Boredom is a force that gives us meaning

It's easy to underestimate.

Rain shut down the job I'm covering, so I had a whole afternoon to myself in Medford. In the rain. And cold.

Rainy, cold Medford is pretty damn...well, it's Medford in the cold rain. Figure it out.

So I took a shower and caught up on some paperwork. Read a book - Cold Iron by Stina Leicht; "blackpowder-and-socery", elves with magic and flintlocks fighting humans with ring-bayonets and 12-pound Napoleons and a fun read - and did some bloggage. Chatted with some friends via e-mail and FB.

Finally I ran out of entertainment so I sat down and did these;

This is "Kittehs o' War" for the Boy, and this

...is "Drachma the Cat God" for the Girl. HAD to be their beloved kittehs, of course. I had a buttload of these postcards and realized that the kiddos have NO interest in reading some sort of boring letter from me. My Bride I can write to...but the urchins? They love the cartoons.

So I taped the postcards together to draw the images and then took the tape off. I'll mail them tonight so next week the littles can put them together as jigsaw puzzles. A quick and fun little project and, hopefully, entertaining for them.

But now I'm done and bored again. I wonder if there's a bad movie on?

Toes, again

I have this friend. She's a sort of epistolary friend, seeing that she lives in Colorado, so I've never actually met her. But she and I correspond through our Facebooks, and share the commonality of having a daughter who was born of another mother.

But here's something my friend does that's kind of a chuckle. She posts pictures of her toes.

Seriously.

Wherever she goes, or sometimes just for her own amusement, she posts a shot of her feet standing on, or in, whatever or whereever she's going. I call these things "Where In The World Are Maia's Toes?" pictures.

Well, at the moment Maia's toes, the rest of Maia, her loving inamorato, and her adorable little girl, are in sunny Nayarit, Mexico.

And whenever she posts her "Where Are Maia's Toes" photo it will undoubtedly be delightfully warm and sunny.

Now. Here's where MY toes were this morning:

My in-laws have this game they play. Well, it's not an actual "game", it's more of a sort of contest they enter into whenever they get together. It's called "My Life SUCKS!" and the object is to lay down such an irrefutably wretched whine that nobody else in the family group can top it. Ideally your story is so jaw-droppingly awful that it's like a mike drop and you win walking away. You got cancer? Well, my cancer had a tumor. You got laid off work? Well I got laid off, then my unemployment got denied.

Then I got cancer.

You see how this works. And you can't win by coming directly out and saying "My life sucks." You have to present your little tale of woe so artfully, so passively, as to seem to be simply telling the story of your past week, or month, or your prospects or lack of same. You can't be seen as actively thumping the tub for your life-suckage. You just have to lay some tracks down and hope that your sucky life is more sucky than anyone elses. Then you win.

I ask my Bride, so, what do you win? and she looks at me like I just coughed up a hairball. You win because your life sucks the most, duh! Nobody else can top you, you are the King (or Queen) of Suckulation and everyone else has to pity you and feel for you because of the massive suck your life is.

Anyway, the point is that, based on the whole toes thing; neener, neener, Maia. MY life sucks worse than yours at the moment.

Gee. That didn't feel nearly as good at it's supposed to.

Maybe I need to talk to my Bride. There must be some sort of in-law thing here that I'm just not getting.

Friday night at the Ramada

Appears to be some sort of party night; the hallways are pounding with running feet and shouting kids. I have no idea what the hell of going on but it sure as dammit is noisy.

Meanwhile I've finished my daily work writeup and have an off day tomorrow - rain is forecast for tonight and the excavator doesn't want to slop around in the muck - so I need to find some time to kill, and blogging is as good a time-suck as any.

I don't recall where I found this; researching the Philippine Sea, I suspect.

It must have been a hell of a hot day over Rabaul, and the flak must have been light. Either that or our man was bolder than I would have been. I'd have strapped a steel pot over my crotch, at the very least. War's all very manly, but let's not let it incapacitate you for the manliest sport of all...

The other funny thing that this skyclad air gunner makes me think of is that it seems like an unbreakable rule of military service that the more chickenshit the conflict the more, well, chickenshit there is. I'm not sure whether that term has survived the twenty years since I first heard it, but "chickenshit", in Army terms, meant petty harassment over uniforms and appearance.

Look at the photos of GIs in Iraq or Afghanistan or, well, pretty much anywhere the U.S. Army has deployed in the past fifteen years. Everybody STRACed down tight; chinstraps fastened, Oakleys on, flak vests strapped up.

