The Trick is in the Breathing and Throwing

I've been listening to a lot of Drive-By Truckers lately. It's good music, with a lot of the elements that I enjoy: You can't really tell if it's country or rock or what, the melodies are catchy, musicianship is top-notch, and the lyrics are deceptively clever.

They have three songwriters, so the songs themselves can vary pretty wildly in tone and style. Today I happened to pay attention to the lyrics of a tune off of their latest disc called "World of Hurt."

So if what you have is working for you, or you think that it can stand a reasonable chance, and whatever's broken seems fixable and nothing's beyond repair
If you still think about each other and smile before you remember how screwed up it's gotten or maybe dream of a time less rotten
Remember, it ain't too late to take a deep breath and throw yourself into it with everything you got

It's great to be alive

Word.

Simple Pleasures

One of my favorite happenings in the week leading up to the Super Bowl is when I see an advertisement or sign that reads "Super Bowel." It seems to happen every year, but so far I haven't spotted it.

I'll keep you posted.

I've Gotta Start Having a Subject in Mind Before I Start Typing

Wow, I don't know where the time goes sometimes. Both of the kids are doing dance classes, my wife is taking a class, and I've been under an avalanche of work. It's nice to stay busy, but a tad hectic.

We're headed to visit our respective parents again this weekend. It's A's 4th birthday next Saturday, so we're going to have her "family" birthday get-together in conjunction with my mom's which is this Sunday. I'm also going to set up a wireless router for my parents brand-new broadband internet connection. That should be interesting.

I've been busy around the house, too. We are nearly finished with the basement bathroom from hell. Just a coat of stain and urethane on the trim around the tub, and some grout on a tile cap I installed on the half wall, and it's finished. I really was starting to wonder if we'd ever get it done! We also got rid of a pretty hideous loveseat that I've been carting around for about 15 years. We replaced it with a nice little desk that the kids can play computer games or do homework on. Our dog, Sadie, was the only being in the house that used the loveseat, and she's pretty miffed at us. She's going to have to learn to cope.

Meanwhile, my mood has improved somewhat over the last couple of days. I guess I've learned a few things about myself this month, so that's got to be a good thing.

I also found out that the kid who was the driver of the truck the killed my brother and his friends is having a parole review hearing in the near future. He's also probably going to be transferred to a minimum security facility that is only a couple of miles from my parents' house. That's bad juju, I'm thinking.

The Boom/Bust Rollercoaster Meets the Heavenly Telephone Repairman

The economy of my home state is heavily dependent on the mineral industry. As a result, there is a very exaggerated boom/bust cycle. The last real energy boom for our state petered out in the early eighties, meaning I've lived most of my life in a depressed economy.

When I was in grade school, I remember years where the class size would reduce by nearly half over the course of the school year as people lost their jobs and moved from the area. We had close family friends who lived in Jeffrey City, so I got to witness a ghost town happening.

Right now, we're at the opposite end of the cycle. Economic times here are as good as I've ever seen. People actually have money. Well, not me, but I KNOW people who have money. Home prices have more than doubled since we moved back in 1998. New houses are being built as quickly as possible due to the large numbers of people moving to the area.
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C had mentioned a couple of weeks ago that her class was to have a new student. He came to class for the first time yesterday. His family moved from Bakersfield, CA. His mother has never lived outside of California, and she has never driven in the snow before. My wife visited with her a little bit yesterday while picking C up from school. The new student's mother actually asked if my wife could pick her son up and drive him to school because she was too afraid to drive on the snowpacked streets. While I suppose that it would be a bit of an adjustment to get used to the snow, it seems like it would be far harder for me to put my child in the car with a complete stranger than it would be to make an adjustment in my driving habits.

The lady called my wife on the phone last night to finalize plans. While visiting, the new kid's mom happened to mention that she was afraid that she'd be unable to call because her phone had been malfunctioning. Apparently, she had prayed that the phone start to work and it finally did. Yes, Divine Providence fixes broken phones.

I Don't Need No Stinkin' Cohesion

I decided that I needed a change this morning and shaved off the moustache that I'd worn almost continuously for nearly 16 years. When my wife saw it, she asked "WHAT HAPPENED?!" It's going to take me a while to get used to it. It might take her even longer, as she really hasn't seen me much without it. She did mention that she'd forgotten about the scar on my upper lip (I fell onto the corner of a metal toolbox when I was a toddler).

