Jerm's Insanity

What are the secrets to my success? Simple; Eat right, exercise, and don’t take any wooden nickels. Tried and true methods for staying fit and avoiding wooden nickels.

For those who haven’t looked, a comment to my last post was:

How do you get your site address down to simply “http://www.Jerm.org/”
Do you have to pay?
Tell us your secrets.

I want to thank you for inviting such a pedestrian post from me, i like to think of my ramblings and a bit more whimsical and a tad less informative than this one is bound to be. I’ll play the djinn for the moment, though, and grant your wish. Besides, it’s only fair that the occasional unfortunate traveler who stumbles across this blog might divine some small morsel to keep their time here form being completely wasted. I’ll get right to it, then.

&lt GEEK &gt

Now, the question was a little vague, ‘How do you get your site address down to simply “http://www.Jerm.org/”,’as getting one’s url to be short really only requires finding a combination of a few letters that no one else is using as a url yet (yes i’m being pedantic, piss off. did you not see the GEEK tag above?). I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you meant, using blogger, how do i keep from having all the ancillary crap AFTER the jerm.org/ in order to get to my blog. Elementary, my dear Watson, this is. (You dig it? Sherlock Holmes after a month on Dagobah (what do you want? it was an all-caps GEEK tag))

Anyway, blogger may have some service in which they’ll do the bloggy hosting thing at the base of your url, and i imagine they’d want you to pay for it. This is a guess, however. I could check, but that would require effort. Consider it homework on your part, i want a 3 page report on it by Monday. I imagine the changes are about 50-50, because as i’m sure they could make some money off of it, it’s much easier to just not do it, much like my unwillingness to check into the existence of this feature.

No, what i do is simply have blogger FTP the bloggy goodness to my webserver which, among other things, houses jerm.org. This option is, well, it’s an option in the “publishing” section. I incorporated a line in the blogger template to include my template file, so every time i make an entry, blogger sends be a new home page with my site template built right into it. It took a bit of fooling with DIVs and editing the blogger styles to get everything laid out correctly, but i think the result is rather spiffy, and since i’m the only one who read this blog anyway, that’s all that matters.

&lt /GEEK &gt

There you have it, dear reader, my good deed for the season.

Jerm’s Tomato Theory: As you eat through the ripe tomatos in a bag, the most ripe of the less ripe tomatoes, through relativity, become the most ripe tomatoes, though in all practical terms they’re no riper than when you began. The net effect of this is that it takes 2 or 3, “Ugh, that was a bad one!”s before you realize that you’re eating a tomato whos grade of ripeness you’d have thought unconsumable when the truly ripe tomatoes were still in the bag.

Jerm’s Corrollary: The knowlege of and acceptace of Jerm’s Theory don’t seem to help one stop reaching for the bag, “Oh, must have missed THIS ripe little beauty….. BLECH!!”

*removes the bag of tomatoes from his desk*

That’s right boys and girls, the guy who not a year and a half ago was trying to figure out where he could hook up his bus to live is buying a dwelling that has neither wheels nor flashing retractable stopsign. And as if that weren’t grown up enough, there’s a rentable space so I get to have a tennant. So, between spending gobs of money and becoming a landlord I’ve got flashes of The Money Pit and Pacific Heights dancing in my head.

To be fair, though, I’m not alone in this daft affair. One Heidi Eklund, obviously at a loss for rational decision making, is accompanying me on this journey. Perhaps it’s something in the New Paltz water, but we’re obviously not in our right minds.

We do, however, seem to have decent taste in houses, at least i think so. Check it out. I doubt we’ll have it anywhere near as “Better homes and Gardens” as it is now, but it’s quite the swell little place that seems to have had (knocking on wood) all the relevant work done on it before we came along (this is where Tom Hanks and Shelley Long really work up a good guffaw).

This is probably the most grown-up thing I’ve ever endeavoured to undertake, but at least it’s a huge risk and scary as hell. Truly, though, it’s all very exciting. The whole thing seems fabulous, at a fair price. I even got them to throw in a shed and a riding lawnmower. And i’ve never had my own shed before. I imagine I’ll need to buy a wheelbarrow.

Ok. Up until now I’ve refrained from a whole lot of gadgety geek blogging, but something this sexy really deserves a note. Not only has Apple finally gotten right the whole idea of a black ipod (re: the colossal ICK that was the U2 Ipod), but it’s so frikkin tiny one would be silly to not drool. I’ve had to wipe my keyboard off several times already.

