The Strangest Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
The Stranger's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 | | 8:32 pm |
For those of you who pray or light candles
I have a good friend, MS, who could use your prayers and good thoughts. She's having some major medical problems at the moment and is pretty scared. She's one of the most kind and giving people that I know and the world would be a bit less shiny without her (yes, it's that serious). She's asked for people to pray for her or light candles (or whatever else they do to ask or push the power that be to help her out). Please give her whatever help you can. Current Mood: determined | | Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 | | 4:16 pm |
| | Thursday, July 5th, 2007 | | 8:47 am |
Transformers Movie, no spoilers
I cannot describe the joy and excitement that I felt watching the new Transformers movie with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) shoes_the_dog yesterday. I loved the cartoon when I was his age and to see him reacting EXACTLY as I would have at his age, and to be able to share something that I have enjoyed for so long with him... wow. Just wow. Plus, he was really good about not spoiling the movie for the others out at sidhefire's place when we went back there for fireworks. Current Mood: Proud | | Monday, July 2nd, 2007 | | 7:26 pm |
Changes around the house
I've got a new friend, M., staying in my third bedroom for the summer. He's a neat guy, teaches physics (that's why he's here for the summer), and is a poly pagan. Why can't I have this kind of luck with scratch tickets? Today the accountant at work, who had previously been a veterinary tech, showed up and asked if I knew anyone who would want a 6 month old female mouse (along with food, bedding, mouse house, and all accessories). It looks like shoes_the_dog and I have a pet again. Her name is Sandy and she's pretty cute. | | Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 | | 7:47 pm |
Not in my neighborhood?
So, as you may know, much of the world is crawling with zombies at this time. shoes_the_dog and I had just gotten home from picking him up early from school when the first of our neighbors threw her quickly-rotting body in front of our car. There would have been a bigger mess if it had been moving at the time. I rushed him inside and grabbed the pair of splitting mauls from out back. It's really hard to swing two splitting mauls at once, but it saved my life. Aparently the invisibility field that seems to envelope my house affects the living dead, too, because most of the neighbors have left us alone. We're holed up for the moment, but I haven't allowed myself more than a moment or two at a go with my eyes off of the property lines. Packing is taking quite a while. I have emails out to friends, but have yet to get any responses back. My cellphone and the land line are both out, but I still seem to have Internet access somehow. Dammit. It would seem that I'm down to only a quarter tank of gas in the car. The truck is full, but it's up at the road, where the neighbors are eating that annoying yappy dog. I may have to dash for it when they're done. Remember, if you see me later and I just moan, kill me. | | Saturday, May 26th, 2007 | | 11:22 pm |
Misdirected emergencies
[snit] So twice today (OK, last night really) people have tried to get ahold of me in what they considered to be somewhat of an emergency. Both of them used only one method of trying to get in touch with me (one by instant message on a network that I was not logged into, and another by SMS message on my cell phone (I had the ringer/alert tone off)). If you have an emergency (I know that one of them wasn't actually an emergency, but the jury is still out on the other), please try more than one method of getting in contact with me. I have a home telephone and cellular telephone. They should be your first methods of contacting me. [/snit] In other news, sidhefire and I had a wonderful day today working in my yard, shopping for plants, crashing through the woods out at her place, making and eating pad thai, and hot tubbing. It was most excellent. Current Mood:  contentCurrent Music: mechanical clock ticking | | Monday, May 21st, 2007 | | 6:35 am |
A distinct lack of posting on my part
I feel the need to post, but almost always have trouble coming up with something of sufficient consequence to post about. While I really enjoy reading up on the little day-to-day goings-on of the people on my friends list, I usually don't assume that the details of my day will be all that important to other people. Am I way out in left field here? Would you guys like to hear (read) more about what I do? If so, what would you like to hear more about? Like I said, I don't just assume that the small details of my day are all that interesting, but you might. In other news, I just brought my twice-a-month Fantasy Hero game to an interim close, and will be getting to play in a temporary game of Starwars (West End, 2nd edition) while I recharge my GM batteries and get inspired again. I've been running a highly successful D&D 3.5 Eberron campaign for a couple of months on alternating Saturdays and have recently started to play in an every-other-Tuesday Forgotten Realms campaign. Wow. It sure feels nice to be able to play for a bit, instead of running every game that I'm in. | | Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 | | 2:54 pm |
| | Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 | | 9:04 am |
| | Saturday, January 6th, 2007 | | 7:41 pm |
| | Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 | | 7:28 am |
miscellania
If one places spaghetti sauce on bread, instead of over pasta, and melts mozzarella cheese over it, instead of sprinkling parmesan cheese on it, children who don't want spaghetti for dinner are quite content to eat "pizza". ----- Oh dear, cub scout uniforms are really expensive. To boot, shoes_the_dog needs the tiger cub version, which differs from the normal cub scout uniform in the hat, socks, neckerchief, slide, and belt. Pretty much only the shirt and pants will be the same next year. Does anyone out there have a spare or left-over tiger cub or cub scout uniform? I'm looking at over $100 for his uniform if I have to buy one brand new. There is a uniform bank (free or low-cost previously used uniforms) in Tacoma, apparently, but they are only open on weekends and may or may not have the parts that he needs. ----- Moustache wax is really hard to find in Thurston County, but I have found one place that does carry it. I'll be going back often now, as I've been waxing my moustache up pretty well every day since Halloween. It looks like it's the long-term trend now. ----- My twice-monthly Fantasy Hero game was a bust on Sunday, with four of the six players canceling. Argh. | | Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 | | 6:28 pm |
Note to self: dinner improvement
