The Blog with No Title

I graduated from Men’s Fraternity this morning. It was pretty cool. We got “knighted” as “kings” with a Crusader style sword from Spain and then we got to have an awesome breakfast of “breakfast casserole”, grits, raisin bran muffins, and rolls. I had way too much.

Afterwards, I headed to work and made it through a pretty normal day. I think the plan for tonight is to stop by the library, possibly go through some VHS tapes, and also do some contracting work.

I have been going through our old VHS tapes and labeling them, sorting them (blank, keep, and discard), and digitizing some of the important stuff. I have some nice old home videos that I duped last night. I’ll probably post them online after I edit them a bit for length (it is about 1 hour and 45 minutes of footage). Excitingly, I have been able to reference my old post on video editing tools. I definitely would not have remembered the names of many of these pieces of software after 2.5 years of non-use.

It is sometimes funny for me to think about how vastly my diet has changed over the years. When I was in high school and before, my mom often bought TV dinner style things each night. They were good but definitely convenience food and not home cooking. On Sundays, I would often have fried chicken or some other huge southern style dinner down the hill followed by another pretty big southern influenced meal at my dad’s consisting of steak, ribs, chicken, or the like.

As I went to college, I shifted to having a lot of campus food. I did often eat the cafeteria style hot line at the GMP rather than fast food fare. I supplemented with a few things like occasionally making ramen or a Zatarans in my room. My sophomore year, I went off my meal plan and cooked with my friends. The food was good, lots of delicious things had over the next few years, but it was different than things my mom or dad would have cooked often.

After I graduated and married Lori, it was mostly vegetarian cooking for the next few years. I was fine with it and it was cheap not having to buy meat, but again, it was very different than a highly meaty diet that I’d eaten the few years beforehand. Then as time has passed, we have brought meat into our diet after Lori gave up vegetarianism.

That brings some new things that we eat fairly often that I rarely ever had before though. The example that made me think of this is hot dogs. My mom doesn’t like hot dogs and I can only remember eating them a handful of times my entire childhood and only about once that I definitely remember her making them for me (a birthday party when my parents were still together, possibly my 5th b-day). Another is pasta. My mom made pasta for me occasionally (she made this excellent spaghetti casserole one time that I have been craving, it is similar to spaghetti pie that we got a recipe for from Holly though), but not nearly as much as Lori and I have it. Also, if I had it, it was often in a TV dinner style thing or just your standard meat sauce spaghetti, nothing remotely exotic. Another example I was thinking of is grilled cheese. I love grilled cheese, but I don’t think I had had it more than a few times in my life before college. We just did not make it nor did we have tomato soup (a common grilled cheese accompaniment in our house).

I wonder what the future brings for my diet. Will I continue eating as I do now or will things switch up drastically?

I thought of this because someone said their grilled cheese was so good that it was “better than mom’s” and I thought “well that is easy since I don’t think my mom has ever made me grilled cheese”

Thusfar the weekend has been good for the most part. There was some stress with setting up our baby registry, but I think we got some good stuff on the list. Now I just need to get some people buying! If you are in the mood, we are on both Babies R Us and Target

We talked a little bit more earlier today about names, but we are still waffling. I expect that to be the case for a while and will be surprised if we settle on anything 100% definite before the baby is due, but maybe I am wrong!

Today, I cleaned up a little bit, worked a decent amount on my CafeID stuff while watching some TV, went grocery shopping, grilled some chicken for this fabulous salad Lori made us, ate dinner and then worked a couple more hours on the CafeID stuff. Now I am getting ready for bed as the time change will wreck us in the morning.

Also, Matt G. might be sad to miss out on his quirk, but I updated Wordpress today and I think I killed the error that causes my Google Reader posts to be spam instead of the real content. We’ll see…

Oh yeah and I tested all our smoke alarms like you are supposed to do when the time changes and now one is chirping at me. How did I manage this right before bed time?

