Raindrops keep falling on my head…

but only in the left half of our front yard. Minor freak out this afternoon when I stepped out front to check the mail (after having been in the backyard for a bit) and found the left half of the front yard damp and rain drops falling solely in that half of the yard. It continues at this moment, and has been going for about an hour or so. A little bit freaky, but there seems to be a logical explanation.

We have 2 trees out front, a Crimson Maple (which of course is bare this time of year) and a very tall Douglas Fir. The maple is about 50 years old (I met the guy that planted it a couple of years ago when they stopped by to see their first house (the lived here from ’55-’59). The fir was planted sometime after that, but probably not long after that given the height on it. Well, it seems the conditions were just right today for a small rain storm just around the fir. Low clouds and fog, just low enough not to condense about the neighbor’s shorter conifer, but low enough to condense (heavily) on the needles of our fir.

And, voila, rain of sorts in that half of the yard. I tried to take some pictures, but I really wasn’t able to capture what was going on. So, since Maya is visiting her grandparents this weekend and I am here alone (not really alone per sé, after all, I’m here with Huxley, Hemmingway, Nin and the chickens, unfortunately Bukowski seems to have found another home and only comes by every several days or so), anyway I wanted a human witness to the event, so my friend J. of the JnX crew a few blocks away swung by to see our little storm and shot the breeze for a spell.

That’s what I’ve got for now, our private rain storm, there is plenty more and I apologize for the sheer laziness that has produced so little content as of late (but, as it stands, I am the Lazy B I guess). I should take this time to share all the news about rats, eggs, and escapees, but I think I’m just going to make a placeholder for it for now and write at length on that topic in the future.

On the whole…

I suck…

because I haven’t writen a well thought out post in quite a while. My Dad was in town over Thanksgiving weekend, and that was a blast. It’s the first time he has made it out here from Dead Rock, MT since we bought the house, so it was a long anticipated visit. He spent some much needed quality time on the couch with his grand-puppy (Huxley) and met his grand-chickens (the girls) for the first time. We went to the Boeing Museum of Flight and to the EMP together which were both pretty cool. We thoroughly enjoyed an outstanding Philipino dinner at Kawali Grill (just south of Columbia City proper) the night before he left (oh dear oh my, can you say lumpia and crispy pork belly?), and then I spent Sunday afternoon and evening playing catch-up on the work for the week, but it was well worth it.

I also ran across this recently: www.lincvolt.com which is just super cool. If they can currently get of 60 mph out of this beautiful heavy old son of a … well, there’s hope for a much more efficient F250 somewhere in the future (which I’ll be able to afford a decade and a half after it comes out, or when I win the lottery).

In other news…well, I’m kind of ashamed to say it, but I have a MySpace page. Let me explain…

I originally set it up just to poke around at their API, since I occassionally see Craigslist gigs for developing MySpace and FaceBook apps. I figured it was worth at least checking out to get an idea as to whether or not this is something I might pursue in a time of need (which fortunately hasn’t arrived yet). Well, Maya has a MySpace page and keeps in touch with a friend of hers in Louisiana via that to some degree and I added this friend of Maya’s to my friends on MySpace. Little did I know I would soon be invited to join here Mob as part of a game called, well of course, Mobsters, and now I have found an inappropriate venue for idle time that feeds my very minor case of OCD quite well. So, some of my time has fallen into this black hole of mild entertainment value (there is a touch of strategy to the game, but it is basically just a series of apparently unending levels of acquisition and whacking other mobsters). Anyway, I figured I better out myself over this whole MySpace thing before someone else does. I’m on FaceBook too, which has actually been pretty nice as I have gotten some updates on very old friends and acquaintences from many various chapters in my life…I look down the list and realize it truly has been a long strange trip…

Also in the past few weeks I developed a crush on Annie of at Edifice Rex when she posted this splendid rant about consumer culture on the heels of yet another Black Friday trampling at a stinking WalMart. If you are so eager to get into a WalMart that you are willing to sacrifice someone else’s life to celebrate the birth of you’re stinking christ, well you probably deserve a ong painful crucifixion of your own, and if your god does exist I hope he punishes you forthrightly for your trespasses. I suspect I’ll have to make a bumper sticker for this one…”Jesus cries everytime you trample a WalMart employee to celebrate his birthday…“, you heard it here first, but I’ll probably have to take the WalMart part out to avoid a lawsuit (even though I should be covered under Fair Use for both parody and political speech, but hey, given the current supreme court line up, why risk it).

