Hello from KC

Richard and I decided to do Thanksgiving
in KC this year-- in the interest of getting away and not having to cook turkey for two. We also wanted to see the Plaza lighting ceremony, and my iPhone needed fixing-- the Apple Store gave me a shiny new one.
Last night we ate at Eden Alley, a rather tasty vegetarian restaurant and ministry for Unity Temple. Unity is an interestingly syncretic religious movement out of KC.



Above is a pic from Eden Alley.
A Happy Thanksgiving to all and sundry reading this blog

-- Post From My iPhone

And on Second Review ...

The official version of the trailer for the new Star Trek movie came out this week:

New Trailer

My first impressions so far (if you haven't seen it, SPOILER SPACE AHEAD):

You've been warned ...


1. I was almost tempted, upon seeing the new version of the Enterprise for the first time, to say "meh" (Kidding!) Seriously, I was almost tempted to put the photo up with an LOL caption on it titled "Epic Fail". It looks like the designer did a mashup of the movie Enterprise and the Enterprise-D from Next Generation, and then badly Photoshopped the secondary hull to draw attention away from the mashup.

Don't get me started on the warp engines, which have a distinct 50s-retro tailfin look to them. At least the designer didn't crib completely from a previous design (as what happened with the NX-01 from Enterprise). No, wait, what am I saying???

I'm hoping that during the course of the movie, everything below the saucer gets critically damaged so that by the end of the movie, it gets replaced with something that more closely matches the starship we grew up with. Or maybe it is an alternate timeline movie like we've been led to believe.

2. The scene in the hangar bay really had a Starship Troopers vibe to it.

3. Visually exciting (almost Speed Racer-ish) in intensity. But is there a story to it? In doing Speed Racer, you could see that the Wachowski's not only knew their story material, they RESPECTED it. I am hoping and praying that JJ Abrams knows enough, even if this is a reboot, to do the same.

4. Simon Pegg as Scotty: I'm wondering if his version of Scotty had already had Aldeberian whiskey (the infamous drink immortalized in the words "it's green" when asked what it was) in the trailer scene? He certainly seemed like he had a pretty good caffeine buzz or hyperactive streak going .....

5. Is it just me, but by presenting us with a much younger Kirk with a slightly different origin story, I think they've already sacrificed some interesting plot points from the original. In TOS, Kirk was a young starship captain (the youngest captain to command a starship, on record), but at least he had risen through the ranks and, when he was younger, survived two incidents (counting Tarsus Four and the cloud being that decimated the starship Farragut). See the TOS episodes "The Conscience of the King" and "Obsession" to know what I'm talking about.

In the new movie, he seems almost way too young to be a cadet, let alone captaining a starship, and there's no sense of how he got from being a deliquent to that captain. It's almost like he survives the Kobayashi Maru "no-win scenario" test and, as a reward, gets told he's getting a starship.

I wonder how they're going to explain the age differential, let alone the scene where Kirk sees the Enterprise being built prior to entering Starfleet?

6. One thing they did get right: casting Zach Quinto as Spock. The look is right, and the delivery is right. The guy appears to be channeling Leonard Nimoy. It's eerie.

I've heard since then that the idea of the movie is that the original Trek timeline as we know it has been demolished, due to the use of time-travel and history being changed, and that what we will get is a timeline that is "close to the original as possible", but not quite.

Didn't Berman and Braga try this with Enterprise and fail miserably? Just wondering.

Anyway, it's just a few thoughts moving forward. I suspect that more will come out the closer we get to the release date, and I'll be standing in line at the local theater come May when it comes out.

Just please change the ship so that it's closer to the original. That's all. Kthxbye.

More Cognitive Dissonance This Weekend

It's a Division II playoff game between my former alma mater (well, one of them), as the Bearcats take on Pitt State. Here in Maryville. And we have tickets!!!

No driving down to KC for this one.

I must admit that the game should be interesting. I mean, Pitt has already lost to the 'Cats once this fall ... will this weekend be the 2nd time around? We'll find out this weekend.

EDIT 1: I've been "outed" as a Bearcat fan. Lauren and I were in Jock's Nitch this morning prior to the game, while on our way to the Bookstop (our local coffeehouse/antique store/used bookstore), and the owner of the Jock's Nitch chain (who had probably seen me in at the store at the Pittsburg mall and knew I was a Pitt grad), came up and good-naturedly asked me why I wasn't in Pitt crimson-and-gold? So the truth is out here in Maryville.

