Just Plain Chips

Holy cow! Two posts in one day!

I just noticed that my title image looks horrible. I think the chips look fine but the blue is all pixelated as it goes from darker to lighter. Not to mention it goes from light to dark to light again. How did I never notice this?

*UPDATE*
On second glance (from my home computer) it looks fine and thus it must be because my monitor at work is set at 16 bit instead of 32? Unfortunately I have to have it like that or the software I use won’t really work. Nicely designed.

And here I thought after long enough away I could use this space to write about anything and not worry about offending anyone or giving away my secrets because my readership would finally really be down to zero.

I’ve actually been trying to gear myself up to start writing again and really expecting that no one would see it. This time I wouldn’t try to tell my friends that I was writing, or writing again. I’d just write for myself. Hopefully I will actually do that.

But then someone goes and ruins that plan by actually commenting on my blog after another two month hiatus.

We’ll just have to see what this means.

For starters, the most exciting thing about to happen in my life:
My girlfriend will be moving up from Austin, Texas to beautiful Minneapolis sometime in the next 4-8 weeks. I’m quite excited about it.

As one of my good female friends said: “Finally, Brenden, one of your girlfriends is moving *toward* you instead of away from you.”
Yep, that’s right. Thanks.

Hehe. Actually, I thought it was funny. I’m not as bitter at St. Louis (the current home of my last two girlfriends) as I once was.

So it has been two whole months since I’ve written in my “daily journal website” or “web log” or “blog”, if you will. That’s pretty pathetic even for me. To anyone who has tried to force themselves to keep up and check regularly, I apologize. I can’t promise I’m going to post tons now that I’ve posted once, but I’ll try.

Since my last post I’ve been to Texas three times; I bought a Nintendo DS Lite; my company has hired two new employees, one of which works under me; and my girlfriend has graduated from grad school and had a birthday. That’s a whole lot going on!

But instead of trying to recap everything I’m going to keep it simple with a little story from tonight.

My parents and I were out on the back porch having a delicious dinner of spinach ravioli and broccoli when we started to hear this popping noise in the woods behind us. We all looked up with confused looks on our faces wondering what it was. My mom thought that maybe it was some kids setting off some firecrackers. I thought that it sounded like something was happening to a tree.

The popping subsided and we resumed our dinner. But then the sound started up again. This time it kept on going and we got up to try and look for the source. Then we saw a big tree swaying a little. It was falling down! The thing was huge and with a number of giant heaves and pops it finally tumbled down back into the forest. And left in its place was a giant “hole” for more light to come in.

Our neighbor walked over into our yard to talk to us about it and we all headed down to see. Lo and behold was a giant oak tree, that could have been 100 or more years old. Broken off a ways up on its trunk and fallen to the ground. I had brought my camera along and here is what I saw, with my 5′ 9″ dad standing next to it for scale.

Pretty darn exciting and sad at the same time. The tree looked healthy and had tons of leaves on it. It didn’t look rotten where the trunk had split and there weren’t any bugs or termites pouring out of it. We thought that maybe it had been struck by lightning in one of the huge storms from last Friday, but there didn’t appear to be any burn marks. It may have just been it’s time to fall.

…that’s the sound of a cold wind blowing.

There go some tumbleweeds through the ghost town that is the world of Just Plain Chips.

It’s not that my life has been uninteresting. It is just that my muse has left me for a while.

The most exciting of news over the last month or so is that I have a girlfriend. It’s true! I’m very excited. She’s awesome. The only thing wrong with her that I can think of is that she lives over 1000 miles away. We’ve been dealing with it pretty well though, at least I think so.

Well, I just wanted to say hello to all of my faithful readers out there. I’m glad you’re still around.

I’m zo zleepy right now. Robert Randolph was zzzpectacular. I’ll write more when I can later. Good night. zzz…

I’ve been in one of those non-blogging moods. I hate those. I’ve had some interesting stuff going on in life, and probably even an insightful and humorous observation or two as well. But there’s been nothing here. It’s a lame excuse but living at my godparents’ place just gets me out of my online routine too.

Alright, that’s it for now. Work is busy.

Holy cow do I need to get off of my lazy butt and do some posting. I had a great trip and now I had an awesome party at my temporary abode this weekend. So much to talk about. So many pictures to show you. Soon. No really, soon.

As you may have noticed it’s been pretty slow around here. I have little responsibility and except for last week I have all of my nights free and of course have weekends free. I just haven’t felt inspired lately–even after doing something fun every single night from two Thursday’s ago to this last Saturday (which is crazy). I don’t know what the reason is. I’m sure I’ll pull out of my slump here soon and you’ll all be back to laughing at the ridiculousness of my life.

My good friend “Kito Montanito” just started up a new blog called Czech Your Parts. He’s not Czech, but that is a play on a phrase from my surveying days. The original phrase used the word “check” and it meant “make sure everything is okay” or “watch out”.

It didn’t take long before it expanded for use in non-surveying situations eg “you best check yo-self before you wreck yo-self” (ie “shut up or my fists will pound you”) or “review what you just did” (ie “you’re an idiot, and you need your head checked”).

