The World According To Wayne

We spent our 4th of July Weekend driving to Ma to pick up my son Will.  It was a good trip, But a lot of driving.
We drove to Albany, NY on Friday and stayed the night there.  Then we drove the rest of the way to Ma in the morning.  We spent a few hours with the rest of my kids while Will worked.  The Rain ruined our plans, but we still had a good time.
Meg is loves to ride in the car, but I think the drive was long for her.
We picked up Will at 4 pm and drove back to Albany and spent the night in a really nice suite.   2 bedrooms with queen beds, Kitchen, and living room.  Both the room at the Fairfield by Marriott and the room at the Marriott town suites were free using my Marriott rewards points I’ve earned while staying for work.
We left Albany on Sunday morning and made a short detour to see Niagara Falls.
Will will be here for the month, And return when I pick up the other kids to come stay for 2 weeks.
I have some good pictures from the falls that I’ll post a couple of now.  Click any picture for a full size version.

Via Sharon
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (this is a must read book if you have never read it.)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

Hellboy 2 actors studio

This is funny.
I can’t wait for this movie to come out.. I loved the first one and this one looks like it could be even better.

Jackie’s new Asus Eeepc 900

This is nothing all that original I’m sure, but its pretty easy to make, And tastes great.
You will need.
1 lbs of boneless chicken breast. (I use 2 breast half’s as you buy them in the store)
1 bottle of garlic and herb marinade or Italian salad dressing
2 jars of Classico Roasted Red pepper alfredo sauce.
1 Large red pepper.
1 Med Onion
1/3 cup of baby carrots chopped small.
1 or 2 cups of broccoli flowerettes (fresh or frozen)
Garlic to taste.
1 Box of Penne Pasta. ( I like to use the Mini Penne )
2 table spoons of oil. ( I like to use olive oil)
1/2 cup of grated Italian style cheese (you can pretty much use anything you like)

I also add Roasted red pepper from the olive bar at our store. Not sure if everyone can get that or not.

Marinade the chicken in the garlic and Herb marinade for at least an hour before cooking.
I usually grill the chicken then cut it up into bite size pieces.
You can also chop it up and fry it. (you will need more oil for this method)
I’m sure there are other ways also but those are the 2 I have tried.
While the chicken is cooking cook the Penne according to the directions on the box.
While you are waiting for the pasta water to boil cut up the broccoli, Carrots, onion, and Pepper to bite size pieces. Saute the veggies in the oil over med heat adding the garlic as they cook. (if you have roasted red pepper do not add it to the other veggies yet.) Cook until the veggies are just soft.
When the pasta is done drain it well and transfer it to a large glass baking dish.
If you haven’t already chop the chicken into bite size pieces and add it and the veggies to the pasta.
Add the alfredo sauce and mix well.
Top with the grated cheese and bake at 300 deg for 20 to 30 mins. ( you have to watch it so that the top doesn’t burn.)
I like to serve it with garlic bread.
This recipe should serve 4 people pretty well.
Let me know if you try it.. Enjoy.

While cleaning. The news paper article about my accident. So I made a point to scan it while it was fresh in my mind.

Click for a version you should be able to read.

Or even better. Click this Link, then click archives and choose Jan 17th 2008.

are some people so hung up on terminology that they refuse to listen to what your trying to tell them?
Tonight I wasted over an hour of my over 14 hour work day, Because the person I was working with on the phone didn’t listen to what I was saying because I didn’t use the right terminology!!!
I’m not sure how I can say “I have disconnected this phone line from the phone system, But when I call the number it still rings in the store” any clearer.  Because I didn’t use the “official” terms he didn’t understand what I was saying so we spent and hour looking at the phone system programing trying to find the issue.
Then when he decided to actually listen to me and realized what the issue was he very pompously informed me that I was using the wrong terminology.
I hate people who are so full of them self that they can’t listen to anyone else.

So this guy Paul wins my Asshat of the week award!
Good Going Paul. You have made the world a less nice place to be.  I hope your proud.

I downloaded the free version of the Spore Creature Creator software today.
I thought I would share my first creature with you all.
Say hello to Sixeye!  (ya I’m not real good at thinking of clever names)

The game looks like it might be pretty fun.  Click the link and see for yourself.

Happy Birthday to my oldest child Melissa who is 19 today.

This picture was taken last summer.

Happy Birthday Melissa.

I stole this from Sharon’s site.
FOUR THINGS ABOUT ME!!!!!
Well, it starts with me, but I really want to know about YOU!

This one is a bit different from others we’ve seen go around. Four things about me that you may or may not have known in no particular order.

Four jobs I have had in my life:

1. Screen Printer (T’shirts ect)
2. Working Cranberry Bogs.
3. Making Wood window Grills.
4. Datacom tech. (installing Phone, And data cabling. Computer hardware, And phone systems. Fixing phone and data related issue’s.)

Four movies I’ve watched more than once:
1. The Princess Bride
2. SpiderMan
3. All Star Wars Movies
4. The Goonies.

Four places I have lived:
1. Halifax, Ma
2. Abington, Ma
3. Middleboro, Ma
4. Centerville, Oh

Four T. V. Shows that I watch:
1. Ghost Hunters
2. Battlestar Galactica
3. (I don’t watch much TV)
4. (ditto)

Four places I have been:

1. Toronto, Canada
2. Las Vegas, NV
3. Louisville, Ky
4. The whole east cost, From Florida to Prince Edward Island, Canada.

People who e-mail me
1. Dad
2. Kathy
3. Jay
4. Sharon

Four of my favorite foods:
1. Steak
2. Baked Potato.
3. Chipotle Burrito’s
4. Pizza

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Hyboria
2. Las Vegas
3. Vermont

4. Scottland

Four friends I think will respond:
1. Mark
2. um
3. Laura?
4. um

Things I am looking forward to this year:
1. Having my kids here in Aug
2. Fall weather.
3. Seeing my family. ( you actually look forward to that when you only see them a couple of times a year)
4. Time off from work.