To take our minds off what’s left of the Gulf coast

I cannot grasp the devestation and horror that has rained down upon millions of people in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and other places. The region will never be quite the same. I wish I had some kind of talent I could use to help rebuild, but alas I am mostly useless and would probably only get somebody hurt. Perhaps after they get the flooding under control I can come help work on roofs or fences or ditches or something that doesn’t necessarily require power tools.

When faced with something like this, I do what I always do — avoid thinking about it. So to that end, here is a link describing an over-engineered computer controlled vibrator. Yeah.

(thanks to Boing, Boing for the heads up)

Please note the time

Last night we spent several hours clearing out the boys’ room and closet, pulling down a wallpaper border, cleaning, etc.

This morning we started at 8:00 AM with the first drywall repair (funny how little boys’ rooms resemble testing labs for Samsonite suitcases). Then, er, all the rest that I’m not going to type right now. And we finished painting around 10:30.

Then — I went to the store. I needed a beer. Silly me.

I’m standing in the beer section, and these two pretty young things come in. I mean pretty young as in one of them had better have a decent fake ID or they aren’t buying any alcohol. (Did I mention school is starting here? It is.) They were dressed in normal saturday night clothing for students, which if you check your handbook is somewhere between what Madonna was a few years ago and what Britney Spears is now. Short skirt and tops that don’t cover much (especially in the refrigerated beer section)…

Oh, wait, where was I? Oh, yeah. Two. Pretty young things walk by. Looking for something “low carb.” I’m tossing Guinness into my basket, and probably scared them a bit – haven’t showered, covered head to toe in paint splotches, wearing my 50,000 visitor shirt that says “please don’t blog this” on the back. I didn’t give it a second thought, I’m the kind of person their parents warned them about.

I moved on, to the milk, where I overheard two guys trying to decide if four kegs was going to be enough for tonite.

Gawd I feel old.

Next up for the old man? Drinking the beer. Eating the ice cream. And a patriotic movie.

America. Fuck yeah.

Crescent City

To quote my ol’ buddy Pooh: “Tut tut, looks like rain!”

I hope everyone in the Big Easy and, hell, that entire area is safely out of harm’s way, or at least in a strong building with a good supply of drinks. (Hey, we all have to die sometime, but if it’s gonna be this week, there’s no sense going soberly)

And I’m not supposed to be blogging, we’ve been painting all. day. long. and now, we have the ceiling and the closet done. Yes. The ceiling and the closet. Why? Um, well, the prep is the hard part. We’ll fly through the rest in no time.

Here’s the prep: What took time was removing the “stuff”, taking apart the beds (they are in pieces out in front of the house, I think), pulling shelves out of the closet, going to the hardware store three times (since I’m a nimrod and bought the wrong joint compound the first time, and then after we started priming we realized we didn’t have enough and the spare primer in the garage was oil based and we need latex, etc.), getting Route 44 Cherry Limeades while I was at one of the hardware store trips, having chinese delivered for lunch, discussing the finer elements of Jackie Chan and Clint Eastwood movies with my seven year old, chasing the dog, and every now and then turning on a TV to see where the hurricane is headed)

So now all we have to do is paint, and put all the shit back in the room. And yet I blog…

Seriously, y’all near the hurricane — keep your head down. We don’t wanna here anything bad.