Friday 5 and a whole lotta randomness

• When were you last in ocean waters?
• Probably about 3 years ago.
• When did you last fly over ocean waters?
• Don’t think I ever have.
• What ocean sports activity seems like the most fun?
• When I was little, I liked boogie boarding. Right up until a huge wave pounded my face into the ocean floor. That sucked. I still have my board, although now it’s a really good snow sled.
• What are your thoughts or feelings about public aquariums?
• I love them. I have quite a few fond memories of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I fully intend on taking my girlies there someday.
• What are your thoughts or feelings about sushi?
• Come to think of it, I don’t know that I’ve ever had sushi. Or at least I don’t remember it. So maybe I’m not much of a fan…? Or I don’t know that I like it. One or the other.

And now for the randomness:

- I’ve recently started following some geekdom celebrities on Twitter. I found out what a Failwhale is. Huh.

- I am so bored here at work. *sigh*

- My laptop crapped out on me. So I haven’t done that “state of the company” address I mentioned earlier. Hopefully it’s just the power supply. Less than $15 to fix it would be fine by me.

- I need new tires. And a windshield. And there’s something annoyingly wrong with my car that causes the cruise control to shut off. And there’s something else annoyingly wrong with it that causes it to not want to start sometimes. Stupid car. But pretty much everything but the tires can wait.

- Since my laptop’s dead, I’ve been using the pos eMachine that my wife bought with the $500 she insisted I give her. She almost never used it. It’s mine now.

- I’m seriously considering building my own desktop. I have a cool looking tower, new power supply, and old DVD/CD drives. All I really need is a new motherboard, processor and hard drives. Could have a nice one for less than $500 fairly easily. I’ll bet I could get some computer know-enough-of-it-all to build it for me if I shipped them the parts and a hundred $ bill. Maybe next year.

- I miss my irregular poker nights with the guys. Haven’t done one since CA. Yet another thing to start doing when I have my own place.

- If I built a good enough desktop, I could play StarCraft II. The previews look awesome!

- Meh. On second thought, StarCraft is a MMORPG. Not my cup of tea. Gimme a gun to point ‘n shoot and I’m happy. Too much involved in anything else.

- Jonesin’ again for a motorcycle. I think I want a blue Honda VTX1300. Shiny.

- Although, poking around on the Honda Motorsports website has revealed the DN-01. It’s a crossover, and I’m not sure I like the exhaust, but very cool looking otherwise. I guess it sits like a cruiser and performs and looks more like a sport bike.

 Yeah, like I’ll be spending $15K on a bike any time soon.

- I took the kids to the free pancake breakfast this morning. Didn’t get to see them actually making the pancakes, which I hear is quite the show, but someone mentioned that they served 12,000 people this last Wednesday and hoped to break that today. When we got there, the line was only about 1/4 mile long and it never stopped moving. A 5 minute walk to chow down some pancakes & a slice of ham. Not too shabby.

- There was a homemade ice-cream stand there too. The guy had 2 big churns that were powered by this little old John-Deer motor. You know, the antique ones that pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Of course the girlies had to ask for it. “No, you can’t have ice-cream for breakfast!”

- I ordered my new power supply. $16 and delivered by the 4th. Hope that solves the problem.

- I suppose I should start filling out rental applications. My goal is to be here for only 3 more months, might even be able to do it in 2 if the stbx actually starts forking out the money that she said she would. Although it’s highly unlikely. She said she was going to pay for one of the girls every week for the summer. She’s paid maybe 1 of every 3 weeks, not even the every other week she was paying during the school year. What’s the point of her working if I have to pay over $1,200 a month in child care?!!

- So anyhoo. My weekend will be spent at a parade tomorrow morning and the rest of it will be spent thinking about all the groceries I need to buy but can’t really afford.

- As sick as I am of feeling poor, no, my life isn’t really that bad. I still have a job and everyone’s healthy.

Thanks for reading!

Movie, Marriage, and…fair food?

Just a bit of geekdom candy here:

Even if you don’t play video games, the artistry involved in creating something like this is certainly something to be appreciated.

So about that question. Would I recommend marriage to a friend?

Right now?

No.

Of course this is an incredibly biased response so I guess I should qualify it.

