I’m Hearing: Die Trying - Oxygen’s Gone

I guess a lot has happened in the last while, but I’ve been either too tired or too occupied to be bothered updating. For some reason I feel really light-headed right now so I can guarantee I won’t be doing any DDR tonight.

Speaking of which, this weekend our friend Jeff (who got married a month ago) and his wife Erin had a housewarming party. Being the sneaky little fox that I am, I brought DDR with me and got a whole slew of people addicted to the game. :-D At one point Jeff landed funny on the hard plastic part and cracked it, but it’s no worry because I won a new and better one off ebay this week. Jon’s pad was acting stupid half the time and simply not working the other half, and mine was going even further wonky, so we’ve kind of decided that we’ll hack them apart and try to mount them on plywood or something…after all, they were only $20 pads, the cheapest kind that’s produced. But mine kind of took a header because of the number of people who were just learning the game (and not doing so well). But it was great…I was able to get a bunch more A ratings and even a couple AAs. :-D I can’t wait till the new pad arrives.

The DDR session among however many people were around the place lasted until somewhere after 10 PM, and we tore ourselves away to visit jetfuel, who showed us some of his new video games. But it was so gawdawful hot in there we decided to go to IHOP for some chow (if only for the air conditioning!) We didn’t get to hang out with him for very long because we were all pretty tired not to mention both he and Brian had places to be early the next morning.

I played Dark Cloud up until the final boss on Thursday night, and after two failed attempts got frustrated at hell when I realized my characters were nowhere near as leveled up as they needed to be to stand a chance against it. I was swearing up a storm and Erin offered to take me out for a drink. I turned her down in favor of reading some, and that felt pretty good. I finished American Gods on Sunday afternoon. Great book. I’m almost done with The Dead Zone (finally). Not sure what I’ll tackle next.

The last two days have been interesting. My boss took my coworker and I to a web development conference in Fond du Lac (town about 1/2 hour drive from here) both Monday and Tuesday. Basically the participants were the webmasters for all (or most) of the Wisconsin public universities. They talked about a lot of stuff involving new things they’re trying to all the politics that they deal with. It was really cool seeing how the web development departments are structured in the different institutions, and the many differences among them. Some schools have a team of 2 full time faculty members with 5 or more student assistants whereas others have only one part time faculty and no student help. Things are very different from one school to the next. It was one of those things that I truly found interesting and despite sitting for hours on end both days, I was not bored or sleepy through any of it. My boss was really happy to have people to talk with about the things that were discussed and I think both my coworker and I got a lot out of it. Plus it was fun getting away from the daily routine of the "office" (if you can call the workplace an office…) Those people really know their stuff and it was really interesting to see ideas I’ve never even considered before. The thing I found most intriguing is the campus that has switched ALL their development to table-less CSS. Their pages look good, and the code is very organized…they really know what they’re doing. I still think it’s far too soon to abandon tables altogether, but someone has to take the step forward I guess.

I pigged out on Chinese food last night and had stomach cramps for the rest of the night to remind me. I use "pigged out" lightly because if you looked at my dish, you would swear to god I hadn’t eaten anything at all. That may be part of why I still feel icky-ish today.

The EAA started today. deep sigh This means 10 days of airplanes buzzing constantly in the sky, crazy tourists from all over the world driving too slow while they try to figure out where to go or stare at the sky while trying to keep from crashing…in a word: YIKES. Once a year the largest airplane convention in the world comes to our city and turns our airport into the busiest airport on the face of the earth (no kidding) sponsored by the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) and it makes this town crazy. I am not fond of this convention for the fact that there’s thousands of tourists taking it over, but it goes beyond that relatively small annoyance. You see, in order to accommodate all these aviation enthusiasts and their planes and vehicles, they need a LOT of field space. So bit by bit the airport has bought out all the farmland around the airport for use during this convention. For these 10 days the land gets used well.

BUT…

When the convention ends, the planes and Winnebagos (motorhomes) all leave and the land sits empty for the remaining 350+ days of the year. Absolutely nothing is done with this land during this time, save for the few times the grass is mowed during the summer and fall. This is, of course, fertile farmland they bought for this purpose, so it’s probably no surprise to you to know that all the farms surrounding the airport have closed up shop and have either downsized considerably or simply sold it all to the airport. Everything up to the crossroad next to our farm has been considered as a fucking golf course for the tourists to use for those 10 days, and they’ve even talked to my parents about selling them our farm for use for…whatever the hell they decide would be interesting for less than 3% of the year. This makes me extremely angry as you can imagine, but there’s nothing that can be done. I mean, yes, my family could refuse to sell to the airport, but that would mean that our farm would be surrounded on all sides by airport, golf course, or whatever the hell it is. They would be strongly urged to sell. And I know they like their privacy so they wouldn’t want public land right next door to them. They first started talking about this maybe 10 years ago, and nothing has been done, so it could be that nothing will happen while my parents are still farming. Actually that’s quite likely. But it’s still a topic worthy of anger in my opinion.

Speaking of anger…a topic came up on IRC on Sunday morning that got me so disgusted and upset that I cried for a good while. It was nothing that I was involved in, nothing that affected me directly, and nothing that I could do anything about, but it bothered me immensely. Those who were in the situation kept telling me not to feel upset or guilty about it, but damned if my sympathy wasn’t totally overwhelming. :-( Sometimes being able to place myself in the shoes of others so easily is just a heartwrenching and painful "gift." I don’t wish it away, but it takes a lot of strength on my part not to fall to pieces sometimes.