Lawryde will be out of the office until 6-4-07

Tonight my brilliant son, beautiful wife, and gimpy dog are heading to Fernandina Beach, Florida for a 7-day vacation.

Everyone who reads my blog regularly will have to go with out my razor wit and critical observations of the corporate world for 7 long days. Don’t worry all you people who just come here for the spiderweb.jpg from google image search, it will still be here. (It’s amazing the traffic that photo generates.)

The plan is to relax on some sunny beaches, go to the Jacksonville zoo, relax on some sunny beaches, take a slow drive along scenic A1A (Vanilla Ice didn’t mention it in Ice Ice Baby for nothing; awesome views and multi-million dollar homes), relax on some sunny beaches, and further relaxing on sunny beaches, all the while finishing up Cat’s Cradle, and Rant.

I’m sad that I’m going to miss two summer hockey league practices and the first two Stanley Cup Final games(Go Ottawa), but I’ll be back in time for the first league game and for the final games for the Cup.

I’ll leave you a few things to ponder about life while I’m away. I’ll expect one page essays on each topic, 12 point font, single-spaced, and don’t just copy the Wikipedia entry because I’ll fucking check.

• Will the future you have tomorrow be the same future you had today?
  
• Are you today, where you thought you’d be 10 years ago? (I just got the freedom to drive 10 years ago) Do you have the job you thought you would? Do you make as much money as you thought you would? Do you have the family you thought you would? Do you live where you thought you would?
  
• At what point did your parents realize you weren’t the perfect, defect free copy of them they hoped you would turn out to be? Did it really bother them, or did they accept it?
  
• Will you always be reading this? Is there a now?
  

Take care everyone (That doesn’t mean fuck off. I always thought it just meant I hope you take care of yourself while we’re apart so we can speak again, but in some circles it doesn’t). I’ll bring you back a sand dollar from the beach, and some shark teeth (Fernandina Beach is full of them).

This Country Sucks Balls

Since non of you were watching hockey on Saturday afternoon, I'll enlighten you to the bullshit that NBC pulled.

The Buffalo Vs. Ottawa Eastern Finals elimination OT was pulled to show pre-horse race bullshit. The game ended up getting over 5:15 on Vs. network. The horse race hadn't even started yet.

What a fucking country we live in that horse racing takes precedence over playoff hockey.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writ...offs.preakness/

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/blogs/content...abres_snub.html

http://www.thestar.com/Sports/article/215909

Lawryde Gets Trained

I elected to take some training Monday through Wednesday. The class was basic machine components. We took apart hydraulic pumps, valves, tractor transmissions, differentials, torque converts, and final drives. It was pretty fun. It got me out of the office for three days.

On Monday I learned my therapist also believes in the tenseless theory of time. Turns out he has also known my tattoo artist since he was a kid, friend of the family or something.

For not posting for almost a week, I really don’t have much to say.


I kind of have all these bits and pieces of ideas floating around in my head, but nothing developed enough to write about.

Maybe I’ll just rapid fire them at you, and you can digest them:

Redneck hunters are sometimes democrats

Old super Liberal British women are cool

Young Indian (the country) American Republicans who think someone like George W. Bush is the only kind of person who can take care of terrorists are not cool

Neither are young white male Republicans who think Socialism is the same thing as Communism

Just because I think that time is spread out like a mountain range and all time exists all the time, does that mean I can’t believe in Free Will?

It’s super cool when you kid starts spitting out complex words with multiple different syllables like “monkey”.

I’m completely socially inept

In that respect I perpetuate the stereotype of my Engineering brothers.

I have no idea how to relate to normal people or carry on a conversation with them.

My wife is going to watch a baby for a woman in the AP Group. The woman and her husband came over last night to make sure my wife wasn’t a serial killer and our house wasn’t condemned.

My wife was upstairs and the doorbell rang. I answered and they asked if my wife was there. I imagine there was a small amount of shock on their part. I had a short sleeve CCCP hammer and sickle shirt with olive drab shorts on, my tattoos flashing and my nearly baldhead and beard.

I told them I would get my wife and that they should come inside.

OK, that’s a normal way to greet someone.

They come inside and I call up to my wife that they have arrived. Carter is playing in the living room, and I go back over and kind of stand awkwardly, glancing over at Carter and kind of smiling and asking him if he can say hello.

Finally the Husband does the thing I should have done and introduced himself. Then the wife does.

The Husband asks where I got the CCCP shirt, I’m not sure if it was a, hey where did you get that cool shirt, or a hey Commie where did you get that shirt?

I blathered something about ordering it back in college. My wife finally came down and rescued me.

I left and got the stuff ready to take Carter to his swim lessons. As we were getting ready to go, the Husband asked me about North-Central Wisconsin since he was from the area as well. I had no idea what to say. I’m sure a normal human would have had all kinds of things to say about their birth area. Not me.

