Friends:
Andy's Blog
Balls'
Blogfish
Caleblog
Doodles
Hoodwinked
JCTMH Reflections
M1
M3
MindSquirt
Viv

---

Kin:
L. Feathers/Cuz
LRHS/Cuz
Mothereffer/Cuz
Other Ben/Cuz
Wif/Wif

Enter your search terms
Submit search form

TP: Looks like i'm going to be in Korea at that time. trac...

---

bean: Dates updated to Sep 3-5

---

Brad: Perfect! We could end our hike at the zoo. These date...

---

Stef: pretty sure the 28th is BATZ

---

TP: Cool. Looks like fun, excepting the rain, of course.

My name is Bean and this is my blog. Hence the name. If you have comments or questions, just leave them in the comments area.

(old search)

Somewhere in a field, months ago, a seedling sprouted. It grew and grew and grew until one day, a grazing cow had it for a snack. As it ate more and more seedlings, the cow grew to the point that it was deemed large enough for slaughter. It's meat was combined with the meat of many other slaughtered cows and made into 1/4 pound patties, which were sold to various stores and restaurants. A man bought one of those patties, grilled it over a gas flame, put it on a hamburger bun with some condiments, and ate it. His body converted the some of the proteins, fats, and carbohydrates in the patty into energy, which it used to heat itself. About 10 minutes ago, that man had to go to the bathroom to "evacuate" the remains of the patty, and as a side effect, some of the body heat it helped generate went into warming the toilet seat.

About 5 minutes ago, I went to the bathroom and sat down on a warm toilet seat, and the paragraph above streamed through my head, in reverse order.

Stef and I were planning on driving to New Orleans this weekend. Our free place to stay fell through, so we made a few changes to our weekend plans. We are now going on a wine and beer roadtrip with a little swimmy swim on the side.

Loyal readers will recall that we toured some of central Indiana's wineries back in April 2004 in weekend-roadtrip style. This time we are going to hit a few new ones and extend our range a bit. Here's the plan:

Friday
I'm taking a half day at work and Stef has the day off. We are leaving at noon and heading to Madison, IN. In and around Madison, we'll have lunch and visit The Ridge Winery, Thomas Family Winery, Lanthier Winery, and Madison Vinyards. Next, we'll head out of Madison and hit Chateau Pomije in Guilford and Villa Milan Vineyard in Milan. We'll finish off the evening by hitting highway 46 where we'll head West to TP's pad for some swimmy swim and barbeque!

Saturday
Wake up from wherever we stay and head north. We'll be on I-65 and I-69 for a few hours before we get to our next stop: Satek Winery in Fremont. Then it's up into Michigan, straight through to Kalamazoo! In Kalamazoo, we'll visit Peterson and Son's Winery and then head to the Kalamazoo Brewing Company for dinner and some of the best beers brewed in the USA. Among their many offerings is Bell's Two Hearted Ale (my favorite beer at the moment), Bell's Porter (A superb example of what a porter should taste like), and Bell's Oberon Ale (a crowd-pleasing summertime beer). I look forward to "sampling" everything they have to offer. After dinner and drinks, we'll make our way to a hotel for the night.

Sunday
The last day of our trip is up in the air. We may be done with wine and just want to get home, in which case we will do just that. But if we are craving a little hair of the dog, we'll make stops in one or more of the following Michigan cities: Paw Paw, Coloma, Berrien Springs, Baroda. There seems to be a plethora of wineries in and around those areas. Either way, we should be home in time for The Simpsons.

Stef's uncle gave Stef's dad a big telescope a few years back. He (dad) was holding on to it for his brother (uncle) for one reason or another and told Stef and I we could take it if we wanted it, as long as we didn't break it or sell it. Naturally, we obliged. It's a Meade LX200, quite a monster, with a gianormous tripod, motors to adjust it, and a fairly sophisticated keypad/computer/automation setup. My neighbor Steve bought a cable so we could hook it up to a computer, but we haven't tried that just yet.

