The Reasons I Hate The Ostrich

Hey y'all

2011-05-27T09:48:00.001-07:00

It's almost summer.

Just typing that makes me laugh, since my last blog was in December. I'm becoming a blogger that only blogs about his own lack of blogging. I had promised myself not to do that, but I fell into the rut. Onward! New things! New blogs! New...news!

So what's new in my life? Well, there are things. Oh yes. I mowed my lawn a couple of days ago. I think I'll mow it again. I played some golf.

ZOMG I'M FREAKIN' BORING!!!

That's why I don't blog. I really don't do anything these days. Every once in a while some exciting stuff comes around.

Last week was crazy, and full of massive ups and downs. I'm not going to talk about the downs. You know me, you know them. So let's talk about the ups. Last Wednesday, right smack in the middle of the week, my friend Reuben hosted the 3rd not-so-annual Jabbergathering. We all like to get together about once a year for some good ol' fashioned drinkin'. Well, our schedules have been getting harder and harder to synchronize during summer weekends, so we collectively came up with the absolutely brilliant idea to each take Thursday off of work, and meet at Reub's parents' cabin in the middle of the state.

We did so. It was epic to say the least. There was drinking and carousing, singing and poor attempts at canoeing that resulted in my phone and Corey's phone becoming, shall we say, waterlogged. All in all, it was a fantastic time.

Then we'll fast forward to the weekend -- my parents took my kids Friday night and watched 'em for us until Sunday evening so that Kerry and I could stay in the Minneapolis area with friends of ours. Kerry worked her last weekend ever, and I had sweet sweet Dungeons and Dragons time. There's not too much to tell as far as the D&D goes, but that it was a ton of fun and that we played for 8 hours and only had three encounters. Good times.

Other than that, it's pretty much business as usual around these parts. Hope you're all well.

Blog! I have a blog!

2010-12-03T08:33:00.000-08:00

I just remembered that I have a blog. Well holy moley. I'd better get on that, it's been months.

So it's December, apparently. The year is rocketing by as it tends to do. The biggest bit of news that I have these days is that my lil' boy turned ONE. He's a year old already. It's funny, I'd probably written 700 blogs about Gwen during her first year of life, and I've probably written 5 blogs TOTAL in Joey's first year. I've been busy. (And yes, I know that I could easily figure this out by LOOKING, but I like to make up statistics. Did you know that 95% of statistics are made up right on the spot? ;^) )

It's apparently winter again. Everything is covered with snow. I'm once again the lazy last guy on the block to put up Christmas lights, but I plan on getting that done on Sunday. Ahh, plans. Other than that Kerry and I are jetting off (read: driving) to the big city (OK, SLP) because she needs to work at the nature center and I need to play some D&D. It's a crushing need.

For the D&D nerds out there: I'm about to take my players through the notorious Tomb of Horrors, as re-released for 4th Edition. It's going to be awesome. I'm excited for the notion of an adventure that forces them to use their minds. I know it's not really the way 4e works, but I'm thinking of giving xp bonuses to those that figure out the puzzles, because some of 'em are doozies. To add injury (no insult here, there's just going to be injury) I'm starting them on their trek through the garden of graves at level 7. It's ok, there are 6 of them, and they're pretty good in a fight. They need a challenge. Heck, a couple of them are still level 6. Hee hee.

In other news, for some reason I got suckered into playing Fantasy Football this year, and it's been a catastrophic failure. I actually got in a bit of a row with the organizer for comparing it to D&D, which really made me laugh. Like...hard. But that's all done with. I won the argument. It's D&D for the a*****s that used to beat up kids that played D&D. It's also not my thing, I'm currently 3 and 9. Obviously my bad statistics (see above) have hurt me in a game that uses...real statistics. Whatever, fantasy football is what it is, and I'm having fun with it -- I guess that's what's important.

That's about all that's new. I'll try to blog more, blah blah blah, but really, I won't. Work keeps me busy. I'm thankful for being a noob lawyer that actually has a job -- many in my graduating class don't. :(

Talk atcha later.

Homecoming 2010

2010-10-10T10:39:00.001-07:00

This weekend, I attended UMM Homecoming for the first time since 2003. The campus has changed a lot since I was there last, and it was awesome to be back. Here are a few pictures of our adventure around campus.

First is Clayton A. Gay Hall, my freshman dorm. The building has been painted (the black used to be blue) and modified (the front door has been replaced with hostas, and a new handicap accessible door has been added.

It's weird to look at the building and think that there's supposed to be a stairway and a door there. We tried to get up to our room, but the stairways were locked and there wasn't a way to get up there without risking arrest.

For some ridiculous reason, people on campus were playing Quidditch. It's apparently quite popular as well, because there were a ton of spectators. But COME ON, PEOPLE. THIS IS DUMB.

I walked into Spooner Hall and found my old room. The RA there (they call them CAs now, much to our confusion) had made name tags from pictures of dragons. I never had an RA that was that cool:

The next place we went was PFM. LOL. There are all new chairs, and the area where the food is served has been totally updated. It's actually really nice in there, but the entryway still smelled exactly the same.

Kristian and I posed by the sign, because we are, in fact, posers.

We went to a bunch of other buildings after that, but I didn't take any pictures of them. These included the new science building and the Student Center, Blakely Hall (where Kerry's freshman room was) and the bookstore.

After our campus infiltration, we went on a tour of town and saw all of our old houses. They all looked pretty much as bad as they did when I lived there.

We found, miraculously, that Don's Cafe was actually open. I had a grilled cheese and fries (of course). Then we went on a tour of local bars. We started at the Ranch House, because Kristian used to bartend there. It was awkward and dark, but full of memories. Then we went to the Met. It hasn't changed much. We were there at 7:00, well before the rest of the homecoming crowd, and we had a couple of drinks and took it all in. We followed it up with a trek over to the Old Number 1 for more drinks, more memories, and an end to a delightful day in Mo-Town.

Fall

2010-09-13T14:43:00.000-07:00

Hey there, Ostrich Haters. How's the fall going for you? Well, it's not technically fall yet, but the weather of late has seemed to indicate otherwise. Although, today is beautiful, sunny, and in the 70s, so...yeah. Whatever. I'm talking about the weather and it's lame.

What should I be talking about, then? How 'bout my favorite passtime and yours: Dungeons and Dragons! Actually there's not much to tell there, other than that we had an awesome session a couple of weekends ago, and we're gearing up for another one this coming Saturday. I'm amped as always! I think that my players have stopped worrying about being in any danger after their recent exploits, so I've got to take it up a notch.

That's always difficult to do, though. There's a delicate and fine balance that a DM has to achieve, whereby providing sufficient challenge to the players so that they don't get bored, and not presenting too much challenge resulting in a TPK. To provide some different types of encounters I've started including a lot of stat check type things, and I plan on using more traps.

In non-gaming news, it's my lovely and darling wifey's birthday this week. She's turning 34, looks 23, and any references to "rule 34" in response to this post will be summarily ignored.

I was thinking about stuff, and it dawned on me that next month I'll have been a lawyer for an entire year. Here's a fun exercise for you kids playing along at home, too: Check out how many blogs I wrote before I was a lawyer. Now check out how many after. Ugh. It's waaaaay different having a job that I actually care about. ;)

Can't wait to see all 3-4 of you readers for D&D this weekend!

Phish

2010-08-17T07:02:00.000-07:00

As usual, Phish was amazing.

Kerry and I woke up bright and early on Saturday morning, and had hit the road by about 7:15. We drove to Ryan and Meghan's house in SLP, and from there we transferred into their vehicle and started the long (but actually short, compared to our recent Colorado trek) drive to East Troy, WI, and scenic Alpine Valley amphitheater.

We checked into our hotel at a little after 3:00 and met up with Lundo and Amy, and then we headed to the parking lot at a little after 6:00. We snarfed some snacks, chugged a couple o' brewskies, and headed into the show.

The first show was stellar -- not the best show I've been to, but very good. The band was super tight. They played a lot of stuff I had heard before, but also several that I haven't ever seen live, including the extremely oldschool "F@#$ Your Face" and the Siket Disc jam "What's The Use". We had fun, and the all-too-annoying Phan Kids hadn't gotten to us yet by this point.

We made it back to the hotel around 1:00 or so and hit the hay. I slept until 9:00 am, which is probably later than I've slept in the last 3 years. It was wonderful. Kerry and I woke up and had some yummy muffins, and then headed down to meet the rest of our crew in the hotel swimming pool. We swam. We chatted. We hot tubbed. It was fun.

We headed back to the parking lot around 4:00 the next day, for a much longer time tailgating. I made several grilled cheese sandwiches and hot dogs on Kerry's backpacking stove, and although I managed to burn the heck out of my finger, the food was yummy.

The setlist for our second night kept hearkening back to my very first Phish show, at the Target Center in the fall of 1999. That made me realize that I've been coming to see this band play for 11 years. I looked around me at the kids that were freaking out, and realized that many of them were 6, 7, or 8 years old. On one hand I'm glad that they (at least some of them) have good taste in music. On the other hand I was incredibly irritated by these kids. Not all of them. Some of them. The ones that aren't there because they like the band. They're there because they're freaking scenesters and think it's cool to go to a show and snort coke.

OK. Tangent. WHY is cocaine popular again? It's been on a steady upswing since I left college, and kids just don't seem to realize that it will leave them broke, addicted, and effing stupid. You heard me, kid. Stupid. You look like a freaking fool blowing the money your parents gave you so that you can spend the whole show snorting powders for your 20-minute high and not paying attention to the world around you. I guess it just proves that the 90s were the 60s again, the 2000s were the 70s again (Techno was totally disco) and now we're in the 80s with bad clothes* and morons snorting coke. I'm going to start selling junk bonds now.

OK, back to reality. The annoying kids really didn't bum me out or anything -- I've been to enough shows to know that there's ALWAYS someone stupid there, and that since I'm there to see an awesome band play awesome music, I can tune the rest out.

Coming back home yesterday was nice. It was a fast trip, and Gwen and Joey were ecstatic to see us, and a warm welcome like that is super wonderful.

Also, I ended up recharged over this weekend. Seeing the music reset my creativity button, and I'm eager to write some more music. We'll see if that works out.

Been a while

2010-08-12T13:48:00.001-07:00

I think this may very well be the longest I've gone without blogging. It's not that I don't want to do some sharing of life events, it's more that most of my readership (if not all) already knows everything I've been up to.

Kerry and I were lucky enough to be able to take a vacation this year, and we drove out to Colorado. It was amazing -- we ditched the kids with my parents and really had a great time together in the mountains. I'm a big fan of taking relaxing beach type vacations, but I also love road trips to cool places.

We took off from Benson one Friday morning and drove straight to Estes Park, CO in one shot. It was about 14 hours of driving, give or take, and it seriously seemed like about 2 hours without the kids in the car. We just took in the scenery and arrived at our destination with little fuss.

We spent a few days in Estes park, mainly hanging out in Rocky Mountain National Park or checking out shops in town. Then we headed back by a northerly route, making fun stops at Mt. Rushmore, Wall Drug, and finally camping in Badlands National Park. It was a fun time with great company.

We get to take another road trip this weekend to go and see Phish again. It's going to be a blast, and I'm ecstatic. I can't wait to hang out with friends and see awesome live music.

The job's been going well. I'm keeping busy and learning a ton still. I can't believe that in a couple of months I'll have been here a year. It's freaking insane. I love the job, love the town, but wish we had more friends here. These things take time.

Last weekend, I went to a birthday party for Corey's uncle and had an impromptu reunion of my college band Alterego. It was awesome. The four of us hadn't played together in over 10 years and Chad hasn't even touched his drums for the last 2, but we were pretty much spot on with our performance of the three songs we chose to perform. So fun.

That's all I know. I'll try to blog more. Heh. Bye!

LOL

2010-06-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

This is just a photo upload for jabberboard revenge. ;)

Grandpa, Pt. II

2010-06-13T05:46:00.000-07:00

So my Grandpa's funeral was yesterday, and it was amazing. There were more people in their church than are in attendance on Christmas or Easter. The fire department was there, in uniform, and they made an honor guard type thing to the sides of us as we recessed to the graveyard. The american legion was there, and my grandma was presented with a flag, taps was played, and Grandpa got a three-volley salute (due to his service in the Navy during WWII). It was moving. I think at last count there were over 450 there, but I'm not sure about the exact count.

The service itself was very celebratory. My dad gave a tribute speech to Ray, who is actually his father-in-law. I sang a couple of songs with my cousin, Gretchen, and my cousin-in-law, Dan. My cousin Eric, a baptist minister, gave an excellent homily. Gretchen read a piece on my grandpa that she'd written for his 90th birthday, the choir sang (I've never seen a funeral where the choir sang!) and other cousins did the readings. The pastor of the church gave, hands down, the best sermon I've ever heard him give.

It was just what grandpa would have wanted.

Rest in Peace, Grandpa

2010-06-08T06:52:00.000-07:00

As is obvious from the title, my Grandpa passed away. It's been a hard weekend and a hard week, but I just have to take a few moments here to celebrate this man's amazing life, because he was an extraordinary guy. Also, he lived to be 90 and his mind was as sharp as a tack. He died peacefully in his sleep, surrounded by family, at 4:30 a.m. this past saturday. Death comes to everyone, but that's about the best way to go possible. Still, it's really difficult for those of us who have to say goodbye. A mighty oak has fallen.

Here are some tidbits about my Grandpa, because in a lot of ways this guy is larger than life:

Grandpa was born in 1920 and grew up during the Great Depression. He was the son of a Democratic State Senator, and grew up to be the strongest Republican I know, so that says a little something for his rebellious nature. (Wait...he was a rebel because he was a Republican? LOL.) Besides being a Senator, my Great Grandfather (A man I never met) was also a farmer, and my Grandpa was a farmer for much of his life.

Grandpa was an Ensign on a Destroyer in the south pacific during World War II. His boat was somewhere near Hong Kong, mainly after the war had ended.

Grandpa was a recreational pilot. When he first started dating my Grandma (an amazing woman in her own right), he would fly to her place (About 133 miles away) and pick her up for dates. Once, a storm kept him from flying home, and he slept outside on my Grandma's parents' porch.

My Grandpa and Grandma got married and got a farm near where my Grandpa grew up. They raised 5 kids -- four boys and my mom. After Grandpa retired from farming (and his other job of insurance sales) they built a house on the farm property and one of my uncles took over the family farm.

My grandparents have been all over the world -- Norway, Sweden, Russia, China, Singapore just to name a few...in my Grandpa's office there is a map with red stickpins shoved into every place he's been. The northern hemisphere is pretty much covered, and the southern is getting there.

Most importantly, my Grandpa was a conversationalist. I have never met (and likely will never meet) a person more genuinely interested in what other people have to say. In one of the books that my Grandpa published (there are 3, short paperback memoirs) he mentions that everybody has a story to tell. He actively sought to learn a piece of that story from everyone he met. Those of you that met him likely had interesting (and sometimes wacky) conversations with him.

He was a heck of a guy. I'm thankful to have known him my whole life -- not many people get to keep their grandparents around this long, and I know that my family is fortunate.

Workin' on my game cuz life is taxing

2010-05-19T07:06:00.000-07:00

The weather has finally warmed up enough for me to play some golf again. There were two solid weeks where it rained every single day (and even snowed once...in May...barf). It was depressing and grey and lame as all get out. But finally, Spring decided to spring for the second time, and I made it out to the course again.

Last night was the first night of Men's League here. It was a lot of fun, and a perfect night for golf. Unfortunately I shot a horrid game, mainly due to a very unfortunate tree-and-sand-trap related 11 on the last hole. (My partner shot a 16 on that hole, with two OB shots and 4 attempts to get out of the same sand trap) All in all, it was a good night for setting my handicap for the rest of the season.

Tomorrow I'm leaving work at 10:30 to go play golf in a scramble. It's the hard knock life for me.

Last weekend I went on a road trip with the boys to Fargo, ND, to see some awesome bands (and one crappy one). Mastodon was the headliner, and I had never seen them before. They were phenomenal. The first openers were the ever-awesome Valient Thorr, a band I've now seen three (or four?) times and who continue to kick all kinds of arse. The second band was Baroness, and they also completely blew me away. I had a copy of their Red album, which was ok but never really did it for me. Their Blue album is excellent, though, and seeing them live solidified in my mind what a great band they are. Then there was Between the Buried and Me, who looked like a bunch of frat boys playing Atreyu-ivium crap and sounding pretty much like garbage to my ears.

It was a lot of fun to go on the road trip, catch up with friends, and have a good ol' time with the boys. P-A-RTY, we don't need no alibi, we party!

Even more nerdination!

2010-04-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

This is seriously getting ridiculous. Being a DM and making awesome terrain has become a bit of an obsession, and hopefully the payoff will be worth it when my players see the fruits of my toils. This all began with a graveyard scene for one of the encounters in Shadowfell. I created it with folded paper mausoleums, walls, and gates, and paper gravestones with funny names on them.

I put quite a bit of work into the graveyard, and had a lot of fun doing it. For the road and some other terrain, I used some Dungeon Tiles and some homemade terrain tiles that I printed. I taped it all down onto my "battle board", a creation of my own involving a dry erase board with permanent marker. After getting done with it, though, I realized that I would have one awesome looking encounter that lasted for exactly one encounter, and then I'll have to retire my awesome graveyard. That's a bummer. So, I got to thinking about how I could make sweet looking terrain at home without spending a fortune, and be able to use it for more than one encounter.

I've invested in a few packs of Dungeon Tiles, and they're great and look cool, but they have their problems. My biggest gripe is that you don't know what's in each pack. Wizards likes to create surprise packages -- I think it stems from Magic: The Gathering. They're really into not letting you know what's inside. The other gripe with Dungeon Tiles is that there aren't enough duplicates to make really big rooms. They've designed them so that you pretty much need to buy two of each set in order to make a good looking dungeon.

Other tile sets are even more incredibly awesome, but ridiculously expensive. Case in point: Dwarven Forge. They look amazing and are much more customizable because the tiles don't often have things like furniture or dead bodies permanently painted on them. However, they're really pricy. So, I discovered a way to replace the money part with good ol' sweat, and I've come up with some rad tiles. First, I went to Home Depot and dropped 20 bucks on some tile. Like actual, bathroom tile. They had sheets of these 1-inch stone tiles for 10 bucks for an 11x11 square of tiles. However, the tiles are glued to a plastic mesh and spaced for grouting, so there's about an eighth of an inch of space between them straight off the rack. That won't do for my gaming. ;)

The other issue is that they come off of their plastic mesh rather easily. So, I decided to take them off, and use some wood glue and glue them to cardboard bases, to give them stability. I started by making some 2x2 inch squares, which will be good for creating hallways and also for setting side by side to create rooms.

Then I started making some larger pieces. So far, I have a couple of 3x3 and one 6x6 as well. It's fun spending time making stuff like this, but I wouldn't recommend it for anyone that's not a fan of modeling, because it gets monotonous. The glue from the mesh sticks to the tiles as well, so I found that in order to create a tight fit between tiles, I needed to use a little sandpaper to get the old glue off.

Happy gaming. I can't wait until the next session.

Nerdination!

2010-04-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

So, based on the acquisition of 4th edition D&D books, I've gotten back into D&D in a major way. I was always into it, and have been playing fairly regularly since I was about 14 or 15 years old. That's well over half my life, and just contemplating that is astounding to me. Very few other games have been such a mainstay for me. Super Mario Bros., perhaps, but I don't play that with anything near the fervor of a good D&D session.

I remember getting my first copy of a Player's Handbook (2nd edition) back one summer long ago. I was doing some corn detassling at the time, and invited four of my friends over after work to play some D&D. The first group ever consisted of my friend Corey as DM (because he'd played before), and Myself, Chad, Nate, and Mike as the players. I played a Halfling Thief (that's right, we called ourselves thieves back then, noobs, because Bards are Rogues as well!). Mike was a Dwarf Fighter, Chad was an Elf Mage, and Nate was a Human Cleric. You know, you just don't get a more vanilla group than that. And we had a lot of fun and played a LOT of D&D over the next several years.

Eventually the DM hat got passed in my direction, and I enjoyed the helm. I had a few stints as a player in college, but I knew that DMing was the place that I belonged. Still, I never felt like I could possibly know all of the rules. That hasn't changed to this day, but I figured out the secret of being a decent DM -- Use good judgment, make it up, and don't waste time looking up rules. If you really need it, the players all have PHBs, so they can look it up for you. That's it. Other than that, be as descriptive as possible and only as restrictive as necessary. OK, I could go on and on, but the truth of the matter is that as long as everyone is having fun, that's all that matters.

Back to the crux of the discussion: I now live farther from my friends than ever before, yet we play more D&D than we have since high school. It's a very social activity, and it's extremely awesome to have the excuse to get my friends to come over (or to go to their places) to sit down, have a few beers/mountain dews/whatever and immerse ourselves in an afternoon of slaying monsters and performing epic acrobatic maneuvers. After moving to a new town, this is pretty much the pinnacle of my social activity.

The game has grown considerably since my days in a 4-player party. So many of my friends play D&D now, and all of them want to be part of the action (which is awesome). This has resulted in a HUGE party of players. At the last session, we had 9 players. There were moments where the potential player turnout was somewhere around 14, but there's never been a time where everyone invited has showed up. I had a 9-player session in my basement in Robbinsdale back when we were playing 2nd edition, and it was utter chaos. There were actually several sessions back then where we only got through one fight. That's not the case anymore -- 4th edition moves a lot quicker for a number of reasons. First, you only roll initiative once. When we played 2nd edition (whether this was in the rules or not I don't rightly know) we rolled initiative every round. That adds up to taking a lot of time. Also, just figuring out whether you hit or not was more difficult.

