Fooo- Fooo-ooood

I eat this prolly once a week at least.

Tunafish
Red & Yellow Peppers
Spinach
Onions
Cumin
Tarragon
Reg Mayo
Hot Sauce (not on it yet)




I've been lovin the pig restaurant lately before we leave! Here we have a Half a Rack of Hogs Heaven BBQ ribs, some skillet beans and collard greens. The sides are not always the same in their making, but still good. Gunna miss these ribs!



I was driving around central Veegus, and gasped when I saw a drive through sign for this place. My last memory of it was being violently ill in the Phillipines driving down the Mayon Volcano, after which I re tasted everything I had eaten at this place.

I'm almost compelled to go in and eat something just to move past it! So I can say if it's really just McDonalds from the Bizarro universe or something harmless. Course, any US restaurant over in the PI is a bit off anyway. It's prolly fine.

But you see the bee man out front right? I guess he seems innocent next to the likes of the hamburgler.



Goodness I gotta clean my windshield!

D Cells please!

There was a time when I would buy cassette tapes for 9.99 at Camelot music. I would just pick something that had a cool looking cover. This was my death metal phase. I bought a lot of bad music that way. I still have some of that stored deep in the parents house.

I can remember the first time I was able to go into a music store and actually listen to certain, not any, just certain cds. Often you couldn't fast forward though which was really frustrating.

My music tastes were always weird, so it was a huge treat to go to Tower Records in New Orleans or Atlanta. Sometimes my friends and I would make a road trip just for Tower Records. We'd spend from 1 to 2 hours in there looking at cds. Then the trip back would be listening to cds the whole way.

One time, the car we were driving only had a tape player. So we brought a huge boom box and a tape player adapter. This would plug into the boom box's audio out port, and the adapter would go into the car's tape player. We used it driving up though and after only 20 minutes of our 5 hour drive back the boom box died. We barely had any money left, so we stopped at some rinky dink gas station in the middle of nowhere and paid what seemed like a ridiculous amount of money for 8 D cell batteries. There may have been a large bag of change in that transaction. All was saved though and the trip home was full of sonic wonderment!

These trips to Tower records though were often full of pressure to buy extra. Finding a new band with a cool sound was a super find! However, you just had to pay for it and hope for the best! There was no pre listen yet.

I've been carrying around 2 huge boxes of cds with me now for a few years. I am finally trimming them down. These 6 cds are the worst cds I've ever purchased. They still sound absolutely wretched! I can't believe I bought an album with the word 'Poodle' in it! Maybe I should keep them. Maybe not.

Smoking Death Weed

Have you seen the recent news bits about cigarette companies having to put graphic images of smoking related nastiness on the packaging? The social discussion is full of oh what's next, will banks have to put up pictures of empty wallets? or will Twinkies have to have pictures of overweight diabetic adults on the box?

I guess they're banking on the results such marketing has done in other countries. Will it really affect anything or as a smoking friend said, now is the time to make cigarette cases hip! Interesting too that there's a new political movement for the deregulation of marijuana. I think it will happen in the next decade. Which state will be the first?!!!

Here's a rare picture of me smoking from 1998. The original exif said Dec 31st, but dang!! Was I crazy enough to be in New Orleans on New Years? It must not have been very memorable. I look at this pic and think ahh man, my humvee watch! That thing was cool. Anyone recognize the shirt?



Anyway, back in 08 or so I quit smoking for a little over a year. Then it was about 6 months of buy a pack,quit, buy a pack, quit, repeat over and over. I would get so irrational and difficult to be around. It was not pretty. So today is finally another whole year of no nicotine whatsoever. I have no urges or desire to smoke either. I just have to be careful not to get too buzzed while eating Mexican, and I'll be good to go for another year!

Random Tbone 221047

If I knew my Pat Tillman post was going to receive so much traffic, I might have wrote a bit more to it. However, most people are prolly just coming by way of the picture on it.

It's officially hot here. It was on broil as early as 9am this morning. I prolly could've ran today, but I found myself on the couch watching some Wimbleton and it suddenly went dark. I needed that dark I'm pretty sure. My run at Bristlecone on Monday was good, but 3 miles of downhill worked my quads good enough to last a few days.

I played with the Black Diamond Z Poles today at REI. These are trekking poles that are stupid light and collapse and fold out very quickly. They are pretty awesome I think, but I haven't decided if I like the whole pole thing yet. I used the REI poles we already had at Bristlecone and decided that I just found them annoying. However, Bristlecone is not nearly as steep as the South Trail, nor does it have any snow. I think Friday if all is well, I will go up the South Trail with no poles. Let it swang natural!

