Uber Fans

My church is located in downtown Chapel Hill, right across from campus. The pitiful amount of parking that we have, is very valuable. This is especially true on UNC Football Game Days. Being prudent Presbyterians, we sell parking spaces to those out-of-towners who come to the game. The proceeds go to the youth program for various activities. Parents and youth are asked to volunteer to manage the parking and collect money on game days.

I signed up to do the game last Saturday. We were playing Virginia Tech. The youth leader told me that people start showing up as early as 8:30, even for a 3:30 game. Early Saturday morning, I spared my daughter and left her sleeping and headed off for the church. I got there about 8:15. When I arrived, I noticed four cars already in the parking lot. I went into the church and got the signs, which say there is parking at the church and that it's for the youth program and that it cost $15. The $15 dollar part is clearly a sheet of paper with $15 on it taped over the old $10. I also picked up the money bag with change and found some sheets of paper and a marker. I wrote "Tow This Car" in big letters on the sheets of paper and placed one on each of the cars in the parking lot. Then I set up the signs, and sat down and went to work.

Around 8:45, the first customer showed up. A big black Ford Expedition drove up with a bit of Hokie paraphernalia (flags, decals, etc.) attached to the outside and a man and his wife hopped out followed by their daughter. They were dressed in the required glaring burgundy and orange clothing required of Virginia Tech fans. I took their money and sent them off to Franklin street in search of breakfast and shopping.

Next came the first of a regular crowd of Carolina fans. They've been driving from the mountains and setting up shop in the church parking lot for many years. The first ones there buy one parking space and put out chairs to reserve a bunch of spaces for their friends coming later.

Then, as I was going to check on the signs which kept blowing over in the wind, the Uber fans showed up. I think it was a big black GMC Yukon Denali. And it was pulling a big trailer that can only be called a party machine, a big folded up Sports Bar. Before they park, a guy hops out of the SUV and says he needs four spots. He gives me $20 each. "Keep the change, give it to the Church," he says. So they pull in and a bunch of people (six men and four women) hop out and start setting up. Some may have been in another car.

First, they open it up and reveal two large LCD screens, one on either side. Then out come the speakers and associated sound equipment. A long coffin sized stainless steel grill slides out from the middle of the trailer and is wheeled over and set up on one side. Two small LCD screens are bolted from the ceiling on the back above the bright orange bar that folds out from the inside. This is followed by an assortment of flags, tables, chairs, awnings and cabanas, all in that dark burgundy or bright orange color. In the meantime, one guy, who I think is the owner comes over and buys two more parking slots, again for $20 each. Finally, they set up the satellite dish and we're watching ESPN on all four LCD screens.

I walk over to the Carolina crowd, who used to think they had an impressive setup, and tell them they need to up their game. They have a pretty nice functional setup including a little motorized scooter but, well, just look for yourself.



And they do. A lot of Carolina Blue roams over to the Virginia Tech party machine/sports bar. They ask a lot of questions, take a few pictures, and shoot the breeze.


By around 12:30, all the spots are sold out and there's a pretty serious party going on in the church parking lot. The Carolina fans and the Virginia Tech fans are blasting music at each other. One young lady has turned ESPN off one of the LCD's and is playing a game of Wii bowling. It's a pretty festive atmosphere. A lot of people are enjoying a beer and watching the NC State - ECU game on one of the LCDs.



The first family to arrive came back from shopping and set up their station. They said that they met Alexander Julian in his store. They offer me a beer. Since I'm done with parking, I say sure and they give me a beer in burgandy beer jacket with orange dots and fuzzy orange stuff around the bottom. I enjoy the beer, shoot the breeze for a while, watch the State-ECU game and relax for a bit. After a while, I decide it's time to head home. I tell everyone it's last call on the church bathrooms, pick up the signs and the traffic cones, hide the money in the church, then lock up the church and head out. Not a bad job for a Saturday morning.

Lemonade for Obama

Today, I took my daughter to a little party on campus. On the way home, I noticed a group of people gathered at a corner near our house. I thought it was a bunch of kids selling lemonade to make a buck for who knows what. Then I saw the sign:

Lemonade
for
Obama

I drove on home but an hour later, on the way back to pick up my daughter, I stopped. There were a number of mothers and kids. They had run out of lemonade but a new batch arrived just after I did. I asked a few of the kids involved if I could take a picture and they quickly posed for me. I also bought a cup of lemonade and a brownie. I gave them $5 for the cause.


