I’m back!

Didja miss me?

I drove up to Santa Rosa on the 24th. Without traffic, it’s a 4.5 to 5 hour drive, but somehow I managed to 6.5 hours, what with stopping for gas, food, and water, toothpaste, toothbrush . . . The later it got, the more I began to worry that by the time I made into Santa Rosa, the grocery stores would be closed, so I stopped in Castro Valley to pick up some stuff, then promptly got discombobbled. Don’t ask.

The rental home in Santa Rosa was remarkably dusty. Sleeping in my bed was enough to kick my allergies into fourth gear, and sweeping up the next day only made it worse. I’ve been trying to decide if this is a cold or allergies. It feels like allergy only worse . . . but then, I drove back to Bakersfield with my trunk and rear passenger seat stuffed with bags of cat hair-laden garbage.

Once the movers emptied out all of our stuff, the rental home looked quite nice. Much nicer than when our stuff was still inside, which leads me to the conclusion that our stuff is crap. Which is true, really. We have a black leather (I guess it’s leather) living room three-piece set which looked handsome when we bought it back in the mid-90s, but that was a lot of baby vomit and cat hair ago. Our Ethan Allen dining room table and chairs were once nice, too, and still are, provided you don’t examine them too closely.

But the real problem is the hodge podge of furniture and the abundance of junk. Why, why didn’t anyone tell me in college to pare away all belongings? “Never own more than you can move in the smallest of U-Hauls,” someone should have told me. I guess it’s inevitable. You need a bed or two, a desk or two, a table and chairs. There’s a kitchen to stock, after all, and a TV, and a computer or two or five. To keep possessions to a minimum, I would have had to swear off owning my own home and only rent furnished apartments.

Which really doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, now that I think of it.

Just received the key to the new house . . . and tomorrow’s our move-in date. We’re in our furnished rental until the 30th, so I have a few days to make the new home livable. Part of Thursday, Friday, and the weekend . . . gaaah I’ll barely have time to set up the bedrooms and make the kitchen serviceable! Unpacking is the worst, the absolute worst. Let’s hope I won’t have to do this again any time soon.

D.

Chores

Some things are important. If you have two cars and two drivers, and one car has to take the kid to school while the other has to shlep back to Santa Rosa to meet with the movers, then a flat tire on one of the cars is a serious bitch. A cracked windshield isn’t quite as big a deal, unless you cross a cop on a bad day.

About the windshield: first, it got starred by a flying rock on the 101, then a trip to Medford in the middle of summer turned the star into a spider. I replaced that windshield and the very next week (again on the 101) a truck kicked up a rock which starred my windshield. This time, I said fuck it, I’m letting this thing ride for as long as I can.

(more…)

Overcompensate much?

My wife insists I blog this.

Zorc appears at around 1:01.

Zorc’s penis appears at around 1:20. Shooting fireballs.

There are antibiotics for that, you know.

D.

Gray skies

First, the blue sky news: Kris Starr has a contest. Promo, baby, promo! And a chance to get a cavity search*, too.

I drove down to San Pedro today to pick up school clothes for my son. That’s a little over two hours in one direction, barring traffic, but it’s L.A., so you can’t bar traffic. Got stuck in the thick of it on the 405 South, and again on the 405 North on the drive home. But the worst bit was the Grapevine, where I crawled at 2-4 mph for 30 or 40 minutes, thanks to a brush fire on the shoulder. That was painful.

Speaking of painful: did you know there’s a Ronald Reagan Freeway now? The Freeway Formerly Known as 118. It astonishes me how many things are named after that criminal.

Smog today: dense. Reminded me of my childhood. Must have been better up here in Bako, since my trainer worked the crap out of me and my lungs weren’t aching afterward (the way they used to when I was a kid. I thought it was a side effect of exercise). If you looked directly overhead, you could see some blue, but elsewhere, just a gray haze. I suspect visibility was under three miles. Yes, I can remember worse, but I grew up in the pre-catalytic converter era. Back then, pine trees would only grow so high. They would hit this invisible ceiling, and the top of the tree would look smooshed, as if the Jolly Green Giant had pressed each one down like Play-Doh.