Then go back and look at the pictures from damn near any Army or Marine unit anywhere in in the world between about 1943 and 1945. Half the time those guys look like hobos who have hit the Army-Navy Store on jumble sale day; blouses un-bloused, helmets or those weird knitted "jeep caps" or just bare-headed, every variation of "uniform" you can think of and some you probably couldn't if you sat down all day with both hands.

I'm not sure how much of this was just the effects of having a gajillion guys in uniform and the near-impossibility of trying to make them all look the same (tho God knows Georgie Patton tried) or whether it had more to do with having more important things to worry about - like getting their asses whipped by truly dangerous enemies - than looking pretty.

I think I found this on one of my friends' Facebook feeds while I was dorking around on the Internet - an occupational hazard of being far from home with nothing else to do. No ulterior motive other than pure enjoyment.

One of the fun things about having older kids other than not having to wipe asses is that they start interacting with you as people rather than just as a sort of parasitical life form that relies on your for food, shelter, and emotional nurture.

My daughter, for example, has developed a truly adorable talent for drawing - which is NOT my doing, by the way; she started sketching well before seeing any of my stuff - and now surprises me with her little cards and cartoons when I go away. She tucks them into my bag, usually early in the morning when she gets up. Here's one from her latest going-away card:

In case the word-balloons are a little difficult to read, the gist is that our two cats are arguing - not an unusual situation - about who is fuzzier...at which point some sort of TV moderator-cat shows up and announces that they are in a cuteness contest, which both Drachma and Nitty ignore. I'm not sure which is better, her cat-characters themselves or the whole comic set-up. Either way, she's a clever little Missy, that little Missy.

Saw my first Carson bumper sticker today which just served to remind me of 1) what a remarkable liar that man is, and 2) what an amazingly stupid creature the average American voter is. I mean, c'mon! If you haven't scraped off that damn sticker after the mad doctor has denied evolution, claimed the pyramids were grain silos, stated that he was offered a "scholarship" to West Point (hint; there ain't no such thing), and shown that his understanding of the U.S. fiscal system is about on the level as a milk-cow's understanding of the Nicene Creed you're a goddamn moron and should be trusted with a vote like a Capuchin monkey should be trusted with a live grenade.

Speaking of odd things...

...I have NO idea what this is or why it is. Some sort of 1950's weightlessness test with a cat for a subject? Wing-wiper humor? I got nothin'...but it's a great image.

Another great, if odd, image:

June Haver - born June Stovenour of Rock Island, Illinois - the "Pocket Grable" some time in the Forties. I'm not sure what the hoops for the hoopskirt are all about, but presumably a publicity snap for some sort of costume picture. Very pretty woman, but her story is more interesting than her looks. She seems to have had a very pallid interest in filmmaking, and she when she married Fred MacMurray (yeah, the "My Three Sons" dad guy...) she dropped out altogether.

The MacMurray-Haver menage sounds fascinating. MacMurray was a real red-meat Republican of the Taft variety and both financially brilliant and a guy who sounds kind of neurotic neat-freak and skinflint; June says that "When I married Fred, he was terribly set in his ways. He was a fuss-budget. He hadn't quite progressed to being a lint picker, but he was already an ash-tray emptier, and that's just about as set in his ways as a man can get." Supposedly one of the keys to his wealth was that he never spent anything he didn't have to. The cast and crew of his pictures commented that not only did he typically brown-bag his lunches but that in the spring they would typically contain a colored Easter egg weeks or months after the holiday rather than waste the technicolor henfruit.

Mind you, June's other career option was to become a nun - she was a devout Roman Catholic and had her share of romantic tragedies - and tho she did take vows she left after a couple of months, so maybe MacMurray was easier to get along with than her Heavenly Bridegroom. Maybe. She is said to have made the comment that she had asked her adopted daughters not to write a Mommy Dearest about her, but that “I told them if they wanted to write about their dad, that was OK.”

I'm still going to have to figure out how to kill the day tomorrow between sleeping-in and the Timbers semifinal match tonight. Which reminds me...

There's another Timbers fan - a fella by the name of Diskin - who domes some wonderfully creative things with standard or stock images or old posters to make, well, Timbers Propaganda. Here's an example:

I have no idea where the heck the guy finds the time or the creativity to do this, and it covers everything from workups of old magazine ads, Soviet propaganda posters, commercial images, original work...Diskin's work is a never-failing entertainment for a Timbers fan. I'm linked to his FB page, so I come across whatever his latest effort is when he posts it.

