Here’s what July would have looked like if Myles and Kim owned a used Saturn!!!

Am I a bad person? I hate hummingbirds.

If you want to be well liked, it seems like you either need to be beautiful or smart. Doesn’t that describe most famous people? Perhaps that describes humans’ relationship with nature. Consider that that dandelions are much hardier plants than, say, petunias (which die if you walk too close to them), but that dandelions are the ones that get eradicated. Likewise, if hummingbirds weren’t more graceful or precious than common house flies, we’d probably have more hummingbird feathers in our fly swatters.

Because the suckers are STUPID.


At my parents’ new house in Riverside, there’s wildlife everywhere. Snakes, lizards, hawks, gophers, coyotes and rats. And hummingbirds. Sidetracked from the flower it was apparently sucking the life out of beside the front door, a humming bird found its way into our house on the lower floor. Just like a fly, it went straight for one of the windows. Whack! Surprised but undeterred, the creature headed for another window. This time it got stuck behind the blinds and a curtain until I let it out. Liberated, it flew in looping circles. Ryan raised the good point that if it were to leave the living room, the next place it would go is straight upstairs. In fact, this is exactly what it chose to do. Tiring of windows and banging its head, the creature dove around our upraised hands and climbed to the upper floor. Not, then, for over two hours would it again attempt to exit through a window or door. And believe me, we shut the access to the attic and the doors to the bedrooms and opened every other portal to the outside.

What do you do about a hummingbird that can’t take a clue? Smash it? No, it will leave a smudge. Bat it out of the air? We didn’t actually want to hurt the poor thing....at first. Our first course of action was to cover all the windows on the upper floor that could not be opened, including the one above the double door to the balcony. This, we hoped, would coax the bird into flying low enough (two feet down from the ceiling) to go out through the open doors. It had a six foot square opening to fly through, but instead, the bird flew back and forth from the chandelier in the stair well to the ceiling fan and back again repeatedly. We tried to corral to the open door first with our hands and then by waiving towels and then by taping a towel around a spade shovel and waving at wildly. It was beginning to tire out at one point and we mistakenly decided to let it rest. Ideally, it would have fallen to the ground and flapped its way outside. Instead we gave it a few minutes downtime on the ceiling fan to cool off.


If you have a fly in your house, you don’t worry about leaving for the afternoon because if it dies, you can vacuum it off the window sill when you get around to it. When a hummingbird flies into your house, you worry that when it dies it’s going to leave a carcass somewhere surprising. So when a hummingbird flies into your house, you cancel your afternoon’s plans and focus on returning it to the outside.

In the process of being chased, the creature got its beak stuck in a small gap above the crown molding. It was only attached for a second, wrenching itself loose with a popping sound that seemed like it must have been painful. By now it was clear to us that by chasing the bird, we were only confusing it and causing it harm. The more excited it got, the closer to the ceiling (an farther from the open door) it would fly. It repeatedly bounced its head off the ceiling, each time leaving delicate feathers behind. A new strategy would have to be developed.

Here, Ryan tries to motivate the hummingbird to leave the fan by blinding it with light.


Hummingbirds don’t chase LASER dots, but they do run from them frantically.



Here, Ryan experiments with bringing the bird down in a flashlight-induced epileptic fit.


By the end, we had erected a ladder in front of the open door with a vase of water on one of the rungs and the brightest purple agapanthis flower we could find in it. Perhaps the hummingbird would come down to feed, and then take advantage of its lower elevation to fly out. Dumb idea? Whatever. We were desperate, after an hour and a half. And while we sat there despairing, calling the wisest people we knew, the little turd flew from the fan, down through the open door, and out into the wilderness. Like THAT was hard, right?

So, in conclusion, a sparrow had relations with a bumblebee one day, many centuries ago, and a race of hummingbirds was born. And ever since that day, they have flown from flower to flower obliviously.

Here, Ryan wishes the creature harm:


I share the sentiment.

Upside from the experience: Now I have a simple story to dramatize and tell people for years to come.

Downside from the experience: Being as I feature carcasses on my illustrious weblog from time to time, a hummingbird carcass would have graced these pages affably.

Here’s one of my most ornery possessions. It has made me more money than any other tool I own, and has probably cost me the most, excluding the forty dollars I spent to free it from someone’s driveway.


Trying to load it in the front seat of my car (it weights nearly 150 lbs) I added a ten-legged spider to my windshield. More on the saw, its most recent project and Myles and Kim’s new place...soon!

The entries I really want to post are long and I’ll get to them in time.

In the meantime, here’s a carcass to tide you over.



This creature was found in the collapsed tool shed full of bags of dirt and shovels and things. We cleaned the back yard out thoroughly before we moved from the Agoura house. It’s completely decomposed except for its skin and a skeleton. We’re not sure what it is...raccoon or opossum? Look at the shape of its feet and legs when postulating. It has lost most of its fur, further confusing the issue. Do raccoons have skinny tails under all that hair?

It’s probably the remains of a baby that got separated from its mother. It was probably one of the many creatures born in our oak tree but it wasn’t one that made it to adulthood.

Nature is cruel, but only I kick puppies.

Part two: Today’s garage sale.

Ellen and me.

Route: Pretty much the same as other weeks. Begin by heading in the Johnson direction and end by swinging the loop up between the peaks from the direction of the Los Osos Valley. Then clean up by finding a few places here and there in the north part of the city. Garage sales everywhere! Johnson had four or so, Broad street had another four, perhaps, and the Los Osos valley had five or six. I didn’t haul in lots, but what I got was quality. Ellen actually made a purchase as well!

For me: A USB 1.1 web cam. I will give it to my sister so we can videoconference over AIM. She’ll bask in the glory of my iSight while I watch a grainy stream from her end, but it will be fun none the less. Not bad for a dollar. If it doesn’t work, I’ll keep the cord and ditch the camera. One point for me!

Additionally: Swing arm clamp lamp. No I don’t have one. Yes I have six. But they’re not green. I’ll put this one up and give one of the boring black ones to my archibuddy Susan.
Two points for me!

Also: an antique fan. Somebody hold me to posting a photo of my fans. They’re delightful. Made around 1950 or 60 or so and sporting surprisingly spartan blade guards, they could take your finger clean off with their metal blades. They’re not all too quiet, either, and they make the most wonderful hot machine smell when they run, but they’re mostly for decoration as far as I’m concerned. I have three counting the new one, which is most petite and doesn’t swivel automatically. Grandma says three is a collection. You don’t have a real collection until you have three. And now I have a collection of antique fans.

Lastly: I have a collection of antique 8 mm video cameras. I have four. I don’t really need more. I saw one today, however, which was in very clean condition and a lot more streamlined than the others in my set, which is to say it was not nearly as ugly. It was a Bell & Howell and it wasn’t a bad deal at three dollars, but I’m not interested in roping off another one of my rare and precious shelves for this particular collection. I decided to pass. Of course, by this time I had already wound it and taken the back cover off the thing. I had the trigger down and was pointing it at my buddy Ellen as if I were filming her. The girls running the sale were impressed that it was operating (they couldn’t figure it out) and decided to bring another item out from the garage that they though might be related. It was in a sturdy metal case, but they couldn’t for the life of them find out how to get it open. It was a Bell & Howell film projector and it matched the design of the camera so closely that the two could have been a set, for all I knew. It was as clean as the day it was new. They were gorgeous. Ten bucks for both.

Despite that Ellen was twisting the screws on me, I turned them down with the condition that I could come back another time and buy the if someone else hadn’t. I’d love to have them, otherwise. Some day I’d like to have a small room in my house where I can put all of the quaint or historical pieces I have including the fans, clocks, phones and cameras, and especially a 1940s deco style typewriter. They were one more pair of items I didn’t need to store somewhere, in the meantime. But the question is this: do I suck it up and go buy them? The girls were way-cute and it sure wouldn’t hurt to got chat with them some more. Is ten bucks worth finding a place for the old things if it means making friends with beautiful women?

Or am I pathetic or what?
Two points for me for spending the morning impressing people with useless 8 mm info.

Anyhow, Ellen bought a chair that she is delighted with. She’s washing the cover now as we speak. One point for Ellen. Have her tell you more about it.

All in all a good morning. It’s certainly no problem when life deals you so many good opportunities that you can pick and choose among them. And the temperature was in the upper seventies....

Garage Sale Updates: Part 1

Today is Saturday!

Today was a great day for garage sales in San Luis Obispo.

It’s the season. Let me mention a few garage sale outings that served me well.

Two weeks ago: Myles, Ellen and myself in San Luis.
The Route: Loomis, Grand, Monterey, San Luis Drive, Johnson, Laurel, Orcutt, Broad, South, Los Osos Valley Road, Foothill. (Roughly.)

The theme? Everything we could possibly want! What a great Saturday to be rummaging through people’s junk! Myles and I set out with a few things in mind. I had been making the proper arrangements to install a new stereo system in my brother’s Sentra, for one thing, and I knew I could use an amplifier for his subwoofer. I knew that if I came across an older G3 Macintosh, I would probably buy it, and Myles had openly declared, "I like your ramp stands. How did you get them?" We had spent a good portion of the previous Wednesday under his car which was up on my stands. I had gotten them at some other garage sale a year ago for five bucks. "It would sure be nice if I could find some ramp stands for five bucks."

First item of interest: Broken Revision B iMac. "The screen doesn’t work." Excellent. Five bucks. It’s an old 233 machine, and it sure has been hell getting an operating system on it, but damned! I found the machine I was hoping to get. Not a bad deal. Let me say one thing, if I may, about selling old computers. If you are to sell an old computer, for you own sake, make sure the following are not still on the hard drive:

Lists of phone numbers.
Your on-line passwords.
Direct bill-pay receipts with your checking account number on them.
Letters threatening your boss.
Your office contact information.
Your and your family’s first names.
Copies of your birth certificate.

...or especially ALL of those things. You never know who’s gonna buy your computer and decide whether or not to wipe the hard drive!

