Random snippets from the last month in reverse chronological order. :-)
Labor day was great. We had 10 people over from our expanded group of friends. Party prep included a porch purge that got us a front porch that is almost civilized again. Other random purges happened inside and let us get back more random space. We had a ton of food and the only minus was that the new orientation of our older grill caused some of the burgers to be undercooked. Unfortunately people who had those burgers didn't tell us that.
But we have a new grill on order. Our sixth anniversary was a few weeks ago. Things were busy enough that we didn't manage to get out and do anything particularly special. Matter of fact, the dinner which was planned for a quiet weekend managed to turn into a flurry of activity with other people. We passed on getting each other random anniversary stuff and decided that we were going to update the grill instead. We had bought the grill on Saturday and gotten it assembled. Pity that it didn't fit into our car! It'll probably be delivered tomorrow.
In other upgrades, Chris also decided that enough was enough with our old TV and we got a new flat screen. Of course, they decided to deliver it from a warehouse in Texas rather than ship one over from the store in Toledo. You have to love dealing with the Internet. That should also be here tomorrow.
Sunday we went out to Ann Arbor to see Carriers. I was one of the lucky few who hadn't actually seen the trailer. Per Chris's description, the movie appears to be a zombie flick. Instead, it's a reasonably well put together low-budget pandemic apocalypse movie. As long as that's what you expect, it was okay. If you were expecting a zombie flick, stay home and save your nickels.
Afterward we went out and had sushi with Simon and Jason, new friends from Peter's housewarming. We then adjourned to Peter's apartment to play Guitar Hero and hang out for a while.
Saturday we skipped SEMGS (sorry about that) to accept a last-minute invitation to a birthday party for Rich G. We met Rich and his partner Michael at Shawn and Doug's birthday party some weeks earlier and we'd had to blow off multiple previous invitations to come down and hang out with them in Toledo. It was a good evening out and we got to see some of the guys we'd met previously from Liam and Dave who are Toledo locals there as well.
The weekend of August 29 we attended Peter's housewarming party and hosted Dave
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davebear_in and Sean redbeardsean. Several of our WoW guild folk were there along with many of the other people we'd met recently via Shawn and Doug - including Kevin tooling who had attended the St. Andrew's Games with us earlier in the month.Sean, Dave, Chris and I took the opportunity that Saturday to all head to the gym together. Sean had recently started a workout program and I've been trying to coach him a bit remotely. This gave us a bit of time to go over some of the things that I had to learn with a lot more error than strictly necessary - especially squats.
The weekend of August 22 we were in Saugatuck to hang out with Liam, Dave and several of their friends from Trident Toledo (a local leather group) for their annual camping event. This year the majority of the group decided to rent the "bed and breakfast" building of the campground rather than camping. I had wanted to skip doing that and just use our existing camping stuff on the grounds that the price of the B&B was about the same as a night staying at Mackinac Island and that seemed excessive for camping.
While we had a good time, the weekend got rained out. We spent the majority of our time hanging with them inside the building and ended up just falling asleep on the couch in there anyway. So, the "camping" aspect of it turned into what Chris considers the worst possible reason to do anything "camping" related: We went to a lot of effort to set up a tent, brought in food and didn't even bother to get much use out of either.
Fun aside, the question really becomes either skipping the event altogether next year from a cost perspective (we didn't really intend to mooch off the rest of the group), paying the money to stay with the rest of the group or find an alternative set of people to share the camping portion of the experience with us. It'll be an interesting discussion.
The weekend of August 15 was Chris and my sixth anniversary. We ended up spending it mostly with friends and also with Chris's mother and his sister, Angie, who was in town unexpectedly. We were planning on one meal out that weekend - just something quiet together. Instead it turned into almost 4 with family and friends. We'll still make it up at some point.
