Canopyflyer

My wife and have extensive flower beds on our property. My very first job as a teenager was in a nursery/garden center and did a lot of landscaping and landscaping design back then. So we have something flowering through out the entire growing season for the pollinators.

Here is one of the more interesting pollinators we have:

“Never pass up the opportunity to keep your mouth shut.”

I’m in my middle 50’s. There are alcoholic drinks I do like, but Miller and Budweiser and not among them. The wife and I will have wine, typically a Malbac or Chianti, with dinner a few times a month, then I’ll use the rest of the bottle to cook with. My local liquor store has a great selection of beers that you can mix and match. I usually pick up a 6 pack, especially when Dopplebocks are in season. A local brewery here has a “Dark Dopplebock” that is really good. Those 6 will sit in my fridge over the next several months until I slowly get to them.

Budweiser in the middle of the night at a party on the shore of Lake Cumberland in Kentucky.

The party was great, but the “beer” was so thoroughly disgusting that I have not drunk it since and that was 35 years ago.

Life is too short to drink bad beer.

“Nor Crystal Tears”: by Alan Dean Foster

One of the first novel length books I ever sat down to read when I was young.

The first series that I fell in love with was: “The Belgariad” by David Eddings

Say what you want about Eddings, the guy was not a nice guy, but “The Belgariad” was a great series and I leaped from it to LOTR.

Scorpius in Farscape.

He was introduced long after the main antagonist, Captain Bilar Crais, was firmly established. Suddenly the Captain was shoved aside for this new monstrous weirdo who’s motivation seems a bit contrived.

Scorpius is absolutely fantastic. Wayne Pygram absolutely knocked it out of the park and then some with portraying both Scorpius and Harvey throughout the rest of the series. Probably one of the best written and acted villains in television history.

I’ve been an IT Professional for almost 30 years and have had to keep up with the computer industry that entire time. These days, I’m more in management and processes, so no more sitting in front of a console with a pager on my hip.

During the technical portion of my career, I was a full +10, at least for computers and associated technologies used in very large enterprise environments.

In my personal life, I’m ore of a +2 or +3. I usually have the previous year’s flagship phone (my current phone is a Pixel 8 Pro) and keep it till it dies. My audio electronics are mostly from the 90’s, because they are high end components (McIntosh) that I have taken decades to procure. Some of which I actually had to fix in order for them to be usable.

All the computers in my house I bought used and refurbed myself. I think the newest one is my computer and it’s a Dell Precision 7550 and it’s at least 4 years old. The network in my house is more current. My router/firewall one of Ubiquiti’s latest and greatest, although both WAPs in my house are about 7 years old. My previous firewall was PFSense that I ran on a VM on Proxmox. It became too much of a pain if there was an issue with Proxmox, then there was an issue with the internet, although I did have a backup, so I decided to just separate the two.

House on the Rock

When I moved to Wisconsin back in 2006, House on the Rock was one of the first things I heard about from my neighbors to go see. My wife and I looked at the website and said “we’ll go see it someday.” Well, that day was about a month ago as back then we started having kids and getting used to living in a new place. However, over the past 19 years I’ve had people tell me that “you’ve got to go see it.”

Now… I understand.

Is that place a monument to a man’s ascent to brilliance?

Or his decent into madness.

There was stuff in that museum that I took DAYS to process and I still really am unable to understand what it was I was looking at. It took my family and I FOUR hours to walk through it. It could have been a LOT longer if we actually stopped to study more than what we did.

I’m 55 years old and I’ve seen and done a lot things in my life… None of it prepared me for the sheer onslaught that is House on the Rock. Walking out of it I told my wife that I rather chaffed at the entrance fee when I paid it… Now, I’m not sure if they charged enough.

If you’re ever anywhere close to South Central Wisconsin… Take a day and go see it.

It doesn’t just live up to the hype… It so far exceeds it that trying to explain the place will never do it justice.

Manfred Mann’s cover of Blinded by the Light has entered the chat. Probably the most misheard lyrics in the entire history of modern music.

It’s “Revved up like a deuce.”

