Thnakes in the Dark

It finally frosted this week but despite the cold morning, I decided to ride my bike anyway—so what if it froze? Last week was rainy....

All is well and good at 6:55am, but I nearly ran into 2 parked cars in the pitch black streets. Yaaaa!

I didn't realize how 'the dark before the dawn' seems extra gloomy and dense especially under over-hanging tree limbs; that and the fact that several street lamps were either burned out or few and far between. Luckily I didn't show up for work with my two front teeth bashed out or anything despite the denseness of dawn (or my brain).

I've walked home from a couple football games lately; it'd been warm enough for flip-flops (not a good idea when it's over a mile), and also discovered a couple unlit areas. The sports field is just outside of town, but you can walk down the road, then find a couple side streets connected from the country and get into town. On one of these ventures I was hustling right along (I leave before the 4^th quarter because frankly, I am a crowd-watcher, not a game watcher, yawn), and I was on the lookout (for weirdos) for chunks of gravel that would hurt through my thin soles....

Hmmm... I vaguely see a tree branch...wait...those curves are too curvy and uniform for a stick....must be....a SNAKE!

It had come up on the blacktop for warmth and I circled it a couple times and poked it with my toe (heck with those flip-flops) to see if it was still amongst the living. (Pardon me but Beetlejuice was on TV this week!) Yes indeedy. No road-kill for me. I kept circling, crouching lower, trying to distinguish what type it was. No luck. It was just too dark to see much at all....but still, I am a perseverer!

I tried my darnedest to see-- what if it was poisonous?

Finally I just tried to determine which end was the head and which was the tail and since I couldn't really tell, I had to pick it up. (If one end had looked way different I would of assumed it had 'the tell-tale triangle head' of a harmful snake. )

I continued on...snake in one hand, flip-flops in another...and as that stinker warmed up, it went wild! Talk about wiggly and frantic! I could hardly hold on to it's berserk little 18” body... but I managed to make it home and containerize it. NOT for the freezer, but just to show Briggs and let it loose the next day... It was a pleasant mild brown color.

Speaking of snakes, one morning in the mid-90's, about 6:00 am, the house-hold was awakened by a bloodcurdling scream from the bathroom. There was Bailey, dripping in a towel, mad as heck-- a huge black snake had escaped the night before and was whipping around the bathtub in a frenzy...she had stepped in and turned on the water...and then it went crazy! Why she didn't notice it before...well it seemed pretty funny for a few moments, but not to her—trying to get ready for basketball practice.

Back to the bike...as I was leaving work, I'd only gone a block when part of the gear/brake contraption thingymajig on my right handlebar fell apart. Luckily a knowledgeable kid helped me fix it because I couldn't quite figure it out. He tightened it up with his fingers, enough to make it home anyway-- all I could think of was 'thank God it worked this morning'-- I really would have bashed into something without a decent brake!

Then I would be lithping thith blog and I don't know how to type in lithp.

The Music of Video Games [119] Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts

I heard this 1 zillion times. Really. One zillion!

The Smart-Aleckness (and Dexterity) of Youth

I'm combining a couple things here as I have been encouraged (and baited) to drink a couple rounds of....absinthe....and some other God-awful concoction that probably tastes like cough syrup, but my throat is numb from strong Anise flavoring... and thus it is tasteless to me...much like my own self anymore.

Yesterday I heard a few bars of the above music (don't even try to listen to it all) and I burst out with 'Oh my gosh! I remember exactly what that was!'

"Ghouls and Ghosts"-- early 1990's and the beginnings of Tegan's obsession with all things digital/electronical/computerized/mechanical/coding/on-screen/thus requiring rapid finger movements (the first few hours when your entire upper body moves with the Ghoul or Mario or Link or Sonic or whomever is leaping across the screen at any given moment until your shoulders realize they are not a participant in whatever evil befalls--only the hands are important) and the utmost in brain concentration!

In remembrance, don't speak to a gamer....it will be ALL YOUR FAULT if they miss the 3rd level and have to start over!

