Uncle's Birthday

A little before 7 p.m.

I'm at my uncle David's house for the fourth of July / birthday party. As usual, my mother's husband is drunk off his ass and can barely talk - and he feels that he has to tell every story that he knows while trying to stumble over a tongue tied by alcohol.

My uncle Dave's house is awesome. He's got the property at the top of a hollow out in Rubyville and has built himself quite a set up. The original house in which he raised his girls, my cousins, still stands and has been updated a few times. The garage he built is huge and could accommodate several trucks or a boat or whatever he'd need, but that is not enough for him. He also tore down the hillside and excavated half the remaining sandstone boulders by himself. These boulders are HUGE; the size of a VW Bug. If I could find a way to grab them and move them over to a field, I could build some kind of stone circle, but along with my conspicuously absent army of robots is the masses of peasants that live to do nothing but my bidding.

I consider this life to be just a temporary exile.

I can smell the food cooking and the grill; the smell is intoxicating. I plan on grabbing some extra and taking home with me since I have Heath coming down tonight around 8 tonight. The man can eat with the appetite of an Elder God. Must be something growing inside him.

More people seem to be showing up. Mom's husband is slurring with some good ol'-boys that I believe to be relatives of Dave's wife, Sharon. I'm not familiar with them but the topics of conversations seem to revolving around hunting, coon dogs, fishing, and everything that I have nothing to speak about. This is why I'm sitting at a nearby table with my NEC and typing up this blog entry.

I think that Brandi, David's oldest daughter, and her husband Wayne just got here. Not like I have more to talk about with them, but at least she's a familiar face.

The search for a Ph.D. continues. OU does not have an anthropology program as an option and Columbus is not really an option for me so I might shift over to a program for Higher Education Administration; more money - much more money.

I can't believe that Dave (and my mother) actually brought him beer to the party. He is such a fucking embarrassment.

Patience is the first lesson. Patience is the first lesson.

Picture: Grandfather (left), Uncle (Right)

Amazon Moving Company...

... if we broke it you didn't need it.

7:00 p.m. Dan and I are cleaned up and recovering from the great migration of stuff down to Ironton from Athens and then the drive back. We're clustered around the dining room table in preparation for yet another migration down to Casa Nueva for fud.

The whole process to move things down wasn't bad at all. Dan and I were able to move stuff without much thought or effort, however, country stairs are a bitch.

Photo from: Sarah M. Golonka

The Green Pilgrim Journals

Ok, how cool is it that my books have been shown on an internationally viewed blog?

AWESOME

I'm still doing my happy dance.

Click on the icon above to go to their site.

The weird thing is that the journals that they mentioned (on Notebookism - thy name by praised), were cardboard covered books I made as a cheaper alternative to leather covers. One of their contributors saw it on Flickr and asked for permission to post it.

I for see some binding in my near future.

Woo Hoo!!!

Go me!

-Tom

Let's call it....Gravel Archaeology

It all began with some buckets and piles and piles of gravel.

Shaolin-monkin aside, the project began as it normally does with my grand father.

"Can you help me haul some gravel?"

The concept of "Some" seems to be a comparative term that is used in reference to the atomic mass of the Milky Way Galaxy.

So, at 8:30 this morning, I went over to my grand dad's for "Father's Day" and quickly realized that 'Some' was going to come and bite me on the ass once more. I should have known that there was SOMEthing up because he asked a similar question last summer and I ended up breaking up 'some' concrete, digging out tree roots, playing with chain saws and then pouring concrete to replace a WHOLE sidewalk.

Each bucket was originally 5 gallons of something. With all the gravel it felt like 50 lbs on average. So, the seven buckets were filled with gravel and loaded into my grand dad's van so that they could be transported to my house. Then, since his van couldn't drive up my driveway, I ended up hauling the buckets up my driveway to fill the trench.

So, each trip was seven buckets of gravel and there were multiple trips. Yes, that's a lot of gravel.

So then, once I had most of the gravel hauled away, it became an issue that there were piles and piles of dead sod from the new drainage ditch that needed to be loaded up in buckets so that they could eventually be ditched over on Hamilton. Once the sod was loaded, I took a rake to the side yard to gather the last of the gravel and loose dirt so that it wouldnj't damage the lawn mower.

So, using a push broom, a rake, a hoe and such the yard was cleaned. Before I was done, I used the hose and the push broom to clean any speck of dirt from the neighbor's driveway in case the new ditch happened to put some dirt there.

And then, I came home.

Ugh.

Thankfully "Grand"-father's day is only once a year. My mother's husband doesn't get squat from me.

Nap time.

Later.

-Tom

Karma can be a bitch

So,

There I was in my office running back and forth to the copier to get the last of my Psychology final from the "Machine that Eats Paper" when I saw what looked to be smoke out of one of the windows. Sure enough that's what it was. I saw that there was a car on fire in the parking lot.

As you can see here, the fire is localized in the front, right quarter of the car as though it were centered near or over the break or front wheel. I would imagine that a break pad was froze and the friction of driving super-heated it.

The small fire continued to grow and whatever material that was covering the car began to melt.
I sat in my chair with a few other faculty members around my window and snapped a few pictures to document the fire.

Eventually the fire department did show up and put the fire out but it took a while. The car next to the one burning finally did get moved and was surprisingly undamaged.


After everything cleared, I found out that the woman whose car was parked in the handicapped spot wasn't where she was supposed to be. She had parked there to "just run in" and handle something. One person said that it was a final. Another person said that she was there to see a professor. Either way, parking in a handicapped slot when you want to can sometimes bite ya in the ass.

Karma is a bitch.

-T

Holocaust Journal Unveiled

From: Yahoo News

JERUSALEM - The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl dubbed the "Polish Anne Frank" was unveiled on Monday, chronicling the horrors she witnessed in a Jewish ghetto — at one point watching a Nazi soldier tear a Jewish baby away from his mother and kill him with his bare hands.

The diary, written by Rutka Laskier in 1943 shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz, was released by Israel's Holocaust museum more than 60 years after she recorded what is both a daily account of the horrors of the Holocaust in Bedzin, Poland and a memoir of the life of a teenager in extraordinary circumstances.

"The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter," the teenager wrote in 1943, shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz. "I'm turning into an animal waiting to die."

Whenever I hear about a new journal from the Holocaust or from a very significant period in time I'm reminded of the power of the written word. It was through the written word that we now know of this little girl, Rutka, and her family as they survived the for a time before being deported to Auschwitz. If it wasn't for such a journal coming to the surface so many years later, she and her family could have been lost to the black hole of historical obscurity - where history becomes not legend nor myth, but simply forgotten.

Always the Quest,

-T

Photo Credit: Atlas Shrugs

A Journal of Impossible Things

So Dan told me about this 'Journal Project' from one of the recent Doctor Who episodes.

So immediately I launched myself into finding information on the journal mentioned in the episode. The contents of the "Journal of Impossible things" were memories from the Doctor; all painted or sketched with ink washes and covered with his own writings.

The style of the journal's binding was difficult to see, but I think it's a soft-covered, leather-bound journal about the size of an 8.5 x 5.5 or a little bigger.

Now one wonders who in the Doctor Who production company did this journal or commissioned it to be created.

And one also wonders where this prop is now.

And one wonders if my agents are close enough.

Maybe someday I'll learn how to paint that well to make such images in my journals.

I'm getting there - slowly.


-T