Mmmmmm bratwurst...

It started out as a mostly uneventful weekend over here in fly-over country. There is a church here, Sacred Heart, which has traditionally serviced the German immigrant community. Not that there are all that many German immigrants to Topeka any more. But there was a time. There was a time, when a good portion of the Oakland neighborhood we populated by people from the "old country" so to speak.

I remember gramma Sachs fondly. She wasn't really my grandmother, and I'm not 100% on why we called her 'gramma' growing up. But that is really neither here nor there. I remember the smell of her kitchen. It seems she was always make her krautstrudal. I loved that stuff. Now, when mom made it, she made more or less individual portions. She would make maybe ten or twelve smaller strudels. But gramma Sachs...gramma Sachs would make this gigantic log of strudel. I always like that better, probably because it could fit more meat in it that way.

Sacred Heart every year has their "Germanfest" fundraiser in early June. Our Lady of Guadalupe has their "Fiesta Mexicana" in July. These are the two big cultural celebrations (ok, not counting St. Paddy's Day) the Topeka has. And the last time I went to Fiesta (a couple of years ago) I was not terribly impressed. Oddly enough, the two churches, Sacred Heart and Gualdalupe, are within a mile of each other, in the same Oakland neighborhood. The neighborhood, once ripe with heavily accented German immigrants, is now populated by heavily accented Hispanic immigrants. But that didn't stop an enormous crowd from gathering at Sacred Heart's Germanfest of good food and decent beer.

All the food at the Germanfest is hand made. Even the noodles, and the breads. All made from scratch which is what makes the event so good. There isn't much for the kids. A few things, but those are mostly for the really young kids, around 5 or so. Mine were told old to have much fun there. But the food was good, and the beer, while being regular, every day America lager, still went down smoothly. And the strudel, brats, sauerkraut and sausages were divine. I don't know if the ladies of the parish actually hand-made the sausage, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit.

The Germanfest runs from Saturday evening through Sunday evening. I've discovered that Sunday is the better day to go. Mainly because they have the beer garde open. I like to give the kids a dollar, and let them go about what ever it is they like doing, while I relax in the beer garden and people watch. But Saturday, the beer garden was nowhere to be found. So I ended up sitting under a big tent listening to the Hayden High School Drumline.

Now, those kids aren't back, not bad at all. But they also don't hold a candled to the THS Drumline. The kids from THS just seem to have more...I don't...passion? yeah, for lack of a better term, I'll call it passion. The Hayden kids were very technical, but didn't have any heart. I have no doubt they hit 98% of the beats (notes?) correctly and in time. But they had the blank expressions of mannequins. They didn't smile, they hardly moved. They played, but did not put on a show.

Easter

It seems like it was just a couple of months ago that we were coloring Easter eggs. But that was a year ago, and this weekend, we were at it again. Boiling eggs, smelling that acidic vinegar smell as the little tablets of dye bubble and pop and dissolve into it. Covering the kitchen table with old newspapers to keep the dye - which will inevitably be spilt - from staining the table.

No. 2 Son is too old this year for coloring Easter eggs. No. 1 Son became too old a couple of years ago. So it was up to Little Sister and myself to color the eggs. She did a great job. The 5/8 had bought some egg coloring kits which came with little foam stickers. So, naturally for a nine year old, the more foam stickers you can use, the better off the entire world is. Needless to say several of the eggs were so covered with foam stickers, they could have been dropped from the top of the house without even cracking the brittle shell.

On Good Friday, it has become somewhat of a tradition that we get Long John Silver's for lunch, eat it at Gage Park (which, BTW, got a lot of print in Stephen King's "Dark Tower: Wizards and Glass"), and tour the Zoo. Two years ago we went, it was dreadfully cold and windy. Last year we didn't go. The weather man promised rain in the afternoon, so we skipped the Gage Park/Zoo tour. But the day was mostly nice, not near as bad as it was the year before. Lesson learned I suppose. This year, despite the gloom predictions of weather, we made plans to go anyway.

