Author: Gene

So here’s the deal. Including this post the blog is 248 pages long (size 12 font) and contains 72,890 words. I like numbers so I thought I’d share. Cool huh?

I was woken by Pat and his sister offering me a doughnut and telling me to get in the car. So I did. We went boating. Last trip of the year since Adam’s taking off for college. Steve, Hannah, Pat, Joseph, Alex, Adam, and I were the gang. Hannah got up on the knee board. Joseph slalomed on a regular ski. :p I made it outside the wake on the slalom but not back in. 🙂 Pat tried to jump the wake on a knee board but never made it. I think Hannah might have some pictures of those crashes, but they aren’t available to me atm.

After that I went to Steve’s w/ Aaron and Donny and Pat and we watched Sin City and ate some of Steve’s food. For those of you concerned (Maki) I did not buy Sin City. A friend of a friend of a fried bought it. Sweet movie. Seen it 3.5 times now. Wish some added scenes were present, but I suppose I’ll see them eventually.

After Steve kicked us out Pat took me to his abode where we played WoW until now. Gained a level. Fun stuff. It’s been a long time. Yeah, so that’s what I’ve been up to. Now I think I should probably sleep. Kait’s been posting like 3 times as much as me… can’t let her win. ;P

just bare with me here. The first picture will give some context. This is a Linfield folder provided when you visit and such. The next picture is it side ways. The 3rd picture a close up of the top right corner of the 2nd picture or the bottom right corner of the 1st picture turned ninety degrees counter clockwise depending. Anyway, I see an image in the clouds, I actually can see 2 now cause my mom saw another. So if you guys would be so kind as to look and see if you can see what I can see, and comment and say what you’ll see, tomorrow or so I’ll say what I see and try and help you see it. I was going to highlight stuff but apparently I don’t have paint. 😛

Lulu.com – Self Publishing – Free

This is cool. Authors get like 80% of the revenue instead of 10% like they get from publishers. It’s small now, but I hope it gets big. That would make getting good books cheaper and easier imho. Plus all us bloggers could make books :).

Ok, I’m posting. I’m back from Ashland and the Oregon Shakespeare festival and I’m all cultured and such, supposedly. I saw 6 plays I think, but I dun remember all of them. yeah. I know I saw Richard III… that was the first one. It was fine. I also saw the something something of Faustus. German guy sells his soul to the devil. Mesotophales is a cool name. That play was fine too… nothing all that special. Hmm… saw another Shakespeare one but the name eludes me. The one w/ the 4 guys who swear to not talk to women for 3 years and then the next day all fall in love. This one was a comedy and so I’d rate it higher than the previous too. Pretty good. Other plays, oh yeah, one called Gibraltar. I dunno what this thing was. Basically I think it was crap. It was modern, following Shakespeare it seemed all the more crude as it stumbled through trying to explain something. I hope it was trying to explain something. I didn’t get it one way or the other. There was a lot of sex and cheating. I think the message was don’t cheat. Anyway, apparently I’ll spend the most time on the play I liked least. Another modernish play was something Millionares. It was about a Italian family during WWI that made a ton of money on the black market. It was pretty ok I guess. Some funny parts. No cool Shakespeare talk though. Oh, and 12th night. I’ve seen it before, it was ok. Romance = bad, comedy = good.

That’s the plays. Other than plays on the trip I read a book of short stories in the Ender universe called Meetings, and Angels and Demons which I’m sure everyone has read. 😛 I dunno if I like reading a book everyone’s read. Was kinda weird. I also got close to finishing the Da Vinci Code, but didn’t. I’ll do that sometime I suppose. I think the Da Vinci Code and Angles and Demons are ok books, nothing special though. Pretty fast reads I’ll grant, but I dun think I will recommend them to people necessarily. I still like Ender’s Game and Otherland way better.

I also ate a lot of good food. Bento is awesome, they should put one everywhere, but apparently they don’t. Also on the way out we stopped at the Wolf Creek Inn (used to be Wolf Creek Tavern) and it had some excellent food. $7 for a huge plate of food, and it looked like half the menu would have be good in my opinion, and I’m kinda picky sometimes. Yeah, go there if you happen to drive past it. 😛

Ok, in news not related to my vacation at all, I found out that the insurance industry is the 3rd largest nation in the world if you go by gross product. $3.2 trillion. Neato huh?