Wait… Manfred Mann’s version is a cover? Yep, Blinded by the Light was originally performed Bruce Springsteen.

Skydiving

Skydivers are not adrenaline (epinephrine) junkies. Adrenaline actually makes you feel terrible. You know that rush and shakes you get when you get hungry? Yeah, THAT’S an adrenaline rush.

No, we go for the same thing runners do. Endorphins. Nature’s own anti-depressant.

Cheese Curds

Yeah, I live in Wisconsin, who’d guess.

I wanted to be a pilot.

By age 16 I had several hours towards my private license.

My junior year in High School I started looking universities with aviation degrees, or engineering. I had settled on Rose Hulman and one other (been 40 years so don’t remember the place, but it was one of the top aviation colleges in the US at the time.) I actually was accepted at “the other place”.

It all came crashing down in the last conversation I had with my enrollment counselor and he asked a question that hadn’t been asked of me in the prior many conversations I had with him.

“How is your eyesight?”

You see, I’m legally blind in my right eye and in the US, pilots are required to have 20/20 corrected eyesight. In order for my right eye to be 20/20 I would basically have to have a telescope hanging off my face.

I never did get my private pilots license, which I can get even with my eyesight, but I would never pass medical for a commercial ticket.

Yes, I did look at training in other countries and yes there are a few that only require perfect color vision, which I do have. The problem was my parents absolutely forbade me to travel to another country.

So that was that.

Spent 2 weeks hiking in around the Red River Gorge, Kentucky and Sheltowee Trace back in the late 80’s. Only time I got wet was when it rained, or found a creek to take a dip in.

When I got home, even my own Mother would not hug me. She sent me off to the bath where I stayed for over an hour.

Greetings programs!

I prefer to think of them fighting evil in another dimension.

This means something.

Your ass looks like 150 pounds of chewed bubble gum!

There’s no fighting in the war room!

Sire! The Great Leslie escaped with a friar!.. He escaped with a chicken!!!

Of course I denied installing CCTV in the nursery! What the hell would they watch?!!!

I think what we have here… Is a failure to communicate!

“Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

My life became infinitely better once I understood that saying.

30 year IT Professional here, who has run laptop depots.

Absolutely mandatory in an enterprise environment.

The number of dead batteries I have seen throughout the years is too many to count. Having to dispatch a replacement laptop, instead of just a battery is really irritating. Sure the affected laptop comes back and my techs can take care of it and put it back into inventory. That comes with the cost of needing to keep extra full laptops in the rotation. Not to mention having to cross ship two laptops. Instead of just having much cheaper batteries that I can send off to the user, then they pop it in and drop off the old battery at a local store that accepts used batteries.

As far as a “thing”, which I would define as an object and not a person or animal, I would have to say my two McIntosh amplifiers. I have an MC7100 and MC7108.

Both were built in 1992. I am listening to the MC7108 in my office as I write this.

My favorite band that I’ve actually seen live:

Duran Duran. Was a closet fan of theirs back in the late 80’s and got to see them when my girlfriend at the time got tickets.

Actual favorite band and unfortunately have never seen live:

RUSH

And it’s not because I think that Neil Peart is the greatest drummer of all time (that would be Buddy Rich). It’s because their music actually talks to my neurodivergent brain. It is also due to that the 3 of them were a confluence of exceptional talent that just happened to come together to make something special.

Landscaping

My very first job at the age of 15 was working at a Nursery/ Garden Center. I also would work on the landscaping crews and even did some design work.

When my wife and I bought our house she said she always dreamed of having a big flower garden, but said she didn’t know how to do it properly.

Well… I do. Even my Mother-In-Law, who is an experienced gardener, learned a few things from me. Although, I have to admit, she really does know a lot and I learned a lot from her as well.

Our flower beds are beautiful throughout the growing season with a huge variety of plants.

My family had “The Best of Bill Cosby” album when I was a kid and we listened to it a lot. Some of the funniest bits on that album and I always had warm memories sitting and listening to them.

Then it comes out that he’s a complete monster. All those family memories tied to that now, it really sucks.