Geekus Major - Geek as Art

Spontaneity

2010-01-28T22:02:00.003-05:00

A group of brilliant scientists once attempted to study how and why people had bouts of extreme creativity during periods of sleep deprivation. Sadly, the study never reached a conclusion as all the involved researchers passed out during pivotal moments. Funny how the world works, isn't it? Maybe the sad part is that those scientists were studying themselves. How arrogant does someone need to be to make themselves the subject of their own experiment?

Even worse: how bored does someone need to be to fabricate an anecdote such as the one above?

Forget boredom, talk about necessity. I just stumbled upon a list of ten incredible self surgeries. Don't read any of them if you're the slightest bit squeamish. If you want the gist of the article without the gruesome details, here it is: Don't ever use heavy machinery or attempt to further the progress of medical science on your own. Take a guinea pig with you wherever you go!

Aww, look at those cute little whiskers. Forget the medical progress altogether.

If you have to perform anatomical experiments, only do use things that can't feel pain. And while you're at it, use something that will punish you severely for messing up:
Operation. I don't know how people, kids or adults, can play this game without developing a nervous disorder. "Okay, be very careful. You need to remove the wrench from the patient's ankle. If you mess up the punishment will be an electrical shock for you, and the patient will never walk again."

No pressure, huh? Just goes to show that you should only preform surgery on really big animals so there are fewer small parts to lose. It works that way, right?

Phrases That Annoy Me - Part 1

2009-10-30T21:22:00.005-04:00

Y'all knew it was coming; yet another post about things that annoy me.

Lately one thing that's been grating on my nerves in a severe way has been language. That's right, good ol' English. As long as it's used properly, well formed and grammatically correct English prose is quite entertaining to me. When people choose to ignore the rules of grammar; that's annoying. But it's not what I'm talking about today. I can be a quirky person sometimes (sometimes?).

Lately I find myself annoyed by something I'll refer to as 'trendy vocab'. You know, those words or phrases that seem to sprout up into common usage seemingly overnight? Some examples from the past would be 'dot com', 'bling' or 'wazzup'.

Here's my top 3 for today:

'RFD' - Rear Flank Downdraft.

Rear Flank Downdraft

This really only makes sense if A) you regularly watch Stormchasers on the Discovery channel, or B) you are a tornado expert. If you do neither of those things, rear flank downdraft is an impressive part of a tornadic thunderstorm that generates extremely strong winds. It annoys me because one of the people on the show, Reed Timmer, always shouts terminology to make himself sound intelligent.

Maybe it's not the term that annoys me, but Reed. Sheesh, that guy is an idiot.

'Webinar'
Wow, who came up with this one? If I had to guess it was some old guy who mashed two words together in an attempt to sound 'hip'. What is it? It's a conference that usually involves a laptop with Internet capability and some tech person, from afar, showing you something on a software program. How exactly that's different from a good old fashioned 'teleconference' or even a standard 'meeting', I couldn't tell you.

No matter who's there or what we're supposed to be learning, the term 'webinar' always leaves me cringing.

Pew Pew Pew
Good grief I hate this term. I hate it. I hate it. I. Hate. It.

I'm not sure how it came to popularity, exactly; we don't need to know. It's some sort of slang phrase used to describe the sounds of lasers and whatnot. Some associate it with Star Wars (never!), others with video games, and still others a SNL spoof on Sarah Palin. No, I don't get it either.

As annoying and stupid as the term looks, is spelled and how it sounds, you can't deny that this picture is totally cute:
So did I just lose any and all hints of credibility there? Yeah I was afraid of that. Oh well. Stay tuned until next time! Or don't. See what I care. You know you can't resist me. My writing that is. If this blog was a book, you wouldn't be able to put it down. You should print out a page or two, just so you can carry it everywhere you go. Yeah...

You've already read my blog; you can't un-read it! Mwa-ha ha haaaa....

Pumpkinstravaganza '09 - Part I

2009-10-24T14:46:00.004-04:00

It sure seems like it's taken me forever to get around to posting this... We actually carved our pumpkins last Tuesday; 5 days ago. Life events have prevented me from sharing more about it until now. Well, life events and my uncooperative computer. Stupid thing did not want me to edit any pictures this morning... it took about 2 hours and 2 restarts to do what should've taken 25 minutes and no restarts.

For our first round of pumpkin carving, I don't think we had the same enthusiasm that we did last year. It's not that we weren't excited; I think we were just tired. You ask why? 'A Whole Lotta Happy', that's why. Yes, that is the motto for 2009's NC State Fair. We went on Monday morning through early afternoon. I suppose NC's state fair is much like any other state's fair. It certainly had its fair share of attendees:

While it didn't have the awesome butter cow that's present at Illinois' State Fair, it did have a tank. Specifically, it had an M2 Bradley. Once my eyes spotted it, I was all over it like white on rice. I just had to climb all over it. How could I not? I ignored the fact there were around 3 other kids in my immediate vicinity; I wanted to play in the tank, darn it! All the little kids in the world couldn't have stopped me from getting to the driver's seat:

Monday + State Fair = Tired.

Tuesday + day off = Pumpkin carving.

While I'd already decided that I would carve Up's Dug into my first pumpkin, I hadn't settled on the picture. After a little more searching I came across this one:
After running it through some nifty filters in Photoshop, I had the template for my pumpkin. The white areas are cut all the way through, the gray areas only have half the pumpkin flesh removed, and the black remains untouched (except for the outline, of course). This is the finished pattern:
Mandy wanted to carve Stitch. We couldn't find a fitting image anywhere online, so I ended up taking a screen capture from the movie:

And the finished template:
When carving these intricate designs, it's pretty easy to lose your place. does this look like an adorable Pixar character to you?

After about a few hours of scooping, cutting, scraping, and almost smashing my fist through the whole thing by accident, it looked like this:

It's not quite done there, as I still had to even out the 'gray' areas so they let light through evenly. Mandy worked on her design a lot longer than I did, stretching over a period of two days:

Once again, they looked even better all lit up:

So that concludes part I of Pumpkinstravaganza '09! Stay tuned over the next few days to see what designs are being considered for round II!

For a better tutorial on how to make your own patterns, click here. It's link to a tutorial on the Pumpkin Wizard's website.

Pumpkinstravaganza '09 - Preview

2009-10-12T21:22:00.006-04:00

It's that time again. Overpriced, oversize, over-orange produce is hitting all the local retailers as some sort of vegetable-y artist's canvas. You read that right: pumpkins are in town. No matter what you think of Halloween, fall or even produce in general you'd have a hard time disliking pumpkins. They're just all big and orange and round and full of ridges and stuff. Don't you just naturally think about hollowing them out, carving intricate designs on 'em and then lighting them from the inside?

No? Really? What's wrong with you?

In case you missed it, check out the highlights from Pumpkinstravaganza '08:
Pumpkinstravaganza '08 - Part 1
Pumpkinstravaganza '08 - Part II

Officially, we're a little behind schedule when compared to last year. That's okay though, since Mandy and I have a long weekend coming up. I anticipate a produce run sometime either on Friday night or Saturday morning. The wheels of my mind have been stuck together for a long time. No, wait... that's not what I meant to say... I've been planning what would be on this year's pumpkins for a long time. There we go. That had to come out correctly sooner or later!

One of the designs has been cemented in my mind since the Pixar movie, Up, came out in late May. That's right, the first subject of Pumpkinstravaganza '09 will be none other than Dug:

Pumpkin number two has proven to be a little bit more complicated, mainly since I'm a major geek (Geekus Major, ha!). If you don't know it by now, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is coming out this November, and I've wanted to commemorate the occasion with an appropriately carved pumpkin. The task is proving more difficult than I'd originally thought. It's not necessarily a matter of the subject being to complex, but rather of finding a suitable source image that has a good contrast ratio to it.

As it is, this is the leading candidate for pumpkin-ification:

Purists may note that this is actually a screen shot from the original Modern Warfare, not the sequel. If you think you can do better, do it. There's still a good change that I'll go for a design featuring the box art from the game, silhouetted against the game's logo. Stay tuned for details!

Writer's Block?

2009-10-10T00:09:00.002-04:00

So have you ever had one of those days when you're feeling creative, or at least the leanings towards being so? It's one of those moments where you feel like all you needs is some kind of blank canvas to create something. That's been me on and off the past few days.

It's late right now; almost midnight. Can't sleep for whatever reason, though I suspect the weather may be the culprit. For the past week and a half or so, we've been able to keep the windows open and get those crisp, cool fall nights to fall asleep to. Today it was in the mid-eighties and humid enough for you to squeeze the air and produce drops of water. It hasn't cooled down yet...

In my late night insomnia I had a vision to renew the theme of my blog. Not just the visual theme, but the content theme. See, I thought I'd "simplify" and try to stick to posting about one type of subject, but that just wasn't working. My plan was to come up here to the office, put the finishing touches on the new look and then put up a commencement post for the re-launch of the blog.

My computer had other ideas. Instead of being a 'tool' like most good computers, mine has decided to act more like a paperweight that carries a monthly fee. It doesn't just sit there and do nothing, it consumes power and does nothing at the same time. Woo. 15 minutes after attempting to use my computer, I'm almost finished typing this post on Mandy's computer and my creative urge is fading with the onset of drowsiness.

I think humans as a species are too technologically advanced as a species to be truly creative anymore. The only way to come up with new ideas is to ignore all scientific advances made over the past 20 years.

Either that, or invent a time machine and go back to the 80's and 'invent' all of today's cool stuff for yourself, sell it all and then retire with some few extra dough padding the bank account. Hmm... Time machines...

Woo! Transparency Achieved!

2009-08-21T21:24:00.001-04:00

Check it out:

What's the big deal you ask? It's this: the above image is the first one I ever made that has a functioning transparency. No it's not a life-changing event, but it's something I've wanted to do for a while and only figured it out tonight. That's either a commentary on the difficulty of the task, or on my brain's inability to read and follow instructions. The latter option is the most likely.

It's not perfect... it's still a low-quality .gif with some of those ugly pink artifacts around the edges. My next attempt needs to have some cleaner edges. Also, that automatic border that blogger puts on all of my pictures has to go. Either that, or I need to manually disable the HTML border code for those images that feature transparencies. Hmmm...

In case you haven't figured it out by now, I've run out of actual content worth sharing and have now attempted to fill this post with enough tech speak to make myself feel sufficiently geeky.

And for those of you who are wondering why I even bothered to make a .gif image with word 'rewind' and a transparent background, I shall tell you this: it's a secret.

If you had to pay to read this blog, you'd probably feel pretty ripped off by this point.

Reflections on Direction

2009-08-15T22:26:00.007-04:00

I've been thinking a lot lately; about God, people, family, society, jobs, careers, etc. Basically I've been pondering this whole series of events that we call life, but especially on how people change with their age. Most people go through childhood with a constant desire to learn, create, share and grow, even if they don't realize it. Eventually we get to a point where we question what we've been taught, rebel a bit and in general act like we know everything there is to know. Later on some of us re-enter that stage of the pursuit of knowledge and discovery; for a lot of people that time is college. Once you realize you're probably going to be working in one field for the rest of your life, you take care to pick something you enjoy doing. Others think they've learned all of life's lessons by high school, or earlier, and are content to either scoff at the opportunity to 'learn' or just ride through college on someone else's wasted money. Somehow most of us get to the point where we have a job or a 'career' that we've been doing for a while.

Eventually, it gets a bit stale.

Now I'm not saying that I'm sick to death of my current job or bored out of my skull or wanting to quit or anything like that. No, what I'm thinking has more to do with than just my job, my career or my degree. In a way I guess I'm referring to my dreams. When we were kids we were always taught to dream big and think of the career we wanted to have when we became grown-ups. Back then it all sounded so big and impressive: Study hard through grade school, middle school, high school, college, and maybe even another layer of school after that and then, only then, will you be an "adult" that has not just a "job", but a "career".

Wow. What a journey! You spend the first 20 plus years of your life learning, basically, how to do something well enough to have a career in something... and then you get to that point where you're done with grade school, done with high school, graduated from college, gone out into the real world and got yourself, and have held that job for several years.

Now what?

I kind of feel like Gil from Finding Nemo; stuck in the fish tank for so long, he dreamed of nothing but getting free. Along comes Nemo, and after a series of wacky events, he and his tankhood brethren are free. Kind of. They're just floating there and Bloat asks, "Now what?"

Well I don't literally feel like Gil. I was never stuck in a fish tank and all of that...

The main issue, I think, is that I'm not meeting my full potential. It's not that I want a bigger, better paying job or a career where I get to make 'big' decisions and go golfing with 'the man'. God put me here to do more than what I am now. Nearly all my life my parents told me that God had big plans for me and I've always believed that, I still believe that. Not to sound arrogant or like I've got an inflated sense of self-importance, but I don't think those plans have been fulfilled yet. My life has been pretty interesting to this point, and I don't think anyone could've guessed the means by which I'd meet and get married to my Mandy. If He could get me to move from Illinois to North Carolina using the string of events He did; man, there's nothing God couldn't do.

Right now, it just feels like the next step in that 'big plan' is still coming but I haven't quite figured it out yet. In the meantime, I'll be here in a state of quiet contemplation and dreaming of what God might do through me.

Yeah, I think I want to be a writer. Or a cartoonist. We'll see what happens.

*crickets chirping*

It's Art! Vol. 1

2009-08-15T09:03:00.004-04:00

The other day, I promised to share some of my recent artsy works. Well here they are! Mandy got me this book for my birthday. It rocks:
The Klutz guide to Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered. It's a fun book that teaches how to have fun while drawing instead of demanding that you draw everything "properly". It's got more than 100 pages that are already partly filled in by the author, but have plenty of space for you to get creative. For instance, one page already has a drawing of a lady standing on the ground, looking up at a guy who's standing on a pole. There's a little 'speech bubble' where she's asking "How did you get up there?" That's the books way of telling you to use your imagination and sketch in however the guy got where he is.

Another exercise in creativity is this one:
The author already drew two of these contestants in the 'hairiest person' contest, and asks you to finish the third. (one of them was only drawn from the waist down) Which one do you think I drew? To find out which one I did, read to the end of the post!

Here's an exercise in drawing imaginative cleaning implements.

Watercolor pencils are pretty cool. I'd never used one before this book, but I think I want to get a full set of them in the near future. Here's a page that wanted you to draw umbrellas, rainclouds and raindrops (the people were already there). I used the graphic pen for the umbrella, and the watercolor pencil for the rain. Basically I just made a ton of dots and smeared them upwards. It worked better than I thought it would:

The book also came with a red watercolor pencil, to be used for emphasis and to have fun. This page just said to add red wherever it was needed.

And for some reason, Mandy and her family thought the hair looked really cool. I thought the lady looked rather humorous when she was bald:

For those of you who suffered through my "art" to see which hairy dude I actually drew, hold your breath no longer:
Afro-Beard Man with Sno-Fro is an original character created by me, and the above is a copyrighted image. If you can see it, you owe me 5 cents for every time you've looked at it. Seriously.

Wow, my well of humor is running dry this morning...

This last picture wasn't in the book. I was sitting around the other night and decided that I wanted to draw a picture for Mandy. Somehow, an Eclectus became the subject of my drawing and I found out that birds can be pretty difficult to draw. After about 5 attempts, this came out of my colored pencils:

It's a bit chubby for an eclectus, but still cute. As far as the slogan goes, I was trying to parody a slogan for something else I saw somewhere at some time, but couldn't remember what it was, where I saw it or how it went. Makes sense, no?

That concludes Volume 1 of It's Art! Stay tuned for next time!

Change?

2009-08-09T21:15:00.004-04:00

No, this isn't a post related to politics in any way; thank heavens! Rather this is another post contemplatively seeking the future of my blog. This is a post where, I once again, consider why in the world I do this again. It's not that blogging is a 'chore', else I wouldn't have started. And this site certainly isn't an attempt to garner 15-minutes of fame for myself; if it was, I've failed miserably. No, this is my blog. Geekus Major, as written by a major geek. It's kind of like Sienfeld in blog form. A blog about nothing, but nothings that almost anyone can relate to.

But does it need more focus? Granted, the only people who read this are family members, immediate and exteneded. Well... Them, and however many hundred (or thousands) of international hits my blog has gotten from people looking for pictures of Animal. It's strange, but true. To prove my point, I shall present to you Animal, from Jim Henson's Muppets:
If you don't believe me, keep an eye on the FeedJit web traffic tracker sidebar. Soon you'll see a multitude of visitors coming straight to this post from Google Images.

Anyway, focus... That's where I was going with this. Focus.

Focus? Me? Ha! While I'm not what I'd call a 'scatterbrained' kind of guy, I'm not exactly a one way street. Geekus Major shall indeed become more of a focused experience. There's no way I can concentrate on picking just one single topic to write about, I do think I shall concentrate on my creative endeavors; writing, drawing, model construction, etc. Of course, I'll always make a few exceptions for a diatribe about the latest pop-culture fad (since when do grade and middle-school kids need a back to school 'fashion statement'? *scoff*).

Here's a sneak peek at what's coming:

For my birthday my wife, and her family, gave me a few gifts to spark my creativity. One of my favorites is a book by Klutz: Drawing: For the Artistically Undiscovered.
It's not a lesson in 'the proper way to draw', but rather a guide to help you use your creativity to draw stuff in your own style. I highly recommend it. I'll be posting some pictures of my completed pages soon.

The other things I've been working on are model rockets. Remember those things you'd build in a day, launch in the afternoon and never see again because the wind took them to places unknown? I'm doing that, except without the 'build in a day' or 'losing them' parts. The first one I'll complete is the traditional Estes Alpha III:
...except my Alpha III won't be that ugly. I mean, man. Look at that thing. It looks like a giant crayon impaled a rotting orange. Eww.

More creative stuff from me is in the works. Stay tuned!

The Thursday That Felt Like A Friday

2009-07-16T21:35:00.006-04:00

Ever have one of those days where your brain tries to trick you into thinking it's really Friday instead of some other, lame, day of the week? That day was today for me. Work was okay. Not great, not terrible, but just a normal day. It was a bit on the slow side, but it wasn't eventful for better or worse.

But it was supposed to be Friday, doggone it!

Maybe I've just got the 'vacation itch'. No it's not a rash that is acquired on time off... it's just an increased, prevalent desire to be on vacation. And not just any vacation, mind you, I want to be here:
The Disney Wonder. I want to be back on board so I can call good ol' stateroom number 6136 my home. There was just something about that cruise, that entire vacation that will probably live on in my memory as one of, if not the best, trip I've ever been taken.

Mandy and I were watching a show on the National Geographic channel (or 'NatGeo' as they call it now) tonight about the largest cruise ship in the world. That thing can hold more than 4,000 passengers; it's huge. It's almost too big in a way... But anyway, the special featured its share of bratty and annoying people, including kids. One girl, who couldn't have been more than 6 years old, when asked how many cruises she'd been on answered, "five".

Five cruises at six years old? Sheesh... what's she going to do for vacation when she's 30? Go to the moon? Kids these days... they don't 'preciate what they've got. When I was their age, any day I didn't have to work in the coal mine was considered a vacation. Heh.

Yeah, I've got the traveling bug. More than the desire to travel, I've just got the urge to do something fun and embrace my wacky side. You know, the part of you that never grows up? The part of you that might look like this:

...well, it doesn't have to look exactly like that...

Soundtrack of My Life - Part 1

2009-07-10T20:45:00.013-04:00

Some of you may have seen a post like this over on Mandy's blog. I'm not going to lie: she stole the idea from me. It's not like I'm going to press charges or anything! Bah, that's not important. What's more important, and interesting is our, how shall I put this, different tastes in music.

