Wren

Just to use this thing.

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 05:35:17 GMT

Not really going to update, but just to amuse anyone who comes by here.

Jim Herring Jr. is the basketball coach at UGA, a college in Georgia. The students on his team were allowed to take a class taught by him about coaching strategies -- or so they thought. The NCAA convicted him of some scholastic violation or another, and it's easy to tell why when you look at the final exam. ex: 5. How many halves are in a basketball game? To read the whole exam: Click here

--WrenOut--

Sat, 28 Feb 2004 23:42:46 GMT

*blows dust off of journal* I think I'll start using this thing again. I'm not sure.

One way or another, I've managed to clean out my friends list and have at least regained the ability to post. I still don't know exactly why I couldn't before, maybe that's just one of those things that happens as you slowly overclock a system.

There are four seperate computer towers in my house, which is an improvement, especially since 3 of them don't work. One is so old that I don't even really want to know what's wrong with it, the other has steel fragments floating around inside the hard disc casing after some brainchild stripped the screws installing it, and the last one ... let's just say I can see holes forming in the motherboard, and that the parts come from at least 4 different countries. (Yes, there is someone out there with more talent for being cheap than me.)

So I convince my parents to buy a newer computer. EMachines, yes, but it's better than doing your history homework by hand. For those too lazy to click the link: 2.6 GHz, 256 MB DDR SDRAM, 40 GB. Now my only problem is that my mom wants me to somehow get files off of that last computer ... ....

I'll think about making a deeper post later. I have some things to do, some places to go. (Now if that isn't vague.)

--WrenOut--

P.S. ... ... Alright, so I'm really just going to play GunBound.

Fri, 28 Nov 2003 03:08:57 GMT

Oh wow. I think this is the most relaxed I've been in weeks. I think I'm in a good enough mood to write something that isn't mostly biting, so I might as well sieze the day.

Speaking of the day, it's Thanksgiving, which might actually be news to someone, especially if you had a day like me. Since my mom's family lives a good hour away and my dad's mom (who usually organizes our big family Thanksgiving) is in Washington, we just kind of sidestepped the whole huge celebration thing. Mostly we just had an oversized meal this afternoon around 3:00 that happened to include turkey by the random chance that it was on sale yesterday in Pavillions. And imagine that, Pavillions and turkeys transitions to my next paragraph.

I don't know when they're going to realize this, but the Checker's Union lost the strike. I'm not even sure if it's a national union or what, but they're already getting paid an arm and a leg, and then they go on strike ?! Their problem is that they stayed out so long that the public doesn't care anymore and the management has already fully trained a new workforce of checkers. They're never going to do it, but their only hope of getting their jobs back now is begging.

I, of course, had fun with it. It was more than a little agitating to listen to a bunch of hobos with "Support Our Strike" signs yelling while I was selecting wine to cook fish in, which is of course a very delicate process known as 'Flip a Coin', so I decided that I would take action. ... Kind of. Mostly I just asked my mom if we could buy this and that as we went all through the store, and since I eat like a lawnmower anyway she agreed to most all of it. We left with so much food that it couldn't all fit in one cart. The reciept was literally longer than my arm. That was the most satisfying thing in all of Thanksgiving, especially since not doing it wouldn't have helped them anyway.

Yes, I did just write two paragraphs about shopping. And I'm launching into a third.

I think my parents are getting fed up with shopping this year, because they told me that if I want anything for Christmas then I need to go buy it and give it to them with the reciept so they can wrap it and reimburse me. I'm tempted to be a little dissapointed in this system, but after reflecting for a moment the advantages became apparent quickly. And I believe I have a day or three to work on that now ...

My dad also brought home a newer computer. It was completely blank, even of an OS, so it's taking me a while to get everything up and running, but I think I'll have it eventually. None of you probably care, but I find the upgrade to 450 Mhz somewhat exciting. Not to mention that I can pull the hard drive and ram from this poor thing, to finally have 256 Mb ram and 13GB of hard disc room.

Unfortunately for my relaxed mood, the rest of the night looks like it could be very boring. (Which was an unusually subtle way for me to cue that the post is ending.)

--WrenOut--

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 07:19:07 GMT

Well then. I guess that if time equals money then I'm a pretty poor guy. Or I need to liquidate.

Halloween was great. I think most of you have already heard this, but whatever: My neighborhood doesn't just have Halloween, we get invaded by it. Some well-meaning program or another takes kids in buses from their lovely homes in the Ghetto of LA out to our neighborhood to go trick-or-treating without the need to eat lead with their candy. While I totally support this in principle, it's kind of ... ... ... I'll just say that we buy 10lbs of candy and leave it at that. I spent most of the night at Kenny's anyway, fragging this and that at Halo and occasionally doing other stuff that wasn't interesting enough to remember.

The next day was pretty interesting, at least what I remembered through the fog of three hours of sleep. Tyler, Louis, Kenny, Kyle and I went to Denny's and, in between discussing how Kyle weeps into glasses of Diet Coke while writing yet another zero on his bowling scorecard, managed to get a little bit of chess in. I drew Louis ... again. It's really kind of sad, he thinks he's good at endings but he really sucks. Anyway, while Kenny and Louis played Tyler and I had what was probably the most interesting conversation I've had in a long time, which naturally centered around video games. (What else would we talk about ? Girls ?) Tyler always manages to find unique points and have a strong position on things, attributes I most normally encounter in myself. ... Yeah.

League Finals was ... symbolic. This CC season has been a test of my patience and my will. My time was not dissapointing in light of my other times this year, but in light of my last season ... I ran a 20:13 last year, and this year I finished the season with a 24:05. Sigh .... I took a good look at just how broken down my body was on Thursday and decided to take 3 weeks off before I bother to figure out how much of a priority Track is in my life, and thus whether or not to join. You're only 17 once, right ?

Hehehe, I wrote that last sentence without even thinking about the number. I actually turn 17 on the 20th of this month, and I have a somewhat odd position. My parents are, more or less, just giving me $100 for my birthday with the expectation, but not requirement, that I'll throw some kind of party. Let's just say that trying to get people together in the late November pre-Thanksgiving holiday season has never worked particularly well for me. My greedy side still says that last year I got a calculator worth more than $100 and didn't even spend my full budget, so I'll probably end up going that route anyway.

I also got a cell phone. ... Mostly. I techincally have to share it with my Dad, but he seems to generally dislike carrying it and probably will only want it about 3 days a year. (I think the Family Talk plans you see floating around now are really good ideas, btw.) If you want my number, ask me.

My last comment is that David came to school as Hugh Hephner (sp ?) and you know it.

--WrenOut--

Sat, 25 Oct 2003 23:15:24 GMT

Now here's a situation you didn't think you'd see again. I actually have some free time and don't feel under siege by any particular disease, simeltaneously. This probably just means the germs are meeting in The Hague to reorganize, but I'll take what I get.

About a week ago I bought Madden NFL 2003 and NBA Live 2003, mostly because I was getting sick of not having anything even like a sports game -- and they were about $30, total, together. Madden is awesome, but I could swear it hates me -- My star quarterback keeps getting injured, or in one case, even apprently died in recovery. I'd rather not meet the person who programmed that feature. NBA Live is just gay, and I'm thinking about selling it back used to GameStop. The Freewhatever thing might have been cool, but it's way too hard to do. In a nod to this fact from EA themselves, many of the things you can do with Freestyle Control are mapped onto other buttons, clogging the rest of the controller from really being useful. The sad part is that it isn't all that it wouldn't take that much programming adjustment to make it a good game.

If you haven't got a laugh out of the N-Gage yet, I've got some links for you. Gamefaqs did three polls on the subject: Poll 1 and Poll 2 on those links. Then they announced the price drop over at GameSpot, and yet another funny GameFaqs poll comes out. I don't know about you, but I'm looking at buying a GBA just because I hate this fr4king N-Gage so much.

Now for your other unfavorite subject for you to listen to me rant about, Cross Country.

Mt. Sac was pretty gay. Maybe this is some kind of jibberish to you, but this is the largest meet to be held anywhere in the world. Competitors come from Africa for this meet. They have four days of racing, with races starting every seven to nine minutes while there's light. You can imagine that they have relatively high standards. Specifically we're talking about a 24:00 3-mile or better if you want to run, and my PR is 23:05, with a 23:23 in the season as well, and the rest of our courses being 5K (3.2 miles). But for some godforsaken reason this wasn't good enough for Coach, who set his own cutoff at 22:00, basically just putting me and Nori out of running, and disqualifying our JV team from scoring by lack of runners. ... Gay.

