Expat of Sadgewich

One thing I realized as we were building the bunk bed, is that I hate musicals

Easy, now! Not hate like I would kick a hole in the screen that dared show one, but a new hate, a strange hate, like the one I reserve for the inlaws--I hate them till I'm near them, then I am okay with them, and even might enjoy them a bit.

S'cuse--issues much?

Chey was watching Oliver! with the twins, and I could hear it in the next room, and I kept a running dialogue with Amanda about how i was being annoyed by it all:

"They're fucking dancing again, aren't they?"
She laughs, not looking up from her cut marking, "Yeah. They're dancing again."
"And that! What Is that? Is that a fucking piccolo?"
Laughing harder, she tries to reply," Yeah, I think it is..."
"Ugh!"

Goddamn buncha happy bastards all flying around singing shit and being merry--yuckypoos.

But then again, Amanda is terribly irked by the fact that I on occasion lobby for favor-repayment in the form of permission to view Monster Dog, with Alice Cooper, or the purchase of some new horrible zombie flick. Although they are quite the learning experience. Without Street Zombies, I would have never really known about the special-effects applications of wet pantyhose.

LMO

Sat down and used brain, to discover that shade doesn't read me--waa! Not sure that it means anything though, as she has to trim down for the Shadesong Bug.

I guess I spend too much time trying to have other people validate me. That's one of the things I want to be rid of.

Will be going tomorrow morning to drop off my background info, and find out what's going to be up with the physical.

Scared?

Yeah.

So far, still going. I've always looked good in olive drab.

Tiger's ATT should get back to us some time next week, and that means disgusting sums of money--to the point where when I get back, I will have to re-assess my life. Fuck. We're actually gonna get to pay taxes! Wow. My whole life spent so far under the poverty level, managing to make appearances. I hope we don't let it get all crazy. We live comfortably enough now, it's just that we'd be able to pay our bills in a timely fashion and not have to worry about shit getting cut off all the time. We could like, save money and shit, too.

I'm going to have to look into doing a living will, if I get enlisted. A year from now, who knows what the world opinion will be of the US, when people here in its borders are crying fascist. I might catch a bullet, or get vaporized in the name of Allah, or whatever. Not that I'm going to spend my time running around thinking about it, worrying--you just gotta live as best you can, and that means making sure that my shit is taken care of before I get assigned a duty somewhere.

I was thinking of pulling a pussduty, getting some kind of career path that would keep me further away fom the bullets, but after vidi spoke support, I can't help but feel that that would simply be another instance of me trying to live a life without honor. Now I'm thinking maybe I should get into it as a journalist, if that's where my best skills lie. Granted I want something that'll translate into a marketable skill when I get out, if I choose to get out, but at the same time, I don't want to back down on our troops.

In world news, we started and completed the twins' bunk bed, made it out of two-by-fours and -sixes, but only had a jigsaw to cut the wood with. My Skilsaw has a bent foot, which makes all the cuts come out crooked. I'm gonna have to find a way to replace it, or scrap the whole saw. I'll have to get in there and sand down the edges, and paint it someday real soon, but for now we're back concentrating on cleaning and trying to get our futures mapped.

Potato.

I put pictures up here.

Had me this hella long entry half-finished, and then left to get our marriage license, and as I'm getting readay to go, I think to myself that I should save what I've written, in case the coming stormy clouds capriciously knock out my power and leave me grinding teeth.

My life is like having Murphy's Law in the form of Steve Urkel standing right beside you wht whole time, talking in that nasal whine.

I think murnkay had the right idea, but I personally would take the bat, and pound one of the chickens up the relative's ass, as a lesson to all of them about who is in charge, but then again, I've always had thought patterns somewhat akin to what would happen if rednecks could breed with the Sith.

I can picture it now, crushing a dead Bud on my forehead as a distraction to my prey, whilst I Force-crank my Peterbilt and run them over from behind. And then turn on the stereo for some Charlie Daniels Band with one hand, and pop open the cooler for a fresh soldier with the other.

This morning, As I've mentioned before, my new coffees and coffeemaker showed up, via UPS, while we were trying to finish fixing the toilet. I went to answer the knock, signed for the package, and returned to our room, where the Tiger wanted to know who it was knocking.

"Who was it?"
"Door-to-door Satanist."

She liked it, and I thought then of a young man, smartly dressed, with enough metal in his face that he could go as a circuit board for Halloweens; tracts in his hand, all of them in my favorite black and red, his voice a whiskey-sweetened Southern twang, like the singer for Lynyrd Skynyrd:

"Hi, have you kicked Jesus outta yore life?"

Just thought I should put that somewhere in the back of your subconscious....

I've just gotten a reminder of how fragile our lives really are, how terrifyingly malleable.

