My snow banks are about 2 1/2 feet deep and my old pal the groundhog says we have 6 more weeks of this shit? To be realistic, even if it didn’t snow again until October, it would take another 2 months to melt what we have. Either way, I blame that furry little bastard.

Hey, it’s February already. You know, in the old days I would have been bitching about all of the stupid stuff I would be selling in retail. Although I still don’t know what stuffed gorillas and singing hamsters represent aside from shitty gift giving abilities; I could care less.

What else has been going on with my boring ass life? Not a whole hell of a lot. My projects that were necessary are done & I’m down to doing things for fun. I purchased a Kreg Jig & I am experimenting with that. Hoping to make storage units for all my tools… But we’ll see what my lazy ass actually pulls off.

Oh Weather Channel, you crack me up. Let me start by saying I do not have DirecTV and I still have The Weather Channel in my house. I have Charter Cable, which can be a whole blog of its own, just ask me about how pissed off I am about the whole FXX rollout someday…

Apparently The Weather Channel and DirecTV had some sort of dispute and either DirecTV dropped them or The Weather Channel pulled out of their deal. Whatever happened, anyone with DTV is no longer getting TWC. I do follow TWC on Facebook for some reason, most likely I was slightly drunk one night and needed to ‘like’ some stuff more like I was a teenage girl.

TWC has had an onslaught of pleas with people to drop their DTV because they are no longer featured there. That is fine in and of itself, but they are doing it in a dumbass way. They are coming out saying that so many people will be in danger without TWC to provide them potentially life saving weather updates. Really? Are you fucking kidding me about that? Last time I looked there were still radio stations weren’t there? What about local news channels providing live local weather coverage? What about that device that damn near everyone seems to carry around on them at all times? It’s like a computer, it can message you when there is bad weather, you can watch live weather on it… oh yeah, a fucking cell phone. The way I see it, nobody is anymore danger from the weather because they can’t see TWC then you are in danger of being catfished because you can’t see MTV.

Let’s mention the other big part of this whinefest… reality TV has destroyed another channel. MTV isn’t about music, TLC isn’t about learning, and TWC isn’t about weather. They would rather show you Coast Guard Alaska, or Prospectors or some other bullshit reality TV show than the weather… although to be honest, can you really fill 24 hours a day with weather? I’d rather sort my sock drawer.

Even though I still have TWC, I hardly ever watch it. In the summer when I am experiencing some awesome severe weather, I’m certainly not watching TWC. I’m in my basement with my TV on local weather channels, I have my iPad on checking out radar loops and I’m listening to my police scanner. Do you know when I am watching TWC? It is when some town far away from me is being destroyed by storms and they are showing live coverage either via storm chaser or local news affiliates. I don’t want to see that if you ever covered my area. Wow, that tornado is going right for that house, hey that looks like my car parked in front of that house… oh shit.

I have come to the realization that I’m old. For further proof I only need to look at my driver’s license and see that I turned 40 in 2013. Now I’m not Centrum Silver old, but if I believed that vitamins were beneficial in any way, I would at least be regular Centrum old.

What has really gotten me down this revelation of my oldness has been my odd renewed interest in this little site that I let suffer for quite some time. I imported all my old blog entries and realized that I’ve been writing blogs since 2002. I wrote my first blog ever on August 16th 2002. However, I had been around for about 6 years prior to that in one form or another with a website. I know what you’re thinking, he’s going to bore us with a story of the old days… I would but my memory isn’t that great anymore, did you forget I’m 40 now?

I was here before Facebook & MySpace, I was posting irrelevant bullshit before Twitter was a twinkle in some twit’s eye. I have been around longer than YouTube and most other social media sites out there. I was grumpy before the cat, I was an ass before Daniel Tosh made it popular, I’m just plain old.

What the hell is up with the weather? I get it winter, you can suck monkey balls if you want to. Enough with the snow and wind and other shitty conditions already. Do you realize that the sun can shine in the winter? I miss the wintery sunny days. It seems like I am either wrapped up like Ralphie’s brother in A Christmas Story or it gets a little warm and we get a bunch of snow dumped on us. Will it ever end? I only need to remember we got over a foot of snow the first week of May last year… so the answer may be no.

So for the past year or so I’ve been entertaining the idea of buying myself a 27″ Apple iMac. It all started when I bought the iPad for myself back in October of 2012. I still love using that and I followed it up by joining the millions of iPhone users in May of 2013. Of course every time I hit Best Buy I’m in the computer section playing with the Apple products.