I believe the marriage and parent/child relationships are as close as we can get to relationship with God, at least in the physical sense. In other words, the absolutely unselfishness that can be had in a marriage or parent/child relationship are as close as we can get in this world to what we’ll have when we meet God face to face.

On the other hand, there really is no comparison, in that sense.

What the marriage relationship also gives us is an unprecedented opportunity for fulfilling what God wants us to do for each other, while we’re here. I’ve failed in that. I know that for a fact. I also know that marriage is a 2-way road. There is absolutely no way a marriage can be successful if both people don’t approach it with an unselfish attitude. I’m sure there are a lot of marriages out there that don’t work that way, but in my humble opinion, those aren’t successful marriages…at least in the sense that God intended. I’ve met more than a few guys who have the attitude, “she does her thing, I do mine, and we don’t get in each others way too much.”

So if a friend asked me if he should marry his long-time girlfriend, I would say these things to him, without committing to a “yes” or “no”. I would also mention that some people change once the ring is on their finger. And some people are trying so hard to ‘land a mate’ that they’re not honest with who they really are during courtship. I think that happens a lot more than not.

Then there’s the people that are brutally honest about who they are that they scare away anyone that they might actually be willing to change for.

I guess I wouldn’t say much of anything. Just give some heartfelt advice and pray. I had the opportunity to talk with a cousin of mine who was recently engaged at the time. I took the chance to give him the ‘one piece of advice’. Don’t get into debt. In my experience, money is the one thing that contributed to the demise of my marriage that I could have easily handled differently. Pick the ‘low-hanging fruit’ first, so to speak.

On to a different topic: This week is the city’s annual party. Cheyenne Frontier Days. Anyone who doesn’t have kids and has lived here for more than a few years just ignores it and stays away from that side of town. But I have kids, so I took them to some of the events yesterday. Saw some Native American Indian dancing which was very cool. Crazy outfits. Besides the concerts, rodeo, and carnival (all of which cost money) there isn’t a whole lot to do so we only stayed for a couple of hours. The girlies mom took them to the carnival last Friday. I plan on taking them to the free pancake breakfast tomorrow, the parade on Saturday, and then again to the carnival Saturday. So they’ll get their fill and I’ll be filled way beyond my desire to do this stuff. I like fair food, but that’s about it.

So what’s your favorite fair food? Funnel cakes? Corn dogs? Cotton candy? Onion rings? Candy apples? Turkey legs? Deep fried chocolate covered bacon?

On a slightly different topic…. I’m really jonesin’ for Chinese food.

Heavy-weight randomness

- I’m part of an online gaming community (the same one AlienCG is a member of) and one of the guys there started a thread a couple of years ago asking people’s opinions about marriage. He revived it today and mentioned that he went through with it and proposed to his girlfriend. It makes me think though, would I recommend marriage to a friend? A good topic for a future post.

- As selfish as this sounds, I’ve been think about myself a lot lately. Specifically, how I define myself now and how I might define myself once I’ve moved out. It might sound silly to wait to change something about myself, but I can only imagine it’ll be easier once someone’s not as likely to criticize me about it. (And no, I’m not coming out of the closet.) I’ve been think a lot more about donating my time to some good causes. Primarily helping neighbors & such, but maybe something official too, like the community action program. We’ll see. I just need to get off my butt and do something. You might wonder why I can’t do that now, but I tried helping an elderly neighbor lady fix her lawnmower (not successfully, dangit) and got chewed out for “not pulling my weight” around the house. *sigh*

- I keep getting myself worked up and worried about my girls when I move out. I know I can’t protect them all the time, but I’m having a very hard time trusting that my stbx will make the right choices about whether or not to bring guys home. If I hadn’t mentioned it before, this is the stbx that brought home the guy she was cheating on me with…while I was still under the impression that we were going to stay married. She doesn’t contact that specific guy anymore, but that doesn’t mean she’ll choose better guys in the future. Yeah, I could start a custody battle and all that, but until my fears are founded in something more substantial, I don’t think I can justify dragging them through that. Which sucks because something more ‘substantial’ is also likely to be harmful to my girls. *sigh* again. I know for sure that my prayer life will need to get a lot better. I’ve already started planning my ‘speech’ to make sure she knows that the girls are more than welcome to stay with me whenever she might want to have someone over. I’m sure it’ll go over like a lead balloon, but I gotta say it.

