i’ve been keeping pretty busy with work and life (more life than work lately, but i prefer it that way. even if the life shit isn’t all that great).

i haven’t been able to get out with my new nikon d5000 as much as i’d like, which is disappointing. i’m working on that though. i have been taking a beginners class from cord camera which is teaching me some stuff about my camera that i didn’t figure out on my own. hell, i even read the manual for the goddamn thing (and so far 2 photography books as well). i’m looking forward to the warm weather so hopefully i can get out and take some pictures. i’m not too comfortable taking it out into the snow and slush just yet.

here’s the new dillinger escape plan song/video. shit is \m/ as fuck

(yes i preordered their album and yes i opted for the $80 box set b/c i am a huge nerd)

while i’m on music, east of the wall (which used to be called the postman syndrome) is putting out what would have been the 2nd postman album. the only catch is that they need 100 people to preorder it so they can do a proper release, otherwise it’ll just be an itunes only type thing. so if you like good bands that are doing it diy then go over there to their site and preorder the shit. i promise you won’t be disappointed, especially if you like some weird-kind-of-mathy-metal music.

so that’s it for now i guess.

as far as a relaxing vacation, i wouldn’t say it was that.  traveling overseas requires a lot of time and then you have to adjust to the time change.  on the way back it is the same thing.  this trip was a bit more tiring since i was meeting all of K’s family for the first time, and they had things planned for us pretty much every day we were there.  it wasn’t like we could just sit around one day and relax if we wanted too.  most of the time there were dinners to go to, visiting to do with her family, places to go, etc.

not that i’m complaining.  it was great to have free places to stay and food to eat almost every day.  outside of paying to get there, we didn’t have to spend very much of our own money.  so, all in all i wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.

we left columbus around 1pm on monday and arrived in gatwick airport, south of london at 7am on tuesday.  we had to transfer planes in philly (both on the way there and on the way back).  after we landed in london it was about 3 or 3.5 hours on a few trains to get to the town where K’s cousin lives (just outside sleaford).  we decided the best way to get on the time over there would be to stay up all day and then go to bed that night.  usually i can get a few hours sleep on the 8 hour plane ride over to europe, but this time i couldn’t.  so by the time we went to bed tuesday night i’d been up for about 36 hours.  i couldnt’ remember the last time i’d been up for that many hours straight.  in the end it worked out well though because the next morning we were pretty much on “england time”.

we spent the day on wednesday in london.  i’d been there the last time i traveled to europe, but only for a couple hours between trains.  it was nice to get to walk around some and spend a day there.  we saw st. paul’s cathedral (didn’t go inside though, it was £11 to get in!) and walked around the financial district.  we also walked over the millenium bridge which was cool.  we spent a bit of time walking along the thames and ate in a pretty decent pub on the river.  we walked down to big ben and the parliament building and took the train back from waterloo station.  all in all it was a pretty good sightseeing day.

we flew from heathrow to the airport in oslo where K’s uncle picked us up and drove us down to halden.  halden is the town where K’s mom grew up, and is where her grandmother and aunt and uncle live.  it sits on a river that leads down to the southernmost fjord in norway.  halden is also the border defense town between norway and sweden.  there is a very cool fortress there called fredriksten that we walked up to and checked out.  the history of the fortress is pretty interesting.  since it sits on the mountain looking over the city it also offers some very good views.

norway on the whole is pretty expensive.  the conversion from norwegian crowns to american dollars is to divide by something like 6.5 or 7.  so something that costs 65 crowns is about $10.  at first it is kind of hard to wrap your head around that.  you see something that is like 150 crowns and think “oh my god that is expensive!” but then when you divide it out it’s only like $23.  of course, everything there really is more expensive, so when you are paying like $10 for a glass of beer you really do realize how much more expensive things are.

