The Excitement Builds

This week is promising to be a very exciting week. On Wednesday, we have a dinner with my boss's boss and all her staff. For some historical reason, I am considered part of her staff despite the fact that I no longer work for her. So we'll be dropping The Childrens off at one of HannahC's friend's houses along with some pizzas and then heading to a fancy restaurant in Olde Towne.

I try to keep my work life and home life separate, as like all great performers, I play a different role at work (decisive, argumentative, possibly somewhat insane technical leader) than at home (passive, brooding slave to wife's every whim). I'm not quite sure which role to affect whilst surrounded by co-workers in the presence of The Mrs., and of course, there's the risk that the two sides may catch on to my flexible personality and like the other side better.

Then on Thursday I turn 40. A sad day, really, as I'm supposed to stop binge drinking when I turn 40. This despite the fact that it is Fat Camp night and Rico has insisted on driving me, since it's my birthday and all. I'm leaning towards just not going rather than putting up with all the psychological abuse I'd have to take from The Mrs. if I had the slightest, teeniest, tiniest hangover Friday morning.

See, I'm already over the hill. Every morning when I get up, I groan with pain. I am not now, nor ever have I been, a morning person. Yet, The Mrs. has decided that these symptoms of approaching death that I exhibit each and every morning take on a whole new meaning on Friday morning. Yes, instead of marking imminent return to the dust from which we are all made, she interprets it as a sure sign of me having been happy the night before.

And we certainly cannot stand for that. Nope. Not one iota.

My favorite is when she walked in on me once while I was sitting down to put on my socks and said, "Too hungover to stand up, huh?"

No. I'm just to old to be able to balance on one foot while putting my socks on first thing in the morning before I've had my coffee. But you just keep on telling yourself that you can nag me into being young again.

Though, if nagging were all it took, married men would live a lot longer than single men.

Hmmm...

Then Friday is another "Kids Night Out," where we drop The Childrens off at the museum and get to go to a fancy restaurant in Olde Towne. We are at this point flummoxed as to where to go. I'm pretty sure it won't be to Lucky Joe's for the fish-n-chips special.

Trench Warfare

Today I dug another trench. Back in the day, I used to be quite a trench digger, but these days, even a little 10 foot long, 9 inch deep, 5 inch wide trench causes my body to ache at the end of the day. I should have used my pick. I forgot completely about the pick, and I used the trenching shovel and the digging bar. The soil here is very hard. The pick would have been the perfect tool. Oh well. I have at least two more trenches to go.

I decided not to do much work today, because it was up in the 90's and blazingly sunny. So, you know, just one little trench. I was adding a sprinkler head to zone C6 as I had this fairly large area (about 20'x4', only it was an arc) that got almost no water from any sprinkler. So the lawn there turns brown and looks like death through the hot days of summer. Then it kinda perks back up a bit in the fall and comes back quite well in the spring. So I added a head in a place that mostly covers the area. I can't completely cover it because with our pathetic water pressure, the longest throw you can get out of a popup is about 10 feet. Even the ones that claim to go 20 only go in my yard.

Adding a sprinkler zone required a trip to Home Despot. Normally, I go to Lowe's instead of Home Despot, but I ended up getting 11 $25 gift cards for Home Despot from work as part of their "kudos" system, but I never redeemed them over the last couple years. Then, the program ended (it was replaced with a centralized system that has a lot more choices and in which you can "let it ride" to get one big gift certificate somewhere instead of a million-billion $25 ones.), and so I had to cash out. Hence, I have a stack of 11 $25 gift cards.

Well, I don't anymore. Now I have only 4. The Mrs. decided to re-pot all her plants with very fancy pots because, "They're free!" Plus, I got some high temperature spray paint and a wire brush for my angle grinder in order to repaint the smoker, which, being a big piece of Chinese crap, rusted through its paint in slightly under a year. I put four coats of RustOleum grill paint on it (that's two whole cans - cans are always best in pairs). Hopefully, that'll hold for a year.

I am now going to soak my sorry, aged body in the hot tub. The ibuprofen is starting to kick in, and there's nothing like some ibuprofen, a soak in the hut tub, and some for of whiskey-base beverage to sooth an aching ego.

No matter how much you don't want to

...every now and then, you find yourself agreeing with Jessie Jackson.

On a lighter note, tomorrow is HannahC's 8th birthday party. Her birthday was Tuesday, but the party of course had to be on a weekend, what with it being summer and all. I was today informed that my job was to supervise the children as they jump through the sprinklers.

I can't imagine a worse job. Especially since there will only be a high of 80 tomorrow given the cold front that moved in this evening. I hope they don't break any of the sprinklers. Already, I have large brown patches in the lawn because I refuse to run my sprinklers every day. I'm trying to teach my grass to live on 15 minutes of water three times a week.

I spooled up my new fishing reel tonight. I couldn't wait any longer. It was just sitting there on the kitchen counter mocking me.

This morning, I almost tossed the fishing gear into the truck on my way to work. It was shaping up to be the kind of day where I didn't have much to do in the afternoon, and Carl, Jr., had been carping about how we never sneak off to go fishing. But, at the last minute, I decided that I didn't want to go fishing without my new reel, and I didn't have time to load it up with line before work. So no sneaking off to go fishing for me today.

Carl, Jr., had brought all his stuff. He's very dedicated. I wonder how long he's had all that gear in his trunk.

Next week, unfortunately, will be very busy for me. So I probably missed my one opportunity to sneak off fishing for a long long time.

I need to clean out the tackle box. It's so full that it barely shuts, and most of the stuff I never use and will never use. Like the two copies of everything that comes with a kid's fishing combo. They live their little assortments of jigs and lures, but none are actually all that useful.

We stopped at Harbor Freight Tools this afternoon after lunch. I'd never been there before. Wow, is most everything in there absolute junk! I mean, it was hard to believe the tools were actually meant to be used. They looked like props. But I did manage to find a ratcheting cargo bar for the pickup, which is something I've needed for 5 years. As I was reading the directions, I realized that the person writing them had clearly never used the thing, as the way it actually worked and the way the directions said it worked bore very little resemblance to one another. I also loved the part where it told me to be sure that I was wearing approved safety goggles and work gloves before adjusting the bar.

I think I'll head off to bed now. Nighty night.

It must be rough

being stupid.

Today, I was listening to the radio, and they were discussing the recent ticketing of a protester who allegedly trespassed at a McCain town hall meeting in Denver. They had a caller on the line who was explaining the whole thing. The "private security guard" from the venue whole filed the trespassing complaint was actually secret service. However, they called him a private security guard because the secret service has recently been outsourced to Blackwater.

Sheesh.

Paralyzing fear

It's not often that I venture in the the strongholds of The Enemy, but sometimes The Mrs. drags me off to one. Thus, yesterday afternoon, I found myself in the Humanities building at The University of Northern Colorado.

I lived here for close to a year before I even knew there was a University of Northern Colorado. Apparently, they don't have a football team that plays CSU, so we never hear about them. But, there it is. Right in the nice part of Greeley.

Or thereabouts.

The Childrens are there for a summer camp this week, and we had to trek out there to register for the class sessions for HannahC. MaxieC is too young to have class sessions. He just has one group all day. HannahC has to change every 45 minutes or so.

It started off badly when The Mrs. called for directions. She wrote them down. This is what they said:

Going north on 11th Ave 1 block past 20th St is

She handed me these directions triumphantly and then added, "We're supposed to look for parking lot L."

OooooooK. I punched up the intersection of 11th Ave and 20th St in her GPS. Nope. Sorry. It was listed as a crossroad, but when I selected it, it didn't do anything. Just ignored me.

So I got out that devil we call TomTom, and it found it right away. Off we go.

As we crossed 20th St on 11th Ave, we had our eyes peeled. Oddly, it appeared to be a residential neighborhood, with the university a block to the right of us, but also behind us. The Mrs's GPS has the university grounds shaded a different color, so I when we got to the northernmost end of it, I swung over a block to where the school was and started tracing the perimeter back the way we came.

In a few minutes, we stumbled across the building we were looking for and the infamous Lot L. Here is what the directions should have said:

Going north on 11th Ave, turn left on 20th St.
Go three blocks and turn left again on 14th Ave.
Go a block and you will be on campus where you will intersect another street which for no good reason is also named 20th St.
Parking Lot L will be on the far right corner, and the building will be on the far left.

