Long, meandering, and not much to this post.

I have one of those sick little headaches. You know the ones that live in your temples, that don’t rant and rage. They sulk. The type that just lingers, all sullen, dull, and stubborn. If I go to bed with it, I’ll wake up with it. I’ll take a couple of advil before bed, and I hate that. I don’t like headache pills. Most times, I would rather suffer, BUT, not with one of the “I’ll stay the night” ones. I’m not a masochist.

My boss had surgery yesterday, on his knee. A torn meniscus, or some such. Anyway, I got to carry a fruit bouquet up to him, that we chipped in money at work to get him. A coworker went way out of her way to pick it out. Thats a great example of the difference between men and women. A man would walk into a place, and see basket + fruit. “Aha! Thats what I was told to get, I’m done!”. Not her. Anyway, the boss is fine. He looked a bit peaked, and was obviously in some pain. Understandable, since he wasn’t much past 24 hours since the surgery.

I got to meet his Great Dane, Dakota, for the first time. She is a bit over a hundred pounds, which is small for a Great Dane. She is a very well behaved house dog though.

Anyway, I didn’t go back to work. Lets see, three hours off, when I put in 9.5 hours on Sunday? And when that STILL leaves me almost 14 hours up on what works “owes” me, in comp time? Well, yeah, I will take that.

So, I went by a little independent bookstore in Woodstock. Normally, I hate little bookstores. I don’t understand how a place that has fewer books than I do can stay in business, for one. I also tend to hate the staff. They always attempt to strike up a conversation, or some such nonsense. I want to say “I’m a customer, all I want to do is see if a book wants to go home with me. Thats it. You aren’t a book, lets not chat, okay?”

I’m not a people person.

But this bookstore (Foxtales) was different. Or, the staff was anyway. She didn’t speak beyond the greeting when I came in the door. No offer to help me find anything, or any other junk. I like that. Now if only the store had more books, it might actually be worth something. I did pick up a nice looking copy of Macbeth, which I’ve never read.

If that headache hadn’t been sulking around, making me miserable, I would have sat in the nearby park and read for a bit. As it was, nope, not happening. Now to go home (its much later. I am writing this in a restaurant.) I’ll snuffle some macaw feathers, do beak kisses with Kermit, and give Kiwi a long deep head scratch. Then mock wrestle Max for a couple, and collapse into bed well doped up.

I love my brain. I’m just glad I don’t, and haven’t, done drugs, because the shit my brain comes up with it already strange enough.

In this dream, I was getting out of the Army. This involves taking a hypersonic subway train on a floating, artificial island. It was a tourist resort ran by a Arab mogul. After several minutes of travel, I reached the end, and joined my travel party. It consisted of Arnold schwarzenegger, and 4-5 midgets. Suddenly the island came under attack (by who? how? No idea here). The place started taking on water.

The midgets jumped into these large flooding tubes to escape. One got sucked into the wrong tube, and almost got chewed up by a large fan. Arnold vanished somewhere or another. Me? I dithered around and presumably died when the thing went down.

I hate heavy molting season. You come in, and all of your birds have lost 2-3 major feathers. So you carefully examine all of them, to see if they are molted, or possibly plucked. Its just stressing.

Not that any of my birds have plucked while I’ve had them. Which is a good thing.

Darpa is claiming that the US geek shortage is a national security risk.

The Pentagon’s far-out research arm Darpa is soliciting proposals for initiatives that would attract teens to careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), with an emphasis on computing.

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/darpa-us-geek-shortage-is-a-national-security-risk/#ixzz0cokTrPjA

Now, take a look at this (I added some bolding, to help with the more interesting stuff

SAN DIEGO — Students were evacuated from Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School in the Chollas View neighborhood Friday afternoon after an 11-year-old student brought a personal science project that he had been making at home to school, authorities said.

Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified.

The school, which has about 440 students in grades 6 to 8 and emphasizes technology skills, was initially put on lockdown while authorities responded.

Luque said the project was made of an empty half-liter Gatorade bottle with some wires and other electrical components attached. There was no substance inside.

When police and the Metro Arson Strike Team responded, they also found electrical components in the student’s backpack, Luque said. After talking to the student, it was decided about 1 p.m. to evacuate the school as a precaution while the item was examined.

——- further down

About 3 p.m., the device was determined to be harmless, Luque said.

Luque said the project was intended to be a type of motion-detector device.

Both the student and his parents were “very cooperative” with authorities, Luque said. He said fire officials also went to the student’s home and checked the garage to make sure items there were neither harmful nor explosive.

“There was nothing hazardous at the house,” Luque said.

The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent, Luque said.

Anyone else seeing the dots connecting here?

Stumbling across the start of the six volume set of the Collected stories of Roger Zelazny started me to thinking about two of my favorite works of his. Jack of Shadows, and Lords of Light.

“For six days he had offered many kilowatts of prayer, but the static kept him from being heard On High.”

So I started looking for my copies of the books. And, not finding them. Good books – defined here as simply any book that you enjoy – move. They don’t stay in one spot. My paperbacks have one specific spot that they are suppose to call home. Its down by the basement door. There is a long ledge there, which is perfectly sized for keeping paperbacks. This is in the U shaped area in the stairwell right before you reach the door to the basement. Its still in the main house. The house was designed with that area there, and that area was designed for paperbacks.

