I took my car in to the garage this morning. The clerk called me after lunch to tell me what was wrong: the brake pads were shot, the rotors were shot, the brake hoses were bleeding, and a brake piston was gone. She quoted an estimate and paused, as if I might think it over and say, "Nah, I'll just pick it up and drive it till it drops." Then I went in to pay for them to order the parts. Once again, she recited a litany of breaking and broken brake parts, and I let her, figuring this was a legal requirement, before I handed over my credit card. As she handed me my copy of the credit slip, she said, "You can bring the car back on Friday." I waited for her to crack a smile, or at least realize what she'd just said and slap herself in the forehead, but she didn't. "I don't think I'll be taking the car home without any brakes," I deadpanned, after which she asked, "So you want to leave it here, then?" Um. Yaz.
While I was reading all the usually dreary news headlines this morning — car bombs going off in Baghdad, hostages getting beheaded, the world's wildlife dieing off, Bush re-elected — my eyes came to an abrupt halt on the headline, Man tries to convert lions to Jesus. A headline like that a man's just gotta click on. And it's just what it sounds like. Well, no, it sounds like hackers broke into the news web site and inserted a link to a story in The Onion. Only it's not The Onion, it's a real news story. I guess anything's possible, today.
I got my car back from the garage, so I drove my darn self to kabuki practice tonight instead of begging for a ride like a bum. Turns out that, in just one short week, I've grown so used to driving Barb's car that climbing into the van feels like driving a Mack truck. And driving it at night down Japanese roads is such a claustrophobic experience that only trying to drive through a garden hose would be worse.
Just about every other time I go up the stairs, Tim tiptoes up behind me and, if we get halfway up and I haven't heard him, he pokes me in the ribs and yells "BLAHAHAHA!" and, before I can smite him with the lightning bolts that shoot out my eyes when he does that, he's gone back down the stairs, round the corner and all the way to the end of the hall, giggling like a maniac. He's gotten so bad, or so good, depending on how you look at it, that for the last two weeks I've gone up the stairs in a crab walk while my head snaps from side to side like a Rain Bird lawn sprinkler. I don't even try to catch him any more. I don't have to. Sooner or later he returns to his room. I've got a lot more patience than he has. That's when The Tickle Tarantula strikes.
Time for a look at the stories in the Stars & Stripes this morning:
U.S.-issued uniforms selling at Iraq bazaar A bazaar in Baghdad's perilous downtown sells U.S. military uniforms at discount prices. The sales take on a sinister air considering the deaths of Iraqi National Guards stopped at a checkpoint manned by terrorists dressed as police.
News Flash! This just in! U.S. military uniforms are sold in bazaars, flea markets, and surplus stores in every country in the world! You can buy them on line! This conspiracy is huge! More as this story develops ...
Bush facing new Iraq questions The article posed just one actual question, however: Will a renewed U.S. offensive break the back of the insurgency? It was two full columns the length of a page to pose a question that isn't 'new' and would only be answered, if Bush or his administration answered it, with a prediction of nothing but total success. So thank you, Stars & Stripes, for keeping me up to date.
Countries look at pulling out of Iraq after elections in '05 In a blow to U.S. efforts to keep countries from deserting the multinational force, Hungary said it won't keep troops there beyond March 31. The Czechs plan to pull out by the end of February, the Dutch by the end of March, and Japan is feeling pressure to withdraw.
Well, there goes another 50 troops from the Coalition Of The Willing.
Jenkins believes desertion sentence 'very fair' Bringing one of the Army's longest desertion cases to a close, U.S. Army Sgt. Charles Jenkins, 64, and in poor health, was sentenced to 30 days in jail, forced to forfeit pay and allowances, demoted from sergeant to private, and given a dishonorable discharge. Jenkins believes his conviction for desertion after nearly 40 years in North Korea is "very fair."
