Well, apologies to my faithful daily readers. Some of us bloggers don't get the whole week off, and instead have to cram a week's worth of work into a few short days. It ain't no fun, but I got so much done yesterday I thought it might bode well for me in the future to pull it off from time to time. Of course, this will take years off my life. Join that to my new Mac purchase, which adds years to my life, and it's a wash. (You just can't win.) Pine as we may for us all to be replaced by robots, it looks like it's not going to be anytime soon.

This week's customer was satisfied. He was late to the schedule, so we shoehorned him into the reduced Thanksgiving week, much to my chagrin (but welcomed by the bank). I think he and I were both surprised when I showed up late Monday with the materials for his new patio cover. He had one to tear down, and I told him I'd have it out of there within the hour -and it was. And just me, too, as I transferred the contents of the trailer to the driveway, and then filled the trailer with his current patio cover. He stood and watched the whole thing.

It was an old-school aluminum cover -real nasty one, too. Covered with bird crap, bird's nests, dead birds. Had a bunch of golf balls, tennis balls, a few old bathing suits and broken bottles on top of it. I even found a gun. A gun! It was a .22 rifle, in a soft gun case. As I pulled it down, he cocked his head and said "What's that?" and I said, "Look's like a gun." I handed it to him and he opened the case. You could tell it had been up there for some time, as the barrel was rusty. "Damn grankids, tryin' to put one over on me..."

Told him I'd be there the next morning, but didn't show up until the afternoon. Again he was disappointed, and again we were both surprised when I'd constructed the whole new cover, yes by myself, by the day's end. Finished in the dark, but got it up nonetheless. Fast, too! You'd think he was standing there with a rifle while I worked!

Before:

After:

It was a long, hard day and when I got home, the wife reminded me of the bills we have to pay. This is a cruel thing to do to a man after he gets in from work and it will only make his mood worsen, but don't worry, I didn't take it out on the goat.

Still, I'm happy that I got it all in the schedule. And a 24 hour turnaround, at that! It was a surprise job, and I wanted it off my mind. It's good that it came along, too, as this season is a tough one on residential contractors. No one has the fortitude to remodel their house during the holidays. "Thank you for sidestepping the construction debris in the driveway, dinner is delivered! And if y'all need to use the bathroom, there's the neighbor's house for the girls and the Port-a-John for the boys. And there's plenty of extra sweaters in the garage with the furniture, as this 2 mil plastic sheeting just don't have the insulating qualities of true stucco and drywall. Oh, it'll be real nice. Easter will be wonderful. Or the 4th. That is to say, if the tile guy ever comes back from Florida. Merry Christmas!"

I don't know why I put a country accent on that last monologue. Something about aluminum patio covers and finding an old rifle hidden in a roof just brought it out of me, I guess.

It's been foggy here in Oceanside of late. The mists roll in after dark and linger through the following morning. I enjoy the change and welcome the mystery of it, but the Little Ditchman awoke a few mornings ago and upon seeing the view from her crib of the backyard draped thick with clouds, she let out a good shriek. It was all explained to her, of course, but again she just looks at you like you're telling stories. When she got sick the other day, we cranked up the humidifier in her room and the fog filled the house, so what goes around, comes around, though it's difficult to tell direction in the haze.

The fog seems to rob the ordinariness out of the neighborhood, and I've been known to go outside and take a look around late at night before bed. When the mists descend things look different, like when you put a ladder in a room and your head in a corner of the ceiling -you turn and barely recognize the place, but it's been so foggy so often lately, the novelty has worn off on me. It gets late and I just want to sleep, so imagine my dismay when we awoke to a thunderous crash at 3:30 this morning.

I had just used the toilet (not the broken one) and fumbled and bumped my way back to bed, happily noting the time on the clock and doing the math in my head -ah, I get about 4 whole hours more of sleep! As I drifted off, I heard a noise that I figured was just a hypnic jerk, as I am prone to, but when the wife was startled enough to get out of bed and do a perimeter survey of the property, I figured something was up. Of course, I just laid there in bed and waited for things to either get worse or go away. Soon enough, I saw colored lights flashing through the mists behind the house and knew at once that a flying saucer had crashed into the hill out back behind the fence.

