profuse (but not necessarily interesting) blogging

Quite possibly for the first time in my life, I don't want it to rain. The dirt (mud!) in my back yard is far too wet for me to run the tiller over it to break it up, not to mention anything about tilling in good compost in preparation for planting my trees. So every day I stare out at my trees, still in their nursery pots, knowing that those poor roots are eager to get planted so that they can grow, and knowing that I can't do much about it right now.

I more or less decided to say 'the hell with it', and just go fight the mud and work in the compost as best I can, tilling until the tines get clogged, then clean them out, then go again, over and over as much as is necessary until the job is done. But we'll see how that goes. In the mean time the rainy days just seem to keep stacking up, which I know is a great thing for the state's water needs, but bad for me and further proof that I just should have made this happen back in September or October.

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Laura and I decided to wainscot the bottom half of the walls in the kid's room and paint the top half. The wainscotting will be the same white color that is on the walls of the house now (Frazee's "Swiss Coffee"), but the top half needs something different. Laura was initially thinking about a neutral color, but in our recent rush to try and get things done and be vibrant and different, we chose a blue that was supposed to play off colors in a new crib skirt. Without thinking I purchased two gallons, THEN went to apply some to the wall to check it out. BAD DECISION.

In and of itself, this is a pleasing color, but it ain't going in my boy's room, and both Laura and I agree on this. WAY too pastell-Easter-eggy-BLUE! Just not the right color. And thanks to the policies of every place I've ever purchased paint, we can't take it back. So it looks like my garage will have a sky-blue ceiling some day, when ever I get around to texturing and painting it, that is. And maybe I'll use some of it to paint under the eaves outside the house (I've heard this is good for keeping bugs from nesting up there; they think it's sky and go elsewhere).

So now we've purchased a quart of a substantially more neutral shade of brown which we'll try out and think about before we buy all the paint we really need. Later we'll revisit the addition of color to the room with accents and decorations.

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After the paint incident I had this great idea for a small business. You get on-line and tell me what color paint you'd like to sample in small quantity. I go buy it, dole it out, and send it to you for a small fee. That was you can try out colors without having to buy a whole bunch of paint. Of course the problem would be that I'd end up with gallons and gallons of random colored paint that nobody wants, and lots of money spent buying these unused paints. Oh, and then a coworker of mine pointed out that Lowes will sell paint samples in small jars, mixed exactly to the color you want.

So much for that money making (?) endeavor.

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I keep forgetting to mention that we cancelled our cable TV subscription. "What the what?" you might ask yourself? Well, we kept complaining that we have all these damn channels that we either never watch or never seem to find much to watch on, and that the money we were spending on it could go to better used (like, perhaps Netflix or savings). We also realized that most every night we come home from work, complain about the things we need to get done around the house or something we'd like to be reading, but then every time without fail sit down and watch TV instead.

With very few exceptions, we really only watched some of the networks and Discovery. And since no cable company seems anywhere closer to offering a-la-carte channel selection packages, we killed the cable and put up the antenna, which actually pulls down all the networks (even in HD!) and PBS. I know I experienced serious withdrawals during the first couple days, but we're slowly aclimating.

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Movie review: Sherlock Holmes. Very entertaining, decent story, good FX. The scene where they make you think that Watson dies is odd, because they bring him RIGHT back without allowing for any real recovery time. Otherwise it was a good movie, and they set themselves up pretty well for a sequel. I would recommend this film.

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Lastly, and briefly, Laura and I are in the market for better cell phones. Naturally I'd love to switch to an iPhone, but I need something that fits in the existing budget, which is to say I don't want to spend any money on a new phone. That said, I want a phone with a good camera, and one that let's me keep track of schedule stuff, takes notes, etc. My brief research so far shows WAY too many choices, most of them too expensive. Any ideas?

nonsense the the back yard

HOW IS A PERSON EVER SUPPOSED TO HAVE THE TIME TO KEEP UP WITH ALL OF THE CRAP on the internet? My goodness, someone has a baby (Laura's friend) and she posts every 26.5 minutes. News articles are coming out all of the time, some of them with actual, legitimate news! I need to plug a wireless router into my BRAIN in order to be constantly downloading stuff, and then I need a second brain just to sift through it all in a vain attempt to find anything useful or interesting! Usefulresting! That's my new word.

BACK YARD! My back yard is ... beginning to get out of control. Wait, let me back up a step.

NO PLAN. I've come to realize that I've been operating all these years without a real plan. I just do the stuff I enjoy, which usually comes at the expense of not getting done the stuff that I really need to do. Consequently I quess at what should come next. While that works sometimes, lately it has backfired. A lot.

Back yard. Again.
I dug five holes in anticipation of planting trees in my back yard. Then I realized I might not be able to afford the trees. Then I realized I could make it work out, but that essentially all the holes were in the wrong places. So I re-dug four of those five holes, and added a sixth hole a day before it rained for an entire weekend. All of my tree holes filled with water, and after a week when they still had not drained on their own, I spent two hours bucket-emptying them by hand.

Later I decided I needed to break up the chunks of clay I dug up so that when it does come time to plant, my new trees won't be loosely held in by huge blocks of earth. So I knocked down my dirt piles and attempted to break up everything with a tiller, except that there is still SO much water in my dirt that it actually binds to the tines of the rototiller, forming tha fast spinning wheel o'mud which eventually just skims over the dirt and fails to break up any of the clay.

I finally was able to buy the trees and have them delivered yesterday, but then last night at about 11:30 a random, freak wind storm came in from the east and blew all of them over, prompting me to get up out of bed and go move all of them around the side of the house and out of the wind. Oh yeah, and the wind stopped AS SOON as I finised moving the trees.

