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Fierce and Furry: The Adventures of Hor

Thursday night El Parquito calls me up saying that his garage door had exploded and he needed help. I go over there and sure enough, his one-piece garage door was off the tracks, held up one side by a fridge and the other side by a step ladder.

Turns out he'd backed into it with the hatchback on his 4Runner open. Ooops.

One of the rails was pulled out of the wall in front, and he was very concerned about it. I think he could have fixed the whole thing himself if he'd thought the force vectors through, but he was sure the force pulled back and that part would never hold. The force there is down, dude. Anyway, we got one side back in it's track, but the other wouldn't go, so I unscrewed the tracking wheel, put it in the track, and then screwed it back on. Voila, and now the garage door opens and closes smoother than before.

Friday after work Isabel and I went to Dunn Lumber to pick up more lumber for the fort/shed. Traffic sucked, but we made it there before they closed at 6pm. In addition to a bunch of half inch bolts and lumber, I picked up a Fubar demolition tool. I must say, it's a lot of fun and very well designed.

B had gone over to visit her good friend who'd had a baby last month, so I was a bit bored and decided to hang the 20' 4x6 beam by myself. I drilled a half inch hole in it, then in the part of the shed where it lines up. Lifted that end of the beam up, pounded the half inch bolt through, and put a washer and nut on the other side. Next I took my trusty ratching tie-down, attached it to the beam and the room, and raised the beam to level. Climbed down, put the other 5 bolts and lag bolts in, and it was perfectly secure, sticking 14' out into the yard 9' in the air. I was most impressed, it barely needs any support at the far end.

Early Saturday morning after I did my Wii Fit routine Harry and I were going to go to Home Depot for some concrete pier blocks. After we got dressed Isabel was just waking up and said she didn't want to go, so we went outside and watered the rhododendron. Before we got in the car Isabel stuck her head out the window and asked if it was too late for her to come too. Of course not, sweety. Go get changed from your jammies to some clothes, we'll wait. I started weeding one of the front planters. A while later Isabel came out and said we had to wait for Mommy. Ok, it's the whole family this morning.

First stop was to Top Pot donuts. I had a raspberry bismarck, Isabel had a raspberry ring, and Harry had a raspberry cake donut. Isabel had strawberry lemonade, Harry had raspberry apple juice, and I had decaf drip coffee. Mmmmm. The guy laughed at our raspberryaucity. What can I say, we love raspberry.

Next stop was to see if my brother and sister-in-law had left for their 11 day camping trip with Sequoia, my 4 month old super duper cute nephew. Nope, they were still packing. We got to play with the little guy, and I got to borrow two awesome tools, a 12" compound miter saw, and a chain-saw-on-a-pole tree trimming lopper. Awesome! I have *got* to stop borrowing compound miter saws.

After that we went to Home Depot, got the pier blocks, but they were out of heavy duty swing hangers and heavy duty swings (why build swings that can only hold 110 pounds when you can go 350lbs? I want to swing too!), so we had to go to Lowes. B also picked up a quart of chalkboard paint, so the back wall of the fort is now a chalkboard.

On the way home we stopped at the local fruit stand to get a half flat of awesome strawberries. Holy crap they're tasty, even better than last week.

I set up the pier blocks, attached the 10' 4x4 posts, and in lieu of remembering how to do trigonometry, I used an internet triangle calculator to figure out how to space them for 70 degree side angles and a 40 degree top angle. That holds up the far end of the beam quite nicely. I got a swing installed, then I tore down the old shed since it was in the way of swinging. I was honestly suprised at how much decent lumber I was able to salvage from that rotting piece of crap. The 6x6" beams it sat on were just over half way rotted through, but the floor board plywood was in fine shape, as were some of the dimensional lumber. I used that piece of plywood to make a 30" by 70" workbench inside the shed.

I ordered the 34 three foot 2x2" rails, but they weren't in stock so I'll be able to get them on Weds or Thursday. Not a huge deal, now that the swings are installed B and the kids are super happy. There was plenty of room for 3 swings, but with the beam 9' high I needed to buy a half dozen 2' lengths of chain to make the seats reach the right height. This of course means Isabel can swing to rediculous heights.