a couple days before we hiked up to the fortress i took a boat ride with K’s uncle and a few of her other relatives down the fjord to an island where there was a viking burial site.  the burial site is basically a pile of rocks about 6′ or 7′ high.  one the way up to the burial mound there is a carving in the stone of a circle.  it looks like someone ran their finger around and around to make a groove in the rock.  they are not sure what it means, or if it was unfinished or what.  standing on top of the mound was an interesting feeling.  just thinking about the thousands of stones there and how they all had to be carried by hand and placed in the pile hundreds of years ago was weird.  there are native american burial mounds in ohio too, but i’ve never seen those.  now that i have seen this viking burial site, i think i will definately have to check out the native ones here.

the flight back home was pretty uneventful.  we did have our connecting flight from philadelphia back to columbus canceled, so we ended up having to stay at the philly airport for a few more hours.  i was very ready to be home by then, so it was kind of frustrating that we had to sit around and wait that much longer, but in the end it wasn’t that big of a deal.  we were back in our own house by 2am saturday morning.

i’m definately looking forward to going back again someday!

all of the pictures from our trip can be seen here

that said, i’m really looking forward to spending some actual time in another country.  unfortunately we only have 2 days in london, but that’s better than the last time i was there where i only spent about 2 hours in the city, between a train over from bristol (where we flew in to) and a train through the chunnel to paris (where our first “real” stop on the vacation was).

K has family in both london and norway, so we won’t be paying anything to stay over there.  her family also owns a condo in barcelona that we’ll have to visit sometime too.  it’s totally awesome having a gf that has family in europe i’ve decided.

preparing to travel isn’t all that stressful to me.  K finds it exhausting and she gets pretty wound up before we’re even ready to go.  she’s already starting to freak out a bit about the few tasks we have to get done here before we go (having mail stopped, getting someone to come by and water our plants, exchanging some currency, etc).  i find that i get more calm as the depature date approaches.  i try to keep her grounded and focused though, so i guess we make a good team that way.  her seriousness in the planning also helps to balance out my seat-of-the-pants-ness.

marek is going to stay with my p and m, which is also going to save us a good bit of $$.  because he is so large, if we board him he requires his own “kennel run” which basically means he gets a little enclosed yard and crate to sleep in.  this runs about $125 per night at the vets where we board him, so that alone would almsot double the cost for us.  i figure this is the one and only time my mom and dad will be willing to watch him, so what better time than when it’s most expensive?  next time we’ll have to leave him at a friend’s house (they already volunteered and i told them we have a wedding in alabama this winter so they’ll def be keeping him then)

this time around we’re going to take our phones with us.  this is nice becuase last time i made, i think, 2 calls home and they cost me almost $100.  we have iphones (on at&t of course) which is good because they actually work over there.  of course it sucks because we have to pay international roaming charges.  i’m sure i won’t be talking on the phone very much, but it will be nice to be able to have someone call me if necessary and to call back home without having to use my credit card or one of those ripoff international calling cards.  but, that said, we cannot use any data over there as that is where they really rape you.  the guy at the at&t store said under no circumstances should we use data, as the rates are set by the carriers over there, and some of them are like $1/MB (YIKES!)

lamely, i think one of the things i look forward to is deciding what clothes i’m going to take and packing it all up.  i should probably check the expiration on my man card and make sure it’s still good… oh, and reading.  for some reason i always love to read on trips.  i think i read 3 books last time i was in europe (but we did have a lot of train time to read in.  doubt i’ll get that much reading done this time around)

so anyways, i guess i’ve rambled on enough for now.  if any of you have been to london or SE norway (we’re staying in a town called halden) and you have any suggestions on stuff to do/see please let me know.

wish me luck!

this time i didn’t have any such notions of being the center of attention so i just wore a really cool t-shirt i got at comfest from vivisect apparel of ohio with a bunch of math lines drawn on it.  (they don’t seem to have the design on their website or etsy store, so you’ll just have to take my word for it when i say it’s really fucking cool.  of course, i like just about anything with ohio on it, so maybe i’m slightly biased).

family reunions aren’t something that happen very often in my family.  this one was mostly for my dad’s cousins (with a different last name than ours) so i really didn’t know anyone there outside of my immediate family and my aunt/uncle.  i’m generally not that outgoing at events like this, and apparently no one else in the family is either, as i ended up sitting at a table with everyone i knew for most of the afternoon.