GAME NOTES EDIT: This game was a lot closer than expected: Pitt brought their A game, and we didn't. Even so, we were leading 31-13 at the half, but in the second half, Pitt reeled off a couple of touchdowns and managed to take the lead with a minute left to play. Of course, it didn't help that our normally solid defense simply couldn't stop the Pitt offense in the third quarter and the officiating in the game was quite possibly the worst (and blatantly one-sided) officiating we had ever seen from a referee crew, even to the point that Coach Mel, normally a very mild-mannered man, was chewing out the line judge over the spate of bad calls and missed calls, which included:

1)Multiple missed chop block and block in the back calls.
2)A ruled touchdown for Pitt by the back judge when nor the Pitt player or the ball broke the plane of the goal line and said player had been clearly stood up within a foot of the goal line. It was painfully obvious to everyone that it was a bad call.
3)Multiple lenient ball spots in favor of Pitt.
4)A couple of very questionable calls in the first half where Pitt receivers caught the ball out of bounds 2 or three times but were ruled in bounds.

Unfortunately, Div II playoffs do not feature replay, although they should feature vision checks for the refs in future years. I hope that in the future, we refuse to have a crew from that conference here ever again.

In the end, it came down in part to penalties called and not called, turnovers, and passing; NW got at least 10 defensive points off of Pitt turnovers early in the game, and Pitt committed a couple of really bad fouls early on. What sealed it, however, was the last drive at the end of the game. Joel Osborn became the hero of the day by throwing a drive (and game) -saving pass on 4th and 10, with 20 seconds left to go, to bring NW down to the 20, followed by a toss into the end-zone for the go-ahead touchdown to make it 38-35.

The defense then managed to force a 4 and out in the last few seconds, we got the ball back on downs, and the clock expired.

So, I'm glad we went, and it's rather sad: my alma mater played their hearts out, but Pitt lost, and the Bearcats move on to next week's game against Abilene Christian, the team that gave us our only loss during the season.

Given that Abilene scored 93 points in their 2nd round game to beat a West Texas A&M team that put up a more than respectable 68 points (almost a basketball score), I think we're going into next week's game as very questionable underdogs. I hope that the 'Cats win, and make it to the finals for a rematch against Grand Valley State, but it may take a few miracles from the 'Cats for that one.

Meh

According to the AP, Harper-Collins has chosen to include the word "meh" in the next iteration of the Collins English Dictionary.

Link

In all seriousness, should we care that this is about to become a word?

"Meh". Probably not.

November Weekend

This feels rather strange. Usually, I'm mowing the lawn and we're doing the household chores that get pushed to the weekend, or we're either out of town for a weekend in KC visiting friends, doing something (like our regular RenFaire trip), or we're at the Northwest home football game (they won the conference again and we'll find out what the playoff picture looks like tomorrow). Or I'm putting in work hours (which, technically, I am today, as I'm downloading and listening to a couple of podcasts for "professional development") and doing laundry, while Lauren rests (or, for this weekend, recuperates from sinus problems).

It's actually been quite awhile since either of us have had the time to actually sit down and blog.

Since then, the world has changed: The elections are over, and after the weeks of discussing, volunteering (we spent Labor Day Weekend canvassing in town), and watching the election results at the Hangar with the rest of the watch party, it's done. We've given Obama his chance, hoping for change and better leadership than we've had the last eight years.

It's been an interesting few months of change for ourselves as well: reconnecting with old college friends in KC (and also seeing some friends drop off the radar due to new developments in their lives, such as new relationships). We're also making plans for the holidays (Illinois again, to visit with Lauren's family for Christmas, though we will be staying at the Starved Rock Lodge, rather than staying with our usual hosts at the Brightwood Inn).

Election Night

We're at the local Election Night party at the Hangar, watching the results on the big screen.

We voted earlier in the morning when the polls opened (for Obama, of course).

Sorry It's Been Awhile

Sorry it's been awhile between posts. Between the job and commute and the semester for Lauren, we're lucky to have time to check email after dinner. We'll write more, we promise .... As soon as we can find the time.

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45 is the new 30

It's my birthday today -- and I'm obviously not shy about my age. Of course, that might be because I've never really felt old. Actually, I feel younger as I get older. When I was younger, I felt like I carried all the burdens of the world on my shoulders. Then, as I got older, I realized that there were many things I had no power to do anything about. I couldn't end the nuclear arms race or cure cancer.

