My friend Tina got me a Sedum 'Odom' over the weekend from The Natural Gardener. It's the lime green one on the left in the photo, in case you couldn't pick it out of a lineup. Or couldn't pick it out as being a plant that someone would see and think of me and buy, seeing as how it's my favoritest color. She brought it to me at work and it made my whole Monday happy! I decided that it needed some friends, so I picked up a Kangaroo Paw and something else that I can't remember off the top of my head. I also got this fabulous blue pot which is a high-density poly resin so it's durable and lightweight. And blue!



This afternoon I drilled some holes in the bottom of the pot, filled the bottom with rocks that I was wondering what to do with after I dug them out of the front garden, and then put in the three plants and some more potting soil. All three plants are perennials in Texas, drought tolerant which is a must for living in my care, and can supposedly take 6+ hours of sun. We'll see about that.

And of course I can't just buy two plants, so I also picked up a columbine and a society garlic, neither of which I photographed. The columbine made it into the ground, but I haven't settled on a place for the garlic yet.

I also potted my Agave Americana in a real pot. It had a bunch of pups which I removed before repotting, so I'll try my hand at starting some new agaves. Perhaps I will be making my own tequila before long. Lord knows I need it.

I think I might start blogging again. ....now.

I just read this article over at wired about websites that track what they call "urban eccentrics". I don't find the tracking of the eccentrics particularly amusing/intriguing per se, but it is interesting to note that pretty much every city *does* have at least one urban eccentric, and almost everyone in town knows of them.

Here are my examples:
Pasadena, CA: Eccentric inventor of the strain gauge Ed Simmons wears tights and a tutu and can be spotted around town - at the grocery store, hanging around Caltech, etc. Check out his wiki article here.

Tulsa, OK: Bicycle riding lunatic? or local color? I think the verdict is still out on Biker Fox, who in an apparent oversight does not have a wikipedia page. Biker Fox can be seen all over town, although I think he mostly hangs out on the south side around 71st street. Biker Fox is primarily identified by his skin tight racing attire complete with advertisements (unpaid), and the racing outfits usually match the bike he is riding that particular day. This guy actually performs tricks (hopping over the handlebars of his bike, and flipping over the handlebars), and his goal is to one day appear on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I know this because Kris produced and directed the Biker Fox video (paid for by Biker Fox) which is available on video DVD.

Savannah, GA: The crazy guy with the sign who hangs out in the squares downtown. His sign is something about impending damnation, fire and brimstone, etc. He also drives the abortion wagon, a station wagon that has all sorts of f'd-up dolls and photos in a sort of collage on the roof rack. The vehicle, like the man, can be spotted downtown.

Austin, TX: Eccentric AND homeless, the cross-dressing Leslie Cochran can be spotted most of the time on 6th Street downtown in the vicinity of Congress. Cochran pretty regularly runs for mayor, and is the homeless spokesperson against police brutality. Sometimes you want someone else to be on the lookout for Leslie, since he is frequently wearing only a thong, and I'm not talking about footwear.

That's just about everywhere I've lived, and each place has at least one urban eccentric. Makes me wonder if every town really does have one, and if these eccentrics take over the position when the incumbent dies? Curious.
3 replies.

For some now-forgotten reason, I tossed the bulb syringe into the bathtub a couple weeks ago. Mommy likes to play 'squirt the baby', a fun one-player game where you fill the blue bulby with water and squirt it at the baby. Points deducted for hitting baby in the eyes; points awarded for giving baby a drink of water.

The second game is making bubbles under water. The great thing about the bulb syringe is that you can aim it anywhere, so you can tickle the baby with the bubbles. Also, squeezing the bulb faster or slower makes different noises. Very entertaining.

Tonight we also played a game called Duck Drop, whereby the Bath Administrator holds a rubberduck approximately 10 inches above bath-level and drops the duck into the water. When flat bottom of the duck makes contact with the water, giggling ensues. When replicating this game, one may want to wear some sort of waterproof gear, I came out of the incident rather wet. I also found that this game works equally well with a 16-ounce plastic Rudy's cup, and with this you can produce different sounds by dropping it top or bottom down. Baby laughs the same - hysterically - in all cases.

I guess this just goes to show that you don't need a bunch of expensive toys to have fun, although the Flashy Quackers LED rubberducks are definitely worthwhile.

Today's project was to put all the recipes that are drifting around in my kitchen into one organized place. I had a bunch of recipes that were written on Post-It Notes, 3x5 notecards, or various other slips of paper. These were magneted to the refrigerator or stuck to the inside of the cupboard door next to the stove or floating around in my cookbook.

I got the spark of the idea from a magazine I was reading recently that suggested using a "brag-book" type photo album to house recipes on index cards. These albums usually hold 24 to 36 photos. Just slide your recipe cards into the plastic photo holder sleeves and you have a tidy spill-proof cookbook at your fingertips.

I didn't have recipe cards though, and my recipe notes were in rather poor condition, so I typed them into a document, setting my margins to 1/2" on the left and 5-1/2" on the right. I needed to squeeze the recipe into 4" in length, so some recipes required a two-column layout for the ingredients, one needed smaller text. I printed the recipes and cut them to size (4 x 6") on my paper cutter.

The finished product is even better than I expected. I only put 8 recipes in my book... these are the recipes I make all the time but still require the recipe because I don't know it by heart. I figure I can add recipes that I want to try out, or new favorites as we happen upon them.

I found the album at Michaels, and it was only 66¢. The one drawback to this album is that I cannot change the cover. I think I will be able to mod podge over it if I want to. The cover is aesthetically fine, it's just that it's not obvious which is the front and which is the back. In the past I have bought brag books at Target... they have albums that hold 36 prints and cost around $2. The advantage to these is that the cover art slips into a pocket so it can be easily replaced.
3 replies.

I am watching the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, and they just had a story on the situation in Georgia (whereby Musharaf has declared marshall law, etc etc). They showed a clip of President George Bush saying the following:

You can't be president and head of the military at the same time.

Wait.

What?

Maybe it was CBS' fault, and they cut off the end of his sentence. It could have been:

A) ...unless you're an American president.
B) ...NOT.
C) ...just kidding folks, I'm really not that dumb.
5 replies.

Muffin Head is on his way to having two teeth. I think by this time next week he will have two fully erupted lower chompers. The first tooth, as I mentioned in a previous post, came out one week ago. He seemed a bit relieved at first, since the tooth had actually broken through the gum and was probably less painful that way. That blissful period was pretty short though, and we have gone right back to regularly scheduled fussiness and biting/chewing just about anything we can get our tiny little hands on.

The fussiness makes it more difficult to get thrown out of our apartment with a scant moment's notice.