Our plans were delayed by the need to meet the Lowe's delivery guy at the Ol' Man's apartment building. The Ol' Man owns an old, mostly run-down apartment building. It was built eons ago. Sometime in the early part of the 20th Century, the building belonged to the American War Dads fraternal organization. The building has a gigantic, beautifully decorated (at one time anyway) basement which was hand-dug by the AWD. I can't imagine digging that basement, with 10 foot ceilings, by hand. I certainly can't see anyone doing that kind of work in this day and age. Instead, they would simply tear down the building and build a new one with a basement built-in.

At any rate, the Lowe's delivery guy called me about noon, just as we were getting ready to head over to LJS to get our food. He was wondering if someone would be there to help him unload the tons of carpet, ceiling tiles and linoleum the Ol' Man was having delivered. The Ol' Man is in his 70s, and about 8/10 blind. He has trouble standing, let alone walking or actually carrying anything, so we took a detour to the building to help the Lowe's guy unload the items.

The zoo was nice. It wasn't too cold, but chilly nonetheless. I have discovered over the last couple of years, that the best time to see the zoo is when the temperature is somewhere between 50 and 65. In the cool temperatures, the animals seem to be out and about much more than in either the cold or the hot weather. The bears were out playing and wrestling with each other. The Orangutans were outside, climbing on the impressively complex looking equipment their environment contains. Even the female gorilla, which usually only has her foot or knee visible from her hiding spot, was able to be seen.

Easter was...well...Easter. We spent the holiday with the in-laws in Lawrence. Not my favorite place to be. The 5/8 family, especially her sisters, tend to treat her like a red-headed stepchild. Constantly putting her down and pointing out her faults, even ones that aren't there. It ticks me off, and the kids are aware of the tension all around which usually lasts for a day or two after any visit to Lawrence. But this time, this time they seemed much more cordial than they have in the past.

While Easter and Christmas are closely related, it is clear to all that Christmas is definitely the bigger holiday. My kids know the reasons we celebrate these times. If you ask them, they'll acknowledge that of the two, while Christmas is a bigger celebration, Easter is the more important of the two. I'm thankful, and proud they know the reasons, not only in a way that they can recite that Easter is the "day Jesus rose from the dead". But that I get the feeling they really, really know what it is about. We haven't kept them close-in and sheltered from other faiths and beliefs. They know that Buddha, and Mohamed and a host of other religious founders were all born a natural birth, like Jesus. But they also recognize that only one of them rose from the grave. No re-incarnated, but re-animated. He conquered death, and with that, waits to absolve us of all our sins and fallacies.

With that, I extend to everyone a (belated) Happy Easter day, and season.

Thanksgiving with the in-laws

Most of you who know me have heard me state that I don't like the 5/8's in-laws much more than I like my own in-laws. Family can be such a pain in the backside. Usually for Thanksgiving we head to my brother's house where his anal-retentive wife keeps a perfectly clean Mrs. Cleaver style house. Never a spec of dirt anywhere. There is a place for everything and everything is in it's place. The worst I have ever seen her house is after dinner at Thanksgiving where the table is strewn with black Friday ads from the day's newspaper and the grown ups look through the ads and pass them around, and look through them again. The women mapping their black Friday attack vectors to hit the best stores with the best deals at the most opportune times. Planning and scheming with one another, "you pick that up for me at this store, and I'll pick this up for you at that store."

This year we made the grueling 30 mile trek to Lawrence to spend Thanksgiving with the in-laws (mine, not hers). Her parents bought one of those half in the ground houses on a five acre lot a couple of years ago, and we seem to be spending much more time there now than I had ever wanted to. Before they lived in a decent sized house, but her ol' man is somewhat of a packrat. Well, somewhat is really an understatement. He is a packrat extrordinaire. Some people drink, other's smoke dope, some look at pictures of naked ladies (or men) on the Internet (or in magazines). But the FiL's true calling is packratism. This guy can save the most mundane things which he can find a reason for them to be nigh invaluable. When they had moved from their old house to their new one, we would go over on the weekends to help clean up out the old house. There were several large plastic trash cans full of empty oil bottles - just to give you an idea what this guy is like.

