big time prayer request

alright quick and important prayer request.

amanda got a call this morning and she has an interview for a teaching position at a middle school here in whitier today at 2pm. so please please pray that her interview would go well and that the position would be hers if it's the right place for her to be. a full time job for her in the fall is exactly what she has been wanting and what we need as a couple looking at marriage coming up here in september. pray warriors unite!

garden state

well garden state comes out here in LA and in new york tomorrow, and i am really looking forward to seeing it. if you wanna know about showtimes in LA check out this link
I was doing some searching of my own, and on the official garden state site, i found this fun blog from zach braff. cool stuff.

i will write more about this after i have seen it, but i am r-e-a-l-l-y excited about it. it makes me giddy.

if wishes were beers...

... you could all go swimming with me

here's to all of you out there this fine friday night!

coffee kid

those of you who are around me know that i usually have most of these things with me: raybans, wool hat, camels and coffee. today i have all of them, and the last one of them is thanks to a new purchase today. amanda and i recieved a gift card to bed, bath and beyond from someone she knows for her graduation (i think...) anyway, got a couple of small things, including our new/oldschool espresso maker.

anyway im sitting back right now with some iced espresso, listening to all things considered on npr. gotta love npr. i don't know what i would do without a radio. i love it

as promised

sorry its been so long since the last update, things have been happening, nothing major just regular life stuff. anyway i told you i would upload a pic of my toe in all its smashed glory. well here it is. i thought about just linking it, but i figured this is my place and kids don't read this or anything. if, btw, you are grossed out by my toe, god help you. anyway here it is below

since this pic was taken, sometime midweek last week, my toe nail came off. actually i sort of helped it come off last night. it was fun, sort of felt like a doctor or something with swabs and bandages and stuff. didn't really hurt that much, i just figured i should try and be sterile or something. hopefully it will be all better soon. who knows how long it will take my nail to grow back... if it does at all. weird

anyway wedding planning and stuff is going well. got the church all confirmed and stuff. it's a really lame site but you can check out pictures of the place by clicking here. or just check out the photo below. its the church at koloa on the island of kauai in hawaii. the date's september 27th. gettin hitched.

black & blue

well kids, little bits of stuff to report.

i spent the day today on the mend nursing my newly messed up big toe on my right foot. yesterday i was unloading the last of the stuff from the back of my volvo, including a large filing cabinet. it's not the up-right standing type, but the longer lower type. it has two drawers, and when you open them they have room for four rows of files that face the front. it's really nice and i don't want to part with it, but i don't have room for it inside the new place. so i was moving it up against the fence in the back with a dolley, and i got it as close as i could. for the last little bit of moving i decided to just use my long arms and strong back to pick the thing up and get it as much out of the way as possible. i paid for this dearly.

i picked the thing up to move it about a foot closer to the fence and a foot further to the left. i had it about a foot and a half off of the ground when i lost my grip. it, of course, landed square on the nail of my big toe and bounced, leaving me enough time to get my foot out from underneath it before it landed again.

have you ever been hurt so bad that you couldn't do anything? i couldn't curse, i couldn't hop around, i was at a loss for what to do... so i just sat down. i put my head between my knees and i just focused on my breathing. then i went inside and promptly ran a really cold shower and cooled it down.

to sum it up, i couldn't sleep because the dam-blamed thing wouldn't stop throbbing. so i took a bunch of ibuprofen, got a bag of ice on it, and propped it up on a couple of pillows while i lay down on the bed. it was getting fairly late at this point, but i couldn't sleep. so i finished reading the last book in the chronicles of narnia series, the last battle. it was great, and if you haven't read the series, do it. but i will talk more about that latter.

anyway, today i spent nursing the foot, then gloyd came over and we watched the all star game. right now i am continuing to soak my foot in a large pot filled with ice and water. i can see my nail seperating from the nail bed, and my two is more than twice it's normally large size. i can't wear shoes, and needless to say, i can't work. so i am up shit creek, and in pain to boot (of course pun intended). to add insult to injury, amanda is out of town since yesterday and i haven't decided what to read next. no one to talk to, nothing to do but bare the pain of ice soaking and boredom. fantastic. maybe if sycz comes to town within the next day or two i will get a picture of this toe and throw it up here for posterity's sake.

anyway, keep up with the commenting, it keeps it lively for me here.

the rising

most of my close friends, and probably some long time readers here, will know that i am a springsteen fan. his latest album the rising has been on my mind a bit lately. it's a couple of years old now, but the things that have happened to me on a personal and societal level over the last couple of years are still just as fresh as this album. and there are feelings rising within me lately about personal stuff, and on a larger scale... nationally.

