Crankcase

Two bags of jelly beans, a ten-year old and a Tilt-A-Whirl.

This one is for Howard.

Someone left a can of Play-Doh kicking around the office and I simply couldn't resist. The eyes are actually Jelly Belly jelly beans (sour apple and a perfect color match).

There are no plans of making this a regular bit here, especially since Play-Doh is quite resistant to scultping (it seems to have a "memory" and wants to go back to it's original form).

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/26/04 17:19 | link | comments (4) |

Super Mondo Flashback Time. We spent most of Sunday digging out one of our bedrooms. I can’t figure it out, but somehow one of our bedrooms always ends up as an All Purpose Storage Room. Gift wrap in this corner, an outdated computer in the other. Boxes litter the day bed and a fountain of papers emanate from various bags. Most of it is items that no longer valuable to us (SAT scores, class notes, etc.) but we also find a few diamonds in the rough. Photo albums, T-shirts from long gone concerts, some too rich with memories to ever consider tossing. And for me, the one box I opened was like finding the Hope Diamond in your vegetable crisper: my letters from college.

I graduated from high school in 1991 (you do the carbon dating on my present age) and the Internet was still in it’s infancy then (at least around my neck o’ the woods). Although the web site Something Awful doesn’t usually print something poignant, I thought this article by Richard Kyanka made a good point about the Golden Age of the Internet. Most Internet connections at that time were painfully slow, entirely text based and required at least a good working knowledge of the program or site you were looking at. In other words, it wasn’t the porn infested pop-up ad wasteland it is now. By timing or luck, e-mails didn’t really catch on until my sophomore year in college, so letters were the norm for distant communication. I saved every one of them in a final exam fruit box that sororities would hit up student’s parents for. That box has been staring at me for months now, but yesterday was the first time I really looked in it since the letters were put in there.

The mad sweep of memories almost leaves me giddy. Postcards from friends still in high school. Lengthy correspondence from a Belgian exchange student I got to know my senior year. Mundane little notes from my mother written in that perfect Palmer Method script of hers, detailing weekly events around the house and the hometown. Cards from the Missus back when she was first a friend, then a girlfriend, and then a fiancée. I have photos, not JPEGs, of friends I chatted with in Seattle and LA (both the City of Angels and Louisiana). Long rambling letters from girls I knew, girls I liked, girls I eventually despised or ignored or just let the trail grow cold on. Endless poetry and deep writings from a girl in Canada. Even a note from my father, who writes little and displays feelings even less, penned for a religious retreat I was on. And names. In college, I was horrible with finding out people’s last names. Alumni records don’t help you much when all you know is someone named Sam who might have graduated a year after you. But the envelopes to these letters tell all.

I had a friend named Mary, in fact the first friend whom I met through the Internet first and in real life second. I remember visiting her at her mother’s house an age ago and hanging out for the day. I vaguely remember driving by a lillypad-choked pond to get there. After searching the address from one of her old letters this morning, I find that the address (and the pond) is about a mile from where I currently live. Go figure.

Sadly, the letters thin out as my junior and senior years approached. Many friends had switched to e-mails by then and those that didn’t slowly vanished from memory. Snail mail seemed so old school then.

Now as I peruse through dozens of letters and four great years of my life, I wished I had written more. A lot more. E-mail may have given new speed to the same old letter, but it stripped out a lot of the fringe benefits in the process. Mail on a screen has hardly the same effect as a sheet of paper in your hands. The differences in writing styles, the ink, the edits done with scribbles or even stickers, even the smell of the paper and old envelope glue, nothing can match it.

I think it’s time to revive a dying art. A few of the addresses I checked seem to still have someone living there who might remember me. When the snow starts flying tonight, I’ll dig out some good resume paper and a smooth writing pen and scribble out a few lines and see what comes of them.

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/26/04 13:31 | link | comments |

 Here's the Answer.

It's the Rival Combination Bean Slicer and Pea Huller. No more wasting hard earned dollars on those fency-schmency cans of French cut green beans! Just stick them through this little jobber and it'll turn your fresh green beans into long wet green strings. Appetizing!

I'm not sure how it's supposed to hull peas without turning them into a useless paste. Unless the French have some use for that along with their shoestring green beans. They'd call it something like pate vert and charge a fortune for it.

