State Fair (The Story)

Posted on by Jordan

Well, somehow the entire week got away from me before I sat down to write down some of what we saw at the fair…

Better late than never I hope!

Heather, a friend of hers and I went to the state fair over the weekend.

The fair here is a big deal! I haven’t ever lived in the city that hosts a state fair before, so maybe some of that is normal. When I say “a big deal” I mostly mean that the majority of the people I talk to have plans to at least visit the fair. Often those people speak highly of the fair, again not something I typically saw a lot of in other cities. (I guess I have really only lived in 3 cities, despite my habit of frequent moves) The website for the fair promised 57 different foods on a stick, among other attractions. I didn’t really dig into the website just figured people were positive on it, I would just show up and be amazed.

We set out for the fair late afternoon Saturday, with only a vague idea where the fairgrounds even were. Once we started seeing people hawking their lawns as parking we figured we should find something and start walking, eventually settling on the local VFW chapter area, selling their lot at a slight discount to the average yard (three dollars instead of five!) They made their money back by selling us all water on our way out of the parking lot, but it was warm, and they promised it was cheaper than on the fairgrounds (turns out this wasn’t strictly speaking true, but at least they weren’t over-charging)

Another ten dollars a head got us onto the grounds, and we were at the Iowa State Fair! First up… empty lots, and some combines. I was trying to let the ladies guide our trip, but those combines looked pretty cool. I guess they came up with some neat features in the (20?) years that have passed after the manufacturing of the combine I last had a chance to really look at the internal workings of.

We then headed to a large building that had tiles all around it vaguely hinting at quilting or crafts of some sort. Once inside, we found out it was an arena, and something having to do with horses was currently in progress. There weren’t any signs, and the guy wanted us to buy a ticket or leave so we left, not sure what we missed.

Then we found our way into the adjacent barns, full of the horses not currently participating in the unknown event. I kind of forgot how big horses can be! I also started to realize how much domesticated animal knowledge I had that was new to Heather. We then headed over to a cattle barn, apparently full of dairy cattle. I don’t know if it was heat stress, or something about dairy cows, but practically every cow in that barn had visible ribs and extreme hip-points. I think it kind of set off my subconscious “there is plague and pestilence here, get out!” warnings… so I was glad to leave that barn, but we got to see lots of cows, and again I found I knew the answers to more questions than I would have guessed.

(update, I just did a quick search for “dairy cow” pictures, apparently they all look like they are starving… weird)

We then found our way into another arena, this one free, featuring a two-horse-team pulling competition. I have no idea how it really worked, but  it was kind of fun to watch! Eventually that got old though, so we headed out in search of new things.

We found the 4H steer auction. I have vague memories of going to a stock-auction with my dad when I was a kid. It was kind of fun to see one again. It was also another first for Heather, and technically a first for me as I hadn’t seen an auction where they did it one bovine at a time before. As with the team-pulling the novelty wore off quickly, and it wasn’t like we were planning on buying beef-on-the-hoof.

Somewhere in transition to the 4H craft barn I found an ice cream cone, and we walked past the Iowa Pork booth, featuring the one and only “pork chop on a stick” however the line for that was probably 75 people long. I figured there would be other exciting “on a stick options later”

After the craft barn, full of nice but not really noteworthy fruit, vegetables, flowers, and craft type things, we headed to a nursery barn. The barn featured young examples of most of your stereotypical farmyard animals. To be honest, my thoughts when I walked in were basically “eh, I have seen this before” but I figured it would be fun for the rest of our little group. They had video playing of a live sheep birth, not the most photogenic thing you can imagine. I think it kind of shocked Heather. I don’t know if it was the video or just the fact that we had been browsing a lot of barnyard animals, but we didn’t give that venue much coverage, and then headed out again.

We stopped to get a Falafel for our guest in the main vendor area, then headed over to the non 4H food building to see if we could locate some winning sticky-buns a woman from church had entered. We saw a lot of tasty looking food, but the sticky-bun entries were no longer on display.  A little more wonder-by sight seeing and it was starting to get late. I realized I hadn’t actually tried any foods on a stick, so we headed back to the main food vending strip, to see what we could find.

I have no idea where the exotic options were, maybe I was just being overwhelmed by choices and didn’t notice them, but it appeared that everybody in the area we were in only sold corn-dogs as their “on a stick” option. I didn’t really want a corn-dog so I searched a little and eventually settled on cotton candy. Not really exotic, but it was on a stick, and I thought it sounded good. For the record I don’t really like cotton candy… I don’t know if that happened because I haven’t had it for so long, or if I didn’t like it that much before and just forgot.

