Author (#1)August 2004 Archives

A couple weekends ago I ran a 10k. The race was a small affair - around 400 people total between the 5k and the 10k - and I didn't expect results to be posted online.

Imagine my surprise when I found that they were indeed posted.

Now, imagine my surprise upon discovering I placed 5th in my assigned age division.

Finally, imagine my surprise upon realizing that my assigned age division was "Female, 35-39."

As of this month, I have lived in the L.A. area for twenty years. I don't remember the exact date, only that my family arrived on the scene a week or so after the Los Angeles Olympics.

I know this doesn't mean much to you but it is a surprising realization to me. I still tell people that I'm "from" Oklahoma, but it's beginning to dawn on me that I'm from here now.

The kids started Kindergarten last Monday.

After a great deal of discussion we agreed to put them in separate classes this year. We figured it was going to happen for sure in first grade and decided to go ahead and get it over with.

Turns out, nobody bothered to tell Claire and Cameron that they should be upset or even concerned. They haven't even mentioned it.

Anyway, here they are on the front walkway, mere moments before we all walked to school that first day:

Last night I got out to Anaheim Stadium / Angel Field / Whatever to see the Angels play the Royals with my Old Friend Ray. (Which is to say that we've been friends for a long time, not that we're Old.)

The seats were awesome. The game was fun. The Angels won. I got to eat nacho chips with yellow glop sauce. It was all good. Thanks go out to Ray's brother Chris, who let us take his season tickets last night. Good seats do make a difference, and free good seats are like sweet nectar from heaven.

Here's a bit of trivia for you baseball fans. The minute the last out is recorded, Vladimir Guerrero of the Angels untucks his jersey. "I'm done working now, I'm gonna get comfortable."

The other night we were watching the Olympics when we heard what sounded like somebody kicking our front door, once, fairly hard. We checked it out but found nothing.

The next morning, Katy found what had made the noise. A bottle of my homebrew had exploded. Turns out that three bottles had cooked off in the hall closet - luckily the cardboard box they were in soaked up most of the beer. Still, I suspect the entry hall closet will smell like a frat house for a while.

I figured the weak point on a bottle would be the cap. Not so:

Dang...

I had another 12 bottles from this batch and suddenly I wasn't too keen on keeping them around. I put together a short clip of what happened when I went to pour them out:

Overpriming Is Bad

Today I was thinking about the Modern Pentathlon.

Modern Pentathlon is an Olympics event built around the apocryphal tale of a young military officer trying to get a message back to his headquarters. Participants shoot, fence, ride horses, swim, and run in a re-enactment of said officer's journey. The event was championed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympics, and was first contested in 1912.

I think this is a cool event, but I also think it's about time for a new modern pentathlon. And so I pose this question to you - what five events should be included in a New Modern Pentathlon?

Whoever you are, you didn't come here to read about politics. Don't worry, this post is only tangentially about politics.

This morning on NPR they were talking about all the organization and planning that is going on to support protests of the Republican convention in New York City. The whole business made me think of a quote from P.J. O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores.

"How come," I asked Andy, "whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American flag?"

"We have jobs," said Andy.

Last week our home computer died. Sigh.

It wouldn't turn on. I checked the power supply. It had a blown fuse. I bought a new power supply.

After installing that, the computer would turn on - that is, fans would spin and such - but it would not boot. I figured something had shorted on the motherboard. I bought a new motherboard and processor. I wasn't sure if the processor had been damaged, but Fry's had a good deal on a combo.

After installing that, the computer would turn on, get through BIOS startup, and crash. I discovered an addendum to the motherboard manual indicating that my old PC2100 memory was Too Slow to run with my new Athlon XP 2800+ processor. I bought new memory.

After installing that, XP couldn't (or wouldn't) recover, so I got to reinstall Windows. And patch it up. Hoo boy, what fun it is to do 50 critical updates at one throw.

The moral of this story? I don't think there is one. It's good to have a functioning home computer again. Now I can get back to the business of filling this space with more mindless ramblings.

The other day on Fark there was a comment thread where people named their favorite song they were ashamed to admit they liked.

Here's one of mine: Barry Manilow's "Copacabana." And since this is my blog, what better place to put forth my personal theory on Just Who Shot Who?

Possible suspects are Lola (showgirl), Tony (barkeep), and Rico (diamond-wearer). Allow me a quick recap: Rico was escorted to his chair, and he saw Lola dancing there. When she finished, he called her over. But Rico went a bit too far and Tony sailed across the bar. And then the punches flew - and chairs were smashed in two. There was blood - and a single gunshot. But just who shot who?

Here's my theory about that gunshot. Lola sees the boys fighting, goes to the bar and gets the Peacekeeper kept under the counter. She aims at Rico and squeezes off a round but in all the commotion Tony gets between them, taking the bullet right between the shoulder blades. Tony dies, Rico walks, Lola gets off on a voluntary manslaughter charge when the jury hangs and gets down to the business of drinking herself half blind.

There you have it.

Oh, and another favorite - John Denver's "Annie's Song." No theories on that one though.

Anybody else reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series?

Travis turned me on to them a while back, and I just finished the fifth book, Wolves of the Calla. I am hungering for book six, and the seventh and final book will be released next month sometime. I am not a Stephen King fanboy - in fact, these are the only books of his I've read - but I am really enjoying this series. The characters are real enough that I'm willing to accept some very strange situations as plausible - such as three people with revolvers fighting a gigantic cyborg bear.

I will be happy to check one of the "unfinished series" slots off my reading list. Soon all that will remain are George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Fire and Ice" series and (along with the rest of western civilization) Harry Potter.

Last weekend we went camping. On the way up we stopped at Sonic for lunch. (Believe it or not, there are quite a few Sonic Drive-Ins in Bakersfield.)

After we sent the carhop in for more ketchup, Katy asked me if I had tipped her.

This question stunned me. I had never even considered tipping at Sonic.

When she came back I gave her a couple bucks, which she seemed to appreciate.

Now that I've had some time to consider it, I probably should have been tipping at Sonic - at least now that I'm not a poor high school student. It fits with my philosophy - as Vinny Antonelli says, "I don't believe in tipping. I believe in overtipping."

Dang. Now I feel like a cheap bastard, ex post facto. That stinks.

The next time I go to Sonic I'm tipping the carhop $20.

No, I don't believe so.

Katy and I went to Hawaii in late June to celebrate our tenth anniversary. It was a great trip - big thanks go out to Katy's family for watching the kids while we were off having fun.

It's taken me six weeks, but I put together an album of photos here.