That’s not everything there is to say right now, but at least it is something, and I’ll jump back when my thoughts are a bit more orderly…

Credit where credit is due…

 I’ve gotta give props (no pun intended) to Keith Olbermann (who generally just irritates me as much as any of the rest of his ilk on the 24 hour news cycle) for the following:

 

Generally, I tend to think the more effective (and more accurate) tact is that in a supposedly “free” secular country “marriage” in and of itself has no place in government. All government recognized unions should be by definition “civil unions” and “marriage” can stay in the churches. The short of it in my view is that the government doesn’t really have any business mucking around in our bedrooms, but if it is going to, then in order to preserve the supposed separation of church and state, then the government needs to recognize consentual unions amongst any given pair or group of adult citizens.

“Lookin’ for a Leader” election day freak out…

first, you have to know that there are 2,532 songs on my iPod (which generally stays in my truck unless I buy or import some songs and need to sync up). You should also know I am a little bit obsessive about keeping it on “Shuffle All”. I enjoy my music, all of it, and I like the random surprises the “Shuffle All” provides.

Another important tidbit to keep this story in perspective is that my polling place is only about 10 blocks away from my house, so it is about a 2 minute drive over there (yeah, I drove, the truck over there…it is cold and wet, I wanted to swing by the espresso stand on my way home, and I’m a carbon nuetral driver with 99.9% bio-diesel in the F250).

So, there is only really time for a single song between here and my polling location, so my eyes started getting really moist when my iPod fortuitously and at random decided to play Neil Young – Lookin’ for a Leader as I drove away from the house. I should also mention I don’t “Rate” my songs, I don’t want to skew the randomness of my musical experience. I bought the song back in November of 2006, and I only recall it coming up on shuffle a couple of times since then, so I suppose it was about due.

I guess there still is some magic in the day-to-day, I sometimes forget that these days since it doesn’t seem to present itself with the same frequency it did when I was younger. Rationally speaking, that song is going to play about once every 2,532 times I go to vote…odds like that aren’t incredibly comforting to the consumate atheist…but, I’ve never said there aren’t unknowns, just that the notion of omnipotent hate mongering phantoms and a “one true religion” that sentences people to eternal damnation for various trivial infractions and moral disagreements seems pretty silly…

Today I’m so….

pre-occuppied with tomorrow that I can hardly stand today…

That’s all I’ve got for now, and tomorrow I will be stationed in front of the TV and the ol’ interweb until the cows come home…

Ok, can’t resist, saw this on FiveThrityEight.com

“And I swore I’d be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn’t give a damn, just as long as I’d be in Chicago tomorrow.”

Jack Kerouac — On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/chicago-tomorrow.html

The cat came back…

6 days later???

Strange that right after we finally posted signs that Bukowski waltzed in the house looking for dinner. Perhaps he can read…

Or, he got himself trapped in someone’s shed or garage…

Or, he has been in someone’s house and instead of calling they just let him go…which is disappointing, but we were sure excited to see him stroll in through the cat door and head up stairs to eat. He spent some time napping on the bed, and then he was off again. He came home in pretty good shape with the exception of a fairly gnarly, but in the process of healing, scab on the top of his back that looks like he has repeated sqeezed under something very tight and rough.

He wasn’t out front this morning waiting for some lap time, but that was a fairly recent phenomena anyway. We have grown accustomed to him carousing for a day or two and rolling back in to dine, but 6 days means he must have some other place, or something…I’m kind of baffled actually, so forgive the rambling, I hope we see him sometime today as well.

It’s the not knowing…

a cliché, but “clichés, good ways, to say what you mean, mean what you say…” (Jimmy Buffet, Clichés, Havana Daydreamin’).

It seems we can’t get through a month without a little drama and disaster around here. Bukowski the cat has now gone missing. We last saw him on Sunday night. Historically this has not been unusual for him. I have often suspected he has an alternate home he visits, but as of today (Thursday) this is the longest he has been gone since he first showed up filthy injured stinking intact and feisty in our driveway. And throughout the summer he has been reliably present in the morning and evening for some quality lap time and hard-core cuddling just about every day.

So, today I make signs (we conveniently have lots of plastic slip covers for lost/found pets since we have the good fortune of encountering every stray wondering in the road for which we have to seek an owner), and hopefully our Bukowski cat is curled up in front of someone’s fireplace living it up on tuna and sardines somewhere… of course, as previously mentioned, it’s the not knowing that sets me spinning…

a lover, but a fighter (and a bit of a lap cat)

a lover, but a fighter (and a bit of a lap cat)