We dropped Sean off at the airport yesterday morning, and stuck around for about an hour to say our good-byes. He was in rare form, goofing around, dancing in the departure lounge, picking his nose and flicking the boogers at other passengers ... no, he didn't do that, he's not that whacky. But he was whacky enough to throw himself against the glass partition between the departure lounge and the visitor's lounge. Planting a big, wet smooch on the glass, he made himself into a puffer fish by blowing up his cheeks. His mother tried to get him to knock it off by sternly mouthing warnings to him while pantomiming urgently, which was exactly like throwing gasoline on a fire. The more deeply she frowned at him and tried to wave him away from the window, the more crazily he flopped against the glass. By the time he was done, he'd left a track of smudges that any troop of six-year-old kids would've been proud to call their handiwork, and his mother was ready to cover her head in her arms and shuffle out of the room, hopefully unnoticed.
It's Thursday, the first of July, just a day away from the start of the Independence Day weekend. It's a four-day weekend for most of the people in what my coworkers call our "workcenter," but since I'm on leave, I've had a two-week weekend — not that I'm trying to rub anybody's face in anything, but I'm on leeee-heave! I'm on leee-heave! Nanny-nanny boo-boo! Anyway, Tim asked where we were going to see the fireworks on the fourth, so I had to break the news that the base commander had decided there wasn't going to be any fireworks. That's right, no fireworks on the fourth! Get a load of that! Well, to be fair, he's just being practical. For the past eight years, the weather around Misawa has been cloudy and usually rainy every July fourth, and every one of those years but one, they ended up postponing the fireworks until Labor Day. The one year they tried to shoot off fireworks in spite of the clouds, witnesses say they ended up with the most pathetic show ever, with feeble little pops and, occasionally, the sight of dim, colored flashes like kids with flashlights under a summer quilt.
Tim and I have begun our study of the ancient martial Art of Poke-fu. If you've never heard of it before, we're not surprised, because we're just making it up as we go along. Just as Ninja is the art of stealth, and aikido is the art of getting out of the way, pokefu is the art of jabbing the other guy in the ribs so hard that he has to curl into a ball and squeal like a little girl. Tim gets his jabs any way he can, usually by attacking me from hiding, but I prefer the more honorable frontal attack, and use just two fingers on each hand. Come to think of it, I usually use just one hand, because he usually attacks me when I'm carrying something. I guess my point is that, this is an art in which my opponent can't fight fair, although he's also usually the one that's doing the girl-like squealing.
We practice our art in public, of course, where we can do the most damage to each other, as well as to others around us. Getting other people to point and stare is a significant element of our art. Today, we practiced pokefu at the Hachinohe fish market, where we also saw marine animals that look like what we normally see only in nightmares. Funny how scary an octopus can look when its head's sitting on a bed of crushed ice; not normal at all. Sort of like a giant, man-eating slug. I watched in morbid fascination as a vendor gutted and bagged an octopus head for a guy who picked it out as though he was choosing a fine wine. And I suppose that octopus head is a food for only those who've developed their palate to a significant degree. Either that, or for people who smoke too much and can't taste a thing they're eating. No, scratch that; no matter how little I could taste, or how much beer I drank, I don't think I could ever bring myself to eat an octopus's head.
Pepsi now comes in blue. That's not a flavor, it's the color. My question is, if it's blue, and it doesn't have any caramel in it now, how can it be Pepsi? Pepsi's brown, and it has caramel. Or maybe I'm just too stuck in the past. Anyway, Tim thinks it's great, because it's blue, but I wonder if he knows it makes his tongue look dead? Come to think of it, he'd probably think that was pretty cool, too, so don't tell him.
