Sorry...

While my readership is limited to a couple of family members and one of my wife's friends, I must apologize to the three of you for not doing an update recently. Loads of them are coming.

You might also have noticed a link in a previous post about photos on a photo sharing site. This was a vicious lie.

While some photos are available, and while you may look, there are neither descriptors nor knee-slapping captions. There are also a relatively few pictures. They are also not organized yet. Man, I suck.

Check back in a few days...

Oh, and as of my writing this, Barack Obama is our president-elect. I find this awesome. More on that later as well.

Further, a cashier at a local Taco Bell really ticked me off the other day. Be ready for a multi-page rant on this, as well as all the other cashiers that have ever ticked me off in my life, to be out shortly. Especially that one chick at Shitty Cashier Depot. She was a real bitch.

All's Fair...

As I have been neglecting my small contribution to the blogosphere, I will be including a few recent events into this one entry.
You should also know that as some of my few readers don’t have the fastest computers and/or also lack the fastest of computers, my photos seem to be slowing down their enjoyment of my super awesome blog, I will be posting a minimal amount of photos here. Should you want to look at photos and read those wacky captions (admit it – they’re the only reason you come here), you can check out more at http://robbspics.myphotoalbum.com/. You don't see the pictures you're looking for yet? Wait a few days. Pictures to come.

Recently Kat and I hit up two annual events in the area; in Puyallup, the famed Puyallup Fair, one of the top ten biggest fairs in the world. Yes, this world. What’s the fuss about? You got me.
The first problem with this fair, and so many, many more, is that they have become horrid commercial events. Fairs used to be about deep-fried vittles, rickety rides and crooked games of “skill” operated by beautiful, toothless carnies, and booth after booth of kitsch arts and crafts. Today the food booths include Panda Express and Popeye’s, the rides are actually sponsored (like the Mountain Dew Extreme Scream), and the craft booths have been largely replaced by roof shingle companies, military recruitment stations, and insurance agents. You know when you walk through a mall and all get attacked by those asses in kiosks? Imagine that, but with Ferris wheels and funnel cakes nearby.


The Puyallup Fair is kind of a big deal, Army booths and Pizza Hut tents aside. It is a huge 4-H event, and includes a main stage that boasts serious national acts.


While we were glad to go, we were let down by the corporate presence, as well as the fact that we didn’t plan enough time; just to walk over the entire area takes the better part of a day.
We did enjoy the 4-H livestock and art exhibits that we saw, found a precious few but great art booths, and ate scones. Wait…what? That’s right, scones. The dry, crumbly, unpleasant British pastries that Americans don’t eat, and for good reason, are a fair tradition in Puyallup. Luckily, they are made on site and are served warm with butter and raspberry jam. Not bad.


The best news of the entire trip was that I found something I’ve been looking for since we moved into a house; a vermicomposter. A whatty-whater? A vermicomposter. A compost bin made to be filled with a special breed of earthworm that enjoys gobbling up food and paper scraps, a vermicomposter will, in theory, allow us to turn our kitchen waste into the best kind of compost. Yay. A big score at a fair in the past might be some awesome piece of artwork or some local band’s album. Now? A fancy trash can. Wow. I’m old.


Even more recently, we went to Issaquah Salmon Days, an event celebrating the return of salmon to their spawning grounds near Issaquah, WA. Jackpot! This fair had it all; local artists, tons of local food, street performers, angry politicos, small time bands, and more. Rides were lacking, but as we have no children, and as my desire to go on rides sans children is vetoed by the wife, it didn’t seem to matter much.


The food highlight was the Rotary Club Salmon BBQ, where for a few bucks one receives a 12 ounce salmon fillet which has been cooked over an alder wood fire, coleslaw, bread, a brownie, and a drink. Forget the other stuff…the salmon was prepared better and came at a better price than you would get at most restaurants. Yum.


We also enjoyed seeing salmon trying to jump up a man-made waterfall in order to mate and die. Joke was on them, though; the locks were closed, so they were just dying, without the pleasure of one last spawn.









Kat really likes this picture. Why? Got me.

You may have noticed that pictures of my wife usually co-star a drink. I should let you know that she is not an alcoholic. She is what we call a "party girl." Just be glad she isn't huffing paint.

Salmon are stupid. These ones are trying to swim up a waterfall. Earlier, we saw some investing all their savings in scratch off lottery tickets and voting Republican. Ba-roo-chee.

