Author: Dave

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out loud regardless


Tonight I can’t seem to get enough to eat. We got home from dropping off Sharaun’s folks at the airport and I played with Keaton for twenty minutes before putting her to bed, Sharaun split right away for her volleyball game. And, even though we’d had dinner shortly before leaving for the airport, I came home and ate a heaping bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios (in whole milk – I’ve become addicted to its creamy sweetness ever since we’ve started keeping it in the fridge as part of Keaton’s diet). After the Cheerios, I finished off the leavings in a bag of Gardetto’s snack mix we’d taken down to the cabin with us last week. After the Cheerios and the Gardettos, I chewed a couple pulls of jerky, the sweet-hot and peppered kind; also obtained on that trip down south for the Fourth.

And now I sit here, listening to the new Animal Collective album for what must be the seven-billionth time this week (I’m not getting into it now, but let’s just say this album is waay radder than the stuff which spurred me to write this). Anyway – I think I’ve eaten enough now, and it’s time to burn some calories on the keys.

I love my time alone like this. I think it’s made even more important in this particular instance because we’ve had company the past week. Not that I didn’t enjoy our time together with family, it’s just nice to sometimes have the run of the castle. I can put on music at my preferred volume (the volume Sharaun calls, “Turn that crap down! How can you think that guys whiny voice sounds good on top of all that treble?”), I can eat sweet and salty snacks, and I can fart out loud (OK, I fart out loud regardless… don’t hate). It was kinda cloudy this afternoon, and I think I even saw a couple raindrops manifest themselves – which made it cool enough for me to open the windows when I got home: another bonus of my alone-time, the fresh air. Don’t ever let the opportunity to sneak away for some “you time” get away from you, folks. And I’m not even talking about masturbation (although that’s probably up there on the list); I’m just talking about good ‘ol leave-me-alone with my thoughts time. Get it.

In anticipation of my near four hours of travel time tomorrow (the airport time, the in-flight time, and the public transpo time from the airport to the Oregon sawmill), and, as a first for me, I’ve loaded up my iPod with some movies. I’ve got Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (still haven’t seen it), the BBC’s controversial rebuttal The Great Global Warming Swindle, and Michael Moore’s newest, Sicko. A regular card-carrying Sierra Club Democrat’s playlist, I reckon. I’m looking forward to seeing them all, but I think I’ll begin with Sicko, mainly do to the insane amount of press it’s been getting lately all about the internets. I never figured myself as someone who’d watch movies on his iPod, that tiny screen always seemed a roadblock to my enjoyment. But after a test with some short clips I found it quite passable and somewhat convenient. I’m gonna need a bigger iPod…

Before I go, one last little morsel; indulge me: I’ve written several times about the writings of this writer, but I found this semi-recent blog entry of his simply perfect, as blogging goes, by my standards, at least, or something. Oh to write like that.

Well, as much as I wanted to mow the lawn and get a haircut before leaving for Oregon – it just ain’t gonna happen. Until tomorrow then, when I should have ample time to write – Goodnight.

iPhone. Ron Paul. Bush. Iraq.

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stick with me


Tuesday, and my last day of vacation. Well, last day for another three days, at least. Then I’m off another entire week. I return to work on the 23rd, and that leaves me with just five weeks of work left before my two-month “sabbatical.” I am truly excited about this, nearly to the point of advanced mental checkout. Knowing that you only have a month or so left at the sawmill can make a person’s mind really start to wander. I know it’s gonna come up fast, I can already tell. Anyway, last night we went to dinner with the family and some friends, then stole and enjoyed a cam copy of the Cusack new horror flick, 1408. Was a low-key evening and a nice way to spend our last real night together with Sharaun’s folks. Let’s try to write a lil’ bit now, shall we?

Can’t hardly believe it’s July in 2007 already. That’s more than the halfway mark (don’t think I don’t know this means I missed my yearly “half-best” list). The fact that we’re already on the waning side of the ’07 also means that my mind starts turning towards Halloween. Last year, almost every single one of my complicated props broke in some major way. Punks tried to steal my coffin-popper, the flying crank ghost got tangled up in her own puppetstrings and ended up a twisted heap, the ceiling dropper shook himself loose to some degree, and the witch’s rags are looking a bit too… raggedy. (Not to mention I got penis’d.) After last year’s soirée, I had all but decided that it would be the last of it – that I was done. Now, however, coming up on August (usually the first month I start thinking about props)… I’m not so sure. Guess I’ll just see how it goes.

