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the sheets and pillow are calling

Hey there Tuesday people.

I’m off again today, taking the corporate sawmill shuttle across the state a ways to work over there for a couple days.  More of the “meet and greet” business, with a little effort thrown in to justify the whole thing.  So, an evening in a hotel and two days away from the fam… could be worse I suppose.

I’m just dreading the 4:45am rise-and-shine… which means I better get to typing here – I got music and Halloween for you today, not much to write home about.

Lately, I’ve been on this soul music tear – acquiring (through absolutely unquestionably legal channels) tons and tons of vintage 60s and 70s soul records to try and flesh out my collection. In the process, I’ve found some simply amazing stuff – the cream of which so far has got to be material by one O.V. Wright. Someone I’d never even heard of before, it’s hard to believe this guy isn’t held in the same esteem as classic performers like Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye. His voice is incredible, full of emotion, and his songwriting isn’t so serious that you can’t get a chuckle here and there. And the music, oh man the music. All the right horns and cymbal crashes in all the right places… this stuff makes you feel.

Anyway, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Some seventy albums into my bender, I realized I’ve now got too much to appreciate before something new comes along – and I’d better come up for air and actually take in some of what I’ve grabbed. Soul is a relatively new area for me, so I’m excited to get educated. I know, you’re riveted right no.  I’ll continue to thrill you with the following, I’m sure…

I was thrilled today as I came up with a really neat concept to “soup up” the Halloween prop setup. Right now I’ve got live power (at 120V AC) running all around the place to power the props. I’ve long worried about this being unsafe, as a lot of my connections are simple wire-nut jobs and could conceivably be susceptible to shorts (and, less plausible but still a concern, human contact). Today I hit upon a way to move most of the dangerous high-voltage hookups under the safety of the front porch roof enclosure – and wire the props in the yard with low-voltage 12V power.

Additionally, I dreamed up a way to reduce the amount of clutter I have by triggering the coffin “popper” and ceiling “dropper” from the same motion sensor. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but to me it means a lot less wiring, a lot cleaner interface between the props, and some cool new features. For instance, both the dropper and the popper can have (timed) associated sounds and targeted lighting now, in addition to the always-on “ambient” soundtrack that was there last year.

What’s more, if everything goes right – in addition to springing down on you from its hiding place above with a blood-curdling scream and scary spotlighting, the ceiling dropper will now spray a burst of fog towards you as well. It’s probably hard to visualize, so I’ll just post a video when I get it working.

Ahem… I’m outta here.  With such an early start to tomorrow, the sheets and pillow are calling.

Before I go, I keep meaning to mention that Ben posted his pictures from our abbreviated John Muir Trail hike over at his site.  Check them out here.

Goodnight.

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the halloween workshop

It’s nearing 2pm on this fine windows-open Sunday afternoon.

I just put Keaton down for a nap and Sharaun’s away at a baby shower.  I put on the new Of Montreal album (which is seriously growing on me, despite my initial skittishness) and decided to write a bit.  Now, writing wasn’t really my intention (nor has it been for the past week, as you’ve likely noticed if you’re a regular visitor here) – but I had no choice.

See, I had intended to get all the Halloween props down and start doing an assessment of what all needs to be repaired and what materials I’ll need to get everything back to working order.  But, all the Halloween gear is inside the fake coffin I built so many years ago to hold the pnuematic pop-up coffin dude, and that montrously heavy contraption is tied to the exposed rafters in my garage for storage (serisouly, where else am I going to store a full-size coffin?).  Problem is, other than my sneaking fear that the thing is gonna come crashing down randomly one day and wreck a car parked under it or worse smoosh someone as it falls, I can’t get the thing down all by my lonesome.  It’s just too heavy and unwieldy.  So, as Halloween prep goes, this morning was a complete loss.

Later in the day though, Sharaun got home and helped me lower the thing from it’s hold up in the rafters.  After that, I was able to get all the gear down from the various places it’s stuffed up into our roof and take a full account of things.  And, surprisingly, I’m not as concerned about the work as I was before.  Yeah, the rubber masks have all rotted and are tearing – those’ll have to be replaced, and I already knew I had to rebiuld the ghost… but everything else is just improvements: rewiring things for low-voltage operation in the name of safety, making cosmetic improvements, improving triggering and timing for the more complex animated props, etc.  I know you care dearly about all of this, so I’ll leave it at that level of detail and be done with it.  But, I’m happy to say that my side of the garage has now been officially transformed into the Halloween workshop; ’tis the season.

