Best of 2009

Jan­u­ary

Really Expen­sive Pedometer

Wednes­day the 14th

Over the years to keep track of how far she walks Donna has tried umpteen dif­fer­ent pedome­ters. We started cheap (because how tech­ni­cal can they be?), like six bucks. Well those pup­pies aren’t too accu­rate, it really seemed to mat­ter that it was on a cer­tain point of your waist to get a decent read­ing, but a lot of times even if you put it right where it was yes­ter­day, it wouldn’t work. We tried dou­bling our price point with no improve­ment. We have even tried one that was like $25 and the results were just as disappointing.

She has tried them while at work, walk­ing around the block and hik­ing in the woods. Occa­sion­ally the mileage recorded seemed like it might be close, but mostly it was way, way, off. The work tally would be inter­est­ing because she really does do a lot of trav­el­ing around the plant in her job. The after work mileage is eas­ily com­puted because we can use the bicy­cle com­puter to repli­cate the route, but the woods walks are harder. The map we use is marked with a grid and the lines are 1000′ apart, so she has been esti­mat­ing the mileage by approx­i­mat­ing the windy trails to the grids cov­ered and divid­ing by 5280. Not too accurate.

The other day when we came out from our walk in the woods she said, “I wish there was a bet­ter way to see how far we have walked.” I said, “I know one sure way.” “What?” “A GPS,” I replied.

Our Garmin eTrex Ven­ture HC arrived today.

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Feb­ru­ary

Red Shirt

Mon­day the 2nd

Although orig­i­nat­ing in Star Trek, the term “red­shirt” has been used in com­men­tary on other action adven­ture sto­ries, par­tic­u­larly seri­al­ized tele­vi­sion. As a plot device, red­shirts are most com­monly used on shows which focus on char­ac­ters who are promi­nent mem­bers of a larger group. In terms of plot func­tion, red­shirts serve to high­light the dan­ger of a sit­u­a­tion with­out forc­ing writ­ers to sac­ri­fice lead characters.

Feb­ru­ary is National Heart Month and this com­ing Fri­day is Wear Red Day 2009 to sup­port the fight against heart dis­ease in women.

For what­ever con­vo­luted rea­son our com­pany nurse decided to pass around a memo last week to try and get every­one to wear red today, Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 2nd and in spite of what hap­pened to Frogurt while wear­ing a red shirt in last week’s episode of TDTVS I took my life into my hands and wore a red sweater to work today. Obvi­ously because I am home sit­ting on the couch in a yel­low shirt, noth­ing bad hap­pened to me on today’s “away mission.”

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March

Giant Metal Squirrels

Thurs­day the 12th

On our lit­tle tour of Dau­fuskie Island there were sev­eral his­toric sites and a cou­ple of art “gal­leries” that were high­lighted for us to stop at.

When we left the Gen­eral Store and Cart Rental place we started out fol­low­ing the rec­om­mended tour route. The first stop was a spot that held two his­toric places, an old church and an old school. Of course there were two other golf carts stopped there too, so we hung around until they left and instead of con­tin­u­ing on the “tour” we took the first left we could. From then on we almost never saw any of our ferry mates again. Hey we came here to get away from people.

We even­tu­ally rode on most of the tour route just back­wards or com­ing at it side­ways. There were a cou­ple of his­toric ceme­ter­ies that we wanted to check out and in spite of trav­el­ing down the roads they were on, never did see any. We did find one of the artist gal­leries, The Iron Fish, and parked our golf cart under the tree in the side yard. It is a 100 year-old orig­i­nal island house that has a front porch that serves as the gallery and the front wall is cov­ered with funky, yet appeal­ing schools of metal fish. The are also metal crabs and mer­maids mixed in. There was a note on the front door with pur­chase instruc­tions: If you see some­thing you like take it and slip your money under the door. For credit card pur­chases, leave a note say­ing what you bought and your phone num­ber. A nice school of four small fish would be an awe­some dec­o­ra­tion on a liv­ing room or bed room wall, but at $85 per fish they were a bit rich for our blood.

