Carleen and Mike

You’re The Giver!
by Lois Lowry
While you grew up with a sheltered childhood, you’re pretty sure
everyone around you is even more sheltered. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, you were
tapped on the shoulder and transported to the real world. This made you horrified by
your prior upbringing and now you’re tormented by how to reconcile these two lives.
Ultimately, the struggle comes down to that old free will issue. Choose
wisely.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Hurray! Linkdom chaosium coming right up!

First off, if you’re a fan of kick-ass horror movies, check out this link to the new trailer for Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. Download the HD version and you won’t be sorry. I was sorely disappointed in the first Alien vs. Predator. You’ve got cinemas two coolest monster movies battling it out - how can you mess that up? Easily, I guess. This one looks to make up for everything.

Now for a new webcomic I’ve been reading: Questionable Content. My friend Matt (well, ONE of my friends named “Matt”) sent me a link to this comic and at first I didn’t like it, saying “This isn’t funny at all!” Then I realized - it’s not supposed to me funny. It’s more of a story comic. But I will say there have been quite a few funny bits since I really got into it. It’s kind of a romantic comedy comic - with lots of indie rock and vague band name references. It’s a bit…risque for the younger set, but overall it’s pretty harmless.

With all the music references in the Questionable Content, I’ve been checking out some of the band names they mention. Here’s one called Maserati. They play ambient rock, kinda sounds like a little Pink Floyd minus lyrics. Pretty cool stuff.

That’s it for today. Enjoy!

I am, by nature, a “Green”, “Crunchy Granola” kind of person. Although I am a firm meatasaurus, in my house anyway, I am the Eco-Warrior. Much to Carleens annoyance at times - I follow her around, turning off lights, reach around her to turn off the faucet the second a dish is not under the stream of water. Recently, I’ve started recycling, even though Bartlesville has no recycling program (we take our stuff to Tulsa, a 40 minute drive, but Carleen is there once a week for Yoga anyway). I even had a manual reel mower (you know, one of those old fashioned kind) for a while until the crabgrass that grows so profusely in my backyard, beat it into submission. The next car I own will be a Hybrid; I have Compact Fluorescent bulbs in all my lamps; I clean with only vinegar and baking soda; I have a compost pile; the list goes on. But I am nothing, nothing compared to these people. My house is a toxic waste dump compared to them. They are my hero’s. It’s a Low Impact Woodland home, build with oak timbers and walls of hay bails covered in Lime Plaster.

Combine that with the fact that I’m a huge Tolkien fan, with a strange love of Hobbits (of all the Fantasy races out there - I’m probably most like a Hobbit, god I’m such a Geek…), adds up to me with a desperate need to build this Low Impact Home. Check it out:

It was built by myself and my father in law with help from passers by and visiting friends. 4 months after starting we were moved in and cosy. I estimate 1000-1500 man hours and £3000 [about $6000 USD] put in to this point. Not really so much in house buying terms (roughly £60/sq m excluding labour).

Now take a look at some of the main features of the house:

• Stone and mud from diggings used for retaining walls, foundations etc.
• Straw bales in floor, walls and roof for super-insulation and easy building
• Lime plaster on walls is breathable and low energy to manufacture (compared to cement)
• Reclaimed (scrap) wood for floors and fittings
• Anything you could possibly want is in a rubbish pile somewhere (windows, burner, plumbing, wiring…)
• Woodburner for heating - renewable and locally plentiful
• Fridge is cooled by air coming underground through foundations
• Skylight in roof lets in natural feeling light
• Solar panels for lighting, music and computing
• Water by gravity from nearby spring
• Compost toilet
• Roof water collects in pond for garden etc.

The main tools to build it? A chainsaw, hammer and a 1 in. chisel. I want a Hobbit Home. I’d even make a round door, painted yellow.

I posted this over on my Gaming blog, but I thought I’d post it here as well, since I’m trying to get as many people as possible into this game. Check it out:

My personal favorite [new game] is a card game that a friend of mine introduced me to called Killer Bunnies. The box says for 2-8 players, though I don’t see why you couldn’t add more players. The starter pack comes with the Blue and Yellow set of cards, you can also buy booster packs that vary in color. It’s important to purchase the sets in order, since each set of cards builds on the ones previous. The goal of the game is to:

1. Still have a Bunny alive at the end of the game
2. Have in your hand, the “Magic Carrot”

I’ll go through a round of play so you can get an idea what’s going on.

