Drivel policy states that I don't drivel about politics for two reasons: First, it's not funny. Some people think it is, and sometimes Leno or Letterman can get in a punchline that's not too mean-spirited, but it's hit or miss, and they're professionals. Second, the people I know are so serious about politics that, if I even tried to make fun of it, it'd be almost as rude as poking fun at religion.
But our two front-runners are so boring that I can hardly keep my eyes open any longer.
Kerry could bankrupt Roget's treasury of synonyms for boring; his delivery is laconic, his presence is wearisome, his explanations go to mind-numbing lengths, and a continuing description would be tiring for you and for me. He's apparently incapable of producing a short, crisp answer. When the subject last week was his war record, for instance, I couldn't help thinking that he would have killed the opposition with a short, simple reply: "I was there; Bush was not." How does it get more complicated than that? Why did the question have to devolve into boringly long explanations with all kinds of sidebars? "My protest, my conscience, my medals, my record, my goodness blah blah blah blah ..." At times it looked to me as though he was almost putting himself to sleep.
His esteemed opponent, on the other hand, seems capable of nothing but short, clipped answers, but in his case it doesn't help. After his meeting with the 9/11 commission this week, he appeared in the rose garden to chat with reporters. He seemed desperate to say something expansive about it. "We had a ... " long pause "... good talk. It was ... " pause again looking for a word "... productive and ... " groping for another adjective "... cordial." Cordial?
I may be wrong, but I think that the reason most political discussion sounds like an overheated rant is, that's the only way to vent a spleen. Even political jokes are almost always kinda mean. But mean is at least interesting, in the sense that you can muster up enough stamina to stay awake for it.
I can't believe it's only May. I've somehow got to stay awake for another seven months.
It's Sunday, the day when I go for a bike ride. To get off base, I go past the chapel, where I can see everybody going to services dressed in their finest track suits. Things have changed a lot since the days when my mother dressed me in slacks and a button-down shirt for mass. Kids wear their saggy pants and backward ball caps to church now. Born to early, I guess.
My bike ride took me to a park I found last summer, but didn't go back to until today. We're at the end of the cherry blossom season, but there are still some flowers on the trees, and the park was still splashed with all kinds of color. I dismounted and snapped all kinds of photos including the one above; if you click on the photo, it'll take you to a page, unfinished as I write this, with more photos of the park.
I spent the day yesterday driving around Lake Ogawara, the lake just north of Misawa air base. It's a pretty big lake, and there's no road that goes all the way around it, so I had to pick my way along highways, smaller trunk roads, graded gravel lanes, and potholed tractor trails through farm fields. Took me about three hours to make my way back home and, as usual I got a slew of pictures — but none of them are on the web yet. I'll post a heads-up when I do.
I thought I was an internet addict, but I'm nothing compared to the gamer in the next room. Tim broke his LAN cord the other day, which means he can't play whatever that game is he plays in his room all weekend. Excuse me, he didn't break his LAN cord; it's broken. And he doesn't play ALL weekend. Gotta get my story straight.
To get another cord, I'll have to drive him the ten miles or so to the computer store in Hachinohe. We're going there on Tuesday to record a show for the Planetarium, but Tim was hoping maybe I'd decided on the spur of the moment to drive down there today, I think. "You'll tell me if you go to Hatch?" he asked me, after I determined that the cord was broken. And then again, about fifteen minutes later, "Dad, can we go down to Hachinohe sometime soon?" I practically begged him to go out driving with me yesterday, but he wasn't interested in going anywhere until he started joanzin for some internet time.
Sean called from G'town today; tomorrow starts finals week, and he's bogged under by all the studying and papers. As if that wasn't enough stress, his thoughts are filled with the details of packing up all his personal posessions for storage and getting ready to fly out here for a few weeks to see us. And, worst of all, he's dreading being away from his girl all summer. Myself, I think I'd just spontaneously explode.
I'm completely unprepared to write anything tonight, mostly because, I think, I didn't know it was May 3rd until I got to my desk at work and my computer told me. I wouldn't know where my butt was if my computer didn't tell me. But I honestly thought it was May 2nd today. I had to fix the dates on these entries when I sat down to write this, because somehow an April 31st snuck in, which is what screwed me all up. I just hope that doesn't stick; as much as I'd like an extra day or two every year, I don't need the complications of thinking it's one day when it's really another. I only hope nobody noticed I was living the wrong day, or that I was living a day that wasn't there. In my defense, I can sincerely claim that I truly believed it was April 31st. When I got to the end of the month, I even checked myself before I wrote it down by reciting that "Thirty days hath September" rhyme in my head a couple times, and I still somehow came to the conclusion that April had thirty-one days. Sometimes it doesn't matter how much you practice, you're still going to muck it up when the moment of truth arrives, which is why I'll never fool myself into thinking I can do brain surgery, or anything really important. That's why I confine myself to government work in the field of national security. Betcha you'll sleep soundly at night knowing that.
I got the afternoon off from work by making sure when I asked that I mentioned I was going to Hachinohe with Barb and Tim to record the planetarium show. Ambassadors For America and all that.
Every time we go to one of these things is more fun that the last time. This time around I hammed it up as much as I possibly could, which wasn't much, because Tim would double over into a jerky ball of laughter whenever I even started to yuk it up a little bit, sort of like the reaction my Dad got from me whenever he started screwing around during mass. He didn't do that too often, because the reaction he got from Mom wasn't nearly as encouraging. And I didn't do it much, because we want they staff at the planetarium to keep inviting us back.
