Jonathan’s Mindless Blog

Today I verified that the first PC I built after college has died and it makes me sad. At least I got to witness the death with the screaming fans and pictures rolling repeatedly through the monitors. Well, I guess 5 years is pretty good for a machine that rarely gets turned off and I’m just glad it wasn’t a disk failure, I verified today that there’s something on the motherboard that has gone short and the power supply crowbars on it; most certainly a dead chicken.

I took a quiz today and here are the results:

I think that pretty much sums it up!

here’s the link: http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_cg.php

I have finished uploading all the pictures from the Colorado vacation.  The last set was from the Garden Of The Gods, an incredible park full of all sorts of weird rock formations.  Most of the rocks were really red due to their high content of iron oxide.  I was even able to get a tiny flower in a macro shot, fairly well focused without a tripod!  Here are the two of my favorites from the park:
 

This year’s first of two Fall vacations was taken to Colorado Springs, Colorado. My friends Tom & Corinna and their daughter, Hollis,
have moved from Anchorage, Alaska, to Colorado, and we were able to make it out to visit them for a long weekend. Tom is now stationed at the Air Force Academy, so we got to drive around base and take pictures and harass the overpopulation of white tail deer. We even got to see a coyote! While at the Academy, we went to the visitor’s center and watched a short film about the school, saw the building of the chapel, saw several other displays and bought trinkets. After that we went to the Chapel which was just weird. Really neat architecture, but all of the school buildings were very shiny metal finish, kind of cold in appearance. If I keep going into all this detail, I’ll never get through this thing, so on to the important stuff… I did not go by myself, I was able to go with Judith! She’s an absolutely wonderful lady that I love spending time with, and was lucky enough to convince her to go with me and we’re both glad we went! I also snuck some pictures of her in so I could show the world a beautiful lady.

She got to meet some of my close friends and we got to hang out and see a bunch of really cool stuff. After the Air Force Academy, we visited Garden of the Gods, just outside of town. It was very surreal, the rocks were very red and it seemed like they were turned 90 degrees from what they should have been, like all the strata was left to right instead of top to bottom. There was so much to see that day, there were mule deer, a homestead, awesome coffee, Pike’s Peak, Cripple Creek and just way too much to process in one day.

I’m done posting pictures for tonight, but there is one more group to come… Garden of the Gods pictures. Sometime this week I’ll get those posted. There are some really cool pictures in the group to come.

Saturday and Sunday were awesome days.  Got some bike time (almost 200 miles) and rode down the Natchez Trace Parkway on Sunday.  What’s that…  how was Colorado you say?  Well it was really cool.  There are pictures and explanation coming, but I’ve been really busy and been home a total of one evening since I’ve been back, and that evening was dedicated to detox from caffeine, so nothing but imaginary blinding lights and advil that night.  Hopefully this evening I’ll have some time to pick a few nice pics for the flickr page.

After an incredibly long break, I’m finally making a new entry.  Just as a summary since I last posted…  my renter told me he was leaving, I’ve had a community meeting every Monday since I can’t remember when (and they’re not over yet), got a new tenant before Daniel ever left, worked my tail off getting the place cleaned up, painted and little things improved, got a new kick-tail super energy efficient front-load washing machine, put another 1k miles on the bike… anyway, you get the idea.  I’ve been wonderfully busy and now I have some time to relax a little, so I’M BACK!  Last night I got a whole lot of my finance stuff straightened out.  It’s been since December of last year since I’ve updated my spreadsheet with my utilitiy usage and graphs, so I got it all filled out and a ton of paperwork filed.  I also got all my rental stuff in order and I’ll make a little money by the end of the year, YEAH!

On other fronts, I’m working on getting my dream property (40ish acre farm), working with the bank and a lawyer to try to pull off something special, and hopefully will have some firm(ish) numbers today or Monday and will find out if this is even a do-able project.

Also, I’m re-focusing how I’m using my time.  The past couple of years, I’ve been heavily involved in the community organization, but as of late, I have rearranged my priorities, and I’m spending much less time with that and spending more with J.  It’s a whole lot more fun and rewarding than anything else I’ve been doing.

If you’re still reading, you’re probably bored out of your mind, but the end of the post is near!  Next weekend we’re vacationing in Colorado Springs, CO to see some fall colors (if they’re still hanging on), my friends and what I hear is some beautiful scenery.  Hopefully will bring back some good pictures. (I got a new CF card that will hold about 1500 pics!).