As we got back into the cart to leave we both noticed sev­eral large metal squir­rels stuck to the trunk of the tree and both of us went, “Coool.” I checked the price and they were $45 a piece and both of us went, “Naaah.” Just before turn­ing the key to start the cart Donna said, “You sure?” I hes­i­tated and then said, “Why not?” Chase, the artist, was in his back­yard, so I walked over and gave him the cash. He offered to wrap it up, but we declined just stick­ing it in the bot­tom of our black travel bag.

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April

Key­stone, SD

Mon­day the 13th

1365 miles from home.

We have been as far away from Aiken as we will be on this trip and also the far­thest north, both of which occurred today. Now we start to work our way south. Up until this after­noon it has been cloudy or rainy or cold or some com­bi­na­tion of all three, but around mid­day blue sky started to show up, so now we are just down to cold, but just at night the days should be pleas­ant (about like early Feb­ru­ary for Aiken.)

Speed­ing north on I-25 in Wyoming yes­ter­day there was a large quan­tity of black ani­mals off to the west, at first we thought they were cows, but then real­ized they were buf­falo. At the posted speed limit of 70 MPH they were gone from view before my synapses could reg­is­ter that maybe I should take a picture.

Speed­ing east on Wyoming 24 this morn­ing they was a large quan­tity of small black ani­mals not far off the road to our right, at first we thought they were goats, but then real­ized that they were wild turkeys. At the posted speed limit of 65 MPH they were gone from view before my synapses, etc.

The deer up here are fear­less. They stand along the side of the road graz­ing and pretty much ignore us. That ignor­ing thing works both ways though, as there are quite a lot of dead ones along the road too.

So far I am 0 for 2 when ask­ing for Coke in a restau­rant, they have had Pepsi, which I have politely declined.

Dev­ils Tower is awe­some. On the way up the rain was spo­radic and occa­sion­ally the clouds would thin out enough that we would almost need sun­glasses, but mostly the skies were gray. I told Donna that I thought it would be cool if I could get a shot of the thing with the top half shrouded in clouds. She didn’t want that at all, she was hop­ing for a nice blue sky. Turned out we both got our wish.

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May

Kamakazie Kricket

Fri­day the 15th

I was just out in the garage giv­ing the Emperor a lit­tle sponge bath in prepa­ra­tion for tomorrow’s MMC event when I spot­ted a cricket watch­ing me. I’m not even pos­i­tive crick­ets have eyes, but this one sure seemed like it was giv­ing me the once over. There were sev­eral large splats on the nose of the car that I was Quick Detail­ing off and maybe this cricket felt I was being dis­re­spect­ful of a dead rel­a­tive or something.

It was no ordi­nary cricket either, it was big one, about the size my friend Mark might use as bait while fish­ing for kayak sized cat­fish. Well, all that star­ing kind of unnerved me a lit­tle, so I slipped off my sneaker and moved slowly that direc­tion to flat­ten Jiminy out.

In some places it is believed if you kill a cricket it is bad luck, but with the way my luck is run­ning recently, who would notice. I’ve also heard that if kill a cricket it’ll rain, but with the weather we’ve had, and are pre­dicted to have, who would notice.

As I swung my Nike with deadly intent at our giant cricket, it leaped out of the way at the last minute. Did he jump away from me, no, he jumped AT me!

I am proud to say that I didn’t squeal like a lit­tle girl as it bounced off my arm, then my chest and then who knows where. I did how­ever flail my arms and upper body around in a pathetic attempt to get away like an unco­or­di­nated spaz who just stepped on a banana peel.

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June

When The Going Gets Tough…

Fri­day the 19th

…the tough go shopping.

The FRS were on TV tonight because they were play­ing the Braves and if you live in the south every Braves game is on TV. The Red Sox had their 13 Tril­lion Yen Man (Daisuke Mat­suzaka) pitch­ing and there was much excite­ment in the Land of the Ris­ing Sun because he was fac­ing off against the Brave’s Japan­ese starter Ken­shin Kawakami. Both guys have had rough starts to the sea­son, but tonight’s rough start award went to Boston’s Dice-K as his first pitch of the game was belted into the bullpen for a home run. Then it went down­hill from there. By the end of the 5th inning the Sox were down 6–0, so we went out to do our weekly gro­cery shopping.

