Living in the Scoot Utopia

Learning today that a chocolate shop is opening in the old River City Books location, it got me thinking about other things I wish I could buy without having to leave my immediate neighborhood:

• Yesterday I bought everything I needed to make a salad in the City Market. But when it came to a hunt for croutons, I was SOL. Many of the shops sell everything you need to make a salad, but none of them sell anything to put on top of a salad.
• In a pinch I can get eggs, milk, and butter from Chinatown or from a combination of al-Habashi and KC Seafood & Meat. But no one carries more than a bare minimum assortment of cheese. A cheese shop would fit in nicely.
• Lots of places sell seafood, but none sell fresh fish that's already cut into filets or fresh shrimp that's already beheaded, delegged, and deshelled. I'd buy a lot more seafood locally if the hard/disgusting work was already done for me.
• None of the stores, at least none open after work (Discounts Unilimited, I'm talking about you) carries basic paper products or laundry detergent. Chinatown, you're open late, you'd do well to add these things.
• There should be an informal restaurant that sells fried chicken or seafood.
• The Cup and Saucer must be the only place with a coffee shop downtown that waits until 7am to open. I have walked by its darkened doors numerous times on my way to work and had to get coffee inside the loop at shops that open at 6am.
• A year-round full service bakery would be awesome.

Dat is all.

Posted by ScooterJ at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I live above a business whose voice mail system, for some moronic reason, makes their phones ring in a nonstop cycle the entire time they are closed. It rings all night long, and also all weekend long. Holiday weekends are the worst.

I have been battling it for nearly two years. They don't seem to care and don't seem willing to do anything about it. I was watching "Pulp Fiction" earlier tonight and could hear the ringing over the music and gunfire.

I am losing my mind.

Would it be wrong if at the start of their business day I put a sound effects CD on loop on "ringing phone", put the speakers face-down on the floor, crank the volumee, and leave?

Posted by ScooterJ at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This past week, I hit 40. Not 40 years of age, but 40 pounds of fat shed since I was first told I had the diabetes last Spring.

Some trivia facts about where that puts me now:

• The weight on my driver's license is no longer a lie.
  
• I'm now at my pre-first(only)-marriage weight.
  
• New sets of jeans I had to buy in 2005 due to my clothes getting too big: 3
  
• Number of X's removed from my shirt and underwear sizes: 2
  

Because I've been working out in addition to the walks/runs and healthier diet, I've also been increasing muscle mass. So it's likely I've actually lost more than 40 pounds of fat and replaced part of it with muscle. The program is working very well, and a couple of weeks ago I began to notice a striking change in the shape of my body. My stomach is tigheting, my arms and shoulders are getting defined, and for the first time since I was a teenager, my chest looks larger than my abdomen.

Now, what's important about this is that as this change has occured, my metabolism has improved and with that there has been a dramatic improvement in the way my body processes sugar. My blood sugar readings have all been in the healthy range as of late, and earlier today I actually had a low blood sugar condition (59) two hours after eating a syrupy waffle. I do believe it is time for me to be weaned off the medication...hopefully the doc will agree on my next checkup.

Posted by ScooterJ at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stealing an idea from Seth, here are the places I stayed overnight in 2005...

• Kansas City, MO (naturally)
• Canistota, SD
• Interior, SD (camping, 3 nights)
• Mitchell, SD (camping)
• Perry Lake, KS (camping)
• Newark/Hebron, OH (2 nights)
• Vandalia, IL

Hmmm... I guess I didn't do much traveling in 2005.

Posted by ScooterJ at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I worked out over lunch and took a shower before returning to my office. I walked back over to my little corner of the locker room and removed my towel to start to get dressed. It was at that moment that it dawned on me that the reason the room was brighter than usual was that someone had opened the blinds of the big window next to me. That window was in full few of the offices of at least three floors of a bank building downtown.

Had the bank not been closed, several dozen employees would certainly have had quite a visual treat! (And I have to concede that there probably were at least a few people in some of those offices.)

Posted by ScooterJ at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

1. Be the 5th-grader who proposed a law banning the sale of cold beer in Missouri.
2. Watch the law get passed.
3. Grow up to drinking age.

