Tag / Funny Stories

by Greg

Chips & Salsa

Chips & SalsaYesterday I strolled through the living room and saw the boys eating chips and salsa again, which has become one of their favorite snacks. That’s cool, and all, except, it’s one of mine also! So I said to the boys, “No more chips and salsa for the boys… FOREVER!!!” 🙂 (I used my teasing voice, I think, so… I thought nothing of it.)

Today, Alex asks Mom, “Can I have some pretzels, Mom?” And Jen tells me that he asks for pretzels now, because I told them to not eat chips and salsa anymore!!!!

Well, I felt pretty bad (but chuckled at the same time…) 🙂 So, I called out to Alex, “Alex… you can have chips and salsa…”

At which point Alex closes the door to my office, but I can hear him run to tell Ian, “Ian! Ian!!! We can have CHIPS & SALSA!!!!!“

Pretty cute. 🙂

by Greg

Drill & Fill

Today on the way to the dentist to have a cavity (a pretty good one, it turns out) filled I was talking with Ian (whom I was dropping off at his piano lesson… busy day!) and I said, “See, Dad likes to go to Chill & Grill (our ice cream place) so much that now I have to go to Drill & Fill.”

He laughed. I laughed. Until I had to sit in the seat for 45 minutes of… not fun.

But don’t you think that would be a clever name for a dentist office?

Drill & Fill.

I think I’m onto something there…

by Greg

I’m STILL Full

I'm STILL FullMan, yesterday was all about the food. And the friends. But lots of food. 🙂

For lunch, we made our first visit to the India House buffet in Victor with our friends the Velasquezes, and a couple of their relatives… it was a big, fun party, with lots of good food (gotta love a buffet!) and I left there quite sure I wouldn’t need food for quite some time.

BUT WAIT. More friends were coming for a visit that evening… the Muscarellas were coming for a Skyline Chili meal! Now, if you’ve had Skyline with us, you know that it’s an all-you-can-eat affair… and indeed… it was. I had three chili spaghettis (2 4-ways and a 3-way) AND a nice big chilito!

AND THEN…

We went to Chill & Grill for the 5th time in the 5 days since it opened!!! HA!!!

I’m still full.

So, going to play basketball now and hopefully burn some calories. I feel… heavy. 🙂

It was a great day of food and friends though. Perhaps we should have just spread it out a bit?

By the way… that is me in the photo to the right, but… I don’t really look like that. 🙂 It’s Photo Booth magic. 🙂

by Greg

My Face Hurts, and Spooky Dreams

This past weekend, we went over to Buffalo to celebrate with a friend (who is also now our nieces’ grandpa…) his 20 years of working with the same church where Jen’s dad was for some 30 plus years. There were lots of blasts from the past. It was quite nice.

The only not nice thing was Kirsten kept complaining of being slightly sick.. like she needed to throw up maybe. That’s always a bad thing… We made it through the night without that, and a very tired Kirstie fell asleep on the hour and a half ride home. All seemed well.

At about 12:30, all had gone to bed, but I was still putting some things away, cleaning up, etc… when I heard Kirstie crying. I went into her room and she was still asleep… so I just helped her get under her blankets again, I figured she was just really, really tired. She went right back to sleep… all was well.

I went downstairs to watch a science show I had been wanting to watch for a very long time. I’m sure I saw most of it, but near the end, I fell asleep… maybe around 1:15 or 1:30? I was out for a long time, but just before I woke up, I had a very clear dream where I was waking up and Jen said to me, “Good, now you can help Kirstie.” Our clock’s hourly chime woke me up, and I realized where I was – shook off the strange ending to that dream (though I did check to see if Kirstie was crying again or something – and headed upstairs.

All was quiet, until I reached the top of the steps. As my foot touched the top step, Kirstie started crying again!! I was a little freaked out the my wife had told me in a dream that I needed to help Kirsten. But, actually, that made me take her cry more seriously. I went in and found her uncovered again, and as I picked her up to get her blankets, I noticed she was burning up!!! No wonder she was crying!!!

