April 2002 Archives

So I was driving back from lunch this afternoon and I passed this humungous RV and the name enscribed on the back was "Hitch Hiker II". It wasn't just "Hitch Hiker"; it was "Hitch Hiker II". The names on these things crack me up. There is obviously this whole RV culture that I completely fail to "get". And I was having a pretty good laugh about it when moments later I passed some hitch hikers trying to get to Kingman and noticed that the "Hitch Hiker II" neglected to stop and pick them up, so after I wiped a tear from my eye, I got to wondering whether they were already full-up with hitch hikers and couldn't fit two more, or maybe they are just total hypocrites, but more than likely, it's that whole RV-Culture that I just don't understand, and "Hitch Hiker II" is really some sort of deep metaphor for a state of mind represented by this huge beast of a home on wheels that never settles down, and restlessly wanders I-40 in search of greasy truckstop burritos and flat beer.

Heaven forbid that I should ever own an RV, but if I did, I doubt I'd be able to escape the irresistable urge to plaster a profound label on the back either. I've had a few things in mind:

Septic Canteena
Turbulence
Resistance is Futile
Bigger'n a Breadbox
Saturn V
Puddin's & Pies
Spin Cycle
Hurtling Ingot
Zamboni
My 401K

Amanda was reading that post about school bullying and reminded me that one of her more effective tactics against creeps in gradeschool was to pump a couple quick bursts of asthma inhaler in their eyes. Heheheh. I'd love to have seen that. She says Primatene Mist was always particularly nasty.

Cube of travelers
Careens, bound by inertia
To get in my way

Jeremy

Okay, and now there's this. Some kid in Germany goes to school and mows down 14 teachers, 3 students and then himself. I have no sociopolitical observation on this. I'm far too myopic for that. Just an old fart observation.

When I was in school, I think it was junior high (7th & 8th grades) that I had my most social troubles. I got bullied like all the other quiet squirts. I was on the welfare lunch program, so I never had any money for them to steal: Ha! take that suckas! My coping strategy was to hang out with the goofballs and cut up all the time. I found that bullies have a hard time figuring out what to do when you poke fun at yourself and fart in class.

But I still had my fantasies of revenge. Which usually involved imagining that I got hold of some electronics and hardware and built a shock-stick so I could drop Neal Pearson on his huge pasty butt like a sack of potatoes the next time he started giving me grief. But I never imagined getting hold of a gun and committing a massacre. Nope. I'd imagine doing a Jedi sommersault over Neal's pockmarked blonde head whilst unholstering my shock stick and watch the confusion in his eyes as he heard the flash capacitors charge up and then his eyes scrinch shut as I did a nunchuck twirl and zotted him in the ribs and love handles. And then calmly holster my weapon and walk away while he cowered in a fetal position and everybody looked on in silent amazement.

It was a total Anime fantasy, before I even knew what Anime was. I think that's why watching Anime makes me feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. I've come to the conclusion that the Japanese psyche must be rife with underempowered, adolescent, persecution complexes. [This cultural stereotype brought to you by stream-of-consciousness rant mode.]

By high school, I was thoroughly schooled in the art of self-depracation and was lucky enough to find a niche with other intelligent self-depracists that helped keep us all out of the lame high-school social ladder of grief.

On a roll today.
Jeremy

Omigosh, just got an email from the building gestapo: Next Friday will begin the weekly tradition of "Hawaiian Shirt Fridays". "Let's all have some FUN on TGIF day!!!" Oh man I am far too cynical for this sort of thing. Why does it have to be a Hawaiian shirt? Why can't it be "Wear a large potato on your shoulder day" or "Come in with your pants inside-out day"? At least something I can do. I don't own a Hawaiian shirt. Fully 50% of the people in my unscientific, angst-initiated survey don't own Hawaiian shirts. I've got a Star Wars shirt with Darth Maul on it, and he's sort of got a Hawaiian print pattern on his face doesn't he? You know what I'm gonna do? I'm going to grab 2 scrap pieces of foam-core board and draw a gawdawful Hawaiian shirt pattern on them, grab some string and wear them like a sandwich board next Friday. Hi everybody! Didn't want to be a wet blanket. I got my Hawaiian shirt theme going. I gotta tellya, your shirt sure isn't as clockstop ugly as mine is! You're gonna have to try harder next week.

