Oh there will be fishing.

The kids are in the living room watching the tube.  Jen is in the dining room working.  I am getting everything ready for a busy couple of hours of kid stuff.

My step son just finished a Disney Channel show.  I know it’s geared toward kids and all… but does it have to be so freakin’ bad?  I mean… this crap is just off the charts lame.

Oh, change of subject.  Today is Bastille Day.  You know what Bastille Day is, right?  It’s a Rush song that totally rocks your face clean off.  I mean, it will rock you so hard that your skin will literally liquify.

Oh yeah, and there’s something about the French Revolution too, but it’s really important because it’s a killer Rush song.

We had to make a quick stop at my darling wife’s office today. Her company has cubicles. Actual walls and everything. My company does not. We are an open concept kinda shop.

I’m so jealous of her cubicle walls.

Oh good.  Today is Friday the 13th.  Way to ruin the best day of the week, you stupid piece of crap superstition.

I’m not superstitious at all.  Not at all.  Hell, I shave during the NHL playoffs.  I walk under ladders.  I spill salt like it’s the in thing to do.  But today… I have had a bad week, and I was fearing that the level of suckitude would not decrease even though the weekend is one work shift away, and now the calendar tells me that it’s Friday the 13th and I just know that sucking shall continue at least until tomorrow.

Being the nerd I am, I checked the wikipedia article on Friday the 13th to try and find the origin of the superstition.  Apparently, no one knows:

Several theories have been proposed about the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition.
One theory states that it is a modern amalgamation of two older superstitions: that thirteen is an unlucky number and that Friday is an unlucky day.

• In numerology, the number twelve is considered the number of completeness, as reflected in the twelve months of the year, twelve hours of the clock, twelve gods of Olympus, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve Apostles of Jesus, the 12 successors of Muhammad in Shia Islam, etc., whereas the number thirteen was considered irregular, transgressing this completeness. There is also a superstition, thought by some to derive from the Last Supper or a Norse myth, that having thirteen people seated at a table will result in the death of one of the diners.
• Friday has been considered an unlucky day at least since the 14th century’s The Canterbury Tales,^[5] and many other professions have regarded Friday as an unlucky day to undertake journeys or begin new projects. Black Friday has been associated with stock market crashes and other disasters since the 1800s.^[3][6]
• One author, noting that references are all but nonexistent before 1907 but frequently seen thereafter, has argued that its popularity derives from the publication that year of Thomas W. Lawson‘s popular novel Friday, the Thirteenth,^[7] in which an unscrupulous broker takes advantage of the superstition to create a Wall Street panic on a Friday the 13th.^[1]
• Records of the superstition are rarely found before the 20th century, when it became extremely common. The connection between the Friday the 13th superstition and the Knights Templar was popularized in Dan Brown‘s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code and in John J. Robinson‘s 1989 work Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry. On Friday, 13 October 1307, hundreds of the Knights Templar were arrested in France, an action apparently motivated financially and undertaken by the efficient royal bureaucracy to increase the prestige of the crown. Philip IV was the force behind this ruthless move, but it has also tarnished the historical reputation of Clement V. From the very day of Clement V’s coronation, the king falsely charged the Templars with heresy, immorality and abuses, and the scruples of the Pope were compromised by a growing sense that the burgeoning French State might not wait for the Church, but would proceed independently.^[8] However, experts agree that this is a relatively recent correlation, and most likely a modern-day invention.^[5][6][9]

 Fascinating, eh?

Anyway… duck and cover.  Don’t do anything crazy like trip and fall while Jason is chasing you with a machete and then just sit there and wait for him to start hacking you up.  Also, whatever you do do not lose your virginity today. That’s just like begging to be the psycho killer’s next victim.

Happy Friday the 13th.

Urgh.

I photo bombed your faces off yesterday with pics from our trip up to Maine.  Now I will do it all again with pics that were actually taken within the state of Maine.

You have been warned.

Again.

Like I said yesterday I tended to take pictures of stuff instead of people.  These are more pictures of stuff.  Mostly.  There will be a private post soon that has people in it.

That is our living room, taken from the side yard at night.  Impressed?  I was.

This is the best picture I took over the whole week.

I tried starting a camp fire one night and failed.  Uncle Ken was successful.

This is the back of our house.  Yeah.

There were perfect spider webs all over the place.  Not crappy ones like the jerks in our yard at home make.

At the edge of the lake.  It looks like there was a boat launch here in the past.

The ducks were regular visitors.  The kids loved them.

More great big, slippery rocks on the shore.

Something about this boat.  I liked it.  I kept going back to it.

Was this the beach they told us about on the house’s website?  Probably not, it didn’t seem to be public, based on the fore sale sign.

One of our two docks had a jet ski launch and park benches built in.

The next few are from a brief, failed excursion to Old Orchard Beach.  All the fun kid stuff was closed.

Obligatory pier picture.

The beach to the left of the pier.

The beach to the right of the pier.

The fire pit, as seen from the hot tub.

We were near the very northern tip of Long Lake and there was a little marina across the water from us.

Looking at the dock on the right, from the back yard.

Bridgton Fireworks!  Happy 4th!

Our living room came equipped with a sail boat.

I think this one is my second favorite.  I like the colors on the water.

There’s that little blue sailboat again.

The little (probably private) beach around the corner from us had a dock for diving.  There were usually kids on it.  Even after midnight.

That bobber was put there by my step son, who is now a fishing fanatic.

I tried taking some long exposures of the stars.  They were all a little blurry.  Probably not due to the rotation of the Earth.

And finally, a birthday wish for myself.  I want the house we stayed in (it’s for sale, for 1.2 million dollars) and this boat.  Can we make that happen?  No?

Today is my work anniversary.  Eight years ago today I took this job, thinking that I’d stay for two years and then find something else.  I’m not up on the exact definition of this word, but I believe this represents the concept of Entropy.

Does it?

I had a dream last night that it was Friday, which means I woke up convinced that it was Saturday.

It’s only Thursday.

I’m now pretty sure that today and tomorrow are going to pretty much suck.

Stupid subconscious.

We just had our second afternoon power failure of the week.  Today is Wednesday.  That means that 66.6% of the work days this week have included a power failure during the afternoon. 

Yeah, power failures suck.