What's That Smell?

Over the last couple of days, I've noticed the distinct smell of burning electronics whenever I entered my office from another room in the house. It was strong enough to make me take notice but not so strong that I went searching for the source of the smell. Well, this morning, I discovered the source. When I came into my office this morning I noticed that the power light on the computer that I use as my web server was flashing and that the computer was pretty much otherwise dead.

When I tried cycling the power little wisps of white smoke started to float out of the back of the power supply. That's usually a pretty good sign that you have a dead power supply. The three of you that read my blog regularly may have noticed that it was out of commission all of this mornning. I stopped by Staples on my way home for lunch, picked up a new power supply and now my blog is operational once more.

Turning Thoughts Into Words

From "The Adolescent" by Fyodor Dostoevsky:

Ah! so you, too, suffer sometimes because a thought won't go into words! It's a noble suffering, my friend, and granted only to the chosen; a fool is always pleased with what he says, and, besides he always says more than he needs to; they like extras.

A Thanksgiving Feast

I am happy to report that for the second year in a row nobody has died as a result of my Thanksgiving cooking. All of Ohana Utah congregated at my house yesterday evening for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. I was responsible for the Thanksgiving staples (roasted tukey, cranberry sausage apple stuffing, garlic mashed potatoes, praline sweet potatoes and thanksgiving sweet potatoes), Ben and Jessie brought the pies (a wonderfully delicious chocolate pecan pie and a traditional pumpkin pie), Marci brought a veggie tray and jello, and Lisa and Les brought the rolls.

Here is a photo of some of my handiwork:



And this is what it looked like after the devouring:



Unfortunately there is not enough of a difference between the two pictures. I'm afraid that we are going to be eating leftovers for the next week or so :)

A Perfect Weekend

As I sat next to Holly in bed this morning eating breakfast, she told me that this weekend had been a perfect weekend. Wow, a 'perfect' weekend. 'Perfect' is a strong word and yet I tend to agree. I couldn't help but feel that we had created something beautiful this weekend. It wasn't tangible but it was still real. It was a beautiful memory; a beautiful experience. Hopefully this will be only one among many more beautiful and perfect weekends which still lie ahead of us.


Click on the picture above to see more pictures from the weekend.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

Watch it, love it. It's too bizarre for words.

Priceless

400 thread count brushed pima sateen sheets: $150
Shower curtain for guest bathroom: $20
Matching towels for guest and master bathrooms: $80
Smelly Candles: $20
Carpet Cleaning: $130
Maid Service: $100
Convincing Holly that I'm not a slovenly bachelor when she comes to visit this weekend: Priceless

Cliff Jumping

As requested by Master Fob:

2 names you go by: svoid, Daniel

2 parts of your heritage: Huh?

2 things that scare you: Transvestite hookers and awkward silence. But especially moments of awkward silence with transvestite hookers.

2 things you are wearing right now: My Harley T-Shirt (from Barcelona, Spain), Fruit of the Loom Boxer Briefs (from Spanish Fork, Utah).

2 of your favorite bands or musical artists (at the moment): I don't like answering questions about favorites, so instead I will list a couple of artists whose albums I have recently purchased and enjoy: Aqualung, Anna Nalick, The Killers

2 favorite songs (at the moment): "Waiting for the Night" by Depeche Mode, "All These Things that I've Done" by The Killers. I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier.

2 things you want in a relationship (other than real love): Trust, Adventure, Passion, Honest and Open Communication, Humor, Comfort. Oops, I guess that I want more than two things in a relationship.

2 truths: (1) A question this open ended is begging to be answered by a humorous and witty quip. (2) I'm not clever enough to think of anything humourous or witty to say.

2 physical things that appeal to you (in the opposite sex): Who would have thought that this would be the most difficult question for me to answer? I've answered every other question and had to come back to this one. I think that the reason that I'm struggling with this is that I can't deconstruct my attaction to the opposite sex. What appeals to me is the whole thing. There aren't parts or things that I find particularly appealing in a general sense across all women. Some trait that I might find appealing or attractive in one woman may not produce any effect in me when encountered in a different woman. That leads me to believe that it wasn't really that 'thing' that appealed to me but that it was the woman herself.

2 of your favorite hobbies: Riding my Harley, Shooting Pool.

2 things you want really badly: Love, To be happy with what I see when I look at myself in the mirror. Hopefully one will facilitate the other.

