Chuggnutt!

Month: June 2003

  • Wildfire

    This weekend saw the outbreak of the Davis Fire, located about 12 miles southwest of LaPine. Not close enough to us to pose any threat, but today the winds shifted (a “wind inversion” over Bend, the news reported) and smoke from the fire blanketed the area, making everything hazy. So much so, in fact, that the light was tinted red-orange, and the sun was so obscured as to appear as a red disk. Eerie.

    And around noon, we noticed that ash was falling, like light snow.

    And the fire season opens with a bang.

  • Lawn Triage

    I’ve decided one of the big drawbacks to owning your own home is the lawn. The problem is, it’s such a nice benefit, too.

    Our lawn is in a sickly state. Part of the problem is that we live in Central Oregon, which is in large part the High Desert— during the summer there are extremes of temperatures where the mercury can soar into the 90s during the day and drop to freezing at night, during the winter it’s uniformly cold, and year-round it’s fairly dry. So right there, this area is extra hard on lawns. If you can get them started in the sandy, sometimes-alkali soil, they require a lot of water and care.

    Despite all this, there are many, many nice lawns here. Hell, we even have a huge number of golf courses in the area, so I know lawns can be done. So what’s the deal with my lawn?

    It’s irregularly shaped, with lots of curves. This makes mowing it a pain. It’s got several small pine trees, a couple of fir trees, a small birch and of course, juniper trees growing in it, and they suck up a lot of the water. We have a crappy irrigation system, which seems to selectively miss parts of the lawn. And finally, we don’t really know what we’re doing with it. I had to buy Lawn Care for Dummies to buy a clue.

    So today, I dethatched the lawn. “Thatch” is a layer of organic matter that forms between the grass blades and the soil line. (Lawn Care for Dummies, page 198.) When the thatch buildup gets too thick, it hinders healthy lawn growth. So you apparently need to dethatch your lawn every year or two (I’m not really clear on how often), but we hadn’t done this in the 5 years since we’ve moved in. Last year we had the lawn aerated, and that helped a little. So this time, we dethatched.

    We rented a dethatcher, which is kind of a like a big lawn mower, heavier and more awkward. Let me tell you, it’s pretty slick. It went over the grass like a mower, and the whirling steel blades inside shredded the thatch like nobody’s business; just pushing the thing around, you wouldn’t know you were doing anything except for all the dead organic matter being left behind. It actually went pretty quickly, about 45 minutes— the same amount of time, typically, it takes me to mow.

    However, the cleanup of all the thatch took me the next 4 hours. ‘Nuff said.

    Hopefully, this will do something for the lawn. Tomorrow we’re doing more, including spreading seed on the bare parts and fertilizing. And then watering the shit out of it.

    Lawns. Who needs ’em?

  • Blog Updates

    So, in a continuing effort to make this site more like other blogs on the web (say, like Movable Type), with all their admittedly neat ideas, I’ve added a calendar (just off on the top right, there) for the current month which shows what days there have been blog entries. Days that are linked will show the entries from those days.

    Yeah, I keep seeing this on other blog sites and I finally liked it enough to steal it.

    The sad part is, it shows how pitifully few entries I’ve been making lately. I guess that’s why it makes such a nice visual layout— to kick me into gear.

  • GeoURL

    I just found a neat site: GeoURL ICBM Address Server. You register the latitude and longitude of your web site (or your location if the web server housing your site is elsewhere, as in my case) with GeoURL, and they will then show you all the other websites they have registered in proximity to you. Neat!

    Right off the bat I see that within 4 miles of me is UtterlyBoring.com, a blog site run by another local computer geek.

    Damn, this is what the internet is all about.

  • Get Father’s Day

    What a neat Father’s Day it was. I got to lay around the house, drink some beer, played some Dukes of Hazzard: Racing for Home (you haven’t lived until you’ve jumped the General Lee over anything with the horn playing. The reviews at Amazon aren’t so hot for this game, though. Go figure). Also I picked up a couple of books for myself, Groovitude: A Get Fuzzy Treasury, by Darby Conley, and How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker, with a Barnes & Noble gift card from my in-laws.

    Get Fuzzy is one of the funniest strips to come along in awhile (for me, anyway). Reminds me a lot of Bloom County (one of my all time favorite strips) with liberal doses of Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side thrown in.

    So for the past 2 days I’ve been reading Groovitude and chuckling. Interestingly, the early versions of Rob is visually very, very similar to Steve Dallas from Bloom County.

    Ooo! The freshmaker!

  • Dilemma

    I got this in email today, and I liked it. It’s probably making the rounds, but that’s okay.

    You are driving along in your car on a wild, stormy night, when you pass by a bus stop, and you see three people waiting for the bus:

    1. An old lady who looks as if she is about to die.
    2. An old friend who once saved your life.
    3. The perfect partner you have been dreaming about.

    Which one would you choose to offer a ride to, knowing that there could only be one passenger in your car? Think before you continue reading… This is a moral/ethical dilemma that was once actually used as part of a job application.

    . . .

    You could pick up the old lady, because she is going to die, and thus you should save her first; Or you could take the old friend because he once saved your life, and this would be the perfect chance to pay him back. However, you may never be able to find your perfect mate again.

    The candidate who was hired (out of 200 applicants) had no trouble coming up with his answer. He simply answered: “I would give the car keys to my old friend and let him take the lady to the hospital. I would stay behind and wait for the bus with the partner of my dreams.”

    Sometimes, we gain more if we are able to give up our stubborn thought limitations. Never forget to “Think Outside of the Box.”

    However, the correct answer is to run the old lady over and put her out of her misery, have sex with the perfect partner against the bus stop, then drive off with the old friend for some beers.

  • What’s Your Matrix Name?

    Here’s something that might provide amusement to some of you out there in cyberspace: What’s your Matrix name?

    It’s a fun little program I’ve been hacking together over the last few evenings. If you ever wanted to know what your name in the Matrix would be (and we all know this is highly— highly— important), try it out.

  • The Matrix Rebooted

    Yes indeed, saw The Matrix Reloaded Saturday (the 31st), and my short review is: I liked it a lot. Oddly, though, I’ve been seeing some interesting things about this movie: there’s a large portion of people who were big fans of the first movie that hate this movie. My wife seems to be one of them.

    As we left the theater, she said: “Was the first movie that stupid?”

    Upon further clarification, what she means is that there was too much talking and not enough action (although the action that it does have is great). This seems odd to me, because I remember re-watching The Matrix for the first or second time since I originally saw it, and I was struck by how relatively little action there actually was.

    Anyway.

    So I’m not entirely sure why people hated this movie; I have yet to find a good answer, other than of the “there was too much talking” variety which people mean to be slow for them: too much unnecessary filler between action scenes, the rave scene was too long and pointless, etc. etc. If anyone can give me a good, coherent answer to why you might have hated this movie, drop me a line.

    To each his own, I guess. As I said, I liked it quite a lot. The action was great, and the effects were flawless; as I mentioned in my X2 post, there’s pretty much nothing that can’t be done in movie effects anymore. I enjoyed the story, too, and I think most of it makes sense to me… there’s still a few things I’m mulling over.

    I’m thinking I’ll need to see it again before it leaves the theaters; the effects are that good, and it’s definitely a multi-tiered movie that warrants multiple viewings.