Jim the Bird Watcher?

My barn swallows are back. I have a couple of new bird nests again this spring. Last fall I cleared out from above my patio on the underside of the second floor deck, all the nests from the last 2 years. Two summers ago I had barn swallows and if I remember correctly, last summer some sparrows used the same nest but added to it. They might've just finished another one that the barn swallows started but didn't finish...I'm not sure which it was. The spaces where birds always build these nests is over my patio on the underside of the deck above. There are several slots which offer a good place to build.
I think the birds get confused when they are building them because each slot has a little bit of nest in it. Eventually they manage to finish a complete nest and live in one of them. I'm not sure exactly who built what and when but out of 6 slots 5 have at least part of a nest built into them. Two of these nests look fairly complete. I haven't paid very close attention lately but I figured the new nests were built by sparrows again. Earlier today I think I saw the barn swallows again. I couldn't be sure because the glass on my patio doors was dirty. Whatever they were they were not sparrows. I cleaned the glass now and I plan to keep an eye on them to see what they are.

This is a barn swallow.

Emissions Test Photos

Around where I live in Wisconsin we have to pass a vehicle emissions test before we can renew our registrations. It seems like I have to go every year but I think it's really every other year the test is required. It's possible it seems like that to me because I have more than one registered vehicle and I think they alternate years. Anyway there are sometimes long lines nearer to the end of the month and at certain times of the day. Someone had a good idea and put up some cameras at all the test stations and a website that you can go look at the photos to determine if it's a good time to go. Last time I had to have this test I pulled up the website on my computer at work and I left it up while I drove over and took my test. The camera takes a picture about twice each minute. After I got back to work I did some investigating. It was a little tricky but I found all the image files in my browser cache and was able to pull out the relevant ones from the time period while I was in line. I'm the green Ranger at the back in the first photos. Blogger shrunk my photos for some reason but if you click on them the full size image is there.

StarTrac Machines and Sandwiches (again)

I just finished my sandwiches after I got back from my Saturday workout. My sandwiches were as great as last week's sandwiches. I cannot imagine a time when I will ever grow weary of the taste of my sandwiches or desire any other after workout meal. Quick summary of my workout....I did an hour on the StarTrac crosstrainer. I've found that different machines have a different feel to the resistance at the same level. I struggled a bit my first half hour to stay at level 12 once I was warmed up. I alternated between 12 and 11 with 5 minutes a piece on each. The second run even on the same machine was altogether different. I used levels 13 and 14 in the same way I did the 11/12 except I did 11 minutes on 14 then 4 on 13, alternating until the half hour was up. I felt pretty great throughout except for there was somebody nearby that kept farting or something. I was near a ceiling fan and I'm not sure if that sucked the offending air toward me or away from me but it was pretty foul either way. It smelled like a sewer. After the StarTrac there was somebody on my usual Lifefitness Cycle so I tried one of the StarTrac cycles. I wanted to try one out anyway and I was pretty impressed. It has the same little fan attachment as the crosstrainer does. I noticed the pedaling seemed to be at a bit of a different angle than I'm accustomed to and the pedals seemed a bit close together but those would be my only complaints. The mechanism for the straps on the pedals was solid and easy to operate. It had arm rests and the heart rate sensors were on this adjustable bar that came out in front of you. I thought that was pretty cool. I tried one of the regular (not recumbent) bikes a few weeks ago and I liked that. The operation was real smooth and quiet on both types of bikes. I think I might switch to the StarTrac bike for good now.
So for the day now I'm worked out, showered and cleaned up, I've had some great sandwiches to satisfy my appetite....and I've written about it here while I rest up. So now what?

Foil Easter Eggs

It just occurred to me as I was eating a few of these chocolate Easter eggs that they are very similar in size and shape to testicles. They're a little smaller than testicles but still this is a somewhat disturbing similarity. I can't be the first person to ever think of this. Why don't they just make them wider at one end like a real egg?

