Sleeve-fisted find

As almost anyone who knows me is well aware of, I rarely watch TV. It’s a complete waste of time and I’m not interested. I also don’t play computer games… they are a waste of time as well but however I am very interested in them but have decided not to indulge because I’m pretty sure I’d become obsessed.

Anyway, the point of this particular post is that I think the brain is very eager to waste time on pointless activities and if given any leeway will do so readily. About once a week, I will find myself in front of the computer at 2 or 3 in the morning looking up inane stuff… no, not even porn. That would be understandable… just utterly useless crap like discussions of upcoming movies that I never see, Amazon reviews, band histories in Wikipedia, or the snarkapaloozic AV Club message boards.

I‘m not talking about late-night blogging (like I am doing now) or book reading (where I will often go through an entire sleeve of Saltines). Both of these are basically ok in my book. It’s sitting here, bleery-eyed, reading endless comments on comments about a review of a movie or book I’ve never seen nor have any interest in doing so that drives me nuts… after the fact, that is.

Springfield! Are you ready to rock?!!!

Ok, ok... my running companions, Fu Manchu, do have a bit of a schtick but somehow, at least for me, they manage to be serious even with songs with titles like "Boogie Van", "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Dice", and "Hot Doggin'"

However, my mind cannot seem to wrap itself around the possibility of these guys taking themselves anything close to seriously.

Get set...

Neither snow nor the looming threat of the dreaded “black ice” kept us from the race. Liam’s was one of several out of about fifty cars that a big deal was made out of (Go Optimus Prime!) which he got a thrill out of. And it wasn’t that slow either. It was last on the first of four but then came in 2nd on the next, and first on another. But the capper was Optimus Prime won #2 Best in Show and Liam got a trophy!

This shot shows the cars in action. The one in the lead belongs to a friend of Liam’s as does the Hummer that Optimus Prime is neck and neck with. Because his Dad was out of town, I made the Hummer as well Optimus. For how quick I worked on it, it actually turned out pretty cool.

On your mark...

Tomorrow is Liam’s pinewood derby race. For those of you unfamiliar with this, it’s one of the more famous Cub Scout events in which each scout builds a car with his Dad and it is rolled down a ramp in a race with the other cars. People go nuts with this and, as you can see, most of the cars are NOT made solely by the kids!

Liam wanted an Optimus Prime in truck form. Here is what you get with the kit that you have to build the car from. No problem, right?

I cut it which involved borrowing a band saw from a friend which ended up not working and I used one at my work which had a metal-cutting blade and burned the wood. I glued some extra wood on the top for the cab then Liam sanded it. I primed it with the stuff I’m going to use on the bathroom ceiling if I ever get back to that project then cut some stencils into tape so Liam could paint flames.

Unfortunately, I failed to realize that red paint over blue does not look like red… especially not the same bright red that the rest of the red parts are! Then the tape pulled off a bunch of the paint… sigh. I touched it up as best I could and glued on the accoutrements: pipes and a chrome bumper and grill. I put in the windshield with a Sharpie and screwed on weights I bought at Michael’s to get it up to the maximum allowed weight… more weight to overcome friction.

For the friction side of things, I did file down the casting burs on the nail axles and puffed in some graphite powder but that was I for the wheels. Oh wait, I also sanded off the plastic blister on the wheels formed during the molding process. I guess I did go a little nuts on this but a lot of folks get a lot worse. I did most of this by hand not with all sorts of custom Dremel tools.

In the last hours before registering the car where they check its weight and dimensions, I realized the pipes were a little high and the entire length JUST exceeded the max 7 inches. I sanded off the back which meant that there was a huge unpainted section then when I was grinding one of the pipes it broke from its Crazy Glue support! Not to mention that now the weight was off.

I glued the pipe back and headed home to grab a slice of leftover pizza for dinner and take Liam to registration. Liam could not stand the unpainted section so I let him touch it up. Just before heading out the door, I decided to glue a washer to the trailer section (the dolly?) to make up for the lost weight.

