I got married to Vivian almost 15 years ago, and somehow I got convinced that we should keep the top of our wedding cake. I was told it was some sort of “tradition” or something and I fell for it. Well, I didn’t ask enough questions at first… Crap, I guess I didn’t ask ANY questions about this tradition because we’ve had the cake top in our freezer for almost 15 years. We’ve been planning to blow it up for several years, but we never got around to it…

So when the power went out a couple of weeks ago for 9 days the cake top was an unexpected casualty. I put it in a cooler on the back porch and it froze again at night and thawed during the days we were without power. We decided we couldn’t afford to wait for our 15th anniversary in April to blow it up at this point. So on Christmas eve there was a representative group from our wedding over for brunch and we took the opportunity to destroy it while there were witnesses.

Here are some pics of our asploding cake that my mom took! I wanted to do the 21 gun salute with the 500 mg rocket pack on the thing but Vivian wanted to save that monster for her birthday, so we just used 3 strings of black cats. It only blew the icing off the cake and did little real damage, but everyone rejoiced! Woo HOOOO!!! Even the people in the truck that stopped up the street looked on and I can only guess at this fact, but I think they rejoiced with us!

I was driving through my neighborhood on Tuesday evening and this poem came to mind. I was very frustrated with the fact it was taking so long for the power to be restored in MY neighborhood in mid-town…

I can feel the heat from the bulb
I can smell the filament burning
But it’s not my light

I can see it from my window
It’s only 3 houses away
But it’s not my light

It’s the 9th day without power
It’s been so long, but it’s almost over
But I still have no lights

We are in the lucky 24,000 still without power
Happy Birthday to me, and Merry Christmas!

My birthday was on Monday, the 10th, and it was the first full day of what I’m calling Hell Week 2007. I hope that’s not too depressing to anyone, but I cannot describe very well the frustration and exhaustion I felt as this “natural disaster” progressed through the week. I’ve never been through anything quite like it before, and I hope I never go through it again.

At my worst moments I thought about the Katrina victims and wondered what my worst moments would be like if they lasted for a year or two… My worst moments, as bad as they were, paled in comparison to what the people of New Orleans went through for sure – what they are still going through…

On Monday I wasn’t aware of the scale of the problem, so I drove around looking for something to eat for breakfast and I stopped at Academy Sports and bought myself a birthday present, a new set of darts! I also drove around taking pictures of the destruction. Little by little the scope of destruction sunk in. By afternoon denial turned into shock and I realized this was far worse than I had at first thought. My mother-in-law stayed at my son’s apartment in Broken Arrow on Monday night since he hadn’t lost power.

(more later)

So I’ve been without power for a full 48 hours now. The storm started on Sunday night and the power went out around 9pm. I’m at Arnie’s bar right now having a few beers with friends. It’s one of the few places that has power, beer and wifi all at the same time. Here’s a couple of pics…

This is my best friend’s dad in his back yard. I went by to check in on him. He’s got a fireplace and a gas stove so he’s doing better than some, but he only has a few days worth of firewood…

This is a tree across from my mom’s house. I’ll post more pics from all over Tulsa later when I have more time, but this is a start. There are currently 225,000 people without power in the Tulsa metropolitan area, which has perhaps 500,000 total combining all of the smallest communities in the area.

It’s amazing to drive all over town and see this. It’s not in pockets. It’s all over. I would bet that 95-99% of all trees in Tulsa have suffered some damage because of this storm. It’s hovering around freezing so the roads are still warm enough to not freeze, but everything above ground is frozen solid – trees and wires… The ice settles and adds so much weight on the branches the trees just can’t hold up the weight any more… Save the trees.

My friend Stanley and I went on a day-long road trip to Miami, OK yesterday to check out the Route 66 darts tournament held at Shooters Bar. We had a pretty good time. I played in the Men’s, Singles, Cricket competition (my first tournament ever), and though I didn’t even win my first games I played pretty well. I got knocked out in round 1 so we came home. My problem wasn’t so much accuracy – I was hitting what I was throwing at pretty well, but the strategy of scoring points is a bit foreign to me. We don’t usually play to score points in our Tuesday night matches, so I wasn’t sure how to approach the situation when I got behind. Still I had a great time.

The tall guy below is supposedly ranked in the top 5 in the country, or so I was told. I didn’t have to play him… The big guy next to him is ranked in the top 10 or maybe top 20 in the country too. I didn’t play him either… The other guy they are both talking to was from Wichita. There was a big group from Wichita called the Dart Frogs…

A shot of the long room upstairs at Shooters. 11 boards lined one wall…

The organizer’s area where they kept track of things. Obviously the board behind their display was NOT used in the tournament. If you notice in this pic there’s a #19 above the scoreboard to the left of the dart board. Each was numbered, and the organizer’s would call out who was playing on each board.

9 boards lined the other wall. The organizer’s area is at the far right of the pic below.

I’m going to practice and get ready for the next tournament in April, 2008. They do it twice a year, and I guess since I won $12 I could say I’ve gone “pro!”

