New Location!!!

Hey, you faithful few who sometimes read this blog, I will no longer be posting here, and I am doing away with the automatedjourney moniker because it didn't make sense and I'm not sure why I used it in the first place. Back to the point: I have moved my blog to...drum roll please!....wait for it....randyhemingway.com!! *excessive cheering* Yep, I bought my own domain name, which just so happens to be my name. *awkward silence* Well, what are you waiting for? Click that link and get on over to my new site to what's happenin'!

Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day kind of baffles me. I mean, why do we rely on an animal that generally makes a pest of itself to tell us whether or not we're going to have to endure a longer winter or not? I guess what I'm asking is, who picked the groundhog. Sure, the little guy's brown and fluffy and hibernates, but why couldn't the source of seasonal depression be something a little more...I don't know...friendly? Maybe an animal that doesn't eat every living thing in your backyard and dig Chunnel-sized holes under your fence. Am I being unreasonable here?
Next question: Why Punxsutawney, PA? I'll leave it at that.
Next question: Why Phil? Why not Peter?
Next question: Why...okay, okay, I'll give it up. I know Groundhog Day is one of those traditional days that goes way back to some holiday that has long since been forgotten by the general public. Is it still relevant? Does Punxsutawney Phil ever get it right? The groundhog ruins most days during the summer, should we really give it the chance to ruin our winter, too? Just sayin'.

web 2.0

Well, I'm entering the internet age...finally. I've used the internet, but I've never really been a part of the internet. Well, I'm on twitter and facebook and I've got a blog, but I really don't understand how to make the internet work for me. Not until lately, that is. Actually, I still don't really understand it, but I'm trying to anyway. So, in an effort to be a part of the internet, I have started my own web site. I can't really tell you too much about it right now, because it's still under development, so to speak, but it was the first time I had to buy a domain name and install wordpress and all that. It was really cool! Then, I had to figure out (with my brother's help) how to access the ftp site to download a new theme. The site's coming together pretty well, but it's still got a ways to go.
I'm writing all this, because I just bought my second domain name tonight (randyhemingway.com). Woohoo! Not entirely sure what I'm gonna do with it yet, but that's part of the fun of buying domain names. Really. You should try it some time. It's like buying a huge book shelf at a yard sale and having no idea where you gonna put it, what you're gonna put on it, or why you really bought it in the first place. It's great! You feel like you've just handed yourself a huge, blank canvas, and your imagination is the palette, and your fingers are the...brushes. It's a lot like finger painting, just not quite so messy, or childish, or .... no, it's not anything like finger painting, and I'm getting sick of the stupid metaphors, too. Let's just leave it at this: it's a lot of fun. Well, I've got some web site constructing to do. See y'all latah!

From home

Today was the first day that I spent the whole day working from home over my company's VPN, because I actually had work to do and it was snowing outside. You might be thinking, "You let a little snow keep you from going in to the office? And why would you not go in if you have work to do?" First of all, when it comes to dealing with winter storms, St. Louis is probably one of the most ill-prepared cities ever...in the universe...of all time. Not only is the city to blame for me not commuting today, but the thousands of other drivers that would be on the roads with me were another deciding factor. Put bluntly: St. Louis drivers are terrible at driving on anything other than dry asphalt, and, even then, I've seen quite a few cars spun around the wrong direction on a dry highway.
I also mentioned that I actually have stuff to do. Right. I do. Or did. I'm done now, but I digress. I figured I could work from home today, in good conscience, because I was handed a project yesterday afternoon, I knew it would take me most of the day, and I didn't figure I needed to be at the office to finish it. If it were a normal day, I wouldn't have a project, I would have to go in to the office to get a project, and I would have to stay at the office because it'd be stupid to go home after all that.
I started out the day with a phone call, and during the phone call I needed some files from the network. Unfortunately and predictably, the network failed and would not cooperate until after the phone call was done. So, I had to mess around with the network to get a reliable connection, get the files, and call the guy back. I don't really like talking on the phone that much, so this kinda stunk. Oh, well.
Then, I spent the rest of the day taking twice as long as normal to do anything because that's the nature of working over a VPN, I guess.
So, overall, I really liked working from home. I could do it all the time, but I don't think I will, because then I'd have to invest in a new sweatsuit wardrobe. And with the economy the way it is, we have no extra money in the "sweatsuit fund." *sigh* Well, I'm going to go see if we have the necessary ingredients to make a deep dish pizza recipe someone's (@rickyjordan's) wife (@southernplate) posted on twitter. Here's the link: http://www.southernplate.com/2009/01/deep-dish-pizza.html
It looks wicked good. Well, that's about it. See ya!