This is getting to be a long blog, but I wanted to mention a couple more things. I totally skipped 3rd edition and 3.5, but was immensely pleased to find out that 4th edition relies heavily on miniatures. D&D started as a miniature game, but by the time 2nd edition rolled around they weren't nearly as necessary and in fact we didn't even play with miniatures until I became a DM. Even then they were only used for placement and facing, not for movement. That's right, we ignored movement rate (it was just too dang complicated). Now my 4 pewter miniatures have become 25 pewter miniatures, although I only actually own 4. My players tend to leave their minis with me. I've also assembled an army of monster miniatures, and crave more. The visual aspect that the miniatures adds to the game allows players to continue to be interested in the board and to strategize their next move even while it's not their turn. They stay engaged, and it's awesome. That helps a ton with 9-player groups.

However, miniatures are expensive. You can get some for under 1.00, but some are ridiculous (like the gelatinous cube that sells for $40 and is just a plastic cube. come on. Some of my dice sets have come inside perfectly good gelatinous cubes. LOL.) I'm so INTO the minis, though, that I've decided to try my hand at making my own, as soon as I can get my grubby mitts on some fimo. Also, crafting cool looking encounter grids has become an obsession/goal of mine, because it really brings the scene to life. So, in addition to the fimo, a woodburning kit might be on my list of stuff to get. Oh, and a tackle box for my minis. This stuff literally fills me with glee.

If you can't tell...I'm excited to play more D&D.

April!

2010-04-02T06:53:00.000-07:00

So, I tend to let months fly by faster than I can say "I really need to blog more", but it seems that March has passed me by already. Hopefully this won't be my only entry for April, but you never know. I've become a lazy blogger. On the flip side of that coin, I've apparently become a much more motivated worker. I think I owe that to having a job that I actually enjoy.

So, the usual stuff is going on, I guess. The kids are getting bigger and doing new things. I'm hanging out. Occasionally playing video games. Working. Recording songs. Etc.

The weather is getting much warmer, and spring is finally here. OK, that's about as lame a paragraph starter as I could possibly craft, but it's true anyway. With spring come good things, like not wearing a giant coat, not shoveling snow, getting outside for walks, actually meeting our neighbors, etc.

I have to go off on a tangent here. I may or may not have talked about the Orson Scott Card theory of Philotics before. I don't think I have. Anyway, according to Card in his Ender's Game universe, there are lil' things called Philotes that kind of tie the universe together. People that develop relationships also develop Philotic Connections. Yes, this is all fiction, but it explains nicely the way that when I haven't seen a friend in a while and I start thinking about that friend, the universe sort of seems to arrange things so that I reconnect with said friend. It happens to me all the time, and probably to you as well. I truly believe that SOME sort of connection is made between people that's beyond physical.

For example, I was talking to Ryan the other day about not having seen Reuben in a while. That night, Reuben called me. There was no conversation between Ryan and Reub, it just happened independently. There are other examples. I've found myself wondering whatever happened to person X, only to go home and find out that they've friend requested me on Facebook.

Anyway, lately I've been trying to track down a friend of mine from high school named Mike. Since I now live in the same town as his parents, I looked them up in the phone book to see if I could find his number from them. Upon looking in the phonebook, I realized that they had moved...to the house that's literally out my back window. Our back yards touch. Crazy. Weird. Philotic connection? Either way, perhaps I'll meet them again soon, since it's spring and people are outside. (See? This all connects.)

Still, calling old friend's moms isn't high on my cool things list, so I just sent a FB message to his brother. LOL. That seems to have worked, as I got his phone number and sent a message. We'll see. Go philotes go.

Joey's Big Weekend

2010-03-04T06:58:00.000-08:00

This past weekend was Joey's baptism, so we had a ton of people to our place to celebrate the big event. It all started Saturday when Kerry's parents rolled in, followed shortly by Kerry's brother Keith and his wife Beth. Kerry's dad had brought a bottle of rum and a bottle of whiskey, so we settled in and prepared ourselves for a night unlike the one we had expected (you know...sober) and put on the party hats.

Ryan and Meghan arrived shortly after that, and we also invited Lars to come over. My parents and grandparents arrived after that, and it was time to get supper going. Kerry's dad had brought a turkey burner (since I think mine is still in Rhyno's garage) and a fry pan, and 200 perch fillets. Kerry, in the meantime, had sliced up a bunch of potatoes. Soon the cooking oil was a'bubblin' (well, what hadn't spilled on my garage floor, anyway) and the fries were cooking, followed shortly by the fish. There was also cole slaw and other vegetable type things, and although I enjoyed a bit of it all, my focus was on fish with tartar sauce and fries with malt vinegar. OM NOM NOM NOM.

We stayed up late playing video games and drinking. The next morning was...well, it was awful for me. But, you do whatcha gotta do, right? Coffee + Advil + Vitamin B-12 and I was back in the saddle and ready for church.

Joey was a little angel for the whole service, and Gwen was pretty good too, because her cousin Charlotte was there and they just colored the whole time. Ryan and Meghan and Keith and Beth are now officially Godparents, and both Ryan and Keith can now make offers you can't refuse.

Awesome weekend

2010-02-22T14:35:00.000-08:00

Life is good. First of, my little less-than-three-month-old boy is sleeping through the night, and that's is a holy crapton of awesome. It took Gwen twice that amount of time, which admittedly was heavily due to Kerry and I not really knowing how to get her to sleep through the night. With Joey, it was all about routine. We didn't even need to do the whole "cry it out" thing. He just decided that he should sleep. Good boy. :^D

This weekend marked a trek to the cities for some D&D. Lundo and Amy were kind enough to host, and as usual I had a blast. It's funny, now that I've moved out of town I play way more often than I did over the course of the last several years. That's due to the blissful lack of law school, of course. It's a lot more awesome to have one or two sessions a month than one every six months. I think that the switch to fourth edition has really revitalized everyone's desire to play, as well, and everyone is having a lot of fun.

On Sunday it was time to pay Kerry back, because she had the kids all day on Saturday and they were a couple of hellians. So, she went out for a long long lunch with her friends, and I stayed at my sister's place with the kids. When I go to my sister's place with the kids, chaos follows, because she has two kids that are about the same age. It was interesting and chaotic, and I hope they all got some rest once we left.

I've been obsessed with Chess lately, thanks to chess.com and their lovely app for facebook. I've been playing against my friends, and it's a ton of fun. If you play chess, and are on facebook, I look forward to your challenge. It's made me really want to break out one of my chessboards and go to town against friends or family in an actual, factual, head-to-head game. Hopefully Lars and I can make that happen soon.

OK seriously

2010-02-17T08:07:00.000-08:00

I suck at blogging this year. I really do. My first excuse (and really, that's all it is) is the new job. Yes, I have more responsibility now. There is, however, still down time, and I should really update the world on my life. Because seriously. The world needs to know. Don't you?

Life in the old town is...well, it is. Honestly, it's kind of like living in a fish bowl. Everyone knows who I am, who my family is, and what I'm up to. You'll notice that I didn't even mention said town in this post, because there are only a few people here, and google is good at finding things. Anyway, it's good to be back here, but there's definitely a culture-shock style adjustment.

The job is going well. I can't get into specifics, due to the lack of privacy on the internet, but I'm doing lawyer stuff. I've been to court, and although the first time was terrifying, I'm confident that I'm in the right place, doing the right thing. For essentially the first time in my life, I'm happy with my job. I probably already said that.

My family is doing well. Gwen is super into dancing now. Kerry found a pair of old ballet slippers from when Kerry was a little girl, and gave them to Gwen. Gwen now wears them at all times, and is freaking adorable.

My Grandpa recently celebrated his 90th birthday. We had a party for him at their church, and well over 200 people showed up. He gave a speech (well, so did all of his children, but we'll focus on his) and he said that he was talking to his doctor. The doctor said that getting to 90 was a great milestone, and Grandpa said, "Now what?" The doctor said, "Well...try for 100!" Funny.

I've happily been playing a lot more D&D, which is awesome. I have the coolest friends in the world, because they're willing to truck all the way out here to play every other session. That's been awesome, and as a result I'm playing the most D&D I've played since back in the epic days of 2001 - 2003 when I had a weekly session. I'm all geared up for another session this weekend, and it's going to be a blast as always.

I had gotten out of playing WoW, in favor of my shiny new PS3. Monday night, though, I had woken up with Joey at about 3:00 am, and couldn't get to sleep until 4:30 because I was thinking about WoW. I actually got out of bed at 4:00 and downloaded the latest patch, so that I could play last night. The problem was that by the time 9:30 rolled around last night, I was all set to play, but I was tired as heck. I still played about an hour, though, and it was blissful.

Settling In

2010-01-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

Another day, another dollar. So, I woke up to the realization that I've been at this lawyerin' thing for a full quarter of a year now. I started with the firm back in October. You'd think that by now I'd have a little confidence about what I'm doing, but that's not the case. Friends and colleagues tell me that it takes a good year to start to feel comfortable, and I believe them. A word to law students: They don't teach you anything in law school about being a lawyer. Even the stuff that really seems like you'll need to know in the future can be rendered close to useless, depending upon what path you take.

That said, I know that I'm more comfortable now that I was at the outset, and I am confident that I will be able to learn everything I need to become a good lawyer. On to other, more fun topics.

Joey, whose official nickname is "Bubs" now (although he'll answer to Bubsy, Zubs, Zubsy, and other variants) is growing at an exponential rate. The lad is huge. I think he's gonna be a bruiser. He could surprise me there, though. I was a little blubber baby as well, but I turned out short and relatively lean. I also turned out generally terrible at sports. We'll see.

Gwenner is basically completely potty trained now! It's amazing -- she just decided that she was able to go on the potty, and now that's what she does, every time. She's a very good and very smart little girl, who astounds me daily. It's amazing to come home and sit down for a conversation with my little girl. She's a chatterbox with a frightening command of the English language. She's also freaking adorable. I'm biased, but it's still true. :)

I got a new toy for Christmas, in the form of a shiny new PS3. It's freaking awesome. As a father, however, my video game time is limited, and I'm afraid that I'll have to give up on WoW for a little while. At least until Cataclysm is released. Although, as an addict, I still feel the pull to play. Perhaps I can devote 1 of my gaming nights per week to WoW. Woo! Justified monthly payment!

As far as PS3 games, I've acquired three that will soak up a lot of my time. The one I'm currently in the midst of is GTA 4, and it's a beautiful and engaging installment of the series, very true to its predecessors. Rock Star seems to have taken out a lot of the more outrageous things that made their way into GTA: San Andreas. Missions where you fly jetpacks to pick up alien goo may be fun (and seriously, GTA:SA is one of my favorite games ever) but they kind of detract from the gangsta feel of the game. GTA 4 is another romp in Liberty City, and so far has provided me with a lot of fun and a minimal amount of swearing.

I also picked up Dragon Age: Origins, a game that virtually every one of my friends has played or is playing. I'm very excited, because I've heard nothing but good things about it. I know that one's gonna be a time consumer.

My brother-in-law got me Assassin's Creed for Christmas, another title that I'm extremely excited to play. It's gonna be a good few months for gaming.

Let it snow

2009-12-28T07:29:00.000-08:00

Well sheesh. It appears that I let a month slide by without blogging. Well, it's the holidays and all, and I think I lost my readership anyway. But hark! This clickety-clack is the sound of me trying to pull it together and type a blog.

What's been going on for me lately, you ask? A lot, but that's always the case. Work is going well. I've finally started doing things that real lawyers do, instead of just typing documents. I'm keeping myself busy here, and enjoying the heck out of being a real live lawyer.

Baby Joey turned one month old on Christmas day. He's growing exponentially, and if this rate continues, he will tower over the buildings of Benson by next fall, and will cause a lot of damage around town just by crawling. Shudder, mortals, for the day of Joeyzilla draws night. In all seriousness, he's doing fantastic.

Christmas this year involved some travel, but not as much as usual. On Wednesday night we drove from Benson to Taylors Falls, MN (where my Grandparents reside). We made this trek in the midst of SNOWMAGEDDON 2009!, a much-hyped winter storm. The drive was pretty intense, but we made it without too much difficulty. We had a lovely Christmas dinner, where I successfully avoided eating any lutefisk (ish). We stayed until Christmas day, and made the trek back home.

The drive home was worse than the drive there. At first the roads were just wet, but by the time we were within 30 miles of home it was complete crap. Four-wheel drive and a speed of 30 mph got us home happily, and I discovered to my great joy that our neighbor across the street had cleared my driveway. I love my neighborhood.

It continued to snow, and I woke up the next day to the sound of a motor, and glanced out to see that once again, my neighbor had cleared my driveway. I didn't see which of my neighbors was the awesome one. I decided to pay it forward, and went over to my parents' house with a shovel in hand. This was Saturday, and they were returning later in the afternoon.

That was the worst time I've ever spent shoveling in recent memory. It took me close to 3 hours, and part of it involved cutting through a chunky wall of snow that was well higher than my waist, piled against the end of my parents' driveway by a series of snowplows. I seriously should have left that there, because it would have easily repelled looters or hordes of orcs. I feel that I singlehandedly destroyed my parents' fortifications, but such is life.

Yesterday, I once again heard the sound of blowing snow. I sprang from my bed like a wildman, intent on catching Mr. Awesome mid-snowblow. I was successful. I ran out the front door and found that it was my neighbor from across the street. I thanked him profusely for his kind act. I went inside and collected a large plate of Christmas cookies, and then brought it over to said neighbor's house as a thank-you gift. I love my neighborhood.

After that, Kerry's parents and some other relatives came to our house for Christmas Two: Electric Boogaloo. We had a great day, filled with food, beer, wine, mead, merriment, and more presents for a very excited three-year-old. I think that Gwen is now convinced that it's going to be Christmas every day.

Welcome to the world!

2009-12-01T09:24:00.000-08:00

The evening of November 24th was fairly quiet. Typical evening here in Benson, without much going on. We put Gwenner to bed at her normal, reasonable hour. Then Kerry and I watched a little TV, and we went to bed. I read some more of Dan Brown's latest, The Lost Symbol.

At 4:10 am, Kerry said, "HONEY!" I've never woken up so quickly in my life. "WHAT????" I replied, bolting upright. "I think I'm having contractions," she replied. "How far apart are they?" I asked, not daring to hide the panic in my voice. "I don't know," she said.

Now, when Kerry says "I don't know" in the context that she did, it really means "you don't want to know." In this particular situation, it turned out to mean "ten minutes", but over the course of the next half hour, that number decreased to four. With a 30-minute drive to Willmar, MN in our future, that number was too close for comfort.

It was snowing outside. My parents rocketed over to our place, and we were out the door around 5:30. I can't really recall the time. There was some dilly-dallying in there. I was more than a little panicked.

We made it to Willmar somewhere around 6. Just like last time, I remember being really annoyed at how long the triage takes. Seriously folks, this lady is having a baby...can you move it along a bit?

Kerry's contractions were very painful by this time, and all she really wanted was an epidural. Unfortunately for her, this wasn't going to happen. She was too far along, and had to just power through it. I reassured her to the best of my ability, and off we went.

We were in our room at 6:30. The baby was born at 7:29. WOW! A little over 3 hours of labor sure beats the 22 hours for Gwen.

SO, welcome to the world, Joseph Dennis Wilcox! 7lbs, 12 oz. 22 inches long, cute as a button.

Date night

2009-11-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

So, this is a fun perk about living in the same town as my parents. Yesterday, my mom called me and asked if Kerry and I were doing anything, and if we wanted her to babysit. We didn't have any plans, but we were more than willing to make some. Heh. It's very backwards for the babysitter to call and ask if you want to do something.

Kerry and I then went to the lovely Demarce theater and saw Couples Retreat. It was pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the trailer -- a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy. However, there was one scene in the movie that featured some rap-like cover of D'yer Mak'er. (Aside: By placing that link, I have found out a number of things. The pronunciation of the song's title is "Jamaica", a nod to its reggae feel. Huh. Didn't know that. Also, the person that "covered" it is Sean Kingston, and it's just a sample in a song called "Me Love", which was last night and still is lame. Ahh, Wikipedia...thanks for fillin' me in.) While that song played, a bunch of high school girls behind us (who had swooned heavily during the New Moon trailer) started singing along. I was like, "NO! No you little dweebs do NOT know this song! GRR!" Then I realized that I'm just old. Sigh.

Other than that, all is well around here. Just waitin' on the wifey to pop out child #2. Then I get to re-experience the thrill of not sleeping ever, and see what an effective lawyer I make.

Too much going on

2009-11-10T12:15:00.000-08:00

Yes! I have TONS of free time now! It's a crazy, weird feeling. Yet amazingly, I'm able to fill it up with a whole bunch of stuff going on. Too much! How do I do this to myself?

It's not entirely true. Yes, there's a lot going on -- mostly stuff having to do with unpacking boxes and organizing furniture -- but there have also been plenty of TV watching nights. Those fill up fast when I'm watching all three CSI shows, a bit of V, a touch of Survivor (for whatever reason) and a bit of Biggest Loser (to feel good about m'self)...yeah. Sloth is the NEW homework!

So yeah. Time to haul that treadmill back downstairs and get back to exercising. Or maybe just wii fit, which almost counts as exercise. It'll be nice to actually do some of that without a GIGANTIC PICTURE WINDOW through which the neighbors get to watch me doing yoga poses and running in place.

I went for a rousing D&D session at T-Rav's place last Saturday. We finally got a chance to try out 4th Edition, and it exceeded every expectation. Absolutely awesome. Thanks to Lars for driving me down, and to T-Rav, Lundo and Amy for playing.

Lars drove me back to Benson on Saturday night. Then on Sunday, I woke up and drove back to the cities for my new nephew's baptism. Sunday night we drove back to Benson. Know what? That's four trips to or from the cities in two days. Know what else? It wasn't bad at all. So to all ye bold heroes with qualms about the drive to Benson, COME VISIT ME! IT'S NOT A BIG DEAL! ;^)

I signed up for NaNoWriMo again, but I think I'm giving up. I just don't have the motivation that I had last year, when I was completely insane. My new motivation is to hit level 80 in WoW before the baby comes. We'll see how that goes.

The New House

2009-10-29T08:39:00.001-07:00

Kerry, Gwennerpants and I (as well as the bun in the oven) have moved into a new house, which we are in the midst of purchasing. The sellers were kind enough to give us an immediate move-in agreement, which is super awesome. We LOVE the place.

Lemme give you the rundown. It's in a very new development of our new town, and it was built in 2002. When we moved in, there were kids playing football in the yard, and one of our neighbors came over and brought us a plate of cookies. This neighborhood feels like Utopia to me. From my driveway, a sidewalk stretches to infinity. Apparently I'm supposed to stock up on candy, because ALL the kiddies are gonna be coming our way on All Hallow's Eve, and I should expect over 200 trick-or-treaters.

The house itself is huge, compared to our previous digs. It's got over 3,000 finished square feet, an attached 2-car garage, and much unlike our last house, a kitchen that's big enough to open both the dishwasher and the refrigerator at the same time. The basement is all finished, and there are two huge family rooms down there, both with fireplaces. The lot is also twice as big as our old lot, and there are swingsets as far as the eye can see.

For whatever reason, my wifey is bringing the hammer down on the basement decor, and not letting me "geek it up". Apparently she wants to hang out down there as well or something. Oh well, the term "man-cave" is stupid anyway. Sorry, Voltron III poster, I guess I have to hang you up in the kid room and pretend my 3-year-old is the one that digs your lion-combining awesomeness. I managed to sneak a sword onto the fireplace mantle, though. We'll see how long it lasts. Perhaps I'll just need to pull out all the goodies for D&D sessions.

Work is going great so far. I love it. I have never had a job where I actually enjoy going to work in the morning. It's amazing.

The first part of the final book of the Wheel of Time came out this week, and I picked it up off of audible.com, because I have too many other books to read and had credits available. During my commute (LOL less than 5 minutes now) I listened to the forward, where the new author, Brandon Sanderson (one of my new favorites, because of his incredible Mistborn series) talks about the Wheel of Time's influence on him, and especially its author, the amazing Robert Jordan. Sanderson talks about Jordan's death and the shock of it all, and of being chosen to complete the series. Honestly, that forward choked me up. I'm excited for the book. If anyone can pull it off, it's Brandon Sanderson.

I'm so thankful that Terry Goodkind wasn't chosen. He would have had Rand ranting about the evils of communism for entire chapters. I'm also thankful that George R. R. Martin wasn't chosen, because honestly he's not going to be around much longer and probably wouldn't have finished it. I want GRRM to keep working on his OWN series, which has a bazillion fans chomping at the bit.

Update

2009-10-22T06:56:00.000-07:00

SO...wow. A lot's been going on. We sold the house, as I've probably mentioned. The closing is tomorrow, and the buyers take possession on Sunday. Therefore, we're gonna motorboat down to the cities (that's figurative...literally going to the cities in a motorboat is probably possible with the amount of waterways in this state, but I'm not about to try it) and load up a second truck full of all of our stuff, thereby clearing out the house for its new owners. I'm gonna do my darndest to never sell a house again, because it's a huge pain.

We're also negotiating a purchase of a home here, but I'm going to play my cards close to the chest on that. This is a very small town, and everybody's business becomes public knowledge almost instantly.

Let's talk about that, shall we? This town, the town that I grew up in, hasn't really changed much. Sure, there are a couple of buildings where there weren't before, people have remodeled, and the traffic lights now actually have left-turn arrows and lanes, but other than that, things stay pretty constant around here. It's quiet, it's friendly, and it will be a nice place to raise the kids.

However, something's gotta be done about these @#$%@ trains. True, there's no rush hour around here. There are trains rolling through town every 15 minutes (it seems) though, and that has about the same effect. I'm going to start lobbying for a bridge. They're relatively simple in form and function, and despite the fact that some of our Minnesota bridges fall down tragically (OVER THE LINE!) the idea has still been around and functioning well since antiquity. Please, people. Build a bridge.

Other than that, life is good. For the first time in my LIFE, I can truly say that I love my job. Things are lookin' up.

I still can't believe that I passed the bar exam. My brain keeps telling me that I need to start studying for it again. I don't. WOOOHOOOO!

The,space,bar,on,this,new,computer,doesn't,work,very,well,either.

Wooooooohoooooo!

2009-10-08T07:55:00.000-07:00

I PASSED THE BAR EXAM!!!!

Other than that, I have like zero time for blogging at the moment. Sometime soon I'll tell you all about my new job, new town, new house (when I get one).

A New Edition (Warning: Geek Post)

2009-09-23T13:38:00.000-07:00

Well, it's almost my birthday. I'll be 33 years old this year, and my plan on that evening is to hoist many a Rolling Rock, because that particular beer has a mysterious "33" emblazoned on the side of the bottle. And I like beer.

Although I'll be becoming even older, that doesn't stop me from acting like a kid. In fact, I'm having some friends over this evening to play some good ol' Dungeons and Dragons. It promises to be a swell night. We're gonna kick back and knock out some AD&D 2nd edition.

Because I'm a dork, I decided to do a little research in the ol' 2nd ed. DMG (which is for some reason not actually pictured on Wikipedia...perhaps some editing is in order) and I discovered a number of slight changes that I'm going to employ this evening. These changes won't last long, however. Brace yourselves, players -- your world is about to be shattered.

You see, I've been finding that although I absolutely adore the 2nd edition, I need something more. You know what that means. You can feel it in the back of your heads. You know where this is going.

2nd Edition, it's not you. It's me. I've loved all of the times that we've shared. Some of my fondest memories involved playing with you. Sure, we've had our ridiculous fights (there was even a time where I got up out of my chair and kicked Corey. Yep. True story. I actually physically kicked him.) and our ridiculous triumphs. But dearest 2nd edition, the fire is on the wane.

The hard truth is, I've found somebody new. No, not that tramp 3rd edition. Not even 3.5. Nay. I've spent some time in the arms of 4th edition, and you know what? It felt good. It felt good to get a fresh start. It felt good to lean in close, and what I really want to do is stick my nose in and smell the sweet perfume that is the pages of the book.

It's my birthday. And that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get the books. The 4th edition books.

Where does that leave us, 2nd edition? I hope that this isn't goodbye. I just need to see other methods. I need to do some soul searching. I need to find myself.

OK back to the real world here. Yes, for my birthday I am really and truly going to purchase 4th edition D&D books. I plan on starting a 4th edition adventure. I hope that my players will accompany me on this journey. It will be fun. I assure you. It won't be painful. It will be fun. And if we hate it, I'm keeping my 2nd edition books and all of the character sheets that I've collected over the years. I know that once my soul searching time is through, if I need to go back to 2nd Edition, she'll welcome me back with open arms. I just might suffer 1d12 damage.

Everything's comin' up Wilcox!

2009-09-21T12:42:00.001-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, after nearly a year on the market my house is finally selling. And that's awesome. In fact we had offers coming in from more than one party, which created a bit of a bidding war and ta-da! We're not only selling the house, we're breaking even.

I say that as if it were a good thing, and in today's market it really is. I know so many people who are completely upside-down it's not even funny. Every day I see someone apply for a refinance only to find out that their home is worth half of what it was a few years ago. It still stings, though, because we put our hearts and souls into that house. We made a bunch of really nice improvements to the place. Granted, a lot of them are cosmetic and don't add to the actual value of the home -- tile floors, changing the yardwide garden into an actual yard, etc.

The thing is, it wasn't supposed to be this way. Purchasing a home is supposed to be the single best investment ever. Alas, that's not the case. On the plus side, we'll be buying again in the same market. On the minus side, we'll acquire another home to make improvements on.

Still, this is a huge relief and a large weight off of my back. To quote my father-in-law when talking to my wife, "Good. Now Ben can stop having migraines and you can stop crying into your cereal." So true. The headache is almost gone.

My employment here at the place I've been working at for nearly seven years officially ends on September 30th. It's been a long ride, full of ups and downs. I'll miss the place, and I'll miss the people, but it's fo' shizzy time to move on, and I'm super excited.

Now hopefully I passed the bar exam. If I didn't, it's really gonna suck to have to tell you all about that. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Down with Disease

2009-09-16T09:21:00.000-07:00

First off, Happy Birthday to my wifey! Honey, you're the best, and I hope your day is as wonderful as can be. I love you!

Now on to other things. So last night, I once again had a fever. That's twice in a week. Here's the standing theory as to how that went down. I came down with a mildish stomach flu last week on Monday. I started feeling like crap while I was brewing over at Ryan's place. That night I had a fever. I went to work last Tuesday, but was feeling very crappy when I got home that night. In the middle of the night, I puked a couple of times and proceeded to stay home from work for the next day and a half.

Gwen then got sent home sick with a fever, but she didn't have any of the upset stomach action that I did. She bounced back very quickly.

I think that Gwen had something other than what I had, and that last night I caught whatever Gwen had. I feel much better today. Nothing that's too big a deal. I think that Rhyno also mentioned feeling crappy when we saw him on Sunday. Perhaps he had the same mumbo jumbo. I think that it goes away quickly. Woot for NOT having Swine Flu. (Yet)

Other than that, not much is going on. We did some remodeling in the basement, which now looks much better than it did before thanks to wall paneling and floor tiles. We also dropped the price on the house yet again, and it's depressingly listed for less than it was listed for when we bought it. That's not how it's supposed to happen. Of course, that's how it's happening, everywhere. Stupid second great depression, I hate you so much.

Tonight Kerry and I going to dinner at Claddagh Irish Pub in Maple Grove, to celebrate her birthday. She'll have to shy away from the Guinness due to extreme knocked-uppedness, but I don't have to be shy at all. Woot.

Things are moving fast

2009-09-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

So, I'm noticing that I'm terrible at blogging lately. It's something that I haven't had a ton of time for these days, because there's a ton going on both at work and at home. I'll try to fill you in...

My work informed me that my last day is going to be September 30th. This is something that I expected, and is a part of my plan. Still, having that official end date makes things suddenly crazy, because there's a ton that I have to do before the big move.

I'm starting with my dad on October 5th, and will probably find out about the bar exam right around then. (GULP). I'm nervous as all get out, but even if I didn't pass the bar there is still a lot of work I can do whilst studying for bar exam number two. (Ugh. I sincerely hope that I don't have to go through that again.)

I've had some opportunities lately to do the things I used to know and love. I played some D&D with friends last weekend, and it was a lot of fun. I went to the Reniassance Festival one day last weekend, and hope to go again this coming weekend with my in-laws. Last night, I brewed some beer (it had been MONTHS!) with Ryan. That was a ton of fun. I've played a couple of rounds of golf, and although my game is still fairly terrible, it's been a lot of fun to get out and play.

The house still hasn't sold, and that's a huge pain. We're going to drop the @#$%% price yet again, and make some improvements on the basement. Not much we can do at this point. We entertained the thought of putting in a bathroom, but it would be cost prohibitive. Therefore, we'll do what we can.

Eight years!

2009-08-25T17:09:00.000-07:00

Today marks my eight year wedding anniversary! By no coincidence, it's also the eight year wedding anniversary of my wife. So really both of us. Cuz we got married. Eight years ago. Yep.

It's been a crazy awesome eight years, too, and I can't even begin to think of all of the stuff that we've been through. It's had its ups and downs, but I gotta say with absolute certainty that these have been the very best eight years of my life, because I've had my wife to share them with. OK, that's not totally accurate of course. I knew my wife before I married her. So technically I've been with her for like a decade. But the life that we created with each other as husband and wife is pretty darn awesome, if you ask me.

Other than the rocket-fast eight years thing, life is now plodding along fairly slowly. No one wants to buy my house, still. That's just the way it's gonna go, I guess. Still, I have faith that everything will come together. It will. I've got all the time in the world. My future job isn't going anywhere. All will be well.

People continue throwing houses at us for after we move. That's a rather hilarious side effect of moving to a small town. Everyone knows that you're the only one that's planning on moving there, and suddenly everyone that wants to sell their house has your home phone number, and will stop at nothing. Hey Lars -- you should buy a house in Benson. People throw them at you.

One final interesting side note: this week is the first full week of classes at William Mitchell. SUCKERS.

What a headache

2009-08-20T06:19:00.001-07:00

So when I was about 14 or 15, I used to get migraine headaches. Really nasty migraine headaches with auras that would knock me out of commission for a long time. I hadn't had one in about 17 years...until this Tuesday evening. Sheesh.

I'm sure that there was some sort of perfect storm of stress, fatigue, and other factors that combined together to smack me in the face. Or forehead, actuall. I was alone with Gwen that night, and she was being a difficult toddler for a while but an angel for the most part. I sat down on the couch and started reading a novel in kind of low light without my glasses on, and my mom called me and told me that my 90-year-old grandfather had had another mini-stroke.

Almost instantly after getting off the phone with her, my vision started to blur in my right eye. The blurring became a strobe-like flicker as Kerry came in, and pretty soon I lost the ability to form words correctly. I would say something, and something different would come out of my mouth.

The speech disturbance lasted about 10 minutes, and then the headache started in earnest. It's pretty much gone now (two days later) but I'm still feeling kind of wonky. So I went to the doctor yesterday. They confirmed that it was indeed a migraine headache, and that nothing further needs to be done at this time. So that's good. It's kind of a scary situation when migraine symptoms mirror those of a stroke.

Speaking of headaches, the second annual Jabbergathering took place this past weekend, and was awesome. Because of this awesomeness, I had a much differenty type of headache all day Saturday.

Another huge headache is this effing house. It's nice to hear all of the optimism from everyone everywhere, telling me, "Chin up, buckaroo! It will sell!" The only problem with the optimism is that the @#$%^ thing still hasn't sold. I can't convey how frustrating it is to spend four years of your life preparing for a large life change, only to have all of your hopes and plans completely fouled up by a stupid house that won't sell. I'm not supposed to be here anymore.

Lotta catching up to do

2009-08-06T06:32:00.000-07:00

Holy carp. (Yes, carp). It's been a horridly long time since I've posted anything whatsoever. Time to get back in the swing of verbally vomiting my random thoughts into the ethers of the internet.

First off, there was the bar exam. It happened. That's all I know so far, of course, because they don't give out results until October. For now, I'll just stick with talking and thinking about it as little as possible.

I'm totally done with school now, and it's a totally surreal feeling. I just can't get used to not having any studying to do, and having my evenings open. It's really bizarre and wonderful and crazy. It's really nice to be able to see my girls in the evenings, and to see friends, and to actually get out and do things.

For example, CLUTCH. I went to another Clutch show (my sixth I think) last night with Kerry, Ryan, Corey, T-Rav, and CJ. It was awesome. We all met for a brew at the Hard Rock before the show, then headed over to First Ave.

We found a little secluded table while Lionize (the guitarist from Clutch's reggae-rock band) played their set. They were good -- I'd totally give their CD a listen and would possibly entertain notions of purchasing it.

Clutch came on around 10:00 and played a solid show until about 11:45 or so. I'm sure T-Rav and Ryan have the setlist for the show, because they're huge dorks.

The show was a ton of fun. Did I say that already? They didn't really have too many OMG moments in their set. They played some of the stuff off of the new album, and a bunch of other songs that I've seen them play before. I didn't really have the OH HAYELL YEAH moment in the show until the encore, which was Big News I with a Big News II tease that segued into Elephant Riders. That ruled.

They played super tight, though. Kerry mentioned that they all looked tired, which is to be expected because they've been touring for a long time now. I didn't notice the tired look, I was too stoked by the rock that was happening. Fun times.

Stuff and things

2009-07-12T10:54:00.000-07:00

This weekend has actually been fun and fairly relaxing. I've been able to spend some time with my family and such, because I've got a brief respite in my studying before the big storm starts...tomorrow. Yes, I could be studying more today, but sheesh -- I need a couple of days with the family.

Yesterday we all went to the zoo. We had a blast. The weather was perfect, Gwen was super into seeing all of the animals, and it was so nice to just hang out with my girls and not think about the stupid bar exam. speaking of stupid, I saw these stupid ostriches while I was there:

Shortly after the picture was taken they started eating the fence. Look at them, with their evil little beady eyes and their vacant expressions. They're planning a global takeover, just as soon as they get through that fence. Oh, how I hate them.

Anyway, it was super fun to hang out with the fam.

Tonight I'm gonna do some golfing with T-Rav and Rhyno. It's gonna be some much needed awesomeness, and I'm gonna SUCK, because this will actually be my first time out this year. We were going to go to Centerbrook, but since the old codger that runs the place is such a jerk on the phone and wouldn't make any tee times past 5:00 (dude, it's Minnesota, it's summer, and you're open -- it stays light until 9:30. You're a par 3 golf course. Also, learn some customer service skills.) we opted for Brookview instead. It should be fun as long as it doesn't storm.

Back to the studying grind tomorrow. That sucks, but what can ya do. It'll all be over in less than a month now. Sheesh. More like 2 1/2 weeks.

Tired

2009-06-28T04:35:00.000-07:00

Pashooooooooo...

It's been over a month since I've written anything. That's no good, but I assure you I have my reasons. See, I've been studying for the bar exam, and it's sucking up a lot of life. My bar review class meets essentially every night, and I'm still working full time of course. I don't get any time off of work until July 16th, but at that point I get 2 weeks off. I anticipate that my days will be full of studying at that point, however. No rest for the wicked, I guess.

My bar review course has been interesting and a bit grueling. Most of it is lecture, but there are always practice tests to complete, and some of them are actually turned in for grading. I've been told that the Barbri program tends to exaggerate when they grade practice exams -- exaggerate on the underside in order to motivate students to work harder. There have been two so far that have been graded, and my grades have certainly been crappy on them. Ugh.

One point of fun and relaxation thus far came last weekend when Kerry and I met a bunch of our friends for the triumphant return of Phish to Alpine Valley. The show was an absolute blast. The boys were completely on fire -- their playing was tight, the sets consisted of a bunch of songs that made Kerry and I very happy, and everything went off without a hitch. I really couldn't have asked for anything more. It even occurred during a lull in my classes, so that was fantastic.

I'm pretty tired this morning. It's early, of course...currently 6:46 but I've been up for a little while now. My daughter tends to wake up early. I was up late last night watching Clerks 2, and it was incredibly well done. Super funny movie, and very very true to the original. Makes me want to watch the rest of the Jersey movies. Well, not Jersey Girl. I still haven't seen that, but I've heard it's crap so I haven't had any motivation.

Well, that's about all I've got at the moment. I'll try to pop in again soon. Stay classy, Minneapolis.

Sick

2009-05-26T05:41:00.000-07:00

Yep, it's the day after a day off, and I'm sick. Staying home from work today. Actually, my child and wife are both also sick. Before anyone starts shunning us based on a swine flu scare, let me assure you that our symptoms don't necessarily fit into that category. Gwen has had some mad diarrhea for the last several days, but seems to be getting better. I've got a rather traditional "every muscle in my body aches" type thing going on, complete with a fever (albeit a low one). Kerry is puking, but then again...it's morning.

Did I mention that Kerry is pregnant? That's right folks! I'm gonna be a daddy again! The baby is due in early December, which means that if it's early like Gwen was, it'll probably be born in November. We'll see. Either way, it's gonna be a Benson Baby! Not sure if that's where it will be born, but that's where it will live.

Graduation was surreal, and it passed in a blur. I have no idea about anything that the speakers said, because I seriously could not pay attention. It was 2 1/2 hours that felt like 10 minutes. I now have a J.D. Woot!

Work really sucks these days, and I have a feeling that people are going to be on my case for missing today. My boss left work sick on Friday with a freakin' skip in her step and a smile on her face, though, so whatever.

Last week was rather hellish, with my ridiculous schedule. Not sure if I mentioned it already, but I went to work at 7:00 am, stayed for one hour, took off for BarBri in St. Paul from 9:00 to 3:00 pm, and then drove back to work from 3:30 to 5:45. That constitutes working a half day. Not fun.

This weekend we went to the parents' lake cabin, and we had a good time...mostly. I have three very obnoxious cousins that suck a lot of time and energy out of my parents, so it's hard to really spend any time with them while said cousins (ages 3, 5, and 8) are there. Luckily we had arrived fairly early on Friday night, and they didn't get there until Saturday afternoon.

While I was at Target the other day, I scored the Karate Kid trilogy for $13. That was a deal I couldn't pass on. The third movie sucks liquid monkey butt, but the other two are icons of my youth. I watched the first last night. It was fun.

This week (aside from today) the schedule has returned to something resembling normal. I'll be going to bar review during the nights and gettin' hassled by the man during the day.

Whoa

2009-05-15T05:31:00.000-07:00

So, last night I went to my last final ever, for Juvenile Justice. It went pretty uneventfully, and before I knew it the prof had come back into the room and told all of us that we had one more minute to wrap everything up. So, I did, turned in my exam, and that was it. No fanfare of trumpets or rush of doves, no thunderclaps or flashing lightning or mules or laser beams.

Heck, there wasn't even a whimper. Just kind of a sigh. I walked out of the room and into the hallway, and I was done with law school. It still hasn't really hit me yet, I feel like I've still got studying to do this weekend. Perhaps that feeling comes from the fact that I have a bar review class starting immediately on Monday. But that's totally different, and doesn't even take place at William Mitchell.

Kristian and I went out to the bar afterward. It was a place called Dixie's on Grand Ave, and I'd never been there before. It was pretty nice, but now that I don't have any reason to be on Grand Ave anymore, I doubt I'll go back. I didn't stay very long, because I had a 7:00 AM meeting this morning (a meeting that I ended up not having to go to).

I walked back from Dixie's and realized that it was on the same block as the Grotto lot. This needs a bit of back story. The Grotto lot is a parking lot near (read: several blocks from) William Mitchell, where the first-year law students are allowed to park. I parked there for much of my first year, and walked from there to school.

Well, last night I decided to complete the circle. I walked through the Grotto lot as if I had parked there, and walked back down a dark Summit Avenue toward the bright lights of William Mitchell, where my car was waiting. I drank in the building with my eyes and breathed heavily. I know that a lot of Mitchell students hide their school pride, but to quote Kristian, "We've had to eat bucket after bucket of [poop]." I'm very proud of my time in law school -- I've got a massive sense of accomplishment to bolster my already obnoxious ego.

Now there's just a bar exam. Here I come, biznatches!

I accidentally the whole computer

2009-05-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

So yeah, I somehow destroyed my computer at work and made it a repeated BSOD mess. That was fun. It was probably a failed hard drive -- either that or I downloaded 400,000 viruses. Either way is possible, I suppose, but it was an old machine.

So I basically went ahead and lost everything that I'd been working on, but what can ya do. My machine was reimaged and I'm back on the attack, cuz inside out is wiggity wiggity wiggity whack.

Everything is coming to a head in the life of Ben. Tonight, I get to go pick up my cap and gown, because I freakin' graduate this weekend! Holy heck! Before that, of couse, I have one more final to tackle. It just happens to be the only in-class final of this semester, and also the lamest. The prof grades harshly, and I haven't had enough time to study. I wanted to take this afternoon off, but unfortunatly it appears that I'm fresh out of vacation, so that blows.

So, after the cap / gown pickup tonight, I've got to hit the books hard again. Blech. After the final, it's time to party down. WAIT. Aww crap. I've recently been informed that I have a 7:00 a.m. meeting on Friday. Seriously, that kind of thing is just lame. Ahh well. I'm counting down the months.

Eh, I guess I don't have a lot to talk about, but it feels like I've got a crapload going on. It's all been mentioned before, though.

Ben is a Bad Blogger!!!

2009-05-07T11:37:00.001-07:00

Wow, it's been a long time since I've written anything -- quite possibly the longest lag between posts in the history of this Stupid Ostrich. There are a number of factors that have contributed to that. I'll try to touch on each in turn.

Work has been crazy. If you look at things like mortgage rates, you'll note that they're very very low. This has caused an avalanche of people who think that now is a great time to refinance. For the most part, they're absolutely correct. However, there are things that they'll have to keep in mind: It's gonna take a while. Seriously, if you apply now, you probably won't get a call back for at least two weeks. Refinances are the mortgage world's bottom-of-the-barrell, and the fact of the matter is that everything else (namely purchase) comes first. Crappy customer service on the part of mortgage lenders? Probably. But it's the best we can do in this situation.

Everyone in my department is working overtime, and most are working Saturdays as well. I haven't yet come in on a Saturday -- it's just not something that I can do. Why? Because of the second reason for not blogging: School.

WOW! I had my LAST CLASS of law school EVER. I'm currently in the midst of my last finals week. EVER! It's a very surreal feeling. Every time I get back to the building, I feel the last four years of my life. Although it often seems like I'm one of the very few, I'm actually quite proud of my school and the trial-by-fire that I went through to walk its hallowed halls over almost half a decade. Stop calculating that. Four years of law school plus a bunch of orientation and school visits before that equates to almost a half of a decade.

My last final is next Thursday, and that's it...until the following Monday when I start my bar review course. That's gonna be a bear. Due to the work mess I've had to rearrange my schedule considerably, because this so-called "night" class meets during the day on nine separate occasions, including the entire first week. Therefore, I get to...drum roll...come in at 7:00 AM every day, work for one hour, come back to work after class at 3:30, and work until 6:15. That counts as a half day of work. Believe me, it's tempting to just not come in. 'Course, in the incredibly unlikely event that they fired me, I'd have to disclose that on my bar application, and yeah. I don't wanna.

Still trying to sell the house. Anyone want a house? I love my house, but it's time to leave it and move on to bigger and better things.

I'll try to be a better blogger. I'm sure life will be full of zaniness over the course of the next few months, and my diligent (all four of you) readers will be chomping at the bit to read all about it.

Too old for rock and or roll

2009-04-21T11:59:00.000-07:00

Ugh. Wow. I'm sore today.