- Last time my parents were down I talked to my dad quite a bit. He mentioned my mom was a little concerned about me being happy and possibly finding someone else to marry in the future. Some time later, he made a case for staying single. Ha! Without reading too much into what that might mean, coming from him, I thought it was kind of funny how much differently men and women think about these things. I’m glad my mom thinks it takes marriage for a guy to be happy with another woman.

- A little lighter-weight: I’m getting pretty psyched for the release of Halo: Reach. Coming on September 14th. I probably won’t be moved out by then, but hopefully shortly after. I played in the multiplayer beta test back in June. Fun stuff!

 

This is a screenshot of a piece of the campaign. Gorgeous!

- I could write an entire post about what I’m looking forward to in this game. Maybe I will some time. Or do a review after release. We’ll see.

- Sometimes I worry about how much I get myself hyped up for these games, but none of the Halo series has ever disappointed.

- Anther game I’m really, really looking forward to is Gears of War 3. Maybe even more than Halo: Reach. Gears is far more gruesome, but it’s hecka fun. Comes out next spring some time. In fact, as much of a Halo fan as I am, I think I like Gears more. But they’re both very fun in their own ways.

Yes, you guessed right. That monster is going to rip the guys arm off and kill him with it. Ewww… 

Cool.

And that is one sick lookin turret.

- Both games are a lot of fun. Much more so because you can get online and play with friends. Either fighting other people together or going through the campaign together. My stbx doesn’t seem to qualify the people I hang with online as ‘friends’. Of course, I beg to differ. I’ve had a guy on my friends list for over 6 years now. Have never met face to face, and hardly play together really, but I’m looking forward to playing some new Halo & Gears with him soon.

- Makes my wonder some more. I’m not sure I’ve ever played online with the Alien. Hmmm... might have to correct that.

Have a good ‘un, y’all!

Friday 5 – Fresh & Fruity

Totally bored at work, so here’s something to do!

• Besides plain, what’s your favorite way to eat an apple?
• With caramel. Lots of caramel.
• Besides plain, what’s your favorite way to eat berries?
• Raspberries on top of dark chocolate ice cream. Or strawberries on angle food cake, with real whipped cream.
• Besides plain, what’s your favorite way to eat a banana?
• Under ice cream. A lot of ice cream. And chocolate sauce. And whipped cream.
• Besides plain, what’s your favorite way to eat a peach?
• Blended into some sort of alcoholic beverage. (not a huge peach fan)
• Besides plain, what’s your favorite way to eat a pineapple?
• Grilled. And then blended into some sort of alcoholic beverage.

Ok, so that was way too simple, but I don’t really have anything else to say about it besides…

I love fruit!

It is by far my favorite food. Being 31 years old, I still can’t stop eating watermelon before I make myself sick. I’m far more of a chocolate pie fan (kahlua cream cheese, thank you very much) as opposed to fruit pie, but since I can’t have it plain…

Favorite fruit? Hmmm…  Since fruit is seasonal, so are my tastes. I like watermelon, nectarines (crunchy), strawberries, raspberries, Fuji apples, pineapple, grapes, and so forth and so on.

Have a great weekend!

Getting over the sick & stuff

Boy, it’s been a while.

My littlest little one got sick last Thursday and didn't really get better until Sunday. She threw up a little the first day and had the soupies for the rest of the time. Poor girlie. She’s feeling a lot better now but guess who picked up where she left off….

I haven’t been that sick for a very long time. Every time I thought I couldn’t possibly have anything left in me, my body would find something else to discharge at an extreme velocity. Come to think of it, it’s been 6 years. I still feel pretty crummy but I’m back at work. Everyone’s calling my office the ‘quarantine zone’, which is fine by me except it seems people are visiting anyway. Maybe I should put up a sign to make it official. Then they might leave me alone.