Before we go in to tape the show, we usually have to stop in the office for some hospitality, usually a cup of hot coffee, and sometimes a sweet. I never drank coffee regularly before, but I'm starting to look forward to it. After the taping, it's back to the office for some more hospitality and questions; we had a ton this time. I asked about the translation of a Japanese proverb: "Smoke and stupid people rise very high," apparently a variation on Wellington's Law: "The cream rises to the top. So does the scum."
The scripts are usually written by Sato-san, one of the guys in the office who also records the shows. Next time, though, they're having the script written for them by the makers of Astroboy. I think Tim should be Astroboy. Und I could be ze crrrrazy professor!
I went to the store this morning to buy a birthday card for my younger brother. He's going to be forty years old. Oh ye gods, how'd that happen? I have a teenaged son, another in college, and my younger brother is forty years old.
"Awesome Possum" — that's the catchphrase Tim uses when he thinks something is really nifty. I don't remember him saying it before today. I've heard it approximately forty dozen times since I came home from work.
My boss asked me to whip up some PowerPoint slides for a presentation he's got to make to the commander next week, "because you're the PowerPoint guru." I couldn't help smiling and telling him, "I think you've mistaken me for somebody else, sir." My experience with PowerPoint amounts to copying and pasting, but I got the slides done before close of business.
The daily drivel output has been pretty lame lately; I've been on a marathon book-reading binge that takes up just about all the spare time I have, which isn't much. I'm currently reading The Right Man, David Frum's love song to President Bush, and The Lies of George W. Bush is in the hopper. These are pretty typical examples of books about Bush; authors either love him or hate him, without much in the middle. That's part of why I'm so single-mindedly pursuing the topic.
I've had a particular hip-hop song stuck in my head on a never-ending loop for the past three days, and I've decided that if I can't make it stop soon through conventional means, I'll have to graduate to guerilla warfare, or more drastic methods. I once thought that the very worst song to get stuck in your head was anything by Madonna, but she's kind of quaint these days, almost smarmy and camp. I know that's hard to imagine, but someday my children will long for the dulcet tones of Eminem, believe it or not. I can't wait.
It's Friday already! Unbelievable! I work five days in a row now, and I seem to get to my days off faster than before. I guess Einstein was right.
Microsoft calls the picture background on your computer screen "wallpaper" and lets you change it — I change it two or three times a week, using photos from the news releases we get on-line at work.
For a while, the theme of my wallpaper tended toward chaos & destruction, specifically flames: towering walls of flames, or long, winding tongues of flames from the barrels of very large guns, or people bursting into flames. There were an awful lot of flames in the news for the week or so that I could keep this up. It was sort of fun to look at when I was still in the towering walls of flames phase, but by the time I got to the people bursting into flames stage, I'd sort of lost my tolerance for it, so I gave it up, even though every day, to this very day, there have been photos of even more wild and crazy flames on the news wire. (They were British soldiers in Iraq who'd had molotov cocktails broken over their armored car, by the way. Last I heard, they were wounded but recovering.)
By that time I had noticed another thread that ran through every day's photos: snapshots of the weird. Today I changed my wallpaper to Don King, leering from between a pair of crossed American flags, his pointy little tongue extended. The caption read, "Don King sticks his tongue out while supporting President Bush at a fund-raiser." With that caption hung on that picture, it fit perfectly into my weird phase.
Before that, it was three fire fighters in neon yellow protective plastic suits, looking a lot like cheap science-fiction movie androids, and before that, the aftermath of a truck that turned a corner a little too tight and the laughing-in-a-nervous-way results on the surrounding vehicles locked in bumper-to-bumper traffic. And then there were Koreans shrouded in protective suits (!) as they took care of an outbreak of avian flu in a farm yard by chasing and clubbing chickens with scoop shovels — keystone kops viewed in a hallucination.
But the next picture will have to be pretty weird to out-weird Don King. I suspect he'll be there for at least a week.
What a gorgeous day we had today. Just a tad on the chilly side, mostly because of the wind, but the sky was clear and deep blue, the sun shone warmly, and everybody in the neighborhood — every squealing child, every lawnmower-pushing dad, every barking dog — was out enjoying it. I guess it wouldn't be hard to prove that the dads weren't exactly enjoying it.
I didn't want to let the day go by without getting out to enjoy it a bit. Even more fun would be to bug the hell out of Barb and Tim to make sure they got out. I managed to bribe them into the car with a cooler packed with a picnic lunch, sandwiches and chips and fresh cherries and Ding-dongs. Then I drove them to a park I found last weekend on the shores of Lake Ogawara. We ate on the grass under the greening trees, and after we cleaned up, Tim and I played catch on the beach with a football.
We couldn't spend too much time out & about — Barb had to finish some papers for school — but it was such a beautiful day that we went for a walk along the shore to the far end of the park. After climbing a steep stair up the hill, we took visited the shrine, toured the campground, and took in the view before we went back down to the beach.
I picked up some rice wine on the way home; it's never a good idea to let supplies get too low. Barb got some fresh veggies and sweets from the bakery; gotta do that whenever we stop at the store. Then it was home again, home again, jiggidy-jog, so Barb could finish her homework and Tim could go shoot hoops with his buds. I settled down with a book, and ended up taking a nap.
Pizza and a movie tonight. All in all, a gorgeous day.
It's Mother's Day. Barb gets to sleep in late, wake to kisses and cards, and sit down to eat possibly the only breakfast her son will cook for her all year.