I do like old farm tools and such, but this one just seems a bit odd even for me. Granted, ones selling on eBay look like they've been lying in a farmer's field since the Dust Bowl, so it may become a nice collector's item. Still is odd, though.

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/22/04 10:53 | link | comments |

Christmas gifts for the damned. This one courtesy of my father-in-law. No, it's not a noisemaker, krazykounselor. Any other guesses folks? The answer tomorrow, now that know how to do this.

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/21/04 18:37 | link | comments (2) |

Okay, I’m back. I had my little hissy fit, sulked in the corner for a day or two and finally came to the realization about why I write. It’s not to build my skills in writing (although it does help sometimes) and it’s not about who reads this or even who comments on this. It’s to write about me and see what I have to say. I know it sounds like this should be coming from some padded cell, but how often do you really think about who you are and what you say and think? Writing is one of those rare gifts that we give ourselves to understand ourselves better. Memories are short, If someone else finds my haphazard groupings of thoughts interesting, great. If not, it couldn’t be helped.

I even went so far as to start up a new blog here. This was not the blog I had originally promised, but something that actually came to me after fixing a small leak in my heater this morning. It’s mostly for homeowners. Renters and condo dwellers might get something out of it, but probably if only to realize why they pay their landlords so much coin.

I also joined a gym. For those of you that know me, the miracle of genetics granted me curves in every place where there should be none. Pear shaped torso, buttocks like the continental shelf, and enormous feet and hands attached to stick-thin ankles and wrists. I look like a lankier version of Homer Simpson (can’t you tell I just exude self-confidence from every pore?). To say I made it into a gym, much less joined one as a member, is no small feat. Fortunately, this gym is much better than most. There are some gorillas present (you know the type: hairy ogres with arms like Popeye who communicate only in a series of grunts and whistles) and some Betties, but mostly it’s just ordinary looking people trying to burn off what the holidays put on them. No sneering looks, no heavy pushing of carbo-this and protein-that for the extra cash, just four walls, some good equipment and people willing to help you at every step. Like I said once before, 2004 is gonna be good for me. Oh-five might find me sleeping in a ditch, but at least I could say I had one good year going for me.

I really wanted to comment on the State of the Union address, but my time runs short and really, most people are going to either elevate it to the status of the Gettysburg Address or poke holes in every syllable Dubya uttered. I will say this: I usually try to watch the SotU and this is the first time I have ever seen at least half of the crowd not applaud a president during the speech, regardless of political affiliation. Normally, the Congress folk try to put on a good face, be it Democrat or Republican, and will stand and applaud when everyone else does. Instead I watched Senator Kennedy openly shaking his head on various comments. Others would simply sit and give a halfhearted, almost sarcastic slow clap or just fold their arms and count the stripes on the flag for the umpteenth time. I can’t be entirely sure, but I think I even heard booing at one point. Equally shocking and an uplifting thought for November. Bush will either win a second term by a blinding landslide or it will be another punch card checking session in some backwater burg.

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/21/04 12:12 | link | comments (1) |

Why do I do this? I really am getting burned out on the whole blog idea right now. I never expected to get movie or book deals out of this (although as mictlan put it, we'd probably all whore ourselves out for the opportunity) but at the very least I thought this would help me to improve my writing skills. If anything, I feel like it has worsened them.

Years back, in what seems like a past life, I was far more creative than I am now. I read incessantly, loved to act, draw, write, and really let my real self hang out for all to see. The "real self" could be wildly moody at times, and sometimes quick to judge, but it also had a far more interesting personality (at least by my take). Something of a mad scientist with the heart of an artist. So, where did this interesting personality go?

I really wish I knew. Some of it got lost trying to deal with being told to "grow up." At six foot one, I was plenty up. I knew what they meant, but I took my late grandfather's words to heart, "The moral of the story is: don't get old." I tried to stay young at heart, kept a fine sense of wonder and magic when and where I could. But reality kept creeping in. I just never seemed to fit in where I went.

The jocks would never accept me. I played soccer since third grade, but was never in fantastic shape nor would I slavishly follow the stats of my favorite baseball or football teams. To this day, I claim the names of a few local teams as my own and keep a few of their players in mind just in case someone asks me, "Didya see the game last night?"