I still am not sure why I haven’t purchased it yet, I am pretty sure it isn’t if but when. When I was younger I once spent over 3,000 on a computer that outdated after the first boot up. My current computer is a little over 6 years old now and it hasn’t lost much of its ability. That is the sad thing about being a “Responsible Adult”, I can make better cases to not buy than to buy. I think the deciding factor will be that I am not impressed with Windows 8 at all. I’ve owned every version of Windows so far going back to the times that DOS was the way to go. I hated ME and wasn’t really impressed with Vista at all. I just know that with them it is same shit, different OS.

I’m just hoping that someday soon I can say I’m posting a blog entry from my new iMac. If not for any other reason than typing on an iPad kinda sucks.

Who would have thought that it would have taken me until 2014 to finally do something with this dying website? I was running on some old outdated Movable Type platform for the blog, cleverly (in 2004) integrated with a website design I created using Dreamweaver CS3. Unfortunately my lack of giving a shit compiled with purchasing a new home four years ago not only limited my logging on to write a blog, it also pretty much ensured that I would never update the guts of the site either.

All of that changed today, and honestly it started a couple weeks ago when I had Christmas week off from work. I started doing my backups and playing around with WordPress to see if I could master it. So yes, the blog has been built on the WordPress platform, and instead of integrating the rest of a website made in Dreamweaver, I built the rest of the website with WordPress also. I went back to basics here, I completely deleted everything on my server. Cartman website, gone. My blog, gone. All non-blog pages, gone. Guestbook, gone. Of course everything was backed up, so most everything is back up and running already. I need to crawl the blog and restore any pictures that I would like to see in there. I think I backed up my guestbook, if not it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. There is a comment section all over this website now. Probably won’t bring the Cartman thing back, that was old as shit.

Benefits I will enjoy now include a website that has links to my DisgruntledHuman presence on Facebook and Twitter, not to mention the actual Twitter feed on the right side of the screen. I also have a website that doesn’t look broken, and actually looks about the same whether I look at it on my Dell in Internet Explorer, or on my iPhone or iPad using Safari.

Hopefully my peaked interest in WordPress means I will actually write blogs on occasion. The fact that I have an App on my iPad for WordPress might help make it happen, because that thing is like my third hand.

This is the longest I have sat at my home computer in 5 years, although the last time I did this manually I was probably looking at another 6 hours of messing with CSS and uploading. This was the easiest upgrade I’ve ever done.

For those that have read my blog in the past or viewed some of my many other pages, or just showed up because of the name in the URL, this may be the most unusual post you’ve ever read on my site, but personally I think it is one of the most important.

Last night I went to a play, it was The Vagina Monologues. As a man, not to mention a single man, this is probably not the play I would normally go see… in fact I don’t know if I’ve ever gone to a play now that I think of it.

I know what you’re thinking, did I read it in the paper and go… well there’s the show for me to go to. No, I didn’t. In fact it wasn’t heavily publicized, but maybe that’s just because I don’t read the paper. A friend I work with told me she was going to be in a play and asked if I would want to go to it, even though it may not be geared toward men. I told her I would think about it, I mean what if I was the only guy there, what if it was embarrassing, what if… but then again, this show was to benefit an important cause out there, to help victims of domestic and sexual abuse.

This brings me back to my friend that was performing in the play. I knew she had strong feelings going into doing this play, and just from our prior conversations I had gathered that she had possibly suffered some sort of abuse in her past, although I never pressed for any details. So Saturday night I go up to the theatre to watch this play and see her performance. When I get the program for the play, I read through it and it has all of the actor bios in it. When I read through hers I come to the realization that she had been raped. My first thought when I read that was why? Who the hell would do that to her, to anyone for that matter? I felt anger towards whoever this asshole was that had done this to her. Maybe that was a good thing, the play was to benefit abuse and make people aware and I just had a huge eye opener at that point.

I watched the play, her monologue was towards the end, and it was “Reclaiming Cunt”. To see her up there performing in front of people and doing it with finesse and grace after going through something as horrible as rape less than a year ago made me smile. It took the anger out of me.

