Dan's Webpage (because everyone loves a farce)

Summer summer time. Summertime.

2011-08-16T17:45:00.008-05:00

Well. Hmm. So. I didn't realize that I'd put off blogging here so long, that all of my more recent attempts to write something here were still saved drafts — a digital monument to my usual difficulties matching execution to ambition. Consistently matching, let's say. Be a bit more charitable.

This summer has been strange. It hasn't been great, but then I wouldn't say that it's been all bad by any means — I just don't feel like I've been able to get much of a handle on it. For a while I thought that might be OK, but I think I don't have the detachment or the demeanor to just roll with whatever summer gives me, if it's going to be all mercurial.

I need to make sense of things. Funny how easy it is to forget how you work.

One thing that's really saved me this summer is my Scavenger Hunt, a daydream that I surprised myself by following through on. It's still amazing to me that I can make a list of stuff I think is cool and/or hard to find, and people will send me pictures of it. Even two weeks from the end I still get excited when I see a really good photo.

After it's done I'll give a breakdown of what it was like and what I've learned — because I had to do a lot of this from scratch and I'd definitely do some stuff differently — but I like the idea of doing something like this every other year or so.

OK I need to go to sleep, but I am NOT making another draft. Some other summer highlights:

-Playing LA Noire with my two Fringe buddies in the off-season. I think it's probably best played as a couch co-op game, actually.

-Since the last post I've seen Scott Pilgrim vs the World, Monsters, and Justified season 1, all of which were great.

-Lawrence Reunion. It was cool to see everyone again and it led to us getting together at Jonas and Sarah's for games recently. Hoping to do the same thing when the Lawrentians in the Scavenger Hunt come over in September.

-Bastion. An Xbox Arcade game that I played over the course of a weekend, really good (videogame) story.

-Biking. Sometimes it's been too hot or I've been too lazy or sick or tired but I've biked a lot this summer, enough that I won't feel guilty in the winter.

-I successfully brewed a beer with creeping charlie instead of hops and submitted it to the state fair. I call it Yardwork. Even getting that far was worth all the effort. I've done a lot of weird wine and herb beers too in 1 gallon batches.

-Boardgames. I just got Hex Hex XL and Bang! from Amazon today and this summer I've gotten to try a lot of other good games: 7 Wonders, Carcassonne with the Princess and the Dragon expansion, Shadows over Camelot, and Lord of the Fries all stand out. I sold my copy of Tobago (meh) for a paltry sum yesterday and plan to buy Race for the Galaxy sometime this week.

Visiting

2011-03-01T20:19:00.014-06:00

Working from St. Cloud for most of this week, wrangling errors and prodding people for our current big project. I'm sure to be burnt out by the end of it if I keep letting myself work the hours I have been, but I'm still getting over a very bad cough and in a weird way this feels like a sort of break, being away from my cube for a few days in a row.

This last Friday my mom came down from B-town and we went to dinner at Brasa with my brothers and their wives, as a belated birthday celebration for Our Bold Hero. And afterwards we reconvened (plus one BFAB) at my place for my family's traditional cardgame, Polish Pinochle, and a quick game of Dixit, which I was pleased to be able to introduce to another group of people. It was all pretty fun.

(Someone got offended last time I called it "a little something for the ladies" but Dixit has met with far more tolerance from the various non-gamer ladies I've played it with than any of my other boardgames. I actually bought it with my non-gamer ladyfriends in mind, and it's probably the only boardgame I own that I could have convinced this group to play.)

On Saturday after a quick breakfast, my mom and I went to the Mall of America, very spur of the moment, where I narrowly talked myself out of buying still more boardgames (when am I playing the ones I have?) but did find and purchase a fantastic kitchen rug.

Back at my place we spent the afternoon watching American Pickers and making cheese, which turned out pretty good actually — basil-thyme — then hit up this new-to-me Italian place, Scuzi, for a fantastic happy hour.

After my mom left I joined some friends at a party-already-in-progress at a bar in uptown and whether it was because I hadn't been drinking as much or because it was just such a tonal shift from the rest of my day, I don't think I ever really got into it. In retrospect I should have either drank more or ended my night prematurely.

But since I was d.d. the most memorable thing for me is the drive home, the unreal distracted-driving-commercial comedy of the various drunken personalities in my car. I think someone actually poked me at one point.

Sunday was predictably quiet, which is just as well considering that I had to work for five hours. I expect this week to be quiet too, or rather I'll pretend it is, since I'm not getting back to the Cities until after happy hour anyways.

And then 28

2011-02-13T10:47:00.006-06:00

I seem to have escaped more-or-less unscathed from my birthday yesterday, although I suspect that if I try to get up from the couch again my hangover will be waiting for me.

I'm not sure there's anything to really say about turning 28: as an age it is well and truly meaningless, a little fake even. The odometer has rolled over again, and I have the same adomania, the same Torschlusspanik that I had on New Year's Day — but no plans to act on it just yet. See hangover, above.

Yesterday night we watched Josie and the Pussycats and played the product-placement drinking game, which is sort of a birthday tradition at this point. I hadn't seen that movie since last year and I'd almost forgotten how much I love it. I cut the guest list this year after last year's craziness, but there were still almost too many people for both my space and the game.

Brooke and Jenna actually brought a set of leopard ears for me to wear during the party, ensuring that there will be still more pictures of me out there that are completely unsuitable for a Facebook pic. I made several abortive attempts to text Markie before she arrived, so she could set me up for the "They're not bunny they're leopard, and they're not stupid they're special" line from the movie. But alas.

Anyways, before the main event I had Brooke, Barry, Jenna and Kevin over for a game of Last Night on Earth, the online "We've Got to Go Back!" variant. It was fun, even though I played the zombies and got absolutely destroyed. We had some good but overpriced pizza for dinner, followed by some Dairy Queen cake, then played King's Cup as people trickled in.

I'd been mulling all week about what I actually wanted to do on my birthday, and I think what I actually came up with was pretty close to ideal. I don't remember everything — which is to be expected with 10 people sending me drinks all night — but it seems like there was so much that could have gone wrong yesterday but didn't.

Barry and Kevin spent the night upstairs in the Infinite Bunkhouse (I keep forgetting to call it that) and we stayed up long after everyone else left. I didn't get to sleep until past 4. I feel like I deserve some recognition for not being exhausted right now.

Vacation

2011-01-19T12:05:00.008-06:00

The place where I work is making me spend the week and a half of vacation I'd saved up now, because we're switching to a new vacation system for the next fiscal year (and I'm sure this helps their bookkeeping), so this is the first of many days off for me.

This doesn't actually disrupt much: even with the holidays over I hadn't yet settled into a winter routine.

Part of the problem has been balance. I like hanging out with my Lost buddies every Tuesday, but we haven't found a show that's engaging enough to get together for every single week. (Or rather we have, and it's Fringe, but they aren't caught up yet.) I like going to the bars maybe once a week for a cheap happy hour, but my usual drinking buddy Barry is only free on Fridays, the absolute worst day to go out to our local.

And I like playing boardgames — I love playing Last Night on Earth — but finding four other people who want to play can be pretty hard.

(Last weekend I was desperate to play some zombies again and so despite my (somewhat absurd) misgivings about being around so many randoms, I ended up going to a game night hosted by some of Rae's friends. Unfortunately I forgot to explain a key rule and my zombies beat the heroes narrowly and unfairly... so I may have ruined my chances of playing LNoE with that group in the future.)

I don't expect to fall into any reasonable pattern now, with so many lazy days stretching out before me, but one of things I really got into in 2010 was boardgames, particularly cooperative ones, and my experience so far has been that I'll need to spread that around between multiple social groups in order to play the amount I want to.

I mentioned in my last post that I actually met some new people last year and part of the reason why I decided to play Introvert About Town was my inability to coordinate enough people to do practically any of the stuff I love often enough, to balance everything out to my satisfaction.

Right now I want to be playing zombies every week, and in the spring I'll want to hit the patios, and weather permitting I'd like to have a fire every weekend this fall. You need people for that stuff and I need a variety so that I don't get burned out or try to strangle anyone. Once this year gets started in earnest and I have a more-or-less routine "Lost" Night and a "Girls" Night and a "Bros" Night like I did last year, I'll have to figure out where everything is going to go.

In the meantime though: I'm on vacation, everyone is at work during the day, and I have all the time in the world to try and get fun stuff organized. It looks like I'll escape my least favorite month relatively unscathed.