I present to you, in somewhat chronological order, the soundtrack of my life - Part 1:

'Jurassic Park'
Weird Al Yankovic on Alapalooza

Go ahead and laugh, we all know you want to. To me, Alapalooza was the 'hook' album; the album that turns you into longtime fan of a particular artist. In addition to Jurassic Park, the album is packed with other classics like Young, Dumb and Ugly, Achy Breaky Song, Harvey the Wonder Hamster and my personal favorite, Frank's 2000 inch TV. We had the album on cassette, and I listened to the thing constantly.

'Bang the Drum All Day'
Todd Rundgren on The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect

Yes, this is a strange one. This one of those one hit wonders for me; I know this one song from Todd, and that's it. I've never heard anything else by him, and I don't really have a desire to. So how did this make it into the soundtrack of my life? Radio. When I was younger, I listened to a lot of radio. Too much radio, some people would've said. The local station I listened to was 103.7 WDBR, Springfield. Every Friday they'd end their morning show with this song. For some reason, it's stuck with me ever since.

'Supertones Strike Back'
The OC Supertones on Supertones Strike Back

This song makes the list since, as far as I can remember, the first concert I ever went to was to see the Supertones. They were the headliners at the Christian concert held at the Illinois State Fair, Powerlight Fest '96 (if I remember the year correctly). I wasn't really into punk or ska but my best friend at the time, Doron, was. The day was made more memorable by a trip to the merchandise tent. That day, I wore a Big Dogs T-shirt that had a logo parody of The Empire Strikes Back, 'The Empire Bites Back'. The drummer for the Supertones was walking around in the tent and saw my shirt; he liked it so much he offered to trade me, so I did. He gave me a shirt with the band logo, and I gave him my parody shirt.

After the show, the whole band signed the shirt - it was pretty cool. I even got a few other acts from the festival to sign it, including Tammy Trent... in bright purple ink. This was in the phase of my life when I cared what my peers thought, and they thought the purple girl signature was 'lame'. So what did I do? I grabbed a bottle of white out and covered all the purple ink! I didn't stop there... I actually signed my own name over the white out.

Yeah, that's sad. It's one of the regrets of my childhood.

Conspiracy No. 5
Third Day

I didn't specify a song here because there's no need to. Third Day's second album was the first one I'd listened to and the first one of theirs I purchased. Released in August of '97, this CD remains my favorite. Period. It's just that good.

Of course, it could also have something to do with the fact that this album made me a fan of Third Day. Because of that, I'm married today. But, that's a long story...

The song that made the list is the album opener, Peace.

Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back
John Williams

About the time I got into Third Day, the trilogy of Star Wars Special Editions was hitting the theaters. I never went, sadly, regrettably, remorsefully, because of some affliction of my ears (which was either real or imagined). Anyway, my ears were still functioning well enough to recognize good music, and the soundtrack to Empire was the best. It was more refined than A New Hope, more consistent than Return of the Jedi and darker than both. It's all good.

The play list includes the rather iconic piece, The Asteroid Field. My favorite, which I couldn't find, is still Imperial Probe / Aboard the Executor.

'Covered in Rain'
John Mayer on Any Given Thursday

Go ahead and get your cringing, groaning or exclamations of disgust out now. Yes, I do own multiple John Mayer albums. And yes, I do enjoy some of his music.
John Mayer, along with the next two artists, enter into my life soundtrack at the start of my college years. Can anybody go to college and not listen to him at some point? For me, the answer was no. I liked some of his blues-y sounding stuff, and the 10-minute version of Covered in Rain is full of it. If nothing else, just skip 2 minutes into the song and listen to the awesome blues guitar.

'Yellow'
Coldplay on Parachutes

Certain people that I'm married to may dispute the following statement, but it doesn't lessen its validity: Coldplay is awesome.

Yellow is the song that started it all. I don't think Coldplay can be classified as pop or rock. To me, they just fit into a genre I like to call 'college music'.

'Starry Night'
Joe Satriani on Strange Beautiful Music

This is another one of those 'introduction' songs that got me hooked on the artist. If you've never heard of him don't bother with research, just go out and buy one of his CDs. His overall best songs are Starry night, live version of Always With Me, Aways With You and Ten Words. Those songs are the reason I haven't gotten rid of my guitars yet. Maybe, just maybe, several decades from now I'll be able to play something that sounds like Satch.

Happy 4th... on the 5th.

2009-07-05T09:26:00.002-04:00

I know I said I'd try not do post a bunch of stupid cheesy videos on my blog, but there are certain videos that are just too awesome not to share. This is one of those videos:

Happy 4th!

"I may not be A smart man...

2009-07-03T08:21:00.008-04:00

...but I know what a lawnmower is!"

As you all know, Mandy and I moved to our new home pretty much exactly two months ago today. With the upgrade in housing a lot of things got better, and bigger. More floor space, more storage space, more money required to pay for space, and more yard space to take care of. Some of my "adventures" in lawn mowing have been chronicled in the following posts:

We Did It!
Trees, Toys and Power Tools

Big yard + little mower = exhausting problem.

What did I do? Naturally, I did what anyone in my situation would: I started researching mowers. Sadly, the sticker shock of a new mower hurt. A lot. I mean really, why should anyone pay a grand for a new lawn mower? I almost rather not mow and risk having my yard look like the Klopek's from The 'Burbs than kill myself by pushing a tiny mower around for 3 hours a week. But I'm a plant geek; I couldn't neglect my yard...

So I can't afford $1,000 for lawn mower, and we didn't want to go into debt for one so we (I) took the next logical step: begging. That may be too harsh a word, it wasn't really 'begging' in the literal sense of sitting on my overgrown lawn and holding a cardboard sign that says "need lawnmower". Instead I started asking everyone I knew if they know someone who wanted to sell an old riding tractor, and we started checking Craigslist and other want ads.

Eventually, it paid off. One of the guys I work with, who's a mechanic, told me his brother had an old riding mower he wanted to get rid of. My first thought was what kind and how much? He told me the guy was selling a Snapper for $150. Of course I was sold at the mention of the $150 price point! As I thought about it more and more, the word 'snapper' was stuck in my head. Where had I heard that before? I knew what a Snapper lawn mower was, but I couldn't think of it. Snapper... snapper... little red mower...

Forrest Gump!

I own the same kind of lawn mower as Forrest Gump. Woo Hoo!!!

Sure mine's a bit newer, even though it looks older and a bit more worn... But it's still the same basic model. Go ahead and laugh if you want, but if you had to make the decision to either drive this thing or push around a 20-inch mower for 3 hours, you'd do the same thing I did.

Take a look at the beautiful machine:

It needs a little bit of Bondo... and some paint... and a good cleaning. And the blade needs sharpening, since it's kind of dull now. To help you understand how sharp the blade is, perform the following exercise:
1. Go to the kitchen, or wherever the eating utensils are stored.
2. Grab a butter knife.
3. Hold the butter knife by the blade, and feel the handle.
I guarantee that the handle of that butter knife has a sharper edge than the blade on my lawn mower.

Still, it cuts grass well enough and is fun to drive.

Look how much fun I have!

And please don't make fun of the hat. The hat is awesome. You're just jealous of it.

Who Voted For Geek?

2009-06-25T21:13:00.007-04:00

If you're reading this post, you've noticed the new theme. ...Unless you're a first time visitor, and have no idea what my blog used to look like. Though I admit I'm slightly biased, I have to say that my blog is looking better than ever. There's not really a point to changing the theme, other than to say that I have a custom theme. I've never really liked 'default' settings. They get the job done, but they're just so cookie-cutter. More importantly, they just weren't "me". Isn't that what a personal blog is supposed to be; a place for someone to express themselves in the digital realm?

The astronomy theme came as a result to the poll. Even though it's basically just a background image created in Photoshop, it still qualifies as a "theme". There are other things I need to fix, such as font and link colors, colors of clickables, and etc. But all in all, I like it. It probably won't bring in a surge of new readers, but that's not really the point, is it?

Speaking of having a lot of readers: People say that when it comes to blogs, the only way to draw and sustain a growing reader base is to focus on one subject or type of subject and kind of limit the focus of your blog. People say that, but is it true? The only reason I know that people "say" it is from my wife's blog. I guess she knows people I don't. Specifically, she probably knows the people that said that. As for me, I don't really know any people.

That would explain why I'm out of the loop as far as what "they" are saying.

But if "people" truly understood the way my mind works, "they" would see that my blog has a theme. Even though I've had posts about politics, flammable frosting, banjos, lawnmowers and kids toys and, last but not least, pumpkins; there's still a cohesive theme to my blog. No, really!

My blog is about a guy, me, who, even at the young age of 24, has begun to reminisce about the "good ol' days". We all remember the days of our youth when we'd make fun of "that old guy" who couldn't stop talking about how things were when he was a kid; how he'd have to walk to school in waist-deep snow, uphill both ways, with naught but a potato sack for clothing. You know the type. He'd always mention how poor his family was, and yet he was content. He'd watch kids today and remark that if he'd been so disrespectful when he was a lad, he'd get punished 'till the cows came home.

That reminds me of a song...

Discover Weird Al Yankovic!

Like I said; I've been thinking a lot about the "good ol' days". Not that the present is bad, by any means. It's just one of those things where you feel like you didn't fully appreciate the times when you could be a kid. This is probably going to sound strange, but I think I had a pretty great childhood. I've got lots of memories of things that I did, either by myself, with friends, or with my family. I did get into computers when I hit my teenage years, but I still did enough "real" stuff. (more to come on the "real" stuff in forthcoming posts) As cool as all of that stuff is, sometimes I wish life was still simple like that.

In the meantime there are days when I feel like I'm being dragged into the future kicking and screaming, not unlike this guy:

Screen capture taken directly from Wall-E, by PIXAR

Ah, Wall-E.

Being a kid never gets old. Take my advice people, grow older, but never grow up. It's more fun that way.

Aaaagh... Mine Burning Eyes! - UPDATE

2009-06-20T07:50:00.001-04:00

If your eyes are throbbing right now, that means you've noticed the temporary 'hazard' theme that my blog has taken on. The short of it is that I was tired of my blog looking like 'just another boring template', and I chose now to start changing it. It's not a small task for someone who barely understands a lick of HTML coding...

Basically what I've done is find a template I like, and am now in the process of renovating the guts of it. So far I've already changed the background image, column widths, header widths, text colors and background colors. The main thing that I like is that I now have the freedom to change the background image to whatever I want, and it's got coding so that it will automatically re-size to match the viewer's screen, and it'll "stick" to the top of the frame. Now that's cool code. Sticky code. Heh heh, handy stuff.

This week is VBS, so I probably won't have much time to play with it in the evenings but I should have a new theme up by next Sunday. If the temporary image burns your eyes, grab a pair o' shades before your next visit. If enough people complain I'll probably just change it to black. Maybe.

UPDATE - Seems I've hit a creative roadblock for blog themes, and I need your help to decide what to do next. I've put five options up for y'all to choose from:
Graffiti - Just what it sounds like. Colorful graffiti on a dark background.
Space / Astronomy - A spacey-theme using original artwork; 100% original, no source images used.
Abstract - Dark - Abstract shapes and colors on a dark background.
Abstract Light - Abstract shapes and colors on a light background.
Geek - Hard to describe. Imagine a geek's notebook, filled with strange quotes and drawings such as contained in this post.

6/4/09 Paul Wright & Rootdown @ The Revolution - Raleigh, NC

2009-06-13T18:33:00.001-04:00

Before I begin telling the details I have to share a bit of truth: I didn't want to go.

It's not that I'm a party-pooper, I'm not, I just had several legitimate reasons to stay home. First off, the concert was at 7 on a Thursday night. That meant two things: 1) I had to rush home from work in order to shower and get ready in time, and 2) since this was a concert, in Raleigh, by the time we got home it would be at least 10:30 and even later before I got to bed. I didn't want to spend my Friday at work in full-on zombie mode. It doesn't look good in front of the boss.

In addition, I wasn't exactly what you'd call a "fan" of Paul Wright. It's not that I dislike him or his music, I just never really listened to it. Mandy is a fan, and she does listen to his music. All. The. Time. ...or so it seems. For that reason whenever she'd play a Paul Wright song my first reaction, instead of actually listening to the music, was to close my ears and say 'No, not him again!'

However, I did have several compelling reasons in favor of going that eventually outweighed my desire to stay home. First off, I needed a break. The week to that point had been stressful enough that I couldn't just sit at home and do the normal thing again; I had to break the routine. Second, the concert was in the heart of Raleigh. Mandy, Jess and Vicky didn't need to go there alone. Not that it's any more or less dangerous in Raleigh, but I'm the one with the most experience driving in and around Raleigh. Lastly, I figured 'What the heck'. It's a free concert, so there's not really anything to lose by going.

Our troupe left the house in the Malibu a little bit before 6PM. In case you're unfamiliar with the Chevy Malibu, here it is: (it's not the Malibu, but it's a Malibu. If you want to be really specific, it's a Malibu Maxx)
Jess got us to the refueling point, AKA Burger King, and I took over the helm for the rest of the trip. It's here that I feel compelled to note something about the Chevy Malibu: I don't like it. No offense to anyone who owns one, but I just didn't like it all that much. The brakes were a wee bit touchy. If you even thought about touching the brake pedal, the car slowed immediately. It's like they could respond to telepathy or something. My other complaint has to do with the headlights. As the driver of the Malibu, they are absolutely awesome. Even the low beams seem to have the power to illuminate the area in front of the car to near-daytime clarity. Therein lies the problem. For any traffic that's in front of the Malibu for any reason, prepare to blinded. Even the low beams seem to have all the power of the sun radiating out from the front of the car. Mine eyes! They burn!

But I digress from my main topic...

Since we were rather short on time, we ran into BK to get our food, and then I took over the rest of the drive to The Revolution. Since it was Raleigh, I didn't even get to touch my burger; Mandy just fed me fries while I was driving.

When we arrived at the supposed address for the Revolution, I was a little surprised. My thinking was that since this church can afford, and has the technology available, to bring a music act in that they've got to be huge, right? Not so much. The Revolution is a relatively new church that set up shop in an older office-type building. We got to park right in front of the doors and were immediately greeted by the pastor.

The front doors were plastered with posters for both the church and Paul Wright. I assume that was to help people like me who wondered if they found the right building.

Inside was smaller than I expected. Granted, my vision was of a mega-church holding hundreds of screaming college students. The stage was in the corner of the building, with three sections of chairs forming a quarter-circle of seating. At full capacity there were seats for probably 75 - 100 people, and standing room for another 50 or so. There were no more than 50 or 60 people present, though there was a good range of ages and cultures present.

I tried my best to get some pictures of the inside, but it was pretty dark and I was using an unfamiliar camera. Mandy's Kodak can take some really nice shots, when she's using it, but I just couldn't get into the groove with the thing. Really it's just the low lighting that gave it fits. Well, low light levels and a really poor auto focus made for a lot of crummy pictures.

The concert itself was a lot of fun! Even though I didn't know many of the songs, Mr. Wright is one of those entertainers that puts on a really great concert. He's easy-going, fun, and doesn't take himself too seriously. He's found what he's good at and uses it to glorify God. The following are the pictures from the actual show; some have comments, some don't. Enjoy! (and just in case it gets confusing, pictures will have comments below them, not above)

This is Paul Wright. He's actually got two musical things going on. He has albums and tours both as a solo act, and with a band called Rootdown. Obviously, he's vocals and guitar for both acts.

Jackson Michelson. He provides bass and vocals. Though it was hard to get good pictures of him, he added a lot of fun energy to the show and could really rock out a bass guitar.

This is Matt Salinas. This guy can really rock on a guitar. He rocked so hard that he actually broke a string in the middle of the concert. Good rhythm, clean transitions, and a couple of awesome solos. Yeah, he's good.

Craig Paulsen, drummer extraordinaire. Because of where were were sitting, my view of him was blocked by Matt, but I did manage to get a few pictures of him. I like his shirt; it reminds me of pirates.

I took this one during the intermission... There were others that I attempted while the band was on stage, but I couldn't get the focus where I wanted it do be for those.

During the intermission members of the audience were free to roam about and talk to the band, which we did. We got some stuff signed, as well as this picture with Mr. Wright himself. He's quite the nice guy, polite, sincere and humble. I guess 'famous' people aren't expected to be nice, but he was. And yes, I did really choose to wear that shirt to a concert.

Even though this looks like a Fender 1952 Butterscotch Blonde Telecaster, it isn't. It's actually a higher quality model handmade by a former Fender employee. It sounds as beautiful as it looks. Yes, I have a thing for guitars.

This should give an idea of how close we were to the stage. Our seats were second row, about 15 feet out.

I was able to take this one when Matt had to switch out the string on his guitar.

Pedal boards are cool. That's all there is to it.

Mandy took this when I got to talk to Jackson and Matt after the show. Again, two really cool guys doing what they love for God's glory.

This is the signed poster we got. It's going to go in a frame, along with some other pictures and mementos from the trip. Look for it the next time you're at our house!

I got this picture of the set list during the intermission. It's not a list that accurate for the show that we saw, but one from the concert the night before. If you can't read the last two lines on the bottom, this is what they say:
Goals: -Acknowledge God -Usher others into His presence -Entertain. Make them laugh -Refreshing and moving set

Coming from someone who was a bit skeptical of Paul Wright and Rootdown, I'd say they surpassed the goals printed on the sheet. I didn't know all the songs, I couldn't hear some of the vocals all that well, I probably looked like a major dork with my Mike Wazowski shirt on, I took pictures 70% of the time... but it was a lot of fun; it was a lot of fun that honored God. When and if the band comes back to the East Coast, Mandy and I (probably Jess too) will be there. And even thought I never thought I'd willingly say it, I'm now a fan of Paul Wright and Rootdown.

As one last treat, here's a video of a song that I believe is called simply "Freestylin' ". So the song makes sense to non-concert-goers, here's what happened: After one of his 'normal' songs, he tells the audience that he's ready to freestyle and asks the audience to yell out some random things related to the area. Some of the things that our audience yelled out: Red, Hot and Blue (BBQ place), John Deere, Sweet Tea, Carolina Hurricanes and some other stuff I can't remember. So that explains where all of the seemingly random stuff comes from. It's fun.

For more information, please visit any of the following websites:

Paul Wright - http://www.paulwright.com/
Paul Wright Myspace - http://www.myspace.com/paulwright
Rootdown - http://www.myspace.com/rootdownsound
The Revolution - http://www.revolutionraleigh.com/

Party pooper!

2009-06-13T16:31:00.004-04:00

I know that this question is totally off the wall, but who ever decided to coin the phrase 'party pooper'? In our culture we know that it's just another way of saying someone is a wet blanket; someone who holds back the fun of a group by not participating. But really, where did they come up with the term?

Party = party.

Everyone knows what a party is. It's a fun gathering of people for some specified occasion.

Pooper = ...we should all know what this is. Unless there's some really obscure meaning to the word that I've missed.

Party + Pooper = ...Hmm....
I can't decide what's more odd to me: The phrase itself, or that someone designed a T-shirt around it.

Weird.

Hockey 101

2009-06-12T23:02:00.009-04:00

The common belief is that most women don't understand sports. Now before any of you feminists get all huffy and ready to start an argument, I need to make a crucial clarification. My take on that common belief is this: Women choose not to understand the sports that they don't like.

I have a few examples of this:
#1 - My mom. As far as I can tell, she doesn't really like any sport there is. Therefore, she probably couldn't explain many sporting rules.
#2 - My wife. She loves Carolina. Hurricanes, Tar Heels, Panthers, all that stuff. She's a rabid Tar Heels fan along with the rest of her family, and knows the ins and outs of basketball. She roots for the hurricanes, but couldn't have told you the rules before I made her watch the Stanley Cup Finals. Panthers football... She knows that the Panthers are the team of North Carolina, and that's enough for her.
#3 - My sister in law. I don't know if she likes hockey or not, but I'm leaning more toward the 'not'. During one of the games we watched I was trying to explain the hockey puck, since it can be a little hard to follow on TV. Her response to my efforts: "Oh, you mean that little ball that they're chasing around?"

