A customer sent in a box of fine cigars to me. No, it wasn’t a thank you gift or kickback. We are a printing company, and they wanted to see if we could print on the glass cigar tube with a “laser”. When I was finished sample printing, I had a whole bunch of cigars left. Nice cigars, too (well, I think they were nice cigars. You don’t put cheap cigars into a glass tube).

The customer didn’t ask for the remaining cigars back, and, not wanted to waste any, I decided I would try one. Now, normally I’m not a cigar smoker, I’m a pipe smoker, but these were free, so what the hell, eh? Well, the cigar was excellent. As I said, I’m far from an expert, but I really enjoyed the cigar almost as much as I enjoy a pipe.

So, I went down to the Corner News today to browse their selection of cigars. I bought a tin of 10 cigars (Acid Cigars, was the name of the company). I had one at lunch time and it was thoroughly enjoyable. I’m sitll primarily a pipe-smoker, but It will still be nice to have a cigar every once in a while.

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These two molecules were walkng down the road, and they bump into each other.

The first molecule says “Are you okay?”

The second molecule says “No, I. . I think I lost an electron.”

The first molecule looks at him in alarm and says “Are you sure?”

And the second molecule says: “Yes, i’m positive.”

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The kids came back from Las Vegas last night. Cindy and I drove down to Boston (Logan Airport) to pick them up. The plane was 15 minutes early, but it still cost us 11 bucks to park.

It was really good seeing the ruggers again. You would think that having the house to ourselves would have been a tremendous luxury that we enjoyed, but instead i found myself missing the noise, and the good-natured scrapping.

Besides, Cindy had the Flu for the past couple of days. She was really in a sore state and I spent the whole weekend looking after her. I caught a touch of it myself, but I managed to shake it off pretty quickly, which is lucky because it would have been a mess if both of us were horribly sick.

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I mentioned buying some Evening Rose pipe tobacco in my last post. Wow, that was the worst purchase I’ve ever made.

It smelled great in the bag. That should have tipped me off. It smelled a little too good. When I packed my pipe with it, and started smoking it, my first impression was: “Its not as sweet-tasting as I thought it would be”. My seconc impression was: “this doesn’t even taste like tobacco”.

And that was the killer: I’ve smoken plenty of sweet aromatics: vanilla, cherry, and even some of the chocolate tobaccos, but they all tasted like tobacco on some level. This Evening Rose didn’t taste like tobacco. It tasted like I was smoking a bowl full of potpourri. It was mildly disturbing, like watching a grown man play with a barbie doll.

Well, I didn’t get very far before I stopped smoking and emptied the bowl out, not even finishing it. I ended up throwing the whole 2 oz bag away.

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After work yesterday, I went down to the main street Corner News where I get all my yummy pipe tobacco. I still have about half an ounce of London Fog, and about an ounce of Black Cordial, but I was in the mood to buy something different.

I said hi to the ridiculously thin, blond cashier-girl, and browsed through the selection of pipe tobaccos. I came across one highly aromatic blend called “Evening Rose”. From the smell of it, it actually has rose-petals mixed in with the tobacco. I decided to give it a try and a bought a 2-ounce bag of it.

I haven’t had a chance to taste it yet. I’ll let you know what I think.

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The kids are still in Vegas with their biological father, and they will be for another week.

My wife and I had an appointment in Lebanon at the big hospital up there, to look at some options for us having a baby. Yes, we are trying to get pregnant.

Now, getting pregnant is easy for most people. It seems like everyone we know is getting preggers and popping out babies lately. Unfortunately, Cindy had a tubal ligation many, many years ago after Aaron was born. A couple of years ago, we started a proceedure in order to have a child by in vitro but we didn’t develope enough folicles (eggs), and we had to abandon that effort at the time. It was very hard to hear that news, after we had invested so much time and hope in the procedure (it was months of giving Cindy two or three injections per day). We were depressed and upset, and we gave up.

Now, we are trying again. We could be in for a long, hard road like last time, but we are determined to have a baby, one way or another.

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This will give you an idea why Lingo Slinger is one of my favorite sites (and one of my favorite people - Snaps to Lingo Slinger!)

Toys that never made it to market

Funny and cute!

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Last night, the wife and I drove the kids down to Logan Airport, and they left for Las Vegas. They are spending February vacation with their biological father, Tim. Since he bought the tickets last-minute, the cheapest flights actually overlapped with some school days. They will both end up missing 3 days of school in total, and they will be gone for 13 days.

We drove into 6 pm traffic around Boston, so we were moving at a crawl from I-95 until we got to the Airport. Once we got to the general vicinity of the airport, I missed a turn and wound up having to drive completely around the place once before I could park. Its a good thing we left early.

The people at the security check were really cool. The kids were scrapping good-naturedly, as they always do, and the security people were laughing and joking with them, and with Cindy and I. Once they left, Cindy was almost in tears — she loves her kids a lot, and it breaks her up to see them go.

We drove back to Keene, and we had a late dinner at D’Angelos at around 10 pm. We were both starving, since we hadn’t eaten, so we sat right there and started devouring the large subs we had ordered. Our eyes were bigger than our stomachs, though, and we wound up only eating half before getting full. We packed up the rest of our subs and headed home.

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I know, I know. . . everyone in the world is blogging about this. But its just too funny to pass up. For those of you who aren’t in the know, Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a 78-year-old Republican lawyer, who he had mistaken for a quail. It could only be funnier if he had been out hunting with Dan Quayle. . .

Dick Cheney Harry Whittington

Anyway, here is the latest roundup of Cheney shooting jokes:

From Jay Leno:
“When the ambulance got there, out of force of habit they put Cheney on the stretcher.”
“When people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity is now at 92 percent.”

From Jon Stewart:
“Whittington was the first person shot by a vice president since Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, of course, shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird.”

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I woke up this morning to a few snow flurries and about an inch of snow on the ground. It was barely a dusting, and isn’t even worth commenting on, except. . .

According to Fox News Weather and many other national publications, we are digging . . . I mean Digging. . our way out of the massive blizzard that buried the northeast.

I’m sure some places got hit with a lot of snow. But if you were an outsider, you would be picturing the entire North East quadrantn of the country buried under several feet of snow, from Portland, Maine to New York City. National news cracks me up.

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