Stuff On My Mutt

This is Snoopy when he grows up, especially growing up in Exeter. Check this website out every couple weeks. It's pretty funny for all the dog lovers out there.

vroom

Check out the go-cart.
(ps...it's not really all pixelated like that... i edited the pix to obscure the old company's name.)

BYOBW

BBW suggested I post this from the last ... you need to watch the video.. it's hilarious:
Bring Your Own Big Wheel Race

Whew... Alright.. I'm starting to get back to normal again. The rain finally broke and we had some amazingly good weather. This weekend I went to visit a friend(Sick0Jerk) up in Mass and to do some real work... digging, moving rocks, and building a retaining wall. It was good therapy to forget about the f'ing test and the horror show of last week. Check out the wall helping to prop up a 160+ year old fieldstone foundation.
Sunday when I got home I finally started cleaning the yard. I made a mountain of brush to burn this summer in the fire pit. Then I started teaching snoopy to run down the trails behind my bike. He went around the whole yard on the trails without stopping...(well, he stopped once to get a treat.). He's getting big:


Totally unrelated:

At work they had a raffle to win the official (old company) go-cart.
Really.

I won.
Really.
I'll post a picture of it tomorrow.

So... how about a big "Whoo Hoooo!"..... we need to play with the go cart this weekend after the Big River Cleanup. (Which is this weekend, saturday, 8:30am).

-40

wrybread/hobo

whew... just got back from taking a test... gotta say.. kinda feels like finals... well, er, maybe midterms. hard to tell these days.

thanks to mrs 40 for picking up a 6pk of long trails on the way home from work, pretty good with steak.

Anyhow.. i found this while poking around eating dinner. Check it out...

-40

I love it here, but....

So I gotta tell ya. It's happened again. It hasn't happened since probably '96 or so. Around this time, things just start to feel ugly. Now back then, I felt confident that it was some sort of mild seasonal affective thing. (Pause: "Back then" in this case was precisely when I had just begun my friendship with Crayons. Man does time fly...cheers buddy!) That was the year I became very conscious of it after taking note that it had been happening for many years. I had been pretty lazy and usually gained a little weight. So every March/April afterwards, I made an honest attempt to fight this and stay positive. By the way, spring fever was certainly part of it, but I think other people's spring fever/S.A.D. was just spilling onto me and I was just getting tired of everyone's pessimism. Well it seems to be happening at work. Don't get me wrong, I love my job. It's an office job, but I work with a tight-knit group of colorful personalities not even big enough to field a starting lineup for a hockey team. But alas, I work with plumbers and HVAC technicians. They are great at what they do, and what they do makes all our lives more comfortable to live in. However when it comes to issues outside of laying pipe or replacing nipples and bushings, they can be, as George Carlin would say, single-digit and low-frequency. I decided to take a swing at the bee hive to see what was brewing. I asked one guy who I know is on the opposite side from me of every possible spectrum that you could drum up about the VA Tech shooting. Could this be my opportunity to make a small plug for gun control? Predictably, and without a moment's hesitation, he makes some comment that involved the words "illegal immigrant." That's right. He went right for his favorite hot button issue. No mention of a messed up kid (23 years old is still a kid, btw) suffering from depression who happened to come here from S. Korea when he was 8 (you do the math) and was on a green card. All he had to know was that he looked foreign and he was foreign. The late Mitch Hedberg would argue Xenophobia should be spelled with a Z, but I digress. I'm not defending this kid's way of dealing with his own alienation, but the Columbine kids were all white, so this crap comes from all corners of the globe.
Then, for an encore, I brought in an old Mother Jones magazine with a cover story, "Why Do You Love to Hate Hillary?" just to see what kinds of reactions I'd get. Needless to say, none were favorable. All they cared about is her last name is Clinton and that she didn't keep her yapper shut for 8 years like a good first lady ought to. Now I'm not sure how I feel about her because I don't really know that much about her except what I read in the article (which I didn't even finish yet), but I know that I don't know that much and will be paying attention over the next 19 MONTHS! None of these people at work could even feign a substantive answer as to why they don't like her. It's getting to the point where I care less and less about which political party platform I might find myself on....JUST KEEP ME OFF THE SAME BOAT AS THESE JACK@SSES!! My only hope is that I can continue to conduct myself in a respectful, intelligent manner so that if they can manage to soothe their own spiritual hypertension just a smidge, they might come to associate healthy dialogue and a truly humane engagement with people on the other side of this godforsaken teeter-totter. Like Gandhi said, the means must be in alignment with the desired outcome....or something like that. Like I even needed to tell all of YOU! Spring is on the way guys. Stay dry. See you soon.
~Sleepy

Vajanyatek. aka What's the Deal with Pandapas

Heh... well. it seems like as good a time as any to say this stuff.

