One Day in The Waiting (and waiting and waiting) Room

I love the way health care systems "work", don't you?!

Thailand

Well, this is the last minute. My suitcase is packed and I'm anxiously counting down the final 12 hours. Soon, I'll be winging my way back to Asia. This time I'll be quite a bit south of Japan where I was last time. My mission is to find the cheapest gifts on the planet to bring back for my family. No, not really. My mission is to have a great time exploring a country I've never been to and never had a particular desire to see. I mean, Thailand would not have been high on my list of places to go if not for this class I took. I'm more of a Central and South America kind of guy. For a more exotic place, I'd go to Madagascar or Palau or Bonaire. I'm a diver and going to a place like the Great Barrier Reef has been on my list since I was about 10 and decided I wanted to be a marine biologist. Thailand will undoubtably be wicked fun (yes, I'm from the Boston area), but it there's something about what I know about the country that I don't like. It's kind of like the smell of something gross in the next room-I can't put my finger on what it is. It's probably just unreasonable prejudice injected into my eyes by Hollywood or something. Maybe seeing "The Beach" twice was unnecessary.

I'm going to try to find a net cafe while I'm there, but I don't really know how much time I'll have to do something like that. I'll post pictures if I can. If I can't, I'll do it as soon as I get back.

ARGH!

Well, just to prove that an expensive and well made pan doesn't make one a decent cook, I just forgot that I was boiling and egg and came up to the computer and forgot about the darned egg. Now I know-once again-that even the most expensive pans need to be watched so that the water doesn't evaporate leaving an egg to explode in a smoky mess and burn the crap out of the pan! Will I learn this time? Probably not.

Another Day of not Doing What I'm Supposed to be Doing

Okay, I admit it. I very often end up not doing what I've planned to do. Right now, I'm sitting in the computer lab in Reykjavík. I'm not at home in Vogar cleaning the house while everyone is at school as I should be. And why, you may ask, is this so? I came to lovely Reykjavík to apply for a new passport for Inga and pick up my plane ticket to THAILAND!!!!!!! Only half of my mission was accomplished, however, because of red tape with the passport. Now, I'm waitin' for the bus so I thought I would hop on the net and post a message because it's been a while.

I started cleaning the house yesterday and what I've done looks pretty good. It's nice to have a clean house. I walked around my room this morning in my bare feet enjoying the total lack of sand grains and dust. Then I stepped out onto the carpet in the hall and it felt wonderful! I guess that since the whole day is shot today I'll start cleaning when I get home but I will have to count on finishing the downstairs tomorrow. It would be great to be finished before Friday.

Now, Thailand...We go first to Chiang Mai. We'll stay in the north for a few days and then head south. We stay in Bangkok for a few days and then head to an island in the Gulf of Thailand. I'm so excited. Being in Costa Rica a few years ago was such a wonderful experience. For anyone who doesn't know, I have a real (but not perverse!) love of animals of all kinds and being surrounded by a rain forest or tropical forest is, for me, like being a kid in a candy store with mama's credit card! I could spend weeks, months or probably even years just sitting in a forest somewhere watching life go on around me and be perfectly happy. But the real world always manages to call me back. When I went with Ruth, her father and three other people to Wyoming for 8 days of hiking in the Wind River Mountains I was ready to go back out into the woods after a shower in the hotel on the way back. But I had a job to go back to and supplies cost money, and I would have been all alone. I'm reminded here of an e-mail I wrote recently in response to one that my mother sent to everyone in the family. Basically, I've realized that although I buy into the capitalist notion that I am a consumer and nothing more, I don't like it. I would like to be able to free myself from that kind of thinking. My dear wife is pretty good about keeping tight reigns on my spending and it's a good thing. Maybe I can learn a bit from her about freeing myself. The fact that I live surrounded by capitalism does not mean that I have to fall victim to its negatives, though. There is certainly a way to avoid the pit falls of credit cards, new technology and stuff I want but don't need. I just have to find it.

I think like this more when I am in a natural setting than when I'm sitting at home. You know how it is: waiting for the internet connection to function properly, or when I walk out the door and look at my still-broken car in the driveway. And then I think to myself almost instintively, "Well if I were to buy a..." and it's all downhill from there. I've been living with this in my head for so long that it's just second nature. I don't realize what I'm thinking until later and by then it's too late.