So we made the trip to Lawrence. The kids (of course) are fighting and bickering the whole way there. I'm never excited about going to Lawrence. The FiL is one of those guys who drinks some sort of whey protein drink for breakfast. It's green and stinks like I don't know what. He is always going on about some health thing. When the 5/8 was a kid, it was milk. They couldn't drink milk because it had some cancer causing enzyme or some such goofiness. Now it is turkey. It is ok to eat turkey once in a while, but folks shouldn't have turkey sandwiches because if they eat turkey all the time it will kill them.

One of the things that I missed by going to Lawrence - and I didn't know I would miss it, I'd never even thought about it before - was sitting at an actual table as a family and sharing the Thanksgiving meal. At the in-laws everyone sits in the living room eating off TV trays. I suppose it works for them, and that is fine if it does, who am I to judge really. But it just doesn't feel like Thanksgiving when everyone is eating from paper plates and off TV trays scattered about the house.

With my family, there is this sense of camaraderie that just doesn't seem to exist in the 5/8's family. There isn't a lot of joking around going on. Most of the conversation centers around what we should be eating to live to be 100 (as if I would want to live that long), as well as what sham good investments to make, and of course, no trip to Lawrence would be complete without a long, and sleep inducing trip through the FiL's biblical insights. He swears he is going to write a book about his thoughts on the Bible and Christianity. And that is admiral I suppose, and of course since he is family I would buy one, and perhaps even start to read it. But I'm I'll know how it ends and pretty much what it says after listening to the man for the past 20 years.

It doesn't always pay to be the smart one

I got a call from my brother yesterday. Seems his computer has started giving him a message from Norton Anti-Virus saying he has a "Trojan.Vundo" residing in "C:\Windows\System32\mljigda.dll". Of course, the virus (according to Norton) is over 2 years old, so I suppose this is the reason Norton can't get rid of it. Their website says to download their "FixVundo.exe" file to fix it. I tried to talk him through it on the phone, first by asking him to disconnect his computer from the internet.

Him: "How do I do that?"
Me: "Well, just unplug it from the cable modem."
Him: "How do I do that?"
Me: "Well, you could just unplug the cable modem from the wall."
Him: "What the hell is a cable modem?"

That is when it occurred to me that the only thing he ever does on the computer I think is read his email and do his fantasy sports stuff, and when I knew this was not going to be solved over the phone. He was supposed to bring me his box on Friday, but showed up Wednesday night with it instead. Tonight I plugged it all in, booted into safe mode, and ran the FixVundo app. Nothing. The application said it could not find Vundo virus on the machine. Have I mentioned how much I hate Norton? Personally, I use AVS and have had zero problems with it other than having to manually start the email scanner after every other update. And it is FREE! And it took over two hours to search his machine.

After that, I rebooted into regular windows mode and went to install Ad-Aware (I love ad aware for malware detection). And sure enough, the stupid "you have a virus I can't fix" message comes up, constantly. Click to close it down it alternates messages from "Unable to repair file" to "Access to the file was denied." So I figured I would run the FixVundo in regular mode (completely disconnected from any network, BTW). I start running it, and about 2 minutes into it, I get some debug messages saying the FixVundo is trying to improperly load a C++ library.

Fracking NORTON! I HATE YOU GUYS!!!!

I click through those, and the thing is still running so I'm simultaneously running AdAware (probably not a good idea, but doing it anyway). I'm heading to bed and will just have to see what pops up in the morning.

Have I mentioned how much I dislike the over-priced, bloated resource hog that is Norton Anti-Virus?

AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!!

*** 28 September, 2007 - Updated ***
Ok, just to show you that I am not unreasonable in my dislike of Norton Anti-Virus, here is an image from my brother's machine.

Now, please note the bright red box which says "Norton AntiVirus has detected a virus on your computer." You see that? Yeah, that came up just about 30 seconds after the box that said "Trojan.Vundo has not been found on your computer."

How cool is this?

As I have mentioned, I have another blog chronicling my attempts at making money via blogging. That blog is A Little More Income. Well, about two or three months ago I posted this post - in which I excitedly exclaimed that the blog had been visited by someone from Belgium and that my grandfather and great-grandfather were immigrants from Belgium.

Fast forward to just the other day, and I am contacted by a fellow who says his grandmother used to talk about relations in Crawford County, KS who shared the last name of my grandfather. Long story short, I found a new cousin.

How cool is that?