August 1, we had our annual trip to the St. Andrew's games in Livonia. Unlike previous years, I didn't get any pictures of the games and at some point need to bother Chris and Peter and Doug for their sets. I had put out an invite to some of the folk on facebook to get a group for the games (which always conflict with SEMGS) and to end the evening at Gaucho, a brazilian steakhouse not that far. Kevin
tooling responded somewhat unexpectedly to the broad invitation and we were happy to meet him at the games. Nate King, also someone we met from Doug's birthday party joined us.On top of the usual hanging around watching large men throw heavy stuff events, my usual "participation" for the farmer's walk this year was preempted by somewhat unusual circumstances. A random guy I had been ogling of the bodybuilder variety not ten minutes before strode up to our group and asked if we'd be interested in helping the Wayne County Sheriff's department with their tug-o-war group which was short a few bodies. I'm pretty sure he was after Nate, who's 6'2 and in the 270+ range and Doug and I served pretty much as just extra bodies.
We ended up competing against the Army team and a local biker team and came in second place.
Of course, the majority of the enjoyment from the event was hanging around the guys from the Sheriff's department, the majority of whom were also powerlifters. I have to wonder a bit how they would have felt to know that their extra recruits were all gay. :-)
That weekend was also busy on another front: Peter
texaspenguin had taken possession of his apartment in Ann Arbor and we spent some time over the preceding few days helping him to move in. Chez Penguin is probably twice as big as both of the actual apartment's I've stayed in over the previous 10 years. I think he and Kodi will be comfy there.The weekend of July 25 we passed on our annual Michigan Beer Fest weekend so that we could join the folks of the Motor City Bears for their canoe trip. The river wasn't all that deep nor that swift in spite of rain the previous couple of days. We waffled on bringing Noodle with us that day and probably could have, but I was concerned about the river potentially being too fast after all of the rain.
(Incidentally, we've just hit the time of year where the River Raisin a few blocks from our house has slowed down to the point where there is heavy grass growing in it. It's odd to see a river that needs to be mowed.)
We hung out with the MCB folk later that evening at Scott W's house. It was a good overall relaxing time.
The previous weekend of the 18th Peter, Chris and I accepted another long-standing invite that we'd had to skip out on the past several years: Adam
alcadd and his partner Tim were having a joint birthday party at their house in Pontiac. I'd had to pass on most of their previous invitations for activities over the years because they typically had happened during the weekday. Their schedule usually precluded the events from happening on the weekends and making the trek from Monroe or Ann Arbor to Pontiac and then home made from a very long day. It was a good chance to see them and hang out for a bit and also to see Walt from MCB which I hadn't seen for a while. The only big minus was a few days later their house was broken into. :-/The weekend of July 11th was more watching large men throwing heavy stuff. Shawn and Doug joined us in our trip to Saline where we hung around the Saline Celtic festival. Again I wasn't good at taking pictures and while we managed to avoid outright sunburn, we finally had to leave so as to avoid extra-crispy Chris and Shawn.
Shawn and Doug seem to have gotten the Celtic games bug though. :-)
This takes us all the way back to the last big entry. I really need to get into the habit of shorter entries, but the speed of FB has certainly put a bit more of a crimp into that.
I've been mostly off WoW the last month or so trying to finish up my IETF MIB project but even the coding on that has been interrupted the last week by some work bleeding through into my personal time. It's also been put off as part of rebalancing necessary house project time into our updated schedule. I expect to finish it very soon though.
The True Blood Mondays that we were doing with Shawn and Doug and Peter have expended a bit and we've had a few extra bodies over. Given that the season finale is about to show, we're planning on moving on to starting Lost instead. We'll be starting from season 1 there and working our way back up. We've been enjoying our Monday nights a lot and they have the comfy feeling of a lot of the events that used to be done while I was living in Westland.
We've been very happy that courtesy of a chance meeting that we've had our regular local circle of friends grow substantially.
In final news, we've finally decided that we should start looking around for a house in the Ann Arbor area. Chris has lived in Monroe his entire life and it's now time to consider moving elsewhere. We'll be starting the joy that is looking at selling the current house and shopping for a new one soon. The tipping point is that a lot of the houses that were far out of reach recently have crossed into what should be an affordable range.
arkanjilRandom blurbs:
Hair-shirt greens
Dark Euphoria
Globalization - expansion without progress for BrIC
Objects as printouts
Things you use and take time as important: Bed.
