October 2007

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Tuesday, 10-23-7

What a difference a day makes.  24 hours ago I was optimistic and confident that, although everything in the world is against us, we will prevail.  Now I sit here full of self doubt (and more likely, self pity) thinking that we were stupid for even thinking that we could pull this off.  How dare we try to do something nice for ourselves?  Haven't we learned our lesson yet that any time we pick up our heads we get them kicked back into the mud?  I belong down here in the dirt, I'll never know why Teresa stays down here with me.

There just isn't enough time.  Money is trickling by and I think we can stop the bleeding but there's no way to come up with any more time.  The forecast looks like it will rain all weekend in Jacksonville and I won't be able to get the house painted.  This means that I will have to try to get it painted on the weekend before festival.  Like I don't have a billion other things to do that weekend.  Pre-festival weekend is ALWAYS hectic and busy right up until we drive out there.  And if we DO get the paint on the fricking house, the realtor will be there Monday morning to get things set up.

Rabid dogs have been tearing at the unraveling corners of my mind, pulling it in twenty different directions at once, tearing it to pieces and feeding on the grey matter.  Two weekends to get my life back in order.  Two weekends to bleed out and die...

Monday, 10-22-7

Nothing has changed here at work.  Incompetence reigns supreme.  I know better than to expect things to get any better but still, I am fooled every time things start to look up.  I want to believe that people can't possibly be this stupid or this lazy.  They can indeed.

So nothing has changed at work but things have certainly changed at home.  We've been working on the house and it's been on HELL of a project.  Everything is taking longer and costing more.  But, just as we were ready to give in and give up, we poked our head up one last time and things fell right into place.  We made one last stand against this oppressive wall of futility and we won.  This is a lot of hard work but the real problem was money.  We had run to the end of the budget and still had a lot to get done.  We had a long talk and agreed to stop fretting about it and trust that "We've done all we can.  If we were meant to do this, it will work out somehow."  Within an hour, a couple of phone calls and an appointment that went well provided us with the funds necessary to get these last projects completed.  We've managed to leverage our butts back into debt but a manageable level of debt.  If we finish this house out with what money is left, we'll be able to pay off the debt before we move into the new house.  It all comes together at the right time.  Cool.

Money is falling into place but time is always short.  I was home last Thursday night and worked every waking hour until I had to leave for work on Sunday afternoon.  Wade and Lisa showed up and we got a lot done.  I bought a paint sprayer because renting one was $54 for four hours.  I'll need a couple of days with the sprayer so, I got a $100 unit and figured I saved money.  We sprayed most of the block/brick on Saturday but it rained on Sunday so I couldn't paint.  I did get almost all of the "parts that will become future projects" out of the back yard and we're almost (not quite there but almost) looking like a normal person's house.  The carpet will be installed on Wednesday, I'm hoping to get the plumbing back in shape when I get home and then have the rest of the house painted by Sunday (no rain, no rain, no rain!!!)

Teresa just called and told me that Becca's old teacher has contributed to Becca's Europe trip fund.  With the bulk of the expense right around the corner, every bit helps.  With our hard work and a little bit of fortune, everything will work out just fine.

Thursday, 10-18-7

I'm still battling laptop issues and time crunches.  I've been plagued with all kinds of problems involved with restoring the new laptop from my old backup files.  Most everything is there but as you know, if you don't install Microsoft programs from scratch they don't function very well.  I'm working on that as we speak.

Spare time has become a commodity that I can ill afford, yet time continues to speed on with or without me.  If I stand still for too long I am quickly left behind and fighting to keep up.  I have lots to say but I just can't gather the time to say it.

Last Friday I went down to see my Grandfather put into the ground.  The military portions of the service were touching.  Although I knew what to expect and I had heard the script many times before, when I heard it in person about a man I knew, it startled me and really hit home.  I was impressed at how these men in uniform made me feel like they had lost a brother, even though I don't think any of these particular men had ever met my Grandfather.  They were solemn and their words were heartfelt.  I was really moved by the military portion of the service.

