Writing for Extra Money Rocks

Sooooooo, as some of you know, I write blogs on the side for a bit of extra dough. I've made it a goal this year to pull in about 400 extra bones each month by ghost writing SEO blogs. If you have never heard of this type of work, it basically amounts to me writing about a topic based around something someone might search for on the internet. For example, if you wanted pizza in New Brunswick, you might search for "pizza new brunswick." Well in order for the search to link you to a delicious pizza in real life, the internet must magically grab content dealing with digital, internet pizza that have those words in it and then put that website in front of your face. Well my blogs help that happen for people. I don't do any of the dirty work, I just write blogs and they pay me money unless they suck (the blogs). 

Well I was watching Psych tonight and then tried to write a blog about "self storage units" when all of a sudden I just wanted to channel Shawn Spencer. I don't have anywhere else to put this, so I decided to put it here. Enjoy.  Oh yeah, I kind of end it abruptly because I realized that I still have like 7 blogs to write to hit my $400 goal this month. Busy busy busy. 

Why Self Storage Units? You. Have. Too. Much. Crap. 

Most people take advantage of a storage unit when they just don't have room to store all their possessions in one central location. Some typical stored items include old Beanie Baby collections, inherited trinkets that you don't dare throw away because you fear they may have captured the essence and soul of a deceased loved one, old mattresses that you have to hide from the FBI because you tore the tag off of them, and possibly some old furniture, among other things. While these are all fantastic ways to use a 10 x 10 cinderblock-enclosed space, here are three far more creative uses for self storage units.

The Eternal Bachelor

Perhaps the most obvious use of a self storage unit is hidden in the name itself: self storage. A storage unit can make a lovely studio apartment, provided you pick a unit that has an electrical outlet where you can plug in the free hot plate you won at RC Willey last year. The other plug will of course be reserved for your pre-paid cell phone, from which you can earn your rent money by scamming old ladies into thinking they've won a $20 gift card to Walmart, then of course you steal their social security checks. After all, when you're self-employed, you can work from anywhere. But if you feel the need to have air conditioning, carpet, and sex every once in a while though, perhaps the next use for a storage unit is more your style.

The Bar Fight that Got Out of Hand

So you've gotten yourself into a bit of a pickle and ended up with a dead guy in your trunk. No judging here, stuff like this happens. Now of course the first place the police are going to look is in the river, but you are one step ahead. A small storage unit is the perfect place for a quick body dump. Make sure you use a fake name though, you'd be surprised how many rookies make that mistake. And pay the deposit and first month in cash. If you are lucky, this will have gone down in late November, giving you a good three months before things warm up and the raccoons start getting interested. This is ample time to do one of three things:

• Fake your own death
• Leave the country
• Become a professional athlete (those dudes are always getting away with stuff)

If none of those options are feasible, get as many payday loans as you can and live it up for a while.

Patio Project

Sorry I haven't posted in forever, but I finally have something worth posting.  When we moved into our house, the yard was a little lacking.  They had just torn up the water main so there was a huge pile of dirt and rocks in the front, I fixed that. A wind storm had just come in and knocked over two trees, I fixed that.  There was a giant dead tree trunk in the back, I fixed that.  And don't forget about the abandoned chicken coop equipped with an overgrown sandbox.  I fixed that too.  Then I put in a garden, planted some stuff, tried to get my grass looking nice, all at different levels of success.  My latest project though was a bit more ambitious.  I had this space of nothingness to work with.

This was even after I cleaned it up a bit

Different angle

So I had an eye sore on my hands.  I didn't like the chain link fence or the terrible rock garden I had in the corner of the house.  I also didn't have a decent place to put my grill that my brother had bought me as a house warming gift.  That little nook-type corner of the house was essentially unusable.  The houses on our street were all built in the late '40s and so all of them had this same terrible L design with an unfinished corner.  Many of the houses have blown out the two walls and finished the corner, but I didn't have the skills or the money to tackle that project.  So I decided to build a patio and a pergola.

The first question I got when I explained my idea was this: what is a pergola?  Understandable, but once you see one you know exactly what it is, you just may not have known that those wooden structures have a name.

Generic pergola

When you search Google images, this is the first picture that comes up for "pergola".  It is a simple outdoor wood covering.  It can over a deck, a patio, or anything else really.  It gives a good deal of shade and a great place to have a meal outside.  And I wanted it!

