Everyday Stupidities

Hello, party people. I've been sitting on posting an entry because I can't think of much which bears writing. Sure, that's never stopped me before, but still, there's nothing worthwhile to say and then there's nothing at all to say. Life hasn't moved one way or the other, which I suppose is the result of finishing the kitchen project a week ago. 'Tis the season to attend holiday bazaars, work on the Christmas clutter collection (we've already obtained 3 pretty ornaments and 6 glass icicles in the last week), and gird your loins against the upcoming Thanksgiving fêtes. Well, for me, two out of three; Paige and I are following our recent-years tradition of going to the Black Angus for Thanksgiving dinner and maybe preparing small quantities of stuff we like (mashed potatoes, stuffing, etc.) after so we can have a managable amount of leftovers without having to stage or attend a family feast to get them.

I'm spacing right now on what in the world is stupid. There's plenty but I'm disremembering. In bright news, the price of gas has hit $2, but I think I talked about curious it was that it would drop so far and so quickly in the last month or two in my previous entry. My sister-in-law has made a mega-stupid decision to hook back up with the guy who was trying his damndest to wreck her life (and succeeded), but that's on the private side and I try not to think about her. I still haven't tried to think about what I'd prefer to be doing with my life, but I did put in an application with the City of Tacoma for a techie thing they were advertising. (I'm presuming a hundred others have too because this place is lousy with techs and geeks who would prefer to avoid a commute north, but I'll keep my fingers crossed.) My high school locker partner Kenny went back to the old 'hood to jam with my best friend from elementary school Richard, the first time those two have played together in about 23 years when they recorded a song about my best friend from high school, "Randy! Randy!"... wish I could have been in attendance. And the replacement hard drive for my notebook computer arrived but the extra memory (necessary for installing a few things!) will be here probably tomorrow. I told you I didn't have much to say!

One of the silliest things I ever did in elementary school was passed a note to my best friend Richard. Oh, it's a little more complex than that. First, the note was passed through the crack in a wall -- the classrooms had a windowframe in the corner that was shared by the next room, so one could slip things between the rooms through the gap between the wall and the frame. Second, the content of the note was derived from a Kurt Schaffer Bloopers album: this innocent nun voice was announcing there would be "a peter-pulling contest at St. Taffy's Church", so of course I illustrated this spectacle. Now, in retrospect I have no idea whether Richard got the note and had it taken away, or whether the fifth grade teacher on the other side of the wall snagged it. (I should ask Rich.) I do know that not long after I was sitting in the principal's office, having a chat with him about my line drawing of two guys swinging each other around by their anatomically exagerated private parts. (A cock-fight of sorts.) I also know that while I usually had a healthy fear of authority growing up, in this case I was aware that I just had to sit through this guy's wigging out because, since he was a friend of my parents, I had it from firsthand info that he had shit for brains. (My wife had that guy as a teacher for some education class a few years later when she was in college, so she found out his head's stuffing the hard way. Gail, you're a tool.) All's well that ends well; at the end of the school year when he was giving out awards to people who had not received any referrals [had not been sent to the office for breaking rules], and this is where I have to interject that there wasn't a Perfect Attendance award (which I would have also received) because the principal's belief was "why would we reward people for coming to school sick?", I got one of those no-trouble awards. He hesitated for a moment as he gave it to me because he knew that I'd been in trouble -- but see, my teacher wasn't involved in this issue so a written referral was never created for it, and neither my friend's teacher nor the principal bothered to write me up because it wasn't their job. No paper trail, the issue was swallowed by the cracks, now suck this and ante up. I displayed that award on my wall proudly all the way through high school.