InterestinKg

Things That I Think Are Interestinkg:

- The digital camera in my wife's iPhone makes the same noise as the mechanical shutter of an obsolete film camera.

- Several cows accidentaLLy froze to death in a federal government cabin high up in the mountains of Colorado. They had got lost. The forest rangers are going to chop them up and feed them to the local predators. Bear breakfast. One rejected idea for dealing with the cabina de carne de vaca con fria was to blow it up. My Question: Is there ice cream on the inside of the frozen cows? They actuaLLy stated in the news article that just leaving cows to rot in the cabin would have endangered the local water supply to a weLL known skinny dipping site.

(I just now imagined John Denver writing a song about these frozen cows.)

- Barak Obama campaign pledged to get us out of Afghanistan before becoming president. Shortly after becoming president he "won" a Nobel Peace Prize after doing essentiaLLy nothing to earn it. Once in office as commander-in-chief he increased the military forces in the Middle East. Now that he is on the brink of being kicked out of office (maybe) he has made commitments for the US to continue helping Afghanistan even AFTER our military eventuaLLy leaves. At that point we can rename the place "AfterGoneIStay".

- The leaves on my grape vines are doing wonderful this year, BUT a worm showed up a couple months earlier than normal. I am just hoping the plants produce leaves faster than the worms can eat, as I raise organic pesticide-free grapes.

- There seem to be an awful lot of mistakes in the textbook for my HVAC college course. There are even a bunch of consistently wrong page number references on an answer sheet, like they are pointed at possibly a different version of the textbook. BUT the most interesting attempt in the teacher's notes in the separate workbook at trying to fix a drawing mistake, the very final one in the textbook: He makes TWO more mistakes in the correction notice itself. The chapter number is 31 instead of 32 and the page number reference is off by 24. I spent a half hour trying to figure out what I was supposed to be correcting. Previous attempts at letting the college know something was wrong with their textbook have been rewarded with silence. I am just glad I have my own private local HVAC mentor and the Internet.

Update about the Mistakes in Textbook: Another interesting mistake in the Workbook for my HVAC course are the words at the beginning of every Vocabulary Builder section. All 19 lessons have these words: "To improve your Floral Design literacy, take time to complete this exercise." Um, no, I am pretty sure I am studying air conditioning, not flowers.

- My wife and I have synchronized pain. We both have a left foot that hurts, and neither one of us knows why.

- I have been a bad boy. My favorite shovel has been left out in the weather too many times and the wooden handle has become rather rough. I had never hurt my hands with the shovel yet because of the rough condition of the wood. Today I apply some sandpaper to smooth it out. BUT in the process of sanding with just a piece of the sand paper a rough spot on the handle snares the paper and my hand gets an almost splinter. Twice. BUT ... after I finaLLy learn the correct way to perform the task, and its getting pretty smooth, I make a discovery. I looked down at the business end of the shovel and realized that I had been working on my least favorite shovel, the one with the poorly angled blade. I blame this mistake on my use of sunglasses and having a dark garage. So I wound up sanding two shovel handles instead of one.

- I got a "new" phone number from Skype a few months ago and now I get phone caLLs from biLL coLLectors for other people. Oh, I typed that wrong, -several- other people. It is now approaching the number of telemarketers that used to caLL my old ceLL phone. Another plus to using Skype is that my name doesn't show properly on caLLer ID, so my mother hadn't always answered my caLLs.

- A blind Chinese man outsmarted the people holding him captive and escaped to the sanctuary of the US embassy. I am not so sure that leaving our embassy to return to China was his best move. The Chinese government doesn't have a very good track record of being nice to people who make noises against them.

- Before I got my new refrigerator I was very diligent about eating my cauliflower. I have wasted very little of it in the last four months. But now I have forgot two of them in a row. At least they aren't lost frozen Colorado cows errors.