Anyway, so we've had this big 12" scope in our living room for like 6 months. We've taken it out 3 different times, with varying results. Last night, Stef and I set it up on the back deck and pointed it at the moon. I took a few pictures by shoving my digital camera right up on the eyepiece. They turned out suprisingly good.
moon1 moon2 moon3 moon4
They may be a bit grainy at full res, but if you zoom out a level, they are pretty good.

This is a pretty cool video about hornets wiping out a bee hive. The video is a little choppy, but it's very well done overall.

It's friday, and I'm about to head out. No solid plans for the weekend. Might canoe. Might go to a wedding. Might eat at Famous Daves BBQ. Might drywall/paint in the basement. Might eat ice cream and sleep late.

Here's a funny pic I found on LJ40 that make me ell oh ell in my pants:
Mo naked hoes!

Here's a naxty pic I found of a two-faced kitten:
Meow.

Trouble about? NateCrawla to the rescue!

I wrote this little web page deally. It's kinda cool. It's super simple. You are given a choice between two scenarios and must decide which on is most likely to be true in the next 15 years. Results are tracked and the scenarios are ranked. After 100 votes, a scenario is retired. The best part is you can add your own. Source code available upon request.

http://15years.beanblog.org

Us duck's have been playin' with it for a few days, so it's chock full of inside jokes which may or may not mean anything whatsoever to anyone but us.

Habba enjoy!

I've blogged about it before, and I'll blog about it again. My favorite SNL skit ever is Will Ferrell as Harry Caray interviewing Jeff Goldbloom as Dr. Ken Waller. Hard to believe it aired 9 years ago. Harry Caray impressions were very prevalent during the canoe trip this year. Here's a few transcripts from the three airings of Space: The Infinite Frontier.

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/96/96tspace.phtml http://snltranscripts.jt.org/97/97bspace.phtml http://snltranscripts.jt.org/98/98fharrycarey.phtml And last but not least, a full video of my favorite one. Be forewarned, this is a 50MB download.

To start things off, let me state in a very clear manner: I LOVE STRASSENFEST.

What's not to love? Old German folks wearing leiderhosen, beer flowing from the sides of semi trucks, rockin live polka tunes, "Jay" Flamion, dollar schnitzels (if you wait till the end of the night). And to top it off, this year the Tennis's are having a "mock reception" in the beer tent!

I've been looking forward to Strassenfest 2005 since the morning after Strassenfest 2004. Most folks that went last year are totally stoked for this year. Strassenfest is a SYMBOL of summer for me and a lot of people I know. So imagine my horror when I realized that on Friday, August 5th, the biggest and baddest night of Strassenfest, I'll be out of the country. That's right, when it comes to Strassenfestivus for the restofus this year, I'm sad to report, I'm out.

PS - It should be noted that I will be in Germany on my slightly-delayed honeymoon at the time, so it aint all that bad :)

Okay, let me preface this story with two facts:
I had 5-6 slices of Papa Johns pizza for lunch last friday. I had pizza agin for dinner friday night, along with 3 pints of beer.
Friday, Jean came into town for the night so we could make an early departrure for th ebustling metropolis of Crawfordsville, IN for the annual Indycool Canoe Trip. We got up damn early, circa 5:30AM and hit the road by 6. Our first stop was for gas and coffee. Our second stop was because of the coffee.

We both had to "go" so we pulled off at a rest stop somewhere along I-74. We took our spots in stalls that just happened to be right next to eachother. There were a few other people in the bathroom at the time, so it was a pretty noisy place. Once the bathroom noise (and my own noise) had subsided, I said to Sean "Man Sean... my first mistake was eating pizza for two meals in a row, and my second one was drinking 20 ounces of coffee this morning."

Jean did not respond.

Perplexed, I peered under the stall wall and to my horror realized that the person sitting next to me (and indeed the only other person in the bathroom) was not Jean. Talk about an awkward situation. I quickly finished up and headed outside. Jean was waiting for me by the car. "False alarm" he said.

More canoe stories to come.

PS - Jean's false alarm turned out, itself, to be false, as we had to make a stop a few miles down the road. After using the can, he bought some Pepto and Immodium AD. When he casually said "How ya doin'?" to the checkout lady at the gas station, she looked at his purchases and said "Better than you!"