No, just drool.

I won’t, mind you, but that so totally and perfectly sums up the post-convention experience that it gave me chills.

For the last 2 weeks people have been asking me how my vacation was, how the convention was, and I invariably reply, “Fantasic, but hot,” or some similar permutation of the two. Detail beyond that is sparse and vague. I imagine the reasoning for that is twofold. Firstly between the heat and the alchohol, i think even my own recollections are sparse and vague. Second, however, is much less environmental and yet all about the environment;

“What happens at the convention stays at the convention,” is a common mantra, though not necessarily true, especially with all of the cameras and photoblogs. I think more of it goes to the fact that, at least for me, lots of the stories, fabulous as they are in my mind, fall a bit flat out of context. Some things totally translate, but i find that trying to get across the vibe of the convention is a bit like trying to describe to a whuffo what skydiving feels like.

I know i had a brilliant time out there, if y’all wanna know more about it, meet me there next august

So i’m delinquent… sue me

So in the interest of moving things along, I offer up this paltry portion of personal pandering and hope that somebody still read this silly blog.

Catching up….. in reverse.

hell… 1:30am and 5 months to go…. i’ll be back.. promise…

the militia is well-armed… now teach them to aim

On saturday i went to the mall.. you remember, the one in kingston, the one that got shot up 2 weeks ago? Some schmuck took an AK-47 knockoff (coulnd’t even get the real thing) and empited 2 30 round clips in the middle of the mall. 30 or 40 peope ended up in the hospital… form broken/flying glass injuries. TWO people actually got hit by bullets. Two. out of 60 rounds. Now yes this is a wonderful thing for the poor innocent patrons of the mall (incidentally, the same chain of malls that was kicking people out for wearing anti-bush clothing a year or two ago… if only i’d had an AK…), but let’s focus on dead-eye dickwad for a moment. Now, i’m not much of a gun guy, but i’ve gone to the shooting range a few times and I can hit inside the circle at 25 yards with someone else’s .38. Motherfucker has his own assault rifle in the middle of a crowded mall and can’t hit more than 2 people? Dude! Kill youself out of shame, you’re givng the rest of the gun-toting crazies a bad name.

So anyway i was at the mall… bought some sunglasses. and a cd. the cd was atrocious….

should have gone for the mp3 player… alas.

oh right.. the great white north part

sunday however was far more exilerating. Went skiing with a bunch of
skydiving folk. Holy shit i’ve never skied so hard. We went to
Hunter, which was busy as hell, but we stayed to the back of the
mountain and avoided 90% of the lines.. very slick. A couple of them
knew the mountain really well so we just skied — no questions about
what color was this or that slope — we just went down everything, and
did it pretty well. Only thing we didn’t do was hit the bump runs, thank
god. Fun crew. one of the more lush of the group had buried little
stashes of beer in the snow at various places on the mountain…
apparently this is a regular thing for him. So we’d pass one or two
around in the lift lines or on the lifts…each run. crazy. we finally broke
for lunch at like 3pm and hit the sushi bar. did you know hunter has
a fucking sushi bar? some place in NYC sends a bunch of fish and
japanese guys up to the catskills on weekends and it’s actually pretty good.
it’s even reasonably priced…. for sushi.. which means you spend what
would would have spend on a burger and fries in the main part of the
lodge. oh yeah, and they have Sake

it was swell.

They’ve been saying it or years; Americans are falling behind in math and science. Now there’s proof. Apparently the masses got their wires crossed and didn’t realize “lowest common denominator” is a BAD thing when used to describe a political candidate…. *sigh*

Oh well, there’s always Canada.

I think i’ll leave it at that for now… really, what else is there to say? I think this sums it up pretty well:

You’ve gotta love technology, or at least respect it for the nifty things it’ll et one do. For instance, at this very moment, that is to say the moment that i’m writing this, not the moment that you’re reading this — indeed, that would be tough as you can’t read this until, at the very earliest, i’m done — I’m sitting in an airport terminal entertaining myself by writing to a bunch of non-existent readers, completely unaware of the annoying music from overhead, the whisper from the headphones of the guy sitting behind me, the fat guy snoring over to my left and the funny looking guys across from me. It’s swell, I’m completely immersed in my own little word, not to be bothered by the lady on her cell phone that obviously needs a more sensitive microphone. Ahhhh, technology.

