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.

They're heeeeere. Who's here?

The DC people.....

No, it didn't take two weeks to drive XC. It's just that the moment I saw the house, I freaked out and went into a coma from which I just awoke. But never to fear...the "silver lining" version of the story goes like this:
We were thinking about having the floors sanded and refinished anyway. And I was kind of regretting picking green for the new carpet in the basement.
Here's a wierd one. The outside of the front door smells like smoke, but not the inside. I guess the hooligans were at least polite enough to smoke outside. However, they were not polite enough to throw their butts in the trash.
There were dirty hand prints (frat boy sized) everywhere. Even the ceilings!
The neighbors have been reveling in the horror stories, in their not exactly veiled attempt to say: HA! That'll show you to rent out the house next to us!
The end of the drive went fine. I'm sure many interesting things happened which I can't remember since the traumatic coming-home experience. However, in order to prove the widely held suspicion that most accidents happen within a few miles of home, I drove to DC, drove around DC for 15 months and drove home without incident. Then an hour after arriving home, I went to the grocery store and had my accident. Let's just call it an incident. And don't mention it to my car insurance company.

Almost, but not quite

Bombed across Wyoming (already can't remember where we were last night). Screamed through the northeast corner of Utah. Blazed over Idaho. And now we are in OREGON. However, we are still about 400 miles from home. But at least the license plates belong.

Question: What does it mean if the BRAKE light stays on? Just a hypothetical question, really. I mean, no reason I would ask. I would NEVER drive thousands of miles with questionable brakes. Oh, except when I did with the VW, but that was different. I was stupid back then...

Newsflash: Idaho has the plague. Not a pandemic or a bacteria or the black death. Just a classic Old Testament bug plague. Here we are, driving the speed limit (about 130), and it starts to rain. Sounds like rain, seems like rain, but doesn't wipe off like rain. DAMN! It's bugs. Well, now they're X-bugs, and they're smeared all over our sensible camry car. I don't know what Idaho did to anger the great "I am". Whatever it was, they'd better repent fast or else many more windshields may suffer the wrath.

Here I am at the Continental Divide working on the lyrics for a country song. It goes something like this:
When I cry a tear at the continental divide
Where does it go?
How does it know?
To which ocean it should flow.
etc etc, fiddle solo, more rhyming, and a verse about the open road.


Here's Taylor singing the future hit song: Continental Divide


Last news item: Cats with jetlag.
The cats are still on Eastern Daylight time. We are now in Pacific standard time. There is a four hour difference at work here. How do I know the cats have jetlag, you ask? Because they are jumping on the bed, meowing, scratching my feet and sticking their whiskers in my nose...at 3am.

My next screenplay will be the sequel to "Dances with Wolves" called "Drives with Cats". Pixel will be played by Morris, Scruffy by Sylvester. For Taylor, we will cast Jody Foster. For me....Lucy Lawless. Aie yai yai yai yaaaaaaiiiii, XEEEE NAAA!!!!!

Tomorrow---home!

More of pretty much the same

Day 2 (yesterday): We tested the theory that cars having stuff in view get broken into. First off, there is NO disguising that our car has STUFF in it, what with the out of state plates, the bikes on the back, the generally overstuffed look....and my wallet and a $10 bill sitting on the passenger seat. Luckily, the good citizens of Milan, Ohio are be-scrupled.

Drove through Ohio and Indiana (not much to say) and past Chicago. Even on Sunday, Chicagoans drive like lunatics--makes the bats-outa-hell look like drivers ed teachers. On to Iowa. The rest stops in Iowa are top notch, even boasting wireless internet. Who knew?

Day 3, subtitled: How to get terrible gas milage.
Here is my primer on taking a reasonably efficient car and turning it into something almost as environmentally friendly as a Hummer, in a few easy steps:
1. Stuff your car with at least 1000 pounds of junk. Any kind of junk will do.
2. Attach stuff to the outside of your car to increase wind resistance.
3. Drive as fast as you can (go toward the liiiiight)


4. Uphill
5. Into a category 4-5 headwind (this sign is being modest).

At least I checked the tire pressure before we left. I have photographic evidence:



Other items of note:
1. Fall is late in America this year. We are getting the fall colors we missed on our New England trip a few weeks ago.
2. Nebraska is pretty. Don't laugh.
3. Iowa is not flat, and it has a formidable west wind. Karin, I hope your bike ride across Iowa was west to east.
4. All hotel rooms smell like cheap deodorizer.
5. Oregon is REALLY far from DC.

That's all the news. Good night from Rawlins, WY, wherever that is.

