BigCat’s Blog of DOOM

So, other than not getting my exact screen name I wanted gmail is cool. That means it is time to start forwarding other emails to gmail.

Anyway, my new possible email is bigcat1 at gmail.com.

Now, that makes like 18 email address I have, and about 5 I check. Which is just too many. I’m going to try to figure out how to forward my hotmail, freeshell, and maybe one other account to gmail and then sort them into folders based on where they came from. But this is something best saved for later since I have a design review due Thursday and I’m completely not ready for it.

G’night all.

Well I went to a wedding today and it was really great. Congrats to Rachael and David, they are freaking awesome together, and I wish nothing but the best for their post wedding relationship….aka marriage. Their wedding was awesome, I think that Wesley is a pretty darned good place to have a wedding. The jury is still out on whether I like that better or Faith UMC for weddings and what not. We’ll have to see after my wedding since I’ve never seen Faith decorated up for a wedding. I still can’t get over (and neither can Dirk) how freaking huge the chapel is at the Wesley church.

Besides that Rob found this awesome punk version of Cannon by a band called Zox. If you want to check out the song it is here (I highly recommend right clicking on this link and selecting “save link as” and keeping this since it is a free download). Lauren and I are thinking of walking out of the wedding to this. Also, as of right now we want to walk in to the reception to the song Tomoyasu Hotei - Battle Without Honor or Humanity from the Kill Bill Vol. 1 Soundtrack. That is the song that Lucy Liu’s character walks into a bar while it is playing with her little gang of people. Part of me really wants to make some of this informal and fun, but at the same time I don’t want to throw away the traditions of wedding ceremonies, because I think a lot of them are cool. But still, I want things to be pretty laid back. FYI, for those of you who don’t know already, we are having Papa Dels pizza at the reception, because we like that kind of pizza, and most of the people we know do to.

School is pretty stressful, I can’t get my microcontroller working so that it programs properly, and I only have one thing left that I can replace to blame the failures on. I don’t know why this has to be so difficult. If I had the microcontroller working I could have had the LCD and Keypad working by now, and we could focus solely on driving the motors for our project. Oh well. Helya has been an awesome partner so far, she is a really cool person who is pretty easy going, but dilligent. In other words she keeps me working, but is easy to get along with.

Wedding stuff is going pretty well, it looks like Lauren booked the last hotel for the honeymoon, which is cool, one less thing to worry about. Besides that my Mom is helping a lot with stuff, but that means a lot of calls asking Lauren to make little decisions, which is hard because they seem never ending, and almost pointless, but they have to be made.

Well, that is good for now. I’m tired and going to bed, because tomorrow I have to figure out what to do about Laurens car since it wouldn’t start tonight in the parking lot to Barnes and Noble.

Some things of note

1. School still sucks. Learning is great, and will always be great, but the institutions of learning built up around themselves like this giant monument to our intellectual egos called a university have always, and will always suck. They are soul sucking entities designed to rip your very will to live from your mind turn it into a fear of failing shoving it back into your brain, and then they piss on you an laugh while you dance around them like a trained monkey.

Or maybe I’m just lazy.

2. Engaged encounters are a good thing. This was a great idea that some Catholic person had, which was to create a weekend retreat that tells you about the things you are going to deal with in marriage that you may or may not have thought of yet. And then they make you answer questions, and share those with your fiance. The difference between this and the “maximizing your marriage potential” that the Vineyard does is simply time and depth. The Vineyard one was great, and I heard a lot of repeat material at the retreat this weekend, but they just don’t go in depth as much. They ask the hard questions, but don’t give you time or encourage you to really share about it with your fiance. At this retreat they separated us from our fiances at the end of each session and had us write about the questions they asked for a while. Then you got to go into a room, just the two of you, for a good long while and read what your fiance wrote, and then talk about it. They had a section on everything too. They had one in there about getting old, ugly and dying, and people dying around you, and how you deal with that. I don’t remember the Vineyard talking much about that at all, but that is a big deal. Anyway, if you are engaged and you haven’t gone on one of these things it is totally worth it, I highly recommend it.