She definitely had a fever, though I couldn’t prove that, since I had no idea where to even look for the thermometer….. 🙂 I did check in the “normal” place, but, not many things are in the “normal” place in our house… 🙂 Anyway, I got her some fever reducing medicine (the last of it) and brought her into the bathroom to give that to her. She started crying again, louder this time. Jen comes in and just stands at the door of the bathroom for a second. No words are spoken. About 3 seconds later, she turns around and just goes back to bed! That was a funny scene. 🙂

Kirstie manages to get the medicine down, followed by a tiny cup of cold water (she really likes that part… even at three in the morning!) and I got her back in bed. I was a bit disturbed by having been told in a dream that my daughter needed help, so I continued to chat with God about her and whether she would be alright. I decided to wait till 3:30 then go check on her.

At precisely 3:30, I went back into her room and checked her forehead… she was cooling right down. She was still awake, so we asked God together to help her rest so she could get better. She smiled, I left, He helped, we went to sleep.

Fast forward to lunch time. The day had been pretty good so far. Kirstie did not eat much for breakfast… but she seemed to be doing fine. During lunch however, she had gotten down to use “the potty” and while contemplating the deep things of life on said potty… she says, “My face hurts. I need to rest so it can get better.”

“Your face hurts?”

“Yeah, right here,” she pointed to her forehead. “I need to rest so it can get better.”

🙂

So, I took her hand and we went up to her room and asked God to take away her face hurt so she could sleep. He did, she did, and all was better.

Kirstie did ask one more time that day if she could rest so her face wouldn’t hurt, but it seems the face hurting ended by Tuesday. We’re glad for that.

It is so fun to hear the things that come from a two-year-old’s heart out through their mouths. It’s kinda weird to hear that comes from the mouth of your spouse in your dreams sometimes…. 🙂

by Greg

Broked – Part II

OK… If you’re following along at home, you might think that last week’s troubles ended with the PowerBook hard drive failing (or perhaps you might even think they ended last week?) 🙂 That is not the case. So, the saga continues with another trip to the Apple Store on Thursday night, following the failure of yet another hard drive!

Thursday morning I was hoping to have a more successful day… just really hoping to finish the crazy week with a normal, quiet day. Wednesday night, Jen & I spent a little time going through the iTunes store to choose some music for her to use her $15 gift card on. That was fun, and after some tough choices, she settled on just the right songs to spend her gift money on. I sent the links up to the computer where we store our iTunes music library on Wednesday night, and made the purchases that following Thursday morning.

After all had downloaded, I went to get Jen’s iPod, and connected it to the computer. It mounted, and started updating, just as it always does. But right as it finished, it gave a little error message. Something like, “Unable to write to disk” or something. That sounded bad, but I assumed it was some strange glitch, and just unmounted the iPod drive and then re-connected it.

That’s when everything got broked again.

The iPod decided not to show up as it is supposed to. It thought it was updating, but iTunes (nor my computer) did not see it. I tried a few things, but eventually it just froze up my two applications that handle mounting iPod hard drives. I tried to force quit both of those, and nothing happened there… so I eventually decided to just unplug the iPod.

It didn’t like that.

It tried to restart, and was not successful. It restarted, then crashed, then restarted, then crashed… until the battery finally died. 🙁 It was a physical hard drive failure. We had just had that happen not 3 months ago! So, the best part was, I assumed it was still warranteed, and we took it up to the Apple Store (our second visit in as many nights.)

I need to make this long story short, so here are the highlights:

1) Long wait at the Apple Store… grumpy Genius handled my troubled iPod
2) “You’re out of warranty,” says grumpy Genius.
3) “How far out of warranty?” asks Greg. “I can’t tell,” replies grumpy Genius.
4) I notice on the paper that the 90-day warranty began on 10-18-2006. It was 1-19-07 that night. ARGH!!! Thankfully, the manager whom we know was working that night, and she took care of us. 🙂
5) They ship back our iPod, and order a new one for us, free of charge.

