Its was Gma's birthday. The Italian restaurant we went to was pretty special. Paul reserved a private room for the seven of us (Paul, Gma, Dustin, Jennifer, Sonny, Becky, and me).
We had shrimp scampi (3 shrimp), and calamari fritti for the appetizer.
- I had osso bucco, because I'd heard of it, but forgot what it was.
- Sonny had sea bass *****
- Becky had Chicken Parmesian. ****
- This kids split a pizza **
- Paul had a seafood medley *****
- Gma had veal marsala ?????
The reason why I didn't rate my osso bucco is that I was raised on osso bucco!
Its basically roast beef with gavy on rice. Whoops on me.
The service was wonderful, the atmosphere was great, and we had fun. Plus we survived the trip to get there along I515.
The price was high, but, for a once in a year event, it was worth it.

I forget sometimes that people do pop on LVDude. This is usually a very lonely site.
Well, someone popped in, checked out the Notary system and entered a transaction.
The system does work in the real world. It will take credit cards, and it does page people on their cell phones.
Its not quite there yet. I behaves poorly. Cox internet has been quirky, and I haven't been able to update it anything lately.
Anyway, I have Sonny in the system as a mythical agent in Ely, NV.
I used his cell phone to test Sprint's messaging.
The notary system finds the agent closest to order (which was, I think, in Michigan), and Sonny got a page. LOL.
I was laughing so hard after I figured it out.
The system still has some minor bugs in it, one of being that if someone did create a credit card order right now, we wouldn't know it.

All except for the final clean up. Becky cleaned and  painted. I painted. Sonny cleaned up the garage.
Sonny actually did most of the work this time. Cheers to Sonny...YEAH!!!!
This time, we'll charge a $50 refundable application fee and we will check references.
No more cash deals. Its too much effort.
I called a real estate agent about the houses across the street.
The 1,600 square foot houses cost $310,000 ($193 a square foot)
The 1,800 square foot houses cost $352,000 ($194 a square foot)
So the condo should be worth over $120,000.

In regards to Question #1: Test for Jimmy... What do you call a newborn baby?

A baby is a "Minature Human"...

Nevada foreclosures over 100,000 for the fifth month
See article. Personally, I own two houses here.
I recently talked to a condo owner who lives near one of them. He said he bought his 3 bedroom condo for $80,000 in 2004. It is now worth $160,000. Like most of the people here, he has refinanced and pulled cash out. If he had only $20,000 into his condo (with payments), that would represent a two year gain of over 400%.
I would think the foreclosures would hurt the loan companies, then the banks, and eventually the US Treasury. I would think the interest rates would go up. But who knows, things often work out the opposite way of how you'd expect to.
On the flip side, luxury houses are going for a mint! A luxury condo at the Turnberry Towers goes for $2,000 a square foot. Most houses go for $20 a square foot.
Child Welfare gets bad an "F".
See article. No surprise there. I've heard the best thing to do, if you need social assistance, is to move to California.
Nevada Educational funding gets an "F".
See Article. No surprise there. Talking to kids these days, they seem to know very little about our Greek and Roman heritage. They're understanding of geograpy is weak. It seems that even with D's and F's, these kids pass the grade. I still find it hard to accept that playing a computer game is considered Physical Education.
Nevada stem cell research is happening.
See article. I was curious about why research was so contraversial so I read up on it. The stem cells can take on the attributes of any cell in the body (IE: liver cells, or in my case, a new brain), but with current technology, extracting them kills an embryo without dignity. Normally, the embroyos would be wasted if not fertilized. See wikipedia.
Nevada Methamphetimine use called Epidemic
See article. No surprise here. I often drive down the road and see people waving their hands and talking to themselves. Sometimes they walk erratic and fast.
This is why I don't read the news much. Its depressing.

That's great. And I think you miss your days at IGT. Speaking of which, have you heard recently from Susan Stone? No, I know Sonny had given you Office 2007. But I haven't worked with it yet. I have no need to spend the money. My Office 2003 Pro is fine with me.