There has been black "snow" coming out of the air duct in our office for the last several weeks or months. I'm not really sure when it started, but I'm certain that it has been going on for a while now. I finally called the apartment office on Monday to put in a maintenance request. They told me they would need to have someone come out a clean the duct work. Fine, I said, schedule it anytime. I'm always here so it will be no problem.

What they failed to mention was that it would be a problem if I was here. The guy showed up today to do the work, and told me I would have to leave. Would have been really nice if the office would have told me in advance. And of course in hindsight it makes sense that I wouldn't want to be here.

So Fussy Pants and I hopped into the car and went over to Michaels. Baby loves some Christmas gaudiness, so this was the perfect place to visit. I can understand it when craft stores start putting up Christmas early, because for crafty stuff you really need to start in oh, say, July. I am however always a bit taken a back when Target starts setting up for Christmas in October.

I guess the real problem is that Thanksgiving is holiday with a slim profit margin. Retailers can't push on you as much crap-that-you-don't-need as they can at other holidays. so they just try to skirt around it.

And speaking of Christmas, there was a designer (Tory Burch) on Martha this morning showing off her holiday line of clothing. The stuff was pretty average/nice looking with a lot of sequins and beads. They march out these four models wearing the clothing, and as you'd expect these models looked desperate for a sandwich. One of them is wearing a dress that is black knit with black beads. Martha asks how much the dress costs, and it's a mere $395.

Wait just a second. Just the tax on that is more than I'm really anxious to pay for a pair of jeans.

How much do people spend on clothes on a annual basis? And I mean REAL people, not Martha Stewart and the rich designers that appear as her guests. $400 is way out of my price range, especially for something that one might wear to a Christmas party, ONCE. Actually, $400 is just about my entire clothing budget for a year.

But somebody has to be buying this stuff, or designers wouldn't be busy dreaming up new lines every year at these outrageous prices. Talk about profit margins. I bet they pay 4 year-olds in India about 12 cents an hour to sew the beads on those dresses. But they'd be making more money than my son is.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has finally determined that babies and children are the real problem for consumers.

They get into everything. They put stuff in their mouths, like lead-painted toys that obviously are not meant to be sucked on. They break things so that they can maim themselves on the resulting broken shards. They pull apart little pieces and swallow them, sometimes repeatedly. All of these actions result in injury. And lawsuits.

The American people should not have to shoulder such a burden. Lawsuits will put out of business the corporations that produce these supposedly hazardous materials. When these companies go under, jobs will be lost. Safety Commissions will be rendered useless. And then what will we do with all that lead paint we just mixed up? Are we really going to bury seven million tiny magnets in the desert of Arizona next to the cartridges of ET?

My suggestion is that we put an end to this senselessness. The real problem here is the children. Not only do they hurt themselves with these harmless objects that they fashion into weapons, but they themselves are weapons.

My son, who is now just over 7 months old and has the cutest fuzzy head and big blue eyes, out of nowhere and without provocation, bit me with a razor-sharp tooth last Thursday. He didn't draw blood, but he could have. He did break the skin on my finger.

We need to stop giving these kids toys. My son only gets the cardboard boxes, everything else gets thrown away. We also need to put warning labels on babies, especially the cute, innocent looking ones.
1 reply.

I rarely read email that my mail client marks as spam. However, this one caught my eye because of the subject line: Representative from your Country needed.

We are at search and selection of both experienced, highly qualified employees, and young, creative and perspective specialists in marketing. We clearly realize that the success of our company are our employees, and therefore creation for them of maximally favorable conditions to maintain and improve their professional level is in our opinion not less important task. We appreciate such merits of employees as initiative, leadership, ability to work with people, striving for self-improvement. Employees with such merits have an excellent opportunity to make successful career at us. If you wish to work in our team, if you are ready to active and dynamic work, we invite you to acquaint yourself with vacancy.
The preference is given to employees with knowledge of foreign languages.
To apply for this job, please send the following information to [email address removed, but this was a gmail address]
1 Full name 2 Address of residing
3 Contact Phone numbers
4 Languages 5 Part time job/Full time

Thank you and we are looking forward to cooperate in long term base with you all.

If you received this message in error, please send a blank email to: [email address removed, but this too was a gmail address]

I clearly realize that this is an excellent opportunity, and while I am certainly ready to active and dynamic work, I don't know any languages other than English. It's also pretty clear to me that whoever wrote this email doesn't speak a lick of English.
1 reply.

Got to thinking about nicknames yesterday after a friend of mine called me Dianey. Haven't thought of that nickname in several years, and haven't been called that in many more.

My brothers used to call me that, insisting that one was supposed to pronounce the E. (This from a kid who called himself in his early years "Phidip" or "Phippis". The neighbor kid called him "Bebop".)

I don't recall how long the whole Dianey thing went on, but I didn't like it at the time. It doesn't bother me much now, but this is probably because I am an Adult, and as such have a much broader vocabulary enabling me to think up much better retaliatory nicknames in self-defense.

When my younger brother was four or five, he started calling me My Sweet. That was probably the most infuriating thing for me ever. At six or seven, I didn't want anyone to hear my little brother calling me My Sweet, but there wasn't really anything I could do except to ignore him, since I have never been prone to violence*. He eventually grew out of that charming little stage, but it seemed to go on for a long long time.

I believe it was in sixth grade that my friends and I decided that we should have nicknames, because in the mind of a ten-year-old your regular name just will not do. The funny thing was that we didn't come up with nicknames for each other, we just decided on the names by which we wanted to be addressed. I believe this was my friend's idea, and I don't recall protesting. She wanted to be called Skippy, and I chose Kiwi. Why? Who the hell knows. As I recall this last only about 2 weeks and then we moved onto some other juvenile nonsense.

In Davis, I was often called Juju. This was a derivation of my IRC name jujubee. This is also the root of jujufett, which is sort of a bastardization of Bobafett.

When I went off to college in Tulsa, I was affectionately called "Phil's sister" or Phillemina. It wasn't much of a nickname though, since hardly anyone called me that. Some people still call me Phillemina, because they are dumb.

Then I was called Cheetham. Also not much of a nickname, since that was one of my actual names. Some people still call me Cheetham, so now that that is no longer my name, I would consider it a nickname.

Most recently I have been called Maxie. My boss in the registrar's office called me Maxie because it went well with the name of one of her other employees. Her first name was Diana, so it wasn't very convenient to call us by our first names. So we were known as Maxie and Mincey. She still called me Maxie long after I stopped working for her.

I'm not a big fan of nicknames, despite all of those listed above. And yet I cannot help but to call my son a variety of names:

• Mr. Benjamin
• Mr. Bear
• Blondie Bear
• Mr. Benjamin the Bear
• and others...

