Category: three sheets

Chiefly concerned with altered states of consciousness.

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fo rth e skae of th bolg


Beeeeerrrrppp Pfestttivaaal!!! Tlonighjt my went ot the beer ffestiveal in Germany!!! Oh people, I had such a grea time in the beer festivea;. IUt really was aewesome to tbe bone. Yoiu gon’e take to me about nthe beer festiveal, becauese it was something so good.. that ytou woudl have to be their to be able to talk to me abiut it. Right’ now i’ts in the AM time in Gernamay and I just got balc from the festivitues. Pat and i dtanlk a lot of enbeers and had a realy,. tood time. Now i”ve somc home to the hotel and I am ready to go to ebd… but I wanted to post a Dridat enry before I did. So, here is what I wil post – some was weritten before the beer festival, some was bwtiiten after the berr fersive. Enogu.

Since I like to be honest with those of you who donate precious minutes of your time reading this page, I’ll tell you straight-off that this is only Friday’s entry because of WordPress’s ability to schedule entries. I actually just pressed “publish” on Thursday’s entry – which won’t go live until 2pm PST on US Thursday, and immediately began drafting this entry for a midnight Friday auto-post. Not a bad way to blog an entire week in a condensed way. I’m sitting now in Pat’s hotel room (I don’t like to link Pat’s name to his site, ’cause it has my last name on it and I strive to keep that off the web – hey Pat, fix that), which is infinitely bigger than mine, listening to some Built to Spill on the iPod and contemplating taking a dump here instead of going to my own accommodations – his room has a bidet. It’s still Thursday morning in Germany as I write, and my belly is still pretty full from breakfast. We plan to head down the cobblestone street for a lunch outdoors, accompanied, of course, by some beer – y’know, to prep us for the 3pm customer meeting… get our minds nice and limber and whatnot.

Tomorrow we leave, but not until something like 4pm, which puts us in San Francisco around 6pm – a mere two hours later. Since we have most of the day free, we’re planning to stop over for a tour of Dachau, which I’m sure will be a sobering experience.

If you couldnt/ tell, those tw apragraphs were rtinne berfore the beer frestival – and this paragraph and the opener were wtrittn after the beer festival. The beer feasstialv was sooo awesome. Pat and I had soe much berr, that we ceased to know how mhch eer we actualle had – and ckept treindking beer depstitea out ob vious frunkeness. I want you to know that this entry was a bithc to sprrell-chjeck cbaezues I prupsoely left the drunbken fat-finerge erros intact for comedic reason.s I trulyu hope ytou enjoyed my writings from ermane. It’s like 1ma here nand Pat just called me from his hotel room (rone foloor benath me) to tel me he was “fdrunk.” CNo craop Pat, we’re both frunk…. we were, after all, at the same beer fieagvl. Until the USA poeople, I love you … please forive me.

Thhis is no koek… I really am stpyting this wayu b ecuae os the b eer. The beer has done nast y thing to my coordingaton… my finger are not doing waht my brain is telling themt o di… althog I will akdmote that I’;m playing it uup (jsut a little) fo rth e skae of th bolg.

O(MFG this new Sufjan dong is carrygin me through Germanbu… one sogn can make an entire trip… this song is sooo good.

I love tou all and I miss you alll… going to bed now.. Dave is… ooooooooooooooooty.

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mover and a shaker


Hung over?! Are you serious? I thought that didn’t happen to me; steel constitution and all.

German Dopplebock, something called “Alligator,” if I recall. Not only that, but the dang cigarettes finally caught up with me. I still don’t know what it is about those beastly things that my psyche holds an attraction to – something about looking “Euro” perhaps. I’ll trade this pain in my throat and sickness in my belly for looking Euro anyday though – as is always the case when I try and extend my “cool” via those awful, awful things. I have to give Pat the nod for attempting to contact my common-sense department when the idea to “try some local German smokes” crossed my mind. “Why?” He asked, “Won’t they just make you feel like ass like any cigarettes?” Yes; yes they will indeed. It’s like going to a different country and wanting to taste their version of the shit sandwich – you’re pretty much guaranteed it’ll be just as bad as the one they serve at your local cafe. Enough… let’s move on.

