Diary of a Wolfeman

– Or –

Where Da Wolfe learns what he is

Cast:

Me, at 11
BigFish – my older brother, 3 years my senior
Trucker – my father
Gloria – his 2nd wife
Brat – her daughter, one year younger than me (and another Gemini)
Jock – her younger son, one year older than me (and another Gemini)
TheBrain – her oldest son, 5 years older than me

Dig if you will, a picture: one average, American boy, age 11, growing up in small-town Oregon. He has no real clue who he is at this point.

He has moved in with his father in order to follow his older brother, as BigFish and Ma are nearly at each other’s throats at this point in the game. My father is married to Wife#2 Gloria, and she has talked him into starting his own business and basing it on her Mexican heritage – only the Universe knows why the hell he thought it would be a good idea to do this in Klamath Falls, but there you have it.

Trucker and the brood lifted sticks and went over the hill, and I visited a few times while living with Ma and her 2nd husband, but I eventually got sick of the stepfather scene and tired of being an only child, so I opted to move back in with Trucker. Klamath Falls had around the same population as Grants Pass at the time, but has always felt bigger to me for some reason. This is my first experience with an honest-to-$diety suburb – prior to this, I had never seen a town that decided “you know, we need an organized housing tract right about here.” It probably has to do with K.Falls being home to a military base.

By the time I move in, BigFish has already been there for about 3 or 4 months, and is fairly acclimatized. When I get there, however, it’s a whole new ball game for me. Suddenly I’m next-to-last in the pecking order instead of the trusty Lieutenant to Bigfish, and I’m sharing a bedroom with three other boys ranging in age from 11 (me) to 16 (TheBrain). Two sets of bunk beds with maybe a foot and a half of clearance between them. I think I was allotted about a square foot of closet space to go with it.

Compared to this adjustment, going to a new school was nothing – in fact, this would make the 5th school I had gone to, but they threw a twist at me there as well. I was in the 5th grade, and at my last school the next step was middle school. In K.Falls, however, gradeschool went to 6th grade, so I was knocked back one on the seniority ladder there as well. That first couple of weeks, I was really wondering if it was going to be worth it.

I did stay, however, and I have to admit, TheBrain’s best friend ThePunk had a lot to do with it. ThePunk found us through school, and he was extremely glad when he did. K.Falls, for those that have never been there, is primarily populated with two kinds of people: Cowboys and Indians. I mean that literally – the Klamath Indian reservation is right outside town, and the biggest industry in the area is cattle ranching.

You can just guess the average IQ of the place, I bet. For most people there, it’s the same as their inseam. Anyone who has ever been to Albuquerque knows what I’m talking about.

Anyway, ThePunk was at a disadvantage in this environment, for he was (gasp!) intelligent, and had a bad habit of speaking his mind, which often got his ass kicked. He figured if he was going to be an outcast, he might as well go whole hog and dove headfirst into the Punk lifestyle. He had a well-kept short mohawk when I met him, and a pocket full of mix tapes of stuff I had never heard before. He was also the only Punker in all of Klamath Falls and surrounds. He was the definition of outcast at this point and this town. The only thing worse for him would have been being gay.

Needless to say, when he had the good fortune to find a bunch of kids that didn’t want to kick his ass on sight, he latched on tight and damn near moved in with us. Two weeks after I moved in, I came home to find ThePunk shaving TheBrain’s hair into a mohawk.

Up to this point, I had really just followed BigFish’s lead, and hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to be like. With this move, however, I suddenly found myself with many examples to choose from. The Brat was, well, a brat – she was the baby and always being a bitch about it. I avoided her as often as possible. The jock is pretty self-explanatory as well, but he was every bit as much of a dick as his little sister was a brat. We casually hated each other.

BigFish could be a consummate asshole, but he was my brother and I knew how to deal with that. TheBrain and ThePunk, however, were both cool. I think the biggest moment of revelation for me, however, was riding on the bus one day and someone was playing Rodney Dangerfield’s comedy song “Rappin’ Rodney”, and my brothers were laughing along with a bunch of other kids and I thought to myself “oh, it’s ok to like this, the other guys do too.”

