Cody

Ok, so I most definitely can’t leave before the leadership summit… Mostly because I’ve got a court date the day before for the car accident so to avoid going to jail when I come home I think I’ll stick around for that. Secondly because for the last 2 years I’ve been wanting to go to the Leadership Summit just never quite got to go. Then we’ve got Angie’s kids coming home for a little while that I might be babysitting… don’t know for sure and hopefully they only stay for a week or two since school will be starting at some point in time. I mean don’t get me wrong I love Zach and Chance can be pretty cool even though he can annoy the crap out of me since he doesn’t listen to ANYTHING! So I have to beat chance up from time to time…. If Angie doesn’t get back to me I’m leaving the Sunday after the leadership summit, if she does, I’ll head out when they go back to California…

The idea is to ride to St. Louis and back. 500 miles round trip. 120 miles to the Katy trail which I suspect will take me two days to get to, then the ride on the Katy trail is a lot longer, but it is 100% flat so I can probably do it in two days also I’ll probably have to take one day to just sit around at a camp site and rest… if I can bring myself to resting, not very good at that. Total planned round trip time 6 days accounting for stops, slowdowns, and the unexpected. I still need to get to the Katy trail ASAP since I don’t really know where I will be sleeping until then. Plenty of camp sites scattered along the trail, but unless I find some random peoples house to invade it will be tough till I get there.

That’s about it with the plan…. I really don’t have much of a plan, I was all happy and celebrating that the order was enough to get a little tent with… uh… that is until I got charged too much for the bracelet because the FedEx guy at the store sent it second day and not two day, and I got my yearly SSL charge my site… so…. here I am again with no money and leaving for a week long trip where I’ll have no shelter, no food, and who knows how I’m truly going to make it.  I really can’t see any reason why my mom is apposed to the whole trip

Ok, so… I’ve got to go. uh… maybe I should explain myself a little bit. I’ve been having this weird series of dreams lately, and I’m not sure what they mean. In fact the worst part about them all is that they’re not dreams at all… You see night one I have one of those dreams that you’re not sure if you’re asleep or awake and it’s even so bad that you don’t even know when the line was crossed from the dream world to the real world. As the dream starts out I was sitting up in my bed (not something I do often being I sleep on the top bunk of a bunk bed and the ceiling fan is right above me) staring at my closet for what seemed hours when all of a sudden this black… almost cloud or liquid begins moving from one end of the closet to the other infecting everything it touched as it crept slowly and ominously into my room. Armed with nothing else I picked up my pillow and chucked it at the black cloud scattering hangers everywhere and cutting the vial creature like darkness in half. Separated from its source the cloud began to wither with a moan. What seemed to be a few minutes later I then went to the rest room, got in bed and laid down without thinking when my head landed with a thud on a barren surface. I looked around everywhere for my pillow clearly remembering the dream, but so sure that it was a dream that I didn’t bother looking in the closet… but when I did I found my pillow and hangars scattered about.

On night two the dream was rather unpronounced and in fact I don’t remember much about it until I was conscious… or… well halfway conscious anyways. What I do remember however is waking up in a cold sweat, and instead of just pushing my blankets to the side I very meticulously rolled them up into this perfect ball, carried them out of my room and placed them in the hall. Then came back in and went to sleep…. an odd situation since I never sleep without a blanket even if it is 105° F outside, and really can’t stand being without something to hold onto.  I woke up a while later cold and rather confused… after looking around for my blankets for a little while I remembered the events of the night before and not wanting to venture out into the hall this early yet I just grabbed one of my spare blankets from beside my bed and pulled it around me… I soon came to my senses and decided that others would think it odd if they woke up and saw my blankets in this perfect pile in the hallway so I got up and gathered them.