Great-great grandparents with my Great grandfather

at one point my great uncle don from florida suggested that 2 people from each table get up and move to another table to get to know some people.  one of my dad’s cousins and her son ended up at our table which was cool because they were kind of interesting people.  the lady was a yodeller and had travelled to europe a few times to attend yodelling … events … i guess.  her son was a native american re-enactor who has been on the history channel a few times.  he was also a metal worker.  he recently did a handrail for the wrigley’s of chicago (wrigley field, etc).

it’s pretty interesting to hear about these people that share genes with me, but that i don’t know at all.  we have some things in common.  there are quite a few musical/artistic people in my family which is pretty neat.  of course, those genes seemed to have skipped me, although i guess i am kind of creative in certain ways.  just not visually artistic or musical.

the best part of the reunion, to me, was one of the 2nd/3rd/whatever cousins had done a good bit of geneology research and had cds with old photos on them.  it’s strange to look at these pictures and think of these people as actually existing.  even stranger to think that i wouldn’t be here without them. it just kind of brings into perspective the entirety of humanity, in a way. all these disparate events and people connect in your past and somehow you are made out of those completely random encounters.  even more amazing when you take into account the myriad and infinite ways that things can not happen.

Great grandfather and his first car in 1918

Ancestral Home in Baden Baden

i have to say that i was probably about due to be sick.  over the past few years i’ve gotten sick on or around my birthday in february.  this past year though i didn’t.  now i wish i had gotten sick, because this last one was a doozy.  i can’t really remember the last time i was this sick.

last saturday night i started to feel like i might be coming down with something.  we’d been drinking and hanging out with a couple of friends during the day (and on into the night too) so i thought it might just be tiredness from that.  that turned out to not be the case.  around 2am i woke up all sweaty and gross.  earlier in the day our a/c had died, so it was like 80°F in the house that night.  anyway, when i woke up i had a pretty bad stomachache.  i felt the cold sweats and knew a painful vomit session was in my near future.  a few minutes later i lived up to that and then some.  after i got all the bile out i felt considerably better and figured i’d be ok by morning.

come morning and i’ve had very fitful, not restful, sleep.  i was still not feeling well, and was starting to get the chills.  this is not a good sign.  i had K take my temperature and it was a balmy 101°F.  ew.  i’ve been a victim of high fevers my entire life.  when i was a baby i used to get them all the time.  it got a lot better once i had my tonsils out when i was 3, but clearly i still get a nice high fever every now and again.

being sick sucks.  being sick in summer is worse.  not having a/c just compounds the suck to levels of suckitude barely endurable.  i’m in bed with a 101°F fever.  it’s about 85°F in the house.  this is a combination for some very uncomfortable convalescence.  i spent the entire day sunday in bed.  usually when i’m sick i feel the urge to at least get up and move to another location to be miserable at.  not this time.  this time i was down and out.  hard. i think from saturday night until monday morning i slept 34 out of 36 hours.  it was pretty intense.  at least i didn’t have those crazy fever dreams.

an aside about fever dreams.  one time when i was in the 5th grade i got really, really sick.  tested for mono and all that.  turned out i had some really nasty strain of the flu that probably kills children in other countries.  anyways, for most of those two weeks i was running a temperature of 102°F/103°F.  this is not good for your brain and can readily make you halluciante.  i clearly remember this dream i had then that my room was filling with monsters, and the only way to kill them was to turn on the lights, so i jumped out of bed and ran to the light switch.  when i turned it on the light bulb exploded and i ran from the room screaming.  in the dream.  in the real world i just ran from my room screaming incoherently about monsters and exploding light bulbs, probably scaring both of my grandmother’s to death (they came to town to help take care of me, i was that sick)

anyways, nothing like that this time around thank god.

