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Okay, we’re back to a more normal schedule, I think. There were much goings-on over the weekend, particularly a cold-weather golf tournament (our second year!) of which I have many pictures, some of Milo‘s backswing, some that Milo took of my butt. I’ll get all that stuff posted probably tomorrowish, or Wednesday, or probably some time before 2008.
In the meanwhile, I started a gallery where I can upload my various efforts at photography, which so far contains just the one album of recent shots. I plan to get most of the New Castle shots up ins if I can figure out a way to batch process them (they start out as 3MB photos and I need to chop them down to 1MB or so before uploading, or the gallery prog won’t be able to handle them, and also I’d wipe out my online webspace in a matter of days; the problem is that there are over 200 of them and I’d like to shrink them in one big process rather than loading each picture into photoshop, resizing and saving it, etc.).
I also uploaded some new stuff to Charles’s site last week, make sure you don’t miss that.
USELESS NOTE: I am aware that the general form of my page is still Christmasy. I shall endeavour to update it this evening.
Don’t worry, I’m alive. I got roped into a last minute business trip, one of those deals in which I work about 40 hours in 2 days. Which I did. Got home early Wednesday morning and crashed like Billy Joel’s car.
Woo. I need another nap. More later.
It only took me, what, half a year? Anyway, the caption’d pictures from last summer’s Brandywiners production (My Fair Lady) are UP! Go enjoy the glory. I’ll be here, waiting for you to get back.
And…woot.
We had a nice loooong weekend. In honor of the commencement of my 30th year (for those of you who are math-dumb, this means that I have just turned 29 and am thusly awesome), I took Friday and Monday off, and we drove to Richmond to be one with our Virginian pepys.
‘Cause they smell rather iffy.
The drive down was a breeze, since I got paged for something and our 6pm ETD got pushed back to 8pm. By that time, of course, there was simply nobody on the road, aside from a bunch of trucks, and the usual idiots sitting in the left lane holding up the works. I guess that means there WERE people on the road. However, they were very few, and dammit I STAND BY MY HYPERBOLE.
We arrived late, which didn’t prevent us from shooting the shiz with Kyle and Kris, having a few drinks, making Charles stay up WAAAAAY past his bedtime, etc. In our defense, he was about as interested in sleeping as I was in getting up at the asscrack of dawn on Saturday for work (more on this later), but we finally got him down to sleep.
We awoke on Friday to the plaintive cries of our firstborn, softly murmuring for mother’s milk. Ha ha! Just kidding. He woke us up at 6:45am by sitting up in his crib and talking at us at the top of his lungs. Here is the gist of what he said:
Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba wa wa wa wooooooo ba ba ba bla bloo blaa wooo!
Translation:
What are you idiots still doing in bed? The sun’s almost up, and I’m famished! Additionally, I just dropped a deuce big enough to feed a family of five.
We gave him a bottle to gnaw on and attempted to sleep, but his constant yammering (I don’t know where he gets this from) caused me to bring him downstairs so he wouldn’t wake up everybody else. We watched Kyle’s enormous TV and chewed on various things.
That day, we mostly sat around and cogitated (and took roughly three million pictures with my new camera), but eventually we did go out that evening to celebrate my birthday, during which I drank many beers and ate a piece of prime rib the size of my head. It was excellent.
Saturday was spent preparing for the bridal shower, which mostly meant grabbing Charles and ducking for cover. In the afternoon approximately every woman in the Commonwealth of Virginia descended on the house, so the boys, sans Charles, hightailed it for lunch and bowling. We played three games; in order, my scores were: Not Good; Slightly Better; and Surprisingly Good, Considering I Had Switched To A 12 Pound Ball And Was Just Screwing Around Trying To Throw The Most Devastating Spin I Could Muster. I kinda “found the range” with my spin and was knocking down pins like cuh-RAZAY, and so have decided I need to buy an actual bowling ball and practice this further. I haven’t told Sarah of this decision yet, mostly because I just dropped nearly a grand on a camera and accessories, so any further purchases must be approved by She Who Would Clothespin My Dong To A Bicycle (As If It Were A Baseball Card) If I Didn’t Keep An Eye On It.
