I love well-written personal blogs.
I'm indoors on a lovely day waiting to see whether hunger or a need to urinate will be the first to get me out of bed. And now I have reading material!
If other people have recs for personal blogs, I'd love some. My list seem to be all evaporating lately and it makes me sad.
It would be nice to see a personal blog by somebody living next to a waterfall or babbling brook.
I like Violaraptor. I don't remember where I came across it so it might have been here.
7: Just trying to make Eggplant get up to pee.
Sorry Moby, hunger wins thanks to a once-empty, bedside water bottle.
If you spill the bottle, I'm still calling it a win.
I just realized that I misread the title of this post as having a meaning similar to "Wendell, I'm not content.".
I followed the link fully intending to read the blog, but then I found this footage of a baby Potto linked in the sidebar and it was game over.
I'm laying in a hammock in the sun drinking a beer, but if I'm going to be completely honest it's a little tough to see the screen out here.
The carrot soup turned out good -- just carrots and an onion sauteed in butter, then cooked in vegetable broth and pureed. I've been making a lot of that lately.
UPDATE: a giant hawk just flew right over me. The other birds are pissed!
The other birds are pissed!
But not the tweety bird.
17: Real-life Game Theory experiment!
I'm laying in a hammock in the sun drinking a beer
I'm sitting on a rocking chair in the shade drinking wine.
The other birds are attacking the hawk! I just saw a sparrow (or something) straight-up bite the hawk on the tail!
And I'm watching a Dodgers offense that's doing even less than any of us.
My holiday weekend is sucking donkey balls.
After a lot of pruning, weeding and cleaning of patio furniture and what not yesterday and earlier today, I'm now on a break from working in the pit of despair otherwise known as our basement which we've semi-neglected these past 20+ years. Shop-vacs are fun for the first 3 minutes, the next 87, not so much. Plus I have a bad cold. Later tonight I get to be on the phone with an Aussie to discuss a work project that's in the ditch. And then I'll lay my head on the railroad tracks.
Anyone else feel guilty about working on a nice weekend? I always feel that a better person would have gotten everything done during normal working hours, and would be out exercising healthfully, or maybe volunteering or subverting the dominant paradigm. Working on a weekend feels like a personal failure.
I have reading I should be doing, but eh: hawk show!
I did take down the storm windows and put up the screens this morning. The financial analysis I have to do I'm putting off until tomorrow night.
Hey, I'm in Brussels right now. Desultory, especially compared to anywhere in the Netherlands, but in a charming way.
Wonder if the thoroughgoing nonpayment of public transit fares here has gotten any international attention. It seems just the thing for NYT's "X Journal".
I did put up the hammock. That's definitely work. I also defeated all comers at ping pong.
Huh. Incredibly improbably, given the season, my previous comment hasn't held true.
I'm living in Belgium for most of this year, and I'd love to be working this weekend, but can't! I need the workstation in my office, and I don't have an access card to the building, which is locked on Sunday. So: Monday can't come quickly enough for me!
This may be pathetic/unhealthy, but I genuinely would rather be writing Matlab scripts and analysing data than messing around outside, or struggling to hear someone's small-talk over the music, or getting drunk, or whatever. My work is just better than all that.
23: A little bit--this holiday weekend is just hitting at the wrong time for me. I was at work until 8:00PM Friday evening sending out a bunch of meeting notices for this coming week and the next that I had never gotten around to. Which is bit pathetic. Where could my regular work hours go?
Plus I had a rather disturbing interaction with someone at work on Friday (not someone I have regular contact with and who is clearly (to me) struggling with emotional/mental health issues); the kind where I stewed about it all day yesterday and this morning made a record of the interaction and now have to decide if and who and how I talk to someone about it on Tuesday.
Upon re-reading 29, I see that it's clearly a loathsome comment. Sorry everyone!
It's all good -- having people to loathe keeps me happy.
30.2: Ask them how their parents raised them so far as gender roles go. You know, for the record.
I liked waffles a great deal when I was a kid, and still think of myself as someone who likes waffles, whatever that means, but I cannot recall when last I ate one. The waffle irons in the dining halls when I was in college may have affected me; they tended to burn the waffles.
29.2 is just so much the opposite of me. And I don't think it's because I use SAS and Stata.
Seems more like a comment on Belgium, if anything.
37: Nah, Belgium is lovely; it's just me.
I understand they make good waffles.
36: I'm alarmingly close to 40 and was never like that when I was younger. Small talk and music and outdoors, I could pass on. The not getting drunk was the strange part.
To be clear, I like getting drunk, too, but in the last few years it's gotten to be more trouble than it's worth: more severe hangovers, etc.
Mild outdoor adventure: we just had a young fox in the garden who couldn't seem to be able to figure out how to get out -- the garden area is a good 40 feet by 50 feet (something like that), blocked off by chicken wire against bunnies. Just a small thing, a cub, smaller than your average cat. It lurked behind a stump for a while, poked around this corner and that ... my housemate wondered whether he should go down and remove the chicken wire, and I said I thought we should leave him or her alone, as humans surely could induce panic, and he or she surely knew how he or she got in, so would figure it out. Right?
