Speaking of breaks, I have tomorrow off! Maybe I’ll play some video games, it’s been a while… a month or more, I think. It’s also Micro Four Thirds Day, and we happen to own a mu-43 camera, so maybe I’ll take some pictures!

Speaking of pictures, I saw this giant plume of dark smoke when I got close to home… in the exact direction of home… and I found myself hoping that home wasn’t on fire. I think, maybe, the landfill across the street from our subdivision is on fire. So maybe we’re safe. There’s certainly a lot of ash floating through the air.

Speaking of air…. um, I got nothing.

It makes me sad that we have to water down the risk in activities that are designed to be risky.

bad news: A1C tests usually mean blood samples taken with a needle and a big bruising scar that lasts for days.
good news: today’s A1C came from the same finger prick they used to test my current blood sugar and was ready in 6 minutes.

bad news: I had to fast for this appontment today and hadn’t eaten since 8.30 last night.
good news: panera bread on the way to the red line (with free wifi)

bad news: I’m not done with the stats for work, yet
good news: I’m downtown for the study appointment, so I can swing by the office and get the stuff I’m missing, hopefully.

bad news: between major seasons, so not much work besides finishing the stats.
good news: picked up a few days at a couple other teams courses and met people and have heard from even more courses who want me to work for them.

bad news: it was raining this morning and I had at least one 10 minute walk on the schedule.
good news: the sun is out.

In other news, I got on the list at a couple more teams courses and hopefully I’ll be picking up more work. Already lined up a few days in between the usual season and summer camp. Hooray!

In other news, we’ll be back on the east coast, doing the family thing and trying to catch up with all the people who I’ve neglected to see on my last couple trips that way from the day after Christmas until about the 30th. Let me know if you have time in there and want to reserve a day or evening, now.

In other news:

Work starts back up soon, one meeting next week and then officially back to a regular schedule the following week. I think we have Fridays off this season.

Got the annoying clicking noise the rear wheel(s) of my car were making fixed… it took three tries, but we got it done. Now I hear every click and creak the car makes when I hit bumps and stuff… still need to do whatever needs to be done about the little ding in the windshield.

And we’ve been using our game consoles a lot over the break… picked up the X-Men Origins: Wolverine for xBox 360 and Fat Princess for PS3 … and I might dig into our most recent purchase, Mini Ninjas during this last week off. Fall TV season be damned, we’re playing our video games!

I’m also back to trains and other public transportation for the summer and have been listening to a lot of music (and Half-Blood Prince, lately, in preparation for the movie). I like how the commute in the summertime gives me a chance to reconnect with my music collection. I’d still love to replace my phone (which still turns itself off quite a bit) and my iPod and the GPS with one device… but I don’t know if I should wait for the Garmin phones to come out or just cave in and get an iPhone. So I’m still nursing my phone along and carrying both.

The wedding and trip out to Maine  was fun. I haven’t really had a chance to go through those pictures and pick out the best ones yet, but again, I’ll post a link, when I do. I don’t think I have another day off until camp is over… though, I may take a Saturday, next week or the week after. I’m LOVING my Macbook pro. I haven’t completely set myself up on it and decided what programs I’m going to use for photo work and web work to replace my windows favorites (Paint Shop Pro and Homesite 5.5). It’s an awesome piece of hardware, and I’ve already used it to do some stats work for adventure ed. and it was almost a pleasant experience. I’ve definitely gotten used to the trackpad and the multi-touch-ness.

I’m also eating a little healthier. When I’m picking out meals, I constantly think of the Dead Milkmen song “nutrition,” which is fun to hum, but it’s kind of a silly song. I’ll get more into the reasons for this sudden health-consciousness when I’ve completely wrapped my head around it.

Right now, sitting at the desk at the Y, all I can really think about is seeing Star Trek. I’ve heard so many good things about it… sure, some classic trek fans have their issues, but it’s trying to reboot the Star Trek world, not continue it. With a bunch of the Fringe team behind the writing and production, it has to be good.
update: Star Trek didn’t happen tonight, but we did a lot of research into how to set up a clothesline for Patti for Mother’s Day. Hopefully we’ll fit Star Trek in, tomorrow.

Good things coming up: more days off, mini-vacations, new Fable II downloadable content, macbook

In the bummer zone: Garmin announced more delays for the Nuvifone. The android phones are looking more and more attractive, even though they don’t have turn-by-turn directions, yet. Unfortunately, the only android phone even rumored for Verizon has a crappy-looking keyboard. If I didn’t think I’d miss the real keyboard, I’d already have broken down and gone with the iPhone. In the meantime, my phone is surviving… only shutting itself off once or twice a day.

