You have to give up one of your senses. Which one will it be?

Common sense. If it’s common, I guess there’s enough to go around. What’s a little extra?

That’s a really tough question. It’s like that Cinderella song, “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)”. If I were to lose a sense, I’d probably have to quit my job. Not that my job requires all of my senses but I would want to quit so I could evaluate what I would do for the rest of my life with my remaining 4 senses.

I would become a chef.

Now, what sense would I give up if I had to? I guess I’d have to give up hearing. It’s amazing what you hear while cooking if you really pay attention, but I think that’s the one to go.

  • Sight: need to see what I’m doing
  • Smell: need it to smell foods
  • Taste: kind of essential
  • Touch: (runner up) need it for cooking/plating – though it might be nice to not feel a finger getting sliced or hot oil splashing up on my arm.

Kidney beans and weird dreams

Elise and I both didn’t sleep well last night. I was laying in bed, watching the Packers vs. Panthers game and could barely keep my eyes open. Elise was next to me, painfully inching her way around the bed trying to find a comfortable position so her back would stop hurting from an apparent urinary tract infection.

I turned off the game and it was then that I became restless. I layed still and thought about nothing. I started getting sleepy again. Then the cat meowed. And meowed. And meowed. We both layed there and thought he would eventually quit meowing. He didn’t. Elise is usually the one who gets up to take care of feline-related activities. She was bed ridden so I had to herd cats. Riley knows when I’m pissed so he ran and hid the moment he heard me getting out of bed. I left the back door open and walked away. Both cats ran outside.

I went back to bed and fell asleep soon after.

Dream #1: I’m carrying a large red barrel of full of finely ground human carcass and partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil to be dumped into the sewer at the northwest intersection of I-35 and Ben White. I don’t know why it was my job to dispose of ground up humans, but I was doing it. I remember looking into the barrel and realizing that there is nothing visably large enough that would distinquish the contents as human.

Dream #2: Same northwest intersection but now I’m in what used to be the Hawthorne Suites. Only now the suites are a dilapidated ghetto. There is looting and rioting. Gun shots are being fired from every direction. There’s a skinny androgynous black kid who is laying waste to almost every target in his path with a Tommy gun-style fully automatic shotgun.

I realize that I’m going to get shot soon if I don’t try to find a way out. I turn around in my steps and start heading back in the direction from which I came. A guy came through the door and pointed a gun at me. I dropped to my stomach and put my arms on the ground above my head as to surrender. I woke up.

Dream #3: I’m sitting on the bank of a huge, still lake at dusk. There is a cargo raft floating slowly toward the bank to my right. The cargo raft is carrying huge cubes of dreams stacked eight high and eight across. A dinosaur serpent with a long neck lifts its head from below the water and gently tosses the raft into the air and to the other side of the lake. I roll over in bed and the sequence starts again. This happened 3-4 times. I don’t know what cubes of dreams actually look like but my subconcious put them there.

Dream #4: I’m walking around the outside of our house and find the control area for an intricate sprinkler system under the office window. It looked like what I would imagine a plane cockpit to look like. I crouched down and got halfway into the control area and looked around. There was a GPS display and all sorts of buttons, knobs and levers. I thought, “Hmmm, all this time and I never knew we had a sprinkler system.”

Dream #5: I’m exploring our house again. I find a lower level that’s painted bright white. I walk into what is kind of like a garage. I turn a right corner and see a long, straight hallway. To the right is a white stairway that leads to what I would guess the main part of the house. In front of me are two moms and two non-descript children. They’re discussing spiders. The two moms can’t seem to remember the names of two of our indigenous poisonous spiders. I tell them that one is the brown recluse and the other is the black widow. They both ask what a brown recluse looks like. I tell them that it’s the one that has a voilin-shaped marking on its body. They asked about the black widow. At that point I look down at my white shirt. There is a tiny black widow, no larger than my pinky nail, on my abdomen. I point out the spider to the moms and chuckle. They both giggle as well. Then the spider takes off and crawls up the back of my shirt with breakneck speed. It felt like a spider a hundred times its size was clawing up my back and pulling my shirt down on the way. Then it stopped. My intuition told me that it was sitting on my shirt collar at the back of my neck.

I woke up. I kept shivering because I thought I had a tiny black widow on my neck.

What’s weird is it is very seldom that I remember my dreams. Each time I woke myself up last night I wanted to immediately go back to sleep to find out what I was going to get into next.

Kidney down and uninsurable

Elise has a really bad kidney infection (it might just be a urinary tract infection). She’s had them in the past but this one is the big daddy. This one has her out for the count. She had to leave work early today to come home to lay down. In the eight years that I’ve known Elise I think she’s missed two days of work due to being sick.