Yechhh. Oh man that post Wednesday was lame. Ptooey.

Well well well, so what's up at work...I'm cranky, everybody's cranky. People are stressing out about new product launch schedules, and then I'm trying to get the 2002 product catalog out the door and having these huge cooperation issues. Review by committee is a nasty concept, and unlike anything else, this catalog has the biggest review committee of them all and it's my joy to be in the middle of that....as I sit here biting my cuticles to shreds waiting for one of the committee members to pass some numbers my way so I can call them in to the printer down in Phoenix who sounds like he's flying high on crank waiting to hear from me.

Oh, and then one of our dear fellow associates in the "Dynamic Media" group is having an Adobe Illustrator Logo catastrophe because we keep giving him logos that "aren't Web/DVD-ready." We print people just don't understand "Dynamic Media." Well crap dude, we just can't give all our print graphics 10 point Disney-coloring-book strokes so they'll work handily on your wicked-cool DVD flying-repunzel-logo intro screen. That's why we give you an Illustrator file, so you can go in there and massacre it yourself. But oh, that's not good enough, we're also not setting the logo up in "layers". What the? Ohhh, okay, because we're not setting the logo up in layers, it's "a pain" for you to select the lines you want to beef up. Oh Booo Hooo, you're going to have to spend maybe 10 or 15 seconds moving the mouse around and selecting what you want. And oh by the way, as you've been told, all the similar pieces are "grouped" so all you have to do is alt-double-click to get the whole group, but why bother using that nifty little timesaving technique when you could so much more easily whine and cry about it. Kind of like what I'm doing now. eheh.






The crab-apple tree in our front yard is pushing out some really deep magenta flowers. A happy little tree, as Bob Ross would say, may he rest in peace, etc. etc. The aspens are pushing out some leaves too, but they look kindof sad still. We got like 5 minutes of really fierce rain and hail last night. Joy. Oh, and I played hide & seek with Giselle again, but, get this, she forgot to come looking for me! Ha! I thought that's what the grown-up was supposed to do. So after about 10 minutes, I creep out of my hiding spot and see that the Power Puff Girls had sucked her in. Well, I know where I stand ;-)

Haikus are on hold
Cannot find inspiration
Daughter forgets me

Jeremy

I've been trying to get published on the Starwars.com website for months now. They have a Photo Captions contest each week that is absolutely hilarious. This week's picture had me rolling laughing thinking about the possibilities, and since there's no way I'm going to get published this week or any other week, I'm sticking them here.

1) MARK! So help me! You rip another one of those and I'm corking you shut with this blaster. You hear me?

2) LUKE! How many times I gotta tellya slipping TurboLax in Chewwie's coffee ruins the trip for EVERYBODY!

Yes, juvenile AND scatalogical, but I can't help but think the picture begs for it.

Jeremy

Amanda was reminding me today about my longstanding morbid fixation with prairie dogs and how ironic it is that they are infesting our back yard. Right now I don't mind because I don't have any vegetation for them to uproot other than weeds and wild grass back there. The only thing is the plague-bearing fleas those little boogers like to carry around with them. I'm told there's some sort of flea killing dust that a fellow can sprinkle about that leaves the prairie dogs unharmed whilst protecting one's children from the black death.

We seek PEACEFUL co-exISTENCE!



oops. Gotta run. My ride is here.
Jeremy

This morning I woke up all excited to see if the lawn and flowerbeds got watered the way I wanted. So I stumbled up to the living room window and peeked through the blinds. And my first reaction was YEAH! there was hardly any runoff! So, I was all stoked that I had timed the 15 minute on/off bursts just right. And then as the crusts began to dissolve from my corneas I noticed that the yard was actually really really sparkly and lumpy. So, hooray, it got below freezing and I managed to freeze everything in my yard. Man, the roses are ticked. Too bad the cats weren’t hanging out when the ice storm began. So the lack of runoff could probably be attributed to the layer of permafrost I created.