Saturday Workout and Sandwiches

Today I went to the gym again for another long workout. At work I've been working in the warehouse for about the last month for various reasons so my morning workout routine has suffered as a consequence. My only day to get a good workout now is Saturday and so because of this for the last few weeks I've been doing longer cardio workouts on Saturdays. I've been spending about 45-55 minutes on the StarTrac Crosstrainer and then an additional half an hour on a LifeFitness bike to cool down. The programs on the machines limit you to 30 minutes so I have to cut my StarTrac workouts into 2 consecutive chunks. My first half hour is the most intense and the intensity of my second 20 or 25 minute turn on the StarTrac depends on how I feel. I've been targeting my heart rate at a maximum of 140-145 during the first half hour and easing off a bit to the 130-145 range for the second run. I cool off on the bike maintaining my heart rate around 100-110. By the time I'm done I've usually drank two bottles of water. When I take my shirt off before my shower I'm always amazed at how heavy and wet it is. It's pretty disgusting really but in a way if feels like an accomplishment of sorts.

I never know whether or not to believe the stats from the displays on the machines. I have no idea how they calculate your calories burned or your distance. I'm most skeptical of the distance figure. I'm not a runner as much as a cyclist but the StarTrac only shows I'm going about a mile every 25 minutes or so. If that's true I'm working awfully hard just to get one mile. I don't think running a mile would take that long or would be that difficult going across real ground. Maybe the settings I use would be comparable to running up a steep hill or something. I always use the manual program and during my first half hour I adjust the level to a 12 or so out of 20 and I keep my strides per minute to a min 130 but I try to maintain it around 140 or so. It's plenty difficult but not overwhelmingly so. These are just the settings I need in order to reach my target heart rate. After my workout....stretching, a shower, 10 minutes in the hot tub, and then another shower I'm usually pretty hungry. When I get home I usually make my favorite sandwich of late which is a peanut butter and banana sandwich on toasted wheat bread. I make 2 of them and I put super chunk peanut butter on one half and smooth on the other half. Because I'm usually so hungry by this time eating these 2 sandwiches is like eating the 2 greatest sandwiches ever made.

ACME Products

The Original Illustrated Catalog of ACME Products.

I'm back.......again

I've not had any real trouble with the "operating system not found" issue but my internet service has been out. I've been off since the 2nd of March with the exception of about a week in the middle of March. I almost became accustomed to not having any service. The wireless service I had uses a radio signal from a tower near my place and the frequency of the trasmission from the tower is 2.4 GHz. Apparently that is an unlicensed frequency that anyone can use. The problem I was having was that someone nearby was using some device with that same frequency and (unknowingly) interfering with my signal. Some newer cordless phones use the 2.4 band among other things. I thought for a while I would ask my neighbor if she had one of these phones but in the end it wouldn't really matter. It's not as if I could tell her to stop using her new cordless phone. And beside that the range on those phones is pretty far so it could be any of a number if different neighbors (or devices). So in order to get back online I got Roadrunner. It's faster at downloading but slower uploading than the wireless was. At least I'm online again. I have the introductory rate for now but eventually it's going to cost me about twice what the wireless was. OUCH! After I got it I went through some of the steps from the booklet in the welcome kit to activate my account. I'm not completely sure it was even necessary to do the steps but I did them anyway. Now I have this roadrunner in the corner of my Internet Explorer browser. He runs whenever I click on a link. For some reason the welcome kit or the roadrunner mousepad that it came with smelled like bacon at first.

So now since I'm back for good I guess I plan to continue where I left off with this blog. That is to say I plan to continue to write about whatever nonsense I feel like sharing and continue to use my corner of the web as my creative outlet.

Weird computer happenings

Just off the heals of my recent internet access woes this morning I had another strange thing happen. I came back to my computer after being away and the screensaver wouldn't go away. I pushed the mouse around and punched the keyboard but still nothing. I tried cntl+alt+del but that had no effect so I eventually I just hit the reset button. I wasn't paying too much attention to the reboot process but when I did look up my screen said "operating system not found". I've never seen that before...ever! At first I thought maybe my drive crashed or something like that. I never had that happen before but I figured maybe this is what it would be like. I hit reset again and watched it go through the bootup process and eventually got the same "operating system not found" message again. I just shut it down after that and pondered my next move. I'm handy enough with computers and hardware so all sorts of things were going through my head. The prospect of more downtime and the time I'd need to take getting up again didn't make me too happy. After a short time I fired up my computer again and it booted without a problem. Windows scolded me for shutting down improperly and scanned my C: drive before starting up but that was all. I've been at my computer for most of the afternoon writing emails and such and it's like nothing ever happened. Just in case though I'm backing up the data on the drive to my second drive. A drive crashing may be just around the corner for me.

