Caught in the act:

You know I have a tendency to post pictures when I don't have much to say. In fact, I have lots to say, with the state leg in session, hoping to legislate our collective morality, and the bloggy land and newspaper opinion pages afire with people making stupid comments and assumptions.

But I shall refrain.

Instead, this was us last night when we were caught watching Chuck in 3D:

There was an interesting conversation last week on Science Friday... talking about 3D technology. The conversation was about whether 3D would move to a more mainstream valid media entertainment method.

To which I responded, "********* I hope not." I was in my car at the time, so I was allowed to swear outloud.

It was a gimmick in the 50s, the 80s, and now it's the same.

I would throw up if I had to watch more than 40 minutes of anything in 3D. Still waiting for that first 3D porn movie though. On second thought... I'll pass on that one.... take an eye out... okay, on to other things...
Here's a picture I took from my computer's web cam the other day... what can i say - I was bored at the time:













Here's what the mountains look like when the smog is thick as mud in the valley below, where all of us normal folk live:

No, that's not me... some moron floated by just as I was taking the pic.






I think I should have a blog topic category that says, "Nothing at all. Nothing to see here, move along, back to your homes now..."

Shameless Self Promotion

I don't have much for you today, so you'll have to settle for a link farm.

I have just over 600 posts of banality, sprinkled with a healthy dose of inanity. Here you will find a Top Ten list of some of the more memorables, in no particular order. Have fun.

There are 11 - so consider the last one a bonus.


The Hinano Incident

My "I'd Do Her" list - to which I have added Angie Harmon - with the non-renewal of Women's Murder Club, I'll have to go back to watching old Law & Order reruns. Bow-chicka-wacka-wacka-wow-woooow..... Just sayin.

The story of my ear hair

The males for whom I have hair envy

Some thoughts on my most recent wedding anniversary

The group of posts I call "On My Hard Drive"

The story of how I got to be me

The 100 (other) things about me

Thoughts on a Utah state lottery

The story of my two tattoos

The battle between Apple and The Beatles, as told by Dr. Seuss

I read signs too quickly sometimes

Every Monday evening I make a trek to The Great Utah County to get a young-un to a trumpet lesson. Each week as I make my way further into enemy territory, the highway bends to the left, where this is a fairly new retail development.

On the end, near the freeway, there is an italian restaurant named La Vigna. I'm sure it's a wonderful place - the D-News gave it a decent review, I saw that while I was looking for the image.

Anyway, EVERY SINGLE TIME I DRIVE BY IT, I THINK IT SAYS, LA VAGINA.

But maybe that's just me.

April Fools' Day Plus One:

Sorry to be so busy lately, and I apologize to BOTH of my readers.

It seems I've been busy trying to find time to go skiing a couple more times this year, and trying to figure out when to start booking tee times as well.

Oh, and the trivial stuff, like WORK, which is seriously impeding the practice of my lifestyle.

I'll be back this afternoon, with a new On My Hard Drive, along with a couple of bonus items to go along with that...

In the meantime, be sure to lock your doors.

The Genesis blah blah blah: Part Last

So if you're still out there, you may be wondering how this all ties up into a nice neat package. And by the emails I've had, there are some questions as well. For starters, I don't blame anyone for where I am, or how I got to where I am, because, you see, I LIKE where I am, and I don't fault anyone for me being here, except myself. I've made my decisions, and lived with their consequences. Many of those decisions have had their costs, and I've paid them. I guess what I am here to say is this: it doesn't matter to me who you are, or what you believe, as long as you are true to yourself.

These 10,000 words are fresh, they haven't been written down except for over the last 5 or 6 days. I told ThatOneWife last night that if I had written them in their entirety before posting anything, I'm not sure any of it would have been posted to my blog. Some if it has been a bit painful. Introspection isn't always rosy. Which I why I started posting them as they were written. And I didn't do so to benefit anyone but me, frankly. Because for me, writing things down serves to solidify things for me - thoughts, reasons, perhaps rationalizations, decisions, directions. These words serve me, but if they have also served to bring something to mind for someone else, then great.

Which is why I blog at all, or at least it's why I started. A little more than 2 years ago now, I started blogging to give an admittedly small voice to things I thought needed to be said. I believe our state is often run over roughshod with a majority voice. All in all, it's how democracy works, but in a lot of ways, I don't think we have a democracy here, at least not a fair one.

Two years ago I said that I thought a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was wrong and unconstitutional from a national perspective. In most other areas, a marriage consists of a civil part and a religious part. But not here. See, if two human beings choose to live their lives together in our society, and be financially and emotionally dependent upon each other, they should be allowed to do that. If the Church doesn't want them, that's fine, that's great. But they shouldn't be disqualified from the regular secular rights and privileges the rest of us enjoy, civilly. The current construct we call marriage needs to be separated from civil rights and equality for all people. It seems to me that the talk about being fair to immigrants flies in the face of being fair to others. If we are going to give civil rights, as pertains to gaining certain rights in this country, to those who aren't citizens, we also need to be right-minded enough to give those rights to all human beings, especially those who ARE citizens. To not do so is homophobic and bigoted.

I also think, while we're on the subject, that we DO have a problem with immigration. It's a hard problem. I tend to go with the republicans (nationally) on this issue, but not so much with the republicans (state-side). I take more of a hard line, in part because I got here the right way, and it offends me that some would seek to circumvent the law, and then demand rights to which they are not entitled. We need to work with the governments of the countries whose citizens are the worst offenders. This would be my opinion no matter what country that is.

It's just wrong to sneak in here, maintain your loyalty to your home country by working here, pay no taxes, use the services, and send large sums of money back to that country (for family, but benefiting the home country as a result), then demanding a path to full citizenship. It offends those who went through the process, paid the price, gave up certain things on the way. It offends those millions who waited for days and weeks at Ellis Island in the early days, who fled their own repression, looking for a better life.

Yes, this country was founded by immigrants. But now there is a right way to do it. I agree that immigration laws need to be changed, need to be made more fair. This needs to be fixed big time. But in the meantime there HAS to be some semblance of order. What we are doing now is akin to trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, and that just gets messy. The solution needs to be as multi-faceted as the problem.

I also have a problem with the mixture of church and state, especially in this state. It irks me that there is in fact a religious test for Presidency of this country, when it is decreed that there should NOT be. It makes my stomach churn inside when a presidential candidate says that the constitution should be changed to more closely reflect God's law. It pisses me off that a candidate and his army of believers would use slanderous means to discredit another candidate's bid based on religious standards of how Christian he is or is not. And keep in mind, that I HATED the candidacy of Mitt Flop Romney.

It bothers me that there is a national wing of politics that would give Israel carte blanche political support as the result of some religious belief they have by virtue of some biblical writings. Those people are the extremists and dominionists the same way some factions of Islam are extremists.

It cranks me that a large number of people in this country want a president who is a practicer of a certain brand of Christianity, and use that as a basis for support.

All of these things really bother me. Agitate me.

I could have written and posted just this Tenth Part, but I felt like I wanted to get the other stuff off my chest too. (Because it was for me too, remember?) Not to show how difficult or easy my life is, but to say that I have earned a certain number of stripes through the meanderings of my life, and they give my thoughts a background texture. The side benefit has turned out to be that for those friends and family who read here - I know there are one or two or three - perhaps they now understand me better than before, and understand perhaps in small part, how I think and why.