Barb, Tim and I spent the day in Hachinohe, where we strolled the streets of the downtown district, nosing through stores and making a spectacle of ourselves. Factually speaking, Tim and I made spectacles of ourselves, while Barb tried to make it look as though she was not with us. She wasn't very successful. The Japanese can dress in some pretty alarming color combinations, but it's pretty hard for a blonde woman wearing a shirt covered in pink flamingos to fade into the background, even in the very heart of Hachinohe city life. That's what's so satisfying about making a spectacle, if you want to know the truth.
I want to tell you a little about where we parked, because it was almost a magical experience. I pulled into a public parking garage, expecting to find, well, you know, a parking garage, where I'd just pull into a spot, pay for a ticket, and leave. Instead, I pulled into an alleyway where a Japanese guy asked me if I could speak the language, and I had to smile and do the dumb routine while Barb tried to catch what he said. Then he punched a button on a panel, motioned us toward an opening door, and asked us to drive in. When I saw there was just barely room to park the car on a narrow metal platform, it started to dawn on me where I was; this was one of those parking elevators. After parking the car, the doors closed and our car disappeared. When we came back, the attendant punched a button on the panel again, and the car reappeared — and it had been turned around. There was barely enough room in there to squeeze in; how'd they turn it around? The longer I live, the more my life is like a Star Trek episode. Honestly. It's getting just as corny, too.
I've posted a couple new photo pages, if you're interested: The first is a few scrapbook images of our trip to the Tsugaru peninsula, and the second is a quick look at a shrine we accidentally found when I took a wrong turn out of Hachinohe. Enjoy.
Hey, happy Fourth of July, or Independence Day, or whatever you're calling it at your lawn party! Long live the republic! And remember, Freedom Isn't Free. I think it's a federal law now that you have to say that in any message about the fourth, or America, or the war. What, the feds thought we'd get confused because it's called "freedom"? As in, Well, it's called 'freedom,' it must be free! We sure have come a long way from Jefferson's eloquent "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants." Hey, copy, this is kinda wordy, doncha think? Tighten it up a bit — something snappy, like, say, "Freedom isn't free." There ya go! Okay, it's catchy, but it's nearly as empty as it is easy to rattle off. It's a sanitized way of saying that people will fight and die for a cause, and it's important for us to say "fight and die" out loud so that we're always thinking about the price we're paying. I think it's about time to retire this trite, empty fart in the wind, "Freedom isn't Free"; it implies Americans are simplistic and stupid.
It's the end of a long and wonderfully relaxing leave. I've been out of the office for just a week, but what a week! We drove up north to Tsugaru for a couple nights to get away and take it easy; we taped the planetarium script for the first time in months with Sean on the panel; we sent Sean on his way to the States; we picnicked at the lake, and followed up with a game of mini-golf; we wandered the streets of Hachinohe, reading the signs, or, for some of us, trying to; and then finally, for some of us again, we tidied up the trashier corners of our hidy holes, a sort of late spring cleaning. And in the middle of all that, I finished up another 600-page book, A Man On The Moon — big thumbs up, I'd recommend it in a minute. Why are all the interesting ones 600 pages and up? Just when I thought I'd be over that for a while, my eye caught another interesting novel in the bookstore today — 970 pages! Might as well give in to the inevitable.
And now it's back to work. *sigh*
Busy day. Wrote lots of e-mail. Chased a lot of people. And still got to take a lunch. Success is sweet.
Today was the day I finally made the office my own ... because, let's face it, I pretty much lucked out getting a day jog and an office of my own, even after 19 years of shift work, and it's only a matter of time before somebody realizes I've got the nice office and nice furniture and conspires to separate me from it, so I might as well enjoy it as much as I possibly can while I'm there.
The first thing that had to go was the crappy old desk. Fortunately for me, somebody actually wanted it, although when it came time to collect, they wouldn't show up. No problem; today was their last chance. I was feeling a need to release some pent-up frustrations. The desk would go. Then, just as I was unlimbering the sledgehammer, they showed up with a handcart to take the desk away. It opened up about half the office's floor space, brightened the room, and oh, my God, is that the debris and wreckage of my lunch, ground into the carpet? I'm such a pig! Well, that's what nature abhors a vacuum for.
