Category Archives: Personal posts

Diablo; Electricity in my life

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I had intentions of getting this thing written pretty early this morning, had and idea that I was going to go on about for however long it would take, then got sidetracked.

It was that damn Diablo again.

I realized that it had been quite a while since I logged any of my characters on, so decided I better do a quick once-in with each of the reamaining ones to make sure that they were not also lost. Of course, as it happens, I found that I had a Paladin that was on his way through the frozen part of act 5, so I figured I would give it a go for a few minutes. What happened, as it always seems to, is that I found the next zone before I found the waypoint. I then retraced my steps and explored out the zone until I did eventually find the waypoint. Thing is, I had already cleared the zone and had a map to the entrance of the next area, if I didn’t continue I would have to clear the whole zone again…

That type of logic kept me going through the ‘Frigid Highlands’, ‘Arreat Plateau’ and even into the ‘Crystalline Passage’, where I again found the next zone before I found the waypoint. Of course it would have been selfish of me to leave ANYA freezing down there when I was so close to the ‘Frozen River’, so I made the decision to free her. The ‘Frozen River’ was actually pretty easy, mind you I am on normal with this character. The thing that made me spend the better part of my day on this damn game was the first drop I got when I entered the ‘Frozen River’. It was not an amazing item, just the Tearhaunch Greaves, but I lost 18 out of 24 characters from my three accounts some time ago, as a result I don’t have anything remotely good that you can use prior to level 45 or so, and those boots were simply made for the Pally I was playing, problem was I couldn’t even pick them up.

For better or worse, I collect the gems and runes that I find along the way with all of the characters that I start. The better is that I always have the right gem/rune for whatever I am trying to do (not counting the higher level runes, as long as I have a Nef and a Lum I am happy). The worse is that I end up with all of my new characters being jammed full of the damn things. Makes me wonder how I did this in D2C, before they doubled the stash size. Anyway, I spent almost an hour clearing the inventories of my three most recent players of their gems/runes, upgrading them as necessary, and saving them to a brand new mule (who will likely get deleted in eight hours or so, making this whole point moot). Then I looked at the clock and saw that I had been playing/muling for almost four hours, at that point I simply saved, exited, and started to type this.

I hate that weird Diablo time warp.

• Fun With Electricity!

As I was laying in bed last night, unable to sleep after having a horrible day, my mind started wandering to weird events in my life that involved electricity. Well, to be fair, the events didn’t always need to involve electricity, but they always did. The results of such were usually not good, and as they streamed through my mind I thought it might make a good anecdotal thing to slap up here. Of course I don’t really know what my adoring fans want, since I never get emails to the positive or negative, so you will take it and you will like it. Or you could choose a different destination, but come on, other than my site, how many more sites are there on the internet?

I didn’t discover the mysterious power of electricity until I was seven or eight. I knew that flipping a switch was not what was making the light come out of the light overhead, but I had no idea what could be causing that to happen. I spent my youngest years, even until I was in the second or third grade, just wondering how it all worked -yet, not wondering enough to read a book on it. And, honestly, if I read a book that explained how the power was carried through little wires, even today, I would think it was a load of crap.

After my first year of school (first grade, as none of the children in my family went to pre-school or kindergarten) , the school that I attended, “Riverside Elementary”, was closed. I am not entirely sure why it was closed, the story that the children were told was that it was too close to ‘Garden Valley Boulevard’, which, through the years, had turned into more of a Freeway than a street. I still don’t know why Riverside closed down, what I do know is that half of the kids then got transferred to “Fir Grove Elementary”, while the other half was divided between “Sunny Slope” and “Rose”. I lost several of the friends that I had made in my first year of school through this change, but you must always trust that your parents’ always have your best interests at heart (even if you think that the best-interests are wrong, or, at best, misguided).

There were only two of my friends, in my grade, that also got transferred over to Fir Grove. Even with the number at 3, we were still only about 10% of that class. That makes you do weird things, things that you would not ever do if you were not being judged by a bunch of people that you didn’t know. So, finally, on to the fun with electricity.

The first, and most unbelievable, experience with electricity involved an electric fence. There was a field around “Fir Grove” that was surrounded by an average chain-link fence, yet instead of having military style razor wire at the top, it had an electric wire. Through the egging on of the other kids, five of us got brave enough to see what would happen if you actually touched the ‘live’ part of the fence. There ended up being a group of five of us, myself and a friend, as well as three guys from the new school that did it. No one actually wanted to touch the fence, so we decided that we would all hold hands as someone did, finally, a much braver kid than me, said he would do the touching. After that we filed in until I was the 3rd person in the chain. We all assumed that it was going to be an equal shock to all of us, turns out that we were wrong. For some reason, which I still don’t understand, the only one that got shocked was the kid that was at the very end of the line, furthest from the power. He looked like he was damn near dying, while none of the rest of us felt a thing. Once the lead kid let go of the wire, the kid at the end quit his spasm. Was it a staged event for our benifit? I dunno. What I do know is that the kid at the end of the line looked like he was having his bones removed through his ears, not a happy face, if that was acting, he should be up for an Oscar.

The next incident involving electricity was much more painful, for me anyway. An Aunt and Uncle of mine lived in a small trailer on the property of another Aunt. They told me that if I was going to open the door of the trailer that I needed to be standing on the milk crate that they used as a step to get inside. I did that each time I opened the door, never questioning why. Of course, being ten or eleven at the time, my memory lapsed just once when I reached for the doorknob.

The second I touched the knob the shock hit me. For some reason, not sure why, I was not able to let go of the knob. I was also not able to shout. I was just standing there jerking around like someone in the electric chair. I don’t know how long I was standing there with the electricity running through me, but it certainly felt like it was at least a good minute. Thankfully, my then Stepdad saw what was happening and reached out to pull me away, but he got shocked when he touched me. He lowered a shoulder and hit me linebacker style to knock me free of the knob, which hurt, but was nothing compared to the jolt I was getting from the trailer. To this day I don’t know how or why the outside of the trailer was electrified, and I still get a bit nervous every time I open the door on a mobile home.

There was a day in my early teens when I was riding my bicycle home from the Tenmile store (why it was called Tenmile may never be known; It was not ten miles from anything.), when I had to stop to relieve myself. This was in rural Oregon and there was hardly any traffic so it was a pretty common occurence. Even at that, I climbed down a small embankment to make sure that no one would see me. I started to water a tree (so to speak) at the bottom when I heard a car approaching from my left. As I turned to the left to make sure that I was not in the line of sight of the car my body, and thus the stream, followed. I had heard that it was not possible to be shocked by peeing on an electric fence, but I am here to tell you that it is possible, and it hurts! I didn’t even know that the tree was holding the electric wire, if you have ever seen a field surrounded by nothing but an electric wire you would understand what I mean. It is just a tiny little strand of metal, but it sure packed a punch. And much like with the trailer in the previous tale, it was not possible for me to move or stop peeing. It did only take a few seconds for my bladder to empty, but still, ouch. Electricity running through your penis is really not all that pleasant.

