summer:
2005-06-17 - 11:38 p.m.
...the season that goes best with red meat and red wine.
father's day is this upcomming weekened, and i am reminded of gernades. when he was in boot camp, my father was on a test range for gernade throwing, and with his senior officer right beside him, he accidently dropped the gernade and threw the pin. movies have been made about such men. songs have been sung.
snowy mounain is the second highest peak in the adirondacks. it's even higher when you're climbing it in the rain, if you include the slippage factor. when we got to the top, we set up camp, piled up wood that we ended up not lighting on fire, and everyone else tried to get to sleep while i succeeded. we also checked out the fire tower while we were there, and found the inscription: "i fucked twins here"..."and peed of this" by an annonymous hiker. the next morning while canoeing, we [mitch, mike, and i] came to the conclusion that it is possible to fuck three twins at one time. because they don't all have to be twins of each other. the following day, we went to NYC, took a stroll in central park, and went on to the Metropolitan [chocolate, strawberry, and quarried stone, as opposed to neopolitan] museum. the pizza in NYC really wasn't really to die for. the best part was that the suggested donation for the Met is 7$. so i haggled for two with the button_passer_outer_lady, and after gas and tolls and food, ended up paying for the whole thing with bottles i'd recycled the day before. The day after that was the opening night of 'Star Wars: Return of the Sith'. It was quite a few days of fun outing stuff, and was extremely fun.
Related Revelation: i sometimes take for granted that there are people who will knock on my door and insist that i get out of my apartment every now and then.
sometime in may, after fixing the brakes. i'd just given a name to my car the day before it broke, or so the story always goes. Shallow Blue. like Deep Blue the chessplaying computer, but not quite as personable. i was driving with Mitch and Jackson in the car, headed for the interstate , when the person in front of me slammed on their brakes, causing me to do the same. the new brakes i put in the front worked well. so well that the frame ripped apart under the tension, and the ti rod came loose, turing the wheel sideways and permanently immobilizing the vehicle. we redirected traffic around the vehicle (it refused to be pushed and took a bite out of my hydraulic jack) for thirty minutes until the cop showed up, who prompty stopped all traffic by putting his vehicle in the middle of our redirection route. after realizing he wasn't going to win the popularity contest, he began to redirect traffic himself. i got a ticket for driving an uninspected vehicle (100$) and being a smart ass (priceless). so began the next great car search.
"when i grow up, i want to be my own brain child." -Nemo
mitch has graduated, he now has a bachelor's degree in physics. security was suprisingly low [i walked past three 'secret' service persons while circumventing the front gate] considering hilary clinton was the speaker (and even more suprising, she gave a decent speech, about how government higher-ups frequently pay off scientists to skew results in energy conservation studies, which has been a major cause of the united states to keep using the same old, stupidly inefficient and dangerous fuels that make us give them more money). the afterparty consisted of me, mike, mike's parents, mitch's parents, mitch's brother and his wife, and a couple other realatives he's never really seen before. we drank beer and played horseshoes.
sometime about the start of june, mitch nearly broke his leg, trying to go up a steep hill over a big branch on a four-wheeler. he's walking on it now [a week later], and the doctors are baffled that he didn't fracture anything.
"squares have legs, too." -Nemo
invention#45: the HEXadvance. like a gameboy advance but instead of the normal 4-way directional pad, it has a 6-way directional pad. especially good for USB parties of battletech (tm). and of course, it would be completely compatible with gameboy and gameboy advance protocols, so you could ignore one of the axes and play, for example, "ogre tactics: kights of lodis" and the skewed 2,5 dimensions start to make sense.
invention#46: the wocket protector. it's a little plastic bucket, in which you put your wocket. then the wocket you put in your pocket, so other people don't sock it. that wocket would fly away in a rocket, if you didn't put in your pocket. because once lost, a wocket is a hard thing to pocket, unless you sneak up on it and knock it.
Dream of the Sirs (as dissembodied voices playing an RPG). I was at work in a state of half-sleep, dreaming of scenarios for campaigns in modern settings with minimum-wage workers as characters. To protect the idenity of the characters, the names of the players will be used, as often happens in RPGs anyways, when the players choose hard-to remember names. The players (Joe, Dave, and Sam) will be played by Sir#2, the DM (Harold) will be played by Sir#1, and I will be playing the Sirs. Paraphrased, of course.
