When peppers attack

In addition to "don't touch your eyes", here's another thing to put on the list of "stuff not to do whilst eating hot peppers":

I'm eating away on a nice, HOT cayenne pepper fresh from my garden. Crunch crunch. Sometimes these things can make a girl sneeze. But my mouth is full of crunched up cayenne pepper, one of the last things I'd like splattered over my computer screen. So I cover my mouth and sneeze through my nose.

Bad BAD idea. Might burn less to clean off the monitor with my eyelids. Next question: How does one get pepper chunks out of the sinus cavity?

I'd better get a good high from this.

Poke her and see if she moves

It's been months and months. I have no more fans. . . . That statement is meant to make you think I had fans to begin with.

It's summer in Portland. It's in the 70's. The rest of the country has heat stroke. It's not always like this. Sometimes we have nice weather (rain).

I've been really busy with work lately. My friend Khalkho says: "Why would you ever want to retire? Working for the forest service is like being retired!" It's one perspective.

This summer has not been very interesting. I work a lot. I landed a small contract to teach an Oracle class at a software company in Corvallis. That means that during my vacation I'll be working that job. At least I can afford better wine now.

On Monday, I made the potentially regretable decision to go to a class reunion at the christian college I attended in my past life. Why? Nobody can figure out WHY I would want to do that. My friends are all amazed. Apparently I associate with non-reuniters. But I had fun in college. Everybody there was real nice...TOO nice. It was like four years of summer camp, with grades. Well, there's another reason: it has given me the motivation to retain a personal trainer. Every day, I get an hour or so of training in my own home with my own home gym. What's my secret? Big bucks consultant? Oh sure. That and Taylor is my trainer. I get special treatment (Taylor: Just 5 more minutes. Me: You said that 10 minutes ago!)

The Family Road Trip of 1985: Why your childhood should be looking better to you

The story of the 1985 family road trip summer vacation starts before 1985. It starts, according to me, in about 1970 when, shortly after my arrival on the scene, Dick and Carol Jean bought the 1970 Dodge Crestwood station wagon with a slick wood grain sticker, underpowered air conditioning and black vinyl seats that gave third degree burns in the summer. This piece of machinery was a thing of beauty, to somebody (not me). By 1971, the wood grain sticker was already morphing into the chaulky white fading wood grain sticker, but the black vinyl seats were as effective as ever. My mom kept an oven thermometer in the car for measuring the air temperature in the summers. It typically showed the 130's and up. That is how I learned about things like the heat absorbing power of the color black and the greenhouse effect. Another thing about the 1970 Dodge Crestwood station wagon with the chaulky white fading wood grain sticker and black vinyl seats that gave children third degree burns, it got a whopping 10 - 12 miles to the gallon. I remember the oil crisis of the 1970's because on the government appointed day of the week based our license plate number, Carol Jean would take me and my sister to the gas station and wait in line for several hours for our turn to fill the monster gas tank.

Fast forward to 1980, we move from the working class neighborhood in Bowie to Columbia, where the up and coming baby boomers lived with their expensive European luxury cars and their snotty, designer-clad children. My parents should have had the good sense to trade up, or at LEAST try to find a Dodge Crestwood station wagon withOUT a chaulky white fading wood grain sticker. But, having both lived through the great depression, Dick and Carol Jean were not the type to spend money on things they didn't absolutely need to ward off death for one more day. So in junior high and high school throughout the go-go nouveau riche designer 80's, while the other kids got picked up from their after school activities by moms in Volvos, I got picked up by the world's largest, mostly glaringly horribly ugly car: the 1970 Dodge Crestwood station wagon with the chaulky white fading wood grain sticker and loud roaring gas gulping engine. I attribute my entire lack of high school popularity to this car. I'm sure it had NOTHING to do with my looks, personality, general demeanor or penchant for barfing in gym class. Hey, running does that to people.

