All posts by djones

friday high five

Guilty Musical Pleasures

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Time once more for:

 

A sad fact of life is that we all have music we love and listen to that doesn’t conform to our normal tastes or likes. In fact, this music is often embarrassing to admit that we listen to, let alone like. Thus I present for your aural edification my escapes from my normal Iron Butterfly tainted taste buds.

Five Guilty Musical Pleasures

Pussycat Dolls – Don’t Cha Busta Version – click here (video embedding disabled)

Ashlee Simpson – Boyfriend – click here (video embedding disabled)

The Veronicas – 4Ever

The Veronicas – When It All Falls Apart

Heart – What About Love

So what are your guilty musical pleasures? C’mon – I know you have some.

Uncategorized

The Sock Recovery Tool and Other Stories

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Time once again for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. This week the prompts are:

1.) What’s ailing you? Diagnose yourself with a syndrome.

(inspired by Kimberly from Kamp KK)

2.) Share with us something you made by hand.
(inspired by Texan Mama via email)

3.) Fess up. Tell us what you found after a spying on someone.
(inspired by The Scattered Mind of a Tattooed Mini Van Mom)

4.) “How are y’all doing it? This summer, I mean? I cannot remember ever being as busy as we’ve been over the past two months. Those of you who are blogging daily, being as witty and entertaining as ever…I beg of you…HOW?”
(inspired By Lula from Lulaville)

5.)What are you afraid of?
(inspired by Life With Kaishon)

#1 – I’m currently suffering from two deadly syndromes. I don’t know which will get me first, but I do know that both are fatal.

The first is the dreaded ILMWS (I Love My Wife Syndrome). That means that I miss her a lot when she is forced to stay in the mountains for weeks at a time for business. Unfortunately, I suffer from the lesser rather than the greater version of this syndrome. In the greater version, amo meus uxor maximus, you pine away and eventually fade away due to not eating. In the lesser version, amo meus uxor grunnio, you make a lot of really high calorie food and eventually die from bacon overdose. In either case, the prognosis is not good.

The second syndrome is CAIS (Computer Addicted Idiot Syndrome). You know you have this ugly affliction when you keep thinking “I can read one more blog post before I absolutely positively have to get up and go to the bathroom.” and you do this repeatedly until the sprint is on. You also know you are on the verge of progressing into the final stages when you find yourself drooling over ads for new computers, even if you already have several working machines at hand. In the last stage, you stop talking to anyone in real life – often insisting that the people you know from blogging are more real than the annoying ghosts trying to keep you from spending yet more time on the computer.

#2 – The only things I’ve made by hand in the last couple of weeks are large piles of vegetation like this:

as I cleaned out the volunteer elms and sumac and weeds from the back yard. Of course if we aren’t restricted to the last couple of weeks, I always have my patent-pending, Rube Goldberg approved, behind-the-dresser and behind-the-dryer sock recovery tool (you’ll have to click on the image to see the full details of the exquisite construction):
Note the full utilization of the the bent coat hanger, duct tape, and a dowel stick to make a tool of extreme beauty. I know you just must have one of these fine tools! {*grin*}

#3 – I’m going to give this a pass. Most of the spying I have dome has been as part of work related activities and isn’t meant to be disclosed. I haven’t spied (or even stalked) any relatives because I believe that their life is their own to handle in the way they see fit. (Or mess up as they see fit as well.)

#4 – The simple answer is that I’m not doing it all. I am not blogging as much as I did in the past winter. For the nonce, I am generally not posting on the weekends. That is because I have other things to do and it is generally the only time L and I have together. So then the question becomes blog or spouse? If you chose blog, I think you are in the final stages of CAIS. Seek help, immediately.