Barb loves holidays. I wouldn't say Mother's Day is the one she likes best, because each holiday has something all its own to offer, but she certainly did like Mother's Day a whole lot more while we were stationed in the UK, where they celebrate Mother's Day on an entirely different day in May — I can't remember the date now — so that she thought she was entitled to TWO Mother's Days, the British and the American versions.
For this Mother's Day, Barb has promised herself that she won't spend any time at all doing school work today. If she can pull that off without spontaneously exploding, I'll be impressed. She spent so much of her time working on her degree over these past two years that I've often wondered if waking and going straight to her desk to work from dusk to dawn hasn't become worse than a habit. Is her constitution still capable of simply goofing off from the time she pitches a lawn chair in the morning sun to the time she switches off Letterman late at night? I don't think she's in any danger today, and I think she could eventually re-learn how to relax for as much as a day at a time, if she progresses slowly and attends all the meetings. She's got a lot of support at home.
In The News: After reading the newspaper the other night, I told Barb that, if we ever managed to decide on a place to settle down, Savannah, Georgia, was not on the short list, or even a long one, because of the H-bomb. I can live with some things, but an H-bomb lying unattended off the coast is not one of them.
Air Force pilots used to practice nuking the Soviet Union by pretending to bomb American cities and, for no rational reason that I can think of, they carried nuclear weapons while they did it, a practice they stopped in 1958, but not before the bomb fell short of Savannah. A bomber collided with a fighter, and the pilot, worried about what might happen to the bomb if they crashed, dropped it in the ocean. The Navy searched for it for ten days, then quit. I guess they figured that, if they couldn't find it, nobody could.
So that's why there's still an H-bomb somewhere in the ocean near Savannah almost fifty years later. The military reassuringly claims that it's buried under 5 - 15 feet of silt and would cost millions to recover, so it's perfectly safe where it's at. And I'm not alarmed that it's there; I used to live in Colorado, just a few hours' drive from missile silos where hundreds of atomic warheads were kept.
The one in Savannah would bother me just a little, though, because it seems that it might be armed. It's probably not, but it could be. They're not certain.
I would think that kind of thing would affect real estate value. For sale: Brick ranch home, 2.5 acres of land, 2,500 sq ft, finished basement, 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, ocean view of H-bomb, $8,500 o.b.o.
Nine days until Sean touches down in Japan! We got a call from him last weekend; he's finishing up his final exams, his last big papers, packing up all his stuff for storage and for traveling — it's a high-pressure environment right now, but somehow he's dealing.
He told us that one night, to take a break and relax a bit, he went for a walk through the neighborhood. A homeless man begged a couple bucks off him, and then, as he went on his way, Sean kept thinking about the man's situation, as only Sean could do. He went back, took the man to a restaurant and bought him a meal, then tried to get him into a shelter but couldn't find one open, so he called a local social agency. They couldn't help him, so he called the police, but they couldn't help him, either, so he finally let the homeless man go on his way, and fell into a funk because he hadn't done enough for the guy. That is so Sean.
Collin Quinn came to Misawa! We had Collin freaking Quinn right here in Misawa!
Our club is usually soooo boring. Every once in a while they book a musical acts nobody outside of Spot Weld, North Dakota, ever heard of, and then they're surprised when nobody comes. This is the first time I've been to a comedy night at the club, because, again, they've never hosted anybody I've heard of, although I have to admit that I don't watch a lot of stand-up comedy these days. No cable out here.
Which is why I don't know what Collin Quinn's been up to since I last saw him on — what? When did I last see Collin Quinn? I think it was when he did the Weekend Update segment on Saturday Night Live? Geeze, I'm even starting to talk like a geezer.
Another comic, a guy named Bob Kelly, warmed up the audience, and did that work out well for Collin. I've never heard of Kelly before, but he was a scream. He tried out a couple jokes on us, found all our buttons, and then worked us over until we were crying. There was a second act, a guy named Nick DePaulo who had to work pretty hard for the laughs and seemed to give up about halfway through his schtick. Then Bob came back, cranked us all up again, and stepped aside.
Collin — he lets me call him Collin — was great, absolutely hilarious, and he stayed on stage for about an hour; I didn't think he was every going to stop, which was all right with me. After, the whole crew stayed after to sign autographs and sell their records.
We didn't get to have pizza on Friday night. Tim was so bummed. Friday's become our pizza night, when we stuff lots of hot pizza pie down our necks and watch a pizza-compatible movie. But because of one thing or another, we never even got to the pizza last Friday. It wasn't for lack of trying. Tim even offered to buy, which would've worked out for us, but it turns out he didn't have the money; he wanted to borrow it from us, which, as far as I'm concerned, is not him buying, it's me buying. It's always about me.
Barb almost went for that, but she wanted to take the money out of my coin dish, which I vetoed. "You're not paying for pizza with quarters, nickels and dimes," I told them. Can you imagine delivering a pizza and having to lug a couple extra pounds worth of pocket change back? Nevermind counting it. Sheesh.
Happy May Eleventh. Beside my usual day at the office, I attended yet another briefing to learn the how's and why's of suicide; finally remembered to pick up my clothes at the cleaners; ran three miles at PT; and got into a surprisingly long conversation with a guy I work with, talking about Lackland Air Force Base, the place all us zoomies go to for basic training. He was trying to figure out where something was, I explained where I thought it was, and when we couldn't agree, I realized it was because he went through basic ten years after I did. We were hardly talking about the same place. Then we got into trying to describe how much every thing had changed, drawing pictures on a wall board, calling up aerial photos from the internet. We got so into it that people who stopped by the office to ask for a case of toilet paper hardly interrupted the process, and over the course of two hours we'd mapped a huge chunk of the base. These are the things that occupy my day, now that I have my own desk. Scary, isn't it?
