oh the bugs

A friend had said, a couple of weeks ago, that "hey, the bugs haven't been too bad this year". The mosquito and midge population had not reached an epic number, and that was nice.

Man, did she ever speak too soon. About a week ago, the midges EXPLODED. Our porches are disgusting. You can't even sit outside with a snack and enjoy the evening. It isn't much better during the afternoon. Usually, they aren't really bad except in the morning and evening, but, euw, it is SO nasty now.

a race track

You have maybe heard of the Race Track in Death Valley. Where, when the playa gets muddy and slick, and the wind blows, the rocks scoot across the ground, leaving tracks.

There's one nearby, too. I went and tried to get a picture of it today. I haven't unloaded the camera yet, but I don't think it turned out well. It'll be overexposed and the edges will be blurry. *sigh*

Anyway, it's near Tulelake

Project Jennifer

Mike, this is the story I was trying to tell you! My brain almost works.. Here's another good story about it. I'm trying to find a picture of the badge to share. It's an eagle with scuba flippers, scuba mask and..

G'Nite, Tubbycat

I had to put my old Tubby to sleep today. Her real name was Chevette, because she was just a little lighter and quite a bit slower than her mother, Chevelle (whose full name was 396 Supersport Chevelle). Tubby had contracted mammary cancer, and it grew quickly. The vet agreed it was probably best to put her down. She was 13 or so. She'd had many kitty adventures, lived in two states, seen the beach, the desert, the city, chased a lot of birds and mice (never caught one, though, that I knew of). Tubby was a dusty Calico cat, pink and grey and white with golden eyes. She had a funny walk. She sort of threw her back legs out in a circle, so she wiggled her butt when she was on her way sit in a spot of sun on the porch. She was a lapcat, and if no lap was available, she was a shoulder, lower back, feet, or face cat. She got the second name of Tubby when I had a horrible snorfly cold, I think, and I called her Tebette. Tubby stuck. It was a good nickname for her. She didn't get the idea of up for about a year. We would play with her and yank the toy up, and she'd look around side to side for it. She liked cat food. Weird. She also liked a bite of cheese once in a while, or a bit of hot dog or bologna, but never gave a rat's ass about tuna fish or the mushy cat food. She escaped a friend's house when we first moved to Oregon. She was gone for three months, but I kept going back over and looking for her. I finally got her to come to me, and she was so thin. The vet told us to feed her kitten chow and gave us steroids for her. One night soon after we got her back, Dale and I were eating our dinner of rice and cheese (well, you know the things you eat when you have $30 to spend for a week for food), and she got up on the counter and finished the leftovers before we realized it. So, she had a really full belly. Like she'd swallowed a big rock. heh. She ate every grain of rice in the bowl. She wasn't fixed yet, and not long after the rice n cheese snack, she had a *huge* kitten. Just one. One big, googly-eyed orange tabby. The steroids... we got her fixed after she had the kitten.

Tubby was weird. I'll miss her. She wasn't the brightest cat, but that was part of her charm.

Not a good enough reason

I love the people I meet at my job.

I'm starting to hate the job. Oh, yeah, after six months, I'm ready to chuck it.

Pain has never really been a good enough reason to stop doing something. At least, that's how I was raised. I'm rethinking that little way of living. I'm just sore all the time. Oh, I have some new muscles and once again fantastic legs, but who cares if all I want to do when I get home is flop on the floor and die? At least it's not back pain. Gawd I feel for all the people who suffer that every waking moment. No, it's just getting-old pain. I joke that I need a cane in the morning. Not funny, because I can barely move sometimes, especially after the Siskiyou route.

I need a better excuse to unload the job. Perhaps I should do something horrendous and get myself fired. That would suck, though.

Loser

I have the cover version of this song, done by Cracker, on one of the CDs in the Fo right now. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard the Grateful Dead one. Weird. But I've loved the song for at least a decade. Today it rolled up in the player and I just had to crank up the volume. It's a perfect song. Especially in mid-morning, with the sky blue and the air cool, the sun just starting to warm everything. It's fun to play on the acoustic and the bass. I think I could nail it on the drums. I doubt I could learn the lead in anything less than a year. But that's because I'm not a lead player, and my brain doesn't work like the brain of someone who plays lead. It's most comfy playing rhythm parts.

Last fair deal in the country.

growl

All this bullshit with my dad has put me in a foul mood. I try to not take it out on other people. It happens anyway. And then, amazing of amazing, I feel bad about it.

I have some perspective. Sure, I have a dad to be angry at. A lot of people don't have a dad at all, to snarl about or say nice things about. I'm grateful I have a dad. There have been times that I have felt like I didn't have one, though. That I just had this guy my mom married. I've had the love/hate thing with him for a long time. I swing from one to the other fairly often. And sometimes I go from being irritated with him to flat-out hating his stinking guts in the space of an hour or two.

So, sure, I have perspective.
Still trying to let this go.
Still having a hard time with it.
Still wondering if he's a fool after all, despite how successful he's been. At least as far as work goes.
Wonder if he'll ever find what he's looking for.

awone

according to OrBlogs, I am the only Kfallzer with a blog. Still. Hrmph.

waving

Ok the city has finally finished, for the most part, the nightmare that is South 6th st and Washburn. I can't wait for the miserable whining in the editorial section of the paper to end. But wait! No, it won't end, because they built these weird guided-by-curbs turn lanes in to the middle of the street. So, everyone in town who is incapable of reading pavement markings is in the middle of some kind of nervous attack over it. Heck, the curbs are low enough, just go OVER them in your monsterous trucks. Who needs curbs when you have 4 wheel drive, anyway? I actually like it. You could spend your entire life sitting in the left turn lane waiting to get into Safeway from that side the way it used to be.

Me, personally, I'm just mostly happy the touring around season is almost over. I mind, terribly, people driving 20 mph in 45 zones. It's not as bad as the 101 in summertime, but it is close. Hey, there's nothing interesting to look at on South 6th, hit that gas pedal, ok?

Hell's Corner

I think, finally, that the computer issues have been fixed. All summer being online has been a pointless endeavor, so no one has seen me much. So I did other things.

End of July, I hit the rapids with some friends for a weekend of splashing and camping. We took a trip down Hell's Corner on the Upper Klamath. That is some fun stuff and I would do it again in a heartbeat. A couple of weekends ago, we rafted the Rogue. Um, what a difference between the two. Three rapids on the Rogue, 42 on the Klamath... hmmm.... But it was fun anyway.

We had our Bly mountain jam, played at the Third Thursday and the benefit to raise money for the Veteran's Memorial at (ahem!) Veteran's Memorial park downtown.

I'm in the process of purchasing a friend's acoustic guitar, and have two more guitars being sent to me, as well as an assload of camping equipment. The two guitars belonged to my brother and he doesn't play them, and the camping equipment is my dad's.

Now let me go on for a moment about my dad. Every conversation with him anymore opens a new wound and wrenches scars off old ones. A thousand cuts, you could say. I'm also angry that the business he built from his garage in the 70s is being run into the ground by the people now running it. Anyway. Dad is moving to Thailand in November. He's getting rid of most of his stuff. He's leaving his condo for my little brother to live in. Dad bought a condo for this woman over there he wants to live with because he says "She just wants to make me happy". Well, dad, you're a rich American. Of course she does. I try to give her the benefit of a doubt, but since I've never met her and probably never will, it's hard. But anyway, the conversations always hurt now. They make me remember all the kicks to the curb. Wasn't invited to the second wedding. Was told to my face i wasn't as important as the new wife (now the 3rd ex-wife). Couldn't be bother to see me when i was a younger kid, "forgot" my weekends, then the demands to see me started when i was a teenager, and i got to be treated like a psych case by his wife, ignored by him. No really i have a long list of things that hurt and really made an effort to put them into the past, and was fairly successful until a couple of weeks ago when it all got dredged back up in a phone call.

I wonder if he'll ever realize it isn't anyone else's job to make him happy and he has to do it himself.

