This is the first time I’ve run this blog on a platform other than my own. While I’m still getting to know it, I’m happy with the ability to customize WordPress. I’m also happy to let the designers make the templates. No doubt I will tinker with and tweak things, but so far, so good.

Today, while home sick fighting the flu, I managed to finally upload pictures to flickr from our trip to Edinburgh, Scotland. We had a great 3 days exploring the city, tasting the whisky, listening to the pipers, trying on kilts, and hiking in the Highlands. Facty and I are planning our next couple of trips now. We’re going to continue to see as much of Europe as possible while we live in Dublin.

Hell, I even played some poker last week and won $500.

Crime

I’ve had guns pointed in my general direction on two occasions. The first involved a late night traffic stop in lovely Reseda, California (Van Nuys adjacent!) where a young, scruffy, long-haired kid driving a very used Honda registered in his mother’s name was asked for his license. Note to new drivers – law enforcement may be nervous when you start digging around in a backpack while in a car that said law enforcement has identified as belonging to a 40-something year old woman who lives 15 miles away. and by nervous, I mean that they will unholster their guns, point them at you and tell you to “drop the fucking bag and put your hands where we can see them.”

The second incident was a simple, “Where’s the fucking safe!?!” style hold up in a record store. I was neither an employee nor a customer, but worked for a distributor and had just arrived to get orders for the latest crappy Ben Folds record, Hawkwind reissue, or not-very-next-big-thing punk rawk band. Now, all 10 people in the backroom of that store, including me, knew exactly where the safe was (in the room just on the perp’s left), but before anyone could actually answer, all hell broke loose. the end result was, among other things, a store “loss prevention” agent being dragged across a table and halfway down a flight of stairs by her hair. The perp never did get an answer to his original question, though he did get caught later that day.

Medicine

As a teen, I was diagnosed with acute osgood-schlatter disease in my left knee. I have a rather large bump at the top of tibia. I mean big. People cringe when I show them. Mothers cover their children’s eyes. The closest image I could find is this one, though I think mine is more…. pronounced. And it is tender. Frankly, I’d rather get hit in the groin than bump the bump on a coffee table. Maybe not. Its close. Imagine, gentlemen, having one of your testicles relocated to just below your kneecap. Enjoy.

Sports

I played little league baseball for a number of years in the catholic school league (?) on a team full of cuban coaches and kids. I was a novelty for not only being the white kid, but being left-handed and bigger than most of the other kids. One year, the coaches tried to teach me to pitch, thinking a left-handed pitcher would confuse the opposing 10 year olds. My memory may be a little fuzzy on this, but I seem to remember plunking multiple batters across three innings before being sent back to first base.

Cards

Like so many, it seems, my grandmother taught me to play cards. She would pick me up from school and we’d go back to her job at a small kids clothing store. Once homework was done, the cards came out. Blackjack, gin, gin rummy. other games long forgotten. I remember a trip to Reno in the motor home that included my first casino visit, where i stood just far enough away from my grandfather’s blackjack table to avoid pitboss notice.

Film

Popcorn is just about the most ridiculous food to sell in a movie theaters where one is trying to listen. Why don’t they sell celery and potato chips? ditto for straws in an empty soda. Combine this with the fact that almost every movie made is terrible, and I end up at the movies about once per year, tops. I had a stretch where I went five years between theater visits.

Food

Yes: seafood, vegetables, cheese, bread, potatoes, Indian, Thai, Mexican, Italian.

No: red meat, poultry, pork, olives, baby corn, pineapple, couscous, eating outside.

Music

I will likely hate your music, and you will definitely hate mine. let’s not even start that shit.

Update: Turns out I did get tagged by someone outside my immediate household. Thanks glyphic!

So I scrapped an earlier half-assed attempt and started over with a bit of object-oriented php:

http://www.fhwrdh.net/rss.php

I successfully tested it in Syndirella, Sharpreader and Bloglines (though the updating is a little squirrelly with Bloglines). If anyone tries it and it fails, please let me know.

Then yesterday I clobbered the file on my web server that had all my may blog entries. As described earlier, I poked about browser caches without luck, but ended up recovering the first two entries from the Google cache. I was pretty much resigned to losing the rest of them.

Maybe you see where this is going. Today I fired up Syndirella to catch up with the goings-on and whatnot and end up cycling down to my own entry. What do you know -Syndirella had captured all my May entries.

So I went to the Google cache and, luckily, found a few of the lost entries, so will restore those momentarily. In the meantime, I know that the only non-poker posts that were lost were links to some new photo collections.

Poker has been a roller coaster – lots of up and down but leaving me off in the same place I started. I’ll catch up with a post shortly…

But I’m starting by getting rid of those gd pears….

There, thats better.