Blame the gays

Will wonders never cease?

Like republicans supporting marriage equality. Nice story about the mayor of San Diego having a last minute change of heart. This paragraph from his press conference is what the whole issue is all about:

"As I reflected on the choices that I had before me last night, I just could not bring myself to tell an entire group of people in our community that they were less important, less worthy and less deserving of the rights and responsibilities of marriage -- than anyone else -- simply because of their sexual orientation."

Well done Mr. Mayor.

Monday Monday

So the weekend is over and I'm really glad. I worked myself almost to death. After the painting prep on Saturday I spent about 11 hours on Sunday doing the actual painting. The first coat of paint took almost 7 hours, with most of that being the cutting in and edging. After a short break for dinner I was back at it for the next round but luckily it went a lot faster. I finally finished around 22:00 and then spent an hour pulling the blue tape off of everything before the paint dried too much. Around 23:00 I decided it was all I could do for the night and went to bed. It's looking pretty good so far, but I've got several pieces of blue tape on the wall marking spots that I need to touch up. Fortunately that should take less than an hour and I can call it done. Unfortunately all of the furniture and the blinds are piled in the middle of the room so I've got that to deal with. I'll post some pictures once everything is back together. Since it's looking so good and making the house feel so much more comfortable, I'm kind of anxious to continue the painting up the stairwell and to the other rooms. The living room should have been the worst, by far, so hopefully the other rooms can each be done in a weekend.

My week is starting off pretty slowly. It was quiet at work which was fine by me. A friend invited me to lunch so that was a nice thing. I'm not sure how much work I got done however but I don't really feel guilty about that. I'm sure I'll do plenty the rest of the week. There is a boat in town that I need to go check out and see if I can get some pics of it. That may be my lunch time activity tomorrow.

I think that's it at this point. I don't even have a political rant I want to go off on. Consider yourselves lucky!

Saturday night...

Well it's Saturday night and I'm about to head off to bed. Being the wild party animal that I am I'm not sure I'll make it past midnight anyway. It's been a busy day...that seems to be the trend for weekends anymore. We went out for breakfast then stopped at Home Depot (always fun) to pick up supplies to continue the eradication of white walls from the house. This time I'm finishing up in the living room, painting the walls that didn't get the red treatment last time. I spent about 6.5 hours today moving furniture, taking down blinds and curtains, removing power outlet covers, and masking off windows and trim. I've used about 300' of blue tape in the last few hours, but that was easy to do when there are five windows each 10' tall, and two 5' high windows as well. Add in a with door with decorative molding, wooden sills on all the windows, and a lot of baseboard and there's the 300' of tape. I'll get up bright and early (okay, bright and early for me on a weekend...it's all relative) tomorrow and start painting. I'm thinking I can get this part done in one day. Oh yeah, while I still had the tools out I replaced the guts of the kitchen faucet because of a leak. It feels good to be productive.

C posted his results of a "career matchmaker" quiz so of course I took the same quiz. Put in Username: nycareers and Password: landmark. Choose the "Career Matchmaker" option.

I'm not so sure about my results, but then again, I have always like taking things apart and putting them back together, so something mechanical makes sense. I'm currently working as a number 12 (at least part of my job) and at one point I did consider an Engineering degree.

Your Career Suggestions
Careers that suit your answers are listed below under Interest Rank. The best matches are at the top of the list. Click on a career to learn more about it and how it suits your answers. Your matching Career Clusters are also listed below.
Interest Rank
1. Mechanical Engineering Tech
2. Small Engine Mechanic
3. Stationary Engineer
4. Office Machine Repairer
5. Avionics Tech
6.Conservator
7.Optical / Ophthalmic Lab Technician
8.Multimedia Developer
9.Engineering Tech
10.Electronics Repairer
11.Forensics Specialist
12.Computer Support Person
13.Biological Tech
14.Electrical Engineering Tech
15.Electronics Engineering Tech
16.Industrial Designer
17.Interior Designer
18.Website Designer
19.Power Plant Operator
20.Electrician
21.Historian
22.Model Maker
23.Fashion Designer
24.Electronics Assembler
25.Air Traffic Controller
26.Computer Programmer
27.Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator
28.Helicopter Pilot
29.Desktop Publisher
30.Dental Lab Tech
31.Curator
32.Millwright
33.Automobile Mechanic
34.Aircraft Mechanic
35.Motorcycle Mechanic
36.Diesel Mechanic
37.Industrial Machinery Mechanic
38.Cable Installer and Repairer
39.Video Game Developer
40.Appliance Repairer

Well, off to bed for me. Hope everyone has a good weekend. And look, I'm done before midnight...

