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If You Could Change One Thing About Your Metabolism, What Would It Be?
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May. 3rd, 2008 @ 10:47 pm
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Me, I think I'd like to have back the tolerance to caffeine I had when I was in college. I could drink a gallon of sweet iced tea and sleep like a baby that night. These days I have to be careful about even having a diet coke with dinner if I want to avoid insomnia.
Current Mood:  tired |
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Charlton Heston
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Apr. 7th, 2008 @ 07:25 am
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I will never be able to think of Charlton Heston without thinking of the one time I laid eyes on the man in person, sometime in 1997.
He'd just authored a book titled "In The Arena: An Autobiography" and had set out on a book-signing tour which brought him to the Borders in Cary, NC where ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) caroleotter worked. A huge crowd had showed up to see him; I'd never seen the store so packed. My wife was delegated to assist with the event, standing at the table and handing him a new book to sign as each person came up. I had nothing better to do that day so I planned to just hover around the edges of the crowd and enjoy the spectacle.
When Heston arrived at the store they had him come in through the back entrance and led him over to the table set up for the signing. He murmured to the store manager that he needed to visit the restroom but when the manager pointed and said "um, it's all the way over there" on the far side of the huge crowd Heston sighed and said something along the lines of "Never mind." He took his seat at the table and started greeting customers and signing books.
He took the time to graciously chat with every single person who came up, most of whom had a favorite movie they wanted to comment on or just wanted to say how much they admired him. I was mildly surprised that no one brought an NRA cap up to have him autograph. Perhaps the store manager had made an announcement that he'd only be signing books.
The signing was scheduled for something like an hour or ninety minutes, I forget what, but instead of just standing up at the end of the scheduled time and saying "that's all, folks" Heston dutifully kept on signing as long as even one person was still in line. He was probably there at the table for a good two hours before everyone had been attended to.
As the event was wearing on and the line had diminished somewhat, Carole couldn't help herself any longer. I'd gotten her to watch The Agony and the Ecstasy a few weeks earlier and she'd been dying for a chance to ask Michelangelo himself a particular question. When there was a momentary pause between one signee leaving the table and the next one coming up, she leaned over and said, sotto voce, "When will you make an end?"
Heston didn't bat an eye. He took the book she was holding, looked up at the next person approaching the table, and muttered, "When I am finished!" Carole all but did a little jig of happiness.
Finally the last person had gotten their book signed and wandered off toward the registers to pay for it. Then Heston stood up, stretched, and quietly told the store manager, "I need the bathroom." They led him across to the bathroom on the far side of the store and waved him in -- and seconds after he went in two kids, around college age, came out looking wild-eyed. How often do you go into a bathroom in a bookstore in Cary, NC and have Moses himself come in after you?
Current Mood:  sick |
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Cheese Weasel Day
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Mar. 31st, 2008 @ 10:12 am
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Cheese Weasel Day is April 3.
Y'all know the song, right?
"Who brings the cheese on April 3rd?
The Cheese Weasel
He's not a silly bunny or a raindeer or a bird,
He's the Cheese Weasel
He's got a cute black tail
And tiny buck teeth
He doesn't bring fish, and he
Doesn't bring beef
So you'd better be good if you wanna get some cheese
From the Cheese Weasel."
Current Mood: slightly dizzy |
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Skype
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Mar. 25th, 2008 @ 04:15 pm
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Does anyone out there use Skype? My parents, for some odd reason, are all enthusiastic about it. It's not a financial boon for Carole and me since we pay a flat minimum fee to our localtelco for long distance and only pay additional charges if we exceed 400 minutes, which we never do.
But my parents use it to talk to my sister and her family in Germany (where my brother in law is doing his Fulbright scholarship) and by extension I could use it for the same purpose if I really felt like talking trans-Atlantic. Since Skype users don't pay for calls to other Skype users, calls to my sister in Germany would be free.
To make my parents happy I ordered a Logitech USB headset and signed up for Skype and talked to them briefly this afternoon. If they want to call me via Skype I guess that's fine; I have no idea what their long distance plan looks like so it might be cheaper for them to call me that way.
Current Mood:  curious |
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I Did Not Vote In The Vermont Primary
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Mar. 4th, 2008 @ 02:58 pm
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... because late last week, while I was out of town, I found out that I'd be out of town today, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and therefore had no chance to get or request an absentee ballot.
Dammit. I hate missing chances to Exercise The Franchise.
But if I recall correctly Obama was leading in Vermont by wide margins so my vote on his behalf wouldn't have changed anything.
Current Mood:  dismayed |
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Water In The Basement
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Feb. 11th, 2008 @ 11:45 am
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For the last five or six months we've had water in our basement, coming in from behind the wall where our oil tank is set into the wall.
( Read more... )Current Mood:  ecstatic |
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Clinton
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Feb. 5th, 2008 @ 11:57 am
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I don't normally discuss politics in my livejournal or much of anywhere else. I find the anger and spite people get up to pretty distasteful, and so I stay out of it. That being said, I'm emerging from my cave to say that if and when I get a chance to cast a vote in the Vermont primary, I plan to cast it for Barack Obama, provided the worst hasn't happened and he hasn't already dropped out.
Policy-wise, I don't have much problem with much of anything Hilary Clinton is campaigning on. Neither do I have problems with what Obama is saying. I actually liked Bill Richardson best of the original nominees, although I didn't agree with everything he said either.
Once I've essentially come to grips with someone's planks, the second question I ask myself is how I like their personal style. And that's where I don't like Clinton. She seems to have a pretty bad temper and she doesn't strike me as particularly honest. I'm still quite curious how the Rose Law Firm records just "showed up" on a table in the White House after years of being "lost".