#5 – Usually not much, but … This week while doing all the bushwhacking in the back yard brought forth a couple of anxiety producing happenings. (No, I don’t mean I tried to chop off a leg or arm with the ax. Cheesh!) When you chop, cut, and pull that much underbrush out, you disturb every bug and crawlie known to man and some not yet known ones as well. There is nothing like the feeling of a few bugs crawling around inside your shirt to induce the rapid removal of same. I don’t know how people of the female persuasion do it – having to go inside before removing the shirt and beating the snot out of the creepy crawlies that is. I’m much more in favor of the immediate gratification of just yanking the shirt off and flailing away. How about you? I figure that anyone who looks deserves the nightmares they’ll suffer from seeing my bare torso.

Of course, the evening that I whacked and piled all the brush made the backyard into a bird smörgÃ¥sbord. There were literally scenes like this one from the Hitchcock classic “The Birds”

going on all over the yard. At twilight, there must have been 300 birds gathered to feast on all the bugs and crawlies that were now exposed. When you see that many birds all staring intently and eating anything that moves, you can really believe that birds are the last of the dinosaurs. My only regret is that it came after it was too dark for me to get some pictures. I think the bird telegraph must have really spread the word that there was a free feast. At least a couple of every kind of bird from around here except for the turkey buzzards (thank heavens – they are the bad neighbor of birds and the largest crappers in the universe) showed up to feast. Wrens and sparrows and crows and bluebirds and swallows and doves and thrushes and … All getting along with no territorial battles since there was so much food for the pecking.

oddness

And Now For …

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And now for something completely different.

Do you ever find that there are things that inspire emotions in yourself and yet have no logical connection to the emotion? For example, do you ever see a storm rolling in and experience a set of emotions in no way related to any storm experiences in your past? I do. Sometimes inane things bring forth emotions that I can see no logical relation to the thing that evoked the experience.

Tonight as I was coming home from the city council work session, I was thinking a bit of the county fair which is now going on. But I happened to be driving past a well lit section of the downtown and the shadow and hue of the lighting caused a distinct feeling of elation. For absolutely no reason that I can ascertain. That ever happen to you?

Getting back to reality, the work session this evening was with the firm doing the water and sewer rate studies for the city. All preliminary at the moment and about as dry as it can get. But, … Never let an engineer with power point loose on a captive audience. I was tired anyway from finishing up the great tree cleanup in the heat earlier in the day, so having someone recite their power point presentation just didn’t lead me to feel the experience was worthwhile. I could have read the presentation in a tenth of the time and not wasted those hours. Oh well, maybe someday I’ll get a chance to bore him to death in return.

It is still warm at 10pm here, above 80. Typical weather for July and August, but completely atypical for what has happened thus far this year. It makes Molly and I sit around with our tongues hanging out. Add to it the swarms of little itty bitty mosquitoes and life is one continuous annoyance. I figure it will get worse on Thursday because that is the day I have booth duty at the fair for the EMS authority campaign. Our booth is outdoors, in the sun, and open walled. So I figure it will be 100+ degrees and windy. Either that or it will turn freezing. (The last time I had booth duty was for the school bond effort a few years ago. It had been hot and dry  right up until that day, then it suddenly turned cold and poured rain. Not only was no one coming by the booth, but I was cold and miserable too.)

Time for me to make a few notes for the radio show in the morning and head for the bed. I’m still debating about getting up early so i can hit the cowboy pancake breakfast on the way to the station. Decisions, decisions.

trees, weeds

What I Did Today

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Today I decided to finish cleaning up all the volunteer growth in the back yard. With all the rain and cool weather earlier in the year, volunteer elms and sumac and weeds went wild. At the start it looked like this:

 
  
After a miserable day in the 100 degree heat, things began to look more presentable. Like this:
 
  
  
Now all that is left for tomorrow is chopping all the trees and limbs up and carrying it out to the alley to be hauled away. Sometime this fall it will be time to pull all the creeping vine and then rake all the pine needles. At that point it will be clean for another year (and we’ll be able to see the rock under the pines for a brief while).

I didn’t have to work alone today. Molly the wonder dog thought it was a good time to explore the forbidden side of the yard with me. (Molly is kept on the other side of the back yard and only rarely gets to run wild on this side.)
 
  
You can tell by her lolling tongue that it was warm. I kept refilling her water dish with cold water, so she had no interest in going back into the house. She wanted to explore worse than she wanted to be cool.

