At The Lake

It appears I have told an untruth.

Not a lie mind you, a lie being the intentional telling of an untruth. I told an untruth, but it was not intentional. This does not mean that I might not occasionally present the truth from my own unique perspective, just that in this case, it was unintentional.

The more perceptive of you will have already figured out what I am talking about.

In my buildup of The Lake Quinalt Lodge I said there was no WIFI. Since I am here typing on my BLOG, that must not be true. I brought along my laptop to work on a book I am writing, and (let's be honest) play games. When I fired it up, a message came on that there was a signal available, and did I want to use it. Heck yes!

Friday when we got here the temperature was up in the 60's the sun was shining,and it was gorgeous. For this time of year that is exceptional. We were tired fron work and tired from the trip so we went to the room and took a nap, then went for a short walk and went to dinner. I had the prime rib, she had the Salmon, and we had a bottle of Asti with dinner. When we finished I walked around and took some pictures of the Lodge the Lake and the Sunset. Some of them are good enough to share, which I can't do at the moment, since I forgot the adaptor from the camera to the laptop, which I figured I wouldn't need since I would have no Internet connection.

Today we went on a hike of about three and a half miles, mostly up and down. Mrs A has better legs, but I have better lungs, but we both did pretty well. I am a little stiff and sore this evening.

The other things we did, while they might be interesting, are not going to be shared. Suffice it to say people might wonder just why the people in 303 seem to always keep the shades drawn.

Of course this is the Rain Forest, so you can guess what it has done all day, but it hasn't bothered us, after all we came prepared with rain gear. And when in the unit, the sound of rain on the roof is very cozy and restful, since we don't have to go out in it.

Wait a minute?!

What's that?

You want to WHAT???

Guess I'd better sign off for now!

Temporarily Disfunctional

This is my current wallpaper on my computer at work. If all is well, I will be there tomorrow. That is the Amazing Mrs A. in the picture. In the background is Lake Irene in the Olympic National Park. It is a moderate hike of about a mile off of the road up the North Fork of the Quinault River. This day was perfect for hiking, so we had gone up the trail several miles, and stopped in at the Lake on out way back.

It was very serene there. There was a herd of Elk grazing in the rushes on the other side of the lake. A bumblebee landed on my knee, and sat there and let me pet him for several minutes. We did not see or hear another human being for the hour or so we stopped there.

It is interesting that women always want to know who the woman is in the picture, men always want to know where the lake is. Guess we are just wired differently.

So mybrain is leaving on vacation now, soon to be followed by the rest of me. I wont be posting for a couple of days, since there are no amenities like wifi or cable connections. The Lodge does not have television, and there are no phones in the rooms. There is no cell phone service. I will probably take my laptop along just in case I want to write on my book, but doubt I will accomplish anything. I am reading George R.R. Martins "A Feast for Crows" so it will be my first choice of activities after hiking and eating and naughty stuff (not necessarily in that order).

I'm taking the camera. hope to bring back some good pictures.

NO NOT OF THE NAUGHTY STUFF!!!!!!!

Lake Quinault

I remember a morning at the Lodge so clearly, it is a part of a little mental slide show I carry around in my head.

I had gotten up at 6:00 in the morning. We were staying in the Boathouse, so I went out on the veranda. It seemed like I was the only one in the world awake. The dew was heavy on the grass and there was just the faint smell of woodsmoke in the air.

I sat in a wicker chair and smoked a cigarette. It was so calm that the smoke barely drifted in the morning breeze. I blew a smoke ring and it held together for a long time as it drifted south.

Smoke finished, I got up and wandered down to the dock on Lake Quinault. The water was so calm it looked like a sheet of glass. Small fish were rising to the morning hatch, dimpling the surface here and there. Out in the middle of the lake, a bit of surface fog slowly drifted across the water. The far shore of the lake was obscured, cleared, was obscured. It was absolutely quiet.