It's not a ball. This is a ball:

Image taken from Sunrise Sports Creations

Notice how it's completely round, some might say spherical, and it would roll quite well as most balls are known to do.

Now this is a puck:

Image taken from 24/7 Hockey Inc.

It's round, but flat. It might roll well, it might not. Notice that is is not, in fact, spherical. Therefore it is not, and could not ever possibly be, a ball.

A puck is not a ball. Period.

Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding of the playoff season came from my wife in regards to the Stanley Cup. We were watching game 7 of the finals last night, and at the final buzzer all the Pittsburgh players were rushing out on the ice to celebrate; jumping and hooting and hollering and all of that. It was at this moment, during the start of the victory celebration, when Mandy said the following:
"Woo hoo. They won the trophy... Which they can't keep."

I was speechless.

It's not just a trophy. It's the Stanley Cup. It is the Stanley Cup. There's only one, so of course it's passed around from team to team over the years. That's part of the game; your team has to earn the right to hold onto it. That's what makes it so cool! Well... it makes sense to me anyway.

There's some pretty cool history behind the trophy, including a redesign or two. Find out everything you wanted to know about the Stanley cup Here

As for me and my active / passive sports interest, I won't really get interested in anything until the NFL season starts. On September 10th, I begin the task of explaining just what happens in a football game.

I'll let you know how it goes.

"Hello, I'm Guybrush Threepwood...

2009-06-01T13:43:00.004-04:00

...and I wanna be a pirate!"

Remember me mention a pirate named Guybrush Threepwood in my post about how Happiness is a Banjo? Well I just found out that this summer, Lucasarts is re-releasing The Secret of Monkey Island with reworked graphics and full audio voice overs.

Woo Hoo!!!

I know it's weird to a lot of you, but I can't tell you how excited I am about this. It's hard not to hyperventilate right now...

AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.......

Sorry... One of the great adventure games of all time is getting re-released. I get excited about things that most others would just shrug at; what can I say?

Grab a mug o' grog and read about it for yourselves over thar':
The Secret of Monkey Island - Special Edition

I've lost my marbles... or so I'm told.

2009-05-27T18:16:00.006-04:00

Image taken from Photoblogster.com

Who says that anymore, really? "You've lost your marbles!" Granted, it is a very popular phrase that is used interchangeably with "you've lost your mind!" But has anyone ever really thought about it? What are you saying?

What is a logical response to :"You've lost your marbles!"?

Here's mine: "I don't play with marbles; and even if I did how would you know where they are?"

That's the logical response, remember. I could also throw a few other tidbits out there for thought. First off, to suggest that someone has lost their marbles you would imply that they had some to start with. How do you know who plays with marbles? Who cares? Second, why marbles? If you're going to make a reference to an obscure childhood pastime, why not make it something that people actually played with?

"Have you lost your Treasure Trolls?"
"Have you lost your LEGOs?"
"Have you lost your pogs?"
Hmm... Those don't have the same ring to them, do they?

Why Marbles? In spite of logic, cultural relevance and dismal popularity, it's just the most fun to say.

Marbles marbles marbles...

Marbles.

I'm done now.

Marbles...

We Bid Thee Adieu, Friend...

2009-05-25T16:26:00.008-04:00

I suppose that it was really only a matter of time, since even electronic devices have lifespans; My camera died this weekend...

I purchased it, or rather I ordered it through my mom, one bright and sunny spring morning in 2002. It was 'Today's Special Value' on QVC, though I don't remember the price. Small in size, solid in construction, and trustworthy it was. 6x optical zoom, 2.1 mega pixel resolution, Fuji's signature color sensors, 128 megabyte memory card: Specs like these were pretty darn good seven years ago. Up until today they've been good enough for me.

Time is rather harsh to any piece of equipment, and the camera was no exception- Yes, that is duct tape holding the door over the memory card. Still, it's held up remarkably well for how much it's traveled. Just look at the places this camera has been: (OK, so it's not that much...)

- Dallas, Missouri, Chicago, St. Louis, Columbus, the beach and mountain regions of North Carolina, Washington DC and Baltimore Maryland -

As a tribute to all of the memories captured by that camera, here are ten of my favorite pictures as captured by the Fuji. I will point out that none of these photos have been digitally altered except for cropping:

Some of you may be wondering how I know the camera is dead, or why it's dead. The simple answer is that it's not responding to any power source. I've changed out batteries multiple times, and checked what connections I could, but it's still unresponsive. It hasn't been dropped (recently) or exposed to moisture, nor subjected to otherwise harsh conditions.

The only clue I have as to the camera's demise is in the last* picture taken with it:

That explains all of it...

*No, it's not really the last picture it took. It's a good comedic effect though, isn't it?

We did it!

2009-05-16T21:36:00.006-04:00

Well we finally did it - We got everything moved!

Aaand that's about all I've got. We did it; it sure took long enough! Besides, just because everything is moved doesn't mean everything is done. All of our possessions are, supposedly, here at the new house. Even though our stuff is in our home doesn't mean we have the slightest clue where any of it is. And no, that is not a normal thing for us!

Aside from doing moving stuff, I've had to mow the lawn here twice. Yep, I've done 2/3 of the part around our house twice. And it's taken me about 2½ hours to do it each time. "What's taking so long", you ask? I'll tell you: The problem is that I'm using this:
To try and mow this:
When I really need to be using this:
"Why don't I get a riding mower," you ask? Simple: I can't afford a riding mower; at least not a shiny new one. There's a local equipment shop that sells used mowers for around $400. It's just a matter of being there when they have one.

Long story short, bullet-point style:
- We bought a house
- We started moving
- We took two weeks, but we finished moving
- Mandy and Joe are very tired

On the fun side, I bought seeds last weekend. We're going to have sunflowers, Gaillardias, Nasturtiums and pumpkins. Fun stuff! The sunflowers have sprouted already, and you can imagine I'm keeping close tabs on the pumpkins. Pumpkinstravaganza '09 could be very special indeed!

I'll have more updates, with pictures, when I have a moment. And... when I can actually find my camera. ...and the cable that connects it to the computer.

Mmm... Waxy!

2009-05-02T08:12:00.004-04:00

If any of you have read all of the posts I've made on this blog, you may need a psychiatric evaluation. Ha! No, really, if you read most of what I've posted then you've probably noticed that I have strange ideas when it comes to edible products. Case in point, the 'flammable frosting' idea.

Remember?

At first glance, it may seem strange but if you really search deep inside yourself I think you'll agree with me: Some products would just be worlds better if they were edible.

We've all gone to Panera Bread and gotten the soup of the day in a bread bowl, and that was pretty cool. You eat (drink) your soup, and when you've finished there's still some tasty sourdough bread to chomp on. That's a little bit creative, but it still falls under a category I'd like to call 'traditional edibility'.

Printing pictures on frosting is a little bit closer to what I mean. It's not something that's normal; usually you think, "Ooh, a picture. Let's look at it!" But when the image is somehow plastered onto a sugary layer of frosting with edible ink, people think "Ooh, it's a cute picture of my nephew on his birthday cake! I want the piece with his face!"
That's different... and weird... and honestly I don't go for that kind of thing. If it's your birthday and you want a picture of yourself on your cake, go for it. I just find it a bit strange that you'll end up slicing through an image of yourself and then doling out chunks of that image for others to eat.

Weird.

But my idea for an edible product is not weird. Want to know what it is? Get this:

Edible Crayons - and I'm not talking about those fake, frosting covered pretzel 'crayons' either.

Just imagine if you were embroiled in the creative process of putting the finishing touches on your Crayola masterpiece, and then BAM! ...hunger strikes in. You're nowhere near a Snicker's bar, the kitchen is too far away, and we've been taught since preschool not to eat the glue. What do you do? What do you do?

In my world, all you'd have to do is take one look at that pile of crayons, choose the color that looks most appetizing and then pop it in your mouth. Mmm... Scrumptious! There are enough colors of crayons that flavors could be as varied as Jelly Belly jelly beans. And for those colors that don't have an obvious flavor-match, we'll make something up. I'm reminded of Homer Simpson talking about a jelly donut:
"This one has purple in it. Purple's a fruit."

Yes. Edible Crayons = Awesome.

Packing = Fun

2009-04-25T22:13:00.005-04:00

Yes, you read the title correctly: Packing can be fun. Or maybe it's just fun to someone like me who gets drawn down memory lane whilst cramming all of your life's possessions into boxes. We've got a decent amount of stuff that's years old; stuff that we don't need, that we forgot that we had, but just can't throw it away. We've all got things like that, right?

Today we packed up everything in the hobby room. That's an accomplishment in itself... we didn't just clean off the table, or the closet, or one corner; we packed away everything in the room (99% of it anyway). Mandy took care of her craft and scrap booking items, and I focused on taking care of my Star Wars memorabilia, model building supplies and old notebooks. There was some stuff from my grade school years: history reports, newspaper articles, a forgotten journal and - this is the fun part, art stuff.

When I see the kind of stuff I used to draw, I wonder why I stopped. It's not that I was so good at being an artist, but I had fun making little doodles of whatever I could imagine. And that's what hobbies are all about, right? Being fun? When we move into the new house and get things set up, I'm definitely going to do more 'artsy' stuff. Here's an example of a classic composition:

There's just no explanation...

Unless I drew that first picture with the same motivation as I did this next one:

What's the motivation, you ask? In one simple word: Sugar. The big blue thing my cartoon dude is holding is a giant Pixy Stix. If you've never had one or don't even know what Pixy Stix are, you have my pity. Just think of a straw that's filled with suger. Mmm, delicious!

Regular Pixy Stix are fun. See the following equation to understand why:

Pixy Stix = Sugar
Sugar = Fun

Pretty fun, right?

Keep in mind that the above equation is valid when referring to the 'normal' Pixy Stix. When I created the artwork shown above, that was influenced by the Giant Pixy Stix. And let me tell you right now, those things were BIG. How big? This big:

/\ That girl is looking pretty mellow for someone holding a box of those things. She must not have eaten any of them yet...

...But I've gotten a bit off topic. The point is that Mandy and I packed up the craft room today; a major accomplishment by any means. As a bonus, we had a little bit of fun taking trips down memory lane. Of course, it's not like I need to remember what it's like to be a kid, since I still act like one:

And just think, that's how I am without any hyperactivity-inducing sugar.

It's Just Like Flying!

2009-04-17T21:40:00.005-04:00

So yesterday we found out how buying a house can be exactly like flying from point A to point B: Delays!
Our closing date has been moved from Wednesday the 22nd, to Friday the 24th. No, it's not a big change, but it's just enough to be aggravating. Why was the closing date moved? The short version of the story is that there was some last-minute paperwork that needed to move from person A to person B, and the parties involved still need 48 hours to review the contract; thus the date was moved back.

So we get to wait a little more. Whoo, fun!

The biggest reason I'm disappointed about it is that I have to wait a little longer to get some time off of work. Yes, my time away from work will be spent moving and doing some heavy-duty cleaning, but that would probably still feel like a day off at this point. In my last two-week pay period, I missed a full day and still had 83 hours. This past week I worked Monday - Saturday and racked up at least 51 hours... and when I got home Saturday I had to spend another two hours mowing the lawn.

I know a lot of other people probably work more hours than me more frequently, but this is my blog so I have a right to complain every once and a while, right?

In other news, I've been getting back into hockey. If you have to ask why, then you probably wouldn't "get it". In short: hockey is the most awesome sport of them all. Speed, huge collisions, 90-mph pucks, fights, goals, shootouts, etc... It's all good. If we can actually pick up a broadcast TV signal in our new house, I plan to watch every playoff game I can. Considering the rather unfortunate unpopularity of hockey, I'll probably only get to see the Stanley Cup Finals; maybe the Conference finals, but I doubt it. It really depends on how the 'Canes do this time around. We'll see.

In the mean time I've been satisfying my hockey urge by playing the demo for NHL 09 on my Xbox. If anyone is looking for an early birthday gift for me, or even a "Congrats, you just bought a house" gift, look no further: NHL 09

Sorry, I had to do it.

As we're about to wrap up another night of packing I've come to a realization: We have a ton of books. I have a lot, Mandy has a lot; together we have a ton. Mandy's got a nice broad mix of subjects, from fiction and fantasy to artsy how-to to photo-essays to spiritual and a host of other topics. My books are a bit more straightforward: about 25-30% of them are horticulture related, 20% have to do with Star Wars, another 10% are other sci-fi, and the rest are a mishmash of other topics that include roller coasters, World War 2, the Dummy's Guide to Playing Guitar and the first 6 Harry Potter books.

Having said all of that, we've got some 6 or seven boxes of books and at least 65% of our books are still on the shelves. Who's ready to put their back muscles to good use?

Moving's fun, innit?

Go Pack! (Go?)

2009-04-14T21:37:00.005-04:00

So tonight is the first one of full force packing... it's strange how you don't think you have that many possessions until you try to fit them all in boxes. Where did we get all this stuff? The whole process of moving doesn't really faze me, probably since I've done it three times before now. Still, that doesn't necessarily make it 'fun'.

The first two times I was still 'just a kid', so all I really had to do was cram the stuff in my room into some boxes and let other people move them. The third move was from Illinois to North Carolina in what I would qualify as a 'bachelor move'. In that type of scenario, I just crammed all of the stuff from my room into boxes and moved them myself. (and with the help of my parents)

This time, it's a "couple move". It's not just my stuff anymore; it's Mandy's too. There will be none of that 'just cram it in a box' stuff... it's all got to be organized, inventoried and labeled. That's a good thing, though. You gotta keep your ducks in a row. Just like the kid who thought he lost some of his Easter candy, you have to ask yourself, "Where my Peeps at?"
Yeah, that was random. I'm sorry.

So in the midst of all this activity, my brain has to take on some train of thought to fill the otherwise lack of mental activity. I turned on some music, but that didn't stop me from thinking of some sort of 'rhythm chant'; you know, like the guys who row a boat to the beat of a drum? Pack pack pack, go go go, pack pack pack, go go go, pack pack pack... Go go go pack pack pack... Go pack... go pack... go pack...

Go Pack?
Okay, not quite what I was aiming for. If you think I've gotten a little side tracked, you'd be right. That would explain why I'm sitting here making a post on my blog instead of stuffing more of my belongings into a cardboard box. But that's not the end of it! In the middle of my packing, I thought up a moving-related haiku:

Go Pack, Go! Say I.
The boxes are numerous
What, we're not done yet?

Yes. I am a geek.

The Easter Bunny

2009-04-10T22:11:00.008-04:00

Here we go. I haven't yet reached the age of 25 and I can't tell you how many times I've started a conversation about how things today are nothing like they were when I was a kid. Am I old enough to reminisce about the "good ol' days" already? Either age sets in faster than you think, or modern civilization gets worse the more technologically advanced it gets. Take your pick; both are probably valid.

Anyway, Mandy and I had to make a run to Wal Mart this afternoon for some random grocery items. We probably would've gone to a generic grocery store, like Food Lion, had I not needed some trusty 312 size batteries for my one working hearing aid. So instead of working through the medium crowd of people at a grocery store, we had to wade through the masses at Wal Mart. On Friday afternoon. The Friday before Easter. Yeah, you get the idea.

As a side note, does it ever seem like people try too hard? I mean, all the major stores are changing logos and 'updating their image'. Woo... In fact, that Wal Mart changed their logo from this:
To this:
Wow. Doesn't the giant, pretty, yellow asterisk make you want to shop there that much more?

But that's beside the point. The point is that we were in Wal Mart on the Friday before Easter. Commercialism ahoy! The aisles were literally stuffed with any and every kind of crud that was even remotely related to 'easter'. Notice the lack of a capitalization and the addition of quotation marks: 'easter' is not the same as Easter.

We're walking to the food section when my one of the 'easter' baskets catch my eye. It's not just a gaudy, pastel-hued plastic basked filled with colored grass and fake chocolate, but it's a 'Military warfare' basket. It actually wasn't too unlike this one:
Wow.

That's just sad.

The rest of our time in Wally World was rather uneventful, with the exception of an incident at the checkout line. I was minding my own business, putting bags into our cart (not a basket, not a buggy; a cart) when something massive, white and gaudy startled me. It was the easter bunny.

At least, it was supposed to be.

Bunnies are cute. Supposedly. At least the ones that God created aren't too bad. They got the all the whiskers and little nose and big ears and the fluff thing going for 'em. I don't fancy them, but they're certainly not the ugliest creatures out there. The person who designed Wal Mart's easter bunny didn't know that. Their easter bunny is so ugly, it's almost and insult to call it a 'bunny'. It needs to have its own name, like WallyBun or something.

In case you haven't seen him, WallyBun is hideous. You know what happens when a helium balloon starts to deflate? It shrinks up, turns off-colored and then gets all wrinkly and stuff? That's what WallyBun looks like. A half-deflated, discolored, mutant rabbit... That happens to be wearing a hideous vest and bow tie ensemble that it stole from a dead clown. Ugly.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm not a fan of WallyBun. No more WallyBun!
Ugh, I apologise for subjecting my readers to such a fiendish sight but it must be done.

I say we get rid of all of the easter commercialism, and give a full time job to Elmer Fudd.
Rabbit season is open!

I Never Thought I'd Do This...

2009-04-05T11:36:00.002-04:00

Normally, I'm not the type of person to collect a bunch of funny pictures, stories or videos and parade them around for everyone I know to look at. But I've come across a few videos that just need to be shared...

Trees, Toys and Power Tools

2009-04-04T11:09:00.007-04:00

It is April 3rd and the weather is gorgeous. 75 degrees out, a mild breeze, and crystal clear, cloudless blue skies. Spring is here. As a bonus, all of these beautiful weather factors decided to coalesce into a gorgeous Saturday! What better way to start it than to spend two hours on the first lawn-mowing of the year?

No, it's not really ideal but I didn't have a choice.

After five months of peaceful slumber my lawn mower was a little stubborn to get going again; I think there was a small clog in the fuel line that took a few minutes to work out. For the most part, the hour and a half I spent pushing the thing around was peaceful (relatively) and uneventful. The not-so-fun part came when I got closer to the wooded area behind our house. Trees aren't bad, they're really nice, but we've got one that's really annoying.

Liquidambar styracifula
In English, that's a Sweetgum. Not a bad choice for a mid-size shade tree. Nice texture, neat and shiny green leaves, and great fall color. The bad thing? It drops seeds. And not just any seeds: annoying spiky-ball seed thingies.

If I only had one tree worth of these things to deal with, it might not be so bad. But as it is, there are probably dozens lining the fence, with hundreds if not thousands of these spiky seeds laying in the back corner of the yard. They wouldn't be so bad if lawnmowers could just pick them up and shred 'em. But no, that doesn't happen. Those things are hard enough that when you run over them, the lawnmower will just suck them up and launch them out the discharge chute with enough force to leave a welt on any unfortunate bystanders.

They also cause loud, annoying knocking noises. It kinds of turns your nice lawnmower from this:
Into this:
Whenever you run over a big pile of Sweetgum seeds, you stop feeling like you're mowing the lawn and start feeling like you're playing with a gas-powered popper; only it's less fun.

/end post

House!

2009-04-02T15:47:00.009-04:00

Well, here it is: the house. It's not really "our" house yet, but if everything goes well over the next few weeks, it will be. Today the home inspectors were there to check everything out. We were unable to stick around for the whole thing, but they didn't find any problems before we left.