Holy crap, it was hotter than hell this weekend. I drank quarts of water and gatoraid yet barely peed at all. Bad to get so dehydrated. For some reason all this work made me really beat, too.

Yesterday afternoon we took a break from work to go see WALL•E. Excellent movie, Pixar has yet to let me down.
posted 9:40 AM | link | 2 comments

Things I've seen on Netflix recently:

Yojimbo. Good movie, I didn't know that the 1996 Bruce Willis movie "Last Man Standing" was a remake. I've now seen Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo, now I need to see Seven Samurai.

Californication: Mulder as an angsty writer who screws two different women per day as he tries to get back with his ex. Kinda fun, actually.

Hellboy: Saw in theater, still good. I'm going to see the new one next month.

I, Robot. Asimov is rolling over in his grave.
posted 10:44 AM | link | 0 comments

I've been doing Wii Fit for about 30 minutes every morning that I've been home and not majorly hung over. I hit 30 days this morning. My current plan is MWF to do a few basic yoga stretches (half moon, sun salutation, spinal twist, chair) followed by a bunch of strength exercises (I managed a 90 second plank today, a month ago a 30 second plank was that level of torture), then on T/Th do most of the yoga poses with just a few strength exercises (torso twist, pushup and side plank, jackknife, plank). On saturday morning if I have time I do all 15 yoga poses and all 12 strength exercises. I've got 15 hours in the game so far and am really enjoying it.

It's not perfect, as I've mentioned before, but I'm feeling stronger and it's not too annoying. Since the Wii already has a weather channel and a news channel (from the Wifi feed), why not add headlines and today's weather to the Wii Fit screen while you're working out? They should also allow people to buy a second balance board and have two people do Wii Fit at the same time. Nintendo should use me as a tester for stuff like this. (I just paused to send them these suggestions).

My google-fu has failed me, I can't find the list of Rock Band songs in the order they are in the game. I want to know how long I have to play some of the crappy songs to unlock the things I *really* want to play, like oh say Tom Sawyer. Speaking of Tom Sawyer, for the last Rush tour (technically the last two, since they were basically the same) they played a South Park skit as the intro to Tom Sawyer:

Lil Rush

Cartman: And a 1-2-3 a 1-2-3 Oh yeah
Cartman: A modern day warrior
Today's Tom Sawyer
He floated down a river
in a raft with a black guy!
Doo do do do doo doo
Doo do do do doo doo
Kyle: Hold on. Hold on! Stop! Stop!
Those aren't the right lyrics, fatass!
Cartman: Tom Sawyer built a raft and floated down a river with a black guy. I read the book.
Kyle: That's not Tom Sawyer, that's Huckleberry Finn, stupid!
Cartman: I am Geddy Lee, and I will sing whatever lyrics I want!
Stan: Start the song again, and this time, do it right.
Cartman: Fine. and a 1-2-3 and a 1-2-3

(Rush kicks in with Tom Sawyer)

Pretty amusing, at least for us Rush nerds.
posted 9:17 AM | link | 0 comments

I got Rock Band for my Wii yesterday. I was a little sad to find out that it's a port of the PS2 version, not the Xbox360/PS3 version, so no custom avatars (I don't care), obviously no downloadable content (nowhere to put it, but they should add support for USB hard drives. I don't care about DLC anyway), and the bummer, no Band World Tour, where you play to earn money to get a bigger audience/etc.

Isabel kicks ass at the singing, so does B. I swear I nearly peed my pants when B was singing "Dead or Alive" by Bon Jovi. In Rock Band, there are places where you can just go nuts playing anything you want (guitar solo, drum fills,etc). Same with singing, and B was doing things like 'oh yeah WOOO babies" and I was seriously dying. Worth every penny right there.

Two weekends ago we had two high school graduation parties to attend, my niece Stephanie, and B's cousin Elly. Stephanie lives in Spokane, and Elly in Olympia. Ugh.

