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While surfing around the other day, I came across an online comic strip generator. It’s not so much a generator as a tool. I used the tool to create this little strip. Warning, dogs may be offensive to some viewers. (It was the best I could come up with using zero effort—when in doubt go for the potty humour, right?)

PS: My first purchase from the iTunes music store was Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand. I heard it on the CBC this morning and it just popped up on iTunes — I thought I’d share that with you.

I can’t stand RockStar:INXS, but I’m watching it. Well, I’m listening to it. I actually am enjoying it, even though the guy host is a scary freak. I think I’m rooting for the blonde guy with the big mouth. Anyway, tonight, while listening to the show, I tried out a new (to me) Flash technique. I had suspected that such a feature existed, and found out about it today. So, I’m a little slow, I’m self taught. This is the result of my experiment.

I lead a sheltered life, and I enjoy it. You see, I was thinking that I should get back to blogging more regularly these days and I was going to post one of these “what I’ve been doing” kind of posts. But, it turned into this. I lead a sheltered life.

I don’t know a whole lot about what’s going on around me. I try to keep myself informed and of course there are my interests that I keep up on too. But, ask me the latest gossip, and I don’t know half of it—maybe even less. That’s okay though, because when I do end up getting out and about, people have lots to tell me.

This leads me to my next point. I lead a sheltered life in the respect that I don’t get out with people much. (I suppose Jenn and I lead a sheltered life together.) This past week we went out Saturday night to meet with Tom, Rob and Jane (who I know from my trip to England a few years back.) It was nice, but we were only out for a couple-few hours. We stopped by soccer (mostly because we had been out house-hunting and I thought I could corner Kuchta to ask a few questions) for a little bit on Sunday afternoon. But other than that, we’ve mostly been out looking at houses in the evenings and on the weekend. Good thing we enjoy it.

I’ve got plans for things to do that will make me a little less sheltered: movie night with the boys, a game night, Indian cooking night with Marla (but she doesn’t know about it yet,) do a bit more recording, oh and I wanted to see Episode III again tonight for $3 at the Cumberland!

Well, you know where to contact us if you want to help us lead a less sheltered life. I suppose I could get my butt in gear too—slowly—gotta let those things warm up.

So, if I was to put a yellow sticker on my car that said “Don’t drive near me, I change lanes without checking my blindspot” or “I can’t stay in my lane, so lookout—if I hit you, it’s your own fauly” would that absolve me of guilt if I hit someone? So, why do trucks have stickers that say “I can’t stay in my lane when I make a right hand corner” and how about buses that come into my lane when they’re cornering? I say, if you can’t keep your vehicle in your lane, get off the road.

I just came up with another theory. And this is it. The Brontosaurus is thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end. Wait, that’s someone else’s theory. Mine goes like this…

Blogging is easier when there are no computers around. Of course, it’d be pretty easy to prove this theory wrong, so on one hand, it’s pretty lousy. On the other hand, I find that I have better (and more frequent) blogging ideas when I’m away from computers. For example, this past long weekend, Jenn and I were out at her parents’ camp on Eagle Lake. The air was fresh, the lake was cool (then warm,) there was plenty of food, and lots of time to do nothing. I was away from home and work for a few days (and as such, away from my computers) and I was relaxed. Then the blog ideas started flowing.

Well, I didn’t do much with them. In fact, I don’t remember many of them now. Never the less, I had a great time out at camp. When you’re not at camp, you don’t remember as easily how good camp is. But, just having been out there, I’m ready to take a week of holidays next year and spend them out there.

And as for the Brontosaurus, I think they got the wrong skull on some other dinosaur’s body — so that theory’s no good either.

I’m assuming that everyone likes a story. Whether they read it, or listen to it, be it fiction, reality, a song or whatever. So, why do we like them? Indulge me for a moment…

I was eating my lunch today and thinking about how everything is math—I know I’m generalizing, but you’ll get the idea. Physics is math. Chemistry is physics is math. Biology is chemistry is physics is math. Music is pattern is math (at least good music is.) Art is like music and geometry and is math, but probably subconsciously. Philosophy uses lots of math. Language—is it math? Well, it follows rules but is it math like? Maybe efficient communication is math-ish.

Anyway, this got me thinking. Do we like stories because they are puzzles with rules and clues and conventions that (might be math like) we can use to try to reach their conclusions on our own? Is the fun of a story just in being told a story, of does it engage us when we think we can figure out where the author is leading us before we get to the destination?

I like mysteries a lot, so maybe I’m predisposed to accepting this theory. Then again, maybe we’re all little detectives trying to solve everyone’s literary puzzles.

Isn’t it great when you get picked up from work on a beautiful Friday afternoon (at 4:30 p.m.) and you’re told that you’ve got just enough time to get changed and have a quick supper before your tee-off time?

Well, yesterday, I got out golfing for the first time this year. Nice for me my dad bought new clubs (second-hand) this year. This means that I get his old ones—when I asked if I should return them, he said “No, just keep them.” Doesn’t that sound like he gavethem to me? Hee hee.

Well, unfortunately, dad was out at camp, so he wasn’t able to join Winston (father-in-law) Dave (brother-in-law) and I. It was probably a good thing for him, I was awful—though I did find my lost ball on the second time through hole four (and picked up an extra two balls in the trees.)

But this morning—my back! It’s embarrassing how much pain I’m in. I’m walking like an old man. Not much I can really do, but wait for it to get better and then get back out on the links to build up those muscles.

