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pumpkins in a wagon

Sunday and another busy weekend draws to its end.

Tonight, after I cleaned out the Halloween workshop (garage) so we can put the cars in again, we packed Keaton into the wagon and all went for a walk down to the market to pick out some pumpkins (funny enough, we didn’t actually buy pumpkins while we were up at the real pumpkin patches last weekend – so we did the “city” version instead today).  It was a nice trip, and, besides, I’ve never pulled a wagon through the aisles of a supermarket before.

Saturday I made the final-final (fingers crossed) repairs and adjustments to all the props, and they’ve all been running fine since.  Now if they can just make it to Halloween night and be in good working order so I can entertain some trick-or-treaters, I’ll be happy.

As Fall continues to creep up around us slowly here in Northern California, I find myself wishing we’d get a good hard rain.  We haven’t had rain here in what seems like forever, since our seasons aren’t as wide-open as places like my previous home of Central Florida.  And, even though we rarely get any worth-mentioning thunder and lightning, I’d gladly take a day stuck inside for a decent thunderstorm.  Something about rain, and I’m certain I’ve written about this before, something about being safe and dry indoors as the rain pours down outside… is very soothing and satisfying to me.  So c’mon rain, come get us wet over here… I’m waiting.

While I was cleaning the garage today, I wanted to put a couple ten-foot lengths of conduit up in the rafters for storage.  Keaton had come out with me (she absolutely loves spending time with me in while I “work” in the garage, she hovers around me asking me questions about what I’m doing and offering to “help” – I love it), and she was tossing around a little bouncy ball as I picked up.  Seeing the unused conduit, I grabbed both lengths near the middle and began to swing them around to position them towards the rafters.  I watched as I maneuvered them so I wouldn’t hit the hanging florescent lights or the workbench behind me, but as I did I heard aloud “thud” and immediately thought I’d hit the workbench.  But, as soon as I heard the impact Keaton began screaming.

In a panic I dropped the pipe and turned to see her bent over clutching her face.  Freaking out now (the sound of the pipe hitting something had made me think I hit something really solid, so I knew she had received a good whack), and cursing myself for working with the long and awkward pieces of metal while she was around, I darted over and scooped her up.  “Where does it hurt, baby?,” I asked, brushing her hair from her face.  Oh crap, she was holding her eye… “My eye!,” she wailed.  Getting more worried, I asked her to open her eye, half expecting the worst.  Thankfully, her eye looked fine, and I finally noticed the little red mark on the bridge of her nose – near her eye but not in her eye.  After the couple seconds I’d taken to initially check her out, I rushed inside with her still crying to put some ice on the bump.

Turns out that after some ice and comforting, she was just fine; but I ended up feeling like a careless dad again for smacking my own daughter in the face with some metal pipe.  It’s a good thing the Lord makes babies tough, ’cause they get hurt a lot it seems.  I’m just waiting for the first broken bone or stitches… you know it’ll happen.

OK folks, gonna stop writing now and read a little.  Have a good Monday and I’ll talk to you later.  Bye.

(Pssst!  OMG can you please look at the picture of Job and Keaton Megan posted last night (scroll down, it’s the last one.)

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getting my #2 time back

Friday, and despite thinking this whole evening that I wasn’t going to write, here I am sitting down at 10:30pm giving it the old college try.

My favorite thing about Friday?  It’s always followed by Saturday and that’s the day a bunch of people come over to our house to watch college football all day.  Thursday, even Thursday’s good because it’s almost Friday.  But, whatever…

You know when everything is going right with your complicated animated Halloween props and you’re all like, “Man, my complicated animated Halloween props are dialed-in this year!”  You’re all proud and happy and triumphant and stuff?  Isn’t that always the time that the blacklight you have mounted to the underside of the porch decides to fall off and hang in the path of your crank ghost’s motor arm?  You know, totally tangling the thing into a twisted mess and nearly overworking the motor to the point of death?  Yeah man, me too.  That crap always happens to me.  Ugh… just more work guys… just more work…

Keaton likes to do this new thing where, while I’m seated in the bathroom, she opens the door and asks me, among other random and non-urgent questions, how I’m doing.  At first I found this a little disturbing – as even in my own house around the woman I’ve been with for fifteen years, I’m a door-closed kinda #2 guy.  But, as she continued to do it (displaying an almost ESP-esque knack for knowing when I’m pinching a loaf), I guess I sort of got used to it.  Lately though, I’ve taken to latching the door while I’m in there.

