It’s funny, when I was younger birthday’s were a big deal, I used to look forward and dread them both. That’s one of the things about being a January birthday, especially when it’s early in the year. Another reason an early birthday sucks is you don’t really have anything to look forward to till later in the year. I mean yeah there’s Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day but when your young you don’t really care about those.  The big holidays weren’t until the summer time, months away!

Of course if the me know could talk to the me then..well there would be much to discuss. If someone had told me when I was 16 or even 18 what my life would be like at 39 I’d probably have laughed at them. When I was that age, I knew it all. I had my life planned out, I was gonna go to college, be married and have my own house and kids by the time I was this age. Funny how life has a way of throwing curve balls at you.

If I had known then that I’d be a widower at 37, I’d have laughed at whoever told me that. If I had known would I have done things different? Would I have still made that first phone call to talk to Michelle? I think I would have. I cherish the memories and times we had together and I miss her every day.  Would I have made different choices at other points in my life? Honestly I don’t know. They say that what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, a cliche I know but I do think the things we go through in our lives make us who we are.  Would I have told my parents to take better care of themselves and have taken better care of myself as well? I hope so. So much happened in my life that could have been prevented. If only my Dad had gone to the doctors sooner, if only that guy hadn’t broken into my parent’s house and attacked my Mom or the door had been locked, if only Michelle…so many if onlys.

Didn’t mean for this to turn into a pity blog but I guess it kinda turned out that way, sorry about that.  One of my resolutions was to blog more, maybe I’ll finally get around to doing part to of my beer review. I still have the beer, just haven’t cracked it open yet. I’ll try to make my next post more upbeat, I promise I’ve just been feeling reflecting about getting older. And for those of you who are gonna say “39 isn’t that old” or “age is just a number” etc, etc I know that, and appreciate the sentiment but if it’s not how old you are, it’s how old you feel then I feel ancient.

Yes it’s Glee, it’s the only version of the song I’ve heard. (and probably the shortest on the net)

So I started my day with Shock Top Pumpkin Wheat. I do have to admit I like the wheat beer over the regular beer. I love a good Blue Moon (with the orange) and even though Bill has already reviewed the Blue Moon pumpkin offering for this year I’m gonna do it too.

Anyway, here’s what the Shock Top Pumpkin Wheat looks like.

With special guest group AC/DC!

I know that’s not a very good picture so let me try this one.

Another shot of the bottle

And here’s an actual shot of the beer itself

I do like this beer but it’s honestly nothing special. I love the color and not just because it goes so well with the coloring of the letters on the back. If your looking for a pumpkin flavor with your beer however don’t bother with this one. If they hadn’t said that it was a pumpkin wheat I wouldn’t have known. It’s honestly kind of a middle of the road beer for me. I’d order it in a bar if there was nothing else available that sounded good. I do have to say though it is a very smooth beer. There’s no bitter beer face involved with this one.

The next beer isn’t technically a Fall beer but I’m including it because as I write this post it’s cold, raining and/or snowing. It’s Isolation Ale from the Odell Brewing company here in Colorado.

After tasting this beer I can understand why it’s a Winter ale. It made me want to curl up under a blanket with a bowl of chili and this beer. It’s a very hoppy beer but I didn’t mind that. It fight with the atmosphere (minus the bowl of chili) and made me feel kind of warm and fuzzy inside. It’s a good beer but not a great beer, a little too hoppy for me but I prefer lighter, sweeter beers. Yes I know, I’m a beer heathen.

The last beer I had before I wussed out is another local brew. It’s Breckenridge Brewery’s After Rakin’ Autumn Ale.

I just realized I didn’t get a picture of just the beer itself. In my defense I was feeling pretty tipsy at this time. And in case your wondering, no that’s not a butterfly knife, that’s my bottle opener.

Since I didn’t get a proper picture for you let me just say this is a very, very dark beer. Not quite a stout but close. It looked almost like a glass of cola instead of beer while I was drinking it. It does have a nice hint of caramel to it and for being such a dark beer it’s not very bitter. It does get more bitter as you go along though. It could have been less bitter to me in the beginning because I had just finished the Isolation ale but I couldn’t swear to it.

I will say that drinking these beers while watching a Gamera marathon of Mystery Science Theater 3000 made the beer that much tastier. Bad movies with good beer is a combination you just can’t beat.  And because I’m in an MST3K mood I leave you with this.

Part two coming soon!