Every night, Barb shut the doors to the kitchen and the living room because they cats are way too crazy to be let in there to do whatever whacko things pop into their heads in the middle of the night, or so Barb says. She chases them out, latches the doors, and so they'll have something to snack on through the night in the event that they get a mite peckish, she sets up a bowl of water and a bowl each for Bonkers and Boo-Boo.
A bowl each. Like they care to tell the difference.
If I were Boo, I would be very interested in learning to tell the difference, because Bonkers slobbers like a drunken maniac while he eats. He drools all over the food, the dish, and the mat that we put on the floor under the bowl to catch all the slop. He's the feline equivalent of your crazy uncle who chews with his mouth open, smacks his lips, and doesn't wipe the drivel off his chin.
Boo doesn't care. Barb's the only one who thinks the separate bowls make any sense at all, so she keeps setting them out at night, and in the morning I collect them, both empty, or as close to empty as the leftover bits, cemented to the sides of the bowl by a putrid glaze, would let me make that claim.
I asked Barb to consider using just one bowl, but she wasn't having it. Spoils those cats like they're babies.
And now, the news: doctors have linked a high incidence of prostate cancer to testosterone. Sounds like somebody overlooked a design problem to me.
Movie Recommendation: The Triplets of Belleville — an almost-silent movie. When Mme. Champion's grandson is kidnapped during the Tour de France, she follows his shadowy captors to Belleville, where the strange but entirely warmhearted Triplets help her and her boy make their escape.
Book Recommendation: American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, by William Langewiesche — tells the story of who cleaned up the ruins of the WTC and how they did it. I have to highly recommend this book for its frank attention to the stories of the people associated with this effort.
From almost the first week we got here, I've wanted a Japanese alarm clock. They're the most eye-catching clocks I've seen so far anywhere in the world.
That's not to say they're especially good-looking, as a rule. They tend toward very, shall we say, vibrant colors, pinks and violets, day-glo green, and any color you might see in a neon beer sign. A significant percentage of their bodies are covered in shiny anodyzed gold finish, or fake chrome, and they normally feature some kind of oddity; something moves, or chirps, or lights up.
I kept my eye open for just the right clock, something that reflected the Japanese feel for timepieces, would be sure to catch everybody's attention, was pleasing to the eye, and had a story behind it.
The chicken was it.
There's a second-store in Hachinohe called Oki-Doki. Nothing especially unusual about it. They resell lots of household appliances, video tapes, compact discs and vinyl LP records (mostly American recordings, all), some clothes, and fishing poles.
Probably the best thing about Oki-Doki, other than the chicken, is the voice-over they play. Every Japanese store that I can remember I've been in has a recorded announcement playing on an endless loop over the public address system. As far as I can tell, it's an advertisement for the store, as if you might have walked in the front door in a very noncommittal state of mind. There's usually an accompanying background jingle that sounds as though it belongs to a Looney Toon.
Oki-Doki has a voice-over, too, in Japanese, Chinese, and English. The English version is such an endearingly earnest translation that I wish I could quote it verbatim, but I can't let you go without trying to give you at least a feel for it, which sounds like: "Have you ever a special product or discarded item used up which no application has anymore? Well now you can! Because of limited space on the ecology, and difficulty what to do to the trash, all need a reuse for your business. Bring your very appreciated leftovers to Oki-Doki!" Well, sort of like that, anyway.
I was trolling through the aisle where the plates were stacked when I turned around to see the shelves on the opposite side of the aisle piles with clocks and table lamps. I've been looking for a desk lamp for a while, so I started poking around there, and that's how I found the chicken.
The comb of the rooster is the ON button; press it, and his eyes turn to slits, as if he's sleeping. That was the first thing I loved. The second thing was the alarm itself. It starts out with a few tentative chirps, then a startled buck! buck-buh-KAW! and then, at an astonishingly greater volume, the Cock-a-doodle dooo! If you fail to wake up from that, it repeats until you shut it off — and even Barb wakes up the first time, so I'd be very surprised to find anybody who could sleep past the crowing.
How can it be Friday again already? Seems like I just went back to work a day or two ago. Not that I'm complaining; I'd rather be starting the weekend than the week.
Sean will be with us on Monday, just three days from today. Barb's going to make a special trip to the commissary to stock the pantry and make sure the fridge is full. I wonder what his appetite will be like after nine months of cafeteria food?
I took my most daring foray into the world of the web yesterday — I trolled the Victoria's Secret web site. First time, I swear.
I started out reading articles at the New York Times web site — if you've never been there, they have loads of pop-up ads. Most are for the south beach diet, but apparently the Spring string bikini sale's on at Victoria's, and a pop-up ad like theirs is pretty hard to ignore. "That's just not possible," I thought, after squinting at it for a minute or so — it was about the size of a postage stamp, and my eyes are pretty bad these days, possibly from squinting too long at similar magazine photos when I was a kid. I clicked it away, but the next article brought up the same pop-up. "How did she do that?" — she was either violating lab-tested physical laws, or the photo was upside-down.
So, what the hell, I clicked on it. Turned out she wasn't upside-down — the water would've fallen out of the pool. According to the item description, the gravity-defying trick was done with wires.
Well. Glad I straightened that out.
Tim's got an alarm clock, too, but I don't think he knows how to use one. He usually sets it to go off about three hours before he's got to be anywhere. On a school morning, that's normally about five-thirty, although he's changed it to about six lately because of me — but I'm getting ahead of myself.