It happened "Out back behind my underneath!" to use an inspired phrase coined yesterday after church and at the brewery (the only place where such phrases could be coined). I noticed porch lights blinking on, and figured I better don all masculine qualities (and slippers) and have a look around, greet the aliens with guarded friendliness.

Something had happened down the hill on the main road behind my house. Through the trees and fog I could make out a few police cars and appropriate emergency vehicles, silently doing their business in the middle of the night. There were some cars pointed different directions, and it wasn't until I heard the morbid clatter of a gurney being rolled across the boulevard that I really woke up. I hopped the fence in my pajamas and slippers, and moved along the crest of the hill to get a better view. Two pickup trucks were aimed in one direction on the wrong side of the divider. Another car, aimed in the proper direction, had slammed into them, head on. I heard what sounded distinctly like a person kicking an aluminum can and then saw a fireman with a bucket, throwing sand or sawdust on a pool of fluid in the street.

A few people were standing in the middle of it, and no one was saying anything. There is a quality to fog that mutes the white noise of everyday life, but allows certain sounds to be lifted above it, and out of that I very clearly heard a police officer say, "You were really lucky," and then to someone else, "You were really lucky, as well."

So it was a traffic accident, in the middle of the night. Some folks going the wrong way in the fog. I couldn't say if it was a drunk driver or a street race or what, but it was a night terror for someone.

The paramedics and police were considerate enough to leave their sirens off in the middle of the night in our sleepy neighborhood. Not so, the tow-truck drivers, who arrived within the hour to take their time in reverse, beeping wildly, to haul off the wreckage. This morning there's nothing left to see, just cars passing in the morning fog, people wiping the sleep out of their eyes on a Monday before a busy holiday, Thanksgiving. The traveler's holiday.

No big blog today. Just not feeling it. Sorry.

But here's some news:

Regarding yesterday's desire for robots: These are not the robots we're looking for. Attention scientists: Please focus...

In a previous post, I mentioned off the cuff that our ideology was better than theirs. Here's a sampling.

Then again, I guess we punish the innocent, too. "It's not the whiskey's fault, dude!"

And I do revere our American culture, but I readily admit it can be taken to an extreme.

Next week: the Santa Ana winds return! And just in time for the holidays!

Have a fine weekend.

I swear, scientists are just making sh!t up, nowadays. (I hope it didn't have black skin.)

---

Two words describe my mood perfectly: "Please" and "leave". As the better half of the family left for their morning workout, I commented that if and when this family ever adds to its numbers, the straw poles that are holding this tent up are going to buckle, and everything is going to come crashing down. (Shoulda used stronger poles, I guess.)

It's just that I take a look around at the piles of unfinishedness around here, with the sullen cries of an empty bank account in the distance, and I think I guess I can't do it all after all. Makes one want to wrap their head in earbuds and their face around a video game, which some men do, I guess. Typical morning: Child enters office looking for attention. Child sees father at keyboard. Child begins randomly pulling papers out of filing boxes. Child gets father's attention, acknowledges it by screaming. Mother screams not to scream. Mother gives child banana. Child drops banana. One of us steps in it. Child looks for attention. Rinse. Repeat.

If I could ever get around to finishing these filing cabinets, there would be no papers strewn about, but it seems that there is a pile of something in every room, and you'd get to it if only the phone would stop ringing and everyone would stop screaming and Please. Leave. It wouldn't solve the banana problem. Robots would. Handy janitorial robots that spend their idle time disciplining your child. When are we gonna have Robots? (This might work -if only it could negotiate the stairs, lift smeared banana out from between the floorboards, and administrate a Time-out.)

(Note: The child handed me the sheet of paper that had the fire ratings on Aluminum -I'd been looking for that!)