The religious portion, well I guess it wasn't what I was there for.  I guess you could try to say that I'm just going to have issues with religion and that's that but it wouldn't be true.  I had no issue with the original service they had at Pop-Pop's church.  It was very religious and I found everything appropriate but this guy is just a poor orator.  I can't speak in public either so I'm not poking fun but this guy is hard to listen to.  Even if I get beyond the stammering, stuttering and the overbearing use of the word "uh", I didn't care for the words he said, no matter how they were pronounced.  Why is it that many preachers use the captive, grieving audience at a funeral as a recruitment?  I can't fucking STAND that!  It happens at most of the funerals I've been to.  He left out my Aunt's name and screwed up another name, babbled on and on about baseball but when it came time to wrap things up he turned it into an all-out recruitment meeting.  I honestly thought the guy was going to have an altar-call right there at the funeral.  Thirty seconds about my Grandfather, one minute about the Red Sox v Yankees and four minutes about how we are all dirty sinners who are doomed without sweet Jesus.

Pop-Pop was a Red Sox fan just to irk my Father who is a die-hard Yankees fan.  Pop-Pop was never really into baseball, he just wanted to have fun rooting against Dad's Yankees.  This is the same reason my Dad is a Gator fan to my little brother's Seminoles and the same reason I root against the Jaguars with Teresa; we Morgan men are just fun-loving jerks.  The preacher went on and on about how Pop-Pop had special pull with God to get the Red Sox to advance in the playoffs and to strike down the Yankees.  "This will give the two of you something to talk about when we are all reunited in Heaven."  First off; Is this really the first thing you'd ask about in Heaven?  Second; doesn't that sound like something you'd say to console a child?  This was a crowd of fully grown adults and the elderly.  Would this EVER come up if the afterlife is anything like what they expect?  You arrive in paradise and everyone you ever knew and loved is there, a huge reunion.  You'll be able to visit with history's scholars and legends (assuming they were Christian) and bask in the glow of the almighty God.  There will be no darkness only light, no more questions, you will have access to every answer, you will finally slake man's thirst for knowledge... and the first thing you'll ask about is a baseball game?  Somehow I don't think so.

Ok, I want to move on before I start to get ugly.  I contemplated deleting a lot of that but decided not to.  I already have a couple of burning issues with this preacher and this only adds one more.  At the end of the day, he seems to be doing what his flock wants from him so really, who am I to complain?  But this "funeral recruitment" is pretty universal.  I've run into it a lot and I never understand how people can restrain themselves from heckling the guy.  Get off the sermon and say a couple of nice things about the man we have come to remember!

So, in remembering that funerals are never for the dead, they are for the living, I was happy that some more of the family was able to attend this one.  Death generally comes unannounced and even though we may prepare for it emotionally, the harsh logistics of getting last minute airfare is something you are almost never prepared for.  My Uncle Steve came down for the ceremony and he said some beautiful things.  I remember him speaking at my Nana's funeral and it was nice he was able to say goodbye.  My Uncle Dave was conspicuously absent but I suspect "the drink" got in the way.  Oh well, he was able to say goodbye at the first service we had.  My Mother and Father were there and I was glad they had this second service to say goodbye.  They were burying my other grandfather across the country when the first funeral happened.  They are both tough and both accept the fact of death as part of life but they also shared a special relationship with Pop-Pop and it was important they got a chance to commiserate and lay his memory to rest.

Friday night I had to return home and get to work on the house.  Saturday morning people showed up to help Teresa and I get this house into selling order.  I was surprised at how everyone jumped in and got to work.  I felt like I was spinning in circles, bouncing from task to task trying to orchestrate and assist.  Tom showed up at 9am and I was physically there but unprepared for "what do we start on?"  We got to work spackling the holes in the walls and by the time Dianne and Lisa showed up we were ready to start painting.  Jeff and Trisha (and Gavin) joined in and we really moved along.  Todd and Jennane showed up with their trailer full of pro lawn gear and beat back the yard-jungle into a respectable looking lawn.  Thom and Kate tackled the Den bathroom plumbing and Wade was lending his wood-working expertise to some of the wood replacements we had to do.  Zephyr showed up with the pressure washer and the house got a solid ass-kicking.  Lena made the trip out earlier in the week to pressure wash before the rest of the crew showed up so the house could dry and we could paint (also to keep from getting everything/everybody wet while we tried to work) but her pressure washer died after the first minute.  The pressure washing revealed a lot more wood damage and we decided to lose the shutters on the house.  We removed the old AC unit on the front porch and left the hole overnight, covered by a folding table.  Teresa was convinced that evil cats would get into the house that night.

