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Posted on

make sure my beer’s not empty

How do you say en Francais?
No internet at my brother’s place means no entry for Friday. Now worries though, as I’m trying to get “back at it” and keep the juice flowin’. The weekend was really fun, getting to hang out with my brother and his wife (still sounds funny to me) was cool. On Friday night we stayed up late talking, kinda letting each other in on those “missing years” when I was away at school and he was a working-man back home. For more than two years there, I had no idea what he was up to – and him the same for me. I thought I got into a lot of trouble when I was a kid… but damn. Anyway, it was great. Even though Frank and I are about as different as two brothers can be – we still have a lot in common that we can talk about and agree on. I’m glad I got to spend some time with him, and he and Angela seem genuinely happy. I got a mini-tour of where he works on Ft. Hood, and a glimpse into what he does every day – it was great. My little brother ain’t so little anymore, all grow’d up with a wife and a job and everything. That shit still trips me out.

So now I’m sitting here in the Continental terminal at George Bush Airport in Houston, drinking a tall Shiner Bock in some airport seafood joint. It was the only non-food-court place where I could sit down and have my food brought to me, which is much more conducive to sitting here typing away on the laptop. Someone to come check and make sure my beer’s not empty, and no one to bother me while I wait for my flight (about three hours and counting, if you’re curious). Nevermind that I look like some nerd, typing on his laptop in a restaurant, while watching America’s Funniest Home Videos on the TV, nothing but a big ol’ beer in terms of sustenance in front of me. See? I certainly haven’t analyzed the situation.

I think I could get used to this solo traveling gig. I mean if I were unattached, of course. I kind of like the anonymity of sitting alone in a booth and just “observing” stuff. Not Sherlock Holmes type observing, just, y’know, checkin’ junk out. It’s kind of a good feeling to be wholly responsible for yourself, making sure you budget enough time to make your flight, return your rental car, eat some food, etc. Guys, I’m kinda buzzed right now? this Shiner was biiig, and I haven’t ordered yet because I still have like two whole hours before I can board the flight. When I do order, here at “Bubba’s Seafood Grill,” I think I’m gonna get one of “Bubba’s Favorites,” namely – the “Buffalo Popcorn Shrimp Platter.” I mean, I’ve been mulling this decision for a good twenty minutes now as I downed this beer, so I think I’m prepared to take the plunge and go with it.

Hey original Cyn… I heard you talking to your sister and your roommate at the pool party, I have super-hearing y’know. So for you, I finally cleaned it up and uploaded it – now I think you owe me sex (or at least something sexual in nature). (I know, the picture is broken). And thanks Benz for the praise on my last entry, I too fancied that paragraph as one of my finest… in a league with the desert island paragraph I’m so proud of.

Time to eat my scrimps, Dave out.

Posted on

feel the confidence in my firm handshake!

Think highly of thyself, dost thee?
Wow, like a dang week dude. Nearly a whole week without a proper entry. I guess there were some mitigating circumstances. One, I don’t work on the weekend; two, I’ve been busy as crap. So, the three day weekend took care of Monday, and Tuesday and Wednesday I didn’t have a second to breathe. So now it’s Thursday, and I’m sitting in a hotel room in Austin, TX. Business took me here, to meet with some customers, but I’m staying through Sunday to go visit my brother in Killeen. He ships off to Alaska next week, and my trip to Houston matched up with his last weekend in town – so I decided to catch a Sunday, rather than Friday, flight, and hang out with him. Should be cool.

I was thinking the other day, how much doctors much hate WebMD. I mean, that site can be a pretty dangerous place for those with a hypochondriac side. It’s so easy to search this huge repository of symptoms and see what crazy diseases you might have. They even have this handy “symptoms checker” page where you can pick from a big nice list of elemental problems to diagnose your ailment. I can imagine some dude going into the doctor with a ream of WebMD printouts, thinking the combination of his shortness of breath and numb toes is anything from West African Mandibulolitus to Fendabular Tindanation. And while I was over there, I found a funny page under the symptoms. The “symptom” is “fishhook injuries.” That’s a symptom? I looked for the microwave and tandem-bike injuries symptoms, but surprisingly they weren’t there.

