It was a swell weekend. Nothing weird happened, and for that we can all be grateful. Mrs. Ditchman and I had a lovely time out to dinner, leaving the little one behind with Granny and Great Aunt Barbara. Now that I think of it, just the occasion to go out into the real world without a child was a "weird" experience. Your field of vision takes on a certain tunnel vision when you have a child, for, wherever you go, the kid never leaves your sight. When you ditch the little one, it's as if the Lord God Almighty has reached down out of Heaven and lifted your head by the chin so you can see, for once, that it's a big wide world! "So this is what restaurants are like!" quoted Mrs. Ditchman upon our arrival at the place. 'Going out' was always something we intended to do more before the kid came along, but it was one of the multitude of plans made and dashed along the wayside in the ride of familyhood.

I suppose we originally thought it would be easier to secure a trustworthy babysitter, but truth be told we just enjoy saving money making our own meals and being around the kid in our nice home, so we don't go out much. We went to one of our favorite restaurants (actually, it was only our second time there) and were led to our favorite table, our table (okay, so it was just the table we had last time.) It was wobbly, so I used the butter knife to tighten the screws that held it together. At the table next to us were a middle-age couple, Mr. and Mrs. Bling. She looked to have just filled the bank account of Doctor Breast Augmenter, and her husband was gnawing her knuckles between sips of chardonnay. No, really. The waitress brought me the wrong beer. Mrs. Ditchman had a non-alcoholic Mojito for $9.00. There were dead bugs on the window sill. Also, the table was sticky. The Ditchmans detest restaurants with sticky tables -I guess we're snobby like that. Anyway... so many disappointing restaurants, so little time.

But it was nice. At around 9:15 we couldn't think of anything else to do, so we just went home. Earlier that day we went to the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and had a pleasant time carousing with the fishes. Scripps currently has an impressive Global Warming exhibit! And by "impressive", I mean impressive in its audacity. I tend to fall on the doubting side of the global climate science. (Sorry!) It's not that I don't think pollution is a problem, it's just that we seemed to have had an Ice Age a few thousand years ago and it's been getting warmer ever since. When they explain the global warming on Mars, I'll pay more attention. I guess I've just been reading too many articles like this. Anyway, the seahorse display was neat! Also enjoyed the whale fountain in the parking lot!

Since we were prepped and in the mood for environmental controversy, we went down and checked out the seals at the "Children's Pool" in La Jolla. I don't have a side in this debate, as both views sound fairly reasonable to me. I must say that downwind it smelled like an upturned PortaJohn, and I feel for the poor multi-millionaires who have houses there. Anyway, the crowds and the traffic are even less tolerable than the stench of the seals, making this blogger appreciate the suburbs all the more. The beaches in La Jolla are nice, but we went to see the seals! The kid liked it, it was a nice day, we easily found a parking place, then home for naps.

This week brings the fateful promise of rain and plenty of work to keep me occupied, lest I become too opinionated in my spare time. I could sit here and type all day, but how could I live with myself when all the aluminum in the world is so long and sits uncut!


~

My Beloved
I choose to truly love you
With kindness, faithfulness, and respect
Through every circumstance life may bring.

As we together face the coming days of joy and sorrow
Sickness and health
Poverty and wealth
It will be my joy to support, comfort and encourage you.

When I do wrong I will confess
When I have been wronged I will forgive
When conflict dims our days I will exercise the patience of true love.

I will be the guardian of your solitude.
I will honor your unique gifts.
I will provide you with inspiration.
I will give you safety with my affection.
I will journey alongside you through the adventure of life.

You forever have my attention.

I will provide you hope,
Christ will guide our passion.

I will rejoice and thank God for the gift of you
And through His Infinite Grace
No matter what may come
I will remain by your side
With enduring devotion
Till death do us part.

3/29/03


I love you truly, Marci.
I'm a lucky man, five years running.






~

Oh, the woes of a morning without coffee. There was some discussion about it last night around dinner time. "We're all out of coffee. I'm going to the store to get some."

"At this hour?"

"You'll be glad about it tomorrow."

I talked Mrs. Ditchman out of it, for some dumb reason. After a long day of work, driving to the store for coffee I would not drink for twelve hours sounded more painful to me than waking up without it. And here we are. I had tea, which is like pouring lemonade into a gas tank. When I was in England for a few months, I had tea every morning, and actually grew to enjoy the stuff, but that was when I was young and virile and didn't need crutches.

