New U2

Has it been 4 years... oh man... I love the new U2 song.

So what are my desert Island Discs....

1. U2: Achtung Baby
2. The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

I'm still trying to figure out my third... tough choice...

A little Microwave cooking tip

Do not put 5 grapes in the microwave for too long.

Do not put 5 grapes in the microwave.

Do not put any grapes in the microwave.

Trust me. They catch fire. I shit you not.

Also smells bad.

Smells really bad.

Just a tip...

oh what a day

I had to brush my teeth at Red Robin*. My stomach kinda hurts. When will I learn?

Next time the kids want to go there, I'm going to get a drink and just watch them eat.... uggghhhh...

*Red Robin could also be known House-O-MSG... be careful out there.

today was blue

I'm not even sure why. There were a couple of reasons, but I think the main one was that someone at work got hurt really bad in a jet ski accident. Another friend of a co-worker was killed in the cascades yesterday when he was hit while rapelling by a refridgerator size rock.

Just a blue day. I'm still a bit sick, but not much. I'm sure that didn't help. I think I'll be turning in early again. Sleep is good.

Well for fuck's sake.

Sometimes expressions really get me thinking. I was in a class yesterday and the instructor let the fuck word slip out then he said, "Pardon my French". When did that become French? I mean fuck. I'm no linguist and I don't even pretend that I occasionally play one on TV or in live theater, but that word doesn't sound French.

First off I can look at it and immediately I know how to pronounce it. Fuck... I don't even need my trusty phonics, but hell it would work if I did. Not "ette" at the end. Like I said I'm no expert but if you get to say all the letters then it isn't fucking French.

So how did they opt all the cuss words in an one time? Shit is not French either, I'm quite sure the word in French starts with an M and actually has letters you don't get say.

Secondly why pardon it at all. No kids in the room and we say it all the fucking time. Also I'm sure he doesn't have any afliction that causes him to cuss at random, so he meant to say it. He didn't look at all sorry when he said, "Pardon my French". (Does the period go inside the quote mark? I'm not that far in the punctuation book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. I did it both ways once above the other way to make sure I wasn't wrong twice. I'm sure I'm wrong at least once though) So we chalk that part up to saying sorry when you aren't sorry at all. If you said it, you said it, just move on, k?

fuck

blog fixed

OK after some antisocial behavior I was able to repair my template. Something bad happened to it and clipped out major portions of it. It seems better now.

While I was in there, I added the ability for anonymous comments. I thought I had set it up that way earlier, but no.

I'm now sick. I have training all day, so I'll try and sit in the back away from people and get some rest. I'll try not to fall asleep.

blog broken

i dorked up my template somehow. Not sure how. fixing it now...

back to the store...

I grocery shopped today. I was a touch sick so I stayed home from work. I didn't want to get anyone else sick. I worked from home in the morning and then I wanted soup really bad.

If you know my annoying reactions to MSG and anything at all about the cambell's soup outfit you know that when I want soup I have few choices. My favorite one is to make it myself. It takes 2 days and quite a bit of work to make rich beef barley soup. So I shopped.

While there it felt so good. Like before when I didn't have a day job. Just slid through the store like I had never left.

I wish every friday were like this. Except the cold part... of course.

Favorite song

I'm really liking MAKTUB "You Can't Hide" from the Khronos Album

I wonder if there is a way to link to a song like everybody links to IMDB for their favorite movie.

I tried the Apple Music Store but there is no way to get to the links because it's all in the itunes frame.

Anyone? Anyone?...

a walk back in time on the back talk blog

So I sent someone link today to a specific post. But when I was looking for it I had to wade through quite a bit of blog.

I always say if I can do things to amuse myself and still get by that's my definition of success.

I laughed.

So there you go. So that makes this random babble have some future value because I might come back and read this post and laugh. So if it's not funny to me now, it might be in a year.

Investing in laughes... one post at a time.

My friend Tom says during his show (pardon me for the butchering for my own selfish use):

The blog is closed caption for the humor impared.
So if you don't get something, just throw your arms up into the air and say, "Oh my, I've never had it this good!".
In some cases that might be true, so look alive.

-- Tom Frank in a street show -- Seattle WA, 2004.

I only put that in because it makes me smile now, but in a year I'll laugh my ass off.

See what I mean?

So why does this work?

I'm thinking CMF Jon can answer this, but I haven't had a chance to ask him directly. He seems to be a regular reader. Maybe we can exercise the comment feature here on blogger.

Why do my glasses work well no matter how far down my nose they are?

If you know me there there is a reasonable amount of slack here. That is up and down my nasal appendage. I don't know the answer, because, well there is "no why there" (as I tell the kids some times). I just don't know. I was sitting in a seriously boring meeting where 3 people were arguing something and, as per usual, a fourth party wanted to weigh in and he did so in a rather loud way near my head so I tuned out. I started wondering about how far down my glasses could go and I could still read the scribble on the white board. I found through experimentation that it didn't matter to me where they were. I could be in "librarian glare" mode way out at the end and it was the same as pushed as hard as I can up to where the polycarbonate is being brushed by my eyelashes. No difference that I could see.

I only got glasses when I turned 29. So I haven't been pondering this or even really had a reason to ponder this for six or so years. If the question sounds like it comes from a first grader, that's why.

I have a few of theories. The first of which is my eyes are strong enough to compensate for my stupid experiment. The other is the nature of my prescription is correcting for the not so spherical right eye I have and that type of correction it isn't critical how far from the cornea the lens is. Third (when I added the third theory I want you to know I went back and changed the word "couple" to "few" because people a couple is two and a few is three or more.) shit after my word usage tirade I've forgotten the third theory... Oh wait I got it. Third my left eye is strong enough to compensate (it's almost a 0 corrective lens on the left) for my stupid right eye that can't see shit.

