Category: Uncategorized

My week has gone something like this:

Sunday, Feb 25th: Drove to the Portland airport and hung out for about 8 hours, just killing time on the laptop until Jammie arrived. Then we drove home.

Monday: Worked, picked up the kids from school, we all went to Tilt at the mall and won tons of tickets.

Tuesday: Took the kids to school, then started driving towards Seattle, listening to almost nothing but the entire Nirvana discography. Seattle is about 5 hours from my house. We stopped in a town about 45 minutes south of Seattle to visit relatives of Jammie. Hung out there, went out to eat at a nearby casino/restaurant, then gambled a few bucks for about an hour.

Wednesday: All of us drove to Seattle for the day. Visited the Experience Music Project which lasted several hours, went up in the Space Needle, rode the monorail, visited the fish market to watch them throw fish. Around 5ish, Jammie’s relatives left us and we went to our hotel.

Thursday: We visited Ye Olde Curiousity Shop and took the Underground Tour of Seattle.

And then…celebrity stalking! No trip to Seattle would be complete without visiting the house that Kurt Cobain shot himself in.

After that, we drove to the house that Eddie Vedder lives in and took pictures. GPS rules for celebrity stalking.

For those who plan to visit Seattle and are having a hard time finding the addresses for Kurt and Eddie (as we did), here they are…Kurt lived at 171 Lake Washington Blvd East in Seattle. Eddie Vedder lives at the end of 44th Ave SW in Seattle. I don’t know his house number, but his GPS coordinates are:

LATITUDE: 47.53138300
LONG: 122.38926400

After the stalking was done, we drove back to Jammie’s relatives, went out to Mexican food, and then drove home to Albany. We arrived home by midnight. Originally we’d planned to visit Aberdeen, Washington (Kurt Cobain’s home town) but it got too late and it was 2 hours out of the way so we decided against that.

Friday: Bowling with Kcochran and friends! It was fun, we drank a lot, my scores were horrible.

Saturday: Breakfast at Original Breakfast. Then we stopped by Fred Meyer and Staples. Jammie bought a laptop for school which I’m jealous of. Hung around the house the rest of the day and did nothing. Went on a walk around Albany for a couple hours. Got ice cream, attempted to win some crane machine prizes at Pizza King, checked on a few geocaches along the way and talked to Cal on his new voice bridge. Took Jammie back to the airport in the evening and got back home around 3am.

Every time I buy printer ink, I get postage paid envelopes to send back the empty cartridges to “HP Planet Partners.” But after getting reamed for $20 – $25 per cartridge, I don’t really want to give anything to HP that will allow them to save money. My hatred of printer ink prices far outweighs any good I’d be doing for the Earth. I fill up the postage paid envelopes with trash, Halloween candy and mean notes instead.

And I am a fan of recycling. I recycle all my paper, cardboard and plastic. Today I stood in line at Fred Meyer for almost 20 minutes, just to recycle $2.00 worth of cans and bottles. But paying $20 for .24 ounces of ink makes me not care. And now they’re rigging their printers so you can’t even use competitor’s ink cartridges.

I need to find one of those kiosks that refills ink cartridges for half the price, if they still exist. I’m pretty sure there’s nowhere in Albany that does it, though.

I sure haven’t been up to much lately. Friday, the kids and I saw Bridge to Terabithia which was nothing like we expected but still a really great movie. Saturday it was in the mid 60’s out and we Geocached for 4 hours. The kids had mud completely covering their shoes and pants on the first one. I even got muddied up a little. Some girl, who was fishing nearby with her parents, came by to see what we were doing in the woods. We’d been searching for an ammo case for about 20 minutes at that point, and after we explained it to her she found it within 5 minutes.

After that, we checked on another one that we’d found a few months ago but just wanted to see if there might be anything good in it. But that one was missing from its usual spot. So we decided to try the elusive Simpson Park cache, which we first started looking for in 2004, I think. Jammie and I finally found it last year but the kids never got to see it, even though we’d tried twice. It’s about a mile hike into the woods and I was able to lead them right to it this time. There was even a PLA button in it still, from the time Jammie and I visited it before.

