mindsquirt

I build Cooper's pup ramp over the weekend and installed it on the dock at the lake. It is basically like the design you see in the blog below(2 blogs down), except i put some floaty boat bumpers on the very end of the ramp, to help it stay up. They are under the ramp, shown as semi-circles. I also put the uprights that you see, to keep the dock from sinking when coop is on the end. for the time being, we used a rope to lash one of the uprights to the other end of the dock. This is seen in the video but not the drawing. the dark blue line below is the water level, the light blue is the foam that the dock floats on, and the dock is grey.

The video below is Cooper using the ramp! it still needs some refinements. I think that he struggles too hard to use it, and i need a better system to attach it to the dock. any suggestions are welcomed. I am thinking s-hooks that slip into eye-hooks on 4 points of those uprights.

Thanks to all that helped. Matt,Brad, mike,dan. and paul for the wood!

I thought it was high time that I posted some pictures of my daughter Alex. I haven’t posted any since she was born. I am a terrible person.

These pictures are kinda old, but pretty good. She is about 6.5 months here.

One day we let her play by herself all day out in the garden. We came back later and got this picture:





















Here is a good one of that rascal Cooper babysitting and licking off that bacon grease we put on her every morning.















Here is a good one of her wearing a sun hat and looking kinda surprised. Cooper has a similar hat, but it is much more glamerous and is covered in rhinestones.

















Here is Alex just being cute and crawling around. She just started crawling over the weekend. This video was about 2 weeks ago before she could really get anywhere. More of a "army crawl". Soon she will be trying to crawl up and kill us like baby stewie.




I also found some more videos of that scamp Cooper.

Here is cooper jumping off of the dock again:




Here is cooper stealing a noodle:



The end. Sorry if you aren't interested in pups or babys.

Cooper is awesome. Witness the glamerous dive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOY63R3DUvY
or

I found some blog spam that I think was pretty funny due to it's choice of words. I thought I could do just as good, so I wrote some akwardly-worded spam as well. Which is real spam and which did I write? Only one of them is real. (I changed the links)

1)
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Post comments and tell me what you think. I will reveal the answer later.

Cooper likes to jump off the dock now. It is pretty awesome. At the beginning of the summer, he wouldn't do it, and it took multiple pushes and some coaxing with a toy for him finally to do it by himself.

I have already caught him jumping off the dock on my camara-video recorder. Expect to see it soon!

I think i will build this ramp for the pup, so he can get off and on our dock from the water. He gets tired going to the shore every time.

I mostly posted this so my brother can see it, and suggest design ideas. Feel free to leave a comment with your ideas.

There are numerous issues that I don't have the answer to. including how to temporarly anchor it to the dock, and how it will behave with a 75 lb pup on it!

below is my first stab and the second. I think the second one is a pretty solid idea.

IDEA 1
IDEA 2

Sometimes you feel the urge for a picture dump.

That is, dumping the pictures off of your phone and onto your computer.

I did this today, since I was going to delete them anyway, and here they are, forever immortalized on the internet:

Figure 1 This is a picture of the biggest spider i have ever seen. I put my thumb in there for scale. You can't tell very easily, but the thorax of this monster was bigger than my thumbnail. What a stupid thing to take a picture of.
Figure 2 This is an interesting creature i found while stranded at a gas station (see Figure 3 below). It was kinda like a snail. The bottom part is a "shell" that is made out of some kind of debris, and the slug thing poking out of the top was the actual creature. I guess it makes it's own shell. i have never seen one before, so i took a picture of it. I ate it, and it tasted terrible! It now controls my actions between 3 am and 5 am. I have a debris shell in my basement that is quite cozy.

Figure 3 This is the car (dubbed the P.O.S) that drives my carcass to and from indianapolis on a semi-daily basis. The alternator went out last week and i was about 100 miles from home. I took a picture of it because I was waiting for someone to bring me a new one, and I had already eaten that slug thing and needed a distraction from the taste.
Figure 4 Here is Brad getting cozy with cooper. how cute!

Figure 5 This is the most enormous moth I have ever seen. I am sure it was longer than 2" and had a wingspan over 4". It also is pretty cool looking. I think it would win in a fight to the death with that spider (figure 1).
Figure 6. This is some bay in san diego. I went there in June for a conference. This turned out to be a very boring picture and even included my thumb! it complements all of the other pictures that I took during that trip that were terrible, and are destined for the trashcan.
Figure 7 Here is a statue of George Bush Sr. from Houstin's airport. I thought it was pretty cool, and i didn't expect to see it. He looks very heroic, with the wind blowing his tie and hair. I thought it was a pretty inaccurate potrayal of what George Bush looks like at any given moment.

Figure 8 Here is a picture that I took of the storage garage that I used to store all of my furnature and whatnot while I live in New Albany. I am renting a 10' x 30' garage and it uses the 3 doors that you see in the picture. I took this picture to show off how efficiently I can pack a storage garage to my wife. She was not impressed or even interested in looking at the picture. This was the last load and it you can see that we didn't have any more room for the tinest thing! with that much stuff, and that much room, it is very easy to underpack or overpack the storage room. So, I was impressed... I can't believe I took a picture of that either.