The registration was at this massive, maze-like fortress of a church. The length just made it and the weight was 5.0 ounces… right at the max. Yes!!!

Too bad

The other day I saw a pit bull and a husky running through the neighborhood. With kids, I’m not a big fan of dogs running loose but usually I let it go. For a f*ing pit bull, I’m calling Animal Control. Oh, I know… it’s bad owners that give the breed a bad rep. I’m sure most of them are wonderful, loving animals.

So how about this compromise? Let’s wipe every last one of them off the face of the earth. Own one? It’s killed, you go to jail. Sell one? It’s killed, you go to jail.

How about that?

A gorgeous, sunny afternoon

So that I don’t completely destroy my knees, I try to break up my running by riding my bike every once in a while. I ride pretty much the same route as my long runs… along a new road near my home that bisects a massive multi-development area. It’s got two lanes on each side so the cars… well, SUV’s for the most part… can give me some room and it’s hilly with expansive views and tough climbs.

Near a park along this road there’s a woodsy area that they are only now encroaching on on all sides with more development. Today, I noticed a dirt road going into this area so I figured I’d ride my bike in and check it out. It went down a steep hill, meandered around a pond, then slipped into a muddy area that I opted not to venture through. Another part of it ascended a tall hill overlooking the whole area… rife with 5-story look-alike uberhomes, manicured lawns, and tennis courts… some air-conditioned.

But do you know what I didn’t see? Not a single trace of a bike tire track on the entire length of the dirt road. Now granted, the route was no big deal but don’t you think in this entire area with hundreds upon hundreds of homes there’d be at least a few bored kids on bikes that would’ve rode up onto the hill I was on?

What kind of soulless, gutless, Halo-engorged generation are we creating here?

And whatever rhymes with “eloquent”.

For the last few weeks… well, more like months… I’ve been doing work on my bathroom ceiling. A long time back some brightboy put in a skylight and neglected to put any flashing around it. This was the 2nd hidden problem with the house that I found out about when I noticed water dripping in through a window. When I figured it could not be getting in from outside the window, I realized it was coming in through the skylight hole and dripping down just above the ceiling and making its way down the inside of the drywall. Unfortunately, I didn’t get around to fixing the flashing issue until a year or so had passed and the ceiling was water damaged. Now that we are considering moving it’s gotta get fixed.

But goddamn but it’s a pain in the ass. The ceiling is popcorn so you can’t really patch it. Which I learned after patching the hole in the garage that I fell through. It doesn’t look that bad… for a GARAGE but it wouldn’t work for a bathroom. So the popcorn had to go.

Although it’s written up everywhere on the Net as a nightmare, getting the popcorn off was relatively simple. Even on a ladder 18’ in the air, it was just a lot of scraping then a bunch of Shop-Vac action. But now I’m fixing all the warped areas with joint compound and there’s an art to this stuff.

I did the whole thing once and sanded it all and it looked like crap so now I’m doing it all again. Today I finally finished putting up the mud with the right drywall knife (more of a trowel, really…. I’m not cutting anything with it but “knife” is what they call it) this time. Tomorrow I’ll sit up on that ladder covered with white powder sanding until my arms are killing me… and I won’t be surprised if it still looks like crap. Then I have to paint… joy!

Anyway, today I had the boom box playing Primus’ Frizzle Fry and when I took the CD out of its case, I found a long-lost Red Hot Chili Peppers’ disk: Uplift Mofo Party Plan. Yes! Both these bands plus Janes and a few others were what I remember listening to a lot driving around Orlando just before Nirvana shook everything up.

But tomorrow no tunes since the dust gets into everything… boom boxes, lungs, eyes, etc. Just sanding, sanding, sanding… and coughing up white phlegm.

Quick bit

My guess is that this whole ad campaign is derived from the "does a bear sh**t in the woods" adage.

What's next... a guy in a pope hat?

Clearly, more Keoughs are needed.

