Trippin out

I've been so busy the last couple of weeks and it is no different today. plus I am ridiculous tired today. We switched to the new 5AM start time this week, and it just happens to be the same week that I need to do all of my vacation prep work. As such I've gotten maybe 5 hours of sleep each night this week, so I am pretty burned out.

All of that being said I've had a really good couple of weeks. The NBA playoffs are all over TV right now so I've gotten in ample basketball watching, and for the most part the playoffs are proceeding how I would like (so far). I managed to play a little flag football before the tornadic weather rolled through which is quasi exercise and lots of fun. The rest of the week was mostly about chilling, but it was all relaxing and enjoyable.

The real glory is hopefully coming this weekend when I plan to spend a week mostly drunk at Interfuse, this year will be TOTALLY different from last year. Although last year was a little cold the weather was mostly nice out, this year its basically rain 80% of the time we are going to be there, should be wet, sloppy and fun!

I'll toss up a big post interfuse post, Everyone have a great weekend.

Get down with the Sickness

I've been busy at work lately or not on the computer, so I haven't had a chance to blog in a little while, and this will have to be a short update as well.

I also haven't been able to throw up any updates from home because I got slam danced by a virus. Conflickr came through and wrecked some house on both of our home computers and I've spent most of my free time jacking around with that. Mike has also been most helpful in getting this resolved. The laptop is finally up and running again and I hope to get my home PC all shored up tonight so I can get back to dorfy mischief.

The rents came out on Wednesday which was grand fun until I attempted to copy a wedding DVD they needed duped. That is when I found out the laptop was infected and was merrily infecting my PC over the network. This obviously frustrated me and put me in a sour mood for the remainder of their trip out, hopefully they still had a good time. The Brady monster came out as well and had a good old time holding baby chicks. Although I can hardly say baby anymore, they are like 10yr olds or something already, they grow ridic fast.

The only other shenanigans I got up to this past week was to enjoy a fantastic (and possibly final) party at Angelumps. They hosted a BBQ out at their pad that around 10-12 of us attended. We ate yummy not good for us food, played football, drank drinks, yelled at fatties, fantasised about Ben Farmer, discussed breast men, and in all that excitement John somehow avoided a broken ankle! The reason it may be the last hurrah for their house is that they had a single mom and her three mistakes move in downstairs, blech! I think Der needs to plant asbestos everywhere and get them the heck on out of there. Their backyard is a great spring/summer time hangout spot for all of us in Lawrence, better then anyone else's pad for sure. Ohh wells, maybe if my parents actually get that lawn mower out to my house we can keep our yard in good enough condition to have it be usable for similar events; we shall see.

I apologize for the mostly boring post, not giving it much effort this morning. Off to do some work, BAI!

Dorfs Dorfs Dorfs Dorfs

<- Cute Dorfs!

Way more accuratly depicted Dorfs! - -->

OMG, get the shorties out of my brain! I seriously must have greatly underestimated my wife's tolerance level because she has been absolutely great to me the last few days. My brain has been completely devoured by Dwarf Fortress. It's all I want to do, and its basically all I've been doing. She has taken it all in stride and hasn't complained one bit. I've tried to watch a little TV with her and such, but really I'm wholly consumed by my next batch of migrants in my head. Although there may be some other factors in her above and beyond kindness which I will get into later.

Anyway, a little bit about Dwarf Fortress. Its an ASCII based game (we play a graphically enhanced 'mod' of the game that looks like the picture at the top right) that is part RPG, part Sim City and part the Sims. Its without a doubt the most complex and deep game I have ever played, bar none. I've played it for about a week and I've barely scratched the surface, and I've not mastered a single aspect of the game, besides the 'laugh your ass off' step.

Anyway, this addiction all began thanks to the most hilarious thing I've ever found on the interweb. Behold BOATMURDERED! (at this point I was going to post a link, but they are all blocked here at work, so look it up yourself ya lazy slabs!). Its a 'succession' game blog about the fortress of boatmurdered (the games randomly generated fortress name). Basically several people each ran the fort for one full game year, saved it, and passed it on to the next bloke. They took screen shots and wrote about their adventures at the helm. If you find that blog to be boring, stupid or uninteresting please unfriend me on facebook, disown me from your family and erase my phone number from your contact lists. John, Mike and myself being inspired by that brilliance decided to begin our own escapades in succession DF gaming. I took my turn at the helm a couple of nights ago . I then made about every mistake I could make, but ohh well! It was good fun all the same.

