Welcome to the Calamity Page!

For quite some time, I've debated with myself about creating a record of what I call "The Calamity." Mostly I've wanted to just forget about it as much as possible and get on with my life. But recently, several cyclists here in Portland have been hit by cars. Some have been killed and others have been injured as badly as I was. Whenever I hear about such events, I have a strong desire to contact those who are about to endure what I did and give them the benefit of my experience, and also let them know they are not alone. Well, now I can send them a link to "The Calamity Page."

If you'd like to check it out, click on the "Full Frinky Site" link to the right. Once there, click on "The Calamity Page" link. There are a few things to fix yet, but it's pretty close.

Now, as they say on The Simpsons, "Let us never speak of it again."

Zombie dog weekend

Argotnaut provided a record of our troubles with our dog, Buddy, over the weekend. (Details on her Argotnaut site.) So I'll just provide a photo with the epilogue...he's resting comfortably now.

I'll be talking with our vet today about follow-up treatment, but I already know what he'll say: "Continue the meds. Then, rest, rest and more rest." That'll be somewhat difficult when Buddy starts feeling better. Like all of us following a prolonged period of pain or sickness, Buddy will be so excited to not be hurting any more that he'll want run and jump around. This, of course, would be EXTREMELY bad. I hope we won't have to cage confine him because he'd think he was being punished for some reason. But if that's what it takes, so be it.

Preparing for "The Big One"

I wonder if all the bad news from the Gulf Coast prompted this guy in Portland to prepare for a possible tsunami.

Student no more! (For now)

For the first time in almost two years, I'm not going to be taking any classes in the coming semester. There are a couple of reasons. First is that I've always been what one might call a "directional student." Meaning that I need a clear direction to figure out what classes I want to take. A couple of years ago, the direction was a desire to increase my marketability while I was looking for a job. So I started the "Web Design Certificate" program at Portland Community College, which led to taking classes in Flash, Dreamweaver, HTML, etc. Then the direction was an upcoming trip to Germany, so I took a couple of German classes. Currently, however, I don't really need to concentrate on a particular area, so I couldn't find anything to get excited about.

Second is that we can stand to save the dough right now.

I had considered taking a filmmaking class at the Northwest Film Center School of Film . Filmmaking is something that has interested me for years, but I'd never done anything about it, beyond some ideas for a few screenplays. But then Lisa sent me a 10-minute film school article by Robert Rodriguez. This made a bit of sense to me, because it preaches "forget about the fancy stuff. Just make a movie." Of course, one advantage of a class is that it imposes discipline...one is much more likely to get one's film done when you have to get it to your instructor by Friday. The disadvantage is, of course, classes cost money.

I've been pretty good about setting aside two hours in the afternoon for writing and writing-related tasks, so I'll just keep that up and see what happens. I suppose I could just pick an arbitrary date on a calendar and say to myself, "Your short film must be done by now." Curse the convenience of video recorders! I can't make any more excuses not to make a movie!

Holy Crap! Still nothing to report

Wow. Has it been three weeks since my last update? I guess I'll have to do what one of my heroes, Bob Mould, does and do a blog post each morning after I get up but before I do anything else. But that would still leave me with the most boring blog in the world, because it seems that exciting things only happen in my life about once every three months or so. Posts more often would just be "treading water" posts, unless I went on rants about things that are bugging me. I guess that would be okay...at least rants tend to be mildly entertaining.

So what would I rant about? Oh, probably stuff like intelligent design "theory." All I can say is, if the universe is intelligently designed, then the designer has a LOT to answer for, like:
Nipples for men
Multiple variations of just about every species of animal or plant. I mean, look at how many types of birds there are! If an intelligent designer were at work, wouldn't he/she/it/they make one REALLY GOOD BIRD and leave it at that? Or at most a few shapes and sizes. But 40-some-odd different types of finches? Come on!
Human spinal column. Look at how many chiropractors there are. 'nuff said.
Hate/greed/selfishness. I guess the prevailing opinion is that the ID (intelligent designer) originally wrote the perfect program for human peace, love and tolerance, and we (humankind) came up with all the "bugs" in the system. Well, shouldn't mister/missus fancypants IDer have created software for the monkey that the monkey couldn't screw up?

Oh, also I finally finished a story I've been working on for a while, but it's approximately 26,000 words long, even after extensive editing. Most print publishers max out at 15,000 words or less. So I'll probably have to send it to e-publishers of science fiction stories, or to magazines that publish serials. Lisa thinks the story pretty good. But she's biased, so we'll see if people who would actually have to pay money for it also think so.