smacky and bucky

Wow, is it really Friday? On top of my regular job, I've spent every afternoon and evening this week being an unpaid plumber, mason, and manual laborer. Yesterday I mowed two lawns, making it the least amount of work I've done after work this week.

Well, the hard work is done for now.

Smacky, wife, dog, and both cats are heading out of town. The humans in the house took all the weekdays around July 4th off, so we have a nine-day vacation, starting at 3 p.m. today!


<----- I'll be in a hammock like this next week.

Movies, books, poker, boating, swimming, and sleeping in our newly hung hammock are on the agenda, and it's the best kind of agenda to have: the kind you can scrap at a moment's notice to take a nap. I'm taking my laptop, but it's only to look up obscure pop culture references to win bets. I might also blog now and then if I have a particularly nice day.


To give you an idea of how much I'm going to relax, one of the books I'm bringing is titled Monster Island: A Zombie Novel. So I'm not planning on feeding my brain anything more substantial than literary junkfood. I'm giving myself a break from evolution theories, chemistry, physics, paleontology, and all the other science subjects I ponder and edit on a daily basis. Now is the time for adventure, escape, and a story about a pack of zombies running nuts in Manhattan.

This post has been edited to remove the crazy rant I put up this morning.

I'm calmer now.

A week and a half ago, we had the sixth driest June on record. Yesterday we officially broke the record and now are in the wettest June on record. The D.C. area typically gets 39 inches of rain in one year. In the last four days, we've gotten 13.5 inches, or 1/3 the total of the entire year.


Yesterday after work I rushed home, determined to get two jobs completed before the promised thunderstorms came:

• Patch two more places in the basement walls
• clean out the gutters

I mixed the cement and did the patchwork first, since I wanted to get it up and give it a chance to set before water began flowing again.

I then grabbed the ladder from the garage. By this time, the rain had begun, but it was just a steady shower, with no thunder. I felt safe enough to climb an aluminum ladder and start tossing handfuls of gunk to the ground. I guess it has been a while since I did this, since one gutter was so full of accumulated gunk when I pulled out a large wad of it out, the water instantly rushed to the downspout. The gutter on the opposite side of the house was even worse: It had an old bird nest lodged in it! Again, removing that crap made the water rush to the downspout. So, two jobs completed, and I was now dirty and soaked by the steady rain, but the thunder didn't start until I was putting the ladder away. The space between the end of the shingles and the inside of the gutter wasn't quite big enough for me to get my hands into, and I now have dozens of minute cuts and scrapes on the top of my hands from catching them on the edge of the shingles.

I had some free time now, so I went three doors down to a little old lady's house. She had posted a note on the neighborhood message board that her finished basement had been flooded, and she could use some help. Two of us showed up to help her (me and another guy from a block over). Between the two of us, we cut and removed all of the carpet and padding, hauling it upstairs and outside. The padding was like a full sponge, with water pouring out of it with each step. To get all of the carpet out, we had to move the following items: piano, sofabed, plasma TV, two bookcases, computer table and computer, stereo, two chairs, and assorted end tables. We finished at 6 p.m. and I walked home in the rain, with my clothes dyed a splotchy dark pink from the padding.

I got cleaned up, checked the status of our basement, and made two Nathan's hotdogs for dinner, with chili, mustard, and onions. They were the definite prescription for a tired, waterlogged body.

All things considered (thus the title of today's entry!), we got through this with a minimum of fuss. A few more days without rain and we should be dry again.

Today they are finally predicting a bit of sunshine. HOOOOOOOOOORAAAAAAAAY!

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Since I feel like it, here's the top 25 most played songs on my iPod (in no particular order; they're not ranked beyond being part of the top 25 most played since I got the thing for Christmas last year). I haven't omitted anything, so even the embarrassing songs are listed:

• Duran Duran: Someone Else Not Me
• The Jayhawks: Blue
• Fiona Apple: O' Sailor
• Emma Bunton: Maybe
• David Gray: Please Forgive Me
• Jefferson Starship: Count On Me
• BT: Superfabulous
• Altered Images: Don't Talk to Me About Love
• Bee Gees: Nights on Broadway
• Lindsey Buckingham: Go Insane
• Cock Robin: When Your Heart Is Weak
• The Cardigans: My Favorite Game
• Blue Oyster Cult: Burnin' For You
• Go-Betweens: Streets of Your Town
• Prince: Little Red Corvette
• Olivia Newton-John: A Little More Love
• Jefferson Starship: Runaway
• Glenn Tilbrook: G.S.O.H. Essential
• Ivy: No Guarantee
• Jim Croce: Things 'Bout Goin' My Way
• Air: Surfing on a Rocket
• Jim Croce: Roller Derby Queen
• After the Fire: Der Kommissar
• Aztec Camera: The Boy Wonders
• Sixpence None the Richer: Easy to Ignore

Our basement leaks a little when we get heavy downpours. It's unfinished anyway, so no big deal.