I do not, however, feel that the pots I bought fall into this category. I am still very happy with that particular expendiger of money. I feel that was something important and worth it and I still do. The food I make in those bad boys is much more flavorful and healthier. They are also easier to clean. So I don't feel that I spent a bunch of money on something that I would have been better off without. I know that at least one person I know disagrees with me, but I don't care. The things that bother me most about myself are the video games (of which I only own two), and the addiction to wasting time. I've greatly cut down my surfing of useless sites. I check three or so sites for updates, but I've switched to reading, cleaning or hacky sack as passtimes instead of sitting in front of the computer for hours on end. I still occasionally play Civilization III. But I've given up on trying to win Icewind Dale again. It's just not the same as gaming.

Speaking of gaming, I was thinking about that yesterday. It would be wonderful to get a decent campaign going again. I know some of you have no idea what I'm talking about so I'll sum it up in two words and a symbol: Dungeons & Dragons. This game is highly addictive and incredibly entertaining. It is only one of hundreds of such role-playing games where each player creates a character and then does his/her best to assume the identity of the character for the length of the gaming session. In this way, you get people really into the game. The game is a story created by a member of the group who is not playing a character but is running the game. He/she comes up with a reason for the adventure-which could be a rescue mission, thievery, war, or treasure hunt, for instance-and then as events occur the game master moulds the story to keep the excitement. Challenges are presented to the characters in the form of battles, riddles, games, puzzles, mysteries, etc. and they very often have to work together to get passed a certain obstacle and rely on talents or abilities of each character. Sometimes individual characters or small groups within the party have their own goals (either supplied by the game master or thought up by the player). In a way, such role-playing is similar to real life. You have to make split second descisions about what to do next, what to say or to keep secret and then you have to face the consequences of your actions. Your player can die almost as easily as a real person. Your charater can end up in jail, go crazy, develop addictions, make mortal enemies and life-long friends, become a hero, or fade quietly into history. Role-playing offers people the opportunity to become someone else for a short time and use their imagination to try out different modes of living without any damage to the real world. The team work that goes on during the typically long gaming sessions can lead to increased understanding of how to work with people and how to get one's ideas across in a clear way.

I love gaming and would love to have the chance to dust off Baid Waverider and play him again. Paul knows who I mean. "Long live the Lords of the Deep!"

I wonder how many of my regular audience (which consists of only a small handful of people) stopped reading a long time ago. But for thoes that didn't, thanks. I use this blog as a place to write my wandering thoughts. It feels good to let this stuff out somewhere. I hope you enjoy reading this crapola. Also, I want to encourage people, again, to respond in any manner they see fit.

SUMMER!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, my last final was yesterday. I'm done! YIPPEEEEEE! This morning I hardly new what I was supposed to do when I got up and now that it's really starting to sink that I'm leaving for Thailand in 6 days I'm getting excited.
The weather here is really looking like summer, too. The sun is shining and if the wind would just slow down a bit it would be pretty warm out. As it is it's great long sleeve shirt weather or hacky sack weather!
Tomorrow I'm going to start planning out the fence that will encircle my yard (and hopefully keep out the local children who have not been taught any respect for anything) by the end of the summer. That's pretty exciting. The yard is pretty big and desperately needs some sort of boundry. Next year we'll be planting a shrubbery just inside the fence to add to the lee provided by the fence, if I can hold to my plans.
I want to thank my friends at school for all their help with studying. I agree with Emo Philips when he said, "College students are some of the smartest and most perceptive people in their age group."
Also, my friend Allan is going off to study in Australia for a semester. Am I jealous? OF COURSE! Boy that's going to be great and I hope he enjoys the experience as much as I know he will.

Heh heh....

This is a great Star Wars Parody:
Store Wars

Íslendingarnir geta séð þetta á hugi ókeypis.

The Day before

Well, tomorrow is my last final. It will be 6 essays from 959 pages of material. Oh no! But I have some of the stuff down pretty well and I think I'll do okay. After 12:00 tomorrow, I'll be free again.
Speaking of freedom, where did the freedom that I always enjoyed as an American go? I'm not going to go into it here, but everytime I turn around, I run my face into a new Bush policy that makes my traveling to the US harder for me and my family. I decided to post this here because I know that Paul reads this site everyday. Paul, check to make sure that your wife and kid have a bar code in their passports. Without a bar code, non-citizens need to have a visa to travel to the US even if it's only for a weekend, even if they are traveling with their American spouse/father. We just found this out yesterday because it never occurred to me that things had gotten so bad that there is a threat of terrorists coming from Iceland to sneak into the US.