Next, I found an old car amplifier! Three dollars! It looked like it had been marinated in egg whites and buried in the ground for a year. A little rather dirty, as I say. It took disassembling the sucker completely and soaking the parts in Simple Green to make it look halfway good, but damned if it doesn’t work. Just my luck!

Lastly, Myles had his cake. As we were driving in the Woodbridge neighborhood, we spied a pair of yellow ramp stands on a well-endowed driveway and made immediate arrangements to SCOOP THEM THE HECK UP. How much? Five dollars? You can’t plan this type of thing! The garage sale gods were smiling. It was a beautiful day, as well.

Next week Ellen and I were in Riverside. I don’t know what route we took, but all I got was license plates. Two South Dakotans. South Dakota is now way over-represented in my collection (which partially borders my bedroom.) but they’re fun. The citizens or Riverside apparently like to have garage sales, but keep all the good stuff to themselves.

Later: Today’s Garage sale! Also--the story of why I hate humming birds!

In celebration of Friday the Thirteenth of May, here are 13 viable routes from San Luis Obipo to Riverside, California. They are the most direct routes through Los Angeles and should all be considered depending on time of day, traffic, points of interest along the way (In-N-Out restaurants, for instance) and/or your mood. See, Sean? You don’t have to take the Sepulveda Pass if you don’t want to! Choose one of the last seven!

These routes begin in Ventura County where the 101 is first called the Ventura Freeway.

101 Ventura Freeway South
405 San Diego Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
405 San Diego Freeway South
105 Century Freeway East
605 San Gabriel River Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
405 San Diego Freeway South
10 Santa Monica Freeway East
5 Santa Ana Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
405 San Diego Freeway South
10 Santa Monica Freeway East
10 San Bernardino Freeway East
71 Chino Valley Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
405 San Diego Freeway South
105 Century Freeway East
90, Studebaker Rd, Left Turn
90, Imperial Highway Right Turn
5 Santa Ana Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
101 Hollywood Freeway South
5 Santa Ana Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
101 Hollywood Freeway South
5 Santa Ana Freeway South
60 Pomona Freeway East
71 Chino Valley Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
134 Ventura Freeway East
5 Golden State Freeway South
5 Santa Ana Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
134 Ventura Freeway East
5 Golden State Freeway South
5 Santa Ana Freeway South
60 Pomona Freeway East
71 Chino Valley Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
134 Ventura Freeway East
210 Foothill Freeway East
57 Orange Freeway South
71 Chino Valley Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
23 Thousand Oaks Freeway North
118 Ronald Reagan Freeway East
210 Foothill Freeway East
57 Orange Freeway South
71 Chino Valley Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
1 Pacific Coast Highway South
10 Santa Monica Freeway East
5 Santa Ana Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

101 Ventura Freeway South
1 Pacific Coast Highway South
10 Santa Monica Freeway East
10 San Bernardino Freeway East
71 Chino Valley Freeway South
91 Riverside Freeway East
Exit at Arlington

Additionally, check out Sigalert.com , which is the coolest site ever! See how fast all of the Freeways are moving without leaving your web browser!

Sarah is the coolest person ever.

Now she owes me three dollars.

What do I say? I’ve got no good news, I’ve got some of the opposite, and I feel like a carcass. So how can I blog about one?

Ok. I’ll give you something substantial tomorrow perhaps. I went to Los Angeles on Thursday so I could visit a small university downtown. (www.sciarc.edu) Only one of the good looking women met last time was there and she was hugging her boyfriend. I will spend all week putting together an application for SCIArc, but it’ll be ok. I’m going to distill every semi/demi-cool thing I’ve done in Architecture into a small book and send it to them. Anyway, I also met most of my Cuesta Arch 251 class at the Walt Disney concert hall downtown on Friday for a field trip. We also went to the Skirball Cultural Center and the J. Paul Getty Center. The Getty is wonderful. It provides for a tremendous view of the City of Los Angeles and all the LA basin. To make a long story long, I would like to share a panorama with you in a few days when I put it together. It will be nice. I might even do a little Architecture photo blogging. That’s not to say I’ll ever be an architect. Maybe someday I’ll have that ’05 Mustang I want. I should get DIA’s tranny flushed anyhow, just in case. You all have a nice afternoon or whatever you’re having now.

By the way, if any of you are fans of carcass blogging, I have more carcasses for you. But only if you ask for ’em. Gruesome dead animals aren’t for everybody.

Ok. It looks like my photographs came back up. I’ll have to send money to Weblogimages.com so that doesn’t happen again. They’ll also take their name tag off my pictures then.

Tell ’ya all what. I’ll post pictures of my cardboard chair a little later on. I’ll explain the project and design requirements at that point too. You will then know what has taken up a lot of my time recently.

Also, if you are one of the ones who wants to know where my blogging went, it’s like this.

If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

This week will be a nice week, however. More later.

I’ve gone over-bandwidth at Weblogimages.com so the picures on this page won’t be showing up until the first of March (two days from now.) Hang in there! I’m gonna get a paid account with them soon anyhow so this won’t happen again. Anyway--yay! My blog is popular enough that I’m pulling down 200 megabytes a month! Good for me!

Ellen signed in to LiveJournal with my computer last night and left herself signed in, right up till now. My first thought? Hijack! It would serve her rightly!

