But we shall return!

And we'll schedule the 5th Annual LKDC Xmas Party. I know, I know. Keep your fuckin' calm, people.

Today is no such day.

You may remember from an earlier entry ("Bread Crumbs", 9/4/07) that the Mrs and I were attacked by a bat. You may re-visit, I'll wait. Well, our adoring audience can't just let stuff like that slide unrebuked. Rewind to a couple of weeks ago. Shannon is about to leave to come meet me and some folks for work for drinks. She calls me.

S: "Dan?"
D: "Uh oh."
S: "We have a package."
D: "Oh?"
S: "The return address is Bruce Way..."
D: "Don't open it."
S: "Why? What is it?"
D: "Dead bat."
S: "What?"
D: "Where is it from?"
S: "Ellitsville, Indi..."
D: "Dead bat. Bring it to the bar."

Fast-forward. It was not a dead bat. It was a bottle of shampoo and a fake decorative bat wearing neon panties. We were relieved, but newly confused. Who? Who? The bat remained in the trunk for a week. The weather was rainy, the bat was creepy, and so it stayed.

And when the chest was opened, and the bat was de-robed, we discovered that the panties in fact were not. It was a bathing suit top. Neon pink and green. Yes. Exactly. The shirts. The photo. The bikini.

You had a distant relative send the package from out-of-state? Rushes, my hat is off to you. But now I have the complete outfit. The game... she must be over. Please? Truce?

I apologize for my record-breaking absence. It's partly (maybe 10-20%) the fault of my web host. They're doing something, I don't know, moving shit and I lost my FTP access. But, she has returned.

11 months! Not married, but working. It's easier. One more day of work this week before the big holiday weekend. We'll back in G Biddy from late-ass Wednesday night and Sunday afternoon. Black Friday? Treehouse. Legs will be humped, good times had, et cetera.

Other than that, life is a series of Guitar Hero songs and decent primetime television. It snowed yesterday, with accumulation. It's November. We are not amused.

I suppose I did go to Canada since my last post, but I'll save that mildly amusing tale for another day.

Shannon's Birthday is sometime tomorrow. Old fart is finally catching up to the rest of us. Wait, is Tree out there? Don't tell her, but I got her

For the rest of the week? My usual Frisbee routine, which has become somewhat less-than-usual as of late. The monthly bowling game with marketing finally resumes this week (I haven't played since I got tied down). Also, the in-laws are visiting for the wife's birthday and we're picking pumpkins with the rest of the New Jersey brood. My first task as asshole will be to get a cat to fit into a jack-o-latern much like a lobster trap.

The office, in their infinite wisdom, saw fit to send me to Vancouver last week to teach a training seminar on the product I work on. In other words, they thought it was a good idea to put me in a room with 40 people with a microphone and leave me in charge. I'm not certain if they actually retained any course material, but I'm pretty certain I cemented the phrase "sum'abitch" in their vocabularies.

Really, what else could I say about my life that you couldn't figure out on your own? Still working, 9 months now. I'm due for some kind of review where I check the floor beneath me for some ACME-style trap door. I don't see anything terribly interesting happening on that front again for a while. One guy on my team is leaving on Friday, bringing our number down to something like 4. Maybe 5, depending on how loose your definition of a team is. Considering what we do, I think maybe this number is a bit... small.

My once-loyal S710A took a dump sometime just before I went to Canada. The battery, so far as I can tell, is in top shape. But the charging circuit that powers the battery seems to have gone out. It was then, with some reluctance I assure you, I procured an iPhone. I swear the Christ, it is fantastic. I've been massaging myself gently with hardware specifications online for sometime now, but only when you really dig your sweet, supple fingers into the thing does the warm, clean sensation it provides really exit the realm of fantasy. I'll spare you any details more pornographic than that, but if you have ever even considered adopting one, please, treat yourself.

What else... anything? No? The new Mae CD still holds a special place in my doldrum and I've been paying a bit of attention to the new JEW as well. More like Futures than Bleed American, it's OK so far, but nothing terribly special. I am bubbling at the thought of new Say Anything to come later this month. If you have details that would either engorge or deflate my... excitement... please, keep them to yourself and allow me my blissful ignorance.

Later, eh? There is Heroes afoot.

I'd really hate to blame marriage for the last couple months of silence, but since now that card is in my deck I guess I'll play it. I could go, at some depth, into the events surrounding our most holiest of matrimonies, but as 1 picture = 1000 words, I think I'll just let them do the talking.

The honeymoon that followed was also a good time. There might be pictures around somewhere, but they're hardly for your eyes. Lots of food, lots of drink, partly cloudy with a chance of iguanas. Onward and upward.

Let's rewind to a couple of weeks ago. The time: 4am. At some point in the night, the now-Mrs gets up to squeeze a kidney. She politely does so without waking me. That is, until she tears ass into the bedroom sans-pants and slams the door.

S: "Get up Dan!"
D: "Wha... what the fuck."
S: "There's something!"
D: *something incoherent*
S: "There's something flying around the bathroom. A bird or something. Come kill it."

So! Equipped with five hours of sleep and some eye-crusties, we peer out the bedroom door into the bathroom and spy ourselves a bat-wing. Noting it's features, I run into the office and pull up the Creatures-of-Hell database and discover that this is a special breed of Scare-the-Piss-Out-of-You Bathroom Bat; indigenous to cramped water closets of middle-income dwellings. Armed with this knowledge, we equip ourselves with the necessities: a towel and a large pizza box (empty). Our plan: I sneak into the bathroom and try to snare the fucker with a guest towel while Shannon beats me mercilessly with the fucking pizza box. I must say that it was executed perfectly, minus actually capturing the bat. After educating Shannon on the most obvious visual differences between members of the order Chiroptera and the back of my melon, we sneak into the bathroom to discover: nothing. The bathroom is empty. We shake and remove the shower curtain. We check the toilet. We check under the sink. I go as far as to peer up the faucet in the tub. Nothing. It's neigh 5am, and I am pretty much ready to write this off as a fucking magical bat. Due to lack of sleep, I conclude that it is just as likely that we just experienced one of those group-hallucinations I've heard so much about. We return to bed.