I was originally going to make this post about autumn in Colorado but when I started taking the pictures (and yes there are a LOT of pictures) I decided to just make it about my road trip in general. My sister Robin and I decided to spend the day in Estes Park taking a lot of pictures, looking at the fall colors and hopefully spotting some of the wildlife in Rocky Mountain National Park. If Estes Park sounds familiar to you then it’s probably because that it’s the location of the Stanley Hotel (more on that later) which was the basis for Stephen King’s novel The Shining. You may have also seen it on Ghost Hunters on Syfy. If you haven’t seen it let me give you just a taste.

While I didn’t get the chance to actually go into the hotel I did get some pictures, but your gonna have to wait. Patience Grasshopper!

So to get to Estes Park from where I live you have to go through the town of Loveland. Okay, technically you don’t have to go through there but if you don’t where else are you gonna see the Statue of Liberty? Aside from New York and Las Vegas that is.

She got tired of New York and relocated to Colorado

Loveland’s actually a cool little town. Their biggest claim to fame is that around Valentine’s Day you can actually mail your sweetheart’s card there and have it re-sent to them with a Loveland postmark. I’ve never actually done it but I’ve heard about it on the news. And as Facebook has taught us, if it’s on the news it must be true! Speaking of, if you don’t read this blog and pass it on to 25 of your friends someone , somewhere will do something bad and probably charge your credit card for midget porn or something.  It was on the news! I swear!

Other than the Statue of Liberty there’s sadly not much to see in Loveland. It’s a nice little town and all but it’s not an entertainment hotspot or anything. Once you get past Loveland thoughyou can stop at the Dam Store. No seriously, that’s it’s name! The Dam Store! I have proof!

Why is it called the Dam Store? Well that’s easy! It’s next to a dam! And it has a tower that you can climb to take pictures of said dam!

Not really much to look at I know but it does have a nifty sign! Oh and these last two pictures were taken from the tower. And now the sign!

Yeah not really a whole lot to it to be honest. It is dam related and has the Dam Store name on it though! Your right enough about that. And honestly who want’s to see a Dam map when you can see things like this?

Granted they’re both shots of the same spot but I liked it so much I had to shoot it twice! And think of it this way, your left eye can look at one and your right eye can look at the other!

So we left the Dam store and were heading up to Estes Park when I saw a sign that caught my attention.

But what really caught my eye was their choice in advertising. No, not the sign, these.

   You can’t see it from this picture but the “girl” on the left is wearing sheer panties. I wish I was kidding.  My sister and I thought they were real people when we first drove by but instead they were what we called the “Hoochie mannequins”.

We eventually got into Estes Park proper and I knew I had to get at least a few pictures of the Stanley Hotel.

I think there was some kind of event going on at the Stanley the day we were there because it was packed! There were cars parked everywhere and still more looking for places to park. One of these days I’m planning on staying a night at the Stanley just to say that I have. On the Stanley hotel’s website they actually offer a Ghost stay package. You can spend the night and even get your own EMF detector to keep afterwards. They also do ghost hunting tours as well if your feeling brave enough.

In case you thought I was exaggerating about how crowded it was, let me show you something.

Okay so it doesn’t really give that great of an idea of how crowded it was but trust me, it was.

We decided to try to avoid traffic and take the side streets to get to Estes Park and that’s when we came across this.

Little did we know that this would be about the only real wildlife we would see all day and they were camped out in someone’s front yard!

We finally made it into Rocky Mountain National park and from here on out I’m gonna keep my commentary to a minimum and let the pictures speak for themselves. Click any picture to embiggen it.

The pictures below were taken at two miles above sea level. We were pretty high up but were gonna go higher.

With these next pictures we were officially above the tree line. There was a sign that said we were entering an Arctic Tundra climate. Sadly I didn’t get a picture of the sign but it wasn’t that exciting anyway.

The picture above is probably my favorite one of the bunch. I have to give a big thank you to my sister Robin for taking it for me.

The one above and the ones that follow were taken on the way back down the mountain. I thought they came out really well and had to include them in the post as well.

Well that wraps up my most recent road trip. I hope you enjoyed the pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them. I hope you at least made it this far into the post too! I know it was very photo heavy but I had to share. Also fair warning, I have one(or possibly two) more travel blog coming. Of course you don’t have to read it but I do plan on being better about updating my poor neglected site. I’m also planning a review of the Star Wars blurays. Not that anyone really probably cares but I’m gonna do it anyway. Because I can.

Thank you all (six of you) for reading and I should have another post soon!

I know I should celebrate your life and the time we had together but right now I can’t it hurts too much. I can’t sleep at night because there’s no one next to me to keep me warm or to rub my back after a long day at work. There’s no one there to laugh at my stupid jokes or to tell me I’m being silly. I miss your laugh, I miss your smile, I miss you.