This morning we also submitted the first of the papers for the full on loan application. The bank already pre-qualified us, and our credit scores were "excellent" so the loan officer said she'd be "very surprised" if our loan wasn't approved. But we're supposed to get some more of that paperwork in the mail before this weekend and then sign it next week.

In the mean time, here are the pictures:
/\ The front, obviously. When we move in, the bushes are getting yanked and replanted elsewhere.

/\ The back yard. The full size door on the right is a small utility closet where the water heater is. The little white square on the right side is the crawlspace access. You may not be able to tell from the picture, but the deck is actually a decent size - fairly roomy.

/\ This is the view of the living room from just inside the front door.

/\ ...and a view of the front door from the living room. The doorway to the master bedroom is just behind the opened front door.

/\ A view of the living room from halfway up the stairs. The big reddish splotch on the carpet is from, as best as we can tell, spilled kid's paint. Overall the carpet is pretty stained, so it needs to be replaced. We probably won't be able to afford to do it before we move it, but we'd like to put down bamboo flooring in the living room / dining room area.

/\ The master bedroom is the biggest single room in the house; it's just hard to get a good picture of it. It has very tall ceilings.

/\ The master bathroom. It's a big tub.

I've got great observational skills. Have you noticed?

/\ The kitchen. It's fairly compact and efficient, but has more storage space than our kitchen now. There's a pantry to the right of the fridge.

/\ Another shot of the countertop. I don't know why I took this.

/\ This is a poorly stitched together panoramic of the backyard.

In addition to the pictures, I've also got some poor quality videos. The quality isn't great, and the sound is worse. I didn't want to do too much narration since our Realtor, as well as two home inspectors were running around. Hopefully it'll give a good idea of the space and layout.

That's all I got for now.

Random Fact of the Day:

2009-03-26T18:58:00.003-04:00

Random Fact of the Day:
"Every cat has a one in fifteen chance of being kicked in the head by a sleepwalking human"*

Think about it. Little Fluffy is in real danger.

*This is not a real fact and as such, has not been theorized, tested, or confirmed by any branch of science. Not even those "global warming" scientists will back it up. That should tell ya something. If nothing else, hopefully that "fact" will have had the most amusing fine print ever. Period.

Snow Day!

2009-03-02T07:42:00.004-05:00

Tired of driving in all that snow? Tired of having to shovel the driveway every week? Sick of looking out the window and seeing nothing but a landscape of frozen white? If so, move to NC. You won't be completely rid of snow, but you'll get to stay home from work for even the tiniest bit of it. Like this:

Yep. Two inches. It's really more than that... but the handrail of our porch was all that I was willing to measure at 7 in the morning since I was still wearing my pajamas and the wind chills were in the teens. Actual snowfall totals were more like 3.5 to 4 inches, but it doesn't look like that because of the ripping wind blowing everything around. We also had rain this weekend. Lots of it. I woke up on Saturday morning, and it was raining. It didn't stop until Sunday night around 7, at which point it had turned into snow... all of that stuff froze and made the roads pretty unmanageable, thus we all get to stay home. Even though it's windy and cold, it's still really pretty to look at. Here's a wide angle shot:

It's a little bit different than other snow pictures I've taken here in NC, mainly because the grass is totally covered this time. For a more accurate reflection of how much snow we really got, look at this picture of Mandy's car:

That's more like 4 inches or so.

Now, I realize that most of in the North will just scoff and say, "4 inches? That's nothing!" And you'd be right. Just keep in mind that most southerners don't really know how to deal with snow. Anytime the word 'snow' shows up in a forecast, people go crazy and rush to the nearest grocery store to buy bread and bottled water. Never mind the fact that I don't think I've even seen a snow shovel since I moved down here. Prepared we are not.

Now that that's all said and done, I'm going to go eat breakfast.

A Typical Monday

2009-02-09T21:51:00.004-05:00

Why does the extra-ordinary stuff always happen on Monday? Have you ever noticed it? Rarely, if ever, does something strange happen on any of the other 4 days of the work week. Perhaps it's just related to the human psyche and the slow transition from 'weekend mode' to 'daily grind' mode. Allow me to provide an example from my day:

For the first two and a half hours, the day went by normally. I got up, got ready, left for, and arrived at, my place of employment in a timely manner. The typical Monday AM routine was interrupted only when I happened to walk past my cell phone and notice that I had missed at least three calls and had a voice mail waiting. It was from my wife. My recollection of the exact words used is a bit fuzzy, but they went something like this:

"Hi, it's me. I don't have a way to get to work because my purse and keys are in your car. Call me as soon as you can."

Well that's great.

I took a trip out to look at my car and sure enough, there was a feminine mini-cargo bag (a.k.a. a "purse") in the backseat of the Ion. Ten minutes later, after explaining the situation to my boss, I was on my way home as the heroic deliveryman. I didn't mind having to leave work for a little bit; at least I had an excuse to see Mandy again.

Upon delivering the mini-cargo bag to its rightful owner, I decided that it would be a smart idea to ensure that all of the required contents were present. "Your keys are in there, right?" said I. Thirty seconds later, the contents of the purse occupied the kitchen table.

The keys weren't there.

In a flash of insight I moseyed on over to our living room sofa, pulled one of the cushions out slightly and was then greeted by a little, stuffed Disney keychain.
Stitch rocks. Of course, this meant that Mandy's keys had never left the house after all.

The moral of this story is: It's illegal to drive without a license. Don't do it!

I Don't Understand... - Part 1

2009-02-05T21:09:00.008-05:00

I don't know why I didn't think of this topic as an ongoing series before now; everyone wants to read about things I think are weird, right? Or else they wouldn't even know of this blogs' existence, right? Right.

Anyway, today I noticed something that was a bit strange to me. One of the new workers at my place of employment drives a nice SUV everyday. The license plate is a custom plate that is simply that person's last name. That part isn't so strange. Lots of people have personalized license plates with their last name on it. The part that was weird to me was that they have their full name spelled out on the driver's side door, right underneath the window. That's the kind of thing they do in the air force, to identify a plane's pilot. It's cool in that situation. On a SUV? Not so cool.

Let's review: Nameplate on an Air Force F-15:
= Totally cool!

Nameplate on a generic SUV:
= Not cool.

Anyway, my point is that it annoyed me and I didn't understand it. As a result of that, I came here and wrote a blog post about it. Not only did it spawn a single post, but the ongoing theme of a series of posts. Welcome to the first entry in a series of posts about things that I either don't understand, or annoy me to no end. Without further ado, I present unto ye the first installment of "I don't Understand...".

I don't understand...
1. - Why I didn't think of doing this before?
2. - Why is it okay to tell someone that they have a biting wit, but not that their wit bites?
3. - Why does everyone think that they can make the car in front of them drive faster by engaging it a bit of tailgating?
4. - Why is it so hard for people to keep their car on the proper side of the double-yellow lines on a curvy country road?
5. - Why do people emigrate to the USA, and then expect its' native residents to learn the immigrant's language? (Try moving to Mexico, refuse to learn Spanish, and see how that works out for you.)
6. - Why does my brain decide to shut down when I have a need to think, and why does it become active when I want to chill out?
7. - Why am I bored with making this list already? I'm only on number 7.

Oh yeah, one more that I almost forgot to put on the list:

I Don't Understand...
8. My cat.

If you know Olivia, you know that I've said enough.
If you don't know Olivia, this picture will be enough explanation:
You've already seen it. You can't un-see it.

Stay tuned for an entire post of "I Don't Understand" devoted entirely to my cat.

I'm cool!

2009-01-31T12:00:00.022-05:00

I'm cool. Some one point five years after getting a mobile phone upgrade to a 'new' Moto Razr, I'm joining the ranks of the hip and cool by getting a 'skin' for it. Behold: The glory of the Wall-E Razr!

Hard to find the words to describe it, eh? Yeah, it's pretty awesome.

You know you're jealous.

Also, thanks to my wife Mandy, who found the website where you can make custom Disney phone skins. She has a cool Stitch (from Lilo and Stitch) skin set up for her phone. At the earliest opportunity, I'll add a picture of what she did.

Baghdad Bob

2009-01-23T21:18:00.000-05:00

Anyone remember good ol' Baghdad Bob? The former Information Minister of Iraq? The same guy who said the words, "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" He was funny.

Bob is past his prime and has moved on to other things. Instead we're left with the antics and proclomations of an individual almost as absurd: Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The guy has hard evidence against him that he tried to sell a vacant senate seat. What's his response? "I didn't do anything wrong!" Right. Apparently he's so hard-headed that he won't even listen to his lawyer. Most normal people take it as a bad sign when their defense lawyer quits on them.

Baghdad Bob, meet Springfield Rod. Are they twins, maybe?

...I had intended to put a side-by-side photo comparison of the two here in this post, but I just can't do it. It would uglify my blog to irreparable levels and traumatize my readers. I'm just not that mean.

It has not escaped my attention that Christmas was over about 3 weeks ago, and I intend to do something about it. In other words, I will be changing my banner image tomorrow. :)

Snow Day!

2009-01-20T10:29:00.000-05:00

For the first time this winter, we have measurable snow! Yay! Since we live in North Carolina, and nobody here has any clue how to drive in snow (or get it off the roads, for that matter), we got the day off. Double-yay! We've got about two inches here at the house, but the word is that the more populated areas have more snow, and all the roads are in terrible shape. The only damper on the day is that I threw my back out this past Saturday. Not-so-yay. No huge snow fort creating for me. Not that I could do that with 2 inches of snow anyway...

Without further ado, I present to you my random thoughts for the day:

- 'Ado' is a rather weird and pointless word. Does anyone ever use it outside of introductions? I didn't think so. Who, in the span of literary history, thought that they needed to coin a new word for the sole use of introducing stuff? Not I!

- Have you ever had one of those moments when you're just going about your usual business, not paying much attention to anything in particular, when a word or phrase will just jump out at you - and then you can't find where you saw the words? It happened to me this morning: I was digging through the closet to find some epoxy glue, and the phrase "Hairy Fiesta" found its way into my mind. Harry Fiesta? Yeah, my mind is a strange place.

- If you're looking for an entertaining movie for a cold winter's night, I have to recommend "Surf's Up". That's about all I have to say about it.

- In honor of this "historic" Inaguration Day (yeah... when has an Inaguration Day not been historic?), I would like to pay a special tribute to...

...The spork: The most misunderstood of all eating utensils, but the most versitale.

This concludes my post of randomness. I'm going to go bake some cookies now.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T06:27:00.008-05:00

So 2009 is officially here. All across the world giant, ugly balls have slid down some pole at the stroke of midnight, people have gathered in public squares to watch the ugly balls, and Dick Clark has worked his one day a year describing how the ball looks as it drops.

What's the big deal? Have you actually seen this thing? It's horrendous!

I thought the whole geodesic sphere thing went out of style in the 70's. But apparently the impaling of a giant, ugly polygon on a stick helps people transition from one year to the next. Whatever floats your boat, people! At least I'm not the guy who invented it. How would you like it if your one claim to fame was that you could go to a party and introduce yourself as "the guy who invented the New Year's ball thingie"?

Of course, we now come to a question so eloquently put by Sir Alec Guinness in Star Wars: A New Hope: "Who's the more foolish? The fool or the fool that follows him?"

So here you have a guy who says, "I have an ugly light-up ball thingie, do any of youse guys want to come and watch it slide down a pole?"
To which the masses replied with a resounding "Yes!"

The word which comes to my mind is "Lemmings". And no, I'm actually not referring to those adorable arctic rodents:
Ain't he cute!?!

Anyway, I have a different meaning in mind when I speak of a Lemming:
lemming - lem·ming
noun
1. A member of any group following an unthinking course toward destruction

Okay so maybe that's a little too harsh of a label to brand on New Year's Eve revelers. But really, can anyone explain to me why people really want to go to an insanely crowded public square, in the middle of night, in the cold winter, and stand around and wait for hours just to watch a ball slide down a pole for ten-seconds? Whoop-de-do. It makes no sense to me.

Speaking of New Year's Eve and resolutions and other loosely related items in this post, I bring to your attention a video game: Lemmings. The original Lemmings was, and still is, a classic staple of computer games. Released in '91 (Wow... 18 years ago?) I know for a fact that it absorbed many hours of life from my brother and I. Any classic gamer will instantly recognize the look:

Ahh... good times to be had there. In fact, it's still possible to have the Lemming experience today, since the game has been faithfully ported to HTML codec and posted on various websites. Go ahead and try a level or two, but don't blame me when you end up sitting in front of your computer hours later, yelling, "Why are you guys so stupid!?!" or "No, I said stop dying!"

Enjoy! DHTML Lemmings

For more information on any of the topics in today's post, click on the following links:

All you never really cared to know about the ugly ball

All you didn't know about those adorable arctic rodents - Lemmings

All you should know about the awesome computer game - Lemmings

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-24T18:13:00.002-05:00

I have seen palm trees. I have seen the beaches. I have been on a cruise ship. And I have been, forcibly, returned to real life.

This how it goes after any fun vacation, isn't it?

It's been a weird transition coming back home and then going straight to work for two days. Today's Christmas Eve. I started off my day by going to work, but the good thing is that we were only there for half a day. The tradition at the nursery is to end work the day before Christmas break with a party where we get catered food, gifts and bonuses. This year we had food from a Mexican restaurant, gifts of sweatshirts, and bonuses of T-shirts. No extra money for us this year...

In other news, Mandy's laptop apparently died this morning. When we turn it on, all we get is a black screen with a flashing cursor up top. I hope we can recover what's on the hard drive... She's got an entire year of pictures on there, and 500 of my vacation pictures are there too. Laptops are stupid. Period.

It's almost time to start the typical Christmas stuff, so I'll check in with y'all later. I hope all of you have a blessed Christmas and remember the greatest gift we've ever received arrived humbly in a manger some 2000 years ago.

I'll wrap this up with my lame attempt at humor:

Leavin' on a jet plane...

2008-12-11T07:57:00.004-05:00

Today's the day! We're leaving on our extremely long-awaited vacation to sunny Florida. 10 days in tropical paradise, taking in the sights and sounds of Walt Disney World, a Disney cruise to the Bahamas, Kennedy Space Center and topping it all off with a few days at relaxing Vero Beach.

There's not much to say, so I'll just post this handy countdown clock which will indicate time until our return. It's the only new thing you'll have to stare at for a week and a half.

Enjoy!

MySpace Countdown Clocks

RROD - Part II - A Photo Essay

2008-12-10T20:36:00.005-05:00

So as I went about my daily routine with a broken (bricked) Xbox, I began to wonder if it offered any uses besides an entertainment device. Lo and behold, it did!

/\ When you first see the Red Ring Of Death your reaction is 'no, it can't be!', followed by repeatedly punching the power button; the three red lights just has to be a fluke, right? After trying in vain to restore your console to normalcy, realization of the inevitable sets in. And you can't believe you've got a $350 blinking light.

/\ A normal angry response to an inanimate object is usually a swift kicking motion. Since that's usually ill-advised when the object to be kicked is worth several hundred dollars, try the alternative: Expensive foot rest!

/\ You you've got a powered box with a blinking light. Press a button, use your imagination, and the dead gaming console instantly becomes the coolest retractable cup holder in the world.

/\ Green and red are traditionally the colors of Christmas. Need I say more?

/\ Hmm... an overheating console with a wide, flat surface. It also does a great job at cooking pancakes.

/\ How many times have you tripped over those annoying brown wedges that seem to be the 'universal doorstop'? Toss your 360 down there and you've got a compact, hefty object that will keep most any door open, all the while flashing red lights provide a visual reminder to use caution near open doors.

/\ So you've got a 14-month old next-gen console that doesn't work. Odds are that you've still got a last-gen console just waiting to be used. Plug in some cords, wipe off some dust, and be reminded about the great moments of gaming past. They sure don't make 'em like they used to.

/\ As good as older consoles and classic games are, it's just plain hard to go back to watching blocky graphics. So instead, you go sit down and watch an inanimate white block. No, the red light isn't going to stop blinking if you look at it long enough.

/\ Doesn't it seem odd that an electronics manufacturer is so good at providing a simple way to return broken products back to them? Really, if they'd spent as much time developing an improved cooling system as they did the 'coffin' to mail dead Xboxes in, there probably wouldn't have been a need for the Red Ring Of Death in the first place.

RROD

2008-12-05T22:16:00.009-05:00

It happened. It took one year, three months and twenty days, but it finally happened. A lot of people out there said it was inevitable. Heck, I did too at one point. My opinion was changed for the better early on, so I put the worries out of my mind; but it finally happened to me...

--------

Tonight Mandy and I decided to end the week by watching a good classic movie on the Xbox 360, which doubles as our DVD player. Some of y'all may have heard of it before: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

It's the first time I'd ever seen it and it's doing a pretty good job at capturing my interest. About 90 minutes in we come to a scene where Bad and Ugly are having a conversation in the midst of a Union Army camp. They're talking and talking, and then there's a pause in the conversation. This point in the film is a moderately important moment, so I'm hanging onto every word in order not to miss something.

Maybe that's why it took me a few seconds to notice that the pause in the conversation was really a bit longer than the filmmaker intended.

Huh? Did I accidentally hit the pause button? I grabbed the Xbox controller and start pressing a few buttons; no response. The console had frozen up... Yeah, they do that now. Moderately annoyed, I get up and switch the console on and off. For the first part of the power-up process, everything looks normal. Then a few seconds later, I see this:
Three red lights. The Red Ring Of Death. My Xbox is dead.

Maybe the surly good looks of Clint Eastwood was too much for it to handle? Who knows? It's probably got more to do with Microsoft pushing out a piece of hardware that's got a failure rate as high as 40%.

Nothing much to do about it now besides requesting a 'coffin' from Microsoft to start the repair / replacement process. Further updates will come as events warrant.

--------

In the meantime, it looks like I'll be going back to playing Burnout and Guitar Hero on the good ol', reliable Playstation 2.

Ah, the trusty PS2. I've had mine since early 2001, if I remember correctly. That's about eight years and counting without a single hardware problem.

Maybe I should've gotten a PS3 instead of an Xbox...

Callin' In Sick Today

2008-11-18T12:01:00.007-05:00

I'm weird. If you want proof of that, just ask my wife.

For me, getting sick is a strange but predictable series of events. You can ask just about anyone who's had to live with me, and they'll be able to tell you when I'm not feeling well. Typically the first sign (Phase 1) is a chronic tiredness, and / or the appearance of "crime dog eyes". I think that somehow came about in relation to McGruff, the Crime Dog...

...But anyway, the next symptom (Phase 2) is grumpiness. That's a pretty obvious giveaway right there! Me, Mr. Sunshine, grumpy? Ha! When I get grouchy, then you know my immune system is due for imminent collapse. Just stand back and watch the fireworks.
Phase 3 is the period of 'actual sickness', whatever it may be. Depending on the malady, this period may range from 12 hours or less to 5 days or more. Sometimes I'll think that I'm doing better than I really am and attempt to do too much, thereby setting me back to square one. This has happened less since I got married. (Read: I know Mandy will fuss at me if I do anything but rest when I don't feel well, so I actually recover faster - Imagine that...)

Phase 4 is the final recovery, which may last several days. During this time I will feel fully recovered mentally, though still a little tired physically; which usually is evident through my voice. If I was sick with anything related to vocal cords (cold, congestion, cough, sore throat, etc.) I'll still sound pretty rough, sometimes even worse than I did when I felt sick. On some occasions, people have suggested that I wasn't ready to be back at work just because of how bad my voice sounded.

Recap: The phases of how I get sick, illustrated:

Phase 1 - Tired

Phase 2 - Grouchy

Phase 3 - Sick

Phase 4 - Recovery

/\ The picture of Animal may not make sense as a way to illustrate 'recovery', but think about it: He looks and sounds a bit rough aruond the edges so people run from him, even though he's perfectly normal and healthy.