I'm back!

My internet connection has been out for about 2 weeks. I have a wireless connection and for some reason unknown to me or my ISP my modem wasn't catching a quality signal. My ISP came out and gave me one of the newer modems with the digital readout on the front. There is more than one kind of modem and the one they brought was the kind that connects to your computer via an ethernet cable. I didn't have a network card in my computer so in order to get up and running again I had to go out and get one. My old modem was just connected with a cable into a USB port which as it turns out wasn't like most modems...even the old kind like I had. After I got my network card I plugged in my new modem but I still wasn't getting a quality signal. Then later on Tuesday night I went to check the display on the modem and it had 4 bars for signal quality. I was pretty stunned it was working but it has worked fine ever since. I am only a few hundred yards from the transmission tower and I was the only customer with this problem. Whatever it was I'm back and I feel whole again. Having no internet access is pretty rough now that I'm accustomed to it. I mean I don' t miss it if I'm away on vacation or anything but being around the house I just have a difficult time without it. Among other things, I read the news and follow my investments on the internet. I felt out of touch without this. It's sort of like having a subscription to a newspaper but then suddenly no one delivers for 2 weeks. While it happening it is rather irritating and I felt cranky at times about it. I'm getting a free month of service from my internet provider and I now have the newer updated modem so it's not all bad. I think this is one of those crappy things that happens in life sometimes but in the end doesn't really matter that much. I can think of a lot worse things that could happen. Life without internet access isn't exactly all that rough in the broader scheme of things.

Movie Quiz

Guess the movie based on a single frame.

http://funwithmovies.com/part2/

I scored a 20 out of a possible 30. I didn't get number 6, 8, 14, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, or 30.

Number 8 and 24 I knew what they were but I couldn't immediately think of the titles. I've seen 15 of these movies and I own 7 of them on DVD so that helped. The answers to this quiz are here.

I went back and took the first version of the test but didn't score as well. I got 13/30. I count number 28 in my score even though I used IMDB . I knew the movie by the US title and the answer is its' UK title. I saw it on the big screen under the US title when I was in college so I didn't know what other name it could have until I looked it up.

Answers to quiz #1 are here. It turns out I've seen 18 of the 30 and I own 11 of them on DVD including number 2 which I didn't get when I took the quiz.

Socks from the Archives

I took this series of photos a while back. This is Becky's cat Socks. I think he was visiting my house while she was on a trip somewhere.

And now that I'm at it how 'bout a few more from a time he visited me when I was still living in my apartment.

Face

I decided recently that I don't express my creativity enough and that maybe I should use my blog for that purpose if I ever felt inspired. I haven't had an art class since I was in 6th grade. Is that obvious? I just created this on my computer in about 5 minutes. We didn't have computers when I was in 6th grade but now that we do have computers and I'm all grown up I thought I'd see what I could come up with. I started out working a completely different idea. I was going to add an element to that idea but needed a image to use as on object. I'm not very particular about creating every element from scratch on my own so I was searching through some images on the internet when I came across the image of a woman's face that I used for this. I scrapped my first idea and developed this one instead.

Today's Picture from the Archives

Today's picture from my archives is a bird picture. I was able to get real close because as you can see this bird is dead. I found it on the drive that goes around to the back of the building where I work. I wonder if it died and then got ran over or if it died because it was ran over.

Star Trac use Temporarily Suspended

I haven't been to the gym since the 9th of February but it's not because I'm lazy. I'm haven't been sitting at my desk all day like I normally do. Instead I've been working in the warehouse assembling orders and heaving boxes around all day. I don't usually go to the gym when I know I'm going to be on my feet all day. When I go to the gym to workout I usually go all out. I don't leave enough left in the tank for a full day on my feet. So for the time being my weight training and Star Trac CrossTrainer use is temporarily suspended. I started my job working in the shipping department and without that experience I wouldn't be the salesperson I am today. I occasionally spend a week or a few days out in shipping if someone is sick or on vacation. It keeps my hands in multiple departments and gives me a perspective that no one else has. I'll be out there until next week sometime so unless I go to the gym Saturday morning I won't be going back until next week. I miss that Star Trac machine.