I hope similar things are happening in your neighborhood.

Slow Drying Out

Well it's been about a month since we made the solid balls of g00. As I said, it may take a while for all the acetone to dry out. I began to wonder just how long it would take, so I took a hacksaw and went at the big ball. I cut out a little wedge to get a little cross section of the drying process. As you can see in the picture, the big blob has dried out about 3/8 of an inch from the surface.



Considering that the rate of evaporation will probably slow down, I estimate that it will take about 7o years for this process to finish. That's a real seat-of-the-pants estimate. After that, I took the hacksaw to one of the smaller blobs. I sawed that sucker in half. It's interesting cutting this stuff. When you're cutting through the hard stuff, it cuts well. As you get into the center, it's more like cutting through a squid. It's arduous. Anyhow, just like the big blob, the smaller blob was still pretty acetone rich in the center. In other words, it still reeked of acetone.



So this got me to thinking about mailing off the plastic challa bread to it's maker. I hope the trace of leaking acetone fumes won't set off some alarms and send the Homeland Security guys down on my ass.

By the way, that white bucket with the red lid in the first picture has a fresh batch of melted polystyrene foam for my entertainment.

Bye for now.

Making Blobs

One of the things you do when you lose your job but you haven't quite lost it yet is try to find things to fill your time. You're getting paid but after a while you get tired of sitting on your butt, surfing the web.

One of the neatest things one can do, which fills time and has little or no value, is melt styrofoam with acetone. Actually, it isn't really styrofoam but is instead "expanded polystyrene foam", which everyone who doesn't respect Dow Chemical's trademark, calls styrofoam anyhow. You know it as that white stuff used in coolers and packing material and coffee cups. What it is, is a little polystyrene and a lot of air. By adding acetone, you start to partially dissolve the polystyrene and release a lot of air. It's not really dissolution so much as solvation. No chemisty takes place in the process.

I guess one could argue that melting it makes the "expanded polystyrene foam" take up less space in the landfills and it does that remarkably well. But the real reason to do this is to have fun.

So I decided to do a little. First I enlisted the help of my humble but able assistant. She's always up for something a little off the wall. We started collecting a lot of the stuff. There was the stuff in the solvent boxes, which cushions the glass bottles during shipment. There were lots of coolers from the bio guys and gals. There was a variety of packaging for syringes and tubes and who know what else. Let's just say there's no shortage of "expanded polystyrene foam" to be found in a lab environment.

We gathered up a lot of this white stuff. Then, to get a nice visual effect, we eviscerated a number of Sharpie pens of different colors and dropped the inky insides of each into acetone squirt bottles. This gave us a variety of colored acetone solutions to shoot at the various "expanded polystyrene foam" products. When acetone hits the "expanded polystyrene foam", it melts to a goo, much like the faces in "Raider of the Lost Ark", when they opened up the Ark. If you use colored acetone, you get colored goo. Cool!!

We got a big plastic (polypropylene) tub and poured in a bit of acetone. We then started stuffing the white stuff into the acetone and watched it disappear into goo. After a while we had a good base and the melting slowed up a bit, so we started spraying down the pieces with the squirt bottles of colored acetone. This elicited squeals of glee from some in attendance. Then we squirted designs in the coolers and as they melted, we stuck pieces together to make a variety of creations. If something didn't look quite right, we shoved it into the acetone vat and reduced it to goo.

This process went on for a few weeks. If you got bored, you went down to the lab and melted more "expanded polystyrene foam" into a growing ball of goo. Eventually, this got to be boring, so we stopped and let a lot of the acetone evaporate while my assistant took a few days off. When she returned we had a nice workable blob. All the colors combined gave a dark green hue to the acetone wet goo.