On Saturday, we took Harrison and Giselle to get their hair cut, and it was a great day of victory as Harrison actually sat up in the chair by himself and got his first honest-to-goodness comprehensive hair cut with no screaming and flinching. Carrying him around in a crowd reminds me of the olden days playing Marathon and picking up the big rocket launcher, and you couldn’t see anything at all on your whole right side. So you had to constantly rotate side to side to see what’s going on and be sure you didn’t fall off a ledge or get sideswiped. And Harrison of course thinks it’s a blast: twist, rotate, sidestep, repeat...

Tonight I made spaghetti, and I’ll make the excuse now that I was distracted with changing lightbulbs and throwing the kids into the living room every 3 minutes while Amanda was sweeping and mopping around the moving targets. So anyway, as it so happens, I managed to screw up the noodles and half of them were all stuck together on the ends. How the heck do you ruin noodles? Well, I figured I could save some embarassment by giving Amanda the good noodles and spreading the bad ones between me and the kids and hiding the bad parts with sauce, because heck, what do kids know about good noodles right? And so of course, after about five or six bites, Giselle says, “Daddy, why are the noodles are all stuck together?” “Ah, hmmm, that’s interesting, Giselle. Just...eat them...” “But they’re all stuck together, and they got stuck in my teeth.” “Oh, uh, well sometimes that happens...erm...OK I RUINED THE NOODLES I DON’T KNOW HOW IT HAPPENED BUT THEY WERE COMPROMISED AHHHHHHHAHAHAHHHHH...” And Amanda is just looking at me like “It ain’t nothin but a thing.”

Fingernails grow long
Like weeds along sidewalk’s edge
Begging for trimmers

Jeremy

So, I was heading out the door today, and Harrison was standing there looking at me, and he says, “Bye Bye Mommy.”

He is out of his mind.

He knows what noses, eyes, cheeks, TV, food, shoes, door, shirts, dirt, snow, water and chocolate are, but he consistently calls me Mommy and Amanda Daddy. He has GOT to be doing it because we get that “what the heck?” look on our faces every time. I skooched over to him earlier and said “Okay YOU are Harrison. And WHO am I?” I repeated the question a few times. And I KNOW he knew what I was asking. He got this smile on his face, hopped down from the couch, got on all fours, started acting like a dog and tried to lick my leg. At which point I ran screaming.

Oh man it’s been windy the past few days. Windy windy windy. An apocalyptic, homicidal wind. Like the Kahoonah Winds on Maui in that one Magnum P.I. episode. So I’m driving up the street after work, and Paul has got his sprinkler going again, and the wind is blowing the water all up onto his roof and off into the ether. Despite that, his yard is turning all nice and green. Mine on the other hand, is still drab, prickly, and yellow. I checked some websites about how to water a lawn during drought to keep it dormant but not let it die. And it pretty much boils down to watering at half the normal amount. So I’ll be watering 3/4” every Monday and see how it goes. I was going to start this past Monday, but I woke up at 4 am and I could hear that the wind was blowing what sounded like trash cans and loose lumber down the street, so I went outside in my next-to-nothings to turn off the sprinklers just as they were getting started. Fooey.

At work, the lady who takes care of our video conferencing, is on vacation. So I get to be runner up troubleshooter for that infernal contraption. Video conferencing is my mortal enemy. Which is of course why I’m the backup guy for that mess. As is to be expected, it goes on the fritz today and won’t get a signal to the Sunnyvale office. And so I get to stand up in front of everybody pushing buttons on the remote, tugging on wires and shaking my bag of bones at the screen. Finally, somebody in the room lost faith in me and went to grab one of the video guys to help. Imagine that, one of the VIDEO guys helping out. Well he tugged wires and messed with the remote too, but I guess he got the right ones because it started working. Man, I’m glad I was there to make a difference.

I was eating a pear at my desk and thinking about how I must be adding at least 6 or 7 hours to my normal lifespan by being so healthy at that moment. And when I was done, I reached over to the stack of spare fast-food napkins to wipe my mouth off and caught myself lingering over the smell french fries on the napkin. There’s got to be something perverse about that.

