It is March 1, people!! What a beautiful day!
17Normally, I read and search and plan how to handle what I am facing in the future. My husband laughed at the number of baby books I bought before our first child (poor second one, I winged it!) …
Being Goat is something that could not be researched. So I am going to wing it!
Tell us something interesting about yourself – interesting could be unexpected, strange, or just never disclosed before.
- 22 comments, 112 replies
- Comment
People think I’m unique.
Not true at all.
I just hide my awesomeness since otherwise people wouldn’t be able to comprehend it and would end up overwhelmed.
As for preparing for goathood - you can’t. Simply because the task is futile as @f00l discovered. Each month of the goat is a whole new experience, where each goat has a different spin on things. Thus, past results will not help future results.
I’m disorganized at the moment.
Can’t claim this is unexpected tho.
@f00l That is my life… no matter how hard I try to be organized!
Hi everyone. I’m sohmageek. I like speakerdocks. I’m sad as I’ve been on a dry spell for quite some time. Anyone got speakerdocks for sale???
@sohmageek you forgot the “it has been X weeks since my last speaker dock purchase” part. No chit for you!
@sohmageek nope… we knew all of that… try again!!!
My first name is actually not Conan.
@conandlibrarian
Wow. What a Con.
Heh. Works on 2 levels.
@conandlibrarian My first name is also not Conan.
@conandlibrarian Then why Conan?
@mikibell “con and librarian”
(And you get a preemptive blame for Irk’s pronunciations of names here!)
@mikibell well I do work in a library, and I have on a few occasions been confused with Conan the Barbarian because we look so much alike.
/giphy conan the barbarian
@narfcake I could see myself being called con. I still think “Con and Librarian” sounds like a typical 80’s television cop team.
@conandlibrarian Actually it would make an interesting relic hunting team. Kind of a subdivided Indiana Jones.
@conandlibrarian you are lucky to be confused with him… my husband, when he weighed a bit more, was constantly confused with Meatloaf!
@conandlibrarian
Re Conan the Barbarian
Where was the resemblance?
The Hair, the Headband, the Pecs, the Accent?
@f00l Yes.
At one point a couple of years ago, I had some discussion via email/phone with some people at woot who wanted me to potentially move there to take on a job. Although the idea sounded really fun, and my wife was actually considering it since she has family there, it was decided that the timing wasn’t really ideal. I also would have had to drop wootstalker.
@lichme cooool… regrets? or right path taken?
@mikibell Definitely right path taken. Since then I accepted a job with another company, had a custom house built, became a dad (best thing ever), and most (but not all) of the people whom I was excited to get the chance to work with have moved on from woot. Plus, the family that she has there regret their decision to move, and eventually plan on coming back here.
I’ve been to all fifty U.S. states and ten Canadian provinces. I drove to all but one.
@craigthom Which one?
@MrMark Funnily enough, someone once accused me of lying about driving to Alaska because it wasn’t connected to the mainland United State by land. She insisted it was out in the ocean, like Hawaii.
@craigthom
/giphy facepalm
@craigthom technically, isn’t the person almost right? It is not connected to the lower 48. The part about in the ocean is soooo wrong…
@craigthom
Envious.
/giphy salute
@mikibell Alaska is connected to the lower 48 by land. That land’s not in the United States, but that restriction was not expressed, and it’s certainly not a hinderance to driving up there, because Canada has roads, even in the Yukon Territory. Not may paved ones, but there are roads.
@f00l Just get in your car and go. The border crossings require passports now, but there’s no other advanced planning needed.
I did a lot of the Eastern US in short road trips. New England was my first one week trip. My first two week trip was the southwest, then one for the Pacific Northwest, then one for Alaska, and then one for eastern Canada. All done.
I went to Hawaii on three-day layover on a business trip to Australia several years before I started the road trips, so I got it out of the way early.
@craigthom I’ve been thinking about that, I’ve visited a lot of the US but haven’t seen Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse Mountain or the Washington Plaza and Smithsonian yet. Also the Copper Canyon railway nearby in Mexico is supposed to be the most beautiful railway in the world. I’ve been on the second most beautiful, the Great Kuranda Rail in Australia twice, but never the best only 233 miles away. Right now I have a sick old dog and no traveling companion, so it’s on the back burner.