With the crappy old desk out of the way, and most of the crushed peanuts and pretzels cleaned up, I started in on the big desk ... the one that's mine ... for now. I wanted to swing it around, into the corner. It's an L-shape, with one of the legs sticking out into the room, which makes answering the wall-mounted phone a big uncomfortable; I have to stretch out with one arm, levering one leg up in an oddly balletic counterbalance, to get far enough over the desk to grab the receiver. It's just not right. But I liked the computer against the near wall. There was nothing for it, but to take the entire desk apart, swap all the pieces around, then put it back together.
This ... is a job for — POWER TOOLS!
The best part of working in the Group Staff office is that the building maintenance guys are in there, too, and they let me borrow their power tools. They've got truckloads. And, let me tell you, the cordless DeWalt drill they've got is da Bomb! Get one.
Taking my desk to pieces wasn't much of a trick. I can take just about anything to pieces, given enough time, even if I don't use a big freaking hammer. Putting it back together, in the corner, turned out to be a sort of a trick, though. It was the trick where you see the guy's feet sticking out through the legs of the desk, but you can't figure out how he got in there, which is tought to figure out only because you'd never believe he purposly build the desk up around him, and forgot to leave a way to get out. Luckily for me, I'm about the width of two sheets of paper, and I was pretty sweaty, to boot, so I slid right out of there like a strand of spaghetti dripping with olive oil, if I may mix my metaphores just a bit.
It was a pretty hot, sticky day, even in the air-conditioned building, so by the time I had the desk put back together, all the strength I had left went into dragging my sweaty butt over to the vent and sitting under the blower for the last half-hour of the business day.
The ravens were diving on me this morning! I went out for a walk after breakfast and surprised three of them yelling at each other in a tree by the side of the road. They flew off in a snit, then took turns strafing me while I stolled to the other side of the street, trying to appear very non-threatening. I wasn't worried they would hurt me, but I was a little scared one of them might try to dive-crap me. Luckily, I escaped unwhitened.
How did these rats with wings ever become venerated by anybody? They're worse than pigeons. A flock of about twenty of them had gotten into a trash can at the house down on the end of the block. They were pulling garbage bags out of the can, tearing them open, and scattering the junk all over the patio. In fact, that's why I was up early in the morning — one of them was trying to noisily pry the lid off our trash can. Apparently, the Japanese think these are spiritual beings, and the English guards at the Tower of London think they're some kind of kindred sentinels. Okay, I suppose there could be garbage-eating spiritual beings. Not a very appealing argument for enlightenment, if you ask me.
The power was out in the housing area all day today, so Barb and I drove out to Komaki's resort, on the other side of town, to check out the hot baths there, something we've wanted to do since we got here. We've heard a lot about Komaki's, even been to a couple banquets there - it's a hotel and a sort of convention hall, as well as an onsen - but this is the first time we went to visit the baths. Apparently they get travellers from all over the country; there are busses in the parking lot, and lots of vacationers wandering through the halls. The baths were all right, but I don't see what all the fuss is about. It was about the same as most of the other onsen we've been to, and the one at the airport's better, if you ask me.
The one thing about the onsen that I very definately didn't like was that a cleaning crew was in there, scrubbing the place down, while we were trying to relax and enjoy ourselves. It's pretty hard to relax when a couple of guys are rinsing and stacking wash basins, and another guy is blasting away at the mats with a high-pressure hose, right next to where you're sitting, naked, trying to clean up and ignore what's going on around you. And the cleaning woman who was checking me out made it a little strange, too. It's not unusual at all for a cleaning woman to wander into the men's bathroom while I'm using it, and they're usually as indifferent to my presence as I've become to theirs. This woman, though, seemed to be looking for a story to tell.