I think I'm finally over my Communist SuperCold (named after some little Vietnamese girl or another).

Besides all that I've pretty much been doing what you guys all do, going to school and doing homework, etc. Be grateful all you sophomores and Freshiemen, Oh Ye of Little Homework and Little Worries.

Now an interesting question waits before me: My season more or less ends in two weeks and then it's decision time. If I don't keep running but decide to join track, then I'm probably not going to enjoy it much and have a good chance of reinjuring myself. But, if I keep running then I'm not sure I can keep my grades up, and I'm almost positive that I won't be able to get a high AP test score. And should I decide to abandon track, I won't have PE exemption for the year and will have to either give up my study hall second semester or take whatever PE they can give me next year. Hmmm.

I think that's about it for now.

--WrenOut--

The Words of a Slowly Dying Man

Wed, 15 Oct 2003 13:59:50 GMT

Cannot ... go on ... life ... so gay ....

AP homework ... so gay ...
Math review ... so very gay ....
Ceramics wheel ... too hard ...
Tucking ... shirt in ... is communist ... gayness ...
Suspicions of ... Matt's ... sexual orientation ...

No youth pastor ... at church ... for two years ...
Youth group ... Junior High Bullshit ... flamingly homosexual ...
Kids with ... discipline issues ... need death ...

Hamstring injury ... so gay ...
23:23 PR ... so very gay ...
Obsession with ... males shaving legs ... defines homosexuality ...
Intrasquad meet ... tainted gay ....

Griff ... I always hated you the most ...

Cannot ... go on ... Must end self ...

--WrenOut--

Catch-up

Thu, 02 Oct 2003 05:46:26 GMT

Yes, it has been quite a while since I updated. Trust me, that is one of a very large number of dropped balls to go into my stats recently, but I think I'm still holding the most important ones.

I've been taking plenty good care of my body if nothing else. It's not even the quarter mark yet and I've already been out of school sick two days, including today, for illnesses that others may have just ignored. I've also avoided slowly tearing any leg muscles this season, even if I was supposed to run high 19's and I'm running low 23's. (Those are times in minutes for 3 mile, in case you're wondering.) I think that this approach is a lot better for me in the long run; I am not going to refuse to take days off school and end up with a flu for four weeks like I did last track season. I'm also not going insane and forcing myself to get a prosthetic leg when I'm 50. What I might not be doing quite right is sleep ...

You see, there's a kind of pattern that hapens in the day of an athlete in school. You get up at high energy, go to school, get all your homework assigned and then go to practice. Practice ends and your first oppurtunity to do homework begins at about six. Often times this suffices for simple things like math homework, rudamentary busywork chem sheets, simple english analysis, and the like, but it just isn't good enough when you really need to nail something important.

At 6 you're too worn out. At 8 you're in recovery mode. At 10 you're too sleepy. You end up getting up at 5 AM most of the time to finish whatever it is in a better state of mind -- But still end up staying up until 12. ... I think I know why "Sacrifice the Body" is such a popular saying.

And I have my grades where I want them, I think. One cannot grant himself perfect assurance of this until one's progress report comes, of course, but I haven't completely blown anything, and I haven't even partially blown anything huge. My worst grade is probably in Chemistry, where I have an 90.00% (to 4 signifigant figures).

Assuming that you're not my coach or my teacher though, you might very well be wondering why I'm such a fucktard this year. Or maybe not even just this year, in which case we have a reciprocal situation on our hands. But anyway, I wish I could be more involved at my church than I am this year, like maybe attending the youth group. I also should go to Kenny's more on saturdays, which is basically my only time with my friends away from school right now. Oi ...

In case you're wondering about my game-age, I'm on my third time through of KOTOR. It's one of the greatest games ever made, period.

Anyway, I'll try to get more consistent with updating this journal. Maybe next time I'll actually site some specific event in my life instead of having to blanket things.

--WrenOut--

P.S. Gotta love LJ friends pages going blank for a day ...

Into my crystal ball.

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 02:42:03 GMT

Well now, this is a unique oppurtunity. I can't really say that I currently have the time to write this post at the moment, but much in the from-nowhere economy logic of America today, I am still going to take the time to write. It's amazing how you can screw yourself with simple American principles.

I think the usual audience of my LiveJournal more or less knows the gist of my life at this time because you are in it yourself. School, homework, lack of sleep, some kind of afterschool thing ... You know these time-leeches well. Add in my entire post about being tired and I think we have things covered.

But I do have a prediction or two for you.

My first prediction is that the Phantom Game Console will not actually be sold. The fact that I've heard of evidence that no consoles have been made and evidence that they do not own copyrights on the name "Phantom" suggests quite a lot when you examine how rumors get started. That is, they get started in some type of fact. This means that they are at least undermanned at the moment, but my prediction still remains. Bets, anyone ?

My other prediction, which spawns off the first one, is that it essentially will be made under a different name. I'm not talking specs and looks here; The Phantom, if it were to be produced, would be a complete sub-genre of entertainment to itself. I know that if you look at this sub-genre compared to other inhabitants of its nearby genres that it may look silly, but that's not uncommon. If you think about it, humanity in America should really be able to have clocks in such multitude populatiing our real estate that no one would ever be severly inconvenienced to look at one. You can probably pick one up at Target for $5 now. Still though, watches continue to be made. ... Think about it for a while, you'll get what I mean.

My other prediction involves the next generation of consoles, GameFly, and my brother. I'm not exactly sure how those three got associations in my mind, but it happened. GameFly is a site that, for a 21.95 per month fee, more or less allows you to always have 2 new games to play at all times. I'll let you read the details on your own, because that would take me far off subject, but the point is that people are looking for new ways to distribute discrete packages of entertainment. Now if you'll just let me talk about Cell for a sec, you might be able to understand my prediction.

Cell is something that Sony is developing for release in the Playstation 3, roughly dated for release in 2007-2009 (the last time I checked). The basic idea is that you have a huge number of connected PS3's that can use the unique design of the Cell chip to help each other out. That is, when you turn one PS3 off, another PS3 will connect to it via the internet and ask it to help process stuff. Now then, what does this all have to do with anything ?

I think that the next generation of consoles are going to break away from the idea of disks and 'games'. You'll just log onto the Playstation 3 network and enter your code then access any data you want for any game will be readily available from Sony. You'll no longer have to buy games and you'll no longer have disks; you'll just pay a monthly fee to Sony and they'll pay people to develop games to put on their network. With this particular prediction I reserve the right to extend it to the next generation after the coming one.

Enough of my ranting. I have homework to do.

--WrenOut--

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 17:36:58 GMT

Maybe my behavior over the past few days has perplexed you a little, so I'm going to try and explain through the use of a certain event exactly how tired I've been over the last few days. I may not have shown outward signs of it, but let me assure you, there was little to no concious ability contained within myself.

On to my example.

It started off when a saw this girl. She was walking through the quad, kind of short, very white, sharp facial features, shorter brown hair. I paused for a moment and reflected that there were many other girls around, in every direction, and wondered why this particular one seemed to contrast with her setting and draw my attention. Soon it struck me.

Yes, at some time or another, I had talked to this female before me. "Where ?" I thought to myself. Yes, then I remembered, I had talked to her on the internet before. Her s/n was Stormie. But what was her name ? I could not recall. I continued to look and mentally grasp at the image, wishing it to give her name up to me, but I could not recall it.

This somehow seemed wrong to me, that a person should exist with an s/n but without a name. I began to feel sorry for her, and then realized that she must have a name but that I must not be able to recall it. Still, I seemed to have a horse but no cart; The universe was wronged and I had to right it.

Meme just so happened to be to my immediate right, and I came upon the idea of asking her for my desired information. In forming the words to use within my mind, I found I had a new problem to overcome. The girl had walked behind a building and was no longer visible from my position. After a small measure of geometric calculation, I soon ascertained that this meant Meme could not see her either. This presented me with a most difficult task.

At the time I had the image of a girl, an image which now was only available to my mind and not to Meme's, the s/n of this girl and the vague concept of her having a name. Mind you that these are, at least to my mind, three very distinct types of information -- visual, audial, and conceptual -- How was I to get another person to connect them all for me, especially when I only had 1/3 of the puzzle to give ?

I began to wonder if poor Meme would be able to comprehend my request and then was paralyzed by my own analysis of the situation. Even if I did succeed in communicating the information to Meme and even if she could connect these three ominous dots for me, would she ? What if she wanted to know why I wanted this information ? Suddenly it struck me that staring at a girl crossing the quad could be quite construed as rude, if taken out the context.

