A neighbor across the street from me owns a dog named Duke. Duke is a very sweet and loveable outside dog and he is free to wander around the neighborhood. Everyone loves him and he never causes any trouble. A few months ago he adopted a dangerous habit of sleeping in the street late at night after his owner had turned in and I became very concerned about his safety. Cars passing thru would have to literally go around him. Some would honk their horn at him to move but he wouldn’t even look up, totally trusting that no one would hurt him.

I’m up late so I would see him doing this and I would chase him off the street only to find him back sleeping in the same spot a half hour later. Frustrated and worried about him, I started making him come in to my house and let him spend the night sleeping on the rug near my front door. Over time we became the best of friends, now he spends about 50% of his time hanging out with me and sleeps over every night. During the day is at his owners home across the street.

The guy that owns him found him wandering the streets after Hurricane Katrina and was never able to find his true owner, so he is a hurricane survivor. He is also quite a character and very independent. Last week I got a brand new Android smartphone and I was trying out the video camera and Duke happened to be handy as my very first movie subject. So, here’s Duke!

To be honest, he doesn’t really wag his tail on command, he will pretty much wag at anything I say to him, he loves attention. His tail would make a great duster wouldn’t it? lol He has become quite a good buddy and I know he loves hanging out with me. He loves taking walks and he walks with me every evening. I still have no idea why he liked sleeping in the street but I’m glad to have him around and safe.

That’s all I got today, hope you guys have a great weekend!

Yeah, it’s been a very long time since I’ve posted to this blasted thing. Two years! Lately it’s been on my mind more and more and finally I’m doing it. I even made up a brand new template for the occasion and Halloween.  I’ve surfed around my old links to see how many blogs are still in action and I see quite a few have either disappeared or are just dormant.I will have to update all my links, lol. I wonder how much Facebook has to do with that?

Here’s an update to the previous post, my folk’s house is completely finished from Hurricane Katrina’s destruction and came out extremely well. At the moment I only have this one photo of the outside, none from the interior remodeling. I’ll try to get a few from the inside later.

The finished look

I’ve moved into another house, about a year ago. It’s quite a bit larger and I like it here much better. It’s an 80 year old shotgun style home built from what they call barge board. This is wood that was salvaged from very old wooden barges that used to travel on the Mississippi River back then. The walls are very thick solid wood with no insulation or sheetrock on the inside, the inside of the wall is the wall, period. Oddly enough the utilities have been pretty reasonable although it takes a lot of a/c to keep it cool in mid summer. It’s 2 bedrooms with high, old fashioned ceilings and very high windows. The river is only about 3 blocks away, I can see ships passing from my front porch which is pretty cool.

I’m not gonna bore you with what I’ve been doing since I last updated this blog (I’ll save that for another post lol) so I will finish up with some wacky stuff like some crazy ads.

I wonder if it really works?

I have a feeling she'll be planning your funeral the next day...

How fast can you crawl?

See you soon!

You’ve probably been wondering where the hell I’ve been, but I’m still around! Just been very, very busy. About the only thing I have to update you guys on is the progress on the house since Katrina. It’s coming along pretty good now as you can see from the photos below, the folks may be able to move back into it within the next few months. Yes, they’re living in the FEMA trailer out in the front yard! Talk about cramped living space, omg it’s just tiny. Right now they’re having trouble getting somone to come out and do repairs on it, the floor near the bathroom is rotten and about to fall through because of a water leak.

This photo was taken right after the sheetrock was all pulled out not long after Katrina

Here’s the same camera angle shot today, now with sheetrock! Amazing huh?

Here’s a good shot showing how high the house and slab was raised, the A/C unit is on stilts!

And the new deck in the rear looks great!

Anyway, Mardi Gras season has come and gone and I didn’t bother to attend any of the parades. I guess after you’re seen hundreds of them it gets to be the same old, same old. Know what I mean? And besides, if you’ve seen one throng of drunken tourists stumbling down Bourbon St, you’ve seen them all. LOL

I’ve pretty much settled into the house I’m renting, love the place actually. It’s nice, quiet and cozy. I built my mom a new PC for Christmas, she seems to like it much better than the old one which was running Win 98, this one runs XP. The new one is 3 times faster and has lots of cool features the old one doesn’t. My mom is pretty good with her computer, amazes me sometimes with the stuff she knows how to do.

Sometimes though she cracks me up. Today she called and said her email wasn’t working and if I knew what was wrong. After asking her a couple questions it was obvious she didn’t have an internet connection. When I asked her if she could view any web pages she told me the internet was disconnected because the workers were putting in new sheetrock upstairs. Well mom, I think that might just be the problem! You must have an internet connection to receive emails, lol. Love you mom! (She reads my blog)

Well folks that’s all I got, hope you and yours have been fine and I’ll be stopping by to see how ya’ll are! Take care and be good!!

I’m feeling much, much better since my surgery. I still have some mild pain when I move around, enough to make me wince occasionally but it’s bearable. I can’t say much for the scar, it’s going to be one of my uglier ones I think. Not that any of them look great or anything like that, but you know what I mean. But enough about that, here’s some news you can use!

Those who’ve been following the two plus year saga of life after Katrina will be amazed to hear that work has actually begun on repairing the folks house. Lo and behold, FEMA waves it’s mighty, magical bureacratic powers in the breeze for what seems like an eternity and stuff actually gets done. Are you amazed or what? What, you don’t believe me? I actually have photographic proof of this strange and unusual phenomenon in action.