The geeks accepted me, but I never really fit in. They were always discussing the latest in computer upgrades, video games, hacking, Robotech, Dungeons and Dragons, etc. I was always on the fringe of understanding most of what they talked about. I was smart enough to discern a circuit board from a carving board, but that’s where my technical knowledge died out.

The arty group was, well, too arty. They dressed in black or military surplus, listened to bands like The Smiths and Bauhaus, and usually discussed things that seemed either too heavy or bizarre for me to even get a grasp on. I felt like a man without a country.

And the women, well, we all know how old Bill Gates was before he got married. I was about that old when I got to date.

So I rebuilt myself. I learned to dumb down my conversations. I took to music with a vengeance. I sampled parts of this person’s personality, a little facial gesture from this one, a tempo for speaking from another. I was a walking hip-hop remix. I found I could make people laugh and people became like combo locks to me. I just had to come up with the right combination of sarcasm, slapstick, or one-liners to get them laughing. I made friends, went to some of their parties, learned more, and developed myself more. I kept refining myself down until now. The end result?

I still don’t fit in.

I have a great wife, a wonderful dog, a fine house, a good paying job, all the trappings of Middle America right down to the charcoal grill in the backyard. But for this, I gave up my writing, my drawing skills, and the creativity that I thought would leave me alienated for life. Sure, I can work on them, bring them back to their former glory, but it kicks my guts out to see what I used to do and how far my skills have atrophied since then. My drawings look like anemic squiggles. This blog, my only writing outside of work, seems thin and cheap to me. I’ve been told some read it, but the comments bin is usually dry. I feel like my third grade teacher Mrs. Moore will read one of these entries and give me a gold star because I was able to spell ‘vegetable’ correctly on the first try. I started this blog on the advice that I needed an outlet for my creative energy. Now I wonder, what energy?

This may be my last post for the blog, I really don’t know. Maybe someone can tell me what brings in readers. Maybe they can give me an idea on what to improve upon. Maybe they can tell me that there are too many blogs as it is and I should just pack it in while I’m ahead.

That’s all for now…

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/16/04 11:54 | link | comments (2) |

The horror, the horror. First off, numerous apologies for not having anything in here since Sunday. My lies of finding time to do it at home have come back to bite me in the tukhas and leave me with a stinging case of blog rabies. I go for the first of a series of shots tomorrow, but I’ve been told the swelling will go down if I write a few entries.

I’ve got to figure a way to break the cycle of my work week. It starts on Sunday night. Fox is on and we watch from the Simpsons straight on through to Arrested Development. Maybe get up during Bernie Mac or Malcolm to do a load of laundry, but other wise we park our carcasses in front of the Digital Altar for two hours. Two hours of expanding the gluteus maximus (and mine is maximus enough, thank you). The shows finish and often I manage to lay out my plans for Monday. Monday almost requires you to put some forethought into it, kind of like laying siege to a castle. Monday rarely pops open the gates and surrenders to you. No, you’ve got to scale the walls and undermine the ramparts and do it the hard way. Sunday night should find you deep in plans lest ye be late in a car with no gas without a lunch and payday is still four days off. So by the time I lay out a shirt and tie and finish constructing the catapults, we usually make it into bed by 11. A bit late for me, but I’m prepared. Get up with the first alarm (I have several), maybe work out a bit, make it to work on time. Monday’s siege goes well.

Here’s where it starts to fall apart. I’m running on a high from Monday. I come home, have dinner, and maybe catch an ep or two of the Simpsons. Try to do something around the house (lately it’s been ripping out the shoddy Sheetrock work in the basement from a previous owner). Get pumped up on music and good feelings about cleaning the place up and totally lose track of the time. Get to bed late. Wake up Tuesday after a few belts of the snooze button. Skip the workout, shower, dress, find something to call lunch, arrive to work late. Come home late and wanting a little food and a lot of sleep. When Tuesday night rolls around, there’s usually Something We Need To Do Together. Often it’s grocery shopping or errands of one form or another and by the time we’re done, I’m whipped like the family pig.

