Tomorrow, tomorrow

The sun'll come out tomorrow! No, it won't, s'posed to rain. Well, the sun might come out but we probably won't see it, put it that way. At least it's not snowing.

Why did I sign on here? There was something I thought I'd report on but now... Oh, yeah. Tomorrow- I was speaking of tomorrow, weren't I? -is a big breakfast blowout for some friends and acquaintances. My contribution is cornbread but I'm gonna bring some chicken gravy too seein' as how I have leftovers from the weekend, just getting better as the days pass. And some blueberry muffins too. I guess I'll drag myself out early in the AM and put it all together, just not in a kitchen mood this evening. I did my kitchen duty tonight throwing together breaded fish and onion rings and topping it off with a quick ranch, horseradish, onion and crab seasoning dip. I should write a cookbook. Except it would be such a mish-mash of non-nutritive extras, super-carbo loaded side dishes and junk food meat/cheese/bread entrees that only the most desperate teenage gourmand would rush out to buy it.

In my defense I did steam some California mix to go with the breaded fish and onion rings.

Oh, and I added a town photo tour to my photo albums. I still have a handful of pics to upload but it is sooooo tedious I gotta save it for another day. It's a pretty unremarkable little burg, East Prospect, but I had fun testing out the new camera as I strolled around town in my Hoss hat snapping shots on every corner. Got a few strange looks and one 'Howdy, Tex!' for my trouble.

Captain's log

   Stardate... unknown. I'm sure the dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie can tell you but I can't. One of the Star Trek magazines I used to get had a system of inverting the date to create a 'stardate', nothing practicable or 'true' according to the physics of faster-than-light space travel, I'm sure. I knew a kid at one time, he might have been thirteen at the time, who could have explained it to me, I'm sure. But I'm doubtful he could have made a drawing of Mr. Spock that actually looked like him. What do they call that? The various human abilities and the way they present themselves, math versus art, right brain, left brain... oh, man, the Alzheimer's is advancing, I think...

   Watched Ice Age last night, a funny little diversion. Including a Star Trek reference, no less. For a pop culture geek like myself those kinds of things make these modern cinematic marvels worth watching. The CG animation is a wonder, of course. And some have a rollicking, snappy story. But catching the goofy 'in jokes' is the fun part.

   There's a chicken in the pot today, I'll probably get to make the stuffing. Just one of my many and diverse culinary abilities. When I tended my short course of studies at Millersville there was a little eatery, a Greek pizza joint, across the way called The Sugar Bowl. Don't ask me why 'sugar bowl'. What does that have to do with pizza, I ask you?!? At any rate, their pepperoni stromboli became a perennial favorite for my pal, Pat, and myself. We were regulars and got pretty chummy with Nick and his momma and the Ms. Pac-Man machine. We had an art pal, E.(Edward) Scott Baer,a big football player, really nice guy, who drove delivery for them for a while. I remember he had a real fascination with werewolves, a number of his drawings and lithographs were lycanthropic themed. Try saying that three times fast- lycanthropic themed lithographs, lycanthropic themed lithographs, lycanthropic themed lithographs.

  Once I moved back across the river, married and so forth, it became a pilgrimage of sorts to go back a few times a year and treat the kids- and myself -to those big, greasy, cheese-laden delights. Eventually, after Nick's Momma died, I decided I needed to try my own hand at stromboli making. It's not complicated, of course- you stuff enough stuff and cheese in there and make sure the bread is done through and you're golden -and anything my wyfe didn't have to cook was great by her. Since she's taken up a more or less vegetarian diet I made a steamed vegetable version this past week. My son and I stick with the stick-to-your-ribs meaty boli, pepperoni and deer burger with red onion. I've made chicken and onion, cheesesteak, turkey, even tried the 'standard' ham and salami once or twice. But the boy and I decided next time we need to try a bacon cheeseburger boli, should be fun.

   But I digress... as if I had anything of great import to record herein.

   Nope, that's it.

Time to write

Write what? What comes to mind? This, that and everything. And nothing. Babble, bable. Yadda yadda yadda.

Well, finally got over the hump on that illustration. Nothing spectacular by any means, limited by size first, lack of real inspiration second  and, third and not least of all, my own rusty fingers and intuition for composition, figure drawing and so forth. My wyfe and kids- make that 'kid', only one in the house anymore -are suitably impressed but I know what 'used to be' and so it's pretty pedestrian by my estimate, if not downright dreadful. But it was kinda fun working through the colors, not really my forte, more of a black-and-white guy. Anyway, I ended up painting acrylics on acetate, sort of like a cartoon cel, for lack of any better materials at hand. Tough doing line work with a brush so there are more than one or two fat lines that oughta be more sensitive, suggestive but instead heavy-handed. I don't know whether it'll make the online album, probably not. Remains to be seen whether the client is agreeable to it as a finished product...

In other news, we finally replaced the long-gone digital camera. A definite plus for my little hobby enterprise and attendant eBay offerings. And the family album as well. Yay! I haven't fired it up yet, got a serious case of late afternoon sleepies when we brought it home and took a nap instead of breaking it outta the box and setting up the dock and software. I could be doing it right now but what am I gonna do, take pictures all night? Nah, tomorrow's soon enough.

Deep breath... aaahhhh...

    Boy, was I in a sour mood there for that last entry or what? Oh, well, that's the way it goes at times. Everything is brighter this morning, sun shining and exceedingly temperate out of doors. The mailman brought a coupla postcards and two AOL coasters- I signed on from one of those startup disk mailings but, really, how many can a person use? -addressed to the neighbors two doors down. So I walked them over and got no answer except the barking of the dogs and left them at the front door. Nothing portends an optimistic slant for the day like a small good deed to start it off, right? Hopefully the neighbor who got my mail will feel compelled to do the same.

  It annoys me how this utility makes such a wide space betwen paragraphs. It defeats the possibility of recording lines of poetry herein. I'm nobody's poet but what if I were? Or a songwriter? I'd have to use slashes to demarcate the lines, not nearly so attractive or as engaging, simply wouldn't flow,  like reading line-by-line. That's just my thinking on the matter.

  In other news, I wrote earlier about the Daisy Model 179 six-shooter bb gun. Mine arrived yesterday courtesy of a fellow in Atlanta Georgia. I found his website, well, I forget just how I found it, but he offers a whole slew of real firearms and a few bb shooters on the side as well. So I got a nice price on it and it's in purty good shape. A little smaller, well, not so much smaller as lighter than the Hahn with somewhat less chunky plastic grips. It works but, wow, it's weak, weak, weak. Probably won't throw a bb more than twenty feet. And it won't shoot straight either, hahahaha. The boy and I ran outside with it, loaded it up- holds twelve shots -and plinked away at a cereal box in the snow. We had a good laugh trying to actually aim with it and watching the bbs pssst into the snow frst to the right, then to the left. So I'll bring it along with the Hahn .45 to the repair guy down in New Freedom after the first of the year, see if he thinks it can be tightened up, maybe install a new spring to perk it up a hearn. I thought both might be good for squirrel hunting but I'm starting to have my doubts- certainly about the Daisy, even if it's tweaked. Less so about the Hahn, I think a new gasket will solve the gas leaking and it just might have enough juice to do more than poke holes in soda cans and cereal boxes.

   It seems terribly self-centered writing here- me, me, I, me, me, mine... -but I guess that's the point of keeping a journal, right? Reflecting on the bullet points that make up a life from day to day. Besides, my wyfe is less than keen on publicizing any aspect of our life, certainly she'd rather there be recorded nothing about herself and the kids- of course, there are some sinister scenarios to consider when writing anything online about kids these days, too bad -and so it becomes 'The Story of Wes' and not much else. Ho hum.

Bitter

Boy, what a crappy week it was. Snowed and snowing again, I guess it's turned to rain now, even better. Enagaged in a push/pull contest with the neighbors, over space in an outdoor shed, of all things. So I spent the night dragging stuff around inside and out, mostly out. In the sleet and rain. Stacking crap on top of crap. In the dark. That goat farm on a hilltop in Kentucky sounds pretty good about now. I filled the bird feeder out front last week and I've seen exactly one dratted bird all week. And he flitted away as soon as he spotted me at the window, stupid bird. Casually twirling my six-shooter tonight and flung it off my finger and- WHACK! - cracked against the bottom horn of the Charvel, putting a big circular ding in the newly restored finish. At least it didn't go off and put my eye out. I can't seem to get a decent draft of an illustration I'm working on. I'd planned to go at it with a vengeance tonight, blown outta the water by the shed thing. Sometimes the general trend of things makes you just wanna spit. Or punch something. Then I'd probably break my hand and really be up a creek. If I thought about it long enough I'm sure I could think of more and crappier stuff but I'm already missing the beginning of ER. Which is probably a re-run. Or a Christmas show. Bah, humbug, I says...

Bang, bang! Shoot, shoot!

Hahahaha, that just occurred to me as I was thinking of a heading for this; that Beatles tune, what is it? I got the radio playing in my other ear so I can't recall the tune right off. Well, they'll play it after while, it's a Beatles weekend on the local oldies station; I suppose largely due to the remembrance of the anniversary of John Lennon's death. It's strange to think it's been longer since that happened than I'd been alive at the time. That doesn't make sense, does it? It's been 25 years, meaning I would have been 20 at the time. No, wait, nineteen. 2005, carry the one... minus 61... higher math, ouch, my head! Yep, nineteen. Reminds me of one of my favorites films, Forrest Gump. Forrest, the accidental witness to any number of historical events and personages, supposedly is a guest on Dick Cavett with John. If memory serves, their casual banter, archival footage of Lennon neatly interspersed with Tom Hanks as Forrest, gives the appearance of being the inspiration for Imagine.

