monkeyplus1

I blame ANIMAL CROSSING for my summer-long obsession!

Maybe you’ve played “Animal Crossing” (or “Dōbutsu no Mori”) on the Nintendo Gamecube, or on the Nintendo DS. For a while, my son and I both had a copy of that game (we each have a “DS Lite”), and we would visit each other’s towns via the wi-fi connection.

Basically, you are an animal in a little village. You have a little house you’re paying off. You buy and sell all kinds of items that you’re given from a friend, dig out of the ground, fish out of the ocean, catch in a net, pick from a tree, get in the mail, or find on the ground.  You decorate your house however you want (though you get points for good “Feng Shui”), you can even make your own designs for rugs, wallpaper, and fabrics that you can use for your clothes.

You modify the landscape, you can chop down and plant trees, pull weeds, plant flowers.

I obsessed over this game, spent countless hours playing it. Fishing, collecting bugs, writing letters, digging up fossils to donate to the museum, and pimping out my house and wardrobe.

This game must have permeated into my reality. That is, life away from video games.

It’s funny how similar my life at home is to Animal Crossing (except my video game character didn’t have any kids).  I’m out there, digging, planting, arranging stuff, and meeting all these vastly different people that come out of the woodworks for some conversation. It’s actually really cool, and I’ve met a ton of people from my ‘hood I’d never have meet staying indoors, plus I’ve gotten really good feedback and advice.

I met a lady and her kid last night (guessing from the accent, skin tone and bone structure, I’m guessing Ethiopian / Northeast-Africa). She asked me if I did landscaping for a living!  I laughed, No!  I’m learning as I go. She was perplexed, and asked again, “you’re not a professional landscaper?”.  No, ma’am.

My neighbor Frank, who comes home after I do, thought that I must have quit my job since he always sees me out there. “You still working?”  Oh yeah, 8 hours a day programming, anywhere from 3-6 hours gardening.

Holy hell, did I go nuts batman? I put in roughly 20 hours of work on my yard this weekend, and I’m just about done. There is not one blade of grass anywhere!  Instead, I have 8 or 9 (maybe 10) cubic yards of Fir bark dust. My truck carries exactly one cubic yard, and fortunately for me, the bark is very lightweight and easy to shovel. rake and spread.

I also got another 500 lbs of basalt rock, big hand-picked ones, to finish up my retaining wall. I got another 400 lbs. of gigantic lava boulders, for decoration.  One of them weighs around 150 lbs by itself.  How I lifted that into my truck single-handedly. I was easily on the threshold for major back-muscle damage, but lifting with the legs (as much as possible, when lifting something from the ground) is the trick.

Of course, now that my camera is busted, I have no pics.

This all said, I’M ALMOST DONE!  Now all I’ll have to do is water, and ENJOY. Actually, I have some exterior re-painting to take care of, and indoor projects I’m procrastinating on (waiting for weather that FORCES me indoors).

The boundary between life and Animal Crossing has been blurred…

In real life, I don’t have quite the wardrobe I was packing in Animal Crossing  (of course, my character was female). I sorely need to expand my wardrobe. I have three kinds of clothes:

(1) business casual wear for work (tan or black slacks, long-sleeved collared shirts, all solid-color).

(2) camouflage - shorts, BDU (”battle dress uniform”, aka, military cargo pants). I’ve got the old-school woodland, urban, and desert patterns, along with the range of new digital-camo patterns (that are all blocky, pixelated-looking), the Marine Corp’s dark-green pattern (”MarPat”), the Army’s current desert pattern, and the International digital. Nothing is as tough, lightweigh, and breathable as BDUs, not to mention they fit me really well and have huge pockets. Not to mention, the digital pattern is dope:

lastly:
(3) gym clothes - running shoes, track pants, t-shirts, and swimming trunks.

Obviously, I need something a little more neutral and casual. Time to go shopping.

There’s certain jargon within IT professionals that sounds like weird mumbo-jumbo to outsiders.  Being a software developer, there are other professional jargons that sound almost like nonsense to me, how people in marketing, business analysis, and project management talk.  (A “PMP”, in a few places openly pronounced “Pimp”, is a project management professional, though most often they’re just called PMs).

Overheard blurbs from the resident project management posterboy (this isn’t a word-for-word dictation, only the phrases that floated across the room into my cube, misheard or not):

Rejecting a level of structure, existing durations for existing tasks, resources required to do this, a given consideration, a dependency that requires a visibility, we need to make sure we don’t assume the level of detail, certain levels run higher risks, what I’m getting to is the flawed logic a lot of people use, we need consistency from a detail perspective. this is not intuitive, once you understand structure and the purpose.

Scope is verified, bought off on, knowing what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, who’s going to do what, scheduling, the whole exercise. the process of identifying these major dependencies, to the extent that we understand the specifications, requirements are a necessary evil. The mentality that if we started writing code three months earlier we would have been finished two months ago. With a level of visibility, when dependencies cause delay, that’s tangible, we can quantify that. This may not have been a well-informed statement, we’re going to have to let these things go, will it be painful? Yes. Why is he pulling this power struggle?