@craigthom
Right now gotta deal with Life and stuff.
Wanna, tho. V good at long distance driving and think it’s fun.
Have been to Oahu. But never the other islands.
@craigthom My daughter once told a gullible teacher, that her step dad (mind you I adopted her as a single parent and there is no dad or stepdad) lives in Hawaii (we lived in OK at the time) in a 6 story house with a pool and tennis courts and earned his living by driving a uhaul truck around the world. Umm…he’d need a uhaul submarine to make it off the island LOL. And that twit fell for it! She actually asked me if I missed my husband since I didn’t see him much and why weren’t we living in this cool house in Hawaii. OMG. Been had by a devious 6th grader.
@moondrake I have made road trips both with and without companions, and honestly, even when everything was great, and the other person was having a great time, the solo trips are better. The main reason is that my trips are full of spontaneous decisions, like “I think I’ll stop here”, “I’m going to go there instead of the place I’ve been driving to for six hours”, “oops, closed, next trip”, etc., and, even when the other person is fine with the decisions, I still have to consider him or her when making them.
I tend not to drive at night when I’m on a road trip, because driving is no fun when I can’t see anything, but I leave at sunrise, whenever that it. And sometimes there’s no place to spend the night when it’s time to stop, and I have to drive an hour or two or three more to find a motel, and sometimes the motels are less than stellar, and that’s tough with another person who may not think driving ten hours.
And I don’t make hotel reservations, because I don’t know where I’ll be at the end of the day. Setting times to be at a specific place creates a sense of anticipation, and the trip becomes “are we there yet? Will we be early? Will we be late?” instead of “man, I’m having fun driving right here”, which is my goal. If the drive itself isn’t the goal, then it becomes a tedious delay between stops.
This means that I miss places because I get there too late or too early, but that’s OK. I see dozens of places, but, more importantly, I see lots of land that’s unlike home. I see different crops (which I will stop and ask about if I don’t recognize them), I see different brands of gas and of potato chips (our last true regional packaged food). I hear different accents, and I talk to strangers everywhere I go.
OK, I officially need another road trip.
Just remember to take maps. Cell phones don’t work in huge parts of the country. You can be without service for hours.
@craigthom That is how I traveled all over Europe when I worked there. Fun. And many unexpected surprises that way. And a few nights spent in weird places due to full youth hostels and then met the nicest people that way.
@f00l We should take a road trip together.
@Kidsandliz We moved so much when I was a kid (no more than 6mos in one city, across 6 states and dozens of cities) that when teachers saw my transcript they would ask me why and I had no answer (still don’t). So in about 5th grade I started telling them we were in witness protection. Shut them right up.
@moondrake
Road trips are the best. Esp when you have time for silly stuff.
@moondrake Now that is good!
A sort of related story: My 4 year old niece and 6 year old nephew were talking about the liabilities of having red hair in a family where it skipped a generation and they were the only one who had it in each of their families. The 4 year old asked what the 6 year old said when asked “where did you get that lovely red hair?”. The 6 year old said, “I tell them it came with my head and it shuts them right up”.
@craigthom Totally agree on traveling alone. My family thinks I am nuts (correct, but not specifically for that reason).
My main travel companion is Mom. She likes to go for the ride and make no decisions. I like the company but worry about pushing her too far health wise.
@craigthom I’ve been on a lot of road trips with my best friend following that model. We would just go, eat when we were hungry, stop for photos where it was pretty, sleep when we were tired. Living in far west Texas, long road trips are the only way to get places on a budget. But to me, a sunset just isn’t as pretty, a roadside stop just isn’t as interesting, a new experience just isn’t as adventurous without someone to share it with. Since Bob died last year I have been taking a lot of our shared dreams out to examine which ones have value alone, which ones have value if I can find someone else to share them with, and which dreams died with him. One of these was our Great American Road Trip to see the middle and eastern parts of the US, having explored the western US already. We’d planned to borrow a friend’s RV this summer so our dogs could come with us. A smaller version of this could be fun by car with a companion but I think making it alone would just make me lonely.
Lisa Violet was one of our cats. Lisa for the Simpson’s character, Violet after my mom (who gave her to us).
