Red Leopard

As some of you know, my one and only purchase on eBay was the famous Fred G. Sanford Memorial Trailer or simply The Trailer. Tracy is still under-whelmed by its appearance but has conceded its occasional usefulness.

To bring everyone up to speed, the trailer is the back half of a ’67 Dodge Stepside half ton pickup. It really is quite the eyesore. Yet, as anyone who has been to the garden store knows, you really don’t want to toss three sacks full of chicken manure in your trunk. It’s on those occasions that the trailer justifies itself.

This year, the floor boards rotted out. The bed is made of wood, you see, and the old boards were breaking through in places. I said to myself, "This could be really cool. I can replace the old 1-by pine planks with sturdier 2-by douglas fir planks."

I’ve been reading George Buehler’s book, again. While I may have neither the time nor the cash to build an Archimedes class cruiser right now, I figured the little trailer project could be just the fix I needed for my boat building jones.

When I pulled the old planks out, to my surprise and dismay, the entire box fell off the frame. Seems the box was secured to the wooden bed and the bed in turn bolted to the frame.

Oh, well. To the drawing board.

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Anatomy of a spam message:

I got this one in my box. It didn’t display properly since I’m not using a Microsoft mail reader. But it did slip past the junk mail filter. Most filters work on a point system. If a message accrues enough spam points, it’s flagged as junk.

It’s a good new, bad news thing. Bad news, spam still gets through my filter. Good news, there’s still much furtile ground for intelligent spam filtering.

Let’s take a line-by-line HUMAN analysis and see how many spam points we get. (Answer: 80 points.)

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Tony sent out the theme for this coming Tuesday’s Toastmaster meeting.

    “THEME – Exercise and Nutrition”

    “Seems like there are many ways we hear
     about improving our exercise and
     nutrition, from TV commercials for
     those perfect abs, to fantastic weight
     loss meal plans.”

    “Even the Dr Phil show has a season long
     weight loss challenge.”

    “There must be a simpler way.”

    “Do you have a favorite nutrition plan
     that really works? Or perhaps you have
     an exercise routine that is effective? 
     Or what is a good suggestion to get
     into that routine or zone?”

My role this time is as a speech evaluator. As such, I need to send in a brief comment that would be used to introduce me to the group.

As I have studied and corresponded extensively on this subject. I think I could summarize my thoughts inside of 5,000 words; That’s a bit long for an introduction. So,… here was my stab at a brevity.

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Some of you know that I’ve taken up boxing this year. I recently commented privately about my workout routine. In that comment, I included a poem that distills part of my mental process while training.

It deals with the issue of quitting. I’ve been pushing the workouts pretty dang hard and in new directions. It doesn’t happen often but sometime the routine pushes me right to the line of collapse or barfing. It’s at those times one must be especially mindful of creeping thoughts. It’s easy to rationalize a break or early finish to the workout.

I’ve included the poem here with a concluding quotation from O-Sensei.

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The sobig virus has hit me. Well, not me directly. I’m on the Mac. But it has hit someone (I don’t know who) and I’m affected (even if not infected).

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Last night I took Truffles (our old english sheepdog) to run with the Agnew State Hash House Harriers. Big-T is getting a bit long in the tooth but he sure does love to hash!

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