What you're up to, these days. Are you notarizing?

I followed the link.  Thought It might lose me it was moving at such a frenzied but groovy pace.  Ended up here.
What feedback? At the payment window I entered some funny credit card number without selecting payment
type, like usd or card icon.  It didnt care.  Took me to the next window.  There was a broken image.
Did this on explorer.  Not my comp.  I use Mozilla.  Im a user.  And a snot.  You probably know this dont you.
DONT YOU?  You and your high falutin cronies.  Good job on it though, Auto complete, auto zip detect, aparently you
have math in your pocket, very nice.  No lines or cursors for some fields and lines under others.  I can backkey and forward thru stuff I entered long after the fact and its still there, even after googling in the same window and rewinding
(after the payment window!).  Something I wish like freagin wonderland you had going for the logs. [because] I had  the most
awesomely smoking response to the "MLK whos that guy" log entry.  Seriously, it was beautiful, like I was channeling
a hybrid of Nelson Mandelas soul and James Woods balls, I was gonna smoke that comment.  Alas, I tried in vain to
bring it back to life after looking up wether Martin Luther King actually walked from Selma to DC (800 miles!) accidentally
from not another tab, and .. it just wasnt the same.  The freak was all I could channel of spirit, every sentence just missed some little kibble of metre, dammit all to hell was my evenings name then.  Anyhoo.  I dont really need the small catapult.
Ps. there is triple scrolling happening here.  two scrollbars, outermost one scrolls a shmeensy percent of the content, up arrow saves the day.  Peace baby.

I had hoped to hear that you had already started nortarizing. Maybe getting your name out there, via flyers, word of mouth, etc. Or had hit "The Brain" up for some possible work at his place, around the corner on Flamingo. There was a guy here briefly, last summer, who was doing Notary, and maybe the laws are different here, than in NV, but he'd quote anywhere from $120 to $250 to go somehere (in the evening after work) to do a typical real estate loan document.

Why????

I've been searching for the meaning of life as long as I can remember.
Growing up, there were too many Bibles, too many insane stories, too many overlooked truths.
I look around and I see animals that are not that different from myself. They have organs like me; hearts, kidneys, stomachs, brains. They have hair. They are as alive as I am. Yet we kill them, because somehow, it isn't a wrong.
I never saw people as black, yellow, white or brown.
That was just a minor difference. All the hate was plain stupidity.
I wondered, if people were smart, why didn't they seek science for longer lives. Why did they seek greed, power and control. I realized, our species is insane. If we don't understand what we see, we invent concepts that are not real. Then we kill our own species if they don't believe in our insanity. As a result, most of the human race believes in things they know can't be real. Our ignorance is only overcome by our arrogance.
It should be obvious to anyone who dares to look...
We were all spawned by the same entity. Everything on this planet is necessary. All life on this planet is related. We are cousins of the animals, and distant cousins of the plants. Our greatest forefathers were single celled creatures. Life on earth could have been spawned by one single celled creature. Four billion years is a long time for life to grow.
It takes our own body only 9 months to form from a single celled life form.
Its not so far fetched, that all the knowlege we were given at birth, was inherited by our ascendants. We are reincarnations of those who spawned us. We just can't remember them simply because we don't need to.
Our purpose is to help life spread.
These observations should be obvious.
I believe that the worst thing we could do to our dead is to embalm or cremate them. To do so, destroys their DNA. It obliviates any chance of their knowledge being passed down.
Adults seem as impatient as children at times.
I've heard people say that when we die, we go to heaven, even though theres no evidence of this.
I think we don't go anywhere. I believe we mutate and there is evidence of that.
I think, in 8 billion years, given nothing else to accellerate the process, we'll be back. I say that because that is how long it took the universe to create us.
Perhaps, in a hundred years or so...
People will drop their fantasies, forget about the gods and devils they imagined, their heavens and hells, and just look at what is real. Maybe we won't use and abuse other life forms just because they are different.
Maybe someday, we'll share with this planet and go on to make the universe a better place.
But for now, the human race seems to be insane with greed, religion and power. We are dooming ourselves.

