smacky and bucky

We got to the river on Friday and my father-in-law said he was waiting for delivery of a tractor. The guy who dropped it off gave us a quick lesson, and I was off. It's easier to work than a car. I picked up a load of gravel and filled in some places on the driveway. Then I mowed the field.

Now I'm freaking exhausted!

I may have come off as a humorless asshole yesterday after work. I stopped by Petsmart to get a new dog bowl, as the old one has a chip in it. I looked over their meager selection of porcelain bowls, picked one, grabbed a new dog toy, and three boxes of catsip (it's milk in a juicebox-sized container that is formulated for cats: lactose free and such. Don't laugh!) and walked up to the register.

"Is your dog an angel?" The cashier (a female, early 20s, asked). I looked down at the bowl. It had a lot of writing in the design, including the word "angel."

"You don't have much of a selection back there," I respond, completely straightfaced.

She pauses a beat and says, "I was just making a joke." She sounds apologetic.

Oh God, I must look like a creep right out of an episode of Law & Order. I decide that chuckling now would just make the situation more uncomortable for both of us. I take my receipt, mumble "thanks," and get the heck out of there.

There are certain bands that will never by "mine." I will always think of them as the bands my older sister and her friends listened to: Kansas, AC/DC, Pat Benatar, Styx, Foreigner... and Kiss.

As I kid, I just found Kiss freaking bizarre. I was too young to get that they just a rock band (I would never call them "heavy metal," because they're not). You see interviews with them from back then, and it was all in good fun, tongue in cheek. But they just seemed dark and evil to me, with their platform boots, black outfits, makeup, spitting blood and fire. Just look:

Gene Simmons is apparently one of the friendliest guys on the planet (He has a reality show on A&E, for pete's sake. ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT CHANNEL!), but when I was five or six, he scared me. One friend's older brother had a poster of Gene on stage, with blood running down his face. Nightmare material to an innocent kid such as me.

Kiss went into super marketing mode in the late 1970s, and you could see Kiss dolls, lunchboxes, bedsheets... if you named a product, you could probably buy an officially licensed version of it with the band's faces on it.

I didn't want anything to do with that stuff, obviously. He scared me, yet I could buy a toy of him? How bizarre was that? (I know now you can buy toys of most horror movie characters, but back then it was a new concept).

Where am I going with all this? I'm not unloading childhood emotional baggage. I'm bring all this up to mention that I watched Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park the other night. On the box, Gene says they were pitched the idea as A Hard Day's Night (the Beatles movie) meets Star Wars. The final results were not quite like that. The band has powers. Gene can spit fire, Ace can teleport, Paul can shoot rays from his eyes, and Chris... well, he doesn't actually demonstrate any power. I guess they ran out of ideas or money by the time they got to the drummer. The movie is hilarious though. The band fights robotic cat men. I'll say that again: The band fights robotic cat men. Awesome. You can find the movie on YouTube, but it's worth renting on DVD to get the full experience. It's in amazing condition for a made-for-TV movie from so long ago.

Trying to get these two pics from the wedding positioned correctly.

A friend of mine and his wife had their second child a month ago, but that didn't make me aware of the passage of time as much as this: Wil Wheaton (Star Trek's red-headed stepchild; author; blogger; poker player) wrote in his blog yesterday about taking his son to college. Wow. Think about that for a second.

I ran across a pretty cool article about children who were photographed for what became famous album covers (Nirvana's baby swimming, for example). That Nirvana baby is now 17 years old! You can read it HERE. It's interesting that every child in the article went to (or will attend) college and has a good job. Their lives turned out better than the band's, in some cases!

I had an unplanned hour-and-a-half nap on the sofa last night. One minute I was watching 2007 World Series of Poker coverage on ESPN, the next it's 9:30, one cat is asleep in my lap and the other is on the back of the sofa looking at me.

What a trip! We got back from Portland, Oregon last night around 10:30. Somehow woke up and made it to work at my usual time, but I think an afternoon nap is in my future.

The wedding was interesting, an outdoor hippie event [not completely unlike our outdoor wedding, but the person presiding over the event was much more "new age"/Eastern philosphy/good vibes kind of person (ordained from the internet, I'd bet)].

Our flight leaving DC Thursday afternoon was delayed two hours due to weather somewhere in the middle of the country, but we were already on the plane, so we sat on the runway doing nothing. The good news was that since Laura had demanded we fly first class, we had comfortable seats and an attentive flight attendant. I also got to finally see Spiderman 3 on the personal screen in the seat, so that was fun.

Due to the delay in leaving, we arrived in Salt Lake City at 10:30pm. As we taxied to the gate, the pilot announced "The last flight has left for the night, and all the hotels are full due to a convention, but we have pillows and blankets for you." Yeah, you can imagine how Laura was going to take that, so we booked it out of there and started calling hotels. We found one with a vacancy on the third try, and their shuttle picked us up and took us there. It was a Raddison just on the other side of the airport. The next morning we were on a 9am flight for the short hop north to Portland. We got our rental car and found the hotel, then went out to explore the city. Had a good lunch at Henry's Tavern and walked a block further to Powell's books. Imagine if Amazon.com was all in one building and they let people come in to shop. It was like that. It's the largest independent used and new bookstore in the world, spread out over about a block and four stories high. Needless to say, I managed to go there three times over the entire four days of our visit!

Finally saw Fred Meyer, so I know what that is now. It's a grocery store that also sells big-screen TVs, basically. Enormous beer selection. There are a lot of microbreweries in the Portland area, and our hotel rooms had empty fridges in them, so we alternated rooms at the end of each evening for mini parties.

The wedding was Sunday afternoon, an outdoor affair. Nice ceremony. A little too hippie for us, which we (all the east coast folks) laughed about over beers later that night. We all had to join hands and dance in a circle (called the "spiral dance" by the woman leading it). So yeah, really touchy feely stuff.

Need to unpack and do some laundry later. And nap. Oh yes, a nap.

Madman, baby!

Didn't feel like getting them all, but I love the retro-spaceman look of Madman, and decided to get two.

Mark Trail finally punches out the bad guy. Seriously, EVERY storyline ends with Mark punching someone hard enough that a piece of them flies off. Last time a guy lost his wig and fake beard from a single punch from Mark Trail. Guy does not fuck around. Or bother with "calling the cops" or "letting the authorities handle it." That stuff is for pussies.

Here are the details from the Amazon write-up:


A neat idea, I think. Let the fans pick two episodes and the actor who played the captain pick the third. And since Enterprise DVD sets are still hovering around $100 each, it's an inexpensive way to get a few more episodes