Life

I went through the Mexico pictures tonight and now they're up! Here are some highlights from the mexico set.



Where are the Spain pics? On my computer waiting to be organized, filed, corrected, and uploaded. There is a lot of them and it takes a long time. And I'm lazy like that.

More pictures from the Iowa / Chicago Trip are sorted, cropped, color corrected, and ready to go. Here are some highlights from the new gallery.


For some reason I didn't take nearly enough pictures in Dubuque. Guess I'll just have to visit again!

The first set of pictures from my Iowa / Chicago trip are up. There are some really notable shots! Only the renunion pictures are there with the others comin next week.

The gallery software I'm using doesn't let me mark particular images so I'll highlight a few here.


I used the new beta of Lightroom for Windows to manage and edit the pictures that are actually edited. Though its terribly slow on my machine and uses an exorbitant percentage of memory, and crashed once during a basic operation, this just all could be due to the beta status. It's a wonderfully organized program that has some real utility. Once I have my new laptop I'll give it a spin and see how well it handles.

He's yellow all the way through! And in this case he's mostly butter! And he's crumby! But he tastes fantastic with his dyed cream cheese skin (fake'n bake, this one) and sprinkle-mosaic eye. I had the power-pill cupcake for breakfast and I must say, it kept me going all day long. So Happy Birthday Erin!!

Back in October I traveled through Peru with some friends. It has taken four months, but I now have the pictures on this site and available for viewing. I also re-did the gallery to a large extent. So take a look at the pictures!

I'm not talking about the children. I'm talking about the real future, the one with the flying skateboards and 3d advertisements custom tailored to your desires and delivered directly to your impulse centers. And, as a matter of practicality in light of how much science costs in the future, the ads were absolutely necessary for funding. Funding for what? Time travel research. You'd think you would have heard about it by now. We all want flying skateboards but do we all want ads microwaved into our cerebellum's? Do you??

Okay, then do what this guy is doing and help out the scientists of the future! Defray their cost and make their work easier! You might even meet a future man! Just think of how amazing and sexually attractive (and skillful) these future beings will be with their centuries of genetic research and breeding. And with contraceptives of the future, there is no risk of polluting the timeline! They are monitoring blogger.com, so be the first to grab retroappt.blogspot.com and post some sexy photos so they will know whom to visit. Become a national hero! After you're dead that is.

I haven't posted anything in awhile because I have many things to post, some getting very old, but they all require attention and more attention them I'm willing to give them. I guess that's the problem with a so called blog-- it is so obvious that it hasn't been updated in awhile that new visitors won't browse around. They think it's abandoned. Shame on me, I suppose.

Anyway, it seems I read a lot of items these days and almost none of them actually interest me. This one did. I found a wonderful little beat on drawing and photography and drawing from photography. I've always had a thing for human perception and I know that a scene is perceived differently when it is real and when it is a photograph. I think the described effect that it has on drawing is demonstrative to that point. The short think piece does a clear and layman gloss of human perception with and without a lens. I recommend the quick read.

I move back into my house tomorrow after a 5.5 week stint in the Hilton Garden Inn. So long and thanks for all the cookies! (Really. They were fresh baked daily around 6pm. I'd come to the hotel from work to find a varied assortment of chocolate chip, sugar, and peanut butter cookies longing for my grubby hands and eager lips. I'll miss you, my cookies.)

I received this fortune the other day. My immediate response was to call bullshit but I didn't like jumping to such an overly harsh and fatalistic position. So I considered the alternatives. The notional antithesis, "Look for misery and you will find it," is so obviously true, so blatantly and overtly part of life that it seems this once sickeningly optimistic fortune perhaps has more color and depth than I first suspected. Why would I go negative like that? In truth, I am an optimist, but perhaps that is just in truth and not in life. Heed the contrapositive for it will no forsake you!

Throughout the centuries there have been many flooding myths, the most popular in the United States and with Judeo Christians in general is the Noah story. But the Akkadians before them drowned the world's numbers strictly for being too noisy. Here is the account that I experienced:

On 8/17 my house flooded due to a malfunctioning switch in my washing machine. I'm posting the pictures here. I'm living in a hotel for now and things are going well. Everyone is giving me plenty of support and the people working on putting everything back to normal are doing a good job. Thanks everyone.

This was just a quick jot I sent to a friend. But I thought others might like to hear it too, slightly reformatted.

This guy, Joseph Duncan, is a convicted sex offender and suspected murder, but had been keeping a blog on blogger.com. He also seems to have a private diary that is encrypted and it's being searched for. Chilling, but pretty incredible. It reminds me of In the Belly of the Beast. There are a few decent articles I was able to dig up about the details of his criminal history. If the blog is down for whatever reason just search for "Blogging the FifthNail" and there are lots of copies.

Some of the posts seem like the reality of Camus' The Stranger. He's a rare case indeed, but I think it is interesting what opportunities our society has given him to convey his emotions, to feel connected to the world. They are lonely and cold, but they're there. In time maybe these violent crimes won't happen as people become more connected through technology. Maybe now is the interim, the imperfect developmental period between extended family bands and a complete global social network that supersedes and does away with the idea of nations and ruling classes, the monopoly of force. Evolution takes millions of years, but the progress rate of the last century shows that maybe the peaceful future isn't as far away as it seems to be.

I had looked for quite some time for a liquor cabinet and wine rack that I liked but nothing pleased me for a reasonable price. So with the help of friends I set out to make my own. A total of twelve days was actually spent on this project, but it took over a year to complete.

The base unit was an unfinished prefab kit with doored cabinets top and bottom. It wasn't set up to be a liquor cabinet and I would need to fashion a wine glass rack for the top and something to hold wine bottles in the bottom.

Lorraine and I stained the wood with cheap all-in-one varnish that I picked out. Don't use that stuff. I then aged it one year to let the wood warp and discolor just to add some challenge to the project.

The wine glass rack was fairly straight forward. I simply cut, glued, and screwed some ½"x2½" birch (I think. Might be alder) and ½" square dowels (yes, dowels can be square. I looked it up) together and aligned them in the center. The wine bottle rack presented a more substantial problem. Originally I was going to make a criss-crossed rack, perhaps something like this, but that seemed to require too many cuts. Wandering around the hardware store, Josh helped me come up with the final design. We bought some of these , connecting pipe, and some pvc cement. With the purchased hardware and a couple bolts and wood screws I hacked together a sturdy wine rack.

Two coats of paint, some graphite for the sliding drawer, custom handles and I now have a liquor cabinet. Cheers!

Eric, Andy, Laura and I went camping July 8-10. I learned Puff the Magic Dragon on the guitar and we burned the metatron. We hiked four miles and it took us about one mile to do it. We pushed in corks, found the spices, set up three tents, used only one, put marshmallows in pancakes, and generally camped the f**k out of Dogwood. There are pictures of it.