Good times. Oh and every time I walk around my back yard now, each boot becomes roughly 10 lb heavier what with all the mud that cakes on.

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I have to touch on a theme again, because I can't seem to stop whining about it. If any of you know a way I can earn money on the side of my real job, legally, please let me know. Baby is on the way, and so is a reduced income. Must dig way out of small financial hole and weld a lid on that hole.

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Lastly, remember one thing today: Usefulresting.

my new money making venture

I've just come up with the most brilliant idea for a new cable TV and web media network. The Nothing Channel (C). People always complain that there's nothing on TV, well, we provide that, guaranteed.

Tune into our channel or log on to our web site ANY time of day, ANY day of the week, and there you'll find nothing. No talking heads, no unconfirmed reports of Big Foot roaming the streets, no promises and no follow-through. Nothing at all.

The overhead costs should be low, as should the upkeep. It would be like a vacation for all those tired bloggers and lost mediaphiles looking for ... relief? ... from the pounding insane flurry of information overload.

Our main competitors (Simply Turning off the TV, Inc., and Not Hetting On-Line, LLC) would be very hard to beat, though, so writing up my business plan will be tricky, but I think I can do it.

real versus fake tree?

Quick poll: For those of you who celebrate Christmas (I believe that includes all one or two of my readers), do you favor a real tree, or an artificial one?

I've been leaning torward purchasing an artificial tree, mainly because I usually go crazy with stringing up lights, and it'd be nice if they were already on the tree, but also because I like not having to worry about watering it or it drying out. But the trade-offs of course include having to give up the nice smell, the realness of it all, the fact that a fake tree, at some scale, is obviously fake, and that some day, when my kid(s) is/are old enough to go out, it'd be pretty cool to take them out to get a real tree.

So what's your opinion?

reboot for the brain

I feel like I have an old brain, one that's operating inefficiently like a PC running Windows. Everything is cluttered and slow, all the young kids are so much more hip on where to go and what to do, and I with my trodding, slow processes at work, and at home, look on in bewilderment as they all seem to zip past me, understanding everything and having answers, solutions, or bright ideas about where to head next.

Is there such thing as an upgrade for the brain? I need a faster processing unit, and some savvy new software that will allow me to access the information of the world more reliably. Maybe I can find some brain steroids?

boy, hip, yard

It was probably poor blog-ettiquete of me to not to post a comment two weeks ago that Laura and I found out we will be having a boy. All few of you who follow my blog already knew (I think) that she was pregnant, and by now already know that we'll be having a boy, but, and this is mainly because Nicole gave me a hard time about it, I had to make it official by posting it here.

Yes, I am a little freaked out, but WAY more than that, I am very excited, and looking forward to March, not because of the sleepless nights that probably await me, but because I am excited to be a father, and make my kid laugh, and take him hiking, and to learn all about him as I fumble through trying to show him this world.

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Let's see, what else. My hip hurts. It has for the last couple of weeks. I think it's related to my body needing a break from rowing, but I can't confirm. My low back has also begun to bug me, so it's probably a good thing that this Sunday's race in Foster City is our last of the fall head racing season, then rowing will take a back seat to work and home projects for the duratin of the winter (and with the kid coming, rowing could be taking a permanent back seat). So hopefully the dull pain is temporary, and not an indication of any other post-dislocated hip issues. It's seriously been over two years since I dislocated! Crazy.

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Oh, I also started working in the back yard. I borrowed my father-in-law's rototiller, and used it all around the back part of the yard to break up the surface dirt. The next part, which starts this evening, will be to rake through it and sift out all the rocks and junk. After that I'll either be trenching for irrigation or just planting trees and hand watering. Either way, I want to get the trees in within the next couple weeks so that they have all winter to get established and start growing.

back to work.

credit and idiot drivers

I heard two ads on the radio while driving in to work this morning for companies that can help you reduce your credit card debt. Both of them liked to say "Do you have excessive credit card debt? It's not your fault, and we can help get those nasty creditors off your back."

While I can't help but agree that creditors can be nasty, I have to wholeheartedly disagree with the notion that someone who chooses to use thier credit card to rack up debts beyond which they can be financially responsible is hardly free of fault. BE RESPONSIBILE FOR YOURSELF! There's plenty of shit out there that I'd like to buy, but every day I gotta say 'no' to myself because I can't afford it! It's like the guys who's "under water" on his house payments, but who refuses to sell his lifted truck or his speed boat because he has to have them. Make up your mind! What's more important? Can you live in your boat?

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Idiot drivers; it's not my fault that you left late today. Either I'm becoming a grumpy old man (which is entirely possible), or people are driving crappier and more idiotic than ever. I suppose this is like entropy (it will always get worse), but son-of-a-B, it just seems like people don't know where they are, where they're going, or have any clue about MOMENTUM, turn signals, or any of the other cars around them (except maybe the one RIGHT in front of them, the one which they are tailgating ... yes, that's me, and I'd get out of your way if it weren't for the SEMI THAT'S RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME (obviously you can't see that far), making me go slower that YOU'D like to go).


So I am taking to driving 65 or slower (can such a thing be done?) in the right-hand lane. I don't seem to have to deal with the idiots any more, in fact most of the time I get a pretty good show watching how people fight amongst themselves, jockey for position, and nearly kill each other trying to shave a few seconds off their commute. The only drawback to the slow lane is now I've got to deal with the fools who can't merge.


I think I've said something like it before, but when I start complaining about everything around me, maybe the problem is me.


Nah.


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Otherwise, when all else fails, Skittles.