A little of this, a little of that

It's been a full week since I've written anything here. This week has been much busier than I thought it would be, and I guess I didn't have a lot that I needed to share. Had a good last weekend however. Spent some time on the boat just hanging out, had dinner with a friend of ours on Saturday night and then went to the Puyallup Fair on Sunday. We had a great time at the fair. We mostly just wandered around and looked at things, and at people, but it was good. Rode a couple of rides, ate some, bought a couple of things, and played a midway game where we each won a prize for the other. It was a very nice time. I posted pics in an album even though there aren't many and they were taken with my fairly crappy camera phone, but there they are nonetheless.

Puyallup Fair

This week has been okay at work. I've been mostly working on Sharepoint issues (if you don't know what that is, you don't want to know) but it's been interesting. I got to be a hero a couple of times and that's always nice. Plus I'm learning some things and that's even nicer. My week was broken up with lunch out on Monday with J, lunch with the entire department for my boss's birthday on Tuesday, lunch with a couple of friends on Wednesday, and then lunch again with another friend today. Do we see a trend here? No wonder I've been so busy…

So we had an odd experience a couple of weeks ago and I keep meaning to write it down. We were going to dinner on Friday night and at the last minute decided to go to Eastlake Bar & Grill. It's a place we've each been to several times and it's been decent every time. When we pulled up to the place we noticed a few cop cars sitting out front and an ambulance pulling away. We thought it was weird but we went in anyway. The manager (whom J knows through work) said they were still open and led us upstairs to a table. On the way we notice a group of people hugging each other so I asked what was going on. He proceeds to tell us that a diner had a heart attack and died. Pretty sad stuff, and I thought it was odd that the restaurant was still open. Dinner was fine, but we couldn't help but notice the manager upstairs near us having a beer during our meal. So, we finished out meal and headed downstairs and noticed that the section near the door where the people were hugging each other had been cleared of tables. We also noticed a large white sheet in the corner with a bare foot sticking out from underneath it. The restaurant had moved everyone out of that section but left the body for the coroner to do a report on (the coroner was there as we were leaving). I personally would have closed the restaurant for the night until everything could have been cleared away. just didn't seem right for people to be walking in and out of an eating establishment with a dead body in the corner.

I can't seem to write any post without some sort of political comment, so I'll continue the trend. This story just has a really creepy feel to me. Something about fathers defending their daughters' virginity feels weird. A signing ceremony for fathers, and daughters laying white roses at the base of a cross? Sounds cultish to me. The problem is, a study (by a christian organization no less) found that abstinence pledges are not worth the paper they're written on. The results from the study found that of the young christians they polled:

• 100 percent professed faith in Christ
  
• 99 percent attended church
  
• 84 percent grew up in church
  
• 87 percent grew up in a two-parent home
  
• 62 percent of males had premarital sex
  
• 65 percent of females had premarital sex

So why are abstinence programs still such a cornerstone for these people? They obviously do not work. And, where are the mothers defending their sons' wholesomeness?

Not sure what's on the agenda this weekend. We might do some more painting downstairs. We also want to mount a new TV we bought to the main bulkhead on the boat. It will be nice to get that up. We used it last weekend and it was great but it took up too much space on the table. Otherwise we've just been booking lots of travel. We're going to southern Illinois to visit Jayson's family in early November, going to NYC with our friends B & C in December, and we're supposed to go to Anchorage in October as well. On top of that we're hosting Thanksgiving for at least my mother and sister. Lots going on the next three months or so.