So, I learned a valuable lesson tonight (although I should have been able to surmise this without having gone through the process of creating it first). When one substitutes half-and-half for regular milk when making clam chowder, the result is significantly better than average. Highly recommended. Current Mood: sated, food coma | | Thursday, November 16th, 2006 | | 8:56 pm |
Enter The Cub Scount
So, shoes_the_dog and I spent a good chunk of this evening at his first Tiger Cub meeting. Fortunately or otherwise, it was a pack meeting and not just a den meeting. There must have been about 40 boys between the ages of six and maybe eight or nine there. He had a lot of fun, but felt sad that he didn't have anything to offer when they were asking the boys to report on what they had been doing in their dens. To boot, the meeting ran past 20:00 (8PM for the world-time challenged), which is his normal bedtime. As a result, we had to rush through getting ready for bed and the story tonight was very brief. I still don't know if he's really going to want to continue going to meetings in the long run. I tried to emphasize the fact that, with meetings running late and us getting home past his normal bed time, there wouldn't be much room (if any) for a bed-time story on those nights. The jury's still out on whether or not he feels up to that. On the plus side, the $85.00 that I had been quoted to get him started as a Tiger Cub is incorrect. It's far cheaper than that. Current Mood: Harried | | Monday, October 30th, 2006 | | 1:19 pm |
| | Sunday, October 15th, 2006 | | 11:10 am |
Unexpected meme information
So, the surprising thing about this is that, given the somewhat odd spelling of my first name, there was anyone besides me with the combination of both names. On a more heartening note, there are over 47,000 people in the US with my last name. Talk about lots of relatives. Current Mood: bewildered | | Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 | | 6:02 pm |
Aggression
So, I've started lifting again (thanks to sidhefire for the loan of her Bowflex). I had stopped back in January because the the stress of trying to find time to lift was overshadowing the health benefits of lifting. I packed on a bit of weight in the ensuing months. Thankfully, the summer allowed me to shed about 30 of those extra pounds, but sadly, some of it was muscle (not all by any stretch). One interesting thing that I have noted is that when I'm actively lifting, I tend to be more reactive to my environment (often in a negative or hostile way) and more aggressive in general. I wonder if it is due to a higher level of testosterone in my body. Testosterone is one of the key hormones that signals muscle growth in the human body (which is part of why your average male bodybuilder is significantly more bulky than all but the biggest of the female bodybuilders in the world) and tends to show up in levels commensurate with the growth of the musculature. I don't know what to do with this information, aside from being more careful about what I say and do in general, but it is interesting. -- In an aside, I'll be home tomorrow (2006-10-12), as shoes_the_dog has been suspended from school again. *SIGH* -- Now I'm off to see what I can do to help him understand that he has to respond when he's told to do things at school, and in a positive manner. Current Mood: introspective and exasperated | | Saturday, October 7th, 2006 | | 1:28 am |
| | Friday, September 29th, 2006 | | 9:37 pm |
New userpics!
Thanks to ulesegisa, I have new userpics! I'll be featuring them in the future, but I couldn't pass up on this one. | | Thursday, September 28th, 2006 | | 5:59 pm |
Blood pressure in the green again
So, a couple of months back I had my blood pressure taken and it was recorded at 160-something over 90-something. I was told, in very real terms, that with numbers like that I was cruising for a heart attack (especially at 31 years old). For the last couple of months I have been working on keeping hydrated and eating the foods that help keep blood pressure under control. Also, I started walking on my lunch breaks again (2.0 to 2.5 miles in 1/2 hour) instead of sitting in the break room and playing computer games. Almost three weeks ago I re-started my resistance training that I had abandoned near the beginning of the year, as my schedule got too crazy and I was getting really stressed about not working out (the fix, oddly, was to just quit working out for a while). While out grocery shopping this morning (see previous post for information about why I was home during the day on a Thursday), I stopped into the store's pharmacy and checked my blood pressure again, as I sometimes do (I had done this twice previously since the scary numbers were brought to my attention, each time with slightly better results). I measured myself at 133 over 86 with a resting heart rate of 64. Much better! This is within the "normal" range, although I can still bring it down a bit more, I'm sure. Yay for hydration, nutrition, and exercise! An apple a day has been shown to shave as much as three to five points off of your systolic blood pressure. It really can keep the doctor away! Current Mood: relieved | | 11:36 am |
First Grade Suspension
So, shoes_the_dog's school called me at just before 15:00 yesterday and told me that I had to immediately come and pick him up from school. He's in a special classroom for kids with behavior problems. It seems that his misbehavior became too much for even them to deal with. Also, the suspended him for the entirety of today. I can't imagine what is so scary about a six-year-old that requied that he be suspended today (or that suspension for one day would fix). Last year the teacher of this class was very good at getting him to have better days in general, and, by the end of the year he was pretty consistently having avarage to good days. The school district decided that he wasn't "mainstreaming" kids quickly enough, so the shunted him off to another job and got a new teacher. So far, I'm not impressed. My boy has consistently had a ton of trouble since starting the school year, and regularly (more often than not) comes home with a daily behavior report (standard operating procedure for this particular class) that places him on the lowest level possible. Sure, some of his bad behavior is attributable to my separation/impending-divorce with goldfish42 (his mother), but not to this degree. Sure, some difficulties are to be expected in a case like this. Additionally, his behavior is pretty well never this bad away from school. Not even in his new daycare (about 15 to 20 minutes before and maybe two hours after school daily) does he have this level of trouble. I may have to sit down with his teacher (along with goldfish42) soonish (assuming that parent-teacher conferences doen't come very soon) and discuss what is going on. Maybe it's not her; maybe it's not her methods; but I doubt it. Current Mood:  frustrated |
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