You see how much better it flows with that whole middle part about being on 14th Ave, not 11th, and there being two 20th Streets that are parallel and a block apart, on in the city and one on campus? Yes, it's a bit wordier, but still.

The Mrs. and HannahC headed into the building while MaxieC and I sat in the van, and I tried to remember how to create a "favorite" in the GPS based on where I actually was. The Mrs., you see, has to schlep The Childrens back and forth twice a day for a couple weeks, so she'll need the GPS to guide her.

As much as I bitch about the user interface in TomTom, there are things that are simply downright stupid in The Mrs.'s GPS. Like, for instance, adding favorites. It goes like this:

Setup->More->Personal Information->Address Book->The Mrs.->Add Address

See, if you just push "Address Book" on the main menu, you can only navigate to something already in the book. You can't add an entry. Adding can only be done from the setup menu.

Oddly, TomTom separates these two functions as well, however by slightly fewer menu screens. It also forces you through the setup menu. So what is with the f'k on that?

When we head inside, there are throngs of over-parenting parents (this is a summer camp for "high achieving childrens" or something like that. I'm not allowed to call it "genius camp" anymore, on account of The Mrs. doesn't want HannahC to get a big head. We had to submit standardized test scores and references and such in order to get in.) who are pouring over the class listings while their children run around in yellow t-shirts with the olympic symbol on them (which they'll get sued for if they didn't license it, just like Olympics of the Mind did before they had to change their name to Odyssey of the Mind back in the early 80's) and try to get cookies from the free cookies table and are continuously told, "You are only allowed one and only after we have completed your course selections and turned in the paperwork and have had it checked!"

And, you really know you're at the nerd convention when they even have gluten-free cookies available.

MaxieC and I looked around, rolled our eyes, and wandered off. This is when I discovered that we were in the Women's Studies section of the building. Gaah! I quickly checked my T-shirt to make sure it wasn't going to get me mugged. It was just a Bad Boys Bail Bonds shirt, "Because your momma wants you home." Nothing offensive about that. Plus, there didn't seem to be any professors around. Why would there be on the weekend? It's not like there is actually any research involved in Women's Studies. It's largely just a matter of citing "experts" in the field who cited other "experts" who cited you, and no one can figure out anymore at what point the statistic you are talking about was just made up out of thin air because everybody has a long chain of circular references and nobody will fess up to being the first to say it.

We did make it up to the third floor during our wanderings, and there we found a couple anthropology professors actually at work. There is still a branch of anthropology that could be considered scientific, but I can't imagine it will last long if housed in the humanities building.

I like to peruse the cartoons that professors put up outside their offices. Humanities professors aren't known for their humor. Not like physicists. Physicists are a f-ing hilarious bunch, if you can understand the jokes as, like fine British humor, it's not actually funny.

Not JackAss 2 funny, at least.

Physicist 1: "I'm pretty sure there's a new subatomic particle. I'm going to call it a neutrino."
Physicist 2: "Cool. What's it like?"
Physicist 1: "Well, it's so high-energy that it blasts right through everything except for very, very dense objects."
Physicist 2: "Like Senator Proxmire?"

An old joke, I suppose. But I don't hang with any physicists cuz all we can ever scare up are semi-conductor physicists, and since they're the bunch of physicists who have actually found application for their work in the real world, their craven drive for monetary compensation has removed a lot of their humor value. Plus, they tend to be a bunch of dorks, and I hang with my fair share of dorks already, thank you very much.

One professor had a political cartoon about the evils of standardized testing, only it was photocopied onto a piece of paper, and then numbers were written on the cartoon and underneath it had a deconstruction of the cartoon. (1) The roof of the building represents that barrier created by standardized testing. (2) The child caught in the roof represents a creative child trying to break free of the bonds of conformity. (I'm paraphrasing here.) Blah blah blah.

Another had snippets from a feminist coloring book. The cool thing about that was that it was modern enough to have an URL. I spent some time pondering this cartoon from a coloring book called, "Girls Wll Be Boys Will Be Girls Will Be..." which I know to you, my loyal readership, sounds more like a nasty Brazilian porn site than the title of a feminist coloring book. First, of course, I was quite offended by the portrayal of a boy wearing a lacey apron. But once I got past that, I got to thinking. I said to myself,

"Self, is this a one-dimensional portrayal of a situation where the sex roles [I know I'm supposed to say "gender roles" in this context, but just because an entire field of study has endorsed a forced grammatical incorrectness does not mean that I, an outsider, have to subscribe to that incorrectness.] are reversed? Because if so, it is a rather feminized portrayal of how a boy would actually act - talking about making drums rather than actually doing it. Oh but wait, perhaps the author is deeper than I have assumed, and instead she is portraying how a girl would act if she had interests similar to a boy's - talking and building consensus rather than just taking over a pot and spoon and starting to drum. But if so, doesn't this endorse the politically-incorrect idea that girls and boys are innately different, thus undermining the thesis of the book?"

Imagine that. Finding a conundrum in a feminist coloring book.

To get back to the point that inspired the title, not long before we were leaving, HannahC handed me two pieces of garbage. One was a napkin, and the other was a scrap of paper. I located a garbage can by the cookie table and went to throw them both out. Then, suddenly, I realized the scrap of paper was recyclable.

Uh, no.

So I'm taking HannahC to farm camp today, just like I have every day this week, and being that it's the third day in a row that she's gone to exactly the same place at the same time with the same people, and I'm in a bit of a hurry as I have to give two presentations at work within the next hour and a half, I say, "So, it's OK if I just drop you off, right?"

"Yes."

I pull up to the curb in front of the door along with all the other parents, and I say, "OK. Have fun."

"Uh, no."

"What do you mean no? You said I could drop you off."

"No, you have to walk me to the door."

Then, I have to drive back to the part of the lot where you can park, park, and walk her to the door. We get right to the door and, without me even setting foot inside, she turns and says, "OK. Bye Dah," and heads off inside.

I have no idea what the purpose of that little exercise was other than that, as a female, she subconsciously structures her life in order to make mine inconvenient.

The Cooler of Death

I don't know how she did it, but somehow yesterday morning HannahC managed to convince The Mrs. that she needed "some Daddy time" where just HannahC and I would go fishing. She chose as a venue, "that pond at Riverbend where we caught all those bluegill last year."

Well, why not. We've been fishing twice this year at new locations, and thus far only The Mrs. had caught a fish, and it was a stinky green catfish. On the way, however, we made a slight (40 miles?) detour up to Wyoming to hit one of the fireworks stores that's right on the border. Ya see, in Wyoming, eveything is legal. However, there are a lot of people who moved from California to Colorado not because they wanted to get away from the creeping death that is California culture like we did, but because they wanted to preserve the god-awful California culture, only in a nicer place. Like Boulder or Fort TomCollins.

In the city of Fort TomCollins, all fireworks of all kinds are banned. This is purportedly because of the danger of brush fire, however one would be hard placed to find any brush in Fort TomCollins. What one finds is a lot of "progressives" who spend most of their time thinking up bizarre ways to legislate away traditional American values - like fireworks and lot sizes larger than 5000 sq ft.

Happily, we don't live in For TomCollins, so only a small subset of fireworks are banned: anything that leaves the ground, and anything that explodes. i.e., all the "fun" fireworks. But we still can get sparklers and spark fountains and smoke bombs and such. So it's almost like being in America.

But if you drive to Wyoming, you can get all the good stuff. The place I chose among the three stores at the very first exit in Wyoming offered quite a deal - 140 free bottle rockets with a $35 purchase. Needless to say, I managed to score 140 free bottle rockets. And some free smoke bombs (yawn).

MaxieC, however, was terrified of the fireworks again this year. He sat in the back of the pickup truck with The Mrs. wearing hearing protection and crying that the house was going to burn down while I lit off a few of the things last night. I think just about everything I set off was actually legal in my area, too. Nothing scary.

This morning, he told me how cool the stuff was.

So, anyways, HannahC and I got to the fishing hole around 11:00, which is when the bluegill around here start biting. There were a couple other fishermen there, but they were not in our special spot. You could see the water teeming with little baby bluegills.

It was a good day of fishing. HannahC caught a fish about every 10 minutes, for a total of about nine, four of which we kept. She got a 7-incher, which was the biggest bluegill we've seen in any of the ponds around. She also caught a couple of the babies, including one within 30 seconds of her first cast.

