Still chillaxin' and doing much of nothing, but wife ordered a sofa and it arrived today in a number of boxes. Luckily it required minimal assembly and withing 20 minutes I was done and the dog was sleeping on it:


Meanwhile... one of the cats couldn't fight the urge to sit in every box she sees, no matter how small:

We played poker with the brothers and sisters-in-law our first night at the river. I did very well (too bad the chips weren't real money). Did I mention that my mother-in-law bought a poker table? Yeah. She's an enabler. See the cards? They're from the MGM Grand casino in Vegas, from the 1970s. An aunt found them at a yard sale and gave them to me a few Christmases ago. It's two decks in a cool slide box.

I'm at my last day of work for 2008!!! I am very excited to have the next two weeks off.

I'll still be posting all over, but it should be more like the goofy old days, about random crap.

For instance, this is awesome. Las Vegas is more likely to have a white Christmas than we are in Virginia:

Record Snowfall Hits Las Vegas

When we were there it merely rained one day and there were over 30 accidents! I imagine the entire city has pulled over with three inches of snow.

Hey, I know this blog has been neglected. On one hand, I blame the full-on embrace of Twitter. When I can say it in 30 words or less, why bother trying to find a topic worth blogging? On the other hand, I've kind of felt like this recently:
I only have THREE more days of work this year, then I'm done until 2009. I won't do a full roundup of 2008 yet, but this year has been good to us. Laura's job picked up, we got Kirby, we both stayed healthy, Laura's mom is finally almost better. We made it to Vegas for the first time!

On the sad side, I lost a grandfather (mother's side) and a grandmother (father's side) in a period of one week, bringing a truly shitty end to the summer and dropping my number of grandparents from three to one.

We are really looking forward to this break. All of Laura's sisters will be together, with their respective spouses, in one place, for the first time since October 2007 (last unmarried sister's wedding).

Finally, you know what? Since I think maybe four people read this blog, and most of them are also friends on Facebook, I may as well do something I've never done on this blog before... post of pic of myself. Here I am with my better half from New Year's Eve a few years ago:


In closing, I'm doing well and feelin' fine. I've been listening to Elvis Presley Vegas shows, circa 1969, when he was kicking ass and taking names... Highly recommended stuff, all.

I have been angry/depressed/moody recently, with no clear cause. General work/upcoming holiday stress, I suppose. Shrug. The holidays also mean that comic strips ramp up the craziness for some reason. I guess the writers are in the same mood as me. Check out the following:

In Mark Trail, Mark broke up a fighting ring in which they chained raccoons to a log and had their dogs fight them to the death. Mark punched out the head hillbilly. But then the hillbilly was approached by a shady land developer who wants Mark out of the way on an unrelated matter, so the developer offers hillbilly $5,000 to kill Mark. Hillbilly conks Mark on the head and gives him to his buddy: the hillbilly with a boat. Hillbilly #1 tells hillbilly #2 if he'll kill Mark, he'll give him half the money he got from the developer. I guess hillbilly #1 is so lazy he's subcontracting the job. Anyway, that's why there's a tame raccoon riding that dog like a horse in the second panel above.


In Judge Parker, Sam "work it like a claw" Driver was on a golf course conducting a business deal when the guy he was golfing with took a sniper's bullet to the head. Then that guy's friend was also found dead from a bullet. Above is the big reveal. Dixie, the exotic dancer who was living with the guy, was going to leave him. But the guy said he was keeping their dog. So she killed two people to get custody of the dog.

Dick Tracy is a little harder to explain, so here's the short version. Bad guy named "Braces" (because he wears braces on his teeth) has a huge robot that robs banks. As luck would have it, the police department just got a big robot of their own! How convenient! The two robots fight each other. Then for some reason the bad guy's robot is disappointed with Braces, so the robot electrocutes him.

Well, not so much electrocutes him as fries his head to a crisp. You might recall last Christmas, when the bad guy was run over by a bulldozer. The first panel says "Holiday greetings from the Tracy Crew!" The next panel reveals that bulldozer is actually parked on the guy.) I blogged about it HERE. Nice to see they're keeping the tradition of upping the body count as the holidays approach. Fits my mood.

They have a Paris casino, and just like the real city, there's a Hawaiian Tropic Zone right next door!
While over at Caesar's Palace, Bette Midler, Cher, and Elton John have rotating schedules.