Night three I went to bed with several questions for myself and life.  I’ve never been one to live the “stable” life so much.  Never had a girlfriend for more than 3 months, never had a job for more than 5 months, and I jump around from task to task all day long at home.  I posed myself with this question after going out to eat with Scott, mommy, and Brittney.  The restaurant we were at was somewhere I knew several people worked during high school I was rather shocked to find them still there… obviously a fun and just good place in general to work… or was it just me?  You see it’s not like I’ve not had good jobs, I was talking with a bunch of my friends the other day who all work 40+ hours a week and live on their own.  They were all talking about how they were looking forward to some good promotions and stuff so that they would be making a little more than the $300 a week they currently are making.  In all honesty I was floored by what they were making… Jobs where I just kind of sort of reluctantly took the job because I have bills to pay and needed something to do for a little while I was making in upwards of $500 a week, and I left those jobs either out of boredom or because I wasn’t getting paid enough to be doing what I was doing… and here these people are happy to be making what I would of laughed at someone who said I’d be making that even at 16.  Kind of funny even when working at Lifetouch everybody was kind of talking about how they were all getting paid different amounts and nobody really knew why Zack asks me what I’m making and I not knowing what they were making just simply said $10.90/hr he looks at me kind of funny and says something like “Dude I’m not talking to you anymore.” not really knowing what was going on I asked the other guy who said that I was making about $1.50 more per hour than both of them.  It’s not like I have some great track record with businesses or anything, I’m a horrible employee and I’ll admit it… I pack up and leave whenever I darn well feel like it without much or any warning at all.  So that night I went over how school never really was my “thing” nor was working for “the man” and I definitely cannot stay stationary for very long.  I was thinking about this thing Scott had said about how when he was a kid him and some friends went on a bike ride across Missouri to Arkansas for a fishing trip, so I was thinking that I should totally just get on my bike and head out… no real destination, no money, and not a clue what I’m supposed to do, it just sounded fun.  I’m at that point right now where the money is gone…. like seriously GONE gone and I have to get a job or something to survive… but nothing seems right and I’ve kind of been feeling God tugging at my heart saying “go” so somewhat joking around I thinking “yeah, I should go, pack up all my jewelry stuff and just ride… somewhere, setting up shop at all the Starbucks I come across to make stuff and sales will come magically so I can afford to continue on” Anyways that night I had another dream, that I woke up to.  What I remember about the dream is that I was standing on an old dirt road that didn’t make sense, staring at a bridge that was destroyed that also did not make sense seeing as there was nothing but prairie land and only a small stream, with no road connecting the bridge.  The bridge was broken, tattered, and flaming, but managed to mend itself with the coblestones below that had fallen into the stream during its destruction… only thing is that the bridge was still burning with flames high enough to keep it’s occupants from their destination… at this point I woke up.  Knowing that I need to make a move soon I asked God to give me some sort of sign that I should be heading out.  What did I ask for?  Either a random sale of jewelry that couldn’t really be explained, or a mended bridge… sales meaning I’m heading out on my bike to… uh… well who knows but I’m going.  Bridge meaning that I need to stay and just work a job quit running based on feeling and just buckle down for a while.  Guess what I woke up to this morning, I’ll give you one guess.

So I opened up my email this morning, still half asleep as the spam messages pile in I see this one email that just says #4 in the subject line, but it wasn’t caught by my spam filter… slightly aggravated at the performance of the spam filter lately I go to mark it as spam so that I can go through all the legit emails when I realized that the email was from myself… I went ahead and opened it to find out that it was order number four on my site (I had done two test orders on the site to make sure everything was working good, then Brenna’s parents ordered her a bracelet).  So needless to say this was an unexpected and unexplainable order that I had been looking for.  Oh, and I had said that it would need to be within the next two weeks since I wasn’t going to head out before the Leadership Summit and God gets back to me within 24hrs

The Three Sided Coin

That’s what I wanted to title this one… the three sided coin.  Originally I was just going to get on here and review this wonderful movie Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School with my own opinions of how this movie was so amazingly intricate story of the “what ifs” in life.  I planned on going on and on about how one mans what if so easily can become anothers new beginning… when I finally realized that the movie wasn’t about the what ifs of life at all.

After talking to my mom I learned that the movie was actually about relationships, or at least from her perspective.  Scott on the other hand knew that the movie was about second chances… yet we were all wrong, the movie is not about the what ifs in life, nor is it about the relationships in life and how they all intermingle to work out God’s plan, nor was the movie even about second chances… no… the movie is about you, and me so delicately complex and beautifully displaying our own life stories reflected in the lives of others on screen.

This is why I spend my time going out of my way to find every Indie film of note to watch.  Because every once in a while you find a Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School that has you happily sighing in awe of the artistic viewpoint of the world around us.  Quite possibly my favorite Indie film of all time pushing past  Dear Frankie… which is also a great film but not as complex or intricate.  You only begin to see just how complex the movie is with the realization that Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School is actually the second part to the story… now the 2005 movie tells the story of both movies with flashbacks from a short movie made in 1990 of the same title.

Well worth your time to watch, and definitely worth going through whatever troubles to hunt this movie down!

I finally got my head cut off.  Generally do for summer anyways, but it’s been something ridiculous like 8 months since I’ve had a “haircut” now that’s not to say I haven’t had a few inches here and there trimmed off but uh… well take a look.

