Diary of a Wolfeman

Well, the weekend got off to a rather rocky start today, since Pook had gotten sick during the night. Of course, she hasn’t learned to sense these things yet and didn’t make it to the loo, so the first step this morning was to hit the carpet with cleaner. Then again after I got out of my shower, the poor dear.

So, I called in to class and took care of her here, since the EMC is currently sick and her husband can’t take care of the both of them on his own while working. Pook was feeling much better by lunchtime, but obviously tired – I’m betting she slept pretty lousily last night. She napped out at 3 or so on the way to the EMC’s to grab some more clothes for the weekend, and again once we got home. In fact, she’s still zonked on the couch as I type.

I didn’t manage to get much in the way of job hunting today – I napped out myself for an hour or so at 10am. I did manage to get an email off to one of the conselors at class who has an in with Clackamas county – that’s two so far, since BtFR knows the guys over at CC Sheriff’s Ofc. I have been directing just about every erg of energy I have into visualizing me getting this job – spent an hour or so today researching the laptops they use; I’ll be delving into the software over the weekend.

Now, I just have to find the homes of the hiring committee and plant subliminal messaging devices near their beds so I can whisper in their ears as they sleep. ;)

I’ll never understand why city, county and state job applications require such stupendous amounts of information. Today’s award for ridiculous requests goes to Clackamas County for saying “List ALL of your previous positions after the three most recent. Attach additional sheets if necessary.”

All? Excuse me? Do you really think that job I had mowing lawns when I was 10 really has any bearing on the position I’m applying for? Okay, maybe if I was going for Parks and Rec or something, but a computer tech? Cut me some slack here!

Personally, I can remember the names of the companies and what I did for them back to the beginning, but specifics like addresses and dates of employment are long gone from my memory. Frankly, some of them I would like to forget what I can remember of them.

Sorry for the lack of real content lately, folks, but I have been busy with some real-life concerns.

As I said, last week was spent in the job-search preparedness class out at PCC. this was an 8-hour-a-day thing that lasted all week. Not a complete waste of time, but I could have condensed the information I needed into a much smaller timeframe.

Now it’s back to the regular full-time job search, which I have been doing since way back in March. I’ve gone on a couple of interviews, but so have 3 million other IT guys, so it’s no real surprise that I haven’t been hired yet. It’s some tough competition out there right now, and employers are quite happy that right now they can get a guy with 4 times the qualifications they need for half the price.

When I’m not job-searching, I have been watching a lot of Stargate: SG-1 lately, since my girl works at the library and has been scoring us entire seasons on DVD. My regular watching habits were pretty hit-or-miss, so it’s nice to be able to see them all in order.

The only book I’ve had a cance to read lately was Marque and Reprisal by Elizabeth Moon. It’s the sequel to Trading in Danger, and both books are good quality space opera. The story follows Kylara Vatta, the daughter of a shipping conglomerate, through her life from being thrown out of the Space Force Academy and back into the corporate fold. Her first assignment goes haywire, and things pretty much get screwed from there. In the second book, things are getting more screwed, but she still manages to pull through – mostly by the skin of her teeth.

Unlike some other authors recently reviewed by Greyduck, Elizabeth Moon knows how to get her protagonists to do something stupid, and them beat them up for it.

Ok, back to the salt mines…

On the assurances that my older brother would spot me the gas money for the trip, I packed up the kids Wednesday afternoon and headed over the hills and through the woods to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Definitely a good decision. A better decision was equiping my rather hyper daughter with a portable DVD player and several movies for the trip. I would have killed for one of those when I was a kid.

My younger brother is currently home on leave while recovering from a wound received in Iraq – seems some fucktard got himself a rocket launcher and tossed an incredibly well-aimed shot into the compound the family Marine was stationed at, and he took some shrapnel in the ankle. This was just before the push into Faluja, so they shipped him home to heal, since he wasn’t able to fight at the time. He managed to make it back to Mom’s house the day I left, so things worked out rather nicely. It’s not often we can get all three of us boys in the same room nowadays.