Now for one where no one gets hurt for a change. You have no doubt seen those Touch Lamps at one time or another. I always wondered how they work (of course as I just google up that link I found the answer, kind of disappointing really, I was hoping it really was magic). While at my then Girlfriend’s house one day, I was screwing with her touch lamp when I wondered what would happen if I touched the lamp, then she touched me. We tried it and it worked. For some reason though it will only work with two people. When we tried it with me touching the lamp, her touching me, then her dad touching her, it just didn’t work. Also, if I was touching the lamp when her little dog licked me it would also trigger the lamp. That was good for a lot of mindless fun, also I did win couple of bets where my buddies would not believe that it would work with more than one person.

In my late teens, myself and a few friends had the most ridiculous form of entertainment that you could imagine. We took an old electrical cord, -I think it came off of a toaster but that hardly matters- and stripped the ends of the wires. We would then take turns plugging it into the outlet, holding one bare end in our hand, then touching the inside of that elbow with the other wire. The electricity would cause the muscles to contract, it kind of looked like you were doing curls at high speed. Now I am sure that you are thinking, “what could possibly go wrong?” Well what went wrong is that one of the friends’, I can’t remember which one, muscles flexed so tightly that he was not able to pull the cord out of the crook of his arm. Strangely, well maybe not considering what we were doing, it took us a good thirty seconds to figure out that we could just unplug the damn thing. In that scenario all of my friends were smoking pot which kind of gave them an excuse for their stupidity. I was stone sober and did it as well, what does that say about me?

That is pretty much it for really memorable moments involving electricity. There are hundreds of other times that I have been shocked, usually while doing something that was at least a tad foolish. The rest of the times that I got shocked were all probably avoidable had I not been in a hurry, or had I thought things through a bit better. Things like getting shocked when changing a light bulb, something that would never happen if you just turn off the switch before you start, but then how do you know when the bulb is screwed in far enough? If you screw it in too tightly it is more likely to break when you try to remove it. There have been a couple of times when I have been changing the ballasts on fluorescent lights at work when someone turned the circuit back on, thus giving me a shock if I was actually touching the wire at the time. This could easily have been avoided if I had just put a piece of masking tape over the switch with something like “being repaired” written on it, but I never think of that until I am sitting on my ass with a weird buzzing going through me.

I have gotten better over the years. Hell a couple of years after I bought my house I actually bought an electrical tester to make sure that a particular circuit was off before I started fucking with it. The down side to having all the bad experiences is that now when I am working on anything electrical I practically shit my pants if someone touches me or I hear the slightest buzzing sound.

That is a bit odd also. Why is it that you can clearly hear the buzzing while you are being shocked but no one else can? Perhaps next time I am doing something foolish enough that I may get shocked I will go ahead and set up some sort of sensitive audio device to record it, just to see if it actually makes an audible sound. Then again if I were to spend that much time setting up the audio device it would seem I would be smart enough to just turn off the circuit first. In theory.

Olympics; Puppy

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There is not a lot to say about the news these days. There is the Repuclican National Convention going on in New York City, the 2004 Olympics going on in Athens, of which the American public can watch about 10% of, and that is only when there is an American competitor actually fares well in said event. While it would be nice to actually watch the competition in the Olympic games, it loses something in the chopped up, American highlight type shit that you get to watch here in the states. Considering that none of the events play live on our National Networks, I would rather just not watch it at all.

A friend told me, recently, that they have live streaming video coming from the Olympic games. I am not sure if that is true or not, what I am sure of is that I am crutched by a 56k internet connection and not likely to watch every fifth frame of a video while still considering it “live”. Isn’t that supposed to be some of the glory of the Olympics? You see the people (from any random country) who perform their chosen sport the best? Our media, in the U.S.A., obscures that by only showing events where the U.S.A. athletes perform well, then they fill the time by telling stories of the “hard up-bringing” that the athletes had to overcome to achieve their Olympic dreams. Sure, that does make for a great movie, but what I want to see is the competition.

If the American gymnast totally fucks up, breaks a leg or something, I want to see, at the very least, the medal winners’ performances. This (the Olympic games) is the only venue where people from all countries can compete against each other on an equal footing. Yet, once the U.S.A. is out of the running, the media just seems to shift to a personal story of tragedy that left that particular person without a Mother and Father, which, in turn, made him/her want to compete in the Olympics. I swear that the media is using some formula similar to this…

Yet, my bitch today is not even related to the Olympics. More related to something that I noticed, and tested a few times, regarding computer opponents in actual games.

It is Tuesday, August 31, 2004

I was stopped just as I started yesterday’s bitching, by a puppy (well, full-grown dog that is smaller than the average full-grown dog of it’s breed). That would be our puppy Zelda, who was so angered/whiny when big brother dog went for a walk with mom that I finally just caved in and followed behind them. I originally had hopes of catching up to them before we reached the park, but there was an issue with the fact that Zelda was so excited and jumpy that it was difficult to get the harness on to her.

If you are not a dog owner, especially the owner of rather large dogs, you really need to know about the harness before you do get a dog. The normal way that idiots (most dog owners) walk their large dogs is to use a ‘choke chain’ (I linked there to an article about the disabilities that such collars could cause for a good reason). A ‘Choke Chain’ could be used to great effect by an experienced dog trainer, yet the device is regulary used by any jack-ass who has a dog.

There actually are ways to train a dog on your own, ways that do not involve asphyxiation and broken necks. The easiest way is through positive reinforcement, you know a simple little treat you give the puppy when it does the vocal command. It is not an exact science, nor is it immediate, but it does teach the dog that rewards will be given for performing certain tasks. As time goes on the rewards get smaller, no longer a chewy treat, just a little tummy rub or the such, but the dog will still respond to the vocal command and perform the task.

The unfortunate thing is that any person, who can show a photo ID, can get a pet. That is if they try to get them from a rescue shelter, there aren’t any laws governing who can take a puppy or kitten that they find three houses over. While cats come out of the womb pretty much ‘litter box broken’, it takes some time for a puppy to realize that it is supposed to do the majority of its bathroom duties outside. The little puppy might not understand that you left the pile of Newspapers in the corner so that he would ‘do his business’ on it, but if you show the dog the place that he did pee, then put him on the newspapers, he/she will soon learn that the papers are there for their peeing purposes. After a bit of time, say two weeks if you have a puppy that was just weaned, those papers will get so close to the door that the only time there will be pee anywhere but on the papers is when the dog gets a bit too excited.