We went to drop off the Tiger's NCLEX loan application, me and the kids, and when we returned there was a huge fire engine sitting out in the middle of our little street, and a couple of fire cars, and a police car and a host of civilian vehicles. Drawing closer, I saw that the neighbors across the street--directly across the street, their front door no more than twenty yards from our back door--had suffered a housefire. Their living room is ash. Fortunately there was no one injured, but it looks, from the extent of the damage caused before the fire was put out, like they've lost most of their possessions.

Granted, it's only things, but, think about the fact that these are their personal belongings, locked safely up and tidied away every evening. Gone now is their sense of home.

I want to rush over their, pitch in a hand, help them get their clothes out, what they can of their personal effects, but the kids are here, needed looking after, and what's worse, is that I have let our house become a sty.

I've done what I can think of doing, offered to let them use some heavy extension cords, if they can talk the people beside them into borrowing some power, I've offered to let them borrow umbrellas for when it was raining, duffel bags for the clothes and such, but I really don't have all that much, when what they need most, now, I would suppose, is a sense of home, and normalcy. It is my most fervent wish that their keepsakes, childhood photos, and the like, survived the fire.

I feel small, thinking all these thoughts I've thought lately, about how hot it is, how damnably muggy, how I wished that the car wasn't trying to overheat all the time so we could use the AC. How I've sat around wishing and dreaming and bullshitting my life away, when, one wrong blink of an eye, and everything can be destroyed.

On the one hand, I feel like I should just dive into everything headlong, as though I am granted not another day on this Earth, but the coward in me also fears such thoughts, and does what it can to rationalize them away.

I told the lady who lived there that she can borrow our fans, for if it gets too hot before they have finished salvaging, and I'll leave them in the laundry room.

They've boarded up the gaping charred hole that was their living room window, and they're going to wherever it is that they're going to stay for the night.

I hate like hell being this socially inept, feeling this awkward, this confused at the right thing to do. If they need help moving anything large, that is salvageable, I'll make sure they get it done. I wish I had a lot of money--for even though the man of the house works at the hospital Tiger does, and probably makes good money, now is the time when expenses compile themselves into a hellish beast, that can't be gotten over.

Here is sit, with all this crap, that some of it I don't even use, and a couple of yards away, through no fault of their own, my neighbors have had their home taken from them.

Am drawing to a close on my "make nunchakus from an old chunk of pine" project, especially since the redicovery of my chisel made bringing the chunks of wood down to their target sizes. And, no i'm no martial-arts freak, i just had a set of chucks once, and miss wandering around the house hurting myself and spinning them, intermittently.

We took a cruise around in the car yesterday, drove down into the Keys, actually, and had ourselves some sort of funniness going on. I was in rare form, coming up with pun after pun after pun on the billboards and highway signs we saw on the way. Unfortunately, as i am a bear of very little brain, I forgot most of them, ahahaha. However, here is the bizarre images I thought to write down:

A male prostitution ring, with a specialization in B/d, as a front, answers their phones: "B&D Tool Rentals...home of the all you can eat subs."

Peacocks live in Florida. I didn't know that--freaked out when I saw a couple flop out of a tree as we drove past.
I came up with a term for semen--monkeyjelly. It causes stickybelly.
We were driving and I saw a sign stating, "Draw Bridge Ahead", so I got out my little notebook, and when I saw the sign that said "Draw Bridge signal" and the signal was green, I drew a bridge.
I also came up with my new thing--tossing imaginary bulldogs on things. "Bulldog--RAWF!", and then a flinging motion with the right hand.

Sometimes I'm just a plainly silly bastard. We stopped at a roadside stand on the way home, and I got my first sand dollar. I also got some shells for the kids, and a little tiny shark tooth. Lonita, they had a pufferfish in there the size of a basketball, among others--those damn things freaked me out. You could also buy hermit crabs for fifty cents--but I'd rather just figure out what they eat--and then snatch one from a sandbar. EVIL!!! I figure once I get comfortable with that, I can move up to dognapping, and then maybe start a prostitution ring for male subs; call it B&D Tool Rental--Order Now and Get a Free Socket Wrench! After that, I'll string the Cabinet members out on crack and make someone sodomize a nuclear missile.

Saw lots of places selling crabs--none called Itchy's, though. Those Keys people are subtle. Thought about making a band called Rudy Pooh and the Colon Cloggers, with their first album title being Relax. Maybe with a follow-up or a side-project called For Nick Atre--a close personal friend, in case you were wondering who that is. We can have my buddy's band open for us--Rob Wymon & Yell At Children. They've got a new mini-disk they're pushing called Hand It Over. It's pretty heavy stuff.
Anyway, I have to go now--Love yas!