For the sec­ond time in seven days we have left a store leav­ing our selected pur­chases behind.

I got in a check­out line behind what I thought was a woman who was nearly fin­ished as she had a full cart and about a dozen items left on the belt. After unload­ing 2/3rds of the cart onto the nearly empty belt I real­ized it hadn’t moved and there were now two cashiers fid­dling around at the scan­ner. I think they were try­ing to take an item off the woman’s order, they’d swipe some­thing and the machine would boop and they’d both look up at the screen in uni­son, shake the heads, repeat. After the forth time I think it worked because one cashier left and the remain­ing one scanned another item and then imme­di­ately start­ing ask­ing for the first cashier to come back. It was now becom­ing clear that she didn’t know what she was doing. And it also became clear that the shop­per was sep­a­rat­ing the final 10 items into 2 sep­a­rate orders and she had a pay­check to cash or maybe a sub­stance check and that we were going to stand­ing here awhile. There was one other check out line open, but there was no way that I was off load­ing the belt to put it in my cart to move over two slots. We looked at each other, shrugged and headed for the door.

We drove a mile down the street to another store, prob­a­bly spent $25 more dol­lars than we would have at the first store, but we were in and out and on the way home like we should have been at Store #1.

The game was mer­ci­fully over by the time we got back, both teams each scored 2 unevent­ful runs, so they FRS lost by a score of 8–2. They play each other twice more over the week­end, so it is not too late to save face.

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July

Pay­Pal Bonus

Wednes­day the 22nd

A cou­ple weeks ago I had an unau­tho­rized charge show up on my Pay­Pal account. I only had a lit­tle over $10 in there, the charge amounted to about $35 and because my check­ing account was linked, they took the over­age from it. I dis­puted the charge with both Pay­Pal and the mer­chant and they both agreed I was wronged, so my money was returned with in a cou­ple days.

I basi­cally only use Pay­Pal for an occa­sional eBay pur­chase, but in the past I’ve used it for snap deals found on the net, so a credit card is also linked. After dig­ging through the Pay­Pal help pages I dis­cov­ered that they could do an instant trans­fer from my check­ing because I had that CC listed as a back-up source. Want­ing to ensure that they couldn’t just yank money out of my check­ing account again, I removed the credit card.

Well, because some­one had used my account with­out per­mis­sion Pay­Pal had me do a cou­ple of things before they would let me access my money again. One of which was change my pass­word and another was to change my secu­rity ques­tions. Both were no brain­ers and easy to do.

The third thing they wanted was to con­firm my address. This was the sticky one. The easy way to con­firm my address was to link a charge card to my account. Nah, don’t want to do that, that’s what got me in this mess in the first place. There is another way, Pay­Pal could mail a code to my snail mail address that I could, when received, enter into their site. Trou­ble was I didn’t meet the require­ments for this option, because I had a dis­pute within the last 3 months.

I stewed for a week fig­ur­ing out what I should do.There were no wor­ries about any­one get­ting any money out of the account dur­ing this time because it was frozen while we con­firmed my address. The plan I came up with was to con­firm with a credit card and then once I had access to my money, pull it all out and close the Pay­Pal account.

To make sure that the card, and con­se­quently my address, were good they were going to charge the card $1.95 and then promptly refund it. I for­got all about the whole thing until about 5 days later when I got an email from Pay­Pal say­ing they were giv­ing me a bonus. I thought, wow, that’s nice, must be to make up for the has­sle I’ve been through, they added a dol­lar ninety five into my account.

Hey, wait a minute!

I checked my CC online and sure enough they had no trou­ble with­draw­ing money, but they never refunded the card. They turned around and cred­ited my money into my Pay­Pal account and called it a bonus.