Killed another presentation today, or, at least I thought did. When I sat down, Pat told me I bounce and sway too much. Unfortunately, this is not news to me – it’s been one of the banes of my public speaking skills for as far back as I remember. I suppose, bouncing isn’t as bad as being totally unengaging or dry – but it’s still a downfall. Anyway, I thought the discussion went rather well overall, and was happy with my effort. Still not sure it was worth a week in Germany, but I’m not protesting too much.

Right now, though, it’s close to 7:30am on my body’s internal California clock – but it’s only 4:30pm here and some guy is presenting in a thick German accent that’s making me sleepy. I’m stuck here for another hour at least, I fear. So, I write. I’ve got my iPod plugged into my laptop to charge, but I can’t plug the laptop in for the wacky German plugs and my forgetting an adapter – so it’s really just trading electrons from one battery to another. At least the iPod will be ready for the journey home, that’s all I care about.

The city we’re staying in is actually really cool, and dates back to medieval times (you can still see remnants of the original city wall from the olden times). Our hotel is on a cobblestone street in the older section of town. The whole place feels very “Euro” to me: with its outdoor cafes and tiny cars. We ate dinner at a small cottage-looking place, out on a vine-clad patio as the sun set. The food, and beer, were excellent, and by the end of the meal I’d developed a nice swimmy head from the combination of sleeplessness and dunkel bier. I debated on joining the folks who’d come over on the short UK flight for another round of beer, but my fatigue got the best of me and I turned in around 9:30pm. Had a nice restful sleep and hit the ground running at 6:30am this morning. Now, to catch you up to the present so I can continue writing: I presented, we had more dinner, we went for beer (see the “hung over” bit above), slept, and it’s 7am Thursday here as I write this (I’ll get to sneak this entry in just under the wire for US Wednesday).

Yesterday, I’d mentioned I’d be posting some images from Germany as well as Keaton. Believe it or not, I think I’m going to be able to come through on both. Not having near as many pictures of Keaton as I thought I did, I had actually decided yesterday to postpone my semi-regular weekly-ish update to her gallery. But, talking to Sharaun, she’d mentioned she’d taken quite a few good ones since I’d been gone – so I decided to walk her through taking them off the memory card and uploading to my server whereupon I could retrieve and post them from the other side of the globe. Worked great, and I’m happy to be able to follow through and give you this update to Keaton’s Gallery. But wait, there’s more. I was also able to cobble together a short set of images from our first couple days – even going so far as to produce one of my little movies. You can watch it here: autobahn.unregulated, and check out the rest of the stills here.

And, that’s about it folks – the laptop is down around 20% battery and I didn’t bring the goofy German plug adapter. I’m off to catch the end of this episode of the German Flintstones and grab a shower before a sausage and potato breakfast. Not sure about posting Thursday and Friday US, as most of those days will be devoted to travel for me – but we’ll see.

Good-day to ya.

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t-minus one month and counting

FetusWatch 2006, Day 1
Some may think a month out is perhaps too soon to start my regular baby coverage, not me – I’m gonna do this in true media-blitz fashion. And, keeping with that blitziness, coverage will approach a fever pitch as the denouement approaches. Plus, I figured, I made the fancy news-style banner (thanks Inkscape!), I might as well kick off the feature. I’m not saying we’ll be all single-topic now, but you can expect the baby-talk to increase.

At the request of the to-be-hitched Ben and Suzy, Sharaun and I rambled up to some sawdust-burg set deep in the old-gold Northern Californian foothills Saturday evening. The place they’ve chosen to nup’ at has some “promotional” deal where the couple-to-be can come up and stay and drink for free, and, what’s more, they’re encouraged to bring friends. Not being ones to pass up an offer of such caliber, we gladly accepted and hit the road. It was a nice night, filled, for me at least, with wine and beer and some bad-judgement cigarettes I bought from the center console of some girl’s Ford… really, she had two-inch white heels on and sold me a pack of cigarettes out of her truck. Had I not switched to water around 1am, things could’ve been much worse – it was a swirly, headachey sleep as it was. It was a great night though, haven’t done that much unbridled imbibing in a while.