There had been a big scare here at my workplace a couple of months ago when upper management had threatened to close our location down due to lower than expected productivity. I don't work in production, so I'm pretty much at the mercy of whatever trend the demand for our product tends to follow. There's apparently been a major turnaround. I read some very good news yesterday that will probably guarantee my job security for years into the future. So I've got THAT going for me.

We had six head of deer in our front yard yesterday evening. I think all of the wind and blowing snow got them confused, and they were headed into town. It was pretty neat to see. Unfortunately, it looked like one of them had recently been hit by a car. But, she was getting around well enough, so it may have just been superficial.

Not too much on tap for the weekend. I'm going to try to make a run to Home Depot to pick up some sort of millwork to finish off a cap on the half-wall in our basement bathroom project from hell, as well as some sort of corner molding to finish off the tub surround. Oh, and football. Gotta watch some football.

I Feel Ripped Off

The chunks at the bottom of that photo were in a bag of Doritos that I was munching on with lunch yesterday. The weight on the bag of chips was advertised as 15 7/8 ounces, and the chunks of seasoning weighed 2 ounces.

Maybe somebody's trying to tell me to cut down on the tortilla chips.

Sometimes the Past Dredges Itself Up

I heard a song yesterday that reminded me of her. I suppose that I've really only loved two women. The Green-Eyed Girl was the first.

Clear back in elementary school, she was my sister's best friend. She was a tiny blonde girl who talked a lot. She was over at our house often, and she and my sister remained virtually inseperable until they were in high school.

My sister goes through phases. When she decides that she's through with an image, she often discards her friends as well. When she was a sophomore, she apparently decided that The Green-Eyed Girl didn't fit the image she wanted to portray, so she stopped calling her.

I was a couple years older. I'd been dating a girl for a couple of months, but she dumped me after I broke a date to visit a friend in the hospital after he'd had a car accident. I figured she'd understand. I was wrong.

The Green-Eyed Girl asked me for a ride to lunch one afternoon. We went and had a great time. Up to that point, I'd never really considered her dating material, but she was cute as hell and my sister didn't seem to want to hang out with her anymore. I asked her if she wanted to see a movie, and she accepted.

For the next nine months, we did the things that high school sweethearts do. She was very pleasant company and had a wild streak a mile wide. Her dad taught shop and built houses in his spare time. Her mom was a nurse. Neither one of her parents was around much, and they essentially left her to mind her two younger siblings. I think that the increased responsibility of being a sort of second mother coupled with her absentee parents made her needy and attention-starved. She wanted attention any way she could get it, and in my hormone-crazed teenage state I was happy to provide attention. Given the way things would go for her in just a couple of years, I still feel guilty about that. But, she was a knockout.She was wild.She looked amazing in that little cheerleader uniform.She liked to leave the lights on.She didn't care who was in the front seat of the car. It didn't matter to her that her parents were upstairs, or that the parking lot was full of people.

I left for college the next fall. At the time, she planned to go to a different college out of the state, so we just sort of decided that we would part ways. She visited me at college once, then...it just fizzled. I met the woman that I would marry that year and that was pretty much the end of The Green-Eyed Girl and me.

Her plans to escape the state for college fell through. She attended good old UW, and started hanging around with my sister again. They did wildly irresponsible things and took great risks. The Green-Eyed Girl was pregnant before she finished her freshman year. I visited her in the hospital after she had her daughter. It was one of the most surreal experiences I've ever had. Her parents were in the room, as well as her little brother and sister. The baby was in a basinette beside the hospital bed. Among the many thoughts racing through my head at the time was the sobering realization that things could have been very different. It could have been mine.

She gave the baby up for adoption and resumed classwork. The next year she was pregnant again. She dropped out of school, eventually marrying the father.

The last time I saw her was at my brother's funeral five years ago. She had aged considerably and was a bit heavier, but still gorgeous. She seemed happy. I'm glad that she was able to pull back from the tailspin. She and her family have since moved far away. I know that she stays in touch with my sister, but since I don't stay in touch with my sister I don't get much news.

I pulled out the few photos I have of The Green-Eyed Girl this morning. Seventeen years have passed. A lifetime. I honestly don't think we would have worked together even under different circumstances. There were too many differences between us. But I still think about her occasionally, and I'm thankful for those few months.

I Can't Believe I Haven't Posted for a Week!

Oh, what a week!

