reidstott Drinking cheap wine and listening to Foghat. All I need is a single-wide trailer, and this time machine is complete.

FakeAPStylebook “Forbear” is something given to a bear. “Forebear” is the portion of the bear before the main bear. “Fourbear” is a party.

absurdities My peanut butter warns me that it contains peanuts. Archeologists of the future are going to be so confused.

SpaceyG I miss days of yore when social media in Atlanta was mostly just @rustytanton and @amberlrhea writing about having sex with each other.

SpaceyG Just ate bagged salad. Now we wait.

[protected user] I’m drunk and I want waffles. #godscrueljoke

[protected user] I wish I had a straw. I would drink my wine with a straw.

The last two on the list are from separate people, which should tell you most of what you need to know about my friends.

It’s not entirely my fault. Bad genes. My dad has always had low HDL, and I inherited it from him like I inherited my curious lack of a fourth wisdom tooth from my mom. Still, I’d like to not have a massive heart attack and quintuple bypass like my dad had, along with diabetes.

I already eat pretty well generally, the occasional indulgence in fried food or a hamburger notwithstanding. Lots of fruit, vegetables, whole wheat bread and pastas, whole grain rice, granola, nuts, etc. No soda, little processed food, little white bread. Rarely drink more than two beers in a day, and frequently go several days without drinking one at all. Lean meat in my everyday cooking (ground turkey breast, chicken without the skin mostly). Usually drink several glasses of water per day.

I’ve been taking fish oil supplements for a while, and have switched over to krill recently. Expert opinion on whether krill is better, the same, or less beneficial than regular fish oil is mixed, but it’s nice not to have fishy burps after popping them.

So what’s left?

The glaring deficiencies are lack of exercise and that I could stand to drop some weight. Softball starts next week, Amber and I are going to walk around the neighborhood a few times a week when the weather doesn’t suck, I’m starting the one hundred push ups program Monday, and there will be yardwork to do soon. So if I stuck to all that I think I’d be good.

I’ve upped my dosage of krill oil supplements. My number is low enough that I’m also going to take Niacin supplements, which help boost HDL.

In about six weeks I’ll test again and see if my number has improved.

Update: The part I forgot to mention when I was writing this late last night is it’s been great to hear from people on Twitter, Facebook, etc. who have also had similar issues. Jason C. told me he hadn’t met anyone else with abnormally low HDL at a relatively young age, and that he thought it was just something weird in his family. Mike was the one who first keyed me in that I should make sure to get the “no flush” Niacin (my dad told me the same thing a few hours later).

So the Internet occasionally is good for something other than trolling and porn delivery afterall, it seems. Please leave comments if you have any more insight.

Amber and me on the Beltline

If the weather stayed like this forever I’d sleep in a tent in my yard. It makes even the most mundane errands a pleasure. I drove over to our storage unit to drop off an extra interior door we had sitting around with the windows down, iPod on shuffle… Rolling Stones, Amy Winehouse, Mountain Goats, Hank Williams, Radiohead, various Motown, whatever …everything that came on sounded like I hadn’t heard it in years.

Sometimes in high school and college, when gas was cheap, I’d drive around aimlessly with the windows down for hours on end playing music too loud, getting lost, finding my way back. The first hint of springtime weather always reminds me of this.

Yesterday we walked a stretch of the Beltline between Glenwood Park and Boulevard. We saw a cold storage building with what looked like effigies hung outside, walked across the cool arched bridge over Ormewood, and took lots of photos. By the end of it my shoes were full of sand and we were planning our next walk. I hope we can see most of it before the kudzu grows too thick. Walking it makes me see what a fucking tragedy it will be if it never gets built. Many parts of this city are as beautiful as anywhere I’ve been in their own backwards way, and are fascinating to watch change (or not change) through the seasons.

Grilled mushroom burgers

There was also a lot of good eating, with trips to Highland Bakery (order the Country Fried Steak Benedict), The Pecan in College Park (delicious but overpriced Southern cooking), and to my back yard to fire up the grill for the first time this year (grilled mushrooms are going to go in almost everything I make for myself for the foreseeable future).

It may sound like some hippy shit, but I’m trying to just appreciate life and tune out all the bullshit that doesn’t matter. I find myself stopping in all sorts of places to take in the air or the sounds or the sights or the company and commit them to memory. Like Amber dancing to cheesy 80s songs from her old box of 45s we were playing an hour or so ago.

That’s what I want to spend my energy on, and fuck the rest of it.