A big turtle swam around the whole time keeping an eye on us. I only caught three, but they were decent enough sized to keep. I spent most of my time at the gutting board while HannahC continued to fish. It seemed like as soon as I finished cleaning her last fish and got my hook back in the water, she had another one ready for me.

I spent way too long a time trying to prepare these little dude for the grill. Bluegill is a very labor-intensive snack.


Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads. Fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum!


A little onion and lemon and we're good to go.


HannahC is begging to go again today, only this time with the whole family. She thinks MaxieC might be able to catch his first fish at this place. Such an altruist.

Like Father, Like MaxieC

I came downstairs this morning and discovered that MaxieC had found a new storage place for his axe.


This scene so inspired me that I felt compelled to practice this evening. Like all practice sessions, though, MaxieC immediately appeared, gave me the thumbs-up, and then proceeded to wildly strum the guitar I was trying to playing. He also managed to knock one string way out of tune with the whammy bar. I guess the locking nut wasn't cranked down enough. You really gotta keep your eye on those nuts when you play with the whammy bar.

It's like prom night all over, as they say.

I tried to teach him classic Van Halen tapping technique (because, really, only a 4-year-old would be impressed with how well I can pull this off), but he became engrossed in the variety of colors of picks I had in the pick box and had to try them all out instead. And then it eventually degenerated into him pounding on the strings and singing "Down the draaaaain...Somebody get me a doctor" which is all he knows of the song.

Really, it's times like this that I wonder how anyone could ever possibly get any work done if they work from home and have childrens. Maybe if your work is like super-super boring and doesn't involve overdriven amplification, flangers, or whammy bars. Like, I dunno, binsplit estimation or pharmaceutical research or something like that.

And not the kind of "pharmaceutical research" you all did in college.

Poor HannahC had quite a day. Yesterday she was over at a friend's house, and she got something in her eye. When I picked her up, the mom said it was either bug spray or something from this plant, which she then handed me a sprig of. She said, "take this with you just in case you have to rush her to the doctor or something."

I chuckled cuz she looked fine.

About 11pm, her face started to turn red and swell. The Mrs. covered it with Benedryl cream and sent her to bed. This morning, it was worse, and the skin was even blistered in spots. So off they rush to the doctor, sprig of weed in hand.

And not the kind of weed you "researched" in college.

The diagnosis is euphorbia burns. I love this line:

In experiments with animals it was found that the terpen ester resiniferatoxin had an irritating effect 10,000 to 100,000 times stronger than capsaicin, the "hot" substance found in chillies.

Capsaicin - you know, the stuff they make pepper spray out of to drop hardened criminals. And for whatever reason, she rubbed this stuff all over her damned face, in her eyes, and up her nose.

She's feeling much better now, though, with the medication.

I miss my medication.

A Homeschool Rhyme

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear.
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair.
Baldness involves the state of lacking hair where it often grows, especially on the head. The amount and patterns of baldness can vary greatly; it ranges from male and female pattern alopecia (androgenic alopecia, also called androgenetic alopecia or alopecia androgenetica), alopecia areata, which involves the loss of some of the hair from the head, and alopecia totalis, which involves the loss of all head hair, to the most extreme form, alopecia universalis, which involves the loss of all hair from the head and the body. Fuzzy Wuzzy was most likely suffering from alopecia unicersalis. Unfortunately for Fuzzy Wuzzy, there is no known treatment for alopecia universalis. So, while Fuzzy Wuzzy could lead a perfectly normal life in other respects, he would always look different from other bears, and this caused him a great deal of stress early in life until he learned to accept his differences and find friends who could see beyond his baldness to his inner goodness.

The Talented Mrs.

Sometimes I forget how funny The Mrs. is. I usually forget on account of her not being the least bit funny most of the time. But every now and then, she whips out the humor. Last night, she got excited about the novelty of the automotivator and produced this little gem:

Wha?

When I got home from work today, The Mrs. asked, "So, did you go to Lowe's?"

She, apparently, is under the impression that I'm still planning to rewire the oven myself, whereas I am of the rather firm belief that I am going to hire an electrician to do so. We shall see, we shall see.

But, of course

The advice the guy gave me at Lowe's for making the copper-to-aluminum connection was all wrong. It violates at least two electrical codes, plus it has another that's potentially a gray area of just being sloppy rather than violating anything.

So, I will shortly rip it all out and call an electrician, who will likely argue that the way I had it was just fine.

Happy Fathers' Day, Now Get to Work!

The Mrs. really found a way to make this Fathers' Day special for me - she made me install a wall oven.

See, it all started back when she willed our old oven to death. I said she could call our appliance guy to fix it (when you deck out your kitchen in quality GE appliances, you get to be on a first name basis with an appliance guy), or we could buy a new one and then she could call our appliance guy to install it. She chose the latter (I think I covered this before).

We ordered one from Lowe's, and it took two weeks to come in. I was out of town on a boondoggle when it arrived, but before I left, I asked The Mrs. if she would be able to handle calling the appliance guy and getting it installed when I wasn't home. She assured me that she would be able to "manage".

When I arrived home at 2am Thursday night, I saw a big giant box in the entrance way.

Oh.

Then Friday night, The Mrs. said, "I thought tomorrow maybe you'd want to see how far you can get on the installation, and then we can call the appliance guy."

"Well, I can remove the old one and maybe cut the hole to the right size for the new one."

Fine.

Saturday morning comes along, and I pop the old oven out pretty quickly. It is very light and flimsy-feeling, which is to be expected given it's a low-end GE. I can lift it and carry it to the garage with no problems.

I go to get the new one, and I can't life the box. Not to worry, I have a furniture-moving dolly because I own just about every bizarre little tool one could hope to. I get it up on that and wheel it into the kitchen, where I open it up to get the install instructions.

And this is when it all goes so horribly wrong.

The hole needed to be 1/2" taller and 1/2" wider. Not a big deal, except if I cut the opening 1/2" higher, it would violate the minimum clearance spec between the top of the hole and the thing above it (the microwave). So instead I had to lower the bottom of the hole.

Except the bottom of the hole has a shelf flush with it that the oven sits on. At this point, I tell The Mrs. that this is turning into a lot bigger job than I want to deal with, and that she should call Jeff (our contractor - not our appliance guy) to finish it, cuz an appliance guy isn't going to want to deal with carpentry.

She says, "No. You can do this."

"But you said I should just do as much as I was comfortable with, and I'm not comfortable doing this."

"Nobody else will do as good a job as you. You know what to do. Keep working."

"But you said... Grrr..."

So now I have to remove the shelf, remove the boards that hold it up, which are both nailed and glued to the sides of the cabinet, but then the electrical junction box didn't clear the support, so I had to notch that.

And, of course, I had to figure out how to connect up the copper wires in the pigtail to the aluminum supply lines. My house is wired for a double-oven (despite us having only a single), and anything higher than 30A has to be aluminum. That meant a trip to two different stores to get the proper stuff. The guy at Ace told me to rewire the circuit in copper.

Riiight.

The guy at Lowe's (a retired electrician), set me up with the goods.

But, all that extra work and chasing around meant I didn't finish Saturday before we had to go to a birthday party. It also meant I left the kitchen in absolute disarray with an oven on the floor, a shop vac, packing material, and an assortment of about 20 power and hand tools. Some very, very sharp.

So bright and early on Fathers' Day morning, I began the task of actually installing the oven, all while my cheerful fambly grouched at the kitchen table eating a breakfast of raspberries, having been unable to get to the cooktop to fry up some eggs.

It took only about three more hours, including the trip to the hardware store in the middle to pick up some wood filler to fill a hole left from the previous oven.

And then, joy of joys, it was time to go bowling to celebrate Fathers' Day. The Childrens like to take me either bowling or miniature golfing on Fathers' Day.

But first, we got to load up the back of the truck with the old oven, the packing material from the new one, a broken lawn chair, and a broken toy tractor with trailer. Why?

So we could go to the dump. After all, the dump is clear across town (~25 minutes away), but so is the bowling alley. So why not kill two birds with one stone?

At the dump, MaxieC's nose sprang a leak, and he covered himself with blood. So much so that he needed a change of clothes before we could set foot in public.

So, it was back home again, change clothes, then back across town to the bowling alley. There, we each bowled one game. They gave us two lanes, one with bumpers and one without.

