Cody

So I have definitely decided that this has got to be how I shall live.  Nothing else would suffice… nothing else would satisfy… and most importantly nothing else would survive.  Haha that’s so great!  Have any of you noticed that I really like alliteration?  I mean seriously I do it all the time, sometimes purposefully, other times with little or no effort.  Then I go and ruin whatever cool thing I said by blurting out “Dude that so rhymes!!” then I get ‘corrected’ by people “well, that doesn’t really rhyme because it has to be the last of the word that matches in order for it to rhyme.”  “Oh, well thank you for that.  Just so you know, next time you go and say something stupid to someone who is of a much higher intelligence than yourself make sure that you are correct before you speak.  First off it does rhyme, it’s called alliteration one of the three main rhyming schemes for the english language.”

Oh right… where was I… ah yes, I was starting my story with the usual nail biting intro of utter confusion because even those that know of what I speak know not of what I speak because of how I spoke it!  By the way, Caffeine is a very, very bad drug.  Now normally I don’t drink caffeine at all, but my tummy was feeling icky and I wasn’t really feeling like eating anything, but I was hungry so rummaging through the kitchen which wasn’t really much of a rummage at all since I just walked in and saw a bottle of Coke on the table where something in my mind said “COKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and somehow I ended up warping to the table because it’s really too short of a distance to “run” and I don’t really remember making any kind of stepping motion I just ended up there… next to the table where I sat and finished off the entire 2 liter bottle myself.

And back to the story.  So right there I was contemplating my life thinking “Dude this is awesome, and it most definitely works” even though I didn’t say any of that, and I never really stopped to contemplate anything I was just kind of like thinking and for a brief moment I thought about all the conversations of “hey what’s going on in your life” that I’ve had this week, cux there were most definitely more than usual, and I got the same response from just about everyone of “You’re doing what?  And how exactly do you pull that off?” when I realized that no other lifestyle would even work for me.   Honestly I’ve never kept a job for more than 3 months, and I’m sure that no relationship has ever gone much longer than that either… stagnant is most definitely not something that I deal with well.  I’ll spend summers running around to various Ren. Faires and town crafts faires like Parkville Days here, then most Winter I’ll do webpage design stuff, freelance work in that arena.  Of course I won’t limit myself to those time windows either but I kind of like the idea of being able to tell people that I’m doing freelance work for MTVN then next weekend I’ll be heading out to St. Louis for the next couple of weekends for the St. Louis Ren. Faire.  People just kind of give you this look when you tell them yeah, I just got back from Jamaica, working for MTV, and then next weekend gotta pack up and head out to St. Louis for some more work of “who do you know, and how can I meet them?” when in actuality… God is the only answer I can give because I never asked for any of this, it’s just any time I’m in need someone walks up to me with the solution before I even have time to ask for a solution or announce to others that I have a problem.  Met more completely than I could of desired or imagined before I would of taken action… now that is a God who cares.

Only the weak shall survive the race.

I was thinking about Lord of the Rings the other day and kind of reflecting about how it all ends.  Had it not been for the frailty of those in the cave the ring would never have been destroyed.   In the end we find that even though between Frodo and Sam the strength was found to get the ring all the way to get to Mount Doom none had the strength to actually cast the ring into the fires and destroy it.  It is only when we realize that we do not have the strength that we can step out of the way long enough to allow the work God has planned for us to be accomplished.  Even though most of us will never be standing in a volcanic mountain with the choice before us to destroy the worlds evil once and for all or hold onto what has become precious to us, we are all daily faced with struggles that would destroy anything less than the strength of our God.  Unfortunately if you’re anything like me you like to look back and reflect upon such events and take the credit for being so strong.

I don’t really have any “point” to this story… I was just saying.  I’ve got in my drafts a blog entry that could have been spun off of this in the middle that actually does have a point, but I’ll just post it later.