Why?  I’ll tell you why.

I miss my smelly little sanctuary.  No one used to bother me in that room; I could read the Newsweek (or stray People if Sharaun had left one), surf the internet on my iPhone (is that gross?  I kinda think it might be gross), or simply rest my chin on my hands and enjoy the silence.  And, as much as I love my daughter – even to the point of allowing her to interrupt my bomb-dropping – I just need my time, y’all.  So, she’ll come to the door, fiddle with the handle, ask me, in a muffled voice, “Dad?  What are you doing, Dad?,” and eventually give up when I don’t let her in.

And that’s how I got my #2 time back.  Goodnight.

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halloween ’08 “walk-up”

Good evening beautiful denizens of the interwebs.

Hope your Wednesday was OK; mine was.  Some friends invited us over for another debate-watching party tonight, so with no time to get things done after work I snuck out about thirty minutes early at lunchtime and got some finishing work done on the Halloween display.  I setup the sound and did final placement and tacking on cables and motion detectors and whatnot.

I’m really happy with the way things turned out.  I’m using the prop activation timer as it’s supposed to be used instead of just as an afterthought as in 2006, and the rest of the work is just icing at this point.  Halloween could be tomorrow and I’d be OK (providing I carved a pumpkin or two with Keaton before nightfall).

And, since I’ve had at least one person ask me to see a video of the whole house “walk-up” as it’ll look to trick-or-treaters, here’s something I put together quickly tonight.  The only drawback to this video is that I don’t yet have the light hooked up to the ceiling dropper – so I had Sharaun hiding out shining a flashlight on it at the right time to simulate.  Unfortunately, the flashlight just isn’t bright enough and the effect doesn’t come through very well in the video.  Owell, maybe I’ll reshoot it once I hook up the real light (which will be a bit more orange and a lot more bright than what you see here).  So, check it out, and, come get some candy… if you’re not too skeered!

[flv:https://blog.pharaohweb.com/video/hween08walk.flv 320 240]

Anyway, with that last light and a couple handmade glowing Jack-o-lanterns it’ll look a lot better… I added it to the Halloween gallery too, y’know, for posterity’s sake.  Let’s move along now.

One of my best buddies has a daughter whose spending a year studying abroad in Sweden.  Before she left, I helped her setup a blog here on the pharaohweb.com servers so she could keep the masses updated with her foreign goings-on and post pictures and do general bloggy stuff.  She’s been gone now for a few months, and I’ve enjoyed reading her blog a lot in those times – it’s kind of like I’m getting to experience the whole culturally-displaced thing through her (even though she doesn’t write nearly enough).  Her last entry, however, really made me stop and think.  I’m gonna link it now without much setup or commentary and just let you take it in for yourself.  Read it by clicking here… heavy stuff for someone I still think of as the eight year old I first met so many years ago.

For real though, I’m straight-up doing a year abroad vicariously through her… since I was too chicken to ever do anything like that when I was younger.

OK folks, it’s coming up on 10pm and I need to not be at the computer for a bit.

Goodnight.