There’s something “grownup” feeling about being in a hotel room, even more so when you’re on a solo trip. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always kinda liked staying in hotels. I think because, when I was young, staying in a hotel meant we were on vacation or a trip. My brother and I always got to share a bed and we would all hang out as a family. Now that I’m all grown up and staying in hotels when I travel, I get some piece of that sensation every time. I like the feeling of being “important” enough to have to travel somewhere for someone. You know, someone is putting me up in a hotel and taking me out to dinner because I’m here to help them in some way. Makes me feel all yuppie or business-class or something.

Kinda like the “importantness” I feel waiting for the daily parking shuttle to the airport terminal in the morning. Rubbing shoulders with the other suits, all of us with our laptop bags and corporate-logoed Polos, getting ready to be flown to God-knows-where… and all these dudes looking at this twenty-something punk kid, wondering why he’s here. What the heck is so important about him that he needs to fly somewhere? That’s right other coach passengers, I think I will bust out my laptop and work on a PowerPoint presentation – just because I can. What? You’re surprised I’m taking an important meeting from my cellphone while I wait for my connection? Sound odd to hear me call shots into the little headset/mic combo dangling from my ear? Wise up old-money, here’s my business card – call me and we’ll do lunch; that is, if I have time to fit you in. I’ma come up in your world with my khakis and dress shoes and exude import – I wear a badge around my neck for God’s sake! Feel the confidence in my firm handshake! I own you!!

Goodnight all, blogging should resume as normal now that things have died down a bit. Until tomorrow, peace out.

Posted on

a peg-leg too

It's cyclical.
So it appears I’m going to Houston next week to meet with some customers. I got to thinking, and turns out my brother is stationed only a two hour drive from Houston. Since I’m coming in on a Thursday and was planning on leaving Friday – I think I’m just going to make my return flight on Sunday and head up to spend the weekend with him. Should be cool, since he leaves to build roads in America’s only rainforest the very next weekend. Right now work is at a peak, with everything conveniently converging on next week – which I’ve dubbed “hell week.” I will rock hell week though, I have no fear.

As predicted, I’ve become totally addicted to PBS’ new “reailtyducation” series “Colonial House.” I’ve written before about my affinity for these series, and this one doesn’t disappoint. I think find them “acceptable” reality programming because there’s no unnecessary drama or Real World-esque bullshit. Not to mention, they’re chock-full of awesome history goodness. No ex-football players giving roses to doe-eyed, streetcorner-clad golddiggers; no diving into entrails to gather enough gold coins to beat the other team; and no one getting voted off as part of a grand strategy. Just learnin’ and hardship, what more could you ask for? PBS rocks, makes me feel all Linuxy when I watch it.

Have you guys seen this new “cleric” they’ve indicted? You know, the one who supposedly built some crazy terrorist training camp in Oregon, of all places. I mean, this guy is a seriously mean looking dude. One insane eye that’s got the crazy-glaze and seems to be permanently on the lookout for enemies approaching from the left. A freakin’ hook for a right hand. And a crazy unkempt shaggy beard to top it all off. Who knows, until we see a picture of him from the waist down – I’m gonna say he has a peg-leg too, he certainly seems injury-prone enough. Allah not really lookin’ out for you eh Abu?

Maybe you’re just not terrorist enough, get more terrorist – that might help. No, I’m joking (lest people think I’m one of those “they’re all terrorists” idiots, it’s only comedy people). Anyway, I can’t see this guy recruiting anyone, let alone a bunch or tree-hugging Oregonian hippies who can’t pump their own gas. If this guy approached me in my mosque about coming to hang out at his cool “ranch” and learning to shoot guns – I’d probably bust him over the head with a bottle of rum and try to steal his treasure map. Pirate-looking loony.


