Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate......

The government has done it to you again...

2010-01-28T12:03:00.005-06:00

Although Obama covered some level of fiscal responsibility in the SOTU address last night, the Senate has just passed an amendment to a previous House Joint Resolution that will raise the statutory debt limit from $12.4 trillion to $14.3 trillion. When does it end?

A preliminary recap of 1/21/10 tornado from NWS Huntsville

2010-01-22T15:57:00.000-06:00

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/hun/?n=january2010_severewx

Crazy Mother Nature....

2010-01-22T06:03:00.002-06:00

Tornadoes in January are somewhat unusual, but Huntsville was hit by one yesterday. Fortunately, there were no fatalities. WAFF's community gallery site has some decent pix and videos...

And to think, when all this stuff started going down, we were gorging ourselves (I was, with three plates from the buffet) on Chinese food...

I'm sure that anyone who would read this has probably used Wikipedia...

2010-01-21T05:08:00.002-06:00

I end up there occasionally. Have you ever given consideration to creating an account? If so, here are some of the reasons to do so...

One of my favorite features (with an account) is the ability to convert any Wikipedia page to a PDF file....

Mainly links here...

2010-01-21T03:58:00.002-06:00

Some interesting weather stuff for the new year:

2010 Storm Spotter Class Schedule

2009 Annual Climate Summary

2009 Tornado Storm Data

2009 Tornado Summary

2009 Annual Climate Statistics

December 2009 Climate Summary

El Ni�o Impacts in the Tennessee Valley

I'm actually giving serious consideration to checking out the spotter class in Athens on March 9th. That might be pretty interesting and I think I'm off of work that night...

That whole escapade in Massachusetts turned out to be quite a surprise. It's kind of amazing that the tide would turn just one year into the current administration. I'm sure that it was just disillusionment with the state of "things" in general. I was disillusioned by both parties quite some time ago...

DI.fm Windows Media Player Stream....

2010-01-16T09:36:00.001-06:00

for your listening pleasure.

WARNING - kinda trippy stuff here.

in reference to: goapsy.asx (video/x-ms-asf Object) (view on Google Sidewiki)

Mmmmmmmm......... Chili and beer and football!

2010-01-07T19:06:00.002-06:00

I wouldn't consider myself much of a fan of any football (college, pro or otherwise), but if I had to pick a college team to be a fan of, it would be The Tide...

I am a fan of chili and beer.

At least we got some snow out of what one local TV station is touting as "Winter Storm 2010"....

2010-01-07T16:07:00.001-06:00

I was reading one of the several cooking magazines my wife gets....

2010-01-05T19:53:00.002-06:00

and I saw a recipe for a meat loaf. That got me thinking. I figured that Ro-Tel would make an interesting addition.

Here's how it ended up:
____________________________________________________
Ingredients:

1 10 oz can Ro-Tel (undrained)
2 lightly beaten eggs
2/3 cup panko (any crumbs would do)
1 lb ground beef (I actually had 1-1/4)
Seasoning (I used Mrs. Dash in the loaf) to taste
1 packet onion soup mix (I omitted this accidentally)
Heinz Hot & Spicy Ketchup (enough to top loaf)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 F. Combine first six ingredients and mix well. Pour into a loaf pan. Bake at 350 F for 50 minutes. Remove and cover (to taste) with ketchup. Bake 10 minutes more. Enjoy.
____________________________________________________
For an experiment, this turned out pretty well. I wish I had remembered to get onion soup mix at the store. That was a my bad. Suzanne said the spicy ketchup made it a little too kicked up. I liked it just fine....

_______________________________________________

2010-01-01T00:00:00.001-06:00

Happy New Year!

To each and everyone out there....

2009-12-25T00:00:00.000-06:00

Merry Christmas!!!

I've tweeted this already, but I figured I'd embed it in my blog as well....

2009-12-23T00:47:00.003-06:00

The pictures are scans of pictures I took when we lived in the northeast during the Winter (1990s vintage). The music is Coventry Carol as interpreted by yours truly....

17 years!?! Whoa!!!!!!

2009-12-19T00:32:00.001-06:00

Happy Anniversary Suzanne!

As it happens....

2009-12-17T00:44:00.003-06:00

I recently joined my daddy-o's channel @ ning.com. I've put up four of my "compositions" so far. Three are mine and one is a mix-up of a piece of my dad's. Here they are:

Find more music like this on Zzaj Energy Channel

New song at indieonestop.com....

2009-12-12T19:45:00.001-06:00

Aethereality TV

To Suzy and my Uncle Greg....

2009-12-11T06:45:00.003-06:00

Happy Birthday!!!

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate....

2009-12-08T21:26:00.002-06:00

Just so you know....

I don't suppose that I have any great explanation why I gave my blog its title several years ago. I just figured that it kind of fit. This blog is about everything and nothing at the same time. Sometimes it is mundane and sometimes I might even have an interesting take on things. When you "enter here", I hope that you're not expecting a great deal of profound material. I blog about things that come to mind that are interesting to me. Often, I'll talk about music or politics. I might even talk about the latest and greatest sandwich that I ate. Hence, the idea of "abandoning hope".

http://etcweb.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/dante/campuscgi/mpb/GetCantoSection.pl?INP_POEM=Inf&INP_SECT=3&INP_START=1&INP_LEN=200&LANG=2

Weekend report....