Now that I’ve returned from Jamaica the real question is who wants to come next year?  Might go in January, but possibly in May again I’ll know what the decision is after next Sunday either way I’d like to see some others go it really is just awesome!

And for what everybody has been waiting… pictures and stories!  For the most part here I’m going to be lazy and just source the pictures from MySpace since then it doesn’t use my bandwidth, and also then I don’t have to photoshop them down to size… some of them however are too awesome to scale down and really need their detail so I’ll do the photoshop work and put them here.

Sitting around at the airport waiting for the bus!  Would of got some pictures from earlier, but until this point we were either on the airplane where I was in the middle seat so couldn’t get any pictures of the ocean or anything, and until now they don’t allow any cameras or anything til ya get out of customs… so here we are, also the first place I got offered some real Jamaican gonja.

I had to take a few pictures from the bus because it’s insane how skinny the roads are!  We’re seriously talking about what would be a one lane road in America is used as a two lane road in Jamaica and they have no problem with driving ridiculously close to one another.

The mountainous regions of Jamaica are so gorgeous!

This is the High Velocity Air Circulating unit in our room… A.K.A. Air Conditioning what a life saver this thing is!

This is one of the main sources of income for Jamaicans who don’t live near any city’s.  This is how they make charcoal, taking large piles of branches they burn it, bury it in dirt and let it smolder until it turns to charcoal… a little different than how it is done in the states, but in all honesty probably more efficient too since they don’t need a second fire.

The work that was started 3 years ago was finally finished by Alan, John, and myself!   And let me tell you setting up a network with limited software, tools, and old decaying hardware… not easy.  While there I did learn a little bit about this group however.  Apparently there was a girl in a college group that came down and loved it, after talking with her old high school principal he decided to send a group down.  According to Henry it was absolutely the worst group they had ever had; cussing all the time, slide tackling the Jamaicans in Fütball, and the chaperone’s were buying them alcohol on the North Coast.  Shortly after being down they called and said that they wanted to come back… Henry and Linda tried to avoid it with everything they had, but after being bugged for months they finally said they could come back but gave them “impossible” terms to meet… they met the terms and came back the next year.  This time however they were one of the best groups that they have ever had come down, baffled Henry later found that almost all of them had either accepted Christ while down in Jamaica, or when they came home.  They no longer restrict who comes down for any reason.

Bauxite Mining *hisses* All the beautiful countryside of Jamaica is being ruined!  You can look up exactly what Bauxite is but the main thing it is used for is the large deposits of aluminum.  There is a large Bauxite company in Jamaica, along with the Jamaican government that have been ravaging the countryside.  The laws state that the land must be restored to the same or better conditions than before the mining began… unfortunately since the government is a part of the deal they both get 50% profits and both must pay 50% expenditure… the government usually has the money spent before the restoration process begins so if the government doesn’t do its part in restoration who is there to enforce that the bauxite company does?

This is a supposedly “restored” area of land.  It’s kind of hard to see the pictures were hard to take from the bus past the foliage on the sides of the road.  But there are few small trees planted and hardly anything else worthwhile to make the land presentable.

This is the family of Ruth (far right) and Lester (far left) also if you see the rest of the pictures from MySpace you’ll see several pictures from inside their home.  We went to see them for what they call “meals on heals” which is basically where one night we get to have a dinner at a real Jamaican home!  Ruth and Lester are actually quite wealthy for this area of Jamaica.  Ruth works as a care taker in Pennsylvania, Lester does contracted work all over the states and even Canada.  I just loved their home, small but very nice.  80% of it or so was built by Lester too, the main area in the middle of the house was there but he built everything else.  It was somewhat obvious, but he said he built everything without any sort of level, and no measuring stick… I still couldn’t believe the work he did, that’s something that I would love to do myself is to build my own home.

