A Running Tally of Metaphysical Phenomena

Lazy…

If you’ve read my blog for a little while or known me for more than a year or so, you probably remember the games of Risk and ping pong tournaments and the like that characterized my tenure over at Xbox. Well, I haven’t managed to get the same thing going over here on my current team (different sort of dynamic, I suppose), but I did get the Summer Cookoff Series Oh-Ten underway in June, and that’s been pretty great. First was Best Dip in June, then Best Chili in July, which was… Well, if you thought “What?!” when you read that, let’s just say you weren’t the only one. The timing was bad, the planning was poor on my part, and, somewhat predictably, no one brought chili in July. In my defense, if Family Feud asked for the top things that are brought to a cookoff, I guarantee you that chili would score at least 60. So the idea of having a cookoff series without chili was also pretty bizarre.

Anyway. When it gets cold out, we’ll try that one again.

Today: Best Cookie! The awards will go to the Best Overall Cookie, The Most Indulgent (read: rich and fattening) Cookie, and The Cookie that Best Balances Weird and Tasty. I think I’m going for the third. Here’s how I made what I made last night. And we finally replaced our poor, drowned camera, so click the pictures for bigger ones.

Start by putting brown sugar (I prefer dark brown, myself) on some thick bacon (or Safeway bacon that says on the package that it’s thick but actually isn’t):

Pop it into the oven for a bit…

Ta-da! Caramelized bacon!

Cut into large pieces and mix into standard Toll House cookie batter with roughly chopped Heath bar and large portions of pretzel sticks.

Spoon it out and bake.

Be disappointed that the cookies don’t actually look all that strange when they’re done.

I was picturing great frightening clods of bacon with pretzel rods protruding at unnatural and disturbing angles and craggy chunks of Heath poking violently out at unpredictable points, all held together with just enough cookie dough to make it eligible for entry in the contest. They look a lot more like normal cookies. But they taste interesting and GOOD! I promise!! Here’s hoping for a trophy…

I got to go to the eye doctor today! I’ve been getting kind of tired in the eyes by the end of the day, and my subscriptions to Obvious Illustrated and Scientific No Duh had an overlap last month, wherein I thought that hey, I work with computer screens all day. I should be grateful that my hearing’s good and go get my eyes checked out. So this morning, bright and early (I thought it was bright; it got MUCH more so), I made my way to the eye doctor. They used this…

and some drops that made eyes look like this…

…which felt a ton more dilated than that picture looks now that I can actually see it. You’ve had your eyes dilated. You know what I’m talking about. You have to wear these…

…which, you know, Mr. Cool Glasses, and everything is still THE BRIGHTEST! And it was already a day of much, much brightness even by regular standards.

And they measured and asked “1 or 2? 3 or 4? 5 or 6?” a bunch of times and had me read an eye chart and giggled behind their clipboards at me when I jumped when they blew a puff of air into my eyes. And looked into my very widely dilated soul with a flashlight that glowed with the fire of a thousand suns.

Now, last time I had an eye exam, it was 20/15 in the right, and 20/20 in the left, and please hold still so we can carve a good sculpture of those eyes, and would you please donate your eyes to science if you ever get fatally smashed by a car, etc., etc. Today, not quite as much. It wasn’t terrible, by any means, but the whole A/B comparison with vs. without correction for each eye made it obvious that my hairline sent a memo to my eyes and told them to catch up on the whole aging thing. Which I’m completely fine with. I’ll take care of myself, and I’d like to live as long as possible, but at some point, the oldness takes over, and if that’s in my late 20s when Dick Clark still looks like a teenager at one hundred and forty-six years old, fine. I have bigger things to worry about. (Plus, my wife, the only person whose opinion matters at all, is still super hot and likes me just fine, so I have no complaints.)

I looked at a bunch of frames, and these were the winners. I think. I narrowed it down to two, but I still couldn’t really see anything at the time, so it could have been the other ones. We’ll see (mmhmm) in a couple of weeks, I guess.

Some observations:

• Glasses make it more obvious that I need a haircut. Kirsten will be pleased, since this will inevitably mean more regular haircuts.
• They also make my nose look kind of bigger, which, teehee, big nose! I don’t think I have a particularly huge nose, so this is no big deal.
• I hope my ears don’t mess this all up. A lot of you may not know this unless you’ve been really intentional about looking very closely (and if that describes you then yikes!), but my ears list slightly to port. Meaning the right one is a little higher than the left.* I notice it when I wear any sunglasses I’ve ever tried (they touch one eyebrow but not the other), and I noticed it with some of the glasses I tried today, but not all of them, and not the pair I picked. Hopefully it wasn’t just momentary luck.

They said that there’s a holiday coming up but the glasses should be ready before then. I’ll make sure and stage a very elaborate photo shoot when I get them,** and you can make other observations and criticisms, which will be fun.

* Also asymmetrical: my cowlick, my eyelids, my earwax accumulation over time, and my eyeteeth. [shrug]. Whatever. Show me a perfectly symmetrical human being, and I’ll show you a person with no heart. (Because, you know, anatomy.)

** I probably will not stage a very elaborate photo shoot, new camera or no new camera, but if I do, you have my word that it will involve me taking my shirt off and riding on the back of at least one exotic animal.

This sunflower plant was only 18 inches tall a few weeks ago. Now it’s taller than I am, and the first of the three blooms just opened up today!

Our friend Leslie told me the other day that when she sees these posts, she just skips them and goes and looks at something else on the internet instead. I thought that was awesome.

Also awesome: my friend Rock and his amazing garage. Here’s Rock…

And here’s about half of his garage. I couldn’t back up to get more in the picture because there were too many pieces of incredible equipment and race cars and metal in all shapes and sizes

Rock’s a friend of mine from my Xbox days, and we had had a few conversations about his metal shop and the work that he does on the race car that the old Xbox team’s manager races. It sounded like his place was the real deal, so when I needed to do a little bit of metal work on my enclosure (which just got here yesterday), I got in touch with Rock, and he was eager to keep the rust off his tools and help me out. I owe him big time.

Rock’s garage is 3000 square feet of absolute magic. This guy is like the Tony Stark of the Northwest. He lathes pistons and forges iron and punches holes through 3/4” steel plates with that whitish grey thing in the middle of the picture. He welds race cars together and bends things and does anything else you can imagine with metal. So getting my little .060” aluminum panels taken care of was nothing. And I had no idea when I started this whole process how in the world I’d get this part of it done. I had a ton of fun working on this part last and ended up with just what I needed. Thanks, Rock!!

Top panel before:

And top panel afterward:

And the inside and outside of the back panel:

I have one more order of parts to place, and this one will be the biggest one, cost-wise, so you get a reprieve from the constant blog posts about it while I save up for a little bit. I’ll be getting one of these…

…a few of these…

…several of these…

…and a few more odds and ends. Then it’s some more soldering, some crimping, and some assembling, and then, finally, listening! Easy to forget that that’s really been the point the whole time. It’s getting closer!

A wise man once said, wisely and with great emotion, “Live EVERY week… Like it’s Shark Week!” Inspiring and challenging words. We can all bear down and try our best, and that, in itself, is a tribute to the greatness of the human spirit.