White Lightning Axiom: Redux

So, tonight is my first class in motorcycle safety. I expect that the 3 hour class will mostly be going over various bits of information in preparation for the Saturday class where we will actually get to touch a motorcycle. Four classes, two on Wed and the other on Saturday. Will I end up as a devoted cycle rider in the end? Probably not, but we shall see.

The crippling heatwave that has been wreaking havoc with the garden and making the TSD review with the Tyrants an absolute horror? It's over. Of course, the damage has been done to the zucchini and cucumbers over the last week is irreversible. The only hope now is that what is left will produce a more hearty fruit due to it's tenacious capability of fending off the worst environmental conditions the Agricultural Sector has seen in years. The bucket loads of water that the thunderstorm landed on us last night was of little relief though, most of it just poured off into the drainage systems and was whisked away to the beleaguered flood plains. The temps are lower and we are supposed to get more rain of the 'pattering' variety though. At least the AC will not be laboring under the duress of Hell on Earth for the time being. Poor, poor veggies.

The Hundred Pushups program is on Day 2 now of 12/12/10/10/Max. My max today was 110. Huzzah! Bring it on. And all that other banter.

Technorati Tags:Gas | Motorcycle | Gardening | Summer | Pushups

Labels: Gardening, Gas, Motorcycle, Pushups, Summer

Sorry to leave y'all in a lurch like that. The last few weeks have been a tad interesting. A brief and entirely uninteresting synopsis:








1) TSD:The intrepid wonder twins; Attila and Ghengis, got their Sparring Gear ... much pummeling ensued. Not to be undone by her beating at her brother's hands, Attila proceeds to 'Beat the tar out of him' when doing one-steps with Josh. I was treated to my own tar-release program in the adult class.

2) ENTERTAINMENT; CHILD:Last wet-day at Sesame Place included rides on the 'big boy (and girl)' rides that required a 42' stature. The lack of lines after Labor Day proved absurdly enjoyable and well worth the price of admission.

3) ENTERTAINMENT; ADULT:Between periods of work and migraines, I attended a few social events. Mostly mundane and rather brief. I owe one of my former co-workers about 20$ for beer and munchies due to an inoperable ATM. I'll send it to him in his Christmas Update Letter (Encyclopedia Sized).

4) EMPLOYMENT:Work, as busy and all consuming as it is, consisted of training, managing, monitoring, self testing and the omni-present and highly fungible level 4 support rotation. Never have I prayed so much outside of work as I did on this rotation.

5) HAUPERTONIAN MANOR:At the manor: Tilled the garden under except for the 10,000 pumpkins, bazillion carrots and bushels of green tomatoes. I actually got the Monster Tiller repaired at a local small-engine repair shop. Well worth the $100 repair bill; started on the first pull. Also got to deal with a clogged main-line sewer blockage. Somehow, a t-shirt label had come loose and wedged itself in the pipes about 25 feet down the way. Took a bit of gumption and a few fixes (small hole in 30 year old pipe) to get everything online. Now it drains like a champ. Of course, in the process of re-assembling the utility-tub drain, I cracked myself on the bridge of the nose with a plumbers wrench. My God ... it's full of stars ... and little tweeting birdies. Thought for sure I broke my nose but the blood loss was minimal and little bruising/swelling proved me wrong. Resigned myself to planting mums and bulbs in the garden after recovering from a monster headache the next day. Gee, I wonder why my head hurt.

6) FAMILY; MRS:The expected busy period for the Mrs got nixed when the recreant and ignoble miscreants from a remote location proved that their flippant behavior was not to be tolerated. They are in the midsts of covering up misdeeds and her requests exposed their roguish cozenages. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth will soon commence.

7) FAMILY; CHILDREN: Children are loving Kindergarten. Almost as much as the Mrs and I as we sit down to go over homework assignments, practice writing letters and going over spelling lists. As God as my witness, I shall make sure they write their first epic novel before they get to 1st grade. Or at least, a story that has all 20 words that they need to learn in it.

And there you are. I still live and soldier forth with few symptoms. Granted, most of my impediments are self inflicted. I shall endeavor to update you with the salient matters (read: blatantly mundane and mostly fabricated) as the occur. HUZZAH!