Jim's Electric......Blanket

I woke up this morning to discover only half of my electric blanket was warm. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to replace it. I keep my thermostat at 65 degrees at night and for most of this winter I've been burying myself under multiple blankets to keep warm. Maybe 2 or 3 weeks ago I decided to pull my old electric blanket out of the closet. I had to wash it first before I could use it again because it didn't smell very fresh. It smelled a lot better after and it's been working perfectly up until now. I've wished I'd been using it all along. The last winter I used it was 1998/99. I only remember that because of certain associations between the blanket I slept under and where I lived and the things that went on during that year in my life. Anyway this morning I was still plenty warm with only one half working. I sleep pretty much in the middle of my bed so theoretically half of me should fall under the warm side of the blanket at all times. I figure as long as my blood continues to circulate I should stay warm. Although I might have to turn the warm side higher for that to work exactly right.

Steady Diet of Pizza

I think I've eaten more pizza this week than I have in the previous 3 months combined. On my way home from work Monday I was picking up some orange juice at the store and I decided to buy a couple brands of frozen pizza that I hadn't ever had before. I got a Palermo's Deluxe thin crust and a Tony's Supreme, also with a thin crust. I'm usually a Tombstone, cheese and sausage kind of guy unless I'm buying the more expensive brands like DiGiorno or Freschetta but I thought I'd try out some of the other cheap brands. I eat half at a time and I ate the first part of the Palermo's that night, then the second half right away on Tuesday night. It was good because it was pizza but as pizza goes it was pretty disappointing. I think the problem was it didn't have enough cheese. For some reason the second half I ate Tuesday night was better. I think maybe the cheese wasn't distributed evenly on the pizza. Then I had pizza for lunch on Thursday. Every year the overall winner of our weekly football pool buys pizza lunch for the office. It was Pizza Hut pizza which is good I guess. I like it better than some of the other places around here. I thought that was all the pizza I was going to have for while but then last night (Friday) my neighbor bought me a small pizza because of a favor I did for her. I wasn't expecting anything in return of course but maybe a half an hour after I got home from doing this favor my doorbell rang. It was her son Devon and he handed me a hot pizza. I was pretty blown away. I told him to thank her for me but I was pretty surprised by the whole thing so I jumbled my words a bit. Anyway I was starving because it was around 9:00 and I hadn't eaten dinner yet. I already had a grilled cheese sandwich going and can of Tomato soup on the stove so I just ate 2 pieces of the pizza and had my grilled cheese and soup with it. I ate the rest of that pizza today. I'm not sure where it was from but it was real real good. There was an image on the box of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It only said "Pizza" and "Thank you for your business" and a few other non-specific things that didn't identify where it came from. I'd like to find that out. I like pizza a lot and if it were a healthier thing to eat I'd probably eat it everyday....but since it isn't I probably should cut back again for a while.

Star Trac Elite CrossTrainer

My favorite machines at the gym are the new Star Trac elliptical machines. I was skeptical at first because I liked the old ones just fine, but I'm finding I like the new ones better. The only thing I like better about the old Lifefitness ones are the sensors that measure your heart rate are right on the poles where your hands are all of the time anyway. The new Star Trac machines just have them on the handles you grab onto if you let go of the poles. The drawback is you can only know your heart rate whenever you grab the handles with the sensors. It's not a big deal I guess and I'm getting used to just checking my heart rate off and on, but I still like to see it the whole time I'm working out. One of the better things about the Star Trac machines is the fan they have. It's just a small fan that sticks off the very top of the display and even though it doesn't exactly blow you away I think it's still a great thing to have.

Until I read it at the Star Trac website tonight I didn't know what SPM meant on the display. It's fairly obvious once you're on this machine it has something to do with how fast you're going but I was never been able to figure what it stood for. The Lifefitness ones have RPM on their display, but these Star Trac ones have SPM in its' place. Whatever SPM was I knew I was doing about 130 to 140 of them at the top end. It turns out it means strides per minute. That makes sense because I'm doing about double the number of them as I was RPM on the other machine.

My least favorite machines at the gym are the Cybex Total Body Arc Trainers. They look like this... I only was on one of these evil machines once but I'm nearly certain I will not be giving one a second chance. I spent maybe 20 minutes on it and everything seemed OK until I got off of it. I wondered as I was on it if I should be because I thought the motion might be hard on my knees. When I got off I found out I was right. The pain didn't last long but why would I put myself though it at all when there are fitness machines there that aren't so hard on my knees?