The early posts of this blog contain many of these thoughts already. I've said them, and I still stand by them. Although I have laid my active religious practicings aside, I feel that I have become a true Christian through the process. In fact I'm a better Christian now than I have ever been in my life. I am way more tolerant and caring for other people now than I ever was before. I really don't know why that is, I thought I was a good person before, and really, I was, but I am a better person now, in every aspect of my life. I am so far from perfect it isn't even funny, but through the things I have lived, I know it's okay to just be me, and try to do good things for other people. I love lots of people a whole lot better than I ever have cared enough to before.

One pretty frequent commenter here noted a reference to a concept called "pay it forward". She happens to be my sister-in-law, and her thoughts are appreciated. She noted that the idea had been a blessing in the lives of her family. It has been a blessing for me too. I try to practice it in as many aspects of my life as I can fit it into. The other day I was waiting in line at the gas station to pay for my Diet Coke, and there was a guy counting out change for his purchase, and was coming up a couple of dollars short. The line was backing up with people, and some were getting impatient. I quietly said that I would cover what was needed and thanks were exchanged. I just said, try to do something nice for someone else when you can. The person was thankful, and we all went on our way.

This is really no big deal. A couple of bucks doesn't really make that big a difference to me, but it apparently made a difference to someone else. I'm not putting myself on a pedestal here at all. It's just an illustration of trying to be a good person, and doing nice things for others. And it's not about money all the time either. It as easy as lending a listening ear, or offering up a word or two of kind encouragement. These are the things that are so important. We just need to be better people. We need to be kinder to people, all kinds of people, not just those whom we know think like us. We need to be fair. Just the right thing to do. We are all together here, so we should just try to do what we can to make it a modicum easier for others when we are able. You never know when that word of encouragement will be needed in your own life.

That's all.

I now return us all to the regular goings on around here, the architecture geekery, the design comments, the music, sports, the pictures, the humor, the thought provoking (hopefully) material as well.

Sincerely.

The Genesis of these Random Meanderings: Part Nine

And for the record, I followed my heart, for probably the first, or second (now that I think about it), time in my life. It was the most difficult decision I've made in my life, but the one for which I am most thankful.

In an effort to be as fair as possible, I'm sure that I was not the perfect husband, church leader, or father. And I'm sure that over the years I inflicted my fair share of damage and harm in the relationship as well. I freely admit this. But on the flip side, I never spent a day where I was unfaithful or otherwise unworthy in my life before I left. I did my best, made what I am sure now are some bad decisions, and paid the price for them. On the other hand she was single-handedly responsible for a 20 year estrangement between one of my best friends and myself, forcing me to make a clear cut definitive choice.

And over those years, I was also notably absent from relationships within my own family. Both of these items have been repaired to a large extent, but there has been a lot of time that has passed by, like the waters of a river - those drops never pass by again, they are lost. Only to be replaced by new drops that bring along with them new hope and opportunity. And I now have new hope and opportunity as well.

I wouldn't say exactly that I am a son who is estranged from his father. But I would also not say we are all that close either. The relationship with my parents is better now, but it was certainly thorny for a long time, again because of choices I made, or, more appropriately, was forced to make. Those relationships always were strained to the breaking point when they came to visit their grandchildren. She was always in everybody else's business, and it was very trying for everyone involved. Since then, in the ensuing years, those friends and family members have noted that I have new life in my eyes, new spring in my life, and I happen to agree.

I am free to be my own person now, and it's got a lot to do with the angel to whom I am now married, along with my own determination to follow my heart, and be true to what I want in my own life. It's interesting, but I've learned now what it's like to be loved without conditions. Hell, my wife doesn't really NEED me, she just WANTS to be with me. What a difference THAT makes! All I have to do is be myself, do my best, be true, loving, and respectful, and the rest falls into place. I have found as well, that when you have a situation like that, it is certainly easier to give that same unconditional love back to a person. Which is how it was supposed to be all along.

I haven't reconciled myself with the religion of my fathers, however, and I doubt that will happen any time soon. There are MANY things that have not been written here - or more accurately, they WERE written here, but there was liberal use of the delete key - because at the end of the day, they are what they are, and they aren't going to be changing any time soon. For the purposes of this little jaunt, let's just say that I have been exposed to some very unsavory individuals and situations that were cloaked in a mask of righteousness. The adage that "I'll be a nice guy and wear a white shirt on Sunday, but on Monday, I'll poke you in the bum" rings so true it ceases to be funny any longer. How appropriate it is then, that this Part would be posted on the last day of the Utah Legislature, the last day that the church gets to legislate its own brand of morality from the state capital, to enshrine its own bigotry and hatred into secular law, all while talking out of the other side of their mouths to say that they don't meddle in politics, care for all people, and want the best for the world.

I have very controversial views (at least within my family) of organized religion in general. I have had such a bad experience that I now feel like organized religion is a modern construct of man for the sole purpose of inflicting guilt and moral superiority on others for the purpose of self aggrandizement in the eyes of others, and to prey upon the weak-minded who need a crutch to get through every day of their lives. They are taught not to think critically, or even question, only to blindly obey. Those who are overly aggressive and seek to impose their system of values on everyone around them are nothing more than simple egoists who need to feel morally superior.

I am not a campaigner against those who find solace in their religion - because I think that is perhaps the true purpose for associating oneself with a particular religion. And at the end of the day, what someone else does with their private life is no business of mine, or yours, and it ultimately makes no difference to me and how I live my life every day. Where I have a problem with it is when that person seeks to compel others to follow along out of some sense of guilty duty, blind trust, and the thought that "I know better than you what is good for you".

I know not all members of the church are this way, or think like this, but there are enough of them that one has to wonder what the purpose is, really. If this is what is bred there, where is the good? I have many friends, members of the church, who are good people, very good people in fact. But I have come to find out that at the end of the day, unless you're in the club, you're an outsider with no voice, no opinion, no validity, no value. There are many others whom I THOUGHT were my friends, but who are just conformists who thought I was too. They have not spoken to me since I left, and many have gone out of their way to NOT speak to me. And to those ones, I say: Fine. Swell.

So let the flame wars begin - I am prepared. You may think of me what you will, it matters not a whit to me. Because I am, for the first time in my life, at peace with my life, and where I am in the grand scheme of things. My children know what I think. I have one who is a missionary now. He knows what I think. He knows and understands that there is a difference between seeking to share your message of hope, which is exactly what he is doing, and seeking to compel others to conform to your way of thinking through the placement of guilt. They also know that, no matter WHAT they do, they could be no less loved by their father. More than one of them has said to me very specifically that they are happy for me now, and are glad that they get to see that their dad can be happy. They never saw that before - I had a constant migraine, and I was often wont to yell. I was not happy on any day.

Part Ten will tie these 10,000 words together and I'll talk about the real reasons I started this blog, and why I chose to write all of this stuff down....

The Genesis of these Random Meanderings: Part Eight

If you're still reading this silliness, here is part eight:

Then I graduated from school and found a job. By that time, she was pregnant with twins, a circumstance having been accomplished with fertility drugs. We decided that I would go to the US, get working, and come back in time for the birth of the kids. And with that, I headed out. I had a contract in hand to be a second engineer on a project that was to start in a few days.

