Over five thousand connections to this site, and yall can't make a comment? Hmmm....

Don't think I've connected over 5000 times...

I remember my ex telling me that deer don't make any vocal sounds. Growing up in rural America, I know that's not true, but I can never recall the sounds well enough to make them. I can make moose and elk sounds, but not your garden variety deer. Well, I went to the garage to get some sandpaper just now, and startled a doe and a fawn. The doe went one way, and the fawn went the other. For the record, and so I don't forget, a fawn looking for a parent sounds a lot like a cat mewing.

I wish I were as good an audial learner as I am a visual learner. In fact I wish I could learn through my olfactory system. This is a bit of an aside, but my brain can easily (too easily) remember situations or times I've had from a smell, but I can seldom actually remember a smell. During Resident Assistant training I was shown (wrong word, but I don't know what the right word is) what pot smells like. I never remembered, and accosted a number of people for smoking clove cigarettes. Smell takes me a long time to remember. (Un)Fortunately, living in the San Lorenzo Valley, I now know what pot smells like. Heck, I followed a Jeep down from the top of the mountains, and knew the stench wafting from the vehicle right away. Of course, I had ten miles to be sure. I wonder why I felt so calm when I got home?

Happy to have deer to train me...

I was starving the other day, and was over the mountains so I stopped in a McDonald's. While sitting there something hit me. You see, I've always been a T-shirt and jeans wearing kind of guy. So, it's no surprise that I ended up in a career working on the west coast where I can where T-shirts and jeans all the time. When I work at home, I don't even have to where that! Ok, maybe that's too much information.

Anyway, this train of thought coursed through my mind while I was watching some high schoolers at McDonald's. Most of the guys were wearing jeans that had the crotch sagging down around the knees, and their underwear was showing. Not being up to date on fashion trends, I recently was told that the underwear was sewn in, which is a relief. Still, I was wondering about the future of this trend. I mean, will the work place evolve into a setting where this is considered normal casual attire? Will casual Fridays grow from T-shirts that show favorite vacation destinations and hobbies to pants that cut across the back below the butt? Maybe it will go one step further, and suits will be made for this. Board meetings will be held where executives sport their latest suits consisting of shirt, tie, jacket, and expensive trousers that have the crotch at the knees, and the tops just below the butt... silk underwear sewn in, of course.

Secondly, the pants seem very impracticle. I thought this "style" came out of the "gangsta" trendsetters. I realize this is not my genre, but I watch TV sometimes, and I thought that gangstas did a lot of running (from each other, from the police, whatever). This style just seems to inhibit the ability to run...

Oh well, those pants will probably go the way of the parachute pants of the '80s. Thank all that's good that I could never afford them, so have no pictures of me in those (now) ridiculous things.
My jeans: above my butt, below my naval

My ex-wife (second) called me a couple of weeks ago from New York City. She had watched something on the news about a little girl being abducted, and found herself suddenly concerned for Annie. I live in the middle of nowhere, at least a half hour from "somewhere". I have a 180 pound dog that sleeps in front of the door, and am somewhat negligent about locking the door at night. My ex knows that. While I listened to her teary concerns, and her asking me to lock the doors, I couldn't help but remember my dad saying that locks are to keep honest people honest.

I understand the concern, though. I know the statistics for abused children, and they are staggering. I know too many people who have been abused as kids. Sometimes I get a little choked up at Annie's school as I look around the room at 21 kids. They are eager and adventurous, and some bastard or bitch is going to damage the psyche of around seven of those kids. The worst part is that the majority of abused kids are mistreated by people they know and trust. This has been the case in all the people I know who have gone through this.

I'm very proud of Annie's ability to stand up for her self. I don't believe a stranger would be able to take advantage of her, but what about the people she knows? She has no problem with telling me "no, I don't want to clean my room", but does she have the ability to tell someone no when faced with pressure? It scares me.