Also, I was featured on the 5 Questions podcast again. I dunno why. My voice isn’t cracking this time but I’m a mumbling dolt w/ a bad microphone. Oh well.

In blog related news, we had a large influx of spam. Thankfully we’ve also had a large influx in legitimate comments, so at least there are interesting things to read when I go in to delete the spam. 😛

I’m taking suggestions for TV shows to try to get a hold of to see. I only have a little bit of time w/ access to fast internet, so I need to fill up my 60 gigs of space if possible. 🙂

Also, the title is a joke. None of this post actually had anything to do with Matt’s skull. There’s no symbolism or hidden meanings.

I’m currently in some hotel in some town about 3 hours north of Ashland. It has internet and mom and dad are still eating breakfast so I thought I’d do a quick little update.

I finished reading Meetings about the time we got to Portland. Meetings is book containing 5 short stories set in the Ender universe, one being the original short story that started it all. I’d never read it before, but I think it’s pretty amazing that it evovled into what it did. The short story wasn’t anything special. 😛 Maybe I’m just spoiled.

We ate at Novak’s. 8 will be jealous. I’ll try to explain a little.

Pat showed up and convinced me to drop everything (not much) and go boating. I did, and we didn’t get back until around 11. We were done at like 9, but these people kinda broke their boat next to us and so we stayed around and fixed it for them. Actually, we just helped them get it back into the water, Adam’s dad showed up and actually fixed it. He’s an electrical engineer, so that helps. My job was mostly to entertain their kids, cause they thought I was hilarious.

Boating was fun. All 3 of us can do the one ski skiing pretty well now. It’s cool. We found a really smooth patch at the start of the day, and had some primo knee boarding as well. So good day.

When we got back Aaron and Cain (haven’t seen him in a couple years) were at Pat’s watching Team America. We did a taco bell run and chilled and now I’m going to sleep. Go here and explore this band… good stuff. Hmm… I just looked, they say they hav e a DVD coming out directed by McG… that you McG?

Tomorrow we (the family) are going to Ashland for to watch some plays. So I’ll be pretty unconnected until Sunday, although I might be able to find a hotspot somewhere to make a post or something. No promises though.

Raisin Bran, although tasty and nutritious, in it’s current incarnation has a glaring flaw in my opinion. On the box it professes to have “juicy” Sunmaid raisins in it. By definition a raisin should not be juicy because a raisin is a dried fruit and water is a key ingredient in juice. This is false advertising of the stupid variety. Just thought everyone should know.

I’ve not updated over the past few days because I’ve been working and then tired and/or sleeping. I’ve been running the grain elevator w/ my dad at the farm. It’s a typical 9 – 5 job in that you only actually work a total of about 1 hour. It’s different in that it really goes from 7:30 – 6 and you have to sit in the sun where it’s 100+ degrees and the flies bite you. Stupid flies are invincible and they know it. There was some other wildlife observed though. My job was to direct the dumping of the wheat so that it went into the pit, and then push the buttons so it would get put in the bin that store it. The only reason I was really needed is that I’m relatively immune to the vast quantities of dust that are blown into ones face during the job. I finished the last two Ender’s Shadow series books, so all was swell. (The books are good, but he left like 50 books open for writing, which kinda makes me antsy)

The only activity that I’ve participated in besides the work described above and sleep was going to a BBQ my friend Steve did. That event involved me eating a sausage and making a few witty and snide comments before falling asleep on their couch while they played poker. I had no money.

I’m going out to eat tonight with my family. The occasion is that we have coupons and they’re going to expire. Mom’s been using expired ones for about a week now with great success though, so I don’t know what the deal is.

(Hmm… those pictures are kinda small. You can see better if you click on them.)

Moodgrapher: The World according to LiveJournal

Gah! I can’t stop.

BBC NEWS | Health | Masturbation ‘cuts cancer risk’: “And they say sexual intercourse may not have the same protective effect because of the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted infection, which could increase men’s cancer risk.”

I haven’t really researched this study or anything. Found on www.digg.com again. That’s what is under “this site” in previous post. I’m going to stop posting, I swear.