Chasing the dogs home

Subject: great day working by the lake

I've never truly gotten into the Smiths or Morrissey. The style was definitely inline with a lot of music I listened to, but never quite made the connection for me.



When I was younger, I always harbored the suspicion that morrissey was basically just full of shit throwing out easy lyrics designed to woo girls and maybe a few boys. I've always thought that they were talented, good music etc, but something just never resonated in the message for me.



I think it may have had something to do with my formative years when I matured past being a teenager. When I was young I could woo (silly word but its a bit of a silly practice so I'm making fun of it now) girls like it was nobody's business.



But it was kind of a hollow little easy game that I grew bored with pretty quickly. So when ever I listen to the Smiths or Morrissey, I just hear some of the same adolescent drivel that I grew past at one point or another.



I suspect that I will never be able to go back and listen to the Smiths or Morrissey with new ears or a new subjectivity that will let me enjoy or possibly really respect the music. Its more a reflection on myself probably than it is on the artist or the music, but sometimes that is the entire point with music anyway. It helps us reflect on who we are, who we were, and who we might yet be.



Unless, I'm reincarnated and have to go through teenage years all over again, I doubt I'll be able to give Morrissey another chance.

I just did this swim again (2nd time) and I' exhausted, but in a can't walk good way.



Just barely able to lift or move my mouse right now.

It started as a very humid hazy morning here on the lake, but it has cleared up and dried up a bit. I have a conference call in 6 minutes and after that I'm going for a swim.

Who says that left overs can't taste great?



The Cheetos are actually about an hour or so on the stale side, but all in all this is a yummy lunch for us non-vegetarian types.

I don't wear these very often as they tend to be a little bumpy, but sometimes my speedo thongs kind of give me a bit of a massage when I move.

Usually I wear a different brand of thongs, but just to change things up I pull these old speedo thongs out of the closet and jump into them.

I was just walking into the house from my Dock Office and as I was walking up the porch steps, my speedo thong was sticking out a little too much and it caught on the step and I about tripped and fell on my face.

I guess that's a lesson to everyone out there that likes to wear speedo thongs, you can't wear them all the time even if they massage your skin a bit because before you know it they'll stick out too far, you'll trip and fall on your face and they don't allow speedo thongs in the hospital!

I have been trying to swim further and further lately, just to see how far I can swim. I'm not training for an iron man or anything like that. Just not interested in that type of thing.



I do however, like to understand what I am capable of doing and accomplishing. Plus, after moving last week, my knees were feeling a little rough so I haven't been running lately.



So as today was pretty damn hot here on the lake, and I needed some exercise, I jumped in the water and swam out to the end of our cove. You can see in this image a buoy that is about 1/10 th of a mile from our dock. We swim to that regularly. Way off in the distance, there are 2 additional buoys that are about 3/10ths of a mile (if I drive the cove instead of swimming it, so its actually a little further in the water).



So I swam a bit of a triangle pattern out to the middle of the cove, then out to the end of the cove somewhat by the edge and back again along one side of the cove.



All said and told it was at least 6/10ths of a mile. My brother-in-law who is a lot better swimmer than I am (he's been trained as a swimmer where as I have just grown up swimming in a lake) thinks that this distance is closer to a mile.



Anyway no matter how far it is, that is the longest distance that I have ever swam before. My arms and legs were not terribly tired at the end of it, but my fingers were feeling kind of wobbly after trying to keep my hands and fingers 'cupped' that entire distance.



When I started out, I did something of a sprint to the first buoy going almost as fast as I can swim, just to get my heart rate up and insure that I would get a good exercise out of this. Then I did something of a modified breast stroke the rest of the way out and the rest of the way in, switching for a few short strokes to a scissors kick when some waves from passing boats were rolling in and a couple dives under water to cool off my head and face as the sun beat down on me.

Kids playing with bolos

Here are two of my kids playing with an outdoor bolo toy.  The goal is to get the bolos to wrap around the colored bars. 