I don’t have a timeframe for the phone upgrade. I was waiting for the nuvifone, but there isn’t a release date for that yet, and the main reason I was leaning towards it was the GPS-centric nature of it. The word on the street is that the new iPhone OS will enable using the Google maps in other applications and allow turn-by-turn directions. I don’t know if I can go Apple in such a big way… but the iPhone does have great customer satisfaction ratings and such. My phone turned itself off three times, completely at random, on Thursday… it is definitely time for that upgrade, but it also might not happen until the summer.

I don’t know if it’s actually going to be an upgrade, but we’re supposed to switch from Dish to U-Verse next month. Our DSL is currently with AT&T, and it can’t even handle streaming Netflix movies… I don’t think we ordered any more speed, so it probably won’t change, but the girl who set up the install sure did try to convince us that it was a newer, better, more exclusive dsl line. As far as I’ve heard, U-Verse is just TV over DSL. It’s pretty likely that we’re actually trying to squeeze TV and the internet over the same pipe and actually downgrading. We shall see.

This site’s wordpress code is due for an upgrade, but I don’t have any desire to do that. All of my little plugins are working fine. Maybe, if I get a little more into tumblr/twitter/etc. after the phone/macbook upgrade, I’ll feel the need to tweak the code here to keep up with more mobile updates.

My car doesn’t need any upgrades… I guess Doug’s van is dead, though. We peeked at some craigslist ads for similar vehicles in our price range, but haven’t started actively looking at anything yet. I’ve been using the Sirius in my car much more often, lately. I got an eMail from Sirius and I was tempted to buy the latest portable radio while I can still “lock in” the current rates. Who knows if Sirius will survive? I’ve done my part to support them. I resisted the urge by telling myself that the radio I had put in my car works fine and I don’t need another portable music player… I like the idea of combining a couple devices, not adding one to carry around.

My camera also doesn’t need to be upgraded, but I haven’t used it much, lately. When I had time to be taking pictures, I was mostly playing video games. I’ll bring it along on the field trips for work and maybe that’ll respark my desire to shoot. Maybe a new toy would help… Or maybe I should get a Diana+ for myself, since it seems to be getting all the cool attachments and add-ons lately.

Upgrade fever is similar to Spring fever. All of our vacation planning is definitely keeping the typical spring fever symptoms at bay… unless vacation planning is a symptom of spring fever. Mom’s coming up during my spring break, we’ve got a family vacation planned for early June and a wedding back east in late June… and we’ve yet to pick out a show, but we plan to hit APT/Theater in the woods again this summer. I guess there are a few weeks between the team-building season and the camp season that I haven’t thought about, yet. There’s always video games…

In other news, Thursday, the Mazda is getting an oil change and the master window switch replaced, again. The first time it was because the Auto button wasn’t working. Then the replacement made the right rear window non-operational. It’s been a long process, and a learning experience, since I’m now on my extended warranty and have to pay money for repairs. I also have to pay a whole bunch of money to have my windshield replaced. I woke up, Sunday morning, to find a starburst and cracks branching off in multiple directions right at the top center of the glass. Illinois doesn’t have that nice separate glass policy that Massachusetts did… so I have to pay my full comprehensive deductible. I’d say that maybe I could get some cook pictures of the work in progress, but we’ve lined up sealcoating for the driveway for the same day, and that smell gives me an almost instant headache that lasts for a whole day.

Tomorrow, I think I get rained on during our first day trip of the season.

In exciting/fun news, one of Sarah’s polaroids from our trip back east is shot of the day on Polanoid … she even gets a gift card! Woot!

In other news, I’ve found a new feed aggregator that I like: Swurl. It has a much more blog-like design, and the timeline feature is really neat. Here’s my swurl. I also got a new camera bag. The one that came with the Pentax owed me nothing, since it was, essentially, free… it finally got too beat up to be used, so I got a Crumpler 6 Million Dollar Home and it fits a lot of stuff.

I’m probably forgetting stuff, but already on the list are some gardens in Victoria, the Capilano Suspension Bridge in Vancouver and Pike Place Market and the Seattle Aquarium… on the probably/possibly/maybe list is the Space Needle, Experience Music Project, Boeing and the Underground Tour.