I was happy to leave and go swimming, even though it has it’s own socially terrible moments for me.

I have no idea what to say to the other dad’s in the locker room. I also have no idea what to say to the other parents while we are in the pool doing the fun little activities with our children.

One of my big problems is that my interests aren’t along the normal everyday Joe public’s interests. My two big hobbies/interests are hockey and tattoos. Most people like football or baseball or basketball, all of which I don’t give a fuck about, and tattooed people are still in the minority, so I typically have nothing in common with anyone I meet.

Money and fear are the mother and father of invention

You may remember several years ago I won fourth place at an invention competition at UW-Madison.

Looking back at that design, it really sucked. I attempted to fabricate and assembly a prototype, but it didn’t work. The system was too complex and overambitious for what it needed to accomplish. I still believe that the current tattoo machine is poorly designed and configured.

Since then I’ve come up with a new design that isn’t as far of a departure from the classic electromagnetic coil machine.

I’ve got all the prints done for this new design. I just need to find some money to get the pieces fabricated.

In an ideal world, this machine would work perfect, I would get Kalib to test it on me, then he would start using it to do tattoos on several people, get a portfolio of work together done by the new machine. Then get a few more machines made and start selling them to other artists, start a website, get more people interested in it. Start selling it, making money, enough to be my own boss. Hire a few people to assemble it while I go to tattoo conventions selling it and meeting cool people. Get the hell out of the corporate world, and get some hand tattoos. Hang out at shops and sell my machine. Go down in history with Edison, Waters, O'Reilly, and Nightingale as the fathers of the modern tattoo machine.

In our society you need a license to catch a fish, but not to have a baby. / I'm just here to look around

One of the many reasons I'm madly in love with my wife.


This weekend, the Peoria Rivermen had their annual equipment sale. I’d never been to it before so I decided to check it out.

The Rivermen are an AHL team so they are one step below the NHL and use the very best gear available.

I got there about 10 min early and they had already opened up shop. I saw basically all the guys I know from the rink browsing around.

At first I was only going to buy a couple pairs of hockey socks for $10, but then I saw they had brand new, never used Pro Stock CCM pants for $50. I hate my current pants, CCM 852’s, because they don’t lace up in the front crotch area, and only have one belt. They were constantly falling down so I had to buy suspenders for them, which chafe all game long. I tried on the Pro Stock pants and they fit nice. These would retail for just under $300 so I figured I’d be a fool not to buy them.

Then I saw my buddy Phil, who is a hockey stick connoisseur (whore, and I mean that in the nicest way). He told me they were selling RBK 7V’s but they only had left handed shots. He was sad since he was a rightey. I went over and took a look. It was a nice stick, and it was only $50 too. Phil said even if I didn’t like it, I could sell it on ebay for $100. So I figured, why not.

I went and paid, and got the two pair of socks for free since the equipment manager told me he just wanted to get rid of them. I ended up getting about $500 worth of gear for $100.

There was an open hockey right after so I gave all my new stuff a try. It was sweet. The pants fit great, and the stick is pretty awesome. I’m not going to sell it, but I should have bought all 7 or so of the sticks and sold them on Ebay. A brand new RBK 7V stick is going for $140 right now. I could have turned an $80-$100 profit on each stick. Oh well, there’s always next year.

Charts and Graphs

Here is a spreadsheet with a breakdown of all my tattoo sessions with the cost and time associated with each sitting. The dashed lines were free for one reason or another. Cost per year ROL is the cost per year for the rest of my life, assuming I live till I'm 80. Then it's broken down further to the cost per day. Less than 25 cents a day doesn't seem so bad.

We just found out this place ex-is-ted

Last night I was trying to find something interesting to watch while my son fell asleep in my arms.

The best thing I could find was Countdown with Keith Olbermann. He had a piece on about how President McDouche vetoed the Iraq war funding bill on the 4 year anniversary of the “Mission Accomplished” speech, and how Orwellian the “mission” has become. First it was to remove a brutal dictator, then it was to get rid of WMD’s, then it was to produce a free and democratic Iraq, now it’s to prevent a terrorist foothold, the perpetual war to fuel the machinery of politics.

During the first commercial break, I saw an add for VS. network and the NHL playoffs. It gave the digital cable channel it was so I decided to flip to it. I had thought that this was a subscription channel. I was surprised to find out that I don’t have to pay extra for it. The Rangers and Sabers game was on. I had watched part of the game on Sunday where the Rangers won in double OT. I decided to become a Rangers fan for the playoffs since they are the number 6 seed and Buffalo is #1 in the East. After the crushing Red Wings playoff loss of 1996, I decided to never become emotionally involved in a teams performance and just enjoy the sport.

Anyway, it was nice to watch some playoff hockey during the week, and the Rangers won, even though it probably should have gone into OT. A final attempt by the Sabers seemed like a goal, but the video review was inconclusive. Good Hockey.