My four year vacation in Washington is coming to a close. The house closes on the 31st and Allison and I are moving back to Louisiana. We actually don't move back until September, so we are trying to cram in as much Pacific Northwest as we can before we go. Top 10 Things left to do before we do set out:
1. Camp on ocean beach again
2. Hike to another Rainier Glacier
3. Watch the Mariners lose #100
4. Weekend in Portland
5. Seattle Art Museum
6. Biking in the San Juans
7. Climb Hurrican Ridge
8. Mt. St. Helens
9. Fishing in the Columbia River
10. Eat more Dungeness Crab
I was kind of depressed about the whole thing for a while, but I am starting to get into it. Yeah Louisiana is hot and humid and kind of stupid in some ways, but the food is good. Plus I plan on getting a sailboat, which should be a good distraction from the worst of the heat. Also, I want to grow things. Especially asparagus. and I want to keep honeybees. and build a kayak. and maybe have some chickens. all things that would not go over so well in downtown tacoma.
hey killoggs. i still read you sometimes between trips to russia and saturn. the rest of the time i read old books translated from spanish into english and back into spanish again. only parts of that are true.
what is true is that i joined a sailing team. so far we have been in two races. the first one was around vashon island from tacoma. it snowed a lot during that race. the second race was from tacoma to seattle and back. we are not very good, but turns out, there are not a whole lot of very good sailing teams that subject themselves to the conditions we race in for fun. if they are any good, i suspect they race in competitions with monetary rewards. probably in warmer climates. we have only lost one person overboard so far, and we actually did manage to get him back on the boat before he died of hypothermia. shortly before that happened, one of the team members learned that he gets really really seasick when the boat is headed into the wind. i was fortunate enough to be upwind of this person. all in all though, it is a pretty good time. the key is to get waterproof footwear. no matter how cold and wet and miserable you are, if your feet are warm and dry, you know in the back of your mind, things could be a lot worse.
i eat asbestos and it makes me feel good. it used to coat the outside of my house underneath a layer of vinyl siding that was falling off. now it is gone. in it's place is new siding made out of concrete and some kind of fancy fibers (but no asbestos). some company wanted me to pay $8000 to have them take the asbestos off. i showed them. i have a few pieces left over which i will not mail to anyone because there are apparently some strict rules regarding this stuff. when i got really full and kind of sick from eating so much of it, i tried to burn the rest in my back yard, but guess what! asbestos doesn't burn. it does however taste better after being fire roasted.
this article may be proof of a global warming trend heretofore unseen in the geologic record. i realize up until now we have just been poking at rocks found in the antarctic ice and overanalyzing satelite data in an effort to paint a clearer picture of what is going on with the planet. the electric car may have arrived too late afterall. puddles are forming where just a few short years ago we were wondering if there was even frozen water.
there are 6 states i have not been to. Alaska, Hawaii, Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, an Nebraska. I have seen Nebraska, and am kind of annoyed I didn't drive across the bridge (i was in iowa) just so i could check it off the list. I am sure I will hit alaska and hawaii one of these days, and next time i am in chicago, a jaunt up to madison isn't out of the realm of possibility. st. paul/minneapolis is a pretty big airline hub, so i could see getting that one without even trying eventually. north dakota has me concerned though. nothing against the place.. josh has even posted some sweet photos from there.. but, i have a hard time imagining that that will not be the last unchecked box in the list of states i have been to. i used to have a recurring dream that i was going to die in ohio. thankfully, that one is already checked off. how many states have you been to?
this is where i live. i like my house on the hill. at night i can hear machines clanging around down in the port. tacoma is like baton rouge if baton rouge was next to the mountains. i like baton rouge. i especially like the kalamata salad dressing at avoyelles cafe on third street in baton rouge. i have been trying to eat salads for lunch pretty regularly, and it would be a lot easier if the avoyelles cafe salad dressing was sold in bottles in tacoma. the restaurants in tacoma are not great. there are some good ones though. at one place this week, an elderly lady asked me if the food was good. i said it was. she said "not great?". i said i did not give out "great" ratings very often. my parents owned a restaurant for a while. a seafood restaurant. that was hard work. when i lived in new york i was an environmental engineer. now i am a civil engineer. i like civil engineering much better. environmental engineering is basically industrial janitoring. civil engineering is all about making improvements.
in this journal entry i made an ass of myself and Reggie very politely pointed it out. then i dug the hole deeper. Anyways, for what it is worth, I apologize for my glib cultural references.
i am really bad at being sick. i am heading into week two of my stupid cold and still no signs of sunnier lungs on the horizon. i never notice other people suffering through colds as long as i do. i am not sure if it is because of some defect in my constitution, or if i simply wear my misery on my sleeve moreso than the average afflicted. either option, when boiled down to a sticky resin, is an unpleasant reality. cough suppressants, decongestants, chicken soup, vitamin c, lozenges, tea, honey, hot hot showers, long naps, weird dreams. i am weary of my cold. and do not like the idea that i am a whiny cold sufferer, regardless of the mettle of my constitution.
i fear i am becoming a headed lurker. five years ago today i got a good bit of my news from killoggs. now i get my news in three single lines each day as my google home page sees fit.