Please let the record show, however, that I did the right thing by not taking over her blog and posting a crazy entry. No Caramel boobies, either!

Evidence:





That will teach you! This reminds me of a story my brother told me recently about an incident between the Chinese and American navies. The Chinese had deployed thirty-two ships to the straight of Taiwan and were conducting exercises, mostly battle maneuvers. It was just practice. If I remember correctly, the United States sent eight hunter-killer submarines to the same location. Each submarine is known to be able to hold four torpedoes capable of sinking a large ship, and each moved in beneath the Chinese vessels silently and undetected. Then, all at once, at a coordinated second, the eight submarines turned on their RADAR equipment.

Ping!

Basically, the message was, "We got you." One ping from eight subs was enough to get the attention of the Chinese. The eight submarines with their thirty-two torpedoes went silently back to international waters.

Garage Sale Update 2-26-2005

Hi everyone!

Sorry, I haven’t been real good about posting updates recently, have I?

For one thing, it’s been raining here. Actually, there were probably all of five garage sales in this entire state last weekend. Garage sales were out in force today though!

Also, I’ve lazied out on a few occasions. They weren’t very interesting days, I think. Three or four weekends ago was a good day, it seems to me; I remember that Ellen and I took an enormous detour out to Lopez lake. "Where does Tank Farm Road go in this direction?" "Let’s go see." We went NorthWest on Tank Farm until it became Orcutt Road and then teed into Lopez Drive. (We went left. Right goes to Arroyo Grande. Beautiful drive, I’m certain, in both directions.) We cruised around the lake briefly on the road at the edge, but decided to head back to town.

It was the most glorious day in all of creation. The hills were all green and the air was clear like it can be only after a good strong storm. I’m looking forward to Summer (I have been since August) but I know it’s gonna be hazy pretty much every day between now and September. Just the nature of things. I had better appreciate the beautiful clear ones now.

We’ll go back. I think Ellen still wants to camp there. We added it to our list of places to explore. We then got back down to Broad street. I think that was the weekend when I bought a pre-amplifier for my friend Ben. I have no idea what the theme was that week. It was probably wimpy.

The next weekend was decent as well, I think. I remember that theme for sure: Telephones. Nice ones, lame ones, ones with cords, ones with batteries, ones with both, but all Touch-Tone. Thousands and thousands and thousands of telephones! True, Touch-Tone phones are probably the world’s most common garage sale item, but it’s unusual for EVERY garage sale to have one. And every garage sale had at least two. Did I buy something? I can’t remember everything, but I got a motion sensor for Myles! And I got six Firestone Walker BEER! glasses. It was a good day.

Ten points for me. Because.

So...today.

I got up late.

No, I got up at seven-thirty to get an early start! I even stuck my alarm clock on my desk so that I’d have to climb out of my bed loft and turn it off. I found myself standing in the middle of my room about three minutes after it had begun ringing, cold and tired, and I made a conscious effort to get back in bed for, you know ten minutes or so.

So later, around 9:30, I actually got on the road. And what you’re thinking is true. That was a lot more than ten minutes later. I’m a bum. But I still got stuff done.

Route: Santa Rosa, Foothill and vicinity, Los Osos Valley Road, Madonna, Higuera, South Street, Broad, U-turn, Santa Barbara, Osos, Olive, Chorro and then to Cal Poly to pick tangerines.

The stuff: I bought Ben a record player ($4 )to go with the previously mentioned pre-amp ($8) from a couple of weeks ago. He’ll be playing vinyl in no time! ($12. Or, if his birthday is coming up sometime soon....) I bought a gasoline can ($2) for my lawnmower (Free plus the cost of a lot of spray paint) which I don’t use. My thought: Maybe I would use it more if I had a way to get gasoline in it? No. What do I have to mow? I could mow the back yard here at my little house but I’d have to level the grass with a weed-whacker first. And I’d hate to even go in the grass because of all of the dog clumpies. Here’s how I see the gas can coming in handy: Lawnmower! With Racing Stripes! $35 dollars! Free Gas Can! Buy it today! And, of course, I could use a little gas to show that the machine works. Oh, have you all seen my lawnmower?


Yeah, I like it too. I refurbished it last summer. It’s a John Deere and I painted it up with the official John Deere colors.

So, yeah, a good weekend. Two points for me. One for the turntable, one for the gas can.

The theme? Well, there were two gas cans, and I bought one. There was no over-riding theme among any of the items, but, interestingly, there was a theme among the containers for the small things for sale. At three separate sales there was a Firestone Walker Double Barrel Ale box that was being used to contain something else for sale! Weird, huh? I guess that has to be the theme. Mostly for lack of anything better.

Another interesting observation:

There was a sign up in front of someone’s garage that said the following:

Twin Bed--$20

Queen Bed--$30

Dresser--$40
(Good Condition)

Piano--$80
(Clean)

House--$539k
(Four Bedrooms)

Gazelle--$100
(Exercise Machine)

I laughed. "Exercise Machine" was written pretty small. Ok, you’re right, not very funny. Let me know if you have a lawn that needs mowing.

