PrimalCon Fun

This year's PrimalCon in Oxnard, CA was a lot of fun.  Between the great weather, food and fun there is too much to cover here.  Google it....  or click this...  Recap of the event

The grass-fed beef, the fresh (slightly undercooked) salmon, the bacon and piles and piles of salad was all delicious.

I got to crush a part of the Earth over and over with my body in an attempt to stand on a slackline.  The people there were cool and it is very much worth the trip. Here is me on the last day.

Shrinky Dinks

Anyone remember Shrinky Dinks? Those little plastic, probably horrible-caustic, deals that you would put in the oven and shrink… anyway, that is how my  stomach is… boooyah!!   After 8 days on a nice tight ketogenic diet, I can already see the results I am looking for. After a hard Sunday kettlebell workout, I feel great and continue all efforts to sleep well.

I called the local tanning place today, and felt like a douchebag while doing so, in order to prepare my oh-so-fair skin for the sun of California.  I do not want to be a crispy critter after my first game of Frisbee, but that might happen; If I wear a green hat they’d call me Sriracha…. Yeah, let’s not…

You can’t tell by this page and my 6 readers don’t care, but I was touching up on my HTML and CSS skills today and it is all coming back. Hey, perhaps eventually I’ll get off my ass and fix myself a dope-ass website for my business.

Also, tomorrow is like Christmas!! It’s the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war!!    That was fun times for all involved. Lots of surfing, some high fiving and ultimately a positive effect on our world.

Peace.   

Saving Some MON-AAAYYY!!

Last year I tried to refinance my castle and got kicked in the proverbial nads due to my credit score. I had even worked a night shift at a new job site to pick up some overtime and was woken up with a denial phone call. Sweet!

 

So, I tried to re-fi again this year and have not been holding my breath. This morning, I was woken up by a call from the bank saying that it was all approved! This is great news.  The interest rate is going down by almost 3% and I am changing insurance companies; turns out I’ve been paying nearly double for insurance for the last four years.

 

Below are a few examples of what I can now afford each month due to my savings!

·         91 pounds of grass-fed organic ground beef at Bill the Butcher

·         279 cans of C20 coconut water. (Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night… all day)

·         Four new tires for my car

·         Fancy smart phone without contract

·         110 Pumpkin spice lattes

·         Full service on the Subaru’s front and rear differentials.

·         29 boxes of ammo for my .45

 

Getting the picture now?

 

Actually, this just means I’ll stress less and not actually GET more. It is something that, on the surface, seems like extra cash, but I’ll be doing my best to put this “breathing room” to use.

 

Holler back

 

 

To the Iraqi People..

Many things have come to light for me in the last several years that were not so apparent as a young man. I love my country and what it is supposed to stand for. I, and many others like me, was lied to, trained and used as a tool to oppress others. Many of these things were not my fault, but I was there to witness. So, like the man I want to be:

To the people of Iraq,

     I’m sorry for helping do to you, what I would never let happen to me or my loved ones. I am sorry for having hate in my heart; bringing my horrible skills to bear upon your brave men is a saddening thing for me in retrospect. I feel guilt for terrifying the people who I was supposedly protecting. I’m sorry for having had the drive to be better at tracking people in my scope, when I should have been opposing the occupation. I’m sorry that I was skilled and able to deal death at extreme ranges; what was once impressive is now repulsive.

     Although I will never deserve or receive your forgiveness, know that I am sorry for helping give my people a bad name. We often helped, but more often hurt people. I have joked about the death of others, but cried over those we suffered; no humans should have lost lives on either side. I am sorry for allowing spite, revenge or rage to fill me up and flow over. I’m sorry for being another invader into your sovereign land and removing your civil liberties at gunpoint. I’m sorry for using superior technology and deception to take away your family members. I’m sorry that we removed innocent men from their homes, without cause, in the name of security.

     I’m sorry I took away your guns. I’m sorry that your land has been ravaged by war and that men like me and my brothers were your enemy. If we had been born on the same block, we would probably been friends. I’m sorry that my friends glorified me for my successes in battle and boasted about their own. I’m sorry also that the common condition in wartime troops is to dehumanize their opponents to make them easier to mistreat; I am just as guilty of this. I’m sorry for being a part of something our Forefathers fought against.

     I’m sorry that I, at one time, thought that the ability to take a life was power. I’m sorry that my country is plagued by young men and women who suffer with guilt over things they did. I’m sorry that we had to kill to ensure the safety of others. I’m sorry that war is ironic at times. I’m sorry that the man in Tal Afar who guarded the bank, who treated us with such kindness, is not able to live in peace. I’m sorry that the Christian family in Mosul, who showed us love, has to live in hiding from sectarian violence.

     To the children, I am sorry that you had to witness young American men as monsters. I’m sorry that your childhood was filled with explosions, gunfire and large, armored men kicking in doors. I’m sorry that your soccer fields became a danger zone. I’m sorry that your kindness and wonder was not able to be spent in peace time. There was an old man and a young boy in the car that was hijacked by another man and all three had their hands up. I shot the hijacker when he pulled out a pistol; I am sorry that boy and old man had to fear for their lives.

     I’m sorry that it took nearly a decade to leave your land. I am sorry that thousands of peaceful people per year were killed by ordinance, stray bullets or carelessness. We accidentally killed a woman and went to pay reparations to her family; I’m sorry to that husband and those children that his wife and their mother died. I’m sorry that there were so many dinner tables with families waiting for their loved ones to come home, who never did.