For the time being and until it gets warm enough outside to that point where I can ride my bike again, the Star Trac Elite CrossTrainer is my machine of choice. I'm going to continue to use one several times a week for a half hour to 45 minutes at a time while I listen to headphones and watch TVs with the closed captioning turned on. The headphones are to partly to drown out the crap music they play on the speakers in the fitness room.....but maybe that's another post for another day.

Jimi Hendrix

I just heard some Jimi Hendrix on a radio show I downloaded. I haven't listened to any of my Hendrix CD's in a while and I'd forgotten how friggin amazing that music is. These are a few of my all time favorite Hendrix tracks in no particular order:

Machine Gun - from Jimi Hendrix: Live at the Fillmore East
If 6 was 9 - from Axis: Bold as Love
Fire - from Are you Experienced?
Third Stone from the Sun - from Are you Experienced?
Crosstown Traffic - from Electric Ladyland
Born Under a Bad Sign - from Blues
Voodoo Chile Blues - from Blues

Hair is overrated

That picture on the right in my header that looks like a negative is me. I took that picture of myself not long after I first trimmed off all of my hair. Or maybe I should say remaining hair. I can't remember exactly when my hair first started to thin out but once I hit maybe 30 it was increasingly obvious that I was eventually going to loose a lot more than I had at first thought. I didn't really mind when my hair started to thin out some, but the problem was it just didn't stop thinning. I got to a point that I wouldn't call "bald" but you could definitely see more of my head through my hair than I liked and I decided something had to change. I decided to just buzz it all off and I did that in May last year. For a while I used a trimmer that I got at Target on the shortest setting it would go to. I had to do that about twice a week to keep it short. For a while now about once a week I've just been shaving my head completely. I'd have to say I don't miss having hair at all. I wish I had cut it all off much earlier. Hair is completely overrated. Even if I could grow back every hair I once had I'm not sure I would want to. I never did spend inordinate amounts of time on my hair but now that I only take 10 or 15 minutes a week shaving my head I think it's been a real time saver. It's very low maintenance. I don't need to keep track of a brush or a comb and I don't need to spend money on hair care products or haircuts. My mother may disagree, but I think my decision to start shaving my head was one of the best decisions I made in 2005.

Tuna Casserole

I made myself a tuna casserole last week. It was the first time I made it in a long time. I wasn't sure why at first but my shelf was real stocked up on the ingredients for it. Then I remembered that the last time I made it was last September when I got sick. I had a big plate of it and that same night I ended up puking everything around 3:00 in the morning. At first I thought it was something I ate (which of course would've been my tuna casserole). I didn't find out until later the next day that my dad and my grandma were also sick and my sister and brother-in-law had also been sick. Apparently my niece brought something home from daycare and spread it around. Even though it turned out that my casserole had nothing to do with being sick in the first place it's taken roughly 4 months for me to get past that association between tuna casserole and being sick. I hardly ever get sick enough to puke. Up until that night I probably hadn't puked for something like 15 years. At first I wasn't even sure how to go about doing it. I was pretty sure it was going to happen but how was I going to know when and how to do it? When the time came and I knew something was definitely going to happen it was real easy. It turns out you don't really have to do anything. Puking is more like something that happens to you. As I was heading for the bathroom I could feel myself beginning to salivate. I don't know why that happens but it does to me anyway. I'd say it was pretty violent and my stomach twisted and churned until I thought there could be nothing left in it. I felt much better when it was all over. I ended up taking 2 days off from work and 4 months away from tuna casserole. I'm glad I can eat it again because I like tuna.

Slow Speed Internet

For some mysterious reason my internet connection slowed to dial-up speed from last Wednesday to Wednesday the week before. It doesn't take a broadband connection to blog, but without it I just didn't feel like doing anything I normally do routinely on the web including posting here. I don't know how I used to handle doing things on the internet at such slow speeds. I've grown accustomed to high speed and I just don't have the patience for slowly downloading webpages any longer. Not surprisingly during this period of time I got a lot done around the house that I wouldn't have otherwise. For one my desk is clear enough that you can see most of the top of it and my file pile is nearly finished. I think I'm going put "broadband internet access" on my brand new list of things that I can't live without. I just started this list and that is the first thing on it. I suppose I could live without it, but I was pretty bummed out for the entire week without it. "Things I'd strongly prefer not to live without" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Electric Mayhem