I did find some interesting things as I was bushwhacking. For example, the volunteer sumac was fruiting. (Looks a lot like bunches of grapes, doesn’t it?)
 

There were also some interesting sentimental things to be found in the trees as well. Way back when they were young, the Son and his cousin used to play in the pine trees, using cord to tie things in the trees, etc. Now all these years later, some of the cords are working free. I found this on the ground under the pine in the corner:
 
It’s mate is still tied to a branch up in the tree.

I’m tired and sore, so its time to go shower and then relax. So what did you do today?
weekend

The Weekend

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This weekend was a mixed bag, matched to the weather. It was in the 80’s Saturday, but today was close to 100 today and the rest of the week looks to be back to the normal toasty warmth.

Saturday started by picking up mom and going to cut some rhubarb. Given that L and the Son love rhubarb sauce (the Son with ice cream), one can never have too much rhubarb. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in the friends patch where we went to pick. We got what there was and headed out.

On the way home, we stopped by my place to pick up some tools and then headed back to mom’s place. While she snapped green beans picked from the garden and chopped up the rhubarb, I trimmed a few trees that were too close to the house and then set up the onion racks. The early onions are getting ready to be picked and then finish drying on the sun racks before storage. I’m getting an education in onions, since some of the varieties haven’t lived up to expectation this year. Don’t know whether it is the strange weather this year or just the varieties.

It seems that many plants have been confused by the weather this year. Our peppers and cantaloupes have blooms galore, but very few peppers or cantaloupes have set on. The winter squash have been very slow to set on squash and may not make it to maturity before the freezing weather arrives. The turnips and kohlrabi have done well, as did the radishes. The beans are doing fine and the cucumbers are just starting to be ready as are the zucchini. The tomatoes are doing just great after looking like they were going to die early in the year. One crop that has thrived with the moist and cool early summer has been the weeds. The Canadian thistle seems to grow inches a day if you don’t keep after it.

After finishing at mom’s house, I came home and mowed the lawn and did some trimming and then got cleaned up to attend the birthday party of my writer friend. This was his last chance to celebrate being a twenty-something before he hits the big 30 next year. His dad hosted a BBQ in his honor, so we had corn on the cob, BBQ’d sausage, jalapeño baked beans, fruit, salad, and other goodies. Then we topped it off with an ice cream cake just before the host had to go on an emergency call (he is a vet and runs a small animal clinic, so he many times gets called out in the evening).

It was a good party with good friends. My friend T, who had serious back surgery a while ago was there. He’s still in a neck collar and moves like a stiff robot, but at least he can feel his fingers again. He’s off the morphine and down to percocet, hoping to be off the pain meds entirely in a short while. It will be interesting to see how the recovery goes; it was just good to see him up and about and showing some of his old vim and vinegar.

Given that the birthday boy and I both share a rather twisted sense of humor, I made him take an oath to become the “official” crank handler for the office of the mayor before I’d let him open his present. I then gave him a sample of what he was going to have to handle that left him grinning from ear to ear. (Most people don’t realize it, but mayors get an interesting amount of crank mail from causes near and far. After all, it is easy to get the address of mayors and if they bite it means a PR gem. At least the cranks that mail generally aren’t quite as odd as the tin foil hat people.) I also gave him a copy of a short story he has been desiring for a while. It is one of those out-of-print classics that are a must read in the genre; I had loaned it to him a while ago and he was duly impressed by it. I think he enjoyed getting the copy.

Today was a lazy day. It was up to 90 by 10am, so I made the strategic decision to relax and read the Sunday paper. That plus my beloved crossword puzzles and some work on the computer made it a fun day. Talked to L in the evening (she was stuck in the mountains again this weekend) and she said it was once again raining and cold up there. It has been rainy and cold for most of the last couple of weeks up there, even leaving a dusting of snow on the hills one day. Seems weather is like water – you could make a lot of money if you could move it from one place to another at a low cost.

Enough drivel for tonight. More later.