Meat For The Hellbound

I found myself musing on a particular facet of my personality earlier but no one happened to be on instant messenger for me to develop the thought further. Then I remembered I have a damn blog for this sort of thing! A poor, unloved, practically abandoned blog… What can I say, my heart belongs to twitter now. I am a victim of an increasingly shortened online attention span.

But I digress. Oh yes, my musing. It has dawned on me that I seem to always find myself in the sort of gray, twilight zone between informed amateur and ‘proficient enough to do a professional job’. I love reading and learning things, but I seem to lack the drive to hone my knowledge into anything more than sort of ‘Oh yeah, I read something about that one time’ or ‘I understand the basic principals of this’. Practice makes perfect, but so much of the time I forget to actually do the practice part. Either that or my interests lead me down more theoretical path where there isn’t really anything to practice. Man, after I write this out, I realize that it sounds like I’m just incredibly lazy. I’m not sure that’s really it though. I just sort of lose interest once I’ve learned a certain amount of information about a topic. Sort of like how I have now lost interest in writing this. Heh.

I am a terrible terrible blog owner.
In other news, Screw You WordPress 2.8!

I’ve been reading Field Notes from a Catastrophe for book club, and as well as being really depressing, it has also made me reevaluate, once again, what I can do to improve my energy efficiency. I have several avenues to explore, but the one that I considering the most is making the jump from mostly Compact Fluorescent bulbs to LED bulbs. I just got done wandering around the house with a scrap of paper and here’s what I found out about my current usage:

* Halogen under cabinet bulbs
** 18″ Fluorescent bulbs
*** I learned when I moved in that if I put a CF in this socket, it blows out the bulb. I wasted 3 before I gave up. :-/

I’m going to congratulate myself on having more Compact Fluorescent bulbs than regular ones, but it’s not by a very large margin. I obviously have a lot of room for improvement, especially in the basement. I’m not sure I’m even going to be able to find replacements for the special bulbs though. These are things like the bulbs in the fridge (CFs do well in cold, so those are out… Not sure about LEDs though) and some really small bulbs that go in a decorative lamp. I might be able to find small enough LEDs to fit in the decorative lamp, but I’d be concerned about matching the color of them to that of the CF that is also in it.

So anyway, all of this leaves me wondering how many of these bulbs I could replace with LED bulbs. I think I’d like to shoot for replacing at least 1/4 of the total bulb count (10ish bulbs) with LEDs, but that depends a lot on what kind of lighting I’m going to get from them. I read a lot, and as a result I tend to use brighter bulbs than the average joe. I usually go with 75 or 100 watt bulbs, so output is a concern. The spectrum is another. I’ve learned to live with the color of CFs, but are LEDs going to be too ‘blue’ for my tastes? Do they make full spectrum LEDs?

One thing I would like to do is get timer or ambient light sensor fixtures for outside. I leave my porch light on all the time, and it would save a lot if I could have it only on in the evening/night time. Perhaps an LED would work well out there? I know if I turn the CFs off during the winter, they take upwards of a day to turn back on in the cold. Would an LED do the same?

So many questions, and there is an unfortunate lack of real information on LED bulbs out there at the moment. I wish Consumer Reports would do a write up on them or something. They are pricey enough that I’d rather not just buy some and experiment.

If I ever move out of Iowa I know one of the things I will miss will be Anderson & Erickson milk. I think it is pretty common to form preferences toward the food you have eaten your entire life, but for the most part I paid very little attention to the company or their products… that is until the put someone new in charge of their advertising.

For the last year or so A&E has been using the same word over and over again in their ads, most noticeably their billboards, and their other marketing materials. I’ve seen ads for ridiculously tasty yogurt, ridiculously refreshing lemonade, ridiculously whateverthefuck dip, and a ridiculously overused, poorly selected word:

ri·dic·u·lous
–adjective
causing or worthy of ridicule or derision; absurd; preposterous.

rid·i·cule
–noun
1. speech or action intended to cause contemptuous laughter at a person or thing; derision.
–verb (used with object)
2. to deride; make fun of.

I really doubt the intent of their ads is to let you know that their lemonade’s refreshing quality is worthy of your contempt, or that the taste of their yogurt deserves to be mocked. I understand that they could be using a normally negative adverb to increase the intensity of the overall statement. And I could understand a one time use of the word; everyone misuses a word now and then (intentionally or unintentionally). But I just can’t shake the feeling that whoever dreamed up this word usage is under the mistaken impression that it means “extremely”. Still, if that isn’t the case, there are so many other negative intensifiers out there to choose from. Why must they keep abusing ridiculous? Why not awfully, or disgustingly? How about dreadfully or insanely? For chrissake, just pick something different! You can’t build an ad campaign around a single word!