Some of you may have already heard about this but Kerry and I are expecting lil’Keough #3 late June. We’ll get some info on whether it’s a boy or girl at the end of Jan. Right now, we’re looking at Finn for a boy and Colleen or possibly Riley for a girl but of course there is plenty of time for this to change!

And when I say "Finn" I don't mean Finnegan, Finnian, nor even Finbar. Just Finn.

So drink up, lads. This round's on me.

Bring on 2008

Yup... a pretty typical New Year's Eve. Had some super-tasty homemade French Onion soup (a tradition from Kerry's family) and let the kids stay up. I knew Erin was going to fall asleep during the movie ("The Last Mimzy" - meh) just as I knew Liam would stay awake. He and I played the laser game up till the ball dropped. Then we forgot to make a toast with the sparkling apple juice. We did get the parrot to squawk "Happy New Year" though!

Not at all like NYE99 at Matt's with the entire front room jammed solid with jumping bodies and no one had queued up a song for the new millenium so it ended up being Madness' "Our House".

Too bad the Y2K mobs didn't show.

Now you're set to get into the groove!

Well, I said I wasn’t going to blog anymore about Christmas but I’ve got to give a rundown of the highlight gifts (ie., “coolest toys”).

Erin got a robotic parrot, a My Little Pony “robot” or whatever these types of pseudo-alive toys are supposed to be called, plus a few dolls. The parrot is pretty cool and it might be fun to program it to respond in different ways but I don’t see it’s long-term appeal lasting especially to Erin who asked for it repeatedly. It was at the top of her wishlist. Pinkie Pie has a LOT of songs stored in it and it focuses on dancing so I can see this being a good one. However, the solid (although not exciting) gift will be the playdesk. Erin’s main love is working on her drawings and crafts. And it’s gotta light!

Liam loved a chess-like game with lasers. He got some great Lego sets but he’s been holding off on working on these. In fact, he still hasn’t opened one he got for his birthday. Now he’s off and running on the big hit to the wallet: the Lego Mindstorms robot. I thought I’d be pouring over instruction manuals and fumbling with controls to get him started but when I got around to doing this he had already built a car that would hit a wall and go into reverse.

More Gravy than Grave

Ok... one more bit then no more Christmas crap for 12 months... well, 10 months unfortunately.

Two classic stories are "A Christmas Carol" and "It's a Wonderful Life". And by classic I'm referring to the basic tale. Yeah, I know they are both overdone and overplayed but still, I can't think of another example of a simple, effective story done as well as these. But that's because I saw one last night and the other is playing right now so my brain isn't working quite right.

Help me here.

Christmas Eve

Here we are, giving the kids some time to fall asleep, ready to spring into action with screwdrivers, tape, and scizzors. For the last 2-3 weeks both of them have been acting like timebombs… like buzzing hives of energy, getting more and more excited with each passing day… all leading up to tomorrow morning.

I was thinking that at any time Liam would start asking the hard questions about Santa. He’s asked how he does it so fast but we kind of have this theory worked up that Santa stops time. Also, I told him a long time ago that Santa imports toys from China so the blatant identicalness of Santa’s toys with the ones at Wal-Mart has never been an issue. Plus I claim ignorance of Santa’s methods as well.

But you know what? It doesn’t really matter. Liam doesn’t ask the hard questions because he doesn’t want to press too hard… he loves the whole fantasy. I’m not saying he’s purposely not asking but I am sure there‘s a subconscious denial of some sort at work.

And it’s a pretty flimsy charade, by the way. With a Santa at every other function, characters on TV wearing Santa suits, and basic logic screaming from every facet of Santa’s operation, how hard could it be to figure it out? Even the Christmas specials often make me cringe thinking that Liam’s going to start wondering. A lot of these incorporate the “Do you believe in Santa?” thing. Before this, I don’t think my kids were even aware that there was a controversy. “Wait a sec.. you mean there are people that DON’T believe in Santa? Why not? I wonder….”