I turned back to look at the Lodge and the rise of the lawn. Nothing moved. A sole set of footprints dotted the lawn. Mine.

I caught a suggestion of movement off to my left and watched as a pair of carp came out of the shadows, moving South, working the shallows. The must have been six or seven ounds apiece, moving with no effort, drifting along.

I heard a noise behind me, sounding like a splatter of rain and as I turned, caught the shimmer of a school of small fish jumped in a wave, a lot like when fans do "The Wave" at sports events. The wave of fingerlings jumping started at the North and went South. This was repeated multiple times, accompanied by a "Whish" sound as they jumped. No doubt there was a larger fish below them looking for his breakfast. I stood there, absolutely still, drinking in the moment.

Eventually all was still, and I wandered back up to the Boat House, and slipped in, to see you laying there, faint hint of a smile on your lips, hair spilled across the pillow.

I go back there to visit when things get cramped and complicated.

Happy Birthday Mrs A.

So today is Mrs A.'s birthday. She has now been 39 for several years, and I hope she will continue to celebrate her 39th for many years to come.

So the kids are coming over to celebrate her birthday, and it will be a hectic evening.

For her birthday, I am taking her to the Lake Quinault lodge for the weekend . No televisions or phones in the rooms. Lots of hiking trails and massive peace and quiet. Just what we both need. This is the place where we went for our first "weekender", where I proposed to her, and where we went after we were married. We have been back a several other times since. What a beautiful peaceful place. It is also out 3rd anniversary this weekend, so who knows, we may never leave the lodge.

Anyway, Happy 39th Birthday Mrs A., and many more.

New Deck

I have lived at AlPlace for about 15 years now. An extensive remodel was done shortly before I bought The Place. Unfortunately, the guy who did the remodel should have chosen some other line of work. It is obvious that no inspection was done for parts of the work.

I have some real homeowners terror tales to tell. The movie Money Pit comes to mind, but on a less grand scale.

AlPlace is on three floors and totals about 2580 Sq. Ft. Add on a couple of decks and 1/4 acre of crabgrass and dandelions, and that is my little corner of the world.

The main problem is that ever since I bought The Place, I have been fixing one problem after another. When something happens, it is always about ten times as hard to repair because what is wrong at the moment is only the tip of the iceberg.

Take the downstairs bathroom for example.

About six or seven years ago R. was taking a shower when this horrible screeching began in the bathroom. It was R., and part of the shower stall had fallen in on her. Now I suppose I could have gone and gotten a tube of Gorilla glue and just glued it back together, but I had always been uneasy about quality of materials and workmanship in the bathroom so I took it as an opportunity to check out the whole room.

After rewiring the entire bathroom, putting in a new sink and medicine chest, new flooring, a new shower surround and tile, and sectioning the wall up 3' all the way around the tub, four months and a couple of thousand dollars had disappeared.

That year R. gave me a Father's day card that said "How many fathers does it take to change a lightbulb?".

"Only one, but he has to replace the fixture, lower the ceiling and rewire the room, so it will take him several months"

Just about every project I have undertaken at AlPlace has been that way. Major problems hidden beneath a questionable surface.

Well, replacing the deck is the last major issue left at AlPlace. Oh there will always be a stream of minor things to take care of, but all of the major things will have been accomplished.

I just may have to sell it and start all over.

Back to the basics

I didn't post anything Friday because I was in a class half the day, and had a day's worth of work waiting for me when I got back.

Today I am tired, sore and grouchy.

Usually when I feel this way it is because I have done something like party too hard, but a WHOLE HOUR OF MY SLEEP WAS BRUTALLY TAKEN FROM ME.

Well, maybe not quite that dramatic, but it is gone and never will be recovered.

besides I am sore from my Sunday chore, pulling the toad. No, that is not what you may think. It's nothing like choking the chicken or spanking the monkey, or pounding the meat.

