Monday, February 25, 2008

MMM yummy

Los Angeles has been named as having some of the best tasting water of any municipal water supply. I do remember the water there tasting pretty good, even in San Pedro, at the end of the line.

KF will never win such an award. The water here is so awful, and anything you cook with it tastes like the awful water, including coffee, tea, spaghetti, punch, whatever... no flavoring can hide it. The bad taste is so overwhelming it over rides everything. Even BAKING with it leaves a nasty taste in whatever you've baked. I'm thankful our fridge has a water thing that's filtered.

People I know who have lived here their whole lives don't notice it, but that was one of the first things I noticed here. blech.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Dear politicians,

Stop telling us what we want. Shut up and listen to us tell YOU what we want, and then GET ON IT.

Friday, February 22, 2008

reached my limit

it happened last night at the jam. I finally can no longer stand to hear the same blues progressions played three or four times a week. I can no longer play them myself without getting ticked off about it. I can no longer stand hearing the blues at all, in fact. I can't stand to watch the same people playing the same stuff and never learning anything new. Three years, it took. I still want to be active in the society, but no... can't play it anymore.

I am bored to tears.

Monday, February 11, 2008

finally did it

yesterday at our general membership meeting/jam, i finally strapped on a git and sang a song in public. Not my #1 hit song. The Stones' "Sweet Virginia".

It was pretty bad, to me at least. The point is that I did it. And anyone who sat out there on the floor and thought bad thoughts, well, fuck'em. They didn't do it, and they don't do it, and they can eat shit.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

training and excitement

Did my OIT DJ training thing today. Easy peazy.

oh hey it's almost 5 am. I am now on track to a normal sleeping pattern again, hopefully. I've been falling asleep at like 10 pm and waking up between 4 and 6 am, and then find myself exhausted by 8 pm again. If i crash now, I'll wake up around 10 am. poifect

Saturday, February 09, 2008

smiley face

oh joy when i came home yesterday the street had been plowed. Wee!

And Thursday's jam was a good one. We played a lot of different stuff. I even sang a bit.

Friday, February 08, 2008

breakin in

This Saturday I am going to the DJ training at OIT for their radio station. They had this last week, and several KBS members went, but I couldn't get the car out of the driveway. S0 they rescheduled it for those who couldn't make it.

I'm really looking forward to doing a blues show, and even more stoked about the prospect of getting a slot for myself.

traffic jam!

We had a pretty incredible clusterfuck on my street yesterday afternoon. Our street runs parallel to the main road, and to get onto it you have to make a couple of fast lefts. The 5 inches of packed snow that was its surface melted into mush yesterday afternoon. When I came home from doing some stuff, there was a Suburban with a trailer sort of blocking the intersection, and there were three cars in strange positions on the parallel road. No way I could get in. So I drove down to the park to turn around. This would make it so I could make a right onto the street. No dice. Still blocked. Went down a block to come up the back way, which is downhill, then a three-house straightaway, then a curve, then uphill and to get home i would just have to get up the little hill and kick a right.

Got stuck on the uphill part. Parked it, hit the hazards, walked up to the house to get the shovel. Two people had managed to get their cars out, thanks to a crew of guys in the white suburban who had... thank you very much... a heavy-duty winch. They were working on getting a 4wd suburban unstuck from the 3 feet of snow in the neighbors yard. When they were done, they took my shovel and ran down to the scootypuff and started shoveling it out. With their help pushing it, we got the puff up to the range of the winch and hooked it up, hauled it up the hill. Then they pushed it all the way to our driveway. There was absolutely no traction to be had.

So all that shit refroze last night, and this morning it's a nightmare of solid ice and woopdedoos. It's hard even getting the Fo through it in 4WDL with main gears in L. The puff won't be traveling today. There's no way in hell it'll go on the road out front. Once I'm done at work I will probably go out and try to do some shoveling on the road. Hopefully it will have melted a bit again by then. But at some point I'm calling the city to see if they can come by and plow these three roads- our road, the one it insersects with on the curve and the one where it meets the other main road. No one with a regular car can get in or out of their house right now, regardless of what kind of tires they have.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Eyes peeled

Yeah, it's time to look for another job. I'm not very happy with this one. I don't get information I need and then get chewed on for not having the info. I don't get things I need to do the job, when I ask for them.

This is the first thing I've done with retail, ever. Now I understand why I stayed away from it.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

mystery shipwreck

A 35-foot wooden ship has come forth from the dunes just south of the New Carissa wreck. There are some great pictures at the World paper.

hookey

I didn't go to work today. I have a perfectly valid reason. Too damn scary on the 97. It's like a washboard road covered in ice today. When the road is crappy and scary to me, I get all wigged out at work and am in kind of non-stop constant state of freaked out about driving. That, in turn, makes me extremely tired and then the drive home is just me at redline terrified. Full-blown panic attack for 75 miles. Good times!

