Days, Months, Years

Long road walked,
empty gas can in hand
desert stretching out on either side
of lonely pavement.
White and yellow lines
dragging onward
as they disapear over the horizon.
Cold nights, burning days
distance unmarked,
untracked,
wearily trekked.
Days blur into months
as knees sore from crawling
get rest on the sand
with the scorpions
as sleep, dehydration,
time consume the almost corpse
lying empty-handed on the side of the road.
Nobody else
has passed
because when his spiritual tank
went to empty
and he set out alone,
he stayed on the road
that got him to where he was
instead of looking for another
where friends,
family,
waited to refill his soul.

Grass

I posted more before I joined Facebook. Then after a while on Facebook I realized I wasn't updating MY status anymore, I was just reading everyone else's. Perhaps I find my life too mundane...maybe the writer in me is struggling because working with computers for so long has made me dead emotionally? Well, I doubt that. So my family has been dealing with a fair amount of drama lately between my mom going in for yet another hip replacement(on the same hip) and my brother's baby girl being born with a heart defect. And between everything that happened I found myself feeling again. Pulling out the pain and anguish and sorrow that fueled so much of my early work. So here I am to blog about none of that. I'm writing about grass.

When we had our house built it came with a "landscaped" front yard. Three bushes, grass and sprinklers. I ripped out their bushes and planted roses because both my wife and I like them. My neighbor's house was built a little bit after mine and when they finally put in this front yard his grass looked beautiful. Then I looked at my grass. We used the same builder, right?? Well, it turns out the the "company" they hired to do the landscaping on my house and several others bought the cheapest(and don't think I'm joking) sod they could, skimped on the sprinklers, pocked the extra and skipped town. So my yard looks like garbage 6 days a week until I mow it and then it looks ok for 1 day. But really this isn't quite the problem either.

I seem to be getting grass everywhere. I dug out an island in our front yard and we planted iris'. There is grass everywhere in there. We have a front flower bed where our beloved roses live that is half lawn. And yet when I look at some of the places where the grass SHOULD be, it's not. The lawn is patchy and inconsistent. So it feels a need to expand?? Can't it just grow where it's supposed to? (I ask the same question of my hair) Sadly, this means I'll be digging the iris' out of the island this summer, expanding it, tilling in something that isn't clay and putting some of that plastic edging stuff to try and keep the grass out. Unfortunately, I can't do that with my roses. They have struggled for so long. We have lost 2 and almost lost a third. I'm slightly beside myself with how to fix that but I bought some plastic edging for that too. Eventually we'll put in some pretty scalloped concrete but this is to stop the grass.

I've decided not to dwell on the grass/gravel that is supposed to be a lawn in my backyard. That takes too many deep breaths to think about.

The Cigarette Tax

I just read the article posted here: Cigarette tax and was glad to see it. Then I started reading the comments left by people. No, I didn't read the 279 pages worth but some of them were just....I couldn't believe it. So I posted my response and then realized that with it buried so deep it might never be seen but I feel so strongly about it that I'm posting it here as well. Why am I so passionate about it? I have asthma. It sucks and it isn't as bad as it could be. I hate to think that kids could suffer the same way because their parent's smoke. It's not fair. So here it is:

"Smoking is not only bad for your health it's bad for all of those around you. 2nd-hand smoke is one of the leading causes of lung cancer. Yeah, not the guy smoking the cigarette, it's his wife, children, their friends. It those of us who have to walk out the same doors you spend your time puffing it up outside of. And good grief the stench! I hate getting in the elevator after someone who has just smoked was in it...the whole thing stinks! Luckily I'm only going up 3 floors because I can't hold my breath much longer than that.
If you could smoke yourself to death and never affect other people because of it, more power to you. If you could drink yourself to death and I could guarantee you'd never get behind the wheel with alcohol in your system, I wouldn't care. But this does affect other people. Innocent people. The ones who die are more often those who never smoked or drank. The lives of families are destroyed when none of them did anything wrong. Console yourself however you want but the truth will always be here staring back at you.
I want to be there when you tell your kid dying of lung cancer because they rode in the car with you while you were smoking when they were younger that you're sorry. I want to be there when you look in your grandchildren's eyes and tell them it's your fault their parent is dead. And then I want to see the hate on their faces as you leave the hospital for a smoke."

That's all I have to say about that.

April Fools gone very wrong

So this is how sad I have become. It was going to be a cleverly titled post about an event that could have happened. But I stopped mid-flow to go play ping-pong and I lost it. I sat down to continue and had nothing. My brilliance zapped by 4 games of intense, victorious paddle-swinging. Oh well. I needed to get some work done today anyway. :)

Worst. Date. Ever.

