Nostalgia Much?

If you're going to drive a gas guzzler, you might as well drive a sweet purple thing with tall fins, right?

Wonder if that barber knows how to give a good crew cut.

Ink

I've wanted a tattoo since I was a tiny kid. But I kept saying I didn't know what to get.

I've been using this buckaroo lobster logo for over 15 years, and I've been in Lobster Land since 7th grade. If anything fits the bill for a tattoo design, this is it.



My friend Roj drew it, but I didn't include his signature on my arm. I did have it mirrored, because it needs to face forward and I wanted him on my left arm. I could have done it on the right arm, but the tattooist I went to flipped it to show me what it would look like. He was so fast and accurate in his copy work, all the fears I had that it wouldn't look right went completely away. Of course, he makes his living at this. Do anything every day for years and competency almost comes by default.

Plus, I didn't know this before, but they make a template, and transfer it to your arm first. That way size and placement is tweaked before the permanent stuff happens.

The pain was, well, it was pain. I don't like pain, or needles, and there's a perverse sort of Zen to sitting there, relaxing despite the pain, not only hurting but knowing that it's a totally voluntary hurt.



But for comparison, my neck hurts more right now for no reason I can figure.

I took a picture while he had a smoke after the black was inked in. They say that's the worst part, and they're not kidding. The color is so painless I wondered if he was doing it right.

Then, when I went to pay, I handed the guy's wife a credit card. She looked at me like it was a loaded gun, and said, 'Can you get cash? It's cash only.'

Even Girl Scouts selling cookies take cards, right? So I went to an ATM and came back with the dough. I wondered, how often do they deal with less than honest customers who would simply vanish at that point. It's not like the guy could track me down and un-ink my arm.

But he never asked me to work for free, so I wouldn't expect him to.

So now I get to practice a new Zen. The one of keeping it out of the sun, yet out of contact with clothes, but preferably not bandaged, for two weeks. Oh, and don't scratch it or pick the scab. Damnit. What's the use of a scab if you can't pick it?

Demolition Derby!

This is the center of my sporting universe. It's the Super Bowl except I get to attend in person. It's gladiator stuff, and unlike most such endeavors, I want to play. I'm much too tired to write about it, so here's hoping pictures are worth those thousand words.




Not to mention the video...

The Law of Displaced Misery

Friends don't let friends drive Volvos. Even with three Rodeo Queens on board, it's not worth it.

I've owned a Volvo, and by displacement it should have excused me from all other earthly suffering...

Object of Desire

It will be mine, oh yes, it will be.



How come that works in Wayne's World but not for me?

Cowboy Up?

Okay, I've thought for a long time I'd like a pair of cowboy boots, but besides their being expensive, I'm not qualified to wear them. I'd be like a member of the Village People, I don't even like country music.

So imagine my surprise to find myself in the stands for bull riding.

It was kind of an accident. A couple of years ago I went to my first demolition derby at the Johnson County Fair, and I loved it. But they don’t' sell advance tickets, and the line forms about eight hours before the tickets go on sale. Seriously. I was there at 11:00 am, and tickets didn't go on sale until 6:00 pm, and there were a good twenty people ahead of me.



It's the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster's weekend with the kids, so I'm free to waste the whole day in line again, but I hired her boyfriend to fix my gutters, and after that I need to go the office Saturday. At least some. Not a ton of overtime, but I'm down considerable on the week for the flat tire trouble and other obligations. The tire turned out to be fixable. Call me crazy, but I hate to spend $70 for a new tire to put on a car CarMax only offered $50 for before the AC went out.

I thought maybe I'd play scalper. The tickets for the derby are $12, but I figure with a line like that, and a couple hundred people turned away every year, I'd get some takers at, say, $20 a ticket. Maybe the cap the sales at ten to a person, I could still make $60 in profit after my own ticket was covered. But they have an 'all events' pass you can buy in advance.

For $35. Too much, to be sure, to pay for a $12 ticket I might be able to get from a scalper for $20. But I can go to work after my gutters are fixed on Saturday, and at time-and-a-half, I'll make better money doing what I do than I would sitting in the sun with a book.

The pass also entitled me to attend the mutton busting two days ago except it was over. And the barrel racing I'd missed. I'm no rodeo fan, so I wouldn't have attended that stuff anyway, but the bull riding was about to start, and I was already paid up.



