em's dance recital: low skill, high cute factor. lots of adorable, ungainly little kids doing the ballet and tap thing.

bbq with gang, incl misti, neil, 2 friends, grandparents. spent most time playing with bugah at mario kart or checking out his room.

may fill in detail later, but too tired now... 3 hour road trip there, and 3 hours back... poor bhk is even more sleepy than me!

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1 year ago - Oneeyed b'day, cleaning up the tech area pics, sugar free cherry sno-cone.

2 years ago - day in moods, bears kill and eat monkeys, auto stitched clouds, new interfaces for flickr and yahoo, police music

3 years ago - Tracy Ullman, Hotcakes and Sausage, tummy owie, who to GP&K, bad hurricane season predicted, movies, work stuff, doctor beat up by a corpse, missing kid case foul up, ernie's, chicago crime, finish the sentence, triple homicide

4 years ago - Oneyed is 21!, Birthday Stars, warmer out, 2-point smart ones, company to php, yahoo mail to 100mb (now it's 1 gig), being left behind in CoH,gumball cards, boy with a bunker, silly amazon stuff, wireless broadcast test, sample memo, bro

5 years ago - trouble with downloads, friday 5, there-quest, publix direct

6 years ago - layout planning, link popularity, now dead cam-ring

7 years ago - jimmy johns, Adipocere, purity test meme, nice chitty chat, mushies, gated communities, super hero casting poll

Hump-day. Somehow, I can't get the mental picture of dozens of Käpylehmät out of my head. Cone-cows for everyone! Color me spoiled, but I'm glad I've got a Wii, a boatload of boardgames, and BHK to play them all with! Come to think of it, maybe she'd like a pine cone duck / llama / puggle for the holidays. This doesn't look like any puggle I've seen.

That said, maybe Pye and Newt would like to play with a few pine cones.... I'll see what I can round up.

Secret Santa Day at work! I got a $20 gamestop card, a gumdrop penguin, and a candy cane! Thanks, Mystery Kringle! I suspect that'll be a hefty piece of Mario Galaxy or some other swell game.

BHK and I are just taking it easy tonight... hitting the sack early, too - just as soon as she's done on the phone with Misti. Apparently Bugah has poor faith about Santa, but they don't really talk about it. That's a bummer... hopefully the holiday spirit will still prevail.

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"The Tunguska event, an explosion on June 30, 1908, cleared an 800-sq.-mi. swath of Siberian forest. Was it a UFO crash? An alien weapons test? Now, Sandia National Laboratories has released its own explanation for the Tunguska event. Using supercomputers to create a 3D simulation of the explosion, the Department of Energy-funded nuke lab has determined that Tunguska was, indeed, the explosion of a relatively small asteroid. The simulation videos are well worth checking out — they show a fireball slamming into the earth from the asteroid's air burst. The researchers caution that we should be keeping watch for many more small, potentially earth-impacting asteroids than we are currently tracking."

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I Am A: Neutral Good Human Wizard/Rogue (3rd/3rd Level)
( Read more... )

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1 year ago - new archie is new coke, longer kong

2 years ago - weezle, danny and newt, knuckle-typing, 100 questions, pineapple pizza poll, bush nsa crapola

3 years ago - road trip pix with Dan, stalker picked up, odd todd, tideland, foamy, ravioli stops a thief, newt bath picture

4 years ago - 50 recoveries, bug dreams, snuggle time

5 years ago - eco kun, sleepyhead, heroclix scotto v2

6 years ago - numen, parachute newt, evil date service, tarot tales, distress

7 years ago - Hell week ends, Alfie, journal entry from 1995

Rise and Shine! Early Bird gets the worm! Road trip to Virginia today with BHK! (in-laws and Louise will caravan with us, in another car)


One of the ideas that BHK and I bandied about on the road trip after making up random drink names... like "The devil's shoelaces", "Cool Breeze" and "Bag o' Tremors", we started thinking about magical drinks that replicate experiences - "skydiving", "slap in the face", "Karate victory" were some of the more tame ones.