Once the dog is ‘house-broken’, a process which could take between a couple of weeks and a couple of years, depending on your level of interaction with him/her, the rest is easy. There is no need for a ‘Choke Chain’, all you need is “Mr. Newspaper”. At least 80-90% of the time, you never have to swing ‘Mr. Newspaper’, you just have to roll it up and look at the puppy. Sure fear tactics are bad and everything, but would you rather all but kill your new puppy with a choke chain, or have it fear a rolled up newspaper?

My/Our dogs are far from perfect, Warlock will chase anything that makes a reflection, while Zelda will bark at any other dog that gets near Warlock. We try to teach them using the command/treat method, and while neither one of them is perfect about following the commands, and neither one would be trusted in a room alone with a child, they are pretty obedient dogs. There has NEVER been a ‘Choke Chain’ on either of these dogs (well, once when Warlock was young, but it lasted only a day or two). We do love our dogs, hell, they are basically our children, there is no way that I would try to strangle a human, why would I do it to a canine?

We (my wife and I) are doing this with larger breed dogs. Warlock has to weigh 60 pounds or so, while Zelda is a very fierce 35 or so pounds. I think that absolute obedience might be impossible, at the very least it is only possible through an obedience school that knows how to correctly use a ‘Choke Chain’. We are not going to be using the ‘Choke Chain’ though, since they have these Harnesses that you can buy pretty cheap.

You just have to remember that you do outweigh the dog by at least a hundred pounds. You certainly don’t have to choke the dog to get obedience, and if you do you don’t deserve to have a pet…Or a child, for that matter.

My father’s voice; amusing bumper sticker

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Well I don’t really have a lot on my mind today, so there will likely not be much here worth reading. That could be argued for just about every day that I do take the time to write something though, so I guess this will be just about the same as usual. Only I have only a couple of random musings in mind and nothing to totally rant on.

• Shortly after waking up this morning, while in the half asleep/half awake strange dreamworld kind of thing, I had a realization; I can no longer remember what my Father’s voice sounded like. If that sounds a bit strange I do apologize. I am pretty sure that everyone can remember voices, you know you sort of replay the phrases through your head and are able to hear exactly what it sounded like. Much like the way that you can play an old favorite song in your mind, you can hear every vocal and instrument as if the song was actually playing. I can no longer do that with any phrase that my Father spoke to me. I can clearly see his face, remember the situation where the event from memory was taking place and the such, but the words that play through my mind are no longer in his voice, they are in my own voice.

I am not really sure if there is any significance at all to this. The only thing that sticks out in my mind is that it means that I have lost a bit more of him. I am left to wonder, now fourteen years since his death, if I would still remember what he looked like were it not for the single picture that I have of him hanging in the guest bedroom (I mean the picture of him is hanging in the guest bedroom, not that I have a photo of him hanging, which happens to be in the guest bedroom).

After all, once you die the only part of you that remains is your memory, when even that begins to go away then it is more like you never existed at all. Kind of a frightening prospect, yet each day I realize more and more that the growing older thing, which I thought would never happen to me, is happening to me. It turns out that you don’t just turn 70 and all of a sudden lose all of your memories, no no, it is like you lose older memories as you gain newer ones, at least I hope I am going to remember the new memories. I suppose that it goes pretty much the same for everyone and I am only focused on it since I am so introspective, who knows. Hell now that everyone (virtually) has a video camera of some sort I may be in the last generation of people that actually try to use their mind to preserve memories of loved ones. As I read the last line, though, I realize that it isn’t true in the least. There seems to be a much deeper emotion involved with actual memories than there is to a photo or even a home video, that is why they are memories isn’t it?

Memories, as I see them, all seem to have a deep emotional tie to an event, be it good or bad, that both happened and played a role in shaping you into who you are today. Yet it seems that the memories somehow etch theirselves into you moral consciousness to the point that it is a part of your being. The memory may fade, but the ideals that the memory built into you remain. Who knows, maybe the memories themselves have a time stamp on them and can go away when they are no longer necessary.

It may be true that I can no longer remember the stern, disapproving voice of my Father when he scolded me. Nor can I hear the calm, sympathetic voice of my Father when I was injured, be it physically or emotionally. I do not believe that his soul has moved to ‘heaven’ or some ‘higher plane of existance’ , no, he is dead. I find it unfortunate that I can no longer hear the tones and nuances of his voice when I see him in dreams, but I am not going to think about that too much. Through his discipline and love (as well as my Mother) I have become who I am today.

It may not be much, but what I have was earned through hard work. Work done by my own hands (with the wife’s assistance, of course). My Father may have been a lot of things, an alcoholic, unfaithful to his wife, unfaithful to his girlfriends, but he worked for everything that he owned. I know that he took pride in that, and I know that he would take pride in my following in his footsteps as far as working for what I have. He might even have taken pride in my being able to ‘keep it in my pants’, who knows.

What I do know is that the only thing left of my Father is his legacy. Not much on that front. He was horribly in debt at the time that he died, had way more cars than he could afford, at least four or five girlfriends that regularly shared his company on the weekends. Hell, his memorial service was a “who’s who” of sluts in the county. I have taken a more subdued approach to women (monogamy, no, it is not a type of wood), which has resulted in a marriage that has lasted several years so far, I think that this would also have made him proud.

It is (or should be) every parent’s dream that their offspring will better them. It doesn’t really have to be about the size of the house or the number of toys, or any of that material crap. Happiness should really factor in. I may hate my job more than my father ever did, I may hate a lot of things more than my father ever did, but, when you come home to someone that you love, someone that also loves you, isn’t that better than a thousand one-night-stands?

Okay, so that went all over the place, hope you’re still with me.

• I am sure that you have seen this photo on tons of cars everywhere. They do change what is getting pissed on though. I have seen the kid pissing on everything from a chevy logo to GOD. I have always found it pretty humorous, in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, when they show him pissing on certain things. I have seen that little kid peeing on “My Ex”, “Bush”, “Censorship”, seems he will pose to piss on anything.

What my wife and I saw today just went a bit too far. The little ‘Calvin looking character’ was pissing on P.E.T.A. I certainly don’t count myself as an activist for animal rights, but come on. Sure the PETA people take it a bit too far sometimes, but the piss on PETA sticker looks pretty bad. The car that the sticker was on kind of explained it all though, it was one of those huge SUV’s. The wife thinks that it was a Ford Expedition. I barely saw the nameplate on the back of it, but it looks about the right size/shape to be the one we saw with that bumper sticker.