So you let out a good Wilhelm Scream and trudge ever onward. I don't think it would be so bad if I'd had a decent amount of sleep in the past four nights. Last night I passed out on the couch after dinner and was Dead Out when my daughter trudged downstairs with her mom in tow. "Icky!" was stated, and I was summoned to fix the rank demons of the pipes. Seems someone clogged up the toilet when they last... well, you know. "Wasn't me," I declared, then realizing it was me, in fact, though twelve hours prior. I was handed the plunger and went to work, still trying to rouse out of the somnambulant fog. It was a perfectly horrid event, one of powerful odium, and when I was reminded that the Little Ditchman had flushed her little Elmo toothbrush down there, I relented. The toilet is now off-limits. We have two others to use. Put it on the list. Poor, poor Elmo.

Then spent the rest of last night in the room of my crying child, begging -nay pleading, for her to quit so I could get some. Not sure what it was this time. More teeth, maybe? CheeseandFries how many teeth is this kid gonna have? She greets you in the morning like nothing ever happened: "Hi buddy!" (New word.)

But that's life. I take some solace when I hear other kids screaming from inside their homes down the street. I used to feel neighborly sympathy for those parents. Now I just, kind of, smirk.

I almost threw my mug of coffee on the screen this morning when the news was covering "Taking Your Child To Work." Out the door, Mrs. Ditchman asked if I was going to do my fifteen mile run today. You kidding? (How does she do it?)

24 days to vacation.

I'd never seen this one before, and yes, I believe it pretty much nails it. (Culled it from Lileks this morning, whose fine post today should stand as a model for every serious blogger.)

The only thing that kinda bothers me about it is the halo over the iPod in the beginning, (did I miss a joke, here?) Do I consider myself superior for using Mac? No. These are computers like all others are computers. You may not have heard, but Mac has a blue screen of death, too, and yes, sometimes I can't find my files, etc. But I do appreciate the packaging. Don't mind, even, paying more for it, really. Whenever I see a box of Windows product, I think my brain is going to brim with petty responsibilities. Seriously, I don't care what third party endorsements you got, just work, dammit. My new computer arrived at the door last week and it almost made me laugh: a black box with a picture of a computer on one side of it, and reading "MacPro" on the other. I'm surprised the wording on the box didn't just read "COMPUTER". Ha! (Last Friday's post has a pic.)

In this, the week of my new computer, I am now happy to report that the sleek machine beside my desk is whirring along with nary a hiccup. (Actually, there's not much whirr at all. It is nearly silent, save for when the DVD drive kicks in, at which point it whirrs like the engine room on a Russian submarine.) I ordered it with the minimum amount of RAM possible, and was dismayed to find that it couldn't just hack it -so I went out to pick up a couple more gigs at Fry's, local discount electronics store extraordinaire. Apple charges a premium on all their add-ons, so if you want an additional hard drive or RAM chip, you can spend an extra few hundred bucks on the exact same product by having Apple put it in for you. Amazing. So do I think Apple is the greatest company in the world? No. Pizza Port is.

It's a crazy world when you'll pay extra for better marketing, but you'll pay less to do it yourself. (Oh, I think I may have revealed too much about myself, there.) Such is capitalism.

So the computer works terrifically. I even got an OH WOW moment out of my wife, as she asked for an address and I said, "Watch how quickly it comes up when I click on it-" and BAM there it was! This is noteworthy only in the context of how she asked me for an address last week, and we bided the time chatting while it loaded up. Anyway, it was worth the price of admission right there. My vacation time just doubled.

It happened again, too, as I was getting ready to go to bed. After asking the 'puter to do a few all-night tasks, I decided to set the screensaver, and it was an OH WOW moment like no other as a picture of the Little Ditchman came on the screen and we slowly zoomed out to show it in a mosaic of ten, a hundred, a thousand other pictures of the Little Ditchman whose colors blend in such a way as to become another photo of the Little Ditchman. (You've seen this sort of thing before.) And then it happens again! Fantastic. And that's just the screensaver! It's stuff like that that makes Mac cool and geeks drool.

