Category Archives: Confessions

Things about me you probably never wanted or don’t need to know.

Cranbeery

Yesterday I tried Cranberry Lambic beer.  It was like drinking a Samuel Adams Cranberry Muffin in a bottle.  I don’t recommend it unless you’re really running short on alcoholic beverages and you need to consume one.  Which is pretty much never, but there may be a few instances where pretty much any other beer is not available.

However, much later in the day I tried Blue Moon Belgian White and that I really, really enjoyed.  It is genuinely white and has a slightly fruity flavor.  It was an impressive beer but has a higher alcohol content so I had to drink it slowly while eating so as to not make an absolute fool out of myself.  I don’t drink enough alcohol to hold my liquor. 🙂

Goldy’s Last Day

Well, the fish, formerly known as Goldy, currently now having reached oneness with the septic system, died. I found her doing the back stroke this morning and quickly moved her to our flusher. Except that goldy didn’t flush. I didn’t know she didn’t flush, but I found out later. How exactly did I find out?

Abby came down stairs saying in a strained tone, “Daddy, someone put Goldy in the toilet. Was it you?!”

So I had to own up to it and tell her Goldy had died. Stupid toilet.

[for the record Abby was OK with the fish dying]

The Story That Never Was

I have wanted to be an author at times in my life.  I’ve also wanted a recording studio (sorry, Mom)… but I’ve got one of those now, at least a home studio.  But about being an author, I’ve written several short pieces in my life and I just ran across this beginning of a story I had entitled ‘The Clock.’  I have no idea what it was going to be about, but I liked the descriptive language.  You can just imagine what happens next because I don’t know the rest of the story 🙂

The watch’s second hand smoothly rounded the number 12; its glass reflecting the faces of those who gazed in on its round surface.  This watch had been handed down for three generations and now accompanied Thomas Hanley out of the meeting room where he had just finished another interview.  The three generations of Hanley that had been in charge of Hanley International Trading, had each worn that watch. Thomas glanced down at the watch which faithfully conveyed the time remaining until the next appointment.

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 8

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

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

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

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.

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 4

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.

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 3

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.

Habanero Hands

Yesterday at lunch I picked a young habanero pepper with my bare hands.  I didn’t think anything of it because it was a quick pick followed by putting the pepper on a paper napkin and then a quick hand wash.  Evening time came and I cut the pepper up (again, bare handed) and roasted it on my grill after de-membraning it.  I cut the membrane out because I’m completely scared of a whole, raw habanero – I ate one once and then unate it hours later.   By the time dinner was over my hands started to itch in certain spots.  About 10:30, after having washed my hands probably 15 times throughout the evening I rubbed my eyes because I was getting tired.  Doh!

I can confirm that rubbing your eyes with chili oils on your hands is a bad choice.  I can also confirm that cutting up a lemon and immediately rubbing the acidic juices on the oil infested parts helps neutralize the base of the peppers.  This was chemistry 101 all over me 😉
I would recommend using rubber gloves for all intense peppers as well as when doing dental work.  The roasted habanero fruit was great on my bratworst with some sautéd onion and orange bell pepper.  It had some heat, but not what I was expecting.  The moral of the story is that Icy Hot has capsaicin in it.  Capsaicin is found in peppers… and peppers and Icy Hot should not be placed on sensitive parts of the body 🙂