Shastika's Knees

I have this job. The job is merchandising. The next question people ask is, "What do you do?". I have a route and i go around to the stores on my route and unload the things they've ordered from the company i work for, separate it into the "you put it away" pile and the "Keep your mitts off the stuff i put away" pile. Once separated, I confirm shipment by making marks on an invoice and then pricing the stuff. For some things, I drop a pull date and a price.
What kinds of things? Things they sell you to eat, that maybe you enjoy eating, but probably shouldn't. Giant muffins, bakery goods, frozen deli items like sammiches and burritos and other fine comestibles. Things that are crunchy and salty, and things like cookies and crackers.
I also make sure that the people who buy this stuff don't end up with stale, old, moldy or just past-date things. Weirdly, that's probably my favorite thing to do, go around the store and find all the old stuff. In any job, there's always one weird aspect that you can take your perverse pleasure in.
It's brainless work. I don't mind it. Some days, ok, i growl a little at maybe the sales guy or how people are so lame they can't put things back where they find them.
I only work three days a week. Rough, eh? One day, i work strictly locally. The next work day, I have a fabulous route in Siskiyou county. My third day i head into the wilds of Tulelake and Merrill. The longest day is the Siskiyou route. I'm so lame i would quit if i didn't get to make that drive every week. I love driving the 97 south. Shastika is different every time. That sounds pretentious, except that there are three places one can easily confuse with each other. There's Mt. Shasta the mountain, Mt Shasta the city, and Shasta City. And Shasta Lake. And Lake Shastina. And the Shasta Nation. So I call the mountain by it's old name. I even descend into the weirdlands of McCloud, and I think that's my favorite stop. It's hot as hell, it's out of the way, the osculating whir of death along the 89 is nearly deafening, but the store is cool, the view is different and the people who work at that store are really nice and easygoing and we laugh and giggle at stuff.
So that's what I do right now. It may be different down the road. I could slip right into a job as a goldsmith's apprentice right this very second, but i'm alright so far with the merchandising deal.
By the way, when your in Lemuria, or the other far reaches of Northern Cal, and you stop into a convenience store for some chow, look for sammiches from the Whispering Pines distribution company. Those are DAMN GOOD. And I'm not saying that because i work for them, because i don't. I'm sayin it cos they're damn tasty as far as road food goes.

(PS yes i know osculating isn't a word. Tell mike over at SOS Forests. Its his word. )

The trip to the ovens of hell

This was a drive down to lovely (not. Still hate this place with all my being) Phoenix Arizona for a wedding. We drove. Through Nevada. Oh and fuck Las Vegas, by the way.

There's a highway in Nevada they call the lonliest road in the world. That was not the one we took (SR 95), but if the 95 is not the lonliest, then my mind boggles at what really is. We went through some of the most desolate land I've ever traveled through. Towns on the road teeter on ghost-town-ness. There are ruins all along the road, interspersed with trailer-park brothel compounds with empty parking lots. The land itself is gorgeous, though, and says "haha!" about us puny humans living on it and traveling through it.

I have some neat pictures from the trip, but until flickr helps me get my account merged i cant do diddly shit as far as showing them off goes.

criminy. All this crap merged and i can't access my flickr thing and there was this mess here with blogger and google and the damn router is crapping out.

But i'm back. Survived the evil monkey eating the C drive. Survived the road to the ovens of hell by way of desolation back in May. Surviving the weekly trip on the siskiyou route for the new job, and it is hot as fuck there. No titles available for some reason. I hate this shit.

100 years of surf

George Freeth.

bane

well damn i put some dirt in the little spot i wanted to grown some flowers, threw some seeds in and watered it down today. Now i look at the weather thing and we have chances of snow all week. Oh well. heh.

three more twenties

Hell yeah. Got a pickup gig tonight. I dont know the songs, but i'll kick ass anyway. Because i know ALL the songs, even the ones I don't know. tee hee.

three twenties and a shit sandwich

wow. If you have to knock someone's joy and serenity to feel better about yourself, I'm not the one with the problem.

dead or dying

They about killed me last night at the jam with the drums.

antenna party and shit the bed

-=News!=-

Ok we had our board member election last night and, again, I was voted in as the secretary.

I've been cross country skiing twice this year. Less painful than snowboarding. Weird to have learned 3 new sports since we've been here- the rowing, snowboarding, now the skiing. Of course i suck at all of them and would like to just stick with skating and join the adult hockey league up at the rink next winter. That just seems to fit what I've been feeling for a while.

Smart Half got his ABO certification a month ago. yay! Now, I'm the loser, because all i know how to do is play music. I can't even relate to people who don't, anymore. I try, but I don't get them, we don't get each other.

Goin to Eugene on 4/14 to see Djeef's new band rock the Black Forest. Court on the 12th, then bail for a day. It'll be good to see him. I miss a lot of my coast friends and only hear from him and my little bro in Boise anymore with any kind of regularity.

Anyone who was as excited as me about a new site, git yer britches back on. This is it.

nthofpril.com!

yay i got my login info! Now i just have to figure out everything, because the last time i did any actual setup of anything i was on a unix shell and that was like, 11 years ago. So, it may be a while before anything of interest pops up over there. yipes. I can't figure out how to import the old stuff... hell, i can't figure out how to get to the Word Press that i installed. rofl

still here!

I havent forgotten this miserable thing, i just haven't had much to say. Still waiting for my login info for nthofpril.com, which i paid for in November.

finally

We got a bunch of snow overnight. Wee! It started around 8 last night, probably snowed all night. There's about a foot of it on the stair railings and anything else like that. And it's still snowing.

what does made in USA mean?

It means the Toyota Camry is the only car in the race today made in the US. *haw haw haw*

yeah ok about my dad

well, just what would you think if your dad was making frequent trips to Thailand, has made comments about some sweetie over there, AND about how "age isn't an issue over here like in the states". What does that mean to you? How's that make you feel about your dad? I feel creeped the fuck out, because he doesn't elaborate much as far as the things you ask your divorced dad about the person he's seeing now. My dad, by the way, is pushing 70.

ignored and pissed off about it

I got set up to do the blog thing at nthofpril.com, in December I think. I haven't heard anything about getting my login info yet, and my emails asking about it have been ignored.

So until i hear otherwise, Pixelita.com is on my shitlist for taking my money and not giving me access to my shit, and for ignoring the emails and things through the contact form that i have sent asking them to provide that for me.

earth to dad

well, i think my dad may be a couple sandwiches short of a picnic. I may be wrong. He's always been a little weird, but i've been getting pretty bizarre emails from him lately. Bizarre by my standards is way the hell out according to other people's, too.

23rd psalm for bassists

my favorite local drummer sent me this some time in January (oh yeah, i have not been checking my emails). It is cool.

23rd Pslam for Jazz Bassists

The Lord is my drummer, I shall not rush.
He maketh me to lay out in tasteful places
He leadeth me beside cool meter changes
He restoreth my "one".

Yeah man, though I read through the trickiest
charts, I will fear no train wrecks.
For You are with it.
Your ride and Your snare, they comfort me.

You setteth up a solo for me
In the presence of mine guitarists.
You annointeth my lines with drive.
My groove overflows.

Surely good feel and swing will follow me
through all the tunes of each set.
And I will dwell in the pocket
the whole gig long.
Amen.

30-second hate

Have I mentioned lately how much i despise the OLCC? No? I don't mention it enough, apparently.

Does anyone need a reason to? Is there a piece of paper big enough to finish this sentence?

"I hate the OLCC because..."

pound pound

I've been playing the drums in public a lot. Well, a lot being probably once or twice a week. I have no drums to practice on at the house anymore. Here's a conversation I had last week at the jam, when i played the things for a whole set: (T is a damn good drummer who's opinion i respect)

T: You're getting pretty good on those! You did a great job on that set! You practicing?
Me: Thanks! Um.. no, the drums are gone over to K's house til it warms up again. This was my practice.
T: *odd look*. Well...
Me: T, I have no idea what i'm doing on those things.
T: Keep at it, you must be doing something right!

But damn one gets tired. I kept at it, i wanted to stop about half way through the set, i was about plum wore out, as they say. I'm still getting the hang of how to use the kick pedal right without fatiguing my whole freaking leg. I know i know... use the leg, not the ankle. Easier said than done, for now. The last song i think i pretty much fell apart. I got two swigs of my beer and had to get back to play bass, someone else's bass which was much weirder to play than mine. That'd be the J-bass i mentioned playing. It's much more responsive than my Ibanez. oooh it has brand new strings on it, which makes a diff. But the strings aren't as bendy as mine are. The bendiness makes up for the lack of responsiveness. I can fake it better when i make a farty sound on mine than i could on his. Plus, he has hamburger makers on the J. Roundwounds. And i'm used to flatwounds.