---

* Many people like to tell the story of how I supposedly stabbed my brother Phil in the face with a pencil, but this is an inaccurate portrayal. The actual happening was that Phil and I were helping clean up our toys one day, and in the process we found a pencil hidden along the edge of the shag carpet of the living room. Each of us had a hand on one end of the pencil, and we were pulling back and forth on it, rather like a seesaw, and I let go. Phil experienced first-hand Newtonian physics and jammed the pointy, leaden end of the pencil into his face between his upper lip and his nose. For a long time he had and possibly even still has a lead mark there, like a tiny tattoo. I maintain that I did not "stab" nor intend to maim him in any way.
12 replies.

• pint glass
  
• 1/3 luna bar in wrapper
  
• notepad
  
• pencil
  
• can of caffeine free diet dr pepper
  
• digital camera
  
• phone
  
• laptop and wireless mouse
  
• universal remote ("remonster")
  
• empty bottle w/ reminants of prune juice/vitamin cocktail
  
• pacifier (2)
  
• bulb syringe
  

2 replies.

We've been iced in for two days now... work cancelled and most businesses in Austin are closed due to the inclement weather. We've had precipitation for the last two or three days, the form of which changes hourly. Things are dripping at the moment, but there is a pretty thick layer of ice on just about everything, and the temperature is not supposed to get above freezing until tomorrow.

Yesterday the porch looked like this:

Icicles on the gutter


Icicles on the porch railing


Icicles off of our porch roof


Snow on the ground in front of the apartment


Today it's even better. The icicles have really grown, and the layer of ice has thickened dramatically....

Ice on the tree twigs


Icicles on the porch railing


Icicles off of our porch roof


Icicles on the gutter


Another shot of the tree


These photos (and more) can be seen full size on my flickr site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dianemaxwell

6 replies.

For various reasons, I decided to get a Flickr account. One of my officemates was extolling the virtues of Flickr, and I was easily won over to the merits of storing my many many photos someplace other than my 4+ year old hard drive and various DVD rom media.

This to say that I will not only be moving the photos from this site over to Flickr, but I intend to post many more photos there. It has become unreasonable to try to squeeze good-size photos into our limited disk space on this server, so hopefully Flickr will be the long-term solution.

I will post photos that are available to the general public, but there will also be photos available only to family and friends. In particular, the family photos that I have scanned over the past few years will be posted there, with the hopes that family members will add comments to the photos. So let me know if you need to be added to my list of friends & family on Flickr, or if you need an invite...
7 replies.

I'm taking a beginning Java programming class online. Two lessons are released each week, and you can work at your own pace as long as you get the assignments and quizzes done within two weeks of when they are first made available.

It's pretty easy so far, and I don't expect it to get to the point of being challenging. I have been able to work through each lesson and finish the assignments in less than a half hour.

Friday's lesson was on drawing. Using the paint method, you can draw primitive shapes, so I learned how to draw circles, ovals, and arcs. In previous lessons, I'd learned how to set the color, so I was all prepared for the assignment at the end of the lesson: draw a smiley face.

The lesson warned that this make take some time, so gave helpful tips about drawing the happy face out on graph paper first so that it was easier to figure out the coordinates for each instance of an object.

I, of course, skipped the pencil-and-paper crap and went right to hacking away at it.

You can probably guess that this provided some hilarious results, which I have provided for you in a handy
PDF format. The first couple of faces I rendered made me laugh out loud, just because they were so far off of what I was expecting.

In my abundant free time, I also took the liberty of creating a little animation. Enjoy!
7 replies.

The only thing better than going to see a movie like V for Vendetta is reading (the very next day) headlines like "Bush said to have approved leak of Iraq data"

This comes as no surprise to me. Perhaps no one else recalls how the White House Press Secretary, speaking on behalf of the administration, basically said that whoever leaked the information would be out of a job. If you did recall, and just wanted to check your facts, good luck, because all those articles are buried under a mountain of more recent news stories. But here, I'll help:

From CNN Sept 29, 2003:

"The president believes leaking classified information is a very serious matter and it should be pursued to the fullest extent by the appropriate agency and the appropriate agency is the Department of Justice," White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters.

From CNN Sept 30, 2003:

SCOTT MCCLELLAN, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: He has made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects to them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.

The original statements sounded like the White House was handling the matter appropriately, but as things played out, it was clearly a joke to the boobs in charge.

From CNN Oct 6, 2003

"I'd like to know who leaked," Bush said. "And if anybody's got information inside our government or outside our government who leaked, you ought to take it to the Justice Department, so we can find the leaker."

Unless the leaker¹ is our fearless leader and his cronies, all acting in cahoots and knowing that they will never be given anything more than a slap on the hand for this.

And now they claim that it is Bush's right to disclose such information

[Reuters UK Apr 6, 2006]

Bush had the authority to declassify the material. But the court papers said Libby noted "it was unique in his recollection" to get approval from the president, via the vice president, for such an action.

but why then not just come out and say he did it in the first place and hide behind that right from the start? Instead he wasted literally years of investigators time and countless taxpayer dollars by allowing the investigation to continue.

There were moments while watching V that I felt that it was a rather heavy handed commentary on the Bush administration. But after the handling of incidents such as this, I can only shake my head and hope that Bush does not create a Supreme Chancellor position and move himself into it.


¹ Who the hell ever let this man talk into the mike?
7 replies.

Bluebonnet Lupinus subcarnosus aka Buffalo clover, is the Texas state flower. They bloom in March and early April, and they are in bloom now.



It turns out it is NOT illegal to pick bluebonnets in Texas. But that doesn't make it a good idea.

I have to catch up on these things since I didn't go to elementary school here :)
3 replies.

Everyone needs a telephone. Especially when you're executing a job search, and hoping that someone will call you with an amazing employment opportunity.

No one needs a telephone to get sales calls. At least not anyone I know of.

I don't know if this was the case in Savannah or not, since I was not at home during the day, but I've been getting a deluge of phone calls here. When we first moved to Austin, we contemplated not getting a land-line, but after two outrageou$ cell phone bills, it seemed like A Good Idea. So I called up the local phone company and signed me up.

Our phone was magically installed by gnomes, and now we can make unlimited local phone calls for free. It's an amazing invention, the telephone! How did the world ever operate without it? My guess is that the telephone put the door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman out of business. It was that, or the National Do Not Knock list.

I bet you can already see where this is going.

So of course when I signed up for the phone service, it was about two days after our service began that I realized that I now had a phone number that was not covered by the Do Not Call list. So I went to the handy-dandy donotcall.gov website, entered my phone number, and put myself on that list.

However, I am still getting phone calls. It had been about three weeks, and I get at least one phone call a day offering something.

Largely it is for magazine subscriptions. They must know somehow that I like magazines, because they've nearly tricked me into signing up. I'm pretty good about saying "No thank you" to phone solicitations, but those calls where they say they're doing a survey that will only take a moment of my time are hard to hang up on. Especially when there's a nice lady at the other end of the line who sounds like someone's grandma.