     I’m sorry that it was “us versus them” and that you paid that price by proximity. I can say that I never targeted an unarmed person with lethal force, but some of my peers may have. I’m sorry that communications get confused, descriptions are vague, maps are not marked clearly and that our judgment is not always sound. I’m sorry that I thought my squad leader was a coward for leading us away from the fighting when he could.

       All these things and more are ones I and tens of thousands of military vets get to live with. We all have the chance to make good lives and we have an obligation to work hard accordingly. I saw the error of my ways and now try to teach my friends that respecting others is the only way we will ever evolve as a species. My son asked me “what’s a war?” and it broke my heart. I am glad though, that he has no clue about the horror so many children experience daily.

Letter to Kit: Busted French Press

Now before you get all mad, I think this is a little bit your fault. I mean, who in their right mind is going to trust something fragile and made of wimpy glass to a guy who can barely tie his shoes and a girl who dreams of riding a moose into the woods with an AK and a backpack full of canned SPAM? I mean, this makes a little sense that you would at least expect this to happen. Right?

Okay, so now that we're on the same page… So, when I was quietly soothing my chest pains with more caffeine, I MAY have bumped your little press off the highest shelf near our desk where it most likely fell the distance of about 4.6 feet where my poorly-tied shoe "caught" it before rolling off and onto the floor.

Now I'm not sure if it was the fault of my shoes that were meant for robots, the friction of the air passing by during free fall or the actual impact with the ground, but there is a small crack near the top. If I had been wearing my Vibram Fivefingers shoes, you can rest assured that this email would not be in your inbox.

So, between Jessica (aka: Queen DorkLord) and me, it will be replaced or simply glued at your request. As it sits, it is fully functional, but the crack does add more character than I am qualified to have around me. I just wanted to let you know, so that next time you're here and see the fault line peering you in the eyes, you do not decide to go on a coffee binge and blog about various shades of window tint.

Thanks for reading this and giving me enough time to get far, far, far away before your rage is unleashed.

Love,

    Jack

Manual Tranny swap days 1 and 2

There are no pics because this is a sort of Top Secret project. Most people who want a manual Volvo either buy one that way or just live with the auto-tragic one until it dies and then end up buying a new car. On day one, out came the sub-frame, axles, all but three bolts that hold the tranny to the motor and various bits all around. We went to Tacoma Screw to get some bolts and was impressed with how awesome that place is. There is a guy who works there that used to work where I work in the same department, except that I was 2 when he worked there.

We only worked for like 4 hours total and got a lot done on day one. Day two we had the help of my little cousin who is an engineer at Boeing, so I assumed he would have some real help, but it was a learning experience for him too. The tranny came out straight away and then we tore out the auto brake pedal assembly, the shifter (taking special care to not anger the grey, anti-theft wire) and bolted up the new flywheel and clutch assembly.

After getting the new shifter cables run and installing the clutch slave cylinder, we attempted to install the new transmission, but clearance was an issue. I think maybe we will get the car a little higher up and lower the motor a bit more than we did. It was dark and getting late, so that was a good stopping point. All in all, everything was nice and smooth.

Day three should be everything for the swap and we just put it all back. YAY!

Sorry, no pics… go cry….

Tom

I have known Tom for about 15 years and we used to hang out all the time. We would get together with a bunch of our friends and play Warhammer 40k or D&D (STFU and keep reading!) while drinking Coke and eating McD’s cheeseburgers. Remember when they were 39 cents each on Wednesday? Yeah! That was amazing for us then.

Anyway, over the years, we naturally spent less and less time as the group of friends we once were, but a few of us still stay in touch via email or whatever. Tom is the only one, who really has spent much time with me over the last few years. Although I still value the other guys, they are busy living their lives too, so I can wait. Tom stayed local for the most part and my oldest son calls him “Uncle Tom” which is a pretty badass title to be someone’s uncle and not be blood.

Well, we had a beer tasting a few weeks back and I never heard from old bald-ass and I was being pissy about it. The beer tasting came and went and finally I heard from him; he was all doped up on pain meds after having been in a pretty bad truck accident. Black ice into the median basically sums it up.

In a nutshell, Tom was sick of never having broke a bone, so he thought it would be great timing. Hit icy roads in the afternoon, careen into the median of I-90 in a full-size Chevy truck and not have the airbags deploy. His left leg was twisted all over the driver’s footwell and ended up being broken in several places. He then crawled from the truck onto the pavement in the twenty-something degree weather waiting for help to arrive.

Luckily for Tom, help did come and he did get treated. The cost of the hospital stay, treatment and ambulance ride (What a little pussy, he should have walked) are somewhere along the lines of the difference between his yearly wage and mine…. Basically, Tom has to live like poor man Jack for a bit to pay off those pins, plates and screws in his leg. They are pretty gnarly though.

This all happened the second week of December and I was happy to have spent the last couple days hanging out with him. We had dinner the 30^th, he came over to celebrate New Year’s Eve and then we went to brew some beer on New Year’s Day. All in all, it was substantially better than the previous few weeks. He has been going mad sleeping at his parents’ house and reading books drinking smuggled in whisky and vitamin water.

I tried to convince him to write a guest post about his hospital experience and the trippy ass dreams he had on all the pain meds. The ghost cat under the bed sheets was an especially interesting part of the story. We will see if he comes through with that or not. Anyway, here is a pic of Tom with the only facial hair I’ve ever seen on him. Give him a red hat and yellow ear muffs and he could be Yukon Cornelius from “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer”.