Our Lady of Perpetual Filingand other broken idols

We're two days behind schedule at work but hanging on. We're all tired. I just don't know how some of my co-workers have the fortitude to withstand twelve and fourteen hours day after day after day without going bonkers. Or how they safely make the drive to and from work. Every night on the way home I hope desperately I won't be required to make any split-second driving decisions.

Tiredness makes you stupid. You know you're tired when you step into the shower and suddenly realize the water's running, you're completely wet, and have made no move towards either soap or shampoo. Some people get wired. I hear their voices at work, accelerating in pitch and volume until they just can't stop and the words run on endlessly - nonsensically. You forget the names of people you see every day. You put your hand on your computer mouse and forget what it is. Your mind goes blank when you stare at your monitor. You pretend to work and somehow you sleepwalk through the day and get something done.

It's time for me to listen to "Industrial Strength Tranquilizers" by the Austin Lounge Lizards. That song usually gives me lift or at least a smile.

There's a lot of wisdom here amongst the employees,
Some of us are street smart, and some have PhD's.
We're all tired and bored but we've all found ways to cope.
Some of us drink after work; the rest of us smoke dope

wash'em away

I probably shouldn’t be creeping around the customer cubicles at night and shooting photos after the occupants have gone home. I sometimes wonder when someone in loss-prevention will notice a flash in the darkness and send someone to confront me but I have a feeling no one’s really paying attention to those security monitors. It’s interesting to observe the installations in cubicles that I would normally never see. And occasionally there are laugh-out-loud items like this one.

The game of Musical Macs I was compelled to play after my Mac had a nervous breakdown Wednesday is over and I’m back at my own machine in my own little home away from home, my cubicle. The doctor was Out until Sunday so I had to work where I could find an open station and it was a real pain settling into a different cubicle each night and having to drag in my chair, my mouse, my back-, foot- and wrist-supports, my headphones, and my water bottle to get comfy. When I'm looking at ten or more hours at a station I need to dig in. Then each individual has customized all the desktop preferences of his or her mac and I have to disable everything. While dashboards and widgets are well and good, I think of them as toys and I don’t want them unexpectedly popping onto the screen while I am in the midst of serious business all because I have accidentally pressed a hotkey while typing.

It was so much easier in the olden pre-press days before computers. The only thing I had to worry about was keeping my twelve-inch metal line gauge (pica pole, or in the most crass vernacular, “ruler”) jammed into the back pocket of my jeans and keeping an eye on my heavy-duty shears I used for cutting film. Most people had a preferred light table; maybe it was the one next to the film processor, where the intoxicating aroma of developer and fixing solution would elevate you to your own personal work “zone”, or maybe it was where you could fix that eye in the back of your head at the film churning out of the processor so you could grab the next sheet and start your slicing and dicing act, but usually preference was dependent on how you liked the double-barreled tape dispenser in the tray attached to your table.

I don’t miss the fumes, standing on concrete floors, or the high decibel level, but the simplicity of the setup is a nostalgic memory.

chocoholic

My boss rewarded me with yesterday with a lovely & luscious chocolate-covered pretzel fresh from Pennsylvania. I think some of my most favorite chocolate comes from Lancaster County, which is Amish country, between Philadelphia and Gettysburg. Forget Hershey! The Wilbur Buds from Wilbur Chocolate Company in Lititz will make you sneer at Hershey kisses, which are after all a gimmick: colorful foil with paper pull tabs. I'd rather have unwrapped chocolate that tastes like chocolate. There are many small shops in Southern Pennsylvania who will, if you order in advance, dip chewy freshly baked pretzels (another local specialty) in dark chocolate, producing the most delectable combination of salt & sweet.

Another specialty, Whoopie Pies, are so sweet your teeth rot before they even hit the surface, but that's another story.

the golf

Colorful car owned by one of our freelancers. I thought he had painted it himself but he said it was originally a yellow car painted over by volkswagen, one of 175, as part of a commercial promotion. My brain can't remember the year, now.

If you follow the white lines of the parking lot straight back, the first patch of green is the field haunted by Pepe the skunk. Beyond it is a paved drive and another field used by Paco the skunk and the four miniature Pacos.

no starbucks for me

Phoebe jumps onto my bed and I start into semi-comatose awakeness for a few brief seconds. I have been dead to the world in undreaming sleep for only four hours and I need at least three more, but this is her daily ritual. She circles the bedcovers to give my face a quick slurp and is gone. I don't mind too much. Dogs need their schedules. My daily rituals are what keep the fabric of my own life from unraveling during the hectic summer months.

The first and most important ritual of the day is tea. Two cups of water zapped for two and a half minutes in the microwave and dumped unceremoniously into a small blue willow teapot along with a bag of black chai tea and left to brew while I boot up my mac and check my e-mail. I love seeing the hot golden liquid flow from the spout of the teapot into my mug. Some milk and a sachet of saccharine and I have my tea. The first cup is usually the best one; it's still too hot to gulp and so I can savor it. By the time I get to the second one, it's cool enough I swallow it greedily in just a few great swigs; for the caffeine, not for the flavor.

Tea in other forms follows my day and week. Upon arrival at work I fill my two empty plastic Ozarka bottles with tap water and stuff a bag of herbal raspberry tea into each to steep until I begin working. It helps me drink the slightly soapy-tasting water that comes from the tap. On weekends I've begun brewing rooibois, diluting it with ice cubes and squeezing a lemon into it. It tastes exactly like traditional ice tea except it is just sweet enough so it doesn't need sugar. I recently learned rooibois has become very popular because it appears in "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series of books by Alexander McCall Smith. I've just received the first book of the series on CD so I can listen to it at work. We shall see about the rooibois!

pack your stuff, turn in your badge, turn off the lights

Note from my boss yesterday: Our daily list of "things to do." He didn't even have time to type it.

I've been given the day off but not for a good reason. It's more than 3 days that our proofing system has been down. In the printshop every minute the press is down is money lost. In pre-press the same goes for the imagesetter. Our onsite operation has only one customer and they're not the forgiving kind. The techs brought in a new worm drive and new laser heads for the XP and they still can't make it work, so they've retrieved our ancient proofer from the bowels of storage and are trying to make it live again. If it does, the next three days & nights will be a marathon of catching up. We'll know by Monday, I think, if we still have jobs.

thanks a bunch, kodak.

baby skunks

BABY

SKUNKS



ARE EVERYWHERE! They are so cute - exact miniature replicas of the adults and just as deadly with their spray (so I hear). The ones we've seen are about six to eight inches long with bushy tails longer than they were. Sunday there were four of them rolling around on the east side of the warehouse in the field usually occupied by the adult I call "Paco". They scooted away in single file when they saw us but only went about 15 feet and started wrestling again like kittens or puppies. Last Thursday on the west side of the building along the bottom of "bluebonnet hill" we saw three more independent youngsters diligently digging for food. I've read that crickets and grasshoppers are a favorite food of skunks and crickets are especially plentiful right now. Grasshoppers are showing up but not in large numbers. June Bugs are also suddenly abundant.