It means removing the toilet. I pride myself in being able to handle any chore that comes up around the house. I have rewired most of the house, replumbed the kitchen, completely rebuilt the upstairs bathroom, built a deck. The thing I hate doing the most is plumbing, and the lowest of the low is anything to do with sewer. I remember the time my ex said "Did you know that when you flush the toilet, water comes up in the back yard?" I still shudder.

The downstairs toilet is continually getting clogged. It is a modern low profile low volume device, so I suspected that it was the toilet design rather than a clogged line, but I have put off checking for better than ten years. That is a pretty accurate indicator about how much I dislike working on toilets.

But I finally got around to it, mainly because Mrs A. put it on the honeydo list. Since it had been in place since long before I owned the house, everything was rusted in place. Rather than being just able to disassemble things, I had to cut it apart with an abrasive wheel. And naturally there was no room to get at things, so I got to contort my body into all sorts of unreasonable positions. This did not go over well with my right arm, seeing as I had surgery on it in October, and while it is 90%, it is definitely not 100%. And that other 10% is always what I need when doing something while draped over the toilet trying to grind the head off of a bolt or something.

What should have taken about 30 minutes, instead took about four hours of cursing, swearing and sweating.

In the end, there was nothing wrong that I could fix. The problem was the design of the toilet itself. At least if I go to replace the toilet, it will be a piece of cake to get it out.

On more thing off of the to-do list.

Next big thing: design and build a new deck off of the living room. I might have to enlist help for this one.

My Life as a Chicken Hypnotizer.

So in yesterday's post, I put in that I was a Chicken Hypnotizer. I felt like a fisherman that had approached a perfect piece of water and floated a gorgeous dry fly, just KNOWING it would get a bite.

BUT NOOOOOO!

Not even a nibble.

Was it just too obvious? Or too far fetched?

Doesn't matter anyway. Once I have set down a particular path, I follow it to the end.

When R. was small, I decided that she could use a little experience in the feeding and care of farm animals, but since we live in a more-or-less urban area, although it is unincorporated, there are some restrictions on what you can do, not to mention the restrictions on space (I only have 1/4 acre).

I was tearing an old dilapidated deck off of the house, so I used the pieces to build a chicken coop in the back yard. Then we went down to the feed and seed store, and bought a couple of Banty chicks that became Rusty and Dusty, our two laying hens.

R was fascinated that without benefit of a male chicken for inspiration, they would produce eggs on a regular basis. Not only that, they weren't white or brown like normal store bought eggs, they were a grey-green and smaller. She used to like to take hard boiled Banty eggs to school because most people had never seen anything but regular eggs.

One day she had a couple of friends over, and she was showing them the chickens, and I asked them "Do you know it is possible to hypnotize a chicken"

"NO WAY! Could show us?"

So I did.

Later R. asked me "Dad, where did you learn to hypnotize chickens?"

As I have mentioned ad nauseum, we had a farm, and raised all kinds of things. We always had two batches of chickens, One batch of laying hens, one batch of fryers. One of the kids jobs was to go out to the hen house in the morning and gather the eggs and feed the chickens. It was always a little like a treasure hunt, because you never knew what you were going to find, Taking the eggs away from the hens could be an adventure too, as some of them took objection to us removing their eggs. After all it wasn't easy producing them.

The fryers life was short and pretty good. They were fed and watered and didn't have to produce anything to earn their keep, just put on weight. The down side was that before things froze up in the fall, would come slaughter day.

Everyone hates slaughter day. It is nasty, smelly work, but it puts food in the freezer for all winter.

The little kids were chicken catchers. Grandfather was the headsman. Uncle Fred and Dad were the gutting crew, and everyone else were Chicken Pluckers. It was our own little assembly line.

My job was Chicken Hypnotizer.

