It's a marshmallow world in the winter

These pics are mostly for the folks who aren't in Michigan any more.

I know Oklahoma got some winter weather here lately, and maybe some of this reached south. But winter has finally arrived in Michigan it seems, even if it only comes in spurts and sputters.

The rain began to freeze last night, putting a glaze over everything. Even the grass is slippery, and breaks like glass when you walk on it.

Power is out all over the place around these parts. The morning drive wasn't so bad, but on the ride home I saw lots of downed tree branches. It was gorgeous.





The pictures are just from around the apartment complex, but I thought of going down the street - the really old part of town - to catch the action. Entire streets were nothing but white and ice and quiet. Everyone stayed in today, except us at the credit union, because of Dr. King's day - and because of the weather.





These are the kind of storms I remember as a kid: dragging my sled around the neighborhood, picking twigs off the crabapple trees and sucking on the ice that coated them. Big snow piles in the parking lot you could either slide down or make a fortress for you and your friends.

Winter was childhood, especially in Michigan, although any season was ripe enough to go outside and play.





The trees are bent because of the weight of the ice. The lucky ones are still standing. Don was watching the news last night, with reports of car ports crashing down on the vehicles underneath because of the snow and ice.

"You should move your car," he told me.

I laughed. This is Michigan. It might as well be Ontario, or Minnesota. We know what winter is, and we build things to withstand the extra weight. Nature forgets, though.






I though I was forgetting, too, until I woke up this morning with a tell-tale tickle in the back of my throat.

Winter is the time to get a cold. Those spring and summer colds are just a kick in the crotch. You're not supposed to get sick when the sun is shining and warm. Winter is the proper season, because everyone's miserable, and no one feels sorry for you.

"Yeah, that's going around," they tell you. No, "Aw shucks," or "Boy, I hate being sick this time of year." No, those condolences are saved when birds chirp.

This time of year, you're on your own.

It's the season of hot soup and warm cider and the never-ending drone of the heater, so being sick only makes sense. Who wants to go out in this mess, anyway?

Well, except maybe to grab a few pretty pictures. Then it's okay.

Call me on my iPhone

The wait, my friends, is over.


Well, almost over. We have until June. But then Apple will finally release it's much-rumored iPhone.

It was announced at this morning's Macworld keynote speech by Steve Jobs, right after the AppleTV product update.

It's gorgeous. It's amazingly beautiful. It has the potential to shape cell phones, mobile computers, MP3 players - all of that - for years to come.

But Jesus is it expensive. $499 just to get you started.

No buttons to press. Few switches to switch. It's controlled by your finger and a touchscreen. Scroll through your iTunes library by dragging your finger along the screen. Resize pictures on the fly by "pinching" and "pulling" them - literally.

You control your music, your e-mail, the web, your contacts, your calendar, and your mobile phone all through this smart, intuitive, clever little gadget.

It's enough to make you want to run out and...well, save up. It doesn't come out until June.

What I love about it (just by watching the keynote - you can view it here) is how it makes navigating and controlling and organizing all your info so goddamn easy. Apple loves to make things easy. Look at the iPod. Look at iTunes. Look at the Mac.

Driver and I discussed it after the launch, and we both wonder about a couple of things. First, you have to use Cingular (Apple's reasoning being they're the biggest and best), a giant dinosaur that has been absorbed into the even bigger dinosaur, AT&T. I don't like AT&T, but if I want an iPhone I'd have to stick with them.

Driver worries about battery life: how long can a device that does so much and look amazing while doing it last? Jobs bragged about five hours of continuous usage, but he likes to over-estimate his products.

We both worried about the price, and I worried about storage. A four-gig and eight-gig model? How much music and pictures and videos and movies can eight gigs really hold?

And frankly, I'd use the thing without the damn phone part. But it has to be a phone, too, and you have to pay for it.

But I remember thinking when the iPod was released how obnoxiously overpriced it was. Maybe, like all things, the price will come down a bit. I really think it could be worth it. It's like a mini-Mac, a full-sized iPod Nano, and a cell phone all in one.