This has got to be the most lenient sentence ever handed out to anybody for anything. I mean to say that, just how do you punish a guy who just spent 40 years in North Korea, eating gravel stew and reading the hundred fifty thousand volume boxed set of the serial romance potboiler "We Love Our Chonger." In his detention cell, Jenkins will be able to use hot running water for the first time in 40 years, and get his entertainment from cable television, instead of the crude transistor radio he had to tinker together and keep hidden under the floorboards. It's like sentencing somebody to 30 days in Club Med with all the drinking beads he can carry and a complimentary daily massage. There's almost literally nothing we could do to this guy that he would consider a punishment. "And we're taking away your commissary privileges!" Gosh, he might not be able to eat canned food for a while. That's harsh.
Europe at odds over Bush's re-election "Oops - they did it again," Germany's left-leaning Tageszeitung newspaper said ... "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" Britain's liberal Daily Mirror tabloid asked.
I might've been able to figure out on my own which way those newspapers usually lean without the helpful descriptions, but thanks. By the way, Barb will pay top dollar for a copy of that front page from the Daily Mirror.
A Jumble Of Thoughts: It took me four full days, but I finished the Sunday crossword without cheating. Now what do I do until next Sunday? – In the time it takes you to read these words, I will have added two pounds of methane to the world's atmosphere. No, no, don't thank me, just doing my bit for global warming. – The Top Ten List and Will It Float? were cut from Letterman's show last night. AFN says they don't do that, and my Congressman doesn't care. "Support Our Troops" my ass! – The cats wake up too damn early. Then again, so do I.
Tim watches The Simpsons every night, even though he knows it sucks. The only kind of videographic self-destruction I can think of that would be more masochistic than that is sitting through every episode of Gilligan's Island, and I should know. I can't claim I never wasted my youth in front of a television set, but at least my show had babes like Ginger and Mary Ann in them. (I have absolutely no defense for Green Acres, and throw myself on the mercy of the court.)
Speaking of television, we were in the store the other day, looking for a video to rent, when I noticed that they had the first season of Mad TV on sale. For just twenty bucks, it was a steal ... OR SO I THOUGHT. One of my favorite skits on the show was Cabana Chat, but we've watched six episodes, and so far no sign of Dixie Wetsworth and her third degree sunburn. So tonight I scanned through the other two disks, looking for a quick fix, and no joy! I haven't felt this let down since Tina Louise refused to join the rest of the castaways for the reunion show.
I used to be in my high school's marching band, and this day was one of the reasons I loved it so much. We would get on a bus and ride out to three or four of the local cemeteries to meet the rest of the townspeople in paying our respects to the war dead. Our mood was generally happy to be getting out of school for most of the day, but when we got to the town, everybody stopped goofing around. At the Manawa and Symco, we crossed a bridge to approach the cemeteries, and the drummers lapsed into a cadance they called "Death March," a subdued, intermittant roll. They never used that any other time than Veteran's Day, and I never learned why. At the cemetery, our rank & file would interlace with the rows of headstones, and a pair of coronet players would break off to bugle "Taps" after the dedication was read and the honor guard fired a salute. We did that every year, so that it was almost routine, but it's one of my clearest memories of marching band, and I wonder if small towns still do that any more.
Tim and I went to The Bong tonight to watch Cellular, the movie about a woman who's held captive and manages to call for help by piecing together a telephone that was smashed to bits. Because she was a science teacher, that's how. Not Oscar material, but not a bad film.
It would've been a great science class: The teacher brings in a bunch of old telephones, sets one on each student's desk, smashes it with a hammer, and says, "There, see if you can make it work." School could've been so much more interesting if I'd thought up the curriculum.
I had to scrape frost off the windshield of my car this morning for the first time this fall. Once that happens, snow can't be far behind. Tim said it snowed today, but there wasn't any around that I saw. If you have to go looking for it, it wasn't snow. But it was freaking cold.
I don't know what to write about, so I'm writing about the weather. Sad.
I'm trying to think of something, but I'm drawing a complete blank. Absolutely nothing. Total block.
