Woohoo!

I got my voter registration card today.

Now I can vote in December's November's elections.

Now I just gotta figure out who to vote for.

Memorial Day weekend we went to Kevin's annual Memorial Day float trip. Longtime readers and friends may recall that it was on one of these Memorial Day floats trips where Camille and I first met, so on top of being a fun trip, it's also a trip down memory lane and one of the most special trips that she and I can take with one another.

• We missed the last call for the flight out of Salt Lake by what must have been thirty seconds. It's frustrating to miss a flight, but so much more frustrating when it's by such a small margin. Though we didn't say much, I think we both recounted every lost second looking for a parking space, trying to find the kiosk, and on the road behind traffic.
• We got lost in Muskogee, Oklahoma. That takes talent.
• We arrived at the campground extremely late. We were a little worried about disturbing the campground. The campground, on the other hand, was not particularly worried about disturbing us. Luckily, we were too tired to care all that much.
• Eastern Oklahoma is a lot hotter when you're arriving from Idaho than when you're arriving from Houston.
• The sun was out the whole time. It's amazing how meticulous one can be with sunscreen and then completely forget about the nose (on one day) and then the forehead (on the other).
• They said that it was important that we got to the waiting point at or before 10:00. It was apparently important that we were there to wait for some three hours...
• Kevin and I found this trap on the river where people kept getting stuck. Someone had helped us get out when we got stuck, so we stuck around to help the next person. We ended up helping out dozens. We absolutely had a ball playing in the water and helping people get out of the jam. The water was a welcome relief from the heat and it was good kharma. We started to refer to this place as "Gratitude Point."
• Unfortunately, we didn't have time to stop in Gratitude Point the next day because our raft deflated and we had to wait a couple hours for a new one. Had a good time tossing around the football with Kevin, Callie, Chris, and Chris's wife Christy.
• If I were a single man, I would get a pug. Tom had a pug and the women were just crawling all over him to get to the dog. What do women find so attractive about pugs?
• I was really a bit of a fuddy-duddy throughout a lot of the trip. I was underrested when I got there and never really got caught up. Unfortunately I turned in somewhat early every night except the first (hard to turn in early when you get there at 1am!)
• Unfortunately, due to my late arrival I was unable to help Kevin muster up an audience to go to a Mike McClure show. Jason Boland also played in the area, though it's tought to motivate oneself to going out after floating down the river. There was a band at the campsite the second night there. They were... unimpressive.
• In addition to the bad music show, there was a bad drama show, too. The folks in the camera next to us were having quite the incident. Some girl was there with her boyfriend. Her brother turned out to be there. I can't even begin to figure out what all the fighting was about, except that it escalated to people throwing things (on to our campground) and then one dude jetting off in his pickup before security got there. We were not sorry when they were gone the next day.

All in all we had a really good time. Next year the trip from Austin will be easier than flying from Utah/Idaho and we're very much looking forward to it.

Five years later, my ex-girlfriend finally pulled the plug on my email addresses through her EV1 account. As such, my email situation is in a bit of disarray. Many emails to me will come back with multiple fails, but I will usually get it. Do not send me any email that is addressed to EV1.net. My Bigfoot account will get to me, but you will get two or three bouncebacks from the EV1 accounts. The safest way to email me at the moment is to send it to my gmail account. First and second initial followed by my last name at gmail.com.

Meanwhile, I'm going to have to make sweeping changes to my current email methods. I lost access to my spambox, so now several of my accounts here and there are inaccessible. GMail can probably take care of most of my ills, but I cannot check it at work. I'll have to figure out some form of webmail to use, as the problem at work is more-or-less limited to GMail at this point, not webmail in general.

Many of you already know, but I haven't made the official announcement.

Camille wraps up her residency at the end of June. She has accepted an offer for a Fellowship in the Great State of Texas. Austin, to be exact. We move down at the end of June.

I don't have any work lined up down there, but I've been polishing up my resume. I've added two years of XHTML experience (six months programming, ten months as a quality assurance person, and 6 or so as the supervisor of the programming team) for whatever that is worth. It was worth more than answering phones, I'm sure.

The job market in Austin is always tough, but it will probably be better than it had been in Idaho Falls and Pocatello, and all things considered I've done phenomenally well up here.

If I don't find work pretty early on money is going to be tight. The job unfortunately doesn't pay much more than she's getting up here, but Austin is going to cost considerably more. On the other hand, we both look forward to there being no state income tax.

We will actually be older than the average Austin resident, but that'll be the least of the culture shock we're going to get moving from Mormon Idaho to hippie Austin.

I'm already scoping out music shows to go to. She still hasn't seen Phil Pritchett play and Austin's no-smoking bar scene will help considerably. I also have a number of friends in the Austin-San Marcos area (and, of course, three hours away in Houston). Dad says that he will visit every week there is a UT home game.

