word!

I realize this blog has been getting a tad stale and languishing. There has been reasons. First and foremost, I’ve changed hosting and am no longer able to use Movabletype without upgrading hosting…. too bad I learned this after the fact. So now it’s on to Wordpress which seems to have a bunch of the same things going for it, with a bit different.

I’m sure the only thing that matters is content, content, content. I have some….. it just needs to get out. Since the last post I’ve been to Germany and back and did a bunch more interesting stuff, so I’ll have to update on that all.

Hope things are tiding over for now….

Having had the choice of spending July 1-6 curled up in the fetal position pondering the relavance of the 4th of July holiday or traveling to the state of Michigan, I boldly decided to attempt the latter. Plus getting the oppurtunity to be able to take only one vacation day off of work to get said holiday; I was stupid not to.

What’s in Michigan you might ask, I might says trees, but that would be rhetorical. Actually, there’s a girl I met some 14 years previous on a 4-H exchange trip. I’ve kept in touch and it’s always an interesting time when I go to visit.

As for the timing of this trip I decided renting a car would be the prudent thing to do, seeing as I can’t imagine how much fun it would be if my car got me stranded in like Chicago somewhere and airplane flights were mucho expensive for a last minute traveler. The prospect of driving nearly 14 hours was not exciting and in retrospect still wasn’t grand. I believe the parts that made it sucketh big time were the said time allotted and also Chicago, the drivers nightmare.

I actually didn’t do so shabby on timing. Going out I started from Gaylord at 7:00 a.m. (sharp) and arrived in Rochester’s airport a bit after 9 for car rental. But someone at Budget decided to sleep in so I didn’t get out of there until 10 am which I originally had planned on timewise. So with fuel/personal pitstops, upwards of 1 hour waiting in traffic on a Saturday night in Chicago and a time change; I made East Lansing, MI by 9:30 pm.

Coming back was pretty much same timewise. I left at 8:00 a.m. and made Chicago by noon after trying to take some back roads that looked like they would avoid Chicago. Seems they had stoplights every 2 miles maximum. That got old fast and I decided to try the parking lot… oops the interstate. Yeah, interstates in Chicago at say 1 p.m. suck. It took me upwords of an our to get out of Chicago by exiting it in the south and trying to fly across most of Illinois instead of trying for more of the gridlocked interstate that the rest of Chicago may have been. Having made time up that way afforded me the oppurtunity to visit a DQ in Decorah, IA that in managed by a family I got to know through Green Isle’s CTC. So that was worthwhile too. All said I arrived back in Gaylord at roughly midnight. So with time delayed on interstates, adding a hour change over and various fuel/personal pitstops, I also didn’t make too terrible of time. 15 going out, 16 coming back on a timeframe scheduled for 14 hrs? Not too bad in my book.

Driving that distance solo makes you wonder how truckers can do that day in and day out. Must love driving and/or have seats that are luxurious. Oof-Da!

Other than hanging out with my friend, we also got to see the Piotter Center and Piotter Highway, both roughly located in Adrian, MI (just northwest of Toledo,Ohio). Although not immediate relation, I have corresponded with family members from the area and they said their ancestors came from Pomerania, the same as my line of Piotters. Except in Michigan they don’t pronounce the name Pee Otter, but Pee- Odor.

Interesting.
Good times.
Ego-trip for sure!

… and try this again… hopefully it all goes as splendidly as it first did.

Odd you may say, but I don’t think so. I’ve been trying to track down something like this for a while now. So when/if I change archives links to particular posts will be flexible and change as well. Used following sites for guidance:

Rayners.org

and following from Diveintomark.org:

Not remarkable stuff but every little bit helps make things workout better. This Macros thing is interesting, seems most people use it to convert into a real smiley or such, but a few are pushing it a tad more hardcore. I might revisted this again if something more seems interesting.

After searching Google for a while, decided to plug in the ol’ surname ~ Piotter and low and behold my newest endevor was uncovered.

Few days back I registered piotter.tk, which points to this blog. The DotTK refers to a small bunch of islands bobbing around the Pacific. Seems they have embraced the internet to help pay for things in their country. So I registered this domain in hopes of having another Piotter domain name. One stipulation though:

Can I lose my free Dot TK domain name?

Yes, having a free Dot TK domain name does not give you the legal ownership. Dot TK allows you to use your chosen Dot TK domain name as long as you have 25 visitors or more on your domain name once every 90 days. Activity must include website access to your Dot TK website. If you don’t have more than 25 visitors to your website in 90 days, your website is either not up or you did not provide any content. That will result in a cancellation of your registration. Your domain name will then be automatically available for other registrants to register either as a free or as a paid registration.

I’m sure I won’t visit it that much, and this domain will probably expire in 90 days, but this seems like a decent way to link to a garbarled web address for a highly frequented place. Heck, they even set up email forwarding up for you.

Just a very interesting domain register.