Buy real things you'll really use.
Your things are:
1. Beautiful things.
2. Emotionally important things
3. Tools
4. Everything else.
Public goods and services are best met by maximizing the efficiency of providing the goods and services to the public. This means removing waste and overhead.
A great deal of profit may manifest as waste and overhead.
This provides a conundrum for providing public goods and services by the free market.
gyvyr and I went out to Pittsburgh for one of those modern Internet events: A big social gathering with people we don't really "know" that well. In this case, it was the wedding of David and Amanda. As is also very typical for such events, half the time you had to think to call David by his given name rather than then name we've called him for much of the last three years: Tips.You see, David's the current guild master of our World of Warcraft guild.
WoW has been very nice in several respects. As a game, it's remained interesting enough between the not-quite-frequent-enough introductions for new content that we've stayed interested in playing. But the main thing that's kept me on has been over the years actually meeting people online that we've enjoyed our general time together where the game is just the reason to be there.
Think the Cheers bar, just with elves, orcs, trolls, undead and very large cows.
Over the past several years we've had several opportunities to hang out in real life with various people from the game that we didn't know from other contexts already. We've had movie nights and gone to Christmas parties and BBQs with guys we know in Ann Arbor, Jim and Paul. We met Mike from Pittsburgh - our former guildmaster - at similar parties. And two years ago when the tiki party was last in Monroe, we had David and his fiance up as well.
You know these sort of events work out well when people get together and while there's geeking about your mutual interest, people have fun and talk about other stuff too. At the tiki party, Amanda was clearly in that half fearful state where she thought she was going to be surrounded by "those game people" for an entire evening. Instead I think she found a wide variety of interesting people. Colleen, Mike's other half, also had a few similar moments. I think Colleen had more of that effect on our group since she and Mike are "those NASCAR kind of people". *alien-point-and-shriek*
So, when David and Amanda invited a good chunk of people to their wedding and the guildies made up about five percent of the attendees, we had hoped that we were going to have a similarly pleasant get together. We were adding a few bodies we hadn't previously met for folk outside of the local region. But add to this that it's a wedding - one of those always awkward events for people. Most of the time if you're vaguely lucky, you'll be at the event with enough of a crowd so that you're not drowning in a sea of relatives. And even if you're relatives, sometimes its drowning in a sea of people you see maybe once every five years.
And we were lucky again. We met a bunch of other people who were until then just other characters in the game, text on a screen and voices over Ventrilo. And we were pretty much comfy with each other from the get-go. It's always nice when things go that smoothly. Much of the initial get together was at the hotel many of the wedding guests were staying at, a few dinners out and hanging out at David and Amanda's place the evening before the wedding. Yeah, there was a lot of game geeking, but again, it was the usual Cheers feeling.
I'll probably post some pictures from the wedding shortly. There's a chance we'll see some of the people again soon at the upcoming tiki party. The full set of photos will probably wait until Chris has completed his cleanup project, the album being part of his gift to the bride and groom.
Probably the only disconcerting bit throughout the wedding itself beyond the heat within the church was the moments where the minister (? - Presbyterian) almost seemed to boom Man And Woman throughout the ceremony. I was torn between recognizing this as one of the normal forms of the ceremony and wondering if he was making political comment.
(A cross-sampling of the music I listen to regularly would probably boggle about 2/3 of my readers thematically. The remaining 1/3 would simply classify my taste as "SCA/fannish eclectic.")
Illumination is the most recent release from the Baebes. Given that they're in the U.K. it's not surprising that it took Amazon a few weeks from release to make the album available in the U.S. The album follows the trend of some of their more recent albums to be a mix of traditional vocals and instrumental to a few pieces that use more modern instrumentation and voice shifting effects familiar to those who've listened to Delirium before.