Anyone who is driving a vehicle that they pay in excess of 30,000 dollars for, with a fuel economy of 15mpg, is not likely to give a hoot about the fact that they are destroying the earth with their excess, especially since there was only one person in that huge SUV. Perhaps they should consider a smaller, more fuel-efficient ride for the ten-second run to the local grocery store, but no, this particular vehicle had a “Piss on PETA” sticker on it. I suppose that the logic is: there will still be an environment, we will adapt to it.”

I did say that I do not support PETA, yet, in this case, I may be right behind them in executing whoever was in that huge SUV.

Olympic basketball; My friend George

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Well the good news is that I saw George in the store today buying a bottle of Port wine. He was pretty drunk when I saw him, which is good since alcohol may be a depressant, but that seems to be the only way to deal with pain. I will cite my neck injury as proof of this; The ibuprofin didn’t really help, the muscle relaxers didn’t really help, the alcohol made it possible to sleep. That is not to say that the pain killers don’t work, just that they may not work in the same way. It is a known fact that alcohol pretty much numbs your brain, whether the pain killers can do that as effectively is probably based on the person and not some formula. I will say that when I was taking the Flexoril (muscle relaxant) it did make the pain subside, yet, if I actually moved the pain would come back. With alcohol it works acrosss the board. Maybe your head is on fire, you don’t care, you can’t feel it, good stuff, liquor, maybe they should use it more often for medicinal purposes. I know I do, and on a daily basis.

• So I have not been paying any attention to the Olympics this year. You may ask yourself why, but likely you don’t care that I am not following them, since you are not following them either. I must admit, though, that I found it pretty humorous that our basketball team got their ass handed to them. Not unexpected, mind you, just humorous. The USA may have some of the best athletes in the world, but when you think about it they are only the best athletes because the conditions allow it. Why is it that the runners from Kenya seem to win every marathon ever? They spend all of their lives running from damn near everything you can think of. They have certainly earned their place as the fastest nation on the planet. I am sure that they do toil and train to get better, but I am equally as sure that if you were to grab a random guy in Kenya, and a random guy in New York, and make them race 26 miles, the guy from Kenya would certainly win. The guy from New York might not even finish, what with his heart exploding about six miles in…

That was a bit off topic, but still, people who happen to live in the USA always get a hand up when it comes to athletic competitions. Well, I suppose it is possible that the jocks that can’t put a noun and a verb together could possibly make it through an average high school English course, but once they are in college (on scholarship) they are getting a lot of preferential treatment. Free passes on exams and the such, just based on the millions of dollars that a college can make on a T.V. deal if they put a good team on the floor. The colleges do sometimes expose the little leaches, usually when the media gets wind of what’s going on, then the NCAA will go ahead and place sanctions against the team for a couple of years. No one really believes that the corruption is going away, but we take the sanctions as an act to show that cheating is not tolerated…However misguided…

The net result of all of the preferential treatment is that we get some more athletes through college and onto professional sporting fields. The fact that they can not read or write seems to take a backseat to the fact that they CAN run, jump, throw, or just be really big for the sake of being big. Hell, ask probably half of the professional athletes in the USA to define a ‘metaphor’ and they would say that they don’t know what a ‘meta’ is for.

This is the crap These are the people that we send to represent our country in the Olympic games, a bunch of whining babies that were the star of the team back when they were playing high school sports in Alaska, then got babied through college since they were the “next big thing”. Then they end up on profesional teams (now I am talking about basketball exclusively) where they are treated in a different way than the rest of the guys who are on the same ‘team’.

You end up with a ton of over-paid, un-educated fools that think they are better than Jesus. Sure the dunk might look great on a poster, but there has to be someone there to pass you the ball to make the dunk. Since the Olympic team we send over now is comprised of a bunch of guys that already think they are better than Jesus, they never really pass. The U.S. basketball team got their ass handed to them, the most likely reason for that is ego. The U.S. has a team that is made up of a bunch of people expecting the other guys to wipe their ass after they shit. The rest of the world is using teams that play as a ‘TEAM’, and they will hand the U.S. its ass over and over again until the U.S. team realizes that it is not a dunk show, it is a game, the team with the most points when time runs out will be the winner. The U.S. guys need to start asking themselves whether they want to be the winner, or the team with the best ‘poster dunk’.

The only reason that I even mentioned the U.S. basketball at the Olympics was because I saw a quote, from Allen Iverson, of all people, that said;

“They play the game the way it’s supposed to be played,” Iverson said. “It’s not about athletics. That’s the game the way Karl Malone and John Stockton play it. It’s good for kids to see how the game is supposed to be played.”

Okay, so even Iverson understands that they need to play as a team. Why didn’t he mention that prior to the game? My best guess is that it would have required him to pull his head out of his ass. Playing the game in the Olympics is not the same as playing it at home; You have to guard everybody, as these are the best five guys that a nation can put on the floor. Every other nation’s team seems to understand that, yet, our athletes think it is going to be a highlight reel. The USA “Dream Team” has won every overall competition since they started to allow professional athletes, don’t you think that is some sort of hype that everyone has on their blackboard?

I really hope that we fall short of the medal in the basketball competition, I hope that only because it will make the athletes try a bit harder next time around. Sure it may be something to write in your diary when you kick the ass of the highest played player in the world, but how do you feel when you lose to a team that doesn’t get paid at all, and therefore plays for thd love of the game? When you can kick the ass of a team that plays for heart., not money., You will be about equal to where I was in grade school, where our team could take all comers. No one ever made a poster out of it, none of us went on to the NBA, but I will guarantee you that we played better, as a team, than the hacks players that we sent to Athens this year.

House guest

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I am sure that I have mentioned at least a few times that the house that I live in is well over 100 years old. A lot of your average, better-than-thou type people think that it is silly that I would choose to buy a house that is that old. The simple fact is that this house is made out of pretty solid material, adobe, that has been standing in the middle of this desert for over 100 years. The exterior walls are all eigteen inches thick, and it has recently been outfitted with the most current double-paned, energy efficient windows. This means that the heating cost in the house never goes over a hundred dollars a month during the winter, and while I do not currently have a central air-conditioning system I would find it hard to believe that it would cost much more. It is sort of like living in an ice-chest; the walls are so damn thick that the heat/cold can’t seep out of them. And, honestly, would you rather live in a house that has stood in the same location for 100 years or buy a “manufactured home” that is going to decay to nothing by the time you pay off your mortgagae? Regardless of what the Real Estate Agent might tell you, aluminum does not insulate against heat, “manufactured home” does mean “trailer” (although they do take the wheels of for you), and the value of trailers depreciates every year. While the value of any home that is fixed to the ground with a foundation will appreciate every year, even if it is 100 years old. Of course the value of this old house is not what I want to get into today…

