Hair

I realized I'm doing this blog thing all wrong. My blog is supposed to be me, I should be using this to talk all about me! I thought I'd give it a try for this post. I'll spare you a post about my obvious manliness, awesomeness, toughness, wonderfulness, and manliness, since most of you are well aware of those traits (I was, after all, voted alpha male unanimously in 2009 by all those who participated in said voting). Instead I'll talk about my hair and it's ever increasing length.

For much of my life, I have fought against the semi-curliness of my hair by keeping it short enough that there was no room to curl. Whenever my hair would get long enough to begin to curl, I would attack it with a vigor that can only be compared in ferocity to that of a battle between a great white and a crocodile, the two most feared animals on the planet. So most may assume that the new hairstyle stems from me either being too lazy to cut my hair, or from my being an engineering grad student, so it's only natural that I throw all personal hygiene out the window. Both are pretty much right.

Scary, I know. This picture probably shouldn't be shown to small children, or those with weak hearts, Actually, this picture probably shouldn't be shown to anyone, and I apologize to all those who will suffer from severe nightmares now.

At first I held off cutting my hair because I had received vaguely positive comments about it ("I like your hair longer, it hides your face more" and "Your hair isn't looking completely horrible anymore.") Fueled by friends and enemies alike (you know which you are) commenting that they thought my hair looked good longer, I've held off on cutting it...though I've come close a few times... But recently I came up with an even better reason to grow my hair out. With it just a little bit longer, I'll be able to combine the three most awesome and influential hair styles ever known to man. I am, of course, talking about the fro, the mullet and the mohawk. Just imagine, fro on the sides, mullet in the back and mohawk to top it all off. Actually, I did a Paint mock up of what it would look like, so you don't have to imagine. I'm pretty excited now, and for the first time in my life, I wish my hair would grow faster.

Behold, it all it's glory, the frollet hawk!

Mail: Boost to the self esteem

Have you ever come home, flustered and discouraged? You go through the mail and find that all you ever get is junk mail? Do you throw that junk mail away? If so, I'm here to tell you to stop. Junk mail is the answer to all discouragement problems. In fact, I stopped calling it junk mail, I now call it "overly polite, complimentary, feel good and uplifted mail", or Opcfgau mail for short. This was a pretty recent discovery for me as I did something unusual one day. I opened one of the envelopes and actually read (well...scanned) the letter inside, instead of just straight up throwing it away. Let me share some of the things I've learned about myself.

This is what it's like when you view your mail as junk mail. You've got to change your attitude!

First off, I am a Member-Elect of an insurance company I'm not even signed up for. Member-Elect. That sounds important. That sounds like me. I deserve to be a Member-Elect, and they recognized it. That same company let me know that I "cannot make a mistake..." (There was something after that about by joining now, but I'm pretty sure the main message was that I just can't make a mistake).

I am also one of a credit card company's most valuable customers. I deserve MORE. Then they offered me many things I didn't need, but the point was, I am very valuable to them, I am important, and I deserve more, and hopefully they will decide later just to send me free cash instead of useless offers.

Throw away that junk mail attitude and start getting Opcfgau mail. Just look at the difference. It's all in how you view your mail.

Insurance and credit card companies have let me know I've been pre-approved due to my greatness. Cable companies tell me I should go boldly into the land of more. Everyone let's me know that I deserve more. So to make sure that all of my friends realize how great I am, and how much I deserve, I have started forwarding my Opcfgau mail to them. Enjoy!

Finding the Blog

Many of you may have noticed my blog has been missing as of late. No, it's not that I haven't been updating it, it's that the blog has been missing so I've been unable to update it. For those who don't understand and view blogs as merely an internet site that cannot possibly go missing, I say "Phhh, you don't understand. You could never understand." My blog was missing, and this post is of the journey I undertook to recover it.

Here is a map to help you follow this great journey I recently undertook.

I left home and headed in the direction I could sense to be the right one. I first approached the cruel, fearsome mountains of inevitable suffering. As I drew closer, I slowly began to develop a subtle sense of dread. I noticed it as I passed an old wooden fence. At the end of the fence, sat a lone crow, the harbinger of doom, cawing at odd intervals. Shortly thereafter, as I entered the woods at the base of the mountains, I saw the venomous black widow, harbinger of sorrow. Further along, after my path was crossed by a cat as black as midnight, the harbinger of bad luck, I came to a small river. Flashing in the sunlight as it jumped, I saw a rainbow trout, the harbinger of good fortune. It was snatched out of the air by a great horned owl, the harbinger of metaphorical disaster. It killed the small fish in it's cruel claws and devoured it until it was no more. I decided that my feelings of misgiving were probably all in my head, so I continued onward. If only there had been some sort of sign to tell me how hard this journey would be, I may have never attempted it. Anyways, to make a long story vaguely shorter, I crossed the cruel, fearsome mountains of inevitable suffering with great difficulty, overcoming many trials and hardships. I was on the brink of death more times than I can count (approximately ten, as I tend to struggle with numbers having more than one digit).