So last night, I went to the Triple Rock Social Club with my cohorts Ryan and Travis. We saw, among others, the band Valient Thorr. I probably blogged about them from the last time we saw them...we were introduced to them because they opened up for the Sword a while ago. I'll let you read all about it on Travis' Blog.

For some reason, I decided that it would be a good idea to spend some time in the mosh pit. As T-Rav mentioned, it was a very friendly and helpful pit. I still managed to get elbowed in the face twice, and I seriously thought I was going to have to come in to work and explain a shiner. Thankfully that wasn't the case -- my eyes are quite normal. Well, they're bloodshot, but other than that they're normal.

We had a ton of fun at the show. I have a couple of V.T. albums, but still can't recognize more than like one song. They were very energetic and fun to watch, though, and their music made me pump the ol' fist a time or two. You know, before being knocked to the ground and whatnot. I must say, I still don't know what he's talkin' abowwwwwwwwwwwt.

It was really good to get out to a show, as I haven't seen any live music in a long time. It was fun to hang out with the guys, too, because I don't spend enough time with my friends. I'm generally kind of a social butterfly, and being cooped up in a classroom has really hampered that. But hey, on this coming Monday I'll go to my

last
law
school
class
ever.

And that's something.

One week

2009-04-17T11:34:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention that I only have one full week of law school left, ever. Holy crap. That actually went really fast. It's amazing how quickly four years can go by, but it's even more amazing how fast time starts rolling along once you have kids.

Speaking of kids, I'm going to be an uncle again. My sister and brother-in-law just found out that it's a boy, as well. That's pretty cute. Even cuter is Gwen's cousin Charlotte, another 2-year-old, talking about the little brother in mommy's tummy. Hee hee.

My week was pretty eventful, I guess. I spent some time in Juvenile Court for a class, observing things like CHIPS hearings and petty traffic misdemeanors. The traffic judge cracked me up when he brought the hammer down on a stupid kid. It was hard not to start laughing in the courtroom. I'll refrain from posting any details on the web, but let's just say that this kid was stupid and leave it at that. Kids often are. Heh heh.

I started playing a little Starcraft again over the last couple of nights. That's a game that I personally have been playing for 9 years, and has been out for 11. I'm flabbergasted by its staying power, and that Blizzard has kept the online play available. Great game, though. I love it. It has an easy spot in my top 3 favorite games of all time.

That's about all I've got. I have a busy weekend ahead of me, but my brain is still wanting some release. I've got a bunch of songs rattling around my head that need to be written. There's something very Jabberwocky about them, and yet not. Several crazy riffs in 7/8 and lyrics about pinkeye are parts of them. If I'm able to find some time, I'll record some demos. Fear this, and expect some very interesting rock that may or may not be filed in the Captain Beefheart bin.

Tattoo!

2009-04-12T15:54:00.001-07:00

Yay!

So, as you can see from the pictures, I got my tattoo. It turned out fantastic, and well worth the wait. Thaddeus, the same dude at Electric Dragonland that did Kerry's tat, was a stand-up guy with an obviously large amount of talent. It was a fun experience.

Obviously the new one is bigger than it's little brother from 10 years ago. Hee hee. Still, there's a balance between the two, in the way that they're standing and whatnot. I've always been happy with my dragon, but let's be honest. The Jabberwocky kicks the crap out of it.

Rhyno came to the tattoo shop with me, and was there the whole time. He took pictures with his iPhone and sent 'em to Kerry, who was at home with the kid. We had a good time hanging out, talking to Thaddeus, and just shootin' the crap about music, video games, motocross, comic books, and all manner of stuff that I would talk about normally. It was a good time. And to those of you who are about to ask the inevitable question, "Did it hurt?", well it didn't feel good. Tattoos hurt. But it's sofa king worth it.

So, the rest of the weekend was also pretty eventful. We went to Megan and Kristian's house on Friday night for another blind beer taste test -- this time the subject was American Lagers. Surprisingly, Grain Belt Primo won with flying colors. The delicious blueberry hints pushed it over the edge. It destroyed other brews such as Budweiser, Miller Genuine Draft, and Stroh's.

Today is Easter, and my girls and I went to my grandparents' house. We saw a bunch of my family, and it was a lot of fun. Gwenner was basically running on empty by the time we left at 3:00, but she slept the whole way home so she managed to get a little nap. When we got home, I set up an egg hunt in the back yard, and she had a blast. She's just so fun to interact with these days.

Tomorrow it's back to the grind. Blech.

Week update

2009-04-01T12:01:00.001-07:00

Gads, it's been a hectic one. There's hardly been time to breathe around this joint. First off, work is in super uber turbo mode, because mortgage rates are ridiculously low these days. Anyway, that's work. Work is work. And it's worky.

Beyond that, school is school. And schooly. I had a presentation to give on monday, about dangerous children's products. It went well, and I'm glad it's over. Then, yesterday, I took the day off to do my second Land Use midterm. The awful thing took me 14 hours to complete.

See, I dispise take-home tests. A lot of people think they're better, more fun, easier...whatever. They're always more difficult. They're always more of a pain. The reason behind this is simple: When the whole class has the opportunity to take the thing home, the professor invariably makes it take a lot longer than a two-hour in-class exam. (See above 14-hour comment). Second, there are always uber lame gunners who will go completely overboard on a take-home exam, so the curve is hosed anyway. In the immortal words of my good friend Kristian, "D's get degrees". I'm sure he's never had a D in his whole life, but considering the apathy that's taken over our fourth-year-law-student brains, it seems like a good set of words to live by.

Speaking of Kristian, we (Kerry, Gwen and I, although Gwen was sleeping) went over to Kristian and Megan's house on Saturday night for the "Great American Light Beer Blind Taste Test". It was a lot of fun. We tasted and rated such wonderful beers as Mich Golden Light, Miller Lite, Coors Light, Bud Light, Stroh's Light, etc. There were 8 beers in all. I think that Kristian is secretly a salesman for Mich Golden Light. I like beer. I like them all. I'll just state once and for all, for the record, that Miller Lite is my Domestic Pilsner of choice, simply because it doesn't give me a headache or gas. A taste test revealed (unsurprisingly) that there were other beers that I liked the taste of better. It was a fun time, and something that we're going to repeat with some Domestic Heavies.

I started listening to the audio version of the first book of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, because he's doing the last book (well, now 3 books) of the Wheel of Time. I gotta say, this guy can write. The premise, in a nutshell, is that 1000 years ago there was a prophesied hero that would rise up and conquer the dark lord, but unlike a billion other epic fantasies, this prophesied hero lost. The bad guy took control, and now the land is a place where ash falls from the sky and flowers don't bloom. So far, it's a heist book, and the main characters aren't the typical fantasy cut-outs...they're a gang of theives. There's no epic quest, there's an epic job. However, the real selling point for me is how effing cool the magic system is in this book. That's all I'll say on that. You'll have to read it to find out. ;)

The Finished Product

2009-03-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick picture of Kerry's new tattoo! It's awesome. The owl is the new one, the tribal design was already there.

Tattoo Madness

2009-03-23T16:00:00.001-07:00

Well, after the consults and the waiting, the time has come for Kerry to get her tattoo. (I still have to wait about 3 weeks for my own.) She headed to Electric Dragonland this evening for her appointment at 5:30. I just got a text from her, saying that it was 6:00 and she hadn't started yet. Typical. Oh well, she's there and ready to rock.

Rhyno and Meghan are babysitting the Gwennerpants while Kerry gets her new artwork, because I'm stuck here in school. Oh well. I wish I could be hanging out with my wifey and taking some pictures or something, but what can ya do.

Speaking of Rhyno, it turns out that this weekend he ran off and got himself a tattoo as well. I gave him grief about "tattoo sniping", saying that he went in before Kerry and I and now people will think that we're just getting ours after being inspired by him. He countered with the fact that he's had this tattoo idea for 10 years, and that if he didn't go and get it now, people may be inclined to think that we were the ones that inspired him to get it.

Well, when you think about it, he chose now (after the clear and irrefutable inspiration of his peers) to actually get the work done, rather than some other time in the last ten years... Just kiddin' Rygar. There's clear evidence that you've been thinking about this one for a while. ;)

Well, I'm off to another ass-tastic class-tastic night. Until next we meet!

Captain's Log: Supplemental

2009-03-18T13:32:00.000-07:00

Here’s a fun moment from my day. I tried to fax one sheet of paper to a fax number. I entered said number onto the keypad, 9-1-800-xxx-xxxx, and hit start. Then I went to lunch.

When I returned from lunch, there was a ream of paper on my desk, and my coworker was laughing at me. It seems that I was on “copy” instead of “fax”, and inadvertently asked the computer to print approximately 918,000,000,000 copies of my one sheet of paper. Thankfully she got to the machine and hit cancel.

Been a while

2009-03-18T06:23:00.001-07:00

Wow, It's been quite a while since I've written anything. I have little in the way of excuses for that, other than that I've had a crapload of things going on. Let's see, where to begin.

Work has been busy as all get out. That's a good thing, of course -- busy means that my job is still necessary, and job security is a good thing in today's market. I guess there's not really anything interesting to say about that. Busy is busy, and work is work.

I spent a grueling week after vacation completing my bar exam application. That was a huge chore. I had to track down every little bad thing I've ever done in my life and disclose them. That time that I pushed Jimmy Nelson down after kindergarten? Yep, that's on there. OK no it's not. There's no such thing as Jimmy Nelson. Well, I'm sure there is somewhere, but I don't know him and never pushed him. Whatever.

I had to remember every single place I've been employed in the last 10 years, and account for all periods of unemployment. That was lame, because 10 years stretches back into my college days. I actually called the Morris radio station and Subway and had 'em look up employment dates for me.

I had to get some notarized documents written by people that were willing to actually say that I'm a good guy.

[Wow...I just stood up from my desk and obliterated a box elder bug...they're all over the place. They're currently down one.]

This week I had my "senior summation" at school. I ordered my cap and gown, checked to be sure that I'm ready to graduate, and made sure that all of the loose ends are tied up. It was the first moment that it really started to sink in that I'm really going to graduate. Holy carp. Yes, carp. Bottom feeding fish. Holy carp. That's some craziness right there.

Other than that, life's been really good. Last weekend was the triumphantly awesome debut of A Flock Of Kobolds' Fantastic St. Patty's Day Revue, and I don't have to tell you all how awesome that was -- most likely you were all there, if you're reading this.

Home again, home again

2009-03-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

Well, we made it back. The week in Grand Cayman was fantastic, but all good things must end, and therefore the vacation did as well. I've already touched on some highlights, but I'll go through it again, just to be concise. ;^)

We flew out way too early in the morning, but the flight went well and was fairly uneventful. Eventually we reached our destination, the one-runway airport in George Town, Grand Cayman. The process of going through customs was long, because there were three airplaines that had landed in close proximity. Still, the weather was amazing and our tired spirits were high.

After customs, we hopped in a taxi to our hotel. The driving is on the left side of the road, which threw us all for a loop. Guaranteed, if we were to have tried driving, we'd all be dead by now. As it stands, we're all just almost dead, due to automatically looking the wrong direction for oncoming traffic when crossing the street.

Our hotel was awesome. The rooms were beautiful, the service was excellent, and the beach was spectacular. I've been in a lot of very nice hotels in my life, and this ranks right up there. Not the best I've been in, but very very nice. (Lah de dah, right? Don't get me wrong there, this hotel was fantastic).

We spent most of our days at the beach drinking, but there were a couple of days that were too windy for beach-sitting, which made perfect days for exploring George Town and the aforementioned trek down the Mastic Trail.

On day two, we went to a bar down the beach for supper. (There aren't all-inclusive places in G.C., which makes for a lot of expense, but also lets you really get to know the town and check out a bunch of cool and different things). This is the bar mentione a bit ago in my post during the vacation. A funny exchange here involved Kristian, who was fairly soused on Bushmill's.

Kristian: Do you like Irish Whiskey?
Irish Guy: Faugh! No way!
Kristian: What?? Seriously?
Irish Guy: Well, do you like Budweiser?
Kristian: Well...no.
Irish Guy: There you go. *lifts high his bottle of Budweiser*

We took a cruise on a pirate ship, and it was amazing. I had too much to drink. This is not surprising, since it was open bar all night and georgeous. I channelled my inner pirate, and although it made the morning less than ideal, due to ample amounts of vitamin B-12 I was able to avoid too terrible a hangover.

The sun takes a lot out of you, and we ended up going to bed (falling asleep usually, not passing out) around 10:30 (9:30 Central). Too funny. Of course we'd wake up around 7:00 am every day (6:00 Central) so it all evens out.

The flight back also went smoothly, although we cut it a little close in Atlanta. We made the final boarding call, however. I was a little self-conscious about reading a Forgotten Realms genre novel on the plane, until I noticed that the row ahead of me went, in order, Guy reading a Star Wars book, Girl reading Twilight, Girl reading Fellowship of the Ring. I felt right at home, and hoisted Waterdeep with pride.

So now we're home. We missed our girl, and she missed us. It was super fun to see her squeal with delight when we walked through the door.

Now my agendas (other than school, of course) are a) finding somewhere to buy Caybrew and Tortuga Rum in the U.S., and b) gearing up for the Flock of Kobolds party on Saturday.

Here there be Pyrates

2009-03-04T12:52:00.001-08:00

I don't know why my entire post isn't working...grr...sometimes technology really chaps my freaking hide. Anyway... There's a post here that's been copied and pasted about a billion times, but blogger can't figure it out.

I'll re-type it later.

Below you can see pictures of our harrowing trek through the Mastic Trail yesterday.

Pirate Cruise time!!!

Here there be Pictures

2009-03-04T12:41:00.000-08:00

We're here!

2009-03-02T05:56:00.000-08:00

We've just begun our second day in Grand Cayman. So far our stay has been awesome. The hotel is beautiful, and the ocean and weather are even more beautiful.

Being away from Gwennerpants has been a struggle. I've woken up in the middle of the night both nights so far, thinking about my little girl and wondering if she's ok. We've been able to keep in contact with her thanks to the magic of Skype, though, so that's excellent.

Yesterday we hit it pretty hard, starting with some Belinis (Champagne and Peach Schnapps) and Caybrew (the local lager) on the beach at 11. (10 am central time...LOL) We did some tanning and walked down the beach, and went back to Megan and Kristian's room in the afternoon to play some cards and relax.

We walked down the beach during sunset last night, and ate dinner at a little bar right there on Seven Mile Beach. By that time, Kerry and Kristian were both getting quite surly. Megan and Kerry went over to talk to a table full of "locals" (one couple was from Austrailia, one from Ireland, one from New Zealand) and Kristian ended up at a completely different table, talking to the owners of the bar and their daughter. I was alone at my table, so I went and joined Kerry and Megan in whatever mad urge drove them to joining a table of strangers. We chatted with the people about how annoying Americans are, and pretty much scared the entire table away.

We walked back to our hotel and stopped at the beach bar, where I ordered rum punch for everyone. Then we watched the beautiful moon as it made a trail of silvery light across the ocean, and hung out by the surf for a while before retiring for the evening.

The ocean here is incredibly calm -- the waves are almost like a lake at some points, and there's a snorkeling area right out from our hotel. Kerry and I are going to do some snorklin' this afternoon. Should be fun.

WOOOOO!

2009-02-27T11:32:00.001-08:00

So I'm trudging through the last couple of hours before departing to Grand Cayman. OK, well, the flight isn't technically until tomorrow morning, but still...after the whistle blows here at work (so to speak) we're out like the gout.

There are items that need to be taken care of, of course. First off we have to make a journey to Benson this evening. We're dropping Gwen off with my parents, and putting her to bed. Hopefully that goes smoothly. After that, we're driving back. The flight leaves tomorrow morning at 6:30 (UGH), so I don't expect an overwhelming amount of sleep tonight. Still, all should be well. Yeah, we may be tired, but it will be well worth it.

I think (hope) that we'll have wireless intarwebbs down in G.C. If so, I'll try my darndest to get some pics up, as well as some words of wisdom about the trip.

Later!!!

Flogging Molly

2009-02-24T06:42:00.001-08:00

Ryan and I went and saw Flogging Molly last night, and it was uber-rad. We had a fantastic time. Let's recap.

I was skippin' school to go to the show, but this is a band that I really wanted to see live, and it was totally worth it. Ryan showed up at my house around 6:30, and we drank some beer and chatted while Gwennerpants showed off for Unky Ryan. It was adorable.

We left, and took the way-too-long drive to the middle of nowhere that is Myth. We drove through the parking lot to see if there might be one secret spot hiding somewhere. There wasn't, but the line going into the club was huge -- that was odd, since doors had opened like an hour before that.

We had to park in the Kohl's parking lot next door, of course, because there's never ever enough parking near a venue, no matter how far out in the middle of freaking nowhere it is. Then we had to sit in the blistering cold for a while while the line crept slowly toward the show. Thankfully it was cool enough in the club that I was comfortable wearing my coat for the whole show. The idiots that were standing in line wearing T-shirts are probably now suffering frostbite or something.

We saw one of the opening bands, the Aggrolites. Ryan gave 'em a 6 out of 10, and I agree with that statement. They were a kind of reggae / ska type band (no horns, thankfully) that kind of sounded like Smashmouth. It was meh.

Flogging Molly took the stage and rocked, even though they played a lot of their tunes at accidentally faster tempos. (That happens with live music, I forgive 'em). I was happy to see that they didn't just play stuff off of the new album, but threw in a bunch of oldies-but-goodies. I don't have a setlist or anything, but let's see how many songs I can remember. These are in no order:

Salty Dog
The Son Never Shines (On Closed Doors)
Selfish Man
Drunken Lullabies
What's Left Of The Flag
If I Ever Leave This World Alive
Kilburn High Road
Rebels of the Sacred Heart
Requiem for a Dying Song
Float
You Won't Make A Fool Out Of Me
Us Of Lesser Gods
The Story So Far
The Worst Day Since Yesterday
The Likes Of You Again
Grace Of God Go I
Devil's Dance Floor
Seven Deadly Sins
Tobacco Island

Like I said, that's not the order they played 'em, but that's pretty much everything. It was a freakin' good time.

Sweet Anticipation

2009-02-19T11:53:00.001-08:00

The countdown has begun. Not the countdown to the end of class (9 weeks, 1 day). The countdown to Spring Break. Oh yes. I can taste the salt-sea air. I'm about to hyperventilate.

As I've mentioned before, Kerry and I are going to Grand Cayman for a week. This vacation will commence in one week and two days. There will be sand. There will be surf. There will be freaking pirate ships. It doesn't get better that that. Woot.

So, in sweet anticipation of the forthcoming event, I've been doing all sorts of things like looking at pictures, things to do, etc. Kerry's been doing things like taking me to target for last minute items like sunscreen and insulated mugs (more on that later). We're going with two friends, Megan and Kristian. I know that Megan thinks very much like me in terms of vacationing (and she's probably looking at pictures and thinking of fun things to do). Kristian, however, is likely still fretting about the hotel, trying to scheme ways to ship himself a 24 pack of coke or booze or something, and generally getting neurotic. Oh well.

Let's talk about Grand Cayman a bit. Shizzle is expensive. Therefore, there are some money-saving ideas that we are incorporating, based on the advice of the world wide web. One of these, of couse, is to buy booze and use insulated mugs to drink said booze. For this feat, Kerry and I purchased a couple of monuments to the gluttanous american way: The Bubba Keg. We each got a 32 oz mug with a freakin' bottle opener in the handle. It makes me giddy.

The downside to this trip is that both Kerry and I will be away from our daughter for an entire week. This is really a long time -- the longest either of us has been away from the lil' tyke. It's interesting, because although I've been gone almost nightly ever since she was born, I've still never been away from her longer than overnight. Kerry's got that record beat, but only by a day or two. It's going to be tough, but a) we need the vacation, b) she'll be in very good hands with my 'rents, and having a blast, and c) who am I kidding, we'll talk to her over skype every day.

Nervous? Yes I am. Excited? Oh hellz yeah.

Annoyed

2009-02-16T15:47:00.000-08:00

It's monday. That's about the best way to describe it. There's a serious feeling of lack-of-motivation going around. That said, I had about the most productive monday that I could imagine.

It started off with not going to work. That always makes for a fantastic day. Unless, of course, you have a midterm to do. That was my case today, of course.

I have this ridiculous Land Use class, you see, and rather than one final, this dude has two midterms and just has a paper due at the end. This may sound like a nice way to go about things, but it has the potential of being 30 pages of writing in 10-point font, and there's just no way that that's cool.

In addition to that, the guy is just a horrible teacher. Nearly every sentence of my notes ends in a question mark. That doesn't make for a lot of useful material.

So, I downloaded the test last night at about 5:00 pm, and had 24 hours to complete it. I worked on it until 10:30 last night, and when I woke up this morning and started work on it again at 8:00, I uttered an expletive and deleted everything I'd written. See, I figured it was all wrong, based on reading it.

Later in the day, I decided that some of it was right. I managed to throw together what I figure is a fairly decent midterm, and thankfully I was done with it by about 1:30 in the afternoon. This is nowhere near the end of my productivity.

See, there was other homework that I had to do for tonight, and I totally got done with all of it. So that's pretty darn rad. I've also begun an outline for a paper that's due sometime in April. The outline isn't due until a week from today. Normally, I would start something like this the night before it's due, but I'm sitting here at school with absolutely nothing to do. It's been a series of extremely slow days on the jabberboard, and nobody is doing anything interesting on facebook either. Therefore, I've been super productive because of the specter of absolute boredom.

After doing the homework this afternoon, I actually completely most of my Bar Application. That's a big weight off of my shoulders, although the most difficult-to-attain bits of it are still not done.

So here I am. The problem is that I'm surrounded by first-year law students. Most of them have left, which is like blessed relief. There are incredibly and undeniably annoying. I pray that I was never such a dumbass as all of the people that were at tables all around me.