When I say workable, it's important to remember that you're dealing with a ball of goo that resembles taffy but reeks of acetone. So it's important to wear good solvent resistant gloves and work in a hood. After a while, I decided to try something different. I poured off any excess acetone and added a lot of water. This dramatically lowered the acetone fumes and seemed to semi-seal up the surface so the vapors went down a bit and the surface turned into a greyish green. If you squeezed a bit on the goo, you could expose fresh dark green acetone soaked surface. So we pinched off a few bits of the big goo ball to play with. My assistant took one small blob and fashioned a piece of challah bread. I took a couple of small pieces and mushed them around. Right before I went on vacation (see below), I dropped the two smaller blobs into water and filled the vat with the rest of the big blob with water and left them for ten days. I left the challah bread out on the hood surface. When I came back, the two small pieces that I was playing with had hardened and the smell of acetone was essentially gone. The big blob still reeked of acetone. Here's how they looked (click on the pictures for higher resolution):


Although these things look kinda mushy, they're really quite hard at this stage. And here's a closeup on the big blob:


And here's the challah bread:


The challah bread was interesting because it was sitting on the bench instead of in water. Over the week I was at the beach the top got hard but the acetone couldn't escape from the bottom and so it stayed soft and supple. Here's a picture of the bottom:


It almost looks like one of those geode things. When it dries out, I'm going to send it off to it's maker.

And that's all I have to say for now about melting "expanded polystyrene foam". Maybe one day I'll calculate the volume of material that actually went into the big ball but I'll have to wait for all the acetone to escape. That could take a while.

Beach Pictures

We recently went to Sunset Beach for a week. We took some pictures. Here they are:

Beach August 2008

A New Career

Earlier this year, back in February or March, our church's youth group put on a play called the Cotton Patch Gospel. It's a musical that retells the story of Jesus as if in modern day, rural Georgia. In one scene, Jesus is telling a modern version of the Good Samaritan story. One of the groups that comes upon the man recently beat up by robbers and left on the side of the road is a hot gospel singing group, called the Quintessentials. That's because there's five of em. Anyhow, they drafted 5 of us older gentlemen to play the part. This is what it looked like.



It's not hard to tell which of this group is more comfortable performing.

New Car, Old Job

I haven't written in my blog in quite a while. So for a quick update to those who occasionally read it, here's what's happening.

The company where I work got bought by a big pharmaceutical company whose logo appears below. They liked what we had, but they didn't think it would be worthwhile keeping us around so somewhere around August 31, I will be out of work. We'll get a nice severance and some other parting gifts, so if I'm not out of work too long, it won't be a bad thing. If I am, it will.


In the meantime, my son came home and got a job and needed a car. We've already got 2 cars with over 100,000 miles on them so we decided to get an new car with no miles on it. My son gets to use my old car. For the reasons mentioned above, we didn't want to spent too much money and we wanted reasonable gas mileage so we got a new Honda Accord. It looks like the picture below.
And that's all the news I have for now.

Some Art from Philip

Often this blog is about technical things in my life. For example, I recently wrote in detail about the wiring that goes into my computer setup. One thing I didn't write up more recently (OK, back in August 07), was that we got a new computer. Maybe I'll talk about that some day. The new purchase was precipitated by some pretty stupid moves on my part in which I destroyed the Mac Mini.

OK, this blog is about my initial forays into computer art. My daughter likes to draw and she often scans in her artwork so that she can colorize it on the computer. So we got her a new Wacom Intuos3 pen tablet. They sort of let you write or draw or paint or whatever in a more natural way using a pen and the tablet captures your input and puts it into a computer picture. Here's a picture of it.


So I decided to try it out and do a little artwork. First, I did a still life.


It's not bad. I think the fruit is a bit out of proportion. I kind of liked this picture and I use it as a desktop for my computer.

Next I tried a man. Here he is:


My daughter thought he looked a bit creepy. It was something about his eyes.

Finally, I did a beach scene. It's pretty clear that I was getting bored by this point.



Maybe I'll get inspired again some day and embellish this beach scene or try a bit more to hone my skills.

Bye-bye for now.

Merry Christmas!

(Adapted from my wife's annual Christmas letter)

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire; Jack Frost nipping at my nose, Yuletide carols ……….

Seems I’ve been hearing those carols being played since Labor Day but it didn’t feel like Christmas until the weather finally turned cold this week. Suddenly, Christmas is less than a week away! I went out for 3 hours today and got all my shopping done. Now, I’ve given myself a day to get out these cards before I start the baking for teachers/neighbors/friends.

It’s been another rather uneventful year and that is a real blessing. Locally, weather has dominated the news as our drought conditions have gone from mild to moderate to severe to extreme to exceptional. For the past few months, a drop of rain generates the kind of excitement usually reserved for snow! We have all learned to take much shorter showers, surrounded by 3 large buckets. I have managed to keep most of my perennials and bushes alive with that collected water. We also have been following the mantra “If it’s yellow, let in mellow….” . They are talking about mandating that even for public restrooms! Between the drought and all the high-temp records broken this year, there are only a few die-hard global climate change skeptics remaining in this area.

