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tainted_beef
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Name: Nathan
Birthday: 6/5/1982
Gender: Male
Interests: I spend more time thinking about what I would like to do than actually doing it. I also obsess about bad grammar. I watched a lot of School House Rock back in the day (and by "the day" I mean the year 1995).
Expertise: Practicing psychology without a proper license
Occupation: Engineering
Industry: Manufacturing
Message: message me
AIM:  Th Dark Viking
Member Since:
5/18/2004
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| I was trying to post 3-4 times a year, but today I just logged in randomly and saw that it's already been over a year since my last post. This has to stop (actually it could stop if I just posted what I have already typed - but I think I'm going to skip the easy way out this time - I think my mead will agree with me on this one).
Maybe a good reason for not posting is because I keep thinking that there is nothing new going on. This happens when you become a responsible grown up human who wakes up at the same time every morning and drives in to the same office every day. I've tried to break myself of this by changing up my alarm and going to work at different times. I have always done this, but now I have been at my current job for over 3 years (that is the longest I have ever held a job - call me a career man) and it is getting difficult. No matter what sleep routine I got into in the past I knew it would only be for a short time (until I went back to school, or got sick of boring Illinois and moved to Texas, or was going to move to a new apartment, or was about to buy a house, etc). But being a responsible, tax-paying, local-election participating citizen has changed things for me. There are no huge changes coming up for me right now. This is what I have been wanting for such a long time now. I like this idea of not having to move; I might even just stay in my house for 10 more years for that reason alone (the only thing that can get me to move out is the chance to start Rosene Wind Energy Inc. - more on that one in a future post). The only issue as alluded to above is that the old tricks don't work. I can't break my schedule up by setting the alarm clock differently every day; I still wake up at 6:30 every day on my own (thankfully I can go back to sleep in one simple rolling motion). The things I have been doing to try and break up my schedule are becoming a routine themselves. Steal a co-worker's favorite parking spot because they are parking in the same spot EVERY DAY? Well, Nathan, you did that last week. Better try something else new and exciting, otherwise you will just be "Nathan the parking spot thief". So the key to being a successful parking spot thief is actually to space things out in 2-3 month intervals.
I guess the difference between this and situations in the past is that I really like my job. I am doing exactly what I thought I'd never be able to do when I was in college and therefore set my standards lower at the time (modeling vehicle dynamics and performing stress analysis on truck suspensions). I want to stay around here for a little while. So I am wondering if the only real problem I have is getting adjusted to being a "normal human". Maybe this is no more than a petty fear. All I have to do is look at myself from an outside perspective and see now non-normal I am (and always have been). I don't watch TV. I brew my own beer (and as of last weekend, mead, just like the vikings used to brew - it bubbles in agreement with me as it ferments). I have a home theater in my house that no wife would ever allow to exist (the bachelor advantage as I call it).
Hmm... looking at it this way maybe I do have some stuff to post about. I will try to do this a bit more in the future.
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| It all started out as your normal chicken fight on a mountain top. I was in my old '87 Mustang (the moose) and my opponent had his windows tinted heavily so I could not make out his identity. It was not important at the time. I was trying my hardest to keep control of the moose. The front end bushings were shot and the sway bar links had been destroyed by the cruel corrosion of 20 Illinois winters. After a failed pass at my opponent I gripped the e-brake and turned my wheel for a sharp U-turn in preparation for another round. My usual commanding grip on the wheel was thrown aside as a tie rod end snapped and the car went into a sideways skid out of control. My footing was much more sure than my grip on the wheel and I managed to slow the car down enough to stay on the mountainside. Unfortunately I had slid off the main path on the mountain and down a long loose slope covered in gravel. The moose had taken every blow of the fall for me and was no longer able to go on. I did not think twice about leaving the car. It had served me well for 5 years but it was not worth rescuing.
I started to climb my way down the rest of the mountain. Something felt odd as if no one had ever been on this side of the mountain before. I used the floor mats from my car to cover up jagged portions of rock to protect my hands and feet. After descending as low as possible I found myself at the edge of an overhang with a sheer rock face leading to the ground. I quickly located a 10 ft. tall free-standing mesa that had just enough space for me to land on its top. I half slid/half leaped to the ground from there. I was so happy to have reached ground that I did not pay attention to anything around me.
I was in the middle of a government complex. This was an advanced R&D facility that I instinctively knew was a high security clearance location. I did not have that clearance. To make it worse a middle-aged government employee was waiting for me the minute my feet touched the ground. From the look of her I just knew that she was a member of a home owner's association. She demanded my security clearance. The next thing I knew she was briskly walking back into the building to report me. She kept on glancing over her shoulder to make sure that I wasn't making a break for it.
As soon as she disappeared around a corner I made a break for it. I got into the cover of some bushes and made my way to the parking garage. I kept my back against the wall as I approached the security guard post. If I kept my back against the wall I could slip around the post just before moving into view. After slipping around the corner I moved quickly to the end of the parking area. All I had to do was get out the gate when it opened for a car to exit. It should be much easier to break OUT of a government facility than to break IN, I told myself.