Despite the insane amount of DF being played there have been other happenings at my home stead. Late Monday night I awoke to a a grumbling coming from my basement. I stupidly decided to do some 'investigative reporting' only to find a MUMMY trapped in my basement. He'd got his foot caught in the muck hole/drainage pipe in the basement. I laughed at his misfortunes and that ended up being a mistake. He yelled 'CHHHUUUURRRZZZ' at me, which is apparently drunk mummy for 'curse' and then started talking about the '16 bringers of stink and noise, who would ensorcel my wife to do their bidding'. At this point I assumed this was all a dream and so I helped the Mummy unhook his foot and sent him on his way. He left grumbling something about heading over to watch scrambled porn with Carl.

The next morning the truth in his words became true at about 9Am...

BEHOLD THE FEARSOME BRINGER OF STINK AND NOISE!

Jessica immediately became mesmerized by their maddening peeps and terrifying 'clump tactics'. I remain ever vigilant against their evil ways, and am learning the cat up to be my Holy Champion against the darkness. Wish me luck, I'll need it!

In all seriousness I think my tolerance of said chickens and willingness to help has earned me some DF leeway from the wife. Even if that is not the reason why, I'm thankful to her all the same. I also endeared myself to her yesterday by helping my Dad till or whatever her garden. It was more work then I thought it would be, but it was a wonderful day, and it wasn't really that much work. Plus it was good as always to see David, I haven't seen them much lately. And he had a GREAT idea for the water problem in our front yard. Whenever we actually start on that project I'll unveil the details of his mad genius.

Other than that life has been pretty pedestrian. Went to a birthday bash for my Dad at my parents over the weekend and picked up some lumber from my other Dad. The lumber came from this terrifyingly huge play structure he had in the backyard. If I still have a picture of it on this computer I'll toss it onto the end of the post. Which reminds me I need volunteers to help me get this hilarious 'bouncy bridge' (to the right on the picture) from my Dad's. It seems as though it would be great fun when drunk. I plan to pick that up in the next week or two.

I'm also vaguely aware there was a championship game Monday night, but my hatred for UNC forced me to mostly ignore this happening. I hear tell that they trounced, may they all get herpes! Almost time for break here in work land, until next time...

The Play Structure

I almost forgot, when looking for pictures of Dwarf Fortress I came across this hilarious weather foretelling device!

Ante Up!

Is it just me or could his tie just as easily be a terrifying pink erect penis?

I wanted to make sure I hooked everyone/My Mum up with my birthday list requests. This list is being updated constantly and much of it is largely just a reminder to myself of things that I want 'someday'. I'm also not sure if I've yet made it so that it will tell the buyers but not myself that someone purchased something from the list; I'll jack with that when I have time.

STUFF, GIMME, I NEEDZ IT!

www.wishlist.com/808list

To any interested parties Jessica ended up having an 'emergency' root canal. It seemed to help her out immediately. Even after having surgery that day she was in high spirits that evening and in little to no pain. The downside of this is that although the root canal was completely covered by insurance her 'cap' is only going to be covered 50% leaving us on the hook for $400+ :( But Like I told Jys, I'd rather have the house taken from us then ignore health issues (not that this will cause us to lose the house, least I should hope not, haha).

My baby chicken Armageddon clock is sitting right around 1 week now, as my dread increases Jessica's joy increases at an equal or possibly even faster rate; it boggles the mind! Last night she was reading a pamphlet like printout about keeping baby chicks alive, you apparently have to feed them water at like 98 degree's or they get to cold and die. Effin pansies can't even drink some H2O without nearly dying; I give our cat pretty high odds of giving them all fear induced heart attacks.

I finally started learning to play DWARF FORTRESS! Its about the most complex 'homework' like game I've ever played, despite the difficulty I had the time of my life last night stumbling through its ASCII graphics. The best part might be the tutorial you read while trying to learn to play the game, Jessica probably thought I snuck some nitrous oxide. The reason I am learning to play it is because Mike, John and myself will be taking a fortress through 6 years of development. 2 years by each of us, started by Mikes 2 year reign as overlord. We will keep screenshots and a written diary of our exploits, hopefully it makes for an entertaining read. If we enjoy it enough we plan on doing further games. I'm retarded excited! (suck that disabled!)

We finally bought our Interfuse tickets yesterday; I stress 'finally' because apparently we had to buy them by the 6th, so hurray for getting them in time. I had the time of my life at this weekend of drunken debauchery last year, and I look forward to it like a child molester looks forward to a power outage in the mall. Mike w/ some amount of pathetic help from my own personage hopes to make some kind of fire cannon device in time for the event, but the time draws Nigh! (hmm that made me think of the Knights who say NII!)