It was dark by the time we got back to the car. Since there was another cache right across the street from there, we decided to check on that one too. It was still there. I don’t think any of us got anything particularly good from geocaching this time, but it was fun, and we left a lot of random junk in them.

Sunday we did laundry, mostly just to get their shoes cleaned up. And then last night I made a PLA TV episode, which was 100% inspired by Jammie. I showed her the original Kids in the Hall skit last week and she said it wasn’t funny. And maybe it would be funny if the guy said “cactus” instead. So I created that, just to amuse Jammie!

Last Friday, Mr. Spessa sent me on some missions in Eugene, Oregon after work, which were really fun and profitable. And Eugene isn’t as bad of a place as I expected. It’s actually a nice little town.

Binary Revolution Radio read one of my emails, schooling them on 80’s vs 90’s movie quotes. Click here to listen to episode #183 to listen to StankDawg & savant read my email. Skip to 21:55 if you don’t want to hear the whole episode, then 25:30.

No school for the kids today. We went to BTH for lunch and to the library. I dropped off the Roald Dahl book that I finished (Boy) and we picked up a bunch of new books. I got Charlie & the Chocolate Factory for both me and Emily. I read it all tonight and it’s pretty good. It’s kind of hard to say which movie followed the book better. Both had their strong points, but I still like the old 70’s version much better.

My weekend was boring. I think I watched 15 to 20 episodes of The Pretender. Plus I watched one tonight. I’m nearly done with season 3, now. I’ve been just deleting them as I finish them since I doubt I’ll ever watch it again. But it’s a great show and I’m enjoying it a lot. I found out that there were two Pretender movies made too, so I’ll have to find those next. There were supposed to be 4 Pretender movies made, but due to bad ratings, they only made 2. But at least the reviews on the 2 are good.

Oh yeah, I finished watching Early Edition a week or so ago. All 4 seasons of it. That was a great show too, even if they couldn’t seem to keep any characters. On all of their season finales, instead of having some great buildup of what was going to come in the next season, they were always lamely coming up with some weak story line to get rid of a character that didn’t want to be on the show anymore.

I put some shelves in Payton’s room over the weekend, which he really needed. He’s pretty happy about that. His room was trashed before because he didn’t have anywhere to put anything. Guess that’s about all I did this weekend. Pretender took up all my time. Stupid TV.

Over Christmas break I was able to do some major cleaning out of my storage unit in Illinois and bring back a lot of good stuff with me. Among my favorite things to have back are…

My lineman’s handset. This would have come in very handy several times this year.

My keyboard. I’ve had Sonar 4 Producer Edition and Reason for months now with no keyboard.

RTF gave me this when I visited NYC last year and I had to dump it in storage for a year.

Ten years of home video. And my photo albums.

My rotary dial telephone. How did I survive without it?

The kids’ Gamecube. Not that I play it, but they sure are enjoying it.

DVDs!

A couple weeks ago, I switched my journal to WordPress. Then last week, I switched phonelosers.org to WordPress. And today, I decided that WordPress is so great that I should just run all of brad-carter.com from it. So I’ve been manually converting all of the pages on phonelosers.org into WordPress pages, which involves stripping the tops and bottoms off the pages and pasting the rest into a WordPress entry. Plus I’m constantly noticing mistakes and broken links, which I’m fixing. I’ve also been converting all the updates from the past 9 years into separate entries. It’s a lot of work but it’ll be worth it.

Today I screwed up a little of the old database on brad-carter.com when switching the whole site to WordPress. So I’ve been fixing that this evening. WordPress is the shit. It does so much. I’m still a little nervous about running my sites in a program that I don’t completely understand, but I’ll figure it all out eventually.

To everyone that’s commented and/or registered for an account here in the past month, sorry but those are gone now. I promise it won’t happen again, though!

Excuse this. I’m messing around with some stuff. The old page will be back up shortly.

Barely from the Barely Podcast doesn’t hate me for taking his voice hostage on the latest PLA Radio. Listen to the following show and scroll to 35:18.

http://media.libsyn.com/media/barelypodcasting/047Barely.mp3