When his alarm goes off, he hits the snooze button. Alarm goes off about five minutes later, he hits snooze again. Five more minutes pass, snooze again. His clock has one of those alarms that starts off sort of quiet, with just a few beeps, then gets a little louder, then adds a few more beeps, then gets even louder, then gets downright obnoxiously loud and beeps like a heart monitor hooked up to somebody who snorted too much cocaine. Tim can sleep through it until it gets to cocaine mode.
That used to bother me when I worked twelve-hour shifts and he set his alarm to go off a half-hour before I got up, but he didn't get out of bed until I had finished my breakfast. "You wanna get up at five-thirty, set your bleepin alarm for five-thirty," I told him. He snuck it up to five-fifteen, and slept until six.
So now if his alarm goes off, but he snoozes more than three times, I shut his alarm off. Sometimes I let him snooze a little more, but usually less. I sleep light, so I spend a lot of mornings lying awake, listening to the other people in our family play with their snooze alarms and snoring up a storm. I can't touch Barb's clock, although I can mess with her in other ways, but with Tim I'm a total snooze alarm fascist.
Why do I mention this? This morning, he set his clock for seven. I shut it off after three snoozes — I was up already, surfing the news on the internet, so I let him have three. He usually slumbers for a little while, then wakes up, but Sleeping Beauty is really becoming quite the teenager these days — he slept until ten-thirty.
Usually he gets mad at us when this happens. "Why didn't you wake me up?" he asks.
Movie Time: The latest version of Peter Pan, starring nobody you'd know, was a delightfully true rendition of the story. Highly recommended. And, I have to admit it, I really liked The Rundown, a buddy action flick featuring The Rock and Sean Thomas Scott. The fight scenes were awesome, the special effects were awesome, Christopher Walken was awesome (and The Rock is no slouch, either), the story was well-paced, the movie was beautifully shot — there was almost no way to not like this movie, if you like action flicks at all. Recommended.
Today was clean the bathroom day. The bathrooms in our quarters are much like any American bathroom, even though they're built with Japanese parts. There are tiny, interesting differences, though.
For instance, the Japanese have ingeniously included a small basket beneath the shower drain. All the washwater has to pass through it before it can go down the drain. The upside: All the hair and lint and grunge that normally gets stuck in the trap and clogs the drain now gets caught in the basket, where you can clean it out with a brush. The downside: All the hair and lint and grunge that normally gets stuck in the trap and clogs the drain now gets caught in the basket, where you can clean it out with a brush.
Gack. I mean, GAAAAAACK!
To me, "down the drain" means that I should never have to look at it again. Isn't that what it means to you, too? I appreciate that having the little basket means that the drain won't back up when all the sludge congeals down there, but plumbers get paid as much as they do so I won't have to deal with sludge. Right? Right?
I tried to mow my lawn with my $20 power mower. Took me an hour and a half. I could have done it all with the weed eater in about forty-five minutes. Proves that you get what you pay for.
I bought it at a yard sale last summer, so it was already old and getting ornery. First thing I noticed today was that the pull-start chord was rotten. It broke — close to the toggle, thank God — so I had to kluge it back together. The next problem was that it wouldn't keep running after I started it. Prime it, pull the chord, VRNNNN! Die. So I did what any American guy my age would do: I got out my vice-grip and took it apart.
I hope mine isn't a common example of modern American lawn mowers. Most of the parts are plastic. How pathetic. I can accept that in a vacuum cleaner, but not a Briggs & Stratton 3.5 HP two-stroke gasoline lawn mower. It's also got one of those dead-stick bars that you have to hold in an iron grip; if you let go, the engine dies. I probably violated federal safety laws when I disabled it.
Once I had the cover off, I twiddled with the valves and springs and hoses in there, trying to look as much as possible like a guy who knew what he was doing. Sometimes you can psyche out the lawn mower that way. And what do you know, it worked this time. The mower gurgled and bucked, and even died a couple times, but eventually I managed to intimidate it into running pretty smoothly, long enough to mow my lawn, anyway, which is all I wanted from it.
We have prepared for the arrival of Sean: The house has been cleaned, a room has been made up for him, and Barb is hovering over the phone, waiting for his call later this evening. If all is going according to plan, he should arrive in Tokyo around four o'clock or so, where he'll have to spend the night before catching a noon flight to Misawa. Everybody but the cats are eagerly anticipating the joy of his visit. The cats will enjoy him, too, they just don't realize yet that he's coming because, well, they're cats. They only know one word, and it doesn't mean, "Sean's coming to visit for six weeks, hurrah."
Movie Time: Calendar Girls is what I believe the voice-over on the previews would call the heartwarming story of the Yorkshire Women's Institute members who wanted something a little different for their annual calendar, so they posed nude doing normal things, and became so famous that their calendar raised more than half a million pounds to benefit leukemia research. The disk I rented came with a feature interview with the real calendar girls. Recommended.
Sean's home! Here's a picture! Gotta go!
At about quarter to seven this morning, I was getting ready to leave for work when Tim came downstairs, rubbing his eyes. "Why didn't you wake me up?" he asked.
"I didn't hear your alarm clock go off," I told him.
He blinked. Then he blinked some more. He didn't have an answer for that. "Well," he said, "could you please make sure I'm up by six o'clock?"
Oh, I see — among my other jobs, I'm now his valet. Next, he'll want me to feed him and wash his clothes.
No, he doesn't want me to feed him, to tell the truth, because I'd want him to eat fruits and vegetables. The only fruit he'll eat is applesauce, and the only vegetable he'll eat is those packaged carrots that've been peeled and sterilized. And the carrots can't be served in anything. He eats them separately, or not at all.
