Flickr Update

I’ve posted more photos. Check ‘em out.

Return-ed

Thanksgiving has come and gone, the turkey remnants are either in the fridge or the freezer or the soup, my parents have cleaned my kitchen for what must be the millionth time (thanks again, guys) and also filled my basement with wood. Now things are slowly getting back to normal, though last night, Meg reminded me there are only a few weeks left before Christmas. Oy.

And so it begins

At the new coffee shop

Me: I’d like a large depth carge, please.
Coffeegrrl: OK, but I’m not sure we have enough coffee to fill the cup.
Me: That’s allright, you can just make it up with more espresso.

Later, in the car, during a discussion about nuclear-based submarine warfare

Me: So the explosion creates both a devastating localized pressure surge and a super-heated bubble of gas and steam that anihilates anything in it’s way.
Bossman: Kind of like farting in the pool?
Me: Yeah, but after a long Burrito-n-Bingo night at Our Lady of Perpetual Damnation and Hellfire.

Failure

So this just in: Go to Google’s homepage, enter “failure” in the search box, then hit the “I feel lucky” button. I dare you.

New Blog Toys

Notice the statusometer over on the right, beneath the Alden update. Notice the radio aj playlist. Oooo and ahhhhh appreciatively.

Manly Man

I have created fire!

Or perhaps, let’s hope not…

Last night, I finished the wiring project that’s been hanging out there, in one spot literaly, for the last six weeks. Meg took care of Alden so I could take apart a wall upstairs, disconnect the switch that was fed by two two-strand wires (!) and replace it with one three-strand wire, then install new switches upstairs and downstairs.

It took about three hours and a run to ACE for wire nuts, but all is officially well with the wiring in that spot now. Or at least better. The wires *could* run in a conduit, and they *could* take a logical path, but that’s a project for another time.

Today, I get to play with drywall and spackle and primer to clean up behind myself.

Boy, 2001-2005

Boy died on the highway this morning.

Meg looked out the window while making tea, saw him, and started sobbing. I ran out, swearing, barefoot over frozen gravel, and scooped him off the centerline, hugged him to my chest and brought him back to lay on the grass by the front door.

Boy’s Story

Boy, and his brother Topa, found us from the bottom of a laundry basket when Meg and I were garage-sale-ing on my first motorcycle. The two of them came home in my helmet, tiny eyes looking through the face visor, fuzzy ear tips poking over the rim.

Boy was originally named Solita, the feminine form of “little sun” in Spanish because we thought he and Topa were sisters. A couple months later as he sauntered by, Meagan and I noticed that he was *definitely* a boy, hence his new name.

The big orange lush takes a snooze in the warmest spot in the house last winter: In my jacket, on a blanket, on the couch, by the heat vent.

This incredibly soft ginger cat was the velvet-gloved dictator of the house; what he said went, at least with the cats. Though he ruled the roost, he rarely choose to enforce his will, except in the case of a particularly choice patch of sunlight on the floor. He even had sway in the dog world, choosing to adopt Whitey and make her feel at home as she learned to trust her humans.

Boy’s only fault was that he was a sprayer. Every week or two, we’d discover a pee-soaked something or other. At first, we thought maybe he was sick, so we took him to the vet. Then we thought maybe he had behavioral issues, so we did all kinds of research. Finally, we figured out that when he went to get neutered, the vet didn’t remove enough of his testicles to stop the production of his “manly” hormones.

Meanwhile, this spring, I evicted him from the house to prevent him from ruining any more of our stuff. He spent two weeks yowling at the doors and windows of the house, and trying to sneak inside whenever anyone came or went. We persevered, and Moomoo took Boy under his tutelage and taught him how to be an outside cat. They scampered over the wood pile chasing squirrels and slept together in the hale bales in the garage. They lounged in open cars and hunted through tall grass. As Boy got more confident, he roamed alone more often, but was always there to offer a friendly “Mrow!” when the front door opened.

This summer, Boy adopted his second dog, Molly. They romped all over the yard, through the vegetable garden and flower beds, chased chickens and frisbees, and went stargazing in the field with me a couple times; A man, his dog, and her cat at peace under the brilliant night sky.