Say what you will about Michael Scott, but he would never do that.
- Jim Halpert on The Office

When Tennessee shitcanned its second winningest football coach in school history near the end of last season — a man who gave almost 40 years of his life to his university — it signaled not just a change in personnel, but a radical change in philosophy.

UT was one of the last holdouts of an era when coaches were grown at home, and stayed at home. The new era is one of mercenaries, ushered in by the hated Gators and Crimson Tide, but one that was inevitable with rising expectations.

It should never be a surprise when a mercenary does an about face and turns his sword toward the last bag of money when the next bag of money comes along. And while it is never a surprise, it still can be shocking when it actually happens, as it was last night.

So I don’t blame UT athletic director Mike Hamilton for hiring He Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken. He was just trying to give UT fans what they were asking for and did the best he could with the available information and pool of coaching talent. If you’re not careful, your school will give you what you ask for too.

Also, thanks for playing. It’s been a lot of fun.

Tiebreaker

The final tiebreaker, which ended up not being necessary, was “How many points will all 10 SEC bowl-bound teams score in their games combined?” The answer if you’re curious was 262.

Advanced Google Analytics and WordPress integration presentation from WordCamp Atlanta from Rusty Tanton on Vimeo.

This is a video of the presentation I gave at WordCamp Atlanta on January 9, 2009 about integrating Google Analytics with WordPress. I’ve made a few updates to the slides and code samples since I found out afterward it’s against Google’s terms of service to track visitors by name.

Due to aforementioned weather, the schedule has been pushed back an hour today, which means my presentation on advanced Google Analytics-Wordpress integration starts at 11 a.m. instead of 10 a.m. now. Here is the Google Doc I’ll be referencing, which also links to some code samples in case you’re having trouble deciding which session you want to attend in that time slot.

If you didn’t buy a ticket, the good news is due to the weather the organizers will now accept walk-up registrations when they hadn’t planned to before. You’ll need exact change though (the registration page says they’re $55, so I’m presuming that’s how much they still cost).

Looking forward to seeing you there!

All photos taken by Thomas Strickland.

“What the fuck happened to you?” one asked me after I tipped one of the strippers on stage and came back to my seat. He was having trouble believing I wouldn’t say or do something insulting or mean as a matter of course.

My circle of friends when he knew me was ruthless in the verbal abuse we doled out to each other. To get by without taking the brunt of it required a quick wit and an occasional hint of menace. He did not have a quick wit, and as such was frequently on the receiving end of taunts.

I don’t feel like I’m a whole lot different now than I was when he knew me before. Yet it was obvious to him that I am a totally different person now than I was 12 or 13 years ago. He was right. Change can be sneaky like that.

But sometimes change isn’t sneaky. I’m now married, own a home, and am planning to be a dad in the not-too-distant future. I was none of those things as recently as 2008. And now going into 2010 I’m perfectly content to be all those things.

So it’s been a unique year, in that some fundamental life changes have happened more suddenly than I’ve been accustomed to. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time reflecting on them, as I’ve been content to just enjoy the ride.

I feel fortunate the year treated me so well when it hasn’t been kind to many of my friends and acquaintances.

And I’m grateful for the people in my life I can rely on to do what they say they’re going to do. This would all be a lot harder without them.

Marriage and Pistol licenses through this door (photo by Thomas Strickland)

After bandying about several ideas for a wedding ceremony — including standards like Vegas and one which involved us wearing custom ponchos and smashing a vodka-soaked watermelon with a sledge hammer Gallagher-style — Amber and I had settled on just going down to the damn court one day without telling anybody. It was the path of least resistance in terms of both money and effort.

May 9, 2010 will mark the five-year anniversary of us hooking up.^* We consider May 9 our most important anniversary, and as such thought it would be a good day to get married. The problem with May 9, 2010 is it’s a Sunday. So that wouldn’t work since there’s no one in court on Sundays.

After that, we asked our accountant whether there would be a tax advantage to marry this year or next. He ran some numbers and found it wouldn’t make much difference.

Next we decided we should just pick a day we were both off work and go ahead and do it.

We both had the week between Christmas and New Years off, but we were in Augusta the 24th through the 26th. Then I was at my parents’ house the 27th. Then the tree guy was coming on the 30th. Then I was going to the Peach Bowl the 31st.

So that left the 28th and 29th. My parents were married Dec. 28, so that was appealing to us, but Amber’s sister^** Crystal wanted to come to town and couldn’t come that day, so that whittled the day down to the 29th.

Getting the license

We went the 28th to the DeKalb County courthouse (the new one, not the old one) to get our license since we wanted to be in and out the actual day of the ceremony.

