Archive for the ‘Family’ Category
This Whole Pennsic Thing.
It’s pretty strange to be here again. Last year we skipped it, too little time, not enough money we said. This year we decided that it could be a cheap vacation. Seems a lot of people made that decision, this place seems packed this year.
Our camp more than filled up today. It’s wall to wall. We had about a dozen people show up, most of them have small popup type tents and most of them seem very young. It’s some household from Indiana.
Before
After
I can’t help but wonder why we go through all of this. Mostly I suppose it’s to create a bit of contrast. A reset switch, an opportunity to get away for a while and do something completely different.
That’s got to be it! What else could it be?
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Immolation Station IV
Last night was the 4th and so we took the small-fry to a friend’s home where they apparently have a huge bird problem. When know this from the wide array of “bird scaring devices” that were being set off all over the place. The boys had a blast!
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An aside
I need to catch up, for some strange reason I have not been too interested in posting. I’m too busy at work and it seems I’m too busy at home most of the time. Also I have a few “entities” who have chosen to follow me around. My first impulse is to ignore them, but ignoring requires that I post as normal. It’s a mistake for them to do this, someday they will realize this I think.
A bunch of stuff has happed. We lost one of the cars due to a rear-ending. It was the paid off one and we won’t get much on the settlement. Deb was driving and thank goodness she was OK. The rear-ending was someone else’s fault, but it’s still going to make our insurance go up and we have a new driver coming on line in the family in just a few years. (OMG! it was just yesterday that he was a child – now…)
Other than that, I still have project Burger Flip under way. I’ve got a couple of YouTubes to complete, I need to get more submissions into the pipeline and and Starbuck’s has some really good gluten-free cookies. As I get older it’s clear how things are going, life becomes more complex, time becomes more precious and the most precious commodity of all are the people we meet on the way and the things we experience.
In all of this, for me anyway – life is good!
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“I’m not going to do what you and Mom did,” he said.
We were doing homework, my son and I. A paper on inertia for his seventh grade science class. We, or I had been discussing how inertia is like an energy bank for matter. When a particle of matter was moving it stored the energy of its movement until it came into contact with another particle of matter, then the energy transferred,
“What are you not going to do? “ I asked.
“That thing you and Mom did in the pictures!” he said.
“Hu? I said,”what pictures?” (Mom and I never did anything under a camera, the whole idea grosses me out. )
He got down a fat photo album, of our wedding, then opened a page to a photo of me taking the garter from Deb. ”I’ll never do anything like that” he said.
“Sure you won’t “ said I, “I’ll remind you about this someday.”
He was thoughtful for a moment. “ I still won’t do it” he said at last.
‘When you find the right one” I said. ”you will…”
“So what does inertia do for matter?” I asked.
“It tells matter how far to go” he said. “That’s one of the things I put in my report.”
“Really, “ I said, “that’s right, where did you get that from?”
“From you “ he said.
“You can’t cite Dad” I said. “for some things…. “
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Christmas trip.
Well, I don’t know when I’m going to be able to post this. My Internet connection has been reduced to a 2.4 Mps pipe. We took ‘E and one of his cousins to the great-white north or close enough to count. Both of them are Florida boys so seeing snow is always a treat.
First we had to fight traffic and lousy weather . We drove straight through after a long stopover at the step-mom’s family spread (this is where we picked up E’s cuz.) Then we drove and drove, it started raining by the time we reached VA and didn’t get out of it until we reached the In-law’s place. We rested up Sunday, the boys ran around in the snow for a while, most of it has melted off, but we might get a couple of inches Monday.
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Blue Cheese – finally!
I did this little thing early this year and gave a version of it (with real names) to E’s soccer team. I messed around with getting a version up on YouTube – they bounced the audio because of copyright stuff. I just left things ass is but in my travels I discovered that Google pretty much has a blanket policy against any music that is not created by a YouTube member and that pulling for copyright happens to almost any soundtrack being put up for any reason.
Of course fair use is fair use and it’s being pointed out in the YouTube community that non commercial usage of tracks happens all of the time, heck people have been putting up their entire CD collections for years. Somehow I can’t believe using using an old Dire Straights song as background to my son’s soccer team’s video (which I did because I wanted to) is violating copyright.
So I finally got around to disputing their bounce and you know what?
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So some more Pennsic.
Ok, so I’m a geek. I dress up in this faux roman garb, sit around in a tent and write blog posts on my laptop.
I dug out my armor today, did some adjustments and wandered up to the field to get inspected. Pennsic inspections are supposed to be this big freaking deal but I’ve never had much trouble with it. They wanted a picture ID this year, and that forced me to walk back to camp (all of five min away.) Afterward I did pickups for a while, until it started raining hard. There has been a succession of fronts coming through, today was hot and dry until late afternoon.
Tomorrow is supposed to be wet again. Deb and I might go into town one last time, I’ve got a case of gluten free beer on order and we need to do laundry.
Those camp bunnies are doing fine, all but one are eating regularly and they are starting to crop grass. They plan to release them on the final day of the war, hopefully they will be old enough to make it on their own.
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So Pennsic
Well, once again we loaded up the family jalopy and headed out to the Pennsic War. Deb, E’ and I got on the road at about 3:00PM on Sunday, July 26th 2009. After about 23 hours of driving and several Starbucks’ stops we arrived at Cooper’s Lake PA which is located in the rolling hills of Butler County.
(Monday)
We got unpacked and set up by around 4PM, then we went into town for a shopping run.
(Tuesday)
Some of my campmates found some baby rabbits. E’ is enchanted and (of course) wants to bring one home.
