Entertainment Center

It took me a long time. Almost as long as it took for me to make another post. But the "Entertainment Center" is now complete. Here is the before.The middle.And the completed project. Yes it took me 3 weeks after I got the tv on the wall, to repaint the wall, which I did yesterday. And then today, I put the trim around the cubbie hole.

That is about it. Oh how about a football prediction. I nailed it last week with the Packers. I am going with a rematch of the 2008 Super Bowl. Giants vs Patriots. The Giants vs. 49ers will be close, maybe even decided by a late field goal. The Patriots vs. Ravens will also be close, but Flacco throws a couple picks. One will be a pick six.

Professional Dilema

Here is an unusual work situation. I have been working at the current office I am in for a little over a year. When I started at this office, I was given a great cubicle. It was two aisles off the main aisle and I was the last cubicle on the end. About 8 months ago an individual was hired who would eventually take over all of my work, as my company's contract is up come this July. This new hire, I will call him George, was given my cubicle and I was forced to be moved to a cubicle right by the door where everyone walks behind me. Not only that, but it is a cubicle that I share with a co-worker, and it really isn't even a cubicle, since it only has one wall. Anyhow, George died this past weekend. How long do I have to wait before I ask for my old cubicle back?

The Packer Game

I woke up this morning telling myself that I won't get that emotionally invested in a football team again. I watched nearly every play of the 4 games this past weekend. But it was the Packer game which made me feel as if I was living and dying with each play. Here are my thoughts on the game.

Coaching:

I was OK with the early onside kick call if there had been proof that the up men on the Giants return team were retreating with the kickoff. But as the replay showed they weren't. Maybe they did on the kickoffs before that one, but I doubt it. In that case, then it was a really stupid call.

A defensive time out with 15 seconds to go and the opponent near mid field. Even if the Packers had stopped them on 3rd down and forced a punt, they might have got the ball back somewhere around their 20 with 5 or 6 seconds left in the half. What were the Packers going to do, throw a hail mary at the end of the half? That will never work....wait...what did I just say?

Charlie Peprah

Really, you don't know how to make a tackle. Are you afraid of getting hurt? Why are you delivering a blow with your forearms rather than firmly planting your shoulder right Hakeem Nicks stomach? I know, everyone wants to deliver that big blow. How about being a team player and making a textbook tackle and wrapping your arms around the opponent rather than trying to be the lead highlight on Sportscenter?

Jermichael Finley

Catch the damn ball. I know you are worried about doing your little shark fin on top of your helmet dance after you catch any ball, but catch the ball first. As far as I am concerned he can be cut.

The pass that Rodgers threw to the outside when Jennings turned to the inside, that was pretty big. And that stupid hail mary at the end of the half. The game was over right there.

I said Saturday night, it will come down to turnovers and penalties. How about this stat that they showed during the game? 6 fumbles lost all regular season. 3 lost in the game on Sunday. You can call that 1st onside kick a turnover too. And those dropped passes. 8 of them. You get paid to catch the ball. It seemed like Driver was the only guy on the field who wanted to catch the ball. I don't think the Giants won the game, the Packers lost it. I feel sick. I am going to go and lay down.

Tebow

I am way over the Tebow thing. In fact, I am actually anti Tebow. I heard today that if the Broncos win, that ESPN is going to launch a new channel, ESPNTEBOW. I did a little fact finding and here are the numbers and they are indisputable. Tebow is 1 o f 33 quarterbacks to have attempted more than 200 passes this year.

Quarterback Rating

His QB Rating is 72.9 (158.3 is the highest you can get), tops in the league is 122.5. Tebow is 27th out of 33.

Completion Percentage

His Completion Percentage 46.5%, less than half of his passes. Tops in the league 71.2. Tebow is dead last, 33rd out of 33.

And have you watched him throw? He can't even throw a tight spiral. Tebow is a flash in the pan. My prediction for him in his game against the Patriots. Less than 150 yards passing. Less than 50 yards rushing. Zero touchdowns, 2 interceptions. Patriots 35 - 3.

Looking ahead to the Packers tomorrow. They win a close game 28-24.

Dead Solider

What is a dead soldier? Well that is a term used for drinks, normally cans of beer or soda, that are left over after a party that have only one sip taken out of them, and then left to die and eventually poured down the drain the next morning. I throw my share of parties and the most infuriating thing to find while cleaning up is a bunch of dead soldiers laying around the house. It is basically throwing my money right down the drain. This past weekend, I had my fantasy football party. There were only 8 of us present to watch the games and play cards. With only a handful of people it was rather easy to catch the guilty party. At one point The General had a cocktail, a full beer that was just opened and another beer that wasn't opened. Being a military man you would think that The General would be the last one to be guilty of leaving dead soldiers around. Now The General might say that it is because that he parties so hard that he needs to have 3 drinks in front of him. But trust me, he doesn't party that hard. I would like to enter into evidence Exhibit A.