When I originally created this blog I tossed around a few ideas for it's title. I eventually settled on "Electric Mayhem" or "Jim's Electric Mayhem" as it is in my address. It's not completely original I realize but it was much better than my other ideas. It came to me one day while I was watching television. I don't recall what made me think of it at the time, but as I sometimes do I wrote down my thought for further consideration at a later point in time. I realized later that I wrote it down because it was the name of the band on the Muppets. I thought it would be a better name for my blog than the one I had started with. And it makes sense considering my intentions for this blog are to have no specific intentions at all. I'm just going to write about whatever I feel like and most of it won't likely be connected in any way. It won't always center around politics, current life events, my thoughts on a CD or concert, my restaurant experiences or anything in particular at all. And so it will be mayhem.....electric mayhem.

63 BPM

I spent New Years Eve high on sugar. I was at my Aunt's place for our Christmas celebration and I had numerous Christmas cookies and some kind of chocolate pie with booze in it. During the course of the 4 hours while I was there I had 2 Point Root Beers which were probably also loaded with sugar. I left my Aunt's place around 4:00 for my annual New Years celebration at Kevins. I ate more junk food there including a homemade doughnut that was covered in sugar. I was also drinking the Mountain Dew that I brought along for the occasion. After all of the festivities when I was going to sleep on the couch I could feel that my pulse was high so I counted it for a full minute. I counted 63 beats. I normally range from the middle 40's to the low 50's. Sometimes during the day it can get as high as the mid 50's but I can't remember the last time it was higher than the 50's that didn't involve physical activity.

I played a new game Kevin got for PS2 called Burnout 3. I thought the game was pretty cool. It's basically a racing game. There's a couple different kinds of races but they all involve a lot of destruction. Your supposed to try to wipe out your opponents rather than just beat them like in most racing games. If I can find that game used or something I'd buy it and I don't buy that many games.

After that we watched a DVD and then we played a game called "Catch Phrase". It's kind of like Taboo only without all the words you can't say. You divide into 2 teams and you try to get your team to say a word that the little gizmo gives you. If your team gets the word you pass it on to the other team. The gizmo has a timer and whenever it goes off the team holding it gives up a point. I noticed that the timer is random so it's not always the same amount of time for each go around. It only beeps faster and faster so you know when it's getting close. There were 8 of us altogether and we rang in the new year playing that. It was more fun playing that than I expected it to be.

After everyone left or went off to bed Kevin and I watched some of the UFC: Best of 2005 show on Spike TV. They had the Liddell vs Horn fight which wasn't on TV before except for the original pay-per-view. I watched that until it was over about 2:30. Just a bit after that was when I counted my heart rate at 63.

Ribs vs. Riblets

Before the Mannheim Steamroller concert we went to Applebee's for dinner. I had a chicken finger and riblet combo platter. I like ribs a lot but I had forgotten that there's a difference between ribs and riblets. They were good but while I was eating them I kept thinking about how I didn't understand exactly what they were. I sometimes make pork ribs at home in my slow cooker and I understand what those are....they're ribs. But I don't understand what riblets are and where they come from. It occurred to me that maybe they're made from piglets. Whatever they are I think that I like eating normal ribs better. I made the diagram below on my computer. It's a representation of what a riblet is. The redish brown stuff is the meat and the gray is the bones inside. The bones are shaped sort of like a slice of bread. Each bone is about an inch tall and maybe 3/16" thick. I think I drew the second one from the left the most accurately.

Until I find out different I think I'm going with my theory that they are made from piglets. I'm sure that can't be right.

