ubada

I walk the bike path thing there in the 'burg as they say or as I call it.. And I used to go to the BNSF railway bridge and turn around and come back but in the past month I have ventured on beyond to a place that has a 2 mile and a curve sign painted on the path itself.. Yesterday I was venturing down the trail and as I was approaching the bridge I could hear the engine approaching the bridge as I was.. I thought it was about a quarter mile away so I thought I'd put it in "mosey high" and race it to the bridge. I hate the idea of having the train crossing over the bridge as I go directly under it but there we were, the train at the start of the bridge and me in what I can only call no mans land, the just about under the bridge area.. I committed to going on through while the train went right over the top of me..  DOOOOOSH CHILLS  Big time  doosh chills..  I come out of the other side of the bridge with the hair on the back of my neck sticking strait out.. ubada ubada ubada...   freak me right the hell out..   I mean not that it has happened right there before but that train has left the tracks a few miles up the way going over the highway before.. TWICE..    Once a grain car fell right on the roadway crushing a drainage culvert.. And the other time a couple years ago when a tornado pushed a car off the tracks just about the same spot..   Not so fun.. But i lived..

Badge Henry

Renew and refew

About two weeks ago, give or take, I got my renewal notice to get my license renewed.. Mom got hers way back in May and it was a card that had renew online.. Mine came the same way and I thought alright, I'll try.. More than likely won't get it but might as well try.. That was a week ago almost to the day.. Today it was in the mail.. Check it out.. :

I'm so proud.. it worked so well.. I haven't aged a day from my last picture.. They have to use your last picture from the license that you got five years ago..  Nice hu?? 

Badge Henry

New to you

The "jump start" might have finally happened.. Yesterday after watching the Saturday morning movie I flipped over to the Roku and went to the channel that seems to never disappoint, Vimeo, and found a site that delivered the goods.. Several videos that I can manipulate into video ideas for my own use.. Checked YouTube as well and got a few there as well.. All together nearly 2GB of video ideas, the greatest was a tunnel idea that could give a few ideas, or expand on ideas from before..

Editing the birthday party from last Sunday was tricky.. Getting the videos converted is becoming tricky as well because I thought I had the perfect setting.. Now I might have the perfect setting and it has to be set manually for each video.. Last weeks birthday party was over an hours worth of video to choose from.. Three videos were produced and the first video was redone because I wasn't happy with the way it looked..  The second was of Ian and Ryan and won't be linked on FB because I'm not sure it should be there, I didn't ask permission to post it on the 'tube.. Between the three  videos I think they all were around fifteen minutes which I'm starting to get the gist of how to build a strong concise video rather than go long and achieve the same effect.. You get what the story is in half the time, and I'm trying to get that while editing.. The way I go about it is get the videos relative to the idea, in this case the birthday party first part where they blow out the candles and then  eat/wear the cake, there were some ten or so video segments to clip from that all together added up to over 16 minutes.. The heart of the video was them having the birthday song and blowing out the candles and then getting grubbed in the cake.. Originally the video was completed at around the seven minute mark but then after having the video converted (for the fifth time) I edited it down even more.. The last version being more to my liking.. 

How about that new channel on the roku??  Actually a subchannel available on one of the private channels.. Called Fairfield (I think) and it is all trains all the time..  I saw it last night and thought this will be here for a short time then be gone.. It's still there today and it has just under 300 viewers on it.. How does that compare??  Well there are two or three movie channels on this site (I'd say what it is but am just sure someone will find out and bring them to a hault).. The movie channels there bring new movies, really new movies.. Like still in the theater new, and in some cases movies that just opened on Friday night.. They have around a thousand viewers on them, sometimes more sometimes less depending on what they are playing.. I'm hoping to see that movie the conjuring shortly, they should have it up fairly soon..  The movie World War Z is playing but I never get in on the start of it..

Football starts shortly and I am hoping some games will be on the Roku on that channel.. Should be, they have a lot of other sports.. 

Badge Henry

Forced to surrender

Hey  guns don't kill people. people kill people.. with guns.. How that works I don't know because it seems like guns DO kill people but they say guns don't so... go figure how it works.. I don't know..


