my week for being stupid
it’s really been my week for being stupid. On Monday, on a long walk down the mountain, I decided to leap over a fallen tree just to see if I could still jump tall buildings like Superman.
I can’t.
My knees smacked into the trunk and I went head first into the ground, right next to a startled young snake which rapidly slithered away. Terrified that it’s parents were nearby I staggered away. (some of the world’s deadliest snakes live in these mountain ranges
and now that the warm weather’s coming they’re all just waking up)
With two aching knees, and a bit of a pulled muscle in my back, it took me ages to get home.
On Wednesday I did something even more stupid and it cost me thousands of dollars.
I’ve got so many memory hugging programs on my 2 year old desktop Dell that it’s been running slow for a while, so I’ve been vaguely thinking of upgrading to one of the new Core 2 Duo machines. But seeing I travel a lot and keep buying new laptops I decided I’d keep the desktop for another year, when, no doubt, Core 4’s or 6’s will be in the stores.
Anyway, I was playing around in Photoshop creating different headers for this blog (the current one is the view from my home office window) when I got really, really frustrated at the time it was taking to resize a photo.
Just a simple request to crop and resize a 6mb photo to 750 pixels wide for my blog header was taking so long that I finally lost my patience with the machine, and drove into town to buy the fastest computer I could find.
Of course, living in the middle of nowheresville, where dealers in the nearby town have only just started stocking Pentium’s (only kidding) it’s probably going to be months or years before it’s possible to buy one off the shelf here. So I got a dealer to order a Core 2 Duo machine with a fast overclocked graphics card, 4 gig of ddr2 ram, and a 24 inch LCD monitor.
Anyway, to cut a long rambling story short I got home to find that I’d instead of sizing my header graphic to 750 pixels I’d made it a whopping 750 inches.
So I could have kept my old computer after all 
You may not be Superman, but you are clearly a Super man. The envy of us all.
You shouldn’t feel stupid. You want stupid? Here’s three stories that will make you feel brilliant.
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Kaleb E. Spangler, 21, was badly hurt by fireworks in August when, according to his girlfriend, he decided to duct-tape a large “mortar-style” explosive onto a football helmet, put it on and light it, while riding with friends in a car. According to a story in the Herald-Times of Bloomington, Ind., alcohol was involved in Spangler’s decision. [Herald-Times (Bloomington), 8-15-06]
Problem Solved: (1) Darrell Rodgers, 40, was treated at Bloomington (Ind.) Hospital in August after shooting himself in the left knee because he felt he had to try something to end the pain there (pain possibly from having shot himself in that knee 10 years earlier). (2) Electrician Paul Trotman, 51, was arrested in Clay County, Fla., in August after allegedly rigging an electrical device to shock a 3 1/2-year-old boy who lived with Trotman and his wife, after Trotman got fed up that the boy was constantly urinating on electrical outlets just to see sparks fly. [Herald-Times (Bloomington), 8-12-06] [WKMG-TV (Orlando), 8-14-06]
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I don’t know what it is about Bloomington. Maybe it’s the water….
Phil…why do we keep denying that we are creeping up in age…and try doing stupid things…which result in sore knees etc?
After having had three heart attacks…I’m still denying there is anything wrong…and carry on with life.
I just learned…to-day is not a dress rehearsal!
Keep making like Super man…the world needs another.
Ron Wagner
Hey Phil,
I hope your knees are feeling better and the snake has recovered…LOL…it’s probably shed it’s first skin after that fright!
You may come from the Beef capital but you certainly aren’t full of that ‘B’ stuff and I look forward to receiving your ezine newsletter/emails whenever you feel like sending them.
I send my building contractors an email every 5 days and to stay ahead with them is not always easy…but I’m determined to give them as much help as I can so once started on my emails, they just seem to write themselves as soon as I start remembering how it was when I first started marketing my construction business in Darwin.
Having been there and done that, my empathic glands start leaking for the blokes I’m trying to help. And as you have been in the building industry you too know how much help the majority of them can do with.
Warm regards,
Jan