Saul the Sulcata

Saul soaking

When I Became a Man

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

I Corinthians 13:11

Winter garden

iloveyoutoday

So much is going on in my life right now, I'd be remiss to not write about it.

Wedding, work, and school: that's a lot of shit.

And by "shit" I mean, "stuff going on".

I love my life and mostly all I can think about these days is that I'll be married soon and I'll have a wife and I'll be a husband and what does that mean for my life in general? What does it matter? A  L O T.

Yesterday we had our pictures taken by Lotus Photography, a fun, talented, and skilled photographer if there ever was one. I thank you for our unforgettable experience. It was a blast and an honor to be a part of your creative process.

I feel like I'm going through a sort of born-again process, not of the Christian variety, though related to it. Nothing is changing but Everything is changing. That's all. And I'm realizing it A L L THE T I M E.

Life is constantly, continuously, and continually happening. Life is all around us.

And all of Life is Love.

Peace,
mitchell

Tires, Tebow, Jesus, and Hemingway

My Scion xA's been needing an alignment and a new tire for a few months now. The one tire was worn along its inside edge down to the threads. It was pretty bad. I amassed enough money over Thanksgiving weekend to finally afford the needed repairs. I figured it'd cost lost than $150 and it did. I wasn't sure how long it was going to take so I took a couple books with me:

I went to Vannoy's on 9th and had an excellent experience. I was immediately greeted upon exiting my car. The lady was friendly and informative. It didn't take long for one of the techs to come into the waiting area and inform me that I needed a new pad on the front driver side. I'm on a tight budget so since it wasn't of immediate importance I declined to repair it. Next time. I was afraid they'd be pushy as far as getting me to buy more tires than I came in for or to pay for miscellaneous other services I didn't know I needed. The tech only mentioned the brakes because what he was saying was true. I need front brake work. Once I said I'd pass he was courteous and back to work on the car. The alignment and tire mission took less than an hour and cost less than I'd expected. Sweet.

While waiting I first flipped through a magazine called Autoweek or something like that. Interesting. Sweet Porsche on the cover, of course. Then I turned to the books I'd brought. The New Testament was in my back pocket. I'd gotten it from a coworker over the weekend. I saw him catching a moment during the shift to glance at some lines in the prep room. I think he thought I was going to make fun of him but I asked him what it was and then told him I used to have one just like it that was green. He asked me if I wanted one because he just happened to have another in his bag. Cool, yeah, I'll take it.

The first Bible section I went to this morning while waiting for my car was Hebrews 12:12. Tim Tebow had something like that on his face when they played FSU and I was curious as to what it said.

Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees;

Um. What?

I tried to find something meaningful in it and gave up. I flipped through some more sections, ones indicated in the front of the book for explaining things like love, charity, courage, trust, et al. Then I'd had enough and turned to the Hemingway book. The first thing I see there is:

On the booze boat Harry had the last sack over.
"Get me the fish knife," he said to the nigger.

DOLP!

Talk about a change in tone. It was too jolting. I only finished the chapter because it was only a page and a half. I was done with Hemingway after that. I don't mean done forever. It was just too big of a jump after piously reading scripture.

While preparing this post I realized that Tebow's face didn't say Hebrews 12:12, but Hebews 12:1-2.

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.
Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.

That makes a little more sense. Keep the faith. Play hard. Jesus is Lord. Go Tebow.

Bourbon, Usability, and Beer

If any of the 0 people that read this blog AND use Blogger are using Safari as their web browser, are you having problems cutting and pasting into the post editor? When I try to paste some copied text it appears on the same page as the editor but below it in a blank part of the page that you shouldn't be able to type on but you can when this pasting error occurs. It can't just be me. Maybe my computer's insane.