I live with a house full of idiots. Four of them. And there are sixteen legs among them all. Perhaps, now, you understand that I’m not referring to the humans. Here are two of the idiots:


This is Cody. Cody is an idiot.

See here? The vacant stare? He sits next to a puddle of his own urine (covered in powered Resolve.)


Cody yawns. Highly hugable for an idiot.


This is Laura, by far my favorite idiot of the bunch. She lays on the floor like an idiot and chases balls like an idiot. It’s really great to watch. Who chases balls, anyway? What an idiot.


Here, Laura tells a toy what for by attempting to rip its eyes out. Laura is an Australian cattle dog--a Queensland Heeler--and is part Dingo. I still think she’s got that wild-dog look to her sometimes. She is really a sweet dog.

Coming soon, the Schnauzers, which are the biggest idiots of the bunch!

Here’s what a good car wax job looks like:


The water beads up everywhere and doesn’t stick to the paint. Wouldn’t you just love to run your hand across that surface and fling water off? No? Want to keep your hand dry? Just as well, I guess. It’s beautiful just as it sits.

Now compare my car to Chandra’s car.




Who’s got a good car wax job? I do and Chandra does not. Note the beading on the green paint (my car) and the flat streakiness on Chandra’s car. No fair pointing out that my bumper needs new paint! It will be twelve years old in half a month! Lucky for Chandra, her car looks nice and shiny right now, but what do you think happens when dirt gets in the water? It does not simply bead up and slide right off! Wax your cars!

Adobe Photoshop CS is the best application ever written. Ever!

Whenever I learn another Photoshop trick I get this chilly feeling like I am in the presence of something big--bigger than just you and me. The power of Photoshop is tremendous.

I find myself feeling guilty sometimes that I only paid $300 for the student edition.

Here, for your pleasure, is Morro Bay in the evening. Click the picture below for a larger view.

Below are three photos.

First, is a picture of Myles cut and pasted onto a generic background with no other changes made.

The second and third are the result of some tweaking including a better connection to the background and touch-ups. The only difference between picture two and picture three is the darkness of the background. Please determine if second and third shots are acceptable as they stand now. The first picture is only posted for the sake of comparison. Hopefully Myles looks less tired!







Thanks again, all!

It’s pictures like this that make me want to purchase a house.

Actually, picture or no picture, I would like to purchase a house. Some day, maybe.

Anyhow, this is Myles as he may appear on a refrigerator magnet near you.

The picture above is a first draft of a business portrait for Myles’ new real estate career. Myles and I have decided to try to pull off a stunt wherein we eliminate the middle man (professional photographer) and pass the savings on to you (Myles.) As the photographer, I need your help. Not knowing what I’m doing, really, I ask you, my demanding and exacting readers, to tell me how you really feel about this photograph. Background no good? Lighting all wrong? Tie selection too perfect? Let me know! And don’t reserve good criticism! It won’t hurt my feelings or Myles’ because our only real qualification for this photography thing is camera ownership. Thanks in advance!

I’ve not much to say tonight, but here is a copy of the panorama I made from fifteen images taken on the top of Black Hill in Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo County on Sunday, January23, 2005. Camera: Olympus C-3000. The time was roughly 3:PM. The city you see is Morro Bay and the rock in front of the city is the famous Morro Rock. Think the Gateway Arch shows up on a lot of post cards? Look in a San Luis Obispo card shop some time. Blotchiness in ths sky is a result of repairing spots caused by a dirty lens. I swear it won’t happen again! The horizon has a curve to it because my camera was pointed slightly downward. What you see represents about 380 degrees of turning. The left and right ends of the image could be stitched together to make a full loop, and, in fact, I have also generated a version of this image that begins and ends at the sunset and is continuous through the east view. The atmosphere is not very clear--there is still a lot of moisture in the air from that morning’s marine layer. I’m hoping that after today’s storm moves out the air will be crystal clear. I will probably try this project again then. For now, though, enjoy a central coast afternoon! Click the picture below to see the larger version. Say hello to Paul and Ellen!

I let Sean off the hook, mostly, for being a jerk and hijacking my blog. Then I beat him to hell at Pool at the University Union. We’re cool now, as they’ve been known to say. Sean has had a stressful week and as we all know, he has been blowing off steam all over the place. Dude, go share your abhorrid supply of interpersonal energy on Sarah. First though, a cryptic message even you can’t touch:



Oh, I think we all know what I mean! Enjoy your weekend of busses, laptops, routers and Sghetti.

Shortly after my folks left yesterday Ellen and I stopped at her house to pick up items. We had decided to hike up black hill (hike details and photos to follow,) and she wanted hiking shoes, her phone, etc. As she put her things together I went out to my car for my camera because Annika’s cats were being cute. Just then, a fellow in shorts and a beat-up T-shirt approached, breathing heavy and acting frantic.