2010

2011-01-02T11:11:00.007-06:00

The year closed out with a long, odd week. Today it feels like my New Year's Day hangover has lingered, minus physical symbols but still putting me in that strange detached headspace typical of certain hangovers.

My thought earlier today was that I feel like an "adult," which is basically not something anyone over, say, 23 should be saying with any sort of earnestness. I know. There's no one reason for it: I haven't taken on any new responsibilities, haven't completed any sort of rite of manhood, and haven't been forced to reconsider my behavior or my place in the world.

Still, for the first time in a while... I dunno quite how to describe it. Not clarity, not contentment, and certainly not motivation. Detachment is getting close to it. Control maybe, or rather a change from being in control of a car on an icy road to being in control of the television remote on a Sunday night.

I buzzed my head after Christmas. My hair had been getting very shaggy, and I like to believe that I store my stress there, and that by cutting it off I can shed my troubles like snakeskin. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

This time I don't think it did, and I had some major stress since, which I'm not about to describe in detail to the Internet of all people (don't worry everything is fine now). And that, combined with all the petty worries and the slow buildup of missed opportunities and bad decisions that come with living life with any sort of engagement — it was a problem.

But on Friday night I went to a good party, had fun, got drunk, stayed up extremely late, and then as my hangover all-too-slowly went away on Saturday, I was left feeling like this. Whatever this is.

This is the blank slate that I was hoping for: 2011. I've fumbled slightly here and there already (keep in mind I was hungover or drunk for a good percentage of early 2011, as previously mentioned), but I haven't made any real mistakes yet, haven't hurt or been hurt, and everything that was bothering me — either I've successfully locked it away where I don't have to worry about it, or it'll catch up with me again at some point, hopefully not today.

But I wouldn't describe myself as content. Or restless for that matter. Hard to say too much more about my state of mind without crossing the line between description and composition, in any case.

I took a nap on Saturday, which is saying something in itself, and essentially skipped most of the day. Since I wasn't about to leave the house I had my cousin Marz and her b/f Aeron over for some Last Night on Earth.

I played the zombies and won not easily, but certainly definitively: by killing every single Hero until they had no one left to play as. Not since I first beat Forbidden Island have I been so amazed at the outcome of a boardgame. I could probably have gone to sleep then, but with those two here it was worth my while to stay up and 100% some LBP levels. They're probably the only two people I know who aren't sick of the game.

This morning I put on my Pajama Pants of Motivation (Cursed - Player Cannot Leave The House) dinked around, and made a batch of homemade cheese. My brother Josh and his wife Erin got me the book Wild Fermentation for Christmas and I've been making a lot of stuff from there in the past week, since I haven't had the time for real brewing.

Christmas this year was good, since I haven't mentioned it here yet. We had three Christmases, our family and then both sides of extended relatives, over the course of one weekend before actual Christmas, up at my parents' house.

The family Christmas in particular was a lot of fun, with some good jokes and an epic late-night game of Polish Pinochle. The presents I bought for that seem to have been well-received, and I got a lot of cool stuff I've already been using.

This meant however, that on actual Christmas Eve I was down here in the Cities, both because I had no desire to go to Brainerd just to attend midnight mass and because special guest Lawrentians Ben and Nora were in town staying at my house with their dog Finn.

My friend Pete, who took me along to New Year's this week, came to hang out early in the evening while his fiance was at work (we watched Chronos, which is surprisingly bad), but when he left I started to feel weird about feeling weird about not celebrating Christmas on the day.

I know I tend to go on about "Yuletide Dan" in December, and my friends seem to enjoy the conceit, but with all my stuff done, I had expected to be able to treat Christmas Eve as just another day.

Instead I ended up having to embrace it. I turned on the lights, and the music, and the Yule Log channel, and stayed up reading until Ben and Nora got back from their Christmastime activities for some quality hanging out. If I ever again hear the 1953 novelty song "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas," it will be too soon.

We'll see how this week goes. It's a nothing, five days of work, no holidays, my first regular week in a while although some of the deadlines at work might make it hectic. I have no resolutions for the new year, more like stuff I could tell myself I didn't have time to do in December and for which I now have no excuse.

As for 2010, it was a mixed bag for me, particularly towards the end. I had fun, biked in the summer, met some cool people, became better friends with others, had campfires in the fall, and even went out of my comfort zone a few times — often with poor results, but I don't regret any of that. My brother got married, nobody died, and I started homebrewing, which will probably be something I'm still doing 20 years from now. More so than in 2009, I figured out how I should live my life in order to be happy, even if I didn't always follow through on that wisdom.

At the same time, 2010 was another year where I was sick in the summer for several weeks (the lesson, in part, is never to convalesce on a couch that's too soft). I also dropped the ball on a lot of things I should have done, and in the last half of the year I developed a nasty tendency to get myself down about stupid people or past business or both, when I should be having fun. Some of my worst days in years were in 2010, which reflects well on how good I have it... but still, I'm glad to see the end of it.

I have so little concept of 2011 though, it's crazy.

Meters to go before I sleep

2010-12-05T10:08:00.007-06:00

Hard to believe it's been a month; I thought two weeks maybe. But then I've been distracted, exhausted this week. Some dim, overoptimistic bureaucrat in my hindbrain is convinced that I only need five or six hours of sleep a night. Anything more is counter-revolutionary.

On Friday I finally had to give up and stay in. I think I was in bed for 12 hours, but I managed to sleep for 8, which is enough. Whatever my brain is up to, I just wish I didn't need me as an audience to do it. At the very least it could clue me in.

Anyways, hopefully that's done — I feel OK today, and I was able to outlast all comers at Barry's b-day party yesterday.

As a pre-party we played Ticket to Ride; I'd talked to Barry a few times about getting it for myself, but after reading some reviews he decided to just bite the bullet and order it off Amazon. Great news for me as that means I can continue collecting light fantasy stuff to complement Last Night on Earth. It seems socially convenient to become the go-to for the type of boardgames I really really want to play.

(I've been brainstorming a Christmas variant of the zombie game, with Santa as an added NPC, but I have no sense of how to do the balancing. Going to try it with three player deaths, maybe scale that down.)

Ticket to Ride was fun though. I can't help but think of it as Risk For People Who Like People. There's still the competition to dominate the map, the limited space. But. Instead of armies and dice rolls you have train cars and cards, conflict is a race not a battle, no one gets kicked out early, and there is an end to the game, definitive and swift.

Probably it was good that I cut my teeth on Monopoly, Risk, Illuminati — long cruel games, sure to build character, to teach people to compete without taking it personally. But these days I can only play Illuminati, for its humor and depth.

I can't stand the other two, and part of the reason I've been getting into boardgames recently is that I'm finally discovering ones that encourage the kinds of social interactions I want to have: quick games that are strategic, but where nothing is taken personally. Games that aren't a battleground but rather an excuse, like the magic of a bar (we can sit around and talk and yet it's doing something — six years drinking and I'm still fascinated by that).

I think I've mentioned this before, but my aversion to direct conflict has been growing for a while. I was in debate for five years, mediocre although I had my moments. I used to think that I liked arguments, but by the time I was out of college I'd realized that, no, I like ideas, I like differing points of view.

Monopoly, Risk — these games encourage arguments, and an actual argument just isn't worth it unless the stakes (personal, political, what have you) are actually high, unless the argument actually matters.

As a general rule it doesn't, and I've seen too many conversations grind to a halt to admit the argument, like it's some movie star shown up suddenly at a small party. I've seen too many arguments in bad faith, with fallacies on both sides, implications that are veiled insults meant to get a rise out of the other person without looking like the bad guy. I'm done with that, done with any little argument that doesn't have a healthy sense of humor.

(Which is another reason why I still make an exception for Illuminati. Somehow, we've more-or-less figured that one out: there's nothing like a tongue-in-cheek Illuminati argument, where everyone knows exactly what everyone else is up to and we're just having a bit of sport about how evil the other guy is compared to our sainted selves.)

As a pre-party, Ticket to Ride was a bit of a failure unfortunately, but only due to timing. I was literally late to the party and so we didn't finish quite quickly enough.

With the recent snow the roads were still terrible, so instead of dining out we had some pizza (only one of the three pizzas was veggie and once I realized it was the clear favorite I had to eat fast to get a decent dinner before everyone else finished it), then played some Soul Caliber (where I'm still the button-mashing king), some Tekken (where my mashing failed me as ever), and sat around listening to music over a muted episode of She-Ra.

