This will be my last RustyRedRock post.  I will leave the site up for a little while longer before I tear it down entirely.

As I have said, my wife and I are expecting our first child soon and I have a lot of projects to take care of before, during, and after the happy event.  Maintaining a website is not really that big of a task, but maintaining one to the level of care that I would like to give is a little tougher.  It’s sort of a “How many grains of sand are needed to make a pile?” sort of thing. I am just trying to reduce the size of the pile…  For now, anyway.

I have removed the Puzzle for Charity and halted work on Puzzle 05: The Chalice.  Don’t worry… They will be back when the new site is posted in a few months.  The Prize Pool and Charity Pool will retain (at minimum) the values they had when I took them down.  I will, however, be writing a $60 check to the current charity (Blue Ridge Food Bank Area Network) after I post this… No reason not to, really, and it’s only fair.  That will make a total of $247.25 (and three huge blankets) donated to charity since the start of this site.  Thanks again to Agmorion and Siun-Kelan for making Puzzle 03 possible.
 
When the site comes back up, I hope to have a few steady contributing writers to help me out.  I have tried that with extremely limited success in the past, but maybe next time will be different .  Also, I think I might switch from Wordpress/Yahoo to Blogger.  Easier for a number of reasons, it seems.  We will see.

Even better would be to write for someone else’s site, which is ultimately what I would like to do.  If you know anyone that is looking for a contributor for puzzle creation or the style of writing you see in the Unexpected Segue or World News sections of this site, let me know.  My contact info can be found in the Contact and FAQ link in the sidebar on the right.

Some final stuff:

I have started on a video project that I may or may not post in the future… The project was designed to be more of a historical archive rather than something for mass consumption so it depends on how the individual episodes turn out.  If they turn out decent enough, you will hear more about them.   If not, you won’t.  Either way, it will be a while before I find my feet and have a few finished episodes, as any of you that have done any sort of video editing will completely understand. 

Speaking of projects, I have finished building my scrap wood holder and nearly finished my firepit.  I built both with (mostly) leftover items from previous projects. The irony of the wood holder project is that I used a lot of my scrap wood to build it, so the problem it was designed to solve sort of dispappeared…  The design was taken from the book The Complete Book of Woodworking.  It is very, very good with lot’s of step-by-step pics.  Here is my (modified) version, front and back. 

Thanks to jimmydunes who provided many, many hours of unpaid labor to help me create a firepit in my backyard.  The exterior was made from the leftover bricks from the elevated garden project and the overall design was based on one at the DIY Network site.  If jimmydunes and I were able to do this, anyone can. Important Project Scheduling Note:  Brickyards (where you will get the fire clay and the fire bricks) typically have banker’s hours for some unfathomable reason, so plan accordingly.  Below is a pic of the first “test fire”, and the other picture is the mold for the capstones that will finish up the project this week. 

I have hung the curtains and ceiling fan in my new den, so the finishing touches of that project are done, at least.

The final sticks of furniture have been added to the baby’s room.  We are looking to add a border, hang some more art, and add a clock.   And some shelves for the closet… Hmm.  It looks like we aren’t done after all… I had better get a move on…  Here are some pics, though.

What else?  Oh, yeah.  I hate my Treo with all of the hate that it is possible to generate toward an inanimate object.  It locks up constantly, stays latched in “roaming” mode whenever I go inside and then leave a certain building at work, I can’t send pictures easily, I can’t convert the video with any tools I have, the Bluetooth connectivity is random… The list goes on and on but it is really no different than any other piece of 2008 technology: something claims to do a million things, but does none of them well. 

So what am I going to do about mine?  The only action that makes really makes sense is this: It’s just a phone, man. Don’t worry about it.  Unplug.  “The only winning move is not to play“, style of thing… Sort of Zen, dontcha think? But, as God as my witness, my next phone will not be Windows-based. 
 
After a rough start, it looks like the tobacco plants are going to make it.  I have started picking the smaller leaves off the bottoms of the plants and the top leaves are starting to grow faster.  I am storing the leaves I pick in a mason jar in my very hot garage to see what happens to them there.  I will use these initial clippings to make my own insecticide, I think.  The soy is also doing well, but the peanuts were a total failure.  Everything else is doing just fine.  Here is a photo of the garden and a close-up of one of the tobacco plants.

That’s about it.  Thanks to all of the readers of this site.  I had a lot of fun doing this and look forward to re-starting it when I can. 

