Tag Archive for 'memories'

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longevity

Published on June 22, 2008 in Family & Friends and Random Thoughts. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Sarah’s mom reminded us that we passed the two year anniversary of our first date. She then started to ask me whether this was my longest relationship and I had to think about it. It turns out that it definitely is. The longest possible definition for my last long relationship was from November 1992 to September 1994… and it was a long distance relationship, only seeing each other on weekends and school breaks, and, for at least one year, it wasn’t an exclusive relationship… and it was in high school… so really, does it count at all? While I was sitting here, bored at work, I figured out that Sarah might also be a record holder for the longest “friendship that turned into a serious relationship,” since we started talking back in 2003, on photoSIG… as long as I don’t count the weird girls who I had relationships with in high school, lost touch with, off and on, for 5-10 years and then had another relationship with. All those years of non-contact don’t count, right? I dunno the rules for these kind of things. I wouldn’t say that two years flew by, but it doesn’t feel like it’s been two years. I know time flies when you’re having fun… but what do you call it when you’re happy and in love and two years doesn’t feel like two years? I guess it’s the same thing, fun just seems like too general a word to sum up the last two years. It’s been wonderful.

In other news, my phone started doing weird things and “rebooting” itself, so I brought it to a Verizon store and got its software/firmware updated. It seemed to help. Apparently, I’m eligible for $100 towards a new phone at the end of August. I looked at what’s available, now and wasn’t overly excited by anything. And I’m certainly not going to double my bill [to get unlimited calling to anyone on any service] just so I’m eligible for the new iPhone rip-off. I may not do anything in the phone department until I find out what carriers the Nuviphone will be on. That would satisfy my new GPS urges and hopefully quash any iPhone urges. I don’t really want to rearrange the family phone plan, though, so if it can’t work with Verizon, it probably won’t happen. What’s nice is that my current phone has been pretty good to me for almost two years. My current little laptop with GPS has been adequate, for a little over two years, but it’s not nearly as convenient or nice as those little portable units. It’d be cool to do some one-stop shopping, but I have to be patient and let the cool new devices hit the marketplace.

Now, I’ve just gotta survive through the rest of the boring front desk gig at the Y… not that I’m complaining – boring work on the weekends is fine with me, but relaxing at home is nicer.

pictures up, car down

Published on June 11, 2008 in Photo and Random Thoughts. Closed Tags: , , , .

trees on rocksSpent most of the day going through pictures from the trip. I picked out about 150 of them and put them up on flickr. My flickr “uploadr” sucks pretty bad… I had to retry the upload on some of these sets two or three times. Sometimes it gives up and keeps track of what didn’t get uploaded. Sometimes it’ll try to finish it’s upload, sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it’ll fail to upload at all and not even tell me. Sometimes it’ll get glitchy and upload the ones it missed twice. It’s pretty buggy. You can see all the picturesfrom the newest sets in my Vacations collection or by searching the tag “Knopf Northwest Vacation”

In other news, someone drove into my car in the YMCA parking lot on Saturday. It apparently happened just before I was going to leave. I didn’t notice, since all the damage was around the front passenger-side wheel. I was in my car, and had turned it on and was ready to drive off… when a kid came running up with a note in his hand and apologized for scratching my car. I got out and looked at it, and it seemed to look like a bunch of scratches, so I was hoping we could take care of it without going through insurance companies. I got his contact info. But then I put the car in drive and it would not go. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the wheel was not going straight, like the driver-side. So, I found the kid, in the Y, and we exchanged insurance info and called the police and I called my insurance company and set up all the towing, repairs and rental car stuff. It was supposed to be towed on Monday, so I went back to the Y on Sunday afternoon, after picking up the rental car, to take some pictures, and it was already gone. My rental is a Dodge Magnum, which is really fun to drive and very comfortable.

Northwest is nice

Published on June 6, 2008 in Family & Friends. Closed Tags: , , , , .