So why do I think Jon will know the answer to this? Because one evening he took my glasses and started moving them around a few feet away from his eyes and played "guess the prescription" and he got it right. That's crazy. CMF

Up early

I love going to work in the dark. It feels like I'm cheating the rest of the world out of a few extra hours.

Weird? Yes.

Very.

today on vacation (including the stitches)

So we're here in Idaho. We have the best Denny's by our house. Best in the world. Here's proof: in Post Falls, ID they have the worst Denny's. So that's one more bad one down on our quest to prove that our Denny's is the best Denny's... and it is.

This one is slow and the food is not so good.

When we woke up it was raining. So we put on our bike clothes anyways, because we're hard core.

Then we went to "Treaty Rock" which a park that is cut in 1/2 by I-90. I walked around and saw it. Tammy waited in the car. She is so smart. It was some graphiti by some guys who "acquired" 200 Acres from a high ranking Indian chief from the area. It was covered in plexiglass because people were defacing the defacing.

We went back to the hotel room and changed again. We were going to go shopping.

Next we visited a book/music/video store. The coolest thing about it was the wide age of geeks camped out on the floor in the back yelling at each other while playing one of those damn collected card games. You know the one, I don't want to type it here because then google will assocaite it with me and FTN (fuck that noise) They were so loud we had to go see what they were doing. We got the sound track to the Big Lebowski. It rocks.

OK so now it's sunny sorta so we went to the state park. Farragut state park with a ton of riding trails. It's an old WWII naval training camp with the camps still there as these big fields. There was a big ass reunion going on. We finally got some water and figured out where we wanted to ride. We took our time getting set and we rode .25 miles when I saw a trail marker and stopped. Tammy fell because of it and bashed her leg on her pedal. It was big and nasty, but didn't bleed much at all, just a little bit. Owch. For just a minute she was really mad at me then as we got her cleaned up she cooled off. We butterflied it closed and she wanted to keep riding. We did some single track down and back up. We had to walk up some of it because it was pretty steep. We went a total of 3.25 miles and got back to the car because her leg was hurting. We untaped it and changed the dressing and decided it needed cleaned.

Enter the nav system. We pushed "Nearest Hospital" and it took us to an urgent care in Hayden, ID. They were so nice, but they took one look at it and said "stitches". So after a nasty set of shots (the local) she wasn't feeling at pain anymore, but the stitching started. 1..2...3...4...5 five V F.I.V.E of them. Black thread that needs to come out next week.

From there we went to the Olive Garden for dinner. If you go to the Olive Garden in Post Falls, ID and there is along wait, I can tell you for sure that the pager is in range in the Boarders. We ate a great meal and headed to the drug store to get some bandages (have to change it daily). We also got her some tylenol PM. She just took one and should be asleep really soon.

Tomorrow we're buying some donuts and driving west til we get home... No Biking. No Swimming. I might get an audio book because she's going to sleep all the way home.

Shout outs to the day: (Tammy says: "ow" and the medical clinic was great) Olive Gargen for a great dinner and pager range.

In I-da-ho

So you think they gots mullets in WA?

I saw two today that were just outstanding.

1. the ultimullet (aka rasta-mullet) shaved in the front and dredlocks in the back.
2. that old fashioned "santa mullet" thats grey and styled with a beard to boot...

we're on vaction... and we're spottin mullets.

Traffic is funny

So today I saw a lady who was yelling at her cell phone. She was driving all by her self and obviously her Star Trek communicator-esque flip phone was in her hand on speaker. She was yelling at it like it was a video phone as if she were being seen. So the hands free kit failed in this case to get the driver on the road. I'm not knocking her for talking, talkings not bad and you get extra bonus points for using the hands free kit. But if you still hold the phone up where you can, "yell at it *real* good" then you just wasted all that hands free mojo. I feel bad for the guy on the other end, but maybe he deserved it.

I wonder what he was driving...

Morning

So the morning started off really nice on 405 with the sunrise and venus so prominent in the east.

I got kinda tired setting up my tablet. I wish Max were here. He's at school by now though. He and I hung out all day on Saturday at work only breaking for lunch with Tammy and Sam.

I was exchanging email with someone on gmail about a particular tool for use with photo blogging and gmail figured out what I was looking for and the advert bar on the right of the email message had a link to what was being referred to in the mail. Nice. Granted it's a google thing at this point, but still.

At least I have the iPod...

If you really want to understand something...

Do it 1000 times.

Tom told me that once ina burger king like 18 years ago. He was showing me something called the SW Shift. Most of you won't have a clue what that means, thats a good thing.

So 1000 times seems like a lot, but it really isn't depending on what you're doing.

In Aikido we have to learn to do forward and back rolls on the mat. About 10 years ago when I took Aikido in Columbus for about a month I learned to do them. The mat was different and a decade has passed. When I first started back I did a couple and they felt fine. Then somewhere along the way when I was learning again I think some fear crept in. See if you go into a fetal tuck position you aren't round. If you aren't round you make noise. If you make noise you hurt. This causes more fear and you collapse more.

At some point I was aware of a little bit of fear creeping in. So when, "are you comfortable with your forward rolls?" was asked in class I went with "no". Sensai had said I was getting to the point where I just needed reps. Another sensai last night said the same thing like this, "now just do it a thousand times". I agree.

So I made myself a chart. This Ross Perot here. I divided it into 100 squares. I put out the futon so I have a pad to roll on and I do 10 reps per block. 10x100 = 1000. (I like to show my work.)

My goal is by the end November to have done 1000 forward rolls.

Don't think, just roll.