Seriously. It takes a lot to annoy me. I have a toddler. In fact, today there were two toddlers at my house, because Gwen's cousin was over, being babysat by Kerry. They were not quiet, by any means. Yet with all of their toddlerism, they did not even begin to approach the level of annoying that was achieved by a 1L study group.

Well, that's that. Now I've written a blog, too. I seriously can't think of a single other thing to do. Until tonight. Then it's time for a beer. Maybe a beer and some WoW.

--BW Out.

A random assortment of thought, focused strangely on television

2009-02-05T06:32:00.000-08:00

So today, Kerry and I are heading over to Electric Dragonland for a tattoo consult. Woohoo for getting some new ink done. The subject of my masterpiece will, as of yet, remain secret. I suppose that out of respect for my wifey I'll keep hers a secret as well. I will tell you, though, that it will not be a severed head coming out of a butt crack, in either case. (But how cool would that be? OK gentle readers, one of you has to go and get that done.) In preparation for this wonderful event, Kerry and I have been watching Miami Ink, which is a show that is full of awesome. (even if it's not really "reality", per se -- the people that get tattooed have all been preselected and whatnot, but it's still cool to watch).

Tonight's the last night of week four of my last semester. That means that there are 11 weeks left of school, ever. But really, who's counting, right? As per the previous post, there's a lot of crap that I have to do yet, but it's all coming together.

So yesterday I made the mistake of following a link to the Dr. Who page of wikipedia. I've seen a decent amount of old Dr. Who stuff, as well as a couple of episodes of the '05 season, but reading that made me really want to watch some more Dr. Who. So I am. Well, I watched the first episode of the 2005 season, thanks to my friend Brian who has provided me with lots of Dr. Who. I now have an awful lot of TV to watch. Oh well, that's been my predicament for quite a while.

Speaking of TV, people are apparently still watching Lost. I have yet to see beyond the first episode of season 3, and honestly don't even know what season they're on now. I have a lot of catching up to do there. I think that when I'm out of law school and the bar exam is done, I'm going to have to just sit and watch TV for a couple of years.

On to other things. I'm super excited, because my newest muse, A Flock of Kobolds, will be rocking it's first "gig" in the basement of Rygar's place near St. Patty's Day. That's gonna effing rule, provided we can get our shizzle together. Heh.

Stress

2009-02-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

Arrgh. It's been a week since I've blogged. Actually, it's because I've had little to nothing to talk about. Not much has changed since last Tuesday.

I'm under a bunch of stress lately, but that's nothing new at all. Work sucks, but that's nothing new, either. I just keep my head down and do what I have to do, and the rest will sort itself out in five months or so. :^O

Speaking of five months or so, I've got a bar exam application to fill out, and it's quite daunting. I need to have the names of every employer I've ever had for the last ten years. That doesn't sound like such a long time, but it is. I've had a few. Not nearly as many as some other people I know, but still enough to be an annoyance.

Furthermore, I need to supply a record of every time I've been caught on the wrong side o' the law: Yes folks, this means speeding tickets. The time frame on this one is ever. So yeah, I have speeding tickets out there that I can't even remember getting. I have no idea where to even begin looking for that information, and I'm kind of hoping that it will miraculously fall into my lap in a fate sort of situation.

I'm still (of course) trying to sell my dumb house. (It's not a dumb house in actuality. It's a very nice place, and I've loved it for like 6 years now. Still, I want to move. It's all part of my life plan, you see, which first and foremost involves graduating from law school and NOT working for the place I currently work.) To add insult to injury, there were spray paint marks in the yard of our vacant next door house. The guy that lived there died last year. OK so looking at that link I can see that it was actually the end of 2007. So a little over a year ago. Yeah, well it looks like that house has finally gone through probate and whatnot, been foreclosed upon, and will be going up for sale soon. For sale by some buttwad bank that only wants like three cold chickens and a nickle for it or something. I hate the world right now. I hate the market. Buy my house.

There's weird banging going on at work right now. It sounds almost as if someone is crawling around in the heating ducts. That would be kind of awesome, in a Die Hard way.

I've been watching the X-Files again lately, which rules. However, the only season that I own is season 4. It's very cool, but I now really want to start the entire season from the very beginning and watch it all again. Seriously, I love that show.

My weekend was awesome as well. I played some D&D, went skiing with some friend types, watched the Superbowl with some friend types, ate some cheese balls, drank some beer, drank some mead, drank some fine wine. All in all, it was a good and revitalizing weekend.

Nerding!

2009-01-27T11:26:00.000-08:00

I adore Half Price Books. I just discovered this store for the first time, and it's freaking awesome. I walked into the store, specifically looking for an item of nerdery (in other words, an item so powerful that it makes the bearer an instant nerd.) I perused the shelves of paperbacks, and there it was: The second book of the avatar series. Yep. A D&D genre novel.

I'm going on vacation later, and I've learned in the past that taking giant bomber 1000 page epic books isn't the best idea. Gripping, yes, but when I'm on vacation, soaking up the rays of Grand Cayman, I actually want to read something that's completely mindless. Therefore, I'm getting some cheezy 300 page paperbacks, and it's going to be freaking awesome.

I just started the third book of the Emberverse series (also known as the Dies the Fire series) by S. M. Stirling. These books are so freaking full of win. I know that the idea of all modern technology suddenly stopping and everyone having to revert to medieval processes is a little far fetched, but you have to admit that it's a belief at the very core of every D&D player. Admit it: You'd like to see what would happen if suddenly everyone had to use bows and swords and horses and the like. This book series properly displays the absolute chaos that would occur. I recommend it highly, and will lend the novels on a first-come, first serve basis.

I'm playing some D&D on Friday night. WOOHOO Here comes super-nerd, flying into the sunset! Hooray! I can't wait.

Last but not least, after successfully beating both Mega Man and Castlevania 2 last week, I downloaded Castlevania 3 (a game that I remember from my youth but have never completed). It's not nearly as good as Castlevania 2, because it reverts back to the style of Castlevania 1 (level, boss, level, boss, etc. instead of the free form of CV2.) I'm a sucker for things Castlevania, though, and I'm enjoying it. It's also the debut of Alucard in a video game, and he goes on to pwn in Symphony of the Night, another fantastic installment of the series.

Rant time!

2009-01-26T09:36:00.000-08:00

This weekend was a bit of a blur. I took half of the day off on Friday, and my girls and I headed out to Alexandria, MN. We stayed overnight there, because we had a discount at the AmericInn, and it was nicely close to our Saturday destination of Fergus Falls. (more on that in a second). Our stay was very nice, because our room was a Jacuzzi suite and Gwen slept very well. Kerry and I watched a couple of episodes of Miami Ink and hung out, and enjoyed too much wine. It was awesome.

The next day we went to Fergus for Kerry’s extended family belated Christmas. Gwen was the absolute star of the show, and everybody was just completely enamored with her. She’s such a cutie when she wants to be. Other times she’s not so cute.

Kerry and I have been watching True Blood, and I’m less than impressed. I have a bunch of mental hang-ups with the show, which stem from having read a couple of the books. This could get long.

My first problem is that people are so quick to trash Twilight and praise True Blood (or the Sookie Stackhouse books, take your pick). Here’s the thing, though: The movie version of Twilight was very faithful to the book, and it’s a good story. The film version of the Stackhouse novels is not nearly as true to the books, which you’d think would be fine since the books are just gorified (vampire version of glorified, © 2009 b33n3rcorp) trashy romance novels. The books are good reads, but nowhere near as engaging as Twilight. The problem with True Blood is that the changes that they make leave gaping holes and inconsistencies larger than the huge gap between Anna Paquin’s hideous teeth.

(spoilers follow)
First off, there’s the whole “V-Juice” crap. Yes, in the books vampires are drained and their blood is sold as a drug. But it’s not this huge Lucy in the Sky trip-out fest that’s going on in the series between Jason Stackhouse and the crazy girl from Weeds (a character who, in the books, is only mentioned over the course of like a paragraph because she’s found dead...whoops that might be a spoiler). Even in the series, Sookie has had vampire blood straight from a vampire two times thus far. It’s shown evidence of how it’s affecting her (when she sniffs out that half cracker under the couch way back in episode 2) but she’s never had the crazy hallucination thing happen. Why? Because it doesn’t. In the books Jason doesn’t even do any vampire blood.

Second, there’s the addition of Main Characters that aren’t even a part of the story. This isn’t nearly as big a deal, because these characters and their weird tangents actually add to what is otherwise a fairly dull series made interesting with occasional vampire sex. Tara, for example. She doesn’t enter the books until the last couple of chapters of book 2, and she’s a very minor character. None of that with the voodoo lady in the forest. Crazy girl from weeds, as mentioned before. Lafayette’s part is considerably bigger in the series as well. There’s no such thing as the character played by Milton from Office Space, either.

Oh well. I’m still entertained. I just wanted to rant a bit. And darnit, I’m not afraid to admit that I really enjoyed Twilight.

New stuff!

2009-01-20T11:23:00.000-08:00

Woohoo! New president! Win!

In other news, I downloaded Mega Man 1 and Simon's Quest (Castlevania 2) for the Wii, and have been playing them with much glee. As mentioned before, I love old video games. They make me feel...eleven. Also, they're just plain fun. This subject has been detailed before, but it's worth mention.

This semester is a definite problem for my motivation. (How's that for a subject change with no warning?) Last semester was also a severe problem for my motivation. However, somehow (according to my grades, anyway) I still managed to do well. I think that the professors of high-level classses generally don't like to fail students, but dang, I really thought that I would have done worse on my Creditor/Debtor class. Pleasant surprises are good.

Kerry and I have decided that we need new tattoos. We've discovered (after much recommendation) a place called Electric Dragonland. Kerry's going there today to check some stuff out and schedule either consultations or appointments. The place is by appointment only, no walk-ins, because they're insanely busy and have to operate by a schedule. I know what I'm gettin', but I'm not tellin'.

As a segue from that thought, we started watching the first season of Miami Ink last night, and it's freaking awesome. Tattoo parlors are interesting places. I don't usually get into reality TV shows, but this one is fun. Buncha punks.

Too Much Information

2009-01-15T11:59:00.000-08:00

So yesterday I was at work, taking a little break. I was taking said break in the can, as I am wont to do. Yep. I'd just settled down, when I heard the door open and in walked a mystery someone who sidled up to the urinal next to the stall.

The stall doors were some sort of weird measurement when they were in stalled in my office bathroom, and the result is that there's a 1/2 inch gap in the door through which one can see the sinks whilst sitting on the toilet. Through this window to the world, I saw my company's CEO as he strode from the urinal to the sink.

He then proceeded to grab one of the cans of spray air freshener from the counter top, after which he unleashed a huge stream of the aerosol into the air, over the stall wall, which in turn rained down upon me like a cold, fresh-scent-of-vanilla rain.

At that point he realized that there was someone in the stall, and that he had just doused that person (me) with air freshener. He got completely flustered, and said, "OH! OH NO!" Then he actually peeked in through the crack and saw that it was me in there. He realized right after that that it was the wrong thing to do, which increased his fluster by about a thousandfold.

"OH! Ben! OH! I'm so sorry!" he cried, his voice echoing through the men's' room. "I'm so embarrassed! Oh no! I didn't know anyone was in there!"

This continued, as I saw the CEO in the hallway about a half hour later. He continued to profess his embarrassment. The retelling of this story to my wife caused a near-tears experience, so I figured I'd go ahead and share it with the world. Dearest CEO, you have no need to be embarrassed. I'm pooping on your dime.

Wii, Weather, Wife, Weecordings.

2009-01-13T11:42:00.000-08:00

Wii fit is fun. I've gone from having a "wii fit age" of 32 to 34 to 28. Hurrah! I'm younger now! Woot! Of course, I've now started school again, so I don't have all the time in the world to worry about fitness, when I have a ton of other crap to worry about. Such is life, of course.

Class started last night, and I had perhaps the worst two drives of my law school careers. The drive there wasn't all that bad except for driving 5 mph the entire way to St. Paul. Miraculously, I was actually on time to class. Wonder of wonders.

The drive home was full of suck, though. I actually watched an idiot in a volvo come screaming down an entrance ramp onto 94, lose control, spin and fishtail for a while, then plow into the snow bank on the side of the road. Other cars stopped for him, and I could see that he was ok (if shaken) before I drove away. Perhaps he'll think twice about driving like a dillhole from now on.

The accidents and spinouts continued all morning, and roads were sucky. They're better now, though, so that's good. We won't be getting more snow until...aw crap! Tonight!

So my wife called me at work today, and left a message on my voice mail. It said, "Call me right away. It's an emergency." Of course, I panicked. Then I called her and listened to her sad tale. She had gone out to my car to start it and make sure it was ok for my drive tonight. Then she somehow locked her keys inside it, while it was running.

The problem with this scenario is that she had dropped me off this morning. Therefore, I didn't have a car at work with which to bring her a key. I actually borrowed my boss' car and drove home to play the role of the knight in shining armor. Or, at least, the knight in shining Civic. Either way, the crisis was averted. Sorry I laughed so hard at you, honey.

We had a Kobolds practice on Sunday night. (OK, the actual band name is "A Flock Of Kobolds", but that's a lot to type. Perhaps we should have a discussion on that tip, gentlemen? ;D) It was super cool. I must admit, we sound hella awesome together. We've got this Irish thing down. The Irish thing and some other strangeness. We've even worked one original tune, and I've written some more so there is more coolness on the horizon. I'm already chomping at the bit for more, and my fingers haven't stopped hurting from Sunday.

Exercisin'

2009-01-08T11:32:00.000-08:00

So I've been told time and again that in order to decrease stress, I need to exercise. The problem that I have with that is that I really don't like to exercise. It's generally not fun. Well, to combat that attitude, my wifey and I picked up Wii Fit yesterday.

Actually, we had been talking over lunch about exercising and whatnot, and I brought up the subject of Wii Fit. Then I said, "It doesn't much matter anyway, because no one has it." Well, Kerry proved me wrong by going to Target and finding that they had three copies in stock. So, woot.

I then proceeded to make a profile for myself and...played Magic and drank beer with Ryan. Baby steps here, people. In my defense, they were really big mugs of beer, and could have constituted exercise because of all of the heavy lifting. Right?

My road to weight loss is also unfortunately paved with cheeseburgers. Yesterday I found out that Wendy's had something called "The Baconator", and its 830-calorie siren song was irresistable. Again, baby steps.

One really funny thing about Wii Fit was that it initially told me that I was perfectly normal. I checked my weight and it told me I weighed something ridiculous like 137. I then realized that the thick shag rug upon which I had placed the balance board was lightening the load by about 30 pounds. So yeah, after some recalculation (read: putting the thing on the wood floor) I went from being normal zipping on up to the line right beneath overweight.

Tonight, I plan to...I dunno, actually play the thing or something. Baby steps, people.

The dreaded three point five

2009-01-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

Last night, I was scheduled to play some D&D 3.5 with a different group of friends. It almost feels like cheating on a significant other, in that I'm totally devoted to 2nd edition AD&D, and I'm currently in the midst of an adventure with my group. (The adventure is a 1 fight over the course of 3 hours, 8-player affair, though, and we honestly don't do a lot of playing in the semi-annual playing sessions). I wanted to try out the new(er) system, and I wanted to do something that I haven't done in a role playing game in far, far too long: I wanted to be a player.

I rolled up a character and everything. It's neat. I'm a rogue with aspirations of being an assassin, and I should be pretty cool.

Then Gwenner got some sort of a stomach bug. She puked a few times yesterday. Not cool. I opted to stay home with her. Because of this, the DM canceled the D&D session. Yep, that's right. Because of me, and my character's absence.

OK wow. So, let's see here...this is a very very type-A personality group that I'm getting into. They know that I'm in law school. The DM's wife is a lawyer, so they know how this is. I think that they're expecting a commitment that I am in no way ready to dive into. Therefore, perhaps it's in my best interests to just stick with my own group. We'll see. Maybe in an opening sequence of derring-do, I'll leap to my (character's) death or something. That would be interesting. Or maybe someone should get some 4th ed. books and I can play as a player with a different DM. If you're reading this, you should think about being that guy or girl. :D

Gwen is feeling much much better today. It wasn't the flu after all, just some sort of upset tummy bug. It breaks my heart whenever she's sick, though. Puking is so difficult for a lil' punkin to understand. She was a trooper, though, and today she makes little silly puking noises and talks about not feeling good. It's super cute. She woke up singing this morning, which is also adorable and has honestly brought tears to my eyes on a couple of occasions. I don't want to be an overbearing dad that forces her to go one direction or another with her life, but she's seriously very very musical for her age, and that makes me beam with pride and puff up like a peacock. She doesn't just toddler-sing, she actually carrys a tune. That's impressive to me. I know I'm biased as all get out.

SHE'S A GENIUS! AN ABSOLUTE GENIUS! I HAVE A WUNDERKIND! OK maybe I'm jumping to conclusions there, but I love her tons and I'm very proud of her. :)

Gorilla thunder!

2009-01-05T08:43:00.000-08:00

This was about the laziest weekend I could have imagined. First off, it didn't feel like it should have been a weekend at all. I had only worked Friday, after having been off on Wednesday and Thursday. A weekend wasn't really all that necessary after a one-day week. Still, it was welcome.

On Saturday, Kerry, Gwen and I spent the majority of the day wearing pajamas and doing a whole lot of nothing. It was fantastic. During Gwenner's afternoon nap I continued my quest through Super Mario 3, and I'm now at level 8. Almost done! Hee hee.

Yesterday, Kerry and I started getting a little stir crazy by the end of the day, so we packed up Nennerpants and headed to the Mall of America for dinner at the Rainforest Cafe. Um, yeah. That was interesting. Interesting if you like terrified toddlers.

You see, they put us in the gorilla room. This is a room surrounded by animatronic gorillas. Having never been to the RFC, I had no idea what to expect here. Our experience started off well, with Gwen very excited about fish and counting monkeys and things like that. Then, rather suddenly, there was a very loud thunderstorm in the middle of the room, and all of the gorillas came to life and started loudly proclaiming their gorilla-ness. It was cool, but from a two-year-old's perspective (based on her reaction) I have to assume that the result was sheer, abject terror.

After a couple more gorilla wake-ups, we decided that it would be best to just get our meals to-go. So we did. The whole way out, Gwen expected gorillas to jump out. She kept saying, "No more monkeys!" Poor girl. She got over it, though, and even asked to see the gorillas again later.

Mario Madness

2009-01-02T06:29:00.000-08:00

I love video games. I just adore them. And in particular, I adore old video games. That's why I really love my wii.

You see, when I fire up an old NES or SNES game, I'm instantly transformed into me at age 11. OR 14. Or even 22, depending on the game. But seriously, the nostalgic effect of video games is wonderful to me. On a lot of levels, old console games are simply more fun than the new games that I play, console or computer. They just are. I can't explain it, but sometimes when you take away all of the gaudy flash and realism and you make the game a simple mechanic of move + jump + fire, the result is much more fun and relaxing.

Then again, it can be incredibly frustrating. I won't deny that I had my fair share of controller tosses and the like at ages 11 - 22. It happens.

I'll get back to that. I had a wonderful and fun, albeit low-key, NYE. Kerry and I did the hotel thing again this year, and it was a very good time. After my awful hangover from last Sunday, I decided to take it easy on NYE. And easy I took it. I drank more mountain dew than beer, and I was still able to go to sleep at 12:30. I woke up blissfully clear-headed.

Gwen had a huge nap yesterday afternoon, because she had been up late with my parents. Kerry decided to match Gwen nap-for-nap, which left me with a wonderful three hours of doing whatever the heck I wanted. This is where I get back to video games.

I looked through a couple of the old school gems on my Wii, and decided on a little Ninja Gaiden. I got bored with that rather quickly, and saw Super Mario Bros 3 staring at me...taunting me. I decided to make it my mission to go through the entire game. Every single level.

See, with other mario games like Super Mario World or Mario 64, going through every level ain't no big thing. You can save your game and go back to it at any time. Historically, with Mario 3 (and 2 and 1), completing every level was much more of an undertaking. Especially 3.

There's a reason that 3 is even harder to accomplish in this fashion than 2 or 1: 1 and 2 are very linear. If you don't warp, then you go through the game in essentially a straight line from point A to point B. Mario 3 introduced the overworld them, wherein you can go either this way or that way, and you often don't have to do every level in a world in order to get to the airship at the end. (Super Mario World continued the overworld theme, with even more levels, but see my previous comment on the ability to save).

Yeah, well things are different now. Now, when I turn my wii off and go back to the game, I'm in the same place that I was before. Mua ha ha.

So anyway, I've gone through worlds 1 through 5 thus far, and I've beaten every level available to me. It's been wonderful, and will be for the remaining three levels.

Also, that may seem like cheating, because I can now essentially save. To that, I must answer that once upon a time, Corey and I took it upon ourselves to go through every single level of Super Mario Brothers 1, 2, and 3 in one day. Pretty much one sitting. We did this on a 15-inch TV in my grandparents' bedroom. That was hardcore.

10 Years!

2008-12-30T06:23:00.000-08:00

So here's another anniversary. No, I didn't forget. OK well maybe a little. But the point here is that although I might not have remembered this one yesterday, I remembered it today. So yeah.

Anyway, today is the 10 year anniversary of Kerry and my first date. Yeah, I know...it's a dating anniversary, not a wedding anniversary. But seriously, I've been completely devoted to this girl for 10 years, and that says a lot. It's because she absolutely rocks my world. Honey, I love you tons. Thanks for the decade, and for many more to come.

So the Muzak system at work is continuing it's mission of aural assault and battery. Today's selections range from the simply bizarre to the absolutely intolerable. Let's see if I can properly form a rant about it.

"When I Come Around" by Green Day was the first song that I heard this morning. That was just strange. I like Green Day, so it was actually pleasant compared to a lot of the crap that I usually hear, but it was still really strange to hear it in my office.