Still not smoking. :)

observing things

Al Gore- Jesus, man, time to use some more environmentally-friendly transportation, like, YOUR FEET.

I backslid and had a cig yesterday. It was kinda gross.

My dreams have been of pants, jumping, Lunada Bay and hearing the crowd but never seeing them.

I have had more moments than usual of "Well, this is all pointless".

I got to jam on an aquaintance's J-Bass yesterday. It was nice. Sounded great. I wouldn't mind having one.

My friend's boyfriend is terrified of me, which is ok, because he's pondscum anyway. But I wish I knew more women in healthy relationships or a with a decent level of self-esteem around here. I know one.

Robert Anton Wilson is dead.

Keep the lasagna flying.

and there is no trail of bodies!

Smart Half and I slapped a couple of patches on ourselves last night. I haven't had a smoke since about 11 PM. I didn't want one when i woke up. I haven't really wanted one today. I took a drag off someone else's and went "euw".

I'm hoping the patch works for me. When i've tried to quit cold turkey, my friends beg me to have one after about three days- if i make it that long without one. I'm always thinking about the thing i can't have when i try to go cold turkey.

The Wellbutrin made me homicidal. I just wanted to kill people. No. Seriously. No exaggeration or embellishment there.

I haven't been eating more (yet) and i don't find i need to play with things. To me, that means i'm a straight up nicotine addict. It's never been a "have something to do with my hands" kind of habit for me.

50 something in Keno

I wish these people would fix their thermometer, or move it out of the sun, or something. Their readings are always like 40 degrees higher than everything else around here.

pfft

we got only the barest dusting of snow last night. Weak sauce.

as of this typing, it's about 17 at the airport. The airport is about 200 feet lower than we are.

so. cold.

The last few days we had freezing fog. It never lifted, just hung around the basin all day. With it hard to see my surroundings, i got lost a couple of times, thinking i was somewhere that i wasn't (the coast). Well, that happens to me. There are times i wake up and forget where i am. I guess it happens when you've lived in many houses.

But anyway, the freezing fog left some beautiful decoration behind. Some parts of town, entire trees are covered in a white rime. Over where i live, the ice is on the side of the prevailing wind. That wind comes right off the lake at our house, blowing in a southeasterly fashion, and leads me to understand what "bone-chilling" really means. i go outside with my wooly ear-flap hat, three layers of shirts, big ugly coat with the scorch mark on the back, wooly socks and the sheep boots. And still, "wow it's still cold under all this shit".

We actually have a wind chill warning for tomorrow and friday. The temperatures are allegedly going to dive into the minus range with the wind.

On my desktop, i have a picture of a pristine white beach, turquoise water, blue-as-blue sky and a nodding palm that i found on the Wunderground site. I've been looking at it an awful lot....

High Contrast Sky

Your favorite band that isn't!

Michele and Turtle have brought back their commenter contributed TOP 50!!!1! list. This time, you get to nominate your favorite fictional band. Spinal Tap? Billy & the Boingers? Steel Dragon? Whatever... go over and leave your mark. These are always pretty fun when they get finished.

Oh yeah, I still write a weekly column over there. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad. Good god, people, it's enough that they GET the thing from me sometimes. Be sure to click out to the main page and check out what they have up on any given day, and there's good shit in the archives too, of course.

post-sunday blabbering

Yeah, Sunday was my Hippy Barfday. I went out, came back home, went out again, came back home, and again went out, and then came home. See. Thrilling.

At Natalie's, i had her scan some old pictures again. The pile randomly grabbed from happened to be mostly from when i was small.

I went to the Evil Empire to show people how to string their guitars, like i had planned to do, and like we had flyers for on the guitars, and no one showed up. Which is ok. I kind of figured that would be the case. I tried.

Saturday I got a good birthday present. It wasn't presented as one, but it was one to me. I got to wail on the drums for an hour at a jam.

About 36 and a half years ago...

this was me.



Happy Birthday to me.

twenty-three years

It's been that long since i got to strap on some skates and get on the ice.

I toted a couple of people up to the Bill Collier Ice Arena last night. Two people who had never skated before. I was so excited to be doing it i was about ready to haul them over and shove them out on the rink so i could go, but i was nice and waited for them to get used to how the skates feel, and the walking in them on the rubber mats. And then... we were off!

Well. I was a little unsturdy when i first stepped out. I stuck by Natalie and Rachel as they worked their ways around the rink. Natalie clung to the rail but gamely made two laps around. She even managed to pass a couple of little kids who were also clinging to the rail. Rachel clung for her first lap, then scooted along for another one. I made three, away from the rail. Only three because i stopped a few times to scoot along with them, and then the rink was closing.

But we will go back! They both had fun and want to do it again. Both had new respect for Olympic figure skaters. We'd like to do it at least once a week. It's good excerize and god knows i need that.

the wait

This girl was waiting for the waves to pick up.

This one and the last one were taken at Redondo Beach, in January of 1995

wipeout

I just got some pictures scanned.

This one is from January of 1995. I hung around the beach for a few days with a camera and took some fun pictures.

relisten, reawake

I just dug out the Afghan Whigs album with "Honky's Ladder" on it. I think that's the name of the album, too.

Great album. I still love the "Honky's Ladder" song. What made it stick was "If you want to peep on something, peep what i got stuck between your eyes". I haven't listened to the album much since i started playing an instrument. So, it's been mothballed for 9 years and 6 months, approximately. Songs on it that i remember not really liking much i listen to with different ears, now.

That's one of the reasons i like that i started playing so much later than most people. I have two frames of reference on music, but only stuff that was released up to '97 or so, and things i've heard for the first time since then are picked apart. I lost a lot of the ability to be able to just listen to a song and enjoy it for the sake of it, i think. I have to tell myself to just listen, rather than analyze. Like the song because it's all rawr!!!youfeelittoooo!!!!, not because it has some neat, obscure tripletty diddly-woos and is in D Lydian or some thing like that.

well, four days in

pretty uneventful new year's eve. meh. Rearranged the house and watched the Metalocalypse marathon. I love Nathan Explosion.

And then all this stuff in the news. Makes me wonder about my reactions to things. Is what I feel about things the way I really feel about them, or the way I was taught to feel about them? Because I was taught that I shouldn't smile about some jerk swinging on a rope, but I was happy to see it happen, finally. I should care, I've been told, that President Ford is dead. So I tried to, for a few minutes, and then tried really hard to, and then gave up, because I don't remember him as a president very much. I have no connection with him. So, uh, goodbye President Ford. Wish I remembered you with some glowing words and flowery phrases. At least you didn't go out on a rope with shit in your pants.

what goes around

yeah so those neighbors... the ones who called the cops... they were gone last weekend and i noticed they had a leak in one of their outside pipes. Apparently when they came back, they fixed it.

And then i go out this morning and hear water again. I looked around our yard and found it was coming from their place again. They're not home, again. This leak is jetting out from their siding. So i imagine it's probably all over inside the wall, as well, and possibly even all over the floor in the house.

The only thing i can think of to do is call the water department and tell them to shut the neighbors water off to prevent any more damage. I don't think the WD is open tomorrow, though.

Don't know what to do. The Mean Pril snickers about it and says "ain't my problem". The little sliver of Nice Pril would like to do something, but doesn't know what.

famous last words

well, damn, these things are creepy sometimes.

Your Famous Last Words Will Be:

"I dunno, press the button and find out."

What Will Your Famous Last Words Be?

At least you didn't get this for Christmas

One of my friends has been on-and-off dating this asshole for years. I've only known her for about a year. Last year, she dumped him because he threw a table at her. Then, at some point this year, she got back together with him, and a few of us reacted with the rolling eyes and "That's really not a good idea". That's all you can do, usually, when your watching someone walk into a meat grinder for the umpteenth time, because people don't listen.