I got my hair cut yesterday. My head still looks like forty feet of bad basement shag carpet, but that's only because almost everybody I work with shaves their heads. Is this the fashionable look in the States? Please tell me it's only the the military that's gone completely over to this uberweird shaved sheep look. Shaved heads never used to be this popular in the Air Force before. Nearly everybody I knew grew as much hair as they could possibly get away with, and only the Army and Marines got the 'high and tight' cut that made them look like they had fuzzy rugs on the tops of their heads. Then about five years ago more and more people got buzzed. The flat top became popular again for the first time since 1963, when I last had one. I started buzzing my head a couple years back, because it was cheap and easy — that's me in two words — but I finally got sick of that and started going back to a barber, and when I go there, everybody's getting cut till they got heads like peaches. I have to issue very detailed instructions to the barber, using hand signs to make sure she understands what I mean by "juuuust a little off the top." But I found one who listens ever so carefully, and I leave her a big tip to make sure she knows how much I appreciate her complete attention.
Still a pretty lame thread so far, but I'm going to run with it ...
Cats are smart. I'm not saying they're going to solve the problems between the Israelis and Palestinians, but they can figure out where the food comes from, so why can't they figure out that I don't like to wake up at five in the morning? I do absolutely nothing to suggest that I will get up out of bed and feed them if they come stand on my bed, paw at my feet and whine pitifully. Nothing. In fact, I go out of my way to suggest that waking me up is a bad thing. I throw them out of the room, one after the other, and I usually have to dig them out of a hiding place, so I know they realize I'm not pleased, and before I close the door to keep them out, I squirt them with water, pelt them with rocks, tie tin cans to their tails and drop anvils on their heads. They might not wake me up the next morning, but they won't go more than two days — and sometimes they will wake me up the next morning. They just don't get it. Even dogs are smarter than this.
Let's move on ...
A fire truck blasted past me on the way to work the other day. It scared the snot out of me because that hasn't happened to me in so long, I almost forgot to pull over. See, the fire trucks don't get called out a whole lot around here, thank goodness, and the few times I've seen them in town, responding to an alarm, everybody acts like it's no big deal. I saw a couple fire trucks pull out of a station in Towada, lights flashing, horns honking, but they waited for a break in traffic, nobody got out of their way, and they stopped and waited for a light when they came to an intersection. I was across the road, staring at these fully suited fire fighters waiting calmly in their truck, wondering if I was in some nightmare twilight zone episode where the faster you try to run, the slower you go until you're not moving at all.
Speaking of surreal dreams, Jon Stewart ran a clip of Dr. Phil commenting on how smoothly the election went. "There were no riots, no tanks in the street," she said, and after the clip, Stewart made a pretty good joke. The surreal part came as I was paging through the news the next morning and found that tanks were rolling down Willshire Boulevard during an anti-war protest the day before Veteran's Day in Los Angeles. The military said they weren't tanks, they were light armored vehicles, and they were just on the way to the Veteran's Day parade. Or Were They? Bloggers were all abuzz with outrage. I just thought it was a bizzarre coincidence.
It's time once again to sit at the computer and bang the keys in the hopes that something sensible will emerge. Ready? Here goes! sdfs fdasff fqwrpzv ru83429n hjfdk aef890 fd fhewqfahu fe fedhu7 fhewuaio afher89 hr8 af ewwrq afhd aser. fdsare afas saf ewrafefs searo0 tgjrio q152389pas yu8gtr tr8479w30qhj ar5839 afheu8h r27 afh7e89wr r3h278 arhqrh hqur haqhe, reuuwiqo ary tr823: ftrhweui9q0 trh4u30haue arhu ehyu wq5h72 awhtue0. Okay, that didn't work.
Barb made a pan of brownies the other day because she bought a bag of Christmas M&Ms to squirrel away for the holidays. She's got zero self-control, though, so naturally she started eating them. This happens a lot to me pretty often, too, especially with pretzels, or Tostitos and a fresh jar of salsa. Anyway, to keep herself from eating the whole bag, she baked them into brown sugar brownie squares, and we wolfed down the whole pan after supper. It sure sounded like a good idea when she was explaining it, but I'm not sure we thought it all the way through until we were licking our fingers.
While we're on the subject of food, do you have the same problem I do with raisins? I love raisins. They're like candy, but they're good for you, because they're fruit. That's what I tell myself, anyway, so if you've got evidence to the contrary, keep it to yourself. I like to dump about a cup of raisins in a rice bowl and munch them down after I get home from work, but I can have my little afternoon snack only on days when Barb's teaching and won't be home for a while, because she doesn't like to be in the same room with me after I've eaten raisins in any quantity. I sometimes wonder if maybe greenhouse gasses and global warming aren't entirely my fault. I've been eating raisins for about thirty or forty years now, and after all this time the polar ice caps have just about melted away to nothing. Coincidence, or cause and effect?
