Shane Life

Alli and I (with the wonderful help of Dave Talcott) have taken on the project of tiling our kitchen this week. On Tuesday night, I pulled up all the carpet and vinyl and started laying out backerboard. I soon figured out that it is a pain to cut and gave up until last night.

Dave and I finished laying the backerboard last night. I got a scoring tool at Home Depot that made the work of cutting the pieces of backerboard TONS easier. Alli helped by screwing in the boards once we had them set where we wanted them.

It’s been a lot of work so far and my back is screaming at me, but hopefully, by this weekend, it will all be over. The plan is for me to start tiling tonight if I feel comfortable, but we have to figure out the layout first. Hopefully, Brett is going to come help a bit tonight after he finishes parking cars at the Chiefs game. Once our layout is done, it’s tile-laying time! We are still trying to figure out what to do with our fridge. We want to tile under it, but we can’t figure out what to do with it until then. I would rather not take it down any stairs, but I don’t really want to put it outside either (but that may be our only option).

2 nights in a row after work, I’ve been working on the kitchen until at least midnight. I’m hoping to work again tonight and tomorrow and then we have reinforcements coming in on Saturday. if we can knock it all out Saturday, I’ll be thrilled. I’m really happy with how it looks. It’s a nice multi-colored tile and I think it is going to make a huge difference to our kitchen. We are both really excited.

Pictures soon.

I saw this meme on kottke.org (who saw it on River Damp), but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Go here and look through random quotes until you find five that you think reflect who you are or what you believe.

Here are mine:

• If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. (Rene Descartes)
• Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. (Abraham Lincoln)
• The secret of happiness is not in what one likes to do, but what in one has to do. (James M. Barrie)
• Last words are for people who haven’t said anything in life. (Karl Marx)
• Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get–only what you are expecting to give–which is everything. (Katharine Hepburn)

What are yours?

Yesterday was Alli’s birthday. We had a really fun day that was all about what she wanted to do…I really wanted to celebrate her (see a full recap here).

I really want to just say happy birthday to her publicly, so here it goes.

Alli, Happy Birthday. I’m so lucky to be married to you and I’m thankful for it every day. Here’s to: watching TV on our new couches, our year in photos, our journaling project, our movie room, you making homemade bread and pizza, the way you are with the girls, how supportive you are of me with my job, how you called your blog “The Shane Fan Club”, spending holidays together, our trip to Santa Fe, how you always read the magazines at gas stations (or anywhere else there are magazines), sleeping with a 85-pound dog between us, the fact that you are an artist - I love that!, how you don’t like driving on the highway, vegetarians who don’t like vegetables…or fruits, how Chipotle has be come part of the fabric of our lives, how much you love me.

Happy birthday, Alli. I love you.

Tonight we went to the Royals game with the young adults from church. It was a lot of fun, but the craziest thing that happened at the game (the Royals didn’t win, nor did they get 12 hits for Krispy Kreme donuts, much to Alli’s chagrin), was that I won the Good Sport Award at the game.

Steve taught me a while back that if you go to Guest Services and sign a piece of paper that says you’ll be a designated driver for your group, then you get a free small drink (a $3.75 value!). You also get entered into a drawing for the Good Sport Award. According to the guys in the Guest Services office, they had more people enter the drawing tonight than they ever had before (to the tune of like 590 people). Out of those 590 people, they pulled me, Shane Adams, out of the box. I was so pumped…my name was even on the scoreboard (although Alli was too slow with the camera to get a picture!). It must run in the family. My mom, when I was about 11 years old, won a car in a Foot Locker drawing from Adidas. It was a Cadillac and she had the option of having it customized by Run DMC. She wisely chose to just pick out her own.

Or maybe the Royals organization just knew that I am a member of the League of Awesomeness and they wanted to reward me. Who knows? Either way, here’s a picture of me triumphantly holding up my “major award” - a Royals rain jacket with a Budweiser Good Sport logo on the sleeve.

Good stuff.

OK, so I was all set to get my blog moved over to a more lightweight theme, considering modding the Indigo theme by Kaushal Sheth. I got it working, but there was something wacky going on with the sidebar widgets and I didn’t really want to mess with all the work of trying to fix it right now. Maybe eventually, but I have yet to find a theme that works better than K2.

I did remove the Flickr photos from the sidebar, although I doubt anyone noticed. Content soon. I also have an update on the weight loss (thought I forgot, didn’t you?).

On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
RATING: 9 out of 10

I first started reading this book in August of 1998 on a flight to West Palm Beach, Florida. How might I remember that 8 years later? Well, when I opened it a few weeks back, I found my airline ticket tucked in the book, perfectly preserved for my discovery.

After I got a few pages in, I realized why the 21 year-old Shane couldn’t get through the book. I had no ability, no frame of reference, to relate to the material. 29 year-old Shane got it.

We all decided to tell our stories, but one by one, and Stan was first. “We’ve got a long way to go,” preambled Dean, “and so you must take every indulgence and deal with every single detail you can bring to mind - and still it won’t be all told.”

Although this passage doesn’t occur until much later in the book, it really encapsulates a lot of what the book is about and how it was written. On the Road has been classified as the voice of the Beat Generation of the mid-1950’s. It details Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical story of his travels with Neal Cassady across the United States. Kerouac is realized in the character of Sal Paradise and Cassady serves as the backdrop for his tragic hero Dean Moriarty.

Sal and Dean meet through mutual friend Carlo Marx (fictional version of beat poet Allen Ginsberg) and they become friends over several years. The nature of their relationship is symbiotic. Sal wants someone to listen to, Dean needs someone to talk at, to experience life with, to “dig” everything with.

But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, made to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

My favorite passage of the book. It really encapsulates the essence of Sal and why he follows Dean around all over the country. This is the type of thing I want to write. It sounds rhythmic out loud, yet isn’t sing-songy. It’s just perfect prose.

I found this book really intriguing. While I couldn’t identify with the lifestyle the characters live in the novel, they fascinate me. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to start hitchhiking from New York without enough money to make it to Denver. The concept of riding a flatbed truck from Omaha to Cheyenne just is insane to me. But it makes sense to Dean and Sal. They had places to go and people to “dig” and they had no cares on how to get there.

About a year ago, this band called OK Go came out with a really sweet video that made the internet rounds called “A Million Ways”. I really liked it when it came out and I thought it was really clever. View it below.

A Million Ways

They came out with another video that is just as clever as the first one, but features them on treadmills…totally sweet. Check it out:

Here It Goes Again

UPDATE: Embedded!