Suddenly a bluejay began to attack the fox cub! Oh noes! The little fox is now racing back and forth across the garden, the bluejay is swooping down repeatedly, and my housemate remarks, "I think I should do something."
Then we found five dollars.
42: I don't think opening a bigger hole in the wire would do any harm. Just try to keep as far from the cub as possible.
But make sure the fox isn't foaming at the mouth or something.
Is the five dollars riding on the fox or the bluejay?
Anyone else feel guilty about working on a nice weekend?
No. Not feeling guilty, anyway. I mostly am alternating between working and nagging the kids to get caught up on their homework. Like pretty much every other weekend.
I did take a break to help my 15-year old use the chainsaw to clear some dead/dying trees. More relaxing than work, except for worrying about him cutting his leg off (which he did not do--he did very well, and later fixed mashed potatos, corn on the cob and grilled bratwurst for dinner).
The five dollars was riding on the fox. Put on your Encyclopedia Brown hats, people: what do you think happened?
Mama fox probably died and baby fox is starving, confused, and doesn't know that dinosaurs and cavemen lived at different times.
47: The Civil War sword was a fake since it was inscribed "First Battle of Bull Run".
You had the snake kill both the fox and the bird?
The fox figured out how to get out, all by him- or herself! Though I will say that my favorite Encyclopedia Brown episode book was one that traded on his noticing that the car hood was warm at some certain time, which meant ... Eureka!
And I was about to guess that the fox had taught you an important lesson about love.
33: 30.2: Ask them how their parents raised them so far as gender roles go. You know, for the record.
Ha ha (said slowly and totally devoid of mirth). Gender roles did come up at one point--the whole thing was not, is not, cut and dried. Part of why I'm not really clear on next steps, if any.
55: I knew that lesson about love, which is why I left the fox alone.
A hedgehog would have known what to do.
But if it comes back it's yours! Right?
60: The other big thing can't be restrained by chicken wire.
This prompted me to refresh my memory on the fox and the hedgehog thing. I haven't read the original Berlin essay, but the general idea never seemed very useful to me.
As far as real hedgehogs go, they're a menace to gardens, unfortunately.
Also I have the hiccups, which doesn't happen that often, but man, it's a pain.
A man, a pain, a root canal, la n'ac too rani, a Panama!
Whew.
You ever read any of those comment threads over at Balloon Juice? They are fucking bananas.
I know, right? Understand, the banana is peeled in this case.
That's plantain seeds that foster life long issues.
At least they didn't spear mint.
My weekend was great! I played a show and hung out with a friend who was visiting from out of town, and then I went to a wedding at a former president's home (saving a baby chicken while we were there), and today I ate at a very '70s-tastic greasy spoon that I avoid whenever the students are around (it gets bro-tacular), and then a nice run along a river, and then there was a minor gardening task (staking the tomatoes) and a Friday Night Lights episode. Oh, and nachos and a salad for dinner, at the beer place up the street.
I'm sure everyone cares.
Belgian Waffling really is great. All hail Belgian Waffling.
70: Yes, but, the $5? Where did you find it?
My weekend was pretty good too! But it would have been better if I had been more moderate in my consumption of alcohol between, say, three and nine pm yesterday.
Or commented more in that window.
We took the family and friends tubing on the river and fun was had.
Beers was had too. In moderation, though.
Everything I had, I had, individually, in moderation.
77: Off-blog information leads me to believe that you had reason to be celebrating, moderately or otherwise.
82: I meant this DLC, but take your pick.
73: Same here, except between 5 and 11, which was really the same time, due to timezones.
The dioxin-like compound of reasons.
I spent the entire weekend both working and suffering with a nasty cold. I'm working again still today! Time and a half, though.
Cassidy turns four tomorrow. Saturday night, we had family over for a little birthday celebration and my brother and I stayed up late drinking rather more than we should have. Sunday morning was spent trying to shake the well-earned headache, then the afternoon/evening at my brother-in-law's new house for a housewarming party. At which my father-in-law and I fell asleep in recliners like all good patriarchs are supposed to do. Today was the birthday party at the pool with a bunch of other 3- to 4-year-old girls.
Unfortunately, I do not have a recliner at my own house.
Dude, you need a recliner. We have a couple orangey old ones no one else wanted when my wife's grandfather died. They rule.
I'm working on the weekend, but that's my normal schedule. Cool and rainy keeping it relatively slow. Had three guys wreck a stolen Honda at a motel and run from us on Sat. I ran one of them down in the trailer park across the street. Last night we surrounded a condo with a possible suicidal subject with a gun. No shooting, she came out and surrendered.
Your momma's so big and depressed...
A hedgehog would have known what to do.
The hedgehog knows one big thing, right? So the hedgehog could have given the thing a call, and the thing could have come over and ripped a hole in the chicken wire.
(I am picturing something similar to an Alot here.)
I am picturing something similar to an Alot here.
No, it's a hen. A big one. Poll' oid' alópéx, all' echinos hen mega. Possibly one of these.