Yesterday i got a call from a number i didn't recognize, and it was her. The 54-year-old toddler (and i have witnessed a couple of his tantrums) had come home, grabbed her by her hair and pounded on her again, leaving her with a black eye and some other bumps and bruises, and broke her phone. Then he left and she went to her daughter's house and called the police. They called back within a half hour and had his lame ass in custody.

He is on probation, and he had three more months to go before he was going to be off probation. He's much stupider than i ever imagined. He's going to be there for a while, i hope.

first time for everything

You know, i had never seen "It's A Wonderful Life". That's right. 36 (a week away from 37) years old and never seen it.

I caught it at a friends house last night. I must have caught it right at the beginning, but i figured "Hey i'll see what's up with it" and watched the whole thing.

I just want to say i really dug the dialogue in it. I don't know why. It seemed so much better than what i've seen in movies made since i was born. I can see why it's a classic, too. The little guy gets one over on the big jerk with the help of the regular people. Fantastic.

cheesy christmas goodness

man, on the abc family channel they're having some kind of marathon of Rankin Bass christmas shows. weeee!

murf

well, here it is Christmas Eve and WHERE'S MY SNOW!? If i wanted a wet Christmas, i'd go back to Coos Bay.

I want a Gibson SG. Not necessarily as a Christmas or Birthday present. I just want one. It's taken me a long time to decide which geetar i want, and finally, that's it. I'd even take a very good copy.

guitar hero & 2

i hate this game so much. I think i hate it as much as i hate karaoke. If you want to play guitar, buy a freakin guitar and learn how to play it. Hell you don't even have to pay for lessons, just spend $4 on a guitar magazine every couple of weeks and you'll learn all kinds of stuff. You can buy a guitar for like $80 and if you like it, spend up later on a nicer one.

and now there's that singing one? I cant remember what its called.. like karaoke in your laptop or something. "The only way to rock". (i guess doing it on a stage with instruments in front of actual people doesn't count...) Pah. You know, the commercial for it has the two lamers at the mall singing the Worst Song The Cure Ever Recorded? That one.

the inner geek howls

at this thing. I saw in it in a Pop Sci magazine. Yeah. I read that sometimes. I don't get half of it, but i read it cover to cover and try to learn things from it. Because science-y type things are very cool.

The Periodic Table Table.

I want it. Smart Half about soiled himself, he thought it was so cool.

our tree of chaos

ice

i noticed today that Lake Euwana had a nice skin of ice over much of it, except the channel where the current from the Link River keeps it moving. So i went and took some pictures.

It's thick enough that someone had tossed a couple of cinderblocks out onto it and not cracked it or punched a hole in it. The birds are all hanging out along the edges.

I haven't been up to look at Upper Klamath Lake yet, which is pretty sad considering i'm only about three blocks from it.

o boy!

More snow arriving! That is just so damn cool.

Our tree is up, and decorated. I still have some orney-mits to put on it. We will need a bigger tree next year. This one is loaded down. I didn't realize i had so many. Smart Half got all his on fairly quickly. However, it appears that when i was younger, my mom and i were ornament making fiends and there are half a billion of them now on the tree. And still like half a tub of them.

Smart Half and i each picked out something to buy and put on the tree. He mentioned something about he picked something he thought would work with the theme i seemed to have in mind. I think i had just mentioned that i prefer blue and silver stuff to red and green. Just me being perverse, probably. So he picked something silver. But a theme! Hell, it's Christmas, and that's the only theme i apply. Chaos reigns on the tree.

Although i love tinsel, we didn't do it. Something about having cats... there's nothing weirder than chasing down a cat with a piece of tinsel hanging out its ass that it ate while playing with the stuff. So, i don't do tinsel.

I took a picture of it today and i'll try to remember to unload it and get it on flickr and put it here.

Also, i have no idea when i am going to have access to my other blog. I'm thinking January, which kind of makes me pout a bit.

off the bluff

yesterday at a friend's house i saw a little bit of video and no sound about a car going off a cliff somewhere, and someone being inside. When i got home, i checked ye old hometown paper for some news on something else, and there it was.

These cliffs were part of my childhood and teenage years. As a kid, my dad and i walked down there a lot, we went down to the shoreline and looked for shells, and then climbed back up. As a teenager, my friends and i often headed down the cliffs to drink. The spot where this person went over is about two blocks from the high school dad taught at for 20 something years. During the 70s, it wasn't uncommon for authorities to be winching cars back up over the bluffs, and a lot of the time, the cars were just left down there. It got harder in the late 70s and early 80s to shove a car off the bluffs or drive one off. The city placed huge rocks along the curbs, but still, somehow, people manage to drive off the cliffs or push cars off. At the time they were placed, wide cars were the norm, so they were probably placed with that in mind. Smaller cars can fit through the gaps, though.

benefit concert results!

The Blues Society had it's annual benefit concert on Saturday. It was the fifth one. Held at the VFW in downtown Klam Fallz.

We filled a big trash can with donated canned food, and there was a wad of bills in the bucket we had dedicated for donations to the food bank. The raffle was a big hit, and people walked out at the end of the night with a DeWalt drill kit, a nice acoustic guitar, guitar lessons, free gas, pounds of coffee, free coffee bucks, free lunches, discounts on clothes, a wok set, a knife set and a glassware set (which the crisis center won!), T-shirts, diamond earrings, a nice print of one of my photographs, and a lot of other stuff. I won a free LOF, a travel mug and bean bucks, and a gift certificate for the local lingerie shop (and of course they will have nothing in my size, so i'll probably spend it on socks or something lame like that). I wanted the guitar and the wok set, but the stuff i won was pretty darn cool.

Smart Half ran the sound, and all the bands sounded excellent! EXCELLENT! Good sound all over the hall. That's because he's awesome at running sound.

We raised almost $2000 for the Crisis Center.

So a thank you to everyone who came out for this, all the people who worked at the hall, the VFW, all the bands, all the businesses who donated things to raffle, everyone who helped move the heavy stuff around and set all the things up in the hall... thanks for making it a great big success. There are women and kids who are going to have a little brighter Christmas than they might have, now.

rough winter

wow. A rather large wave of unfortunate events have swept through the northwest this year.

Plane crash in Bandon, plane crash near Hauser, Sammy Boehlke, the Kims, the three hikers on Mt. Hood, the empty catamaran, several and various boats needing to be rescued (well, that's probably not particularly unusual this time of year), nasty storm in Washington, another nasty storm which left 1 million people without power and caused people to think they could bring their bbq inside to cook and heat (collective bonk on the head to those people). Various people dead from weather related stuff-floods, candle fires, exposure...

Am I missing anything?

must have been something i ate

I'm probably as surprised as anyone by the last outburst. Of all the things people know me by, being emotional in person or in print is not one of them, generally.

For now, i'm tapping the foot and waiting for the snow that's been promised repeatedly. Well, where is it already?!

My buddy the Beeb is heading up from Oregon's Bay Area (ha ha ha that just makes me laugh every time i think of it) to do a gig at a big local employer's Christmas party. He's coming today so he can jam with us, and doing his gig tomorrow, and maybe hopefully he will stay over to come to the benefit Saturday.

We are going to get our Christmas tree today! We last had a tree in '97 or so. It was a total Charlie Brown tree. But we loved it. Prior to that, i think the last time i had a Christmas tree was at some point when i was living with one or the other of my parents. My mom and i decorated her big ficus tree one year. That last tree would have been in the 80s some time, probably. So you can imagine i'm about jumping out of my skin with glee about getting one again.

And lastly, i'm going to drag Natalie ice skating. I would like to do it this week. It's cheap. Surprise surprise- i took ice skating lessons when i was a middle-schooler. I went straight from rollerskates to the ice. I was at a little thrift/antique/cool old junk store a couple of weeks ago and they had two pairs of men's 8 ice skates. These were *old* skates. But the blades looked good as new, the leather was supple and in great shape. I'm thinking i would like to go back and get them. I like ice skating. I love the way the ice feels as you move across it, and the scrinch scrinch sound.