But I started to make a note about a new diversion. When I was a kid my Dad was park ranger at a campground, the Pequea Creek Recreation Area. Sixty five acres of hills and woodlands, peppered with campsites, a few pavilions for group outings, a big grassy field where the kids for miles around gathered to play ball, nature trails, swing sets and other playground structures and the muddy Pequea Creek running right through the middle of it all. Along with the campground office we ran a little camp store selling Sterno, plastic picnic tableclothes, candy and soda, luncheon meats and cheese, badminton sets, fishing worms- my brother and I had a going concern with that concession every summer, lemme tell ya! -canned goods, Stewart hot sandwiches, firewood and lots of goofy souvenir items.(At one point I drew several pastoral scenes for use on the souvenir goods- a coupla Amish children running after a buggy, deer in a field, stuff like that.) But the coolest thing we used to offer for sale was the Daisy "Spittin' Image" BB gun. It was called 'spittin' image' because it was the perfect likeness of the six-shooter every TV cowboy carried. It was something like 15 bucks- a veritable fortune then, even for an enterprising twelve-year old like myself -and I always wanted one in the worst way. I don't recall if it was a matter of never saving the money, spending all our bait worm profits on candy, gumcards and Tastykakes, or if Mom wouldn't let us have one for fear we'd put an eye out. Which we probably would have. My cousins had both bb rifles and pistols and we'd invariably send the youngest, George, out the yard to set up the cans or whatever we were using as targets... and then we'd shoot at him. In our defense we did have the good sense to shoot low so it was always only a leg or butt shot... And he was almost always wearing jeans. But I never did have a Daisy six-gun of my own, drat.

So off and on, given my adult onset fascination with TV cowboys, I've looked for them on eBay. I learned they were Model 179 and, since Daisy long ago discontinued their manufacture, had become quite collectible. And they always seemed to end up selling for more than I wanted to invest being A) interested purely for sentimental, non-practical reasons, B) a cheapskate of the first order by nature and C) poor to boot. Then they seemed to dry up. I guess eBay banned their sale, impossible to regulate just who was buying them, I suppose. I mean, any juvenile delinquent could conceivably order up a very realistic looking BB gun and commit who knows what heinous acts. Hold up grannies on the street, rob the local mini-mart, put his own eye out.

Anyway, despite the dearth of availability I would search every so often just in case one somehow slipped under the radar. Sure enough a week or so ago, crammed into a lot with some busted up cap guns, I glommed onto the Daisy's counterpart, the Hahn '45'. Actually, this gun predates the Daisy by a few years at least. And unlike the Model 179, it's a CO2 powered bb shooter. So it's a little more powerful than the spring action versions. Plus it's got faux antler grips, very neat. The listing said 'missing parts' and it was obvious from the awful picture that the CO2 cartridge was absent. I ventured a ten dollar bid, won, paid another ten smackers to ship it to my door and discovered it also had no trigger. But I'm not complaining at that ticket. A little web searching found a guy in New Park PA, maybe fifteen, twenty miles down the road at the outside, who works exclusively on bb and pellet guns. He calls himself Precision Pellet. Now, if he can scavenge a trigger somewhere and re-seal the gas input for less than thirty, forty bucks, I'll be in business for less than half the usual going rate. As it is he's too busy to get to it until after the holidays so I'll just play with it for now. Practice my gun-spinning technique so I don't shoot myself in the foot when it's all fixed up.

But it does shoot even without the trigger. Oh, yeah, it does. I know this because my son, the duly trained firearms handler and mighty hunter of harmless woodland creatures, had installed a CO2 cartridge from his own storehouse of shooting goods and was toying with it while I busied myself with something or other in the toy cave here in the basement. I wasn't paying any attention until I heard a distinct 'phhhhhht' behind me, followed by a hollow clicking sound back the hall. He says, 'Well, it shoots!' 'So I gather... It was loaded?!?' I ask, incredulous that he would be so remiss as to fire the thing off indoors. 'No, no,' he says. 'Well, what was that chink after it went off?' I says. A quick inspection of the hallway and the foldout laundry room door revealed a bb-sized hole which, I'm fairly certain, was not there before.

Brother, no wonder Mom didn't want me to have one...!

As I added the picture it occurred to me how... inconguous, at very least, it is to be yapping about a gun, even a toy gun, after starting off with a reference to a death by gun violence. I can only qualify my remarks by saying I'm not a big fan of the gun. Too loud. And dangerous, no doubt, as demonstrated by the foregoing anecdote... though I tried hard to give it a humourous spin it would be decidedly non-humourous if it had been a real sidearm.

My dad was a dyed-in-the-wool, 'pry my gun from my cold, dead hands' kind of gun fancier. And his gun enthusiast's argument that guns don't kill people is all too true. But 'people with guns do kill people' is too true too. On the other hand, Cain had no gun. Likewise Jack the Ripper- no gun. So it's not the gun, it's the motive of the person mis-using it that makes a useful instrument something vilified in the minds of so many. But then I've never been shot or had somebody I love shot to death either... No end to this debate...

Deep thoughts

Random thoughts that occurred to me today while driving in traffic, running errands and having lunch:

"Wow, she must think I'm really hot. She's really staring at me... That or she thinks it looks ridiculous the way I stack my sunglasses on top of my prescription glasses... Yep, that must be it."

"Wow, I am really hot. This coat is great outside but I've got to ditch in when I come into the store. The scarf too."

"Note to self: Remember, Hoss's is a steak place. When you order a burger, you've got to specify 'well-done'. Or you get a bloody rare burger like this one. Ughhh... And you know it'll just get spit on or 'accidentally' dropped on the floor if you send it back..."

"When I wear these black gloves I feel like Zorro. ( horizontal-diagonal-horizontal slashing motion) Or the Lone Ranger. Hi-yo, Saturn, awaaay!"

"Hey, I remembered the important stuff! Craft board, shipping boxes, Aragorn doll. Can you believe it was only five bucks?!? Somebody else could have remembered we came in here in the first place to get power steering fluid..."

"I'm never going to remember all these when I get home! It's almost like a mental curtain is drawn once I pass that portal. All the meditation and interesting distraction is left at the threshold, displaced by 'What's on TV tonight?' and 'Where's that leftover Chinese? It was here yesterday?...' 'Yes, I do think it'll be okay to eat it...'  'No, the red dye kills the trichonosis bugs. I read it somewhere...'

Okay, I made that last one up. But it's true, absolutely true. I hope.

And now for something...

... we hope you'll really like! I added just two of the hundred or so photos from the West Virginny trip from two weeks ago. Coupla the girls smiling for the camera and a nice wintry scene that I'd print out and hang on the wall if my stoopid printer wasn't acting up! It printed okay but not nearly as crisp as a stark image like that needs to be. Still, a nice meditative view of whitened trees over a fence. I wish I'd taken it! I'm better at retouching and trimming photos than taking them. Check 'em out using the 'Family Album' link at left. New photos load at the bottom so you have to sit through the 'old' stuff loading to get to 'em, sorry.

In other news: I made some bacon tonight. Not real bacon, play bacon for my Johnny West dolls. If anybody remembers Johnny- anybody? -he was the original cowboy doll by Marx, very cool. One of the few boyhood toy pictures I have- I love those old shots of kids and their toys, usually black-and-white, making believe with the help of some doll or whatever -shows me and my brother with Johnny and Thunderbolt, his palomino horse. Good stuff. But Johnny came with all sorts of teeny rubber and plastic cowboy accessories; hat, vest, chaps, spurs. And a coffee pot, coffee cup and frying pan. But no play food to use in the pan. So I'm making my own from latex and sculpy clay. Eggs and bacon. Coupla biscuits. I'm sure I'll get around to pancakes and syrup, I'm already thinking of how to make a melting pat of butter for on top of the stack! Hoo boy, what I won't do to distract myself from the hum-drum!

What the...?!?

Man, it's always something. I can't get my printer to align to save my life, keeps offsetting the colors on my little print jobs for my homespun doll goods. I'm torn between letting it go, allowing for a 'vintage misprint' look and running the alignment test for, like, the fourth time since installing new ink cartridges a week or so ago. I think the real reason I worry about it is because they are adorned with my cartoon likeness! The misprinting makes me look silly. Sillier than normal, I mean. Vanity, thy name is Wes, man. Hahahaha...

Took a pre-dawn drive to Hershey PA this morning. Not to smell the chocolate- which you definitely do in warm weather, not today for sure, it's sub-freezing all day -but to bring my grandfather to the hospital for a procedure designed to halt the spread of a certain proto-cancerous growth. It'll be a regular appointment for the next six weeks, well, five now. We yapped about idiot drivers and cell phones- neither of us own one -along the way, stopped for breakfast on the way home. I promised to bring him some of my wyfe's turkey pie before the week is out. Brought his little lap dog, Bo-Bo, the bacon from breakfast. My aunt warned me beforehand not to allow myself to be browbeaten or suffer quietly Pap's well-known rollercoaster temperament. But I didn't have any trouble. I'm an easygoing sort to begin with, been referred to recently by one adversary as a 'good-natured goof' to which I responded 'Thank you very much!', but I did make a point of speaking clearly and unequivocally and sitting and standing straight to make my height advantage more obvious to my dear pappaw. That and I threatened to kick his cane out from under him if he acted up.

No, not really! I'm kidding! Kidding! It was all very nice and familial, really.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the beginning of my married life. Let's see, nineteen years. Easy to remember because one year to the day after that memorable occasion my daughter was born. So all I have to do is remember her age and add one, simple. Her age is easy to recall this year- despite the lack of birthday revelry in our family -because it was an auspicious date in all our minds and not simply because it marked the attainment of 'adult' status. From all appearances, and according to my own prophecy, it was a countdown on her part to that date from the revelations five months ago of her secretive involvement with a young man of our acquaintance. Suffice to say, the discovery of what had been going on under our noses, quite literally, was a stunner of outsized proportion. Said countdown ending with an early morning call from my sister-in-law on the date in question asking for a family conference to discuss the desire of the daughter in question, who had stayed overnight with said sister-in-law, to emancipate herself from our home, take up residence with said aunt and- most importantly -take up where, under extreme parental duress and coercion, she had left off with the young man in question.

A lot of questions, eh? Which begs the question: Is this really the end result of admittedly imperfect but well-intentioned parenting? Hmmm. I think if I was told this was what I had to look forward to eighteen years ago... well, that way leads to madness, theres' no doubt. Like nearly every circumstance of life, hindsight is the perfect vision no glass goggles can approximate before the you-know-what hits the fan. You'd think we'd learn from the generations that went before, recalling our own mindset at such-and-such age and so forth... but no, we stumble blithely along, certain that our experience will be different somehow. As though roseate optimism is certain to foster miracles in our case while the poor schlubs around us falter and flounder under the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'. (And you thought I knew no Shakespeare! No, really, I don't...)Quick! Where's the looking glass?!? I do believe I've spied the common but elusive poor schlub!