I'm somewhat worried that Barry didn't do quite everything he'd have wished this year: certainly I run my birthdays more tyrannically, I feel like it's an understandable prerogative. But whatever, I had a good time, seems like everyone did.

Today I did my usual Sunday Psych and Bloody Mary ritual, with Markie thrown in the mix because this episode was a Twin Peaks homage.

On Friday I'd thought, rather ambitiously, that I might go into work yesterday, but I just didn't have time between running a week's worth of errands and undoing a week's worth of insomnia. Today though, well, that's just my fault, but I won't go into any of that. Suffice it to say that, except for Psych, even my slacking off today wasn't what it should have been.

(I'm thinking it may be that these pajama bottoms are cursed, or more prosaically, that it's difficult to actually start a day without proper pants on. When I put these on this morning I was committing myself to a day where I didn't leave the house.)

Bottling Day

2010-11-02T22:03:00.002-05:00

Today was bottling day for my unnamed Dunkelweizen — I was able to confirm that it hadn't been contaminated, but it's hard to judge much else from an uncarbonated, room temperature sample.

Bottling takes forever, hours from start to finish if you clean everything, but I had some good podcasts to listen to (My Brother, My Brother, and Me is tailor-made for this and many other occasions) and I'd still rather be packaging five gallons of beer than mowing the lawn or putting together that toilet downstairs. Let future Dan worry about that stuff, if he gets to have all this delicious beer.

Halloween was fun. I went as Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter and no I didn't know beforehand that was a recently published book — although I'm not too surprised. After so, so many years of bad costumes I had decided it was worth spending the time and effort on something good, and I didn't regret it.

My plans for a low-key get-together on Friday fell through (basically: people either couldn't come or flaked, and because I'd sent out an invite rather than just calling around, I was stuck at home in case someone did show: lesson learned) but on Saturday everyone came over to pre-party here. We watched Scream, played a half-round of Last Night on Earth, then headed out to Kevin's friends' party.

As was pointed out a few times, Kevin apparently hadn't seen these people for five years, but it turned out to be a good time nevertheless. The party had good costumes, and there was a large garbage bin that had ingeniously been turned into a cooler for four kegs of homebrew. I remember a bit of conversation with a guy who'd dressed as Philip J. Fry, and then playing many rounds of Tippy Cup without losing one.

The next day Jenna, Kevin, Jess and Our Bold Hero went to Brasa for breakfast and then to Dixie's for their great Bloody Marys. I take partial credit for that plan. Because as usual I had neglected Saturday when planning my Sunday, I got next to nothing done for the rest of the day, unless you count giving out treats.

I have to say, the costumes were noticeably better this year, probably because (like me) all the kids had gone to the huge Halloween costume shop that popped up on the main drag near my house. There were a lot of classic costumes this year, vampires and pirates and fairies, and the best were probably these two little twins that were both dressed up like vampires.

I love giving away candy to trick-or-treaters, but after last year's poor turnout I wasn't expecting so many visitors and so I ended up running out of candy after about an hour. Next year I'll have to double or triple my candy supply so I can keep doling out candy by the fistful as is my wont.

Snickers this year mainly, if you're wondering. Because of that great commercial with the disturbing fake lady. I love that commercial.

Bottling notwithstanding, tonight is my night off — at the spur of the moment yesterday I got together with my Lost buddies Markie and Matt for happy hour and a flick. (The movie was Dance of the Dead, a B- zombie movie that I've been sitting on for a few weeks now. Maybe a little better than you'd expect.) I felt more-or-less fine today, but I've got hunting this weekend and I've been going through my hard cider recently at a pretty steady clip.

State of the Dan: October 2010

2010-10-17T21:39:00.005-05:00

I'm blogging from a new room after some redecorating last month, because this September my friend Adam's little brother David came to stay with me while he looked for a house. He's there now, renting out the place (which is ridiculously close to the Blue Door, my local bar) while they sort out the paperwork.

Unless you count Ned, our mostly theoretical junior year roommate, David was easily the most unobtrusive person I've ever lived with — but it was odd having another person in my space again after over a year in this house alone.

It was nice to have someone around to play Halo with after dinner, mind you, but I'm used to being the only living thing here larger than a nickel. (Spiders or centipedes any bigger than that are killed on sight.) Even though it was no inconvenience at all having someone up in the attic I never use, it is nice to have the place to my self again.

With the warm weather I've been trying to have more campfires, which is harder to do than you'd think when no one I know likes having a fire quite as much as I do, they'd all rather hang out inside or at a bar for the most part.

I succeeded on Friday though, texting my friend Pete supposedly mere moments before he was about to text me, proposing the same thing at his place. Since the other coworkers from our little company drinking society couldn't make it, and I knew already that all my friends would be gone, cloistered or busy, we had him bring his crew.

Which worked out fine, although since they were more-or-less complete strangers to me, I ran into trouble when we migrated inside and I needed to come up with an appropriate after-party activity.

If I can get two or three more fires in before it gets too cold for that sort of thing, I'll be pretty satisfied; I'd be further along on that front but for the nasty flu I had earlier this month. Hopefully my last! I got a flu shot this year for the first time ever, so maybe I won't be sick all winter for once.

On Saturday, slightly hungover (there was a flask of good whiskey at the fire on Friday), Our Bold Hero drove Barry and Jenna down to 'kato, where we met up with Brooke and Kevin for lots of drinks, a round of the zombie boardgame I've been foisting on everyone, and what turned out to be a pretty good concert. I took many mostly terrible pictures.

(I'm hoping that someone else managed to get a good picture of me, but I guess we'll see: I hate most pictures of myself, but I can't use the photo from my brother's wedding on Facebook for too much longer.)

Today despite our grand plans to leave 'kato early (or should it be 'Kato? Not sure what the rule would be for an abbreviated proper noun...), the three of us limped home after noon and I basically wasted the rest of the day recovering, when I should've been mowing or any number of other chores.

This could have been a really bad week for me, and maybe it was. There were lot of intermittent irritations that I don't want to get into here, but I've resisted the urge to deliver some sort of verdict. Right now it's just a collection of events, some of which were good times. Why do I feel the need to label a bad day or a bad week like that anyways? No one is keeping track.

So yeah, what have I been up to more generally? I've got two things going in the brewery downstairs: some hard cider and an as-yet unnamed Dunkelweizen (a proper weizen this time, not a pretend one like my Dangerweizen). I've been baking bread as usual, that good stuff that takes like 20-odd hours from start to finish.

I've also started to cook myself stir-fry, which means my fridge actually has vegetables in it fairly regularly these days, amazing. Forgot to wash my hands after I chopped up the Scotch Bonnets for the last batch though — that was a big mistake.

I've been trying to get together with my Lost buddies Markie and Matt more, but until they catch up on Fringe we don't have a good replacement show. Last time they were over we watched Pontypool instead.

I really, really recommend that movie, but I'm also trying to tell people as little as possible because if I hadn't known what I knew about it going in, if I hadn't even known what kind of movie it was, it might have been one of my favorite movies of all time. I've been assuring people I've recommended it to that I'm not trying to trick them into seeing something they'd find offensive.

(Ideally you'd take some sort of test to see if you'd like it, and then a man would come deliver an unmarked DVD to your door and start the movie for you so you don't get any spoilers from the Main Menu by accident. Any trailer or review for that movie is far too much information.)

My brothers have been around more since Halo: Reach came out; I think we're going to eventually settle back into our winter routine of seeing each other at least once a week for videogames or a movie. I like Reach, although I haven't really played it by myself since I beat the (difficult) single player campaign.

Without going into specifics, work has been crazy. I'm on a different project from the other quality assurance people right now and it makes me a bit nervous not to have my fingers in the usual pies. I just know that someone, somewhere, is doing something incorrectly and no one is going to catch it.

There are many things as-yet undone in the house, some of it stupid little stuff, but I've either been unmotivated or exhausted whenever I'd had the time to get to anything.

I'll try to get to this again soon; one of the perks of this new room setup is that the keyboard always plays nice with the computer now, so blogging isn't the chore it used to be.

The Main Event

2010-08-03T20:06:00.012-05:00

Now my August calendar: that's nothing like my July calendar. No weddings, no out of town events, nothing much at all planned so far, actually. The whiteboard calendar in my room (they're great, btw) is as-yet uncluttered.

