Ryan Jones

Got home from the casino around 730am, put the flag out. It's going to be a nice day here in the DC metro area for the 4th. Justin and I will go to a bridge right across the street and from the top we can see fireworks from 3-4 places, assuming there's no clouds. I've done the downtown fireworks enough, no need to ever go again. Hope everyone else is having a fun day today and hope Elsa takes a turn in a different direction!

You're right. Damp joints don't burn as evenly!

I once billed my doctor for having to wait 90 minutes past my appointment time. I used print shop to make official looking letterhead. Got ignored first letter, second letter. Last one I threatened to send to a collection agency and I received a check for $150 in the mail. Took the check to his office, dropped it off, told them the place was fucked beyond repair and found a new doctor. The one I have now, if you get there 10 minutes early, you're the only person in the waiting room. Either before or by your appointment time you're in the back. I can't imagine going to a doctor that has a waiting room half full of patients.

I did the jumping out of airplane on my 50th birthday. Had to do tandem of course, I was just along for the ride. The falling part was fun, the drifting down with the parachute? Not so much. I was very glad to get back on the ground and, unlike Bush the older, will not be doing it again on my 90th birthday!

Thanks for the comments. I guess the real problem is that I feel cheated out of the joy of being a father. My son was born in 1974 and that was as accidental as the Patty one. I would never have known had I not gone back to visit the woman 2 years later and the total joy of being his father is the best thing. I feel like I had the right to know. If it was my child and I'm 99.99% it was, we did it so much that she didn't have time to be with anyone else, they shouldn't have kept it secret. Interesting that @Kitt mentioned the child could have been raised as a sibling. It was always rumored that my grandfather was really one of his older sister's children. The 1900 census lists him as a grandson in the household, not as a son. By 1910 though he's listed as a son. I'll use my government contacts to find out, then I'll decide. Now that it's so stuck in my head I have to know whether or not I ever make contact. I did decide to go ahead and do the DNA test kit just in case they are looking for blood relations.

Hello everyone. Happy Father's Day to the ones it applies to. My son, grandchildren and great grandchildren all called me this morning to say hello and Justin burned some breakfast so mine has been great! I'd like to get your opinion on something. When I was 12 this girl Patty decided her and I were going to have sex. At the time I had no idea about sex with guys, if you had asked I would have said I was only attracted to girls. Not that I thought about sex, in the early 1960s puberty wasn't as hurried as it now. Patty and I went to the library and sneaked into the "adult only" sections and read every book we could find on how to make the experience good for both. It was a little amusing in retrospect. There were whole chapters on how to make it better for the woman, much less for the man. Theory was great, how would it work in practice though? November 22, 1963. A day that will live in infamy. Also the day I lost my virginity. We had been planning our sexual experience since late September but Patty's mother was always home when we got off school so no way to do it. This was the day JFK was assassinated and they let us out of school early. So her house was empty when we got there and off we went, like two rabbits. Her mother's schedule at work changed a week later. She was never at home now until 430pm so it was every school day that we "practiced" what we had learned. On and on, puberty hit her first, then me in February of 1964. Condoms? Never heard of them. There was no sex education in the school and nobody bothered to mention to me anything about pregnancy. This was a fantastic time for a 12, then 13 year old boy. Quite literally I was getting all the sex I could handle. We didn't stop until a certain part of me refused to go on. As a family we would visit relatives in NC every other weekend, leaving on Friday after work, coming back Sunday evening. It was in late May 1964 that we came back home and when I went to pick Patty up to walk to school on Monday her house was empty. All the furniture gone. She hadn't mentioned anything to me about it but hey, I was 13 and while I missed the sex, life went on. At my 47th high school reunion we were talking about first sexual partners and I mentioned Patty. This woman overheard me and interjected with this line. "She got pregnant at 13 and they moved" So, there's the backstory, condensed as much as possible. Evidently my parents were never informed. Had they been I'm sure at some point once I became an adult they would have said something to me. Obviously I didn't know until a few years ago. The question is, what do I do? Justin (boyfriend, soon to be husband) thinks I should attempt to find my kid and their family. I had told Justin about what I learned after the HS reunion, he didn't really say much about it at the time. I guess he's had time enough to think about it and formulate an opinion. Can I find the kid? Probably yes but should I find them? I'm torn. Yes, I want to see them. I think it's an instinctual desire more than emotional. I would do the DNA test kit, just to see if they had done it but that opens up another whole can of worms involving me and a group of lesbians in Charlotte in 1977. What do you all think?

I'm just English. I can kind of understand Dutch, can kinda read Dutch. Speaking it makes my throat hurt though.