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sometimes i suck too

Something went wrong with last night’s post scheduling, and I didn’t notice until midway through the day today that it hadn’t auto-posted at midnight as my entries usually do.  If you missed it, you can just scroll down – so don’t panic. And now, to Tuesday…

You guys know what?  I totally got the crank ghost up tonight after work.  If you would’ve asked me yesterday I would’ve said it might not happen at all this year.  See, my new rig was flawed, was tangling the strings and the thing wouldn’t work.  But then,  I got all nuts and made it work.  I also managed to set up the motion detector and prop timer for sound and animation and lighting.  I didn’t, however get it all hooked up or cable-managed.  But, good Lord I almost made my self-imposed October 15th deadline for all the old props being up and running.  Tomorrow I’ll hook things up and take a video of the coordinated triggering I setup for the popper and dropper so you can see it all in action.

Y’know… I get on to Sharaun a lot for being disorganized, unmotivated, and, at times, downright lazy.  I know, what a great husband, right? I like to think of myself as a shining example of organization and motivation, never letting myself falter.  Every once in a while though, I’ll step back and realize I’m a fairly lazy procrastinator in my own right.  Take for example the pair of tennis shoes outside our front door right now.  They’re all dusty and dirty so I stuck them out there to knock together a couple times before bringing back into the shoe rack in our closet.  Sounds prudent, right?  Yeah, all but for the part where I forgot to mention that I put those shoes out there right after removing them from my feet upon returning from our aborted JMT hike back in the first week of September.  So yeah, a month out there on the porch waiting for me to bring them in.  That’s pretty bad y’all… pretty bad.

Hey guess what?!  I actually posted some new pictures to Keaton’s gallery!  Yeah, I’m for real.  Now, even though I’m supposedly covering two months time with this update – I only managed to pull together a measly twenty decent pictures.  But, I figure it’s better than nothing.  You can go check out the new stuff by clicking right here.

Goodnight my friends.

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no tengo nada

Sorry for no Monday entry.  Sunday I spent the post-praise day working on the Halloween props, and with dinner guests that evening I found not a common moment between me being awake enough to write and me wanting to write.

Anyway, the props are about 80% ready – still some wiring and cable-tacking and fine-tuning to do before everything’s perfect.  Of course, setting things up wasn’t with out issue, and I found myself frustrated and pressured by some imagined deadline.  I’ll be happy if I get everything dialed in this week, and then can spend some time working on the “new” prop to see if I can get that working before the 31st.  I’ll let ya know.

I’ve really got little to post today… but I did want to share a little bit of why our daughter constantly amazes me.  And yeah, I guess this is sort of dad doing some bragging… but…

See, she’s got this little “music table” toy that sings all sort of songs.  It’s actually from when she was little, but we keep it around because she still enjoys it and it’s good for our friends with cruisin’ babies.   Anyway, the thing sings counting songs and the alphabet – and does both in English and Spanish according to how a little switch on the side is set.  Apparently, Keaton’s been practicing her alphabet in Spanish.  Check it:

[audio:alphabeto.mp3]
Better than I could do.

Awww, that’s the cutest Spanish alphabet I’ve ever freakin’ heard (that last bit goes something like, “La cancion del ABC y la sabes bein, cantas la tambein”).  I love that girl like she was money.

Oh and because I’m so behind in updating Keaton’s gallery, Megan posted some new pictures of Keaton (and one hilarious one of yours truly too) – and Bill posted some of Keaton and Jake from our first debate-watching party (yes, we’re old) – and Ragan posted some from when they visited.  Go check them out here, here and here, respectively.  Thanks for doing my work, folks.

Goodnight y’allz.

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couple nights alone

Friday and I’m passionate for the weekend.

I have to work from home today (which is tomorrow as I write, being that I do all my keybanging the night prior to an entry) for two reasons:

1) We’re doing the introduction meet-and-greet for the gradeschool e-mail pen-pals thing I volunteer for at work.  So I get to meet my kid tomorrow.  If they really do pair us up based on the questionnaires they made me fill out I expect to get a kid who plays no sports, loves math and science, and whose hobby is “writing.”  Holy crap I’m gonna get the hugest nerd y’all…

Anyway, 2) Sharaun is leaving for her New Kids on the Block concert around midday.  It’s her big several-hundred dollar VIP package, complete with her own meet-and-greet.  For her, I seriously think this is a childhood dream come full circle.  And no, I did not give her permission to sleep with any of them were she to be invited “back to the bus.”