We're both quite excited. OU graduate Camille says that the town is too infected with burnt orange, but that she could get to like it.

I heard something today that it never occured to me that I might ever here:

"It's like the Pepsi equivalent of Surge."

For those of you that don't recall, Surge was a green citrus-flavored sugar-and-caffeine powerhouse released by Coca-Cola in 2000-02 or so. It replaced Mello Yello and was after a couple short years replaced by Mello Yello.

The comment was made by a woman at Taco Bell when her son asked what something at the Pepsi machine was.

It looked like he was either looking at Sierra Mist or Mountain Dew

If Sierra Mist, they were of course wrong. Sierra Mist is Pepsi's answer to Sprite. A very poor answer at that. In that sense, I suppose, it is a bit like Surge.

If Mountain Dew... well that's techincally correct. Mountain Dew is the closest thing Pepsi has to something that tastes like Surge used to. But calling it Pepsi's equivalent of Surge is like calling Denver "the Boise of Colorado." The two have a pretty good deal in common (dirty capital cities with a substantial portion of the state's population and a more liberal tilt than much of the rest of the state), but you don't equate the relevent item with the comparatively irrelevent one. Boise could be called the Denver of Idaho, for instance, but calling Denver the Boise of Colorado seems wrong. Even if it's right, it's just wrong.

I don't have all the official pictures yet, though here are a selection of other pictures: [Read More!]

I was thankful that I had alotted myself some extra time when I saw the four identical letters on the bottom right of my airline ticket: SSSS.

They are letters I have come to know quite well. Though I can't say for certain, I am increasingly convinced that I am on some sort of national list. Four of the last five times I've flown alone my ticket has been flagged with the SSSS. It's actually gotten to the point that it's the first place I look when I get my ticket, even before the gate or seat number.

The routine is pretty simple and it's seeming more and more silly. The person that checks my ID will get out a colored marker (usually a light color like neon green or yellow) and mark it up. When I hand the ticket to the person manning the metal detector, he or she will not say a word to me, turn around, hold the ticket in the air in order to flag down a security person. The security person asks me to step aside and waves the wand all over me. A couple times I got a pat-down. Once I had to open my pants to demonstrate that the the wand was going off because of a button on my boxer shorts.

I'm generally pretty laid back about it as there isn't much else to be. I was perhaps a little too familiar with it all this last time. I've found that the TSA people expect you to be a little nervous. My friendliness was met with a distrusting glare. In at least one case, I suspected that I let the TSA dude down by not being upset or nervous -- I think some people get a kick out of that.

I could say that it makes me feel better about our national security that they're flagging down potential troublemakers (even if they erroneously believe that I am one), but they have thus far followed such a strict pattern that there are holes in it the size on Montana. They only flag me on the first leg of my first flight. It's only when I fly alone. The only time I've not been flagged down was one of the times my flight didn't change and I wasn't flying one-way.

If this is their idea of security, I'm more than a bit disappointed.

WHEREAS, it is 3:30 in the morning

WHEREAS, I am dead tired from moving stuff in the driving snow

WHEREAS, I have quite a bit on my mind

WHEREAS, I am getting married on Saturday

WHEREAS, I am leaving Thursday

WHEREAS, they're cutting off high-speed Internet tomorrow

WHEREAS, I do not expect to have much in the way of Internet access at all in Louisiana

RESOLVED, I will probably not be posting again for a spell.

I was kind of hoping that we'd get a good snow again before it started getting warmer.

However, I would have preferred it not come the day I am renting a UHaul without snow tires to move all my stuff against a tight deadline.

I'm not saying the weather got nasty, but I will say that when I was lugging a matress, the wind literally knocked me down.

It's 3:30 in the morning. What am I doing posting? I don't even post in non-obscene hours these days...

Considering I am one week and two days away from getting married, you would think that I would have more pressing concerns on my mind.

I'm not sure how, but the thought occured to me at work today that I haven't collected my mail in a little while. The truth is that most of my personal mail and deliveries are sent to Camille's place because I trust the mail to get there and stay there more than I do here. All of my bills but my power bill are paid automatically.

But if I haven't checked my mail in a while, it means I haven't paid my power bill in a while. I tried to remember the last time I actually collected my mail and I could not remember a time this year. Could I be over two months behind? I was at work at the time and I tried to get back to work and wait until I got off work, but it became all-consuming. I just had to exactly how far behind I was on the power bill.

Breath-bated, I checked.

I apparently paid my power bill within the last month.

Sure enough, I get home and there is only one power bill in my mailbox, due a week from now for the usual amount, give or take.

I'm thinking I should have some sort of calendar program remind me to check the mail once a week or so.