2/1/21 Don't California Our Texas?

     I absolutely love this new slogan, and I hope it gets through the knuckleheads leaving that former nirvana known as California and making a fresh start in our beloved Texas.  I don't have a huge problem with the people moving, if I lived there and saw my state falling apart and the cost of living gradually get out of control, I think at a certain point, I would be thinking of doing the same.

    I did think it was ridiculous a recent article came out about some dude trying to make the move and improving his lot in life at the same time.  As I heard about it last week, this guy was whining that Texas was not all that, in fact, it wasn't that cheap and some of the other factors were not worth his time.  I just heard another news story about this "Bro" and he moved back, I say good riddance to bad rubbish.  In the story he talks about moving from a 2000 square feet house in California to one of over 4000 square feet on one floor in Bee Cave, here outside Austin.  First off, that is where I have wanted to move to, but it always just seems out of the range of affordability, house prices are in the median range of $650,000.  That is about $200,000 more than the median in Austin proper.  He is not being honest in comparing houses if he doubled his square footage either, come on, Man!  Doubling is of course going to double your consumption of electricity, and I heard he had something like 6 kids, stop fucking you're not a blue ribbon bull that we need so many of you around.  I am sure your growing family adds to the cost as they continually grow bigger and more demanding, Numbnuts.  He also complained of the heat, the property taxes, the people not being as friendly, and even the fact that he had scorpions on his property.  Fool, you moved to a house in the hill country, probably to a new property, think of what had been on that land before, sorry for the inconvenience.

   I wish the best for people who come here and look to ass tot he value of the community, but remember why you left your shithole of a state.  We don't need more liberal thoughts flowing out here, drive around town, it's the liberals making the city look shitty, with all the homeless people under the bridges and road intersections.  It is the liberal thinking that is going to increase our property taxes yet again to pay for a railroad system that as far as I can see, runs empty 95% of the time.  I have ran into the little train that runs people up north crossing the road in front of us, and there will be a handful of people sitting in them, awesome use of a billion dollars, geniuses.  That same mentality will now be spread down tot he south of Austin, so in twenty years, we'll see empty trains running around town, wasting tax resources, but whatever keep them liberals happy.

1/31/21 Revisit Gremlins On TV With Baby A?

     We have been occasionally watching old movies that we consider important or that were big hits with Baby A if not for their entertainment value but to fill in the holes when we make some obscure reference or quote from said movies.  This has been almost more fun for Wife and I because Mijo is not like Boy, this one tells you exactly what is going through his mind as the thought comes.  Boy could be on fire and it would take him a few minutes to eventually say "maybe I need some water, if you don't mind."  I love my boys but they are very different.

    Last night we finally watched Gremlins which Wife had recorded sometime around Thanksgiving.  First, it was weird with all the Christmas commercials, we hardly even watch regular TV anymore, it seems quaint that the movie stops to go to commercial every ten minutes, I guess it's what Youtube does on its longer videos.  We did enjoy the breaks since we were eating our dinner, then washing the dishes, I even made a low carb chocolate brownie to eat with some low carb ice cream towards the end of the movie, the commercials worked for me.

    The movie does not really hold up, and our son let us know from the beginning.  The father going down into the basement shop in Chinatown, Mijo was already "No! No! No! You don't go down some weird hiding place with some kid that is dragging you off the street, what the hell!"  He was then not impressed with Billy, the protagonist kid.  He already seems overwhelmed with life, with going to school and working to help support the family.  Taking the dog to work and hiding it under his teller's booth seems far fetched too.  Wife was trying to say how cute Gizmo, the mogwai creature at the center of this story, is, but Mijo was not having any of that.  He never liked Furbies or any little furry creature toys and he certainly found no charm in Gizmo.  I have to admit he looked very mechanical, the whole nose and mouth section looked plastic, in today's high production value animatronics.  Our son was then yelling at the TV about the three simple rules and why would the idiot kid eat on the bed so close to the mogwai if he can't get wet, why allow the other kid so close with his glass of juice and he certainly didn't like Striper even before he turned into a gremlin.  The idea that the scientist would be in the lab, in a high school, at 2:30am was also ridiculous and after seeing it appear out of thin air, why wasn't he calling other scientists?  Why were there classes on Christmas Eve?  All this before the gremlins even started their mayhem.

