Chris Risner . Com

As a team building event at work, we did an Egg Drop.  The idea was that each team would build some contraption to carry an egg safely down from a 4 story drop.  My team at work decided that it would be pretty cool, and seasonably awesome, to put the egg in a pumpkin.  So mid-way through October, we picked up three pumpkins from a local greenhouse, dug them out, filled them with popcorn (it’s a shock absorber), and placed our egg in it.  As a test, we threw the pumpkins off the highest point we could find while it still being safe to drink beer: my roof.  You can see in the below video that we were able to successfully drop the pumpkins off the roof without the egg breaking.  Unfortunately when we made our final egg dropping device it just didn’t end up protecting our egg.  So while you can’t be happy knowing our death star protected it’s precious cargo, you can be happy to know that I don’t mind throwing pumpkins off of my roof:

With my birthday and a 4 day week quickly approaching, I ended up taking last Wednesday through this Tuesday off from working out and instead to gorge upon a diet of fatty food, beer, liquor, and nicotine.  During that time, I decided to do something I’d been planning to do for several weeks now, plant some trees in the backyard.  Not just any trees though, trees that would help me cut back on yard work.  How is this possible?  The spruce tree, specifically the Norway Spruce.  The spruce tree is acidic so it will kill the grass around the tree.  Now, most spruce trees grow pretty slowly, but not the Norway Spruce.  It will grow up to a meter (or about a yard for you non-metric sorts) a year for the first 25 years.  So all of this means the grass in the far end of my backyard will die and I will have to mow less.

Some of you are probably thinking, “What the hell is a morlock doing planting trees?”  Don’t worry, I have two things to say to you.  First is that these trees will aid in blocking the sun (that great big spherical thing in the sky that keeps me from leaving my cave like home) and secondly I’ll burn anything that falls off the trees, thereby destroying our environment and making it safe for morlocks everywhere to wander outside.

Now that the weekend of lush like living is over, I’m getting back to the P90x program.  I’m officially 7 days behind though.  Tonight was another night of Shoulders and Arms.  One thing I will say of the (minimal) workouts I’ve done from P90x is that each and every one has left me pretty sore which I take to mean they’re actually doing a decent job.  I would like to get more cardio in to my routine though (perhaps do more doubles) as the 3 cardio X routines just don’t seem to do enough (though I’m use to running).  In an effort to keep with the program, I’ll hopefully update more about working out.

My “friendly” neighbor Atomic has what he calls a gnome cam.  It’s quite simply an all weather web cam that sits outside his front door snapping pictures every few minutes.  On occasion the camera catches something interesting (see below) but usually the camera only captures images of a boring driveway.  Now the problem with the gnome cam is that, while pointed directly at my house, it fails to get any helpful images of my house.  If Atomic’s camera was better, we could see both of our boring driveways and the count of interesting occurrences would at least double.  When I moved back into my cave, he didn’t exactly say he was going to get a newer and better camera, but I’m pretty sure he thought it to himself.  So in response to his assurance that I’m a lazy Morlock that doesn’t eat enough Eloi, I say, when you have a camera that allows me to more easily see the Eloi as they travel around the cave’s entrance, I’ll chow down.