When we get TEN AND A HALF INCHES of rain in four days?

Yeah, it doesn't leak, it floods.

We took the day off yesterday to go to Home Depot for supplies:

• Dehumidifier
• Quick-drying concrete
• Extra garden hose
• Two plastic tarps

We've had the dehumidifier running constantly since Monday morning. It says the humidity is 70% in the basement, most of which is likely caused by the expanding puddles of water on the floor. I have a garden hose attached to the dehumidifier, running into the sump pump pit. Water comes out of the air, into the pit, and is pumped out of the house (where it probably seeps back into the basement, but don't tell me that, even if it's true).

In a rare break in the rain yesterday afternoon, I patched several places in the walls where water had been gushing out the night before. (one of them was about two feet up the wall, and it was flowing like someone turned on a garden hose and left the room). We circled the leaks with sharpies to find them again the next day. I'm happy to say the places I patched held. Of course another crack I had missed (or that didn't exist the night before) began flowing water last night as a result. Damn. I was going down to the basement about every 30 minutes and using a push broom to move the water toward the sump pumps. The pumps probably purge 10 gallons each time one of them comes on, and Sunday night they were both coming on every 30-45 seconds. I won't do the math on that, but it's a lot of water.

I'm not terribly depressed about this, as, since I said, it's an unfinished basement, and a quick flip through the local news channels shows a lot of people in shelters, with their homes condemned as a result of flooding waters. Not that I mean that makes me feel better. It just makes us realize it could have been much worse.

We need about a week of dry, sunny skies with low humidity.

They are calling for more storms this afternoon, some possibly severe, with an inch or more an hour falling.

I'm at work now. I can't keep taking off to push water around with a broom. As long as we have electricity, the sump pumps will keep up with the water, and I'll grab the broom again when I get home and push some more around.

I finished book VI in the Gunslinger series. The final volume comes out in paperback at the end of August. If I can wait that long, I'll get it. I'll likely break down and order a cheap used copy from a seller on Amazon in the next few weeks.

I watched Conquest of, and Battle for, the Planet of the Apes also. The last one epecially has a neat germ of an idea there, but the budget for the final movie in the original Planet of the Apes series was obviously crap. I could imagine that movie with today's special effects technology, or just with a decent make-up budget.

Of course Claude Akins was the big bad gorilla, and, as Joel said in the MST3K version of Master Ninja, "Say what you want, but Claude Akins has a nice butt."

Title courtesy of Will Shakespeare (and then borrowed by Will Faulkner. Lots of good Wills out there).

The night began normally enough. Heated up some leftover Chinese food (szechuan shrimp and walnut chicken) for my dinner alone. Watched a rerun of Homicide: Life on the Streets, read a book for an hour, then watched CSI (an episode I had missed about a psychic that has a premonition of her own death). Then I climbed into bed and read for another half hour, going to sleep at 10:30 with the dog and both cats sleeping beside me.

At 12:15 a.m., the thunder woke me up. The dog was already awake, and started licking my face. I assured her everything was all right. I could feel the thunder reverberating in the walls, and the lightning was so numerous that the sky had a strobe effect. I went back to sleep and woke up again at 1 a.m. as the electricity cut off, silencing the air conditioner. (Alarm clock has a battery back-up, so it still worked.) Glancing at the window, I could see the near continuous lightning through the blinds. The thunder was overlapping, a big bass drum repeatedly kicked.

Suddenly my cell phone began ringing from the living room. Who calls at 1 a.m., unless the news is very bad. I jumped up, still half-asleep, and ran to answer it. The phone display glowed in the darkness. I didn't recognize the number. Not even the area code.

"Hello?"

No one answered. Then I began to hear voices. Two men having a conversation. Their voices were very clear, and they were speaking English, but between my lack of consciousness and the thunder, I couldn't make out the words.

The phone disconnected, and the call duration flashed 23 seconds. By now I was just awake enough to seriously creep myself out. I imagined I was in a horror movie, and the second male voice on the phone was going to sense I was there:

"Excuse me a second," he says to his companion, voice still muffled.
Suddenly his voice is loud and clear.
"Don't turn around."

