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methanol yall

Posted by Aaron - 25/11/08 at 03:11:00 am

Raiding my dad’s liquor cabinet isn’t as fun as it was in high school. But now I found his chemistry cabinet in the basement. Methanol Martini yall.

JUST KIDDING. Don’t drink methanol kids. Scientist Dave Aupperlee says it makes you go blind, and they make you drink ethanol to get rid of it.

Gross

Stick 2 PBR/Sparks.

The economy, like Cannonburg’s plunge

Posted by Aaron - 24/11/08 at 04:11:00 pm

A friend was laid off on Monday. He told me about it Thursday, exactly one week after I visited him in Denver and on my Welcome Home tour across the country. He sold lumber for a national company and had for about three years. He was good at his job, using his fluent Spanish skills to penetrate the growing Hispanic market in Denver. Two years ago, when I visited him on my way out to California, things were booming. He had just bought a new Subaru and had another new one by time I visited him on my return trip.

But the industry had changed. He was working 10 to 12 hour days to sell the same amount of lumber he was two years ago. Clients weren’t paying him and he spent most of his time fighting with them over payments rather than smoozing them over 2×4. He told me that if I saw the what the price of some type of popular lumber now compared to two years ago, I would understand. The company, he said, was not much better.

“take a look at this week’s performance on Google Finance,” he wrote during our conversation. “looks just like the plunge at cannonsburg – short, steep and shitty.”

He said on Monday, his boss called him into his office and told him they couldn’t afford it anymore. For as much as he complained about his job – he wanted to look for a new one – the possibility of being laid off was never part of our discussion.

He wasn’t sad or mad or depressed. The world wasn’t crashing in. Relieved actually, a response to the situation I became familiar with when my father was laid off a few years ago. He took pride in getting things accomplished that Thursday, making a pot of coffee, playing with the dog.

Of course his girlfriend, a public school teacher who had recently moved in with him, was a bit more nervous. She had bills to worry about. He wanted to go skiing.

I agreed to meet up with him when he comes back to Michigan around Christmas. Unemployment drinks, he said. I fear more friends might join us that night.

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