robot invasion

I built two vibrobots yesterday. I spent three hours working on them. I used two Altoids tins, two small motors, three AA batteries, a coat-hanger, some popsicle sticks and a bunch of carpet tape. It was totally worth it and not at all a tremendous waste of my time. Just ignore any comments made by my wife. She's cynical about anything that doesn't immediately have a purpose. Except for babies. For some reason she looooves babies.

Note: For those of you who aren't familiar with vibrobots, they basically just shake and rattle around and don't do anything helpful whatsoever. Well, I guess they have one purpose: to keep tinkering husbands busy for three hours on a Friday night. And, evidently, they terrify 22-month old little girls.

Turn your trash into... more trash!

I love clever stuff. Not novelty furniture (except for those chairs that look like giant hands...THOSE are awesome) or kitchen utensils that look like fish (even though we have some). I'm talking about those guys who take a metal coat-hanger and bend it and cut it and make something out of it. Well, I'm not talking about the guys who make those things, I'm talking about the actual things. Let's not get confused. But those guys are pretty cool, too. Mostly.

I have trouble throwing things away because I'm convinced that there is a cool use for just about everything and someday I'll figure out what that use is. I have a box full of broken toys and stuff in the garage that I refuse to throw out. Someday I might get that rare tumor thing that John Travolta had in Phenomenon and then I'll get super smart and I'll actually build some cool stuff. Then I'll die, like in the movie. It would probably be a better use of my new-found intelligence to figure out a way to not die.

Anyway, I found this website, Instructables.com, and there are all of these people who post ideas for making your own stuff out of trash and other spare parts. Like, this one guy built a tiny barbecue from an Altoids tin. Awesome? Yep. There were clocks made from Altoids tins, survival kits made from Altoids tins, guitars made from Altoids tins, an Altoid dispenser made from an old iPod... I just typed in "Altoids" and clicked "search." I'm sure there's tons more cool stuff on there.

I also love origami. I really do. I used to work as a machine operator in an ice cream factory and there were often large lapses in the actual work. So, standing around, leaning on pallets of raw materials, I got bored. So I found a scrap of paper and folded it into a frog. I would make about three dozen a night and just leave them wherever. Pretty soon people from other shifts started complaining about the paper frog infestation. I just love the idea of taking something plain and ordinary and giving it new life as something beautiful or useful or just plain fun.

And what's with the weather today, huh? Frickin' amazing, right?

Not hugs, either, apparently.

*sigh*

It seems that some people can't tell the difference between pretend misspelling and for really real misspelling. Here's an easy way to tell the difference: If Matt Beers writes a word, however he chose to do so is the accepted proper spelling. If Matt Beers writes a word and you know deep down in your simple little heart that he spelt it wrongly, then you need to assume that he done so purposefully.

I am referring to "amination" in the title of the last post.

Amination is easy if don't care about doing it good.

I've been playing around with some animation styles, testing this and that to find a good balance between quality and easy. Flash is the obvious answer, but I don't have Flash and that would require learning something new. I prefer to use only things I already know. So, I am going to be making some short cartoons and I will post them here and there and everywhere. I will post them in a box. I will post them with a fox.

This is gonna be awesome.

What a weekend.

This weekend was a very trying couple of days. Saturday was absolutely gorgeous, but Betsy and I had a seven-hour training session for the daycare, so we got to spend the whole day inside. I won't go into details about how informative the training session was, but it certainly left us feeling bitter about the whole affair. Then we went home, fed the kids and had a fairly relaxing evening.

While we were relaxing and feeling sorry for ourselves for having missed out on all the sunshine, some folks from church were dealing with a far more serious set of issues.

Scott and Rachel Amstutz saw their third child born a week ago. I don't know any of the details, but I assume things went well. Saturday was their oldest daughter's sixth birthday. I may be wrong, but I heard that they went to the Fort Wayne children's zoo, which I am guessing was lovely on such a day. That night, after the kids went to bed, Rachel was feeding their new daughter and began to feel ill. A few minutes later she stopped breathing and was rushed to the hospital where she died. Apparently there was blood clot in her lung. (I don't have nearly enough details to be calling this account "fact," so if you would like more info, I would suggest not asking me.)

Anyway, I've known Scott since the eighth grade, I think, and I first met Rachel when she worked with my friend, Joe, at Chic-fil-a. Scott is an amazing guy and Rachel was always very nice. It's an awful tragedy and it left Betsy and I feeling very upset.

One thing that amazes me in this is Scott's attitude. He has shown nothing but gratitude to God for the time he spent with his wife. He has been encouraging and faithful and set an incredible example of how a Christian faces loss.

Betsy and I are praying for Scott and his kids, and we're trying to appreciate every minute that God gives us.

My back hurts.

So, being a fat guy with wide, flat feet has finally caught up with me. I have a hard time finding comfortable shoes, so I usually just go with Chuck Taylors, which aren't exactly lauded for their arch-support. As most of my day is spent on my feet I find that these less than stellar shoes have, in conjunction with my copious belly, wreaked havoc on my back. I wonder if Bilbo Baggins ever had this problem.