POW and MIA, you are not forgotten...

…because, good news! You don’t exist!

While I am officially neutral in this year’s election (as I’m sure you’ve read in many AP stories), this article was passed on to me, and I think it is worth sharing.

As John McCain’s basis for being CEO of the most powerful nation on the planet seems to be largely based on the fact that he was a POW, this is rather damning. Whatever your opinion of the candidates, the last few unpopular wars, and the American government itself, not supporting our troops, our veterans, and our POW and MIA is just immoral and unethical.

And as far as this campaign goes, you should all keep in mind the most important qualification of any candidate for the White House; the ability to slaughter and expertly field dress a moose.

Conveniently located adjacent to a raging bigot.

I almost forgot the best part of the move. The day after we brought over our furniture and the bulk of our other crap, one of our new neighbors dropped in to my work.

To provide a little background, he and his wife are local leaders of a national Christian youth group called Young Life. As one of its many philanthropic actions, our store donated several box lunches to their recent golf touney/fundraiser.

The neighbor in question popped in to let me know how much they appreciated our help and how great the food was. Oh, and to ask me whether or not I was married to a man or a woman.

According to one of my coworkers who was within earshot and sight of this, I literally rocked back on my heels, tilted my head to the side, and stuttered out the answer. I remember the stuttering, I didn’t realize that I was a physically jolted as I was psychologically.

The response I received was “good.” Well, I agree, in that I am not homosexual, and in that I am (fairly) happy with my current marital situation. I disagree in that should I have been in a loving, physical partnership with a member of the same sex, it should be as good as if it was with a woman.

The thing that was most off-putting about this question was the fact that it was a neighbor coming into my place of employment to ask a personal question while I was on the clock.

Customers often come into retail establishments and make inappropriate comments, tell offensive jokes, hit on, and insult employees all the time. Likewise, everyone at some point has had a neighbor that they didn’t like, couldn’t stand, or downright hated. Now combine the two; now there isn’t a line anymore. You can’t dismiss the customer as someone you will likely never deal with again, and you can’t just agree to disagree with your neighbor.

The happy ending to the story is that s Kat and I were taking an evening stroll through our new neighborhood the other day, said neighbor came running out to apologize to me, and said he had actually come back into the store on that same day to try to apologize to me and the other employee who overheard. He said he realized that it was rude and inappropriate to ask such a question, and that sometimes you say something stupid and all you can do is apologize for it.

So…the sentiment is out there, but at least he manned up and let me know he knew it was inappropriate. Fair enough?

Oh well. Welcome to the neighborhood.

Is it cold in here, or do I just have the chills?

Ugh. Sick today. Severe cold or flu or something. It’s been going around in the area. The bad parts? No pay for a sick day, I feel like crap, and I can’t taste anything. The good parts? Star Wars marathon, link hopping on Wikipedia, and online shopping.

If I’m going to miss a day of work, I’d rather be unpacking or otherwise productive, but between the muscle aches, the Loratadine, and Tylenol, I am pretty much just staying on the couch and relaxing.

Man, if it’s not my back, my knee, or one of the other dozens of problems I seem to collect, it’s a flippin’ flu. Don’t remember what it was like to be healthy…

House

So moving day has come and gone, the old apartment is cleaned and turned back over to the management company, and we are settling in to our first house; a rental house, but a house nonetheless.

Yes, apartment dwelling is a thing of the past for us, at least in the foreseeable future. No more shared walls. No more listening to the upstairs neighbors use the bathroom over our heads while we brush our teeth. No more groups of two dozen “unregistered visitors” from south of the border cramming themselves into a home meant for a family of three underneath us. No more pictures falling off the wall when the next door neighbors slam their doors so hard the walls shake.

The best feature of the house? For me it's the yard, which is ample and shows great potential. That's right, gazing balls! Gazing balls everywhere! The worst feature? For me, the bathroom, of which there is only one, and which looks like a caulk factory exploded in it. For Katherine, the worst feature is probably he1960s wood paneling that covers all of the “family room” and half of the living room.

It should be mentioned that the “family room” was formerly a garage, which was converted into a classroom by the former owner sometime in the ‘60s or ‘70s to teach music lessons in. Since then, no one has bothered to scrape the “Member: Federal Way Chamber of Commerce” sticker from the window, take the hand-crank pencil sharpener off the wall, or remove the pegboard music book racks. It ends now.