In this photo you can see the huge mess that comes from tunneling under the foundation.

Here’s what one of the holes looks like that they’re digging to be able to reach the pilings under the house to get it jacked up. It’s going to be raised 3 feet off the ground and it will take about 6 weeks.

Of course the interior still looks like this, but hey, what do you want? It’s only been two years! Give the govmint a chance will ya! They’re giving it their best!

Of course my mom is ecstatic now that work has begun in earnest. All the planning she’s been doing on the interior is now going to become a reality, she get’s to redecorate the entire interior with all new stuff. It’s going to be a nice home once again, one of these days…

Hope you guys are having a good weekend!!!

WOW, I’ve been so busy lately! I’m in the middle of moving to a new house and I’m trying to help my parents get their house back in order from Katrina as much as I can. There’s one project that’s been totally kicking my ass and that is building the shed from hell. It’s a prefab plastic 7′ x 10′ unit manufactured by Rubbermaid. It was packaged in two oversized boxes and it’s intended to replace the one that Katrina blew to smithereens two years ago.

The instructions claimed 2 hours assembly time which has to be either a typo or an outright lie. It’s more like 2 hours per panel! And there’s about 14 panels. The strangest thing is this weird looking symbol that’s been slowly materializing on the side now that it’s nearly complete, not sure what it means though…

Blogs Gone Wild has been going really strong, I recently did a complete redesign of the site and it now runs on WordPress and includes a blog for updates and site news. Something I had been wanting to do for a long time.

Free Blogger Skins has grown like crazy too, it now gets over 80,000 hits a month! It’s also in the Top 200 blogs listings on Technorati, that’s just crazy! I’ve also been doing some contract web work for a local company outside of Blogs Gone Wild, I would like to get more of that.

I just recently did another makeover for The Redneck Mommy, she wanted the conversion to WordPress that I did for her a few months back converted again into a 3 column template. I think it came out great, if you’ve never read her, she’s awfully engaging and fun to read and very, very popular.You guys really should check her out.

Here’s a few more that I’ve completed lately as well, Randy Rainbow, Sportz Chicago and Jottings From Jersey

I’ll have more on my moving to a new house next week with pictures once I get all the utilities up and running and settled in a little bit. It’s a really cool house and I can’t wait to get in.

Finally, I’ll leave you guys with a joke that made me LMAO!

I have 2 dogs & I was buying a large bag of Pal at Big W and standing inline at the check out.

A woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

On impulse, I told her that no, I was starting The Pal Diet again although I probably shouldn’t because I’d ended up in the hospital last time, but that I’d lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IV’s in both arms.

I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Pal nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry & that the food is nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again.

I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was by now enthralled with my story, particularly a guy who was behind her.

Horrified, she asked if I’d ended up in the hospital in that condition because I had been poisoned. I told her no; it was because I’d been sitting in the street licking my balls and a car hit me.

I thought one guy was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard as he staggered out the door.

Stupid bitch… why else would I buy dog food??

Hope you guys have an ass kicking weekend! =)

I decided it was time to “repaint” the old FEMA trailer that’s been sitting out in the front yard. It’s been there well over a year now, unused, while we wait on FEMA’s engineering reports on what’s to finally be done about the house repairs. The worst part is that once they actually do something we may have to “live” in the piece of crap. Hard to believe but it has room for 8 people to sleep inside, talk about cramped. Sardines have more space to move around. LOL

I came across this cool quote from Ronald Reagan that sums up the governments laggardly response to Katrina.

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Doesn’t that just say it all? hehe

And speaking of Ronald Reagan, I came across this old cigarette advertisement. Gotta love the “Christamas Card” cartons. Hey Ron, I’ll take a dozen!

I got a brand new toy a couple of weeks ago and I just can’t stop playing with the damn thing. No it’s not a sex toy, minds out of the gutter please! Although it is almost as fun as sex.

It’s a new LG cu500 cellphone that’s also a music player and a video camera. My old Motorola was getting pretty tired and since I was eligible for an upgrade I decided to go for something really nice. It has a removable 1 gigabyte memory card that can hold up to 250 mp3 or wma songs or 3,000 photos or 300 minutes of video! The memory card even fits in my regular digital camera, so it’s very versatile. Granted, the video quality is pretty low, but the photo quality is pretty damn good, I’m really quite impressed.

And the data is all transferable back and forth to my PC thru a USB cable. It runs on At&T’s new high speed data 3G network and it has quad band so it can be used anywhere in the world. The music player is basically identical to an iPod with song shuffle and repeat and you can create custom playlists. I never imagined a cellphone could be so much fun to play with. Now if it just vibrated a little stronger…

Not a week goes by without a roofing contractor stopping in and asking if we need a new roof put on the old place. They always make it sound like they’re the very first ones to notice too… I can’t imagine why they would think we need a new roof, do you? Just because the tarps are so old they constantly flap in the breeze and there’s a huge hole in the back where the oak tree fell on it, naaa, we don’t need a new roof. We like that it leaks in about 5 different places.

Yes, I took this photo today, it will be 2 years this coming August since Katrina blew thru here and we’re still waiting on FEMA to decide whether or not the house will be repaired or demolished. Don’t you just love governmental bureaucracy at it’s finest?

Bastards…