Sub-sistence

Okay, who can do a backflip?  Well, can you at least do one with the help of a trampoline?  I can’t either.  How about when driving  a several-ton monster truck?  Say what?  Apparently for the first time ever this stunt has been achieved.  Check out this video:

Maybe if I use the wall I can do it…  Without the truck of course.

Sorry for the lack of posts.  Time, stress, not feeling like posting- you know, the usual.  Still nothing about my life at the moment, but here’s a cute video.  Merry Christmas!

Oh, I’ll start reading some blogs soon too…

Who complains about too much free time?  Well, with no wife or kids, a dislike for many common social activities- okay let’s just go with the truth here and say no friends I hang out with outside of church, and work that takes less than the normal eight hours plus lunch per standard, I just have too much free time.  What do I do with it?  Get movies from the library, spend time on the internet, and play games mostly- what a life, eh?  In the last few days I have even purchased several games on Steam- did they have to make it so easy?  I didn’t even use steam until they had a $9.99 sale on their Orange Box collection a few months ago.  Now I have the complete Luxor marble game collection, Ghostbusters, GRID, and Osmos.  Anther service called Direct2Drive also successfully tempted me with a $5 sale a short time back.  I added no less than a half-dozen games from them including Neverwinter Nights 2 and Serious Sam Gold.  A waste of time and money really.  Well, I have been playing a lot of Serious Sam and the Luxor games, so just a waste of time in their case.  To be fair, I didn’t pay much for any of the titles, nowhere near full price, but still…

So what can I do instead?  Theatre groups abound in this area, but I know very few of them anymore- I would have to look them up again.  I have also looked a little into compassion ministries, serving those in need.  I still have to look it up on the church website as I was directed to a few weeks ago.  The obvious one in most people’s minds is the friends issue.  I have been to singles group, but it was very uncomfortable for me so I really don’t go anymore.  No friends that way.  Perhaps through the other two potential outlets?  I don’t know.  I know I have needed to schedule a quiet time with God, but I have known that for so long I wonder if I am really capable?

For now though I just sit here on the computer…

So what does it mean when it’s November and I still have posts from September sitting on my front page?  Still not all that excited to blog I guess.  It has now been over a week since some of my Ohio friends came out and we all went haunt hopping.  It’s a little late to review them, and I’m no expert on this sort of thing anyway so I think I’ll just say that it was a good time had by all of us.  Fortunately the threatening rain stayed away.  Sorry you had to miss the last haunt, J and M.  According to C & L it was really good, though whether it be that I was third in a group or just my logical mind drowning out the “let’s have fun” portion I just didn’t get as much out of it.  That said, I though the actors did a good job, especially outdoors (I really wish I had seen the one jumping out at the younger kids but I was facing the wrong direction at the time- apparently their reactions were priceless).  Thanks again C & L for paying for that one.

For work, this week was much better than last for the most part.  The only work-day that had rain was Friday, but I was able to take a full-day sub job that day instead, bumping my one Friday gig to Saturday- yes, the holiday.  Did you all have a happy Martin Luther day?  You know, the anniversary of Luther nailing the Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in 1517 (the doors were popularly used as bulletin boards at that time).  Oh, you celebrated a different holiday you say?  Well, so did the kids on Friday.  Unluckily for the teacher I subbed for, her son got sick on party day so I was the lucky one who got to take the job in her place.  It was my favorite grade, 5th, and it was quite easy.  The morning consisted of three tests- didn’t you hate days like that in school?- split by an hour of gym and music.  At least one of the tests was only spelling, so only two of them were big thinking tests.  Of course, I say “at least” for the spelling test as I was a really good speller in school.  I suppose for some it may have been just as rough as the other two.

Lunch time, then the kids were back in costume.  Did I mention this was the one day of the year 2/3 of the class went home for lunch?  All afternoon was party time.  There was a costume parade through the neighborhood scheduled as well, but- you know- rain.  As a result, the parents came to the school and watched the kids march across the stage instead.  Outside of this time the parent volunteers were in charge.  They organized the classroom party- the food, games, and whatnot- while I just helped as needed.  The kids had a scavenger hunt, played cauldron bowling and a scooter-relay with toilet paper mummy-wrapping, created a haunted story web, felt brains, hearts, and whatnot in a box, jumped for donuts on a string, and had cupcakes and water (where was the punch??).  Most of the year in hometown district serving food in classrooms is a big no-no- they even stopped birthday treats last year- but this was one of the few times they still get to eat sweets in class.