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hey everyone! my name is ben. long before killoggs ever existed i had the email address anotherben@hotmail.com. ben@hotmail.com was taken. anyway, i live in tacoma, wa. i used to live in bellingham, wa. before that, new orleans was home. before That, it was sleepy hollow, new york. even before that i lived in the red stick, which happens to be where i was born.
i got married this year. it is pretty cool, though i have not yet received any discounts on my car insurance. tonight i am trying to decide if i like vodka martinis or gin martinis better. i am leaning towards gin. extra dirty.
it has been cold as shit in tacoma lately. they have this thing here called freezing fog. in the mornings, when i am scraping a nights worth of ice off the windshield, this stuff starts freezing to the freshly scraped glass faster than i can scrape. funfun.
a lot of you people i dont know. it seems like there are more heads everytime i look at the site. that's cool. i like the idea of getting old.
i feel like at this point i should be getting to the point..to some sort of point at least. i don't have one though. i just felt like posting to the front page. it has been a while. i used to argue ad nauseum with keesh and josh and a few others, but i lost my enthusiasm for all that. then i got a new job that blocks internet access to all the workstations. i don't want to talk about that, but it is a real boost to productivity to any of you in a position to benefit from increases to productivity. anyways, i dont have a point.
christmas shopping is nuts. wow. who are all these people driving around?? and where are they going? they weren't going to the bookstore today... there was plenty of parking there. but.. wow. driving around on the weekends is really miserable.
okay. i will stop now. merry christmas people of killoggs. and happy new year. and all that.
i am joining the married gang this weekend. people keep asking me if i am nervous. i keep telling them no. but now i am starting to get nervous about the constant questioning about whether or not i am nervous. maybe i should be nervous. right now i am wondering if i need to bring the ferns in off the porch in case it gets cold while i am gone. but then, that might be a clear sign to my ghetto neighbors that nobody is here. i wonder if people walking down the street even notice the fern. it is kind of small as far as ferns go. i have a much larger fern in my office at work. his name is fern. tonight i am flying the red-eye to baton rouge. leaving seattle at 12:30am and arriving in the red stick at 9 am. i like airplane food. or i used to when they served food on planes. there is something divine about dining on pre-prepared single serving meals while hurtling through the sky several miles above the earth. next week i will be in st. lucia. i will be on the front lines if hurricane gamma or omega or whatever we are up to now makes a move. hup hup.
Some thoughts for New Orleans:
- The levees should be replaced with two levees. An earthen levee should suffice for the primary, outer wall. The redundant levee should be a little more engineered.
- The levee system should segment the city so that in the event of a breach, only a portion of the city floods.
- it is time for light rail to connect the br to the no. this will be handy not only for future evacuations, but also all the commuting workers who will relocate businesses to br but still want to live in the dirty dirty.
- someone should shoot the oysterfisherman who are suing to prevent the state from diverting the mississipi into the marshes and replenishing the coastline.
- the interstate system should be revised in low-lying areas to be above sea level at all points.
- bridges across large bodies of water should be constructed such that rising water does not displace segments from their risers.
- speech lessons for future governors, perhaps from the no mayor.
- replace lee circle with a commemorative park for the lone star state as a sign of appreciation for what organized government can achieve. refugees in texas started school last week. refugees in louisiana might start school this week.
- hurricane proof cell phone towers. lots of them. seriously.
- locks on the lake end of the canals.
- new superdome with some sort of refugee accomodations in mind.
tomorrow is tuesday and we all know what that means. today is monday. i was scrolling through some old photos last night and came across the antman photo and started to sort of get nostalgic for killoggs. sort of. .. in that i used to read these bluewhite pages daily. keenly. i was intrigued, fascinated, repulsed, entertained, inspired and occasionally piqued.. if that is the right word. i still read nowadays.. though not nearly as much, and not out of the original curiousity. i think it is habit now. an ocular fixation. a mental 42nd daily handwashing. a quick tap on the door frame before touching the doorknob for fear of getting a zap. killoggs is the comic book series that has no heroes and no end in sight. i still have expectations for some of the characters. some, so much so, that i don't even read anymore. not out of contempt or dislike or anysuch. it is almost like switching the channel after pausing on a seinfeld episode for a few minutes. mostly, i just scan the titles, glance at the heads in the journal rack, and then click on. i have a theory that the world is going to end on a tuesday. this is largely because i expect the world to stop spinning on a tuesday, and therefore, there will be a very long tuesday in the distant future where lots of things will happen. tomorrow is tuesday. a brief glimpse ahead to the end? actually, it is already tuesday on killoggs time. antman died on a tuesday.
my k[eybolard i6s fuck[ed up. oletters that are nolt suppolsed tol appear when i6 press certai6n k[eys sholw up anyway. i6t i6s mak[i6ng me crazy. golddamnyoluk[eybolard! aolsol, folr the past 3 days i6 coluold nolt olpen k[i6olololggs frolm my colmputer... olr cnn, ggmai6ol, folxnews, olr abcnews. i6m nolt much i6ntol colnspi6racy theolri6es, but i6 was starti6ng tol get a oli6ttole freak[ed olut. at oleast gmai6ol sti6olol wolrk[ed. anyway, everythi6ng seems tol be wolrk[i6ng nolw, except my k[eybolard.
i now have about 5,000 games on my xbox. gamebox games. genesis games. arcade games. atari games! super nintendo games. n64 games. it is absurd. there are even xbox games. too many to ever even begin to play them all. today i played bust a move, ms pac man, ms. pac man champion edition, earthworm jim2, the original asteroids, tetris, f-zero, several generations of super mario, zelda, zelda2, jade empire, lode runner, contra, quake2, and barbie super model (curiousity killed the cat...).