I drove down by myself. No need to subject Karen to such a long drive, and Jake had schoolwork to worry about. Karen took his measurements and sent me on my grumpy** way. And now Jake is well accoutered to look like all the other Catholic High School kids 🙂

L.A. is like no place on Earth. (No place on Earth I’ve ever been to, that is.) This is where I grew up, this is my brain’s default idea of a city, but it’s still amazingly big. It took two or three minutes to drive from one end of Crescent City to the other, ten to fifteen to do the same in Santa Rosa. San Antonio was a little bigger: it used to take us about an hour to get from our home in Boerne to some of the cooler stores at the southwest end of town. Bakersfield? Maybe 20, 25 minutes tops to cover its full breadth. L.A. has no clear starting or stopping point, but one could easily spend several days driving the named freeways of Los Angeles . . . yeah, just the freeways.

This place is too big. The government needs to break it up into a bunch of Baby Bells. You could put Compton somewhere east of Bakersfield, Rancho Palos Verdes in the corn fields of Iowa. Hollywood gets to stay in Hollywood. Keep a few beaches down there, but not too many; I’m sure a lot of midwesterners would like to learn to surf.

Just a thought.

D.

*By your dentist, that is. Oh, go check it out, you’ll see what I mean.

**I really don’t understand why some guys like to drive.

Where do athletic shoes go?

Where odd socks go, no doubt.

Karen’s best friend from high school and college, Kira, came to visit with her two young boys. We haven’t seen her in 13 years. At the time, Jake was a fetus and Kira’s boys were metaphysical glimmers . . . and you know, it really does seem like 13 years. A lot has happened since then: Jake’s now a fetus with a wicked sense of humor, Karen and I are going gray; there was a year on faculty at USC, two years in Texas, ten years in the Pacific Northwest, another year bouncing around between Santa Rosa and Walnut Creek. Yes, I realize that adds up to 14. Trust me, it works somehow.

Anyway, we got back from dinner in time for me to make it to the gym for my training session, but I could not find my shoes. In our little 1000 square foot apartment, they were nowhere to be seen. I checked both cars — nothing. They’ve vanished. The only place I haven’t searched is my office at work, but I really don’t recall changing my shoes there. By the process of elimination, they can be nowhere else.

I need new shoes. These are falling apart. It seems like I’ve had them for years, and that’s about right, since I bought them two visits to Vegas ago. Two years? Three? I’ve walked them into shreds.

Maybe they finally disintegrated?

D.

I gotta get into some of this overdubbing action!

Because a show which exists solely to market a trading card game deserves all the ridicule it can get.

D.

Sore

With my new gym membership came two free hours with the trainer. Tonight was my second hour; Tuesday, she measured my body fat (pinch testing) and did a variety of tests to get a sense of my strengths and weaknesses. Today, she simply worked the crap out of me. The sweat was pouring off of me and my tee-shirt got drenched. Amazing, since all I did was crunch and lunge and do stuff with big rubber balls. We didn’t touch a single weight machine.

Now I need to decide whether to pop for more workout sessions now that my freebies are all used up. It’s like those first few fixes of H to get ya hooked. Yes, I want to, because this gal got me working and stretching and shvitzing like no one else. And she claims she can get me to where I can touch my toes! Yes, that’s one of my big goals in life: to be able to touch my toes.

A flat stomach would be nice, too.

And now I’m going to lie down and moan for a bit.

D.

PS: Saw my first few patients today! As usual, the damn computer is the toughest part of the whole thing. Same software, but Southern California Kaiser has tweaked it differently than Northern Cal. It’ll take some getting used to.

Father’s Day

Images of fatherhood we grew up with, which never quite jived with the real thing:

In residency, we occasionally spoke of taking our junior residents “to the woodshed.” No spanking involved (though some might have deserved it). Just a lot of hot air which sometimes met receptive ears, sometimes not.

In my family, spanking was not a sign of love. It was equal parts intimidation and dominance ritual. I was unusually apt at worming my way out of spankings . . . and look how I turned out!

Here’s another.

Robert Young was insufferable. His Jim Anderson was the kind of dad you’d want for all of about twenty minutes, and then you’d find yourself putting dog crap in his loafers just to see if you could get a rise out of the guy. Hugh Beaumont, he seemed human like the rest of us.

Ward Cleaver always had an answer for everything.

Happy Father’s Day, all you fathers!

D.