Sometimes I wish I was still 19 and stupid.

I'm laying in bed last night, enjoying a peaceful night with a book. I've got the balcony door open in my room, letting the cool breeze in. (Christine was at a friend's house, that's how I was able to get away with having the door open when it was 12 degrees outside). Anyways, suddenly I'm interrupted in mid-paragraph by the sound of a V8 pickup with glasspacks roaring down the road below my house, and I mean wide open... the noise fades slightly, then returns, just as loud.. and then a third time. I think, "What the hell, is he doing laps?... Waitaminute, he is doing laps!" *For those who are unfamiliar with my neighborhood, there's an old abandoned oval racetrack in the trees just off the road nearby. The gated access to the track is well down the road from my driveway, but the back stretch of the track borders on the field behind my house.* I jump off the bed and run to the window, sure enough there's two sets of headlights flying through the trees, the loud one in the lead and a quiet one following. Every time they round a corner there's tire squealing and resulting laughter, obviously from people piled into the back of the pickup. I head downstairs and throw on some shoes, intent on getting down there in time to watch a few laps before they take off. 30 seconds later I'm halfway through the field to the footpath that leads to the track, the noisy truck is rounding the bend and crankin it open for the near stretch when..... scrreeeeeeech..BOOOM. I watch the headlights through the trees as they whip around and stop, facing back the way they came, right next to the trail that I'm about to walk down. By the time I reach the treeline I can hear their voices... at first there's a lot of "holy shit, everybody ok?", followed by "who put the tree in the middle of a racetrack? haha". I stop just off the track, in the trees, and just out of sight in the dark. From there I watch the gong show. "Hey man, yer truck's old, this just adds character." "The door won't open and the window won't go up, Duke's of Hazard style baby." I had briefly considered going down there to give them a hand, but quickly reconsidered. They had more than enough manpower available, and nothing kills a drunken teenage buzz like some old dude stepping outta the trees to offer his opinion. Eventualy, with the help of the other vehicle and a tow rope, they got the truck dislodged from the tree. Gave it a push to get it started again, and slowly cruised back around the track. I headed back up to the house, and by the time I got there they had decided to make another couple laps just for good measure. I love Monday nights.
-- I went back to the scene the next day and took the pictures shown below... CSI style :) --

This track was probably much less interesting before the moss and trees grew in. 

You don't see too many BFG mud terrain tires at Daytona anymore. 

Nosebleeds are trippy

Cool shit happening at the edge of my yard.... composting leaves + 4 weeks of rain = big freaky mushrooms.
I wonder which side I have to eat to grow bigger?

. 

I have a new chair

So I head upstairs to the accounting offices the other day, and find that all the staff up there got brand new desks and chairs while I was away on vacation. But poor them, they don't like their new chairs cuz there's not enough lumbar support. So I grabbed one of them and ran.
This chair kicks ass on my old one.. it's got levers that adjust it in any direction, a full height back, and a springy tilt. And the best part of all, the armrests turn in over top of my legs. Now I sit down and lock myself in, much like Captain Kirk did with the armrests of the command chair on the refitted NCC-1701 from ST:TMP. This way I'm ready if the evil Kohler empire launches an attack and our building loses inertial dampener control. I'm not gonna go tumbling across the floor of the office, it's too dirty.

Conspiracy theory

I do remember saying to myself, way back then, "Jeeze, you'd think there'd be a lot more damage than that."

http://www.freedomunderground.org/memoryhole/pentagon121.swf

Click on the link and give the movie a minute to load....

Home Sweet Home

Ahhh, it's good to be back.... For those of you who don't read Spencer's blog, Christine and I (and Spencer, Ingrid, Jeff & Craig) just finished up a full week of rest and relaxation down at Christina Lake. Seven straight days of hot tubbin', red meat, and plenty of alcohol. We spent the first six rain-filled days lazing around and playing games, then rented a speedboat with a pull tube when the sun popped out briefly yesterday. Everyone took turns hanging on for dear life on the tube while whoever was driving did their best to give us a white knuckle ride. This resulted in a few lake surface cartwheels, and a lot of sore arm muscles today. It would have been great to have a camcorder on the boat, that way we could all see how dumb we looked out there.
I'm going to spend the rest of my weekend recovering, then planning to try and lose the 5+ pounds I likely gained during our week of relentless consumption.

The Christina Lake crew... from left to right: Me, Christine, Spencer, Ingrid, Jeff, Craig 

There are those who would blame the provincial government for the recent "dry spell" in BC's Northern interior fishing industry... Personally, I think it's a combination of global warming and the West Nile virus. Oh, and gay marriage.
 

Only three more sleeps till Christmas.

http://www.christinalakevacation.com/2386WestLakeDrive.html

It's a long drive to Prince George

I just sat down to throw some crap on here, but now I have to pee... be right back.

K, now there's room fer more beer. I'm writing this from my parent's house in PG, after spending the last 36 hours (off & on) repairing my Mom's computer, I figured it should be put to some use other than email and solitaire. It was a fun repair job, the computer had a few minor problems, and at least one virus, so since there was absolutely nothing of value on here, I decided to just wipe 'er and update everything fresh-like. The first problem I encountered was the hard drive... the dos format was able to identify some bad clusters, and even though it thought they were being fixed, problems still occurred. A very long and slow Norton scan finally corrected the stragglers. I had also brought along an old 128 meg sdram chip to add to their 64, and man, this puppy just smoked with those 192 megs. :) Until I started the new Windows install. Several hang-ups and aborted runs finally prompted me to pull the two old 32 meg chips out, seems they didn't like Mr. 128 muscling in on their turf, and the mainboard just wasn't big enough fer the three of 'em. *insert one more goofy saying here* So I tossed them in my suitcase to see if they're worth $10 in store credit when I head down to get a used 512 SD for Christine's rocket PC.
Mom's happy now though, she's got her 400mhz email/solitaire machine back up to it's full potential.