But the books don’t stay there, for the most. I go past them at least twice per day, seven days a week for the most part. Once in the morning, bleary eyed, to put the dogs in the basement. Once again in the evening, somewhat tired, to take the dogs out of the basement. (And usually once again in the evenings, putting the dogs back down there for a few minutes so that they can take care of any prebedtime business out in the sideyard, which connects to my basement). Its not uncommon for a book to latch on to me during these trips, and ride me back up like a giant cockleburr.

Its mostly specific passages that snag out little thorns, and which get read far more than the entire book. Normally they aren’t anything particularly important or engaging to most. Those little barbs are specific to me. I like reliving how Jack of Shadows (who is, overall, an Ass) overcomes the Rock that Eats. Thats a barb.

What it means though, is that books move from where they are put. A bit part of cleaning up for me is putting these errant books back where they belong. And, it explains why I can’t find my copies of those two books tonight, when I went looking for them.

Well the Danish authorities captured the escapee Laura Drecker (the 14 year old girl who wants to sail around the world solo) and returned her to captivity.

Two quotes of interest

Child Welfare Authority spokesman Jan Dirk Sprokkereef said he was satisfied that Laura’s father Dick will cooperate with the agency in the future.

and

“They know everything much better,” she told reporters sarcastically, pointing to the courthouse. “They know what’s best for my child.”

Welcome to the real world, where Freedom was killed a LONG time ago.

Tonight there is a dense fog advisory here in Georgia.

Alert:
…DENSE FOG ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 7 PM THIS EVENING TO 10 AM
EST MONDAY…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN PEACHTREE CITY HAS ISSUED A DENSE
FOG ADVISORY…WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 7 PM THIS EVENING TO 10 AM
EST MONDAY…FOR ALL OF NORTH AND CENTRAL GEORGIA.
A SLOWLY DRIFTING WARM FRONT WILL MOVE NORTHWARD ACROSS GEORGIA
INTO MONDAY MORNING. CALM WINDS AND HIGH DEW POINTS WILL CONTINUE
TO PRODUCE WIDESPREAD DENSE FOG WITH VISIBILITIES OF ONE HALF MILE
OR LESS.
Instructions: A DENSE FOG ADVISORY MEANS VISIBILITIES WILL FREQUENTLY BE REDUCED TO LESS THAN ONE QUARTER MILE. IF DRIVING…SLOW DOWN… USE YOUR HEADLIGHTS…AND LEAVE PLENTY OF DISTANCE AHEAD OF YOU.

Anyway, if you’ve ever driven highway 75 North, in the upper parts of Tennessee, lower parts of Kentucky, you’ve probably seen those severe fog signs. To put it mildly, they aren’t kidding. I came through there one night during one of those severe fogs – and you ain’t seeing nothing when that fog is in. It was downright dangerous. Interesting though.

Being a bachelor means: Waiting to clean the shower until the hassle of doing the cleaning outweighs the effort required to unstick your feet to exit the shower.

I hate those colds where you wake up full of energy, which drains out of you so fast that by 10 am you are just slogging through a dull grey miasma. Then in the evening, you are so dead to the world you just vegetate semi-comatose, until its late enough that you can go to bed, to repeat the cycle the next day.

Back in May, I blogged about a case where Continental airline pilots were fired/sued for getting what the airline claims were “sham” divorces, for the sole purpose of getting pension money. I.E, get divorced, conceal said divorce from family/friends, receive the money, get remarried. I stated then that so long as the divorces were legally real, then no crime was committed. Its nice to see that the judge agrees (even though its obvious).

From here

The pilots in question all obtained divorces from various states with domestic relations orders that assigned 100 percent, and in one case 90 percent, of their retirement benefits under the plan to their spouses. The retirement plan qualified the domestic relations orders and, because the pilots were of retirement age when the alternate payees requested a lump-sum payout, the plan paid the benefits.

Miller said “the facts show — and the pilots do not seem to contest — that the pilots and their former spouses did not behave in a manner consistent with the breakup of a marriage.” He said many of the pilots continued to cohabitate, remarried soon after obtaining the lump-sum payout and all essentially conducted themselves as if the divorce had never happened.

But the judge said none of that was relevant to the issue at hand.

He said “the administrator may not refuse to qualify a domestic relations order based on criteria not present in the statute.” The judge added that “the court finds that the motivation or good faith of the divorce and resulting domestic relations order is not an enumerated requirement.”

I was reminded of this after reading about a soldiers being charged in marriage fraud. I utterly fail to see how this is fraud either. If you are married, you are married. It is not relevant whether you only met the other person 30 seconds before the marriage, and never see them again 30 seconds after the marriage. Its an on/off switch.

Newest addition

Originally uploaded by The_Gut.

Someone had abandoned this big fella in a rental home. I came by him through a freecycle post. If he lives – which I think fairly likely, I’ll have to get a bigger tank. Since he had spent several days in a cardboard box, with just a bit of tap water, and some cat food, I dunked him in distilled water. Then it was into the tank with my other (vastly smaller) crabs. He should have gone in an iso tank, but I don’t have one, and didn’t have time to make one.

I don’t particularly want him, but I’m not willing to let an animal die when its as easy to care for as these guys are. (Large upfront cost to these suckers, next to no ongoing cost). Especially when you consider – he is at least 10+ years old, and no hermit crabs are born in captivity.

The language is clear and concise, but not to the point of obscurity.

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