Political rant: Stealing from US taxpayers

I've thought for a long time now that Iraq was only ever about money. I've thought that the entire Bush cabal was only ever about money. That group saw trillions of dollars available in the U.S. treasury and decided they had to have it for themselves and their friends. Iraq has been nothing more than a delivery system of U.S. taxpayer money into their hands. This article from Rolling Stone does a good job describing some of the worst offenses in Iraq. The article is lengthy, but well worth the time to read it.

For me, the key line in this story is this:

George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government.

Bush and his crowd would love to privatize any and every service the government provides. Our deplorable health care system in this country is a prime example of what happens when a public service becomes a for-profit venture. BushCo have been trying to undermine faith in the federal government for the last 6 years by not being there when the citizens expect them to. The response to Katrina is a good example of that. The lies about Social Security being insolvent in such a short amount of time, and therefore the need to privatize it immediately, is another good example. The less faith people have in the government the more they will turn to private enterprise. Eventually they will simply come to expect private enterprise to take care of what used to be a government service. In the end it all comes down to this regime trying to get its hands on taxpayer money.

Weekend wrap up

So my long weekend was nice, but I'm more tired today than after a normal 2-day weekend. This weekend seemed all about work. It started on Saturday when we moved a good-sized armoire from the 2nd floor guest bedroom to our top floor bedroom. Anyone who's seen our house realizes that that's no mean feat. To start with, there's a short flight of stair outside the guest room with no real place to stand an armoire at the top. Getting into our bedroom is even worse since you have to go up one step, make a 180° turn before you run into a wall and immediately go up another flight of stairs. After getting stuck only once on the turn (but really well stuck), we finally got the thing broken free and up the stairs. I'm thinking that now that it's up there we'll simply have to sell the house with the thing in place if we ever move. After we got the thing up there we had to rearrange everything that had been in the smaller dresser and find it a home. Even worse was taking everything that had been in the armoire and finding room for it in the guest room. We got it figured out but the whole process ended up taking about half the day.

On Sunday we started painting the living room. Anyone who's seen our house realizes that that's no mean feat (didn't I say that once already?). The ceilings are over 12 feet high and there are lots of angles, wood trim, windows, and other obstacles to paint around. I spent at least 2 hours masking things off before we could even get started with the paint. We used a dark red so it ended up taking about 4 coats of paint and we finally finished around 20:00 on Monday night. We're both wiped out after 2 full days of painting. The sad part is that we only got the red done. We'll be using a more neutral color on the rest of the room but we didn't have time to even get started on that. Of course, once we're done with the living room, we'll be heading up the stairwell and into each of the three bedrooms and bathrooms. This process could take months…

I always find it interesting how a certain song can transport me to a time in my past. While we were painting on Sunday we had XM Radio playing in the background when "What Have You Done For Lately" comes on. It's not a song I ever particularly cared for, but as soon as it started it brought back a flood of memories. I'm on my parents’ boat, anchored in Nassau Harbor in the Bahamas in early summer 1986. There's a waterfront bar a couple of hundreds yards away on the shore and they used to play that song (and others) loud enough so that any boat within 1/8 mile could hear. I would sit in the cockpit of our boat listening to music coming from the bar and watch the seaplanes that flew to and from Miami take off and land in the middle of the harbor, not that far from our boat. We used to walk past that bar on the way downtown where my parents had found a little café called Parliament House just up from the Straw Market. We would go there for lunch once in a while and my parents would let me have a drink, usually a daiquiri or something not too hard  (I was not yet 18 at the time). I would go to the beach on Paradise Island with our friends Rodney and Carmen from a neighboring boat and we might spend the entire day by a pool at one of the hotels or sitting on the beach. It never bothered me to be spending all my time with people who were are least 10 to 15 years older. Or, I would take our dinghy exploring, sometimes down to the cruise ships when they were in town and marvel at how big they were from our little inflatable boat. So much of who I am today comes from that time period, but it feels like two lifetimes ago. Looking back, I am so fortunate to have had those experiences.

Even though the astronomical calendar still says it is summer, the weather decided that on Labor Day summer was over. Right on cue the weather turned cloudier and rainy. It's been raining and foggy all day today. Last night we had thunderstorms come in just after 22:00 and I loved it. It was great lying in bed watching the lightning outside the windows. I hope this weather holds…I've had my fill of hot weather and an so looking forward to autumn.