WHAT A BEAUTIFUL DAY FOR AN AIR SHOW. The sky is clear, the sun is out, the temps are warm — oh, wait. Never mind. Forget I said that.
I WENT OUT TO STRETCH MY LEGS ON A WALK AROUND THE NEIGHBORHOOD, and ended up getting quite a bit more exercise than I bargained for. A couple was trying to bring their new television in from their car, and seemed to be having trouble getting it across the parking lot, so I volunteered to help. Television sets are packed in such oversized boxes that they're hard to handle. I figured that, with my years of box-carrying experience and my boundless, genuine good will, we'd all whisk that boxed television set into the building in no time. Boy, was I wrong. That television wasn't just big, it was big and heavy. It was one of those new flat-screen plasma television sets, and I would have guessed they weighed twenty, maybe twenty-five pounds at the most, but this thing was in a box the size of an easy chair, and felt like it was packed full of bricks. Together we'd waddled a few dozen feet across the parking lot, stop for a moment to catch our breath and shake feeling back into our fingers, then pick up the load and start waddling again. Once we got it into the elevator, my boundless, genuine good will had evaporated as completely as had all the strength in my upper body. "You guys got it from here, right?" I asked them, backing out the door.
THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES have never provided so much mirth in our house, I feel it's safe to say. Barb just about peed her pants when President Bush said the insurgents in Iraq fought our troops "fierceifferously." She looped the tape about a dozen times on that spot, at first just for the belly laugh, then to try to figure out what he was saying. It sounded like he was trying to say "vociferously," but with his Texas twang it came out mangled, and it didn't make much sense, after we looked it up in the dictionary. They were fighting loudly? They were very vocal about fighting? That's not technically incorrect, but we kept riffling through the dictionary pages and playing the tape over and over to see if we could make it sound like something else. It wasn't happening, but it was a lot of fun.
NOODLE TIME. Tim, Barb and I went out for ramen last night, and although Barb and I are dedicated ramen eaters, Tim was apparently much hungrier than we were. Our favorite noodle house serves ramen in bathtub-sized bowls with lots of garnish on top, and I can usually get through one in about fifteen or twenty minutes, but I was just getting started when Tim settled back in his seat, patting his belly and belching like a diesel truck.
FAT CATS. Barb took the cats in for their shots, and the vet said they're too fat. We've talked about this before, because Boo's just a bit chunky-looking, but neither one of them is like some of the overstuffed furbags I've seen. Always sensitive to the doctor's suggestion, though, we cut back on their kibble, and now they act like gutter snipes attacking a crust of bread whenever we put some food out for them. I avoid the kitchen because Boo follows me whenever she thinks I may be headed that way, and nips my ankles to get my attention if I stop by the fridge for a drink.
USED TO BE A TIME WHEN A UNIT COMMANDER WAS RESPECTED, even feared. At the very least, you didn't take up his time with nonsense, but those days are long past, it seems. The commander of our group has an anonymous e-mail drop set up, as part of the open-door policy that's supposed to make him accessable, as if he isn't already. Instead of using the drop to ask questions about policy, or make suggestions that would help the unit more effectively accomplish the mission, he gets questions like: Why aren't there sodas in the fridge when I go to get a drink? Why aren't there any toilet seat covers in the bathroom? The questions to which today's airman believes his commander should apply years of experience and specialized education involve soft-drink resupply and toilet-seat cleanliness.
And I have a question about the toilet seat covers, if you'll indulge me: What measure of cleanliness do you believe you get from something that's tissue thin and doesn't repel water? And we're talking about contact between a public toilet seat and a butt. Use a public toilet, or don't. It's not like you're setting your face on it. Grumpy mode off.
THE PASSWORD IS ALOHA. I don't know why, but Tim has begun to say aloha whenever I enter the room he's in, sort of like he used to add desu ka? at the end of every sentence he spoke, back when we first got here.
I SPENT THE WEEKEND trying to find out a thing or two about Madison, the place we're planning to retire. You'd think that I might already know a thing or two about it, because I was born and raised in Wisconsin, and, as it turns out, I do know a thing or two: It's the state capital, the capital building is on a spit of land between two lakes, and back when I was in high school, I helped put Lee Dreyfus in the governor's office by playing the trombone. This seems like a rather unlikely way to help get a guy elected to the post of governor, don't you think? And sometimes I wonder what it says about Wisconsin. Is it just that they're no-nonsense people, who listened to Dreyfus and responded gratefully to his plain-spoken message? Or was it that they overwhelmingly liked the polka music we played?
