Better late

Okay, I'm officially suffering from 'occupational burnout'. Probably more than anything the result of the previous several years as a dedicated man of leisure, crafting my homespun doodads and not much else for a few hours a day, so that being dragged kicking and screaming back into the workaday world- albeit still on a part time basis -has got me on the ropes. The drive is a little more or less an hour each way and that doesn't help, add in travel time and it makes the twelve hour toy delivery days a regular grind. It's more physical burnout than mental, the actual 'work' is great fun, especially when it includes the satisfaction of fulfilling the search for that one needful item. Yesterday that included a Creepy Crawler Thingmaker- the last one found buried under some baby dolls in the stockroom made a teen goth chick and her family super happy campers -and a High School Musical Troy doll. I was only a little afraid of the gaggle of soccer moms holding their breath under the ladder as I scoured the back of the shelf out of arms' reach of anyone standing on the floor. But, boy, when that little plastic man came out, the excitement was simply electric! I've got most of the cash register issues figured out- credit v. cash, coupons, discounts, employee discounts, grandparents' rewards, returns and exchanges, et al ad infinitum -so there's a little less anxiety over that part of the whole. And despite the foibles and momentary dramas that accompany any gathering of strangers in a confined space- shared germs, spilled drinks and bruised egos -it's really a swell bunch of people to work with.

But, like all good things, it may be coming to an end. The hours will definitely shorten across the board after the peculiar madness of the holiday season wanes- with the cost of fossil fuel to power the car anything less than eight hours in a day is just paying to add gas to the tank to make the trip! -and what's more, there may be a >gasp< full-time gig looming on the horizon. And I do mean 'looming'. Rather daunting after my extended absence from a forty hour occupation. Besides, how is a guy supposed to keep up with the demand for homespun playthings- not to mention eBay browsing and online Boggle -while spending so much time in a mundane pursuit of a regular paycheck and attendant benefits? I mean, c'mon, do we really need health insurance? Sure, my eyes aren't getting any better on their own and doctors and dentists gotta eat too but, well, I dunno... I'm just determined not to lose sleep thinking about the family history of diabetes, heart disease and cancer and the occasional numbness in my left hand while others in the house lean to the opposite extreme of the worry chart.

And there you have it: your long overdue 'real life' update from my little corner of the planet. Which is, in fact, the center of the known universe.

Depending on your perspective, of course...

Thanks for tuning in!

Attitude adjustment

Y'know, I haven't mentioned in this forum the most amazing development since our return from the week at the beach: Miss Pussis, formerly of the look-at-me-and-I-will-flee school of emotional detachment, the not-so-finicky-as-Morris eater but decidedly aloof in her interspecies relationships, the cat whose personal slogan is 'Just Feed Me and Let It Go At That, Willya?!?'... has become almost 'friendly' after her week of forced solitude. Can you believe it?!?

The report from the friend of a friend who looked in on her during our absence was that she effectively hid herself somewhere in the house all week long or at least when her food and water was being filled and litter box tended.

But, boy, when we opened the front door upon coming home... she bolted out of hiding, came right up... and meowed! That's right, the original silent feline film star mewled like a baby and actually swirled underfoot looking for attention! What a striking development!

She spent the first week the same way, sticking close to feet, jumping up to be petted and scruffed and just made a real fussy show of being glad to see us. What's more, since then she has actually shown a desire to cross over the formerly fear fraught threshold of... the bedroom! Yeah, she'll complacently allow herself to be carried in at night, placed in her spot at the foot of the bed and will willingly stay put for most of the night. Until restlessness or hunger wakes her up in the wee hours and she lets herself out, scratches the door open and heads for the food bowl.

She still likes her chair to herself all day long and is not really keen on being held and petted while TV watching or anything 'human' like that but, all in all, a definite turnabout in her demeanor. Like night and day.

I mean, we know she's the same cat... but it's like she's a different cat!

Although she's still no dog...

Twilight Zone

Now... would you look at that? I'm just now noticing the duplicate- or almost duplicate anyway -entries below. I had written up the report of the toy-store-delivery-gone-sour and either the pc shut down or froze up at the very end of it and I assumed it was lost in the ether, as it were.

I did my best to replicate the earlier version- whilst editing myself as I always am wont to do here in this forum -and it's weird to see the repetition and emphasis and the added note about the suddenly-mysteriously-missing-hat coming back.

Which it did, I'm pleased to report.

Doesn't smell any different so I guess it wasn't mistreated too badly during it's... er... wayward...ness...

Nobody's Poet

Wildfires in the news / but I got rain in my shoes / if I wake tomorrow to meet the day / will the world look the same way? / I know the scene is changing / I don't doubt it's true / it's not just the weather / but the color of me / and the color of you.

There you have it. Another bittersweet nugget of joy tinged with heartache and sunny pessimism. Thank you, thank you very mush. Don't applaud, just throw money.

Funny story: Well, not really a 'story'. Not even a vignette, just an aside overheard from atop a wooden ladder in a toy store. Man says to his woman companion while browsing the preschool aisle and looking over a familiar spud-headed character toy:

"Look. They have Mr. Emesis."

Wha...?!?

I couldn't believe my ears and what the heck was he talking about?!? He said it again, the woman repeated it and, unable to make sense of the exchange, I, looking down from my lofty perch, just had to ask...

"Say what...?!?"

He says, "I said they have Mister and Missus... Potato Head..."

Oh... okay then... as you were...

Autumn

Hey, my knowledge of times and seasons is only slightly more limited than my knowledge of world geography but it feels like fall to me regardless of what the calendar says. Which is great because I'm ready to break out the sweaters and jackets and put the shorts away. Yay!

In other news: The toy business is heating up. The homespun enterprise, not so much, but the retail gig is winding up to throw a fast ball. Steadily increasing freight deliveries are a sure sign of what's to come for holiday madness. I'm told it gets positively whacko for the weeks intervening Black Friday and the end of the year with crowds upon crowds crowding in the aisles picking the shelves clean for to fill wee tykes wish lists. Should prove interesting.

What also should have been interesting but turned otherwise was a trip with my regular toy store cohort, Big Don, to lend a hand to another local store with their weekly delivery on Friday. I expected a gladsome few hours of toy geek comraderie, much like I experience every week at my own 'home' store. Not.

It seems the locals at that unnamed outlet have a habit of not finishing their delivery in a timely fashion and we were more or less recruited to show them how it could be done. Not an altogether happifying circumstance to say the least. After arriving well before the home team, unloading their truck in half the time they normally take and trying to make some reasonable semblance of order in their ridiculously miniscule stockroom, it became pretty obvious that we were as welcome as a bag of marbles spilled on the dance floor.

When it became additionally obvious that our attempts at ingratiating ourselves to the natives with charm and humour were falling on deaf ears, we more or less lowered our heads and determined to make the best showing we could for ourselves and get out of Dodge, as it were.

Disappointing, to say the least.

The capper- pun intended -was the conspicuous absence of my favorite timeworn Abercrombie baseball cap at the end of the day, missing from our little stack of wearables and personal items. A search of the crowded stockroom proved fruitless and queries to the home team were met with blank stares and protestations of ignorance. I was not pleased that it seemed to have taken wing. It's not just a hat, after all, it's the principle of the matter and I determined inwardly never to cross that unfriendly threshhold again.

Since then I've gotten a call saying- Surprise, surprise! -the manager has located chapeau in question and it will be hand delivered to my store.

Still in all, a sad, sorry chapter. Tsk, tsk...

But right now I'm off to 'home turf', batting cleanup before tomorrow's scheduled HUMONGOUS toy delivery. Let the games begin! Yee haw!

Autumn

I don't know if it's official yet- my knowledge of time changes and seasons is only slightly more limited than my knowledge of world geography -but it seems the summer heat is broken. Applause, applause. I'm quite ready to put the shorts away for another year and break out the jackets and sweaters.

Still haven't edited, collated and uploaded those vacation pics yet, one of these days.

Things are heating up at the toy store, bigger shipments every week leading up to the holiday onslaught. Should be very interesting as we get into the thick of it ere long. By all accounts it becomes a royal nuthouse for a few weeks beginning with Black Friday, for all retailers but especially the toy venues as folks stock up on baubles for the wee tykes.

A field trip to another store to help out with their weekly delivery turned into a debacle of sorts. I thought it would be a cool comraderie of fellow toy aficianados glad for the assistance of myself and Big Don, one of my regular toy store cohorts. Not.

Instead we got tossed into the mix with a handful of low energy, seemingly un-motivated youth who apparently have a habit of not finishing their weekly delivery in timely fashion. Instead of being glad for the help, they seemed downright disdainful of these two strange beings who showed up early, unloaded their truck in half the time they usually take and priced in six hours what they might not have finished stocking before the following week's delivery. So after the first few hours of slight assistance from the natives- and my best attempts to win them over with my inestimable charm and humour falling flat -we sort of lowered our heads, dug into the stacks of toy goods and determined to make the best showing we could for ourselves and go home. 

The capper- no pun intended -was the disappearance of my favorite timeworn Abercrombie baseball cap. We took our lunch at the end of the day and came back to retrieve our jackets and sundry goods before heading home to find the hat conspicuously absent. Questions regarding its whereabouts were met with blank looks and protestations of ignorance from the tweener crew and a search of the stockroom proved fruitless. Waahh...

All in all a rather disappointing experience.

Home Sweet Home

   At the risk of repeating myself... I'm back! Yes, in case anyone noticed it was a week away from home for the first time in quite a while and it was quite welcome, lemme tell ya.

   It's a short 440 miles- something like eight hours with one stop for gas and two more for stretching the legs and eats -to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean on the barrier islands, the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There a group of, let's see, sixteen if my math is correct plus one very spoiled poodle spent the week enjoying the comforts of a big old residence about fifty yards off the beach. Long story short: Plenty of sleeping in, staying up late, TV Land, sand and scrub, swimming in the pool- I try not to swim in the ocean, sharks can smell my fear, I'm sure of it -hot tubbing, chasing sand crabs and gathering shell fragments on the beach and other lazy, goofing off, vacation-ish kinda things.