As for washing his clothes, forget it. His collection of basektball jersies is far too precious for him to trust anybody to wash them. They have to be very strictly sorted by color, washed only in cold water and dried on the low, delicate cycle, one shirt at a time. That's very important.
Barb, on the other hand, is very trusting when it comes to washing the clothes, but her trust in me is misplaced, I'm sorry to report. She'll sort the clothes carefully into color-matching piles of greens, blues, reds, yellows, and two kinds of whites. Then she'll get so far into her school work that I'll throw a load in, then another load, and pretty soon I've washed most of the clothes.
Being generally a lights & darks man, I scoop up the blacks, browns, greens and blues into one basket and dump them all together into the wash machine. She knows this, but she keeps on carefully sorting the clothes. I suppose I could be a gentleman and carefully wash them in fourteen separate loads, but all I want to do is get the piles washed so they're not in the way, so I throw in as much as the machine can hold. It's a guy thing.
There's a story in the news today about a German couple who went to a fertility clinic to try to find out why they'd been unable to have children after eight years of marriage. Both husband and wife were tested and found to be fertile, so doctors at the clinic started with the basics. "How often do you have sex?" they asked. Husband and wife didn't seem to understand the question. Punchline of the story was that, although they were both otherwise intelligent, productive members of society, their devoutly religious parents had so sheltered them from the details of sexual relations that they had no inkling of what they had to do to make babies.
Oh, right.
The story originally appeared in tabloid newspapers (the Sun (UK), and the Mirror (UK))that are not known for their thorough, objective reporting. The husband and wife aren't named in the story (well, that's not so strange, I guess, given the circumstances) and neither is the fertility clinic's spokesman.
But what I don't get is that these otherwise intelligent, educated people, were tested at the clinic and found to be fertile — the doctors must have examined the wife in an intimately physical way, and the husband must've produced a sample of his nuclear material — and I'm supposed to believe that they had no clue how to mechanically put the elements together? Puh-leeze!
No segue to this story:
In the course of a conversation at work about being deployed to Iraq, one of the conversants (conversers?) said he'd rather not go because of the rather obviously heightened danger of an early, and very probably messy, demise. Whereupon one of the other conversers voiced the opinion that you go when you're meant to go, so it doesn't matter how or when.
I hope I wasn't too abrupt when I offered my opinion that it almost certainly does matter, whether you care to admit it or not, although the point might not come home to you until some whacko with a jagged bayonet was truncating your apex. I also pointed out that the odds of decapitation were markedly slim in Green Bay, Wisconsin, these days, while in Baghdad they were approaching a certainty for captured Americans.
Sean's been with us for just a few days now, and he's already apologized about a zillion times. During the thirty minutes or so during our dinner last night, he apologized a half-dozen times. "Could you pass me the salt, Sean?" "Oh, sorry, here." So he hasn't changed much in that respect.
One thing about him has changed: Sean's got a girl. Almost as soon as he was off the plane, he had to show us his favorite photo of his sweetheart, Jenni, as well as the whole slew of photos he kept in a wad in a cheap school folder. Once he settled into the room upstairs, he taped a wallet-sized graduation picture of her to the edge of the shelf at the foot of his bed, where he could gaze on it all night. He framed it with a bit of construction paper and wrote little goojy-woojy things around it.
He's so totally smitten. Everything reminds him of Jenni, even, for instance, if I'm gouging chunks of flesh and bone from my toe with a nail clipper. "I just can’t get rid of this hangnail," I'll curse under my breath. "I might as well cut the whole foot off." He'll sigh wistfully and say, "Jenni’s got the cutest little feet." Woojy-goo.
I've been there. My best girl's birthday is today, and she's every bit as cute as when I first met her, even when she's feeling a little gassy. Maybe especially when she's a little gassy. She's sort of musical that way. But don't say I told you so.
The main base folks have been exercising all week. That's not to say they've been marching down the street in formation, waving flags and singing inspirational dittys peppered with expletives; that means that they've been living in tents and going to and from work at all hours of the day and night in full combat gear. They call it "exercise" because it's supposed to be good for you, sort of like boiled asparagus spears and cold showers.
The first typhoon of the year to make it this far has been dumping heavy rain on us all night long, and it should continue through the day. The typhoon's adding a level of realism to this week's exercise, of which I'm not taking part. Being a spook, I don't usually do military crap like crawling through the mud wearing eighty pounds of gear, and now, at the age of forty-three, I've grown to appreciate that quite a lot. I believe in a well-prepared military, but I also believe that standing outside today in the pouring rain wearing a helmet and flak vest would really suck, and I'm not all that ashamed to say I'm glad I'm not doing it. When I was younger, I enjoyed being the kind of miserable that only the military could make me. These days, I believe that military folk younger than me should get the same opportunities to be miserable that I had. Makes me some kind of a jerk, I suppose, but there you are.
The point of exercising during a drenching typhoon is to show everybody a little bit what the nitty-gritty of war is going to be like. Just about all these airmen will be going to war in the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq. Does anybody besides me see the irony?
When it's finally my turn to rotate to the desert, I suspect that a lot of people will point at me and chuckle, and say things like, "Payback time, spook, for all those times you skated out of the exercise. Now you're going to be really hurting." And I probably will be hurting, but I'm thinking it'll be because I'll be alternately sucking sand and dodging grenades, and not as much because I didn't cuddle up to the experience of standing guard outside a decontamination tent all night long getting drenched by typhoon Nida.