We broke for the evening and sat and drank a little and played some poker.  Mike and Diane showed up to visit and play.  Jenanne tried to hustle us all but after a few hands it was obvious that she in spite of her claims of not knowing which hand beats which, that she knew exactly what she was doing.  She walked away from the table the clear winner for the night.  Everyone was tired and I'm sure that most of us slept like babies.  The next morning about half of the crew returned to knock out the rest of the work.  We had the addition of Heffner and after everyone else had gone home, Heffner, Teresa, Zephyr and I worked well into the night trying to get this place livable.

We got 90% of the interior painted.  60% of the exterior pressure washed.  75% of the yard brushed back.  We got the front wall patched up nicely and the den bathroom is running beautifully.  The rotten wood at the roof replaced and the trim in the den replaced.  The lights in the kitchen and the back bedroom were replaced and we've still got a long way to go but I think we got the jump on it.

If you've been reading this stupid little blog of mine for a while you'll notice that I generally keep names vague and will often refer to people by pronouns or even the generic "a friend".  This is because I feel weird placing people at a time and place without their explicit permission.  I know, it's not like I'm plotting out some caper here or anything and anonymity only goes so far when most of you know exactly whom I am talking about anyway...  But, this time I intentionally mentioned names because these people deserve more credit than I can give them.  I really can't say enough how amazed I am at the work we did and how special I feel that we have some great friends that jumped in to help us.  Teresa and I were touched by your generosity and your love.  Thank you so much!  We really couldn't do this without you.

As long as I'm dropping names, there is one name that should be listed above all the others.  Teresa is working twice as hard as I am and she's holding things together while I'm out at work (getting a rest from all the hard work here at the house)  It's a hard job she's got and I know I couldn't do any of this without her strength.  I love you baby!

So Monday I was able to stick around the house and complete a few more tasks before I had to travel to Miami.  I restored the laptop from my last backup and all my data is here but some of the programs won't work.  They just need to be re-installed but the CDs are back hare at the house.  So I squeaked by all week and got through it without many of my usual programs for work.  More than one way to skin a cat and all that...  But it also left me unable to update the website or even log on to a lot of sites because my password cookies were cleared.

I got home tonight and we are trying to figure out just where we are in the project.  The budget says we are done but we have so much more work to do.  Everything is about timing.  ALL of out financial obligations are coming due at once.  Something has got to give but what?  Everything is important and everything is due.  Oh well.  We may have caught a break by getting screwed.  Make sense?  No?  Not to me either.  We went to Home Depot to get the new carpet.  I had heard it was a week lag time.  Now that we sat down with them I find out that the special they are running is a four week lag time.  If we want the carpet in there next week it will cost us double.  So, Teresa calls the realtor who is understandable anxious to get this pig on the market and he says that he doesn't want to put it out there until the carpets are in.  So we are looking for other options but it looks like we now have a few more weekends to finish the projects.  Good news/bad news huh?

On top of all this I get home tonight ready to jump back into the projects and I am saddled with a new one.  A rather urgent one.  The new den toilet is overflowing when Teresa does laundry.  Now that the drain has a toilet instead of a plug, the clogged drain water has a place to go; all over my den bathroom floor.  I start digging up the patio pavers ready to replace the pipe but Thom arrives (out of the blue like freaking Superman) to drop off the pressure washer and tells me to stop because he has "a huge snake" and will be right back to help me clear the drain.  After a couple of hours, we discover that the pipe has some odd angles in it and the clog is at a 90 degree turn under the slab.  We are pretty sure it is cast iron so we will rent the drain rooter machine to clear it out.  For now, we stuck the washer hose out through the dryer vent.  If it's not one thing it's a thousand others.  I am starting to wonder if we will ever see an end to the list of projects.

Thanks again to the many who were able to show up and to those of you who weren't able but wished us luck.  I am looking forward to having a NO-work party at the new house where you will all be the guests of honor.  Thank you so much!

Wednesday, 10-10-7

Yeah, yeah I know I'm late.  I get to all of that later on.

Ten days in Puerto Rico.