I have not changed any of the locks since we moved into this place some three years ago. Truth be told, I never had the keys to a couple of the locks, a fact that I only found out yesterday. The house has three exits, one is through the back and the one that we use the majority of the time. One is through the front door, that is usually only ever used to get pizza deliveries and the such. The third enters directly into the room that my brother-in-law is now inhabiting. I wanted to change some of the locks around so that my wife and I would have access to the house through both the front and back doors while adding a different lock to the third door so that the brother-in-law wouldn’t have to worry about his privacy. I happened to have an old doorknob/deadbolt set that I put up on the “guest room”. I then took the recently removed locks from the guest room and was installing them in the living room, which would make it so that the front and back doors were keyed the same. That way if the back gate didn’t open the wife and I would be able to enter through the front door instead of the guest room. Midway through that process I had forgotten which doorknob was which and had my wife bring me her keys so that I could check. It turns out that neither one of us had a key to the doorknob that used to be in the living room, nor did either of us have a key to the doorknob that used to be on the guest room. I guess, then, that it is pretty good that we are both so forgetfull about our keys that we never lock a knob before we close the door; You have to have a key to lock the bolt and that is how we lock up the house whenever we leave.

The result of all of this is that now my wife and myself have a key that will open the front door and the back door, my brother-in-law now has a key that will open the door that goes directly outside from his room, and if we ever lock a doorknob we are all fucked. The only doorknob in the house that matches the key to the deadbolt, on the same door, is the one that I put into the guest bedroom yesterday. I briefly thought about changing all of the locks when I found the problem but two things popped immediately into mind. The first is that I have lived here for a few years and I don’t know what key does what, so how could anyone trying to break in, even if they had the keys, figure it out wihout being noticed. The second is that lock sets really cost a lot of money, not the type of thing I am willing to spend just to add a visitor to the house.

Then there was the issue with the interior door. The door that had previously separated the “guest room” from the rest of the house was a weird, wooden, luovered kind of closet door thing. It gave no privacy at all, added to the fact that, even when locked, my dogs could open it up with a couple of head-butts. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any other doors in the shed the correct width to fit that space, but, the closet door in the same room was exactly the same width. I set to work trying to swap the louvered door for the real door at about noon on Sunday. After an hour or so of trying, I was able to make the real door fit in the space that was previously occupied by the louvered door. I then put a lock on the door (doorknob) that had only a single key, if he dies in there before he gets us copies of the keys I will feel a bit sorry for him. Also, this is probably the most freedom he has ever had. If he locks both of the doors he will not be disturbed, unless, of course, we are concerned for his health, at that point we might dig out the keys to that room and make sure that he is not just dead, that should probably seem to be quite a small price considering his previous accomodations.

This will all have been rhetoric until the brother-in-law makes good with his promise of saving money for an apartment. No one can ever know how sincere the person was with their statements until it has all come down. I certainly hope that he was being truthful about trying to get into an apartment, family love/respect can only last so long.

Job frustrations; Megadeth

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Another day has come and passed. I am certainly in much better spirits today than I was yesterday, what that amounts to really isn’t much. I did receive yet another bitching session at work, but this time it was in a much more tolerable way. It was in a calm, firm voice that I was bitched at. This makes it more of a conversation than a bitching, which meant that I was able to get a few words in, in the same calm, firm voice. No one died, no one was injured, and I think we both were able to understand each others position when it was spoken about instead of being shouted about. I guess I am probably still a useless piece of shit, but I at least got to get in a word or two, and even surprise the boss when he found that I had not actually been wandering aimlessly the day before, but completing a task that he had assigned me earlier in the week. Of course none of that means that I am any less useless, but it was a day of relative calm that I absolutely needed.

The strange thing about what happened yesterday is that I got too angry to drink. Not really, I did imbibe a few of the frothy nectars, but not as much as normal; I was too angry to get drunk. This was certainly an unprecedented event around here. This fact was evidenced by my wife’s statement that she was pretty sure I was going to quit my job, which she told someone that she works with. She based that assumption on the fact that I said that I was going to quit, and I said it when I was sober and in a very matter-of-fact tone. This didn’t actually happen today, and with luck it won’t happen for a while. As for yesterday, that was exactly what I felt and I guess it was pretty obvious.

If I can make it through tomorrow without actually walking away from the job I will have all of Sunday to take care of things around the house and kind of cool down. I do hope that happens. I haven’t actually had to look for a job in about a decade and do not look forward to the thought of it. There have been dozens of people who have come into the store over the years and told me to look them up if I ever need a job, I am not sure how sincere they were, and hopefully I won’t have to find out in the immediate future. Enough about that.
• Megadeth’s new song “Die Dead Enough” hit the air in Phoenix a few days ago. I have been reluctant to make any mention of the single since I had only been able to hear it over really crappy radio reception. I heard the song today, in my car -which has way better reception than the pseudo radio I have in the room with my pc- and all I have to say about it is that it kicks unholy ass! The drummer is going ballistic with the triplets and quintuplets on the bass drums, the guitar is rocking in a way that Megadeth has not matched since their “Rust In Peace” album, it is fast, hard and in your face. It is, in a word, MEGADETH.

I guess that when Mustaine got injured he started to realize that he threw a few albums out there just to get the money. Then he had the time to listen to what Metallica is calling music these days, added to the fact that he is listening to the same radio station that I do, Phoenix-based and it never plays anything off of Metallica’s last few albums, or any of Megadeth’s for that matter. I guess it hit him that he needed to really hit hard with his next album. I do hope that it is as heavy as the first single would indicate, it has been a long time since I have had a cervical injury and it would be way cooler if it happened when I saw MEGADETH returning to their former glory.

When I used to visit Megadeth’s website frequently the address was www.megadethcyberarmy.com, which is no longer an address at all. The site that was called “Megadeth.com” was nothing more than a fansite. I guess the buzz about Megadeth kind of died when Mustaine got his injury, also Megadeth either sued the guy who was running Megadeth.com (which seems really unlikely since it was the best fan site I have ever seen, even to this day), or just gave him a job (the webmaster of Megadeth.com, I mean). Whatever happened, Megadeth.com seems to be the official Megadeth site. Which sucks for me.

It was just one little thing that I had in my life, but it was important to me. I was the first ever moderator of the “Official Megadeth Chat”, which was through the now dead megadethcyberarmy website. For a simple man, like me, that was power. I suppose that I should be happy with the fact that I was the first, but with the old site gone, as well as the java chat that I was in charge of, how would I even go about trying to prove it? I suppose that I just kind of gave up hope at some point. That point would have been long after I wasted a lot of time to create This. I had no idea how to make the images pre-load at the time, I also had to crop the sound from cds that I actually had and save them in some weird ass format to work with java-enabled browsers at the time. I bet you can download the whole thing and see all thirty different images being displayed in less than thirty seconds on a current broadband connection.