Sound asleep at a concert. No, not passed out, sleeping. There is a difference. So from this point on, The General will not be allowed another drink at my house, until he has shown me that he has finished the last one.

Drinking

Let me begin by saying that I have lived my life up to this point pretty much on my own terms. I do not like people telling me what to do. I have become quite comfortable with the fact that I answer to no one (maybe my parents, but they are both smart enough to know better). I like to say, "If I wanted to be told what to do, I would get married." I will admit it, I have my share of flaws. Probably way more than the average person. Drinking alcohol is one of them. I don't believe that I am an alcoholic (of course no alcoholics do), but I am without a doubt a binge drinker. For the last 3 years I have decided to take a break from drinking with the start of December. Lately I have been taking some heat from a number of people about my drinking or lack there of. I started this annual tradition just to prove or convince myself that I don't have a drinking problem. But after the grief that I have received recently, now I am doing it out of spite. I may never drink again.

House Sheepshead Rules

Until updated at a future time, here are the Sheepshead rules at my house.

Call an Ace

$1 a point

Cracks

Recracks

Double cracks

Round of doublers after a 60-60

Schwanzers

Doubler after a Schwanzer

Last Round of the night (for the table, not when someone is leaving the table) are Quads

Now if I am not at the table, play for however you want to play. If a game is going on, and I am asked to sit down after the game has started (i.e. The Freeman Party), when I sit down my rules.

If you have a problem with this, go play at someone else's house. Questions?

On a separate note, to all the kid bartenders out there, you split half your tips with the house.

The Last Christmas Pictures

My parents and all of their grandkids.All 21 of us.

More Christmas Pictures

I know that Tree hates pictures of kids, but here are a couple more pictures from Christmas.

All 10 nieces and nephews. I will have to dig out the pictures from past years. Every year we have all of the kids on this couch.
Jeff, Sue, Zach, Sara and Joey.Now these next two pictures you might not guess by looking at them, but based on their reaction to being asked to stand and smile next to their families, Jon and Dan find this activity unbearable. I don't know why it is such a surprise to them either. I take these pictures every year. And I have never heard a good reason as to why they don't want their pictures taken with their families. Maybe they are embarrassed, maybe they are lazy. One day they will thank me. But I doubt it will be anytime soon.

Jon, Julie, Bonesaw and "E". Dan, Jody, Princess and Hollywood, and I guess Erin, Lindsey and Tim in the background. It wasn't worth the effort to get Dan to stand there long enough to get the people out of the background, so I just took the picture with them in the background. Maybe if I had set my camera up on a tripod I could have photoshopped them out of the picture.Tim, Deb, Boomer, Crusher and Fuss.And my parents. My mom also is a bit reluctant to getting her picture taken as well.

Christmas

Here are some Christmas Day photos of my nieces and nephews.

Erin, a.k.a. Fuss, Pussycat.
Nick, a.k.a. Pickle, Bonesaw.
Jared, a.k.a. Crusher
Lindsey, a.k.a. Boomer.
Ethan, a.k.a. Auggie, "E".
Zach, a.k.a. Zack.
Josh, a.k.a. Hollywood.
Abbigail, a.k.a. Princess.
Sara, a.k.a. Sarah (or is it the other way around, I forget)
Joey.

Christmas Card

By now, everyone who was on my list should have received their Christmas Card.If you haven't, let me know and I can get one out in the mail to you. But I would like to get a little reader reaction. What did you think of this year's card? Hopefully I get the poll right this time. (The Halloween contest has been officially cancelled because I screwed up the posting. Remind me and next year I will put both 2011 and 2012 entries up for the competition.)

What did you think of this year's Christmas card?
	Best ever.
	Killer Christmas is still number #1.
	You are embarassing yourself, just give up.
Free polls from Pollhost.com

What is your favorite Christmas song?

How about some crowd participation this Monday morning? Come on, who is with me? Dorothy Boyd? I can never really get in the Christmas spirit if there isn't snow on the ground. Last I checked, there wasn't any white stuff on the ground. But to help you and everyone else get into the spirit, I would like to know what your favorite Christmas song is. Mine is the 12 days of Christmas by Jon Denver and the Muppets.