Suddenly, I realized that I had forgotten what Stormie looked like.

I searched my mind a few moments to recall her image, and soon came upon another paralyzing question -- Had I imagined her ? This supposition seemed to fuffil a few obvious facets of her existence, including her lack of name and lack of image. I drifted back again to the idea of asking Meme and found myself confronted by a new moral issue.

What if Meme was imaginary ?

It was becoming increasingly obvious to my feeble mind that my imagination may not entirely be on its leash. If Stormie didn't exist, would it be right to ask a real girl about an imaginary one ? What if, by this instance, the real and imaginary gained a crosspoint by which to suck Meme out of true existence ? What if I then, by the same mechanism, I was too made imaginary ?

The complexity of the subject overwhelmed me, so I simply listened as the conversation moved on.

--WrenOut--

Nnnngh.

Fri, 05 Sep 2003 04:03:04 GMT

Oh wow. Breathe in and breathe out. Breathe in and breathe out.

I know that I'm a wise Junior now, and with that wisdom is the general idea that all your problems just go away, as if dispersed by unseen magical waves of the hand uttered in the direction of far-off problems, but let me tell you that this is not the case. It's especially not the case when you neglect the use of your wisdom or just plain mess things up.

I doubt you need the full synopsis of it, so I'll just summarize. This was starting to become my WhineJournal anyway. I have yet to touch my homework and I planned to be asleep half an hour ago. I've had about 11 hours of sleep over the last three nights combined. I need to buy a book tomorrow morning so I can do homework that is due tomorrow afternoon. I overstressed my recovering left hamstring. Sigh ...

I pity Matt. It's not so much because I actually pity him, but because I promised an LJ post with this subject contained therein, and it seemed like an appropriate opening sentence. Today, with the full attention of the team, a one Nicole (AKA Senior!Nicole) stated, "I am so joining Tennis." I don't plan to publicly analyze the ludicracy of her statement, because a much more relevant one followed in the silence there after, one made by Matt, for all the team to hear. "Good." ... I think you can figure out what happened from there.

After about 123441243131322231423534234 changes I finally finished the flyer for The Gathering, which under my printer's (AKA mother's) instructions required massive changes. Yes, in case you're wondering, that is where a rather large part of the time I lost to awakeness came from.

[How do you slam a keypad and get no numbers over 5 ?]

A few days ago the CC team spotted a stop sign on top of the roof of the weight room and, through the the risking of Matt's personal safety, managed to procure it for our own enjoyment. After much using it for a frisbee and other non-reccomendable actions, we took it over to the track itself. There we found that though it had some corners on it, it rolled well enough. Two minutes later I nearly had my kneecap taken off, and Matt nearly got it to the face. With a flying stop sign. Good times.

Now then, if you'll excuse me, I just drugged myself with sleeping pills so I can nod off through the rising tension of not turning in masses of homework on the third day, and I need to write this postcard for English while I still have a brain. Good Night.

--WrenOut--

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 17:36:42 GMT

I have a lot of housecleaning-like stuff to do, which applies both to this post and to my life in general at the moment. Sorry about the dead period ... I've been busy. Busy giving the hardline lightsaber treatment to those who I deem unworthy to live in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, but still. Busy is as busy does.

My bike tire popped riding along some of the really serious grass at Liberty and it's taken me forever to fix it. Just so we're clear here, I have a nice bike, but this grass is some really wicked shiznit. If you've ever driven through 16 inches of mud, that nearly simulates the kind of resistance these sadistic blades create by leaping out and onto your bike tires with vengance not seen since Braveheart. Then, in trying to get to the tire and thus the site of the puncture, I found I had to take the back wheel off. I'll save you all the bloody details, but I broke a ratchet wrench before the nut came off. Now there's a 'new' nut on my bike, which has been fixed after something like 3 hours of work. For a flat tire.

I went shopping for school stuff yesterday. I don't know how many of you this will make sense to, but I feel as though I have too much new stuff. True, we only picked up 2 pairs of shoes, some binders, pens, pencils and a library book, but still. I think I need to spend some time exclusively with my old stuff, to see how it feels about the new additions into my life.

I have been trying with all my summer-ish might to force myself to read The Scarlet Letter, but it is just not happening. I'm finally on what I call the 'Spread Program', where I spread that book out as much as possible over the next 5 days. Of course this has the unfortunate side effect of making me read other things at the same time, potentialy causing mental crossover points if I'm not careful, but it's the only way I'll get my AP homework done.

Jake's started going to college. It's much like the summer, except he's gone 10 hours/4 days a week. Surprised ? Not me.

After my enforced haitus from running I'm finally back. I wish I could say that I was still in great shape and could still outrun my usual crowd, but it simply isn't true. Oh well, I get to climb the ranks back to my usual spot now ... even though our first meet is in a week and a half, for which I will be absolute toast.

Subway summer work has been nice. Don't let me give you the wrong impression, I thank God for the chance to work there and to earn some money. I also thank him for the chance to get away from it. ... Let's just say that I haven't exactly gotten along with all of my co-workers.

Now onto my real work for the next hour or so, making a flyer for The Gathering.

--WrenOut--

Mammoth Camp

Sun, 17 Aug 2003 05:08:14 GMT

Hopefully you noticed that I was gone. Or maybe you just figured that my soul is consumed by KOTOR and I've joined a cult or something. Not that this isn't the right game to form cults about, but I'm getting off topic before I'm even on it.

Mammoth camp was awesome. We're talking ~5.5 days of pure enjoyment here. 5.5 days of pure enjoyment on a mountain, with the team, with a few regular friends on the team, with dirt and running shoes and everything. I don't know how to ask for a better time.

We started making a quote list:

Myself: Matt, are you trying to negotiate your way out of doorknob ?
Meme: Don't you DARE spoon me!
Sadie: [referring to Meme, said to me] Back off! She's with me! ... If only for a moment.
Matt: [Breaking a silence where 12 people were all talking 5 seconds ago] DIE!!!
Jimmy F.: [To obvious parody tune] Baaaaby I need your money! Got to have all your money!
David: [Playing Risk] Oooooo! Kill me kill me kill me! I need to die!
Coach Bex: I'll give you the ball ... to the FACE!
Andrew: [After chasing two barking squirells off the road] Did you hear what he just said to me?
Coach J: [To the tune of 'Farmer in the Dell'] Cows are bred to die! Cows are bred to die! Hi-ho the Dairy-oh! Cows are bred to die!
Christina: Am I the only one who knows what guys do for fun?

I've probably forgotten a few, which you can feel free to fill in with comments. [Meme thinks that my quote should be something I said to try and Zen her into shuffling cards correctly, "Meme has not mastered her eye of the tiger, where as Wren's eye of the tiger is his bitch."]

When I actually got there I was in a pretty bad mood. I'm still not sure exactly what was up with me. Some of the Non-Seniors started throwing balls, balls at high speeds, and frisbees, frisbees with speeds to match, and for some reason it didn't appeal to me at all. I had no rationalization of this, and even forced myself to participate a few times, but in the end I just pulled Meme out of the crowd and made her sit somewhere and talk with me. After a good night of tent antics I was much more myself.

The whole thing with my injury was more frustrating than a phosphate bullet in the groin [they continue to burn inside your body ... slowly]. As you've probably heard, my left hamstring is torn and the tendon behind the knee is getting jacked too. In case you didn't catch that, I was at a camp that went running twice a day while unable to run myself. I ended up doing a lot of halfassed biking workouts in places that were clearly not meant to be biked upon, neither by the designer of the place nor by any biker who had his choice of places in the area. I think I gave Coach more grief about not being able to run the Mammoth Rock Run than I have given him in all my other time on the team. And now I get to go to Mayfair Pool five times a week and go swimming ... for the next two weeks. Great ...

But don't let me give you the wrong impression, I had a ton of fun. Like coloring my hair, just for example. It was really just a small random thing, but I saw some coloring stuff in Rite-Aid and my hamstring didn't want to wander town much longer anyway, so I bought it and hiked back to camp with Meme. Though in the beginning I just intended to have some blue hair just waving around on the top of my head, it was soon discovered that this was indeed gel, very hard gel. In the process of bumbling around my stone-like hair threads she got some of it on my forehead, and it stuck to the skin. Inspiration struck. Ten minutes later I had half a blue nose, Braveheart style, and about 6 cameras pointed towards me. I went on the run that way too, laughing at the fishermen who jumped when they saw me coming.