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And April, into Summer!
At some point in time you have to decide that enough is enough, and that the bad guys have to win. Sometimes they deserve it!
A couple of people have noticed that I’ve not been writing here very much. I could say it was a time thing and be mostly truthful. I’m reading lots more than I usually do. One book is this hideous thing called “The Turner Diaries.” Now I don’t believe in censorship but if there was one book to hunt down and burn every single copy of, it would be The Tuner Diaries. Mr. PH asked me why I put myself through it
“sheer curiosity” was my answer (or something close to it.) I wanted to find out how depraved one mans’ imagination could be. I wanted to look radical racism in the eye and then leave it where it belongs, on the trash-heap of history.
It’s not that the book is badly written (though frankly, it’s no Gone with the Wind. ) The Turner Diaries is more or less a first person account of a racist insurgency which, after bombing buildings and firing mortars into public gatherings ends up capturing some ICBMs and manages to start World War III, completely obliterating all non-whites and Jews. Around six billion people all told.
I can’t even to begin to express my revulsion of this book. There is no justification for the mass slaughter (lovingly described) in this story – other than “they is not whait like us!.” Over and over again we are treated to atrocities in the name of white purity (whatever the hell that means.) The author justifies wholesale indiscriminate slaughter for nothing more than a belief in his own superiority.
Say what now? Dragging people out of their beds at 3 AM, reading some claptrap about race betrayal (coz they have black associates) and hanging them from lampposts can be justified?
I think someone should make a movie of this book- as a warning. Nor really! They should play it straight too, just like the novel describes. A cautionary tale about how insane people can get. I think there will be some people (Like Timothy McVey) who will mimic the crap this novel describes. Most (I am ever hopeful) will get it and understand that any society based on the depravity described in The Turner Diaries will be xenophobic and brutal, not unlike some fundie Islamic sects.
It’s a bunch of crap, read it only if you are curios.
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We took E’ and Mable to a local mutt derby
Unsurprisingly she won her heat and came in second overall, that freaking dog is fast!
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Swine flue is big news. Two people in my county happened to get it, out of a million. I’d bet that more people were diagnosed with terminal cancer or died in motorcycle crashes today.
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Deb and went to a couple of SCA things this month. This is the first weekend in a while that I’ve been able to do much other than work. Next weekend I will be working and the weekend after we have another SCA event.
Otherwise, ‘E’ finished up his “spring” soccer season. School is winding down and everyone has spring fever. It’s been hot and dry this spring (very unusual) and the economy sucks. Deb and I decided that the Japan trip was out of the question this year, ‘E’ was thrilled with that news, he was never very warm to the idea of spending a couple of weeks there, now he may be spending more time with his cousins.
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Watchmen came out to great fanfare, than vanished as soon as people went to see it. Mr. PH and I went to the matinee because we were too cheap to pay full price anymore. We were horrified that some moron brought their small children, thinking that this was a family movie! I suppose they missed the ‘R’ rating. Mr. PH went over and had a word with the parents just about the time “Rorschach” threw boiling oil on someone. Watchmen was not a nice film just like it was not a nice graphic novel. The film captured the essence of the original piece pretty well I thought. Mostly i think Watchmen is going to be forgotten under the onslaught of more popular summer fare.
The new Star Trek movie is just coming out this week, the reviews have been outstanding but I suppose I’ll catch this when it hits HBO next month. I really haven’t watched movies or TV in a long while. Some times I pop a DVD into the desktop when I’m working on someone’s web page or PC but even that is a bit too much.
Now if I could just figure out what this was all about!
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February, let alone March!
Sometimes you wonder how in the hell you got through the last couple of weeks. I cannot begin describe all the stuff that’s happening.
It’s been really dry lately, we had a bout one afternoon of light rain in the last two months. The weather is fine for this time of year, cool at night and high 70s during the day. But dang; lawns are dying and the county is starting to hand out stiff fines for people watering at all. Someone needs to tell some of my nie
Last night Deb, E’ and I went to see the Kodo Drummers over at Ruth Eckerd Hall. Kodo is a Taiko drummer group from Japan. They played a two hour set and is sure didn’t seem like it. E’ was not too sure he wanted to go last night but he was riveted. We have been trying to sell him on the Japan trip idea. He’s not too sure that he wants to go. Japan is a big, scary, alien place to him. Hell it’s pretty scary to me too and I’ve been there a couple of times.
Work has been a hassle, people are frightened and it’s starting to become obvious. Our admin people are being as reassuring as they can be and things look solvent for now. I’m in an industry that’s thankfully buffered a bit from economic problems. People always need to be educated, there’s always money available for that or so I would hope. Deb’s in much of the same position, her county digs are not likely to change drastically other than possible pay cuts. How the county can even think about cutting teacher salaries I’ll never know.
E’s football season wrapped up with his team getting district champions. They just missed regional by one point. I managed to take a bunch of video at the last couple of games and did a couple of little YouTube-like pieces which I’ve mastered into a DVD disk to present to the parents at the season wrap party. I’ve been doing various video things over the last year, PC power has gotten to the point where a modest rig like mine can put out pretty nice looking stuff. Hell even my laptop can produce full motion-professional grade material. I’m kind of astounded by that, after growing up using super8mm and splicing that junk together with tape. Now I just need to get a nice 3CCD DVcam with image stabilization – and a pony!.
Deb just called to tell me we are going to the dogs tonight (like I didn’t already know that.) Oh yes and Watchmen tomorrow.
It never ends!
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