At this point, I'll make an observation - my parents had kindly volunteered to let my wife stay with them while I was gone, as they had just done some remodeling and had combined two bedrooms into one in their home. So that was the plan. This lasted only a few days though, as she went stir crazy and my parents drove her crazy. She bailed out and went back to live with her parents, who, you will remember lived close to where we were living, and where all of our "friends" were as well. It's odd I think that my family took her in while I was a missionary, but now she had a hard time dealing with them.

By the time I GOT to the US, she was out of there, living at her parents' home. Which is fine, but this was a harbinger of things to come. And here's what I know now: there was a history of chemical balance issues that seems plain to me now, but was not clear then. And while I don't blame her for this, it turned out out be one of the major reasons we are no longer married. This was also a major factor that contributed to a situation that manifested itself in other aspects of life that made things eventually untenable and unbearable for me.

If it were the only thing, perhaps I could have worked through it. But it was really only the tip of the iceberg. And we all know the tip of the iceberg is connected to the rest of the iceberg. Some of those iceberg things that were underwater, but no less damaging, were things like the very palpable and real guilt that resulted from the death of her younger sister at age 11 or so. She felt that in order to see her once again and be with her, she needed to be perfect. And being perfect meant that she had to have the perfect family in fact. She ruled family life in this direction through guilt, verbal abuse, and derision to an extent that it ruined family life over the long haul. She felt compelled to be perfect, and therefore sought to coerce uber-righteousness from all the rest of the family members. I don't respond well to duty-by-guilt, or coercion, so I often pushed back.

My life was miserable, both from a personal, and a church standpoint. I had been in leadership positions for several years, and in fact I've voted to excommunicate more people than I ever baptized, which is something that troubles me greatly. Who was I to judge these people's lives? There are lots of bad experiences I could share here, but suffice it to say that the combination of a bad home life, along with an over enthusiastic church leader, I was pretty much in hell.

She never worked after having kids, and I was left to earn the living for the family, which I did the best I could, my career has served me decently well, though I am not a doctor, lawyer or accountant, something I was reminded of on a surprisingly regular schedule, if even by intimation. I often think that if she had decided to get a job, she would have been happier with herself, and that would have made her happier with everyone else. Being the sole breadwinner, I was forced to seek employment with the only requirement being income, rather than job satisfaction, which led me to have a somewhat circuitous career path. There were jobs I had which I loathed. But my income has always grown year over year - for the most part. There have been difficult years, but there have been good years too.

There are so many more examples of the degradation I endured, the times I was made to feel inadequate, times I was yelled at and berated, then propped up to look like I should be the next leader of the local denomination, the times where intimations and undertones were more meaningful than the actual words spoken. I endured for perhaps a few more years than I really should have, but when there are children concerned, you do everything you can to suck it up. But it never got better, and there were times that I had thoughts of hurting myself, and certainly thoughts of hurting her. I've never hit a woman, nor will I ever, but damn, was I tempted to on more than one occasion. At the end, there was no joy in any facet of my life.

I left after having been physically abused for the third time. The Bible says we are to forgive someone 70 times 7 times. I couldn't make it past three, and perhaps that's my failing.

The Genesis of these Random Meanderings: Part Seven

All through this time, I never forgot about Joanne. She wrote once or twice after I got home, even after we were married, I believe. She always told me to follow my heart.

I will never forget that one day though. When our oldest was less than a year old, I got a letter in the mail notifying me that Joanne had been killed in a car accident in a mountain pass in the interior of British Columbia. Her mother wrote me the letter, telling me she had died in a pretty violent accident, and stating that there was a little box filled with the things I had given her as gifts over the year we were together, and did I want that stuff back. I remember sitting on the stairs of our little 2-bedroom condo and shedding a tear for her, out of guilt and out of sadness. I had always thought that I would one day gather the brains and the courage at the same moment and get in touch with her and tell her how sorry I was for what had happened, that I treated her poorly, and would she please forgive me.

Instead I wrote a letter to her good catholic mother. I told her that if she felt okay about it, that I would be honored to have my little box of trinkets occupy a place among the things they were keeping as a remembrance of her. I also apologized to her, in place of her daughter, and asked for her forgiveness for breaking her daughter's heart and treating her so poorly. She wrote back and of course forgave me, and told me that Joanne had indeed waited for me to come back to her, but it was okay, she had decided to move on with her life, had forgiven me, and had a boyfriend at the time she died.

She said they would be happy to keep my small gifts along with her other things they had decided to keep, and she told me she loved me, and I needed to forgive myself. A wise woman indeed. My heart broke for the whole thing, and I felt absolutely terrible. Then her mother told me to just follow my heart, and everything would be okay. No kidding! She sent me the obit from the newspaper, along with some information about an endowment fund that had been established to provide a some music scholarships for the high school we attended. (That fund still operates today, 25 years later.) I wrote out a check for as much as I could afford and sent it away, guilty as hell.

Over the next several months I replayed in my mind what I would have said to her, had I been able to gather enough brains to make a call, apologize, ask for forgiveness, and move on with life. I've never forgotten the advice to follow my heart though.

From a career perspective things went well for me. Not saying it wasn't tough, but it really wasn't out of the ordinary, especially compared to other people we knew in basically the same circumstances we were in: young (very young), with a young family, basically beginning the education process, trying to figure out who we were, separately and together, and fitting into the church culture. As we were in this phase of life, we lived very close to my in-laws, and very close to everyone with whom my wife had gone to high school with. We all had little kids, school, and all that stuff.

What was weird though, was something that I have found common in lots of other geographical areas we have lived: there was open campaigning for callings (or jobs) within the church. This was true particularly the case among the wives, who were by and large ALL stay at home moms. Whenever someone was asked to do something in the church, and a position opened up by that vacancy there were always the rumors and speculation. Along with this came the inevitable call to some one, and the others were left, sometimes wondering why THEY weren't asked to be the president of this quorum, or the head of THAT organization. This bred a lot of disappointment, competition, and judgment. If you went through this process several times and weren't tapped to take a job that carried a certain amount of responsibility, you were somehow lacking. This can be a tough thing and is a microcosm of life in the corporate world. Except that it wasn't supposed to be that way in the church. Wives started whisper campaigns, the men competed for the positions, and feelings were hurt.

This was true where I was, but I am sure (because of later experience) that it is the same elsewhere.

This competition spread to career choices as well. I wanted to be a teacher, then a recording engineer, while everyone around me was in either law school, medical school, CPA school, or dentistry. And that was it - there were probably a dozen people in that little group of friends, and I was at the bottom of the pile. For the wife, she then was doubly motivated to see that I at least got a good church job. In the end however, I was teaching music to the elementary aged kids, every Sunday. This was an unspoken source of contention between my wife and I.

As far as the private life was concerned, it wasn't too much better. But I was doing well in school, and I was liking what I was doing. To hell with everybody else's expectations, let everybody else go to school to learn how to wear a suit and work a calculator for the rest of their boring lives. That wasn't for me. Shoot me in the face right now, please. I needed more. I needed more than black and white input into my life.

