Monthly Archives: July 2006

Sleep, Its a Good Thing

Posted on by

Well, the Puppy has mellowed out now and is getting used to Jessica and I beling the Alpha Male and Female.  Last night she slept through most of it without issue.  At 2:00 AM I had to get up (we set an alarm) and take her out to go potty, which she didn’t do, but I let her try at least, then I went back to bed.  Not until the morning at six did I have to get up again.  It was like sleep, except that it had one interruption.  I don’t do well with interrupted sleep and every time we have a baby I have taken a week to get used to it.  After about that long I get used to disrupted sleep and my body learns to fall back to sleep rapidly.

It is nice to sleep without whimpering from the puppy in the background, though.  It makes it a more restful sleep and I don’t feel like some nasty person who is ignoring a baby dog.  Which in essence the whimpering is output for that sole purpose: “Whimper, yip, yip, whimper! [You are ignoring me, but I can yip longer than you can lay in bed trying to fall asleep]!”  It is like Bill Cosby talking about the children asking over and over because they know they’ll live longer than you 🙂

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 8

Posted on by

I hate advanced Mathematics.  I come from a line of really sharp mathematicians but the brilliance really skipped me because I took Algebra 1 twice in Junior High and High School.  My job requires me to do some math, but it is not often difficult stuff.  What’s funny is that some mathematics I can do in my head without thinking about it, while other parts just cause my brain to fry.  I blame my failure in mathematics on lots of things, but mostly the part where the story problems were horrible.  I love stories.  I love problem solving.  But I don’t like lame problems in story problems.  If they had put practical things involving jumpes, bikes and blood I would have totally gotten sucked in at that age.

Example:

Randy is riding his bike at 45 miles per hour down a hill in the Sierra Nevada’s.  He crashes and is bleeding on the road side.  His father picks him up in the Suburban moments later and travels 5 minutes to pick up Randy’s brother.  From the point of picking up Eddie to getting home to wash up the distance is 35 miles.  The Suburban gets 12 miles to the gallon.  How many pints of blood will Randy lose before getting home to be bandaged up?

That is a perfect story problem.  There’s drama.  There’s action. And of course there is a little bit of trickery because nobody cares how many dollars Randy’s dad spent on gas driving the suburban, it was when gas was barely over $1.00 a gallon.

Have you noticed that I also don’t do super at things like spelling?

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 7

Posted on by

The Internets.  I love them.  All of them.  DARPA, AOL, dialu-up, broadband, ISDN, WiFi, usenet, BBSes or mobile phones.  I love the internet connections that bring me funny things like the standup comedy that inspired the name of our new dog.  I also love that I can email friends, family and business contacts as well as Nigerian spammers for so little.  Of course I really need to reply to a few people in the very short term because they’ve been waiting on me 🙂

I love that the interwebs bring bloggers together so that you can leave comments on this blog.  And other blogs.

I love that blogs are called blogs on the sneakernet.  Blog is short for ‘weblog’ which is a name somebody came up for an online diary.  Which is a name somebody came up with because saying you have a diary on the internet sounds kinda stupid.  However, it is now commonplace for folks to embrace the intersnot movement of MySpace usage.   Except for me.  I cannot for the life of me create a MySpace account.  If someone held me at gunpoint and said, “Create a MySpace account or I’ll blow your forking head off! [which they would totally say because I ask violent assailents not to swear around me]” I would just start crying because it is an absolute impossibility for me to get past the CAPTCHA part of their account creation page.  It simply will not let me in.  Which is fine, because I don’t want a MySpace page.

I also love that the Internut has Xanga, which is like the ‘Junior’ version of MySpace.  It is where more safe oriented people create severely handicapped blogs.

And of course, who doesn’t love that the internot hasn’t brought together people from all over the globe.  I read about people I’ve never met (but would love to meet) who live in Seattle, New York, Australia (sorry, Phil, I don’t recall where you live), China, Texas, Salt Lake City, and can’t tell you most of my neighbor’s names.  I’m going to remedy that one day by become a politician, and then I’ll finally have a reason to knock on their doors.

