August 2002 Archives

Meteorology

We had some seriously awesome storms roll through town last night. The first one looked like it fired up just north of Phoenix about sunset, and started hauling butt right up the rim before it petered out near Winslow. I laid waste to nearly two rolls of film trying to get some good lightning pictures. Whenever these things crop up, I inevitably spend 20 minutes searching the house for my tripod and the little clip that attaches the camera to it, and so by the time I'm ready to hop in the car and head to my vantage point, the bluster has died down or moved behind a mountain. Anyways, I think I got a few good shots.

We went in for the parent-teacher discussion today for Giselle. It is so strange navigating through the hallways with bazillions of little munchkins racing around. It's like visiting the Ewok village during the Caffeine Intoxication Ceremony. One of the first things I noticed was the playground. All the slides and swings and things were all interspersed amidst shady ponderosa pines, with Mt. Elden looming in the background. It was so cool.

You know, when I was a kid in Phoenix, recess was a lesson in sun safety. The playground was a vast, flat, sunbleached slab of burnt bermuda grass, pea gravel and concrete. Thank goodness school was out during the summer, or there'd be a lot of dead, maimed, and disfigured kids in the desert southwest. Back in my day (hah! I'm a codger now), playground toys weren't made out of this new fangled sun-safe plastic, fiberglass stuff. Nosiree, those merri-go-rounds, monkey bars and slides were all made out of smooth, unpainted, sunshine-absorbing stainless steel. You only went down that blistering metal slide or grabbed those curling-iron monkey bars once on the first day of school, and you never made that mistake again. Sometimes there'd be a gnarled old tree on the playground, but more often than not, once the sun started taking the life right out of you, you could either sidle up against a North facing wall, or duck under one of the meager metal-rooved ramadas with 150 other panting, sweaty kids and wait for the whistle to call an end to recess. Fooey. The only thing the cracked soil on those playgrounds was good for was dirt-clod fights. Nothing like being eight years old and picking gravel and dead roots out of your ears to take your mind off the cataracts the sun was putting into your eyes. But the crabby, sunburnt, playground teachers and the principal tended to frown most heavily on the throwing of any objects. Cranks. Just give the kids bike helmets and welding masks and let them have at it. Or not.

Sun scorch'd playgrounds blaze
Around the desert's children.
Daughter gets pine trees

Jeremy

Sprouts

Today is Giselle's first day at school. She left with her backpack, new school clothes and a big ole smile. I got lots of hugs this morning. ::sniffle::

Life just moves on and on and on.

Since it's day one, Amanda went with her for all the first day orientation shenanigans. So I took time off work to stay home and keep an eye on Harrison. We just polished off some Eggo waffles and he's a sticky mess. "Daddy, the sticky my nose...the sticky my nose..." He has such cool hair. I could just scruffle it all day long. I imagine by the time he's thirteen, he won't want to put up with that all too much =)

There's a couple forest fires burning south of town, and the blanket of smoke has been pretty thick the past few days. It's like being in LA, except it smells like a lovely campfire all day & night.

Transposition

Okay. A quick extra note for the day.

I just got off the phone with my sister, Jennifer. We were joshing around about our collective social anxiety issues, and on and on, and we finally got around to hanging up, and you know how sometimes, you’ll say something to somebody you haven’t talked to in a while, and you’ll accidentally say something to them the same way you do to somebody else you talk to more often? Huh? Right. Well, so she’s like, “okay, tell Amanda and the kids I said Hi, okay, take care,” etc. And so I’m like “Alright. Good to talk to you. Take care. Bye, love you, babe. ::click:: D’OH!”

Jeez! I just said “Love you, babe” to my sister. I almost called her right back to explain how I yanked that from my Amanda files by accident. But then that I figured that might be even weirder. Arghh.

It’s the stinking Kentucky genes expressing themselves. :P

Ooh! Discover Channel had Celebrity Shark Week on yesterday, and they showed photographers cruising around South Africa, Australia, and the California coast provoking Great White Sharks into breaching. MAN that was awesome! Big, humongous, submarine sized, Great Whites hurling themselves into the air like Shamu. If I was to go on some sort of touristy sea safari, Great White watching would definitely be top on my list.

Okay then. I’m done for now.

Jeremy

Emotional Bedsores

Mind if I drone on some more?

Great.