Brigham was watching a Youtube of the old Super Ghouls game before he went out the door to buy a Coke at the gas station. Of course, I admonished that pops were too expensive and 'you should not waste your money' whereupon he replied that he wasn't wasting HIS money.
(DRAT! My $5.00 had been laying on the table...) Smart Aleck!

And this morning I heard the sound of rustling as he entered the door after work...I'd always hoped that he'd stop and pick up some groceries now and then, but to no avail.
'Yea!' I cheer from the kitchen (I was a good cheerleader in high school), 'I hear SACKS! I hear SACKS!'
'Oh yeah?' he replies, 'I hear an OLD BAG.'

Smart Aleck.

So here I sit typing and him and the boys are upstairs. Brig had bought coke and chips. I went up there to mention that REAL food was available for the 4 of them, but was screeched at: 'Can't you see I'm floating in Zero Gravity and you just messed me up?!'

Hmmm. All I saw is some 4-legged scorpion monster explode guts all over the screen from some sci-fi blast gun...Oh so sorry!
Again....don't speak to a gamer....or you'll ruin their level....! How many times have I heard that? Or the phrase begged...'just wait 'til I beat this level...just wait 'til I beat this level...
(No one tells you it could be a 3 hr time deferential!)

I'd made a huge pot of chili, cornbread, brownies for these guys ON MY DAY OFF...but now it sits cooling off; it is sadly ignored for the sake of a sugar cube, lighter, shot glass and hopes of seeing a Green Fairy. This will not happen though...a few brave swallows of this strange liquor (and some smart aleck remarks geared toward mom), but NONE of them could handle the taste of licorice, so they ran back upstairs to attempt Mario Kart this time (while I practice unsuccessfully on an online Tetris game-- absinthe+finger dexterity= failure.)

Well, that's good-- they didn't need absinthe anyway...attempting to light a spooned sugar cube on fire reminded me of old-movie-mad-scientists (or heroin addicts), so thank god no one was watching them through the window! Is that why Frankenstein has a green face?

So go up and play your games boys, and I will smile and thank my lucky stars that I can't hear 48 hours straight of continual Wolfenstein/Duke Nukem/Doom music reverberating through my ears like the (sigh. ahhh.) good old days!

[Sarah Marie...you have NO IDEA of Tegan's old addiction to lan parties! Just ask 'GOD' himself.]

Techies?

Hey anyone out there that can help? I very quickly showed some students how to do extremely simple frames in PhotoShop...we can play them in Adobe, Jasc Animation Shop, and Movie Maker so they loop, but I am not an animator... and I have to save them as QuickTime files...which don't loop...
Here is an example in this first post....the student should be sliding down and up...
Thanx!

Spiked Turnip

Farmer Guy brought in a volleyball-sized turnip yesterday—weighed over 7 lbs. He gave me a couple smaller ones, halved accidentally by the disk. Now, before you turnip your nose, I did eat an entire ½ for supper—part raw sticks and part cooked.

Due to their immense size (or old age?), I was afraid they'd grown coarse and bitter (like me!), but it was pretty good.

I proclaimed that I was going to try to grow a bigger one next year in a special pot and baby it along! This riled Farmer Guy who said he was going to feed his a mixture of Old Milwaukee, Coca-Cola, and household Ammonia—apparently a home concoction of Miracle Grow (...or the makings of a meth lab?)

A topic of more Home Brews followed...Hungry Farmer Man told how he makes his own Schnapps out of Everclear; I agreed to donate persimmons and crabapples to Skinny Farmer Guy's 'homemade wine cause'... They all told their stories of drinkin' and youth and avoidin' the law...

(Not naming any names, I was called back up to the football game Friday by a 20 yr old kid-- uh, he was 'looking for my son for a ride home—he was getting an MIP'. Brig wasn't around, so I went up to the stadium for the 'rescue' but when I saw that there were 3 of them, I knew they wouldn't fit in my truck. These boys were all pretty good kids/non-drinkers in high school/currently 'testing the waters' and I think this was realized because I stood back a distance while they were bade to pour out their booze in the gravel... I told the officers that I didn't know there were 3 of them so I didn't have enough room and eventually a dad came and picked them all up...Where was Brig? Standing inside the stadium with some lovely pink roses for Paula...He picked a good night to watch his gal cheer! Whew.