Please, PLEASE, PLEASE vote this type of paranoid militaristic government out next time! At least Bush can't get in again. That evil little Texan has done quite a good job of ruining many of the things I used to love about America and I, for one, will be glad on the day that he leaves office. The next ruling government can't be any worse, from my point of view. Of course, Bush and the Fourth Reich have stirred up a shitstorm that won't settle until I'm old and grey (if ever) so the next president, no matter who it is, what he believes in or what he tries to do will have a monumentous job of cleaning up before him. I feel bad for that old white guy...and I say guy because I find it unlikely that the powers that be will allow a woman to be president (even if she were voted in legally) unless she is a war mongering Bush clone like Rice, and let's face it, a brown person has no chance either.

Sea Creature of the Day

The silver spiny fin, Diretmus argenteus. Photo by Peter Wirtz.

Mommy says

My mother is putting together a collection of memorable or significant things that people's mothers have said to them. This is going to part of an art show this summer in Massachusetts. She would like anyone who wants to contribute to go here and write out what mommy said. You don't have to put your name. You can remain annonymous and don't have to worry about anyone hearing that it came from you. I'm still thinking...

Verkfæri

I wonder if I will ever hear a song as perfect as "Pushit", "Eleven", "Fourty-six and 2", or "Ænima" by Tool. I'm listening to the cd for the first time in about two years. It blows me away every time.

Lots of Great News!

Qs from Yuri McAlduff.

We'll start with the cute stuff. A good friend of mine from BSC (the first college I went to!) has been living in Korea for 9 years and is now married. He had a daughter five years ago and she is starting to learn to write the alphabet we all know and love. When she got to Qq Paul thought of me and scanned in a page of her handwriting excersizes. By the way, for those of you who don't know, Q is the knickname I've had longer than almost any other. Anyway, I thought it was so cute and I thought it was good to hear that Paul was thinking of me so I decided to post the photo he sent me.
And yes, Paul IS the guy who posts on this site under the same name.

The second bit of good news is that my friend Peter wins the prize for My Favorite URL Sent by a Friend/Family Member of the Month. His act of sending me the url for this site is what made me invent this new category for a prize. I haven't figured out what the prize will be, but I'll think of something good (and cheap!). If you want to enter for the prize for next month (to be announced on June 5th or 6th when I get back from Thailand), e-mail me your favorite URL's (web addresses for those of you who don't know what a URL is) and I'll carefully review them.
Now without further ado, the winner of the very first My Favorite URL sent by a Friend/Family Member of the Month goes to Peter for the web site found HERE

Maybe A TINY Bit of an Overreactiion...

Awww, poor little kitty! Moowahahaha!

Blog Á Íslensku

Hæ hæ,

Í my profile, þú getur fundið link á síðu sem ég er búinn að skrifa um mig á Íslensku. Ég ætla að skrifa meira einhvern tímann ef fólki finnst ekki of leiðilegt að lesa um mig í mín eigin orðum. Anyway, síðan heitir "Um Klessuna Miklu". Ég villdi era þetta af því að mér finnst að þið þekki mig ekki vel.

The Newest Addition

Announcing a new link! Hooray!!!!!
If you have any interest at all in Paleontology, there's a great source in the links section in the sidebar.
Enjoy.

Okay, I'm sorry for the game

That was not a fair contest for the points, I admit it. The changes were so small and picky that you would have to have been searching the page completely for the last few days to notice. I changed the order of a couple of things in the side bar, namely the last two sections. When I did that the first time, there was not line in between them. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to get he line to appear and for about 12 hours there were two lines below the last section and no line between the last two sections. So, I admit that there was no way that anyone would notice.

I'll offer a new chance for 10 points. But, unfortunately for many of you, it's going to be a biology question.

What's the world's longest organism that is not made up of a colony of individuals?
Hint: It's not a blue whale.

Labbi labbi labbi

Í dag fór ég í gönguferð. Ég fór með rútu frá Vogunum og fór út nálægt Kringluna. En, ég var að fara í Ingvar helgarson til að ná í varahlut fyrir bílinn. Ég labbaði allan leið og svo snýrði við og labbaði í BSÍ til að taka rútu heim. Nú er ég að passa Guðjón og Almar á meðan að þrællinn minn er í búð að kaupa mat til að elda fyrir mig! Svona á lífið vera.

10 Points

I'll give 10 points to anyone who can tell me what I just changed on my site (anyone except Carl because he helped me do it). It's a very small change, but I couldn't figure it out on my own.