Sir#1(H): Okay, all set. You guys are all working at Doug's Warehouse, which is sort of like an eastcoast mom-and-pop version of an Amco, everything from bird food to spray paint. You're are working graveyard shift as you have many times before, but as the sun sets you realize something is different tonight, there's something deadly in the air-
Sir#2(J): *lets out a flaming poot-on-command and smiles maniacally*
Sir#2(D): 'gawd, stop doing that! anyways, as i was trying to say, my character is an ex-cowboy, who used to ride bulls but had a couple of his ribs pulverized so now he has to have a lame warehouse job. he's got metal plates or rods to replace roughly a quarter of his bones and he's the fastest tape dispenser gun in the east.'
Sir#2(S): *comes in late, bearing chips and soda* 'my character is a...' *reading from sheet*: '"scrawny whiteboy who spends all his spare time on the internet searching for ex-cons to grant him raw ass pleasure." you guys suck.'
Sir#2(J): *roaring laughter* 'my guy is a burly ex-convict who has latent psychic powers and can only speak spanish. his hobbies include making Sam his bitch.'
Sir#1(H): *after a stint of nothing being done gamewise* 'okay, so by now it's dark outside, Sam is on the forklift of magical vibration, and Dave and Joe, you guys are near the door loading stuff onto pallets. suddenly, the power goes out, silencing the tunes from the "rock-shock-weekend" radio show. it'll be a couple minutes before the emergency lights come on. Dave, off to the left of the building you hear grunting and huffing noises, like a bull makes just before they open the gates.'
Sir#2(D): *turns to Joe* 'did you hear that?' *turns to Harold* 'I'm gonna go close the door, before some crazy pigcow gets in here.'
Sir#2(J): 'i'm gonna reach around near me; anying i could use as a weapon? then i want to dive underneath the door before it closes.'
Sir#1(H): 'okay. Dave, you hit the button. Joe, you grab a shovel, 1d3 damage with a crit of 20-20 x5. You roll underneath the door just as it starts on it's way down which would have looked completely foolish, but no one notices because it's pitch black, and you're a mexican. amid a ruckus of hooves-on-cement, a shadow even darker than the night zips by you on the other side of the door, huffing and grunting. Sam, since he doesn't actually want to play his character, bumps into a shelf with the forklift. some boxes fall to the ground, taking 1d6 damae each. *rolls* A box of cheese doodles bursts open! the door closes with a crankish thud.'
Sir#(D): 'so, there's a wild beast in here with us, eh? i'm gonna jump on it, soon as i find it! i brandish my tape dispenser and try to locate it's location, by the sound of it's hooves...'
Sir#(J): 'is there like, a powertool section where i could get a really big weapon? i search around for that.'
Sir#1(H): 'Dave, as the emergency lights flicker on, you see the beast. it's a patch of solid darkness, a real Maine moose, 12 feet tall and weighing more than three tons. Foam drips from it's mouth and it's eye spiral out of control. It is obviously either rabid, or it's mating season. You watch in horror as it mounts the forklift! *d20* you hear the crunch of the cage breaking, and agonizing screaming from Sam's character! *rolls some really big dice* Sam has been beaten to death with a giant moose wang! oh yea, and Joe, you find a battery-operated jackhammer.'
Sir#2(J): *sarcastic sniffle* 'it's the way he would have wanted to die...'
Sir#2(S): 'that's not fair! Joe gets a jackhammer, and i get raped by a strange moose?!?!'
Sir#1(H): *Shhct* 'Sam, your new character is Doug, the owner of the warehouse. you have a clipboard with your favourite doodles on it, and a hard hat that gives you an armour class of 1. you need to find out who turned off the lights in your office, and fire them.'
Sir#2(S): 'awesome, now i can go kick some ass, ninja business style!'
Sir#1(H): 'Doug, the owner of the store, walks in from the back stairs, just as the satan-moose lets out a bellowing mating call. it echoes and reverberates inside Doug's helmet, causing him to stumble and fall down the stairs, where he lands in a heap of broken bones, dead. Sam, make another character.'