One of the many things that continues to bug me about my interaction with computers is the seeming inability of the application to get get out of the way of what I'm trying to do. For example, why am I seeing the address bar, links bar, close, minimize, maximize buttons, etc.? Or like when you're working in Word, you don't need to see any of that when you're just typing. Why don't the borders, pull-downs, and all that fade away when you don't need them? All that stuff wastes valuable screen real estate. A web browser should display the site and get out of the way. The desktop shouldn't ALWAYS show stuff that you don't care about at the time. There's probably a quarter of my screen taken up with crap I don't need most of the time. Why is it there?

micromachines

That's a grain of pollen and red blood cells sitting beside a nano-machine!

It's blowing my mind.

Micromachines

Not THESE Micro Machines!

Hezbollah in Nikes just do it

My morning news wanderings started with the obligatory spin through the Pensacola News Journal. The only article I bothered with there had this headline: Santa Rosa takes deed to part of Tiger Point road. Don't ask me why I even cared about that one. I guess it's because a government entity is gaining ownership of a piece of land and not paying for it. I'm not saying it's bad; that's just what hit me when I read the headline.

After checking out the local scene I went over the MSNBC to see what was shakin' nationwide and around the world. Right at the top, the featured story: Hezbollah gunmen seize large sections of Beirut. I can't say my initial interest had anything to do with concern for the people living in the city or the local/international political scene in the areas there. What caught my interest was the photo alongside the lead story.

Doesn't it look like that could've been a posed shot?  Look at the guy standing up in the middle, against the wall.  He's pretty buff isn't he?  And don't they all look clean?  The one guy's clearly wearing Nikes.  Go Nike.  Just do it.  Is Hezbollah sponsored by Nike?  I like how it says HOT on the building's walls.  I'm not saying this is a posed shot.  I'm just saying it looks like one.  Not all armed insurgents/revolutionaries are dirty, poor, hiding in caves.  It's a crazy world we live in.  The picture above says to me, "Welcome to 21st Century warfare."

I noticed the pic was from Reuters so I went over there to investigate further.  There, too, the Hezbollah story was top news, though not quite as prominently featured as it was on MSNBC.  The Reuters story, Hezbollah impose control on Beirut, is more thorough than MSNBC's.  That doesn't surprise me.  It's to be expected.  They have different audiences.  Of course the images caught my interest again and I clicked into the photo slideshow related to the story.  The crazy pic from above was in there.  The first one is really cool, too.

Another thing worth noting in the pictures from the conflict is how it shows that Beirut is a modern city with modern culture.  If it can happen there...

Apoptosis: Pulse of Life

Life's many layers blow my mind.

The interweaving of seemingly disparate wormholes and mindthreads from across the blanket of reality and even from beyond the fabric itself, seeing how it all connects...beginning to see how it all connects, sometimes visibly and sometimes you can just feel it.

Life and death. Good and evil. How beautiful is the above entity? Is it odd that we instinctively know we're looking at a manifestation of life? That's prostate cancer, my friends. Real bad shit. [snicker] Odd how something so deadly can be beautiful. Guess it isn't, though. A great many beautiful things will kill you. Death itself is a thing of beauty. Death is a polytentacled energy vector. Death is simply energy transfer and movement on the atomic level.

Mitochondriate eukaryotic cells live poised between life and death, because mitochondria still retain their repertoire of molecules which can trigger cell suicide.[16] This process has now been evolved to happen only when programmed. Given certain signals to cells (such as feedback from neighbors, stress or DNA-damage), mitochondria release caspase activators which trigger the cell-death inducing biochemical cascade. As such, the cell-suicide mechanism is now crucial to all of our lives.

Cell-suicide mechanism? That'd be a good band name. Biochemical Cascade. Bad-ass.

Programmed cell death. Some cells are designed to die in specified situations. Their deaths benefit us.

Beautiful. We live and we die every day in a million different ways, the pulse of life.

Donkey of the Week

This week's Donkey of the Week:

Yes, it was the first donkey picture I saw when I searched for donkey on Photobucket. So what? I think it's an excellent donkey picture with which to start my Donkey of the Week project.

Donkeys are funny.