Friday night we drove across the state, and were making good time until right before Sprague, WA, the traffic just stopped. Cars backed up for miles ahead. A trucker next to us rolled his window down and said there was a trailer fire 3.5 miles ahead. It took us an hour to creep that 3.5 miles. Ugh.

As soon as we got past that, we passed the Sprague rest area. As soon as we were just past the offramp, Harry yells out "I gotta go poop bad!!!" I was like, "hold it boy, we'll take the next offramp" "AAAAA! I POOPED MY PANTS!" That poor guy. Lucky for me, the division of labor in our marriage is I handle vomit, she handles poop.

Once we got to town I dropped B and the kids off at her sister's place and went to meet up with my friend Nate. (We've been friends since 4th grade). He was out at his mom's place, the same place we used to play when we were 12. Very strange to be in that house again. We stopped off at the IGA to pick up a tasty selection of beers, then went back to his place, where we talked until about 1am then crashed. Sadly, his 8' curved green couch is no longer, replaced with a very cool 1930s wicker couch, but the wicker couch is like 6' long and not nearly as comfy for sleeping.

Early the next morning I went with Nate and his friend Josh to an estate sale. Nate hasn't worked for anyone besides himself in 4 years, just going to estate sales and reselling books on Yahoo. It was kind of interesting to see the whole estate sale culture, everyone knew everyone and most people had little bits of tape with their names on it on their bag or belt or somewhere handy to slap on an item they wanted.

I was once again craving nachos, so for lunch we took the kids to the Swinging Door, which is basically a dive bar with part open to all ages. I got the $18 nachos to share with my brother-in-law, and let me tell you, eighteen bucks buys you one flaming metric shitload of nachos. The plate was large, and mounded probably 16" high. We were playing nacho Jenga, then I tried to bore a hole all the way through the nachos to make a nacho arch, but the cheese in the middle had cooled limiting my efforts.

Afterwards we drove out to the valley to my brother Steve's place for the pool party. It had been snowing 3 days earlier, but it was 80F, and the solar heater had the pool up from 60F to 70F, which is pretty cool, about like lake swimming. The kids had a blast swimming. I'd brought my 21yo cask strength Lagavulin for tasting, and my brother had 3 bottles of Deschutes Abyss after calling every store in town. My oldest brother Johnny shows up with a cooler, saying "heh heh check this out", he had two more bottles he'd gotten in north Idaho. WOooo! We ended up drinking two of them, they're damn tasty.

At some point I ended up in Steve's neighbor's garage drinking moonshine. His neighbor has a friend in Boise who makes 'shine, and most of that guy's friends like it as white lightning. He got a wild hair up his butt and bought an oak cask, charred it, filled it with 'shine, and let it age 5 years. It came out as a damn nice whiskey. None of his friends like it, so Steve's neighbor had a half gallon, and can get more. He gave me a pint to bring back for my friends to sample.

At 8am Isabel woke me up asking me what time it was. D'oh! We were supposed to be on the road at 8am! I woke up B, and with some hustle we were on the road by 8:30am. We were making good time, but the kids had seen an ad on Food Network about Shari's taking cinnamon rolls, slicing them, then using those for french toast, so we had to stop at the one in Moses Lake. It was Father's day morning, but it was only supposed to be a 10 minute wait. After we'd been sat for a while, the waitress breaks the news that they were down a cook, so things were slow. Gah! I was hoping to be out of there in 45 mins. We didn't get our food until an hour had passed. Bah!

Thus, we were an hour late to the party in Olympia, but that wasn't a huge deal.

Both girls were really touched that we made the effort to show up at their parties.

As a side note, I paid $4.45 filling up in Seattle on Friday, then $3.90 in Spokane on Saturday. That's by far the largest delta between two tanks I've ever paid. Gas in Spokane has always been about 10% cheaper, but at current prices that point is really driven home. We got 22mpg in the van, vastly better than the 12.5 we were getting. I'd taken one of the back seats out, and inflated the tires to 40psi. I didn't notice a rougher ride, but man the milage is much better than I thought we'd ever get. Even just highway miles we'd never broke 18, but we normally drive closer to 80mph vs 70 much of this trip.