Stopped at Sheetz to get a nibble mid-trip...
Observations:

• garlic fries good but swimming in oil at the bottom
• mac and cheese bleh.
• Cinnamon pretzel needs no frosting.
• Coffee drink was sort of weak.
• How many teenagers lurk there as a social thing?
• Cups leap out an attack patrons.

I think we'll stick to pre-packaged foods next time.

While at Bugah and Em's b-day, met Nana (great Gramma), The Gramma and Roy. We all went to an Italian place for supper - Joe's. From the school of "HUGE portions of OK food" The spaghetti looked great, as did the lasagna. I tried a bite of the eggplant parm, which was a little bitter - my veggie sub did fine.

Speaking of the birthday, I was surprised to see that BHK and I were the only ones to get the 10 and 5 year old any toys! Next closest thing to a toy was a gumball machine bank. Oh, wait - I forgot. Louise got Em a toy cell phone and necklace. Bugah seems to dig the skateboard, but it looks like the learning curve may be a bit more steep than we had initially thought. I'm confident that he'll be all over it soon.

After playing tanks and a few other mini-games, Bugah's given me the Wii bug again. We may try and pick one up this weekend. I also played Destroy all Humans 2 on the xbox with Bugah, which seems to be a nice sequel to the one we have for our Xbox at home.

Em was a sweetie - leading me around by the hand - we played some concentration (using dominoes to match the number of pips) before leaving for dinner.

We made it back to our place about 11:30 - worn out from the day's ruining around and socializing. My hip was a little creaky after the drive, but no ill effects aside from that.


1 year ago - work sickies, Internet lawsuit fraud, giant prehistoric Syrian camels, free hp Lovecraft audio books, john Mayer and Sheryl crow bear costume,

2 years ago - supercar, monkeytown usa, pi song, obey the bunny, nazi?

3 years ago - h-bot, walkabout pics, sammich girls, mockery troopers, living tissuejacket, ff2, dan dog, bro evicted, Eau de humanity, Templar

4 years ago - nightmare, tri-bloc embalming, bra sizes, angry kid, sex resource guide, sweetalyssm's bday, alien abduction tags

5 years ago - restless, newt, poo-fuel, baby costumes, bike ride w/bro, chupacabra,laser jet temp tats, honest opinion, kung fu channel, quizzes

6 years ago - hector, ap bday, sleepies, landlord issues, luxury

7 years ago - kingdomality, jobs, ghost dog-bears

Restless night sleeping, accidentally booted Newt off the bed once, but he stuck with me throughout the night. BHK was restless too, but I didn't leg-sweep her out. Pye visited briefly, but high-tailed it after the barest commotion. I dreamt that BHK and I were hunting animals, tagging them for reference, and re-releasing 'em into the wild. A side effect of geocaching, perhaps?

Bugah & Neil went fishing - to no avail, as the water was too choppy.

Half day tomorrow! North Beach Fireworks are going to be something else!

via jwz - Search for Lonesome George mate is long shot

While scientists search for a mate for "Lonesome George" -- the last known survivor of a species of Galapagos tortoise -- some say the effort to fend off extinction may be in vain. Even if a mate is found, George has not been interested in reproducing in the past and may not know how, former keepers and others who have worked with him said.

"He has problems ... he probably never saw a female and male of his own species reproducing," said Swiss biologist Sveva Grigioni, who worked with George 13 years ago.

Grigioni, now back in Switzerland, said she could normally get tortoises to ejaculate within minutes, but spent months manually stimulating George and never extracted semen from him.

Age is not George's problem. He is estimated at between 60 and 90 years old, and could live to be 200 and still reproduce, scientists say.

The visual differences in tortoises from different islands were among the features of the Galapagos that helped 19th Century British naturalist Charles Darwin formulate his theory of evolution. Since then, the tortoises have been hunted by pirates for their meat and their habitat eaten away by goats introduced onto the islands. George, who weighs 198 pounds, was found on Pinta in 1971.

Reviewing Openads for the company's ad server for the web. it seems pretty reputable and reliable, thus far.