Now back to our main point, the 1985 family road trip. Dick had decided that we would aim west and go and go and go until we could go no more. To some this would mean the Bearing Straits. To us, it ended up meaning Idaho. Every family road trip must begin with the obligatory packing fiasco. So my mom, always wanting to be prepared for any possible contingency (later we will see why this is just not possible), cram jam slam packed the back of the station wagon, known as the "way back", with everything ever invented. I suspect she's the reincarnation of somebody who took the Mayflower and, 90 minutes out of the harbor, suddenly realized they had forgotten their toothpaste. After the back was too stuffed to even shut the gate door, the next phase involved scientifically arranging more load into the rooftop clamshell, a device invented by Exxon designed to further reduce gas milage and increase their profits. While Carol Jean clam-crammed everything we "might not need the first night", Dick was busily having a tantrum and throwing things back OUT of the car because "I can NOT drive if I can't see out the back!" During this show, my sister and I were perfect and ladylike...0h Actually, I recall saying things like: "You do NOT need to bring a DRESS for me! I am NOT dressing UP on vacation! I'll just stay home from church in Kansas!" Finally, the episode came to its foreordained end the way they always did, with both Dick and Carol Jean resentfully convinced that they had lost. So in July of 1985, we all went to the bathroom and then piled into the crowded, crammed, heaped, jammed, loaded, laden, piled, squeezed and compressed 1970 Dodge Crestwood station wagon with super chaulky white fading wood grain sticker, black vinyl seats that give third degree burns and splits in the seat piping that gave nasty little back-of-the-leg pinches, and were ready to go.

That's when the best thing that had ever happened to me up until that point in my life happened. Carol Jean turned to Dick and said: "Did you remember to check the oil?" Dick did the exasperrated groan thing that husbands do when they know their wife is right but they don't want to hear about it, and pulled the handle under the dashboard to release the hood. And.......drumroll please....the handle came OFF in his hand! The hood did NOT open, and suddenly we had a car that, in the event of unforeseen breakdown, we would not be able to repair with the entire professional garage toolset packed efficiently in the way back. This was slightly better than the time when I was about 10 and I jammed the ingnition key in upside down and it took Dick a week of disassembling the steering column to get it out. How could this possibly be better? Well, because the exasperrated Dick got out and announced: "We are taking the new car!" Nobody, not even the Amazing Kreskin, could have foreseen this.

The clouds parted, the sun shone, the angels sang: aaahh AAAAAHHHH! We're taking the new car! The new Oldsmobile Delta 88 with plush velour seats, no fake wood stickers, and effective air conditioning. The Oldsmobile Delta 88 that does not embarrass delicate teenagers. The Oldsmobile Delta 88 with only 3,000 miles on it, that still smells NEW! Oh, what a beautiful day indeed.

So, we piled out of the 1970 Dodge Crestwood station wagon with chaulky white fading woodgrain sticker, dangerous black vinyl seats with pinchy piping, every possession in our possession and the hood that wouldn't open, and we REPEAT the packing episode. This time, it is in some ways more painful, and some ways less. Why? More painful because the new car, the beautiful new Oldmobile Delta 88 is SMALLER, much smaller. At that point, Dick and Carol Jean make another earth shattering decision: "We will NOT camp! We will stay in motels. Motels, where you park in front of your room, walk down the sidewalk for ice, watch TV and put in quarters to make the bed vibrate. Not hotels where you stay completely indoors with heated swimming pools and room service. Those are too expensive. But we can stay at motels, indoors, with beds and plumbing and mattresses that don't have be blown up.... Well, you and your sister will have to share a bed." I guess you can't have everything. And so, we were able to fit the barest essentials in just the trunk of the new Oldsmobile Delta 88 with nice plush burgundy velour seats and good air conditioning and nice paint job. But wait! One more thing. Dick came out with a sheet, put it over the back seats, cut two holes for seatbelts and informed us that we are not to TOUCH the plush velour. I was disappointed, but also wondering where the sheet had been for the last 15 years that I been touching those white hot black vinyl seats.

Off we went, west west west. In the nice new Oldsmobile Delta 88 that got over 20 miles to the gallon and had working a/c. In and out of days, checking in and out of Motel 6's (and sometimes upscaling to Super 8). We came to Deadwood City, South Dakota. Wild west town famed during the gold rush. Dick wanted to find gold, so we went gold panning. Did we strike it rich? What do you think? Then we went to the downtown to make the standard cruise through the trinket shops. While we were perusing all of the 24k gold, fools gold and faux gold treasures offered to memorialize our visit to Deadwood City, South Dakota, the sky darkened, then rain began to fall in the big splashy raindrops that foretell of impending storm. Then....then!.... the hail started to come down, and it got bigger, and bigger. And pretty soon it was hailing ping pong ball size ice balls. By this time, Dick had bolted out of Trinket Town back to the parking lot to protect his beautiful new Oldsmobile Delta 88 with plush velour seats and nice new paint job that we had driven because the 1970 Dodge Crestwood station wagon with old crappy paint and chaulky fading woodgrain sticker had a broken hood cable. And it poured. And it hailed gigantic ice rocks. And this went on for a good spell. Carol Jean started to worry that Dick might have been killed (later we found out it was only brain damage). I actually worried a bit too, but mostly I had more time to examine the fool's gold. I did not learn much because 15 years later I examined the fool's gold called internet stocks. Anyway, after the hail subsided, Dick reappeared. This time, his hands were all bloody and covered with scrapes and his wet bald head was bloody and covered with welts. However, this was not the problem. The PROBLEM was that the new Oldsmobile Delta 88 with plush velour seats and AM/FM stereo with front and rear speakers was now covered, golf ball style, with DENTS. OH. MY. GOD. This was a blow Dick could never have anticipated. How could one prepare for such a thing? PACK for such a thing? He told of trying to protect the car by covering it with sleeping bags. But the hail was too much for a couple of (now drenched) KMart sleeping bags. Then he tried to cover it with his body, but that wouldn't do as he was not car-shaped. Then, he realized that he might be in some degree of danger being assailed by falling ping pong ball sized rocks. He considered crawling under the car, but there was not enough clearance. So he crouched next to a dumpster with his (now mangled) hands over his head. I can't exactly remember why he did not just get INTO the car, a sign that brain damage had already started.

