donnunn.com

#116

Chasing Tail ale in my Squatters Mug Club mug :-)

Why I will never be on the PGA tour

Matt: youve been working a hell of a lot lately
Don: Yuh.. I don’t have a carpool anymore, so it’s an easy way to avoid traffic, and I also want to bank up hours so I can travel a lot over the next few months w/o using my paid time
Matt: ohhh ok
Matt: where you going?
Don: San Diego in April, Salt Lake in May, Molokai in July, road trip in August/September
Don: Possibly India in there somewhere too
Don: Though the India thing would be for work, so no time off required for it.
Matt: holy crappers
Don: mmhmm
Don: All but the India trip are definite
Don: If the India travel plans had worked out as originally hoped, I’d be there now in fact
Don: Would’ve left on/about the 6th of this month
Matt: wow, why Salt Lake?
Don: See friends who still live there, and participate in a charity golf tournament
Don: Which by itself is amusing because I play golf like drunk people fuck
Matt: ROFL
Don: Hell of a thing, my golf game. I have a strong drive, I can get 150-200 yards sometimes, but I can’t aim to save my life.
Don: It’s worth your scalp to be within 20 feet of me when I swing off the tee ;x
Matt: lol I’ll keep that in mind

Happy birthday, Mom

Thank you for everything over the years.

Know that we love you and miss you.

Have a good day!

2008 in cities

List gets shorter each year, even though I’m spending about the same amount of time traveling. Fewer destinations, more trips to some of them.

Links lead to related posts; boldface indicates cities I visited more than once.

• Seattle, WA (home)
• Salt Lake City, UT: February, June
• Cannon Beach, OR
• Reno, NV
• Rosario, WA
• Telma, WA (actually a cabin on Lake Wenatchee)
• Corvallis, OR
• Sequim, WA
• San Francisco, CA

A bit different method this time. The list includes cities where I spent less than 24 hours if the city was the primary destination. Previously, I only included cities I where I had spent at least 24 consecutive hours, but this year I made a few day trips I wanted to include.

If this is at all like last year, family and friends will remind me of a couple of trips I took and didn’t have listed in my calendar, so I may add to this list over the next few days.

Previous “in cities” lists: 2005, 2006, 2007.

Also, Katharine’s list; our friend Julie Anne’s list.

On Vox: QotD: Broken Bones

I’ve only broken one bone in my life, my left pinky during a game of fly’s-up in grade school. 4th or 5th grade, I think, but I don’t remember exactly when.

I had a hell of a time convincing anyone it was actually broken—it was only a hairline fracture and didn’t really hurt, it was just this strange sensation of warmth and a slight numbness for a week or so after it happened.

Some months later my pinky had developed a misshapen lump over the knuckle. Turns out bone had grown over the break while it healed, so my left pinky is lopsided now.

Answering:

Have you ever broken a bone? If so, how?

Originally posted on donnunn.vox.com

Seven years already?

On this date in 2001, I made my first DVD rental from Netflix. Picked three movies, received all three two days later.

In alphabetical order:

Antz. I can’t remember exactly why I rented this. Only thing I can figure is it was a fairly new DVD release at the time, and probably I wanted to be able to compare it to A Bug’s Life, which was due for release in November of that year.

The Big Kahuna. Hated this movie. Hated, hated, HATED it. Rented it because I generally like Kevin Spacey and the trailers somehow made it look good to me.

Enemy of the State. Will Smith’s latest (at the time) blockbuster, and it held my attention from beginning to end despite the occasionally laughably obvious plot.

I was struck, as I looked over the rest of my rental history, by how strongly I remember some of the movies, or at least the circumstances of their rental or viewing, and by how utterly forgettable other movies have proved to be. The Ice Storm, for example, I still clearly remember watching on a November evening in 2001. The film itself didn’t register on me much, neither particularly good nor hideously awful, though I quite like both Kevin Kline and Joan Allen; but the circumstances of when and where I watched it, I remember well. Not so for Spider-Man 3, which my calendar and my Netflix history both tell me I watched less than a year ago on Nov 15, 2007, but which I have no memory of seeing—neither the movie itself nor the when/where of it apart from my calendar record.

The seven years in my Netflix history since, by the numbers:

• 435: Number of movies I’ve rented.
• 165: Longest time (in days) I held a movie. I’d lost a Netflix envelope among a stack of papers and needed several months to find it. And then returned it UNWATCHED.
• 50: Discs returned unwatched due to lost interest. Some of these I knew I wouldn’t watch and forgot to remove them from my queue.
• 14: Times I changed my membership level, as high as 4-at-at-time/unlimited and as low as 1-out/2-monthly depending on how I was using the service at any given time.
• 12: Number of movies I’ve rented twice.
• 9: Discs returned for replacement due to unplayability. Scratches mostly, my DVD player is VERY sensitive to that; but in one case, the DVD arrived snapped into four pieces inside its mailer.
• 2: Times I put my account on hold while I was moving from one state to another.
• 1.2: Average number of movies per week over the entire 7-year run.
• 1: Shortest time (in days) I held a movie (actually 30 different titles) and number of movies I rented 3 times.
• 0: Discs I’ve lost and Times I’ve entered movie-rental stores.