   Took in a fishing class, elementary stuff for the real fishermen among us but fun nonetheless for the kids and myself who hasn't wielded a fishing pole in, well, I guess it's been ten, maybe fifteen years. If I may be permitted to boast a wee bit, I caught the first fish during the class, yay! And a few days later, invited to join in surf fishing with the one serious fisherman in our midst, I pulled six or seven little fishes from the ocean, two in a row on the first two casts. Now, that makes fishing fu-u-un!

   More to come, it's late- or early depending on how you look at it -and I'm practically sleeping on the keyboard... zzzz...

 

  

The week that was

...was long and painful. A lingering lower back ailment is making me feel all of my youthful forty-five soon to be forty-six years. I don't recall the exact 'Ouch! My ba-a-a-ack!' moment at all so I guess it kinda sneaked up on me so that by Wednesday night I was laid so low and was so powerfully pained that it took all the grimacing, groaning wherewithal I could muster, a few almost-unprintables, lots of sissified wincing and about half an hour to drag myself from the heating pad outta the bed to the necessary room right next door in the middle of the night.

Too much information, you say?

Well, in other news I've finally finished poring over and though The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, great stuff*. A massive tome collecting all- or close to 'all' anyway I would guess given the size and scope of the volume -his short stories; plenty that's humourous and thought-provoking, it makes me wanna read more sci-fi again.

Cat is becoming somewhat acclimated to a new sleeping arrangement: wherein my wyfe drags her in and, quickly closing the door behind her, drops the feline at the foot of the bed. I protested mightily given that the last attempt at acclimating her to such close quarters resulted in an early morning footful of something regurgitated and an awful shade of ochre. At first the puss was just bug-eyed, petrified and ready to flee for her life when unhanded inside the domain of her giant captors, then after a coupla weeks she became somewhat resigned it seemed to her nightly confinement- although she regularly managed to paw the door open and make good her escape once her captors succumbed to the embrace of Lethe, as it were. Now, after perhaps a month of repeating the process, she seems almost comfortable and will actually cross the threshold of the bedroom** of her own free will no less.

 She's still a weirdo in my book.

* A favorite? Forget it! There are just too many and besides, my memory is such that I could start reading it again tonight- it's been on the night stand for three, four months, maybe more -and read them over again like it was a new book. I did particularly enjoy the Tales From The White Hart especially though. A gaggle of drinking buddies, all with a more or less scientific bent, all bent on one-upping the last tall tale of their fellow jolly good fellows. Plenty of irony, some twisty endings, some in a darker vein, with a dash of slapstick thrown in for good measure, with a recurring cast of odd men that gives their appearance amidst the stories of space flight and time travel a familiar, episodic flavor when they pop up.

Sort of like Cheers for the rarified English lab coat and tweed set.

**Previously dubbed the 'abyss of boiling lava' after the common ultimate horror of childhood's playground. You know... hot boiling lava under the monkey bars? Where if you let go and dropped to the ground you writhed in mock agony as you were instantly parboiled by the steaming molten stuff? ...Maybe you played different game on your monkey bars... 

Nothing much

So... last week I started to make some observation here in view of some 'Intelligence for your life' heard on the FM radio one night while mixing up rubber concoctions and daubing paint about.

Something about narcissistic tendencies, stopping to look at yourself in the mirror- every mirror! -and so forth...

At first I thought to muster a defence for what must seem most often like self-agrandizement in this forum citing A) respect for the privacy of friends and family, B) prudence in the case of my minor children, er, child and C) deference to the wishes of my wyfe who- without any hint of paranoia whatsoever -desires to stay well out of the publick eye.

And who can blame her really? You stick your head above the crowd and somebody will invariably lob something at it! Or you end up on YouTube being chased by stalkerazzi and the next day Harvey whats-his-name, formerly of The People's Court, is on the Today show harping about your brutal encounter with his poor overworked camerman.

Speaking of YouTube, what a vast time-sucking wasteland of popular culture trivium and amateur showmanship that is! Have I mentioned this before? Every so often I get sent a link to some not-to-be-missed piece of video- which takes my Flintstones-era computer for-stinking-ever to load and thirty nine seconds to watch -and then get stuck browsing the links to related and unrelated clips, usually for a few hours thereafter.

Once I checked out a whole gaggle of guitar videos concentrating primarily on twelve-year-olds playing Van Halen's Eruption with more speed and facility than I've been able to muster after, well, after seeing those youngsters I won't even say how long I've been scratching the strings trying to make vaguely musical sounds. Sheesh! There are enough guys with real talent playing guitar in their garage or bedroom on YouTube to populate a small- maybe a not-so-small -African nation, I think. Maybe even Australia, who knows?

But on the plus side I got a good look at what must have been every Star Trek blooper known to man. Coming only thirty years after my first missed opportunity to see them at an appearance by the late James "Scotty" Doohan at a local college. Being a backwoods kid, I had no sense of the geography of the campus despite its location right next to the high school I attended. So I missed whatever stage presentation the Chief Engineer of the starship Enterprise had made, caught only the waning peals of laughter as the lights came up after the showing of the blooper reel and was immediately carried along by the tide of humanity anxious to shake hands and proffer some scrap to the star for his autograph.

For all my misdirection while finding the college library, I did come prepared for a signature with my Starfleet Technical Manual in hand. I was not, however, prepared to stand and make comprehensible speech in the presence of so lofty a personage. When finally I came along in the line to the table where he sat I could barely gasp, 'Good evening, sir!' and shove the book in his direction. To which Mr. Scott, er, Mr. Doohan responded, 'What's yer name, lad?' Hah! 'Lad', he called me! 'W-w-w-es...' says I. And he scribbled 'To Wes! James Doohan', slapped it shut, slid it back across the table to my sweaty hands and turned to the next startled youth standing in line.

Wow... I wish I still had it but like so many artifacts of yore, it went away, traded or sold while scrabbling after a newer, older passionately desirable gewgaw representing some other TV favorite.

But I digress- Finally I decided, well, if it seems somewhat self-involved to engage in this kind of exercise in...

Then the lights went out from an electrical storm and the whole mess went away.

And I sort of forgot about the whole silly notion after that.

Now I'm pretty much chalking it up to the fun of typing- pecking, really -and watching the letters appear onscreen, it's spelling and writing exercise and so on. Nothing wrong with that. Might even slow the onset of brain rot, a little. Maybe.

But aside from that, all the bright ideas for making something out of nothing that I've had since then- I get them all the time away from the keyboard; here, there, everywhere, anytime day or night -have taken wing and I got nothing, Jerry, nothing!

And no wonder, it's 3 AM... and time for all little and not-so-little self-centered toymakers to close their eyes and venture off to the land of Nod.

 

Perseids

Excited by a tidbit of news on my welcome screen I raced out of doors at the stroke of midnight, hopped my bicycle and pedaled for the park next door in hopes of finding a suitably bedarkened piece of real estate from which to view the expected meteor shower.

Alas, while there was, as foretold, no moon to obfuscate the streaking arcs, there was in place of that orb plenty of slow moving cloud cover. Waahh. Still, it was a pleasant interlude, quiet and still around the neighborhood with a soft breeze wafting about.

In other news: Despite the pressing presence of several crafting projects here in the toy lab I succumbed to a wild hair and created a new cartoon self-portrait. Like one wasn't enough! But as much as I like my Classic Plastick 'retro logo' I've always held a slight sneaking grudge because it wasn't my own rendering but that of a talented patron of my homespun enterprise pitching in with some unsolicited- but welcome, to be sure! -signage. We made some kind of deal with my makings for his graphical input and both came away happy little toy geeks.

Anyway, I figure this new cartoon'll serve as a little calling card, as it were, for graphical employment and the like.

It reminds me of my last self-portrait done as a drawing class assignment in art school. Simply in subject matter, not in style or execution. It was in all modesty a quantum leap in my rendering skills at the time as I devoted hours and hours and hours to it, trying not only to create a realistic portrait but also to replicate the aesthetic stylings of my wizardly professor. The head and hands were drawn separately and added into the whole as 'puzzle parts' of a sort with miscellaneous doodads drawn into the clothing in a non-sequitur approach to illustrative ornamentation. I was growing my hair out at that point and still wearing suspenders as a fashion statement. Or I drew them in so I could add buttons and hanging things onto them, I forget which.

But, sad to say, it disappeared somewhere not too long after I came home from school. I know there were times thereafter when I cleaned out sketchbooks and loose drawings, gleaningthose worth saving and pitching the detritus of three years of doodling and printmaking and drawing but what became of that particular drawing I just don't know. It was practically life sized so it's not as if it would have slipped away undetected on its own...

Anyway, here's the new calling card for your perusal. I may have to see about registering a site name for drawing bidness as it might be a wee bit confusing for the uninitiated to navigate from the front page of the toy making site to the drawing archives. We'll see:

 

mini-vacation

Hey, I'm ba-a-a-ack! Yes, in case you didn't miss me I spent three whole days away from the rattle-and-hum of the toymaking sphere, the cat and the computer and the 12x70 tin enclosure I call home.

The cat, doleful as ever, seems to have eaten less than she does when we're around. I swear she eats more when we're home because she thinks we're competition for her bowlful of fishy kibbles and bits.

A short absence like that always means a boxful of mostly worthless emails upon returning, of course. Amazing how many varieties of come-ons and schemes show up on a daily basis. What a waste of time and energy. Multiplied by the thousands, nay, millions of times it goes on, day after day... Tsk, tsk. How better all that could be spent. But, hey, who are we kidding? Where the bottom line is concerned is anybody seriously thinking this particular shell game is going away anytime soon? No.

But I digress! It was a very, very nice three days spent in the company of family and friends. Thousands of them, literally. Got to explore scenic Reading PA just a little bit. Directed by one new acquaintance the first night to a great Chinese buffet. You know that was a real highlight for moi! I likes my coconut shrimps, Forrest. Too bad its over sixty miles from home, just a smidge too far for casual dining on any given weekend.