Their albums tend to be a blend of slower more ambient music - think the pace of most Enya tunes - and something that's moderate dance or marching pace. One of the reasons I tend to like the Baebes is that both sets of music are appropriate for my different moods: If I'm programming and want quieter background music, their easier listening stuff is perfect. As my day progresses or while I'm driving, the music with the stronger beat tends to complement my mood. But their albums are almost always contain about a third of content that's at best "eh" for me. True to fashion, Illuminations is very much the same. Usually it's from their slower pieces, but this time included something meant to be a bit more of a busy piece. The Blacksmiths is completely different from their traditional material but would remind many people of pieces done by Steeleye Span. The song is very stacatto and beyond the random bits of modern English airy singing thrown in the middle seems like it would have probably been less grating to me if done by male vocalists.
The bits of the album that I've liked have also been notable for music that I'd expect out of a random reanaissance era movie. In other words, they sound a bit like something from a soundtrack. These include "I Sing of a Maiden", "Yonder Lea", and Sunrise.
Sunrise is probably my favorite song out of the album. The news link on their website appears to have the full song as background music as part of a rotation of their work..
(Although we could both deal without the *yarf* at our heads at 7.)
Saturday we went to our third Motor City Bears event of the year - a pool party at one of the members house. There was probably over sixty people there by the time everything was said and done. We managed to get a bit of sun and had just enough sunscreen on in order to not have any serious burns. The big trick will be getting sun other than on the top of our shoulders since those have been crisped at least twice now. :-)
We also got to see Nate from Doug's birthday party a few weeks ago. We understand that even with the SPF 45 that he managed to turn himself into a lobster.
(Geek moment: I always have a hard time writing SPF and not thinking link-state routing.)
Since we're going to the MCB canoe trip in two weeks, we finally decided to re-join MCB. I mostly dropped my membership a few years at the apex of the typical drama that seems to occur regularly in such groups. Since then, they've managed to purge themselves of some of the toxic individuals responsible for the problems while at the same time having a good core group of people working to have fun stuff happening on a regular basis.
Sunday for the most part was just random projects. Chris has been busy enough with work that he's been burning hours on the weekends to keep up with them. I spent the day catching up on random projects that have been sitting around for a while: Assembling the bench for our garden that Liam and Dave got Chris for his birthday. Recovering a bit of order from different pieces of the house. (ZOMG, we can see the floor in the bedroom closet for the first time in over a year.) That sort of thing.
I even managed to learn how to properly fold a dress shirt for the first time. There were plenty of videos on the net which showed the same two flip technique made famous by the loud chinese videos being used on long sleeve shirts but that doesn't work so well on flannel.
Going back a bit further, my parents stopped by briefly on the way back from their rambling vacation around the U.S. They stopped in North Carolina to visit my brother, made it through other parts of the South and eventually worked their way back up to us. I'm sure my Dad thought the visit was the right length since they were there for dinner and not much longer. :-) The only bad news is my mother mentioned that she's now fully a type-2 diabetic and is on the usual medications to control her blood sugar. It's yet another hint that I've been wise to control my blood sugar over the last several years.
We've also been having Doug and Shawn over regularly to work through True Blood, Season 1. Peter picked this up for us a few weeks ago. I didn't have any major expectations about what to think about either the show itself or its premise but we've been really enjoying it. Our only problem is that we've not bothered with any sort of pay channels like HBO for years. Given the way they tier the services, it's just not been worth our while for as much as we actually watch TV.
As it is, we gave up on Netflix for a while since we'd had one set of videos sitting on top of the TV for almost a full year unwatched. Netflix still suits the way we actually watch TV but we still don't watch enough to use the service unless we know we're going to have some down time. In the future we may be better about suspending the service when we're not using it. For now, it'll probably sit dormant until winter time.
The Summer is shaping up in our usual pattern: We're going to a few highland games. We're going canoeing. We have a tiki party scheduled and need to do some additional planning. We're hoping to bike some more. It'd be nice if we could plan on taking a short trip to see random people out of state as well - we'll see how things shape up.
In final good news, in what shouldn't need to be news at all, my employer had just recently revised its same-sex partner benefits and Chris is now on my health care. Given that we use BCBS of Massachusetts, it's not surprising that they can underwrite the plan. Previously the company had required that partners be with each other, with supporting documentation, for seven years. I hope that health care reform in Washington makes some progress because this simply shouldn't be an issue. But, it's Washington and I have limited hope at best.
solarbird.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co
Excerpt:
Credit card companies are raising interest rates and fees seven months before new rules go into effect that will limit their ability to do so, much to the irritation of Congress and consumer advocates.