Here is some more Office Humor

I walked into the office one day and there was a bit of a hub bub going on around my Project Manager’s (and direct boss, Pete) cubicle. Pete was gone on this day. Lately the office had been suffering a bit of an invasion of fruit flies (dysofoila melonagaster). And my co-workers had found the source. It was Pete’s trash can where he had been throwing orange peels, apple cores and banana peels and not emptying out on a regular basis. We had a team meeting that day, and when Pete is not in the office, he assigns me the task of running the meeting. First order of business, Pete’s trash can. I made a strong argument that Pete was to reprimanded. He would have to wash out his trash can and would loss his in cubicle privileges for the remainder of the year. Everyone was in favor of this punishment. Then after the meeting someone mentioned that we should put up some signs and caution tape. I have to be honest, it only takes a slight push in the right direction to get me going. After putting up the warning and for the rest of the day, whenever someone walked by Pete’s cubicle, they asked me what it was all about and there was the immediate accusation that I was the culprit to put up the warnings. This same thing happened at my parent’s house during deer season. My brother, Dan, shot a prize buck this year, and brought over a picture of him posing with his trophy. I eventually blacked out one of Dan’s teeth on the picture. Everyone who entered the garage and saw the picture immediately assumed that I was the person to deface the picture. Am I that predictable?

Office / Nerd Humor…..Maybe

Every month at work I have to put together a presentation which updates management on the budgets and schedules of major highway construction projects in the south east region of Wisconsin. And more often than not, I take a part in giving the presentation. There are also handouts that go along with the presentation. I had help from a co-worker as I was preparing the handouts, and she made the point of mentioning that certain cells in the spreadsheet handout were to be a specific color. As you may or may not know every color has a color code. This color code has three components, Red, Green and Blue. Each component can be set to a number between 0 – 255. According to my co-worker, the exact color code for these spreadsheet cells is 255, 192, 0. Fast forwarding to the presentation, I was going through the handout and here what I said, “And as you can see, the projects that are on our Issues and Risks Log are highlighted in orange, or for those of you partial to color codes, 255, 192, 0.” As I am sure you can imagine, nothing but crickets. Well I thought it was funny.

Need a Little Help Here

This blog entry is for any of the handymen out there. I bought my TV and I will be hanging it on the wall. Having the TV up off the floor means I have to do something with all of the electrical components. So what can I do. Here is the wall right now.
And because behind this wall is a closet, I have decided to make a little cubby hole to hold the cable box, stereo receiver, Blue Ray, etc. You can see here that I have made some progress.This is a closer look at the hole. It is really the only place that I can put it. But as you can see I have some electrical conduit running right through the space where I intend to put this cubby hole.This is the back side view looking into the closet. Obviously that middle 2 x 4 will be coming out. But the conduit will still be in the way.My only thought on rectifying this situation was to cut some slits down the 2 x4 and then slide the conduit down as well. This is shown here in red.
This all seems well and good. I'm still not sure if that will give me enough slack in the conduit. Oh and better news, this is a load barring wall.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Shower TV Upgrade

I was able to acquire a TV last month. I used it to replace the TV I had in my shower. Here is the old one.And here is the new one.

More Bad Juggling

I guess it is out of boredom, but as any loyal blog reader knows, juggling is my hobby. And everyone wants more. If I juggle clubs, you want fire. I give you fire, you want knives. If I juggle 3 balls, you want 4. Well just recently I have made a break through, and to some degree, I can now juggle 4 balls. Let me beat all of you to the punch, no I did not invite 2 guys I met on Facebook over. I am far from mastering it, but I am on my way. Check it out.

Also check out the double take I make at Erin Andrews on tv. Also on an unrelated topic, I would like to wish a new loyal blog reader a happy birthday. Al shown here drinking Captain Morgan's out of the bottle, just days ago became a year older, happy birthday.

Calling All Hunters

Well it happened again. More dog crap in my yard. I found this today after work.I know that my brothers have offer the use of their trail cameras to catch the culprit on camera. I am officially taking them up on their offers. Let me know when you want to come out and help me set it up. I will even make it worth your while. Dinner on me. I am sure you know more about these trail camera than I do. It probably goes without saying that it will have to be positioned in a location where the culprit can not get at it after they have been caught. However, I am very excited about the possibility of catching this person and even more excited about exacting revenge.

115 Inches of Pure Football Enjoyment

Saturday morning, I bought a new TV. My old TV is 12 years old and is starting to go. The old one is rear projection and recently whenever you turned it on, the lens were out of line and the easiest way to realign them was to use some physical persuasion. I had had enough so I went and bought a new one. Once I set up the new TV, I decided before putting the old one out to pasture, that I give it one more day of football. So here was my Saturday watching college football all day with 55 inches on the left and 60 on the right.

End of Deer Season and Soccer Picture

Sunday afternoon, I told my buddy, Jay, that I would help them with the deer they shot. I stopped out at my parent's house to grab a couple of knives and a hook. While I was there, I thought I would get you one more dumpster picture.Or how about just a bunch of deer heads laying around.When I got to Jay's parent's place this is what I saw when I walked in. You got it, they were carving up two deer on the dinner room table. My mom would never let me in the house again if I did something like this. But Jay's mom was right there, in fact helping out by wrapping everything.Once we finished up with the deer I stuck around to play some cards. And I got this picture of Jay's son, Henry, riding the dog.