After the little kids caught a chicken, they would bring it to me. I would stick it's head underneath it's wing and then pump it (the whole bird) up and down for about 30 seconds. Then you could set it down on the ground and it would stay where you set it. Eventually it would sort of shudder, pull it's head out and look around like "Where the hell am I?", but on slaughter day, they generally never came around. If they started to, I would just grab them before they got any ideas about running off, and rehypnotize them.

It always caused me to wonder "How did someone figure this out? It would seem logical that it would be someone who wanted to transport chickens quietly and easily. Like maybe a Chicken Thief? How did my grandfather, who was from the hills of Kentucky and taught me the fine art of chicken hypnotizing happen to be in possession of this particular bit of information?"

I never did get around to asking him this. I'll bet he learned if from his grandfather, too.

I have always wanted to put this on my resume'. Chicken Hypnotizer. That alone should be good for a first interview, and once you get your foot in the door anything is possible.

I have never found a use for this very rare skill in the modern world. I mean you can't exactly pick up a newspaper, and there on page 13 of the classified ads you find "Wanted: Chicken Hypnotizer. Full time. Full benefits. Must be experienced. Top Wages."

Any one need a perfectly good barely used Chicken Hypnotizer?

Claim Jumper

I confess, I am a claim jumper. Not one of my most notable accomplishments, such as Chicken Hypnotizer (I always wanted to put that on a resume'), but something that not everyone can say.

When I was in college I wanted to build a cabin in the woods. A place to get away from everything a la Thoreau. Since I live within driving distance of a lot of National Forest, a couple of friends and I did a little research on the mineral laws of the area.

If you have a working mineral claim on National Forest land, you can build a cabin on it so you can work your claim.

Once it has been established that there are minerals on the claim worth recovering, you can claim the land, build your cabin. To keep the claim active, all you have to do is either do $100.00 worth of improvements on the land, or extract $100.00 worth of minerals. Neither one is very difficult to do.

So how do you establish that there is mineral content on your chosen piece of property?

With a little research, we found an area alongside Blewett pass that has placer gold claims all over the place. Most of the mineral content has been mined out, but the claims are still there.

We went to the Hall of Records, and searched for a claim that had not been filed on for five years, and filed a new claim over the top of the old one (Claim Jumping). Then all we had to do was go out to the claim and put our marker in place, and Voila' we were mine owners.

Our claim was at the confluence of Pipe and Swuak Creeks, was fairly level, and would make a wonderful location for a cabin.

We started making plans for the cabin, water supply, heat.

Then one day as I was reading the paper, I saw a notice that the area on both sides of the road through Blewett Pass had been declared a National Scenic Area, and no new construction would be allowed within 1,000 feet of the hiway.

We had missed our window of opportunity. If we had gone and thrown up a tarpaper and plywood shack, we would have been allowed to improve it, but as things were, we just missed it.

And here I had become a Claim Jumper and gotten nothing out of it. We went over and panned a little gold, just for the fun of it, but let the claim revert to the State.

Thus ended my career as a Prospector/Claim Jumper.

OH Yeah

I'm a Ferrari 360 Modena!

You've got it all. Power, passion, precision, and style. You're sensuous, exotic, and temperamental. Sure, you're expensive and high-maintenance, but you're worth it.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

No Mexico

Looks like we won't be going to Mexico in August like we were hoping. Two things happened simultaneously.

First, Step-son R. called, and he has an opportunity to get into his own home. He is a little short on the down payment, so the money we were setting aside will be going to him for the downpayment. We have spent a lot more for the other kids on things that didn't have such a positive reason, like divorces and DWIs.

Right at the same time, my uncle Ben e-mailed to say that the house would not accommodate all of us at the same time. Looks like it was not in the cards for us to go this time.