“With my good eye I will see the infidels! I will then hobble to them on my good leg and pummel them with my good hand! Fear me!!.”

Well, it’s 11:30pm here and we’re on a marathon-run of Colonial House. Happy birthday dad, feel better mom! G’night blog faithful. Dave out.

Posted on

cheesecake charity

Lord, thank you for this dairy treat. Oh, and these laws and rules and junk.
Written for yesterday and never posted:

Oregon, Tuesday night. Sitting here in the hotel room watching Willie Wonka on AMC. For reals, this movie is great. I’ve always been attracted to movies and stories that have some element of the fantastic. Fantasy, absurdity, these have always been my favorite narrative elements (either on screen or in print). Anyway, I’m not writing about anything right now, just rambling. Intro paragraph over.

My grandfather turns 89 in a couple weeks now. 89. I was thinking about it today, what kind of things you’ve lived through when you’re 89. He was born in 1915, two years before we joined the Allies against Germany in WWI, although that conflict would come and go before he could remember it. He was 14 when as we entered the Great Depression, and spent those oh-so-glorious teenage years during some of this country’s hardest times. At 26, the 3rd year of post-college career life for me, he would see America again enter into world conflict after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Four years and two bombs later, that war also ended – only to see us pick up arms again in Korea a mere five years afterward. The Kennedy assassination, the Beatles, the civil rights movement, the space age, Vietnam, the cold war… so much. Kinda crazy to think about, and he’s got a sister who I think is in her late nineties.

I’ve got the window open in this room because it looks like it might rain tonight. I love the sound of rain, and it’s not my place – so I’m gonna keep the window open and hope it does. It’s a nice little room really, complete with a fridge and stove and dishwasher and microwave. They even give you some complementary popcorn which, were I not fulled up on beers and burger, I’d probably indulge in.

Written for today:

Back in the CtotheA. Tired from getting back late, and just that travel-tired, even though it wasn’t anything heavy-duty. Two days spent in a different state really makes the work week fly by though. Almost Friday and almost camping.

Yesterday was some Jewish holiday (when Moses received the commandments from God I think), and in celebration of this day the Jewish people eat cheesecake (which I’m pretty sure was also given to Moses by God on that same day). Just so happens that the woman who was chairing the meeting my boss and I went to Oregon for is Jewish. Anyway, she had brought like 20 huge cheesecakes to the meeting, and in the end there was one wholly untouched cheesecake leftover. She tried pawn it off on several people, who made various protests about already being overweight and whatnot – and then finally tried to give it to my boss and I. At first we declined, saying we were going to be on a plane in a couple hours. But then someone made a joke about giving the thing to a homeless person on the way to the airport. Struck by the awesomeness of the idea, we decided to do just that.

We set out for the airport, but stuck to the surface streets through the city instead of taking the highway. All the while keeping eyes peeled for those less fortunate than ourselves. You know how, sometimes, you’ll see something every day, some random object in a strange place at home – and you’ll think “wonder what that’s doing there?,” or “what a strange place for that.” but not do anything about it? Then the day comes when you actually need or want said thing, and you can’t for the life of you remember where you’ve been seeing it? It was kinda like that trying to find a bum, when you want one – they’re nowhere to be found, but when your stuffing cash into your wallet after walking out of a fine meal at a nice restaurant – they’re there to hold out a grubby hand and make you feel guilty for being so Republican.

We went on a mission, taking a 40min detour (and really pushing it on our arrive-early airport thing), just to find a homeless person. Finally, with one hour left until the flight too off and still being 20min away from the airport – we found our man. A grey-haired scruffy gentleman sitting on the corner, forlorn and hungry looking as he sat on his bedroll, trash strewn about. We rolled slowly up to the corner, and I held the cheesecake out the window. Before I could offer it to him, he jumped up and moved towards the window. I offered him the cheesecake, telling him it was brand new and we couldn’t take it with us. He smiled, looked at the cheesecake, seemed a little confused, smiled again and thanked us – then backed away and gave us the peace sign with the left hand, cheesecake clutched in the crook of his right arm. It was truly a sight to be seen. We weren’t laughing or anything, I didn’t want this man to think we were making fun of his station in life or anything. Although, after driving away – we did chuckle at how absurd it was. My boss said, “you know what that guy is probably thinking right now? ‘Man, I don’t have a fork, and my hands are filthy, how am I supposed to eat this thing?'” That cracked me up.