Afterwards, I stopped to watch my sister-in-law, Julie, play soccer. Then they asked me to take a team photo. Here they are fresh off of a 10-0 victory.

Christmas Cards

I will be sending out an email, but in case you are a loyal blog reader and I don't have your email or mailing address. Send me an email with your mailing address to mitch_kumstean@yahoo.com and I will make sure I get a card out to you. While this isn't the best card, it will be better than last year's.

New Years Resolutions

This is becoming quite the tradition for me. Coming up with a New Resolution every year is almost as stressful as coming up with a Christmas Card picture. Every year I post my New Year’s Resolution, and with that I once again reinforce my past years’ resolutions. The list of resolutions is getting very long and distinguished (Topgun anyone?). But since some of my past resolutions have been food and alcohol related, I start a month early. This will keep me from eating poorly and drinking too much the entire month of December. So starting today, December 1st, I am starting my New Year’s Resolutions. But let’s review what resolutions I have had in the past and what I will be missing out on:
No Buffalo Wings (We just had some this past week and they were really good but now they are out of my diet)
No Fast Food (This is one that I have been really good about keeping. Since 2006 I have not had anything to eat from McDonalds, Taco Bell and only once while I was in Colorado, I had a breakfast sandwich from Burger King. Although this year, I am adding Culvers to the Fast Food category, but Gillies is not.)
No Candy (But I really love eating runts while at the movies.)
No Chips (Even Sun Chips? Yes, even Sun Chips.)
No Soda (So the large rootbeer at Oakland Gyros is out, but they still have milk shakes.)
No Cheese (That means no pizza, one of the main staples in my diet. How insane is this?)
No French Fries (What about American Fries?)
No Alcohol (This is the third year of the no alcohol resolution, and how about this, I can remember the exact events in which I broke this one. 2010 was the Badger Hockey game at Camp Randall (2/6/10). 2011 was Rebecca's birthday party (3/12/11)
No Swearing (Damn it. Alright starting now.)

Introducing myself to people I don't know. ("Eric Stratan, Rush Chairman, damn glad to meet you." Did I just swear again?")
No Eating after 7:00 p.m. (But when can I start eating?)
Juggle 15 minutes a day. (My goal is to have a much better performance that last year's pitiful display at the Freeman Party. Top trick to have down by the party, juggling 4 clubs. On and I will by purchasing knives this year. Ethan I am still working on chainsaws, maybe next year.)

Last year's resolution was not talking on the phone while driving. I was actually pretty good about that one. Normally I would just let the call go to voicemail, or if it seemed important, I pulled over to the side of the road. I did break this resolution a couple times, but it was definitely less than 10 times.

This is a very long list, 13 items I am watching myself on and hopefully making me a better person. With so many resolutions I decided this year to make an easy one for this year. This year my New Year's Resolution will be to rinse my mouth with mouthwash everytime I leave my house to go somewhere. Pretty easy and yet good for me. Plus when I will be introducing myself, it will only make a better impression that my breath smells fresh and minty. I encourage all of my blog readers to call me out on any and all of these resolutions. And if any of you have any resolutions, past or present, leave them as a comment, I would be interested to read them and / or possibly steal them from you.

Roller Skating

Saturday night we had a group that went rollerskating in Delavan. It is a really old skating rink. But it reminded me of the gymnasium that the movie "Carrie" was filmed in. What do you think?Here is Vanessa in action. They didn't have any races, but when it was an "All Skate Backwards Only" I dominated.Trinity, Angela and Al.Harper was certainly a handful.I told these two kids, that if they put their noses in my rollerblades for a minute that I would give them a dollar. I can't believe how easy it was to get them to do it. I thought it would be at least $5 a piece. And those things did not smell good.After skating we went to the bar across the street. We ended up playing bar dice. 7-14-21. I haven't played that in a long time. We eventually ordered what the bar was calling a "Mystery Shot". 4 of us had to do the shot, I would classify the taste as black licorice covered with red peppers. It was awful as you can tell from Al's expression.But I was delighted to find that this bar had Karyoke that same night. However, I can not just stand at the mic stand, I have to get out and mingle with my people when I perform.

Thanksgiving

This year was very special Thanksgiving for me. It wasn't because the Packers won. Or that we played the Turkey Bowl. It was special because I got to carve up the turkey. 38 years and I have never been asked to do the craving. And let's be honest here, I have more than enough experience wielding a knife. Although up until this Thanksgiving turkey, I had absolutely no experience cutting a bird.

Thanks for taking the picture Erin.