Especially fun was a little game we called 'Handball'. I don't know if this is some kind of complex I have, but I really like new games that we've never played before. This is because there is always something that needs to be changed in the rules, and thus something to argue about. I actually managed to get thrown out of the game when Matt blocked a goal for me, violating a rule that got made about ten minutes later. Also, just besides that, it was a great game that looks a lot like soccer and rugby put together with a rubber ball, if you even want to imagine that.

Our tent was pretty nice too. We tried to re-establish the previous year's Sophomore Tent as a new and improved Junior tent, and we did manage to find all five Junior boys a home under one piece of canvas, but it was still slightly amiss. We were forced by other tent conditions to take in a Senior and Sophomore refugee, but neither of them really did anything but sleep and answer questions directed towards them. In the mean time us Juniors were having more fun that I could beleive, including the incident where my quote came from.

I spent a lot of time teaching Meme the ways of the outdoors. I had to teach her how to skip rocks, which amazed me before I found myself later teaching her how to throw rocks. I also had to teach her how to play Heirarchy, Rummy, and Pit, but that didn't really suprise me too much by then. I may have been a little more overbearing than neccesary, but all in all she enjoyed learning.

I'm really glad how the team is shaping up. I thought we might have a few spikes but really everything is going just fine. There were three freshmen that in the beginning kind of ... worried me, but they didn't cause any major glitches in the good time of anyone while on the mountain. Or at least not any that I noticed. Besides that the rest of the guys are just being the same awesome teammates they always were.

I'm going to have to enter a rehibiliation program back to normal life or something after this. Even as I was writing the hash for this post I'm still wearing some Mammoth dust and trying to figure out my schedule for the rest of the day. And I have to be at work in about an hour and a half.

I think I'll be going now.

--WrenOut--

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 07:26:03 GMT

Well now. It looks like I have some free time actually, which suprises me to no end with the various events coming up.

Specifically I'm going to Mammoth for CC Camp in just 3 short days, Monday morning bright and early at 7:30 AM. I don't even have words to describe the experience of camp the last two years, and the sense of ownership from being an 'oldbie' puts in on a plane where I can hardly even think about it for fear of overloading my pleasure nerves. The fact that Matt, Meme, and Sadie are going to be there helps too. The high of it all is even augmented by some recent purchases.

I know it's the taboo of all manliness and all Dutch-hood to say this, but it's true. I really like spending money on long shopping sprees. I don't even know how the coincidence of it all can be true, but I actually had eight, yes I mean eight, different places to go this afternoon all on the corner of South and Woodruff, and didn't really need to go anywhere else until 7:30. The pile of camp shweigh hardly fit into my backpack at the end, and I spent nearly $100. But I'm still pushing off what you may or may not find most interesting.

After hearing Tyler and Tycho talk so highly of it, I finally caved and bought KOTOR. I've only played 5 hours, but I'm really starting to agree with the high ratings. True, after your first battle goes smoothly (~20th), the sensation is somewhat like being hit over the head with your own previous incompetence. Also true, I have to augment the in-game map with some of my own doodles, but then again I had to do that with some levels of Super Mario 64, so I think you can all consider that a moot point if you're wondering whethere or not to buy it. The thing that's really apealling to me is the fact that I have already been in a place where I've seen 7 or 8 plots going at once, with the full choice by your actions of which ones to get involved in, what part to play in them and when to pull out of them. As long as you find some way to get your main objective done, which more or less seems to be getting to the next planet, from what I hear. So far it's awesome. I also consider it proof that Fable has extreme potential to be insanely good.

Seems like The Big Kenmiester is taking an interest in Gina, the unamed girl who I went out with once. I'm filing this under 'good things'.

I'm now quite thoroughly addicted to Opera. I don't even know how I got around the internet anymore without the use of mouse gestures, which are commands given by holding down the right mouse button anywhere and moving the cursor a certain way. eg, clicking the right button, moving the pointer to the left and then letting go gives it the 'back' command. They have gestures for back, forward, new blank page, close, minimize, go to parent directory, maximize, reload, create duplicate page, open link in new page, home page, and open link in new background page. After setting it to open all the sites I visit on startup anyway, I don't even touch the keyboard anymore.

Gina just said that I have the same personality as Kenny, except I'm more logical. ... The question is, do I need to be shot or does she ?

I'll just leave you to ponder that question.

--WrenOut--

P.S. The person previously known as 'The Big Kenmiester' has asked that I no longer use this name for him, and thus has been renamed 'Mr. YourMom'.

PPS. He doesn't like that one either. I'm now following Gina's example and calling him Kenbee.

PPPS. Gina doesn't like me calling him Kenbee. He has been renamed O because I feel sad for the poor little vowel next to the amount of attention that P is getting with all of these postscripts. I swear to God, if anyone has a problem with this one then I'm just going to name him Uther and tell you all to shove it.

Sat, 02 Aug 2003 06:14:29 GMT

What the heck, I'm going to be up a while anyway. You have all that free will stuff going for you if you decide that I'm just rambling for this post.

Lesson one for the day is always do nice things when people don't expect them. It's also indirectly why I'm going to be up for a while, and why I seem to be typing faster than I'm formulating my thoughts. The story of why I was where I was will come out when I get to the chronology of it all in a second, but the important point is that I was by Pavillions and I used some of my own money to buy some toilet paper because my family was out. And then my mom brought me Starbucks. Do something nice, your parents appreciate it. Now that's all there is to learn, but you can listen to my caffienated ramblings further if you desire.

As usual for an 8 AM practice I was up at the ungodly hour of 6 AM, taking showers and eating foods and doing other things that human beings are fond of doing before they go places. I wish I could sleep in longer but unfortunately it takes a good hour and a half for my allergy medicine to start working and thus prevent my slow and painful death. Not that CC practice still wasn't quite painful, but that's another paragraph.

Coach Bex wants me to get my left hamstring examined to see if it's torn or just pulled, because it certainly is not in anything resembling good condition. The point is that if it's torn then I will eventually take a month off, either because I'm forcing myself to or I can't walk any longer, and it would be much better to take August off than sometime in the middle of the season. Fun fun, now the real issue is getting that taken care of with the insurance company before I have to leave for Mammoth Camp in ten days.

Afterwards I went to Sadie's house mainly just because it's summer and I can. I could only stay about two hours, which was just long enough to get royally screwed in Mario Party 4 by the cruel mistress Luck, but it was fun enough. And though I nearly killed Sadie's computer when Evanescence came on, I apprently escaped before NSYNC made an appearance.

I only worked two hours because said hours intersected with the time that the local health inspector was coming by. Apprently they think I have a talent for cleaning neurotically. Go figure, it's more money in my pocket. And a good excuse to drop by your local next-door Pavillions, which you already know about.

At home after dinner, Starbucks and Hershey's bar in hand, I decided to dig through some of Jake's DVD's and see what I could see. I settled on watching Minority Report. It's a very good movie, but since nothing is sticking out at me I think I must have missed the point of it. Unless it's just a commentary on choice, which would very much justify the movie by itself.

Two more paragraphs and I'm done. Really. They aren't even the whitewashed 'Today I Did This' paragraphs seen above.

Once upon a time I said that I would sell a kidney to own Fable and Soul Caliber 2, and in spirit this is still very much true. The difference is that recently I've been hearing some good things about a few other games, good things that rival the good things that I've heard about the games in the topic sentence in their goodness. I am most definitely going to buy 2 or 3 games in the time period from now to the winter, but now Knights of the Old Republic, Full Spectrum Warrior, Secret Weapons Over Normandy, Counterstrike, and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow have all been added to the now extensive list of canditates. I'm stil favoring Fable and Soul Caliber 2 just because I have no game in either of those genres currently.

You remember that paragraph about something that I couldn't yet tell you about in the last post ? Yeah, well, it looked for a moment like it might get kind of complicated, but the results seem simple enough so I'm not even going to examine the process anymore. This girl and I went on a date. We decided not to date anymore. And three days aftewards, her 250lb ex-boyfriend no longer desires my death. Simple, ain't it ?

Anyway, have a nice day.

--WrenOut--

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 03:45:52 GMT

I still think the effort of writing a post is beyond the normal limit of mental exercise I should be getting in this kind of state, but I guess I'll survive.

