Well, it looks like the weather forecast was off by a day. I had been hoping to get the bike out this afternoon for a little while, but it’s nasty and has been raining off and on since last night. I suppose if I were really dedicated I could gear up and ride in it anyway… but I think I’ll stay in and work on the new desk instead. I’ve got about one more day before it’s ready, I think, just the clear coating and final assembly left to do. That sucker is huge. I have emailed the pearl supplier to see if I can use the pearl treatment in brush-on clear, or if I need to spray it.
“ME”-ligion
Pete sent me a picture message this afternoon; apparently there are some flavor of quasi-religious nutbars on campus there, advertising their views with signs of some sort and, no doubt, flyers and noise. I couldn’t quite make out the writing on the sign in the picture he sent me, so I asked him what it said. His response was, “Well, we’re all going to hell, basically”. Nice.
This is one good example of what I like to call “ME-ligion”. It’s kind of like religion, but more personal. In a ME-ligion, your belief system boils down to this: “Everyone in the entire world is going straight to Hell. Except ME, of course, because obviously God agrees with ME.” And, one assumes, those who agree totally with and are willing to be completely and unquestioningly subservient to the individual in question.
There are ME-ligions based loosely on Christian beliefs as well as Muslim, Jewish, and some really oddball beliefs. Wherever you find arrogant, self-aggrandizing megalomaniacs you’ll find a new and more nutty flavor of some religion. And, hey, once you’ve convinced yourself that only YOU have the answers and that everyone else is going to be smitten by God anyway, it’s not a big leap to realize that it’s OK to shoot them or blow them up.
The office is coming along
We went to Ikea while we were in Minneapolis for a wedding. I had heard a lot about Ikea, and most of what we saw was some fairly good quality stuff. There was some dorm room quality stuff I wasn’t too impressed with, but for the most part it seemed to be an excellent value.
We settled on a Galant desk system for the office. Unfortunately, one piece of the desk top is too big to ship UPS, so the shipping cost was going to be $300… and we had driven Lisa’s car instead of the pickup. Oh well. I have ordered all the frame and leg pieces, and will be making the desk top myself out of some birch plywood. The only part giving me any concern is a large radius cut for the top, and how to treat the edges. I’m leaning toward some hot-glue veneer edge band, mostly because of that radius.
In the mean time, the floor is looking good and my buddy Stu tells me some satin polyurethane will touch up the finish if I need to do any trimming or sanding. Have not gotten on the air yet, but it’s coming one of these days. Oh, and the Fusion averaged about 36 MPG for the trip. 38 on the way up with a tail wind, 34 on the way back with a headwind. It was getting around 36 each way on the east/west legs, with a slight crosswind.
Heart @ Stir
OK… when did Heart become a cover band? I think we heard them do almost as many Zeppelin songs as they did Heart songs. It was a little unexpected (though not altogether unpleasant) to hear Ann belting out The Immigrant Song.
A new office
It’s nice to get out of the basement!
For the last couple of weeks I have been working on a new home office. We took the carpet out of one of the empty bedrooms, painted the ceiling (thanks, Rob!) and walls, and I put in a bamboo wood floor. After putting the trim is back in place, I ran phone, Ethernet and coax cable to a wall jack and moved my work laptop up here. Now all I need to do is find some suitable furniture, as the computer table I am borrowing is really not the right height.
It’s looking like I may finally get a working ham station too. There is a good sized window over the back yard, with a good run to two maple trees. I had plans to run a number of end-fed half wave wires to the trees, but have decided to just run one end-fed wire instead and use a tuner. I managed to toss a temporary run of around 70′ or so into one of the trees, and the rig’s internal tuner managed to match it OK on several bands. Haven’t tried any contacts yet, maybe if I get a chance today.
Of course now I have to clean up the basement area where I had been working. Ugh.
Spammers suck.
This morning I came downstairs to find over 100 SPAM comments had been posted to my blog overnight. None of them were ever visible, of course; I don’t allow comments to be seen until I have seen them first, and that is the exact reason why. So far I have had one real comment (thanks, Lisa! I love you, too) and several hundred spammers trying to publish links to God only knows what.
Screw ’em. I have a delete button, and I know how to use it…
Fusion Hybrid, 3 months in
Well, we’ve had the Fusion Hybrid for roughly 3 months now, with a little under 3600 miles on the odometer as I recall. This car continues to perform extremely well.
Saturday we took it to Hastings to watch the Broncos soundly defeat Briar Cliff (34-20, and the game was not as close as the score would indicate). From Omaha to Lincoln we were in heavy Husker football traffic, moving at a steady 65 MPH. I think we were in a pretty constant slipstream with the solid line of cars and trucks, we got 43 MPG between our Omaha fill-up and the far side of Lincoln! Amazing. Our overall mileage for the 299 mile round trip, including some in-town driving in Hastings after the game, was 38.6 MPG.
I wasn’t exactly nursing it along; we drove at the same speed we normally would have, other than the Omaha-Lincoln stretch. There we drove as fast as possible, which was 65 MPH. After we cleared Lincoln, I had the cruise control set for 70 for the rest of the trip out and back. We stopped at the Stangs’ house to pick up Buddy on our way home. I figure we used less than $19 worth of gasoline for the trip, and less than half of what my truck would have used. In fact, we probably got almost the mileage we would have gotten on the Harley.
As for the features other than fuel economy, the car is still impressive. Lisa likes the rear view camera and early warning system when backing out of places; it’s pretty nice that the car will pick up approaching vehicles and warn you before you’re able to see them in a crowded parking lot. The sound system is great, and we’re even getting used to using the Sync system occasionally. The hands-free Bluetooth is nice. We’ve loaded several CDs into the car’s internal jukebox hard drive; my only gripe there is that while you can play music from a USB drive, you can’t transfer the files to the jukebox. Oh well.
It’s a keeper.
Shooting at The Bullet Hole
Played a little hooky today; I took an hour and a half to take a trip to TBH with Pete and his friend Austin. We managed to come home a couple of pounds lighter, having gone through 100+ rounds of .40 S&W, 50 or so rounds of .44 Magnum and a couple boxes of .22 ammunition. Much fun was had by all, and I think I may have brought home more .40 brass than I started with for a change.
The guy in the next lane had a suppressed .45 and a suppressed Walther – didn’t see whether it was a .22 or a 9mm. On a bright note, it looks like Titegroup works quite well in the M&P .40 Compact, so I can go ahead and load up a bunch of rounds with that.
The French Cafe
We’ve seen a lot of restaurants come and go. Many follow a path that is, by now, rather predictable. We saw it with Colton’s most recently. A new restaurant opens, and it’s great – great food, great service, nice decor, etc. We go there fairly frequently (for us anyway). Then something happens; the food quality falls off, service gets sloppy. Pretty soon we don’t go there any more, and more often than not the restaurant ends up closing. So, it’s good to know there are some places that have not lost their edge over the years.
If you have not eaten at the French Cafe recently, you really do owe it to yourself to do so. Lisa and I had our anniversary dinner there. It’s really the only place I can think of that has remained consistently close to flawless over the years we have been going. Our most recent visit was every bit as impressive as our first. The service was spot on, attentive but not intrusive. The food was beyond excellent — where else can you get French onion soup that good, and escargot? Nowhere that I know of, not around here.
The menu is fresh, not just the same thing year after year. Tony and Valerie Abbott keep things new without getting too far out in left field. I can only hope they keep it going at the same outstanding level until they can pass it along to someone who will do as good a job. I hope to have our 50th anniversary dinner there too!
Indian Cave State Park
We took the Harley down to Indian Cave State Park on Saturday…