2 places you want to go on vacation: Australia, Russia.

2 things you want to do before you die: Katie Holmes and Jessica Alba... at the same time. Just kidding (unless Jessica or Katie is reading this right now, in which case I'm totally serious). No seriously, I would like to travel and see the world and to learn to play the piano.

2 ways that you are stereotypically a dude/chick: See previous question.

2 things you are thinking about now: Whether or not anyone will be offended by my response to the question before last. Whether or not I care.

2 stores you shop at: Albertsons, Target.

2 people you would like to see take the quiz: Holly, Chris.

Oh yeah

Oh yeah, here are some pictures that we took at the Miller Horticultural Domes. Click on the picture below to see the rest of the pictures.

Memoirs of a Weekend in Milwaukee

I would like to tell you about my weekend in Milwaukee with Holly, but I'm struggling to find the balance in between informational and intrusive. I'm tempted to just give an itinerary of events, but somehow I think that leaving all perspective and reaction out of the accounting would make for a pretty boring post. The whole dilemma reminds me of an excerpt from the opening paragraph of Doestoevsky's, The Adolescent; a book which I picked up this weekend. He writes:

I am not a literary man, do not want to be a literary man, and would consider it base and indecent to drag the insides of my soul and a beautiful description of my feelings to their literary marketplace. I anticipate with vexation, however, that it seems impossible to do entirely without the description of feelings and without reflections (maybe even banal ones): so corrupting is the effect of any literary occupation of a man, even if it is undertaken only for oneself. The reflections may even be very banal, because something you value yourself will quite possibly have no value in a stranger's eyes.

I'm going to try something new and just list random good memories from the weekend. They are not in any particular order, chronological or otherwise.

• Watching Holly laugh as she discovered the picture that I picked for myself on her smell phone.
• Getting "lost" in the corn maze at the Miller Horticultural Domes.
• Using the wrong inflection and saying, "I liked that?" when what I really meant was "I liked that!". Holly, unphased by the question responds, "Yes, I think you did".
• Listening to a bunch of hair stylists shout at each other in Ukranian while waiting for Holly to get her hair done.
• Doing about 90 miles per hour down I94 from Madison to Milwaukee trying desperately not to be late for my breakfast date with Holly.
• Being treated to breakfast at Perkins by Holly. She sneakily stole the check while I was in the bathroom.
• Hanging out with Mom (Holly's Mom) before going out to the movies on Saturday night.
• Staying up all night with Holly before my 6:30AM flight back home on Sunday.
• Standing at Holly's workplace amongst the jobless, homeless and disabled all dapperred up, reeking of cologne, and holding a dozen roses in my hand waiting very nervously and uncomfortably for Holly to finish up with her client and come meet me.
• Seeing the look on Holly's face when she realized that I had actually flown all the way from Utah to take her out to lunch in Milwaukee.
  
• Hearing the phrase, "I can't believe you are actually here in Milwaukee", about a 100 times while we were having lunch together.
• Hearing about one of Holly's friends asking her, "What did you do to him in Mankato???"
  

Additional Flushes

For some reason this amused me in my sleep deprived state this morning. Apparently this is a problem in the Detroit airport...

I'm freakin' out, man

So, I'm sitting in the bathroom in the Denver airport and I hear over the intercom, "Just to remind you, Detroit is in the eastern time zone. Please adjust your clocks accordingly." What? Detroit? What city am I in? Was I that out of it this morning?

Apparently I was. I am sitting in the Detroit airport right now and not the Denver airport. It makes sense now that I think about it. That's why the flight was so short. Detroit is much closer to Milwaukee than Denver is. It also explains why I was hearing flight announcements for destinations like Flint and Kalamazoo. I thought it was really strange that there was a direct flight from Denver Colorado to Kalamazoo Michigan.

The good news is that discovering that I am in the Eastern time zone instead of the Mountain time zone just shaved 2 hours off of my layover.

Sleep Deprivation in Denver

It's 7AM and I'm sitting in the Denver airport. I didn't sleep a wink last night. Not wanting to waste a single minute of my visit to Milwaukee, I was hanging out with Holly until 3:30 in the morning. My flight was scheduled to leave Milwaukee at 6:30 in the morning. I decided that it wasn't even worth trying to sleep for an hour before waking up at my originally scheduled time of 4:30.