My wife felt a lot of pressure for me (being that she married a person who wasn't from that original med school/dental school/law school group) to get one of those positions and show that I was worthy of her, and that I could measure up to these people. My RESPONSE to this pressure was to act in such a way that she didn't like, and in a way that made it appear that I wasn't remotely interested in the job. When my first kid was 3, I pierced my ear with an ice cube, a needle, and a potato. One of my first outward acts of rebellion.

The Genesis of these Random Meanderings: Part Six

My return from missionary life was a weird time - it went by fast, and was a swirl of new and old feelings alike, along with increased pressure and expectations. All of a sudden, I was back to being expected to do certain things. My mission president told me my next calling was to get home and get married, and it seemed my parents were standing by ready to do whatever was necessary to get that done. This was not a new posture for them though - they had been plowing that field for 18 months in my absence. I'm not going to bore you with various miscellany here, but just will say that I was engaged within four days of my return home, and was married four months later, the day after my 21st birthday in September. Looking back at the pictures, I looked like a scared 17 year old whose prom date had somehow taken a horrific turn to the left.

The year was 1984, and we served a sit-down roast beef dinner to 400 at our wedding reception. We registered for china and silverware, and got 5 settings of each for gifts, along with every other sort of household gadget one could think of. We moved into a one bedroom apartment, and got down to the realities of life.

With the accomplishment of my marriage, everyone around us felt that their jobs had been successfully accomplished and they basically stepped back and left these two idiot children to figure it out from there. My bride had contracted mono during the engagement, and our honeymoon consisted of her sleeping for 20 hours a day, being drugged for the other four, and me watching this new show on TV called Cheers. But somehow, when she was sleeping, she was also expecting that I should be wanting to ravish her sleeping body for hours at a time, and was VERY disappointed that I was trying to be the gentleman and let her rest.

She was basically unconscious the entire time. This would turn out to be a major source of contention many times in the ensuing years. She was off work for about 6 weeks as she recovered and all in all, it was a pretty rocky start to what would eventually become what it was from the outset: a doomed relationship.

As I stated previously, my parents didn't really take an active part in the education of their kids - I had never really had a job, a bank account, a sexual education, or much responsibility to speak of at all. That was pretty much all left up to the church to handle. And when I got married, that was the end of whatever interaction in these areas I would get. I entered school with the intent of being a music teacher like my dad.

You will previously remember that I had grandiose dreams of becoming the next Luciano Pavarotti, but the chilling gravity of my life's responsibilities suddenly brought several things into cruel focus, and I swallowed a bitter pill of reality. To say this was a major realization on my part would be the understatement of the year. I began to realize that I had, and would soon be expected to have more, people for whom I was now responsible, and trying to be an opera singer, which was a goal lauded by my proud parents earlier, was not going to cut the mustard in every day, actual LIFE. I toyed with the thought of becoming a musicologist (a pursuit that lands you solidly in the world of academe, not necessarily a bad thing), but decided on secondary music education.

I didn't totally finish that before I realized that while I liked to be around kids and people in general, teaching high school music wasn't going to satisfy me musically, or emotionally. I drew this conclusion from reflecting upon having watched my high school music teachers, and spending time in the classroom as a university student. While the band teachers were all very accomplished musicians, each gigged outside of school, and seemed to gain immense gratification from doing that, more-so than teaching half-interested kids in school. That was the band teachers.

The vocal teachers were simply miserable, and seemed to simply hate their lives in general. And it unfortunately showed in their teaching. It was then that I did some serious self evaluation for perhaps the first time in my life. That process yielded more questions, but also ideas, and direction. I decided that what I really wanted to be was a recording engineer. This way, I could stay musically engaged, and work with a mix of professional and hopeful musicians. I liked the idea that I could both teach AND learn from a group like this, and so I set out into another degree program.

By this time, we had a young son. Also by this time, I was starting to get used to having a wife, and being responsible for my life. I had student loan debt, I had summer jobs, a crappy car, a second apartment subsidized by a student family housing program. And the trials and tribulations that come along with being generally unprepared for life. but we went along. The birth of my first child was a pretty amazing experience, one that I won't soon forget. I remember it as if it were yesterday. But it wasn't - he turns 21 in two months. He's the one now on a mission in Fiji, and suffice it to say, his eyes are a little more open than mine were, and believe me, there will be more talks to come after he gets home. He's on a similar path to mine, but I will do everything I can to give him what I didn't have 25 years earlier.

Anyway, I auditioned to get into the music school I wanted to - one had to have a principle instrument in order to get in. I sang 8 bars, and they stopped me. I thought I had failed miserably, had done something wrong, had forgotten to follow some critical instruction, like no singers allowed. But all they said was, "stop right there, you're in."

The success of that audition was the first of many real successes while I was a student at that school and totally validated my previous misgivings with where my education had been previously. The education was intense, and I learned from great people who had forgotten more about music theory, composition, training, performance, and technology than I will ever know. As my second year took shape I was accepted to the recording major, a given as far as I was concerned, and I totally ate it up.

Having had no success in math earlier in my life, I immediately grasped the physics and math as it pertains to sound properties and production. Finally, it was logical to me. We started in the studio almost immediately and it was like a light went on for me. I was at home for the first time in my life, and was met with immediate success. As recording students we were allowed to book studio time at our leisure, and I found myself booking the last time of the day, and barricading myself in the studio for the entire night. I did this weekly.

I logged double the studio time over anyone else. I recorded and mixed everything I could put my hands on, knowing that I needed to build a portfolio of work that would land me a job as a staff engineer. Doing this was cathartic for me, because, as you know, music has a special power to move me. At the same time, I was an intern at a local recording studio as well, doing anything and everything they needed me to do, from emptying the garbage to striping tape with timecode (a new thing then...) It became clear to my fellow students that I had skills they did not have, and MANY of them came to me and paid me to do their projects for them. And I took them up on it.

Anyway, the career thing was moving along nicely. I ended up in the US as a result of my tenacity, a strong portfolio and strong recommendations from people around me. And that's not really what I am here to talk about - I've done that before. So, we'll move on to other things.

The Genesis of these Random Meanderings: Part Five

The arrival home was certainly better than the travel, which, I'm sure, is what my parents were banking on. I am pretty certain they were in a big hurry to get me away from my previous life, and get me back into my old life. Which, to various degrees, is exactly what happened. It was the beginning of August by now, and with a month or so of "free time" I was generally left to my own devices for a while. I spent that time catching up with friends, and generally hanging out. My brother and I rejoined the old softball team we had left behind a year previous, and we entered a late summer tournament. The tournament functioned as a friend-reunion on a larger scale, as I knew MANY of the players on the other teams. One of those teams was made up of guys I knew from a particular part of town. (I had spent a good potion of my tenth grade year skipping school and hanging out at their high school with my then-girlfriend who also went to that school.) I knew many of them very well.

On the Saturday that the tournament ended, I was invited to go to a Bilbo Baggins Birthday Party, and there were many friends there. At one point several of us ended up piling into a car and heading out to a local A&W drive-in for hamburgers and frosty-mug root beer. (Remember those?? The good old days, for sure....) I ended up striking up a conversation with a girl who was next to me in the back seat of one of the cars, and she seemed fun and bubbly and we had a good time. Over the next several days we saw each other several times, and she told me that the tournament we played in was actually named after her grandfather, who was a popular local umpire.

