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Its all part of the "Image" If you dont understand it, they cant explain it to you

Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting

That's what I'm listening to as I type anyway -- the Nickelback cover of Elton's song, featuring Kid Rock. I dig it.

The motorcycle moved around this weekend. I had to wheel it out in order to organize our garage, then wheel it back. The upshot is that now we can actually park our van in the garage -- the first time we've been able to park a car in a garage since we first got a garage two years ago. Well, we did trial it once, but couldn't open any doors on the car, or walk around it. This seems to be a longer-term solution. So yay!

Had Monday night tae kwon do tonight. My son has decided to quit...at least that was before-hand. I talked with him (or at him, one or the other) after, and he's going to finish this session because he started it. Anyway, I think I have my first form learned, "Tae Guek I" I learned some more back-fists and a spinning side kick. Cool sounding stuff. It was fairly low-key this week, and I'm not even sore.

We've had warm weather mixed with rain this past week, and our new baby grass has exploded. It almost needs mowed before snow falls. Almost, not quite. I'm quite happy with the performance of the grass. Then again, I'm a lawn-guy. I like 'em.

We also tried to christen our newly-moved firepit Saturday night, but the wood was all too wet, and we succeeded in burning some magazines and that was it.

That's all. Not much.

You watch out. that 12 year old is hidin behind the grill. He's gonna jump out and kato ya sometime soon.

Yeah, if that 12-year-old is behind my grill I'll hand his a$$ to him -- I don't have to pull my punches on my own back deck...not like you do when you're having a "friendly" sparring match. Matter of fact, there'd be nothing wrong with taking a nine-iron to him.

Hello, people. Gutentag. Bonjour. Buenas Dias. Ooga-Booga.

Still alive in my slice of Michigan. Bike is still sitting in the garage. I took the battery out when we started getting regular frosts and a light snow or two. Yeah, we've had our first snow. And our second. And supposed to be more tonight, but so far none of it has stuck for long.

So, tomorrow is the Day of the Turkey. (DotT) We have to go to two Eatings of the Turkey (EotT) on the same day, and neither looks to be all that uplifting. First we go to my wife's grandma...the food will be the better of the two meals, and my wife's cousin's girlfriend/fiance/hump-bunny will be there, and that's a show that's always fun to watch, if you turn the sound down first. If you know what I mean. She makes me hungry.

But, grandma is eighty-something, and had a pretty bad year -- in and out of the hospital, a couple of pneumonias, some dementia (probably caused by some meds), some other things. She may be here next year, we may not. So we're visiting.

And after not-quite-enough EotT we then pack the six of us into the van and slog our a$ses forty miles to my wife's step-dad-equivalent* and HIS mom. The food at this EotT will hopefully not make me sick, and I'll have to eat more of it than I want. We won't have either of these people next year. Her step-dad-equivalent is in month two of a six-months-to-live cancer prognosis, and his mom has some massive inoperable aortic aneurism that at some point is going to pop and put her out like turning off a lightswitch.

Uplifting $hit. Entering that house is like walking into a palpable cloud of doom. Gawd.

Bwuh. <shudder> Moving on.

Been going to tae kwon do faithfully. My son and I should be testing for our orange belts on Dec. 17. Yee-hah! My twin daughters turned one year old two weeks ago. We tested our basement for radon and came back un-naturally high, so we've gotten a digital tester to find out what the heck is up. Whatever, life isn't all bad.

*step-dad-equivalent. See, my wife's mom only just got married for the first time a couple of years ago, but my wife's 33 (or 29 again, whatever) and her brother's like 22. Her mom lived with a succession of guys, and a couple of them were long-term so they were like stepdads, only without the officiality of marriage, so they can only be equivalents, I guess. She used to call them "ex-step-a$$holes." Play some banjo, smoke some weed, cap a couple of canoe-ers, you'll get the idea about my in-laws.

Molehill < Mountain

Yeah, well, so Thanksgiving came and went and most of that doom 'n gloom stuff didn't happen. I mean, I got to ogle my cousin in law's hump-bunny for the whole evening, so that's all right, anyway. The whole trip to the doom house didn't happen. They had dinner at the same time as grandma, so we didn't go.

