’cause i bet i’ve wasted more:

[dr.evil] one hundred, meeeeellion dollars! ha, ha, ha, ha! [/dr.evil]

national election

president & vice president: obama/biden

obama has his sights set on strengthening the middle class, which is exactly what our country needs and has been losing. the republican ideal of supporting the wealthy who will in turn trickle down the wealth doesn’t work — the rich want to get richer and keep the money for themselves, even if that means cutting costs by hiring foreign suppliers and labor. all of the world’s successful nations have a very strong middle class. countries that have primarily the very wealthy and the very poor? disasters.

california propositions

1a: safe, reliable high-speed passenger train bond act: yes

a high speed, clean energy train connecting southern and northern california would reduce flights and be a starting point for creating a culture of public transportation which we’re going to eventually have to move to. the train would be able to take me from la to sf in about 2 and half hours which if you consider airport security is about the same amount of time as flying.

2: standards for confining farm animals: yes

i’m an animal lover, and while i’m also an animal eater, i think that these animals shouldn’t suffer while they are alive. being allowed to walk around and move their wings and lay down doesn’t sound like too much to ask, and if a chicken breast increases by ten cents to allow them this decency, that’s fine with me.

4: waiting period and parental notification before termination of minor’s pregnancy: yes

i’m definitely pro-choice. but i’m also young enough to remember how stupid and emotional children are and how they make rash and unreasonable decisions, i mean hell, they were dumb enough to get pregnant in the first place, let’s put a bit of a restraining order on their decision making rights after that. in some cases, maybe in most cases an abortion is in everyone’s best interest, but if they are a minor, giving the parents 48 hours to discuss this with their child and the doctor is completely reasonable.

7: renewable energy generation: yes

like proposition 1a, we need to be investing in the future, and a large part of that is reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. requiring our government owned utilities to increase their use of renewable energy 50% by 2025 sounds like a reasonable goal and a responsible step forward in both protecting the environment and producing a majority of the energy we use here in the united states. i also just have a similar argument for prop 10.

8: eliminates right of same-sex couples to marry: no

i know this is a bit of an about-face for me and what i’ve said in the past. i think before i was married i had a more ideal view of marriage, that it was more than just the sum of its elements. and while there is definitely something very special about being married and not just in a committed relationship, as far as the law is concerned i think same sex couples should be afforded the same benefits. it’s almost like the hangup with most people (and to be honest a little bit for me still) is just the word “marriage” and that the sanctity of marriage in general will be tarnished if same sex couples can marry. i kinda feel like if same sex marriage was just called narriage or something everyone would be cool with it (although even in just typing that, that sounds pretty discriminatory), everyone would get their rights and life would go on :shrug:

i don’t really have much of an opinion on props 3/5/6/9/11 & 12, so if anyone wants to chime in, please do. i mean 3 sounds like yes, who doesn’t want more hospitals for kids? 5 sounds like yes, expand treatment for drug programs, and limit the amount of time you can be jailed for drug related, non violent crimes. 6 sounds like yes, give the police more money to fight bad guys. 9 sounds like yes, let victims of crimes know about the offender’s bail and whether they might be coming to get you. 11 i don’t really understand and 12 sounds like a yes, providing home aid to california veterans is the least we can do.

but yeh, happy to hear anyone’s input on any of these propositions. and whether you agree with me, or think i’m wrong on every single issue, vote.

i sell a lot of stuff on ebay and have found that the usps priority shipping is the fastest and least expensive way to ship things within the united states. on top of reasonable shipping rates, usps priority boxes, stickers, and tape are free, so i usually use this method for most of the things i ship. i also usually pay the extra $.65 for the delivery confirmation for piece of mind, although i usually don’t keep track of the receipts since i had never had a problem with a delivery.

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ever since my wisdom teeth came in about 5 or 6 years ago, they’ve bothered me. they aren’t impacted at all so they’re not moving my other teeth, but they’re just so far back in my mouth that they’re bothering my gums and they’re difficult to completely clean since they’re right up against the skin. this has caused frequent cuts and even infections which is painful as hell.

so yesterday as i was kept awake by the pain i decided that i needed to stop being a pussy and take care of it. when i woke up, i called the oral surgeon and scheduled an appointment for the middle of next month to get all 4 removed at once. just the thought of having that many teeth pulled kinda makes me sick, but a few days of pain vs a lifetime of irritation seems like an obvious choice.

i also decided that once that heals i’m going to get braces for my bottom teeth. my top row of teeth are nice and straight but the bottom are getting bunched up and are bound to get worse. it looks like with my insurance, and only aligning the bottom row of teeth should cost about $1000, which seems decent enough not to have ugly teeth.