While here, he decided to put some of his combat pay to use and grab some wheels to drive himself back to base with. If you see a mostly black 1979 Trans Am with blue stripes on the hood on the 5 in the next week or two, get out of his way. He’s got places to be and terrorists to obliterate. We talked about what he wants to do when he gets back over there, and he says he’s going to volunteer to be a Forward Observer – the guy with the radio and the laser designator, otherwise known as the most dangerous person you could ever face. That laser designator is guiding large pieces of ordinance into your front door. Smile for the camera.

Ma, of course, outdid herself once again with one of the tenderest, juciest turkeys to date. This huge bird (22#) came out of the oven so perfectly cooked that I almost pulled the carcass out of the meat while trying to get it out of the pan – I ended up having to drain all the goodies out and invert it onto a breadboard, then lift the pan off. At that point it was still too tender to flip over manually, so I had to repeat the procedure onto a second breadboard before I could carve it.

Hey Ma – that ziplock of leftovers you sent us home with didn’t make it back to the house – Ratty and I munched ’em the whole way home :)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Because I will rampantly advertise my blog anywhere I can, here’s the Carnival of Sin, a bunch of blog articles from all over hosted by Alexa over at A New York escorts Confessions.

Happy reading!

“Many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do.”
– Bertrand Russel

Too bloody right.

Today was one of those days when you simply cannot get up the enthusiasm to do anything. For instance, I noticed we were low on kool-aid mix and out of lighter flints, so Pookie and I walked down to the store. We walked because it would take longer, not for any desire to get outside and enjoy the fact that it wasn’t raining.

(Note: Safeway does not carry flints.)

With nothing else to do, we wandered over to the video store and cruised through the stacks for another half-hour or so, and came up with a Batman and a Scooby-Doo. (For me and her, respectively.)

Dinner? That was popcorn. Yeah – that kinda no-enthusiasm. I’ve got leftover steaks, fer chrissakes, and I made popcorn because it was easier. Open nuker. Toss in bag. Close nuker. Hit ‘popcorn’. Watch it spin…

Major accomplishment for the day? Convincing the Linux version of Firefox that yes indeed, I do have java installed, now load up that damn jewel-matching game, ya tosser! Thank DOC that Firefox finally went 1.0, now I can stop upgrading the damn thing.

I did manage to catch my mother online, and set up the preliminary bits of going down to GP for Thanksgiving. She is hyped about that – it’s been over a year I think since she’s seen the kids, and with any luck my little brother will be home on leave. Quite the reunion – she said she’ll try to con Grampa into coming up, too.

I suppose it’s time to burn a disc of updated drivers and whatnot for mom now. What I really need to remember to do is take some damn pictures of the kids for mom. My roomie even has a digicam, and I can just never remember to grab pix…

Like Grau over at Frizzen Sparks, I too am a member of a re-creationist group: The Society for Creative Anachronism. While he’s into the early American stuff, we go back to the middle ages for our fun. Here’s what happens when I get into armor…

So there I am at Briaroak Bash, one of the early years, and there’s a long battle coming up – the King’s men are supposed to hunt down a band of rogues in the forest. I’d love to play, but have yet to complete a suit of armor. I’m kvetching with Sir Paul of Sommerton when I notice the limp he’s nursing.

“Aye – I took a shot in the ankle yesterday, and the chiurgeon’s banned me from the field until it heals.” he says. We both look at each other for a moment, and realize that we’re damn near the same size. “Y’know,” he continues, “if we wrapped an Ace bandage around your ankle, it might scare folks off long enough for you to get a shot or two in…”

I grin back at him, and we scurry back to his camp to stuff me into his armor. I had to turn his white Knight’s belt inside-out since I’m a lowly commoner, but we skipped the bandage. I was young and cocky, figured I’d get at least one good swing in…

Yeah, right. Thankfully, it was a resurrection battle, so I still got some good play in. The part that sticks in my head the best is my death during the siege of Castle Dunlop.

Somewhere in the past, some soul saw fit to dump some 3000 old tires in the woods at a State park. Don’t know how he got away with it, but we couldn’t let them all go to waste. We stacked ’em up Lego style and built some rough castle walls to play around.

