Quick Hits

In the last several days, last week’s “Kiss my ass, summer!” temperatures in the mid-90s with heat indices in what Laura cleverly referred to as the “hundred-and-frick” range have given way to awesome days in the mid-80s down to the mid-70s.  It has kicked SO MUCH ass.  On Tuesday night, I grilled burgers (Dys’s turkey burgers, NBAI comrades, so no fear!) and we sat outside and ate on the deck.  That’s something we do maybe three or four times a year, tops.

So yesterday, when I drove home for lunch (something I also do maybe three or four times a year) as a way to be with Boy for a few more minutes before his vacation…we made PBJ’s and ate them outside as well, as per his request.

Hell, we could possibly do it again tonight if we wanted.  Mosquito bites are making my legs itch a bit, but it could be done.

I’m just enjoying it while it lasts.

***

What’s on tap for this weekend?

• Well, Dys says she wants to finally knock out one of the Rock Band Endless Setlists.  I think we can do that.
• If I get my way, we’ll eat out at least once.  Preferably  I’ll be having (NBAI peeps, look away!  Do not, I repeat, do not click on this link!  Damn you, you just don’t listen, do you?) THIS  little item.  Diet murder?  This is like a diet Holocaust.   But Oh Emm Gee is it worth it.
• The US Grand Prix at Laguna Seca.  Yep, they moved the first of two American races to the July 4th weekend.  Woohoo!  Anybody who watched last year’s race is probably still shaking off the adrenaline high.  Seriously.  Now we just have to see who has the balls to run it through the dirt through a blind-entry S-turn over a 91-meter drop THIS year.
• Woodford.  Awesome.
• Maybe some horsies?  Depends on the weather.

***

Speaking of horsies, on my way to work this morning I got behind a truck pulling a horse trailer.  One of the two horses in back was chillin’.  The other?  NOT chillin’.  That was one very large and agitated horse, especially when they turned off one street onto the other.  But as I passed, he stuck his head out the window and looked at me.

Not crazy eyes.  Excited eyes.

I wish I knew what that horse’s name was; he’d have $2 riding on him this weekend, that’s for sure.

***

Last night, I finished eating dinner quite a bit late (after my workout, etc) and noticed that Boy wasn’t in the living room.  Quick check of the dining room table (his Lego assembly line) – nope.  His room?  The door was closed, not surprisingly, but the light was also out.

I poked my nose in – he was already laying in his sleeping bag on the floor, covered up.  (He’s been sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor off and on for weeks now instead of in his bunk bed.  It makes my back cry just to think about it, but that’s what being 9.5 is for, right?)  It was close to his bedtime, but still maybe half an hour early.

I didn’t say anything, I just laid down beside him and tossed an arm over.  He laid there for a second before talking to me.  “Want to turn on the light and read a book?”  “Nah, that’ll make our eyes hurt.  Let’s just hang out.”

I poked him.  He snickered and poked me back.  The dog, hearing voices, poked her head in.  Two people on the floor is an irresistable dog magnet, so she came in.  Once she figured out we weren’t wrestling, she plopped down nearby and went into imminent-naptime mode.

Basically I just laid there with him, ignoring my complaining back, sometimes talking about nothing and sometimes just being quiet, for about fifteen minutes.  (Once he had me get up so I’d be off the coverlet – so he could throw it over me as well.)  Then I had to get up and finish the laundry for his trip.

Fifteen minutes isn’t a long time, unless you’re laying flat on the floor.  But still, that was a damned good fifteen minutes.

***

No kid at home for the 4th (he’ll be at the small-town parade with my parents if the weather permits – and he’s still not plagued by bad memories of getting sick after a rainy parade with Dys’s mom a few years ago), so probably no fireworks for us this year.

Probably.

Hope y’all have a safe and happy long weekend.  Happy birfday USA!

Tripped

Boy is preparing for one of his summertime jaunts, this one to Virginia to spend a week with my parents.  Camping, swimming, wrestling with my brother’s sawed-off grizzly chocolate lab, trying to decide when to good-naturedly tolerate his 2.5-year-old cousin and when to just hole up and hide.

This typically means several things in the Taoistkinesia household.