This past weekend was also fun. Friday night was the Casino Night party from our school auction (see last year). This year El Parquito and his wife Blondie came. Once again, drinks were flowing, and I played roulette to try to win or lose big fast. First spin was red, I now had $200k. Next spin was red, I had $400k. Woo! Next spin was the green zero. D'oh! I got a 50k bonus for losing out, gave that to B, and sat down to the $40 buy-in Texas Hold'em tourney.

THIS year, my luck was better. After getting nothing for the first 20 hands, I started to get En Fuego. I caught AA, slow-played it, and took down a nice pot. The immediate next hand, AA again, and it again took down a nice pot. Wooo! I then went on a tear, getting high pairs and flushes, and soon there were 5 of us. I cooled off some, but used my dominating chip lead to push people around, and after a while I was the winner. 11 players, $40 buy-in, I took half, $220. Not too shabby.

Meanwhile, El Parquito had to go home to relieve their babysitters, and B had had her 10pm shot of tequila. I had been drinking coronas and coors lights constantly, so I was feeling pretty happy. Blondie was in the hot tub, and got talked into taking her top off, wrapping up in saran wrap, and running through the house. Of couse, there was like 40 layers of saran wrap so nobody could see anything, but it was pretty funny.

This year we only stayed until like 1am. Uff-da. Great party.

Saturday I was pretty seriously hung over for only having beer. In the afternoon I did some weeding, but mostly sat on the couch playing WoW or watching TV.

Sunday my folks were in town to help my brother build some stairs for his hair salon. The salon is really high, and there is plenty of height above the back room to set up an office, but they needed a stair. I spent 6 hours helping them with that. Let me tell you, doing 3/8"s 6" deep core drilling on 100 year old concrete without a rotohammer drill is seriously no fun. My dad commented, "Yeah, this concrete was probably 3500psi when it was new, now it's got to be 8000-9000psi."

Sunday night we had our annual Thanksgiving in June dinner. Two 12lb turkeys, tons of mashed taters and stuffing and other yummies. 11 adults, 5 kids. Tasty!
posted 5:38 PM | link | 7 comments

I can't wait for Rock Band for the Wii to arrive. (Est arrival June 27th). I am going to name my band "Non-Canadian Power Trio", which according to Google has only been used to describe some NE Patriots. I've been doing Wii Fit for two weeks now, and am still enjoying it, but man I can hardly believe anyone actually used it in testing. You have to press A three times at the end of each exercise, then it defaults to repeating it, so you have to hit left arrow then A again. Five un-needed button presses if you've done the exercise more than once. They need an advanced mode where you can just set up a daily workout, do this then this then this, smoothly going from one to another with few if any button presses. As it is I am reaching down to pick up the WiiMote between each gig, and while I've gotten over letting it anger up my blood, it's still annoying and taking far more time than needed.

This morning my bike helmet in the garage was covered in web and baby spiders. I brushed most of them off and said "eff it" and wore it anyway. What is a cute little baby spider going to do to me anyway? Fortunately I'm bald so once I got to work it was easy to de-spider my head.

B and I watched "28 weeks Later" and it was pretty good. Kinda dumb premise, and easy to pick apart, but still a decent B effort. On the other end of the scale was "Transformers". Maybe I'd like it if I'd watched the cartoons, my only experience with Japanese robots was Shogun Warriors 10 years earlier. Shia LeBoeff was totally annoying. I'm going to go ahead and put him down as not my favorite actor.
posted 8:17 AM | link | 0 comments

Happy Birthday Isabel! My little girl is 7 years old today. Most of her presents are clothes and accessories for her American Girl "Bitty Baby" doll she got for Christmas. This morning she got to open up her bitty baby birthday outfit and she was super excited about it, at one points saying "gosh, you guys are spoiling me!" and "this is the best birthday EVER!" Very cute.