I thought maybe I'd post the recipe for the chocolate icing that I use for cakes. As I said earlier, you have to be a little careful, if you beat it too long it will turn to fudge before it gets on the cake. As a side benefit you can take what you don't need to ice the cake, add whatever you want to it (nuts, etc) and form it into individual fudge pieces for later enjoyment. Chocolate Fudge Icing 3/4 cup butter 9 tbsp cocoa 3 cups sugar 1 cup evaporated milk 1/2 tsp salt 1 tsp vanilla Add cocoa, sugar, salt in the pot and mix it up. Add butter and milk. Stir good and bring to a boil and stir constantly Boil at rolling boil 3 minutes or 4 minutes. Remove from heat and add vanilla. Beat with mixer 5 minutes until it gets thick. Scrape around pot with knife and see that mix is getting thicker and stickier and sticks to knife. Once it starts to thicken, get to icing that cake before it sets! Note to all. Not sure if you've ever tried the fudge recipe from the Hershey's can. If you have then you know that when it starts to boil the mixture expands and you need a very large pot for it. This mixture expands very little so it can be made in a normal sized pot.

Is that a cooked icing? I am a chocoholic and growing up my mother used the fudge recipe off the Hershey's cocoa tin. It was tricky, you had to take it off the heat within 30 seconds of the soft ball stage. Too early and it didn't set on the cake, too late and it turned into hard fudge before you could ice the cake. I use my aunt's recipe now for icing. It's more forgiving although if not careful you can still end up the same as the Hershey's recipe.

All I could picture there was the unicorn horn coming out of a certain place. Then again I've been told my mind is below the gutter....

Have to admit the Disturbed version of SOS is just fantastic. I think I read that when Paul Simon heard it he was just floored by the execution. Obviously I've heard the Imagine Dragons on the radio, never saw the video. Not sure either video would be good for late night viewing, might induce some seriously weird dreams. Oh and double jointed people have ALWAYS freaked me out!

We traveled too much to have a pet. Every other weekend we went to NC to visit with my mother's side of the family. My parents really weren't into pets but we ended up with a manx cat when my sister and her husband got evicted from a house and had to move into an apartment. 30lbs, little nub tail and vicious if you weren't a family member. He had his own chair that he shredded. Even the solid wood was no match for him. He was an outdoor/indoor cat, someone catnapped him and about 3 months later he reappeared. Since he was actually placed inside our screen door it's obvious someone made sure he was noticed. About 6 months after that I noticed a lot of kittens with no tails a few streets away. Cats do generally last longer than dogs, our two cats now are 16 and 15 but I think this is getting near the end for both of them. Since I'm 70 now I suspect that once these two pets are gone that's it for permanent pets. I will still do foster cats for a local group if they need it.

I often wondered if the people that worked for me had similar issues with me as a boss. I had some strict rules: 1. No pleasantries. 2. Never be late, even by a minute. 3. Don't tell me you can't follow one of my instructions. I remember one assistant told me he couldn't do what I told him to do. I gave him the stare of death because what he really meant was that he "wouldn't" do what I told him. I do admit that occasionally I went a bit overboard but hey, it was my group and the last time anyone tried to tell me what to do Jimmy Carter was POTUS and little Stanny was my boss. That worked about as well as Carter trying to get rid of the neutron weapons.

I have to admit I'm not overly fond of vegetables. The ones I'll eat are: Brussels Sprouts, Broccoli, Baby Lima Beans, Collards, Cabbage. In season I love white corn. Also the usual suspects in a salad like lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes. I can't stand to even look at cauliflower. To me it looks like an albino brain.

Don't feel bad. When I first read it I thought he was talking about Greek MEN! lol

I'll stay out of the food discussions. While I *can* cook, actually I'm a pretty good old style (lots of butter) French chef when I want to be, it's just too time consuming. My boyfriend isn't into cooking although he loves to eat. Heavy foods though aren't really his thing. Also the clean up from cooking is too much. I have to have every ingredient in a dish before I start to cook. Just wanted to give a quick update on the how places are reopening in MD. Full occupancy, people who have been vaccinated don't have to wear a mask except in one county that still requires it. At the poker room they have removed all the plexiglass dividers from the tables and gone from 7 people per table to 8. Before the pandemic it was 9 per table, not sure if they will go back to that or not because people tend to like the 8 players better. At the casino this morning I'd say it was about 60-40 people still wearing masks, including me. I would feel okay without the mask, I think. Until I do it I'm not sure. What's going on in your area of the US or world?