After our last pass of the food, we headed back to the car, feeling like we saw at least a good swath of the fair.

-Jordan

P.S. Sorry for the mammoth post, I just wasn’t sure this was interesting enough to warrant splitting into several posts.

Laptop Problems

Posted on by Jordan

A few days ago, Heather’s laptop suddenly didn’t have a wireless ethernet adapter.

That was rather interesting,  mostly because the adapter is built-in so I didn’t expect it to go missing. A few minutes of tweaking and poking around convinced me that this really was happening, so I got online to see what I could find.

Turns out, this is a known issue with that model laptop. For reasons unknown to me, Hewlett-Packard decided that starting in 2010, even though this is caused by a known defect, they won’t fix it for free. If this would have happened a year ago, we would perhaps have been better off.  Somehow heat causes damage to the motherboard, eventually causing the wireless to die. My research indicates this damage will continue to spread across the motherboard eventually killing the sound and video as well.

The Hewlett-Packard tech on the phone helpfully offered to repair the three-year-old laptop for $450… quite a bit more than the laptop is worth. When I pointed that out, he managed to find a $200 discount  laying around somewhere. I was actually starting to think that maybe the repair would be such a bad option, even being three years old, it still surfs the internet without any problems. Then he informed me that the motherboard replacement came with a complementary drive-wipe.

Let me explain something here… there is ZERO reason for that! I suppose someone in their tech support staff realized that, without some preventive maintenance, computers start to get slower over time just to accumulated stuff. Our laptop does not have that problem. And speaking as a member of the technical support community (in a loose sense) I would rather people retained all their data instead of saying “whoa, this computer is so much faster after HP worked on it!” It makes me so sad whenever I hear people talk about loosing thousands of pictures thanks to the tech support people just nuking their machine and starting over. … and I better stop on that tangent or I will turn this into a 2000 word rant…

All of that being said, we can’t really live with the laptop being a wired-only model, because we already know its just a matter of time before it dies.

I have started looking into new laptops, and thought I should share this little chart. Notice who is on the “fail” end of the graph? Yeah… I wasn’t too happy with HP going into this process, and then seeing that (technically again, it was published in November) I realized there might be a reason for it.

The downside is that the $250 repair cost is not going to buy a one-to-one replacement for that behemoth of a laptop. All of my frugal living enthusiasm kind of points to doing the repair anyway. I am honestly still torn about that. The thing is, a three-year-old laptop is knocking on deaths door anyway, so patching it up isn’t a great use of money. The batter life is down to maybe 20 minutes unplugged, and will only continue to decay I am sure. That alone kind of makes the wireless connection issue silly… you have to keep it plugged into the wall just to use it with our without a wireless connection.

Stay tuned, it is only a matter of time before some sort of replacement is selected. (and it will be posted here, because… really I don’t always have that much to talk about)

-Jordan

Quck Book Review, And Other Weekend Notes

Posted on by Jordan

I finished “Pandora’s Star” and it’s sequel finally!

I thought a lot about how I would sum them up. I think my feelings are that it was good, but after plowing through a little over 2000 pages I wanted great! I feel a little unhappy with the author for making me plow through that much book for something that didn’t end up being amazing. I suppose maybe there are people who enjoy having a more substantial read, with well fleshed out supporting characters and tons of trivial sub-plots, but I just didn’t feel like the pay off was there.

If you are ever in the mood for an absolutely massive space-opera style read, I can loan them to you 🙂

Other news this week…

We actually made corn! I don’t know how the entire month of July slipped past without us stopping at a local stand to pickup some fresh corn, but I somehow it happened.

I am forming plans to get some tomatoes from the same stands and make BLTs, but Heather’s aversion to the smell of cooking bacon has been somewhat compounded by a tour of a hog packing plant. Not the most uplifting side of our food production chain I am afraid. The tomatoes should be in season for at least a month, so hopefully there is time for some of the traumatic memories to be repressed or something 🙂

-Jordan

My Brain Is Full!

Posted on by Jordan

Well, maybe backlogged is a better word.

And actually, I feel like I am starting to catch back up now, but I felt pretty overloaded earlier this week… Might have had something to do with my taking so long to get this post up.

I spent the past weekend at the “No Fluff Just Stuff” conference. It was really good, but doing ten 90 minute sessions in a weekend left me feeling a little numb. The sessions were without a doubt non-fluffy. I learned a lot, but it was probably more than I could really absorb.