For those of you out there who are still single, two words of advice: Circadian rhythm. Find someone compatible with the way you run your day. If you get up with the sun, find an early riser. A night owl should find someone to rule the night with. Not so in our happy little home. The Missus has always been a night creature. She can easily stay up until midnight on any given day, while by that time I look like an extra from Night of the Living Dead. By default and commuting times, I am the early riser. Up by 6:30 and out the door an hour later. When I get home I can actually feel my energy drop off as hers starts to pick up. She’ll start vacuuming or baking or doing something at 10PM and I’m ready to hit the silk. Unfortunately, being the guilty-for-being-alive Catholic that I am, I feel obligated to stay up and help with whatever task is at hand. Bad idea.

Wednesday. Hump Day, and what a fine hump it is. Ignore the alarms. Ignore workout plans. Reduce showering time to whatever I can wash in the sink. Hope the can of beef stew I left in the office for lunch in 1999 isn’t bulging with toxins. Arrive to work late. Sleepwork throughout much of the day. Drive home in a trance. Cram some food in my pie hole and hope the idiot box doesn’t catch me deep in its flickering glow. Make it into bed too late regardless.

Thursday and Friday are about as bad, although I’ve reduced my personal hygiene to an extra five coats of deodorant and my couture is down to a pair of jeans I found on the floor and a not-too-wrinkly shirt of some kind. Pullover of course. The fine motor skills for buttoning shirts is gone by Wednesday night.

Saturday I wish would find me swaddled in bed sheets with the dog providing extra heat and the impetus to stay in bed just a little while longer. Rarely that is the case. It’s usually some familial obligation that sees us up before the noonday meal. I take some comfort in an extra hour or two of sleep Saturday night and the process begins anew.

By the way, anyone recognize the movie quote from the first sentence of today’s blog? Anyone? Well, I won’t tell just yet. This gives me fodder for tomorrow’s entry. Toss your guesses in the comments box. Extra credit if you can tell me the actor’s name. Gold star for his character’s name.

Tomorrow: political intrigue!

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/14/04 12:27 | link | comments |

Another home posting, and on a Sunday no less. I’m getting better at finding snippets of time to work this up at home rather than crank out something at blitzkrieg pace while on my lunch hour. There’s always a disparaging amount of time spent between writing something and actually reading it. What takes me an hour to write can be read in five minutes. It’s a wonder why we just haven’t bagged the whole concept in favor of mental telepathy.

And now I can tell you What I Wanted To Do for a New Year’s Resolution. The Discovery Health Channel was sponsoring a National Body Challenge. Show up at a Discovery Store, get weighed in and, for your tireless effort to do just this, they give you a free three-month membership to Bally’s. As it turned out, the closest store was an hour and change away, but on an up note, it was close to a college friend who just recently had her first child. I figured that the weigh-in would either be a teeming mass of the cellulite challenged or three people who happened to hear about it the night before.

I drove up Saturday morning early, hoping to hedge my bets and beat any potential crowd. I pull into the mall parking lot and find it empty. Okay, maybe the mall is closed. Nope, I walk in to find most of the stores shut down and the senior mall walkers out on their morning stroll. Killer, I think. I entered an odd side of the mall (this is not a mall I am familiar with or can very much afford to shop in) but still, there seemed to be no one around except the health walkers and me. Then I turned the corner and found the store. A line of two, maybe three hundred people snaking their way down one walkway and starting to turn back on itself on another. Okay time to bag this idea. I’m hoping to at least find a local gym to join instead.

I browsed around Border’s bookstore for a spell then went on to my friend Lil’ Britches. She was the wife’s roommate in college and also the Titania to my Bottom (heh heh, “bottom”) in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her baby, G, is only a few months old, but gives me an idea of what to expect when we get a screaming little monkey of our own. (Get? Oh yes, have. I meant “have a screaming little monkey of our own.”  Right.) LB was particularly hit hard by having a kid (not that she didn’t want one). She was just a very free spirit who went from doing what she wanted when she wanted to an at home mom with a child who wails almost on cue. Something to think about if one should come our way.