(Part of me knows I'll get sick of that, start panicking on some Friday when I realize belatedly that, these days, I actually have to plan in advance in order to get something social going. I'd be more sympathetic if that part of me weren't so terrible at saving money.)

This weekend was the Main Event, my youngest brother's wedding. Just not being sick this time around, as I was for Matt's wedding, was enough to make me enthusiastic.

My boss let me off work a couple hours early on Thursday, so I had time to get all of my stuff together and then to remember everything I would have otherwise forgotten.

I actually stopped to get Josh and Erin's gift on the way up north, knowing full well from watching the registry all week that there was no way they'd already have all the cool stuff they wanted from Williams-Sonoma.

Oh Williams-Sonoma. If I were a millionaire...

Some poor driving — not entirely uncharacteristic of me, I'll admit, but still unexpected — took a sizable chunk out of my bonus free time, but I still arrived in B-town before dinner, the usual three meal's worth of food that my mom likes to cook up for company.

(She'd procured all the meat for this weekend locally from this cool meat market by Pine River, which was really cool as it meant I didn't have to feel awkward about my "happy meat" thing. Usually if it's a really special occasion I just make an exception and feel a bit guilty about it afterwards.)

I opened up my homebrewed Dangerweizen before dinner, but the bottle was mysteriously flat. Not sure if everyone believed that bottle was the first dud, but in any case when it was clear that would be a dealbreaker I got to finish the bottle by making colaweizens. And those were great.

That night we went to the Pickle Factory up in Nisswa and played a fair bit of bar shuffleboard. NOT a bad game. Although I'm not a huge fan of that bar: they have ads up for beers they don't carry, which always bugs me in a dive, but it's a decent place and probably the best in that area for our purposes. It was a good time.

As always when I go home I had to disable whatever ticking clock my parents had in my room before I could actually sleep. This one was better than the last one, they know my issue, but it was still audible. I'm totally used to the background sounds of my own home these days, but I still can't stand a ticking clock.

On Friday morning I attended a pre-wedding golf scramble, i.e. there are four people on your team and you play the best shot out of the four each team. Way less frustrating than regular golf, which I'm quite terrible at. I was on the amateur team with the groom and two of his friends and we did... not well, comparatively, but over the course of 18 holes even I had some shots I liked, shots our team used.

Afterwards we had a snack and some beers at the clubhouse with the rest of the teams, I think there were about 20 of us, and then went home to prepare for the rehearsal.

I'd brought three different shirts for this: my first choice I didn't wear because everyone else was wearing long-sleeved rather than short-sleeved dress shirts, and I was ready to leave in my second before I tore the collar while adjusting the tie. My first choice pants, at least, were deemed acceptable despite their cargo pockets. I ended up wearing what I call my "young Southern preacher" outfit.

It's strange being back in our church these days, just hanging out, after the countless hours I spent there as a kid for mass and bible study and puppet practice (I have mentioned that, right?). The geography of that place is one of those immutable impressions that reminds me it wasn't totally someone else's life, all that back way back.

Since they were hosting the groom's dinner at their place, we'd done most of the last-minute prep work at my parents' house before we dressed for church, and by the time we got back there the party was getting started.

There were surprisingly few of my relatives present, so I spent a lot of time talking to Paul (my brother's brother-in-law, or "brother from another brother" as I started calling him last Wednesday) and a few of Josh's friends whom I'd met earlier.

After dessert Matt and I gave a funny speech we'd prepared, which went over pretty well but suffered a bit from our mutual lack of practice. Our practice readings were so much snappier! I don't know why I thought we could pull off delayed wordplay at the actual event.

(I'm not used to working off of a script on the fly, although I wouldn't say my extemporaneous speech at the wedding reception was particularly great either. Years of speech and debate can only carry you so far when you're years out of practice.)

It had been a long, sleepless week for me already so when everything was winding down I went up to my room to sleep. I tried to read Maelstorm for a bit beforehand but I could barely keep my eyes open.

On the day of the wedding, Saturday, we went to the church at 11 for some getting ready pictures, but since we were guys and wouldn't take long at all to get dressed, all the guys ended up playing Scrabble downstairs for at least an hour. I think I cared a little too much that my team was winning: another good reason why I shouldn't be playing Scrabble very often.

My tux fit fine, black with a creamy green vest, although I had to enlist someone else's help to figure out the suspenders, with the usual running joke about how Matt had taken all my mechanical aptitude.

I'm not sure I'd recommend the Men's Warehouse in the future: two of the guys had white suspenders randomly, and one of the other groomsmen had two shoes with different sizes. My dad and grandpa barely got their tuxes in time: M.W. lost the dimensions my brother had called in and had to ship them from Texas at the last minute.

For the wedding my other brother Matt and I were co-bestmen, but I guess because I was the oldest I had the traditional place in the lineup. The maid of honor and I walked behind the flower girl and ring bearer to make sure they made it up to the front OK. That part went better than at rehearsal.

Everything about the actual wedding was great. I don't like the way this priest sounds when he preaches, but the homily was short and to the point, and the rest of the ceremony went smoothly. I ended up holding the rings for longer than expected when we mixed up where we were in the program, but that was just amusing. I kept worrying about dropping them of course, everyone hearing a metallic clink in a pause between songs.

After the wedding we hid out downstairs while people filed out, then walked to the waiting party bus through the now-traditional gauntlet of bubbles.

Pictures, drinks (surprisingly tasty champagne), etc. On the way to the reception, which was at the same resort we'd played golf at on Friday, Matt's wife Amy managed to get a request through to the radio station to play "Small Town Girl" and everyone rocked out.

The reception was more my element than a lot of the rest of the wedding. A lot of the same people I see at my cousins' weddings were there, and I talked to all the usual suspects, drank some beers, and went out on the patio whenever I needed to cool off. Danced to the hoped-for club songs and (by request) that Darkness song I like. There was a surprising lack of slow or older music for the other generations, but I think that's just what most weddings do now.

All the food was amazing: I brought a big styrofoam container of cake back to the Cities with me the next day when everyone was leaving. Josh and Erin did not do a public gift-opening, which I think is a great decision all around.

I'd planned to do a few hours of work when I got back to the Cities on Sunday, but I ended up splitting my time between character creation for Monday's Shadowrun game — that's this fantasy-meets-cyberpunk RPG I've started to play with Jess and Rae's friends — and the end of Maelstorm, which was pretty good.

Interesting post-apocalyptic setting, especially the conception of the Internet. That said, I still did fall asleep reading it, again, a few times on Sunday after that long weekend.

Recovery Sunday

2010-07-25T13:13:00.006-05:00

Long day yesterday — I drove an hour and a half each way to my little cousin's grad party, both to make an appearance and because my dad had tried to coordinate it so my immediate family would all show up at the same time. Unfortunately my parents were late and my brothers (understandably) didn't choose to make the drive, so I ended up milling around for while without anyone to really talk to. Even if I'd had a mind to, I was too exhausted from a string of very late nights to attempt smalltalk with strangers.

I imagine one of the pleasures of being an old man some day will be that I can just wander off by myself in that situation, without having to care that people might think I'm sad or crazy.

(Deleted a long, long section of the post here after some second thoughts. Don't worry! It wasn't about being sad or crazy! It might have been too personal though, or I might just be out of practice at that sort of sharing. Certainly I used to publish similar stuff. Probably I should start journaling again in, I dunno, my journal — but the Blogger 'New Post' window has a nice way of keeping my introspection moving.)

Eventually my parents did show up and we talked about the wedding for a bit. I guess I'll be playing golf next week: a game that, like tennis, I never got better than terrible at despite years of lessons. But it's a best-shot scramble! So I'm thinking I can just practice my putting and let everyone else do the rest of the work.

I now have a better sense of the whole wedding schedule, which I suppose is a useful thing for the co–best man to know. Oh, and I tried a Busch Lite at the grad party and hated it, and remembered why I hated it. Also useful info.

The drive back wasn't bad, especially since I'd already called Shelley and arranged to meet up with her for drinks in Maple Grove. I don't think I'd seen her at all since the 4th, so that was cool.

The main event yesterday was a showing of Dance Flick, my punishment for having lost a bet to my brother's-brother-in-law Paul at Josh's bachelor party a few weeks ago. That was what was waiting for me when I got back to St. Paul.

Josh and his wife-to-be Erin came over too for solidarity, but the movie was terrible. Not as terrible as I'd thought it would be, in that there were some good jokes, but there were still plenty of moments when I had to look away from the screen in disgust. Never ever watch Dance Flick, but I suppose if you're reading this you're either someone who knows that already or someone who'll watch it anyways.