As for actual life updates I spent a weekend doing very very little, and it was GREAT! The fact that KU lost was painful and sad; but its amazing what lowered expectations can do for you. If that had happened last year I'd still be on a suicide watch. But as it is I look back on that night with fond memories because I had a great time sitting next to John, Mike, Gary, and Dopple at Jefferson's soaking up the atmosphere (and the liquor). Ohh, and there were some ladies at the table as well apparently... The rest of the weekend involved a stupefying amount of movie watching... In closing are my remembered remembrances of movies watched.

Religulous - I truly enjoyed this movie, the coolest part I thought was when the parallels were drawn between the various religious fairy tales. AKA virgin Mary, Resurrection and other popular godly fairy tales.

King of Kong, a Fistful of quarters - Never in my life have I hated nerds so whole heartedly. You don't hate all of them, but the super nerds are such DOOOSH BOMBS! I completely recommend this documentary though.

Sicko - Never have I wanted to be a Canadian more then after watching this movie. Even more then when I knew there was an imagined prospect of having a Zamboni driving, drug dealing, topless neighbor. Plus OMG even the dirty french are superior to us in health care, damn it all! Give me socialized medicine for the love of health!

Twilight - I'm not sure what kind of enjoyment you are 'supposed' to get out of this movie, but I enjoyed it. I found it to be totally hilarious, the only way I can think of to describe the faces the vamps (mainly the lead) make in this movie is the following: Imagine you are coming to 'fruition', taking a crap and practicing being a stoic English guard - that roughly sums it up. The actual 'plot' seems semi interesting though, and I got alot of back story from the wife.

The Savages - Phillip Seymour Hoffman once again making an indie movie and knocking it out of the park. His co lead Laura Linney may have even out shined him. I'm not sure Jessica enjoyed the movie much, but I love it. It reminded me a small bit of Sideways in its pacing. It didn't bring the funny as HARD as Sideways does, but it did bring it in the same timely fashion as Sideways. I also recommend this, but only if you enjoy flat-indie-humor.

And in closing....

HAPPY APRIL JOHNS DAY! (BADUM CHING!)

Clipped wings, Triple dubs and Creamy faces! (oh my!)

Its been a long long while since I last threw up a post. The reason for this is two fold, the first is that I apparently manged to use up my 5 gig limit via an Edge connection, no clue how I managed that. Because of this I have no Internets at home right now. Secondly although I've had time to post at work, I've spent it doing 'research' meaning I've spent it reading about the Iphone and various MP3 devices.

I'll attempt to remember the last 3 or so weeks in chrono order, I know the first hunk of joy I experienced came in the form of Angela's Birfday Bash.

stupid side note. Even after updating my blog the only way I am able to move this around in the text is to actually edit the HTML, pretty durn stupid! also girl in middle is the Legendary Seedorficus Hauticus enacting her haut barrier, not even the tricky DJ 'doosh face' was able to crack the shield.

It was as fun as advertised. Although I've come to the conclusion that you can't eat anywhere on mass street for your birthday unless you're a big fan of horrendous service. I think we sat around waiting to pay for a full 45 minutes until someone saw fit to deliver a bill. Then it was another 15 minutes until someone felt like picking the bill back up. This led to us being an hour late to the Sauna, er I mean Karaoke room. Imagine all the comfort of a clown car, all the heat of the LWO and all the awkward of an enkai and you can picture this karaoke room. I think we were only there for an hour and split out. It should be noted that between the karaoke club and the 'bar' (put in quotes because Brothers is more of a dooshbag watering hole then a bar) Ang had a wardrobe change, it was classic Ang.

Anyway, the bar was a really fun time. Two stories in particular stand out in my memory. The first is the story behind that picture. More or less since I've known Ang she's fed us sweet nothings on the unbelievable force of beauty known as Kelly Seedorf. She has been described as having an advanced 'haut guy' barrier that re-diverts the likes of us to wing-women and beer-goggle-morning-mistakes. We were lead to believe her Chesticular pressence would have us JIMPing at first sight; this however was not the case. Kelly is certainly an attractive lass, but there are only a handful of women on the planet that could have lived up the legend. My second favorite happening was the owning via awkward of Mr. Popped collar. While Jones/MrDer/myself were dancing w/ Ang/(Traveling circus of hot chicks) some hilarious supreme doosh came grinding into the group. I figured the easiest and funniest away to send him on his merry was to return the grinding favor. His tiny D-bag brain was unable to cope with the situation and he fled as fast as he could, I chuckled for a great while afterwards.