Martin Luther King Day was founded as a holiday and was promoted by labor unions in contract negotiations. hmmm. See Wikipedia. I don't know much about this guy, except that he was a Babtist minister. I guess he was pretty cool back in the 1960's. But as a kid, he scared the brownies out of me. He was always yelling and pointing his finger at something. He even yelled about his dreams!
People like that scare little kids.

Ford Trucks Red, White & Blue Balloon Festival
An event for the entire family is coming to Sam Boyd Stadium on January 13 & 14, 2007. The Ford Trucks Red, White & Blue Balloon Festival will feature twenty-five special shape balloons and forty race balloons. Making it the second largest Special Shape Balloon Festival in the country.
We went there.
They didn't launch the balloons and they did last year. There was no wind, so that couldn't have been the reason. The balloons were only inflated for less than an hour. And to top it all off, the DJ for KOMP radio said there was no smoking at the outdoor event. Ummmm. So thats the way its going to be.
Between the balloon event, and the short New Years fireworks display, I have to wonder what's going on.

Iraq is smaller than Arizona. It has less people than California. Mexico City has almost as many people.
With that in mind, why is it so hard to conquer?
If something sounds wrong, it probably is.

Did someone say disturb?? Someone say ugly head? Guess thats my cue. For all they have seen and done in deed, "it must be horrible".  The news on the wankertube should be reformatted in three layers.  First the news, keep the sounds and oratory media.
  1st superimposition, CSI like hyperbolic pornography.  The kind of stuff that tailors itself to fantasies involving solving murders and keeping consumers together when trauma takes ahold in some unfortunate demonstration of tissues force and physics.
This sets the tone for alerting the viewer that interest and fantasy is now licensed(thus possibly connecting with a baseindex of meanings from outside the actual box of the hour(program)).
'because we care about YOU' Thats a real message solicited across the broadcast interface. (TV)..
Second superimposition.
THE media REAL detectives, police EMTs and medical triage peepz must sort through every second of the day.  mainly the gruesome cacophany of images taken for evidence in repugnant flash lighting. If you like text there are reports to be read then. Adjoin a sparse but breathtaking clause of  THE scenery. things WE are familiar with, that usually offer the inheritance of their usual safe, usefull ordinary meanings, (this is a wall, that is a mailbox, this is a refridgerator, thats a bustop,hey look children playing in a park!).  Now you have the news. 
Hmm, clean desert clad 'workers' kicking in a slightly dusty door for the nteenth instance and reviewed? Following an APC exposing security enhanced bodylanguages, ...
Nope, just keep the dumbed down audible headlines and cirkle-reasoned headline qualifying agents, (gotta keep something to let us knoiw its the news right?),,,,
Add the fantasy liscencing agent, and then please dont close your eyes cuz you need to know what youre recompositing with the fantasy licsencing agent along with the ordinary scenery clause into the news,ok now add those two last little darlings so that YOU, who WE care about, like ..oh my GAWD, all the time -- DUHH !!! can actually get the news, and then, i dunno, pop an asperin or something.
Thats the world of these poor people from under one umbrella of hate to under a several of others is like. 
And then read some antiquated irrelevant humoring bits of stuff copied of John Quincy Adams in his feverd rush to rise to his occasion something something um experiment in democracy .. yeah yeah yeah and TRY like hell to keep an even brow when someone tells you in so many unspoken terms of preemptive censorship that{"if we werent there" As If {(the official infinitive state of the term 'there' is whatever an ends justifying a means will suffer;) evidence of children torn apart and wailing parents is ok}}. Im done.  Im too pissed now to be of any use. Tvee news should be experienced in three layers minus the heart though, if we are as interested as our habits suggest. sorry eh. There is always a simpler way, what use this is escapes me.
If anyone has any better and distanced perspective please share, my myopia is summoned me into a trite fairweather gadfly.
yuck!!! ooh, theres what I was hoping for "Please enjoy your visit to LVDude." ok, next time then.  can I still have that beer??