Next up on the journey was the uncrossable burning lake of freezing death. This lake is famous for burning with a heat intense enough to burn you to your very soul, while the the water itself is so cold that the average man or woman will freeze to death at just the thought of it. The lake does a fair job of defying logic and passage across it. It wasn't easy, but I was able to swim across it by skimming the surface at the interface between the awful heat and the frigid cold. It also helped that I am, by nature, a fair amount tougher than the average man or woman.


Finally, I arrived at the location of my blog, the cave of horrible trials and great rewards. It was indeed horrible, but I made it through, at last arriving at the room of hidden wonders. There I found my blog, resting between treasures of equal value, such as the fountain of youth and world peace. Not wanting to be taken as greedy, I only took my blog and left (well, I did technically take a sip of the potion of manliness, guaranteed to make you the most manly guy on earth. I was not surprised to note that I remained unchanged after drinking from the potion.)


I decided to try an alternate route home. It was getting late, and I was somewhat anxious to get my blog home. This route was similar to the first, only instead of uncrossable burning lakes of freezing death and cruel, fearsome mountains of inevitable suffering, I crossed over meadows of wildflowers. This route was slightly longer, but in the end proved to be significantly faster.

The McMurtrey family curse

Having visited family recently, the ominous McMurtrey family curse was made fresh in my mind. It's not something we talk about, and rarely to those outside the family. But, I decided, if you're really to get to know someone, you should know about any family curses. And what better way to reveal family curses than on a blog?

We do our best to act like a normal, happy family. But there is constantly a dark cloud hovering closely around, never far from our minds...the McMurtrey family curse.

I'm not completely sure when the curse started, so the parts of the following story that I don't know, I'll exercise a bit of artistic liberty to help the story flow. Here's the mostly true story of the origin of the McMurtrey family curse: Sean McMurtrey, my great great great grandfather, lived in a small fishing village of the coast of beautiful Ireland. He was known for being a handsome, strong, extremely manly, intelligent, tough, rugged man, traits that had always seemed to run in his family, and would for generations to come. Often, as the sun peaked over the Emerald Isle, Sean would take his young son fishing. He enjoyed these times, reeling in fish after fish with his son. He would continue to enjoy them, until the day the the family was cursed forever.

This is that fearsome place where the McMurtrey family was placed under a curse. I stress that this is definitely the place, and not just the first picture that came up on a google image search for Ireland.

On that fateful day, long remembered by his descendants, Sean took his son fishing early in the morning. As the cool breeze blew across the shimmering lake, Sean thought: "Today will be a wonderful day." He couldn't have been more wrong. Not long after he cast in his line, Sean felt a fish nibble on the bait. At that same moment, an old woman came up behind him begging for alms. "Wait jest a moment, I think I've got one!" The woman only begged more loudly, crying and sounding miserable. Sean feared she would scare away the fish. "Can ya not see that I'm busy? Isn't there somewhere else ya could be beggin'?" He said. He ignored the woman after that, staring intently at his line in the water. Suddenly a clap of thunder was heard, coming out of the beautiful blue sky. Birds in the forest took flight, and a horrible screeching sound came from the forest. Sean turned to see the old woman, skinny arms clawing strange signs into the air, hair blowing wildly, though there was no wind. "For caring more about fishing than the good of those that ask your help, I curse you and all of your descendants. Never again, when you go fishing with your son, will luck be with you." She cackled horribly and then vanished, leaving only the stench of burnt hair in the air. From that time forward, McMurtrey's have never been able to catch more than one scrawny fish in any father and son fishing trip. I have many memories of fishing as a family when I was a kid...but few memories of ever catching anything. I was recently reminded this, as my dad wanted to go fishing when I was home. To ensure success, he decided we would get a professional fishermen to show us the best places to fish. For trying to go around the McMurtrey family curse, my father was rewarded with a large thunderstorm the morning of, and a cancellation of the fishing trip.

Vacation

Well, I'm on vacation, so I thought I'd take a vacation from my random posts, and actually post about what I've been up to. Plus I have just a little bit of time, as I accidentally got myself out of the game I was playing with my family, so I have to wait for them to finish so I can jump in on the next one. My vacation can probably be summed up by Friday's experience. I woke up from my afternoon nap on the couch at 4:00, saw my dad walking through the room, and asked "So what's planned for the rest of the day?". He thought about it for a second, and replied "Nothing." Beautiful, I thought. This is what vacationing is all about.