Hmmm…. so now here’s a story.  Unfortunately this image shows my little friend much smaller than he is in real life, but I think you get the point.  One night I was showering late (as I generally do, I like to be alone in the show kind of go to my own little world and use it as reflection time) in Jamaica all our showers come from rain water that is caught off the roofs and stored in underground tanks, so we must take very short showers.  What you do is wet yourself, kind of rinse off, turn the water off, lather up, then rinse the soap off.   Well following protocol I rinse off, wet my hair and kind of slowly moving I step back and bend down for the shampoo.  Being that there is a shower curtain behind me that separates the other shower when I stepped back my heal kind of brushed up against the curtain which was actually rather annoying… so I move forward a foot or so as the curtain then moves up my leg at an alarmingly fast rate past my knee… I quickly realized that it was in fact NOT the curtain that I had run into rather… something… else, something alive.  So I do what any mature grown man would do… I screamed like a little girl flailing my arms and legs.  That’s when I saw my new buddy who kindly went to the corner… after calming down we had a little chat.  I very nicely asked him to stay in his corner and I would stay in mine.  We were cool for quite some time, in fact my short speech seemed to have a great impact on him and he did stay put in his corner, since he kept to his word I too kept to mine as I lathered up.  When I went to turn the water back on to rinse off I believe he thought I was violating the agreement which freaked him out a little bit and he sped to the other shower… uh… shortly after taking a detour up my ankle and down the other side… this in turn freaked me out a bit once again doing the mature thing I screamed like a little girl flailing my arms and legs… this time a little more spirited than before I accidentally kicked the curtain separating the two showers.  He didn’t seem to like me invading his land… or maybe he was a bloods roach and the other shower was infested with the crypts roaches who said they’d cap him if he didn’t leave… either way he came zooming back to my side making sure to let me know he had returned as he crossed my feet again to escape to the vast unknown of the bathroom.  After this whole ordeal I couldn’t not get a picture of him, and that is why there is a gigantic cockroach amidst the many other images.

I’ll continue on later… time for bed now.  Hopefully this will satisfy my Brenna for now if you want to know more feel free to ask me about anything or if you want more details I know I’ve been vague on some you all know I have no problem with expounding upon stuff
oh… and tomorrow I will also put up the pictures I bought.  They have a photographer follow us around the whole time we are there who takes pictures and at the end of the week we can buy a DVD with several hundred pictures on it, so those too shall be added to my MySpace page and maybe here if there’s anything story worthy (I honestly forgot about it so haven’t seen any of the pictures from it, we’ll see if anything is good and worthy of coming here, it’s not like picture quality really matters since all my images have been reduced to 1/3 their original size and very much so desaturated to save on bandwidth so who knows.)

I have returned, but I am not home yet. I am so disgusted with the computer here that it’s going to take me nearly two weeks to get it back in “working” order or at least what I would consider so. But none of that really matters so much… those are only comfort things, what I need before I am home is a Tiana, and a Brenna… Didn’t even realize how much I missed my Brenna until I got on MySpace and saw some of her comments counting down to when I return, and about her dream… but yeah, that’s what I need, unfortunately I’m so tired right now I just want to curl up next to someone and take a nap, after which I will post many of my 150+ pictures from the Island later this week to gather images from several of the other people and post some of their pictures too.

So looks like Sunday I’ll be running off to Jamaica!  Can’t hardly believe it’s this close already… but yeah, here shortly I’ll be leaving for a foreign land (my first time out of the U.S.)  things should be interesting, I’ll bring my camera, but will most likely get most of my pictures from them… I guess they have someone who takes pictures for you and afterwards you can buy all the pictures they take for $10 or something like that.  So yeah, there will be pictures, and what not after the 20th when I return!  Which actually means some time after the 21st because I’ll probably be sleeping for a while (All the sun, and building a house will most likely wear me out… plus they’ll make me sleep a “normal” sleeping schedule which always destroy me).