The gals planned to go out to dinner, so the guys had to come home and entertain Charles for a few hours, after which the girls returned and kicked us out again so they could have a Bachelorette party and watch Carmen Electra Strip Tease Workout videos. (Seriously. I couldn’t have been more thrilled when we came back and discovered them all practicing with chairs and poles and things. Most of us wept a little bit, and I took some pictures that will never see the light of Internets if I ever want to have more children.)
Sunday was my birthday, so I got up and hung out with Charles while Sarah slept in. This may not make sense to you, but it sums up our marriage dynamic rather tidily. (Just kidding, honey! Put down the pliers!) Around 11am, we were watching some NFL pre-game TV when Kyle noticed it was snowing. Neato!
Around noon, Mel and Craig (who were also down for the weekend) skedaddled north. Team Hearn needed to be in DC by around 3pm for the first birthday of another of our friends’ childrenz, so we had the car completely loaded up when Craig called to alert us that the roads north of town were icing up, full of traffic, and basically at a standstill. So, Sarah and I got into HearnHuddleTM and decided that we would wait out the precipitation and traffic. This meant that we would have to miss the birthday party, but it also meant that I didn’t have to fight through heavy, sleety traffic on my birthday, which would have caused me great angst and possibly forced me to develop a small nuclear program.
It also meant that we were able to watch both Conference Championship football games, which was nice too. Yay for Peyton Manning finally coming up big.
We ended up getting on the road about 10:30pm, and sure enough, there wasn’t much traffic. The roads were still slick, though, particularly just north of DC where apparently no salting was being done and there was a good inch of slush on the road. This slowed all the cars down to 35mph, but seemed to have no effect on the heavy eighteen-wheelers, all of which were blowing by us at 50-plus. Coupled with the fact that you couldn’t see any lines on the road, I spent a fair amount of time praying to God to spare us and, if He had to, kill one of the other families in our stead.
I just made one stop to drain the main vein, and we made it home around 2:30am. Since I had yesterday off, I was then able to sleep until about 10am and it was SO AWESOME. Then I did some computery things and took my camera over to Old New Castle to take some pictures which I plan to edit a bit and post later this week. (Don’t worry, I don’t intend to turn this into a Photography blog, because photos aren’t especially funny (with obvious exceptions), and my purpose in life is to make you giggle until you pee and ruin your best work pants.)
AND THAT WAS MY LONG WEEKEND. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much I enjoyed doing it, except for the driving in the slush with maniacal 18-wheelers part, because I enjoyed that not at all.
I got a new camera. Happy birthday to me!
ADDITIONAL UPDATE, YO!: Mondo pictures over at CharlesHearn.com. Fact: Charles is awesome.
Okay, here’s the thing. If you don’t watch “House” you are missing out on The Awesomeness.
I myself came to the show late. I started watching last fall and was like “WHOA It’s like a party in my brain! What have I been missing!” HW and I have been trying to catch up on the episodes we’ve missed, and as a result I feel like the hole in my soul that has been there ever since well FOREVER really is starting to fill up.
Yes, Charles did fill a hole in my soul, but that was A DIFFERENT HOLE. My soul is like swiss cheese, people; I need a little Charles, a little scotch, and a little Hugh Laurie and Jennifer Morrison.
Side note: the name Hugh is totally bad. When I say bad, I mean good. Like, bad-azz and shiz. Just throwing that out there.
The show has everything: supreme intellectual discussions of diseases and disorders; grizzled manly men (House, Foreman); emotionally-available prettyboys (Chase, Wilson); moderately psychotic hot chicks (Cuddy, Cameron); and the occasional exploding testicle.
What more could you possibly ask?
Okay, yes, perhaps some nudity, and maybe a little more of Doctor Cameron smoking a bunch of meth and getting it on with Doctor Chase, but even without that stuff the show is near perfection, even with the exploding testicle thing, which makes a brother queasy, fo’ reazy.
