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> previous 20 entries Why I have a journal:
A journal is something that I had always meant to start. So many parts of my life disappear from my memory. For me, a journal is a record of the events in my life that I can turn back to as a reminder of the things that I have done. Every time that I would start a journal, I would write in great depth about my feelings when I felt bad, and then I would abandon my journal once I felt better. That wasn’t the kind of journal that I wanted to keep. It did help me realize that a journal is an amazingly helpful tool to sort through my own thoughts and feelings and a way to deal with them. Through writing down my unformed ideas, I am able to more clearly understand my own thoughts.
Why then, do I put my journal on the internet? Well, I remember that when I first started working out at the gym, the only thing that kept me from skipping a workout was the fact that I had a workout partner who would notice that I had stopped going. Just like the only reason that I clean my apartment is when I know that it will be seen by others. The online journal has the same effect on me. Some days, even though I know that I’ll appreciate having written after it’s done, the only reason that I actually sit down and write is sometimes the fact that I know that somebody I know might notice that I’ve stopped writing.
My journal is a tool for myself. It’s a partial record of the trivial things that I do that I might want to remember. It’s an unfiltered dropping ground for partially-formed thoughts as I empty my mind of the things that trouble me, bother me, or entertain me. It’s the grounding rod for the lightning-bolts of life. My journal is not me. My journal is not an accurate representation of my life. My journal is a personal exercise -- like my daily walk, like my daily exercise, like brushing my teeth.
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July 13th, 2009
 | 04:04 pm - Rats!
Today I saw the reappearance of five rats in the back yard, of varios sizes, like nesting dolls.
location: US, Oregon, Jackson, Medford
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July 9th, 2009
 | 06:54 am - Big round numbers
Today, I turn the big 3-0!
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June 27th, 2009
 | 01:00 pm - back home
Back home from the bike ride.
elevation 1450 ft. Not as big of an elevation difference as I had expected.
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| 11:50 am - Picnic in Ashland
I made it to Ashland. It was a lot easier than I expected and it only took an hour.
I unpacked my bag and had a nice picnic before heading back home. Current elevation 1772 ft. 
location: US, Oregon, Jackson, Ashland
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June 17th, 2009
| 09:27 pm - Busy Bridesmaid
I've been busy lately getting ready for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) angeldoc's bridal shower. I finally decided on enough of the reservations in order to send out invitations and spent the weekend getting those made and sent out.
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| 09:26 pm - Grandmother Visit
Back over Labor day weekend (May 23-25), I flew to Arizona to visit my Grandmother. I haven't seen her in a couple of years. I flew in on Allegiant, which was actually a fairly nice airline, as long as you don't check any luggage. I did make one mistake in that I rented my car from the wrong airport (Sky Harbor instead of Mesa). I ended up having to take a $70 taxi ride between airports late at night. Fortunately, I wasn't driving up to Prescott that night. I was staying at a fairly nice hotel in Phoenix. I got a really cheap price because it was graduation or something so it was full of loud teenagers who made noise until late at night, but it didn't make much difference to me.
I rented a prius, which was actually the cheapest car available in Arizona. It was a pretty nice car, which backup cameras. It took a while to get used to it. I did go 200 miles on less than five gallons of gas. One drawback was that I had to spend fifteen minutes reading the instruction manual before I was able to figure out out to turn the car on.
I had a good time with my Grandma. The first day partially overlapped with my aunt Linida's visit. After she left, we spent almost the whole time playing cards and scrabble. I brought some pictures for her, both printed and digital for her frame. This was a kind of a big visit, since she was the last person to whom i hadn't come out yet and I told her all about thedogcow during this visit.
On the way back to Phoenix, I allowed myself three hours to make the two hour trip, but only made it by the skin of my teeth. There was a big accident on the interstate that closed it off for more than an hour. It took me an hour to go the five miles to the first exit so that i could go the rest of the way on side roads.