I really enjoyed our trip to Seattle, Vancouver, Victoria, the Olympic Peninsula and Mt Rainier. While we didn’t hit any of my yelp food finds, except for the Georgetown Truck Stop, we did eat well, and kept ourselves very entertained. All the pictures are on the Mac right now, I’m nowhere near ready to sort them and get them online. Maybe this afternoon or sometime this weekend. I’ve also got a lot of yelping to do. For now, I’ll attempt a quick blow-by-blow… and it will turn out to be a long-winded, rambling mess:

Our airport taxi wasn’t at the house on time, so we called them, and got upgraded to a stretch limo. We were late, but so was our plane. Frank, Sarah and I played Mario DS at the gate, and a random stranger joined in with us. Gotta love wi-fi video games. We ate Cinnabons at the airport, but after the delay and the long flight with minimal snacks and the extra long time it always seems to take United to get your luggage to the claim centers, we were starving. We said as much to the guy who drove our shuttle to the rental car place, and he suggested a couple very close food options. We picked up our super-duper 08 Dodge Grand Caravan SXT (later dubbed megatron, by Frank) it had power sliders and liftgate and a camera for backing up and a touchscreen stereo with Sirius built-in. It was pretty sweet. We immediately drove it around the block, to the closest food place that the shuttle guy recommended, Dave’s Diner. We got soups and sandwiches and desserts and it was all pretty yum. It was certainly, exactly what we needed. Then we found our way to our hotel (with the help of the GPS unit, that we added to the rental) and checked in. We decided to go check out what we could of the city, at that point, and ended up mostly driving through various neighborhoods as they closed up shop. We noted that Elliott Bay Book Company was still open, so we found some parking, shopped a bit, walked up and down a couple of streets and then got some pretty good Italian stuff at a place called Mitchelli’s. We headed back to the hotel, by way of a Walgreens, for some in-room snack foods.

The next day, we had our first sampling of the (decent) hotel breakfast, then headed directly for Pike Place Market. I think we got the full market experience in… saw the first Starbucks, experienced flying fish, had some mini-donuts, ate some crumpets. We debated buying some fish, but decided to put the decision off until it would keep for the trip home. We then headed back to the Pioneer Square area, to try and catch some of the shops that were closed when we walked around the night before. We really only went to one, Magic Mouse Toys, but it was worth it, big toy stores are awesome. Next we went around Elliott Bay to the viewpoint at Alki Beach. It was a great place to take in the whole Seattle skyline (pictures later, I promise). When we were done there, we decided to try to find Archie McPhee, which was fun… and we were about to get in the car and drive away when we saw More Archie McPhee across the parking lot. We started heading back to the hotel and then plugged “game stop” into our GPS, as an intermediate destination (Super Dodgeball Brawlers for the DS came out the day before we left, but we couldn’t find it anywhere). It brought us to a dead end street around the corner from Redmond High School. After a quick stop at a Target, where we saw a woman bring her dog shopping by letting him ride in the big part of the cart, we realized our error and searched for “gamestop” (without the space) and got our game. By this time, we were hungry, and entered Redmond Town Center, a giant outdoor mall, drove around it a couple times and then parked and walked over to Pizza Schmiza… which was delicious and well decorated. And then we went back to the hotel and to bed.

We attempted to get up early the next morning and drive directly to Canada. We didn’t get up as early as planned, but we got past the pushy, intimidating border guy and all the way to the Capilano Suspension Bridge in fairly good time. We walked around the grounds at the bridge for a while and took lots of fun pictures from up in the trees and stuff. We went to a very expensive Canadian Burger King on the way out and, since Sarah started running out of polaroid film, we plugged “camera” into the GPS. It led us to an amazing Asian mall called Aberdeen Centre. No film for us, but a crazy experience, none-the-less. We continued to make our way through the Vancouver traffic congestion to the ferries. When we finally got to there, we were a little early, so we headed into the Tsawwassen Quay Market and found Oh Gelato, a gelato place with amazing presentation and very yummy gelato. We got on the ferry, which was huge, and explored it for a while before settling down and enjoying the ride. When we got to Victoria, we decided against the gardens, since we were already tired from walking around Capilano, and instead, drove and walked around downtwon Victoria a bit. We even parked in the “Tourist Parking” and got out and took some pictures. We checked into our hotel for the night and Sarah’s Mom went and got some Red Robin, which was sort of gross. Then we slept.

