Yesterday, being the first day in a fortnight without rain or clouds or fog as heavy as a sodden quilt, was the day they shot off the fireworks. They promised that it would happen the first chance they got. Usually they just cancel it and reschedule for Labor Day - I think I told you this already - but this is a new year, new commanding General. Shoot 'em off! he said, and so they did.
Barb and I went down to the beach to watch. We asked the kids to go along, but they begged off. They figured that sitting inside playing video games or watching television or downloading nudie pics from the internet was better than dumb old fireworks. Can you believe that? Just where did I fail as a parent? But Barb still loves fireworks, and I love 'em, too, so we went down to the beach, picked out a grassy spot, and set up our lawn chairs in the middle of the squalling kids and the smoking adults, and held hands while a couple of guys on a barge in the lake set off explosives that make my chest palpitate. Or probably that was the hand-holding.
I had the most pleasant surprise today: When I woke up this morning, I was sure I had to report for a mid watch tonight, so I started off with a little light reading, updated some web pages (the Japanese-English web page has a new look: go to www.o-broze.com/dave/cheeserool to check it out), then I was going to run to the post office to pick up the mail and come back to eat lunch and take a nap.
Barb's concerned about the cat. His eye's watering, so she wanted me to take him to the vet if she made an appointment. "Can you make it around threeish, so I can get a nap?" I asked her. She asked if my nap time was flexible, and I said that so long as it didn't get pushed back to five, when I'd have to get ready for the mid, that'd be okay. She looked puzzled. "You don't work a mid tonight."
"Of course I do," I said. "I'm working mids tonight & tomorrow night."
"Since when?" she asked. "Your leave doesn't end until Thursday."
I was so sure I'd have to work tonight that I trotted downstairs to take a look at my leave form, and you know what? Turns out I DON'T have to go back until Friday night! It's like finding twenty dollars in a coat pocket!
I have to tell you that I had coffee last night. Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I didn’t know that was a brand until last night, just as I didn’t know I could like coffee until last night.
I’ve had all kinds of coffee foisted on me by coffee drinkers who gaped unbelieving when I told them I don’t drink coffee, and especially after I explain - they all want me to tell them why - that all coffee tastes like dirt to me. Then they whip out the vanilla mocha or the chocolate latte or some other froufrou drink, or they point out helpfully that maybe I’m not adding enough creamer and sugar. I don’t bother mentioning that Folger’s with lots of creamer and sugar tastes like sweetened mud.
But last night I was standing a mid watch on about four hours’ worth of sleep, and I’d already sucked down a bracing pot of Earl Grey tea, and the coffee smelled good. The ensign offered me some, so I poured just a bit in my oversized mug and sipped at it experimentally. Hey. This might be the antidote to the way coffee usually leaves me feeling as though I’ve just been chewing on dirt.
Or not. The commissary doesn’t carry Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I can’t imagine where it came from, but it just figures, doesn’t it, that the one brand of coffee I might actually drink isn’t available. Oh, well. Plenty of Earl Grey on the shelves.
"What did you two do while I was gone?" Barb asked, when she came back late in the afternoon from a noon coffee klatch.
"We had a rubber-band war," Tim answered.
She looked at her watch, laughed at us. "What, all afternoon?"
Tim and I both shrugged. "Well, yeh." Sheesh. Girls.
Tim started it. He built a rubber band gun out of K'nex. It had a ratchet that held eight rubber bands he could shoot one at a time, like a revolver, or he could cut the ratchet loose and fire all sixteen at once like a shotgun, which hurt like a mutha.
I'm nowhere near as mechanically gifted as he is, though, so I had to depend on a crooked index finger, which wasn't nearly as straight-shooting as I'd like it to be. I compensated by getting in close and pelting him mercilessly. Unfortunately, I didn't order a bottomless bag of extra-thick rubber bands off the internet, like Tim did, so I had to come up with a winning strategy for collecting rubber bands: I took his opening salvo. Brilliant, eh?
In the spirit of fair play, he delivered the opening salvo to the back of my head after sneaking up on me while I was busy with a mentally demanding task. (Peanut gallery: "Aren't all the mental tasks demanding for you, Dave?") He was especially good at taking the cheap shot, then running like a rabbit while I chased him down the hall, snapping rubber bands wildly in his direction. He knew I wouldn't chase him unless he went for the head shot, even though he squealed like a four-year-old girl all the way to the bathroom, where he locked himself in. I especially hated the neck shots.
Other than my Hulk-like capacity to let his shots bounce off me, I did have one other advantage in this afternoon's skirmish: he was wearing shorts, while I was in pants. I moved in for the leg shot whenever I could. There was almost no limit to the pitiful groveling he would do to avoid getting snapped in the leg with a fully-extended rubber band at close range.
I claimed the final victory, because I'm the dad and I say so. Besides, I could give the official word to say when the fight was over, then wait until his guard was down and hit him with everything I had. It was underhanded, but effective.
We gave Tim the choice for dinner: "You fix it, or we eat shrimp buffet at the club." Personally, I was pulling for a trip to the club, but he looked through the cookbooks, checked through the pantry, and decided he would fix lemon-spiced chicken and rice. It was pretty tasty, too.
Dang. If we'd known it was that easy to get him to make more dinners around here, we would've started leveling ultimatums long ago.
But it didn't stop at ultimatums. He's whipped up dinner several times a week ever since then, and never just quick and easy meals out of a package or a can. He goes on-line to look at interesting recipies, picks out one to match the food we've got in the pantry or goes to the store to pick up the ingredients he needs, and after working a little magic over the stove, he puts a tasty meal on the table.
And no, it's not what you'd expect a twelve-year-old would make, cheeseburgers or something like that. It's pork strips in pepper sauce with steamed corn on the cob and french-cut beans in cumin. He doesn't even eat beans.
Well, I suppose there's a lesson in this somewhere, I couldn't care less what it is. If this is just a phase he's going through, I'm going to be one sad-eyed puppy when he gets over it.
According to the calendar, the rainy season in Japan is over.
According to the unbreakable cloudcover that's blocked out the sun for the last thirty days and drenched everything we own, inside the house and out, we've still got a little way to go. This must be what living in Portland is like.
It's even wet inside my car. I can see how it gets in the back - there's a gap in the seal around the sunroof - but I still can find how the rain's getting in to soak the carpet on the floor on the driver's side. It's a little distracting, especially in town, when I have to clutch a lot, to have my feet constantly squishing in a boggy little swamp under my seat.
Is the constant rain good for anything? It could be keeping the bugs down, but then I don't go outside much to be able to tell. I save a little on the cost of washing my clothes, because there's no need to dry them - ten minutes after they come out of the dryer, they're clammy enough to put out cooking fires. And, since I'm focusing on the up side here, the usual summer heat wave that rolls in about this time and broils us all, leaving oily bags of limp flesh where once humans walked upright, has mercifully been delayed, might even be shortened. It may be a small price to pay for being covered in mold.