Sadly, I could have used the bumpers. Both of my bowling balls were hanging up on my thumb, and that made my aim (which isn't all that great to begin with) completely erratic. This takes the joy out of bowling, and it's the main reason I always choose miniature golf if given a choice.

The Mrs. ended up beating me by over 40 points. Humiliating. I barely beat MaxieC, who was bowling with the aid of one of those ramp/chute things that you point and roll the ball down.

However, the pro shop was open, so we stopped in afterwards and he sized my thumb, and then decided the thumbs holes on both balls were too small (they hadn't been drilled the same size to begin with). As you get older, your knuckles get fatter. Anyways, he charged only $5 a ball to redrill the thumbs.

The Mrs., not to be outdone on Fathers' Day, bought herself some new bowling shoes that were on sale for $30.

Then it was back home, where I dropped off the fambly and then headed back out to get both propane bottles refilled. See, on Friday we had a BBQ that I didn't know we were having, and I ended up killing both bottles as I had the smoker and grill going simultaneously. Luckily, everything was done when the last bottle ran out.

Oh, I also got gas.

Back to the house, where I wanted to have a nice, peaceful ride on my lawn tractor while mowing the lawn. However, MaxieC needed a ride, and he needed to drive, so this delayed my joy.

The Childrens got me a T-shirt that says, "Life is Good," and has a cartoon of a guy grilling on it.

After mowing the lawn, I got to watch one hour of uninterrupted television before I had to go outside to watch The Childrens while The Mrs. heated up leftovers for dinner. I wrote most of this post while watching DIY.

So, to summarize, it was a normal Sunday here, except I went bowling, got a T-shirt, and watched one hour of TV. Oh, and I tried to be nice to the kids. HannahC only called me "the worst dad in the entire world" once. I had sent her to naughty corner for torturing MaxieC.

Let there be Light

Despite The Mrs.'s seemingly generous offer, I ended up doing low voltage lighting today. I tore out all the old stuff and started over, cuz the previous transformer had melted for some reason. I suspected it was perhaps a short, so I made sure all the lightbulbs were out of the old fixtures, and I measures the resistance from the supply to the ground wires.

It measured 475 Ohms. Now, for those of you who do not have an electronics background, that's waaaay too low to be a normal open circuit. So I decided to replace the wire in addition to the fixtures and transformer.

Later, as I was tearing out the old wires, I discovered about four more light fixtures that had been overgrown by ice plant (little spot-light jobbers, not the tall lanterns I had known about). Perhaps they were the reason I got a low resistance. It certainly in range for having a few 10W bulbs connected. But, whatever. I got to see how the previous owner had done junctions - just twisted the wire together, wrapped it with electrical tape, and buried it. That's asking for trouble. I bought fancy silicone-filled waterproof outdoor wire nuts.

I put in four carriage-style lanterns (one can be seen in foreground rock-pile of the photo) and one post-style light (seen in background between steps and dwarf spruce tree). It all went smashingly, except I ran out of time before I got to bury the wires.


We had little lamb chops for dinner. A great deal at Sam's club.

CherkyB and the Inappropriate Humor

It's almost like I'm a dentist or something.

The Mrs. [to The Childrens]: "I'm going to go brush my teeth so that I'll be ready to do whatever it is Daddy wants done."

Me, CherkyB: "Oh. You'll probably want to brush your teeth afterwards instead."

I am lazy

Thus, tonight I will resort to photoblogging. The worst of all possible blogging forms. Perhaps I should have started drinking earlier...

Today, we went to Sam's Club. We filled two shopping carts. As I was unloading the winivan, for some reason this scene made me think of Blogauthor.


And then, of course, I learned how hard the life of a stay-at-home mom is.


Do you drink Scotch or vodka with that?

TomTom customer support sent me a file to downgrade my firmware back to the previous working version. That has restored my GPS to its normal level of uselessness, as opposed to its especially-complete uselessness. To celebrate, today I had it navigate me to the koi store.

Koi stores are not "points of interest" that make the cut for a GPS map, as it turns out. So I said, "well, I know the intersection". But, as it turns out, I only knew the main portion of the street names. I didn't know, for instance, that it was "S Timberline" and "E Lincoln". I only knew it was Timberline and Lincoln. It turns out not to be able to figure out that if you put in "Timberline" that you might be interested in "Timberline," "N Timberline," and "S Timberline". So you end up pretty focacciad when you find that Timberline and Lincoln do not cross anywhere.

And, once again, I am reminded about just how much better the Alpine-based system in the wife's winivan is, as it never sweats the compass direction details. Those in-car systems cost like $3000, but they really are 10x better.

Garden of Rock

The long-awaited pictures of the rock garden:




And, of course, the fuel that keeps me going during such projects:

(Dis)Harmony

So it took about an hour, but I got the Harmony universal remote working. In a bizarre twist of fate, of all my A/V equipment, the one thing it decided it didn't already know how to run was the DirecTV receiver. I had expected it wouldn't know how to work my Kenwood A/V receiver, as I got that in the summer of 1986 with money I earned from working at a car wash, and none of the roughly 6 or 7 universal remotes I have tried on it has ever worked.

In fact, the RCA universal remote I bought a few years back cuz it could "learn" your IR codes could not even learn the codes from this receiver's remote. I actually ended up throwing that remote out, I was so angry with it. But not until I wrote a scathing review of it online. A review that is the only actual hit to me if you do a google image search on my real name with quotes around it.

The DirecTV receiver is not even seven years old, which makes it newer than the aforementioned A/V receiver and the VCR, and roughly contemporaneous with the TV. Yet, it didn't know how to operate it.

Or so it claimed.

After making me teach it the IR codes for like 20 different things, it said, "Another device has been found that shares the same codes," and it pointed me to a model that was the same as mine except for the last digit.

Wonderful.

However, it turned out that it didn't actually know how to work my TV. It thought it had a different set of input lines than it actually had, so I had to go in and have it "learn" each of the buttons I push to select the different inputs. It sequences through the inputs normally, but then the remote depends upon you never changing it ever by hand or with another remote so that it can remember where it is in the cycle. I happen to also have hard-coded buttons for each of the inputs, so I just had it learn those. It knew the codes already, but I didn't know the name it had associated with each code.

I was most impressed that it was able to do the sequence for playing a PS2 game:

1. Turn on TV
2. Tune TV to channel 3
3. Turn on VCR
4. Tune VCR to channel L1
5. Select "VCR" for output mode
6. Turn on A/V receiver
7. Select "Video" input

If The Mrs.'s PS2 was newer than fall of 2003, it would also have been able to turn on the PS2. But this "original" model does not include the IR hardware.

I may need to get another of these remotes for the upstairs setup. That setup is less complicated, but also the universality of the remotes is oddly lower. Like the satellite remote barely controls the TV and DVD, and the TV and DVD, despite being of the same brand and year, don't actually have the right button sets to properly control each other, and they can't control the satellite at all.

When is Fathers' Day?

Funky CherkyB

I am in a funk. Why?

Well, let me see:

1. The DirecTV dish has decided to have slowly degrading signal strength over the last six months. It started with just one receiver losing signal, but now all three are frequently unwatchable. They were supposed to give me a brand new dish when I moved in as part of the moving package, but the installer said, "That dish is the same one I'd install, so let's just use it."
2. The new oven cost over $2000.
   
3. One of our 16" floor tiles began rocking back and forth in the kitchen. Now all the grout is out. It looks like the floor is sinking. The tile only covers about 800 sq ft, so if I have to retile, that'll only be maybe 12 grand. If I have to restructure the support beam in the basement that is right under this spot, well, I imagine that'll be more.
4. Carl, Jr. is a better fisherman than I am.
5. The DVD remote in the basement was lost (though HannahC just moments ago remembered where she hid it and "discovered" it without admitting any guilt). It was stuck up the arm of the couch between the wood and the cushion.
   
6. I had checked there three times already.
7. TomTom, in their infinite fucking wisdom, pushed out a firmware revision to everyone three weeks ago that causes your GPS to hang if you ask it to navigate to either a "point of interest" (eg., store, restaurant, gas station, airport) or to an intersection. So unless you know the address of where you are going, you can't get there with the GPS. They are "aware of the problem but do not have a timeframe for the fix" according to an online help forum. One of the users in the forum has posted a way to downgrade to the previous firmware, but I'm so far afraid to try it as it comes with a README that says, if something goes wrong, you may render your GPS useless.
8. Not that it isn't pretty fucking useless already.
9. I hate Mexican food. Really hate it. I can choke it down if I need to, but in general I try to avoid it.
10. I decided to dig out my Harmony universal remote control. I got it for, I think, Fathers' Day last year, but didn't have time to tackle it. I got it out 20 minutes ago, and it is still farting around downloading revisions and making me create web accounts and the like.
11. I don't like kids. Especially kids who feel the need to constantly be touching you, leaning on you, climbing on you, or need to spontaneously yell for no reason at all.
12. Obama!
    