@lisaviolet I knew that already… but
because others may not.
@lisaviolet Sammy was my dog. Because we liked the name.
I eat GOAT. Particularly, in the month of March.
@mfladd
Beware the Eyes of March.
@mfladd
@mfladd
/image chivo stew
@mfladd
@mfladd That reminds me that my favorite taco place, a restaurant inside a supermercado, has goat soup only on the weekends, and I’m never there on the weekends. The menu doesn’t say “goat soup”, but whatever it said translated to “goat broth” or something. Maybe it’s a stew.
@f00l I’des say only to beware on the 15th…
@craigthom Cabrito? That’s what they call goat meat around here.
@moondrake No, it was a different work. I already knew cabra and cabrito from signs by the side of the road and chupacabra.
I don’t wear catshirts every day.
@narfcake
/giphy The horror!
@conandlibrarian Today is not one of those days, however!
/image teeturtle across the starry night
@narfcake I have that shirt. I thought I bought it from TeeFury. Maybe teeturtle wasn’t a thing yet?
@RiotDemon Ramy had it up at TeeFury first before putting it up on his own site. TeeTurtle existed, but it was still his side hobby to med school at that time.
I frequently leave the house without my cell phone. On purpose. I can be unreachable by phone, text or email, sometimes for hours on end. And… amazingly… the world continues to spin, the birds keep singing, and the sun still rises the next day.
/giphy sunrise
@ruouttaurmind Are you outta your mind?
@moondrake Rumor has it.
/giphy straitjacket
@ruouttaurmind You got a great gif with that slash.
@mfladd Only took 7 edits to get that one.
@ruouttaurmind Just like it did before cell phones, laptop computers, answering machines… Guess cell phones put the bells families would hang by their front door and have a special pattern in their ring to call kids to come home when they were out playing in the neighborhood out of business.
@Kidsandliz My mom would whistle and I’ll bet the sound could travel for miles. And somehow we were able to distinguish the sound of mom whistling from any other parent in the neighborhood. Uncanny.
I may have the longest commute to work. Although I don’t commute every day, I regularly travel back and forth to Maui from New Mexico for my work. I’m on Maui right now! Something else interesting; it is snowing here. At least it is on Mauna Kea, over 6" so far today, and the forecast calls for snow on Maui at the summit of Haleakala. That’s where I work.
@accelerator
I want your job.
@accelerator Maui???
@accelerator Are you an astronomer?
@accelerator Cool beans… I have been to neither place. I have trouble getting my husband to travel to places he has never been!
@jqubed Astronomy is not my profession. But, I do work at one of the telescope sites where we do optical R&D.
@mikibell I think northern New Mexico, especially, is an amazing place to visit. Check out Santa Fe and on north to Taos. I bet you would love it.
@accelerator Hope you get time to play tourist and lounge on the beach…
Jewel (the singer) touched my nose. On purpose.
@ACraigL Hopefully not with her fist?
/giphy punchout
@ruouttaurmind Nope gently with her fingers, for about 90 seconds, or however long it was to finish our conversation.
@ACraigL Was this a romantic conversation? Or just a run of the mill “Hi, I’m Jewel and I’m going to pet your nose while I chat with you” kind of conversation??
@ruouttaurmind The latter. Something she does, apparently, though I like to think of myself as special. I would have tried to turn it towards romantic had I not been with my girlfriend (now wife) at the time.
To this day I tease my wife that I could have been Mr. Jewel. She was pissed at the time, and it never fails to continually amuse me, seeing her annoyance about this shine through.
@ACraigL Ya, but if you were Mr. Jewel you’d have to move to Alaska and hunt moose and raise cattle and spend 12 hour days maintaining a homestead.
Actually, except for the Alaska and moose part, it doesn’t sound all that bad…
@ACraigL for all you know, having pet your nose could mean that you are married to her, and are Mr. Jewel – have you researched it to make sure it is not a little known tradition for a religion somewhere??
@ACraigL Then you and Jewel could have a Baby Jewel, and collectively, you would all by called Family Jewel
I used to be able to at least attempt to put curses on people, but not anymore. BLAME!
/8ball Can I start cursing again?