Cheers!

 unplugnow

Answer using the poll in the sidebar.  I will leave it up for a week.

Also, I am thinking of ditching this site altogether… at least temporarily - baby on the way, you know.   I think I would rather focus on building the Puzzles for Charity and write for someone else’s site.  I am not sure yet what I will do.  If you know someone looking for a news/humor writer and has a like minded attitude regarding the power and potential of small charities, let me know.

I will put up a poll regarding that as well.

Go figure. I doubt you are heartbroken, though.  :)

But here is the Cliff’s Notes version of stuff I would have written about in the past week in a less busy alternative timeline:

• There are now over one million Priuses on the road.  I have been getting 53MPG lately, and expect even higher as the weather warms up.
• Over 50% of our Incentive Check will be spent offsetting over-the-top gas prices.  Check out my previous post on the topic here.
• GTA4 has the best co-op version of any game I have ever played. The noticeably smarter and tougher cops are now sort of a cross between low grade Terminators and 007-School dropouts.    
• I believe that forests aid in randomizing weather patterns.  By chopping down huge (and not-so-huge) areas to make room for housing developments, the now chaotically smooth areas allow for stronger straight-line winds and weird hurricane-like weather patterns to develop over land.
• I don’t watch soap operas, but I am really getting tired of listening to Spinelli.  No one talks like that outside of a Renaissance Faire.
• The news angries up my blood.  The world is doomed, celebrity news, the world is doomed, puppy dials 911 to save master, the world is doomed… Etc, etc, etc.  Do what you can to fix stuff locally, and the bigger stuff falls into place a little easier.
• My tobacco plants are coming in nicely.  I hope to be able to use some of the crop as insecticide for next year.
• Today is Bike-to-Work day.  It got me thinking of all the places between my house and work (about 25 miles) where bike and/or pedestrian traffic is prohibited by law (bridges, tunnels, certain Interstate portions, and whatnot).  Is it actually illegal for some people to get to work without involving a car? Wow, if true.

I planted the seven slips he gave me of yesterday before some storms came through.  I hope at least a couple of them make it - we will see.  I will take pictures as time goes by and, if all goes well, I will start building a small curing shed in the next month or so.

Also, a new poll has been added.  Every vote counts - this topic: Who would you least like to see own a real, working Light Saber?

Congrats to jimmydunes on the purchase of his new motorcycle.  Enjoy, dude, and may you find all the Sweet Jumps you desire.

The Towel Princess

On a feminine beauty scale from one to ten, this gym employee rates a 5.1 and is obviously tired of being hit on by every single guy who walks into or within one quarter mile of the place.  It has gotten so bad (in her 0.1 focused mind, anyway) that the only way to deal with the constant threat of having to turn down spontaneous marriage proposals and throne abdications is via pre-emptive strike: hyper-rudeness to everyone at all times.  After all, you can’t spell “customer service” without a “what the hell is your problem, pal, can’t you see the extra towels are over there?”  

The Clustering Chucklers

Nothing gives these old gents greater delight than a non-stop exchange of cliche-rific one-liners first thing in the morning, each more rip-roaring than the last.  Nothing, that is, except to do it in front of your locker, effectively blocking you from doing anything but enjoying their wacky routine.  Side-splitting, time-consuming topics include church cookouts, baldness, and “where Barney’s gotten to these days, haven’t seen him around much, probably got sick of his wife’s cookin’ an’ took off a-hur-hur-hur”.

Why not, you may ask? Why is she so damn lazy - too many soap operas and bon-bons? Hasn’t she ever read the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper? 

The truth is she is 7+ months pregnant, and her ogre of a husband refuses to let her deal with fertilizer, come near insect poison, or dig in the hot sun.  I figure she’ll have ‘labor effort’ enough later. In the meantime she can just focus on building us a little dude and let me tend to the crops.  Personally, I couldn’t be happier to do it.

Since this is “my” garden this year I got to add a few plants that normally would not have been there.  For instance I will be planting some soy, some peanuts, and even a couple of tobacco plants.

Why those? The wife and I like tofu occasionally and, as with the peanuts, I think it’s cool to get protein without having to raise and kill farm animals.  Not that I am a vegetarian -  there is nothing I like more than a huge medium-rare steak, and, statistically speaking, at the time you are reading this I probably have a #1 combo from Wendy’s somewhere in my digestive tract.  I also know that growing only a few plants might sustain a small family for a week at the outside, but no longer than that, that’s for sure.