When I first got my cell phone, I flirted with the calendar and the notes and the alarms and all that, but I gave up after realizing I hated inserting letters with a 10-digit keypad. It's crude, and slow. What I would love is to be able to sync it with the iBook and be done with it. And I know there are phones out there that allow you to do syncing stuff, but no one seems to have it down pat.

Not until now.

With the iPod so successful, and now the iPhone and AppleTV, Apple is getting more and more into non-computer related fields and making them a user-friendly experience. So "Apple Computers, Inc." is no more. Now there's just "Apple, Inc."

If you have a spare hour or so, sit down and watch the keynote, because it's hard to capture the beauty of this beast in a stupid blog. Think your iPod is fun to use? Wait 'till you see this.

Friggin'. Visual. Voicemail.

Instead of slogging through six voicemails to hear every one of them, you can select - with your finger, not your time and ear, which ones you want to hear in any order you wish.

Want a keypad? Hit the keypad button and they appear. When you're done, they disappear. The keypad on my current phone doesn't disappear when I don't need it, does yours?

The Safari web browser shows actually pages, not truncated, squat versions of webpages. Need to see something closer. Tap it with your finger to zoom.

Apple found a way to make all that stuff we get frustrated with and...well...just fix it. Poof.

So six months from now, maybe I'll have the $500 to buy an iPhone, maybe I won't. I didn't think I'd get an iPod, until I went to the Apple Store in Novi and actually tried one out for a while. Maybe that's what I'll do this time - make a little recon trip.

And hey, my current cell phone contract expires in July. Coincidence?

Yup. But I'll call it good timing too.



Now if only they would work on an iRemote Control for our TVs...

Go Gators

There's revenge, and then there's revenge - and then there's admitting you're wrong.

I remember feeling, like the rest of my state, that Michigan was screwed out of a rematch shot with number-one ranked Ohio State when Florida moved up into the number-two spot.

But now? Well, after the Rose Bowl, and tonight's championship game, maybe we were all wrong. Wrong about Michigan, about Ohio State, about the Big Ten in general - who only won two bowl games this season.

I still feel that 40-50 days off affects a team in ways I can't even begin to imagine. It's the spring semester at most schools now, and they're still thinking football. It's basketball season, you dummies.

But then part of me feels like OSU fell short of the Real Deal. They beat Texas, sure, but barely surved their encounter with Michigan. Then the break.

Then the Break.

Against high-flying offenses and constant pressure from the defensive line, the Big Ten's Big Boys fell apart.

Since Michigan didn't play, I didn't have a favorite in tonight's game. But I will say I rooted for the Gators, out of fairness and underdog-ness and spiteful glee at the prospect of that neo-robot Troy Smith getting shoved into the turf.

There's something about those SEC colors, too. The bright orange and royal blue stood in stark contrast to the midwest's own drab colors. We don't dress brightly here in the North, especially now that the snow is finally falling. In Florida, you need bright colors to stand out from all those beaches and swamps and howling hurricane winds.

Speaking of Hurricanes: I propose the Midwest/Florida Bowl - something where some team from the Sunshine State and some other team from the Rust Belt go head-to-head on some rain-drenched Pacific Northwest field. We'll play at Washington State. They don't need their field. Boise State can show us how things are done.

This marks the first time I've paid more attention to the NCAA than the NFL, and I'm so glad I did.

Now we wait until late August, when the marching bands warm up their instruments, the cheerleaders stretch in the late summer sunlight, and students paint themselves in orange and maize and scarlet and cheer on the last vestiges of the War Between the States.

Living life 1.5

I picked up a copy of Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" issue and - lo and behold - the person being celebrated was me.

And you... And everyone.

The shiny, white iMac on the cover caught my eye, as did the reflective Mylar - a postmodern gimmick that reflects the viewer's own image back at them - and because I've been hearing so much about user-created content and Web 2.0, I just had to read more.

What I learned, and what I'm sure everyone logging into MySpace later today already knows, is that people are taking over the internet.

It goes something like this... In the old days, big corporations - Nike, Coke, Apple, The New York Times - built web pages where people would go to read, purchase, browse, whatever... But the companies and organizations that owned the web site controlled what you saw.

