The shoe-tying part of my life has finally been consumed by sheer laziness. A while back I bought slip on shoes for church. Although the time savings is not actually all that significant, the mental effect is substantial. I feel like I'm getting ready faster, which makes a big difference when you have to be to church at 8:30a. The comfort factor should not be overlooked, either.

Alas, this only lasts for a few hours on Sunday mornings. During the week I am plagued by dangling shoelaces. The shoelaces get caught in the wheels of my chair, they get stepped on and they come undone. Correction: I was plagued! This last week I found some shoes that fit like regular shoes, but have no laces. Sure, they look a little goofy but who cares? I don't have to tie them! Plus, they're comfortable.

To call the content of this post graphic is all very relative. Compared to what you're used to from this "family-friendly" blog, this is very graphic. This subject matter is not for the squeamish; however, by reading this post you may be able to help me scientifically explain what's going on. The text of this post is not particularly disturbing but the accompanying image will surely cause your hair to stand on end.

I have a hair on my face - one, single hair - that is much larger than any of the other hairs on my face. It grows on the right-side of my chin about an inch below my lower lip. To say that this hair is larger does not do it any justice at all. To really understand you need to view this image. The two hairs shown in the image are labelled appropriately and were harvested at the same time. One was not given unfair advantage to grow more than the other.

What could possibly cause this? As far as I know, this is something new for 2003. I don't recall ever having this condition previous to this year.

Lest any of you think that I have used trickery, I have taken the two hairs shown in the above image and laminated them. If you ever want to see them in person, just ask.

There's no good reason to ever tell anyone about this except to bring you personal enjoyment and satisfaction at my expense. While at lunch today I had a slight mishap. Everything started okay - I had some food and ran an errand for work. The enjoyment turned to horror as I was driving through the parking lot at work.

The story starts earlier than that, though. Any good nerd can tell you that hard drives contain very powerful rare earth magnets. When hard drives go bad we like to take them apart and extract the magnets. I had some bad drives at my desk, which I had already removed the magnets from. It was these magnets that I held in my hand as I drove through the parking lot.

For reasons still unknown I put the magnets near my face while they were separated. For other reasons unknown the magnets slammed together on my lip and quickly began sliding, pinching my bottom lip between them. Before I could react, the magnets slid completely off my lip, but not before seriously injuring my lip in the process. My lower lip appeared to be badly damaged and bleeding, but strangely enough no blood actually escaped. It was much like a blood blister on my lip and it hurt very much. I iced it for a while, which caused much of the swelling to go down and the bloody, gashed appearance to diminish somewhat, but it still hurts.

The moral of the story is to keep magnets away from your face because they will hurt you for reasons unknown.

So on Friday night I was headed to Walmart to pick up a few things. I pulled out of my Garage and noticed a car on the street. I stopped in the driveway to let the car pass, but the car stopped. I pulled out and headed up our street. As I turned the corner I noticed that the car behind me had sirens and then all of a sudden they flipped their lights on. The rent a cop pulled me over because he says I had no rear lights. I'm thinking, It should its a brand new car. The rent a cop proceeded to tell me how to put the in park and to pump the brakes so he could observe the rear lights. " Ohh the lights work" he says. I told him that I flipped on the lights as I was driving down San Joaquin. He walked back to his rent a cop car, obviously mad or embarrassed. Man I wonder what he would have done if I was not wearing my seat belt? Nothing.

I finally watched it. All in all I think it lived up to my expectations; however, there were a few issues that bothered me a little.

First, there were too many bad guys and it was too hard to tell who was really the bad guy. The one who appeared to be the real bad guy (Talbot) did not appear in the movie for more than a few minutes and was killed well before the end of the movie. The other bad guy was the general. He was the confusing bad guy. He seemed to show compassion toward the young Bruce Banner (in a flashback shot) and even showed some desire to help the present Bruce Banner. He had a sense of duty, though, which required him to "eliminate" the danger of the Hulk. Although it appeared that he wanted to be a good guy at times, he never shrunk from the idea that he wanted to kill Bruce. Bruce's dad also appeared to be a bad guy. He seemed to show a lot of love for his family at first, but then tried to kill young Bruce to stop the thing he created. Again, as an older father, he tried killing Bruce's girlfriend for seemingly no reason. At the end, the dad becomes the super bad guy and Bruce is forced to battle with him in the final struggle of the film, which leads the viewer to believe that dad is really the real bad guy and the rest are just supporting bad guys. It was just too much.