"Hi, hey, I don’t know if you know or if there’s anything you can do, but I was out hiking back up the road a few minutes ago," he said, "and I saw this little white spot on the ground and it just caught my attention, you know, because it didn’t look natural and it was bright white and I dug it out of the ground and it turned out to be a skull! I kept digging and I found a bunch of other bones and I wasn’t sure if I should call the police or what and I went and talked to Harold Miossi and he didn’t know what to do and he said he didn’t want anything to do with it but now I’m worried and I don’t know if it’s a missing person or what or if the police want to know, you know? I just don’t want to leave it because it what if it’s a person and I couldn’t live with my conscience and I don’t know what to do but I want to do the right thing, you know? Maybe we should tell the authorities or something...."

I cut him off at some point and suggested he show me where it was. He obviously thought he had come across the bones of some person recently lost in the grass out near Cuesta park and he was really quite beside himself with fear and probably the simple shock of seeing unidentified skeletal remains. Calling the police occurred to me as well but I decided not to jump the gun considering the likely number of animal carcasses scattered throughout the valley at that precise moment. I suggested he show me where the exact site was. So the fellow Brent and I hopped in DIA and made tracks up onto old Harold Miossi’s ranch. We missed the turnoff to the small trail because Brent was still lost in the world of missing persons and/or "the right thing to do" and wasn’t paying attention. Finding the trailhead on the second try, we made our way through the short green grass and headed down along a creek until we reached the bones.

I picked up the skull. Not human. The eye sockets were on the sides and it had a long, though incomplete, snout. The brain cavity was small. Actually, the whole skull was rather small. Softball sized, roughly. I declared to him what I saw. Perhaps you can imagine a scene where a doctor brings good news to a patient? It would go something like, "We have good news, Mr. Brent. Our tests indicate that, in fact, your liver is not going to hemorrhage massively then combust spontaneously sometime this hour. Now go live a happy, productive life." The look of relief on the man’s face when I gave him the good news was about the difference between winter and summer. I showed him the shape of the vertebrae, the pelvis and the skull and teeth, especially and declared it to be a deer, likely. He said he was glad to have brought an expert up to take a look. He asked if I was a biology or medical student. I said that I was not, but that I was happy that I had taken bio and life sciences classes before. I took about thirty pictures and then left the remains for nature to tend to. They will likely be obscured by the grass in a matter of weeks and probably buried or washed away within a year or so.

I dropped the fellow off on Loomis street by the gate to the Miossi ranch. He thanked me again for lifting the burden off his back. I said it was no problem and that it was nice to meet him.

Here are a select few pictures from the scene:


The scull, from the right side.


The skull from below, showing a healthy rack of entirely molars.


The lower half of the wreckage. Note the ribs, vertebrae and pelvis with small tail especially.

The first reason I wanted to post this story is to ask for help identifying this creature. I can be almost completely certain it is a deer, but I’m curious to know if I’m wrong. There are no feet or hooves to give clues nor front teeth, which make me slightly more uncertain. Those aren’t dog teeth, I know for a fact, so it’s not a coyote or a fox. If any biology majors read this and want more pictures, let me know! Please forward this url to any biologists you may know if you, too, are curious. Thanks!

Secondly, I observed here what power a basic education grants a person. Knowing a little bit of biology from high school was all I needed to put the mystery to rest. Brent said, "I’m really glad now that I didn’t call the Sheriff." Being able to deal with body parts in a measured, calm fashion is a skill every kid graduating high school today should have. May the bio lab dissections continue, and may laboratory sciences never go the way of shop, music and art programs.

May I take this opportunity to extend a warm, friendly EAT BLEACH AND DIE to the lovely Sarah Sghettiletti for prohibiting my use of the boys’ new cookie jar. Sarah, I know Ellen was the instigator, but that doesn’t make it right or any less hurtful. If Ellen told you to put pepper in Sean’s coffee, would you do it? I think not. (By the way, I just thought of a good practical joke. Ask me about it sometime when Sean isn’t listening.)

To make a long story long, here’s what I think of your cookie jar dictum:





Furthermore, eat bleach and die and don’t listen when Ellen talks. It’s bad for you.

In other news, meet Specimundi, the iPod.



Specimundi lives in people’s pockets, enjoys music and likes computers.

Specimundi is a special needs appliance much like every other iPod...

iPODS ARE SLOW LEARNERS WHO FOR THE LIFE OF THEM CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO PLAY CONSECUTIVE SONGS WITHOUT A GAP BETWEEN THEM.

Silly retarded iPod. Clearly I thought this issue was fixed but apparently I was lied to by whichever web site I looked at. It wasn’t an Apple site; it was some fan-site and they were wrong.

Not to fear! It’s likely that Apple will add this feature with the next release of iPod’s firmware! RIGHT?? Besides, Apple technical support will probably enjoy talking about it as I call daily requesting the feature be added. Until the featue is added.

In the meantime, Specimundi is making friends with the other appliances in it’s new home--five CD players--which will still be getting a lot of use until therapy and a firmware update can broaden Specimundi’s horizons.....

Post Script: Besides the dead gap space, I’m very happy with the design and performance of this modern technological marvel.

Fresh carbs. You’re welcome.

Maybe I have no sense of humor, but I don’t like to have my blog messed with, even if it’s revenge that’s all in good fun. Apologies to those of you who had to witness the replacement of Cookies2.jpg. The original photo has been replaced. If you still see pornography when you view this page, please clear the photo cache in your browser. Thank you.