Thought I'd start this entry with a comment I made to a political site on facebook today.. Guns don't kill people, let's get that strait right here & now..  But they kinda do kill people..  A conundrum of sorts I reckon..  You can't have one without the other.. If a bear shits in the woods and there's no one around to smell it  does it still stink..  If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear it does it still make a sound..  If a tree falls on the bear after the bear sized crap does the leprechaun still deliver the gold??  The grandest of all questions.. 

Thad

For the past to future present

 And in this picture we have.. With a little help from the Faststone picture program.. Yep that's my dad.. Bad ass that he was.. This was taken the summer before his senior year at SHS ...  The original picture was very hard to make him out and after doctoring it, the picture isn't much better. Use your imagination..  He's there.. Third from the left..

 "She may be new to Sidney, but she is not new to taking care of you".. What?? If she's never seen me that by very definition is NEW TO TAKING CARE OF YOU..   duh???

From this weeks (last weeks) Silverton paper the ode to the firefighters who lost their lives recently in Arizona..  

Badge Henry

Derailed

In a word. FRUSTRATED ...  The program that I have used to convert my MOD files from my video camera ... I can't find the setting.. I do a test video and think, there it is.. Then I do the whole run of videos and ... They look HORRIBLE...  Maybe horrible is too strong of a word.. I'm not a perfectionist, this video will be going to YouTube and be seen by nearly nobody unless I link it to facebook or here..  But I want it to look good, close to the original but it is tough to get.. The forth attempt to get it is  going (converting) as I write this.. Last night I was converting the second attempt at about midnight.. I thought I'd wait and get an idea how long it would take.. and ended up doing some things I had been meaning to do.. First..  Google Earth.. Just for shits & giggles I opened that program up because sometime last fall I met the Google Earth vehicle out by Sapps and thought, I wonder if they were running their camera that day..  Well strange thing.. I was on the four lane heading towards the McD out on "hamburger hill"  as everyone calls it, and there it was McD with the old roof on it.. Still no change yet.. Made the turn to go north on the street that goes by the shed and the Sapp parking lot and ... Suddenly it was like a time warp.. It went from whenever that was shot to whenever the day that I was there was shot.. There I was, the white Buick heading north.. I couldn't tell it was me (couldn't see my ugly self driving) and the plates were fuzzed out both front and back..  I can't remember which day it was. I want to say November or February but can't remember.. Anyway I came to the 'burg here to see if the town was different.. And sure enough the neighbors vehicles are what they are now.. The old pickup is in front, and the patch that I would eventually reseed wasn't done yet.. Not sure when they were through but I'm figuring it was almost when I did that patch.. The truck would be moved the Wednesday before Labor day .. I think that was the day.. It was about that time although the exact date is eluding me right now..  Then I take a look at my little brothers abode and the earlier GE showed his back yard without the fence.. Same as now except just like out at Mc.d there are some frames with the fence and some without.. Very strange to see, like a time warp thing..   It says May of 2012, with the old from 2008.. Not sure any of those dates are right..

Watched a few shows via Roku last night.. First Hell On Wheels.. A series from last year on AMC.. Looks to be a pretty good show.. Then because mom is talking about watching it I started watching Frasier.. I had started watching it shortly after getting the box at Christmas time but I was using the show to fall asleep by, so I restarted the series from show one.. I forgot how good that show is.. I used to watch it when it was actually on.. Video taping it and watching it back in "the day" as it were.. This show does make me do that LOL thing..  So currently I am watching the Bannen way on Crackle (series) and Coupling and Frasier and Hell On Wheels on the Netflix.. I check Cryptic channel daily.. That's a good channel for b grade movies and tv shows..  And.. oops the converter is done.. Entry complete..

Badge Henry

A year later

"A Year In The Life"  The name of the video that has me stumped as how to get it completed.. Three songs will be in the single video, a first for me.. More than one song is a new one for me although I did mess with a video with several parts music, it was never completed.. This one does have me stumped.. It seems like an easy concept, put all the pictures that I ave acquired via different means, and meld it into a video.. I had the song in my head today, the perfect song.. It fit, it was the perfect feel for what I wanted.. And then I thought of two more songs to try to edit.. Got them edited and put the video together with the songs and then.. The edited versions of the songs didn't feel right, so try again making them a little longer, the video is about fourteen minutes in length so I could have the songs edited longer. Then putting it together the main song didn't feel right.. And the video seemed to fall apart so.. I scrapped the idea for now.. More often than not sleeping with an idea in my head results in a better finished project/product.. So hopefully that will happen for this.. Hope so anyway..