I arrived in the rain, late at night and very aware that I was out of my safety zone.  The hotel was less than five miles away but I drove for an hour trying to find it.  These strange new roads aren't marked the way I am accustomed to and even when the occasional sign is posted, it is often covered by overgrowth.  Driving in San Juan in a lot like driving in Miami but without laws.  Imagine the chaos you'd get if you had a large city in which all the drivers knew that the cops were not going to pull you over for something as trivial as pulling up on the sidewalk to get past a driver stopped at a red light.  Where it is perfectly acceptable to run the stop sign/red light as long as you are pretty sure there is no traffic coming.  Traffic lanes (where they were visible) were merely suggestions and were often ignored.  This is driving in San Juan.  Every driver in Puerto Rico is an expert mathematician and can make calculations on the fly.  They know the exact size of their car, your car, both speeds, acceleration and traction and somehow weave in and out of traffic into spots that I wouldn't have tried to fit a motorcycle.  But, I never got hit.  I even found that (for the most part) when you did cut someone off or got cut off, it was never personal.  It was just traffic.  Here in the states if you cut someone off they'll follow you for miles just to scream and holler at you.  I've personally missed my exit on the highway just to catch up with a guy that cut me off so that I could bark at him.  But that's not how it is down there.  You may get the occasional finger or even get the frustrated yelling but it's over in seconds.  It was, after all, just traffic.

One of the first things I noticed was that everything was green.  The street signs covered by tree branches, the mountains with very little exposed rock, the abandoned buildings that nature quickly reclaims with vegetation.  The island gets so much rain that the trees just never stop growing and spreading.  I went up into the rainforest while I was there.  The guy at the guard shack said that El Yunque had already gotten 190 inches of rain this year and they'll probably hit 250 inches before the end of the year.

I was surprised how much driving you can do in the rainforest.  For some reason I expected a parking lot outside the entrance and a bunch of hiking and biking trails.  There were trails but you could also drive around under the canopy.  It got so dark under there that I had to turn on my headlights and it was 1:00 in the afternoon!  I got out and walked down one of the trails but it wasn't what I was expecting.  I saw relatively few birds, and it was like walking around in the woods anywhere else.  "Rainforest" is just an image in my head I guess.  I did see a lot of those little Coqui frogs and they were cool (and loud) but I didn't see any tropical birds.  Not in the rain forest anyway.  While we were waiting for the parts by the air traffic tower we saw about ten birds flying around.  I barely noticed them until someone pointed out that they were green.  I took a closer look and they all looked like parrots, green with a red splotch on their head.  They fluttered around a tree for a while and even lined up on the fence.  I took a couple of pictures but those are the ones that were lost in the laptop crash.  I just thought it was cool, parrots flying around there like pigeons here.

I finally made it up to the Arecibo Observatory.  It was a nerd paradise.  You park at the bottom and walk up the rest of the mountain.  So it is more like a "semi-in-shape nerd" paradise.  Along the way they had stations showing the scale of the solar system.  In the parking lot they had the sun.  It was just smaller than a basketball.  the first station was Mercury and in the glass display was a speck of dust.  Earth was about the size of a pea and Jupiter was about the size of a quarter.  I took a LOT of interest in Jupiter and read everything on the display twice.  Not that I really care that much about Jupiter but I needed to catch my breath without telling Jose to wait up for the fat guy.  I wasn't fooling anyone...  So we got to the top and there before me was what I had made the entire trip to see.  The largest single (immobile) dish on the planet.  I'm sure that if I had dragged Teresa up there she would have killed me.  "What?  What am I looking at?"  There was very little to see unless you are into it.  Even then, there is very little to see.  They have a visitor center where they had interactive displays.  It was like a school field trip to a museum.  I spent a lot of the time (and digital film) out by the dish platform.  I got a whole bunch of pictures of me and Jose standing in front of the dish and the transmitter/receiver bell.  The place is huge.  I know there are larger arrays out there but the size of this one dish is very impressive.  More impressive that the dish is the tower/cable system used to hold up the Tx/Rx bell.  They were doing maintenance on the bell while we were there so we got to see a few people using the catwalk and cable bucket to get out to the main bell.  The people just fade to ant size as they approach the bell and only then do you get a true sense for just how big this thing really is.  I had a lot of fun, bought a few souvenirs and took a bunch of pictures.  Some people believe in various gods and travel to a special shrine to pay homage to their deities.  I believe in science and my pilgrimage is now complete.