I'm no pro. I think i took lessons on and off for about two years, and did a lot of just skating around and around, but i can stop, i can start, i can do those crossover turns and skate backward and a couple of fancy spins that i probably wouldn't try now anyway. It'll be the first time in years i've been on the ice. Natalie will probably be treated to watching me fall on my ass a few times until i get me feet back under me. That's all right. It cant be any worse than sliding down the slope on my ass with my still-hooked goofy-foot with the board on it heading over my head, with my left knee next to my right ear, and hearing that wonderful *rrrip* sound.

symbolic vs. actual

I'm talking about action. Activism. It's been eating at me for a few weeks.

When i read that the camera-ready protestors had finally managed to run the Schumacher fur store out of Portland, it started eating at me. What had they actually accomplished? Nothing. There are still animals that need our help, and a once-monthly protest at some store? Did that actually help any animals? What do the protestors do when they aren't lookin good for the TV people? Do any of them volunteer at animal shelters, or work with abandoned horses, or talk to cattle ranchers about keeping their charges healthy? Are any of the people of college age in any kind of program at school like veterinary tech or even maybe working toward a degree to become a vet? Do they have pets of their own? How do they treat their pets? Have any of them even spent more than 10 minutes at an animal shelter? Or donated a single dime to a spay-neuter program or any other kind of program that puts the right people in the right places to do things that tangibly help animals?

The Schumacher fur store protests were purely symbolic and mostly devoid of any real action taken to help any kind of animal. People will always buy fur. We don't buy as much as we used to, but i don't see us stopping the practice any time soon. So they ran the store out of downtown. Big Woop.

I correspond with Strayer at Cat Eyes. She's a great lady. She puts her money where her mouth is, and she surely doesn't have a whole lot of money to be cramming down her gullet. Her focus is on cats, and i would bet that if she could afford it or make it happen somehow, she might expand to other animals. (Let me know if i'm wrong on that Strayer, but i believe it about you). But the fact is that she goes out and traps strays and ferals and fixes them and finds homes for them, she helps get them well. That's actual action. Her effort sometimes seems futile just because of the sheer numbers of irresponsible people out there. She keeps doing it. She isn't wasting her time standing around some store with a sign in her hand, smiling for the media.

Funny how she lives, also, in the bluest of Oregon's blue cities, and all she gets for her actual action is a bunch of crap. There are no animal activists beating down her door to help her. Maybe they're afraid they'll get dirty or something.

When i first moved to Oregon, someone jokingly told me you can't live in Eugene or Portland or Corvallis unless you have some cause or another. That was fine with me, and i didn't have any causes. Over the years i've lived here, i have taken on a cause. People. Even when i can't hand out money, i still get out and try to do something for someone. I have a couple of people on fixed incomes in different parts of the state that get a care package from me a couple of times a year. It takes me a while to build the packages up, but they always get one from me around Christmas. They are usually some frivolous silly things, some small luxuries, some necessaries and maybe a little cash if i have it. I just added another person to the list of people i send these to. I do a lot of work with the blues society here, and i've played more volunteer gigs with them this year than paying ones with the band i was in earlier. I drive someone around because they can't drive.

At Christmas time i see all the trees around town that have the little stars on them or whatever with a childs name and Christmas list, or a senior citizens name and Christmas list, and i want to cry because i can't just take all the little stars and buy all these people the things they want. Pants! For god's sake, some of these seniors just want a pair of pants!

I don't know. Maybe put the protest signs down and head into a homeless shelter, or an animal shelter, or pick a star or two off a Christmas tree. Do things because it's right instead of because your politics dictate it. Do something, and waiting around for the media op isn't something. Jeez, on my birthday i'm going to teach people how to string guitars that have never owned a guitar, and if they couldn't buy it at the Store That Shall Not Be Named, they might never own a guitar. That's why i'm doing it- i want to take some of the frustration out of it for them. Make it fun right away. "Your fingers will be hamburger! Your neighbors will complain! Your parents will come up to your room and yell at you to turn it down! But what are you doing? Something a lot of people don't get to, so take it up and enjoy it, and get good, to make other people happy, because it will make you happy". Really though, what the hell else is there to do on your 37th birthday?

And by the way i think altruism is a load of crap.

And if you have some extra dollars, head over to Strayer's page and plunk them down on the Donate to POPPA button. Money doesn't taste much better than feet do, but it's more pleasant to put your money where your mouth is rather than your foot.

Blues Benefit

Our annual benefit concert is NEXT WEEKEND! Holy cow! Yeah, next Saturday night (12/16) at the VFW. Four bands including the KBS Jam Band. That's just a group of members that changes from event to event and we get together and do these things as the KBS Jam Band.
Last year i believe we raised something like $5000 for the KYDC (and several families had Christmases they would not have normally had) and two big trashcans full of food for the Food Bank.

This year, our beneficiary is the Klamath Crisis Center and, again, the food bank.

We go around town and collect items and gift certificates from local businesses and raffle them off. Holiday Jewelers always kicks in something with diamonds. This year, someone may get a Blues-O-Gram from Natalie, Rachel and I. I'm donating at least one of my photographs, too. The local awesome guitar store kicks in a guitar.

Anyway if you are in the area and are looking for something to do Saturday night, roll on by the VFW at Klamath Ave and 5th street with a couple of bucks in hand and an item of nonperishable food.

a gift on my birthday

ok don't get me wrong. Today isn't my birthday. But follow along, if you please.

Smart Half's department at The-Store-I-Do-Not-Name is in charge of selling musical instruments. They sell the same brand as the ones you can get if you by whatever VW it is. These aren't bad little guitars. You could do a lot worse for more money. Trust me on that. Made in USA, headquartered in Boston, MA on the street named for my mother's mother's family. I goof off on them when I'm waiting for him. Any guitar is a good time to me, though.

Ok onward. He told me that last year, the biggest reason for returns on these guitars was because a string broke. My first thought was "How retarded. Do people think the strings are indestructable?! Or that the guitar is now broken?!". Whatever. Customers are freaks. Anyway. How lame!

So the gears started turning and my brain started smoking and i spit out an idea. I'm going to give a little guitar clinic type thing down there in his department after Christmas. The best day happens to be on my birthday. So, on my birthday, i am going to be helping a group of brand-new guitar and bass owners learn the important stuff. The important stuff is things like learning how to restring your guitar, how to tune your guitar, where to take it around town for repairs and adjustments, who to go to for lessons, a little demystifying the hype about guitars and letting them know which things you REALLY need when you own a guitar, and which things people just tell you that you need to make you spend money that you don't really have to.

Each guitar has an invitation to this event on its box. I will bring some cookies and soda or juice or something. I'll have my guitars and basses there so people can see the different kinds of strings, bridges and saddles, etc. I'm going to print a little handout with the local guitar store (who is a member of the blues society, and i am doing this as a society member) business cards of their teachers, a little diagram of what is on a guitar and a bass, and a note chart of the notes on the neck AND a small list of helpful things you should have around. Like a small Allen wrench, wire cutters, soft cloth, lemon oil, small phillips head screwdriver, stringwinder, etc. The guitools you always seem to need when they aren't around.

You know what? I freakin hate stringing my guitars. I take the six-stringers to a shop and pay them to do it, i hate it so much. I am not a fan of stringing the basses, but it's not as tedious. But it's a necessary skill and i am going to spend my birthday teaching brand new git players these things. No one taught me them until i was well under way.

Yeah. Happy Birthday to me! It will be the coolest birthday present to myself, ever.

psyching up for indoctrination camp

Well, in all the years i have pondered what i should head for in college, i may have figured it out finally. But first, we have to get the crapmobile out of the shop, and that's another $900 we get to throw at someone. It'll be nice to have two cars again. It's happened so rarely for us to have two working correctly at the same time. Usually the issues with them are something beyond my ability, space and tool collection to handle. (As an aside, every damn car i have ever had in my possession has had exhaust issues. I am so sick and tired of that.)

So, with any luck, i'm book bound in spring. I'm keepin it to myself until i get a thorough overview of what i want. I'll just say that my love of the outside world has a big influence on what i want to go for. I just want to talk to the instructors first and see if they are really instructors or just taking the opportunity to cram their ideology down the throat of young college suckers.

Of course, it will be transferrable. I don't know where we will be in five years, and i may not be done by then anyway.