(But! It was a victory for crazy bets, of which I am a huge fan. Got to keep my eye out for further opportunities.)

Afterwards I kicked everyone out and went straight to bed, the first time in many many days that I'd gone to sleep before 2 in the morning. Caitlin's going-away, Inception, the campfire I had Friday night — it's been a long week and I'm enjoying the chance to recover.

Our Bold Hero vs. The Arcane Projects

2010-07-09T22:22:00.007-05:00

I worked 12 hours today, which makes it slightly galling to be stuck in on a Friday night — but on the other hand I did get off at 8 without calling anyone first, and I expect that this next week will have its fair share of excitement. At the Door yesterday I prophesied that I'd be sick of everyone just in time for Brooke's annual Potlatch (or as I like to think of it: The Friendship Olympics) on Saturday. In remote Mankato, where there is no escape from the fun.

My Fourth of July was pretty tame: I had Shelley, Nick, Jenna and Barry over for beer, brats, and some bocce ball, but to the untrained observer I doubt our interaction was distinguishable from your everyday grilling.

(Minor disappointment of the summer: the guy I usually get my brats from has been consistently out of the really good stuff. We made do on the Fourth with my latest batch of venison brats, but I'd be grilling way more if I had a good supply of fantastic bratwurst like I did last year.)

Since then I've been working through happy hour all week, and I'm too thrifty to organize an outing at some other time, so I feel like I haven't done much of anything. On Wednesday I finally opened up a bottle from my first batch of beer, which I'm calling Dangerweizen.

First because it's a Dunkelweizen recipe I adapted from a German dark beer recipe called Danger Knows No Favorites, and second because I miscalculated the sugar when I bottled it, and I was worried for a few days that my basement beer cellar would be celebrating the Fourth of July early.

It's not great but it's decent-to-good and that's more than enough for me. Part of the reason I brewed a weizen in the first place was so that, if it turned out bad, I could just turn it into delicious colaweizen.

Excited to try it with some other people: there are multiple parties tomorrow after my mandatory overtime. (Which can get exhausting — but the money is good. I'm just trying not to get burnt out like last time my team was overcapacity like this.) For now I'm off to bed; I've had enough of staring at screens today.

Our Bold Hero vs the Summer Social Calendar

2010-06-27T20:51:00.006-05:00

Sitting at home, still winding down from my littlest brother's bachelor party this weekend. I played paintball for the first time on Saturday; that was pretty fun. Almost like a good game of Modern Warfare II come to life, with considerably more sweating.

This summer is so odd for me socially: I'm used to having fixed plans for two or three of my weekdays and wide open weekends, but for the past month I've had weddings and various other parties-aforethought every weekend and nothing during the week. This weekend: Josh's bachelor party. Last weekend: Cari's wedding. Looking out ahead I see, for sure, two parties and a wedding in July.

I wish I had some pictures from Cari's wedding to post, but for whatever reason every picture I took that night makes my friends look like monsters. Monsters. I've never trusted this new camera.

That was a good time though. The wedding and reception both were at this farmhouse in Wisconsin, Spotted Cow was on tap, goats were available for feeding, and I was able to fill my plate with fresh delicious pork. I hadn't been to a good, casual wedding like that since my high school friend Danielle got married years ago now.

The awesome food was my downfall. I expected — nay, I looked forward to! — getting riotously drunk with my friends for the first time since, probably March I think, but after eight beers I was still surprisingly sober. Sensing too that the drunk I was all-too-slowly headed towards wouldn't be a good one if I ever did get there, I went back to Minnesota that night with Shelley rather than camping out as originally planned.

Luckily "I Believe in a Thing Called Love," the song I'd been hoping to hear at this wedding, played just before I left. My dancing to that one was pretty bad — in fact my dancing in general that night really was subpar I think — but there was a Drunken Dinosaur dance with Jenna late in the evening which I'm fairly proud of.

I'm also OK with my dancing at the wedding the weekend before in Iowa. Even if a Kei$ha was implicated at some point. My cousin's wedding was more typically formal: church, dance in a ballroom at a reception hall, the kind of wedding I go to a few times every year.

It was still fun though: there was a candy buffet, good beer, the dance floor stayed active all night, the bridesmaids had capes at the reception, and, because there were too many of my male cousins in the wedding party to assemble our usual cousins' rowdy table, they placed me with my parents and her sister's family, who I don't get to see often enough.

I talked to their oldest daughter, my most simpatico cousin, for a good chunk of the night, and ended up having her and her boyfriend over for Little Big Planet last Tuesday — apparently someone out there wasn't sick of playing that with me yet.

I've got another blog post in the works, stuff that didn't really fit in here, so maybe there'll be another update quicker than usual.

But I've also been twittering for a few weeks now as @ourboldhero, figuring out what if anything I wanted to do with that service. (I follow some funny webcomic and podcast people on there.) Bonus: my delicious links from the ourboldhero.com sidebar will show up there too.

Memorial Day weekend

2010-06-03T22:17:00.003-05:00

So this past weekend my brothers and I went up north (it's Up North in my head of course) to our family's cabin, which as I may have explained before is one of several cabins at a former resort that we share with our extended family.

For Matt and Josh that meant fishing; for me it meant mostly a lot of reading. In fact I spent a good chunk of Sunday reading inside because the weather was too dreary to justify leaving the cabin. I got a lot of reading and thinking done this weekend, for lack of shinier distractions.

(The best thing I read was Tim Powers' Three Days to Never, which I found a lot easier to read than his similar secret history–style fantasy Earthquake Weather. I think he may have sacrificed some of the latter book's idea density to achieve that, but I don't remember liking Earthquake Weather this much so maybe that's OK?

I also liked Signal to Noise, a sci-fi novel — supposedly "hyperpunk" but let's just ignore that label — about codes and communication in a world with virtual reality interfaces.)

I'm not sure how I feel about the cabin. I had a lot of fun there as a kid, and I know that probably-eventually I'll be really glad I have access to something like that, but then again it's a three hour drive for some reading and a fire, and I have a yard and a couch and as of last week I even have a firepit.

(Still haven't had a fire, maybe this weekend. I have all the supplies but so far I've been having trouble coordinating my friends, the rain, the wind, and my work schedule.)

It's nice to see my relatives and stay up late drinking with them, but as a general rule we don't seem to have many shared interests to talk about when we're not at the campfire cracking jokes. It can be relaxing to be up there, but then again sometimes it's not.

Monday was my brother Matt's birthday, one of only a couple birthdays I can remember without looking it up, so on our way back from the cabin that morning we stopped at my parents' place in B-town for a celebratory fish fry.

As usual I also grabbed a bunch of stuff my parents didn't want anymore: a hammock, a potato masher, an old-school egg beater, and a man-sized semi-circular orange fabric pushpin wall. Yes that. They're planning to have a huge garage sale this weekend and donate whatever is left over, so this was last call for salvage.

5/6/10

2010-05-06T23:19:00.001-05:00

Well I seem to have done it again. What's happened since my birthday? Quite a lot it feels like: the wedding I went to was pretty good, although I'm more excited for the many weddings this summer at which I don't have to worry about driving home, my littlest brother's among them.

There was still snow on the ground when I went to that. Spring is here, I've already mowed the lawn once, gathered up firewood (a firepit is on order: those things are deep magic), pulled weeds, removed a stump from the front yard like a mighty lumberjack ladies, seen my first rabbit, and found the four kittens a stray is raising under my shed.

I don't think I'm really a cat person, but I like cats enough to be considering domesticating these ones for adoption; supposedly it's hard work, but doable if they're young enough. There are ladies from the local cat shelter who are supposed to contact me about this whole situation, but so far no dice. Eight weeks is rumored to be the cutoff point so this is the closest thing I have in my regular life right now to a race against time.

At work on the other hand, there are some Deadlines approaching, and I've been doing and will keep doing some odd hours, which is good because I need the money to pay off home improvement debt etc., but bad because I remember getting fairly burnt out the last time I had a month like what I'm expecting from May.

Odd that you can tell sometimes when you're being dumber than usual. This hasn't been too much of a problem for me lately — if anything, these past few weeks an unfortunate tendency to stay in bed for 20 minutes or so after my alarm has gone off has let me think through a lot of stuff I needed to get a handle on — but even leaving aside all the thoughtless stuff I've said when I'm drunk, I think that sometimes Our Bold Hero will lose access to portions of his brain due to mental exhaustion.