We had a long strange talk on ghosts. It started out talking about what painkillers LB took during labor and proceeded into how anesthesia in older people can potentially produce psychotic episodes (trust me, I’ve seen it happen in person). Then we went on to talking about how I saw ghosts at my wedding. Call me crazed, but I felt my grandparents watching over my wedding rehearsal (the actual wedding was so hot that day I concentrated on the eyes of my Missus to keep from collapsing, so they may have been there, too). The wildest was seeing Jesus behind a rose arbor while at my great-grandmother’s funeral back when I was 7 or 8. I know it sounded hokey, but it looked like every painting you see of The Son: long, flowing hair; long, flowing robes; an arbor with an impossibly large number of roses blooming in a size and color that Jackson and Perkins could only hope to reproduce. Every time I closed my eyes, He would appear near the top of the church rafters. I’d open my eyes to look up and see beams.

Anyone else ever have weird experiences like this, or are you going to send me to a nice room in Greystone Psych?

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/11/04 07:22 | link | comments |

Well, I had to put something in here. It's not from lack of ideas that I haven't been writing; it's lack of time (which tends to be the one near constant in the culling of blogs). There's a project I'm working on (of course I can't spill the details, despite being home when I write this) that basically we won the job by cajoling someone into believing we could do it cheaper than anyone else. And anyone else in this case would be a company in India. 

Granted, this is part and parcel for almost every job imaginable (folks, when you see traffic repairs going on, that's not the best crew out there but more likely the cheapest. Something to think about when you drive over or under a bridge next time). Normally a job like this gets sent out to India (yes, hard to believe that a country that has an idiosyncratic phone system and a hankering for giving a nuclear wedgie to Pakistan is handling our electronic data). Well, my underboss (more on that later) told someone that we could do a job cheaper than India. By "we" he meant "me." On something I've never done before. So I've been burying myself in this job for eight hours a day and trying to keep other barbarian co-workers from crashing my gates and asking for maps or reports or whatever. It always helps my mood when I can picture the office as a game of Risk.

And if this were Risk, our department would be Luxemburg. West Luxemburg to be exact. Our department is actually so small it’s a sub-department. Three guys run all of our GIS work, which is roughly 1 percent of our total company. I was actually a carry-over from East Luxemburg (the environmental end of the department). Technically I’m out on loan, but there’s a better chance of them shipping Lenin’s body to D.C. before I get to slog through another wetland.

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/09/04 06:13 | link | comments (2) |

Suffering a severe case of writer's block here. Any suggestions as to what I should write about? Politics to cartoons, all suggestions welcome.

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/06/04 11:48 | link | comments (5) |

A New Year and a return to the same old dren. I’m hoping that’s not the case; I’ve got some big resolution’s shoes to fill this year. Maybe because it’s an even year or just because I feel like I’m hitting my stride, but I feel this will be a year of big changes for me and for everyone else. I say this after spending the bulk of my holiday off time sleeping, eating or watching the idiot box (ooh, Mummers!). And we all know how productive that trifecta is. Fortunately, most of my resolutions are long range in nature so January didn’t start out as a complete downer.

We did meet one of out short range resolutions and finally saw the Lord of the Rings. Funny, our watching the movies oddly paralleled the story itself. The first movie was seen with a bunch of long standing friends (much like Merry, Pippin and Gandalf). The Two Towers brought us a whole new group of friends (mostly co-workers of mine, we’ll consider them the Elves and the Ents). The final chapter came down to the two of us, Frodo and Missus Sam. We loved the movie overall, although sometimes I think the scenery and CGI work actually outdoes the story line here. Granted, Tolkien had stretched himself out pretty thin by this point in the books and had a lot of loose ends to tie up before the last page. The only complaint I could level was the ending, or should I say endings. Peter Jackson originally thought it best to wrap up the story at various points along the way, but after making a dozen different endings, he couldn’t decide on which one to use. Rather than choose, he used them all. This decision makes the last 30-45 minutes of watching seem as interminably long as the Ents trying to give the Gettysburg Address. Several fade out shots for no real reason (it’s pretty easy to pick out where half of the dozen endings begin and, uh, end). There were also enough slow motion shots that I could type this blog entry without missing a minute of useful footage and, after the last major battle, it just was a long plodding trek to the final credits. Kind of like the books, but with better visuals.

posted by: Jiggsy at 01/05/04 12:19 | link | comments (1) |