When the play was over everyone came out and explained why they performed in the play and what they were standing up for. When she came out, not only did I now know that she was raped, I also found out that the person that did it was found not guilty of doing it. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt a knot in your stomach before. It is pain in the pit of your gut, it’s not a bathroom pain or a gas pain or anything, but it hurts like hell. It’s the feeling of helplessness, the feeling of “What the fuck?”, and not in the cutesy WTF way, in the What the Fuck is going on in this world way. Not only was she raped, but then she had to sit through a trial to only find out her perpetrator wouldn’t even be held accountable for his actions. I cannot even fathom what kind of emotional turmoil that would cause someone.

The show was over and the cast was in the hallway talking to people that had watched the show. I went out and talked to my friend a little bit, told her I enjoyed the show and her performance in it. She seemed happy to have done the play and was conversing with the other cast mates as they got ready to go out for a cast party. I left shortly after that and went home.

When I got home I couldn’t sleep, I was quite wound up. I was on the internet looking up things online about rape and survivors and what you can do to help. It was a crazy low sleep kind of night. I just want to thank my friend for having the courage to move on with her life, to fight back, to try and make a difference in this fucked up world we live in. Nobody should ever have to go through what she went through.

I think it is time for some changes around here. I am looking at dumping my trusty old MovableType blog in favor of a WordPress driven blog; and if I do that I know I’ll need to do some sort of redesign as well. My site looks like shit these days because the CSS is all broken up, but as you can tell I am not that into caring at the moment. I am off of work all next week so the job of a redesign that should take all of 6 hours still probably won’t get done, but we can always hope.
In other internet related news I am now on Twitter and Facebook… so welcome me to 2007.
http://www.facebook.com/DisgruntledHuman/
On Twitter find me at @disgruntledhumn
They screwed me out of one letter with their stupid policy on length of names… damn you Twitter.

I was excited to see the new show “Breaking Amish” until I realized it wasn’t a spinoff of “Breaking Bad”. They’ve been talking the end of the world for.a while now, I would say the Amish having their own reality show is a sure sign of the appocolypse; not that Honey Boo Boo isn’t.

Hey on a positive note with these remaining few months before the world doesn’t end, I may actually blog more. This iPad is pretty slick, I can take it anywhere. That means I can write a blog while taking a shit if I wanted to… Get that image out of your head now. In fact, if I ever write a bunch of blogs in one day, you may be thinking either he’s really inspired or he ate at Taco Bell today.

So far almost a week in I only have one complaint about it, it makes me hate my so called smart phone. If I’m at work and want to look at something on facebook I turn on my phone now and I find myself thinking wow, what a piece of shit you are phone. I often find myself swearing at inanimate objects, it makes me feel like a real man. Sometimes I’ll go to peel a banana and it isn’t quite ripe enough so the peel splits and you only get that first layer off and I’m like fuck you banana.

Maybe I should get my own reality show.

Yes it has been almost a year since the last time I posted semi regularly. I did post in May after Adam Yauch passed away but I think I just rambled there because I was mostly in shock.

Well the good news is I’m still around but the bad news is I bought myself a 64GB IPad 3 last weekend and haven’t put it down yet. Although my time online hasn’t dwindled and won’t be now, my unwasted time online has gone down even more. If there is a glimmer of hope or silver lining here it is that I wrote this on my iPad.

Summer vacation of 1986 was my bridge between middle school and high school; it was also the summer that I got my tonsils out. I remember one of the get well gifts was Licensed to Ill on cassette. I spent most of the next month lying on the couch and constantly flipping that tape over listening to it. It was the first rap cassette that I ever owned and it opened me up to a whole new world of music.

In 1989 when Paul’s Boutique was released, I was ecstatic. I had memorized Licensed to Ill and was looking forward to new songs from the Beasties. I went out and bought my cassette as soon as it was available. My cassette was red; apparently there were different colors available. I played that thing until one of the reels came loose. I could still play it but I had to make sure the reel lined up with the hole in my cassette player.
A few years later I remember watching Yo! MTV Raps and they debuted “Pass the Mic”. That was an exciting moment knowing that another Beastie Boy album wasn’t too far away. Not only did I have a new Beastie Boy’s tape (yes, still tapes), but I had a driver’s license too and as a 19 year old I had to play that and play it loudly.

Only two years would pass before another album would come out. I bought that cassette on its release day again and jammed that in the car. There’s just something about driving around with Sabotage playing.

There was a 4 year wait before Hello Nasty would be released. 1998 was a totally different time too, the internet was really starting to become commonplace and I bought Hello Nasty on a CD. In fact after buying that on CD I went back and repurchased all of the previous releases on CD as well.