"Shiny Happy People" by R.E.M. came on shortly after that, and although R.E.M. is an ok band (albeit never one that I got into) this particular song is terrible. It is also a very poor descriptor of the people in my office this morning.

Last came the worst: "I Saw The Sign" by Ace of Base. (Or is it Ace of Bass? I don't know and don't care enough to google it. LOL. I think Base.) Swedish Schlock Pop is the musical Thing That Should Not Be, ranking just below Steve Miller (the Dark Lord of Crappy Music) yet light years above Neil Young (a mild annoyance in my musical world). Ace of Base is just crap, pure and simple. You should feel very bad for me (and perhaps send me five dollars) because of the suffering that I went through having been forced to hear it.

Well...time for work I guess. Have a wonderful New Year's Eve, gentle reader. I'll see you all again in 2009.

Anniversaries

2008-12-29T08:23:00.000-08:00

So, I'm kind of terrible at remembering Anniversaries. For instance, Yesterday was my parents' 35th wedding anniversary. I wished them a happy anniversary over the phone, after being told that yesterday was the day. Oops. Happy Anniversary, 'Rents.

Another one that I forgot was the one year anniversary of this blog. Hooray! It's funny, because I was looking back through the archives and I saw that last Christmas was filled with a lot of the same stuff as this one: Sketchy driving, longer than normal trips to Bemidji, etc. etc. Anyway, happy anniversary, OstrichBlog!

Here's a random rant, injected into the rest of this blog. This involves malls, because 'tis the season for commerce, and the mall is where it's at in that regard. Anyway, here's my gripe: Why in the ever-loving heck do stores like Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch (and no, I won't give their dumb sites traffic by making links) have to stink so much? Walking by them is like nose torture. It's seriously revolting. I can't imagine anyone in their right mind goes by there and says, "YUM! What a wonderful smell! I'm going in there to buy some clothes!" Yet that has to be the purpose, right? Is there some sort of pheromone in the foul stench that emanates from these establishments? Some sort of, "My dear lord! I smell a smell that indicates to me that if I buy clothes here, I will have wild and recklessly passionate lust-fests with each of the 18-yr-old clerks in the store!" I can't help but think that the answer to that query is a resounding "no". See, I just about want to puke every time I go by. I know my wife feels the same.

Well, that's all I've got for today, I think. It's a slow day in the office, and I'm thinking it will be a pretty darn slow week all around. This is a good thing. It's been nuts around here lately, and I'm ready for some good ol' fashioned slackin'.

Ugh

2008-12-28T12:28:00.001-08:00

Holy hangover, Batman. This sucks. Seriously.

So I was surprised to discover that my friends Travis and Katy, from Yuma, were in town for Christmas. They came over to my house last night. The rest is history. A blurred, drunken history of which I am not incredibly proud. I'm sure we had fun. This morning (and afternoon) no such luck.

I just managed to consume a slice of pizza, and I'm not entirely sure that it's going to stay where I want it to. After reaching my 30s, it seems that hangovers have changed from the morning inconvenience of my college days, and are now a beastly all-day affair. At this rate, I'll probably still feel like crud tomorrow. Ugh.

I guess I deserve it. It's a nice reminder to myself to take it easy on New Year's Eve

I got a bunch of fun stuff for Christmas this year. My darling wifey got me a Bose SoundDock, which is awesome. The slight problem with it is that the remote control doesn't work, and I have to contact Bose directly because it's a factory refurb. I'm lazy, though, and have just been controlling it un-remotely.

I also got a kit of some Irish Stout from my in-laws. I was going to brew it tonight, but I'm rethinking that idea. The smell of brewing beer will not be a fond one this evening, I'm afraid.

Well, looks like I'll go back to my day's activities of sitting and/or lying on this couch. I leave you with my work-in-progress ode to a hangover, Hands of Fate.

Headache

2008-12-19T12:36:00.000-08:00

So, I've had a headache for the last four days. It's completely due to stress. The problem is that it's still not gone. That's pretty typical for me, also.

See, last night I had my last final of this semester! WOOOHOO I'm on break! So that's pretty awesome. The problem is that even though my main stressor is out of the way, my reaction to stress (the aforementioned headache) has not yet caught up. So, unfortunately, I have a headache that hurts so badly it has brought me close to vomiting. Yikes.

So hopefully tonight's wonderful session of Dungeons and Dragons will help to alleviate this monster migraine. If not, then the flow of beer should help in that regard. Heh heh. Nothing in the world like medicating with alcohol.

Last night, I tried to record another flock of kobolds song. The problem was that it was too late for me to figure out that I needed to adjust my microphone levels. Everything was clipped, and I didn't feel like doing it over again, so it's back to the drawing board on that one.

The recording experience made me realize something, though. I'm absolutely obsessive about recording in one take on garageband. It doesn't matter to me if it's the first take or the two-hundredth, I just have a thing about having one giant line from the beginning of a track to the end. Seriously, if you're one of the lucky A.F.O.K. recipients of .zip files (which, based on my known readership you almost certainly are), you should look at the vocal lines. It's funny.

The problem with that is obvious and twofold: 1) If I make a mistake, I have to do the whole darn thing over again to fit my mad obsessive compulsion. 2) I inevitably make a mistake that I can live with but don't correct for the sake of one giant string of uninterrupted sound.

Oh well. That's the way I roll. As a result, I played the song "Factory Girls" by Flogging Molly all the way through a few times last night. All for nothing, because as mentioned before, I just deleted the whole thing and went to bed. HAH.

Oogh, I'm tired. I had a 7:00 A.M. meeting this morning. These things are the bane of my existence. If I were only allowed to change one thing about work, it would be this 7:00 a.m. crap. If I were allowed to change more than one thing, it would be that and all the other crap. Heh.

What up, player?

2008-12-17T06:34:00.000-08:00

I have ONE final left tomorrow, and studying for it is getting old. I've got such a complete and total lack of motivation for school right now that powering through my studying is becoming a real chore. I can only imagine how hard it's going to be in May, when the sun is shining and the birds are chirping and it's my last set of finals ever. (Besides the dreaded Bar Exam, of course.)

One good thing about next semester is that I've successfully registered for classes that are basically fluff. So that rules. I'm excited for some good old fashioned slackin'. Coming from a guy whose current semester allowed him sufficient time to write a novel in a month, saying that I have fluff classes next semester is saying a lot. Hopefully it's actually true. Heh.

On a totally different note, my friend Lukas was interviewed on NPR yesterday, regarding the mortgage industry. If you didn't get a chance to check out the interview, here it is. It's very interesting and informative, and it (*gasp!* I know that this next sentence will be shocking) actually makes me happy about my current job. I don't have to do any cross-selling, nor do I get any incentives for getting someone into a product that they don't need. Woot for credit unions. (I still don't bank here, though, because I don't poop where I eat. LOL.)

During my finals week, my limited spare time has been spent sneaking snippets of the Twilight series. I'm forced to admit that I really liked the first book. It's the teen girl in me, as previously discussed. The second is equally gripping, although for much different reasons. Most of it is kind of irritating me, honestly. Vampires rule, werewolves drool.

On the subject of the undead and lycanthropy, it's freakin' D&D time on Friday! WOOOOHOOOO! I'm super excited for that shizzle. I've got quite the crew coming over to throw down. I've since moved my keg of porter into the basement, so it's a nice temperature and easily accessable by players that want to get rowdy. (Taking that sentence out of context would be funny for the use of the word "player". Like "playah!" Yeeuh. Unfortunately IN context it denotes a player of the lovely game of Dungeons and Dragons. Aww yeeuh, thugg life.)

Weathery goodness

2008-12-15T06:14:00.000-08:00

As per usual, the weather wasn't nearly as bad here as people were hyping it up to be. There was supposed to be this terrible blizzard that hit yesterday. Still, that doesn't mean that the weather is nice at all. I had a very slow drive in to work this morning.

Yesterday we had another open house, to which no one showed up because of the weather. There was freezing rain going on, and the no-show was kind of expected by yours truly. Oh well. We'll see how things go on that tip after the holidays.

Last night the snow was falling pretty fiercely, and I entertained a hope that work would be cancelled this morning. No such luck. Oh well, I didn't really expect it to happen. This morning's drive (as mentioned earlier) sucked, though. Snow plows hadn't hit Highway 100 when I left, and therefore traffic crawled. Luckily, I had left very early and thus ended up at work early.

I've probably mentioned it already somewhere in the world of the Ostrich, but when it snows around here, people that have been living here their whole lives suddenly become complete toolsheds. This affects people in various ways. First, there's the overcautious type. ONE snowflake on the road and Mr. Overcautious decides that going above 10 miles per hour is a very bad idea. Ugh. Then, when the weather actually gets to the point where driving is dangerous (case in point, this morning) you have Mr. Moron, who weaves in and out of stop-and-go traffic going 70 mph over the ice, thinking that his F-150 makes him invincible. Ugh. Sometimes people deserve to get in a car accident, and sadly it never happens to the people that deserve it.

I watched the movie Wanted last night, and it was exactly the type of movie that I wanted to see. Lots of action, very little of which was actually plausible, veiled beneath a rather weak plot about an age-old guild of assassins. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I also watched the first half of Pineapple Express with my wife. It was ok, but we turned it off because she got tired. There were some hilarious parts, but the "oh, he's high on weed" joke lost its luster rather quickly. Stoner movies just get kind of boring. So do stoners.

I have one final left to take this semester. It's coming my way on Thursday, in Workers' Compensation. I don't expect it to be so bad -- many of the themes of the class tie in with a bunch of other stuff I've taken, and a lot of it just makes sense. The rest is fairly simple math of the third-grade variety. That's about my speed. Shouldn't be bad.

壞理髮

2008-12-11T06:33:00.001-08:00

I have a terrible time with haircuts. It's just a fact. I've gone to a number of places in the area, ranging from the uber-cheap to the fairly expensive, and although I've sometimes ended up with satisfactory haircuts, I've never had an experience that has made me say, "why heck, that was awesome". Nope. That doesn't happen.

First, my curse: I never, ever have someone cutting my hair that can speak English very well. (Except the one time that I got my hair cut in Bemidji.) Now, I have absolutely no problem with non-english speakers coming to America and making their way. However, there are some career paths that require a degree of communication, and in my opinion the cutting of hair is one of them. It's not a very good situation for a language barrier. I have no idea why, but I have terrible luck with this conversation. Sometimes the results are kind of fun, like the Japanese lady at J.C. Penny that cut my hair with a straight razor. That was awesome. (Pretty good haircut, too, actually.) Usually, it turns out fine. Other times, that's just not so.

My hair is not difficult. There isn't any rocket science involved in the cutting of my coif. Use a #2 on the sides and back, finger length on top. No problem, right! These are instructions that usually can break through even the thickest, toughest language barrier. However, now that you know the back story of my communication curse, it should impress you even more to know that the haircut that I got on Saturday was the single worst time that I've ever had trying to talk with a stylist. [This was at a place in Robbinsdale. I was going to name names and have Google fight my battle for me, but it's unnecessary. Really, the only satisfaction I'm going to get from the situation is to not go there anymore]

Oh. My. Sweet. Thunderin'. Dang. This lady was impossible to understand, and she did things to my hair that are probably considered torture in a number of nations. I ended up with this ridiculous 'do that, if not combed precisely from my left to right, kind of slopes downward from the right to the left. If I were the type to throw some gel in it and spike it up, I could roll marbles off of it. It's freakishly ridiculous. I mean, I've had worse -- the famed Jabberwocky "bad haircut" picture comes to mind -- but this is bad. To my great misfortune, my hair is also short, which means that in order to have someone fix it, it has to grow out.

Oh, for the love! Unfortunately for me, with today's belt-tightening mentality I simply can't justify driving all the way out to who-knows-where to get a haircut, nor can I justify spending the kind of ching on a place where you sit down and a man with a large mustache lovingly sculpts each individual hair on your face and head. Even if I were to go to some highly recommended place, I have to stress that my language curse transcends venue and value. Seriously. It does not matter how much I spend on the haircut or where it is, I will not speak the same language as the stylist.

Ahh Music

2008-12-09T06:19:00.000-08:00

My friend and yours, the Jabberboard, has been ridiculously inspiring lately. It's been filled with videos of myself and others, engaged in the art of playing music. It's been really fun to watch all of the videos and see the performances throughout the years. It's really made me want to play some freaking music! I'm going to categorize this post by my dreams, hopes and aspirations, as broken down by individual bands of which I am currently a part. Bear in mind that there's this whole law school / children thing that makes playing in bands supremely difficult to do on a regular basis, not only for myself but for my friends as well. Anyway, here are my desires:

Jabberwocky -- Let's play another show. I say it all the time, but we could really do this if we discovered the motivation to make time to get together. We always say "summertime", but you know, it turns out that this coming summer is really bad for me. I've got a bar exam to do, and after the recovery from that, it seems I have to move. Stop that, Jabberwocky. Stop being sad. You sad little monkey. NO. Listen. I have a car, a driver's license, and motivation to come and jam. This is proven by my successfully playing in the band Alterego through my entire college career whilst practices were held in the cities and I was in Morris, MN. I'm digressing. The Jabberwocky thing starts with getting together, sitting down in a basement, and playing music. That's really the beginning. Show or not.

Ghola -- You're not dead. You're only sleeping softly in your Axlotl tank, awaiting your rebirth. The Craw Wurm will rise again, as soon as anger sufficiently fills the heart. Until Then...

A Flock of Kobolds -- I'll be honest, my dear Irish Pirate Music, you are my muse of late. It's the wonder of a new medium (for me, not the world) that's got me craving more and more of this music. Guys, let's get together. In the meantime, I'm still going to crank out songs and record my part on my end. Who knows, we could get a really fun Flock album out of the deal, even if the quality of the thing isn't perfect. I love the Kobold music.

Piehole -- Yes, there is a time for punk. That time involves wearing silly headgear and recording a cover that I've already mentioned. We should really do that. Really. For the kids. For posterity.

Gods' Dice -- Dudes, I have a lot of fun on the extremely rare occasions that we get together and bash out 90s covers. Grunge lives on in my heart, and there oughtta be a time that we can find ourselves in the LundoCave with a couple o' cases of beer. We all know that it's not outside the realm of possibility, and it's a super fun outlet.

OK bands, I've talked to all of you separately. Now I'll talk to you together. I love music. Music music music. It's a fun time for one and all. I want to get together for each and every one of the above mentioned things, but probably not all on the same day -- my voice would get really tired. I'd need a break in between, so the festival would have to add a couple other bands to the festival bill. ;)

I welcome your comments. :^D

One down...

2008-12-05T06:42:00.000-08:00

Well, I finished my long paper. This is the thing that I was ranting about back in October. The final draft was a lot less work. I could have put more effort into revisions, I suppose, but I figure that I had a solid paper in the first draft and that with some minor changes all is well. One class down, three to go.

Finals are suddenly upon me. I have my first on Tuesday night. It's a take-home, which I've opted to go to school to do. I'm weird like that. I'll find a nice, quiet nook and type away, rather than try to accomplish the daunting task of doing a final with a bawling child in the background. (Or a cute wife -- honey, you're distracting. ;^D)

Before that, though, it looks as if I actually get a weekend. Woot! I don't have my Saturday morning class tomorrow (or EVER AGAIN, except for the final on the 13th) so I get to have a Friday night that's blessedly free of homework. With my exciting social life, that begs the question, "which movie will I watch?" Again, woot.

The last final is on the 18th. That sucks, because it's the last possible day for a final to fall on. It almost feels like I'm being cheated out of winter break because of my lame finals schedule, but everything will be fine. It will go quickly.

After that, I slide into the very last semester of my law school career. That's a whole lot of crazy right there.

The world is a vampire

2008-12-03T11:35:00.000-08:00

OK, I'll admit it. I started reading Twilight. There are a number of reasons behind this move. First, I like to keep abreast of the pulse of the nation's young readers. Harry Potter is still a hero of mine. Next, I've been told by several people, all of whom I greatly respect, that it's a very good book. Also, there's a movie now, and I really would rather read the book before seeing it. (Not to mention the fact that the time spent reading the book will allow the gushing teenage girls to clear the heck out of the freaking movie theather and allow me to enjoy the film sans cell phones and giggling.) Last and certainly not least, I love vampires. I think they make for dang cool characters.

The story behind my reading it is actually kind of funny as well. I went to Target and saw it on the shelf, and meekly asked my wife if I could purchase the book. She agreed, reluctantly. I was in the middle of a different book (World Without End by Ken Follett) and writing my own novel, so Kerry figured that I wouldn't get to Twilight for a while. (A week, as it turns out. Anywho...) So, Kerry picked it up. She was on to the second book in the series by the next day, and is now reading the third. I respect her opinion more than anyone else's, so yeah. I started reading it. (Funny, I had made up my mind to read it before she picked it up, and I purchased it for myself. Whatever. Hee hee.)

I'm only a couple hundred pages in at the moment, and I must say that it's a very good story so far. This goes back to me liking vampires. I'm forced to admit that I'm also a sucker for high school melodrama, so here I am, enjoying a book that's really intended for girls that are half my age. I shouldn't even put that sentence on the Internet, sheesh, people might get the wrong idea.

Back to World Without End, the other book that I just finished. This is the sequel to Pillars of the Earth, and it's more of the same. Pillars of the Earth is a thousand page bomber about building a cathedral in medieval England. They way that Follett writes these is kind of roller-coaster style, with each chapter ending with a new catastrophe. After 50 catastrophes it honestly starts getting more than a little old. I don't know why I read the sequel, but I did.

Still, there's something about the way that he writes that makes even a 1000-page brick read rather quickly. It's good writing. It just makes you feel so bad for these people and all of their stupidity and catastrophes.

The second book can stand alone, as it takes place a few hundred years later. It's the same town, and this time we have the added bonus catastrophe of the freakin' plague. Good times.

I did it!

2008-12-01T11:32:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentlemen, against all odds I am indeed a winner. I have tackled the beast of writing a novel during law school while employed full-time and raising a toddler. I wrote this novel completely within the month of November, 2008.

What do I get for this achievement? Bragging rights. That's about it. Let's get one thing clear: No one ever said that the novel had to be good. Therefore, it's not. It's a window into the life of a depressed and lonely attorney as he goes on vacation in the Dominican Republic. There are thrills. There are chills. There are spills. There is gratuitous sex. There are zombies.

A ha! Now you're intrigued. Fear not, gentle blog follower. I shall post my manuscript on the world wide web very soon. I harbor no illusions of publication -- I wrote this one just to be able to say that I finished one. It's not even as long as The Bard was, but it differs wildly from The Bard, mostly in that it actually has an ENDING. Also in that it's a totally and completely different kind of story in a different genre yadda yadda yadda.

Well anyway, that's done. The book is over. I walked into work this morning to convert the whole thing into a .pdf and put it up for the world to read, but apparently my I.S. department is having server issues that cause all recent docs to be "access denied". Wonderful. I totally freaked out when I came in, because I (of course, paranoid me) assumed that it was just me, and that the technical gestapo was after me. That turned out, to my vast relief, not to be the case.

Gentle reader, now that I'm done with the novel, I assure you that the blogging will once again resume in earnest. So will the WoW. Hee hee.

In other news, Turkey day was very good. My family and I went up to my grandparents' house on Thanksgiving for a nice dinner with my family. Gwen was a little spaz, and she was very very cute. She played a lot with her cousin Charlotte. Those two are so freaking adorable when they're together that it's very hard to put into words.

On Saturday morning, I had class. After that we piled into the car and headed up north to Bemidji to visit my in-laws for Thanksgiving Two: Electric Boogaloo. When we got to Motley, MN, both of my girls were sleeping and it was snowing in earnest. The road (Hwy. 10, I believe) was clear-ish in one lane, and the other lane was covered in snow. I was going 55 even though the speed limit was 65, just for safety's sake (precious cargo, you see). People were whizzing by me in the snow-packed lane at 80 mph.

Outside of Motley, I hit a patch of black ice and started to fishtail. Kerry woke up (crappy way to wake up, I tell ya) and yelled, "What's going on??" as we proceeded to spin a 360 in the middle of the highway. There were no other cars on the road at that point (thank God). We came precariously close to going in the ditch, but thankfully we stayed on the road, ended up facing the same position as before, and didn't flip over. It was a shockingly scary experience.

Gwen slept through it. I would like to thank the Britax corporation for making one fan-freaking-tastic car seat.

The car was fine. We were shaken up, but it wasn't anything that a little Frappuccino couldn't take care of. (Well, Frappuccino and about 70 beers later that evening). The rest of the journey was totally uneventful.

Once we got to Bemidji, we just kicked back, relaxed, chatted and played games with the family, and had another awesome turkey dinner. All was well. We came home last night.

WOOHOO FOR LEFTOVERS WEEK!

Sick

2008-11-26T13:54:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow! I wish you all copious amounts of delicious turkey, potatoes, stuffing, yams, aardvaark, crowned rack of lamb, possum pie, pork roll egg and cheese kaiser buns, cranberry sauce, and roasted alligator. That is, if your Thanksgiving is like mine.

I'm still a bad blogger, and it's still for the same reason: My writing time this month is being sucked up by a silly idea of a spare time novel. So anyway, yeah. Here we are. What's going on this week, you ask? Well, I'll tell ya.

Actually, Ryan J. Nelson, my hero and compatriot, summed it up nicely with a rather famous post of his from the days of old. That's pretty much what I've been up to. I've been sick since Friday night. I pretended that I was better on Saturday night when we had some people over for a movie night, but in reality...yikes. It hasn't been pretty.

I'm done with that now, though, and the future is looknig bright! The family and I are heading up to my grandparents' house for turkey day, and it's going to be fantastic.

School is winding down once again, with my last day of classes next tuesday, followed by fun-filled finals week. SUCK. Oh well. This is the second-to-the-last finals week ever.