The lot attendant and an armed security guard came running at me before I reached the gate. I froze in my tracks because I didn't want to get shot in the back. I thought that I could have saved some red tape and bureaucracy by just slipping out, but it did not matter if I was stopped. After all I was not guilty of anything. As soon as the two reached me the guard had handcuffs ready. I was only able to verbally protest. I tried every logical argument that I had to defend myself. My car had broken down on the mountainside. I climbed my way down to safety. Just because I didn't have a pass didn't mean I was an intruder or anything. And what kind of poor government facility design had I been able to break into so easily? None of these arguments worked. The guard just methodically led me off to jail. I was informed that under certain provisions under the Patriot Act I was considered a terrorist and therefore I was not going to get a trial. Desperation kicked in. This was not going to be a slap-on-the-wrist spend-one-night-in-jail kind of thing. I was in tears at how unfair everything was. The guard was the only person on earth who was going to hear my defense as he hauled me in the back of his squad car to prison.
My alarm went off. For the first time since I got my RadioShack Chronomatic-267 clock at the age of 6 I was actually glad to hear that obnoxious sound. I had never woken up with my heart beating this fast. I knew that I should be telling myself that it was just a dream, but it was not that easy this time. Anyone who has been in the world as long as I have knows that the worst lies are the ones that have a little bit of the truth mixed in. This dream was no different. I was shaken up as I tried to start my morning routine and I realized this: the worst part of my story could be very real. The government can arrest and detain me at any time without giving me any explanation or trial.
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| Okay, so I am not the best on this update thing according to human standards. I think that 3 posts a year is pretty good. I just update when big stuff happens (like the other day when I found a "free" bottle of coke from a vending machine). (and by "coke" I mean "cocaine"). Then some hobo came and was like "that's my coke" and I was like "you're going to have to fight me for it" but then we both lost interest.
So I went walking around Plano tonight and I stumbled upon a 24-hour fitness (that is their name - I suppose I should have capitalized it). My membership at my gym ran out last month so I went in this new place to ask about prices. I ended up listening to some bald dude give me corporate-speak for over 45 minutes. Then he asked me to give him $600 or something. I was like "that's my money" and he was like "give it to me" then we fought. It was epic. You should have seen the finishing move.
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| Lots of stuff has happened in the last week. Last weekend my friend "Matty" (I'm still not sure if that's his real name) and I camped out for a Nintendo Wii. We brought chairs and sat outside of a Toys 'R Us (I couldn't get the "R" backwards with this text) for 10 hours. This was the first time I had ever waited in line for something like this. Of course I came prepared with junk food, my PSP and Nintendo DS in hand. The line was full of nerds who chose to "pictochat" on their DS handhelds instead of talking like most humans do. I didn't do much of that, but I did get to play other nerds in multiplayer tetris and mario kart for hours on end. Anyways, to sum it up I bought my Wii and a handful of games that night and this past week has been life-changing.
My family came down for Thanksgiving weekend and we had fun. I cooked a 20 lb. turkey along with some stove top stuffing and some cheesy mashed potatoes. Perhaps next time I make potatoes I will try a twice-baked recipe as those make me salivate. The rest of the meals for the weekend had turkey *carefully* concealed in them somehow. Maybe I'll try making a turkey pizza this week. On the day after Thanksgiving my family and I avoided all the annoying shopping humans and took the train to downtown Ft. Worth for lunch and "sightseeing". The women shopped and my dad and I talked about engines. Then on Saturday we went to McKinney to see my company's facilities and to show off my office to my parents (I have a picture of a bear on the wall). We stopped at downtown McKinney (very similar to downtown Princeton) and there was a Christmas festival in the streets! I couldn't have found something better to take the family to if I had tried. The family left Saturday night and I am looking forward to going to Illinois for Christmas.
That's really all I have. I'm going to get back to playing Nintendo Wii now.
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| I did something uncharacteristically clever yesterday. I was in Longview after a sweet Halloween party and as my usual Longview routine goes, I went to Hastings and Game Xchange to buy used games. I found some cool stuff that I'd been meaning to buy for awhile at both stores. As I was making my purchases at Hastings the chick working there gave me a stack of 5 scratch-and-win cards. She said that it was a contest that was ending soon and so they were getting rid of all their game cards. Well, one of my favorite past times growing up was scratching off things like that with a coin. So I said, "sweet! I love to scratch things!". Well that landed me about 15 more game cards.
So each game card had 10 scratchy-pads, and the goal was to scratch off 3 matching pads to win. You could not scratch more than 3 or your ticket would be void. I tried this for 10 tickets and I couldn't even match 2 of a kind on any of them. Being the nerd that I am I decided to use statistics to my favor. I took the 10 losing tickets and scratched them all completely. I looked for patterns in the cards and I noticed that in more than 50% of my batch a certain prize tended to land on the same pad. So using the three most likely locations I scratched the next card - and won. The prize wasn't very much - but I'm still cool, right?
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