I’m off to Oregon in the early ‘morn tomorrow, driving there in the dark as the flight leaves with the sun. I’ll spend a couple quick days at work there, and an even quicker night at my folks’ place between the two. So, once again, posting may be light for the next week or so – which is kinda nice for me, but perhaps not so good for maintaining readership. Guess that’s the way blogging goes.

Until sometime later, stick with me.

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worth a thousand words


Ahhhhhhhhh…..

That’s one long sigh of relief; in honor of my vacation. As I write, I still have two full blissful days of relaxing to look forward to. Then it’s back to work for a mere three days, followed by another full week of loafing (as more relatives come to visit). Today is Sharaun and my 7th wedding anniversary – I remembered and got a card, she forgot and didn’t. Kinda feels good to not be the negligent one.

The vacation thus far has been outstanding. We spent two nights at the cabin down south, and then had a barbecue at the house with some friends and the in-laws (got to use the BBQ again). Today, which is Monday, as a whole herd of saps are reporting to the old sawmill for another day’s slave-labor, I’m sitting on the couch with no real motivation to get going. This is a good thing, however, believe me. We’re planning to go out to the lake today, let Keaton goof around on the shore and sit in the sand. After that, our plans are… nothing. So good to be off, I’m really just realizing how much I needed the time.

I started to write last night, but gave up for lack of material. I was all ready to call it another lost day, and send the blog down what would’ve ended up being one of the longest dry-spells in its history. Then, I was checking my e-mail on the BlackBerry while I was taking my morning coffee dump (yes, I do this) when a certain configuration of bits and bytes flew through the ether, recombined into a JPEG on my phone, and inspired me. What got me going, it turns out, was a photo that my dad sent. His simple explanation was that it was an “old photo” of me that he thought I “might like.” Check it out (click for a slightly larger version in a new window):

Now, to me, this picture was a treasure-trove of memories. Let’s set the stage first though, shall we? I can roughly date the picture by examining the wall decorations: We’re somewhere in the pre-Beatles phase, and still have quite a bit of post-5th-grade holdover material (the Garbage Pail Kids posters, the Alf poster). I have my TV and NES in the entertainment system, but not my VCR. The lack of Beatles material and VCR mean this picture was likely taken right around my late-7th-grade Beatles enlightenment (I would’ve been thirteen years old). I couldn’t help staring at this thing all “what’s wrong with this picture” style. Some things that I liked:

  • Looking closely at my left wrist, I can see the clay-bead-on-leather-strap bracelet I wore religiously for a few years in middle school. I noticed that an 8th grader had dropped it in the locker room one morning while we were dressing out, and stole it up as my own. I was even brave enough to wear it to school, back into that very locker room with that very 8th grader. I could’ve sworn I saw him looking at it, knowing, but I don’t think he ever challenged me on my ownership of it. The beads were all swirly and spotty and psychedelic, again placing this photo into that 7th-grade time of burgeoning wanna-be-hippie.
  • You can just see the edge of my dad’s old turntable in the left of the shot (by then I had adopted it as my own), and both of my two speakers: one on the right of the TV table with that yellow lamp on it (we used this one as a makeshift stepstool to get a leg-up while sneaking out of the house through that window above it), and the other to the right of the TV stand with some stuffed animals perched atop. Not too much later, I’d purchase another set of speakers from our neighbors garage sale and setup a true quadraphonic system in my room. The first record I listened to in quad was Traffic’s eponymous 1968 sophomore effort – I sat cross-legged in the middle of the room and just grooved.
  • I liked Alf?!
  • In the right-front foreground you can see the corner of my beloved bunk beds. I had these through somewhere late in the 9th grade, when they were replaced with a waterbed. Just barely in the shot near the top right you can see the blurred shape of the ceiling fan which hung directly above the ladder providing access to the top bunk. You had to climb up all hunched over to avoid hitting your head on the thing as it was whirring. I remember being extra super-aware of this on one particularly harrowing evening.
  • I used to keep all my NES cartridges in the little cabinet you can kinda see at the bottom of the TV stand. That’s where my lightgun and ROB the robot lived, too.
  • The stuffed animals on the speaker are, from left to right, “Star” and “Teddy.” Teddy was my brother’s, he was a bear; Star was mine, he was a dog. They used to have all kinds of adventures together, and were the best of buds – as stuffed animals go.