But getting back to my story, if there was one: You've just heard everything I know about Madison. (Oh, and the University of Wisconsin is there. Sorta makes sense, doesn't it?) Everything I used to know about it, anyway. I've been trolling the internet, desperate to learn a few more thing before I plop myself and my dazed family down in the midst of it. You may be thinking that the internet isn't exactly busting with factual information, but would you have believed I could help elect a governor using the skills I had as a twelfth-grade trombonist? Well, there you go.
I've been spending a great deal of time on the net looking over the Madison-area job market. I'm not convinced the internet is a great, or even a good way to look for a job, but it gives me an idea what's going on out there, and I've got to tell you that, if the jobs posted are any indication, things are a little crazier in the private sector than I had ever believed. There's an advertisement for a civil engineer, a guy who plans and builds roads, sidewalks, and sewers. The job requires a four-year education in mechanical engineering, and pays $15.92 an hour. Then there's a job for a janitor at the local convention center. It pays $2676 a month, and requires no more than a driver's license, and a willingness to clean the lavitories. I'm not saying the janitor's job is preferable, or that it's not. I'm just wondering why the guy with the four-year degree starts at less than the janitor. And I'll bet the civil engineer is wondering, too.
A place to live would be nice, but I almost wish I hadn't looked at that. Houses cost a gazillion dollars any more. When did that happen? Okay, I'll stop with the old fogey bit — houses have always cost an arm and a leg, except in retrospect. There's nothing to do about it but report to the realtor's office and submit to the pain. Then again, I suppose there's always the living under a bridge option, although it might be a little hard to talk Barb and Tim into that. Well, not so much Tim, as Barb. Tim thinks living under a bridge would be kind of cool.
I don't even want to start thinking cars yet. Just the idea of arm wrestling with car dealers makes me want to swallow a bottle of NyQuil, wrap a pillow around my head, and go to bed for a week.
IF BOO WOULD WAIT JUST A HALF-HOUR before she got the urge to start chewing on my toes, I wouldn't have to kick her out of the bedroom at five in the morning. I usually get up at five-thirty — or at least I'd like to. There's no sleeping past five with Boo in the room, waiting for her breakfast. If I head in the general direction of the kitchen, she bounds ahead of me, drooling all over herself, which makes it easy to lock her out. Bonkers is just the opposite, tottering into the kitchen with filmy, blinking eyes, yawning and scratching like an old man. Okay. Hang on. I'm up, but hang on. Okay. Um. Now, feed me. Sheesh.
YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, I PILED ALL THE PAPERS ON MY DESK into a heap on the blotter and moved out of my office and into a cubicle. I became an office prairie dog, one of the consequences I more or less expected when I signed up for a day job. For a short time, I worked in an office of my own, because my predecessor was in there, but our boss wants everybody on her staff to be together in the main office now, where she can easily see and talk to all of us, and we can easily see and talk to each other — so yesterday I became Of The Body.
On the down side, I have to listen to the pop-music crap they play on Armed Forces radio, which is piped in over the speaker system. I could shut that off in the office and work blissfully in peace and quiet, but no more. Lucky for me, I'm the superintendent of supply, so I can scrounge a couple sets of ear plugs from the stock room and stuff my ears with foam.
On the plus side, the coffee maker's in my cubicle now, no more than an arm's reach away.
I made a big pile of shredded mulch today. Almost half of my first full day as a cubicle rat was spent sorting through the ten pounds, give or take, of paperwork I'd accumulated over the last six months, and shredding about three-quarters of them. I didn't start out trying to clean up — I was looking for something that couldn't be found in that mess, so I started weeding. Talk about a liberating feeling — There goes that power point the boss hung around my neck like a millstone last summer! (Yeh, it's already last summer. *sigh*) And for some reason I had three copies of exactly the same operating instruction, except that each copy I found was exactly one year older than the one I found before that. The shredder was begging for oil like a rusted tin woodsman in a birch grove.
A 19-YEAR-OLD AIRMAN came into the staff office yesterday as part of a work gang shuttling supplies from one building to another. I knew how old she was only because Lee took one look at her and asked, "Hey! How old are you?" Not one of the other airmen she was with looked older than twenty or twenty-one.
19 years old. That means on the day she was born, I had finished basic training and was being force-fed a foreign language. She wasn't even thinking about the Air Force, because she was just barely thinking. She probably has no memory of the first Persian Gulf war, when I was on my third tour of duty in Berlin, was married just a year, and had just an hour or so a day to play with my newborn son when I wasn't standing guard all night, or sleeping off a guard watch. She's younger than my oldest son! I mean, Holy crap!