I know he's talking to me, and I know there is someone standing behind me. Helpless to stop, I begin to turn...


"Holy shit, stop it," I said out loud to myself. I looked down at the dog, who is sitting at my feet, looking up at me. I looked out the front window as it rocked from another burst of thunder.

I went back to bed and tried to think of something else, after freaking myself out with that middle-of-the-night waking dream.

I woke up at 6 this morning. The sun was rising on a clear sky. The electricity came back on at 6:15 as I was brushing my teeth.

I just looked up the number on anywho.com. Since it's a cell phone number, it doesn't have a listing. I looked up the area code, and it's local, about 10 miles outside of town. Somehow, in the midst of all that storming, signals got flung around, and my phone intercepted someone's call. It just happened to happen during a huge thunderstorm, at one in the morning, seconds after the electricity went out.

Damn.

My wife has tomorrow off, and the latter half of today, so she's leaving at noon for the river. I'm here until 3:30 tomorrow. Sigh. Another night with me, a dog, and two cats.

It's supposed to be 95 degrees today, with a chance of "severe" thunderstorms, followed by a chance of rain every day through next Wednesday. Sheesh. At least I finished mowing two lawns yesterday, on the longest day of the year, with 90% humidity.

I'm trying to decide which Planet of the Apes DVD to watch tonight. Suggestions? I'm tempted to just start in order, and eventually get through all 14 DVDs. My other thought is to just skip the first two movies, since I've seen them a million times, and go from there. Of course, I've never seen the television show, or the cartoon...

I haven't looked at my site stats in months, so I decided to check out which search terms brought folks to my little blog. The strangest was bjorn borg in the jet magazine in 2005. Does the person mean a picture of Bjorn Borg in a jet, or Bjorn Borg in Jet magazine? Was Bjorn Borg interviewed by Jet magazine in 2005? If so, why? That's like putting Dolly Parton on the cover of Vibe. It seems outside the target of your demographic. Unless Jet was purchased by a Swedish company, and they're trying to relaunch the magazine in a bizarre new direction.

Not much to say. Work is fine, the weather is okay (hot, but at least the torrential rains of Monday have stopped for a while, though there is a chance of thunderstorms for the next five days...), and I've been reading when I get home. Up to book VI in the Gunslinger series.

If you feel like your life is a mess, check out D-Listed, and tell yourself "At least I'm not a celebrity. If people are mocking me, it's only a select few behind my back and not the entire internet! So much snark out there, it feels like love. Unless you're a celebrity.

On a whim, I stopped at one of our local Goodwill stores the other day (Why are there three within five miles of me?), and picked up an old Fleetwood Mac album and a white cowboy shirt. The shirt is actually very nice. The tag says it's from a cowboy store in Denver. It has a subtle off-white design stitched into it and pearl buttons. The only downside: Unless I get invited to the Country Music Awards, I'm not sure when and where I'd ever wear it. Well, for $4, I couldn't say no.

George Carlin quote of the day (from my page-a-day calendar):

As a public service, next weekend Boy Scounts will be picking up litter and trash from America's highways and dumping it in America's rivers.

For Father's Day, I sent my dad the Hopalong Cassidy TV Collection on DVD. It has 26 episodes on 4 DVDs. Hopalong was my pop's childhood hero, the good guy that wore all black (bucking the trend there!). Hopalong Cassidy had starred in 66 movies before his television show premiered! That's when you could make a movie in 10 days for $100. Now it takes 10 days just to get Costner out of his trailer...

Here's a link to the official Hopalong Cassidy website. Warning: The folks who designed the site thought it would be clever to use a midi file of western music on the home page. At full blast. Sounds like a child playing a toy keyboard on a covered wagon. Hopalong would have shot the kid for playing that crap. Well, okay, he would have sat him down and giving him a talking-to, making the kid decide for himself that the keyboard was a bad idea. Hopalong Cassidy was the original western jedi, don'cha know.

Love that Beatles song! Anyway... I got home yesterday afternoon and found a box sitting on the front porch. Could it be? Yes! Yes it is! My Planet of the Apes package arrived! Five days after it shipped, using the free shipping option. Awesome.

I removed the ape from the packaging, opened the back and looked at the DVDs (they come in a very neat compact book) and put everything back in the box. This ape and I are going on a weekend roadtrip. I wonder if having the ape and my dog in the car allows me to use the HOV lane? Maybe if I let the ape do the driving.