2009-12-06T19:32:00.002-06:00

Hmmm, where to begin? Friday was an off day, but I had to go in for several hours due to unforeseen circumstances. It's all good, I was only there for several hours. After that, the day was a VERY lazy day. I don't even think I ran on Friday. We did have a fine pizza that night...

Saturday started with a kickin' morning exercise hour and snow. After a good shower, we went out to Cheddar's for a pre-birthday birthday lunch for my wife and a friend of ours. The Cheddar's in town has just opened in the last month. Our best friends got there 20 minutes early and were seated by the time we got there. It's good they arrived earlier than we did, because the wait would have been a little while. For as busy as the joint was, the service was pretty good. The food arrived in a decent amount of time and was as tasty as I remember. On the negative side, the food could have been a little bit warmer. Other than that, the experience was great. We'll be going back again...

And then there was the Bama game....

I don't consider myself any kind of big fan or anything, but it was good to see The Tide win. We didn't even stick around the house to watch the entire game. I had brought up going to a fundraising event for Toys for Tots that was being put on by a friend from high school earlier in the day. It just so happens that the event was a number of dance acts by women specializing in belly/tribal/world fusion dance with the appropriate accompanying music. I had seen my friend's group perform at Panoply before. My wife actually thought the whole thing was pretty cool. We left a little early for some grub and a chance to stop by to see the Mother Unit (1 each).

This morning started with another hour of sweaty exercise. That's always an exhilarating way to start the day. After that, we had breakfast with friends. The monotony of shopping occupied the next couple of hours. It was a lazy enough afternoon until I decided to finally get up and run on the treadmill for five miles. The most exciting part was the catfight in/near our front yard. The run was very refreshing. After a little dinner, here we are: Watching Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Obviously not award-winning, but this flick is mildly entertaining....

Well, I think I'll run along now. Y'all have a great week! Peace!

Mmmmm, Cheddar's....

2009-12-05T11:00:00.001-06:00

We first tried Cheddar's in Newport News, VA back in the mid-90s. Much to our delight, we had one in the IL/IA quad cities (Davenport, IA) when we lived up there. There's a new one in Huntsville and we're headed there for lunch with friends (kinda for two looming birthdays). Hope the food's as good as I remember. More later....

in reference to: :::::Welcome to Cheddar's!::::: (view on Google Sidewiki)

This ever so slightly snowy morning...

2009-12-05T06:14:00.001-06:00

I will be out early to partake in one of Tony Horton's workouts from hell:

Plyometrics

in reference to: P90X� | Our Most Complete Extreme Home Fitness System (view on Google Sidewiki)

It even snows in Alabama...

2009-12-05T05:21:00.003-06:00

This snow isn't much, but it looks nice!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

2009-12-04T20:22:00.001-06:00

Just got done watching the latest installment of the X-Men franchise (in conjunction with a fine, fine pizza). I wouldn't say that it was the best of the four movies, but it was definitely good. I'm sure I'll watch it at least once or twice more when it comes on the movie channels...

in reference to: X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) (view on Google Sidewiki)

One of my holiday food downfalls.....

2009-12-04T14:06:00.003-06:00

is eggnog. I can't fully explain why my tastebuds are so tantalized by the flavor. They just are. I can get into a store, buy a quart and down it VERY quickly. As in five minutes....

Anyway, I've had two varieties of the Hood EggNog. I've had the Pumpkin Eggnog and the Sugar Cookie Eggnog. I like both flavors, but of the two, I TOTALLY DIG the Sugar Cookie Eggnog. If, like me, you're an eggnog fan, find some. You'll probably love it.

The purpose of this post is twofold. I recently noticed a function of the Google toolbar called sidewiki. It allows you to:

-Publish helpful information about any web page right in your browser
-Read insights in context from Sidewiki entries added by others
-Share Sidewiki entries through Blogger, Facebook, Twitter and Google profiles

I'm checking out how the blog posting works with this post. Wanna give it a whirl?

http://www.google.com/sidewiki/

in reference to: Hood� | EggNog (view on Google Sidewiki)

You know what I think might make some interesting movies?

2009-12-02T19:31:00.002-06:00

Jonny Quest

Jonny Quest opening
by Himura86

OR

Thundarr the Barbarian

Action packed day (after I finally woke up around 9 AM)....

2009-11-29T20:15:00.002-06:00

I didn't turn on any alarms on purpose. After waking up and finishing the necessary first mug of coffee, I eventually got around to an hour on the treadmill. Felt pretty good after that...

Not necessarily sure that it was the best choice to run 10K on the treadmill before we went over to my best friend's place to do the P90X "Legs & Back" routine. Worked out OK, though.

After all the sweating, we all went out to eat at Jason's Deli. The folks behind the counter seemed a bit surprised that I went for a replacement bowl for their AYCE salad bar twice. What can I say? I was hungry...

Follow that up with a trip to the Huntsville Botanical Garden's Galaxy of Lights and (at the insistence of our best friends' kids) watching Merry Madagascar and it's been a fun day!

Well, it's approaching time to crash for the night. Peace y'all!