I'm not a cheery person in the morning. Especially after the weekend. I come in to work, and exchange greetings to a few different folks on the way to my desk. And I'm okay with "Hey", "Hi", "Hello", and other similar sayings. But the one thing I can't make myself say is, "Good morning", even when people say it to me. All I can come back with is "Howdy." I don't fully understand why. I've tried to explore the roots of the problem, and beyond the fact that I'm not riding a tidal wave of endorphines for the first couple hours of my day, the only other thing I can come up with is that saying "Good morning" to someone is like I'm giving something up. Like oh yeah, I don't mind seeing you right now, and "Hiya", but no way in heck are you going to force me to be happy and cheery and optimistic at 8:30 in the morning (sakes, I have it rough coming in at this unthinkable hour).

Mondays are the worst for this...but not because of the usual Monday reasons. It's because people inevitably want to know how your weekend went. And I know they're just being nice. But it's like I've either got a choice of being fake and saying "Oh yes, wonderful weekend. How was yours?" or being honest and saying "Oh holy crap. I didn't get any work done out in the yard. I sat on my bloated rear end all weekend long and watched Law and Order reruns with the missus. The kids were crawling all over me, and I think my hemmorhoids are coming back. And I'd ask you how your weekend went, but I'm sure it was way better than mine, and I don't need to feel any worse about it right now." And that's not to say I don't have good weekends, but when I do, I don't feel like sharing. "That was my awesome weekend, and ain't no way anybody is going to leech off my goodtime vibes. THEY'RE MINE! MINE I TELL YOU!!!"

Ugh. I'm a selfish jerk.

If I had waited until the caffeine took effect before writing this, I don't think I could've pulled together the right emotions. Is crabbiness an emotion or a symptom?

Allright. I gotta get on with it.

My day that is.

Jeremy

Oodles of Doodles

Amanda is outside the window sprinkling coffee grounds around the rose bushes. They're going through a big ole blooming spurt right now. One of them has a fungus I have to deal with one of these days.

I just got finished yanking up a bunch of weeds on the East side of the house. It's the one part I haven't been putting any effort into, and it was an impassibly tangled jungle. The Goat's Beard plants (Yellow Salsify) were the worst. Gigantic 4 foot tall, bug infested dandelions I tellya. Apparently, there's lots of people who like these things. They're as bad as Oleanders, as far as I'm concerned. I really screwed up leaving them to infest for that long. Now that they're cleared out, that whole side area is just littered with those nasty, webby, parachutey little seedlings, and every teeny gust of wind lifting a few dozen at a time over the fence and out into my neighbors' yards. I'd love to get over there and just sweep it with a bic lighter and a can of hair spray. FOOOOOSHHHH... But I'm not sure if my homeowner's policy would cover any unintended consequences from weedlette arson.

At work, we're contracting with a freelancer to do some illustrations for one of our dura repair products. There's no way I'd be given illustrations to work on directly...there's way too many other things that need my attention than doing drawrings...but I still couldn't get out of my mind the thought of working on medical illustrations, so I spent a few hours at home working on one of the images from scratch, just to see where I could take it:

It needs more work to tune it up, but it was a blast putting something like that together. The problem with doing illustrations, is that they take forever, and there just isn't enough time in the workday to add illustrating on top of all the other stuff that needs to get done. The sad thing is that in the graphics industry, professional illustrators who work for a company tend to get paid like data-entry rates. It's very strange.

Freelance illustrators are a different matter though. One of the guys who does some of the super-high-end work for our company Keith Kasnot, does absolutely amazing illustrations. He's my hero.

So I'm wondering if I want pick up some freelance illustration jobs here and there to keep the juices flowing. Or not. It's not as if I haven't got plenty to do already. Sheesh.

Jeremy

REM Disruption

Okay. A couple things.

First. Raisins have no business being put into cookies. None. I just grabbed what I thought was a chocolate chip cookie, and was subjected to the ruination of raisins masquerading as chocolate chips. If you're going to foul your chocolate chip cookies with raisins, at least have the decency to be sure a couple of your beloved, shrively, chewy raisins are peeking up on the top of the cookie, instead of all hiding down inside waiting for the unsuspecting to bite down into their gummy nastiness. Yuck.