A few scant weeks after the travesty of Ginovese (the restaurant on mass we attended for the Ang bashtacular) we finally found a restaurant that IS awesome for birfday parties! All hail Casa Agave! Casa Agave is a new mexican't restaurant that opened rather close to where I live, it has affordable meals and is most tasty (IMO). However its birthday wishes are what truly make it great. The ridiculous fun begins with 4 of our 10 member group ordering margarita's of ridiculous size. I believe they are called 'monsters'; they are 27 oz margarita's in a giant marg glass, very silly looking! Anyway we inform the waiter that its Mike's birthday and before long a grouping of probably 8 spanish/mexican men come forth to serenade Michael. And a waitress brings him out a GIANT fried ice cream platter, with TONS of whip cream. She then proceeds to stand around awkwardly for the duration of the singing. The singing to me sounded like a group of Mexicans singing an Italian love song in Spanish; but I'm told it was just some Spanish birthday wishes song. They then follow this up with an American happy birthday (with us singing along of course).

Then the reason for the waitress to be lingering is finally made clear when she begins to spoon feed Mike the fried ice cream. This led to a sneak attack that I never would have seen coming! On the fourth or so spooning of whip cream into his mouth she neatly, efficiently and purposefully whipped an entire spoon of whip cream all over his face. Photo ops, laughter at our table, laughter by random strangers, smiles, joy, cures for cancer. It was an excellent birthday meal to say the least.

In much sadder news, that same week Jessica suffered from a cruel attack of GINGIVITIS!

She is on some fun pain meds and antibiotics now, and it appears to be helping alot, but she is going to have a follow-up exam by a specialist this Wednesday. If you somehow still believe there is a god send her your prayers, otherwise just send her luck bolts! Ohh and she doesn't actually have GINGIVITIS! I just needed an excuse to put up a cartoon monster. Its some kind of broken tooth or something, I'll know more after Wednesday I hope.

Now back to joyous experiences! The unstopable force met the very movable, kickable and piss-on-you-when-your-down'able object this weekend when the Kansas Aldrich's tore apart the Dayton 'flyers' (hilarious name!). It was touch and go, especially in the first half, and I'm still terrified about us being a two man team. But if Aldrich plays like that we will crush everyone! Plus the competition on our way to the FF is less intimidating then I first thought it was. My bracket did take a kick in the junk that probably knocks me out of the tournament when Mizzou rode gutless tactics and referee computer assistance to the Sweet Sixteen. My poor Golden Eagles had their wings clipped prematurely. Makes me very sad, they are a very fun team to watch.

In non-event news we have a couple of new purchases living with us. The first of them are two new sofa pieces. We now have what looks like a very tall capital L in our living room (Jessica has photo's but she hasn't been blogging lately). I really love how we can buy these piece by piece (we have 5 pieces now). It lets us gather a nice couch a little bit at a time and allows us to change the design of it as we see fit. I think we will end up making it an additional piece thicker in the middle but otherwise it will be exactly the same. The other new addition is very dangerous new device. It gives off unhealthy levels of cool radiation. I've been playing extra sessions of D&D and Magic the Gathering in order to live in such close proximity to its hipness. Jessica is the first to get one, but I plan on getting one as well as soon as we can afford for me to do so.

Beware its brain altering cool!

Really the only other development in my life is an addition to my after-work work-out. I've always spent around 45min-60min doing a basic rotation weight regimen but as I've gotten plumper then I've ever wished to be I've decided to kick it up a notch and add in some yogging. currently I'm running about 3 miles in around 25 minutes (with a 5 minutes cool down). I've managed to force myself to do this everyday except when my Ipod dies prematurely, its just to hard to make myself run in silence for 30 minutes. That is much of the reason I am down with getting an Iphone so I have a new MP3 playing device.

Well this has already gotten way out of hand, so to my royal reader(s) I say adu!

Spring?!?

(I can only assume the reason I can't move these photo's anywhere is because my work users IE6 which is painful in ways you can only know if you are forced to websurf without tab browsing as well. Anyway these photo's will make more sense with further reading. The second picture is just me wondering why I have a beer in my hand.)

I don't want to jump to conclusions but is Spring actually on its way? Its supposed to be 80 degree's of bliss today! I've looked into Obama's weather plan for the rest of the week and it gets 'chilly' again after Saturday, but I think it still has highs in the 50s! Now if I can just get the rest of this Poison Ivy to bugger off I'll be ready for outside wonderment!

