Diary of a Wolfeman

A few weeks ago the Old Man called me up and told me he was going to be back in the old hometown for a week camping at a nearby park, and I should grab the kids and come on down. Since Ma and me Brudder are still both in town, and Grampa P is there now too, it seems like this would be an easy way to roll up a quick family reunion of sorts.

A noble idea and all, except for a few small factors. The Ratboy is a busy guy, and he couldn’t make it. Pookie was already scheduled to be camping at the beach with her Mom, so that was out. Third, gas is damn expensive.

And I really wasn’t all that hip on seeing the Old Man.

See, the Old Man has never exactly been what you would think of as a good father. Luckily for me and my brother, he hasn’t been a BAD father, just not a good one. Mostly, he was just indifferent. (I largely blame Grampa C for this, he’s a cold fish and was probably a bad father. every time we saw him for 10 straight years the first words out of his mouth were “when you gonna get a haircut?” But that’s another story.)

Anyway, let me give you some examples of his not-so-bright moments:

When I was 7 and crashed my bike, resulting in internal injuries, it took mom 2 solid hours of nagging before he finally gave in and drove me to the hospital. Another 2 hours and I probably would have died. As it was, I was in hospital for the next two weeks.

When I was 16, I decided it had been a few weeks since I had seen him so I hopped in the car one Saturday and drove to his house, only to discover he was moving and hadn’t bothered to call and tell me.

You get the point. I didn’t really want to drive down to GP to see the man, and i begged off blaming gas prices and whatnot since the kids couldn’t make it… and then he has to open his mouth and say he’ll spot me a C-note for fuel.

Hell and tarnation, now I gotta go. Shit.

Through dint of fast talking (and because she really does love me) the WBGF agreed to come along and meet the whole fam damnily in one fell swoop. Here’s the rundown:

Friday: drove 4 hours to GP on the hottest day of the year. Arrive at the campground and my nephew gives me crap for only having one ear pierced. I magnanimously refrain from explaining to him that when I was his age, a hole in your right ear meant you were gay, hence only the left was pierced. He’s sporting 2 in each lobe and a labret besides. Manage to deal with a bunch of mostly-drunk people I barely remember until we can finally scoot off to my brother’s house for some sleep. Sleep badly due to heat and the sinus infection I had already been fighting all week.

Saturday: Over to Ma’s for a nice chat, when my niece and her boyfriend manage to swing through for a quick visit. I like my niece, she’s a good girl, and it seems she found a decent guy for herself. Ma’s cat monkeyface takes up residency on Tolerant’s lap – I was worried I might not get her back.

We troll around town for food, and eventually settle on Applebee’s just because I can’t for the life of me figure out what else might be good to eat – I haven’t eaten anything other than fast food in GP for 18 years. I’m bummed because the County Fair is in town, but now Saturday is the hottest day of the year (104 degrees) and the hell if I’m standing around in that. We go back to my brother’s to while away a few hours before going back out to the park.

Later that evening we head back out, and it is much quieter now that all the old friends have gone home. The Old Man is also blissfully sober and pushing water to make up for all the alcohol over the past week, and we manage to have a decent visit while watching lightning hit in the next valley over. I’m still glad to get away once 10 o’clock rolls around. Slept badly again – not due to coughing this time, just a strange bed with hot muggy weather.

Sunday: Nice leisurely breakfast, then it starts raining so I decide we should hit the road and outrun the storm. Swung by Ma’s on the way for a quick g’bye, and then blazing trails up the highway.

About average for a family reunion, I suppose. And Tolerant got out of all of her seeing the BF’s family duties for another 5 years :)

It is official: The Ratboy has done flown the coop. He came over this morning to pick up a few last things and clean the room up for his sister to move into. The Pookster and I will be doing a little driving around tomorrow in search of a new bed for her new room, and generally sprucing up the place for a female occupant.

She’s already complaining that she doesn’t have a tv or computer in there. Sheesh!

yeah yeah yeah – it’s been like forever, I know.