I need a ridding partner. Started ridding every day, and there’s really only so much to do, or so far to go without someone else to ride with. Someone else who has an XC Hardtail that doesn’t fear doing a little bit of offroad would be awesome too! I would really like to eventually ride the entire Katy Trail, possibly at the end of the summer when things cool off again, or whenever. Actually go out and spend 4-6 days just ridding the whole thing camping out and all. The trail is 500 miles (to St. Louis, and back) but has plenty of stops along the way for camping, food, and other various rest stops along the way. I’ve never traveled more than 150 miles on it so it would be interesting to ride the whole way. For those of you who haven’t been, the Katy Trail is an old train track converted to a cycling trail, so it’s mostly flat, and very few inclines those that are present are very low grades so it’s easy to travel 100 miles a day or more. It would just be a lot of fun to get away from everything for a week. Here’s some photo’s of the trail from various photographers, I was really looking for this one that was taken from a bridge that crosses the Missouri River at one of many places where the trail runs right alongside the river and there are high bluffs on the side of the trail with the MO right on the other side, but I couldn’t find it.

Do you ever have troubles just saying what you should?  Ok, so the truth of the matter is that I don’t really need a ridding partner, I need a life partner, someone who can hang out and we’ll just do life together ya know?  Ok, so probably not.  Thing is there are some things that I just can’t do alone… none of us can, nor were we designed to.  Before most of you close the page with the notion that I’m just here rambling on about how I so need a girl… you’re wrong, this is another issue, don’t get me wrong I’d like a girl, but I’ve actually become content in the last few months waiting.  We all hear from church leaders and everything about how we need to find someone of the same sex that will understand many of our issues to talk with and keep accountable to God with… Every time I hear anybody start any kind of speech like that the walls go up instantly.  A lot of you know that I don’t hang out with many guys, heck some of you know that I don’t trust guys, and even know why.  Am I trying to pass the blame for my downfalls off on my dad?  No, and in all honesty I’ve long ago forgiven him.  He still annoys the crap out of me, and there are times where I go to the hilltop sitting alongside Jonah, but that’s not a daily thing anymore.  Either way, also doesn’t mean that there is a single guy I can think of that I would even begin to talk to about my issues.  Not even Jordan… yeah we hang out often, and I don’t mind doing work for the guy, but even at that I can still find excuses as to why I won’t talk to him about anything more than Company of Heroes or websites.  There really is nobody at the church I go to that I’d be comfortable with, so I figured it would be easier to just find someone with common interest… Oddly enough I could think of tons of my female friends in whom I could confide, I only don’t because I’m not sure if they’d understand, or something to that nature.

Leveling the playing field

Hey guys, One of my friends is on the RealWorldCasting website thingy, after voting I very quickly noticed something Amuck about how many votes some of the top people were getting.

Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t of thought anything about it. But I have experienced these types of scams before. Back in the day (2 years ago) when I ran only 1 website, barely knew basic HTML, and was not so tech savvy as I am now my cousin Zachery was on some cosmogirl cutest guy site thing. It was a cutest guy competition that ran each day allowed people to vote for who they liked the most out of two guys, then the next day it would be the winner and a new challenger. Well when Zach got up there we rallied the troops (8 aunts and uncles on my mom’s side of the family, plus their kids, etc.) and legitimately voted him to the top every day. The days were ending with around 150 votes for Zach and around 100 or so for the other guys, so our votes were helping, but he was legitimately winning until one day we all are going to vote when some punk has over 1,000 votes in the middle of the day… now I know a lot of people, and I know how to rally the troops, but I don’t know 1,000 people who I can convince to vote for me every day. Being that at most the total vote count of days past was around 250 someone having over a thousand by mid day was a little skewed. My other cousins Jordan and Joel much more tech savvy than myself quickly figured out what was going on and using a macro set as described in the video we were able to get the cheater beat out a couple of days later… unfortunately my cousin still lost, but after getting 8 computers over 3 internet connections running we finally beat out the cheater. Now again the same techniques are being used by some losers on the MTV Real World casting site.

I’m doing my best to expose them, and do not plan on giving up at any point in time.