When Liam was born, I kind of went back and forth on the whole Santa thing. I didn’t like the idea of lying to my son especially in such a huge way. Basically, I’m setting him up for a tragic, life-changing stab-in-the-back. But I gave in and went along with it. I’m glad I did as the kids love it and I’m sure they always will. Although I still hate how it completely flies in the face of the honesty ethic - something I value highly - as well as creating havoc with the parental trust thing, denying Santa from them would be stealing something from their childhood. Besides, if it was good enough for us… etc., etc.

HO HO HO!!

Home of the Whopper

My first job was at a Burger King on US 1 in Titusville, FL, when I was 18. As everyone who has done it, working at a fast-food place is hell but, like war, you’re in this hell with a bunch of other people just like you so it ain’t so bad.

And I still think the food at BK is far superior to McDonald’s. I’ve walked into McDonald’s in BFE at 9pm. The place is a ghost town yet there are 4-5 sandwiches in each chute, wilting under the hot lamps. When I was in the trenches at Burger King, the only time we had 5 sandwiches in a chute was when the entire front was completely slammed and people were lined up out the door. And maybe this was only at the place where I worked but if we left a sandwich in the chute over 20 minutes (we were supposed to toss them after 10), we got yelled at. I heard from a guy that worked there that at McDonald’s, “if it’s not sold, it’s not old.”

But, man, that place was tough. Working the burgers and the fry racks at the same time, your brain would go into some frenetic, hyper zone. Of course, running in the back to gulp down Mountain Dew from a plastic glass with your name Sharpied onto it likely didn’t help keep things calm and mellow. And changeover was the worst. That was when we’d switch from serving breakfast to lunch but there was an hour overlap where we served both. Once I was trying to get a bag of chicken patties open in a hurry and when I couldn’t tear it open, I hacked at it with a big knife. Only trouble was my little finger was in the way resulting in a pulsing fountain of blood.

Other mishaps included a dropped gallon of mayonnaise and a case of frozen Whoppers. I did toss the ones flat on the floor but all the rest went into the cleansing inferno that was the flame broiler.

But those fry vats… god I remember that sweltering hellhole… slunk over the boiling oil, a rabid slave to the beeping timer… hauling a basket of hot, dripping fries from the cauldron and slinging it under the high-intensity heat lamps then mechanically tossing salt all over’em. I remember several times doing this even though some ass asked for “Fries. No salt.” which of course I would remember 0.2 seconds after salting them. So I’d have to drop another basket and go through it again. I say “ass” because I figure that most of the time, people ordered like this to get a fresh batch. Ask for one then, dangit. Grow a pair!

When I’d get a minute, I’d lunge into the walk-in freezer with the giant bags of rock hard fries and sit in the cool blackness trying to get my head straight. Then I’d hear the cry go out that a busload of seniors was pulling up and it’d be back into the meatgrinder for me.

But then for lunch, my special sandwich would be a bacon-double cheeseburger deluxe (meaning with lettuce, mayo, and tomato) fresh off the grill. Mmmmm…… never got old.

To end on a pleasant note, one of the – no, it WAS the worst task was to empty the cans of old fry grease. Every night, the old grease would be slopped into this 5-gallon can that rolled on a little cart. When the level of grease got to the top, you were supposed to wheel the can out back and dump it into the 55-gallon drum. But nobody wanted to do this so the they would let the can get filled ALL the way to the very rim with rancid, chunky, slimy liquid which would, of course, spill all over the place when I wheeled it to the drum.

And let me tell you. If the grease in the can was rancid, the yellow-green slop in the drum was absolutely overpoweringly disgusting. I would literally hold my breath for each step of the operation. I would stand around the corner from the dreaded drum and take a few breaths of relatively untainted air, clamp my lips shut, and bound in to remove the lid…go back for another breath then haul up the can to the lip of the drum and pour it in. The putrid crust that had formed on the top of the sludge would break and waves of stench would billow forth from the depths, driving me back, retching and gagging. Once, upon removing the lid, I found the bloated black body of a rat congealed in the thickened grease.

Merry Christmas!