Recent happenings:

Sea Dog Nights – fun wit’ da Family. A bunch of us trouped down to Lebanon for an almost-SCA event, and fun was had by all. It was also the maiden voyage of our new chandelier, a design that is probably best described as “Martha Stewart meets the Hell’s Angels”. Take three lengths of chain, weld them into concentric circles. Then hang them horizontally with the smallest diameter circle at the top, and hang the next one from that, etc. Now weld some pipe sections horizontally so you can set a votive holder in them. Voila! Gypsy chandelier, courtesy of Tolerant’s brother-in-law.

Work: is work. We’ve been just busy enough to keep me hovering on the edge of qualifying for a bonus. Just 3 more percentage points…

Movies: saw The Dark Knight on Monday, well worth the ticket. Folks have been complaining about the violence in this one, but it boils down to one thing: the Joker is an agent of Chaos, and he’s a sadistic, violent, psychotic sonofabitch. The director was right about that. The plot could have moved a little better, but the acting made it all worth watching. Ledger nailed the role, and someone else is going to have a helluva time living up to that performance if they ever bring the character back.

Tolerant: is still the WBGF.

The Ratboy: is all set to move out for the first time. He and his new roomies (an old friend and her boyfriend) are set to take possession of their new apartment on the 4th. The management just spent a bunch of money refurbing the building, so they’re offering some good deals to load up on tenants to pay for it all.

Computers: just tried to upgrade my laptop to KDE4.1, with limited success. It won’t boot into the new window manager, but it will run some of the new apps under KDE3.5. I just need to dig up the logs and figure out what the problem is – I just don’t have the time or the brainpower to do so right now.

And now it’s off to bed.

This weekend Pookie and I went by her old school to check out the park next door that they were re-opening after a long bout of refurbishment. Silly me forgot to bring my new camera to take pictures, but I was absolutely astounded at what I saw:

An actual, honest-to-$Diety all-steel play structure, and not a single foam pad in sight. There are no swings, but there are these chairs that sit on threaded poles; you can theoretically spin them all the way to the top and then spin all the way back down again in a maneuver guaranteed to induce nausea. There’s also a vertically-stationary spinny thing with $Diety’s Own Frictionless Grease on the bearings, because this thing really gets moving.

The best part? The climbing walls that are bolted to the thing go all the way to the top, about 8 feet in the air. Those top bars, however, curve downward at a nice angle. So nice, in fact, that moments after I noticed them, I noticed that one of Pookie’s classmates was scooting right up them so she could perch on the top. (I noticed a moment later that her dad was 15 feet up in the tree behind me – the monkey gene runs true in that family.)

Everywhere I looked at this thing, I saw places where an uncautious child could splatter themselves all over it. The only safety feature is the three inches of bark dust on the ground.

Every where I turn, I see nothing but Nanny-State mandated warning messages (lid of my coffee cup:Warning, contents may be hot) and here I am at a playground made of solid steel with no padding that can be climbed in about 10 seconds by an 8-year-old.

I think I almost wept with joy.

Our Dungeons and Dragons 4E boxed set arrived this week, and I’ve just finished the Player’s Handbook. Looks pretty good so far – I read the 2nd Edition books once and didn’t like the changes, then was kinda out of the circuit during the 3E and 3.5E days, so I can’t compare to those, but I like the way it’s changed since good ol’ AD&D. They’ve added some complications compared to the original, but streamlined it in other places.

Most impressive change: 1st-level mages and clerics are actually useful! I really like the idea of the At-Will, Encounter and Daily powers for every character. This takes away the sting of playing low-level characters who used to have just one thing.

Even better is the knowledge that even the ancient Romans were geeky – check this out.

I’ve recently been thinking about getting a digital camera for taking the occasional snapshot and posting pics of my leatherwork, and today I got assigned to do a site survey of a new client. Actually it’s a two-fold client, as the end-users hired $BigNationalMSP to handle their stuff, but $BNM doesn’t have anyone local – so they hired us at $SmallerLocalMSP to do the legwork in the event a remote session can’t fix things.

Anywho, $BNM has a 20-page survey form, and the last page says “take pictures of everything you can”, so I figured why not? Cameras have been coming down in price lately anyway, so off to the store I go.