I guess I am a bit less into Megadeth than I was in the past, but when Megadeth is making actual songs that kick ass, while Metallica is making drippy folk songs, I guess I have to hope/choose that Megadeth is going to lay something heavy on us. Right?

Job related stress

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I had wondered how long the nirvana-like work environment would last after I returned from vacation. It started to fade away yesterday and then just completely disappeared today. Yes, I am back to being a useless piece of shit that they don’t even know why they keep around, or so it sounds from the screaming I endured today. What I wonder is, if that is the way my employers really think of me, why don’t they just can my ass and be done with it?

I suppose that I shouldn’t be so upset with the situation at work that I bring it home with me, yet I do and can not stop. This is the only place in the entire world, in my entire life, where my best was not only ‘not good enough’, but not even worth the time to try, apparently. I am constantly being bitched at about ‘Don’t start another job until you finish the job that you are working on’…then getting the same bitching about why I didn’t do ‘X task’ before I continued on with the job that I had already started. How can I ever be right in that situation? The simple answer is that I never can be. I just have to say that I am stupid for assuming that when they say to finish one thing before I start another that that means that they want me to finish one job before I start another. There are a lot of times when this particular statement not only doesn’t work, but is also impossible. Unfortunately I don’t know about the particular rules regarding it until long after I have been bitched at and demeaned for a good half hour.

There are many tasks that I need to do when I get to work, tasks that I was easily able to take care of within an hour or two when they used to have me come in at 9:00a.m. every day. Unfortunately, since I had the neck injury some time back, and asked them to please not make me be on my feet for more than four hours at a time, they have had me working straight shifts ever since. Previously, back in the days where I was able to do all the stuff I needed to do before I started being a little bitching bag, I could have all of my day to day stuff done within two hours and have the rest of the day to do whatever they wanted. Now, I try to start to do the day to day stuff that I usually had completed by 11:00a.m. and get stopped to go and do different things, yet still get the bitching of a lifetime about why I never finished with what they specifically told me to stop doing.

Bleh. I would probably find more sympathy if I shit in a soda can and sent it to the president.

Since I am on the subject, though, I am going to throw out one more thing. I have gained about ten pounds since they have had me working these shifts. I have gained ten pounds and not been able to do my job since they have put me on these shifts. The reason I have gained weight is pretty simple, too much food in the evenings. The way it is currently I don’t eat a scrap of food until shortly after 6p.m., that is when I enjoy a treat from the local circle k, my first meal of the day. Of course I am getting home at just about the same time as my wife is ready for dinner, so there is usually food awaiting me. Food which I don’t eat until a couple of hours later, but I do fill the time between the two meals with a healthy amount of hops and barley, which is fermented, and gets me by. When I used to take a lunch I used to take in about 400 calories with a can of chili each day around noon, this left me feeling a lot less hungry and meant that I would likely eat a bit less when I got around to re-heating the dinner that my wife had cooked for me. Now I just eat whatever is left, regardless of portion size, since I am so damn hungry after not eating anything but a circle k treat all day.

In a strange twist of events/ideas, I think that I might actually lose weight in my current situation if I were to switch back to sugared sodas. My body is currently waiting for me to eat way too much late in the evening, just about the time that my metabolism is about to call it a night. If I were to take in a bit of sugar over the course of the day it could possibly give me a bit of energy to burn while not actually adding to my waistline. Something to consider, but I have been repulsed by sugar ever since I found that I was not only borderline Diabetic in my teens, but my Father and his Mother both died due to complications or eventualities of that disease.

Long story short(er), if they really think that I am such a fuck-up that they can’t employ me, why don’t they just fire me? I think I might take the initiative and ask them about it tomorrow. If they truly believe that I am a liability to their business I do not want to be there to be their punching bag.

I am not entirely sure how I should phrase the question. Should I ask if they feel that I am a liability to the company, or should I ask if they feel that I am a liability to their profit margin, or should I ask if they feel that I am a liability to their ever making a profit again? Perhaps I will find out what I did so incorrectly that I have put the future of the store in jeopardy. All I know for sure is that I would take a job for half the pay if it were in an actual chain store where you are not able to verbally abuse the employees.

While still on the topic there is one more thing that is pretty bitch-worthy about this job. No time clock. They do round the numbers, of course, everything short of 30 minutes gets rounded to the previous whole hour. Everything from 31 to 59 minutes gets rounded down to the previous half hour. If you come in fifteen minutes early and work fifteen minutes late, you get paid for the particular hour you came in until the particular hour that you left. The 15 minutes on either side will just not count. Hell, I got shorted for an hour and a half of work in my last pay and just didn’t say a word. Why? You have to sit there for half a damn hour while she (the boss’ wife) figures out your pay. I am usually at least a week behind on pay so I will take whatever they give me, if I were to dispute it she would break out a piece of legal notepad where she wrote down what hours everyone worked. Unfortunately, she is prone to take several naps during the course of a day and has no idea when anyone actually comes in or leaves.

Of course I forgot to factor in the fact that I often have to go and do things to maintain the boss’ rental properties. You know, water the trees, clean the carpets, that kind of shit. Of course that never makes it onto a paycheck. He does say that if I write him a receipt for doing all of that stuff that he will pay me. My question is “why didn’t he write a work order for me to sign”? That document would protect us both, yet he doesn’t do it. One must certainly understand that I have done a lot of work on rental houses, on my own time, for the guy which I have never gotten paid for. I assume that the work that I did for him in the last year is going to go the same way. I really thought that spending my own time to repair shit for him would make him think that I was actually trying to be helpfull… I was dead wrong…

Vegas vacation w/photos

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We got back home from vacation a couple of days ago. This ranks as possibly the worst vacation of all time, not just counting my own personal experiences, I mean the worst vacation anyone has ever had. It was not all that enjoyable at all and I am not going to get into it. Best just to try and forget.

I did manage to write quite a bit of stuff while I was on vacation but I did not have a connection that allowed me to really try to upload anything. It is a miracle that I was able to get the two pictures in the last post uploaded. It took about thirty minutes for them to upload, thankfully I was occupied with other things or I would never have had the patience. As far as the stuff that I wrote while I was away I am not sure how I am going to handle it. I could just slap it all on the page here, but it is even less organized than usual so I really think I better edit it a bit. That is not going to happen today, or tomorrow, so don’t hold your breath.