Today, and what prompted this diatribe, was a phone call for, well, I don't even know what.

Lady on the Phone: Hello, my name is Maria blah-de-blah with [some company name that I did not catch]. Donkey donkey donkey donkey....

Lady on the Phone then strings together a bunch of words that I recognize, but not in an order that makes any sense to me. Words like "travel agency", "services", "valley", "banking", etc.

Me: I'm not interested.

LotP: In what?

Me: [galled] In whatever you're selling.

LotP: [arguing] I'm not selling anything.

Me: [now pissed] Well I'm not interested in anything you're offering.

LotP: [still arguing, and now coping an attitude] You don't even know what I'm offering...

Me: [now really pissed, yelling] I'M NOT INTERESTED.

I hear that LotP starts to rebut, oh she's been trained well, this one, but by now my finger has already started approaching the phone's OFF button at the speed of light - which as it turns out is not, in fact, faster than the speed of sound.

GAH.

The trouble at this point is that I don't really want to start screening my phone calls through the answering machine, because it could be one of the hundreds of people who've received my resume calling me back for an interview, or to give me a pile of gold.

And frankly, at this point, caller ID would do no good, because all of these phone numbers are unknown to me, and I would answer anyway.

So, if you call me at home and I start screaming at you and hang up, just call back and speak in gentle words. Words that do not include "magazine" "Ginsu" or "I'm with donkey donkey donkey corporation".
5 replies.

I've decided to renew my passport. Not that I have any particular reason to, but my passport expired before the turn of the century, and well, you just never know when someone my request your presence abroad.

Actually, I've been meaning to renew it for a while now, but it wasn't until Kris started submitting his thesis film to festivals that I thought of it again. He sent the film to a film fest in Portugal, and we were saying how cool it would be to get to go there. Of course, that would require proper documentation to get out of and more importantly back into the country.

Not that any trip to Portugal is looking likely, but since we've moved to Texas, I was thinking it would be smart to get a passport in case we have to go to Mexico. Probably more likely that we would end up going to Portugal than to Mexico anytime soon, but you just never know.

Of course, you used to be able to travel in North America with just a birth certificate, and that's certainly all I've needed in various trips north and south of the borders. I'm not sure that the passport is mandatory, but I recall hearing that was the case.

Since I've got my old passport, it's pretty easy to get a new one. There is a two page form that requires surprisingly little information (given the policies of the latest administration), then you send your old passport, two photos, and some money. Oh, and marriage license since my name has changed since the last passport was issued.

Off to get some photos taken...

As many of you know, I am addicted to Spider solitaire. When I bought my Dell a couple of years ago, it came with XP and the very addictive Spider solitaire game.

Spider can be played at three difficulty levels: Easy (one suit), Medium (two suits), and Difficult (four suits). When I first started playing, I always played medium, and had trouble winning. The game is pretty challenging, and after playing several (probably dozen) games at the medium difficulty, I moved on to four suits.

The four suit game was really challenging at first. This is what I always play now. I usually the game until I win... I try not to ever just quit a game. When I get stuck, I just restart the game, and play it over from the beginning.

I'd like to add right here that this is what I do on my computer about 80% of the time. It's sad, I know, since my computer and my brain could be put to much better uses. But I can't help it.

I used to play majongg this way. The trouble with majongg is that I have some very specific (and not necessarily painful) memories that surface whenever I play the game. It kind of sucks, because I'd like to just be able to play the game without practically reliving my freshman year of college - when I first played the game. So I don't play it much anymore. Spider, on the other hand, doesn't stir up any such memories, so it's something I can't do without any emotional investment.

Until now.

I've had pretty good luck beating each game. Sometimes I have to leave it alone for a couple of hours or until the next day, then when I see it with fresh eyes, I can complete it.There have, of course, been times when I had to reboot my computer, or the power failed, or I just clicked the wrong thing and closed the game, so I can't say that I've finished *every* game that I've started.

That brings me to the last several days. I have been playing the same damn spider game for the last four days, and I can't seem to finish it. I have come pretty close a couple of times, but each time I get backed into a corner and have to start it over.

This caused me to do some research to find out whether you can beat every game or not. It sounds like it is not possible (see the wikipedia entry) but it is possible to hack the statistics, if one were so inclined.

I was going to try to save the game and send it to fellow spider addicts to confirm that it is an unpossible game, but I can't seem to find where the game data is saved. If anyone has an idea of where the saved game goes, please reply. In the meantime, here is a screenshot of the game I can't win:


9 replies.

For the past several weeks we've been packing and purging, donating and selling, all in preparation to move to another city in another state. That state is Texas, which I'm told comes from the Spanish word tejas, or roofing tiles. Really it's supposed to mean "friendly" but in the 2 seconds of research I did just now, I could not make the connection. So I gave up.

The move went well. We rented a Budget truck, sixteen feet long and eleven feet tall, and stuffed it full. We'd had a sale on the Saturday prior to the move to unload all of our furniture on unsuspecting yard-sale shoppers, which was fairly successful in that we sold Kris' car Susie (of Empty fame) and most of our furniture. We did not manage to sell our sofa and loveseat, so that got piled into the truck. We also brought our washer and dryer with us, since we will never again be without them or a suitable replacement. We loaded in dozens of boxes.

On the night before we were supposed to drive away from Savannah, it became apparent that we were not going to be able to get rid of the second computer desk (mine had sold several days before the apartment sale), so we packed that up too. Trouble is that the computer desk has a 3' by 5' tempered glass top, and the truck was already packed. Kris just leaned it up against everything in the back of the truck and we prayed that no one would get killed when we opened the back door upon arrival.

We finally got the apartment cleaned out and scrubbed, and went down to the office to turn in our keys about about 12:45PM. The office staff was out to lunch, so we had to wait to depart. We still had to drive back to Budget to pick up the car trailer hitch... we had decided to drag my car to Austin rather than try to drive it. By the time we were on our way out of town, it was 2:15PM.

We made it as far as Mobile the first day. We drove until we could stand to drive no further, and I'm proud to say that we didn't get ourselves stuck anywhere -- with the tow trailer you can't back up, so we had to be careful that we always parked somewhere that we could pull forward. The motel in Mobile was the seediest trap I've stayed in in recent memory, but we were in Hurricane Victim territory and it became apparent that we should have called ahead to find a vacancy, so we took what we could find.

Day two on the road was also uneventful. We saw a lot of trees snapped in half, billboards crushed, and debris along the side of the road. The roads were good until Louisiana, where they roughed it up for us before we got there. Once we crossed the border into Texas, the distance to Austin seemed to stretch out before us as though we were driving on a treadmill. Finally reached Round Rock at about 11:15PM greeted by good friends and a warm bed.

