B: Three is the new tantrum

I finally did it...I accepted that the era of the blog boom is mostly dead...likely replaced by this facebook thing people keep talking about, so I finally went through and cleaned out my list of favorites. I always find dead blogs kind of sad. I know ours was (or continues to be)!

Anyways, I did it. No more will I carry around a long list of blogs dead for more than a year.

On another front, why do they always talk about the terrible twos? It must be because it sounds good...it sure as hell doesn't get any better after two! One of the things that I wasn't prepared for was the "silliness". It is like she is holding a contest to see how much time she can possibly waste being silly. I know it sounds wrong, but this is actually waaaaay more frustrating than the tantrums. If she hits her sister, she gets a time-out and tantrum or no, the rule is clear. With the silliness, there is no rule that it shouldn't take 25 minutes to pick out a pair of socks, but that is what happens. You don't want to get mad about a little girl being silly, but it can absolutely test every last ounce of patience you have just trying to get a pair of socks on.

B: Transients

I used to own this truck. I liked it. It died. Several times. I got rid of it.

I used to own this car. I loved it. It was time to have a more grown up car. I sold it.

Things come and go. The trick is learning to let go. People bitch about our culture, but that is a system of well made products. Shit that wears out fast has to be disposable. Before the iron age, everything was pretty much disposable. Plastic has become a way for us to revert to the stone age...In more ways than one probably.

Things have felt so transient lately. It is hard to keep a hold as life fleets by. The Lil one is growing so fast and getting so smart and argumentative and fun and outrageously enraging. It happens so fast.

Number 2 is on the way and we aren't ready yet. We need to paint a room, get a bassinet and get things arranged. It felt like there was so much time.

On another note, I have noticed a sharp drop in the number of transients that I see on a daily basis. Do you think the economy has become so bad that people can't afford to stand at stop lights and beg for money...because it doesn't pay anymore?

B: Guiding Lights

About 6 months ago our Internet friend Rob set your friends here at Cumulus up on a date with some strangers. It was a bit weird and very 21st century for us, but it worked out great! We met some new friends (A and M) and had a new bond with Rob.



Tonight (just now) we finally met out blog friend Rob. He was exactly what we both expected. A very nice and personable guy. A geologist with a familiar reference point and common sense of humor. I know this is virtually a common place thing now, but I am still amazed to have made a virtual friend from Atlanta and to meet them in real life here in Sacramento. It is weird and magical.



Congratulations Rob on your decision to run 2 century ultra marathons, followed by an Iron man race all in a single pair of awesome socks!!!! We will so be there to support you!

I went for a ride with Steve on Sunday last. We rode the Foresthill divide connector trail and it was pretty gnar. The trail is packed nicely and had only a moderate level of underweight lycra cross country dweeb traffic (as opposed to overweight freeride poseur traffic). The trail mostly rolls and winds up the hill with only a few big sustained climbs on the way up and a few on the way back. The return trip drops only a couple of hundred or so feet, but this modest drop is achieved in series of rollers that requires that you pedal the whole thing to keep it going.

I manged to pedal through all of the rollers on the drop at top speed for the first time this trip and it was brilliant! All of the key corners are bermed, the trail is butter, and the only trick is remembering which corners can be jumped across without carrying too much speed into the next.

The views were nice and the open fall canopy was really calming under the oak and madrone. I stole all of these pics off of flickr as I rarely remember to take pics of my own. Here's one of me hitting a sick jump.

It may not be northwest riding, but it isn't too bad...

B: the magember crunch

Like every summer, I have allowed myself to become so busy at work that I am totally burned out and desperately in need of some time off. To combat this and avoid going all Tyler Durdan on my family and co-workers, I am taking Labor Day week off. I have already planned so much stuff for that week though that there is really no way I will get to do everything that I want. At some point I am going to need to add some scheduled relaxation.....I am an idiot.

We are really coming down to the magember crunch. I am doing absolutely nothing for the big 31. I think that is really the only way to note the occasion...by trying to ignore it. Mandy and I are having our 5 year anniversary this year, Lily is turning 2 and then Mandy is turning 30....holy crap that a lot of stuff for September. If we had another September baby we would have a 4 in 30 chance of hitting an already important date. I like them odds!

Other stuff....I sat next to this guy and his obese body guard/homey in the terminal at LAX cuz they were next to the only free laptop charging station. He looked less crunk in person.

He was just kicking it doing some FORTRAN programming or something on his laptop and listening to what I have to assume was Bach. Nervous teenagers kept coming up to get his autograph. After much debate I had him sign my golden chalice. It isn't as nice as the one that he is pictured with here, but it special to me and now it's a highly valuable collectible.