Last night we saw a possum running as if for its life. We think there is a predator in the area, probably a coyote or bobcat. One night last week an adult skunk who saw us ran quickly for quite a distance before disappearing into some brush down the road. After we walked a little farther we saw a pair of eyes reflecting from "bluebonnet hill" that looked like something much larger than a skunk or opossum. IT watched US and then faded into the brush. spooky!

Photos are from Mary's Wildlife Page. She has more photos of skunks & opossums. The possums we see aren't nearly so cute.

bane

Witnessing one corporation blatantly trying to screw another one was a shock. The aftermath is making life miserable for us drones who do production.

At the heart of the matter is this Kodak XP Proofing System. We had two ten-year-old Kodak proofers and Kodak convinced the powers-that-run-my-office this new one would be twice as fast with better quality. So we bought one. First we thought it was funny there was no documentation for the software. Then when something went wrong a few weeks after installation someone peering at the innards found a sticker dated 2002. We had paid for a new machine and received a three-year-old refurbished one. The installer 'fessed up and All Hell broke loose with the powers-that-run-my-office. Threats of lawsuits (according to the grapevine) convinced Kodak to replace the machine with the machine we had paid for.

I think they screwed us again. We haven't had the machine run for an entire week yet without something going wrong. There are only two technicians for the entire southwest u.s. so we often have to wait while they fly their guy in from Colorado or Oklahoma. Now that we're in the midst of our major summer crunch our "fast machine" has been inoperable for over 36 hours and the technician can't find the problem. We are steadily falling behind schedule. Our customer was understanding yesterday but today or tomorrow will be a different story.

Litigation is certain to occur.

Time Time Time - See what's become of me!

More to the point, what's become of my time?

neighbors

Nando peered through the grimy kitchen window at the chain-link fence that was bothering him. He was a slightly built young man of twenty-three who almost looked muscular under his baggy clothes but if you looked closely you could tell whatever tone there was to his body came from leftover youth and not from working out. His name was really Fernando but people who knew him mostly called him Nando.

The house he dwelt in was a clapboard-sided two-bed one-bath that had been built in the 1940s when the neighborhood was young and solid working-class couples raised kids who went on to own bigger and nicer houses in newer neighborhoods that radiated ever more outward from the city’s core and the owners here, much like their abodes, gradually grew older and more decrepit. The owners died and were buried, the houses gained new lives as rental properties, and the neighborhood fell farther into disrepair until it became “the hood.”

This house had belonged to Nando’s grandmother, he thought. Sometimes he didn’t remember. His parents had rented it out after she died but when the last tenant left Nando had been allowed to move in. His folks didn’t want to throw him out onto the street but they didn’t want him at their house with their two teenaged children.

At the moment Nando was obsessed with the chain-link fence that encircled the back yard. His next-door neighbor, a thirty-something black man who had moved in only two months ago, had erected a six-foot wooden fence across the back of his yard that abutted the alley. Nando envied that fence. He couldn’t stop thinking about how nice it looked with the wide dog-eared pickets and golden brown stain. He thought it might be fun to throw a softball against the fence and hear it thud against the boards. He thought it would be convenient to throw his empty beer cans over the fence into the alley. Man, that was a nice fence, and he wanted one for his own yard.

Mr. Miller was playing a video game inside his house when he heard an odd metallic noise. It wasn’t exactly a “clang” nor was it exactly a “clink,” but something in between. Was it his water pipes? The gutter? He heard it a second time and then it became regular.

Clank.

Clank.

Clank.

Mr. Miller opened his back door and saw his young Hispanic neighbor hacking at the chain-link fence with a machete. He was somewhat startled. He suspected the young man used drugs but he seemed harmless. He walked over to Nando, who continued to abuse the thick metal pole that constituted the fence’s top rail.

“Hey, bro, whatcha got goin’ on here?” asked Mr. Miller calmly.

“I’m gonna take down this fence and get me a new one,” replied Nando.

“The way you’re goin’ I think it’s going to take you a while.”

Nando did not reply and continued to hack, but the cadence slowed a bit.

“Well, good luck,” said Miller and returned to his video game.

The noise abruptly stopped and when Miller looked outside, the machete was on the ground and Nando had disappeared.

he's a real scream

yes, it turns out the office mummy is quite a ham! It's tough having a cadaver on the premises when you just don't know what to do with it. Mummy sits on a stool an no one notices. Mummy perches on a cubicle and stares over the walls, preventing people doing their work. Mummy circulates among the cubes producing screams. It's only a matter of time before mummy gets locked away.

the curious incident of the dog in the night-time

The remnants of Hurricane Dennis have given us thunderstorms every day for the last six days. I was at work every day but yesterday so I finally got a front-row seat. I like thunderstorms but Phoebe does not. She wants to see what's going on but the crashes frighten her. I sat on the back steps until the sheets of driven rain pushed me back to just inside the doorway. Even there I was getting misted. The storm must have lasted 45 minutes as the lightning got closer and closer. If you count the seconds between the time you see the flash to the time you hear the crash there's a formula that'll tell you how far away it is. If you see and hear at the same time you're at the point of impact. Yesterday the noise was so loud my heart stopped. The impact was so fast I couldn't even flinch. The storm passed but about 9pm the power went out all over the neighborhood. Today I found more than 29,000 people were affected. Things are so dark and so quiet. Phoebe doesn't like thunder and she didn't know what to do about the black hole that our house became. She's uncomfortable around flashlights. I wasn't sure it would be safe to walk around the neighborhood in the dark so after enjoying the darkness for about 30 minutes I thought I'd take a short nap. It was at least 6 hours before my normal bedtime but I'm tired from extra hours at work. Phoebe jumped on the bed with me and snuggled up next to me and went to sleep. This is totally out of character for her. I guess she was a little freaked out. It was nice having my puppy there, though. We napped for about an hour and then we got up and I lit a candle. It was getting really stuffy inside the house even with the window open. The rain had cooled the temperature by 20 or 30 degrees but had left that oppressive humidity behind. The moon had risen; it was almost half full so it was quite a bit lighter outside, so we sat out there again. About 11:30 the power came on again.
Now I had light again I finished reading this book. It went really fast & I liked reading it. It's sort of a murder mystery narrated by the protagonist, an autistic fifteen-year-old. The character is a genius at math and at solving puzzles but finds it extremely difficult to live around people. I identify with characters like that.

widget schmidget

DC has been using his newest "gas price" widget in Tiger to try to find cheap gas. You type in your zip code and it gives you the five lowest prices and their locations. So far he has been chasing phantoms; when he finds the gas station the price is no lower than it is elsewhere. He was going to try again yesterday on his way home from work. It's hard to believe someone's selling it for $1.80 when I can't see any for less than $2.19. I felt a small piece of luck fell my way on Tuesday when I filled my tank for $2.21 a gallon while I watched a tanker truck replenishing the station's supply. When I passed the same station in the wee hours following work the price had increased to $2.23.