Suffice to say, it was an anniversary only of hand-wringing and mood swings, harsh words and heartache, devoid of all but the most meager sentimentality. Sheesh... who writes this stuff?!? Anyway, it remains to be seen what the day after will bring. Confrontation, recrimination, accusation? Or bittersweet resignation? Either way, bags and boxes brim with the left-behind accoutrements of a young life, a pack-rattery of both necessary and inconsequential goods. Each object a remnant with it's own peculiar cachet of sentiment, utility or combinations of both.

 

Home Shweet Home

Aaahhh, nothing like familiar surroundings after a few days away. On the road to 'wild and wonderful' West Virginia the past few days, visiting our 'adoptive' Mammaw and Pappaw York, my brother-in-law Terry's family. My own wyfe and kids have made the trip quite a few times over the years, hence the familiar 'mammaw and pappaw', but I always was occupied making a living so I was the new kid in town this trip. Said town of St. Albans, way down the southeast corner of the state, is over a coupla rivers and more mountains than you could shake a stick at. It's a seven, eight hour road trip, lotta drive-drive-drivin'... Plenty of rocks and rills, deer and wild turkey, valley vistas and little mountainside towns to gawk at along the way, quite scenic. A great little roadside orchard store called Hepburn's is close to the end of the journey, always a stopover on the way. They offer fresh fruit in season and plenty of little souvenir doodads, craft goods and stuff like that but the real draw for travelers is an assortment of incredibly delectable homemade fruit pies; we stocked up for the stay with pumpkin, blueberry, pecan* and, last but certainly not least, one called 'fruits of the forest', a conglomeration of apples, strawberries, rhubarb and a couple other fruity-berry chunks thrown in for good measure. Good stuff. Naturally, like any vacation, we made a point of eating out every day- including the usual turkey and all the fixins at the Charleston Marriott on Thursday and one of Terry's favorite hometown eateries, Captain D's, a down-home version of Long John Silver's featuring yummy fried fish, hushpuppies and fries -and lounging determinedly at the hotel every night. I got chided for watching the usual three channels we have at home when the cable in the rooms offered nearly a hundred channels. All those channels and nothing on, y'know. The kids used the pool a coupla times and wound up with burning, stinging eyes the last time from the high concentration of chlorine, ouch! Visited one local shopping plaza which featured a cool used music shoppe and a great hobby/crafts store where I found some thin brass rods to use in one of my doll projects(more about that later on my toymaking website news column). The town has a mess of pawn shops, I like to check 'em out for the guitars, there must be six or seven shops but only made it around to two of themthis trip. We looked at some of their rifles too; my son, the hunter, is looking for a bolt action .22 because Pennsylvania forbids hunting with semi-automatic arms like the rifle he currently owns. Anyway, we told the counter guy at the first shop that and asked, 'Can you hunt with semi-automatics here?' 'Oh, yeah,' he answers, 'This is West Virginia, you can shoot just about anything with anything here.' Pretty funny, causing an aside to my wyfe in my best hillpeople accent, 'We jes' step off the porch and start shootin' at whatever runs by, ma'am!' Handful of antique/collectible shops too but with the short stay and a full schedule of visitation with Pappaw at the family residence- spent a good deal of time chatting about his family of nine sisters and three brothers -bringing Mammaw to and from the nursing home and visiting older brother Roy and his wife Louise** right down the road in Hurricane- 'HER-a-kin' in the local parlance - there was no time to make the rounds of those. The kids took turns staying overnight with Pappaw, watching cartoons turned up too loud until all hours, playing with their doll men in the empty lot across the street and coaxing the neighborhood stray pooch onto the porch. The poor creature apparently was turned out of doors and is neglected by it's people, he/she was awfully skittish in addition to being pretty unkempt. By the time we departed, 'Honey'- I don't know if that was her name by his 'owners' or if the kids came up with the name -was slightly less wary of approach, allowing the kids to pet her, and had a new dog box and blanket on Pappaw's porch. At least she won't be turned into a pup-sicle when the temps dip below freezing. And fer sure there are more details of the whole adventure but, as usual when I get around to updating here, it is late, late, late. It is good to be home and sleep in my own bed. Better get off to slumberland and check in again another time. Yep.

*Y'know, I love all sorts of nuts and those pecan candy logs like you used to get at, well, now I can't recall the name of those highway eateries, what was it? Anyway, you know the stuff I'm talkin' about, right? The chopped nuts are rolled around a gooey nougat center. But I only recently, within the last coupla years I mean, became acquainted with pecan pie when my cousin Suz, Susan, started making them. Ooohh, that gooey goodness with crunchy brown-sugary nuts on top is just...>mmmm-wahhh!!!<

**Louise is a self-taught painter of landscapes and still-life. I'd seen several of her paintings- Terry and Marcia's home and the beach house, for example -but we stopped into a local gallery in town where she had a dozen or so works displayed with several other local artists. Some very nice work, very inspiring. Marcia says she has a number of such venues and sells quite a few paintings. Very cool!

Flashback

Speaking of 1979, took a little drive up the country this afternoon. Right by the infamous Three Mile Island at Middletown. I used to see it across the panoramic view of the river valley as I drove to work every morning, waaaay off in the distance. But we were right alongside it today, up close those huge towers are big, baby, with steaming rolling out over the top. Makes you expect a meltdown any minute. Or a third eye to start growing from your forehead as you drive by. Okay, it's not that bad. But we did see several glowing, multi-limbed fish walking along the riverbank.

No, not really, I made that up.

But it was a flashback because I remember being sent home from school when it was ready to meltdown or explode or whatever it is out-of-control nuclear reactors do. More than a few of my schoolmates were properly frightened but most were just glad for an excuse to leave school early. I'm sure I was too- just glad to get out of school -because I'd never heard of TMI up to that point, being a country-fied rube I supposed our electricity was supplied by mules turning a water wheel somewhere further up the Pequea Creek. What did I know about reedio-activity or nuke-yeller power? Even now most of what I know about nuclear power comes from watching The Simpsons. And handling those hot glowing rods obviously hasn't hurt Homer none. Doh!

Nowadays TMI has become our family acronym for 'Too Much Information'. Somebody spills the beans or offers a too-revealing personal glimpse in mixed company, it's "Hey!!! TMI, thank you very much!" Like tonight while visiting friends, our hostess proclaims their giant cushy reclining sofa could turn anyone into a couch potato. And my daughter offers, 'Daddy has a pair of red underwear that says 'couch potato' on it." Hmmm, really? Ah, did anybody need to know that?!? Hoo boy!

Dream a little dream

So I had this dream the other night. The family and I are frolicking, yes, frolicking about a verdant hillside. There seemed to be quite a group of people about, none I could identify in my dream state but we all felt right at home, safe and sound among the trees and the breeze. Sun shining and puffy clouds. Kites flying. Squirrels hopping about. Then somebody pointed skyward and everybody looks up to see a streak of light, like a shooting star but it's broad daylight. And then there was another. And another. Soon the skies are lit with streak after streak of streaking... something. It was fascinating and not at all threatening and everybody was 'ooohing' and 'aaahhing' and quite enthralled.

Until one of the streaks appeared to stop short above our hillside location and started to drop, looming larger and larger until it was obviously crashing down right on top of where we stood! People started scrambling this way and that, screaming and running, shoving and clawing to get away from the crashing whatevers. In the confusion I was separated from the rest of the family and finally was alone in the middle of an unfamiliar forest. There was nobody around and the crashing things, I never really discerned exactly what they were, meteors, boulders, washing machines... I dunno, but at least they were no longer falling outta the sky threatening life and limb.

So I walked out of the woods and came upon a little village. Like a little Swiss hamlet nestled in the hillside. One of the first ten issues(I forget which issue exactly, maybe number five because I think the next issue included Batman and I know that was number six)of Swamp Thing by Berni Wrightson and Len Wein features such a peaceful little place. Everybody walks around smiling and greeting one another, perfectly at peace and happy all the time. A little alpine paradise. A paradise where even the misshapen creature that used to be Dr. Alec Holland is welcomed and treated with compassion and kindness despite his monstrous, moss-encrusted form. Turns out they are clockwork people built by a rotund little clockmaker as a template for a peaceful world society. And then they go berserk and everybody dies. Except the Swamp Thing, of course.

Anyway, in my dream I go into this little hillside town and it's Oktoberfest or MeisterBrauMunchenHappenin or something like that, bratwurst grilling everywhere and giant kegs of beer tapped on every corner and the tangy sweet odor of sauerkraut punctuating each breath. And the people, once again, are walking around smiling and greeting one another, perfectly at peace and happy all the time. And the oom-pah band or the polka is playing as frantically I go from person to person trying to warn them that, hey, there are huge meteors, boulders or washing machines falling from the sky and their little bubble is about to burst in a big way and would they please help me find my family!

And nobody listens. It's like they don't speak the same language. Which, of course, they don't. They smile politely and nod at me and look at each other with a shrug and offer me a beer or a brat. So after a while- and a few beers -I gave up and walked out of town and back along the mountain path the way I came...

And that's all there was to it. Is it just me or do most dreams have, like, no real resolution one way or another? No ending or imperative that finally is met and wraps everything up neatly so that everybody lives happily ever after? Or would that be the 'thud' of hitting the ground when you dream you're falling? Probably. I've never dreamed much, not to say 'never' but not much, of falling. More often of flying. I remember as a boy I dreamed of flying, and it was very real, right up and out of the park where we lived most of my boyhood years, dodging the power lines and telephone wires, up over the trees and hills, following roughly the route my school bus took every day except a hundred feet in the air. And I wasn't afraid.

I don't remember when the flying dreams became less frequent but I know when they did I often tried to instigate them by thinking 'flying thoughts' before I went to sleep at night. That didn't seem to work. Maybe I'll have to try it again, zoom, zoom, zoom!

Live from East Prospect...

...At least I theenk I am still alive! Boy, it seems I end up here late, late at night a lot. I guess it's the last thing I tend to check before signing off the brightly lit 'lectronic magick box for the night. A quiet week, lot of driving around town and messing around the house. Not that I'm getting anything done, just spending time. On the plus side I have time to think about how to go about a lot of things I didn't have time to do before. I need a sign: 'Genius At Werk'. That way when the steam starts rising from my brow anyone who happens by will know I'm not to be disturbed. Uhh, yeahhh...