Failure and Success

You know, when I think of a "rock garden", I think of a garden with a lot of rocks in it, and some moss growing on the rocks, and maybe some tiny little desert plants here and there.

Apparently, The Mrs. thinks of something completely different. More on that later.

I made a gigantic mistake this weekend. I decided to take the fambly fishing at a spot highly recommended by Carl, Jr. However, we decided to go in the morning before it got too hot, and so that we'd have the remainder of the day to finish up the rock garden. It was nice cuz we had the entire lake to ourselves. No other people fishing. No fish. Just us. We fished for a while, using every fancy lure in the tackle box, and then finally switching to worms. It was over an hour before we found a spot where the bluegills were nibbling.

They ate a lot of worms without ever getting hooked.

The Mrs. managed to catch two fish. One was a dead trout that was all tangled in fishing line. The other was about a 7" catfish. These are her first two catches in Colorado.

Now, for some reason, The Mrs. got it in her head that catfish are somehow too dangerous to touch. So she sent HannahC running over to the playground to fetch me to deal with it. I was watching MaxieC on the swings, as he got kinda bored with not catching anything. The little train that runs around the park was broken due to mechanical difficulties.

We all hustled our sorry selves back to find The Mrs. standing on the shore with her line in the water with an unhappy-looking but remarkably calm catfish on the other end. This was very exciting, because I got to use for the first time my Berkley Pocket Lip Grip that I got for Christmas. Remarkably, it worked fabulously well. Held fishie-fishie nice and steady while I reached in with my Rapala stainless steel fishing pliers and removed the hook. However, being that I had been baking in the sun for a while, I neglected to use the built-in tape measure to measure the exact length. Such is life.

Much of the rest of the weekend was filled with rock garden activities. The Mrs. managed to spend about 3 hours in two trips to the nursery, where I was left to babysit MaxieC the whole time. That, of course, went very well. The rock garden is about 20'x8', and The Mrs. managed to cram in over $600 worth of plants. I didn't count, but it was probably 20 bushy plants and 40 groundcover plants. I took a bunch of pictures, but they're in the camera.

In the end, there were so many plants I had to go with micro-sprayers rather than individual drips. I put about 10 of them. It's a fabulously water-wasteful way to go, but these plants are all low-water varieties once they are established. So I'll water a bunch now and then back off in a couple months.

I also tackled the UV sterilization system in the back pond. I have one in the front and one in the back, and the one in the front always trips the GFI, so I have it unplugged. The one in the back was also unplugged, cuz it didn't seem to do anything.

However, upon discussing with Mugsy, I learned that these things were great for fighting algae, something I battle in both ponds. So, being a sooper-genius, I plugged the light back in, followed the wires to the lightbulb, and noted that the bulb was not glowing in the little window that they put there so you can see if your bulb is working. Online, I learned bulbs last ~1 year at best, so given that it wasn't new when I bought the house, and I've been here almost 2 years, it should be a bad bulb.

So, again with the sooper-geniusitude, I unscrewed the bulb and began to withdraw it from the sleeve. I pulled it out as far as it would go (it was 6" from a rock wall), and then tried to lift it out. I heard the wonderful tinkle of broken glass and water started to pour out.

Sheeit.

It turned out the bulb was intact, but the glass sleeve around it was broken. After a while, I realized the bulb was too long to be removed out the end of the tube, so I had to figure out an alternate plan. After removing a lot more flagstone, I found that there was a big-giant tube that was close to three feet long down there with quick-disconnect compression couplings. So I took the whole thing out.

Turns out the lightbulb is also damn near three feet long.

I could read the make and model off the tube, so a quick check of the web noted that the glass sleeve (called a "quartz sleeve") is a frequently-replaced part. I also found my local pond store was a dealer for this model.

Cool. There are two local pond stores, and I didn't want to switch. Turns out the other one is also a dealer for this brand, too.

That stupid quartz sleeve cost $70.

Now, the water is much clearer, but I also dumped in a bunch of algicide, and changed the skimmer box filters (though not the bio-filter), so I don't yet know whether the UV is helping or not. Next week, I'll tackle the front pond. That one, I suspect either the transformer is bad or the quartz sleeve is broken and flooding the bulb electrical connection on account of the continual GFI trips. The pond store was out of transformers (more arriving tomorrow), so I put this off until next week.

The previous owner's solution to the GFI trip problem was to run an extension cord through the front porch door to plug into a non-GFI outlet inside the house. I'm hoping to do better than that.

MaxieC, Political Analyst

Me, CherkyB: "Obama!"

MaxieC: "Ahhh...we'll you're a poo poo."

Oh, the Humanitarianism

As you may have heard, the neighboring town had a tornado whip through it on Thursday. This has put The Mrs. into a veritable frenzy of wanting to help. But she also doesn't want to not do any of the things she had planned for me to do this weekend, and thus conflict has arisen.

Those of you who know The Mrs. know that she is a little dynamo of energy. But, alas, she is also a dynamo of overcommitment and, because she simply can never not do any fool spur-of-the-moment thing that comes up, she simply drives her loving husband to do all the stuff she signed up for but really didn't have the time to do.

Now, the loving husband here has a plenty time-consuming job that is filled with all kinds of stress and conflict, and he also has quite an active life of yardwork and fixing up things that manage to keep him fully subscribed through all daylight hours. But, you know, it was a tornado and all, so I figured we'd have to modify our schedule some.

In order to lighten The Mrs.'s load a bit, I decided I'd pitch in and take charge of the housework on Saturday morning. You see, the house hasn't been cleaned since maybe February, and as far as I can tell, The Childrens haven't put away a single toy since Christmas. So there were virtually no places in the house where you could see that expensive carpet we put in when we bought the place because of the toys and various clutter strewn across every floor.

If you were to have entered our house, you would have assumed the tornado hit it.

Plus, The Mrs. had decided to cover my entire bar with the contents of the kitchen in case of another tornado, and this included filling up every plastic cup she could find with water and setting them on the bar. Nothing irks me more than when I can't get to my own bar.

So I began gently instructing The Childrens to pick up their mess lest I throw it out. My The Childrens are very unused to being told to pick things up, so they immediately ran off screaming to The Mrs. about how mean I was. Thus, The Mrs. saw an opportunity to snipe at me about how, "Well, I had hoped we were going to volunteer to help with the tornado victims, but I guess Daddy has other priorities."

MaxieC eventually caught on, as he has only been spoiled for four years instead of eight, and he started helping pick up in the basement. HannieC mostly locked herself in her bedroom crying about how unfair it was that she wasn't allowed to keep her stuff wherever she wanted.

I guess she learned this bratty behavior at school?

We never did find the DVD remote in the basement, despite all the cleaning up.

Then we moved to the first floor, where a big, giant box of Lincoln Logs was dumped on the floor. I instructed The Childrens to pick them up, and they went screaming to Mommy again. So, for motivation, I went into the garage and got a big empty garbage can which I then set on the floor in order to throw out any of their stuff they decided they didn't need anymore by leaving it on the floor.

This was, of course, accompanied by wailing and screaming, etc.

After a little bit of picking up, The Childrens got distracted with playing and whining and all those other annoyances, so I picked up one tiny little Lincoln Log and quite ceremoniously tossed it into the garbage can. Oh my, you'd think I had sold them to gypsies. MaxieC, however, regained his senses quickly, marched over, and dumped the garbage can out on the floor. Sadly, it had a good pile of garden dirt in the bottom.

Well, that was predictable.

HannieC went and hid in her room again. MaxieC got down to it and cleaned up all his stuff.

Then we headed off to the volunteer center that had been set up a couple blocks over in the headquarters of our rural electrical co-op. There had been a lot of media coverage about the volunteer center, and there was a pretty steady stream of folks coming in. They all had the same reaction we did when greeted at the door with, "Please fill out this form, and we'll get back to you if we need you. We're not using volunteers today."

