Regular Life

Road, field, and sky through windshield at 4 p.m. CT Tuesday.
Note: That IS NOT a hillside back there behind the tree line.  That’s black sky.
(click any image to enlarge)

It didn’t seem to matter that the western hemisphere’s tallest cross sits just a few miles from here.

Frozen hell blew into town late Tuesday afternoon and quickly caught the area in its icy grip. Winds gusted to 50 mph and weather forecasters issued tornado watches. Between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m., the temperature dropped from 51 degrees to 28 degrees Fahrenheit. When a customer and I climbed into his truck to head back to another location, he whipped out a telescoping ice scraper that would have made Tim Allen proud. Against the wind, his truck never relaxed enough to settle into overdrive.

By 6:15, the mercury dipped to 18 while thunder clapped and sleet bounced off the truck. The wind still blew.

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You see that boy sleeping back there? I miss him right now because I’m traveling for work, and I miss his mother, my wonderful wife of more than 15 years. The dog has managed to grow on me a little, too.

Today should have been my 30th post in the Wordless Wednesday meme. For a couple of reasons, it isn’t.

The “official” Wordless Wednesday site now proudly boasts that it covers every day of the week. I was cool with the separate Tuesday and Wednesday editions, due to time zone differences, but this latest change dilutes the game too much for me. Not that anybody really cares, but I don’t fault those who still take part. In fact, there are a few whose blogs I might still visit.

In addition, I already spend enough time at the computer without clicking around to various WW sites. I don’t like to do things halfway, so I always made sure to sincerely consider and comment on each picture I viewed. I’m going to give my WW browsing time to people more valuable to me.

I might still post in the Wordless Wednesday category occasionally, but it will be for those who visit here regularly, not for a few extra hits per week from those hoping for the same.

Oh, and happy hump day. I hope if you’re with your family, you give out some big hugs and more than a smattering of kisses.

Unbelievable. I hate getting into the Mac vs. Windows debates, but I’m starting to understand why the Mac’s controlled hardware environment is attractive to an increasing number of people.

About two years ago, I wrote about my excitement at receiving great video editing software, Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0, for Christmas. Turned out, however, that the computer I had built just a year before was missing a CPU feature needed to run the software.

Solution? Upgrade the computer’s core components. Problem solved. Video editing ensued. And, surprisingly, nobody sued (although a few certainly were rude).

This year, with some Christmas money, I again upgraded my computer — to a dual-core CPU. That basically gave me two CPU’s instead of one. For good measure, I doubled my RAM from 1GB to 2GB. My video editing software is written to utilize multiple CPU’s. All this should have been a boon to the filmmaker in me, right?

Well, sure, except for one infuriating catch.

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What if someone you knew stacked huge hay bale walls and built a castle inside, unbeknownst to everyone but you? Would you tell? Would you use the word “unbeknownst” when telling about it?

How about this… could you keep it a secret for more than four years?

Well, unless Robert Fidler, 59, of England had absolutely no friends, or friends who never visited his home, somebody managed it. Now that the wall of bales is gone, authorities want to tear down Fidler’s castle.

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Thanks to all who answered my call for help on Thursday’s post. I think I came to some of the same conclusions in a comment or two that a few of you pointed out later, but no problem. It turns out that all the repetition moved me to action.

If you read yesterday’s post, can you guess from the pictured tools what I did?

(click any image to enlarge)

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I need help, and it required a visual aid. So, I decided to forgo a text post, skip the podcast, and go straight for the vlog.

Please click the “play” button. Give it a moment after doing so (in IE you might have to click it twice to get it started). Scrolling could mess it up, too, so simmer down with the scrolling.
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Click to see what’s going on here.

Update now that WW is over: The band is Jacob’s Trouble.  They performed at an outdoor Christian rock festival in Wilmore, Kentucky, established a year after Woodstock.  About 15 of us loaded up into a 13-passenger van and drove there from central Arkansas to join the 17,000-plus fans.  That was the kind of thing I did for big fun back in college in the early ’90’s.  My views have changed since then, but I still love a good road trip!

Please see other Wordless Wednesday participants at:
http://www.wordlesswednesday.com/

Is there a site you like to read, but it posts new material sporadically? Do you get tired of using bookmarks (Favorites), or (even worse) manually typing in a URL every time you want to check a site for new content? Would you like to keep up with comments on a blog post without having to go back to that post several times?

Then it’s time you said, “Yes,” to RSS. It’s the easiest way to keep track of the various news sites, blogs, online comics, or whatever you read (provided that those sites use RSS — which most do in some form or other). You are notified each time there’s a new post, and sometimes the entire post is delivered right to you.

This isn’t meant so much as a how-to as it is a why-not. That said, I’ll elaborate a little without getting too technical and then provide links at the bottom to help get you started.

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Click to enlarge.

I wish they would have had these pits when I was a kid. Just last weekend, when I finally got to see one, there was some lame rule about nobody older than 18 using the equipment. I stood there in my sock feet and sulked for about three seconds, then went about my assigned business of taking pictures with Shannon’s camera. I know she uses it when I’m not around, so what gives?

I first named this post “The Pit of The Square,” as a tribute to The Princess Bride’s Pit of Despair, but then realized these were cubes.

Note — The child in the picture is not Ben, but his friend N. Alas, Ben had to miss this birthday party due to illness. His grammy watched him for a while so we could represent our family.

And eat cake.

I have been fairly easy to entertain all my life.

These days, however, it isn’t so simple. Books still do a pretty good job of earning my thumbs-up, but movies aren’t faring as well. Television, while it has the potential to take the viewer far deeper than a movie can, isn’t doing as well as it should. Is this because quality has dropped, or just that I’m pickier than I used to be?

I’m sure there are plenty of reasons, but today I’m blaming it on age. As we get older, we’ve heard and seen more things, in real life and in fiction, that make it hard to find material that is both original and compelling.

Books do better because they allow so much more time to develop the characters rather than focusing so heavily on the plot. Even if we’ve seen the basic story before, the author has room to create characters that make us want to keep reading.

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