Finally got some of those Beatlemania pictures back- mentioned away back -I thought there would be more but it's only a handful. Anyway, the counter guy at WalMart's photo department probably dropped his teeth when he got this order. There must have been twenty rolls of film my wyfe had saved up. I mean, some of them the kids look half their present age! Ridiculous! But there are some beach pics, dogs, kids, lotta stuff. I'll have to try and sort a few out for inclusion in thee Yahoo! family album. Yahoooo!

A walk in the park...

It's called Rocky Ridge for good reason and the walking trails are evidence of how appropriate is it's moniker. Part of the York County Parks system; my Dad used to supervise the maintenance of all the county parks, making trails, trimming trees, cutting grass, all that stuff. Anyway, the fambly took a looong hike through the woods there today, down one hill and up the other. It was sunny and temperate and altogether the kind of day you wanna be out traipsing around in the woods. We were making way too much noise to spot many birds or small creatures, one little grey bird and a single chipmunk being the exceptions. Along with the little rocks dotting the trails there were giant rocks to clamber over and in between- I mean big rocks too, you know, the kind that are stuck together, jutting from the ground at odd angles and one seemingly perched precariously on top of another so that you wonder, 'How did that rock get there anyway?!?' -and walking sticks and plenty of unidentifiable varieties of leaves to be found lying hither and yon. Pretty cool.

BTW I bought a big, hardbound Get Fuzzy comic strip treasury book yesterday and one of the strips featured a haiku by Bucky, the wacko cat who stars in the strip. So I made one up about our sojourn into the forest:

Train whistle, mournful. Ttitmouse barely bends the branch. Woodland afternoon.

Hahahaha, I'm a poet. A Japanese poet, at that. Hahahahaha. Alternately, it could go like this:

Oh... my feet kill me. Watch out for bloodsucking ticks. Put that down, 'stick boy'!

Snap, crackle and pop

That's the sound of my bones, muscles and joints this week, like a bowl of cracklin' breakfast cereal. After who knows what caused a debilitating lower back malfunction, commonly referred to as being 'backed out' in the family parlance, slept the wrong way or something last week, I forced myself out of bed before dawn Saturday to help a group of guys finish the interior of the garage at our local meeting place. With the rain falling steadily if not hurriedly all day, it was in and out of the rain for materials and up and down ladders and scaffolds hanging insulation and sheet metal for six or so hours. Not enough to hurt most of the crew who work construction jobs all week to begin with but for irregular heavy lifters like myself, a real workout. Nothing like it to let you know it might be time to add some regular activites to the schedule to keep body parts from seizing up like an engine what ain't been oiled for a month of Sundays when it's impressed into service once in a while. Sheesh!

So 'Oldies' on the radio is sure appropriate. It's interesting how a number of the songs they play now as 'oldies' I remember hearing for the first time on the radio. Some we used to sing along with in music classes in junior high school(we called it middle school though). 'Billy, Don't Be A Hero'. 'My Eyes Adored You'. 'She's Havin' My Baby'. Imagine twenty or thirty thirteen-year-olds singing, 'She's havin' my baby!' Surreal. I remember riding the school bus from Pequea, the driver played the radio to keep us young savages soothed somewhat, hearing Ray Charles' 'Hit The Road, Jack'. I didn't care for it and my pal, Scott Bechtold, said, 'You don't like this?!? It's rock'n'roll, man!' A hoot to think of that now, 'rock'n'roll', sure.

My favorite oldies? Roy Orbison's 'Oh Pretty Woman'. I used to get a kick out of Winchester Cathedral too. That whistling melody and old-timey, nasal song style was cool, daddy-o. My folks listened to Hee-Haw style country at the time so I like some of that vintage stuff too.(Not the 'new' country, faux country I call it.)They were more than a little mortified- and my brother, the dyed-in-the-wool KISS fan, overjoyed -when I came home from college listening to Scorpions and Van Halen.

Rain on the roof...

...was a wake-up call this AM. Good thing I got most of the grass cut yesterday afternoon, looks 100% better, was becoming a wee bit wavy with the slow growing of the cooling past few weeks catching up to me. Spent the morning on a slow driving tour of the countryside around Brogue and Lucky close to the river where my folks spent their formative years, myself too for that matter. I wondered as I went along how many people still lived roundabout there who are pictured in the three old-timey school pictures I scanned off for my Mum this week. The first is from the Shenk's Ferry school in 1947, my Dad was nine! Here he is now...

And then there are pics from '50 and '51. At least one kid I know, Tim Gordon, I passed on the road this morning, in fact. He was an impish looking youngster and still looks mischievous with a twinkle in his eye but with a gray beard so that he reminds you of one of those yard gnomes! When my sibs and I were small tots he and his wife were 'Uncle Tim and Aunt Judy', my brother and I spent a lot of time traded between their place and ours along with their two girls, playing dolls as I recall. Maybe that was the germination of my own fascination with figurative playthings. I'm pretty sure that at least one of the school pictures was posed at side of the homestead-slash-country store my great-grandmother had there by the river but I don't remember my folks saying they held school there too, I'll have to ask about that.

Whirlwind afternoon in store despite the rain, doctor appointment for the wyfe, drop the girl at work, make a mail run, haircuts for the boy and I, drop him at his uncle's for a weekend hunting trip, then a casual dinner date with some friends. I guess becoming I'm anti-social in my old age, I'd rather come home and fool around in the dark of the toy cave with the radio playing 'House of Hair'. Humbug!

 

Bitter vs. sweet

As if to prove apropos the moniker of this journal, the last week or two have been a real roller coaster. Bitter is parting from a job you hated anyway, no, wait that's super-sweet. Hopefully, those left behind know how much fun I had with them that made it tolerable and, twice as hopefully, them that made it taste like a morsel of death on the days in between enjoy doing without me. Bitter, certainly, is the uncertainty of where the scratch to pay the rent, dentist and doctor and every other money-sucking facet of everyday life is coming from now. But it is sweet to contemplate the days as autumn weighs in, beautiful, sunny, breezy and cooling. Excellent, excellent weather. One of my nieces stayed over the weekend and we made a day at Sam Lewis park, frolicking on the giant rocks that jut from the ground in the most unlikely of places and collecting hickory nuts along the wooded trails. I don't know what you can do with hickory nuts? Sam has an incredible view of the Susquehanna River valley from Wrightsville to Columbia, you can spot parts of Washington Boro between the trees. I'll bet with a telescope you could see all the way to Millersville and Lancaster.

But I'm having fun with my homespun enterprise, sweet, making rubber goodies for action figure aficianados from coast-to-coast and Canada even. It's keeping me busy enough that I wonder how I got any of it done wasting eight hours a day at a real job, hmmm. My wyfe says I need a 'business plan' if I want to work for myself. I don't have a clue what that means except maybe what can I do on my own that somebody else might pay actual money to get me to do it. So I'm thinking real hard about that, Uncle Jed. You know, when I was in the fourth grade at Conestoga Elementary School, Mrs. Rankin- a formidably grandmotherly woman, not unlike the teacher in Calvin & Hobbes -drew a big, red line through the name 'Jed' when I used it in a sentence writing exercise and wrote above it, 'This is NOT a proper name!' 'Well', I protested(quite out of character for the backward youngster I was), 'It's a proper name on The Beverly Hillbillies.' While quite amusing to my classmates, that did not elicit a positive response from Mrs. Rankin and the red mark stayed. These days any oddball combination of syllables serves as a proper name. Moon Unit and Dweezil come readily to mind. Somehow I don't think Mrs. Rankin would have condoned those in writing exercises either.

Well, time to make the rubber gloves. Suh-weeet!

On the road to hell with Fred and Barney

...Hahahaha, that gets your attention, doesn't it?!? They say that particular figurative byway is paved with good intentions, I must be on it 'cause good intentions I got. They say that and they say 'No good deed goes unpunished.', right? Sometimes I think that is true enough. Try to please everybody and you're bound to get kicked in the teeth for it once in a while just to remind you that, while, yes, there are plenty of sweethearts in the general populace, some people are just bastids looking for a fight and none too particular about where they pick it. What am I talking about, you ask? Well, nothing I'd publicize more than to wax philosophical about what happens when you give an unknown a chance to prove themselves and they sneak up and bite ya where the sun don't shine. Hahahaha, take that, nasty bastids! You know who you are, I guess. Or do nasty people know they're nasty? Like Klingons. They know they're behaving badly and they revel in it. Or do your garden variety, run-of-the-mill malcontents just think they're on an even keel while everybody else is A) out to get them or B) is a natural born sucker from way back? I wonder. I suppose they have flashes of insight every now and again, momentary revelations, how might you say? -epiphanies of self-awareness, maybe? Maybe not. Probably less than anybody else at any rate. Too busy sharpening their claws.

Aaaahhhh, I just like to hear myself talk, that's all. Yadda-yadda-yadda. Yabba Dabba Doo! Bah-hah-hah-HEE-Hoooo! I could do this all night! Rock on! Optimism RULES! Oh, Mr. Sunshine, won't you sing me a song? Mr. Sunshine, shine all day long!

Speaking of The Flintstones- Remember how they used to 'Flintstone-ize' movie stars, making their names into stone age parodies? Cary Granite. Rock Hudstone. Ann Margarock. A little stretch that last one, if you ask me. Who else did they do? Tony, no, Stony Curtis. I haven't watched the show for ages, lacking cable access and too cheap to spring for it on DVD so I can't bring up any more from the morass of memory. The point is: One episode featured a cameo, not a walk-on but a ride-on, if you will, of the Bonanza guys, the Cartrocks, hahahahaha. Riding dinosaurs as horses. Now that I'd like to see again. Did they carry six-shooters, I wonder? Or maybe they had slingshots on their hips? Did they wear pants? Fred and Barney didn't, after all! Man, I'm glad it's not the stone age. I'd hate wearing a fur skirt year 'round! Hoo hoooo!

...