On Friday evening we went over to my brother's house for his baby Sequoia's 100th day incarnation celebration. It was very nice, a vegetarian potluck (B made a very popular among the non-vegans mac-n-cheese with gruyere and dubliner cheddar) followed by whatever you call an Ommmmm-ing circle then the burying of the placenta under a cherry tree in the yard. Yep, frozen placenta looks a lot like fresh, aka like a slab of liver. Blegh. Anyway, as an atheist attending hippy ceremonies like that feels just like attending Christian baptisms to me, but I am happy to let people have the belief system that makes them happy, and it's certainly no stranger than baptism. It's important to be part of my relatives lives.

Saturday I let B sleep in and after doing my Wii Fit yoga with the kids watching, we loaded up and drove to QFC so I could buy supplies for my weekend trip to see my 10th and 11th Rush concerts. Isabel asked why we were walking down the baby food aisle when we emerged and she said, "Oh, I should have figured, we're at the BEER section". For the trip I got a sixer of Laganitas Pils, a sixer of Lost Coast 8-ball Stout, one of Widmer's Broken Halo IPA, and three 22oz bottles, one of Alaskan IPA, one of Deschutes Hop Henge, and one of Stone's Smoked Porter.

I also got a half dozen bagels and some cream cheese, a bag of white cheddar popcorn and a bag of cheesy poofs, as well as a few bags of ice.

Next the kids and I went to the Farmers Market for some cheese curds, and by the time we got home it was 10:15am, B got a pretty good sleeping in.

B took Isabel to her gymnastics class (man oh man I don't quite understand how little kids can make that gym smell like sweat so bad, it's nasty) while Harry and I drove down to Ezell's for a supply of fried chicken, which turned out to be very appropriate since the Rush shows had a chicken theme going on. On the way home I filled up the tank, setting a new high score for gas purchasing, $83 beating my old high score of $73.

El Parquito came over and we got the truck loaded, putting in the 4" foam pads in the back, sleeping bags, folding chairs, the portable awning, and the coolers.

We drove downtown to pick up a buddy who was coming with, and drove to George, WA, where there Gorge Amphitheater is. First we stopped down Vantage Road to Frenchman's Coulee where we met up with my brother Steve who'd driven from Spokane. By meeting up there we were able to enter the Gorge campground together and park next to each other.

The campground at the Gorge is just a grass field, we got to pay $40 per vehicle for the privilege of parking overnight.

We had a few hours to kill eating cold fried chicken and enjoying some tasty beers as well as the Ardbeg 10 year that Steve had brought. When it was time to walk the half mile over to the concert venue, we ran into a 3' fence that looked like we wanted to be over it, so I just went over it, no problem, as did Zach and El Parquito. Steve, on the other hand, managed somehow to fall and sprain his ankle. He had to lie down for a few minutes, then managed to limp to the show, but after the first song he was going to go back to his car to get some tylenol since his ankle was totally killing him. I knew if he went back to his car he wouldnt make it back to the show, and there were no pass outs from the gate anyway. I told him to find the first aid tent and they'd hook him up, which turned out to be correct. They got his ankle iced down and wrapped with an ace bandage, and he watched the rest of the show from the lawn.

Ok, I haven't been to the Gorge in six years since the White River Amphitheater opened, since the shows I see have moved to my side of the mountains. In 2002 they were in an anti-alcohol phase and a total pain in the ass. I've never been happy with that facility, I don't see it as nearly as pretty as it's reputation. They have relaxed all the anti-drinking rules, you can drink openly in the campground and buy beer in the venue to drink at your seat.

However, the Gorge can still suck my left anus. For the first time we had reserved seats up front instead of lawn seats, and they just stuck rows of folding chairs out, but the rows were WAY too close to each other. Empty you could barely walk down a row to get to your seat, and with people it was a total clusterfuck. As an added bonus, the seats were numbered with masking tape, and our row had seats 13, 14, 16, 17, 18. No fucking seat 15. Thus, we paid for 4 seats and only got 3, so 4 guys had to cram into 3 seats worth of space. It was almost fortunate that Steve got hurt and left.