1 point for yellow

2 points for red

3 points for blue

 

If you wrap a bolo around more than one bar (like blue and red, you get the points for both.

 

Its a simple little game and toy.  The bars are made out of PVC pipe stuck together.  The bolos are two golf balls with nylon string drilled through them to connect them together as a bolo.

 

You could probably make this toy yourself with a few old golf balls and 20 feet of pvc pipe from home depot.  In general, given the housing market you might actually get more bang for your buck getting your kids outside and playing than investing some money installing new Moen faucets with the same amount of money and similar skills applied.

Hey Sim,

Sorry to hear that you are leaving, but happy for you that you are exploring something new.

I'm sure you have some excellent experiences and lessons as you move on from Utterz, not least of which is that wearing an animal suit in a bar can make for a lot of fun. :)

In case it helps, here's some suggestions for new company names (if they can remotely be applied then maybe you can once again venture out in an animal suit!)

Badgerz - Kind of the annoying dark side of social networking

Buggerz - This one may be more popular in gay bars. Fortunately Seinfeld has paved the way to make bugs look cute.

Skunkz - Sports social network for people that get stomped at sports

Fingerz - Thinking of a raccoon theme here with a big raccoon suit with over developed raccoon fingers. No idea what the business would do, but could be good for selling sex toys.

Mulez - This is a great new play on the internet combining energy conservation with social networking as millions of Americans are forced to give up cars and turn to riding Mules to work. A small methane burning generator is attached to the back of the mule, which powers a laptop computer for people during their extremely long commute to work so they can stay connected.

Tailz&Talez - Social networking website for strippers and devotees. Who come to share their Tailz and Talez literally online.

Jowlz - Social network for the growing number of flabby cheeked people of the world inspired by the movie Wall-E with a Blue Tick Hound or a Bassett Hound as the mascot. (Sim you might be a little too tall for this get up if its the bassett so I recommend the blue tick hound, less of an under dog too)

Good cd

Blue margarita in pink glass

I'm not a big fan of marriage as an institution. I'm even less of a fan of the concept of a big wedding, but I'll wait around for hours for an open bar just like the next person.

Those disclaimers aside, I do not understand the growing trend of brides to trash their wedding dress. According to this Reuters article the trend is moving to Australia as a new fad too.

http://www.reuters.com/…2120080724

I just don't get it. If you dislike the idea of a wedding so much, why have a big wedding and buy a super expensive dress anyway?

Why go to all that trouble if you are almost literally going to spoil the whole thing?

It seems like a huge waste of time, money and effort reminiscent of precursors to the French Revolution (especially if you read the winners side of history).

Instead of dropping a few hundred to several thousand dollars on a dress, why not donate that money to charity, or put it towards your savings for a house or potential college funds for your kids, throw it into a moving pods storage system or hell just go spend it on a longer honeymoon.

I really can't get into the perspective of brides that would want to do this, but I sense a direct correlation to this silly fad and appearing in a Girls Gone Wild video. It would seem that demeaning your self has grown out of a fad and almost into a right of passage for women.

That's why I ask WTF?

here's a quote from trashthedress.com

"You've made a commitment to your husband. He's your one and only true love, right? Then you'll never need the dress again. And no, your daughter won't wear it in 20-30 years. So you have two choices: 1) Suffocate it in plastic and throw it in a closet, 2) Show your husband how committed you are by trashing the dress, and get some great fun pictures while you do it!"

I'm sorry but that just seems tarded to me.

Hello! You are getting married. If that isn't showing enough committment, then you and possibly your new husband have serious issues and I predict a speedy divorce.

Solution

Don't waste the money on the dress if you are going to destroy it. If you want to show committment (stupid idea if I ever heard one) then go spend $100 on some bondage equipment and have your father walk you down the aisle on a leash and hand you over to your husband with a dowry in hand.

Now that is showing committment!

Not that I recommend that either, but is just as freaking ridiculous as wasting thousands of dollars.