i’ve had a full sized bed for the longest time, with a very crappy foam mattress that while i always thought was fine, taka always hated. so now that sleep and comfort is becoming even more important to her, we went out and bought a queen sized bed. we’d been going back and forth on what kind of mattress to buy. the fancy mattresses from the mattress stores started at about $1k, and we don’t like that high box-frame action, so with a decent ikea frame would bring the total cost to $1300.

we tried lots of different mattresses, and ended up agreeing on an ikea sultan hasselback which was only $400, we bought another malm frame (we had the same one in full size) in queen and some fancy mattress pads and sheets and last night we both slept very well (me because i was so tired buying and moving everything.) you see, pregnant women aren’t supposed to lift anything heavy, so loading an suv with a bed and putting and strapping a 90lb mattress on the roof, and then carrying it all up to your second story apt *alone* made me a little tired. the hasselback mattress feels great though. it has isolated coil springs with memory foam, so it’s a nice balance of comfort and firmness, and honestly doesn’t feel any different than the $1k serta mattress we were thinking about getting at sit-n-sleep.

fuck you $49 delivery fee

this morning i put my old bed on craigslist for $50 and within 15 minutes someone was on the way to pick it up.

yep, taka’s about 10 weeks along now and we’ve just now started telling our friends. we got the first sonogram a few days ago and saw the heart beating and the little arms and legs moving around. it was the first time in these 10 weeks that it really hit me that this is real. we’re of course very excited and i’m sure there’ll be lots of baby related posts for the next while. but yeh, kentomatic as a dad? insane.

two years ago today, me, my wife, and my friends were waking up in japan after a night of drunken karaoke-ing after a day of wedding-ing. it’s hard to believe that it’s already been two years, but they really have been great. i won’t start to gush about my wife ’cause no one likes to hear couples gush, but i really am lucky to have her.

random, but astronaut garret reisman who went up on sts-123 and lived aboard the international space station for 3 months, installing the new japanese science module, kibo among other things, signed this for me yesterday:

and this is a part of taka’s card that i thought was cute enough to post up here:

it’s scary watching some of these mccain/palin rallies and so much of the republican base is a scary set of folks. all the time people yell out “kill him” and call him a terrorist. thankfully the secret service actually looks into people that scream out threats, but its appalling how ignorant some of these people are.

here’s a few clips of a mccain rally yesterday, where he has some decent remarks to keep his insane audience at bay. while i’m voting for obama, it’s refreshing to see this side of mccain.

this morning eric and i were supposed to do a bike ride, but when i left my house at around 9a, it was freezing cold. i put on my arm warmers and rode the 4 miles to his place and by the time i got there, my nipples were so hard, it was obvious it was too cold to ride.

so we went and had breakfast at the local coffee shop and ended up playing 9 holes at the dominguez golf course. it’s actually not half bad, considering the $13 green fees and the fact that we were pretty much the only people out on the course. for not having played golf in quite a while we both played pretty well and we’ll hopefully start playing golf there more often. towards the end of the game, costin showed up, played the last few holes with us and then he and i headed to the hustler casino.

i’ve only played poker at hustler a couple of times and i’ve never gone alone, for fear that i would make a habit of it. i bought in with $100, and played pretty tight. after about the fifth hand, the announcer said that there would be a drawing for a table to spin the wheel. my table won and the 9 players split $500, so that $55.50 put me ahead. over 2 hours, i won about 10 pots and in the end came up $41.50 ahead, although if you don’t figure in the bonus money i got, i actually lost $14 playing poker. but a win’s a win and it’s always nice to walk out of a casino ahead.

anyway, time for nap!

two things i hated most about that last rosarito ride (aside from almost dying of dehydration after a night of terrible diarrhea) was that my feet and butt were killing me by the time i finished the ride. i think in past rides, i had done it in a shorter amount of time, so these things hadn’t bothered me as much, but lately, even on short rides this has become a problem.

so i replaced my worn out, 10 year old pair of cycling shorts with the new pearl izumi 3d race classic short, which has 3x the padding of my old shorts. i also got new road shoes. the diadora road shoes that i’d worn for the last couple of years had always fit ok, but after while, my small toe always got cramped up by the poor front design of the shoe. i picked up a pair of sidi zetas, and while i haven’t done a ride in them yet, they feel amazing compared to my old shoe.

eric and i are planning to put bike rides into our regular work out routine. hopefully this weekend i’ll get a chance to try this new stuff out.