Oh yeah…I remember this.

…for Jones Soda to whip up a fresh batch of tantalizingly tasty Turkey Soda! This year, they have some new flavors for the whole family: Cranberry Soda, Mashed Potato & Butter, Green Bean Casserole and Fruitcake Soda. Mmmmm!

Darryl pointed me to a great roundup of (liberal-ish) post-election graphics. Go look, it’s pretty good!

Back in college I worked at a sporting good store, in the rock climbing section. I was poor and I climbed a lot back then, and the employee discounts were key to gear accumulation. When it was slow on the sales floor, I used to make belts for myself and for friends out of tubular climbing webbing and fastex buckles. They were super cheap and super durable–just what climbers needed. Of course, now you can buy similar belts in any decent outdoor shop–they’re totally commoditized.

A few months ago Tru needed a belt, and I remembered the ones I used to make. So we took a trip to REI and bought some 3/4″ flat webbing and a couple of plastic buckles. I made a belt for Tru and one for his cousin Benjamin. Benjamin can’t find his, but Tru wears his all the time. He loves it because he looks like a big guy with a belt, and he can buckle and unbuckle it by himself. I like it because it cost around a dollar to make each belt–and that was paying retail for supplies.

This evening I was talking with my sister, Benjamin’s mom, and she was asking me about the belt. She said that she knew a couple of other people who wanted similar belts and jokingly mentioned that I should start selling them. I figured why not? So I’ll try ebay and see what happens. I think Amy and I will make a few during the evenings and drop them off at local shops, just to see what kind of response we get.

Yesterday I went to bed at 3:30am and woke up an hour and a half later. That’s because I was busy making the presentation I had to give, which I wrote about on Slacker Manager. So I was feeling a little weird all day. We had lots of leftover food at the conference, so I brought home a bag of eats–that was nice.

Later in the evening, Amy had a meeting and I was giving Tru a bath. Came out of the bathroom and there were two gallons of milk on the kitchen counter. I was a little freaked out that there was some kind of milk-ghost in the house. Amy told me later that she was expecting a friend to drop of the milk–guess she just came in, dropped it off and left. When Amy got home, she had a free loaf of bread from her meeting. Lots of free food yesterday.

The new blog is doing nicely and getting a couple hundred visits a day. Not bad for being less than a week old. This evening I bought a textad on Metafilter (only $10 for 10,000 pageviews), so we’ll see if that drives any traffic over there. The AdSense ads are weird–all about blogging, but I don’t really talk about blogs. Not sure what’s going on there and I hope it changes. Also, looking at the referrer logs this evening, I see that I’m one of the top results for the search paired ranking. Weird.

This evening Truman is watching Godzilla. He said it’s his favorite movie and I can understand why. Big dinosaur-monster. He loves it. Amy had the movie for one of her classes and Tru turned it on when we got home and is just digging it.

Finally, be sure to go check out Jared’s writing over on Simple Subjects. He’s kinda writing about the stuff I wanted to address when I talked about the ‘Right Living’ blog. Go look, it’s good stuff. And help a brotha’ out–click a couple ads for him. 🙂

Well, I decided to unleash a new blog upon the world. It’s called Slacker Manager and I’m looking forward to writing it. I’ve got it hosted on TypePad.com, which ought to provide quite a bit more reliable uptime than I’ve experienced with our pintglass.org hosts. This blog will be a little experiment for me…I want to try and force/fool myself into writing more about the slacker@work stuff. And also, I’m curious to learn more about the blog advertising model. I’ve got Google AdSense on the sidebar of the blog, and I’m curious as to how that’ll work out. We’ll see.

Anyway, it’s yet another way to keep up with my doings, though I’ll be keeping the personal writing over here and the ‘professional’ writing over there.

Jared posted a few pics of their latest family addition, Levi! Go take a look. And bookmark Jared’s site…he’s got interesting interests that may interest you if you’re interested.

Well, it looks like my manifesto went live on the ChangeThis website. That’s kinda fun! Be sure to get linky with it and pass it around. Now that it’s up, I guess it’s probably time to write the book proposal… Sigh. I don’t like having to work for my millions.

Well, I voted. Oregon does all voting by mail. It’s actually really great, since you can vote at your convenience right at home. I think the ‘e-voting’ initiatives that other states are undertaking sound great and I’ll probably vote over the internet someday. But for now, this old fashioned way of voting seems awfully easy and secure. I make my votes, I put my ballot in a ‘secrecy envelope’ then I put that envelope in yet another envelope and walk it over to the ballot box down the street. Easy as pie.

I breezed through most of the ballot, but Measure 34 really had me stumped. Still does. I like the idea of setting aside 50% of the forests for non-logging uses, but I have a very hard time reconciling the killer combo of reduced income to the state and increased expenses to the state. The Pacific Greens urged a yes vote, but with a “strong caveat’ (which I never found). I went further and voted against it, but with a heavy heart–I actually hope it passes, but I couldn’t, in good conscience, vote for it.

Last week was kind of a whirlwind. Starting Saturday (a week ago yesterday), we cruised up to Seattle and visited with Amy, then went to Brandon and Kristin’s wedding. The wedding was beautiful and traditional and the reception was going off! They had the reception in this big catering place and there was tons of food and drink. We brought Truman, but he started getting squirrelly, so we split early. I was able to finally meet JVE (and his lovely wife Kelly) in person, so that was pretty cool. Wish I could have spent more time chatting with them, though…

Got back last Wednesday night from my conference in San Diego. The conference was kind of dull, but I was able to hook up with three old friends from college, so that made it all worthwhile. 🙂 Then Lu and Joanie brought Trey into the world–wow, what a cutie! Been quite a week.

Tru’s ‘grammy’ comes into town this coming Wednesday, so that’ll be fun for all of us! I think Amy and I might even get a chance to take advantage of some free babysitting and have a little weekend getaway…we’ll see.