Second. I'm fascinated by the state of my mind first thing in the morning when the alarm clock is going off and I'm trying to poke the snooze™ button. Last night for some reason, I positioned our little caller-ID box next to my alarm clock. And so this morning as the alarm was bleeping...and let me say now, that I anticipate my inability to wake up by setting the alarm 1 hour earlier than I need to wake up, so I get about 7 or 8 snooze disarmaments before I reach consciousness...but anyway, I half-lucidly noticed each time I stumbled over to hit the button, that I spent several seconds messing around with the Caller-ID box before dropping it and hitting the alarm instead. Really weird. Somebody could drop a dead skunk on the dresser and then rubber-cement a couple shiney buttons to it's fur and I'd try to shut it off first thing in the morning too. There is definitely weird subliminal stuff that goes on during that twilight hour of waking up. I notice when the occasional Coffee or Kellogs commercial comes on and plays the sound of somebody's alarm clock bleeping, that I can instantly sense this primordial, reptilian portion of my brain stirring and trying to move me to action...arrrrrrrr ... must ... stop ... noise ... must ... make ... it ... stop... arrrrrrrr...

Third. Harrison has the most doggone nasty morning halitosis. Yowza!

Jeremy

Grimm's Fathertales

Tonight, I was thinking about being a little kid, and all the vivid lies the grownups on my Dad's side of the family used to tell us kids to keep us from doing things they didn't want. Like going to Grandma's house and her telling us not to play down in he irrigation ditch: "No no mijo! The boogeyman lives down there and he'll eat you up!" Or going over to my Aunt and Uncle's house, and it was so boring because they didn't believe in toys--which I find myself agreeing with more and more--but anyway I'd be tempted to hunt in their closets for the calculators and other stuff to mess with, and Aunt Rosie comes running in "No mijo! Don't go in there! The giant hand that lives up in the closet will come down and get you!" I was 7 years old for Pete's sake. I knew she was lying. All she had to say was tell me to stay out.

But as time passes, I find myself sympathizing more and more with their tales. The daily struggles of debating with Giselle are starting to wear me thin.

Dad: Come on, you two. Let's go to bed.
Giselle: But I don't want to go to bed. I'm not tired yet...gripe gripe gripe
D: That's too bad. Come on. Let's go.
G: But why do you guys get to stay up?
D: Because we're the grown ups.
G: But why do grown ups get to stay up later?
D: Because we need quiet time together.
G: But why do you need quiet time?
D: Because we...oh good grief...because if kids don't quiet down at night, the lions come down out of the forest to see what all the noise is from and...
G: AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
D: Yeah! So lets get you into bed!

Must...fight...urge...for...instant...gratification...

Jeremy

Hovercraft Rides

So, we've been on a tight budget for the past couple weeks after doing some overspending on the yard. To compensate, we've been eating lots of beans for the past few days. Mmmm mmmm. I love me some beans. When we cook them, I go into a feeding frenzy. But they've been tearing me up. Amanda and I have been sitting in the living room at night, taking turns uttering grievances at each other. I can't get to sleep. It's been keeping me up at night. Seriously.

I went to our Sunday meeting today, and that's just not an ideal situation when you're riding the frijole express. The Hnattyshacks were sitting behind me and I think I just about killed them. I tried to keep the ruckuss down, but you have to contort to do that. I'm sure they must've figured it out after the first couple assaults. I can just imagine a third party watching every time I hunch forward and immediately seeing them lurch back and scrinch their eyes shut, maybe crying a little bit.

I should probably get my slacks drycleaned now.

I hate to spoil the mood of eating my beans by dripping solvents on them, but I guess it's time to invest in some Beano™.

Jeremy

Compressed Spring

Giselle's playing outside in the rain...er hang on a sec...in the hail, right now. There's some new kids in the neighborhood that are closer to her age, and so they've been playing together now & then. It's weird. I don't know how far to let her go, as far as playing outside in the neighborhood with the other kids. When I was seven years old, I ran around and played in the neighborhood. I don't remember much from when I was five...other than the older neighbor boy coming over to my yard and shoveling dirt in my pants. Duggy was a jerk.

But it's a different environment now from when I was a kid--as Amanda keeps reminding me. So do we just keep her all cloistered up for fear of her getting abducted or hurt, which, after enough time she'll flip out and start sneaking around behind our backs anyway. Or do we give her enough reign to run around with the little kids at the end of the street and get some healthy play in at the risk of stranger-danger driving by. We pratice the "what do you do?" questions so she knows not to help strangers find their puppies and candy and all the other what-ifs. But it's still scary. She sure is having fun though.

Man this rain is great. I went out earlier with a little 3-prong cultivater and dethatched some of the more hideous parts of the lawn. Hopefully that'll give the grass more opportunity to recover there. The weeds will probably love it too. I need to put some anti-weedlet fertilizer in there.

I finally buckled down & uploaded some pictures of the kiddos.

Giselle's new glasses.

Harrison has to have glasses too now.

Burying her brother in the sandbox

Rain turns into hail
In the big bad world outside
Daughter needs to play.

Jeremy