Phil has had a good year at work and he’s still employed. For a chemist these days, that’s certainly not a given. He continues to enjoy singing in the church choir. He’s also serving as an elder and chair of the music and worship committee - which means he spends many an evening on the phone trying to round up smiling faces to greet or usher. He recently joined AARP to get reduced hotel rates for a business trip and had the gall to sign me up too. We can’t possibly be that old, can we? We do, however, enjoy being able to excuse the occasional odd mishap as “a senior moment”.

I started the year by turning the house into a sewing factory as a friend and I made 125 costumes for our youth choir production of “The Wizard of Oz”. Later, I actually made some money sewing a few costumes for a small, professional salsa dance company. Then I started a project that seemed to go on forever. I decided to turn the ugly, pie shaped slope at the front of our property into a terraced perennial garden. I (with help from my wonderful hubby) began by digging out a foot deep of the heavy, hard, rooty, rocky clay soil. Then I terraced it by building stone walls, moving 4 ½ tons of stone. It turned out to be a great way to get to know the neighbors better, as they would often stop by to chat (and give me kind encouragement). I’ve now turned my attention to the inside of the house. We have lived here for 16 years now, and most rooms are in need of an update.

Blake is in his junior year at Earlham, double majoring in math and economics. He’s having a great year and really appreciates his single room this year after being in a triple last year. He works as a teaching assistant/tutor for the math department, and seems to enjoy that. He took a semester break from concert choir , but will start back in January. This past summer, we were happy to have him at home. He spent the summer baking bread at Great Harvest Bread Company. His 5 AM start time was a wonderful incentive to do well in college. He has been dating a very nice young woman, Hannah, for about 2 years now. She came home with him for spring break and we look forward to her coming again this year. He, in turn, will be spending the last week of his Christmas break with her family is Seattle. Could this be getting serious?

Whitney is now a sophomore in high school. Music keeps her busy and happy. She is in the treble ensemble and band this year, and also plays in the small wind section with the orchestra (we had 3 concerts in one week - full of wonderful Christmas music!) She also sings in the church youth choir and is on their leadership team. In addition, she continues to take tap dance lessons - and has absolutely no interest in any other sporty endeavor. She’s a typical, lovely 16 year old girl, spending hours chatting with her friends, not on the phone but on the web. She is in no hurry to learn to drive and has yet to take drivers ed. It feels rather strange as a parent to be pushing a child to start driving!

As a family, we’ve continued several wonderful traditions this year. We had our 20th annual summer week at Sunset Beach with Phil’s extended family and were joined this year by our good friends Jay, Sue and Haley from Pa. In Nov., it was back to the beach for our 15th annual Thanksgiving celebration. During Whitney’s spring break, we headed down to Charleston, SC. We took some wonderful tours (I highly recommend the Gullah tour if you are ever in the area) and ate some great food. We also managed a quick trip to Iowa after dropping Blake off at college in Indiana, and managed to catch up with family and friends.

We hope you and your family are well and find time to enjoy the blessings of this wonderful time of year.

……Glad tidings we bring to you and your kin; Glad tidings for Christmas and a happy New Year!

And now some pictures.

The Thanskgiving Bunch


Parts of the Beach Crowd


Blake and Hannah


Whitney and cousins, Joni and Paige


Donna's Project (before plants)

Nightmare

About a week ago I woke up early, shaken by a horrible nightmare. First, some background: I have a 1999 Volvo S70. Now to the nightmare, it's short. I took my car to the dealer to have it worked on, maybe it was a tune-up, that wasn't really part of the dream. The bad dream was picking it up. I went up to the cashier and asked how much it would be. She casually said "Fourteen thousand dollars". "Fourteen thousand dollars?," I said. A horrible feeling of terror swept over me. How could it possibly be $14,000? My worse fear was how I would explain it to my wife that I let them charge me $14,000 for a simple checkup of a car that was worth, at best, $4,000. I remember standing there stunned with a whole bunch of emotions running through me and then I woke up, badly shaken by the whole affair. I got up and went to the bath room and was turning it over in my mind. I was relieved that it was a only a dream but I was still pretty upset about it. There was a mixture of anger at the dealership for not calling me before doing the work and that helpless sensation anyone feels when you don't have control. The emotions I felt at the dealership in my dream stayed with me for a few more hours, wearing off gradually over the morning.