These guys are totally shot out of a cannon. I could see myself driving a demolition derby car, but what kind of crazy says, 'let's tie a strap around a bull so he'll kick like hell and see if we can stay on?'

It was also surprising the music on the PA. Cowboy shit, sure, but they also played hip-hop and metal. Go figure.

I don't understand the scoring. If you don't make eight seconds, you get no points at all. The ones that do hang on all look the same, yet one will get 66 points and another gets 72. Weird stuff.



I didn't stay for the whole thing. I got bored. I shouldn't have, these guys are risking the grave and the wheelchair every time they get on, but it's not that entertaining. I guess it must have been boring on the ranch, and there was no TV, so they started doing this and now it's a tradition.



Oh, and it was raining. And there was a garage band who hasn't heard that Foghat sucked thirty years ago. The material isn't getting better.

Morning in America

One of those days, or it was in the morning. Running late for work already, I hear a funny sounda s I back out of the garage, a slapping sound. I pictured some new catastrophic mechanical failure, but no, just a flat tire.

So I found the secret hiding place the tire jack was in, dug out the donut spare. The donut only had 15lbs of air in it (supposed to have 60), but it wasn't quite floppy. It had more air pressure, anyway, than the tire it was standing in for.

Then I try to pry the hubcap off, and it's not coming. I'm pulling hard enough to almost bend it.

Looking in the owners manual, the wire style wheel covers are noted as an 'option.' They're hideous enough without thinking of some dork paying extra for them. The center medallion pops out with the aid of a tool kept in the glove which also has a sort of socket for removing the lug that holds the cap on. Go figure, ugly hubs that require specialty tool — one more thing for me to lose track of.

Then I stop at the Gas & Sip on the way to work to air up the donut, and I knew they wouldn't have 'free' air like a gas station ought to have. But I was unprepared for how bad it's gotten: 75¢ to run a fucking air compressor for a minute or two. That's somehow more offensive than the $3 gas. It's not like we're dependent on foreign air. No one is closing down the Canadian Air Pipeline for repairs.



If I'm going to drive an old car with mechanical deficiencies, I want something that's more...me. A '61 Continental with suicide doors, maybe. Or better yet, a Rolls pickup. Technically that's more Travis McGee than 'me,' but still, it would be a cool ride.

Burnt To a Crisp or Bloody As Hell?

For some reason, I had it in my head that Em didn't care for steak. She eats salmon like a fiend, so does Mo, so that's what I tend to get for the grill, when I can find salmon on sale and am relatively solvent.

But when I found the Omaha Steaks in the freezer, still sealed in their vacuum pouches, I figured I'd throw a couple on the grill and she could try it. I knew I'd eat them, no problem there.

I really expected her to ask me to throw hers back on the grill. I timed them for medium rare, 4 minutes, flip, two minutes. Hot all the way through but quite red inside. 'I like medium rare as well as medium well,' she said. She proceeded to devour her fillet, delighting in the bacon wrapped around it.

She did ask me what this red stuff was. I knew she'd pull a Ghandi hunger strike on me if I said 'blood,' so I said, 'It's just the juices. They run red if the steak is rare, brown if it's overcooked.'

She pronounced the fillet 'tender and juicy' and said she'd eat grilled steak anytime Dad wanted to light a fire.

She ate a pretty good serving of salmon to boot.

Meanwhile, Mo scarfed most of the shrimp I'd bought. The sale was too good to pass up, but I bought less than a pound of it, and she made short work of them.

Then she proceeded to drown her salmon in ranch dressing. I swear, there's nothing this kid doesn't like ranch dressing on. Chicken nuggets, french fries, I'm half expecting her to start dipping her Oreos in the stuff.

The Golden Arches

I almost never eat McDonalds. My general feeling, after consuming anything there, is it would have been better to stay hungry.

Still, it's an interesting snapshot of America in a way. We ate there largely because I had subjected the girls to a lengthy shopping expedition, we were all hungry, and we still had to do a grocery run. Besides the fact that I had budgeted for a meal out that we didn't have last night, I figured I might save about as much as the meal cost in unnecessary groceries by not going to the store hungry.

I shouldn't have offered McDonalds as an option if I wanted to avoid it. It was about as nasty as I remembered.

But I noticed things, maybe because I'm so rarely in the place. A sign above the drive-through window says 'Presentation Target: 10-15 Seconds.' I remember when I was a kid they did a promotion, 60-seconds or it's free. They'd have a person grabbing the items you ordered from the heat lamps while the person at the cashier was still taking your order. I might not think much of their food, but obviously their marketing research has told them most Americans will eat any Soviet-style ersatz food if the service is fast enough.