I was having so much fun talking to everyone here tonight, I almost didn't look up and see the beautiful sunset taking place here on the lake.



Hope you all take a break from the screen to see a little reality tonight too!

Resting on the driveway

Well, sometimes we become far too dependent on technology. This week, my Bull Shit Detector is out of commission and I am highly susceptible to the BS. I have to quickly find a remedy for this situation and get my detector up and running again, preferably before I find myself up to my ears in bull shit. Even better, I'd like to solve the problem, before the smell drives me out of my mind.

(note this isn't a plug for the company that makes these bullshit devices nor for commercial collection agencies, I just noticed the prominence of the url in the video post production and its about 95 degrees in my dock office today and I just don't feel like a do over . . . :)

Here's the latest update on our moving adventure. Today, is Sunday but this was shot on Thursday and part of Friday.



I'll leave you in suspense about what happened yesterday and what is going on today...

I'm exhausted! We've been packing up the house all day and I am done in.



I'm just about ready to crash (after I post this utter and let my brain realize its time to settle down).



We have carpet installers coming tomorrow, so we had to get everything out of the rooms they will put carpet into tomorrow morning. That forced us to speed up our packing a bit.



Then we are picking up a rental moving truck at 4 pm tomorrow. Somewhere in between those two events, we have to pack up the rest of the stuff, and I need to do some work for a couple of my clients that have small little projects that popped up last night and today.



Well, that's all for now. I've got some more fun video to go with this, but too tired to mix it and upload it tonight.



Sleep well those of you in utterland on the dark side of the planet right now....

We've moved all over the place over the years from north to south and back to north and back to south again, midwest to west to east to midwest.



This particular move has been going on for about a year. We haven't sold (or even) listed our house in Atlanta and we're just now getting our stuff out of the 6 figure mini storage facility we used to call home. :)

As I was packing today, I resisted throwing out my magazines from the last 2 years. I tend to go through on again off again relationships with magazines, where I will subscribe and read tons of magazines for a year or two and then take 2-3 years off.

Right now I am not reading too many magazines, but as I was packing to move, I was hesitant to throw them out.

Then I thought of capturing a picture of each of them to create a movie thing with them just for shits and giggles (probably more not giving a shit and less giggles).

This video is from Wednesday Afternoon, shortly after we arrived at our old house to pack it up in preparation for a move.

The place is a mess and needs to be cleaned as well as packed and I'm just running through fairly quickly.

As I type this now, its about 1 am on Thursday morning (about 8 hours later) and I'm exhausted.

I'm about ready to get things set up in the library so that I can start packing it up first thing in the morning. Earlier today, I packed about 70% of the garage and burned off some of the tree branches that fell over the last few months while we were away. (Zero scaping and reducing the branches to ash which I then spread back over areas of the yard for fertilizer.)

So anyway, once I have things ready to go in my library, I'm crashing. The library is a bit of a special project as I plan to get pictures or video of all my books as I prepare to get them more organized and cataloged or something. I have a hard time throwing out books and even the thought of it is more painful than remembering my teenager years awash in acne cream.

Arriving at our other hometown in lawrenceville

just outside atlanta

Mya please dont stop the music

singing in the car to cellphone music

This really cheap gas makes me sad

Going to bed hope to watch the rest of the all star game tomorrow without using a tivo ;-)

Moron parked sideways at gas station

Cheap gas

Just a quick thing. I was on page 5 of all utterz. I tried to flag some spam, but realized that I wasn't logged in. I signed in and Utterz pushed me to page 1 of Recent utterz.



This might correspond in a smallpart to missing stuff. If I have a default of page one of 'recent', which apparently is not 'all' then I can't hop right on that utter five pages in and get side tracked with something different (like this feedback note) :)



I'd like to be able to login and be at the exact point that I attempted to login at.



As an extra, if I'm on the home page logging in, I'd like to change my default view to 'all' instead of 'recent', but not sure how to do that or if that has to be programmed.