Other than that, today was uneventful. I studied evolutionary analysis all day. It's much better to study with Tinna and Guðrún because they can help me decipher all of the Icelandic garble that comes out of Snowbear's mouth. Thanks.

I'd like to make a small list of things that need to be fixed on my car:

1. Hood
2. Windshield
3. Emergency break-or Hand break if you're British
4. Skiptibarkinn-I don't know the English word but it's the connection between the shifter and the transmission in an automatic.

All of these things have a somewhat amusing story behind them, but I have to go to bed so I can get up early to study tomorrow. Good luck to my friends and relatives who are studying something.

Sea Creature of the Day

A northern puffer, Sphoeroides maculatus. Photo by Johnny Jensen.

Another Laugh from the Perry Bible Fellowship

For the parents out there...

DevelopMental

Well, that could have gone better. I mean, I know I passed and that the grade will probably not be my worst. But I know I should have studied more BEFORE exam time! Why is it that although time flies and has been doing so since I can remember I always end up in trouble because I don't realize how much time is lost? My dear wife is right that I have no sense of time. I can usually guess pretty accurately what time it is if I think about it. But when I'm just living my life and trundling merrily along I don't notice as hours/days/months rush passed like ghosts, unseen. Then, all of a sudden, it's the end of the semester and all those times I thought, "I really have to read chapter 5 tomorrow" add up to three months of not reading chapter 5 or anything thereafter. I usually start off with great intentions. I took fantastic notes from my physiology book until I had gotten somewhere passed the middle of the thing. But for some reason, I always stop working so hard. I always think, "I'll do better next time," and then I don't do that much better. The boredom that overcame me in evolutionary analysis and developmental biology killed my spirit to work. Add to that all the times that I didn't come to school and missed lectures and the wasted time waiting for the bus and you have a recipie for disaster.
But whose fault is all this? Mine. I know, I know. I can scream at the sky "Damn you, Civilization III!" all I want and it still comes down to the fact that I just shouldn't own any computer games. I can't blame the fact that I have a family that needs me to help out from time to time. I admit that I waste most of the time I waste all by myself without anyone's help. Inga's very supportive and tries to push me, but the ambitionless gene is not normal in my DNA (a little joke for those of you who know that Drosophila genes are named after their mutated form).
I will, however, say it again: I'll be more duglegur next semester. Oh sorry, I don't know a really good translation of duglegur...hard-working is the closest I can think of right now.

Exam Time

So, I've been sitting here all day long studying for developmental biology. I have to say that the book we have to suffer through is not my favorite. But today, partially thanks to Tinna, Auður, and Guðrún, I've learned quite a bit. I almost feel ready for this exam tomorrow.

This weekend was spent studying, walking on the beach, and cooking. We had some wonderful garlic and lemon chicken on Friday night and then a real omlette yesterday afternoon. You know, one of those omlettes that is so full of vegetables that you can hardly fold it over. Mmm mmm, I know I'm supposed to be eating healthier food, but I couldn't resist upon seeing all the stuff Inga bought on Friday.

I was supposed to have a meeting tonight to discuss details of getting a visa for my passport and other things about the Thailand trip. BUT, the meeting was cancelled, unbeknownst to me, and I took the bus all the way here for nothing. I suppose that since coming here meant that I got to study all day long and go to the post office this wasn't a waste of anything more than the 1360 krónur that it takes to ride the bus here and back home again.

Yup, the Thailand trip is sneaking up on us. It's very exciting. I'm going to Asia again. It was gerat the first time and this time promises to be even better as I'm going to study biology instead of working in a city. I mean, it was a lot of fun to be in Yokohama and all that, and organ building was fun. But my heart really lies outside, not in a building somewhere. This time Iget to climb mountains (although Fuji was quite an experience in Japan), and wade through knee deep mud in a mangrove swamp where there is a slim chance we'll see crocodiles. We also get to snorkel of the coast of one of the islands in the Gulf of Thailand. There is an elephant safari on the itinerary and a trip to the royal family's botanical garden. This is going to be great.
Is anyone getting tired of hearing about this trip yet? I don't care because it's really exciting and this is MY corner of the net in which I can write about anything that pops into my head.

Strangely, I'm looking forward to my trip to the States even more. I can't wait to be there during the summer with the kids. They are going to have such a good time that it won't be possible for me not to enjoy myself fully.

I have to get back to studying.