Oh, and for the truly geeky that care about such things, the included certificate says I got Ape # 186 out of 10,000. That makes it more valuable, because it's such a low number (kidding. Just using some faulty e-bay logic here...).

So this weekend will be spent alternating between swimming and watching apes battle man. Rock on.

Yesterday after work, we went over to the other house (soon to be on the market again, if you know anyone moving to the DC area...) to check out the newly refinished floors and touch up some trim paint. I removed my work shoes so as not to damage the floors with my duck feet (I wear size 11 shoes, which are pretty large for a guy under six feet tall. Yet I still fall over and trip all the time. Odd).

After about an hour dabbing paint here and there, we started to move a few random items of furniture back into different rooms. The final (and most unwieldy) piece was a chest of drawers. We were lifting it and carrying it small distances, so we wouldn't scrape the floor. Turning the corner into the other room, my wife decides to put her end of the chest down without telling me. The extra weight transferred to my side caused my fingers to slip, and the chest came down on the big toe of my right leg. I was only wearing socks. You recall everything else I've done to this leg in the past two weeks: poison ivy on the ankle, bruise on the thigh, and sledge hammer to the second biggest toe. Now I can add "bruised big toe" to the list. Sheesh.

As De mentioned last week, Deep Discount DVD is having their big 20% off sale, with 20% off their already freaky low prices. Last week (like De) I ordered Planet of the Apes - The Ultimate DVD Collection - With Ape Head Packaging. The set includes all five original movies, the complete TV series, the complete cartoon series, the Tim Burton remake, and a ton of bonus features, for a total of 14 DVDs worth of ape love. Amazon has it for $143 (it was $161 on their site last week... odd), but with the discount, I got it for $96, with free shipping. I also picked up the 25th anniversary edition of Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz for $6.

I thought I was done, but yesterday being Tuesday, that means new DVD releases. Specifically, the fourth season of Dead Zone came out yesterday. Most places have it for between $24 and $29 on sale. Since Deep Discount's sale is still going on, I checked their site, entered another promo code, and got it for $17, with free shipping. My wife actually likes this show too, so anything resembling sci-fi we can watch together, I'm getting. You can only use one promo code per order, so make a list of what you want. Of course, there are a ton of promo codes available (I used USATODAY and SUPERSALE), so if you find something you missed, it's no problem. But the sale ends Saturday, and they won't do it again until sometime in November, so take advantage of it while you can.

I awoke this morning with the lingering images of a dream that seemed to last all night. The sort of dream that your brain works over like a logic problem, leaving you exhausted instead of refreshed. I feel like I took the GREs in my sleep. It was one of the "It's very important that I find _______" type of dreams. And in the course of looking for ______, I ran into a lot of people from my past, including an ex-girlfriend I haven't seen or spoken to in over eight years (and boy, she was a heart breaker, dream maker, love taker, to quote Pat Benatar). I can't even remember what I was looking for, hence the ______. I'm not just being cryptic.

============
We might actually be forced to wander into a movie theater a few times this summer! Laura wants to see A Prairie Home Companion, I want to see Nacho Libre ("These are my recreational clothes." "They look expensive." "Thank you."), and we both have an interest in Superman Returns.

So last Tuesday I scraped the skin off my right heel. Ouch. Saturday, I was shoveling gravel into a wheelbarrow and the handle of the shovel put a huge bruise on my right thigh. Ouch again. Yesterday, I was pounding the end of an iron slat back into shape on the end of a water run-off grate with a sledgehammer, and the sledgehammer ricocheted and landed on the second biggest toe of my right foot. Ouch a third time!

Why am I so determined to injure every part of my right leg?!?

I fear for my right knee...

Aftermath of the first Death Star explosion

Oh, man... this is why I love Robot Chicken.

So I've been looking over the schedule for the World Cup this year (which kicks off today. First game this morning!), and I'm actually interested in watching some of the matches.

[I'm talking about soccer here, folks. The rest of the world calls it football, and the rest of the world lives and breathes this stuff. Americans? We consider it a "cute" game. No pads, no contact? Meh. Hard to top the excitement of driving around in a circle 500 times! Yay NASCAR!! (end sarcasm).]

The reason I'm showing the slightest interest is because three African teams qualified for the World Cup for the first time ever: Ghana, Togo, and Ivory Coast.