The last session I went to “Hacking your brain for fun and profit” while non-technical has been the easiest to start using. It covered ways to make yourself smarter/more productive. First up: getting more sleep. I don’t know if I can keep it up, but I really felt like I should try harder to stay on top of that one. The next point I tried to apply was avoiding distractions at work. I now have all my “new e-mail” sounds turned off, instant messenger can’t make noise ether, and my toolbar is set to auto hide. After nearly a week of that, I think I can tell that it is easier to focus on a task.

As sort of a byproduct of that, I found that Eclipse seems to prevent the taskbar from popping back up like it should sometimes, leading me to look into ways to improve task-switching. I hear there have been some great improvements in operating systems over the past… eight years or so, but my place of employ is still using XP so most of the cool things I initially found weren’t going to work.

Eventually I found out Microsoft labs had a product “Alt-Tab Replacement” in their Power Toys for Windows XP collection. It isn’t perfect, but it improved my situation fairly drastically.

And, that little tip is probably only useful to me… but hey the subscription was cheap right? 🙂

A (nearly) free weekend coming up, can’t wait to see what Heather and I end up filling it with!

-Jordan

Review: The Millionaire Next Door

Posted on by Jordan

As I mentioned in my initial multi-book review from summer vacation, I really liked this book.

What has started to become apparent to me as I have tried to tell people about it, is that they seem to start out expecting that I read some book about how to become a millionaire, or in some way convinced myself that I found the secret to getting rich.

That is in no way the case! This book is basically just a compilation of facts about people who have a net worth of over one million dollars. The authors provide some commentary, trying to explain why they think trends appeared, and in some cases offer advice.

If I were going to give a one sentence summary it would go like this: “This is the book to read once you are doing the Dave Ramsey thing, and want to start thinking about what the rest of your life looks like”

Again, I want to stress that this isn’t about “getting rich”!!

Basically what you start to realize is that the people who actually accumulate wealth are the people who don’t spend it! Living below their means, and working hard, are  two of the hallmarks of the people this book looked at. In no way do you leave with the impression that doing a few things will let you live in a huge house and have all the toys your heart desires. They are quite clear that most of the people living that way have no hope of sustaining it, ether spending everything they make, or being heavily subsidized by a parent or grandparent.

Like a lot of what you get from Dave Ramsey, nothing in the book is really outside of common sense, but it’s easy to get blinded by day to day life. I found this book so exciting to read, as just an encouragement that the plan Heather and I are pursuing really is where we want to be.

Probably the single biggest point thing I got out of the book, as far as things I can use today, was their information about houses and behavior. Basically, if you live in a “high-consumption” neighborhood, you will spend like the people around you. Apparently it is really hard to live conservatively when surrounded by people who aren’t. Considering there aren’t vast enclaves of budget  conscious people in most cities, the authors  recommended simply living in a house that cost no more than double your annual household income. Last year when Heather and I were looking for houses, I can assure you that the banks will be happy to loan you a lot more than that!

I cannot recommend this book enough if you are looking for encouragement to stick with a budget, or just sticking with a lifestyle that doesn’t have as many toys as the people around you. Outside of that I thought it was just interesting to have my perceptions rocked as to who in this nation actually has wealth as opposed to putting on a show of wealth.

-Jordan

Deep Thoughts… Or Something

Posted on by Jordan

Over the weekend, Heather and I drove out to western Nebraska for a wedding.

But before that, let me setup my frame of mind…

First I saw this video:

And then, the Internet being what it is, the remix video:

So, back to my drive out west. The song was kind of stuck in my head, and at the same time I was driving into an awe inspiring lightning show. I mean a really incredible storm! Clearly I all to easily forget how intense a storm can be.  I was really enjoying the lightning show, and started thinking about the guy in the video.

Now, I am afraid he may have been under the effects of some mind-altering chemicals at the time of that filming, but I don’t think that means he was wrong really. Rainbows, storms, all the other things you see outside… they are so amazing and I kind of take them for granted too often.

I actually have started investigating some ways to force myself to get outside, and outside of city limits, but I won’t post any details until I actually get something going. For now lets just leave it at enjoying the amazing show weather patterns in the Midwest can produce, and in awe of the splendor God has built around us.

-Jordan

Book Reviews

Posted on by Jordan

As I mentioned in the vacation summary post, I read quite a few books that week.

I thought I could throw up some quick thoughts about them here.