We had a few choices for breakfast, but it was our last day in Canada and everyone indulged my Tim Horton’s obsession. We hit a camera shop for polaroid pack film, and scored some b&w. Our ferry out of Victoria filled up very early, so we were stuck there for a while. We explored the area we had driven and walked through the night before, including a great shoe store called Baggins with lots and lots of Converse. We also drove up to the castle and took a few pictures but didn’t go in any further than the gift shop. Then we wandered South to a place called Clover Point, where we had a cool view of the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula and some guys flying kites. We picked up some goodies at the Dutch Bakery and headed to the next ferry. We had to wait there a long time, questioned again by border and customs people.The ride was ok, though… we enjoyed watching the huge mountains in the distance get bigger and bigger. We arrived in Port Angeles, WA and, after a quick stop at Rite Aid, we headed up to the Olympic National Forest Visitors Center, which was closed, but just happened to be a guy there who workedin the park. He told us that we could probably make it to the rain forest with some daylight and could definitely make it to the coast before sunset. We decided to drive towards the coast, enjoy the sunset, stay somewhere in Forks then enjoy the Hoh Rain Forest and Hurricane Ridge the next day. We ate at one of the few restaurants in town and then checked into a HUGE suite just outside of town. I got the best night of sleep on the whole trip in that place.

We went to breakfast at the restaurant across the street from the one we ate at the night before. Breakfast portions were huge, so we were happy. Then we headed into the Rain Forest, which was gorgeous, and took a bunch of pictures. Furry trees are cool… then we went back through Forks, and around the park, through Port Angeles, again, and up to Hurricane Ridge. Lots of pretty mountain views on the way, but the top was kinda foggy/cloudy. We had a little food up at the visitor center on the ridge and then started the long drive to the original hotel … we didn’t make the ferry that cut through Puget Sound, so we had to drive around. I was pretty beat after all that driving.

Monday morning, we sacrificed a trip to the creperie to go visit Nintendo of America’s Redmond headquarters… it was sort of nestled in amongst Microsoft-land. There was a cute little visitor center. Then we headed downtown to check out the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, which I think were worth the money… we were a little worried about it after reading the reviews. We combined that trip with lunch/dinner at the Sky City restaurant in the Space Needle… then we popped over to Pike Place Market to buy more donuts and purchase the fish. I ate some donuts and drank some of the Walgreens milk that we bought on our first day, back at the hotel that night… and I think it made me sick.

On our last full day, we headed to the Georgetown Truck Stop for breakfast. It was very impressive… in it’s small size and big portions. Mt Rainier was our destination for the day… not the top… but the park, in general. We opted to go in the Southwest entrance, since it was open year-round, and some of the roads were still closed. We found out once we were in the park that the Northeast entrance (and Southeast entrance) were both also open, but some of the higher roads were not. It was kind of cloudy/rainy, so some of our views could have been better, but we did catch a break in the clouds and see Rainier at least once. The visitors center at Paradise was really cool, but apparently very impractical and due to be shut down… so I took lots of pictures of it. On our way down the mountains and out of the park, we grabbed some dinner at a local Inn/Restaurant/Gift Shop and then headed back to the hotel for our final night of sleep.

Aside from my body trying to eat itself from the inside, the day of our departure was fairly uneventful. There was a small delay in our plane, a large delay in our luggage getting to the baggage claim and a lot of sleeping, by me, through most of it.

Overall, great trip. We brought home a few Huckleberry flavored souvenirs and some clothing and trinkets from here and there. We’re on a website for the Forks visitors center, holding a sign, proving that we’re Twilight fans who visited Forks. I’ve got a bazillion pictures to go through… and I can now say I’ve been to the Pacific Northwest and that I like it a lot. I’ll surely think of some great thing that I forgot about or some super highlights to expand upon later, but for now, I am done.

I’m on YouTube?

Published on May 4, 2008 in Family & Friends, Music and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

This page has some videos of me performing in my high school’s song and dance group (the ones with titles that include years back in the 90s – cause I’m old).  Totally embarrassing. Enjoy.

It’s been a fun week. The weather was fairly nice and we went to the Flea Market, today. We’ve been teased with warm spells and then temperatures dropping back near freezing overnight, so it was nice to walk around in a t-shirt today. The overnight trips for Adventure Ed. are this week, so I hope this warm spell continues. We saw Iron Man on Friday. It was pretty darn good, especially for a comic book movie. We also went yard saling that morning and attended Fly Bird’s 4th birthday bash-thing and picked up some weird stuff. I think we’re doing a double date tonight and seeing another movie, maybe Forgetting Sarah Marshall or maybe Baby Mama… I really liked the intriguing “is that for real?” ad campaign that Forgetting Sarah Marshall did with their billboards and busboards.

