Archive for September, 2007

Ochotoberfest

Published
by
Chalupa
on September 27, 2007
in Friends, Oktoberfest and sIIs
. 2 Comments

I’ve been realizing recently that even though I can juggle multiple side-projects at once, I can only really pour lots of time and energy into one.  For a while now, that one has been my podcast.  So that means I post on here about once a week and I put up movie reviews on my other blog a couple times a month and I haven’t touched my Spanish blog in months.

This weekend marks the eighth annual Oktoberfest with Schnaps, Soulman, BHouse, Gavette, Barn, Butros, Whipple, Ed, Stavros, etc.  I sadly missed number 6 because my lungs weren’t working, but I’m excited for number eight.  Last year was dubbed Augbachtobirthdayfest or something along those lines.  It happened to be in August and fell on mine and Cameron’s birthday.  This year Soulman’s calling it Ochtoberfest.  I’m definitely looking forward to some new catch phrases.  Something emerges every year but not many have stuck around.  I think my most famous phrase has been “PARTY VEHICLE!!!!!!!!!!!” which is what you call a vehicle you could possible have a party in.  There’ll also be some Whipple-ball, videos games, TV watching and lots of hilarity.  And who can forget topping everything off with a trip to Schmitt’s Sausage Haus in quest for the ever elusive “meat headache”?  Hopefully we won’t have a repeat of number 5 where the neighbors called the cops.  Funny thing is their party was way louder than us listening to music on the porch.  People are weird sometimes.

Happiness

Published
by
Chalupa
on September 20, 2007
in Faith and Life
. 0 Comments

Tonight in our small group we talked a bit about happiness and learning from/living in/dealing with your past.  A lot of interesting things were said.  I think happiness is a weird thing.  For some it seems to be as easy as anything and for others it’s as elusive as a North American yeti.  Why is that so?  Why is it so easy for some to be content with life and others aren’t able to find it?

I don’t really have these kinds of life answers, but I have a few theories.  One thought/idea that was mentioned is that happiness just comes with age and maturity.  Some older or elderly people just seem to be happy and content.  When that was said, I immediately thought of certain bitter old people that have just been crabby for years.  Does this mean they aren’t mature?  I really feel wise, content and cool old people don’t just magically become that at the age of 65.

Some people also have different outlooks on life.  Some people are always pining for the past.  Things were always better in the “good old days” or when they were younger.  Other people live so much in the moment they don’t make good long-term decisions.  Other people live so much for the future that they don’t learn to appreciate or take advantage of the now.  So how should we live?  This is easier to say than do, but like with everything, I think moderation is the goal to strive for.  We need to learn from our past; we need to enjoy the present; we need to plan for our future.

Personally I can look back on a lot of situations where I wasn’t happy and there were two easy solutions.  I’m not saying these apply to every situation, but in most instances these could have fixed my problems.

The first would be my attitude.  Sometimes I just have a bad attitude.  Ryan and I were talking about when we were kids and our mothers would always get on us about our attitudes.  It’s only as adults that we both understand this concept.  I can’t even begin to count the times, situations, events, etc where I just had a bad attitude and wasn’t having a good time, wasn’t liking my lot in life, wasn’t enjoying a situation, got worked up, etc because I had a bad attitude.  In many situations things could have been a lot better if I had just chilled out.

The second would be making a decision or just doing something.  Sometimes there was something I could have very easily, or not so easily, done to rectify the situation.  These can include talking to somebody to clear up a misunderstanding or doing something out of my “comfort zone” to branch out.  There are even certain situations where I needed to stop or not do something.  Maybe I was making bad decisions or being stupid.  I can look back and see times where I’ve done these kinds of things knowingly and unknowingly.  Some of this can be avoided by learning from our mistakes.

So what am I trying to say here?  I think anybody can be happy if they want to be.  I have it so easy living in the United States.  I have a full time job with health benefits.  I can pay my bills.  I have more than enough food to eat every day.  I even have extra money to buy stuff, go places and do things.  I have friends and family that love and support me.  I have the freedom to do pretty much whatever I want.  So why am I unhappy with all my stuff filling my two-bedroom apartment, my freedoms, my social life, and my financial stability?

I don’t really have a fix-all answer for that.  Why can’t we just be happy with our allotment in life?  I know there’s lots of people out there and they don’t even have one of the good things going for them I mentioned above.  Yet they’re still happy.  Maybe not all the time, those people are just creepy, but they’re still happy.  They’re content with life….something to strive for I guess.

Neville’s back

Published
by
Chalupa
on September 18, 2007
in Friends, Stuff and Subway
. 0 Comments

That’s right folks. Neville returned from China. No more teaching English and film…at least for a little while. Neville’s on his way back to Fuller, but found some time to stop by and say hi to us on Sunday. I even got him to be on Episode 9 of my podcast and it turned out to be really good. I’m not done editing, but hopefully I’ll have it done and ready to go soon.

I’ve seen probably 4 or 5 movies I need to write reviews for as well as typing something up about I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski. Work has been kinda crazy after coming back from vacation. Hopefully some of that will taper off too.

Oh, and today also happens to be Tuesday which means SUBWAY day.  Gunner and I will be picking up where we left off in May.  I haven’t had a Chicken Bacon Ranch in quite some time.

GMail Contacts

Published
by
Chalupa
on September 13, 2007
in Advice and Google
. 2 Comments

I’ve had an email account for quite some time now…since 1994 or so if I remember correctly.  I’ve always like organizing my contact list by last name.  It’s just easier to find people.  Well, GMail auto-inserts contacts for you.  They like to list by first name.  For the past three and a half years I’ve been manually editing every contact to be Last_Name, First_Name.

Any time I’ve ever tried to add email addresses by selecting them from my contacts list it’s never worked.  It always tells me the addresses are invalid.  This has been very frustrating.  I’ve even contacted the Google people about it and have gotten nowhere.  Tonight it finally dawned on me why.  Most email clients let you separate names by comma or semi-colon.  I prefer the semi-colon.  Well GMail prefers the comma.  All of the aliases in my contacts list have commas in them which is why is gets all confused when trying to import contacts.

So now I have to decide if it’d really be worth to go through 300+ names and change them to the way Google wants.

But this is our most modestly priced internet cafe

Published
by
Chalupa
on September 10, 2007
in Vacation
. 0 Comments

Liz and I are currently in L.A., Hollywood to be exact.  Today is pretty much the last day of vacation, as tomorrow will be a travel and laundry day, before going back to work on Wednesday.  We only got onto our beloved internet once on the boat.  We were charged $.75/minute on a satellite connection.  That means slow.  Not much fun…and expensive.  Basically just had time to check the mail and not really respond.

We’ve had a lot of fun.  We’ve seen a handful of great movies, I got to eat at an In-N-Out and we’ve met some great people.  So I guess you’ll be seeing us soon.