Web 2.0 says we control what we see... Go to my Flickr account and you'll see all the photos I've taken in the last year... Come to my MySpace profile and read about how I survived New Year's... Go to eBay and bid on stuff I'm selling... Point your browser to Amazon.com and read the book review I just wrote... That's Web 2.0.

And, essentially, it's the power of all that people-created stuff that made Time pick everyday citizens as the people of the year.

Why not?.. From the sounds of it, we've all been pretty busy...

This raises concerns, however, because if you've ever visited a random YouTube video - maybe the one where the guy performs dance moves to music through the decades, as Stacy showed me one day (and I want that six minutes of my life back, dammit) - you know that there's an awful lot of garbage out there.

That makes the quality stuff, the real cream, harder to find among all the junk... Web 2.0 provides tools, like del.icio.us, to help us sort, thankfully... But after a whlie all that crap takes up a lot of our attention - and a lot of our time.

For the most part I've embraced a lot of 2.0 stuff... I love reading through Wikipedia... I could spend hours on there, browsing through all the links, learning about how information interconnects... I use backpackit to keep a list of books I want to buy or interesting software I want to check out... I read Lifehacker every day to see how some geek in Idaho turned his Mac SE into a neon fish tank (and how I can repeat the process)...

I also read about people spending their entire lives on the computer, noting every little moment, typing in every little to-do for the day, wasting hours on YouTube watching a kitty fall over asleep.

Brian Williams, in a kind of counter-argument to the "Person of the Year" spread, wrote that "the danger just might be that we miss the next great book or next great idea, or that we fail to meet the next great challenge...because we're too busy celebrating ourselves."

I like spending time online, and wasting time reading my friends' blogs, but I make sure to actually live Life, version 1.0, because that's where the really good stuff happens.

You can't beat a scrap piece of paper, scribbled with the daily to-dos and crammed into your pocket... You can't beat actually watching some goofy animal do some goofy trick, right out there in nature.

[Side story:.. I'll never forget the day I watched a squirrel fall out of a tree - actually lose his/her footing and come crashing to the ground - while I was eating my lunch outside one summer day... That's life!]

And you sure as hell can't beat finding out about a person's life from their own lips... I learn more about Suzanne or Don or Ladane from spending a good meal together than I ever will reading their bulletins, no matter how much information they pack in there.

It makes me wonder how people my grandma's age ever got along without the Internet... Isn't that a strange thing to think about?.. Life Before?.. Here we've grown up with..the Web..since we were at least teenagers, and I've learned a lot trying to teach my grandma what all is possible with something as simple as, say, a Google search on who sang "Lean On Me.".. She still heads to the encyclopedia, even after all these years.

Sometimes just sitting, and thinking, and picking your teeth with a toothpick can be the best thing in the world, you know?

...well, maybe not... That one's pretty personal.

It'll be interesting to see where all this stuff leads to - where, say, Web 3.0 could take us... I just hope it won't be the hyper-celebrations of the Me Culture, the incessant desire to become..some crypto-Internet celebrity, that I have nightmares about.

But in the meantime, I'll be living the best of both worlds - trying to stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest, but still taking the time to live a life that isn't contained within a 17-inch LCD screen.

ATO Founder's Day 2006

This has probably been a long-time coming (oh, since about April), but I finally got the pictures from Founder's Day/Weekend developed.

You can head to my Flickr account to see all of them, but here's some highlights for ATOs who are interested.




We played the usual wiffle ball game in the backyard, but this year is was all us Old Balls versus the current guys.




Thankfully we had our star picture (and my big bro) John Neff.





We also started up an impromptu poker tournament. Is that Neff looking at my ass?





Driver was so excited about the tournament he...well, he fell asleep. It was probably more because of a bunch of older 20-somethings trying to stay up late like rock stars. This is the result.





Gobble gobble. I don't know why me, Neff and Driver were doing the Wild Turkey salute. That was...Jesus...about seven years ago, and I'm surprised Driver would volunteer to relive such a painful reminder.





Rockin' the Freestyle, it's Gugin, Cowboy and Keith (with Driver hidden in the back) in Neff's very suburban, very domestic Ford SUV. Where were we going? Probably a late breakfast, to moan about our aches and pains from the night before.