So why do I bring all of this up? I bring it up to make a simple statement: I hate calling in sick.

It's not that I can't stand to be out of work; I love days off. No, my problem is that I dislike the actual process of picking up a phone and calling in sick. What's the big deal, you ask? It's this: you have 30 seconds or so to justify your unscheduled day off. It's true that if you're sick, you're sick, and therefore don't need to worry about 'sounding sick' to a manager. It's probably just something that I worry about. Yeah, my brain is weird, isn't it?

I think my thinking is a result of 'sick time' being misused. Not everyone who calls in sick is actually sick. As a result of that most people who take a sick day feel the need to justify it, to prove themselves. Not nessecarily to the point of bringing in a written note signed by a doctor, but by making sure that others notice the little things: A well-timed cough or sneeze when co-workers are nearby, initiating discussions on the prices of over-the-counter drugs, or just talking about how boring it is to be sick and stuck in bed all day.

For the record, I called in sick this morning because I was. Stress / Life Issues / Back Problems / Neck Tension / Etc. gave me a really bad headache last night; it was actually probably a low-grade migrane. I took some Excedrin Migrane and went to bed at 8PM. At 2AM, I woke up because I just didn't feel good. (you know what it's like; you don't feel good at all but can't really explain why) By the time 6AM rolled around, I hadn't fallen back asleep for any significant period of time and I was cold. Not just chilly, but fully decked out in flannel pants, hoodie, underneath 4 covers and next to Mandy, and I was still about frozen.

So I called in sick and have been sitting around, covered in blankets and staring off into the distance ever since. Fun, huh?

On the plus side, I did figure out how to hook up Mandy's laptop to our TV so I can watch online shows in the living room. Netflix instant movies, Firefly, new episodes of The Office all within comfortable reach. I'm a genius. In addition, the tiny box of computing capability proves to be an adequate source of heat. It may prove that laptop computers aren't so bad. I may have to rethink my previous opinion of them. Maybe...

Dreams

2008-11-15T18:12:00.004-05:00

So, dreams are weird. What are they, exactly? This is a paragraph that I pulled off of a website after a brief Google search:
"Scientific theories about dreaming take a view that dreaming is a mechanism by which the brain can sort out the information it receives during the day in order to make sense of it. It has even been suggested that dreaming is an accidental by-product of brain activity and as the brain sifts through impressions made during the day, it will discard the nonsense and therefore, according to some psychologists, this accumulation of ‘nonsense’ is expressed in dreams created in order to be forgotten. Other theories see dreaming as unconscious problem solving."

If what that paragraph says is really true, it makes a lot of sense. The first part does, anyway. I don't think I've ever had a dream that I would call 'unconscious problem solving', or if it was, I wasn't solving a problem grounded in reality. The bit about the brain discarding nonsense is much more logical to me. To back up my opinion, let me reiterate the highlights of a dream I had last night:

----------

It started on a mini-golf course. Mandy, my parents and I were enjoying a round of putt-putt on a particularly extravagant course, when we came to a hole that was shaped like a 'U'. Tee off was on the top of one side, and the hole was on the top of the other side. Once I got to this hole my golfing party, my family, disappeared; and I waited for the groups in front of me to finish the hole. But I got bored and started walking around the course, and at that point I became disgusted with the irrigation methods of the 'turf' on the course. (like mini-golf courses use real grass, right?) Being the plant guy that I am, I grabbed a hose and started watering down the nearest green.

Then it started raining.

But this was no ordinary rain, no siree. This rain was the result of secret government device called the 'tectonic plate shifter' or something like that. Basically, the government was trying to shift the tectonic plates underneath the East Coast into better alignment for some reason. How I knew about that, and why that made it start raining, and what that has to do with mini-golf, I cannot tell you.

The dream gets really fuzzy at this point, but I think I uncovered some government conspiracy to try and make the East Coast fall off the rest of the US continental mass and slide into the ocean. My response to that was to take Mandy and drive through torrential rains to her parent's house... which happens to be in Central NC. On the East Coast.

----------

Told you it didn't make too much sense.

My favorite dream of recent memory involves me, as a Jedi, fighting alongside Obi-wan Kenobi to rid a mall parking lot of goons in black suits. It was a fun dream that had the visual looks of Star Wars and The Matrix mixed together. That was one that made perfect sense.

The Best Ads You've Never Seen

2008-11-08T22:00:00.001-05:00

I was browsing through all of my bookmarked websites when I came across the Advertising Slogan Generator. Just type in the name of someone you know, the name of a pet, or the name of any random object, and it's good for a laugh or two.

A Laxative is Forever.

Generated by the Advertising Slogan Generator. Get more laxative slogans.

Have fun!

Voting - 2008

2008-11-01T15:16:00.011-04:00

I Joined a special club this morning. The members of the club are special people, and there's only one thing you can do to get in. How can I prove to you that I got into this club? Simple. Look at the sticker I got:Yeah, that's right: Mandy and I cast our vote early!

In anticipation of long lines come Tuesday, we decided to go out and vote this morning. There are only three locations in all of person county that we could go, and the closest one to us was closed. So we headed over to the old public library. And let me just say; I've never seen so many cars, or so many people, at a library!

Unfortunately, not all of the people there were the quiet, stand-in-line type. Democratic supporters had put up a sign near the library's driveway that said 'vote for change' (ha!), and there were no fewer than four people clad in Obama campaign buttons noisily trying to persuade voters at the last minute. Aren't there rules or laws or something in place so that voters aren't badgered by annoying people trying to force their opinions on others at the last minute?

Once we actually set foot inside the Roxboro library, a textbook example of 1970's interior design, we stayed there for quite a bit. We had about a 45 minute wait before we were able to take our ballots into one of the lovely official voting booths. (And before anyone asks, no, that is not the most time I've ever spent in a library.) You know you're up to official government business when you have to cast your ballot in a voting booth that looks like this:
Classy, eh? I looks more like it ought to be the new board for "Battleship: Deluxe Edition"; at least for those people who take their games of Battleship very seriously.

And now, a word about our NC ballots. Maybe we're just in the wrong part of the country, but we have the boring ballots. There's no lever-pulling or chad-punching. Rather, our ballots are more like those college exams where you had to fill in the circles for your answer to a multiple choice question. You have a list of candidates and the offices they're running for, and there's a blank circle next to each of their names; you simply fill in the circle next to the name of the person you wish to vote for. Simple, right?

It doesn't seem that way.

Since the general level of laziness in our country has reach new heights (or lows, rather), ballots have been 'simplified'. Instead of forcing people to take two minutes to fill a total of less than twenty circles, they've included an option for a 'straight party' vote. Want to elect all Democrats or all Republicans? It's easy! All you have to do is fill in one little circle next to the desired party's label. Look at our ballot; it's easy!
So what's the 'problem'? On our NC ballots, straight party voting does not count as voting for president. It shouldn't even be an issue, because those very words are printed on the ballot! "A straight party vote does not vote for US president and vice president..."
Basically, what's happening is that people aren't reading the instructions and only filling in one circle, thereby not voting for president. That's only a 'problem' only when you can't afford to spend 15 seconds every presidential election (i.e., every four years) filling in a circle next to someone's name. It's not rocket science, people.

The really sad part about all of this is that there are a lot of people out there who don't know how to follow directions. It's not just one out of every 5000 people with this problem, it's more like one in every fifty. Here's a rather sad article on the subject: Could Confusing Ballots Swing the Presidential Election in NC?

People are stupid.

On a better note, Mandy and I went to McDonald's for a quick breakfast after voting. We hit the drive-thru, since Mandy had to go and open up the ice cream store today. Anyway, I'm creeping forward in the drive thru like normal, ordering my food... pulling ahead to pay... I give the lady my debit card, and then she starts muttering expletives under her breath. My intuition told me that something was up, because that's not a typical reaction you receive when it's time to pay for something. Apparently, McDonald's was very busy that morning and their card reader was broken. Short of it: we got breakfast for free. Oh yeah.

Good things happen when you vote Republican.

And that's the story of how Mandy and I voted.

By the way, who the heck is Bob Barr?

Cats - A Prelude

2008-10-29T21:07:00.003-04:00

Most of you who know me know that I am a cat person. Not one of those weird 'cat people', but a 'normal' cat person. If you know that much, then you also know that I'm married to a woman who isn't necessarily a cat person. The more thought I give the subject, the more I tend to think that there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who like cats, and those who don't. Used to be I thought there was some middle ground; riding the fence, so to speak. Not anymore. Either you're on one side, happily entertained by a simpleminded ball of fur, or you're on the other side wondering what's so special about a hairball waiting to happen.

Tonight I found an impartial video that illustrates a trait common of almost any cat I've ever known. Enjoy:

You can see two other cartoons done by the same guy by clicking on the links below:
Simon's Cat 'Cat Man Do'
Simon's Cat 'Let Me In!'

More cat-related posts will show up in the near future.

Pumpkinstravaganza '08 - Part 2

2008-10-22T20:15:00.012-04:00

Welcome to

Pumpkinstravaganza '08 - Part II

Yes, you read it right! This is part deux of the NC pumpkin carving festival. Upon reading my last post, some of you were probably wondering why on earth we chose to carve pumpkins as early as the first weekend of October. Yes, it was way too early; but we did it for fun, having no intention of setting them out for trick-or-treaters to come and see on Halloween. Even so, Mandy and I did expect our first attempts to last a little bit longer than five days. For future reference: yes, it is a bad idea to carve pumpkins before an 87 degree heat-wave comes and stays for a week. To find out what happened to Mike and Buddy, read (and see pictures) of it on Mandy's blog: All That I Am - Heat Waves in October

Out of respect for the (quickly) departed gourds formerly known as Mike and Buddy, two pumpkin-less candles sit on our porch:

Mandy's sister decided to join us in carving pumpkins this time. Yay! Take a look at the things we tried to duplicate in pumpkin-form:

/\ Jess - This is the Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube. If you've never played a video game called Portal, then you have no idea what this is. However, you don't need to have played the game in order to understand it's awesomeness. Look at it: It's awesome!

This isn't exactly the same picture as what made it on the pumpkin... I had trouble finding the specific photo online.

/\ Mandy - This is the Florida Orange Bird. Apparently he was something of a mascot for the citrus industry starting back in the 1970s. I had never heard of it before, but apparently it was a pretty popular thing. He even had his own themed refreshment area in Disney's Magic Kingdom. Find out more than you ever wanted to know the Orange Bird at this website: Sunshine Tree Terrace and the Florida Orange Bird - 1971 - present

/\ Joe - You could see it coming, couldn't you? It's Wall-E! He's only one of the most awesome robots ever!

/\ Jess scoops the goop for the first time in many a year. Looks fun, doesn't it?

/\ Mandy hard at work for the second time in as many weeks. Ain't she cute?

/\ This is me 'working'. Apparently, to some people, working smarter instead of harder is the same as cheating. Wall-E had lots of little areas that needed to be hollowed out; little detail sections that would've been very difficult to get with an X-acto knife. So, I went and got my Dremel tool, attached the detail pen to it and carved out those tiny areas with a tiny drill bit. Smart, eh? The only negative to using it, aside from making the room sound like a dentists' office, was that it pulverized the pumpkin tissue; making fairly messy.

/\ Mr. Companion Cube is coming along nicely! It's hard to tell in this picture, but the two rectangles in the bottom right part of the picture is a piece of cake. ...or is it? The cake is a lie. (once again, if you haven't played the game you won't understand what I mean)

/\ The orange bird on a pumpkin. Isn't that what you call ironic?

/\ Though Wall-E is a robot made of metal, his essence transfers well to the vegetable arena.

The Finished Products

As with before, be sure to click on each image to get the full effect!

/\ "This was a triumph. I'm making a note here, 'huge success'..."

/\ Aww, ain't he cute?

/\ Wall-E: The little robot that fell in love.

/\ Just plain cool. All three of them are totally cool!

There may yet be a round three for us in NC. Yes it is a decent amount of work, but at $4.50 a pumpkin it's a cheap way to have a day of fun with some friends. What will the third and final round bring? I can't remember what Mandy said she might do, but I'm debating between another Pixar character and a futuristic crustacean.

Pumpkinstravaganza '08 - Part 1

2008-10-12T11:24:00.027-04:00

Welcome to

Pumpkin-stravaganza '08

At the very least, welcome to round one. :) Since these are the first pumpkins Mandy or I will have carved in many years, we may consider these "practice" and carve some more in the coming weeks. We got our pumpkins from Wal-Mart for five bucks each. All of them were a pretty good size and of decent shape; but that didn't stop me from laying about a dozen or so in the aisle just to make sure I had the perfect one.

Enjoy the following pictures! For ease of reading, all the captions will be below each picture.
/\ These are the subjects into which our pumpkins would be transformed. On the left, Mandy chose to care out the likeness of a Sunshine Buddy. If you've never heard of them before, Sunshine Buddies are essentially solar-powered head-nodders. Put 'em in a sunny spot, flip a switch, and their head will nod from side to side in a happy, relaxing sort of way. The only down side to them is that you don't ever want to set them on a radiator heater; Jesse (Mandy's sister) found out what happens when you do (R.I.P. little dude...).
On the right you'll see that I've chosen to carve out the familiar character, Mike Wazowski, from Pixar's Monsters Inc.

/\ We treated these giant fruits as well as anyone would treat their kids, including taking necessary safety precautions.

/\ This is photographic proof that no project should be started too close to a meal-time. It was getting close to 1 PM and I was hungry. As I was in the process of cleaning out a large vegetable, I got confused rather easily.

/\ After some lunch, tasty Brunswick Stew, I began the process that can only be known as "entering the mind of the artist". It may appear that I'm bored, but really my mind was filled with intense concentration about the task at hand.

/\ "Why doesn't he use tape?" For complex designs, taping the paper to the pumpkin would've been more of a hindrance than a help, at least for me. There was a lot of detail work that had to be done with an X-acto knife, especially since a bunch of the carving didn't actually go all the way through the pumpkin.

/\ The three-layer technique was quite a bit different than how I used to carve pumpkins, so after a good amount of work it didn't look like much of anything. You can't tell that's supposed to be a character from Monsters Inc.? What's the matter with you?

/\ He's mostly finished at this stage. This picture is just to help show what areas are carved all the way through and what was only thinned out.

/\ Mandy's hard at work on scooping the goop. That's a fun phrase to read, and even more fun to say. Try it; you'll agree!

/\ While my pumpkin had some more detail work, Mandy's was more time-consuming in that the majority of her design had to be thinned-out. You never realize how thick a pumpkin rind is until you're intentionally thinning it out, trying to get light to pass through it.

The Finished Products
Be sure to click on the pictures and see the full size versions to get the full effect!

/\ Mike Wazowski! Not the best picture; I may try to get a better nighttime picture over the next few days. I'm glad the expression translated well to pumpkin form.

/\ Sunshine Buddy! It looks cool now; it's even cooler in person.

/\ Both of them together. They add a welcoming and smile-inducing element to our front porch.

Other Stuff

If you're struggling to find inspiration or cool patterns for your own pumpkins, check out the following website: http://www.carvingpumpkins.com/ There is a lot of good stuff there.

If anyone wants me to make a pattern for them, let me know. I'll post more details on how I got the Mike Wazowski pattern later this week. You can see the one I used in the seventh picture of this post. A simple explanation of how it's done: I found the picture I wanted, converted it so it's only got three colors (white, black and grey), changed a few details so they were easier to carve, and then I printed it out. White, you don't do anything to. Black is cut all the way through. Grey is chiseled out, so the light from inside the pumpkin filters through to the outside.

Questions, comments, requests? Please let me know!

If anyone has completed pumpkins of their own, send me some pictures and I'll post the whole family's work on a post here before the end of the month (or, just as people send them to me).

Garbage Wars

2008-10-12T10:44:00.004-04:00

If any of you know our landlord, Mr. Brooks, you know he's a particular fellow. He likes things done his way. When something isn't done his way, he's irritated. One thing that he's especially picky about is his dumpster. Now, when you think of a dumpster, you don't typically give it much thought. It's a big metal bin for a bunch of trash, right?

What about a big metal trash bin that just so happens to sit mostly unattended alongside a pretty sleepy country road? Do you think that it's going to be used by only the people who are supposed to? Ha... So, we had a problem with random people dumping all sorts of stuff in, and on the ground near, the dumpster. Things such as bikes, exercise equipment, vanities, toilets, garden tubs, and any other random furniture.

Mr. Brooks doesn't like that kind of thing. So what does he do? He posts a sign. And not just one sign, but several. And they're not just normal signs, they're the most garish, blinding color of orange you've ever seen. They're also light reflective, so they blind you at night, too. See here:
Pretty easy to understand, right? Don't use the dumpster unless you are a tenant of Mr. Brooks! Simple? Apparently not:
That ugly blue chair has been there for a month or so. Last week, Mr. Brooks decided to solve the problem the only way he knows how: He made another sign. Considering what it says, I really think it's going to be an effective tool:
"If you put this chair here, please get it up. Can't you read?"

One week later, the chair remains.

"It's all over, Jack!"

2008-10-01T19:10:00.007-04:00

You think they don't see you, but they do. And really, what else are they supposed to think? Torn apart from their brethren, stuck in the back of a crowded truck, and taken to some foreign market. There, they await their doom. Random and strange people will search through the lot of them, sometimes picking them up, sometimes rapping their fists on them, sometimes dropping them; eventually, they are bought and taken to a strange new home. All seems well for a little while, but then they spot you. You didn't come just to look, no. You've got a knife in your hand, and you mean business. With one hand, you hold them steady; with the other, you drive that knife deeply in and they have one last thought...

"It's all over, Jack!"

Of course I'm talking about pumpkins! What else would it have been?

It's October, finally, and that means fall. And fall is only the coolest time of year! But what is it that makes fall feel like fall? Falling temperatures? Falling leaves? Falling in love? Okay... I can take a hint, I'll spare you the stupid puns. Anyway, I was thinking about fall the other day and a little bit about how it's changed since I was a kid. Used to be that fall only meant three things: 1) School starts. 2) It's high time for allergies. 3) Halloween = lots of free candy.

In the reality of the present, I've come to find that: 1) Summer vacations don't apply to "grown ups". Why is it that I wanted to be an adult? 2) It's still high time for allergies. Viva Claritin-D! 3) Halloween still equals candy, but it's not exactly free. How many of us have gone to the store a few days before October 31st and snuck a few bags of treats into the shopping cart? "They're for the trick-or-treaters," you say. But deep down inside, you know that your house will be completely dark on Halloween. Any cute little kids that come to your front door, either dressed up as goblins, characters from Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, or superheroes, will all go away depressed and empty-handed. Meanwhile, you'll be barricaded in the back corner of your house, watching a movie in the dark and snacking on the candy that was supposed to be "for the young'uns".

You know what I'm talking about. Don't try to deny it.

So why do I bring all this up? I bring this up because on Tuesday night, I flexed my power as Man of the House and I made a decree.
"This year, the North Carolina Luhns will be carving pumpkins."
It's possible that we'll end up using the pumpkin guts for some practical purpose; perhaps pumpkin pie, more likely pumpkin spice cake. Maybe I'll roast the seeds and give them to someone who likes that kind of thing. Maybe. But my focus is the carving; no, not just carving, sculpting of a work of art. And not just work of art, singular. I'm going for at least two. Perhaps they'll be traditional, perhaps not. My creativity hasn't quite grasped the reality of what I'm trying to accomplish. I could go with some other, unorthodox, ideas I've found online, but I don't think I will.