The Lost Fleet Series:

The basic hook in these books remains the complications of communication over solar system sized distances, given the painfully slow speed of light. The rest of the story was ok, but probably wouldn’t have held my attention. It helps that the books are an easy read, of the six books in this saga, I read two of them in a single day (one day per book). Strong points of these books: deals with religion without being disrespectful. The author did invent a faith that is very much not along the lines of Judeo–Christian, but sci-fi books gain points with me just for treating faith with some respect. Another strong point is the author keeping the book inside a PG-13 rating. Some of the other books didn’t and I just don’t see a reason for that. In short, the books are a fun read, but nothing too deep.

The Millionaire Next Door:

This book was amazing! I plan to devote an entire post to it later. The quick summary: “If you want to get excited about saving and living a thrifty lifestyle, read this book!” The book is mostly just detailing things the authors have discovered from years of doing marketing research, but I found it really really interesting, and motivating.

Altered Carbon:

The book boils down to a kind of private-eye story, that incorporates a lot of “way out there” science fiction elements. The story had lots of conspiracy, and suspense… kept me pushing to finish for sure. I keep trying to cut the author some slack for just wanting to have a conflict between religion, and tradition against technology, but I felt like the book really beat up on the Catholic faith more than necessary. I know that the kinds of things they were doing in the book would cause some real conflicts for people and churches, namely the ability to move your contentiousness to another body, more or less at-will. It made for an interesting problem to wrestle with, but given how many other things were made up, I don’t see the point in calling out an existing church. That wasn’t a major element of the book it just annoyed me. I should also include a warning that the language is course, and the book includes both sex and torture scenes that were a little more graphic than I prefer to read. Despite all my complaints, I do plan to pick up the sequel to this eventually.

Black Hawk Down:

The book on which the movie is based. As you might expect, it goes into much more detail about the battle depicted in the movie. I was really shocked at how inexperienced the Rangers were in this book. A year or so ago, I read the book “The Unforgiving Minute” that goes into detail about one man’s path through West Point, Ranger school and then on to Afghanistan. What that book tried to explain, and Black Hawk Down did a better job of explaining, is that, as hard and good as the training provided to the army’s best is, nothing actually prepares you to get shot at. We now have 50 years of practice training special forces, and it still hasn’t changed the fact that “green” troops are going to make a lot of mistakes in their first battle.

The second thing that really stood out to me in the book is how vastly different the culture of Somalia is from ours. The book is full of examples of women and children gladly acting as shields for the tribal fighters. Pregnant women running through gunfire to bring more ammo up to the fighters in cover. Frankly the behavior seemed more alien than some of the stuff I was reading in my sci-fi books. I haven’t nailed down what I think about that, or how a we deal with that without going places nobody wants to be… I probably won’t write whatever conclusions I come up with here…

I thought it was a great book, and I guess I would say if you could handle the violence levels in the movie, and you want to spend some time thinking about the actual conflict, you should check it out.

-Jordan

About That Bike Ride

Posted on by Jordan

Well…

We did make it back, but there were consequences:

We didn’t get left as early as I had hoped, maybe hit the trail by 10:30. The path I was planning to take, also known as the actual bike path, was closed about half way down town due to the flooding that has been plaguing Des Moines for the past few weeks. Our detour involved a killer hill, but we eventually found our way to Grand, that has a straight shot to down town.

The farmers market was starting to wind down by the time we made it there. Lucky for us Heather’s favorite stand still had a few of the whole wheat croissants she loves! We bought some sandwiches to finish out our lunch, and headed for some shade to relax for a while. At that point we were starting to feel like we had gotten some exercise, but the ride home didn’t sound so bad. I think we were both starting to look a little pink, but each chose denial rather than admitting that two fair skinned adults headed into a day out in the sun without stopping to put on sunscreen.

After lunch we headed for home. As it turns out, the 11 miles we rode in were all still there waiting for us on the way home. Also, that gentile breeze we had been enjoying was blowing into our faces now. I may be mistaken, but I think there is a noticeable climb from the banks of the river to our apartment too. The sun started to feel hotter too, and given that it was now about 1:30pm, it may actually have been hotter. What I am trying to say is that the ride home was no fun! It took us nearly two hours to get all the way back to the apartment. Heather and I are starting to think that her co-workers who described this as “an easy ride” may be trying to get rid of her.