Campaigning on her opponent's lack of experience when a) she hasn't gotten any major legislation passed either, and b) her husband didn't exactly have tons of experience when he was elected President, strikes me as pretty darn disingenuous.
I grant you that eight years of withering personal attacks from the Richard Mellon Scaife crowd and the impeachment can make anyone a bit sour. I doubt I'd be secretly the world's happiest and merriest person if I'd been through all of that.
I'll vote for Clinton if she's the nominee, but if she wins I expect a very polarizing four or eight years. And perhaps it's just the small-town Vermont Town Meeting-influenced personality in me talking, but I don't like polarizing politics. I'd like to think we can be a bit more adult than that.
Current Mood: pensive |
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Blizzard of 1993
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Feb. 4th, 2008 @ 03:51 pm
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We're a month shy of the fifteenth anniversary of the Blizzard of '93, which still stands as the biggest blizzard I've personally ever been through. I was still in grad school at Vajenyatek in Blacksburg when the storm hit and I wound up spending at least one night sleeping on the floor of my office and drinking bottle after bottle of Cappio bottled cappuccino and eating Cheetos because that's what I had squirreled away in my cabinet. By the time the storm finished, we had something like five feet of snow pushed up against the doors of my building.
My father, a professor at Tech, decided "I Must Clear The Driveway". His half-mile-long, steep, unpaved gravelled driveway. With only his blade-equipped pickup truck. And, like a lot of idiots, he wound up having a heart attack. Some guys had to be fetched out from their houses using front-end loaders and whatever heavy equipment could make it through the snow.
Mom called me at my apartment when the storm was just really socking in to tell me Dad was in the hospital, having had his heart attack, and told me under no circumstances was I to try to walk to the hospital to check up on him. Before she said that part, it hadn't even occurred to me to walk six miles through total whiteout conditions all the way to the hospital. Afterwards...
Well, I was picked up by the police and labeled "a total fscking idiot" about a half mile away from the hospital. They gave me a ride the rest of the way and my father, who was resting comfortably, just about had another heart attack when he saw me come in, dressed in my heaviest coat and swaddled in scarf after scarf. After a while they told me was fine, needed to rest, and made me leave, but at least the cops gave me a ride to campus and I rode out the rest of the storm in my office. Drinking endless bottles of cappuccino and gibbering like an idiot.
Good times, good times.
Current Mood:  silly |
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Super Bowl
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Feb. 3rd, 2008 @ 10:10 pm
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Not because I'm a die-hard Dolphins fan or anything like that, although I did consider them 'my team' when I was in elementary and middle school in the 1970s.
Mainly because it's gonna feel damn good walking in to stores back in Vermont this coming week and seeing a COMPLETE ABSENCE of pre-manufactured gloating "19-0" merchandise on every available surface.
Thank you, Giants!
Current Mood: jubilant |
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Notice
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Jan. 31st, 2008 @ 05:17 pm
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Moje vznasedlo je plne uhoru.
Current Mood:  restless |
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Writing -30- on blood
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Jan. 7th, 2008 @ 07:09 am
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I have probably donated my last unit of blood, ever.
Someone from the local Red Cross called and left a message Friday evening saying that if I wanted to try donating again on Saturday at a blood drive at the mall, I should ask to speak to Roger, their charge nurse, and he would personally handle me and make sure an accurate reading of my hemoglobin was taken. I took extra-extra-extra iron that night (more than is actually considered healthy), reasoning that if my hemoglobin was still vanishingly low after days of extra iron and a last-minute extra boost, it'd be a sign to just pack the whole donating-blood thing in for once and for all.
On Saturday, we showed up at the mall. The teenager on duty at the doorway to the vacant store they were using for the drive took one look at my blood donor ID card and immediately told a Red Cross employee that "Mr. Furr is here." It looks like I really stirred things up with my email last week. Roger turned out to be the extremely tall and affable white-coated guy I'd often seen lurking around at the donor center doing various things. It turned out that he'd read my email as well and was very understanding about my confusion and pique.
Unfortunately, even with the extra iron, I was still short. 11.8 grams/deciliter, far short of the 12.5 g/dcl that I needed but at least a bit better than the 11.5 I'd gotten a week earlier. If the extra iron I've taken this week only boosted me from 11.5 to 11.8, I can't imagine what'd it'd take to get me to 12.5.
So that's all she wrote, as it were. I'll try again in six months when I've been exercising a lot and in good health and eating lots of iron-rich foods and if I'm still wandering around in the mid-11s, I'll just shrug and find some other philanthropy to obsess about. :(
Current Mood:  okay |
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Minnesoter
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Dec. 17th, 2007 @ 07:06 am
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I normally avoid Garrison Keillor and the Prairie Home Companion radio show on NPR like the plague; a few years ago he broke the camel's back of annoyingness and since then I scream and lunge for the radio dial when I hear his voice. But Saturday night I happened to climb into my car at the airport and head home just as he was doing a drawing for four public radio contributors to win trips to St. Paul, Minnesota in midwinter. Keillor rooted loudly for the trips to be won by Floridians. The second and third winners were from Michigan and Illinois, which amused me mildly, and the fourth and final winner drawn was from Austin, Texas, which got a few celebratory whoops from the studio audience. But the first one drawn will probably regard the trip to St. Paul as a warm tropical vacation; they were from Kotzebue, Alaska. Find that one on a map and you'll know why I happily said "In your FACE, Keillor" as I was paying the parking attendant. (Got some looks for doing that, I must admit.) Current Mood: bouncy |
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Thanksgiving
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Nov. 21st, 2007 @ 12:57 pm
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We are not traveling at all for Thanksgiving.
( Read more... )Current Mood: listless |
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