So no coffee. I'll live. (Only slower.)

Time for the roundup of this week's news of significance...

From the University of Bored Scientists Flushing Away Your Tax Dollars. Imagine the possibilities! We could avoid moody people by merely farting in their general direction!

From Space, The Final Frontier. The Japanese orbital closet has been delivered and installed! They celebrated by eating lunch with chopsticks in zero gravity. No, really. Next up for those innovative Japanese astronauts: launching paper airplanes from the space station. Cool!

State wildlife officials in Ohio are posing as fishermen. Yes, that's right, undercover fishermen, to bust people who catch more than their limit. Don't worry, though. In the future, the fish will catch themselves.

Remember when we put the Arabs in charge of American shipping port security? And then we outsourced the manufacturing of the Air Force to France? And then there was that time when we accidentally sent nuclear missile parts to Taiwan? Well, now our passports will be made in Thailand. Don't worry, the Mexicans are sending troops to the U.S. border. Wait, what? Wake me when we win the War on Terror.

More signs the End is near. God is drunk, living in Ipswich, and refuses to appear in court for his traffic violations. In other The-End-Is-Near news, the inventor of the egg mcmuffin has died.

I'm looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend. I'm going to take it easy in the yard, and smoke with the tortoises.

Enjoy life!


~

Do I believe in crop circles? Of course I do. Why, there was one in my backyard just the other day! Okay, so it wasn't in my backyard. It was just down the street in the field near my house. I caught a glimpse of it coming over the hill on the way home recently. (That day, everything was "weird".)

Real crop circles are an impressive display of fractal geometry:


Oceanside crop circles look more like this:


You really have to see these things from up high to get a good look at them. I may have to rent a helicopter. Visiting aliens? Government experiments? Drunk farmers? Bored teenagers? The best explanation I've heard is that they're all created by inebriated, underpaid alien interns making a few extra bucks from the galactic office of interstellar marketing by placing brand logos from galaxy-wide corporations on our world's farmland in preparation for Earth's forthcoming admission into the Galactic Federation of Planets. It only makes sense.

These things go back a few hundred years, before aliens existed. Back then it was always The Devil. Oh, give me the olden days, when the unexplained was just the trivial ball-tossing of the gods! Why, if that was the usual explanation, we could all just shrug, cross ourselves, and get back to work when something weird happens.

But I'm not stupid. I got out of the car and hiked in to get a closer look. Everyone knows you have to check these things for:

1. Elongated apical plant stem nodes.
2. Expulsion cavities in the plant stems.
3. The presence of 10-50 micrometer diameter magnetized iron spheres in the soils, distributed linearly.

(In order to distinguish them from the fakes.)


My determination? UFO landing. No, really. I know because I nearly broke my ankle when it got stuck in the hole the craft's landing gear made. It probably landed the other night when we had all that fog. If I'm lucky, the aliens will disembowel the neighbor's cats for research. Those cats keep crapping in my yard.

And I wonder why I'm always late for work.



~

See what complaining can get you?

They really did a bang-up job! Tire tread marks streak the street now, which I'm sure someone will complain about. This whole episode lasted about three or four months. The remainder of our cracked street goes unrepaired, as I expect it will for some time. Also, my key sticks in my mailbox, which has no street light over it. The intersection down the way desperately needs a stoplight. I would like the graffiti on the neighbor fences to be painted over at a faster turnaround. And then there was the day the hydraulic line failed on the garbage truck, releasing its mechanical bowels and dumping a puddle of brake fluid at every house in my cul-de-sac, staining the street with a large blotch and a trail between them. The street cleaner fails to mop up every time around, and we're still parking on the lawn when he rolls by every other Thursday with the parking citation specialist. I would like the Dept. of Mosquito Abatement to take care of the standing water problem in the abandoned house next door. Others on my court are concerned about the level of street noise from the adjacent boulevard. I guess it could use resurfacing.

I jest, of course! In a minute I could tell you what's wrong with this country, but it takes a while to figure what's right with it. That's human nature, unfortunately. This is why I always encourage people to get some travel in while they're in college. For the perspective. You should see the size of the potholes in, say, Mexico! Potholes are a fact of life in most countries, I believe. They probably don't even have the word "pothole" in most of the world. They're just called "roads".

