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Ducklings in the road

To start of, I have a little story to tell about a man, driving in his car at dawn. He’s going down the road, minding his own business, listening to the bible on his mp3 player, and he sees a small figure waddling in the road not too far ahead of him. He’s cruising along at a good clip on the turnpike, and a duck is about half way into his lane up ahead.

It’s not just a duck. It’s a duck leading a procession of ducklings across the turnpike. Cars whizzing past her.

The man didn’t even think, didn’t give more than a cursory look. He just swerved. And he missed them all.

Those ducklings most likely got killed, and the duck with them. But at least the man didn’t kill them.

He could have caused an accident like that.

Dexter

I got home yesterday and I figured I’d sit down and watch some TV after checking my email and whatnot. I did some searching around for what’s good TV, and yet again Dexter came up. I was just like “whatever, I’ll watch the first episode and see what it’s like”. I tend to shy away from HBO and Showtime shows because they’re usually vulgar, full of profanity and nudity. Not all of them. I mean, Stargate SG-1 had nudity in it’s first episode, and not any more thereafter.

So anyway, I turn Dexter on and watch the first episode. And the second episode. And the third episode.

Yeah, I’m hooked.

Last year (or maybe longer?) I had a Netflix subscription. I got it because I wanted to watch Battlestar Galactica and a couple of other shows, and I don’t pay for cable, so it seemed a reasonable compromise. I dropped it when my TV watching started to peter out.

In the interim, they launched an internet based video viewing system. Essentially you could play stuff, but a limited number of hours. Something like x hours per $ you spent on the service. So if you spent $17 on the service, you’d get 17 hours of view time per month. Not bad!

Well I’m thinking to myself “I need to see this next season of Battlestar Galactica” and I figure maybe I’ll get Netflix for a while again. Then I see that their internet based video distribution is now unlimited. That’s right – a subset of their content can be viewed on demand online. And with an HTPC, this is totally sweet.

Saturday Climbing

I went climbing on Saturday. I couldn’t hook up with my climbing partner Michael, so I went for some bouldering. It was like 5ish when I went and the place was only lightly populated. I worked a bit around in the boulder cave, then on the walls of the gym where people weren’t roped up.

They cleared away a lot of the holds in the boulder cave and it’s much nicer now. It was too chaotic before – way too many holds. It was hard to figure out where the route went, and you’d be on the wall looking for the next holds in the midst of a bunch of rudely tagged stuff. Now the wall is much more clean, and it’s easier to identify where you can “legally” use holds in a tagged climb.

So in the middle of my climbing session I tweaked my left shoulder. I was on the ceiling of the boulder cave and I went for the last hold on a new route with my left hand, and something went wrong because it just hurt and I dropped down and felt nauseous. I climbed a bit on the slab wall, giving that arm a rest, and moved it around until it felt better, and later went and completed the climb; apparently I had missed this one large red hold immediately prior to the last hold.

Anyway, on Sunday my shoulder was painful to move. I even tried putting my arm out the window driving (since it was fairly nice out) and that hurt too much to do.