L'histoire de sa vie

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and surrounding areas in 2005. The damage was extensive and harsh. Hurricane Ike hit Galveston in 2008, doing similar damage (though perhaps less so). However, in two years, though not fully rebuilt, Galveston has gotten back into much better shape than New Orleans in five.

Part of this is the can-do attitude of Texans that is present in Galveston. It’s the attitude that says “we’ve been hit; let’s get back up again.” Perhaps the greatest display of this is the Galveston Tree Sculpture Tour.

Galveston has a lot of trees, much like the rest of the Gulf Coast, and when Ike hit, quite a few were uprooted, as would be expected in a hurricane. Many others were destroyed by the storm waters. Rather than panic and leave the trees in disarray, local and outside artists came and sculpted the destroyed trees into neat creations.

These sculptures are pelicans, a Dalmatian and fire hydrant (near the fire station), a hand clutching a diploma (near a child’s park), a geisha, various dogs, and many other creations. Pictured above is the Tin Man and Toto, in front of a house that was once the childhood home of King Vidor, one of The Wizard of Oz’s directors.

The sculptures are quite awesome and worth checking out if you’re in Galveston. It’s amazing how fast the rebuilding has taken place, and it’s even more amazing how much of a difference a little art can make in the effort.

On Saturday, due to Rebecca’s visit to Houston, my mom put together a group of her friends to go to the Best Shot Range in Friendswood to shoot a whole bunch of guns. See, my mom’s friend Carmen owns a wide variety of different guns and loves to go shooting, and it’s something Rebecca has always wanted to do, so my mom was happy to rally the troops.

We shot a .22 caliber rifle, three 9mm semi-automatics, some .44 revolvers, a derringer, and an awesomely powerful .45 from WWII. That’s right, I shot a gun used to kill Nazis.

In addition to completely destroying my target (this fake green guy won’t be coming back to haunt me), I spent a lot of time reciting Lil Wayne lyrics having to do with guns, and both John and I recited the Dirty Harry monologue regarding his .357 Magnum.

And, because Carmen is awesome, she encouraged us to have fun by firing off several rounds in rapid succession. I did this, and I did this holding the gun sideways, as if I was in a movie.

Firing a gun is awesome. Firing many guns is even more awesome. As Officer Michaels says in Superbad, “it’s like having two c**ks, if one of your c**ks could kill someone.”

At Minute Maid Park, there’s a deal where if an Astro hits a Grand Slam during the sixth inning, a randomly chosen spectator shown during the middle of the inning wins $25,000, courtesy of Sonic Drive-Through.

This is a poor promotion, in my opinion, and it’s just added to a park that is gradually becoming filled with nonsense. See, I don’t really care if some random guy I don’t know wins a lot of cash. If I’m on the line, I guess that’s more exciting, but in a stadium of say 30,000 fans (or more like 3,000 these days), the odds are against me.

There is another promotion the Astros have, one that I much prefer, which provides the blueprint for a better Sixth Inning Slam promo: the Chick-Fil-A “Eat More Fowl” Foul Poles. See, if any Astros homerun hits the foul poles, everyone in the stadium gets a free Chick-Fil-A chicken sandwich.

That’s awesome. Everyone, one sandwich per person. Nobody hits the jackpot, but everyone is rewarded, in contrast to the sixth inning slam promo, in which only one person is rewarded. Imagine if instead, a sixth inning grand slam promised everyone in the crowd a Cherry Limeade or Strawberry Cream Slush.

Now that would be a heck of a promotion. And one for which I would cheer heartily in the case of a four-RBI four-bagger. As opposed to now, when I would likely cheer for the runs but not care much about the lucky jerk who just won while the rest of us advanced to nowhere.

On Monday, Saint Arnold released their latest brew, the first in their new “movable yeast” series. The beer uses the same recipe as Lawnmower, but with the added twist of using a Bavarian hefeweizen yeast. The idea is to show how different beers can be just by using a different strand of yeast and therefore creating different flavor profiles.

Lawnmower is not my favorite Saint Arnold brew, largely because I’m not a huge fan of Kölsch in general. However, I’m a huge fan of wheat beers (like Hefeweizen), so the idea of using the hefeweizen yeast appealed to me.