Next week: I expound in my usual ridiculous style on the topic of 24 and why Jack Bauer is going to give me a big hug. (He needs it.)
Oh, I made a wiki, do with it what you will.
Link day, y’all! HECK YES!
- I got a new haircut yesterday, and trust me, I definitely considered this. It was simply fear of my violent wife’s wrath that kept me looking my usual self.
- It’s new! It’s fast! It…is it frowning at me? That’s an interesting marketing ploy.
- I admit: in an effort to understand this comic, I looked up the Ackermann Function as well as whatever g64 is. I think the brain overload gave me cancer.
- This reminded me of my Recording professor at Peabody, Alan Kefauver, who had a reputation for making dumb freshmen believe that if you held a piece of recording tape to your ear and ran your thumbnail on it at just the right speed, you would hear the recording stored thereupon. He didn’t try to pull it on me, which nice ’cause I’m an idiot and would probably have tried it, but now I can pretend I wouldn’t have fallen for it.
- The beauty of socialised medicine! (Spelt all Britishly ’cause the story’s all Britishy.)
- Speaking as a Fat American, this is hilarious.
That’s all I got! So…bye!
I’ve been thinking a lot about vegetarianism lately, prodded by my friend Rachel and various other famous folks, and I think it’s time I joined the fray. Not that I have anything of value to say, really, but Lord knows if I can say something stupid and pointless about a subject that I know nothing about, I am going to do so, dang it.
It’s the American Way.
Anyway. I’m willing to concede that a vegetarian diet is undoubtedly healthy, even healthier than a meat-laden diet, assuming you make sure to get various vitamins that are found in abundance in meats and rather scarcely in veggies. I’m a little hesitant to concede that eating meat is unethical, because I am a bit of a moral relativist and I don’t like when people tell me where to draw lines. (What I mean by this is the following: my house has an ant problem. It hasn’t been bad the last few months, but usually they reemerge every spring in swarms until I pay a thin man with a truck full of noxious chemicals to arrange for their collective demise. I consider this to be vital to the health of my family, and I’d like to think that any vegetarian with any sense would deal with a pest problem the same way. Ants have brains, though. Why does a chicken’s brain have any greater claim to the continuation of life than an ant?) I’m completely supportive of the idea that animals should be treated humanely, and thus I do disapprove of large farms that stuff animals into small cages and inject them with horrific chemicals to counteract the effects of putting millions of barely-healthy critters into a small space. (Not gonna lie, though, KFC is hella good.)
I do get into arguments with veggie folks, though, over the idea that humans were or weren’t designed to eat meat. Humans may or may not have subsisted primarly on seeds and pine nuts 50K years ago, I wasn’t there taking notes. But they did eat meat when they could get it. And why? Because It Tastes Good.
My argument here is not that we should be permitted to eat on animals just because it tastes good. What I’m saying is that animals are designed/evolved/made by robots/whatever to eat certain diets, and to them those diets taste good. Carnivores eat meat not because they have made an objective decision that, ethics be damned, they believe it is their birthright to eat the flesh of their fallen animal brothers, but because IT TASTES REALLY DELICIOUS to them. Herbivores stick to grass and leaves and things not because they are tree huggers who drive hybrids with ACLU stickers all over them, but because to them that stuff is like prime filet, yo.
I can’t speak for anybody but myself, but to me, red meat tastes like there is a party in my mouth and stomach and NOBODY ELSE IS INVITED ITS ALL JUST FOR ME YOU BASTARDS. Tofu tastes like an elephant crapped and somebody rendered it into cube form. My tongue was designed to deliver pleasurable sensations to my brain when I eat meat, and thusly I intend to continue eating animals AND vegetables in massive amounts, as is my nature, until enough people disagree with me to make a law saying it’s illegal. I figure this’ll happen around 2032 or so, so I’d better get my fill while I can.
Do you ever completely irrationally miss things? Not miss as in “I tried to shoot my cat but she ducked,” but miss as in “I shot my cat and I wish I had not done so as I had not foreseen how much her peeing on me while I slept was part of my life.” I was chit-chatting with some coworkers about Accenture, a company with whom we frequently do business, and how they took over the old Wanamaker Building on Augustine Cutoff (the only image I could find is this one, which was taken recently and seems to feature crap).
