A Florida Cracker in the Last Frontier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX6LmojEWy4 E Street Shuffle - Bruce Springsteen Growing up in Florida the only "shuffle" I knew was the "stingray shuffle". If you don't know when out at Florida beaches it is wise to drag your feet in the sand when walking in the water because if you lift your feet up and step down on a stingray, which can happen during certain times of year, you will get stung. I don't mean like a bee sting it's a huge ugly gash akin to being sliced by a small harpoon. Lately I've been doing a different shuffle. The streets and sidewalks are plowed but covered in ice and light snow. It makes them extremely slippery and some way more than others. I try to walk to the edge of the road or sidewalk is to walk in the plowed snow to keep from slipping but sometimes that's not practical because the snow is really high. So, I've adopted a type of shuffle that is like playing broom hockey on ice. It's like half skating a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLIppgE45wM Don't Eat the Yellow Snow - Frank Zappa As the temperature reaches the single digits and we have received more snow I have been trying to get the boys outside to do some fun (frozen) activities. We started with sledding, and we are still getting the hang of it. I think we might need to have two (or more). Gracen loves just being pulled around while he sits in the sled. It got me to thinking that we should look for a place that does sleigh rides.  I was thinking just the other day that we need to research how to make a snowman because our snow has been too powdery / dry but I'm sure with a spray bottle or something we could do it. I noticed on my last trip to the park to go sledding that there were little patches of yellow snow near the entrance. I understand that people let their dog pee on the round all the time and I just don't see it but... come on man! What really makes me audibly sigh is when people don't ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxKjOOR9sPU&list=RDC4_yFX4cvE8&index=5   - " Sweet Disposition " The Temper Trap Sweet disposition Never too soon Oh, reckless abandon Like no one's watching you A moment a love A dream aloud A kiss a cry Our rights Our wrongs A moment, a love A dream aloud A moment, a love A dream, aloud This is one of my favorite songs. I recently went to Portland, Oregon for a seminar about FCC funding for Library and School internet connectivity (called Erate it is managed by USAC), and when I looked for a Spotify playlist I found one entitled "Portlandia", the first song was this one. I left late Saturday night (1:25 am) and arrived in Portland around 8:30 am. I had a connecting flight in Seattle that was delayed and the plane was not big enough for all the baggage. Guess whose bag was not on the plane... mine. So when I arrived in Seattle and could not find my bag I went to the Alaska Airlines baggage window. The...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpadYhXHgw A Jump Into the Fog - The Wombats I love, Love, LOVE this song and the Wombats. Oh, since 1998 when the did a cover of an Operation Ivy song. It has been very foggy here. We had fog ALL Day for like 5 days. I've never lived in a place where the fog got denser as the day went. On most week days I go to the gym at 5am. On Wednesday I say frozen fog, it's really interesting. It looks like sparkles all over the air. I tried to take pictures but nothing does it justice. It made for a very spooky atmosphere for Halloween. I must say I found Halloween a bit odd here. There were people with porch and drive way lights blazing and they didn't answer their door or hand out candy. Jerks! Halloween had some cute kids and some even wore coats, not my kids which I was proud of. They weren't bothered by 40 degree weather even though they are Florida-born. Pumpkins last longer in this cool, cold, (today) frozen weather. In Florida a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBecM3CQVD8  Sympathy for the Devil - The Rolling Stones I listened to a bunch of covers of this song(Motorhead, Jane's Addiction, Bon Jovi) to see if one of them was better than the original... NO WAY! Great song, and it was on my soundtrack for an event I recently attended. People that are beer geeks know that there are certain beers that get people to wait in line and pay ridiculous sums of money. One of the types of beer that inspires such craziness is barrel aged barley wine. Anchorage Brewing Company is known for one of the best barrel aged barley wines called "Deal With The Devil". This year they released a box set that had a beautiful wooden box with six different barrel aged varieties. The box set was $300 for six 750ml bottles in a laser etched box, but they have been going for ridiculous sums of money on the secondary market. Each barrel imparts different characteristics and since the product is organic it is kinda a uni...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0yGvypBwyA  Informer - Snow I know this is a weird song choice but whenever I hear "snow" I automatically thing of this cheesey song from around Middle School (maybe high school). I just learned that Snow was from Canada, you can't make this stuff up. I wonder if he was a bastard like Jon Snow... I mean I know Jon is actually Aegon and not a bastard but bastards of the North were given the last name "Snow". Sorry for my trip into Game of Thrones. Anyways, it snowed on Saturday, October 21st! It was chilly in the morning and I had already planned to change the tire tires out and while I was at it change out the air filter, cabin air filter, and wipers. While I was at it I was going to change the brake pads. Well, that was the plan... the auto parts store gave me a power steering motor instead of an engine air filter (I knew that thing felt too heavy) and Kendall Toyota gave me the wrong size brake pads. On my way to e...

Ice, Ice, Baby - Vanilla Ice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE  I am so behind on blog posts. I have been super busy at work and to be honest the last thing I think of doing on home is hopping back on another computer, just seems a lot like work. We had a week straight of ice. It was pretty cold, one day it was down to 8 and had a few days that didn't get higher than 21. It made all the rain water freeze into ice. So, Gracen (and the other neighborhood kids for that matter) started throwing ice on to the street to watch it shatter. I has all fine with the cold and ice but I had to use a work vehicle and had to scrape the windows and heat the thing up. The inside of the windows had water streaming off them once they started to warm up, so I had to clean them off. All of this told me, snow is coming soon and I planned to switch my tires on Saturday morning. As far as dressing for the cold, I wore my base layers and they worked really well but being wool ...