Rich man, Poor man, Beggar man, Fireman?!?

I guess some of the other tenants got as frustrated with management as I am and decided to burn the joint down. They brought out the big fire truck to deal with this one.

While I was down in the parking lot reliving the dorm days (how many firemen does it take to shut off an alarm?) I decided two things. One, I need to bring back my climbing rope so I can escape out my window if I need to, and two I need to hurry up with my plan to put all of my digital pictures on DVD’s and in my brothers fire safe. That way if both of our houses burn down mine pictures will be safe in his safe.

The Chief Chef

Well right before I left my brother decided to put on airs and start baking. He made some wonderful treats, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The blueberry one required a “Spring Form Pan”. To me this is the height of cooking technology, just listen to the name “Spring Form” I am sure it has some space age alloys, high carbon teflon, or advanced electronics.

California

Ahhh summer in California, it doesn’t get much better then this. Backpacking on the coast, trips to the beach, the San Diego Zoo, the best fresh produce in the world, and more weddings then you can shake a stick at. Spend some time here and you understand all the songs about Californ-eye-aa.

The Turtle Moves

This morning I got up late and decided it was a good time to organize my music on iTunes. While I was going though it I found a bunch of sermons from the Walla Walla College Church. It is Sabbath so I thought it would be nice to listen to one. I started one, but the quality was kind of low so I clicked on another one at random. The sermon started off with Karl Haffner mentioning Jay and Tiffany Melashenko (who I am good friends with). This perked my interest so I continued to listen to it. The sermon was about adversity, and how with God we can survive anything, including the loss of a loved one. It couldn’t have been more perfectly targeted at me if he had tried.

The College Church has a podcast of all of their sermons. I had downloaded this months ago, and periodically my computer would connect to the internet and download all the latest sermons. I did not even know that I had them.

If you knew Nick please download it here and listen to it, it is an encouraging message. God works in amazing ways.

Riding a Motorcycle Prevents Alzheimers

My father was killed by a drunk driver on the way home from work. Don’t Drink and Drive.

I scanned in 83 pictures of my dad, from all time periods of his life, for the funeral service. I also got four short video clips. If anyone wants a copy of these pictures and videos e-mail me. I can either send you a CD in the mail or post a torrent of the files. If you don’t know what a torrent is send me your address and I will mail you a CD.

42, That’s Not So Bad For a Pointy Eared Elf Prince

I have been on a Lord of the Rings kick lately and have been watching all of the appendices about the making of the movies, and the movies. This is a very time consuming kick as each of the three movies has between five and six hours of extra footage. This in addition to the three to four hour movie and you have close to 30 hours to watch.

Anyway all of their talk about designing and creating in the appendices started to get to me so off the the art store I went.

This is my first addition to my sketch book, there was one other trial before this on scratch paper but it looked a little bit scary. Hopefully I will improve and I am going to try and post anything decent I do under the Artwork link.

O Tannenbaum

Well I decided I needed a study break from my 12 hour study-o-rama. Actually it has been riddled with breaks, but one more can’t hurt…

I am lamenting the transformation of my beautiful christmas tree (see “Yuletide” for picture) into a Charlie Brown christmas tree.

Do you see the similarities? Ya me too, oh well I will be going home in two days and then I will have a real, and not dead, tree.

Let It Snow!

It has been cold here in Detroit, but at least it has been cold and snowing. It makes it much easier to get into the Christmas spirit when there is snow on the ground. I find this a little ironic because I can’t remember spending a Christmas anywhere snowy but it is still true. I took some pictures of some snowflakes that were on my car window in the morning, they came out pretty good so I decided to post them. I have always wanted to look at snow flakes up close and so I was pretty excited when these came out. I hope everyone is as excited as I am about Christmas (I get to go home!). Have a happy holiday!

Supersize Wal-Mart

I recently watched Supersize Me, which I thought was excellent and highly recommend to anyone, and found out the exciting fact that I now live in the fattest city in the fattest country in the world!! Isn’t that exciting, Detroit is the fattest city in the United States. In the movie he is blaming fast food for the obesity in America. You hear this a lot, and I think that it is true, but it might not be the whole story.

I was reading an article and I found this quote which shocked me. “the [grocery] industry continues to face tough price competition from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research), the largest U.S. seller of food.” Have you seen the food that they sell at Wal-Mart?!?! I don’t think there is a single healthy thing in that store! They have boxed “food” like mac-n-cheese, soda, chips, cheap nasty bread, and ice cream. Now I understand that the Super Wal-Marts have a wider variety like regular grocery stores, but how many Super Wal-Marts are there? They can’t make up the majority of the food sales.

Maybe someone should eat nothing but food from their local Wal-Mart for a month and see what happens. What is happening to society, are people really that busy that they can’t even cook a decent meal, or just hopelessly lazy? If they they are that busy doing what? Working two jobs to pay the brand new SUV and the gas to go with it? American consumerism really makes me ill; and not to be outdone the rest of the world is following suit.

Yuletide

With Thanksgiving safely behind us all of the stores have swung into the Christmas Spirit (trying to pawn cheap trinkets that no one wants). Not to be left out I decided to fulfill my role as an American and do a little consuming by buying a bunch of stuff I don’t need. In this case I spent my money on plant paraphernalia, and a tiny Christmas tree complete with decorations. And thanks to a good friend I even have a present to set under/beside it. It is feeling very Christmasy here. As you check the temperature over to the left, yes it is that cold, and windy to boot.