First, you take the small Carrot Card pile, shuffle it, and choose one card, without looking at it. Place it at the bottom of the deck, and put the deck aside. This is the Carrot card that everyone is trying to collect. Obviously, no one knows, during play, which carrot card was chosen, so out of 20 carrot cards, you could have 19 or them and still lose. What’s great about this is it levels the playing field. No one will ever get better than the rest of the group, since the winner is chosen at random. Winning isn’t the idea, the fun is in causing as much trouble for your opponents as you can - winning is just a happy bonus. Case in point: The last session we played I was without a Bunny card for 3/4 of the game (a bunny card is required to do just about anything in the game, so I wasn’t doing very much most of the game) - but I snatched one towards the end and ended up collecting the winning card. Even though I won, the game wasn’t that much fun for me, since I didn’t do much all game.

Now that you’ve chosen the winning carrot, each person takes 7 cards from the deck. You will then choose 2 cards to place down in front of you, one above (not on top of) the other. This is called your “Run” pile. Nearly all cards in the deck must go through the Run pile. On your turn, you flip over your Top Run card and either put it into play (if it’s a Run card or Bunny card), set it off to the side (if it’s a Special or Very Special card), or discard it (if you can’t play it or don’t want to play it). You then move your Bottom run card up to the Top Run card position. Now choose another card from the deck and choose a new card to place down as the new Bottom Run Card. If you put a Bunny through the Run pile, you will place it in what is called the “Bunny Circle”. This is the area in front of you - only Bunny’s may go there (or special cards that give the Bunnies protection). It’s called a circle because all the Bunnies are connected, in that if a weapon attacks adjacent bunnies, it means bunnies, not players, so a weapon could affect more than one person’s bunnies at the same time.

Here’s where the fun begins: in the deck are many and various ways of killing your opponents Bunny’s. Remember, you need to have a Bunny to win the game. You must also have a bunny to attack other players with weapons and also to collect Carrot cards. To collect carrot cards you can do several things: you can buy them with Dolla’s or you can play “Choose a Carrot” cards. These are taken from the special big carrot deck (not the small deck you’ve sat aside). Now, if you are able to put down 3 Bunny’s of either the same color or the same type (Sinister, Timid, Congenial, Gleeful, Lumbering), you may play both Top and Bottom card in the same round. Trust me, this is tough to achieve, not to mention to maintain for very long - as it gives you a hefty advantage over everyone else, so you immediately become a target.

Once all the Carrot cards have been collected, the game is over and you take a look at the card at the bottom of the small carrot deck to see who has the matching big carrot card. That person wins the game. If you want a better picture of what this is all supposed to look like, take a look at this.

It sounds complicated, but you’ll have it down in 15 minutes, easy. It’s also addictive fun, not to mention terribly frustrating, as you build up a strategy and watch as it all comes crashing down. It’s just good, clean, evil, Bunny-Killing fun!

I had this horrible dream last night that I kept getting in trouble for things at work. I showed up without shoes once and then reshelved a bunch of books wrong. Those are the only two I can remember. As punishment, they made me tie balloons to the belt hooks on my pants.

I think the source of this dream comes from various things. First, Mitch sent me this article yesterday about police in Thailand who are punished for minor offenses by being forced to wear a Hello Kitty armband. Second, I spilled gasoline on my shoes yesterday while I was filling up the car on my way back from lunch. I didn’t have time to go home and change so I had endure the smell for the rest of the work day and I was scared to death that a patron would complain or I would get in trouble for getting people high off the fumes or something. Third, I was late for a staff meeting on Tuesday. Lastly, there’s obviously some sort of “you have more responsibilities at work now and yikes that’s scary” thing going on and I guess this is how my psyche is trying to deal with the extra stress.

The balloon thing was pretty funny, though. The Hello Kitty armband definitely wouldn’t work for us since most of us are women and love cats. I guess we could always use it on Matt.

I woke up at 4am this morning from the sound of Chani’s tummy rumbling. Not necessarily an unusually thing for her, however, it seems as though she’s eaten something that’s left her feeling a little out of sorts. She’s outside right now, probably eating more grass which she’ll likely puke back up later. I hope it’s on the laminate floor and not my new area rug.

Speaking of dogs, our local newspaper had a front page story yesterday that really made me clench my fist and say a couple of naughty cuss words.

Bartlesville police responded to two separate reports of potential animal cruelty cases within just minutes of one another Monday.