Greasy lips part wide
Beef, cheese and Pepsi engulfed
Where floss dares not tread

Jeremy

Hey, so I was pretty proud of the whole rose-thorn anti-cat situation right? Well there I was Saturday, bashing my way through the hyper-cement ray-shielding along the foundation of the house for my fence post hole, and I look up to see that !@#% grey-striped cat stalking into my yard. So I stop for a second to watch and see what he does. So he starts scratching at the grass and I’m thinking ahh uhh he must be checking for prairie dog holes, and then allasudden he scrunches up and starts dumping turd after glistening turd right on the lawn! And he’s looking me in the eye the whole time as if to say ‘oh you think you’re so bad with your rose thorns, I’ve got your deterrent right here buddy.’

By the time I ran up to swat him with a glove, he had already piled up a steaming kairn big enough to relieve a medium sized dog. So I’m doing the Yosemite Sam thing stomping around the front yard and just in time I see good ole Paul laying a sprinkler hose in his side yard like 5 feet from the oozing cat monument. And I’m like Aha! So I go grab the shovel to scoop it up before his very eyes, and I’m thinking how this will make it pretty freakin obvious to him what’s going on with his rotten cats, and so he says “Wellll, whatcha doin?”. “I’m scooping crap outta my yard, Paul.” “Aww yeh, I’ve been finding that in my yard too.”

What the?

Yeah, I bet you’ve been finding it in your yard buddy, probably not as much as in mine for pete’s sake. And it ocurred to me that the pile of crap was so huge he prolly thought it was dog crap. This sucks like Texas. So now I have to figure out how to bring this up with them. He did all the work on building the backyard fence between our houses, and he helped me lay the sod in the front yard, so I have all this guilt building up about railing on him because of his fuzzy little turd-factories. But I have to say something because as soon as I get the cat traps and start hauling his critters off to the Humane Society, they’ll be knocking on our door asking if we’ve seen their cute little woogums, and then it’ll develop into why didn’t we tell them there was a problem in the first place? Which brings me back to, exactly what CAN they do about the crap holocaust their cats wield upon my yard? It’s a no-win situation. So I guess by next year I’ll know whether we’re mortal enemies or not...

I used to like cats
Now they haunt my fitful sleep
Yard smells like Woodstock

Jeremy

Post-posted from Thursday, April 11, 2002, 8:30 pm

I just got finished playing hide & seek with Giselle. She counts up to about16 and then starts to scatter the numbers “twenty-two, twenty-three, a hundredy-eight, nine and three-quarters, TEN!” As I scrunch behind the bathroom door chuckling to myself. It took forever for her to find me that time, and by the time she made it into the bathroom, I jumped out: “BLAAAAAGHHHHH!!!”...oh man did she yell—for like 30 seconds she yelled while staring me straight in the eyes, and then, “Daddy why did you SCARE me like that?? DON’T SCARE me like that! Okay now, you find me and I’m going to hide so good you’ll never find me.” Oh man she is a barrel of laughs.

We took her and Harrison to the doctor on Tuesday. And she’s just soaking up the attention. So after all the check-up stuff, the doctor leaves, and in comes the nurse. She has Amanda hold Giselle in some sort of full-nelson hold-down, and Giselle is just letting it happen—and in goes the first of three shots and happy time is over. It was horrible. We didn’t tell her anything about the shots. We’d never get her in the door. And she was screaming endlessly. So I’m holding her after the shots and telling her I’m sorry, and how I know it hurts, and it’s all over now, and meanwhile, Harrison is getting set up for one booster shot. And he knows what’s coming and he’s struggling and yelling and I whisper to Giselle “Look, Harrison is going to get his shot now,” so she’d know she wasn’t alone. And so he gets his shot and they take him off the table and Giselle says “HEY! How come he only gets ONE shot? I only wanted ONE SHOT! AAAAAAAHHHHH!!! I only wanted ONE SHOT!!! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!”

It looks like we’ll have to get her eyes checked and she may need glasses. They did an eye test on her that surprised me when she couldn’t see things that I assumed she did. Wow, that was something I hadn’t even thought of. Well, we’ll get her some cool glasses. Not like those thick, square, institution glasses they forced on Amanda and her friends back in Oklahoma.