I took the picture of the boarding house from the Silverton paper and started to mess with it.. Using photoshop I got the glowing edges effect to get what I wanted but then continued working with it for a couple dozen extra ideas.. Sometimes messing with a picture a few times will jumpstart the creative juices, and I think it might have for the pictures and music and the video as well..   Hope to start working on videos again sometime in the next few days..

Confusion over was that video from the Iderdown folder or Worlds collide folder.. it was from the worlds collide folder but I left the Iderdown as Iderdown  to show I had made a mistake..

Badge Henry

Fridge follies

It finally happened.. Some two plus years in the making... A loud crash and  some flurry of action and it was all over.. That's right. little miss speedo Skootr the cat while attempting to climb her tree had it crash out from under her.. Yeah it was bound to happen and the fact it hadn't before now is a testament to the engineering to keep it upright.. So much bailing wire and glue.. Well not so much bailing wire so much as a shitload of glue. I think it was about a year ago I took it apart and cleaned it up and then put it back together gluing each piece together hopping that we might prolong the life of the tree for a few weeks maybe a month or two.. I think it lasted close to a year but it was sure to fall.. Mom pointing out that the two cd spindles that I had taped together were starting to fail, and the upper level post was really nearly done.. There was no quick fix this time, the tree is on it's last pins.. I was hoping we would be here when it came down and luckily we were.. It fell towards the freezer and did no or very little damage to anything but the cats ego.. Now we look for a new tree.. Happy kitty??  Hope so..

Badge Henry

The speed of thought

So mom gets this thing in the mail a couple of weeks ago for free hearing screenings (checking) and she had been wanting to get her hearing checked by someone other than the twit Massey has as his audiologist..  And she wants to set it up and then asks me if I would like to have mine checked.. Moms hearing is way less than very good.. My hearing more than likely is not nearly as good as it once was, I can tell that.. For example, when someone calls on the house phone (land line as it were) mom has the volume turned up as high as it will go and if everything is perfect and the fans are off and volumes on the tv and computer are mute I can usually hear both sides of the conversation fairly clearly, but now not as much as I could a couple years ago.. Same as with the cell phones.. We were at the bank last week and mom was getting some money out of her account and had to straiten a situation out calling Freda on the cell.. I could tell it was her but couldn't make out the entire conversation, where two years ago I would have heard her side clearly..  I hated that I could hear the other side of the conversation but that's how it was.. Now I can kinda hear it, but not as well.. Depends on how tightly to the head the person is holding their phone.. I can't hear a pin drop but I used to could.. And I can still hear the high pitched squeaky shopping carts at all the stores.. Makes me want to carry a can of oil with me and stop the person and say I just gotta stop this shit NOW..  Your driving me INSANE.. That squeak is off the charts..  And yet finger nails on a chalk board have never bothered me.. Go figure right??  So tomorrow while the over all effect will be nil, mom won't be getting a hearing aide and I will see how deaf I am becoming, it could be seen as a waste of time but ...  Not really..

Badge Henry

Snow in the forecast??

Coming up on a year later, a year after the fact, and I keep thinking what I would have done differently.. There really wasn't much.. This year unlike last has been more weather tolerant.. Less nasty continuous heat this year.. Last year it was hot and you could count on it being hot every day from the first of June until well into September.. HOT.. But as the day comes along and I think of what I was doing to prepare for it, doing video test shots and trying this and that, the one thing I wished I would have done was scout the site out.. Ask someone to let me see what we were going to be dealing with.. I like to think on my feet and I think I did alright with the rehearsal as well as the wedding itself.  The reception was a complete different thing but it worked out quite well..  The day of the wedding I wished I could have gone down earlier than I did..  The after the wedding outside shots, the cruise around thing and then the second picture session I would have loved to have gotten, taken the camera by hand and gotten the cruise around part but I would have needed a driver.. The second picture session was really something I think should have been done.. The reception would have been nice to get their arrival but all in all not bad video.. For a video that might only be watched twice by those who were in it.. I watched it some two or three dozen times so when everyone got together and watched it on that labor day I really didn't need to see it yet again.. 