Yacht Club

A recent post on a friend’s blog got me thinking about the Yacht Club, a dive in Little 5 Points that was one of the joints I used to hang out at (around ten, yes TEN years ago!) until my friends and I discovered East Atlanta.

Apparently, the place had great food but I never found this out until a guy hosting a SuperBowl party around the corner got take-out barbecue from there. I did have a reuben there once. We were having dinner and a few beers before heading over to Variety Playhouse to see some band and the waitress came up behind me and spilled the contents (a greasy reuben, for chrissakes, AND bar fries!) of the sandwich platter over my shoulder, down the front of one of the shiny retro-y shirts I used to wear, and into my lap. My table-horts erupted in laughter, of course, but it was cut off a little short. In it’s past life, someone must have washed the shirt in lacquer because when I plucked the disheveled sandwich and the fries from it, there wasn’t a single spot on it.

Usually I stuck with beer. Crowded around the dartboard were stacks and stacks of cases of beer which, as a borderline alcoholic, I found comforting. One night, Ashim, Travis, Matt, and I were at a booth discussing normal edible items that became disgusting with quantity… mayonnaise, sugar, etc. This resulted in Ashim betting he could drink a bottle of ketchup. The bottle we grabbed was only ¾ full and he cut it with Guinness (which I think is more nauseating than straight) but he got it down. Another night, reminiscient of the famous Duff Gardens scene where Lisa drinks the water on the parody of the Small World ride, Matt entertained us by drinking the water out of those plastic water games that had been sitting on a shelf in that place for years.

Ah yes.

Thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole

Oh wait, besides the Charlie Brown soundtrack, of course there are two other Christmas CD’s that are pretty decent. This one has all the songs from the TV specials except for Snow Miser which is on the 2nd one… damn! And this one has got a lot of older, be-boppy versions that you don’t hear often except for Feliz Navidad… double-damn!!

Up on the roofies, click, click, click...

I was going to go another little rant about Christmas songs but it looks like I’d only be repeating myself. But I must throw out something… ok, two things…

Winter Wonderland is a treacly number right out of Bedford Falls but that “we’ll say ‘no man’” bit in it brings up a sudden discordant image of Chong and Randy of the Redwoods hittin’ a spleef behind the snowman.

I still like Baby, It’s Cold Outside but in this day of rohypnol and kidney-robbing tales the line “Say, what’s in this drink” comes across just a little creepy.

Finally, unrelated to holiday tunes, telling a bunch of kids about how Christmas falls in the summer in Australia loses a bit of it’s impact when it’s 75° outside!

What.... again?!

My friends and family have always known me to be one for misplacing things, most commonly my wallet and keys. I stress “misplacing” because, other than a single incident, the objects have always turned up. For some reason, I almost never place my stuff in a consistent location, choosing instead whatever horizontal surface is handy.

My Dad and I do this thing where we make a big deal over “The Checklist” whenever I leave after a visit where I physically show him the location of each of my belongings.

“Wallet?” “Check!”
“Keys?” “Check!”
“Glasses?” “Oh... wait a sec…”

I once lost my geek-famed HP-28S calculator in college and lived without one for 6 months. I was literally 2-3 days from buying a new one when someone finally noticed it in the back of a filing cabinet and called the number I had written on it.

In Puerto Rico for work, I left my pack in the middle of a public square after sunset and had to get the guy I was with to drive an extra hour and a half to go back and get it since my passport and wallet were inside. We knew it was going to be gone but no, it was there with $30 in cash inside.

Once, in the Keys, I lost my own when some friends and I were snorkeling. While we waited 3 hours for a locksmith to come, we swam around looking for them on the bottom of a flooded quarry. We finally found them inside the car.

