So when I’m trying to leave the haircut appointment I get in the car and grab the brush to wipe off the back window of the rental car while I start the engine. As I’m fully aware that I need to wipe the window, I havn’t shut the drivers side door, and I’ve got my leg hanging out still on the pavement. To my (shortsightedly, I admit) surprise the windshield wipers kick a stream of snow onto the inside of the open door and my foot. I jump out of the car and wipe the snow off the door armrest onto the slushy ground. To my chagrin, I also managed, in that one swipe, to lock the doors to the car. I shut the door, locking the keys inside along with my cell phone, ignition still running, and the wipers going, radio blaring —etc. My car (a beat up pickup truck) has a safety feature to prevent such calamities, but I digress.
Suffice it to say, I didn’t make it back to work before 5:00, and I’ve ended up paying not more (but an unknown amount) than $76 for the 2 minutes it took the AAA man to blood-pressure-cuff the door open large enough to admit a small rod to roll down the window.

The wedding invitations are starting to show up. If you didn’t get one for some peculiar reason, consider this an invite.
or, at least a notification.
My favorite part is the back of the envelopes that were stamped, “Some of my best friends are flakes” with some snowflakes around the words.

you know who you are.

So, when I packed up to come down to Mt. Pleasant yesterday I forgot one present. And probably the one present that I shouldn’t have forgotten. Hunter’s helicopter. I realized on waking that when everyone gets together you can’t tell a young boy that you forgot to bring his present with you. So Kayla and I took the long round trip to pick up the toy and bring it back.
Then again, I had one of those helicopters for me too, and I guess I needed it for Christmas.

although, they do drive me crazy sometimes.

So at the Clay Arts Utah fall pottery sale I was in I met a woman from A Gallery who liked my stuff and asked if I would be interested in showing there. She told me to get a few pictures up to an email address at the gallery, so I (finally) borrowed Jacks digital camera and tried to do a quickie shoot tonight. The pictures didn’t come out too well, so I suppose I need to reset tomorrow and shoot right, but the light here sucks no matter where I am, I think, and I can’t shoot with a flash due to the glossy nature of the glazes. I guess it would work better if I knew a little more about the camera, or if I just went and did it right with the roll of tungsten slide film I have in the fridge and the lightbox at school, but I’m a lazy, lazy man…

So these kids I brought home are really a handfull. They seem to think that the whole house (that they’ve been alowed to explore, so far) belongs to them, which I should know, from experience with the long list of cats I’ve known. I think I’ve grown complacent on how my current cat, C.T. Shino, sticks to the lowlands. The highest he’s ever gone is the bed, and when I got a taller bed, he wasn’t quite sure about being more than 3′ off the ground. So now I’m going around trying to figure out where would be really bad for these kids to find. They seem to like the top of the back of my chair, the stack of laundry baskets at the foot of my bed and the headboard of my bed.


Shino the orange slinker hasn’t come out of his hidey hole of his own volition that I’ve seen since yesterday morning. I brought him out and tried to soothe him for a few minutes. He was ok as long as I was holding him on his back in my computer chair (the only position I’m allowed to hold him in) but he didn’t take kindly to being moved to the bed which was occupied by the kids, and retreated back to the safety of the corner.

Chance is totally mezmerized by the kids and can’t leave them alone.

Tomorrow is [a] Der Tag. I’m heading to Florida for Supercomputing ’06. Which means that due to my fear of having to hitchhike to Tampa, I figured yesterday evening was the last chance I had to see my honey before I come back on the 17th. So I went down for a good home-cooked meal date and attempted to display my nerdy acumen on Debbies computer. As it came time to tear myself away this morning so I could return to work, the bitter of parting was softened somewhat by the sweet of the quiet country morning. For the third time I found the drive from Mt. Pleasant to be very…. pleasant. It was dark this morning, and the heavy stormclouds showed some silvery bellies from the lights of distant towns. The air had the smell of alfalfa that I really love and everything was quiet. It felt otherworldy, as if I was drifting along impervious to everything, my headlights picking out the hills ahead of me, just islands in the inky dark.

So I picked up a slide scanner from costco. Not sure about the quality yet, but was playing with old negatives. I have no recollection of this moment. It must be at the Giles house in New Hope, MN, but it doesn’t even look familiar. Not the first fire, but within a month of learning, I suppose.

So, I’ve been goofing around with the video files some more, and I guess I need to get some real editing software, because the free edition that came with the DVD burner just isn’t cutting it. There’s also a longer clip of me climbing that Jack shot creatively. Then there’s the time I ate a bug. And the video from whence it came (64 megs).
I’d better get the software soon because I’m running out of hard drive space really quick.

So I finally got around to playing with my video camera and figured out how to dump my old vhs stuff to the hard drive. I got almost 2 hours of climbing videos from 1995. It’s mostly slow and boring but it really takes me back. There was some fun stuff like this little dance Anne did I hope she doesn’t kill me for posting it, but it’s cute and shows why she was so much fun to hang out with.
Unfortunately the Roxio software that came with my DVD burner doesn’t actually burn DVD’s. I only found that out after I cut in all the chapters and arranged it all the way I wanted it. Kinda cheeses me off, but I guess if I copy the data to work I can make one with the software there.