Friday Night Lights

Why does no one watch Friday Night Lights?

It’s a great show. You should really watch it.

IM Convo of the day

[Emmy] : These guys (ed. her roommates) seem to think because I own the house I should do all the cleaning.
[Me] : No, it’s not that. They think that because you’re a woman that you should do all the cleaning.

Response from the guys when I share this with them:

[Ernie] : True.
[Mike] : Ha.
[Ron] : *lol*, but it’s true!

I dream

I want to live like Kimi drives.

Fearless, relentless, blindingly quick, unflappable and on it all the time. Oh and it’d all be done in a Ferrari.

I cut my finger

I just cut my middle right finger while cutting an onion, there was a little blood and a flap of skin going around but my Spongebob Squarepants bandage is making it feel better. Thank goodness I have a sharp blade so it was a clean cut. Sharpen your blades kids!

Buzzing the tower

There’s this thing I do when I drive that either makes me a total asshole or just your friendly neighbourhood safety cop. There are a lot of drivers out there with lousy lane discipline – people who can’t keep it consistently in the centre of their lane. They drift left to right, they drift a wheel into other lanes, they can’t stay on line in long turns.

These people, among many other drivers, drive me batty as they are a significant disruption on traffic flow. Their drifting causes drivers to slow down to avoid them as the driver can’t real the drifter’s intentions which causes EVERYONE behind that driver to slow down. This is bad for the environment and it’s bad for everyone’s temper. There are several types of drifters: there are the ones who meander left to right, right to left, there are the ones who straddle the adjacent lane, there are those can’t stay on line and are herky jerky.

I don’t get bothered by the herky jerky and the ones who meander are hard to deal with but the straddlers are ones I can apply some knuckles to. I “buzz their towers” when I overtake them to get them back into their lanes. Other drivers will give the straddlers a wide berth thinking that they’re such terrible drivers that they better give them extra room but that holds up traffic everywhere (straddlers tend to be slower drivers).

Me? If I see one I will sidle up to them very closely when I pass them. Usually I’ll buzz them by driving only a couple feet (never closer) off them which almost always catches their attention as most people are uncomfortable driving close to other cars and a fast moving, very close car always catches their attention and has these cars popping back into their lane and staying there for at least a little while, long enough for all the cars that have been held up behind them to get by.

You can either call this being a bully or you can call this a friendly notice to help with traffic. I prefer the latter, my actions are to help traffic flow and to get someone to pay attention. If I wanted to bully them I could have honked and waved a finger at them. Instead I slide up next to you and nudge you back into your lane and I’m on my way.

What say you? Asshole or friendly nudge?

Raising the Steaks

Raising the Steaks

Well I suppose it’s one less cut/type of meat to eat. Then again so much of our food is raised in abusive conditions in the effort to keep it cheap, if we raised our meat ethically things would probably cost twice as much. The upside of that is that we’d eat a lot healthier than we do now. More tofu, lentils, chickpeas etc.

Myers-Briggs

Everytime I touch on the Myers-Briggs test I get big headed about it which naturally means I’m an INTJ.

Supposedly I represent 1% of the population, I’m a natural leader, a highly analytical and logical thinker and something like a third of us score in the top 2-3% in IQ tests. I’m linked to people like Colin Powell, Lance Armstrong, C. Everett Koop and Peter Jennings – high company indeed.

But I’m not one of them so whatever and we SUCK at relationships. And Rudy Guiliani is one of us. God damn.

No white food?

Ernie just called me looking for a white restaurant near home as he needed to take Colleen’s parents out for dinner and I suppose it’s not particularly surprising that near where we live that there are no white restaurants other than the chains such as Earl’s, Cactus Club and Milestones.

A check on various Vancouver critic sites show that the best restaurants on Vancouver’s East half and Burnaby are all Asian restaurants.

Anyone know of a good one in the area?

I can't hear you.

I have bad hearing. I’ve had it since I was a kid where I was sent for a hearing test at Richmond City Hall and they found that I had virtually no ability to hear high pitched sounds. The recommendation back then was to avoid concerts and other loud events which I have largely done but age takes a toll and my hearing is slipping over time.

I don’t need a hearing aid yet but I know the day is coming. If you’re male and I’m speaking one on one with you I can hear you just fine but I have trouble hearing women especially those who speak very softly or who have a high pitched voice. I have trouble hearing people in loud room because I don’t have enough hearing range to filter your voice out from the other noises; it doesn’t matter if you yell, I just can’t filter it out. It’s very interesting how much the ability to hear high frequency noises changes your ability to hear across the entire audio range.

I suspect this all got started when I was a little and my dad took me to the air show. We didn’t use earplugs back then and hearing military aircraft buzzing by a few hundred feet away could not have been good for my 6-9 year old ears. I essentially have race car driver ears. Race car drivers have terrible hearing as they are strapped next to enormously powerful and loud engines with very little noise protection. In some cases, if the driver has driven the same car for many years they develop a hole in their hearing range based on the frequency the engine is loudest at – guys who raced front engine Vipers and Corvettes are particularly susceptible to it.

Anyways, when a woman says that I don’t listen to her I actually have a valid excuse, I really can’t hear her.

I'm feeling good

The best way to take my measure of happiness is to watch me drive. The better I’m driving the happier I am and right now I’m driving like I never have before. I’ve never been more accurate with my car placement, never been more smooth in traffic, never been more gentle with my inputs and never been more capable of adapting to changing conditions.

Just a few weeks ago I worked my way down the gearbox from fifth to second via a smoothly executed heel/toe downshift through each gear (5-4, 4-3, 3-2) with passengers on board. I’ve never done that before since I’ve never been smooth enough to want to put my passengers through it and doing that many downshifts while slowing from 110kph to a 2nd gear corner is a lot to do in a short span of time.

Street is narrow? Will have to drive less than a foot off the curb at 60kph? No problem. The wall is a foot away? No problem either. I’m not concerned because I’m driving so cleanly that I adjust so well and I’m so aware.

Oh to be happy and content.