*blinks at a snort from the comatose dude*

It’s actually kinda sad. I mean, how often in our daily lives do we get away from our usual crowd with several hours of basically free time in which to interact with others. Here are real live people, each with their own lives and stories and things to be shared and learned, and here I sit absorbed in this little electronic device speaking very possibly to no one at all.
I might feel a little worse about it if it were just me, but i think we all now differently. Anyone who has taken mass-transit or even just walked down the street of any decently sized city recently would have to be blind not to have noticed the tooling masses with their ipods and their cell phones and their newspapers and pretty much anything they can come up with to block out the rest of the world as they travel though their lives. Most people don’t even look up anymore, and any inadvertent eye-contact is quickly broken, a shaken and often embarrassed visage inevitably following. I know people have their moods and you can’t expect everyone to be friendly, even i have been known to be lost in a novel during a train ride, but i didn’t expect nearly everyone to have the same sense of guarded solitude about them. I’m talking about entire subways full of people, not just some random folks in a bad mood.

Is it just my naiveté that makes me thing there was a friendlier time, when people weren’t so eager to shut out the rest of the world? Sure it’s easier to lose oneself in their distraction of choice and not deal with any of it, but what do we learn from that, indeed, where is the fun in that? I’ve heard it explained away as, “My morning commute it the only time I have to myself.” Maybe it’s cause i’m still a tourist. I haven’t lived IN a major metropolis long enough to have become truly jaded yet, and if that’s what i can expect from such and experience, perhaps I’ll stay in the suburbs. Sure the streets are cleaner here and the drinks are cheaper, but hopefully it’ll take me a while longer before I zone out and stop looking around.

4th of july weekend was quite a blast. There were fireworks, gunfights and skydives a-plenty. I got beaten up by a lizard, saved by sheep and even got to watch my girlfriend wrestling around on the floor with another hottie. Oh yeah, and there was booze.

Heidi and i had done a sunset jump, and the DZ dinner was ready when we got down. Not wanting to miss the food, we threw down our gear, hopped on the queue for some scrumptious morsels and proceeded to stuff our faces. In the midst of our sustenance ingestion, the fireworks started. Now, many places have some nifty yet piddly little fireworks display that’s kinda pretty but not really anything wo get worked up over…. often the involve little tanks that blow up on the driveway and beer bottles to aim the projectiles. At The Ranch, however, we’re far to fond of explosions to settle for such quaint pyrotechic entertainment. No, we have 50/50 raffle and a DZ match for a fireworks budget and our enthusiasm for sparkling mortar blasts is quite satiated with the display that is put on. Lest we blow ourselves up (and we would), we actually hire a pyro company to come dazzle and bombard our senses with twinkling concussive bliss. The whole tows comes out to the DZ to witness the event and what i’m really trying to get across here is that once doesn’t miss the fireworks display for something as menial as packing, especially if you’re not getting paid for it. As such we frittered more could-be packing time away on the entrancing fireworks display. Immediately after the fireworks, the packing area was swiftly transformed in a boxing ring for the annual Ranch Fight Night where i received my ritual reptilian beating. Suffice to say that by the time all the brutality had settled i was far too tired and, more importantly, drunk to finish packing. And anyone who knows me knows that that’s pretty drunk. The parachute was stashed for the night and merriment ensued for the remainder of the eve. My plan was to pack it the following morning.

Well, morning arrived and i didn’t get around to packing, as work kept me occupied for whole day. In a generous attempt to help out, a friend of mine decided to do me a favor and pack for me. At the end fo the day i was informed of this, said thanks, stowed my rig and popped a beer, it had been a long day and i was tired. The coming week held dodgy weather and various distractions, so i didn’t get tp jump until the friday. I had a lovely jump, fun but uneventful, that is until i opened my parachute.

Now without going into so much detail as to (further) bore the whuffos in the audience, the skydivers among you may picture in your minds a silicone slider bumper stuck on the forward left line group, about 12″ from the bottom skin of the canopy. In short, it was a malfunction. I immediately started cursing myself for having been careless enough to miss such an obvious problem with the packjob and began trying to work out the problem.

As i’m sure you’ve gathered by this point, the problem wasn’t able to be worked out. The parachute was controllable, but barely so, and most certainly not healthily landable. I concluded that i must cutaway the main and pull the reser……. ummm… _I_ packed this reserve.. *gulp*… it’s only the SECOND reserve pack i’ve ever done…. *gulp*…. hope i did this right….

and i pulled my handles.

So, did it work? you’ll have to wait until next time to find out.