Mount St. Helens Dome Growth

This was in the paper last Friday; a cool video showing three years of dome growth at Mount St. Helens.

This Time I Am Not A Blond

Yuck!

Unfortunately I appear to be fighting a bug. This one is different than I've had in a long time and apparently it's what is going around these days; my boss had it and now I do.

The weird part is that this one does not have the usual symptoms I am used to. This time, I have no energy, have dizzy spells (not to be confused with ditsy; I am always ditsy), and have a nasty headache. Yesterday, I was so tired and dizzy that I left work early and went home to get some rest. Literally within two minutes of getting in bed, I was asleep.

This morning I felt better but thought it would not be in my best interest to go work out so I skipped that in favor of another hour's sleep. I hope to go back to the gym tomorrow.

According to my boss, around 2 pm today I'll start to feel run down again and in another two days, it'll hit me hard (at least that is what he went through). I am not looking forward to that and hopefully I can stave off the full effects of this one.

Of Abandonment and Dreams

Well, this morning was rather tasking. I woke myself up with a whimper.

It turns out I had another dream about my long dead cat Reggie. This time (yes, I've had several now), I was in an alley trying to find something I had accidentally thrown away in the trash. So as I'm rummaging through the trash bin, some lady walks by and ends up picking up one of the stray cats (there were two that I was aware of in the dream)... anyway, the cat starts to hiss at the other one as the lady draws near me. It's then that I notice that I recognize the cat, it was Reggie and he was scared. I held out my hand and he sniffed it and calmed down; he still recognized me.

It turns out that the backstory (yes, I get complicated dreams sometimes) of the dream was that I had to give Reggie away for some reason. But I also deduced that the new owners had abandoned him and so he was a stray now. It broke my heart in the dream to where I started to whimper thus waking me up with tears in my eyes.

I wonder when/if time will smooth this one over since obviously my subconscious still has issues regarding Reggie.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I typically do not pay attention to Valentines Day since only once in my life have I actually been dating someone when the day arrives. Even then, our relationship was on the fritz so it really wasn’t a romantic day after all.

Anyway, I saw this on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site and thought it was pretty cool; see, I do have a romantic streak; I just don’t have anyone to show it to. Yeah, I know, poor me.

I’ll just reproduce what they wrote below.

Long Stem Rosette

Explanation: The Rosette Nebula (aka NGC 2237) is not the only cosmic cloud of gas and dust to evoke the imagery of flowers. But it is the one most often suggested as a suitable astronomy image for Valentine's Day. Of the many excellent Rosette Nebula pictures submitted to APOD editors, this view seemed most appropriate, with a long stem of glowing hydrogen gas in the region included in the composition. At the edge of a large molecular cloud in Monoceros, some 5,000 light years away, the petals of this rose are actually a stellar nursery whose lovely, symmetric shape is sculpted by the winds and radiation from its central cluster of hot young stars. The stars in the energetic cluster, cataloged as NGC 2244, are only a few million years old, while the central cavity in the Rosette Nebula is about 50 light-years in diameter. Happy Valentine's Day!

Twelve Months and Counting: On The Road to 40

Well, today is the big day. We are now exactly 12 months away from the finish line. In other words, this is the final lap on The Road to 40. Boy do I need to pick up the pace.

I have to say that while I have made some advances in my fitness level, I am still very far away from where I need to be. Grant it, by adding six-pack abs into the mix after I started on this road, I kind of moved the goalpost back a bit. But still, I would like to attain that goal by this summer’s Vancouver, BC trip though. Unfortunately, time’s a wastin’ and I ain’t moving very fast. My cursed muffin top is not going to go away on its own.

I definitely need to “kick it up a notch” with this whole fitness lifestyle. That means I need to get the nutrition under tight control, increase weights in my workouts at the gym, and add back that (in)famous Green Lake run (read “cardio”) that I “started” (and then stopped) late last year.

A struggling Muffin Top’s work is never done. Wish me luck; I need all that I can get.

Do they still offer full frontal lobotomies?

The older I get, the more there is a desire for ignorance. My tendency is to over analyze everything to the point where I get angry or depressed. Many times I find myself desiring the simple life (no relation to Paris Hilton) where I do not see the unpleasantness of people and situations; where I don't have expectations that require effort on anyone's part including my own. Life is too short to always be taken so seriously. Besides, who wants to be around someone who is always a downer?

Therein lays the problem. You get down so people don’t want to hang around you. This leads to a lack of friends to do things with so you get even more down. Now even more people don’t want to hang around you. Anyone see a trend here? Pretty stupid isn’t it? If it’s not body fat, it’s mental fat. Why am I so challenged all the time?

Anyway, this leads me back to my original question; do they still offer full frontal lobotomies? Maybe there are some drugs that will make me happy all the time… oh wait, alcohol does a good job with that. The only problem with getting drunk is that you have to come down sometime; I want to stay floating above the fray.

Gotta love those Monks!

Saturday some friends and I met for dinner at Quinn’s on Capitol Hill. This place is relatively new and has an assortment of expensive beers. Of these, my favorite was a Trappist Ale.

I can’t help but wonder if it’s my favorite because after only three of them I was quite happily drunk. Times like those are when I miss living on the hill and stumbling home drunk off my ass. Now days I have to sober up before driving home.

It takes a long time to sober up if I’m not out dancing the night away and last night was no different. Unfortunately, there was no dancing since one of the pair I was with does not care for the clubs and if his boyfriend had gone with me, there’d have been hell to pay when he got home. But, like a good friend, he helped me walk it off until I was sober.

Mmm… Trappist Ale!

Good Friends, Good Snow, Good Skiing

Yesterday, some friends and I headed up to Crystal Mountain for fun on the slopes. The four of us were evenly matched into pairs where our skiing capabilities are concerned. Dan and Fred are advanced skiers while Becky (Dan’s girlfriend) and I are beginners.

Dan and Fred helped Becky and I for the first half of the day giving us pointers on the Bunny Slope. Before lunch, we ventured onto the harder runs for awhile until finally giving Dan and Fred their leave so they could enjoy the black diamonds while Becky and I worked on the greens.

What a fun time! We ended up skiing past 4:30 into the night skiing portion of the day. This is the first that I’ve ever night skied and it was pretty cool.

After we wrapped it up for the night, we ended up meeting with some friends of Dan who had an RV parked up there for the weekend. After some beer and good conversation, we finally took our leave and drove back to Seattle.

I enjoyed the trip and want to do it again this season. Sooner or later, I have to get my skill level up and the only way to do that is practice.