I miss your beautiful blue eyes and your smile that could light up a room. I miss your stories that I’ve heard a hundred times before but always acted like I’d never heard before. I miss the way you used to play with my hair. Thirty-two is too young to leave this world.

I know your in a better place now, there’s no more pain, no more lousy hospital food, no one poking you or squeezing you. But where you are I can’t see you except in pictures or in my mind. I tell everyone I’m doing ok but I’m not, I feel like I’m broken inside and nothing can fix it. It was hard enough to lose Mom and Dad but to lose you on top of it damn near killed me.  The only reason I didn’t lose my mind the night you died is because I knew that’s not what you would want.

I know one day we’ll be together again and I know that your still with me in spirit but I would do anything to have you next to me for one more day. You will always be my one and only Michelle, you will always be the piece of me that’s missing. I’ll do my best to make you proud of me and I know that I’ll hear about if your not when we’re back together.

Be at peace my sweet angel, I’m so glad I got to tell you one last time that I loved you before you left me. I know you loved me too, you wouldn’t have put up with me otherwise. Just know that I loved you with my whole heart, mind and soul and a piece of me died the day I lost you.

I love you more than you’ll ever know,

Dan

Since it’s Hanukkah as I write this let’s start with one of the few Hanukkah songs I know. I’m sure most of you know this one too, if not please to enjoy four plus minutes of Adam Sandler singing about Hanukkah!

You know, I did a search on YouTube for Hanukkah songs, not a whole lotta choices! So since I’m not really Jewish and I couldn’t really find any other songs that I know or really inspire me to post them I’m gonna move on. No offense Jewish readers.

I’m gonna start with one of my favorite holiday specials ever. This one usually puts me in the mood but when you watch it for the first time in November it kind of kills the mood. Regardless of that I still love this one, even if it is forty something years old.

You know I tried to find the actual clip from the cartoon but the only one I could find was a crappy version that some had recorded from a camcorder and uploaded. The one above is the best one I could find. (And I watched a LOT of them!) There’s something about Thurl Ravencroft’s voice that’s soothing though, I could listen to that song over and over again. Oh wait I did!

Since we’re on the subject of the Grinch

I can’t believe how hard it is to find the original clips from the cartoon! This was the best I could find for this song too! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot over? Oh well I guess it’s the song that really matters right? Right??

How can you do an article about Christmas songs and not have a clip of Rudolph? I gotta admit, there are a ton of memorable songs from Rudolph, I’m gonna restrain myself and just post a few of them.

I gotta admit, I have a love/hate relationship with this song. Because my last name is in the song every Christmas guess what I heard?

Last one from Rudolph, I promise. What’s that? No Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer? I can’t do Christmas songs without including that one? But..but…it’s my blog! Okay, fine! You win!

I knew if I didn’t include that one, some of you would track me down and lynch me. I gotta admit, I may have watched this one when I was a kid but I don’t remember it as fondly as some of you do.I gotta give it to the Rankin-Bass people, they did a heck of a job for what they had back in the day.

Okay I know this isn’t technically a Christmas song but come on, who doesn’t think of this at Christmas time? I actually remember aluminum Christmas trees. Thank Jeebus they didn’t last very long, they were pretty hideous. Off topic for a second, one of my favorite childhood memories is my Dad selling Christmas trees outside the firehouse. He wasn’t exactly a “people person” but he could sell ice cubes to an Eskimo if he wanted to.

Anyway, back on topic, I’m going waaaay back with this one. This is another one everyone should know, maybe not the cartoon but the source material.

From a Golden Oldie to something a little more modern.

I know this probably isn’t gonna win me a whole lotta geek points or improve my street cred any but I was never a big fan of The Nightmare Before Christmas. I don’t know why, it combines Halloween (my favorite Holiday) with Christmas. You’d think that’d be instant win but it just didn’t do it for me.  I know a lot of my readers are fans though so that’s why I included it.

I struggled with this next song. Not because of the content, but because it was so hard to choose between this one and his other “Christmas” song. I went with this one purely on seniority, not because I like it better.

You know what? You guys guilted me into posting Rudolph so I think I should get to post another one of my choices by default!

You know, on that note I think I’ll wrap this post up. I hope the songs and clips helped put you in the holiday spirit. If not then your just a grinch!

Thanks for (still) reading!