Actually, I’m home alone right now because Sharaun is at (guess… c’mon… guess) a New Kids on the Block concert.  Yeah, tonight is the first of three.  Two back-to-back and one later this month that she’s flying to Florida for.  Sigh… at least I got to have the TV off all night, the iPod on, and play with Keaton…

And, since we’re on the topic of dreams (well, we kinda were… somewhere back there…) I had an insane and frightening one last night, and it was so vivid upon waking I figured it might mean something. Now, bear with me because dreams aren’t always quite linear… but here goes:

Sharaun and I somehow got free tickets to see a hip-hop/rap act play in some highschool auditorium in San Francisco. In my dream I knew who they were, some very popular radio-staple act like Lil’ Wayne or something. Anyway, it was some kind of “secret” show I think…. We arrived and stepped into some glass-walled booth above the stadium-seating style auditorium, where we’d watch the show.

The place was filled with highschool kids sitting very reserved in their seats waiting for the show to begin. As the house went dark I could see shadows taking their places on the stage, and when the lights came back up and the beats kicked in the place went wild. Kids tore the backs off their seats and started a frantic teenage riot, trashing things for the sake of trashing things.

Immediately, authority figures in the form of what I assumed were teachers and administrators swept in from the aisles and quieted or restrained the unruly kids. The show was stopped and everyone was ushered out of the room. The entourage on stage walked off in disgust and ended up joining us in the glass booth. Being less than interested in hanging out with Lil’ Wayne and his crew, I opted to walk around instead – leaving Sharaun there (this has got to be a dream, as no married man would ever in real life leave their wife alone with Lil’ Wayne and his boys… that’s just not a good idea).

Upon wandering, I met a doctor (I know, it moves fast here) who said he wanted to talk to me about my medical history… and had some forms for me to fill out. We decided to step outside and have a seat at some tables there to go over the results. As we sat talking, I was facing the street and he had his back to it.

Suddenly, and this is the moment in this dream that made me write about it, behind him in the air I saw something huge falling through the sky.  Doing a double take, I could see what appeared to be a huge rocket drifting down with a large parachute trailing behind it. Despite the parachute, the massive thing was sailing down at a pretty good clip. I remember think that no who hadn’t yet seen it as I had would even know it was coming, as it was completely silent as the parachute lowered it through the air.

I watched in confusion and growing horror as it moved from top to bottom across my vision, crossing the imaginary line formed by the tops of the buildings flanking the very street we were sitting along, drifting towards the busy road. It was then I realized just how close the thing actually was to us, it couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile away – just down the street. And, by the time I realized it was nearly on top of us and was going to impact it was too late.

I sat and watched helplessly as it crashed nose-first into the street with a tearing shearing sound of twisting metal. I can remember expecting an explosion just before one came, and I swear I could feel the heat from the fireball in my dream – it was that vivid. The explosion didn’t destroy the rocket, however, and the thing, still stuck nose-first into the ground like a fallen arrow, began spewing forth a white mist – which came shooting out of it at high pressure.

At this point the doctor I was sitting with jumped up, pulled the neck of his shirt over his mouth and darted back inside the building. I followed suit, but the mist was so thick and quickly enveloping neither of us made it inside before being swamped in it.

Once we did get inside, the air was already getting fuzzy with the stuff. I can remember running around trying to find Sharaun, terrified that I wasn’t with her when this happened. In my search for her I somehow must have ended up back outside, where the air was now clear and by now there fireman cops and ambulances arriving en-masse.  I can remember helicopters circling overhead, and tons of people were milling around confused.