Three of those ideas are worth being re-posted here, so take a look:
/\ Sick pumpkin. /\

/\ Pumpkin cannibalism. /\

/\ Pumpkin Pi. Pumpkin pie. Get it? Pi; pie? Ha ha... (yes, I'm a geek) /\

I know not what my pumpkins will look like, but they will be awesome.

Anybody up for a friendly, nationwide, family pumpkin carving contest? Let me know!

Science!

2008-09-27T10:47:00.002-04:00

Science is cool!

Everyone on this planet agrees with the above statement, whether the realize it or not. Sure, not all science is cool to all people. I mean, there's something out there for everyone; chemistry, physics, meteorology, astro-physics, geology, quantum-physics, horticulture, biology, a bunch of other ones I'm sure I'm forgetting, and finally, the coolest of them all: astronomy. You may look at that list and think, "But Joe, I'm not interested in any of those things... at all!" My response to that: You're lame, then.

Nah, just kidding. For anyone who still things science isn't cool, I have one photo that gives unequivocal proof of the coolness of science:
You know I'm right! If nothing else, you have to admit he had a great theme song! Bill Nye, the Science Guy (Bill Nyyyyyyeeeee....)

There's lots of great science out there, but unfortunately there's also lots of wasted science. Let me define my terms before I go into detail:
Good science = The study of how our world works, never losing sight of the fact that God made it all for a reason.
Bad science = Wasting time, effort and massive amounts of money on stupid theories about the genesis of the world, all in a vain attempt to justify our existence apart from an all powerful God.

Since there's so much good science, I'll instead provide an example of bad science: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

For those of you who don't know what it is, the LHC is the worlds largest particle smasher. See the big, tube-like section in the above picture? CERN (a European science / research hroup) built this thing underground in France. It's a 17 mile long particle accelerator that was built with the intention of recreating the conditions present a few miliseconds after the big bang. Scientists think they could disover new particles that are supposedly responsible for the creation of the world. Here's what I think will happen:
If you want some worthwhile science stuff to look at, check out NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. You'll have to ignore some of the off-the-wall 'explanations' behind some of the pictures, but it's a cool site that showcases the handiwork of our Awesome God.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

No Homers Club

2008-08-27T20:29:00.008-04:00

No updates for twelve days? I'm slack, I know. My motivation to do, well, just about anything hasn't been there lately. Call it the dog days of summer, lack of a vacation, laziness, or whatever; I just haven't been one for ambition in recent days. Whatever it is, one truth has emerged: I'm tired of people. I'm not tired of family members or my wonderful wife, but rather the general population outside of those select people. There's plenty of back story to it, but I don't really care to, nor do I have the energy to, go into it right now. Instead, I'll leave you with one of my newly crafted images that could be my logo for the week:
On a somewhat related note, here's a favorite Calvin and Hobbes strip of mine that seems pertinent:

Yeah. That's about it. I'll post something more upbeat and happy when I feel like it.

Renovations

2008-08-15T22:13:00.004-04:00

Any of you sharp-eyed readers out there should have noticed the new look of the blog. It was time for a change. The old look served its time well, but all web pages need to be refreshed from time to time. Visually, what you see is the most I can do without spending many hours studying the intricacies of HTML code. As such, my creative talents are thereby limited to a snappy header image and whatever English prose makes up the body of my posts. You may see some tweaking of colors and arrangement over the next few days, but have no fear; for the blog isn't going away. Hopefully this visual renovation will be accompanied by a more regular posting interval, and a higher quality of posted content.

On a somewhat related note, it is with sadness that I must announce that my current optical mouse is dying. Certain people who shall remain nameless, you know who you are, have had problems operating my computer's mouse for a long time. Tonight, for the first time in at least five years, I've experienced similar problems using the mouse. Jumpy movement, unregistered clicks, unwanted double, triple, even septuple clicks are all signs of a peripheral device gone awry. I'd put the life expectancy of the stalwart clicking device at less than two weeks. Sad times, indeed.

If I don't have a chance to say it later; farewell old friend, you've served me well.

Life Is Like A Mop

2008-08-15T02:43:00.006-04:00

"This is my new mop. George, my friend, he gave me this mop. It's a pretty good mop. It's not as good as my first mop, I miss my first mop, but this is still a good mop. Sometimes you just have to take what life give you, 'cuz life is like a mop. Sometimes life gets full of dirt and crud and bugs and hairballs and stuff and you gotta clean it out. You gotta stick it in here and rinse it off and start all over again. And sometimes, sometimes life sticks to the floor so bad, you know, a mop, a mop; it's not good enough, it's not good enough. You gotta get down there like with a toothbrush, you know, and you gotta really scrub 'cause you gotta get it off; you really gotta try to get it off. But if that doesn't work, if that doesn't work you can't give up. You gotta stand right up. You gotta run to a window and say, "Hey! These floors are dirty as heck, and I'm not gonna take it any more!"

Such inspiring words, suitable for almost any life situation!

If you checked the time stamp of this post, you read it right. I'm typing this out at 3AM because of my current, temporary, inability to sleep. That's all thanks to some recent issues I've been having with my back, which has been feeling progressively worse over the past month. The strange thing is that I can't think of any recent activity that would cause the pain. At first it was just a little discomfort. You know how it feels when you wake up and feel like you slept on something wrong all night? That's all it was at first. But whenever that happens, you usually feel better after waking up and stretching out a bit. That didn't happen. The 'morning stiffness' lasted all day. Then my back just started hurting, not all the time, but whenever I'd bend far forward or slouch back too much. After that it started to hurt when lifting or carrying normal everyday things. Now, now it hurts almost constantly. There's a dull, ache or burning pain in the lower back all day long, occasionally augmented by sharp shooting pains at random intervals.
So what cause all of this? My issues all started on one fateful Saturday morning; Saturday, January 13th, 2007, to be exact. Mandy and I were holding an "Awareness Day" at our church about Invisible Children, child sponsorship, and the war in Uganda that would feature food after our presentation. Mandy had already left to get things set up, and I was running a bit late getting ready. My duty was to cart some stuff over to the church, and bring the food with me. Most of what I needed was already in the car. All I had to do was pick up a casserole dish, put it in the car, and be on my merry way. Simple, right?

The one small problem was that I had parked the car too close to the carport, so I couldn't get the passenger side door all the way open to easily put the casserole dish on the front floor. Instead of being a simple movement up and down to placed the dish, I now had to pull off some contortionist moves, twisting and turning to fit the casserole dish and my upper body through the barely opened car door. It was hard, but I did it! And just when the bottom of that dish hit the car floor, I felt it: twinge. Ooh, my back didn't do that too often! Was is supposed to do that? It's just a little soreness, I thought; it'll be gone in a short while.

By the end of the day, I literally could not move. We got home from church, I sat down on the couch, and I could not move without the help of my wife. It took at least ten minutes for her to walk me 30 feet from the living room sofa to the bedroom.

So that's how it started. It's all the casserole dish's fault.

After some X-rays I had taken on Tuesday, I now know what my problems are: 1) Minimal trace multilevel Grade 1 retrolisthesis, 2-3mm, on 3 of the lower vertebrae in my lumbar spine. 2) Mild degenerative disc disease at L5-S1. 3) Mild levoscoliosis of the lumbar spine.

In English:
1) Your vertebrae are supposed to rest on one another with no overlap, no lip. Mine have a small 'stairway' thing going. In more scientific terms: "A retrolisthesis is a posterior displacement of one vertebral body with respect to the adjacent vertebrae". There's all sorts of images online if you Google the term.
2) The disc that separates the lowest vertebrae in my back from the next bone in line, the Sacrum (?), is showing premature degeneration. i.e. it's a bit thin for someone of my age.
3) If you stand behind someone at look at their back, their spine should be a straight line up and down; mine curves. That's not typically a good thing.

So there ya have it: more information than you probably wanted to know about my body. You already read it, you can't un-read it! Ha!

Long story short, I've got some work to do if I don't want to look like this guy:
Excellent!

First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence

2008-08-11T20:41:00.003-04:00

What is excellence?

ex·cel·lence
noun

1.	the fact or state of excelling; superiority; eminence

That definition comes, appropriately, from Dictionary.com. Strange kind of definition though, isn't it? I always thought that when defining a word, you couldn't use that word, or one of its derivatives to define it. In this case, the definition is about as useful as telling a blind guy that the sun is bright. Duh.

ex·cel
–verb (used without object)

1.	to surpass others or be superior in some respect or area; do extremely well

Now that's a bit more helpful, don't you think? Excellence is the act of doing something better than anyone else.

Why do I bring this up? I'm not too sure, honestly. I've been thinking a lot about creativity lately; about how everyone has at least some ounce of creativity and some way of expressing it. At least, I think everyone has a way of expressing creativity. Expressing creativity and excelling at it are two different things. Do they go hand in hand; being creative and excelling? Are they supposed to? Does it really matter at all? Is it counter-productive to attempt to excel in creative arts? Is it all a competition?

To help illustrate my point, let's try this exercise: Think of someone you personally know to be a good artist. Now imagine if the two of you were told to draw the same subject after being given the same tools, same paper, and same time frame. If you're anything like myself, you'd do your best to draw it, but would never be able to put out of your mind that your piece of art is going to look like chicken scratch compared to your artsy companion. I could spend hours, days, weeks; all working on a masterpiece of my own design, but when I compare it to the work of a more gifted peer, my 'masterpiece' looks more like a great big piece of crud.

You know what I'm talking about, yes?

All my life I've believed that everyone on this world can do something better than anyone else; that everyone has at least one great talent. I don't know why I believe that, but I always have. There's just one problem I've been having with myself recently: I don't really excel at anything. Computers? Nope. Video games? Even though I've invested way too much time in them, nope. Guitar? Ha! Tried that, nope. Drawing, painting, sketching, etc? Nope. Plants? That's a slim possibility... Public speaker? HA! Athlete? Only if belching is a sport. Writing? That probably falls into the same category as art, in that there can never be one single person who's noticeably better than everyone else out there. But still, to be good enough that one is noticeably better than most; that's something.

Why is it that I search for something to excel at? It's not some masculine-driven desire to prove myself better than everyone else. And if that's the case, then perhaps my use of the word 'excel' is misplaced. No, I don't look to be great at something just so I can say that I'm the best. I've no desire or need to be in the spotlight. Perhaps my own drive is just a quest for significance; importance. But it's not quite that, either. It's not about me. I've learned long ago that focusing pursuits only on yourself result in wasted time and feelings of emptiness.

God has all of us here for a reason; that our lives are here to serve a purpose not for ourselves, but for some divine reason that we may not understand until our time on Earth is done. I don't need to know what my divine reason for existence is but I would like to know what I need to do, what I need to focus on, for God to work through me. I'm not a great vessel, but God can do whatever He wants to through me. My job is to put my effort into something that seems ordinary, so He can turn it into something extraordinary.

My dilemma is: what do I focus on? What can I do, excellently, for Him?

Roughing It - Day 12

2008-07-17T19:24:00.005-04:00

Today is a landmark day. Today had brought forth an idea into the world that shall change the lives of all who have had a birthday. And not just those people having a birthday, but those who help others celebrate birthdays. The lives of chefs, grocers, firemen and birthday party attendees shall be forever changed. For today, I have had an idea for a revolutionary invention:

Flammable, edible frosting. Forget the candles, set the whole cake on fire! After the lucky birthday person makes a wish, extinguish the cake and eat it as normal.

Pretty awesome, huh?

Just think how much more dramatic the birthday pictures could be!

Today was my 24th birthday. It was like any other normal day. I didn't make a big scene at work; I don't think anyone even knew about it. Nobody brought it up, and I certainly wasn't going to walk in and out of the office proclaiming, "It's my birthday!" That kind of thing gets annoying. It really doesn't even feel like a birthday for some reason. Some years you'll be happy to increase in age by one, other years you'll get depressed that another year went by and nothing significant occurred. This one slipped by quietly without much of a reaction.

I did get to wear a birthday suit!
A Tyvek, chemical resistant suit, that is. Just like the one that guy is wearing. Although I have to admit, I didn't look as happy or as dashing as that fellow does. I also had to wear a NIOSH-approved organic vapor-filtering respirator and safety glasses, so I probably looked a bit more threatening than him, too.

My dinner was a fine entree of Arby's roast beef and a side of curly fries, topped off with a Jamocha shake. Classy! The entertainment for the evening was scheduled to be the movie Event Horizon, but Netflix delivered a cracked disc so I watched some episodes of The Office online instead.

That's all I have to say about that.

Be sure to voice your opinion in my new poll! Each week, I'll be asking a unique question most of y'all would never think to ask. It might be interesting to see what the majority of my 4 readers have to say.

Random!

2008-07-16T22:01:00.002-04:00

Random question of the day: Am I a dork for adding the Ghostbusters theme song to my online music playlist?

Roughing It - Day 11

2008-07-16T20:19:00.004-04:00

Y'know, I'm starting to see the meaning to the phrase 'Your life is what you make of it'. Most of the decisions we make are not about how you can make something happen, but how you react to something you couldn't control. I'll provide an example of something that happened after church tonight: One of the older ladies at church was aksing me how I was doing with Mandy gone and tossed in the comment that was somewhere along the lines of, "Well it doesn't look you've lost any weight, so you must not be having a problem feeding yourself!"

Now, there are a plerthora of ways people could respond to that. Here are a few of the options:
- She thinks I can't cook!
- Is she saying I'm fat?
- Does she really think I'm so helpless without my wife that I can't cover my basic survival instints?

This particular incident didn't really bother me, because I knew the person making it and that it was a comment made in good humor. However, I can't escape the feeling that I'm becoming known as 'the guy who can't survive without his wife'. It's not that a ton of people are making comments left and right. It's just one of those 'vibes' that you pick up from people. It seems like it's crossed the line from, 'Aww, he misses his wife. That's cute.' and gone over to, 'Wow, he's pathetic when his wife's gone.'

I don't mind that people know I miss Mandy. I love her, and therefore I miss her when she's not around. What else am I supposed to do? It boggles my mind to think that anyone could be away from their spouse for two weeks and not miss them.

The whole modern perception of marriage bothers me, really. Too many people treat it as a whimsical thing instead of the serious commitment that it is. Divorce? It's wrong. Marriage is not a contract, it's not an agreement, it's not a convenience, it's not 'just something you do'. Marriage is a sacred covenant that is symbolic of Jesus' commitment to the church; it lasts for the lifetimes of the parties involved. If you can't keep that covenant for the rest of your life, then don't get married. It's that simple.

But I digress, I guess. What was my original point? Oh yeah... I made it already. Normally, this is where a blog post would end. However I have one more question to ask you: What is the differance between a boat, a sloop, and a yacht? Before I looked up the answer on Google, I thought it was an important question. Now that I know what the answer is, it's turned out to be an anticlimax. I thought it'd be funnier than it turned out to be. Oh well.

In an attempt to salvage this post, I'll endorse one of my favorite music artists: Matthew West!
Check out some of his music on the official website.

Roughing It - Day 9

2008-07-14T20:17:00.003-04:00

"Here I go again, on my own..."

My parents went home this morning, and now it's back to being on my own. It rather stinks how these visits seem to be over in a blink of an eye. There are at least 6 or 8 things that I wanted to do with my folks, but didn't have the time to. It's the downside of living 800 miles away, I guess... Hope I get to see them again soon!

After dropping them off at the airport, I had some other errands to run which took a little longer than I expected. The good news is that I don't really have to worry about buying groceries for the week. There's still most of a casserole, one grilled chicken breast, 3/4 of a birthday cake and other goodies to sustain myself off of until the weekend.

The good news is that I was able to talk to Mandy today! After 8 days, I reached the point that I couldn't wait too much longer to talk to her, so I gave her a call at about 1:15 AM this morning. She's doing fine. Having fun, but ready to come home. I asked if she had any requests for when she got back, and her response was a predictable, "A fridge full of Sprite!" I don't know about a whole fridge full, but I'll definitely get some. She also wants Domino's pizza; ham, pineapple, and Canadian bacon. We may have to arrange that.
It's actually pretty remarkable if you think about it, that we have the ability to call someone on the other side of the world over the phone. Punch in 15 numbers, wait a minute or so and you hear someone greeting you in words you don't quite understand. That coolness comes at a price of $1.50 a minute, however. Even though it was a relatively 'short' phone call, it still cost me $34. It was worth it.

The rest of the day was so-so. Worked on putting together one of Mandy's surprises this afternoon. She's always wanted one of those organizer things for our bathroom that fits over the toilet, so I got one on Friday. With any luck, we'll be able to verify that we actually have counter tops in our bathroom, and not just mounds of stuff...
Tomorrow, I've got to start making a list of what I need to do before Saturday. Thankfully, the list should be pretty small. Now, I think I'll go to bed since I did only get 4 hours of sleep last night...

Roughing It - Day 7 & 8

2008-07-13T23:43:00.005-04:00

Well it seems as though I'm a bit behind, eh? In relation to time, yes. In relation to quantity of events, no. Saturday was a pretty nice, lazy day. I managed to sleep in until 8:30 or so (woo!) and didn't have to go anywhere or do anything in particular. I did venture out to Wal Mart and bought a second home phone. This time, it's a cordless with a ringer volume of 'ear splitting'. That means there's a slight chance I'll hear it! Upon taking it out of the box, I was a little surprised at its size: we've had cell phones bigger than this thing:
Sunday was pretty typical. Took my parents to Berry's Grove for the first time. I had to sit in the sound cubicle again, but it's all good I guess. Rev. Tim Bowes preached a great message from Romans 1:16, 'I Am Not Ashamed'. T'was a good, convicting, encouraging message to hear. It's really gotten me to do a bit of thinking about how this past week has been.

My wife has been gone since last Saturday afternoon. I have received three emails and one voice message from her in the eight and a half days she's been gone. To any of you who know what it's like to be separated from your spouse for any period of time, you know those messages aren't much. I miss her. I miss her because I love her. I miss her more than she could know. And even though it's not a fun thing to bring to mind, this week has made me think, 'what would I do if she was ever taken out of the world?'

After thinking about it, talking to God and hearing from His Word, I've come to a conclusion. If Mandy were taken out of this world, I would survive. Not because she means less to me than I thought she did; far from it! I would survive because my purpose for life is bigger than my spouse, no matter how much I love her. My purpose for existence is to honor God. He's the one who put me here, and he's the one who gave me a more wonderful companion than I could have ever asked for. God has given all of us more than we could ever possibly have need for, and it's important for us not to value the blessings more than He who gave them to us.

So many people live their lives having only temporal things for fulfilment. Even if those things last a lifetime, our lifetime is just a moment in eternity. How will you spend those moments? Don't waste them on yourselves. Live for God, and don't be ashamed.
"For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek." Romans 1:16

Now believe me when I say that I'm preaching to myself as much as anybody, but anyone who claims to know Jesus has got to be better at living it in public. I don't think I really have that strong of a faith, and I certainly don't feel like a capable spiritual leader, nor do I have great evangelistic talents that come naturally to me. Sometimes I feel like my idea of witnessing is checking the 'Christian' box in a religious survey. Why is that? It's not because God isn't powerful enough to use me. It's because I've been content keep God in a box, ashamed to let His light shine through me. Think about any conversations you've had with a co-worker or friend when you thought about bringing up some mention of Jesus, but decided not to just to remain socially acceptable. That's just a way to say that 'fitting in' is more important than proclaiming God's truth.

We've got to do better. I've got to do better. If God will remind us during those quiet times that He's the reason we're here, we owe it to Him to tell others that's the reason they're here, too.