I wonder what Freud would say about this.

Some Photos from Thanksgiving

This was the 15th Thanksgiving that we spent with family at the beach. We do the traditional turkey thing on Thanksgiving day and have a little cocktail party on Friday night where we steam a few oysters. We always take a couple of walks down to Bird Island and visit the Kindred Spirit mailbox. This is to get rid of the cobwebs in the brain from maybe a bit too much wine the night before and to take time out from constantly eating. As you can see from the pictures at the mailbox, it cooled off a lot from Thursday to Friday. A good time was had by all. Here are some pictures.

Thanksgiving 2007

Video Test

OK, I haven't blogged in ages and it's time that I started back. There are a lot of reasons that I haven't blogged lately. The biggest ones are that I don't have time, I don't have much to say and I'm lazy. But, I've decided to get back on the circuit. I have an upcoming blog on the work my lovely wife has been doing out in front of the house. But not tonight. Tonight I am going to experiment with posting video. I have a nice little piece of video that I shot, oh, about 19 years ago. I've recently turned it digital and now I'm going to put it up on my blog. It's from the very early days of my son learning to talk. Here goes. (By the way, let's not mention this to him).

Beach Photos, Summer of 2007

Hi guys. We go to Sunset Beach every summer during the week that crosses over from July into August. Sometimes I take pictures. Here's the ones I took this year. The link will take you to my public photos on Picassa.

Enjoy.

Simpsonize Yourself

Could anything be cooler than this. There is a new web site that allows you to upload a picture of yourself and turn into a Simpson's character. I took that photo over on the side of my blog and used it to make a Simpson of myself. Here it is:



I could have messed around with it a bit more but this is OK for now. If you want to make one of your own go to the Simpsonize site and give it a go.

In Fairness to Durham

In all fairness to the City of Durham, North Carolina, they finally finished the corner and a lot of other stuff. They even had a celebration. I didn't go but I did take a picture of the finished corner for you to see.

Enjoy!

How to Prepare a Gourmet Meal

Recently, my wife went somewhere and I had to feed my daughter and myself. This was an excellent opportunity for me to prepare a real gourmet meal. It's not hard. You can do it, too. Here's what I did along with some instructions and illustrations.

First choose a gourmet meal. I chose Marie Callender's Chicken Pot Pie, a delectable mix of chicken, vegetables, crunchy crust and some weird creamy yellow goo to hold it all together.



The first thing you do is turn on the oven to 400 F. While the oven is heating up, open up the boxes and place the pot pies on a tray. Then you tear off little strips of tin foil and wrap them around the edges of the pot pies. This keeps the outer edge of the crust from drying out while you're trying to bring the bulk of the food from rock hard frozen up to steaming hot. When the oven hit's the desired temperature, in they go.



Now comes the hard part. Set the timer for 60 minutes and go work on the Sunday Cross Word puzzle. You're supposed to cook then for 65 minutes, but you'll need 5 minutes to fix a couple of glasses of milk.

OK, times up. Open up the oven and give them a look. They should have a nice golden color. They should look like this.



Now comes the really hard part, the Flip. The real test of the gourmet preparation of a pot pie is a successful Flip. Basically, you have a fragile crust holding a flowing magma of goo and your job is to flip the whole thing over onto the plate and keep it all intact. Of course, the successful Flip must include a good release of the pie from the container. Nothing is worse than a good Flip, followed by tearing away the pie bottom and releasing the pie's contents before its time. If you do it right, it looks like this.



Bon Appetite!

Downtown Durham Update

Over a year ago I wrote a blog about the work going on in downtown Durham, NC. I specifically wrote about the absurd placement of a new fire hydrant in the middle of the street. Well now I can see, sort of, why it was put where it was. It looks like the curbing was going to be extended out further so that the place where the new hydrant was to be placed would be on the sidewalk. That's all well and good except that a year has passed and these photos show how the project is going.





I'm glad I don't pay taxes in Durham, though I suspect that there's a bit of Federal money going into this downtown revitalization project.

