Never Trust a Hippie

So I got my haircut today. I went to the same place I've been going for about 6 months now. I don't go often, once every 4-6 weeks. Each time I've had somebody different cut it, except for today, it was the same woman that cut it last month.

I thought she looked familiar, but I wasn't totally sure, so I didn't say anything right off. She started asking me how I liked it cut and I told her, but she seemed kind of strange about it. Last time she totally got it and I didn't have to go into as much detail. This is one reason I thought it was a different woman. I told her I wanted the sides shaved, like with clippers, and she said, "You mean bald?". Uh -- no, dumbshit, just short.

Once she started going though I totally knew it was the same person. I knew because she's a total stoner. She was like, "Man, I hate driving, it's like everybody's just got to share the road man." Meanwhile I've got my glasses in my lap so I can't actually see what she's doing to me. Maybe she is shaving me bald and I wouldn't notice. I did notice a lot of gray hair falling away.

She's really nice though, even if she is a hippie. She didn't wash my hair because she was the only one working and there was another guy waiting in line, but she did give me a little neck massage while wiping away the stray hair clippings from my neck, so I gave her a good tip.

I'll be back hippie chick. Hope you remember me next time.

Mail carriers aren't morning people

So I've always wondered who gets their mail in the morning. Only once in my life have I lived in a place where I got my mail before noon, and even then it occasionally arrived at 11.

I've always lumped mailmen in with paper carriers who get up early in the morning to start their deliveries. I don't think they're sorting their own mail, so what's the holdup? Is it proximity to the post office that determines what time you get your delivery? I have to admit, I've never tried living next to the post office so I haven't tested this.

In Seattle we were on the last part of the route, so we didn't get our mail until after 5 pm, sometimes 6 or 7 even. Here in Portland it's about 2.30. I see mail trucks driving around all day, so what's going on here? Are they stopping by the coffee shop to get enough caffeine in them so they can go deliver all the mail between 12 and 5?

And UPS guys aren't any different. I'm waiting on a package right now (which is what go me thinking about this topic). It's noon, and I'm leaving for work in 30 minutes, and I'm sure the package won't be here before I leave. Not that it's a big deal, just strange that I never seem to get early deliveries.

Another mystery of life...

Now we're cooking with gas...

Cooks are in these days, my mom-in-law said today. She's right, we're watching cooking shows left and right. Hell's Kitchen, Top Chef, Rachel Ray (not much but sometimes I watch her). It's enough to make me wish I knew how to cook.

I can follow a recipe for the most part, but to be honest, even if I were to follow it to a T, it never turns out well. Which usually means that I end up winging it. This involves adding more salt and pepper and usually more cheese as well. If it's not a dish that calls for cheese then I might just add a little cheese, and if it has cheese in the recipe then I might just add a variety of cheeses to give it more cheesy goodness.

Now, I've had a couple successes in my life. In fact I had two in one week last month, I can't even remember what it was, but probably had something to do with pork chops and cheese. I find pork chops difficult to mess up. I think I made home-made mashed potatoes and some kind of green vegetable as well. Or maybe it was squash. Funny enough, being a picky eater as I am, I like a lot of vegetables that turn most people off.

One of my problems is that I love to drink when I'm cooking. I find cooking to be kind of like gambling in that I never know whether it's going to turn out well or not, so if I drink while cooking, then 1) I have an excuse for why it turned out poorly, and 2) the food is going to taste better if I'm a bit tipsy.

I just have to remember not to grate the cheese when I'm drunk. That always leads to trouble.

Movies

Now that I'm getting over being sick I'm going to post more. That was my Sick Time Resolution.

We watched 'Running With Scissors' last night. It made me sick it was so bad. I was puking and crapping my pants with righteous indignation for having wasted time of my life watching it. Don't watch it if you don't want to puke and/or crap your pants. It's a shame as I remember slightly the book being decent.

Tonight I watched Munich on HBO. I watched 2/3 of it at least, because I didn't realize it's a 3 hour movie. probably could've easily been boiled down to 2 hours, but the 2/3 of it I watched were pretty good and did not make me any sicker. In fact they probably helped dispel my sickness of the night before, because at this moment I'm feeling a little better now.