So it was today that I came across this:

The "shake the gates of hell" thing is a Timbers Army song, and Shakes the Skunk there is, well, shaking the gates of hell. This is with the playoff match coming up tonight so, well, because.

But that's not what the entertaining thing was. To me, anyway.

Nope, the fun bit was the original image that Diskin used to adapt this, which is the Distinguishing Unit Insignia (and, yes, it's called a "DUI") for the Oregon State Army Guard Headquarters; HQ STARC.

The original has a beaver (no, duh?) instead of the skunk and the Army reds and golds rather than Timbers greens:

Which, in turn, reminded me of my time assigned to STARC, my last Guard unit and the one I retired out of.

Not that I was actually assigned to STARC proper, that is, the head shed under the flagpole. I was one of the satellite detachments, of which there were a shit-ton. STARC in my time was ginormous, probably something between 300 and 500 bodies altogether, easily larger than any one of the infantry battalions (that were chronically understrength, and moreso after several extended deployments to the Middle East). Apparently this is a common ARNG thing; state headquarters tend to be a repository of warm bodies and not just any warm bodies, either; they are usually pretty senior people in both the officer and noncommissioned officer ranks. The maneuver units might go hungry for bodies, but STARC never starves.

I'm not sure what the situation is now...except that I know that the umbrella Oregon maneuver unit, the 41st Infantry Brigade, is no longer a true brigade; it has been reduced to two infantry battalions and has lost one of the artillery batteries - my old Charlie Battery - from the FA battalion. Whether this is a top-down sort of reorganization, or a recognition that most of the old "traditional" one-weekend-a-month Guardsmen have been driven out by deployments and that there is no way to fully man a three-battalion brigade, I have no idea.

And speaking of the FA battalion, here is the unit crest for that outfit:

I still have the DUIs from that outfit, but I was never able to look at the crest without observing that even though I know that the critter on the top is supposed to be a beaver (the sunset and the beaver are from the old 41st Division/41st Brigade crest) it always looks like a goddamn prairie dog or a gopher to me.

I mean, look at it! No beaver was ever that lanky, they don't stand up like that, either, and that's the saddest little skinny beaver tail I've ever seen. It's a damn gopher, and we're not the damn "Gopher State". Puh-leeze.


So. I'm off to find some other source of entertainment...but you might end up hearing from me sooner than you'd think. It's pretty dull down here in Medford.

3am

Awake, empty-handed, in the darkness with the sound of rain
rattling inside the cheap metal gutters like muffled drum-fire.

The warm, soft smell of your hair pressed close still rich
in the sharp empty chill of the rented room.

The sough of the distant highway your night-breathing
rising and falling, deep and slow and far away.

Darwin Award (Arboreal Rodent Edition)

More bizarre things found in soil fill:

This is Squishy Squirrel. How the hell he managed to get caught in the soil stockpile I have NO idea.

The nearest trees are hundreds of feet away from the area where the excavators were cutting borrow. Was he an adventurer whose luck ran out? An outcast, forced to roam the dirt hills of Medford like Chuck Connors in that old Branded TV series carrying around his saber-knifey thing?

Was the Black Squirrel heavy on his heart and all the chittering joy leached so out of gathering nuts that he went out to the field to end it all?

Clearly something went very, very wrong. To be a dead squirrel in a pile of dirt is like being the guy who dies licking a light socket or mortocycle jousting or something equally bizarre. Regular squirrels get pancaked on the pavement. Ol' Squishy must be some sort of Darwin Award winning squirrel to die the way he did.

But the why? We will never know. Regardless of why safe in the fill he now bides, food for worms, brave Squishy.

I have a very odd job sometimes.

Technical Question

To: Project Engineer
Re: Non-Soil Materials, Structural Fill

Note attached image. Prior experience suggests this object is most likely "hobo underwear, used, 1pr, size medium".

Please advise on suitability for inclusion and/or recommended course of action.

Attachment:

(Note 1: the site I'm working was the campground for a fairly large contingent of the local homeless folks. With all the earthwork they have scampered but left a considerable assortment of their stuff behind. I jokingly commented that I was pretty much okay with the occasional pop bottle or tin can but I drew the line at used hobo underwear. So I'm still not sure whether this was a bizarre coincidence or whether I'm being pranked like a boss by someone on the earthwork crew...)

