So yesterday I went out back to see if the charcoal my brother left behind was still good. I leaned over and lifted the bag open and reached deep inside to grab a chunk of charcoal and had one of those moments where time really slows down. At first I thought, something about that isn’t right. Then I started turning over that gray shape in my mind trying to match it to something familiar. My hands reached a briquette and I thought, “That’s odd, I thought it was chunk and not formed…” My mind finally snapped the gray shape into alignment with what I knew it was just as I saw the imprinted logo in the charcoal. Then for a snap second I started considering what my options were. I dropped the charcoal and jumped about three feet diagonally backwards, being very careful that I didn’t make contact with the bag in my flight. I landed shook my hand vigorously looking at both sides and was a little stunned that I hadn’t been stung. The wasp nest is still there, and I can’t quite decide what to do about it. The wasps (or yellowjackets, or whatever they are) just move slowly over the surface of the nest and don’t seem to fly out much, unless I get near it with the grabber. Then they show me they can fly.

silly baby

eats peppers and bananas too…

The choice between the ease of ramen and the tastiness of PB&J (without milk, though) is making my breakfast decision tough.

So I’m getting ready (finally) to submit work to a gallery and I thought I’d get the pictures together here, too.

Continue reading Gallery Submission →

I was running around tonight from task to task becomming sidetracked at every turn. I got the kitchen table loaded into the truck to go to the D.I. tomorrow morning and when I was cleaning up the boxes that were stacked on the table I ran across a piece of coaxial cable with only one connector. Sam had been telling me the other day that he was getting HDTV really well with just a $10 radio shack rabbit ear set. He said he’d initially tried it with a piece of stripped coax. So I stripped one end of the coax and plugged it in and got 20 channels of over-the-air HDTV. Which led me to plug the vcr into the system so I could channel surf without fighting with the worthless remote that came with the tv. Doing this, I got the shirt I was wearing dirty fooling around in all the dusty hardware, so I went to get a crappy t-shirt to work in and ended up cleaning out the dresser and moving my clothes into the new dresser in the new bedroom. Some of my old clothes had been washed, but I decided they’d make better rags, so I started cutting them up. Looking for the scissors I found some tools that hadn’t been put away, so I took them downstairs and found some boxes of stuff that probably ought to go to the DI, so I took them up to put in the truck with the table, which reminded me I was going to get rid of some books…
It was about then that Brian called and said that he hadn’t been able to get one of the scratch servers at work that had crashed to come back up despite our best lights-out efforts, and if I wasn’t busy, would I mind going up and taking a look. I’m only about 15 minutes away from the machine room, so I filled my pockets with my traveling accoutrements and went up to Komas. The server wouldn’t power on, and pulling the power plug and replacing it spun the power supply fan about a quarter turn –its only sign of life. I called up Brian and we decided to give it a try at swapping the power supply out. Now this server happens to have 12 hard drives plus a cd rom and floppy drive (if I’m remembering all the plugs correctly) and I thought, as I pulled out one hot glued secured plug after another, how much it was symbolic of my night up to this point. And, as we had no spare supply, I had to down fieryfurnace013 also, so I could pull its power supply, as it’s of lesser importance. When I finally got fieryfurnace017 back together I found that its situation had not improved any. Brian decided it was probably a shorted out mother board and we’d have to swap it for ff013’s motherboard. I was disinclined to futz more at this time of night as I’m not too sure I wanted to attempt a motherboard-ectomy on a step ladder. I didn’t think I could get the machine down from near the top of its 8 foot rack by my lonesome anyway, so he said he’d get to it in the morning.
So now I’m tired and I should have gone to bed, but I’d thought ahead and phone-cam’d a picture of the mess and figured I ought to write before I let this, too, slide by.