I couldn’t find my wallet this morning. Who has it? Did you find out anything interesting about me?

Spring Break is about spending!

Spending time with people is what I’m talking about. But as I charged
up my credit card, I noticed it was getting heavier too! Naw, I’m quite
blessed financially, and I have no problem sharing. This is what
happened tonight.

That’s me popping the buttons off my new shirt with Joe’s new “CALL ME”
hat on while Joe is chilling in his awesome new shirt and visor. He is
going to be Class AAA Dangerous this summer wearing that shirt! My oh
my…I look looney in that pic (I call it the clown look, as if I have a circus wig under that hat). But Joe is one slick dude.

Rosanne is an inspiration! I’ve gotta give away some clothes. Anecdote of mine on the topic:

Whew,
good long day with lots of heavy lifting! We crushed some tree jobs
then Joe and I spent the afternoon running from the police and putting
leaflets in newspaper boxes. And a school group meeting during Spring
Break. The depravity!

Job Notes
[1]
Much of my job involves driving, and I’m pretty good at the task. Never
an accident, plenty of tickets, and many roadside conversations with
the men in blue. Never a female in blue… Over the course of the year,
I spend about 60 cents per day on speeding, for the direct cost of
tickets and for litigation expenses. I also trade tree work with my
attorney.

One of my most favorite things to do is to wave at disgruntled drivers. You know the ones that don’t understand the concept of slower traffice, keep right. It is soooo much fun and soooo fulfilling to just smile and wave! I wish I could share these stories in person.

• Getting pulled over and looking back to see 3 squad cars and 4 officers.
• Rationalizing 80 in a 35 to an undercover cop. Oh, and drag racing at that. (verbal warning!)
• Playing down the fact that we were chasing deer through a farmer’s field with the Jeep.
• Explaining to the judge how passing a fire truck with its lights on sounds worse than it really is.
• Making the point that committee meetings are legitimate reasons to speed.
• Apologizing for spinning my tires through an intersection with my
  lights off at night while going straight through a turn-only lane with
  expired plates.

It’s fun having a stable of Jeeps! And now some pickup trucks, but I
would really like to have a sports car. Despite the sure bet that it
would be the end of me.

How do I let things like this happen. Whenever things get over-analyzed
in my life, they belly up and die on me. Always with girls. Always
lately. Why why why…. I could walk you through 100 examples of this
in the past 10 months, but I’ll spare you.

Part two: It’s curious how I wish but don’t wish I was better looking. How do you figure, Nick? I figure that I’m not bad looking but not the best looking
either. Which is fine. Actually, perfectly fine, and I should be happy
with that. So like 90% of the world, I figure I’m above average. But I see my brothers, all three of them. Two are male models.
Literally, have/had jobs as models and/or acting. Joe just gets cast in
great roles for plays and never got into modeling. But he’s a stud, I
know that. The effect of this: lots of female attention from equally
fantastic looking women. Hehe, we framed pictures of Perry’s girlfriends and hung them on the wall!

So I recognize that I’m not in that league. And I’m a little jealous.
But what league am I in? There’s no answer to that…leagues don’t
really exist. And I’m not looking for any compliments except from Pete.
But I’m thankful for how I look, especially as I see troubled lives of
people that are able to get by with their smashing good looks. And now
I’ll stop starting sentences with conjuctions!

In Chi Alpha last week, we actually talked a little about this. Okay, I
talked about it a lot since I can’t shut up. Unfortunately, they can’t
scroll past this like you can! We talked about how someone’s physical
appearance is more of a projection of our inner visage than we may
readily believe or accept. Six layers of foundation won’t fix a frown.
How beautiful a genuine smile is! How beautiful it is when someone’s
heart is just glowing wth love beamed direct from God. It’s awesome.

