New Member To The Mookified Compound

Look at how cute I am!

This is Gracie.  Officially her name is Sergeant Gracie Mae Lovell.  But we just call her Gracie.  She's a Yellow Lab mixed with Husky. And as I write this post, she's trying to lay on my feet... that is until I wrote that sentence, now she got up and decided to have food.  I feel she is just preparing me to go for a walk..yep, there's the singular scratch at the door signalling that I must do as I'm told before finishing what I want to do.  Just like a woman.  Speaking of women... here is proof of their craziness:



"I got it! I got it! Now what?"

Now I grew up with dogs all my life.  Gracie is the first dog I've had since leaving my parents' digs.  In all my life, the only dog I ever saw chase her tail, much less actually get it, was Odie from the Garfield cartoons and comics... until the other day.  I just assumed it was comedy on the part of animators, but it turns out this is serious real-life business.

Anyways... Last Sunday I was taking my boys up to stay the week with my parents, and the plan was to get a dog, Tucker, who had been getting nursed back to health at their local Vet hospital my mom clerks at.  It's a long story of neglect and malnutrition prior to them trying to save the dog.  On the day we were to go up, I get a call from my mom saying the dog was found dead.  Well, I had been set on getting my first adult-life dog for about 3 weeks at this point.  After doing some hunting, I found an ad on craigslist for Gracie, and she lived here in the Des Moines area.  Her previous owner had a life situation and had to find her a good home or turn her over to the ARL that same night.  So after a quick supper with my parents and saying good bye to the boys, my girlfriend and I hustled back to Des Moines to pick up this 4 month-old pup.  She's been either full steam ahead or napping it out since.

She only slowed down one day, and that was Saturday when we went back up to my parents to have her spayed and get all her shots, and then on Sunday bring her and the boys back home.  She actually rode in the car very well:

See me...I'm blond just like my new brothers!

 Oh, I was supposed to be in that seat back there?

I prefer the window seat.  Josh doesn't mind me using his lap!

The only thing about bringing Gracie into our home to really consider was The Colonel.  On night one he established himself as the top dog of the house, and asserted the difference in rank, him being an officer and her being enlisted.  As he went up to sniff her out, she moved behind a chair.  It was all over from there.  He chased her round and round the basement, him getting that puffy cat look and her running scared out of her mind with her tail tucked between her legs.  Gracie is scared of cats, and the Colonel took full advantage of his intimidation factor.  Only wish I had a video camera for that!  The basement is now been deemed solely the Colonel's territory.  He has another blue chair down there that he uses, along with the blue recliner in my bedroom he took over long before we moved into this place.  Gracie will now attempt to play assuming the "downward dog" position and trying to lunge forward a couple inches, but the cat mostly ignores her.  Unless he's in a corner, then he gets on his hind legs, hisses, and occasionally throws a couple jabs, and Gracie comes running for protection.

When outside, she is always on a leash.  She is getting better, but she is a puppy and can get distracted easily, whether its a scent trail, a moving bug, kids, people, squirrels, random sticks, trash... you get the idea.  Whenever she spies a bird on the ground, she does the classic "pointer" pose.  But she does do a decent walk along from time to time.  On the homestretch, she likes to reach back grab the leash in her mouth and give it a tug to let me know its her turn to walk me, and if I'm willing, she really loves to run along.  I don't know if that's just her thing, or the Husky side coming out.  While at my parents, who have a fenced yard, she was allowed to roam free.  At first she wasn't entirely sure what to do, but it didn't take long to go exploring.

She knows how to sit, lay down, shake, and hi-five.  I'd say she knows the STAY command, but it seems I'm not allowed to leave whichever floor we're on to go to another without her wanting to follow along...  She has grown attached to both my girlfriend and I, but she really seems to have bonded with me.  And with the Olympics on these last couple weeks, she decided to invent her own sport for us to participate in together.  I fell asleep watching TV one afternoon, as she was napping after a long hot walk.  I woke up to her having chewed a sandal, and now was trying to lick me to death.  So I got up, decided I would use the bathroom quick and then take her out for the same.  So I go to take a leak and I left the door open.  Hey it was me and the pets, so why not?  Well, she followed me over, stared at me, and then decided that her spot on the carpet in front of the bathroom was perfect to trying out her half of the "synchronized peeing" routine.  Part of me wanted to laugh, the other part wanted to cry, because I had to clean up.  That and we would've been penalized heavily on our synchronization skills since I was standing and she was squatting... We have a long ways to go if we're going to get that act into the next games down in Rio!

But anyways... She's the newest addition.  The Colonel tolerates her.  The kids love her, and she loves them right back...Josh even took her for a walk around the block at my parents.  And she seems to be quite attached to me and my girlfriend.  So I'm quite happy in how things worked out.  She got a happy home without going through the shelter system, and I finally get to have my own dog again!

