Uh... Apparently I'm not quite as eternal as I imagined

So I'm filling out this enormous background check packet for the Oakland PD, and I have to go back to my outbox from 1999 to figure out start/stop times for some of the dinky college jobs I had... (Snakes in a toilet!)

I thought I didn't change much, but dear god, I was kind of an ass in 1999. Um, parents, sorry! What was I thinking to demand you send out my lava lamp in the same mail that I berated you for not mailing credit card bills fast enough?

Hm. At least I sent people mail back then, keeping them in touch with my life. Well, uh, LJ, you will no doubt be pleased that I finally broke down and bought a vaccuum cleaner brand new, and it is so very shiny and awesome. The AweXome is hard to stand. Clean floors!

Also cool: at Costco where I went on lunch break determined I would not leave without a vaccuum, I was able to figure out how to take it apart and put it together again while sitting on the floor of the aisle. Aw, yeah.

Of course, the one I bought is now full of hair, so I don't want to touch its underbits. But... Full of hair! That isn't on the floor! I didn't even have to scrape the hair up with my hands after the vaccuum pushed it into a pile! Oh, so sweet.

A thing of beauty

Check out this video. They showed me this in the "how to throw your parachute" class I took as a part of learning to hang glide. The guy is doing aerobatics in front of a Telluride festival, so he's got a smoke trail coming out of his glider. He flubs a wingover, one wing of the glider breaks, and it goes into a flat spin. He throws his chute, and it gets twisted up in the wreckage before it can get enough air into it to open. Because he's doing aerobatics (dangerous even today, much less in 1986) he's got a second chute, so he throws that. It also gets twisted up in the wreckage before it can open. He spirals into the mountainside, 1,500 feet below.

Dan Murphy, the pilot, walked away from that spectacular crash in 1986 with a few bruises. On Sunday, 20 years later, as he sat on his motorcycle chatting with a fellow pilot at Fort Funston, an insane asshole walked up and shot him in the face.

( More about Dan, big photo, sorrow )