I was playing this old fart game with Tim a little while back, when he was doing his math homework with a calculator that was probably more powerful than the computer I used in high school. It was a teletype machine; the readout was a roll of yellow paper. We had hand-held calculators back then, but they were thick as hardcover books, and the ones that had any more than four functions cost over a hundred bucks. Digital watches were the size of cel phones, they had just four digits, and you had to push two buttons to make the time pop up. Tim gets one hell of a laugh out it when I codger and grump over old stuff like this.
AT KABUKI PRACTICE last night, Bando-san loaded up all the props for the play into my van, so that I could take them to the base and bring them to the practice at the club tonight. When he chucked the armload of samurai katana swords under the back seat, I thought, "Hmmmm ... I wonder what the security police are going to say when they pull me over for the random vehicle check tonight and find that?" But somehow I sailed through the gate and the cops never even looked my way.
Didn't matter. We signed the whole lot of them through the gate tonight for the practice on-base before the Navy Day Ball tomorrow night, and the cops just smiled and waved them through, even though they were carrying swords under their arms. I guess that's not weapon-ish enough to set off any warning bells.
THE NAVY DAY BALL is finally over, no more worrying about how the kabuki play is going to turn out. It was a huge hit. There was one teensy-tiny hitch right at the start, when we came out and a table, podium, and some flags were in the way. The audience lost interest in us while we cleared that up, but three shouting swordsmen lept onto the stage immediately after, and when Bando-san began to cut them up into beef jerky, the audience sat up and paid attention. They cheered and applauded through the rest of the performance, so I guess they liked it fine.
I thought the plan called for the performers to leave the base almost immediately after the show, so I was surprised when the lieutenant asked them if they wanted to stay, and of course they did. Quite a few wanted to stay until the club closed, and I don't blame them. There was a lot to see and do. There was a DJ on the stage in the ball room, the disco at the end of the hall was jammed full of people, all the dart boards had games going, and the jazz room had an excellent five-piece combo playing very smooth music until just past midnight. I stayed with the night owls, partly because I had a van and could take a lot of passengers, but mostly because it was a great party and the Japanese were having so darned much fun going from room to room, trying out a little bit of everything.
I'VE BEEN PLUGGING serial numbers from dollar bills into the Where's George? web site for a couple months now, and in the last two weeks or so, I've been getting the message that I'm tied for first place with the guy who has registered as many bills as I have without getting any 'hits.' Shouldn't I get that message just once? I mean, if I was tied, then shouldn't I either fall behind or pull ahead? Maybe somebody who's better at math than I am could explain it better, but the other guy would have to keep plugging in exactly the same number of dollar bills as I did in order for me to be tied with him for over a week, right?
If you've never played the Where's George game, you can go to this web site and plug in the serial number of dollar bills. Whenever somebody does that, they usually write Where's George? somewhere on the bill. If somebody else finds the bill and plugs the serial number into the web site, that's a hit. The web site will tell you were the dollar bill has been, how far it's travelled, and how long it took to get to you. It's a slight variation on the old message in a bottle.
MOVIE TIME: I rented The Ring last night, because I kept running across it while channel surfing, and it looked interesting enough to watch all the way through instead of in pieces on late-night television. It got better than mixed reviews, and a 72 on the tomatometer, but I was disappointed. It looked creepy when I caught bits of it, but all the bits together don't add up to much. It started with two school girls trying to creep each other out with an urban legend about a video tape that kills anybody who watches it. Then one of the girls dies. The girl's aunt is a reporter for a Seattle newspaper who discovers that three of the girl's friends died at the same time on the same night, and they apparently all watched the tape together. So she finds the tape, watches it, gets all creeped out by dreams and a string of coincidences, and her hollow-eyed son learns to speak with the dead ... does any of this seem scary? Or does it seem like something you've heard before? This is the kind of movie that used to make Barb and I pee ourselves when we were in grade school, but we would've been pretty obnoxious if we'd seen this in a movie theater, because we were shouting at the screen the whole time: "Don't go downstairs!" – or – "He's behind you!"
STORY TIME WITH UNCLE KNUCKLES: Truman sits in the cubicle next to mine, and shares it with Melissa. Because Truman's a DJ, he likes to sing along with the songs on the radio, or just sing songs whenever they pop into his head, and Melissa, having the same musical tastes, will very often join him, which is what she did the other day when Truman started singing, "Ring My Bell," a remake of an Anita Ward disco number from the late 70's.
"Truman, please," I begged him, "please don't sing that song." I had to live through its first rise through the top ten (it actually made it to the top five), and I'm trying to avoid its newfound popularity by never listening to the radio, with mixed success.
"Don't you like that song?" Melissa asked me. "That song rocks!" She may not have actually said "rocks," but I'm so far from hip that I couldn't get there on Space Ship One, and I sure don't know any ultra-cool lingo, so I'm sort of paraphrasing the conversation. I hope nobody minds.
"That song sucked in the 70's," I said, "and it sucks now. I can't believe somebody was so bored they felt a need to remake it." (I don't know who remade it, and I don't want to know, thanks.) They countered my opinion with the firm belief that it's the hippest song on the air, that the original was even hipper, and then, just to rub it in, they sang a few more choruses.
Later that afternoon, Truman stuck his head into the office from the hallway and called, "Hey, Sergeant Okonski, you've got to come out here."
I prairie dogged out of my cubicle and regarded him with naked suspicion. "You're going to jeep me, aren't you?" A jeep joke is when they send new guys down to the flight line to pick up a bucket of prop wash from the tool shed, or some similarly hilarious trick. I'd never seen this one before, but "You've got to come here right now" sounded like pure setup to me.
"No, I'm not going to jeep you," Truman said, "but you're going to kick yourself if you don't come out here right now." So I went into the hall. Why not? I can take a jeep joke as well as the next guy. And it was a pretty good one. "Ring My Bell" was playing on the hallway speaker system.
"Don't think I'm not going to get you for this, Truman," I told him. But he was way too happy to care.
Speaking of pop music tunes that should never be remade again, there's a version of the Gloria Gaynor disco hit "I Will Survive" playing on the radio over here by some grunge head who earnestly moans the words in a monotone while strumming a six-string with all the energy that he, or any speeding locomotive, could get out of three chords. And it's awful. Just awful. There's not a single redeeming quality about it, except maybe the part where it ends.
But you never know with these things. Tim has been walking around the house for weeks humming, "The Final Countdown," a pop tune from the mid-80's that I've never completely recovered from. He wanted to know why my head dangled uselessly to the left and spittle drooled from my lip whenever I heard the tune, and after I wiped my chin, I told him that, aside from the numbing repetition, the synthesized melody that resembled nothing so much as car horns in a traffic jam, and the awful, whining vocals, I supposed some people — that is to say, maybe people who've had a complete good taste-ectomy — might think it was a good tune.
Then he played it on his horn. And you know what? The melody doesn't sound half bad when you play it on a trumpet. How the heck does that happen? I tried to imagine it as a routine by a drum & bugle corps, and I thought it might make a pretty good tune that way. Is this some kind of twisted practical joke? Here I thought that bad pop music was just bad, but somehow it can apparently undergo some kind of redemption. I don't know if they can do it to all those thumpy-thumpy-thumpy disco songs that nearly caused my total mental collapse.
(That's a pretty cool phrase, mental collapse, isn't it? I know it's probably not very technical, but I just love the sound of it. My brother said he used to imagine it meant your head caved in, and the best name for a heavy metal band that we could think of was Mental Collapse.)
One of the perils of channel surfing is that you never know what you're going to jump into the middle of. I got bored with the news tonight, so I started flipping, and one of the first channels I came across was a close-up on the face of a guy who was obviously on an operating table. His features were completely slack, he was wrapped in bluish-green sheets, and he had a plastic hose jammed in his mouth. Somebody — presumably the surgeon, or at least I'd like to think — was narrating in Chinese or Japanese; I only caught a few words, so I'm not sure, but he was luckily, or unluckily, translated by a caption at the bottom of the screen: ... we have removed his testicles.
Yikes! I sure hope that's what he meant to have removed.
Dang! I haven't written for four days? Time flies when you're doing nothing but screwing around. So let's get to work! Here's some drivel for a big, sloppy kiss-and-make up:
Freedom's on the march, but I still don't have a ballot. Democracy's flowering everywhere except right here in this far-flung bastion of America. I've pretty much given up any hope of ever receiving a ballot from my state of residence, which has been Colorado ever since Barb and I figured, after living there for five years, it would probably be easier for us to change over than do everything long-distance with Wisconsin. Boy, were we wrong. This year, I'm just going to send in a write-in ballot rather than wait and wait and wait and finally give up all hope of them ever sending me a ballot, which is what they did (or didn't) last time around, and the time before that, but Barb is determined not to give up. She won't stop making phone calls and swapping e-mail with state election officials all over the Denver metro area. Eventually, they'll fly over here and deliver her ballot personally, just to get Barb out of their hair. That would be the easiest thing to do. If they did, I bet they'd forget to bring mine.
We've been working on the Sanctity of Marriage amendment, completely on our own initiative and we offer, at no charge to the taxpayer, a compromise that we think everybody can get behind. See if you don't agree that this could work:
Okay, first off, the gays still can't marry. Sorry, but I guess the argument gets stinky because marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman, and none of that dirty sex, either. Remember, this is a compromise, so we'll all have to give a little leeway if we want to get through this.
Marriage is a sacred institution, and this amendment is about protecting that sanctity, so I'm afraid that divorce will be a no-no, too. Out of the question. In fact, it will be a felony, and summary justice will be imposed on anybody who goes through with it. Attempted divorce will be nothing more than a misdemeanor, or however you spell it.
Now, for those who've been divorced already, we can hardly force them to get remarried, especially if their ex has already remarried, because that would pervert the sanctity of marriage even further, so we'll have to require some kind of penitentiary action from them. Since half of all marriages have resulted in divorce, it would cripple the workforce to lock up all divorcees, so it'll be simpler and more productive to simply shun them. They'll wear black bags over their heads, no eyeholes. Just a peek out the bottom ought to be enough to see where they're going.
If they've been divorced once but have remarried, they may wear white bags over their heads. But still no eyeholes.
The federal three-strikes-you're-out precedent has been so well established that it should apply here, too: anybody who has divorced more than three times goes to jail for life, no chance of parole. States that have the death penalty may consider applying them to these cases.
Anybody caught living together will be forced to donate their homes, incomes, and all their personal posessions to happily-married man-woman couples, and they'll wear red bags over their heads, until such time as they marry and earn some respectability. And still no eyeholes.
How's this plan look so far?
Movie Time: The O-folk went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow last night. Barb, after the movie: "How'd you like it?" Tim: "Okay. How'd you like it?" Barb: "Okay. Dave, how'd you like it?" Dave: "Okay." So I think we've established it was okay. I don't think the movie's makers were going for okay, though. I think they were going for Spectacular! Fantastic! Not To Be Believed! I mean, just look at the title! This was a movie trying to one-up the Indiana Jones movies, and it certainly beat the second one, but there was just way too much super-dooper stuff, the dialogue was pretty flat, and the story was thin. Rocketeer was just as fantastical, and way more fun.
Movie Time Again: Did you see Supersize Me! the film about the guy who eats nothing but McDonald's fast-food for a month? (Geeze whiz, that makes me feel queezy just thinking about it.) I'm not suggesting for a moment that it's anything but a stunt, however, this is a genuinely hilarious movie. Okay, it gives you something to think about, too, but just watch it for the laughs. You won't be disappointed, I promise you. The segment about the french fries is worth the price of a rental, if nothing else is.
One Final Movie Time: Barb finally got her hands on a copy of Fahrenheit 9/11, and all but forced me at gunpoint to watch it. I can see why she wanted me to. The first twenty minutes were thought-provoking documentary. Then it turned into stunts, and way too much of the movie was given over to the woman who lost her son in Iraq. He made his point with her in five minutes, but he dragged it on and on and on. At least the whole second half of the movie was pretty hard for me to watch, but maybe you'll feel differently, and for sure the image of Paul Wolfowitz licking his comb to slick back his hair is worth the price of admission. So see it for yourself and decide, even if you think Moore's a weenie. You can always ask for your money back.
Just back from Towada, where we had kabuki practice. With the days getting shorter and shorter, the drive's all in the dark now, which makes the whole experience a lot more like one of those video games that I never win because I usually end up crashing helplessly into something. The only way to describe how startlingly large a city bus looks when you're driving uphill towards it on a winding, narrow Misawa street is that it feels like trying to squeeze past a blimp in a hangar.
Watch out! Dangerous ideas ahead! The debates brought up the subject of the minimum wage, which a few in congress — a very few — want to raise from $5.15 an hour to $7.00 an hour. After I did a little back of the envelope figuring and realized that neither could pay the rent and keep food on the table, I wondered: What's the point of minimum wage, anyway? To keep employers from paying workers a wage that's somewhere below total crap? And what's the point of arguing over raising the minimum wage to diddly squat from total crap? I'm stumped. Help me out, here.
Story Time with Uncle Knuckles: Back when I was young and indestructable, I drove cross-country from Denver to California to visit Pete, who was living in Pacific Grove at the time. The trip's a lot longer than it looks on the map, and it looks pretty dang long on the map. But the long distance and long hours of driving didn't worry me much, because at the time I was working twelve-hour rotating shifts, so sleep deprivation was my natural state. I was practically trained for it.
On top of the extreme distance, my car was a '69 Volkswagen microbus, with a top speed of sixty miles per hour — when the road was flat and the wind was fair, much less against the wind and uphill. And I used to maintain the engine myself. I didn't just change the oil, I also adjusted the timing, replaced the generator and the muffler, and made other modifications. Today, the more reasonable me would never step into the car that the younger me had ever taken apart.
I started out by heading south to Albuquerque, where I planned to dogleg west across Arizona. I crossed the New Mexico line just after sunset and pulled over to sleep off a little drowsiness, then kept on. I think I've mentioned that I've been back to New Mexico and Arizona, but let me just say again that I've never been anywhere that so closely resembled a cat box. I guess I'm used to places that are lush with trees, bushes, grass and crops, and the mile after endless mile of flat, orange clay was too much for my little brain. Until I got to Kingman, the only thing worth mentioning about Arizona was that other travellers had become so bored by the drive that they pulled over to the side of the interstate and spelled out their names with white rocks, which stood out like neon signs against the clay. There must be thousands of names in the desert out there.
What about Kingman? Other than it being one of the names in "Get Your Kicks On Route 66," I pulled over for gas there, and when I turned the key to get going again, the van wouldn't start. The engine didn't turn over, the starter didn't make that click that means dead battery, nothing. A couple warning lights on the dash lit up, and that was it. I went to my toolbox and dug out my copy of "How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive – a guide for the complete idiot," the book I used when I made all my repairs to the volks, and looked up "car won't start." After ruling out several malfunctions, I narrowed it down to the starter. The first recommended fix action was, "Hit it with a hammer." I'd been on the road for more than a day, and I was stuck in the middle of the Arizona desert. This sounded like reasonable advice to me, so I pulled on my coveralls and scooted under the car, hammer in hand. After one solid Ping! on the starter, I climbed back into the driver's seat, and tried the key. Starter cranked the engine right up, first time. Go figure.
I finished crossing Arizona and half of the Mojave Desert that afternoon and evening. I had never been that hot before, and despite my constant whining, I don't think I've ever been so hot since. I tried rolling down the windows to cool off, but I actually felt hotter that way, so I rolled them back up and tried to think cool thoughts.
Some time after sunset, halfway across the desert, my brain sent me the urgent message that it would be closing for business very soon. I pulled over at the next rest stop, crawled into my sleeping bag in the back, and crashed for four or five hours. I woke up only because there was a steady stream of trucks pulling into the lot for the same reason I had and, tired as I was, it was more than a little difficult to sleep over the sound of diesel engines coming and going.
I got the same urgent message just a couple hours down the road, when I tried driving a little more. It's sort of like when you're starting your computer, and everything seems to be going fine until you get that pop-up that says Fatal Error but doesn't give you any more information than that, and you have to shut down the computer and start over.
I thought I would sit down with a cup of coffee and write some drivel. It's not what my brother would call coffee, because he makes coffee by grinding his own beans in his own special way. He has one of those little Braun grinders, and he usually just pours beans in right up to the top. After grinding them up, he dampens the grounds slightly with hot water and chugs them from a really big cup. Hey Pete! I think if you take that big plastic top off the grinder and use it to scoop up a heap of beans, you could make your coffee about three times as strong as you do now.
Even money says he tries it.
I never finished my story yesterday. After that last sleepy spell, I was able to climb into the driver's seat and finish driving all the way up from Paso Robles up Highway 1 to Monterey. That's got to be the prettiest stretch of road in California, and every Volkswagen bus in the state was on it that morning. Whenever I passed one, the driver would smile and wave at me. Pretty soon, I would smile and wave first. It was like being in a club.
I think I arrived in Pacific Grove right around suppertime, and found Pete's house without any problems that I recall. I did have to stop once at a machine shop to buy a couple lug nuts for the oil filter plate on the engine. The mechanic warned me not to crank them down too tight, because it was easy to strip the threads on the bolts, but I'd already done that. He was too late. But that wasn't a problem getting there, just a problem with my brain, and the car kept running so long as I kept checking the dipstick. I stayed for about a week, then headed back, north this time, through the Sierra Nevadas and across the Nevada desert.
I think I would have appreciated the Sierra Nevadas a lot more if I'd been able to see them. I drove across them in a blinding snowstorm. Also, my appreciation of the mountains was dimmed somewhat by the fact that I froze my ass off. Really. I have no ass. And even if I did, I wouldn't have been able to keep it warm in a Volkswagen bus. If you want heat in a minibus, you've got to buy a heater for it, a real one, not the dinky little camping heater I had. I drove across the Sierras as quickly as I possibly could without sliding off the snow-covered cliff edge.
The less said about the northern Nevada desert, the better.
Northern Utah has that salt flat, which is so large and so white that it's really surprisingly impressive. For a while. It's a little hard to stay impressed after driving across the same white, flat landscape for more than an hour. But definately go see it once.
The only thing I remember about crossing Colorado from the west is the mountains on the west slope. I've been out there several times since the first time I saw it, and it never failed to impress me. The lush green valley around Fruita is gorgeous, and the cliffs around Grand Junction and the gorge out of Glenwood Springs are jaw-droppingly awesome. Then there's the utter desolation of Dotsero, until you near Aspen. And when you drive down the highway on the east slope, of course, you feel as though you're in free-fall. No matter how long you've been driving, that'll wake you up.
Today is Halloween in Misawa, Japan. They closed off White Pole Road at about noon, and all kinds of brightly-costumed little kids went from store to store to trick for treats.
Tim and I drove down to Hachinohe to buy some parts to repair the computer, which had a bad cooling fan. And when I say bad, I'm talking absolutely delinquent. It was smoking, it was drinking, it was up all night, hanging out with the wrong sort of crowd. Last night was the absolute worst: it got picked up for posession and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. "This is the last time I'm bailing you out," I said, putting my foot down. I unscrewed it from the heat sink, and dangled its power cord off the edge of the couch and let the cats snap at it. That may seem a little harsh, but I bent over backwards, and this is the thanks I get.
My ballot arrived in the mail today, eight days after the postal service's deadline to send them in. I'm going to go ahead and drop it in the mail five days ago, just to see what will happen last month. Don't worry, none of this makes any sense to me, either. Tune in yesterday to see how it will possibly have happened.
We'll get back to the picture in a moment. I mean, you can take a look at it now, but I can't tell you about it right now. I'll tell you about it after I tell you about the conversation we had at the dinner table tonight. Some things just can't wait, and this is one of them.
We were enjoying a lovely green salad while Tim was recounting his teacher giving the class examples of a totalitarian system: there's one ruler with some guys under him, but doesn't have to listen to them, he just does what he wants, and his secret police whisk people away without recourse to the law. And Tim asked the guy, "So it's sort of like America today?"
I just about coughed a whole salad up through my nose when he told me that.
"You said that to your teacher?" I asked.
"Yeh, and he tried to argue with me, but his point was pretty lame," he said.
So this may be my last drivel to you before we're all vacationing in Guantanamo. I wish I could promise you that it'll be a good one, but that remains to be seen.
Back to the picture. It's a notebook that Barb picked up while she was shopping in town. She and I both love the way the Japanese phrase things in English, so we pick these up whenever we see a really good one. In case you can't make it out from the photo, the cover reads: Strawberry Switchblade We are favorite girl 2 person groups of a mischief. Apple Jam Today and will surprise everybody.
Okay, first of all: Strawberry Switchblade has got to be about the best gaga psycho name ever for a cutsey grrrrl book. I wish I were sixteen again, so I could look into a young girl's eyes and ask her tenderly if she'd be my one and only favorite girl 2 person, my darling Strawberry Switchblade.
Also, I can't tell you how crushed I feel that I'm not part of any groups of a mischief. Was there ever a chance I could have been? I'll probably never know.
We carved the family pumpkins tonight, and placed them on the front step to take a picture and post it here so that you can get a good look before one of the neighborhood thugs smashes them into a zillion little orange chunks. Happy Halloween.
Today was Warrior Day. I had to go into work a little early so that I could dress up in heavy coveralls and a gas mask and pretend to survive a chemical attack. About fifteen years ago, I would have lapped up this kind of fun with a spoon, but these days I'd rather suck sewer water out of a ditch, which would be the equivalent of drinking through the straw in my gas mask, which they didn't make me do, thankyouthankyouthankyouohmygodthankyou. Most of the morning was spent standing around waiting to do things, a military custom that goes way, way back, so that part was actually very realistic. The activities we did get to do were supposed to teach us how to behave in the real world, but when we did the vehicle search, in which four fake IEDs ("improvised explosive device," military-speak for "bomb") were hidden in various parts of a car, the first thing most people did was fling the doors open to start searching inside. This seems to me like an especially quick way to make the car go boom. I could be wrong. But it was pleasant to be outside instead of inside, and we got a free lunch at the end of the exercise. Hard to beat a free lunch.