OK I’m tired. Have a good day at work, punks.

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pretending to remember


Happy Monday night to you this Tuesday morning, my friends. Tomorrow is my this week’s Friday, as after that I’m away from the sawmill for a full seven days. Seven days, folks. Then it’s up to Oregon for some displaced work (y’know, work away from your day-to-day desk always feels different). After that, I have one single, solitary, lone-wolf day back in the office before I’m off for yet another week. It’s going to be a fast and spotty July. And, when I get back on the 23rd, it’ll be a mere month or so away from the beginning of my sabbatical. Two. Months. Vacation. ‘Nuff said. Let’s get this over with.

Remember way back when I was all obsessed with the bermudagrass infestation in my lawn? I went out and bought some serious poison, which I applied twice with some success and then didn’t follow up with the prescribed regimen and thus wrecked any small progress I made, ‘member? Anyway, I shoulda stuck with the regimen, y’all… I really shoulda. My lawn is at least 60% bermuda these days… I swear. Those little tendrils snake their way out of the boundaries of the lawn and onto the bare concrete of the driveway and sidewalks, where they stand out like blinking neon: “Dave got weeds.”

The other morning on the way to work, I came up with a novel new game to play while alone in the car. Speaking imaginary eulogies for those I know; practicing, out loud, the from-the-heart tributes I’d give in their honor at their funerals. May seem macabre, but I got a lot of enjoyment out trying to condense the essence of those I know down into small little speeches. I would revise my speech as I went, looking for honest, impactful, “real” things to say. It works best for those I know best, of course – easier to talk honestly about someone you understand (or think you do). This isn’t to say I want anyone I pretended-to-remember to actually slip this mortal coil, I guess I just enjoy hearing myself talk.

Goodnight.

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no post today, just pictures

A busy weekend, just a little too beer-soaked for my tastes – but good despite. So, I didn’t get to write. However, you can click the image below to be taken to a fresh batch of Keaton pictures at her gallery.

Happy Independence Day from Keaton (and family)!

Enjoy!

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global… or something


Today I sent out a pretty informal e-mail to a group of friends, inviting them to join Sharaun and her sister and brother-in-law and I for a weekend camping trip later this month. One of the responses I got was from a friend of ours who works for a major shipping company. Unfortunately, he relayed, the weekend I had chosen was the very weekend that the new, and presumably series-ending, Harry Potter book is released. Due to this, he had to work Saturday and would not be able to make it.

It struck me, then, how things effect other things. Because a British author wrote a wildly popular series of young-adult novels, demand for the final installment is unprecedented. This means that a friend of mine here in Northern California has to pull extra hours to manage the glut of book shipments to various outlets, presumably for both one-off private and bulk point-of-sale. Funny how that whole cause-and-effect things works, and how second, third, and even latter-order effects impact the daily routines of regular peoples I know. Kinda cool… global… or something.

We got together with some friends tonight for a leisurely walk over to the local ice cream parlour and some post-ice cream beers. At some point, Kerry, one of said friends, mentioned that she’d read the blog today (which is, as you read this, yesterday’s entry here) – and had a suggestion for my ongoing problem with birds in my garden. Backing up, I came home today to find two more tomatoes ruined – cherry this time, something they’ve previously not gone after. You can see them as the inline-image associated with this post. Anyway, Kerry suggested I offer the birds an alternative – an actual bird-food alternative. Now, I can immediately see this in two lights: 1) Having “real” bird food out for these beasts may sate them and ultimately keep them from my fruit, or, 2) Having “real” bird food out may invite even more hungry beasts into the yard – making me a regular avian all-you-can-eat buffet.

In the end, I decided to go ahead and give it a shot – as it seemed infinitely more implementable, not to mention humane, than my impulse-idea: A massively-charged “bird zapper” designed in the spirit of a “bug light.” Something that would find me coming home to piles of dead birds heaped around my planter box, all killed instantly the moment the dared flutter near my yummy tomatoes. I had also seriously planned to wall the entire thing via with some large-scale fine mesh box, but wasn’t going to be able to expend the time and effort until this weekend – which, at the current bird loss-rate, would cost me four to six more pieces of fruit. So, anyway, I’ll hang the seed-block thing early tomorrow morning… and see what happens. Wish me luck.

