A little old, but still funny

Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974

There are many hilarious things there.

Bday and stuff

It was my birthday a few days ago. Or maybe yesterday. My folks were out. My dad and I went to a coin store down south, and we found a few cool pieces and haggled for them. They include a Dupondius of Trajan with a really excellent portrait - it's really clean, and nicely centered. We also got a nice big Galerius follis. Galerius is one of the less popular guys in the tetrarchy. And a few other smaller odds and ends. I had gone looking for a Nero or an Augustus. But there were none. So we went back to the house, but dropped by the local coin store on the way. They had a nice Nero Semis with a great portrait and a Helena AE 3 that we wound up haggling for and buying.

I also got a new set of strings for the Lehua. I got a bone saddle for it a few days ago. I put the strings on it and sanded down the new saddle today and fitted it It is a lot louder now, and has picked up a lot of tone. Whoo.

ramblings

I took off a few days of work last week and am off all this week since my folks were out. My mom is out here now, she's been here for a few days, and my dad will be out tomorrow. Once my dad is out we are going to go out an look for ancient coins for my birthday. Hopefully we will find something cool - if I am lucky I might find a Julius Caesar or Augustus for a reasonable price, that or a cool Greek coin. My mom gave me a few Constantine coins she found at an antique store. The one is pretty cool since it has a cool reverse with VOT XX in a wreath with a legend around it. Not a common reverse.

I sent in an resumé for a job working for the Order management people. They want a PHP/Perl/MySQL person to maintain their current stuff and work on reporting tools. I have spent a lot of time with that type of stuff. I expect that I have no chance since other applicants will be more qualified, but I figured I had to try.

I have been working on the verdant fish paradise that is my aquarium lately. It has filled out really nicely, but since it is so well filled out I never get to buy any new plants. The current plants are happily bubbling up oxygen, so things are good. I want to get a few new cryptocorynes at some point, since they are easy to sneak into shaded spots under the mega-growth above. The fish are all doing well, as are the shrimp.

On Fri. Sophia went to a friend's birthday party at a bowling alley. I hadn't been in a bowling alley in many many years. They still seem the same, like they are all frozen in time. Sophie bowled, but they didn't have an open slot for Max, so he and I went checking out the pet stores in the area. I like going into pet stores. We went to Herpeton, and beheld the glory of huge snakes, and iguanas, and many other various lizards. They were very cool. They had a brilliant aquarium set up with about a half foot of soil, a waterfall, and nice plants. There were mosses, ferns, and various exotics. There was a snake in there and a few other critters. Then we went to another exotic pet place. They have some great turtles, and snakes. They also had Sugar Gliders. Max now wants a Sugar Glider. I have to admit they seem really cool, though they are kind of expensive. I am worried that if we got one Cowboy might try to eat it.

I saw Pops last Wed. again. We worked at a few songs - mostly 'Brother Can You Spare a Dime,' and 'Egyptian Ella.' On my own I have been working on "Makin' Whoopee," (awful name, but great melody) "All Of Me," "Rubber Ducky," and "As Time Goes By." The first and last in the list are chord solo type things - more complex, but they sound cool. I am still working on my tremolo, it is hard to get it just right, but I keep practicing.

I still have a kidney stone, but I think I will be seeing a urologist before too long. Hopefully.

Why did the chicken cross the playground?

To get to the other slide.

Why do chicken coops have two doors?

Because if they had four doors, they'd be chicken sedans.

Not a great last few days

I have had the last few days off work. I still wound up checking work email and responding to stuff. But not as much as I would have otherwise. I have another kidney stone. Ryan was in an accident and crashed his car into a tree. Luckily he is fine, but the car is probably totalled. I wanted to get a picture of it in the ditch smashed into the tree with the rear wheels in the air, but I didn't bring a camera. It is a good idea to bring cameras to accident sites, since you can record skidmarks and other evidence. And take pics of crashed cars.

I have been spending a lot of time with Cowboy, who has been especially flatulent lately. Ugh.

Stop Motion Movies

This weekend we spent some time messing with iStopMotion, which is an excellent stop motion animation tool. We have an iBot so we cooked up a few movies. The kids had ideas for movies. I was animator and cameraman, they directed and created the screenplays:

Max: Jar Jar Dies
Sophia: Knightfall

Once we did those, Haley and I tried out a few things to get a more technical feel for how to do stuff:

Drawing Movie
Bean Movie

I want to borrow an iSight since they have a nicer picture quality than the iBot.

How do you kill a circus?

Go straight for the juggler.

Why did the one handed man cross the road?

To get to the second hand shop.

What do you call a fish with no eye?

Fsh.

What's large grey and doesn't matter?

An irrelephant.

Alas, I'm becoming that guy I never wanted to be.

A while back I had a kidney stone. The worst part about it, besides the sheer agony part, was that I had to get a blood test. The blood test said that my triglycerides were extremely high. So was my bad cholesterol. Apparently, my triglycerides were so high that the measure of good cholesterol could not be accurately measured. Thus, I am now wretched.

When I was younger I had friends that were obsessed with the various kinds of fat content in food. We would go out to eat and they would talk about LDLs and HDLs and about eggbeaters and various kinds of fatty acids found in this food or that. They couldn't eat without going through a ponderous fat-calculus. Then they would eat some awful desiccated flavorless muffin thing that looked horrible, and would cringe when I would put some butter on something. I pitied them.

Now, here I am, forced to think about how to lower my triglycerides, and how to increase my good cholesterol and lower the bad cholesterol. I go to restaurants, and consider which foods are the most 'heart smart.' I'm thinking about buying flax seed oil. I cringe when I think about putting butter on stuff. I'm becoming that guy.

Sigh.

Lehualicious

I had to create a LiveJournal account so that I could mock Adam Yoshida in a non-anonymous manner, so I figured I may as well start a blog. Once again a few years late onto the bandwagon... I remember refusing to get an email address back in '95. Sigh.

Of note, I picked up a Lehua Concert Uke for cheap. It is one of the older Mahogany Mexican-made ones. It looks like this:



I actually like the styling on the old ones more than the current models, since I am not into the rope binding, or fancy rosettes. I like things a bit more simple and elegant. This Uke has great action, good intonation, and a nice tone.

I have been playin Charlie Christian inspired bop solos on it. Not what it is intended for, but it actually plays really well. It really makes a great rhythm chunkin' little Uke. I have been compin' away at various swing numbers. Perhaps one day I will be the Freddie Green of the Ukulele. Or maybe not, but you gotta have a dream.