No one was killed when we opened the truck the next morning. In fact, hardly anything had even shifted in the truck, which was far more than we had hoped for. It took 5 people just a few hours to unload everything.

The new apartment is fabulous¹. Kris had taken video when he first scouted out the place in January, so I already had a feel for the layout. The space is much larger than I had imagined though; the first few days I was here I kept forgetting about the other "wing" -- second bedroom for an office and second bathroom. We have a lot more storage space, that is everywhere except in the kitchen. I think I am going to have to squirrel away the lesser-used small appliances in the bedroom closets.

Hopefully in the next few weeks we'll be able to replace all the furniture that we sold; we bought bookshelves this evening which should arrive on Friday. When things are cleaned up a bit more, I will post some photos. We've toodled around town a bit and are amazed at being in civilization once again. Savannah had so few places to shop, and we had to wait almost a year and a half to get a Target. Here, we are surrounded by places to shop, eat, and be entertained. We are also one block away from the post office and grocery store. I was worred about moving to Austin because of the traffic, but as it turns out, we don't have to go anywhere!

¹There are trees and green grass! This is a big deal since the last apartment had gone down hill quite a bit since we moved there. They chopped down all the bushes around the apartment buildings during "renovation" and had since kept the stumps trimmed of any growth.
7 replies.

This is really geeky, and mostly a note to people like myself who are having difficulty with ColdFusion MX and Oracle CLOBs. It may be really bloody obvious to some people, but it took me all damn day to figure it out, so I thought I write about it. If you're not interested in CLOBs or ColdFusion MX, sorry :)

****

Today I was trying to fix a ColdFusion problem. My curriculum tracking application users were encountering the error "String literal too long" when trying to add text on a form. The field in the database (Oracle) was set to varchar2(4000), and some users were trying to enter more like 4500 characters. No big deal, we'll just let 'em put in more characters, I thought.

Knowing that Oracle has a limitation on the size of varchar datatypes (and that limitation for Oracle 9.2 is 4K) I thought we'd just switch to a CLOB (character long object) datatype. Oracle CLOBs can store up to 4GB, so that would suit us just fine.

So our DBA, Anita, changed the datatype and I tested it out in our test database. I was still getting the same error: ORA-01704 string literal too long. I tested inserting more than 4000 characters through TOAD, and that worked, so I wasn't sure what was wrong. So I searched the ColdFusion "knowledge base" and couldn't really come up with much.

Anita and I searched for a while trying to come up with something. I read something that led me to believe it was the Oracle driver I was using - apparently the Oracle native driver has some sort of limitation on inserting with SQL. I didn't really understand the nuances of the problem, but it seemed from what I'd read online that if we switched to another driver, that would take care of the problem. Now the problem was that our web guy was out today and wouldn't be back for another week, and I really wanted to get this off my plate sooner than next week.

Anita found some stuff on using an Oracle package DBMS_LOB which has all these nifty functions for manipulating LOBs (CLOBs and BLOBs) and is, I gather, delivered with Oracle. So I started pulling documentation on DBMS_LOB to see what if anything I could make it do for me.

So now it's mid afternoon and I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to make my application take more than 4000 characters and stuff them into a CLOB. I decided to write a little test page to try using the DBMS_LOB.write function, and had spent about 20 minutes doing so before I realized that the function takes four parameters: loc_lob (location of the LOB), amount (how much you're going to stuff into it), offset (where you want to start stuffing it), and buffer (what you're going to stuff into it). What this package doesn't allow you to specify is what row (or a WHERE clause). Doh.

But then I remembered that at some point during the day, I'd read something about a ColdFusion tag attribute called "cf_sql_clob". Don't know where I read it, in what context or anything, so I just googled: cf_sql_clob. A littel more surfing around took me back to the Macromedia ColdFusion livedocs page about the tag cfqueryparam. Read all the way to the bottom, and some nice user added a comment about how to use the cfqueryparam to do EXACTLY what I want to do.

Long story short, it's much easier to dump lots of text into a CLOB. You don't have to use any special drivers (Oracle native works just fine) and you don't have to write PL/SQL to handle the insert. Just use the cfqueryparam tag in the insert/update SQL (within a cfquery tag), like so:

<cfquery name="example_insert" datasource="datasourcename">
update MyTable
set MyCLOBColumn = <cfqueryparam value="#MyLongTextField#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_clob">
where TableKey = #KeyValue#...
</cfquery>

I believe to get it back out of the CLOB, you have to select the enable long text retrieval option in the ColdFusion administrator for the datasource you are using, but that's as easy as checking a box.
10 replies.

[The following is a junk message I got today... so funny...]

Hello Tom,

6 months ago I was let go from my employment I held for what seemed like forever. Its hard to thank you enough for starting me in this new profession. You have given me a new start on life. Already taking home twice as much as I realized in my old job.

I took delivey of a brand new Mercedes. Taking home 150,000US in 18 months. I am having a great time in this career. It is a blast and I am a hero to the judges and to my clientele. What an outstanding business to be in.

Carefully following exactly what your training recommends me to do, is proceeding better than I ever dreamed possible. I go to the local court house and locate all of the clientele I can handle.

I avail myself of your advanced reporting services to find all items which can be garnished. Using your fill in the blank forms I send them thru the post office to the appropriate firms. Then the funds arrive to my PO Box. Its like magic. Every day is like Christmas.

I can take a holiday when ever I have the notion to do so. Germany and Holland this year.

Please provide this letter to others. This profession is so massive it needs many more of us assisting the courts and the people who have been hurt.

Sincerely,
Solomon A. NJ

This may well be you!

Progress to our location below where we provide you more indepth points about our arrangement at 0 outlay or responsibility. You do not have anything to lose and plenty to receive.

[Link removed]

In such a battle, however, the Turks were at a disadvantage, for the active Tatars slipped beneath their horses and disabled them, bringing both the animals and their riders to the earth. At the first onslaught Rob shot his pistol at a Turk and wounded him so severely that he fell from his horse Instantly the boy seized the bridle and sprang upon the steed's back, and the next moment he had dashed into the thickest part of the fray

Above line to study more or to discontinue receiving additional information and then to see location

3 replies.

Dear Blockbuster,

Thank you so much for taking a few moments to address my concern about the functionality of your website. I really appreciated your quick¹ response². I realize that you have chosen to develop your website to work with only one browser³ for a reason⁴. Kudos to your development team for being so diligently single-minded in their task.

I also appreciated the opportunity you provided for me to rate your customer service by means of a short survey. I felt strongly about my responses⁵ to your survey. I am confident the information I provided will assist in your efforts of improving customer service⁶.