There was lots happening for me at this time. I was getting at least one letter a week from Joanne, and I was writing about one a week as well. We talked a bit on the phone as well, but that wasn't exactly convenient as cell phones would not be invented for some time to come yet, and we didn't even have a cordless phone. So a private conversation was not to be had at all. So we wrote. Also at this time, I had dutifully submitted my application to become a Mormon missionary - again, as expected of me. And, for some reason, I was interested in seeing this other girl with whom I had had some fun with at the birthday party. So, I was a little conflicted. Joanne had told me to do my duty and that she would wait for me to get back, and I told her I would come back for her.

I received a call to serve an 18 month mission to Denmark, where my father's family is from, and my family could not have been more thrilled, for all sorts of reasons, most of which you could probably guess. I was to check into the training center on November 15th (or so - can't quite remember now...), but I do know I was to spend both American Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years in the missionary training center, and would leave for Denmark in the middle of January, after having spent two months learning to speak Danish.

(A quick aside here: I was one of very few who was actually called for, and served, an 18 month mission. The 18 month call was put into place only a few months before I served, and it was rescinded only a few months after my mission began. Depending on how many months you had been out, you could choose how long to stay, either 18 or 24 months, but I didn't fall into any of those categories, and I served for 18 months.)

The day I got the letter in the mail sending me to Denmark, I called that girl I had spent some time with, and we went out that evening. Upon my return from that "date", my mother was waiting for me in the kitchen, with baited breath, wanting to tell me how thrilled she was that I was seeing a good LDS girl, and how wonderful it was that I was doing all the things a good mormon boy should be doing, and, and, and... Looking back, I can tell by my behavior from here on out that I was willing, if not eager to please my parents and do the things they wanted me to do.

We saw each other pretty much every day between then and the day I left for Salt Lake City, and then Denmark. That time period was 6 weeks.

Over that six week period, I still got letters from Joanne, and I sent some too. Every time one would arrive for me, my mother would hand it to me, giving me a lecture about what I needed to do, and when. However, doing that would require that I acknowledge the idea that I was subscribing to what they wanted me to do, and that I was a conformer to their ideas for me. That wasn't something I was particular ready to give in to.

Anyway, I got off to the missionary life, and arrived in Denmark in the middle of January. They had warned us that it would be dark and cold. But seriously, I was from Canada, and it would be no big deal. How truly wrong I was!! I remember arriving in Copenhagen along with the other four or five missionaries, and we spent our first night in the basement of the mission office, which was also where all the office missionaries lived, about 6-8 of them. The basement was reserved for new missionaries, or ones that would be going home in the next couple of days. Anyway, I remember laying there, unable to sleep, listening to the weird sirens, and lots of noise that accompanied the downtown of a big city reluctant to sleep.

After a couple of days, we were each shipped to our individual areas, and I was assigned to a nice missionary who was from Pocatello, Idaho, and our area was a suburb of Copenhagen. I won't bore you with missionary stories, except for one: I can remember waking up in the little missionary apartment, which was really just the attic of a house, early in that January, and I can remember sitting on the side of my bed, cold, dark outside (I felt like I had not seen the sun in days - in reality, it only shone for about 5 hours per day at that point in the year...), and very lonely. I remember thinking that I had made a very horrible series of very bad mistakes, and I was way out of my element. I couldn't understand a single word anyone said to me, and I felt 100% alone. It was very difficult.

Things did get better for me, as I began to understand the dialects of the cities where I was stationed, and I began to get my feet under me. The cold was this horrendous, wet cold, that, no matter what you wore, went through you and cut to the bare skin. Being from a landlocked area, I wasn't used to the humidity, and the combination of that and the cold was about all I could bear. It seemed like my feet were cold for months straight.

I was getting letters form Joanne, and now too from Kathy. Joanne had sensed that there was a distance between us that wasn't about miles. And in her letters she always said that if I would follow my heart, I would come back for her when I returned. And of course, being the stupid boy I was, I responded by stopping writing to her altogether, as opposed to just telling her I was either GOING to come and get her, or that I WASN'T. That, apparently, was too difficult for me to do - I was too cowardly to give her at least that courtesy. My parents droned on about how thrilled they were with Kathy, that she was waiting for me to come home, that they were having her out to the house, spending time with her, that she had started knitting me something, etc. She had become a part of the family, and they were totally thrilled with the entire scenario.

I suppose one would have to understand the LDS mindset in this regard to understand the pressure here: as a missionary, the last thing they tell you when they send you home from wherever you are, is that you are to get home and your next calling is to get married pronto, and have kiddies. And this is generally the situation today - I've now seen this from the other side of the fence as well, as I've previously served in church government positions before I left the church.

So there's the missionary part. Generally, it went swimmingly well, and I had moderate success, and held various leadership positions while I was there. And the letters telling me to follow my heart.

(That's it for the missionary parts, and things pick up speed from here - I promise...)

The Genesis of these Random Meanderings: Part Four

So, skipping along here... (I have wondered here if there is way too much detail here, but since we've started, we'll continue...) Spring shows up with the blooms for which the city is famous, and graduation comes and goes. By now, I am feeling the pressure of it all, and so is Joanne. We have lots of long talks about it, and like the (very) young kids we are, we each make promises to each other - her to wait for me, no matter what happens, and me to come back for her, whether it's in a few weeks/months, or 18-24 months. Things went along pretty well for several weeks, and like the true kids we were, after the serious talks, we just went along with our living our lives as we had done for the better part of the year by now.

One evening after arriving home from a date in June, my mom casually mentions that the decision has been reached that we are heading out in the middle of July, rather than the middle of August. You can imagine how well this went over. I yelled, nay (that WORD again!), screamed at her - and I believe this was the only time in my life I have done that - that this was not fair, and that I was not going, and how could they do this to me, after yanking me out of my old high school for senior year, and, and, and... it was quite the tirade.

As the years have gone on from there, I have reflected on that moment, seared into my brain, and wondered if I was justified in my outrage, or if I was selfish for saying what I said. I felt like a farmer whose arm had been caught in the combine and yanked clean off in the blink of an eye - shirt sleeve and all - no time to react or adjust. Now, I don't think ANY son has the right to yell at his mother, ever, and that's not what I wonder, but rather, if my rage was justified. Most of the time I feel like it was - I felt betrayed, disregarded, and relegated to tagalong status, not afforded a thought about how I was feeling about the whole 12 month episode, and how it would effect me. And I still feel like that.

In the end, my tantrum held no water, and we packed up in July for the drive home. I was devastated, depressed, angry, enraged in fact. Saying goodbye was heartbreaking for both of us. I wonder if somewhere down in me I knew it would be the last time I would ever see Joanne again - but at the time, my intentions were clear and so were hers. On the day we left, she told my mom that she would see her again, and that she was waiting for me to come back and get her. I don't think this made my mom very happy. She was never really thrilled about the relationship from the get-go, and this was a well known and well rehearsed conversation in my family. Seriously dating someone who was not LDS, and furthermore, who was in fact a catholic, was simply unacceptable, a notion I was reminded of whenever I came home late, or was seen as spending too much time with her.