Due to an overwhelming disdain of the wood-paneling, Katherine has “given” me this room to make into a den, man-cave, or what have you. What does this mean? Well, given we have no money to buy things for a man-cave, it means there’ll be a lawn chair, an overturned milk crate with a can of Pabst on it, and a stack or Playboys. Hmm. Actually, I guess that’s all you really need for a man-cave.

Pictures coming when the place is clean enough and fixed up enough to show to the public.

Seals, mummies, zombies, and Quaaludes

Saturday, August 16 was spent in Seattle, first at the Seattle Aquarium, and then wandering the piers along Alaska Way, the waterfront road in downtown Seattle.

The aquarium was kind of sad, considering the fact that it was right on the water. Its focus is on the ocean life of the Pacific Northwest; not all that exotic, unless you live in, I don’t know, Kansas, for example. There were some really neat parts, though. There were tide pools where you could reach in and touch starfish, venomless anemones, lobsters, sea zombies, and the like. There was a pen with harbor seals, which were cute as the dickens. There were also several tanks of Pacific fish, which ranged from the beautiful and delicate to the grotesque and dense.

One of the more interesting exhibits was an information center on an underwater laboratory which is literally underneath the aquarium and is used to study sharks in the Puget Sound. Six-gill sharks, more mundane than the violent sharks of the cinema, but sharks nonetheless.

Better than the aquarium was Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, a museum slash souvenir slash gift shop on Alaskan Way, the main street that runs along the waterfront in downtown Seattle. The museum has operated in one form or another since 1899, run by the same family the entire time. There is a collection of oddities, including American mummies (a “couple” named Sylvia and Sylvester), a two-headed calf, four-legged chicken, a replica English village made entirely out of cork, several Irish zombies, genuine shrunken heads, and more. They also sell all kinds of odds and ends, from touristy crap to genuinely rare and fascinating baubles.

I would love to spend a lot more time in there, since I only observed a handful of oddities, and they have literally thousands and thousands of pieces in their collection. I completely missed the 350 year-old preserved monkey with its own intestines wrapped around its head as a turban. Christ, how will I be able to live with myself? I felt it necessary to leave early, though, as Katherine is not huge on standing-room-only tourist shops filled with mummies and grotesque mutated barnyard fauna.

After arriving back in Federal Way, we had dinner at Indochine, a Pan-Asian fusion restaurant, the first of a local chain. The food was fantastic, the drinks were ample and colorful, the décor eye-catching, and the zombies relatively tame.

In completely unrelated news, my neck and back are much improved, thanks to the healing power of laughter. Oh, and heavy doses of steroids. They seemed to have done the trick of reducing my muscular inflammation and irritation to a tolerable level. I have since been able to stop taking the pile of pain meds, anti-inflammatories, and sleeping meds that had previously been prescribed to help, but which only managed to make me irritable, sleepless, lethargic, sweaty, and unusually terrified of zombies.

It’s been nice to not hurt, sleep through the night, and be able to raise my arms, in, say, a defensive posture against an attacking zombie. And, furthermore, when I’m stoned, I like it to be from huffing paint out of a paper bag from the liquor store like they taught me in Sunday school, not from handfuls of pills. Oh, unless said pills are those Mexican Quaaludes I found in that K-Mart parking lot one time. Then it’s ok.

A carved hunk of driftwood looks like a dolphin and marks the entrance to the Attle Aquarium. Oh, you thought we went to the Se-attle aquarium? The tree in front of the building begs to differ.

One of the simulated tide pools where visitors are invited to poke at poor, defenseless sea creatures. Not as much fun as the aviary we went to where visitors were invited to poke wingless birds.

Starfish and anemones together at last. Who would have thought they'd repair their relations after the starfish/anemone riots of 1966?

A jellyfish floating past a light in a large, circular walk-through tank full of jellyfish and colored lights. Tourists come from miles around to see the colored lights.

The rare Pacific sexy jellyfish, discovered by that famed French marine biologist Jacques Kinsey.

A green plastic ball. Oh, and a harbor seal.

A shark, and some other fish.

Right under the diver's orange glove is a wolf eel, ugly as sin, but apparently quite tame. This one is about to eat a squid out of the man's hand. If only I had a photo of the eel grabbing the squid from the diver...

...and voila!

You'd have the same look on your face if you'd just peed in the seal tank.

I think the sign says it all. "Ye Olde Curiosity Shop." Yep, that's what it says. And that's all.