Only fifteen, maybe twenty miles from my part-time workplace though... hmmm....

Greeted plenty of old friends, indoor picnicking lunch, pitched in off and on for some crowd control- meaning standing by answering questions like 'Where's the ladies' room?' and 'Do these stairs go up?'("No, but you can go up on them...") -and cleaning duties too. ( Reminding me why I gave up that line of work but, hey, anything for a good cause... ugh...!)

All with a close-to-home-friend-in-tow, a recent foot surgery patient with a few weeks of convalescence remaining, she enlisted our assistance with her wheelchair for the duration. We got the better of the deal, I think, with handicapped seating on the floor of the venue where the air conditioned air- heavier than the warm air rising from those five thousand and some odd souls respiring repeatedly -gathered in bunches, making the requisite coat and tie not only endurable but welcome.

Circumstances beyond our control made it possible to spend the two nights in a nice economical hotel rather than drive back and forth as I previously expected to do. Saved plenty of wear on the car... and us, that extra hour and a half of sleep in the AM we would have spent driving made a big difference in wakefulness throughout the day, lemme tell ya. 

Even so, recuperating from three days out of town will take another two days at least. So it was a sleepy, sleeping in sort of day today.

Which, no doubt, is why I'm still goofing off here at three in the morning! Yaaahhhh!

Good night already!

 

Blah blah blah

This week's attack of the tse-tse fly notwithstanding- I've slept in more days than not the past five, missing Andy Griffith in the early AM -it's awfully quiet at the ranch.

The current neverending carpet company postcard assignment has become- with input from numerous sources known only to my employer -a mish-mash of humdrum elements hanging incongruously in the middle of plain jane textual blurbs but, hey, they seem to like it nonetheless. And they've said that they like the fact that I work cheaply. At least I know I'm not pricing myself out of business before I get a proper start!

Toymaking has slowed somewhat, SOP for summertime when everybody is spending their fun money elsewhere and right after Xmas when they've spent all their fun money, period. Finishing up some longstanding orders and thinking deep thoughts about how to bring off other playthings-in-waiting. Fun stuff. Maybe when one or two of these are behind me I can get back to some nearly finished characters and ready them for entry in the Great York InterState Fair come September. I promised the little old ladies who judged the art entries- they loved the early Cartwright and Batman figures -I'd have more to show them, that's been a few years back already.

Got a handful of mail items to run out and deliver today to the fine folks at the US postal  service. I get little white card collector boxes from several local antique venues for mailing my teensy items so I'll be making a stop at one or the other to stock up on boxes first. I rarely find anything else of particular interest for my collecting self in the antique stores these days but it's still great fun browsing the musty dusty stuff of generations gone by.

Hey, I think Norah Jones was skipping there, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit. S'all right now.

Speaking of musica, the youngsters at the toy store, appreciably impressed by my humble toymaking efforts- several of them customize their own superhero and wrestling figures -also enjoy my 'old school' musical selections. Loudness, a Japanese 80s metal band, and Motorhead in particular. I'm reliably informed I must 'still have some fire' if I can still listen to Motorhead. We'll see if that impression holds water when I roll out the Roy Orbison and Doc Watson. Hahaha. I'll show those whippersnappers what real music is all about, by gum!

A little Boggle, a little Google, browsing eBay for fun gewgaws I can't afford and/or don't need rounds out the nights and days. Speaking of Google, I searched up a fellow I knew at college, a right talented guitarist(showed me my first real guitar lick, the intro to Heart's Barracuda) and draftsman(we traded lithographs at one point, my dragon v. guitarist for a nice miniature of a fairy tale castle amid misty mountains, I don't know if I still have it socked away somewhere or not) who's making his living at both music and art in and around Lancaster these days. Very cool. Here's his website: J. Stephen Davis Music I dropped him a note to say, 'Hey', have to make the scene at one of his upcoming coffehouse appearances.

And so it goes...

Hullo

What's on my mind today, you ask? Well, earlier as I chopped onions and potatoes and broke eggs for breakfast I was thinking about a good nickname for the cat who nobody ever calls by her 'given' name, Cocoa, anymore.

Except my mother-in-law who calls and talks to her when nobody's home. It's comical because that cat is payng no more mind to her voice on the answering machine than the front door or the refrigerator...

Usually it's 'Pussis' or 'Pussalump' or 'Fuzzy Lumpus' or 'Beat it, you!'

Ferris Mewl-er. Because she mewls around like true love, rubbing up against and swirling underfoot, when there's food being prepared whereas any other time you might try to get her attention you might as well be calling the front door or the refrigerator.

Mom says thats the way with female cats and boy cats are much more affectionate and desirous of your attention. Now she tells me...

I'm just of the opinion that a creature that depends on you for everything but the air it breathes might deign to show a glimmer of casual interest if not outright gratitude and/or feigned affection once in a while.

At least something other than baleful or cautious observation from afar and scurrying away leaving puffy tribbles of loose fur drifting on the wind in their wake at the slightest step in their direction. Sheesh!

Doldrums

What's the origin of that word, I wonder? Is that a meteorological term? I don't know but it's bandied about in the summertime more often than not, I think. And even though the weather has been decidedly un-summerish- very temperate, 70s and breezy, beautiful stuff, thank you very much! -it might as well be doggedly hot and overbearing for the lack of exciting goings-on to report.

But, hey, sometimes that's a good thing. At least nobody's breaking bones or crashing cars.

There is the forcible relocation of my online photo archives from Yahoo! to PhotoBucket. Unscheduled and unexpected but thus far uneventful. Updated the photo album links at left so once I get everything squared away at the websites it should prove pretty much seamless. I hope.

Plenty of toy news with the arrival of my first professional looking boxes for the Bonanza men. Fun stuff! Naturally, it makes me wanna supply the same kind of cardboard homes for my other little men. So they don't feel underappreciated or left out.

In addition to regular face time with my erstwhile and present toy store workmate, Big Don, I got a few minutes with another former workplace pal, Patoo, as well as 'original Pat' this week. Fellow toy geeks every one so we were able to hash over some doll and comic news and generally inconsequential topics of that sort.

Son boy spending the week with his car crazy pal whose Dad and I joked that he should just be adopted, he spends so much time there. I'm glad he's taken an interest in what goes on under the hood- I can check vital fluids and that's about it... -but it's weird when he's gone for a stretch like this. Plus I have to take out the trash and cut the grass myself. And field all his calls.

That's not true, I rarely answer the phone. I have a real aversion to phone conversation of late. I'd rather be kicked in the shin than answer the ringing appliance. If I can use the speaker I don't mind half so much but some people are funny about broadcasting like that. Where do those quirks come from? Same place as chocolate vs. vanilla, I suppose. To-may-toe, to-mah-toe.

Stopped in the other day on mother dear just in time to find her starting to set up her new dog kennel all by herself. So the wife and I lent a hand at that and it's standing upright if not in place all permanent and solid like. Needs a good sized post and some hardware to finish up, mostly due to the uneven ground where it stands.

Reminded by an old friend of my mother of the old homestead where I was a boy. She remembered me in a crib there though more likely it was my brother given the time frame she specified. Either way it made me think of the place, nothing left now but some foundation stones, and some of the pleasantries recalled from that era. Plums in a jar with sugary syrup. Dried apples. Frosty cold Cokes from a floor cabinet filled with ice. The smell of the wood cabinets and damp cellar environs of the store my great grandmother and maiden aunt kept. The array of candies and confections in the glass front cases.

Boy, I'm making myself hungry...

 

 

Nothing much

...is new at the ranch. Spent last Saturday with an old- and new -co-worker at a local flea market, pawning our wares. Lots of leftover and extra goods I've had cluttering up the place for too long. It was an interesting early start- 4 AM -despite having stayed up too late the night before- 12 AM -gathering the goods and deciding what to keep and what to part with from those extraneous stores still stashed in the dining room, right inside the front door. Managed to pare the pile down by half and probably sold off three/fourths of that, lots of early birds, other wheeler-dealers, grabbing up the goods I had on the cheap for their own profit- more power to 'em! -and still lots of real customers throughout the rest of the day went home happified with some artifact or comic book or doll to call their own. I made enought to spring for a 1/18th scale Monkeemobile from the indoor die-cast dealer that I otherwise might not have splurged on- Hey, that's what 'found money' is for, right? -a modern vintage Magnus, Robot Fighter comic for 50 cents that I soon discovered was the first of two parts so now I'm looking for 'Part Two', enough to fill the gas tank- no mean feat these days! -,take us out to dinner Sunday afternoon and still have a little left over for the week. Not bad.

And it was fun too. Watching the people browsing(I always say if I could find a way to make a dollar watching people I'd be a millionaire! Okay, I just made that up...),making the rounds myself(I know two serious antique and collectible dealers- one is another former co-worker who caught me up on the rash of dead former co-workers from that place of employment; the other a fellow Bat-geek of longstanding acquaintance, the generally acknowledged 'King of Toy Scouts', York PA chapter. -who hold court in the permanent antique venue indoors.), checking out the fruits and vegetables and dusty doodads from vendors from all corners of the map. Got to talk at length to a mature gentleman who might have simply passed by but for another patron browsing my wares who asked, 'How much for the Cisco Kid cards?' The fellow stopped at the mention of his old nickname, turns out his family name is Rinaldo, somewhat akin to Cisco's Duncan Renaldo, hence the moniker given by his Army pals at the time the show was new. We talked about his stations in the Pacific during his time in the service, why he didn't fly to Hawaii with his brother-in-law several years ago- too long to sit, fear of forming blood clots -and his recent enjoyment of some old Flash Gordon serials on DVD which, naturally, led to talk, full circle, of my own recent fascination with Cisco and Pancho. I took his address and promised to send some Cisco episodes for his perusal, which I did this past week along with a downsized photo print of a flyer advertising Duncan Renaldo's availability for county fairs and rodeos from a 1957 Fairs trade publication. Feels good to share the joy, I hope he gets a real kick out of them and I think he will.