Mannheim Steamroller

This is my long overdue post on my review of the Mannheim Steamroller show I went to on December 2nd. It's not exactly fresh in my mind anymore but maybe that's a good thing and so only my most lasting impressions will come to mind as I write this. It was early December when we went which was a great thing because it was the first real thing to get me into the spirit for the Christmas season. I decided to go partly for that reason. My parents paid for my ticket as an early Christmas gift. The ticket was better than $60 after service charges and all that. That's more than that White Stripes ticket was that I passed on earlier this fall. I kind of regret that now though. Anyway the show was basically free so there was that reason to go too. At the time I wasn't real familiar with Mannheim Steamroller except I knew my mom had a few of the CDs that she plays around Christmas. I think I've always heard them not knowing what they were only to find out what I was listening to all along was Mannheim Steamroller. So it's mostly Christmas music that they do but there's no singing or anything like that. They sort of jazz up the Christmas classics in their own style and the singing just is not a part of the equation. Which is part of the reason I think that I like it. Ordinarily it's not the sort of thing I listen to but it was enjoyable nonetheless. So enough of my brief description of Mannheim Steamroller and onto my thoughts about the show itself...Chip Davis had just a few words of introduction and some fairly dry humor which thankfully was kept to a minimum through the show. The songs basically went from one to another without interruption except for one intermission. We sat some distance from the stage but high enough to see well enough. They had screens with different things on them to watch which kept things interesting from a visual sense for those of us with the more distant vantage points. The highlight for me was a song marked in the program as Faeries which was an interpretation of a portion of Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies from the Nutcracker. It definitely had more life than the standard version. It was by far the most rockin thing I heard the whole night. If I have one criticism it was the volume that they put on the recorder that some lady was playing during the latter part of the show. It was much too loud over and above the rest of the music and was rather irritating. Overall I didn't have great great expectations of the show but I'd say my expectation were exceeded. Given the chance I'd go to see Mannheim Steamroller again sometime.

As a side note just before I left for the show I visited the official Mannheim Steamroller website. It was very lame. There's a lot of room for improvement there. The photo gallery is filled with some spectacularly uninteresting items. On the other hand I know first hand how much work can go into putting together an attractive website, but still it's pretty terrible all things considered.

Scolopendra gigantea

I found this picture on Yahoo a couple of months ago. It went along with a story about a guy in London who found this bug in his house. He heard something rustling behind his television or something. Apparently it’s the biggest kind of centipede there is...at least I hope that’s as big as they get. I’m not sure where this guy in the picture fits in. I’m pretty sure he’s not the guy that found it or even if the one he’s got there is the one that guy in London found but this is the picture that went with the story. I hope we don’t have those around here. I don’t know that the climate in London is all that different from here so if they’re there why aren’t they here? I hope I never see one because that thing is huge. I’d probably try to capture it a container instead of trying to kill it outright. What if it was a momma centipede and it had a nest somewhere with eggs? They'd all hatch and I'd have a zillion of the friggin things crawling around my house. I just read up on it at wikipedia (Scolopendra gigantea) I guess I don’t need to worry about that thing around here. It says it lives in South America, Trinidad and Jamaica. Why this story was from London doesn’t make a lot of sense unless the bug was someone’s escaped pet or something.

When I was looking around on the web about it I found this website insectaculture.com. They have some radical pictures of beetles and a lot of other cool looking bugs. It doesn't say anywhere how big these bugs are unless you go to the page where you can buy some of them. Most of the beatles are in the 2-3 inch range but some of them are up to 5 inches long. I took these pictures from that website. You can buy one of these bad boys pictured below for $10 and to make it even simpler they're set up so you can use paypal to pay for it.

This new blog of mine

I decided to do this the same day as my Rat Patrol post in November. I don’t have any real idea yet how often I plan to post, but 3 weeks ago when I first set this up I figured I would have more posts than this by now. It's extremely unlikely that I will be breaking some incredible news to the world here. I have no expectation that anyone will even read this. I think of this so far as my own corner of the web to do whatever I want with and to say whatever I feel like saying even if it's directed toward no one in particular. I do find it interesting that my profile has been viewed 53 times so far especially since up until now all I’ve had was a simple post I put up just to see how this service worked.

To follow up on that post…

I’ve seen that huge inflated rat up a few more times. They don’t have it up every day but I’ve probably seen it about 3 or 4 times in the last week and a half. I think that Rat Patrol is actually a part of the union itself rather than a separate group. I think I saw something on the truck the rat sits on that says local 139. I think it was 139 but I couldn’t swear to it. I mostly look at the rat. I just think it’s real interesting. I probably should be watching the road. This particular strike has been going since sometime in August I think. I don’t remember exactly but it’s been a long time for sure. It’s at Halquist Stone and I think it has something to do with retirement benefits or something. I don’t know much about the situation at all but as a passive observer I’d say the strike hasn’t slowed the traffic of trucks going into and out of the quarry any. Save for the occasional appearance of the giant inflatable rat and the dozen or so daily picketers it looks like business as usual whenever I drive by.