...I was thinking when I woke up this morning about the little railroad station in Red Lion, when I first became aware of it a local musician/entrepreneur- John Farmer, quite well-known as a local bluegrass player -was running his antique shop/music studio out of it. I was between my first and second years at Millersville, working at one of the wood shops in town and killin' time after work, waiting for a ride home and it might have been the first time I'd ventured inside when I spied my Charvel for sale. I was pretty green as a guitar player, still wonking around on a no-name hollow body clunker through a cassette player. If you plugged the guitar into the microphone input and pushed 'Play/Record' the guitar sounded through the teensy speaker, even distorted enough to get a rock'n'roll sound... sorta. I only knew the intro to Barracuda and the first lick from Sweet Home Alabama, I guess, enough to amuse myself for hours.

   399 smackers the Charvel was- John said he got it from a guy who played it in the U.S. Navy Band -and being a cautious shopper I called up the only real guitarist I was acquainted with at the time, Bob Riegel, formerly of Gimmesome Roy and Wizzard, to gimme his learned estimate of it's value. And he was a guitar wizard too, a real talent. Later on I bought an Ampeg half stack from him and when we showed up at his place to look at it he was 'foolin' around', playing along with some Triumph record, then he did a little of Van Halen's Spanish Fly for us, really impressive. Still is, I'm sure, though I haven't seen or heard from him in twenty years. Bob worked at another local wood shop at that time along with my cousin, Ronnie, and the singer/bassist in the band, Kirk Folk, and I winced every time I thought of these amazing musicians running table saws and drill presses, endangering their digits every day. Bob looked over the Charvel, sped through a coupla licks without plugging it in and said, 'Well, if you don't buy it, I'm gonna!', so I did. Later I would haunt the railroad station looking for vintage Batman toys as John and his brother, Steve, had become auctioneers and purveyors of sundry antique and collectible goods.

   Nowadays they have their business in the old Kingdom Hall in Red Lion. In fact, the sign out front calls it 'The Old Kingdom Hall Auction House'. Comical. I don't know what's in the railroad station right now.   

Rainy Days and Mondays

How many 'rain songs' are there anyway? Kentucky Rain - Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head - Rain On Me... Man, it's been a dry coupla weeks, maybe more, and now we're making up for lost time, er, precipitation. It was supposed to taper off this afternoon but decided to stay a while and set up camp, I guess. Well, it's a good thing, the grass was brown and dry and crackly underfoot. Maybe it'll green up once more and we'll get one more good mowing in before autumn really takes hold and things cool off for good.

What else is there besides weather to report? Not much. well, there's a lot to report but nothing for a public forum that calls for a certain amount of discretion regarding family details, habits, workplaces and so forth, religious persuasion and hot button topics like that. So it's more mundanities - Is that a real word? -and meaningless chatter... Made a coupla fun road trips for my burgeoning toy enterprise this past week, searching out fabrics for various getups for little plastic men. Lemoyne, home of the PA Fabric Outlet also has half a dozen music stores. We went in one because my son wanted some guitar picks of his own and a pair of drumsticks(what he's going to drum on, I'm not sure...!). Fella was demonstrating an 80s Washburn guitar, the A-20V, a nice, creamy off-white, neck-thru, I used to have one like it but in black. One of those 'Honey, look what I bought even though the rent is due and it's a week from payday' stories, seemed like the thing to do at the time. And then over to New Holland, outside Lancaster. I have more fun just browsing the fabric stores, feeling this and that, slick and textured, glossy and colorful stuff. All the bric-a-brac is neat too, cords and lace and trimming for all sorts of finery. Not to mention the buttons! The trick is thinking ahead to what you can mix-and-match with the next handful of projects or stocking up for things you haven't even thought of as yet!

Boy, it's late and I'm not going to wanna get up in the morning. I got started working on a coupla things here in the basement lab and then browsed the mighty eBay for a while. Running out of things-I-don't-need to search for and running out of steam in general.... zzzz.....

Begone, vile bugs!

Oooooh, bite my tongue next time I mention freedom from illness! This stuff is hangin' in there like a trouper. Or a trooper, one of the two. Sore throat, wheeziness, general achiness. 'Ugh' with a capital 'gh'...

But at least it leaves me enough energy to do some toy making in between narcoleptic bouts and general malaise. And entertain my brother, Brad, who stopped in yesterday with a gift of a guitar effects box. But I'm being paged now to make breakfast- even sick, I'm still the 'Breakfast King'! -so I better answer the call. More later perhaps!

Sick Day

Off work with sickness today, not long after noting to a friend that it had been some time since I had so much as a sniffle, cough or wheeze. But I dragged myself out of bed to keep my plaything production afoot and added a note over on the toy weblog so I thought I'd update here as well. One of my son's favorites has always been Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, I long ago learned a pidgin version to amuse him and so added this cd to the collection thinking I might learn a tune or two from Gordon and never did. Pretty stuff, very engaging, he's so mellow-voiced and the guitar is so clean and tuneful. I'll bring it upstairs and put it on the bedside player, a coupla Benadryl and I'll be Dreamland bound...zzzzz...

Do I overuse the ellipsis?... It seems a useful device oftimes...

News of the day

Ahhh, what to write? No great shakes lately, been a tolerable week thus far at the workplace. Had some fun comraderie with my buddy, Patoo, and another recent toy convert, Doug(who, by the way, is a woodworking hobbyist as well, builds elaborate birdhouses and is working, however slowly, on a Ponderosa ranch house facade for to display my own homemade Bonanza men), over a closeout store find of some retro-style GI Joe figures. One has a neato pilot helmet with a little flip down visor, very cool. We all got snookered out of them once before when a fourth toy buddy snapped up a batch at another store and promptly sold them off at a healthy markup on eBay... without a thought of his fellow toy geeks, that stinky goat! (Yeah, you, Don!) Happily, I was able to hook everybody up with their favorite Joe outta this batch.

Don't you hate an IM box popping up, thinking, 'Hey, who's this? Somebody I know but don't know online perhaps?' and it turns out to be another 'We're getting naked!' come-on?!? Eeee....

What else? Footloose and fancy-free over the weekend so the boy and I picked up our buddy, Fred- he whose wife deserted him along with my own on the road to Kentuck, leaving him high and dry without a car or spending cash! -and ran some errands and went to Pizza Hut. Next day it was just the kids and I after Sunday-go-to-meetin' so we took a little drive up country to Hummelstown to browse the All Toy Company, a collection of vintage toy dealers. The town also boasts one of the best pizza joints for miles around, Jo-Jo's, great Italian bread sandwiches so the kids laid waste a pair of cheeseburger subs. I got a pepperoni stromboli, a standard junk food from my college days at Millersvile's Sugar Bowl. I make them myself a coupla times a year and they're better than bought because I stuff 'em so full of pepperoni they bust out at the seams with cheese and grease.(Drooling on the keyboard...)

Back to Fred, he's not an artsy type at all- he and Cathy have a few years on us and he's worked as a prison guard and in various manufacturing environments before being sidelined by some health problems -but some time ago he started out of the blue making these little wacky sculptures, just something to pass the time, I suppose. Animal heads, some strange cartoony faces, small figures and what-have-you. I've tried to encourage him to make some molds and duplicate them because they are really pretty nice for an untutored artist. I mean, they'd be nice for a schooled artist.. you know what I mean? I'll have to try and get some pictures of them. Anyway, he's tried renting a craft mall booth, that was a bust even though I thought he was offering them waaaay too cheaply, and was supposed to place a few in a new gallery an acquaintance of his son's was opening but that never materialized. He had a coupla new ones to show incorporating plastic doll eyes, strange but cool in a 60s Rat Fink surf monster way.

The wyfe returned from Kentucky gushing dreams of relocating there in the near future. Says it's beautiful and green and the cost of living is way lower, cheap land, cheap housing... no work. I dunno. We toyed with the idea of moving to the beach on and off but I think if I'm gonna uproot it better be for a more agreeable clime and something like sandy beaches to recommend it. I guess Kentucky is more southerly and therefore more temperate, I guess, I don't really know, but what else has it got? I'm not a practical sort of man, by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't see jumping from a frying pan into a fire on a whim or a weekend vacation's impression either. Not like moving down the street or across the county even, which we've done way too many times as it is. We're like steenking nomads, fer cryin' out loud! I remember how hateful it was the few times I moved with my parents, my kids have had to do it twice that many times...

And I bought another guitar, a real throwback to the halcyon days of metal mania, all pointy and begging for a tiger stripe paint job. I'm thinking lately I may never master the music but, by cracky, it won't be for a lack of instruments. The question is "Do I start hanging them from the ceiling next?" I'm tripping over them almost daily in our wee abode already...!

 

Observations

  Boy, I thought I had some odd stuff in my music library. My brother, Brad, stopped by last night to show off the finished Wonka trike and brought along a CD case full of some wild stuff, a lot of nu-metal I guess you'd call it. Not a whole lot to my taste, it all sounds the same and not very catchy at all. But I picked out this band, Guano Apes, to give a listen for a while. They have an interesting vibe, lot going on, very cool production. I'd liken them to Evanescence but not so ethereal or operatic, some great heavy sounds with a little Oingo Boingo thrown in for good measure. And how 'bout that moniker? I'm telling you, I was fifteen years ahead of time with 'Monkey Grip'. Anyway, I swapped him Queens Of The Stone Age' latest and presented him with a Rogue Male album he'd admired last week on eBay. I think they were French, 80s metal, like a junior Motorhead from what I remember of their sound. He's gonna make us CD copies from it, should be interesting.

On my tour of the neighborhood this morning I saw a variety of cats, blacks and grays, one a black and brown calico I guess you'd call it, very skittish. And one rabbit. I'm surprised the rabbits ever show themselves with as many free ranging felines as call this little burg home. There's a house on the main street with a great rambling English sort of garden, they have several giant green pumpkins maturing on the sidewalk. Another place with a morning glory vine overtaking the shrubbery at the rear of their yard, great little violet and white blooms. Speaking of, there's another house with a giant sort of trumpet vine-slash-bush with great big white blossoms. I can put two fingers inside the trumpet, cool.

The man down the street with the pink flowering hedge and the beautiful collie had a big blowout last weekend and it looks as though he's gearing up for another today. In fact, he was just readying the pig for the roaster last night around ten. At eleven he was perched in his lawn chair in the driveway and the roaster was smoking already. This morning at seven he was in the same spot, maybe he slept in the chair, turning the spit in his sleep. Wow, it wafted the alluring smell of smoky bacon and then some and followed me halfway down the street.