Fire drill this morning was a welcome break in the day - cool outside, everyone seemed laid back and calm - helped move the rest of the time that much more rapidly. the 2pm meeting went well... lots of good information for me to ruminate over the next few projects. I really dig that I'm in an environment that will allow me to use the skills I have! (Last gig wasn't bad, but a lot of repetition. This time, there's a lot of room for creative thought along with brute force.

Day closed with S'mores over a fire pit, some preview fireworks, and then Bugah and I played a bit of "Destroy All Humans". Not a bad thing.

First Paycheck! Timely arrival, give that our quarterly assessment is due to be paid on Monday. It's nice to be able to put a little coin into savings, too. Slightly larger than the next few, given that insurance hasn't begun to be withdrawn on them yet. (I get insured starting August 1.) Plans for next paycheck - contemplate a new couch, and start catching up on old debt. Revising a budget to accommodate *more* income and savings should be fun.

I don't really want an iPhone, but I would like a Nokia N85. Perhaps initially a little expensive, but still cheaper in the long run. Maybe after my current nifty-phone (LG enV) bites the biscuit. Who knows how long that'll be... it's pretty dang rugged and I just got it a few months ago. I am getting a blackberry and a laptop with my new gig, but those are purely business toolkit goodies. I think I'm still more jazzed about the Wii, as far as silly toys are concerned.

Scientific American has an fascinating feature An Earth Without People, not to mention these renderings of what the city might look like sans humans.

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via chuckm -

Eternal Plastic

The Register has an interesting article reminding us that plastic lasts forever. Every piece of plastic you've ever thrown away still exists somewhere out there in the world. Every fork, every cup, every GI Joe.

In this particular case, it's a flotilla of 10,000 plastic duckies that escaped a sinking cargo boat in 1992 and have been sailing the world's oceans ever since. From the article:

The luckless fleet of cursed, wandering sea-going toys - Flying Duckmen, perhaps - circled the northern Pacific for some years before a fresh horror befell them as they drifted into the Arctic. Here they became frozen into the pack ice, suffering untold torment in their icy prison as they slowly transited past Greenland into the Atlantic.

Their yellow paint has washed away to ghostly translucent white. I can only imagine what 10,000 of them look like floating by. Every now and then one little duckie breaks off from the main group and washes ashore. Apparently they're considered quite a collector's item. The rest are all doomed to float like phantoms on the currents of the ocean.

Break It Down!

But there may be hope. According to The New Scientist, an American company has created a specialized microwave that can break plastics back down into diesel grade oil and gas. Non-hydrocarbon materials are left untouched. That means you can easily convert the plastic coating on a length of copper wire as oil, and leave the pure copper behind for recycling as reclaimed metal.

Among the first companies to use is an automotive reclamation plant in New York. They plan to use the machine on what they call "autofluff". That's a very cute word for all the non-metal stuff that comes off a car and usually ends up in landfills. This machine will allow them to break down the plastics within the autofluff. Supposedly this process will generate enough oil to power the machine itself, meaning its self sustaining and will additionally reduce the amount of car material going to landfill.

Now to round up those duckies...

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Advice from someone in their fifties to someone in their twenties.

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went with misti, bhk and em to see buga and neil tote a balloon in the richmond christmas parade - had a great time - aside from the obvious perq of bugah, there were also tiny shriner cars, a really overweight darth vader, cowboys, balloons of odd things blowing like the hindenberg, and more sousaphones than even john phillips could ask for. Odd thing, since the giant balloons were being hoisted through downtown richmond, they had to be lowered to duck under the street lights every few blocks.

misc pictures from road trip to md (including newt in lockdown, south of the border, and electric palm trees, as well as the parade) click here.

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bro still is where he is... writing him a letter tomorrow or first thing monday.

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after the parade and a quick trip to target to look for some xmas lights, we visited with misti, neil & co, bfore heading to the in-laws for dinner. long day, but a solid one... on the way back, we drove through DC, and I got to eyeball the washington monument and nation'a capital from the potomac bridge. more photos from that neck of the woods soon.

with that, I'm hitting the sack. until later, dear journal.