If you’ve never been there, you’re missing a treat. It’s seven stories tall, built in a modern architectural style in 1966 and 1967, and towers over the Decatur skyline. Some might call it a monstrosity or a blight, but they don’t understand that true beauty comes from within.

You walk in the front door and go through the metal detectors, then through a hall to the atrium. You can either hop on the elevators or read a directory. Marriage licenses are in the basement, along with pistol licenses and the snack bar.

After taking the elevator to the basement, you wind through a hall past the snack bar. There are two signs for “marriage and pistol licenses” on the wall in the hall, then one more MARRIAGE AND PISTOL LICENSES —> sign outside the room. There are also makeshift printed signs reminding you the court only accepts cash and that there are no ATMs inside.

Inside it’s like a doctor’s waiting room, except there are people wearing suits and wedding dresses filling out forms instead of sick people.

They give you a clipboard with explicit instructions not to write on the instructions page. The form asked if we were related, had “sex” fields under the bride and groom sections even though gay marriage isn’t allowed in Georgia, and was generally confusing.

We turned in our form and were asked to hold up our hands and swear we were telling the truth. Then we paid our $58 (cash only) fee, and were given an envelope containing our license and AIDS and Sickle Cell Anemia information packets.

The ceremony

*press* Hello? *unpress* (photo by Thomas Strickland)

Ceremonies are held on the first floor rather than in the basement. Instead of taking the elevator downstairs, you just walk past the atrium and turn right, where there’s another long hall, only lined with wooden pews. To the left is the door labeled Magistrate Court, and an intercom and directions that say to press the green button.

We mentioned Crystal came with us (this is now today, Dec. 29). We also asked our friends Thomas and Nikki to come and take photos. None of us really wanted to push the button, but I eventually did.

(press) “Hello…” (unpress)

“Yes?”

(press) “We’re here for a wedding. Do we just sit down?” (unpress)

“Yes, we’ll come out.”

Waiting for the DeKalb County Magistrate Court judge (photo by Thomas Strickland)

So we sat and waited. And waited. Other people who hadn’t seen us buzz came up and buzzed, equally as befuddled. Eventually someone came out and said they would collect marriage licenses, and so I handed her ours.

We waited some more, and more people buzzed. Wedding hours were from 1:30 to 3, and we were starting to get a little worried they would turn us away after not finishing the rest of the queue before quitting time. The woman answering the buzzer told yet someone else that the weddings would start when the judge arrived. He was more than half an hour late.

This fellow missed the entire wedding (photo by Thomas Strickland)

Things finally started moving along a little after 2, and we saw it was moving quickly enough that we didn’t really need to worry. Other than that little bit of anxiety, I have no complaints, because the people watching was superb.

There were several couples ahead of us, including one accompanied by an entourage of at least 30 people. When their ceremony started, someone from their party arrived late and tried to buzz in, and when the buzzer operator wouldn’t let him in, he barged in and we could hear him being chewed out over the intercom.

“Hey, you can’t come in here! Wait outside!”

She ended up letting him in though.

Wedding ceremony inside DeKalb County Courthouse (photo by Thomas Strickland)

Whenever a couple would finish, the waiting couples sitting on the pews would clap for them. It wasn’t a hearty clapping though, as some people wouldn’t be bothered.

When the couple with the entourage finished, the fellow who was late complained he’d missed the entire ceremony. As we learned, ceremonies don’t take long.

We were called not long after, and led to the first small room on the left. It was cramped, maybe 8×8, making us wonder aloud how the entire entourage fit in there. It was decorated with Christmas lights and tinsel.

We stood near the far wall, and the judge behind the podium. He told Thomas and Nikki to stand against the wall opposite us, and Crystal stood next to Amber, but a couple of feet away.

You may kiss the bride and pick up your pistol license in the basement (photo by Thomas Strickland)

Then he asked us to move over so we were centered in front of the State of Georgia seal, and asked if we were going to exchange rings. We weren’t.

He told us to look at each other and not at him, then went through a standard-sounding set of vows. We each said “I do” twice, kissed, and that was that.

When we left, the couples in the hall clapped for us.

The reception

Amber, Crystal, Nikki, Thomas and I had lunch at The Brickstore Pub. We split some pretzels, and I had a brat, brunswick stew, and an IPA.

The waitress told us she was getting married in April, and that she wished she could just go to the courthouse and get it out of the way.

Just married! (photo by Thomas Strickland)

Big thanks goes to Thomas for taking our photos and to Nikki and Crystal for being there!

^* – If my future child is reading this, “hooking up” is a phrase people used in the late 20th century and early 21st century to describe having sex without being in a committed relationship.

^** – Technically not related, but sister nonetheless.