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 | 08:54 pm - Random musings
For no reason whatsoever, I was wondering which villain will be featured in the next Batman movie. Having never read the comics, I can only make guesses based on my knowledge of the Tim Burton line of movies and the animated series. This essentially limits the possibilities to
Robin, Batgirl, Catwoman, Penguin, Riddler, Mr. Freeze, Bane, clayface, harley quinn, poison ivy, killer croc, mad hatter, and manbat.
Now, this new incarnation is much more grounded in reality, and therefore it makes sense that any character imbued with supernatural powers that can't be written out of the plot will never appear in this series. This excludes Clayface, killer croc, manbat, and Mr. Freeze.
Harley Quinn is out, because she can only be used in conjunction with a post-jail joker and they wouldn't put two joker movies back-to-back, and will probably never do another joker movie in this series.
They can't introduce Batgirl before Robin. They can't introduce Robin before Catwoman because he would be too much of a cock-block. They can't use the Riddler without Robin because this Batman isn't the kind of person who talks out loud to himself, and no plot involving the Riddler makes any sense unless the solutions to the puzzles are explained out loud by Batman and Robin explaining the solutions to each other.
So this leaves Catwoman, Penguin, Bane, Poison Ivy, and Mad Hatter.
Mad Hatter and Poison Ivy are technologically implausible.
Now that they've killed Bruce's girlfriend, the door is open for Catwoman, and Batman would be primed for a rebound fling, so I think the time is ripe.
In order to avoid repeating the previous series, I doubt that they would combine Catwoman and Penguin into a single movie again.
I also remember seeing an the the extremely muscled Tommy Lister as a prisoner on the ferry at the end of Dark Knight. When I first saw him, I immediately thought "Bane."
So, that's my prediction: Catwoman and Bane.
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June 8th, 2009
 | 07:00 am - Storm Chasing Update 2
We're back home now, so here's the update on how the rest of our storm chasing went.
Tuesday and Wednesday, there weren't any storms. Tuesday, we spent in Ames with my sister and niece.
Wednesday, we started driving to set ourselves up for Thursday. We drove from Ames, IA to McCook, NE.
That evening, we met up with thedogcow's Grandfather for dinner, and the next morning stopped in to say hi to his Great Aunt and Grandpa.
Thursday, we drove into Colorado. Just north of Limon, we approached a low precipitation thunderstorm. It had great structure, but it had a high base and conditions weren't right for a tornado. We did get some nickel sized hail and at the end was a very beautiful rainbow that went from horizon to horizon and turned into a double rainbow an also part of an inverse rainbow. The TIV passed us at the storm north of Limon. We headed back down to Limon and gawked at it for a few minutes before finding a place to stay overnight.
Friday, we positioned ourself in the area of greatest probability, which was in Eastern Colorado. However, nothing ever happened there. What did happen was in Eastern Wyoming. VORTEX2 was in Wyoming at the time and saw a tornado. We started to head back to Iowa, since we couldn't get to Wyoming in time, but then the storm track changed and we headed to the panhandle of Nebraska to catch up with the same storm several hours later. We watched a huge thunderstorm east of Oshkosh, NE with great structure that really looked like it should be producing a tornado, but didn't see a tornado. We were sandwiched between two storms. A larger one on our north was already tornado warned, but we couldn't see anything in it, and the one to our south had perfect structure. We followed it until it got too dark to follow it.
We headed south of Oshkosh and tried to get South of the storm so we could watch the lightning in the dark, but we misjudged our distance and the storm, so the storm came up on us in the dark and we ended up smack dab in the middle of the storm. Ping-pong ball sized hail started falling. We headed south and it got worse, we headed north and it got worse. There were no east-west roads to take. We headed south again and hit a wall of rain that was traveling horizontally. We headed north checked the radar. We realized that we were stuck between a hook to the south, which may or may not have indicated a tornado south of us on the road, and a heavy precipitation to the north, which meant worse hail. We waited it out for a few minutes until the storm passed. At some point, the hail knocked our weather radio antenna off the roof. After it passed, we stayed and watched it produce lightning in the distance. After it got a ways away, we were able to make out the silhouette of a tornado under the storm when the lightning flashed. A ground spotter also verified the tornado (It was reported three miles north of Paxton, NE).