Dan

You’d be surprised at how many times I find myself singing that song during the day. Not sure why but it’s one of my weird quirks I guess. Anyway, thanks for sticking around! I know it’s been a while since I put anything up and the last post was kind of a downer but a lot has gone on since that last post. I am happy to say that my Dad is still with us, thanks for asking but a lot of other shit has gone down. I’m not gonna go into details because I don’t feel like it and honestly it’s not relevant to this article. Those of you who know me  outside of the blogosphere know what went down and frankly that’s good enough for me.

Ok now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into the real reason for this article, my take on the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. I know I’m a few weeks late getting to this but I didn’t want to go see it by myself, no not because I’m scared but because these types of movies are always more fun to watch with someone else so there!

Where do I begin? I wanted to like this movie, I really, really did! Despite the fact that it was a “re-imagining” of a classic I was willing to give it a go. It wasn’t completely bad but boy it wasn’t very good either!

I’m gonna assume that everyone knows the back story of Freddy so I’m not gonna go into it here. It is explained in the movie but for those of you that want to see this still I won’t ruin it for you.  You have to wait a good bit to get to the origin part and when you do, to me anyway it felt like an episode of Scooby Doo gone horribly wrong.

To me if your gonna redo a franchise as storied as Elm Street you’ve either got to make it your own totally or you’ve gotta be true to the original. This one however tries to do both and it didn’t work for me. There are a few nods to the original but honestly they could have left them out of the movie and it wouldn’t have hurt it at all. That’s my opinion anyway, feel free to disagree if your so inclined. I will say this though, the one thing they did do in the remake that I really liked was the micro nap thing. Basically, and I don’t know if this is true or not but it’s a col concept, once you get past a certain point without sleep your brain will shut down temporarily to try to recharge and your body won’t know it.  Obviously since Freddy can kill you in your dreams this can be problematic. There is a scene in the drug store that plays heavily on the micro nap concept.

My other problem with the film is the characters are supposed to be high school students but none of them look like it! All of them look to be in their early to mid 20′s which I’m sure they are. That and Nancy’s boyfriend in this looked like a hobbit to me.

On that note, I’m gonna wrap up this review. I have some other stuff I plan on  writing about soon. Some of it’s Iron Man related and some of it will hopefully be a sequel to this article.

As always, thanks for reading and sticking with me during my rather prolonged absence, I promise the next break won’t be as long.

I hated that fire station when I was a kid. I was too young to understand exactly what and where Dad went to do when the siren went off, all I knew was it took my Dad away from me. I know he enjoyed what he did, and I can still listen for hours to his stories of the fires he fought. It still didn’t make it any easier when you were  young and you didn’t know exactly where your Dad was.

Some of my fondest memories are of things I’ve done with my Dad, be it fishing off the St. Joe dam for “the one that got away” or fishing out of the boat on Paw Paw lake with my sister, pulling fish in faster than Dad could take them off the hook and reset our worms.  I remember him taking me to the movies lo those many years ago to see a little movie called Star Wars and being blown away from the get go. Of course he also took me to see Dawn of the Dead and scarred me for life (or at least till I was a teenager and forced myself to watch it again).

My Dad is the one person I knew who would always be there for me, in good times or bad no questions asked, I’ve been lucky to have him in my life. I know I haven’t always told him how much I love him and how much he means to me but I believe deep down inside that he knows that. He’s always there with a hug and a kiss on your forehead whenever you see him. And no matter how many times I’ve heard his stories I love to hear them again.

I don’t know how much longer I’m going to have my Dad, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer recently and is having a hard time as of late. The one thing I regret more than anything else in this world is not having children of my own to appreciate what a wonderful man their grandfather is. I never knew either of my grandfathers growing up and I’m afraid that my children won’t either. I’ll have a ton of stories to tell about him and I know the rest of my family will too but all the stories in the world can’t measure up to the great man that my father is.

I don’t know that my Dad will ever read this, I hope that he will and that he’ll know how much I love and respect him. I hope that the day that I have to say good-bye is a long time coming because I want to cherish every moment I have left with him. If you are reading this Dad, I just want to say that I love you very much and I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for all of us. You’ll never know how much just you being there for the small things meant to us. There are so many more things I could say about my father, so many stories to tell. Maybe one of these days I’ll put some of them down here to share but for right now they’re mine.

I’m sorry this isn’t the light-hearted stuff that I usually put out but I want the rest of the world (or those of you that still bother to read my stuff anyway) to know how proud I am of my father and how much he means to me. I count myself lucky to have had a Dad that was involved in my life and cared enough to be there for me through thick and thin.

I love you Dad.

Your son,
Daniel

With Zombieland doing so well at the box office I figured I’d highlight some of the other Z-word  films out there.  I’m sure that at least some of my regular viewers have seen most of these but I’m betting there may be one or two that have slipped through the cracks that they haven’t. So without further adieu let’s get this show on the road!