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Gobble Gobble!

30 K???

2008-11-19T17:54:00.000-08:00

So I started NaNoWriMo as kind of a larf, not thinking that I would actually be able to do it. To my complete and utter shock, I'm basically on pace. I just cracked 30,000 words today (with a goal of 50,000 during the month of November). I don't mean to toot my own horn here, because seriously (as I'm sure I've mentioned) the book is kind of crappy. But there it is. I'm 3/5 done. OK maybe I do mean to toot my own horn a bit. It's not the best story, but it cracks me up as I write it. Also, I'm writing a novel, going to law school, working a full-time job, raising a child, and...um...playing World of Warcraft. (OK you shouldn't count that last one as a feat). Ladies and gentlemen, I do this all without cocaine! Now, admit it: I'm awesome.

The whole book thing is probably the reason for the complete and total lack of blogs this month. You know, I can only write so much. I look at a blog and say to myself, "Jeez, that's 200 words that could have been in the book!" I'm a huge dork like that. Heh.

Other than that, there's not a whole lot going on. The first open house went well -- we had 5 parties come through while we were out. I spent the time over at Rhyno's place with my lil' girl (who flat out refused to even think about napping, but sat quietly with me for maybe 30 seconds and talked about the Vikings) and two cats (who cowered in fear and anger under the guest room bed.) Hopefully one of those 5 parties went away with a really good impression of the house and will buy it. We'll see. In these days of housing market doom and gloom, I'm still optimistic.

I'm starting to get into my usual panic about school. Finals are approaching rapidly, and as usual (and even more so during fall semester, it seems) I feel like I haven't learned a stinkin' thing over the course of the last few months. I know it will all come together like it always does, but I'm looking at a light at the end of this long, dark and dismal tunnel, and all I can think about is fearful panicked thoughts about failing all of my classes. Realistic or not, fear is still fear.

Hmm...seeing as how I'm currently sitting in class, perhaps I should pay attention. That brings up a different point, though. I'm in a class that meets once a week. For the last four or maybe five weeks, there has been a guest professor. How is that even remotely cool? Our professor is doing nothing. It's a bunch of dag-gummed malarchy if you ask me! With several other made up old-timey sounding curses! A pox on the man, by jove!

/Ben out.

In a nutshell

2008-11-14T08:44:00.000-08:00

I've been a bad blogger lately, obviously. My posts have dwindled severely of late. I think that 10 days might very well be the longest that I've ever gone between posts. Hopefully this will be a nice, long blog full of stuff to make up for the lack. ;D

Let's see here, what's been going on. The last time I posted was on election day, and I'm happy to say that things went the way I wanted them to. Enough about that, we don't need to get all political. Hopefully things will turn out good.

Kerry and I put our house on the market last week. There's a big 'ol for sale sign out front and everything. If you know my address, you can find the listing online. Due to the state of the market, we obviously have to ask for less than we would like for the place, but that's the way things go. At least we're not asking for less than we owe, which would really suck and is still within the realm of possibility.

Things aren't all bad, no matter what housing doom and gloom you hear these days. Home sales went up 24% in September. That's a LOT. Some people think that our country's downturned economy will last forever, or for years, but that's simply not the case. Things will get better! Now...everybody do your part and go out there and buy a house. Start with mine. Thanks.

School has been plodding along. I'm into the last three weeks of the second-to-the-last semester of my law school career. I registered for classes for the last time EVER yesterday, and I'm happy that all of the stress of that crappiness are behind me. I'm pretty much taking all fluff classes tought by professors that give really high average grades. It shouldn't be too much of a hassle, I'm hoping.

I kegged up my porter, and now I have a keg full of beer in my house! It's warm, but it's very good. Not my best batch, but it's a very good and delightfully strong porter. I shudder to think of how beer on tap will change my life. I'm becoming something like a chocoholic, except with alcohol. Just kidding. I've had the keg filled for almost a week and have had two glasses of the stuff thus far. No need to plan an intervention.

The latest WoW expansion came out yesterday, and it's awesome. I've only played for about 45 minutes, though, because (of course) everybody with a WoW account is playing WoW now, due to the expansion's release, and there are queues of over 1000 people waiting to get on some servers (including mine). That means it takes about an hour to log on. I'm not too worried about it, though, because that's just time to work on my novel.

That brings me to the next point. I'm still hard at work doing National Novel Writing Month. (Sometimes it amazes even me how much crap I take on to do at a time). I'm basically halfway to the 50,000 word mark, which means I'm right on track. My novel gets increasingly sillier with each word I type, but as I mentioned before, it doesn't have to be good. I can write really quickly when I don't have to cite anything. No need for stimulants, just good time management.

Yep. That's the last week in a nutshell.

Go vote!

2008-11-04T04:51:00.000-08:00

Vote vote vote! Go vote! Vote right now! Leave work if you have to (that's allowed!) and go vote!

It's important!

Now, on to other things.

My lil' girl does not abide by the rules of Daylight Saving Time. Therefore, I've been up at 6:00 am at the very latest. It's been...tiring, because I have trouble convincing myself to go to bed early. I've managed to go to bed around 11:00 the past couple of nights, though, so it's been OK. I just always kind of feel like I'm not making good use of my time when I'm asleep.

I've been participating in National Novel Writing Month, which is admittedly ridiculous, but I'm actually on track so far. It's only been 3 days, though. Still, I'm writing the silliest novel that I've ever attempted. It's about a guy that goes to the tropics (the Dominican Republic, specifically) and...well, he gets captured by Voodoo guys. I don't know what's going to happen from there, though. I think he'll get some sort of secret powers. Either way, it's going to read part like a trashy romance novel and part like that episode of the Brady Bunch where the kid gets the hawaiian necklace that makes him fall off of his surf board. So it'll be pretty bad, if I finish it, but that's just fine. Nothing says it has to be good.

Other than that, just school and work and kid occupy the time. It gets dark early and I get sleepy and we keep on keepin' on.

So go vote! And while you're voting, enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that George W. Bush will soon be gone forever, and we can get this country back in shape again!

Wowzers, I'm tired.

2008-10-29T06:17:00.001-07:00

I am bone tired, but I finally got the paper done yesterday. I had stayed up until 1:00 on monday night writing the dang thing, and then I woke up at 5:45 the next morning to continue working. I was done as done is gonna get at about noon yesterday, and turned it in last night. I wish I would have gotten more sleep last night -- I went to bed decently early, but my daughter decided that she wanted to wake up at 5:30 this morning. Sweet. So yeah...I'm a tad weary this morning.

On the upside, if any of you want to know anything about the legality of gestational surrogacy contracts, just talk to me. I'll pretend to know what I'm talking about. Stupid paper.

Last night I watched the sneak peeks of "Legend of the Seeker" that were available on iTunes. I was disappointed, but I'll still watch it. When I've invested so much time into reading a book series, I don't like to see a screen representation completely change the story. I understand taking some liberties and whatnot, but from the relatively small amount that I've seen, it looks like they're really gonna change this one. (Umm, no magic of Orden mentioned at all? Kahlan has the Book of Counted Shadows? Richard doesn't know Zedd all that well? What?)

Sorry, I burst into a bit of nerdery there. Like I said, I'll still watch it. Part of my problem with the sneak peek things was that one of them was hosted by Lucy Lawless, and I couldn't help but laugh my arse off every time she came on the screen. Poor thing, she's got nothing better to do. Oh well. Visually, the show was pretty cool. ***slight spoiler*** However, they changed Darken Rahl's hair color to brown, (which makes him look just like Richard...ooh teh foreshadoweeng!) ***/slight spoiler***

The thing that really bugged me was when Terry Goodkind himself came on the screen and said that this story "has become a tale for every generation". What? Don't fluff yourself so much, dude -- the last three books rrrrrrrrrrrrrrreally sucked. And you're ugly. OK that was low.

After billions of recommendations from friends, I finally picked up American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It's excellent so far. Very cool concept.

@#$% Paper

2008-10-27T06:19:00.000-07:00

Holy gads, what a weekend. Gwennerpants (as mentioned previously) turned a mighty two years old on Friday. To celebrate, we threw her a huge party on Saturday at Westwood Hills Nature Center in St. Louis Park. It was a madhouse, but a really really good time.

A ton of family and friends showed up for pizza and pop and cake (and ice cream, which we forgot to serve. D'oh! Anyone want ice cream? Come on over. I'll give ya ice cream.). Gwen had a really good time.

My in-laws stayed with us on Friday and helped with some final projects to get the house in order. Props to my father-in-law, who did an awesome job patching our front steps. My parents came over yesterday afternoon and added the finishing transition pieces between the kitchen (recently tiled) and the living room. I gotta say, everything's coming together and it's all looking great. Our new stove is supposed to be installed today -- I've got my fingers crossed, that's been a bit of a debacle. We should be golden after today, unless they somehow connect the gas to the water and the water to the gas...

My Long Paper is due tomorrow. I've been working on it since Wednesday, and I've put hours and hours into the dang thing. I'm now about 1/3 done writing. Honestly, the research part of it is the part that has taken the largest amount of time, and I inevitably find myself doing more research while I write any of these lame things. The problem that I always have with legal writing is citation. I have thoughts that pop into my head while I write, you see, but all of these thoughts have likely come up before. Therefore, I have to find a "source" to cite, in order to write them. Hard to explain, but it makes the process frustratingly slow. I could write 25 pages of BS in a half hour, but for some reason they want me to be able to back this stuff up with fact. Pshaw. Who knew?

So yeah...carry the one...I've put in about 20 hours on this thing (that's a rough estimate) and am going to head home at noon today to finish the thing. Hopefully I'll get it done at a reasonable hour. Barf.

Wacky Wednesday

2008-10-22T06:44:00.001-07:00

I have a bad case of senioritis. Well, I'm not a senior, per se -- I'm a fourth year law student. It pretty much amounts to the same thing, though. I've been doing this for far too long, and I have very little motivation left.

It's not like I'm going to completely neglect class or anything, it's that I have a very large aversion to studying. Getting myself motivated is becoming increasingly difficult. I can only imagine that next semester is going to be even worse, but next semester I plan on taking ridiculously easy classes. Heh.

Last night, Kerry and I booked a vacation to Grand Cayman Island for the first week of March (my spring break). I'm freaking stoked. A nice week in the sun will be just what my aching mind needs. (Oh, and all of the pirate stuff around there, too. Woot. I love pirates.) We planned this vacation with Megan and Kristian, a couple of friends of ours, because Kristian is also a 4L and will be celebrating his final spring break as well. There will be reckless drunken abandon. This is sure.

Gwennerpants will be staying with her Grandparents that week. They'll have a good time.

Speaking of my lil' girl, she turns TWO YEARS OLD on Friday! I can't believe that she's such a big girl. She acts like it, too. She's been talking up a storm lately, and it's fun to sit down and have actual, real conversations with her. She's excited for her birthday party, which will take place on Saturday.

I used a gift card that I got for my birthday at Target the other day, and purchased some Wii points. With the Wii points, I downloaded the first episode of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, which is absolutely hilarious and much more fun than I honestly expected. It plays like Space Quest, Maniac Mansion, and other games of that type, and it's a lot of fun. So far there's been quite a bit of play time, considering that it's only part one of an episodic game series. Good times.

I also downloaded the Secret of Mana, a classic SNES RPG that I hadn't played back in the heyday. It's a lot of fun -- thus far it's fairly typical of Squaresoft games, but is a Zelda-style hack and slash game as opposed to a true RPG. Either way, it's loads of fun thus far. I love video games.

The war on bugs

2008-10-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

My work is hilarious. Every single year we get infested with one bug or another. Once upon a time it was Asian beetles. (Y'all remember those suckas?) They were seriously everywhere in here. It would crunch when I walked down the hall.

Over the past few years, box elder bugs have been the typical pests. They're disgusting, because they don't really do anything, they're just everywhere. I'll sit down and start my computer, and one of the lil' red bastards will climb over the ridge of my keyboard and look at me.

I have declared war on the bugs. I will kill every one I see, by shoe. I will mash the bugger into the floor. This is particularly funny, because just last week the carpets were cleaned, and now there are a bunch of bug splatter marks over everything. (Personally, I've caused the most bug destruction on walls, chairs, and my desk. Looking around it's obvious that I'm not the only one at war, though.)

Today, I met a new bug. He was faster, stronger, and harder to kill. I had to give him the ol' boot three times before he stopped coming at me. I named him Rasputin. He was a fighter. Unfortunately for Rasputin, his reign of terror is over.

In pursuit of my latest musical obsession, I've recorded a bunch of Irish music. I'm silly, you see. Here are some .mp3s. (Keep in mind that these versions are just myself, and all of them are intended to have the full backing of the rest of the members of my crazed entourage, "A Flock Of Kobolds". However, until the day that the music is joined by all of my compatriots, you can find enjoyment in the 'demo of a demo' versions by yours truly.) Two of these songs are original Ben masterpieces, and the others...aren't:

The Hands of Fate (with Ryan on elec. guitar and backing vox)

The Wanderer (with Ryan on keys)

Haul Away Joe

Fathom the Bowl

Hanging Johnny

What's Left of the Flag (Arrgh. For whatever stupid reason, Blogger isn't letting me link the whole link to this one. It should be http://b33n3r.lundo.com/What's%20Left%20of%20the%20Flag.mp3 which still might not work past that apostrophe, so copy and paste the link. Grr.)

Yeah, I'm weird. Whatever. I'm over it. Tonight, I brew beer! I've picked up a nice porter for the coming fall weather. Hopefully all goes well with the keg.

Another Weenend Down

2008-10-13T06:43:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, I'm becoming a tad lackadaisical with my blog posting. I've gone a week since the last one, and that's just not acceptable. My readership is suffering! I feel a bit like Robert Jordan...except not dead. Maybe more akin to George R. R. Martin. That's it.

The tile floor is now finished. On friday night, Kerry and I did all of the grouting. I managed to literally wear a hole in the tip of my right hand index finger. I had to plug this oft-bleeding hole with superglue. As such, I've now got a blob of superglue sticking out of my finger. This makes typing interesting.

Last night, Greg and I had plans to go to a metal show at Station 4, featuring the viking stylings of Amon Amarth. Well, we got there and they had already started, and it turned out to be $25. Since we're a couple of cheaparses, we went with plan B: Not seeing Amon Amarth. We went back to my house, drank some beer, and spent some time playing Golden Axe on the wii. That was quite fun.

I was dismayed to find that my Wii Sports disc has a hole in it. Yep, a hole going straight through the disc. I blame Nintendo for not giving me a case for it, but I really know that the blame somehow falls squarely on me for not taking care of it, or on Gwen for somehow managing to put a hole through the disc. Anyway, if anyone has a copy of Wii Sports that they don't want anymore, I would be interested in making a purchase from you.

Big weekend

2008-10-06T06:31:00.000-07:00

It is finished. Well, mostly. This weekend, my parents came to town and went to work. On Friday night we finished ripping up all of the old vinyl tiles from the kitchen floor. It was backbreaking, sticky business. Sticky because of all of the adhesive that was still on the floor. This made for some hilarity whenever a cat or Gwen tried to cross the floor, because their little paws or feet would just...stick. It was funny. Poor kitties and Gwen.

Saturday morning I went to class as usual, and my Dad started tiling the floor. That project lasted until 8:00 pm, so he worked for 12 hours and I worked for 8 (with a break to mow the lawn). It's done now, and it looks awesome. It's not such a gigantic change aesthetically, because the tiles are still white. They just look a whole lot cleaner and better and are ceramic. I now have to go through the process of grouting, which is a chore but shouldn't be too big of a deal.

Kerry was camping with her friend Megan all weekend. She had a blast, but I missed her (of course). Gwenner is quite the handful these days, because she's just about two. I had a lot of fun hanging out with my girl.

Saturday night I had some dudes over to play poker, and we had a lot of fun. A good bachelor night was had by all.

Yesterday was rainy, so Gwenner and I went shopping, because I was getting cabin fever and there was nothing else to do. Our first stop was Best Buy, because I wanted to pick up the newest Flogging Molly CD. I have most of my music in digital form these days, but I really wanted a CD that I could hold, look at the artwork, flip through the booklet (in my hands, not on a screen)...that sort of tactile thing. I think that it's unfortunate that those feelings of removing the shrinkwrap from a CD and opening it up and holding it in your hand are all kind of going away. I'm going to hold on to them as long as I can.

Well, we got to Best Buy, and it was closed. I had 20 minutes to kill, so I went to the Target that was nearby. Gwen and I meandered around the store, looking at pumpkins, and I made some random purchases. (A ream of paper, a 12-pack of diet coke, and most importantly, a new ivy cap). When we got to the car, I immediately placed the hat on my head and went to Best Buy. Gwen just held my hand in the store, and we walked up and down nearly every aisle. She got sucked in watching a 60" TV that was displaying elephants and zebras and giraffes and monkeys and all manner of creature that she knows and loves. I was able to pry her away eventually, and we succeeded in my mission of finding music.

It wasn't until I got to the cashier that I realized what a tool I was to be purchasing Flogging Molly while wearing an ivy cap. Ahh well, I'm positive that I wasn't the first.

Projects!

2008-10-01T11:24:00.000-07:00

A great and total transformation is currently underway in my kitchen. My wifey has taken it upon herself to completely redo the floor. OK, not completely all by herself, but so far yeah. We're going to replace our ugly vinyl with some nice ceramic tile.

Kerry started ripping up the vinyl on Monday night. We had a bit of hope that under the vinyl we would discover wonderful hardwood. When the first tiles were pulled up, we realized that lurking under the vinyl tiles were....

...more vinyl tiles. Which is kind of lame, because they're probably the original 1954 floor, which could mean that they contain asbestos, which means that we don't want to rip them up. No siree. So, we'll continue pulling up the more recent vinyl, and put some ceramic tile on top of what remains and it will be beautiful and wonderful and so on and so forth.

I'm trying to organize a poker game for this weekend, because my wife will be out of town. So far, responses have been slow, but hopefully something comes together...it would be a shame to waste a perfectly good bachelor night. Gwen will be sleeping at that point, which is good, because she's a heck of a poker player and I would hate for her to embarrass my friends. ;)

Well, that's about all I've got for right now. The sun is shining, the air is crisp, and all is well.

I'm old!

2008-09-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

They're married! Rhyno and Meghan tied the knot this weekend in a beautiful ceremony and a superfun reception. I was successful in most of my best-manly duties, and gave what I thought was a pretty darn good speech. The day was a lot of fun, and I offer sincere congratulations to both of them. Have fun in Cabo.

Yesterday was the anniversary of my birth. I am now officially 32. Funny, I don't feel a day older than 31. Har har har. It was a pretty low-key day, as the mornings after big weddings usually are. I took my tux back, did some hanging out with my parents, racked my mead, played some video games, read some more geek book, and watched most of a movie with Kerry. It was nice.

Kerry got me a kegging system! This means, ladies and gentlemen, that I will have my own homebrew on tap at my house. That is sofa king cool. No more running upstairs for beer during D&D sessions. Oh no! Just reach over to yon tap and fill thy frothing mug with ale! My lovely wifey also got me a Flogging Molly T-Shirt, because she rules.

Yesterday afternoon, our 2nd realtor came over after having done a market analysis. It was like night and day compared to the first lady that came (see previous post). The news was much more to our favor, and this lady really has her stuff together. The last chick seems to have been doing exactly what I thought: Trying to get a quick, small payment now rather than wait out the winter. Well, good luck to her in her endeavors, she won't be selling our house.

It sucks to be back at work, because the weekend went by like lightning. That's always the problem with a power-packed weekend. So, here goes. Time to work.

Hung over, boring, unlucky and clumsy

2008-09-25T13:35:00.001-07:00

Well, I made it through the crazy bachelor party weekend, but barely. The problem wasn't the party itself, but the day after. I had to wake up fairly early and drive back to Minneapolis, which wasn't fun at all. I think that my hangover lasted until around...Tuesday.

The rest of the week has been fairly boring. Life is fairly boring right now. Oh well. Like some jabberboarders have mentioned, there is no boredom, only boring people. I guess that makes me a boring person this week.

This weekend my friends Ryan and Meghan are getting married. They've honored me by asking me to be the best man (thus the whole bachelor party planning and whatnot) and I'm very excited to celebrate with them.

So far, this week has been a bit of a series of unfortunate events. Last night, during my break from class, I went to get a coffee from the gawd-awful-coffee-machine at school. I put in my dollar, made my selection, and watched in horror as all of my coffee went not into a cup but instead directly down a drain. Apparently the machine was out of cups. Last night I filled out a document for a class, only to find that when I tried to save it it cleared the form completely, causing me to have to do it all over again. This afternoon, hankerin' for a snack, I went to my work vending machine and purchased some cookies. I jammed my finger, rather painfully, whilst trying to retrieve the delectable snack, which I then took downstairs and proceeded to spill all over the floor and myself when I tried to open them. It's these little things. They're adding up. In fact, I just found out that I have a 7:00 a.m. meeting tomorrow. Barf.

Maybe it's anxiety about the wedding. I'm not stressed about the wedding, but there might be a tinge of nervousness about giving a speech or something. Maybe it's my upcoming birthday. I turn 32 on Sunday. Maybe it's just the initial symptoms of lycanthropy or something. Either way, I tend to go through these extreme periods of klutziness and bad luck every once in a while. Such is life.

Arrrrr

2008-09-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

Arr arr HEEyar arrrrrrr arr. Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day, ye scurvy sons of sea hags! Tis September the Nineteenth today, and I can hear the wail o' the wind an' smell the salt o' the sea, callin' ta me, down ta me boney bones.

OK enough of that.

It's been a pretty uneventful week for me, unfortunately. I can't really recall anything particularly spectacular that's happened, it's just been kind of the same old situation. Work's been workish, school has been schoolish, and everything has been trudging along. The week has plodded it's merry way toward today, blessed Friday, and the utter awesomeness that is a weekend. This weekend in particular.