Technorati Tags:Gas | Swimming | Karate | Children | Plumbing

Labels: Banalities, Bar, Beer, Children, Family, Lawn, Migraine, Parenting, Summer, Swimming, Water, Weekend

Busy weekend ... well, not really. In actuality, a lot of nothing was done. Oddly, it was more exhausting than if I had actually done something productive. Saturday was primarily spent by me waffling about in bed somewhere between a lucid state and the bizarre dreamland I love to inhabit. The Grandparents were down so the Tyrants had little interest in me. Rustle up some bacon/eggs/toast for a family breakfast. Do a bit of laundry ... bumble about the manor and then go down into the chilled cellar to fill up a cooler with beer (IPA, Victory Lager, Victory V12, Chimay, Mikes Hard Lemonade ) for a party with the Butler/Seliga Clan at 1600 hours. It was SWELTERING hot the whole time. As sure as the sun rises in the east, the pool was somewhere near freezing though. So, the Tyrants were in and out of the pool like flying fish while the adults tried to sooth their beleaguered, senses by sloshing alcohol down their gullets in a feeble attempt to either numb the screaming senses or add a natural cooling agent to the system. Not a bad night all in all though. The party was for one of the extended family who is a Philly police officer and he had his partner and a few of his work friends there. He has made it his (jokingly) intention to make sure he has the opportunity to arrest everyone in his family at some point. Great guy though. Just got a dog, a Doberman. Named him 'Thor'. Go figure.

Sunday, ugh. Too much beer. Just a bit sluggish getting up so we went to the 1000 mass instead of the 0830. Since we were on the later side of the morning, we went out to the Warminister Diner for breakfast. By far, one of the best diners we have visited. They staff did not have the effrontery to deign our order too big to serve all at once so there was very little room on the table top. It was a rather good meal but we had some problems with the Tyrants and their eating habits. Alexis, once she got her waffles, did not want them. Jake was fidgety and had problems consuming his bacon and flap-jacks. They were still a bit tired from the previous night and were a bit gummed up (given that they primarily consumed chips, dip and cheese). Their digestive system is used to more ... 'healthy' food. Jake frequently requests chicken or pasta instead of junk food. Well, that is, when he is NOT insisting we buy a brick-oven pizzeria to sate his appetite for pizza at every meal. Later that day, the Grandparents packed up their belongings and we strapped the Tyrants into the back of their troop transport. You see, they were going to 'host' the Twin Tyrants of Turpitude for a week. Genghis and Attila treated this with great gravitas and spent most of the day inquiring if everything was ready to go. They had great interest in escaping the Manor for a quieter, gentler time at the FOB. I cannot imagine their spirits being any higher once they were trundled up and slowly cruised off into the horizon. Then ... silence.

We missed the children greatly. Sure, there was no early morning battle to get everything ready and no harrowing rush at the end of the day to start the extra-curricular activities. We got up a bit later and still made it to work (Well, I did. The Lovely Mrs took some time off from work.) early. Plugged through the day and took a 15 minute trip to get back to the manor. We went off to deal with some financial fallout from the Annual Budget Considerations and then enjoyed a wonderful early 11th anniversary dinner at Savona. It was distinguished by the lack of our little heartbeats making sure we were aware of their blessed presence. Sure, I talk glowingly of them when I'm hundreds of miles away ...

Technorati Tags:Anniversary | Weekend | Family | Party | Summer

Labels: Beer, Children, Family, Grandparents, Sleep, Summer, Weather, Weekend

Well, let's see here. What to talk about first. Friday was fairly anti-climatic. Let sleeping dogs lay was the theme for the day. I stuck around the Home Office all day in case I needed to be called on to 'testify' for the TL9000 audit of our division. Silly stuff, so I bounced about and helped out some of my co-workers where I could. Standard end of the week agitprop greasing the slide into 5 O'Clock slackerdom. Friday is an exercise in pushing items off your plate and trying to temporize any requests that may come your way. Any meeting you come away with fewer action items than you went in with is a success. Even better, avoiding meetings where you might get something which would demolish your weekend is even better. But, you know, that's not really the team spirit, is it?

When I was heading back to the Manor after skirting responsibility all day, I was about to load up the POS SuperSaturn with my wheel barrow of work related paraphernalia when I discovered that I had neglected a complete a critical task that morning. You see, the squirrels have been destroying my crocus bulbs in their quest to dig up the emerging 7/21 year cicclids. So, they happen on my bulbs and think: MMMMM, this might be tasty. Argh. Go eat the damn bird seed you tree rats! In any event, I've been trapping them with live traps and relocating them on the other side of the turnpike. No chance that they will find their way back. Now I'm not trying to eradicate the population, I know better. Won't happen. I'm just trying to remove the sub-class that seems to have the gumption to dig up my flower beds in spite of the defensive perimeter claymore mines and the cybernetic hell-hounds leaving their acrid scent everywhere. So, I caught on this past morning and dropped the chattering little bastard into the trunk of the SS, cage and all. And there he sat, all day. Gitmo could have learned something from me. It was a relatively cloudy and cool day so he did not end up roasting to death, and when discovered ... was still filled with piss and vinegar about being trapped. I let him loose and he bounded off towards the near-by military base. Probably to pick up some plastic explosives and assault weaponry to get back at me. He disregarded the contract I had him sign saying that he would denounce his former 'anti crocus' ways. Damn tree rats.

