Harry Potter Blues

So have you read the script for the new Harry Potter play? I bought a copy on the day it was released, but I hadn’t read more than the first two scenes. Wednesday was the first day my step kids were at our house since the release and my step son had already finished it. He asked me, begged me, pleaded with me (I exaggerate some) to finish it so that we could discuss it.

I actually have a lot of work to do this weekend, but… my step son needed me. I dove into the script and read about 80% of it. Sadly, reading on an iPad does wonderfully awful things to my eyes and I am seeing double now and have lost the ability to see anything at all. My eyes are literally too tired to function.

I still have 20% of the text to get through. My step son needs me! He needs me to know the whole story! I can’t let him down! Harry Potter needs to be completed before the sun comes up!

Geddy’s

My tiny little brain is so easily confused.

I was going to write something about how the last time I officially swapped blogging services was just before a long weekend get away my beautiful wife and I took to Bar Harbor, ME. I was going to connect it to today by saying that we need to go back to Bar Harbor for two reasons. First, I changed blogging services. Second, the t-shirt I bought at Geddy’s has a hole in the armpit and needs to be replaced. That would be a funny post, right? Ha. Funny.

Then I realized that it wasn’t the Bar Harbor trip that coincided with leaving Blogger, it was a long weekend getaway to the White Mountains in New Hampshire where we stayed in a cabin set off from the rest of the hotel and there was an outdoor hot tub and we used it even though it was December and about zero degrees out, and also drove all the way out to Dixville Notch for absolutely no reason at all.

So my coincidental t-shirt/blog service post is null and void.

I still want to go back to Geddy’s though.

The view from Cadillac Mountain in Bar Harbor, ME.

Go Away

Go away.  I’m  (probably temporarily) done here.  New posts (for the time being at least) are here.  So don’t keep hanging around here, there won’t be anything new (for now).

I feel like such a nerd.  I should just stop this stupid blogging garbage all together.

Is Instagram’s stories function a shameless rip off of Snapchat?

The Onion’s Coverage of the Rio Olympics on Instagram

Is Instagram’s stories function a shameless rip off of Snapchat? Well sure, but it doesn’t matter because The Onion has already created the greatest story humanly possible.

Random Thoughts at 6:20am

Is our hot water heater dead, or is it just messing with us like the jerk that it is?

I’m working from home today. Hopefully there is a plumber coming to check on our water heater. I had one cold shower yesterday and I don’t want another one. Why is a cold shower such a soul crushingly miserable experience? Why can’t it just be… cold? I don’t get it.

I was talking about the lack of hot water with my step kids yesterday. I said they were probably going to want to skip taking a shower this morning. My step daughter got all indignant (well, a tiny bit indignant at least) and said she was going to take one anyway. Ah to be a cocky teenager again. Wait, was I ever a cocky teenager?


Hey, do you remember when the Olympics were interesting? I do. Back in the long distant past the Olympics were can’t miss television. We used to watch coverage every night. Even the most ridiculous events had us glued to the tube.

Oh, check it out! Synchronized Swimming is on again! Yeah!

When did that change? Was it the end of the Soviet Union? Was it when they added snowboarding? Was it when they let professionals compete thus creating “the dream team” and crap like that? Was it the year the network (was it NBC or CBS?) tried to tie in a pay per view option? What did they call it? Olympic Triple Cast or something like that? I only remember David Letterman ripping the whole thing to shreds on a nightly basis. It was probably a little bit of all of the above (but mostly snowboarding).

I still get really excited for Olympic hockey during the winter games, but other than that? Snooze. Rio this week will mark the first games held since we ditched cable TV and I don’t regret it for a second. I’ll be visiting my mom for a while tonight so she might have the opening ceremonies on. Otherwise I won’t watch any of the coverage at all. Part of me misses the pageantry of the whole thing, but given the mess that Sochi seemed to be two years ago, and the disaster that seems to be shaping up in Rio… well, maybe it’s time we start re-thinking the whole thing.