The biggest drawback to going to Grandma's for dinner? NO leftovers. I mean, the t-day leftovers are practically better than the dinner. I know lots of people lust after turkey sandwiches or turkey noodle soup but not me. I'll eat plates of leftover turkey dinner until the ingredients run out. My wife doesn't understand how I can do that...she gets bored with the same food, I guess.

And speaking of holiday dinners, I have my simple requirement for holiday table bliss. I call it the "Holy 4." Turkey. Mashed potatoes. Gravy. Stuffing. Give me those four and I'm happy as a clam...everything else on the table is nice, but you could strip it all away and leave me the Holy 4 and I'd still be rosy-pink happy. And that's what I'll eat plates of for a week. If one of the components runs out, I'll have plates of Holy 3. And since we went to Grandma's, I miss out on all of that. <sigh>

And all of that came in the middle of my semi-new November obsession. It's called NaNoWriMo, (National Novel Writing Month) and the whole concept is that you start writing on Nov. 1, and if you have 50,000 words on Nov. 30, you have a novel and you win. This is the second year I've done it, and it's the second year I've won...I'm really geeked about it. I've spent the entire last month in the basement, hammering coffee and Coke products, trying to stay awake after the twins and everyone else has fallen asleep; trying to crank out a couple of thousand words per night. I'll probably never do anything with these novels, but I did 'em. Go me.

Different track...I get to go on a road trip tomorrow. My employer's renting me and a coworker (a coworker and I?) a car and we're driving to Madison, Wisconsin to learn to fix laserjet printers. Okay, let me fill in between the cracks now -- we're currently getting a blizzard. Like, right now, this instant, as I listen to Korn and type this blog entry, it's blowing and our low-voltage sidewalk lights are covered with snow that wasn't there at dinnertime. Like, we're supposed to get 9" of snow, then follow it with sleet and freezing rain. And I'm setting out in a Jeep Compass at noon for an eight hour drive. If we can get south of Grand Rapids, we'll most likely make it.

And my employer's policy is to give us $50/day to eat. Each. Including "gratuities, drinks and mini-bar." Mini-bar? Drinks? Geez, I'll actually have to WORK to eat $50/day. Especially when Tony (the coworker) and my taste isn't so much "Robaire's Wine and Glitz" and is more of "Quaker Steak and Lube" -- a real chain in Madison, by the way. I plan on bringing a sixpack of Killian's red, and the ingredients to make Kamikaze's in the hotel room -- that would be vodka (Finlandia, thank you!), triple sec and Rose's sweetened lime juice. Should be good times. Assuming we don't die in a snowbank and get discovered in the spring.

What else...nothing motorcycle related. Maybe not even next year, as we're scraping together the money to buy the house we're renting right now. That may have already kiboshed the bike in '08. I haven't even done anything with the bicycle project I've been tinkering with for a year. My latest project was actually a ball point pen. Yeah, an ink-pen. See, one of the managers in my department handed us all out free pens, hefty, metal, and painted with our hospital's logo and a pithy phrase, something like "You sick, we make better," or something. Well, I came to notice that the barrel of this pen was apparently solid brass. So I brought it home and took a wire wheel and steel wool to it, and sho'nuff, it's a gorgeous brass pen. Naturally, I killed my power drill when trying to do all this. Gad. Maybe I'll get one for Christmas.

I did this like a few weeks ago. Today I hit with some rubbing compound and polishing compound, and the pen fairly gleams. I'm no mysta2, but I gots me a cool ink-pen, anyway.

And with that, I'll quit this thing, and maybe sleep, or something.

Don't read this if you're in a good mood...

I had a sobering morning this morning. I hate it when real life intrudes on my little world, y'know? So here's the setup, I guess. I spent the morning yelling at the kids to stop dawdling, get dressed, put on their snowpants, coats, etc and catch the school bus. I bundled up in my fleece, shell, wool hat and warm gloves, and scraped the layer of ice off my new-ish Volvo so I could drive to work at my (doesn't seem like it to me but I guess it is) high-paying job in I.T.