Posted by ScooterJ at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just because I haven't gotten around to posting anything in the "Movies" category yet, here are some excerpts from some of my favorite reviews that I wrote for my old Bad Movie Night web site:

Babe: Pig In the City ...I don't care what the official credits say, this movie's screenplay was written by Torquemada and the director was Josef Mengele. "Babe: Pig in the City" is a sick, psychotic, nightmarish, ugly, painful, and pointless movie that has absolutely no business being marketed to children. Please, do NOT take your children to see this movie. They will be upset. They will be terrified. They will have nightmares...

Blackenstein
...Though technically blaxploitation, "Blackenstein" lacks several of the elements traditionally found in this genre. There is no hero who sleeps with all of the women. There is no plot focusing on drugs or prostitution. It does not seem to be about killing Whitey or bringing down The Man -- Eddie kills people of all races and, in fact, Dr. Stein himself is white and is not the focus of Eddie's wrath....
...If you should decide to see this movie, pay particular attention to Eddie's fascination with intestines. If you can figure it out, let me know. I'm stumped...

The Crawling Eye
...the only places on Earth with a climate this species can survive is the peaks of mountains, leaving the aliens to the cumbersome task of wiping out the Earth one mountaineer at a time...

Deep Rising
...Here we have a creature that is about the size of your average Taco Bell, yet it is able to slink around the ship unnoticed, sliding through ducts and crawlspaces and attack people through fume hoods and toilets...

Glen or Glenda
...Lugosi is not a homosexual, nor is he a transvestite (the term used by medical science to describe a person who prefers to wear the clothing of the opposite sex), a pseudo-hermaphrodite, nor a lovely and intelligent woman. No, he is a drug-addicted former vampire who sits in a chair offering completely meaningless babble into the insights of the infinite depths of a man's mind....
...Check it out as Dr. Alton gets turned on while describing Alan's transformation into Ann...

I Know What You Did Last Summer
...Victims in a confined space will always seek the escape route of most resistance. Thus, when Helen realizes the killer is in the building with her (while standing within arm's reach of the front door), she chooses to instead exit through a third-story window...

Lost In Space
...The movie is called "Lost in Space".
1) We have to sit through about 45 minutes of family bickering before anyone even goes into space.
2) Once the Robinson family finally does get lost, they are lost in space for about 5 minutes before they find something familiar and a star map that can lead them home.
3) They then spend most of the rest of the movie lost in TIME.
4) They finally get lost in SPACE again just in time for the closing credits.

Scared To Death
..."Scared to Death" is a mystery, what caused a "beautiful" young woman to die? Of course, that mystery is no mystery to those who happen to know the film's title...

The Time Machine (2002)
...In the book, it is a catastrophic war that causes the fall of civilization and the split of the races. In the 1960 film it is a nuclear war (in the 1970s I believe). The common message in both masterpieces is an anti-war theme... a message that war could eventually get out of control and destroy forever all that we hold dear. The only message in this version of the story is "never colonize the Moon."...

Posted by ScooterJ at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two years ago when the lease ended on my old car, I decided that since my commute is measured in blocks rather than miles and that I drive about 20 miles in an average week, that I didn't need anything special and really didn't want to have a car payment. So I set out in search of a car that I could purchase outright for the cash I happened to have in my wallet. About four hours later I owned The Hoop and have been driving it ever since.

The Hoop is a beat up old 1992 Chevy Cavalier. It looks like this:

...except, picture that with a dull and scratched up paint job, dents, rusted out spots, spots where a dent has been pulled out and the holes filled with tar, worn suspension, scratched and permanently stained windows, the spoiler broken off, the finish all chipped off the wheels, a quarter of the trim gone, the center arm rest broken, stains on the seats, a chunk missing from the steering wheel, a detachable driver's side window roller handle, a warped dashboard, a gaping hole where the stereo used to be, and a horn that has been known to fly off if the wheel is turned too sharply.

But, it gets me where I need to go.

This week The Hoop gave me quite a scare. While rounding the corner at 11th & Grand the other night I heard a loud pop under the chassis. Ever since then it has made a low rumble whenever I go over bumps, slow down, or make a left turn.

My main worry was that the repair would be urgent and tremendously expensive, because I can neither afford that right now nor afford replacing The Hoop. Though I can walk to work no problem, there are/i> a few places I go to each week where neither walking nor the bus are an option and I did not want to become a burden on my friends.