Enter: the next morning. Sparing you some of the more gritty details, I'm in the shower. For reasons not initially clear to me, my shampoo bottle chirped when I reached for it. The little bastard was tucked away in the back of the shower caddy behind a bottle of Head and Shoulders for about 2 hours. I allow myself the most the most manly of shrieks before calling my sidekick into the bathroom with more towels. Not taking any chances, we attempt to rip the entire caddy off the wall and wrap it in a towel. That didn't quite work out, so I settled for double-wrapping the little shit into some sort of squeaking burrito. After procuring a towel for myself as cover, we escape out the back and pitch the bat, towels and all, into the perfectly lit yard where I'm sure the neighbors thought they were witnessing some shit from Lawnmower Man or something. The bat, knowing that we just tried to kill it, circles back in for the kill and still wearing only a towel, I high-tail it back into the building. The creature then escapes, and I like to think, is later captured by Ozwald Osbourne and devoured.

I can't think of anything more entertaining in the last 2 months to report than that. I should probably leave on that high note, but not without listing the current contents of my CD player:
* Boys Night Out, Self-Titled - Absolutely. On the level of Trainwreck, even. I'm almost to the point of hating their first CD for love of this one.
* The Honorary Title, Scream and Light Up the Sky - Nothing on this one has grabbed me, but it's obviously still the same band. Good mellow music, though I'm certain the lyrics would depress me if I would strain hard enough to listen to them.
* Paramore, Riot! - Of course. The singer is legal now, which might have only barely stopped me before. If Falling was your cup of tea, consider this your crumpet.
* Mae, Singularity - It's no Everglow, but it's still good. Procure and enjoy.
* Blaqk Audio, Cex Cells - Davey Havok set to trance music? Sure, what the hell.

I'd like to be able to promise more frequent updates, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Maybe I could satisfy everyone with mini-posts a la Keacher. Look for them soon.

Adieu.

You're stripped to the waist,
And I'm begging for you to do what you do.
A sip for the taste and a shot to subdue...
All the things that hold us back
From the bed to the shower, the shower to the floor...
You call out for more.
From the floor to the climax,
We get up and pour out two more for two lovers.

I have made a couple of brief forays into Ohio in the last three weeks or so: the youngest of my brood finally graduated High School, my soon-to-be-Housekeeper graduated College and my former-biatch got hitched. If I didn't see you on any of these return trips, my apologies. I'm back again the weekend of the 13th for yet another wedding. Then, the next week, I sign my own life away.

And I figure I better include this "above the fold" in an effort to retain readers. We've got another goddamn mouth to feed. His name is Cosmo... for now. The next k"); ?>This is what you do when you really love someone.

Before I dive into the "meat and potatoes" of the post, I feel I should probably explain the title. One of our software guys has taken to calling any embedded glitches I become responsible for "Koberrors". I can't prove it, but I think this moniker was derived from his original mispronunciation of my last name as Ko-bear. That is, he seemed genuinely surprised when I remarked that the 'e' is short. Then there was a joke about my height/age. And some crying the bathroom.

So, I feel that I should delve deeply into the latest CD from Linkin Park that dropped yesterday, but I wanted to make sure that I gave it a couple of run-throughs before making any official statements. I bought it on iTunes yesterday before work because I realized that the wait to get to Best Buy that night might have actually killed me.

If you want a quick, concise review that I pretty much completely agree with, I think the boys at Uncrate did a pretty good job. But if you're looking for something more in-depth, I'll put something down for you.

First off, I like the album. I've yet to reach that stage in our relationship where I can admit (to anyone) that I might love it, but "like" is a good way to start. My expectations grew at first from the single, which (along with one or two other tracks) are real outliers from the general feel of the album. Linkin Park has 6 members. I mention this, because at times it feels like they simply took turns performing rather than working all at once. The sounds can be gripping (the hairs on your neck... they can stand) but it's not because you're being bombarded with a lot of energy. 8 out of the 11 full-tracks have a very slow and soft feel to them that occasionally rise into the sort of gripping ballad you might be used to. The back-and-forth between Shinoda and Chester is just gone. The rap/rock elements are completely separated, and I don't think Shinoda got a fair shake as a result. There are two rap-feeling songs with singy choruses, and a third song that is actually sung by Shinoda. It's almost spoken word... but it's certainly not the hip-hop Shindoa we've come to expect. And... there's clapping... everywhere in the album. On tracks where Mr. Hahn's scratching is absent... I think he just beats his paws together.

Overall, I'd say the band moved in a very "emo" direction with the exception of the three harder-hitting tracks. Again, I like the album, and you'll never hear me say that I regret spending actual money on it. Oh, and it's the first of the three full-length albums from LP to carry a Parental Advisory. There's some potty-mouth.

Tracks for the Listening

• What I've Done - The single is still my favorite off the disc. It's very Meteora.
• Bleed It Out - One of the two rap-tastic tracks. Kind of reminds me of webefreestylin' from Gym Class.
• No More Sorrow - Ooooooooh. How political. Hard-hitting and bad-ass. Tickles my funny-place
• Hands Held High - Sad... and political again. Trying to keep up with the Benjamins, eh?

Just my favorites so far. Everyone score this album, please. You'll be surprised, but hopefully not disappointed.