daverea.com

Before I begin, a quick note: YAY!

Ahem. Yes. It occured to me, sitting in front of my computer organizing my fourteen GB [~/private/digital_photos/] directory: I don’t take enough photos. I know that’s an odd conclusion to draw when you’re staring at a pile of digital photos that consumes nearly half your hard drive. But draw it I did. I sat back and thought about all my recent escapades, and all the beautiful weather we’ve been having, and all the fun stuff I’ve been writing about in this blog, and I realized that I have absolutely none of it in pictures.

In fact, thanks to my spiffy new date-based filing, I can tell you at a glance that the most recent photos I’ve taken were on August 29th. Hmm… Since then, I’ve gone hiking twice, shooting four times, cooked two “gourmet” meals and covered three ambulance shifts. With no photographic evidence whatsoever to show for it. How pathetic for the self-proclaimed shutterbug!

While caching with DVand today, we spent more than a few minutes badmouthing my Nikon Coolpix 4500. But when I really think about it, a) the camera has served me very well in the 2+ years I’ve owned it, and b) it actually takes fairly nice pictures, if you know how to use it right! Sure, it’s a far cry from the Canon 20D that I dream about several times a week, but it’s still all mine and damnit I’m gonna make the best of it!

When I install a service pack for a piece of software, I think my expectations are pretty simple: Update the software to take out all your crappy mistakes. Do not add new features, do not break old ones, and do not do other things that make me want to tear out what hair I have left.

Of course, Microsoft has to break this rule. For better or worse, I just finished installing Winblows XP Service Pack 2 on my laptop. I figured that fubar’ing that machine wouldn’t be anything life-changing, so it was probably a safe risk.

Fortunately, nothing got messed up. But something unexpected did happen. After I rebooted the machine and was relieved to see everything come up normally, I noticed an innocuous-looking – but new – icon down in my system tray. “Hello, what are you?”

Turns out it’s a blasted new feature. Apparently Microsoft has decided their “Automatic Updates” system – where your computer, not you, keeps track of how many stupid mistakes Microsoft has made – wasn’t enough. No, now they want to keep track of your firewall and your anti-virus software. No, NO, NO! I take care of that. You take care of making my computer look pretty and running my programs. Stop trying to think for me.

As if I want Microsoft, the proverbial master of computer security (cough, cough) managing the security of my computer. Bang-up job so far, guys. You’ve already pushed an OS on the world that’s got more holes than a wheel of Swiss cheese. You’re just who I want handling security for me!

Let’s see. I have a simple port-blocking firewall. I keep my VirusScan up to date. I don’t do stupid things with e-mails from strangers. And (knock on my non-wood computer desk) nothing has taken me down to date. Oh, and I back my crap up in case something does. So get off my case!

I realized that it’s September 11th this morning, as I was signing into the log book at the boathouse. Don and I started the day off right: five miles in a pair of Maas Aeros on the Erie Canal. I grabbed a shower and headed down to Dad’s place afterwards, for a meeting and some Contender practice.

I met his new girlfriend Barb, and bought them lunch. It’s nice, every once in a while, to be able to buy lunch for your dad rather than the other way around. Given all the meals he’s bought me, it almost seems like a special occasion when I get out my wallet to pay, ever to his chagrin.

After a quick run over to Beikerch’s for even more reloading supplies, I finally got home and got ready load up some hunting rounds. I was getting sick of putting it off for lack of the right equipment. I put a basket of laundry in, did some reloading, some ironing, and some frantic e-mailing when the reloading didn’t go quite by-the-book! Two e-mail threads and four hours later, I have a closet full of freshly-pressed clothes and ten fresh, shiny 7-30 Waters rifle cartridges. Unfortunately, I have no place to try them out!

It seems like a lot more time has gone by than just three years. But at the same time, it seems like it was almost yesterday. I remember the weather here then was a lot like today – clear skies, with a touch of chill in the air to let you know Fall is right around the corner. It makes for a striking juxtaposition, contrasting the beauty of the day to the horror of what happened just a few hundred miles from here. Makes you wish bad things were only allowed to happen on rainy days.

Happiness comes from a lot of areas for me. Sometimes I derive it from spending time with friends, or family, or my girlfriend Kelly. Sometimes it’s circumstantial; when I feel like the “pieces fit” a certain way on a certain day, I’ll end up content. And many times, satsifaction is the direct result of productivity.

