karenmeal

You don't have to.. But it's been my experience that it may be easier to pro-pack a brand new canopy. (I've been a packer for 5 years.) The canopy seems more contained and less likely to slip out from underneath your knee. Also, there are a bunch of people who will be able to show you some tricks for getting it into the bag, not as many people will be willing to mess with your flat-pack considering they don't know much about it. Buy your local packer some beer or something and have them teach you, it's really not that hard. In fact, I taught myself from the directions that are at the back of the Poynter's Manual (I forget which one it was, I think it was II.) So maybe get a zerox copy of that and practice at home. -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

Awww... Pshaw! -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

THE PERFECT BREAKFAST... AS A WOMAN SEES IT.. YOU'RE SITTING AT THE TABLE ENJOYING A NICE PLATE OF PANCAKES AND SAUSAGE WHILE YOUR CHAUVINIST PIG OF AN EX-HUSBAND GETS NEUTERED FOR BEING SUCH AN INSENSITIVE ASSHOLE WHO THINK IT'S COOL TO CHEAT ON HIS WIFE WITH SOME PLAYBOY-SILICONE-BOTOX-ENHANCED-HO. BUT YOU GOT THE CAR AND THE RIGS, SO IT'S COOL. AND SOME HASHBROWNS. DAMNIT. "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

Do I win? I skipped A, B, and C and went straight to D When I first started jumping I was eager to learn as much as I could about the sport. Even before my first AFF jump I had downloaded the SIMs off the internet, printed it off my computer and had it bound! No instructor had to tell me to do this, I just started researching the sport. It seemed obvious to me that one would want to educate themselves as much as possible to make it more safe. I had that thing practically memorized within a few weeks. While I didn't go do the license tests I surely was able to pass them. It is discouraging to see newer jumps who let studying their SIM get in the way of them receiving a higher license. When I was student I was happy to read every available bit of information. And for the people planning on going straight to a D license.. don't forget you still have to qualify and take the tests for all the licenses you are skipping. But you only have to pay for the license you are getting! -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

Different Caravan, silly! -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

The logistics of that are interesting. "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

My boyfriend (of 4 years) and I went through an experimental phase. It was fun.. maybe next summer we'll go searching for some new places. As a side note... the waterfall thing isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's loud.. you get pounded with water in a non-sexy way and have to hang onto slippery rocks for support. But atleast we can check that one off our list.. -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

On top of a huge stack of bales of hay. In a waterfall, just for the dramatic effect. Front seat of a caravan. Back seat of a caravan. On the runway numbers. Middle of the landing area at LP, it's tradition. "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

I don't know what I expected to see when I clicked on a picture that YOU posted in a thread on sex with hermaphrodites. But for some reason I was very surprised! "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

I don't have my recipe handy.. But I've done the breakfast thing before with steel cut oats, walnuts, and chopped dried cranberries and apricots. Add a bit of cream and brown sugar.. Yum! "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

Well, I have to disagree. I think that those complaints are somewhat unreasonable. The "wealthy" people who are paying higher taxes because of a higher property value are also paying higher income tax, more sales tax (presumably they are consuming more goods because of their increased income level) and whatever other taxes you have in your area. Those taxes go to support a number of programs that the "wealthy" people (I say "wealthy" because these people may just be middle-class) may see no direct, personal benefit from, that's just the way it works. However, what makes the issue of funding in education more screwy, is that an area that provides poor education ends up with a local depression that then causes the area to get even less funding and everything just kinda spirals downwards from there. So this poor area has poorly-educated children who have less options available to them. Perhaps their best option then is for a factory job, except that now the factory jobs have been shipped overseas. So now these people are unemployed or working at Burger King making minimum wage which is not enough to support their family, so they get a second job, and poof, they have no time leftover to raise children, and advocate for their childrens best interests; equitable funding for public schools. On the other hand, the wealthy area has well-educated children that go on to make a comfortable living, can afford childcare and even have time leftover to be advocates for the needs of their own children, do bake sales to raise money, organize groups of people to support certain politicians who have the wealthy peoples interests in mind.. etc. Perhaps I'm just a socialist at heart, but I think equal funding is the answer to a number of problems in society. (And if not the answer, at least a good start.) -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

