with relatively no family of my own, its startling how many demented people i know. in fact, i learned of one more over the weekend as a friend’s dad went temporarily missing and a second last night as she drove down my driveway and hit my house. no measurable damage was done to the house but when natalie went out to see why she was driving her over-sized car in to our house, she said “visiting you”

she left our driveway and went back to the public roads with little to no more certainly than she had come.

when we called the folks in the neighborhood who were this ladies intended destination they didn’t seem surprised that she had ended up in the wrong driveway, more accurately they were curious how far away she was this time.

this is just the beginning of the tide of demented old people who will soon be out wandering around our towns. our only hope is that they don’t master cell phone technology and start texting as well…

given the amount of hatred i have for this stuffed version of dog its unimaginable to how i would feel about a real one that was pooping in my yard, licking and jumping on everything and leaving hair on everything it touched.

pretty sure logan’s wish for pets will be unfulfilled until she is out on her own and if she decides to leave town or join the peace corp she will need to find some other willing home to take in her livestock.

we’ve all noticed that turning in the homework results in little to no feedback and certainly isn’t resulting in a grade of any kind.

a neighbor’s son who despises the daily homework even more than ethan has also caught on to this lack of grading. a few weeks ago he answered every question on the homework with -

my butt stinks my butt stinks, my butt stinks

unfortunately his parents also review his work and this awesome experiment never made it back to the teacher.

unless its the new edition of the spider man comic in the mail.

she was pretty sure she broke her arm but a trip to the urgent care center ruled out a break and luckily she only has to contend with a miserable strain.

not to be outdone, i was in the garage earlier this week getting ready to dig some holes. i had on my boots with lace hooks at the top but my shoes were not tied. as i stepped by my mower one of the lace hooks on my boots caught on the mower’s starter cord and threw me off balance. i went tumbling down backwards over the mower and in to other tools in the garage. i didn’t need a visit to the urgent care center to know my arm wasn’t broken but its crazy tender to the touch even still.

as i was digging the holes i replayed the odd fall over again in my mind. i was thankful i no longer disabled the engine running safety that requires you to hold two bars together to run the engine.

a cohen-esque scene played through my mind of snagging my shoe on the mower starter cord and as i fell it pulled the mower to life, as i hit the ground the mower rolls over one of my splayed limbs taking a piece of me in a dizzying spray of blood™

so after a finding her animal’s distinct waste in our yard i had to speak to her about it. i’ve spoken to her a number of times but the day i asked her to clean up after her dog she looked like she thought i might hit her. i swear i said it as nicely as is possible but if ever i thought i wasn’t perceived by the kids today as an angry old man telling them to stay off my grass, that illusion was shattered.

so now that i’m officially a curmudgeon i’m owning it – last night i posted this to the neighborhood web site:

Tonight around 7:15pm a young man was speeding along the circle by [redacted] place and on past [redacted] court.

The young man was driving a greyish-blue, older sedan, license plate [redacted]. If you know this young man please impress upon him that this is a neighborhood with lots of small kids who walk, play and ride bikes in the street and their safety is exponentially more important than wherever he poorly planned to be.

yesterday was the first full day working at it and next i suspect i’ll sound like a retail clerk complaining about their aching feet, but on the plus side, i’ll might be alive to do it.

we commented sometimes that young people don’t know quite how to act when they like someone else.

ethan said we didn’t know the half of it.

he said there was a girl on the bus that liked one of his friends and this girl was doing all kids of strange things. when we asked for an example he said -

“on the bus she yells [name redacted] has chicken pox and i need to take his temperature in his butt”

i know logan has gotten very clinical explanations of both in vitro fertilisation and copulation from her mother the family medicine physician, but i can’t help but think she is confused about the baby delivering process and the baby making. i’m betting she thinks her “sperm bank baby” will be delivered in a test tube not merely seeded that way…

what we call the family pile

midway through the afternoon they got cold and asked for towels so they could lay out on the driveway and warm up. then of course they requested snacks and i brought out platters of sliced fruit, cheese, meats and crackers.

then they ordered up seconds and asked for grape juice.

i’ve never been to sandals or any other spa like resorts, but i started feeling like the help at one.

well don’t crack your head this trip or i will be really sad when the helmet arrives.

we completed our last day of skiing without cracking any heads and had the best day yet. nearly seven inches of fresh snow on the mountain and the place all to ourselves, hard to beat.

winter storm walda (am i the only one who thinks naming every rain cloud that passes by is ridiculous?) brought extreme winds to steamboat springs where we are staying and our mountain host closed the lifts when trees starting blowing over.

we were holed up at the top of the gondola waiting to see if the storm was going to be short lived but instead of getting better we watched visibility drop from hundreds of feet, to tens of feet, to just feet.

about this time, we heard they were closing the hole top side of the mountain and were arranging a snow cat to ferry folks to the base. after a brief walk outside to check things out, we returned inside to wait for our snow cat taxi.

a little while later it cleared up a bit and we saw some other skiers held out. my friend knew i was anxious to get some skiing in and suggested i join them on the trip down. i thought they were out of my league and he said i could certainly hang with them. we had come to the gondola just behind them and had a sense of their skills.

just as i was about to contest my ability to “hang with them” they passed ski patrol who wanted to know if they were heading down – their response “we’re going to go climb south peak”

i obviously was not in their league but did take the light break in the cloud cover to ski my way off the mountain while my supportive friend took his first ride in the back of a snow cat. a memorable day for us both.

one of their favorite exhibits there is a large sandbox where you can ‘excavate’ little sharks teeth from the sand.

now that their clothes from that day have gone through the wash, i have an exhibit in my laundry room where you can also ‘excavate’ little sharks teeth…

logan as sybil

ethan as tom

it was all of that in epidemic proportion with a ray lewis cherry on top when he claimed god wouldn’t have allowed him nfl success if he had killed people.

granted, my boycott is easy to live by at the moment. its not october with the world series beginning and the nfl playoff at hand.

but in case i thought their might be cause to waver, tiger woods ensured there is not

this is no mock successory, its a real life online ad, or as i refer to it, a public service announcement from nike. speaking of which, i may boycott nike as well for perpetuating the culture where being a supreme dick is permissible, maybe even desirable as long as you win a meaningless game.

ok, judging from the snow, we took a late winter bike ride.

the drive home was equally challenging as we encountered dense fog on i-77 (picture courtesy logan from the back seat)

it was remarkable when we were there and tragic less than an hour later when 75 cars piled up, including 3 fatalities

so, when i woke up yesterday with a 1am software deployment in my daily planner i knew i had a curious day in my future.

and to be sure everything got off to a bright start, my laptop networking interface stopped working and i got to spend the first three hours of the day with desktop services.

the release was a bit rocky and ran longer than expected for a variety of reasons but i’d say overall i was remarkably not cloudy.

i was a bit grumpy at times during the day but only being grumpy a few times a day represents an improvement over some days…