That cinched it, I trans­ferred my measly $60 back into my bank and I’m shut­ting down my Pay­Pal account.

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August

I Know It When I See It

Wednes­day the 5th

Let’s talk porn, in honor of my two recent posts on the sub­ject thanks to io9, the scifi (not syfy) site I read every day. They are part of net­work of sites that cover var­i­ous sub­jects, one of which is about the biggest money maker on the net, porn. So every time there is any­thing remotely about sci­ence fic­tion over on Flesh­bot it gets cross posted on io9.

At my age pornog­ra­phy has lost a lot of its lus­ter. Notice I didn’t say all of it, I’m not above check­ing out some of the posts on Flesh­bot when io9 links them, but I don’t have the site book­marked or any­thing. There is noth­ing like that first thrill of find­ing your dad’s Play­boy at 12 or sev­eral years later a friend dis­cov­ers some black and white 8mm stag films in his base­ment. When I was in the Navy there was a co-worker who knew where you could get XXX on VHS. On Sat­ur­days I would carry my VCR over to his house and we would both make a copy a movie. He was try­ing to amass a col­lec­tion, I was just using the same tape and copy­ing over last weeks movie.

It was the last six months in the Navy that removed most of the lus­ter off of porn for me. My final duty sta­tion was aboard the U.S.S. Iwo Jima as an E6, or Petty Offi­cer First Class. We had a 1st Class Mess, which was basi­cally a small room on the Mess Deck, where we could eat our meals, take a coffee/smoke break or just spend our down­time read­ing or play­ing Acey Duecy. There was a TV mounted in high up in one cor­ner of the room, so we could watch Armed Forces TV. The TV also had a VCR attached so we could watch movies. There was a selec­tion of cur­rent releases if you were inter­ested, but by far the largest col­lec­tion of tapes were of the XXX variety.

Who ever the guy was that was in charge of movies really liked the hard core stuff. Every, and any, time you went into the mess that cor­ner of the room was filled with inces­sant moan­ing and close ups of gen­i­talia. Try to eat eggs over easy and sausage links at 5 AM or hot dogs at lunch with that going on in the back­ground, it sort of takes the plea­sure out of both activities…

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Sep­tem­ber

Covey of Cachers

Fri­day the 4th

I mean that not in a avian way, but in a Dead­head or Phish Fol­low­ers way. These are a few of ingre­di­ents that were stir­ring around in my sub­con­scious lead­ing to last night’s final dream:

1. Attend­ing the June CSRA Geo­cachers meet­ing where there were 60–70 peo­ple.
2. Read­ing the logs of caches where it seems like some folks travel in packs from 6 to 12 or more and do big quan­ti­ties of finds in a day.
3. A brief con­ver­sa­tion with a cache owner when I returned his ban­ished from SCDNR land ammo can.
4. A short scene from the last movie we watched, Invis­i­ble Cir­cus.
5. I ate too much junk from the Ryan’s Mega Bar the night before.
6. Wak­ing a 4AM to go to the bath­room, thus leav­ing enough time to get back into deep REM sleep before…
7. …being jolted awake mid dream so the last snip­pets were fresh in my brain.

We were out caching on a South Car­olina back road and had just logged a find. Donna was sit­ting in the car plan­ning our next des­ti­na­tion and I was walk­ing the short dis­tance into the woods to replace the ammo can. Donna shouted, with a slight bit of alarm in her voice, “Brian!” I hastily tossed some pine straw over the cache and started out of the woods. I can see what caused her state. There parked on the other side of the road from where we were was a bus that looked like it came from a scene in The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And out of the bus piled dozens of peo­ple aged from 8 to 80 in odd dress that looked like it was bor­rowed from J.F. Sebastian’s man­u­fac­tured com­pan­ions in Blade Run­ner. There was jug­gling, a uni­cy­cle rider, tam­bourine play­ing, etc. As I got closer I rec­og­nized the faces, they belonged to geo­cachers from the local Club. Just as I was cross­ing the street to intro­duce myself to one of these char­ac­ters with a Cyrano de Berg­erac nose when the alarm went off.