That has been the topic on FM 100.3 this week as they are giving away tickets to the Eagles concert. They have had some pretty bad dates and ironically many of them were had with a future spouse. But that got me thinking back on all of the dates I went on in high school and after my mission. Man, I was a dating machine. My wife would probably like some of that part of me back. :)

Anyway, as I thinking back trying to remember my worst date so I could call in because I like winning stuff, I came a wonderful realization: Even my "worst" date was really pretty good. So I decided I wanted to send a big Thank You! to all of the girls I went on a date with for not giving me a story I could share. Thank you for the good memories and the fun.

Internet death, great neighbors, freedom!

It happened out of the blue last Wednesday while I was at work. The internet at our house died. Not the usual playing dead where a good kick in the ribs will bring it back to life, but full on blood everywhere, no pulse dead. I called our provider which is run by a room full of monkeys flinging their crap at each other. The unsupportive tech person said I needed to be in front of my connection at my house because she couldn't send the ticket to the next level if she doesn't go through her 3 steps. We go through two of them every time it plays dead. I couldn't be there because I was at work. I had class that night. By the time I got home I had forgotten that I needed to call them because I was tired. So Thursday Michelle called and went through the whole 3-step process. Then a level 2 tech called to say we were definitely broken and he would have the scheduler call to schedule a tech. Then hours of silence. I called when I got home to find out that they are idiots and the monkeys were still covered in excrement and loving it. The scheduler wasn't in the office on Thursday. He would be back on Friday. Nobody else there did his job when he wasn't in. Good thing customer's don't have problems on a regular basis apparently. So we weren't going to hear anything from these yahoo's until Friday.

Fridays are special. I get to work from home on Fridays and that helps with Michelle's sanity as she can go shopping or rest or whatever without having to take or worry about all of the kids. Well, without internet, I can't work from home. Without internet there were a lot of things we couldn't do that we wanted to. After confirming that they don't know what good customer service is, I called our next door neighbors to see if we could 'borrow' their signal for a few days. I'd like to say we have the best neighbors in the world...but I don't have to because if you know them, you already know that they are! He came over and helped me get on their internet and I was able to work from home the next day. Well Friday came and went with no phone call from the primates. Maybe they were overwhelmed by the stench of their own idiocy. No word all weekend.

Today I called and asked what the heck was going on. Well apparently the scheduler lied in the notes and said he called but the number was disconnected or no longer in service. I verified the number she had for us and confirmed that I had just talked my wife on that same number less than 5 minutes earlier. I came as close to calling the guy a bald-faced liar as I could without using those words. The tech did in fact come out, did nothing with our equipment on our roof and left declaring it was fixed. Michelle still couldn't get on and my night post-class will be figuring out why. I of course demanded a credit for all of my down-time. And hopefully on Friday, our local carrier will show up and install better internet. Then I will finally be free of the missing link that has been our ISP.

I will not name them but feel free to ask me. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone. Unless of course you like dealing with stinky monkeys.

The good old days

"Do you remember the good old days?"
"When was that?"
"Oh you know, yesterday. Last week. When mammoths were mammoths and possums were possums?"
"Yep, those were the good old days."

Can you name the movie? I'll tell you at the end if you can't.

That line has been rolling around in my head along with the stabbing pain of what is hopefully just a sinus headache and not a precursor to a sinus infection. Do I remember the good old days? And what qualifies?

So the first days I thought of were those wonderful pre-return-to-college days when my wife and I spent time together after putting the kids to bed or she crafted while I watched movies or played video games. Back when I actually knew what was going on in some TV series'. Back when the stress in my life was only generated by my job and my children.

Then I went back further to that great summer after high school graduation when I played until way late every day and got up friggin' early for work. And for some reason that was the way I saw my life...play first, work later.

Good times. But then I thought about the line again. "You know, yesterday. Last week." Was yesterday a good day...what about last week? Decidedly no-ish. Valentine's Day was a saga that I'm not going to bother posting about at this point and then I'm still apparently sick and Michelle was getting sicker and life didn't stop or pause long enough for us to get better. Sure I made to church before primary started and we had a great lesson in Elders quorum. But unfortunately that didn't cure me.

So if you need me, I'll be sitting here trying to tape markers or pens or something to the side of my head to keep pressure on my throbbing temples. Merry George Franklin day.

P.S. The movie is Ice Age 2: the meltdown