This immediately brought me up short. I had to examine that thought pretty hard for a couple of days. I borrowed a bunch of tapes from ThePunk and snuck off with BigFish’s Walkman for who knows how much time listening to all kinds of stuff – The Clash, China White, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Peter Gabriel, XTC, the list goes on. (I still haven’t figured out how ThePunk got all those great records, the stores in KF suck).

The song that mattered the most, however, was “Grey Matter” by Oingo Boingo. Right here was a song pointed at me, and I was listening. This was followed up by “Who do you want to be today?” Yeah, they were talking to me alright. Thankfully, I was ready to listen.

By the end of that set of batteries, I had decided that from here on out, I would be doing my own thinking and not just blindly following along with what the others thought. TheBrain would go on to be a big influence on me in later years, but it was ThePunk who handed me that Boingo tape and said “check this out”.

Had a bit of a worry today – Pookie and I had been out running around avoiding the bridal shower The WBGF was throwing for a friend of ours, and I figured it was time for an oil change. I pull up to the bay, and right then steam starts pouring out from under the hood. Pop the hood up, and sure enough, somebody has sprung a leak in the coolant-return hose.

Yes, little miss Golightly, I’m talking about you.

So, borrow some duct tape from the boys in the bay, and off down the road to the nearest parts store – which has recently been bought out by another company. Lo and behold, guess who doesn’t stock the hose I need, and can’t remember if they even sell duct tape (I wanted a new roll) or know where it would be in the store. We’re outta there!

Out in the car, I call over to the Autozone on Cully, and the lady on the other end says she has the hose in stock. Trusting to the many wonderous powers of duct tape, I wheel it for that store and hope. Arriving, the lady spends about fifteen minutes dilligently searching, but is unable to find the hose we need in the stacks – apparently they are changing their inventory system around, and currently the hoses are in some disarray.

Knowing I will need to get a hose on Holly before Monday, I go out to the car and take a picture of the hose in question, and tell the clerks to wing it – just find something basically like this, and I’ll make it work from there. They do, and I buy a few other things to go with – like brake pads. We’ve started squeaking in the past few days, and I figure since I’m already here… turns out one of the guys behind the counter used to work in a Kia dealership shop, and got me just the right parts, saving me about $20 in the bargain.

I guess I know what I’m doing next Saturday.

Picked up a new app called FxCamera for my G1, thought I’d try some of the effects. Here’s fisheye:

 

So, been pretty busy with life lately, and my writing has fallen by the wayside. My apologies, etc., etcetera.

I may have mentioned this before, but the general consensus is that our SCA family is going to sit this year out as far as events go. The last few years we have been going to the Pirate events, of which one has gone away to be replaced by a new event on the same weekend, and we’re just tired of the other one. This all means that we would have to pick new events from the actual SCA calendar to go to, and we’re not really happy with those choices either.

Plus the fact that over half the family has spent most of 2009 unemployed, and you can see where this is all heading.

Fortunately for myself and Da Roomie, business has been mostly quite busy – unfortunately, this super-busyness has led almost directly to the loss of an important client. It’s a long story, but the gyst is we weren’t paying enough attention. Then there was the client that hired us, bought a ton of hardware and spent some 50 or 60 hours of labor, and then went completely belly-up. Yee-haw, that was fun.

In the same vein but with a different vector, we lost one more client today because the owner opted to go for a ‘merger’ with another company, that has resulted in the next best thing to ‘they got bought’. The ‘buyer’, of course, has their own IT setup and doesn’t want to deal with us.

This one is a bummer, because the client is the first one I brought in. They called us one day because their server went tits-up, and I came in and sold them not only a new server, but the management package as well. The folks in the office have always been great to work with, and they’ve been very good about not breaking things – almost a perfect client, really :) I’m going to miss them.

Okay, that’s enough moping. Onward!

So the H.S. Golightly (Holly to her friends) has recently ticked over the 60k mile-mark, and is in need of some maintenance. I took a few minutes a couple days ago and spoke with a Kia dealership to see what this sort of service entails and costs.

The service consists of the following:

• Change the timing and accessory belts
• Flush radiator, flush transmission, change oil & filter
• Change the spark plugs
• Total: $1185.00

Ouch!

Not having that sort of money lying around, I figured I was going to have to get my hands dirty and do as much of this myself as possible. Breaking it down, the belt changes only come out to $360, and half of that is labor. That seems doable, but will probably have to wait a bit.