And here is Gracie doing what I always wanted to do- fart on my dad!  She does me proud!!!!

Now I just need an official flag for the Mookified Compound...





Technology As A Tool Of Anti-Mookism

WARNING!!!! This post may contain some inappropriate language and attitude within the contents. Those who are prone to picking up a stick and beating random people after reading displeasing material should just stop reading now. For the rest of you, well, you've been warned.

As I have mentioned before, I am the target of many conspiracies to hold me back. In fact some of you who read this refuse to add yourselves onto my blog as official followers or to comment openly (there is an option to post comments anonymously without logging in, you know). I can only assume it is because you have heard or know of these conspiracies, and you don't wish to be targeted or have members of your families circumcised merely for your associations with or to me.

I'm pretty sure the UN is part of the grand anti-mookist conspiracy

Well, the grand conspirators have struck at the Mook again!!! Last year there was a fake virus warning that was in fact itself a virus. Clicking on anything pretty much guaranteed your computer was going to be infected and you could do nothing. This happened to my mother's computer. My brother-in-law used his laptop to figure out how to take care of the problem. Then mere weeks later, our computer became infected while I was online. I got into contact with my brother in law, and after 2 to 3 hours we got things fixed. All was good, that is, until yesterday. The bastards struck again while I was online researching information and reading news articles. In fact I didn't even get a warning. Some random pop-up appeared and I merely tried to close it. The computer went into some sort of delay, then a balloon showed up from my task bar saying a virus has been detected, blah blah blah, and then the antivirus window popped up and things went crazy. Just the latest example of a wave of anti-Mookism that has infected the power structure of our world.

Naturally I called down to my sister's place. They don't admit to it, but they are Mookist sympathizers, so I knew I could get help from there. Unfortunately for me, my sister informed me that her husband was at work, so it was going to have to wait. I called my wife and let her know of the situation, and she contacted them last night to get the computer straightened out.



I was informed by my wife after getting up for work that the computer was in fact all fixed up now. I was also told in a frustrated and unjokingly joking manner that if it happens again while I'm online I'll be banned from the computer save when adult supervision is available to monitor my activities. Even with the adult supervision, my activities would be severely curbed. Probably limited to checking but not actually reading my email and getting to play minesweeper or solitaire, games that aren't connected to the Internet.

Of course this is what the grand conspirators are counting on. By curtailing my access to information and being able to disseminate that information along with my own high brow intellect out to the world, they can keep Mookism confined to my household instead of to the masses who deserve to hear sane messages (save these crazy blogs of mine anyways) and have better options for leadership in this world (like mine...remember to write me in for President in 2016!).

For there sake, these anti-Mookist conspirators had better hope I never find them. As a matter of fact let's just go ahead and include anyone who plugs nasty viruses into the cyber world to mess up people's computers and lives. If I do find these people, I have great plans for them.

While I am normally mild mannered, this kind of crap really pisses me off to a degree which none of you can possibly fathom. (Hell, I get overwhelmingly irritated about open cabinets or refrigerator foods being left out. much more so than I should be over something so dumb) Most of you know I'm pretty ardently "anti-electric technology". I hate phones, cell phones, texting, voicemail, ipads, etc, etc. But I do like my computer and what limited things I am able to do with it. I can write my blogs, check and answer my emails, read other blogs, research stuff, write my books, play games and all that. These are the kinds of things I do to entertain myself during the day while being at home alone. I am a man of routine. Ask my wife, interrupting my routine is NOT a good thing. And these conspirators/virus hacking engineers, whatever you call them REALLY ruined my routine.

I just hope someday I run into one of these guys who does this stuff to amuse themselves. I hope he is drunk and just looking for someone to socialize with and blabbers about doing this stuff. And I will be his best friend for the moment. I'll be more than happy to give his drunken ass a ride "home". But when he wakes up, he will find himself tied down to a table. And there will be me, the mad scientist, armed with multiple syringes of adrenaline, a funnel, and a nice vat of corrosive acid.

RE-WARNING: THIS NEXT PART IS CRIMINALLY INSANE...LAST CHANCE TO TURN AWAY!!!



I will pour the acid all over the evil bastard's daddy parts, starting right down the guy's pee hole, with the funnel, and let it burn in real good, dissolving all the important stuff. I will be injecting the guy with adrenaline to keep him from passing out from the shock of it all. And then I will make sure he lives, so that he will remember it, and he will be made to know exactly why such a fate befell him. If it's a girl that does this hideous crap that messes with people's computers and/or steals their identity ruining their lives and all that, she'll get the same treatment.

