Irish Circles
I started a Irish history class last week, and we started off with studying archaeological evidence. There really isn’t all that much to study other than the various ring forts that were built. There are only a few hundred artifacts from early Irish history, and no writings that are known. Compare this to the Egyptians, Romans, Greek, or American Indian cultures, and it’s quite scarce. It amazes me that we know anything at all about the culture and society of ancient Ireland.
One of the lasting items are the various ring forts that were built. There are four Royal Sites (Cruachain, Tara, Dun Ailinne, and Emain Macha) that are heavily studied. They are not royal in the sense of kings and queens, but in the fact that they hold the most archaeological evidence available in Ireland. In one of the books that we are reading, there are many aerial photos and diagrams of the circles that were built. The remind me very much of the crop circles, and it makes me wonder if the crop circles were inspiration for the ring forts that were built.
I learned ages ago that it is easier to defend a circle than a square for many reasons. All of the ring forts follow this wisdom, but something that I wondered was why they were all circles. It seems to me that through trial and error, there would be some square, rectangular, or (maybe) triangular shapes. I asked my instructor if there were any non-circular shapes to be found. She said that there was one, and that was because it was built along a sea cliff. There was no way to build a complete circle around the fort. However, the one wall that they did build as a defense was built in an arc. Had there been room for a full circle, there would have been one.
It amazes me that a culture was able to build such perfect circles, and that they managed to hit upon the best defensible structure without any errors. Something in my conspiracy theorist mindset tells me that the Reptilian Overlords gave the secrets of fire, engineering, and warmongering to the Irish before fading into the background to watch the fruits of their labor.
Halloween Party
I went to a Halloween party Friday night at Fred’s invite. I barely managed to get out past all of the snow, but I got on my way nicely once I made it to paved roads. I stopped to get some food before getting a haircut before the party. I decided to dye my hair blond this time around, but the stylist didn’t do a good enough job. It came out a lighter red color. What a waste of time and money. I’ll probably get something from the store and do it myself in a week or two.
I was one of the first people to get to the party, so I hung out and helped Fred with the decorations for the party. He’s got a thing about heights, and we needed to hang some lights about 10 feet above the floor. Not too high, but the ladder that I had was shoddy. After bailing off of the ladder a few times, I managed to get the lights hung where they needed to go.
People finally started showing up, and the party got into full swing. I knew all of 10 people that were there, but I still had a good time. There were some good costumes. I went as Randall from Clerks 2. I had the Ranger Danger T-shirt, the Moobys overshirt, and the Leonardo Reapers hat that was on backwards. I felt like I had a pathetic costume for the party. I’m going to have to do better next year. One thing that made me happy was that about half of the people there recognized the Moobys shirt. That made me feel good for Kevin Smith.
We had a total of a little over 100 people at the party. There was good dance music, and plenty of booze. I stopped drinking around Midnight, and stuck to water after that point. Just before I left at around 1:45, I grabbed an energy drink and downed it on the road home. It was a good time, and I was glad that Fred dropped me an invite. I hope that we get together again next year, and I’ll have a better costume next time around.
Snow Update
Craing carpools with me to work, and he tried to get to my house this morning only to find himself mired in a snow bank. He hoofed it the last 100 yards to my house, and worked from my house until around Noonish.
We were walking to his car to see if we could get it out of the snowbank when we came across a guy that was plowing the roadway. I offered him $60 to dig out our drive way, an he gladly took it. Once he plowed his way to our house, he unburied our driveway. That’s a goo thing. It would have taken me days to dig the damn thing out.
We finally got Craing’s car unstuck with the help of another man that had a backhoe on his tractor. If it wasn’t for him, Craing would still be stuck. We finally got Craing’s car down the slope, and in a safer place (after almost getting it stuck a second time.)
There is still one snow bank between us and the main road that hasn’t been cleared just yet. I’m not sure when the road crews will get around to clearing this part of the roadway. I have a party that I’m going to with Fred tonight, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to get out. I hope that I can make it out of here before the end of the day. I’m starting to get some serious cabin fever after spending 2 straight days stuck indoors.