I also did something bad to my knee at some point this week. I think I may have injured it on Tuesday night when I was doing a balancing-on-one-foot-and-tying-my-shoe dance. It was kinda sore on Wednesday, worse on Thursday and really really painful on Friday. Yesterday it was much better and today it feels fine… but it really made me feel old. I was all gimpy and hobbling around the yard sales on Friday.

Oh, and while it wasn’t my boss, this time… a director at the YMCA I work at was let go this week. I’m not directly involved and, as I said, it wasn’t my boss, so it has nothing to do with the curse that I bring along to every after-school day care that I’ve ever worked for, but I am curious to see how they fill his position. I haven’t yet worked for a YMCA that filled a vacant position with anyone half-as-good as the person that left/they fired. They usually cut corners and give some of their responsibilities to other directors and maybe hire a new assistant.

What’s wrong with Barack Obama’s campaign:

Published on April 22, 2008 in Random Thoughts. Closed Tags: , , .

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not political. I’m not even registered to vote in Illinois. I thought I was last registered in Dudley, but who knows. Until a candidate who is an atheist, possibly an existentialist, in favor of a complete destruction and rebuilding of the monetary system from one based on debt to one based on work and is basically an anarchist runs, I can’t get behind one and give them my vote, because they won’t represent me. Having said that, I have voted once (and attempted to vote a couple other times, but was told I didn’t exist). I will vote for or against the presidential candidate that I would like to or not like to see on TV for the next four years. I didn’t want to see Bush’s creepy little beady eyes on TV for four years (or four more years), so I attempted to vote against him, twice. I didn’t really like either candidate, but I knew who I didn’t like, based on what I’d seen on TV. I occasionally watch some election coverage, so I’m not clueless about who’s on the ticket. Tonight, the Pennsylvania primary coverage was on. Barack Obama was losing the state’s primary. He’d traveled to Indiana to start his campaigning there, so he gave his speech tonight, from there. Here is what I saw… and what I don’t want to see, for the next four years:

obama and fitch

That’s Barack Obama and three guys who look like fratboy-idiots, in Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts. I’m not saying that this is some sort of purposeful advertising campaign by Abercrombie, though that would be really disgusting, too. I’m saying that I don’t want to see dumb people behind my president. He seems ok, but those buffoons behind him are obviously fratboy sheep. If they were blank t-shirts, it would’ve been ok. If they had witty text on them, I might’ve been intrigued. But they’re brand name t-shirts among the likes of Aeropostale, Hollister and American Eagle Outfitters. Why are they there? Do fratboy-sheep like this guy? It makes me think twice about liking him. If nothing else, this is a tragic mistake by some staffer on his campaign. There must be a guy who looks at the people who are going to be on screen with him… image is important, right? To an unimpressed, unaffected voter like myself, it’s just about all that matters. And if there is such a guy, he let those three bully-esque, stubble-faced kids with giant advertisements on their chests, be the backdrop behind his candidate.

30 is easy to remember

Published on February 25, 2008 in Family & Friends and Random Thoughts. Closed Tags: , , , .

We’re right at the beginning of a new season of work, so I’m just getting to know the new staff. When one of the new guys asked me how old I was on Thursday, I told him I was thirty. It’s easier to say and easier to remember than all these twenty-something ages I’ve been going through for the past decade. I’ve never felt like any specific age, so all the early twenties seem to blend together and twenty-eight seemed to be the age that would pop into my head, even when I was twenty-seven and twenty-nine… I guess just because it was an even number or easier to say or something. But I’ve officially accepted thirty, a few days early, even.

Last night, Sarah put together a gathering of some of our friends. It was a mix of local friends of hers and people she went to school with. I think she felt bad that I didn’t have any of my own friends, but I’m not that close with the people I work with, really. Most of my friends at home were people I had gone to school with and kept in touch with or musicians. So, since there aren’t [m]any old acquaintances out here and I’ve yet to join a band, I just don’t have a group of local friends. Sarah’s happy to share hers, though, and I like them. Anyway, we had a bunch of food, all cooked here by us, and played some awesome games, including Bananagrams, which has turned out to be one of the most popular Christmas presents from Sarah to me.