Sick Goals

Why is it that whenever I get sick I feel like it's time to renew my New Years Resolutions? It's like, I'm lying in bed, feeling horrible for whatever reason. Maybe the spicy chicken wings made me puke, maybe I got the stomach flu from the kids, whatever...but my mind automatically starts thinking, "If I weren't feeling so bad I'd be getting a lot of stuff done right now".

Which is absolute crap, I know, because if I weren't feeling so bad I'd probably be lying in bed, wishing I were sick so I could stay home.

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to my own father and all other fathers out there.

My own fathers day started last night with Lexi throwing up in her bed. We cleaned it up and let her sleep in our room, and she's probably thrown up about 10-15 times since then.

It's really horrible to have to watch her do that over and over again. Though now she seems to be pretty good at it and isn't surprised when it happens. And we got her a big red bowl to use, which she seems to like. Maybe I should paint a bulls-eye on the bottom of the bowl.

Ow, My Balls!

So there's this Japanese game show called Ninja Warrior that Mandy and I have been into a bit the past few weeks. In one segment, the contestants have to straddle a giant log and roll down a track while astride this log. One day we were watching it and I might've said something along the lines of, "Ow, my balls!".

A couple days later I flipped across the show again, and Lexi exclaimed, "Ow, my balls!". I think she thinks it's the name of the show. Though she kind of seems to know what it means because at daycare she kept spreading her doll's legs apart and slamming it to the floor and yelling, "Ow, my balls!".

We're really going to have to start watching our language one of these days.

Phone Spam

I hate answering the phone. But I hate marketers even worse, so I inevitably pick up the phone even when it says Unknown Caller. In fact, I usually only pick up the phone when it's an unknown caller. I'm an all-day sucker.

Lately it's been for some guy named Phillip Anderson. It doesn't matter that I tell them they have the wrong number, they just hang up and try back later. I swear the next time they ask for him I'm going to pretend I'm him and see what happens. I'm guessing they're bill collectors. I'm gonna tell them the check's in the mail and see if they believe me. I'll even describe the check, tell them what color it was, what kind of pen I used to fill it out, and tell them I put the stamp on upside down, because that means I love you. I wish Phillip Anderson would pay his goddam bills on time or at least update his phone number so I don't have to take care of his problems.

The last phone call I got was the local newspaper. I subscribe to the Sunday paper so I can look at all the pretty ads for the local stores. Most the time we don't even get around to reading the actual paper itself, we just like to check out the specials at Target and what have you. Ever few months though I get a call and they tell me they're going to give me the rest of the week's papers for free, for a year. One year of free daily newspapers just by paying 2 bucks a week for the Sunday paper. I'd say they're a bunch of idiots, but I really think they're a bunch of dimwitted fuckers. Because every time they call I tell them thank you for your offer but I don't even read the one paper each week that I currently get.

Last time they called I warned them of how serious I was. I told them I was thinking of unsubscribing even to my Sunday paper because their phone calls were getting annoying. I told them if I got another telephone call I would cancel my Sunday paper. It was quiet for awhile while they respected my wishes, but I guess they got bored and decided to invade my privacy again.

And the worst ones are the firefighter and police associations. I've been suckered into giving to these a few times. Usually just 5 bucks so they could take some kids to the Shriner's circus. What kid really wants to go to the Shriner's circus anyway? Most kids want to hang out behind the mall and smoke cigarettes with their friends. Next time I feel like donating on the phone I'm going to drive to the mall and search out some poor looking kids and give them 5 bucks. That should make both of our days.

Ow, my eye!

For the past year or so I've been troubled with an affliction involving my eye. I'll be sleeping and wake up suddenly in the middle of the night when my eye feels like someone's stabbing it with a burning poker.

I went to a doctor about it and he said it's called Corneal Erosion. This means that the top layer of my cornea sticks to my eyelid, and when I wake up, it rips that top layer like a flap of skin off my eye. It hurts for hours until that flap re-attaches itself to the eyeball.

Sounds nasty, doesn't it?

Well it is. I usually find myself doubled over in pain with my fist or an ice pack compressed into my eye socket to try to relieve the pain. I mention it because it happened again yesterday. I actually tried to go to work, I dropped the kids off and went in for a couple hours, but I'm pretty well useless (and shouldn't have been driving anyway), so I came home and went to bed.

Normally my head starts hurting and my vision in that eye is blurred, but it's always been better the next day. But today it's still blurry and even though my headache is gone, it always comes back after a few hours of this blurred vision.