Zombi 2: If you haven’t seen this one and your a Zed head you really need to put this in your Netflix queue, trust me you won’t regret it! I’m not gonna give you a plot summary, that’s what Wiki’s for but this movie is famous for two things and lucky for you I’m gonna show you both of them!

The first one…well I don’t know how to describe it without ruining the moment so go watch it for yourself. Go on, I’ll wait.

Well? What did you think? I’m still trying to figure out how they shot that particular scene! I dig it though!

This next one, all I’m gonna say is don’t watch it if your in the least bit squeamish, it’s pretty bad! Again I’m not gonna describe it for you because I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t seen it but here it is: (Don’t say you weren’t warned!)

That one makes me cringe just a little, not enough to stop watching but just enough to be uncomfortable.

This next clip comes from one of my personal faves, the original Dawn of the Dead. I’m sure most of you have seen this one but this part still cracks me up.

The best part about that clip is the zombie totally looks like my friend Curt! To this day we still call that one the Curt zombie.

Versus: I’m not sure how many of you have seen this one but it’s actually pretty good! It’s kind of a cross between The Usual Suspects & Night of the Living Dead with a dash of Kill Bill thrown in. Sounds weird I know but it actually works pretty well. See for yourself! (FYI – Zombie goodness around the 3:30 mark)

Flight of the Living Dead: I’m sure there’s a Wiki for this one but honestly this movies so bad I didn’t bother to look one up. I watched this stinker at my annual Zombie-thon last year. It was an hour and a half of my life I’ll never have back.

Undead: An Australian movie this time! This one isnt’ gonna win any awards but it’s not a bad movie. It’s one of two “horror/comedy” entries (you can probably guess the other one). Again I’ll let Wiki explain the plot for this one because it’ll do a better job than I can. Me? I’m just a clip whore. See?

One thing I do have to give to Undead, it’s the only movie I’ve ever seen where a man punches a zombie fish. Don’t believe me? Check this out!

Not sure why the fish sounds like a pig, maybe it’s an Australian thing. If any of my readers are Aussies, please feel free to correct me!

As long as we’re down in that neck of the woods, let’s take a look at……

Black Sheep: While not technically a zombie movie it was advertised as one to me, it’s an interesting little film from New Zealand. See for yourself.

Shaun of the Dead: Again I’m not gonna bother with a Wiki for this one. I’m fairly certain most of you have seen this one at least once. I can honestly say this is one of my favorite zombie movies ever. They obviously have a lot of love for the Romero films and you can totally tell with this one. The clip that follows is my favorite part of the movie, the clip itself however is less than spectacular. Sorry about that but it was the best I could find without really exerting myself.

George Romero paid back Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright in his movie Land of the Dead:

That’s them under all the makeup. So that’s my official Halloween entry for now. I’ll try to come up with something a little less video/wiki heavy next post but it’s late, I’m tired and cold so you take what you can get right?

Till next time kiddies, thanks for reading!

I don’t know if they show these commercials outside of the Denver area or not but we have a local airline called Frontier here that features animals on the tail section of their airplanes. A few years back some genius got the idea to make a series of commercial featuring these animals in a day of the life situation. I don’t know if that makes any sense or not but maybe this will. Please to enjoy.

That’s Jack. He’s one of the regular animals that they feature in their commercials and that’s about the tone for the majority of the commercials they air. Jack has a thing for Foxy who’s, you guessed it a fox which they explored a little bit in this series of commercials.

See why I like these commercials?

Since it is snowing outside (stupid snow) I have to post this one. This one I have to say is one of my favorites, you’ll see why.

I gotta hand it to whoever’s behind these things, they’re pretty creative. Flip the dolphin campaigned  a few years back to go to Mexico or he was gonna go on strike.  There are a whole series of commercials about it but I don’t want to subject you to them so I’m just gonna spoil it for you, he got to go. Unfortunately for Flip it didn’t go exactly as planned.

The last year or so when fuel prices sky rocketed Frontier, like a lot of airlines, got into financial troubles and had to declare bankruptcy and there was some talk of them being bought out by Southwest airlines. Southwest would have probably have changed the look of the planes to their ugly ass logo but fortunately for Frontier some one else bought them instead and decided to keep both the Frontier name and the animals on the tail section which brought us the latest installment.

If you got a laugh or at least a smile out of these there are a ton more on the interwebs. I’ll have some more actual content up soon, I just gotta get outta my funk first. Maybe I’ll even finish that post about Mary.