They have a TV on the wall that shows profiles of employees along with advertising crapola for McDonalds and Coca-Cola and whatnot. The frame that struck me was the one claiming 'This is How Coke Should Taste.'

Technically, perhaps, but not true.

When I worked for QuikTrip (this is going back about ten years), I learned about the brix ratio for soda fountains. The syrup comes in a bag, and by the terms of licensing with the bottler, you can dilute it 4:1 or 5:1. You cannot cut it 3:1 with carbonated water, you can't go 6:1. The soda cops will get you if you do that.

QT, and most places that feature soda fountains prominently in their business model, uses the 4:1 ratio, which closely matches what you'd get from a bottle of the same soda. Which is important if the customer is stopping specifically for soda: the Coke from the fountain needs to taste like the Coke in the bottles and cans, or like the bottles and cans if you poured them over ice anyway.

But at McDonalds, they go 5:1. I'm not sure, but I think this is a dispensation they specifically got from Coke so the soda cops would leave them alone. No one ever goes to McDonald's just for a soda, but because the economy of scale McDonalds is operating at translates that watery soda into profits large enough to shame Bill Gates, they do this anyway.

It's why McDonald's soda is so nasty: they do it on purpose. And the ad on the in-house idiot box is their way of trying to con you into thinking it's a good thing.

Thing is, the corporate machine knows better; I have proof: McDonalds also owns Chipotle, a chain that doesn't do much advertising, but which does serve pretty decent food as 'fast food' goes. I guess they figure they'll grab the few dollars that aren't coming in just for fast presentation. So they send their real food to Chipotle and spend billions on advertising to make up for the pre-vomit they pass off at the golden arches.

I also learned that while mayo on fries is good, it's not good enough to make McDonald's fries worth eating.

Looking forward to lunch tomorrow. The fast food foray put the kibosh on the plans I had to grill dinner. In my freezer, I found a pair of Omaha Steaks, bacon-wrapped filet mignon, remnants of a gift last fall, still vacuum sealed. Add to that salmon (on sale) and a few shrimp (also on sale), and it's going to be a good surf & turf in Lobster Land tomorrow.

B-52s

You connected the dots there, huh? The whole Midwest Rock Lobster thing starts with that song, and a classmate with enormous boobs in 7th grade who was into the B-52s, and my lifetime pal Mayhem suggesting we smoke some Rice Crispies and go to Lobster Land.

We went to the Dot. Everyone had a pager for a chain restaurant...

Okay, that won't work.

We trekked out to the Legends at Village West free concert deal. Retro Music Festival, I think they called it, but to me, it was a chance to hear the B-52s live. I still love them, even if Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson are no longer young enough or svelte enough for those costumes.

For starters, it takes forever to get there. I wouldn't have burned the gas, but a free concert. And I thought my kids would dig it, even though Em insists she hates the B-52s. She hates them based on me trying to get her to listen to the song Rock Lobster. If I like it, it must be poison.

Parking was at the Speedway, with shuttles to bring people in to what really amounts to a strip mall parking lot. I figured, music festival: funnel cakes, hot dog vendors, etc. If I had a thunder of a hunger for the Outback Steakhouse, I'd have been set. Or if I had the dough for sushi, or the patience to wait 35 minutes for a table at Cheeseburger in Paradise.

I had been thinking 'free concert.' But clearly, the idea was 'generate traffic for the restaurants.'

Seeing the B-52s in middle age reminds me of seeing Steppenwolf play Worlds of Fun back in the 80s. John Kay chewed gum while he sang. They tried to do new material, but the audience wasn't having it, and in fairness to the band: given a choice between singing Magic Carpet Ride and Born To Be Wild every night for decades on end on the one hand, and honest work on the other...well, if you saw the members of Steppenwolfe circa 1984, you'd know honest work wasn't actually an option. Those burnouts couldn't have gotten a job cleaning ashtrays in a biker bar.

The B-52s, on the other hand, could easily get work as PTA board members, school bus aides, maybe even paralegals if they'd suck it up and take the classes. Apparently, singing Rock Lobster and Love Shack for decades on end is preferable to honest work.

They sounded pretty good, if a bit loud in the concrete-ness of the venue. I'm not really a dancer, but I can't not dance to Private Idaho, you know? Mo was digging it too. Em, on the other hand...