The other fear is someone attacking her in my presence... say, late at night. It's absurd, given where I live, and what I have around me. I mean, no one can drive to my house at night without neighbors taking notice of it. But still. I remember a time when I was sixteen. I was driving around on a Friday night by myself. That's what we did in my hometown... drive around... "cruising". I was going down a back street to meet up with the main drag, when a girl came running out at my car. I knew her. She was in my class, and my class wasn't very large. I stopped. The street was very dark, and she stopped in front of my car and threw her hands on my hood. She was screaming, "help me!" Out of the darkness ran another person... her boyfriend. She ran around my car, and had realized who I was. He gave chase, and I tried to keep the car between them (my car was huge). She screamed at me that he was going to kill her. She called to me by name. I wanted to help, but I was paralyzed. He stopped at my door and menacingly told me that this was not my business, and I should keep moving or he was going to... whatever. He was bigger than me, stronger than me, older than me... I was terrified. I wanted to help, but I couldn't. I drove away, and went to get help. I went to where I worked, and my frantic description convinced my manager to go with me. We went back to the scene, but no one was there. For three days I struggled with the thought that she could have been badly hurt. It was late afternoon on Monday when I finally found her at school. I was too ashamed to talk to her, but took some solace that she did not appear hurt. That episode haunts me to this day... almost twenty years later.

I know that if anyone hurt my daughter I would bring them to "redneck justice". But, I'm terrified that I will be paralyzed again in the immediate face of danger...

Cowardly?

I hope all fathers had a good day yesterday. I don't think any fathers read this site, but maybe they'll get the feeling over the testosterone network. After putting a second coat of paint on the bathroom, I got the presents that Annie had for me. There were two beautiful pictures she had drawn of the two of us (one of which now resides in my work notebook), and a picture of us that her teacher had taken, and Annie put it in a frame at school. Most importantly, I got a hug, kiss, raspberry, and an "I love you".

I really wanted to finish the trim work in the bathroom, and would have. For once I had planned the timing accurately with enough buffer to make up for the 5,000 parts that had to be assembled to install the medicine cabinet. However, after installing the plumbing valves (no leaks, woo-hoo!), and cutting the next piece of baseboard, a little girl told me that she wished I didn't have so much to do, because she wanted to play with me. So, I covered up the work stuff, ordered pizza, and sat down at her request to watch her circus show. This went on for a long time. We were supposed to play hide-n-seek, too, but the pizza came, so we went to eat.

We ended up watching the second Harry Potter movie and talking until it was time to go to bed. She's been looking forward for so long to spending weekdays with her mother, I was surprised when she told me she was going to miss me. I don't want her to be sad, but my juvenile mind was a bit hurt at how excited she was to be away from me. On the way over the mountains this morning, she told me she hoped she didn't cry when mommy picked her up, since it was different than the normal routine. She's getting good at this. I couldn't tell if she was saying this for me, or in truth. At any rate, it's getting close to the time I would normally pick her up, and it's already deafeningly quiet here. No "can I have something to eat", "can I watch something on TV", "can you watch me swing/bike/climb", or "Daddy, I need to show you something." This will take a little getting used to.

Four more days until Friday...

My Grandma sent me this, and I thought it was funny, so I'm putting it here...

A young guy from Missouri moves to Florida and goes to a big
"everything-under-one-roof" department store looking for a job.
The manager says, " Do you have any sales experience?"
The kid says, " Yeah, I was a salesman back home in Missouri."
Well, the boss liked the kid so he gave him the job. "You start
tomorrow; I'll come down after we close and see how you did."
His first day on the job was rough but he got through it.

After the store was locked up, the boss came down. "How many sales did you
make today?"

The kid says, "One."

The boss says, "Just one?!! Our sales people average 20 to 30 sales
a day! How much was the sale for?"

The kid says, " $101,237.64"

The boss says, "$101,237.64? WHAT THE HELL DID YOU SELL?"

Kid says, "First I sold him a small fish hook. Then I sold him a
medium fish hook. Then I sold him a larger fish hook. Then I sold him a
new fishing rod. Then I asked him where he was going fishing and he said
down at the coast, so I told him he was gonna need a boat. So,we went down
to the boat department and I sold him that twin-engine Chris Craft. Then he
said he didn't think his Honda Civic would pull it, so I took him down to
the automotive department and sold him that 4x4 Expedition."

The boss said, " A guy came in here to buy a fish hook and you sold him a
BOAT AND A TRUCK??"

The kid says, "No, he came in here to buy a box of tampons for his wife; and
I said, well, your weekend's shot. You might as well go fishing!"

Wish I had the customer's problems...

No, I'm not dissecting them, or injecting them with hormones. The last place I lived in Missouri, I began experimenting with getting more hummingbirds to come ot the feeders. If you have a couple of feeders, you may have noticed that they are very territorial (the birds, not the feeders). I had seen articles where people who had feeders without the birds being territorial, so I started adding feeders. I had about eight feeders, spaced 2-3 feet apart. After about a month, they no longer cared if another bird was there. They knew there was plenty of food. A person could stand quietly in the middle of the feeder area, and have fifty or more hummingbirds buzzing around.

