Category: Jake

I Survived Halloween, and My Wedding Anniversary

As I mentioned in the past, my wife and I got married on the day before Halloween not because we liked the holiday, but because we liked saving money (we got the building we got married in for free if we got married on that day — we couldn’t pass it up). Ten years ago yesterday, my wife — and my best friend — and I tied the knot. How she’s managed to tolerate me all these years is beyond me. Just the same, I surprised my wife with a day-before-the-day-of (so Thursday) overnight trip to Sunriver to stay in a Sunriver home with my employer and a nice dinner at the Pine Tavern, where we went for our first anniversary. I actually got the house for two nights, knowing good and well my wife couldn’t get away for more than a night, so we brought the kids out for the second night (the actual night of our anniversary) and had a good time with all of us in a nice fancy house.

So as per tradition, my wife and sis-in-law decked out our house for our annual Halloween party. I don’t really like the holiday, probably primarily because of it’s timeliness to our wedding anniversary, but I still survived the day. All the nieces and nephews came over, we had far too much food and desert, and bunch of trick-or-treaters that my brother-in-law dealt with. We did have a couple teenagers who were old enough to drive that I just flat-out told to go away (I didn’t dig out the pickled asparagus with the labels). My exterior lights were off, I was enjoying the tail-end of the World Series and the Duck Game, and these guys were pounding on my door with nothing resembling a costume. I just told them we were out of candy. They didn’t believe me, I said I didn’t care and told them to go away. Little punks — I should’ve turned the hose of them.

Otherwise, the kids all had a great time, and that’s really all it’s about. Now I’m going to bed to hopefully take advantage of the extra hour of sleep that I really need.

October 31, 2009

Updated Bend Telephone Prefix List

Years ago I posted a Bend local phone prefix list, because it was getting harder and harder to keep track of what was a local call and what wasn’t. I updated that list today with another bunch of prefixes, and also included the cities they’re based out of for folks like Simone who can’t call to Redmond from Lapine on her home phone without calling long distance, but can call Bend (at least when I first posted the list).

Why was I updating this list? Well I was playing with Google Voice, and looking to try to get a better number as my Google Voice number is less-than-memorable. Since we can’t port numbers to Google Voice yet (though as of today, we can use their voicemail services on our existing numbers), if I was going to be using Google Voice at all, I wanted a nifty number, and wanted a number that was local. While they’ll tell you where the number’s based, it’s nice to have another place to confirm it.

So if you’re in the same boat as me, check out the updated list (and this is going to get even more complicated when the new area code comes to town and 10-digit dialing is required).

October 27, 2009

Symphony Concert Tonight

If you’re wondering why I’ve been offline for the last few days, I’ve been playing and rehearsing with the Central Oregon Symphony. We had concerts the last two days and have one more tonight to finish the weekend. It’d a good show, concert is free, tickets at the door, hope to see you there!

And hope to get back to the blog later this week.

October 26, 2009

Power’s Out, Trees Are Coming Down

The snow and ice storm (see previous entry) has knocked out power all over town including my house. I’m posting this from my cell phone. Tree branches have breaking off all over my neighborhood from the snow and if you stand outside for a few minutes, you can hear the cracking wood echo throughout the area.

I’m just really glad we have a fresh load of firewood so we don’t freeze. It’s a nice 71° in the house right now.

The snow has appeared to stop for a bit. I’m going to go see if I can knock down some snow off my trees.

Update later in the evening: The power was out for about 5½ hours or so. Our leafy trees all survived, but I can’t say the same about the rest of Bend. Our neighbors all lost many branches. We have a 20-foot chunk of one of our neighbor’s trees that has taken up residence in our backyard after cracking off high up on the tree and bouncing off our shed. The folks living behind us have a large chunk of something laying on their roof.

We drove around town a bit now that the roads have melted off a bit, and the damage is mostly to the deciduous trees around town that had yet to lose their leaves for the season (as this is really early to have this kind of snow). The wet heavy snow stuck would usually have nothing to stick to, but the leaves gave the snow something to stick to. The trees’ branches couldn’t handle the weight, and just snapped left and right. A gigantic poplar tree up the road from us lost a ton of branches and made a big mess out of the road that I had to move to get out of the neighborhood. Drake Park was a mess of broken branches throughout the park. We saw a nearly full-size tree that just missed clobbering an SUV on the West side of town. KTVZ has a decent gallery of photos of some of the carnage.

The theory is that tomorrow’s weather is supposed to warm up, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

October 4, 2009

Snow This Early Sucks

I tried. I really tried. But despite attempts with two different cars, I can’t make it out of my neighborhood here in Bend and make it to work out in Sunriver. We have at least two inches of very wet heavy snow that makes the road nearly impossible to drive on without studded/snow tires (and studded tires aren’t legal for nearly a month). It’s especially bad when you’re making the first tracks out of your neighborhood like I was this morning. All the trees and bushes in the neighborhood are bent over or being crushed by the heavy snow. The trees and bushes still have all their leaves, so they’re holding on to the snow. I’ve already gone and shaken off the snow on a couple of our trees so the branches don’t all break off. Trying to get up the street, there were several trees that had large branches broken off onto the road that I had to move out of my way before I could try to drive.