Six years passed before I heard anything new, however now with the internet an everyday use for me, I had no problems finding out when To the 5 Boroughs would be released.

The next album was a little different, all instrumentals but it was still cool and I used it a lot to just relax and sometimes to fall asleep to.
When Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 was coming out last year it was so awesome. I was a 37 year old man now excited for a new CD to come out. I felt like I was in my youth again waiting to get the CD and listen to the whole thing. The only differences between this and when I was 13 was that I was buying a CD and then I ripped it to put on my IPod.

For the past 26 years the Beastie Boys have been a part of my life. No matter what song of theres I listen to nowadays, it always takes me back in time in my mind.

It is a sad day in the music world… RIP Adam Yauch (MCA)

I know I don’t blog very much, but I was shocked that after I wrote the first blog of any length or importance in quite some time, my site crashed and burned. I wrote a blog on the 11th and then when I went to my site to look at something the last entry showing was from February. In the blink of an eye I lost 7 months of blogs, or 6 entries, however you want to count it. When I tried to log into anything using my SQL databases it told me those were moved to a different server. I had to email my webhost and ask them a very simple question: what the fuck?

It turns out my site was moving to a new server and I was witnessing some leftovers at the old location. It took about two days after I bitched and then it was back to normal. I’m just glad that it is back again, now I can get back to ignoring it and not making entries.

I noticed that I didn’t have a “blog” back in 2001, that didn’t appear until almost a year later. I made my first official blog post on Friday August 16, 2002 shortly after returning from a vacation in Rapid City South Dakota.

I never told my “Where Was I” story, because frankly it wasn’t very interesting; and honestly it still isn’t. Back then I worked as the HBC/GM manager at a little shitty store. It was a job I hated very much, although there are certain aspects I did enjoy very much (that is for a different entry sometime in the future). I worked 8am to 5pm most days at this job, Tuesday was no different. I got up at 6:30 am, turned on KSTP to watch the news while I did my morning rituals getting ready for work. I started at 8am back then and I had about a 20 minute drive so I would have to be out of the house at 7:30 to make it. I still had the TV on and Good Morning America was on and they said they would be talking to Michael Jordon when they got back, and that was the point I shut off the TV and headed out the door for my lovely job. I never listened to the radio back then, I had no reason to. I had a sweet 6 deck CD player in my trunk and that was my entertainment while driving. My task for the day once I got to work; set up Halloween.

By the time I got to work at 7:50, the first plane had already hit the first tower, but I wouldn’t even know that for another half hour or so. If you’ve ever worked in a store or with the public you know that information comes into you incomplete and somewhat distorted. It’s like playing the game grapevine back in school. We had no radio in the store, just piped in music so there was no news coverage. Once all the stories started coming in and I soon realized that I was not going to put 100% into my Halloween set that day, I went to the shelf and pulled one of my radios off and went to the backroom. By the time I did that the Pentagon had also been hit. It was an absolutely crazy day there because it really sucks not knowing what is truly going on. I unfortunately couldn’t stay in the back all day and listen to the radio, I had to go out on the floor and try to look like I was attempting to do some work (let’s face it, after 6 years I had gotten pretty good at that).

A large portion of my product was up near the pharmacy and I would hang out behind the counter sometimes, usually just to escape the floor. They had a radio in there, and I was drawn to it much like anyone that day. The towers collapsed while I was in there and we were listening. I remember the looks of disbelief on some people’s faces that worked there and customers. These weren’t young people either; these were people in the late 50’s and early 60’s. These people were alive when Kennedy was killed; they were around for Vietnam… I had a reason to be freaked; I was only 27 and had never experienced anything like that before.
I actually drove 20 miles home for lunch that day so I could see some television coverage because I wanted to get a better grip on what was happening. Watching the news really didn’t help either because no one really knew what was going on. We knew what happened, but didn’t know what was really going on.
I don’t remember much about the remainder of the day at work. I think I spent over 90% of it in the back room. I had a lot of phone calls that day from friends who wanted to discuss the day’s events. The one thing that did stick in my mind was when I came home that night and saw the lines of cars at the gas station. I had only seen that in hurricane coverage on television.

The next morning when I got to the town I worked in, I saw the gas stations had no amounts on their signs. When I got into work I heard from the people that lived in the town that the stations changed their prices multiple times during the day and night and took the numbers down after they went over $5 a gallon… and that is my boring 9/11 story; although I’m sure people with frontline stories would be more than willing to trade stories anyday.