I guess my few site readers grew bored of not having anything to read and they all started to go away. Judging by my site statistics I have had only one visit each of the last three days, one of those days I know that it was me that visited; I wanted to see how the pictures looked on a real monitor instead of the one on the laptop. I hope that as I began to post on a regular basis my meager fan base will find its way back to me. Time will tell.

• Well here are a few photos that I took while we were in Las Vegas. I had wanted to see some of these old Las Vegas landmarks for years. We have been going to Vegas on vacation every year for the last four years and only just found them this year. I guess that just tells you how stubborn I am about asking for directions, eh? Especially when you take into consideration that the hotel we stayed in last year and this year is owned by the same company that owns a number of the casions on the old strip, where the photos you see here were taken.

The first photo I really just wanted to take the picture of the horse, but I decided to go ahead and get the shot of the 7/11 sign at the same time. To anyone who has never visited Las Vegas I think it would be a bit surprising that damn near every shop on the strip has a sign that is lit up with hundreds of lights and neon. The 7/11 one is a pretty good example, but some of the more humorous ones were at places like McDonald’s and Walgreens. Just imagine them with signs lit up every bit as much as the 7/11 one, it is something to see.

The picture on the left is, of course, Vegas Vic. This is surely one of the most recognizable landmarks in Las Vegas, of course it took us four years to find him, but find him we did. Here is the photographic proof. Vic’s arm doesn’t wave anymore and some of the neon lights don’t appear to be working, other than that he is just like I imagined him.

There is a canopy over the top of Vic’s head that now runs along three solid blocks of Freemont Street. I think that it was constructed in 1999 or 2000, can’t remember for sure. This was the other reason that we wanted to find the old part of Las Vegas; To see the light show at the Freemont Street Experience. If you are ever in Las Vegas you should definitely take the time to make it down there after dark to watch the show. It lasts about ten minutes and is pretty cool. Due to the length of the canopy where it all happens it makes the show look 3d if you look down the street. I tried to take a photo of it but it certainly didn’t look like it should, I really think it is something that you just have to see in person to enjoy.

The final photo is just a closer photo of the girl that is across the street from Vic. I am not sure if she has a name, if she does I don’t know what it is. This photo was hard to take because of all the pillars around the sign and the fact that there was a huge chicken dressed as Elvis blocking it from the other side. A lot of the lights are out on this one but I still wanted to get a picture since I may never again get the opportunity. I should also note that just below this sign there is a large video screen that shows women stripping. Even though it puts little stars over their nipples, I think that it is a bit wrong. This particular part of Vegas had more kids there than anywhere else that I can think of. The only possible exception would be Circus Circus. Still, should they really be able to show stripping women on the outside of a building where anyone can see it? It is Las Vegas…

I guess that is just about all for today. Hopefully I will get back into a regular routine with these updates now that I am back. With a bit of luck I might even sift through all the crap I wrote while I was in the hotel room and get some of that posted in the next few days. As always, don’t hold your breath.

Vegas vacation ’04

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Vacation has officially begun. I got a call shortly after 6:30am from the boss at work which forced me out of a sleep that I had barely gotten into, having gone to bed past 2am and not sleeping well due to overwhelming heat and humidity. Thus we were on the road bound for Las Vegas by 9am.

The drive went relatively quickly, at least at first. We had made it from Florence to Sun City in only about an hour, better time than we have ever had previously I think. We even had to make a stop at the Wal -Mart over there to buy myself some jean shorts and some extra batteries for the digital camera. Trust me, you do not want to have to buy batteries at the littly sundry shop in a hotel on the Vegas Strip, nor do you want to buy them at a convenience store where either way you are paying at least four times what they are worth. I am just glad that I remembered them while we were in the store, as my camera only uses two batteries and when I say uses, I mean uses.

As for the road-trip itself, it was pretty uneventful. That means that we only nearly died twice, a new low for the drive. Once was due to someone in an SUV trying to pass three cars when he didn’t have nearly enough time to do it, which forced us, the car in front of us, and three oncoming cars to all move over onto the shoulder. That kind of driver is the reason there are so many fatalities along this stretch of road. The really irritating thing about it was the he did that when we were less than five miles from getting onto the Interstate, why would someone be in such a hurry that saving ten seconds would be worth their life and the lives of people in at least five other cars? Retorical, I guess. The other near death experience was while we were on the interstate and apparently a tow truck to vehicles ahead of us lost the tread off of one of his tires. My wife swerved to avoid it, but hit it anyway, and the truck and trailer behind us did the same thing, nearly jack-knifing which would have been really bad for him and us, as he was following us pretty closely. If he actually had lost control there would have been nowhere for us to go, and since we were going downhill he would not likely have been slowing at all whenthe weight and inertia of his trailer started pushing the truck along. Gosh this is a fun drive.

The Hoover dam is usually the worst part(as far as time) of the trip. It went pretty well today with the 8 miles (four on each side of it) taking only about 25 minutes. I even snapped a few photos in the hopes of illustrating the point that I made some time back about the drought having made the water level in Lake Mead drop several feet. I am only able to view the photos on my laptop currently, but as I was in a car that was in motion when I snapped them, I think they came out pretty damn good. We may actually stop there on the return trip since it won’t be a Sunday so there won’t be nearly as many people there, that could allow me to get some even better photos of it.

I mentioned several days ago that I would not be able to update the page because of charges at the hotel, as it turns out I could be wrong. They are now charging us for “unlimited local calls”, and as I use MSN for internet access that means that I have both a pc (laptop) and a local number to dial. I am a bit nervous about it, as I won’t know if they are charging me until I try to check out and then have to wonder why I spent so much on internet access when I could have treated myself to multiple prostitutes for the same price, or less depending on the quality of the prostitute.

Update: after having spent a few hours out whiling away the time on some penny slots, then eating breakfast at 9pm (honestly, where else in the world can you get an omelette and hash browns at that hour), then spending an additional hour or so playing some video poker, I started trying the internet access thing to see if it worked. I spent a bit of time on the phone with customer support for my ISP to make sure that I would be able to do it without having to dial a toll free number (which cost a buck a pop through the hotel), and then got online just long enought to check my email. I am going to inquire at the desk tomorrow about phone charges and if there are truly no charges for the local calls, this post will likely go online at that point.

Another thing, or two, or three, about the vacation and the photos and the website and all of that stuff is that I completely forgot that I have absolutely no imaging software on the laptop. What that means, basically, is that all of the photos that I take while I am here are going to have to be sorted by whether I think they are usable, then transferred to one of the other pcs once I get home for some editing, thumb-nailing and the such. If it turns out that the internet really is free for me to use while here, I might upload some of the full size photos and link to them through my updates so that I can then download and thumbnail them when I get home since there is no way that could take more time than trying to transfer them from pc to pc when I have to do it a couple of images at a time on 3.5″ floppies.