What I got was a nice little Samsung S860, which had the two features I really wanted: Digital Image Stabilization (I’ve wobbled almost every picture I ever took with other cameras), and it takes SD memory (because I have a spare 2GB card already). It has some pretty simple controls, and a goodly number of features for taking pictures in various lighting conditions – it can even take movies. Best of all, it’s black :)

Now, the funny bit came when I decided it was time to try offloading some of the test pics I’d snapped around the house. I read the manual, and it was the usual crap for Windoze: load the driver disk, install the software, uninstall any crap I don’t want, etc. On a whim, I took it down to the garage and hooked it up to the new laptop that runs Kubuntu.

A couple seconds went by as it thought about it, and Lo and behold! A window pops up asking if I want to download pictures from the device with DigiKam. <click> and the program launches, scours the camera, and shows me a selection of the pics it found on the camera.

Poking around in the software a bit, I discovered that it has some fairly intuitive image-manipulation routines, so I don’t even have to wade through The Gimp to do a little touch-up and resize. What a relief! (The Gimp is exceedingly powerful, but also very complicated; for my needs it’s like using a bomb-pumped laser cannon to swat a gnat. Sure it looks cool, but I think I missed the target…)

So far, I like ’em both. The camera was just $100, so I should get my money’s worth and then some out of it.

Now I think I need to design a camera case for it. Where’s my pencil…

So, a busy few days. Let’s do a little recap:

Friday through Monday: The Pirate Gathering at Horning’s Hideout. Nice venue – it’s a privately-owned park. Would have been a lot nicer had the rain stayed away, but we still had a good time. There was actually enough of us camping that there was usually something going on in our main pavilion, so I was rarely bored. Always a good thing.

I did get to spend a fair amount of time playing with leather stuff, you’ll have to read the other blog for that.

Tolerant’s niece joined us this year, and had fun by all accounts, despite our inept attempt to find her a playmate. We’ll have better luck playing matchmaker next time.

Tuesday, I took the day off to recover from the long weekend, and ended up tripping down to Fry’s and buying myself a new laptop to replace the poor, aging Dell I have in the garage. Then I spent most of the rest of the day bashing the Vista install and installing Linux on the thing so I can actually use it :)

I started off with Kubuntu, and had it mostly bashed the way I like it when something irritated me and I went for OpenSuSE instead. Well, that went over like a lead balloon. (Wait – Mythbusters proved it possible. Make that a concrete balloon.) I was in dependency hell inside of 5 minutes just trying to get the ATI drivers installed. So, back to Kubuntu I went, and as of 30 minutes ago, I think I have it tweaked just right.

This will, of course, last for about a day.

For those who may be interested, I followed this guide to get the config down. Extremely thorough, with lots of pictures. Actually a bit too thorough, there were several things I left out because I don’t use them.

Oh, and the laptop? A Toshiba Satellite A215 with a Turion64-X2 proc, 2GB RAM and 160GB HDD. Not bad at all.

Not a whole lot of interesting stuff going on. Tolerant and I have been prepping for the upcoming Eventing Season, and that means finishing up all the projects we started over the winter – clothes, gear, etc. I finished the scabbard for the cleaver, you can check it out here. Tonight I managed to get a decent inventory of the gear in the garage, so that leaves tomorrow night for the preliminary packing and maybe a grocery run.

Zoom!

So there I was, figuring I had heard and seen the last of the Beastie as I drove off the dealer lot in my new Kia January of last year when Lo and Behold, a letter comes for me.

A bill for towing and storage fees, and notice of auction for one black 1987 Cavalier.

It seems the dealership sold the car to someone, who never bothered to re-register the vehicle in the 14 months since I traded her in, then went and ditched her someplace where she got towed. Of course, the towing company waited a solid 15 days before sending me the letter, and haven’t returned my calls for two more days (they charge by the day for storage, so they are not in any hurry) so now whoever bought the Beastie would have to pay over $500 to get her back… and she was worth maybe $250 when I traded her in.

Poor thing. She’s going to end up on the auction block.

When I started the whole leatherworking thing, I thought about selling my stuff, and with that comes a website – so I went and bought www.rogueleather.com

After a few months of making sure the guy who owned it before me didn’t want it back, I finally decided to do something with it – only I now realize that I don’t really have the time or inclination to sell my leather stuff on any sort of regular basis. So, I turned it into another blog. I will probably copy some of the posts I have done here over there, and any new leather-related posts will be at the new site.

Just thought I’d let ya know.