Figure 9 This is picture my wife took of me with my new babe Alex. She fell asleep in my arms. She is about 3 or 4 months in this picture. If you haven't experienced a baby falling asleep in your arms, especially your own, it is very satisfying and quite peaceful. I recommend it to anyone with a baby and a good grasp. I was also wearing a beard at that time, which i think is rather handsome. This was also before I gained a few inches on what I like to call my "pappy belly".

on a completely different topic, we are getting Coop groomed, due to exsessive "dog butt" smells, multiple dunks in the lake, and my lazy approach to bathing my own pooch. I was looking for groomers on the WWW, and this critque caught my eye:

"Allison takes care of my Yorkie & spoils him rotten! She also does a great job with him & has him smelling handsome and smelling great for days!"

SMELLING HANDSOME? That is a no-brainer. I think Coop will really like the idea of smelling handsome.

Labels: picture dump

I was beginning to suspect that I couldn't throw a box of tissues 30 miles/hour. (See this blog) I needed to confirm that tissues can't kill a person, so if I ever go to another defensive driving class, I can tell the instructor he is full of more shit than a composting toilet.

So, I threw a box of tissues in front of my cubical at work, and found that I could throw them about 25 feet. (see picture below with measuring tape and tissues at far end)
















Now, to calculate how fast I threw them, I ignored air resistance. There probably would have been a fair amount of air resistance because of the mass/surface area ratio, and the fact that earth has an atmosphere. Of course there really is air resistance and if there wasn't, I would have thrown them further. This calculation will fudge on the side of showing a slower speed than what was actually thrown.

anyway, I calculated that the time they were in the air was .57 seconds (x=.5at^2). Using that time and the distance I threw them, I found my throwing velocity to be 14.91 m/s (x=vt), which converts to, GET THIS, 30.86 miles/hour!

I am pretty sure If I hit someone with them, they would just be slightly annoyed. The only damage that I could see it doing is if I hit someone with the corner of the box, in their eye.

I asked the foreign guy (who can't speak english) across the room to allow me to hit him with the tissue box. He just polietly nodded, smiled, and said "yes" like he always does.

I think I will wait until he doesn't see me coming so I can hit him in the face. I will let you know if he dies.

Yesterday I went to a “defensive driving” class in Clark county. I was actually offended by how unorganized and useless the whole thing was. It was really more of a punishment rather than a learning opportunity. It was scheduled to be from 5:00 pm to 10:00 pm. I arrived on time at 5:00 and we all waited until 5:30, so that some one could put a VCR tape in for us to watch. The room was enormous and was not conducive to watching a 27” television at all. There were at least 100 people there. I couldn’t see the TV at all. It was understood that we would not be tested on what we watched. So, no one watched and most everyone talked or slept. I pity the people who actually listened. I considered lying on the floor for sleep, or sneaking off. I ended up drawing pictures, reading a book I brought, and playing games on my phone.

It was funny, because the next speaker (retired insurance attorney) waddled in and decided that the movie was over. It wasn’t even finished yet! He just turned it off, with the guy on the TV in the middle of a story. He then taught us all a “good lesson about driving responsibly”. What he actually did was make ludicrous analogies like stating that you should check your car the same way a pilot checks his airplane before taking off. (guages, cowlings, tires, widgets, do-hickies, etc.) Who in the world invests that much time checking their car before they get in it?

I swear he must have went over an entire pilot's flight plan, because he went on with this anaolgy for at least 30 minutes. he took at least 60 seconds to discribe what an altimeter was. It was like he was so engrossed in describing plane safty, that he forgot that he was supposted to be talking about car safty.

Then he went into the standard scare session, where he wanted to scare us into being better drivers. His insightful speech included such memorable phrases as: “your car is a loaded weapon”, “driving is a privilege”, and he said: “ … well … he’s dead now” at least 3 separate times.

He also claimed that someone was killed by a box of tissues when they got in a car wreck going 30 miles per hour. How absurd. Look, I can throw a box of tissues at least 30 miles per hour, and if I hit you in the most tender of areas, it won’t kill you. What a buffoon. Regardless, I am sure over 99% of the class believed it. You probably believe it.

Anyway, he lets us out 3 hours early, which further confirmed that it was such a royal waste of time, that even the instructors wanted to leave.

I knew I was home-free when he asked if anyone had questions. Unfortunatly, some people in the class had to bitch about semi-trucks, or argue the injustice of their tickets, as if this were the proper place to do that. I am pretty sure you should have went to court if you think you were innocent. So that ate up another half-hour.

I have never been so relieved when something was over.

I bet you feel the same way about this blog.

I had trouble sleeping last night. I ended up going to bed at about 12:00. I set my alarm for 5:00 am. I “snoozed” it a bunch of times until 7:00 am. That means I “snoozed” for more than ¼ of my sleeping session. Why did the alarm clock industry call the “snooze button" a “snooze button"? Why not a “doze”, “sleep”, or “slumber” button? They really should have called it a “re-awaken button".