When I was in the Peace Corps, Burkina Faso hosted the African Nations Cup. With so many African countries taking part (including countries that are normally quite hostile to each other), and many of the countries no bigger than the average U.S. state, country and team pride was overwhelming. The Burkina government loaned TVs and generators to most of the small, isolated villages, so even the areas that have never had electricity (can you believe there are still places like that in the 21st century?) could gather and watch the matches. Since I lived in the capital of Ouagadougou, I watched a good number of the matches live at the stadium. For matches played in the other large town on the other side of the country (Bobo), I watched them at the outdoor bar two blocks from my house. It was a four wood poles holding a thatched roof, a dirt floor, low wood chairs and tables, a big TV, and cold beer and soda. It was easy to get caught up in the excitement. The country basically took two weeks off and concentrated solely on football.

For the past several years, Ivory Coast has been embroiled in a tense standoff between the government in the south and rebels holding territory in the north. It's not a full-fledged civil war yet, but it's not a good scene. And thousands of Burkina Faso citizens who depend on seasonal work in the Ivoirian cocoa fields have been barred from entering the country, so the problem affects neighboring countries as well.

There's hope that national pride will bring talks back to the table, as both sides root for their country's team.

Ivory Coast plays tomorrow against Argentina. It will be broadcast live on ESPN 2 at 3pm, EST (check your local listings). I'll be rooting for the Africans, despite the odds against them.

"We're not going to stop until marriage between a man and a woman is protected," said Sen. Sam Brownback.


I don't really care how you feel on the issue of gay marriage. But could somebody please explain why heterosexual marriage needs protecting? What is threatening it? The divorce rate still hovers over 50%, so are they afraid gay marriage will... I don't know. What could gay marriage do that would threaten MY marriage, for instance? I have no idea. Are thousands of married men going to suddenly come out of the closet, divorce their wives, and finally profess their love for that cute guy that works at the gas station down the block? Really, what the heck? And spare me the whole "slippery slope" debate, because it's retarded. "If we pass gay marriage, next people will want to marry animals, or have five spouses, or marry a ROBOT!" Bullshit.

As George Carlin once said (paraphrased): You'd think Republicans would support gay marriage. Gay couples will never get an abortion, or need the morning-after pill.

This is just a cynical ploy to rally conservatives in an election year. It's not like Bush can proudly say "Look at the economy. Look at how the war is going. Yay me!" So they whip out this old chestnut. In the '50s, the hot-button issue was segregation. This isn't any different. You know why I say that? Because I believe that being gay is not a conscious choice. You don't "decide" to be gay. Why would someone willingly choose to be in a lifestyle that makes you more vulnerable to hatred, violence, social shunning, and loss of legal rights? Because you love the music? In the '80s, Reagan tried repeatedly to get a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. That had as much chance of passing as this one, but helped rally to angry conservatives against a common enemy: All those millions of people just waiting to burn Old Glory. (These people don't exist, okay? Not in nearly the numbers they tried to say.)

Someday scientists are going to announce they discovered, well, not a gay gene, because it's not that simple. They'll announce they discovered a series of biological conditions, including genetic factors, that make a person more likely to be gay. People will scoff at it, and it will take generations to get mass acceptance, (just look at evolution), but it will happen.

Here's something I stumbled across, and it's brilliant (courtesy of the Onion):

Yesterday after work I carried twenty boxes to the basement, moved four (full) bookcases into another room, brought a bedframe in from the garage, assembled the bedframe, put the boxspring and mattress on the frame, made the bed, and organized some boxes for charity. (Short sentence, but these tasks took about three hours to complete.)

At the end of the day, I pulled off my right shoe and discovered my injured heel had bled through the sock (again). Yuck. A shower and a few new bandages later, and all was well.

I currently have 5,067 items on my iPod, mostly songs, but a few podcasts I need to get around to listening too as well. I just hit shuffle all songs, so it should keep me occupied today. And tomorrow. And five more days after that, if I let it play nonstop.

Last night around 9:30 I decided to move some boxes into the basement, because that's how I start projects: On a spur-of-the-moment whim. I looked at the stack and figured if I carried three at a time, the task would be done sooner (because that's also how I start projects: Deciding the fastest way to complete them). I also decided to do this in bare feet. That's an important part of the story, as you'll soon see.

The third step from the bottom, my right foot came down and the heel rubbed against the riser (the vertical slat of wood on a staircase). It hurt, but I continued down the steps and put the boxes on a table. Then I looked down and noticed the blood. I had left a trail of it across the concrete floor. I raised my right leg to look down at my heel and saw that I had scraped about a two-inch area of the skin off the heel. When I lifted my foot, the blood flowed down my arch and was now dripping off my toes.