Not like anyone who doesn't know this and would care reads this LJ, but I recently aquired a little game called Apex. I give it my personal thumbs up in all categories. True, at first I was about ready to kill someone with the piling masses of frustration that the beginning levels acrued, but that has nothing to do with the game itself. That has to do with the Universal Law of Racers and Fighters, which states that I suck at them regardless of other circumstances. The concept of owning your own company and the various run-ins, charts, options, etc. that come from that certainly keep things interesting, not to mention that you can play songs on your Xbox's hard disk while racing. People whine about the collision physics, and they're certainly not hyper-realistic, but they do serve to keep random dirty racing to a minimum. I've played through once and I'm starting it through again.

I've also downloaded Opera, which is like Internet Explorer in function. Mostly I just use it to block popups, which I know isn't the full extent of the power of the program, but it's all I'm willing to find in these fr4king help files. I guess the fact that you can keep all the windows in one neat place in your taskbar and switch back and forth with 1 and 2 is also nice.

Blah blah blah, I know I talk about games and programs too much.

Subway seems to be doing a lot better. We have a credit card machine finally set up, which may or may not have to do with anything. The owner seems in a much better mood and there are more people working usually. So it looks like they're here to stay ...

Someone prod Meme into writing another post. I'd do it myself but I think I've bothered her about every other single thing she does already. And her dad is helping my hit parade.

I was kind of worried that the CC team wouldn't be able to develop it's own ... culture, or maybe I just mean coherence, with literally half of last year's members graduating in one massive fallout. I'm still a little hesitant to call it before we all end up at one place at one time, but we seem to have a healthy enough core of people that at least are willing to get along and have fun. Not that I would quit running if I couldn't get along with this small group that also chooses to run anyway.

Another thing also happened, but I'm waiting it for it to get more clear before I start blabbing my mouth off about it. Nnnnngh.

Anyway, have a nice day.

--WrenOut--

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 04:21:19 GMT

I know I haven't updated in a while, but I've been more or less looking towards today as a key point for having something interesting to write about. Now I'm not sure where to begin.

As a few of you may or may not have noticed (with our without envy), today I was at Raging Waters pretty much all day.

Just by bad luck it ended up that nearly 3/4 of the entire program is in summer school, meaning that they can't readily attend events that start in the morning, plus the usual round of reasons why those who can don't. We managed to get the group rate by bolstering our numbers with a full 6 person and 2 friend family-thing that goes to our church, but in the end I still only had 2 kids. Not that it's a bad thing for me, I just felt kind of guilty having the church pay for me to go to Raging Waters so I can watch just that many of these students.

Though I can find no more logical solution, I still can hardly beleive the events that happened right after we got there. Three guys decide to rent a large locker. Three girls do as well. I'm one of the three guys. The three guys' stuff doesn't all fit into the guys' locker, so we stuffed some in the girls' locker. Specifically my shirt, Jacob's (not my brother) shirt, my socks and Jacob's shoes. Later in the day they took our stuff out to get to their own stuff and couldn't stuff our stuff back in, sans the shoes. They left it on top of the lockers and ... Yeah, both shirts are gone. Later tonight I rode my bike home 3/4 of a mile showing off my nice semi-tan.

None of us really cared what we rode, so we just rode every open ride in the park. That may sound like a lot until you realize how limiting the adjective 'open' is in this particular instance. Dark Hole, Neptune's Fury, Raging Rivers were down most of the day, and The Wedge was down for a good time as well. Fortunately there weren't a lot of people around the park so the fact that we had to pack in the few there were wasn't excruciating. [Imagine how long the lines would be at Disneyland if they had to close half the rides suddenly.]

All in all, pretty interesting, and the overcast today kept me from getting a sunburn. Now I think there's some other things I shoudl be talking about.

The first thing you must understand is that I'm not doing as well financally as was initially expected. The Subway I work at is kind of dying. Originally there were five of us hired new (like me) to work at that Subway and apparently they've had to let go of two of us. They can't even get thing straight enough with the bank to get a credit card machine in there. Lately the managers and owners have been coming in to work shifts themselves and to argue about different ideas to try to save it. I have nowhere -near- 20 hours a week, and quite frankly I spent almost $400 of my own money on various things last year and only have $320 right now.

The other thing that influenced me was a stop by GameStop. That Xbox I have over there, while still quite crappy, is getting some games that have lowered in price. Apex sells for only $20 now, and I'm really not seeing the need to make any new investments. Thinking back to what the schoolyear was like last year, I could quite easily live off of used Xbox games. That wouldn't even look like something that could seem to be mistaken for something analagous to a problem.

I kind of had to make a decision about all of this because Chris offered me his 1.5GHz 512MB ram computer (full thing, monitor, keyboard, mouse) for $320 and was trying to get rid of it quickly. He just called now and I told him that I really didn't want to buy it. ... If any of you need a new computer, look up his number and/or call me.

Anyway, I need to go find a new shirt to put on.

--WrenOut--

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 21:59:22 GMT

Well now, I was planning to talk with Drak for most of the afternoon, seeing as it's her birthday and I went and brought her a gift and everything, but she flew off to the library. On her birthday. At the library. Riiiiiiiight.

Although I can't really blame her though, since my gifts recently deserve the ultimate Ghetto Award. The gift to Drak was a collection of various assorted really cheap and/or free items I've picked up over the last year that could be uesful and/or funny, including almond scented hand lotion that I'm almost sure she'll never use. And two boxes of altoids that will probably expire in about a week. Kelsee's gift wasn't much better, but that is in and of itself a whole story.

I was going to give her some of the generic makeup stuff that incidentally wound up in Sharon's present, but about three days before the party inspiration struck. Ok, so it wasn't so much inspiration as Kelsee-anation, when she told me she'd like a PC game. The next day I finally found someone willing to pool funds with me and actually buy the thing, namely Matt, and ... you have to realize that I had about an hour on Friday night to work out with Matt and my mother exactly when and where I would be buying which game for the party on Saturday.

The first problem is that since she only knew it ran Windows XP, we could only assume a mere 700MHz and 256mb of ram, and even that might push things. Realizing that it's insanely difficult to remember the good games of that time, we first kicked around two ideas (WCIII and WCIII: The Frozen Throne), and then dismissed both of them based on incorrect evidence that we didn't have the time to check. Finally we agreed on Max Payne, and I had to call 5 places to get a hold of it, and it was the last copy. ... So naturally it doesn't work on her computer. Greeeat.

The party was a blast. I was only there for the latter two hours of this little event, but in retrospect, thinking about how sore I was the next day after just 120 minutes, I think that was a good thing. Not that it wasn't fun, I just like to be able to walk when it suits me. And I pity poor Bob the stuffed Frog, who must have gotten lost more often than Micheal Jackson gets surgery.

The day before the party I ended up at Matt's house for a few hours with our ill-fated present. I really have to applaud Matt. I mean, everyone in that house is insane to some degree, but Matt is by far the least. Between Benny constantly jabbering smiling into random patches of air for no discernable reason and Alison (sp ?) trying to force Matt and I to stay in her room and play with her bird, I barely escaped with my own sanity. And the fact that Alison envied my ability to wrap presents was a little scary ...

Now that I actually have the majority of my uniform, I think I can talk about it. I still don't agree with the idea of uniforms in principle;The students are more or less being forced to solve the teacher's problems. In practicality I would be willing to let it slide if it were done a little better. I mean, you would expect a company that did nothing but supply uniforms to be able to, you know, supply uniforms, right ? As of now the company True Grits is not accepting phone orders (like they advertised they would), is not accepting internet orders (ditto), is not accepting walk-in orders (ditto ditto), and is not supplying the white polo shirts they claimed they would. I also find it highly weird that my new in-uniform jacket is actually from Russel Athletic but monogramed, meaning that it's literally a copy of my old jacket in every way but with the word "Valley Christian" across the front. And it was ~$35.00.

The other thing I'm not appreciating is this kind of second dress code they've issued, a set of rules about how you're supposed to wear the uniform. First of all, the only
reason for wearing uniforms that every held water was so that the teachers didn't have to spend time and ruin teacher-kid relationships by enforcing the dress code. If you need proof that that this is not the case, I point to the fact that the old dress code is 1/3 pages long and the new one is 2 pages long. Second of all, it supposedly requires boys to tuck in their shirts. Third, it outlaws dickies, which are the uniforms pant with a different label. The labels are even about the same size. What the heck is all that ? I'm not even going to touch on the fact that girls can no longer wear scarves, which you know, makes you look just so slutty. [/sarcasm]

I'm starting to like Danny's take on the enitre school, which is that it's run by elitist bastards that can do whatever they want.

Sorry about the whiny post. Have a nice day.

--WrenOut--

Wed, 09 Jul 2003 22:56:35 GMT

I really should stop putting off posts like this. I've just been doing a lot lately.