Off into the sunset

After over a year in DC, we left this morning. Goodbye DC. Goodbye center of the universe. Goodbye unlimited source of material for pieces I never got around to writing. Go west young cats. Drive off into the sunset.

Well...turns out, driving into the sunset isn't so much a romantic thing as a safety hazard. Tonight's menu special: cajun blackened retina.

Our overstuffed car-ship is sailing with dangerously little freeboard. The ride is about as comfortable as that of an old little red wagon. Whilst filling up in Breezewood, PA, (CITGO gas $2.19!!!), I came up with my brilliant idea for how to lighten the load without evicting any passengers. I told Taylor: Gas weighs about 8 pounds a gallon. When our 17.5 gallon tank is full, it adds 140 pounds. We should drive with the tank almost empty.

She gave me one of those: You ARE joking, right??? looks.

Um...yes, it was a joke. (It DID seem like a good idea for a second, I mean, a half tank is 70 pounds lighter than a full tank. I'm going to have to think hard about this one.)

In addition to the gas, Taylor wants to leave behind two wheels, since they are quite heavy. Question is: Which two? We need at least one of the front drive wheels.... I wonder if the engine can run with less oil and brake fluid. So much to consider.

Tonight finds us in Milan, Ohio. Milan??? Scruffy has a new best friend---the cat in the bathroom mirror. Either that or she's looking for wrinkles.

Tomorrow we are Iowa bound.

My Stuff For Sale

Friday update: All the stuff is sold or disposed of or, in the case of the monitor, Taylor decided she loves it too dearly and we will be bringing it home with us. I expect it will get to ride shotgun as an honored member of the family. I don't think I'll let it drive. Toonces is teaching Scruffy driving. I'm nervous enough about that.

3pm update: All we have left is kitchen stuff and computer monitor. Please respond to the craigslist notice if you are interested. Kitchen stuff is free to a good home.

****SOLD*** Nice dresser. Not from Ikea... $75 ****SOLD***
***SOLD*** Bedside table, matches dresser. $35 ***SOLD***
***SOLD***Ikea table and 2 chairs. $75 for the whole deal. ***SOLD***
***SOLD*** Pine utility type shelves. $10 ***SOLD***
***SOLD***19" TV, power antenna good for getting free TV over the air, Table (DVD player NOT included). ***SOLD***
***SOLD***Formica table. Legs can come off so fits in car. $25 ***SOLD***

Headache -- The Poem

Woke up with a headache
Not a hangover
I didn't drink last night
I rarely have a headache
Drank my coffee
Still have a headache
Rode the metro
Packed in like sardines
Too short to reach the bar
Too far to reach the other bar
Surf to work
Packed in like sardines
Don't touch anybody
Who let one?
I still have a headache
Got to work
Servers are down.
Kick the servers.
They have a headache
Finish prepping my presentation
Servers still down????
Test the meeting software
Maybe I'm thirsty
Drink lots of water.
Still have a headache
Scramble for a projector
Ask around for aspirin
Maybe I'm hungry
Eat a muffin
Headache still there
Give presentation
Ten people in my live studio audience
Only one hostile witness
Thirty people in conference call land
Uh oh. Have to pee.
Too much water.
One hostile project manager
Went bureacrat on my ass
Last time I make a decision
The headache is worse
I didn't drink last night
I don't deserve this
Many beeps during talk
Tell me the herd is thinning
Survived the presentation
Live audience won't go away
Maybe I didn't have enough coffee
Went to starbucks
I like starbucks
Here, I'm TALL, not grande
Consumed caffeine
Now I have headache
And I'm hyper
My muscles are vibrating
But not in a nice way
More of a "Is that my cell phone buzzing" way
More servers are down
Damn servers.
Email my boss
Warn her about the angry bureaucrat
Who will be CONTACTING her
When will the headache go?
Leave the office
Ride the metro
Not quite so packed.
Discuss servers with Jay and a stranger
Who had to listen
Because she got between us
And my headache
Is still there
Keeping me company
On my way home
Buy aspirin
89 cents
No tax
Get home
Maybe it's a brain tumor
Eat aspirin
Eat tylenol
No more caffeine, thanks
Out to dinner
Feeling better
Better
.....
BETTER.
Check please
$60 plus tip
.
.
.
I have a headache

The NYC Conundrum -- It's great. It stinks.

Couldn't sleep. Taylor turned off the AC and it's hot in here. Screw conservation, I want my air conditioning. So instead, I'm writing to you, dear reader.