I've done the same thing here. In winter there aren't as many hummingbirds, so I get lazy about changing out the food. Annie had started asking if we could fill the feeders, so we took them down, scrubbed them as clean as we could, and replaced two of the more sorry looking ones. We now have hummingbirds again. I've never achieved 50-60 at once, but it's not uncommon to get 20-30. They are still getting used to feeders being full, so they run each other off sometimes. One of them just dove over the top of the plumb tree so fast, it sounded like a torpedo with the wind whistling around it. There are scattered whistles and chirps in the trees, with the associated buzzing when they go for the goodies.

I'll have to get a picture when they start coming in numbers...

Investing in sugar futures...

I'm looking forward to "older" technology becoming obsolete. I'm working on a project for Annie's school, and spent the entire day scanning pictures. I've taken over two-hundred digitally, and had them all transferred to the computer in a matter of minutes. Of course, by the time everyone accepts digital, and the technology has advanced enough to put film cameras in the same pile as 8-tracks, I'll be on to the next thing, so I might as well accept it...

This morning I've caught up on bills and finances. Geez. My mortgage interest went up again. Yeah, I know I should refinance. Unfortunately, no one will touch me right now. I need the stock market to go up, and Sun's revenue to increase so that my stock is worth something, and I start getting performance bonuses again. If that were to happen, I'd have the second mortgage paid off in no time, and could probably look at refinancing.

It could happen...

No, I'm not on the whacky weed

It's been fairly warm today, and the jacket I was wearing early this morning was cast onto a chair on the deck. A little while ago, I decided to put it back on, as the sun was sinking below the ridge, and it was cooling off. I jogged upstairs to get a doc from the printer, before I returned to my station on the deck. I stood for a moment in the study, looking over my doc to verify it was all there. It was then that I felt something on the back of my neck. I disinterestedly reached back to see what it was, and it moved. It was big. I instictively flung it off my neck, noting that I had to use three fingers and a thumb to grab it, but I never saw it. What the hell was that?!?! Lilo had followed me to the study, and we searched the study as a team looking for the attacker. My heart had rather quickly resumed it's normal pace (that of a person living in cold blackness), and the culprit was not in sight. I was looking for signs of squished life on the desk, floor, bookshelf, everywhere. Nothing. Finally, I decided I couldn't waste any more time on it, I had work to do. I left Lilo in charge of the investigation.

Apparently, Lilo had decided he wasn't going to look if I wasn't. I went up just now to get another printout, and there was a small lizard running frantically around the study trying to find a way out. I scooped him up, and returned him to the wild, where he will most likely be eaten by one of my neighbors cats.

Me? Panic? No way.

As Memorial Day Weekend continues, I am taking the time to try (key word - try) to catch up on work around the house. Sometimes, it's frustrating. Ok, usually it's frustrating, but today was even more frustrating. I spent the entire day, ok, up until 4:00 when I ran out of steam, working on clearing grass. The worst part? Only 10% of the time was spent on my own property. I used the weedeater to knock down the grass in the "clearing" between our house, and my only neighbor's house. In my mind, it's just as much their responsibility as it is mine, but that does not seem to be their opinion, as I'm the only one who takes care of it. Once that was initially cleared, I brought out the mower. Of course, it didn't work, so I spent an hour fixing it. The good news is that it works better than when I first bought it.

Well, after that I turned my attention to the road. Again, the road goes only a short way through our property, but I was sick and tired of the brush leaning five feet into the road as I drove by. I used the hedge trimmer to make a line at the edge of the road, but some of the brush was too thick for that. Anyway, I cleared the brush from the road. The next neighbor up the road drove by (part of what I was doing was his property), and he jokingly told me that he had an excuse - he was out of gas. So was I, but I drained the generator so I could keep going.

After I finished cutting the brush, the next neighbor came out to the road. I was miffed when I realized he was coming to help (the worst brush was on his property), but I had to forgive a little when he brought me a beer. He admitted that he hadn't realized it had become so bad, and seemed genuinely interested in clearing it. Maybe he'll take the rest out.

At any rate, I'm beat. As usual, I thought I'd get farther on the grass cutting, but I'm too tired to continue. Believe it or not, I thought I was going to hang a couple of pieces of drywall today. No dice. I'd just screw it up. So? I have some paperwork to go through, and Annie and I will make a good dinner together. Maybe we'll even make banana bread.

Looking forward to sleep...