Snowed In
We had a huge blizzard hit our part of the world yesterday. We went to bed Wednesday, and everything looked fine. We got up in the morning to find ourselves snowed in. There really isn’t lots of snow on the ground (for Colorado, anyways), but it’s blowing around so hard that we can’t even see the mailbox at the end of the driveway from our front door. That’s a distance of about 25 yards, so it’s pretty bad.
I was really looking forward to my Thursday night D&D game sine it’s bee a while since I’ve had a chance to get together with my friends and game the night away. Oh well, I’ll have to save up my gamer energy, and use it all on Saturday. I’m not sure what Kolvedic has planned for us for the Saturday game, but I’m really looking forward to it.
My usual day for working from home is Thursday anyways, so it’s not like I took the day off or anything. I still worked the day away.
We didn’t get anymore snow after around 6 PM yesterday, and it started to warm up almost right away. Hopefully the snow starts to melt away because we have almost 2 1/2 feet of the stuff drifted up in front of our garage. I started digging out last night, but I didn’t get very far. I worked on the snow some this morning, and made some good progress. I’m going to see if any of it will melt away before going to shovel some more. I’ll probably head back out around Noonish to see what I can do about the snow.
Writing
With the help of Craing, I finally got my first short story polished. “The Hack” is a dark future, cyberpunk story with a great twist of irony at the end. I’m going to submit it to the Colorado Springs Fiction Writers’ Group when I’m finally a full-fledged member. I would submit a longer work (“The Hack” is a little over 2900 words,) but I don’t want to inflict my writing on someone else (or even a group of someone elses) if my writing is horrible.
I don’t know if my writing is good, bad, ugly, great, wonderful, or just plain average. I think that I’m a decent writer, but I’m not sure about it. I have a good grasp on grammar, spelling, flow of words, and the other technical details. It’s the creative side that I’m worried about.
I’ve already submitted “The Hack” to a publication, and they rejected it. I don’t blame them. The first draft wasn’t all that great. It flowed well, but had no point or real story line to it. Now that I’ve rewritten the ending (about a dozen times,) I hope that the story is good enough for the world at large to read it. I guess I’ll find out in a few months if its worthwhile.
The other project that I have going is a short story called “Tablet of Life” that really wasn’t all that good. I was trying to cram too much into 7,000 words, and I failed miserably. It’s 8,700 words, which is a little too long for a short story, and the descriptions that I have are lacking in detail. I assume that this is because I tried to be terse enough to fit it all in under 7,000 words. I’ve given up on “Table of Life” being a short story, but I’ve not abandoned the story. I’ve already chopped what I’ve written into 4 chapters. I’m going to go back through the chapters and add more detail to my descriptions. It will make it a better work of art, and will be the first novel that I’ve truly put effort into.
When I was younger (junior high and high school) I would read a great book, and that would inspire me to write. However, the writing was obviously a rip-off of what I had just read. I would get a few thousand words into my writing, and I would realize that I was just copy-catting what I had already read. I would scrap the writing for fear that someone would accuse me of stealing ideas.
Now that I’m older, I think I have the maturity necessary to write some well written works. We’ll see how it goes…
Nine Years
My little sister was murdered by a drunk driver in October of 1997. It’s been nine years since her death, and I’ve missed her ever since. We didn’t always get along, but I had always looked forward to beating up the first guy that broke her heart, congratulating the first man that got her to settle down enough to get married, holding her children, and attending her graduation from high school. There were so many moments in her life that I was looking forward to, but they were all stolen from me by a series of foolish acts.
She was 17 at the time, and she was dating a 19 year old. They went to a party together, and were both drunk when they left. He got behind the wheel, and my little sister foolishly got in the SUV with him. On a curving road, he missed a turn and ran off the road. The SUV flipped, and my little sister was ejected from the vehicle because she wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Maybe if she was wearing a seat belt, she may have lived. Maybe not. There’s no way to know that for sure. After she was tossed from the SUV, it rolled over the top of her and caused some brain damage.
