Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Smorgasbord

One of my favorite places to eat is Bob's Home Cooking in Duluth. It's a southern-hospitality-food buffet, and you can get a little bit of fried chicken, ham, dumplings, fried green tomatoes, collard greens, and peach cobbler—on the same plate, if you so desire. This is a blog post buffet, a conglomerate of various thoughts that are rattling around in my head. Pick what you like and enjoy, y'all.

I just got a laugh out of a banner ad. "Zoltar predicts you won't rollover this banner," it boldly claimed, shortly before I rolled over the banner. The explanation? "That prediction didn't count. The mighty Zoltar had his fingers crossed." I'm not sure what it was advertising, but whatever it was could not have been as interesting as the banner itself.

I'm moving into my apartment at Georgia Tech on August 19th. That's a mere ten days after I get home (from this family reunion trip to Boston, MA and Culpeper, VA). For those who didn't know, I'm living in the GLC, the nicest on-campus housing there is. It's on 10th Street. I have a list of exactly 22 things I must do to be ready for school. That list had exactly 14 items when I thought it was finished the first time. It will have more the next time I think about getting ready for school. Said list is a .txt file that I made in Notepad. I have about six such lists and catalogs on my desktop. I think this kind of list-keeping confirms that I am obsessive-compulsive. I'm okay with that; I rarely forget things and am very organized that way. I rarely use a semicolon like I just did. Odd.

The "Apple Students" group on Facebook is giving away a free 25-song iTunes sampler every week until September 30th. The first was rock, and it was pretty cool. The second was electronic—it was just plain weird. Still, a couple of gems. This week's is rock again. I downloaded it today, and I'm looking forward to listening.

I had a short e-mail exchange with Stephen Bailey earlier this week, and it was good to hear from him. <plug>Check out his band, Elevation, here.</plug> In case he reads my blog, it was good talking to you. Definitely visit me when you're downtown sometime.

I just bought a couple new toys for school at TigerDirect.com. The first is an external hard drive, seeing as my iTunes library is quickly edging out what free space I have on my laptop drive. This baby is a 250GB Seagate drive with a fan-cooled USB 2.0/Firewire enclosure. And it was $89.99. Everyone say "sweet." The second item is a Sandisk Cruzer Micro USB drive. The USB drive I carry now is my trusty red Lexar JumpDrive 32MB that I received as a treasured Christmas gift in 2004. It hasn't failed me yet, and I still love the thing—but I need more space for holding all my school files, especially since I'm taking computer science 1371, which is Matlab for engineers. Anyway, this Sandisk is small and has a retractable USB plug, not a cap. It's 1GB and has U3 (mobile app) technology. And it was $28.99. Everyone say "sick." Sick is apparently the new sweet, but I think that's a northern thing. My friend from Connecticut introduced me to that term. My GF homies know him, he (Pat) visited with us a couple of weeks over the summer.

I read Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller on the trip up to Boston last week. I think that's why my writing on this post is more halting and has a marked lack of compound and compound-complex sentence structures. That book made me think about a lot of things, and I'm going to have to spend time over a good think before I post on things that Miller said.

I love my cousins. I am the oldest grandchild on my dad's side, and I have 4 cousins, ages 11 to 16. We had an absolute blast over the past week, having the run of two rented houses and a medium-sized yard in Boston, plus movies and local attractions. We played Sardines almost nightly, had large and violent games of Spoons, and after supper we watched movies together in whatever house the adults weren't in. I wouldn't trade sitting in that big recliner with Bev, the youngest, and having the rest crowded around on the floor and on the sofa, all laughing together at Napoleon Dynamite or Madagascar for the world. I hope that week meant as much to all of them as it did to me. It's like all these little kids that used to play in the halls at the Holiday Inn in Richmond and forget who each other was by the next year were finally a family. A fun, loving, relaxed family. I love each and every one of you, and I'm praying for you all the time. I covet my readers' prayers for my extended family, also—many of them need to know the Lord.