I got biz-ay!

I actually did get busy today, not in the sense that I implied in this post's title, but in the traditional sense of getting busy by doing actual work.

Today was such a nice day that I decided to get started, REALLY started on the garage. Sometimes I say I'm going to clean the garage but what really happens is I move piles of mess from one side of the garage to the other, sweep where the piles of mess used to be, then move everything back. I pack the piles in tighter so it appears that I've actually made more room, but nothing legitimate is accomplished. But today I tore it up. I cut up a bunch of cardboard boxes, I moved my table saw, I threw some "old trash" (Betsy's words, not mine) away, I swept, I reorganized some of the kids' stuff, and I got things ready for our upcoming garage sale. There's still a lot left to do, but it looks so good that if I stopped now, it wouldn't be a big deal.

I also mowed.

Then I took a nap in the hammock.

I would go into greater detail on both the mowing and the nap, but I have to pluck a five year-old cretin from the tub. He is apparently drinking the bath water and sticking things in his butt. Somehow, these problems fall under my jurisdiction. I am not flattered.

So, I have this other website that is so much being launched as it is evolving into something worth seeing. According to my wife, the statement "something worth seeing" is kind of a big, fat lie. I may or my not disagree. We'll see.

This video is what visitors to the website will see upon... visiting... the website. Hmm.

Invalidated... again.

It really annoys me how easily I am dismissed by pretty much everyone I know. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the dumbest. I read a lot, I watch a lot of intelligent movies and television... sometimes. I listen to enlightening music and I pray a lot. I involve myself in group discussions and I think I can hold my own on a variety of topics. So why do I get the feeling that everyone is just waiting for me to stop talking so the "grown-ups" can talk?

I have some theories.

The first problem is that I'm kind of an ass. I have a hard time not making jokes about everything. I'm getting better at recognizing inappropriate humor when I think of it, but that recognition isn't enough to convince me to keep my mouth shut.

The second problem is that I never went to college. Well, I went. I took four classes, then dropped one because I didn't want to write a paper on speech pathology. I decided that I wasn't ready.

So, no proper education and a foot perpetually in my mouth. These are the reasons why my wife and my peers don't take me seriously.

The real irony is that the only time I'm taken seriously is when I'm joking.

The end.

The cool kids

I was never very cool in high school, a trend which I have faithfully continued to the present day. There were these girls in my class... I guess they weren't cool, either, but they acted cool and it always seemed like they knew something the rest of us didn't. For some reason, I always wanted to be one of them. Well, not a girl... I mean, every guy goes through phases, but that isn't what I'm talking about. Anyway, they were always my ideal of "cool."

One of them was actually a good friend of mine, but she spent most of her time with them. Of course, I had friends of my own and we all pretty much existed in our own world, our own inside jokes, our own agendas. But there was something special about those girls.

Maybe it was because they didn't ask for or seem to want permission from anyone to do anything. Or maybe it was because they could make you feel like you needed THEIR permission to do stuff. It might have been that they were the perfect balance of funny and confident and smart. But, probably it was because they were all pretty hot and still talked to me.

Looking back I'm beginning to realize that, except for the confidence thing and the hot thing, I was kinda one of them. In Government class we all broke away from the rest of the class to form our own political party. In journalism I was included in their inside jokes... usually as the butt of the joke, but still, I was there. And even now they remember me fondly, I am told.

I wish I had realized this stuff fifteen years ago.

Lasers.

I'm sorry, but this post has nothing to do with lasers. I misled you and, for that, I apologize.

I've officially begun the first garage-cleaning of the year. Typically, I clean out the garage about five times a year. It's not because I'm a clean-freak or anything. Quite the opposite, in fact. I'm relentlessly messy and if I didn't clean the garage every few months we'd eventually lose the mini-van.

I have two character flaws... well, as far as you know... unless you read my wife's blog... that I wouldn't mind waking up tomorrow without. They are these: I am a pack-rat and I love to start projects, but I hate to finish them. This makes it very hard to keep my garage in any kind of order. Let's face it. It makes keeping my sock drawer in order.

Betsy has accused me of being a pile-maker. I make piles. If you walk through our house on an average day you'll see stacks of my belongings... books, video games, movies, CDs, clothes... EVERYWHERE. Some guys express their basic maleness by sleeping around, spreading their seed, making certain that their genes live on. Not me. I just leave my crap lying around everywhere I go. It could be worse. I could pee on stuff.

I guess the whole garage sale thing (Did I mention that we're having a garage sale? I think I did a few days ago.) is me trying to break out of my pack-rat routine. I'm even getting rid of some of my old Star Wars stuff... maybe.

The problem is that I've given myself no room to grow. I have so much junk and no place to keep it. In a way it's good because it keeps me from buying more junk because where would I put it? But in another way it's bad because... well, my house is full of junk.