I was dragging ass by the time that I got to the airport. When I checked in at one of the Northwest electronic ticketing kiosks, I discovered that my flight to Minneapolis had been cancelled. Instead I was going to be routed through Denver and had an extra 25 minutes before my flight left.

I felt like the walking dead by the time that I got to my gate. I chose a seat where I could lean back and rest my head on a pillar behind me and tried to get some sleep. As I drifted in and out of consciousness I glanced up at the monitor displaying the flight information above my gate: departure time, 6:55AM, current time, 542. I drift back out of consciousness again. What time is it? Departure time, 6:55AM, current time 542. Good, still plenty of time.

One more time in and out of consciousness. Departure time, 6:55AM, current time 542. At this point it should have disturbed me that I had been in the airport for more than 45 minutes and yet not a single minute had passed according to the clock I was looking at. It should have, but it didn't; I was too disoriented. Later I would realize that the reason that the clock never changed was because the current time that I was looking at, 542, was actually the flight number and not the time at all.

As I slept I dreamt that I heard someone calling my name. It sounded something like, "Will the passenger Daniel Christensen please report to gate...". Wait, was that a dream? I open my eyes and look around. The terminal is empty. All of the other passengers that had been surrounding me during my last period of consciousness had now vanished. Had I dreamt them too? I was confused and disoriented. My flight didn't leave until 6:55 and it was still only 542.

Still I thought that I had better check with one of the gate agents. For some reason I looked around and tried to locate the source of the voice. It occurred to me that the voice must have come from the PA system and that the direction of the voice would not only be impossible to discern but would be totally irrelevant even if I did. Still I looked. As I scanned the terminal I was disturbed by how empty it was. Not only were the passengers gone, but all of the employees seemed to be as well.

I finally located a lone gate agent. As it turns out he was actually manning the gate sitting directly in front of me, but as you've probably been able to gather, I really wasn't all that lucid at this point. "I think I heard someone call my name", I said to the gate agent. "Are you Daniel Christensen?". "Yes, why?". "You really need to get on that plane. It's about to leave without you." Holy Crap. I had almost slept through my flight departure.

The flight from Milwaukee to Denver was way too short. I passed out as soon as we got into the air and what felt like 2 minutes later we were touching down in Denver. This was and probably will be the only time in my life that I wish that the flight would have dragged on for hours longer than it needed to. Why couldn't they have just circled for a couple of hours? Didn't they know that I needed the sleep?

So, here I sit in the Denver airport. I have nearly 5 hours to kill before my next flight leaves. I figured that 5 hours of dead time in an airport justified the $6.95 for wireless internet access. I have books to read but I don't think that my mind is clear enough to handle reading Doestoevsky right now. Then again, I'm not so sure that it was a such good idea to write either.

Belated Novelloween

I know that Halloween was a couple of days ago now, but I just got this picture back from my sister. Marci and Malina decided to come to Novell this year for Trick or Treating. I had invited them in previous years but it seems like there was always something else going on. Malina came dressed up as Pocahontas. We had a lot of fun walking around to all of the offices on my floor and collecting candy.



I felt obligated to explain to everyone that we bumped into that this was my sister and niece and not my wife and daughter. One of the guys on the Agent team seemed relieved to hear the explanation. He told me that he had been certain that I didn't have kids since I rode a Harley and people who ride Harley's just aren't married and don't have kids. He was confused when he saw me walking around with Marci and Malina.

My candy supply was almost overstocked this year. I went from giving out single pieces of candy to giving out two pieces to giving small handfuls. As time wore on, I was worried that I was going to have to take a bunch of candy home with me and starting stuffing large handfuls of candy in the halloween bags and buckets of confused and delighted children.

Survival

Today was that fateful and dreaded day where the company I work for enacted the lay-offs that have been rumored for the last couple of weeks. Fortunately, I am still employed. In fact, my team has weathered the storm fairly well. Unfortunately, we did not escape unscathed. Two of my team-mates have been given walking orders. I'm sorry to see them go and wish them both the best of luck.

These boots are made for walking...

I bought a new pair of boots tonight. My other boots were literally falling apart after this weekend. I'm not thrilled about the white stitching and I think that it may take a while to get used to the higher ankle but they are awfully comfortable and seem to be pretty durable. The yellow laces were replaced by black ones before I even left the store.