    I think towards the end it just gets ridiculous and we just stopped judging the things that wouldn't or couldn't happen and we enjoyed what the movie was trying to do, somehow showing that gremlins are real and not just something "crazy people", like Billy's neighbor, talk about to explain when things go wrong.  It is absurd that the gremlins understand electric circuits for city streets, know what guns do, learn how to pronounce words as they go along, but there we were along for the ride.  Baby A took a little pleasure in watching the gremlins all die, but he didn't really think Gizmo should be so protected as he was the cause of all the trouble, he should probably have been exterminated too.

1/30/21 We Be Composting?

     Wife started talking about how we were going to get a composting bin a couple weeks ago.  I tend to ignore stuff like this because it ends up being work for me.  Well, it arrived last night and as I see it, now we have three trash cans to worry about.  I thought it was bad enough to separate the paper/cardboard boxes and gradual things that have been added to the list over the years.  But, we all love Earth, so we do as we're told.  Now, they have instituted a composting component to our trash, I had heard that the goal is by 2030 or something like that, we will be sending 0% of our trash to the dump.

    Along with the composting bin, really a small green trash can, looks like the brown and blue ones, we got a booklet which explains what goes in this can.  Mostly, we are to put anything that was at one point alive in it, whether it is leftover food, grass clippings, small brush, spoiled foods, and the like, even say pizza boxes will be able to be mixed with the compost, oh yeah, and for the 2-3 people that still get a newspaper, that can go in there as well.  I thought it odd that the notes said that an animal carcass did not belong in this compost bins, I guess if somebody kills a dog accidentally, it is not to be placed in these bins.  I guess that makes sense, but what if we cook a pig and we have a lot of leftovers, this should be ok, right?

    So what does this extra work going to save us?  Nothing really, we will already be charged $2.50 more, but all they have to do is say it's for the children... and Earth.  Supposedly, if we transfer over enough of the trash from our regular bins, we can reduce from the bigger brown trash cans to the medium or small ones and save an impressive $300, yearly.  I'll believe this when I see it.  Same with the recycling efforts, we get charged a little bit, someone is making money off that trash, does the city benefit somehow?  According to the pamphlet, the compost will be then sold back to us, double dipping in our pockets, the American way.

    I guess it is a good idea to reduce the trash we produce, but they can also get the food manufacturers involved.  Stop using stupid containers, like styrofoam which does not decompose, or multi material containers, like when we would buy toys in a cardboard box, with a big plastic see thru panel.  The plastic wasn't supposed to go in the recycle bin, so we either had to go through the trouble of tearing the two apart or just saying F it and throw it all in the regular trash.  I guess progress comes slowly.

1/29/21 Huge Stock Market Scandal Being Handled Quietly?

     I almost hesitate to write about this mostly because I have yet to fully understand the stock market, but the drama and ramifications are too good not to discuss.  In the last week or so, it seems a bunch of underground "little guys" got together via Reddit and took a stand against the big money hedge fund managers who normally use the stock market to make themselves rich and richer.  These are the sons-of bitches that quietly make hundreds of millions of dollars a year, yet don't add any value to society by creating anything new.

    The game, as I barely understand it, was that the hedge funders decided to "short" the stock for Gamestop, the video game store, when they saw its price hovering around under $20.  As it was mentioned in one of the many stories I saw yesterday, once these piranhas pick a stock, they then put out an article talking about how bad that stock is doing and how it is a dead player in the market.  This usually prompts others to then react and sell their shares, so it drives the price down even more.  The complicated part was explained on Ben Shapiro's show last night.  Let's say stock company A holds the shares, well the hedge fund managers decide to "rent" the shares for a short time, I reason it is called a short because it only lasts a month or so.  To rent, they might pay the company $10, as Shapiro said, to make the math easy to follow.  Now that they "own" the shares, they start hoping the price goes down.  People buying or owning shares at the start of the month might have been at $50 a share, and if the price goes down to say $20 a share, the hedge fund people make $30, minus the $10 they pay to company A who really holds the stock, and the hedge fund people walk away with $20.  Well, when Reddit got involved and started buying shares, instead of the price going down, they drove the price up.  Now, instead of the hedge fund people making a little money in the loss, now they are holding something that is worth up to $400 a share.  This is legal, but the hedge fund people are on the hook to company A for the difference the stock has risen plus that $10 fee.  This was a beautiful explanation because I did not understand how or what "short" meant.