Suddenly, one cop got on a megaphone and announced loudly that they would be “offering heat treatments” to anyone who wanted them, and explained a “heat treatment” as a precautionary immunization/sterilization for those exposed to whatever may have spewed from the rocket. As he explained this, he was holding above his head what looked like a stun-gun – nodding towards it so we could see how they’d deliver the “heat treatment.”

After he spoke, several cops, each with their own “heat gun,” who’d now dispersed amongst the crowds began asking, “Who’s first?” I watched as the first person stepped up: The officer pointed the device at him and fired, and like a stun-gun two prongs attached to his body, trailing wires back to the “gun.” The man convulsed and screamed, and I heard the same happening all around me.

I decided I did not want a “heat treatment” and began to try and slip away from the action. But before I could get away, an officer approached me with his gun at the ready. I remember saying I did not want a treatment, and he told me it was not optional right before I felt the prongs latch onto my forearm. I can remember dream-feeling an intense heat bloom over my entire body, and screaming as the heat became unbearable.

Then, I woke up.

Anyone got some interpretations for me?  (In before “vote McCain.”)

OK moving on.  Yesterday (which is today as I write, because… you get the drill) at work stunk again, and at some point I began singing the lyrics to a great song that seemed so fitting.  It’s called “Moving Units,” and the part I was reminded of  by my day at the sawmill goes something like this:

If it isn’t making dollars, then it isn’t making sense.
If you aren’t moving units, you’re not worth the expense.
So if you really want to make it, you had best remember this,
If it isn’t penetration, it isn’t worth a kiss.

Ahhh… songwriting…

Goodnight friends.

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bring on the pumpkin, turkey, & reindeer

Humpday.  Sorry no entry yesterday, my brain failed.  Not much more for you today, I’m afraid.

Tonight Sharaun had volleyball and I was on daddy-duty.  And, I gotta admit I kinda neglected Keaton in favor of the debates.  Man, was it tough.  She just wanted to play, y’all.  It was heartbreaking.  I’m a bad dad.

A couple times I obliged her and paused the sparring senators so we could “hide from bears” (huh?) and “do decorations” with crayons.  But, for the most part I was a deadbeat dad sucked in by the glow of the plasma and the soft lull of two men babbling.  You don’t need me to analyze the thing, so I won’t – but I will say that I found it a lot more interesting than the initial debate.  If you missed it, rewind your Betamax and get your watch on!

Today was a wall-to-wall day at work… a 7am meeting with Germany and a meeting until 7pm with Japan.  Delivering the same message to both – and what a difference culture can make.  The meticulous and honorable Japanese refuse to take a simple “no” for an answer, while the Germans make an extremely detailed evaluation of the data and arrive at the sober conclusion that “no” is the only technically-feasible answer.  One meeting fairly easy, one hard – both equally uncomfortable for having to be the bearer of bad news.  Maybe that’s what they pay me for… because it’s surely not the stuff of paragraph-three over here (one of my very favorite unedited bits I’ve published).

Today when I walked out of work wearing my jeans and tucked-in company-logo polo (matching belt, shoes, and socks too, I’ll have you know) – I noticed that, for the first time this year, I was comfortable with the outside temperature even in pants.  As I was thinking that the weather must be turning, a windblown leaf skittered across my path.  And then another, and another.  This and the flirting rains this weekend past say that Fall is in the air – and I couldn’t be happier.  My favorite season, my favorite time of year, my favorite succession of family-oriented holidays.  C’mon Fall, make haste.  Bring on the pumpkin, turkey, and reindeer.

I dunno guys… there’s no magic tonight.  Sharaun’s snoring on the other couch and the remote for the TV is buried amongst her in the blanket and cushions… so I’ve left the television on but have switched on the iPod as the audio.  Right now Jerry Garcia is soundtracking an episode of Dateline or 48hrs Mystery or something… did you guys know Rubin & Cherise killed some plumber in the Hamptons?  Or… something.

That’s it, this is without point at this point.  I love you guys for real, let’s meet somewhere for a beer and some catchup.

Goodnight.