Sincerely,
Satisfied Customer

¹hasty
²about how I should use the only browser you support
³Internet Explorer
⁴it was easier to launch the browser that came with the operating system than to download a standards-compliant browser. Plus you saved all that downloading time.
⁵all five of them, plus you didn't have any of those pesky "text fields" where I would have to put in something freeform and thoughtful
⁶by getting the guy who answered my question fired because he was only doing what he was told*.

*reply quickly, not accurately; choose a word from the question/problem and make up a solution/answer around that word - in this case "browser"; assume the customer is actually a monkey or infant who accidentally got ahold of the keyboard and went nuts; etc.
10 replies.

This is a lonely weed growing on a mound of dirt in Bryce Canyon National Park in November 2003. You can see a bit of frost on the ground in the background where the path bends between the canyon walls.

And without color:




7 replies.

Another tree photo from
Bryce Canyon National Park
November 2003
1 reply.

Zion National Park
November, 2003

more Zion National Park trees coming soon...
8 replies.

a view from Tybee Island Lighthouse, Georgia
December 24, 2003
3 replies.

Bryce Canyon National Park, November 2003.
2 replies.

This photo was taken at Lake Mayer on Montgomery Cross Road on June 5. There is an open patch of grass and weeds on the corner near the Truman Parkway off-ramp, and in the late spring there was a spectacular patch of wildflowers growing there. Judging by the variety of flowers that sprung up in that one spot, I suspect that someone scattered seeds there, but they were beautiful nonetheless.
4 replies.

A wise, wise friend of mine advised that we begin watching Angel interleaved with the fourth season of Buffy.

I am very sorry that we did not heed that advice now. We just got finished watching the season finale of season one, and already I know at least one major plot point has been spoiled by having seen Buffy through to the end of the series. I try to imagine how much more enthralling Angel would be if I didn't have prior knowledge of what will come to pass, but alas I cannot unknow what I know.

Anyhoo.

So far, first season Angel is about on par with first season Buffy. Which is to say episodes that are necessary steps on the journey, but they are through ankle-deep toilet water. Fortunately the writers seem to be bailing out the water during the last few episodes.

Not sure if the same group of writers did Firefly, but Firefly is more evenly intriguing in my opinion. I don't think they leave the character and plot development until the end of the season as was done in both Buffy and Angel. There may be other reasons for that in Firefly though... oh say cancellation?

So now we wait. We don't have anyone to borrow the next season of Angel from or have any Blockbuster coupons until next week!! But the next season of Six Feet Under is on its way. Needless to say that we're finding it easier to watch entire seasons of television at a time rather than waiting to see if a show is going to be good (or get any better?). Like 24. Don't think we're going to keep watching that if it's even on again this year.

And in other news, check out this cutie.
4 replies.

Today I found this: Custom Printed M&Ms.

Seriously folks, how cool is that?

Okay, maybe it's just me, but my parents will probably be glad that these weren't available when I was planning my wedding, or else these would have been a must-have. As it was, I had my brother Dave bring bags of special colored M&Ms from Vegas to put in the wedding favor boxes, and those weren't real cheap. (Although it was a lot cheaper to have Dave bring them than to have them shipped - the shipping was half the cost at the time)

I wonder how they print the messages on the M&Ms...
5 replies.

Price of regular unleaded gasoline in Savannah Georgia: $3.29
11 replies.

I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, so now I am almost caught up with all the kids these days. This is the second Harry Potter book for me that did not turn out to be a page turner. I never did finish reading Prisoner of Azkaban, I think there were a lot of other things going on at the time, and then the movie came out so I just watched that instead.

Order of the Phoenix wasn't bad, it just wasn't nearly as interesting as, oh say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I hate to admit that I would put down a book to watch TV, but I did. Many many times.

We are now watching the fifth season of Buffy goodness. My favorite character on the show hands down is Spike. I don't know what we are going to do when we've finished watching all the Buffys there are to watch. Maybe go back and watch them all again :)

Kris is gone for the afternoon, and while I have not been expressly forbidden to watch Buffy without him, I doubt that it would go over very well if I "previewed" the rest of the season. So I'm off to find some other way to amuse myself...
10 replies.

It has been a really terrible couple of months. The weather here has been pretty yucky - if it's not raining like the apocolypse is nigh, it's hotter than hell and humid to boot. I hate summers in the south.

So not really wanting to spend a whole lot of time outdoors, I've been slaving long hours at work or holed up reading or watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on dvd. No wonder drinking is considered a hobby in these parts.

Things at work have been progressively worsening. Besides the fact that we are rushing up on a major software upgrade in December, for which we have been preparing for close to four months now, we are also rushing up on a sudden maternity-leave fest. There are at least half a dozen people I know at work who will be out this fall, which means a fleet of temps will probably be brought in to warm a deskchair at the very least, or cause me a great deal of additional work. Yay, I'm so excited. Then there are the stupid software applications that somehow I got stuck supporting... I can feel the years dropping off the end of my life.

So when I'm not at work, I hardly have any desire to sit in front of a computer. Wait. Actually I have very little desire to sit in front of a computer at work either, but I have little choice in that matter if I want to continue to have a roof over my head.

Speaking of the roof over my head, we got our water bill last month. Apparently we used 181 units of water. We usually use 8. I figure there must be a mistake, so encourage Kris to call the water company (City of Savannah). They say they'll send someone out to check the meter. Someone checks the meter and says it's correct. Must be a leak. So Kris contacts the apartment complex, because there must be a leak. They fake up some paperwork to make it look like they are investigating (and so that we can have our over $200 water bill reduced) but water co doesn't like that. They send someone else out, who checks the meter and says that it was read incorrectly, that we will be sent a new bill. (Meanwhile, a week has passed) No new bill arrives, so Kris calls water co again. The last guy never filed a report or amended meter reading or whatever the hell he was going to do, so that reading is like it never happened. So we fork over the money to pay the now 2-day-overdue water bill. Kris tries to contact the apartment managment again, to no avail. I can tell there's a freakin' leak because there is a swamp forming around the water meters in front of our apartment. You can see said swamp from the parking lot. This saga is as of yet unresolved...

Buffy has been good. We are in the middle of the fourth season now. Didn't much care for the first season of Buffy, but starting with season two it is very addictive. Also didn't care much for the beginning of the fourth season (the Buffy goes to college year) but it is growing on me.

When I'm not watching Buffy, I've been reading. Picked up Harry Potter book 5 - Order of the Phoenix a couple weeks ago now and have been chugging through that at a leisurely pace. I'm in no hurry to get to book 6, considering the hard cover Harry Potter books weigh approximately 10 pounds. Plus they are all pointy around the edges.

That's all for now. I'm trying to get back into this whole blogging thing, but I think it will be in baby steps.
5 replies.

Today's Bleat is interesting. Some good food for thought about halfway down the page.
2 replies.