It's been a weird couple of days. I'm in the midst of studying for my pe exam.... stressed as sh*t.... about the test, about work stuff, about the new member of the household(snoopy).

lately i've been thinking about wtf i've been doing for the past few years. Since college graduation I've lived in a few different places Got married. Changed jobs. Built some bikes. Took some kayak trips. Took some bike trips. yadda yadda yadda.

I had an idea a few years ago for an 'outdoor lifestyle accessory'(the iBucket) make a few prototypes.. i even sold one (I got a check for it... I photocopyed it and stuck it on my wall. It was check #666 from sleepy g. yup.)

anyhow... the website names. ( one of them). Why Pandapas? well... i went to school at Vajanyatek(I had a bumper sticker on the back of my 87 k car that said that when i graduated), Aka Virginia Tech. Sick0Jerk and my sister, (shes Mrs Kaptain Krunch) was there at the same time for a couple years too. It's a great place to live, great school, great people. Sick0Jerk and I had a lot of fun down there. Here are a my favorite places and things about bburg, which I'm sure you've all heard about before.

brush mountain
old farm road
kim and eddie's video
wuvt (say wooo vit)
the new river
south main cafe
...and of course... pandapas pond

Pandapas Pond is a small man made pond just outside blacksburg. It had lots of trails around there that went up brush mountain, it was a pretty mellow place and made even more on occasion. a good place to have campfire. it is around 3 miles from campus out 460, or straight up and over brush mtn by bike. It was named after James Pandapas who had bought 500 acres at the end of Poverty Creek, and made the 7 acre pond, was operating a sawmill and intended to use the timber to build houses with. He then used the land to help attract people to work at his factory by giving them exclusive access to hunt, fish, and enjoy the place. Eventually, they named the pond after him.

Anyhow.. long story short, i spent six years in bburg between school and co-oping, then finally left. During that time I spent lots of time at Pandapas Pond with Sick0Jerk, his (then)wife MB and toddler son Lil B. Now Lil B is 12. We'd head out there after a long week, have a fire, enjoy a couple 22s(cause 2x22s are less $ and have ten percent more beer than a forty, yes we were engineers then too), and well yeah.

It took a while for it to soak in what a professor told us on the first day of EF(engineering fundamentals) ... he said "You won't realize what a special place Blacksburg is until a couple years after you leave". Which... was true. Blacksburg is an amazing combination of an outdoorsy hippie, high tech, laid back, cheap living shangri-la you need for a few years in your life. What happened there yesterday was freaky and horrible. Thats all I'm goign to say about it.

anyhow just a few more days till the exam when i will hopefully be a whole lot less stressed and i'll be back full time with BFB and iBucket updates.... stay tuned.

-40

Flooding

This is the first in a series of posting, I'm sure. We had rain Sunday night, a lot of rain. The town next to mine, New Hartford, got 7" of rain in one night. I live in a basement (you know where this is going). I woke up Monday morning and stepped off my bed into a puddle. My first thought was "I peed the bed." I have never peed the bed since I was little, but that was my first thought. But then I realized the bed wasn't wet so then I figured it out. My landlady had gone on vacation Saturday night and before she left she said "I turned the heat down." My reply was "Turn it off, it's not that cold, plus my heat from below will keep things ok." Then I thought that a pipe had burst because I told her to turn her heat off. I would have felt so bad. In 40 years, there has never been water in the basement. That's why I didn't think it was the rain.

But I went for a tour of her house and no problems up there. I got a wet/dry vac, moved some furnature and sucked up about 20 gal of water and went off to work. It was still coming in, but not that bad.

I came home from work Monday w/ a better wet/dry vac. I moved more furnature. And sucked up about 150 gallons. It seemed to have stopped coming in. But stuff was still wet. I set up a fan and dehumidifer. And I went to sleep.

GardenGirl (welcome aboard) lives across the street from the Farmington River. The water kept rising up....and up....and up. It started flowing in generously though the walls. Finally about 11 last night (Monday) it just started reached the windows and hatchway in the basement. The basement is now full to the ceiling with water. Washer, dryer, heater, how water, all trash. They had to shut the power off to the whole street.