Other than taking it easy and playing games with the family, seems like we've been spending a good amount of time in either a lake or a pool. I haven't done a lot of swimming in these last few years, so that's been a bit rough...especially playing sharks and minnows. I've played a different version with some friends before, but the way we play it in my family is basically like tag where you can't be tagged while you're underwater. This means the "shark" has to trap people while they're underwater and force them to surface before tagging them. And that means the game is pretty closely related to drowning. Next year I'll have to practice up on my swimming...and drowning...skills before visiting home. Anyways, I'll be out here at my parents house in Texas until Wednesday, and then back to the joys of work and such...

Early mornings stifle creativity?

So, originally I wasn't actually going to put up a new post this week. I just haven't been able to think of anything to write about. I admit, I didn't exactly "try hard", but let's be serious, you're not supposed to have to try hard to come up with a blogging topic. Usually if I have to really search for a topic, I end up writing just to write something, and it's feels forced and not so good. As I was trying to figure out why I couldn't seem to come up with anything, I realized it's because early mornings kill creativity. Here, I made a chart to make sure it's clear.


Bottom axis is supposed to be wake up time. I realize now that I should have made the time go forward...but I wanted the creativity to go downwards, so...anyways, it's already made, and I'm not about to go back and fix it.

I remember never being a believer in the old saying "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." It wasn't until I read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, that I realized how the saying's supposed to go. If memory serves me well (usually doesn't), the quote goes something like this: "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes." I've had to get up early for the last week and a half to use a machine that is always booked during the day by other people. Since everyone else seems to realize that getting up early actually makes you a worse person, the early morning times are usually free and I've taken up scheduling them. On a side note, there is a computer set up in this lab so you can get on the Internet while the machine is running. It's a Mac. This is my excuse for the lack of quality images in this post. After an epic battle with the mac version of excel and then photoshop, I was able to get the graph made. I'm not willing to risk my life trying to make any other sort of graphics. I did, however, find an icon labeled time machine...I will most likely double click it at some point after I post this, so if you never see me again, I probably died in the future, or the past. Hard to say which, given my Mac-using abilities.

Fun and useful

Well, there's been a lack of blog posts lately, mostly because I've been traveling. Now I don't want you to think my blog is unimportant to me, and that I dropped it as soon as I found something better to do. So I've prepared a great story about how I was going to update it while traveling, but just as I went to upload the new posts, I was attacked by a large group of men. Only it turns out they weren't men, but were actually beings from another dimension disguised as men. And they weren't just attacking me, but had plans to destroy the entire world. After I subdued them, I found that nearly two weeks had passed and the first thought that passed through my mind was "Curses, I haven't been able to update my blog yet." So as you can see, the blog is of utmost importance to me, I just was unable to update due to unexpected attacks on my life and the planet I live on. Someday, this event will mostly likely be made into one of those movies based on actual events, so I don't want to go into more details than that, otherwise I'd ruin it for you. But, having my life nearly come to an end that way, made me realize I'd better pass on some more wisdom to those that read this. Here's a couple of the most important things I've learned in my life.



Pooling comes with hot and cold rinse cycles, commonly called hot tubs and normal pools, to help your clothes get extra clean and retain their vibrant colors. Please be advised that the use of bleach is typically uncalled for while pooling, especially if multiple people are pooling nearby.

Do you know about the importance of pools, especially during the summer time? Yes, they're fun, but what makes them important is how useful they can be. Pools can replace showers! It's a great time saver, plus it makes getting clean fun. Instead of showering, you could be pooling! The chlorine in the pool acts as a disinfectant, plus it leaves you with that nice clean smell that everyone loves. Worried that your hair might not be getting the nutrients it needs? Don't worry, put a little shampoo in before jumping into the pool, and problem solved. Need some clothes cleaned but don't feel like doing the wash? The pool is the place for you, it cleans clothes just as well as it cleans you. So put those clothes on and jump in the pool.


This man has it all...well...a grill that bears his name. And in the end, isn't that all that matters? That alone makes him worthy of being anyone's idol.

Another fun time saver is the George Foreman Grill. I've been ignorant about how great these things are for most of my life, but that all changed about 6 months ago when I got one. Yeah, it's easy to cook on, and let's you grill from the comfort of your home, but what you may not have realized is, like all grills, the foreman grill doesn't need to be washed! You never wash grills, you just scrape off the charcoal from before and throw new things on. And this grill is no exception. My only hope is that someday I will be able to make as useful a contribution to society as Mr. George Foreman.