This means that they want some $825 for changing a bunch of fluids and the spark plugs. further research on the spark plugs shows that the OEM plugs are NGK and run $2.50 each retail – but the dealership wants $15 each!

I call ‘horseshit’.

So, off I went to Oil Can Henry’s and my local Schuck’s, and between the two I got a better set of spark plugs and all the fluids and filters changed for $200 plus the time it took. Which was significant, because OCH was packed when I got there. I waited in the car for an hour before I could get into a bay, but it was still worth it to have all that bit sorted by someone else. After all, I had my copy of Sherlock Holmes in the car with me, so it’s not like I lacked for company :)

 

You know what surprises me nowadays? When other people tell me they haven’t checked their email in a couple of days.

O_o?

I don’t get this at all. Even before I had a smartphone, I was always in my email. I just don’t get it.

 

I went through all the trouble to fix this thing, I suppose I had better post some shit.

There’s a new post up over at the leather blog about the new screwdriver case I just finished. Next project is a belt cheath for my new Gerber multi-tool, so stay tuned.

Work has been batshit crazy for the past couple of weeks. This is the first time in I don’t know how long that I have been booked solid for the next 3.5 days. Call me right now, and I might get to it by Thursday afternoon (Friday afternoon is booked too). Tuesday is going to especially suck.

Loved ones and pets are all doing quite well, so I have that to be happy about.

My car has sprung several small problems on me. The reverse lights are not working, I think the switch has gone bad somehow but I have to remove half the air intake system to get to it, so I have been less than enthusiastic about tracking it down. There is also a slow leak in the power steering system – and those hoses run about $60 each. Bleah.

My daughter is following quickly in her father’s footsteps – she has both a Yahoo and a Gmail account in the same name. I’m tempted to sign her up for a similar MSN account just to round things out.

That’s all for now.

Considering how I have spent most of the last 5 Christmases, I have never really gotten around to decorating much. Having Tolerant living here has put an end to that! There has been much decorating, and we bought a new batch of lights for the porch, along with a nice wreath.

Here we have a few pix of Casa Wolfe du X-Mas:

That’s Tolerant’s stocking, I’m making myself a new one this year and retiring the old knitted sock I’ve been using.

Funny thing about those LED lights on the porch – they flicker at 60Hz. You can’t see it until you swing the lights a little, then they strobe almost enough to give you seizures.

As usual, my apologies for the blurry pix. One day, I’ll get a tripod.

So Tolerant and I have been enjoying having her digital TV plugged directly into the cable feed, and thus getting the strangely-numbered channels and “point” channels coming over the wire. It’s been kinda cool – PBS, for one, has several point feeds and there’s been some good stuff on.

Well, we get to enjoy that no more. Comcast recently re-enabled their encryption system, which disables all of this extra functionality. They claim that their contracts with their providers require the encryption to prevent “unauthorized viewing”.

From what I can see, it means that Comcast has a perfect excuse for making you rent an HD converter box to get the HD they broadcast.

Bastards.

So, big news in the Rose City tonight on KPTV12 is about a cop that shot a girl with a non-lethal beanbag round while she was resisting arrest.  The MAX station security video shows a pair of cops trying to arrest the girl, when she hauls off and punches one of the cops. The punched cop gets in close and tries to bring her down, while his partner swings his launcher off his shoulder and very deliberately shoots her in the thigh with the beanbag. Shortly after, the punched cop is successful in subduing the girl.

The girl in question is 12 years old.

This is the part where most people stop listening, but there’s one more piece of information that is very pertinent: the girl also happens to be 5’7″ tall and weighs in at 150#. At this size, she is easily as big as many adult women I know. Heck, my ex wife isn’t quite that big and I know how hard she punches – it hurts.

So from where I’m standing, the cop was perfectly justified in popping her with a beanbag. He used a non-lethal round and carefully shot her in the leg – making sure there would be no chance of a major injury. Sure, he could have used his baton to deliver that little wake-up call – and in so doing, he could have broken her leg, where as the beanbag just hurts like a bitch. The kind of hurt that snaps your attention away from everything else you’re doing so the shooter’s partner can get some cuffs on you.