I stopped at Central Market on my home from work today so I could buy her a bottle of pure cranberry juice. She’s laying relatively flat and comfortable on the couch right now. She’s still in a lot of pain and is hoping it will go away on its own before her doctors appointment tomorrow afternoon.

To add insult to injury I got a letter from Humana today. I’m not insurable because I’m an expectant parent. Me. The father.

So when we have our child, will I be uninsurable because I’m a parent? Will the auto insurance company call and tell me I can’t have insurance because I have a car? Then what? A dropped homeowner’s policy because I have a house?

I never really paid attention during political debates when the topic was healthcare and insurance. I will now.

FCUK Him

I love the smell of green peppercorns. I love the smell so much that I did some poking around to see if I could find a cologne that contained green peppercorns.

Here’s what I found:

FCUK Him contains head notes of sangria, basil, rosemary and lavender, a heart of hemp, New Mexican black sage, green peppercorns and tea leaves and a drydown of black suede, CO2 vanilla, ebony wood and patchouli. [link]

“Josh, you smell fantastic. What are you wearing?”

FCUK Him!”

Janicek nano

For those who don’t frequent Apple.com:


Apple's iPod nano
The inspiration

Apple's iPod nano
The website

The iPod nano is one of the hottest consumer electronics on the market right now. I thought it would be cool to do a spoof on Apple.com’s current incarnation to make public the news that Elise and I are expecting.

Janicek nano — Millions of cells. Impossibly small.

No, we’re not going to name our first-born “Nano” and “Maly” hasn’t been discussed.

New York Strip

Tonight I grilled New York strips topped with smoked mustard seeds and green peppercorns as well as sauteed cipollini and garlic. On the side: garlic mashed potatoes with bacon drippings.

This meal was inspired by our recent anniversary dinner at the Driskill Grill here in Austin.

Staples in steak grilling now are smoked mustard seeds and peppercorns. If someone hasn’t already created a cologne based on green peppercorns, I’m doing it… they have an amazing aroma!

iBook uh oh

I left work yesterday afternoon and headed to Fry’s in north Austin via Hwy 1431. Traffic was a pain in the ass once I got to northwest Austin and 1431 is a road that’s best driven in a low profile sports car. Not a early-90s mini truck with no power steering.

I was on a mission to buy supplies in which to fabricate my own bus-powered external hard drive. Fry’s has clunky and ugly bus-powered enclosures and their 2.5″ hard drives are more expensive than I expected for Fry’s. So I held off on making any type of external storage purchase. Since I was there, I had to look around. I didn’t find anything that struck my fancy nor that I thought I had to have so I left.

I stopped in at the dollar store next to Fry’s. I needed some empty spray bottles for household and auto cleaning products. I picked up three of them. I walked to the register to find that there was a $7 minimum on purchases made with a debit card. I had to find four more items. Bandaids. Twizzlers. Air freshener. Shaving cream.

My debit card didn’t work. Our bank sent us new debit cards and I activated both of them. Apparently I have to have the PIN set. Wouldn’t you think your PIN would carry over?

So my Friday evening was a total dry run and waste of time.

I went home and pulled out my old external drive so I could backup the iBook. The iBook wouldn’t recognize the drive. Ugggghhhh! I plugged said drive into Elise’s laptop. Worked great. I messed around with this drive for at least an hour. I still couldn’t get it to mount on the iBook. I’d walk away and try again occassionally. It finally mounted and I started a backup.

Elise came home and I exlained my recent woes. I told I really didn’t want to, but it was looking like I was going to have to invest in quality, manufacturer-built external hard drive. She understood and agreed that this would be a worthy investment as I have, in the past, lost some important documents, website designs, photos, music, etc.

I left the iBook to back itself up and went to bed. I woke up this morning excited thinking I would find my external drive sitting on the kitchen table, where I left the night prior, with all of the iBook data backed up. Nope. It didn’t complete the backup. After a quick investigation I realized that the drive was full. So I started deleting older backups.

Elise woke up and needed to check her e-mail. I was kind of using her computer as well as the iBook. I handed over her laptop and she tried to open Firefox. “I can’t get online. Fix it!” So she handed over her laptop. I set her computer down in front of me and in doing so I accidentally bent the USB cable just perfectly so that it hit the power button on the external hard drive and turned it off.

Uggghhhh!

I started it up again and once again, the iBook can’t recognize it. I plugged it into Elise’s laptop and it’s recognized. Now I’m deleting 100 GBs of old data using Elise’s computer to see it will then be mountable on the iBook.

But I still love technology.