Ed & I saw two possums last night near a pond we hadn't noticed before. We were just checking out a small stand of junipers and were crossing a soupy swath of turf when we saw the first possum. It seemed awfully scraggly and small - not fat like the other one we saw a few weeks back. Then we saw there was a large pond beyond the slight ridge we were climbing. Ed joked about alligators and suddenly there was something swimming in the dark water! I thought "cottonmouth"! We trained our flashlights on it and it came closer a few times but not close enough to see clearly. We could tell it was some kind of mammal, so we guessed "possum". We heard but did not see half a dozen or more turtles plopping into the water. We crossed the street and waded through some more watery muck to one of the canals and spotted a huge bird flying silently over the water. In the dark it looked as large as an egret, but was most likely an owl. Was it a barn owl or a great horned owl? Do opossums swim? Do skunks swim? Our night walks are giving my brain as well as my legs exercise as I try to research these creatures of the night.

We've decided 11-11:15pm isn't a good time for wildlife viewing because the tractor-trailer rigs are finishing their last run of the day and there's too much noise. Last night we realized 12:30am isn't good, either. There was so much traffic around the warehouse it must be when the shift changes. The pond was far enough from the road you didn't notice the cars much but our circuit around the warehouse was positively dangerous as we had to avoid 6 or 8 speeding cars. We only saw one skunk on the premises.

fa male

HERE's how I feel.

LP told me yesterday everyone's collective tiredness was rendered into complete silence at the morning meeting. The only sound was the air conditioner. Ten more weeks.

aargh

Ed & I went out at midnight last night and saw three skunks. One was a farily large one on the northeast corner at the far edge of the field abutting our parking lot. We have seen a skunk only once before on this side of the warehouse. This one ran away as did the previous one so we think it may be the same individual. Most of the skunks just look at us and keep doing what they're doing. Last night we also saw two smaller skunks on the west side of the building where we usually see them. They were foraging in their "regular" locations.

I've now become extremely irritable. I'm always tired and we may be going to a six-day work week this week. Of course the extra money will be nice but as I do every year I question whether or not it's worth the loss of my sanity for two or more months.

la gritona

vignettes desde los dos lados de la frontera

My eyes and back are both too tired to spend much time sitting at the computer at home but I'm not having a problem reading, so that's what I'm doing. Maybe along with the audio books I'm listening to at work I'll get a massive injection of culture.

skunk patrol

Ed & I are continuing our nightly excursions around the warehouse an hour or so past the witching hour - or should I say the skunking hour? Our chief companions are kildees and striped skunks. On the best nights we may see three skunks and an owl. Once we saw a possum, but it scurried up a tree and hid itself so well we gave up trying to find it with a flashlight. The skunks aren't usually afraid but we don't get too close to them either. One night a skunk was rooting in the dirt directly in front of a ground-level spotlight and I got about five feet away to get a good view but walked away without it noticing me. We have learned the owls tend to perch on top of the tall spotlights located in the parking lot or along the street, probably to get a good view of potential prey. We think they, or it, is a barn owl. We don't know if it's a single bird or if there are several. It's amazing how silently they fly. We've spotted another smaller bird that's probably an owl. We saw fewer skunks last week and thought maybe the weekend fireworks exhibitions might have disturbed them a bit. Or maybe they are trying to avoid us. We're going to schedule some walks before midnight to see if there's a bigger party then. Supposedly baby skunks are usually born in May and may stay with their mother for up to a year but the skunks we have seen have all been solo explorers and none of them seem small enough to be juveniles. I'm not finding much detailed information about skunks on the web and haven't yet found a book about skunks that's not written for children. Adults want to know, too!

bubbles

Ed & I took a long break from work to check out the fireworks from nearby Pioneer Square in Las Colinas on Monday night. I toted my tripod through the dark field adjacent to the warehouse to experiment. The camera was not cooperative. Shutter lag increased tenfold so I couldn't snap the shots I wanted. I tried to anticipate but the shutter lag was never consistent. I was able to try some different exposures and got a few interesting shots. I think this was my favorite - a handheld shot after I got disgusted with the whole shutter thing.

can't escape the weather!

Hot! Hot! Hot! I found the "Hot Tamale" package on the parking lot at work and knew I had to use it for something. This collage wasn't what I had in mind, but think it works pretty well to convey the furnace raging outdoors.

gettysburg day

It's happy fourth of july holiday for most folks, I reckon, but for me the first few days of july take my mind back to a few hot summer days in 1863 when more than 50,000 soldiers wearing blue and grey were killed near a peach orchard in Pennsylvania. Last year I listened to an audio tour of Gettysburg called "on hallowed ground" and I recommend it for students of that battle, who like myself, have never been to that sacred place. I do hope to see it someday and hope the carnivals of entertainment planned for the surrounding area are kept hid from view. The movie "Gettysburg" was a pretty good rendition of one of my favorite books, "The Killer Angels," by Michael Shaara, but I think I'll go read a few pages right now, since my creativity level seems pretty low.

dreaming dog

When I was thirteen my family joined the hordes of Dallas' "white flight" and moved several miles to a new neighborhood inside the westerly edges of the city limit. It was a hastily constructed neighborhood, one of many developments springing up to house anglo families trying to escape the newly integrated schools closer to the inner city. We had never lived in a new house so it was exciting for my brother and me even though the house itself was somewhat shoddy and the neighborhood was sorely lacking trees and had only rudimentary lawns. There was a nicely-wooded park down the street with a small creek that afforded an occasional crawdad if you were patient enough to sit on the concrete drainage pipe for several hours with a scrap of bacon tied to a string.

There were two brothers named Bill who lived across the street and 6 or 8 houses up the block. We thought it was funny they were both named Bill but we didn't know much about divorce and the mixed families that resulted from second marriages. The only single parents you saw on tv in the sixties were single because their spouse had died like the dad on "My Three Sons" or "The Courtship of Eddie's Father." So sad. There were also single guys who inherited their nieces or nephews like the swingers on "Bachelor Father" and "Family Affair." There didn't seem to be any single moms though except for Diahann Carroll on "Julia." She was the first single mom I remember seeing (again as a result of death, not divorce) and also the first African-American woman to star in a tv show. I sometimes wonder at the messages these shows must have sent, as if being a single parent was cool if you were a white man but was only acceptable for women if you were black. And divorce was something reserved for movie stars.

The two Bills on Wisteria Street came to be called "Big Bill" and "Little Bill." Little Bill was younger and he was the mean one who harassed other kids and would take their bikes from them when he felt like it. Big Bill would rescue you from the clutches of his half-brother if he was around, but he disappeared from time to time so you couldn't rely on his help. You were better off just riding the other direction if Little Bill was outside. The Bills' family moved away after a year or so and I forgot about them until my friend Jean started dating Big Bill about ten years later.

Bill was a sweet guy, nice-looking, and he always had plenty of money. He took Jean out every weekend and sometimes during the week, too, and was almost like a dad to Jean's five-year-old daughter. They took family vacations on the beach at Galveston. This was quite a switch for Jean, whose deadbeat ex-husband had never earned enough money to move them out of Jean's grandmother's roach-infested house and who now never paid child-support and rarely bothered to even visit his adorable blond daughter. Jean and Bill were happy and had just become engaged to be married when Bill jumped off the edge of sanity and stripped away the facade of his life.