Looking at the Sunriver webcam, it looks like there might be less at my office than there is here in Bend, which is unusual. But I ran into the same thing last night when driving back from the game last night — there was hardly any snow up on the pass (light dusting), but ran into more in the lower elevations.

Hopefully some of this will melt off a bit so I can make it up my street tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m working from home today and keeping the fireplace stoked and just hoping that nothing breaks at the office that requires me to make it out there.

October 4, 2009

Come Listen To Me Pretend That I Know What I’m Doing

So the folks at Smart Solutions here in Bend run a monthly SmartGroup roundtable/seminar session, and this month’s topic is “Blogging: The Good, Bad, and the Ugly”. They’ve asked me, Jon Abernathy from HackBend and TheBrewSite (he also works for Smart Solutions), Andre Jensen from FreelanceSEM, and Meg Thompson from Audette Media to come and present. I would probably say that Jon = “The Good”, I = “The Bad” and Andre = “The Ugly” with Meg being “The Meg”, but I digress. I’d encourage you to come, as it’s going to be a good panel of pretty smart folks. The Facebook event page is here.

While anybody knows me knows how I can jabber with the best of them and have been directly interviewed several times about blogging before, I’ve never really presented in a setting like this. So I ask you, dear loyal readers (I know there are a few of you): If you were attending this seminar, what would you like to hear from me?

September 28, 2009

I Realized Tonight How Much Of An Idiot I’ve Become

Despite the fact that I have a college BS degree, I haven’t taken a math class since high school (I have taken some comp. sci and physics classes, but not a math class). I was really good at math in school, and took a placement test when I was first in college and received several college credits for aceing it — which killed off my need to take a math class for the journalism degree I was after.

Tonight, my 21-year-old sister-in-law came over with her COCC math homework so my wife (also a science/math geek growing up) and I could help her. And I realized two things: One, I’ve completely forgotten how to use my TI-83 or my wife’s TI-85 graphing calculators, resorting to online versions, and two: it’s been way too long since I’ve even thought about any sort of advanced algebra. I’m bumbling my way through it, but I remember this stuff being stupidly easy back in the day. I’ve sort of become a math moron (granted, I’m doing better than some probably would, but just the same, not nearly like I used to be).

My late high school calculus teacher would be seriously disappointed in me.

September 24, 2009

Disappearing

I’m heading out of town on a last-minute mini-trip to the coast, visiting some family over there who I rarely see and may not have many more chances to see. Will be mostly offline until Sunday. Everybody play nice.

September 17, 2009

Anybody Know How To Find A Property Manager For A Specific Home in Bend?

Or, does anybody in the City of Bend PD who’s reading this have nothing to do tonight?

I know the Sunriver police department maintains a list of which homes are managed by which company in Sunriver (a list that property management companies in Sunriver also have copies of). Anybody have any idea if the City of Bend and/or property managers in Bend have such a list? I won’t get into why, but let’s just say that I think a property management company would want to know what kind of folks they’re renting to in a neighboring house that does nothing by keep us up nearly every night (and while I’ve called the non-emergency police line a couple times, it hasn’t done any good). As we speak, they’re in their backyard (about five or six of them with several more inside) about 20 feet from where I’m sitting in my living room having a drunken discussion about something that involves throwing around the F-Bomb as much as humanly possible. And I’d like to go to bed at some point here in the near future.

These guys have parties like this at least 3 or 4 times a week and have all summer. Then during the day, they’ve got a crappy garage band that pounds away on the drums and guitars in their garage. Their drummer can’t play, either, and I know a thing or two about music and I know bad music when I hear it. The guy can’t even keep any sort of resemblance of tempo, and that’s the drummer’s most important job.

I never thought I’d say this, but I pray for the cold weather to come so the idiots will go inside.

September 15, 2009

Convertible Stroller/Bike Trailer and Train Table for Sale

This is for the folks that have kids out there (and I know there are a few of you). Our kids are getting too old for some of this stuff, so it’s time to get rid of it.

We have a convertible two-child bike trailer/stroller. It’s in great shape, still has all parts, and we paid well more than the $80 we’re asking for it. It looks just like this, but in red.

Also, we have a big ol’ sturdy train table with two train sets. These are those wooden train sets that you see at some of the toy stores. The full craigslist ad (with pictures) is over here. It’s a really solid table, with two large drawers, and is barely used as well. Could probably double as an ugly coffee table. $195 or best offer.

Would love to have this stuff out of my utility room so I can move around in there again, so make me an offer! Pop me an email using the form on the right of the page.

September 4, 2009