Why the privacy, yo?

Hi, if you're reading this, then you have super secret amazing access to my now private blog. All whopping nine of you. My readership numbers are amazing. Although, I didn't create a blog way back in 2001 (at another URL which then became this one in 2003) to try and make it become some super popular thing for lots of strangers to read about me. I started it for fun, to help me improve my creative writing and to update my friends and family on what's up with me life.

So why the privacy now? Because I've now officially started the job hunt, folks. I applied for a position with NPR.org this week. And despite having removed all references to my first and last name from this blog, this blog is still the first result to show up when you Google my name.

So, should the HR folks at NPR or other places I apply decide to google me, they might get some random blog address as a result (with no name on it), but they won't be able to read it. Also, it's not like I ever wrote anything bad or incriminating on here. I was always very careful to only talk generally about work, such as things about my work trips. I never bad-mouthed any coworkers or complained about anything. Yet still - I suppose someone could take my hating rats as a bad thing? I don't know, I'm just covering my arse.

And now I can be more open with you folks. Now I could start telling you how I really feel about my job at this point, but most of you know (it's negative because of a certain coworker) the situation already. Plus, I'm still a tiny bit paranoid that even though this blog is now invitation only - it could still get out and make me look bad. If you want the scoop and don't know it, email me.

Not sure what the complete future of this ol' blog will be. I may take it public again after a while, who knows? It's not going to become a job-bashing place, just another update on my life with random silly musings about rats in my car, old ladies scolding me and all the random other stuff going on for me. It's a nice writing outlet for me - as if I don't do enough writing already!

That's it for this update. Hope everyone is well. All nine of you.

Private

An update - I'm taking this blog private for a while, folks. If you'd still like to read it, feel free to send me an email and I'll invite you.

Send an email to v3locih3ather AT gmail DOT com

Only instead of the two 3's up there, use a regular "e". And then obviously AT is @ and DOT is . And no spaces either.

I'm just trying to avoid spammers. Also, for those of you who know me and use my other email addresses, you can email me how you normally do.

If you're outy until I go public again, that's cool, too. Don't know how long that will be, but it'll happen eventually, most likely.

Spring and misc.

I got into the spring season mindset last night by planting some pansies for the front porch. I'm pretty good with houseplants, but this is my first real foray into outdoor flowering plants now that we have some space for them.


Since it's still early spring and not many other "ready to plant and flower" plants were available yet, I got some seeds and will attempt to grow some geraniums and delphiniums from scratch. Amy's also being brave and will try once again to grow a tomato plant. Her past attempts at this have not been very successful, but maybe this is the time for success.

Another fun household project last night was painting a birdhouse that a friend got for me. It's this little kid "Paint it yourself!" birdhouse kit that came with paints and a pre-made birdhouse. Simple enough, and I had way too much fun painting it. I thought a racing stripe was just the right touch. Hopefully this weekend will find it set up out behind our house.


I'd put up a bird feeder, too, if I knew it also wouldn't become a huge giant rat feeder at the same time. When I mentioned that to someone else, he asked, "Well how would a rat get up to it if you hang the feeder up high?" He's obviously never seen how birds use a bird feeder. They kick the seeds out all over the place looking for their favorites, and so half the seeds end up on the ground. Instant rat buffet.

Speaking of giant evil rats, I saw my next door neighbor last night and he mentioned that his daughter (who lives with him) recently had rats in her car as well. So they went from my car to hers this winter and did a lot of damage there, too. Damn rats! Thankfully they haven't touched my car in ages, but I know they're still around. One morning a few weeks ago I went out back to put the trash out. There was still snow on the ground and as I walked back toward our back door, noticed some odd markings in the snow near the edge of our driveway and fence. Upon closer inspection, those odd markings were rat footprints. Very large rat footprints, complete with a large tail dragging mark. Yeesh.

Moving on - what's that picture there to the right? Why it's a switch loop that I wired all by myself! I'm taking a basic home wiring course at a local community college here and it's pretty damn cool. The teacher is really funny and has the best Baltimore accent I've ever heard. He tells great stories and teaches us a lot of really helpful stuff. We do all our wiring projects on sheets of 2x2x1/2" sheets of plywood, and here's my first. I wired a light switch to a light fixture with the power source coming in from the light switch to the fixture. If that makes you think, "Where else would the power source come from?" then I'll answer "Sometimes the power source comes through the light fixture and then goes down to the light switch that controls it." I'll be wiring something like that at my next class.

So, anyway, my first wiring project was a success. He gave me a light bulb and then wired up my project to his extension cord and had me flip the switch. No one was electrocuted or killed and I did not burn down the school building. Success!

The class is very enjoyable, but I still feel like a lot of it is going over my head. Electrical work is not always an easy thing to grasp and I hope I can at least get the basics down so I can do some little projects myself in the future instead of having an electrician charge us $400/hour for something simple like rewiring an outlet.

Here is even more concrete proof that I'm a total nerd.