My stbx got yet another job. Selling cars no less. I’ll give her props for never having been fired from a job, but why does it seem like she still can’t keep a job? This will be her 4th employer in 2 years. She’s not quitting her other job, just cutting back on hours. I’ll bet you anything she didn’t quit just so she could keep her employee discount. And rack up yet more debt because they only let employees use a company credit card to get the discount. *sigh*

I don’t unnerstand…

I think I’ve lost a significant amount of my ability to speak. It just seems a lot harder to put thoughts together very quickly and then get them out of my mouth in an orderly fashion. I probably think about it too much…or I’m just getting dumber.

I found this picture on Google Maps. It’s a mesocyclone that happened somewhere in Wyoming at some time. Pretty freaky.

I sat in on a web/teleconference about Lean Six Sigma today. If you don’t know what that is…well…that’s ok. I think it’s a good idea to do these things every once in a while, but as I know, and as the presenter even said himself, the ‘Lean Six Sigma’ concept will not work unless it’s a top-down effort. And since I’m not really at the ‘top’, whatever excitement I might drum up to get it done is somewhat wasted. *sigh* again. But it’s still good to listen to it every once in a while. Maybe some day we’ll actually implement it.

I am so ready for this company to make some money. This struggle to eventually watch ends not meet is getting old. As in 3 years old. My division is pretty much breaking even, but it doesn’t make up for the other 3 who are all losing a lot of money.

Sometimes I really miss my days as a designer. I always new what I was going to do the next day and I could put on my headphones, bury my nose in a set of plans, forget about my problems, and not give a crap about other peoples problems.

Thems was the days.

Hope you’re all feeling a lot better than I am. In health and heart.

Horn tooting & hilarity

It seems I can publish from Windows Live Writer on my work computer. I didn’t install the update on this machine, so I wonder if that’s the issue…?

I haven’t tooted my own horn for a while. No one else toots it, so why not me?

I started working my current job in November of ‘07. Just over 2 1/2 years ago now. The division was losing a lot of money then. We still are now, but not nearly as much. This morning I started putting together a little presentation for my guys to show them how well they’ve been doing and I’ve made even myself pleasantly surprised at how much improvement we’ve seen since then. Just some facts:

- 20% increase in our ‘efficiency’ rating (projected job time vs actual)

- 12% increase in productivity (getting any increase in productivity is difficult when there is only half the work to get done)

- 30% decrease in overhead (coinciding with a 50% decrease in sales) (I know, not quite enough, but still….)

- 15% decrease in average wages (I know it’s not nice for the people making those wages, but it does have a big effect on profitability)

- Sales are up 38% so far this year and losses are down 60%!

We’re fighting some uphill battles though. Most of the equipment, mainly the forklifts, are coming up on the end of their lifecycle. Some are well beyond. We’ve spent 70% more on forklift repairs this year compared to last year. That sucks.

On a totally different note. Has anyone found the Old Spice channel on YouTube yet? It’s hilarious!! He’s responding to customer tweets.

Have a great one!

Enter new title here - Yeah, I couldn't think of one...

For some reason, my Windows Live Writer can't connect to my blog. So much for decent text to picture alignment...

It seems part of the separation involves me losing the 2 pieces of furniture I’ve built myself. Not that I mind so much, I really think of them as the girls’, and I can always build another, but still…

The first was finished years ago. A decent sized bookshelf that’s served us well over the years.

I would really like to keep this one, since it was my first project. Maybe I still can, since when we decided how to split the stuff she was the one who was going to move out. Now it’s me who’s moving.

The second is this mini-picnic table. It’s only about 4’ long, built out of 2x6 pine. Very heavy! I can drag it around by myself, but forget actually lifting it. It was the girls’ craft table inside for a while, but the wife commandeered the office so it went outside and has actually served as a picnic table. Most of the artwork has been washed off by the rain and faded by the sun already. It took me all of about 4 hours to build and didn’t pay retail for the lumber, so not a big loss.

When I find my new place, I’ll need to replace the girls’ beds. I found some free plans online for bunk beds built out of 2x4’s. Should be able to do it for less than 50 bucks. (Just for the frame though. I’ll still have to buy mattresses.) Since I’m probably only going to get a 2 bedroom place, I may even try to build ship style bunks, to fit all three beds in the same footprint as one. Wouldn’t give them much head room though. Either that or a 2 bed bunk with a trundle underneath. Anyone have any thoughts or experience about that?