Chase, for instance, will raise the minimum payment required of some of its customers from 2 percent to 5 percent of the statement balance starting in August. Chase and Discover have increased the maximum fee charged for transferring a balance to the card to 5 percent of the amount, up from 3 and 4 percent, respectively. Bank of America last month raised the transaction fee for balance transfers and cash advances from 3 to 4 percent. Card issuers including Bank of America and Citi also continue to cut limits and hike up rates, which they have been doing with more frequency since January.
Ah, yes. It's still got info for the card I just had ganked out from under me by HSBC's security system. At least it's easy enough to point to the active card. I probably should delete the old card so it doesn't keep trying to use that...
... er... maybe the 12 cards I've had in their system since 2002.
Oi.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 had already granted U.S. citizenship to all people born in the United States; the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment added this principle into the Constitution to keep the Supreme Court from ruling the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to be unconstitutional for want of congressional authority to pass such a law or a future Congress from altering it by a bare majority vote.
While this is from Wikipedia and thus subject to editing to a form someone would consider useful to support such matters, this is the kind of thing I'm always reminded about when pondering the current issues working their way through the various U.S. States with regard to gay rights. The important points are:
- This sort of thing has happened before. It will happen again.
- Just remember kids: The Constitution and the courts have enshrined second class citizens. Don't count on the existence of being one "unfair under the law".
- The main way we've gotten out of such stupid messes before has been by using big sticks. In the case of the 14th amendment, we had to get Congress to push through something to block the courts. There's a reason why the religious right have been working so hard to get an amendment in place that enshrines DOMA in the Constitution.
It goes without saying that I'm neither an American history nor Constitutional scholar. This is just some ramblings from someone who sees history broadly.
( Spoilers inside )
Apparently there's a mourning-dove like bird that has a call that sounds a bit like Peter's alarm clock. Instead of a continuous series of boop boop boop it does 3 of them, then pauses. It still woke me up even though it's quieter than his alarm clock.
I think three years of working at an ISP has left me way over-sensitive to anything that sounds like beeping.
Last week was definitely busy. Chris's birthday was on Sunday but in the interests of trying to get some folk together with us to celebrate we did stuff on Monday. It was a nice turnout: Liam and Dave, Doug (whose birthday was Monday too!) and Shawn joined us. Jared, who was on his way back from his Chicago visit managed to bring with us a mostly surprise guest, Richie
oom741. Apparently Richie wasn't as big of a surprise as he should have been since he dropped too many hints to Chris on the guild Ventrilo server. We had dinner at the Monroe Street Grill, which as always was delicious.Richie stayed with us a few days for some general hang-out time. He took the Megabus back home to Chicago. The Ann Arbor pick up point for the Megabus is conveniently right across the street from where I work. From the sound of things, it was very roomy and also had free in-transit wi-fi. That sounds like a huge step up from the last time I took Greyhound almost two decades ago. I don't have good memories of Greyhound and he words "unwashed humanity" would describe that experience pretty well.
The day that Richie left, we had Hunter
javabear come to visit for a few days. He needed some out of the house time and Peter volunteered to have him come on up to hang out. I think Hunter talked more in the following days to me than he had in the previous years worth of other interactions. :-)During his visit, we went to see Drag Me to Hell. It's worth a writeup.
Saturday we went to Doug's birthday celebration at Doug and Shawn's place. It was a nice overall visit and we got introduced to more people in their social group. To some extent, it was as if someone had taken a snapshot of the "people you might know" out of facebook and dropped about half of them into their living room. Good times. :-)
Sunday we went to the Motor City Pride festival in downtown Ferndale. This year they had it along a few blocks of 9 mile road rather than in one of the parking garages like they had in previous years. The layout certainly helped open things up quite a bit. Given the line for their biergarten, they need to expand that just a little bit. As is tradition, I managed to get my first sunburn of the season there even though the day was generally overcast. We left as soon as Chris started turning pink. Even though I wasn't pink before leaving, I managed to turn bright pink by later that evening.