The doctors worked on her for two days to try to save her life, but the brain damage was too much. My mother had to drive from Texas to Alabama to say goodbye to her only daughter. In the end, it was my mother’s decision to turn off the machines that was keeping my little sister’s body alive. Her spirit had already left, so there was no reason to keep the bag of flesh that was once my little sister breathing. My mother decided to save other lives by donating my little sister’s organs to people that needed them. I don’t know how many other lives were saved by the selfless act of kindness, but I wish I could find out.
While my mother was in Alabama, my step father was doing the equally hard task of calling all relatives to tell them of the tragedy. I was one of the first people that he called, and I could tell from the anguish in his voice that something was wrong. He had the strength to tell me that my only little sister had been killed. I had the strength not to yell at him, or blame him for telling me the bad news. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to tell someone that a loved one has passed away. I’m sure that I’ll have to do it someday, and I can only hope that I have the same resolve and strength that my step father had on the night that he called me.
The next few days were a blur as I called my grandparents to ask for money to fly from Montana to Texas where the funeral was going to be at. They agreed to pay for my and Kiara’s tickets to Texas, but I had to fly into my hometown. After flying in there, we piled into my grandparent’s suburban and drove the 5 hours to San Antonio where the funeral was going to be. We arrived in the morning just in time for the funeral.
It was a solemn event because a life was stolen from us before it could really be lived. Because I felt the need for a shower before the funeral (I hadn’t bathed in almost a week,) we were a little late to the funeral. I was later told that there was a seat up front for me to sit in, but I stood in the back of the gathering in a stunned silence. I know that kind words were said. I know that a song was played, but I cannot remember any of the details of the event.
There was the usual line of well-wishers walking past my mother and step father, and I was told that I should have been there as well. Instead, I stepped up to the casket that my little sister was in. Fortunately, it was an open casket, so that I could say goodbye. I stood far enough away from the casket to allow people to walk by and say goodbye as well. I’m not sure how long I stood there staring at my dead little sister, but the next thing I know is that I was collapsing on the ground in tears. Kiara and my cousin, Scot, were there almost right away to pick me up. The comforted me in my time of pain, and I am eternally grateful for that.
After that I remember standing back and watching everyone leave. Withing a few minutes, my little sister was lowered into the ground and buried. I watched the whole thing. I can still vividly remember the details of the cement lid being placed over her coffin and the backhoe slowly scooping dirt into her grave. Isn’t it strange how some details are lost to time, but others will never leave you?
It was the first funeral that I had attended, but not the last. However, it is the one that evoked the most emotion in me because my little sister should have lived out a long life that was taken from her by a foolish 19 year old. Granted, my little sister bears some responsibility for her own death because she got into the car with a drunk driver, and she chose not to wear her seatbelt. I still blame the driver more than my little sister. In the end, it was his driving mistake that started the chain of events that killed my little sister.
This was a hard entry to write. I had to stop several times to wipe the tears from my eyes, so that I could see the screen. Even though my little sister died nine years ago, the pain of her death is still fresh.
Adventures in the Snow
Last Wednesday we got our first real snow storm of the year. It wasn’t too bad, but I’ve discovered that the hills between the highway and our house don’t combine well with snow and my sports car. The car is too light, and with only the front wheels driving the car forward, there just isn’t enough traction to keep things going on a slippery uphill slope.
We managed to get off of the Interstate, and on to a side road before I had to give up. I managed to eke the car off of the road, and get it parked in front of a house. While I was struggling up the final incline, Shinto was on the phone to his mom. She has a 4×4 SUV that can handle the snow without much problem. About the time I got up the hill, and pulled over to the side, Shinto’s mom arrived.
Craing, Shinto, Kiara, and I piled out of my car and into the SUV. We tried a couple of different routes, but we finally got to Shinto’s house. Shinto’s mom was worried about getting Craing, Kiara and me to our house even though it was only a 1/2 mile away. I was fine with it, though. She had gotten us to a safe, warm place and we were happy to be there.
We still had dogs kenneled and cats hungry at home, so I decided to trek through the falling snow to my house. Craing offered to join me, so that I wouldn’t be alone out in the cold. I was happy to have the company. We made our way through the snow that had fallen. There was about 3-4 inches of snow already on the ground.
