Information overload (get ready)

I didn't realize it had been so long since my last post. So here's a super fast recap of what's been going on since:

1. Grimm and I went back to the park. We went much further in this time and it was a lot tougher. Fun but exhausting.

2. Went to the book sale and picked up a paperback copy of White Fang and a hardback of Martin Eden (both by Jack London), a hardback of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and coffe table book about Volkswagen Beetles, a giant pop-up encyclopedia of dinosaurs, as well as a couple of books for Ricci. Grand total: $5. That's right, five smackaroos. That's why I went ahead and got the paperback of White Fang. I'll read it now for a buck and if I really want a hard copy later I'll find one. Afterwords we went by Halfprice because Ricci wanted a copy of Madeline hardback that I had seen the day before. It was a reprint though so she didn't want to spend five bucks on it. However I picked up a copy of Call it Courage for a quarter. No joke with tax and all I only spent 27 cents. Awesome.

3. Ricci's great-grandfather Pappo passed on weekend before last. The funeral was last Monday and then we went back this past Saturday to his farm with a bunch of the family to clean up and take things to remember him and his wife Nanny by. I never met Nanny because she died 12 or so years ago, long before I had any relation to the Barnes, Lowaks or Fenners. It's really cool to go through all of their stuff (in a totally respectful way). I picked up a couple of pins for my collection and some glasses from the old Pearl brewery. It was good to see the family laughing and joking about the things they remembered about that house or about Nanny and Pappo.

4. Ricci and I (mostly Ricci) spent last Tuesday decorating one of the guest bedrooms. She painted the walls green and we hung up a bunch of my old posters. I tend to hang out in there because it's mostly my old stuff as opposed to the frilly stuff in our bedroom. If we stay here for med school we're going to get a big desk and that will be my office/study room. That's why Ricci wanted to make it look nice, so I could enjoy being in there for hours on end when I study. Part of the decorating process included buying a shadow box for all of my pins and buttons. So now I can actually display them all. There's still some room for more but I'll probably have to buy another box in a couple years.

5. Zach and Brandon came in last Thursday so we could all go watch Rifftrax Live: Plan 9 from Outer Space. From the same guys that did Mystery Science Theater 3000 comes a new movie-riffing show. However this one skips all the in-between stuff and goes right to poking fun at movies. Rifftrax.com offers downloadable audio of people making fun of movies. Then you provide the movie and play them at the same time on your computer or with a dvd player and iPod. This way they don't have to deal with royalties, etc. and can riff a movie as soon as it's released. For this event, however they were doing a live riffing of Plan 9 from Outer Space in Nashville, Tennessee. That was broadcast live to hundreds of theaters across the country. So the three of us went to go see it here, and had a blast. Zach also had a bootleg copy of Transformers 2 (though I don't support bootlegging or piracy). I watched and was dissappointed. I might go into that in another post, but it's too long for this one.

6. This week I got in my first issue of Wired magazine, my Cabella's fall 2009 catalog, and picked up a hardback copy of The Boxcar Children for a buck. I also finished Island Boy and I think I'm going to start Call it Courage next. IB was good. Not as good as I remember CiC being but I'm more partial to survival stories so I have nothing against Island Boy. It's a good read, though definitely aimed at a younger audience. It does a great job of telling the story while giving a view of life in ancient Hawaii.

I'm trying to finish all of my one-player games for the wii by Christmas so I can sell them back. I have Zelda:Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy. Both are enjoyable but Mario definitely moves faster and is less confusing/tedious, though the camera angles and controls for Galaxy often make me nauseous. I don't do backwards and upside down very well.

I found my leatherman. Very exciting/humbling. It was right where it was supposed to be. Somehow I thought I had lost it for several months... :|

Lastly, this morning when I got up to run with Grimm at 6, I found a swarm of ants on the counter attacking some rice krispie treats. awesome.

Sorry that was the update equivalent of a wildebeest stampede. ( In the gorge! Simba's down there!)

Josh out.

Books!

If you've been keeping up you know that Ricci and I will be working on making bookshelves soon. We have books laying all over the house, which is only bad because I have a hard time finding the book I'm looking for. You'll notice I added a section on the side for books I'm reading, will read, and don't own but am looking for. I have an old (really old) Weekly Reader hardcover version of Island Boy that sits out on our living room table because Ricci thinks it has a cool little illustration on it. I've started reading it again because I remember really enjoying it when I was younger.

I've thought about buying the Barnes and Nobles Classics reprints of White Fang, Call of the Wild, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but I'd like to find old hardcover versions that I can display like Island Boy. Hopefully this saturday I might find some of those at the Hendricks' book sale. If not I'll start looking at HalfPrice and Amazon.

I think Grimm and I might go back to Brother's park again because we had a blast and he was so exhausted that he slept through the whole night even though we moved his crate out of our room. Here's hoping!

Betrayal

WHAT?! Ricci and I got the original Star Wars movies on dvd from some friends as our wedding present. We were pumped. And I'm still grateful don't get me wrong. But we just watched Return of the Jedi and it had all the extra garbage George Lucas decided to slap in (rather un-seamlessly I might add) in 97. Like the nasty singing dancing alien thing in Jabba's palace. And replacing the sarlac with Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. And the scene with the fireworks on all the planets when the Empire falls apart. I saw these with my family in theaters as a fourth grader when they were rereleased as "Special Editions" in 1997 so I had adjusted to their unnecessary stupidity. I didn't like them but I didn't let it ruin the movie for me. Unbeknownst to me however was that after making episodes 1, 2 and 3 Lucas re-added things to the originals, I can only assume to try to make the horrible gap between the trilogies less ragged and ugly.