ATTENTION SEAN'S FRIENDS: Sean has become a country music lover. Yes! And not just your passive, "it's on the radio so I just happened to be listening to it" kind of country music listener — he loves the stuff enough to memorize the lyrics and sing them in public, twangy voice and all. Not long ago he was thuggishly grunting to the beat of his favorite rap, and now, just nine months later, he's singing through his nose. You can never truly know what to expect of people, but you can be sure it'll be an eye-opener.
Just as before, though, he's not exactly self-conscious about his passions. We went to the Mokuteki, our local fast-foot joint, to pick up pizza the other night, and while we were waiting at the window for it, he entertained me with several verses of a ballad dripping with sopping-wet emotion for the soldiers, sailors and airmen fighting and dying for our country. I've lived through fourteen years of Lee Greenwood's "Proud To Be An American," so I've pretty much overdosed on this kind of music.
Lee Greenwood Fans: Check Your Fire! My heart, too, once swelled with pride, and I shamelessly sang along when they played this song on the radio at the beginning of the first Gulf War. Trouble was, they played it at least once an hour on the Armed Forces Network in the first few weeks of the war. At that rate, the most country & western-lovin' patriot in the world would get sick of the finest twangy song every written about flag-waving since the invention of music.
And it wasn't played just during the first Gulf War. The military sort of adopted it as an unofficial anthem, so although I never heard it with the numbing regularity of those first few weeks of the first war, they continued to play it several times a week. It became enormously popular again after the 9/11 attack, and was played on the base Giant Voice every day after retreat.
So maybe you can see why I just don't care whether or not I ever hear another song like this again.
Wait a minute — I meant to say, "soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines." Sorry, didn't mean to leave out the Marines. I don't need the Lee Greenwood fans and the Marines on my tail.
Tim, Sean and I went to the gym yesterday and beat the heck out of a raquetball ball.
I hate saying that — asking the attendant at the front desk for a "raquetball ball" makes me sound like I forgot what I was saying and began repeatedly babbling words for no reason. "I'd like a raquetball ball and three raquetball raquettes. Ball. Ballraquet ball raquette raquetball beeble beeble boo." Raquetball has got to take the prize for one of the dumbest names ever for one of the greatest games.
There are lots of other games with raquettes and balls, like tennis, squash, and lacrosse — names with imagination, names that sound like they came from the distant past in a faraway place, or at least names that didn't make you want to stick out your tongue and go, "duh." Raquetball is so flat and obvious that no self-respecting guy would want to play it, until he found out that it involved whacking a rubber ball off the walls of a small room with a tennis raquette. Just about every American boy alive has broken a window in his room with the tennis ball his dog kept as a chew toy when he was learning how to ricochet it off the walls.
So why can't the game be called something really cool, given a name that makes it sound active, fun, or at least destructive, like ricochet, or smash? Even asswhupping (what you got when your father came home) sounds better than "raquetball." A congressional panel ought to be assembled to review this as soon as possible.
One thing's for sure: the boys really know how to play raquetball. No rules, no semblence of order, no style at all. Just hit the ball, hit it hard, and make it bounce off as many walls as possible. It was all I could do just to keep them from rearranging my dental work with their wildly swinging raquettes. I hung out at the back of the room, occasionally adding a little juice to a stray shot that dribbled into the corner.
We played for a little over an hour. After about twenty minutes of warm-up, I challenged them to some one-on-one to three points, briefly explained the rules to them, and we rotated in and out of the room. That lasted maybe as much as ten minutes. They weren't having nearly as much fun, so we went back to random chaos.
"Random Chaos." Now there's a name for a game.
Barb finished the last of her school work yesterday evening. Done. Finito. Ain't gotta study for a while. So what book did she bring to bed to read last night for a little light reading? A psych textbook. You can mail her at barb@o-broze.com and tell her what a doofus she is.
I was afraid that this was going to happen. She's become so used to studying incessantly that she's doing it automatically. She can now eat a meal without thinking about a paper that's due at midnight, without having to wolf down her food and bolt from the table, but I think it's going to take a little training to wean her off the classwork. Slow and easy, so she doesn't panic.
It was a Monday, just like any other Monday. No, wait, that was a song by Foreigner.
It was raining. I was taking the bus to work because Barb wanted the car to buy groceries at the commissary. She needed the car to haul back the forty-seven thousand pounds of produce and raw meat needed to sustain the college student. There was no other way.
Thankfully, it wasn't still raining when I walked down the street, or while I was waiting at the bus stop, so that I could wear my rain poncho with the hood down, and I could read a book while I was waiting for the bus to arrive.
Oh, crap. The bus was the Blue Goose. The base has quite a few of the old school bus-type buses, the kind with the iron-frame bench seats and bare metal interior covered in puke green paint. The heaters are always on — to ride in one is to be dried to a thin strip of beef jerky. And the shocks haven't been replaced since 1963, so every jolt over a pothole is amplified through the springs. It's like being repeatedly kicked in the kidneys by your worst playground bully.
The base motor pool also has several brand-new Japanese coaches. They're all air-conditioned, have comfy seats, and they ride like a town car. The windows are even curtained, to screen offending rays from sleepy eyes. I love the mornings when I get to ride to work in those. But this morning was not one of those mornings.
To top it all off, the driver I got this morning thought he was Mario Andretti. I've never had that experience here before. The bus drivers are all normally very, very relaxed about getting from here to there, hardly ever straining the buses to go any faster than thirty klicks, but this morning he was maxing the speed limit from the moment he picked me up to the moment he slammed on the brakes at the motor pool to get out and have a smoke.