Maybe I should've started with the fart joke, on the theory that it can only get better after that. Too late now.
Happily ever after, the end.
I like to pop in a movie to watch while I fold laundry. Last night, it was a copy of The Taking of Pelham 123, and Tim, who was doing crosswords on the sofa, sat bolt upright when he recognized it, and called it "the best subway-train movie ever!" Probably the only subway-train movie. Robert Shaw is the icy ringleader of a group that hijacks a New York city subway train. He tells Walter Matthau he wants a ransom of one million dollars delivered to him in one hour, or he'll start killing a hostage a minute. You might think pitting Matthau against Shaw would be the biggest mismatch of wits ever, but they do a great job playing against each other. And the ending is perfect. Four Stars. By the way, this movie used to play on the late late show a couple times a year way back when, and I watched it so often that I got used to the reformatted-for-your-television version. After I bought a copy on e-bay, hearing the actors curse like sailors was almost like seeing a new version of the movie.
And now, the news: President Arnold Schwarzenegger — some jokes write themselves. In fact, it's an old joke, a one-liner from the 1993 movie Demolition Man, when Sandra Bullock tells man-from-the-past Sly Stallone that President Schwarzenneger did such-and-such, and Stallone reacts with horrified surprise. Now, life imitates art, or movies, anyway, and another actor-governor from California is on the road to the White House. But first, there's that pesky Article Two of the Constitution to terminate ...
I ran the mile and a half PT test today, an event that bores me so completely that my mind wanders away from my mortal shell and I begin to live in my memories, replaying other days, or sometimes years and years of my past life, but sometimes I'm so cruel to myself, as I was today when I remembered running the mile and a half for past PT tests.
When I was in language school, there was one girl who not only always finished last, she finished way last. Everybody else was not only done and gone, we had gone back to the barracks, showered, changed, eaten supper, done our homework, gone to the club and gotten drunk, stumbled back, tripped & fallen in the roadside ditch, and as we dragged ourselves back to our feet, there she was, rounding the bend, doggedly headed for the finish line. She actually walked faster that she could run. I don't know what it was about her physique, but as soon as she broke into a trot, her arms flailed uselessly in the air, her knees knocked together, and her feet didn't seem to be able to get more than four inches between them. She was huffing and puffing in less than ten seconds, and she'd usually start walking before she'd gotten more than a hundred feet, at which point she'd really begin making time.
Then there was the smoker. I've never seen anybody run so fast who didn't do it for money. The whole class would meet at the drill pad for warm-up exercises, and he'd be there before anybody so he could smoke a coffin nail or two. After calesthenics, he'd take off like a rabbit that had just felt the sting of bird shot in his rear end. The measured mile and a half was an out-and-back loop, and about the time we'd gone halfway out, he'd pass us all going back. The look on his face said, "Holy Shit! How am I going this fast?" Which was the question we were all asking ourselves as we sucked on his dust. If we hurried back to the drill pad, we could get there before he lit up his second smoke. I've never seen anybody like him since.
Wow, do I know what it's like to walk a day in Mr. Potter's shoes. The O-Folk played Monopoly last night, and when we were about halfway through the game, I had just about all the money. I shouldn't give away my secrets, but I usually play to lose. I've never gone bust before the halfway point so long as I was willing to play as if winning didn't matter. Last night, I bought the utilities and all but one of the railroads, and I made a pile in rent and somehow held on to it until the very end of the game by luckily hopscotching from Chance to Community Chest to the railroads and utilities. Barb and Tim built hotels on every one of their properties, and I paid thousands for landing there, but do you think I got any respect when they landed on my properties and had to pay a measly twenty-one bucks? Tim would toss a twenty my way, and then it was grinch, grumble, scrooge when I asked him for the other dollar. "What do you need an extra dollar for? You've got more money than the bank!" So the next time you watch It's A Wonderful Life and wonder for the umpteenth time how Mr. Potter can be such a crab, I can tell you that it's because he's been hearing, "Whaddaya need to be so rich for?" at least once a day for probably fifty years.
I just love Monopoly. Every game is the same: Everybody starts out on an even playing field, everybody's got a plan, everybody's full of optimism, they're all happy to play. About halfway through the game, when most of the properties are gone and people have to start making deals to collect color groups, things start to get ugly, and by the end of the game, somebody's close to tears. Monopoly is everything you ever need to know about life.
Wonder if you've seen the stories that the military is calling up old farts who were discharged years ago from active duty? I mentioned it to my brother, who served in the Army, and he asked, "Really? How can they do that?" Pretty simple, really. It turns out there's a condition in the enlistment contract that says we have to serve at least eight years. Most people join the Guard or Reserve when they get out, but if they don't, they join the ranks of the Individual Ready Reserve. When I say 'old farts,' I'm talking guys who haven't pulled their combat boots on in thirteen years. One guy pointed out that he hadn't flown a helicopter in eight years (his job) — he was told they just needed bodies on the ground. There are about 115,000 ex-military in the IRR, and about 4,000 have been called up so far. And that's why we don't need a draft.
And it was another wonderful night of Monopoly again at the O-folk mansion. I managed to buy all the railroads almost right away in the first game, so I'm still dripping wet from all the spit the other players were hawking at me. We played two short games tonight, and Tim won the second one. He got to find out what it was like to be the rich guy, but it didn't seem to make much difference — after the game, he was dancing around the house, singing, "BOO-yah! BOO-yah!"
Other than that, I spent the day cleaning — I started with the toilet, on the theory that the day couldn't get any worse after. Then I cleaned up the closet, where I stash a lot of magazines I want to keep for some sort of future emergency in which I picture having lots of time to sit around re-reading old magazines I've painstakingly sorted and stored in boxes. Like that'll ever happen. Once I had all the magazines sorted, piled and boxed, I moved into my room, where I began the months-long task of clearing the junk out of my desk, cleaning up my workboxes and tools, and putting my choo-choos in order for the winter modeling season. It's time to start sniffing glue, people! Actually, it's not. I use mostly superglue anymore, which has no buzz and more risk — I always end up glueing my fingers to something, usually myself or something that doesn't move easily, like my desk.
Barb made pizza for dinner tonight. Tim said it was way better than mine. I'm off to the glue factory, folks.
Have you ever heard that "Ring Around The Rosie" is actually a song about the Black Death, and that a surprising number of childhood songs are about something equally dismal? My mother used to sit by me on the porch swing and sing to me, "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray." It was such a sweet sentiment that I was really very pleased to find it on the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and I skipped ahead to the track, ready to be taken back to happy memories. You know what that song is about? It's this guy singing from the depths of despair after his wife left him for another man. Instead of happy memories, the song made me want to crawl into a hole and cover myself in ashes. Actually, the whole album is like that. I'll Fly Away is a beautiful spiritual about the merciful release from slavery that death will bring. Big Rock Candy Mountain is a hobo singing jauntily about all the little things he wants but doesn't have: a place to sleep, enough to eat ... a pair of socks, for crying out loud! Man of Constant Sorrow is pretty much all right there in the title.
And then, with no segue whatsoever ...
Monopoly is so predictable. At the beginning of the game, which we will call Stage One, everybody's happy. It's the Happy Stage. In Stage Two, also known as the Cocky Stage, people are buying property and talking smack about kicking the other players' butts all over the board. You enter Stage Three, the Money-Throwing Stage, after a player has to mortgage at least half of his property and is left with no bills larger than a fifty. Stage Four is the Crybaby Stage for obvious reasons, and you don't reach Stage Six, the Bloodshot Stage, until you've been playing for at least four hours and several of the players are either watching television or sleeping between throws of the dice.
Barb and I went to the winter concert at Edgren High School tonight. Besides being a wonderful concert, it was mercifully short, which is a blessing when you've got to sit on bleacher seats designed by Mengele. After a normal two-hour concert, I can't feel my bottom at all, but tonight's concert was over before eight o'clock, and they packed a lot of quality into a short hour. The chorus was first, and there was a lot of talent on hand for such a small chorus. Then the advanced band came out and played. Again, it was a very small group, perhaps thirty students. I'm no expert, but to me those were some complicated numbers, and they handled them very well. You can see the first decent photo I've managed to take of Tim playing his trumpet if you click over to the picture page.
Stuck for something to write about, and leafing through the paper, a few news items caught my eye:
The Associate Press posted this picture of world leaders getting ready for a group photo during the powwow in Santiago, Chile. I don't know what Bush is up to, but I want to believe Koizumi's saying, "Hey, Bush-san! XYZ!"
Do school kids still say "XYZ!" to the poor dorks who step out of the toilet with their zippers open? Or am I the only guy who's ever heard that?
Diane Duyser, the woman who scorched her cheese sandwich so that it apparently looks like the face of the Virgin Mary to some people, sold her miraculous lunch for $28,000 on e-bay. No doubt there are people deliberately burning their lunch at this very moment, with hopes of making bags of money auctioning off the face of Jesus. How come Joseph never gets any air time? Mrs. Duyser said the toasty talisman helped her win $70,000 at a casino, but that must not have been miraculous enough to keep her from putting it under the hammer. Additionally, and in my opinion not at all coincidentally, the buyer was a casino, a spokesman for which stated that everybody should be able to learn of the sandwich's mystical powers – and, very probably, play more slots.
It's the start of a four-day weekend, and I'm gonna spend it on the sofa with a remote control, getting seriously vegetized!
Here are all the O-Folk at this year's turkey-day celebration (Sean is here in proxy; you can almost make out his photo at his table setting), raising a glass in toast to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving! Right after the flash went off, we fell on the bird like ravenous beasts and stuffed ourselves silly. I had to walk off my meal; Barb went traditional and fell asleep in one of the living room armchairs. I think Tim did something completely uncharacteristic, like played on-line video games.
This is the first year in many, many years that I didn't carve the Thanksgiving turkey. Instead, Barb picked up the fork and knife and butchered away, all in the name of practice for the Thanksgiving meal she puts on for her English students two weeks from now.
Strangely enough, the cats weren't the least bit interested in begging from the table this year, and we couldn't get Boo to even taste a scrap afterwards, even when Barb tore it up into titchy little chunks and tried to hand-feed it to her. I've never seen a fussier cat. Bonkers didn't wait for us to ask him twice.
Sean had called just a few hours before we sat down to dinner to let us know he was visiting relatives in Colorado, and his mom was still thinking of him when she set the table with his photo at his place.
Aw, geeze, Barb & Tim brought another kitten home from the shelter. He's tiny and he's got the most beautiful golden eyes that he looks right at you with when he mews and he crawls into the crook of your arm or the corner of your lap and curls up and rubs his head against you and purrs louder than a Sherman tank. You can just see what's coming next, right? Can you? Sure you can. Although I don't know — Bonkers might eventually get used to him, but Boo hates him bad. Stalks up to him, raises her hackles and hisses like a snake, her tail straight up in the air and big as a hairbrush. You'd either have to put up with that or do a lot of smoothing over.
Today was my day to wake up early. Yesteday, the insomnia bug hit Barb for some reason she couldn't name, and this morning I crawled out of bed shortly before seven, even though I was planning to sleep the day away like a lazy pig. It wasn't insomnia, it was a plugged-up nose, or, as we say in this family after Sean coined the phrase, a "puggled-up doze" that kept me from breathing. Every time I slid off into slumber land, I would start awake from a dream about drowning, or having an elephant stand on my chest, or being smothered in chocolate mousse — that was a weird one. So I just grabbed the book I was reading last night and headed for the living room couch, where I switched on the television in time to watch Letterman. It was the Thanksgiving show — Stateside shows always get her at least a day late — and Dave's Mom was on to play "Guess the Pies." The show's always worth watching when Dave's Mom is on. Natalie Portman was the chatty celebrity, but when she came out of the wings looking like an anorexic hooker, I had to turn it off and open my book. There are some ideals you build up in your mind that just shouldn't be undone. I wish I could've held on to all of them, starting with the tooth fairy, but the movie ideal I'll miss the most is Natalie Portman as the sweetest girl in America.
We were supposed to get snow here in Misawa, the Great White North of Japan, or so everybody says. I don't know where everybody gets the idea that winters here are the closest thing to being actually sentenced to twenty years in a Siberian gulag — I've been here for three winters now, and so far they're pathetic! The first one was the most impressive, by which I mean snow fell deep enough that I had to shovel it regularly. Last year we got this wimpy dusting, a seasonal total of 88 inches when Misawa usually gets between 120 and 240 inches during the winter months. Everybody says, "That just means we're going to get dumped on this year," like there was some kind of Weather Demon saving up bad juju last year in his Winter Savings Account, earning interest of 5 inches in snow & sleet per quarter, and this year he's going to shoot the works on the most impressive ice-capades that Misawa has ever seen. Sure. I'll just be waiting on that.
Tim's really bummed that the snow didn't come through. Earlier this week, he was pulling up the weather channel to see when & how much, and now he's turning it on just to jeer & boo. If the guys down a the weather squadron were the Indiana Pacers, he'd be throwing cups of beer at them right now.
Well, I've got to go & let other people use the computer now, but before I do, I've got to let you know that if you've got an internet hookup, and I think you do, you've got to try AccuRadio, the internet radio web tool thingie. I love the jazz selections, but they have a wide variety of music you can play while you're browsing the internet. It's absolutely top-notch. Having said that, I have to admit that, right now, they're playing a dissonant jazz number that's been going on for about fifteen minutes, long enough that I was to mount a military coup on the broadcast station just so I can take over the microphone long enough to scream, "PLAYING SCALES ON A SAXAPHONE IS NOT A SONG!" And then I'd give it back so you could enjoy the otherwise wonderful music they play.
I went for a walk to get some oatmeal at the shopette; they have tons of that kind of food for the dorm dwellers, or so I thought. There must have been a bunch of guys thinking the same thing I was this morning, because the spot on the shelf that the oatmeal calls home was just a big, blank white space with a sign that said, "Got here too late – BOOyah!" So I bought some mini-wheats instead. I've been reading a lot of news stories lately about all the warning signs of the declining dollar – here's one for you: a box of cereal costs three and a half bucks! Nevermind the Dow Jones Industrials, or the NASDAQ, whatever that is. Draw a chart of the skyrocketing cost of a box of Cap'n Crunch – that'll scare the pants off you.
I saw the first teenie, tiny, very lonely snowflakes of the season. I think there were six in all. Not much, as far as snowfall goes, but the first I've seen. Maybe we'll get more as the day goes on, because it's pretty frikkin cold out there, and lots of dark gray clouds are bunching up in the sky overhead.
Did you ever have one nostril plugged solid and the other one open but something weird was going on deep in the oozing nether regions of your sinuses so that every breath you took came out as a whistle? Mine nose was whistling so loudly last night that it woke me up! You know how a mosquito buzzing around your head in the dark will drive you right up the wall? I didn't even have a mosquito to blame — I was doing it to myself. So I went to the bathroom, squished around in my nose a bit with my little finger, the preferred digging implement for 9 out of 10 nose-miners, then I blew a couple times, tested the result by breathing normally, and when everything seemed fine I went back to bed. As soon as I laid down again, though, the whistling came back. I figured, okay, fine, I'll just roll over and maybe my sinuses will un-gunk themselves and the whistling will go away, but it didn't go away no matter how long I waited. I tried to breathe a bit more slowly, then I tried shallow breathing, then I tried huffing and puffing, but the whistling wouldn't stop. I think it even got louder. I wanted to just bash my nose in with a brick and stuff it full of rags, but I hate breathing through my mouth all night long, so I didn't do that. I can't remember how I got back to sleep; I may have finally simply held my breath until I passed out.
Doesn't look like there's any danger of the new kitten sticking around permanently. Tim held it and cuddled it and gave it plenty of chances to sleep away nearly the whole afternoon yesterday, so naturally it had plenty of stored-up high-octane kitten energy to burn up last night. To judge from the bags unter Tim's eyes, he didn't get more than a couple hours' sleep. I'm willing to bet a tidy sum that he'll be ready to take the little furball back to the shelter long before it's time.
