A couple months ago, I sent Chuck Palahniuk (author of such awesome novels as Fight Club, Choke, and Survivor) a letter. He accepts mail about once every couple years for only a month. If your letter is postmarked in that month, he will write you back.

This time, Chuck said that he wanted to hear about something we had recently accomplished or were proud of. I told him about how I had just recently bought my first new car and had started attending grad school classes.

Well, I received my package back from Chuck the other day, and it was pretty close to perfect. It was probably the most awesome random box of stuff you could ever imagine getting. In addition to the letter he wrote (Your power mallard is enclosed!!), he included the following items:

• 1 Stuffed mallard duck
• 1 Harmonica
• 1 Switch-Blade comb
• 1 Fake severed finger
• 1 Box of chocolates
• 1 Box of mints
• 1 Light up Christmas light lollipop thing
• 4 Fake gold coins
• 6 Plastic astronomy shape things
• 2 Packets of flowers to plant
• 1 Packet of watermelon pop rocks
• 1 Little Chinese New Year’s popper thing
• 1 Plastic spider
• 1 4-pack of crayons (toxic)
• 2 Sheets of magnets
• 2 Bouncy balls
• 1 Package of birthday candles
• 1 Egg of silly putty
• 1 Bookmark
• 1 Temporary tattoo of some Chinese symbol
• 1 4-page coloring book (to go with crayons)
• 2 signed CD’s of Chuck’s readings

Pretty freakin’ awesome if I don’t say so myself…but I did…so there it is.

w00t! I passed my Zend Certification test and I’m now a Zend Certified Engineer!. There are less than 500 ZCE’s in the US and only 18 in North Carolina. It’s basically like the Java certification, except it’s for PHP.

Feel free to throw money at me or bow to my greatness as necessary.

I’ve posted the pictures we took in San Francisco last week. Check em out here.

I’ve put up pictures of our other two pumpkins from Halloween. Amy ran into some issues with her Futurama one, so she opted for a cool ghost design. I did Bowser, as promised.

Check em out here.

I don’t wanna jump the gun, but it seems I might have rid myself of comment spam. I haven’t received any in the last 5 days, so that’s a really good sign. Let’s hope it actually has worked. *knocks on some wood* Let me know if you have any issues with making comments or anything.

We were in our room last night when we heard a loud bang and felt the whole room shake. We went to our window and saw a big cloud of smoke rising up over some buildings across the street. We didn’t think much more of it other than, “crazy…”.

I decided to go up the street to get some McDonald’s for the food, and I heard some sirens coming and then saw like two fire trucks, some police cars, and another emergency vehicle coming down the street and turning into the PayPal / eBay parking lot. I had to check out more of what was going on. I managed to snap a couple of (really really crappy) photos and a short video on my phone, before a truck drove up yelling at a dude near the building. I talked to a couple of people who worked there who said they heard that it was a gas explosion, but they’ve apparently decided that it was some kind of explosive device and was not an accident.

No one was hurt they say, but the blast was strong enough to blow out a large first story window.

Very crazy…

Here are a couple of really awful pictures and a very small video (I only had my cell phone on me…). You can hear the alarm going off in the video and see the lights flashing.