Thoramel

About to head out and go see They Might be Giants perform their album "Flood" in it's entirety. I see a decent amount of live music, but I'm seriously geeking out for this one. TMBG puts on a great show and it's been a very long time since I last saw them. It's been long enough that when I went to put on a concert Tshirt from the last time I saw them it was from the days when I had a fairly different body shape. Either it shrank or I grew. Anyways, here's the album if you'd like to check it out... https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW1c4UK-iy_bSKOlaNAcf1WCwFf43jFEV

I like my job. I get to spend a lot of time standing around in streams, swamps and woods looking at interesting plants and animals. They even give me a pack of interns every year to do a bunch of the office work I don't enjoy doing. So If I had to pick something I'd just say my current job but with more money (and less politics).

I've had a lot of great pets over the year so it's hard to say which memory is my favorite. But this morning, after having to throw our cat out of the bedroom last night for being mischievous while I was trying to sleep, there was a line of cat toys (and a couple of dog toys) starting at the bedroom door going down the stairs through the front room then through the living room and into the TV room leading to his box of toys. Seriously, there was a different toy every few feet from the toy box to the bedroom door. No idea what the heck he was thinking, but I suspect I'll be telling this story as a favorite for a while.

Here's all the merfolk from the Bones V Kickstarter. I've been working on these off and on for about a year and really enjoyed them. I didn't spend a ton of time on them, but then they were so well designed and easy to paint I didn't need to. When I started this I was looking for something a little more colorful to paint, and since these were already getting painted as part of a nautical themed project I've got going, they fit perfectly for that. I'm really looking forward to these hitting the table. I've got some Evil DM plans to drag unsuspecting characters beneath the waves! First up, the group shot: This one is my favorite. She even got a pet shark. Cheers all and thanks for looking!

Not really. It's just more recycle to deal with. Besides, the local newspaper around here is just rewritten stories from the wire services, tons of advertising, and the political opinions of the ownership dressed up as news. I don't need any of that. I will occasionally read the homeless newspaper that's produced around here. It's written and distributed by folks who are, or have been, homeless. And all the money goes to helping them out. Plus it's a perspective on local events that you definitely won't find anywhere else.

The best one directed at me was "Are you trying to get me drunk and take advantage of me? Because you don't have to get me drunk." We have been together 28 years now. I'm usually pretty oblivious to such things, but that one was direct enough to understand. My wife says I still get hit on/receive pick up lines all the time. But I can't tell so I just assume she's saying that kind of thing to boost my confidence. I was about to say it would be one of the various messaging apps. But I have several of those and depending on who you are in my life you get to use a different one. So the actual time spent messaging is broken up among several applications. But I probably use the camera on the phone on a daily basis. So instead, the camera app is likely the most used.

This past weekend I took part in a three day bachelor party I had planned for my oldest friend who finally went and met someone he wants to settle down with. People flew in from all over the country to participate. There were feats of strength, skill and intelligence, a bunch of great food and way more alcohol than was necessary was consumed. And it all culminated in a great hardcore/metal show on Sunday night. Then yesterday, while all the unlucky out of towners had to fly home, I spent the entire day on the couch recuperating and contemplating whether I should buy my liver a Get Well Soon card. I think though that in the end there were a couple of great lessons learned... First, even well into middle age it's possible to find love, which makes me pretty happy. And secondly, a bunch of guys in their 40's and 50's should not act like they're a bunch of guys in their 20's. Seriously, I'm still sore.

I generally prefer Marvel over DC, for both movies and comics. Hadn't really read any comics since the early eighties. Then my wife recently got me a subscription to Marvel's online comic database and I tried re-reading some of that old stuff. Man some of that writing was just dumb as all get out. It was fun taking the walk down memory lane, but the newer stuff is far, far better. Nope, never had an aquarium. Had a terrarium with a tarantula in it for a couple of decades until it died around the age of 30. That was given to me by someone who had no idea how to care for it though, I'm generally not a fan of critters in cages. We've got an aquarium at work that the fish folk (they're not actual fish folk, like some sort of Lovecraftian Deep One, they're ichthyologists. But everyone calls them the fish folk) keep stocked with common native species. It's nice to be able to show interns and other non-biology people what some of the area's most basic species look like. It's not very good for pictures as they keep it is surrounded by a large cardboard box that helps simulate the low light conditions the fish in there would normally live in.