There were a few families that had driven in from out of town. One group had Iowa plates. And they were turning us away in droves. We stayed to fill out the forms. It was humbling because I think of myself as a fairly handy guy, but the only skills they had listed that I could check were "Labor: packing/loading," and "Labor: cleanup." They didn't have a choice for building an inground trampoline.

So, instead, we decided to plant our garden. We "only bought as much stuff as we could plant and hook up the watering to in one day." Which means we bought everything for the entire garden. Oh, except we were going to a birthday party all afternoon. But not to worry, that just means that Me, CherkyB can double-time the drip system.

Naturally, I ran out of drip hose halfway through and had to run to Lowe's. On the way back, my low fuel light came on, meaning I have 30 miles of gas left, so I stopped at a gas station.

Just as I began filling up, a lady came over to me and said, "Are you in a hurry to get home after you pump your gas?"

Look at watch, it's 7:30. "Uhh...a little. My wife is waiting for me for dinner."

I did not know at the time that The Mrs. had decided we were skipping dinner cuz we had some tacos at the birthday party at 3:00. I didn't find that out until long after I got home.

"Oh."

"What's the trouble?"

"I need to find someone who knows about putting air into tires."

"Well, that's pretty easy. I could help you with that."

"Really, all I need is to know how much air to put in. There's a sticker on the door that says 2000 lbs. You think if I just put in 2000 lbs., that'll be fine?"

Ahhhh, womens.

"No. That's probably the weight of your car. You'll probably want to put in 35 lbs. Pretty much every car made takes 35 lbs."

So then I went over to take a look. She had a front tire that was 100% flat. She asked if I thought it would be safe to drive if she just filled it up to 35 psi. I said no. She negotiated me down to OK, if your house is really just one mile away, and you don't go on the highway or really fast, you'll probably be safe.

Then she sighed and said, "I guess then I'll need to find someone who knows how to change tires."

I guess so. Oh, look at the time! My humanitarianism does not run deep. Plus, I've learned life goes more smoothly if you realize that life never follows the plot of a porno.

Today, The Childrens had a lemonade and cookie stand for tornado relief. They made like $80.

Well, that was a lot of fun

Nothing like a tornado to spice up an otherwise dull day.

We have escaped unscathed, except that MaxieC ate my whole bag of potato chips. The Mrs. hustled The Childrens into the basement prior to lunch (tornado passed through town a few minutes before noon), and the only food down there was the bag of potato chips that I munch on while blogging at the bar, and popcorn. Without electricity, she was unable to will the popcorn to pop.

I'm glad they forgot about my martini olives.

At about 2pm, shortly after I arrived on the scene, they're all whining about being hungry but were unwilling to leave the basement. So I went upstairs and grabbed the peanut butter, jelly, and bread. There was great wailing and gnashing of teeth about how I was unnecessarily exposing myself to imminent death, but I had been following the tornado online at work and knew it was 30 miles north of us by then, I had just driven home through largely sunny skies, and there were news helicopters and camera crews all over the scene (we have a two TVs with satellite at work in the cafeteria now - my The Company has become completely soft - and they just put in what looks like about a 60-inch plasma with a Wii). I figure there couldn't be that bad that I'd get killed going for a 1 minute jaunt to the kitchen.

I was right.

A new series

I'm planning to publish the critically acclaimed "Frances" series of morality-plays as a new feature here at Me, CherkyB. The only problem is that I can only remember two of them.

The House of Pain

This morning I was happily sleeping, when suddenly I was awakened by MaxieC poking me. He was all smiley, and then he ran away before I could swat him. So I took an old trick from The Mrs.'s playbook, and I put a pillow over my head.

A little while later, The Mrs. snuck in, reached under the pillow, and flicked me on the nose. I stirred a bit and tried to ignore it, so she did it again.

I believe the constitutes ground for divorce, but I decided to save that as a backup plan.

She was very excited to tell me that the oven was broken. At some time during the night, the control panel had decided to light up every LED it had and to start ignoring the buttons. I said, "We probably need to power cycle it."

So I shlepped myself out of bed (I hope the Democrats in my audience aren't deeply offended by my usage of Yiddish on occasion. I know how tres chic antisemitism is in the "progressive" movement these days, though it's cloaked in the guise of trendy faux-concern for the "plight" of the Palestinians and all. But I'm from Barfalo, where we have a large Yiddish-speaking population, and thus it is as ingrained in me as circular reasoning and the belief in the supremacy of emotional responses over logic is in you.) and headed to the garage to flip the breaker.

It didn't help. I tried it three times, each time waiting longer with it off in case there was a capacitive discharge issue, but still the oven control panel was non-responsive and had all its LED lit up. I declared, "Well, that's the extent of my ability to fix this. We'll have to call the appliance guy." (As previously noted in earlier posts, this house is built so crappily that we not only are on a first-name basis with a plumber, but we also have an appliance guy.)

The Mrs. has always hated the oven. She said, "Well, it'll probably be cheaper to just buy a new oven."

Right. I knew the oven she wanted, as she's been whining about this oven since we moved in. The oven she wants is $1749. Replacing the control module on a crappy GE oven is not going to be anywhere near that price.

But whatever. I made that last month off advertising on my trampoline post, so it's no big deal. I left The Mrs. in charge of buying the new oven, which I believe she didn't do. It's special-order only at Lowe's. There are about 10 other appliance stores around that carry KitchenAid. I imagine I'll be calling them on Saturday.

I'm pretty sure she willed it to die. She's crafty like that.

I did not die in my sleep

I see that as largely good news.

See, yesterday morning, my left eyelid felt a bit scratchy. I ignored it cuz I had a lot of yardwork to do, and during allergy season, my eyes are often not feeling perfect. I went out with MaxieC and put down weedkiller on all our weeds. 4 gallons of weedkiller it took, and we only sprayed it directly on weeds, not on the whole lawn. I used Ortho Weed-B-Gone. It works very well and doesn't kill the grass like Round-Up does.

After that, I went to work rototilling the garden. Last year I used a big, rear-tine rental tiller. This year, I had 1/2" drip line all around plus a bunch of perennials (strawberries, raspberries, and asparagus) that I needed to negotiate. The big tiller would never be manageable. So, I borrowed Rico's front tine tiller. I had done an hour of tilling on Saturday evening, and I had gotten about another hour into the tilling Sunday morning when I just couldn't stand my scratchy eye anymore. I went inside to take out my contacts.

When I looked in the mirror, I noticed that my eye was fine, but my eyelid was all swollen up. I showed The Mrs. and asked if she thought I should head over to Urgent Care. She insisted on driving me there, in case they decided to give me a shot in my eyelid and I couldn't drive back.

So we packed up the family into the minivan and headed to urgent care. The Mrs. is one of those people who zooms up to stop signs and then slams on the brakes. I often have to close my eyes when she's driving. But she's never crashed, whereas I have a couple times. So who am I to criticize? (Plus, she was upset that I focused my last post too much on her sister and not enough on her, and so I need to make sure I'm extra-critical of her in this one.)

Speaking of which, HannahC got "grounded" today. I asked what that meant and was told it meant dinner, schoolwork, then straight to bed with no computer and no TV. She's up there right now watching YouTube videos with The Mrs., and it's past her normal bedtime.

I hope The Mrs. gets much better at this "grounded" business before HannahC is a teenager. Right now, she sucks at it.

Anyways, I sit around for like an hour waiting to see a doctor. He looks at my eye and says there are a few things it could be. Could be an allergy or a blocked tear duct or a side-effect of one of the meds I'm on. After close examination, he rules out blocked tear duct.

Then he goes on a long spiel about how one of the side-effects of this drug is something called "angioedema", which he described as a leaking of the capillaries and how, if that was the case, we'd need to take it very seriously, as it would be potentially life-threatening. Then he tells me how there's no real way for him to tell whether it's allergies or this drug side-effect or what, but that's he pretty sure it's nothing serious cuz the drug side effect only affect 0.25% of people, and it's usually much more of your face that swells up, not just an eyelid.

But just to be sure, he's going to check with the other doctor on duty.

He came back about 10 minutes later and said, "Yeah, she never heard of it starting as just an eyelid either. It's probably nothing. But watch it and if it gets worse or starts to spread, go to the ER."