So I got it.

And here it is.

Finished project

Notice the fancy solar lights

 This project was a beast, but I am very happy with the result.  I'm excited for next summer when we will get to really use it.  So what do you think?  Did I improve the space, or would you have preferred an overgrown rock garden?

Disney Princesses

Special thanks to Kenny, Bethany, and Diana for the content.

Disney princesses. Little girls try to dress like them and little boys think they’re gross. Teenage boys are creepily attracted to them. But some Disney princesses really aren’t princesses at all. They are mainly just peasants or wannabes in strange circumstances, circumstances that often lead to mental instability.

Belle is normal for about the first 20 seconds of Beauty and the Beast, but then the townspeople let you know she’s pretty much a loon. She reads a book to some sheep, talks to dishes, then falls for a hairy, talking bison/lion/gargoyle. It’s no wonder she’s crazy, look at her dad!

Mulan has a gender complex (also not a princess, and never becomes one either).

Ariel is almost a princess, but she is also a fish, which kind of disqualifies her.

Snow White is like 16, lives with 7 old tiny men, and kisses them all every night.

Cinderella commands an army of mice and has an abusive family. If the prince were to visit her home in the modern world, it would most likely be to arrest her for a triple homicide.

Rapunzel is great, but she just wouldn’t be able to function after years of solitary confinement, and her hair would have more junk living in it than David Bowie’s pants in The Labyrinth.  

But there is one princess that stands above the rest as legitimate royalty. I will give you a hint—she has a PET TIGER. That’s right, Jasmine is our winner. Even if Aladdin is the “princess” type character in that movie, Jasmine is still widely considered a Disney princess, and rightly so. She lives in a palace, has a sweet blue pendant headband, and did I mention she has a PET TIGER! She isn’t sent away by an evil step mother, captured by a witch, or taken by some crazy old woman, she runs away because she wants to run away. Jasmine knows her subjects and is aware of their dire situations, tries to help them, and even falls in love with a “street rat”. She is witty, intelligent, wealthy, compassionate, and let’s admit, she is pretty sexy for an animated character.

Even though Jasmine is a great princess, she is an exception to the rule. Almost every other classic Disney princess (not including the Frog Prince girl because I never saw it) is not a princess at all, and you know what, I think that’s just fine. It’s so much cooler to see a strange, poor, eccentric, or even non-human creature succeed rather than a princess. Princesses are great, but who wants to see a princess’ life get any better than it already is? They’ve already got it all. So thanks Disney for letting little girls all over the world know that even if they’re a crazy, deranged, psychotic child, they can one day be considered a beautiful princess. 

Cleaning the Keister

As many people know, bidets are popular bathroom accessories all around the world, but it seems that the proud people of the United States can’t quite seem to wrap their heads around the concept. Every time I tell someone about the awesomeness that is the bidet, I get a blank, grossed-out stare. My go-to illustration for bum-fountain bliss is dog poop on your shoe: which do you use to clean it off, the hose, or toilet paper? The choice is pretty easy, and almost everyone chooses the hose. For most people, something immediately clicks in their mind, and they realize that a bidet is superior, but they can’t admit it yet. Others come up with a list of exceptions for why toilet paper is still better. “Yeah, but…” No buts about it, mister.  Instead of admitting how rational that dog poop logic is, they put up even bigger mental barriers because they know they’re wrong.

Talk about chafing

What is the big deal with shooting a fountain of water at your poo-covered butt hole? Ok, admittedly that sounds strange, but I feel like we are living in the Stone Age with toilet paper! We seem to have been stuck in a butt-rut for the past two thousand years, using everything from corncobs to animal fur to wipe our precious tooshies. Greeks used rocks to clean their bottoms, and the Romans cleaned off with sponges soaked in saltwater. In China as early at the 6^th century, people were using rudimentary forms of toilet paper, and by the 1300s they were manufacturing huge amounts of the stuff. That’s all well and fine for them, but it’s all gross to me, and it seems incredibly obvious that we should have come up with something better by now.

With a bidet, all you have to do is spray some water to get everything off. You don’t get your hands dirty, you can get everything off, and you will never have to buy toilet paper again. Whatever you might think, it is much more hygienic and healthy. And people who think it’s weird to wipe with a rag, how do you dry off your derriere when you get out of the shower?