The Fountain of Middle Age

I've truly lost my adolescence. I think of myself basically as unchanged since 17, except maybe for my politics and my attitudes about 16-year-old girls.

I don't mean like a mid-life crisis, I mean I never have felt like I was not a teenager. Just that the actual teenagers I encounter seem less and less like me. More irritating, less educated than I surely was.

What's this got to do with the shedmonster pictured above? Glad you asked.

Barley sheds. Like he's training for the goddamn canine olympics shed team. Downhill shedding, cross country shedding, he could be a contender.

Plus, as yo can see, he's black. Meaning his little black hairs are instantly visible on what was once, I swear, off-white carpet. That tan, neutral stuff that's supposedly better for resale value.

For the past six months or so, I've been trying to keep it up with the shop vac. This is because my upright no longer sucked hard enough that I could see where I'd been. But the shop vac, powerful as it is, has a 3" swath, and it takes a long time, on all fours or stooped over to get the house done with it.

So Mom gave me an early birthday present. A vacuum cleaner. And I was excited to receive such a gift.

Which is where the lost adolescence thing comes in. It is so un-cool to get excited about a vaccum cleaner. It's probably immoral even.

But it does the job, and without the athletic effort the shop vac involves. I present before and after shots of the end of the hall where Barley The Dogfaced Boy sleeps.

Bermuda Triangulated

We lost another.

Gonzo, it was explicable. The maiden voyage of that one, the parachute didn't deploy properly and it went plummeting. It wasn't a real suicide attempt, just a cry for help.




Second launch, that one caught a good stream and wasn't even losing altitude when it cleared the tree line.

We started writing my phone number on the rockets after that.

That original rocket, the one with an altimeter, the Elephant Lobster, it's still with us. It wasn't windy today, but breezy for rockets. So we launched that one first. It's the older one, plus it's heavy. 2.6 ounces, least likely to go to Oz.



Sure enough, it did it's usual spiral descent, never really under canopy, just rotating around the parachute as it falls, maybe 200 feet from the launch pad.

Okay, Scribble was a much higher flying rocket. Unlike Gonzo, who was more or less Elephant Lobster's peer (like these nicknames? We got a whole bunch), Scribble goes so high you can't see him. 1100 feet max compared to 600 according to Estes' materials, on the same engine. What a difference 1.6 ounces makes.

Scribbles maiden voyage the shock chord didn't hold. The tail/tube fell unrestrained to earth, the nose cone and parachute eventually got tired of being way up there.

L-R: Grandma Mary, Mo, My Bro, Aunt Arlene, Aunt Joy, Em & her Hippie Dad

I re-glued the shock chord and hoped. I wonder if the glue I use is the problem. Super Glue should do anything, but maybe the gooey wad of rubber cement is what's called for. I'll never know.

Well, unless I get that phone call that says, 'I found this rocket on my porch' from someone two miles away from the launch, and see the thing with the chord still attached. Or when the yet-to-be-purchased Scribble II does fine with Super Glue.

We did the countdown, we watched, the ascent was spectacular. Can't wait to see what Cousin It, Scribble's yet-to-be-assembled younger sibling (.42 ounces, but still a C engine, should go a good 1800 feet) will do. If I ever see it again.

Because it went out of sight, and there was the puff of smoke and nothing.

I thought I spotted maybe the nose cone, maybe the shaft, but it was a bird on second look. Nothing. No falling tail section, no loitering nose cone, nothing. Gone.

Bermuda Triangulated, to take one of Chuck Palahniuk's more apt coinages. Gone like a train in Bill Frisell's lexicon.

Sucked into a wormhole? Secret experiment by an Estes engineer to prove a C engine can put shit into low earth orbit?

So then we went to the pool. When it's 100º out with a heat factor of 106º, what's the alternative? The pool wasn't quite bathwater warm, but it's not as shockingly cold as I'd like on a day like this. When we left, I was miserable with heat before we got to the car.

But we had to leave, my Mom was expecting us for pizza. My Aunt Arlene is in town. She was here last weekend for Mom's birthday, but I forgot my camera. And that was burgers on the grill. This was Pizza Slut. I thought we'd settled on Godfather's (my preference), but when it came I was like, 'Godfather's has made their boxes look just like Pizza Slut boxes. Then I saw the Pizza Slut logo.

But there's no such thing as bad pizza.