    The result, I guess as the month is ending is that some of these hedge fund managers owe billions of dollars which they have to pay.  The stinky part in all of this is that yesterday Redhand, an ap on people's phones which people can use to buy and sell stocks as well as e-trade and the other access points to the stock market online all decided to "freeze" buying of these (Gamestop, Nokia, and a 3rd stock were all being played this way) stocks, but they were nice enough to still allow people to sell their shares.  Who benefits in this manipulation, the hedge fund people, of course.  It was actually amazing that both republicans, such as Ted Cruz and democrats like AOC both got together and condemned this vile activity.  On the surface it sounds illegal as hell, I mean this is outright wrong and there is no way to paint a pretty picture on it.  Of course, there is already notification that Janet Yellen, the new Biden Secretary of the Treasury was gifted $800,000 by one of this wall street groups, so you know how this will play out.  Biden himself has yet to address the issue, but the poor guy doesn't know where he is at most of the time, I believe.

    This is literally a modern day David and Goliath story and although we are all supposed to be pre-disposed to root for the little guy, in today's fucked up world, there are already whispers I see in some tiktoks and short videos protecting and siding with the wall street people.  The Reddit people did nothing wrong, they got information of activity in the stock market and played to it much like people are supposed to.  The stock market does not belong to the upper class billionaires and rich fucks that "play with money" daily.  According to the stories, many Reddit people got rich yesterday doing this, and if the stock was bought at a lot of $4, where it was, and sold at near $400, all I can say is wow, congratulations.

1/28/21 Allergy Pills Work?

     Apart from being a fat guy and all that, I think I am pretty robust, hardly ever get sick, I have some body aches, but I think all people do as they age.  The one thing I have never liked about my state is my sinuses, which either show as a runny nose or snot collecting in my throat.  I'm not sure what could be done about it to fix it, but I have tried some simple things and they don't do much.  

    Last night, for the first time in a long time, I went through the night without having to blow my nose or deal with phlegm and I have to think that taking two generic Claritin pills helped.  I had tried taking one in the past here and there when allergy season starts, but they never seemed to do much.  The last time I went to a doctor, I rarely go, I know that isn't good either, she told me to try and take two allergy pills to see if it helped since I am so big.  I might have done it and not noticed much or maybe it was a different allergy pill, we always buy the generic knockoffs because they are all made the same, fuck paying for name brand.  Last night I got tired of my constant runny nose and decided to buy some new generic Claritin.  I know if Wife had been by my side she would have said "Don't!  We have some in the cupboard, meee meeee meee...." you know how women go on and on because they know everything. 😁  For some reason, I wanted new medicine and since I was not being babysat, I got it.  My allergies are so bad, even in my dreams, I am dealing with a runny nose.  I've been in the middle of orgies, probably because I fall asleep with the computer on Pornhub, and even in those dreams I am having to deal with a runny nose, I know, first world problems.

    I won't get into the specifics, it is rather gross, but after I took the two allergy pills last night, I deliberated between sleeping on the bed, I have been having a lot of lower back pain, or sleeping on the big chair in our bedroom.  It was only midnight, early for me, so I decided I'd sit and look at Tiktok videos until I got sleepy.  I fell asleep and didn't wake until 5:45am, the longest I have slept consecutively in about a year.  I am constantly waking to go pee and blow my nose.  I also wore socks because I can sleep uncovered but my feet do get cold and the socks were awesome.  I need to try this combo again because it was pretty awesome to sleep solid like that.  I know, I'm a fat fuck, I know that losing weight will also help in all of this.  I am back on the diet and have already shed 10 pounds from Sunday night to this morning.  It might be all water retention blah blah blah, but I need to see some gains to inspire me to get on it.  Like I said, I know what I am doing, cutting out the carbs can't be too bad for me, other than diet soda, everything else I eat is healthy food.  I refuse to take diet pills, that is a scam, the only downside to this diet is that protein is expensive, but as the biotches on Facebook constantly say, "I deserve it".

1/27/21 Baby A Earned His Letterman Jacket?

     Our son got a notification from his coach on Monday that he qualified for a letterman jacket.  I think this is cool and a great motivator for the time and energy he put into the game.  As far as I understand and what I have read, letterman jackets are given for participating in varsity level activities and our son did manage to play on the varsity team of his school this past year.  It was a tumultuous season, to say the least.  First off, he didn't do much preparation all summer because we had been saying he wasn't going to go to school in person, due to Covid-19.  Then the coach put out the message and of course he got all excited and I guess we fell into it because we like seeing Mijo happy.  It was a weird about face on all our parts, even my folks had been lecturing us to not let him play, it was too dangerous, only to have him go out, along with his younger nephew in 7th grade and even my niece go out and support as a cheerleader.  For all my parent's fears and consultation, they were out there watching the games, as best they could.  It might just be a football thing here in Texas, I don't know, but it is an awesome feeling to see your kid run out on that field and fight for school honor, and a jacket.