From: Morningstar.com, stock named HAL.
I guess, from what I've read, $1.4 billion was awarded to the Texas company called Halliburton in a no-bid contract. It was run by Dick Cheney, a Bush advisor (See Article).  That stock price has to be one of the hottest ones in the NYSE. Man, why can't I have buddies like that!!!   
The Bush speech was touching. .
Help the Iraqis people grow democratic.
Stop the 'insurgents'. Stop the Alkiada regime. That sounds great!
But how do we know we've won, exactly?
And how we never, ever, hear about the oil production over there?
I've always thought thats what the war was really about. We never hear about that though.
I do wish we'd help our neighbors in Mexico, instead.
Maybe they'd stop fleeing to the US. I suppose there is now profit in that. To bad, hombres. Your country doesn't seem to have anything we would kill for to get. hmmm.
Now, I gotta say that I don't intentionally look up disturbing new.
It just seems to rear its ugly head all by itself.

It was cold in the parking lot in front of the Frontier. We found a parking spot, almost right on the Strip, and right around 9pm. I thought that was AMAZING! We had to hang out for the next three hours for the big fireworks spectacle, so....

Becky and I walked up and down the Strip.
We popped into the Frontier, Venetian, and Treasure Island. Compared to the other New Years, the crowd was as thin as Charmin. But like I said, it was f-f-f-f-f-r-e-e-z-ing!
Finally the time came...midnight on the Strip.
I futzed with my new Christmas camera for a few moments, the looked up, and it was over! Wut thu hay I hooted, and I'm not an indian. 2007 had to be the shortest New Years fireworks display I'd ever seen, lasting only 6 minutes long.
The things I enjoyed this New Years were:
The scantely clad girls.
The guys in heavy fur jackets.
The people with flashing balls in their mouths.
The horse cops.
And the all-slapped-give-out drunks.

Good Morning babe
I had a great time last night. You were right about the fireworks being so short.
I really didn't know what to think about that guy that came up to me dancing.
I've never had that happen before. It was kinda flattering to me. I wanted to grab
you but you were taking a picture. LMAO!!!!!!!!. What was so funny about it
was the way he danced. I got a kick out of all of the people there. I couldn't
believe how some of those young girl's were wearing dress skirt's in cold weather.
WOW!!!!! LOL. Thank you so much babe for a good time at the strip.
I Love You
Becky

WHY??????

12/31/2006 - I saw the New Years Ghost
I saw a ghost this News Years Eve when I looked in the mirror. It looked just like me.
Then I started seeing ghosts all around me.
When you go out this New Years, look around at the people. Picture them as if you watching them in a video filmed 100 years ago.

Notice how much we all look alike, how well we get along, and how we all seem to be related? Don't look at our differences. Look are how much we have in common.
Pretend you lost your long term memory?
Ever see a picture of a Great Great relative that looked just like you? Ever talked to someone who thought just like you?
If you can think like me for just a moment
Imagine that when we die, we don't go anywhere. Imagine the we are all reincarnations of our ancestors, without their memories. Imagine that it goes much deeper than that. Imagine we are all the reincarnations of the dinosaurs and further back. Too me, life seems too obvious. Animals, birds, fish, insects, we all have the same organs. We all must be related.
We were born with knowledge.
It came from someone. It probably came from our parents.
Nature could have populated our memories with that of our ancestors, but for whatever reason, it didn't.
Who knows, maybe we'd still be arguing about how someone sacrificed our favorite lamb or something...
But doesn't that seem a lot easier to believe than some fairy floating down and touching us with her magic wand.
If you think like I do, you'll know that on this planet, all life is related. Given enough time, we all come back.