Oh and as a special bonus both pictures contain my newest creation, a necklace with an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ worked in as the centerpiece… I like to call it Nerd Bling.  You guys are the first to see it and if I can get a line on a large supply of old processors I plan on actually making a whole jewelry line of Nerd Bling and possibly nerdbling.com or something started to sell it Problem is the only ideas I have thus far are the CPU necklaces, RAM Bracelets, and possibly some necklaces/charm anklets with old keyboard keys spelling out peoples names and what not… just gotta get TONS of old keyboards for that part.

Then after I lost 6 inches of hair… kinda odd since it’s been so long with long hair, but showers are much faster, and it’s so much cooler

My mom has been seeing this guy for two weeks now… or so maybe three, but anyways she asks me how I like him.  Obviously having three kids it is just as important that we like him as it is that she does… or well that I like him as she does since Brittney isn’t going to like anyone who takes attention away from her, and Brook is never home so it doesn’t really matter.  To be honest I really do like the guy a lot.  He has a good job and makes great money, but remains very down to earth and isn’t one of those strict neat freaks that you see with most people with the same job positions.

Anyways… on to the point of the story.  You might remember that I had an article on here a while ago about wanting a ridding partner, then went on to explain more what I was really asking for with that.  Well I never did ride the Katy trail, would be fun and I’d love to do it sometime, but getting out on my own is majorly no fun, and trying to convince someone else that ridding bikes for 4 days on a 300 mile trip would be awesome is difficult to say the least.   Funny thing is Scott (My mom’s boyfriend that isn’t really her boyfriend because we’re definitely not in 6th grade anymore and there is no such thing as a good adult boyfriend… every time any of my friends referred to their parents boyfriend/girlfriend it was not in a pleasant tone.)  rides his bike all the time and was talking about this area by him where they are doing construction and the land is all torn up, how much fun it would be to go out there when it is raining and have fun getting a little muddy.

yeah… so there wasn’t really a point to this one… I was just sharing

Can we say ownzinated? Definitely was not expecting the movie to be as good as it was. You know I go to movies all the time where people are like “oh dude the CGI stuff is so amazing” so obviously I have to go see it because I’m one big nerd ya know? Then when I get to the movie I’m sitting there watching and all these “cool” CGI effects are going on and everything and this pestering voice in the back of my head keeps saying things like “particle system is lacking…” “oh, and they couldn’t program in world reflect?” “what is up with those vertex shaders?” “wow, horrible rag doll effects.” “uh… ever heard of anisotropic filtering?” “seen better in games…” So I end up really disappointed with most peoples idea of good CGI effects… which I wasn’t expecting much with Transformers anyways. I was going to relive some childhood years and do my quarterly hanging out with friends ya know? Get out of the basement for a little while… leave behind my gorgeous 22inch 2ms widescreen with 3000:1 dynamic contrast. Anyways, Transformers did an awesome job with the CGI I was very impressed (which is a pretty high complement coming from someone who stares at CGI all day long). The lighting and world reflect details are especially good and really show the attention to detail and time taken to make the movie. They blend the CGI in so well that there are only a few times during intense fight scenes that you would even question the CGI as real… but there is so much going on at the time that most people won’t even notice then.

I was pleasantly surprised with the story line of Transformers also. Could easily be put up there on the level of the Spiderman series as far as plot and script writing goes. Although the battle scenes are what makes the movie amazing there’s plenty of humor spread throughout to make the slower times pass with ease… also get your past some of the poor acting. Now don’t get me wrong I think Shia LaBeouf is a good guy, did rather well in holes too… unfortunately he’s not the greatest of actors. You kind of just get him in whatever he does. Which is fine I know it’s worked for a lot of “actors” before who have very unique personality’s like Shia. And in all fairness Mr. LaBeouf wasn’t too shabby for the movie, just a few things seemed forced, and since I can’t think of anyone else within our age range that could pull it off better we’ll leave it as is. Megan Fox’s role as Mikaela Banes could of been played by a hundred other girls who could of pulled the role off much better. The whole movie she’s trying to pull off this cute sweet and innocent girl who’s a total badass as well as the way the script is written mixes in a sex appeal to the equation. It’s really the cute, sweet, and innocent that throws the balance off though I think… Angelina Jolie pulls the whole car freak who’s drop dead gorgeous in gone in 60 seconds with no problem, much the same role as should of been played by Megan for Transformers… it just doesn’t come off that way in the movie. She comes off as ditzy and afraid of something. Somewhat I understand where her acting comes from since she’s supposed to be this whole popular girl thing and she does so very well… maybe it should be the writers that I complain about here instead since “the popular girl” would not be caught up in that situation. Mikaela reminds me a lot of my friend Liz who was one of the popular people but loved cars because her dad was always into them. Liz however would not be caught dead in the middle of a robot droid death match, and if by accident did end up in that situation definitely would not have stuck it out to the end like Mikaela did… which is probably why Megan’s role in the movie is so unbelievable since she has no real motive for staying around but does, which sounds great to the American who loves rogue vigilance, but just doesn’t happen in real life.

