For those who are unfamiliar (don’t worry, I had no idea what this thing was when I agreed to it), it’s basically a race that makes you pray there will be someone waiting at the finish line with a gun for you to shoot yourself with. The race begins in Logan and then winds 190 miles up the backside of the Wasatch to end somewhere round about Park City (Course Map). The race takes the better part of 2 days and we’ll be running straight through the night. Each of the 12 team members gets 3 legs of the race for a total of around 15-20 miles and spends all of their non-running time packed into a couple minivans which follow whomever the current runner happens to be. Basically it’ll be 2 days of tired, cramped, smelly hell. Fun, huh?

This is a happy pre-death picture

Anyway, the main point of this post is to solicit support from our dear beloved readers. Emily and I have joined up with several friends from my new job to be on one of two “Cancer Teams” that will be running the race. The main difference between a regular team and a “Cancer Team” is that all of our entry fees will be going to the American Cancer Society. The only downside to this is that the entry fees/donations for the Cancer Teams are much steeper than are those of the regular teams and this is where you, my dear readers, come into the picture. Emily and I are humbly asking for your monetary support in the way of donations to the American Cancer Society as we train for this brutal ordeal. Please feel free to donate as much or as little as you can and be assured that all donations will go to the ACS in the form of one lump sum donation that will be put together by the members of our team. Emily and I will need to come up with $700 for our part of the donation so every little bit helps. The only thing we can offer in thanks is the hard work we’ll put into trying to survive this thing as well as a promise to have someone post pictures of our limp and lifeless bodies located wherever we happen to collapse between Logan and Park City. Thanks in advance for your support and prayers for our survival. We’ll need em.

Donate for Mike

Donate for Emily

Bus to Beelzebub Team Donation

Or you can donate via PayPal below and we will include your portion with our team donation.

It’s just weird to think that my brain was working enough to get me from the Doctors office to the car, but I honestly can’t remember getting to the car or even getting home for that matter. I do remember talking to the nurse briefly as I woke up after the surgery. She asked me if I felt ok and if I was prone to puking. I told her I felt fine and that I don’t puke too often. Then she helped me stand up to move to the recovery room, but I don’t remember walking down the hall. I only vaguely remember laying down on the bed, but then I don’t remember anything until Emily got out of the car to get the kids from my mom. After that, the next thing I remember was laying on the couch at home. I don’t really even remember getting out of the car and into the house. It’s quite disturbing to think that I was up and interacting with people, but that I’m unable to recall most of it.

Anyway, the surgery went ok and aside from a little swelling I feel pretty good. My jaw aches a little, but for the most part there hasn’t even been any pain. I just hope the fix sticks and I don’t have to have that tooth worked on ever again.

You can see the original picture here for comparison. And if you’d like to try this out on your own photos, you can visit the tiltshiftmaker here. Or if you’d just like to view all the crazy pictures other people have made, you can check out the flickr group here (beware that some of the pictures in that gallery didn’t work out so well).

Anyway, the other night I was having a strange dream regarding the seemingly endless supply of energy that the Axiom ship (that’s the human “life raft” ship in the movie) seemed to have. As I dreamt, I recall wondering how, after 700 years, the ship was still able to power all the lights and billboards and robots and other electrically powered items on the ship. Keep in mind I was dreaming so the possibility of some alternate source of energy didn’t really enter my mind. I was thinking strictly in terms of energy storage circa 2009 so my mind was boggled while trying to figure out how they hadn’t run out of energy yet.

I pause for a moment here to acknowledge that to this point, there really wasn’t anything interesting about this dream. It might be an odd subject for a dream, but I’m sure many of you have had stranger dreams. However, the thing I found interesting about this particular dream is how it seemed to be a result of my physical situation at the time. I’m sure many of you have experienced something similar when you can’t seem to stop dreaming about water and then when you’re forced awake, you realize that you’ve never had to pee so badly in your life. Same sort of thing here.

As most of you probably know, I have a little ailment called Diabetes. One result of the medications that I take to control this ailment is that I occasionally experience the effects of hypoglycemia which is basically what happens when the sugar content in your blood gets too low. Basically, without a high enough content of sugar, your body literally runs out of gas and it results in weird side effects like shaking, sweating and loss of concentration. So to tie this back to where I started, as I lay there dreaming about power consumption in a fictional space and as I wondered how power could be maintained for 700 years without a recharge, it happened that I was at the time experiencing the effects of hypoglycemia. Luckily this condition tends to wake me from sleep (which, if any of you know how heavy a sleeper I am, you may find this rather miraculous). As soon as I woke up, I started to put the pieces together. As I rushed into the kitchen to shove anything I could find into my face I was a tad amused at how the brain works. I couldn’t help but find it amazing that as I lay there sleeping, my brain was still interpreting input from it’s surroundings and trying to put that information into some sort of context that made sense. I was literally running out of juice and my brain subconsciously turned that into an apparent need for a quick recharge via my hideaway solar panel.