When I walk into the Business Administration building of my school, I’m
either wearing work clothes (on the left) or my preppy business attire (Frat-boy
look, as it’s been called). In my work clothes with my name emblazoned
on my chest, I get a lot of stares as in, “the tree you’re supposed to
climb is outside, you nummy” and other double-takes. With a good preppy
outfit as picked out by my sister Beth, though, I get checked out
and how. It’s really funny, honestly. I can do the same thing walking
through the hallway. Smile at a girl. In uniform? She looks away.
Dressed “well”? She smiles, sometimes a smile and a lock. Interesting
and puzzling and disheartening all at the same time.

Where is this coming from? Most recently, things are stemming partly
from a certain brother of mine who is dating a very beautiful girl. Ack!
This is going to be so childish and emo and bloggish and everything I
don’t want it to be! I haven’t found a girl in years that he thought
was beautiful. So I’m just not in his league…. See above.

I joined Xanga Premium. My IntelliMouse battery has lasted over 100 days.

I’ve seen this label a lot lately!

As part of my Nick-is-going-to-be-healthy program, I’m drinking a half
gallon of milk a day (that’d be eight eight-ounce servings). It’s a
superb source of protein, sugar (!), and a secret source of caffeine.
I’ve completely rejected soda for several months now and am doing far
better regulating my energy.

It helps to have a more steady stream of energy when I’m trying to work
for 70 hours in a row! But I know things will only get worse as the
season gears up. Tree and landscape companies are about to face the
most intense part of the year, and we will soon have hundreds of
customers expecting us to be there yesterday.

I’m up for the challenge! I just wish I didn’t have a full-time class
load too….. So this is a heads-up as well that I won’t be the most
prolific writer, but I should have plenty of crazy life experiences to
share!

Lessons Learned the Hard Way

[#2] In the same breathe, DO NOT tell someone that you don’t have feelings for them but rather for their best friend.

A
week late but better than never, I want to let the world know that I
saw the most amazing high school drama production of my life in
Appleton last Saturday. I imagined that they would do a good job, but I
had no idea that the $10 I was paying was getting me a $40 Broadway
show.

The roles were played so well, and the “Cast A” that we saw were
definitely A+ material. I know that I’m going to have trouble going to
high school plays from now on…. Maybe I’ll just have to go to
Appleton each year now. I think this was a big deal to them too,
though, being the first performance of Aida of it’s kind (off-Broadway,
etc…).

If you learn nothing else from the entry, it’s pronounced A-eeda. It
was an opera to Giuseppi Verdi’s music in 1871. The story is set in
Egypt and otherwise parallels my tragic-romantic-comedy life. Although
I still think Nicolas Cage in More Than 60 Minutes Late would be a good
movie of my life.

Casey knew the lead male role Andy who played
Radames, and we went out afterwards in the surprisingly urban Appleton
downtown to a coffee shop called…and I forget this everytime…Copper
Rock.

Okay, nighty-night for Nicky who has stayed awake for 44 hours now with
only 2 short naps (one on a bed, one on a couch). Plowing is great….but in March? Bring on the
spring time! I wanna see the bulbs in my pick-up truck bed, hehe…

Edit: I just went upstairs, and it’s snowing again…almost an inch on
the ground. Hmm….I guess it’ll just be another nap! Tomorrow: Ryan’s
birthday party at Prime Quarter and Pete’s gig at Sprizzo Gallery Caffe.

You do NOT know anyone else in the world like me.

I started growing grass in the back of my truck last summer, and
this winter, I planted bulbs as well. As soon as they poke up, I’ll
have pictures on here for you.

Kill the Cats

Wisconsin
is considering allowing the hunting of cats. Not cougars or mountain
lions or tigers on the loose but putty-tats: Sylvester the cat. Morris
the cat. Garfield.
     
The aim is to prevent the mass killing of birds by cats, mostly of the
feral — i.e., wild — variety. In other words, some people want to give
granny a shotgun so she can kill Sylvester before he gets Tweety Bird.

I’m more of a dog guy, but I like cats. Nonetheless, a cat massacre makes more sense than you might think.