Just finished a project that was two years in the making. Athena and I started this small quilt almost two years ago now. We bought the fabric, cut out, and pieced all the squares together in late May of 2003, right before I moved from Tulsa to Savannah. We actually did 90% of the work... all I had to do to finish it up was machine quilt and finish the binding.

I did the quilting a couple of months ago, and Mom and I (mostly Mom) finished up the binding while she was here visiting. I think it turned out pretty nice.



It is 24 inches square, so it's pretty small, but made a great quick project. OK, so it did take 2 years to complete, but the amount of time that actually went into it was only a couple of days. I just lack focus people! :)

---

In other exciting news, I think The Cacophone is finally going to wrap production this week (*knocks on wood*). After suffering some major setbacks last week, the cast and crew is at it again tonight shooting one of the final major scenes of the movie. I did some cacophone repairs over the weekend, created a banner, and made a faux sandbag out of burlap (filled with vermiculite so they could drop it on an actor's head). And did I mention Kris shaved his head? I can't say I'm terribly pleased, but I guess if it will help this thing to be finished, I will put up with it.
8 replies.

Kris mentioned on his webpage that The Cacophone is currently underway.

I won't go into any details about the project itself (you can read about it by following the links above if you're interested). Instead I am putting out a shameless Call for Parts...



I will be building the Cacophone, and I am in need of the items listed below. If you have any of these items, know where I might get these items, could get them for me, or whatever, please let me know!

• Brass Instruments or parts including but not limited to valves, bells, or piping
  
• Cello or cello parts including end pin and the curly head thing
  
• Accordion, concertina, or bagpipe parts
  
• 1 to 2 inch flexible tubing
  
• Pressure or temperature gauges
  
• Faucet handles
  
• Oil filter (probably not used unless it's pretty clean)
  
• Any other junk parts, interesting looking, that could be grafted onto this badboy
  

I am not looking for anything new... junk parts would be great. Our resources for these sorts of things are very limited in Savannah, so I am putting out "feelers". We currently have several items to work with, but the more stuff I have to work with the better. Please feel free to post if you have anything to contribute!
12 replies.

Today's featured comic is Batman vs. Joker, another drawring by Kristen Maxwell.

The plot of this one is not as complex as Superman vs. Seamonster, which allows you to more appreciate the child-like renderings. In the interest of preserving said renderings, I have doctered the original as little as possible to in order maintain the integrity of the artwork, so it maybe be difficult to read the artist's handwriting. Therefore, I have transcribed the text of each panel below:

Panel 1 Mr Wayne, Sir...

Panel 2 It looks like you're needed at the office...

Panel 3: Yeah...

Panel 4: Haw! Haw!

Panel 5: Stop!!

Panel 6: No! I'll kill you! Haw Haw!

Panel 7: (PUNCH)

Panel 8: We're Cops. / Here... lock this guy up. / He... He... Gurgle...
6 replies.

Greetings my faithful readers. Welcome to uh 2005, where there will be an update to this page approximately once every 90 days or whenever I feel like it.

Several years ago now, I was updating this place *every* *bloody* day. That seems like so long ago now.

Not that I don't miss it, but I just don't really feel as motivated to write long rants like I used to. I think this is primarily because I no longer design Yahoo stores, I no longer subscribe to Real Simple, and frankly nothing about The South surprises me anymore. Also I tend to rant directly at people while I'm at work, so that takes a load off.

***

I have had a pretty decent couple of months though, thanks for asking. I like my new job... most of the time. Every day is a new obstacle course of land mines, and so far I've made it out in one piece.

We went to California for Christmas. The trip from Savannah to California via Houston was just about the worst airport/flying experience I've ever had. Kris picked me up from work and we went directly to the airport to catch our 6 PM flight, which was delayed more than an hour due to the fact that we were over our weight limit. (Not "we" as in "Kris and I", but our plane, which was overweight because of some weather-related FAA imposed restrictions)

After the flight people bribed five people to get off the plane, we finally left Georgia but didn't make up any time in the air and were way past making our Houston connection. There were tons of people who had either missed connections or had their flights cancelled altogether, so we had to stand in the most amazingly long and inefficient line ever. By the time we got to the front of the line (almost three hours later), I had long-since rebooked us on a flight the next morning via the 1-800 number (but we had to remain in line to get our boarding passes). Kris' mom picked us up, took us for something to eat at Denny's, and then we pursued a 45-minute nap at a Day's Inn not far from the airport.

Oh, did I mention that we got our flight rebooked into a different airport? So then we had to go to two airports once we were actually in California, because they wouldn't reroute our already checked bags? Yeah.

So after the initial getting-there woes, we had a pretty good time. Except that it rained almost the entire time we were there. Not that I'm bitter.

We finally got some nice weather when we got back to Savannah. It's been unseasonably warm here this "winter" (and I use the term loosely) - today it was in the mid-70's and has been like this for quite some time. I guess this is payback for all the hurricane nonsense we had in the Fall.

Well that's all I have for now, but you can't really complain because that's more than you've gotten out of me in a long damn time. Goodbye and goodnight!
5 replies.

I just thought I'd post a link to what I consider to be a valuable resource : Project Vote Smart (vote-smart.org)

I've heard several people say in the last few days that they don't know anything about the candidates on the ballot, save for the presidential race. In Georgia, it seems to me to be pretty difficult to get any information - all I see are signs plastered everywhere, nasty campaign ads on television smearing this and that candidate, a twenty-five phone prerecorded messages a day left on my answering machine by whatever special interest group that happened across my phone number.

Project Vote Smart has a lot of information, including what seats are open and who is running in your state, candidates information including their voting records if any, etc. Maybe this time I can go into the voting booth (although it's not so much of a booth as it is an alcove in my precinct) and vote for someone for all of the races instead of just voting on the few I've heard about!

Do your civic duty. It's not that difficult. Plus you'll get a sticker!
18 replies.

but I'm acutally updating my webpage!

Somehow the momentum of not posting anything has been hard to overcome. I feel like there is pressure to say something genius now that I've been sitting so long thinking by myself.

Jumped on the bandwagon and downloaded Mozilla Firefox about a week ago. And here I am to extoll the virtues of this up and coming browser.

I used Moz for a while before it's incarnation as Firefox, but frankly there were some very minor problems that kept me from making The Switch. For whatever reason, which I'm positive can be attributed to some sort of voodoo, several problems became apparent on my machine when I selected Moz as my default browser. Some programs didn't want to play with the new kid in the sandbox, so refused to play at all, and others just kicked sand in Moz's direction.

Firefox is the kid who moved from out-of-state in third grade and is everyone's new best friend. The other programs trade him their cookies for his celery sticks at lunch. He gets picked first for kickball.