The fourth of July was spectacular. We ended up with somewhere around 75 dollars of illegals and 200 dollars of legals, including 500 firecrackers, 90 picilo petes, and 90 Magic Whips. Based on this Chris, Jake, Ryan and Becca started making traditional brews of various fused explosive that we've come to call 'Ground Displays'. It starts with a magic whip, which is very much itself just a superfancy fuse complete with reports, leading to a series of other braided strands of 3 magic whips. The strands lead around the board, with the spaces in between them stuffed with whatever the maker fancies. Near the beginning of the strand we pour some gun powder. The end result is a blinding amount of multicolored light, defeaning roar of pops and bangs, a ZZZZZZZ sound that would make a construction crew cringe and a nice hole in the board where the powder was. Suprisingly enough, Becca really got into it too.

But for me, that's not really what the fourth is about. It's a large majority of it, and I do contribute to the stockpile when I can. But my traditional Independence Day role has been something quite different. First of all, I buy all the fireworks to entertain the old folks, which I did this year, even though all of the oldies cancelled sans my parents. Moreover, I make desert.

This starts at high noon when the homemade ice cream gets into the making. Though I don't particularly think you'll want to hear all the details, the vast majority of the work is watching it freeze and repacking the ice when it gets low. That involves about 40 minutes of standing over this spinning bucket with some loosely ice-cream like white stuff floating around inside of it. And then there's the brownies, to which my mother and I add a special (and legal) supplement to so that it tastes delicious. These two ingredients put in a single bowl are, as Tycho once described it, like watching two girls make out, pleasure followed by more pleasure in and undulating rythym. Everyone who has tasted of this well remembers it fondly, and almost all give some kind of primitive appreciation noise, like 'ooooo' or 'ohohohoh' or 'aaaaah' at the mention of it.

Incidentally I took a sticker reading 'SALE 24.99 Retail Value 36.22' off of some fireworks and put it on my 1995 monitor.

After finding the exact processing power of a GBA, comparing it to my own computer and then thinking about stuff for a minute, I realized that I don't lag all that far behind with this machine and should be able to play something. So I dug up an emulator and I tried a few games ... and much to my dismay, it lacks the speed to do most games justice. I did however find that by disabling the sound and setting it to skip 4 of every 6 frames, it is capable of doing Advance Wars. ... I played until my eyes hurt. I don't think I've done that since Command and Conquer came out. I'm still playing it a lot and three days after starting, I've finished one campaign and am two of 18 missions away from finishing another.

Work at Subway has certainly managed to keep interesting. This crazy old guy gave me a tip. I've heard over ten girls that I've never seen before in my life tell me I have pretty eyes. Also, at first I just kind of tied the apron loosely around myself, but the manager told me to tie it tight, thus showing off exactly how skinny a 125lb 5'11" guy is. All the girls keep telling me I need to eat more. Not only that, but sometimes there are 4 languages being spoken all at once ...

And tonight I get to go back to teaching Middle Schoolers again, despite the fact that I'm supposed to be off for the summer. I don't really mind because the season on the whole will still be restful, not to mention the fact that the regular teacher and the assigned backup teacher are respectively in Tenesee and Kentucky at the moment. It just seems odd to have this book in front of me in July, reading a lesson and cropping it for time again.

Anyway, I have a feeling that anything more I type won't really be read considering how long this is getting. Have a nice day.

--WrenOut--

Whee for nearly forgotten ocassions.

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 18:00:39 GMT

I guess an ocassion like this deserves an LJ post, especially since it doesn't look like it's going to get much more recognition, at least for a few days.

July 2, 1983. July 2, 1984. My parent's anniversary and brother's birthdate, respectively.

The odd thing is that I don't beleive we'll actually be celebrating until the fourth, which has always been the day to celebrate Jake's birthday because of his pyrotechnic obsessions. It actually makes things really easy for me because I always buy him fireworks for his birthday, and not only does he not mind but he wouldn't have it any other way. And the anniversary right there, I mean jeez, you couldn't ask for more.

Back to today though, I think the biggest marker was a telephone call from Grandma. Of course, I dutifully went and picked up the phone despite the fact that Mom and Dad are both gone and Jake is asleep, and had a slightly akward conversation with her about this and that. Seeing as 3/4 of this house is more or less being celebrated, and I soley am celebrating (Major Dutchism right there), it seems a little strange to be sitting here by myself.

We always make up for it on the fourth, though. It's become something of a tradition for me to make homemade ice cream on that day, and something more of a tradition for all the neighbors to come by and ask for a bowl of it. Not that I mind, I don't make the darn stuff to be stared at, and it makes the whole thing seem kind of ... united. Or patriotic. Or something.

In other random news, I've begun considering the idea of buying a Game Boy Advance instead of a computer upgrade. It seems like the new SP's run for around $100, which is somewhere less than half of the computer upgrade price. I don't really know for sure, but it seems to me that it opens up about the same number of awesome games for playage, and also has a lot less ability to screw up. Plus it's mobile and all that junk. The reason that witholds this very much is the fact that an upgraded computer could very easily run some of the GBA emulators, not to mention a few severly backorder emulators for N64 [I have yet to technically know all the buttons for a Zelda game], for only some slight ilegal-ness. It's not like I don't have some 100MB of downloaded songs on this system already if there becomes an actual way to get in trouble for that.

Anyway, and a very merry unbirthday to me.

--WrenOut--

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 05:38:44 GMT

If Saturday was yin, then today was my yang, and Sunday was something like a jelly doughnut. I never really liked the particular notion of stuffing a pastry with a large mass of something that I always was taught to put on top of pastries in small portions, but hey, why not, it's a doughnut.

Starting out in order of interesting-nessocity, I got a new bike today. It's a something or something other little mountain bike made by some Taiwanese import company that I didn't really feel like remembering the exact nomenclature of, not that any of you really would know what I'm talking about from the little call numbers and letters they assign these things for catalouges. 21 gears, a light double shock directly connecting the to the front wheel, then a suspension spring mounted in the frame near the back, hollow aluminum body, alloy everything else, all the blueness you could ask for. Would it make someone who actually knows something about bikes laugh ? Hell yes. Did I get it cheap and does it work ? Hell-er yes.

I really need to stop being so nice to people. So far, just by acts of kindness and/or friendlyness, repeated or otherwise, there are now rumors circulating that I like a total of four different girls. Yes, in case you're wondering, I've tried to convince nearly all persistent perpetuators of these rumors to desist, but to no avail.

To implement this new policy of un-niceness, I've decided that I now hate all gay black ambidextrous Jews that live in Andora. Whether such a person exists or not I don't know, but Jebuz strike me if I don't hate him ! Just think about it. A guy like that could sneak up on you in the night and cut your throat with a left handed scizzors just for the fun of it. And with that kind of minority status, he could walk onto campus at Michigan State, demand that the Dean become his personal biotch, get his demands met and leave with three degrees all in the same day. Bastage !

I'm not usually a big TV person, in fact there really isn't a series I've watched more than half of, but recently I'm kind of getting into the Monster Garage and Monster House thing. I mean, that's just good television. They made a 2 seater coach into an 80mph lawn mower. And in the mean time they explored the relationships of the buil -- Did I mention that they turned a 2 seater coach into an 80mph lawn mower ? If that doesn't define universal appeal, then I don't know what does.

Ryan had a kind of party like thing on Sunday, technically known as an 'Open House', wherein apparently all were free to arrive at any time and leave at any time as well, yet we all arrived at 2:30 and stayed until around 7:00. We managed to scrounge up two TV's, two Xbox's, 5 controllers and the proper cords and plugs for it all, but we simply could not get the two systems to connect. In the end this really didn't turn out to be much of a problem because then the three smaller kids could play on one and the four slightly larger kids (ie. Me, Jake, Derek and Chris) could get some serious Fraggage on. Brute Force made a good attempt at coming out, and TS2 apparently held the floor after I left (bleh), but mostly we were playing Halo. And for everyone one of you asshats who said I simply don't understand it, I won all three rounds I played.

I'm not sure how exactly it got lost in there, but the important part is that Ryan is going to Marine Corps Boot Camp on the 9th of July. Pray for him, or if you're not actually Chrisitian then maybe you could like, I dunno, sacrifice a virgin snake or do whatever it is your religion does. Actually, even in the second case if you could just skip the snake and pray anyway then that would be nice too.