So call this a very tiny experiment in self-sufficiency.  I will post pics and descriptions as I go.  Sort of like Agmorion has been promising to send me for well over a year now to post on this site.  I mean, would it kill him to send a few descriptive paragraphs of the work he has done on his basement greenhouse?  But, noooo, he can barely fire off a zero-text email with “a bunch of pictures attached” and remember to actually attach them… But let’s get back to the tobacco.

I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get someone in this tobacco-growing region to give me a straight answer to the question “Where can I get a small number of tobacco seeds or slips?”  50% of the people I have asked, at both large and small gardening centers have haughtily rebuffed me for even asking such a stupid question. They even seemed angry, as if this was my 50th time calling in this “prank” and they had had just about enough of my shenanigans.

49% of the respondents, while non-rude have been less than useless with their answers, trading in the perfectly acceptable reply of “I don’t know” with “I don’t know, so instead let me while away the hours telling you everything I do know about tobacco from the establishment of Jamestown Colony to modern federal regulatory actions…”  I have even gotten responses that, if true, prove the existence of time travel - “The plants are grown from seed in greenhouses in February but you can’t get seeds because the plants are grown from slips starting in May…”

It’s almost like I have stumbled onto the existence of a secret society of some kind, one whose pass phrase is “Where can I get tobacco seeds or slips around here?”.  The correct response on their end is “Tobacco plants draw worms away from tomatoes” or similar.  The correct response on my end then is probably something like “The pearl is in the river” or “John has a long mustache” at which point we would show each other our secret tattoos and they would lead me to some tastefully decorated underground lair…

But, since all I actually want are two damn tobacco plants all I get are trivia of suspicious value and strange looks.  You know, I might actually have to follow the advice of the other 1% of the people I have asked (Siun-Kelan). She said all I need are three things to get them: a shovel, the cover of night, and a moral compass that doesn’t point True North.  Check, check, and check. 

I will let you know how it turns out.   Who knows?  You might see it on the news.

No damage to this neighborhood - electricity was not even interrupted.  The nearest serious damage was 3 miles from here.

Please say a prayer for those who were not so lucky.

And, man, I mean freaking never. 

As a matter of fact a lot of the stuff people collect have no possible use other than to act as a great disservice to archeologists of the future.  Think about it. Wildly inaccurate claims will be made on the life and leisure of people of the 21st century based on the items that are found in your ex-house.  “It was considered a symbol of high status amongst these primitive peoples to gather and store as many irreparable gas-powered Weed Eater engines as they could, possibly for religious rituals…”

Fortunately, I have been cursed with a low tolerance for clutter and blessed with a like-minded wife. We recognize the difference between a memento worth saving and a shoebox full of broken cell phone chargers.  We don’t measure a room’s potential value by trying to imagine it packed to the rafters with cardboard boxes filled with broken exercise bicycle parts and half-used PAAS Easter Egg coloring kits that we will sort though “some day, we swear”.

I know, I know… You are thinking the geegaws that comprise your little hoard “might be collector’s items some day”.  I will let you in on a little secret: it’s 2008.  That means absolutely everything is a Limited One of a Kind Platinum Edition Director’s Cut in the Special Metal Box with the Shiny Foil Trading Cards and Cheat Codes Inside.  Everything is amazing, everything is garbage, everything is useful and necessary, and everything is just taking up space.  Everything, in short, is the Tom Waits’ song ‘Step Right Up’. 

(Steps gingerly down from soap box. Looks around. Blushes) But we have been slipping lately.  Over the past decade we have accumulated enough worthless stuff to mandate having a yard sale.  Actually, that’s not true.  We have about half of what is needed so we are sharing happy-fun-time-crap-fest with some friends of ours this Saturday.  They live in a more populated area and I don’t think even the most ardent connoisseurs of other-people’s-very-used-stuff will drive 30 miles to paw through our collection of maybe-all-there jigsaw puzzles. 

(Places one foot tentatively back on soap box) Or maybe they would.  But be ye warned: Oh, I will take your money as you successfully haggle a functional TI-85 calculator with no battery cover out from under me for $3 instead of the suggested $3.50.  But know that I would have been just as happy with $2.00, $1.00, or even 50 cents just to get the dust-collecting thing out of my dang house.  And, when you leave with your treasure, I will mock you for it relentlessly, trash-boy.

Weather permitting, of course.