So here we are, the King’s men sieging this pile of discarded tires. I’m fighting sword-and-shield, so I have a couple of pikemen in front of me trying to bust through the defences so that I might jump into the fray and wreak havoc for the 0.2 seconds or so that I expect to live. Off to the right of us, a rogue javelineer is tossing some pretty accurate spears, so I’m keeping one eye on him and the other on the battle before me. He’s not pating me much attention, though, so I’m not worried.

The pikemen are stabbing furiously trying to bring down a defender or two, and it looks like we are getting close to a way in. I check Sinkyu the javeleineer – he’s still not looking. One of my pikemen manages to take down a defender – Sinkyu is still not looking. The pikeman jumps the three-tire-tall ‘wall’ and forces a man back, making room for me – Sinkyu is…

WHAP!

Sinkyu had apparently been waiting for me to move. As soon as I did, he slung one of those dastardly spears of his my way, and I just happened to turn and look just in time to catch one straight in the face. I swear the man never even looked in my direction…

Since a friend over at Intellectual Orgy recently got a ticket, and it reminded me of a few past indiscretions involving my lead-lined sneakers.

About a year after I moved to ‘Vegas, my dutiful little motorcycle started giving me some grief and electrical issues, so I opted to buy a car to get me through the winter months. Since I was working a crummy job at the time, I had to get something cheap. ‘Cheap’ ended up being a 1974 Plymouth Grand Fury Brougham. This translates into a car 18 feet long, 8 feet wide, weighing in at 6,200 pounds. That’s right, three point one TONS of good ol’ American steel automobile – wearing classic 70’s Dodge Bronze paint, a vinyl top and opera windows.

When she rolled off the line, she was a classy ride – power steering, power brakes, AC, AM / FM 8-track cassette, the space to sleep 8 comfortably and ability to double as a landing strip. Oh, one more thing: a giganamous 400 cubic inch Mopar powerplant. It seems that in the year she was made, all the cops were driving Furys, so the ‘stock’ motor was a bit overpowered to begin with, even before the police mods that turned them into chase cars. The speedo stopped at 120mph, and I pegged the needle at least once.

Of course, it took me a full mile to get it up to that speed, and I didn’t stay there long because of the corner a couple miles down the road…

Anyway, one night the EMC and I are over at her parent’s house watching tv with her sister when we decide it’s time for me to make a burger run – during my favorite show, of course. Being a dutiful husband, I jump behind the wheel and plant a foot on the ‘GO’ pedal and tear-ass down to BK.

Ten seconds later, I realize I’m going the wrong way. Whoops! Pull a quick U-turn (well, quick for anything smaller than the Titanic, anyway…) and I’m headed North again. Two blocks down, the light turns yellow, and I have enough room to stop so I take my foot off the accelerator – when I notice the car next to me lunge forward to make the light.

“Well hell, if he can do it, so can I…” and I stomp the pedal same as he did. I sure loved to hear that motor roar and watch the front end lift from the massive torque that thing produced.

That’s when my mind rewinds, and I remember seeing the car next to me do the same thing. The car with the white hood. And black fender. With numbers on it…fuck, that was a cop.

Sure enough, he drops back and lights ’em up, so I meander on over to the curb. He saw me signal to pull over before he hit the lights, so he just let me off with a warning, but I think it was also in surprise that I beat him through the light :)

The article at Universe Today talks about the conjunction of these two planets early Friday morning. According to them, there was a similar conjunction in August of 3 BC, and some scientists theorize that this is possibly the event that the Zoroastrian Magi saw which led them to travel to Bethlehem.

It’s possible – it’s not like supremely accurate records were kept back then. No written records from the Magi exist, and we know the Church fudged the calendars in a number of ways. (You’ll notice that all the current Christian holidays fall on roughly the same days as popular pagan holidays. Simpler for the Church to convert people if they didn’t have to give up their favorite feasts.)

If that was the event the Magi saw, it means Jesus was a Leo. Kinda fits, when you think about it.

Hey B – get the camera out, eh?