And, in iPod news, I spent some time this weekend importing album artwork into my library using the iTunes Art Importer, which works really well, if slow. Every time that little picture of the album comes up with a song, I feel a smile spread across my face. This thing, this “iPod,” was invented solely for me; I’ve been waiting for it since I was 12 and didn’t even know it – how I lived this long without it, I have no idea. I’ve also been slowly wading through the library and making sure the genre tags for all the tracks are correct. I never cared about tags that much before, but with the ability to shuffle within or listen to a particular genre – it’s become more important. Want a grunge mix? Blues, maybe soul? Fire it up.

No more writing. Goodnight.

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tied to the mast

Mizzen you already.
Hey folks! Check it out!

The 10/12Z notations are dates slash times. If you look, between 12 Zulu on September 10th and 12 Zulu on September 11th, typhoon Khunan will grace Taiwan with its presence. Doing the Zulu-to-local conversion (providing my math is right, I never was good with time), that puts this thing in Taiwan sometime between 8pm Saturday and 8pm Sunday. My flight is due to arrive in Taipei at 8:15pm Saturday night. It’s almost like Khunan and I got together and planned it!

Direct hit?

Swirling red wine in a glass at Wayne’s place… midnight on the eve of my departure. Too much wine, really… stubborn fingers are ugly on the keyboard.

Goodnight, fare-me-well. Until next week, in Taiwan. Goodnight.

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scotch on the rocks

Glug glug.
Today, no two paragraphs are about the same thing. At least I had some time to write this weekend. Time that should’ve been spent mowing lawns or painting walls or doing laundry or any number of other things – but wasn’t. Tonight was Chivas Regal scotch on the rocks at a coworker’s place for dinner… four of those and the fingers are a little heavy and stubborn on the keyboard.

Got my bermudagrasss killer in the mail the other day, and I eagerly opened the package to find the pint taped securely shut across it’s lid. Anxious to put the stuff down on my weeds, I sat down to read the product label and advisories. Apparently this stuff is the most caustic poison on earth. You can read the warnings for yourself, but this is some evil stuff. When applying, you’re advised to wear long pants, a long sleeved shirt, and special gloves to avoid skin contact. You can’t breathe it or get it in contact with your skin, and God forbid you somehow get it in your eyes or ingest it. You’re supposed to triple-wash the container before recycling, and are advised not to burn it or spray it near irrigation or animals. When I placed the order online, I chose the full pint over a half, thinking that, if I did need to do several applications to get the job done, I didn’t want to run out. Turns out the stuff is so potent, that you use less than an ounce for 1000 square feet of turf – so my $60 pint is probably enough to treat an entire city.

I’m sorry Death Cab, I probably jumped the gun. The more I listen to your new album, the one I panned a last week, the more I realize that my downloaded copy is probably not the real deal. The quality isn’t stellar, and some of the songs sound half-done. If this is, indeed, the studio version and not some comp of demos or whatever, I’m cool with that too. It’s not 100% bad, but it’s not what I’ve looked forward to as a follow up to that album with the bird and string on the cover. It’s slow, and drippy, with only a couple peppy numbers to break the melancholy. Most times, I love the dreary indie-pop, dig the teary-eyed horned-rim stuff… but this stuff is kinda… bland, kinda… vanilla. I’ve got some hope that, when and if the proper album leaks, it’ll be a little more polished and a little more instrumented… but who knows.

I was sitting in church this Sunday, looking down at my folded hands as I often do during a prayer. That’s when I noticed a smallish raised bump on my finger – what I used to call my “writing bump.” A callous from holding my pen/pencil tight as I write, only now it’s merely a dwarfed miniature of what it once was. I just don’t write anymore. Thinking about it, I write so little, I can name the few instances when I do: signing something, such as a document at work ; writing the one check a month for that single remaining bill which I can’t setup for auto-debit; or taking quick notes during a meeting. All of this probably amounts to only a few hundred words per week. Using my hands to write has almost become a thing of the past. I type everything. Back in college, when I would fill both sides of a piece of notebook paper with the step-by-step operations of a laborious LaPlace transform – my writing bump was prominent, well-worn. Since college though, the actual times I hand-write something have dropped so sharply, I hardly have a bump at all.

Goodnight.