I won the money in a “shootout” style competition. If you pay $1 you could throw 3 darts and try to “go out” on a number between 2 and 170 with the last throw being a double. For example if I drew the number 170 I’d have to hit a Triple 20 with my first dart (60), another Triple 20 with my second (another 60), then a Double Bull’s Eye (50) for a total of 170. They started with $20 in the pot. If you won you got half the pot. I was the first shooter and I pulled a 103 out of the bag of numbers and missed it… Then I drew something like 117 and missed it. Then someone else threw and missed. Then I drew a 4 (FOUR!!!) out of the bag. I hit the double 2 and won $12. Woo HOOO!

It was funny enough that I had to stop and take a picture. It made my whole morning.

No more fun??? Dang…

I’ve wanted to go to the Tulsa Aquarium since it opened, but I hadn’t made the effort until this weekend. I took my mom today and we had a great time. I wouldn’t rank the Aquarium anywhere near the best ones out there (the New England Aquarium is the best I’ve ever seen), but it was a fun trip. It was a bit pricey too, but I’m probably not going to go back for a while so they gotta make money however they can to keep it up to a good standard.

The only real strike I’d put against the Aquarium is the lack of backdrops in many of the tanks. The designers went to great lengths to create good environments for the fishies, but many of the tanks simply had gray or blue backgrounds. If I were a fish stuck in a tank I’d want a painting of the ocean – or where ever I came from – on the back walls to remind me of home! It just wasn’t there. Still, I had a great time, and I think my mom did too. When we first went in we heard a little boy yelling, “LOOK MOMMY! IT’S NEMO!!!!” It cracked me up. I love Nemo.

Here are some pics! Click a pic to see a larger version, and use the browser’s “Back” button to return to this page.

There’s a phrase that has been tossed around for the last 4 or 5 years. It started getting kicked around when we invaded Iraq. I just find it difficult to accept, so I’m finally writing about it. This phrase is brought out and paraded around when anyone questions the current situation in Iraq. If someone doesn’t like it they are “not supporting the troops.”

The President uses this phrase (and Republicrats in general) when anyone challenges the status quo in Iraq. They are immediately accused of not supporting the troops. What I find difficult to accept is that the troops were put in harms way on a hunch, on a cooked scheme, on a lie or series of lies at worst – just bad intelligence at best… We were told there was conclusive proof that Iraq had WMD’s, but when it was generally accepted that it wasn’t really the case we didn’t immediately apologize for wrecking Iraq and pull out or offer assistance and ask forgiveness for wrecking the country…

If challenged the administration simply changed the story to something else to justify what was done, and the challengers were told they weren’t supporting our troops who were doing a very difficult job! Well, yes they ARE doing a very difficult job. They are doing something they shouldn’t be doing! And questioning the situation IS supporting the troops! We can’t just leave them over there indefinitely! Are we willing to have a military presence in Iraq for 50+ years like we’ve done in Korea!? I’m not.

The administration keeps trying to justify continuing to stay in Iraq any way they can, but there is no justification any more – at least no other justification than we screwed up their country and we should fix it, or at least hang around long enough to maintain stability so it doesn’t get worse… If it’s about the oil, then we need to come clean and just say it. I’ll be glad when we have a new administration. Any administration will be an improvement!

UPDATE: The following on Yahoo! News makes my point directly… How is it that we can say we’re “supporting the troops” when we read something like the following? We aren’t even going to give them equal time at home! I don’t understand why the Democrats can’t capitalize on statements like this…

“…Gates allied himself with Sen. John Warner to make his case against one Democratic proposal in particular — a measure by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., that would have guaranteed troops more time at home.”

This was less an action movie and more a “movie movie.” I think it was based loosely on real events, and heavily on a real person. Jet Li is a good actor in his own right, and he does a great job in this movie.

Fearless is the story of a young boy who watches his father lose a martial arts fight, and swears that he will learn to fight and that no one will ever beat him. As a man he defeats all other challengers except one, the man who beat his father. One night his students bring another student on a stretcher and tell him the man who defeated his father beat up the student. Seeking justice for his student Li confronts that man, challenges him to fight, and not only defeats him he kills him.

This sets up a series of events that takes Li to a remote corner of China where he learns just how misguided he has been since childhood. He lives in a small farming community and learns to respect not only the world around him, but also the people in his life. He learns that not everything is a competition that he must win for personal glory. Eventually he returns home to pay respects to the memory of his dead parents and set right the problems he caused earlier. I won’t give away any more of the plot because I think everyone else will enjoy being pulled into it as much as I was.

One thing about the movie that I found to be a bit hilarious was the first Westerner that traveled around challenging Easterners to fight. It was the Western boxer versus Eastern martial artist and the Irishman, O’Brien, had never been beaten. The man playing O’Brien is a mountain of a man, not fat in the least, very muscular. I’ve seen him in one other movie (The Protector) and he had the same lines – “Come on! Yeah! Come on! Yeah!” It could be that he’s really that big, or it could be that he just looks that big next to the smaller Asian fighter he’s facing… Whatever the case he’s a good foil, though not an actor with a very deep pool of inspiration to draw upon.

The movie is subtitled so be prepared to read. It’s worth it though. I’d rank this movie very high on the must see list.