UtterlyBoring.com

Anybody Want To Make Any Bets…

…on how much they’re actually going to enforce the fireworks laws locally, especially after making a point to tell everybody they’re going to?

As everybody knows, the 4th of July is one of my least favorite holidays, as I live about two blocks from Pilot Butte, which they set on fire around this time every year. Which means I’m right in the middle of where everybody goes to party, get drunk, and shoot off a crapload of illegal fireworks. Generally speaking, I don’t mind the illegal fireworks, if they are used safely and properly (meaning not in the middle of a dense residential neighborhood). But who does that, minus the folks shooting them off the Butte (and even they catch acres of land on fire)? Nobody is safe — they’re too beered-up. I spend the entire evening watching bottle rockets and other flying projectiles land in my yard, worrying that they’ll catch something on fire. Considering how dry this area is, and how fires are already burning up around eastern Oregon, I won’t be surprised at all to see a fireworks-caused fire this year.

But sadly, I don’t envision their newfound willingness to enforce actually changing anything. These laws have been on the books for years, and they haven’t stopped anybody in my neighborhood at all, nor have I ever seen a law enforcement presence (and yes, I have called before when I feared fire).

So, anybody want to make any bets on how many fireworks citations they’ll give out this year? I’m willing to bet it’ll be less than 10.

July 1, 2008

If I Had My Own Office…

…I would totally make it look like a Super Mario Bros. level.

July 1, 2008

Fun Flash Rodent Abuse

Nothing like trying to launch a hedgehog into outer space to kill off an evening. How many days did it take you to do it?

June 30, 2008

Am I the only one…

…that’s excited about this? I’m not much of a game player, but Diablo was the first PC game I got into, blowing way too much time on it in college. I played the expansion pack and played through Diablo II as well as its expansion. I played Dungeon Siege and its sequel, and while they were superior games in many respects, Diablo has a special place in my heart — mostly because I wasted so many hours in college playing it when I should have been studying.

I’m just glad the third version of Diablo will actually be 3D accelerated, as the graphics in previous versions were a bit iffy.

June 29, 2008

Dang You, Dave

I’ve killed far too much time on this game thanks to you.

June 29, 2008

Finally — the Sprinkler System is Working

After spending pretty much every night after work in the backyard digging and cleaning ditches, the sprinkler system is now in and functional (read a couple of my write-ups about it here and here). I’ve basically spent every night after work digging around tree roots, removing beachball-sized rocks that the trencher couldn’t handle (and there were several that took me many hours to dig out). So after finally getting the last of the rocks out on Thursday, on Friday we started laying pipe for the backyard (the front year was already pretty much done last week). We got about 70% of the pipe down on Friday, I spent Friday night getting out a couple more gigantic rocks, and then Saturday we cut and glue the rest of the pipe, hooked up the sprinklers, wired up the controller, and fired everything up — and amazingly enough, it frickin’ worked.

We need to adjust the flow on a couple of the sprinklers, we still need the bury the pipes in the backyard, and we still need to get attachments for the drip system (we have the drip hose ran, we just need to hook into it), but that stuff will be easy compared to the initial task of getting everything dug up and installed.

Clean up is going to be a bit of a pain in the butt. Between all the rocks, the old sidewalk chunks, the sod we’re taking out of part of the front yard, and the piles of dirt, we have a lot of junk sitting around — it looks like we’ve gotten nothing accomplished, but we have. We still need to make a huge dump run with all the crap we can’t recycle (sod, cement/concrete/whatever-it-is, excess rocks, etc…), so that’ll take a bit of time and effort, but otherwise it’s nice to just have to do clean up at this point.

My whole upper body (mostly my hands and wrists) are sore as heck, but it’ll be much easier filling things in than taking it out.

But as is always the case, we don’t have enough dirt to completely fill in everything as when you remove all the rock and don’t put them back, obviously there’s space to fill. And I still have to fill in the sidewalk before the city decides to fine me. So if anybody has any good soil and or bags of concrete mix, let me know and I’ll give you and address to drop them off.

June 29, 2008