At this time, it was now midnight, and the major parts of the storm were now sitting on top of I-80 with several new tornado and hail warnings right on top of the interstate east of Ogallala, so we crashed in a hotel in Big Springs, NE. The TTU VORTEX2 chase team was also there and we got to say hi to them.
The next day, on Saturday, with our chasecation an unqualified success, we headed back to Iowa. There was a chance of severe storms that day as well in Iowa, so we stopped at a rest stop and waited for the cap to break, but it never did. No storms in Iowa at all that day. We headed back to my sister's and had some good family time.
Sunday, more family time, then returning the rental car with an additional 2662 miles than when we started and one hail dent in the roof (That's about the distance from Portland, OR to Miami, FL). And the car (a nice '10 ford fusion with all the toys) had only started out with 817 miles on it to begin with!
There were a lot of storms on Sunday to taunt us. We couldn't see many of them from the airplane, since we were flying through the clouds most of the time. However, the storms did make everything at Denver backed up by several hours. We spent an hour trying to convince the airline to move us onto the direct Denver-Medford flight, but they wanted $300 do to it. At this point, our SFO-Medford flight was already delayed 45 minutes because of runway maintenance in SFO, and everything at Denver was delayed, but not reported as delayed because they were making the planes wait on the tarmac. We got on our Denver-SFO flight, and sat around for a while. Then they announced that we weren't going to leave for another hour and that we had to sit on the plane while we waited. They also started kicking off standby passengers because people who had missed the flight started showing up. I hit the call button and told the stewardess we might miss our connecting flight and that they should see if we could get on the direct flight. Ten minutes later, we were being escorted off the plane to pick up our new tickets for the direct Denver-Medford flight. Kind of a walk of triumph past all of the people who had to sit on the plane at the gate for another hour.
We got home and olive dished out heaps of love to us all night, happy that we are home.
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June 2nd, 2009
| 11:04 am - Storm Chasing, Update 1
We completed our first two days of storm chasing. We arrived in Iowa on Saturday and headed straight to Ames.
Sunday, we drove to Nebraska city to see some trough action in Nebraska. In Nebraska City, we ran into some other storm chasers who were headed over to Lincoln. We decided that was a good idea. We got about half way to Lincoln when the cumulus clouds overhead transformed into storm clouds, so we pulled over to watch. We were able to watch a small cloud transform into a thunderstorm around 5pm. We stayed around until close to sunset and were able to see several more thunderstorms form. One of the thunderstorms had a white rain column, which was later verified to be hail by storm spotters. We even saw some circular rotation overhead, but there was a cap that prevented anything from being severe enough to form tornados that day.
Monday, we drove to southern Iowa to see if we could see any action in front of the cold front that was moving across Iowa. We moved down into northern Missouri at around 3pm and saw a bunch of small cumulus turn into a big mess of a line. Not much storm structure, but we did see some strong rain, a little flash flooding, and some pea size hail. There wasn't enough shear or structure to form a tornado that day either. Around 5 we decided to escape Missouri and head back into Iowa. We managed to keep just ahead of the storm on our way out of Missouri, but were overtaken by the gust front several times when we stopped to observe.
On our way back to base, we stopped by the oldest covered bridge in Madison county.
It looks like there won't be any action for the next couple of days.
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May 11th, 2009
| 08:59 pm - Catching Up
I've forgotten so much about what's happened since the last time I posted.
thedogcow's Birthday went well. I took him to the Ashland film festival and we saw the movie Fuel. Then we went to a very nice restaurant in the hotel next door. The food was incredibly good. Crab fondue, roast duck, gravy made with bacon drippings. I bought him an extra-large fan with a remote control for his present.