Officers responded to the 1500 block of S.W. Jennings Avenue where a chained dog was found dead at approximately 3:30 p.m.

The animal still had a collar and chain around its neck. An empty water bucket with dry dog food in the bottom was found nearby. An above ground swimming pool filled with water was out of reach from the dog and there was no shade other than a small dog house. The dog appeared to have dug a hole in the dirt in an attempt to find water or stay cooler.

I was telling Mike that I really feel people should be tested for their ability to care of living things. “Here, keep this bamboo alive for a month and then we’ll talk about the dog.”

All in all, I think this one is fairly close to the mark. Mouse over the various squares to see what they indicate:

Say Mike, what did you do this weekend?

Me? Oh I only laid a floor in my living room. BAM!

We had a nasty brown carpet (it was even nastier than we thought - the bottom side was beyond gross). The Linoleum was underneath, I laid the new, laminate floor overtop that. I got it down in about 6 hours, but of course then I had to replace all the trim - so that took me into Sunday. I am so sore from putting it down so fast, but it was worth it - this floor would make Bob Villa weep.

Liam’s Birthday is coming up and we have a request by anyone considering getting him a gift. 1 million toys have been recalled by Fisher Price that were made in China and found to have excessive amounts of lead in their paint. Due to the many recent Chinese recalls, we’re simply not going to buy anything made in China anymore (which could prove rather difficult, but I think we just want to be more aware of of where our stuff is coming from - especially things for Liam.

You know…it’s incredible how quickly your dreams and aspirations can take a back seat to the every-day routine. You spend so much time thinking about the future - a future that always seems to far away, the horizon seemingly never in view. Not only do your dreams and goals take a back seat - you almost forget you ever had them in first place. And then something happens; you take a giant leap forward and the horizon comes into glaring view and despite all the talk about the future, despite all your planning, you are literally knocked breathless with realization that the future you planned for is actually coming to fruition. It’s frightening and exciting and nerve-wracking all at once.

We just took out a $10,000 loan (using Carl’s money as collateral) for home improvements. We’re getting new windows, a new floor throughout the house, remodeling the bathrooms and replacing the countertop in the kitchen (among other things). We’ve talked about this for so long as the single thing holding us back from moving away from here, and now that this time is here, I’m a bit frightened. Mostly because I’ve never been in this much debt before, and I’m really going to have to bust ass to get everything done that I want done. Once this house is finished Carleen can finally start seriously looking for jobs elsewhere and I can finally start looking into Massage Therapy schools.

I had sort of lost track of Massage Therapy as a future career - it just felt so far away. We’ve been talking about moving away for so long it was starting to feel like a pipe dream. Now that the last few hurdles are in view, I’m a bit apprehensive about making the decision to start classes again. After all, I was so sure that photography was the career for me. Am I choosing Massage Therapy because of the money? Am I choosing just because it happens to be the Career of the Week for me? Once bitten, twice shy, you know? I like the sound of it, I like the idea of having a flexible schedule and Biology was always a strong suit for me, I just can’t help but feel just a small amount of worry.

The end is near, and although the next few months are going to be severely trying - the end result will be worth it. I’m feeling unusually optimistic about the future, so I’m just going to ride that feeling while I can.

My brother just sent me a rather disconcerting article from a Norwegian newspaper. My Norwegian is extremely sketchy and I’ve probably got most of the details mixed up here but if I’m understanding this right, a teenager wanting to renew her Norwegian passport was denied because she’s now a resident of Sweden (statsborger..right, mom?). She was born in Norway and raised there as a child but moved to Sweden later. This actually sounds like something the Norwegian Embassy in Tulsa was telling me the last time I renewed my passport just before we left for our honeymoon. Apparently another girl a few weeks before me tried to renew her passport but was denied by the embassy because she hadn’t lived or visited Norway since she was a baby. I think there was some kind of ten year limit that you could be away before they decide that “well, you haven’t lived here, bothered to pay our outrageous taxes, or even attempted to visit so you can’t be Norwegian anymore”. My Norwegian citizenship has always been very important to me, it’s part of my identity despite the fact that I can’t speak the language fluently or feel a little foreign each time I’m here. That’s just part of being cross cultural. Multi-culturalism was something I always thought Norway embraced. But this idea of stripping people of their citizenship simply because they haven’t been or lived in their Norway for awhile stinks of some sort of weird nationalism.