What you are saying does happen sometimes, but your view is much more jaded than necessary. I go to school and try to get the best education possible. I take the classes I need to graduate and classes that I think will help to make me a more useful member of society (sociology, anthropology, history, law, government...), and try to glean the most information out of my teachers and the textbook as possible. Consequently, I have a very high GPA. The problem that you describe is not an issue with what schools are doing. The issue is with peoples attitudes about college, that you "must" go to college. If people think of college more as a training program for a future career and not as something that their parents are making them do, then they will approach their classes in a much different manner. Which also means that parents shouldn't force their kids to go to college, encourage, but don't force. When you force them to do that, those are the annoying kids in class who complain about kids like me who are in the front row and ruin the curve. -karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

Yes.. non-religious. But actually... I think that the solution to the problem of crappy schools is in how funds are distributed. When the funding of a school is directly correlated with the property value of an area then you are going to get great schools in the nice neighborhoods and shitty schools in the poor neighborhoods. I grew up in a nice neighborhood, and consequently I received an excellent public education. But the kids in the county over from me in rural appalachia.. they didn't get such a great education and are at a much greater disadvantage. I think that for public schools the money from property taxes needs to be pooled over the entire state and then distributed on a per pupil basis. It's shocking to realize the way that the funds are actually distributed. But this fix isn't going to happen until wealthy people, or people who can't see the big picture and the society-wide benefits, quit with their NIMBY attitude and realize why we have a public school system in the first place.. so that everyone can receive an equal education. -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

I think that your notion of what people on welfare are like is very skewed. When you say ridiculous lifestyle do you mean working a full-time minimum wage job, trying to feed a small child as a single parent, pay for that child's daycare needs and pay bills? I think that that is a more accurate description of someone on welfare than "people who live ridiculous lifestyles". Check out the minimum wage in your state, it's about $7.50 here. Which means a 40 hour work week leaves you with about $300 before taxes.. that is less than $15,000 per year. Try working out a budget for that which includes paying for rent, electricity, garbage, water, food, child-care costs, gas, car insurance, car payments and trying to save for retirement or the child's education. Maybe that will help your perspective a bit. -karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

Finished my homework.. that part took all of five minutes. Any notion as to why my computer would convert spaces and periods over to "%2E"? "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

Hoooray! I figured it out.. I opened up the rtf file in word, read that and realized that the name of the installer file had somehow gotten scrambled into something like this: MaxMSP_4%2E5%2E6_Runtime_Installer%2Emsi When it should have been something like this: MaxMSP 4.5.6 Runtime Installer.msi So I renamed it.. and VOILA! I can do my homework now! Weird...... Thank-you guys for the help! Thank-you so much Bruce for e-mailing that to me.. if I ever meet you remind me to give you a free pack job or something. Thankyou!!! -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

Unfortunately I don't have a phone that works when I'm at my computer. I only have a cell, and I live in a basement that gets no reception. That's also frustrating me. But I really appreciate your offer. I'm trying to open up what Bruce emailed me, but it's asking me what program I want to use to open it with? This is supposed to be a program that I use to open other files with.. Now I'm really confused again. -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

I am using DSL, I have a pentium 4 with windows XP Pro. When I try to just open the file, it tries to open and then it times out and shows the cannot find server page. My boyfriend is pretty good with computers and was also stumped. I'm almost positive that we're not just making some goofy error.. it's got to be something to do with security settings that we don't know about/firewall stuff. -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

I don't really know what else I can tell you.. Right clicking, choosing to save it in a folder on my desktop. Going to the folder on the desktop, opening said folder, nothing is there, but it does say that it had been updated seconds ago, which tells me that I'm not accidentally putting the file into some other place. Does that make sense? I'm clueless as to why this isn't working, it has worked for others in my class.. Could it be a firewall problem? I know nothing about firewall stuff. -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

