patrickrhett

Julie hasn’t posted anything in almost a year, and tonight I just happen to take a look, expecting to see the same old post that I always see right before I hit the back button, and… it’s not there. There’s other stuff there. New stuff posted today. For a moment, I was sure that I had clicked on the wrong link. Her last post was announcing her engagement, and she says she felt pressure to make the next one as momentous and blah, blah, blah. I don’t believe any of it. I have it on pretty good authority that she has been isolated in a secret NASA training program as part of her long-term plan to become the first female astronaut President.

Anyway, in order to get back into things she decided to write a frivolous post and link to a map of every state she’s ever been in. So I will, too.

She’s been in more states than me, but that’s ok. She’s very competitive.

This is a test of an embeddable flash mp3 player plugin. If it works, what follows should be the Mosquito Sound …

[mp3]/sound/mosquito_sound.mp3[/mp3]

Hmm, that produced less than stellar results. Let’s try one more…

[mp3]/sound/MillersTheme.mp3[/mp3]

That worked much better. Excellent.

I couldn’t even manage a single post. Not a stupid YouTube link, not a boring personal update, nothing. Go watch Bill Moyers interview Jon Stewart – that’ll be a much better use of your time. I’ve got to go lie down, this post wore me out.

So I just pulled up my page to make sure it was still here, and realized it’s been exactly one month since my last post. So, let’s see…

I’ve changed the Lust page to a Camera page and a PC page, as all of my material lust seemed to be focused in those two directions. (And it corrected the disturbing issue from my last post.)

The Orangeburg has been replaced! I’d show you pictures, but there’s not much to see. Mainly a bunch of dirt where there used to be grass.

Work is… the same. That’s a good thing.

The Lovely Wife’s work is… almost done. She’s about to be off for the Summer, and I have to say I’m looking forward to her doing all the work around the house that I’ve been putting off for months.

And really… that’s about it. Life has been pretty peaceful of late, which makes for a good life but a boring webpage. Really, who needs to read, ” Mowed the grass today. Ate a sandwich. Drank a beer. Watched “Dancing With The Stars.” Went to bed.”? I can’t even justify that as a journal entry to my future self.

As a challenge to myself I’ll commit to making a post a day until next Friday, and I’ll try to make it more substantial than 7 YouTube links. But I’m not promising anything.

Added a page named “Lust” up there in the top right corner; it will be a repository for all of my base, material desires. Now that it’s up I feel like I should balance it out a bit, maybe add a page named “Charity” full of links to worthwhile causes that I support and think you should, too. I’ll get to that right after I go look at the picture of the D200 again. That’s a damn fine camera.

P.S. Maybe I should change the page order or something, every time I look up there for the link all I see is “About Me – Giant Weiner, Dog Lust”. It’s disturbing.

St. Patrick’s Day was a bit of a wash. We got there around 6pm, which I figured was a perfectly reasonable time to start partying, only to find everyone there many hours and many beers ahead of us. After a couple of hours it was apparent that we were not going to catch up, so we went home. The Lovely Wife did make a nice green gingham skirt, which I guess she’ll get a chance to wear again in about 361 days.

Since we were there for such a short time there were no pictures taken. There will still be garden pictures, as soon as we get some sprouts. Maybe I could set up a nice time lapse series…

I’m on Day 4 of a 5 day weekend, and I’m feeling pretty relaxed. I need to do this more often.

Today I planted a tree and a couple of rose bushes, day before yesterday I planted some flowers in the front planter.

Pictures.

The Lovely Wife has started a huge garden in the backyard, and I’m about to leave for St. Patrick’s Day Festivities. I’m sure there will be pics of those things eventually.

Bye.

Thursday I got to eat, and share, a crazy stupendous cake, made by the inimitable Holly from work. Chocolate cake with a layer of chocolate-espresso ganache in the middle and topped with chocolate-espresso truffles. I think that’s what it was, I’m not sure. I went into a short coma after eating a slice and woke up about an hour later. If you have the chance to eat anything that Holly has baked, climb over the person in front of you and eat their portion, too.

Friday, as my present to myself, I took the day off and had cable installed, with the all-important DVR. While I’ll admit to lameness in being happy that I’ll never have to decide between CSI and Grey’s Anatomy again, I’ll defend myself with dorkiness and admit that I’m most excited about never missing another episode of The McLaughlin Group. I love that show, and I hope John McLaughlin lives to be 150.

I also bought an album, Gulag Orkestar, by Beirut. (iTunes link) It’s excellent, check it out.

That night, my parents took The Lovely Wife and me to Austin Land and Cattle (not to be confused with the far inferior Texas Land and Cattle) for steak, followed by a stop at Opal Divine’s, where I had a glass of Balvenie 1966, a scotch older than me. It was all fantastic.

Saturday I went out with The Lovely Wife and bought a bicycle, which is something I’ve been wanting for awhile. I am too sedentary, Spring is coming, and I’ll never look like this if I don’t get off my ass. And riding a bike is fun. Or it will be, after I get past the part where it hurts.

Sunday is today, and it will mainly be a day of rest with some preparation for the upcoming week thrown in. It’s been a good weekend.

Today is my 37th birthday. I took the day off and relaxed, had digital cable with a DVR installed, and will be going out for a steak this evening, courtesy of my parents. All in all, a pretty good day.

As of yesterday, I have been a non-smoker for 363 of the past 365 days. (There were two lapses last spring.) If you’re thinking about quitting smoking, do it – it’s worth it a thousand times over. It is fantastically hard, probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and that’s one of the reasons it feels so good to be rid of it. I smoked for 20 years, and every day of that time, even the few times I tried to quit, smoking seemed like something necessary, mentally and physically. After the past year I can still remember it being satisfying, but the craving is gone. My time as a smoker seems like a strange dream, where I remember the basic plot, but can’t quite grasp the sensation. It’s a tough journey, but if you don’t even try, well, a year from now you will have just spent another year smoking, killing yourself, and paying someone for the privilege.

And now I’ve gotten it out of my system. No, not the smoking – the ex-smoker proselytizing. I always regarded ex-smokers as even more irritating than non-smokers when it came to telling me how stupid I was to smoke, and now I understand why. They kicked it, and they were telling me I could too. They were the saved, and saved people are incredibly annoying. I don’t want to be that person, and I think proselytizing in general is usually ineffective – it works on those who want it to work. But it’s hard to not be that person when you see friends and family being stupid. So here it is – if I know you, and you smoke, you should quit. If I can, you can, and if you can, you should.