The big inspection finished up last Thursday. I'm pretty happy with the results. They found some stuff (they ALWAYS find some stuff), but it was nothing serious. I put in three 14-hour days last week, so I was pretty ready for the weekend.
Saturday, we had two extra kids around the house. My wife's friend N had a continuing education class all day, and her husband was stuck in Dallas due to the ice storm. Their two little girls are very, very close in age to ours, so they get along really well. They all had a good time, but by the end of the day, my ears were getting a little sore. I boiled up 5 gallons of homebrewed red ale Saturday afternoon, so I've got something to look forward to in a few weeks.

Yesterday was deemed home improvement day. I spent a good chunk of the day cutting ceramic tile for some of the finishing touches on our basement bathroom from hell project. Using a wet saw in an unheated garage when it's below zero outside is no fun at all, and I don't think my fingers have warmed back up yet. But, there are just a few little things to finish, and the bathroom will be done. At last.

It's slowly warming up a little bit outside. We haven't gotten much above 10 degrees F since last Wednesday. It's supposed to be almost 20 today, but the wind has picked up again, and it's blowing all of the snow around.

My wife and I have this somewhat unusual business arrangement/friendship with a wealthy doctor and his wife here in town. The doctor is a former employer of mine, and my wife has done bookkeeping and general toadying (is that a word?) for both of them for seven or eight years. They are very nice people, but can be very high maintenance. Last month, the doctor's wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery last week, and the biopsy results were not good. Downright scary would probably be closer to the truth. Stupid cancer.

Meanwhile, the mood really hasn't improved much. Have you ever heard the term "fear of impending doom?" I think I've got that. I mean, even more than I usually do.


Fear of impending doom. Yup.

Blah Blah Blah

Still feeling pretty blah today.

I'll probably be scarce for much of this week during our big inspection. These things usually spell 14 hour days for me.

The weekend was pretty exciting by our standards. I had to replace a leaking faucet on our kitchen sink. This is a job that should have taken 20 minutes, but somehow managed to stretch out to nearly four hours due to supply lines being too short or leaking, fittings being different sizes, and all of the other disasters that pop up when doing home improvement.

We also bought my wife her first ever brand new laptop computer yesterday. It's very nice, and that brings the tally of working computers in our house to five. That's right, we have more computers than people.

We rule.

OnWHEEEEEEEE!!!!!

I really haven't felt like my usual chipper self for the last couple of days. There's no good reason for it. Things have been going very well for me, I'm just out of sorts.

I'm finding myself bored with my job, which hasn't happened since my last job change. It's not that anything on the work front has changed, I just haven't been happy with it for a couple of weeks. I thought that taking time off around the holidays would help my attitude, but it really seems to have exacerbated the situation. To top it off, we have a major inspection scheduled next week. My apathy probably won't help that very much at all.

And, while my family life remains very satisfying, I feel sort of alone. I'm extraordinarily lucky that my wife is my best friend. But, most days she and the kids are the only people I speak to outside of the workplace. Our friends The Possible Perverts have been at each others' throats again, threatening divorce for the third time in a year by my count. A nice get-together with them is pretty much out of the question.

My wife thinks that I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. I don't know if it's anything that serious, but at this point I can't figure out how to approach the problem. I went for a nice run outside in the sunshine on New Year's Eve, which definitely helped. For the last couple of days, the skies have been dreary, and the wind has picked up again. More of the same is on tap for the weekend, so it looks like time outside really won't help much.

This too shall pass, I suppose.

Freecycle Fun, Chapter 3

Wanted -
Buck goat


I don't wanna know.

Happy New Year/Reading Too Much Into It?

And so, blog o' mine, we begin another year. I have reached that point where the changing of the years goes by like flipping through the pages of a book. Last year was a pleasant blur of activity, and I'm hoping for a repeat.

We have adopted a tradition of ringing in the new year by staying in and cooking dim sum. This year we had paper wrapped chicken, steamed dumplings, broccoli salad and a bottle of Korbel. It's not terribly exciting, I guess, but it's what we do.

Friends of ours had asked us over to their house New Year's Eve, but they ended up getting stuck in the middle of Nebraska in an ice storm and had to cancel. Probably for the best, really. For starters, we really do prefer to stick to our own little routine. Also, when we last spoke to them they insisted that it would be safest for us to stay overnight at their house (probably true), and that they had bought a special bottle of wine for the occasion - Folie à Deux Winery's Ménage à Trois Red.

I hadn't really given it a second thought. My wife brought it up yesterday and says that she's still weirded out by it and will have a hard time looking them in the eye the next time she sees them. Regardless of their intentions, I think the comedic potential here is notching up.

Happy New Year, all. May your year be happy, healthy, and free from sorrow!