Now, full disclosure here, this is all some evil fantasy in my mind. Its the kind of stuff I think these morons deserve, but is in no way the premonition of some criminally insane plot by me. It is however something I obviously wouldn't do in real life, but I'm free to imagine it. And also a legal disclaimer, I do not condone this actual activity in any way shape or form, and furthermore I refuse to be held accountable in the event some complete moron actually goes and does this. We've seen the acid-based disfigurement of people in movies before, so it's not like this is some original idea of mine. You're free to think whatever you want, just don't act upon it.

Fearing the Emerging Threats of Headless Chicken Attacks

When I was about 12, I had a kid I grew up with, Cole Long, scare the hell out of me twice in one day. First we traded bikes, and we made our way fom my house down the infamous Platt Hill. For those of you who have grown up in Sac City, you know how stepp Platt Hill can be. It starts off going down at about a 45-50 degree angle, and then about halfway down it gets worse. For a kid going down it for the first time on a bicycle, one would think it was a straight drop. Well, as we hit the hill, Cole informs me that his bike doesn't have breaks. Rather than being sensible and getting the bike to a full stop and walking it down, I attempted to slalom down first, ten found myself taking the ride of my life. As I near the bottom, I see the school bus coming up on the intersection with the cross street. I was too young to have my life flash before my eyes, so my mind played the reel of me plastering up against the side of the bus while the bike got crsuhed underneath the big old bus' wheels. At the last second, I make an amazing 90 degree turn and stop on a dime. As the bus passed by safely, and probably obliviously (it was a blind corner for the bus to look up the hill), I took a moment to check my pants and make sure I wasn't going to need a new change of superhero underwear. I came pretty close to beating the crap out of my cackling friend who stopped next to me.

Once everything checked out okay, we proceed over to his place. They had some animals on their property, including a penned up turkey. My experience with turkeys at this point was Thanksgiving dinner. Cole decided we would go inside the pen, as he "had to feed the turkey." My job was to just usher it to the back of the pen. Being the big tough boy that I am, I thought this was a legitimate responsibility that I could handle. I step through the gate, and then, it closes behind me. I hear first laughter, and then experience fright as I hear and see a demon turkey coming after me in this tightly confined pen within a small shack. After 11 thanksgivings of me partaking of the turkey portions, I guess this was karmic revenge. This turley was going to carve me up and have me for dinner. No doubt he would've spoken in Satanistic tongues as he gave thanks to the Dark Lord of the Poultry Underworld. After being let out, I again almost beat the crap out my friend.

Fast forward about 12 years from the Day of the Turkey, and I am working a security gig at an office building in West Des Moines. Geese had begun nesting in the tree islands of the park lot. While I was patrolling the building, apparently one of the workers leaving the office thought that getting an up close and personal look at the geese would be a good idea. Then she got too close to one that was nesting. Out of nowhere the Gander swoops in and goes chest to chest with this lady, flaps its wings once, and the lady was on her backside. And this was no stick of a woman. She was short and a bit shall we say, on the thick side of things, with a nice low center of gravity. It wasn't until that day that I realized both the level of protectiveness and strength in geese. But let me tell you, the footage from the security cameras was played over and over that night as I and my partner had a good old time laughing at replay after replay of this gander absolutely owning this lady! When I left work that night, under the cover of darkness in my big old black Cutlass Supreme, I decided to venture towards the nest with my car, safely tucked inside the 2000 lbs of American built steel. Once I got close, out of nowhere again this gander comes to his maiden's rescue. This damn bird was ready, willing and did go toe to toe with my tank of a car. Once he realized that he might get run over, he shifted from a full frontal attack to beating the crap out of the front quarter panel with his wings, as he ran into the car repeatedly. I decided for the safety of my aging vehicle that I would bow out of this competition, before it did any more damage than me or my buddy Jay had already done to the vehicle over the years.

Not exactly, Alfred Hitchcock's redition of The Birds playing out in real life, but quite clearly I have shown the active and aggressive prejudice that birds have against people.

So last night before we went to sleep, my wife was telling me about some instances in life when she was growing up on a farm. Well, okay let me backtrack just a bit. The other night I was hungry and I was felling liek having some chicken for dinner. Well, for a few bucks you can get a nicely prepared Rotisserie Chicken from the grocery store. I threw on my shoes and a jacket and grabbed the car keys. My wife asked me where I was going. I told her I was going to pick up a chicken. She looked at me as though I was stupid. "WHAT?!?!"

"I'm going out to pick up a chicken," I stated pretty matter of factly.
"We don't have room for a chicken," she replied.
"What do you mean we don't have room for a chicken? I'm getting a rotisserie chicken from the store to EAT!"
"Oh...I thought you meant-"
"NO honey, I'm not the kind of guy who would bring a chicken to our apartment as a pet," I said. What is it about men and women trying to communicate cross-species like this. I'm hungry, she assumes I'm just following up on a crazy thought in my head. For the record, I generally don't follow up on crazy ideas. I just blog them here, so that you people can keep a good eye on me and my insanity. Anyways, back to last night...