I did not see that. But I wholly support that right for everyone!

After counting it looks like I'm still able to name 11 Muppets from the Muppet Show. That number rises to 12 if you count Elton John as a Muppet. And since, during his performance of Crocodile Rock on the Muppet Show he was wearing more sequins and feathers than your average Muppet cast member, I do count him. Of course that doesn't include anything from Fraggle Rock, Sesame Street, The Dark Crystal, or Labyrinth (David Bowie is also an honorary Muppet in my mind). Gonzo is probably my favorite.

I never share aspects of my own spirituality or what forms that may take. I find that to be a deeply private thing.

It's only Tuesday, but it's already been one of those weeks where you'd just like to tell everyone what to go do with themselves. So last night, when I sat down to paint a bit, this seemed like the appropriate miniature to work on. I was going to put it on my office desk, but my wife saw me loading it up this morning and now it's hers. That's okay though, I bought ten of these in the Kickstarter. Because sometimes the world needs extra middle fingers directed at it. Cheers all and thanks for looking.

I'm the laid back kind of person when it comes to life's little annoyances. As far as I'm concerned no amount of getting stressed or angry has ever resulted in a better outcome or made a problem get fixed faster.

When I was very little I used to tell people I wanted to be a pizza maker and spin the dough in the air. Later I realized we were dirt poor and I just wanted to get to a point in life where I wasn't constantly worried about money. I do have some future goals which involves converting a portion of the family farm into a forested wetland which stems from some noble, if naive, ideas about attempting to leave the world in better shape than I found it I did work in a pizza place as one of the many jobs I held while getting my wife and myself through college. In fact I can still spin the dough around in the air. So you know, mission accomplished. As a result of getting through college and getting decent jobs I rarely worry about being so poor I lose everything. If you've ever been that kind of poor though you never really quit worrying about it. We also have actual pensions, so fingers crossed that whole not being dirt poor thing is behind me for good (knocks on wood). Still working on the farm thing. For the pizza thing I worked nights in a pizza shop. For the not being poor thing my wife and I went to college. We kind of did it in stages though. My wife is a few years older than me so she went first while I worked as much as possible to keep a roof over our heads. I think I averaged something like 64 hours a week for the last three years of her education. I even managed to get a couple of community college classes under my belt while doing it. Then after she graduated and got a good job I went back to school and got my degree while she kept the lights on and food on the table. It worked and now we both have decent jobs, pensions and a union that helps protect us from unreasonable management. For the farm thing I've drawn up plans to plant and create a forested wetland over a period of ten years starting with changing the hydrology in one field and then planting it with native herbaceous vegetation and about 400 woody stems per acre of various shrub and tree species. That's not going to be cheap, so I've shopped the plan around looking for grant money to do so. Unfortunately it's just outside of a watershed where there is plenty of money for this kind of work and I've been having trouble finding any organizations in our watershed with the funding for restoration. The next step is talking to some mitigation bankers who build these environments to sell "credits"to developers who impact wetlands elsewhere as a way of compensating for ecosystem loss. That route could tie my hands on what I could do with the land in the future, but they'd pay me a lot more per acre to restore this than what I'm getting for rent on the land. Also, I have to find someone who doesn't mind that I'm planning on leaving a few acres of land out of this plan in order to build a house at the back of the fields some day where I can retire away from people.

I went to a one year old's birthday party for my cousin's umpteenth kid. Normally I would avoid such things but I haven't seen him or his family in quite some time so it seemed like the right thing to do. While there I had to interact with numerous children under the age of five. Could have been just a few, could have been dozens. They all look the same to me. Normally having a conversation with a stunted little proto-human that insists on touching you with their sticky hands is way out of my comfort zone. And I had to do just that multiple times throughout the afternoon. But by the end of the day several of the kids there had learned a couple of new finger gestures and I didn't pick up any nasty kid germs. so I guess it went okay.