Some Yelp searching has turned up these, that I’d like to add to the food possibilities list:

Paseo – the words “food orgasm” come up in their reviews, especially when it comes to something called a midnight cuban.
HoneyHole – sounds dirty, and delicious… “best fries in seattle” in several reviews
Armandino’s Salumi – great reviews… short hours, long lines and sort of expensive, but worth taking a day off of work for!
Cloud City Coffee – need to snub my nose at Starbucks by having good coffee somewhere in Seattle and this place sounds pretty cool
Portage Bay Cafe – good breakfasts, some talk of “unlimited fruit” and such at the “toppings bar.”
Georgetown Truck Stop – affordable, delicious breakfasts

And some other stops/shopping that sounds interesting:

Elliott Bay Book Company – we like books.
Archie McPhee – toys and silliness
Lincoln Square Cinemas – in case we decide not to break our movie night tradition
Nintendo Headquarters – yeah, we love nintendo.

Any other suggestions?

It’s been a fun week. The weather was fairly nice and we went to the Flea Market, today. We’ve been teased with warm spells and then temperatures dropping back near freezing overnight, so it was nice to walk around in a t-shirt today. The overnight trips for Adventure Ed. are this week, so I hope this warm spell continues. We saw Iron Man on Friday. It was pretty darn good, especially for a comic book movie. We also went yard saling that morning and attended Fly Bird‘s 4th birthday bash-thing and picked up some weird stuff. I think we’re doing a double date tonight and seeing another movie, maybe Forgetting Sarah Marshall or maybe Baby Mama… I really liked the intriguing “is that for real?” ad campaign that Forgetting Sarah Marshall did with their billboards and busboards.

I also did something bad to my knee at some point this week. I think I may have injured it on Tuesday night when I was doing a balancing-on-one-foot-and-tying-my-shoe dance. It was kinda sore on Wednesday, worse on Thursday and really really painful on Friday. Yesterday it was much better and today it feels fine… but it really made me feel old. I was all gimpy and hobbling around the yard sales on Friday.

Oh, and while it wasn’t my boss, this time… a director at the YMCA I work at was let go this week. I’m not directly involved and, as I said, it wasn’t my boss, so it has nothing to do with the curse that I bring along to every after-school day care that I’ve ever worked for, but I am curious to see how they fill his position. I haven’t yet worked for a YMCA that filled a vacant position with anyone half-as-good as the person that left/they fired. They usually cut corners and give some of their responsibilities to other directors and maybe hire a new assistant.

I’m back on a normal schedule, this week, at work. Last week was daytrip week. We did three in a row, and had good weather for the first, but rainy/snowy freezing temps on the second and a cold start on the last one. It tired me out pretty good.  We’re moving on to bigger and better problem solving initiatives. The boss is throwing some weird rules at us, that I really feel are hindering the natural progression of the groups… but apparently, we’re all about skills this season, not teams. Yet, we’re still experiential… so wouldn’t building a good team and forming naturally and working together in the best team possible be the best way to experience the skills needed in a community or team? Whatever. The daytrips were a great environment, but I’m glad that I’m back to the schedule that I’ve sort of grown accustomed to. I do have to start getting the stats from the initial surveys entered this week, but it shouldn’t take too much extra time.

I also made some eMail changes this week. I was playing around with Google Apps, and it really made me realize the superiority of GMail. I now have GMail retrieving (and then deleting from the server, thus solidifying my committment) all my POP accounts AND I’ve got the old HoTMaiL (I like to pretend that Microsoft didn’t take it over and ruin it, and therefore still spell it with the, admittedly obnoxious, capitalization that it originally debuted with) account forwarding there. Right now, I have them filtering into separate labels for each account, but I’m sure I’ll make up a set of labels and filters like the folders I have in Thunderbird now. I also enabled IMAP for the whole GMail account, so I can still use Thunderbird and see all my old mail and my new mail in one program, though in separate inboxes. I’m happy with it so far. Next web project: upgrade this blog to WordPress 2.5.

Now that Michigan is behind us, we’re rapidly approaching our Seattle trip. Sarah and her mom are all about having a good plan, so they’ve started asking around and researching attractions “not to miss” in the Seattle, Victoria & Vancouver areas. My first thought, when Seattle is mentioned, is Kurt Cobain. While I appreciated him as a songwriter and musician, I’m not enough of a fanatic to go seeking out any of his old hangouts or the house he died in or anything creepy/weird like that. We’ve got a week there, so I guess one of my goals is to find some great places to eat. I’ll definitely be using Yelp to see what the locals think.