Barb and I went to Towada to take part in a kabuki rehearsal. Kabuki is a sort of Japanese play, almost vaudeville. Barb heard from some of the women in the English class she teaches that there was a kabuki class in Towada, so she talked me into going along to see what they did. Turns out that, if you go there, you don't just watch. They danced around for about an hour, pretending to fight one another, then put a wooden sword in my hand, taught me two or three moves that I'm pretty sure I couldn't repeat tomorrow, and signed me up for shows in October and November. This was after they saw how lame I was. I can't imagine why they'd be that desparate. I look like an eight-year-old playing pirate, not a samurai in a fight, but they said I did great. Not that I knew what they were saying, because they all spoke in Japanese, and they thought I did, too. All I said to them in Japanese was, "Pleased to meet you," and I was lost from then on.
I was supremely bummed after my first attempt since I've been here to get my hair cut at the BX, where I told the Japanese barber that I wanted just a bit trimmed off the sides and top, and the back blocked. I'd grown a bit of hair on top, and I was thinking I'd like to comb it again. Can't remember the last time I did that. I wonder what kind of middle-aged neurosis a desire like that reveals to the keep psychological mind? Anyway, the barber listened carefully to my instructions, repeated them so that I was confident he knew what I wanted, then broke out his electric shears and buzzed my head the way he buzzes everyone else's. It was a cut I could have given myself in the dark using just my left hand.
I try to go out for a walk every morning, because it might be the only chance I get to take a walk outside, and because I like the stillness of the morning. But even at this early hour of the day, there's a lot about the morning that isn't very still at all.
For a start, there are the motherless ravens. In case I haven't clearly articulated my feelings yet, these birds have raised annoyance to a practiced art form. They scatter garbage everywhere; they don't have a song, they have a scream; and they dive on you when you're walking along in the mornings, minding your own business. But mostly they're loud. Their call sounds like a baby screaming, and they seem to do it most when they're hanging around right outside your bedroom window. There are probably more annoying animals in the world, but I'd bet there can't be too many.
There are the morning chimes. I'm not sure what these are for, but at six o'clock every morning the loudspeakers in town play "Fur Elise" loud enough that everybody in town and on base can hear. Over at the Japanese air force headquarters building, a loudspeaker plays some kind of bugle call, but it can't compete with "Fur Elise," which seems to be coming from several different locations. This is not to say that I dislike hearing "Fur Elise" at six in the morning. After three years, it's somehow oddly comforting and, if they stopped doing it tomorrow, I'm pretty sure I'd sit bolt upright in bed bothered by a strange feeling that something terrible had just happened. Just for your information, in the evening at six, they play "Greensleeves."
And in the election season - and they seem to have an election every six months - you can expect at least one political announcement first thing in the morning. Again, this is done over the city's public address system. I don't know exactly where the city's public address system is, but there seems to be a huge network of speakers all over the place. There's a click, a pause in which you hear the hum of an amplifier warming up, and then a woman makes a very urgent proclamation in a slow, measured cadance that lasts several minutes. I have no idea what she's saying, but I imagine it goes like this: "Citizens of Misawa! (LONG PAUSE) Citizens of Misawa! (PAUSE AGAIN) Exercise a vote to the candidate of favor cheerfully!" (REPEAT SEVERAL TIMES) Something like that. Or maybe I've been reading too many translated advertisements.
Finally, there's my own front door, which has hinges that defy oiling with a nasty, creaking noise that gets transmitted through the contcrete of the entire house when I open the door to leave, and again when I come back. I've tried every way I know of to sneak out that door, but I might as well just fire off a couple rounds from a shotgun and shout up the stairs, "GOING OUT NOW! DON'T MIND ME!"
Rain, rain, go away, Timmy wants to camp today. Today's plan called for a trip to Lake Towada to watch the fireworks they shoot off for a weekend festival, but it rained all night and all morning, so we went to our back-up plan: Spider-Man 2!