I miss Wanamaker’s. They moved out of that building 1991 in favor of a massive new location in Christiana Mall, which subsequently sold out to the May’s corporation which turned it into a Hecht’s, which in turn became Lord & Taylor, which closed last year. I’m not sure why I miss it (this is the irrational part); it was no different than any other crappy clothing store, except by the time I knew it this particular store was stained. Literally and figuratively; the cheap panel carpeting looked like it had been lived on by an incontinent elephant, and the whole place had an aura, from as far back as I can remember, of “we’re probably going to close in a few months. Don’t put anything on layaway.”
Externally, though, the building is MAGNIFICENT, even if the inside had lost all luster decades ago. It has different levels, and a huge glass curving window with pillars on the outside, and it’s simply a mid-century architectural masterpiece. Not having a picture to show you is KILLING me. (I keep having to inject myself with small doses epinephrine to keep my heart going.)
I don’t have a lot of memories of the place. Just a few of going with my mom and sister and playing hide-and-seek among the racks of clothes and getting into trouble, which happened a lot, and one vivid memory of me making My First Purchase Of Any Kind. (I’m pretty sure this happened there, although it also could have happened at the Sears in Governor Square, another sad loss to the Wilmington economy.) I had scrimped and saved, and I had my $2.50, and I wanted a set of the Hot Wheels cars that had little swivelling parts that would simulate crash damage when you banged them into one another. (Ah, the simple tastes of youth.)
I remember a major point of discussion with my mother at the time was whether I should tell the cashier to “keep the change,” which would have been a penny. I apparently was quite the generous tipper at 8.
OMG I have TOTALLY figured out how to be thin, and I am going to share it You, The Reader! It’s very simple, and will TOTALLY WORK FOR YOU.
First, you must figure out how much you want to weigh. I would like to see if I can weigh 200 pounds, although in reality if I were to be that slender you would probably call 911 because I would look I just walked out of the desert.
Second, you have to figure out how many calories you need in a day based on the weight you would like to be. (Just do some googling, you lazybones, there are calculators EVERYWHERE.) For example, apparently a 200 pound man of average daily activity burns roughly 2600 calories per day.
Lastly, you have to figure out exactly how much roasted skinless chicken breast, baked potato with salt, and butter fits into that calories, and divide it up to eat all day! Super simple. You can even just blend all the potatoes and chicken and butter together and drink it in shake form throughout the day!
Using my example, I need to take in 2600 calories. Diet AuthoritiesTM (yeah, I don’t really know who either) tell me that you want to divide those calories up thusly: 30% protein, 20% fat, 50% carbohydrates. So I need 780 calories of protein, 520 calories from fat, and 1300 calories from carbs.
I’ll get my carb calories totalled first, since neither chicken nor butter have any, and I’ll know how many potatoes I have to eat tomorrow. 1 ounce of baked potato with skin reportedly has 24 calories from carbs and 3 calories from protein, with negligible fat, so I will need 1300/24=54.16 ounces of potatoes, or roughly 3 1/3 pounds! That sounds like a lot, but don’t forget: potatoes taste awesome.
The potatoes also contribute 54.16*3=162.5 calories of protein, so I only need to get another ~620 calories from that, which I’ll get from my chicken. 1 ounce of skinless chicken breast contains 16 protein calories, so I’ll just go ahead and roast up 620/16=38.75 ounces, or about 2 1/3 pounds, of tasty chicken. This will also give me 38.75*9=349 calories of fat, so I only need to get 170 more calories of fat, which is handly contained in about 1.5 tablespoons of butter!
All I have to do is eat 2 1/3 pounds of chicken, 3 1/3 pounds of potatoes, and a spare hunk of butter every day for the rest of my life, and I will weigh 200 pounds!
I’m all over it.
UPDATE: It turns out I cannot have any peppermint patties on this diet, so SCREW THIS.
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