Best movies from the past few days   "Warm Bodies"  was really interesting, a yet 'nother zombie type of movie with a "but what if.." type of feel to it..  The girl with the dragon tattoo was a really good movie, just when you thought the objective was reached it continued..  Then Battleship which I thought was going to be corny at best wasn't terrible at all.   The movie that caught me by surprise was the movie Vile.. Vile it was, and it was one of those where I pretty much knew how it was going to end and who in that room was the "bad guys"..   And while it was a "scary" movie I couldn't help but break out in laughter.. Trying too hard to be scary I guess  you know sometimes movies try to be scary and end up being unintentionally funny..  To those with a twisted mind..

Badge Henry

Fritter away

Yesterday we were at walmart and as we round the corner there is a site, sign of the times.. They are getting their back to school stuff out.. Man I hated school, or at least the going back part.. Once we got back in the rhythm of it it was ok, but getting the first opening day done.. Talk about your kicking and screaming moment although not literal, it was close.

So we get to the McD yesterday and as I'm letting mom out of the car I see the front of the paper and it has a picture of what I thought might be an artists rendering of the new school.. We get home and it turns out to be the new hospital.. The first line in the second column is the first joke I read.. ".. The new facility will be more patient friendly"..  In the previous line they said they are getting three new doctors.. That's really good, what are they going to do with the dpishit league they have right now??  Put them out to stud??  Shoot them??  

Badge Henry

(P.S.  Well I finally went and done it.. I set the final entries for all three blogs.. The dates aren't set in stone but in case something happens to me the date the final entries are set is for here and I.I. is October 3 of this year.. For PNOP the final entry is set for October 3 of next year with the final final entry  being set for November 3rd.. The Y.M.B. entry is that date.. Hopefully nothing happens and we all get out of this alive, but you what they say.. Nobody gets out of life alive.. Just the way it is.. )

The end of guessing..

To start the growing season every year I don't use a timer for the plants.. And it is good because not everything needs  a boatload of water that early.. A week ago I turned the water on and went and moved the sprinklers to the front, and went about my evening events (watching tv)  came down and thought I could hear the water running.. Turns out yes indeed it was running.. So forty five minutes of what is usually maybe ten minutes needed..  Oh well..  Then last night happened.. I did the same thing, set the water to go while I moved the sprinkler to the front, set it for the sequence this morning and went in and did my evening stuff.. This time I didn't hear the water running and this morning mom says, the ramp sure is wet.. Well it did just rain but something clicked in my head.. DID I LEAVE THE   WATER ON ALL NIGHT???  Yes I did.  SHEEEUT!!!  So I got the timer out and hooked up.. No more mistakes dammit.. Thing is the tomatoes didn't need watering, they got watered during the watering of the lawn.. I also had filled the Earth box reservoir right up full, so they all gor more than they ever needed last night plus a little rain.. Goodie..

The saga of as the McD turns.. There are new owners of the McD there in town.. Watching the place go downhill the way it has is just astonishing.. For one thing  think their starting wage is a dime or so above minimum  and most everyone had to start there after making what they were.. They all got their pay cut.. The old GM moved back to where he was originally from to work for the guy he started with forever ago.. The new GM is clueless.. This past weekend he fired five people so that might have been a third of his work force.. Guess what dude, you are about a month away from losing your school age work force..   It's interesting to see how things are out there.. You get the feeling that the new owners don't care about their workers, besides the cut in pay they cut the breaks to one half an hour break and got rid of vacation pay..  What's next, they have to pay for their own food out there?? 

Looked at the video I shot from Sunday.. This is gonna be tough editing down..  It was before but now as the girls get older I can't see the process getting easier.. I look at these girls and think there is just no way I am related to them.. Any of the girls in the family.. Just blows me away.. I was adopted, this is proof..

Badge Henry

Heat gettin' old..

How long will the Phudge Nuts site be the way it is??   I've decided to keep it going as an everyday entry thing at least until the 10,000 view mark.. Or until the end of the year, probably well into 2014 as well.. But after that it might go less regular entries..  But PNOP will continue at least until the end of next year, the Rhino Rock box entries will take until next March (I think) and then there are a few more box sets I'm going to put up.. The first is the Gold and Platinum set that will take up all or most of next summer.. But the Sunday music entries will nearly stop after that, and will be moved to the infinite improbability site, and then not be every Sunday but rather every whenever I think to do a music entry such as it is now with my videos...

