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Big Knoxville Overground Event Tonight!

KO is working on building a micro-enterprise development center at 35 Market Square and is hosting a social mixer there tonight (link to the flyer).

From KnoxViews:

Their proposal, modeled off of the top-ranked San Francisco Renaissance Center, entails using the space as a resource where startups in a variety of industries (specifically companies positioned to bring in the majority of their revenue from outside Tennessee) can grow around a community of other startups, self-employed professionals, and organization representatives that specifically serve the startup community.

If you fall into any of these categories, swing by and check it out! And, as always, there’s the weekly Wednesday open house at the coworking space on Kenesaw where you can meet cool KO people and find out more!

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Good Peanut Butter and Good Toilet Paper

…the rest of life is butter if you have those two things.  Really good butter.

Check out this awesome video of our ol’ buddy at ktownlowdown and his (much) better half, CouponKatie. You may have to watch the video twice, because the first time through you’ll most likely be distracted with thoughts of, “how did that guy land her?!?!?”

I don’t think such things, because I’m in a similar situation myself.

UPDATE–Had to link to the video…the autoplay was driving me nuts.

Katie is a serious money saving ninja and has built an incredible resource for families looking to save money in our area.

If I had any money I would actually pay her to come help me save it!!!

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Gift Ideas for Heads of State

Over on my “short post” blog today I linked a story about the gift President Obama gave to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown–25 of the awesomest DVDs this country has to offer. I mean, how cool is that? I wanted that for Christmas, but I don’t have any friends or relatives that can pull those kinds of strings.

It would have been cool if Mr. Obama could have swung a Wii Fit, but those are tough to find.

Ok, seriously? DVDs? I think, as a general rule, you should stray away from giving heads of state gifts that you can get on Amazon or in the White House Gift Shop, although the James Bond Blu-ray set or a Kindle 2 would be cool. But I’ve received better gifts than DVDs in the past year, and I couldn’t get elected to the board of my HOA.

So, of course, I have some ideas for future gifts that are better than DVDs if the President ever decides to actually give something thoughtful or significant. These are all things I think the President could actually pull off:

  1. An external hard drive with all the music he downloaded back in the Napster days
  2. Offer to help him move, and actually follow through
  3. Tickets to an Oprah taping (transportation to Chicago not included)–bonus if you can swing a lifetime membership to the Oprah Book Club
  4. Let him “ride bitch” on one of the motorcycles in the Presidential motorcade
  5. Offer to let him crash on the couch for the weekend
  6. Autographed photo of the cast of Facts of Life
  7. A couple of four day passes to Disney
  8. Cubs tickets
  9. Hook it up for him to ring the opening bell at the NYSE (on a non-trading day)
  10. Teach him how to work the teleprompter
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Boring Work, Varmint Rifles, and Recycling BBs

What a weekend–finished tile demolition project, bought some soy milk, and took care of several administrative tasks.

There was some fun in there too. We went up on the mountain to a birthday party which, as all good birthday parties do, involved a few pops, pulled pork, a discussion on the merits of golf carts as local transportation, and the firing of several rounds from a “varmint rifle”.

It became clear to me that I’m an even worse shot now than I was when I shot often. At one time I was a pretty decent shot. Never great, but decent. Of course, I’m turning this into justification for an air rifle purchase in this month’s budget. I figure the cost of that along with the price of a few thousand BBs is much cheaper than the amount of ammunition it would take for me to ever be able to hit the broad side of a barn again.

By the way…did anyone else run their own BB recycling program as a kid? If I remember, a piece of plywood behind your aluminum can targets did a pretty good job of knocking them down, after they’d been slowed by the can of course. I don’t think we were smart enough to put some sort of catch tray at the bottom of the plywood. We probably spent more time picking up BBs off the ground and shaking them out of cans than we did shooting. Once we moved on to shooting bumblebees under the pear tree it became too treacherous to try and collect “reloads”.

Sorry for the autobiographical pause…just thinking that marksmanship skills are something that should be maintained throughout one’s lifetime. You never know when you will have to take down a squirrel or rabbit for dinner.