Incidentally, we had some friends over the other day and reclined after dinner -marveling over the AppleTV screensaver. Again.

So it's great! Now, I've got to clean up the office and get to work. Where do I start? And how do I start on a beautiful summer day like this? Weather: 72 and Sun. All week. In November. Best month of the year in California.

Home Invasion
11-12-2007 4:02 AM
(San Diego, CA) -- Authorities are searching for three men who robbed a Bonsall home carrying AK-47 assault rifles. The Sheriff's Department says the trio kicked open the back door of the residence on Calle Joya just off Camino del Rey about 4 a.m. yesterday. They tied up the resident and demanded cash. The men got away with 300-dollars. No one was hurt.

Well, I'm glad to hear no one got hurt. AK-47 assault rifles? This happened just a few miles from my house!

Can't get around to posting anything of significance today, I'm transferring about a Terabyte of video files to the new Mac...

Instead, I encourage you to go to this website and marvel at the concept, take a look around. This is a new arm of Pizza Port, who has started a line of premium beers by way of taking over the old Stone Brewery in San Marcos. (If you're looking to get me a Christmas gift, the "Devotion Ale" is my favorite. Best beer I've had in years.) The old Pizza Port Brewery, which was next door to the Pizza Port Carlsbad, is now the Pizza Port Bottle Shop, where you will find a selection of only the best beers from around the world. And the new Stone Brewing Company and their "World Bistro and Gardens" is simply awesome.

I always did think Pizza Port did it right.

The Future is Now!

Life can be so cruel. Intel's new computer chips -better, smaller, faster- ship today. Which means we can expect the MacPro2 or the MacSuperPro or the MacTasticSpeedemon or some such permutation by the end of the week. That's what happens in this arena. The next big thing is always just around the corner. Sooner or later you've just got to settle, so I gathered myself and found a shady spot.

But it's great! Can you just feel the power? The completely untethered speed at which this page loaded up when you clicked to it? No? Hmmm... must be a problem somewhere. I'll have to look into it. It's possible that my new Mac was just completely demoralized by the news of the new chips, and just decided to run at a half step slower pace. It's like any race. A close second and a distant second is still only a silver -why work so hard for it?.

Buying a new computer is like buying a new set of tools. They're nice and shiny and they sit there in your garage until you've got something to do with them. You never really go out and buy the tools, you just agonize when you're trying to fix something and you realize you could use some new tools. That's why I saved up the money for it -so that it wouldn't be so painful to the bank account when the purchase was finally made. Cash is king! I'm trying not to use credit cards, if only to avoid the tsk-tsking of Mrs. Ditchman. I'm not entirely dumb, though, I got the Apple Family Discount and then I used the Visa for the points and paid it off. If I focus on the good deal I got, it takes my mind off the new MacPro that will probably be released tomorrow. I'll deal. As long as the new release isn't faster and cheaper than the one I got, I'll deal. We'll see.

Truth is, I didn't get the fastest computer out there anyway. Couldn't afford it. The rate I was saving up money wasn't as fast as the rate at which they improve these things, which is good for civilization I guess. I always said that the next computer I got was going to be the fastest, best thing out there, so as to prolong the lifespan of the thing, but you know when it comes down to it, Necessity trumps all the Good Intentions, which is what makes life so confusing. Ah well, it all works better than it did.

So I spent a good portion of the weekend just floating 1s and 0s from Mac to Mac, with some problems. Everything on the old 'puter is a few operating systems old, so it was like a teenager trying to communicate with a geriatric. With Alzheimer's. We're still trying to find some common ground, but I was able to post this, so there's hope.

Thanksgiving is coming! Can't you hear it? It sounds like clinking glasses and yelling children and it looks all cluttered with the mismatched chairs, but it's awesome. I suppose it's supposed to look like the Pottery Barn catalog, but there's a reason why those photos are completely devoid of people.