So, that kind of worked…

Friday morning, I had to restart my computer because Tuesday night the iPod crash had frozen up my disk utility program. So, when I got the chance, I restarted. BUT… for some reason, it spun up my external hard drive, and then would not quit. After waiting a very long time, I decided to force it to shut down. When the external drive is spinning, and you do a forced shut down… that makes a very very bad sound.

I spent the next 45 minutes I think doing all I could to save my 500GB external drive from a hard shut down. Thankfully, that actually worked! Was my luck changing? Were things technological going to begin to improve for me?

Guess not.

Sunday we got the call that the iPod was in and we could come pick it up. Jen did, and when she returned I went up and happily connected it to the computer, so we could load all 25GB or so of our music on there.

It didn’t show up. The computer, and iTunes were not recognizing it. I tried several different things. Nothing. I unplugged it (not recommended) and tried again… again nothing. Finally, the third time I unplugged it, I got the bad, BAD sound again! It fell right back into that loop the last one had done. Restart, crash, restart, crash…

You get the point.

Yes, folks. The REPLACEMENT for the REPLACEMENT of the REPLACEMENT … CRASHED! The FIRST TIME I CONNECTED IT!!!

It has been a very bad technology week here. 🙁

So, we’re headed to the Apple store tonight to have them order another one for us. It’s warranteed… but come on. This is ridiculous!!! Hoping the curse has run its course….

I’ll let you know in episode three…

by Greg

Broked

Tuesday morning, I awoke to a few phone calls, a couple IMs and an e-mail or two from a client (and friend) of mine who had woken up to find his website was down. That happens… so I wasn’t too worried. We had just spent 9 straight days getting him up and running on a new server – MAJOR craziness – and all was going well for a week… untill… his account just disappeared from the server. Gone. No trace of it ever having been there.

Thankfully, with some great help from several sources, we got his site up and running again within 24 hours. That was a bit of a miracle, you could say. It was quite welcome news this morning.

This afternoon, after a few more minor things were not going well… I went to check a web page I was working on over on my PowerBook, and I noticed I could not access it. The mouse was still moving, but I couldn’t click anything. I couldn’t get out of it any way I knew how, so … I just shut down the computer and tried again. Unfortunately, it just kept getting worse and worse… until, I was fairly certain I had lost all hope of recovering any of that drive 🙁

I am very good at backing things up, but unfortunately this time, there were DAYS worth of work on that computer that had NOT been backed up. Gone. Lost. No trace of it ever having been there.

Oh! And I almost forgot… I have some old gaming systems (Nintendo NES, Sega Genesis, TI 99/4a) and I had created the entire current Sabres team on the Sega Genesis NHL ’96 game! It’s awesome! The boys and I have enjoyed that. Last night, I played two games, and at the end of the second one, as I was about to shut it off… the screen froze. When it does that, you have to shut it off immediately, or you might lose the season, or perhaps other data. Yes… you guessed it. Not only did I lose the season… I lost every player I created, and all traces of it ever having been there.

Goodness… I’m in a pretty serious rut here…

At one point this evening I wanted to just completely eliminate all things that can break from my life. Mainly I was thinking electronic things… but then I just thought, how about EVERYTHING that can break. No more frustration then, eh? 🙂

Sadly… I do realize that everything breaks. Servers, hard drives, old computers, tables, couches, houses, and yes, even people 🙁 That’s the way it is.

Still, I can’t help but think that some of the great frustration I have endured this past week (and even this whole month so far I think) could have been alleviated had I a bit less dependence or involvement with electronic technology. The weird part is, that’s what I love! I love all the fun technology we have… but it does seem to cause me almost as much grief as enjoyment.