On a very nice note, my 2 oldest girls, G who’s 7 and A who’s 5, have recently taken to giving me unprompted & random kisses. *sigh*…the heart goes pitter patter.

So Pamela mentioned in a recent comment to go ahead and feel free to write those depressing posts. Well, it’s not that I don’t feel free to, or don’t plan on doing it again, it’s just that I feel like most of my posts have been depressing. In real life, quite a few of the conversations I’ve had with friends over the last year or so have revolved around my failing marriage, as is understandable. But for some of my friends, that’s all we’ve talked about and it seems like they’re drifting away. Which to me, is also understandable. ‘Venting’ to people all the time isn’t a fantastic way to build friendships and I don’t want to continue that route here on this blog or in real life. So, I’ll certainly write what I feel like, and sometimes that’ll involve the depressing stuff, but not always.

Along those lines, I was somewhat enlightened by a friend of mine recently. We were talking about the depressing stuff, specifically about how my wife and I talk to each other. I feel she’s been repeating the same things over and over to me, I suppose to get me to understand something as she feels I don’t yet understand. (I believe I do understand but have failed to convince her of that…but that’s another topic.) I said to him that common sense tells us that if we continue to say the same things to someone and they don’t understand, that we should either change how we say it or change what we say, and why hasn’t my wife thought of that. His very simple response was, “Well, common sense doesn’t really apply here.”

Oo

Thinking of that has certainly affected my expectation of our conversations. In other words, I don’t expect anything except a waste of time. Of course we’ll have to figure things out, but it seems it’ll be on her time. Oh well. Live & learn.

Thanks for reading!

I wanna get outta here!

I’m sure ready for a change. Whenever I can scrape up the money, I’ll be moving out. It’ll probably be a few months. With all 3 girlies in daycare, every extra penny is already called for until school starts again. So I’ll get through July & August and hopefully by November 1st I’ll be living somewhere else. Same town, different hole.

This whole separation/being poor thing is a pain in the butt. I’ll be filing for bankruptcy too. (Shoulda’ done that 2 years ago…) It just recently occurred to me that all the money I’ve been paying out every month for the last 2+ years for debt reduction is only touching 25% of our actual debt. And by all that money, I mean $1,300 a month!! And none of it’s for a mortgage! I accept responsibility for being in this situation, but I’m not the one that actually spent the money. I just turned a blind eye…..*sigh*

So it’s a little early to be looking but I’m checking out apartments & houses for rent. I need to decide whether or not I want to pay the extra $’s out for a house. Probably not. I’d really like to have a yard for the girls to play in, but it’ll probably end up being a ‘just do without’ situation. Although I just checked and craigslist has a couple of low rent trailer houses on there. I’m sure something will turn up when I’m ready.

It’s fun to read some of the listings on craigslist, which are either mistakes or scams. Someone listed a house for rent, $500 a month, and only 3 subway stops to the city! Woohoo! There is not a single subway in all of Wyoming. (Unless you count the sandwich place, in which case they’re all in the city, so it still doesn’t work.)

I’ve discovered a weird thing around here though. Almost no one does month to month renting, only leases. If they do monthly, it’s only after completing a lease. Back in CA, everything was month to month. Or at least you had the option. I wonder why that is.

I’m just teasing myself by looking though, since it isn’t going to happen for a while.

(I just deleted about 3 paragraphs of depressing relationship stuff.)

What else should I talk about? Did a whole bunch of nothing on the 4th. Didn’t see even one firework, but there was lightning, which I think is always very cool.

I told myself when I started blogging again, I would always include a picture, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with the main topic:

This is a picture of an old circular saw. It was at the pioneer exhibit at the Museum of the Rockies. One piece of equipment in our shop is called a component saw. It has 5 big (24”+) saw blades in it and it’s computer controlled, meaning that it can move all those blades & change the length with a push of a button. I should show this old one to my sawyers, “How’d you like to cut 5,000+ boards a day with this?”

And here’s a picture of the ‘redecorating’ I did in our office waiting area (a long time ago.) The new stuff is the trusses on the walls and the floor truss coffee table. Just showing off the different shapes we can create. The previous decorations were this wreath and these little hats with flowers on them. No, we don’t make anything with flowers…

Thanks for reading!