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Octo­ber

Talk­ing Birds

Fri­day the 23rd

1. This morn­ing we stopped on the way to work to take some cash out of the ATM. Donna sat in the car, I walked up to the build­ing and inserted my card into the machine. For every but­ton I push on the ATM it emits a pleas­ant lit­tle beep.

Donna could hear some birds off to the right in a lie of hedges between the bank and a home. She also heard what she thought was a dif­fer­ent bird com­ing from the big tree near the ATM where I stood.

Donna heard the birds on her right move over towards me and the other bird. At the same time, as I wound down my trans­ac­tion, I heard a cou­ple of very noisy birds so close that it sounded like they were in the ATM alcove with me.

The birds I heard were in the tree not the ATM alcove and the dif­fer­ent bird she heard in the tree was my ATM but­ton presses. So, did the beep­ing ATM talk those birds into mov­ing from the hedge into the tree?

2. On our lunch time walk as we passed the car we could hear a crow in a tree in the pas­ture next to the plant, “Caw, caw. Caw, Caw.”

The Weather Chan­nel was call­ing for a 30% chance of evening show­ers, so we had left the top down with the cock­pit cover on, but the skies were now look­ing kind of dicey. As we walked, we dis­cussed whether or not to just put the top up. I thought that it was prob­a­bly going to be OK with it down as the clouds didn’t like like big rain pro­duc­ers, but I was not real certain.

As we neared the car on the way back, that same crow was still speak­ing loudly, “Caw Caw! Caw Caw!” It seemed like he was talk­ing to us and it sounded like he was say­ing, “Top up! Top up!” So we put it up.

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Novem­ber

How Was Your Day Dear?

Mon­day the 16th

Can you say root canal?

I did not watch this evening’s episode of House. I will plan on down­load­ing the tor­rent, so I can watch it in HD tomor­row. I under­stand tonight’s episode has some­thing to do with a sick porn star and absolutely noth­ing to do with her hav­ing a root canal.

Same deal for Cas­tle, don’t watch and down­load the tor­rent, their first sus­pect has air­tight alibi, turns out he was hav­ing a root canal done at the time of the murder.

I need to buy a Nestle’s $100,000 Bar 100 Grand Candy Bar soon as the Emperor cur­rently has 99,864 miles on the odome­ter. I’ll be care­ful to chew it up on only the right side as I wouldn’t want the soft, chewy caramel to pull out the tem­po­rary fill­ing from my freshly root canaled tooth.

Mod­ern den­tistry is awe­some, the hard­est part of get­ting a root canal these days is hold­ing your jaw wide open for 45 min­utes straight, well maybe the sec­ond hard­est after you see the bill.

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Decem­ber

The Spi­der That Came In From The Cold

Fri­day the 18th

Just as my wife was was bring­ing din­ner to the table see cried, “Roach!” This as we all know is the man of the house’s call to action. I shout where as I reach for a suit­able insect death device. She points down and says, “There, but hurry it is going under that chair.” She spins the big arm­chair next to the couch out of the way. With no shoes handy, I grab the top mag­a­zine from the plethora of them semi-neatly fanned across the cof­fee table.

By now Donna has her bug tracker radar locked on the intruder and has cor­rectly ascer­tained that it is a large spi­der. Like most mod­ern war­planes her radar can track and iden­tify sev­eral tar­gets at once, so she orders me to drop the newest South­ern Liv­ing I had picked up and replace it with last week’s Time.

I’m grate­ful it is a slow mov­ing spi­der, I have a chance at that, those pal­metto bug/roaches move very fast and I usu­ally end up slap­ping the floor sev­eral times right where the bug used to be before it squeezes under the base­board mak­ing good its escape.

By now the large black, 1–1/2″ long, spi­der is under one of the end tables which lim­its my arm travel. I make sev­eral inef­fec­tive swats at it and I am begin­ning to think it might get away when I get lucky and it zigs right under where I’m swinging.

I think I need some spi­der swat­ting lessons from Garfield.

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