So yeah, screw that. It just isn't a good idea to drive on Valium, either.

out

our blues society board member elections are next weekend. I'm stepping down as secretary. I just don't have the organizational skills for it. I tried valiantly for three years. I am going to try to stay on as a board member at large and just do stuff.

In all honesty, I'm pretty bored with playing blues. Maybe if it wasn't the same blues I've been playing since we've been here i'd feel better about it. But since I'm just a bass player I don't have much say in what we play. And certain people insist that we play just like the recording. Ok well I haven't ever heard the recordings for about 80% of what we play and I'm not going to go and listen to stuff I don't particularly like just so I can make some purist happy. I don't even practice blues stuff when I'm home. I don't listen to it driving around. I go out of my way NOT to play it at home, actually.

I usually get to play with anyone new who shows up at the jam. Especially if its a new drummer. Some people would get all bent about that, but I don't mind. I see it as "someone has to keep the time" and since I do that very well, I always get to play with the new people. Also, I've been told that I wing it really well. Except on something like "Loan Me A Dime", which I've probably heard four times in my life and played once. That's my sticking point. If I haven't heard a song very many times, I can't even wing very well. I have to be able to have the song in my head all the way through. MOST blues is pretty easy to wing it on though.

And slow blues... let's not go there. Snore blues.

Last week, due to the weather, we had a pretty small turnout. One of the players suggested that we just throw a CD in and play along with it. I said I wasn't going to do that. It's one thing to sit at home and practice that way, but to get on stage and do it is so damn lame. It just stinks of karaoke somehow, or even worse, lip-synching. Plus, on a lot of recordings, the pitch is different than what our instruments are playing, even if we're all tuned and in the same key. I just think that's cheesy and usually sounds like shit. How the hell does someone play for 30 years and not hear that?

I'm really weird, I guess, about a bunch of stuff. I hate it when people tune on stage (through their amps). I hate it when people play stupid shit between songs (drummers are really bad about that). Both of those things just seem inconsiderate. No one wants to hear that shit. NO ONE. When we had our Christmas benefit, I asked that we please tell everyone to not tune on stage, because this was a big thing and it should be at least semi-professional. One guy said "oh, my guitar is cold when I get there and the only time I can tune is on stage." Bullshit, I called. Get there earlier and use a fucking tuner, jackass.

overtime

big props to the city guys who have been trying so hard to get the streets navigable again. There has been a crew working on my street since last night. Sometime yesterday evening they found our mailboxes for us. lol. Not only were they buried under snow, but when the plows came by, even more got piled on top of what was already there. They've got the berms out of the middle of most of the roads. Our streets are as wide as they're supposed to be in most places.

My only beef is the ruts. It's like a slotcar track out there. And once you're in them, good luck getting out to change lanes or whatever.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

beat beat from head to feet

A big part of my job is driving. From one store to the other. Normally, it isn't so bad. But today really sucked ass. Yesterday the snow on the roads had melted a lot, and then the whole mess refroze overnight. The whole town is like a rutted, washboard backroad. You get thrown all over the road, stuck behind people who are, I guess, concerned about their suspension- it's that crappy. If the suspension on the Fo wasn't already toast, I'd probably be worried about it too.

Monday, February 04, 2008

bringin down the roof

The Egyptian Plaza in downtown KF had its roof fall in from the snow on it.

It used to be a Ford dealership, and was decorated with bas relief (i think that's the word) Egyptian art on the face and on the column fittings inside. I had not had an opportunity to see the inside except from the outside. Not sure, but I think it was built in the '20s, when Egyptian derived art and architecture was popular. Last year someone had the exterior restored and they opened it up as a banquet hall/event center thing. I understand it had horrible acoustics.

There have been a couple of roof collapses in town the last two days.

how lame of me

I sometimes have crises of conscience at work. I often can't stand that I'm putting all of this "food" on the shelf for people. And so much of it is deceptive. "Healthy" snacks full of unpronounceable crap and refined sugars, like the "meal-replacement" bars and energy bars. Clif is the one I've seen that I would be ok with eating. That's one out of probably 50 brands and types I stock. All the snack food loaded with salt, the perishable (refridgerated deli) foods with two, three and four-week self lives. That's disgusting.

The lady I often work with is a year younger than me and already has a problem with high blood pressure. I'm not even 40 yet. She isn't heavy or overweight by any means.