DGM, 1-24-2005, 11:05:00 PM

This report concludes an unusual weekend, one in which my family spent time here in San Luis Obispo instead of the me spending time in Agoura. Also unusually, Ellen did not go along on this trip. She was teaching a seminar at Cuesta Saturday morning. She was replaced physically though not in spirit, by my mom.

The Cast, then: Me, Myles, Mom.

The Route: Starting from the Sands Hotel, where my folks and sister were staying: Monterey, San Luis Drive, Johnson, Laurel, Orcutt, Broad, Tank Farm Road, Poinsettia, flower name nonsense, Alyssum Drive, flower name nonsense, Sunflower Drive, flower name nonsense, Bluebell Way, flower name nonsense, Tank Farm Road, Broad Street, Marsh Street, Freeway, Madonna Road, Los Osos Valley Road, Oceanaire, Madonna, Los Osos Valley Road, Foothill and stuff, and back over to Murray Station Apartments to pick up Myles’ truck.

The stuff: I got a belt sander and a brown swing-arm clamp lamp. Two points for me! Swing arm clamp lamp: good condition, except brown. Actually, it will be a nice change of scenery. I have, currently, two white ones, two black ones, a grey one, a yellow one and a broken black one in the closet. I don’t know if I’ll use this one in my room despite the spectacular color variance it would bring to my space. Instead, I may give it to Susan, architecture buddy of choice. The belt sander is made by Rockwell (update later if I check and am wrong) and needs a new cord and a belt (loop of sandpaper). Here’s what I think: I may be risking a lot by paying two dollars for a broken power tool but I can easily replace power cords. There could be other things wrong with it but I’m guessing that it worked fine until the cord got eaten. You only have to break one major thing in order to render a tool inoperative and I think that that one major problem is the cord. To have broken two major parts at one time is not likely. Come to think of it, I will assign myself an additional arbitrary two points for paying two dollars for it and an additional nine for buying a broken power tool.

My new point total: Lots. Continuing:

Mom gets one point for buying Ellen an neat "throw" thing. By "throw thing", I don’t know what I mean except for that the item is made of deep red velvet with a gold pattern on it and tassels on the corners. Mom also gets an additional one point for generosity. Ellen seems to like it. She says she will "throw" it on the end of her bed and that it will go well with her room when she has her red accessories out. Apparently she can deck her room out in red or green depending on her mood. I’m glad mom was here to look at the blankets and other things made out of cloth because I usually overlook them completely, seeing VCRs and wire and stuff.

Myles wins the most points however. He and Kim are now proud owners of a Kenmore standalone gas range and oven. And hood! It’s clean, complete and the perfect thing for their new apartment. I have offered to build an island countertop for them in their new location and this will be the perfect centerpiece. Note: we did not tie the range to the top of DIA. As I said above, we retrieved Myles’ truck and loaded it up. This concluded garage sale morning. It was a good morning.

The overall count: There were lots of garage sales. Ten maybe? Still no motion sensor lights for Myles, but lots of other good things to look at.

Oh, and finally, the theme: Car wheels. Definitely car wheels. A set off a Chrysler Town and Country minivan, a set off a Chevy Camaro, and a set of custom Boyds wheels.

Myles says I should photoblog garage sales. Should I? Post a comment if you think you’d like to live out my garage sale experiences through pictures as well as words.

I did an awful lot of work for the Taus family in the previous eight days. As such I was exposed to an awful lot of Public Radio. There’s no need for me to say exactly how I feel about public radio. Instead I can offer you a new drinking game.

NPR News Shots:

Take one beer shot once when any of the following items is mentioned:

SUV
Fraud
Opinion
Corporate
"The Arts"
Protest
Discrimination
University
Hearing
Greed
Independent
Election
"Senior Official"


Take one hard shot of your choice as any of the following words is used:

Agenda
Advisor
Committee
Consortium
Commission
Council
Hydrogen
Politicize
Scandal

Oh, may I recommend that if you plan to play using shows like "Morning Edition" that you tape it and play it back in the evening? You’re gonna get loaded and perhaps it’s best not to play before noon.

Do you think I left anything out? The words selected are timeless classics and will be featured on "All Things Considered" between now and forever. Ok, go ahead and add "WMD," "Torture," and "President Bush" if you want, but you’re still gonna be puking when Freedom Jazz Dance comes on the next morning. Don’t talk to me about it.

Now that school is about to start and I am faced with the prospect of hours of un-fun boringness I foresee a tremendous increase in blogging. Starting now.

Weekly Garage Sale Update 1-15-2005

Yay for the first garage sale run of 2005! I wanted to go out for garage sales on January first when I was in Florida but I went to the friggin airport instead. I came home on the first. I came back to rain. I mention the rain not complain about it but to explain how it was that I went over fifteen days without pushing junk around on someone’s driveway. I mean to say that it was fifteen days in to January before I went garage-saleing. In fact, it has been a lot longer than fifteen days since I’ve been out for a morning of yard sales. Early December it was. It’s kinda nice to be back in the old routine.

Anyway.