As the weather turned colder this fall, Boy became more insistent about coming in the house at night, but I stood firm in my resolve to keep him from the house. Just yesterday, in fact, I told him how he wasn’t going to come in the house while I scratched the side of his mouth.

Then I carried him from the road.

Farewell

This morning, I burried Boy in the pine trees, where he’ll be sheltered from the winter’s winds, but where the south sun will still keep him warm on his last jaunt through the tall grass.

Farewell, orange cat.

Pre-Enjoyed Sleep

I tossed and turned some last night. So did the poor kid next to me. At 4:38, I decided it was pointless to stay in bed any longer.

Now, all I want to do is sleep.

Cowed

Well, it finally happened. After all my years of playing jazz gigs, someone in the audience finally managed to intimidate me into sucking it up.

I played a wedding gig in a beautiful old home in Bayfield last night as part of a great little accoustic quartet. During the middle of the second set, a couple guys were standing in the doorway of the room, pretty close to me, one telling the other how jazz worked and what we were (supposedly) doing. I was close enough to hear him pretty clearly outlining the chord structure of the songs we were playing and telling his friend how we had put in years of diciplined practice (ummm…) to master the ability to chose a note to include in our solo line by glancing at the chart, reading the chord symbol, creating the chord, expanding it to a scale, changing it to reflect the dominant voicing from the rhythm section, and making sure it leads into the next notes from the next scales.

Holy crap! I do all that while I’m playing? Here I thought I just showed up and let ‘er rip.

So of course I start getting self-conscious about what I’m doing and worrying about making a bad choice, and of course that leads to making bad choices, and before you can say “fuck!” I’m lost in the form and sounding like Sun Ra on a bad day.

But that was only for about three songs or so. The first set was awesome. We jelled as a group immediately and sounded really great. The beginning and end of the second set was pretty tight, too. I guess we wound up following the musicians’ golden rule: Start strong; Finish strong.

The 34 Sholin Secrets of AJ

Dream Two

I was in school for a week, or maybe weeks, brushing up on some coursework – mostly math, starting with basic algebra and rapidly progressing through “huh?” – and living in the dorms, but at least this time I had a single room.

Most of the week was about what you’d expect, going back to school for things you haven’t seen in years and living in a dorm. The wierdest thing was that some group had come to the campus and left a series of books about Sholin everywhere. The books were in the dorm rooms and in the library and in classrooms. There were seven (I think) books in the series and they all had covers printed in red fading into some darker color (blak or blue, maybe?) and a badge on the spine with some sort of eastern script or kanji in it.

I kept looking at the books all week, but never opened one. I’d be sitting in class, my mind would wander off and I’d find myself staring at the books.

For some reason, at the end of the week (or maybe one of the weeks), the teacher decided to have class in a different town about an hour and a half away, and I had forgotten until about an hour before class started. I got dressed in black dress pants and a white shirt, and put a black Pilot G2, a fine-point sharpie, and a number-seven mechanical pencil in my shit pocket, even though I was worried about the pen leaking ink and making me look like an idiot.

For some reason (hmmm…), my room was a complete disaster, unmade bed piled with laundry and books and I couldn’t find the text book I needed, so I was rummaging around on the bed when Meagan came into the room. She had long black hair, but I still recognized her. I put my arms around her to give her a hug and was looking down into a large mostly dark hall from somewhere up near the top.

There was soft, gray light coming from somewhere shining on me in the middle of the hall. I was dressed in some sort of gray and black cloth that unsetteled the eye and made it hard to focus on any one thing. It was wierd watching myself, but I rapidly forgot about that because I started doing some sort of kata in the middle of the floor. The pool of dim light began to grow and there I was, again and again. Finally, the center of the hall was dimily lit, and there was a small crowd of me – 34 of me, to be precise – each doing a different kata.

There was one one old man on the floor with all of me, just to the right and back of the center of the hall, brilliantly lit and dressed all in white, ignoring the katas on the floor and looking at the me that was watching from the ceiling with a little smile at the corners of his mouth.