One morning when he should have been at work, Bill came to Jean's home, talking a mile a minute and pacing incessantly as he babbled about people coming after him. Worried, Jean phoned her brother, Des, who was also Bill's friend. It took about ten minutes for him to drive to Jean's. When Bill saw Des pull into the driveway, he ran from the house to his own car, shouting for everyone to keep away. At breakneck speed, he started his car and backed around his friend's car to get out of the driveway, throwing gravel in every direction in a frantic effort to leave. Jean's brother had been waving his arms shouting "it's me, let's talk" to no avail. In a few moments, Bill was out of the driveway and out of sight. They could still hear the car as its tires screeched on asphalt and hard concrete and suddenly there was Bill again in front of the house, the car flying up over the curb into Jean's front yard where she and her brother still stood. They now had to dodge the oncoming car and Bill dug deep circular ruts in the lawn with his tires as he spun around the yard two or three times and was then gone again. It would be almost 24 hours before they would see him again.

What no one knew then was that Bill was a manic-depressive, that he had gone off his medication, and that he had exacerbated his manic condition by ingesting a large amount of cocaine. He was spotted several times during the day in neighborhoods of his friends and family and finally corralled after the bulk of the cocaine had faded from his bloodstream. The truth about Bill's medical condition came out and he was institutionalized in a psych ward for three months. When he came out he wasn't the same. The medication that was supposed to level out his mood swings made him impotent and depressed. Jean felt helself pulling away from him though she hoped Bill would get back to "normal." One day Bill asked to borrow a handgun from his brother. A few days after that he turned the tv volume up loud in his house, walked into a closet in the back bedroom and shot himself.

tgif

End of the week for me again. And we get paid today. I'm much more tired today than I have been. Very hard to get moving. We have caught up enough at work that everyone is getting a 3-day weekend for Fourth of July holiday.

Since I can hardly think about writing, I shot a photo of some of my old ink bottles and writing accessories. The cabinet card of the woman even has a deer-head ink reservoir on the desk.

buzzards

Once I got down past Stephenville on Route 67 I couldn't get away from the turkey buzzards. They literally look like turkeys until you get close and see those naked red heads staring at you. I spotted my first "gang" of vultures somewhere south of Stephenville when one of a set of seemingly interesting fencepost ornaments suddenly launched into flight and I saw I had been looking at a whole row of buzzards. They were a constant sight after that, feasting on road kill, hovering in trees, or circling in droves high overhead out in the middle of nowhere. I tried to shoot photos of them a dozen times or more by slowing to a crawl on the highway when there were no other cars around, which was often, hoping to get close enough in my car that I could get a good shot. The vultures would, without fail, allow me to get almost close enough, and then take off into the sky beyond reach. They take off pretty quickly for such a large bird. So I never got a really good photo of them. I did kill one with my car. I was on my way home after leaving Big Bend, on a nearly deserted highway going 70 mph when I spotted yet another vulture breakfasting on a road-kill cottontail. This was the only vulture who didn't fly away before I got too close. As I realized I was too close I swerved to the left. As the vulture realized I was too close it launched itself, but right into the front of my car. I must have knocked that bird fifty feet from the road. I felt bad. After awhile, though, I started noticing how many other vultures had become road-kill, so I realized it was part of the life-cycle out there in West Texas. The buzzard came back to haunt me though. At work the assortment of sample merchandise now includes two life-size turkey-buzzards cast in resin. They have become a fixture atop one of the cubicles, perennially scanning for victims.

the window

It took about 90 minutes to reach the end of the hike where slick rock jutted up to frame a precipitous drop that looked out over the Chisos Mountains. I got vertigo even fifteen feet back and just barely got a shot of "the window," the opening in the peaked rock formation some distance away. A century plant stands guard to the right of the window.

I was too tired to fully appreciate the view. The climb down had been easy but the last quarter mile involved clambering over stone and cement steps cut into the rocks and the sun had climbed high enough so shade was becoming scarce as the temperature steadily increased. My real lessons were learned on the way back as the ardurous climb ever upward began to tell on my already tired legs. My boots were broken in, but I was not used to a constant downhill jaunt or uphill climb. I could feel blisters forming as the boots wore on uncalloused toes. Half a mile up the trail I rested on a bench in some providential shade. The few other hikers I met seemed tired, but I was already down to my reserve energy. The higher I climbed the more difficult it became to just put one foot in front of the other. I had to stop and sit for awhile after every 200 steps, then after 100 steps, and I gradually declined until I could not climb more than ten steps without stopping to rest. I thought of the Lion Warnings and realized I had become a good candidate for a Lion-snack. I would not have been able to run, which was good, but I so resembled a wounded deer a lion would not have hesitated to strike. Then I ran out of water. I had started with a gallon and had drank all of it. I was only a quarter mile from the lodge and was well-hydrated but as my water reservoir emptied I trulyI came to see the value of water. I understood why ranchers fought over water rights and how someone could kill for another's canteen. I also learned not to take the desert for granted. I'd been enthralled by its beauty for years; now I bowed to the beauty of its danger.

the window view

My first sunset at Big Bend National Park was devoid of spectacular colors but not from spectacular light. The next morning presented a much different view of the same scene as I began my hike toward that small v-shaped notch called "the window view." I had originally planned to do a much shorter hike the first day but after my 600 mile trip I was tired of driving and the proximity of the trail head to my sleeping quarters beckoned. I was feeling good and didn't think a 2.5-mile-hike would be that difficult.

I miscalculated. The hike was 2.5 miles in ONE direction making it 5 miles round trip. The first half of the hike was a descent with a loss of 1000 feet of elevation. That meant an uphill climb back in the midday desert sun but I didn't find that out until later. I set out about 8 a.m. and planned to be back before noon. I had a gallon of water and some snacks and had slathered on a considerable amount of SPF-50 sunscreen.



When I saw the "Bear Warning" sign, I thought it was funny. Bears are rarely seen and I thought the trail was so well-traveled I certainly wouldn't see any. Then I saw the "Lion Warning" sign and sobered up a bit. A woman at the lodge had spotted a mountain lion only a few days ago. I had to remember not to run if I saw one. Still, I felt reasonably safe. There were so many birds and plants, some familiar, many not. I was surprised by how many mockingbirds inhabited the park and at how many vultures there were, too. I had thought their many numbers were mostly due to the abundant road kill, but now began to realize that there must be many carcasses resulting from something other than vehicle impacts.

smog

The smog was so thick yesterday you could cut it with a knife. Wonder how many times I've thought or written that statement? The newspaper moved the weather & air quality report to page 2 of section 2 so it's harder to find. They've made the pollution index into a really small chart and it's in black and white instead of color so you don't notice you've just been through a week of RED days and oh, yeah, yesterday was a PURPLE day! Propagandists at work for the city of Dallas. Well, most of us don't need no stinking chart to know WE CAN'T BREATHE and THE AIR HURTS OUR EYES!