Roughing It - Day 6

2008-07-11T21:42:00.004-04:00

After living in North Carolina for some three (?) years, today would be the first time I actually made the trip out to Plant Delights Nursery (PDN). For those of you who have never heard of PDN, it's a mail-order plant nursery that specializes in hostas and rare perennials. Their website is worth taking a look if you're in the market for some cool plants:
Plant Delights Nursery
Any of the driving directions I'd seen for the place have it located South of Raleigh. And they were right, the nursery is South of Raleigh. Way, way, way south of Raleigh. Before we left I estimated a rough travel time of 45 minutes or so. It actually took us about an hour and twenty minutes for 60 miles of driving. We started the journey in Timberlake, out in the sticks. We drove through Durham, and then Raleigh, and then the sticks south of Raleigh before getting there. I guess you could say it was a well-rounded journey, scenery-wise. To top it all off, the place was small enough that I drove right past it! When I think of a big, popular mail-order nursery, I picture a business with some size to it. Not so for PDN. The property front wasn't much bigger than some residential lots, though the property did expand a bunch toward the rear.

There's really not much I can say about the greenhouses, since if you've seen one or two plant nurseries, then you know what to expect. I will say that even though the plants PDN has to offer are expensive, the size and quality of the plants is worth it. The stuff they sell is big and healthy. Not like some other nurseries I've had experience with... *cough* Owen Nursery *cough*

Here's a picture of one of the shadehouses:
There were a lot of simply gorgeous plants there; enough to make me wish that A) I could afford to buy more than one at a time, and B) that I actually had a permanent yard to plant them in.

Since Mandy and I both like to take close up pictures of Echinacea, I couldn't resist this one:
The actual gardens around PDN, both Tony Avent's (the owner) personal garden and the Juniper Level Botanic Garden, were a bit of a disappointment, I thought. Yeah, they had lots of cool specimens of plants you don't typically see, but there was too much for the space there.

Some gardens are average, using normal plants and techniques without either great sucess or severe detriment.

Other gardens use space and specimen plants to show off the uniqe aspects of every plant present.

Othergardensaresopacked thatyoucan't eventellwhatonearth isgoingon becauseplantsofallkinds arejustthrownintheground andlooklikeabig jumbledmess.

The gardens there, they were just... blah. They had every plant imaginable, and that was the problem: there was one plant of every kind. There was no repetition of texture, themes, or colors. There was no space; everything seemed cramped. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. This picture is the best I could do at tying to capture an area that wasn't too overgrown:
All in all, I do recomend buying plants from PDN because of the size and quality. But if you're ever in the Raleigh / Durham area and want to visit a nice garden, I'd skip the whole PDN experience. Instead I'd suggest going to Duke Gardens, the JC Raulston Arboretum and the North Carolina Botanical Garden (UNC).

I'll close the gardening topic with another picture:

My parents and I continued the day out with a trip to Sal's for some pizza buffet, a stop at Bed, Bath and Beyond for a surprise for Mandy, and concluded at Cook Out for the mandatory milkshakes.

Later in the night we watched 'Bee Movie', the one with the voice of Jerry Sienfeld. It was deifnately an amusing tale, as long as you can overlook the obvious horticultural oversights. My two main beefs with the movie:
- Pollinating a flower will hasten its decline, not make it look better.
- Dead flowers cannot be pollinated. Period.
If you can forgive those egregious errors, you'll enjoy it. Even if you can't forgive 'em, it's still an okay movie.

Roughing It - Day 5

2008-07-10T22:05:00.003-04:00

Day five has not been a happy day for me. It's the first day in a long time that I actually slept in past 7:30, and I'm sorry I did.

Mandy called at 6:58, and I missed it.

To help you understand what happened, here's a bit of background info: A) We keep the home phone in the office, which is in the middle of the house. B) I have at least a 40% hearing loss. Combine those two pieces of information, and you'll know that when I'm in the bedroom I can't hear the phone ringing. It doesn't matter whether or not I have my hearing aids in; it doesn't even matter if I'm awake or not. I have never heard the phone ringing in the office when I'm in the bedroom.

Of course, this morning at 6:58 Mandy called the home phone. And I missed it. :(

I'm not sure why she didn't call my cell phone instead of the home phone; I'm not sure why she didn't try to call both... But I'm sure she had a valid reason. It's just made me really sad that I missed a chance to talk to her. She did send me a personal email, but it's not the same as hearing her voice.

The rest of the day was okay. Went to Hog Heaven for lunch and did some grocery shopping at Wal Mart... came home and cleaned up the office a little bit more... closed out the day by grilling some chicken for dinner and just hanging out with my folks. It's now 10:20, so I think I'll go to bed. After I move the phone into the bedroom.

There should be some cool picture updates tomorrow, as we're planning on heading to Plant Delights Nursery and the Juniper Level Botanic Gardens over in Raleigh.

Roughing It - Day 4

2008-07-10T21:55:00.003-04:00

Yes, I know I'm a day late. Day 4 was pretty busy on all fronts. It's amazing how much more complicated it is to take time off from work when you've got managerial responsibilities. On top of that, one of my growers was out for the day so I had to cover his responsibilities as well. All in all, everything that needed to happen did and I left work in a timely manner. After all, I had to pick up my parents at the airport around 7PM.

Getting to the airport was 'fun'.

A rather large band of severe thunderstorms decided to roll in just as I left the house. And wouldn't you know, those storms took the relative same trajectory as my drive to the airport. There's nothing quite like driving to the airport in rush hour traffic during severe weather! Plenty of 2-lane streets had one lane completely submerged under 2 inches or running water. Lightning was flashing and thunder was rumbling every few minutes. The wiper blades were going as fast as they could, and it was still impossible to see anything of detail out the window. It took me an hour, but I still made it to the airport on time!

Mom and Dad's plane didn't! Well, the plane made it to the airport but it couldn't land in the weather, so they were in a holding pattern for about 30 minutes or so. Add to that the 40 minutes or so we had to wait for the checked baggage to arrive at the carousel, and it was 8:30 before we were on the way home. But even that's not too late for a milkshake from CookOut! :) We all made it back home safe and sound, without a problem.

Roughing It - Day 3

2008-07-08T21:14:00.004-04:00

So this is day three. ...it's only been three days?

There's really not much new to report on the day. Work was work; which is a really odd thing for me to say, since I love what I do. I mean, people pay me to grow plants. How cool is that? Y'all should know I don't have the attention span to look at a computer screen for eight hours a day, and I'm way too fidgety to sit at a desk that whole time. The highlights of my day included finding a large population of thrips (both Western Flower Thrips and Greenhouse Thrips) on the crop of Hakonechloa that wasn't doing so well. That really wasn't so much a highlight, since the presence of the insects is a pretty bad thing, but it's the principle of the issue. Some people spend their days at work searching for computer viruses; I spend my days at work hunting and eradicating insects that carry plant viruses.

And for those of you who have no clue what a thrip is: It's an insect that's pretty bad news for greenhouse growers. They like to hide out in clumps of new plant tissue (flower buds, new leaf shoots, ect.) and suck juices from the plant, oftentimes deforming new growth; and in severe infestations, killing the plant. Here's a picture of what its' different life stages look like (pupa on the far left, adult on the far right):

If you want to know how big these things are, take a look at a nearby book. It doesn't really matter what kind of a book it is, let's say it's a novel. Open it up and find a comma somewhere. That's about how big your adult thrip is.

My time at home was a bit less productive than in recent days. All I did this afternoon was clean out the Ion. It only took me a little longer than an hour or so. The rest of my time was spent eating dinner and relaxing. That's all I have to say about that.

Only one more day to go until a five-day weekend of hanging out with my parents. :)

Roughing It - Day 2

2008-07-07T21:02:00.005-04:00

Yawn: That sums up my day in one word.

This morning when my alarm clock went off, visions of slicing it in half with my hand, karate style, flashed through my head. Sparks would fly everywhere as the shrill wake-up noise is silenced once and for all. My head would float back down to the soft pillow and I'd be able to sleep past 7:50 for the first time in a few months.

But the reality was: I had to get up. After two nights of not much sleep, I was doing good to make it through the day without passing out. Why haven't I been getting much sleep? It's Mandy's fault. :p It's not so much that I'm worried about her to the point that it's keeping me up, it's more that I've gotten so used to her being with me and it's disrupting my sleep habits. Most nights I'll just stretch out my arm to the right and she'll be there somewhere. The past two nights it's just been emptiness. And this is just day two of fourteen! I miss her...

Work was work; typical Monday morning stuff. Check in with my employees, check on all the greenhouses, see if the bugs we found last week are dead, figure out how to deal with a rare fungal issue on the Hakonechloa, etc.

The more interesting / frustrating part of my day occurred at home. I couldn't help but recall a line from yesterday's post:
"It's just a seal, so hopefully it will be an uneventful repair."
Ha! If there's anything I should know about home improvement by now, it's that there is no such thing as an uneventful home repair.
-The first problem came when I tried to remove the bolts that attached the tank to the seat: the bolts were corroded enough that the heads came off, leaving only the threaded shafts and no way to remove them.
-The second problem was the seal between the tank and the seat. It's obviously had problems before; there was a whole bunch of old, crusty caulk beneath the tank. The repair kit I'd bought came with a seal, but it was too thick. I didn't have the part I needed, so I went to Brook's Hardware store which is only 1.3 miles away. They didn't have it. So I had to go to Lowes, which is about 7 miles away. They did have what I needed. It cost me a total of $2.07. Seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for a part that costs 2 bucks. I'd have felt better if it was something that looked a little cooler, or was a bit pricier, but chasing around for a 2 dollar rubber band? That's annoying.
-The other problem was dealing with the hose connection that supplies the toilet with water. Getting it apart was easy enough, but putting it back together was a pain in the butt. It took me at least 12 minutes of fiddling to get the thing back together without cross-threading it. Metal and PVC were not meant to go together.

All in all, the bathroom was restored to working order and cleaned. I'm sure mom and dad will appreciate that in a few days.

Come to think about it, there's only one way that my afternoon could have been simplified. Can you think what it is?

Roughing It - Day 1

2008-07-06T09:06:00.008-04:00

9:06 AM -
Welcome to the first in a series of new posts, starring me: the Plucky Protagonist. In my earlier blogging days, whenever I was left alone for a considerable amount of time I would chronicle my experiences of living on my own. Titled 'Life as a Bachelor', the posts had pictures and text that covered the events of my day, or whatever it was I cared to write about. Since I am married now, the old 'Bachelor' title doesn't apply. Finding a new name was harder than I thought it might be, so 'Roughing It' was the best I could come up with. One online dictionary defines the term like this:

"To live without the usual comforts and conveniences"

It's close enough of a description to fit, I think.

3:47 PM -
Here I am, taking a break from some cleaning. It's been a busy day, and it's hard to believe it's well into the afternoon already. I couldn't sleep well last night and was awake and doing stuff by 6:30 AM. By 7:30 I was in Wal-Mart picking up some Mini-Wheats and other items needed for repairs around the house.

It seems both toilets in the house decided to have problems at the same time. First, the one in the guest bathroom started leaking from the tank. It's just a seal, so hopefully it will be an uneventful repair. The toilet in our bathroom had a broken handle, which was replaced easily enough.

The final repair was to my computer, where I managed to break my sound card the other night. Yeah, I know it sounds weird and it is. I use only headphones, and those headphones are plugged into the sound card via an extension cord. What happened was the extension cord got caught on the office chair as I was rolling away from the desk, therefore pulling my CPU tower by the headphone jack, which then snapped off. No, it's not the smartest thing I've ever done. The fix was easy enough; the hard part was shelling out 30 bucks for a new sound card.

This afternoon I've been doing a bit of cleaning. It really feels a bit backward, since I would expect that any time a married person's spouse leaves for a while, the one left behind would do the cleaning right before the get back, not right after they leave. It's not like I'm planning on making a huge mess anytime soon, so all should be well. The only problem I'm having right now is with the hobby room; and that means scrapbook stuff. How on earth is a guy supposed to put his wife's scrapbook stuff where it belongs? Take a look at how things are now. All of my stuff is taken care of; I wish I'd taken a picture before I did anything...

I may have to make another trip to Wal Mart, or at least to Dollar General for some more 'storage solutions'.

6:29 PM -
The hobby room is finished, and thankfully I did not have to venture out and buy anything. It's still not great, but it's about as good as it can be in our house.

In our time here, I've noticed a few things about where we live: A) For one person, it's a great fit. B) For two people, it's a tight fit for both people and all of their stuff. Either because the house is just too small, or there are virtually no options for storage. We've got three closets; two of them are no bigger than a phone booth. C) The floor isn't level. I'm guessing it's not a good thing when you can walk across a room and feel where the floor dips or rises.

Still, it's a decent place to live. It's affordable, in a safe, quiet area, and it's served our needs well as Mandy and I are starting our lives together. We;d both like a house soon, but with no means to make a down payment of any substance, we're kind of stuck where we are for a while.

Now I've got to get some light dinner while I take a short break from productive tasks. Before the end of the day, it's my goal to put away all the laundry. After that's done, there won't be a single piece of dirty laundry in the house. "How can I do it", you ask? How can I get all of the laundry done in a single day? It's really simple.

As it come out of the dryer, it goes on top of the bed. If I want to get any sleep tonight, I've got to fold all of the laundry first. It's simple!

Robots

2008-06-26T21:12:00.006-04:00

Who doesn't like robots? I, for one, love 'em! Of course, I don't own one. Sad thing, that. Here it is in the middle of 2008, well into the 21st century, and robots still are not a household thing. What about all of those 'futuristic' movies and cartoons that folks saw in the 50s that promised not only robots, but flying cars and moon cities by the year 2000? Compared to all of those lofty dreams and man made plans, we're still livin' in the stone age. If you disagree with me, let me ask you a few questions:
- Is the primary source of your interior illumination still the ol' fashioned incandescent light bulb? It's been around since 1879! Where's all the neon?
- Do you still cook your pizza in ye olde convection oven, or microwave-emitting box?
- Do you still drive a car, powered by the same old fossil fuel?
- Do you still have to drive, period? Where are the instantaneous teleportation devices ("Beam me up, Scotty!")?

Why all of this talk about the 21st century being so technologically advanced, or "the future" as they like to call it? Pffft.

Here's just a few things they need to bring to the mainstream before we as humans can consider ourselves as living in "the future".

Lightsabers - It's the first thing on the list for good reason. If you wonder why we need it in everyday life, I'm not sure my explanations will be of any help to you. Sure, we may not have to strike down an evil Sith but you have to think outside the box. Ever try to chop down a tree with an ax? It's hard work! Using a lightsaber has all sorts of horticultural implications. Or how about uses in the kitchen? Imagine it's Thanksgiving dinner, and the turkey has just come out of the old fashioned oven, looking all juicy and delicious. You're surrounded by close family, all of their attention is focused on you; you and your turkey carving skills are under close scrutiny. What happens if you're handed a dull knife?

There's no such thing as a dull lightsaber. Think about it.

Flying Cars - Maybe the won't be called "cars" exactly, but that's not the point. Is your commute to work the same every day? What do you see of the world from behind the wheel during that routine drive? Every day is the same old boring thing. If you're like me, the only noteworthy events on your commute are something like this:
Monday - Ooh, dead possum.
Tuesday - Dead possum now has flies.
Wednesday - Hey, it moved!
Thursday - The carcass is pretty decomposed by now.
Friday - Eww. I hope someone cleans that up soon.

It seems a rather anticlimactic way to describe one's routine experiences in an automobile some 94 years after Henry Ford made them affordable. Where did the fun go?

Flying to work every morning would be more fun, don't you agree? Just because it's rainy and dreary when your alarm clock goes off doesn't mean rain and clouds are all you have to see on the way to work. Simply pull back on the control stick and soar above the clouds for a peek at the sun before punching in.

If that's not enough for you, just picture yourself driving a flying DeLorean every day. Cool huh?

Ray Guns - Yes, the use of guns can be violent, but who can't say that ray guns are cool? If you think about it, most sci-fi ray guns (or laser guns, or blasters, etc.) are a step back from current ballistics weapons. Weapons nowadays fire very small bullets at high rates of speed; if someone shoots a gun, you'd be hard pressed to track the bullet to the point of impact, let alone jump out of the way. Most of the future weapons fire some sort of energized particle that's very visible and relatively slow moving.

But that doesn't mean they're not cool.

Perhaps my affinity for lasers, lights and ray guns is also related to my love for lights of all kinds (except florescent lights; nobody likes those!). Or perhaps it's just because I'm a huge fan of sci-fi. Either way, I can appreciate all imaginative interpretations of future weapons of war.

Except for the guys who did the weapons in Star Trek. Man, what were they thinking? "Set your phasers for stun." I bet that line really made a Klingon shake in his boots. The name "phaser" is lame enough, but did they really have to make them look like handheld vacuum cleaners? "Hey Scotty, grab your DustBuster, the Captain's got cookie crumbs on his uniform." sure, you may think I'm stepping over the line but I offer you photographic proof to support my opinion.

Deadly weapon of the future, or helpful portable tool for cleaning up small messes? You decide:

And now we get to the core issue. What the world needs now in order to be truly sci-fi is robots.

Now I'm not talking about simple, automated machines that assist in manufacturing and industrial fields. I'm referring to actual, intelligent, moving, speaking, interactive robots. They've appeared in almost every good sci-fi movie or novel ever made. Unfortunately robots are also subject to typical stereotypes. The three main types of robots out there are Funny, Evil, or Practical.

Funny (at least, that was the intention) = Johnny 5
Why is he funny? His version of an insult: "Your mother was a snow blower!"

Evil = The Terminator
Why is he evil? He's the Terminator. Duh.

Practical = R2D2
Why is he practical? He can hot wire anything, he's got any tool you'd ever need, and he can fly. What more could you want? It's like someone dumped every practical object into a garbage can and then it turned into R2.

As it is in the current day, we're still a long way from having any interactions with those robots in day to day life. And if you do it's probably due to lots of smoke and mirrors; the whole "man behind the curtain" thing. In this case, it's more like "the man in the garbage can".

All in all, robots are fun. Even though they aren't real, yet, they do good by provoking the imagination of kids of all ages. If all goes according to plan, I'm taking my wife to see Wall-E tomorrow. From all of the video clips I've seen so far, it looks like Wall-E could very well become my favorite robot ever (sorry, R2). If you haven't seen any clips yet, click on the link at the bottom of this post. Even if you don't like Wall-E, it'll be easy to see why I do.

Wall-E movie trailers at Apple.com

Cat Food

2008-06-25T19:17:00.004-04:00

It's been a while since my last post. For that, I apologize. In effort to make it up to the faithful few of my readers, I'll let you in on a little tidbit: My cat likes to eat Cheez Doodles. Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself:

You've seen the proof. Can't say I didn't tell you so.

My next real post is in the works and should be up no later than Friday night. Thanks to all of y'all who do read my blog, and if you have any topics you like to see me tackle just let me know!

Trying New Things - Part I

2008-06-13T20:06:00.010-04:00

Hello one and all and welcome to my second post since I switched web browsers to FireFox 3. It's much faster than IE7! If you're wondering why I tried a different browser, let me ask you a question: Does your web-surfing experience include frequent instances of you asking, to nobody in particular, "is this page ever going to load?" That's how it was for me before FireFox. Try it out, it's faster than a fox with a case of the runs that caught on fire while running for the bathroom. Yeah, that's fast.

This entry has been inspired by a very similar post on my wife's blog. Keep on reading to find out about some new things I've tried, that I may or may not have ever thought I'd do.

Eaten at a Japanese 'Performance Cooking' Restaurant - Kurama's in Chapel Hill was quite a cool experience. Most of y'all have been to one already, where you sit around the big grill and a Japanese chef pulls off tricks while cooking your meal in front of you. My favorite part, which Mandy won't let me try at home, was the onion volcano.