It turned out to be a rousing success after all. Alex showed up about 7 and we started a game of Plunder. Heather Jones said she was coming about 9 or so while we were playing it and then Heather Dimery surprised us by showing up in the middle of the Plunder game. Once we finished that, we had a quick round of Big 2 as Heather Jones, Scott, and Ross arrived. After they got here, we played a round of Apples to Apples and a round of Taboo. It was tons of fun though it is soooo late! I guess I should get to bed

How is life going? Does anyone still ever read this?

Things have been pretty good for me. I am really happy that Lori and I are going to finally have our first little baby boy (I never announced that here did I!?!). It is so exciting and scary still lol.

I am a little bummed tonight to be honest though. It is supposed to be Game Night but attendance has been absolutely terrible since our hiatus for Christmas. The past few nights it has mostly been Alex and Brian and last week no one showed up until Heather stopped by about 9:30PM. We ended up just talking and it was completely fun, but it is sad that others have not been able to make it out in such a long time. Everyone that doesn’t make it seems sad to miss out. I guess people have just gotten so busy with their own lives.

I had a really nice weekend. I got off work a little late because I had to make up some time from earlier in the week (I had car trouble), but it was okay. I hung out around the house and worked a little bit in the afternoon while wathing some TV and then Lori and I left for the fair. It was a long 2 hour car ride to the fairgrounds. We seriously almost turned around a couple times, but it was great when we got there. I had a polish sausage sandwich for dinner and Lori had Italian Sausage. We then split a funnel cake. After that, we headed over to the animals and checked out the chickens, ducks, other birds and bunnies. There were these cool baby ducks next to this waterslide like thing. It was hilarious how they kept falling down it. There were also these baby chicks in with a hen and they were hiding so well under her that it was hard to even get a good count of the amount of them.

I saw some ducks that reminded me of the albino duck that used to come behind our apartment at Wellspring. I really miss the ducks a lot from there. It was so cool to be able to sit out and watch them along with the tons of baby ducks. We also saw some peacocks (though they were not fanned out) and a bunny that looked kind of like Oreo but with pointy ears.

Afterwards, we went to the petting zoo area and Lori got to spend some time with her llamas. They are so greedy with the food though. We also petted a few goats and saw two of them get into a fight (one of which had and oddly shaped horn that followed his jawline instead of going up like normal) over some food. We checked out the cows briefly, but only from a distance as we did not want to step in some nasty mud that was near them.

Realizing the time, we hurried over and checked out the place where they exhibit art and produce. We saw a 166 pound pumpkin and another that I think was about 140 something pounds. There were some giant watermelons too and other impressive vegetables. We did not really have much time to peruse the art (it was about 9:50 and the area closed at 10:00), but we did notice there was an antique bike display on the upper level. Looking at it from below, I saw one of those old bikes with the huge front wheel and another that had what looked like a metal wagon wheel on it with huge spokes. By the way, I always wondered what the practicality of a huge front wheel was. Apparently this site says that since there were no chains, the wheels were attached directly to the pedals. As a result, the only way of gearing was to… make the wheel bigger so you could go further on a single rotation.

After this, we realized that we did not really want to ride any rides and were a bit low on cash anyway, so we ate about half of an elephant ear before we were too full and then got a couple caramel apples to go.

Saturday started out with disappointment as I realized that I forgot about the Honors College Champaigne Brunch until it was too late to go. I was really upset, but Lori cheered me up and we had some spaghetti together for lunch. We watched a bit of TV and then left for the Engineering Tailgate. They had barbecue, fried chicken, corn, green beans, hash, rolls, and banana pudding to eat. I stuffed myself even though it was not the best bbq and hash ever (it had a bit of a sour taste). They also had an open bar. I tried a little bit of scotch, but I did not want to drink too much. The best part though was that I saw Dr. Matthews. We had some small talk about what I was doing for work now and such. He eventually asked if we ever went to football games. I said occasionally, but it was a bit of an expense that I didn’t want to pay for a lot (this is a bit of an exaggeration though since I hadn’t been to a game since the 2004 season, jeez I can’t believe it has been that long). Anyway, he asked if I was going to that night and I said I didn’t have a ticket and then he floored me by saying “would you be interested in going if you had one?”. I was like “definitely!”. He then proceeded to give me two extra tickets he had to the game! (Actually he accidentally gave me three, but I realized and gave him back his personal ticket to the game)