The Big Apple----

For this past three day Labor Day Weekend, Taylor and I went to the actual BIG CITY, New York City! We stayed right at Times Square in a type of hotel one can only call "expensive cheap hotel". Neither Taylor nor I have ever touristed in NYC, so it was all new. I mean, I didn't discover anything truly new. We were in Manhattan. It's in the movies, on the news shows, in pictures. It was like visiting a place after having studied about it in school. No wait, it wasn't _like_ that, it WAS that.

We went to the fantastically wonderful play SPAMALOT. If you're a Monty Python fan, you should be feeling jealous right.....about......NOW.

As I mentioned, we didn't discover anything new. I mean, how would you discover something new in a place where about 10 million people have been before you? I could say "I discovered myself" or something cheesy, but it wouldn't be true. That being said, there is one thing for which the texts did not adequately prepare me. This fantastic, vibrant, stimulating city STINKS to HIGH HEAVEN. I mean, HOLY HELL, this place really fills the snoot. It's mostly piss smell, seasoned with dumpster stink and a side of simmering sewage. Penn Station smelled like the barf brigade came through right before we got there. And our cheap ($100/night) hotel room smelled overwhelmingly of urine and lysol. Taylor kept telling me to stop thinking about it. She suggested I try moving the earplugs (cheap, noisy hotel) to my nose. Either way, I wouldn't be able to sleep.

So, besides the stinky factor, we walked for MILES and MILES all over Manhattan and:

• We saw all those places you see on TV, and now Taylor is pointing them out every time they show up on TV: "We were there, oooh, there too. And there!"
  
• Saw a bunch of pigeons
  
• We saw a dead ringer for Taylor's grandmother at South Street Seaport (also saw a few chili dogs...) and stalked her like papparrazzi. That was funny, for us at least. She started looking nervous after the fifth time Taylor ran up next to her and I took a snapshot.
  
• Ate at some great diners.
  
• Saw pigeons.
  
• Got together with my old friend Khiang in China town for dim sum with half of the population of Manhattan all stuffed into one giant room.
  
• Watched some rats running around. They don't look so scary. Not like the dive bomber pigeons.
  
• Rode in a taxi and experienced 0 - 85 in 1/2 a city block. Asked the taxi driver to let us out BEFORE we reached our destination, figuring our odds of survival were better.
  
• Saw skywriting (really cool) but couldn't properly read it because the tall buildings blocked the view.
  
• Saw those green newsstands like Seinfeld has in his show.
  
• Got chewed out by a homeless (i think) woman for not helping her get her cart up over the curb (I thought she wanted to be independent. I didn't know).
• Saw more pigeons
  
• Got attacked by a woman with so many rings that she cut my fingers when she walked by and scraped me with her multi-caret jewels
• Paid $24 to go up the Empire State Building, but Taylor found 5 pennies up there, so really $23.95
• Have I mentioned pigeons?
  
• Learned too many personal details about a guy talking on his cell phone on the train back.

Then we came home. Well, back to DC, which now seems like a small town. And we washed ALL our clothes....in HOT water.....right away.

Mozart's

Tutoring just started back up. Loyal followers will remember tutoring from one of my very first posts, so I won't bore you with the details. The important point is: after tutoring, some of us tutors go across the street to Mozart's. Mozart's is an unexpected place, and a bit hard to describe. It is right smack in the middle of downtown DC, across the street from the church where we tutor, World Bank, Metro Center and Mc Donalds. It's a German deli/bar/restaurant/knick knackery. The deli section sells regular deli stuff, German food, german trinkets, German candy, German magazines (that look at least 20 years old, lending credence to the rumor that the front door is really a time machine), German groceries, German Beer...you get the idea.

I like the bar. It's a neighborhood bar. Sometimes there are drunk people sitting there, and I've sang songs with them (can't remember which songs at the moment). There are rarely tourists because, as I mentioned, this place is unexpected and nobody who didn't know it's there would find it (which does bring up a certain chicken/egg question regarding their customer base). There is a resident musician who is usually in the dinner room next door doing a karaoke style performance where he plays his guitar and sings, accompanied by the recorded bass and accordion lines. He dropped by our table this evening and said: "I am here now to play you songs for you. My name is Tim. I am from Georgia, the country. I play Georgian music, Russian music, German music, American music and my own music. What would you like me to play for you?" Our first request: play your OWN stuff, perhaps a baudy drinking song. He gladly obliged and sang a nice song. He said it was about drinking, and we had to take his word for it because we don't speak Georgian, the country. The song sounded more like a love song than a drinking song to me, but love....drinking....I can see the connection. Next song was a Russian gypsie song. That was good fun. Finally, the request was for an American song. Tim: "Which one?" Us: "Play your favorite." So he played 500 miles. Classic Peter Paul & Mary. Karin & I knew it, but our other comrades did not. I pardonned Sharmila, the Canadian, but I'm not so quick to forgive Clark who is a good, Yankee boy in his late 40's. He has no excuse. Anyway, as it was getting more and more surreal, we paid Tim $7 to go play for somebody else. No, we tipped him generously and thanked him for his music. It was, after all, unexpected.