Not bad for a Monday

The reason today is not a bad day for a Monday, is the weather is great, and I didn't go to work. Not that I was sick or anything. V. had a medical appointment and they told me to schedule a couple of hours, and it didn't make a lot of sense to me to get up at zero dark thirty, work a couple of hours, get off and go to the appointment, grab sone lunch and go back for a couple of hours.
Besides, I ironed out the electrical problems in the Z and it needed a shakedown run, and I needed to get new tabs for it, too.
A good enough batch of excuses huh?
No, really!
You know you would have done the same!

OOOHHHH The lights!

We have a light tower right behind my work area that is a status tool. Green light on the bottom, yellow flashing light in the middle, magenta light on top. It is an airplane status indicator.

The light system went coo-coo this afternoon. All the sudden, all the lights went on at once. We had no indicators that anything was wrong, just all the sudden all the lights went on. Shortly after that the phone started ringing from people who wanted to know what was going wrong.

After about the third call I was less than enthusiastic with my replies. After about the ninth it became: "We are currently experiencing a disturbance in the space/time continuum which is causing crossover between the coils. This is allowing crossover between alternate realities, allowing several different expressions of reality to exist simultaneously. Thus the airplane is well, we are investigating a problem, and the line is stopped all at the same time. Either that or by the principle of Occam's Razor, the light is F%^&*()ed up."

I know visitors to Alville will be shocked that I stooped to sarcasm, but we all have our off days.

At least I didn't break out the dead blow hammer and can of Whoop Ass.

Mexico?????

I received an e-mail from my cousin, Ginger yesterday saying that she and her husband and my Uncle are going to Mexico in August to visit my Unle Ben and Aunt Pat. He is a History Professor at the College of Michoacan in Morelia. She asked if Mrs A. and I would like to go along.

I have been wanting to go back ever since Mrs A. and I went down there on our honeymoon.

Trouble is, we are already going to Mexico with a Church group in July, so getting the money together for both trips will stretch the budget to the max, but it is doable.

My first impulse is to just go for it. An opportunity like this doesn't come along every day. The airfare is about $2200.00 for V and me and Mrs A., but once we got there, we would be staying with my Uncle, so no hotel fees. We would be expected to take them out to dinner and stuff, but a dollar goes a long way down there. I figure we would have about $800.00 spending money. I don't see how we can turn down the opportunity, even if it means we eat bread and beans for a while.

Got to practice up on the essentials

"Otra cervesa por favor!"

"Donde es el bano?"

Fortune

Your Fortune Is

Man with hole in pocket feel cocky all day.

The Wacky Fortune Cookie Generator

So I stole this from Daphnewood. The fortune generator, not the fortune!

I did not do anything to influence the fortune generated, so I won't be held responsible.

GET YOUR MIND OUT OF THE GUTTER. YEAH YOU! YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE! KEEP YOUR HANDS IN PLAIN SIGHT!!