Otherwise it's business as usual. Work- I use the term verrry loosely -at the toy store this week was interesting, little experience on the customer service end of things, spaghetti dinner courtesy of a fellow worker(hope we're scheduled together again soon!)and carpooling to and fro with my flea market cohort so we had plenty to yap about in addition to the usual toys and comics banter.

Hey, I've got a box on the way for the last of my little vintage Bonanza dolls who came without, the nefarious Outlaw. Exciting stuff! He's hard to come by in his own right but with his box to call home? Forget about it! So I'm looking forward to that arriving in the mail sometime this week. Not to mention swell homespun boxes for my own homemade Cartwrights nearing completion! My sewing lady will be so happy! She's saving a set for her heirs- "Look what your Grandma made once upon a time, kids." -so it'll make a nice presentation package for them.

And so it goes. Got my bike tightened up so that's back in action, yay! Grill has been getting a workout, who wants to heat up the house with the oven in the summertime anyway?!? Cat is being catlike, has started chewing in frustration on the mini-blinds at the living room windows when she can't get a look out at the wild things she can't get to and wouldn't know what to do with if she did. Hoo boy, the joy of living with domesticated creatures... Gimme a goldfish any day...! Or a nice friendly dog who's smart enough to listen but too stupid to make like he rules the roost...!

Hey, hey, hey...

...hey, there! It's been days and days since I've been over here talkin' to myself and things have just been speeding by like a schoolboy's summer!

Hey, my new part-time occupation is proceeding apace. No rocketry science involved so I'm safe as far as that goes anyway. It does, however, involve the use of a small, sharp implement on a regular basis so I have to be careful with that!

Co-workers are mostly people younger than myself- a growing percentage of the population, it seems -and mostly art students at that. Which is pretty cool because, even though I've forgotten more about art and art history than I ever knew, I can still yap about my own projects and demonstrate that even while following a convoluted course of life and work a guy can still exercise some creative energy in a positive and productive- and fun, let's not forget fun! -way.

I've already got two youngsters who want to commission dolls- er, 'action figures', rather. Now that I'm 'in the trade' I have to use correct terminology -for themselves. One a wrestling student- I'm serious! -who wants himself 'Plastick-ized' complete with his wrestling getup; the other the self-described 'world's biggest Queen fan' who'd like to have likenesses of the band members made.

I'm anxious to get a look at some of their artwork too. They gotta have student shows, right? Plus one girl's boyfriend is in a band who just released a CD of their own music, be interesting to hear what that's all about.

Nice, limited hours are a good way to ease back into a workday situation. Nothing too strenuous for my practiced lethargy and, what's the word?, atrophied musculature to handle. Cool.

Gets me out of the house and on the road and that's good. I get to see lots of toys up close and I can take my pick outta the fresh case with a whopping discount to boot. Double cool! There aren't a lot of new toys that I have to own but I'm sure there are going to be some things showing up that I can't live without...

Plus I can run errands on the way home; drop off mail, pick up supplies and so on. There's a fabric outlet right down the road, always good for some unusual and useful goods for toymaking. This week I found some great thin leather strips for Bonanza hatbands and heavier leather stock- I imagine they're selling it as straps for purses or something -some with embellishments, some with realistic looking hemmed edges, good for making belts and holster belts, stuff like that. Neato.

In other news: September NC vacation is all paid up, just need to save up some spending money now. And gas money. Maybe we should take a bus! And walk wherever we go when we get there...

Or ride bikes. My bike is coming apart, handlebars are loose and I don't have the right size metric allen wrench to tighten them. Danger, danger! And I was just getting into the habit of breaking it out in the early AM for a ride around the park next door and adjoining neighborhoods...

Maybe some duct tape... Or Krazy Glue...

 

PT

It's been, lemme see, well, I can't affix a day and date but better'n eighteen years anyway since I've had a part-time job. Worked at the Turkey Hill convenience store nights between my defection from higher learning and my landscaping gig. My school pals would come and read the magazines and hang out while I played the radio too loudly and mopped the floors and kept the coffee on the boil and stocked the dairy case. As a happening young dude I was too cool to wear the paper hat and with all that work it was too warm to zip up the logo vest they asked me to wear and it seemed a shame to waste the out of date milk and sandwiches and I was in the middle of one of each when the manager made a midnight visit. After my buds scattered like roaches under a kitchen light and I stuttered some lame excuses which cut no ice whatsoever in the face of her red-faced recitation of the numerous company statutes I was ignoring, she promptly sent me packing and asked me not to return. Aaaahhh, memories...

Anyway, I start tomorrow at the local toy outlet(I won't mention the name here in case company representatives should somehow stumble upon this forum and read the foregoing...)with a half day of what I expect will be leisurely fun and games amidst the, uh, fun and games they sell.

And I wanted to mention: I've made public a handful of photos in some of my family albums which heretofore were hidden from view because I uploaded them and neglected to check the appropriate box so anybody who had a mind to could look them over. Includes some charming pics of my youthful self. At the risk of repeating myself: Aaaahh, memories...

Now what...

...was I gonna write? Oh, I know, since I missed the milestone of the second anniversary of this exercise in futility- the end of April if memory serves(which it does not as a rule) -I'm trying to make up for the lack of fanfare on that inauspicious occasion by writing more this week.

Which is no mean task because there ain't much in the way of earth-shaking developments.

I can report, however, that my bright idea for revolutionizing the fast food burger experience has had its initial test. I posited an uber-burger of sorts to my ol' pal, Jim, during one of our jaunts northward to band practice a while back when we would make a weekly stop at a Burger King en route: The Whopper, King of all fast food burgers, topped with- get this now -a grilled chicken breast. Mmm-mmm! Are we talkin' serious drool-fest or what?!?

And the name?: 'The Chopper'! Get it? CH-icken + wh-OPPER, 'The Chopper'! Vroom, vroom! It's absolutely brilliant, if I do say so myself!

I had the chance to try it at a burger stop last week where I ordered my own Whopper and mi esposa the salad topped with grilled chicken. Distracting her with a surprised gasp, a pointing finger and a cry of 'Is that Brad Pitt over there?', I swooped off with several marinated chunks of chicken flesh and added them atop my sloppy beef wafer sandwich.

Suffice to say, the 'maximum meat' experience was a taste-tempting treat without parallel in the mundane world of drive-thru delicacies. I'm slavering on the keyboard just thinking back on it... Really, I am...

Given the explosive popularity of custom bikes, that show on cable TV, OCC logos adorning everything from eggshells to underwear, it would be a super profitable promotion for all parties involved to offer the unsuspecting public the original Whopper loaded up with a hunk o' fowl, all the usual fixins plus some honey mustard. Oh, bestill my beating heart...

For an even healthier treat it could be served with bacon even and called the 'Super Hog Chopper'! Excellent! The flesh of three, count 'em, three different creatures on one bun...!

Remember, you read it here first! Burger King, OCC... I'm waiting for your call, Mikey! No outrageous percentages, just pay me a reasonable consultancy fee- commensurate with the genius required to concoct such a swell, mega-selling treat -and it's all yours, guys.

Lull in the action

Yeah, besides the lawn mowing season coming on, always diverting, kinda slow lately.

Last week the big news was a coupla days spent organizing the garden shed. It was a 'stuff avalanche', things falling out while forcing new stuff in on top every time the door was cautiously cracked open. So with fair weather there was opportunity at last to make it a useful space. Took the better part of two days to sort what was needful from what was just taking up space, made a little work for the trashmen come Monday morning plus four or five big Rubbermaid bins of bats and balls and gift-ish doodads and so on to cart off to Mom's yard sale this weekend. End result, I can actually find hand tools now as they're needed, bikes can be hung up rather than dropped on the porch and, should the notion arise, one could actually sleep comfortably with a fan, a shop light and radio. Yay!

Working in some sculpting and landscaping both this week. While I redux my Adam West sculpture for absolutely the last time- I really mean it! -Mummy planned to redux her two-tiered koi pond and I dreaded it. Finally she decided to recall the contractor who installed it in the first place, good idea. So we busied ourselves instead with some small jobs; transposing some shrubs and flowers, spreading mulch, laying a few stepping stones and creating a little tile patio for an ornamental table and chairs in one corner of the garden. A quite pleasant day including a few minutes to hand wash the Crash Magnet. Nice.

That's about it. Well, I know I'm forgetting something... I'll come back I guess if something momentous occurs to my addled memory...

Ponderables

Y'know, I was thinking the other day- dangerous business, I know! -and got to wondering: I've read that our physical selves are basically a whole new organism every seven years; that is, in that time span the process of cell replacement that goes on primarily at night while we sleep has pretty much rebuilt a person completely- hair, skin, organs, everything.

That being the case, even if we set aside the infinitely indecipherable processes of the mind; vocabulary, memories, favorite smells, tastes and so forth, why do we keep something like a cowlick in our hair?

Big question: Why don't missing limbs or digits or eyes grow back?!? I think what started this line of thought was a radio trivia question: Americans lose 25,000 of these every years. The answer: Eyes!!! That's frightening! Definitely not 'trivial' either...

And why do scars keep their place? I've got a few that stick out and while it doesn't trouble me from day to day to look at them I have to wonder why, if the entirety of me has been rebuilt, what?, three or four or more times since the initial injury... and they're still there... Go figure...

The week in revue

Sunday: Post Sunday afternoon go-to-meetin'- since our building serves two congregations we alternate morning and afternoon meeting times -made a trip across the river to a swell steak buffet. Always a taste-tempting treat plus there's a fabric/craft emporium along the route home, found some useful stuff for my makings. Yay!

Monday: Was an exciting day of packing and sorting stuff I sold via eBay, plenty of my own homespun playthings plus a handful of vintage pieces and parts that have been cluttering up the bins for a while on their way to the four corners of the map. Yahoo!

Tuesday: Received a batch of TV cowboy photos from an online vendor expecting them to be of good caliber, clean reproductions that I could use to illustrate custom-made boxes for my Bonanza men and other western figures I'm hoping to create. Instead I got fuzzy, bitmappy computer prints which won't be useful at all beyond the lesson learned. Bah!

Sunday's culinary adventure comes back to haunt us, both son-boy and myself got sidelined by a peculiar malaise. Yuck!

Wednesday: Saw my little old lady seamstress to hash out some details on current doll clothing in the pipeline and plan some upcoming projects. She's 90-plus and still sturdy despite protesting some eye problems that give her fits when sewing the details on my little men's duds. Widowed, she lives with a temperamental cat named Snoopy in a wooded property populated by deer, squirrels and the occasional pheasant. The place always smells of wood smoke from the stove, pleasantly reminiscent of my folks' home where we had fireplaces and wood stoves a-burnin'. Mmmmm....

Thursday: Spent a few hours walkin' and talkin', Bible in hand. Well, okay, it was mostly driving to reach the remote corners of the area. I thought Red Lion had some wilderness, Dover has its share as well.

Friday: Me mudder has been trying to make room in her garage for a vehicle since she built her new house, going on two, three years now. Since I had a coupla stacks of moveable bins full of my toymaking leftovers and comics and toy collections and assorted ephemera helping to clutter up the place I was recruited to help sort and remove some out to the garden shed, some in from the garden shed for an upcoming yard sale and so on. Ugh!

The Hyundai made like a truck on the way home, packed from back seat to bumper with boxes of comics binders, Batman model kits, Munsters cars, VHS from the 80s and more containers of I don't even know what, brought home and stacked unceremoniously in the dining room. Since my antique-slash-junque shop outlet closed up a while back I'm looking around for a new venue to offload some of the excess. eBay is great but you have to be prepared to practically give it away if you offer a thing at auction.

Saturday: Another coupla hours stumpin' the neighborhoods after the regularly scheduled AM Bible study program. Doorstep topic of the day: Coping with the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, unequal opportunities. Rather conspicuously illustrated by myself in my 1950s issue brown suit- my wife hates it, I love its unassuming 'vintage' aesthetic -riding in company with a young pretty 'power couple' in their H3. Strange but true.

Then the afternoon spent weeding, mowing and trimming with our pal, Jerry, at our meetin' place. Suffice to say, I don't spend enough time in the great outdoors or in moderate regular physical activity so the weed hacking and spraying in the afternoon temps approaching eighty- felt more like ninety! -was somewhat taxing. Phew!

After a leisurely din-din at the Dover Diner- we practically lived there while we were moving into the area but have been absent for a while now -came home and plugged in some Big Valley on DVD. Good stuff, I wish I had the episode with Adam West but I'm sure that doesn't come along until later.

And full circle, we're back to another pleasant valley Sunday. Some are sleepin' in while others poke the keys and touch up some rubber projects and one small fuzzy someone purrs about looking to be fed.

Stay tuned!

New business

Hyundai is all mended, unusual. Nice to start it up without the attendant rumbling of a faulty exhaust, gotten somewhat used to it even if my neighbors hadn't. My son, well aware of my pet name for it, 'Crash Magnet', cleverly decided that should have been obvious from its moniker from the outset. 'Accent'. Just two letters shy of 'Acc-id-ent'. Clever boy. Perhaps too clever!

My recent stopover at MySpace- a much neglected facet of my too numerous cyber outlets -included a few name searches to see who is represented there that I might know. Among others I turned up my best pal from junior high, Mike Halbleib. We were part of a small but mighty gang of uber comic book geeks back in the day; Mike was a serious Spiderman fan and did great drawings in a Gil Kane vein. Most memorable shared Marticville Middle School highlight: Putting on a short play straight out of The Weekly Reader called "Ratman and Pigeon", complete with cardboard Ratmobile. My first experience wearing tights and not my last. Mike's actually worked professionally in the comics field, for Marvel Comics, no less, very cool. I gave him a long-winded capsule history of my life since the eighth grade and will be keenly interested to hear back from him and see what other adventures life has handed him in the intervening years.

Aaaahh, technology. Ain't it a wonderful thing? A wunnerful, a wunnerful.

Old days

So I was putting up a new photo album associated with my toymaking and decided to browse around some of my other albums especially the 'Vintage Family Photos' section. About halfway through the cache of images there I noticed they are all marked 'Private'. Hmmmm, I must have posted them and failed to make them visible. So I remedied that right quick. I'll have to scout the rest and see if they are likewise invisible...

I think I've mentioned previously, at least in passing, my reading habits as a 'tween', tending toward fantastic fiction. My choices in visual entertainment have always leaned toward that end of the spectrum as well- Star Trek, Batman, vintage sci-fi and so forth. So the feature version of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers was a must-see despite its somewhat visceral visuals.

I had to confess though to being ignorant of the source material. So it was with keen interest that I took up reading several of Heinlein's novels this past week. Turns out a pal of recent acquaintance, Roy, was himself an avid sci-fi geek as a lad with a serious interest especially in Heinlein's writings. Being a few years older than myself he had stashed away and collected a number of vintage editions- some are obviously well-loved and careworn, a fact that adds to their charm -and loaned them first to my son boy while on that beach vacation of a few weeks ago.

Citizen Of The Galaxy, The Rolling Stones(nothing to do with the musical group! Maybe that's where they got the name, eh?), Tunnel In The Sky. Next: Orphans Of The Sky and Between Planets.

Worth noting is the origin in Stones of one of Star Trek's more memorable catchphrases, Dr. McCoy's retort "I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer (or whatever apropos occupation)!", uttered first by Dr. Edith Stone encountering an unknown space malady.

Which is not to mention the appearance later in the same narrative of Martian 'flat cats'; formless, purring balls of fluffy fur with a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system and a fantastic capacity for reproduction. Golly, could they be any more familiar if they were called... oh, I don't know... 'tribbles' maybe?!?

Hats off

    In a little mixing of metaphors or at least confusion of subject matter from my toy arena, I discovered that I can hand sand the hard plastic hats I make for my Bonanza men and they not only go on and off a little better- which is accomplished, if you're interested, from front to back due to the tuft of hair on the actual figure which is molded in reverse into the crown of the hats. Hopefully it'll help keep the paint from rubbing off so much too with the on and off of the hat -but it cleans up some of the inconsistencies in my quick sculpting of the hat and the vagaries of the mold lines and so forth.

In other news it's a pleasant valley Sunday and, despite my somewhat slack-jawed condition after a week of sickliness, it looks like a good afternoon for a motor ride in the country. Mum cancelled our planned Sunday dinner, she didn't sound so good, probably caught my malady when I was down the other day, so the afternoon is wide open. Sorry, Ma.

Well, daylight's a wastin'... Off we go!

Payback

That's what you get when you know you're not well and you push yourself anyway. Why? Well, usually it's a stupid reason. Like a paycheck. Or an item on sale that you can't live without. Or, in the most extreme cases, a little toy car.

Okay, so I was maybe looking for part-time employment, maybe, and I really did have that haircut appointment- which, trimmed way down in anticipation of warmer weather, looks mighty fine, if I do say so myself -but we all know the real reason I dragged myself out of my sickbed, shaved and shined, dressed and drove forty miles each way to see a former workmate who I only confab with every two, three months of late...

That's right! It's the Batmobile, baby! Na-na-na-na-na-na-nah! Batman! Not a cartoon Batmobile! Not a movie Batmobile! The REAL Batmobile! Score, baby! Thank you, Big Don!

Yes, what started life as the 'Car Of The Future'- envisioned, oddly enough, by its designer after a real-life encounter with a shark; the streamlined contours, fins and toothy grillework a mimicry of those belonging to the powerful fish -the 1955 Lincoln Futura enjoyed a whirlwind tour of the years' auto show circuit and a brief stint as the centerpiece of the 1959 celluloid masterpiece, It Started With A Kiss starring Glenn Ford and Debbie Reynolds. Relegated to a musty storage facility until self-styled 'King of the Kustomizers' George Barris bought her for a paltry sum in the early 60s, she seemed destined for the scrapheap or perhaps, under George's hand, some way-out, kandy-kolored, psychedelic supposition of 'Hey, Daddy-O' hipness... until fate intervened in the form of a TV show based on a comic book character with a pretty hip ride of his own.

With only a few weeks' notice until shooting began on Batman, ol' George was under the Hollywood heat lamp in a big way! So he rolls out the languishing Futura, strips some chrome, makes her an open top- much more happenin' than the claustrophobic Jetsons-style closed canopies -paints her black, adds a few Bat-notions and some pinstriping and >voila< she's done.

By all accounts the car was quite literally a rolling wreck: too heavy with its huge all-steel body so that it constantly blew out tires and could barely be stopped by its braking system, hard to handle without power steering and a suspension made for a car lighter by half, not to mention a miniscule gas tank good for getting from its trailer into the shot but never back again...

In spite of these behind-the-scenes flaws, the car onscreen was a dazzling thing to behold. Long and sleek, polished and deep, deep black, with it's jet cockpit styled bubble top... it looked for all the world like just the one-of-a-kind conveyance for those mysterious and colorfully garbed Caped Crusaders.

And the magical undercranked camera made it seem like it would cover the fourteen miles to Gotham City before Commissioner Gordon could return the red phone to its cradle.

But, I digress...

I was sick as anything all day then yesterday, hacking and going on like pneumonia, weak as a pup and alternating between chills and heat flashes and the best part of the night was a struggle to get comfortable between the same extremes of temperature and general malaise. What a drag!

At least I had that new little Batmobile on the wall to glimpse through bleary eyes and bouts of achey breaky sweats...

And just to prove that I learned my lesson I was back on the road today, all over the county stocking up on mailing supplies, wrapping articles for mail in the back seat of the car, gathering doll parts, consolidating artifacts and craft materials at my remote storage facility(Mom's garage)and back tending to e-business tonight another coupla hours. Yeah! Go, baby, go! 'Sick' is all in your mind...

>hack, hack<

So, now... I need at least one more Batmobile so I can break it outta the plastic bubble and play with it like a little kid. And then one to customize, y'know, tweak the details a little. And my son surely wants one too... Hey, a few small pleasures adds up to one big one, I always say.

Okay, I just made that up. But, seriously, anything and everything you might wanna know about the TV Batcar can be found here:

1966 TV Batmobile

A quick one

Just to say 'hello' and report on the weather and keep not too many days going by without a note here. Quite temperate and sunny out of doors. It'll be swell to get out there- sometimes it takes an act of Congress to cross the threshold and see beyond the confines of the homeplace, get stuck in the toy studio or at the keyboard and before ya know it the day is waning -running over to the local KayBee Toy Outlet to see my old workmate, Big Don, who's working there part-time now- Wonder if he needs any help? I'm a natural for a toy store, after all! -and snagged one of those snazzy new Hot Wheels TV Batmobiles for me. Whatta guy!

It would be more exciting if I weren't fighting a cold or some sort of invasive malady; I'm all chesty, sinus painish, overall bedraggled feeling... >blaaaahhhh< Where does this stuff come from?!? I was fine yesterday and toward evening it came all creeping around uninvited...

Maybe my haircut appointment this after will freshen up my outlook some. If I don't fall asleep in the chair, that is.

Yep, just another day in paradise, as it were. Wheeee!

Weather report

Hey, well, this is different. A good morning that sees the daylight rather than the middle of the night!

It's a beautiful wintry morning here in south-central PA with the sun breaking brightly despite the snow on the ground. Through the frosty pane I see robins and doves drinking from the puddles of melted snow in the backyard while inside the house not a creature is stirring except this mouse.

And the day holds promise of fun and frolic. Well, okay, maybe not frolic but fun anyway. Then again I may frolic just for the fun of it. So I can say at the end of it that it was indeed a day of fun and frolic.

Isn't it funny how when you say words repeatedly they seem to lose their weight or sense? Frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic, frolic...

Hahahaha, see there! It's 'fun and frolic' already with the 'copy' button and I'm not outta my pajamas. Hoo boy, am I easily amused or what? ....Yeah...!

Hard Day's Night

That's what I think of when everything starts to run together. Not that I have such a crowded slate of activities but working from home, working early, working late, working in-between... It gets weird sometimes. Nice but weird, seems like the 'normal' rhythm of things just goes out the window sometimes. Plus there are times when it gets so I hate to leave the house. Like this past week, it was so nice for a coupla days- just a few days ago, seems longer -I think it broke the 70 degree mark one afternoon and I might have gone out twice, three times, usually to check the mail. Too late, now it's back to frosty, snow-covered, thirty degrees or less wintertime again. So I'm definitely not excited about going out now, all bundle-fundled and breath freezing in your nostrils. I hate that feeling like few others. Maybe worse is the feeling of knowing your gonna throw up and there's really nothing you can do to stop it. That's worse. Worse than actually throwing up. At least then you know it's getting over with. But knowing it's coming... that's bad. I hate that.

How'd I get on to that?!? So, I finally got the Crash Magnet into the garage this past week; inspection, as always, reveals problems to the tune of several hundred dollars. No getting around that muffler fix plus tires plus brakes. Torture never stops. But it'll be good to have it be nice and quiet again. Scheduled for this week once the garage gathers all the parts they need to do the work.

Cat has evidently forgotten the game of fetch. I can't blame her given her almost two months forced confinement, in that small space there was no room for chasing the orange mouse-like device hither and yon and I guess that time span is a lot longer in cat time. She still gives her string toy- a plastic stick with pink yarn wrapped around with a long, loose length to whip back and forth -what for and will chase that thing forever and a day but the mouse when thrown she only chases after and never returns. Too bad, I really thought she might merit a trip to Letterman one day with that act.

And so it goes. I've got a 'care package' to get together, been promised over two years now- Time, as they say, flies when you're having fun. Even when you're not, I think, but that's a whole 'nother story -and I've been holding off until everything I wanna include is 'just so'. Well, you know how that goes. Or maybe you don't. But with my scattershot approach to things 'just so' could be another two years and that just wouldn't be right. So I'll give it a mighty push this week and see whether I can actually finish something for once.

 

Like Humans Do

I've got part of my PC audio playlist leftover from the previous owner and while I think I've got a modicum of variety in my own musical library I own no Talking Heads. As far off into left field as I've gotten was Oingo Boingo, you know, the guy who went on to score Tim Burton movies and stuff. But there's a leftover David Byrne track in the midst of my own Audioslave and Disturbed nuggets. An interesting aside on social interaction and the nuance and quirkiness of the things people do as a matter of course. Neat.

Things like that make me yearn to be more musical, able to string words and notes together. Music never clicked for me in school- not that it does now, by any means. I'm strictly a pretender, don't read, can sometimes barely decipher the chord arrangements of radio stuff and maybe drag half a melody kicking and screaming out of a reticent and uncooperative guitar -when it might have made a difference in my chosen form of expression.

Isn't it funny? Artists wannbe musicians. Musicians wannabe actors. Actors wannbe artists. Or musicians.

I'm too distracted to go too deep here. It's time for Smallville...

The week that was

Coco-Loco-Miss Pussis is out of her bathroom prison and, as expected, is completely weirded out by her newfound freedom. Spends a lot of time under chairs and skulking behind things.

Saw Night At The Museum with a handful of friends, quite entertaining, coupla laugh out loud moments. Cheap seats and free refills on the large buttery popcorn and raspberry tea, can't beat that for an hour and a half of diversion.

Spent the day today 'backed out' in bed or on the couch, kinduva drag. I don't know if it's skeletal, muscular or what but it came uninvited and I hope it goes away likewise unbidden tomorrow.

One possible cause: 'Crash magnet' is living up to its name again this week with son-boy behind the wheel. His mother wheedles and begs every opportunity for his tutelage without regard for traffic and/or weather conditions so I've taken to riding in the backseat and letting her ride shotgun. At least I don't need a seat belt back there and it's only half as nerve-wracking when you can't see how close the corners are cut or the uncertain hand at the wheel. I doubt it would have made any difference being in that front seat when he made a wide semi-truck type of turn at a not-so-wide local intersection Friday afternoon at the height of rush hour as I barked from the back seat, 'Don't... hit... the... curb...! Turn, turn, turn!!!'

BANG!!!

Caved in the right front wheel, neatly slicing the tire and breaking a lug on the cement curbing before lurching to a stop on the flattened rim. Managed to remove the wasted tire and wheel after some struggle and replace it with the donut spare and- with the boy safely removed to the back seat -coaxed it the remaining half mile home on three lug nuts.

You know, for as many hours upon hours he's spent at the video games, driving and careening about in virtual driving, you'd think he could avoid something as big as the side of the road and that curbing... but nooooooooooo...

So tomorrow will be an adventuresome day of wheel and tire repair, breaking into the moolah set aside for the long overdue muffler repair and upcoming inspection. Yay!

I keep thinking that I haven't set eyes on me mother in probably almost a month now. Not only are we removed to the other side of the county, there's also the on-again, off-again nature of her relationship with my spouse, lotta water under the bridge between 'em and... well, like everything else in this ragged existence, it ain't what it oughta be. A super drag. I hear she has a new dog, another German Shepherd, one better trained, more mature and less hyperactive than the last adoptee.

I need to scavenge some stuff from my collected paraphernalia still stored in her garage so I'll have to make a point of covering the intervening miles sometime this week. Or get disowned.

And so it goes. Stay tuned for more exciting meaningless drivel, er, I mean, exciting news soon, you betcha!

Liquid lunch

Boy, it's been a loooong time since I used that terminology. Like, fifteen years. Probably longer... But I ran some errands today and went out of my way a little bit to Millersville and lunched at the House of Pizza- always reminds me of my first year at school, hangin' with Curt Gilbert in his loud Camaro with the Scorpions blaring -decided to go all out and have a small pitcher o' the golden grain as long as I was freewheelin' and in no particular hurry. I could take my time plus it was a good sized stromboli for a small. No problem.

It amounted to three and half glasses and it was all I could do to finish it off. And it still isn't sitting well twelve hours later. Uuuu-uugh!

When I was on a landscaping crew back in the day we loved local jobs where we could scoot over to the Papertown Inn in Spring Grove for, ahem, lunch. Suffice to say, the rest of the workday was not highly productive after those midday breaks.

Of course, we had at least one real, live alcoholic leading the charge and he was a foreman, after all. A cool little character, reminded me of a knee high Mark Twain, but with an angry streak, I'm not sure what mental bugs he had, other than the alcoholism, but there was something about life that didn't sit well with him, fer sure. But with a few beers he took on a real glow, lightened up considerably.

It's funny- not funny 'hahaha' -how hooch treats different people differently. Some get happy, some get angry, some get sleepy. I got happy then sleepy in short order. But if I was kept awake then I could get angry. Not a pleasant state to recall at all. Of course, some of the 'happy' times were less than pleasant too! Things you'd like to change if you knew better. Oh, but wait, I knew it all then; that's right, I forgot.

When I think about it now I wonder what the big attraction was. I didn't have any great things weighing on me that I needed to escape, really. I think more than anything it was just to be sociable. It did get me to open up a little, become a little less frightfully backward. Of course, under the influence that wasn't always a good thing.

Plus, you know, everybody was doing it- although there were plenty of other substances going around that I never touched. Which is probably a good thing because my long term memory has suffered in large part, I believe, because of those intemperate bouts. I'd likely be a complete vegetable if I'd gone the whole nine yards of substance abuse! -and it gave your hands something to do besides stick in your jeans pockets.

Nowadays I rarely bother bringing beer home because it just takes up too much room in the fridge. For a looooong time. Summertime, maybe a few times. One with a steak off the grill. Then it's like a minor celebration, woo hoo! Lookit me! A steak! And a beer! Livin' large, baby! I drink about half of it...

...then I fall asleep in the lawn chair...

 

Taco salad y gato

Man, my overnight visitor didn't show himself until sometime late in the evening- I was tucked under the blankets reading David Lee Roth's autobiography by flashlight, the room lights are too dim and the bedside lamp is flourescent, too bright, I gotta remedy that one day, until 11, 11:30 and called it quits -so my careful taco preparations were for naught when he slipped in sometime after I faded off to slumberland. But, hey, that just means leftovers for today and the next day or so which are always better anyway.

So, having turned in that early I woke an hour earlier, almost 6:30, and re-discovered The Andy Griffith Show for a few minutes before venturing out for a stroll 'round the neighborhood. Only took about twenty-five minutes to decide the risk of frostbite was too great, temps of 24 with wind chills making it seem half that, and fairly jogged back into the warm.

I've got some mail to shoot out and may take a drive up country to find a Dick Blick's Art store which until recently I had no idea was fairly local to me in Lemoyne PA. Their online catalog says they stock the casting urethane and various other supplies for my homespun enterprise  so perhaps with a little drive time I can save the expense of home delivery. Besides, you never know what else you'll find that'll be useful for some goofy project in the craft emporiums or dollar stores.

Plus there's a fabric outlet close by and three or four music stores, actually, more to the point, guitar stores. A little window shopping may be in order.

Meanwhile Miss Pussis has gone into hiding. She has a funny habit of investigating the cabinets under the sinks in her bathroom cell- it's comical the way she noses and paws open the doors and slinks inside, slowly dragging her fuzzy tail inside as the door closes on it -and so, having suffered the slings and arrows of my displeasure for having unrolled two full rolls of toilet paper into her litter box in as many days, has been retreating to that dark recess when I make my presence known.

She may be cowering but neither did she leave me unscathed,  might be we can have those claws trimmed at the same time as Monday's feline snip-and-tuck. A double whammy. Meee-ow!

After that non-elective surgery she'll be at large, granted run of the house and freedom from her confinement at last. That ought to be an adventure too as she goes all 'lunatic kitty' exploring the other five rooms and closets in the place, spaces under and around furniture which she's been denied until now, not to mention all the attendant familiar and unfamiliar smells that are sure to excite her little animal olfactory center, views from unobstructed windows, outdoor distractions and so on and on.

I can hardly wait...

Counters and stuff

Boy, if I had a nickel for every computer or website glitch I've encountered since signing on to this virtual world, well, let's just say I'd have a whole lot of nickels. More nickels than you'd want to fall on your head all at once, that much is certain.

The latest is the counter here on this forum. It looks to me as if it reset itself and now reads single digits, strange. I have no clue where the count was at but I'm reasonably certain it hasn't turned over like a car odometer...

What was I gonna write about here today? Oh, I know, along with my mail run and a trip to the craft store for some supplies I made a pilgrimage yesterday across the bridge to see my old school chum, for the sake of anonymity- he'll appreciate this -we'll call him 'Pete'. Now, 'Pete' is a peculiar fellow, I'm sure he'd agree completely with that assessment and take pleasure in it as well. We knew each other in passing in high school and then got to hanging out in college and have, in spite of his weirdness and sometimes downright disagreeableness, sort of stuck it out in the intervening years due in no small part to our common interest in pop culture, comic books and overlapping musical tastes. That and my own good natured acceptance of everybody else's weirdness- I'm no weirdo! -and Pete's in particular.

Plus his mom says I'm the only friend he's got. I know that's not entirely true but I think she says it because she figures it makes us both feel good having found a fellow weirdo to commingle with for all these years. So we keep in touch largely through email but hang out a coupla times a year and exchange reading material, which is to say 'comics' and pablum like TV autobiographies, and yak about inane topics nobody else will sit still for.

But after sending a dozen or so emails during the last month or so- items of interest, auctions, inconsequential questions -and receiving no response I thought I better trundle over the river and see if he'd perhaps been killed in a flaming wreck or some misadventure. Because you never know, y'know? Unless you live next door to someone how would you be aware of their sudden absence... Sobering but true...

Anyway, Pete turned out to be alive and well, simply closed up his email box for a while to ignore spam(and everything else along with it!)and was, as always, good for a few hours discoursing on various, whattayacallit, 'conspiracy theories': hidden agendas, goverment spying, the dangers of wireless telephones, secret societies, invasion of privacy, who killed Kennedy, the moon landing hoax, fake Paul McCartney and so on.

And so it was yesterday. I have to admit a great many points he presents on these various subjects make a lot of sense and he has no shortage of reading material, internet research and related factoids to back up what might otherwise seem outlandish, tabloid variety assertions.

But we always come back to simpler stuff like the new toy Batmobile, the possibility of a Van Halen reunion tour, what my wacky family members are up to, people and events he reminds me of from our college years which, with his expansive memory, he recalls in unusually keen detail and I have only fuzzy impressions of having been there once long, long ago.

Which would, in fact, be very, very painful if I chose to dwell on it. I mean, besides the obvious joys of recollection what shapes our daily determinations and perspectives more than cumulative experience that is the stuff of life and especially those shared, right? When that whole filing section has become a dimly lit room down a dark corridor of the mind... Well, were there was an experimental chemical remedy or exercise regimen to correct that dysfunction, I'd be standing in line right now, believe me. 

In more mundane news: I've still got to make my tacos tonight. A family friend, a young fellow a few years senior to my son, has been camping out with us a coupla nights a week since we are relatively close to his workplace versus his home down country. He's a great kid, very pleasant and a positive influence on my boy-boy so we're happy to accomodate. I should call him and see if he's coming by tonight, let him know there'll be taco fixings a la carte for us bachelors.

I'll have to have everything in order before Smallville, yay!

Well, I suppose I'll do some crafting before the sun sets; cold, rainy right now so it's not exactly a 'bright, bright, bright sunshiney day' anyway. Did you know the guy who sang I Can See Clearly Now, that lovely 70s ditty, Johnny Nash, also sang the theme song to the 1960s cartoon, The Mighty Hercules? It's true.

There's your useless but fascinating factoid for today.

I don't remember much but I can write the lyrics from memory:

Hercules, hero of song and story / Hercules, winner of ancient glory / Fightingfor the right, fighting with his might / with the strength of ten ordinary men / Hercules, people are safe when near him / Hercules, only the evil fear him / Softness in his eyes, iron in his thighs / Virtue in his heart, fire in every part / of the mighty Hercules

Stirring, innit? Ahh, yeah, well, thanks for listening...!

 

Get funky!

Wow, in case you couldn't tell I was in a seriously funk-ified mood earlier and I wouldn't say it had anything to do with my case of DVD mis-information frustration. You'll have this, especially when the house is quiet and there are no distractions and one is left alone with ones thoughts for a few days.

"Wait a minute!", I sez. I should be living it up! So I went out rack scouting for the new Hot Wheels Batmobile... a veritable bust that was. I was so desperate I bought three of the 'Mystery Cars' at the Dollar General- now, I don't even know for sure that these opaque black-bubbled packages are supposed to contain the TV Batmobile but if you're gonna take a chance for a buck, what better vehicle to hide under there than this much-sought-after version, right? Well, that was a waste of three dollars. Not entirely, son boy still has his car collection after all and on occasion he drags them out and crashes them into one another, so he'll be happy to add these to his cache.

Since I was finding no Batcars I made myself feel better with a stop at the Chinese buffet. There are at least six Chinese restaurants that I can think of offhand, I'm sure it's more than that, around town, we favor one in particular, Kevins. Not a very Chinese sounding moniker that.

Although it's changed hands and names at least twice since we first patronized the place we still call it by it's pet name- 'Little Blonde Boy Buffet'. The first owner of record was a middle-aged gentleman who doted on our son as a boy of five, maybe six. He always made a point of stopping by the table, patting him on the head and, grinning from ear to ear, announcing "Little blonde boy! Verrry good boy! He eat verry good, little blonde boy!"

Now there was a man who knew from good customer relations. I imagine he's living like a king back in China by now. Or... somewhere... other than York PA...

I used to like the 'fast food' Chinese at York's Central Market too but they went out years ago. They had great little mushy egg rolls, not crispy at all. And a nice, greasy combo lo mein. Central Market used to be a favorite haunt on one of the three market days, Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday. When we were in the office cleaning business, we'd often stop in as we were finishing work downtown and things were opening up in the market house. Usually we had to find a way to kill some time- like eating breakfast at the teeny diner in the northwest corner of the market -until Mr. Henry was ready to make ham subs or Bair's had chicken parts and potato wedges and chicken livers tumbling out of the fryer or the girl had her Chinese stand up and running.

But the Cookie Man could always be counted on early in the morning. His family had a butcher business just down the aisle and sometimes Mr. Myers would pitch in there but his own enterprise was baked goods. If Keebler has elves, he had... well, I don't know what is superlative to elves making cookies but whatever it is... he had it!

He offered cakes and turnovers and sweet rolls and several varieties of cookies, usually a slightly different assortment every week. But my personal predilection was for his sugar cakes. We always called them 'sugar cookies' at home but his really were more like cake. Big as your fist and, like, there was something, some unknown thing that held the butter and sugar and eggs together because they just seemed to melt... Oh, sorry, I'm drooling on the keyboard... ugh...

One week he had no sugar cakes so I opted for the lesser delight of chocolate chip cookies. Now, normally I'd give three sugar cookies for one chocolate chip but, remember, we're talking about the sugar cake, and Mr. Myers' sugar cake, a thing to which few earthly delights will ever compare...

Suffice to say, the chocolate chip were soon a secondary, but ever-so-slightly secondary darling to the sugar cake. Again, it was like there was nothing holding them together once they passed the lips, all buttery and chocolatey chips and chocolatey chunks... Awww, there I go drooling again...

Alas, like all good things eventually do, that era has passed. Mr. Myers, despite his cherubic countenance, mild persona and confectionary- or 'confectionery', which? -gifts on a par with my own dear Aunt Esther or Grandma Lehr(neither a slouch with a spatula, a dozen eggs and a pound of sugar, lemme tell ya), devised compelling reasons not to continue in his business. Or in life. A dratted shame, and not just because I miss those cookies...

So along with my toy car search today I picked up my taco fixings and eggs and potatoes and milk. I splurged on 2% versus the usual skim while the wife is away. And hazelnut creamer for my tea.

And I brought home some Rainbow Keebler chocolate chips today. Not awful little confections. Just not... not quite the palatable nirvana as a Mr. Myers chocolate chip cookie...by any means... >sigh<

Funny how one thing, one, one thing leads to another, innit?

I could go on, of course, but I gotta get some Boggle in yet- Go, sleepy brain! Go! -and it's getting late. Big mail day tomorrow and a five minute micro-discourse to prepare for tomorrow evening. Not a great big, hairy deal but any public speaking- regardless of the audience or circumstance - well, it's still not my favorite thing. So I wait until the day of... Brilliant strategem!

I remember once... Aahhh... There I go again...

Monday, Monday

Okay, so it's another holiday so there's no mail which in my little world pretty much means no sunshine. Nothing coming in, nothing going out, no fun in that. Great for schoolkids and the government and postal and bank employees, for everybody else it's not so swell.

I've been thinking lately about civility. With regard to the whole framework of human interaction, that is. I mean, if you've got just one person who gives vent to some frustration or says what's really, really- I mean reeeaally -on their mind it will impact everybody within arms reach to some extent and that impacts everybody they know and so on. Like dominoes or ripples from a stone thrown into a pond.

In fanciful time travel stories they've come to refer to the correlative action as the 'butterfly effect'. I'm sure as a teen enamored of the sci-fi genre I read the story- I can't recall the author or title exactly -in a collection of short stories- a company offers hunters the opportunity to travel back in time to bag a T-Rex with the explicit instruction 'Do NOT leave the paved hunting trail!' because any untoward action may impact history as we know it. One overzealous hunter leaves the trail, natch, and upon returning to the present finds a world quite different from what he knew. Squashed on the sole of his boot... a prehistoric butterly. So that small action caused ripples that changed everything he knew... 

No wonder conventional wisdom says the tongue is a 'flaming fire' and it's well nigh impossible to get it under control. So we all do it, leave things unsaid for fear of the avalanche of repercussions, for the comfort or well-being of someone else. Well, not everyone does it. I suppose in a great many instances that's why there are aggravated assaults and murders and wars.

So it's better to bite one's tongue. Of course, sometimes that means stepping on it to keep everything gurgling below the surface from frothing over, erupting, spewing, stabbing forth. But intellectually recognizing the value of self-control doesn't make it easier to swallow all that stuff. An acrid, fetid, bitter pill. >Ble-e-eck!<

So since the local Sunday afternoon TV offerings consisted of NASCAR and basketball and not much else, I screened The Cowboys for myself. I wondered as I watched what became of all those youngsters? I think it was 1972 so we're thirty-five years removed. Are they still acting? Would we recognize them if they showed up on House this week? Or have they become realtors, school teachers or cab drivers? Robert Carradine, of course, went on to Revenge Of The Nerds. Or was it Revenge Of The Geeks? At any rate, he was in a n acting family so it must have seemd like the thing to do for him.

The DVD cast notes feature only the 'name' stars- John Wayne, Roscoe Lee Browne, Bruce Dern, Colleen Dewhurst. Which brings me to another bone of contention.

What careless, moonfaced, slovenly college graduates are they paying to research and put together these 'extras' on the DVD release of vintage movies?!? Whoever it is and whatever they're being paid... it's too much.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with actors of some repute would recognize a picture of Colleen Dewhurst, am I right? I'm sure the average person on the street would have a hard time putting a a name to the face if confronted out of the blue but we're talking about people whose job it is to put names to the faces and the facts attendant to their career. People with all the vast resources of the film company they're working for not to mention the internet movie resources to help them get it right...

Now, Colleen Dewhurst is an actress of some repute and deserving of proper credit for her body of work. And yet the four pages of notations under the heading 'Colleen Dewhurst' in The Cowboys cast extras all feature pictures not of Colleen Dewhurst but Sarah Cunningham, the actress who played John Wayne's wife in the film!

Means nothing in the grand scheme of things but if I were Colleen Dewhurst- or Sarah Cunningham, for that matter -I'd hope for a higher degree of accuracy in the dissemination of such information.

Well, the rubber doll parts are all setting- got an early start today around seven, been getting to bed earlier and up earlier since I'm on my own this week, a good habit. Now to work on my awful eating habits! -and I've learned a little of Elvis' Suspicious Minds this morning from the oldies' radio to follow up In The Ghetto yesterday. On a roll, last week I learned an imteresting little change I'd been missing for twenty years in my slacker version of Dust In The Wind. At this rate I'll have enough strumming, finger-picking, easy-listening songs to set up on a street corner downtown come summertime and play for spare change.

Buh-waaahhh-hwahahahahahahaha! Now, that's comedy, my friends.

I'll likely forget them all by this afternoon...

 

Weather

...is the big news this week. A few inches of snow finally and some sleety wet snow to top it all off, mmm-mmm-mmm! Swell! It made for some fun shoveling and heaving the heavy wet stuff to get the car out to go nowhere but just in case. I gotta tell ya, after more than a year at a nearly completely sedentary occupation... it was more like work than any snowfall I can recall. And we had some biggies a few years back! Yow! So in order to avoid a coronary event- I didn't want mi esposa to think I was pulling a copycat move! -and force an ambulance to traverse the ice-covered driveway I did what little I had to do at a leisurely pace while my dear son boy was busy helping the neighbors. Wait a minute! This is NOT why I had progeny! Where's my little lawn mower and snow shoveler when I really need him? Off doing it for money at the neighbors!!! His mother calls that enterprising, I say it's only enterprising after our work is done!

In other news: I'm diligently searching the racks of local toy purveyors- WalMart, KMart and Target mostly -for a new Hot Wheels TV Batmobile that's supposed to be hitting the shelves any day now. I've been at the toy and collectible game for a looooong time now but only rarely do I go out of my way for a newly produced item preferring to scout up the playthings that remind me of my youth instead and it is a goofy feeling to say the least to be pawing through those little toy cars - I can only imagine what 'normal' people passing by must think when they see a grown man(that's an estimation that's up for debate, of course...)anxiously groping the Hot Wheels displays! -but the anticipation of maybe actually finding one on the rack is virtually palpable. It really is like being a kid again! Weird, huh?

Still, I'm not exactly optimistic. I think there are too many serious Hot Wheels guys prowling those same racks while the stock people are hanging the cars they're basically grabbing them outta their hands, I'm sure of it.

I'll have plenty of free time to look around this week as the wife and son are off with friends for a wintry beach visit to OBX. It's been nearly ten years since we've been to the NC shore- a powerfully compelling locale, a beautiful, beautiful place -and while funds were exceedingly limited, the opportunity was not to be missed. For two-thirds of us anyway. I'll be right here 'making the donuts' as I like to say.

With afew sales I'll be able to patronize the nearby McDonald's and the Dover Diner- when we were moving in here we practically lived there while the new digs were stacked to improbably full to actually prepare food for ourselves! -versus cooking for myself all week long. I like to cook but when it's just one, not so much. Coupla leftovers and peanut butter and jelly will likely suffice for the first few days, if I get ambitious I'll work up some taco fixings, enough for a few more days, and feed on that between cheeseburgers.

Gosh, talk about compelling journal entries! This is seriously the stuff of life, brother!

Dust bunnies the size of Rhode Island

And tumbleweeds blowin' through this venue! My, my, at the rate I update this forum the aforementioned moon goes 'round and 'round several times 'tween entries.

At any rate, here's the latest news from the home front: Son boy now has a learner's permit to drive, frightening. For all the video game driving he's done over the years, his hands-on-the-wheel maneuvering is herky jerky and tense. He's already managed to add a highly visible scrape to the front of the 'crash magnet', clipping a speed limit sign in the trailer park driveway...! Poor crash magnet can't get a break!

Miss Pussis- remember her real name is...uh... Coco, that's it...! -is growing up in confinement. Just two more weeks until her parole from her bathroom prison. She's more than a little twitchy when she's removed from that cell, hand-carried from one room to the next, I can hardly wait to see how she responds to freedom and full-blown run of the house.

While some parts of the country have been having their fill of winter white we're due here for our first real taste of the stuff in a day or two. If the track or speed of the storm doesn't alter drastically before then, that is.

I'm excited because as word has traveled among the better part of our little neighborhood here that I've been oft appointed 'Breakfast King' on vacation or special occasions, expectations are high that while several vigorous volunteers shovel and salt for the more mature residents I'll have water on the boil and the pancake griddle fired up bright and early for their refreshment. I'm stocked up on sausages and corn meal but I'll have to grab more 'clucker fruit' before the roads become impassable.

Downside of the pleasant prospect of being snowbound for a day or so is a planned road trip right in the middle of the week- and amidst the expected inclement weather -for mi esposa and a pal to parts north and norther. Important business, sure, but I'm hoping it can be postponed, we'll see. I know I don't wanna get out and drive in that junk, who needs that as long as there's bread and toilet paper and the pipes don't freeze...

I could go on, you bet, but I'm practically asleep at the wheel now and, besides, I gottta save something to write next month! Oy!

Oh, I know one thing I wanted to add before I forgot: A little guitar fumbling today produced some familiar chordings that sounded suspiciously like a Rod Stewart song I once knew by heart, You're In My Heart, which, I'm certain, was included on the Greatest Hits LP that I used to have but disappeared somewhere along the road to now. What's worse, I'm sure I replaced it on CD- because I don't own a record player anymore -and I don't know where that copy is either!

I'll have to make a search for it, I suppose, because my primitive ear can't quite figure out the changes at the chorus from memory; a few dozen spins of the song and maybe I'll have something close, enough to fool the casual listener anyway. Now to work on my whiskey-throated falsetto... mi, mi, mi, meee! Yeahhhh, right...