Socks

The other day I was helping my wife do some laundry. Of course, in our house, anytime you do a load of laundry, you always find an old load left in the dryer that you have to deal with before you can get your load through the process. Well, in this case the load in the dryer was particularly interesting. It had a bunch of my kid's underwear and other such stuff. There were also a bunch of socks. Anytime you fold laundry with socks, you always have a single or two. Well in this load, there were 12 socks and only one pair in the bunch. Here's a picture.



Who knows where their partners are. Maybe they'll show up in the next load.

New Computer

I recently got yet another computer. I didn't really need it but I didn't know it at the time. Tonights blog is about what I bought and why.

When I left Lilly a few years ago and started a new company, I needed a Windows computer because I was going to sell robotics which would require a Windows computer. I'm normally a Mac kind of guy, but for this application, well, I needed Windows. So I bought a Dell Inspiron 600m. Here's a picture of one:



Over the next year or so, the company didn't make enough money so I went back to work and left the company on a low hum. In the meantime, my lovely wife developed an affection for my Dell computer. She moved it downstairs to the living room and started playing online poker and sudoku and lots of other things while watching TV. She became very attached to it. I think I wrote about how I had to go buy another computer to use. That was the Mac mentioned in a previous blog. Of course, my daughter took over the Mac, but that's another story.

Anyhow, about a month ago, the Dell went on the blink. I came home from work and my wife told me the Dell wasn't working. So I went over and booted it up and it all worked fine. "See," I said, "I must have magic hands." About that time, just as I showed it to her, it locked up. I tried to reboot but it wouldn't happen. After a couple of hours, when it had cooled down, I tried again. It booted up fine, but after a few minutes, maybe when the fan kicked in, it locked up again. So it appeared that it would work just fine after it had cooled down, but when it warmed up, kapow!

It was this juncture that I did something stupid. We booted up and took off all the files that we needed. Then I started trying to figure out what was wrong. I decided to do some sort of disc scan to see if there were any errors. Well, a disk scan takes a long time and you can't get control of the computer back until it's done. It's not hard to figure that it could never get through the disc scan without locking up. It was during the many attempts to get through the disc scan that I was finally able to see for sure that the machine locked up just when the fan came on as I'd suspected. Hmmm! I think "So maybe if it stays cool, I can get through the disc scan." It was still sort of cool outside so I took the computer out and put it on the cold cement porch and let it sit there until it got plenty cold and booted up again. It ran a lot longer but not long enough to get through the disc scan until it locked up again.

I talked to the computer guy at work and he said that it might be a memory problem. So I came home and took out one of the memory chips. And, what do you know, it ran through the disc scan and seemed to be working OK. But with only one 256 MB, it ran really slow: 1/2 hr to boot, 15 minutes to launch the mail program, forever to surf the web. This is because, windows XP consumes all the ram and everything else has to get it's memory from disc swapping. So I got a new memory chip from work and put it in the computer and it booted up and ran fast again. Cool it's fixed. Then the fan came on and it locked up. Crap.

By this time my wife had gone into severe withdraw and showing signs of depression. So I figured it was time to replace the machine. I asked my wife if she would like a new computer for Mother's Day. She looked so happy, so I ordered one. I ordered a similar machine, though, because it's been three years since I got the last one, a similar cost a bit less. Also, I didn't buy Microsoft Office again. The bad news is that this one has the new Vista operating system. It sucks. Anyhow, here's a picture of the new machine.



In the meantime, I tried to figure out how to fix the old machine. I looked on the Dell web site and sent in a problem ticket. They said it was a bad mother board which they could fix for about twice what the computer was worth. So I got to thinking, maybe the only thing wrong with the mother board is that it can't read one of the ram slots and the electrical drain that accompanies the fan coming on exacerbates the problem and causes the lockup. This doesn't have to make sense. It only suggests a possible solution. Don't use the bad slot and jack up the memory in the good slot. It so happened that Staples had a 512 DDR notebook ram dohicky on sale for $40. So I bought one and slipped it in the good slot on the Dell and, viola, back to it's old self.

So now my wife is happy again and I got a new computer that I didn't really need but at least now I can blog at the same time my wife plays Nanosweeper and my daughter plays with her iTunes playlists.

OK, enough of this. So long for now.

An Afternoon on Jordan Lake




So I haven't blogged for a while. And a I got a nasty comment from one of my two readers telling me that I need to start back and that I can't blame it on God. That's not exactly how he said it, but it's close. I haven't had so much to do that I haven't had time. It's more that I've always got a little something to do which I'm always putting off and so I can't blog when there's something else that needs to be done but can be put off a bit longer. I call it "procrastination as art."