We ended up making it to the house without any problems, and the pets were grateful to see us. Craing and I ate dinner, watched a little TV, and then hit the hay.
Craing left the house before I woke up in the morning as he was eager to get home to take care of his own animals. He called me later in the day to tell me that he had made it home, and his pets were in good shape. His dog didn’t make a mess of things even though he was cooped up indoors for 24 hours.
After this snow storm, Kiara and I have decided to invest in a vehicle that can handle the bad weather. I’m thinking a Jeep Cherokee or something similar. We can’t afford it right now. We may even be unable to afford it until winter is over with. However, before next winter strikes, I would like to have something that can handle it.
Spam Flood
I haven’t checked my email since Wednesday nght, and I knew that I would have a ton of email waiting for me. I had a grand total of 1,710 emails waiting for me. 80 or so were from mailing lists, and I just skimmed them before deleting them. About 1,500 of them were spam, and they were junked fairly quickly after reviewing them all to make sure that my spam filters didn’t stop a legitimate email. The remainder were legitimate emails that I took the time to read. The whole process took me about an hour and a half.
My spam flood used to be fairly manageable, then a spammer sued spamhaus to make them shutdown, and he managed to win. I used spamhaus’ SBL/XBL list to blackhole proven spammer IPs. This saved me on bandwidth, cpu cycles, hard drive space, and, most importantly, my time to filter through all of those messages. I used to get about 100 spams a day with spamhaus active. Now that it’s gone, I’m back up to a little over 300 (sometimes close to 400) spams a day hitting my mail server. I check everyday to see if spamhaus is back online because they were a wonderful service. I’m not holding my breath, but I’m thinking that it may return. I’m hoping that it will return.
Breckenridge Summary
I typed some of this as it happened, some of it the next day, and some of it a day or three after the events happened. Details are sketchy in some places, and very precise in others. There are also probably quite a few things that my drink addled mind just couldn’t remember. I had a blast, and I think everyone else did too…. Here’s what happened to us while at the cabin.
Thursday, October 19th, 2006
I got up at my usual time, did the usual morning things, finished packing, and threw some ice over the beer and food in the three coolers that I was taking with me to Breckenridge. My deodorant exploded on me in a final gasp of its existence, so I had to make a side trek to the grocery store to buy some more. This put me a little behind schedule, but I still made it to Jhianna’s and Kolvedic’s house before Bobo, Jasmine, and Craing. We hung out for a bit, then got on the road to Breckenridge. The weather was nice, so we chose to take highway 285 instead of interstate 70 because the scenery is nicer.
The road trip was pretty uneventful. There were some great shots of the mountains, and I took some photos (yes, while driving) of the scenery as we went. At one point we passed four baby elk along the side of the road, and they didn’t seem one bit concerned about the cars zooming past them a few feet away. We finally made it into Breckenridge, and got to the cabin. The cabin had a steep uphill driveway, and due to the snow, I was unable to make my way up the driveway. Fortunately, the cabin owners had built a turn-out, so that people like me could park off of the side of the roadway.
We unpacked and got settled in. Bobo went to work shoveling the walkways to clear all of the snow out. He did an awesome job, and no one managed to slip and hurt themselves. After unpacking, we decided to head into town to get some food, so we headed to the Breckenridge Brewery to get some burgers and beer. The place smelled like brewing beer (mainly hops), and I love that smell. I was a happy camper. With our bellies full of beef, we piled back into the cars. While jumping into the back of Kolvedic’s Defender, I managed to smash my knee into the door latch, and I think my response was, “Son of a whore!!!” It hurt so bad, that I had to lay there for a few minutes to catch my breath while Kolvedic laughed at me because he had done the same thing many times. My knee hurt a little bit for the rest of the day, but it wasn’t too bad.
When we got back to the cabin, the repeated trips up and down the drive had cleared away enough of the snow to make it possible for me to get my car off of the road. I barely made it, but I finally got into the driveway where I could pull off to the side and park my car out of the way. I just hope that Spice is able to get up the driveway when she arrives Friday night.
