Who's Driving?

I've driven lots of buses.  All kinds of buses, big ones, small ones, some in great shape, others so beat up that driving them was a real bitch.  Likewise, the roads varied a lot, most being okay but a few quite rocky and hazardous; a couple times there were no roads at all, not even a track.  Most of my adult life was spent in the driver's seat.  I enjoyed it and I was good at it.  It was a natural fit, square peg in square hole.  Sometimes the passengers requested that I drive; other times I was following orders from above.  No, no, not that far above.

Driving wears on you after awhile.  Nowadays, I'm content to sit back and enjoy the ride, let others do the driving.  That said, I do still enjoy donning the harness occasionally, especially if the bus is going to a fun place, like the houseboat on Lake Powell.

I need to qualify that 'sit back and enjoy the ride' up there.  I don't enjoy the ride if I think the bus is going in the wrong direction, taking a roundabout route, or moving at a rate that's either maddeningly slow or recklessly fast.  In that event, I don't sit back either.  If I can't convince the driver to change whatever needs changing, I'll take over the driving myself - or at least attempt to.  If all else fails, I exit at the first opportunity.  There's lots of good drivers out there, no need to stay with a turkey.

Shit!

1.       Monday AM, I drove home from Apache Junction (east of Phoenix) where I attended the annual Super Bowl/Poker Party/Mini-Reunion with my college fraternity bros.  It’s always fun hanging with these guys but it would have been even more fun if I had won my fair share of poker hands.  Just my fair share, mind you.  After losing nearly every hand for several hours, I tossed the cards to one of the guys, told him to keep them.  Had to be the cards’ fault, right?  I grabbed a new deck, but that didn't help.  Same old, same old.  Shit!  Gave away that deck, too.

2.      Tuesday dawned cool, calm and sunny, perfect for outdoor pickleball, players due at my place at 9 AM.  A while back I’d invited the usual suspects – 10 advanced players - to play here on Saturdays and on weekdays when the indoor courts are unavailable.  I put down fresh chalk lines, set up the net, the backstops on the driveway, chairs, about 1.5 hours to do everything.  Nobody showed; I forgot to send out a reminder notice.  Shit!

3.   “Okay.  I’ll run errands instead.”  Had to hit the bank, library, Kmart.  Hopped into the truck, turned the key: clickety, clickety, click.  As Bones said, over and over, on Star Trek, “It’s dead, Jim.”  Shit!

4.     Grabbed my portable jump starter, hooked it up to the pickup battery, hopped into the cab, turned the key: clickety, clickety, click.  Shit!

5.     Trish is out of town so couldn’t jump start from her car.  Shit! 

6.      I plugged the jump starter into an outlet, hoping it would work after charging up awhile. 4 hours later, I hooked it up again, hopped in, turned the key: no clickety, clickety, click.  The engine started.  Something finally went right!  Went to Auto Zone, bought and installed a new battery, stopped at bank, library, Kmart.  Kmart didn't have the stuff I specifically hoped to find there but did have a few things on the grocery list: pickles, bottled water, AA batteries.   

I checked out (“No, I don’t have a rewards card.  No, I don’t want to apply for a rewards card.”) set the grocery bags in the grocery cart, in that raised area near the handle where toddlers can sit, and headed out.  Crash!  One of the bags fell through the toddler leg hole - the bag with the pickles, of course.  Broken glass, pickles and screaming yellow sticky pickle brine everywhere.  This happened directly in front of 3 check-out lines filled with people.  Know what I said when the pickles exploded on the floor?  Loud and clear so everyone in the front of the store could hear me?  You guessed it: “SHIT!!!”

I had more errands to run but decided not to risk it since my daily shit-tolerance level was already well beyond red line.  Time to boogie on home and pour a strong one.

Turtle Dove

Ever wondered about it, how turtles and doves are related?  Kind of a stretch don't you think?  Doves don't eat turtles; turtles don't eat doves.  Interbreeding seems an extremely remote possibility, don't even want to think about it.  They don't resemble each other in the slightest, don't sound alike, don't live in the same habitat, don't even hang out in the same taverns.  Anyway, they've been called that for ages and everybody
accepts it without question.  Until now.

Actually, the disconnect in the name appeals to my sense of the absurd.  And, since we're talking absurdities, I've come up with some new names for fine feathered friends yet to be discovered.  They're living out their quiet, obscure lives in Amazonian jungles and lesser known regions of Africa and Australia.

Chimpanzee Chickadee
Buffalo Bushtit
Cockroach Cockatoo
Alligator Albatross
Grizzly Grebe
Whale Warbler
Aardvark Auk
Hyena Hummingbird
Platypus Plover

I could go on.  And on.  But, no, I'll wrap this up with one of several theories about the turtle dove name.  Allegedly, this bird's song is a deep, purring 'turrr, turrr' that kinda sorta sounds like 'turtle'.   Hey, don't blame me!  I didn't name the doggone thing!

Buses

Buses by the Bridge is an annual January event in LHC and it's happening now - as is the annual balloon festival.  Yesterday, we did the Buses, after whacking a bucket of balls at the driving range and before whacking a burger and fries at In and Out Burger.  Hey, did we pull out all the stops or what?

Hundreds of buses of the VW persuasion gather in the state park for 3 days along with the owners thereof, groupies, hippies and assorted camp followers.  And I do mean assorted, everything from Rastafarian types in rags and dreadlocks to the swave and deboner.

