Epilogue

I've started anew on the blogging - this time without the money-grubbing or the made-up stuff. It's a whole different animal. As different as a gazelle, yes, a gazelle from a deer. Update your eyes to point to:

http://moberlicious.blogspot.com

And while your eyes are pointed there, keep them out for news about Professional Cool dot com. It's-a gonna be-a great!

You May Want To Sit Down

I've got some news, and it's the kind that sometimes sends people into a spiraling freefall of despair. So compose yourself before reading on.

I'm retiring procool.blogspot.com. As in, I'm not going to write things here anymore. You can stop reading this blog because there's nothing more to see here.

I could give you all the reasons, but I think it's summed up pretty well by this quote from Michael Scott on The Office:

Michael: Nick, I had a dream last night that I had two full time jobs. One here at the Lipophedrazone diet pill company---
Mr. Figaro: Lipophedrine
Michael: And the other I was a Regional Manager of a small paper supply company called Dunder Mifflin.
Mr. Figaro: Never heard of it.
Michael: In this dream I did both of these jobs beautifully, and I loved it, and everybody loved me. But the truth is, I can't do this.
Mr. Figaro: Are you quitting?
Michael: I am.
Mr. Figaro: Come back anytime, don't forget to disinfect your headset.

Okay, maybe that doesn't explain it after all. Instead I'll use another The Office analogy. Remember how in seasons 1 and 2, Pam was with Roy because she'd been with Roy for a long time, even though Roy was an idiot and Jim was much better for her? Well, this blog is Roy. And I'm Pam. No, wait... I'm Jim. No, that's still not right. I'm Dwight, spraying the pepper spray in Roy's face. Yeah.

I'll be buckling down this summer and getting professionalcool.com in shape, hopefully to start highlighting the actual cool things that are happening in my community. I'll let you know here when it's ready, so don't unsubscribe just yet. But if you're the kind of person that needs to say parting words, then this post would be a good place to leave them.

Procool.blogspot.com, we hardly knew you.

Speedsolving The Cube: The Book!

I took the kids to Barnes & Noble last night for a little family fun in the presence of books. I wouldn't go so far as to say we actually went there intending to read anything. They intended to play with the train table in the kids' section, and I intended to see whether Barnes & Noble's attempt to sell designer board games has failed yet - and if, as a result, any of those games have gone on clearance. It's such an emotional struggle. I'm really glad they sell great games like Pillars of the Earth, Ingenious, Modern Art, Settlers of Catan, Age of Empires, etc. Hopefully it will increase awareness in designer games. But on the other hand, as long as they're selling well the store is going to be charging full price for them, which even to a dedicated enthusiast is pretty steep.

But I digress. We didn't completely ignore the books. The kids had a good time thumbing through a few kids' books, while I took another whole-hearted stab at finding a shred of interest in the graphic novel section. The fact that I just completely don't get it at all makes me more and more certain that there's something big that I'm missing, and perhaps if I could tell what it was that I don't understand, I'd be able to appreciate it more. Or maybe I'm just the wrong type of person to try to understand this kind of book and that's all there is to it. If anybody out there is a manga fan, help me out.

Back on track... the real highlight of the evening was stumbling across the first ever (to my knowledge) published book about the world of speedcubing: Speedsolving the Cube by Dan Harris.

I couldn't believe my eyes! A publisher really thought a book on speedcubing was worthy of national distribution in major retail stores?!? Well, time will tell whether that was a good investment for them, but as a speedcuber, I'll weigh in and say the book is outstanding. For $10, you get a history of the hobby of solving the cube against the clock, as well has complete solutions of varying complexity and efficiency for all currently available sizes of cube (2x2x2 through 5x5x5). It contains just about everything I know about the hobby, plus a few things I've still been hoping to someday get a handle on. Even if I had already mastered all the material within, I would have bought the book just to own a copy and support the author, but the sections of information I have yet to learn are presented in such a great way that the book was still worth the cost to me.

So anyway, this book would make a great gift for any eccentric geeks you know. Especially people who like learning how to do stuff just because it's hard. And have a lot of free time.

Looks Like We Made It

We did go to King's Island last weekend, despite the rain on Friday night. We gave up the dream of camping in the scenic woodlands of Ohio for the equally enchanting dream of staying in a Days Inn, which bills itself as hotel but meets every criterium of a motel in my mind. The only hotel-ish thing about the place was an outdoor pool, which was closed since it was storming and somewhat chilly. But whatever ground that may have forged into hotel territory was definitely lost on the customer service front. We accidentally left a big box of snack food in the room when we checked out. We called them 15 minutes after we hit the road and asked for them to keep an eye out for it, but when we returned in the afternoon to pick it up, the cleaning crew had made off with it and the manager on duty refused to take responsibility. If that doesn't say motel, I don't know what does.

But whatever. We slept and woke up, and now on to King's Island. The weather there on Saturday was beautiful. We spent the entire day in the Nickelodeon kids' park, and the kids were both qualified to ride on nearly every ride there. And we got through quite a few, since the lines were short due to most schools being not yet out for the summer. Most of the kids there were either younger than school age, high school graduates not seeking a higher education, or good old-fashioned truants. Very few early adolescents. Yea, nary a face in need of acne treatments in the bunch. My kids each had one experience that was beyond their threshhold of enjoyable thrills, but overall it was a fantastic one tank trip. I look forward to going again.

I Decided Not To Blog About This

I was going to make a whole post just about this mudflap that I saw on the drive in this morning...



...but then I thought "No, that would just be schilli."