I don't know how much movies cost in the States these days, but a movie at the mall over here is pricey, roughly an arm and a leg and another leg, and that's without the popcorn and sodas. We got tickets for an afternoon show, then went down to a Chinese restaurant for lunch, and after the show, Barb and I visited the hot baths across the street. I thought they were great. Barb says she didn't like them as much as I did, but I noticed that she was in there longer than I was.
Spider-Man 2 was okay. The movie makers did a good enough job, but I grew up reading the John Romita Spidey, and anything else just looks wrong.
I'm a little late with this one, but maybe you haven't heard: The Food and Drug Administration announced last week that they're banning the use of cow brains as an ingredient in lipstick and other cosmetics.
Okay, think about that for a moment: Somebody out there was putting cow brains in lipstick. Of course, it was a relatively safe thing to do, and nobody was ever at any significant risk, which implies the FDA's banning it for no particular reason at all. They're just brains. Why wouldn't you smear them all over your lips?
Oh, I'm going to be so sick.
In the perfect world, there will be no pop music when you're on phone hold. It just doesn't work. I made a call to an office on main base today, and when they put me on hold, I got to hear some really pissed-off hip-hop dude scream in my ear. This is supposed to make me want to wait until the person comes back on the line? I suppose there might be something neutral you could play that anybody would like, but I doubt it. I said "no pop music," but I'm pretty sure no matter what you played, it'd rub somebody the wrong way, so in the world where everything's right, there won't be any music, noise, whatever it's called. Hold will just be silent. You need that, every once in a while. Every minute of your day doesn't have to be wired for sound.
I see more unusual things in the twenty minutes I take first thing in the morning to walk around the neighborhood. Dozens of people are out power walking, which is funny enough to watch all day long, so it's good for a chuckle right off the bat. I almost always see ravens doing something outrageous, like fighting over a bucket of half-eaten fried chicken, and scattering it all over somebody's lawn in the process. I see bicycles in trees, and eyeglasses resting on somebody's bowl of half-eaten cereal on the playground. Yesterday morning, as I was coming down the hill, I heard one of the neighbor's girls crying, begging her daddy not to go. This guy was trying to get into his car to go to work, but she wouldn't go back in the house and stay there. She was only about a year and a half old, and kept toddling out to the sidewalk in her diapers, bawling her eyes out. Tim used to do the same thing to me at that age. No matter how quietly I snuck out of the house, I always looked back over my shoulder as I drove away, to make sure he hadn't followed me out. Every so often, I'd see him standing in the open door, crying and calling for me. Barb is such a heavy sleeper that I knew she wouldn't hear him, so I'd turn back and put him in bed. Now this poor guy was faced with the same problem, except apparently she wouldn't stay in bed, and he was tired of fetching her back, so he stood there, commanding her to get in the house. Then, all at once, his wife popped out of the house to scoop up the girl and take her back in. I guess she wasn't a heavy sleeper. She also wasn't very shy. She was wrapping herself in a towel as she ran out the door, and it didn't cover her very well. Sometimes I see a little too much when I'm out for a walk in the morning.
We had a houseguest today and yesterday, a Japanese student from Hirosaki, a town west of here. She was taking part in a total-immersion language class, the kind where the students are dropped into a community that speaks nothing but English. The only one of those that I know of in northern Japan would be us. Barb heard they were looking for host families, and signed us up, and Nanae showed up Thursday night.
We're supposed to do things with her that we'd normally do. There's no hiding the fact that we're some of the most ordinary, average people on the face of the planet, so we got out the board games and treated her to an evening playing "Boggle." It's a word game - you scramble up a set of letters, then make up as many words as possible. That might sound like a pretty mean game to trick an unsuspecting Japanese student into playing, unless you take into account the fact that, as a group, nobody sucks at "Boggle" the way we do. My specialty is three-letter words, the absolute minimum you're allowed, worth one point each. Nanae beat me a couple times.