Knowing there is very little I have control over is extremely liberating. It turns out that all I can do is to leave this world kinder and cleaner than I found it. Just like in Girl Scouts.




I'm thinking about this because today is the 7th anniversary of 9/11. To Americans, no explanation is necessary -- my birthdate is shorthand for terrorism and tragedy. The media headlines at the time screamed, "should we be more scared?" as if fear could somehow prevent another tragedy. When I truly realized that I had no control over what terrorists in another country (or my own) choose to do, my fear dissolved.

All I can do is leave my little corner of the world a little kinder than I found it.





-- Post From My iPhone

I Knew It Would Happen

Getting old, that is .... I'm 39 and almost to 40 in December. I get NO sympathy from my wife about it, by the way.

I've been noticing within the last week that I've been experiencing some near-vision focusing jumps ... nothing serious, but certainly a problem for what I do for a living (technical writing and editing), and I had also noticed that as of late, my night vision, which used to be really, really good, was starting to degrade a little bit. Given I commute to my job and on most days, I'm driving there right at dawn or (especially later in the fall) near dusk or right around dark, I chalked it up to age.

It turns out I was partially right. There's a specific vision problem brought on my excessive computer use called (ta-da!) Computer Vision Syndrome. You really see it in jobs where you have excessive (heavy) computer work or stare at a screen for hours, such as technical editing.

Given the symptoms, it was time to stop in and talk to the eye doc about my options. Lauren has already made the jump to bifocals ... was it time for me as well?

Not really ... the doc doesn't want to go that far. Instead, I'm going with a pair of reading glasses.

Why is it that I suddenly feel like Jim Kirk around the time of Wrath of Khan? "Well, Bones, these are ... charming." I'm sure this will be the same experience for me. I hope.

My 3-Day Blog (Cheshirekitty speaks)

You can catch up to my training and fundraising efforts for the 2009 Chicago Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk here

Opie Says Hi.

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New Toy

Today I FINALLY got my iPhone. What a neat little toy!

Meanwhile, Richard is playing with his (formerly my) iPod Touch that I won in a raffle. He's wanting me to win an iPhone for him now...yeah, riiiight.

Test#2

Testing a new mobile blogging app for the iPod/iPhone called Cellspin. Hoping to get both pics and text in the same post...

Lazy Sunday

It's a lazy Sunday here in Maryville, punctuated by a couple of noteworthy items:
1)We did the now-traditional office cleaning ritual that for Woodgie marks the unofficial start of the fall school year. Her classes are set up, and apart from the first week's meetings the last week of August, she's ready to go.
2)The weather has been a bit muggy; we may actually get stormed on this afternoon/evening.
3)The house is filled with the wonderful smell of baking chocolate chip cookies: two of our teams at work are having a grill out at our project manager's house in Liberty, so I'm bringing my world-famous decadant chocolate-chip cheesecake recipe: it's actually a cheat out of the Mr. Food cookbook, which wraps a basic cheesecake (egg, vanilla, cream cheese, sugar) layer between two layers of Pillsbury chocolate chip cookie dough (if you want to add insult to injury, or at least spike your blood sugar, top it with chocolate syrup). The first time I made this and brought it to the college library I worked as as an undergrad, I left it the morning before I went to class. By the time I got back to start my shift at 11, half of it was gone! So, it's been a never-fail recipe for me.
4)But the really big news is that Woodgie's iPhone has shipped, so sometime this week, she will be the proud owner of an iPhone 3G (and I get to inherit her iPod Touch in the process).

BSG/Band of Brothers

Just had to toss this in:

Being a fan of both Battlestar Galactica and the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, I ran across this on YouTube today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVX3Le5bWSw.

It's a fan-made title sequence mash-up which I thought was very well done (just ignore the typos).

In doing a Google search later, I ran across a link to two more mashup videos, brought to you on this posting on the acclaimed BSG-news and info weblog Galactica Sitrep.

http://galacticasitrep.blogspot.com/2007/12/band-of-brothers.html

At least, they are supposed to be there: the post itself is blank, probably due to firewall/anti-virus issues, so if someone looks at this and can get to the links, let me know how they were :-).

For a small bit of trivia, Jamie Bamber (Apollo) in BSG played a small role in Band of Brothers, so there's a small connection between the two shows.

Testing, Testing

I'm testing an iPod/iphone app called LifeCast to see if it will talk to Blogger. More later on how I intend to use it...