One of the chores out on the farm for my wife and here family was the eventual evisceration of the walking poultry I prefer to call White Meat or Dark Meat (and throw in some mashed potatoes and gravy on the side). She explained the (cool to observe) phenomena of chickens who had just recently lost their heads. Apparently the saying "running around like a chicken with it's head cutoff" is based on reality. They just run round and round for a while. My wife told me that once, even as she ran in a zigzag pattern attempting to evade one headless chicken, it just kept right on her tail chasing her wherever she went. Radar equipped chickens can be scary business. "Goose, I've got lock...too close for missiles, I'm switching to guns."

She also told me about how the heads will just lay there on the ground for a bit, eyes blinking and the beak opening and shutting, until the chickens biological systems finally give out. Now I know how the chicken chased her. It's head was still able to see a little blonde girl who had just whacked his head off with a machete, and was using its last moments to hone its remote guidance system and direct the body after the chicken killer, hoping for revenge before the lights went out for good.

And now, I have an idea to get rich. I'm going to petition the government for research funds. The idea is to see if the chicken is still capable of getting scared, if I pick up its severed head and scream in its face. I figure abpout $10 million in grants should be good enough. I'l whack some chickens, pick up their heads, scream at them...and then declare the stucy inconclusive, and walk away rich. My only worry is that the chicken will scream back at me when it sees my ugly face up close, and the study will be conclusive that I do scare chickens, but not nearly as much as they scare me. I'll be forever known as the scared little chicken boy, but I'll have my money!

Then strange ideas kept creeping into my head as Dani was telling me these stories. Yeah yeah yeah, I know, big surprise right? Strangely they were all movie based.

I answered the phone, and on the other end of the voice was Golden Plump, played by Anthony Hopkins. "Hello Mookie...have the chickens stopped screaming yet?"

Or,

A troop of headless chickens trapping me in the castle, chanting (or rather wheezing like a retarded manatee like they apparently do) carrying their big fancy spears as the Wicked Chicken of the Midwest comes to snuff me out before I can get to to wonderful wizard in the Land of Oz, and go back home.

Or, in honor of my watching westerns:

Traveling in my Conestoga Wagon heading west, when all of a sudden the entire Foster Farms Nation came showing up on the ridge line. Headless chickens, everyone of them savage beasts, began to bear down on our little prairie party. As they approached, I prayed for God to breakout a thunderstorm and have these headless mongrels get dstracted by it and drown.

Or the zombie side of life:

We can't go outside just yet. We're safe here. We've got enough food to survive until help can come, and these old shotguns to defend ourselves should the zombie chickens attack. Just remember, body shots won't help. You have to separate their heads from their bodies, just like you learn in any good zombie flick.

"But Bob...They have no heads!"
"Well Sam, I guess that means we're just %$^&ed" Bloody gore ensues, part from the people being murdered by headless chickens...part from the blood coming up out of the headless chickens necks.



Or, a more happy story...

If You Build It They Will Come!!! Having toiled long and hard on a brand new state of the art chicken coop, I looked over yonder to the field of corn about 20 meters away. And then suddenly, headless chickens emerged from the cornfield. Strange that they had baseball gloves on their wings, and the ball caps kind of sat funny atop their necks. But the voices were right, I had built it and here they were Of course, I won't spoil the ending here, but lets say it has something to do with Chuck Norris jumping down from a nearby tree wielding a machete in each hand...I'll spare you the graphics and let you see the movie when it comes out.

Peacelovers everywhere would like to assume headless chickens are just misunderstood, and that we should all just get along. But when it comes to headless chickens, once I get over the laughter so hard that makes me giggle incesantly like a third grade girl for about 15 or 20 minutes before I can get ahold of myself, I am a hatemonger. I recognize those little bastards for what they are: Sadistic human-hating, feathered warmongers, plotting there revenge.

Mark my words, it will happen. You'll be outside enjoying the weather, maybe with your kids playing off in the distance. And then suddenly you'll get the feeling someone is watching you. You'l glance over and see a chicken head laying on the ground nearby, just blinking. You'll be distracted by this, and then, when you realize what's happened, it's too late. Your kids are gone. Out of the tree line, they come fast, neck skins flapping all over the place as headless chickens in a full sprint come to put you out of your miserable existence. People will look to the farmers as the one group of people capable of stopping this new scourge, but don't realize that the farmers were already taken out. Murdered in their sleep by vengeful Dark Meat Special Ops teams. And, these are powerful headless chickens. Raised up by Dr. Chickenstein himself, they thirst for one thing, well three things. They want you dead, some hot to trot hens, and a sasparilla. Because everyone knows that headless chickens can't deny themselves the tasty treat on a hot day of a Sioux City Sasparilla.