I went to a defensive driving class last night. It was completely useless and stupid. I think I will blog another blog about it.

Speaking of stupid things, my sister used to live in a house with a composting toilet in it. It was basically a port-a-potty inside the house, and it had a crank on the side to churn up the human waste. I suppose it somehow disappeared after a while. But, it was not made to be emptied. It was really something! I guess you have to sell the house when it gets full. It is comparable to cutting a hole in your bathroom floor, and shitting into that.

I don’t know about you guys, but after I evacuate my bowels I don’t want my business loitering in my house for too long. Why would anybody put one of these in their house? A cardboard/wax paper chute that directs the waste outside the house is a better idea.

How about a human litter box? that is a pretty funny mental picture, to see an adult trying to use a giant litter box! LOL! Seriously though, it isn't a far stretch from this composting toilet. If my sister called me up and told me that she is using a giant litter box now, I swear I wouldn't bat an eyelid.

When I stayed there one time when I was 15 or so, me and my friend started tearing down some old building that was on her property. On a total whim, we actually got some tools and started dismantling this old house, and burning it right there on the spot. I don’t know why we did that.

I might be buying a investiment house here soon. A bank owns it because it forclosed on it. My dad is coaching me to undercut them. He is quite the negotiator. I would say that he is serious about 5% of the time, and he gets serious when it is time to negotiate. He and I had a serious discussion last night about how to deal with the bank that owns the house. Here are some funny phrases that my dad used to discribe bankers:

"they wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire"

" [bankers] are lower than whale-shit on the bottom of the ocean."

good stuff.

He doesn't hate bankers, in fact he has a friend that is one. He was just trying to convince me to be tough with them, and really get a good deal.

I'll keep you posted.

Hi.
I am in a slump at work. I am pretty bored here for the most part. The job is challenging, and I am learning a fair amount of useful stuff, and the pay and benefits are decent, but it is not quick-pace enough for me. Anyway, I decided to go to the Robo-psychotherapist to vent my frustration. This time, I knew what to expect. Not like last time. (if you haven't read about my first visit, visit that link)

Here is what happened (psychotherapist is in red) :
---------------------------------------------------
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each
time you are finished talking, type RET twice.

I find this job incredibly boring.

Why do you say you find this job incredibly boring?

it isn't challenging, and my boss is rarely around. i need to be
nurtured, ya know.

What makes you believe you might want to be nurtured?

because I fantasize during work hours about cuddling with my boss

Is it because you fantasize during work hours about cuddling with
your boss that you came to me?

well, no.

Earlier you said you would like to be nurtured?

yes, but not by you. let’s not talk about that. i am more
worried about how boring my job is. the mere fact that i am
talking to you instead of working, indicates this.

Does it bother you that you are talking to I instead of working
might indicate that?

I think you have your pronouns use confused. yes, it bothers me.

Maybe your plans have something to do with this.

....

Can you elaborate on that?

well, i don't know what you are getting at here.

Are you sure that that?

what what?

You mentioned that you fantasize during work hours about cuddling
with your boss?

yes, why are we dwelling on this?

When did you first know that are you dwelling on this?

No, you are dwelling on it. Look, I take it back, okay? I just said that to be funny.

Is it because of your life that you are going through all this?

maybe

I would appreciate it if you would continue.

Well, maybe this has more to do with my problem with stealing my
co-workers lunches from the fridge.

I don't understand.

well, i am so bored at work, i take bites of their sandwiches and
put them back. there has been emails circulating...

Do you really think you would like to be nurtured?

what about sandwiches? Why are we still talking about that?

How does it feel to want?

I dunno. needy?

How do you reconcile the people you hang around with?

I have just recently stopped taking bites of their food when they are not looking. That has helped.

Earlier you said you are talking to I instead of working might indicate that?

Yes, I think that really shows how unmotivated I am to work.
Instead of working, I am talking to you, a computer program that
picks out clauses from my typing, and uses them to simulation a
helpful discussion, in the guise of therapy. It is sad, really.

Perhaps this has something to do with any hobbies you have?

I enjoy outwitting computer programs.

You have your mind on computers, it seems.

I could say the same about you.

You mentioned that you fantasize during work hours about cuddling
with your boss?

ugh. Yes. I am disgusted.

Possibly your sex life are related to this.

Yipes! I am leaving.

Is it because of hang-ups you have that you say you are leaving?

No, I just want to get out of here. You are not helping, and
making me more depressed. I am going to go take more bites out of
co-worker’s sandwiches.

Are you depressed often?

Bye

My secretary will send you a bill.

Bill? go to hell.

Perhaps you could avoid such unwholesome thoughts.

bye

Bye bye.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The end. Not a bad session!

I am particularly proud of this line:

"You have your mind on computers, it seems."

"I could say the same about you."

man, that is funny on so many levels.