decent weekend

nice to spend some time with Loren, for a change. he didn't make it last weekend at all, and a couple weekends before that he didn't make it either. that makes for a pattern of "a couple weeks off, a couple days on", which is a particularly irritating combination of frustrating and annoying. so i took advantage of a slight lull in the work schedule at the end of last week and enabled a 3-day weekend with m'boy.

Thursday night we made our way through another of Hiyao Miyazaki's films, My Neighbor Totoro, which was aimed toward a little younger audience than i anticipated, but was still funny and enjoyable. i was tired enough that i missed the last 10 or 15 minutes of it due to falling asleep on the couch. Friday we took care of chores and got the house in order, and i watched him chew through a couple levels on a PS2 video game Sly Cooper 3: Honor Among Thieves, and we had steaks for dinner and watched a bunch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the evening. Saturday we got to play some chess, and a round of his D&D Three Dragon Ante card game (despite neither of us seeming to muster quite a firm enough grasp on the rules of...), and we ate a great spaghetti dinner while we plowed through another DVD of Star Trek: The Next Generation- which incidentally had a couple of excellent episodes on it: one which i'd never seen featuring a temporal anomaly allowing an appearance by (the previously deceased character) Tasha Yar ("Yesterday's Enterprise"), and another which i've seen often in which Data creates himself a child ("The Offspring"). fun stuff, there. Sunday we did put the final nail in the chore coffin, got in a couple games of darts, played a little Dragonball Z Budokai Tenkaichi (2, i think) on his PS2; just enough to know that it would take more than a couple hours for me to master that head-to-head game sufficiently enough to be any kind of competition for him, and headed downtown for the Sonics / Clippers game at Key Arena, courtesy of my folks' Christmas present to us. the Sonics got beat down handily, shooting slightly less than 33% from the field, and around 60% from the charity stripe, losing to the (lackluster!) Clippers 98-76. it was the Sonics' mascot Squatch's birthday, and at one point i had my eyes on the game and he ran up a row of seats literally right over my head. Loren and i had a great time at the game, with excellent seats, despite the loss.

only things of note (not that they're particularly important in the scheme of things) that i left out of this weekend were finishing T.H. White's The Once and Future King (great book, 2nd time i've read it), and beginning Harry Thompson's To the Edge of the World (only just begun it, but so far so good).

so much for the weekend. Loren's back to his mom's in the morning, and i'm back to work. PEACE

night crew

once again, Benny and i spent the evening in lifts out in front of Nordstrom's in downtown Seattle. somewhat pleased to find those LED christmas lights coming out more quickly than i anticipated. i finished clearing the lights out of two trees Benny strung, one rather small (but again particularly annoying) tree i strung, and about 1/3-1/2 of another one i strung. we got the whole west side of the building done, not too bad for the first night, and just barely beat the rain. i felt the first drops on my face as i was carrying the last of the road closure signs back to the truck. it was cold but my new Carhartt coat (courtesy Jason and Melissa via Christmas- thanks guys!) was up to the task. the corduroy collar on that coat kinda rubbed my neck raw the first tew times i wore it, but it seemed to have mellowed out, until tonight when my safety harness was pulling it out of place constantly, and rubbed me raw again in a different way...don't know if the collar gets less abrasive or more flexible over time or what, but that's a minor thing compared to freezing your ass off all night. it's really an amazing coat, much lighter than most of my other "warm" coats, and hands down the warmest one i have.

so, here i sit at 6:07am, drinking my coffee, in my old black sweat pants and my favorite oversized sweatshirt, both nice and warm from 5 minutes in the dryer. feeling a little tired, but i made it through the shift OK, since i stayed up as late as i could stay awake last night (well, the night before last i guess), and slept in until 12:39pm.

Loren's mom still hasn't gotten him to school, and i think they started again Wednesday. pretty typical, and i'm not happy about it. the boy has some very low marks in some of his classes, and sitting around playing video games at the Ronald McDonald House in Seattle might be plenty fun, and it's certainly more convenient for his mom (with all the twists and turns in the saga of her niece's youngest boy, who's pretty seriously sick), but it's just not right. regardless of what's going on around Loren, the bottom line is: school and sports practices are not a high enough priority for Loren's mom, and, not unexpectedly, this attitude rubs off on him. he's got his work cut out for him, and i'm in his corner, but fully expecting him to drop off the honor roll and tank this quarter. i'll give you three guesses who'll get to be the bad guy when that happens....

OK enough about Loren's school. in fact, enough about everything. this is inf, signing off. have a nice day, i'll be sleeping through most of it.