The car wash (and almost me wash)

All right, this story deserves a little background. I bought my red-hot '96 Chrysler Concorde two years ago for my senior year of college. Correction: substitute "My parents bought me..." for "I bought..." Ok, that's better. When I got the car, it had a couple things wrong with it. First of all, the paint was deteriorating from the top of the car down from sitting out in the sun all the time. Also, the moon-roof would not close of its own volition. It opens great, but you have to "volish" it back into place by yourself. Easier said than done, and I've only ever had to do it once. So, lately, whenever it rains, water leaks in around the moon-roof. Anyway, so all the road grime and junk has kind of been accumulating on my car for a while now, so I decided to go thru the car wash, fully aware of the risk I was taking. So, I pull into the car wash and kind of push up on the moonroof and wedge a door stop in there to keep it from leaking (normal operating procedure). Then, the fun begins. First, the sprayer goes around the car a couple times to get it good and soapy. No issues yet. Suddenly, the pressure of the sprayer kicks up and it starts making its way thru the rinse cycle. As the sprayer moves past my door, I'm looking at the moonroof to make sure everything stays in place. All of a sudden, I feel this drop of water on the back of my head! I jerk my head around to see where it came from, and the seal on the upper back corner of my door had come loose and some of the water had spurted thru the opening. Fearing a second rinse cycle, I quickly grabbed a napkin and shoved in the hole. Fortunately, the sprayer returned to its home position and didn't come back around (I got the cheapest wash). Then, I had to make it through the dryer. My poor wipers were being dashed about by the gale-force winds, but then I moved under the top blower, and the moonroof collapsed under the pressure! The glass has to lower and then move back into the car when you open the moonroof and, with nothing supporting the back of the glass, it just plopped down. It was nothing serious, it just scared the what-not out of me. So, I quickly exited the car wash to avoid any further incidents. So, yeah, I don't think I'll be going thru the car wash again any time soon.

Imagine this...

You are a stalk of wheat grass, enjoying your life in the sun, swaying with the gentle August breeze in a vast field of your fellow wheat stalks. Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, these huge men come with scythes and start mowing down your fellow wheat stalks...in your part of the field. They come closer, you feel your wheat stomach climbing wheat esophagus into your wheat throat, and just as they take their final swath of wheat, you close your eyes, waiting for the inevitable. Then, after a moment of silence, you slowly open your eyes only to find that you were spared while the stalk directly in front of you was not so fortunate.
That's kind of what my day was like. It started in the mid-morning when I went out to the shop for something. One of the guys in the shop says, "Did you hear about the lay-offs?" At first, I thought he was joking, but, sure enough, two of his supervisors were being watched as they packed up their stuff and went home. That was the craziest feeling. There had been some lay-offs involving the laborers in the shop before, but I had never witnessed a lay-off that actually threatened my position in the company. I felt really vulnerable, and, to be honest, I felt like a number in an accountant's ledger. That is a terrible feeling. As the morning progressed, there were always a lot of groups of people just hanging around, talking. It was really weird. Everyone was whispering about the latest guy that was told he'd have to leave and speculating about who would be next. As I left for lunch, there were several boxes and a briefcase lined up next to the exterior door: all the desktop gizmos and family portraits that had adorned someone's desk just a minute ago. Someone else was packing his car with boxes and a plant just outside the door. The rest of the afternoon, I worked in a fog, the confusion and distrust that accompanies a fresh round of lay-offs looming in the forefront of my thoughts, clouding my ability to concentrate on the project at hand. Mid-afternoon, we received an e-mail from the head honcho, vaguely detailing some of the happenings across the North American part of the organization, but it wasn't enough. Why him, not her? What's going to happen next? Is this just the first round of several? Questions seem to pour from everywhere inside your head, and they all, ultimately, get answered by the accountant's ledger. Fortunately, the accountants saw fit to keep my number in their ledger...for now. But I know, from my first up-close brush with a lay-off, I'll never forget that uncertain, awful feeling I felt today.

Playing Catch-up

Hey all! Wow, it's been a long time since I posted anything on here. Well, let's see. There's so many stories I could tell you from over the holidays. Most of them being travel stories like the time there were a couple Chinese guys at the McD's in the airport trying to order and the cashiers were being complete idiots to them. Or maybe the time the guy threw our bags on a cart and escorted us to the check-in counter. Then, he wouldn't take a dollar (all I had besides 20's) for a tip. "That's an insult. Keep it." Then, he graciously offered to bring me change so I could offer a more fitting tip. Feeling completely ripped off, I agreed. Then, he brought back 20 one-dollar bills for change. I gave $3, and didn't slap him. I hope he's grateful he got anything at all. But I won't bore you with such stories. Since I last posted, I've been to New Hampshire and back, been back to work for what already seems like forever, started on a new website, and been setting up my new table saw. So, I've been up to some stuff, but not too much. My main focus right now is to get my site up and running and to get my table saw get set up so I can finish that bench I'm working on for Faith. Well, I've got stuff to do. Catch ya later!