My co-worker and I have started taking walks at night to avoid the heat and pollution. We take a brisk walk around the parking lot and warehouse about 1:30 a.m. after I clock out for the day. It takes about 15 minutes and I think it may be about half a mile. It helps to wake me up so I can be alert for the drive home and Ed says it should help him get through the wee hours of the morning. It won't help him much on his drive home during morning rush hour. The temperature was down to 85 degrees last night (this morning?) but the pollution hadn't let up - we still had a thick haze overlaying the countryside. Part of it may have been humidity from the lawn sprinklers or the nearby canals that run through Las Colinas. I could smell dampness.

Yesterday was a real smell-a-thon. I got behind a garbage truck that was fleeing an abbatoire, blood and stench dripping a gruesome trail on I30 into downtown. On the way home I got an almost unbearable odor from the open sewer they call the Trinity River as I passed through the downtown mixmaster.

stormy window

yes, another day of desperate collaging fighting off the name-calling demons who say I should sink into the oblivion weariness brings. Most of my creative thought goes into problem-solving at work so how can there be much left over? Am hoping I can stoke a few embers over the summer but I'm already becoming unable to make sense of technical jargon when it occurs in conversation. In a few weeks I'll be lucky to understand basic English and to be able to find my way home at night.

I've had to make a mini-budget to rectify my mindless purchase of collage materials of late. I got a couple of items that I really don't know what to do with so now I'm forcing myself to at least ration purchases on paper before executing them.

hump day

inching toward the top, hoping to coast through to the weekend.

The addition of at least six extra bodies at work in the form of freelancers has suddenly and dramatically increased the noise level in the afternoon. Neiman's has also increased the number of their personnel, resulting in more noise in their area, fewer parking spaces in the lot and an all too frequent emptiness in the diet dr. pepper slot of the soft drink machine. And now's the time of year when the restroom really resembles a sty after the pigs have had a good wallow. All I can do is clap on the headphones and get to work.

books on cd

messy shelves

I've got a new reason to expect mail. I signed up for a books-on-tape rental service so I can have new inspiration at work while I'm slogging away at my work station. I tried the service last summer and was enormously entertained. I decided it was worth it to try again. I've got tons of music cd's, have almost filled my 30GB iPod with songs, and can listen to other folks' iTunes at work over our network but it's never enough when you have to be sitting in front of a computer screen doing a lot of intensely detailed but fairly repetitious photoshopping. Music helps me get in "the zone" but after awhile it starts running together and becomes a humming annoyance because it's not fresh. I was surprised to find last year that books often did a better job than music of distracting me from my weariness and made those ten-hour shifts just fly by. I'm going for the comedy of David Sedaris, Garrison Keillor, and others of their ilk with some stories and educational stuff thrown in for variety.

Besides, it's always groovy to get stuff in the mail.

best buy

the beans that keep yer kar kitten-quiet. altho as Saffanna put it, "I think I'll stay off of Route 9 for awhile."

I cracked myself up with this ATC. It practically created itself. I hope lots of people got giggles from it.

the rubaiyat

Here's the cover of "the rubaiyat" book I may be altering. I think it's probably a good size - the pages are 6.5 x 9.25 inches - but I'm a little intimidated by it so I may have to work up to it. Am also still intimidated by the thought of ripping up a perfectly good book. My practice altered-book is a paperback, which made it a little easier. I'm still enjoying the musty smell which evokes visions of tall dimly-lit aisles containing a multitude of dusty tomes long-forgotten and considerably marked down in price. This copy of "The Rubaiyat" is not rare and cost me less than what I might pay for a used paperback, yet the connotation of "book" renders it somehow sacred.

I will start by ripping out the color illustrations. I think there are twelve. After that, more destruction will be easier, I think.



I was so dull yesterday, still trying to adjust to my new work schedule and the pressure that's going along with it, that I felt I would never be creative again. I took some time to prep a few pages in my mini-journal with a wash of acrylic paint and that helped a little in that I was doing something, but it didn't feel creative. I finally just started clipping words out of the newspaper and gradually the above page came together with some useful quotes about creativity that seemed to be the spark I needed. I feel better now.

dullish day

photo by hurleygurley

My office reeks of an ancient mustiness which emanates from a 1937 hardback copy of "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" I got in the mail yesterday. It has some nicely colored illustrations in an art-nouveau style but more than that, the book has suddenly become a very likely candidate for alteration. It has a sturdy binding and is just the right size. I think the couplets of poetry could be clipped to make some nice text to accompany the alteration I would be doing.

But alas, I am dull today.

thursday's friday

will have to do without a photo today. It is Friday for me since my work week runs Sunday thru Thursday. The nine-hour days haven't been too bad but my brain is already getting tired. My priority-setting skills are much deteriorated and I feel I have too many irons in the fire. I don't know how I will keep up with my non-work projects. It's so hot when I get up and the pollution's been so bad I don't want to take Phoebe out for a walk but the next two days I'll be able to take her out in the evening.

I enlisted in the Gluebook group at Yahoo but now I don't know if I'll be able to contribute to the group. I may be able to at least do some of the challenges on my own time and learn a few new things. After all, the gluebook (my mini-journal) is supposed to be for me. The random glueing thing is a great idea, relieving the pressure of having to plan and just letting things fall together. Today I found a drafting template left over from school and I got wonderful results using it in the book to draw a bunch of different sized circles and then coloring them in with crayons.

faint

Creative time is becoming a faint memory already as the jobs pile up each day at work. We've gone from a backlog of about 88 images to over 200 in just a few days and that's only the beginning.

I glued in my mini-journal today out of desperation to do SOMEthing creative. I'm glad I had some more pages prepped with background color. It's becoming more difficult to do any writing in the journal because of its small size and the giant rings binding the pages, but I would like to keep it for mini collages and to practice technique.

My photographer friend Susie and I are debating the ethics and copyright infringement possibilities of shooting graffiti and then making money off the photos. She is almost definitely going to buy the Canon EOS slr. I like the idea of a digital slr but I'm leaning toward the new Canon Powershot with the 12x zoom and image stabilization. I like the idea of not having to change lenses in the field. And on long hikes every extra ounce feels like a ton of bricks.

here's a video clip of some graffiti artists plying their trade in Germany:

pre-rush hour

....................stuck in traffic

I can feel rush hour nipping at my heels every day now on my way to work. The barrier for the HOV lane is in place or in the process of being zipped down and traffic from the opposite direction is already at a standstill. Traffic after midnight is so much lighter than early evening but there are more people driving faster. Last night a storm passed through and I had slick roads and an oily windshield to deal with. The lightning was bright but not scary.

I've been learning about colored pencils from my artist friend, Larry. I'd been trying to add color to some of the old black & white illustrations I'd clipped from magazines without much sucess. Acrylic is too thick and when thinned it wrinkles the paper too much. My cheap watercolors were a little too watery and I was considering artist-quality paint. Then I thought about colored pencils and thats what I want to try next. Larry told me about the "art stix", wide flat pencils you can use to lay down a background, and about watercolor pencils that you color with and smudge with a damp brush for a watercolor effect. How exciting! So today I've been researching availability and prices. The local art stores I've been frequenting either don't carry the brand I want (PrismaColor) or their prices are higher than what I would have to pay through an online store. So it's a math problem: spending money & time here on gas to drive to the store plus higher price plus sales tax versus lower online price plus shipping. Where's my calculator?