Let’s start with the big picture. If you know anything about American
environmentalism, you know that Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring,
is a secular saint. Time magazine named her one of the “100 People of
the Century.” In 1992 a highfalutin panel of distinguished experts
named Silent Spring as the most influential book of the last
half-century. “More than any other (book), it changed the way
Americans, and people around the world, looked at the reckless way we
live on this planet,” writes Philip Shabecoff in A Fierce Green Fire,
his history of U.S. environmentalism.

As the name suggests, the thesis of Silent Spring was that the birds
were dying from the ravages of DDT and other pesticides. The chemical
was found to thin the eggshells of some species of birds, most notably
eagles and falcons — which, a pedant might add, are not particularly
known for their contributions to melodious springs.

Carson’s science was deeply flawed, partly because we’ve learned a lot
more since then and partly because she was interested in scoring
ideological points. She asserted, for example, that DDT was a
carcinogen in humans, which isn’t true. For a thorough debunking of the
Rachel Carson myth, see Ronald Bailey’s “Silent Spring at 40″ in the
June 2002 issue of Reason.

Anyway, while Carson’s cancer scare was a big deal, the part of the
book which has kept Silent Spring on the shelves is the bit about how
spring would no longer bring a symphony of songbirds.

Well, the inconvenient truth is that cats kill more American birds, particularly songbirds, than DDT and pesticides ever did.

Wisconsin is considering allowing residents to shoot feral cats in part
because a respected study found that felines kill between 7.8 million
and 217 million birds in Wisconsin alone. Data from a Michigan study
suggest that some 75 million birds are killed there just in the summer
alone.

Estimates for how many birds cats kill in the United States vary almost
as widely. The lowest estimates are around 100 million and go up to the
2.5 billion, though the consensus seems to hover around half a billion.
What this leaves out, of course, is that many vulnerable bird species
are particularly threatened by cats (and, alas, sometimes dogs as
well), a non-native predator that often kills small animals for the fun
of it.

Cat defenders say that this is all bogus. If cats didn’t slaughter the
birds, natural predators would. Maybe, but they are, uh, natural
predators, and nature’s a big deal for environmentalists, right? Or
have I been reading the wrong magazines? They also claim that losing
habitat to development is a bigger threat than cats. OK, but even if
that were true in some places, why should that get cats off the hook?

This raises an important insight into what is really going on here. The
objection to DDT and pesticides has a great deal to do with the fear of
technology and material “progress.” For example, Carson’s memory is
still invoked regularly by the anti-pesticide movement today.
Anti-pesticide activists claim that some 67 million birds die every
year from such chemicals. In other words, compounds that make food
cheaper and more abundant for everybody kill between 10 and 20 percent
of the number of birds killed by cats every year. And yet,
environmentalists are terrified of making cats a major issue, because
it will split the movement. An official at the World Wildlife Fund
calls the cat issue a “third rail” for environmentalists.

Whether DDT was as bad for birds as Carson and her heirs claim is still
the subject of great controversy. What is not controversial is that the
bans and regulations Carson’s work implemented came with real costs. In
the Third World, malaria continues to kill millions because
Carson-induced DDT phobia. The bias against pesticides produces lower
food yields with no proven benefits for human health.

Meanwhile, the contribution of feral cats is 100-percent aesthetic. We
like kitties. This raises an outrageous double standard. Dogs — our
closest allies in the animal kingdom — can be shot for harassing
wildlife or livestock. But free-loading cats are protected when they
massacre birds for sport. Where’s the justice?

This isn’t to say that there aren’t other important reasons why spring
is becoming more silent. But the loss of habitat, pesticides, and the
advent of wind power all bring significant social benefits. While
tolerance for the multitude of feral, often diseased, wild cats is
pure, spoiled self-indulgence.

— (c) 2005 Tribune Media Services

Today I added a review for your viewing pleasure on the topic of Constantine, a movie I saw on Friday with Chris and his Locust St. Ladies.

Check out the Instant Messenger Handbook for some good laughs and good points about this form of communication that I use waaaay too much! Just ask Chris.