But the strangest thing was somebody's outfit left by the ball diamond. Jeans, t-shirt, belt, shoes and a white garment which, having not inspected too closely, I can only hope was not an undergarment yet. Stacked carefully if not precisely at the curb in the grass and I guess they walked away in the altogether. Who knows...?

ROTFLLAM

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, rolling on the floor, indeed. My high school senior year picture now graces the box at left. Boy oh boy, what a glamour shot that was. At least the friendly photographer managed to retouch it so the prominent teenage scourge of debilitating skin eruptions didn't show. Probably took a few hours I would think.

Anyway, it's just one of a handful of photos I found under a stack of junk, waiting to be added to the online family album. Don't take my word for it, go look. The newest additions are at the bottom. Use the handy and aptly labelled 'Family Album' link at left. I'll wait here.

Pay no attention...

...to this entry, just saving my goofy turn of a phrase for my own future amusement as I get ready to change the picture in the box.

This is a picture of one Wes McCue- note the insipid grin; the tousled, carefree appearance and the indisputable photographic evidence of electromagnetic super-energy spiraling from the subject's cerebellum. Consider, if you will, his weblog at right. Is it random cogitation of the sort one might ascribe to an intelligent chimp? Possibly. Or is it the mutterings-under-his-breath of a man heedless of passersby at midday on a busy city street, a man hardly grown into his adult skin? Perhaps. 

Or is it something more? Something only given slight notice... in the Twilight Zone...!

Thor's day...

This collection begins with Kentucky Rain, coincidental becuz' the wyfe is in Kentucky this w/e. Like most 'foreign' places I imagine it all primitive, untamed like the days of Daniel Boone even though I know better. Y'know, Boone was borned right here in PA, I've been by his birthplace on some road trip or other. This song was written by Eddie Rabbitt, his best work I think. It's one of those songs I can put on 'repeat' and listen to over and over again. I slacked off adding to the family album but in the whirlwind reconstruction of the toy haven I found a small cache I had planned to add so I'm scanning them now. I like the virtual process- scanning, saving, naming, uploading and so forth -but the tangible photo is still something special, isn't it? You can't carry a .jpg in your wallet as such. I guess if you have one of those photo-capable cell  phones it's a portable image. Still not the same as that glossy scrap of paper getting dog-eared over time.

Events

  Boy, as a kid I used to love The Monkees too. I remember watching them and my Dad saying he couldn't believe they actually got 'paid to act like idiots on national TV'. He wasn't big on their music either. I'm sure later on he would have preferred The Monkees on my stereo versus Van Halen. Once upon a time, probably 1982, he called the family to the porch for a picture and I was decked out in a concert jersey, my 'holy' jeans and at least four bandanas wrapped here and there, the big tiger striped one around my neck, hair everywhere. Hahaha, he would not take the picture until I at least took the one off my neck. "This is real life, not #*%@ Van Halen!", he said. I think I was stunned that he actually knew the name of the band. I recovered quickly enough- "It's just Van Halen, Dad. Not #*%@ Van Halen.", I said, hahahaha. What a smartass kid I was.

   But I digress. I mentioned the 'Stony Brook Bypass' previously, my usual route home. Monday night as I passed the apartment complex on one side there was a teeny little girl in rain boots standing all by herself not a foot off the side of the road. Now, it's not a main artery, by any means, but it is a pretty heavily trafficked cutoff and this was right after work so it was waaay  too busy for this tyke to have any business whatsoever standing virtually on the roadway. I thought, 'If nobody stops and finds out what's going on you'll see her on the evening news hit by a car...', so I swung around and as I came back to the spot where she was standing there was a van stopped in the road and the wee lass crossing deliberately and none too speedily in front of it! Ay-yi-yi! By the time I got off the road and parked, a woman in another van had stopped to help too. I thought it better anyway that a motherly figure approach the girl but, fearing an untoward domestic situation, the woman asked if I would accompany her as she walked the girl home. Which I did along with another fellow who happened by and overheard the woman quoting the little girl, 'I don't want somebody to call the police on my Mommy and Daddy..' Finally, the girl spotted her father walking about the complex, a mite too casually by my estimation given the life-threatening circumstance his four-year-old daughter had wandered into. He did seem genuinely consternated when apprised of the situation, however, and we left it at that. Not that my kids never made an escape or got out of sight at a tender age, still, it was no small cause for wonder that such a small fry would A) have free run of an apartment complex where she could endanger herself in any number of ways and B) determine she needed to cross a busy street to a business where she was unknown and knew no one... Go figure.

   In other news, the toy haven is coming along. All that remains are one materials shelf and the video shelves to arrange. The videos are a real mess, tapes and more tapes and even more tapes- Batman, Star Trek, Bonanza, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, lots of other sci-fi and TV westerns -and then DVDs stacked on top of those stacks. I hate to unload any because I know I'll need to watch it as soon as I do. Oh, yeah, and a little sorting of the storage bins of various and sundry craft materials, fabrics, dolls and doll parts, photo file and who-knows-what-else I've stashed and forgotten. By the time I'm finished I figure I'll have to start all over dusting the plastic men. Some of them were really, really hairy looking after standing here unattended for many, many months. I finally stopped trying to dust and wipe them individually and dragged them by the handful into the driveway and hosed them off, no kidding, and let them dry in the sunshine. I was careful not to do too many at one time though lest passersby think it was a toy yard sale or something going on.

  I should be getting accustomed to the bachelor life by now. This week my spouse is out the door Wednesday headed to Kentucky for the weekend, some sort of spa retreat with her best gal pal whose husband begged off. And the kids'll stay with their cousins to facilitate my girl child's work schedule, her workplace is only a stone's throw from their abode. It'll give me plenty of time to do my little rubber experiments and spray paint some homemade toy fixins, I guess. Maybe the neighbors will be out a night or two and I can turn the amp up to eleven, squeeee-ZOINKS!!! My erstwhile bandmates have been trying out some new playmates too, might be a chance to see what's happening on the rock scene... We'll see, maybe I can talk them into doing 'Hey, hey, we're the Monkees!'...

TGIF...

...and it was a short week even. Still seemed like an eternity, bleecchhh. Anyway, I usually pass my little family on the route home as they come the opposite way driving my daughter to work. Her start time makes it just a hearn too precarious for me to get all the way home and get her back to town on time. So we flash headlights at each other and wave like idiots as we pass. Tonight I thought 'I'll be a little smarter and park along the way where they can pull over when they see me. Then we can plan a little shopping or dinner out or something.' This is what people who have yet to join the cellular communications revolution do instead of driving with one hand and dialing with the other.

   At any rate, we missed each other and I ended up shopping for myself at WalMart, fuel injector cleaner, oil and filter- my one small foray into automotive maintenance, I can change the oil! Well, I can change a flat too. And wash the car. Yep, that's about it... - thumb tacks and packing tape, new rulers- my old wooden one is so scarred and dog-eared, plus I use it to stir colors into latex, whatta mess! -and some small picture frames for displays in my toy enclave.

   The good news is our paths didn't cross because they were doing a little shopping of their own at the local irregular/closeout clothing store and brought home a super-neato Creature From The Black Lagoon T-shirt for moi, despite its evolutionary leanings Creature is one of my favorite monster movies. Which is double-super-neato because I just brought the Creature doll back into display circulation as I organize the shelves and wall space in the toy museum. When the makers announced the Creature doll, it was supposed to be a rubber mask over a likeness of the actor who did the swimming parts in the film, Ricou Browning. For some reason it didn't make it into production and it's a standard hard head figure. Which is still incredibly cool, the likeness and detail are just beyond compare. I'd like to know what scale these things are sculpted in originally because they are astoundingly accurate, all the scaly textures and finny protuberances are there, right on the money...

   Again I'm more in the toy mode but that's my wont, I suppose. Like a pendulum swings, so go my interests and the intensity of the attention given to them, waxes and wanes, hopscotching from one thing to another. Some would say that's significant, that it smacks of attention-deficit disorder or some such modernistic malady. But at least one learned individual with many certificates and degrees on his wall has pronounced me free of at least the more pronounced symptoms of that disability. Says I'd never have completed an Adam West as TV's Batman action figure of my own making if that were the case. Still, some might beg to differ with that conclusion based on that limited evidence...!

   Boy, can I go on about nothing or what?

The Toy Cave

I suppose this belongs in my Classic Plastick log but, hey, it's mundane enough for inclusion here, sez me. I'll copy it over there and kill two birds with one stone. 'The Toy Cave', alternately the 'toy lab', the 'enclave of madness', 'dungeon of defenestration'... Okay, I don't even know what 'defenestration' means... Anyway, the main pathway through our humble abode passes right by the ramshackle desk/shelving/display/storage area that houses my toy collection and the workings of my so-called toy company. It has slowly grown and overgrown until I could hardly make my way to the desk chair or turn 'round twice without knocking into some stack of craft items, comic books, ring binders, record albums, guitars and parts of guitars and assorted seemingly self-reproducing articles of various stripes. It started simply enough with the shelves and topmost surfaces of the computer desk arranged with all the little plastic men I hold so dear and the lower regions arrayed with the latex, paint, clay, paper and other makings but at some point it all went haywire and it became easier to just stack stuff on top of the last stack, however precarious.

But this week I've taken a good run at organizing the place. The largest task by far is just dusting the toy men! I'm taking that in small doses to avoid being overcome by the flying dust balls. But I have managed to make some sense of the 'library'- a small collection of TV, comic and superhero related books -as well as the dozen or so ring binders of various sizes loaded with Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, Hanna-Barbera TV Superheroes, Joe Kubert's Tarzan, Bonanza and a few examples of other TV western comics. Hung some stuff that had been laying around waiting for a thumb tack or wall space to become available. I've found some things I'd lost or forgotten about; the DVD slideshow and video from the now defunct Ponderosa Ranch at Incline Village, Nevada, a binder of Viewmaster sets seperated from the main body of the collection, an arm from a plastic figure of Talos, the giant bronze man from the sword-and-sandals classic Jason and The Argonauts, a huge negative blown up from a drawing I did shortly after my adult onset Bat-mania took hold; a big, broad-shouldered, running Batman with his cape fluttering around him, I need to get some prints from that. I even took time to straighten out Superman and Space Ghost 'flying' above the desk. They no longer face the wall as they dangle from their fishing string harnesses, cool.