Mayhem and Chaos

I was going over to pick up my daughter yesterday so she could do laundry and cut my hair. As I went along the way, I passed a house that had several cop cars and a couple of TV crews. The house was cordoned off with crime tape. They were still there when I came home.
We turned on the news when we got home, and found out that one of Vs classmates had murdered his grandmother. We are talking a 13 year old kid here. It raises all sorts of questions for which I have no answers.
What drives a 13 year old to kill? Medical evidence says that the frontal lobe is the last part of the brain to develop. Therefore teenagers are only marginally capable of rational thought. My personal observations agree pretty closely with this. Neighbors say he complained that his Grandma wouldn't let him go out and play until he did his homework. Yesterday was the first day on Spring and a beautiful day. Sounds like ample reasons for killing your Grandma to me!
Do you try him as an adult? Tough one to call. Some 13 year olds are just little kids, some are pretty mature. The law suggests that if you are capable of formulating a plan and executing it, you can be tried as an adult. If you try a 13 year old as an adult and he is convicted, you have put him in the great garbage can of society. The chance he can ever become a functioning member of society is so slim as to be non-existent. But if you try him as a juvenile, he basically gets away with murder. He goes to some summer camp of a detention facility for a couple of years,, gets counseling and gets out at 18. Has he been punished and rehabilitated? Or has he been taught how to be a more effective criminal?
V. has this great underlying rage. There are times you can see it peeking out from under his actions. He is a pretty passive kid, but if you are observant, it is pretty obvious. The fact that he is failing two classes is because he doesn't like the classes and teachers. Not doing or turning in his homework is a direct manifestation of his anger.
So Thursday night he gave me his latest progress report. Two Fs. I asked him to explain to me why he was failing, but he couldn't or wouldn't explain. So Friday night I made him sit down with a blank piece of paper, and told him he needed to explain to me why he was failing. He told me he didn't want to. I told him I really didn't care if he wanted to or not, he was going to. After that it only took a couple more hours to get him to actually DO anything. At the end he wrote a half a page. It scared the crap out of me. Such vitriol!
It would be just peachy keen fine with him if the majority of his classmates would die, and he wouldn't do a thing to prevent it. Might even help initiate it. Ditto for some of his teachers. I knew there was this underlying rage, but I had no idea it was this pervasive.
At any rate I called up our Health Care Provider yesterday and set up for him to see a Psychologist at an Adolescent Treatment Facility. I am not forcing this on him, this is something he has agreed to. He knows he is unhappy and angry, but has no idea what to do about it.
Maybe they can give him some answers.

Spring

Today is the first day of Spring, Wahooooo!
I love it when the flowers start coming out and things start budding and blooming. We have some crocuses blooming and I have a Tibetan Magnolia that is budding. Can't wait for all the Spring flowers to bloom. The ornamental cherry and early plum are in bloom, as well as the forcythia.
Had a real good weekend. We finally got around to making egg rolls. So we made like 120 egg rolls while we watched "Good Night and Good Luck" which is the story of Edward R. Murrow and his group standing up to McCarthy in the 50s. Man they had some cojones! McCarthy was one of the most powerful men in the U.S. at the time, and was the head of the House Committee on Unamerican Activities. They were a bunch of commie hunting fanatics who would have done well in the Salem Witch Trials. Good Movie, but not real entertaining.
Then on Sunday we had out daughter R. and her friends over for a late St. Patrick's Day dinner. Corned beef and cabbage with potatoes and garlic bread. I'm afraid I overindulged in the spuds.
So today would be the Equinox, right. Day and night of equal length.

St. Patrick's Day

So Happy St. Patrick's day. Go hoist a pint. Today everyone is honorary Irish.

I grew up believing that we were Irish, mostly. Oral history held that the Warrens came over fro Ireland with Lord Baltimore's son and helped found the colony of Maryland in like 1695. It was with great dismay that I found out that the Warrens that migrated were most likely English Catholics, not Irish at all. From there I discovered that the Warrens were probably not English either, but Norman. The duc De Varren participated in the Norman invasion of England and the Warrens were minor nobility in England.
Holy crap!
I was more likely related to The Sheriff of Nottingham than Robin Hood! My whole idea of who I was came crashing down. Not able to leave it there, I trudged on through History.

The Normans were the people living in Normandy. The land in that part of France had been ceded to them by the King in a treaty, mainly because he couldn't control them. The were the "North Men" or Normans. The northern coastal region was occupied by the invading and raiding Vikings, who intermarried with the locals and controlled the area.
Now this I could identify with. Raiding berserker Viking. Oh yeah!
Luckily my mother's side of the family had some Irish in it, so now on St. Patrick's day I can be an Irish/Norman Berserker Viking.

Have one for me.