I found some really cool wallpaper in Better Homes & Gardens magazine that I'm thinking about putting up somewhere. It's white paper with frames drawn all over it so you can draw or paint on it or glue things on it to make your wall covered in mini-works of art. My problem would be that I would probably want to save my art and how would I get it off the wall?

nine

I've started my 9-hour shifts and at the same time I have to push my schedule forward to arrive at work at 3pm and leave at 1am. My sleep is already disrupted after only one day! I'm putting blankets over the windows to help me since I'll probably be sleeping til almost noon. Photography & collage may fall by the wayside sooner than I anticipated.

This is another page from my mini journal done after reading another short bio on Kandinsky, one of my favorite artists.

journal practice

The mini journal is evolving. I thought it would be strictly a glue and stamp book but now I'm adding writing to see what happens. It looks kind of interesting as a design element and it might help me with the blog, too, since that's also a work in progress.


Last week when I had a few days off I went to Stamp Asylum in Plano. It's a small store packed with mounted rubber stamps, printed ephemera, cards, stamp pads, chalks, tools, embellishments, and I forgot what else. I bought two rubber stamps, and got a stamp pad and a "rubber stamper" magazine at half price. The store has classes for all levels of rubber stampers that look interesting but most are too expensive for me ($60 to $150 on average) and seem to require items I don't already own.

All of the stamps at the store are mounted stamps; there weren't any unmounted ones. I've discovered that unmounted stamps are much less expensive so I bought a few to try them out. They work great although I have to handle them differently. I've ordered some acrylic mounts and static cling foam that will let me mount each stamp temporarily when I want to use it. So many new things out there in the art world!

I got a rubber brayer that I've been using to ink some of my stamps and also to mash down some of the pieces on my collages. I like it better than my burnisher.(I think my burnisher is the same thing as a "bone folder" but I like the term "burnisher" better.) You get really even pressure over a small area or an entire page of a book.

The Rubber Stamper magazine was interesting for some of its examples and techniques, but I didn't like it enough to subscribe. I did get the names of some rubber stamp manufacturers and a few interesting tips about layering papers that could be useful. They have a web site with a few tips on rubber stamping.

friday

Finally the weekend arrives. I have so many projects I don't know where to start! In addition to my art projects I have to replace a doorknob my mom destroyed. I don't know how she breaks so many things that seem to be relatively durable. A curse of old age?

Next week I'll be working 9-hour shifts so I'm going to start getting tired soon.

Freelancer "A" is going to stay with us for 3 weeks and then go to her new permanent job elsewhere. We will be stuck with "Prince Charles" the megalomaniac. Someone asked the boss how he could even think about hiring a person that no one wants to work with - I guess he feels he has no other option. The job market is bad, it's true, but it's mainly a bad attitude that keeps this moron unemployed.

Both air conditioners in the scanning/proofing room malfunctioned yesterday. The temperature got up to 89 degrees and the new proofing machine went haywire. We got it down to 87 and were able to use the equipment. The air conditioner leaked 5-10 gallons of water per day into our work area last summer which we caught in a big trash can and emptied throughout the day. We can't do anything because the building belongs to the customer we're contracted to so it's their responsibility to fix it. The head of their production department has finally got angry at the building crew because our malfunctioning equipment means their proofs arrive late.

making sense

I was invited to join a new group on Flickr called "we don't make sense." One of my favorite albums was the Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense" so the title of the group appealed to me. But what is "sense"? How do I NOT make sense? I posted this photo of sticker graffiti that I really liked but no one had ever commented on. I figured it must not have made sense to anyone but me.

I don't think it's possible to really STOP making sense unless you have become senseLESS and by that I mean lacking the ability to sense things such as being in a vegetative state. The simple act of labeling, whether or not the label itself makes
sense, is making sense. Even the most deranged mentality is probably trying to make sense of things.The perceptions are different and so are the coping mechanisms.

We have unexpected visitors from Tennesse today. I wonder how they will react to the non-functioning doorknob on the front door? Will it make sense to them? It makes sense to me!

I have Tiger at work now. A no-brainer after becoming used to Panther. Biggest change is I have some widgets on the Mac dashboard. I don't understand the excitement my nerdy co-workers display over them; they only seem like eye-candy to me. There's even a widget for the Flickr Zeitgeist but it's so tiny it might as well not be there. As long as the operating system works so I can get my job done I'm happy. Today I'll be getting Photoshop CS2 which will be more of a challenge. Every upgrade in Photoshop has required more mouse moving and thus more wrist problems. The program is geared to creativity, no doubt about that, but it's not geared to improve the plight of the workers who mass produce for hours on end.

I have learned through the grapevine that Freelancer "A" has been offered a permanent position at another company. My boss has counteroffered because if she leaves now, we have a problem for summer production. The only qualified candidate for her position is a snotty prima-donna who worked for us briefly last summer. He is not a team player and refused to conform to our production system. He also tended to talk more than work. I get really irritated by people like that. If you've agreed to accept money to be part of a production process you just can't be a diva.

I ate the red ones!

cherry tomatoes

The 4th & 5th tomatoes of the year. Yumm. As Guy Clark wrote, "what would life be without homegrown tomatoes?" Yesterday someone brought tomato & mozzarella sandwiches drenched in olive oil & vinegar. I will have to make some of those if we get big tomatoes.

We're getting Tiger & Photoshop CS-2 installed at work this week and next. I hate getting new software as summer arrives because it means I'll have to learn all the new stuff while under extra pressure. At least there may be a week of grace so I can get familiar with it. The scripting on our FileMaker database has been getting locked up so that's not a good sign. And worry is spreading because we have not got the photos this week that were already two weeks late. Our prognosis has already changed since Monday. I was told yesterday I'm definitely getting someone on second shift to run the proofing and laminating machines. We replaced one of our old Kodak proofers with a new machine that runs twice as fast but it is so labor intensive that I can't run it and do my regular work as I did before. I'm reminded again of The Religion of Technology by David W. Noble which discusses how technology is not meant to make our lives easier.

salad

phoebe

Phoebe has been munching on some of the plants in the back yard. Today it's the squash plants.

The first freelancers started working yesterday. We rely on freelancers to get us through the summer weeks so it's important to have good ones. Even mediocre ones are ok if they're reliable. "A" is a former employee who went to a different job, got laid off in November 2003, and hasn't been able to find a permanent job since. She's reliable, hard-working, funny and has great taste in music. (We share a lot of music at work!) "B" is also a former employee who was fired in September 2004 after more than two years of inconsistency and bad attitude brought on by a bitter divorce and excessive drinking. He can be relied upon to be unreliable. When he freelanced for us this last winter he often failed to show up when he said he would, so it's hard to understand why my boss has hired him again. He has dyed his hair blue and silver which might not look bad on a younger guy, but this man is forty and stuck in the 70's so he looks more homeless than hip.

