In honor of today, which is one of my favorite holidays, I have written a halloween haiku for you.

My Halloween drink
is not a dark witches brew
rather tequila.

Happy Halloween!

This week has been the You Tube week.

…And this guy keeps a straight face the whole time. Impressive!

The thing that’s not so funny is I’m pretty sure I’ve seen almost identical presentations at the CTEK Angels. Engineering entrepreneurs are so wrapped up in the technology that they assume everyone else understands.  Think investors fund things they don’t get?  (Not usually, unless their best friend is investing and he/she gets it).

Okay, they’re cousins by marriage. But I’m greek, and in the greek tradition, we’re ALL family!

This is a shameless familial plug, but it’s good!

My cousins The Brother’s Nee wrote, directed, and filmed this second version of A Fine Frenzy “Almost Lover”. It’s getting some good traction! You can view the video in it’s entirety below, but don’t forget to vote for the video on VH1 here…

You know that I have a reputation with photographs – that they are decent but everyone has to wait YEARS to see them (case in point, wedding photos still are not up from July 2006). So here’s my funny (but long) story.

My husband and I have recently returned from a three month trip to South America. Everyone keeps asking me to see the photos, and determined not to disappoint, right when I got back from SA I uploaded everything to my father’s computer, organized, deleted, edited the goodies, and starred the ones I would upload. I couldn’t yet do the upload though b/c I needed my own laptop for that job, which was in Colorado. So I backed everything to DVD’s and flew back to CO.

When I got home, I learned that my hard disk was FULL and I would need to move some old photos off to accomplish the job. No prob. I have a network storage device with hundreds of gigs just for the job.

Well, right about the time I went to do the transfer, our network went down. Comcast came out, fixed it. then 2 days later mark broke it again. Comcast came BACK out, fixed it from the modem to the computer, but as soon as you put the router in there, it broke. After 3 weeks of me trying to figure out what was going on, I discovered that the router was broken. New router.

Okay! Intranet/Internet now working, after about 4 weeks. I go to connect to the network storage device, and I can’t see it. Can’t ping it, can do nothing. 2 weeks go by of me communicating with their tech support, they can’t fix it. After pulling my hair out, I come to learn that the new firewall I installed on my computer was blocking the map network drive and ping functions, but only to the network storage device (have other drives mapped no prob). Go figure. So after configuring the firewall, VOILA! Now I get access to the storage device. So I move a whole bunch of files off (takes 2 days, we’re talking lots o’ gigs here). I install the SA photos. Except some of the tags and descriptions I had set with the photos aren’t there (this part took me HOURS AND HOURS when I got back from SA). So I ended up re-creating them. That took me maybe a week.

Okay, tags and descriptions done. On hard drive, done. Now let’s begin the upload! I start to upload. Right when the first set finishes, my computer battery dies. So I plug it in, but no juice is flowing. After about 20 minutes of fiddling with it, I’ve come to discover that the DC jack on my laptop has just died. It’s fused to the motherboard. And battery is fully drained, without a way to juice it. Mark and I operated on the laptop figuring the connectors were lose and we could just re-soder. After 1 agonizing hour of intensive laptop invasive surgery, we discovered this job was for a pro and WAY beyond our skills. That was thurs.

So, right now, I have about 1/20th of my photos online. The rest are stranded on my laptop HD which is sitting besides me, calling my name, but no way to access it. HD enclosure didn’t work. Installing the HD in a new laptop didn’t work. My motherboard is sitting in a repair shop in WA somewhere trying to get fixed. There’s lots more blood and guts to this story, but I’ll spare you the details.

Suffice it to say if you really want to see photos, I can direct you to about 1/20th of them. Let me know if you’re interested.

I’m having somewhat of an embarrassing problem, and for those that know me, I don’t embarrass easily.

I’m somewhat of an exercise addict.  I have tons of energy and get stressed out easily.  Exercise is the only thing that brings my energy and stress to manageable levels.  I feel better about myself, I obsess less, I’m less grouchy and irritable, and generally, a nicer person to be around.

I spend probably half my workout time in a spinning class, and the other half my workout time outside in some manner, running, hiking, or road biking.   When I’m outside, I obviously don’t have access to a mirror.  In my spin class, I usually sit so the mirror is next to me instead of in front of me – I have ZERO desire to see myself all sweaty and blotchy and frizzy.

ANYWAY, a while ago, I had to sit in a different seat in my spin class since the class was almost at capacity.  So there I am, in front of the mirror.  I ride hard that day, and at the end of the class, I sit up on my bike, stretch my hands over my head, and glance at myself in the mirror.  To my horror, I realize that MY NIPPLES HAVE SWEAT THROUGH MY SHIRT.  I have huge wet RINGS around my nipples, and it looks like I’m lactating!  I am not pregnant, I have no other shirt, and it is glaringly obvious.  All of a sudden I feel all eyes on me.  I know the whole class is staring at me, probably trying hard not to laugh.  I’m convinced the person next to me is suppressing a guffaw.  My face instantly goes red, I quickly dismount, grab my towel and water bottle, hold them in front of my wet boobs, and I leave.

Next day I’m in class again, and the same thing happens!  I sweat a lot, so my shirt is fairly wet, but my breasts are dry except for my wet nipples.  The HUGE wet spot around my nipples!  The next day I go for a run outside.  When I get home, same thing.  I’m sweating through a lined jog bra and a t-shirt. I am not exaggerating here.  I’m not imagining it either.

I’m so embarrassed.   I’m going to have to put maxipads over my boobs when I exercise.

I have a hypothesis and am looking for someone to validate it for me.

Pavlov was a founder of classical conditioning.  His experiements showed that if you repeatedly rang a bell before presenting a dog with food, the dog would salivate.  Pretty soon you could stop presenting the dog with food, but the dog would still salivate at the sound of the bell.

Why can’t this work for abdominal muscles?  I’ll drink a margarita, then do crunches.  Margarita, crunches.  Margarita, crunches.  Pretty soon I can stop doing the crunches and my abdominal muscles will still respond after I do abs.

Anyone care to give it a shot?

It’s Darwinian really.

As the lions pick off the weakest of the herd, thus removing the weaker genes from the herd’s gene pool and strengthening the genes of the future generations of the herd, so goes drinking.

Drinking eliminates the weakest brain cells, thus strengthening the whole.  Drink more!