Tying Up Loose Ends

It's time again for another rambling post where I write about a lot of stuff that doesn't meet my stringent guidelines for "ramblebility" and therefore doesn't meet the cutoff for justifying individual posts.

First off, I just found out that a friend of mine (whom I once owned in Trivial Pursuit because of my knowledge of the inventor of the little black dress) has been blogging and the ass never bothered to tell me about it until today. Of course, after reading the blog, I understand why. I'm not a computer programmer (although I taught myself Basic somewhere around fifth grade to write my own text games and dabbled in C++, Perl, and Javascript in college), so most of his topics are completely uninteresting to me. However, Hank is quite possibly the most literate computer programmer ever, so I even found a few of his more code monkey intensive posts interesting. Still, I'm not recommending you click the link for his blog on my blogroll unless you find computer programming fascinating (which many otherwise normal people do). I seriously doubt you'll read about poop and bloodthirsty babies on his blog, but that could be a good or a bad thing. Before I move on to another subject, I'd like to take complete credit for his literacy. Sure, dude's brilliant in his own right, but then so are most programmers. It's just that not many future programmers spent their formative years surrounded by literary geeks. That's the great thing about going to a small, rural school system. I got to play varsity tennis and Hank was forced to learn creative writing to fit in with the rest of the smart kids. It wasn't like there were enough kids around to give me much competition on the courts or Hank a more math-and-science aligned group of smart kids.

I'm a bit disappointed my kayaking weekend fell through. K and I are busy both weekends of our spring break with things planned long ago and Courtney and Mickey (well, actually only Mickey) have jobs and don't need to take off too many actual work days. Sure we can always do it later, but K won't let me use our tax refund to buy a sea kayak and this makes me sad. I think I'd feel better about the whole thing if I had a kayak of my own in the carport to ignore for most of the year.

It's always a little disconcerting to walk out of a building in the mid-afternoon and it be distinctly cooler outside than it was when you walked in the doors at 7:30 a.m. Yesterday it was in the mid-60s when I walked into the school building and it was just north of 50 and dropping as I walked out the doors for tennis practice. My room lacks windows so I rarely even see the outside environment, much less feel it, for almost eight hours a day during the school year. Stepping outside into drastically unexpected conditions is much similar to how I expect awakening from cryogenics twenty years into the future would be.

I stopped by a gas station today to get gas and I stopped inside to get a drink. While I was waiting in line a girl came up to her mom with a candy bar, then noticed the white chocolate Reese's Cup display at the cash register. Instead of going back to put up her Skor bar, she just puts the Skor in the Reese's display and takes her preferred candy. All the mom says to her is, "You like those, don't you?" What kind of mom doesn't tell the lazy kid to put the unwanted candy bar back where it belongs? What kind of mother are you? You rank somewhere along the lines of the turds who are too lazy to take their grocery carts to the cart corral. Your laziness (or acceptance of your child's) is just making the lives of underpaid, likely uninsured, employees that much more difficult. At least with the candy bar you're not increasing the risk to damage to other people's vehicles. But you are risking me popping you kid in the back of the head.

Finally, I think I know the reason that the reading level of my blog is always so low. Despite my vocabulary, my average word length is just over four letters per word. I must use a lot of prepositions. I'm guessing the only thing keeping the algorithm from giving me a single-digit grade reading level is my average sentence length being around 25 words. Personally, I think I should get extra grade levels just for combining small words in a way that makes it sound like I'm using a lot of big words.

Tomorrow I discuss just how much a year of my life is worth.