i watched this video the other day, and it pissed me off. it's the W giving an interview to a reporter from IrishTV. he's a freakin jerk to this woman. and to be fair, i think that she was approaching the interview from a very journalistic, though foreign stance. I thought she was very respectful, and he was a jerk to her. it's little things like these that push me more and more towards a stongly non-bush voting position come november... unless of course, in full dictator style, the man decides to post-pone ellections because of an un-substantiated threat of an attack by terrorists.

the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe + the Horse and his Boy

well i've completed the L,W&W and now i am on to the horse and his boy. these boks are good fun, great writing on the part of Lewis and they read very quickly. I particularly enjoy the narrator's asides about things. lovely lovely.

listening to iron & wine right now, the new one "our endless numbered days". good stuff. got it as part of my "new music for me project" from jesse "never been drunker than my birthday" gloyd. for those of you who don't know about the project here's the deal. about two months ago my car was broken into and all of my cd's from my entire life got stolen. i never kept them in there, but the one day i happen to have them there my automatic door lock didn't work right. so i returned to my car the morning after i had last parked it to find all my doors open and my stuff gone. so get music back into my system i started giving ten blank cd's to people, one person at a time, so that they could burn me ten discs they thought that i needed to hear. "our endless numbered days" is the fruit of the gifts of jesse.

anyway, back to reading, drinking coffee and waiting for aslan to return once again

The Magacian's Nephew

When i sit down to read, I really mean it. Some of you might remember the week about a year ago now when i read The Hobbit and the entire LOTR set all the way through. Two weeks ago i read five books, two of which were the fourth and fifth in the harry potter series, which i read in a day each. so i like to read, and im trying to knock down some of the books that i should have read a long time ago, or those that i haven't read in many years.

today i started in on a new task; to read through the chronicles of narnia before saturday. I started maybe two hours ago, and i'm already through the first book in the series "the magician's nephew". good stuff so far, and im remembering little bits of it here and there from reading it sometime long ago.

there's a couple of camps on what order to read the books in. there's the folks who are "publicationists" and those who are "chronologists". the former prefer to read the books in the order published, and the later in the chronological order of events of the stories themselves. Then of course there are those rare bread who like to read them in the order they were written, which is a different thing entirely. here's a nicely laid out guide to the whole deal.

i'm sure there are otns of folks out there who have read the series as adults and i would love to hear what you have to say about the subject. drop me a comment below and start a conversation. as for me, i'm off to be mixing things that aught not to be mixed... english breakfast tea and irish single malt... mmmm

is relativity any longer relevant?

regular readers will remember that i like science, especially physics and quantum theory. so while i was browsing one of my favorite science blogs from my friend alan over on msnbc, i came upon this little link and it really peaked my interest.

there has been some research recently that conjects that the speed of light is not constant, and has infact changed over time. besides blasting holes right through the theory of relativity by our favorite swiss patent clerk, it could possibly explain a ton of different things that have baffled physicist for a long time now. i really think that you should check it out.

if you want to check out a fun post of mine on physics, string theory, and the crazy cosmos etc, just click here (scroll down to Sept. 10th)

spring... er, SUMMER cleaning

well i changed a couple of things around here, gave myself a nice little exercise in my limited knowledge of html. its amazing what a very cursory (pun intended) knowledge of graphic design can do for you when you want to change up the colors and things on you blog. I can now track everyone who logs onto this thing with my handy dandy tracker, unless you have some sort of proxi or something, but in general i just think its fun to have something else to check.

maybe someone will actually read this at some point, but who knows. shout out if your out there...

boxing day

Though it's not quite december, and not quite Cananda here in Whittier, I'm currently up to my neck in emtpy boxes from moving. There's so much stuff here now, and i can't possibly seem to live without any of it. i guess im a total packrat.

Luckily enough there is tons of stuff for me to do around here so that i can actually avoid having to unpack anything. We've got web access, cable tv, a little bit of music, coffee and of course.... cigarettes. Unfortunately it's beginning to get too hot for me to go outside and actually enjoy having a refreashing (ha!) round of turkish and domestic blends. I've really got to get around to sun-proofing our patio outside. there's always cloud seeding too... but that might be a bit cost prohibative at this point.

so rather than weathering the heat outside, im sitting here in the dark and cool living room listening to an old mix cd from someone i knew years ago. unpacking things brings lots of opportunities for remembering the past, and perhaps that is why i am such a packrat. there's not much connection to the past for me anymore, save fo what little bit of boxed up treasure i have. i think i will be like this for the rest of my life. I've already started "files" of stuff. scraps of junk i like, pictures, anything at all that catches my attention. it all goes into file folders and drawers and boxes. eventually i am probably going to need a bunker or something to keep all this stuff in. I'm a future archeologists dream come true.