Pizza is a rare treat these days of Single Dad Economics. Like trickle-down economics from the other side of the trickle. Still, when you have pizza less than once a month, any pizza is great pizza. You know, like sex when you're married.

Note: this is not a slam against my ex, one of the few people who ever bothers with this blog. It's universal that sex decreases exponentially after the exchange of rings if not the exchange of phone numbers. They could easily allow the Pope to get married without compromising his celibacy if they could find a chick to give him a ten year head start.

When we lost Gonzo, Em said she would never launch a rocket again. Actually, I think, she said she'd never take a chance again. Really? Live like the boy in the bubble?

But today, when Scribble disappeared, she was, if anything, more excited by the fact that none of us could even figure out where he went. We thought we saw his nose cone on a softball diamond in the distance but it was a Twix wrapper.

Bermuda Triangulated, she said. And I was like, Where'd you hear that?

Just another day in Small Town America...

You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry

Okay, I'm no David Banner, I wont be turning green and hulking out, but it's not like I don't have cause to.

The City has billed me for testing the possum Mo bit. This is because she found the dead animal in my yard and bit it; if it had bitten her, my tax dollars would be at work.

In other news, the oral surgery she had, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of the 9th Circle of Kansas is willing to pay for the surgery but not the anasthesia. If they want to try and do this shit with her awake, I'll try to find their fingers so they can be reattached. Assholes. I can buy a license to shoot deer, yet insurance executives are protected by stupid laws.

Deer are at least useful. And good to eat.

Limits

Limits: I don't like them.

Years ago, I was going to be a Famous Luthier Some Day. This was before I found out I was an inept carpenter. I built some bee hives for my homebrewing hobby (making beer led to cider led to mead), and I was lucky to get them built to where bugs would call them home. I let my uncle do the instrument making.

Still, I impose limits on myself. I don't dive because I'm afraid of belly-flopping again. Even though I last made an earnest diving effort 25 years ago. Yet I hassle my own kids to face their fears and do what seems impossible.

So anyway, I've always wanted a motorcycle. If not always, at least since Jimmy Carter was President, okay? It's always been a someday kind of thing. Someday I'll buy a bike.

There's a few ways it could happen. I could shell out a couple-three grand for a decent used bike, ready to roll. I could spend more money than a car would cost for a testosteroney chopper. I could buy an old Honda or Yamaha and learn to clean fuel systems and replace rings and gaskets.

I was 33 when I learned to change the oil in my car. Not real mechanical.

Or am I? Is the 'not mechanical' thing just a script I run? I mean, changing the oil isn't hard. And there was a time when I knew nothing aobut water chemistry or cell biology, but when I got into making beer I was able to learn it. I went from being a C and D math/science student with some college to reading grad school yeast culturing texts. Might I not learn chain maintenace for a 1975 CB-750?

I have a coworker who fixed up an old Honda CB 350 to commute to work on. He's saving a good $75 a month on gas. I don't have quite such a long commute, but as long as I'm running with no air conditioning, why not have fun with it? Especially if I can buy and fix up an old bike for less than what one month's car payment would be?

Then the question becomes, do I buy a small engine like a 350 and accept that I won't be doing any road trips, or do I seek out a slightly larger engine, a touring bike I could theoretically make a White Castle run to Cincinnati on?

Confederates in the Air Center

The Confederate Air Force had their WWII expo this weekend.



I didn't think I'd get to take the girls to it. It's their weekend to be with Mom, and I had to work freelance, and that's the way the cookie crumbles, right?

Except it wasn't.



Normally I'd get to do dinner Thursday if I'm not going to have them the weekend. But Thursday, Em was staying the night at Grandma's on a cousin sleepover bender.

So we had Thursday dinner on Saturday. Still, there was the air show we were missing.



Fortunately, the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster let me borrow an hour this morning.

I think this is the first air show I've ever been to where it wasn't 105º in the shade. Of course, at an airfield, there is no shade, so generally, vintage aircraft equals 120º temperatures if you're lucky.



It was maybe 80º when we got to the show. And not a metric 80º like you'd expect.

The size of things amazes me. Tires half the height of a guy should not be on something you want to fly in. And past 60 years of age, these planes are suffering physical symptoms worse than the few veterans who remember flying them new. Witness the oil slick on and around the tire of the B-29.



You could, if so inclined and adequately funded, take a ride in these pups. A twenty minute joy ride ran from $80 for a wimpy Cessna that differs only cosmetically from the one your dentist flies to $400 for a ride in a real Japanese Zero.