We spent the rest of the trip not talking too much. Not that we were exactly a chatty family, about all we could do was reduce the bulk of bickering. We all quietly mourned. The Dick for his new car gone bumpy. Me for the poor, no-longer-new Oldsmobile Delta 88 sedan, now pitted and pocked like an adolescent's face, my hopes for a less embarrassing senior year of after school pickups SHATTERED like so many cheap souvenir snow globes.

A month or so later, the insurance company sent a check for several thousand dollars to cover repairs, but Dick decided he'd rather keep the money and try to repair the car himself. Somebody gave him a junker car, which lived in our backyard for the next 10 years while Dick threw ice cubes at it to accurately simulate hail dents (because just hitting it with a golf club is not authentic). He never figured out a good way to remove those dents, but not for lack of trying.
He did figure out how to fix the hood cable on the station wagon. Such that, when I finally got a drivers license, that is the only car they would let me near. I eventually escaped to college where, without the spector of the 1970 Dodge Crestwood station wagon with embarrassing chaulky wood grain sticker and cracked up old black vinyl seats, I went on to become hugely popular and highly regarded.

And finally in 1995, Dick sold the 25 year old Dodge station wagon for $700 to a young guy with children who needed embarrassing.

Why I like working from home

Dear Diary. Working from home is an improvement over working in an office. Don't think it's heaven or anything. I still work 8 - 15 hours a day, don't do other stuff while I work, talk to people a lot, get pestered and interrupted thanks to the miracle of online chat, etc. It's just that my cube is in my house, not in an office 40 min away with everybody else. I did move out of the basement to a second floor bedroom because the basement is cold and my hands were always freezing. Now my second floor is cold and my hands are freezing. Must be getting old....

Here is the thing that is better at home (besides the obvious part where, of course, I work naked...hey, wonder if this is why I'm always cold), it reduces my contact with the inevitable annoying office people. Like the strange woman with such a thick accent that she was usually incomprehensible who would always follow me around asking the same question over and over, even into the women's room and bother me while I was peeing. Yup, don't miss that. And the gal who listened to talk radio too loud in her cube, and the guy in the next cube over who thought a bottle of cologne was single serving size, and the guy who thought I was his secretary and would send things to me to print out and copy. And the person who constantly complains about everything and how she is always the victim (she does this in chat too, but it's easier to ignore). These things don't happen in my house. It is so great. There is one thing that does happen here, Scruffy helps me work. I should put her on the payroll.

Another thing to know

If one eats handfuls of dirt, one will poop sand for the number of days equal to the number of handfuls of dirt eaten. Example: Eat two scoops of dirt from the sandbox, poop sand for two days.

Any questions?

Things that are good to know

It's been a long time. Not much is up. I work in my basement. Not much happens down there. It's cold.

A new feature that will appear whenever I get around to it: things that are good to know. Readers are free to wonder how I came about these tibdbits.

• The old episodes of Lawrence Welk are better than the newer ones.
• There is no need to add extra bran fiber to your morning oatmeal.

In other news. I babysat my friend Deb's pipsqueak Kate, who is almost 18 months, for about one hour last week. In that hour, she stepped in dog doo (three times), ate not one but two handfuls of dirt, jumped in an oil slick, dumped a sandpail full of muddy water all over her head in an attempt to drink out of a grown-up cup and learned to pretend to barf. In my defense, she's a real quick draw on the dirt eating. And the barfing thing was an attempt to get her to spit out the mouthful of dirt. But she didn't get the spitting part, only the bend over and say "bleh" part. Aunt Christine is the coolest.