GG's parents live 5 houses down the street and their nursury is right next door. And behind them is all woods. So tonight I have to go over with my kayak and rescue stuff from the woods. Just stuff that floating away. It's easier to tow stuff out now than to hike in the woods and carry stuff out later. It's was supposed to crest today at noon. I want to get out into the woods and kayak before it goes down. It is pretty fun to kayak in the woods.

I'll try to get pictures of the flood and keep you all updated.


PART 2!!!!

OK, so I went down to GG's house w/ the kayak. I got there and her brother was supposed to meet me there. No one. I called her parents and they decided it was rainy and cold, so we would do it another day. They left me a message but I didn't check them. So I was "gear up" to walk in the water. That means pants I didn't care about and wool socks and water shoes and a hat. It was quite a beautiful site. Well, her road was closed, but she lives at a T, also a bridge, so I drove to the end of the T. But so was everyone else including the random cop. On the bridge, river raging beneath me, I start to wonder, is kayaking now illegal? It's definitely not the smartest thing I've ever done. I'm not kayaking in the river itself, just in the flood plain woods.

I take a walk back there, the water is absolutely freezing. About 3 minutes and I can't feel my toes. So I look in the house, everything looks ok, no water on the 1st floor. I go back, get the kayak. If nothing else, I'm leaving it there for GG to use to round up all the stuff in the woods. So I decide the plain doesn't have much flow, so I get in and I'm off into the woods. My main goal is to find her dad's canoe, a vital tool in rescuing stuff later on.

I'm paddling behind house's, dodging branches, running over logs, getting stuck in vines. You just tap the logs and they sink an you go right over them, quite rewarding. I hear a car horn honk a bunch of times. The last thing I want is to someone think I need rescuing and endanger themselves to help me. I figure if it is a cop, he'll at least give a couple chirps of the siren.

So thankfully the canoe is white. I begin looking for it. You would think it would be downstream. I finally see it upstream in the woods. I tie it up to my stern and I'm off. I look to try and stash it at the nursery or her parents house. The water at the house is flowing too much for me to want to try it, even though there is a section that is only 3" underwater. I can't find anything at the nursery that I can put it on. So I head back to GG's house. On my way back, I kayaked over the bed of a full size pickup truck. The windshield was 1/2 underwater. I get there, pull the kayak onto the deck (above water) and tie the canoe up in the water. Success, no cops, no rescue, no death, not yet at least. The water I'm sure is contaminated w/ heating oil and sewage and god knows what else. So if my legs fall off tomorrow, we'll know why. I go inside, do a couple things, look in the basement. I can see 3 steps, that's it. I leave, lock up.

I give GG a call when I get back to my car. She's on her way down from her boyfriend's grandma's house where she is staying, remember, no elec, no septic, god knows what chemicals. She shows up and we take a walk back to her house. The water is about one foot up the foundation. It's reaching the windows in the basement. She said it looks like the water has dropped about 5" already.

I come home shower and start vacuuming my house more. Good times. I'll try to make this a little more interesting w/ pics soon. Right now, it's just a story, if not boring, but a good distraction from work.

Redneck

You might be a redneck if part of your parole states that you are not allowed to own sheep.

Or in my case, a dog.....

Sh*t-heads

Lately I've been noticing much more litter around here. As the snow melted you could see it sprouting along roadsides, then deeper into the woods. Yesterday I took a ride through some local woods and saw this:


Two engine blocks and a transmission. Dumped at a trailhead.

Seriously... WTF???
If you can't keep a beer bottle or a coffee cup in your f'ing pickup truck for ten more minutes till you get home and feel the urge to toss them out the window then you are a lazy piece of sh*t.

But, to deliberately load two leaky oily engine blocks in your truck, drive out to the woods, and dump them, Then you are a disgusting, horrible, sh*t-head.

Other sh*heads in the news this week:

Hit and Run in Minneapolis. Go read/watch the news story here, then go donate some $$ to this guy. Busted up bike(being replaced by the Surly boys), but Zito's out of commision for months, and with a mountain of medical bills(yes, he's un-insured)

A related sh*thead: Make sure you send this guy some emails about how far off he is.

"I can't support bike lanes. Roads are built for buses, cars, and trucks. My heart bleeds when someone gets killed, but it's their own fault at the end of the day."-Rob FordToronto City CouncillorEmail: councillor_ford@toronto.ca

Oh, and Jan "I'm a Cheater" Ulrich got busted, By his own DNA. Classic.

Happy Easter. -40.