Squatters

I love wind chimes. The sound of them stirs up weird sense memories from my childhood I think. We bought this really cool wind chime when we were in San Diego a few years ago. It was made of shells. It doesn't make much of a tinkling sound...just a sort of clacking noise, so no sense memories, but it's really neat looking.

Hopefully, you can see it well enough in that picture. The background, no matter which way I turned, was just too busy and bright. Sorry.

Anyway, I've noticed recently that there's all these flying bugs circling around the thing. I couldn't figure out why, but yesterday I looked closer, and I see a sort of grayish mud down inside some of the cone-shaped shells. I realized that these flying bugs...kinds of wasps, I think...are building their nests inside the shells in my wind chime!

What do I do? I'm afraid to touch it, in case I might get swarmed. I don't want to throw it away though, it's too cool. So, should I just spray it down with raid or what?

Unusual Reward

While several members of my family were out of town taking my oldest son to college, my fourteen-year-old daughter was solely in charge of taking care of the six-year-old with no help from anyone else. Since she'd performed well, she sent me a text asking for me to pick up a reward for her. Here's the text (her messages are grey, mine are green):

Are you as confused as I was? Doesn't make a lot of sense to get white out and put it in the fridge, does it? Well, we kept talking, because I figured somehow my daughter was making a joke.

Okay, so what is this joke she's making? She wants to drink white out? It's yummy? Silly joke right? Unless...

I finally figured it out...but I kept playing around with her a little more. Now I could see what was going on, but she still didn't understand, so I spelled it out.

You see, my daughter was talking about a completely different white out. It's sad that I didn't understand what she was talking about right away, because I was the one who introduced her to white out a few weeks ago. You see, white out is a variant flavor of Mountain Dew.

Before I was diagnosed as a diabetic and had to quit sugar sodas altogether, I was a big fan of the various Mountain Dew variants. White Out was possibly my favorite of all, and my daughter, who also loved Mountain Dew varieties, had never tried it before, so I got her one. She liked it, and now wanted it as her reward. I thought the confusion was pretty funny. The next morning, she texted me from school and said:

I texted this back, just to annoy her a little further:

Sadly, I'll probably have to wean her off the stuff so she doesn't wind up diabetic like me someday. Maybe next time I'll just bring home real white out...do they still make that stuff?

Hard Rock?

When I was about eighteen years old and about to move away to college, my dad decided to do one last big vacation with myself and the rest of the family. We went to Florida along with several other states in the southeastern U.S. As part of that trip, we wound up at the Hard Rock Café in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. My mom was not down with the atmosphere of the Hard Rock at the time. Sitting in a big room with bands like Everclear, Green Day, The Toadies, and Soundgarden blaring at a very loud level was the last thing she wanted to do. I was right at the age where I couldn't imagine anything better than doing that, and I just couldn't understand that joyless state that my mom found herself in. I laughed a great deal when I saw that she had taken her napkin, wadded it up into two little balls, and used it to plug her ears with so that she could withstand the atmosphere of the place.

Now, twenty-five years later, my own son is about eighteen years old and about to move away to college. I've gone on several mini-vacations with him over the last few months. They've been short weekend jaunts, but I'm doing the same thing that my dad did, trying to make some last few memories with my son while I still can.

On one of these trips this past weekend, my son decided that we should have lunch at the nearby Hard Rock Café. It's funny, because I haven't been there since that day years ago. Here's a picture of me with Roy Orbison's guitar.

Sitting at the table, the atmosphere was similar to what it was twenty-five years ago. Music was blaring at top volume. However, Everclear, Green Day, and Soundgarden were nowhere to be found. Not even The Toadies made an appearance. I wanted to point out to the waitress that brought us our overpriced burgers that they needed to change the name of this place, because there was no hard rock or hell, even soft rock, going on here. Instead, we suffered through dance songs with repetitive thumping beats that used to be reserved for remixes of pop music songs that only played in dance clubs where people were dancing and wanted a beat to dance to. Stuff like the Rihanna song that made me look around for the waitress so that I could say, "Check please!"

Here we were, all these years later, and the circle was complete. I was my mom, wanting to stuff the wadded up napkins in my ears to save myself the discomfort of suffering through the popular music of the kids these days. The best thing about it all is that I at least did my job as a parent, because my son didn't like the stuff like that Rihanna song that they played anymore than I did. So, at least I did my job there.

Gunning For Gunn

 James Gunn has been dropped from The Guardians of the Galaxy after he was found to have made tasteless jokes in the past. Rish and I talk about that on the most recent episode of That Gets My Goat.

(EDIT: This one was on the Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine feed. Now that the feed is gone, the only way to hear the show is over on the Dunesteef Podcast YouTube page, which I am embedding below).

No So Good

I was at Torchy's Tacos this past weekend, and they have this slogan that their tacos are "damn good". They sell shirts with little cherubic demons flying around the slogan at the register.

They have the slogan all over the place, including picked out in big light bulbs on the wall. While I was eating, I thought that this would be a perfect thing that I could update my profile picture with. It would be like that time when Rish had a picture like this:

And I had a picture like this:

It could be a new one in the series. So, I turned on the selfie cam on my phone, which I rarely use because I'm not a millennial, and tried to frame up a shot. It would be obvious to most that I rarely use the camera like this, because I stood there for way, way too long trying to get the words right above my head. At last I figured I had it and took this shot:

I guess it might be ironic...though I can't be sure, because Alannis ruined that concept in my brain...but I guess I'm definitely not damn good.

But damn that goo!

Qualifier

I took my son who is about to move off to college with me this weekend to the Johnson Space Center in an attempt to hurry up and make some memories that will make him remember me fondly instead of how he will probably remember me.

While we were there, we were looking at the space shuttle exhibit.

And I noticed this picture of the astronauts lost in the Challenger explosion from sixth grade.

If you notice the text next to the picture, when it talks about Christa McAuliffe it says that she would have been the first teacher in space. For some reason that line stirred up the curmudgeon in me, and I couldn't help but say, "really? We're really going to go that far with the qualifiers?"

With space travel, there's bound to be a lot of firsts. Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space, but then there was Alan Shepard the first American in space. Then we further qualify it with Valentina Tereshkova's trip to space as the first woman in space. Furthermore there was Sally Ride who was the first American woman in space. And on and on it goes. We get Christa McAuliffe who, certainly I'm not going to deny her bravery or pioneering spirit, but saying that she's the first teacher in space is kind of ridiculous, right?

How far does it go? If Lance Bass ever gets to space, will he be the "first former member of 'N Sync in space"? Or if I one day get there, will I be "the first overweight California native Scorpio living in Texas with four kids in space"? You gotta give it a rest eventually.

Oldschool Tech

I was looking through some boxes today, and I came across some old stuff. My kids couldn't remember ever having come in contact with these things before. They'd never actually touched them with their hands, though they have seen them on the wall behind glass...

I told them they were very old analog smart phones. The good thing is that their battery lasts a very long time, and they're really slim in their design. The problem is that their memory is pretty low. They can only handle one jpeg per smart phone, so you have to buy a lot of them. Luckily, they were much more affordable than the new smart phones they have these days.