Counting can be fun

A Thanksgiving weekend in review

For each direction, there were 750 miles driven (eleven hours) and about 31 gallons of gas consumed, which equates to a mediocre at best mid-20's mileage. Let's also not forget that speeding ticket I got ON Thanksgiving by Officer Sphincter (85 in a 75 zone on I-90... gee, I wonder why the mileage wasn't that great?).

Oh, and to Wyoming's Fish and Game Department: It's time to send out the memo again telling the cute brown bunny rabbits to stay OFF the damn asphalt at 2am when I'm driving along. I turned one of them into a roadkill appetizer for an aquila chrysaetos to feast on later in the day. I did indeed see one of these grand scavengers on the highway enjoying breakfast a few hours later. That was one BIG bird. Had to have been a six foot wing-span as he lifted off to get out of the semi's way. Damn that I didn't bring the camera this trip.

And pass that memo on to the deer too, huh? I won't tell you what I saw spread here and there at about the mid-point between Casper & Cheyenne.

Over the weekend there was also:

One turkey carved and devoured.
One ham, dressed with pineapples & cherries.
Many helpings of REAL cranberry sauce. The kind that requires a stove top & pan, and no can opener.
Mashed potatoes & gravy.
Fruit salad, peas, warm bread & butter, not-from-a-box stuffing... The table was buckling under all the goodness.

But after that...
10 doses of Tylenol Cold non-drowsy (no, not all at once), totalling
- 6.5 g acetaminophen
- 200 mg dextro... hell, call it cough suppressant
- 4 g expectorant
- 100 mg decongestant
6 doses Robitussin cough syrup
- another 600 mg expectorant
and for night-time, 3 doses of Sudafed something-or-other that knocked my ass out.

So after that, there was time for some more counting for the drive home when 5am Sunday rolled around...
Inches of snow: 3
Degrees above zero: 4 F
Attempts needed to start the Nissan: ONE, which makes me all kinds of happy.

Not that I would have been totally crushed to have had to take a day off work due to being out of state and visiting my mom, but if the Nissan can handle Montana's version of an "it's getting a tad chilly" morning, I have no doubt that it'll handle Denver's worst "it's damn cold out there" morning.

187,000-ish scored on one play of Super Mario 3 on the original NES that my mom has had stashed away as her secret addiction (it's only a personal best, and in world 2 at that).

In other news, it turns out that my mom is an old-school gamer. How fucking cool is that? She tells me that some nights she'll stay up until 3am or so playing it. I had a talk with her, gently reminding her about those nights that she would chastize me about the Commodore 64 sessions I had until all hours. The irony was not lost on her, and I mourn the lost opportunity she had to contribute to my delinquency back in the early 80's. Ah well. Oh look! Three more star cards collected. 5-UP baby!

Micronaut, Gravitation Redux

If I dig any deeper...

I found a root sometime in the past few hours.

First some perspective. I have had nightmares for most of my life & could never figure out why. I wasn't knocked around at home, didn't get in to the liquor cabinet (much), let alone ingest/inject any other (debatably stronger) substances, as a kid. Didn't have any Uncle Molester that I had to visit. I just usually had gory dreams & never could pinpoint a root cause.

It bugged me, because I like to have a neat & tidy explanation for things (why this doesn't make me a dyed-in-the-wool athiest, I couldn't really say). A couple years ago, I made a conscious choice to not let it bug me so much. This coincided with me letting other things go a while after my divorce. I'd held on to some self-doubt for a while.

Anyway, I started writing a few of the nightmares down. One of my earliest remembered haunts came to me the other night. It was based in a waking incident one winter when I was knee-high to a grass-hopper.

We lived on a court. "Not a through street", as the signs say. One night I'd gotten out of the house because of some noise I'd heard. The moon was out, there were some clouds in the sky. There was one that was not like the rest though. The others were all just hovering there in the sky, no wind at all. One of those clouds, all poofy, was moving. I followed it as it drifted across the sky. Then it stopped. I stepped off the porch, and two steps onto the lawn, it started moving again. A little quicker that before, slowing down as it moved.

I stepped further out into the lawn towards the street because it kept going behind the roof line of the garage. Start and stop. I heard sounds of an engine revving, and thought, "What a weird cloud." Start and stop. Further onto the lawn I went, nearing the sidewalk. Start and stop. Before I knew it, I was in the middle of the street, looking at this odd-ball cloud sputtering across the sky as its companion clouds moved not one bit. The revving engine sounded closer. Louder. Then the squeal of tires brought me around on my heels to see headlights bearing down on me.

The revving went down with the nose of that car as it came to a stop not an inch from my chest. The odor of tires, locked up, filled my nostrils. Air rushed by me... through me... where I stood. The car rocked back and forth as it came to rest. The fan behind the radiator pulled air through, threatened to pull me through. I could tell you even now how many bug corpses were in the radiator of that Chevrolet Bel-Air, because I was sure to be the next corpse to be added to its fins.

A yell came from the front door of my house. It was my name, bellowed by my dad. Yelling at me to get in the house right now. Looking back, I see that I had cheated death. I was supposed to be a corpse in that grill. Because of a cloud. As I started running to the front door, I looked up at the last place I saw that cloud. It was still there. Glowing. Hadn't moved one bit, as though it was there, just knowing what was going to happen. It had lured me out to death's door (Christine?), and now appeared to be irritated that I wasn't taking up residence next to all the other bugs. That's when I was awake.
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KISS, Detroit Rock City (as I peek out the window for any glowing clouds)

Explicative-free zone, one day only

The weekend... it was a mixed bag. The races were pretty good. Three Ferrari 250's placed one-two-three in Sunday's group 6B. 6A's big iron roared fantastically on Saturday, and there was only one car-damaging wreck & no driver injuries. In that, it was great.

The post-race conversations where politics and other world issues / crises are solved... well, that just fell through. It seems that while I may be my dad's son, I'm still only a child when debates and discussions are brought to the adult's table. Being interrupted, talked over, and generally ignored made me feel like just going with the thirteen year-old son of dad's business partner to ride bicycles. Only as long as we stayed in sight and out of that dangerous traffic (/sarcasm). In truth, I did get up and walk away, completely unnoticed. I suppose I should be glad someone didn't pipe up with, "Say Larry, could you go to the cooler and get me a beer? Be sure to use both hands now." (okay, NOW /sarcasm... really!)

Photos. Half a gig of photos await downloading & distributing, but I feel more like just deleting the lot of 'em.

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And in the bad news department (yeah, it got better upon my arrival home), the property managers did the landscaping for more than half the yard here. Looks like absolute ass, and I am just ever so looking forward to the forthcoming bill for it. It's gonna be hell to try raking up Cottonwood droppings, too.

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I think I'll go for a swim over there in that pool... the one with the big letters on the side that says (Lord help me) "Coors". This weekend is just so far beyond explicatives and colorful metaphors that I'm not even gonna bother with 'em

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Seefeel, Moodswing ... no shit Dick Tracy. (oops, an explicative... so sue me)