I think that the happiness I derive from achievement is among the best I experience. When I spend a day or an evening working, accomplishing things, and having something to show for it, I can truly end my day being satisfied with the way I’ve invested it. Last night, for example, I cleaned up my kitchen, paid my bills, balanced my checkbook, and spent three hours working on the computer and scrawling in my black notebook. No, I’m not a work-a-holic. Otherwise I’d spend every night this way, and if I did that I might build up a tolerance for it…

Another example might be this past weekend – Kelly and I managed to go shooting, put up new track lights in my office, change the oil in my car, and fix a bunch of other car-related loose-ends. Sure, we were both exhausted by the end of the day, but sleeping in until 11am on Labor Day took care of that!

The point is this – sometimes it seems like productivity is a steep slope, since I often have trouble getting motivated to take on projects and get things done. But once I’m over the hump, the satsifaction of reaching the other side – achievement – is well worth the climb.

I think I may have solved my overcaffeination problems. After I mistakenly set down my bag of aging whole-bean coffee in a puddle of kitchen-counter-water the last time I made coffee, I had to go out and get some fresh beans.

As a brief aside, I really have no idea why I feel compelled to keep coffee in the house. Like I said, I don’t usually drink the stuff. Maybe I’m being ever-wary of “the pop-in”, in case I need to caffeinate some friends. Or perhaps, on those occasions that I do make coffee for myself, I just like the “I’m in a coffee commercial and thus I must have a great life” feeling that I get.

Anyway, short of buying 100% decaf, I think I’ve solved the coffee conundrum. I hit up the “bag your own coffee” area at my local supermarket, and mixed half-and-half regular and decaf breakfast blend coffee beans. After thoroughly shaking the bag, I made a pot, and after one cup I haven’t started to twitch or convulse yet… Victory is mine!

This story has got to be one of the most amazing true-life accounts of survival-under-pressure that I’ve read. It makes me glad that a) I don’t do any hunting in Wyoming, and b) when I do go to New York’s bear territory (of which our hunt club in the Southern Tier is a part) I carry a sidearm, not a can of seasoning.

OK, so apparently we actually didn’t roast the transmission of our ambulance on Monday night. After a day in the shop, the mechanics determined that we just blew a high-pressure power steering line. The power steering fluid looks and feels more or less the same as transmission fluid. All was fixed, and the bill came to a whopping $114. Yay for pleasant surprises!

There’s nothing like winding down a hectic evening with some delicious chocolate cake…

After I took off from work at 5pm yesterday, I somehow managed to get home, retrieve my range bag and head over to the firing range by 5:30. The first group was just getting ready to shoot as I rolled into the parking lot, so I grabbed a form and managed to squeeze myself onto the clipboard, and thus into the running.

We ran two scenarios (“courses of fire”) – in the first I was a convenience store owner who was sweeping up debris in the alley behind my store. At the start signal, I had to drop my dust pan and broom, draw, and engage as I moved into cover. In the second COF, I found myself caught in a bank robbery. I discovered that shooting while you’re moving is not as easy as it looks! Nonetheless, of the five rounds I shot while shimmying to my right, I did manage to place two well enough to get out alive.

After I got home and washed up, I started dinner. Kelly and Jason arrived as the pork loin, butternut squash and potato wedges were coming out of the oven. All was devoured, all was delicious and all were made full. Except those damn potato wedges – they were underdone. My oven sucks, man.

After dinner, the three of us sat down to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Now here’s a movie that I saw for the first time in high school, and found gut-crampingly funny at the time. I guess sometimes our tastes change more than we realize, because all my nostalgic fuzzy-feelings about the movie melted away into a big puddle of suckyness this time through. I’m really not even sure why they bothered to do a DVD remaster of it.

There was one upside, however – while we were watching, we got to chow down on some incredibly delicious cake that Kelly bought at Phillip’s European. Wow.

Of course, after the “utter dissapointment of a film” ended, we needed some way to redeem the evening. And what better way to do that is there than attacking each other with what was left of the cake?! Jason managed to stay out of the fray, but before the smoke cleared Kelly and I had ambushed each other with enough cake to completely cover both of our faces.

I love frosting fights…