Sebbylite

Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but it necessitated my first 911 call of my life so I’m sticking with it.

Ok, I’ll back up and start from the beginning: as I was walking my dog this morning, one of the houses that I walk by was glowing. I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen a house on fire before, but it was an amazing site. Since I had never seen a house on fire before, I had no idea what was going on, and I didn’t want to make a prank call to 911 for someone’s weird neon lights display.

So I walked past the house with my dog. On the way back (for the record, my morning walk is down a block and back, so it’s not like I wasn’t keeping track of the house the entire time), the windows started popping out from the fire. I didn’t have my phone with me, but a woman was walking by and was almost up to me, so I waited for her. When she came close, I said “Excuse me, do you have a phone? I think that house is on fire.”

To which I got absolutely no response at all. I tried again, this time adding a “ma’am” to sound polite. Still nothing. At this point in time all the windows are popping out of the house and flames are starting to poke out. And so I ran past the woman, up to my place, got my phone, and called 911.

I have to admit that I was impressed by the response time. After I called, gave them the address, and hung up, the first fire truck showed up in about 90-120 seconds. Soon after that the first police car showed, and then more fire trucks. By the time the third fire truck had arrived, two police cars had closed off the street on both sides to traffic and the first truck had a guy with a hose spraying down the house. By the time the second guy joined in with a second hose, the fire seemed to be pretty much contained. Which I count as impressive considering just moments before it was flaring up pine trees on both sides of the house and seemed to be raging along pretty impressively.

All told, 5 of the long fire trucks showed up, 3 police cars, 2 fire marshal trucks, 1 EMT ambulance, and 2 news helicopters. And that, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is why you get renter’s insurance. Do you have any idea how much that must cost?

Ten minutes after I called 911, the fire was well under control. 15 minutes later, it was out and the firemen were starting to cut into the house to see what started it. I still haven’t heard what that was, but on the bright side there was no one in the house and no other houses were burnt.

Ok, now I have to go back and talk about the woman again. What. The. Fuck. I understand that it is 5:30 in the morning, and that you don’t want to interact with anyone at that time because the chances are good that they are crazy, but wouldn’t you respond when you heard the words “house on fire”? Or maybe your ipod was up too loud and you didn’t hear me. Again, is that a great strategy for walking around by yourself at 5:30 am? Deaf to the world? If I had been someone intent on harm, you never would have even known I was coming after you until it was too late.

Or do you just not care that a house was burning down right next to you?

In a word, nothing happened.

Evidently I forgot to pay for my hosting (and by forgot to pay, I mean that DreamHost messed up my autopay settings so they canceled my account for a while), so it was shut off.

But now I’m back, again, and refreshed and ready to post some more. Riiiigght.

PS-happy now mom?

Is my internet broken? What happened to that pretty blue layout that used to be the basis behind Sebbylite?!?

I changed it, that’s what happened. It’s an exercise in semantic markup, style sheets, design, boredom, and one or two more things that I could probably come up with. In a nutshell, I wanted to monkey around with the design, so I set it back to a baseline to then go from there.

And that baseline is what it is: blank, white, etc.

Don’t worry, more changes will be made soon (soon being a relative term).

Christina Stonkus

Debbie.
Tom.

I’m pretty sure every blog that is run by a single person has made this post before: “Where I’ve Been and Why I Haven’t Been Blogging”.

Well this blog is no different, and if you look through the archives you’ll probably notice quite a few. Well, here’s this month’s edition, in a tag cloud of sorts:

-frisbee, work, 5am, Labor Day, Esky, move/moved/moving, cubicle, summer, 30D, Potlatch, Colombia, Corvallis, bridge jumping, your team, one man wolfpack, EZA, CSS, Mazda 3.

Suffice to say that was the abbreviated version of the last few months, but if you want more details then get in touch with me. But I also have plans for the future and for this site. So you may notice some changes around in the near future, don’t be alarmed, I’m just poking around under the hood a bit. We’ll see how that turns out…

In the meantime, yes I’m still alive.

Thanksgiving and Christmakkah pictures are finally online. I am also working on the pictures from Doc Brown’s going-away party (aka, Slapurday night). I’ll let you know when those are up…

Oh, and guess who has two thumbs and needs to not go to college parties anymore?

This guy.

Would you rather have sex with a sheep, or a pig?

So it turns out that Jeopardy is having online tests to get new contestants. Which is actually a great idea: it cuts down on costs for the show and the contestants, and it allows more people to take the test for the show.

The thing that pisses me off about it though is that I have a basketball game this Thursday during the Pacific Coast time slot. Eff.I bet I’d get my ass kicked at the test, but I’d still like to take it.

Anyway, if you are interested, here are the time slots to try out for Jeopardy!

Harper’s Index edition of how effed up these last 8 years have been.

Enjoy!

Personal favorites:

Portion of his presidency he has spent at or en route to vacation spots: 1/3
Seconds it took a Maryland consultant in 2004 to pick a Diebold voting machine’s lock and remove its memory card: 10
Portion of all U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the top 1 percent of earners: 3/4
Rank of Bush among U.S. presidents with the highest disapproval rating: 1

Change is going to come!

What? So it’s been 6 months since I last posted, what’s your point?

I could throw a bunch of excuses out at you as to why this is the case, but why bother. I’m pretty sure my readership is down to about 0, possibly less than that even. So I’ll just ignore that little fact, and start up with the updates.

1. The economy sucks, but so far I’ve still got my job. The company I work for is small enough that it is doubtful that they will lay people off (other than the temp workers, data input people, and consultants that have already been let go). There is a chance in the upcoming months that I might see a salary cut, but I think that would be it. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
2. My old car died (1986 Honda Accord, 177000 miles, older than at least 3 of my teammates). Well, technically it’s still alive, but the headlines completely shut off which makes it tough to drive in the mornings here in Seattle. But since my plan was to get a new car anyway, this was an alright thing. So I’ve got a new car now too, 2007 Mazda3 Hatchback, 24320 miles, heated seats, leather, etc, etc. Nice.
3. Probably the biggest news, I found out that I’ve been playing with 2 hernias and a torn stomach muscle since July. And I go under the knife in early February, followed by 4 weeks of basically sitting in bed and watching movies. Yep, no running, jumping, swimming, biking, lifting, or thinking hard for four straight weeks, minimum. That will hurt me more than the surgery itself. But hopefully after it’s all over I’ll be back to my old self, and able to play without wearing all my old man gear (aka, the Corset). Instead, I’ll have a bunch of mesh sewn into my abdominal wall, kinda like an internal corset. Definitely better.
4. Oh, I’m officially older. Turned 31 in January, which means I can no longer claim to only be in my upper 20’s, I am officially in my 30’s. So I should probably stop hanging out with 18, 19, and 20 year olds sometime soon. I’ll let you know when that happens.

That is about it. Work, frisbee, play, etc. It’s all still going pretty much the same, other than the above.

Oh yeah, and I’m going to Vegas next weekend, so I might have some more stories after that…

One of the members of Sockeye got married this past weekend. So what did I do? I took a bunch of pictures.

Actually, I can’t even claim that. I took some, and someone else took my camera and took a bunch more. I don’t know who, but I do know that I didn’t take half of these pictures. Oh well, enjoy!