I called out to my wife upstairs and calmly asked if she could bring me a paper towel. She must have noted something in my voice, because she ran down with an entire roll. As she turned the corner, she saw the blood and followed the trail with her eyes as it led to me, now standing with my foot raised and a growing pool of blood beneath it. I'm sure I had an "aw, shucks" dipshit smile on my face. The sort of smile you give when someone has seen you do something stupid.

I held a paper towel on my heel and we got the blood up off the floor while it was still wet. She said if I ever go missing, CSI will test the basement, find my blood everywhere, and ask where she buried my body.

Some antiseptic and a few band-aids in a cross pattern and I was no longer a biohazard. I elevated my foot and read for a little while. I wore an old tennis sock on my right foot last night, and this morning noticed that it had bled through in four places. Luckily the sock absorbed it all, so no bloodstained sheets.

So that, along with the poison ivy that is just now starting to go away, and I won't be modeling shorts in the Sears catalog any time soon. (Not that I ever did before, it's just now it would be icky.)

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I didn't mean to imply that XL = fat. I was just trying to come up with a delicate way to put it. I'll just quote The Simpsons: "I heard your dad's ass has its own congressman!"

Wife and I had a rather romantic weekend, brought about mostly by the absence of her family. See, at the river, her parents are our neighbors. They're fun to hang out with, and Laura usually cooks a big meal for everyone on Saturday nights, but we didn't realize how nice it is to be alone until they announced they were going out to a romantic dinner and we'd be alone. We ended up making fajitas, and making a spicy homemade marinade for the chicken and shrimp. After dinner we had margaritas on the back deck and watched the sun set on the bay.

Saturday morning it was cold and raining, and we found ourselves at a huge Catholic rummage sale (the sale was huge, not the Catholics... though I suppose there are a few XLs in the church. Fat doesn't discriminate about religion. I'm just sayin'...). We arrived at 10:30, and the rain was taking its toll on attendance. The Catholics were desperate to sell their crap, thus everything was already reduced 50% by the time we got there. The paperbacks were an even better deal. The guy watching the book tables said "It's 24 books for a dollar now." My standards for selection got a bit broader at that point, since picking 24 books I'd actually read was looking impossible. Then he handed me a cardboard box and said, "Here, fill this up for a dollar." Wow, Catholic, calm down. I picked up everything that looked vaguely mystery or science fiction. Most interesting find: An early edition hardback collection of Clive Barker's Books of Blood. It includes the short story that was the basis for Hellraiser. I'm sure there's some irony in finding that at a church yard sale, but I chilled on the snark and just added it to the box.

After spending much of this week doing outdoor manual labor, yesterday after work my behind had a date with the sofa. I think they hit it off.

Last piece of nerdy Lost talk for the week:
I'm convinced that Claire and Jack are siblings, both with Christian Shephard as a father. I watched "Raised by Another," a Claire-centric first season episode yesterday, and in the middle of the break-up with her boyfriend Thomas, he said "Here we go with the daddy abandonment issues." So, missing father. Also in the episode, she tells the perspective adopting couple that her father used to sing a certain song to her. We need a flashback of that.

Actually, Claire has to be related to Jack because otherwise that flashback was completely pointless. Both Christian and Ana Lucia are now dead, so why even bother to show the late-night banging on the mother's door scene?

Of course, if it is true that the plane crash (and certain people being on it) was not planned by Dharma, and it was just a random accident, all the strange connections between the characters we've seen in flashbacks are just unlikely coincidences that don't mean anything. That would be a giant cop-out, and a cheat by the writers. I still believe the plane, and many specific people being on it, happened by design. I won't make the points why here now, because I doubt anyone is even reading this far down anyway.

My father-in-law called yesterday afternoon and said he could drive down after work and help me install the new ceiling fan in the other house. I mowed the lawn (again, in 90-degree heat) and he showed up around 7. We went to the other house and got to work. We climbed the newly purchased, 8-foot ladder, pulled down the ancient, non-working fan the previous owners had left us, assembled the new one (A Hunter 52-inch model. A thing of beauty.), and installed it, along with a new fan-speed dial next to the light switch. It looks great.

Finally got back home around 10:30, took another shower and collapsed on the bed.

The upside of the gel that dries poison ivy: Stops the itching for a while.
The downside of the gel that dries poison ivy: Hours later, I want to take a garden trowel to my shins and just claw away at them. Poison ivy sucks. I've had it on my face so badly my eyes have swollen shut.

At least this time it's localized to my lower legs.