There may be some pictures when Sarah’s paparazzi school friends upload some. Sarah and I were too busy cooking and entertaining to take any ourselves.

more vacation, please

Published on February 7, 2008 in Computers, Family & Friends, Photo and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , .

I thought that the Dell had ended it’s extended lease on life, again, but it turned out to be bad drivers for my network card. It took way too long to narrow the problem from random freezing to maybe the Firefox beta to maybe just Firefox to anything internet to the new drivers from windows update. It’s been running normally again since I updated a few power management settings that were suggested on some forum. Acceptable solution, I guess. Before all that narrowing down was done, I opened it up again to make sure it wasn’t simply overheating. There wasn’t a whole lot of dust to blow out, though. Opening up laptops and fiddling with them isn’t as much fun as full sized PCs. Yet another reason my next laptop will be a Macbook Pro. Still don’t know when I’ll make that upgrade, but I thought about it a lot more, while trying to figure this thing out.

In other computer-related news, two of the hard drives I sent in for recovery have come back to be by way of a new external drive. Most of the data is intact and there are some original versions of photos from a couple events (shooting the house in Bedford, trip to Philly with Drew to see Olivia) from 2003 and 2002. The oldest drive was not recoverable, at least not by the company I went with, and should have all the photography from my first year or two with my Olympus and a bunch of other old band-related and website-related stuff that I’d like to recover. I’ll probably call around and see if anyone’s up for the task.

Adventure Ed starts up this month. We have a some new blood with us this season, so that should make things interesting. We’re also trying to shift the focus to skills training, which sort of sounds like what my last program was all about. There, we had a big long talk with the kids coming in to the program… explaining what we were going to work on. Here, we’re going to do it in a more subtle way, I guess, but there will be some frontloading of teamwork concepts, which I’m cool with it… just don’t know how it fits with the timeframe. We’ll see how it actually goes.

It’s been snowing a lot. I’m a fan of winter, I really am, but we’ve had enough of this stuff, now, I think. We still have rolls of film to finish, but there hasn’t been a great day to do it… either too cold or too gray. It was kinda fun to go through the House on the Rock stuff and get it uploaded. I think Sarah and I are both itching for a vacation. Maybe we should do another short road-trip. Montreal was suggested, but that’s a bit long for road-trip. I’m all for it, though. Sure it’s not the right season to go North, and sure the state of affairs with needing a passport/not needing a passport to go to Canada is still up in the air… but what’s the worst that could happen, we get stuck in Canada forever? Or take a road-trip and be denied at the border because our birth certificates aren’t notarized? It’s still sounds like a vacation.

my fault, sorry

Published on February 4, 2008 in Family & Friends, Photo and Web. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

So, I’ve been reading a lot more, lately. Reading instead of doing my homework for adventure ed seems to be my favorite pastime. I reread Childhood’s End around Christmas. I finally decided to give it another read after I heard about Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday. Sarah’s mom picked me up a cheap hardcover copy of Anansi Boys on the clearance rack of a book store in the Borders Outlet at Gurnee Mills and I read it almost immediately. Sarah challenged me to read a book I wouldn’t finish in two days and suggested House of Leaves. I think I spent five to seven days on it. I remember when Drew lived in Woonsocket the first time, He and Candace were reading it, maybe, possibly they were just admiring it, I never really talked to him about it, cause I wasn’t reading it. I suppose I should ask him if he ever did end up actually reading the whole thing. I started American Gods on Saturday. As I’m reading, I get to a part where they visit The House on the Rock, up in Wisconsin, and I can see each room as he’s describing it. I think about all the pictures that I took when Sarah and I went there and pop onto Flickr to check some of them out… and they’re not on Flickr. I somehow managed to not post any of them or mention the visit in my blog at all. I guess it wasn’t until November or so that I decided I want to write here more often.