We work 8-hour shifts this week and will increase to ten hours the following week or two. Initial prediction from my boss is that we won't be in "trouble" until the week of July 12. It will be interesting to see how accurate that prediction turns out.

lighten up

Summer Looms. I saw the first sign posted yesterday as a note about "impending production increase" which means it's a matter of a week or so until my life goes "on hold" for 3 months. So when I flipped over my calendar at work and saw Roy & Dale fighting I knew I didn't want to look at it for the rest of the month. We will all be cranky enough soon without a bickering couple looking at us. I think visual surroundings affect us even when we're not thinking about them. Maybe that's why my brain gets confused? because my home office/studio seems to be a big mess most of the time. I'm making an effort to keep it neater because I'm getting a big collection of paper bits, magazine clippings, paint, glue and otehr stuff related to making collages, and a messy area means I can't find what I want when I want it.

If I can keep up this blog I may be able to leave a record of the annual deterioration that occurs each summer when we have the bulk of our work. I'm way more proficient on my camera than I was a year ago so I may be able to add photos. It's hard to be objective, though, when you are dead tired and trying to meet a deadline almost every day.

We had the first of the Halloween items two weeks ago. I expect the Christmas/Holiday items will appear this week or next.

art journal

mini art journal

I found this nice little spiral notebook at a garage sale yesterday for 50 cents. It has a thick board cover and the pages are nice and white. I don't think it's vellum but it seemed like a good way to get started on an art journal. It's about twice the width of an ATC so I can enlarge my scope without feeling too overwhelmed by a large canvas. The ATC format has been a great starting point for me but sometimes my brain can't fit stuff onto a card. The altered book I'm working on is good for practicing composition but I needed a smaller format for practicing some new techniques, comparing inks & paints, etc.

I've been looking at some amazing journals and tips by Teesha Moore. I love the rubber stamps she and her husband sell. I ordered two stamps from them and they sent a couple of extra stamps and some collage bits as a "thank you." What generosity there is in this art community!

I've become much more of a scavenger lately. When I take my dog Phoebe for a walk I am usually keeping an eye out for scraps of paper I can use for collaging. At work I've got to check the packaging material of anything we receive to see if there's something to add to my collection.

dog day afternoon

I've been obsessing over making ATCs so much I haven't been using my camera much, except during my Big Bend Trip. Then I go and I get a simple shot like this that I just love, even though the zoom sucks, and I wonder how I could NOT be shooting.

vacation

prickly pear detail
.

I had such a great time at Big Bend National Park! It's been over three years since I've been to a nice desert so it was real nourishment for my spirit. Just me and the landscape and a few other hikers. There were still a lot of things blooming, especiailly in the upper elevations, but nothing close to the colors of March and April (so I'm told). I took a lot of photos and I'm still going through them all. I've had a lot of frustration trying to identify many of the wildflowers I saw. My reference books are woefully inadequate so I was searching the web and found this site dedicated to Texas wildflowers. Jo Cox has really put a lot of energy into this great website and now I'm going to be helping in a small way by contributing some of my own flower shots. Since we live 200 miles apart, we're in different geologic regions of Texas so I do see a few flowers she doesn't. Now I have to improve my observation skills to get better shots of plant parts other than the blossoms.

accidents will happen

I had a fender bender on the way to work Tuesday. It had been raining, the roads were wet and messy. I was on I30 in the mixmaster downtown slowing down quite a bit because traffic ahead was slow and the guy behind me rear-ended my car with his pickup truck. I was pretty shaken and had a stiff and sore neck for a few hours but I think I’m ok. I was even hoping maybe a miracle occurred, that the collision maybe popped my bulging disc back into place (like Locke on the tv show "Lost"). I don’t know if it did or I psyched myself into it but I did seem to have less pain today in my lower back. The bike rack is bent but it may have saved the rear end of my car. I don’t know if there’s damage to the frame underneath the car. The truck hit the rack, bent the support bar and shoved the rack into the plastic rear bumper and broke a hole in it about four inches square and the rack also broke out the left tail light. I’m supposed to take the car to Mesquite on Friday to have it looked at. It was the truck driver’s fault & the guy had insurance so maybe it won’t cost me anything. I had forgotten it would be a headache dealing with the insurance. (see "allstatesucks.com")

hunting & gathering

I’ve just come in from my latest front-yard foraging. It must be a genetic harkening back to the aboriginal food-getting techniques that’s hard-wired into humans. But it takes something to uncover it. Crisscrossing the lawn, spotting each nut, stooping and collecting it into my plastic bag is somehow so very comforting. “Squirreling” them away for the winter. I recognize the technique in others’ motions. The Hispanic construction guy yesterday who, when I asked if he was looking for pecans, answered “nah” but when I pointed him in the direction of a sidewalk windfall, he went. Our scrawny tree has yielded at least 30 pounds of raw pecans this year. I wonder about the dozens of people, probably hundreds in this neighborhood that just let them waste away on the sidewalk and street and let the yard-maintenance crews chop the crop to pieces with their lawn mowers. One nearby house has a dozen pecan trees by my mom’s reckoning. Multiplied by 30 is 360 pounds and at $3.75 a pound at albertson’s foodstore that’s a cash crop of over $1300. Well, at least we have not wasted nature’s bounty and left plenty for the squirrels, too (the ones who do the “real” squirreling).

less

got about 4 to 4 1/2 pretty good hours at work today. was it the walk this a.m.? or the combo of aspirin and ibuprofen? I am willing to do the pain of the walk; it's not so bad and if less pain is the dividend it's really no pain.

i saw new things on my walk - things that were there before but i didn't notice. maybe tao is a new way to look at things.

p in the b

finally a few hours of only minor pain while sitting at work. Can pain make you more creative? I'm thinking of Frida Kahlo and the bus accident that forced her to wear a body cast for months on end and not just after the accident, but periodically throughout her life. Now I know why she suffered operations trying to get relief. emotional pain brings out creativity and they even have genres like emo-punk which is just a never-ending whine draped against fast guitars. Maybe creating helps to block out the pain.

die dream

The back pain just won't go away. I resist using the dozen or so Darvocets I have stashed but am frequently tempted. I have to ask myself "isn't this something aspirin or ibuprofin can take alleviate?" and usually that's what I take. But it's getting hard to be productive at work when the pain won't go away. Just bending, or sitting, or walking around without pain - something I always took for granted is now everpresent in my mind. Can zen or tao or anything help me deal with it? The worst part is seeing that some of the very simple dreams that take my mind off work involve movement and I can't accomplish them without pain. My ambition has always been somewhat lacking and terribly unfocused so now what? This mortality bit is depressing. I think it's that nagging feeling that here I am past the half century mark and my genius has never burst out, and that I in fact have no genius. How do you get THAT back?