    I said tumultuous because not only did he not know that he was going to play and didn't do much training in the off season, but he was put on the varsity squad but barely got into any practices.  He was very much a back-up role in the beginning of the season and kept wondering if he would get kicked off the team and sent back to the JV squad where most of his classmates were.  He took some harsh criticism from the coaches who did not hesitate to bust his ass to play harder, but that him a better player and we saw that from the first game where he got on the field for two plays to the end of the season where he was starting on both sides of the line, playing offense and defense culminating in him being chosen for 2nd Team all-district honors at the end of the season.  To think he got recognized here in central Texas, on a 5A team where a lot of big schools play, I think is a high honor.

    I just wish the little knucklehead would listen better.  He said the coach told him he could go pick up his jacket today, so naturally I got all excited at the idea of going to pick up some gold colored jacket with a cool ass Cougar showing on the upper right breast and maybe even his name, figuring the coaches would order him a 2XL jacket, but no.  We went to campus and they had the order form on which to order said jacket.  There are so many nuances to make that it almost seems too confusing to do it at home.  He can choose about 6 different fonts for his name to be written on the back, being Hispanic, for some reason, he already chose the classic Old English lettering, and it goes from there, such as what other sports to add, he can upgrade to leather sleeves for an additional $75 and so forth.  I guess we will sit with Wife this weekend and figure it all out.  Either way, congratulations to my husky boy, he sure works hard for his team.

1/26/21 Getting Back On My Diet?

     I kind of had the discussion with my mom and brother about "dieting", he doesn't like the word, per say.  I know it's not the best way to describe what we are doing, but "eating better" sounds kind of douche-y to me.  I put on so much weight over the last month, I don't even want to say, but I am going to say it's not all my fault.  I fully intended to take the two weeks of Christmas off and just enjoy whatever came in front of me, as far as food goes.  I hate going to my folks and in-laws and have them worry about what we can and can't eat, I don't like being a nuisance that way, but the reality is that we are home most of the time.  Then right as I was going to get back on track, I got the 'rona and that had me locked up in my room for another two weeks, so I have been off the diet over a month and probably put on 25 pounds, but I was really bad the last two weeks.  I couldn't leave the room and I found myself waking up to coffee and some cake or cookies, then some plate of breakfast, usually three tacos with egg and something, then later in the day a lunch or dinner and throughout the day chips, nuts, and whatever else they brought into my room.  I knew all of this was bad, but when you are stuck in a prison cell, it seems like the only thing to do is eat and sleep.

    It is now Tuesday and I just finished eating lunch with Mijo here at home.  I love the notion that I can fire up that pellet grill, and thirty minutes later be eating a grilled steak.  Part of the reason the grocery bill is consistently over $300 is because I usually get a pair of NY strips, ribeyes, sirloins, some burger patties and then maybe some chicken or pork for the two of us, apart from what we eat as a family on the weekends.  I love having my son home, it helps that he is a homebody and doesn't really miss the school atmosphere, he has gotten used to online learning.  I don't know that grilling for me alone will be as satisfying when we go back to normal and he returns to school.

    But for now, I ate my lunch yesterday and then just the routine of work and stuff kept me busy the rest of the day.  I showered, ran to the bank, took him to school to pick up some paperwork, stopped to get him Bill Miller at 5:00pm, then headed to work.  Before I knew it, it was 2:30am and I came home, ate some winnies with some cheese and went to bed.  Staying busy definitely helps in the not eating process.  My brother worries that the weight will come back once I get off the "diet", but I don't really want to change back to eating all the carbs, it is just easier while I was sick and you have to enjoy egg nog and all the Christmas goodies while it's the holidays..  The only thing I do miss is pizza, but we have a low carb version we eat at Mod Pizza and that works for me.  I don't think we will be getting off the routine of how we eat for a few months, maybe in the summer when and if we go to Florida for the Disney parks, if Covid will just go away.

    Maybe it will take me a month, but I'll get back to the 350s and continue working on myself, this was not a setback, it was me being sick.  I felt so much better at the lower weight, that in itself is motivation enough to get back on it. I want to approach 300 by the summer, so I have my goals set, now to just shut up and do it.