Firefox (outside of the playground) is awesome. It has a plethora of extensions and is highly customizable. Some of the extensions are silly, like the Radial Context menu extension I installed, which gives you your right-click menu in a circular layout that is rather confusing. (I uninstalled that one after using it for one day.)

In other news, I am three weeks into my New Job. I am still working at the same "company" which shall remain nameless lest a search engine pick up certain keywords and direct people this way, but I moved over to the IT department. So far I am liking it a whole lot better than I had anticipated, as I had a number of reservations about moving. The work is a lot more varied and more independent, making it (thus far) less of a grind.

And in still more news, Kris and I went to see They Might Be Giants perform in Atlanta over last weekend. The show was pretty decent - we've been to several concerts before and while the music doesn't change much, the audiences definitely vary widely by region, and this one was the most civilized I've experienced. The opening Guy was interesting; he was this guy with long blond hair that sang and played a large white accordion. The first number he did started with almost operatic music, which then evolved (or devolved, depending on your perspective) into a rock tune. The music wasn't fantastic, largely due to the fact that it so loud that it was almost impossible to understand the lyrics. Between songs, he would sort of heckle the crowd and tell stories, so overall his act (the singing and the storytelling/between song stuff) was entertaining.

TMBG was good too. If you've seen them, there isn't much to tell, except that they did not play Instanbul at this show.

This was the first time we'd been back up to Atlanta since we drove through on our relocation voyage in June of 2003. The drive is still the same boring 5-hour ride, which I can authoritatively declare the Least Scenic Drive in America. Believe me people, I've driven (or been driven) across a great deal of the country, and the stretch of GA I-16 between Savannah and Atlanta is the worst ever. Ever.

No seriously, you can't even comprehend until you've done it once, twice or three times. There are trees, pine trees of some sort, all the same size and distance from the road for hundreds of miles. There is a median that divides the highway down the middle that hardly changes in width and varies little in topography. The road itself is of average quality, not full of potholes but not freshly resurfaced either, and pretty darn straight. If the road crews had put a couple of hairpin turns in there somewhere, that would have really livened things up.

The scenery improves as you approach Atlanta only because you begin to see the Kudzu that has swallowed the aforementioned boring pines WHOLE in a matter of hours. The result is these large protusions that look like some sort of alien foliage invaders trying hard but not successfully hiding along the road, like refugee shrubbery giraffes and elephants in a topiary garden.

But at any rate, we made it back, mostly alive. And the best part was that even though we were gone for the better part of two days, fortune smiled upon us and sent us a hurricane, so that we could stay home from work and school on Monday.

And the weather was bad, but not so bad that we couldn't get together with Courtney, Casey, and Caboose, watch Star Wars.
5 replies.

You may all be wondering why, for the love of God, I haven't posted anything in the last month. Well... Behold! I have been working on an exquisite masterpiece of comic genius.

Kris churned out this little bad boy during his Art Criticism class several weeks ago. No, he wasn't goofing off in class exploring other career options (and if he was, I certainly wouldn't advise this one)... it was part of a class assignment.

The assignment was to draw a 5-page comic in 15 minutes. The students were given a topic on which to draw, and they could draw as many panels within the 5 pages as they needed. Thus, Superman versus Sea Monster was born. Or spawned.

It was pretty hilarious in black and white, but I decided to present the comic here in Cool-O-Color™.
8 replies.

I grew up in Southern California. The summers were hot, and the temperatures in late August, September, and even October would be in the 100° range, on rare occasions soaring above 110. But it was a dry heat.

I never really understood what a dry heat was when I was a kid. Seemed to me like something you tacked onto the end of your statements about the hot weather, smirking while the words passed your lips. Only now do I truly understand.

One of my biggest fears about moving to Tulsa was the humidity. I didn't think I could survive in an oppressive climate, by my definition one where the typical humidity was over 15%. The first few weeks were admittedly rough for me, but I spent most of my time indoors in the air conditioning anyway, so I survived.

After a two or three weeks, the human body adjusts. You sweat a little bit less going outdoors, because somehow your body knows that you don't need to sweat as much in a more humid climate. It's still pretty fricking miserable outside, but maybe you forget a little bit each day how a dry heat feels.

I hadn't experienced an oppressive climate until we moved to Georgia.

The first two days we were here, middle of June last year, I wanted to die. We had just unloaded everything we owned from the trailer that hauled us here on what I sincerely believed to be the hottest day in all of history. I was absolutely drenched by the time we were finished, and the air conditioning in the apartment was struggling to keep up. As it turned out, those first few days we were here in June were among the hottest days last summer.

I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the daily temperatures last summer, because for the most part I stayed at home indoors when it was hot. I ventured out occasionally in the heat of the day to go to the sauna that is the apartment laundry facility or to check the mailbox.

I don't know if this summer has been any hotter, but it's been damn hot. A couple of weeks ago, I checked the temperature as recorded at Hunter Army Airfield (right up the street from our apartment) and it was 98, heat index of 118.

Today when I went out to the car to leave for work, you could see the moisture in the air. It was like a foggy day in the fall or winter, where it's like you are walking through a cloud. The primary difference today was that the fog felt like I'd stepped into the mouth of a whale.

I can't imagine why anyone ever decided to settle in a climate like this. I can't imagine what this would have been like before central air conditioning, or even ceiling fans. Or access to a sometimes twice-daily shower.

Problem is, I don't think it's possibly for me to adjust. Maybe it's some sort of logarithmic adjustment, the higher the humidity the longer the adjustment — and it will take three years instead of three weeks. Sure does shed some light on the dry heat thing though.
6 replies.

I am at home again for the second day in a row. On Monday I ate crabcakes for lunch at a restaurant, whose reputation I will not slander here, but I will not be eating there again. From that lunch, I seem to have contracted some sort of vile stomach ailment which keeps me awake all night running for the bathroom. Today I am on a all-liquids diet.

So, since I'm not at work, I thought I'd take this opportunity to update this rotting website. It seems that lately the only time I think of anything to write about, it's in the morning on my way into work, so by the time I get home and actually have a chance to post something, that idea is long gone.

We bought the only season of Firefly on DVD a couple of weeks ago at the recommendation of many many people. Firefly was aired on Friday nights on Fox a while back, and as any show in that damned timeslot would have been, it was cancelled — without even airing all of the episodes.

The first two-hour episode was a little difficult for me to get into. It had a few technical problems that didn't sit too well with me, but I kept watching. We are now on the 4th or 5th episode, and the show has really blossomed.

The episode called "Mrs. Reynolds" had me laughing so hard that I maimed myself. Somehow my hands/arms were flailing wildly at one point and smacked together, and I thought for a moment that my right hand had drawn my left hand's blood. We paused the DVD and turned on more light to check, and in fact I was not bleeding but it still hurt like the dickens, whatever that means. At this point, I can't even remember what was so funny...
3 replies.