They weren't on my flight though, so I didn't get to fulfil my plan of befriending him and convincing him to: (a) explain the origin and meaning of crunk, (b) feature me on a future track, and (c) teach me the meaning of love.

Oh well.

PS..

We had a delicious dinner made from scratch my Mandy last night with our new mystery friends mentioned here.......link..... I think it went fabulously and they probably don't hate us yet

PPS

Strapless panties continue to be our most highly hit post ever. Those people ought to be paying us.

blind date

.
Did you guys ever watch that crappy show Blind Date? I loved that show. It was so bad it was good. Total douchebags with slutty chicks and really cheesy commentary. When I had TV and too much time on my hands I could waste hours watching that. (Some people might say that they wish they had those hours back, but not me. I think it made me a better person.)

B and I have a blind date this weekend. Except it's more like a blind friend date*, and to be honest, we're a bit nervous. Our good friend Rob that hangs out where the ocean meets the land has some real-life friends that recently moved out here to Sacatomato. He knew that we had recently moved out here, and nice guy that he is (I assume that he's nice, I mean I suppose he could really be some creepy old man with 17 cats, but I doubt that) he thought to introduce us. Except that we've never actually met Rob. And so not only do we have a blind friend date, it's a blind friend date set up by someone who we never actually met.

Based on his blog, Rob seems to be a pretty cool cat. Sometimes I wonder though what we're portraying ourselves as on our blog. Is it a good representation? If we ever actually hang out with Rob, would he be all, "man those guys are nerds"? (Actually no, I think we're pretty good at asserting our nerdiness here.)

The one thing that's getting us through this all though is that Rob's a fellow geologist, and we geo-nerds tend to gravitate towards each other. And we trust other geo-nerd judgement. So if Rob says they're cool, then they're probably cool.

And they're all probably reading this post. So hi new friends! See you Saturday!



*note this does not actually mean a date with a blind friend, like my grandma's blind friend for instance, which is a topic for a whole other post.

B: the gift that keeps on..

Now that we are much closer, I have this problem that my Mom is always offering me things she has. Not nice things like antiques and quality hand made furniture, but mostly worthless junk that nobody would really want or need. Case in point, this chair:

Nice enough I guess. She bought it at a garage sale or something and realized that she doesn't have room for it and has now offered it to me several times. I don't want the damn chair, but she thinks that if she can pawn it off on somebody then she won't have to own the fact that she wasted money on something that she can't get rid of.

I always feel guilty telling her I don't want her junk. She has always been a bit of a pack rat, but it is getting worse with age. She has that disease that older people get where they fill their time searching for bargains on crap they don't need. I wish there was something she could do with her time, but she has no interest in doing anything productive, or contributing to society in any way.

I want to give her some real money, and tell her to spend this wasted time searching antique stores and estate sales for the perfect coffee table that we don't have the time to find, but I know she couldn't be trusted not to buy crap.

I am almost done with Atlas Shrugged. I think that book is fucking with my world view. I don't totally agree with her perspective, but it is interesting if a bit simplistic and naive.

Atlas Shrugged was ranked #2 behind Gatsby for the greatest american fiction of the 20th century. Personally, I think it is better than Gatsby which I have never really cared for that much. I think Gatsby was very much about a time and a place which has degraded appreciation over time. This is happening to Atlas Shrugged as well, but I think it is a bit more timeless.

I think that Atlas Shrugged could be written today in much the same way and still be relevant. The weakness of the book in my mind is the tendency to become excessively preachy. Seriously, John Galt needs to shut the F-up after a while. We get it Ayn...move on with the story. She could have cut 150 pages of preachy dialogue and had a much more subtle but effective story. I believe that she made this book so lengthy and the lead in so slow to discourage the sort of people that she preaches as the evil of the world from being tempted to even read the book.

I highly recommend this read recognizing that quite a few people will dislike it for a wide variety of reasons.

B: I am a rotten Mr. Grinch....

or Why I hate "Days" (mothers, fathers, administrative support personnel)

I hate fathers day. All of these Hallmark holidays should be abolished or at least abstained from by reasonable people. When did we turn the calendar over to women who want to have a special activity once a month that centers around making somebody feel special? I know it's sexist, but I can't imagine that a man came up with Fathers Day.

The major reason I don't like fathers day now that I am a father, is that it is patently clear that Fathers Day isn't really about fathers at all. It is about kids school projects and selling greeting cards, and making people that aren't really grateful express feelings they don't mean, or making people that are grateful express their thanks in a really lame over hyped day wrought with expectation and disappointment.

If Fathers Day was really about fathers, it would be called Leave me the fuck alone day. There would be no LMTFAD cards, tradition would require a simple gift of a sixer or bottle of Dad's favorite booze, or cigs or cigar or bicycle part or BJ and then that he be left the fuck alone for at least part of the day. That is all any man really wants, a simple pleasure and some time to himself. I don't need your coerced guilt or a hallmark expression of your appreciation. It is nice, but entirely uneeded.