I’d come upon reviews on Yelp while searching, but never realized what a big and active site it was, until Friendfeed tempted me to sign up for my own account. If you’ve got an account on Digg, Google Reader, Reddit, del.icio.us, Furl, Google Shared Stuff, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, Gmail/Google Talk, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter, Seesmic, Vimeo, YouTube, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug, Zooomr, Tumblr, iLike, Last.fm, Pandora, Amazon Wishlists, Disqus, LinkedIn, Netflix, SlideShare, Upcoming, Yelp or a blog with an RSS feed, you should sign up for friendfeed. Then we can be friends and I can get updates about your stuff without having to make up an “imaginary friend” feed for you… and you can see updates from all your friends’ stuff on one page. I think it’s a brilliant use of RSS technology.

In other computer-related news, two of the hard drives I sent in for recovery have come back to be by way of a new external drive. Most of the data is intact and there are some original versions of photos from a couple events (shooting the house in Bedford, trip to Philly with Drew to see Olivia) from 2003 and 2002. The oldest drive was not recoverable, at least not by the company I went with, and should have all the photography from my first year or two with my Olympus and a bunch of other old band-related and website-related stuff that I’d like to recover. I’ll probably call around and see if anyone’s up for the task.

Adventure Ed starts up this month. We have a some new blood with us this season, so that should make things interesting. We’re also trying to shift the focus to skills training, which sort of sounds like what my last program was all about. There, we had a big long talk with the kids coming in to the program… explaining what we were going to work on. Here, we’re going to do it in a more subtle way, I guess, but there will be some frontloading of teamwork concepts, which I’m cool with it… just don’t know how it fits with the timeframe. We’ll see how it actually goes.

It’s been snowing a lot. I’m a fan of winter, I really am, but we’ve had enough of this stuff, now, I think. We still have rolls of film to finish, but there hasn’t been a great day to do it… either too cold or too gray. It was kinda fun to go through the House on the Rock stuff and get it uploaded. I think Sarah and I are both itching for a vacation. Maybe we should do another short road-trip. Montreal was suggested, but that’s a bit long for road-trip. I’m all for it, though. Sure it’s not the right season to go North, and sure the state of affairs with needing a passport/not needing a passport to go to Canada is still up in the air… but what’s the worst that could happen, we get stuck in Canada forever? Or take a road-trip and be denied at the border because our birth certificates aren’t notarized? It’s still sounds like a vacation.

I’m in Dudley at my parents’ house, actually, outside my parents’ house and Dad is there. He tells me he’s heading somewhere, some weird location whose name I know was repeated multiple times in the dream, but that I can’t recall at all, now. He said he had to pick some stuff up, but that some people might come looking for stuff… and he started to say, “If they come, it’s…” but then he changed his mind and said just to tell them that he was out. Some people definitely came, and I don’t remember my exact interaction with them, but I do remember that they did finally decide to leave, but that there were a lot of cars in the driveway, so they proceeded to smash into many of them on their way out… one of them was in a little classic dodge caravan type thing and backed into this 80s Oldsmobile looking thing on the grass behind the house and somehow pushed it all the way across the yard and into the fence. I told whoever was standing next to me that it’s ok, “it doesn’t run.” Then he continued his many pointed turn maneuver and pulled in between some small trees onto the neighbor’s yard over their driveway and down to the road. I remember being thankful that my car (which was my current car, my Mazda 5) was parked way behind the house and out of his rage range. I was looking at some awful gold-rust colored Cadillac up on the hill that heads up to the barn and being thankful that they hadn’t hit this one. I think it was partly because it belonged to someone important to my dad and partly because that someone would’ve gone crazy and beat them up, or something. Then I was talking to someone, maybe the same person I had told not to worry about the car on the lawn, about my dad telling me where he was going and that people might come by and I mentioned where he went and they said, “oh, then he’s gone to get the paperwork.” And proceeded to explain to me that he was probably out getting whatever illiegal documents were needed to make this other guy into me, on paper. I don’t think there was good explanation why, at the time.

The next part I remember is a bunch of people gathered inside with Dad, and this guy who was going to become me, and they were all sitting around a table, maybe, but I think we were all on couches. I know that I wasn’t supposed to know about this identity thing… so there was some point in the conversation when my Dad asked if anyone had anything to say, or maybe asked me something directly… either way, I said something about not being able to ever start my own company because “he’s going to be me.” There was some shock, I think, that I knew.

