Rantings of a Lunatic

So, we got our next energy bill the other day, and it was 3x times what they have been recently. This obviously caught me off gaurd a little bit. And, it also made me take a second look at how we were maintaining the house. So, today, I installed a new 7 day programable thermostat. I actually have missed that a bit. The last appartment I had in Austin had one installed for me, and I remember enjoying it. The way that it allowed me to program it to be comfortable when I was there but more efficient when I wasn’t was nice. Anyway, I installed the new one this morning, and adjusted it a little. [Read more]

So something snapped in me recently. I can’t say what it was, or even if it was in me for sure. Rather I know something is different, and my outlook on the world is definately different than it was 6 months ago. I have started to think about some things that I haven’t thought about in a long time, and I have started to act in a manner that I acted when I was a kid. When I was young, I was very active in the Boy Scouts, which I credit a lot of my current self to. I could never be a boy scout now, but I got my eagle when it was an appropriate time for me to do it. I am a different person now than I would have been if I hadn’t had that training. I think it was when I started using Google Reader that I stumbled across a blog that caught my interest. It was a survival preparedness blog, and I have been reading it ever since. If I remember correctly it was the blog “Bear Ridge Project”. It is a blog of a guy who is setting up a cabin on Bear Ridge, and attempting to live in an off-grid manner. I have thought about that sort of lifestyle quite at bit since I was a kid, even going so far as to research earth ships and the like fairly thoroughly. I think the passive nature of the earth ships is one of the really appealing things to me, but that is a separate post.
Anyway, as I continued to read the Bear Ridge Project, I came across more blogs that while they might not be the same topic, they are at least similar. I have included a list below of blogs that I do read, more accurately an export of my “Survival” feed folder in Google Reader. [Read more]

So, first up, I caught a pic of a spider in our back yard about a week ago, and then I caught another pic of a similar spider out on Jeff’s porch on Saturday. Here are the photos below, I am not sure what type of spider they are, a rough google search makes me lean towards a grass spider or funnel web spider. Either way, they are appropriately big, and they are definately creepy.

Next up in todays wonderfully illustrated post is the Venture Brothers. I love that show. I am not sure why I didn’t watch it from the beginning, but its a sort of misrepresentation of Johnny Quest all grown up. I haven’t seen any of season 3, but apparently its back on Adult Swim on Sundays, so I need to get my mythbox all set to record it for me.

And the third topic for a short post today is Amber has left KXAN. Apparently she and I graduated from high school together, and she swears that we took classes together, but neither of us can tell which ones. Anyway, following are some photos from her going away party. They mostly suck, but I like the lighting in a couple, and in one I think I even got the fabled “not pissed off Morgan”. Anyway, here are the photos, and I hope that Amber enjoys the direction that her life is going in now. It wasn’t long ago that I made a similar cross-country move.

And here is a last image, just a random shot I took and offloaded from the camera at the same time as the others.
Enjoy.

After lunch the other day, Travis, Todd and I were running a little early for having to be back to work, so we stopped in at this little book store called Brave New Books. It is right next door to the Vietnamese restaurant Pho, which has a great grilled chicken on rice plate, which is what was for lunch. Thats a sidetrack though. Travis and I had mentioned going in there previously, and so as we had an extra 20 minutes to kill we decided to stop in. When you walk in the door, the actual book store is down in the basement, and when we walked in we were greeted with a decent selection of conspiracy books and such. I am sure they won’t like me phrasing it like that, but its a cool place. I will definitely be going back shortly, because they did have a couple of books I had actually been thinking about trying to find already. There were books on everything from current politics to ancient philosophies.
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Wow, as every post starts, its been a while. And (un)fortunately, this most recent lapse of content posting has found me with an invigorated mental outlook. I have been working a fair amount of course, and only this week has it really slowed down. I know that will disappear next week, or the following at the latest as we go into July sweeps. Its the sweeps period that nobody really pays attention to, but that we still have to involve ourselves for the same. I personally would like to know who thought up the current sweeps system so that I could go kick them.
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