The Red Green Show

About a year ago I discovered the ultimate "redneck" show. Well, a comedic rendering of redneck life, anyway. This guy is on PBS on Saturday night in our area, although the shows are all reruns as the series ended a few years ago. Click on the title to see what I'm talking about. I don't care much for most of the other redneck comedy shows, but this one is funny.

I reformatted my computer today, so the viruses are all gone, for now. I forgot how much stuff you have to download because other applications use things that aren't on the computer to start with, so it's taken me all afternoon to get things back to normal, but I think I'm back.

Virus Season

I haven't been on here for a while now because I've been sick for about a week, but mainly because my computer is sicker than me. A couple of months ago my virus protection expired and I never got around to getting it back, so of course I was hit by several viruses. I went to a free scan site and found out that I had 16 Trojan viruses, 50 bad cookie things(sorry if I get too technical here), and 38 unidentified risks. Since these all are making my computer run extremely slowly they couldn't be taken off, so it looks like I'll have to reformat my hard drive, again. I'm putting that off as long as I can, but I can't wait too much longer.

I Didn't Know

A while back we hosted a kindergarten drinking party at our house. I thought it would be a lot safer than letting the kids cross the street to get to that house that smells like a dirty birdcage. Plus I thought the kids would think of us as the "cool" parents, especially when the strippers showed up. I didn't know it was illegal to serve alcohol to minors in my own home, or that we could pay a fine, go to jail, and even lose my job as Sunday school teacher unless we knew who to bribe. But that's what happened, and it wasn't cool. I learned my lesson... don't invite that cop's kid next time.

Happenings

Well, any news in our family this year has had to do with my middle son, Nathan. Earlier this year he earned his Eagle merit badge in Boy scouts, which was a good thing. Then he graduated in June, also a positive. Then we went through a hassle trying to get his college finances straightened around, and getting him enrolled. Umm... a little before that he got a new car. Then, about a month ago he announced that he and his girlfriend were engaged, not exactly a shock to me but my wife was surprised. About two weeks ago he got in a fender-bender in his new car*. To top off everything he gave us the news last week that his girlfriend is pregnant...so....I'm going to be a grandpa.... I'm not sure how to feel about that one right now.

So needless to say, Nathan's provided us with our share of ups and downs recently. It's something that goes along with raising a child I guess.

*I have to expound on his accident because it's gotten me furious. He was at a stop sign behind a car driven by an old lady. She started to pull out to make a right turn. Nathan coasted ahead and turned his head to look for oncoming traffic. In the meantime the lady stopped instead of pulling out, and Nathan's car bumped into hers. I said above that it was a fender-bender, but no fenders were bent, nothing was scratched, no damage at all. His car is brand new, a 2007 shiny red Cobalt, and his bumper had no scratch at all. Her car was an older, much larger Marquis. The impact was so slight that he said he hardly felt it... no air bags deployed on either car, so you get the picture of how light the contact was. Anyway, the lady jumped out of her car and started screaming at Nathan. The police came and made out a report, but since there was no damage Nathan wasn't cited. Because the cop couldn't find any damage on her car, the old lady got furious with him and started yelling at him too. At any rate, the police took the insurance info and the incident was forgotten...well, not forgotten but put out of mind....until last Friday when Nate got a letter from the lady's insurance company saying that they were filing damage claims. We contacted our insurance company (Nathan's on my insurance policy) to see what was going on and they said that the lady had gone to the hospital a few hours after the accident claiming that she hurt her neck and back. When Nathan explained that she had jumped out and started yelling at him and seemed perfectly fine then the insurance lady said that yes, she was probably faking and nothing was wrong, but the insurance company usually just pays anyway because it costs more to go to court to try to prove her wrong. That means that his insurance costs will go way up. This angers me to no end that the old lady is going to get away with insurance fraud, at our cost...my cost, since I usually wind up paying Nathan's premium for him. However, the old lady doesn't realize that she's incurred my wrath, and since she's from around here, and since settlements of that kind are on public record I'm going make sure to let everyone know who this fraudster is................. don't mess with us quiet people.

Just the Facts Ma'am

As the tv westerns started to give way in popularity to police shows, one man came along who solidified the public interest in the police dramas. Jack Webb's promotion of the law enforcement field through tv made him the "top cop" of the sixties and seventies. Dragnet was one show that our family gathered around the tv to see. I don't think it was so much the storyline of each episode that drew such a large following as it was Jack himself. Even though he was the star of the show he always cast himself as just another cop, who happened to narrate the show. The family-friendly format made some of the episodes almost laughable at their non-violent nature. I mean, even at the young age I was, I still knew that Dragnet or Adam-12, another Jack Webb production, was not an accurate portrayal of the life of a cop in L.A. But there was no mistaking Jack's determination in trying to educate the public about the processes of the law. Sgt. Friday was a cop who seemed as boring a person as you'd want to meet, but for some reason you had to stay glued to the tube to see what happened next, right up to the end where you had to wait until after the commercial to see what the bad guys got... "In a moment, the results of that hearing".

The interest in police dramas started to fade a little after the seventies. There were a few in the early eighties - Magnum P.I., Miami Vice a little later, and some lesser known ones, but I don't think it was until the mid nineties that they started to pick up, and now they're all over the screen again, although most of them seem to be of the CSI type. Personally, I lived through the barrage of early seventies police shows, so by the time Magnum came around I wasn't much interested in watching cop shows anymore, and I don't watch them at all now. But Dragnet, even with its dull routine and bad acting by everyone except the main characters, was one of my favorites.

Long Ago Things Were Simple

The warm summer day held a blue sky void of clouds. A lazy afternoon at work for me, a furniture delivery man, in which I was spending my day on only three deliveries which were in three different directions meaning lots of drive time. Ray Parker Jr. was singing "You can't change that" on the radio, lulling me into a dreamy state where I was thinking about the girl I was madly in love with, and planning our future together. Of course I would somehow have to come up with the courage to ask her out first, but that was a minor detail not even entering my thoughts at the moment. My delivery partner was a horrible driver and right now he was sitting in the driver's seat. Luckily I was awake enough to see that he had fallen asleep and was running off the road going down a very steep hill. I yelled and his head snapped back up in time to jerk the van back onto the road. That was all the excitement I wanted right then... on that perfect day... with my perfect dreams.

I was living at home at that time and putting away some money, despite having payments on a still fairly-new car and a brand new motorcycle. I could come and go as I pleased. Work was actually a fun part of my day at that point. I had lost weight from my high school days- just a couple of years before- and was even called "skinny" for the first time in my life. I knew that these were the best days of my life so far and looked forward to even better ones.
Soon things would change, and not in the way I had hoped. I would meet a girl who would become my wife and we would make a life together, but not without many many stressful, trying times. My parents, who I had never thought would leave, would depart this world, my mother being the first to go just a couple of years after the clear, bright summer day when I was planning my future. My own sanity would be pushed to its limit as panic and anxiety, which were unknown to me before this, took control of a large portion of my life. Children would enter the picture and bring many joys and many trials.The outside world would change too, bringing new technologies but also new, unforeseen problems.......Twenty five years or so later the world is not as I had pictured it would be.

Long ago, on a summer day, a young man with a simple life full of dreams knew that he was living in a perfect world.