When I look at the forecast in the weather I look at the overnight temperature anymore.. That determines how hot it might be the next day.. A starting temperature of lower 60's is more of a mid nineties day.. Upper sixties to around 70 degree starting temp means a day from hell heat more likely to be upper nineties to triple digit heat..   Last night was the closest I've come to digging out the big fan.. So close to getting it out and starting it.. I'd like to see if I could weather the storm on these two fans.. The two I am using are those twin fans that are designed more for exhaust and moving air when a central air system doesn't have ducts in distant rooms.. Same as with those box AC units although oscillating fans would do as well.. When you bring air from outside in there has to be an exhaust port for air to go out otherwise pressure builds up and the air conditioner has to work twice as hard to get air in..  Same as with a evaporative cooler.. Those were fun..

I have like five extra towns set on my weather app on the Roku.. Moab Ut, Death Valley Ca., Silverton Co., Glenwood Springs Co., and Richfield Ut.,   as well as the home burg of Podunk Ne., or as I have set on twitter Point of Entry.. 

How about them movies??  I watched two last night, first was Olympus Has Fallen via Roku Justin.tv channel.. This was a little hard to watch, it is a bootleg MKV file but I got hooked as the planes flew in and started to take the whitehouse..   The second was "The Perks Of Being A Wallflower".. This might be my favorite movie, or have that feeling to me.. It reminded me so much of when I went to school, how I was from freshman year through to graduation.. It did focus on the kid being a freshman and through pure luck getting to fit in with the nobody crowd.. Just like me..   Very good movie.. 

Badge Henry

So hot and yet

The misunderstanding.. Here we go..  That sounds ominous and shouldn't be.. Check it out.. The other day I'm playing a game of Scrabble on the computer, I have it set on the forth level or veteran level.. That was a huge leap for me a year or so ago because up until then I was playing the level just under that and being bored, I needed a challenge so up the level.. I play it still as timed at 45 seconds per turn and so there is a sense of urgency to get a word played, however it isn't that big of a deal once you get used to it.. On the game I played Tuesday night everything was going alright, I was down by maybe fifty points or there about and most people would freak out about being down by very much but I had some premium tiles and so scoring big was more than likely going to happen.. And there it was, the triple word score space was just wanting me to play with the J and the right combination of letters, I was about to cut into that lead.. and then the unexpected happened.. This has never happened while playing any version of Scrabble.. I was blocked from playing a letter on that space.. Well not entirely true, I could play something there but every time I put the tile there it showed as an A... Every tile I played was an A there.. Even in subsequent turns.. What's going on here?? The clock started to beep at the ten second countdown as per usual but I couldn't get the "PLAY" link to work.. The buzzer sounded, I got all my tiles back and then the truly odd thing happened.. My score started to count backwards..   And when it hit zero it added the negative symbol and so now it counted backwards to negative 9999  so it read -9999 before I got my next score.. This was odd beyond belief.. So instead of the program stating the obvious and shutting down like it normally does, it counted backwards.. Final score of the game was the computer score around the usual three hundred mark.. My score was -9089 or there abouts..  Worst loss ever..

So I use this twin fan that they have out there, and have used it since the start of the hot season this year.. Normally I am the first to grab the big three blade monster fan to cool things off quicker.. This year I broke out my old twin fan. This fan hasn't been used since the days of the old swamp cooler days when I used it to exhaust the air after it got wet.. This fan worked so I set it to be used and thought I'd use it until it got to be unbearable at night.. In other words TOO FREAKIN HOT..  And there have been a few times I thought about getting the big fan out but.. It cooled off.. And has cooled off well at night. So much so that I wussed out and put a second blanket on.. Wow the first of July and I have to have a second blanket?? Where am I Silverton??  Nope still in Podunk Nebraska population 3000 (prarrie dogs that is)..   Harvest usually starts by the 4th of July.. Not this year, in fact they say maybe next week.. Test cutting by next week..  Last year they were done by the tenth, this year they might get started then..

Badge Henry

Welcome to you

 For those who have never been to the Memorial Gardens in Sidney.. You're missing a treat.. The whole thing is quite an amazing thing to see.. And just quite nice..

 Walk paths around the park..

 Flowers everywhere..

 Angel of hope..

 Big center gazebo where the swimming pool used to be way back.. way back.. way.. anyway ..

 Pond in the park..

The wind blown gazebo from several years ago has not been replaced yet.. It wasn't big, it was just a cool little gazebo..

Badge Henry