We've been prepping for our storm chasing trip. We got a camcorder so that we can make videos of the storms.
I'm going to be visiting my Grandma. I haven't seen her since my Grandfather died. She's figured it out on her own already, so the plan is for me to come out to her on this trip.
We've started applying to new locations. Yes, it's that time already.
This week is my last week of choir at church before it stops for the summer.
I have started riding my bike more often. It's finally warm enough to ride to church in the morning. Riding up hill is a pain. Riding down hill is such a thrill.
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May 2nd, 2009
| 03:37 pm - My favorite Big Bang Quote
Here's my favorite quote so far from the series Big Bang Theory:
"I'm a physicist; I have a working knowledge of the universe and everything it contains."
Since the best quotes are those that are taken out of context, I choose to ignore that it was followed by "Who's Radiohead?" "I have a working knowledge of the important things in the universe."
Besides, I love Radiohead.
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May 1st, 2009
April 18th, 2009
| 07:11 pm - Pre update update
It snowed on Wednesday. I guess that means that winter isn't over yet. I would like to put my plants out away from the house but it's still too cold at night. On the balcony I've been assembling a cat garden. So far I have catnip, cat mint, creeping rosemary, lemon balm, and wheat grass. I still haven't found Valerian and cat thyme. I think that the cat thyme is too obscure and the valerian might be only in Europe. My next update will cover thedogcow's birthday through now.
location: US, Oregon, Jackson, Medford
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March 8th, 2009
| 04:24 pm - Up to not much
What have I been up to lately? Well, I'm still making great progress at the gym. My lay workout injured my forearms with cleans and preacher curls, so my new workout goes easier on me those parts. Someone with an overinflated sense of power has started to put fake tow notices on cars that park in the common driveway of our building. The towing company says they don't even tow at our property anymore. Tv seems to be in a lull. I actually managed to get the DVD down to zero shows before I left. I beat the first campaign of the lord of the rings RTS. I have started playing the relatively new Quantum of Solace game, but it makes me dizzy an makes my head hurt if I play it too long. I quit as a beta tester on the stergate MMO. I need a productive hobby. I'll be in Houston a week from now, so anyone who wants to see me should give me a buzz.
location: US, Illinois, DuPage, Wood Dale
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| 04:14 pm - Valentines day retrospective
I should have gotten around to posting Valentine's Day earlier, but here it is. thedogcow and I had a very romantic day just doing sweet things for each other. He got me a card and I got him chocolates. We had a very nice dinner of broccoli and bread fondue and strawberries and chocolate dip. I love him so much
location: US, Illinois, Cook, Chicago
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| 04:09 pm - Air travel is still hating me
I had to get up at 4am on daylight savings day to fly three time zones East. I am going to be so jet lagged. The planes get smaller all the time. My carryon wouldn't fit under the seat in front of me flying into Chicago. It has fit on every other plane it has been on. The flight attendant accused me of overpacking it, as if I hadn't just gotten off another plane where it fit. Someone asked me if I fly a lot and want the best airline is. I told him yes, and the best airline was 20 years ago. In retrospect, I probably could have given him a real answer, but "Royal Dutch Airlines" would probably come off as snobbish. I think my answer was more 'common man' and he seemed amused by it. So here I am at the Chicago airport. My incoming flight was delayed half an hour because it has been raining for 36 hours in Chicago. My outbound flight is now delayed over four hours. On the bright side, my boss missed her flight so we might still arrive at the same time in Detroit. The Chicago airport leaks in the rain, and there are buckets everywhere to catch the drips. 
location: US, Illinois, Cook, Chicago
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March 6th, 2009
| 09:14 pm - Disappointing Dead Like Me movie
I just watched the Dead Like Me movie. I liked seeing the show again, but I was also fairly disappointed. Part of me hopes that it comes back on TV, like they said it might if the DVD sells well enough. Another part of is too afraid that any new episodes would turn out like the movie and that they would drag down the original.
here are my main complaints:
( Spoiler alert... )
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