Sometime in late September, Sarah and I took a trip up to Wisconsin to see a play at an outdoor theater. We booked a hotel stay with the tickets and then planned a couple little adventures around the show. We saw [most of] the Mount Horeb trolls and had a wonderful dinner there. We visited the House on the Rock and took two of the three tours. I really got a kick out of the 60s/70s vibe to all the rugs and appliances and the various collections were really awesome… There was also a life-size whale & giant squid battle that reminded me of Childhood’s End [and the They Might Be Giants Apollo 18 album cover], but the little plaque said nothing of taking its influence from the book. We saw the show at the outdoor theater… in the rain. It was very wet, but the show was funny. There were some near-spills due to wet stage and a complete false start, due to a downpour about a minute into the first scene. We also picked up some meat on a detour on the way home from a favorite butcher of the family. It was a mini-vacation, it was a lot fun and I still don’t know how I failed to mention it here at all.

spindleI went through the pictures last night and picked out some decent ones and added them to my flickr. As I logged in to flickr, I shuddered at the thought of it becoming a Microsoft-owned and controlled site. The Microhoo merger seems like an all around bad idea to me. Maybe I’m still upset about Microsoft taking over HoTMaiL. I certainly stopped using it for anything but junk after that and it’s pretty close to unusable, now, with all the crazy Windows Live crap they turned it into. Yahoo didn’t ruin flickr. Hopefully, if that merger happens, Microsoft won’t either… but their online track record is pretty bad.

Before going through the pictures, though, I watched the game. I formally apologize to all of my friends back east who care about sports and to the Patriots for watching the game. I was completely aware that every Patriots game I watch turns into a loss for them, but I really wanted to see if there were any really funny commercials. In my defense, they were still in the lead when I paused it for dinner. So they may have lost while I was eating and not while I was actually watching… but I did return to the TV and watch the rest of the game. So it’s most likely my fault. Sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin your perfect season.

Voegtlin Corporation and Companies

Published on January 14, 2008 in Random Thoughts. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

Just woke up from a weird dream. It was sort of a suspense/thriller feel, so I was kinda upset about waking up, only because I would love to know what was gonna happen next. The basic disjointed pieces were like this:

I’m in Dudley at my parents’ house, actually, outside my parents’ house and Dad is there. He tells me he’s heading somewhere, some weird location whose name I know was repeated multiple times in the dream, but that I can’t recall at all, now. He said he had to pick some stuff up, but that some people might come looking for stuff… and he started to say, “If they come, it’s…” but then he changed his mind and said just to tell them that he was out. Some people definitely came, and I don’t remember my exact interaction with them, but I do remember that they did finally decide to leave, but that there were a lot of cars in the driveway, so they proceeded to smash into many of them on their way out… one of them was in a little classic dodge caravan type thing and backed into this 80s Oldsmobile looking thing on the grass behind the house and somehow pushed it all the way across the yard and into the fence. I told whoever was standing next to me that it’s ok, “it doesn’t run.” Then he continued his many pointed turn maneuver and pulled in between some small trees onto the neighbor’s yard over their driveway and down to the road. I remember being thankful that my car (which was my current car, my Mazda 5) was parked way behind the house and out of his rage range. I was looking at some awful gold-rust colored Cadillac up on the hill that heads up to the barn and being thankful that they hadn’t hit this one. I think it was partly because it belonged to someone important to my dad and partly because that someone would’ve gone crazy and beat them up, or something. Then I was talking to someone, maybe the same person I had told not to worry about the car on the lawn, about my dad telling me where he was going and that people might come by and I mentioned where he went and they said, “oh, then he’s gone to get the paperwork.” And proceeded to explain to me that he was probably out getting whatever illiegal documents were needed to make this other guy into me, on paper. I don’t think there was good explanation why, at the time.

The next part I remember is a bunch of people gathered inside with Dad, and this guy who was going to become me, and they were all sitting around a table, maybe, but I think we were all on couches. I know that I wasn’t supposed to know about this identity thing… so there was some point in the conversation when my Dad asked if anyone had anything to say, or maybe asked me something directly… either way, I said something about not being able to ever start my own company because “he’s going to be me.” There was some shock, I think, that I knew.