Anyway, Kito was a good buddy of mine and my brother’s best friend out in Bozeman (lots of Shogo). Brian and I used to say that Kito could get you into messes you’d never dream of, but if there was anyone you wanted along to get you out of a mess, he would be the one. He’s been over in Cairo for a while and he’s just starting to put up some of his pictures and experiences. He is a highly entertaining and interesting guy and I look forward to reading about his exploits and his opinions.

I think you should all czech it out. (sorry)

Dang, my chess crowd dried up pretty quickly and no one else seems interested in my old chess games. If only I had something more interesting to write about than how much I like melty peanut butter and syrup on my waffles.

Have a great weekend.

Well, it was my birthday this weekend and I had another big bowling party. I was going to write about it last night but my blog was down and I couldn’t post. So check back later for the birthday party post. I’ll try not to be as sporadic about it as last year.

Sorry, I know it’s been a little slow around here lately. But work has been busy and life outside of work has been a little busy as well. I still have to tell the rest of the wedding weekend story and maybe a few tidbits from this last weekend. I hope all is well with everyone.

Just before I woke up this morning I was having a very weird dream.

I was driving in my car behind the building I work in. But it wasn’t the building I work it, it was like a college dormatory or something. Anyway, there were lots of people walking around and trucks parked out back. One particular truck that I noticed was a Lays Chips (warning: annoying Flash homepage) truck. It was interesting that I would notice that truck because after driving down a little bit further I noticed a lady in a Lays Chips uniform that I assumed was the driver of this truck. This lady was noteworthy because she was rolling around on the ground.

Rolling around on the ground? What? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Another interesting thing was that she seemed to be rolling around right in front of my car or where I’d want to be driving, like she was trying to block me in. She was really rolling around, not staying in one place, but she managed to always just happen to be in my way when I wanted to drive forward. This went on for a couple of minutes until finally she rolled a little too far one way and I zipped around the other way.

On my way by her I thought, “Wow, I’m going to have to blog about this.” It was just after that that I woke up a bit and remembered that it was a dream and it didn’t really happen so how would I blog about it? And then I decided to blog about it anyway.

I got nothing. Nothing at all.

Well, there was a huge spider in my bathroom this morning. That was pretty exciting.

I think I’m going to start requiring that everyone start using the prefix “Doctor” when calling me by name. Either Dr. Johnson or Dr. Brenden will work (depending on our familiarity). Why, you ask? Mainly because I am an expert in “quad bypass surgery“. How do I know this? If you go to www.google.com and search for those very words: “quad bypass surgery” a post on my site comes up as the first hit. That seems like pretty good credentials to me, don’t you think?

I would think that some article on WebMD or something similar should come up first, but that’s just me. I know that the actual name of the surgery is “coronary artery bypass surgery”, but everyone I’ve ever heard just calls it “bypass” with “quad” or “triple” or whatever in front of it.

Ahh, the fun world of internet search databases.

Okay, a little meta-blogging here.

For those of you who are new here, you may not know that this isn’t my original blog. I was on blogger for a few days less than one year before I moved over to the WordPress goodness of blogsome.

But some days I get more hits on my old site, which I haven’t posted on since early May, than my new site here. And it all seems to be because of one picture that I posted from last Halloween. A group of my friends dressed up as old, retired Hooter’s girls. I took a picture before going out and posted it on my blog and called it “HotWings”. Somehow people find this picture searching on Google Images and to look at the picture end up visiting my site for one second. But I don’t know what search terms they use. (I wouldn’t necessarily recommend searching for “hooters hot wings” while at work or anything) Anyway, I thought I’d post the famous picture here for everyone’s enjoyment.

Here are the five fine ladies, showing off their backsides.

I had a couple of “interesting” things to post about. But as I was writing them up, they struck me as exceedingly boring and stupid, even for me. So you get nothing.

Edit: After reading Steve’s comment and re-reading my post, I guess this does come off a bit more bitter than I would have liked. When I wrote “So you get nothing” I was saying it in my head like Sgt. Schultz says “I know nothing” on Hogan’s Heroes, so in more of a light hearted tone.

This is insane. Apparently a guy posted an entry to his blog about some one he knew that stopped by his apartment–just before the visitor murdered him! Chilling.

Just last Friday was the one year anniversary of my first blog post. I was too busy that day and forgot to write something about the grand date. Also, just a couple of days before, Steve remembered his accomplishment.

When we started this blogging thing, once again I was following Steve into something, coming in second. If you were at his wedding (’hi’ all one or two of you–the groom and maybe the bride) and heard my toast (probably one of my best speeches ever; I’ve never had people come up to me out of the blue and tell me that I did a great job speaking after the fact like that night) you would know that this isn’t an isolated incident. For whatever reason (most likely myriad reasons) I seem to come up just a bit shy of Steve’s standards in most things that we both try. It’s really quite funny. (Oh wait–I can ski better than he can–hooray!) I have a similar problem with my friend Chris. I can’t beat him at anything. We were playing bocce ball last night and I was up 6-2 on our way to 7. I lost 13-11. I’m starting to get a complex.

I didn’t set out with any kind of goal or theme in mind but if you look at the title of the blog and the topic of my first post you can see that the focus really hasn’t changed that much since the beginning.

Thanks for reading the inane ramblings of a run-of-the-mill, American 20-something–I’ll keep them coming for you.

A little hiccup in the servers. No big whoop, right? I’ll get back to posting all sorts of important and entertaining stuff here very soon.