The boys got off with a warning scare, but won't be so lucky again.)

So, back to the shenanigans of youth... The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

• There is no Good.

• Stitching a pocket on the inside of your cheerleading coat so you can sneak in a bottle of brandy to a dance.

• Ditto Prom with a pocket on the inside of an ugly polyester dual-topstitched baby blue tux coat (with ruffled shirt)!

• A nice boyfriend that scrubbed vomit out of the inner-pocket passenger door of his red Firebird Transam. Purple Passion.

• Rolling a truck multiple times down a hill. Wild Turkey. Sheer luck=no major injuries.

• Hitting a telephone pole the next week after sneaking out from being grounded due to the Wild Turkey incident. Jack Daniels+ Sheer luck= no major injuries.

• Police Chief visits you at high school to confiscate your fake ID. When using it to by TJ Swan, the liquor store owner realizes it belonged to her niece. And you aren't the niece!

• Losing second ID in Kansas City by signing your real name for the bouncer instead of the one on the ID. I didn't really want to get into a disco anyway. Rock and Roll!

• Ditching school to drink vodka with friends and strangers and ending up in jail a few hours later labeled a runaway.

• Etc.

The above is not recommended: I had a terribly shameful sophomore year and wouldn't advise

anyone to act as stupid as I did! That's why to this day I cannot stand the smell of wine or hard liquor. Now should I tell some of the Coffee Drinkers' stories.....? I better not!!!

Instead I'll sit here nibbling more turnip sticks. And stemming sweet crabapples for something to do.... while thanking my lucky stars that my kids turned out brighter than I did!

Bored. Filling my mind with fluff.

Trying to amuse myself tonight by looking at the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator....(Hey! I LIKE unusual names...so I guess that's the only + I can give her...)
and the Jokes. Yes. Lots of Jokes!

I Don't Care - Fall Out Boy

I don't care what you think. Really. Just heard this on TV so I had to find it...

Mind Trash

Each time I see Dan's opening blog rocky beach picture, all I can envision are the two people in the background, one up/one down, with a rather obscure object in the foreground which I keep seeing as an AK-47. Don't ask me why, but that's what I see. Or a machine gun. My mind at work...

I almost started this blog with "I rolled over in bed the other night and felt something hard..." (!) which sounded inappropriate, but the truth. There was one of the "A" guns tucked under the covers, an AK or an AR-15--whatever, but it was hidden there when a lazy boy didn't lock it up in the gun safe like he was supposed to.

Speaking of stalkers in an earlier blog, I just learned that a friend and her old boyfriend had each filed restraining orders against one another. This seems like a game or a soap scenario--who breaks it first? Look at the beach pic again: Do you see his arm pointing? Is he demanding? Yelling for her to get up and get the heck out of his life??? LEAVE. RIGHT. NOW.

I heard an interesting quip on TV last night: you're "pathologically allergic to human relationships". I couldn't remember exactly if it were 'pathologically' or psychologically' allergic, but the online dictionary pretty much defines them in a similar fashion, although being 'pathologic' seems dredged with a bit more negative or sinister aspects than 'psychologic' does!

But isn't that an interesting phrase? Is that me? Am I allergic? Are many of us 'allergic to human relationships'? (Would this be like a cat allergy?--meow.) I suppose it could be an 'innate slight mental phobia: a whispering fear of closeness'--yeah, people in general should just be avoided!

Or like my friends mentioned above--it turns into a "pathological lingering addiction for diseased human relationships". Don't break that restraining order! I can see it now, like that guy in the pic...soon he'll run over and grab that up that weapon...

Just kidding. It looks like a nice beach, a loving couple, and its probably just driftwood and a coat!