Poor Beta is nearly 13 and bored. She… I’m not going to brag about here here, if you want to know her grades this year send me a mail. She’s going to an amusement park today with her aunt and a friend so she’ll do okay today. And we did go to see “Lilo & Stitch” this weekend, which we all liked, although it freaked Gamma out, I suppose she was identifying with Stitch and got scared when the mad scientist type alien was blasting at Stitch with his ray gun.

The grandparents were over yesterday as the girls splashed in the wading pool and got squirted, of course. These new-fangled high-pressure squirtguns are worth the money, man. Unfortunately I missed it, being at work. From what Alpha told me, and forensic evidence I was able to gather, it looks as though they stopped at our house after a funeral, in their nice clothes, and Gamma let her grandmother have it with the squirtgun. She knew enough not to do it directly, so she was squirting vertically and the stream sort of wandered over to her grandmother and it looked like an accident. Much yelling.

Then their grandfather was doing something in the back yard in his underpants and Alpha – his own daughter! – gave him a full load, running him back and forth like a yellow tin duck in a shooting gallery, much to the children’s merriment.

Better him than me.

Feral Living currently #2 in this google search for “fucking shit”, behind The Onion and ahead of some chick.

Screenshot.

Yeah, yeah, slow day today.

New entries to the Shoe Project.

US Independence Day in 1976 was interesting because it was the bicentennial, and it is also the year I can remember where I was on that day (all the other years, okay, I was probably watching fireworks near the Columbia River someplace) because I was with a busload of high school students in Budapest, Hungary. Gee, 26 years ago. We stayed in some gigantic, monolithic Communist era hotel with some Euro-Communist-style name like Eurotel or something. The balconies had orange awnings, I think. I remember I did a little naked sunbathing on the balcony for a while, feeling European. I also (no longer naked) exchanged cash dollars for Hungarian forints in the restroom in the cellar of the hotel, for a good black-market exchange rate. And the evening of the fourth of July was spent dancing around in what, in my memory, seems like a big disco somewhere in the city, surrounded by Hungarians wishing us a happy Fourth of July.

A day or so after that, we traveled by bus to a small town in Austria that was my favorite place of the whole trip (not only because I kissed my first girl there, who is still cute although a little snaggle-toothed) – and believe me, we visited a lot of cool places, like Belgium (where we spent about 45 minutes driving from France to Holland, and ate “french fries” which are actually a Belgian invention). Little did I know back then that I would end up living there (in the small Austrian town, I mean, not Belgium).

This Fourth, we won’t celebrate much. Maybe I’ll talk to my kids about what being American means to me [Bill of Rights]. Seriously. Maybe we’ll go have ice cream, then listen to the news on the radio. If it’s hot, maybe we’ll sit in the wading pool.

A play in one act.
Location: Mig’s home office.

Mig: [Talking on telephone, picking at navel absentmindedly, pulls out feather.] “WTF???”
Person on phone: “Bzzbzzbszz??”
Mig: [holds up feather in question] “I just pulled out a… never mind.”

[The end.]

A headache woke me up from a nightmare (crashing helicopter) around midnight. It was the worst headache I’ve ever had, including hangovers. So I stumbled around blind looking for a pain pill, found one, took it, went back to bed and waited for it to kick in. It eventually must have, because the alarm woke me up this morning from another nightmare (boy paralyzed in dirt bike accident).

The end.