I'm meeting a lot of people who are right around my age with problems like high blood pressure. That's crazy! I think of it as an "old person's disease" but then there's my dad, skidding in to 70, in near-perfect health, shacked up with a Thai woman literally half his age. Go, dad!

Seems like everyone I know over 45 is diabetic or teetering on the edge of it. Mom has stopped the progression of her diabetes in its tracks. Go, Mom!

and finally

Just wanted to throw out a "congratulations" for the queer folk of Oregon for finally having one of your basic human rights acknowledged by the state.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Gone!

The little fence that goes around our house is completely covered in the front yard. If anyone can get to the mailboxes for our block, I'll bring out some brownies for them. Car went missing again. Its out there somewhere. I do believe that if I fell off the front porch, I'd be lost, as well. Going to find the phone and go and take some more cell phone pics.

Rider- I'm sad I'm not invited :(

Saturday, February 02, 2008

hasn't stopped yet

stop sign

It stopped snowing long enough to make an effort

to get to the car

oh and then this

I just wanted to share something kinda funny.

In my travels around the town lately, I have seen some people stuck in the snow. You know who I see stuck in the snow the most? Big, lifted 4x4s with knobby tires. You know why they're stuck in the snow? They get cocky. It seems they forget about this thing called "high centering". They forget (or never knew) that on most 4wd vehicles, it really is only 2wd. One front drive wheel and one opposite rear drive wheel. If you run your giant idiotmobile into a drift in a lifted 4wd and can't get it out, you deserve to walk.

You know who I don't see stuck? Old timers. People who grew up here. Folks who live on ranches. And drive around in their 10-year-old Lincoln Continentals or 40-year-old pick-em-up trucks. Guys with dirty cowboy hats and short hair. And its often these folks I see out trying to help the giant idiotmobiles out of whatever mess they drove themselves into. And shaking their heads and smiling all the while. I love it.

The friend that will help

One of my friends is moving out of her little place. Little, as in, it was most likely the laundry room for the trailer park it's in, at one time. We went and looked at her new place, and I think I'm more excited than she is. "I'm so stoked you're getting this place! I can clean out my garage now!" meaning that some of the furniture we have that has no home IN our house will have a home now in hers. And the Avon boxes.. finally... these are going, too.

Well, anyway, she's excited to be getting a breakfast nook dining table, a bookshelf, free boxes, a computer desk and a computer to put on it. And whatever else I can haul out for her.

Why I babble so about the snow

It's still a relatively new experience for me. This is my third winter here. Had I a blog when I first moved to Coos Bay, I would have babbled about all the rain for a while.

But I gotta say, Holy Cow, when will it stop? We've had snow every day for almost two weeks. More snow predicted for the next two weeks, except I think there's a one-day break in there.

I have only wiped out twice so far this year. No injuries :P I saw a dude wipe out pretty bad walking across a street a couple of days ago. At least traffic stopped for him.

Anyway on the shopping list for next year will be two pairs of snowboots with tread, or some of those ice biters they make, or something. More thermals. A snow shovel (someone I know has two, so they lent us one).

There is enough snow at the edges of our driveway that when I came home last night, I struggled to get the door of the Scootypuff open so I could get out.

We had a big plow berm where our street meets the main road. One of the neighbors came home over it one afternoon and lost it, ended up sliding sideways down the street. He ended up calling someone out to plow here so we could get in and out. It's hard getting to the houses in any direction, actually.

Yummmay!!!!

I finally found a tasty little thing to drink that has no yucky stuff in it and is a nice break from Orange Juice and Apple Juice. V8 Fusions Pomegranate-Berry. ZOMG!11! I like normal V8 but i always have to water it down because it is SOOOOO salty to me. I grabbed this stuff one day in the deepest throes of the cold and had a wee little moment of glee when i noticed there was no HFCS in it, or any other added sugars. Tastes rillyrilly good, too.

So, yeah, a "health drink" that really is healthy. Bitchen.

Friday, February 01, 2008

and on looking upwards...

ok in the yard we have close to four feet of snow built up over the last few weeks.

On the roof... jeez.. i have to figure out how we're going to get some of it off the roof of the house and the garage. Probably will call the landlord today when I'm done working (on a break now) and see if they will send someone out to do it. A good foot and a half on the southern side. A little less on the northern one. another 10 inches predicted tomorrow.

Our place was build in the 20s. From what I understand, heavy snow was more common then than it has been in the last couple of decades. MAYBE the roof can handle the snow load. but it sure would suck if it couldn't. At least it's not a flat roof. It's got a pretty good slope on it.

But even if I had a ladder, you'd be hard pressed to get me up on the ladder to rake it off.