And then it turned into a party, for this guy, because the cat was out of the bag, and my dad explained that he was going to take control of the Voegtlin Corporation and Companies. Somebody said something about him not really needing to be me to do that and whoever was sitting next to them said that it would be cheaper if it was inherited. I remember that I got really mad at Dad at one point, I think he had said something about playing music and not being able to start a company doing that or something, and from my position, half-lying down on a couch, threw a drumstick (a bass drum mallet, one of two I was twirling around in my fingers) at his head, though, intentionally missing by a couple inches. He paused and looked alarmed and after a while, threw it back and I caught it somehow with the other stick. I also remember that I was just lying on the couch and saying very little while this party was going on around me. At one point, this guy who was going to become me, who I’m not positive had a name until this point, was talking about how much he loved certain pills he was taking. There was lots of agreement, including from my Dad, I think… and then there was some mention of his birthday and someone said, “yeah, what are we gonna do for him on his last birthday as Eddie?”

Then some more science-fiction flair got thrown in, someone, possibly me, asked about how he was going to prove he was me, if it ever came into scrutiny, and wouldn’t it be easier to steal Ernie’s identity (my older, mostly incommunicado, brother), and so on… and while there wasn’t really any explanation, my Dad did ask me for a blood sample, and for some reason Eddie was drawing his own blood, too. And then I told them that this wouldn’t work because I didn’t take any pills and everyone took pills, so my blood would certainly show up as irregular and any investigator worth his salt could tell that (pointing at various people in the room) “you’re on…” this and that drug and “you two are both on…” these pills and so on.

And that’s about the time I woke up. Thinking about it afterwards, the weirdest parts were that I was concerned with starting my own business… but maybe I was just using that as an example of something I couldn’t do if I wasn’t me, anymore. Another thing that struck me as odd was that “Eddie” was hispanic. he sort of looked like a bald Carlos Mencia… Dad was just a little bit racist, and it just didn’t seem right to me that he would hand down his whole company to a guy like that, but it’s not like I knew the guy, this was a dream, but it did occur to me right after waking up, so maybe it was part of the dream, too. Then there’s the fact that I had my Mazda. We essentially bought our Mazdas with Dad’s life insurance benefits. And the room the party was in was not like any room in our house in Dudley. It looked like a small, white apartment… but there’s gaps, I don’t even remember Dad coming back from wherever he was, in the dream, it’s possible that we all went somewhere else between the time I found out about the identity theft and the party. Then, in true Mark Mandeville, Dream No. 1 fashion, I started wondering if any of it was true, while preparing my breakfast (Mark wondered if he would drop dead any moment from the poison he drank in his dream, while he was eating his cereal). I wondered if Dad had, in fact, set someone up as a fake me. Of course, then I remembered that Dad was not as maniacal as he was in my dream and that there was no Voegtlin Corporation and Companies to inherit.

Back in the real world, I have some sort of training for Adventure Ed, tomorrow. Not sure exactly what it’s about. But I’ve also got to finish up the stats from last season and eMail the students with the links to the pictures after the training. I miss working a little bit, but I’d much rather sit home and play Lego Star Wars on the Wii… or go out and take some pictures, but it’s still looking pretty gray outside. I put in that order for sunlight on Friday. No tip for the sun god this time, that’s for sure.

making a short list, shortening the long list

Published on December 22, 2007 in Family & Friends. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

I’ve said before that I miss the windy hilly roads of New England. I can now make a short list a New England driving quirks that I miss: the need for high beam headlights on those windy hilly roads which lack streetlights, knowing when your crossing a town line by the quality of the plow work on the road, actual rotaries (roundabouts), the sense of urgency drivers feel when a red light turns green that causes them to immediately start rolling forward.

The visit home is going well. I probably won’t make it to the teen center this time around, I’m not going to take a ton of pictures of all my old haunts (which was on my mental list of things to do and not well defined, I think it was a flickr-groups-inspired idea and I can’t think of which groups/themes I had in mind) and I don’t think I’ll be able to fit in hanging out with everyone who wants to, since today is pretty much the only day I have and only Erika has come up with a time and place that works for her… and I pretty much slept the whole morning away. I suppose I could fit some time in with someone around our visit to Karen and the kids in Stoughton, tomorrow… or before dinner time on Monday. Heading out to Worcester this afternoon, most likely, with Mom and her good friend Joyce. I’ll probably take my own car so that I can break off and meet with someone, if they get in touch with me before it runs into my other plans. I guess I should go shower.