I could fly most of the way to Japan for the price of a ride in that Zero.

Still, if I had the bread, I'd have signed up. Even more if they'd had my favorite plane of that era, the F4U Corsair. The gull wings get me. Or maybe it's because I remember the TV series glamorizing Pappy Boyington, I don't know.



But Mo is one menacing tailgunner, I know that.

Plus, both girls liked standing in the bomb bay. It seems so small, compared to the hug plane itself. Doesn't seem like it would carry enough mayhem to be worth fighting in.



We got popsicles from the shaved ice van, and then Mo tried to break away from me to play a drum set that was there for a band getting ready to play. I thought she'd peel her hand off to get away from me.

How The Other Half Lives

On the way to the air show (what I'm really about to post about) we had to wait for a mile long parade of motorcycles. I'm not sure what charity this run was for, where it started or ended, but damn, for a buy with chopper envy to see several hundred bikes go by.

Em always objects that Mo would jump off, or that motorcycles don't seat three people. But then, we see gorgeous sidecars, trikes, etc., with kiddos on board.

Plus, my idea about doing a street legal mini-bike, really a maxi-bike with a mini engine, it's been done. Many times. Full size choppers with 16hp Briggs Stratten engines. I want one. Bad.

But then, to, I want a camera that takes shots of such armadas that aren't jokes. I had to turn down a coworker looking to unload a high end digital SLR with three lenses. What he was asking was less than 25% of new retail, but it was still a ton of cash.

Frankentuber

Trivial, I know, but I love extremes.

I won't throw in with Rodney Dangerfield's 'I hate small food,' because I adore White Castles and mourn the passing of that chain from my area. If my car wasn't such a heap and gas wasn't so freakish expensive these days, I'd drive to Cincinnati to get a sack of sliders.



So when I did my grocery shopping last night (what do YOU do to really party on a Friday evening?), and I saw they had some unusually massive bakers, I had to get me some spuds.

Thing is, I actually bought more potatoes than I would have otherwise because they were so big. Each one is a meal by itself, my own private Idaho on a plate.

Pool Party

What could be better than swimming?

Swimming in the dark, of course.

This was a pool party for Special Olympics, participants, volunteers and families. It started at 8:00, when the pool normally closes. Well, for kids, it closes at 7:00, the last hour is Egyptian Swim, all Hebrews out of the water.

It's been so freakish hot lately, the pool was warmer than the night air by the end of the evening. The water was like the hug of a fat, child-molesting clown. But in a good way, because when you got out, the evaporation factor still worked to cool you off.



At first, Mo wanted a life jacket for the diving board. She'd gone without the one time, but since then she's preferred to bob like a cork. But then, after she'd tired of the diving board and ditched the jacket to do some regular swimming, they announced a contest. Well, first there was a race across the pool, and Mo couldn't give a shit about racing. But then they had a splash contest at the diving boards. I don't think she's got any more competitive instinct about the splashing bit, but I think seeing almost every kid there lining up and jumping in sans jacket might have made an impression.

Hard to say. Most kids are going in that way when we're there during regular pool hours, but maybe Mo thinks of this as a different set of kids. She knows most of them, from school and/or Special Olympics.



But she went over and over off the board. Jalinda, who took these pictures and emailed them to me (thanks!), tried and tried to get Mo in mid-air going off the board. But Mo kind of stands there thinkng about it for a while, and then with almost no warning, splash, she's in the drink. Then the challenge is to convince her to swim to the ladder so the next kid can go, rather than just floating under the board, waiting for the next jumper/diver to crash down on her.

Gutter Talk

I'm not particularly handy. Or graceful. Or the owner of a ladder.

The result is I have an ecosystem where a gutter should be. I blame bad design for this problem in part. Part of good design is low maintenance, in my humble opinion. Extend the eaves and slope roof lines way from doors and you don't need gutters at all. Or extend roof lines to where gutters can be reached with a minimum of climbing, if not from barefoot on the ground, say, standing on a chair at most. Or put dormers in the attic that open out to reach cleanouts.



Then we got a big rain, lots of rain. Enough rain I've got to replace yet another burned up pump. The excavation and landscaping for my home, when it was built, was inspired by the city of New Orleans.



So besides the burned out pump, the gutters are starting to come down. Another storm like this and I'll be able to reach to clean them out.