Shifting gears then…

Today as I walked in to pick Keaton up from her Sunday School class at church, her teacher turned to me and said, “Keaton had a day today.”  “Uh oh,” I said, recalling how we’d already struggled with her ourselves from the start as well.  “Yeah,” she continued, “I’ve never seen her like this.  Not only did she have four kicking and screaming on the ground fits, but she bullied every single kid in the class!” “Oh boy,” I sighed, looking down at our little angel sitting forlornly on a chair in all her infinite cuteness.  As Sharaun slid in beside me her teacher went on, “She pushed Madeline and pinched Matthew and just wouldn’t listen.”  Sharaun, having borne the brunt of Keaton’s earlier “No!” and hitting fit, screwed up her face and sternly asked Keaton to apologize, which she did.

Of course, after church she was a perfect little girl for me when Sharaun was away.  I sometimes think she acts out more for Sharaun than she does me, maybe because she’s got more to prove to her since she’s with her all day long or whatever.  Y’know, asserting her authority most to the one who’s the authority for most of the day, or something.  It sometimes makes me feel bad, because there are instances where she flips like a switch and instantly behaves better for me if Sharaun’s removed from the situation… but then again I also figure this is just the beginning of her wrapping me around her little finger so she can exploit me later in life.  Nah… I’m just playin’.  But I dunno y’allz… this girl can flex some bad, straight-up bad.

OK, whatever.  Goodnight.

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baked away the day

Monday night and what a welcome end to a long day.

Began around 7am when my boss called me from the airport.  I mean, I’ve not even made it into the sawmill yet and here I am listening to my boss in my ear as I fart around the house getting ready to go.

Yeah, I know, I’ve got to do more work with less people and less money.  Fix what went wrong on the last project but make absolutely no changes from the way they did things, uh-huh, right.  Sure, no problem.

I couldn’t even give Keaton a proper kiss and hug goodbye for holding the phone up to my ear to promise I’d “run some numbers” and estimate what might “fall off the plate” if I didn’t “get any upside” in first-quarter 2009.  I’ll tell you what’s gonna fall of the plate man… my faith in the fact that things can change… that’s what.

Ugh.

On top of this I’m buried in unread mail when I finally get to sit down at my desk.  Four-hundred bold-font missives stare blankly at me from my monitor… each of them threatening to make me think, make me do something.  I start to group them by subject, weed out the crap, the mile-long thread where thirteen people thank each other and reply with useless one-word statements like “OK” or “Sure.”  Past the near-ten pieces of corporate spam telling me they’re resurfacing the parking lot in front of building F or that the servers that run the Coke machines will be down for servicing Saturday night from 3am-5am.

Man, I could care less.  Is this where I landed for real?  I mean, I slept in a lecture hall one night in college we stayed studying so late.  We ordered pizza to the building, snuck in after the cleaning staff left, studied until 5am, slept on the floor until 7am, and studied again for an hour before the class began at 8am.  I worked that hard for this, eh?

I know, I sound sour – but I’m really not in that bad a mood when it comes down to it.  I guess I’m just in one of those moods where I want to stay in bed all day with Keaton and Sharaun.  When I got home, I put on some new music (an amazing series of rare 60s American “Northern soul” compliations called Talcum Soul) and played teaparty and “river” with Keaton.

And, after dinner I decided to have her help me bake some banana bread while we listened to the new Of Montreal (Sharaun took pictures).  So maybe the lyrics aren’t exactly the best for a two-and-a-half year old, but at least they don’t really swear… they just talk about “kicking it softcore” and “taking it both ways.”  It’s cool, she’s not listening anyway, she’s all tied up in cracking an egg into our banana-batter and licking the mixer/beater things clean when we’re done stirring things up.

Mmm… I’ve dried up.  Nothing left to write.  Let’s paste on this little closing job I did sometime earlier today when I thought I was gonna write this whole thing but didn’t.

Well folks, the LHC (which I’ve written about before) is coming online tomorrow.  Y’all ready for the Eeath to asplode?  I’m not.  In fact, I just sent out the invitation to our Halloween party… so I’m banking on at least another month or two of Earth, K?  K.

Oh, and I know I’m once again behind in getting new pictures of Keaton up… so to tide you over here are some new pictures Bill posted on his lil’ corner of the web, as well as one here from pro-photog Maygsters.