3. Not leading a small group is good. I totally don’t have time or energy on Saturdays for that right now, and I need to sink some more time into my senior design project, and Saturdays are looking good for that. Plus it was getting draining to be there on Saturdays in the middle of the day. I think there should be a small group for people who work nights, but man, I don’t think I’m the guy for that. Maybe someone who actually works nights would be a better choice.

4. I suck as an artist, like really bad. But I put up a new part to my website, at http://bigcat.chaosnet.org/gallery which will have thumbnails of things I drew, think are funny, or pictures I took. Also there will be albums on there of my friends stuff. Right now Scott has a little of his artwork up. I might put more and more stuff up there as time goes by, but right now it has a fairly good collection of my works availalbe in a digital format. And this new software makes the thumbnails for me as I upload the pictures. I thought that was cool. The new software I got is called Gallery, you can google for it if you want, it is an easy thing to find, I’m just feeling lazy and don’t want to put up a link.

5. When you tell someone you don’t want something done a certain way for your wedding why do they argue with you. It’s my wedding damn-it, not theirs. And why do some parents think they can insist that things go the way they want them to. Laurens parents are driving us nuts, which isn’t terribly out of the ordinary. But it is so annoying to try to communicate with her mother and having her father respond to us. Can you really have a relationship with someone if you aren’t willing to personally resolve conflict, and if you never apologize. I tell you, that isn’t how my family does it, and I’m glad.

6. Wedding planning is stressful. You plan and plan and plan for this one day event, but a lot of times it makes you loose focus on the fact that marriage is a forever kind of thing. That one day is very important, but not as important as the rest of your life, but you just focus on this one day, not the forever. I’m glad we planned on doing this marathon of counseling / retreats this month because that is building for the future, not just that day.

7. I emailed a bunch of you with an official wedding invitation. RESPOND DAM NIT. It isn’t that hard, your available to come in two months or your not. Please let me know. We would like all the responses by the middle of July so we know how much food to order. Currently Matt asked me when we wanted the RSVP and no one else has emailed me. Also, if you didn’t get an email from Tice (mostly my roommates who weren’t on the email list) you should ask him what he has up his sleeve for the day after the wedding. He is planning some get-together for the former 5 Northers, but I didn’t see your names on the email, so you should hit him up asking him what is going on.

Well, that is pretty good for now. Back to writing this proposal for senior design class.

I don’t know what is causing it, but my right eye feels strained all the time. Also I’ve been sleeping a lot and still being very tired during the day. I hope I’m not getting sick. This sorta sucks because I need to write this report for my independent study class, but I’m really tired and it hurts more the more I look at the stupid computer screen. Oh well, we do what we must to get the job done.

Last night was pretty cool. Had a good time with some good food at Small Group leader appreciation dinner. The only weird part is that I never got an invite to that, and I only knew about it because Lauren did. The even wierder part is that Dirk didn’t get one either. I think they don’t like our address.

Well from discussion last night I thought I should add a funny link or two. Make sure you visit the first one first, then the second one. The second one is a video Volition made to the audio from the original Dead Alewives audio, so you should listen to just the adio one first.

Well, enough time wasting before I really get to cracking on this report. Take it easy.

Well, this is interesting. It appears the Canadians have gone the way of the US Anglicans and have affirmed the “integrity and sanctity” of same sex unions. You can expect the Anglican church to split in the next year. The international body of the church asked all the smaller bodies not to take action on it until the international body meets to discuss it. (This happened after the whole US bishop thing last year) On the upside, the Vineyard has a great relationship with a lot of Anglican churches in the UK, so maybe if there is a split our denomination might gain some new international members. That would be sorta cool, even though I’m not a huge fan of transfer growth, but at least our little denomination would get some press time and some more recognition.

I went home Saturday with Lauren. Yesterday we did the pre-marital stuff with my folks. It wasn’t that bad. My Mom and Dad are pretty good at it, and they should be since my Dad has done over 200 weddings and my Mom has done her fair share of them too. The only part that seemed to suck was when you got to a place in the service where my Mom and Dad do things a little differently, then we had to decide which way to do it. The only part of the traditional Methodist wedding service I didn’t like was the statement of intention. That is where Lauren and I both repeat some thing about what we intend to do, to make sure we are both their to get married. Then after that they ask her Dad that “Who gives away this girl..yadda yadda yadda” question. It seems like he is up there for way to long that way. Mom and Dad assured me that it only seemed long because we were discussing everything and having each part explained to us, but in reality it won’t be long. But I still wasn’t a huge fan of that part. I mean, I guess I decided to put a tux on, and she put a big white dress on and showed up at the church because we like to dress up….of course were there to get married. That is stupid, and the wedding vows should cover everything the “statement of intention” does too, so why do the same thing twice.