The second night was Friday, time for the customary pizza & a movie. Barb took Nanae to the video rental, where they picked out "Pirates of the Carribean." After all this wild excitement, I was pretty sure she'd be straining at the leash to return home, but she seemed genuinely sorry to leave.
It's been so freakin' hot here that the publishers of reference books, from Webster's Dictionary to the Encyclopedia Britannica, are furiously rewriting the definition of the word "hot" as we speak. It's not what you'd think it would be; blazing sunlight is only half of it. The temps have been in the mid-80s, but the humidity is so high that it's impossible to cool off at all. Barb and I spent the afternoon, the hottest part of the day, sitting limply in the living room with all the drapes drawn, trying to move as little as possible. Even then, we were both dripping sweat. Well, Barb was a little sweatier than I was, but she was getting a workout, pushing the buttons on the television remote.
PT was, for once, interesting. PT normally bores my ass off. Really. I have no ass. Like many of the Okonski men, it's completely flat. You can pick us out of a lineup, even when we're facing the wall. But, I digress.
For a start, we did our warm-up push-ups and crunches on the lawn. The gym was just too freaking hot; I broke a sweat just carrying the exercise mats in from the store room, so the PT monitor said, "Let's do the warm-up outside," where it was already cooling off nicely. There was a breeze from the south, and a few drops of rain made us wonder if things were going to get really wet right away, but it didn't and we just went ahead and started our run.
It was miserable. Even with the wind, the humdity was so heavy I could barely suck enough air into my lungs to keep going, so I lagged back in my slowest old-man trot and dragged the run out as long as I possibly could.
But when I had just a half-mile or so left, the clouds moved in, the wind died, and the heavens opened wide. Rain came down in melon-sized drops. They acutally splashed back up off the pavement; I could feel the water going up my shorts. I was soaked to the skin in a matter of minutes, and it felt great. Just minutes before, I was trudging ever closer to heat stroke, but after the rain started, I felt refreshed, cool, and I picked up some speed and finished the run in good time.
On the walk home, I played in the puddles. There was just too much water everywhere to be ignored. Most of it was sweeping litter into the storm drains, backing them up, and making huge lakes out of the low spots in the roads. I had to wade across them anyway, so I kicked the garbage aside to open up the drains, which made swirling whirlpools that sucked at the water with a huge slurping sound. I had to leave my tennies upside-down on the patio, after I poured the water out of them.
Please take a moment to check out the picture page, a few choice photos from the past week.
I like nearly everything about my day job. Oh, there are a few things need working, but, on the whole, the hours are great, I've got a desk nobody else will mess with, and if I screw up, nobody gets whacked but me. I call that a pretty sweet setup.
There's one thing I can do without, though, and that's the drive home in the evening. I knock off work at four-thirty, which is coincidentally the time about eighty percent of the base population heads home from the trenches. The other twenty percent leave at about five. If you're even distantly related to the sharpest knife in the drawer, you can see where I'm going with this.
I work on "Security Hill," a portion of the base rather far away from everything else — an appendage, as it were, dangling midway between main base and what has been colorfully labeled "the north area" by one of the more imaginative wags in the planning office. It's not far away, but the way home is a two-lane road that shoots straight over a causeway to the golf course, where it meets the perimeter road that winds around the west end of the runway. I have to go that way. So do those eighty percent I mentioned eariler.
Heading south along the perimeter road every day between four-thirty and about five-thirty or six, I meet a tailback of cars and trucks crawling bumper-to-bumper toward the main gate. I could do what just about everybody else does: put on a sour face and tailgate the guy in front of me, and I've got to admit, I've had some kind of crappy days when it actually felt sort of good to finish it that way. For the most part, though, I put on CD of my favorite music and make a game out of moving as slowly as first gear will possibly allow.