Underwear Story

So, when I stopped by The Peanut Queen's Blog this morning, she had posted this hilarious underwear story http://stacy68.blogspot.com/. This brought to mind an underwear story of my own:

Bats in my underwear

My first wife, the truly evil Mrs. A. and I had just gotten married, and were staying at her parent's cabin on Herron Island. That is not a misspelling, the island was not named after the bird, but Captain Herron who had owned the island at one time. We were sleeping on a hide-a-bed couch in the living room and had stayed up late watching horror movies. All the sudden she stiffens up and whispers "There's something in here." Being the sensitive, caring guy I am I said "Yeah, sure. You've just been watching too many scary Movies".
"No there it is again!!!."
"Holy shit, you're right!"
All I was wearing was a pair of old ratty jockeys, but I jumped up and flicked on the light. There was a bat flying around the inside of the cabin looking desperately for a way out.
There was a salmon net on the wall, so I grabbed it and started swinging it around trying to catch the bat. Jumping on furniture, knocking things over, Mrs A. screaming at the top of her lungs.
Of course we woke up her parents. So here they come tearing out of the bedroom to the sight of their brand new son-in-law running frantically around the living room in nothing but his jockeys waving a salmon net in the air. They didn't see the bat right away, so they must have thought I had lost my mind.
About this time the bad found a way out and everything settled down to the point I realized I was standing there half nekkid in front on my mother-in-law with a salmon net in my hand. I started laughing my ass off, thereby convincing them that I had lost my mind, an opinion they never fully recovered from.

Family

No one can get under your skin quite like family. Mrs A. and daughter-in-law have been at war since Thanksgiving. I adopted my grandson V. several years ago. At the time my son was not in a position to be able to take care of him. Since then he has remarried, and when he did, I let V. go live with him and his new wife. Soon after they got married we started receiving complaints about how difficult it was to raise a kid. Those complaints accelerated until we were asked to take him back, which we did. I was extremely disappointed in the situation, but I love my grandson and if it is my fate to raise him, I will embrace that challenge.
DIL didn't talk to V. for six months after he came back to live with us,because "her feelings were hurt". Then she got in touch and said she was better, so she wanted to start seeing V. again. She wanted to be his "mom". She didn't want to raise him or discipline him or be responsible for him, she just wanted to be free to come and get him whenever it was convenient, reap all the rewards of being "mom" and then dump him back on us. We let her know that she could have a role in Vs life, but that it wasn't "mom". Mom is the one that gets him up in the morning and off to school, makes him do his chores, is there for him 24/7. That is Mrs. A. and she is the only one in his short life that has really filled that role. So Mrs A. tried to make amends, and it cost her a lot of effort to let by-gones be by-gones. I was proud of her that she had the grace and fortitude to make that step. Unfortunately DIL has very nastily refused any overtures of reconciliation.
So, this morning I sent an e-mail to DIL to say that she had effectively resigned as Vs "mom" when she sent him to live with us, and so she has no say in any decisions regarding him, that I will back Mrs. A. one hundred percent. It may be that this will cost me my relationship with my son, but if he chooses to support her childish behavior, so be it.
Damn this all sucks!

Full Moon

I came in this morning, and right out of the box, went into full tirade. We use 16 channel radios to communicate with each other. It saves a lot of time and walking to just be able to turn to the appropriate channel and talk to whoever you need to. My flow day has about 18 radios. They need to go back on the charger at the end of shift for a couple of hours to recharge. When I got in this morning there were 8 radios in the charger. The top charger had four radios in it. Only thing was, the whole machine was unplugged. Now the machine has lights that come on when you plug in the radios, so if you plug in the radio and no light comes on THIS IS A CLUE THAT SOMETHING IS WRONG.
The other four radios were jammed in the chargers in such a way that they were not making contact with the charging electrodes, hence, no lights were on and the radios were dead. This is not rocket science. This is not even science 101 (Bonehead science). So I went off. I feel much better now.
I noticed that everyone I had run into this morning was in a pissy mood, so I checked my official Lord of The Rings Calendar, and, sure enough tonight is a full moon. So I have read and seen that there is statistical support for Lunacy. Increased admissions to Mental Institutions, Increased Suicide rates, increased domestic violence on the full moon. Anyone have any observations?