Not only that, it was all accomplished along with making a nine piece stencil of the Willie Wonka logo and a Target license plate for a custom tricycle, if you can believe it. More on that later. A few more nights of this and the place might even be...>gasp<...presentable!

Monday, Monday...

Aahhhh, nothing like a Monday with no work. Stay up late, sleep in, loll about all morning. Why can't every Monday be a holiday, I wanna know? Or Friday? I'm not particular, I'll take either one. I recall a certain high school social studies teacher telling thirty glassy-eyed youngsters that by the time they'd been in the work force for perhaps a few years economic conditions and a rising standard of life would make a four day work week the norm. Well, let's see... I've been out of high school for going on twenty-five years, in the work force for twenty two of those years and I have yet to obtain employment that asked only four days a week. Maybe I'm just doing the wrong kind of work!

Anyway ol' Doc sings and plays such a mellow, folksy kind of tune... I'd give a toe on either foot to make my fingers do just half of what that old blind carpenter can do with a guitar, sweeeet.

Speaking of guitars, fired up the Charvel with my bass buddy Jimmy on Friday night. Not for long though because, though it's still got a great sound and feel, looks great since all the little dings and dents have been glossed over and refinished... it also still does not stay in tune. No magick fix occurred over time while it was gathering dust or on the glue bench. I guess I'll have to consider some opions at the nut, rollers or something. I hate to go the whole tremolo route, A) because it has a certain 'pre-production' name value in spite of it's misadventure, always lessened by additions or modifications, not to mention my own sentimental attachment to the guitar as it stands.

   And B) the cost of adding an aftermarket locking tremolo unit is numbingly expensivo. I found that out when I snagged my Epiphone Strat for forty bucks- can you believe it? -an Epiphone humbucker for ten smackers and the Floyd tremolo for fifty, three swell eBay deals. I thought 'Great! Now I'll get the tremolo slapped in there for a hundred or so bucks and be ready to rock and roll on the cheap!' I was duly warned it would be less expensive to buy a guitar already outfitted with tremolo and, still heedless of the dangerous cost of hours of routing and wiring and fitting and testing and so forth, insisted on proceeding with the instrumental makeover. Suffice to say, the guitar is a joy to play, sounds great, actually stays in tune once its tweaked properly and the strings are stretched in right... andcost almost four times the figure I had in my head. Ouch!

Well, enough for now, the day is far too beautiful to spend here in the darkness! Adventure awaits!

Giant green bass waves...

That's more like it, I had a huuuuge photo, resized now... Anyway, there's that old PhotoShop rippling magick at work. Not professional, by any means, but still gives a rather surreal, even otherworldly edge to the image, don'cha think?

Good ol' Jim, 'Jimmy Rave' he styles himself onstage. When I was seriously interested in becoming a heavy metal type guitar player, nigh almost twenty years ago, Jim and I worked together for a local fly-by-night landscaping outfit and he was just starting out playing bass. Because I could fake a few licks and stumble through a song or two but especially because I had the requisite rock star 'big hair', I became his guitar hero. We get a good laugh outta that these days, lemme tell ya.

Anyway, we lost touch after a while and then one day a little over a year and a half ago he called up outta the blue. We went out to lunch and he brought over a video of his band playing some local watering hole. He'd become a bona fide rock star! And it was like the intervening years were but a week, maybe two. That's just the kind of guy Jim is, gregarious, easygoing, do-anything-for-you. Always there when you gotta move a refrigerator, tow a dump truck by hand or build a log house.

So he twisted my arm into venturing along one night as he jammed with some guys who were putting together a band and eventually we got together with the aforementioned little group until just recently. In fact, we're headed up to the storage facility tomorrow night, just to goof around and make some noise now that I have my old Charvel back. Wheeee!

Hump day

Half past another week. Three more days we'll never get back. It's all downhill from here, as the saying goes. Ain't that the truth? Well, at least my home wasn't built seventeen feet below sea level and now inundated by seawater with nowhere to go and no way to get there. There's always an upside to any given situation, I suppose. For those who find themselves in the aftermath of natural devastation, it's that they're still drawing breath no matter what things they may have lost. Easy to observe from high and dry, harder to put yourself in that place where everything's gone but what you've got on and you're trying to figure out where you're gonna live now, where you're gonna sleep tonight for that matter. Where to get a drink of clean water... Makes you thirsty just thinking about it, doesn't it?

I usually have some inane patter to drivel on about here but I think I'm too steeped in the evening news to banter casually tonight. Or I'm just too tired, shorted myself on my usual caffeine intake today by more'n half. Though I did manage to edit my 'About Me' box at left. Snappy, huh? I guess it's no sin to banter casually a little even though the world outside is a frightful mess. What if we all walked around moping over eco-disasters, political unrest and myriad human ills day after day...? We'd be a planet full of mopey-faces and the USS Enterprise would never bother traveling back in time to save itself because they'd be a future full of mopey-faced spacemen, moping around the galaxy...

Talk about steeped in the news, I'm just steeped in TV and goofball popular culture, is all. My wife hates that I can never be serious for long. Grocery shopping, make a banana nose and stick oranges up my shirt. Car breaks down, show a little leg to try and get a ride. Funerals... well, I don't make fun at funerals. Not much anyway. And not out loud.

What else is going on? Can't think of a thing...

Sunday driving... again...

So it was busy day at the wheel, driving, driving, driving. Out and about around 10 am, had some homespun toy makings to mail off including a pair of my little rubber gloves to a chap in Australia. Can you believe it only costs 80 cents to send a small padded envelope all the way around the world? I imagine the dingos looking up as the mail plane flies low overhead dropping the mail sack at some outback outpost. Ah, I'm sure it's more civilized than all that. Made a stop at the local convenience store for some edibles for the road. I've made a habit of patronizing one store in particular since they've begun offering the homemade snack cakes which are made by a fellow I've dealt with for vintage toys at Renninger's Flea Market for 10 or fifteen years. He calls it 'Home Sweet Home', good stuff.

Hit a few yard sales, stopped by Barry's Country Market, close to home, for a bucket of fried chicken and potatoes and Turkey Hill Green Tea with Ginseng and Honey for lunch and kept on the road through my boyhood stomping grounds, Smith Hollow back of Brogue, PA, passing the small bridge where, driving my cousin Ronnie's Monte Carlo, I almost drove into the creek while looking down at the gearshift to see where the next gear was located. Passed the spot where my Mom went to the one-room schoolhouse and later a black family sat my brother and I when we were small (I remember more than once coming in from the bright sunshine into the darkness of the house and being jolted by old John T. speaking from his chair in the corner. Couldn't make him out but for the whites of his eyes even after my eyes adjusted...), two former homes of one aunt (no, actually it was three, I tend to forget she lived at the third for a short time), one former residence of a 2nd aunt and uncle(an old farmhouse with a handful of outbuildings made a great playground as a young'un, of course, the landscape has changed completely now...), my grandparents' old house, my great-grandparents' old house where my family lived as well for a while when my parents were younger than I am now, Pret Gohn's little country store, shuttered and quiet like his home next door since he died last year. Or was it the year before?

Passed the place where one of Ronnie's girlfriends' sisters lived, she had the coolest gunmetal gray metallic Dodge Challenger when we were teens. The dairy farm where his best friend lived, still does, I'm guessing (It was party central for the gangof kids from Collinsville and Brogue. They always thought it a great joke to offer me the bong as it went around because I hung out with them, liked the same music, went to their beer parties and backroads drag races and so on but never took up the habit of smoking their stuff.). I was looking out for the Collinsville Fish & Game Club where Deep Sixx, my 1st garage band, made our 1st and only public appearance but I made a wrong turn down another back road before we got that far.

From there it was a long, winding road through the back country of southern York County- Woodbine, Fawn Grove,Stewartstown (whose venerable community building was the site of my 2nd band, Mean Streak's, 1st and last public outing), Shrewsbury and New Freedom, home to Jeff Hostetter's Stringed Instrument Repair where my long-lost pre-production Eddie Van Halen style black-and-yellow Charvel guitar was all fixed up like new. As close to new as possible anyway for a guitar that met with some serious misadventure and was split into two pieces and only one of those connected to the neck. On top of the glue and clamp job to put the body back together it took a coupla new frets, filling some divots and paint touch ups on the body, steaming out some nasty dings on the neck and then assembling the whole megilla again. I wanted to ask Jeff if perchance he'd gotten any 'Before' and 'After' pictures to maybe post on his website but I was too excited and more or less just grinned like an idiot looking at myself in the smooth, glossy finish while I wrote him a check.

Two antique store stops, one clothing consignment shop for the girls' buying pleasure, another music store stop, WalMart for an Rx refill for the little woman, Borders where the boy had a book special ordered waiting and, finally, back home where I dragged the Crate out to the tool shed and plugged up the Charvel for the first time in, like, six, seven years. I thought I might have a hard time with it because it's a slightly wider neck and the two guitars I've been playing lately have standard, rather narrow necks but it was actually a pretty easy transition, my little left paw always liked its unfinished neck and big frets, plus it's just a goooood sounding guitar when it's turned up. Not so great for mellow stuff but for power chords and squealing lead parts... it's a winnah! Finally gave it a rest when it got dark and I thought I'd best quit before the neighbors complained and the cops showed up. Now it's here on a guitar stand, boy, is it weird to see it sitting there. A good feeling, but weird. I pretty much feel like I'll never be a 'musician' just a dilletante but even so, I'll tell you, I still think it's an amazing thing, fingers on strings making sounds outta nothing, outta thin air as it were. Ceaselessly fascinating. I remember I literally ate and slept with this guitar when I first got it. In fact, I have maybe six pictures of myself with it from way back when and in three of them I've fallen asleep with it strapped on. Nutty, I know...

Anyway, that was my day in a nutshell.

What I meant to say was...

...I reached under the car seat she was sitting on... not her seat. Oh, brudder!