The Cast: Ellen stayed over at apartment 82 so I picked both she and Myles up at 9:15 or so.

The Route: Murray Street, Santa Rosa, Foothill (Nothing there!!) Los Osos Valley Road (NOT pronounced "LOVeR" for short), then a bunch of nonsense including a traffic circle taken at forty miles per hour, Madonna, Higuera, South, Broad, Santa Barbara, Marsh, Santa Rosa, Murray.

Let me take a moment to address the topic of traffic circles. I fugging hate traffic circles that are installed to control traffic. It may be the American in me but I think that when a set or bunch or lot of roads come together there ought to be a traffic signal doing the hard work. I don’t like to merge into an intersection and then merge back out again. Waiting for a light to change is much less work and a lot less dangerous I think. It also gives drivers time to change CDs, comb their hair, etc. Traffic lights are better than traffic circles.

What I fugging do like is to molest the decorative traffic circles! Some neighborhoods look better with planters or trees in the center of their intersections, apparently, and so in places in this city where small residential streets come together and where there is basically no traffic, there is sometimes a traffic circle. I guess when you live in a rich enough neighborhood your sense of aesthetics requires something less octagonal than a stop sign where roads meet. I must live in a poor neighborhood. Whatever. Anyway: When I find one, riding in my car is like qualifying for the Urban Botanical Speedway 500. I go as fast as I can without breaking exceeding the coefficient of static friction in all four wheels. If only three of my tires are sliding, that’s ok. It spices up the driving in this otherwise boring little town. Oh--see also driving through puddles. I’d like to address that at some point too.

Anyhow--The Morning’s Statistics: Ellen and Myles should correct me by commenting if I’m wrong but it seems like we only found three or four or five garage sales. It wasn’t a really great morning, but some stuff was gotten. We chased a garage sale like crazy off of Los Osos Valley Road but the sign that we thought had told us to turn off the main drag was actually just alerting us of a garage sale over on Madonna. Gr. Stupid sign with no arrows. We hunted for at least ten minutes I think before we went over in the direction of Madonna and figured the mystery out.

I bought a bicycle helmet for two bucks! I didn’t buy it because I like bicycle helmets or much even because I intend to wear it, but because wearing a helmet means a lot to my dad and I’m not about to spend three dollars or more on one. Two-fifty, maybe. Anyhow, it’s a nice looking helmet and I’m sure it will look great on me as soon as I WASH IT REALLY THOROUGHLY. Um. Did I buy anything else? I almost bought a beige Apple G3 (and so did Myles) for five dollars (G3 233 with 32 MB RAM, 4 GB HDD, floppy, modem, a NIC and two monitor hookups) but we both decided that we didn’t need another really old computer. Besides, my iMac runs at 333 Mhz now and it can still be considered a piece of junk. Also: Myles and I met a genuine crazy person. He greeted Myles by commenting on how Myles’ hair was made out of leaves and then proceeded to act out some drama wherein he caught a flaming football or some such weird thing. He was a neighbor of one of the families putting on the particular garage sale and the good folks seemed like they did not enjoy the company of this gentleman. The family didn’t have much for sale but just the same I think we kinda skipped actually rummaging through their things and concentrated on getting away from the crazy man, which was too bad for the folks. That was the last garage sale of the morning. Hm. I keep thinking there was something else I bought. I’ll let you know if I think of it. Myles did not find the motion detector light he was looking for. Bummer. Maybe next week. As with all things: Maybe next week.

A beer followup:

When I first began to drink beer, I was somewhat unsure how to do it.

I was a wine drinker first, and I learned to drink wine at Vaughn’s wine-tasting bar on Higuera Street. Wine is swirled, sipped and swallowed only after extensive analysis.

Beer, likewise, deserves analysis, beer portions are larger than wine portions. Once I got used to beer and became an *official* beer drinker, I found out that beer is to be consumed more like soda than like wine. But it is to be savored more than soda if it’s decent beer.

So that’s the conclusion I’ve drawn. Beer is not to be sipped like wine, but it is not to be guzzled like soda. I like to consume beer in some manner in-between.

In light of recent events....


I must solemnly, officially and ebulliently declare the word of 2005 to be BEER.


Begin the festivities.

It seems amazing to me how intricate and confusing our world is. It’s also amusing to me how this complicated world has outmoded my mother a time or two.

Chatting with my folks at the breakfast table one morning someone mentioned how raunchy the internet can be. Perhaps I described the best way to steal music without the Feds finding out (peer to peer network) and mentioned that it’s how the kiddies get their porn also. My poor mom says, "Well, I know you can get it on google images, too.

"I wanted to do some research for school on obese teenagers and I typed ’fat teens’ into Google and was SURPRISED BY WHAT POPPED UP!"

My dad saw what was coming before she got the whole story out and tried not to laugh, but oh, did we laugh.

Not everything that showed up was XXX teen hardcore sl*t teen f*** teen fat XXX suck c*m teen sex adult.....but.....


Anyway, there’s an....um....NICHE for everyone’s.....um..........tastes?

Oh. Don’t steal music. That’s bad.

Also: The breakfast table is the same table as the dinner table. Different meal, same table.