Oh.. and Mike- *wink wink*

I'd like a bacterial infection grande, to go

Taco Bell's most recent problem rather makes me happy that i haven't eaten there since '93 or so.

Siam Thai

I finally got over to a local restaurant that i had been meaning to try since we got here. The Siam Thai on Washburn. Smart Half and I are both big fans of Thai food. Unfortunately, for the last decade, we have lived in places where Chinese food is about as exotic as it got. 'Cept the great Mediterranean cafes in North Bend, of course. Not that i have anything against Chinese food. I like Asian food in general, but Chinese gets old.

So i about soiled myself to see a Thai place. And so far, i have not been disappointed. Yesterday we had lunch there for the second time, and i was really enjoying the music coming in over the speakers. Oh and the food of course.

But anyway, the music... yes...
I hear a blues progression. Standard, very Western. And then, the vocals in Thai. The vocal melody was more Asian sounding, and the juxtaposition over the Western blues riff was really cool. Then another song came on, which was, like, prog rockish i guess, with very Western drum parts, electric guitars and meandering effects, but in the background, sort of buried in the mix, underrunning that Western feel was a distinctly Asian instrumentation and scale.

So i could just sit in there and eat fried bananas with honey sauce all day and trip on the music they play and be completely happy. I even asked them to turn up the music.

now a little incredulous

the more that comes out about how the Kim family got lost and what they did, honestly, the angrier i get. in some article or another, someone is quoted as saying Mr. Kim did nothing wrong. I'm sorry, and if i had any readership i'm sure i'd take some heat for this, but Mr. Kim did plenty wrong. He didn't have to die. That's the shame of it. I think it's unreal, what happened.

A simple "get off at the next exit and turn around to get back to the 42", and he would still be alive. Those beautiful little girls of his would still have a father, and Kati Kim wouldn't be a widow.

Sad

Sad to hear that James Kim wasn't found alive.

And frustrated. All they had to do when they missed the exit for the 42 was turn around or continue south to the 199.

One can point blame at mapmakers and signage, etc., but someone made a series of bad decisions and this is the unfortunate outcome.

beat down

Rumor has it my li'l bro in Ontario may have taken the dive into white dope. That pisses me off. If the rumor is confirmed, i'm hoppin in the car and going up there to beat him severely about the head and shoulders. hell hath no fury like me finding out one of my friends is hooked on that shit. Whoever he's getting it from? Start looking for a ditch that fits...

why?

I'm very happy that three-fourths of the Kim family have been found, and i hope they find James Kim alive and well.

But i can't help wondering what possessed them to take that road?

titanic

I watched something on the history channel yesterday about the Titanic. I guess it was filmed in 2000 or something. I didn't have a TV in 2000 so i wouldn't have seen it when it was new.

It was a documentary about some guys who were looking for reasons that water had been coming in through one of the boiler rooms while it was sinking. The old theories about the ship sideswiping the iceberg didn't explain why water would come in through the bottom. They eventually found two pieces of the bottom- the keel.

In between footage of the wreck, there were passenger stories interposed. They talked with Milvina Dean (who was an infant) and the son of another passenger that was 15 when the ship went down.

But that wasn't what really piqued my interest in it. They talked about the band.

I've come to the conclusion that venues have been dissing musicians probably since the dawn of time. "We love having the entertainment, but we aren't paying you" is apparently the mantra.

White Star lines didn't want to pay the band union scale, so they listed them as second class passengers.

Strike one.

As the ship sank, the band kept playing. They all went down with the ship and froze to death in the water.

Strike two.

The band leader's name was Wallace Hartley. To the end, he and his bandmates offered comfort by music to the people trying to leave the ship.

Strike three- When the passengers that were rescued arrived in New York, there were thousands of people waiting. Again, when many of them returned to England, they were greeted loudly and with cheers. Hartley's funeral had some 30,000 or so people at it. What a send off... but then...

The band members' families were sent- can you believe this shit- bills for the loss of the uniforms that the members were wearing.

You can read more about the band here.

This is a thankless thing to do, this playing music thing.

i have a question

well actually i have tons of questions. This one in particular, i probably know the answer to, and its one of those answers you don't really like.

If you get busted on a 3rd strike drug offense you should do more than one year in jail, correct? ("should" as in, I'm sure the law generally provides for more than one year in such a case. Not should as in, "well i think he should do more time")

Especially if the offense is for cooking meth in your house...

Where there are some kids and a girlfriend...

Who doesn't lose the kids, even though she's involved...

And she doesn't do any time either...

What does all that mean?

I think i know, because then there was this-
Someone else who got busted (but was only ticketed, due to it being a different drug) who had yet SOMEONE ELSE at their house who the FBI came and got...

First person (who did the year) calls the second person the day after the bust and says, "Hey i heard the FBI was at your house".

What the hell would you think? I have a jailhouse mentality. I've been in the system too long. The courts in three states have extorted plenty of money from me, so i automatically think something that's very dangerous to be thinking. If you slap this label on someone, you endanger them. So i'm not going to mention the label i'm thinking.

But what do YOU think?

I'm someone's hero

And that's pretty damn neat feeling.

I have a myspace thing because so many of my friends don't have phones, but DO have computers and cable internet (go figger...) and one of them just got her own myspace thingie. I was looking at it, and where it asks you to list your heroes, she's listed me for not being afraid to be myself.

Listen, when your myself, there's no hiding it. All the years that i wasn't myself, it was an ugly time. All the years i spent trying to live up to someone else's expectations, i failed, and called myself a failure for it. All the years people thought i was stuck up because i was too shy to talk to people were very lonely ones. I used to worry what people thought of me, and i'm sure a lot of the time their opinions weren't very nice. I once took people and their insults personally, and you spend a lot of time being angry when you take the world personally.

I'm not sure when it happened. Some time between the two rehab trips, i think. It happened in Oregon. It's almost like i woke up and went, "fuck people and their opinions" and started all over. Complete teardown and rebuild, you might say.

Someone doesn't like my playing? Ain't my problem.
Someone thinks i'm weird. They may be right, but it ain't my problem.
Someone has an issue with some piece of me. Ain't my problem.
Someone doesn't like it when i'm honest with them. See above.
Someone doesn't like my habits? They don't have to hang out with me.
Someone doesn't like me? Move along, find someone else to victimize, because i don't care.

People who get in the way are passed up. People who try to suck the energy from me, those psychic vampires that just drain you when you spend time with them, i usually figure that out pretty quick and kiss them goodbye. People who think less of me because i don't have the same opinions or politics as them can take a hike, too.

Hell yeah i am selfish about my time and my energy and my mental wellbeing and i don't handle people with kid gloves and sorry if you have a puny little ego and self-esteem issues, but get the fuck over yourself.

I'm a spaz and life is awesome and i'm glad to be alive to complain about it. I write horrible fiction, bad poetry, play three instruments like a 10-year-old on LSD, draw things that other people call art (for some reason), and i love it that i can do that.

I have a husband that loves me and i don't know what i'd do without him. I have friends that love me in spite of all my personality defects (maybe because of them?).

I'm here now, thank you very much Ram Dass.

And thanks Joan C for being my friend.

what is cold..

well, it was 3 degrees when i woke up this morning.

nuh nuh nuh nuh nineteen

old song, yeah. Guy named King i think? Back in the day when we had Prince and Queen to listen to, there was also King. But "19" was a Paul Hardcastle song.

But, it's 19 degrees right now. Allegedly, it will drop to 9 before the night is over.

No snow today. But the evil combination of snow that was graded and plowed, then melted slightly, and refroze as more snow fell on it makes getting places interesting. weeee!

Someone i know came over the hill from Medford yesterday and said it took him 3 hours because of the weather. That's my one real issue with KF. It's a pain in the ass to get out of it to other cities, especially in the winter.

And i feel like i'm running out of things to write about for FTTW. I can't really do a lot of bitching about my fellow musicians, because at least a couple of them read over there.

lotsa snow

well, to me it is. Remember, i'm the one who squeals with delight when we get a dusting. It snowed most of yesterday, and then we got a break in the late afternoon, and then it snowed probably all night, and it's been on and off snowing all day today.