Although a year or so later at Millersville I stopped to give a ride to another girl I was mooning over- I know, I had a different crush every six months there for a while -and was just moving my books and stuff to make room for her when she slipped in the seat. I often thought afterward, 'Hey, that's a pretty sly trick...', though I really didn't intend for it to happen. Really, I didn't! I guess I should warn my own daughter to watch out for things like that... Even though she's prohibited from dating until at least 21, maybe 27, we'll see...

How did I get on this subject anyway?!?

What rhymes with 'jacket'?

Placket? Whack it? Hoo boy! Since I mentioned it, I confirmed my change-of-season mania, fever, madness, whatever ya wanna call it for outerwear by starting early this year. A stop at the local thrift store on the way home this after yielded first a cool faded denim blue corduroy 'big shirt' I'll call it. Not a coat or a jacket by design but certainly a practical function as heavy as it is. Man, I can hardly wait for the temps to drop to about 50, 55 one fine day, hoo hah! And a nice foresty green pullover fleece thing with blue nylon accents and one of those hand warmer pocket things in front. Zipper neck, very cozy, great for early morning surveys of the neighborhood on crisp autumn mornings. Daggone, this is exciting stuff! I guess the whole change of season thing is more of the inspiration than anything for the love of jackets and coats. Back to school, of course. Trees changing. First snowfall. Things like that. I remember once taking out a girl I had crushed on for quite some time, it was very autumnal at the time, we went to see The Terminator and then stopped by her high school football game so her girlfriends could check out the long-haired college guy. Funny. But I remember the breezy night and my Rocky Horror t-shirt, a big brown corduroy suit coat and the brown and white striped scarf I sported with it, good thing the coat was warm because my jeans were 'holy' and not good for keeping out drafts. Aaaahh, 80s rock star fashion. I also recall feeling under her seat at a red light for a certain cassette I wanted to play for her- all very innocent, honestly - taking my foot off the brake for a second and tapping the car in front of us. Doh! Very smoooth, dude... It was once and done though, I was too wild looking for her parents' liking and a coupla years later she married a nice church-going guy I had worked with at the wood shop. He and I had actually doubled up with a coupla girls we met one night and... well...ah... that's another story entirely...

Summer twilight

Isn't it funny how as summer winds down the days seem to just roll by like a wagon ride downhill? No, wait, that's every day, all year long, after you pass the bloom of youth, I guess. Reminds me of those Calvin and Hobbes cartoons where he careened carelessly along, whizzing by trees and over rocks, mindless of the omnipresent possibility of bloody upset and dire misadventure.

Kids are starting back to school already, in a day or two anyway. Temps are moderating somewhat, especially at night. York Fair coming up in a week or two, still have HersheyPark tickets from work to make use of before they close up for the season. I wonder if they still have the creek full of those giant goldfish? And Skee-Ball? My Dad used to roll Skee-Ball all afternoon. I don't remember what kinda prizes they gave out back then. I know I was always begging change to try out the arcade vending machines, you know, those sepia-toned picture cards of movie stars and stuff? I have a handful of them in my Bonanza collection now; Little Joe, Hoss and Ben, Chuck Connors. They were probably color by the time I came along though. One of the machines had custom car pictures and I just knew there had to be a Batmobile card in there somewhere. But I never got one. Last time we went, a few years back now, we caught the music revue including a cool Elvis show. If I ever went karaoke, it'd have to be Elvis. And I'd have to have a few beers. All the better to curl mah lip, li'l momma...

Been a short summer it seems. Good thing as hot as it got in spots. Anyway, I'm always ready for the change in wardrobe the change in seasons brings. Somewhere along the way I developed a real love of coats. Coats, jackets, windbreakers, big hooded overwear, stuff like that. I've always got a goodly selection and hate to part with any when I get a new one. Go figure. Before you know it it'll be coat-wearing season and blankets piled high at night because of the cold outside and not because the AC is cranked up, forming ice on the windowsills.

Last year my spouse took a turn removing the air conditioner from the upstairs window with comical results. I guess she expected the appliance to balance itself when she threw open the window because it fell headlong to the ground in a big, metallic hurry. Or at least it fell as far as my front lawn guitar chair, conveniently placed aganst the house versus its usual place under the tree, smashing its plastic frame into several pieces. Needless to say, I got a new guitar chair this summer. AC still works okay. She says it was like a scene from a movie or something, screamed out loud watching it slip from the sill and when she stuck her head out the open window to see the result of its drop laughed out loud. Brought the kids running thinking she was having a mental break of one sort or another. Of course, they had a good guffaw as well when Mommy, doubled over laughing, could only point out the window...

Well, I think I've had enough electromagnetic exposure for one night. Now I'll go turn on the television... Say goodnight, Sheryl. "Good night, Sheryl."

 

Lancaster report

Short and sweet the little day trip to the Red Rose City, stopped at our usual breakfast place on the way, George's Restaurant and Pizza Castle in Mountville, found Lancaster's farmer's market closed but we did browse the downtown Art Shop and a coupla artsy gewgaw purveyors including Strawberry & Co., Zanzibar and POP!, a weird little punk/retro fashion boutique. I always make a stop at the pawn shop for guitars but they had nothing exciting in stock. One stop I now realize we forsook was Stan's Record Bar, drats. There are a coupla galleries and one little shop with some windup robots and a cool selection of cards and stuff along the same street. Oh well, save those for next trip. The best part, of course, was watching the people on the street, in their cars, hurrying who knows where. Interesting how people you'll never meet remind of people you've known or famous faces. I often think I'd like to have a camera handy in public and just shoot strangers right and left, take 'em home and make an album of interesting faces. There was a hot dog vendor on the square who we did not patronize having recently broken fast and the newspaper company has a little courtyard open to the general public with a swell waterfall and fountain, neato. We went in and watched and listened to the water for a few minutes and resisted the urge to stamp about in the invitingly cool and frothy pool.

Hahaha, this Semisonic song, Never You Mind, has a Star Trek reference from the episode 'Spock's Brain'. Missed that on previous listening. Coupla co-workers were anxious to let me know a newspaper article last week announced the upcoming availability of a cell phone modeled after the Trek communicators. I always said I'd go cellular when they were like a communicator with the cool flip-up lid and sound FX a la the original show. Of course, I had to comment that I really want a real phaser next. There's a short list of people I'd just like to stun real good. Just once...

McCoy: "Blast it, Jim! You can't just go around stunnin' folks right and left" Kirk: "Who's the Captain here, Bones? You? Or me?" Spock: "Logical, Captain. Flawlessly logical." Kirk: "All right then. Let 'em have it!

Field Trippin'

Howdy ho, neighbor! I've got the day off, doing some mechanical stuff at the plant so there's no power throughout the facility, breaks my heart! So I'm loadin' up the truck and goin' to Beverly... Hills, that is... Well, no, not really. Just over to Lancaster Town PA, cross the river. They've got a nice little downtown scene goin', coffee shops, art galleries, not sure if the Central Market is runnin' today but I'm gonna find out, by cracky! There's even a junk shop or two where y'never know what you're gonna find, records, guitars, etc., etc. Holds the promise of leisure and warm strollin' sidewalk joy all day. Wahooo! Let's go!

S-a-t-u-r-d-a-y... Night!

Big deal. It used to be but no more. Talk about your settled-in homebodies, look in the dictionary and my picture is there. Anyway, it was another lousy week at work, proving, as if I didn't know it before, you can't trust anybody you've known less than seventeen years. Even then, you better keep an eye on 'em... Not to worry, I'll have my optimist goggles on again in a few weeks, a month at the outside and then some other worldly-wise bastid will have the opportunity to take their shot at me while they're smiling in my face. No problem.

I think it's just a conglomeration of circumstances making me somewhat... not morose exactly but definitely on the disaffected side of the street. Work is crappier than usual, wife and kids home early from the shore- not a bad thing at all, in and of itself -except it's because of a death in the family which caused some serious tension between the three girls. Seems there's always a crisis looming, breaking or healing over in a family with enough mental health issues to keep a battery of psychiatrists busy as the proverbial one-legged man. And that tension isn't left at the doorstep of our humble abode, by any means. It walks right in, kicks its shoes off and gets comfortable. I hear him upstairs rooting in the fridge for leftovers right now, I think!

So I spent the day working on the storage shed. Wow, what a nightmare. It gets cleaned and organized once, twice a year and still manages to becomes a tangled, lopsided, impenetrable mass of tools, bikes, bins, balls, unused small appliances, things we might use, things we'll never use, unfamiliar things that thought there was a party goin' on and came to stay from who knows where.

Anyway, I got a good start on it: dragged everything that wasn't nailed down into the driveway, got a former pantry cabinet in place to store some car stuff, organized the overhead shelves into discernible departments: craft goods, camping gear, luggage and my toy collection overflow. Yes, that's right, I'm 44, old enough to know better and still have more toys- playthings, not grown-up boy toys -than I can comfortably keep in my house. Sad and strange, isn't it? Also got the spaghetti leading to the power strip figured out so I finally fired up the phonograph that's been gathering dust out there for a year or more. I did a little yard-sale-ing the other weekend and got four Ventures albums and have been itching to give them a listen. It's interesting, the liner notes on one says the guitar players were relative novices when they first hit it big, they'd only been playing for a few years. Amazing. I wonder if they still play shows? I'd go see 'em.

It finally got to where the outer perimeter was all nice and straightened up and I realized everything that had to come back in; mowers, empty storage bins, assorted snow toys, a rolling cart with fax machine we got free at another yard sale and never tried out and some old videos, more stacking plastic chairs than we've had guests in the last five years, a single wooden folding chair my wife insists we keep because... well, I don't know why really, unless it has something to do with its mate which she asks about every so often and, I swear, I have never seen, was more than gonna fill the remaining floor space and I was gettting more than a little tired and bored so I more or less just dragged it all back in the middle and will have another spell of organization another day. It'll give me a chance to drag out the eight or ten Bonanza albums I have on a shelf and give them a spin! There's one where Hoss, Dan Blocker, narrates American folk stories and John Mitchum( actor- he was the fat detective who couldn't get over the fence in Dirty Harry -also brother to Robert Mitchum and, of course, folk singer) sings the songs about said characters and places.

And, hey, I feel better already! A little tippy-tap and a pleasant Bonanza reverie and the cares of the day seem to faaaade awaaayyy...