Subtle differences, and some funny stuff...

I just got back from a very short weekend in the Chesterton, Indiana area. I have noticed a few more differences between here (Overland Park, Kansas) and there...

1. Overland Park has no zoning. There are stores all over the place. Every other block has a gas station, grocery store, church, or strip mall. In Chesterton and Valparaiso, there are fairly well-defined residential areas and there are also fairly well-defined commercial and shopping areas. The two don't mix much, except in the downtown areas. It seems weird to have your shopping areas spread out all over the place, but that is how they have done it in Overland Park.

2. Aggressive drivers. Both areas have them, but they are easily five times more prevalent near the I-94 corridor. You can't travel from Chesterton to Valparaiso on the 49 bypass without being tailgated and getting the bright lights flashed at you, if you aren't doing 85 in the left lane. If you still wait too long to get out of the way, you will get passed on the right with inches to spare, and get the middle finger. In Overland Park, I can't remember the last time I was tailgated for not getting out of the left lane fast enough, and I have yet to get flipped off. Generally, people in Kansas will even slow down to let you merge. I never thought I would see that, honestly. I used to drive I-94 to work everday, where they only pedal that gets used is the gas pedal until everyone sits in the daily gridlock. Another thing, when someone wants to get past you, they are supposed to follow a little closer than you would like them to, that's how you signal that you want to get past. I don't call that aggressive driving. This "signaling" distance appears to be about 30 feet in Kansas and about three feet in the Chicago area.

3. Overland Park lacks the homey small-town appeal that Valparaiso and Chesterton have. They have nice stuff in Kansas, but it lacks the old-school charm that Chesterton and Valparaiso have perfected. The downtown area in Overland Park is quite crappy by comparison. Pretty, but crappy. Overland Park really has no old-school style, or perhaps it needs a little bit more hillbilly for me to really enjoy it. When all the little "Mom and Pop stores" looks like Target or Kohl's, and none of the floors squeak in the old buildings, it isn't nearly as fun for me. In fact, it's just kinda weird to walk into an old brick building and have the interior look as though it was built three years ago. -Maybe my expectations are a little off. Overland Park is not a small town, so perhaps I should stop trying to think of it as one. It's probably hard to be small-townish when your population is about 200,000.

4. I may have said this before, but I will say it again. There are a million clunkers and hoopdies driving around in Northwest Indiana. You will rarely see someone driving a bucket in this area. I saw a million buckets and POS cars in Indiana this past weekend. You would think that there would be a lot of crapwagons out here in podunk Kansas, but there just aren't very many.

For those who are unfamiliar with my car terms, here is a brief, funny glossary:

Hoopdie: Older automobile, named because it is riding on one (or more) of those tiny little "donut" spare tires that you are only supposed to drive on until you can get to a gas station. I have seen cars (two of them) riding on four donut spares that didn't even match. The donut spare is a also sometimes known as a "hoopdie wheel". There is another variant of the hoopdie, known as a "Ghetto-sled" which refers to a hoopdie automobile that is larger than average, usually a 1970's Oldsmobile or Buick.

Clunker: Car that is in such disrepair that it makes a ton of noise hobbling down the road. It is definitely dragging something, like a muffler or a bumper, or the undercarriage may be skimming the pavement due to a broken suspension. These are most common in the snow belt due to the wonderfully corrosive properties of the salt they use to keep the snow and ice off of the roads in winter.

POS: A little bit of a dirty term, it literally means piece of $hi7. Totally worthless automobile, should have gone to the scrap heap a long time ago but still moves under its own power on occasion. See also: Bucket, Crapwagon

Bucket: "Bucket" of bolts, may have duct tape holding it together or perhaps some fine vintage of bailing wire or clothes hangers. "Buckets" usually are also commonly missing parts off of the exterior of the vehicle and the interior. A missing radio coupled with a missing hubcap, and you are well on your way to bucketville. Add a little duct tape to cover a broken taillight, and you are indeed a bucket. See also: POS, Crapwagon

Crapwagon: My favorite type of road-going garbage barge, a crapwagon is the car that has had zero maintenance in its lifetime. It usually makes a lot of engine noise due to no oil changes and it blows blue smoke at every stoplight. Finer crapwagons may be found broken down along the freeway in any season. My personal favorite crapwagon is the "screaming crapwagon" so aptly named due to the howl that either the engine belts or the power steering pump is blasting out at full volume. Nothing like hearing the beautiful noise emitted by a screaming crapwagon while putting around town in the summer... Good times...

Feel free to add your observations in the comments area.

Lest anyone think I am a snob - you should see some of the crap that I have driven over the years. I write this post from experience. I used to drive a car that would backfire out the intake and shoot flames out the top of the carb. That was a sweet ride, yo. It sounded like this when I tried to accelerate: urp, urp-burp, urp, ka-blam, blam, BA-BLAM!! That was not the only "feature" of that car, it had quite a lot of "character" that I will save for another time.

YAY, Friday!

Here's a picture of my buddy James from our vacation in Myrtle beach back in October. Cutest kid in the world, I tell ya.

Happy Friday!!

It was one heck of a week, but we made it! I almost ran the plant out of two of our most popular products. That could have been disastrous, really. It would literally be the equivalent of Ford running out of cars and trucks in the same week, and all they had left was the vans and some of last year's slow-moving inventory. Anyway, we have emerged once again without shorting any of our customers, which is nice. :) It could have been some really bad times. Bakeries tend to get pretty pissed off when they can't make products for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Another cute James story! (Stop reading now if you are tired of my mushy baby stories.) I have been practicing with James to get him to say "Mama!" when he sees Karen. He would do it over and over again, right on cue, until we actually saw Karen. As soon as he saw Karen, he leaned towards her and said, "Dada! DAAADAAA!"

One more James story: Karen got James out of the bath tonight and he immediately peed all over the floor, laughing hysterically the entire time, and playing in the stream of whiz like it was a fountain. That's my boy, Rip Van Tinkle.

We must fix the budget!

Ours, not the nation's.

Saturday, I was at work for physical inventory and Karen was at home doing some of her own inventory... of our money. She's now put each of us on a spending allowance of $250/month, not including gas, grocery, or utilities. This has been happening since Nov. 1, and I am underspending her by $110. I rule, yay. (think Howard Dean yelling "yeaaarrrrghhhh" here) Most of my money goes towards soft drinks, m&m's, and sandwiches from the machine at work, and Karen bought new smoke detectors and coats for her and James (which almost accounts for the $110 difference). I've picked up a couple of trips to Custards (where we spend about $8/trip), and a dinner or two. I have to say it's very weird being a 30-something on an allowance again. We'll see how long this lasts, my "magic credit card" finger is getting itchy... Oh, and Christmas presents don't count. I think I am getting "me" lots of stuff soon. :)

Reality check...

Karen and James were out of town last week, leaving me to fend for myself. Actually I had a big project (install ceramic in the upstairs spare bathroom) to keep me busy while I was not at my normal job. After working hard all day at my job and then coming home and working hard at installing the tiles, I was ready for a reward. I decided that I needed some ice cream. I headed over to CUSTARD'S LAST STAND, the best ice cream joint I have ever been to. Upon ordering my ice cream, I thought that the girl (a very pretty young thing) was perhaps being a little flirty with me. I left the ice cream store with a little extra bounce in my step, thinking that a pretty young girl was giving me the eye.

The next day I went to work in the morning and told the story to my assistant. She looked at me and said, "Since you were probably wearing your dress pants from your work uniform, she probably thought you had money. She was flirting because she wanted a tip."

I know what I am getting my assistant for Christmas: A whole lot of nothing, sucka.

Additional funny!

We usually raise our voices and say "JAMES" when James is being bad. Lately he has been up-ending his dinner plate onto the table, eliciting the raised-voice "JAMES" response from Karen and I every time he does it. This afternoon, James turned his plate of veggies over, emptying his veggies onto the table and then he loudly announced "JAMES, JAMES, JAMES". He cracks me up.

News and more news!

MY FRIEND SCOTTIE IS GETTING MARRIED!!! He asked Melisa to be his wife, and she accepted! Congratulations you two, I am totally psyched for you guys!

Scottie also asked me to be his Best Man!! I have been friends with Scottie for a long time, and this really means a lot to me! I am very honored and really excited that he has asked me to participate in sharing the day with them! I can't wait for the big day!

I wanted to talk about this as soon as Scottie told me the news, but I was afraid to spill the beans, just in case someone hadn't heard about it from him.

A little bit about my life. Karen and I started the adoption process through a place called "Independent Adoption Center" located in Indianapolis. The neat thing about the independent adoption center is that the birth mother gets to pick the couple that will be adopting her child. We are going to put together a letter for women who are making an adoption plan for their child. The birth mother selects the adoptive parents from the letter. It is also an open adoption, I.E. after the birth of the child, the birth mother (or biological parents) can stay in contact with the child if they choose to do so. We will probably be adopting a domestic-born baby, since we probably couldn't afford to adopt a baby from outside the US. I (we) just hope it happens soon!

Back to being myself again...

After several months of really struggling at my job, I seem to have a few more things figured out and I appear to be swimming instead of sinking. I feel much better about my job and I am much happier these days. Just thought you should know. Instead of an upset stomach, now I have a sense of pride that I am capable of doing my job. It was really scary for a little while there, but things are looking good lately. Now, if I could just figure out how to get the efficiency so high that I wouldn't have to make the guys work every other weekend, I would be very happy. That would be nice. My conscience gnaws at me pretty heavily for making 200 people spend so much time away from their families.

I still feel horrible that the plant manager lost his job this week. I really hope he is okay. I know he took pride in his job and I feel awful for him. I only worked with him for a little while, but I gained some respect for him in that short amount of time and I still have that respect for him even though he is no longer my coworker.

$2 a gallon?!?!

Okay, what gives? Why the hell is gas back to two dollars a gallon? Is this in light of the recent inquiries launched against the big oil companies? I think we need to investigate the makers of really sweet cars to see if they drop the prices too.

In other really strange news, the plant manager where I work was fired this week. He worked at the plant for something like 27 years. That scares the hell out of me. He is a nice guy, too. He is definitely in my prayers. It was definitely a shock to almost everyone.

I have some really exciting news! Karen and I just started the process of adopting a baby! We are very excited about it and we hope it happens quickly as we would love to have another little one to love. Wish us luck! I wonder if it will be a boy or a girl???

New internet connection!!!

We are finally getting a DSL!!!! I have been a dial-up user since 1992, and I am finally getting a high speed connection!! I can't wait for my line to be installed!

I will probably wonder how I ever got along without it.

It seems weird to me that my son will never know what the world was like without a computer or the internet. My, how times change... Remember the days when books were more than just entertainment?

One of the schools in this area doesn't even use textbooks any more, the students have PDAs to carry all of their info on. Imagine if you forget to charge your PDA and you lose your homework, all of it, along with all of your textbooks, and your databases, etc... Weird.