:’(
@ELUNO
Cannot predict now
/8ball Has the /8ball cursed @Eluno?
@ELUNO This is not a blame thread… and we knew that about you already – INTERESTING information, please!
welcome to goathood @mikibell! it’s about time.
something weird:
back in high school, we were at my friend’s house (Jay) and his dad got a phone call from india. my friend’s grandmother got hit by a car. nothing serious, it just bumped into her, knocking her over. mainly just scrapes and bruises.
the next day, i went to dinner with my uncle and my friend’s uncle. Jay’s uncle mentions they got a call from india yesterday. i pipe in “oh yeah. how’s Jay’s grandma?” he gives me a funny look and asks “have you seen Jay today?”
“nope, haven’t seen him at all.”
“then how do you know what happened?”
“uhh… because i was sitting there when they called?”
“that’s not possible. they called at 2 in the morning.”
we all got kind of quiet after that. he kept giving me weird looks for the rest of the dinner.
@carl669 You’re so creepy
@carl669 HE’S A WITCH!!! BURN HIM!!!
/giphy witch
@carl669 Wait, were you there at 2 a.m. or had the family just waited and called the uncle much later?
@jqubed i wasn’t there at all. the thing about me sitting on their couch when the call came was apparently just a dream.
@carl669 I had a few things like that happen to me when I was in college – for a while, I was afraid to dream because the people I dreamed about kept turning up dead… Luckily, it seems that part of my brain has been quieted.
Stealing an idea from @accelerator:
Not counting those who work from home, I might have the shortest commute to work? 9min, 3.2mi (per Google Maps).
I like to tell people that it takes longer to walk to my desk from the parking lot than to drive from my house to the parking lot.
@compunaut I transferred from a small city to a small town. I told the realtor I wanted to be close to work. She showed me a cute house, took me out into the backyard, and proudly showed me the smokestacks for the chemical plant I worked at. Nope, just nope.
@sammydog01 As the old saying goes, “be careful what you wish for, you might get it”. A friend of mine is the head chemist for the local refinery and his house is as far from the refinery as you can get within the city limits. He likes to wear a tshirt that says, “if you see me running, try to keep up”. I had a friend 20 years ago that was head of the local EOD team, and she had the same logo on her tshirt. Multipurpose.
@compunaut For one glorious year, I had a .9 mile commute. I never walked it, though, due to Texas summers and the homeless camp on the route. That, and laziness.
@compunaut I am now .2 miles driving to work according to google. I have been walking which is shorter because I can cut off the corner intersection. Less than 4 minutes walking unless I am chatting with the neighbors. This could be a problem when the weather is warmer.
@compunaut I am jealous. I have a 26 mile commute to work. The drive takes between 23 minutes to 248 minutes to get to work. One never knows what is going to happen on the main road to work. Alternate routes can be just as bad, depending on the weather. Luckily, I work from home 2 days a week!
@mikibell
Manhattan?
@f00l I wish… CT … we had severe flooding one day that took out the main roads to work. It took hours for the water to recede so we could get to work… wouldn’t have been bad if I could have turned around and gone home, but I stayed on high ground to ensure I was safe. Taco Bell was my haven.
@f00l another time there was a factory on fire, and it was spewing chlorine gas, so we sheltered in place again… lots of snowstorms, too many to count… I have been commuting for 20 years. I have gotten stuck in all sorts of situations…
@mikibell might have been an ammonia gas – either way, it wasn’t something to be inhaling!!
ummmmmmm…@mikibell How did you get a topic bubble with a protester whose sign reads Pussy Power? (I just noticed).
Did you pick that?
@mfladd Are you implying cats are powerless on the internet?!
@ELUNO No, no…that is where I see them at their best (most of the time).
@mfladd ummmmm Goat Magic!!!
@mikibell It’s just like a horned cat, right?
@hanzov69 Horned cat?
http://www.teeturtle.com/products/the-magical-kittencorn
My brother’s birthday is today. Happy birthday, Steve!
@lordbowen Happy Birthday Steve!!!
Bet Steve hasn’t been wished happy birthday by a goat before!
I got drunk and applied for a job in New Zealand once. They called me a few hours later, woke me up, and offered me the position.
The next day I sold everything I owned that wouldn’t fit in my luggage.