Once we were back at the cabin, we spent some time in a side house that had a fireplace, foosball table, some couches, and a pool table. We had a good time listening to Kolvedic’s iPod, shooting pool, and talking. It was good stuff. The night was getting colder, but it wasn’t too bad. We ended up getting enough alcohol into us to brave the cold, and get into the hot tub. We managed to pack eight of us into the hot tub. When Spice arrives on Friday, it’s going to be a tight squeeze to fit all nine of us into the hot tub. We may have to rotate around and take turns in the tub.
We spent another hour or so in the hot tub drinking our happy little heads off until we decided to head inside to dry off, warm up, and watch a movie. Ball-Check had just bought ‘Click’, so we opened that up, and started watching it. No one made it to the end of the movie. We all ended up retiring to bed at various stages through the movie. The movie wasn’t bad, but it had been a long day, and we were all ready to get to sleep.
Friday, October 20th, 2006
I woke up around 7:00 AM to the sound of an alarm going off. I ignored it because I knew it wasn’t mine. It went off again, then again. I finally decided to track it down, so I started wandering around to track down the sound. It turned off before I could find it. I decided that since I was up, I would just get out of bed and start the day. Craing, who I was sharing a room with, was awake when I got back to the room. He loaned me some shampoo, and I hopped into the shower. I guess Craing and I started waking people up with our showers and stomping around the cabin. Ball-Check and Kolvedic were soon up and cooking in the kitchen. There was no sign of Tasty, Jhianna, Bobo, or Jasmine just yet.
While writing this, I looked out the window and saw that it was snowing fairly heavily outside. I was glad that I had gotten my car off of the road when I did. I thought about waiting another day to let the snow melt off more, but that didn’t happen. We spent most of the day just hanging out. There was a game room attached to the house, and we spent quite a bit of time in there shooting pool, playing foosball, hanging out by the fire, and chatting. Craing has these two books that are filled with questions that all start with “If…” There are some pretty good questions in there, and not all of them are easy to answer. I don’t remember any of the questions, but they are all designed to allow friends to get to know each other better.
It was snowing pretty hard, and I was happy to be in the cabin rather than driving around in it. Spice was supposed to join us after she got off of work on Friday, but the weather was just too bad for her to come up. We talked to her several times on the phone to tell her how bad things were. We wanted her to join us, but we didn’t want her to run off of the road on the way up. Spice finally decided to stay home for the weekend. We missed her a great deal, but I was glad (in a way) that she didn’t come up because I would rather have her as a friend for years to come than go to a memorial service for her next week.
I don’t remember most of the details of the day because I didn’t write about it right away. Jhianna, Craing and I ended up in the hot tub for a couple of hours. We were mainly drinking water because we had been drinking all day long, and if we continued to drink in the hot tub, we’d be hurting the next day. I don’t remember what all we talked about, but we had a good time sitting out there picking each others’ brains during the night. It was good to hang out with my friends and just talk. It’ll be one of my best memories of the trip.
We finally got out of the hot tub, and Jhianna called it a night. Craing and I hung out for another 30 minutes or so on the couches talking about our D&D worlds. I learned quite a bit from him about the background of his world that I had been missing out on. I was glad we had the talk.
Saturday, October 21st, 2006
After getting six hours of sleep (Craing got three) we got up. We hung out for the morning before heading into town to get some chow. Ball-Check drove us into town to get some chow at the Breckenridge Brewery. I wasn’t feeling too good because of the heavy drinking and lack of sleep. Once I got some food into me, I started to feel much better. After eating, we walked up and down Main Street. There were some cool stores there, but nothing really caught my eye. I did manage to find some snacks for the dogs at a specialty store. Most of the other folks bought various shirts, hats, sunglasses and other stuff.
About the time my feet were starting to get cold and sore we reached the end of the shops, and walked the length of Main Street back to the Suburban. We ended up back at the cabin where we warmed up. We shot some more pool, hung out some more, and had a good time relaxing. It was going to be Jasmine’s birthday soon, and Jhianna had bought her some gag gifts. They were all funny and some were sexual in nature. It was good stuff, and we all had a laugh about the gifts.