A few other things that you should keep in mind while you are reading this. First, the laptop is the only computer that I have used in the last three years or so that does not have a v-shaped keyboard, so typos are to be expected (even more so than normal). Second, it is 11:30pm right now and I have been up since 6:30am after going to bed after 2am, so I am not operating on a lot of sleep to begin with. Third, one day we will all look back on this and laugh (I am only saying that in case I do something horribly stupid and end up in prison or something).

There is yet another issue that I had not even thought of prior to the vacation. The character map on the laptop is way different than the character map on the other pc (likely due to fewer keys and a different OS). That has made it so that I am not able to use the little dot that I always have used previously to attempt to separate my thoughts. The alt commands just did nothing, so even if I typed it in and didn’t see the dot it was not like it was really there but I couldn’t see it, no, it was just not there. Whether I will correct this after I get back home is up in the air only if you think that I take a lot of pride in this page, which I don’t, ’cause if I did I would not have totally ripped off someone else’s layout to begin with. Though I must admit that it has been quite theraputic in a way, calming without having to resort to anger against those around me. It sure is fun to bitch.

A final note before I go read a bit more of Harry Potter (3rd book). I just looked over at the clock and realized that I am going to be 30 in less than a half an hour. No matter how hard I concentrate on that damn clock it just won’t stop. I think I would like to be upset or depressed about this so-called “milestone” birthday, but the truth is that every breath that you take moves you one closer to death. When you start counting things such as years you have been alive, breaths that you have taken, times your heart has beaten, that is the point where you are not really counting down to your death anymore, more like you are hoping for your death: No two people ever live the same number of seconds, no two ever take the same number of breaths, no two hearts beat the same number of times in a lifetime…Some people die of “old age” when they are over 100 while some die from the same affliction in their 50’s. Whether you like it or not, the 50’s are gonna be upon you about 2 decades before you want them.

I have finally gotten my ftp client tow ork correctly and so I am going to throw a couple of phots below. These are both taken for the illustrative purpose of showing the level of lake mead. The white that you see on the canyon walls in both photos is where the water level was a couple of years ago, while the water itself shows where it is now. I saved them at 75% size which is about the only option I have right now, so if they are huge on your screen I do apologize.

30th birthday related pining

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As hinted about in a couple of my side bar additions yesterday, my birthday is coming, and quite quickly at that. It is now only four days until I turn 30. My body has been showing the signs of the forthcoming age for several months, I have put on about ten pounds in the last six months or so, my belly is appearing to be more of a barrel than an actual physical feature, some of my joints aren’t working with the fluidity that they once did… Whether any of this is directly related to the age I am going to be on Monday is not all that clear, it is just that I am noticing all of these little things a lot more as that age approaches.

The most annoying part of it is the weight gain. When I graduated high school, and thus no longer had physical education or the other after school activities, I ballooned from my normal 170 pounds to almost 210 pounds in less than a year. I was still working full time during this period, but the fact that I was working at a pizza joint, and thus my every meal was pizza I suppose that is to be expected. I switched myself over to diet soda at that point, that might not seem like a big change, but when you are guzzling down a 12 pack of coke a day taking away all of that sugar really does help. Another factor that helped me become a little less porky at the time was a new job that I got, at an ice cream parlor. I am not a real big fan of ice cream, so I didn’t eat the leftovers nearly as much as I did at the pizza place.

I got myself back down to a satisfactory 175 pound size, which went down to 165 when I was without a job or a home for a few weeks near my 19th birthday, but otherwise I have been that same weight for about 11 years. Even when I went into the hospital with a neck injury, that I talked way too much about, several months ago the nurse did not believe my 175 pound estimate of my weight and put me on the scale. True I did weigh 178 at that point but that was still pretty much in line with what I have weighed all of my adult life. I now weigh 184 pounds and I am not wearing it well at all.

I suppose what I really need is the discipline to put myself back onto the simple workout schedule that helped me to thin up after reaching the 205 pound mark. My excercise was simple. Before bed each night I would do 50 sit-ups and 50 (well it started at 20 and went up incrementaly until I was able to do 50) push-ups. In the morning I would do only the sit-ups, as the push-ups really killed my arms and I needed to have the strength to be able to throw around cases of dead animal at work, each case can weigh over 80 pounds, and after moving them around for ten minutes you really know that you did.

I really don’t remember why I gave up on those excercises. I began to live with my wife around the time that I gave them up, but she was generally always in bed long before me, and it is not like it takes more than about three minutes to do it. Exerting the muscles actually helped me to get to sleep when I wasn’t entirely tired before I laid down. I can not think of a single reason why I ever quit doing it. I suppose that it is just a routine that you get into and once you break the routine once it becomes easier to break it again, and again, until the routine is to not do it at all. What is worse is that it is a hard routine to get yourself into. Unless you are either already in really great shape, or a masochist, it is a lot of hard work that does not show any results for weeks or months. I think I will start doing it again, but, wait, I am going on vacation in a couple of days so I better wait until I get back…

In 30th birthday related things, I still find that I am getting asked for my ID when I attempt to buy alcohol and tobacco at the local convenience stores. I find that a bit humorous only because the people that are asking for the ID are usually ten years younger than me. I don’t see how anyone could look at me and think that I wasn’t 18, come on, all the grey hair should at least tell them that I voted for Dubya..gotta be 18 to vote..

I often look into the mirror and think (while I am combing my hair) that I don’t look much different than I did when I was 16. Thinking about it now, I bet a lot of people do the same thing as they are approaching a so-called milestone birthday. Of course I don’t look much different, my eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin, hair-line (thankfully) are all still just where they were when I was 16. The multiple holes from the earrings that I wore in my teens can still be seen, though I doubt that they are still usable. The problem is that when you see yourself every day in the mirror you don’t notice all of the minor things that are happening, the things that basically erode you over time. I can see, in my face, very slight lines that were certainly not there 14 years ago. My eyes seem to be a bit deeper than they were all that time ago. If I actually smile, my face knows just where to put all the skin based on pre-creased lines.

I don’t really want to be young forever, I doubt anyone really does, yet, aging is something that we all seem to hate. I can understand why I hate aging, it is a sign that I am mortal and that death grows nearer with every passing breath. What I really don’t understand is why people who are very religious dislike it. In a religious person’s mind every breath means one less until you are in Heaven, right? Heaven is supposed to return you to your former beauty, so shouldn’t religious people look at wrinkles with love? One step closer to God after all.

• I had no intention of bitching all day about my age. I was actually hoping to throw up a news item or two, there was nothing worth bitching about.