Night Of The Dark Remainders

Friends,

A lot’s been happening over the last few days, so here are some of those bits for your particular approval:

• Blowing It: I called the folks during my weekend holiday in Chicago after I had heard the sad news about my aunt’s passing. They’re having a continuing row with my brother and sister in law, so that was mentioned briefly during the conversation. Mom found it tremendously disrespectful that my brother had not bothered to break the silence and call to offer our Dad his condolences on his loss. Of course, I didn’t bother to do that either, I just had something of an everyday chat with him. It didn’t occur to me to say that I was deeply sorry, rather asking him how he was holding up. I guess I should have explicitly mentioned something about it, but I was pretty down, he was down, and that was the last place I wanted to go at the time (or even now, really). Seems that we’ve all lost our ability to think clearly during all of this.
• Going On Vacation To Relax: Not me. I could really use a nap. Maybe for a couple days.
• Gas Prices: I came that close to buying a motorcycle while in Chicago. A nice Triumph Bonneville seemed appealing. Nice low-end torque, decent fuel economy (in the 50s), and classic lines in a relatively up-to-date package. The idea of learning how to ride on the twisty mountain road to my house scared me a little though. The two gas stations in my little alpine vacation village (which are not colluding at all, how dare you even think it!) are both charging $3.59 a gallon for 87 octane unleaded. That’s crazy Hawaiian money and they don’t need a ship to bring the petrol up here. How-freakin’-come?
• Work, Work, Work: I may have said that I was bored at work. That invoked the jinx, as you would expect, and launched an onslaught of problems, unsolvable puzzles, and general crabbiness. I find that pinching people who are giving me a hard time, after issuing a general crabby alert, is very therapeutic though.
• The Dum Dum Team: The dogs’ learning skills are very poor. I’ve installed a dog door that’s identical to the one they use every day at their flatland dacha, but they haven’t figured out how to use this one. I’m afraid, though, that urging them to just “push!” out loud will certainly alarm my neighbors. They did manage to remember how to eat books and they found the oldest and most valuable volume from my library to destroy today. This isn’t going well and I’ve only had them for about thirty hours.

So that’s it for now. I’ll get back into this thing more over the next few weeks I think. More pictures are in order, for sure.

Your pal,

bob