The final battle between good and dad was a little strange, too. When the Army nuked Bruce and dad/real-bad-guy (who is no longer a human), Bruce miraculously emerges unharmed, but dad is killed. How exactly does that happen? Dad had sucked most of Bruce's power and combined it with his own, which made him even stronger. Dad was able to take on the properties of anything he touched - rain, water, lightening, rock - so wouldn't he have taken on the power of the nuke, too?

All criticism aside, it was better than I thought it would be, but not as good as it could have been.

Well I am having a pretty non-productive day a work, so my hubby suggested I blog. What about I dont know. It is getting close to our ward Primary Program and I am stressing out. Do to our lack of children in our ward we do not have alot of options to make the program interesting, so its "say your part" and sit down, (pretty boring). All the kids have 2 parts maybe three if some children do not come on Saturday for the final rehersal. I will be glad when it is over. ITs almost a new year so it will be good to start over with the new theme, oh and hopefully more familys will move in.
Tonight is "the Bachelor" I am hooked on this show. Ever since the show started with Alex and Amanda I have been hooked. This season is not my favorite though, I think Trista and Ryan is my favorite followed by Andrew and Jenn. Yeah this is my trash show. Not very moral like, not something a PRimary representative should watch but, oh-well. I hope BOB picks Merideth! To bad she has already been dumped.. So ya Ill be watching bachelor nad Brad will watch "Big ugly thing" in the other room.

After a bad week of movies last week we finished the week off well. We went to see Elf, which turned out to to be an excellent film. In fact, this movie was so good that it actually countered the embarrassment I felt for "Revolutions". I definitely recommend this one...

To make things even better, I finally got my hands on Hulk. I took the lame movies I rented last week back to the video store and finally acquired Hulk. I hope it lives up to the standard that I've set for it. I haven't watched it yet, but hope to soon.

I had plans tonight to have some fun (possibly by watching Hulk), but my dreams were soon shattered when I went by my dad's shop to look at a computer problem. I was stumped and spent several hours on the issue until I finally just left to take a breather. I went up to to the NLCN (No Library Card Needed) cache. I've been there once before at night but was unsuccessful in finding the cache. This is embarrassing because it is rated as a very easy cache to find. Anyway, I had some difficulty finding it tonight, too, but finally got it. Emilie was at Enrichment Night, so it was as good a night as any to have problems finding an easy cache and fix computer problems...

I'm back at my dad's shop now finishing up the computer stuff. I found a suitable workaround, so I'm leaving. Finally.

This week was vegetable week. I spent most of my spare time watching movies and not doing much else. My work days have been very long, so it was nice to sit back and vegetate; however, I made some grave errors. It started when Hulk came out on DVD. I tried to find it at the video rental place, but was unsuccessful. I went back several times at different times of the day, but never got my hands on it. Feeling the need to watch a movie, I just picked a couple out, which turned out to be a huge mistake.

The first movie that I watched of the two that I rented was Holes. It was horrible. It was rotten. I'm ashamed that I watched it. It was exactly like every other horrible, rotten live-action Disney movie I've ever watched. It was Rugrats bad. Seriously.

The next night (Thursday) Emilie and I went and "heard" about a movie at the theaters. It was The Matrix: Revolutions. From what we "heard" the movie did not live up to the first two Matrix movies that we "heard" about. There wasn't enough fighting - only a brief scene towards the beginning and then the big one at the end. Even the big fight was not that big. The movie consisted almost entirely of the sentinels attacking Zion and Zion fighting back. It went on way too long (from what I hear). The worst part of the movie is that the story abandoned the complex, intricate universe that was created in the first two episodes. Perhaps the makers of the movie were trying to illustrate the Occam's Razor theory. I'm glad the trilogy is over and that we know how it ends, but next time they should ask me how I want it to end.

Two let-downs in two night. Too bad.

Well after months of dealing with Subaru of America and Lithia Reno Subaru we have finally got our car. We went in on Nevada Day and purchased a car as a replacement for our lemon.
The car is very nice, nicer than our previous car, but after all the stuff that went on these last 5 months, I think it helps get over all the problems we went through.
I personally will never return a car under the the Nevada Lemon Law again, it is not worth the anquish that goes along with it. The car manufacturers loose alot of money when this situation happens, but they still want to make a buck off you so they will do anything to make that buck. In this situation we fought untill we made a buck, and about a buck is all we made.
It has been a big relief for me, I have been like ten times happier in the last 3 days than I have for awhile. A big stress is now been released, and it feels good.