I'm pretty set on a computer upgrade now. It doesn't have to be be big and fancy, in fact I'd rather not to save on cost, because I have massive amounts of backlag to take care of. Quite literally, I have yet to play a game made in this millenium on this computer. A celeron 2.0GHz with 512 MB of ram shoudl fit very nicely, and should cost under 300 dollars. It doesn't really need to run the programs of tomorrow, just the programs of today.

Oh, and if any of you think you have weird parents, you have yet to meet my mom. Between being 8" shorter than me and still 75 pounds heavier, plus an odd occupation, plus just this general weirdness she takes the cake. The short and sweet title for all the different things she does is 'Spiritual Director', basically a short way to say that she gives help to those who really, really need it. And I mean the 'really, really' -- These people scare the crap out of me when they call sometimes. This really came to a point today because she informed me quite randomly that she had prophecied about me. What she said is so easy to misunderstand that I'll prefer not to post it on the internet, but dude, just remember that the next time your mom has a problem with the way you fold your socks or something: At least she isn't doing that.

Anyway, there goes another day in the chronicles of me.

--WrenOut--

Most. Unlucky. Day.

Sat, 28 Jun 2003 17:02:35 GMT

Whine, whine, whine, but still. At least it's what has been happening in my life very recently. Yesterday was the most unlucky day ever. Or at least the most unlucky afternoon, but I don't think the original title would be lost to the dilution.

First of all, Drak was leaving / has left. Forgive my forth-with-ness here but the majority of the time I spend talking to people is spent talking to her. Mostly this is just because I can rant philisopical stuffage at her without getting laughed at or made to feel dumb, but still. Bleh.

Then there's coming home from Subway's. First of all, it's pertinent that you know that I bought a single scoop cone of ice cream before from the Rite-Aid next door before leaving the general area of Subway. It's pertinent because when I rode off a 4" curb about half way home, the ice cream literally seemed to jump out of the cone and land on the street. Looking later at the cone which recently housed the frozen confection, I noticed that the ice cream had been pushed down about 3/4".

I didn't really have long to think about that, though. The more important event that happened when my front tire hit the ground, probably the cause of the event already described, was the outer rubber tube of the front wheel slipping out past the edge of the rim, forcing the rim onto the inner tube and gashing it neatly along about a quarter of the tire.

So I chucked the cone and started walking the bike, chucking it too against a tree here and there, examining the asthetics of the place it landed and wondering if I could leave it as 'City Beautification' or something. Then I arrived at a sort of blind corner, or at least a not very visible one, and stepped out two or three feet. I've done this several times before, seen a car there, watched the car stop, and then proceed. Unfortunately today I met up with a crazy Asian guy in his truck. Instead of stopping he actually sped up and only some ridiculously fast reflexes kept me from being a small twitching pile of broken bones intertwined with some newly flattened pieces of metal.

Well, at least when I got home my mom promised to buy me a new bike.

Then around 8:00 or 9:00 or so, all of Comcast went down in the entire area. And I mean all. Everyone on the street basically lost their TV service, we also lost our phone and DSL service too. And Jake was supposed to call us when the movie he was seeing was over so someone would pick him up. Fortunately he had the sense to beg Becca for a ride home when no one here answered, but that could have been really bad.

All right, but now that you've listened to all the whining, let me talk about Brute Force. I picked it up two days ago.

It's a pretty good game, you just have to realize what it is. And that is not a strategic game, nor really even very much a tactical game. I mean, there are a few really obvious tactics. For instance, you need to shoot snipers, even if it means finding a better place to shoot from. And you shouldn't let your teammates stand next to a plane you're about to throw a frag gernade into the cockpit of. And you shouldn't leave enemy spawn points unfragged behind you. That's pretty much the limit of it; Sniping isn't really of any value because while your weapons decrease accuracy over distance, any Blow Joe with a homemade pistol can hit you accurately from 500 feet. But if you really like the rush and frag, hit the medkit and keep blowing stuff to kingdom come, hey there's some enemies let's go rush in and blow stuff up kind of game, like a Halo kind of game, then by all means you love the hell out of this thing. It's probably the best rush and frag I've ever seen. It's just that the various commands and intersquad relationships don't really let you do anything more than set all 4 into frag mode and make minor corrections to their fragging technique, which is not even neccisarily a bad thing.

The one qualm I have is that Brutus is the most ugly character design of all time. It doesn't even really look like he has a face. And if you look at him from behind, it also doesn't look like he has a head. Plus he looks like a retarded frog running on all fours.

Oh, and I can't beleive I didn't explain this in my last post -- The 'would you like fires with' thing was making a little fun of my boss's accent. If you can even imagine this, he's a big Middle Eastern guy that learned English as a third language, his first language being something I can't even begin to recognize, and his second language being German. I know that none of you will beleive me, but after a day of him calling me 'James', everyone thought my name was 'Shawn'. It got really bad when he decided to explain the biology of making bread...

Anyway, have a nice day.

--WrenOut--

Would you like fires with -- Oh.

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 16:40:02 GMT

Yes, I know, I'm updating way too much before enough filler happens. Well this time there's some kind of justification, not that I ever really needed any on what I do with my journal, but at least a good attempt at it, because there's some real news.

Yesterday I thought I was going to the beach. In fact, I even got a few people to tell me I'm a bastard for it, but honestly I thought it was true. I was misled by the fact that I had the old Higher Ground schedule, and something just didn't feel right in the morning so I called the church. To make a long story short, I then had the right schedule and an entire day to find something to do.

Of course, being the penny-pinching bastage I am, I went out looking for jobs again. Enter Subway.

The new Subway on South and Woodruff is a small little place, not even wide enough to have the entire counter then the door next to each other parallel to the front like most subways. Instead the counter cuts diagonally over to the door, and they mean 'back' in 'back room'. The other thing is that it was not quite open yet.

Actually, it opens today.

And actually, I walked in at 1:58 yesterday and was hired by 2:05.

I came back at four after buying some black pants as instructed 'for training', and I think they honestly did expect me to get some training from 4 to 8. Unfortunately they had a few other details to take care of, like a small medical emergency at another Subway they own, and the fact that their freaking food joint opens tomorrow. Not that I mind opening boxes and packing fridges dand making Teriyaki (sp ?) chicken for 6.75 an hour, no, but I only made sandwiches for half an hour of my four hours there. Not exactly what I expected, but hey, I get to say 'Chipotle' a lot. =P

And did you ever wonder how they keep those aprons and shirts so clean ? They're made out of the same material you see on those really bad pants commercials, the ones where the guys in the car spill coffee all over the three of them and one doesn't have a stain. I don't know why, but the fact that someone out there made pants out of this material never really clicked over for me that someone else could then make an apron and shirt out of it. Whatever.

Oh, and you have to love the title: Sandwich Artist.

Anyway, that's all for now. Have a nice day.

--WrenOut--

The insanity man, the insanity.

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 22:02:44 GMT

Summer, and it is good to be home. Yes, I wake up in the same bedroom every morning, but everything just feels so much different. I can't say it's a pure thrill ride but the edge has been taken off of a lot and I definitely like it.

The first serious fun I had was at Boomers, which was incidentally a higher ground event, despite the fact that only 2 actual kids showed up. We left the 12 person van at the church and just piled the 5 of us into Nick's brand spanking new suburban and left. You may feel free to laugh at me but I spent two and a half of the three hours I paid for in the arcade, and let me tell you that playing Time Crisis II and Capcom vs SNK was like coming home to a girl I hadn't seen in years. Or so I imageine because I've never done that, but yeah. Despite the fact that I haven't even held an arcade joystick in well over a year, I remembered enough of Tyler's cheap megaman and Ryu tactics to fend off 4 challengers in a row and get beaten by the 5th by only one hit. Man, it was good times.

Somewhere in the middle here in some rough kind of chronological order, I picked up the 30 day free trial for flash. I'll just say that many real artists out there probably have fond memories of when they drew like this in the second grade. I'm working on something, loosely incorporating the help of Drak, which I may or may not ever show you depending on how royally it sucks. At least it fills the time.

Friday I went job hunting for a few hours. Actually, with the density and willingness of the local buisinesses in my little area, it may be more accurate to call it job mining, or manybe job stumbling upon, or something to that effect. We actually just went about 3/4 of a mile down one direction and I managed to hand out 8 resumes to people looking for workers my age. And then there was Baker Square.

I actually managed to get an interview on the same day with the manager of Baker's Square. It was actually kind of ironic that the manager of a resteraunt in a center called Dutch Village was a dark Arabian named Ali who didn't speak English very well. He looked over my application, asked me a few questions mainly about when I'd be able to work, and then said "We probably will have job for you, I will check you references and call you in few days." Fun fun, I'll probably be going out to find some more places tomorrow.