jump ahead a week to this past monday.  my ears were starting to hurt me something fierce.  after the flu symptoms i got bogged down with a really nice chest/head cold with the thickest mucuous i’ve ever experienced in my life.  after spending a night waking up every couple hours because it felt like someone was stabbing pins into my left eardrum i decided i might want to go to the doctor.  when the doctor looked in my ears, she told me i should’ve been there a week ago and i wouldn’t have been in this situation now; with an eardrum that is about to rupture and the other one not looking much better.

so i was given 10 days worth of antibiotics to take to clear out the infection in my ears. i also got a good helping of 600mg ibuprofens and, as a nice little addition, a set of 100mg vicodin.  the latter being in case my eardrum ruptured, which my doctor told me “will probably the most painful thing you’ve ever expereienced.  so you’ll want these” (these meaning the vicodin).  so far my eardrum hasn’t ruptured and i think the antibiotics are working because my ears don’t hurt anymore.

i did take one vicodin the first night to see how it would make me feel in case i needed to take one before work or something one morning.  i didn’t really feel any different, maybe a bit more HAHA than usual but that’s about it.  what it did do was give me crazy insane dreams all night long.  i dreamt that i became a part time cop with some of my friends.  it was weird because we would hang out someplace during the day, then go back there at night to bust people and shit.  the most strange part of the dream was that i kept going back into it.  i woke up a number of times that night to drink some water or use the bathroom, and every time i went back to sleep i was back in the same dream.  very strange.  i don’t really know why people take these things recreationally.  i guess the part where you have 2 beers and are completely wasted is a big attraction, but not really for me.

so now that i’m on these antibiotics for 10 days it means i’m going to have a nice sober 4th of july weekend.  which isn’t really that big of a deal because i don’t have plans anyways but it would probably be nice to have a couple beers.  i’d just rather my medicine work and not have my ear drums burst open, spewing all kinds of nasty puss and blood everywhere than have a couple beers by myself on the deck.

oh and of course the past couple of days K has started to show the symptoms i had when i first got sick.  she’s smart though and went to the doctor today to nip it in the bud instead of waiting until the last minute like i always do.

we had marek’s mom jasmin visiting us for a couple days this weekend while her owner was out of town. she’s a great dog and a good visitor (aside from peeing in the basement on sunday before i took her home)

here they are chilling out on my friend’s deck while i was waiting for K to get out of a haircut appointment on saturday afternoon.

everything with marek was great until sunday night when he got sick.  this isn’t all that uncommon as he likes to eat every goddamn little piece of shit he can find on the ground, including rocks (see this pic of him chewing on a rock in the backyard), sticks, leaves, cigarette butts, grass, flowers, tree branches that are low enough for  him to get at, etc etc etc.  occasionally these things make him throw up.  no big deal.  he’s a big dog and doesn’t have too much of a problem getting stuff up.

well, sunday night (technically monday morning) at 5am he threw up again.  i got up to clean up one pile as he made another pile in the bathroom.  K was cleaning that one up and noticed little specks of red in the yellowish mucous that he puked up.  we didn’t think too much of it as it could’ve been tree buds or flower pedals or whatever he ate up during the day coming up.  then, monday morning around 930 he puked again, and again there were little red things in there, something that looked like flesh to me.  this worried us both greatly so we decided we’d better get him checked out in case he ate a screw or something else sharp that was cutting him up inside.

we found the info on what i think is the only emergency vet in the city and gave them a call.  they told us that if we thought he had blood in his vomit we should definately bring him in.  so we loaded him up in the car and drove over there.  when we got to the emergency room it was probably about 1/3 full.  there were a lot of people sitting around just like they do in the human emergency room; kind of dazed, stunned, or otherwise bored.

of course marek was a hit there (as he is everywhere we go) so we got the question “what kind of dog is that?” from about every person that came in after we were there (and a couple of times from the people that were already there when we arrived).  K and i are used to this question as we get it everywhere we take him so it was no big deal.