New Boots is awesome in this kind of snow. Part of the fun is watching the people who hadn't bothered putting on snow tires yet and have two-wheel drive. They were out all over the place today. The neighbor with the Jetta with low-profile tires, the guy in the big white van out in the middle of S. 6th, going in circles, the lady in the new Nissan that pulled out of Burger King and kept right on going forward into the center median, and the best one, a guy in a late-80s Camaro with lowpro street tires, fishtailing all the way down Washburn. In the morning, i was treated to watching people coming sideways down the offramp that's kitty-corner to our house. Probably not such a treat for them, but fine entertainment over this way.

As for me, yeah, i have it in H4, and i'm the slowest mofo on the road. Your blood pressure is your problem, not mine.

Mine all mine and back

Look! There it is! The New Old Nth of Pril! I obviously have some fixin to do. There's about a year missing on it (the other domain dropped in August or so of 06). The time represented where it ends is right after we moved here to Alabamath Falls. Or Klabama. Or however you wish to derisively mangle the name.

Joni at Pixelita.com is teh arrghsome.

Anyway, with any luck, it should be all befestooned with Prilness by Monday.

coming soon

very soon! The old NthofPril (not the greeblie version or the original one i started on blogger in late 2000). On its own domain. That's right. I've finally been dragged into the 21st century, muttering and grumbling and vascillating and deflecting the entire way, finally giving up that credit card number for some words on a browser bar.

Not ever.

The last election has been turning over in my head lately. The most interesting thing, of course, is that now that the Democrats are in power in Oregon, they intend to raise the tax on beer. I mean, it was the first thing that they made the paper about, because it was pressing and important and all. Nevermind that important stuff like school funding or police funding or keeping the state university system afloat. No. Gotta raise the tax on beer, not for schools or public safety, but to treat people who drink too much of it. Retards.

Yeah see if i EVER vote for one of you again.

How can Oregon Dems redeem themselves, in my eyes? Dismantle the OLCC. As soon as possible, and then completely rewrite all the codes and laws related to alcohol in the state. Nothing less.

(later...) o and let's talk about SNEAKY shall we. Rep. Chuck Rangel (D-NY) wants to reinstate the draft because he hopes it will make future US leaders think twice about staring any silly wars in the future. Chuck, your "I'm a dipshit" forehead sticker is on the way.

After a year, this just occurs to me.

I know a drummer named Tom! *laff*

Laugh, dammit

The Port of L.A. has issued a directive to increase laughter by 30%.

Excellent. Everyone needs to laugh more anyway.

slippy slidey

well, they gave us a forecast of 1 to 3 inches for last night. We had that by 10 pm i think. There's at least 4 or 5 inches stacked up on our back porch.

4runner did awesome drivin this morning. Way less terrifying than the camry is in the snow.

I'm one of those dipshit californians that can't drive in the snow. Ok, wait, i CAN drive in the snow, but it's weird and this is only my second winter in a snowy place. Rather than being the idiot in an SUV with regular tires zipping along and sliding everywhere in 4wd, i'm the sloooooow person in an SUV with mud/snow tires you're stuck behind. So, sorry. Watch for finger and all.

around 3:30

it started snowing. It's snowed pretty steadily since then.

Which brings me to...

all new shows on Adult Swim tonight. Been looking forward to that. Halfway through the first meatwad show, "no signal". Poop.

dammit Jim, I'm a bass player, not a mind reader

so last night i guess the neighbors called the cops and they came by to tell us to shut down at like 8:30.

These neighbors have never said word one to me in the six months we've been here. How am i supposed to know anything about them, specifically that one of them goes to work at 7 am, if they don't talk to me? I hate that kind of passive agressive bullshit. The cops have better things to do than come over and tell me to stop playing.

So I'm angry at these neighbors for a lot of reasons. Mostly, i'm angry because they won't talk to us, even to say hi. I suspect that this is because they're special, being homeowners and all, and we're just mere renters. We have cooties, and to say anything to us would somehow sully them.

Listen, y'know, i may be a jerk sometimes. Ok fairly often. But i try to be considerate. If a neighbor is bothering me, i go talk to them unless they've proven themselves to be someone you can't talk to. I'm not confrontational with people about these kinds of things. If someone had come over, about a month ago when we started this, and said "Hey i get up really early for work can you guys cut it off earlier or play in the daytime it would be great", well, i would have done it. But no one did. One person came over last Saturday and i guess pounded on the front door and said... nothing....really i guess. Dale dealt with them. So i don't know.

But, yeah. Just talk to me. I'll work with ya. Jeezus. Ain't a whole lot to ask, not so much waste of resources on the city's part.

splat

last night i got to see a very drunk woman totally trip over a chair and faceplant. It was too hard not to laugh. So i just laughed and laughed. It was funny, ok? Damn, it was funny.

weee!

Snow started falling about a half hour ago.

!!!

but still..

hey i just listened to the goof off tape from Saturday night.

No wonder the neighbors came over at 8:30 and told us to shut the hell up already.

awesome.

bluh

i don't think it matters who wins this election, or any other election. The outcome is the same. Politicians (and their hooting peanut galleries) talk to constituents as if the constituents are drooling idiots. New inane laws are passed, and old inane ones remain on the books. Someone is trying to tell you and i what we can and cannot do to ourselves, what we can and cannot say, who we should and should not worship, how we should act, etc. Am i singling out a particular party here? No. Because both are guilty. Both are full of bottom feeders and disgusting, hypocritical thieves.

No i'm not cynical about politics at all. (sarcasm)

All i ask is that one day, i don't have to choose between the lesser of the two evils. That i don't look at my ballot and think, "Who is going to damage my city, county, state, district, country the least?".

And don't tell me it's one or the other. I think we all know it's none of the above, in most cases.

challenge what you think they taught you

Have you read Mike's blog, SOS Forests?. The things he writes about should make anyone think about the things we've been taught about forestry and forests. I've been reading him since he first put fingers to keys on it last year. He has now started his second year with a redesign, and thoughtful writings on forest science methodology. Roguepundit's most recent post dovetails nicely with what Mike has been telling us.

If we are critical thinkers, and many of us like to believe we are, we need to stop swallowing the dogma that's been fed to us for the last 20-plus years about forest management, and start questioning it.

digging the geography (dirt geek)

I'm something of a closet earth geek. Not Earth-capital-E-love-your-mother-earth, but earth as in the stuff we tread upon. I think it's fun to stand around looking at the ground and rocks and cliffs and things like that. I DO stand around looking at stuff like that a lot. The fun part is in dredging up bits of knowledge and using them in trying to figure the earth stuff out. What kind of rock is that? Why is it here? How might it have got here? Why is it that color and shape? So, Klamath Falls gives me a case of the "Hey neatos" a lot. A lot of subtle reminders that the area is or was volcanically active. Down at the Grass Lake rest stop on the 97, you learn that you are surrounded right there by five small volcanoes. Going north on the 97, huge hills of basalt, in big squarish chunks, stretch out parallel to the highway. Closer to the surface at the roadbed, chalky stuff. Where the shoreline used to be. Eastward, near Lakeview, is a geyser and i hear there are bubbling mudpots so i must go see that. At the place we get our morning jumpstart, there's a ditch that leads out toward the railyard, always full of steaming water. I guess that's part of the whole geothermal thing around here. KF has pipes of geothermal brine buried under the sidewalks and crosswalks downtown to keep them clear in the winter. Some people have it as heating in their houses, which i guess is free. Heading down to Medford on the 140, you're on the scenic volcanic byway (the same one that wanders through the Modoc National Forest), and you can go check out some lava beds near Lake of the Woods. On a clear day, if you find the right hill, you can see the peaks that surround Crater Lake, pieces of the volcano that collapsed on itself. Mt Shasta is made up of 7 small volcanoes all packed together.

I would like to spend a lot more time poking at the ground and learning about it.

on making noise.

Natalie and I have jammed in the garage probably 5 or 6 times since we decided to do this. Each time, we've come up with a song structure. We switch off. Sometimes i play guitar and she plays drums, and then versey-vicey. No lyrics or anything, just the noise. We finally got to really hear what our brains have been flowing to our fingers the last time. I brought the Yammy 4-track down. It's easier to use and there's no RF interference like we were having with the one that's connected to the PA. It ain't bad, i gotta say.