They’re not seeing what it means to not support that, then there’s this visibility in the requirements, my statement before was misguided. They don’t see that, they won’t have that…that grudge. We’ll be willing to work with you to resolve it. What is the time spent there and lost functionality if we go there?

Someone mentioned the priority of development instances, at some stage there’s no distinction between production and the project, whether or not it’s going to be an issue, I have no idea. All of our solutions are re-writes. Again, I don’t know what level of detail these guys have on the project, I got yelled down, I got burned.

Once again, let me state for the record that I am vehemently opposed to needless warfare. I have to state that, because my fascination with first-hand accounts told by warriors themselves might lead folks to believe I’m a warmongerer. I’m not. My new neighbor across the street has a window sticker in her car that says, “I’m already against the next war,” that I think echoes the sentiment of a lot of people in Portland, myself included.

Mostly, I stick to books written by the soldiers about their experiences, but in some cases, I’ve read books written by historians and journalists as well, just for a broader perspective.

I’m not fixated exclusively with the conflict in Vietnam, although I just finished another excellent book, Combat Medic, by Greg McPartlin, who was a medic with the Navy SEALs in the Mekong Delta; I’ve also been reading just about every first-hand account I can find from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which in some cases includes stuff written by embedded reporters.

I’m always very partial to the no-bullshit ones, and like the books written by Vietnam veterans, the new books coming from soldiers called to Iraq and Afghanistan, are equally critical of the politicians who get the US into these mires, as well as the often-idiotic decisions by the US military leadership.

Of those that I’ve read (I’m excluding a few), my recommendations for good reads (in no particular order):

The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell by John Crawford
Just Another Soldier by Jason Christopher Hartley
My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell
Generation Kill by Evan Wright
Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper by Jack Coughlin
No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah by Bing West
Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War by Tim Pritchard
Marines in the Garden of Eden: The Battle for An Nasiriyah by Richard S. Lowry
Down Range: Navy SEALs in the War on Terrorism  by Dick Couch
Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad by David Zucchino
Hammer from Above: Marine Air Combat Over Iraq  by Jay Stout

The local public library has most, if not all, of these, so if you’re looking for different,  often deeply personal views on life in the sandbox, check any one of these out.

I hosed my cell phone with water on Friday, killed it accidentally. On Sunday, my digital camera fell off the couch, jamming the lens crooked, breaking the mechanism - also killed.  No new pics for a while, the landscaping and kitchen project eating up money.

I did pick up a mini-DV camcorder recently. Aside from the wide-screen mode, the selling point for me was the jack for an external microphone, since I have a nice Sony stereo microphone I’ve used quite a bit in field recordings.  Will post some footage up soon.  Promised my father a DVD a while ago, not that I owe him shit.

Signing off for about a week, heading up into the mountains for some time-off. There’s some wild hot-springs in the area, found only on a detailed topographic map, but not sure if I’ll make it out that far or not.

It would seem my self-indulgent hours, over the last few months, napping in the steam room, occasionally doing sets of push-ups and sit-ups in the intense heat, has acclimated my body incredibly well to rigors under intense heat.

It was over 90°F degrees yesterday, and over 100°F the day before. I drank about a half-gallon of gatorade and water (and a couple beers for good measure), and hosed myself down with cold water from the hose every 20 minutes, and I was just fine.

“Hey, superman!” yells one neighbor. “You’re crazy, dude,” says another.

While everybody was passed out from the heat, complaining miserably, in under three hours, I shoveled 7,000 pounds (3.4 tons) of “1/4 minus” crushed rock, under the sun, and wheelbarrowed-it into the 4″ deep pathway I’ve spent weeks slowly excavating by pick and shovel around my house.

This is my recipe for physical endurance: sit all day long in a cool office, doing my programming, the most physical activity is getting up for a drink of water or walking to the restroom. Then I get home, change clothes, put sunblock on, and work like a dog for 3 or 4 hours outdoors, drinking plenty of fluids, and taking breaks to play with my kids. I eat dinner on the patio (since I’m filthy at that point). Then I go to the gym, where I shower off all the dirt, soak in a jacuzzi for 20 minutes, massaging all the sore spots, then jump into the cool swimming pool for a few leisurely laps on my back - and, if I don’t have to share a lane, I’ll just get some floaties and lie still in the water until I feel cold. Then, 20-30 minutes stretching out in the steam room, another quick shower, then home to read a bit before catching twenty winks of shut-eye. Rinse & repeat.

One thing for sure, hard manual labor sure makes for restful sleep! This weekend, family obligations permitting, I’m going to go buy the flagstones for the path, now that I’ve almost got it filled and level.

Pics to come (though I didn’t take as many “before” pics as I should have).