Things like when it shows a particular planet during the fireworks scene, we hear a familiar (aka loathed, detested, hated with the fire of a thousand suns because he is the worst character in the entire series) yell, "Wesa Free!". Okay... I thought maybe I'd never noticed that because I saw it before Phantom Menace. It was plausible that since PM came out only a few years later they were already well into making it and wanted to give a little tease. I could have believed that. Until the worst betrayal of all. Worse than Lando giving Han over to Vader. Worse than Sal helping to set up Michael Corleone's assassination. In the final scene where Luke smiles to the ghosts of Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobi, his father appears but as Anakin Skywalker and not Darth Vader. It is a nice moment where we see what Anakin could have been if he had chosen the path of good. But that wasn't good enough for Lucas, no. He replaced Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christianson. That cardboard hack of an actor from episodes two and three! WHAT?! Why?!

Thanks Georgy! Seeing as you didn't screw it up enough when you made 1, 2 and 3 so that I have to show my children these movies in the order they were made in so that when Vader says "I am your father!" they don't go "Yes...and...? Didn't we already know that?" But now when I show them 4,5 and 6 at the end they will go "Who's that long haired sissy dude next to Obi Wan dad?"

What next? Are you gonna tell me Mr. Rogers was a drug dealer? I'm more upset about this than the fact that the moon landing may have been faked.


Sigh....tear.....deep breath......okay....I think I'll be alright......

Moving on...To quell some of my earlier anxiousness to get out into the unknown, I took Grimm to Brother's Park and we followed the creek bed through the woods. I packed a pop tart, two water bottles, binoculars, a camera and my knife into my backpack and we headed out. I tried to use a cloth belt (army belt/d-ring belt/whatever you call it) to strap my knife sheath to my thigh but it kept sliding down so I put it on my actual belt. We saw a rabbit and a squirrel and it was a lot of fun. We may go back this weekend. I'll let you know.

Wanted: wilderness or frontier

I started rereading Wild at Heart by John Eldridge. And I'm itching to go camping even worse now. Seriously any place you guys know of to go camping let me know. Even if it's somewhere close. I've been looking at knives, tents, boots, everything because I haven't had the chance to really get away in so long. I've got really bad cabin fever right now. Yesterday I was cleaning up the branches on the trees in our backyard and then decided to climb the other one. Sure I knocked a couple of dead branches down but I really just wanted to test that tree out. Guys you know what I'm talking about. I want to get out and do some exploring!

Two posts in one day. Aren't you lucky!

"A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing, for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this." Deuteronomy 22:5

Finally! Biblical proof that it is not okay for guys to wear girl-pants! This is not pointed at anyone in particular, so don't get all huffy if you wear girl pants. But seriously. Ew.

Now I read the verses around this one because I didn't want anyone to say "yeah but you totally took that out of context". We've seen that done countless times. Especially living in Aggieland with the shirt that says "I will cut off the horns of the wicked (Psalm 75:10)". Because the second half of that verse says "but the horns of the righteous shall be lifted up." I'm not dogging people who wear that shirt, I just don't want people to seriously think that God prefers Texas A&M over that school in Austin. If He did wouldn't we have won a few more football games? ;)

I guess my point is that there's not really a way to take this verse out of context. Check it out for yourself. That's what we're supposed to do. But God's laying out simple rules and instructions for the Isrealites. If you see your neighbors oxen wandering around, don't be a jerk. Get it back to him. If that's too far away hold onto it until he comes for it. Don't cross dress cause I think it's gross. Don't put a donkey and an oxen together to plow your field. They are not bff and will probably just screw up your crop rows.

That's a paraphrase, but close enough.

In conclusion:

Yes....



No...









Any questions?

Bookshelves

Last night I was trying to find a particular book and I couldn't. I looked on the very small bookshelf we have. I looked through the books stacked on the shelf in the closet in the guest bedrooms. I looked in the closet in our bedroom. I looked through the stacks of books on the floor of both guest bedrooms and on the guest bed. Still never found it. But I did get desperately frustrated that we have no proper place for our books. So I'm going to Lowe's and HomeDepot today to price up wood and build us one, since pre-made shelves are really expensive or really crummily built. Is that a word? Crummily.... It is now.

I thought about floating shelves but I'd rather not screw stuff into the wall if I can help it. If anybody has good ideas or links for DIY shelving let me know.

Apology

Okay on further looking into "Emails from Crazy People", the website I talked about in the last post, I realized that it is not held to the same "G-rated" standard as most of the cheezburger network. So yeah... sorry about that. I'm not sure I can really recommend that anymore.


In other news I just found out that I sort of know a comic book artist. I mean we've met a couple of times and I know his kids pretty well. Aaaaanyway, his name is Darrin Stephens he works with Jorge Vega to create Kaeru Boy, a comic book about an unlikely hero. I haven't really had the chance to get my hands on a copy yet so I can't say much. But I have seen pictures and I'm excited. Darrin and Jorge make up KidKong Entertainment. It's good clean fun. I'm excited about reading a comic that isn't oversexed like so many (by which I pretty much mean all) today. Here's to you Darrin, Jorge and Kaeru Boy