1)  I get two ~5 hour drives alone with Boy.  This used to be a humongous pain in the ass, because he required a hell of a lot of attention – for the last three years or so, though, it’s been an absolute joy.  We talk a while, listen to music a while, hit rest areas  for pit stops/quick snacks/fast dashes/when available, 15 minutes on playground equipment, grab fast-food meals together, and sometimes just ride quietly.  Honestly the one thing I’m really waiting for now is for him to weigh enough that I can stick him in the front seat beside me instead of talking over my shoulder to him in the back seat.  (Well, that and my long-fantasized father/son motorcycle trip, but let’s not get nuts quite yet.)

2)  I get 2 ~4 hour drives by myself.  (They’re quicker when I’m not on someone else’s bathroom-break schedule.)  In case I’ve never said this before, I heart driving alone.  I cruise, I observe, I think, I blast my (very nice) car stereo with no regard to what anybody wants to hear except me.  It’s those long interstate runs that make me feel the faintest tinge of envy for my grandfather’s career as a long-haul trucker.

3)  Project Time. Not having the kid around is when we generally try to get up the gumption and do some fix-up stuff around the house.  Notice the word “try.”  Quite often what we genuinely intended to be Project Time falls victim to

4)  Us Time.  PG-13 TV shows and R-rated movies whenever we want!  Rock Band played full volume until past midnight!  Maybe even *gasp* some nekkid time!  (Okay, you’re right, let’s not get crazy.)  Still, we always manage to get out of the house a little more to go out to dinner and/or do something fun.  Nice when you can do it.

5)  Quiet Time.  Dys still works her job on its time, and so that means a lot of evenings are still tied up with her working.  That means I get some time to myself to read, play some music, watch some TV, and not worry about hogging the Xbox or the DVD player and so forth.  Aaaaah.

And by the time it’s all over with, I’m ready for another five hours alone in the car with m’boy again.

It’s gonna be a nice week.

They Said It

Sometimes you think you’ll write an article that will be a lot of work…

and sometimes if you wait long enough, somebody else does it for you.

The Onion AV Club Primer on Heavy Metal

With the exception of the (much-discussed in the comments, the answer being “we couldn’t decide where to categorize them”) omission of Tool and Pantera, I have to say this is a quite well-done guide.

2 of you may care. 

Those Who Can’t Do…

…can still help others to teach.

You might have noticed a few days back that I sent some good vibes to my blog-bud Crisitunity, who finds herself in just such a crisi-tunity situation right about now.  Choosing to focus on the opportunity side thereof, she’s making a leap of faith and attempting to use the loss of her job as a chance to follow her dream of teaching yoga.

She’s set up a site to sell some of her short stories in exchange for $3 toward her Teacher Training Fund.  Having read some of Crisitunity’s fiction before, I can tell ya, it’s good stuff.  And even if you don’t agree, just think of the great karma you’ll be earning by helping out!

I have to say, when I heard of the idea I was somewhat skeptical – my general opinion of humanity tends to be fairly low.  I tried to gently prepare her for disappointment.  The result, so far, has been a stunning indictment of my misanthropy.  Lesson:  Take TB’s pessimism with a huge grain of salt.  And also:  there are good hearted people out there after all.

And so, heady with a new burst of optimism in human nature and the power of the internet, I say this:  Like many of us, Crisitunity could use a hand.  You don’t even have to take my word for it.  Everybody, at one point in his or her life, has a dream.  Some of us have been close, and just needed a little nudge to put us up on top.  If ever you’ve had a dream and could use a little help to get there, consider giving the gal a chance.

I don’t know about you guys, but to me, life feels a little better when it feels like folks help each other out…and that the good people have a shot.  And that means that today, I feel pretty damned good.

Thanks, folks.

Monday Music

But what I really wanna know is…

Lenny Kravitz, “Are You Gonna Go My Way”

A New Suit

Those of you of normal vision and not heavily under the influence of some substance or other will probably notice that I’ve changed my theme and layout a little bit.

As I added the No Butts About It graphic (thanks, Laura!) and stuff, I decided it was time to mess around with my widgets a bit.