I'm going to see a specialist this afternoon to find out if there's anything to be done to fix it.

Hot Pockets

I admit I have been eating Hot Pockets for many, many years now. This guy is hilariously right-on about the truth behind them.

By the way, if you get a chance to check out the Chicken Bakes from Costco, I heartily recommend them, they're wonderful.

What the heck is going on here?

Jesus loves me

To: Macsmith230

From: Jesus

Subject: Re

I got an email today from Jesus. I didn't read it since it was in my spam box, but it looks like he finally got around to answering me.

The problem is, I've forgotten what I wrote him about in the first place. I could have been e-viting him to my birthday party, or maybe it was forwarding the message about saving the children. In any case, it was nice of him to write back.

Best Job

Ok, may as well tell about my favorite job ever. I spent a summer working for Washington State University's Tree fruit research center in my hometown. It was totally awesome. Spent most the summer outside, often driving around in government cars with their bad paint jobs and am radios. I actually listened to a lot of Rush Limbaugh because I've never liked listening to Top 40 radio.

The worst job we did that summer was to spray the fruit trees with chemicals to test them out and see how effective they were at killing the pests. At first this wasn't so bad, because I just drove the truck slowly down the row of trees while someone else had to trail along spraying the trees. Then they got smart and taught me how to do the spraying. It's not that spraying was so bad, it's that you had to wear a jumpsuit (not the bad part) and big rubber boots and a big, floppy rubber hat and big ol' rubber gloves and a respirator, and it was usually 110 degrees out, while the driver got to sit up front in the air conditioned cab and listen to cds. I'm not sure why the spray truck got air conditioning and a cd player, but we didn't take it for granted.

It was mainly a group of college kids working there, so we sat around a lot and shot the shit while doing menial labor. One of the most boring jobs was to take a box of leaves we'd plucked from the test trees and run them through a little machine that had two brushes on it, which would brush off any tree pests onto a microscope slide, which we'd then count under a magnifying glass to see how many had survived the sprays.

Another job I had to do was to go into a test orchard and pluck little worms from the leaves there. These worms would get in the middle of a leaf and wrap the leaf around them, so I had to unwrap the leaf and put the worm into a container. I had to collect 200 of them so it took me several days to accomplish this task. Once I had my 200, I had to put each one in a little plastic cup with a lid and a few fresh leaves for them to eat. Over the summer we would do tests on these worms, so I had to make sure they had fresh leaves and then I'd have to clean out their little worm poop from their cups every couple days. These worms had a surprisingly large amount of poop coming out of them. After a few months they turned into moths and we pretty much killed them all with hazardous chemicals.

The very best part of the job was that sometimes I had to go out to the remote orchards to collect samples, so you'd grab a car and drive a couple hours with the windows down and a soda in your lap. Once you got to the orchard you didn't even have to leave the car. You'd just drive down the rows and pluck some leaves from the trees as you drove past. This was totally awesome and I'm not sure now why I didn't stick with this job.

Once we were done with all our tests and had our data compiled, the supervising bosses would write up their results and publish them so that the orchardists knew which sprays to put on their crops to kill the invasive pests. I know it's a long ways from the organic food which is getting to be popular these days, but I sure did love that job.

My worst job

I had one job that I worked for just one day because it was so horrible.

I was in college and my uncle offered to get me a job through a friend working for RPS, a delivery company similar to UPS. I was going to school at BYU and the job was in Salt Lake City, 45 minutes away. Somehow I thought that wouldn't pose a problem. The worst part about it was that the hours were from midnight to 7 am. Since I had just learned about No Doz and Mini Thins, I figured I could go to work, come home in time for classes, then sleep in the afternoon and start all over again.

On the night I was supposed to start my new job, there was a blizzard. Maybe not a full blown blizzard, but one of those where you're the only car on the road and the plows haven't come out yet and you're wondering what you're doing outside. I knew what I was doing, I was starting my new job! I left around 10.30 to make sure I'd make the 45 minute drive in time, and I got there just before midnight. I had a quick smoke, then went inside and introduced myself.

The rest of the night was so horrible. Basically they would back a semi truck up to a conveyor belt and unload the packages onto that. Delivery trucks were parked in rows on each side of the belt, and you were supposed to pull the packages that were on your truck's route. Except since I wasn't from there I didn't really know whether a package went on my truck or not, and the big information sheet they had posted near me didn't help much either.