Hell of a ride. I wonder how much my late fees would have been on those films I kept longer than the brick-and-mortar stores’ policies allowed back in 2001? I should figure that out sometime, but I think this is enough stats geekery for now.

QotD: There’s a Monster in My Closet

The title and default tag of this QotD are appropriate, because when I was a kid I had an almost paralyzing fear of my walk-in closet. It was big and dark and full of clothing on hangers and it had these large drawers full of bedding and linens. The drawers were easily large enough for me to climb inside until I was about 5 or 6 years old, so the idea that I might be playing hide-and-seek and never get found was just horrifying.

But worst of all was the hole in the closet wall at the edge of those drawers. It was a ragged hole, knocked into the wall to allow access to the crawlspace between the eaves and the house’s brick walls. But I had seen the 1980 version of The Fog, and I recalled a scene where an eerie light was emanating from the walls of an old house and a young woman reached through a hole in the wall to grab something she had lost (or possibly left behind, or whatever), and as she reached in, THE MONSTERS GRABBED HER AND PULLED HER THROUGH TO HER DEATH.

I would NOT go near that part of the closet at night, and in daylight only with every nearby light source turned on. Scared the SHIT out of me.

Answering:

What were you afraid of when you were younger that seems silly to you now?
Submitted by wandie

2007 in cities

I spent at least one day in each of these cities in 2007. Fewer cities than 2006 but about the same amount of travel time.

In roughly chronological order:

• Mill Creek, WA (my home until mid-April)
• Seattle, WA (home the rest of the year)
• Spokane, WA
• Salt Lake City, UT
• Astoria, OR
• Friday Harbor, WA (twice, for whale-watching trips)
• Victoria, BC, Canada
• Corvallis, OR
• Orlando, FL

Similar lists for 2005 and 2006.

Idea via kottke.org

2006 in cities

Rehashing the same idea from last year, the list of cities I spent at least one day (a contiguous 24-hour period) in 2006, in roughly chronological order. Asterisks indicate multiple visits; links lead to Google Maps:

• Mill Creek, WA (home)
• Seattle, WA *
• Denver, CO
• Vancouver, BC, Canada
• Salt Lake City, UT *
• Corvallis, OR
• Santa Rosa, CA
• Napa, CA
• Monterey, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Mill Valley, CA
• Victoria, BC, Canada

I was going to list the cities where I spent at least a few hours as well, but that would number into the dozens—maybe even a hundred or more with the several road trips I took this year. I might do that later if I decide to scrape the info directly out of my Palm database.

Lori Soares’ family removes married name from headstone

Salt Lake Tribune: Name ‘Hacking’ struck from headstone
Her mother: Donates decorative angels sent to her to a shelter for abused and neglected children

by Jason Bergreen

image not available
The Soares family has replaced the name ‘Hacking’ on their slain daughter’s gravestone with ‘Filhinha,’ which is Portuguese for ‘little daughter’
Rick Egan, The Salt Lake TribuneLori Hacking’s family has changed her headstone at the Orem City Cemetery to remove “Hacking” from her name. It now reads “Lori Kay Soares.”

Police found Lori Hacking’s body on Oct. 1 at a landfill they had been searching since mid-July, shortly after Mark Hacking reported his 27-year-old wife failed to return from an early morning jog in City Creek Canyon. He later allegedly admitted he shot her in the head as she slept and disposed of her body in a trash bin.

“We just felt that Mark obviously didn’t want her anymore,” Lori’s mother, Thelma Soares, said during a phone interview. Where Lori’s married name once was on the headstone is now engraved the Portuguese word “Filhinha,” which translates to “little daughter.”

Mark Hacking’s parents were notified of the change, made more than a month ago, and understood, Soares said. Saturday, Soares donated decorative angels sent to her from all over the United States to be used as Christmas ornaments at the Christmas Box House, a temporary shelter for abused and neglected children.

“I tried to think of an appropriate way to share them and the love they represent,” she said.

Children at the Christmas Box House decorated a 12-foot tree, Soares said. A picture of Lori was also placed in the branches. Creating the angel tree memorial for Lori seemed appropriate because Soares’ nickname for her daughter was “Angel Baby,” she said.

“It’s gorgeous,” she said of the tree.

Utah brewers get a taste of success at beer festival

Entire Salt Lake Tribune story quoted below. I’ve added links to the breweries and restaurants in question, since the Trib doesn’t provide them in its stories.