I've never made it all the way home that way — sooner or later, traffic always came to a complete stop. After some of that, I like to do my next favorite thing: let the cars out of the parking lot. I don't know how much this bugs the guy behind me, because to date nobody's walked up to my window to threaten me, but I'm hopeful. Today I got at least a dozen cars out of a single parking lot into traffic, just came to a complete stop, hung my arm out the window, and kept waving them through. Because, it's not like I'm going to use second gear any time soon, right? We're not exactly making tracks for the front gate.
By the time I get closer to home, traffic's a little looser, the cars are starting to tool right along, nobody's crowded up on anybody else's rear bumper — it really sucks, because when they get a momentum going, nobody wants to stop and let me make that final right turn into the home stretch. A right turn against traffic in Japan is purgatory. We drive on the left here, remember. And when you're hanging at an intersection, waiting for a break to let you through, the cars don't wait behind you — they crawl around, sometimes up and over a curb or median, to get past. Nobody's waiting but you. All that hang time could be spent learning to the words to the tune on the CD, but I usually spend it making up new and unusual curses, a little embarrassing when somebody crossing the street catches me at it.
And then home.
Sometimes, when things go right, you've just got to slap your forehead and say out loud, "I can't believe that worked!"
Barb got about halfway to a job in Towada yesterday, but she had to stop at a Circle K store by the side of the road and phone me at work to tell me, "The car's engine is making a noise."
"That means it's running, dear," I told her. We love each other that much.
I drove out there to pick her up, and to have a look at the car. We guys have to "have a look" at the car, as if we might be able to tell, at a glance, what's wrong with it when it breaks down. I especially love it when the car won't start, and a guy will open the hood and look around in there, as if there might be a big, red arrow pointing at the broken part.
In the case of Barb's car, the exhaust pipe was dragging on the ground, so a simple glance did, in fact, tell me what was wrong with it.
We made an appointment at the garage to have it looked at, and arranged for a tow truck to bring it back to base. The tow was going to cost a pile of money, and I wondered, "What if I just went out there with a couple tools and had a look-see what I could maybe do about it?" Barb and I went out there tonight, and I figured I might be able to sling a wire around the pipe to keep it from dragging on the road so she could just drive it back to base. Hey, if it saves us anywhere from fifty to a hundred bucks, it's worth a try, right?
Trouble was, I never worked on a car before, just trucks and vans. There's lots of room under the trucks and vans I've worked on, but there was barely enough room under this car to snake my arm under it. I had to sort of wedge myself in behind the front tire and slowly wind the wire around the tail pipe one-handed, with an assist from my other hand, which was pinned against my chest. It took about an hour, and I still have charley horses all up and down my back.
Barb hung out in the parking lot to offer moral support, and to keep passing cars from backing over me. At one point, with even my head wedged deep under the door sill so I could almost see what I was doing, I heard somebody walk up behind me and ask Barb something. She answered, saying something that sounded casual and hopefully reassuring, but every word of the conversation was in Japanese, so I turned my head away from the pavement and asked her, "Did somebody offer to help?"
"I think he's afraid I ran over you," she said. "He's not leaving. He's sitting in his truck, watching you."
That was an interesting idea: A woman who ran over guys in the Circle K parking lot, then sat down on the asphalt next to the car to have little chats with her victims. Of course, now that I mention it, it doesn't sound so outlandish, compared to some of the stories I read in the papers.
I wrapped a loop around the pipe to hold it, then half-rolled out from under the car so that the whole world could see that I was all right, just a little cramped. It took just a little longer to finish, then we were on our way, Barb driving very gingerly over the bad stretch of road near the train station. I was never far behind, expecting to see a shower of sparks at any time, followed almost immediately by a very expensive tangled knot of steel.
It never happened. The wire held, she made it all the way home, and I still find it hard to believe. A dollar's worth of picture wire saved us a tow from the other side of town. You just never know.
Geeze, I can't believe I forgot to tell you about the shoes.