Sometimes I wonder about Rudolph. He is after all an 80-ish old man who just quit smoking, but sometimes he defies what I thought was the human limit of low. Kenny and I are always at the same table with the same board every Saturday, with Kenny's chess tutor Louis and often Rudolph, so we decided to turn on some music to give it a little lift in interest. This worked well right up until Caress Me Down by Sublime came on. I kid you not:

"This song reminds me of your sister, Kenny. She's a very pretty girl." -Rudolph

All I remember for a few moments after that is the sensation of unbeleivable pain inside my brain in between moments of relative sanity wherein I begged Kenny to cause my immediate death.

I guess I ate something bad Saturday night, becuase I woke up Sunday with two Klingons inside my stomach battling it out for all the honor. Battling with those huge shiny knives, taking some swipes here and there meant just to decimate their chosen battle field more and more. Which really wasn't so bad until George Bush decided to nuke the surrounding continent. Fortunately I was feeling better by the afternoon.

And now who knows, I may even start updating regularly.

--WrenOut--

Happy belated Birthday

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 19:33:13 GMT

Ok, first of all, we really need a better system for letting me know when it's people's birthdays. I managed to IM Kelsee something before I had to leave, but I could have made some good use out of some more time to write a post/ buy a present. Anyway --

Happy Belated Birthday Kelsee !

Now for the rest of this junk in my brain.

I really like this mug. I made it in Ceramics class about three weeks ago, but only now do I truly appreciate it. It's big and thick, can hold an entire can of soda topped off with about an inch of something else left over from the last can, and has a certain weight to it. To truly drink of a mug this size requires a little arm strength and the willingness to open your mouth quite a ways. It has a kind of manly, fleshy aura to it. I leave it out on the counter most of the time partially so it's more availabe to me and partially beacause I would feel bad for the other cups in the cupboard having to compete with a mug that could slap them around. At first I didn't really like it because it felt so rough and had so many sharp-ish edges as most newly fired clay does, much like meeting a pretty girl only to find that you yelled at her parents last week, but now with handling the roughness is gone and I guess the analogy then runs that I shot her parents. Homicide never tasted so good.

[And y'all say you have nothing to write about.]

You know you've thrown a party right when you have the party, feed everyone till they're full, snack on the leftovers for a day, feed your family the leftovers for a meal and then have leftover leftovers. Especially when I'm eating. I think we still have around twenty hot dogs as well. Indeed, it was a bulk culinary work that I don't think we'll attempt again soon.

Unfortunately my summer job with my uncle never worked out. This creates an interesting problem for me because now I have to either find a new one, create plans that don't involve a job, or more than likely do a little of both. I have all day today to get my junk in order and then tomorrow I go out around to all the local businesses (there are a freaking ton around here) to see who's hiring. And of course, if that works out then a job plus running should more or less fill my day.

The question is what to do if such profitable means do not become available to me. I've more or less decided that in that case I should at least turn to some intellectual pursuits, most likely meaning that I would get more serious about chess again. [I only play like ... three or four times a week as is.] I think that then I could make the summer at least bearable.

As for what to do with any money I do come across, I've more or less decided to upgrade this computer. Looking around TigerDirect.com, NewEgg.com and GoogleGear.com, the price of an upgrade to a 2.0GHz Celeron and 1GB of ram cost somwhere between 200 and 300 dollars. And that would mean that I would basically have 3 years of PC gaming at my disposal to catch up from, much of which has been discounted by now. Considering that a PS2 costs 200 plus controllers plus 50 per game, I think that's actually quite a good deal.

The scary part is that I think I know more about hardware than everyone else in our group, with the exception maybe being Matt.

I called the Children's Pastor today about me working on Sundays ... interesting enough. She and Lanell (the person I was 'watching') thought I did really well, or at least said so, which may or may not have been true, and definitely did not change the fact that I did not like it. I told her I'd do it for another week if they needed more time for a replacement, which may or may not have been a gigantic mistake, and then prayed that they do find someone. Poor kids if I have to do that again ...

Anyway, this post is [getting] kind of random, so I'll sign off.

--WrenOut--

Mop up time.

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 16:15:17 GMT

There's some serious house cleaning to be done in the news department right now. My life has been way too stressful for the start of summer.

There really hasn't been a break since my last exam on Thursday. That was an Honors Algebra II exam, one of those little exams where it seems easy because there are only 44 questions on it but then each one counts for like 2.75% of the test. You get four questions wrong and you're already in the B range. Fortunately I could get like an F--- on that exam and that would make my grade a B, which is still an A since it's an honors class, so I managed to be one of maybe three people in the class not to develop some kind of nervous twitch by the time the bell rang. I felt like a burned out lightbulb.

Friday was almost a good start. I managed to at least sleep in till 8:00, which was somewhat encourging. Unfortunately I was soon in the shower getting ready to go to Costco, the place destined to sell the food meant to be consumed at Sunday's party. Even this may have been alright had I not foolishly ate one of the Hebrew National all beef kosher hot dogs they sell with a drink for only $1.50. First it felt a little like I wanted to throw up that hot dog. Then it started to feel a little like I wanted to throw whatever organism had spawned inside my stomach. Then it felt like I was about to involuntarily make another Aliens movie. I managed to at least get all the shopping done, and by the fact that I seem to be all in one piece and no one's suing us, I don't think any major injury was done.

The ridiculous-ness continued. Jake's graduation started at 8:00, so of course Dad and I had to leave to get there at 5:00. Sigh. Kids, listen to me on this one: You don't want to invite 18 people to a 2000 person capacity church. Bad things happen. We arrived at 5:45 to find that people with even larger parties were already there waiting to save seats, which was somewhat good because then we had someone to talk to at least. I was actually thinking that if the glass of the cathedral shattered outward that I would only use the shards to cut one wrist instead of both when Jake and Mom arrived.

Jake yelled at her the entire way over. Because he thought they would be late. They were fifteen minutes early. Bastard.

I have to applaud them for making the graduation itself go pretty well. Especially I thought Ms. Addmiral made a very good speech. And the fact that Uncle Jerry said his company might have a part time job working with 'computers and numbers and ... yeah, that kind of stuff' didn't exactly hurt my mood.

In the cracks of Friday I had enough freed brainspace to think more about what I would do with any summer job money I might come by. With a little less to think about it dawned on me that I might be able to upgrade this computer to something decent, even if really cool new computers cost dirt cheap. When I got down to finding out exactly what could be upgraded and what was still industry standard, I found that a freaking lot was already bueno on this machine. 52X CD Drive, 2.88MB Floppy, 17" CRT monitor, 2.1 speaker setup, 64MB graphics card, 10/100 ethernet card. In fact, the only problems are 300MHz processor, 128MB DDR SDRAM, Windows 98. And, incidentally to upgrade the processor I would need a new motherboard and a new fan. Just to give you an idea of how cheap this can be, Motherboards.com sells a 2.0GHz celeron processor, fan, 1GB of DDR SDRAM and a compatible motherboard for $292.00, and they're kind of expensive compared to some of the stuff I've seen out there. (Check out TigerDirect.com.)

Anyway. I think I was at Saturday.

As always I went to Kenny's house. As always we played this and that game, BatMUD, watching Kenny play some EQ. As always Louis came over and said some pretty wrong and disgusting things in between setting the puzzles up wrong. The difference was that we were both totally shot and could hardly walk straight, much less figure out these blasted puzzles. And the other difference is that I was watching Planetside so intently that I missed the fact that I was supposed to be at Kym's.

Kym's was kind of fun. It was actually Sadie who informed me two days before the party that this party actually had some kind of point, some kind of occasion, instead of another random getogether like we usually do. Now here's my Drak-like moment for the day.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KYM !!!

I blame the little one.

Mostly we talked and ate for a while, then watched the sixth sense. Not the same 'we';Daniel and I both bailed on the movie and went to play N64 with Kym's mom. After a few matches of SSB and Pokemon stadium, we returned to the movie ... to find Drak turning nuerotic quickly. She actually managed to curl up inside her hair while hiding behind a corner so that the TV was barely visible, and you could hear her breathing from the other side of the room. I tried to help but I think I mostly just drew even more attention to the fact that she was scared.

I came home at 11:00, then you already know everything about my Sunday.

I'm not exactly sure where it was, but somewhere in there I also bought an icemace in BatMUD, increasing my battle prowess signifigantly.

Actually, I'm not sure how a lot of things happened.

--WrenOut--