Cheesecake to the homeless in celebration of the ten commandments, peeing in the street (on a Salvation Army truck no less), and being served hot wings by a 41 year-old Hooters waitress – I call that a successful trip to Oregon. Oh yeah, and we did some work too.

Dave out.

Posted on

straightup buy a live chicken

Jetsetting yuppie.
On a plane to Oregon tomorrow, only gone for a couple days. Tonight was a pretty uneventful evening. Spent the time upgrading my RAID array to 240GB – since my “digital migration” project (ripping all my CDs to MP3) was taking up way more room than I originally accounted for. Surprisingly, the upgrade went off without a hitch, and I’m happily back to ripping songs.

Whoa, in the middle of writing that 1st paragraph about this being a rather uneventful evening, I decided to open today’s mail. Turns out we got another check from our home refi, for what seems to be more leftover impound account balance. Anyway, to me – it looks less like an impound account refund and more like a backyard. Yeah baby, it’s all there, every cent we need to hit yesterday’s targets by the arrival of Sharaun’s folks in July. I have changed my tune, and now think it’s entirely possible. I’m pumped.

Today Sharaun took her class on a field trip to Chinatown in San Francisco. They took a guided tour that hit some temples and other places of interest, one of them a traditional Chinese marketplace. The way she described it to me, it sounded a lot like some of the night markets in Taipei, lots of seafood and odd animals parts for sale? as food. Anyway, apparently this place has all sorts of livestock for sale too, frogs, turtles, chickens, etc. I guess one of her kids actually bought a live chicken.

One of the other students alerted her and she got back to the chicken hawker just in time to see a the saleswoman folding over a paper bag, stapling it shut, and poking four air-holes in it. When Sharaun asked the student what was in the bag, he replied with great excitement, “I just bought a real chicken for only a dollar fifty!” She managed to talk the woman into taking back the chicken, after explaining that it wasn’t going to be accompanying them on the two-hour bus ride back. For some reason that story had me cracking up, what kid tries to straightup buy a live chicken in Chinatown?! You got moxie kid, I like that.

Turns out the disks I wrote about the other day are unreadable. Yup, they either got the bit-rot, or there’s nothing on those mofos. You know, now that I think about it – I think Joey and I may have used those things on a PC sometime after we used them on the Mac? I wonder if we were smart enough to format them and store crap on them. Either way, I’m gonna try and get them back and see if I can read them on a PC 5.25″ floppy. Owell, it was worth a try.

That’s it, midnight-thirty and I have to be up around five. I’m off to bed, g’night losers. Dave out.

Posted on

technically, illegal

Baaaa-licious.
So I was lazy last week, didn’t write on Thursday or Friday. Well, lazy may not be the right word, more like busy as crap. Work was kicking butt, after-work schedule also kicking butt, and just a general lack of things to write about. I’m not making excuses for you punks, so don’t think I’ve gone soft – I’ll still break your ass.

Worked on the backyard a bit this weekend, forming up the sidewalk that’s going down the right side of the house. Even though I’m now gonna redo it (I want to make a little “landing” where the garbage bins can live), I was proud of the work. Now I just need to get some fill dirt to level it out and then I can pour concrete (sometime next week I think). Also bought some do-it-yourself interlocking landscape curbing, for the little garden strip I’m doing on the left side of the place. Sharaun hasn’t really seen my vision of that yet, so she was a little confused. I’m totally confident it’ll look utterly rad when it’s done though – plus it simplifies the sprinkler layout on that side. I thought about my goal of having things pretty much wrapped up by Sharaun’s folks’ arrival in mid-July, and I’m just not sure. I’ve got concrete, sod, pavers, and plants left to do. That’s about $500, $600, $400, $500, respectively. I think I may be able to do all but plants before they come – which will at least give us grass. Then there’s all the little expenses that add up, like sand for the pavers, edge restraint, etc. At this point it’s the wallet that’ll give out before my back does.