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my testicles hurt

Mercy me.
I used to joke with Sharaun that I must have some sort of internal “timer” that finds me visiting the emergency room whenever it runs down and resets for the next time. Sitting in the crowded waiting room now, I can remember the last time I was in a place like this – nearly a year ago. Hospitals suck. They suck bad.

This weekend was a whirlwind of travel. Sharaun and I flew home to Florida for our ten year high school reunion. Took the redeye into Orlando, leaving Thursday arriving Friday, and then flew back to Northern California Sunday morning. The trip wasn’t as long as I wanted, more run-run-run than relaxation, but it was good. Without going into the long of it, the short of it is that we had a great time. Saw some folks I literally hadn’t seen in ten years. Cheap beer and wish-I-hadn’t cigarettes filled two social-centric evenings with old friends. Since we were in Florida, we dined primarily the standard hot wings, southern barbecue, and sweet tea fare – stuff you just don’t get here in California. Fried alligator tail and Bud Light make for one hell of a fine southern meal.

I guess I’m not much in a writing mood. It’s late, I’m grumpy from flying and not getting enough sleep for the past three days. My Economy Plus seat wouldn’t recline on my last connecting flight home, which made getting my much-needed rest more uncomfortable than it could’ve been, and then our luggage somehow ended up on a flight coming in four hours after us. Since it was after 10pm, the next time they could deliver it to the house would’ve been mid-morning tomorrow (Monday). All Sharaun’s bathroom junk was in there, and it’s her first day of school with her new class tomorrow. That means we’d have to make the 45min drive back to the airport just hours after leaving, to stand and wait by the carousel for our bag to come off some flight we weren’t even on.

This place is somewhat surreal. Is it my imagination, or does the societal underbelly seem to need “urgent” medical care more than others? Right now, there’s a completely skeezed-out woman making a series of frantic calls on the payphone trying to locate some cigarettes. Something about leaving the older kids at Taco Bell and taking the younger kids home, then coming back for the ones left earlier. Bottom line though, is that she’s got to get those cigarettes. She’s got a pot-leaf embroidered on the right back-pocket of her size-zero jeans from Gap – Crack Whore. The young girl in pink terrycloth pants at the registration counter has multicolored hair and is giving her profession as “MT,” massage therapist. Cigarette-woman’s hands are soot-black, and her feet shoeless. I feel completely out of place sitting here with a portable computer on my lap. Emergency rooms are sad places, I don’t like them at all.

‘Night.

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wheelchair love is cool and all

Summer summer summer, turns me upside-down.
Today I’ve got a lot of images, some of them big. At first, I considered shrinking them so that those of you with smaller screen resolutions wouldn’t have the site layout being all messed up – but I decided at the last minute that I didn’t really care. So, hope you enjoy this Monday’s entry.

What LP sets my heart a’ pitter-patter these days and nights of summer? This week, it’s a little gem called Underwater Cinematographer by yet another Canuck collective – The Most Serene Republic. Lead croon has a very Gibbard-esque voice, and you can even sometimes hear strains of Gibbard’s work here (Death Cab, Postal Service, etc.). But I don’t want to pigeonhole the band… as they definitely have a varied sound… and really kickass drumming at times. Plus, they scream courses… which for some reason, I love. You give me a studio full of people standing 10ft away from the mics screaming a ragged course at the top of their lungs, and I’m going to buy your album. These guys did it twice, and in a less-freaky way than the Polyphonic Spree’s saccharine-cult mantra version (which I also totally dig). Survey the scene for yourself here, headphones required.

This weekend Saturday was bliss. I swam all day in the pool at Pat’s house, ate some grilled hamburgers, and then ended the night by watching the hotly anticipated remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Yeah, it totally does… I wish that’s how it actually went down. Here’s the real story:

This weekend Saturday was bliss. With weather.com reporting the high that day at 108° F, Pat had called and asked if Sharaun and I wanted to come over to his place for some swimmin’ and grillin’. Sounded like perfect summer fun to me, and it would actually be the first time I’d be able to confidently go swimming without fear of death. I headed over, wifeless, due to headache, around 2pm. Shortly thereafter, we were in the water. Together, we balled our fists and shook them at the summer swelter, symbolically, of course, by drinking cold beer and lounging in the tepid pool. Hour by hour we defied the shimmer of heat on the horizon, beer cans amassing at the pool’s edge at an alarming pace. Before I knew it, 6pm had arrived and more folks had shown up for the cookout. Oh, and I had made an even trade: swimming in the pool for swimming in a drunken haze. Stumbling inside, I managed a burger and a half before laying down on the floor for some rest. Waking up, I wasn’t in any shape for a trip to the theater… so Sharaun took me home where I crashed on the couch alone. I missed the movie, which really bummed me out. I woulda done better for my day by drinking a little less and making the movie… but I guess it all worked out OK. I still had a nice summer day, and my liver got a workout.

You guys wanna hear some crap? Sharaun got her degree right, her Masters in Education. Spent extra time and extra money at school to get that graduate degree. Right now, we’re still paying that thing off – as graduate tuition is like 3x normal in-state tuition. Anyway, she got this degree while we were back in Florida, and would we have stayed in Florida – she could’ve immediately started working at any public school with a Florida teaching credential. We, however, did not stay in Florida; we came to sunny California – for my job. Upon arriving, she learned that her two Florida-earned degrees didn’t hold much water here on the West coast. In order to begin teaching, she’d 1st need to apply for an emergency credential (good for three years) and then take some test. She passed the test, a yawner that most high-school grads would do fine with, and scored her emergency teaching credential. And, for the next two years she applied and interviewed at every school district around. Despite the news’ constant blathering about California’s “teacher shortage crisis,” she wasn’t able to land a job to save her life. Finally, a long-term substitute position was her foot in the door and she scored a full-time position. And, for the past three years she’s been teaching on that emergency credential.

Now we’re caught up to the present, and her emergency credential is expiring. Thing is, the process by which out-of-state degree holders earn “real” credentials is insane. There are a couple options, all of which will cost us considerable amounts of money and her considerable amounts of time and stress. The constant between the options is this test she has to take, the CSET. Far from the high-school yawner described above, this is a comprehensive test which covers a variety of topics – and is not easy in the least. Y’know, I can talk about it all I want and you probably won’t get the proper appreciation for the level of absurdity I’m trying to convey. So, here, painstakingly excerpted from the practice tests online, are some of my favorite questions that California kindergarten teachers are required to answer to obtain their credentials:


I feel like I should know this – but I don’t. I think I could make an educated run at it, but I don’t know it for sure. Oh, I have a bright yellow notebook at home that contains all my notes from 9th grade World History with Mr. Hines – it’s likely in there… but it didn’t make it from there to in my head with any sense of permanence. Here’s another:


Double-header here, fit better with the layout. Re: 43, the Radical what now? I swear I never even learned this. I couldn’t even come up with a good educated guess on this one… does that make me stupid? That second one has got to be a trick right. Even if I had ever heard of this thing, all these would sound right to me on test day. You know, you don’t learn California history if you don’t go to primary school in California… Let’s see what else we got here:

Using my knowledge of geology?! What the… oh yeah, because I would have, of course, studied geology extensively in my pursuit of a degree in teaching elementary school. And here we go:

OK, now, for real. Shut up. Just shut the hell up. These things are making me more and more angry as I go along. Soon enough I’m about to jump out of my CSET desk and jam my two #2 pencils in the proctor’s eyes. This test is so stupid. And now… I’ve saved the best for last… my personal favorite:

Oh. My. Word. What the crap? What class, exactly, would’ve prepped me for this question? Music theory? Every person aspiring to be a teacher in California must be able to read music and identify melody, rhythm, and form. Stupid-ridiculous.

Were she the graduate of a California college, with or without a masters degree, none of this would be required – none. But because her degree is from out of state, she has to jump through innumerable hoops before she’s declared “fit” to teach the budding young’ns of Northern California. I’m all for holding teachers to high standards, but this crap is pretty ridiculous to me. Sure it’d be great if all our teachers, K-12, knew how to prove the Pythagorean Theorem – but I’m pretty sure you can handle 3rd graders just fine without the knowledge. Whew! Now that I’m done venting…

That’s it. Nothing more. Until tomorrow, goodnight.