karma kitty

What kind of karma results in a being coming back to earth as a kitten who at 5 months of age is hit by a car? Said cat, Pedro by name, was recently abandoned at an apartment with his brother when his caretakers moved away. After the accident he was rescued and brought to the vet who required the kitty to be neutered before placing his broken leg in a cast. Ouch! Talk about adding injury to injury. Toe to hip now encased in plaster, Pedro drags his useless limb about his new-found home. The two cats into whose home he has been inserted hiss and spit at him. His caretakers note his treks through the apartment by following the single unbroken track in the carpet pile. What will happen? Will his rescuers keep him? Will he and his brother find a home at Operation Kindness? or will they be LOST

fogtown

no, not the song by michelle shocked. I noticed some store is advertising a "fog machine" for halloween. I wonder if it's the same kind of fog the chief saw at the asylum in "one flew over the cuckoo's nest"? He talked about how the orderlies would start cranking up the fog when the inmates got frisky. As the fog crept through the ductwork in the building delicate tendrils would reach out into the room, growing larger and larger until there was no place for anyone to move and they were frozen into place. Then the orderlies could come in and pick up the stiffs and put them back into their cages. At least that's how I remember the story. That stuff would be handy at work when the customers get too lively for us. But it might not work this week. This heavy humidity is already too thick to move through. Creepy clammy fingers that won't leave you alone. Your clothes feel wet. The car seats feel wet. You have to take a shower to dry off.

I noticed you have to buy the fog juice separately.......

shop class

I didn’t want to wake up in the whitepine lumber aisle at Home Deppo still wearing pajamas but I had such a small window of opportunity that I had to move when I could. I thought a cup of strong chai tea was all I had time for before that thunderstorm was gonna hit. I didn’t want to be loading lumber into the back of my wagon during a downpour. That can get a mite uncomfortable especially if you’re dodging lightning bolts at the same time. You know you’re driving into it when you can barely see the approaching vehicles on the opposite side of the freeway even though they have all got their headlamps on but it's night at ten a.m.

After I barely woke there was the incident with the Spanish-speaking checkout thing in the self service line. I laid my stuff out before checking which language it was set on and when espanol came out the speakers I thought “I can do this” and I did until the very end when I hit “debit” instead of “credit” because I couldn’t tell which was which and the thing kept yelling obscenities at me until an employee came over & got me out of the loop. Now my boards are home, safe & dry and ready to be made into toothpicks.

rsvp

I got a letter from God. Which is odd because I haven’t believed for a long time. I’ve never been a full-fledged atheist, just a non-believer. But there it was in the blur of time that occurs after most of the worker bees have rushed out of the the building and away to sit in traffic on the freeway and only I am left there working – in black and white, in the women’s restroom - a letter from God. To me. I knew it was to me because it was entirely relevant to my personal situation. It must be from watching “Joan of Arcadia” and its idea of God as “everyman” (or anybody). On the other hand, this letter was nothing like those characters on television.

I got a letter from Buddha.

futbol

The Cowboys lost yesterday and I made it home safely. I am grateful. During football season I have to plan my drive to work to avoid as many of the most rabid fans that I possibly can. Texas Stadium lies where 114 and 183 split from one another and then cross Loop 12 and these freeways are how you gain access to the stadium’s parking. The game started at 3 pm and the weather was warm and smoggy, so I figured the tailgaters would be there in full force by noon. It’s a scene you don’t want to be involved in if you are “through” traffic. Scalpers lined up on the shoulder of the freeway for a mile and traffic tangled for at least a mile more as the people in the right two lanes haggle for the overpriced tickets. It’s illegal to re-sell tickets within, I don’t know, a hundred feet or so of the stadium, but apparently not illegal to bring 60-mile-an-hour traffic to a standstill.

I was lucky. I passed the stadium about 11:15 am and saw only one scalper. I could tell I got through just in time. Another 15 minutes and it would’ve taken me 20 minutes to make a 30-second drive by.

At least it’s a stream of cars going in to park. After the game the it’s a flood, always some accidents, probably caused by drunks. Especially at night people see the left-turn lanes as their way to a quick drive through at the stoplights. Eeek. I met a passel of them on a bridge on my way home. Narrowly avoided a head-on at 20 mpg. I had to quote Red Forman: “dumbasses.” After 8 hours confined in that dome who wouldn’t want to hurry up and get home? I passed the dome at 11:15, drove more miles to work, did my 8-hour shift and a spot of overtime and drove back only to find at 8:30 pm there was still a backlog of vehicles trying to get onto the freeway. They had been sitting longer than I had and had had to pay for the privilege. And unbeknownst to me, the ‘Boys had lost, so mostly they were not happy campers.

lies all lies

framgirl
Originally uploaded by Fifi LePew.

I hate it when the makeup artists don't do those last-minute touchups on the Neiman Marcus models right before a fashion photo shoot. "oh, well," they say, "not to worry, they can airbrush that out." Too true, you cheapos, and fortunately for your lazy ass we "airbrushers" are extremely good at what we do and take a lot of pride in doing it even though all but the most famous of our clan get paid a pittance for our expertise.

It's all lies, people. Those models in the clothing catalogs don't look like that. The clothing doesn't fit like that. It's partly saftey-pinned and scotch-taped into place and mostly manipulated by Photoshop to get that perfect fit. Don't expect it to be wrinkle-free or to hang on you just so.

The ample flu vaccine supply is also a lie. Or maybe this should be titled "just how dumb is our government?"

Seriously, if I had a dime for every tattoo, zit, wrinkle, eye bag, extruding collarbone, bony knuckle, bunion, popped-out vein, and excess body hair that I've removed I could probably retire comfortably tomorrow. Throw in a dollar for every anorexic woman that required removal of another 5 or 10 pounds and I could retire in style.

No sir, you don't fight that kind of terror with a head of lettuce!

It's a little disconcerting to come to work after 2 days off and find a long-time co-worker has been fired, or in this case "asked to resign." The name plaque on the cubicle now blank. And the essence of his persona as well. The Monty Python slogans. The blue pilates ball he sat on. The disarrayed books spread about the work area. The pictures of a daughter and her crayon art on the walls. The photo of him posing proudly with some semi-well known female entertainer. The music cd's jammed wall-to-wall inside the overhead cabinet. All gone. It would take longer to make him disappear if he had died.

It also pointed out to me how unobservant people are. There are two of us who end our weekend on Saturday night and begin our work week on Sunday. Employee One had been at the office since 8 a.m. and hadn't noticed anything. I clocked in around noon and immediately wondered at the absence of the big blue ball as I passed his cubicle on the way to mine. "Employee One!" I shouted. "Where's D's ball?" Then the black unlettered name plate stared at me. And then the rest.

We two are sad. Maybe some others at work are, too. D was a good guy til his bitter divorce about 2 years ago. Since then he's been self-destructing. Drinking too much. Late for work. Really late for work. Searching for young blond women in the internet personals on company time. Volatile on occasion. He was given a number of warnings and had made two "formal" commitments in writing promising to do better. I guess his chances ran out. I would like to be supportive but he hasn't been my friend for a long time. I don't know how it happened. Maybe he associated my behavior with his ex-wife's.

I wonder about the legality and/or morality about asking someone to resign as opposed to firing them. It's happened before. It almost happened to me.