Retirement update: I got a call from the airman at the retirement office yesterday; she wants me to go in tomorrow to fill out some paperwork. I can only assume this means my retirement has been approved, although I was so jazzed by the phone call that I forgot to ask her, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out. More later ...
My car broke. The front wheels went wobbly, then they went whomp whomp whomp when I drove it very far, and now they make a sound that I can only describe as something like chewing on bubble gum covered in sand. You ever have that happen to you? It's just like that. Since it seems to be something wrong with the brakes, I don't drive the car now. Driving a car with brake trouble just doesn't seem very smart to me, you know? So I took the bus to work this morning, and back home this evening, and it was just as awful as I remember. Some things never disappoint you by changing even the tiniest little bit.
Why is it that riding a bus to work is tedious and boring, but riding a train or a roller coaster isn't? Why couldn't there be a roller coaster to work? Would it really cost that much? And wouldn't it be worth it in the long run to make people line up and look forward to blasting off to work and arriving happy and full of adrenaline? They'd be so ready to go that they wouldn't have to spend the first hour hanging around the break room, sucking down pots of coffee, but I'm guessing they probably would, anyway.
I made it to that briefing with the sergeant in retirements yesterday. By the way, airman Scaramouche doesn't work back there any more, much to my disappointment, so I can't say her name at every opportunity, drat the luck. Anyway, retiring from the military is so simple as to be almost pleasant, and the sergeant who briefed me is even more so. She explained to me which offices to visit and when, which letters to get them to sign, and she even explained to me why I should outprocess in Los Angeles, for which I will be forever grateful. It doesn't involve free tickets to Disneyland, but almost. So onward to retirement! and, with any luck, a job that doesn't involve janitorial services or fast food. It's not that I have anything against janitors, mind you, but I'd rather not clean toilets. Not right away. But I do have something against fast food.
Today was the last Friday of the month, and that means ... READINESS RUN! All the active-duty service personnel on base who weren't physically disabled or attacking an enemy combatant, or couldn't figure out some other way to get out of an early-morning jog, had to go down to Risner Circle at six o'clock this morning, form up with their units in the middle of the road, and trot around the main base area in closed ranks. Well, almost everybody. Lots of people fell out to the side of the road, clutching their sides and wheezing, before they got as far as a hundred yards. These are your Fighting Forces of Freedom.
But I was glad I went. The vice commander was there to give us a pep talk before the run, and to sort of get us to fire each other up, he yelled out the names of each of the units standing in formation around him. "Is the Army here?" he called, and the soldiers shouted an answer. It sounded like the Army "Hoo-Ah!" but it could have been anything. Then he did the same with the Navy, the Marine (there was just one), and then called out to each of the Air Force group formations, working his way around the circle until he got to the medical group, which was formed up right next to ours. After they shouted their answer to him, he stopped and said, "All right, then, everybody's here."
And that's how we learned that we, the spook squadron, really are invisible.
I happened to see The Return of the King while I was channel sufing the other night, and oh my bog it's just as plodding and tedious as The Fellowship of the Ring was. I kept hitting the fast-forward button, hoping to speed things up just a bit, but no luck. It just kept dragging and creeping along. The problem is not the story, or the acting, and every scene is just beautiful, but the action was paced by a guy who had no concept of time. Every scene was at least fifty-seven times longer than it had to be, and way too many scenes that were already horribly long were shot in slow motion, to make them even more agonizing, I suppose. I enjoyed reading these books a lot, and I used to think, like everybody else, that it'd be great to see them made into movies, but now I wish I'd never wished that.
One of the sound bites to come out of this election campaign was, "He's the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time." Just what do you suppose that means? It's my guess that he just wanted to say "wrong" as many times as possible, but if you had the wrong man, wouldn't you want him on the job at the wrong time so he couldn't screw things up? And why would anybody want to get the wrong job done? Wouldn't the wrong man be a good thing there, too, to increase the possibility that he'd do the wrong thing, and maybe everything would turn out right? This politics stuff seems complicated sometimes, but if you just think it through, it all becomes clear.