Once home, we were spent. Our plans for the afternoon went from wildly ambitious to lying under the fan and drinking water. As we reflected on the ride, we realized that this does highlight a pattern we seem to be establishing. We don’t go on long walks, so we did a half-marathon, we don’t go on long bike rides, so we decided to ride the entire way across Des Moines. You would think we would be learning about training, and working up to things, but so far no. 🙂

-Jordan

We didn’t get left as early as I had hoped, maybe hit the trail by 10:30. The path I was planning to take, also known as the actual bike path, was closed about half way down town due to the flooding that has been plaguing Des Moines for the past few weeks. Our detour involved a killer hill, but we eventually found our way to Grand, that has a straight shot to down town.

The farmers market was starting to wind down by the time we made it there. Lucky for us Heather’s favorite stand still had a few of the whole wheat croissants she loves! We bought some sandwiches to finish out our lunch, and headed for some shade to relax for a while. At that point we were starting to feel like we had gotten some exercise, but the ride home didn’t sound so bad. I think we were both starting to look a little pink, but each chose denial rather than admitting that two fair skinned adults headed into a day out in the sun without stopping to put on sunscreen.

After lunch we headed for home. As it turns out, the 11 miles we rode in were all still there waiting for us on the way home. Also, that gentile breeze we had been enjoying was blowing into our faces now. I may be mistaken, but I think there is a noticeable climb from the banks of the river to our apartment too. The sun started to feel hotter too, and given that it was now about 1:30pm, it may actually have been hotter. What I am trying to say is that the ride home was no fun! It took us nearly two hours to get all the way back to the apartment. Heather and I are starting to think that her co-workers who described this as “an easy ride” may be trying to get rid of her.

Once home, we were spent. Our plans for the afternoon went from wildly ambitious to lying under the fan and drinking water. As we reflected on the ride, we realized that this does highlight a pattern we seem to be establishing. We don’t go on long walks, so we did a half-marathon, we don’t go on long bike rides, so we decided to ride the entire way across Des Moines. You would think we would be learning about training, and working up to things, but so far no. 🙂

-Jordan

A Wedding, Fireworks, And Demolition

Posted on by Jordan

It has been a while hasn’t it?

What have Heather and I been up to?

Well, we went to her cousin Kiley’s wedding. Perhaps most notable in the fact that it will probably be the last wedding ever to hold it’s reception at Dana College. The news of the college going into bankruptcy came out a few day before the wedding, but somehow arrangements were made to allow the reception to proceed as planned.

Outside of that excitement, it was really nice wedding… I just don’t feel like I know what to say about it. Heather has a big family, and the majority of them came for the wedding. I got to meet a few family members for the first time while I was there! I am beginning to realize that easily my favorite aspect of weddings is the opportunity to interact with the other guests. Everyone has such tight schedules that chances to see some friends or family may only come up at major events like weddings. Not to discount seeing the bride and groom, but if my wedding is anything to go by, so much gets packed into those few hours, it’s all a blur. A warm fuzzy blur, but still a blur.

After the wedding, and after staying up far too late talking to family at the farm in Blair, Heather and I drove to Kearney to see my side of the family. Quite a few of my cousins were there, and they all brought fireworks! To be honest I was a little disappointed that things worked out this year such that Heather and I were unable to attend a professional fireworks show. I am not sure getting to supervise a handful of my younger cousins as they set off an arsenal of patriotic spirit is a full consolation, but it’s something. We have managed a perfect safety record so far, although towards the end of the “show” a lot of effort was put into trying to simultaneously launch two and three things at once. I was sure  that would eventually lead to problems, but we ran out of fireworks before we ran out of luck I guess. 🙂

Moving on to this weekend (still in progress) Heather and I finished work Friday without any special plans for the evening. We had attempted to set something up with a few couples from church, but no concrete plans ever finalized. When we got home, Heather had an e-mail from another couple we know through church, inviting us to come help them demo the house they just bought. Maybe your thinking, “hey, that doesn’t sound like a great way to spend a Friday night” well, maybe you don’t live in an apartment and type on a computer for a living? I am not sure I would want to do that every night, but I truly enjoyed getting to swing a hammer for a few hours! Beyond that factor, it is just nice to feel like we have some friends we can hang out with here in town.

Looking to the future, Heather and I plan to ride our bikes all the way down town this morning to visit the farmers market. It will easily be our longest ride this summer, although not long by most bike enthusiasts standards I suppose. We have discovered that Des Moines seems to have spent a significant amount developing an impressive trail network throughout the metro area, but they have not spent much putting together an online map for said trails. A few low-res .gif files are they best they have to offer, and what they have are years out of date. The adventure may end up being if we can find the trail everyone tells us we should have seen on our last ride.

-Jordan