I finally got most of those little somethings done and so now I can blog freely for a few days.

Today I'm going to talk about what we did yesterday. But it starts on Friday, or maybe sooner. I work for a small biotech company in Durham. Like most such organizations, we don't make any money. We do something much more interesting. We create value. Recently, we created some more value and so, to celebrate, each employee got a little gift. This past Friday afternoon, we had a small happy hour and everyone got the same gift, some flexible remuneration and a lovely group photo. They said that we shouldn't use it (the money) to pay bills but to do something nice for ourselves.

I came home and told my wife about it and, of course, she had an idea. "Why don't we go to Jordan Lake and rent a motor boat and ride around the lake?" She had already done her homework. There was this place, a marina, that rents motor boats and we could go tomorrow and it would be a lot of fun.

So I called the next morning and reserved a boat for us from 1:30 to 6:30 PM. We loaded up some drinks and snacks and took off for the lake. It was a beautiful day. It was in the mid to high 70's and there were a few fluffy white clouds in the sky. When we got there I went in and read all the rules. The rule book that you had to read had lots of pictures and at the bottom of each page it said "NO EXCEPTIONS!" "NO EXCUSES!" We paid up and off we went. Here's a picture of a boat like the one we rented.



Of course, I had to drive. We took off slowly but pretty soon we got the hang of it and sped up a bit. The first thing we did was head south under Highway 64 and started looking for something interesting to do. "Let's go up the Haw river." But instead of going up the Haw we took off a bit further to the east and went into a little nook as you can see on the map charting our progress.



There were a lot of tree stumps off to one side of the nook and so we went fairly gingerly and stayed in the middle away from the stumps. This path eventually stopped and obviously didn't lead where we had wanted to go. So we got out the big water-proof map that they give you so you don't lose their boat and realized that we went the wrong way. We turned around and took off to where we needed to go. My wife had a bit of trouble figuring out the map and kept looking for a bridge that we should go under to get to the river mouth. Eventually, we figured out that the road that she was looking for was now under water and it all made sense.

Given that I was driving most of the time, we didn't get a lot of pictures. Here's Whitney, sitting up front, enjoying the ride. She's always liked to ride in boats from the first time we put her on a boat at age 2.



And here's our intrepid river boat pilot manning the stern.



So we eventually figured out the map and went a few miles up the Haw river and then came back through the lake and up to the more northern parts where there a few more stumps and trees off to the sides. After about three hours of this, the clouds got a little thicker and it was actually cold when the sun went behind the clouds. So we headed back taking one more little side trip under a bridge before heading back to the marina. Before we left, we went back in to pay for the gas we used. I happened to look on a map on the wall and saw that our trip into the first nook was in a strictly forbidden zone,"NO EXCEPTIONS!" "NO EXCUSES!" Luckily, we didn't hit anything in there and damage the boat. That would have chewed up the rest of my little gift and a lot more.

So that's what we did yesterday. We ain't gonna do nothing much today.

Bye!

Shopping at COSTCO

My wife likes to shop at Costco. Costco is one of those big membership warehouse stores, like Sam's, except that they have liberal policies like paying their employees well and giving them good benefits and they don't try to destroy the environment and other eco-friendly things. It's "Sam's for Liberals". They're from Oregon. Figures!

Anyhow, the problem with a place like this is that they sell things in really big quantities. "What a bargain!!", my wife says as she hauls in a 25 lb. bag of rice.



And so I get around to the subject of tonight's blog. This week, I finally emptied out the last of the 25 lb. bag of rice into the little rice jar that sits on the counter for regular use. All the rice is not yet gone, but I was able to throw away the bag and free up some room in the storage closet. I went back to see when I took the picture shown above which I took soon after the rice came home. I took the picture on February 1, 2006. So it takes this rice eating family a good year to do in 25 lbs. of rice. So if anyone ever asks you how much rice our family eats in a year, you'll know that it's probably less than 25 lbs. but not by much.

Well, that all for tonight.