If we clean something as gross as poo off with just paper, why don’t we clean everything off with it? I can just imagine coming home sweaty after a tough workout and my wife says, “Aren’t you going to shower?” and I respond, “No, I’m just going to mop up with some dry tissue paper.” Of course, this is disgusting, but that’s exactly what we do when we wipe with Charmin. We may not want to face the facts, but we are far behind a lot of the industrialized world in butthole hygiene.

By the way, never touch anyone’s left hand if you go to the Philippines...

Ancient Writings

We have learned a ton about old cultures and societies from their writings. The Rosetta Stone was probably one of the greatest anthropological finds in history. It unlocked the secrets of the writings of ancient peoples, allowing us to study them and learn more about them. I can only imagine what societies of the future will study about us. I just really hope they don’t find ancient files of YouTube video comments and take them as viable archaic writings.

I can just imagine two highly evolved humanoids discussing what “Fake and GAY!!!!111!” meant to the ancient Americans. Then they would run a special on their version of Nat Geo about our primitive nature: that we enjoyed watching people fall on their faces, rack their scrota, and jumble their words after strong anesthesia. And then the one person who makes poignant, political comments would have all their writings turned into a religion.

Just missing the Dew

Then the History Channel would investigate the origins of “The Internet Troll.” Was there just one troll? Was there an entire secret society of trolls? Or was it just an entity that spammed the internet simply by willing it to happen? It would be kind of like us trying to find out who Jack the Ripper was 200 years after the fact. Middle-aged men who drank copious amounts of Mountain Dew and still lived in their parents’ basement would get the most attention.

Then they would probably find old episodes of Jersey Shore, that would really throw them for a loop.

If IKEA made cars...

When I was a little kid, the only thing I knew about Sweden was that they made little gummy fish and meatballs. And for the longest time I thought the only market for Swedish fish was the small eastern Idaho town of Malad. Whenever we would visit my Grandma there, we would do three things: fish at Crowthers Reservoir, eat some good bacon, and purge ourselves on Swedish fish. I never saw the candy anywhere else, so I figured they had a special market with old folks (I think the mean age in Malad is about 70). Well, I guess the GDP from Swedish fish and meatballs wasn’t good enough, because they moved into the furniture market—and the world is a better place for it.

Who knew the Swedes had so much engineering skill hiding behind those tight blonde braids and blue eyes. Their furniture is incredible! IKEA makes my life heavenly with tiny chairs, sleek designs, and space-saving, ready-to-assemble furniture. A trip to IKEA routinely sets me back about 150 bones, but I never have buyer’s remorse. Where else can you get an 8 dollar side table and feel like a king of modern interior design? I think they should get into other markets. Like the auto industry, for example.

If IKEA made cars, they would be cheap, efficient, and cute as a button! I’m sure an IKEA car would have a hideaway stove, room for 12 people, a separate bedroom, and still be the size of a Honda Civic, all at the price of a scooter. While we are admiring them so much, why don’t we just let the Swedes rule the world? Oh yeah, they did once and people hated them and their pointy, horned helmets. But I don’t think they would rape, pillage, and burn as much now as they did back then. They would just make cute tables for everyone, and maybe make Dancing Queen the world anthem.

A Day in the Life

When I tell people that I'm majoring in Chemical Engineering it usually elicits a response of, “oh wow” or, “so you must be smart”. Of course, it’s a little bit harder than the average major, but the coursework is nothing compared to how difficult it is to work with my classmates. I am going to explain my typical day as a student in the supposed “hardest major” at BYU.

               
 I start my mornings at 6:00 AM with a trip to the gym to get ripped, seems to be working out quite well, if you don’t believe me, ask me to take my shirt off, I will gladly do it, and you will never want me to put it back on. Actually that is all a lie, I try to work out at 6:00, but usually I put snooze on until 7:45 and either go late to my 8:00 AM class or just don’t go. It’s ok because it is just Chemical Engineering and Society. I already know all the stuff they teach me and I am probably the most liberal eco freak of all my crazy right wing, gun totin’ classmates (we talk about the environment a lot in that class, so their viewpoints come out). Then I get a two hour break where I do my homework and study while I watch the Price Is Right. I am sorry, but I think Drew Carrey is actually doing a bang up job.

               
Anywho, then I go back up to the Clyde Building for some Materials Science. I don’t mind that class because half of them are seniors and they seem to be a little more in touch with reality than my fellow juniors. Here is brief description of the stereotypical juniors in my classes.

