Current Brainstorms
Monday, August 30, 2004
Camping Misadventures
This weekend my buddy Josh and I decided that we needed to go camping. We had bought food on Thursday night along with fishing licenses. I was very excited all day to get to go. The mood was dampened a little bit when I found out that they were expecting rain for Saturday morning. I decided rain wasn't a big deal and it should serve to cool everything down for us. Silly me...
I left work early and managed to get home a little before 4:00. I had not packed yet, so I was running around trying to pull everything together by the time Josh got there. Josh got there about 4:30 and had to wait for me to finish packing, but we were out the door by 5:00. We drove up to
Bonham State Park. Bonham is a very small park. The ranger station was actually closed by the time we got there, so we set up camp and then drove back into town. Our plan had been to eat on the way, but neither of us were hungry. So when we went back into town we had some dinner at a local steakhouse.
After we got back we sat back and relaxed for a while. We played Backgammon. The first game we made up our own rules before we actually read the instructions and the second we played according to the rules.
We climbed in the tent and attempted to sleep, but it was stifling hot with no breeze. When I woke drenched in sweat I moved my ground mat and sleeping bag outside to try and sleep. When Josh found me I was on top of the picnic table sound asleep. Rain drops splashing down had awakened him and he was fumbling around for the rain fly. We got the rain fly on and then both of us crawled into the tent. A short while later the heavens opened up. I expected rain, but what we appeared to get was the torrential remnants of Hurricane Charlie. The rain started coming down hard and only proceeded to get harder. At one point I realized that the tent was getting flooded so I poked my head out to see what was going on. That's when I realized that the whole tent platform had 1.5-2 inches of water. As soon as I climb out of the tent I'm immediately soaked with very cold water. I tell Josh to get out and come help me move the tent. He took his time, but finally emerged to help drag the tent down to a sloped grassy slope. We climb back inside the tent cold and soaking wet. Josh is more than a little bit slap happy and everything seems to be funny now. He's laughing at me, at the situation, and the fact that he's shivering. We manage to go back to sleep for a little while.
When we finally get up and get breakfast going, the park ranger comes by to ask us to swing by the office. They were closed when we got there last night so we needed to get officially signed in. Since the sun finally came out we put everything out to dry and walk up to the office still undecided about staying another night. We asked about the weather and are informed that we can expect more showers. Josh and I looked at each other and decided we'd had enough for the weekend.
8:06 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Monday, August 16, 2004
Sleep Deprivation
Maybe my next goal sheet should include something about sleep deprivation. I seem to be good at that.
Last week was nuts at work. I left at 6:00 on Friday because I needed to get home and then get to the church for a youth event. When I left I asked James to stay and be moral support for Kapil. It turns out that about half of the office was up here until 2:30 that night prepping some laptops to get to a customer by this morning. By that time the youth were at the Stonebriar Mall playing broom ball on the ice rink. Glad it was them and not me.
Friday night was Marathon Night to wrap up Youth Week at
Grace Avenue. Our first stop was at
Exposure. It's an indoor rock climbing facility. I think the kids had a great time, but by the time we left my hands were tired from holding the safety lines. Next we went to
Super Bowl. They had eight lanes for the youth and when another lane opened they gave it to the adults. Now I'm really lousy at bowling normally, but I did super lousy by the time we left. Ironically though, the first and last balls I rolled were strikes. At 1:00AM we went to the ice rink at the
Stonebriar mall. When everyone was there we all put on a helmet and grabbed a stick with a rubberized "broom." We played
Broomball until 3:00 when we went back to the church. Some people watched movies, some people tried to sleep, and some just went wild and crazy and we had to restrain them. At 5:15 we loaded up and went to
Krispy Kreme for fresh donuts and then off to a neighborhood pool to swim. A cop comes around and decides to pull in to see what 45 kids are doing swimming at 6:00 in the morning. He seemed content when we told him we were a youth group. By 7:00 we were back at the church for the parents to pick up their youth. I'm pretty confident all the adults went home to crash, but I had a couple of girls in my car that were talking about making it all day without sleep. Not sure how that turned out.