What's the average turnaround time on pothole filling in most American cities? I imagine it's about the same as Oceanside, depending on the size of the pothole and the size of the city. Americans see a pothole and they curse their wasted tax dollars, not considering that we have the safest, widest, best-designed streets in the world and we don't have to slip the cop an extra 50 bucks just because he pulled us over for the broken tail light.

I drove from Mexico City to Acapulco once. It took a couple days. Truth be told, a good section of the highway was actually in excellent shape. It had just opened, so it figures. The older roads were a disaster, which says more about the politicians than the highway workers. Seems everyone will rally behind a "New Road!" but few hurrahs are heard for maintaining the old ones. Federalis stopped us every eighty miles or so just to check us out. The same friend and I also rented a car and drove the length of Great Britain from London to the Scotch highlands to Wales -on the other side of the road, mind you. It was impressive how nonsensical the road signs were, and how all of the lines on the streets were white. I remember the sign crossing the border into Scotland: WELCOME TO SCOTLAND -STAY ON THE LEFT SIDE OF THE ROAD.

I've driven from Mexico to Canada and from the Pacific to the Atlantic and hardly needed a map. In college, I used to drive to Tucson from my home in L.A. and all I'd have to do is get on the 10 heading east, drive 500 miles, and get off at Tucson Blvd. and be at school! If I had kept going, the 10 would've taken me all the way to Jacksonville, Florida. Want to go to Seattle? Take the 5 north. Want to go to Las Vegas? Salt Lake City? Helena, Montana? Take the 15. Even numbers go east-west, odd numbers go north-south. Simple. American roads are fine, well-made things and I suspect it's because Americans are travelers and explorers at heart. 500 years ago, everyone just headed for the frontier and ended up on the edge of the map in a vague, unmade place called AMERICA. Then we kept going west, and invented the airplane, the Cadillac, and the rocket ship along the way. Even today the only thing stopping us are all the complainers.

Last week they repainted the lines on the surrounding streets in my neighborhood (the street dividing line is a bright yellow -GENIUS!) Our system seems to work pretty good. They haul off your trash for you, clean your streets, deliver inexpensive water, gas, and electricity to your house (and yes, I believe it's relatively inexpensive when you consider the ease-of-use.) We have freeways, public transportation, clearly written signs that tell you where you are and where to go, and the city lights up at night. When you flush the toilet it all goes away. There's schools, hospitals, parks, harbors, airports, bridges and, generally speaking, you can go outside and not worry about getting blown up.

What a country!




~

So much for spring sunshine, I thought to myself this morning when I saw the coastal fog wrapping itself around the trees and streetlights. I saw it roll in last night at about two AM when I awoke on the couch worried about the day of work I had before me (a few tricky problems awaited solutions I have yet to uncover). The fog just wafted inland on its own, came up our street, floated over the new asphalt patch a few houses down, and then drifted in my wide open office window and found me downstairs on the couch, where I had pitched sideways in the middle of Dancing With the Stars and could not be roused. This drives my wife nuts -not because I can't stand Dancing With the Stars, but because once I fall asleep on the couch, I can't stand at all. There I lay until about 2 AM, at which point I somnambulantly stagger to bed.

I was pretty tired yesterday. All the Easter hopping about caught up with me, I guess. I was having a vivid dream I was on a snowy mountaintop with a group of skiers, who took off without me and caused an avalanche to chase them -like in one of those sporty, x-treme vids. I was without skies, so I just stood there with my video camera, waiting for the chopper to fetch me, but it never came. I ventured to the edge, thinking I could hike down, but every time I did an avalanche kicked off below me, and I knew I could never outrun it. Meanwhile, hikers were arriving at the summit to greet me -I guess going uphill didn't cause any snow to fall. One of the hikers was my yearbook advisor from high school. She said she was getting a divorce from one of the guidance counselors at my school and was working through the settlement. At one point she admitted she had done cocaine and that it may be something she'd have to pay for.