Number 1

1. The girl who thinks out loud, shouting every answer to the professor because she knows she is smarter than everyone else.

               
2. The girl who only wears pink and blue that is only in the major to find a boy who is going to be rich someday, chemical engineers typically earn lots of money.

               

Number 3

3. The chunky kid with his butt crack hanging out who is always a half a step behind in the conversation.

               
4. The guy who thinks he is cool by blurting out the most complex mumbo jumbo to solve the simplest problem.

               
5. All the people who think number 4 is really cool.

               
This is my life.

I begin dealing with these people at 2:00 PM in Physical Chemistry. The first day of class, my professor said that P-Chem was the study of everything—so far he is right. I pretty much know a little bit about a ton of stuff. I won’t bother telling you because you won’t understand it, but no worries, I don’t either. My classmates seem to already know everything about everything, or at least you’d think that by the way they talk. I am surprised the professor can even teach with everyone and their dog finishing his sentences.

               
Then my day culminates with Fluids Mechanics, which is full of juniors:  internship hungry, blood thirsty, top-of-their-high-school-class, young engineers vying for top position. They go to the library every day, read 5 days ahead, do every homework problem 1,000 times and brag about how awesome their major is. They all seem to think that chemical engineering is the cat’s pajamas and that no one in another major can think on the same level as the dullest Chem E major.

                 
Spoiler alert— ALL THE OTHER MAJORS HAVE INTELLIGENT PEOPLE TOO—I seriously overhear them bad mouth English, History, and Art majors because they are lesser degrees. I wish there was some way to open their minds and shove something other than an equation in there, maybe a novel? It is frustrating, but I feel like I have an advantage over them because I actually know who Herman Melville, Monet, and Louis XIV were. I like to write, and believe it or not, I can carry on a conversation that doesn’t involve the intricacies of the Schrodinger Equation.

               
I hope I can survive the next two years…

On a Slightly Serious Note

I like to fish. Whether it’s threading a worm down a sharp, barbed hook or tying a tiny knot to a rooster tail, I like it. Diana and I went to Blue Lake in the La Sal National Forest this week to do a little angling. After inching down rocky forest service roads, we found ourselves at a small, clear lake brimming with hungry trout. They were jumping like crazy, ignorant that a couple of their friends would be my dinner.  I tied my line and tried a few lures, but they weren’t biting on anything, so I thought I would try something new, a marabou jig. I hadn’t ever used one, but I knew I had to make it dance up and down, so I thought I would give it a shot. I put out my line, started bobbing the lure about once a second and BAM! A bite! Ten minutes later I had two fish in my hot little hands—dinner.

Blue Lake

I am not a hunter, not even a good fisherman, so killing things is a little tough for me. Usually I just let the fish suffocate on the ground or knock them out, but we needed to eat them soon, so I had to kill them quickly. I used a technique that involved stabbing them in the “iky spot”, which is behind the eye, leading to the brain.  I took out my long fishing knife, got ready, but then had something of an epiphany. I felt bad killing another animal. I know it’s ok, God put animals on the earth for us to eat, but I was the one taking its life, I was in charge of this creature’s fate. It felt like the moment needed to be reverenced, that the fish deserved respect. Fish don’t feel pain like we do, their existence has little to no pleasures, and they live to be eaten, either by us or another animal, but I still felt like I should give my respect to it and nature. This led me to ponder other religions’ beliefs on animal slaughter.

Jewish dietary laws, or kashrut, state that animals need to be slaughtered in a certain way, by a pious person known as a shochet. The shochet is a person of Jewish faith, good character, and is often the rabbi in smaller communities. The knife used must be razor sharp and the animal must be bled first with a single clean slit to the throat, causing unconsciousness quickly and killing it humanely. These and other regulations make the meat kosher.

While not one of the five pillars of Islam, halal is the Islamic code of health similar to the kashrut. The halal method of slaughtering is called dhahiba and is the same as the Jewish form of slaughter; the only difference is that a prayer to Allah needs to be said at the time of killing. The method is controversial; many animal rights activists say that it isn’t as painless as they say. Studies have been done, but a clear consensus hasn’t been reached.  