An old friend from middle school and high school was in town for his sister's wedding. They live in Arizona now so I never see him. In fact I hadn't even met his wife. Since he was in town several of us went out Saturday night. Joshua, Faith (his wife),
Dezi, George and myself all headed out in my car. We ate some good Tex-Mex and then played Putt-Putt and drove golf carts. Between activities, Josh called to check in with his mom and younger sister who were watching their 3 kids. After a little discussion it was decided that we needed to head back and relieve them of their responsibilities so they could get some much needed sleep. We stopped by my apartment to get some games and then got some munchies to take back to the apartment. Daniel caught up with us there after getting off work. We relaxed and talked and cheated at
Trivial Pursuit.
It was while we were there that Josh got a phone call from his mom who was looking for her car keys. I could only hear one side, but it went something like this:
"Find my tux, I think they may be in there."
"Putt your hands in my pants pocket"
...
"Mom! Quit being dirty!"
9:26 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Friday, August 13, 2004
Split Reason
Something to enliven your Friday the 13th.
Presenting truly twisted geek apparel at
SplitReason.com
I particularly like the
Kill Bill Gates shirt
9:52 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Thursday, August 12, 2004
Lock the doors
I'm to the point of closing my office door and pretending I'm not here just so I can get some work done. So far it's worked wonderfully.
12:20 PM Posted by Big Dave
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Monday, August 09, 2004
Successful Birthday
Well after my smart aleck post I only had one comment. Dezi told me later she thought about making a comment but didn't.
I had a great weekend. And a very merry birthday. For lunch my co-workers treated me to Bennigan's. Work was fun, but quite since Yaser was out of the office.
Yaser's wife and kids have been in Kuwait for the last three months visiting their relatives and were coming back on Saturday. Yaser was going to take some time off to rest and clean the house up. Yaser's a regular
Bob Vila. Actually Bob Vila never did anything on the show, so I guess he would be a
Norm. He's always coming to work with junk all over his hands. His project for the last few months has been to completely gut and redo one of the bathrooms. I'm assuming he got it done.
Over lunch I was talking to Sarah about trying to find this
Dessert Beauty stuff that I had heard mentioned. It was supposed to be this make up that was almost edible. Candy flavored stuff or whatever. I had tried to find it for our 2 year anniversary (dating). Sarah told me that I really should go to this store called
Sephora. She helped show me were it was and I got one of the outrageously priced little bottles of stuff. Not sure on Dezi's reaction. She seemed to think it was too greasy.
Dezi and I went out to eat at
Mimi's Friday night. We ordered a to go package of the bread pudding. By the time we left we had three to go boxes since neither one of us finished the food on our plate. It looked like we had enough food to last us a week from that one meal. We had talked about going dancing, but we'd both had a long week. Dezi had a headache and I kinda used that as an excuse not to go out. Instead we did a little shopping to take advantage of the tax free weekend.
I should mention the cool present that Dezi got me. It's a micro keychain camera. Something like
this. Saturday we went shopping with some of my birthday money. I got some nice shirts and some shorts I would actually leave the house in.
I don't know if I've mentioned this here, but I'm looking for a new car. The only problem is I truly despise dealing with salesmen. Not looking forward to the experience.
9:35 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Friday, August 06, 2004
I'm wishing the happy birthday before I get kicked off.
I'm sure David doesn't remember he gave me permission to get into this blog. I'm sure that will be remedied immediately, but in the meantime, I'm wishing happy birthday here:
http://sharpwriters.com.
2:51 PM Posted by Barbara Rollins
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Happy Birthday
Go Ahead. You know you want to. I give you permission. It's alright.
You may wish me a Happy Birthday.
These people have birthdays too.
8:52 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Sanity Check Please
I would love to have a couple of days to recover my sanity. The last few weeks have been extremely taxing. Work is coming together. We have all our servers moved to this office, but we are still working on problems. Several of us gave up a Saturday to get the firewall installed. I was hoping to learn more about firewalls, but it was in the hands of a professional and we had a lot of issues to work out.
I have been enjoying the fact that we have a large mall within easy walking distance. If not always the price of everything in that mall. It makes it convenient to run out and grab a bit to eat.
I got my next big assignment today. I'm excited because it's going to be extremely challenging. I just have to go make it happen.
Tonight marks 2 years for Desiree and myself. I have to admit to feeling less than inspired. I want to do something fun and exciting, but I'm just flat worn out. I know we'll go out and do something, but it won't be up to the standards I usually set for myself.
1:23 PM Posted by Big Dave
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