On Tuesday after I got home from work I flipped on the TV and the movie "Volcano" was on. It's got Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche in it. It's about a volcano appearing in downtown LA and almost destroying the city.

Anyway, Jones plays the head of the Los Angeles Office of Emergency Management, and Heche plays a seismologist. Toward the beginning of the movie, Heche and Jones are at a park in LA and she's trying to explain to him why earthquakes keep affecting that particular park.

She says, "It's a geological event."
And Jones replies, "What's that?"

So then she does this basic elementary description of tectonic plates and earthquakes, etc...

But my nerd proof is this: Earlier in the movie, it was mentioned that Jones just started this LA OEM job after moving there from being in the same role in St. Louis. So when he goes, "What's that?" and Heche has to explain what an earthquake is, I thought, "That's so lame and untrue - if he was really the OEM head in St. Louis, he would've known a lot about earthquakes because of the nearby New Madrid Seismic Zone. This movie is fakey."

Yes, folks, Huge Giant Nerd.

The picks and some books

Normally I don't care much for college basketball - at least not until March Madness hits. Most years I do some brackets just to see how low I can rank in ESPN's online contest. I typically do much worse on the women's brackets, too.

Sometimes I try to not overthink it and instead do something like a college friend's mom always does: Pick the winners based on whose school colors are better and which schools' mascots are neater. Yet I can't maintain that because I hold alliance to some teams (O-H!).

So this year, I'm again getting obliterated in my women's brackets, and am doing mediocre at best on the men's brackets. Right now I'm ranked 1,125,598th on the ESPN's men's bracket. Awesome.

In other news, I have now finished four books as part of my year-long "Get Off Your Ass And Read More, You Loser" campaign for myself. I'm sure Amber is on book #789, but that's cool because it just makes me want to read more. Anyway, after my embarrassingly slow start of one short book in two months, I've now read three in two weeks.

I finished "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" - and it was really good. I knew how it ended since I'd seen the movie, but it was still very interesting. It was a little heady at times because the narrator used a lot of symbolism in several chapters, but once through that it got much better.

Then this weekend I burned through "The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead." That was equally fantastic. I love how Max Brooks' wrote some version of this sentence throughout each section of advice in it: "...or you may find yourself being gripped by the cold hands of the moaning undead masses." Seriously, he must have written it 15 different ways, and each time it was hysterical.

Next up is "In Dubious Battle" by John Steinbeck, since I borrowed it from the library and it's due back soon.

300

I saw the movie "300" this weekend and it was awesome. I think that will only be true to people who love Frank Miller and/or graphic novels/comic books and know what to expect from Miller. I keep reading these reviews (in Village Voice, also on Slate) of the movie and these lame-ass reviewers don't get it. It's based on a graphic novel, aka - a glorified comic book. The dialogue seems over-dramatic - that's Miller's style. The visuals are breath-taking and not like real life because they come from a graphic novel. If the reviewers had even taken a moment to look through the book version of "300," their complaints would not be like this. They would've instead been amazed by how well the movie mimics the artwork. The visual effects are stunning and I thought this phrase numerous times while watching it: "Holy crap!" That's because it's beautiful on the big screen.

If the movie did fail somewhere, it's in all the extra plot crap they added to it to round it out, which they most likely for people like those reviewers. It would be 100% awesome had they not added material not in the book. Instead, now it's somewhere around 85 to 90% awesome to me.

Beyond that, it's not some modern commentary on white people destroying brown people, or the Iraq war, or big muscular straight guys beating up gays and anyone who's different. It's a movie based on a comic book that took a lot of creative liberty on the original historical story. Stop reading into it, reviewers!

Photos
Flickr stopped being a jerk long enough to let me organize my Florida trip photos. Please click here to see them. The slideshow is a nice way to see them, except you don't get to read the captions. Whatevs.

Florida update

Obviously I've been back from our Florida hurricane relief trip for more than a week now. I'm currently trying to upload all the photos from the trip, but Flickr is being a jerk at the moment. Once I get them up all and orderly, I'll post the link. In the meantime, please enjoy these few photos as a teaser. One is a jumbo giant gator.

The other is of my dad and me covered in joint compound and holding up some corner bead. Mom took this photo.

And in the meantime, if you'd like to read a trip report I wrote, check out the United Church of Christ disaster ministries Web site.

Because I work so closely with them in my regular day job, they let me write a personalized account of the trip.

Again, this trip was fantastic and should any of you ever have time to do something similar, I highly recommend it.

Books

So not too long after the turnover to 2007, I chatted with Amber about seeing how many books we could read this year. I have this pile of books in my house that are waiting for me to read them, but sometimes I just need motivation. I thought having someone else helping me to read as much as possible this year would help. And so the first week I was making headway on one book.

Since then it's been me losing big time. Sure, it's not a competition, whatever. But Amber is kicking my butt (and poking fun at me on her MySpace, all LOLROTFL 'n' junk) about how little reading I've done.