My parents had sought to set me up with local LDS girls, even at one point overtly hoping I would take an interest in a girl whom I KNEW my brother was secretly in love with, named Theresa. There was another girl I was vaguely interested in, named Kirsten, but she didn't quite score many points with my parents either, because she was a bit of a rebel in her own way, even though she was LDS, albeit from a "broken home". (I no longer use that term, because single-parent households aren't broken, they're just different from the neo-con view of an appropriate new-cue-lar family...) Needless to say, neither Kirsten nor certainly Theresa were able to attract very much attention from me, which was a source of grave consternation on the part of my mother. Both parents, really, but certainly my mother was the most vocal about it.

The 24 hours' worth of drive time back to my home town was filled with dark clouds for me. The one hour ferry ride back to the mainland was somber indeed. Given that we were driving all of our belongings with us, including a travel trailer and a U-Haul, and I was the third driver in the family, I was tapped, thankfully, to drive the 1978 Oldsmobile NinetyEight. This car was literally a land yacht. With skirts over the back tires even with the rest of the fenders, fins, and a hood the size of a football field, it floated along. One never really drove that car as much as one simply herded it in the general direction of where you were going. Inside, with the plush interior with six-way electric seats, I got out my cassette adapter for the 8-track and played Supertramp at full blast all the way back. I was not happy at all.

The Genesis of these Random Meanderings: Part Three

All through my growing up years, and this senior year included, I was (along with all my friends) a good Mormon boy. We had our wilder side, for sure, but we were always there Sunday morning, doing our duties, and generally being good. It was my last year of high school, and I found success in the music programs beyond what my old high school offered me, in fact not since junior high, when I was a student of This Guy. Everything was pretty great for me, given what could have been the case, having been uprooted for my final year of what should have been a pretty good time in a big high school.

Being about "that" age, my parents eventually turned to talk of missions and things - and the conversation always came around to my girlfriend and what I was thinking. The expectation that I would go on an LDS mission was always implied, always a given, expected. It was spring now, and during the spring General Conference of the church, they announced that they were changing missionary calls from 24 months to 18 months. This was good news for me, as I was feeling drawn to come back to this city as soon as I possibly could swing it.

All in all, and though I had no idea at the time, I was very ill prepared for life in general. My parents had always given me money, I had no bank account to speak of, and I always had a car to drive, and gas in said car. Never really had a job actually, as that would have taken time away from lessons and things like being a footloose and fancy free teenager. I hadn't been taught about money at all. Or the world, or politics, or much of any of that kind of thing. My interests were music, and music alone, aside from the social aspects of being 17-18 years old.

It was during this time that I began to listen to a lot of Luciano Pavarotti and other tenors like Placido Domingo, who was making a name for himself internationally as well, and whose voice I found particularly heroic. I was performing a lot, and somehow I caught the attention of the University Of Washington, whose head of the voice department told me to call him when I was ready to come to his school to study. My voice had been taking shape for a while by this time, and I had been taking lessons from prominent professors at the university in my home town, and had even been invited to sing in the school's opera workshops with regular university students, even though I was only 16-17 at the time, and only an 11th grader.

My voice was in the true tenor range (I could hit a high C without a problem, given a proper warmup...), but it had a dark timbre, like a baritone, which made me unique and I got a fair amount of attention early on. The term for this type of voice is "helden tenor". Loosely, helden is the German word for "hero", and its implication in this instance is that parts for this voice were often lead roles, and often very difficult to sing well. There are several opera roles for this type of voice, particularly in the German style, written by guys like Richard Wagner etc. My university professor/teacher recommended that I look into taking lessons from a well-respected lady named Selena James at the Royal Conservatory of Music in the city where we were going for the year. Which I did. (Ms. James still teaches there, by the way...) My voice flourished during this time, and I was put into the program in the Conservatory. I was happy with where that all was going.

I tell this part of the story to illustrate the many forces at work in my life at the time: a flourishing musical "career", albeit in its very infancy, nay, in utero even, a girlfriend, friends whom I dearly missed, etc. And the mission thing. I knew it was there all along, and I was having an increasingly hard time reconciling all these things with the fact that I was to be gone, and I do mean GONE, for an extended period of time, whether it was 18 or 24 months. No matter how long it was to be, I was feeling the angst of it all as the spring progressed toward graduation, and my impending departure from my girlfriend loomed larger on the horizon every day.

"NAY" ??? Where the hell did that come from?? See, that's part of that very formal, almost british writing style that I try to purge from me... works sometimes, sometimes not... Anyway, back to this story, which you are hopefully NOT finding too droll. Part Four tomorrow morning, if all goes well, and I don't go skiing - which seem imminent at this moment.....

The Genesis of these Random Meanderings: Part Two

So, Mrs. ThatOneGuy called me last night (she's out of town this week on business), and said, "where is THAT all going?"..... I replied that I had no idea, I hadn't finished writing it. So I guess we'll see. Actually, I do have an idea of where it is going, and what the point of it all is. Much of this information is background, and I PROMISE, it will tie up into a nice neat bow, and smell of rainbows and puppies.

Here is Part Two:
As our instruments were unloaded, it must have seemed like a tour truck for Chicago, Tower of Power, or some other horn-heavy band of the day, this girlfriend started asking questions about the new occupants and owners of all these horns. She was told that there were two sons, one a senior and one a junior, who were coming to go to school at her school.

This apparently scared the silliness out of her, and by the time we showed up two or three weeks later, we had almost gained cult status - our supposed and implied reputation had preceded us, and the stories circulating had grown to mythic proportion, based on the sheer number of instruments, and possibly their brands. They must have thought we were there to play a year-long gig. This stuff was started and circulated by this girlfriend who was over at the house all the time, and by the time we actually showed up it was clear that there was no way we would live up to this expectation.

Anyway, long story short, we got into school and settled into band, jazz band, marching band, the vocal program, etc. One day when we were goofing off in the gym during lunch time, the volleyball coach saw us (my brother and me), and asked us if we would try out for the volleyball team. I came to find out later that this school had a pretty good reputation for both volleyball and tennis, because of this coach. He had a bad mustache and a lisp, but he was a damn fine student of both games.

I bring this up to note that we were effectively in the "Y-Vowel" category of people at the school - sometimes in the jock crowd, sometimes in the band-geek crowd, and most of the time, in both. We were busy and generally well-received at school - something for which I was thankful then, as now - it would have made for a very long senior year of high school otherwise. It was during this time (and the only time in my life) that I finally learned to slam dunk a volleyball and hang on the rim. I could never do it with a basketball because my hands are too small to palm the ball with one hand, though that never stopped me from trying, using additives like Stickum (which was acceptable in the NFL at the time for receivers...), but I never could get it down. But I could palm a good clean leather volleyball with just a little spit.

During the whole band process, I was placed as a tenor player, alternating first chair in all the different ensembles, with a girl named Joanne. She was the best friend of the aforementioned girlfriend. It didn't take long for us two to begin a friendship that would shortly turn into more than that. She was tall, slender, had GREAT legs, and a lovely moon-shaped face with sparkly blue eyes. She had an older brother who was married, and a younger sister who played clarinet in the band as well. All of a sudden we were a "thing" at school and quickly became inseparable, at school and the rest of the time too. Our prom experience included a small-club Police concert followed by a midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with rice and toast. This was 1982. Do the math, and you know basically how old I am... Anyway, I remember walking to and from her house so many times in the dark of night listening to my (newly invented) Sony Walkman playing Billy Joel's Songs In The Attic album on cassette.