we sat in the emergency room for about 2 hours before we got to go back and see the vet.  this gave me some time to make the observation above, that the emergency vet has the full spectrum of emotion from extreme happiness to extreme boredom to extreme sadness.  we saw a couple of people that were there because their pets were being put down.  one man carried his dog in crying.  he went into an exam room right next to the waiting area and we didn’t see him again, or the dog.  we also saw people picking up their pets, all fixed up, or on their way to being fixed up, so very happy that their pet was ok.  the worst thing was a woman who came in hysterical about her cat.  they put her in the waiting room, and while she is sitting there with her father (a clearly weird dude) and another guy i assume was her boyfriend/husband, the cat stopped responding in it’s crate.  the nurse came running over and grabbed the crate to take it to the back rooms and i heard her ask “do you want us to perform CPR if we can?” which i found… startling.  i don’t know.  it was upsetting i guess.  and i’m not even a cat person.

so after sitting there we take marek back to see the vet and she checks him out and asks the usual vet questions (what do you think he ate?  what does the vomit look like? whatever) and we answered them.  she then took him back to have x-rays to make sure he didn’t swallow anything that was hurting him.  about 30 or 45 minutes later we got to go back to the room and the vet told us that there wasn’t anything showing up in the x-ray, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t something there (how reassuring, right?) so we would just have to take him home and give him some meds and keep an eye on him.  so he got an antibiotic, a thing to soothe his stomach, and, get this, pepcid ac that we bought at the drug store.   apparently pepcid ac works just as well to control acid buildup/reflux in dogs as it does people.

so anyway, we took him home and watched him the rest of the day.  he got sick one more time yesterday evening around 730 but has been good since.  we gave him his first dose of meds last night and he kept those down.  this morning he ate some food and got more meds and he seems ok.  K went home to check on him at lunch and let him out (poor guy has some nasty diarrhea) and he seemed fine and ate some more.

here he is convalescing on my legs last night while i was doing some work on my laptop.

anyway, the house is all organazized.  we found out that there were mice getting into the garage from outside.  there was a little hole near the back door that went out under the back deck.  being the badass mofo that i am, i bought some mouse poison to dump in the hole and a can of that foam insulation shit to fill it in.  now the waiting game begins.  i’m pretty sure mice can chew through the foam if they want to.  hopefully they will be so gorged on poison that they won’t bother.

at the chester we had quite the mouse problem for awhile.  i had one cornered in my room behind my desk once, only to watch it jump from the floor to the top of the desk, scurry down the desktop, jump off the desk and into the furnace vent in the floor.  i was amazed at the athletic ability of the mouse.  it would be like me jumping from the ground up to the top of a 30 story building (well maybe not quite that extreme, but it was still impressive).  after that i did some reading on mice and they are pretty amazing little creatures.  they can jump really well, swim, and squeeze through a hole the size of a dime! wikipedia says they are the 2nd most successful mammal (behind one homo sapien)

besides that everything at the new place is great.  i’m loving parking in the garage.  no more walking from the car to the house in the rain.  once winter hits (can’t be long enough away) it’ll be even better to not have to chip ice or any bullshit like that.

of course, now that we rent an entire house, it’s almost like being a homeowner (especially with a landlord that lives a couple thousand miles away).  i don’t mind doing home owner-y type stuff, like the aformentioned mouse invasion defense, but at the same time, i don’t own the fuckin place so any money i put in is pretty much wasted.  no return on my investment.

mowing the grass isn’t as bad as i remember it being though.

beyond that, what else is up with me? well, K and i are moving. we found a nice 3 bed/1.5 bath, attached 2 car garage and fenced in back yard (yay for marek!)  place in a neighborhood on the near east side called EASTGATE.  i’ve never heard of it either, so whatever.  it basically sits between olde town and bexley.  our house is about 4 blocks from the governor’s mansion and 2 blocks from the ghetto.  i’m pretty excited.

let’s see… in other news i recently became the promotions department for lo pan (in addition to designing**/hosting their website) by making them some buttons which you can see here and here.

um i guess that’s it.  marek is up to something like 110lbs now, but i’m not 100% sure on that as we haven’t had him weighed in a month or so.  oh and his birthday is in a couple weeks on april 1! which happens to be the first full day we’ll be in our new place!!!  yay us!