Spyderco finally released their Sprint Run for the Bob Lum Tanto folder. If there was one thing that would've been perfect in the universe of knives for me, it was a spydie hole and a tanto blade. There just weren't any being made. I saw the sprint posted on Knifecenter.com in the am and knew that in an hour it would be gone ( it was). I paced and thought about it intensely for like ten minutes. This was a knife I could buy and easily sell back later at what I paid if not more. Alas, I said nope. If this knife could not urge me to click the Add to Cart button, then I don't know what could. I haven't purchased a knife since late January. I think it's official, I am done with knives!

Severator is done.

MULE

Oh the joy of watching your player emerge from the round in the lead. Oh the excitement of a meteor strike. Oh the excitement of a 'collusion'. Oh the annoyance of pest infestation! The list goes on and on.

Redstander

Once upon a time in a program called 3D Studio Max I would sit and spend hours mutating and adjusting and randomizing and doing other things equivalent to poking fingers into the dark. 97% of the time the shapes I would get would be just junk. Course you might see this and think that, but I happen to like it. Whatever it's orientation, I can always come back to the Redstander and find some interest in it. I would often use it as a displacement map while altering layers in photoshop.

Tick Tock

Time is running out for our stay in the Veegus! A month from today, if all goes as planned, we should be in Colorado Springs. The first stop in the long path back to humid Florida. I'm sure I will miss the 10% humidity here.

Last couple of days have been non stop cleanathon for me. We had a family come look at the house today, so I had a TUUN of stuff to clean. It was a good thing, a stressful thing, but hey it helped me look everything over for packing. Seems that we gotta get rid of some stuff... again! Freecycle time!

Been quite a few days since I've eaten super bad, so there was no way I was going to get my kitchen dirty tonight. Off to the Pig Restaurant as my daughter calls it. It's a local bbq joint. This is another item from the Veegus I will miss, Hogs Heaven BBQ. I love coming in this place, where I can get a half rack of the tastiest melt in my mouth ribs, listen to some great jazz music, see guys in tank tops and jail house tattoos cooking the food, while loud aggressive women whip on them and love up the customers, and wash it all down with insanely sweet tea. Mmmm good! The collard greens were awesome too!

Rewind to two days ago, and I came moments from getting seriously hurt. It was really a crazy merging of events. I guess many accidents are in retrospect. Let's see if I can explain.

Imagine riding on your bike on a wide two lane road. I'm coming from a direction that hardly any traffic ever comes from. In fact, this whole area is pretty low traffic. That's why I ride here. Anyway, I'm also coming behind a woman whose just out for a cruise on her bike. She's going at a moderate clip though, and I feel like a weirdo just hanging behind her, so I start to pass her. She looks back and is a bit startled. We exchange some friendly talk, and I speed up to pass her. So now I'm moving much quicker. There are 3 cars bunched up coming down towards me with a white BMW leading. I'm approaching an outlet to a subdivision that is longer across than usual. There's a median which is kinda odd, but hey Veegus has some odd stuff.

At this point the BMW sees me, but hasn't committed to turning in front of me yet. I feel at this point, I should just go faster so this guy can make his turn since he's got 2 other cars right up his butt. So I speed up more. Then the 'oh shit' alarm comes on when a silver VW Beetle comes from the subdivision to pull out in the same direction I'm going. The driver is a teenage girl. She sees the BMW slowing down, but since I'm not a car, the BMW is beginning to move over since the street is wide giving the illusion that he's going to make a turn. I'm staring at the driver of the VW, kinda in awe that she hasn't looked in my direction at all.

So you can see the dilemma. I have a BMW making his turn at a rate of speed that if I was clear, would be fine, but I've stopped peddling and am on the verge of full stop at prolly 20+ mph. Going in front of the VW would not be prudent. If only the VW driver would look at me. The VW driver has 2 other girls in the car. Her passenger I'm pretty sure said something like Look Out!! That's what the look on her face said anyway. The VW driver finally turns her head which is immediately full of apology and embarrassment. At this point I'm already braking, just a nano second from 'omg, squeeze the brakes with everything in your power and then hope to somehow flip over their car braking', while the BMW is moving ever closer to my back wheel. And in that next half second as my hands released their tense grips on the brakes and my feet fired through the pedals, I kept going as the VW driver waved me along. Accident avoided!! But whooooooooo...kinda close!