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.

Cold rain

The recent dearth of posting is because I've been up in the foothills of the Olympic mountains on a job...

It's a pretty spot, and the project - building a footbridge for the Park Service - is a trifle less grubby than the usual sort of "7-Eleven" and "filling station" projects that make up the working week of a private geotech, but sadly the part we're involved in hasn't gone well and is likely to end up in litigation. Well, shit.

This week the normal outdoors adventure was enhanced by about two to three feet of old snow on the trail into the site. This stuff was the worst of Northwest snow; wet, slushy on top when it wasn't glazed with ice, heavy, and dirty with needle- and bark litter. In several places it had corniced over the narrow trail and there was a certain...thrill of uncertainty...whether one was walking on two feet of old, rotten melting snow over the trail or two feet of old, rotten melting snow over...nothing.

And the weather, too, managed to be the worst of the Pacific climate; cold but not cold enough for snow. So you got a steady misting rain but never warmed up above the forties. The wet raingear and the chill air combined to suck the heat out of you; I had no less than five layers on, including a heavy snow parka, on Monday and found myself shivering like a vibrating string all afternoon. Brrrr.

This week's work went as planned. But that well is poisoned already, and all factions are whetting their legal knives. It made the slippery walk to and fro each day seem a little longer and colder.

And I'm due to return next week to test the anchors installed in this one.

I hope the weather turns either warmer or colder by then. The feeling of hunching miserably under a cold rain is all too reminiscent of too many bad days I spent in the field in my youth.

Work and Worry

If I seem downcast in my posting lately it's partly because the Rains have arrived in force. I always have a tough couple of weeks getting used to the cold, wet, and dark.

If there's another thing it's because I have a job that is going very badly on me, and one that involves a great deal of walking around on my bad hip. So I get up very early to drive a long way, then walk a mile or two with my hip aching like a Congressman for a lobbyist's wallet, and then everything at the job goes wrong and everyone is pissed off at everyone else.

Don't get me wrong; walking a mile through the beautiful Northwest woods is still better than a kick in the face and a toxic waste dump in downtown Gresham. But don't tell me that when my ass is aching and not just because the client took another bit out of it.

What a fuckin' fuckstory, as my old pal James used to say.