The wind at the Gorge was fierce. The speaker stacks were blowing like crazy, the lighting rigs were smashing into each other. WIth the speakers swaying like that the sound was total crap. Neil always looks pissed off, but Alex was scowling the whole show as well, leaving only Geddy looking like he was having a good time. I'm going to rate that show (my 10th) as the worst Rush show I've seen yet, pretty disappointing.

The half mile walk back seemed much longer, but eventually we got back, had a few drinks, and crashed around 1am.

Man oh man, I was hung like the proverbial french monkey the next morning. The sun must have come up at like 3am or something, (actual sunrise was 5:15am, welcome to June at 48+ degrees north) and I spent from then until 9am trying not to hurl. Eventually I got enough energy to make myself an alka-seltzer and later to eat a poptart. We got packed up and began our drive to Portland. I'm not sure I am ever going to see another show at the Gorge. I suspect I'd rather just skip that and see them in Vancouver BC. Hopefully the band had a bad enough time they'll go back to White River instead.

We drove down through Yakima then over across the Columbia river to I-84 and drive down the Columbia River gorge in Oregon towards Portland. I'd set my GPS navi (she's named Navi) to Australian English, and man that voice is hot. However, any highway in Washington (like WA 57, etc) is abbreviated WA-xx, and she reads WA as "Western Australia". Very amusing, but worth it for how hot she is. It was like, "Oh baby, say that one more time, I'm almost there"

In Oregon we had to stop for gas, and they don't let you pump there so we had to use mini-serve. $87 later we had a new high score for a tank of gas at $4.22/gallon. My truck had gotten 15.75 mpg, but El Parquito isn't a gas saving driver.

The Columbia River was extra high and angry with the spring runoff. The dams all had their spillways open to let excess water out, which lack of generating capacity has to make their managers cry. We stopped off at the fish hatchery at Bonneville Dam to see Herman the Sturgeon, and feed the trout in the trout pond. El Parquito would put a quarter in the fish food dispender, and get 6 pellets. I put one in and got a handful, probably 50 pellets. Zach would get 50. Parker tried again and got six. I laughed and told him he was putting the heads and tails sides the wrong way. It was pretty funny, no idea why out of 9 quarters in two different dispensers Zach and I got handfuls each time and Parker got rooked.

We stopped off at Multnomah Falls, and hiked the 1 mile to the top of the falls. Rising 540 feet in 5280 feet, that's over a 10% grade. Uff-da. Not so great while hung over.

In Portland we headed to the Horse Brass pub. I had a pint of Walking Man's Homo Erectus imperial IPA, as well as a tasty scotch egg (hard boiled egg wrapped in sausage then deep fried) and my ploughman's dinner included Branston Pickle, which was quite tasty! I first heard of it in a recent Zero Punctuation game review, and have been wanting to try it. I'd buy a jar if I find it locally.

The Portland show was in Vancouver WA at the brand new Clark County Amphitheater. Very nice place, free parking, right off exit 9 on I-5. The show rocked, Alex was in a great mood, the sound was good, it was a great Rush show. We took off during the encore and were on the freeway in 5 minutes, damn impressive. The guy sitting ahead of us was from Seattle and he reported that last year he made it home from both White River and Clark County at the same time, despite one being in Auburn, because the traffic at White River is totally redonculous.

Arrived home at 1:45am, tired but happy. Rush shows #10 and #11 are in the books.

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posted 9:10 AM | link | 1 comment

Last night B and I watched Stardust. I'm not sure why it was in my Netflix queue, possibly because I said I liked "The Princess Bride". While this movie is very different from that one, I would describe Stardust as this generation's Princess Bride. Excellent movie that I am sure will become a cult classic.

Wooo! This morning the lumber fairies showed up. When I opened my garage door to bike to work this morning the 20' 4"x6" beam was sitting in the driveway. Thanks, Lumber Fairies!
posted 1:28 PM | link | 2 comments