The Big DumpTruck

Man, I had to turn off commenting today. I was getting HAMMERED by spammers. I think I got 10 spam comments in a row in a 5 minute span, and I didn’t see an end in sight so I just shut off comments. I have shut off comments in prior months, I may leave them open in November and October. We’ll see.

Why do I feel like this month is going by WAY too fast? I have so many things on my to do list that I need a to do list for updating the to do list. Unfortunately some of them have to be done NOW if I want them for Christmas. Better get going, huh? Maybe if I fuel myself with some chicken lo mein and miniature Charleston Chews…

We did head out for more shopping this morning. I was very happy with Junior because he really was focussed on getting stuff for people other than himself. He has a very hard time with that normally, and it’s tiring to go shopping with him because he wants everything in site. Today we bought something for my niece and for my friend’s daughters and I know he wanted one, but he was very good when only two boxes went into the cart. We also finished up my step-son…Mr. Dump and I got his big gift last night, and Junior got him a present.

I don’t think there were as many people out as I would have expected. Did everyone finish already, or is everyone buying online? I think we’re at about 60% online this year. And you?

What, you think I’m going to post that here? What if Junior suddenly starts reading the Dump? Well that wouldn’t fly, now would it?

Oh, and I was going to tell you about a present I bought for myself (but will give to Mr. Dump to wrap and say it’s from him, or Junior, or the doginator) but I just realized that I bought two of these items, one for my step-daughter who DOES read the Dump so I’ll be darned if I’m going to blow the surprise. Sheesh. That was a close one.

Looking at the budget, we can probably do a little more shopping this weekend, maybe I can get my niece and nephew and my friend’s two daughters out of the way, so I can focus on Junior and the step-kids when we get the rest of our shopping $$ on the 16th. I hate having to wait that late in the month for Junior because he always wants the trendy stuff that they run out of. He’s 80% done now, though, so even if something happened and we couldn’t spend another dime on Christmas, Santa would have a nice selection of items from his list. And some things he didn’t ask for but will like anyway, darn it!

(Can I be frank? I can’t wait until he learns where the Santa gifts come from, because it will be nice to be able to streamline his list and tell him that no, Santa isn’t going to bring him a jet car (a real one, not a toy) or an XBOX 360 because I’m not shelling out $400 for a game console. He’s kind of asked about it a little bit over the past year, but I haven’t heard a peep now that it’s close and he’s got his list all written out. He turns 8 in a month (ACK!) and I think he’s really edging close to figuring it out.)

This is a quick post to show that the brain is a wondrous filing cabinet. As is the Internet. Together, they fight crime.

Okay, so to begin, there is a person on my current project whose last name is Pappas. All fine and good. The odd thing is that in my head, I keep calling him Doug. I even wrote it in an email to another person on the team. But his name isn’t Doug. So I started to think – why do I keep wanting to call him Doug? I must know someone else with that name. So of course, now I can’t stop trying to remember. I know it’s not a person from school or work. I also get the sense that it’s someone I knew a while ago, but not just in passing. So I start working through the mental checklist. He’s not from any of my current mailing lists, or from this website. Did I know him from my old BBS? That’s quite possible, and it feels right, timing wise. But that was a loooong time ago. So maybe from CompuServe? I hop over to Google to see what I get. I get a ton of hits, because someone who appears to have been very well-respected in the baseball industry died while hiking about a year and a half ago. I thumb through 22 Google pages of “Doug Pappas” hits and 98% of them were for this guy. Well, I don’t think there was a baseball connection, that doesn’t sound right.

So I start to narrow down my search. Nothing sounds right when I add the word Massachusetts, so it’s not a local thing. So I add CompuServe and get a few hits. I look at the first one, and I know this is the same guy – I did know him from CompuServe. We were both members of at least one similar forum, Rocknet (although we could have been in more than one, this is the one mentioned in the Google hit) in the right timeframe, 1990-ish.

And then it starts coming back. The Google hit says he was into road tripping, and I suddenly realize that he might be one of the two people I used to exchange ugly, horrid postcards with. If true, this would confirm my feeling that I knew this person more than in passing, but not in person, you know? We’d buy the “worst” postcards – the best ones were the old out-of-date ones. And then we’d mail them to each other. So now I’m 90% sure this is the guy…and I check out another link which happens to have his home address, and my stomach kind of lurches because the minute I see it, I recognize it, and thus I have tracked down the Doug Pappas from my past. The unfortunate thing is that this Doug Pappas is the same Doug Pappas who was the editor of the Society for American Baseball Research. The same guy who died while hiking in Big Bend National Park. So in one fell swoop I rediscover an old friend, and find out he is no longer with us.

Stupid brain.

In my long past, back when I was working for Information Mapping, we used to go nuts decorating our cubes and offices for the holidays. At some point, someone (I am not positive who said this, although I have a couple of people in mind) looked at one garish display and declared it “F’ing Festive” (with the full word in place of the apostrophe). The juxtaposition of those two words gave it an instant place in the hall of fame. I cannot praise it enough. So fast forward 7 or so years, and I still use this phrase, especially when things are over the top.

You know, I started writing this a couple of hours ago, and I can’t remember what I was going to describe to you. Probably the way the house looks from the outside, because I believe I did use that phrase with Mr. Dump the other night. He has the background on the phrase and appreciates its appropriate use.

The Doginator hasn’t tried to eat the tree or any of the ornaments that are sort of kind of within his reach, so that’s good. He doesn’t need to supplement his diet of the buttons off my LL Bean coat anyway. That’s right, buttons with an S. I was kind of wearing it anyway, with the one button gone from the bottom, but apparently the coat fell off the coat rack the other day and he ate another button off. (They are attached with a bit of leather string, and he gnaws through the leather. He hasn’t actually eaten a button, as they are huge. So now I just can’t wear the coat any more, which has me seriously bummed out. I won’t have money to replace it until at least after Christmas. Bah, humbug.

Did some Christmas shopping over the weekend. I was in evil step-monster mode and dragged the poor children to the mall. I have been told that I must announce a momentous occasion here in the dump: My step-daughter and I agreed that an article of clothing was cute. Can you believe it? This hasn’t happened in years. She’ll be 14 in January, and I have no taste in clothes whatsoever. Granted I can’t fit one leg in the skirts at the stores where she shops. So she did pick out a few things and I got all evil and said they were being put away until Christmas. Bwa-ha-ha-ha!

Oh, but she got me back. I am currently obsessed with SuDoku and I showed her how to do it. We each got on a computer and loaded the same puzzle from www.websudoku.com and she beat me at finishing it. Ratzen fratzen kids these days.