And the result is awesome: Weedwacker tastes like a wheat beer. In fact, it’s a little hard to believe it’s not. It’s a delicious concoction with all the familiar tastes of a hefeweizen: the citrus flavor, for example, is pronounced. It’s delicious, to say the least.

John and I were able to try the brew yesterday, after trying to find it to no avail on Monday. Because it is such a limited release, it’s been going fast all over town. Bars that have had it haven’t had it for long. Luckily, one bar, the Porch Swing in the Heights, had it on tap during the day, enabling us to have it around lunch time, when the demand was much lower.

I’m looking forward to future releases in the movable yeast series. If they can turn the Lawnmower into something this amazing, I can only imagine what they can do with truly amazing beers such as the Christmas Ale or Elissa IPA.

The other day, as part of an “employee appreciation” thing at camp, I received a new fleece. It’s quite nice, and I’m really happy to have received it but I am at least a little worried that I may not have it for long.

See, I have a really bad history with fleeces.

I got my first fleece when I was in middle school, to use on Boy Scout camping trips. Almost immediately I burned a hole in the sleeve, near my hand. I’m not entirely sure how this happened but for a while I used it as a thumb hole. Until my freshman year of high school, when I lost the fleece in New Orleans.

The next fleece I owned was given to me in December of 2008 as an employee appreciation gift from National Ramah, my employer in New York. I brought it to camp the next summer, because it was awesome, and promptly lost it.

I received another fleece this December, but I haven’t worn it anywhere out of caution. It seems that I’m not destined to wear fleeces. I now own two but I’m in constant fear that using them will require losing them.

The more fleeces I collect, the more I’m reminded of the bygone fleeces of my past. But at the same time, they are really comfortable, so I don’t know how much longer I can afford to live in fear.

A continuation of my “Confession” series, modeled after Alana’s “Sunday Confessional.” Check out all my past Confessions here.

Not always. And it’s not always simple. But often, I get overly excited about things that by this time in my life should be routine technologies. For example, as my plane landed in Houston last night, I was temporarily marveled by the idea that humanity has achieved flight.

Consider how amazing it is: we’ve built giant metal tubes, ridiculously heavy tubes, and filled them with people, food (on Continental anyway), luggage, and who knows what else. Then we figured out that if we burn the right kind of oil in the proper number of engines, we can shoot these tubes all over the world.

This is a technology that we have all come to accept as fact but every so often I get really excited about it. When I try to explain this to others, they laugh at me. But consider how much heartier the laughing would have been if I were discussing the possibility of flight only a little over a century ago.

Other technologies amaze me as well sometimes, including technologies that I understand fully. For example: I purchase a lot of hard drives. Three years ago or so, I bought a 500GB drive. It’s composed of two 3.5” drives in a single enclosure. It was $300. It’s clunky and huge. A week ago I purchased a different hard drive, for one third of the price. It’s twice the capacity, 1TB, but it’s tiny: composed of a single 2.5” drive, it’s about a quarter of the size of the old one.

I understand how we do this, but I’m still continually amazed that we do it. Consider that we can fit a powerful video camera into a cell phone, when only a few years ago, home video cameras were the size of suitcases and produced ultra-grainy video.

Consider that we can record and play back music. Consider that we can do the same with video and so well that it’s becoming more preferable to view broadcasts of events than actually be at the event itself.

These things aren’t that exciting to most people. But every so often, I get really excited about them. It’s amazing to me how humanity has improved itself.

For the last four summers, I’ve been the IT manager at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin. At the end of each summer, I leave to begin the school year, but today I’m leaving for the last time. Today is the last day that I will work in Conover, WI.

The four summers have been fantastic. I inherited a fledgling network and turned it into a semi-self-regulating system with over seventy connections at any given time. I took a jury-rigged expansive system and turned it into a planned network, each summer improving it to have fewer points of failure and higher adherence to industry standards and best practices.

But that’s it for me. These last few weeks, I spent time each day training my replacement, and in the future, it will be up to other people to determine the direction that this network will go.

I’m graduating at the end of this coming school year, at which point I will move on in my life to get a full-time long-term job. Summer camp won’t fit into my schedule. And I’ll be sad, but I understand that it’s time to say goodbye.

Thank you for the memories. I’ve had a great four summers.