After that, he was a bit more relaxed, but still seemed to be in more of a hurry than I've ever seen. I got to work five minutes faster than usual. Still, I managed to finish a chapter.
Barb, Sean and I went to the summer concert at Edgren High School, the one where they give out the end-of-year awards. Tim won the award for Outstanding Brass player. And he's been selected for advanced band next year. The kid's got talent.
I love going to these concerts. They're genuinely a lot of fun, and I get to hear some great music from all three bands — beginning, intermediate, and advanced — as well as the chorus, that never fails to pleasantly surprise me. The beginning band, for instance, played a couple pieces that made them sound much more accomplished that you'd expect a bunch of first-year music students to be.
The one thing about concerts at Edgren that they could work on, though, is the location. They play in the new gym, which is nothing to sniff at. I played many concerts in a gym when I was in middle school band, but they brought out folding seats for that. Edgren either doesn't have folding seats, or figures the bleacher seats are easier. Unfortunately, the bleacher seats happen to be the most maliciously painful seats that modern technology has ever devised.
I don't know what it is about them. I've sat on lots of bleachers in my life, but always the ones that are like plain, flat boards. Edgren's new gym has bleachers made of plastic, shaped in what I can only suppose was designed to be ergonomically comfortable, but it has exactly the opposite effect on my bony fundament. I sat on my jacket last night, to try to pad it a bit, but after an hour and a half I was still walked like a crippled man when the concert was over and I got up to leave.
We had a big old ham for dinner night before last, so every meal since then has been ham something. It's inevitable. Tonight it's red beans and rice, with lots of ham for flavor. Great meal. And the beans make you musical.
There's always something that people dislike about the place they work. I'm no different. For me, it's the music in the hallways. I'm even pretty particular about it. I don't mind listening to almost anything, but the Neil Diamond has got to stop.
I hear Neil when I come in, first thing. I hear Neil during lunch hour. I hear Neil as I'm heading out the door in the evening. The machine that plays the music is supposed to be set up to play the songs at random, but My God, How Much Neil Diamond Can There Be? And why's it all loaded into this one muzak machine?
The day you hear about an out-of-control sergeant in Japan attacking an apparently inoffensive computer is the day they played the live version of "Sweet Caroline" one too many times. Just so you know.
Been writing down and editing a growing collection of memories of my dad. When I started it, about four years ago, one of the things I recalled was an album of African tribal music that he used to play on a tricked-up phonograph in the basement of our Green Bay home. The name of the album (which turned out to be the name of the artist), Olatunji, was somehow still stuck in my memory after all these years, so I plugged it into amazon.com and, for a laugh, hit the button. I was so stunned to see the results that I ordered the album right off the bat.
When I sat down to write some more yesterday, I started by editing and expanding a bit that I wrote about the darkroom that he had in the basement. It brought to mind the Yashica camera he used to have back then, which I wanted to know more about, so I plugged it into e-bay to see if any were for sale. I got one on the first hit. I don't know what I'll do with it, but I put a bid on it.
The page isn't finished yet — I don't know that I'll ever call it finished — but it's posted for viewing at its new o-broze web site.
The rainy season cleared up just long enough for us to take a picnic lunch out to the lake and relax by the shore with bellies full of crabmeat and potato salad. Even a rainy weekend can have its high points.
Our first destination of this day of Mandatory Family Fun was the Tonami Clan Park, just north of Misawa. To have Mandatory Family Fun, it was first necessary to wake up all the members of the family, which can be tricky in the summer. The oldest teenager can sleep until noon, if we let him, and the youngest teenager seems to be a contender for the older boy's spot. But, using techniques finally crafted over a period of years, we got them all up and awake and ready for action by ten-thirty, when we all piled into the van and hit the road.
Tonami Clan Park is a quiet recreation area just a ten-minute drive from the base, very easy to get to. Entrance is entirely free, although the reason Tim wanted to go there was to ride the go-carts, which cost two bucks. Oh, and we played putt-putt golf, known in Japanese at pahtoo gahfohroo. We played with no rules at all. Sean was lobbing shots into the parking lot, and Tim perfected a scoop shot to get out of the rough that was just a little better than simply picking up the ball and tossing it. Best damned golf game I ever played.
After go-carts, we were getting pretty hungry, so we headed down to the lake, where we spread a blanket and opened a cooler filled with yummies. Tim and Sean threw sand on each other while Barb and I went for a walk on the beach.
It's a Memorial Day drivel, and an pretty rainy one, at that. Good thing we had our Memorial Day picnic yesterday, because today we would've been awfully wet and miserable.
So today, I concentrated on trying to catch up on my reading, and made good headway, too. I'm about a hundred-fifty pages into a book on politics that a friend lent me, and if just one-tenth of the stuff in there is true, our country is in a handbasket to hell. I sure am glad when people give me books like that to read.
Tim's been catching up on his computer time. He played Civilization just about all day long, a video game which is apparently more addictive than cocaine, heroin, nicotine and Kentucky's finest malt liquor all rolled into a big, sticky ball. Just to make it interesting, every once in a while I went in there to poke him in the ribs real hard and get my face between his eyes and the computer monitor. Really torqued him off.
Sean and Barb went into town to buy flowers for the yard, because that's what they planned to do today, darn it, and they weren't going to change their plans because of a little bit of rain. They didn't have the gumption to plant them in the rain, though.
The cats didn't know what to do with themselves all day. They wandered restlessly through the house, mewling at everybody, but when Sean chased them around, then ran and hid. Didn't want to play. Didn't want to sleep. Didn't feel like eating.