Roller Coasters - Now I don't remember what my very first roller coaster experience was, but if I had to guess it probably took place at some county fair in Minnesota way back in the late 80s. Any of those rides couldn't have been anything bigger than some cutesy little bug-themed railroad kind of thing. You know the ones I mean, with a small oval track that has a maximum 5-feet of vertical travel. That early stuff wasn't too significant. The first significant coaster I ever rode was Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

It was scary. Not only were you stuck in a runaway mine train car, you were whipping though caves and around dinosaur bones and past erupting geysers and all sorts of crazy stuff. It was one intense ride. At least, it seemed like it was when I was 6 years old. Reports say that I didn't handle that one too well. My sister claims I had a death-grip on the restraining bars while screaming "I don't like this!" through the duration of the ride. I have little memory of the events. But for a glimpse of what I went though, here's a video of the ride in question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyTuBWxzSQA

So yeah, I guess it really wasn't that bad. Maybe.

In spite of the trauma that coaster may have inflicted on me in my childhood, I didn't let that stop me from trying, or being forced by other people to try, other roller coasters. The most intense ride I've experienced is the Mr. Freeze at Six Flags St. Louis. Big Thunder Mountain got to a top speed of, say 40 - 45 mph, maybe? Mr. Freeze sneezes at that speed. This is a coaster that uses electromagnetic propulsion (LIM) to launch a train along the track instead of a lift hill. That kind of propulsion can get you going fast; think 70 mph in 3.8 seconds. Take a look and see if you think I freaked out or not (make sure the volume is turned down before you watch the video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tA9MSc1NU8

The one time I rode it, I think I started screaming before the train left the station and didn't stop until after it had parked.

Eaten Tofu - Pure white, cubed, jiggly 'stuff' is not an acceptable meat substitute. Period. That's all I have to say about that.

Fire a Shotgun - I guess this is either common or uncommon depending on where you live. The guys I work with, southerners, were surprised to find out that I, a born 'Yankee', had never fired a gun before; so one day after work we went out to a dirt road to shoot some random objects (blocks of wood, cans, etc.). The first gun I ever fired was a single-round 20 gauge shotgun aimed at an empty coffee can about 25 feet or so away. The cool thing was that I didn't miss! As you can see, the coffee can was rather damaged.
That coffee can had been sitting on my desk for almost a year as a memento to my first experience with firearms. Now that I have a picture of it, the coffee can is in the garbage can. If I had taken a picture of it sooner, it might have freed up some much-needed desk space. Why I didn't think of that months ago is beyond me!

The second gun I fired was a 12 gauge pump-action shotgun. You can see slight differences between the round size in the above picture. The smaller the gauge, the bigger the round; 20 gauge is yellow and the 12 gauge is green. The picture below shows some difference between the guns. On the 12 gauge, you put four or five rounds into the gun through an opening in the bottom, and after a round is fired you 'pump' the handle to eject the spent shell casing out the silver door on the side and at the same time that mechanism loads a fresh round into the firing chamber. On the 20 gauge you have to load and eject the shells one at a time.
Having fired guns, I do have a greater respect for what they're capable of. Both guns had a bit of kick to them, and while they didn't knock me to my feet, they're nowhere near as easy or 'smooth' to use as is shown in most movies. While I'm not in a rush to go out and buy one, I won't rule out owning a firearm in the future. My preference would probably be for a rifle; ideally, a fully restored World War II era M1 Garand but that's quite a pricey proposition.

Belch the ABC's - Officially, I haven't gotten all the way through in one sweep but I did make it up to 'm'. Am I cool or what?

Eat Hot Food... At A Bad Time - Most guys have an ego thing when it comes to dares or bets. Dare me to do something, or bet I won't, and there's a good chance I'll try to pull it off provided it's not too extreme. My least intelligent move to prove my worth came after I was challenged to eat a Hungarian Hot Wax pepper. By itself. Inside of a retail garden center. Where I was currently employed. And at that moment, I was on the clock.

You can see where this is headed.

I, stupidly, take a huge bite of said pepper, chomping down about half of it in 20 seconds. "It's not so bad" I think to myself. It had the texture of a bell pepper, though the juice burned a slight bit. That's all it had, right? Just a slight kick while chewing? Ha!

Funny thing about hot peppers is that the 'hot' feeling doesn't kick in for at least a minute or two after you've eaten it. Needless to say, I spent the next forty minutes running back and forth between working on retail duties and drinking inordinate amounts from the water fountain. The sad part is that every time I went for a drink of water I had to walk past the checkout counter, where my manager was stationed for the day. Thankfully, she took the incident in good humor and I did not receive a warning.

The sad part is that this pepper only scores a 4-5,000 on the scoville scale (a measure of how hot a pepper is). For more on the scoville scale, check out this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale

One day, I hope to eat a raw a habanero just to say I've done it. Unless I've done it already and the trauma was so intense that I forgot the entire situation. That wouldn't be good. Maybe it looked like this?
Drive a Vehicle With Manual Transmission - It's not as hard as you might think. I learned on a pickup truck at work. Sure, I stalled out, burned out, peeled out and ground gears a lot when I first tried. Eventually I got the hang of it, and could drive it around just like any other old vehicle. It does seem like a hassle and I definitely wouldn't want it on any vehicle I buy, but it's nice to know how to do it.

Wow, remembering and typing out all of this is taking longer than I thought it would. It looks like this will have to be a multi-part post. We'll see how long it takes to get the next parts posted; the next few days will be very busy since it's VBS week at Berry's Grove. But just to give you a reason to come back, here's a list of things things I've tried that you can expect to read about in the near future:
Operate Heavy Equipment
Know What 'The Wizard' Felt Like - Referring to the 1989 movie with Ben Savage
Moving Cross - Country
Lived in a Dance Studio
Given a Cat a Zerbert
Met Third Day
Got Married

Stay tuned for more!

Politics in 2008 - Part I

2008-06-12T19:27:00.007-04:00

It's 2008. Know what that means? Yeah, you got it; it's election year. If you're not thrilled at that thought, you're not alone. Something I've observed in my life is that the older I get, the less appealing presidential elections are. Back when I was younger it was kind of entertaining; all I really saw it as was a popularity contest between the 'good guy' and the 'bad guy'. Either it was a battle of the 'good' and 'bad' or at least the 'wrinkly, old and ugly' vs. the 'young stinker'. It was entertaining in some form or another, it had to be because I was a kid!

Nowadays I'm able to understand the nature of elections and the twisted game that has become modern politics; and it's not a fun thing. These days, most of the individuals grabbing the headlines hold only popular opinions, with no personal convictions of beliefs. The motto of most politicians could very well be "If it's popular, I support it. If the public hates it, so do I!"

What I'm trying to say is that I'm tired of politicians and presidential candidates that lack integrity. It's one of the most important things for a leader to possess. As Jesus Himself said in Matthew 5:33-37:
"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one."

More annoying to me than the evils of modern politics is the general public's mass ignorance of it. The internet had made it pretty easy to be stupid. All you have to do is start a website or an email forward and you have the power to inform or mislead countless people. Too many voters are apathetic to the point that they really have no knowledge of any of the facts on either presidential candidate. They take e-mail forwards as 'fact' or just rely on word-of-mouth to inform them of the important stuff.

Now, I'm going to say that I'm as guilty as anyone in this regard, but I aim to change all of that. It's no question that the election this year could be one of the most important that our country's history. It's our job as voters not to pick a president, but to elect the man that will lead our country for the next four years. One of the great privileges afforded to us as American Citizens is the Constitutional right to vote. It's not only a right, it's a responsibility. If you waive that right, it's a way of saying 'I don't care enough about my country to influence the direction it's heading.' Sure, most of the politicians we know lack integrity and support things that we ourselves don't, but we have the ability to change that. Not by becoming elected representatives, but by using our power as voting citizens.

So, what does all of this mean? It means that I'll be injecting my humorous blog with doses of seriousness from time to time. Don't worry, the funny stuff is here to stay, but I've got to try and exert some form of positive influence on the four people that read my blog. There are a lot of things I'm not great at, but writing is something I feel like I can do halfway decent. God's got me here for a reason, and He wouldn't have given me the ability to write if it would never make a difference to anyone. With that in mind, I'll do my best and let Him work with it.

In closing, here is a link that may shed some light on one of the most popular questions in the 2008 political season: Is Barak Obama a Muslim? Now, I know that this is just one article, but I'll work on finding multiple sources to verify that what this guy says is legit. Just give it a read:
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/5544

Happiness is:

2008-05-24T08:29:00.004-04:00

How many of you know that grumpy person? I'm not just talking about any random person who happens to be moody once in a while, but the individual who's commonly known as the 'grump'? It's a title that many are quick to give, but very few will acknowledge that they're a deserving recipient. What is the meaning of the word, exactly? Dictionary.com lists the primary definition as:
"1. a person given to constant complaining"
All of us have worked with 'the grump' at some time or another. That person has the power to ruin an otherwise swell day by doing nothing more than sitting in a sullen silence. How many times have you wanted to either; A) make that person go away, B) make 'em take a "chill pill", or C) just punch them in the face? How many of you have wanted to make the grump happy?

For those of you who genuinely want to improve some one's mood, I know exactly the thing that will cheer them up:

A banjo.

Think about it. Happiness is a banjo! How can anybody listen to a banjo and be unhappy? For those of you who aren't used to it, I'll answer your first question: No, it is not a 'hick' or 'redneck' instrument, nor is it an instrument to be used only in the background music for car chases. Something I missed out on by living up North for my childhood is a little thing called bluegrass. I admit that upon my first exposure to it I did dismiss it as annoying country music, but I've since realized the errors of my ways. But I digress.

Not only are banjos happy, they're cool. I know of at least three famous people who push banjos out into the mainstream. First is Steve Martin. He plays a banjo. Not only did he play it, he played it on the Muppet Show. You can't get much cooler than that, can you?

Speaking of the Muppet Show, let's not forget the many talents of Kermit!

The other banjo pioneer is definitely underrated. In fact, I can guarantee that most of you have never heard of him. He fist came on the scene almost two decades before Captain Jack and Will Turner made pirates 'cool'. He resolves his disputes by dueling not with pistols, but with banjos. He's the pirate who doesn't know how to swim. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Guybrush Threepwood:If they had wanted to make the Pirates of the Caribbean movies even more popular, they would've given Will a banjo and had him sing a song about scurvy.

For further proof that banjos are an instrument of happiness, I'll ask a rhetorical question: Have you ever seen a goth banjo player? I didn't think so. You never hear of any goth-bluegrass bands. The power of the banjo can be used only for happiness.

I rest my case.

What's My Motivation?

2008-05-18T18:34:00.006-04:00

Apparently, some people actually read my blog and then wonder why I only post once a month. Personally I'm still perplexed by the fact that people actually read my blog. Believe it or not, writing is something I actually enjoy a bit. That's probably hard for some to believe, especially my mom! Though it is an enjoyable pursuit, there are still problems with finding the motivation to voice my thoughts in a written medium. Looking to the past, I see many different reasons I've arranged compositions.

Back in home schooled Country Lake High, I wrote because I had to. Plain and simple, I wrote essays because my mommy made me. Years later, those papers are a source of great amusement. Perhaps I'll re-post some of those here as "classic" writings.

In my college years, there were multiple things that caused me to write. Any recreational composition took place either on the Third Day message boards or on my first web blog, Xanga. More importantly, I had to write papers if I was going to graduate from college. Thankfully all of the grade school book-reading and forced essay writing gave me an excellent grasp of the literary arts. On my ICC placement exam, I scored near-perfect in the English sections which in turn made my base class for that subject Composition 110.

Comp. 110 was a fun class where my teacher, Ms. Ward, focused more on the art of writing well than the technicalities of 'proper citation'. My English class the following semester was supposed to be about argumentative writing; presenting and defending opinions about various hot topics. Instead, the class turned into 'MLA Documentation 101'. Personally, I can't recall a constructive comment about my papers other than how I messed up a citation somewhere. The cool thing was that the class met in a computer lab, so anytime the professor went off on another tirade about margin spacing on quotes more that 4 lines long, I could tune her out and focus on playing solitaire on my computer.

In spite of the boring, tedious and technical path the class took, it still gave me an excuse to watch lots and lots of cartoons. My mid-term project involved recording and classifying cartoon violence in the TV show Futurama.

Of course there were plenty of papers to write for my horticulture classes. Though I never really got to express my 'creative edge', I gave my best and never got less than an 'A' on any of those assignments. Just look at two of the compelling titles my papers received:
- Horticulture Industry: Landscape Horticulture
- Interior Plant Maintenance
Wow, who wouldn't be drawn to reading papers like that, huh? Toward the end of my college years I did get a bit creative with my titles, but not much. The title of my last college term paper is definitely the most 'me'; I still don't know how I wasn't docked any points for a completely unprofessional title like this:
- Pesticides : Why They Make For A Crummy End For Your Life
My only thought is that I wrote that paper during a summer class and my teacher wasn't as strict as he would've been during a regular semester.

Though I was a good student, I didn't write most of those papers in typical good-student fashion. See, a good student would do lots of research, form a couple of rough drafts, get others to review their work, and then write the final paper and be finished with all of it several days before the due date. I did all of this.

Except for the last part.

Personally I found that good, interesting, readable composition could only be pulled out of me when the right mood struck. "What mood is that," you wonder?

Last minute panic.

See, the thing about my writing is that if I do it over a period of several days, the overall composition feels disjointed and nothing flows smoothly. Imagine a conductor starting and stopping a train multiple times over only a few miles of track. Onlookers would wonder, "what the heck is wrong with that guy?" The same would happen with my papers. I'd write a bit one day, come back later and then not be able to grasp and continue the thought that was there earlier. My best route was to research the topic thoroughly and then write it all in one sitting. Most of my papers were finalized and printed in final form only the night before due date. A relatively small percentage, 20% or so, I actually wrote up in a computer lab the morning they were due! I don't advise anyone to try that for themselves unless they're a trained professional.

How did I do it? What was my secret during those college years? Three words: Do the dew!

I don't have to do that anymore, thankfully. My blog is my creative outlet now, here for the amusement of others. At least, I hope others are amused by it.

We Are Gathered Here Today...

2008-04-25T16:05:00.011-04:00

Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of one of our dearest friends. Though he was young, full of energy and a curious one, the time came for him to leave this world. My friends, it is today that we mourn the passing of Skippy : The Squirrel Friend You Never Knew Existed (Until He Was Dead).

Speaking as the one unfortunate enough to find Skippy's corpse, and thereby making him responsible for burial, Joseph recounts memories of the spunky squirrel in this interview:

Question: "What was life like with Skippy?"

Joe's Answer: "Y'know, I never really knew him all that well. Sometimes when I'd get home from work there'd be a squirrel or two in the yard, standing straight up and looking at me. It's possible one of 'em could've been Skippy. Heck, for all I know he was the one digging all the holes in my flower bed!"

Question: "Did the two of you ever go to school together?"

Joe's Answer: "No."

Question: "What was it about Skippy that made you want to meet him?"

Joe's Answer: "Well, there are a few reasons why you want to meet someone; they may be attractive in physical form; they could be famous; some people you think they'd make a good friend; it's even possible you want to meet someone just to see if all the rumors about them are true. Skippy was different. I wanted to meet him to satisfy my sense of curiosity."

Question: "What about him made you curious?"

Joe's Answer: "His stench. One Saturday I was getting ready to mow the lawn and when I opened the doors of my storage building this awful stench hit me like a blow to the stomach! Immediately I thought, 'Good gracious, what is that wretched smell?'.

Question: "So he had already died when you met him?"

Joe's Answer: "That depends on if you really think you can 'meet' something that's already dead. My guess is that he crawled in the building the last time I mowed the lawn, and I locked it up before he had a chance to get out."

Question: "Good point. So you don't have any fond last memories of Skippy?"

Joe's Answer: "Well, I remember the smell. I can't say I'm too fond of it. There's not much else to say except that I could tell he was well past the point of rigor mortis. He was dead, and he was stinking up my shed so my only option was to give him a proper disposal."

Question: "Disposal? Don't you mean burial?"

Joe's Answer: "What, did you expect me to put him in a tidy little shoebox and bury him in the back yard? I did the only thing a rural North Carolina resident would do: I got my shovel, picked him up and threw his squirrley corpse on the other side of the fence."

--------------------

That concludes the adventures of Skippy.

Jell-O

2008-04-06T19:58:00.003-04:00

Everybody loves Jell-O! Do they? Do they really? I mean, Bill Cosby loves it, so who wouldn't?

For a simple dessert, it's one that always interested kids. C'mon, think back to when your mom would make a batch of Jell-O; you know you wanted to help, or at least watch, every time! It was like a tiny box of wonders... A small thing, smaller than a matchbox, sitting in the pantry with naught more than bold letters on the outside and a packet of powder on the inside.That fruity-scented powder could have been nothing more than Kool-Aid (Oh Yeah!), but it was more; it was magical. Combine that fruity pixie dust with a bit of hot water, stir vigorously, and then set it in the fridge for a while. What happens? The bowl full of colored liquid has turned into some sort of mostly solid mass than can be described as "Jell-O"! It's not a liquid, unless you took it out of the fridge too early, and it's not a solid. Given a little bit of space, the stuff has better dance moves than Elvis Presley.

Now that I've grown older, and some would say I'm even a little more mature, I've come to question my formerly unquestioning acceptance of Jell-O. First off, do you even know where the stuff comes from? If you don't know, I won't ruin it for you; but based off the original ingredients the food could be classified as a poultry dish.

Tim Bowes put it simply during a sermon he preached at Gateway Baptist Church; "I love to eat, but if you ever invite me over to your house for dinner, do not serve me Jell-O. It's just flavored air." For the most part, I'll have to agree with him. That's not to say the gelatinous desert has no place. On the contrary, it's an anticipated staple of Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, and is even welcome during some summer cook-outs.

The important part to remember is that Jell-O is not better left alone. If you're going to make it, put some marshmallows or real fruit in there. Make sure it's got either a pretzel crust or some sort of white topping. (What was that stuff anyway, Cool Whip?) The bottom line is: if you love Jell-O, more power to you! If you know someone who doesn't like Jell-O, don't force the wiggly, brightly-colored mass of flavored air at them. It's a free country, after all.

Time

2008-03-21T20:05:00.006-04:00

Have you ever noticed how much time people waste? Most of us probably see wasted time but don't realize it until the moment is past, but have you ever actually looked to see how people waste time? Today, I was looking at some videos on YouTube and happened to stumble across a video of a guy 'playing' the Super Mario Bros. theme song on a ruler. You read that right: a ruler. I won't post the link, because I wouldn't want to waste 30 seconds of my reader's lives but you can find it if you really want to.

Here's something that's even more absurd: Have you ever folded your hands together really tight and then flexed them a little bit to make those cool suction noises? Well, some people took that concept a little too far and learned to vary those sounds enough to sound like musical notes; and people actually play songs with their hands. Even more sad is the fact that the people who can do this refer to themselves as 'manualists'. The worst part is that one of these 'manualists' has a channel on YouTube that has gotten millions of views and thousands of subscribers...

It just blows my mind how people can be so stupid. It's also frightening to me how the stupid people seem to flock together. "Look! That guy can make music with his hands; let's go make him a celebrity!"

People annoy me, can you tell?

Sure, I can point out the annoying people pretty easily, but what am I doing to make a difference? Am I any better than them? Why can I judge them and not be judged myself for doing other pointless stuff? You want my honest opinion on that? Here it is: I'm not popular, so I can do what I want and nobody really cares.

Either way, I prefer to hang out with the smart people; like the guy who invented this:

I'm buying stock in the company that puts this product on the market.

*Yes, this post has been a fatigue-induced tirade against the general public. I'll try to make the next post more intillectual.