Fog's gone. I looked out the window downstairs and thought I should bring a sweatshirt to work. Went upstairs and looked out the window and it was blue skies to the horizon. Huh. It's possible it's going to be one of those days where the waking life is like a dream, with weirdness at every turn. There is weirdness at every turn, you know. It's just that some days you notice it more.

I tend to be someone who seeks it out, if only to entertain myself. A friend of mine, when he encouraged me to start this infernal blogthing, implied that I wouldn't have trouble with it because, as he put it, "I find your life much more interesting than mine." It's not, really. It's just a matter of enthusiasm and curiosity and an appreciation for the "Newness" in things -and the connections perceived between them. Life can be pretty boring if you don't regularly satisfy your interests. I try to have something to say about it.

But if nothing happens, there's always the dreamscape. So then this guy arrives at the mountaintop, someone who I haven't seen in nearly twenty years. An old high school chum. He points out the red shirt I'm wearing, heretofore unnoticed, that claims in bold white lettering how many feet up I've climbed. Knowing I'd taken a helicopter, he demands I give him my shirt. I refuse. I wake.

This guy was a good friend for a few months, way back when. I remember him being overweight and kind of nerdy, and our friendship didn't last too long. He had never had a girlfriend, but I remember him at one point saying that when he got married (optimistic!) he wanted me to be the Best Man. I demurred, and that moment alone may have led to the end of our friendship -which petered out, as I recall, with no conflict or event. Sometimes it happens that way. What's funny about the story is that about a year or two later he got married to this very pretty, tall, blonde, smart woman and we were all impressed. I wasn't even invited to the wedding! A year or two after that I saw them at a restaurant, a few tables over, and they were in the midst of a heated argument about I-don't-know-what. After dinner I went over to say hello and they both froze, smiled, and chatted with me -like there had been nothing going on. I'll never forget that awkward moment, the very human looks on their faces, and how it made me laugh how human we all are. I haven't seen either one of them since. Until my dream last night.

I heard they had kids! Man, those kids must be in high school by now. Probably the same high school we went to, with the same yearbook advisor. Life's funny, that way.

See?


~

Woke up this morning before the Little Ditchman, for a change. Evidently yesterday's lack of a nap caught up with her, dear thing. The Easter Bunny came and hid the eggs after he mowed the lawn (we were having guests). We set the little girl in front of the television to keep her distracted and I came in after "mowing the lawn" to tell her, "I think I saw the Easter Bunny hiding some eggs outside!" She palmed my face, pushed it away and chided, "Little Einsteins countdown."

Well.

It was a fine spring Sunday of God's whole glory in our little backyard. Had ham with some family and friends and a pleasant white sangria, which Matt drank out of a mason jar. These are the jars I use for barbecue sauce, but are on the glassware shelf for decoration, really. "Makes it taste like summer!" he proclaimed. Wish I'd thought of it.

Topped off the day with a relaxing game of Bocci. Bocci! The old man's game! The game of life! After the first few tosses of the stone spheres down the court, the Little Ditchman came out to join in. She happily picked them up and brought them back, and the balls were ruled 'still in play' according to local Ditchman game regulations (shooting Volo is disallowed, for example.) There was no talking her out of it, of course. You'd have a perfect throw, inches from the pallino, and then the two-year-old would go over and move the balls, thus changing your game standing and score in one random hazard. The metaphor was recognized immediately. Bocce is life. And then you have kids. No wonder it's an old man's game.

The game ended in a tie, or something. The rest of the weekend was spent trying to get some rest, and I was able to catch the first few episodes of John Adams on HBO, which was seriously great. I got the sense that, like United 93, this is a film of historically accurate proportions and one which every American should see. It's also pretty moving emotionally, well-photographed, well-acted, and with some stunning sets and skillfully subtle effects mattes that make you feel like you're really there. It's worth purchasing when it comes out, and will be shown in high school classrooms for years to come. Think Band of Brothers with the American Revolution. It's that good.

Also woke up this morning to find I was going to be late to work. Had a hundred things to take care of that I'd completely forgotten about. (Typical contractor.) Headed out the door and down my street to find this:


Well, God bless the City of Oceanside Dept. of Public Works! I ran around to see the fist of Godzilla breaking through the soil, but alas, I must've missed it. Look how good these guys can stand around!


Just kidding. I'm glad they're there.

Spring sunshine brings the best out of everyone.


~