It’s things like this that make me wonder about our true capacity for knowledge and learning. Brains are amazing things and it’s my opinion that they can do so much more than we can even comprehend presently. Guess we’ll just have to wait for that next sphere of existence to learn all the secrets. Until then, I should probably investigate some way to rig up a personal limitless energy supply so I can survive the next 700 years in space… or something like that.

There’s not much content in this post other than a couple pictures of the babies sleeping. I just like how peaceful (and silly) they look while sleeping.

Either way, it’s probably the greatest idea EVAR!!! (Yes, I meant to spell it that way, please refer to my post from Oct 22nd, 2007 for details.)

Anyway, I woke up from a dream this morning at 5:51am in what can only be described as “a moment of genius”. Emily and the babies probably wouldn’t agree because I woke them up as well as I scurried to the computer and began furiously typing in order to get it all down before it fluttered back to the land of dreams, but I’ll let you judge for yourselves. I won’t go into the details or the scenario around which the dream was centered (let your imaginations run wild), but here it is…

Conan O’Brien circa 1979.

I googled it and found no results that matched my idea so I can only assume my brain concocted it during REM sleep, but the brilliance of the idea makes it hard to believe that it could have come from my own brain. Some of the details of the dream wouldn’t have really worked so I guess that adds fuel to the dream argument, but in the dream Conan announced that they would be doing a whole seasons worth of shows from 1979. He announced that due to some crazy snafu, all of the Late Night shows from 1979 had mysteriously vanished and were no longer in the archives (yes, I’m aware he wasn’t on the air then). There was some contest or another in the dream, but basically they would be doing an entire season of shows as if the year was 1979. The theme would include retrofitting the set and making sure that all costumes were chronologically correct (guests included). All musical guests would also have to conform to the time shift and Max and the band would cover all sorts of hits from the 70’s during commercial breaks.

- Typed this evening -

It’s been a week or so since I first had the dream and the idea doesn’t seem nearly as amazing as it was after being startled awake at 6am, but I still think it would be a clever running gag for a few shows. And if there’s anyone that could pull it off, it’s Conan (or maybe Craig Ferguson). Anyway, Conan, if you’re interested, feel free to use the idea but please give me some sort of acknowledgment in the credits. Or you could fly me out to be a stupid extra for an episode. Regardless, I’d love to see the end result put into practice. It’s just too bad I’m not a comedic writer for Conan’s show or maybe I could show you all what a great dream it was.

Last weekend the girls decided they wanted to use their free rental card from Hollywood Video so Emily took them down and they rented the new straight to DVD Disney “Princess” movie about Tinker Bell and her fairy friends. I didn’t watch it myself, but from what I saw while walking through the front room it seemed to be on par with the slew of Barbie movies the girls have in their collection. Which is fine I guess. They enjoy them.

Anyway, before we had a chance to return Tinker Bell and friends to the land of Hollywood, she had a bit of an accident. In an effort to hide all of the less-than-inviting smells floating around our house these days (twin babies if you forgot), Emily has tried multiple air freshening systems. Her latest attempt was these little bottles of scented oil with sticks hanging out of them. I’m not positive what the purpose of the sticks was (maybe to soak up the oil and make them smellier), but the bottles themselves were open at the top. This designed proved to be less than ideal when one of the girls decided to put a book on top of the entertainment center. We’re not sure which daughter decided that the entertainment center was her personal book shelf, but whoever it was couldn’t see where the book was going when she shoved it up there and it ended up knocking the bottle of oil over. I discovered the spill when I grabbed the channel changer and started clicking. It took me a minute to figure out what the goo all over the remote was, but once I identified the consistency (it could have been anything around here), I started to notice that the plastic of the remote wasn’t just oily, but was in fact melting.

We did some quick oil spill cleanup, but by the time we found it, the oil had covered both the Tinker Bell dvd as well as a Netflix dvd on top of the entertainment center. The book that caused the incident also got covered, but didn’t seem to be effected too badly. Unfortunately though, both dvd’s were beyond rescue. I have no idea what’s in that oil, but it doesn’t like plastic much. We tried wiping off the dvd’s, but the oil had literally eaten into the bottom of the discs. The remote suffered some melting damage as well, but its already so near its deathbed that it didn’t matter much. In the end we had to buy Tinker Bell in all her melted glory and even after getting the disc resurfaced at Hollywood, the dvd still doesn’t work. So the lesson here is, don’t buy oil based air fresheners (or any air fresheners in my opinion) if you value any property they might chance to leak on. Apparently the oil they put in those things is made from a mixture between Alien saliva and Basilisk venom. Consider yourself warned.