Look! It's a Return of the Jedi bikini-clad slave-Leia Lego keychain!


(There was a $500 Millennium Falcon Lego set that I wanted, but I settled for the Indiana Jones Lego keychain for a buck.)

Greetings from Legoland, California! It was not closed and it did not rain out and we did not get into a multi-car collision on I-5 on the way there, and for those things we were very grateful. The first half of the day was spent on the phone haggling with different aluminum dealers about the cost of "Spanish Brown" so, whatever. I felt like one of those 'bad dads' you see at theme parks who neglect their kids and can't leave work at home (wait a minute- I was one.)

But the second half of the day? Ahhh, the second half! There's really nothing like a day at a theme park with your daughter, who came out of the gates running full bore at each height requirement measuring stick. She's at that perfect age where she is not bothered by not being able to go on half the rides, doesn't notice that the Lego sculptures would benefit from a professional-grade pressure sprayer, and yet she has an unbridled enthusiasm about the environment that makes a parent's heart swell with joy. (And at age 2 she also gets into the park for free.)

We had a great time, which was a long time coming. She'd been telling us all summer about how she wanted to "go to Legoland and ride a rollercoaster with Daddy." It's the kind of thing you just can't let go. We did ride a rollercoaster and she shrieked with delight over the first drop, which I will remember for the rest of my life. She went to bed talking about it last night, and awoke this morning picking up right where the conversation left off. And now, here I've got to run off to work again.

There is a sorry, selfish temptation for the father to check that off the list of things that had to be done -going to a theme park with your kid. That's the kind of mindset that leaves your life empty and wanting, as the kids grow a foot every time you turn around. Today she started in on the imaginary friend, who had arrived looking for someone to play with, evidently. I am sitting here and mommy is doing the laundy and the Little Ditchman, well, she's in the other room talking to "Sully" about how they're going to go to Legoland together and go on the boats and the helicopters and the rollercoaster.

"It's normal," Mrs. Ditchman explains, but I've got a sick feeling about it. Then they head off to Jazzercise and all the other unknown quantities of mommy's day and I'm off to screw a bunch of aluminum together in the sun, this last day of September. I'll turn on the radio for distraction, and then I'll get home, too tired to pick her up. I'll pick her up all the same, because I know this little one's doing the heavy lifting of my soul, and it's a daddy's lot to take it.



~

A proper weekend! We seem to get one only every six weeks or so this year, so it came as a welcome respite from the madness. This week: more madness. Awoke this morning to a sudden bang and a clatter, accompanied by intemperate distant thudding, the likes of which is not often heard in these parts. I got out of bed and looked out the office window into the sunrise -thunderclouds were blowing in from behind me, off the mighty Pacific twelve miles west of here, and there in the middle of the field adjacent to our suburb I saw a bright tear in the sky, striking the top of the hill, backlit by the sun. It was an odd sight. I blinked awake a bit and mumbled, "here it comes" and-

WHOMPBOMBOMBOMBUMBIDIBUMBUM!

Right on top of us. Someone up there doesn't want us to go to Legoland today, I thought.

But it has since passed and there's a smattering of rain and a rainbow and all is well in the suburbs. I hear it tumbling off into the distance, the lightning raking ahead of it, and it's on its way out to Escondido, where the morning grey of Oceanside goes to die. Here comes October! I am not a quitter! I spent a good amount of time out in the garden this weekend turning and amending the soil and planting some onions, peppers, tomatoes -all those things that thrive in the Spring. Thought I'd beg the gods for another shot at it in the next few months. Hey, it's California! It's a twelve-month growing season!

Members of DawgRun headquarters came Saturday for barbeque and wine. They brought the wine -that is: 2 bottles of cabernet, a six-pack of pumpkin ale, 1 bottle of port, and a twelve dollar chunk of Manchego. There was no obligation to bring half of the local Ralph's Grocery European Dining aisle, but we appreciate it all the same. (The port and cheese will be here for the pumpkin fest, available to all who attend.) That being said, I had already opened a bottle (jug) of Spanish wine previously and had stopped by the Oceanside Ale Works for a growler of the local suburban hefeweizen, so after a day in the sun and a willful neglect to hydrate, I woke Sunday morning with a powerful headache. I begged off church and stayed home to shave the cat.

He's nineteen! He had yet another birthday last week and I went to pet him to find he had become no less than a matted geriatric fur ball that reeked of the unmentionable contents of his litter box, with a sorry all-my-nine-lives-are-pissed-about-it kind of attitude. He didn't like the shaving, but I just know he'll appreciate it in the long run. I didn't much like it either, so we did the clipfest in shifts until he angrily sunk a fang into my hand, then I gave him six hours off. If we make it to Legoland today, I may succumb to feline distemper, but at least my teeth aren't hurting as much.