We have Ang's Birfday partay this Saturday, I'm looking forward to it! Not so much because its Ang's birfday but because we finally get uncorked on the elusive Seedorf! I plan on drinking whatever amount properly prepares me to embarrass everyone present except for myself as I long ago became immune to my own shenanigans. I'm really hoping my hair is long enough to 'top knot' or at least to 'multi knot.' That should make me 'pretty' enuf to sit in genovese, amirite?

Ok, enuf looking into the year 2000, might as well tell my 1-2 readers all of whom already know what I have been up to... what I have been up to (try making sense of that, I dare you!).

Last weekend Karma put the pimp hand down. I spent Saturday evening/night over at gary's kept-man(I use this term very loosely)-lodge at a haut-ub party. It was a ridiculous amount of fun, a whole lot was drank, pong was played, asses were pounded - but not in the same way as is custom in DJ/Hamids home, paddles were broken, tickles were dished out, and what can only be described as a violently/joyfully/erotic game of leg king of the hill was played. My punishment for this came two fold. The first of which involved a confusing trip into Walmart at 3:00 that morning. Why we 'had' to go shopping at that ungodly time with my legs barely listening to my slurred commands I'll never know. I'm pretty sure I spent 4 decades wandering its hallowed halls in search of Mush (polentia if you hate Amurika) only to come up empty handed and disheartened.

The second punishment came the morning after. At some unholy hour of the day like 9:30 Jessica starts frantically getting out of bed which awoke me from my slumber. When asked why she would be moving when not moving seemed to be where the smart money was she responded that she thought she heard a knock on the door. I mostly assumed this was either a case of her paranoid hearing of things or at most a postman that was drugged out and thought today was Monday. Turns out it was the people who wanted to take our beleaguered hot tub off our hands. Why they were out at this time of day with 4 inches of snow on the ground only Beelzebub himself could tell you, but there they were, waiting for us to arise. Thus did I face the cold, unfriendly morning with a pounding headache and zero motivation. After an hour or so they were gone with the haut-ub in tow, but I knew I had done wrong the night before to pay for a night of haut-ub bliss with a morning of haut-ub pain.

Other then that all I've been up to is minimal house work and attempting to update my Ipod, btw if anyone reading this knows anything about Ipods after I get this thing all updated is it fairly easy to transfer everything exactly as it is on this Ipod to a new model? I really hope so cause to say this thing is on its last legs would be giving false hope to paraplegics. But its given me a reason to listen through various albums I had not yet listened to, dig through Mikes neverending supply of terrible music for that which I want to keep and remind me of what music I need to download at a whopping 3k/sec or whatever trash rate I get. I really really really want to hook an antenna up to our internet so that its not so terrible, it fairly regularly picks up the 3G signal now, but it picks it up so weakly I try to make it switch back to edge as edge is actually faster at its far superior signal strength. Currently our money is being siphoned by my boy blue, our couch. We bought the most expensive of all the parts to it a week ago, but it won't arrive for another couple of weeks. Then we only have 3 more pieces to buy (I think) and they are all the 'cheapish' parts. But each still comes in at around $150+ after shipping.

I've finally gotten myself back in the swing of things as far as going to the gym. Its not that I've been a whole lot the last couple weeks, but the times I have gone I've actually enjoyed it again. I have no idea what changed, maybe its just spring time. I don't want to figure it out either way, I'm just happy that its fun to do again. I'm hoping the weather clears up enough in the next couple o weeks that myself and the band of merry men can once again play a rousing game of broken ankles that some people call football once a week. I'm in desperate need of some excuse such as that to start getting in shape, so that on the weekends and a night or two of tennis during the week should go a long way towards making me less of an American.

And just so everyone knows, I still believe the Dream of Tyler Thigpin, but apparently the Chiefs don't...

Trudge through the Sludge

First of all, I haven't forgotten all about my blogginz, I was just knocked into a state of depression over the cold war I continue to wage with the Internet overlords. I believe we are closer now then we ever have been to having a reliable, quick(relatively speaking) internet connection. But so far its not even a moral victory. Whenever we manage to climb back out of poverty status we'll buy ourselves an antenna to boost our reception and if that fails a booster to boost the reception. And if that fails we'll get a fuzz booster, boost fuzz to fuzz up the boost (sweet, sweet Big Hit). But until then its TV for outside information and 'every once in a while' internet.

Since so much time has gone by I don't see the point in rehashing everything. My professional life is only made to look good by the mind numbing self loathing atrocity of my personal life. I go on vacation this week, hopefully that goes well. Hope everyone has a great weekend and takes adv of that 60 degree Saturday. And Go Cards! I don't really care who wins the superbowl, but I would like the cards to take it home. I'll be watching it in Durango, BYE!