Goodnight.

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commiserating


This weekend, I read an article about the baby from the cover of Nirvana’s classic grunge-flashpoint, Nevermind – he’s sixteen now. Nothing can make a dude feel old like the infant on an album he loved when he was fifteen turning sixteen. Man, that’s a bummer.

Also in the bummer department, the birds in my garden have me really exasperated lately. I’ve done a good job keeping them out of the strawberries, for the most part. Well, actually, the protective cage I built over my berries caught another winged devil today – but that’s not what I’m here to write about. It seems that, having been denied my berries, the birds have developed a taste for my tomatoes.

Over the past months, I’ve been attentively watching my larger tomatoes grow fat and plump, and have been particularly happy over the past few days (before leaving for Oregon) as they started to get some color. I knew, upon returning home, I’d likely have several large ripe ones for the picking.

However, the birds once again robbed me this glory. I don’t know how they know, but it seems like they’re tuned into my brain. It’s like the day I tell myself, “Tomorrow, I’ll pick that one, it needs just one more day on the vine,” they attack. I’ve yet to be able to pick a full-size tomato before it being ravaged by beaks. Seems I can only get the cherries off before they get to them. They’ve gone through five tomatoes so far, completely gutting them on the plant. I can’t describe how frustrating it is to tend a tomato for weeks in anticipation of literally tasting the fruits of your labors – only to have the dang thing ruined right under your watchful eyes. It may seem trivial, but I want to taste one of my own tomatoes so bad.

Writing that last sentence, I couldn’t help but feel a little empathy. For whom?, you ask. Well, I’ll tell. Imagine you work hard on something, like, growing tomatoes from seeds, for instance. You sweat and work and toil over the infantile fruits as they take shape from the dirt. You watch and tend them, pulling weeds and giving them water, making sure they have enough sunshine to thrive, etc. Then, right as you’re about to pick the ends of all your work, something comes along and steals it away.

Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. Those “farmers” whose “tomatoes” are albums. Albums grown from chord progressions and words thought up randomly, worked and reworked and polished, finally perfected and fit for public consumption. And know who I am? That bird that I loathe so much. That bird that swoops in just as the tomato/album is ripe and ready to enjoy, and glibly consumes it – with nary a thanks nor a dime. All their work and effort, pecked into bits by a punk thief with no regard for the work that went into the things he consumes.

Sorry, musicians. Maybe one day I’ll learn. Or, maybe you’ll end up shooting me with a BB gun the way I plan to take care of the birds who are “torrenting” my fruit. Seriously though, check out some pictures for the heck of it.

“Knee-high by 4th of July?” I got that and then some. From seeds too!

Just look at that thing, inside my strawberry cage.

Three of the fallen, two more were too brutalized for photos.

I read online about this thin tight-woven netting stuff that you can supposedly “drape” over your plants to protect them. To me, though, draping something over tomatoes just means all the bird has to do is peck through the netting. I think, in true over-engineered fashion, I’m going to use some sort of netting to build a huge cage around my entire planter box. OK, maybe that’s extreme… but I’m open to suggestions. And, I’ll stop talking about birds and tomatoes now.

Let’s do the wrap-up paragraph now.

Got some vacation coming up next week, and I couldn’t be more ready for it. It’ll be nearly two weeks, although not taken consecutively. Vacations are always iffy for writing, sometimes they’re good for it, sometimes they’re bad for it. No promises (other than to have a rockin’ good time not-working, that is). And yes, folks, I know, lots of you have been bugging me for new pictures of Keaton. I wanted to wait until we were back from our Oregon visit before posting them, so I expect to have them up this week. Trust me though, she’s only getting cuter.

Before I go, in music news. Check out this exclusive feature on the Arcade Fire’s upcoming follow-up to Neon Bible. Also, the new Interpol has been floating around in sketchy quality, and from my first listens it sounds better than some of the other recent leaks. Oh, and, the six leaked tracks from the new Animal Collective have really grown on me. Still under evaluation: the new Thrills, the new Super Furry Animals, the new Editors, and the new Vanderslice. Oh, and, Ben got it right on his blog, the Los Campesinos EP is downright fun.

Team Campesinos trick or treating on your driveway in the middle of August; one of us dressed like a zombie, one of us dressed like a pirate, one of us dressed like a ninja and four of us dressed like schoolgirls.

Goodnight.