After the gifts, some people hit the hot tub, and the rest of us stayed inside to play some drinking games. We started with with a plinko style game that was called Drinko with various shots of drinks in the bottom of the plinko setup. I had a shot of whiskey (eww!!) and something else, but I don’t remember what it was. We decided that mixing the various types of alcohol in our system would lead to some serious pukage. We ended up heading to the dining room table to play some 3-man. It’s a drinking game where people get very drunk, very fast. Poor Ball-Check ended up downing four beers in a matter of about twenty minutes. He was burping like you wouldn’t beleive. I felt sorry for him near the end of the night. We cleaned up the cabin a bit after the drinking game, and headed to bed. It was around 12:30 by the time I got to sleep. I had forgotten my meds the first two nights that we were in the cabin, but I had thrown my pill bottles on my pillow during the day. This night, I took my meds, and the meds combined with the booze knocked me out cold. I’m pretty sure that I had only been in bed for a few seconds before I was out.
Sunday, October 22nd, 2006
I slept in Sunday morning, and didn’t get up until 11:00. It was good to sleep in after getting up so early the three previous days. Jhianna, Craing, Ball-Check, and Kolvedic grabbed the plastic sleds from the garage and spent a good hour outside sliding down the hill. I got some good pictures of it. I thought about joining them, but I spent most of yesterday with cold, wet feet, so I decided to pass this time around. It really looked fun, but I was happier inside where it was nice and warm.
We didn’t do much of anything during the day. It was a lazy day of relaxation, TV, naps, and books. I spent most of the day just hanging out and watching TV. There was a “Dog Whisperer” marathon on one of the channels, and most everyone watched it all. I watched about four episodes, and the guy kept telling the owners of the dogs the same old stuff. It wasn’t new to me, and I got tired of the repetition. Craing, Ball-Check, Kolvedic, and I ended up in the game room at some point, and we played quite a few games of pool. It was lots of fun.
Sunday gave us the best weather of the weekend, but we were all too pooped from the previous days to go out and enjoy it. I tried to get some people to go to the hot tub with me, but no one seemed interested. I don’t really blame them. When the sun went down Sunday evening, the temperatures plummeted quite a bit. It would have been very cold out there during beer and water runs outside the tub.
Monday, October 23rd, 2006
Monday morning was very cold, and I was hesitant to get out of bed. However, I could hear people moving around and talking. I figured that they were cleaning up the place in preparation for leaving. I didn’t want to be a slouch, so I got dressed and headed downstairs. I was right. Everyone was very busy cleaning things up. I tried to help, but I seemed to be getting in the way. It was a 3-4 person job, and we already had 6 people working on it. I decided to head upstairs and pack my things. By the time I got most of my stuff to the car, Ball-Check, and Kolvedic were coming around the cabin with my coolers in tow. I snagged the two light ones from them, and let them double-team the heavier one.
Once we were all packed, I headed down the slippery driveway first. Everyone watched as I slid my sports car down the snowy slope. I managed to keep things under control just fine, and I made it down to the road. Once we were all on the road, I got a call from Craing telling me that we were going to Bubba Gumps one more time for lunch before going our separate ways. I hadn’t had a chance to pay for a single thing while on the trip, so I took this opportunity to pay part of my way for the trip.
We had a good lunch together, and that was the last of the trip. We all piled into our cars and went our own ways back home. It took me a little over two hours of driving to get back home, and I was glad to be there. Don’t get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed the weekend, and I’m glad I took the vacation. However, it’s always be back home in your own place after being gone for so long.
Going To Breckenridge!
I’m going to Breckenridge tomorrow for a long weekend with some friends. The trip has been planned for quite some time, but I didn’t think that I would be able to go until late Friday night. I was kind of bummed about not being able to go, and when Kiara told me to go, I was ecstatic. I can’t wait to spend a weekend with my friends doing nothing important. It’s going to be a good trip.
My friends went last year to the same cabin, and they came back with some great stories. I can’t wait to join them. From what I hear there will be lots of food, lots of beer, lots of liquor, lots of fun, and a hot tub. Not a bad combination, eh?
I’ll report back in next week when I get home to tell you how things went.