Sir#2(S): 'what's the point? you're just gonna kill him anyways. this is so dumb, you're only killing my characters because i showed up late.'
Sir#1(H): *feigning a thoughtful pause* 'i'm sorry Sam. i mean, after all, it is my job to make sure everyone has fun. your new charcter will be the local sheriff, level 4, complete with full riot gear armour, a MFG +5 versus chocolate mooses, a sexy haircut, a house with a white picket fence, and a tricked-out dodge mustang that you use as your cruiser.'
Sir#2(S): 'okay...so i step out of the cruiser, make sure all my riot gear is in place, check that i have bullets in my gun, that i haven't locked my keys in the car or...'
Sir#1(H): 'just then a cloud of fog sweeps in, reducing your visability to two inches.'
Sir#2(S): 'dash it all!'
*this part of the dream is a blurr, and not really important; suffice to say that there is also a female moose in the warehouse and eventually the endurance scroes of both moose are reduced to zero, while D attempts to mount the male, and J swears in spanish*
Sir#1: 'opening the front door, you see a local cop with his arms outstretched in front of him, walking in circles. the mask on his riot gear appears to be fogged up. Proceed to Chapter Two: "the Mystery of the Missing Mustang"!'
End Dream.
i feel like i've just moved into my own house, except none of the furniature is mine. mitch's computer desk, jared's loft (which, by the way, was a pain in the ass to assemble; assembled it inside-out and then backwards before i got it right), mitch's super-television and super-couch, and somehow i've crammed these things into my living_room_combination_bedroom in such a manner so as to not indicate it is crammed. and i'm starting to get used to it.
the number of people that are intelligent and drink are always on the decline.
theory #547: the traditional workforce is composed of five distinct groups. labourers&clerks, managers, technichians, and the unemployed. labourers&clerks know what they are doing, but not how it works. the technichians know how it works, but not what they are doing. managers don't know what they're doing or how it works, but they know how to make other people do it for them. the unemployed know what to do and how it works, but never actually do anything. the evolution of the workforce (postmodernism) has given rise to two more distinct groups of the workforce, researchers and professionals. researchers are an offshoot of technichians that spend their lives trying to figure out why it works. professionals are an entirely new branch of worker. they only need to know how to read a watch and who to bill for their precious time.
hypothetical question for all the game wardens out there. i am sitting on a dock with a beer in one hand and a beer in the other. there is no water in sight, but i am screaming at the top of my lungs, "here fishy fishy fishy fishy!" am i fishing?
Misses Anderson (but you can call her 'Pam'). A white Celica ST from 1988 with a barbed-wire tattoo on the hood, and a clean blue interior. picks up country stations really well, unfortunately. getting the car was a bit of a process; as of monday morning, i had to be at work at 16:00 that evening, without transprotation. i held in my hand a check for a good sum of money that would need to be deposited to buy just about any vehicle i would be looking at. i called up work, swapped shifts for tuesday, and drove mitch's truck to work tuesday. i spent the time until tuesday morning looking for a car in the capital district region (which, by the way, is the third worst place in the world to buy a vehicle), and by tuesday i had settled on the celica [60 miles west of here], which i had looked at two weeks ago. paid for a taxi to get to the location, bought it without a problem, registered and inspected, and then had to bring it back two days later to have it reinspected for June2006. the real kicker was trying to deposit that check on monday. my bank was 8 miles away, and i was too stingy to pay for a cab. it just so happened to be the hottest temperature in the capital district in the last 20 years, and i still had a sunburn from mitch's graduating, and hiking two days prior. on my way back from the bank, badly sunburned and terribly thirsty, i stopped in at a stewarts for a few seconds. the sky was black and blue when i walked out, and i was standing in the middle of tornado-speed winds. a full tree fell down four feet behind me, and i dragged it out of the street so that the traffic wasn't obsctructed. picked up three more trees on the way home, soaking wet and without thanks or help from any of the people driving past, in their little cozy cars.
Operation: Some Assembly Required will commence tomorrow, approximately oh-100 hours.it will involve, among other things, the shaving of my head, doing dishes, and eating. food.