And then it turned into a party, for this guy, because the cat was out of the bag, and my dad explained that he was going to take control of the Voegtlin Corporation and Companies. Somebody said something about him not really needing to be me to do that and whoever was sitting next to them said that it would be cheaper if it was inherited. I remember that I got really mad at Dad at one point, I think he had said something about playing music and not being able to start a company doing that or something, and from my position, half-lying down on a couch, threw a drumstick (a bass drum mallet, one of two I was twirling around in my fingers) at his head, though, intentionally missing by a couple inches. He paused and looked alarmed and after a while, threw it back and I caught it somehow with the other stick. I also remember that I was just lying on the couch and saying very little while this party was going on around me. At one point, this guy who was going to become me, who I’m not positive had a name until this point, was talking about how much he loved certain pills he was taking. There was lots of agreement, including from my Dad, I think… and then there was some mention of his birthday and someone said, “yeah, what are we gonna do for him on his last birthday as Eddie?”

Then some more science-fiction flair got thrown in, someone, possibly me, asked about how he was going to prove he was me, if it ever came into scrutiny, and wouldn’t it be easier to steal Ernie’s identity (my older, mostly incommunicado, brother), and so on… and while there wasn’t really any explanation, my Dad did ask me for a blood sample, and for some reason Eddie was drawing his own blood, too. And then I told them that this wouldn’t work because I didn’t take any pills and everyone took pills, so my blood would certainly show up as irregular and any investigator worth his salt could tell that (pointing at various people in the room) “you’re on…” this and that drug and “you two are both on…” these pills and so on.

And that’s about the time I woke up. Thinking about it afterwards, the weirdest parts were that I was concerned with starting my own business… but maybe I was just using that as an example of something I couldn’t do if I wasn’t me, anymore. Another thing that struck me as odd was that “Eddie” was hispanic. he sort of looked like a bald Carlos Mencia… Dad was just a little bit racist, and it just didn’t seem right to me that he would hand down his whole company to a guy like that, but it’s not like I knew the guy, this was a dream, but it did occur to me right after waking up, so maybe it was part of the dream, too. Then there’s the fact that I had my Mazda. We essentially bought our Mazdas with Dad’s life insurance benefits. And the room the party was in was not like any room in our house in Dudley. It looked like a small, white apartment… but there’s gaps, I don’t even remember Dad coming back from wherever he was, in the dream, it’s possible that we all went somewhere else between the time I found out about the identity theft and the party. Then, in true Mark Mandeville, Dream No. 1 fashion, I started wondering if any of it was true, while preparing my breakfast (Mark wondered if he would drop dead any moment from the poison he drank in his dream, while he was eating his cereal). I wondered if Dad had, in fact, set someone up as a fake me. Of course, then I remembered that Dad was not as maniacal as he was in my dream and that there was no Voegtlin Corporation and Companies to inherit.

Back in the real world, I have some sort of training for Adventure Ed, tomorrow. Not sure exactly what it’s about. But I’ve also got to finish up the stats from last season and eMail the students with the links to the pictures after the training. I miss working a little bit, but I’d much rather sit home and play Lego Star Wars on the Wii… or go out and take some pictures, but it’s still looking pretty gray outside. I put in that order for sunlight on Friday. No tip for the sun god this time, that’s for sure.

Kinda sad that I have to actually go to work in the morning. It’s been a fun week of being a total bum. Not that I did nothing… we did plenty …but I’ve totally pushed off all the other work-related stuff I should’ve been doing. Adventure Ed stats aren’t done yet; gotta finish those this weekend and make a nice presentable summary file. I definitely blew off a staff holiday party tonight, probably gonna blow off one, if not both, tomorrow night as well. Might work one long day in the city, on Monday. I need to turn in the stats and help pass out t-shirts.

I had a couple little geek triumphs this week when I successfully added reCAPTCHA and tinyMCE to the simple blog script running Sarah’s site. Technically, I just got reCAPTCHA working and displaying the simplest of custom themes, we haven’t tweaked it to the way we actually want it to look yet… and the tinyMCE is running on my testing site until I get a chance to add it to Sarah’s code. It truly makes me appreciate all the work that goes into a CMS package, when I try to integrate a seemingly simple feature… meanwhile, my old friend and bandmate, Shana, is putting my web adventures to shame with her new site, Stylastic. It’s kind of like Hot or Not for style. I signed up. Those rating sites are a guilty pleasure, always have been. I know what your thinking… shouldn’t an existential fashion disaster be the arch-nemesis of such a site? Well… maybe … but we all know that’s just a witty name for my blog and it has nothing to do with fashion or clothes (of which I have a lot) or style (of which I have only a little). My Threadless obsession doesn’t count.

Work early tomorrow… should be sleeping. Off I go.