There's something really cool and liberating, also, about working with an instrument you don't normally play. I've played drums maybe 30 times in my life. And i'm kickin butt on them if i do say so myself. Natalie hasn't played guitar too much, and she's doing some cool stuff. I don't know about her, but it forces me to think differently with regard to rhythm. Rhythm being my prime part, as a bass player. Now i really see how the drums and bass interact, because i play the drums like a bass player. If that makes any sense. Different metering or timing or something involved. You have to break a lot more down to put it together when you play drums. With bass, i just listen, hear where the notes are and where the not-notes are, and you just sort of put the notes in where it feels right. On the drums, i'm not dealing with the notes. I'm placing the not-notes for the rhythm player to build off.

Plus, it being just us, there is no one standing around saying "play it this way". Just me and her, making noise for a while and then laughing and yelling "That was cool! That was awesome! Play it back! Ooh did you hear me nail that change?"

We've told some people about this, this Strange Basin thing (which we are just sort of using as a kind of place holder name) and we get different reactions. Most people think it's cool. There are a couple who you can tell are instantly threatened, just by their body language and what they say after we tell them. They want to know what exactly we're doing (we don't know. So there). They want to weedle their way in (after dismissing us, not so subtly). They want to help (with help like that, who needs a saboteur?).

You know, i really think i've done this whole thing backwards. My timeline goes like this:
Buy bass. Start learning it. Ship it off for repairs. Buy guitar. Goof off with it, but never quite learn it right. Get shoved into jam nights. Continue goofing with guitar, learning an average of one new chord every couple of months, many by accident. Get invited into a working band. Take music theory classes while in working band. Back to jam nights. Start making noise with someone.

Isn't it more like:
Buy guitar. Jam with friends in garage. Find you have too many guitar players. Make one play the bass. Start band. Lose band. Start another band. Lose band. Get into pattern of starting and losing bands, but playing always the same music. Get into jams.

At least that's how it seems to be to me, and for the places i've been since i've been playing.

yeah well i feel really free in the garage. it's so awesome.

nth of pril may be back

I finally got hold of the guy who had the account that the old Nth of Pril (the last one) was hosted by, as well as the hosting company. I'm looking at taking it over, since it was only suspended and not deleted. Just have to take a peep at the finances. We've decided to keep the crapmobile and get the water pump fixed, so i have to take that into account, re-register and re-insure it and then i think i may be able to do it.

For reference: I'd like to take a moment to spit on property management companies that don't allow you to work on your own vehicle on property you rent. I could fix the car myself, for $35 and some frustration, and probably it would take more than book time to do it (would probably take me about a day to do it, because i don't have all the correct tools or a lift). Book time is 3.5 hours. A shop will do it for about $350. Plus, i'll be having it towed. Driving it could cause the $350 repair to quadruple. You drive with a failed waterpump, you easily end up with a blown head gasket. So. The money we will spend to repair this is close to what we pay to live in this place. Big ol' one-finger salute to property management companies.

no more mr nice guy

i didnt really think of a costume this year. I was on my way out the door to a friends house for a party i was invited to jam at, and i thought hmm maybe i'll run back in and put some zombie makeup on. I started looking through my makeup and found this cool black eyeliner i have, and then decided to do Alice Cooper makeup. Did that. Dug up some shiny rockstar pants, big black boots. Then i needed a shirt, and we happen to have a Phoenix FD shirt (brother is a fireman in PHX), so i wore that because that's where scary Alice lives now.

Then i went to the party. Everyone thought i was a zombie anyway. Only one person recognized me as Alice Cooper. Huh.

like the white stripes, but a million times better

This has happened before... i went on a Toadies tear, and a Deftones one, a Cream one, a Big Sugar one, a Therapy? one.

I'm now on a Black Keys frenzy.

My favorite store, still around. Plus a little punk rock history

I used to LOVE going to Restyle. I rarely could afford anything there, but when it was time for new boots, it was off to Restyle. I let nothing come between the boots and i. I just loved going in there and checking out the clothes. Everytime i go back home to visit, i stop in a couple of places... Aardvark's Odd Ark (Last time i was there it seemed more like a charity store for AA than the really great vintage clothing store it once was), Greeko's (been there since the 60s. Great head shop. It's also taken a weird turn), and good ol' Restyle.

Maybe i'm old, but i kind of roll my eyes at 2nd millenium punk kids. Mohawks barely turn heads, especially when they're on 8-year-olds. There doesn't really seem to be anything rebellious about it. The newer music kind of sucks. It's all been done already, so how boring.

sugar coated

the mountains got a light dusting of snow last night. Probably right at about 5500 feet. It looked really pretty this morning.

number six

Sunday was our sixth anniversary :). That's a long time. To me. We've been together for eleven years i think. Since 1995? Before i came to Oregon.

have some dirt, boys

We got the PA, the 4-track, the effects all hooked up. By ourselves.

Yesterday we sat down and made some noise, just to make some noise. And we got a nice hooky thing out of it that can easily be rendered into a song. We were missing some things, like a drum key (we dealt), a tuner (we got the guitars as close as we could), a strap (sat on the floor). I joked if it was this cool when we were half-assed, imagine how it'll be once we have our shit together. I'm going to fiddle around with the 4-track, maybe see if i can find a user manual for it online, this week, scrape the memory of how to use it off the inside of my head and throw a tape in.

the little light stays on

One of the people i enjoy jamming with here and i had decided a few months ago we wanted to put something together. Last week, we finally got a drummer, a guitar player, a bass player and a vocalist all in the same place.

And the next day, i saw Natalie and kind of sighed about it all. That group just doesn't mesh for some reason. It might, later down the line, but combine it with a psycho little kid at the practice place and it probably isn't gonna happen soon.

So my little brain started working really hard. And slowly, it dawned on me. We have the drums. The bass. The PA. The guitar. We can fumble along pretty well on all those instruments. The thing that really matters is that we also have two 4-tracks, Audacity and we know how to use them, as well.

Screw it. We two of us are a band. We don't need anyone else. If someone asks us to play somewhere, we'll have to wing it and bring someone in for the gig, but we're just going to record stuff.

yabba dabba doo

We got this rental car, a 2005 Chevy Cobalt. The new thing is in the body shop thus the rental car.

It's zippy and all, but drives like it has square wheels. Or big granite ones.

all these things that went on

i was out on the coast this weekend again. Stayed in the cabin at LaVerne Park (near Coquille) and then a yurt (yurt-de-durt) in Sunset Bay State Park. I had four people with me. Three of them were teenagers. One of those teenagers says i listen to the shittiest music. Well, i made her listen to Butt Trumpet and the Supersuckers and Reverend Horton Heat. They all like Skynrd. So who REALLY likes the shittiest music? yeah, ain't me. Thought so. pfft.

Outward, a tire blew up and we got lectured by a dirt-phobic state cop. Who, i should add, was nearly completely useless. All was relatively fine after that.

A lot of my friends came by to hang out, and the kids busied themselves out collecting crap like crawdads at LaVerne, which they ate for dinner.

I don't know if i had fun or not. I did a ton of driving. It was nice being out there, but i was on someone else's time schedule and that always makes me a little edgy.

I was surrounded by raccoons at Sunset. Everyone had gone to sleep and i was out at the campfire, and two raccoons came nosing around. Everything was put away and thrown out, but there they were. Then another one came around. There were just the three for awhile, and then two more snuck in and i just watched them. They're so weird to watch. Then i heard some rustling and saw like four more come cruising into the site. So now there were 8 of them, all looking at me like i was something that shouldn't be there, and together they were going to remove me. I gave up, said goodnight, and then crashed out.

Yeah so next time, it'll probably be just me and maybe one or two other people in a yurt-de-durt or a cabin again. those are nice. They sleep five, but it's like being in the damn drunk tank with five. The New Boots ran pretty good, although it was pretty weighed down with five people's crap and the five people. I really struggled steering it on some of those turns. It just wallowed.

And then yesterday we saw a sea lion on the beach at Bastendorff. Weird place to find one just hanging out and staring at the sky, but there it was.

Pictures will come along shortly, probably. My camera is screwed up, it's just getting old and needs new batteries so the camera sat charging itself like 70% of the time i was there.