On MySpace earlier, a certain online "matchmaking" service (read: equally yoked in immorality) that I refuse to mention lest you visit it advertised its services to me. They told me that "Love is just a click away." Also, "It's easy. It's free." And they underscored their point with a large photograph of a provocatively dressed female, who, though she appeared easy, was probably not free. And I suspect she was more than just a click away. Anyway, if you want two-dimensional representations of attractive females and superficial conversations with girls whose purpose is to be easy and free, then I suggest you pay this advertiser's website a visit. If you were actually looking for what they said they advertise, please move along...nothing to see here. As has been said before, sex is easier than love.

7 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Text files are useful. The guy at 43folders.com swears by them.

Notepad? It works. Barely. The way Wal-Mart furniture works. Alas: no regex. No line numbers. And it selects text oddly. I'd rather use vi.

Have fun at GT. Listen to Sunday's sermon on "Work" before you get started. It's not about education. It's not about grades. It's not about getting a job. It's about worship.

Remember: You have one shot at this. One round in the chamber. Make it count.

I just wanted to say: good luck. We're all counting on you.

Staccato prose is addictive. Like a game. Like Hemingway. Sort of. No. Not like Hemingway. Like bad film noir. Yeah. Film noir.

Hey... Whose Line is on...

10:10 PM, August 08, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yay! A smorgasboard post!

I'm also reading Blue Like Jazz. I love his writing style, it's so abstract, yet so profound...lol. We can talk after I finish the book.

As for your obsessive list-making:
Amen to that, brother. You're not alone.

I've found that the memories that were made with my cousins are some of my fondest. They're three of my best friends ever and I wouldn't trade their friendship for the world. Great isn't it :-)

I like semicolons too. I should use them more often.

My daddy gave me a flash drive a few months ago, and I've become attached to it. Whoda thunk that I'd need such a thing?

If you like the aforementioned country buffet, remind me to introduce you to Brenda's next time you're in the Gulf Coast. It's a hole-in-the-wall country buffet. Best southern home cookin ever.

-Amy

12:28 AM, August 09, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What are the games Sardines and Spoons?

8:59 AM, August 09, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Next time Regina's and the kids are out, we should make a run for Bob's. Fried Green Maters ... mmmmm!

3:57 PM, August 09, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

P.S. Understanding Don Miller's arminian slant, BLJ was a good read. Took me 2 days after spending a month on Mere Christianity.

4:00 PM, August 09, 2006  
Blogger Jeffrey J. Stables said...

Kev—Sardines is a hide-and-seek variation. You play at night, in a building or house with all the lights off. One person hides and the others count and then go look for that person. When you find the hider, you hide with him. Eventually, depending on how many people are playing and the size of the hiding spot, it becomes virtually impossible to conceal the hiding people, who are packed in like sardines. After the last person finds them, the first person to find the original hider gets to hide for the next round.

Spoons is a card game, where each player is dealt 3 or 4 cards. There are spoons placed in the center of the circle, one less spoon than there are players. The dealer picks up a card and either puts it in his hand and discards one that he already had, or passes it down the circle. Everyone does the same, discarding or keeping cards, until someone has 3 or 4 of a kind, depending on how many you agree constitutes a set. The person with a full set goes for a spoon, at which time everyone must grab a spoon. The person left without a spoon gets a letter from S-P-O-O-N-S. You're out when you spell the whole word. (As you may imagine, there are always two winners, because you cannot play once you get down to two people.)

John—Thanks. I enjoyed writing it. I was actually in Virginia when I posted, but I just got back in town (this is late Wednesday evening). I will call you tomorrow to work out details...I will certainly make time before I move out to get you all set up.

Dave—It's a deal. At $6 a person, it's a wonder I don't go to Bob's more often and weigh much more. And this is freaky: I just finished Mere Christianity after piddling around with it for a couple of months, and the next one on my list was BLJ. Interesting coincidence of reading schedules. I'm working on Celebrating the Wrath of God by Jim McGuiggan right now. I'll post my thoughts on that one later, as well....

9:42 PM, August 09, 2006  
Blogger Seth Ward said...

I envy the man who can eat all of that heaven on a plate and see nary an ounce show up on his belly. Not fair. Not fair.

5:04 PM, August 12, 2006  

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