Hi & Bye July 4, 2009

Well. Life has been so busy lately I haven’t had time to do much of anything except eat, sleep, laugh often, stir a little bit of trouble, CAMP, and skim a few articles.

It’s that last one that is receiving my full attention for this post. I LOVE to read articles about interesting stuff (and often times nothing in particular); if they have random tidbits of information and are witty I’m instantly hooked.

I have a set folder of tabs that I open daily; and throughout this week I have opened them, left them open all day long, and then re-bookmarked them because I didn’t have a chance to do much except raise an eyebrow and ooooh at the name of the article.

I will admit: I have not read all of these in their entirety, some I have and thought were noteworthy, some contain foul language (sensitive readers cover your eyes) and some probably aren’t true; which will later (August) cause me to twitter once more about an article and result in Jeff calling me to remind me that you have to fact check the world wide web.

My finds for the week:

Can I just say that I love MentalFloss? I floss daily:
The Rand Corporation – heard of it, never knew what it was till now
Drunken Fruit Flies, the Truth about Gangs, and Other Science Discoveries – I plan on telling Pat that item #3 explains why I can’t add straight. (That’s my their story & I’m sticking to it)
How Cults Rewire the Brain – I have had people ask about the “compound” right off of 81. Then I usually say “the campground? Yes…that would be where I work.” (Awkward silence) I’m fascinated by the title, simply because of the fact that the world in which I love and work could be considered one by an outsider. Plus, we’re not a cult. There’s a God.

Ok. Done flossing. Well almost – these next two I am pairing together, for obvious reasons. It’s hard for me to believe that I once owned a walk man; harder still to believe that someday I’ll tell my kids that when I was their age, I had a record player. Even though it’s 30, I’m not. And even though I can’t get my ipod to work, I’m not going to revert back like this British lad. I’ll just suffer in silence.

These next two I’m pairing together as well. They relate. For the longest time (up until two years ago) I didn’t have a cell phone plan that allowed for texting. Now, I have “unlimited” – and boy do I use it. It’s great for sending a friendly hello, getting Pat irritated (he hates texts) and is quickly becoming a way that I communicate. The thing I like about texting is that if I send you one, it means it’s nothing urgent. If I need you, I’ll call. If I just randomly think of you then I’ll text. And the beauty of texting (for me) is that it allows me to contact you when I think of it, but you can respond on your own time frame. For some people in my life, like Luc, it’s sort of one long open-ended conversation that just quietly strolls on through our lives, allowing us to share both the silly and important. The downside to texting is that my vocabulary has gone from being quite verbose to 160 characters (Twitter is only 140!). There’s actually a pro and con there: Pro – it forces me to censor, Con – sometimes I censor the wrong things and start massive miscommunications that only jack up my life and the other person involved. Plus “gr8″ just flies all over my nerves. While I see and reap the benefits of texting, these two articles raise interesting points: Kids These Days and 7 Ways the 21st Century is Making You Miserable (please disregard the language and notice point #3)

Based on the above paragraph and those two articles, it ties in nicely with this train of thought: What (or who) exactly are we becoming? How much have we gained, how much have we lost? This is a fine day and time to study psychology, in particular psychology and the internets.

This made me laugh, and then immediately review our posts. 7 Deadly Sins Please be kind and DON’T point out our writing flaws.

I hope everyone saw this coming: The Gap

Living alone has been one of the best things for me. I genuinely love it. However, it does provide one challenge: I’m not MacGyver (or MacGruber, whichever you prefer). Therefore, since I’m not a man and don’t have man muscles or man problem solving abilities, I do the best with what I can. I’m not nearly as bad as these people, but I’m pretty close. Plus I tend to say “there, I fixed it” ALL the time to the animals in my ark; I say it almost as much as LOVE ME.

Blob. Get the vd. 75 decades of service. That’s a stick out. There’s HELP for the afflicted: Tip of My Tongue

I absolutely LOVE this. First I like the pretty colors, secondly I like seeing how many people are in my boat for the day, and it helps to provide balance: there always will be people who are better & worse off than you. We Feel Fine.

Not all of us have a Mac and it’s amazing-take-over-the-world-awesomeness. For those of us in PC land here’s a site to help us create all those cool picture effects without using Photoshop.

I WANT TO DO THIS. Only a few, minor problems: 1. I’m not an artist and 2. I’m not a homeowner. But if I were, lookout Staples and your “buy a Sharpie one at a time” display because I would buy you out and have an amazing basement guest room.

I love my big small town and our amazingly historical state. Honest, I do. Our giant star is tacky, our mountains are beautiful, our ham is wonderful and our weather is pretty spot on. This article about some recent laws that were passed cracked me up. Can I just say that regarding the Driver Safety classes for the elderly, I would like to know what elderly person can’t drive yet can get on the internet. I have a feeling if you can do one, you can do the other. They might want to reconsider another option, although I applaud them for looking for a solution to the problem.

I’m not ashamed to say that I have so done this. I only wish it’d been around last year for Pat – aka “Power Man”. My hand-drawn seal wasn’t as good as it could’ve been.

I’m pretty sure everyone who knows me or Luc, or has visited our brilliant and beautiful site (yes, the one you’re on right now) has noticed our fine fascination with some former church-going boys and their man vests. We saw all 7 at the Kings of Leon concert, and this article made me reminisce and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Well, that’s it. As Jan says often “I’ve emptied my brain” of anything that could remotely interest anyone. The rest of it is so full of camp that it hurts most days. This is my Hi & Bye for the month of July, I’ll return sometime in August!