She's beating me big time. Two weeks ago, Amber had already read something like 468 books, and I'd read one. And that one book was only a graphic novel by Frank Miller ("300", so I can be ready to see the movie), and so I guess it counts - but not really. Come on now, I love Miller's work, but there aren't that many words in his graphic novels.

Now two weeks later, I've read a total of two books, and Amber's up to something like 494.

Okay, she said she's only up to 12, but still - I'm not making good on my side of the deal here. I read in phases, though. I'll go through a month-long period where I'll be a voracious reader and go through four or five books. That's voracious for me. But then I'll hit a period where I can't read anything.

Thankfully now I think I'm moving back into a reading phase (thanks to Amber's joking), so I've finished two books and am half-way through another. This week I finished "Juiced" - the autobiography by former baseball player Jose Canseco.

It's an easy read, Canseco's certainly not a complex writer like Melville or anything. Most of the time he's descending into narcissism and touting the awesomeness of steroids and how he brought them into baseball. I do like books like this because I enjoy learning about what ball players do when they're not on the field, and Canseco doesn't fail there. He also drops names like no one's business, it's interesting not only to read who else does steroids like he did, but it's also funny hearing how these guys would all follow each other into the bathroom at the park and inject steroid needles into each other's "glutes." For how homophobic many athletes are, that's pretty funny.

So yeah, it's a good and easy read if you want to learn some more baseball details and hear his sermons on how amazing steroids are. He does raise some good points, if you can find them through all his "I'm so awesome and cool and not a bad guy at all" chapters.

I hope to have my third book read by the end of this weekend - I'm half-way through "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kersey, and I'm really enjoying it.

I'm sure that during the next few days Amber will read another 14 books. And that's okay, I can make myself feel better by thinking about how much I've motivated someone else to read. Yeah, that's it.

Amber: 12
Me: 2

For those who know...

I am fortunate to have some really great friends in my life. A few I talk to regularly, and then a few others I talk to maybe every few weeks or so.

With any of them what I love is that even if we go for some extended period of time without chatting much, when we do talk again we can pick up again right where we left off. There's no awkward readjustment time. They also just seem to understand, you know? They know what I'm talking about, they know how I feel when I talk about something, and they can relate. Vice-versa. There's no explaining.

We'll email each other stuff we've written, or maybe we'll get random fun mix CDs in the mail from each other, or we'll send cookies, or I'll make my roaring dinosaur pen prank call them and hang up, or maybe we'll send each other one line emails of some silly old inside joke that we know will make the other person laugh. It's all worth some great laughs and smiles.

I love those friends and I hope they know it. I think I usually tell them that, but maybe I'll go email some people now. But you guys know who you are. Thanks for being super neat.

Anyway, I just felt like saying that today. Nothing like a sappy Hallmark card blog post, eh?

If this post didn't make you smile because you thought about similar friends you have, then please use this photo I recently took of some baby ostriches be your smile-inducer.

Shampoo Jokes

Amy likes to use Herbal Essence shampoo, and just recently they changed the style of their bottles. Now they're all trendy and crap, or whatever the word is for "cool." Plus, they now include a joke on each shampoo bottle, but the answer is only to be found on the corresponding shampoo style's conditioner bottle. So if you mix and match shampoo and conditioner types like Amy does, then you don't get to read the super awesome punch lines from one joke, but you do get to read a punchline for a joke that you never read.

While I don't remember the punchline given on the conditioner bottle Amy has, I do know the unanswered joke on the shampoo bottle.

"What is the favorite sport at a nudist colony?"

I'm sure I'd chuckle at the answer, but in reality I'm wondering the opposite. Actually, I'm not really wondering, I'm coming up with answers for what would be the least favorite sport for nudists at a nudist colony.

Some examples:
1- Bowling.
2- Skiing.
3- Pole Vaulting.
4- The triple jump (done at track & field meets).

I can make jokes about Two-Hand Touch Football, too, but I'll leave those to you. In any case, I thought about many sports and what it would be like to play them naked. Some wouldn't be a big deal, most likely (for a nudist, anyway), because what you're wearing just isn't important due to the game constraints. Take Lawn Darts, for example. If you get stabbed by one of those things it's going to hurt whether you're naked or not. Unless you normally wear chain-mail, in which case, playing Lawn Darts naked will be a drastic change for you.

Also, baseball, basketball - those may not be that bad naked (again, for nudists). The same for the javelin throw, or running a marathon. Water-skiing? Swimming and diving? Nothing major there. The same with beach volleyball. Even with swimsuits or clothes, you still get sand everywhere.

Skiing and hockey would be hard - especially if you wiped out. Equestrian might be a challenge, too. And here's another question that came to me, if you're a proud nudist and a frequent skateboarder - do you wear a helmet and safety pads?

So, who knows what the answer to the joke question from Herbal Essence is, I just want to thank them for giving me something to think about. If you have any other ideas about least/most favorite nudist sports, kindly suggest them in the comments.