Ugly as this is, it's before everything got really nasty. "Piano Man," Alpha Mu style. I was unprepared - I didn't wear my orange boxers, but they'll do. I think this is the first time I've seen Gugin's ass from this angle.





This is the last morning, just before Driver took off for Parts Unknown. He was the big traveler of the weekend, flying up from the southern lands to be with us.





The obligatory "In front of the crest" shot, with all the alumni who made it (except for Jim, Brent, and Nemo).

ATOs - feel free to steal the pics off my Flickr account. I know Gugin and I were always the big picture-takers in the fraternity, and I don't mind playing historian.

Hope all of you have a safe and happy New Year.

Love and respect.

On writing life down

Last night I decided to pick up a much-neglected habit, one that I've been putting off for the better part of a year: journal writing.

If you've ever tried to keep a regular journal or diary, you probably know how hard it can be - how long stretches of time can pass when you don't comment on anything, and much of what you do write is catch-up material.

I've always heard that the best writers keep a journal to put down their thoughts and experiences, a catalog of sorts for a life lived, day-by-day. They could then mine the journal for material. I've also heard that writing can help you to put down thoughts to ease the rambling in your head, and it's for this reason that I took up the practice.

I kept little notebooks - mostly the simple, ruled, spiral-bound kind - through high school, forgot about them through college, and picked up the practice again when I graduated. In fact, the one I found has the first entry marked "7-20-03," the summer after I left Adrian. Sometimes I would write often, sometimes I would go for months without putting anything down, but I dug it out last night just to see what I was thinking - Jesus! - three and a half years ago.

It's remarkable what changes in three years. I notice broad patterns of discussion, subjects that appear, then disappear, only to reappear months down the road. I write about Dayna a lot, because we were dating at the time. And I write about my then-new job (here's one, marked "8-3-03": "At least I have a steady, decent-paying job. My luck may have turned around. For once, things are going okay. A few goals left to achieve, and life will be good.") I write about issues I still struggle with today (at "8-19-03," I rant about my lack of self-discipline: "Usually writing things down helps me. Developing a habit helps even more...speaking of discipline, I need to exercise!").

A journal is kind of like a history for yourself, a written-down reminder of all the events and adventures you've been through. On "9-15-03," I write about first moving in with Don into Granada Apartments: "After having gone to 15 different schools until high school, the prospect of moving again, despite its inherent benefits, didn't seem fun...but I think I'm better now." I document grandma giving me her car, concerts Don and I went to (like coming back from KMFDM on "11-8-04": "On the way home, Don and I saw the Northern Lights. Beautiful! Subtle greens and pinks, and it looked like a quiet daylight at midnight...it was perfect, a once-in-a-lifetime event!"), the 2004 election ("Bush won, Kerry lost. 'Nuff said."), Dayna and I splitting up (8-23-04, a single line before the split: "Wet eyes red no more.") - it all seems so long ago, but by reading through it last night it reminded me of a lot of things I haven't thought about.

Quite a bit reads like foreshadowing; me glimpsing into the future, or setting a path for myself that I've followed pretty well. On "10-4-04," after the split, I wonder what the heck I'm going to do with my new-found singleness: "Now I'm single again - for the first time in over three years. I must spend more time developing myself, really growing up and seeing what the world has to offer. It seems now is the time to take advantage of my youth, and do the things I've been wanting to do." Little did I know that following spring I would venture off to Chicago by myself, and the spring after that travel cross-country down a mythic highway. "Life's too short," I wrote. "Time to start enjoying it!"

I spot symptoms of behavior that I still feel today. On "12-28-04," I write: "My trip to Ann Arbor last weekend was a symptom of the deep wanderlust I have when life is in upheaval. My dad does it - guess I have some of that bug, too." Some things never change.

Life wasn't any simpler back then, either, such as on "1-27-05": "Between writing for the magazine, cleaning, reading, playing my new acoustic guitar, or other hobbies, I have a steady, always-filled 'to-do' list available." Hey, that sounds like a typical day today.

