Category Archives: About me

Another story from my military days. This one from my Army years

It was a lot less scary than you would think. Training? Or just youthful belief in my indestructibility?

I’m working on my confidence in front of the mic, so here’s a little story about the time the US Navy took me to Falaraki, on the island of Rhodes, Greece.

Topless pool bars are pretty sweet.

I had fun doing my audio blog post a few days ago. (Check it out if you’ve not listened) I’d like to do some more audio blogging. I’m not yet ready to try a full on podcast, but maybe. I’d need a co-host to do that.

So to get me started, ask me some questions. If you’re hard core, you could use Audacity (or any other MP3 recording device) to record your question, comment, rant, whatever, send it to me, and I’ll respond.

Even you gun haters out there. Go ahead, ask away. Email your questions, or recordings, to [email protected]

Since the story came up on Facebook, I thought I’d fire up the microphone and tell you all about the time I told all my high school peers how to beat a traffic ticket in California.

I spent my July 4th Independence Day holiday riding my bicycle. Not just any little spin around the neighborhood. I rode the Firecracker 100K bike ride out of Cary, NC with the Capital Bicycle Club.

Almost 65 miles of pedaling.

I’m fortunate that my father-in-law likes to ride, and went with me. It was pretty nice to spend the day riding with him. We completed the entire route in 5 hours 36 minutes and 35 seconds for an overall average speed of 11.1 MPH, including three official rest stops plus one extra rest stop. The big drops in the speed line show you where we rested. Our on-the-road time was 4 hours 55 minutes 1 second for an overall riding speed of 13.1 MPH. Not bad for my first organized bike ride in about 8 or 9 years. Also, pretty impressive on my Father-in-Law’s part given he was riding a mountain bike with dirt tires.

Best part of the ride? My really awesome ninja shower

I hauled up the shower bag, stripped to my shorts, and showered off right there in the grass next to the truck. 5 plus hours in the sun and the water was nice and warm.

Then, on Saturday, I got a phone call telling me that they had drawn my raffle number and I’d won a $100 bicycle pump. SWEET! My previous pump died about 3 weeks ago, so it was just what I needed.

I’m looking forward to my next organized bike ride which will be  the Tour d’Orange. I’ll be riding the 68 mile loop. If you’re local and you can ride at least 36 miles, you should sign up and we’ll ride together. They have 36, 68, 80,  and 100 mile routes, all of which share the same first 36 mile loop. FiL is planning on getting some road tires, so we should be a bit faster this time.

And yes, I was carrying concealed.

This post has been removed. In it’s place, here’s a photo of me getting two buckets of .22LR ammo at Gander Mountain.

I finally cleaned my desk. And my office.

Several things happened that led to me finally cleaning up my desk. The company gave me a new printer/scanner/fax to replace the old broken printer that used to sit on my desk. I moved the new printer to a box off to the side. You can see it next to the Michael Z Williamson signed special edition on the left side of the picture.

Since I had all the new space on the desk, I thought I would haul out the second flat screen monitor my wife got for really cheap. Two monitors, one computer! But that didn’t work. I don’t have the right cables. But the new flat screen is a lot bigger than the old, so I swapped them out. Now I have the big monitor on the main computer.

So then I thought, why not pull out the spare laptop, the one I use for Skype? So I pulled it out and hooked it up to the old monitor. This meant a trip to the store to get a new keyboard. I dumped water into my old keyboard and broke it, so I’ve been using the spare keyboard. I got a wireless keyboard and mouse, swapped the wired keyboard to the Skype machine, along with the wireless mouse I already had, and presto, I’m all set to give myself computer monitor sunburn.

I must admit that it’s a little strange to be working on the computer without having to elbow piles of junk out of the way.

I spend a lot of time in the car. I drive from location to location and do inspections of a nature I will not reveal for a company that will remain nameless out of respect for their undoubted desire to remain out of my political activities. I will go so far as to say that I work for an insurance company and leave it at that.

In any case, I’ve been driving a great deal since I started the job over 7 years ago and it’s only just occurred to me that perhaps listening to Pandora Radio (and Sirius Satellite Radio before that) all day long isn’t making me any smarter. A working knowledge of music that can be loosely categorized as Electronic Dance Music has helped me to catch the cultural reference during an episode of the really great TV show Grimm, but I have a feeling that if I just read a few of the more well known books I might at least feel a bit smarter for all the time invested.

For very good reason, the NC State Troopers frown on reading actual books while driving so I’ve turned to the Wake County Library’s extensive audiobook collection. And by “very extensive,” I mean “I didn’t know that many audiobooks existed, let alone in one easily searched, easily ordered, conveniently located place.” And that’s just the ones on physical audio CDs. They have more that are downloadable.

When I received my new company car, I found that Chevrolet had kindly installed a USB port that allowed me to connect a flash drive to the radio. Neat! I already had ripped most of Harry Potter, so I put it on a flash drive and I listened to it again, all the way to Book 4. Then I discovered the Aubrey-Maturin novels. These books were the basis for the Russell Crowe movie, Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. The books, not surprisingly, are even better than the movie. I am working my way through them at a prodigious pace. I’ve read the books up to book 13 and I just finished listening to book 10. I cannot recommend them highly enough. This leaves me with a serious problem. I’ll be done with book 20, and the series, in just a month or two. Then what? What should I listen to then?

I’ve combined one of the online “100 books to read before you die a horrible death because some idiot wasn’t paying attention during his morning commute” lists with the Wake County Public Library’s helpful online card catalog (we can still call it that even though the cards are virtual, right?) and I’ve developed the following list of books to borrow and listen to. This list is alphabetical by author’s last name.

I am surprised by the number of books on this list that I have never read.

Any suggestions? Did I miss any that you think I should add? Are there any that I should avoid like the plague?