Khudaa haafiz (good-bye in Urdu)

Marginally Cleaned Up Desk


Since I recently wrote about my computer desk and the wiry mess below it, I thought it might be worth mentioning that I have done a little work to make it a little less of a mess. My wife gave me a new power strip for Christmas. It's one that has some space between the plugs and has the plugs aligned outward. This way all those little black power converter boxes can fit on it without covering up all the other plugs. So I replaced the old two power strips with one new one. I added two little micro-shelves that you can't see to on which to hang some of the wires. I another shelf below the server shelf so I could put in the VCR that feeds the TV box. I stacked the TV box on top of the computer using some little spacer feet. I added a shelf behind the monitor to hold the speakers (Oh, I think they're new also) and the wireless router so the desk is a bit less cluttered behind the monitor. I also added a little headphone-speaker switch (the little black box next to the computer) so that I can listen to the speakers and my daughter can listen to headphones without having to go behind the computer every time we switch computer users. The best thing is that one (usually my wife) can get to the little dust bunnies that used to grow under the wires with the vacuum.


OK, so it's a pretty pathetic life if this is all one can think of to talk about but I poured out my passion last night on the lottery.

Kíhtwám ka-wápamitináwáw   (goodbye to more than one in Cree)

The North Carolina Lottery

About a year ago, North Carolina finally got a state lottery. This is supposedly for education. I hate state run lotteries. If there's something that will get me up on a soapbox fast, it's the lottery. The lottery is one of the lamest, unethical things a state can do. It's a tax on people who can't do math, people who ain't got nothing but dreams. Stupid People. It was always obvious to me and to any moron who manged to look, that a disproportionate amount of the lottery tickets were purchased by people who should have been spending the money on something else, like food and clothing for their children. So basically, the state sets up a mechanism to extract money from the very people that it will have to turn around and support in some other way based on their lower expendable income due to money spent on the stupid lottery. It's not only unethical, it's also inefficient. For all the money we get from them, we only get to keep about 30%. Half goes to the few people that win, and a bunch more goes to the corrupt organizations that run these lotteries. If we really want to screw these people, which is what we're doing, then why don't we just shoot them. It's only marginally less ethical and certainly more monetarily efficient.

For a long time, I was proud of being a North Carolinian. We didn't have no stinkin' lottery. We weren't mean and nasty like those arrogant jerks up North who like to look down on us. Lotteries are tacky and North Carolina was classy. OK, NC has it's problems, but in this instance, we were a model of class. Then all of a sudden all the stupid states in the south started feeling like they were missing out on something that all the other states were enjoying, "Screwing the Stupid People for Fun and Profit." About the only argument for a lottery in North Carolina that I can abide, is that now we get to screw over our own stupid people rather than let Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina do it for us.

The reason that I bring all this up is that the PowerBall lottery got up to $240 million and I got stupid and bought a lottery ticket. Here it is:



Last night they had a drawing and here are the numbers. Some stupid person in Missouri won.



I didn't match a single number. Now I really hate the damn lottery even more.

Görüsædæk (that's good-bye in Azerbaijani)

DOG POO !

No matter how long you live or how well adjusted you are, you never get quite used to stepping in dog poo. It just takes the shine off your day.

Today I was walking around in the woods behind the house, looking at the dead trees aimed at the house. When I walked back to the house I noticed something on the side of my shoe. It had the consistency of muddy clay but unfortunately, it wasn't the right color and it had a subtle but pungent aroma. Damn! Dog Poo! I walked back out into the woods and found what was left of the offending excretion lying in the trail. I used a stick to slick it off to the side. Then I used many of the dead rotting stumps to scape the offending stuff off my shoes. I got most of it off but my wife suggested that I leave the soiled shoes outside.

Maybe I'll go walking in the mall tomorrow to loose up the remains and return my shoes to a state of OK.

May you always have clean shoes.

Good night.

A Bit of Snow Today!


I got up this morning to go for my morning walk and, "Holy Cow!", there was snow on the ground and it was coming down like gangbusters. That was all the excuse I needed not to go for my walk.

Actually, there wasn't that much snow, only about an inch. But we haven't seen much snow around here since Global Warming really took off a few years ago. And it wasn't really coming down all that fast, but it was exciting just the same. It's been pretty warm around here lately and so the snow melted almost immediately on hitting the pavement. So I went to work as usual. School was canceled. There was a planned delayed opening and so I guess they decided to just "call it a day."

Anyhow, by about 8:30 AM the snow turned to sleet and then rain and by the afternoon, the snow was little more than a memory and we were left with only a cold rainy day. Yuk!

Well, enough for now.

Auf Wiedersehen!