By Christmas time I was desperately in love with her. We had talked about the fact that I was only to be there for the year, and we would be leaving at the end of August so my dad could go back to his job, and the guy whose house we were living in could go back to his teaching job at the university in time for fall semester. And although we did talk about it, we were content to be in the moment, making out in her garage. We dealt with several issues, like her best friend resenting me for taking her best friend and her first chair position in the band, and more notably, the general disapproval of my parents for dating a catholic girl. We were just content to "be". And be left alone.

In general, the school year was fine, and I was successful. I missed my three best friends back home - badly. We were very close and did everything together, good and bad. We had done so many things together - we basically grew up together and were the very best of friends. We memorized the script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we raced our dads' Pontiac Bonneville and Chevy Citation with the air filter lid turned upside down so the motor made more noise. We had purchased an attachment that would allow us to play cassettes of things like Blondie, Devo, The Police, Elton John, Billy Joel, and any-and-all disco we could get our hands on, in the cars' 8-track tape players. We peed into circular parking garages from the top floor, we gave a guy two nickels at a bus stop, then watched him smoke his heroin (or whatever it was...), the nugget carefully placed between the ten cents. We had grown up together, and had started a little barbershop group (with THREE people) where we would modify the written harmonies to accommodate only three singers. We had a lot of fun doing this, and even had business cards made up - we were called Three Piece Suit ( we each wore a piece of a suit as our "getup"). I missed them a lot. I also had a large network of other friends as well back home and I felt that loss for the entire year, in spite of Joanne's presence in my life.

More to come...

The Genesis of these Random Meanderings: Part One

This post has been inside me for a long time. About three weeks ago, somebody I know wrote about their thoughts and reasons for beginning a blog, and that inspired me to drop a post on the story behind why I started blogging, or, at least, why I chose a blog as a venue.

I've said a couple of times that I started this blog as a venue to practice a more casual writing style. One of my first real jobs was as a technical writer, and from there, I moved to a marketing role for a company that had a very casual product line, somewhat irreverent, even, and I found it a challenge to write in that way. It's much easier for me to write in a more technical and precise way, and sometimes that shows up as very stilted language in a personal blog setting.

I like to write, and as for a career, I've stated here that if I had it to do over again, I'd be an architect. That is 100% true, and my second career would be writing. I like (romantically) to think that I have a novel somewhere in here, but I don't really know. I know that I have a creative mind for stories and that kind of thing - and I appreciate a good plot twist, but like I said, who knows?

So the start of this blog was primarily to practice some of that casual tone. Sometimes that goes better than others.

One of the side benefits to blogging is this: when you decide to blog, you need to find a way to post things on a semi-regular basis. For me, that has led to putting more of myself out there a little more than I thought I would be willing to do. And you know what? It's been quite therapeutic for me in that way.

There are some things you already know about me: I came to the US about 20 years ago. I am not a citizen, but I am a legal resident. I used to be a member of the LDS church, but now I'm not. And I'm totally fine with this concept. I have four kids (biologically) and four who are step kids - although they are all "my kids". By and large, and most of the time, all of our family members are fine with where we are, both immediate and extended. And I am totally at peace with where my life is in terms of what I think about life generally, and religion specifically.

But there are deeper things. Most of my extended family doesn't know about this space because I have never told them about it. All of my immediate family is totally aware, and many read regularly, many others read occasionally. There are others who have not been told about it on purpose.

My parents don't know about it - I believe - and I have been fine with that as well. Early on, I espoused some pretty critical thinking, along with a healthy dose of downright liberalism, and while I know they love me, I wasn't sure they would be all that thrilled about reading about it.

This is where I relax and finally recline on that nice leather couch in the office, and tell you all about it....

When I was going into 12th grade, my dad took a year-long job exchange with a university in another city on the Canadian Left Coast. I was VERY not happy with being uprooted for my senior year of high school, but obviously, there was nothing I could do. So I went along.

We shipped our stuff out to the rented house we would live in for the year, and followed it out a couple of weeks later. Part of that shipment included 4 saxophones, at least 2 trumpets and a flugelhorn, 2 guitars, several boxes of accompanying music books and other ephemera, among the rest of a garage full of personal effects. Dad was to teach music classes at the university for the year, and so there were also many boxes of university-level books and things as well.

Turns out that the house we were going to live in was owned by a family with a son the same age as me, whose family was also off to another city as part of this job exchange. This son was popular at school, and had a girlfriend who spent a fair amount of time over at the house, and was there when our stuff showed up. She was very pretty, with wavy brown hair, tanned skin with freckles across the bridge of her nose, and slightly large teeth, and a pretty fine arse. She happened to be the first-chair alto sax player in the school's band program. Her best friend was the lead tenor player. (This little tidbit would become important soon enough.)

Part two coming shortly. (Yes, it gets better...)

Risk | Reward:

When you RISK going up the mountain when there is every possibility that the county could close the road behind you, your REWARD is 15 inches of fresh, untracked, ungroomed powder.

Snow Totals
48 Hour: 15”
24 Hour: 15”
Mid-Mtn. Base: 127”
Season Total: 426”















When you (as a 13 year old boy) seek the mental REWARD of successfully jamming a wine cork into your dad's nice scotch decanter, you RISK the very real possibility of him trying to break your teeth out with his boot.














I got the cork out, and am now qualified to build a life-size model of the QE-II inside a beer bottle.

Just sayin'.

Note to SarahBellum:

You hearin' me Bellum, loud and clear??

:)

Goes for the gender thing too... and one-eyes versus two-eyes....

Something about me

When you first start blogging, like any new little hobby, you spend a lot of time looking at your site, looking at others, reading others, leaving comments, looking at your stats, wondering why you only have three hits a day, participating in and tagging others for participation in memes, etc.

And as a product of that time, I, like everyone else, have a "100 things about me" type of post.

Here are two things that are not on that list:

1. When I brush my teeth, I do in front of the sink, with the cold water running full blast. If I don't do this, I am wont to GAG. The sound of brushing teeth to me is disgusting and putrid, and I need the sound of the water to drown it out. (That picture over there even makes me wanna gorp.) When our kids were very young they would say things like, Dad, Barney says to turn off the water when you brush your teeth, because it wastes water to just let it run like that. My reply was always, It wastes less water to let it run now, than to clean up the puke all over the floor when I blap on the floor.

Similarly, when I see someone else who is brushing their teeth, NOT in the bathroom, I instinctively have the impulse to gag. People who walk around with a toothbrush hanging out of their mouths need their eyes poked out. I saw someone DRIVING while while brushing their teeth the other day, and I almost flurbed in my own lap.

2. I have roughly the same reaction to people who chew with their mouths open, and talk at the same time. Dude, I can wait to hear what you have to say til after you swallow, I promise. I'm not going anywhere. When I go out with people who do this, I seek (sometimes aggressively) to sit beside them, because I can't stomach the idea of sitting across from them in a dinner conversation. This leads them to believe I really want to sit beside them, but really I just want to hold my dinner down for the entire time, and I don't want to witness the gaping maw that is their eating habits.