Well, three days, seven hours later I’ve finished Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Normally, when I’m reading recreationaly, I just do a chapter or so before bed, but this time I filled up a lot of my spare time with it. Jenn of course is a much faster reader than me so she finished yesterday evening.

Without giving anything away, I’ll say that I figured out who the Half Blood Prince was a number of chapters before the identity was revealed (after making some false guesses along the way) and I correctly identified, fairly early on in the book, the character who died.

Now, I have to be careful here, not to ruin anything, but I’m convinced that the person who we think did the deed, didn’t. Jenn developed this theory, so I’m not taking credit for it, but if you want to know what I think, read it and beware of spoilers.

Just so you know, I’ve only got spoilers on my theories page. I hope that if you have comments that would be spoilers that you’d keep them to that page as well. If you want to leave a comment about “Harry Potter is a tool of the devil” go ahead and leave it in the comments here.

Well, we’re by no means settled in Thunder Bay yet, but the anxiety levels are dropping. I’ve got a full week of work under my belt and am feeling like I’m fitting in and am able to “get the job done.” It should be a good job. Our department (all four of us) went out for lunch at The Madhouse on Friday, so that was nice too.

Friday night was Harbron Hullabaloo time. In addition to burgers and snacks, there were a lot of people that I hadn’t seen for a long time. It was good to catch up with them all at once, but there were some obvious omissions to the crowd. It was a last minute thing, so even though not everyone could make it, there was a good turnout.

After the BBQ at Harbrons’ Jenn and I started to head home. It was around 10:45 p.m. and I suggested that we swing by Chapters to see what was going on. At midnight they were selling the first copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We pulled into the parking lot and it was full. Inside there were hundreds of people, young and old, dressed up (and some not) and participating in the fun and festivities. We saw Heather Martin Laakso at the Starbucks and the three of us decided to wait until midnight together. You already know that I managed to luck out and get to the front of the line and had my copy before 12:05 a.m. so I’ll tell you that Heather teaches a high school course that includes C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra. I just happened to be reading through the space trilogy now (well, it’s currently on the back shelf due to the new HP novel) and she promised to e-mail me all her notes.

Robin, Doug and I finished up some recording at Rich’s place and we caught up with a few friends at First Baptist on Sunday, but we spent a lot of the weekend house hunting. We got the crazy idea on Friday and will look into the financial possibilities of the whole thing becoming a reality this week. Never the less, we hit eight open houses and got the addresses of several more places that looked interesting. We’ll see how that works out.

Think of a submarine sounding a ping and getting an echo… from Thunder Bay. It’s me, I’m back and I’m beautiful (five points to the commenter who knows what I’m parodying.) Anyways, it’s been over a week since I’ve been away from blogging, but I’ve got my eMac plugged into my father-in-law’s not-quite-high-speed-but-speedy-enough-for-now internet. So, I should be back to something close to normal blogging now.

First off, not that I think any of the thee will be reading this, but a big thanks to Roy, Peter and Roy for helping Jenn and I pack things up last Monday afternoon. Getting a UHaul was a frustrating task (especially since we had a reservation,) so it was especially nice to come home to these three guys who did almost all the work. Who knew that preachers were such good movers?

Jenn and I spent our last two nights in Ottawa at her sister’s place. Shannon and Don took really good care of us and it was nice to spend some quality time with them before we left. Wednesday morning we hit the highway at 7:30am. In Petawawa I parked on the side of the road with all the other big trucks while we went to the Tim Hortons. We also filled up the 26-footer there with $180 worth of gasoline. Crazy!

We traveled along through Sudbury onto the Sault with little to comment on. We devised some hand signals to keep each other apprised of our condition—did I forget to mention that I drove the big truck (at around 60mph) while Jenn followed in the Bora? The hand signals consisted of &ldquo:thumbs up” for everything is okay and “thumbs down” for I want to stop. The rule was, if someone made a hand signal, you had to respond with your condition. There were only two thumbs down on the whole trip—a bathroom break was needed once and Jenn was confused in the Sault and thought we missed our gas station.

We spent the night at Adam’s Hotel, the same place I stayed when I moved down to Ottawa almost three years ago. We had dinner at a restaurant on the Great Northern Road and stopped at Northern Breweries to pick up some nostalgia for dad.

After putting another $170 in the tank, we hit the road early on Thursday morning and I listened to CBC radio’s coverage of the London bombings. We stopped in Wawa for a quick stretch a couple hours later and then pushed through to White River. I was feeling a little more confident in the truck the second day and the road was smoother, so I had it running close to 65mph. We stopped to fill up again in Terrace Bay ($70 and some A&W) and made for the home stretch. The hills outside of Schriber were worse than those in Montreal Harbour and I was crawling up them at about 40kph.

At around 3:30 pm I came around the KOA hill and caught sight of Thunder Bay. The strangest part of seeing town for me wasn’t that we had finally moved back, but that I was starting a new job. Mom and dad welcomed us with refreshments and food and a nice shower. We took it easy and spent Friday unloading (thanks to Heather, Dave and Caleb,) Saturday at Lake Shebandawon for my cousin Jill’s wedding, Sunday at church in the morning with Robin, the Kuchtas and Andersons, then back out to Shebandawon. Did I mention that it only took about $40 in diesel to drive the VW home and boot all around?

Anyway, I’m getting settled in to my new job and looking forward to seeing some friends at the Harbron Hullaballo this Friday at 5:00 pm.