Anyway, this week I went to Minnesota to visit a window factory, a window equipment OEM, and a refrigerator plant. I gave myself 2 whole “non-rush hour” hours to make the flight but because of a wreck on 400, I got to the airport with minutes to spare before the 45 minute check-in cutoff. I knew I was to late to go to the park’n’ride that I usually use and I knew I wasn’t going to make it to the desk in time to check-in bags so I ended up in the economy lot one row away from the last rummaging through my suitcase so I could leave my big bottle of contact lense solution in the car. I hurled it inside and a shuttle pulled up. I was about to get in when I realized my keys weren’t in my pocket. I started frantically searching my briefcase, my suitcase, both my coats (I had worn one for Atlanta but had my heavy coat on for Minnesota), and even my car. The shuttle drove off and I somehow ended up bumping the cardoor closed and still no keys.

I knew I was going to miss the flight if I didn’t get moving so began running to the terminal with my luggage and briefcase, wearing big, clunky boots, topped off with a heavy coat. No matter that I’m a runner, when I lunged up to the kiosk I was a mess. The time was 44 minutes before the flight… I had missed the cutoff! I frantically entered my info and made it on! It turns out (I think) that the 45 minute cutoff is only for checking-in bags.

Then, nearly 2 hours outside of Minneapolis by snow-scattered highway at the hotel lounge (apparently quite a hot spot of the St. Cloud scene) where a pretty decent (especially for no cover) blues band was playing, I ended up leaving my coat. The next morning, I walked through the now cleaned-up club without finding it and the staff couldn’t find so I headed coatless to the refrigerator plant.

The factory was only a few blocks from the hotel so I returned after. One of the clerks brought me in the office so I could look at the coat rack. No coat. And it was my nicest coat: a dark green pea coat kind of affair with kind of a Soviet look to it. Damn.

Then, off in the far corner of the office, I saw the edge of something greenish hanging on a chair. “Is that it?” I asked pointing. It was.

My brother-in-law (a helluva swell guy) met me at the airport with a spare set of keys and, yes, my keys were in the car.

Then, today at lunch, I returned to the office after a filling, soulless meal at Taco Bell. Five hours later, the guy behind the counter passed me my jacket.

I'll have a large fries with that dust, please.

Today, I completed my last section hike of the Appalachian Trail in Georgie: Hogpen Gap to Unicoi, 13.6 miles in 3 hours, 47 min. Not bad but the guy I went with finished about 35 minutes before me. He's doing the ING Marathon along with me in March so any trash-talking I was planning on is out the window.

The F’ing Tree

Tonight was the start of the Christmas holiday in our household. This is really just a concession to Scrooge McDad… we would’ve probably put the tree up November 1 if it was up to Kerry. She grew up in Syracuse and spent 11 months out of each year snowbound so there was not much else to do than celebrate Christmas.

While some headed north to the noble tree farms to cut down a live tree, I headed up into the attic to bring down the four boxes containing our 9’ Empire Spruce, purchased at B.J.’s but hand-crafted with love by Chinese artisans.

Although I’m typically a traditional guy and put off by “modern contraptions” like cellphones, electric knives, and escalators, I like the plastic tree. I’ve never felt quite right about cutting down a tree just for a holiday prop in your living room them ditching it out on the curb a month later. I know, I know… “they grow them for that” and all the other reasons for justifying arborcide but I just know I don’t like it.

I also brought down all the other Christmas chrap… seven 18-gallon bins and numerous boxes! And we have a relatively small place. I can’t imagine where some of the folks around here keep all of it. I was at a holiday party once where they had 3 huge trees and the place was crammed with “festive accoutrements”. They must have rented a truck and a couple o’guys to empty a few off-site storage units! Maybe there are consultants that people hire to holiday-ize their house. I can just picture warehouses jammed with Santa Teddy Bears, mile upon mile of tangled Cristmas lights, snowglobes, and boxcars of tinsel that the service uses… much like the places storing the tin Nehi signs, old sleds, rustic picture frames, mounted deer heads and all the other assorted wall knick-knacks that populate the theme restaurants of the world, all itemized and catalogued, ready for instant ambiance-setting.

Once ol’Dad got all the stuff down, I have to admit it was nice to sit, sipping egg nog and watching the kids help Mom put up the tree, all to the sounds of Vince Guaraldi. And then I had to put up the lights.