I didn’t post to my wordpress.com blog yesterday, but I did post to medium.com. Does that mean I am done with wordpress.com? Probably not, but maybe I am for a day or two. We’ll see. One thing that is infuriating me about medium is that it refuses to let me put two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. I hit the spacebar twice but the bastard cursor only moves once. That’s definitive proof that medium is an evil, unAmerican enterprise. Two, two, two spaces following a period at the end of a sentence! Damn you and your markdown menace!

When I first started looking at medium.com as a blogging option, they had an iOS app but it was read only. You couldn’t post from it. That wasn’t a deal breaker but it was damn close. Now you can write and post and upload images from the app (at least from the iPad version).

This very post, in fact, has made use of both the iPad app and the web app. I started writing this while sitting at my computer. I got about halfway through the stuff about the Olympics and then had to stop for a little while. When I picked it up again, I went to the drafts list on the iOS app and continued writing. After finishing the Olympic stuff I had to stop again and now I’m back on my Mac. Pretty cool. I never did that with wordpress, although I know I could have. Still, living in the future is kinda fun.


Speaking of living in the future, I just turned on the lights in my living room, and my air conditioner using apps on my iPhone. Yes, living in the future rules.


I have to ask a serious question about a not-serious topic. When did Hollywood lose the ability to make a decent DC Comics movie? The first two Superman movies are classics. The first two Tim Burton Batman movies are fantastic. Batman Begins is excellent, and The Dark Knight is about as good as comics movies have ever been. Now though? I didn’t hate Batman v Superman as much as most people did, but some of it was just laughably bad. Hey, what was it that made Batman and Superman stop trying to kill each other and become BFFs? Yeah, that’s what I am talking about. Now Suicide Squad comes out today and, while I really had no interest in it at all, the reviews are vicious. Is it really that bad, or has Marvel just bought out all of the critics? Maybe they took some of that massive Disney money and did just that.

My step kids and I watch the DC TV shows. We all love Flash. They love Arrow (I think it’s okay). We just started watching Supergirl so the jury is still out. My only beef at this point is, why does Jimmy Olson look like he could bench press a mini-van? Isn’t he supposed to just be a nerdy little guy? Regardless, DC is getting the TV shows right but getting the huge budget films terribly wrong. At this point I can’t imagine it is simply bad writing or bad directing on an individual movie basis. If it’s a trend then it has to be coming from higher up the management food chain, doesn’t it? Is Suicide Squad going to be bad because the parameters within which it was written, cast, filmed, directed, edited, and marketed bad? It’s starting to feel that way. It’s starting to feel like the DC movies are going to be awful before the stories are even conceived. It’s like they have three strikes against them before they even start.

The little Justice League tease they released at the San Diego Comic Con was pretty exciting, but when push comes to shove… who cares, there’s a Star Wars flick coming out in December.


Okay, so I’ve been picking at this for an hour now. Do I have anything else I need to leak out of my brain? Nope, just going to wait for the plumber to check in.

We’re in Hot Water Now

My wife took a shower this morning, no problem.

I shaved, no problem.

I took a shower, the hot water ran out… and never came back. 16 hours later, we still don’t have any hot water. Damn it.

We are trying to get a plumber here tomorrow. It looks like they’ll be able to get here. On the phone they asked me how old is my hot water heater. I laughed. Like I know. They then said they will need the heater’s name, rank, and serial number before they get here so they can know what they are up against.

On an unrelated note, iTunes just failed me. My brother has become a Walking Dead fan. He’s through season 5 via Netflix. I wanted to give him season 6. I bought the season pass so I have everything. I downloaded all 16 episodes, put them on a flash drive, and then tried to open one using someone else’s iTunes account. It wouldn’t play without my password. Damn you digital rights management (or whatever the hell you’re called)! My kid brother needs to see him some Negan! I have failed my family name!