Perhaps a solution would be a technological sabbatical? What’s the likelihood of that? Me giving up technology???? It would certainly be different… 🙂

SO, my PowerBook has been shipped off to Apple again, and it will come back brand new… covered under warranty. But I did lose all the data on that. And there are some other things that are working around me… but it’s only a matter of time before they get broked too.

That’s just no fun. Wish stuff didn’t get broked.

by Greg

What A Surprise!!!

I can’t believe how little I have been able to get up here and share the fun stories from life in the Campbell home. I really do love to tell stories. I think it’s because I love to read stories. (I could say something cheesy like, “Stories are the fabric of life.” or something… but we all know that anyway, so I’ll leave the cheese out here…) Who doesn’t love stories?

Well here’s a quickie…

Last Tuesday night, Jen & I were headed out for a nice dinner together… no kids… (there’s a theme to today’s posts…) 🙂 but first we needed to get some gas. We went up to our gas station and filled up, and this time I happened to have lots of cash, so I decided to use that. (Almost never do that…) After I had filled up, I headed inside, but the pump beeped LOUDLY at me. I figured I needed to do something else, but when I returned to check, it said, “Please Pay Cashier”. I thought, “Ummm… right!” 🙂 And I headed back inside.

Our gas station gives away 50 gallons of gas every week. When you fill up, you just run in and get some tickets, and then check back on Fridays to see if you’ve won. We never have, but I still like to get tickets. Just in case. 🙂 This time, as I was heading inside, I noticed a sign on the door that said “Double Tickets on Tuesdays!” Sweet! More chances to win! I was going to make sure I mentioned that when I was paying.

When I came inside, the two ladies behind the counter were laughing, smiling… just having fun. I smiled, but thought nothing of it. As I approached the counter, I noticed that one of the ladies was our old neighbor (from our previous residence) and smiled a hello at her. Her co-worker, a younger, perhaps teenage girl, was arguing her case, “He was just cuuuute!” I smiled at her as well, and in response she said, “You were just cute! Running up and then running back to check the pump and then running back in!”

I was cute? They were laughing at me? Hmmm. I was a bit surprised by all of this now, and really didn’t know what to say. I said, “Thanks?” And after a bit more explaining, justifying, etc… the giddyness seemed to die down and I said, “I need to pay for my gas…” 🙂

They were still chatting happily as we completed the transaction, and as they did, I made sure to request my tickets. The younger girl gave me my double tickets and then a few more for good measure. (I was “cute”, remember… I guess that gets you more tickets…) 🙂 And then our former neighbor and I chatted a bit… just catching up on our respective families.

When I left I recounted the entire (humorous) story to Jen and we had a good laugh, too, over my “cuteness” and then had an enjoyable evening together… Jen took me out to a sub shop we’d never been to. Then we stopped by the Apple Store for a leisurely, “kidless” evening. It was quite nice.

Alright… I said “quick” but we’re getting long…

Fast forward to Saturday morning. It’s nearly noon and I need to hit the bank and the PO before the clock struck twelve. The bank was first… and with a long line, I knew my plans were mostly foiled. But, it went rather quickly, and I was out at 12:01. The library, which is in the same parking lot, had a book on hold for us, so I ran in there real quick, hoping they had stayed just a few minutes past 12… They had. I found out they close at 2. 🙂 That was nice.

I hurried to the now closed post office and got a stamp out of that little machine, and sent in my tax payment… so that was all good. Just one more stop… had to check on our gas tickets, since I was right there anyway.

I jumped out of the car and hurried in (remembering the funny “cute” story from a few nights before). I checked the tickets again and looked at the general set of numbers I was hoping to see on the winner’s board. When I got to the counter I looked at the number, and it was close! But we’ve been there before… just a number or two off. But this time… IT WAS EXACTLY OUR NUMBER!!!!