**yes i designed that page and yes i wrote it in notepad.  i never claimed to be any good at html.

anyway, a couple tuesdays ago (the 16th) was a pretty sad day for me.  around 7pm i got a phone call from my grandfather’s house.  i thought it was him returning my call re: family holiday gathering, but it wasn’t.  it was his neighbor.  he told me he’d found my grandfather dead on the floor of his house, and mine was the only number he could find (i’m assuming because i was the last person listed on the caller id and we shared the same last name).

needless to say, i was completely caught off guard.  it was the last thing i expected to hear.  my grandfather was in pretty good health.  he had a bad foot but that was about it.  i did not know about any other major health problems.  his mind was definitely still there, and he worked a lot with his hands and outdoors all the time.  i just didn’t know what to say, so i think i said “ok i better call someone.”  i felt like i was going to be sick.  K told me that all the color drained out of my face and that i started sweating.

after gathering myself together for a few moments, i called my parents.  it was a very strange experience, telling my mother that grandpa was dead.  i was just glad it wasn’t my father who answered the phone.  it would’ve been harder to tell him that his dad was gone (especially since my grandmother just passed away this past summer).  i guess i’d never really thought i’d have to ever call them about a death in the family.  i’d always assumed they would be the ones doing the calling.  i think from the start, that kind of gave me the feeling that i was the closest (in miles) grownup to this situation.  i started to feel that it was my responsibility to take care of it for the family, which i think put me in a very particular state of mind from the start.

i do not know what caused his death.  we arrived at his house after the paramedics had already left. i spoke with the police and got the details, and then made calls to my aunt and parents to give them updates.  eventually K and i went into his house to see him.  he was still lying on the floor between the living room and kitchen.  he looked like he was asleep really.  i don’t know if the paramedics closed his eyes or if they were shut when he died.  i’ve seen dead bodies before, at funerals, in coffins, dressed in funeral clothing.  it was very surreal to see one lying on my grandpa’s floor.  looking a lot like him but dead.

one of the officers told us we weren’t really allowed to be in the house while the body was there.  he’s always referred to as the body or the victim or the deceased by the police, which i found oddly comforting. so we waited for awhile in the police cruiser or in K’s car.  it was really a lot of waiting.

after awhile the last officer took us back in the house to collect important papers, my grandfather’s check book, and any valuables we could find.  at this point he was covered with a sheet, which i found more disturbing than just him lying there, more final anyways, but seemed to comfort everyone else.  we dug through his drawers and took what we thought would be important.  other than his wallet and check book i’m not sure anything else we grabbed really matters.

the body transportation guy came around 9:30 or so to pick him up.  i watched them put him in the body bag and put him up on the gurney and wheel him out.  i didn’t have to sign anything at the end of the night, which i found strange.  the police officer had to sign but not me.  K and i got back home around 10 and i think i feel asleep by 10:30.  all in all, it was a very draining experience and one i hope i don’t have to go through again for a long time.

update:  since i wrote this the day after he died (but didn’t post it as i let things settle in and the holidays go by) i’ve attended the memorial service for my grandpa.  it was a nice thing.  he was creamated, so there wasn’t a casket with body or anything.  i met my grandfather’s brother for the first time who drove up from florida for the service.  afterwards we had food at a local church. 

other than that, we’ve been travelling around a lot.  drove up to my parent’s house then all the way to FL to visit K’s parents too.  it’s been a fun trip, we have marek with us.  he’s been very good in the car and all that.  of course everyone loves him, which makes K and i both very happy.

anyway, happy holidays to all of you!