Most of the rest of the trip was not as exciting for you to hear about but was definitely the BEST part of the trip for me.  Work kept getting interrupted by various problems.  My camera died from the humidity.  I was careful to keep my laptop out of the humidity but it still died.  Tony had the same trouble and his laptop died within hours of mine.  We were able to Frankenstein the two laptops together and get a working machine so we could complete our work.  Unfortunately, the new path between Miami and San Juan is down and the path from Miami out to the telco cloud hasn't even been built yet.  So as soon as we completed our install we got the word to come home.  Between only working until 3pm and being cut short a few days, I had plenty of time to visit with Jose.

I was unsure of what to expect because I hadn't seen him in seventeen years and back then I was more obnoxious that I am now.  Hard to imagine huh?  So I gave him a call and we went out one night.  It turns out that we have a lot more in common than I thought we would.  We ended up hanging out just about every night and I got to meet his fiance Irmaly.  She is a very sweet woman and she didn't seem to mind that I took up a lot of their time while I was there.  It's too bad that I wasn't there on the island with Heffner because the two of them were a lot alike.  Old guitar players that are fed up with the ridiculousness of the metal scene and are digging on other genres that showcase the guitar without being the obnoxious-over the top shredder.  I got a lot of cool music from him and he copied a lot of my music library too.  We drove around listening to rap in Spanish.  He'd pause it, give me the translation and then play the next line, pause, translate...  It was funny.

I got to see a lot more of the island than I would have if I were out there on my own.  I only hit the Burger King once and it was 3am.  I ate at all the back wall places and ate a lot of the local food.  Mofongo, beans and rice, plantains and lots and lots of pork.  One stop we made at a roadside stand.  We got a bag of pork rinds, sweetened bread and a few cups of fermented sugarcane.  It tasted like a sugary version of my meade.  Oh it was sooo good.  I normally don't like pork rinds but I figured "what the hell" and dug in.  I still don't like pork rinds.  But the bread was good.  There are a couple of Mexican restaurants down there that I will hit every time I go now.  They have these super huge burritos and they are delicious.  The other place had something called Chilaquiles (or something close to that) and it was incredible.

We walked around Old San Juan at night and I fell in love with that city man, it was just so beautiful.  The fort is huge and a lot of the city wall is still intact.  A lot of the appreciation I have for the place comes directly from Jose's tour.  As he'd show me something around the city, he knew a story about it and you could hear it in his voice how proud he was of his home.  It wasn't just him either, our local FAA tech would also talk about Puerto Rico like that, especially when he was telling me about the history of San Juan.  When we had to wait on a phone call (more time spent waiting than actually working) Tony would go sit in his truck, crank up the AC and play solitaire on his laptop.  I sat out in the sun with Juan and he would tell me all kinds of things about Puerto Rico.  He was especially happy to hear that I had a friend down here that was showing me around so that I wouldn't waste the trip by hanging out in the hotel room.  I couldn't agree more.  Walking around with Jose and Irmaly and looking at the city at night while smoking a freshly rolled cigar...  A memory that will stay in my brain for the rest of my life.

 I did spend two nights in the hotel but they were when Jose was busy and I spent a lot of that time in the bar or in the casino.  Tony and I had dinner up there one night and I was drinking JW Black.  I just wrote up the differences between whiskey and scotch for the webpage a few weeks ago and I saw the bottle of Blue Label sitting up there.  I asked the bartender how much he was charging me for my Black.  He said $7.50.  I asked how much for Blue?  $25!  Yeah right, that's why I'll never know what it tastes like.  The next night I won $100 at blackjack and ended up in the bar again.  I drank four shots of the blue and to be honest, I don't have the palate to really tell much of the difference.  Oh sure it was smooth but was it smooth because I saw which bottle it came out of?  Would I be able to tell in a blind taste test?  I don't think I could.  I'm sure SOME people could, but I'm not that guy.  By the time the fourth round came it tasted great!  But then, gasoline would taste great if you drank enough of it.

