Category: Uncategorized

Every year for the past few years I’ve been involved with an organization called Rebuilding Together. As the website says, it’s mission is “to preserve and revitalize houses and communities, assuring that low-income homeowners, from the elderly and disabled to families with children, live in warmth, safety, and independence.” We go and do what we can in a day to fix up houses in disrepair for deserving families. Each house is sponsored by another organization, the house today was sponsored by AIA Middle Tennessee.

My job today was to clean and repair an existing mailbox and provide a coat of much needed paint. I also served as a runner back and forth the Home Depot and did my best to offer unsolicited general supervision.

I also took pictures. Enjoy.

Last night I took the opportunity to consolidate all of the digital pictures that I’ve taken since I got my first digital camera. I brought them all into Picasa, I’ve discovered that I like it better than the Adobe Photoshop Album that I had been using. Now that Ludicorp has been bought by Yahoo I’ve given up hope for direct Flickr/Picasa integration, but it made sense to go that direction with my photo organization. I only really use Flickr for taking pictures with my camera phone, I guess I’m more of a do it yourself kind of guy, but I think it’s a great idea. I do wish that Picasa sorted photos by date (rather than by folder) like Flickr and Adobe Photoshop Album does. I haven’t played with the tagging features to know how they stack up.

In all, I’ve taken about 5400 shots with the various cameras since Christmas 2001, which currently takes up about 5.8 gigabytes on the hard drive.

Suprising Statistic of the Night: Suprisingly as it might be, only 350 of the 5400 pictures are of the Abbydog.

Added a new feature this weekend, a daily photo page. There are a lot of these out there that I enjoy looking at, and now that my hard drive is filling up with pictures, I figured I’d share some of the better, more artsy ones. Today marks day three of this exercise, I’ll do my best to keep going with it.

Each photo has it’s own comments section if you’re obliged to say something, the Atom-formatted feed is here.

Completely unrelated to yesterday’s post regarding sushi, this week I was given a new pet, a betta named Clementine.

Clementine resides in a glass vase shared with a lily plant on my new desk. From what internet research I’ve done, this may not be the best environment for her. I’ve read pages upon pages telling me that this arrangement is bad for the fish, the plant, and our national security as a whole. Be wary, readers, that I promise to remain vigilant to make sure that Clementine has only the best of what cubicle living has to offer.

(Also know that I realize that Clementine is actually a male betta.)

On the advice of Muffy, and the review in the Tennessean, tonight I ventured down to Bodeli Sushi, the new Cool Springs sushi bar with the conveyer belt. This style of sushi joint, called kaitenzushi, was pretty interesting, fast, and enjoyable if only for the novelty of it. Actually, I kind of felt like a country tourist visting the city to just to ride an escalator.

Video here. (Of the sushi conveyer, not me riding an escalator.)

The accounting system is brilliant, the plates are color coded and you’re charged based on your stack of plates at the end of the end of the meal. Here’s my damage for the night. (Gold plate – $3.50, Red plate – $2.50, Purple plate – $2.00, Lime plate – $1.50.) The sushi was good, but it wasn’t the best…I’ve actually had better in Williamson County. At the end of the meal I just wanted to take my empty plates up to the cashier to settle up.

Bottom line, if you have been to the airport and have ridden the moving sidewalk, go to RuSan’s or Peter’s Sushi in Brentwood. Unless you have guests in town who’ve never been to Bodeli, then go, get separate checks, sit so they can’t see the sign on the wall which explains the pricing. Then stack your empty plates on theirs.

One minor note, leave your camera at home. I was scolded as we left, the manager instructed that I couldn’t take pictures of the restaurant. But I had to document this sign.

Taken by a co-worker at one of our hospital renovation projects. I sure hope they don’t get confused about what gets loaded where.

Helped a friend move some furniture yesterday from his grandmother’s house in beautiful Humboldt, Tennessee. On the way back we witnessed a Uhaul trailer lose a tire coming down the Tennessee River Bridge. I guess he buys tires at Sears.

Tim Morgan: it’d have been cooler if I had dotted the I with the flash.
College Roommate: so… still no girlfriend, huh? 🙂
Tim Morgan: Uh. Yeah.
College Roommate: seriously. find one. when you have time for stuff like this, you need to meet someone. anyone.