I say "mental exhaustion" but I hesitate to use the word "stress." I remember high school and middle school and stress. That stuff was sweat and razorblades.

These days, like anyone else I'll use "stress" as a shorthand for any number of problems or issues I'm having, in order to eke out a few minutes of leniency from the world at large, but it's been probably 5 years at least since I couldn't sleep because I was worrying about something.

Even if most of my tiny little problems as a 20-something are probably a bigger deal objectively than the ones I had back then — they manifest as heaviness now. Heaviness can wait until the morning.

The issue is that, even though I've learned how to seal off the bulkheads so that my problems can't get to me like they used to, now I'm sealing off the H Deck and captain our men are still down there! I said seal the bulkhead lieutenant but sir that's an order yes sir. And so it goes: you get 3/4 Dan, half-Dan.

I remember right after I bought the house, being pretty dumb for a week or two because I was still trying to process everything and get everything fixed or setup or ordered, although I didn't really notice this was going on at the time. I would walk through Menards looking for something to fix something and the store may as well have been a foggy hedge maze.

More recently, I owed a bunch of taxes this year (forgot to change my withholding after my government house–kickback) and I eventually realized that I should just buy Turbotax because I'd shut down and I couldn't really trust my half-Dan math, plus I wouldn't really be myself until I'd dealt with the tax issue.

(Having to pay meant waiting until the last minute to pay, which was the core of the problem. Normally I file as early as possible and drink the equivalent of my anticipated refund that weekend.)

But it'll be summer soon, that wonderful, relaxing season where I forget how much I hate the winters here, and plus I think that even just being more aware that a dumbening (wait, that's not how you spell dumbening...) is happening should help to prevent a burnout this time. That's the hope at least.

OK, as expected it still takes me forever to write one of these, and longer than forever when I'm out of practice. I haven't worked out a system for blogging here yet, but I bought a new keyboard that actually works most of the time, so I'm gonna keep trying to post here. I've also started putting up smaller quick-hits of the more frivolous social stuff alongside notes on what I drank over at Dan Drinks.

27

2010-02-13T10:04:00.007-06:00

It was my birthday yesterday, and so I had about 15 or so people over for my annual Josie and the Pussycats drinking game party. In retrospect that was more people than I can comfortably fit in my living room — but it was a nice excuse to see everyone, watch a funny movie, and show off the house to those who hadn't seen the place since I bought it last March.

(More so than my birthday it's that upcoming anniversary which reminds me I'm getting older.)

I know 27 doesn't sound like a big deal, but to me it's always been the last of the young person's birthdays, the last birthday you really take notice of before 30. And then it's 35 after that, and then 40, and so on. What's 28? It's nothing. Another notch.

Earlier this week I did some painting downstairs, in the misguided belief that I could make my basement livable before the party. On one podcast I listened to, Jordan, Jessie GO!, they had a long discussion of 27 as a milestone. What stuck out for me was their assertion that, at this point, you basically have to accept responsibility for where you're at in life. It's been your choices that've got you here, because at this point you've probably been the one in charge, more or less completely, for a few years at least.

In my case I have no problem with the sentiment. Even this year, hell this week, I've made some regrettable decisions, but overall I think I did pretty well with my 26th year. Last February I didn't have a house, I wasn't as good of friends with some people whom I've gotten to know a lot better since, and I didn't have any of the useful little skills I've acquired in the course of fixing up this house.

I grilled and biked all the time this summer after spending much of last winter promising myself that I would. Most of the stuff I bought this year, the stuff that will last at least, I bought only after a lot of deliberation — which means that I'm really happy with my fridge but also with this clock that I have to look at every single day.

(I've never needed that much, but I've learned that it's worth it to make sure the stuff around you is pleasing rather than just acceptable. Probably I've told you that's my philosophy with beer and cheese as well.)

I have a plan for 27 — time, luck, and money permitting. I know roughly what I want to do with the house: the basement will have a workshop, a beer cellar, and (eventually) a bedroom. Outside the house in the front I'm doing some sort of terracing so I don't have to risk my life mowing anymore, and on the bedroom side I'm going to plant something that can climb, if I can figure out a way to keep the squirrels from using my trellises as a funtime play area.

But last night's party: pretty good. Cramped, as I said above, but only because the parameters of the event required everyone to squeeze into one room. I could easily have a lot of people here, with the upstairs and soon the downstairs and backyard as well available for spillover.

The game itself, I don't know. With that many people I'm not sure if the game still works. It might lose its impact at 9 or 10 players. Still fun to see Josie again after a year wait though.

I think I'll still always enjoy the occasional game of King's Cup (although we played with the meanspirited old-school rules yesterday, which I certainly won't do again) but drinking games in general have been losing their appeal for me for a while. If I'm getting drunk I'd much rather sit around and have three or four good, strong beers than the eight or nine macrobrews I had last night (no hangover though: birthday miracle!)

Although if I'm just having a few I'm not picky, and I'd better not be because everyone brought beer yesterday. I filled up a trash can with empty cans and bottles this morning and I still can't fit all the leftover beers in the fridge.

OK, I've got to go, there's a wedding I've got to get to. Eventful weekend.

Quick update

2010-01-22T22:58:00.007-06:00

For all my grumbling, this month has passed extremely quickly. And it's warm out! By which I mean: it's occasionally been at or near freezing. Tomorrow is the big day, when maybe the solid inch of ice on my steps will have a chance to melt.

I did nothing tonight, wonderful nothing, and I've had a lot of days like that this week. I worked overtime this weekend, so I suppose this was my attempt to compensate for the missed downtime.

The only day of any note was Wednesday, when I went to Buffalo Wild Wings' trivia night with Rae and Noble Joshua. Our team won, albeit with minimal assistance from me.

(After Lawrence's contest, I'll always be a computer trivia guy — for us it's not about knowing stuff, it's about knowing how to find out what you don't know. In less than three minutes, preferably.)

Trivia was definitely a highlight, all the more so because I had a few setbacks these past few days.

Once again, despite hours of research on the IRS website — I ran through their withholding calculator at least twice! — I think I've messed up my taxes. We'll see how everything shakes out once I get my W-2, etc. but I started investigating this week for any early filing and it does look like I still owe the feds money. Bah.

I have to say, I preferred last year — can't I get thousands of dollars for buying a house again? That was pretty cool.

I also lost my ipod, or it was stolen, who knows. I thought I brought it home from work on Wednesday but there's only so many places something like that could be and I've already torn the place apart. It'll probably turn up, but in the meantime I almost went a little crazy on Thursday without 8 hours of podcasts to listen to.

So. I bought a new ipod. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it seems to get the job done. And since I had a few Best Buy gift certificates left and my old ipod hadn't been working so great lately, I don't feel too guilty.

And that's the end of me; I'm exhausted. Further updates later/soon.

Give me Smarch any day

2010-01-11T21:05:00.007-06:00

It was very cold last week, to the point where I actually bothered to keep my giant gloves on when fumbling for my keys. It's supposed to warm up this week, but I still hate January.

Oh how I hate it. December has so much excitement, and February has that big circle around my birthday — warmer weather too, some years — but January. January.

New Year's Day, with a mess everywhere and a suspicious new year staring you down with its full 3-65. Snow, the certainty of snow. And cold. January isn't the start of winter, but it's the month where you realize what exactly you've gotten yourself into, the month of the hangover.

I usually get a bit of cabin fever by the end of January, and of course that's mainly my fault for never getting into skiing or snowmobiling or ice-fishing or any of the other winter stuff I've tried. As I'm sure I've written at some point while talking about deer hunting, ultimately I'd just prefer to be warm.

My first floor has a-lot-a-lot of green so fingers crossed. I'm still mulling over what color to paint the basement, a green called Painted Turtle was the frontrunner last time I looked at the samples... but now that Ben and Nora are gone and I'm not expecting houseguests for a while again, the impetus to dive into another large project has faded.

I've been hunkering down. Continuing to hunker down. Last week I finished season 2 of a Doctor Who spinoff called Torchwood. Yesterday I watched a surprisingly good horror movie called Broken.

Mostly I've been playing a lot of Modern Warfare II.

It's another one of those games where you shoot strangers online. But I'm also gaining experience and leveling up, like in an RPG. And my guns are gaining experience and the individual attachments for the guns are also gaining experience and there are so so many unlockables.