(Note: I don't want you to think that our house is a maze of stacks of old newspapers and shoe boxes filled with decade-old cheesecake. Betsy sees to it that everything is kept clean and tidy. But it's pretty evident that there is a certain amount of stuff that is un-organizable. That's all me, not Betsy.)

I have a headache...

I'm addicted to caffeine and I don't drink coffee and if I try to drink a soda in the morning I get dirty looks from Betsy. I get headaches a lot from caffeine withdrawal. Chocolate seems like an acceptable solution, but once I start eating junk, the rest of the day kinda goes in that direction.

I enjoy tea a great deal, but I don't like hot tea and iced tea with breakfast is sort of weird. Well, my friend, Brian, and his wife often have this hot orange Russian tea that is very, VERY tasty, but I don't know how to make it and I can't very well go over to their house every morning. Betsy wouldn't allow it.

These headaches make entertaining a house full of excited children something of a challenge. Betsy often experiences the same thing, but she's a trooper and she doesn't complain much. I, on the other hand, am an accomplished whiner, born of a long line of whiners... and quitters, but I'll talk about that later. Also, farmers, but I would rather NOT talk about THAT.

So, this morning has begun well, with the exception of a caffeine headache. I will press on and I shall overcome. Or be overcome. Time will tell.

This day, as opposed to others.

We had another birthday party for Jack today and I think he's starting to expect them every three weeks or so. We're gonna have to do something about it. Like military school.

Right now Betsy is sleeping on the couch and the 40 Year-Old Virgin is on USA, so all the cuss-words are gone but all of Paul Rudd's hilarity is pretty much in tact. "You know how I know you're gay? You like Asia."

I bought Rock Band yesterday and then played until my hand cramped up, then I played MarioKart until I got mad and started swearing at the Wii. Then I went to bed. I said all this on my Facebook status already, so I apologize if this statement is a rerun for you.

I play a lot of video games, so much so that I don't do much of anything else. I wonder how other people get things done. I'm guessing that if video games had been invented ten years earlier, Punk Rock would have never happened.

I am so unmotivated it's sick. I want to lose weight, but I don't want to do the work. I just want to wake up thinner. I want to be a professional writer but I don't want to write. I just want to wake up rich. I want to stop being a slave to my television... Actually, no. I don't mind that so much.

Anyway, I just wrote all this because I'm afraid that if I skip a day on this blog I'll skip a week, and if I skip a week I'll skip the rest of human existence, which would bore my readers. So, that's all for today. There will likely be something less interesting and more depressing tomorrow.

A goal achieved, a dream realized. And facts.

Last night we went to Panera and got some of that soup I was just talking about. It's amazing how knowing what you want and then going out and getting it can really make you feel pretty good about the world.

After dinner Betsy took Jack to buy some shoes and I took Macy to a bookstore where I bought yet another needless information book. I love trivia. Here are a few tasty bits:

Bruce Willis's real name is Walter.
Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button (not so sure about the authenticity of this one, but it sounds good).
The average woman consumes six-and-a-half pounds of lipstick in her lifetime.
The bones of the garfish are green.
Diet Pepsi wasn't invented until 1983.
The Sahara Desert covers nearly 5.6 million square miles. The next largest desert, the Arabian Desert, covers about 500,000 square miles.
The largest snowflakes on record were somewhere in the area of eighteen inches in diameter.

No one needs to know these things.

I really, really, really, want to eat a Chipotle burrito right now. RIGHT NOW! Although I might be persuaded to trade the burrito for a bread bowl of broccoli cheddar soup from Panera. But here I sit in my living room, writing about what I want but not eating it. Does this automatically classify me as "unhappy?" Or "fat?" Or both?

On an entirely different and unrelated note...

When Betsy and I first got married we bought this really cool computer desk. It's really wide and has a hutch and everything. We've had it for seven years and it has moved from house to house, room to room, and finally, today, I removed the hutch and put it in Jack's room, were it will probably remain until the day it dies.

In Macy's room is a bookshelf my mother bought when my brother, who is 37 this August, was a very small child.

Our first kitchen table is now my maternal grandmother's property.

My desk is an antique that we got from Betsy's dad.

Betsy's dad has a parlor table that we got when my paternal grandmother died.

Our second kitchen table is in our bedroom. It is my "puzzle table."

In our garage are some cabinets that my friend's dad pulled from on old bank he was demolishing.

My point is this: We do a good job of getting the most out of the crap that comes our way and Betsy has stated that we have all the crap we need.

Long, lazy day...

I'm tired. I played a bunch today. Some Laffy Taffy and cherry cola and I'll be okay. Don't worry.

April Fool's Day

I posted as my Facebook status that I am going to be having a testicle surgically removed. Not true. A lie.

So, here I am, telling whoever reads my blog that I will NOT be losing a testicle (hopefully) and that everything in that region is in proper working order.

I would also like to emphasize that I am a big believer in quality over quantity, which is not necessarily a reference to the afore-mentioned topic. But it kinda is.