Visit the kelpforest....

Boy, what is with me? Seems like I only make an entry lately when there's a drastic change in the weather. Which there has been lately - abnormally cool summer punctuated with short lengths of record high temperatures. It was over 100°F at my office yesterday, so I don't even want to know how hot it was in San Pedro where I was collecting squid samples. Yes, it is right on the water, but Palos Verdes blocks off any ocean breeze. Not that there was any - the air was pretty much dead still. At least at the second dealer, they sort the boat's load inside their facility, so it was fairly cool in there. The truck's AC seems to be dying though - it was just barely feeling slightly cool when I arrived back at the office (about a 20 minute drive). I stopped at Fresh & Easy for something cool for lunch (I'd brought something frozen to heat up, which just wasn't appealing), and I tell ya, nothing like a grocery store for a place to cool off.

So for a recap of just lately:

• Kids are back to school - Gareth and Angus are now going to the same school again, for the first time in three years. Gareth was a little overwhelmed with the changes the first week of middle school (it's middle school now, when I was going there, it was always "jr. high" - and indeed the school team is the Jr. Oilers, after the high school about a block away). Avalon's the last one at the elementary school, and for the first time, has a teacher one of her brothers had. Angus had her for third grade.



• Two weeks ago (already?) I spent a couple of days in Boise, ID. Last time I was there, I barely got out of the hotel; this time, the HMS agenda items on the Council's plate (which the team I'm on spent the previous two days discussing) finished early, my flight back to LAX wasn't until 8pm, so I got to spend a couple of hours wandering around downtown Boise - and the capitol building. Weirdly, I was trying to find a place for lunch and nearly all the restaurants closed at 2pm , then reopened at 5pm for dinner. Finally found an upscale pizza/wine bar and coincidentally both the hostess and the server had lived in Huntington Beach (after asking where I was from). They had a very good small pizza/salad lunch special, and I'd recommend the place if you're ever in Boise. Especially looking for a late afternoon lunch. Oh, and I also tried Basque food at a rather pricy restaurant that came well recommended - and several of us were less than impressed. I don't know if it was just the restaurant itself or I just picked the wrong thing. Oh well.



• I made a list of topics to write about about a month ago - and I've only gotten to one of them.



• At the top of my agency's intranet website:
  

  Dust off the ol' crystal ball again!  Take the State Budget Survey! (Looks like those of you who chose "When the cows come home" got it right!)




• Part of the update laziness, I guess, is only having a non-starting home PC to write on currently. I could use my phone but I'm just not up to typing the size entries I usually do with my thumbs (and I don't thing the phone browser likes them either - letters start becoming invisible at the end). Anyone just upgrade to Windows 7 and have no further use for their XP disc? Mine didn't come with one, and I'd only need it for attempting repairs and reinstalling a backup registry.



• Scooter is now neutered. In trying to find a vet with a reasonable price for doing this, runsamuck found the range went from $75 for a place in Santa Ana to $350 for the vet closest to us - who used to be our animals' regular vet when her office was in Sunset Beach. However, since she moved to the shopping center close to us, she more than doubled her charges. I suppose it was the rent - that all goes with the realtors calling my neighborhood "prestigeous." We went with Santa Ana. Anyhow, he was so out of it when we picked him up, poor guy.



• runsamuck decided his ponytail is a pain and cut it off. He must have asked me ten times if it was ok with me; however, it's his hair. I'm not going to force him to keep some way he doesn't want it. If I were smart, I'd do the same with mine, but I actually kind of like it.



• We've all had colds; and the dishwasher is going kaput. It refuses to get anything clean, so right now I'm just using it for a giant dish drainer. Which I need to leave for home and go do more of.


Bleh.

Apparently the Red Cross has trouble reading my handwriting, because the latest email they sent me was addressed to LEHNNE LAUGHLIA. Admittedly, I do not have my mother's nearly perfect cursive, which sometimes, when I come across an old note or recipe card of hers, seems like it could have come from a computer font, except it's in ballpoint pen. I suppose I should make another donation appointment - last time they couldn't take me because I was still taking antibiotic eardrops.

It's a small thing, every six weeks. It seems I don't do much to make the world a better place, but I can at least do this.

