random-crap

I’m sorry, internets. I’m not neglecting you on purpose.

I’d love to pretend that I’ve been so busy being a Rock Star that I haven’t had time to blog. I’ve had time. It’s not me, it’s me. I just don’t feel like oversharing as much as I used to.

Here’s a little snippet of what’s been going on:

We sold my wife’s mom’s house. Yay! We have that behind us, after six months of fretting and working on things. We’ve learned some stuff. We hate the housing market right now (there are so many foreclosures and people trying to sell that - hell, just read a paper. It sucks) Still, it’s done.

We closed on it, and it took maybe ten minutes. There was also a four hour drive (each way) to make this happen. But the kids saw their grandparents (it’s been too long) and Dad (that would be me) tried hard not to piss everyone off (it sorta worked, for a while).

Father’s Day was low key; the way I like it. We had cupcakes, everyone went swimming, we watched geeky science shows on TV, my family cooked me a steak dinner. Pretty awesome, yes?

I’m still running; I have 23 miles so far in June, including three four mile runs. The heat is kicking my ass. Actually, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. It was 77 this morning with a dew point of
76 or so. Yeah. But get this - I think I saw a fox this morning. Ran across the road about twenty yards in front of me, and it was pretty light out. Very slender, dog shaped, but with a bushy tail
that was almost as long as it’s body, very fast.

(disclaimer: this was toward the end of my run, so a pink girraffe on a cell phone wouldn’t have surprsised me at this point)

I’m alarmed by oil prices as much as anyone, I guess, but there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it, so I’m trying not to lose any sleep. Just watch with me while our economy follows our environment right into the crapper. Sorry, kids, we enjoyed fucking your planet up for you, maybe some of you are smart enough to recover from our mistakes.

Whew, I’m such a happy little bastard! Sorry about that. (I keep saying “sorry” and can’t seem to quit, and I think it’s driving my wife nuts, because she comments on it. Not sure what to do about it,
though. Oh, another thing that drives her nuts? That I’m ‘addicted to movies.’ Another thing I can’t seem to get out of my system. It could be whores and drugs, though, so maybe it’s not such a bad vice? And what’s with the parenthesis? Dayum.)

This is going downhill, fast, so I better just quit. Have a nice one.

You ever get something in your head, and unless you tell somebody or write it down, it won’t go away?

Me, too.

So I’m writing these things down so they can go away:

1) I so want this shirt for my wife:

2) I don’t like sellers on Ebay who won’t leave feedback unless you, the buyer, leave them feedback first. I won your auction, I payed your overpriced shipping and handling charges, why don’t you acknowledge it?

2a) I leave feedback regardless, because it’s the right thing to do.

C) I think these are the best grapes I’ve had in ages.

4) To celebrate 21 years of wedded bliss my wife and I are taking our boys to see Indiana Jones. Insert age jokes here. I saw the original Indiana Jones with a different girlfriend, I think, who dumped me unceremoniously shortly afterward. I wonder if she’s been married as long as we have?

5) I ran 5K this morning, under a full moon.

I feel better, now.

Got this from Hal Higdon’s web site (I’m following his Spring Training plan).

I ran three days in a row this week. Not far, certainly not fast, but I did it. I ran in 39 degree rain. I ran when I was tired. I can do this.

Today, for my “rest,” I’m driving a couple hundred miles, supervising movers, renting a truck and moving other stuff, hopefully meeting with a realtor and perhaps a handyman (or woman), and wrangling three bored children.

Ah, I can feel the stress just melting away…

He’s bound for New Orleans..

Sorry, lost in the headphone zone again. I’m trying to block out distractions. For some reason I’m easily distracted. BTW, that’s why the Black Crowes are below this entry; there’s no hidden meaning, it just came on the radio and made me chuckle so there it is.

Todd Snider tells a great story about how some of the best advice he ever received was to never own more shit than you could pack up and move in 15 minutes. Let me tell you, I’ve never met anyone who has actually acomplished this (I can’t speak for Todd, he tells the story but I have no idea if he still follows that advice). I know for a fact that we just spent four days sifting, sorting, and packing stuff; we still aren’t done. What a long fifteen minutes…

And hey, I’ve been busy all day, I just checked and the world is panicking as stocks slump. Oh, now there’s a shock. You can almost hear a dozen Presidential Hopefuls preparing their press conferences about how they are now Expert Economists and have the secret to Fix Everything, but they won’t tell us what it is until after we elect them. And just last week everyone was jumping around saying that giving American’s $1,000 would keep us out of a recession. Yeah, right.

Did anybody watch any football? I saw one play, this weekend I think. The last play of the Giants / Packers game. Damn, that looked cold.

My kids were awesome this weekend. Their dad is the one that needs the work. Really. One more weekend of hell, and we’ll be caught up on the moving front. I hope.

I feel like I’m in a rut, writing-wise.

Is it because there is nothing to say? Perhaps. Too much? Maybe that, too.
I’m writing this in a word processor and it keeps telling me when I screw up, with a sentence fragment. Or something. I think it’s funny that our computers think they know grammar better than we do. (that’s a joke, computer. And thanks for telling me that I mis-spelled ‘grammer’ a minute ago, that was cool of you)

So what’s going on? Where should I start?

My mom-in-law got sick just before Christmas. No, not broken-arm sick, that we had for Thanksgiving, this was an infection that had moved to her blood. So she spent a week in the hospital. Now? She’s in a skilled nursing facility, doing exercises and getting real live nursing care that we really can’t do here at the house with three kids. My wife has been busting her ass to do things for her (legal stuff, plus the usual ‘can you run get me a sprite’ stuff). Visit just about every day; unless someone else from the family is stopping in to see her.

The home itself is an incredibly sad place, to me. People that have just gotten old. Now they sit in their chairs or their beds, waiting for the next big activity. Some days it’s a haircut. Sometimes they just look forward to lunch or dinner. It’s tough just to be there, for me. But it’s a necessary thing; there aren’t enough nurses in the world to be in all of these people’s homes at once.

We are hoping that in six or eight weeks she’ll be home. Maybe before that. But the main thing is she has to be strong enough to move herself around. We’ll see how that goes, but you’ll understand that I don’t write about it much here – there isn’t much to say right now.
Christmas was strange, for us. Not just because of the hospital stay, but because this is the first time in over 20 years we’ve been home for Christmas. My kids were freaking out (‘Santa won’t come here – it’s too HOT.’) In the end we had a lot of family time, just our family, and it was pretty cool.

The paycheck-gathering thing is kicking my butt, time-wise.

I mowed the lawn last weekend; it was hot. Won’t have to mow this weekend, and they say the weekend after that it may freeze. Go figure. If you want I’ll take a picture of the green grass.

Say, in the ‘can of worms’ department – I put my email address into one of those websites to get a quote about a move (Grammy’s stuff going to another town, the big question is should we uhaul it or pay someone to do it). Guess what? Yeah, they are FLOODING my fucking in-box. And calling my phone. “We’re ready to give you! A Quote! Here’s a coupon for a free box! We’re the best!” Yeah, except on some of the emails (I’m not making this up) they misspell words like “quote”. Which is kinda funny, since my word processor told me just now that ‘kinda’ is not a word; but apparently I spelled “fucking” right, since it isn’t underlined. Oh, and that was one mother of a run-on sentence, it just said.

I think I’ll quit now. Say something, I won’t bite.

Okay, one more thing. Die Hard, re-enacted by Bunnies, in 30 seconds.