(Note 2: And this story brings back the story I told you seven years ago about the woods, the girl, and the gorilla.)

X and Y. And Z.

As Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh famously said; "Sometime you win.

Sometimes you lose.

Sometimes...

...it rains."

It has been a very strange and busy sort of week; to give you an example, the last of the four pictures above is where I spent my suppertime yesterday - standing over a fifty-year-old tank full of well-fermented used food in Corvallis.

And they say that modern times lack romance and adventure. Piffle!

Anyway, I've been too busy to post; it's almost nine p.m. and I'm still at work, so I'll just throw out a couple of random musings.

Hopefully I'll post something more coherent this weekend.

One great thing about my job is that it takes me to some of the most beautiful parts of Oregon, not just the ones with filthy foetid septic tanks. This is Sunset Beach, on the Coos County Coast.

The high seacliff is formed from the Eocene Coaledo Formation, and this 35 to 40 million-year old marine sedimentary rock is well known for it's fossil shells;

As I was fossil-hunting these three girls wandered up and caught the fever; here's the middle daughter carefully pounding an anadara sp. out of the siltstone:

...she did it nicely, too, and went home with a good fossil.

Just to the south is the spare, rock-bound, haunting loveliness of Cape Arago...

...with the bizarre manicured beauty of Shore Acres, the remnant of a Jazz Age Mitt Romney's pleasure dome, perched uneasily nearby.

Merely steps away from the formal rosebeds and the koi pond are the fierce upthrust rocks of Simpson Reef and the violent collision of land and sea; the contrast is at once soothing and disturbing.

My work there was all too brief, but I have been away from my family for long days, so as spectacular as the scenery was I was glad to return home.

The poor little cat is still slowly dying. Steroids have fought to reduce the ruthless growth that is destroying her from the inside, and she has improved a bit in the past weeks. But she is still visibly thinner, and weaker, and, less adorably, tends to lose bowel control at random moments. The worst part of such a death is the theft of dignity, and she seems to be ashamed, and slightly aggrieved at every episode.

I am already grieving for her. For all that she is no more than a small domestic predator, we have shared quite a long while together - more than fifteen years - and I will miss her small silent presence and soft fur when she is gone.

As you may have noted, my beloved Timbers are having a terrible season, and today I received word that our goalkeeper, Troy Perkins, was dealt away in a straight keeper-for-keeper swap.

I am not one of those who swooned for the man as a player.

For one thing, I kept the goal myself back in the day, so his shortcomings were painful for me to watch, and he did have them; his positioning was not always good, his distribution out of the back frankly terrible, and he was not a particularly effective leader of his defense.

But he was an upright man, never willing to speak a comfortable lie when the truth would better serve.

As a player he was strong, and brave, and a good shot-stopper. He loved the team, and he loved our city, and he spoke to those fans who loved him in return.

He never quit - well, once, but only for a moment - and I will miss him, our first #1. I wish him well wherever he goes.

And the truth is that his loss is not our gain; his replacement is not a solution, and the woes of this season appear certain to go on - we will be unbelievably lucky to avoid the wooden spoon.

But onward, Rose City!

Last Saturday I volunteered at our local Rose City Rollers flat-track derby club - again - but this time had the strange experience of men's roller derby.

Merby, as it's called sometimes, is not the same game. The men are huge, and their mass more than makes up for their lack of skill and tactical experience.

The "Bro City Brollers" played a pick-up team from our derby gals and won handily. It was hard to watch the very talented gals block a guy fifty pounds heavier and get nothing - it must have been like wrestling with a Hereford.

And the guys didn't really have to block; they were so huge they just stood there and took up practically the whole track. You could see how frustrating it was for the women, used to using their speed and strength against opponents with similar size and weight.

When I hear people going on about how unfair life is I think about things like this; the fact that men are usually larger, and stronger, than women is unfair. That a mere Y instead of a XX should make someone so much less vulnerable is not kind and is not fair.

But it is also a sort of unkind and unfair that is the product of nothing more than Nature's cruel caprice, and not anyone or anything's "fault".

Nature and genetics will no more listen to your complaints than the ocean will respond to the pleading of a drowning man.

All you can do, and, perhaps, the best thing you can do, is what the women did that night; pick yourself up and throw yourself at that object again and again.

You will lose. That's the unfair part. You will not, cannot, win.

But you will not be beaten.