Then I decided the whole damned list was too long.  I deleted a few but they were short ones anyway.  So then I thought, “Ooh, who has a good three-column theme instead of a two-column?  Laura does!”    I looked, and yep, that seemed like the way to go.

Then I went to browse themes, and found that many allow a custom header, or have three columns, but very few have both.  I’m kinda attached to my header image, really.  It was actually the one thing about my design that I really was happy with.  But this one, Digg 3, had both, so voila!

Any comments?  Too cluttered?  Did I delete something you find useful?  Could I reorganize things to put more helpful bits and pieces up high where they’d be more friendly?  Should I go suck a tailpipe?

Feedback welcome.  It’ll probably take me quite a while to get used to myself, so until then I’m game to shift some stuff around.

Finding Ferracci

Today I want to tell a story about a guy named John (a pseudonym).  John’s not a friend, more of an acquaintance, but a guy I’ve gotten to know over a few years via my motorcycle board.  A motorcyclist, (sometime motorcycle racer), musician, and generally good guy.  The fact that the guy can play a gig one weekend and race a Ducati the next makes me twelve shades of Envy Green.

A few years ago, John was let go from a good job.  Suddenly and unexpectedly.  As any reasonable human being would do, he flailed about in desperation for a few days before settling into a determined job hunt.  It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t easy, but suddenly the clouds parted and a blazing ray of sunshine laid upon John like the finger of the Almighty.  He interviewed for, and won, a job at a motorcycle shop.  Not just any shop:  Fast By Ferracci.  That name surely means nothing to most of you, but the motorcyclists among you just got a lot more interested.  That’s because FBF isn’t just a motorcycle shop; they’ve also sponsored race teams that have won both AMA and World Superbike titles.  More than once.

For many a motorcyclist, working for Eraldo Ferracci is a dream job.  It was for John, who not only got to work there, but also got partial sponsorship and parts discounts to race a Ducati.  Hard to beat that with a stick!

That was a couple of years ago.  A few weeks ago, John’s longtime live-in girlfriend suddenly split with him.  Again, with no real warning and not much explanation.  Again, he floundered for a while…but then picked himself up and found that as he reconnected with himself, not the self that he’d lapsed comfortably into during his relationship (as even the best of us tend to do) but a more genuine self, he found someone he liked.  A lot.

And that was apparently contagious, as he soon found himself paired up with a female friend who’d also just ended a long relationship.  And, he said, did he mention she’d done a little modeling?  It’s amazing how things work out, he said.

I replied that for the last several years “Finding Ferracci” has been my own personal shorthand for looking for that one thing that you didn’t even know you needed, sometimes when you need it most.  I told him that “Finding Ferracci” twice in a decade must mean he was livin’ right.

For me, just knowing John’s story to be true always serves as a little ray of hope when things look bleak.  A reminder that sometimes the world or God or karma or the Great Tao work in ways that make little sense at the time but can bring us to peace in the end.

So I hold out a warm feeling of hope for a good friend.  If anybody can pull an opportunity from a crisis, she can.

Quick Hits

Still heinously busy in general, and out of the office quite a bit.  I feel a little guilty for not having much to blog about lately, but I’ve gone through these little phases before and suddenly I’ll have a ten-page opus spring forth from my head.  So don’t panic.  I’ll be making you say “sheesh, does this guy ever STFU!?!?” again very soon.

***

The biggest thing going on in my life is that I’ve started hitting the gym again and generally doing weight-loss-y stuff.  But I’m blogging about that over at No Butts About It.  Those of you who care can come on over and see (we’re generally a fairly incestuous blogroll, aren’t we?  and odds are somebody else whose blog you read is posting there too); those who don’t care can spare themselves the eye-rolling.

***

I really need to update my blog to reflect the No Butts stuff, and a few other changes to the blogroll.  People moving, new blogs, etc.  I probably won’t have time today but hopefully by Friday…

***

I’ve been doing a lot of grunt work lately – stuff that needs to be done, desperately, for all kinds of perfectly good reasons, but isn’t the kind of work I went to graduate school for.