So now I started the process of finding someone to go with. I called Matt Gerrald (already there), Erik Murrah (busy), Chris Altman (busy/didn’t get call in time), and Brian Cope (didn’t answer or return my call). By that point, it was definitely getting to the point where it would be a stretch to get Lori back home and get to the game before traffic got terrible. Fortunately, she said she would go with me if no one else wanted to go. So we stopped by the tailgate that Matt was at and chatted a bit (it apparently won the prize for Publix tailgate of the game) before heading over. The game turned out to be so much fun. Sure the Cocks could have played better (they only won 14-10 over a team they were hoped to significantly outclass), but a win is a win, and the best part was that Lori had a lot of fun. She really got into the cheers and watching the game, especially after I helped her understand a few of the finer points. It was exciting the whole time since it was close also. She expressed interest in going to another game this year, but we will be out of town for Florida and I imagine Clemson tickets will cost too much. We will see though.

Sunday was a good day as well. Sunday school was nice (we ran into Elizabeth and Daniel Smith afterwards too. They kept nursery, so they were not in class, but it was really good to see them for a bit, Colin is HUGE now compared to when I last saw him), Lori’s mom made pork chops, mashed potatos, and mixed veggies for lunch, and then we had my football game. The game was fun even though we lost. I wish I had played a bit more of the game, but I almost hurt myself near the beginning so I had to stay out for a few minutes. The reason it was so much fun though is because I got my first pass reception of the season! I did not make it tons far after I got it, but I was glad to at least catch it. Either way, because of how other teams faired, we are still in second place going into the playoffs which gives us a bye week. I then had a nice evening at home with Lori and got some cleaning and work done.

I started an xkcd parody comic. If you want to see it, go here. It is probably only funny in the context of being familiar with xkcd, but even if not you could try it.

So I am watching Twilight with Lori. I realized that there are a lot of people in the movie that I have seen in other movies or TV shows. I think it is pretty hilarious to try to think of each person playing as that character in that instead of as their current character. Here is a partial list.

Bella Swan – Girl from Speak
Edward Cullen – Cedric Diggory, but I never remember this normally.
Rosalie Hale – Party girl in Thirteen and/or girl who kills her mom in Mimi’s First Time
Jasper Hale – Nicholas Fiske from Beautiful People (THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE DUN DUN DUN)
Esme Cullen – Jane Doe from Grey’s Anatomy whose face is screwed up
Mike Newton – Joan of Arcadia’s little brother Luke Girardi
Victoria – Apparently she was in MTV’s Undressed. A show with hilariously bad acting.

I tossed a Netflix into it yesterday (I often do this), and it was received today. I did not expect that since yesterday was a postal holiday, but I am guessing they did a drop somewhere that actually got picked up and sent yesterday!

I wrote the following in response to someone’s Facebook status in which they argued that Al Gore shoudl be rethinking global warming based solely on the current cold snap in the US. I thought it was as insightful as I get, so I wanted to post it here.

What I always must say on the global warming conflict is, just think and consider, what if global warming is real and human caused? What if it really could change the climate enough to make a difference for the ability of life to sustain itself on earth? What if everyone realizes this too late because they are convinced it is just a plot of the so-called liberal media?

In the face of that, are considerations like cheaper gas and a stronger economy in the short-term really important? If making this assumption is wrong, then we are out some money, sure, but if the assumption turns out to be correct, many of the beauties of Earth could be gone forever even if humans find a way to survive the climate changes.

A January cold-snap does not make for an invalidation of subtle global trends.

Full disclosure, I am not certain that global warming is real and human caused, and I agree there is a lot of global warming hype, but I do really think that assuming it is real is a responsible choice as long as their is not a scientific consensus to the contrary. Besides, most of the remedies from global warming have ‘real’ advantages such as lower pollution and less dependence on foreign oil.