Random thought - I have been referring to the offspring as "the fry" in keeping with my username. However, it just occurred to me that Angus is only a couple years away from being a teenager. Maybe I should start calling 'em smolts. Or is that only salmon?

Dream:

We were all in the park at the end of my street, flying kites, late in the afternoon (note:in real life, this park is not all that great a place to fly kites; there are too many trees, and a couple of buildings for them to get stuck on the roof of). I think even my dad had come. Instead of flying them from west to east, the normal wind dirction, we were flying them from north to south, so we were actually standing in the street and the kites were in the air in front of the scout cabin. Our kite was pretty small and plain. Another man showed up and began setting up a series of figures in a semicircle on the grass in front of the scout cabin. The may have been cartoon characters or political figures or flowers, I don't remember, but we wondered why he was taking such care with how they were arranged. Then he came back to where we were standing and began sending a black kite up in the air. By this time, it was after sunset and it was getting fairly dark, so the rest of us were working on reeling our kites in. Once we had gotten them down and put away, we heard a BANG BANG BANG, and look up to see the man had set off series of fireworks along the string of his kite. They traveled up the string, and when the sparks reached the kite, it burst into a fan-shaped fountain, which burned for a few seconds. This of course burned up the kite as well, and it turned over and nosedived to the ground, crashing right in front of the figures set up on the ground in a shower of sparks. This set off lines of incendiary to each of the figures, of which the outlines flashed into flame from top to bottom. Wow. We all stood and clapped, as he smiled quietly and began to pick up all the remnants of his display.

This may have been triggered by commercials for Making Fiends running on Nickelodeon lately. where evil Vendetta brings a kite to fly alongside her would-be friend Charlotte's kite.

Charlotte: "Oh, you have a kite too Vendetta?
Vendetta: "Oh yes, it's a very special kite!

And then her black kite sprouts tentacles and teeth, growls, and grabs Charlotte's kite and eats it.

(I actually started watching these as web videos a couple of years ago before Nick started airing the series)

I was thinking about this dream when first got up (actually I was ( TMI! )), and it segued in my head to the the little kite I'd gotten once as a prize on the bottom of a Slurpee cup, and how free prizes in kids products used to be so much better than they are now. Cracker Jacks (a brand of carmel popcorn snack) used to have actual toys in them; I remember when I was about five, getting a tiny plastic elephant (assembly required) that had some kind of rider (a monkey or a mahout, I don't remember) that fit into a slot on its back. You pushed down the elephants tail, or maybe its trunk, and the rider went flying off somewhere (and you were lucky if you ever found it again). Nowadays, you get a sticker or a temporary tattoo. My father used to save Planters Peanut wrappers for me because you could send away for free stuff with them. I think I still have a Mr. Peanut bank out in the garage somewhere. Nothing on the backs of their wrappers now. I notice the Dums-Dums suckers my kids got in their Halloween candy have a "save wrappers for stuff" thing, but you order from a website and the wrappers only get you a discount.

An exception lately was the alarm clock from a box of Poptarts, which you needed to have several coupons from a box to able to purchase. It has pictures of a the little dinosaur from the commercial on the hands, and when the alarm goes off, it says:

"Get up. One of us has to get up, and it ain't gonna be me. Get up or I tell all your friends you wear jammies!"

It also runs backwards, so it takes a bit of squinting to tell what time it actually is.

I should make a pattern for that kite. It always amazed me that it actually flew. What do you remember getting out of a box or sending away for when you were a kid?

A mug from the breakroom I borrowed. A cuppa's main purpose in this office is to get my hands warm...

I just stumbled upon a link to this; it looks very interesting; a surreal pastiche of horror, psychdelic, traditional Japanese, Art Noveau, and Gustav Klimt (wait, is that redundant?).  On looking it up a bit, it looks like it just aired in Japan this past summer, and is a spin-off of another series (Ayakashi or Samuai Horror Tales in English).  However, that one aired last year and is already out at Netflix, so maybe there's hope it won't be too long.  Looks like one I could just watch for the prettiness, nevermind subtitles.  Certainly this video is pretty addictive...parts of it remind me of Heavy Metal...


Oh, and at minute 3:20? Someone actually walking normally, not that legs-only-move-to-the-vertical that irritates me so much... Yes, I'm nuts...

( Meet the Medicine Seller...[video] )