Tyrants behaved as they usually do. All uppity in the pool and such. Don't want to go swimming, want to go to karate till it's time to get out of the pool. Then they want to swim and not go to karate till I remind them that it's dodge-ball Friday. Fickle little turds. Jake is still a bit under the weather and had a mini-meltdown in class. We cut that short! His 'tantrum' is usually him clenching his fists and screwing his face up into a whiny scowl and emitting a high-pitch screech ... like a wind-up to a major explosion or something. Usually I just have to bark out his name and he cuts it short. I've only seen him do it twice, but I let him know that it's not a behavior that I'll let go unchallenged. He is starting to learn that he will not get his way all the time and there are more ... proactive ways of resolving conflicts. This one will not work.

Saturday: do nothing but sleep in with a cruddy migraine and slum around all day. Pick some veggies, clean up the Master Suite a bit. Hang with the kids. Since the lawn is a perfect beige color now, mowing is not required. I'll certainly make sure that the sprinklers are turned on next year, the lawn looks like hell after this summer. The garden isn't much better off, but we do have about a dozen pumpkins that are looking quite spectacular now. A basket of very intense tomatoes too. Very flavorful due to the limited rainfall.

Sunday: more of Saturday's activity. We were planning on going to Sesame Place again, but forecasts of mid-day thunderstorms and a general malaise with the Tyrants but the kibosh on that. Genghis and Attila took turns napping on the Iron Maiden (New non-Hydraulic Master Mile Wide Bed), desperately trying to shake whatever NEW virus they managed to pick up. That, or the old virus mutated in both of them and they gave each-other a new bag-o-crap ... which I'm now coming down with. Nice. Indeed, each had a bit of a fever and the hacking cough prevalent in the Haupertonain TB Ward. The phlegm and snot runneth deep here, mind your step.

Technorati Tags:Weekend | Swimming | Karate | Children | Illness | Gardening | Lawn | Summer

Labels: Banalities Work, Bed, Children, Gardening, Illness, Karate, Lawn, Migraine, Summer, Swimming, Water

Just a few things to banter about, the greatest of which is the gobsmacked state I'm in due to me laying down coat #2 on the floor in Jovial Jake's room. A little splash of mineral spirits, a daub of paraffin based oils ... wheeze! My noggin is swimming in an ocean of synaptic discombobulation. This leaves only one more coat to apply ... this Thursday after sufficient time for drying. Then, while we are on vacation, the final coat should coagulate into a high-gloss shine. Slap up the wall-paper and call me Susan! It's fortunate that I did manage to find those last 4 cans of finish ... the only ones left in existence. I used two on this coat so I should have just enough for the last layer. Looking forward to that ... like an enriched uranium enema.

I called the water company, Aqua PSW, yesterday. I asked for them to send a 'technician' out to put my seasonal meter back in so I can start up the summer sprinkler system that I so meticulously installed. After going through voice mail hell TWICE, I finally get a rep who tries to sort out my account. She hems and haws about various inconsistencies about my account and makes a comment about a meter shutoff request made in 1985 ... yeah. I was living in another State at that time and most assuredly did not make that request. So, she confesses that she is not sure how to proceed and needs to ask her manager (I'm expecting another hang-up at this time). She actually comes back online and says that she will be able to do this, but there is a 50$ meter transaction fee. WHAT!? Yes, 50$ to install or remove a meter. So, here are my choices: I can pay 100$ a year to have my seasonal meter removed/installed or pay 20$ a month for a minimum usage fee. Dammit, what kind of nonsense is this. They want to venerate myself before their billing department for the privilege to pay more for nothing? Gha! Every one wants a slice of my pie, and they have no problem laying out mendaciously specious tales to get it. I've threatened to have a well drilled for the singular purpose of feeding my sprinkler system due to their horrific billing practices and inability to keep accurate records. Now, I'm on the precipice of doing so. Double argh.

Technorati Tags:Home Improvements | Water | Fumes | Polyurethane | Plumbing

Labels: Banalities, Home Improvements, Lawn, Summer, Water