I guess I was being trained, in that they explained to me what to do for 10 minutes then let me go. I had my own truck, and a woman came by every 15 minutes or so to see how I was doing. I was doing terribly. The inside of the truck was divided into six sections, then each section subdivided by 3. Once a section (or subsection) filled up, you weren't supposed to put the next packages in the nearest section, as you'd suppose, instead you were supposed to magically make the packages fit into their correct section that was already too full. Somehow this seemed pretty fucked up, because 5 of the sections were empty and only one section was getting packages and it was overflowing.

Anyway, this job sucked. And next time you're wondering why your package is broken, it's because those little bastards at the warehouse are throwing your shit around from one end to the other.

Sick-o

Ugh, sick as a dog today, and the wife's in California for a couple days so it's just me and the holy terrors.

Ok, they're being very good, but it's doubly hard when you're not feeling good.

I used to like being sick. You could lay around and watch tv and do whatever. Now it feels like work. I feel like I have to clean the house, and now I'm doing laundry to prove that my sick day wasn't enjoyable at all. Sometimes I wish I had no conscience (I'm sure my wife thinks I don't, but it could be much, much worse).

Video

Trying to get video up and running here...

Lexi Dancing

Hometowns

I grew up in a smallish city in central Washington. I went home this past weekend to visit, and while there I realized I hadn't been home in over a year. Even when we lived in Seattle I didn't make it over as much as I wanted to, but now that we're six hours and two screaming kids away, it makes for an even tougher journey.

But every time I go to visit my family there are certain things I just have to do. I have to eat a hamburger at the local place called Dusty's Drive-In. I have to go to the Hastings bookstore, which has a better selection of magazines and books than the Borders near here. I'm not sure why, I like to think that they feel bad for all the people who live there that can't escape, so they like to offer a lot of diversions.

And I usually make Mandy drive around with me and I point out important places from my childhood; the schools I attended, that sort of thing.

But this last visit there were some surprising things that I wanted to see.

First was the Gas/Groc. That was never the real name of the place, but for some reason they built a convenience store/gas station and right in front they had a 50 foot sign that said Gas/Groc. I always understood the gas part, but the Groc was the funny part that didn't make so much sense. I guess it stands for groceries, though it's not really a place you're gonna go shopping for your evening meal. Alas, the sign is gone now, though there is still a convenience store there. I didn't go in.

Just down the street from the Gas/Groc is the oil-change coffee shop. I forget the actual name, but it's the first place I ever saw that combined oil changes and lattes. When Seattle's coffee boom hit, Wenatchee wasn't spared. We had coffee shops on every corner with coffee stands/carts on the sidewalks between them. And we had the oil change/latte shop to complete the set.

Anyway, though I miss not being near my family, it's good to be back home again in my own bed.

God made mud

A PRAYER FOR THE DYING

God made mud.

God got lonesome.

So God said to some of the mud, ‘Sit up!’

‘See all I’ve made,’ said God, ‘the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.’

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.

Lucky me, lucky mud.

I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.

Nice going, God!

Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.

I feel very unimportant compared to You.

The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.

I got so much and most mud got so little.

Thank you for the honor.

Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.

What memories for mud to have!

What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!

I loved everything I saw!

Good night.


R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut

Misc. Wednesday

Work's been painfully slow lately. Nobody want to buy furniture right now, not with taxes due soon. We went to see Blades of Glory tonight, the new movie with Will Ferrell and John Heder. It was pretty hilarious. Now I need to see 300 before it leaves theaters. I'm going to try to see it next week when we go to visit my family in Wenatchee.

Lately I've been getting annoyed by all the talk about being carbon neutral. It reminds me of the indulgences you could once buy from the church to rid yourself of sins by paying money. I'm not sure that giving money to organizations that build solar panels in Africa should really get you a gold star and a pat on the head. Ooh, I helped pay for a windmill, so now I can feel better about driving around in my gas-guzzler.

Maybe it's a good thing, but I'm suspicious.

Mondays suck

The worst thing about Mondays is emptying out two diaper pails. Holy sheet it's some nasty-ass jobbery.

Changing one diaper is bad enough, but opening up the lid and being assaulted by the smell of 25-30 poopy/pee-stained diapers is just too much.