashcan. So move forward in time and Gregg scours ebay for another copy of the toy. But this is a rare toy and usually goes into the thousands so he's never been able to find an affordable one. One day he decides to send an email to somebody selling a copy of this robot. He goes on to tell his sad story about having one as a kid and tearing it apart, how he is now an engineer and works on his beloved robots for real, etc. The lady writes back and explains that her husband owned the robot and recently passed away and she was selling off his toys. He was an engineer like Gregg his whole life and apparently the story touch this lady. She said she thought her husband would have wanted this toy to go to an engineer who would really enjoy it like him so she sold it to him for whatever the price was at that point which was around $300. So when he received it he took a picture of himself next to the robot and scanned a picture of himself as a kid next to the robot on that xmas long ago. Gregg had to laugh since he realized when he was 7 he was wearing a red sweatshirt and blue jeans that day and he had the same outfit on for his recent picture the robot. Whats the chance of that?!

Happy birthday to me

Today's my birthday! I'm 42 (yeah, answer to life the universe and everything). I just dropped Annette and Kenzie off at the airport. They go to Florida every year with Annette's dad and relatives. 10 days of the beach is just too boring for me. So I'm home alone. I feel kind of guilty but I'm really enjoying it..haha. Ah absence makes the heart grow fonder right? Annette bought me a Bruce Springsteen box set for my birthday. Actually I'm not a big fan of the "Boss" but I really like the Born To Run album a lot. It's easily in my top 10 favorites albums. It never gets old, can listen to it anytime. It's chock full of poetic lyrics, great melodies and the E Street Band really hit all the notes together on that album. Classic. Anyway the box set is a 30th anniversary of the Born To Run album. It includes a remastered version of the album itself, a dvd of a concert they did in London in 1975 and a making of dvd. Right now I'm watching the concert film. Funny seeing Bruce without the muscles. I like that version better, reminds me more of a regular joe who could write amazing songs.

Anyway I don't have a lot of plans this coming week by myself. Plan to head over to my mom's tommorow morning for a big breakfast she promised she'd make me for my birthday. Always reminds me of growing up, it's a good feeling. Tuesday the guys at work and I are going to the Cardinals game. They are playing the KC Royals, our cross state rivals. One of the guys is from KC so it should be fun. However they just played a 3 game series in KC in which we lost horribly. It's depressing to think that it was just last year we won the World Series and can't even play above .500 this year. Whenever we play the Royals most Cardinal fans are reminded of the ugly 1985 world series in which the Royals beat us with the help of bad call by a first base umpire. I also might try to catch an independent film that Webster University runs every week at the Schaffley Bottleworks bar. Have yet to go to one but I'm gonna try to make one this coming week. I'll see if my movie friend John will meet me there. On Friday I'm going to take my mom with me to visit the Art museum downtown. They are having a Napoleon Bonaparte artistic history display. It's supposed to show the art created during the period of his reign and how the ideals of the French Republic influenced it. Sounds interesting.

So that's what coming up but what's been going on with me? Not a whole lot which has got me kind of bored as of late with a lot of stuff. I've returned to the gym and enjoying it. Although tonite I took the night off for my birthday and sit here and watch videos, eat pizza and play on the computer. Happy birthday Craig! Work is steady, just churning out code, very successful. I tried to break the boredom by writing some of my own code. I developed a screen scraping app of my favorite usenet binary compiler site. I made use of XSLT technology which I've been meaning to learn for some time. Turned the whole app into an rss feed and can now stay on top of what's going down on usenet. Even added filtering so I don't have to see all the crap that is posted on usenet most of the time. I started finally watching all of the back episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Really enjoying it. I'm half way through season 2. Some of the storylines are a bit predictable, but I guess that's because I do watch/read a lot of scifi and after awhile the stories get rehashed. I'm really holding myself back from just watching the rest of the season in one sitting. I pretty much did that with season 1 when I stayed home one day with a cold. I ended up dreaming about the show..haha.

Well not much else happening. I've got some ideas to keep blogging later on. I hear a lot of funny/sad/inspirational/etc stories from other people that I think I'll go ahead and share here. So look for those soon.