Two days later I was standing in Auckland.
(Which is right about the time that what I’d done actually sank in).
One of my better decisions.
@hanzov69
I think almost any excuse will do for going to New Zealand?
@hanzov69 how long did you stay?
@hanzov69 Wait, it’s that easy for an American to move to New Zealand?
@hanzov69 sweettttt… wish I had the guts to try that before I grew roots to the life I have now. I did love my stay in Australia a long while ago though!
@RiotDemon Two winters. I was teaching snowboarding during their winters, then came back and worked the season here in the US.
@jqubed Well… sort of.
The system then (I assume it’s still the same or similar) is that basically every job (even say a dishwasher) has a job classification and certification associated with it. If I get this wrong, I apologize, it’s been a long time…
Inland Revenue (if memory serves) tracks how many people who are presently in country (legal residents) are capable of those skills.
So in my instance, they would say “OK, there are presently 90 people in country qualified to teach snowboarding, our industry has need for 130 people, so we’ll allow 40 visas”. Then, if for some reason the businesses can’t source people, they can petition for a variance or something along those lines.
Which is sort of what happened to me, I was planning on returning for a third season and my employer wasn’t able to get a visa for me. Which was sort of a bummer because I was going to begin pursuing some sort of residency.
It all worked out in the end, because I finally realized that I was never going to get ahead financially as a snowboard instructor, so I needed to get a slightly more adult job.
@hanzov69
Which is what?
@compunaut Eh, I took on a SysAd job for an ISP (dial up). When they went under, I hung out in New Mexico at a wolf sanctuary for a while before taking a gig as a System Engineer.
That took me overseas for a bunch of years, doing defense work for a large US Aeronautics company.
Finally got tired of living out of airports and carrying a passport, so I moved stateside permanently, left the company and took a job as an IT Director for a FinTech company.
I have never eaten a Big Mac.
@jqubed Me neither… that special sauce always make me queasy just looking at it!
@jqubed
@mikibell
I have, when desperate and I didn’t know better.
You can skip this “experience” and be the better person for skipping.
@jqubed When I had my wisdom teeth pulled, couldn’t have solid food for a while. That’s when I had a craving for a Big Mac.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
May have been the last time I had one - lots of better choices these days
I start most of the vegetable and flower plants in my garden from seed every spring. Since you have to start so early in the year for some of them (December to February), it seems to make the winter shorter.
@mehnyblooms before I got into cake decorating, and filled our counters with the supplies, we began our vegetable garden from seeds too. That is one of my goals, to clean the counters enough to do that again.
@mikibell And of course you get bragging rights when your tomatoes get ripe before anyone else. Ha ha.
@mehnyblooms our last frost is typically in May, so we also bought greenhouses to protect the plants when they outgrow the space and it is still too early to plant them.
And fresh salsa before everyone else… yummmmyyyy
I can juggle
@CaptAmehrican what can you juggle???
@mikibell tennis balls, priorities, men
@CaptAmehrican welp… I am one for three there
I always wanted to be in the situation of juggling men!!!
@mikibell lots of upper body strength for that one I’m guessing.
As a crewmember of the USS Abraham Lincoln, I participated in Operation Fiery Vigil in 1991 and got to see the aftermath of a volcano dumping ash over everything for hundreds of miles. When we got there, everything was grey. Sea, sky, land, even the ship. The only color was the blue of our uniforms when we ventured out.
@PocketBrain that must have been a life altering experience. Thank you for your service!!
@PocketBrain
Did you go ashore?
@PocketBrain That’s incredible!
@f00l We did go ashore briefly, to help handle baggage and pets (!) and get them onto the ship for transport. We had a kennel area set up in one of the hangar bays they called the ‘zoo.’ Air Force personnel and their families were evacuating; the mission was to get them to safety. We took a couple/few trips (can’t remember how many). We did see the USS Midway during the first transit to Cebu. At the time, the Lincoln was the newest US Navy aircraft carrier in commission, and Midway the oldest. Later on, in October, we returned for “standard” shore leave, but I imagine it wasn’t the same thing as before the volcano.
@PocketBrain
Yeah I would imagine quite a difference afterwards. Was the bar life still very lively?