I pretty much stayed out of the casino even though Tony won over $280 at nickel slots.  The first night we were there Tony and I played blackjack.  I put down $20 and after about a half hour I was up about $30 and saw that he had gone out.  So I dropped my entire $50 on the next round.  I drew to a nineteen on the house's ace.  Of course she had the blackjack, I lost it all and we went up to the bar.  Another night I dropped $10 at the nickel slots and another $20 at roulette but made another $20 at blackjack.  With my $100 bar bill winnings I figure I walked away with $70 of the casino's money.  Not too bad, especially considering that I was being cavalier the first night and let it ride when I should have at least pocketed what I had put down.  I figure gambling is an entertainment expense and not a way to make money.  I bet the whole $50 because I went in planning to lose the original $20.  It was worth the expense to risk it all and go for the big win because I figured I had already lost it all when I put it on the table.  It's all for fun.

So that was the trip.  There are probably a million things I haven't written about but with the laptop down I haven't really had a chance to write this up because any time I'm at the house I'm busting my ass trying to pack up the den.  I've got it well under way but there's still a long way to go.  I'm such a hoarder.

I've got pictures coming and even a few movie reviews but there's no way I'll get to them in the next couple of days.  Teresa just walked out here and busted me for not packing/cleaning the den.  Sitting on my ass in front of the computer again...

Tomorrow is work at the ARTCC and hopefully getting HP to repair my laptop.  Tomorrow night I'm back to packing the place up.  Friday I'm going down to be with family as they have the ceremony of putting my Grandfather into the earth.  I've got to make it back up here and get to Home Depot/Lowes to buy the paint and supplies for Saturday.  This weekend a lot of friends and phamily are coming over to help Teresa and I paint and do those little repairs that are beyond my scope of expertise.  (Big embarrassed blushing here)  I'm not used to asking for help but I was poked and prodded until I promised I would.  When I did I was shocked at the response.  I'm looking forward to this weekend because the number of people that are planning on coming should make short work of all this paint and repair.  I'm scared to death of having so many people trying to help but I'm also overwhelmed at the love that came flowing this way when we admitted we could use the help.  It really is amazing how many people are out there that want to help out.  So, we'll get both the inside and outside painted, a little bit of wood replaced (before we paint of course), a few plumbing problems fixed and the jungle trimmed back to a respectable yard.  The landscaping expert is showing up with a trailer full of equipment and a dump truck!  How cool is that?  I plan on working my ass off Saturday and Sunday and we're even planning on working in a poker game on Saturday night.  This is going to be a fun weekend. 

So, if all goes will, HP will have my laptop repaired and I'll be back on the road next week.  If so, I promise to get these pictures up here and write up a few more entries.  Sorry this one was so late but it's out of sheer will you're even getting this one and it will probably be the last you hear from me until Monday or Tuesday.  See ya then!

Wednesday, 10-3-7

A lot to go over, so little time.  I just got home from Puerto Rico.  I am tired and I've got too much to do to type up a full update right now.  I'll never really do the trip justice with my simple little words but I'll try to add in some pictures when I type it all up.  "Why haven't I updated all week?" you ask?  Well, I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the Bermuda Triangle.  My camera died on Wednesday (Thursday?), my laptop died on Friday and Tony's laptop died over the weekend.  What a long strange trip it's been.

I had a lot of fun and all I can really say about that place is...  WOW.  I really fell in love with that island and I can't wait to go back.  Everyone I met was friendly and helpful to the point that I felt like I wasn't doing my part by at least speaking Spanish.  Full report later but even in this short dispatch I have to say a big thank you to Jose and Irmaly for extending their hospitality to me as if I were family.  I had a great time and got to learn so much about your beautiful country.  Thanks guys, I will be back!

Ok, so I'm going to unpack and get some rest, tomorrow's a big day.  I've got a lot of "house stuff" to get caught up on, Teresa and I have a meeting at Becca's school with her gifted teacher and I have to work with HP support to troubleshoot my computer problems.  Friday ,Teresa and Becca leave for their Girl Scout camping trip and I've got to re-pack my truck and get caught up with my "work stuff" once my laptop is fixed.  This weekend I'm pressure washing the house because next weekend we're painting.  I know there's a lot of other little things I've got to get done but those are the big ones.

So, full report and lots of pictures coming real soon.  See ya!

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Last Updated: 11/12/07 09:40 PM