You know what?  I like it.  Even though it’s unairconditioned and it’s been so hot lately that the last two days we’ve done it, a sympathetic lady in the AC’ed office next door has brought us Fla-Vor-Ice popsicles in the afternoon, I feel good when I’m done for the day.

It’s a similar sort of feeling that I expressed several weeks ago in a comment over on Crisitunity’s page.  In some nebulous way it feels more like “real work” than what I do.  I feel like, unlike my actual job, I wouldn’t have to explain it to my gruff old great-grandfather, and then watch him sort of sniff at it when I was done with my partially incomprehensible-to-him explanation.

It reminds me of some thinking I’ve done from time to time, and in a very disorganized manner, on masculinity and masculine roles.  And I just the other day remembered a book that a counselor recommended to me some years ago that I’ve never read, so I might put that little bugger on my list to read in the near future.

Perhaps, if I’m lucky enough to have some insight, I’ll have more to say on this subject later.

***

Just generally, between that thinking I’ve been doing lately, some talking to Dys and a couple of others, and probably partially because I just plowed through the whole second season of In Treatment over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about seeing an old counselor again.  Not because I feel a crisis, just because I think I have plateaued on the frontier of self-knowledge and I wonder if having a guide would help me climb a little higher.

Still, even with insurance, that stuff’s not cheap and money isn’t exactly falling out of my pockets nowadays.  (Especially since the Indy GP is coming up, and so is the Tool concert that I managed to convince Dys we needed tickets to.  Expensive tickets.  But Tool is about the only act that I’ll willingly pay more than $50 and sit in an arena for nowadays.)  Best do some reading first and ponder calling in a guide later.

***

Finally, this weekend my son and I finally started on the model we bought back in January.  Frankly, I expect it’ll take longer to finish than it did for us to get started, but so far I’m enjoying myself.  He doesn’t seem to want to do it for very long at a time, but he already seems to have enjoyed painting pieces a bit more on the second day than he did on the first, so I’ll take each step as a good one.

Hope everybody’s having a good week.  And staying cool!

Monday Music

A while back I finally revised the long-planned Rainy Mix into a disc.  I’ve been spinning it from time to time since then, but opportunities have been harder since I don’t have an hour a day in the car anymore now that Boy is out of school.  Anyway, I’m gradually getting some ideas to refine it.  Luckily I saved it to my iPod when it was at 200 songs, before I cut it down to 149 to fit on a disc – so it’ll be easier to go back and add things that I ended up taking out should I choose to do so.

Anyway, I thought I’d give a little preview.  This song would have been on the list even if it was only 10 songs.  (But this is NOT the song that made me completely stop production when I found out it was in the wrong compression format so I could re-compress it to a form that would burn.  I looked for a YouTube vid of that song unsuccessfully, so you’ll just have to wait!  Mwuhahahah!)

Mother Love Bone, “Gentle Groove”

Out There

This morning, as I was taking my morning walk, I saw something cross the road about fifty yards ahead of me.  It was far enough away that I can’t be 100% sure, but unless there are some really long-faced cats in my neighborhood, it was a fox.  Which would make it the second one I’ve ever seen in the wild.

Being out at daybreak is invigorating for me.  Once I drag my ass out of bed…and in the case of this morning, once I open the door and go “GAH, it’s STEAMY already!!” (according to the Weather Channel, 75 degrees, 87% humidity before 6am – hello summer!)…it’s really enjoyable.  I can’t completely forget that I’m in the city, as the streetlights and the gentle hum of even the earliest-morning traffic can be heard all of the time, but in my quiet neighborhood  it’s as close to peace as I think you can get under the circumstances.

It reminds me of why I hunted and fished when I lived in the country where such things were easily done.  It brought back the peace that I had during my vacation last week while out on the boat with Dys or just on the dock by myself – despite minor mother-in-law psychic eddies, I could just let my mind drift.  Beautiful.

The 5:30am alarm sucks, but it has rewards beyond the exercise.  That’s pretty damned cool.

And as a funny postscript, lying in the front yard of one house was a Mylar balloon that wasn’t there before.  It wasn’t tied to anything, but was clearly just having crashed there, spent.  It read “Happy Mother’s Day.”  Doesn’t it make you wonder where it started?