A few - damn few - buses have been totally refurbished and/or customized and look like a million bucks.  At the other end of the spectrum - the larger end by far - are the beat-to-shit rigs that look like $1.98.  The majority, though, are in the middle somewhere: they run, they look okay, but they're nothing to write home about - or blog about for that matter.

You may detect a hint of sarcasm (Who?  Me?  Nah!) or wonderment in my comments, a bit of "I don't know what kind of weird disease these poor folks have but I darn sure don't want to catch it!"  You see, I'm mystified by car fanatics.  And motorcycle fanatics.  All flavors of motorized vehicle fanatics.  To me, vehicles are tools.  They take you from here to there.  If you take good care of them, they will also bring you back from there.

Granted, vehicles are more useful than your average tool, a hammer for instance.  But - they're still tools.  I love tools, both new and old - but not enough to haul them around the country to tool shows several times a year.  Not enough to spend countless hours swapping tool tales with other tool nuts.  Not enough to join a tool club so I can spend even more time immersed in tool mania and trivia.  I thrive in a much more diversified life style.

It's all a matter of perspective I reckon.  Maybe I'm the oddball, the one with the weird disease, the main symptom being 'the inability to stay focused on any one thing for an extended period.'  Actually, I may not lack the ability but I darn sure lack the desire.

Sunspots

Colors influence moods and feelings.  Red = excitement.  Blue = calm.  Yellow = happy.  Green = envy (just kidding).  Lines and shapes influence us also, although it seems we're less aware of that influence.  Horizontal lines = relaxed.  Jagged lines = excitement.  Diagonal lines = movement.  Dots = buoyant.

One of my how-to art books has a small picture of brightly colored spots.  The picture appealed to me and inspired me to paint Sunspots.  The appeal of the little picture, sort of a feel-good thing, carried over to the painting.  It wasn't until I finished the painting that I fully realized the mysterious appeal of the colors and shapes wasn't really mysterious at all.  Anyway, I'm now more aware of color and shape influence than I used ter was. 

Sunspots

Acrylic on Canvas,  18" x 24"

December, 2012

I'm something of a 2-year old, always asking, 'Why?'  Why the feel-good?  Is it the obvious - they remind me of balloons and lollipops - or is it something much more deeply ingrained?  I'm inclined to think it's the latter, maybe dating back to our hunter-gatherer days when those shapes and colors meant fruits and berries, food that was easy to get and easy to eat.

"What's for dinner tonight, honey?"

"I was thinking either fruit or saber tooth tiger steaks."

"Aw gees, I'm tired, had a long day, just not up to battling one of those nasty, stinking cats.  Then you gotta skin the darn thing, cut it up, pound the living crap out of it until it's chewable, heat the BBQ rock for a couple hours. Let's go with the fruit."

Hanford 177

The Hanford Site, near Richland, WA, is where they refined uranium into plutonium for atomic bombs.  Its 625 square miles contained several manufacturing plants, housing for 45,000 workers, 8 reactors and numerous supporting structures.  It was deactivated in 1989 after 46 years of operation.  What remained were the byproducts, the most deadly radioactive chemicals and sludge ever created, stored in 177 huge underground tanks, many of which have leaked.  It's estimated that the tanks held 56 million gallons of waste, nearly 3 cups of glow-in-the-dark soup for every man, woman and child in the US. 

To my knowledge, no colored photos have been taken inside the tanks, at least none that have been released to the public.  So, we don’t know what those cauldrons of seething deadly brew look like.  They might look something like this.

 

Hanford 177

Acrylic on Canvas 16" x 20"

Mike Delaney  December, 2012

 

Given the season and the colors, another possible name comes to mind:

'Oops, I Dropped Christmas'

       

The Itch

HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS ITCH RUNS RAMPANT!

 

Nearly a Billion Infected!

The good news is that a cure has been discovered.  Without fail, the infected masses have found that joining a social network brings long lasting relief.

I've avoided the infection somehow, could be I'm immune.  I did join a social network though, because I was curious, "What's all the buzz about?"  What the hell, join up and find out.  So I did.  And, I'm glad I did - my curiosity is satisfied and I'm slightly less out of it than I would otherwise be.

Being uninfected means I have no desire to Tweet.  Nor, as I so subtly implied in my last post, am I the least bit driven to Like.  Being Linkedin is great for transporting convicted criminals but is otherwise unappealing.  Okay, enough badmouthing.  For now.  Linkedin is, at least conceptually, a great tool.  It's for professional networking, rather than social, and networking to find employers and customers and so on makes a lot of sense.  I've been out of the workforce for 20+ years and have no intention of getting back in so have no need to professionally network.

Fed up with being email-pestered by friends, I did finally join Linkedin a few months ago.  Now, I'm even more fed up by Linkedin emails announcing that, "Dan Delines is linkedin with Cherie Pitts."  Whoop do doo!  Although I wish Dan and Cherie all the best, I never met 'em, never even heard of  'em, the announcement of their freshly minted linkage a non-event of the first order.  Yesterday, I got another one of those emails.  The last one.  Today I Linked -out!

I remain on Facebook because it's my online Scrabble vehicle and I do love that game.  Unfortunately, the FB version freezes up every few seconds and irritates me no end, been waiting in vain for several weeks for the FB dipsticks to fix it.  Methinks it's time to find another Scrabble purveyor.  Oh yeah, sometimes when it's a really slow day - we're talking snail, turtle and slug slow here and those days are rare indeed - I scan the FB friend comments and become underwhelmed all over again.  I've been known to show my artwork on FB also.

Having now aired my highly jaundiced personal take on social networks, it's only fair to acknowledge that, having provided all that itch relief, social networks may have some merit.