Remember that Army sergeant, Jenkins, the guy who defected to North Korea and just recently came back to Japan with his kidnapped wife to stand trial for desertion? They let him out of the brig a week early. Army spokesman Capt. Hugh G. Rection said they let Jenkins go because he just couldn't get into the spirit of the whole jail thing. "Deserters don't get beds, so we took his mattress away. He just curled up on the concrete floor and slept like a baby. Didn't even use the scratchy wool blanket. At the chow hall he asked for stewed dirt clods or grass salad instead of the three hots we usually serve. The whole incarceration thing just wasn't having the desired impression on him, so we let him go."
No matter what the meteorologists or astrologists or whoever tell you about the official first day of winter, I think it's not really winter unless you look out the window in the morning and see snow. And I saw snow this morning. It took me completely by surprise precisely because they had predicted snow for last Thursday and Saturday, and I assumed we weren't going to get any for a while yet. The weather squadron here couldn't forecast snow if God himself phoned it in. They don't even know inclement weather when it's happening. I don't know how many times I've wandered outside to find it pouring down rain when they've got a slide on the weather channel showing a smiling sun behind a few scattered clouds. Sometimes they'll change it, I suspect after one of them steps outside to smoke and gets drenched.
But back to the snow. It turned the lawns white and covered the cars in a blanket just thick enough that it took me a good five minutes to clear all the windows and the roof, taking care to sweep plenty of it down the front of my jacket. I look like a spaz after clearing off the car, sort of like I've just been in a pillow fight, where the pillows busted open.
We had a big old earthquake last night, like somebody kicked the foot of the bed. GET UP! Barb got up, and stood in the doorway. It was pretty much over by the time I sat up and shook the sleep out of my head. The house was still rocking back and forth on whever kind of big rubber bands they've got holding it up off the ground, but the bang and jiggle was all done. Everybody at the office was searching the internet for the colorful maps and news stories in the morning (a dozen people with minor injuries, dozens of convenience stores incovenienced when the clerks had to clean up the cup o' noodles scattered all over the floor).
The kitten didn't stay. Our cats are pretty happy about that, but Barb and Tim got all weepy when they took it back Sunday afternoon, and I got to put on my grinch face and say Told you so because what else is going to happen to you when you bring home a cute little kitten, play with him, cuddle him, let him fall asleep in the crook of your arm, and name him? I mean, really? You're just asking for a broken heart. Barb and Tim are kicking around the idea of trying to talk the shelter into letting them "home care" the kitten, which is sort of like being a foster home. Wanna bet how that turns out?
The video rental store has been filling aisle after aisle with discs of television shows that have been airing back in the States for the last two or three years, presumably because they're enormously popular. Please tell me you're not watching that crud. It's so bad. Not that we have good stuff on television over here — oh, all right, we've got Survivor, and The Bachelor, and you just can't beat The Pentagon Channel for non-stop giggles. They spoil us rotten.
Barb rented the first disc in the second season of the television series The Office, and we watched the first two episodes last night. The guy who wrote that series is a certifiable genius. I've can't remember the last time I watched a comedy that made me belly laugh and squirm in uncomfortable embarrassment at the same time. The writers and the actors play out the lives of office drones with such hellishly accurate clarity that I have flashbacks when I'm at work and somebody says or does something that I watched in an episode the night before. And the boss makes Dilbert's look harmless. Well worth the price of a rental.
And we got still more snow today — big, fluffy flakes, but only about fifty of them, maybe a hundred at the most. Nothing to really stick on the ground and make you go Wow! But what it is today is butt-freezing cold, even in the office where I work ... maybe especially in the office where I work, like maybe they're just blowing it straight in from the outside. Rub your hands together all you want, you pathetic little office drones! Hell really has frozen over! Bwahahaha!
I'm just poking fun. The guy who controls the heat also happens to work in the same office I work in, and it seems a stretch to believe he's intentionally freezing himself; he looks to be a lot smarter than that. Then again, he does prefer a cool office to a warm one, so maybe this really is all a part of some nefarious plot. Gads! I know too much! Gotta run!