I live in the MD suburbs of Washington, DC. This is the "big" year for cicadas. The 17 year brood. We had a large tree in the front yard but it got damaged in a storm and had to be taken down. The only front yard tree now is my next door neighbor. I went over yesterday to take a look and the tree is covered with the husks of the molted cicadas. Not only that but I'd say there were at least 1000 of the husks on the ground at the base of the tree. This is just ONE tree. So imagine that multiplied by every tree they like. Oh and they are pretty large, for a flying bug. Dragonfly sized maybe? They aren't coordinated either. When they are at their worst you have to watch out, they might just fly and smack you right in the head. They don't bite though, or sting. This is our first hot week of the year so they are just exploding out of the ground. By the weekend they'll be in full chorus, according to the information the sound of them can be as loud as a lawnmower, decibel wise.

Of course now I can't find the picture in a search but on FB there's often posted a picture where the front door is on the left hand side of the house and the front door concrete steps have been installed on the opposite side, to a bare wall. That reminds me of what you're describing.

I never had an 8 track player. I went to cassette instead. Had a dual cassette deck attached to my stereo so I could make my own cassettes with just the songs I liked. It was always very annoying when that tape got inevitably messed up.

I'll tell you what I liked about the regular bread the hotel had in the breakfast buffet in Amsterdam. It had a nice really dark chewy type crust on the top. I hate bread that looks half baked, I want it to look practically burned. When I had a cook/housekeeper here she could make the bread come out just like the Amsterdam bread. Then she retired and I wasn't home all that much so I never got another cook. Just the maid service weekly.

It's a lot harder to get a "tell" from a person's face. Not just the mask but the way they have the tables set up now there are plexiglass dividers between you and the player next to you. Or dealer. So the glare from that also causes difficulty in reading people's body language. Something I'm reasonably good at. I suspect now it's just a matter of a week, two weeks, at most a month before the plexiglass dividers disappear also. The "fish" are helped a lot by the coverup provided by mask and plexiglass. I'd like to think that (most of the time) I'm not one of the fishies. lol

Today felt almost surreal in a way. They relaxed the covid restrictions in Maryland, matching the CDC guidelines. So there's no mandate from the state to wear a mask any longer. You're supposed to be vaccinated but obviously they aren't checking to make sure. So I get to the casino around 2am and notice maybe 30% of the people aren't wearing masks. It's going to take some getting used to, after over a year of everyone being masked seeing a naked face is unsettling. I found myself looking at them considering if they were just crawling with germs or not. A business can still decide masks are mandatory, some regular stores and grocery stores are keeping the mask requirement. I wore my mask, will probably continue if for no other reason than it's COLD inside a casino and my face will freeze! Hope everyone is doing good! Or great even!

Now a comment like that in a pm would make me go ballistic for sure. You have better self control that me, someone would have been found the next day with a hoof print indenting their head. Not that I'd do it personally but I think all of us have "people" who owe us favors. I could handle someone yelling at me but from personal experience I can tell you that anyone yelling at my son might have had a hard time surviving. Let's hope the situation rectifies itself without further issues.

I always get up between 2am - 3am to go to the casino to play poker. This morning I rolled over, had to pee, got up at 202am and decided it was time to loot the players at the casino. It's weird, I had one of those teenage feelings, like I was immortal and nothing could ever happen that would be bad. I wasn't sure what to do with that feeling but on the way to the casino I was driving on the Baltimore Washington Parkway. It's a 2 lane each way road, in a park like setting. Large medians, treed. You get the picture? There was practically no traffic on the road today for some reason and as I was eating my Tastykake chocolate cupcake, doing about 75mph (speed limit is 55), a motorcycle went zooming by me. Not sure exactly why but I decided to chase that motorcycle. Now, I have a Chevy Sonic, with a 4cyl engine. Not exactly a racing car. It's got a digital speedometer and I was practically entranced watching it go up and up. 80, 85, 90, 95. Then I started to think. Not really about my speed as such but I wondered to myself, did that speedometer have 3 digits? Or would it just stop at 99mph? I decided that I may as well see and pressed the accelerator down. Well, I found out it does indeed go to 3 digits. I got up to 106mph, then it stopped accelerating. I was finally catching up some to the motorcyclist although he was probably a mile ahead of me when I saw flashing lights, a cop car had given chase to the motorcyclist. My exit was coming up the next one so I slowed to a more reasonable 80. When I got to the casino I was exhilarated. I hadn't been that fast since I did a driving course at Daytona. I was quite literally tingling all over. For a minute I thought about just going back home and waking up the boyfriend to take care of the tingling but he's so grouchy if he doesn't get at least 7 hours of sleep. Unfortunately the exhilaration didn't carry over to poker. I got there around 225am, left at 630am. Was up exactly $31!

I kinda like the second one. I've never been able to handle stupid people, that's why I had my own operations group. It's also why I retired at age 39. It was much easier and almost as profitable to be a drug dealer (legitimate) and then if anyone bothered you it didn't matter because you were always "testing" the weed.