That game is downright dangerous. On a few occasions I've played until my left hand developed an uncomfortable malady I've taken to calling Modern War Fingers.

Even if I get sick of that game (unlikely from where I'm sitting) I have so many to get to yet that I don't expect to be bored this winter. But I do wish it were over.

Catch up

2010-01-01T11:24:00.012-06:00

I don't want to bore anyone with a tech troubleshooting story but suffice it to say that in the last week or so I finally figured out how to use my keyboard from the comfort of my couch. Apologies to anyone who isn't using an RSS reader like Netvibes to follow this site — I know sporadic blogs can be frustrating when you're checking them the old-fashioned way.

I'll probably be blogging more, not because it's a resolution but because I prettymuch couldn't before and I can now.

Anyways, I'm still doing website quality assurance at a large corporation, still working on the house whenever I get motivated, still watching movies and playing videogames and all that.

I lucked into a good New Year's Eve last night, despite my own laziness. I refuse to go to the bars on New Year's Eve, so I'd planned to stay in and have a quiet night, but Nick and Shelley were interested in the same sort of thing, and then Barry, Jenna and special guest Kevin decided to come too rather than go to Minneapolis like they'd originally planned. Good times.

It was prettymuch 90% King's Cup, but we were a good group for it. Oof, can't do that too often though.

On Wednesday I stayed up well past my bedtime to see off Nora and Ben, who stayed in my attic this week while they were in town for the Christmas, on Tuesday I went out to Sweeney's with my mom and my brother Josh, and on Monday I went over to Nick's to watch the night football game only to see it go into overtime.

I'm a little wiped from all of this excitement actually, but not nearly as exhausted as I'd expect to be. Really looking forward to trying to sleep in tomorrow. I plan on being totally dull all day.

The one with the gigantic computer monitor

2009-10-18T19:10:00.025-05:00

It must be the right phase of the moon tonight, because my wireless keyboard is actually working as intended — which means the triumphant return of living room blogging!

I've felt a bit guilty about not blogging for those of you who actually read this occasionally. Moreover, I think it's bad for me personally to take such a long break from writing. My brain needs to write, and my life seems like it needs more pauses for writing and reading lately.

That's probably the main reason why I'm tired this weekend, although last night at Markie's annual Fall Festivus party I said that it's because I'm coming into work a half hour earlier this month or because I didn't have any heat in the house Friday night. Both of which are true, obviously. I don't know why anyone would lie about facts of this size.

Getting the furnace checked out for winter was a bit of an adventure. I called the guys Xcel uses over to do some preventative maintenance — it doesn't look like a professional has looked at the thing since 2003 — but after taking some readings the furnace man said he couldn't do anything for me and that I should get a new one.

Perhaps understandably, the home warranty people did not buy that line when I contacted them, and they sent out their own subcontractor to inspect the furnace all official-like. To my uninformed eye he seemed to do a much more thorough inspection than the first guy did.

Sometimes I'm perversely proud of this house, like when the electrician saw the ad hoc basement wiring they'd called out on the Truth in Housing, or whenever I show new visitors the hilarious upstairs staircase. I have to admit, when flames shot out a foot from the furnace panel during this guy's inspection... that was one of those times.

There was no CO2 in the air, but the CO2 readings from inside the furnace were really really high, and so the second guy shut it down for liability reasons. I spent Friday night buried in a mound of blankets, but the house only got down to the mid-50's so it wasn't bad.

I'll be far more miserable on the hunting stand in a few weeks, I promise.

Lucky for me that same company was able to send some people out to clean the furnace on Saturday, on my dime still, and I'm told everything is fine now. I'm not sure if I'd rather have the furnace break sometime this winter while it has a clean bill of health and is still covered by my home warranty, or have it shamble on for a few more years so I can save up to replace it with a super-efficient model without putting all my plants in danger.

It's nice to think that I might be able to go at least a year now without having to leave work to let some stranger into my house. Once I actually get the curtains done (I know! I'm getting closer!) I might even go a month without spending over $100 on home improvement.

Yesterday night I was talking to one of Markie and her-Matt's hippie friends — hippie being just about my favorite dysphemism in the world these days — about his buying a house, and I still think it's worth it, despite everything.

(I also really do recommend the 203(k) loan, no matter who you're going through to get it. Kick some ass with that repair money.)

Maybe this is me and my paranoia or maybe it's something very primal, but at night in my various apartments I used to feel like I was surrounded by darkness, and these days I feel like my boundaries are the walls of my house. I'm in my little fortress on the hill, and any trouble that wants to find me has got to come up all of those surprisingly uneven stairs.

Which reminds me. A few days go I watched Tooth and Nail, a post-apocalyptic defend-yourself-against-the-cannibals movie notable mainly for #1. The humanity-runs-of-gas-early apocalypse, still a fresh one as apocalypses go and #2. The casting of Rider Strong (Shawn Hunter from Boy Meets World) as one of the survivors. It was terrible, but that's the sort of nonsense I get up to on my instant queue.

More importantly, I finally watched Little Miss Sunshine this Friday, after having had the disc out for two weeks. (You're welcome Netflix!)

I had such a grudge against that movie, and it didn't help its case by showing me a preview for Sideways and some other movie I hated but can't remember beforehand.

But it won me over. It's amazing now to think of how much I liked American Beauty at the time, when I've seen probably a dozen better movies since then that have the same essential message.

I suppose I should go to bed though; I barely woke up at all today and I'd like to have better odds tomorrow.

In which I don't mention the time I got lost for an entire hour

2009-08-30T11:20:00.010-05:00

As a sop to the poor, housebound thing I'll be in a few months when Minnesota starts to become cold and awful again, I've been biking a fair amount lately. Not a lot — I haven't biked to work yet because I dread going up and down the ramps on Snelling — but prettymuch whenever I'm going to Minneapolis. Where at most it's about 30 minutes to anywhere I'm going.

I've had a few inconsequential, not-entirely-sober falls, and I've gotten pretty turned around in that strange city to the west when coming back at night, but for the most part it's been positive. I can get to Markie's or Town Hall or Cari's, and back again, without getting lost. Basically that's all I ever need to do, though there are rumblings about a more ambitious bike ride in the coming weeks. As long as it's not down that hill in St. Paul. I've pushed my bike back up that enough for one lifetime.

This was a busy week. I pulled out the carpet downstairs, which was dubious even if it wasn't visibly covered with the dread black mold, and I've pulled out what I can of the waterstained particle boards underneath. On Monday I have what I hope is my final code inspection, checking some work on my water heater vent that's been completed for months now.

I also got a letter this week telling me that I'm officially off of St. Paul's vacant house list, which saves me from a $1,000 monitoring fee.

I bought a PS3 Slim, or rather Barry floated the purchase for me for a month so I could play Borderlands co-op with him and Nick on the platform of his choice. Pretty excited about that, since I was planning to purchase one later this year but didn't expect to have the money for a while yet.

I'm sending back the Season 2, Disc 2 DVD of Pushing Daisies as soon as I get it on Monday, so that I can finish watching the (fantastic) series on Blu-ray.

I bought curtains, yes, the expensive curtains from Sears that I was complaining about on Facebook if you saw that, after pricing similar curtains elsewhere. It turns out decent pleated curtains are expensive, outrageously so if you don't get buy readymade from a chain store, and I refuse to get blinds.

(As everyone I've ever lived with has at some point or other noticed, I cannot operate blinds correctly. But I also prefer the look of curtains in any case.)

On Thursday a few of us got together at Cari's for Project Runway, which so far has been enjoyable, the terrible ads we have to watch now that it's on Lifetime notwithstanding. I pre-partied with a homemade and thus way too strong gin-and-tonic before I left, which I'm guessing was my downfall, as Jenna would say.

Downfall because even though I felt fine all night, I woke up at 2 in the morning, startled to find myself throwing up Girl's Night red wine all over my white sheets. I have to say, I'm really, really impressed by the effectiveness of Shout Gel Advanced. They should do a viral marketing campaign featuring twenty-somethings who make bad decisions.

On Friday on the way home from work, I realized I had a flat tire. Like really flat, either because I ran over a nail in the alley that morning or (I can't resist a paranoid twinge) because someone had let the air out. I filled it up again and drove home; it'll be interesting to see if the air has leaked out while it's been in my garage this weekend.

I should mention that when I was walking to my house that night I saw a squirrel, a rabbit, and several birds all fleeing in separate directions from the same spot. Another secret conspiracy against me!

Rather than deal with my car I biked to a coworker's housewarming that night, which was a good time. I don't know those people too well so I got a bit too quippy, which was unfortunate albeit expected.

Everything stayed low-key, but at one point one of his housemates was on my case for occasionally (and legally) biking on the sidewalk, claiming I could kill a pedestrian, which I think is far less likely to happen than my getting hit by a car.

(I can't remember who I was talking to about this a week or so ago, but I don't understand why some bikers insist that we all act like traffic, when casual riders like myself appreciate having the sidewalk as an option. There aren't too many pedestrians to yield to around here at 10 at night, and I don't count on drunk drivers noticing my LED taillight.)

Since I was still a little hungover from Thursday night's debacle, I biked home early, after three hours and three beers. And of course after assuring everyone that three lager beers over that timeframe is not enough to get me drunk, and it isn't, I immediately crashed my bike in a hidden sinkhole in my coworker's front lawn. I'm guessing that no one in the backyard saw that, because how could you not laugh?

Also happening this week: my littlest brother, Josh, is engaged now, which I found out on Thursday at Cari's (same place I found out about Matt, as I recall) so yesterday I had those guys (plus Paul, my brother-in-law once removed) over for pizza and videogames. Which is to say, the usual. I'm sure there will be grander festivities sometime next spring.

Books and circuses

2009-08-09T11:36:00.002-05:00

The walls are painted, the dining room furniture has been placed although I'm already starting to rethink the arrangement, and right now I'm sitting at the computer (which I've set up here in the living room, using the rather large t.v. as a monitor: yes!) eating some of the copious leftovers from last night's visit to Senor Wong. I am apparently the only one in my family who wants to deal with restaurant leftovers. Ridiculous and fortuitous.

It was my parent's anniversary weekend, so after hitting Wong last night we walked over to Cirque de Solei, where the eight of us had seats in the second row.

What I saw of the show was pretty cool, but unfortunately about halfway through we heard sirens in the background... and they had to evacuate everyone to a nearby parking garage to wait out the tornado warning. Picture white pillars everywhere, paint peeling off the ceiling in envelope-sized chunks. I resigned myself to not seeing the rest of the show basically immediately, and after about an hour they made it official and we headed back to Wong to retrieve our cars.

There were some seats available this morning, but not together and not in the second row, so we ended up accepting the refund. I guess that's a free hour of Cirque de Solei then?

For my own entertainment I've been playing Red Faction Guerrilla a.k.a. Explosions on Mars, but I've also been reading a fair amount, most recently God is Dead — the August selection for Noble Joshua's book club. It had some good bits.

I checked out China Mieville's The City and the City a few weeks back — I think he may be my favorite author these days — but it wasn't quite what I expected. I wanted a hundred little ideas, but as far as I could tell there was just one big one.

I'm reading a Tim Powers book at the moment, since he's apparently one of Mieville's influences. It's been slow-going so far though, not because it's bad but because there's been so much to make sense of. Crossing my fingers.

Well, I suppose I should go look at curtains. One of the houses across the street doesn't have any either, and I'd like to be able to look out at the street occasionally without creeping out the neighbors.

In which I triumphantly return

2009-08-04T21:35:00.007-05:00

When we last left Our Bold Hero...

I didn't mean to go dark for quite that long, but blogging does eat up a fair amount of mindshare and I had — still probably have — plenty of more important stuff to think about.

The house continues to be expensive, just less so now than during that fateful month when I had to buy all the major appliances.

I've made a lot of progress: I have a nicely furnished living room now, and I'm sleeping in the bedroom of all places!

(It was only after my brother Matt's wedding that I realized sleeping in my then-damp basement was probably the source of the mild "flu" I'd had for the previous week, but fortunately I never got seriously ill while I was living down there.)

My dad and two of my uncles spent two days here last week helping with some of the stuff I couldn't do, e.g. installing new kitchen stairs, so at this point I'm just a dozen curtains and two gallons of Weeping Willow away from having this place up and running. Then the remainder of my chores will be minor enhancements.

I'm dreading painting the living room though, in part because I used three different colors in my bedroom and it took almost an entire week for me to anal-retentive my way to the end of that project. My hope is that since this green stuff is the only color I'm using, with any luck by the end of the week I should be done painting for a while.

More on what you've missed later, probably-maybe. I need to get through this last push before I add another way to slack off back into my repertoire.

In which I have not yet painted my kitchen

2009-04-12T21:40:00.006-05:00

This is Our Bold Hero, coming to you Galaxy News Radio–style from a makeshift setup in the attic of my new place. My wood floors are done, but I want to paint and hang up some curtains before I move to the main floor. So in the meantime I've been coming up here to use the internet and going down to the basement to sleep and watch t.v.

That basement room is kind of nice, actually. There's not much about it that's correct, but I like what they were trying to do with that loose carpeting and cracked wood paneling. Add in a minifridge, my Xbox 360, and my parents' hunting lodge loveseat and I may never see the sun again.

I'd say that it'll probably be three weeks before I can get really settled in. I lived here for almost two weeks without water until I finally bought a $1 pipe cap for downstairs and turned the water heater on, but the plumber will have plenty to do when he finally arrives tomorrow. You can hear water dripping from prettymuch anywhere in the house.

The awesome fridge is coming on Tuesday glory glory hallelujah, and I should be done painting everything I want to paint (i.e. most of the main floor) by sometime next weekend. My contractor assures me that the garage door will open soon.

There's still plenty to be done besides that, but I look forward to the point where I'm not longer spending all this money and I can just relax, even if everything isn't perfect. Working plumbing and cold beer will help with that.

Arrg

2009-03-20T08:56:00.000-05:00

Snow on the ground! Nature, what did I just say?!

As Red Leader would say

2009-03-19T18:42:00.006-05:00

It's been a quick week, and I've been tired for most of it. There've been too many hours at work, too many loose ends to take care of before I finally buy the house on Monday. That's the official day now.

It annoys me — and annoys my brother's anxious fiancee even more — that I won't be able to move all my stuff in immediately because of all the work that needs to be done on the house, but I'm planning to spend this weekend packing and (if all goes well at closing) much of next week repairing the house and getting settled in. The best part about this move will be not having to do it again in a couple years.

In other news, I just got back from a week in Bonita Springs with my family (except for Matt, who'll be in Florida while I'm moving out of his place). I didn't do anything particularly exciting, but it was warm and relaxing down there and that was all I needed.

We ate out for dinner every night — I'm trying to eat only "happy meat" at least until Lent is over, so I had a lot of shrimp and stone crab and grouper — but during the day everyone prettymuch did their own thing.

My thing was hanging out by the pool and reading: I must have read at least 3,000 pages last week, all of it sci-fi. Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light was pretty good, but I was only about five pages into Dan Simmons' The Hollow Man before I remembered why I'd never bother to finish the Hyperion Cantos.

When I wasn't reading I was usually either biking around while listening to podcasts, or wandering the nearby outdoor mall. The World Market store there had cool furniture and imported beer, although I only looked longingly at both offerings. Neither was worth carting all the way home.

On Tuesday or Wednesday of last week we saw The Watchmen, the story to which I only vaguely remembered from when I read it seven or eight years ago. Apparently there was a squid? And some stuff about a boat, which I'm sure I skipped over.

Anyways, I thought Rorschach was extremely well done and that's all I wanted. I can't remember where I heard it, but I like the idea that geeks should see the movie as an accessory to the graphic novel rather than an adaptation.

My littlest brother Josh left on Friday and my mom arrived late that night, so on Saturday we hit up a garden center and two flea markets in nearby Fort Myers.

There was a lot of cool stuff at the garden center (I've been thinking about getting a tropical for the bathroom), but I didn't see lemon verbena or miracle fruit. I might have to go to the seed catalog for some lemon verbena this year if I can't find a plant. After killing my last one and not being able to find another place in Minnesota that has them, I consider finding and growing lemon verbena a personal challenge.

Fleamasters, the second flea market we went to, was bustling with tourists and stocked with an incredible variety of cheap merchandise. It was like the Minnesota State Fair — without the gouging or the impassible crowds. I got some (happy meat–hypocritical) leather belts and an old book on growing herbs, and managed to purchase a neat German goblet at one of the garage sale booths just before the whole place shut down. St. Paul garage sales are up there with sandals on the list of things I'm looking forward to this spring.

I really like the idea that I left for Florida for a week and almost all the snow melted while I was gone and we're not going to have any more until November. Yeah, let's do that.