It’s a little ironic that I thought of this as I was killing a fish because in both kashrut and halal laws, fish are excluded. Although I ended up killing the fish and eating them, I tried to do so respectfully and reverently. Even though there is a lot of controversy surrounding the Jewish and Islamic methods of slaughter, I commend them for their traditions and reverence towards nature.

To Save or Not to Save?

Thanks Mom and Dad!

I was driving around the other day and my attention was drawn to the little sticker in the upper left hand corner of my windshield. You know, the yellowish sun stained sticker that one that no one pays attention to until your car is 3,000 miles overdue for an oil change. So since we are going on a couple trips this week and both the mileage and the date on the sticker were embarrassingly far-gone, I figured I should get my oil changed. As a poor, starving, impoverished college student I thought I would save a couple bucks by doing it myself, so I did a little research on how to do it and how much money I would save. The following is a list of products I would need and conservative prices:

1 Oil Filter: $5.00

4 Quarts of Oil: $16.00 (at $4.00 per bottle)

Crappy Pan: $1.00 at DI

Finding a Way to Dispose of Old Oil: Sucky

Probably an Oil Filter Wrench: $10.00 on Amazon

So the total comes to a conservative $32.00. Of course I could reuse the oil filter wrench, so eventually it would pay for itself, the pan too, so let's say around $25.00. Jiffy Lube offers the service for around $30.00, and then I can get a $7.00 discount for being a student, so $23.00 total.

Let’s recap, this is what would happen if I did it myself: I would get dirty, I would have to get parts, and I would be saving negative $2.00, sounds pretty undesirable. Then I said to myself, “Wait a minute Jordan, don’t you want to have a more intimate relationship with your vehicle? Dont you want to know what's being put into your wonderful Honda CRV? And aren’t you tired of telling them you’ll wait until next time to change the gross air filter?” But then I reasoned with myself by saying, “I have a great relationship with my wife, but when she has a problem under the hood, I send her to the gynecologist, I don’t look it up on youtube and learn how to fix it. Why is the car any different?” That seemed to shut myself up because I received no rebuttal, which means I am going to Jiffy Lube.

Marriage, Bellies, and Babies

This picture makes me feel awkward.

I have discovered that there are four types of students at BYU: single, married, pregnant married, and married with children. They all have distinct views on life, school, and the other groups. I fall into the second, and happiest group—married. We have all the benefits of cheaper housing (just barely), government grants, sex, and we don’t have a child so we can do whatever we want whenever we want. So when someone gets married, they are banished from the sect of single people and forever become the weird married friend. And every time the single friends do see you all they can think about is the fact that you are married. You get the question, “So… how’s married life?” and you know what they’re really asking: "How's that forbidden fruit?" One of these times I’m just going to call them out on it and say that it’s great, but kind of messy and more work than you’d think.

Married people get along well with married people with children. It quells the baby hunger to play with a baby that isn’t yours. It’s always been my favorite thing to make faces at babies behind peoples’ backs in church. I love the myriad of reactions I get. There’s the happy, trusting baby who smiles and hides in their mom’s shoulder, then there’s the intellectual baby who just stares, unimpressed. I feel like those ones are studying me, saying in their head, “What a blooming fool, does he think I like to be patronized?” And then there’s the horrified baby who thinks I’m going to eat him. That’s when I pretend I’m asleep so the parents don’t turn around and see that I am the reason their baby hates church.

Pregnant married people are much stranger than married with children people. I don’t think they realize that people who aren’t familiar with the female gestation period have no idea what “33 weeks along” really means. I know that it takes about 9 months for a human to make a baby, and 2 years if you are an elephant, but I don’t want to divide the weeks by 4. When my wife gets pregnant, I am sure I will understand the nuances of the different stages and in what week certain junk happens, but right now, I have no idea. We don’t measure things in tiny quantities in other facets of life, why in pregnancy? When people ask me how much longer I will be in school, I say a little less than 2 years, not 98 weeks, or a little under 60 million seconds.

Well since this is my first post. I will make it interactive. You should leave a comment about your favorite interaction with somebody who belongs to a different one of these groups that was really awkward or foreign to you. My buddy Trevor came over to give me something one morning and while he was there Diana came out of the bedroom and said hi to us. Trevor and I have known each other forever, but I think it was hammered home that morning that I was married now, because he looked extremely uncomfortable. We just laughed about it. Well I will try to post something once every 168 hours, so be prepared for some awesomeness.