It was a beautiful morning...the sunrise was pink and orange in the east, and all the trees were picture-perfect; white-frosted and gorgeous. The temperature was hovering between 15 and 20 degrees according to the thermometer in the car. I enjoyed my 20-mile drive from my 3-bedroom home to my job in a lakeside resort town, and parked in the parking lot as I usually do.

And as I was walking into work from the parking lot -- again, beautiful sunrise shining against the 19th-century yellow-brick Gothic buildings of the old Traverse City State Hospital, I saw a small old guy walking toward me...no, *staggering* toward me. As he got closer, I saw that he had a woefully inadequate coat, dirty and hanging open. He had too many days of unshaven beard, and his hat didn't cover his ears -- again, the temperature was only about 15 degrees, and that's after the sun came up. His eyes were fixed straight ahead on nothing, and he was staggering and weaving so much that I got off the sidewalk. And that's it, we walked on our separate ways. But my mind can't let go of it.

I'm ashamed that the first thing I thought was "dang, the guy's still drunk," because my immediate second thought was "then again, he's probably so d@mn cold that he can't walk straight. I know I would be." I just feel bad for the guy. I also feel selfish and guilty that I didn't offer him one of my jackets, or my hat and gloves, or anything to actually help him. I at least have the empathy to feel bad for him, but at the same time I kick myself because feeling bad for him doesn't get him warmer or put food in his stomach. I wanted to run after him and give him everything I had...but did I? No. I did what everyone else does: nothing.

I get so caught up in my own problems -- paying rent, paying for $3/gallon gas for our two cars, getting Christmas presents for my kids, wondering if the wine shop is going to get a shipment of our favorite Riesling, hoping my wife makes yet another batch of Christmas cookies, my oldest daughter dawdling, the cost of groceries for a family of six, getting a close parking space, worrying that someone made a fresh pot of coffee at work --

-- and I realize just how selfish and stupid a lot of that really is when I am faced with living, staggering evidence of just how hard a life can be. Whether or not the wine shop can get me a bottle of a particular wine is really insignificant next to a guy who probably spent the night walking around in single-digit temperatures without a warm coat or hat or gloves. And I think all of this stuff in the space of about three seconds, then dwell on it for the rest of the day when what it really boils down to is that this guy needed my coat, my money, my help so much more than I do, and I gave him nothing. Merry G0d D@mn Christmas, here's nothing, aren't I the big man?

Sorry, I had to get this off my chest. It's killing me, and what it's doing to ME doesn't even matter.

Hey, I know what you mean about helping out the less fortunate. But to put things in perspective. Recently in the town I'm from, Colorado Springs, a newspaper there sent out reporters to interview the people begging by the side of the road. About 3/4 of them had a car they drove to their begging spots, and a good 9/10 had an apartment/house they lived in. They also found they usually had a min. of 3K in the bank and one guy bragged about having (and showed the reporter recepts for) his 300K bank account...
So while some of them really are less fortunate, a lot of them just act it to play on emotions and sympathy.
Wrider

Oh, I know about all that, Wrider. In fact, my dad's side of the family lives in New York City, and when I've visited we've seen the guy walking through the subway train with a box of Hershey bars hawking "help me feed my family," and we've seen the couple outside a deli with signs around their necks saying "dying of AIDS, please help," and in all cases, my uncle has told me not to pay attention for much the same reason:

"Some of them may be legitimate, but some of them make a business out of begging, and you can't tell which is which, so you can't give money to any of them, or you could get burned."

The guy I saw wasn't rich or faking, from what I could see. He wasn't asking for money...in fact, if he saw me at all I'd be surprised. He was dirty, he was underdressed for the cold, he couldn't walk in a straight line. His eyes didn't even flick over when he shambled by. I don't know why he would be walking BY a hospital without just checking in to get a warm bed for a while, but there he was. I can only hope he was heading for the restaurant that was a ways behind me to get something to eat, because beyond that was just a mile of bog before anything else.

The whole thing just really makes me feel like bourgeois, I guess...and I should just let it go.