He then sent me off with instructions to take Benedryl before bed. Benedryl makes you kinda loopy. So all night I'm in this semi-drug stupor, except I keep having to feel my face all over to make sure it wasn't swelling anywhere lest I become in danger of imminent death, but when you're half asleep and drugged up on Benedryl, a little itch can seem like the end of the world.

I think I slept quite well, given that.

The swelling seems to have largely subsided now. I will never know the cause.

CherkyB, Eco-Warrior

Boy, when you try to be an environmentalist, it always ends up backfiring.

Take today, for instance. I rushed home from work so that I could taxi HannahC over to her swimming lesson on time, and I was greeted by my loving wife, The Mrs., with, "HannahC is still getting ready. She's had a bit of a day." In the C household, that means there have been some disciplinary problems during the day. The Mrs. then went upstairs to try to hurry things along, and I heard a continuous stream of snarls and squeals, which is how HannahC communicates her displeasure when she is angry.

Apparently, being a homeschooler, she hasn't picked up the proper vocabulary of invectives yet. Odd. I'll have to work on that.

Upon her eventual arrival in the kitchen, she looked at me, put one hand on her hip, pointed at me, and said, "Daddy, I am the maddest that's possible at you!"

"Why?"

"You threw your cigarette butt right in the lawn!"

My immediate reaction was to desire to paraphrase Ratatouille, which is odd because it is an eminently forgettable moovie. "What you need is a little perspective. That's it. You need some fresh, clear, well seasoned perspective."

Then, I thought about how I could explain to her how I don't smoke cigarettes, and what she found was the stub of a wonderful Arturo Fuente cigar, something normally out of my price range. But I knew she knew this (well, the cigar vs. cigarette part, probably not the Arturo Fuente part) and had just misspoken.

Faced with these two alternative retorts, I chose neither. Instead, I stuffed my mouth full of Cheetos puffs, as I had been snacking when she showed up. See, that's the wonderful thing about being a man - I can realize someone had a bad day and just let sleeping dogs lie. I don't have to turn every goddamned little thing into a confrontation.

Plus I really like Cheetos.

The interesting thing here is that it is all Ellie's fault that HannahC is mad at me. See, a couple weeks prior to our visit out there, she got all excited about me meeting her boyfriend, a fellow known around these parts as, "The Locksmith," but whom she refers to on her blog as, "D_," as she likes to cop the style of classical French novelists like Dumas and de Sade. In one of the many IM conversations we had about her excitement for me meeting The Locksmith, she said, "D_ wants to smoke cigars with you."

I believe now that she just made that up. However, at the time I assumed that this was true, so I started quizzing her on what kind of cigars he smoked and where the local cigar shops were in Barfalo. Being a woman, she didn't have any answers at all, but it was easy enough for me to find a local shop not too far from my parents' house by using this really cool thing called google maps. So I got it into my head that I'd need to set aside an hour for cigar smoking while on my vacation. You wouldn't think that'd be such a difficult thing, but you've never vacationed in Barfalo with two families warring over your time.

At some point, I figured we were having a big barbecue on Mothers' Day, and it'd be a great time to stooge out by the grill while cooking. So I went off to the local shop on Saturday morning and got a couple of Fuentes. Special occasion, so I splurged.

Then, of course, multiple things transpired to destroy the cigar-smoking experience. First, being Barfalo, it poured. It was beautiful almost the entire week we were there, right up to about an hour before grilling time. Then it decided to pour. On top of that, The Locksmith decided he had to "work" that night and didn't come to the BBQ. And then, of course, I had forgotten about Ellie's couple-days-later follow-up to my queries about The Locksmith's cigar preferences which went like this, "D_ doesn't smoke cigars. He chews tobacco," which, of course, made me wonder whether he wanted to smoke cigars with me in the first place or if it was all made up to feed some sort of bizarre desire in Ellie that her Future Husband, RIP, get along smashingly with her brother-in-law who lives 1500 miles away the one or two days every 3-4 years they would ever see each other.

At any rate, I ended up bringing the cigars home with me unsmoked. I slapped them in the humidor as soon as we got home, as 5 days in a baggie can't possibly be good for them. (The first three days were in Barfalo, where the humidity never got below 85%, so the baggie actually kept them dry rather than keeping them moist.)

Saturday night came around, and like clockwork The Mrs. declared she wasn't feeling well (lest I get any ideas) and went to bed at 9pm. I took it as an opportunity to sit in the hot tub, finish off a bottle of wine, and stooge. All you married guys know what I'm talking about. You spend a lot of time recreating a wonderful evening with your wife, only she's not there so you substitute alcohol and tobacco...

After about an hour of stooging pleasure, I left the stub in my gigantic Partagás cigar ashtray to be disposed of later. On Sunday, I disposed of it by composting it in the lawn. It is, after all, nothing but a bunch of rolled-up, dried leaves. No chemicals, no paper. Nothing but leaves.

And this is the thanks I get for my environmental consideration.

Home for the Holidays

Why were the flags flying at half mast all across Nebraska today?

We made it home without serious incident today. Everyone is very happy to be back after two weeks away.

It's a very strange thing how some things work just fine forever, and then suddenly decide to malfunction the one time you're away. Case in point: one of my pond pumps.

Upon our return, The Mrs. reported that neither waterfall in the back pond was working, and that the pond was filled with algae. I figured that the water level was low from evaporation, and I got out the hose to refill it. Then, I noted that the water level was plenty high enough to feed the pumps. The pumps were just dead.

Uh oh.

I went to the breaker box and found a tripped GFI breaker. I reset it, and it immediately tripped again. I went back to the pond and unplugged everything (two pumps and two heaters), and reset it again. This time it worked. I plugged in one pump, and it started up. When I plugged in the second, it tripped again. I repeated this a couple times just to be sure.

So, the greatness of having redundant pumps is eliminated if one of the pumps decides to develop a short. That takes out the whole pond's electrical.

And WTF? Why does a pump develop a short when we're away? Why not any of the other 50 weeks this year that we're home? And these aren't cheap pumps. They're like $250 bucks. Why would it develop a short at all?

I'm hoping that my "spare" pump is the same flow rate. I got that when I decommissioned the pond that is now the rock garden. However, that was a much, much larger waterfall, so I'm guessing this is a much higher flow pump that will not be right for this application, and I'll end up buying a new pump on Saturday.

Fudge sticks.

Cabela's was a big disappointment. Their fishing section was about half the size of Sportsman's Warehouse, and they didn't have the thing I wanted. Much like a non-mouthy woman, it is mail order only. I did manage to score a 50 round magazine for my 10/22, though. I can get those locally as well, but not this brand.

And Cabela's bathrooms are nothing special. Lowe's has the best damned bathrooms of anybody.

Ahh, the Joy of it

The Mrs. has taken The Childrens down to the hotel pool, leaving Me, CherkyB, in the hotel room with only FreddyC and JackieC for company. It is so peaceful. This is by far the nicest hotel we've stayed at yet. I may have to move Best Western up on my list of preferred chains.

We still need to scare up dinner. There's a Perkins attached to the hotel, but I'm lobbying for this place called "Brewburgers" that is diagonally across the street. I will almost without question lose this battle.

Today was a day I would characterize as a day of rest stops. In the 500 miles here, we never made it more than 1.5 hours without stopping. MaxieC has learned that since his accident yesterday, all he has to do is say, "I have to pee," and we stop at the next stop. Even if he follows it up with, "Juuust kidding!" as he likes to do.

We had lunch at Craker Barrel. None of us had ever eaten there before. I can cross that off my list of things to do. Yuck. The Mrs., however, really liked it. She had to call her mother to report the wondrousness of a bowl of stew, turnip greens, some other nasty veggie, and cornbread all for $7.19. I always forget how much more of a bumpkin she is than I am. I don't know why I'd forget that, given how much I saw her family over the last week.

Oddly, The Mrs. and I have taken to high-fiving each other whenever we finish our meals, calling each other "baby," and looking at each other all dreamy-stoopid. Then we crack up. I don't know why.

Heading for home

We've completed the first day of the three day journey home without incident. The weather has been quite cooperative - clear and sunny the whole way. There was a big band of thunderstorms over the Iowa/Illinois border when we left, and it managed to get to our hotel in Portage, Indiana about an hour after we did. It rained all night, but stopped by this morning. Now there appears to be no weather between here and Omaha.

The Mrs. has declared the free coffee at the hotel breakfast bar "undrinkable" and instructed me to find a Starbucks. It just so happens there is a drive-through Starbucks a couple blocks from here that I passed last night on my way to pick up the pizza.