Still no updates eh?
So sorry, I’ve got nothing
Here, read something good

Part of the joy of allowing small, furry animals of the feline persuasion to live in your house with you is the litter box cleaning routine. If you do something the same way often enough, the cats will eventually just accept that is the way things are and go with it. Unfortunately, this makes it very difficult to STOP them from doing something they’ve come to accept as routine.

The cats have two litter boxes that sit next to each other on the back porch. Every few days or so, I wander back there for litter duty and one (or both) of the cats always comes along to supervise. Cats tend to be really picky about their litter, and want the cleanest possible pile of dirt in which to do their business. So they get REALLY excited when I clean the boxes cause they know they will be soiling pristine litter, and that is waaaay better than stuff that is unclean. Sometimes (most of the time), they get so excited by the prospect of clean litter boxes that while my back is turned they will rush into the 2nd box and go to town… even if I haven’t cleaned it yet. That leads to them being becoming very agitated when I am banging the other box around during the cleaning process. Not only do they want clean, virgin, white sands in their boxes, but they always want complete silence. And what else is there to do if you are mid-dump and there is a loud noise directly next to your box? Well obviously you should flee the box at top speed, even if you aren’t quite done. Alana will be more than happy to clean up all the litter and poo you just left strewn across the floor in your haste to escape. It’s cool. No really.

As much as I would like them to stop trying to use the boxes while I am cleaning them, they just don’t really seem to GET it. They sit and watch me bang and crash and make lots of noise, and I really wish they would put two and two together and wait until I am DONE to try and use the other box. It might be a competition thing, cause if Miyu doesn’t get in there right away, Icky might come along and get to use it before her! Or it might just be that they are idiots. Or perhaps they just hate me and enjoy watching me clean shit off the floor halfway across the room.

I occasionally have dreams in which I dream about something and then tell one of my dream companions about it. It also usually provides me with a moment of lucidity as I always seem to realize that I’m dreaming about a dream while still dreaming. It turns into this bizarre Russian Nesting Doll scenario, as I almost always end up telling someone about it once I wake up.

Anyway, I had a dream last night in which I was dreaming that Brian and I were in bed asleep when I woke up to the sound of heavy footsteps nearing the bedroom. Then a large, intimidating man entered the bedroom and asked us where the ice cream scoop was. I then woke up (in the dream) and told dream Brian about it and mentioned how weird these meta-dreams are.

Nurse: “Well, Brian’s all ready to go. He was a model patient”

Me: “Oh good. So no problems?”

Nurse: “Nope, none at all. When he woke up, I told him we were all done and he said ‘Really!?‘. Then he kind of drifted off to sleep again. I woke him up and told him I was going to go get you, and he said ‘Okay… but why?’ so I told him it was because we were all done and he said ‘Really!?‘ again.”

Hooray! It’s the end of the month and I have once again burnt through my stash of backup posts. So I guess you get another lame-o review of my progress.

• I didn’t miss any days this year. Yay! That means there was a solid 30 days of hot hot blog posting action.
• All in all, there were 32 total posts made.
• Of those 32 posts, 10 were tagged “Half-Assed”. But I personally feel they were much less half-assed than last years half-assed posts.
• I don’t feel I ‘resorted’ to posting cat pictures this year. It was more a decision to cut myself some slack and just go ahead and post stupid cat pictures on Sundays. Oddly enough, this seems to have lead to half-assed posts with much more content than usual.
• As usual I now see all sorts of spelling/grammatical errors, but I am still lazy to go fix them.
• I still wish wordpress had better list handling…

So all in all, I think I did a marginally better job this year. I certainly didn’t feel it was as much of a burden as last year. I still didn’t sign up for the official contest part, but that’s mostly because I don’t want anyone to read this stupid thing. I realize that seems rather silly, as I take the time to write these things. But I can’t help it. So please don’t read my blog if you stumble upon it. Okay?

I can’t believe I’ve never posted this one before.

To the deepest part
Of the human heart
The fear of death expands
Till we crack the code
We have always known
But could never understand
On a circuit board
We will soon be born
Again, again, again, again
From: Arc of Time, Bright Eyes