This weekend we’re doing an adventure-camp trip up the Sacramento River. We went yesterday to scout possible riverbank campsites, and found a really nice one about 15mi up from where we launch. Nice sandy beach complete with a little hollow to have a fire. Technically, camping on the river is illegal – but I think we found a pretty good spot. There’s no road on that side, and the bank is probably farmland – as there’s an irrigated grove just over the levee. I figure we should be able to camp for the weekend without getting busted. And if we do get busted, we’ve got a backup plan – the owner of some seedy riverside bar said we could camp behind his place for free if we got booted out by the cops. Should be really fun. We’ll go up Saturday, setup camp, wakeboard all day, then repeat on Sunday and Monday. As long as we don’t get eaten by river rats, accosted by pirates, or chased off by farmers, it should be a success.

Heading to Oregon early tomorrow morning for work, returning sometime Wednesday – which doesn’t give me much time to work on the yard before we’re gone all weekend. I was thinking about taking Friday off, to maybe do my concrete work and just get a jump on the long weekend, but not sure yet.

I’m done. But guys, I got some bad news: that stuff we thought was lamb curry, it’s not lamb curry – it’s goat curry. Yum, goat. Dave out.

Posted on

a 7th grade attempt at fantasy

Just a really cool GIS for "womb."
Last night was the sneak-attack Decemberists/Shins show in Davis. Pat and Cynthia accompanied us, as Cynthia was the conduit for tickets being a UCD student and all. The acoustics during the opening band were kinda lacking, and I don’t know if I just got used to the hollow “high school gym” sound or if the equipment/mix just got better with each act – but the Decemberists and Shins sounded great. Was a fun night with an earlier bedtime than the usual SF shows.

Shipped off a couple of old 5.25″ Apple IIgs floppy disks today, sending them to a dude that does file recovery from old Apple disks. I found them in the spare room the other night. They are mine and Joey’s class disks from our middle school Language Arts class. I’m pretty sure they contain all our work for the year, including essays and whatnot. The main thing I want off of them is our “final” project from that year: a long fictional narrative. I’m pretty sure mine was called “Quest,” and was a 7th grade attempt at fantasy. I remember being extremely proud of it at the time, which was before I ever even read the Hobbit. I think Joey’s was about some kid who went inside a waterfall in search of some treasure or something? but I can’t remember. Anyway, I’m hoping to at least get those stories – and kind of getting my hopes up for some recovered surprise, maybe some lost stories we were working on or an interesting assignment. Anyway, it cost $36 to get text files off two disks – hopefully it’s worth it.

One the “indie music is on TV” tip, Pat brought over a Newsweek article to rub in my face the other day. Here’s the online version of the article, without some supporting graphics from the print version. In the actual magazine, they have a graphic that does that “if you like this band, try this other band” thing – pointing people towards indie bands that may fit their likes. The bands in that sidebar graphic read eerily like my Best of 2003 from last year: Shins, Bright Eyes, Postal Service, Death Cab, etc. It’s actually a good article, and they mention several newish albums that are also on my current playlist. I like the quote from Gibbard about “feeling” something coming? I wonder. What the heck am I gonna listen to to be cooler than everyone when everyone’s listening to indie? Man, a self-important music-snob’s job is a hard one?

OK, I have nothing more. Oh wait, I got one thing. I forget where I stole this from, but check out Britney Spears’ backwards message. If you play the chorus of “Hit Me Baby One More Time” backwards, you can hear “sleep with me I’m not too young.” OK, where do I sign up?

Dave out.