That summer brought a flurry of thoughts, emotions, reconnections and activities, until the fall when I found all the previous concerns I had written about "are no longer relavent," especially after "winding down a year of exploration."

Then it ends. A year and two months ago, "10-23-05" being my last entry.

After reading through three years of note-taking, I decided to start the practice up again. I struggled this spring and summer to kick-start the habit again (but kicked myself when I couldn't remember the password on the encrypted file on my iMac), but will now stick to pen and paper, and try to see what else I can accomplish in three year's time.

And maybe, years from now, I can look back and remember what life was like for a twenty-something Dave - a Dave probably still struggling with the same issues I face every year.

Maybe I've found life doesn't change all that much, just some of the characters, and some of the places.

The road to self-improvement

Home sick today, after having my top two wisdom teeth pulled out. The experience wasn't a fun one (I nearly ripped the dentist chair's arms off during the procedure), but it had to be done. So this morning I woke up to a bloody pillow, a sour feeling in my stomach, and two less teeth. Joy.

But I did manage to attend my final Financial Peace University Class last night with Suzanne, ending a 13-week long session of self-discovery and budgeting education.

Suzanne's boss paid for her to take the class, and since you're supposed to take it with a spouse - and she didn't have one - she invited me to attend with her. I was pretty skeptical at first. I was thinking it was another one of those get-rich-quick schemes; you know, buying or selling crap, real estate scams, etc.

Now, however, I'm so glad Suzanne invited me. The class has been one of those experiences where you wonder how you ever got along with out it.

Not that I've ever had big problems financially. I've always been pretty responsible, especially since leaving school. Except when it comes to debt, in which case I thought everyone gets in debt while they're at school. Right? Who doesn't have a student loan or a credit card these days?

"The borrower is slave to the lender," Dave Ramsey says, a quote he took from the Bible. Ramsey is the one who instructs the class (via a DVD series we watched at a local breakfast place, every Tuesday night). If you haven't heard of Dave Ramsey (he's got a pretty popular radio show), I suggest you check him out. At times he can be arrogant and tough, but he knows what he's talking about.

His motive is simple: get out of debt so you can use the money you're currently paying to credit card companies to build actual wealth.

And use financial methods our grandparents used. Not so much a can filled with cash on top of the refrigerator (or in the freezer, as my grandpa used to do), but building an emergency fund for those sure-to-come events in life, or buying things with cash and bargaining when the situation fits.

The plan involves baby steps and debt snowballs and all kind of neat (but truly legitimate) tricks to get yourself out of debt. Just the other week I paid off a credit card I've had since college. I even over-paid, so they have to send me a check for the remaining balance. And I'm going to frame that check to document the first time a debt-causing business has ever owed me money. It's a pretty good feeling.

Next will come a few other credit cards I've had, then paying off my vehicle early, then my student loans, and so on. I like the thought of not owing anyone any money, and I really like the thought of the house I could buy with all those saved payments. Imagine what you could do if you didn't have any student loan or credit card payments. I've already started imagining.

The whole thing has been a blast. I've started selling a lot of my crap on eBay, and I'm doing pretty well. With the money I've raised, I can hammer away at my debts. The program also includes budgeting, which I've always strangely enjoyed, and I'm finding that I'm spending less and saving more. That may mean I'm the designated driver a few more nights a month, but I have plenty of fun with the money I have.

Last night we had a nice potluck and handed out "graduation" certificates, but the over-arching theme of the night was people breathing a collective sigh of relief. This stuff should be taught at the high school level, before the credit card companies get to you, but we were all glad we learned it now. Better late than never.

I've also met a few new friends, and found out that just about everyone has money problems of some sort. The trick is, as Dave says, to manage your money - not let it manage you.

So off I go. Ready to pay off another credit card probably by the new year, and then another, and then I can use all the money I was making payment with to make bigger payments on the stuff that's left. It's brilliant. And I can't wait to be debt-free.

Dave Ramsey encourages the class to take the knowledge and spread it to others (free of charge!). I think that I'll save up and buy my dad a spot in the next class, because I know he's never been great with money.

It's probably the best gift I could give him.