I've tried saving it and deleting it after it failed to open atleast 15 times. Can you send it to me, pretty please?? "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

I've tried it with internet explorer. I've tried right clicking on the link and then saving it to a folder on my desktop. However, when I go to open up the file from the folder to extract the files, nothing is actually contained in the folder. It's like it goes through the motions of downloading and appears to work, but nothing is actually there. Does that make sense? "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

OK.. For my class I need to download and install this link: http://www.synthesisters.com/download/maxmspruntime456.zip My teacher reccommended that I use Mozilla Firefox to do this.. so that is what I am doing. After having tons of trouble, someone suggested that I needed something to unzip the files with, so I downloaded and installed EZ Zip. I still can't get the file to open. I click on the link, and it times out. The same message you get when your internet is down, or the site is down. Tried all the things it suggested. Now what? I'm so frustrated because I've spent 4 hours trying everything I can think of to figure this out with no progress... and I should be working ony the actual homework, not dealing with technical issues. Argh. Anyways, Can someone pretty please help me? I'll give you a pack job (if you're in my area) if your advice helps me solve the problem. Thanks, -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

OK, So I didn't want to hijack this thread and turn it into reasons why support of the death penalty is hypocritical for Christians, but a brief word on that. People make mistakes, sure, all the freaking time. But things like adultery, lying, not respecting your parents, those are to be expected. But after careful reasoning, to come to the conclusion that the death penalty and the bible can jive? That's just freaking wrong. I'm not going to be openminded about this, because even the bible does not encourage you to be openminded about this, it is fairly blunt on this matter. Here is a pop quiz for you to show how interpreting the bible is not that hard and scary, it will also show you how these people you ar defending are very wrong: 1.) After a group of people tried to stone a woman for her sins, Jesus stopped them by saying, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." This might mean: a.) Only women can stone sinners. b.) Kill the sinner, afterall, we proved that they committed the sin. c.) After the first guy throws the stone, it's free game for everyone. d.) Since we're not perfect, we shouldn't pass judgement on others. If you coudn't guess, the correct answer is d. 2.) "Thou Shalt Not Kill" could be interpreted: a.) Don't kill people on Sundays. b.) Only kill people who have killed people. (Two negatives equals a positive.) c.) Don't kill wealthy white men, kill everyone else. d.) Both b and c are correct. e.) None of the above. The correct answer is E. However, if you looked at records of the use of the death penalty (especially states in the bible belt) you may think the correct answer is d, but that is wrong. -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

Well Krisanne, you should go get the book and read it! I would give you mine but Jeff has to read it, then my mom, then my brother. Do you think the reason that Carter wasn't a very effective politician was because he wasn't playing the game? (Lying, taking money.. stuff like that) I'm just curious because I don't know much about him. (wasn't alive then.) Anyways... I will definitely give it to my brother, he recently got me a book about Christianity to read, so I figure a book about politics written by a Southern Baptist would be appropriate for him. It's a fairly easy read too. So... I thought that someone would want to come and try to discredit Jimmy Carter. Should I start posting passages from the book? -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

I feel it would do my brother good to read this book. As a Southern Baptist, Jimmy Carter strongly disagrees with many things that we now associate with the religious right, mostly he writes about the big ones, support of the war in Iraq, and support of President Bush and what his administration has done in the last six years. He also recognizes the importance of the seperation of church and state and speaks out against things like teaching intelligent design in the classroom and having prayer in public schools. I am not a religious person myself. One thing that sickens me about organized religion is the blatant hypocrisy that exists that everyone seems to be so blind to. So often we see people picking and choosing the bible verse that best suits their needs and ignoring the fundamental (peaceful) teachings of their chosen religion. (ex: Christian support of the death penalty... how the heck does that work?) However Jimmy Carter actually seems to live his life according to his belief system, AND he used to be a politician! Anyways.. I was hoping some people had read it, perhaps Republicans who could tell me exactly what points they disagree with. If you accept the stuff in this book as truth, it would have to sway your political views. -Karen "Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham