The New Grill

Lisa is coming into town this Friday. She’s been trying to get out here to see old friends for a while now. She did manage to come to the Prairie Dogs CD release party in February, but she was here and gone so quickly that it was like it never happened.

Friday is also the day our neighbors get their new puppy.

Corlis came by and helped me get the old oil tank out of the trailer and into the back yard. Now things are really looking white-trash around here Itellyouwhat. I have no idea what the hell to do with it now that it’s out on the lawn, but I figure better outside than in. I parked it next to the old broken dryer.

After the yard sale Sweetie called the city and scheduled a junk pick up, courtesy of our municipal government. Earl tried to get me to help him put their old cast-iron potbelly along side our junk, but there’s no way I was gonna move that heavy piece of crap. City wouldn’t take it anyway even if we did make it to the road and he’s already got enough garbage in his front yard without adding some rusted iron to the picture.

For the past three days it’s been raining hard but that hasn’t stopped me from cooking with my new bar-b-que grill. I mentioned that I got a new grill didn’t I? No? We’ll I did. Pretty nice one if I do say so myself. No gas, all briquette, and a place to put a smoker on the side if I want to. I think there’s only been one evening since I got it that I haven’t cooked something on it. Had some of the Copper River Salmon on it last night and it turned out perfect as a mater of fact. Thanks for asking.

I’m getting a cable modem this afternoon as well. When I upgraded my computer I found out that my old DSL modem wouldn’t work with the new Windows operating system, so I took the opportunity to get rid of my ISP and sign on with a local company.

Yeah…now if we can just start getting the weather to cooperate around here, we can call summer officially here, doncha think?

Garage Sale

The trailer park had a swap meet/garage sale on Saturday where everyone put their stuff out and we posted signs out on the highway and everything. The rain held off for the most part and though the sale got off to a slow start, by the early afternoon things were really hopping and the money flying. Sweetie and I won the prize for most money made bringing in $130 bucks and two bottles of wine. The wine having been traded in by Dewy and Ham in exchange for a painted chair we no longer wanted and that they thought would go nicely in their guest bedroom.

It was all crap that we sold. Crap that had been cluttering up the back closets and storage shed since we moved here right before the youngest boy was born. Boxes of books, an old Mac monitor, air filter, CD towers, playpen, torn green leather chair, small bookcase, small beat up dresser. My sale of the day was made when I sold a paper shredder for $2 as a toy to a woman with kids. She hadn’t even been looking at it, I just said I thought she needed one and after I explained why, and she said that they were thinking of getting mice, and wouldn’t that be useful shredding paper for their bedding. She asked me if I would take less than the $3 dollar asking price and since she was getting some books I said absolutely. It was my goal to not have to cart any of that stuff back into the trailer or the shed and I wasn’t going to let that sale get away. By the end of the afternoon I was left with a high chair and stroller, some old beer mugs from Europe and an Ivana Trump Biography given as a prank a few Christmases ago. Around three, Earl backed up his pickup and we loaded in all the leftovers and took them over to the Goodwill station, though not before I managed to sell one last end table off of the back to a garage sale latecomer. People were just in a buying mood I guess. Garage saleing has got to be better than reading the morning paper these days anyway.

After the sale we packed up the boys and headed out to a birthday party for the four-year-old son of some friends who live in Sumner. They have a large piece of property in one of those modern housing developments where none of the streets have curbs and there are no sidewalks and they tell you what color you can paint your house. Though the surroundings are unsettling our friends are not, and we had a great time catching up with them and their family. E_ and I went to high school together and was one of the first friends I’d made when I moved to Tacoma back in 81’. There are not many people that I still keep in contact with that have been around longer than Sweetie has, but he and his brother are two of them.

We dodged rain clouds and ate bar-b-que until the youngest one started to complain that it was past his bedtime. The older boy was starting to feel it as well, though he swore he wasn’t tired. He had had a t-ball game early that morning and since arriving at the party, had only slowed down long enough to eat a hot dog, and then only because Sweetie made him. The proof is that neither boy put up much of a struggle when we said it was time to go.

Ike complained every time the car had to stop at a light on the way home, which is his way of telling me to quit messing around and get him to bed already. The older boy felt carsick and though neither of them fell asleep on the way, it didn’t take long for the trailer to get quiet after we got home.

I sat out on the stoop for a while and listened to birch trees talk to the wind. For a moment the sun made it’s way out from under the Cedar trees that line the road at the bottom of the hill escaping the cloud cover and the tree’s thick branches in a burst of gold. Two minutes later it was gone, swallowed by the earth. Night was falling.

I closed my eyes and it started to rain.

I Am A Computer _______.

Where have I been lately? I know it seems like forever since I last updated this page, if by forever you mean over a week. Sure the last update wasn’t much, so if you want to say that it’s been over two weeks since I had a decent update of this site far be if from me to argue.

Last night I put the finishing touches on a project I started Saturday afternoon. I decided to take the old PII 400 chip in my computer at home and replace it, the motherboard and the case, with state of the art. I put an AMD 2500 Barton in it and WOW is it fast! These are the best kind of upgrades to make, the ones that take you from that slow and pokey computer sludge, straight into the modern age of light travel.

I’ve never done anything like that before -- doing a total swap-out of parts all by myself. I usually don’t think I’m all that technically minded about that sort of thing, but apparently I’ve played just enough Dungeons and Dragons and watched the minimum amount of Star Trek hours to qualify as a low-grade Semi-Tech computer tinkerer. By that I mean that the manual that came with it was pretty decent and what stuff didn’t match up, I was able to make some good guesses at.

I imagine that reading about a computer processor and motherboard upgrade is right there on par with a long dissertation on a Jungian breakdown of the reoccurring dreams I have about shopping. But to anyone who comes by this infrequently updated site knows, if there’s one thing that’ll get me to update, it’s when I get to stroke my own ego by patting myself on the back.

Freud beats out Jung every time here at the old Trailerpark. Sure he’s outdated and most of his theories debunked, but I’ve never really forgiven Jung for my first quarter of college when while looking for water, I was instead given a book so dry that it almost made sand drinkable. Come to think of it, I never forgave my teacher, Doranne Crable-Sundmacher either. To this day in my head I still see that cracked wrinkled-skinned woman who in her youth spent too much time in the sun pseudo-intellectualizing passages of Schopenhauer and Descartes and I get all wobbly and glaze-eyed and my nose starts running.

You know, it’s hard enough to come up with something to write every week without having to keep a fresh box of dream-away nasal tissue hidden in the upper left lobe filing system of my brain.

A Trip To Seattle

It was a pretty quiet week around the park. Last Tuesday we took Ike up to Children’s Hospital to the spasticity clinic for a round of examinations. It was near the top of our list of things we’re not looking forward too all that much, so it came as a pleasant surprise that we thought they did a nice job. Smart people with some good ideas, plus Ike was beyond pleasant and entertaining. Though he is, for the most part, a very good natured boy doctors tend to have things like Evil Stethoscopes hanging from their necks or Small Rubber Hammers of Torture. Once Ike’s neurologist rang a Small Dinner Bell, a crime so cruel that he wasn’t forgiven for the next several visits.

After we talked to the PT about Botox injections on his ankle and to the OT about thumb splints for his hands we decided to head out to see if we could drum up some of our old friends who we used to spend time with to stave off making ourselves a pain ass with the white coats. We found Ike’s old nutritionist, Maura, and the IICU social worker, Louine and chatted them up for a bit. We looked for out old friend Morty, but Tuesday is his day off. It was the first time we’d been around the hospital since we sued them, but everyone was nice and no one even brought it up.

We have a final project due for my writing class that is to be five to ten pages in length. I’ve decided to see if I can tackle Ike’s first three weeks of life and put it into something of a story. We kept a diary of all of our stays up there his first year. Though a lot of our first stay was written after the fact, as I didn’t have a laptop to write it all down with like I did later on. It’s pretty dry stuff really. I was just trying to get the facts straight at that point, figuring that I could always hammer it out into something worth reading at a later date. Well here it is more than four years later and I still haven’t spent any time with it.

Speaking of class, I’ve been having a pretty good time with it. Before it started I was a little concerned about the commute, but that’s turned into a non-factor really. Traffic is usually light and I can just set the cruise control the whole way. The workload hasn’t been too bad either. I’ve been keeping a journal and getting my assignments in on time.

This week I’ll start a draft of Ike’s Big Adventure and if anything comes of this project I’ll put it up here.