None the less, I still liked the movie a lot and would recommend everybody go see it!  They’re also working on a sequel… which I’m not quite sure if I’m stoked about or not.  I’ll go see it none-the-less but I hope they don’t botch the movie with sequels like has become the trend lately.

What is up with everybody plotting for me?  I mean seriously, every time I turn my back there is someone new with plots and plans on helping me and making things so much more awesome for me… only thing is I’m so oblivious I didn’t even know it this last time.  Most of you know that I was greeted coming home from Jamaica with job offers and everything necessary for me to survive without scrambling to get another job.  Plus the freedom to go to St. Louis for a couple of weekends to have fun at the Ren. Faire.  Then while at the Ren. Faire I got accepted into the “family” and got the royal treatment the entire time with help from everyone, even if I never knew their names they were always coming up to offer help/advice of any kind that would be of service to me.   Truly was awesome, and there will never be a time that I miss the Ren. Faire again because those people truly are my family
Just today (well technically yesterday, but with the hours I sleep I never know what day is what) I learned that there have been more plotting in my favor as well!  And when I say this, I don’t mean they just had some opportunity for me that just kind of works and hey why not get Cody to come…. no, these people have gone out of their way SPECIFIED me and did everything they could to push me into the path of said opportunity [as a side note, I was stumbling and found some random article and there was an add on the side of the page with a guy and a blender at the top it was scrolling through messages that said “started drinking vegetables?” “you could be heading for a mid-life crisis.” so obviously I’m headed down that path to a mid-life crisis, next thing you know I’m going to be getting a loan to start my own business and wait… crap… I am having a mid-life crisis… guess I’m only gonna live to 42 ]

wait… where was I?  I got distracted by my stumbling… uh… so yeah, I wasn’t really ever planning on actually TELLING you what this new plot is, because I don’t usually do the whole telling people what is on my mind thing.  Doesn’t hurt that only 1.5 people actually visit this site a day… unlike Archmaille Designs which now, thanks to StumbleUpon has reached 300 people a day… let me say that again because I’m not sure if I believe it yet, but the second day of optimizing my stumble information I’ve reached 300 people for one day, not including yesterday where I had 150 people, so nearly 500 people in the last two days… not so bad.  Oh, and the moral of the story is that I win

Although cash donations are accepted that’s not what I’m talking about. As some of you know I’ve been working desperately to get search engine terms for my site ArchmailleDesigns.com (in hopes of sales). Unfortunately I can’t compete with the top people, it is just not possible on my own… even with help from Jordan it’s not possible.

Here’s the problem. The number one website that comes up for the term “sterling silver jewelry” is evesaddiction.com a site that has held that spot for quite some time. This company makes major bank… and I suspect they do most of their business online. Not only do they have the number one spot for both Yahoo and Google for the term “Sterling Silver Jewelry” they also pay $1 per click to be number one for googles AdWords. This website has 6,637 backlinks according to Yahoo… granted Yahoo keeps better track of backlinks than anyone else that’s not everything that links to them, some smaller unknown sites aren’t even registered. They also have 2,645 pages to their website… which does give them a lot of their backlinks but it is still only a small portion. My site ArchmailleDesigns.com has 326 backlinks registered with Yahoo and 88 pages… In order to make sales I need to compete, I need to get to having at least half of that, or something. One major difference as to why I am able to compete with them is that 100% of my incoming links are quality links and only about 1% of theirs are so my site has a PR4 as does theirs (hoping to push that up to a PR5 by the end of the month).

Which brings me to what I’m accepting donations for I need links to my site. Don’t bother with MySpace if you don’t already have one they have put msplinks into place and all MySpace links are 1,000% worthless… well all new ones are anyways, I have a link in my profile that is still a direct link but I can never update my profile again because it would then convert it to a msplinks link which would ruin whatever good it is doing. If you would be so kind as to help me out here are some suggestions of what is always welcomed and good practices for link building.