Remember when I told you about the downpour I ran through a couple days back? Well, I'm afraid I have to report that my shoes weren't nearly as refreshed by the cool summer rain as I was. When Barb and I headed out to fix her car, and I fetched my tennies from the patio where I had almost succeeded in pretty much drying them nearly all the way, the putrid stench that escaped when I put my feet in them nearly made me toss my cookies. As unspeakably nasty as my feet are, and they're in a pretty wretched state of decay these days, I very nearly ripped the shoes right back off my feet, afraid of any bodily contact with whatever mutated fungal growth had polluted them — but I figured that, because I was wearing a clean pair of socks, and I wouldn't be wearing the shoes more than a couple hours, I was relatively safe, so I kept them on. Besides, I figured I was going to be crawling around under a car, so I'd most likely ruin any footgear I was wearing. These were garbage now, anyway; they were perfect for the job.
As I drove along the road, gagging weakly whenever the odor from the floor made its way to my nose, even through the blast of air from the open window, I felt more and more regret over my decision. Barb was much less subtle. "My God!" she would shriek every so often, edging her way further and further away from me each time she caught a whiff.
Even in the open air under her car, stretched out as far as I could get myself, I couldn't escape the ghastly, rotten funk from the shoes. When we got home, I peeled them off before I made it as far as the front steps, and tossed them over by the trash cans. I didn't want to actually throw them into the can, because there might've been something in there they could've fed on. I figure I'll douse them with gasoline and burn them before I throw them away, just to make sure.
I had to stand a twelve-hour watch today — a Saturday day watch is almost a guaranteed snoozer, so I was pretty motivated to do something when I got out of work, even though the rest of the family was near death because it was so freaking hot all day long. I had no idea how hot because I was in a windowless, air-conditioned building all day long, and I was very careful not to leave it at any time, too. But I didn't rub it in. Much.
When I got home, though, I began to realize just what kind of hell they'd been living through all day. The temps had climbed into the 90's, and our residence, which has walls of cement several inches thick on a steel frame, had become a giant brick oven, and was still toasty warm when I got home. "Toasty warm" is one of those phrases that you would never believe could ever make you feel anything but pleasantly cozy, but the way I'm using it, it was totally wrong. There was nothing pleasant or cozy about the inside of our home. It was a hell-hole, and as soon as I got there, I was making plans for getting out of it.
Actually, I was making plans for getting out much earlier — almost as soon as I left work. There was a new anime at the movie theater, Steamboy, and this seemed like the perfect day to see it: I was almost drooling from the boredom of the long day watch, the weather was still way too hot, and the movie theater was air-conditioned. Just the last factor all by itself convinced the rest of my family to tag along.
I like cartoons a lot, and Japanese anime are especially easy on the eyes, but Steamboy left me baffled. I can usually work out at least some of the plot by just watching the action, but there wasn't much action in Steamboy. Every one of the characters must have had something pretty darned important to say because they wouldn't shut up! "I wasn't told this movie would be in Japanese," Tim pouted when we got to the theater, and by the end of the movie, I was feeling about the same way. The previews I'd seen were so enticing that I thought I'd get to see some pretty spectactular artwork, at least, but even that was pretty average, so I probably won't be seeing a Japanese movie without subtitles for quite a while.
It's so unbelievably hot here — have I mentioned that before? — that the cats are (I just have to say it) cataleptic all day long. Boo & Bonkers both spread themselves out as limply as they possibly can, and remain inert for as long as they can. All this inactivity means that, as soon as night falls and the weather becomes relatively cool, they have lots of energy to spend the few short hours before sunup roaming the house, climbing on furniture, knocking breakable items off the shelves and walking across our faces as we try to catch a couple winks, behavior that's looked at as slightly annoying when we're having enough trouble sleeping through the hot nights as it is. Can anybody recommend a good feline tranquilizer, besides a quick rap on the head with a bat?