I come from a time and place, although I don't know how I got this way, but I know how to signal the waiter, with where I place my fork and knife, that I am finished with my plate. I tend to tip really well (20%) for those who know this and respond quickly to the signal. We went out for dinner with the kids a couple of weeks ago, and I only tipped 5%, but it wasn't because they didn't clear my plate promptly. It was more about not getting my entire meal at the same time, not getting it while it was hot (one of my MAJOR meal pet peeves, whether at home or out to eat), and not getting all the meals for the table at the same time, and having to ask for more to drink. I'm also not above writing on the back of the credit card ticket either. I've actually had a waitress follow me out to the parking lot to ask why I hadn't tipped her well. So I told her. Just trying to help.

A Random Offender

Ever have this happen to you???

Every once in a while, I get a nose hair, way up there, that seems to turn sideways, and poke, itch, bug, bother, and generally annoy me for an entire day, until I can get home and get the 2.5 HP gas-powered weedwacker out to put the little bugger out of my misery. My nose hairs are of the coarse variety, like brambles on a thorny bush.

No matter how many knuckles I jam up there, no matter how impolite I am about it, it just doesn't help. Perhaps I am going through my "Second Puberty". I chuckle at that site every time I think about it.

I guess only MOST of the hairs I own are coarse. Some are soft and fuzzy, like little frail old men, holding on in the twilight of their years. Remember my Ear Hair story?? I still get comments from that post. Crack me up.

Which reminds me (oddly), I have been reminded of a writing thing once asked of Hemmingway: what's the best six-word story you can come up with? His was "For Sale: baby shoes. Never used."

That's pretty damn impressive, actually. So here's one for you - what's YOUR best six-word story - in three minutes or less?

One or two off the total top of my (thinning) head:

Do over - I'd be an architect.

Another:

Found: what I was looking for.

Some Housekeeping items:

Okay, so it's been a few days since I wrote here...

The markets have been a bloodbath lately, and while it's not something that effects me directly and immediately, it's not nice to see. The FED this morning took an emergency .75% rate cut to their benchmark interest rates - this will probably spur a refinance boom for a while, as people try to get out of bad loans. One problem though, is that their houses MAY not appraise for what they need to in order for that to be successful. And another thing, loans are pretty hard to come by, no matter the rate, unless you exhibit pretty bullet-proof credit. Which isn't everybody, by any means. So there are other remedies that need to take shape here, if a true crisis is to be averted. And that's all the doom and gloom I'm going to foment here.

On another note, I get many comments to my posts sent to me by the commenter right through email, as opposed to posted as actual comments to posts.

One of those commenters, named Brian (premission granted), noted my post about lunching with our illustrious Senator Bob Bennett. That post is here.

He comments: I saw your blog and noticed you had lunch with Bob Bennett. I am curious how much you know about him and what he is up to politically. Have you heard of the Merkel Initiative, the Streit Council, the Transatlantic Common Market, or the Transatlantic Policy network?

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59713

Anyway, I have been aware of some of the shenanigans of Brother Bob, and I wrote the following back to Brian The Commenter:

Merkel Initiative: - Essentially, the drive toward one worldwide
financial currency?

Streit Council: The alignment of european and US economies?

Transatlantic Common Market: The movement of those two economies into one market by 2015.

While I am not a "tin-foil hat" wearing kind of individual, my general impression of Bennett is that I wouldn't trust him with a dollar bill of mine. He's part of a national establishment of do-what-you-want republican politics, and locally, one of those who find no fault in
the mingling of outside interests into the political landscape for his own benefit, and to further the causes of those who have poured vast amounts of money into his pockets. One world economy/currency/market is a bad deal for the US. No matter HOW it's sliced. Or who thinks it's great. When has government economic direction (meddling) ever worked out to benefit a truly free market society?

"Harmonizing agency rules and regulations" Gimme a break, dude.

So there's that. On another post (found here), I talked about the movie Fracture, and in particular, the architectural design of the house around which the movie takes place. I noted that there isn;t much information available on this lovely home, but I did find out a couple fo small tidbits of information. You'll have to look back at that post to see what that was...

Then I got an email recently from a person who shed a little more light on the situation.

He gave the address of the place - apparently in Encino, CA... which was pretty much where it was determined to be. However, after putting 2 and 2 together, you can see it on Google Earth.

If you don't have Google Earth, you should - it's a bunch of fun to explore places you've heard about, read about, but have never seen. Wanna see the Taj Mahal? Yeah, I thought so. And if you want to see that house from the movie Fracture, put these coordinates in: 34° 9'2.78"N, 118°29'18.89"W. And have fun. I'd still like to know who the architect was though.

And one other thing. I wise person sonce said to me, in the beginning of my blogging life, that I should throw in a picture with every post, just to make it fun and entertaining, from a visual perspective. So here's one for you - you deserve it, if you've read this far today:
















I usually stop the TIVO to watch the Apple vs. Mac ads on tv (produced by Apple). They usually make me laugh. This one is probably one of the most clever examples of online advertising I've seen in a long time. This is a headline bar-style ad, in concert with a "skyscraper" ad on the side. It's making fun of Vista - the guys lights aren't all working.... anyway, the best part: the ad appeared on C|Net, on a page for Windows Vista.

Hilarious.

And coming later this week: On My Hard Drive-Herbie Hancock, with a sidebar for Naturally 7, and a comparison between Ruth's Chris, Flemings, and Spencer's here in Salt Lake, along with a rave about Solitude Ski area.

See: Ski Day, end of.

Taken at the end of the day yesterday, on our way down the mountain. Crappy phone camera didn't do much of a job capturing the low angle sun colors, etc.

I guess you had to be there. But it was a nice day, and everybody had fun - generally speaking.

One or two were wondering about the randomly meandering brain wave that led me to post about the Hinano incident. And here it is:

I wrote in a post a week or so ago about taking kids up to go boarding in the evening. I noted that my skis were not yet ready for me, so I was relegated to being the chauffeur. To cut the boredom at one point, I decided to go down to the little store and buy a drink to kill the time.

On the way, you pass by one of the swimming areas. These areas - I believe there are 2 outdoors at Snowbird - are ringed in glass all around them, to allow only guests to access the area. Note that I said it was glass. As I walked by, I couldn't help but notice, among the swimmers there - keeping in mind that the thermostat thingie in my car said it was 11 degrees outside, where the pool area is - about four young lasses clad in about 9 square inches of swimming suit between them. And before you call me some perverted dirty old man, THEY WERE PARADING AROUND just asking for people to look at them. So I did a little bit. It was kind of surreal, actually, all foggy from the cold air meeting the warm water, etc. It's not like I had pressed my face up to the glass, wiping the fog away with my nose or anything. Seriously, I didn't.

Which brought my mind to warmer climbs, and visions of closer encounters with surgically-enhanced females. Otherwise known as The Hinano Incident.

This particular pool at Snowbird, ironically, is where a particular pair of 15 month old twins learned to do somersaults into the water on a warm summer evening about 16 years ago.

Okay, that's kind of eery. What a freakin' long time ago. I was chauffeuring one of those twins, now 17, that evening last week.