One of the two-headed animals that inhabits Ye Olde Curiosity Shop.

A whale's Oosik. In other words, a male whale's member. Many a human male wishes his oosik was this big. Come to think of it, many a female human probably wishes it was, too.

A giant spider crab. It's tacked up on the wall. I keep my giant spider crabs under the bed, like they taught me in middle school.

A naughty picture show from the turn of the last century. Basically, you put in a nickel, and still pictures of women in what can best be described as a two-piece habit that flip around every few seconds.

This photo was taken right before the vice squad burst in and dragged Katherine out, kicking and screaming.

No, it's not Kate Moss. It's Sylvia, the gal in the American mummy duet at the shop.

Some of the shrunken heads on display. No, really. These represent the last or some of the last shrunken heads legally sold/traded in the world. One was small and dried, but didn't look "shrunken" to me. It did, however, bare a strong resemblance to pictures of the Lindberg baby...

Sylvester, the male half of the mummy couple. Skinny, tan, and loaded with buckshot, Sylvester bares a strong resemblance to Nicole Richie.

A two-headed calf. Two heads are better than one, say the leaders of the sledgehammers manufacturer's union.

The head of a giant eland. This thing was freaking huge. For a rough idea of scale, think of the largest eland you've ever seen in a park or in a Hardee's bathroom, and double the size. That's how big it was.

The dread Jackalope, pictured center. The skull on the left is that of a wolf eel, pictured earlier gulping a squid out of a diver's hand.

The famed Fiji Mermaid, and her son, the Fiji Merboy. Oh, they weren't attractions; they just swing in once in a while for postcards and snowglobes.

Katherine with a pink cocktail of some sort. It's nice to see her enjoying a drink in a glass, instead of just swigging from the bottle of Crown Royal like she normally does.

You win some, you lose some...

Recently, our "Bistro Specialist," the person in the company that picks all the products we carry in the bistro, helps the production chef come up with recipes and so forth, has left the company to be a stay at home mom.

With the position open, I figured I'd give it a shot and apply.

That was about three weeks ago, and today I heard back that I wasn't getting interviewed, due to the "pool" of more qualified senior managers that were also interested. No biggie; I didn't give myself a snowball's chance, but I figured it would be good to get my name out there to the corporate types.

In that sense, mission accomplished. The direct supervisor of that position has told our store director he wants to meet with me, and to schedule a good time. I think that's a good thing, or at least has potential to be a good thing. We'll see.

Some Random Pics

We had a brat BBQ in front of the store one weekend. It was kind of a flop; the brats were pre-cooked, so they didn't release clouds of smoke and aroma as they were heated on the grill, thus not attracting the crowds we get when we do burgers. Anywho, the setup is in front of the exterior half of the floral department. They were bored, and we had waste. The result? A BBQ bouquet, or BBQBUK for short.

From our new British section, some spotted dick. Boy, was my wife mad when I came home with a case of spotted dick! The case price for these cans of bread pudding is worth it, though. I plan on hosting a spotted dick party, where friends and neighbors can come over and get a mouthful of my spotted dick. I might get sick of it, though; think I've crammed all the spotted dick into my mouth that I can take already! Herpes.

Finally! From the Weird U.S. series, there is finally a Weird Washington book! I do realize that this is boring. But look at the quality of my camera phone!

Neck, House, Etc.

The follow-up to the follow-up regarding my neck strain or sprain (depending on the doctor), and/or my injured or congenitally defective vertebrae, and/or a possibly irritated, pinched, or damaged nerve went better than any of the initial visits. Our PCP (or primary care physician) seems to actually have a head on his shoulders, and is polite and attentive. I guess there's a reason the others I've seen are "floaters," filling in where and when needed, rather than having their own practice.

I have, however, added another drug to the lineup, a steroid anti-inflammatory this time, which has the unfortunate side effect of causing euphoria, according to the pharmacist. Darn.

If there hasn't been more improvement in ten days, though, I get an MRI. Yay! Scary magnetic cocoon!

In other news, we are officially moving into a house soon. More about that later, when I can post photos, but for now know that it's close to where we now live, closer to my work than we are now, has a big yard, and the landlord lives next door. Most importantly, though, it's a house. No more listening to the upstairs neighbors stomping around or peeing, no more of the neighbors' cigarette smoke blowing into our windows, and a quiet neighborhood.