Goodnight.

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hey john, you can have your trail

Monday morning and, if I were the lying type, I’d tell you that I’m writing this after midnight Sunday… having just returned from our successful epic six-day JMT hike.

But, y’allz, I’m an honest Joe, so I’ll fess up: Early evening on Thursday we reached our third campsite after a long, but surprisingly bearable, sixteen mile trek and decided (in a groupthink snowball of unanimous rationalization) that we all felt accomplished enough with our ~40mi three-day adventure, and would rather be in a hotel eating a meatlover’s pizza and sipping some cold suds than bedding down again on the ground in our filthy clothes to wake with the sun and do it all again for three more days.  So that’s just what we did.  And, by late Friday afternoon we were in our respective homes, taking our respective showers, kissing our respective significant others, and easing into clean duds.

Didn’t bother me much to end early, and now that the trail has beaten us twice I think we’re officially done with it.  My pride is somewhat salved knowing we put in some good effort, and I’ve seen about ~70mi of the thing… so I count that as a neat experience.  Good enough for me, I suppose.  Oh, and I did blog while out there in the wilderness.  I saved the entries on the iPhone and upped them sometime this past weekend.  Scroll down to check them out if you’re interested.

Switching gear now, moving onto the normal stuff: I want to talk about Keaton for a moment.

Lately, she’s been protesting naps and bedtime more and more.  Saturday, for instance, she refused to go down for either – repeatedly getting out of bed, opening her door, and leaving her room. After several frustrating rounds of this back-and-forth game, I decided we need a way to “keep” her in her room (the bedrooms in the house don’t have locks on them).  So, call me a bad parent or whatever you’d like, but I improvised a door-locking mechanism out of a bungee cord and the nearby hinge of another door.  We used this “lock” with success Saturday night around 1am when Keaton just refused to say in her room/bed.  I secured her door and got back into bed with Sharaun.  And, after about ten or fifteen minutes of tearful protest she finally accepted her lot, crawled back into bed, and drifted off to sleep. Yeah, I feel kinda bad for having to “lock” her in there… but it’s what’s working for now.

Well folks, it’s creeping up on midnight and I better hit the sack and send this thing to the presses.  Love you and hope I didn’t lose you last week while the blog languished during the hike.  Talk to you soon; same place, same time.

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second day: hard

Our shadows stretched out long in front of us as we made our final ascent down to the lakeshore that is tonight’s campsite. It was a long day, much more arduous than yesterday – partly because we had a 1,900ft cumulative elevation gain and partly due to the altitude and second-day soreness.

At some point during the day we all encountered difficulties, although Anthony had the worst of it – succumbing once again to altitude sickness and losing his lunch and the day’s liquids somewhere along the trail (and then twice again before hitting they sack). Erik’s also showing small symptoms of a possible cold, with a sore throat and cough. But, tomorrow is another day… and we’ll just have to see how it goes.

Actually, it’s eight o’clock right now and all of us are tucked into our bags for the night (it’s not even fully dark outside). However, we’re all more than drained and it’s just too chilly to sit around outside. So, we decided to retire early. With luck, the night will restore our bodies an spirits (and be bear-free).

Tomorrow should be a little easier, with a mostly downhill morning and a small climb in the afternoon. If we feel OK, we may entertain the idea of pushing on into the Mammoth area… but, after today, that’s a big “if.”

Until tomorrow (or when I have a connection to post this), keep sending us positive thoughts!

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Day one & feeling good

It’s around 5pm on Tuesday and we’re all sitting around in a circle at our first campsite.

We ended up trekking a bit more than a mile further than we’d planned as the rangers warned us about an “aggressive” bear active in the area where we’d originally planned to stay the night. And, actually, having been able to check out the intended site on the way here, we’re at the better place.

Asking around the circle, everyone seems to be in good spirits, and I think we’re all happy with our stamina the progress we made. Then again, we’re still hiking on (relatively) fresh legs and aren’t trail-beaten yet.

It is absolutely gorgeous up here, and the trails aren’t as crowded as we expected for the holiday-led short week. I’m trying to take in more of the scenery this time around, instead of watching the feet in front of me and the terrain coming up.

Tomorrow sees us at our highest elevations for the whole of the hike, and likely our most brutal day in terms of exertion.

Wish us luck!