Showing posts with label cheap. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cheap. Show all posts

17 October 2013

A Few Anniversaries

I am happy to note that Lisa and I have been married for 25 years this coming Tuesday!  We will be off somewhere and sleeping in and having the sort of fun we tend to have, which is probably terribly low-key compared to most...

I also calculated something else and it has been fifteen years since "The Great Writing Year", where I penned many of my short stories, the awesome novella Rachel and Her Knight in Shining Armor, and wrote the first complete draft of a book from The Navigiary Series.  That was 1998, while I was bobbing about on the waters off the US Gulf Coast and the west coast of Africa as a seismic navigator.

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of my big writing push, I am giving everyone A Free Copy of "The Joys of Autism and Christian Ethos", which is a collection of many of these stories that is available from my Amazon store.  The book will only be free for a few days, so don't hesitate to get it right now! Of course, I welcome your kind reviews of my writing!

If you are really in a celebratory mood, you can certainly check out other books by Jason Nemrow on Amazon and make me a a little money.

I'll be celebrating over the next few days and you can, too!  Happy days for us all!


11 June 2012

The Great (Yet Premature) Down-sizing

It was almost a week ago when some spare hard drives, disturbed by my shuffling about in preparation for our upcoming move, dropped from a cabinet onto the open-faced motherboard that served as my web and gopher server for the past year.  The debris dislodged the sound card and jarred the hard drive enough to gouge the surface and totally ruin the drive.  I typically have a none-too-recent backup of the drive, but I have had to shuffle around the backup drives to put my daughter Shayna back into service, so the backup drive had been recently formatted and EVERYTHING is now lost!!

Fortunately, I had been slowly moving most of my core documents to cloud servers, so all of what I would consider to be the really important stuff has weathered this storm.  The server itself is back in service and there is a web and gopher server running, but they are both quite empty for now.  Both the old podcasts are totally gone, which is a bit sad, but it would probably be just as well that I render most of the information that went into the podcasts into far more concise text, probably for posting in the future on this blog.

Frankly, there were likely some very dangerous recordings and essays on the server that probably were very outdated and really needed to be removed.  It isn't good to have too much of your uncensored self out on the public web anyway.  It was okay when no one really looked at the site, but with job changes, moving, and graduate school in the offing, there was a good chance that something damning that I have said/wrote in the past could come back to haunt me!  I am quite prepared to attribute the falling hard drives event to a fortuitous act of God and be grateful for the happening...

If you go clicking on links to the old QuIX properties, I hope you are not too disappointed at the lack of objects to browse.  Life happens!

03 August 2011

The Hunt for a Cheap, Long, Light Sleeping Bag

I don't even like to talk about how many sleeping bags I have.

For years, in my camping and hiking adventures, pathetic though they may seem, I have always struggled with the problem of sleeping bags.  I am too tall apparently, and only relatively short people are supposed to do such things.  Of course, I am an anomaly in a lot of ways from other camper/hikers (besides all the other anomalies I have generally with humans), as I prefer my equipment ultra-cheap and relatively light, in that order.  If I pay more than $50 for a piece of equipment, I must really, really think it is going to save the world or some such.

Over time, I have collected an assortment of bags, each with features I had hoped that I would like, hoping one day to stumble upon that "holy grail" of fit, comfort, and utility.  Lightning hasn't struck yet, but even so far as yesterday, I keep trying.

Of course, when it comes to sleeping bags, cheap and light rarely come together.  I am told that part of the fun of camping and hiking is the procurement and testing of new equipment, but I have never gotten into that aspect particularly.  If a bag is lightweight, it costs a ton, as it is typically stuffed with down (a whole bunch of it) or contains some new-fangled synthetic batting that hasn't come down in cost yet.  The cheap bags end up being crammed full of shredded jeans or other recycled fluffy stuff (they may even have an asbestos one for all I know), so they end up weighing 5 or 6 pounds.  That's heavy, as Marty McFly would say on several levels.

Then, you couple that with the length issue.  I am 6'3'' tall and standard bags are cut all wrong for me, just like beds, pants, and just about everything else that seems to be standardized back in the days when 5'0" must have been the average height.  Tall bags are definitely made, but they seem to be a specialty item and the price reflects that.  By nature, a tall bag needs more material and more batting to cover more area, so it will also be heavier than standard, to add insult to injury.

Some cheap, tall, and light bags are actually starting to make an appearance, but I can now add a new criteria to the mix:  thermal rating!  The bag that meet my original criteria are often only rather down to 50 degrees and get described as "summer-only" bags.  That really doesn't work for me because I often car-camp on into the edges of winter, ending as late as December and picking up again as early as February.  However, as my lovely wife will attest, I am one hot-blooded guy and put out heat like a furnace, so I higher-temp-rated bag might actually work for me out of its intended season.  This would be the first example of a hope that I have always had about life which I call the Psychic Proximity Principle:  You will gravitate toward a place and circumstance that actually fit you and your nature.

So, I am brought back to the cunundrum.  But, I happened to be a Sam's Club yesterday and they had a Coleman 4-in-1 sleeping bag for about $30.  Of course, it weighs like it is filled with rocks, but I bought it and will try it out tonight for the car-camping that I do when I overnight for my work.  I have yet to even try a bag made for tall people (they say it works up to 6'6" or 6'4" depending on who you ask) and I am hoping it goes well.  I am really tired of having to fold myself like a pretzel to fit in a bag and stay warm!


Update:  Well, I used the bag on 8/3, but it was so hot all night long that I just opened it out and slept atop it.  It has a nice-feeling liner, which you can take out and use separately, which is one of its selling points.  So, I cannot say if it even fits, but I am hanging onto it.