I don't know if we'll hit a Cabela's today or tomorrow. It's in the plan, though. Possibly a Bass Pro as well. Never been to either, though most of my hunting clothes came from Cabela's mail order.

Gotta pack now. Later.

I am death

I always manage to get sick on my vacations. I have had a very bad cold for three days now, but each night I try to put on my game face and be sociable. I think I am better today than I was yesterday, but it's hard to say. It's possible I am just more used to being sick.

Christmas Doom

Tuesday night, at Ellie's house:

The Mrs.: "Boy, the Wii is fun. Maybe you kids should ask Santa for one for Christmas."

The Childrens: "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"

CherkyB, Jokester

The last day before my vacation, I sent out an email at work that had the subject, "It's been fun." Then, it went like this:

As most of you by now have probably heard, today is my last day here at FCDC*. Boy, time really flies. Can you believe we’ve been in this building for a year already? And I’ve spent almost 14 years with [The Company], which is a pretty good run in the technology world. We’ve had some good times and some rough times along the way. I wish you all the best of luck keeping up the drive to [our project's goal].

Anyways, I’m using this post-April [note: April is performance-review time] opportunity to do a little traveling, rearrange my priorities for a while, and get to know what my family looks like again.

[My boss] (who I recently learned may hold the record at this site for having employees “quit”) and I are feverishly working out the coverage for my myriad responsibilities. I believe it goes mostly like this:

Yadda Yadda Yadda...





* for two weeks. I’ll be back in the office ww20.5. Don’t steal all my office supplies, you punks.

See, you had to scroll down to see what the asterisk referenced. I sent this to a select list of folks, all of whom I figured could take a joke. Oddly, only two people bit. Also, oddly, those two people were the only two on the list who had a particular job description. Now, I'll get to rag on them for having poor reading skills. You know who you are.

Hee hee hee.

Some Vacation Photos

I gots millions of them, but none of you really care. So here are the ones that I have chosen you will care about from the first few days.

Here is the van all packed up and ready to go (except for the eggs). See how happy The Mrs. looks? She doesn't realize we're going to be driving through a blizzard two hours from now.


The Childrens look happy, too. Suckers. JackieC is in the cage behind MaxieC. FreddyC is on the floor between The Childrens.


Visiting with the clan in Richfield. Richfield gets a Cabela's. I'm kinda jealous. My bro, DougyC, took all the cousins for a tractor ride. Well, this was the first of many.


Fun and games are now over. We're at Fat Moother's house where The Mrs. promised I could put on a show of the CherkyB talent for yardwork. If you need Me, CherkyB to fix up your yard, I am apparently available for hire. And I largely work just for beer.

Moother had her yard re-sodded a year or two ago. Then it largely died. Here is after I have spent hours of backbreaking manual labor raking out all the dead grass to prepare for re-seeding. See all the big piles of dead grass on the sidewalk? Three garbage bags full.


I bought a hydroseed mix, except that it was dry. It has perennial rye, Kentucky blue, and creeping fescue seeds, plus it has "mulch" (which turns out to be shredded magazines), and some bluish fertilizer soaked into the mulch. It said it covered 100 sq ft per bag, but it didn't quite. I'm going to have to go add more some time. This photo is taken after about two bags of it.


After seeding, I got to water. It has rained some every day since this, so this is the only time it needed watering. The weather in Barfalo is iffy at best. Mostly, it sucks.


You'll have to wait for Niagara Falls photos.

Tripping

As has been reported elsewhere, we managed to arrive at the old homestead in Barfalo right on time Monday. We had a great visit with my brother and family (including lots of little boy cousins for MaxieC to play with) along the way.

Oddly, none of the motels in which we have stayed have included free in-room internet. The first night, we had wifi in the lobby only, but our room was just two from the lobby, so I got a weak but usable signal in the room and could post an update. The next two had no indication of having wifi anywhere, and honestly we were just too tired to check.

Today was a day of tourism. Meaning we went to Niagara Falls. We managed to do something that neither The Mrs. nor I had ever done in our 18+ years of living in the area - ride the Maid of the Mist boat. My recollection as a child was of asking many times if we could ride the Maid of the Mist and always being told it was too dangerous. However, both my parents denied that today but could provide absolutely no explanation as to why we never went despite going to the falls probably 20 times.

It shall forever remain a mystery.

I have lots of great pictures, but the camera is out in the winivan, and I don't fell like walking out there. Not for the likes of you folks, at least.

Yesterday was a day of slave-driving. I rakes and reseeded a lawn; replaced a showerhead; changed the oil, sparkplug, and air filter of a lawnmower; mowed a lawn; re-installed vinyl lattice fencing that had blown over in the wind; replaced the fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen fixtures; and (mostly) stopped a leaking garden hose coupling. And nobody even fed me lunch.

A Blizzard in May

So last night, the winds were all whooping it up, and there was a forecast for snow in Wyoming coming down into Colorado. I decided, therefore, to alter our route from taking I-25 to Cheyenne to pick up I-80 to instead taking I-76 and connecting up with I-80 farther east in Nebraska.

Ahh, the best laid plans. We stopped at a rest stop in Sterling, CO so the kids could pee, and they told us that I-76 was just closed, and I-80 was closed all the way across Wyoming and to Ogallala, Nebraska because of a blizzard.

Come on, guys, it's f-ing May! It's not supposed to blizzard in May.

They had an info counter there with a couple guys with maps who were trying to give alternate routes to folks. Mostly, they were sending them south to pick up I-70, but that's quite a trek and well out of the way for Iowa, which is where we were headed.

I axed how to get to get around the section of highway that was closed, and he said, "well, you can take the old highway that we used to take before they built the interstate."

Glorious! I've seen Cars like a billion times. The joy of the old highways. The charm. Maybe I'll find Radiator Springs,

Bzzzt. Wrong. US-6 runs through cornfields and ranch land and the only "towns" on it in this section were really nothing more than paved intersections where there happened to be grain silos.

He showed me this route. It worked fine, but the GPS was very unhappy with it and kept telling me to turn around.

The GPS may have more sens than I do.

The little diagonal shot of 176/23 from Holyoke to Grant was particularly harrowing. We hit one complete whiteout where I couldn't see 4 feet, so I inched over onto the shoulder and stopped for a minute. Then an SUV came by with a big rig right on his tail. The SUV slowed when he saw my taillights, I guess, and the big rig ended up locking it up with the tractor passing the SUV on the wrong side of the road, but the ass end of the trailer still on the right side of the road behind the SUV. I was positive they were gonna wreck, but they disappeared into the blizzard. I decided that, since I could now see a good 25 yards, I better get back moving or we'll all be killing on the shoulder of the road.

We mucked along for maybe three hours on this little detour. Sometimes is was clear, most times it was blizzarding. I got to learn that the minivan's stability control was a damn fine thing to have, as I was headed for the ditch twice and then the van just started doing a remarkably perfect power slide (which is very hard to do given the front-wheel-drive nature of the vehicle) with the back end maybe 15 degrees to the left of the front, but very true and controllable as we slowed and straightened.

Damn that's nice. I'm glad The Mrs. insisted we get the van with the traction control. Her tires are without a doubt much much worse than mine in the snow. I have M+S A/T truck tires, though.

We passed a few cars in the ditch on the stretch of 61 between Grant and Ogallala. This road was mostly quite bare, but every now and then it had 6" of snow drifted across it. There was a cross wide gusting up around 60mph, and if you were moving too fast when you hit the snow, there was quite a tendency to slide sideways. This is actually what happened to me both time I almost left the road, but by the time I got to 61, I had been driving through the blizzard for almost two hours and had the routine down. The minute you see snow on the road, hit the flashers and slow to 25mph.

So what was supposed to be a leisurely 675 miles turned into a rather harrowing experience for 3 of those hours. About another 6 hours we had to deal with the high winds and rain, and then it got pretty nice. We got to the hotel about 12 hours after we left home, which was an hour off pace (I planned for trouble of some sort - mainly I planned for barfing).

The Mrs. and The Childrens are swimming in the hotel pool here is beautiful Grimes, Iowa (a suburb of Des Moines). I'm staying with FreddyC so he doesn't tear up the room with everyone gone.

Tomorrow, on to my brother's place in Richfield, WI. I hope there isn't much weather.