i just read where it snowed 20 inches overnight and 4 feet in the last week in vail, colorado. i miss living in a place that has four seasons. hell, i miss living in a place with even three seasons. st louis has two gears, hotter than sin and colder than my dates with erica the monkey girl.

i heard someone recently talking about how they just saw tombstone and thought it was pretty good. i'm your huckleberry, i'm your huckleberry, i'm your huckleberry, they kept saying. no, you're the pain in my ass that keeps saying i'm your huckleberry. catch up arnie grape and call back when you've at least hit the mid to late 90's.

sunday morning, marty and i awoke and groggily exchanged our dreams from that night's slumber.

while doing some last-minute cramming for my class final right before the test, i looked up and realized that we all had lockers next to our seats in the room. sidetracked, i opened mine to find a disaster. i immediately set out to cleaning up a semester's worth of garbage, totally ignoring the professor's announcement that we were changing rooms to take our exam. later looking up and seeing everyone was gone, i panicked since i didn't know where they went. i raced to the department office for help only to find bookguy running things, unsurprisingly. marilyn monroe was sleeping in a chair in the corner of the office. i found this equally unsurprising. so i went over and started talking to her and five minutes later, we're making out and yes you guessed it, also not surprising. as is often the case in my dreams, i suddenly and desperately needed to go to the bathroom. so i fled marilyn and dashed to the toilet only to find it stopped up, no doubt the skilled work of one bookguy. given my urgency i was not dissuaded and began to relieve myself. as many have probably experienced this phenomenon, albeit not nearly as frequently as myself, you know the drill and how it typically pans out. fortunately for the guest bed in my mother's home i awoke in the nick of time and drowsily stumbled to the real toilet down the hall and was consequently spared an awkward lecture from my mother in front of my wife come morning.

meanwhile, on marty's pillow, she was studying for a statistics test, a class which she is not taking. someone told her she could say her baby was sick and get excused from the deadline. she did this. now that she had gobs of time, she was kicking around and passed the school gymnasium. she saw that they were holding basketball tryouts and thought she'd give it a whirl. in her initial discussions with the coach she learned that they only had varsity shorts left and those were therefore the only positions they were looking to fill. she knew her skills would only earn her a spot on the jv team and since she was a senior could not entertain such a thought knowing full-well that e-love would make fun of her in this role. so she instead opted to go out and train her pet dolphin.

i swear, marty's dreams go from being overly pedestrian to wildly fantastic in such a blip. i mean, i was at least making out with marilyn monroe before almost making wee in the bed.

someone once told me that you know you're fluent in a language when you dream in it. last night i was up unitl 5am, or roughly 4 hours ago, working on my java lab final. when marty tried to wake me up this morning, she said i was muttering in some sort of "dork nonsense."

if i was able to successfully figure my lab out, i may think that i'm fluent, but since my Frequency Analysis pretty much never got out of the blocks, i think such mutterings are simply a sign of jello-head, akin to the shivering, pale guy who came a little too close to the supernatural.

i'm glad i get to 'go' to college but equally glad that i don't 'have' to go to college anymore. i feel as though i'm competing about as well as i would in a game of one on one with a college athlete, and if you're wondering, I wouldn't have stood much a chance even when i was supposed to be in college.

saw potter and was impressed. it is one of the more respectable movie translations i have seen. while i don't want to say a whole lot about it, i feel compelled to recant my earlier allusion that it was doomed to suck. now let us hope that the lord of the rings shows up with an equal effort.

food is to thanksgiving as presents are to christmas. stay centered my friends.

We've got film, literature and tales of self-deprecation. How's bout we add some melodic stylings to the mix. Please swing by and visit the newly added What I'm Hearing section of the dearmitt playhouse.

I've received multiple inquiries about yesterday's post. I guess my allusion to our getting the car (me playing with the sunroof) was not telling enough. People were also curious what we bought. So, allow me to elaborate. We did buy the car. For Marty, or more applicably for Bella and it is a 1992 BMW Touring Wagon. It's black with beige leather interior (and that's leather, not pleather), has a full-size spare, heated seats, and looks shiny-brand new.

This car replaces Marty's non-infant friendly acura integra, which is now on the open market. So, if anyone, who is not going to have kids in the near future, is interested in this sporty little 2-door, let me know. We'll give you the family rate of 1% cash back. And, oh yeah, all sales are final.

wednesday night, walt handed me the paper and asked me to call about a car being advertised in the classifieds. twenty minutes later we were in the home of the seller looking at a beautifully preserved european auto. marty kicked the tires, drove it around and listened to the motor. i confirmed that the rear windows went all the way down, played with the dual sunroof and gauged what the instrument panel would look like at night.

thursday morning, marty and i stopped by our local garage to talk about the car with our mechanic, gleb. gleb asked a few questions about it (i.e. make, miles, year) which marty readily answered. he then looked at me and wanting to contribute to the conversation, i added that the sunroof was very cool and had this button which made it go this way and that. he looked at marty who hung her head in a disapproving manner and they resumed their discussion as if i wasn?t there.

regardless of their ill-appreciation for the finer points of a classic car, i spent thirty minutes opening and closing the fore-mentioned sunroof on saturday.

The other day Marty asked me to watch Bella while she attended to some household matters. She popped in this video called Baby Mozart which she said Bella liked to watch. This tape is nothing but a bunch of close-ups of moving images, like clocks and electric trains, to Mozart music. So Bella and I sprawled out on the floor in front of the tube and started watching the colorful antics. About thirty minutes later I hear my name barked in a fairly authoritative tone and turned to see Marty standing by her desk in the next room. When I looked at her she motioned down towards her feet where I saw Bella sitting under marty's desk gnawing on one of the computer power cords which were now in a tangle about bellas legs and waist.

So what I'm saying is Baby Mozart is a pretty good view and Bella's attention span doesn't yet seem to match her father's.

the secret cajun band site went public yesterday. while the site is not quite baked, i guess it's more baked than the previous site. I simply got the order to put it up so up it went. it is still missing some content (i.e. photos, tour dates, order form) but guess most people will be able to figure it out.

if you are looking to burn a couple of minutes, i'd recommend visiting the quotes page. nothing, other than their actual music, will give you a better flavor for the palatial characters that made this musical entourage up. The below picture, from the inside sleeve of the liquid monkey cd, also goes a long way in defining these fellows. The guy on the left is the trumpet player, swamp daddy, and the dancing girl is the guitar player's sister, gaya. Had this picture been entered in the everyman contest, it would have had more than a sporting chance on going home with honors.

i stopped drinking caffeine a few days ago ... again.

yesterday morning i wrote an email to my boss and a few peers disparaging the choices being made by a fellow development group. on this not flattering correspondence, i inadvertently included the manager of the department in question on the sending.

my phone started ringing within 30 seconds.

i'm back on the caffeine ... again.

first, a retraction
i'm just going to come up for air long enough to tell you that i may have spoke to impetuously the other day (11.06.01). as life surely emulates, i tried to fight the good fight in reference to sticking to my tried and true mac os, but only lasted two days before leaving the reliable and steady woman (os 9.2) for that young and lithe hellion (os 10.1). she kept whispering in my ear, telling me of the exotic life we could share. shut up, i would say, audibly might i add, but in the end i found myself gazing into her eyes. her dazzling, binder-blue and feature filled eyes until i did not have the internal wherewithal to fend her advances any longer. sorry 9.2, marry another, my heart has been stilled by this young and fresh damsel i have named desiree.

second, another retraction
multiple people have requested that i raise the allowable entries in the everyman contest from one to more. i initially had it set to three but changed it right before i published because in the event only one person entered the contest, it didn't seem fair to pay them all the jack (for one entry), even though i said i would. bookguy suggested that i raise the number of entries one can make, but say that each person is only eligible to win one award. couple that with my newfound confidence that i should receive at least three separate contestants, i'm ok with raising the number of potential entries. so i'm returning it to three photos per entrant. please feel free to dig deeper and better your chances of selection.

lastly, yet another retraction
while i may not be a photoshop guru, i have used it enough to spot an obvious fabrication. such was the case with the first photo entry received in this years contest. granted a strong clue was left in that i've been in the house where this photo was taken and am pretty sure don knotts has not holiday'd there. while i do not want to stifle any creative ambitions here, blatantly doctored photos may not be the strongest of candidates ... i hope.

It's here! It's here. It's finally here. After missing an incredibly early morning delivery attempt which forced a late night run to the inconveniently located fed-ex office I cracked the impressive packaging to my new titanium powerbook. Marty put it best when she saw the box and said, "I'll see you in a week, have fun." Did I score or what with her?

Pre-loaded with two operating systems, os 9.2 and os X (aka aqua), I knew my work was cut out for me. I will admit that I have adored mac's classic os so much I had problems envisioning what sort of obscene things os X would do to me. I shouldn't have worried. Like most brand new operating systems, this doesn't seem quite baked just yet. After my initial glimpse into it, I can honestly say that it seems as though I'd be leaving an intelligent, centered and reliable spouse of twenty years for some buxom and randy coed whose conversation would smack of Tori Spelling high on juice boxes (it's the straw, it's the tiny straw). So for the moment, I think I will stick to the classic version, using the newer one situationally. You got to leave something on your plate for tomorrow. Regardless of the os drama, this machine is exquisite, simply exquisite.

Excerpt from the 11.04.01 NY Times

This film, unsurprisingly, looks like it doesn't stand a very great chance getting out of the blocks. Originally the work of a single-mom inspired, it is about to be devastated beyond her wildest expectations (which are pretty wild) by those who devised the likes of jar-jar binks. I'm just glad that shakespeare got his words on paper before it had to be co-branded beside a McDonald's happy meal or box of tacos. With that said, don't misunderstand me, this film will most likely do well in the box office, much for the same reason films like pearl harbor and coyote ugly made a dime and titantic ravaged the world. I will not get to into the particulars behind this phenomenon because I'd rather not offend the masses, but those who know what I'm talking about, know what I'm talking about. It just saddens me.

I personally witnessed the demise of Halloween. I remember as a child joining all other young children, pillowcase in hand, forming a human chain/parade on the sidewalks of our community, racing from house to house, screaming, laughing, pushing for position and frantic in our desire to accumulate record volumes of candy. Then one year I recall overhearing my parents talking about the boy who had ...

many people i know are very creative. far more creative than myself. some wish they had a site. other's don't know that they wish that but they do and some are so bizarre they don't think normal thoughts like the rest of us. bottom line is though that they all have things to say and experiences to share. my everyman contest is a vehicle to allow expression for those who may not have adequate channels to vent through.

i have been thinking about doing this for awhile and figured that instead of sitting here at my desk a year from now thinking i should do the same thing, i'd just give it a tryst and see what happens. it's all about experience and thinking about it just doesn't seem to count the same as going through the gyrations, so here we are.

if you are reading this it must mean that you are one of my four visitors and given such bleak numbers, i'd appreciate it if you could direct anyone you know who may be interested in this contest my way. while i'm mentally steeled for a flop or bomb, i'd like to see it succeed, although i haven't yet determined what that means.

saint louis has this thing where you can't get candy until you tell a joke or do some pantomime (trick). Saint louis translates the phrase trick or treat very seriously. I initially hated this, mostly because i know i would have loathed this added pressure and time hit as a child, but i have since grown to enjoy the tradition. Here are some of the more noteworthy offerings this year:

best joke of the night
Q: when isn't a door a door
R: i don't know
A: when it is ajar

most overused joke
Q: why didn't the skeleton cross the road
R: i don't know
A: because he didn't have any guts

worst joke of the night (actually a riddle)
Q: you're in a room with no doors or windows and only a table and mirror in it. How do you get out?
R: i don't know
A: neither do i