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Back From Vacation

Oh, boy. It's been a few weeks since I've last posted. Frankly, we've just been too busy to post very much (although Cheshirewoodgie, aka Lauren) has been exploring the Apple iPhone App Store, loading her iPod Touch (which I'll eventually inherit) with apps. She's testing an iPhone application (see above) to let us make blog postings (and post photos) on the road. For this, two things have to happen: 1)The app has to be updated to work with Flickr, so we can upload photos, and 2) Her back-ordered iPhone with camera has to come in.

Since we were out of town during the Friday iPhone launch, "Look, woodgie, there's an AT&T store!" was one of my teases, while "I want my #$#$#$=!!! iPhone" was one of her regular comments. Now that the phone's been ordered (and is on back-order, with the 2nd million customers who didn't get theirs in the first run on Friday), it's down to, "it's still on back-order" grumble, grumble, grumble.

So, last week, we headed out to Blacksburg/Christiansburg, VA, where we went to help Lauren's friend and colleague Ceclia Hayhoe celebrate her 60th birthday and her tenure approval at Virginia Tech. We'll have pictures from the week, as soon as Cecila's daughter, Janice, has her pictures developed from that weekend.

Where to start?

The trip itself was fine, although we discovered that we were going to be in for an interesting flight when our outgoing flight from KC to O'Hare was delayed, first by heavy winds at O'Hare, and then by the approach radar at O'Hare temporarily going out (where were the backups???). Note that I had flown a few weeks ago to Richmond for my work-related trip, and that trip was very uneventful, but given that TSA had upgraded the threat level to Orange the day of our trip, the staffers working our check-in seemed very harried and tense ... I don't blame them. Depending on the airline, it's hard enough to fly these days without being inconvenienced in some fashion, and lumping on a higher security alert than normal only added to that.

Still, we made it through to O'Hare, only to find out that, once again, my bad weather average in flying through there struck yet again: we were concerned we were going to miss our outgoing flight to Roanoke, and we did ... after a round of Thursday-evening lake-effect storms, our flight was delayed. Then delayed again. Then delayed once more around 9:30 pm, when it was canceled.

Fortunately, we made it to a customer service station before the bad lines formed, got rebooked for the 6:00 am flight, and then set off to find a hotel, with Lauren wishing that O'Hare would upgrade their signage for directing people from terminals to hotel shuttlebus stops. Even so, we managed to get to our shuttlebus and off to a nearby Marriott.

The following morning's flight was uneventful, and we made it into Roanoke in good time, snagged our rental, and were soon tooling down I-81 toward Blacksburg/Christiansburg. I must admit, being from a very flat portion of Southeast Kansas, I've never experienced actual mountains up close until then. I was like "wow ....", and my wife, who had lived in upstate New York for awhile near the Catskills, was like "What??? It's just mountains." When we have pictures back from the trip, there should be a pic of us standing at a nice overlook near the Blue Ridge Mountains, somewhere close to the former home of Confederate calvary leader Jeb Stuart.

Since we had been delayed Thursday, we were concerned that we were going to miss the events Janice had organized, but we made it to Cecila's house in time to join them for a trip into the mountains to Floyd, VA and the nearby shops and wineries, including Chateau Morrisette (home to the Black Dog and Our Dog Blue vintages), and to Villa Appalaccia, an up-and-coming small winery down the road. After checking out their shop and having lunch at Chateau Morrisette's wonderful restaurant, we had time for a winery tour and tasting. Later that evening, we stopped off in Floyd itself to visit the Floyd Country Store, which features a century-old tradition of live bluegrass music every Friday night on its performance stage. Prior to that, a stop at a local antique store led to Lauren's find of the trip: an authentic Victorian-era blouse which she hopes will form the basis of a Victorian Christmas set.

Saturday morning, we were left on our own until the party at the Inn at Virginia Tech (located off their alumni center), so we journeyed into Blacksburg to check out the Saturday morning farmers market, and from there, onto the Virginia Tech campus to tour the Smithfield Plantation. Admittedly, Lauren isn't a student of military history, so she was afraid that this was going to be a Civil War-battlefield-esque experience. Instead, we both enjoyed a Revolutionary War-era Southern plantation with a lot of home-life "how they lived in that era" history, which we both like to experience. What really got her attention was the garden spaces; I think she actually knew more about what they had in their gardens and why they had them then some of the interpreters that day.