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 6

Posted on by

I’m a bit of a religious nut.  Probably a brazil nut, I think, because they’re big.  Being raised in a Christian family somehow I didn’t rebel, somehow I didn’t walk away from Christianity.  I did, however, have my times of doubt, but instead of finding my faith destroyed by the doubt, I dug in, I studied, I grew and I feel confident that my faith is in something with substance.  I know that lots of folks who read this blog consider themselves ‘former Christians’ and I can understand why: there are a lot of bogus people walking around in the name of Christianity doing a lot of bad things.  However, I have found that those doing the bogus stuff are not doing what is written in the Bible.  In fact they’re doing things that the Bible warns about much of the time.

Yes, I do consider myself a fundamentalist in the classical sense, not the neo-media-craptastic sense.  That is to say that I believe that God inspired the Bible, has preserved the Bible and that is applies to my life today.  However,  I also consider myself to be abnormal from what most people expect that to mean because I try not to compromise myself, but I don’t sit around in sterile legalism.  I have written about some of what I believe on this blog under the Bible category as well as on bible.randypeterman.com.

I wish everyone was a Christian, yes, even you if you’re not one and I do love you, even if you’re not a Christian.  Get that.  I love you – because tollerating you just ain’t going to happen 😉

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 5

Posted on by

Music has been one of the major influences in my life.  If I could be in any band I would be in Switchfoot.  They will never ask me to be in the band.  I have one tenth of the musical talent of their least talented member.  If I’m lucky.  However, their lyrics, their music and their passion really grab me.  If I could work with any person in the music industry it would be Steve Taylor.

I play the drums, guitar, piano and bass guitar.  I write songs, but I don’t record them because for some reason I don’t like the way any of them sound when I record them.  I love to record goofy songs like these two: Lina Loves Her Lettuce and Happy Remote Day.

Hot Pockets

Posted on by

Hot PocketsThis would be our new puppy, HotPockets, or more likely ‘Pockets.’  After having Kicker, my mother-in-laws dog, for so long in the house it became apparent that it was doggy time.  Hot Pockets is a mix of multiple mystery breeds.  The cute puppiness will wear off and we’ll have a full grown mutt some day, but for now she’s pretty darn cute.  More pictures of the puppy and various family members will come shortly… once Abby can handle touching the dog (for some reason living dogs are hard for her compared to stuffed animals).  Evie loves the puppy, and the puppy loves Evie.  But the puppy loves to jump up on Evie, and that just has to be monitored too heavily for the two to be left alone yet.

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 4

Posted on by

I loves me some ice cream.  There are many, many desserts on the planet.  They’re made with great ingredients in many cases (and nasty ingredients in some cases, such as Twinkies).  But none come close to Ice Cream for dessert rankings in my world.  I love ice cream.  If I was on an island and had to pick only one food, I’d pick ice cream with a perfectly balanced nutrition bar in it.  The downside of the island appears to be that it is in the arctic circle because otherwise the ice cream is totaly not going to keep.

My favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chip ice cream with Andes mints.  Get some.

More Pictures

Posted on by

Tonight we went to visit a friend who is working at the Berry Patch Farm. I took some pictures of the sunset.  Wow.  This was a really neat trip up north of Denver, but really beautiful and fun as well.  It comes highly recommended!

Check out the photos on my flickr page.

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 3

Posted on by

Laugh. If you don’t laugh it makes me uncomfortable. When I get nervous I start cracking jokes about anything in site. I could be at the proctologist’s office in the room getting ready for the exam and the used kleenex [please, Lord, let it be a kleenex] in the trash can would be the prefect prop for a story about that one time when so and so did such and such and we’d all laugh and everything would be OK.

I get on the phone with folks and we’ll have to discuss something serious and I can’t for the life of me keep a straight face I must tell a joke even if we’re discussing something like death, disease or a major world catastrophe. I am not trying to belittle the topic, I’m trying to cope. Sometimes when I write satire for this blog (or in an email) the purpose is to get people to think. But rather than come out and be brutally intense, I’ll make it an attempted piece of humor because I find it disarms people.

I probably am not as funny as I think I am, but I try. If everyone’s laughing, everyone must be OK.