After counseling my Mom was like “What if I payed for alternate dish at the wedding, like say 250 chicken breasts.” And I got to thinking about it on the way home and I figured why the hell would we buy a whole different entree. I’m really sick of her and Laurens Mom whining about the pizza thing. Why is it such a big deal that we are having pizza. I don’t care if people can’t eat it, not everyone likes the dry chicken and undercooked roast beef that everyone else has at their wedding, so why should I have to have a second entree in a quantity that can feed all the guests on top of my pizza. The dish we picked is pizza. To have something like that would compete with the pizza, and undermine the message we are trying to send, which is “we like pizza, a lot, and we want this to be laid back, like the rest of our lives.” That just upsets me. And when I called my Mom back in the car to tell her that we didn’t want her to do that, Lauren asked for the phone and didn’t give it back, so I didn’t get to say anything to her about it and how tired I am of hearing about it. Seriously this whole deal with my parents not liking the fact that we are having pizza is really annoying me, and I’m getting insulted. The message my mother conveyed with this is “Pizza isn’t good enough for my family, so I’ll go so far as to pay for something that I think is better in a quantity that basically replaces the pizza as the main dish.” I don’t care if that isn’t what she is thinking, that is basically what she said. Buying anything in a quantity that can feed all the guests basically makes what we picked a worthless purchase. At most I would buy a second entree that could fee half the guests, and even then, I don’t really want to. There will be multiple kinds of pizza, and who doesn’t like pizza to the point that they can’t eat at the reception? I don’t know anyone that doesn’t like pizza, and I don’t think my aunt is so diabetic that she can’t eat a piece, or just be happy eating the salad or something. I think the primary reason my Mom keeps bugging me about this is because her sister is diabetic and can’t eat pizza or something, but I’m really thinking why should I buy a quantity of chicken that makes the pizza worthless for the three diabetic people I know. I figure maybe we’ll have something like a cold-cut plate that feeds 50 to 100 people available. That might cover the people who won’t eat pizza. But 250 chicken breasts we will not serve, because that is ludicrous in light of how much we want to spend and the plans we already have, besides, where would we cook that and when would we have time without hiring even more people to help serve the food.

In other news we are having an invitation stuffing party tonight. Please stop by if you want free food and drinks. I think we are ordering Papa Johns and buying some pop and beer. The more the merrier, so stop on by.

The big news besides wedding stuff is that we decided to stop the Saturday small group. It was seriously dragging us down by having the group in the middle of the day on Saturday. And almost no one ever came. At our peak we had three people besides the three leaders. So we are disbanding and looking to go to a different small group. Possibly Brent and Val’s since they are having one for couples. Lauren would like to go to a group with some woman in it, and it would be nice to get to know some couples before we leave. We don’t hang out with too many married couples, so that could be a good change of pace.

Thats it for now folks, hope everything is going great with you today.

I went home this weekend. That was pretty nice. Tried to get Aaron’s computer working again, it won’t talk to his guitar POD (Basically a fancy DSP), which he really wants it to do, I got it working nicer than before. It just doesn’t want to talk to the POD, nor does my laptop. So I blame the POD.

I went hiking with my Dad and brothers…that was a lot of fun. We will probably go back to that place (Panther Creek) again sometime and camp, fish and hike. They have nice group campgrounds too.

I took my big computer home, trying to clean it out, and vacuum it and what not. That went OK, then when I got back here I took it to work to try to make my front mounted USB ports work (it was a mod I did to the computer, so that is why it wasn’t working….not because something actually broke) and now they seem to be working. If only it didn’t start raining just as I finished up fixing the computer and putting it back together I could take it home. Oh well. Maybe it will quit soon and I can go home with it. This fix should allow me to actually get my Wacom tablet working nicely with my computer. The rear USB ports are too far away and the cable is short, so I had to get the front one working in order to make the tablet useful for my desktop.

Anyway, that is about life for now….later.