She was showing me her crayon pictures when I got home today, and describing a picture of a house, and “this is the bed, and this is the living room, and this is the bathroom...” and she moves on to the top floor of the house, “and this is the laundry room, and this...” as she points to all these wavy lines “this is the stink...” and I start cracking up and she gets offended, “well it’s because this is the trash can, and see, it has diapers in it...” I just about wet myself.

I was checking the flowerbed in the front yard today, and after nearly a week, the neighborhood cats haven’t crapped in it yet. I cut up thorny rose canes and layed them all over their favorite stomping grounds. Sure beats paying money for cat repellant that doesn’t work for squat. And it doesn’t look all that bad either. I never thought I’d chase those rotten varmints out of there. I’d just love to see them trying to walk in and scrape open a hole and then run squalling out of the yard after getting stabbed. HA! Take THAT! Of course, I’m going to have a yard full of crispy dead leaves and grass anyway if it doesn’t rain at least once every couple months. It wouldn’t look to good for us to have a lush green yard if the rest of the town is rationing this summer.

Simpering son sits
Like wet sandbag on my lap
Head is bonking too

Jeremy

Post-posted from Sunday, April 7, 2002

I have the urge to write this stuff. But I’ll probably write tonight and then not write again for maybe a couple or three years.

Giselle and Harrison are growing up and I’m going to forget a lot of things.

Giselle is getting smarter and smarter. She could probably read by now if I spent more time reading with her. She’s known the alphabet for over a year. She can write some letters if they’re named to her, and she’s getting really good at writing her name. She colors with crayons, watercolor, and on the computer. Over the past couple months, she has started going leaps and bounds with the things she draws. She’s going to be ahead of where I was when I was in kindergarten. She was frustrating Harrison today by not giving him the Blue’s Clues toy house that he was glomming on all day long. She’s telling him “No Harrison! I need it to concentrate! No!” so I look up and she’s in Photoshop drawing the house as she looked at it. Boy oh boy, it was too cool.

And now she’s coloring pictures of the bathroom and the kitchen for me and griping that the computer isn’t letting her “type letters” to her friends (SimpleText isn’t working for some reason).

Harrison is a character. He sticks to Giselle like glue and he’s talking more and more. He’s an emotional little guy. He can be so happy and jolly and then next thing you know, he is crying pouting and throwing himself to the floor and bonking his head to make his displeasure known. When he suddenly decides that something is gross, he says “eeyuckie boogers.” Cracks me up every time. He can be really polite with his “thank yous” (keekoo) and “your welcomes” (yewecome). He has this obsessive compulsive thing about latching the refrigerator safety lock if one of us forgets to. When he’s not glued to Giselle, he’s crawling all over Amanda and jabbing his elbows and cranium into her ribs and any other pressure points. I’ve been wondering if we need to get him boxing gear to protect himself and his unsuspecting victims.

Oh man, the X-Files is such a joke the past year. I think they’re letting Barnum & Bailey write the scripts.

I’m “trying” to build gates for the back yard. So I go out yesterday and lay down $140 for lumber, hinges, latches and cement because that’s the easy part. So then this afternoon, I get to wreck my hands trying to dig post-holes through the titanium reinforced cement that the butthole contractors spilled within a three foot radius of the foundation and sidewalks of the house. I’m wearing my oh-so-safe plastic safety goggles and chiselling it with a hammer and screwdriver and a pick-axe and sparks are flying and I’m just waiting for a razor sharp chip of cement to slam into my groin at mach-one. Well I busted a couple inches away and have six more to go. Yay. Tommorrow I’ll see if I can get my hands on some dynamite. “That’s a rather oddly placed hole in your house Mr. Perez.” “Yes, that’s our new sunrise breakfast nook.”

Ok, see this, I’m writing too much already. I’ll think I have to do this every time, and I’ll decide I just don’t have the time for a few more years.

A lame haiku:

Up till 2 am
Watching TV and bloating
Kids are on the rag

Jeremy