Of course, I have to get through class tomorrow morning, but that oughtn't be too tough. It's a pretty entertaining and engaging class.

Tomorrow at approximately noon, I set sail (parrrrrdon me seafarin' references!) for lovely Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, in wanton celebration of the death of Rhyno's bachelorhood. Don't worry, Ryan...it's not such a bad thing to lose. If I know anything about you, it's that you're ready to get married to that blushing bride. First thing's first, though, and that first thing is a party.

So that's what we're a'gonna do.

Other than that, we've got the second opinion realtor coming over tonight. That should be fine. We'll see what she has to say (doubtfully anything of substance tonight, we'll find out more later)

I'm playing pirate ballads at work today. People are confused, but when they ask, I just tell them that I'm celebrating the holiday.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

2008-09-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

In other, less depressing news, today marks the birth of my lovely and intelligent wife, who is (hands down) the most wonderful person in the entire universe. I am completely blessed to have her for a companion, because she is (in my opinion) perfect in every way.

And hot.

Love you honey!!!

Well that really sucks.

2008-09-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

Ugh. All I want to do is sell my house. Well, not all – I’m still holding out for the offer to open for Clutch on tour. Selling this house is a big priority right now, though. It doesn’t really matter when – I graduate next May, and don’t take the bar exam until July, so I’m fine with sticking around. It would be better for us, though, to sell the house early and have to live in an apartment than to not sell the house and have to stay in my crappy job ad infinitum. This brings us to our sordid tale of woe known as the current mortgage market.

Let’s start from the beginning and bore you with details. As much as I would love to blame George Bush for the current state of things (I’m sure he’s got something to do with it, right?) the fault can be placed on the shoulders of idiot lenders that gave mortgages to people that really shouldn’t have had them. Said idiot lenders were handing mortgages to other idiots who would then idiotically buy houses that they couldn’t afford. Due to an extremely sharp rise in the prices of houses, a lot of these houses were actually selling for considerably more than they were worth.

Suddenly, the terms on many adjustable-rate mortgages came due. Like a shotgun, people that were barely making interest-only payments at 5% or less now had to pay three times what they were paying before, due to a higher rate and having to pay principal. (Lost? Sorry if I’m skipping definitions, I’m trying to be brief. Heh.) Long story short, these people (and there are LOTS of them) couldn’t make their payments. Their houses went into foreclosure, and are now being sold dirt cheap by the banks that took them back.

What does this mean? It means that in my neighborhood (and likely yours too) there are 47 houses for sale in a 6-block radius and 30 of the 47 are foreclosed properties. This produces an effect that makes me want to go on a violent rampage: Person A has a house for sale at $200,000. Person B got their house (similar in every way to person A’s) foreclosed upon because they couldn’t afford it. Bank C sells person B’s house for $30,000. Person D, a generic consumer, sees two identical houses, one for $200,000 and another for $30,000. Yeah. Tough choice.

As a result prices of houses everywhere go sharply downward. (Yes, I know there’s more to it. I’m simplifying here. There’s a story, after all.) The infuriating result of this is that when Kerry and I contacted a realtor, she said that our house could sell for a maximum of about $60,000 less than what we want for it.

That’s a lot. That’s out of the question.

There’s more to it than that, even. I may very well be projecting here, but I’ve got some severe misgivings about the realtor we spoke to. See, I know that she’s in a difficult financial situation (because I’m a snoop, a spy, and a person who knows people), and I know that she’s done some kind of shady things in the past. I’m thinking that she wants to sell a house immediately, because she wants a smaller commission now rather than a big one later. It might be wishful thinking on our part, but either way, yeah…not gonna be going with her, I’m thinkin’.

Wait, why did we call her in the first place? Because she's a very nice person who was our agent when purchasing the house, and we wanted to see what she could do. Yeah, not so much.

Weird week thus far

2008-09-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

My earlier stated goal of writing and recording three songs in some limited amount of time took a little longer than I had expected. The good news is that I’ve written 5 songs now, rather than three. The bad news is that I haven’t recorded them yet, for lack of time. The good or bad news, depending on your musical tastes, are that the songs are all the type intended to be played by A Flock of Kobolds. So, if you dig songs about Vikings, drinking, seafaring, soldiering, and/or wandering vagabonds, you’re in for a treat. And really, how could you not?

I’ve had a weird week so far. My work week has been filled with random meetings, every day, always at 2:00 PM. My home life has been (unsurprisingly) filled with homework. My school week (consisting of only one night thus far) has been filled with awkward Bioethics conversations about abortion, which (again unsurprisingly) ended up being monopolized by a complete douchebag who decided to evangelize for a while. He got completely pwned by my friend Kristian (inventor of the reset stick, incidentally) but the results and politics of that conversation are going to be dropped from the rest of this blog. My mission here is certainly not to attempt to sway people from their current way of thinking.

This past Sunday, I took Gwennerpants to the zoo. It was super fun. She adored the Giraffes. However, there was a moment of interesting shock: We were observing a rather angry-looking 400 lb. gorilla, who was just kind of sitting sullenly in a corner. Suddenly he LEAPED from his sitting position and crashed his fist against the Plexiglas. Gwen’s reaction was delayed compared to the rest of the crowd’s shock, but she was soon wailing. I was already on my way out of the gorilla viewing area. Heh.

I'm happy with my geek status.

2008-09-05T06:43:00.000-07:00

I’m excited to go to the Ren Fest this weekend. I’ve been there a billion times, and there really isn’t anything that changes, but I love the Renaissance Festival like other people love the State Fair: It’s this happy place that satisfies a craving for scotch eggs, mead, and bread bowl soup while at the same time providing nostalgia on about a billion levels: First, nostalgia from my youth. See, from high school until now, I’ve gone to the Renaissance Festival at least once a year. Sometimes (hush now) I even wore a costume. The second type of nostalgia is from my past lives: See, I’ve been a Viking, a Pirate, and a British serf in my past lives, so…wait, no. I’m totally kidding about that stuff.

Speaking of Vikings, I’m brewing some mead, so far it smells really good. Unlike beer, I can actually smell the mead through the airlock. I tried to convince Kerry to let me get a good drinking horn from which to gulp my honey libation. I’ll grow a crazed beard like my friend Johnny and shout “SKOAL!” with mead dripping from my drinking horn as I guzzle. Perfect. That’s the life for me.

On a tangent – last night I was playing WoW while drinking my homebrewed IPA and eating my father-in-law’s homemade venison and elk beer sticks. See, my father-in-law got a spiffy sausage maker for a retirement present, and the results have been delicious. Talking over my snack with friends produced the suggestion that we get my father-in-law and move to the woods somewhere and survive off of beer and sausage for the rest of our lives. Sounds like heaven. Might need to recruit some gatherers, though, or the ol’ bowels might suffer from lack of roughage. Of course, Lundo suggested that maybe we would just evolve to be some sort of beer-and-sausage culture. Like Germans.

In furtherance of my quest to become the ubergeek, I’m playing some Dungeons and Dragons after the Ren Fest on Saturday. I don’t know what’s going to happen – all of that geeking might cause me to turn into a druid or something. I predict best day evar!!!!11

Fond Memories of the Stick

2008-08-29T06:46:00.000-07:00

Mario Kart makes me want to break things. I have had more juvenile outbursts playing this game than I have in a very, very long time. The funny thing is that when I go online, I can actually hold my own against the real people around the country (despite the game’s lack of any good online interaction…Nintendo, please add a “PWN3D!” message button that you can just hit during the race. Mua ha ha). My problems with the game arise when playing against the computer. It’s freakishly frustrating.

Last night I was about to finish a grand prix and got so angry at the system that I just shut the power off. A similar occurrence happened very often back in the days…of the Casbah.

Let’s drift off into memory. It’s story time, kiddies! My Sophomore year in college, I lived at a house in Morris, MN that my geek roommates and I had lovingly named “The Casbah”. It was not a party house, as we lived right next to the Sherriff. We participated in our share of shenanigans, though, and had a lot of hazy, delightful, drunken old times. There were a total of five of us that lived in the house. Of the five, I still talk to two on a regular basis. Of the five, three went on to law school. These are just factoids, not really terribly important details.

This was the fall of 1996. It was a happy time. I was a strapping young lad of twenty summers. Almost every night, we would shirk our homework duties and gather around the magic box: The Super Nintendo. See, the N64 came out that fall, but none of us could afford one. So we played oldschool games on one roomie’s SNES, and it was a ton of fun. One of these games was the original Mario Kart, and as it supported not one but two people playing at the same time, that was often our game of choice.

The SNES didn’t have a remote control like modern consoles. Oh, no. It had two big purple sliders on top of the box, one marked “power” and one marked “reset”. Frustration with @#$%@ Mario Kart became the mother of invention, and the owner of the SNES (in his mighty wisdom) came up with a brilliant device that stayed by our couch for the duration of the year: The Reset Stick.

The Reset Stick was…a stick. It was a broom handle, actually. However, it was a wonderful way for us to remain comfortably seated on the couch whilst resetting the SNES in our frustration. It was amazing. In fact, I like to think that it was the Reset Stick (and other similar methods likely concocted all over the gaming dens of the world) that led to this bold new renaissance of remote console. I thoroughly enjoy being able to turn off the power to the Wii whilst comfortably seated on my couch, turning purple with rage. Stupid Mario Kart. Why must I love you so?

The Inner Sanctum

2008-08-27T06:48:00.000-07:00

Those of you that know me (which I have to assume is all of you…heh) know that I tend to have really crazy dreams. This morning, during a thunderstorm, I was drifting in and out of sleep, and ended up having a really interesting one. OK, not that interesting, just vivid.

I was in class, just waiting for the professor to point his finger at me and make me answer a question from an assignment that I had not read. So, in my dream, I just got up and walked out. I went to my car and drove around the street. (This isn’t so important, but in my dream William Mitchell was situated perpendicular to the way it is in real life…not important to the story but weird in my dream and hard to explain). I got in my car and drove around the corner, and saw police, out of their cars, in a heated gun battle with some criminal types. I promptly turned my car around to avoid them, and decided to go back to class.

I was on a side of the building that I was unfamiliar with, and in my dream the building was much much bigger. I couldn’t get back to the parking lot – something to do with the gun battle. So I parked my car and went into a door at random. I found myself in a hotel that was attached to my school. It was kind of like a hotel/daycare, but there was a concierge/reception desk with a receptionist. Just outside, there was a playground and a swimming pool. The swimming pool was filled with kids around 2 to 3 years old. It was thundering in my dream (and in waking life as well, I later discovered). I told the receptionist to get those kids out of the pool, because it was raining.

Relying on my deft sense of direction, I chose a door that I thought would lead me back to my class. It opened into a darkened section of the building. Have you ever been wandering around a part of a building that you know you’re not supposed to be in, but just couldn’t help exploring a bit? That was the situation in my dream. I started looking around this back area. There was a sink, and a bathroom. I could hear someone in the bathroom, and I glanced to the right and saw that it was the Dean’s office, and presumably the Dean was taking a pee break. I turned around. Down a hallway I heard voices, so I investigated.

At the end of the hallway was a board room, with a board meeting going on. I didn’t want to get caught, so I turned around and went back toward the first door to the reception area. On a table, I spied some dirty dishes. I picked them up and put them in the sink. Then I woke up.

Yep, no clue what that one means.

Back to real life: I got myself a cork, so I made my mead last night. I’m fairly positive that I wrecked it. OK, I’m always positive (read: paranoid) that I’ve ruined beer. Every time I brew it, I think I’ve done something that will wreck it, only to find that it’s still good. This time, though, I think I’ve got a problem. I really thought that the carboy I was using was clean. It looked clean, and smelled of cleanly goodness. I had washed it with a powder cleanser thoroughly after using it last time. I rinsed it out and sanitized it last night. As I filled it with my freshly made honey-water, though, I noticed a spot, maybe a ½ inch square, of crusty old krausen that was still clinging to the side of the carboy, just under the surface of the might-someday-be-mead substance. DOH. That sucks. I’ll let you know in a month, I guess, when I rack it.

Fancy dinners and Star Wars elitism

2008-08-26T06:38:00.000-07:00

Kerry and I had a nice dinner last night, in celebration of our seven-year anniversary. We went to Bacio, an Italian restaurant near Ridgedale, and stuffed ourselves silly. It’s amazing how much I now appreciate going out for a nice dinner with just my wife, after having a kid. Don’t get me wrong, I love Gwennerz to pieces and love spending time with her, but it’s very nice to take a break every once in a while. Anyway, if you want a nice dinner I recommend the place, the food was excellent.

In my hasty weekend update I forgot to mention that Kerry and I took Friday off to go see the Star Wars exhibit at the Science Museum. It was really neat, but we weren’t able to spend as much time there as I had thought we would. That’s fine -- I got to see everything I wanted to see. Perhaps I’m a bad person, but I started feeling a little bit elitist about the whole thing. I liken it to the feeling that a person who went and saw Jerry Garcia play with the Grateful Dead 120 times must feel when he sees a 13-year-old kid wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt. Kind of a “Move over kid, and let me see Chewbacca…I was there, man, I saw it live” thing. I mean, there was a kid – about six years old, I’d say -- listening to his grandmother tell him about the Millennium Falcon. She was saying, “Ooh, this is the space station from the movie,”. GRRRRRR DOUBLE-FAULT! Now this kid (who wasn’t even there, mannn!) is being poisoned by the drivel coming out of the mouth of his ignorant grandmother (who also wasn’t there). Sorry for the rant, these things are dear to me.

Also -- and this is a note to parents everywhere – I am taking a picture of Darth Vader. I am not taking a picture of your kid. Your kid doesn’t know better, but you do. Kindly remove your kid from my Darth Vader shot, otherwise it will completely ruin my ability to capture the look of scorn and hope of redemption from his glossy visage.

One last gripe -- the Omni Theater showed a movie with the Star Wars exhibit. This movie was called "Special Effects". It was from freaking 1996 or so. It showed the filming of "new scenes for the Star Wars movies" and "a new blockbuster called Independence Day" and movie magic from freaking "Kazaam" starring Shaq. Seriously people, that stuff is over a decade old. Science changes in that time...especially the science of special effects. Come on, Science Museum. You can do better.

Keeping on the subject of being a dork, I was in Borders the other day and simply could not resist picking up a copy of “Shadowdale” by…some author. It’s a Forgotten Realms book. Yeah…I’m a dork who occasionally dips really deep into the murky pool of genre novels, but D&D books are good clean fun that can’t be replicated by…well, by better writers, really. Back off, man. I love it. Yes, I’ll lend it to you when I’m finished. ;^)

Last but not least, I got me a cork for my bunghole. That is seriously funny to me. So…maybe some mead will be made tonight. We’ll see.

The Weekendy Weekend

2008-08-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

Well hey, whaddya know, today is my anniversary. Kerry and I have, as of this day, been married for 7 years. I’m trying to say this as romantically as possible…ok here I go.

I just wanna give a shout-out to my sweet sugar mamma, who’s been wit’ me all of these years. Baby, you so sexy. Awwwwww yeeeuh. Thanks 4 makin’ this pimp’s heart all a-fluttery.

Sorry sweetie, that’s the best I could do with this early A.M. timeframe. I love you, wifey.

Moving on! The weekend was pretty rad. Well, it started out un-rad, because I was back in class on Saturday morning. That wasn’t such a big deal. It’s an interesting class with an interesting professor, so it should be ok. After class got out, my girls and I went to my Grandma’s birthday party. Gwen had an absolute blast. She got to hang out with her cousin and my youngest cousin…the three of them are all within a few months of each other in age. They had a very good time running around like maniacs, playing ball, and riding on Grandpa Don’s shoulders.

Sunday morning I decreed that we were going to the MN State Fair. So, we hopped in the car and did just that. After causing my lovely wife of seven years to nearly have a heart attack from my driving “skills”, we parked and went in. Gwen had a ton of fun looking at sheep, horses, and cows. I managed to hungrily consume my greasy fair food trifecta: Cheese Curds, Pronto Pup, and Mini Donuts. The deliciousness is still oozing from my pores in the form of batter-fried sweat.

Our fair day was awesome – perfect weather and good times – until we got back to the parking lot. It turns out we had a completely flat tire. I have some sort of back-right tire curse, because this is the third one I’ve had to change in as many years. The other two were on my other car, though, so once again I had to figure out the silly little tire-iron and jack that came with the vehicle. Luckily, even though these items are small and hard to get out of their hidey-holes, their basic function is pretty straightforward. I’m also happy that my Jeep has a full-sized spare tire, because donuts suck (except state fair mini donuts, as previously mentioned).

My WoW experience has become much, much faster, as I am now the proud owner of an epic flying mount. Awwwww yeah.

So last night I was going to brew up my first batch of mead, and I couldn't find my spare BUNGSTOPPER! (seriously, a word like that has to be in all-caps. Sorry.) So, I've gotta hit up the beer store again for an extra one. (oh darn.)

Disconnect

2008-08-21T07:09:00.000-07:00

Ugh. I’m really down and disconnected this morning. I grant that it could have been the beer consumed last night at the Flock of Kobolds rehearsal, but I have no physical symptoms of that action. I’m going to chalk it up to being the first night of school. I’m happy to be going back and getting it all done once and for all, but there is still a ton of stress involved with the whole situation – leaving the girls at night, studying, and general preparation for the huge life changes that will be associated with graduation. I know that I should really focus on one thing at a time, but there’s a lot to think about: packing up stuff and getting the house ready to sell, finding a house to move into, moving, starting a new job in a new town…all of these things are a long time away, but I’ve seen firsthand how fast years have started going by, and I know that this one will be like a rocket.

I’m not all that worried about school. I pretty much know the drill there, after three grueling years. There are little things about it that are bugging me, though. First off, it’s hard to go back to having no free time. Second, it’s always rough (as mentioned before) to be leaving my family every night. (Thankfully I actually managed to get two nights off per week this semester. That will be nice.) There’s also the stress involved with graduating this year – you know, making sure that I’ve actually managed to satisfy every requirement. Finally, there’s the bar exam looming over me next summer. Tackling that will be no small feat.

Last night’s practice was super fun, but there was kind of an air of…I don’t know, some sort of disconnectedness, maybe? Discontent, perhaps? I’m sure a ton of it was in my own head because of stress in other areas of life, and if that came through into band practice I apologize, guys. Anyway, hopefully we’ll be able to get together again soon, because it’s hella fun to play ancient ballads and whatnot.

Kobolds and Kart

2008-08-19T11:45:00.000-07:00

Well, tonight’s the night that I get to start studying again. Blech. It’s always an awful feeling. I would have put it off until tomorrow night, but I’m going to be far too busy playing Irish music, work songs, pirate ballads and songs from the wood to busy myself with a schoolbook. So there you have it, a Flock of Kobolds shall invade tomorrow evening. May the world tremble.

I picked up MarioKart for the Wii the other day. The game does the franchise proud – it’s incredibly fun. One especially cool feature is the ability to play online with friends. However, there are some gripes I have.
1. Far too many of the tracks involve places that you can fall off. It gets annoying.
2. All of the weapons cause you to lose your weapon when you’re hit. That’s LAME. The fun of the old versions was having that red shell in your arsenal for that moment that the jerkwad that hit you with the shell passes you. Lightning bolts aren’t supposed to rob you of your defenses.
3. The addition of motorcycles and different karts for each character was unnecessary. Come on, each of the characters is different from the others…there’s no need in my opinion to clutter the game with more choices to make.
4. Online play is fine and dandy, but Nintendo should REALLY think about some sort of voice chat or typing thingamajig or something. There is simply no way to communicate with your friends while playing this game, and that’s who I want to play with: My friends. I don’t care to test my mettle against the kid in Beijing. Nope, he can have the trophy, he’s way better than I am. But I want to be able to actually converse with my friends during online play, rather than resort to canned messages that I point at with my wiimote in between games. The only alternative is to have Skype running on a nearby computer, which neither of the dudes I was playing with last night have.

That’s all I’ve got, really. Despite my grumblings, the game rocks.

Small World

2008-08-13T10:49:00.000-07:00

The following story might seem a bit convoluted, but if you follow me to the very end, it will all come together. Kind of like the movie Memento, which is awesome and I highly recommend seeing. On with the show.I went golfing last night with Kristian and Ryan. More on that later.

Just after getting out of the car, I got a phone call from Kerry. She told me that she had just gotten a call from her boss, who relayed to her that he was vacationing with some friends on Madeline Island. Said friends have known Kerry for years, as they are residents of the town she works in and frequent the nature center that she works at.

Making a long story very short, it turns out that they own the building that was the one-time residence of none other than Creepyguy himself. Yep. They’re his landlords. Crazy small world. They also confirmed that he no longer lives there, which is reason in itself to cheer and whoop and celebrate.

So last night’s golfing was fun. The night started well for me, but soon some darkish clouds started inching their way across the sky. By the fourth hole we started to hear some thunder rumbling, but the three of us pressed on, trying to convince ourselves that the thunder was far away and that there was no lightning.

By the end of the fifth hole, the lightning was becoming a bit obvious, and the sky was looking a little grim. The horn blew as we were on the tee box from the sixth hole, which signified that the course was closing. The problem was that that tee box is literally the farthest point on the entire course from the clubhouse and parking lot. So, we three brave golf warriors set out across the wide open course, dodging lightning bolts all the way to the parking lot. OK, all except the part about the lightning bolts.

We hopped into the car and drove off, and not two minutes after we started driving it started POURING. It was an absolute deluge, to the point where other cars had pulled off the road because they couldn’t see the road. It was an adventure, to say the least. That would not have been fun to have been stuck in.

After that I went home and played a little Starcraft with Reuben, who fell asleep. I stayed awake way too long after that, playing poker online (for fake money). I discovered this fun little browser-based site, which unfortunately screws up every once in a while. I blame Safari, Apple’s browser, which has some nice features yet still gets all wonky from time to time.