That led us into the birthday celebration: held in one of the Inn's conference/banquet rooms, it was a very informal occasion, with "fun stations" to do scrapbook pages for a book for Cecila, a cariacture artist, who did cariacture pictures of all of us (the originals will go into the scrapbook, while we'll be provided with digital copies for ourselves), fun food (veggie burgers, hot dogs, and sides, plus the makings for root beer/cream soda floats), and a wandering magician/card artist/balloon-maker. Needless to say, everyone had a wonderful time.

Apologies for Being Absent

My apologies for being absent (and for not doing things like moderating comments), but both of us have been either absent or busy ... me, absent last week to Richmond, VA, on a software conversion trip, and Lauren, off to the wedding of our former minister, Fr. Mike Kyle's, wedding, followed by lots of teaching/weeding/sleeping.

As I mentioned, I was off in Richmond, VA for a week, on a client experience trip (read: software conversion) that my employer requires us to do every year. I figured that I wouldn't have very much time for sight-seeing, but Sunday evening, I discovered that me and seven other coworkers would be assigned to work 12 hour night shifts from 7 pm-7 am. Although I did sacrifice some sleep, I was able to sight-see a little bit in the daytime ... as a Civil War/history buff, it was a pleasure to see the American Civil War Center, located on the site of the former Tredegar Iron Works, the Virginia Historical Society, St. John's Episcopal Church, the site where Patrick Henry delivered his famous "Give me liberty" speech, and, although I wasn't aware of it at the time, actually stand on the site where Virginians ratified the US Constitution (West Hospital, part of the VCU Health System, now sits where this occurred). I also toured Maymont, an historic, Tudor-style home which now stands as a Victorian-era museum and garden estate.

Should We Start Building An Ark?

Just a quick update for the weekend: Lauren's prepping for her second summer class and I'm prepping for my work trip to Richmond, VA next weekend, where I'll be with a team doing a software conversion from next Sunday to the following Saturday.

Given the storms we've had the last few days (complete with storms since Thursday, local flooding, and now a new storm watch today), and the local flooding, we're both wondering if we should be building an ark. At the least, we ought to start moving faster on plans to build a full basement, given we dodged a bullet Thursday night: we spent a half-hour in the small storm shelter we do have waiting out a tornado warning (and wondering why the town didn't blow the sirens even though NWS had called an alert for the entire county???)

In any event, we came pretty close to having a tornado in town; at about 8:30 pm, we saw the alert, called our neighbor with a full basement only to discover that she wasn't home, decided to get together some bare minimum survival items (windbreakers, water bottles, lantern/flashlight, phone (so I could keep up with the alerts and radar), laptops, and a bottle of wine and corkscrew (just in case it was going to be a VERY long night)), and headed down to our storm cellar. As I pulled the doors closed, I turned to see the beginnings of a funnel cloud (not sure if it was a cold-air funnel or an actual tornado) start to form from the cloud base down towards the ground. Even though it was south of town and heading away from our area, needless to say, I slammed the door shut and prayed that we weren't going to do a Wizard of Oz imitation.

Fortunately, the storm was moving fast enough that the funnel didn't develop any real rotation, didn't touch down, and dissipated as the front moved on. Even so, we didn't get much sleep that night; I stayed up until 11:00 until the tornado watch expired, and after that, I asked Lauren if we could purchase a weather radio with an alert that will wake us if we get warnings overnight, and she agreed.

EDIT: The weather radio came in today (6/9), and it's already coming in handy.

200th Post

Would you believe that this is the 200th post of the Cozy Kitty's Weblog? I wasn't sure that we would have enough to write about, but it seems that journaling about our lives in Maryville, MO and our travels has gotten us to 200 posts for now. Who knows how much more we can write about!

This weekend found us in Lauren's home area of Marseilles/Ottawa, IL for a Memorial Day weekend gathering. The gathering was a follow-on memorial/family wake for Lauren's mom on Saturday afternoon and a good grill-out later on, as well as being a good couple of days off for both of us. Lauren also got to do some garden refreshing in the family herb garden in the back yard.

We stayed at our now-standby bed and breakfast, the Brightwood Inn, spent time with the family on both Saturday and Sunday, and got in a couple of days of good trail walking at Matthiessen State Park Saturday morning and on the Ottawa stretch of the Illinois and Michigan Canal trail on Sunday. One of these days, we hope to do the entire canal trail, once we're in shape to do it. We also did some wine tasting Saturday morning as well and had dinner at Starved Rock Lodge Sunday evening.

When Lauren's mom passed away, the last thing she said to us was that we should both "go out and have some fun". I think she would have approved of this weekend.