Then, on the way back to the Metro, I found a coin in the road. But not an American coin (this is the second non-American coin I've found in DC). It is so mangled from the miles it has travelled, that I cannot tell what it is. It is copper colored, just a hair larger than a quarter, has a picture of a woman and I can make out the word Elizabeth. The back is so worn that all the letters and pictures are completely scraped off. I've never seen a coin this worn out. Taylor thinks it's an English Tuppence. I don't know. I just hope they'll trade it in at the bank.

Long time no e

Since it's been so long, there's no point in posting the news. So I'll just tell about the metro this morning. I had the distinct pleasure of overhearing two teenage girls speculating on the origin of the metro stop name "Foggy Bottom". They surmise that it has something to do with a person's behind quarters the day after eating too many chili dogs. I also learned that the term "poot" is a new euphemism for, um, "toot". My life is gonna be boring when I only telecommute.

Dreaming of Love

Much has transpired since last we blogged together. They blocked blog access from the office. Now I have to blog on my own time. darn.

The following is a true story about a dream I recently had. I hope this proves that dreams are meaningless nonsense.

In my dream, I met Karl Rove. In person (so to speak), he looks much younger than on TV, more like a frat boy with shoulder length wavey blond surfer hair. He took an unexpected liking to me, and started pursuing me romantically. I thought he was sweet, not at all the kind of nasty self-contained axis of evil I had imagined, although I found him more of an amusement than an attraction. He sent me packages and gifts, all signed: Karl Love

What can we make of that? I've already said too much.

Love Christine

Freak Museum -- May 7, 2005

Last weekend, Taylor and our friend Linda P and I went to the National Museum of Health and Medicine at the Walter Reed Army Hospital campus. After going through security and showing our id twice, we were then allowed to roam the campus unsupervised. There were canons posted at defensively strategic locations to encourage us to be on our best behavior.

The museum is a right good laugh. It features a delightful retrospective on "Field Medicine in the Civil War", complete with bullet-riddled skulls, bone pieces of the unfortunate casualties and even a few preserved soft body parts. YUMMY. Another exhibit focused on medical implements of yesteryear. For those of you who pine for the "good ol days", I'd say: "You must not be thinking of the dentist, and you CERTAINLY don't have the proctologist in mind." Oh yeah, nothing warms the heart quite like a display of gynecological implements from the days of yore--complete with rust.

For me, the highlight has to be the collection of deformed fetuses floating in preserving fluids. Proof that not all babies are cute (or alive).

Now, for your view pleasure, the evidence:


Linda and Taylor prove "We were here"

Taylor imitates art imitating bad taste

Part of the collection of "antique" medical implements: A Diagnostic Procto-Sigmoidoscope.....with light! circa 1965. It just didn't sit real well with me....har har

I think this one is self-explanatory. One must protect one's health for the good of the Allies. Click the pic for a larger view.

This poor guy was born without a brain. He's considering running for president.

National Cathedral--May 1, 2005

Visiting the National Cathedral. Lightening didn't even come anywhere near when I set foot in it....really.

Odd combo

Sin City on the clock --April 2005

I went to Laughlin, Nevada for a work meeting. Laughlin is where the over-75 set goes to gamble. In the rest rooms, there were syringe disposal containers. I'm not making that up. It was fun. I won $2.02 out of a slot machine into which I put no money at all. That was a very good return.

On our travel day, some of us computer comrades met up in Las Vegas to "do the town". I got lost at M&M world. It was tragic. I bought $5 worth of blue M&Ms for $18.


Vanessa, Karen, Carolyn & Me in "Paris". Vive la Official Work Travel.

Vanessa and Debbie's sock puppets deliver my "technical presentation" about Oracle metalink. I'm looking for a Tony for best actors and best playwrite.

DO NOT TAKE MY PICTURE!!!! The TSA professional makes sure the flying public is safe from Vanessa's knitting needles.

April News

Testing out a new government lunch program. This is the front of the Department of Education building. 

Taylor ran for Pope, but was edged out by an old guy with a taller hat. I voted for her! 

Power Broker -- Me and Gordon Smith, R-Oregon. Note--I went in Republican drag and claimed to be a swing voter. Very strategic, don't you think?