The old Detroit Edison billing center in downtown Monroe. 
Chris walking the dogs. No, he doesn't normally look that grumpy. :-) 
Here's some pictures from Kevin (kevinnickerson and Jennifer icyfeetofdeath's wedding. This is the one where Chris and Peter did the Dalek cake.When I get up, Noodle always wants to go outside. If I let her in, it's a complete bet as to whether she's going to lay down somewhere quietly or become a psychotic white tornado of craziness.
This morning: psychotic white tornado.
(of craziness).
I just finished reading War of the Flowers, by Tad Williams. At this point, my feelings on the book are mixed. To some extent this could have been predicted by the fact that as a fantasy book, it was involving something that is theoretically familiar territory: Faerie. The somewhat familiar setting, depending on how it is cast, restricts the amount of world building that is available to the author. Williams does manage to add a bit of a spin to the familiar - a faerie that has incorporated modern elements of the mortal world: cars, cell phones - all without a serious level of kitsch. Thus the book is a success in taking a familiar world and making it his own and building on it for the story.
Probably my bigger problem was our protagonist, Theo Vilmos, and his role in this world. Much like Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, Theo is pulled out of his element and forced to survive in some very unusual circumstances. However, unlike that general premise, Theo is used in a fashion that I tend to not care for as much in my epic fantasy. He is taken through The Guided Tour.
In the guided tour, the characters are often an excuse to expose the reader to the World and the world itself becomes much of the protagonist. The reader is usually given good reasons for this. In this particular story, Theo takes on the role of the shell-shocked abducted mortal and spends a significant portion of the story being ferried from hither to thither.
I've read plenty of fantasy with this general M.O. and it's usually okay. Science Fiction often takes this approach when the author is weak on character building and the world building is the far more interesting aspect of the book. Williams, however, has proven himself to be much better at character development. Theo's companions are interesting but for the most part serve the world building rather than the story. It's only in the last fifth of the book that he leaves the guided tour role and finally starts taking part in the decisions that affect the story's outcome.
So, gripes aside, what is War of the Flowers about? 30 second synopsis:
Theo is abducted into Faerie. He spends more than half of the book not knowing why but is both pushed and pulled among the various factions that want him for those unknown reasons while he tries to figure out if his great uncle, a prior traveler to Faerie, is actually involved in the story. The forces moving the pieces on the chessboard are of the seven "Flower" houses that rule since the last war lead to the presumed demise of the monarchs who had ruled since time immemorial. Eventually Theo finds out What's Going On and spends the last 100 pages taking action... that mostly leads to him being a spectator in his fate.
The book is good fantasy popcorn and good world building but the protagonist is much weaker than I recall William's previous characters being. The Victorian style social commentary is integral to the plot but not presented in a way that it adds significant value to the reading experience.
I'd give it about 2.5 out of 5 and it's suitable for pretty much all ages of reader.
I'd appreciate hearing from others if his Otherland series has similar issues. I've considered adding that to my reading queue but this gives me a bit of pause.
I was pondering out loud to Chris the other day that we should be seeing cheaper gas. The premise is that the prices are supposedly tied to the price of oil, but oil has been close to $50 a bbl for weeks now. Based on this random bit of graph, we should be seeing $1.50 a gallon gas right now. I haven't seen it cheaper than $1.99 for a long time.
http://disciplinedinvesting.blogspot.co
I forgot to write down exactly when this was, but this was probably January sometime. I've had my Honda CR-V since the middle of 2003. Aside from needing some brake work, it's worked great. I just had the "100K mile service" on it two weeks ago - and that was when it was at 115K. Hopefully it holds up a few more years without any problem. It'd be nice to not have any car payments for another two years.I do wonder, especially since the insurance has gone up, whether it's time to take it off full coverage. Time to hit the blue-book I think.
- Music:Ready Steady Go (Album Version) - Paul Oakenfold
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