So...If it is not too late, let me suggest that when you think about giving Dad something for fathers day, give him the gift he really wants....a new router bit and some time to use it, or free day to go riding at northstar with nobody waiting around at home (thanks Mandy!!!). It will mean so much more than dragging Dad out for some event that is about everybody else feeling good about doing something for Dad and achieves nothing in consideration of what Dad really wants.....to be left the fuck alone.

PS If you want to see the origins of Fathers day in the US please read the wiki entry for proof that I am not a complete sexist pig. Also, if you want an idea for a fathers day present that dad actually wants look at the the german fathers day. A wagon trip with a cask of beer??? Yes please.

400*

Things I'm realizing I had forgotten about California, in no particular order...

ants
palm trees
snapdragons
heat
"speed limits"
sprawl
wisteria
wine
flies
oak trees
olive trees
sunglasses


*400th post! woo-hoo!

B: Lame Friday post

I have two blog topics for today. First, I just found this blog again after several years, and it is funnier than I remember. Oakpark Mastermind, Thank you. Here's a quote to give you an idea of how lowbrow and witty she is. Background, she is a making an alphabetical list of things not to be thankful for:

K. ky jelly commercials. have you ever seen one of those commercials? they
are all filled with people who look like they have never had sex in their life.
people that are like 'try a massage with this new ky warming liquid!' UH, THAT
SHIT IS NOT FOR MASSAGES, THAT SHIT IS FOR FUCKING. how come commercials for shampoo are all about fucking and commercials for ky jelly are about wholesome activities such as massage therapy?

A rational critique of the hipocracy of our puritanical policies within media. Certainly well trodden territory but well aimed. I choose to give some possibly undeserved credit and assume that the entire blog is a satire. It is more entertaining and droll that way. Plus it allows me to be in on the joke and feel smart and use the word droll which I totally love.

mishief managed.


Secondly, I am bringing back an old cumulus tradition of a puppy on friday.




So heres a puppy! Let's hope this puppy finds a nice loving home that will change it's name from Elvis to something that doesn't suck. I hate people names for pet's. I think we ought to have a new class of names assigned specifically to animals. I personnally like naming animals after food, but sandwich never really stuck for kitty, and I didn't come up with the idea until after we had Luna for a while. If we were to get a new dog I would call it salsa. There now I got dibs.

warning

We've decided that now that we've moved, and no one in Sac knows about our blog yet, we're allowed to be more introspective here.

Don't ask about the logic. It makes sense to us.

Don't say we didn't warn you.

B: a review in blogging

Cumulus has now been going for 3 years (more or less), and this time has covered a period of great change in my life. I went from being a newlywed to a new parent. I went from my mid 20's to getting ready to turn 30, and I have grown and changed quite a bit. Unfortunately, to read the blog you see very little of that because we have always been careful about how much we disclose to the internet.

It is a tough thing this internet sharing. Some people pour their lives out, but then accumulate a crew of stalkers and freaks and create a publicly accessable record of the minutia of their lives for all to harvest what data they. The alternative is Cumulus, with our relatively impersonal blog of meaningless junk. I don't how you balance the trade-offs.

There is a blog that I read semi-regularly by this girl from seattle that is just a little younger than us and really screwed up. Based upon the details in her blog it would be really easy to track her down if I wanted to, and that is freaky! Obviously I don't want to and haven't, but anybody familiar with Seattle could. Is that level of exposure really worth the benefit of having this neat little journal with a bunch of imaginary online friends?

I don't know. What is the point of the blog anyways. What do I get out of this besides an unproductive diversion??? Am i cheating myself by not sharing, or is this whole thing just a whiny useless waste of time? Why blog?




On another topic, I am just finishing up The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I have found it to be a great read and a refreshing oportunity to reflect upon a perspective that is so divergent from our cultural understanding. He sets out to delineate a basic tenet of evolution and the behaviour of genes, using zoological examples to illustrate his points, but leave the reader to draw what they will about the impact these basic facts have on our understanding of existence.

His greatest desire in the book seems to be to accentuate the fact that humans are the only known animals that can take willful action that is contrary to the design of their instincts (ie genetic programming)to act in a truly altruistic manner. In addition he spends a good deal of time on game theory showing that mutual cooperation is gennerally the best stategy for population stability, ulimatelty leading the reader to conclude that sharing, cooperation, and altruism are really imperative to our genetic survival despite the genetic programming we may have as individuals that lead us to behave in a selfish manner.

I reccomend this as a read, if you can make it through a fairly dense piece of popular scienctific writing.