I must have checked it four times before I finally said, kind of quietly, “I … think we won?” The guy behind the counter said to another worker on the floor, “This guy says he thinks he won the gas giveaway.” The lady he was speaking to came over to inspect and I said, “I think I’ve got it!” She verified they were the same numbers and took my license number so that when we come in, we just put our gas on that tab until we’ve gotten our 50 gallons!

FIFTY GALLONS. Gas is $2.45/gallon at the moment, so that’s $122.50 worth of gas!!! Nice!!!!! We’ve said before that money is not flowing freely around here, and that remains true. It’s even been a lot tougher of late, which causes a little extra stress in the home. So, this was just nice timing, and a very fun gift to us. We’re excited!

So what I got out of this story was, be sure to be cute when you’re getting gas, and you might end up winning 50 free gallons!

Well, ok… maybe not. 🙂

by Greg

Go(o)d Timing

While I am here… I wanted to post this story last week, but didn’t have the time. (I don’t now, but since I’m here…) 🙂

I usually take a break for lunch (which my wife dilligently prepares for us) around 1pm every day. Often it will end up being 1:15… or if a particularly busy day, it could be later. But this past Friday, I had finished up some things… and there was a rumbly in my tumbly… and didn’t want to start the next thing for fear of going way past 1:00… so, I decided it was time for lunch at 12:15. Usually, I would not make such a decision. There was a set of odd circumstances that led to that, and then even more odd was, if I ever do “leave” early… I usually find several things to do on the way out of my office. But today, I didn’t. I just left.

I walked downstairs and greeted my family. The greeting I received in return from my wife was, “Why are you down here now?” It was not the kindest greeting, but Jen prefers things to be as they “should” be. So, deviation from the norm (though completely expected from me) is much more difficult for her to handle than me, or perhaps our children.

I tried to think of how to explain why I was down there early, but really, there were several reasons (too long to explain) and at the same time, there were no reasons. So, after a brief pause, I replied, “Because I had to.”

The words even surprised me. 🙂 I think I followed that up by saying quickly, “That was a weird thing to say!” But not 5 seconds after I had said, “Because I had to,” there was a knock on our front door. I peeked around the corner to see who it was and it was a friend we have not seen in a while who stops by on occasion to spend time with “basic”, as he calls us. 🙂 From observation, it seems like he’s on the lonely side, so we’re happy to share a meal with him or just hang out for a while.

So, I said to Jen, “And maybe this is why…” (refering to my previous statement, “Because I had to.”) I went to the door, and happily invited him in. 🙂

The cool part was, had I dove right back into the next project, I would have come down, but not been “free” to do so. This time, I was, and it was an enjoyably quirky lunch. (He’s an odd fellow, to be sure…) 🙂

After he left, I just marveled for the rest of that afternoon at God’s timing, and maybe even the way he gave me words to say. I mean… I didn’t know really why I chose the words, “Because I had to,” but they seemed to fit once our friend knocked on the door. (FIVE SECONDS after I said them!!!)

Just a fun God moment in a very busy week. Wanted to share it with you. 🙂

by Greg

Sleep

Usually I do not need much sleep. I regularly can operate on 6 hours of sleep or so. This past week was a bit more full than others, so the sleep hours were down even more. Very late nights (some would call them mornings) and then a bit earlier than normal mornings. (I’ve been trying to get up around 7:15-7:30 to go out for a nice 2-mile walk.)

Well, I think today it caught up with me. 🙂

I went to bed last night just after 4am, and was hoping to get up with my alarm clock at 7:15am. It was not till about 8:30am that I woke up and remembered that dream where my alarm went off and I could not get it to shut off. I also remembered that after a brief struggle, I was victorious. And thus… I did not get up till about 9.

Sometimes, the body just takes over, I suppose. In fact, the reason I went to bed at 4 was that I was falling asleep sitting at my desk! That’s never happened before! Would have been kind of funny if I really did fall asleep!

Perhaps I should take a nap this week or something…