First off I need the links to go to http://www.archmailledesigns.com/ <– the trailing “/” is VERY important, Google gives a huge amount of weight to that little “/” for who knows what reason, but they do. The link should say either “handmade jewelry” “Sterling Silver Jewelry” or “Handmade Silver Jewelry” both Sterling silver jewelry and Handmade jewelry get about 20,000 searches a month on Yahoo possibly double that on Google so they’re going to be the big ones, Handmade Silver Jewelry only gets 500 searches a month on Yahoo and I’m very close to having it anyways so it is appreciated but not necessary, although having a variety is good too and even handmade silver jewelry does help for both of the other terms.

Places to link from:
Forums <– oh if you would be so kind as to put my link in your signature I would love you forever, it is easy to get up to 500 posts on a forum that you are active with and that would give me nearly 100 extra incoming links (by the end of the month I will have about 900 as I just added the link to the bottom of my site kclanparty.org with a little more push I’ll be hitting 1,000 links )

Blogs <– blogs are awesome! If you own the blog and put me in your blogroll that’s spectacular, once again blogroll = much loving forever!!! If you use other blogs such as Blogger.com, blurty.com, whatever Yahoo’s blogs are, a WordPress blog, xanga.com or any other that you don’t own a simple link will do and will help a good amount.

Social Bookmarking sites <– Backflip, Bibsonomy, Blinklist, Blogmemes, Blue Dot, de.lirio.us, del.icio.us, Diigo, Furl, Looklater, ma.gnolia, Rawsugar, Shadows, Simpy, Spurl, Wink  Any of them are good, and add links to the site!  If you use a program called “OnlyWire” which can be found at onlywire.com and sign up for all of these bookmarking sites and bookmark all the main pages of my site (or if you’re feeling really good all of the pages) I will have to come and find you to give you a great big huggles and what the heck I’ll probably kiss ya too (you probably couldn’t stop me from doing both if you truly use onlywire for me).

StumbleUpon <– most of the pages of my site have already been submitted by me, all you got to do is install the toolbar go to my site go around to the pages and hit “I like it”

Play4Traffic.com <– it’s a stupid game, but the links work out

Guest Books <– if you know of any sites that have guest books and allow links go for it, every little bit is a help.

any time you are asked to put in “your site” during registration of a site it is a good thing.

There are some times that you go to watch movies in order to escape reality, other times that the movies you go to watch only enhance reality.  This just so happened to be the latter.  I wasn’t really expecting anything when I went to watch the movie “Mozart and the Whale” but sure got a lot out of the movie.  It was just one of a few random movies my mom had rented and since I’ve been too sick to want to do anything but lay down and sleep watching movies has been good, and what I’ve been doing for the last couple of days.

I’ve always just considered myself Obsessive Compulsive because I know that I am… never been truly diagnosed but according to tests that I’ve found, and well my behavior it’s a pretty obvious thing for me.  It has never bothered me, and in fact makes me better at a lot of things that I do.  Watching Mozart and the Whale which is about a couple of people with Asperger’s syndrome (a kind of autism) I couldn’t help but sit laughing at myself.  The movie was a littler peculiar, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Probably a million times I’ve had different friends of mine tell me that they were going to clean my room when I was away, which I generally have no response for because what do you say to such treachery?   It’s kind of funny watching Mozart and the Whale one of the big scenes is when Isabelle cleans Donald’s apartment and he FREAKS!  It would be about the same for me… I might not live through the ordeal (coronary heart attack) or if I did you might not.  From watching the movie I kind of wonder if it could be Autism that plagues me instead of OCD… but then again I’m no expert and when you really look at things ADD, OCD, and Autism all are very near to one another in symptoms and not being any kind of expert really couldn’t tell you what the major differences are.  Funny thing is, one of the reasons I fell in love with Chainmaille so much is because of something that would seem very autistic.  I have a cousin who is Autistic his mom is a psychologist and was talking about how at her work they have a lead jacket for autistic people because they love the confinement… which is exactly why I love the way chainmaille feels… I like to describe it to people as being the opposite of claustrophobic, when I was in middle school I used to love going into storm drains and I would actually travel entire street blocks through the narrow concrete pipes that connected them… dark, stingy, and barely enough room for my body I loved being there in the quiet hole that was so far from where anyone would bother to find me.  Only problem is I’ve got all the bad things about Autism without any of the good side affects, usually autistic people are writers, mathematicians, composers, or in some other great artistic field of profession.  Oh well, for those of you who would like to see what would happen to Cody if you really did go through with your plans of secretly cleaning my room while I am away at some point in time watch the movie “Mozart and the Whale” and you’ll get a good idea of why I’ve never allowed anyone to come close to touching my room.