Some of the costumes were classic.  There were a few wearing ghoulish costumes including the obligatory Scream mask, some costumes of movie/tv characters like Darth Maul, and a few M&M girls, but there were some stand-out ones including a girl with an overturned bowl of spaghetti on her head (represented by white yarn with brown yarn-ball meatballs), another girl who came as a washing machine with her head under a pile of “dirty” clothes on top, and a boy who came as a vending machine.  Actually, while original, I’m not sure the last one would have won any awards.  The front really did look like a vending machine with real chips, candy bars, and whatnot, but in reality it was what could have been a store demo with straps so he could wear it in front of him.  It was apparently heavy too, as he took the elevator upstairs instead of the stairs.  I hope he had permission, but I felt for him so I didn’t ask.  The washing machine on the other hand was an excellent costume.  I already mentioned the pile of clothes to hide her face, but it also came complete with a box of fabric softener and bottle of detergent taped or glued to it.  The only thing that would have improved the costume was if the round door in front actually opened revealing more clothes.

So what did I do for halloween?  Well, following work on the windy day I…  handed out candy.  Yep, that was it.  I did have a “phantom of the opera” half-mask, so I wore it when I answered the door, but that was pretty much it.  We had our usual half-dozen groups of kids come to our door.  Seriously, is our house on the sex-offender list or something?  Since moving here we have had no more than ten groups of costumed candy-beggars stop by each year.  Nothing at all like or previous location across from a school.  Oh, well.

We did have a 4th/5th grade church party Friday night, but this post is getting long so I think I will save it for a future church post.

Take a look at this trailer for the 1951 version of Raiders of the Lost Ark (click the video to go directly to youtube for a larger version)!

What, there was no such version you say?  So what was was this then since the actors are real 50s stars?  Give up?  Go to this youtube link that breaks it down for you.

Incidentally, this isn’t this guy’s first work on a trailer like this.  Click here to see a couple more goodies.

Just haven’t felt much like posting, though I did make an attempt to do a post yesterday, like fellow blogger JustJ did the other day, after playing around with Vista’s voice recognition software.  Incredible in comparison to Dragon Dictate from several years ago, though I suppose if that software is still around it is at least as good as Vista’s.  Of course, knowing Microsoft their software may very well *be* Dragon Dictate, or some other commercial package bought by them.  They started off that way back when when they bought a DOS from someone, relabeled it MSDOS, and licensed it to IBM way back when, so why not these days with voice recognition?

Anyway, I still don’t have much to say, so I leave you with this hilarious video mentioned on Majorgeeks in today’s news:

I am back from camp and have in fact enjoyed a nice afternoon with C & L, who are in the area for tomorrow’s Chicago vs. Chicago game. There was a new indoor mini-golf place over at Stratford Square mall which we were told just opened last week. I’ll take their word for it since it has been over ten years since I have been there. Following 18 holes of golf (out of 54) we decided our eyes were getting tired of the black-lighting (the whole place was lit that way with the neon paints) and proceeded to have some dinner. Deciding against the one real restaurant which L said seemed like an Applebee’s after looking at the menu, we opted for the food court. I had Chinese, they had Sbarro’s and some pretzel dogs. All of us had blue raspberry lemonades from the pretzel stand which was quite good. Instead of going back to play more golf, which we could have as the fee C paid for us covered the entire day, we talked for a bit and walked around the mall which surprisingly was still quite active with seemingly less than 5% vacancy. I guess maybe I am used to other local malls, not counting Woodfield in Schaumburg, that have closed in the last several years. We stopped at a pet store and C & L found that they could happily own a glorified mutt with a fancy name for the bargain price of $1600. No, I didn’t accidentally add an extra digit. Not $160 or $600, but over a grand and a half! Ouch. Well, that was pretty much it. They had to go shortly after and so we went our separate ways.

What? You wanted to hear about my week at camp? Well, that is coming soon. As for the title, C talked me into updating Live Messenger with the newer Live Essentials version and I noticed I could install a Writer program to write my blog posts. Right now I am seeing this post exactly as it should appear on my blog page once published- grey background, full justification, and lowercase title included, unlike the Wordpress editor on which I would have to click a preview button to see how it would look. It seems pretty nice and barring any difficulties I will probably give this a longer test run with added pictures and whatnot. There seem to be things that I don’t think the Wordpress editor even has. I’ll see how it goes. Well, until later…

Edit: Well, that didn’t go well- I needed to edit the post straight away.  It added a bunch of #160s and forgot to encase the paragraph tags in <> symbols so the post had extra p, em, /em and /p characters included in the text.  I guess there are bugs to be worked out- oh well.