Legoland! I got last week's order in late, so I got a free day today. Sort of. The phone just rang a bit ago and the plant only has a coil of the .032 gauge in the Spanish Brown -can you believe this crap!? Oh, man, that screws up everything! And I was going to take my truck in to get the "Engine Check" Light fixed so I could get it properly smogged for the DMV registration. I can't afford all this!

But well, that's life. Allow me to draw attention away from this blog now, to the DawgRun's new little addition: here. She's so cute! Welcome to the blogosphere, baby.


~

I barely made it through the week. That day off I had anticipated early on was just a brief delusion, wishful thinking. Now I'm behind schedule on next week's big order, which puts it in the league of everything else I've been meaning to get done before Halloween -that holiday that looms as a Spectre of Eternal Responsibility. My costume has been chosen: "DAD". Don it and the zipper breaks. The costume never comes off.

There is no Big Home Show this weekend, which is good because I'm not sure I can set up and tear down those bundles of aluminum again. It's not just me, it's that the dented things won't hold anymore. The temptation is to just scrap it and replace it, but that will cost a pretty penny. I should probably just piecemeal the thing back together for the next Show, and live with it until we're in a good place to buy a new one. Or I could call the dealers and hammer them to foot the bill, since I'm the one bringing them the business. But I divide my sales between the dealers, because they serve different options at different prices, (we're a satisfy-the-customer outfit who will design at the beckoning of your whimsy.) The dealers know this, and want ALL the business, so there's a certain reluctance from them to give up their wares for advertising and display purposes. "Then increase your product-line!" I say. In this wobbly-kneed economy? Forget it.

I think I just made an analogy for the current economic crisis. What do I know about the economy? Next to nothing. But I am a moderately-successful business owner and I know my flaws and failings as well as my strengths and successes. I'm one of these guys who thinks the economy can all be dumbed down. It's not like particle physics, where it's all theory and principle and stuff you can't see working on a molecular level (the Large Hadron Collider is down for the season, by the way. The discovery of God and ultimate destruction of the planet has been put off until next spring. Seems they're having problems with the magnets. I ask you: when you were a kid, weren't you convinced that all the mysteries of the universe lay inside the magnets? Quantum physicists overwhelmingly agree.) Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, the Economy. No, the economy is all about workers and bankers and capital and the price of money. I know that they shouldn't have lent me all that money to buy this house, but I was willing to accept the risk. I've been good on it. Others weren't so smart, or so lucky. The banks probably shouldn't have done it. People probably shouldn't have taken the loans. There should have been more governmental oversight. Politicians didn't act. Some bankers pretended nothing was wrong and exploited the system. Now? Well, we're all going to have to pay. And those of us who worked harder and made sacrifices to be good on our debts are ticked off about it.

I've always thought "banking" was just "sales," and if you want to be a successful salesman and make as much money as possible, sell the most expensive thing because the commissions are higher! And what's the most expensive thing? Money. And every salesman pretends their product is worth more than it is -this makes the customer more satisfied and the salesman more money- but it's a very fine line between honesty and deceit. It is no less true with the bankers buying and selling all these loans. The funny thing is, the banks are going out of business, and everybody else will just go back to work -at least until their business needs to borrow money to expand, or their customers can't borrow money to buy their product, and then there will be less work to go around. Does this affect me, lowly aluminum patio cover installer? You bet it does. Why would someone want to borrow money to build a patio cover when that loan's gonna cost them so much. Better to wait. Save it. Now, throw in the world market and its international investors and the panicky greedy types on Wall Street and the Fed messing with the rates every other day and a certain lack of policing the system and a certain lack of consumer confidence and you have a Perfect Storm trickling down on all of us. Get out the plywood for the windows. Hang on to your hats.

Here's an interesting piece on the current solution. It distills it pretty well and dumbs it down enough for the proletariat to grasp.

Like the politicians, the Little Ditchman is obsessed with "change", too. A few weeks ago we showed her a piggy bank and tried to teach her what the coins were: pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. She still thinks five pennies is better than one quarter, but now when I come home from work, she hears me jingle my keys and shouts "change!" and demands whatever loose cash I have on hand so she can run upstairs and put it in the piggy. Seeing her joy at the reception and dance of the coins is worth whatever it costs at face value -literally every penny- and a quarter only goes in once, while five pennies go in five times and get five smiles. So five pennies is worth more, and such are the economics of family. I was saving the change for some new corals for the aquarium. She saves it because it's neat. We both get more than our money's worth when I give her every last nickel I have.

If you think the American Economy is more complex than all this, well, it is. But if you think I'm being too simplistic, then what are we all really worried about? Inflation. A drop in business. Losing the house. But let's keep some perspective here: we can afford to lose the house.

The home we take with us.



~

This children's book would never be accepted by any publisher in America today. And that would have been the end of it.


It's from the first one, Curious George by Margaret and H.A. Rey. We all know the illicit story that begins with chimp smuggling and ends with everyone laughing about the naughty shenanigans the little beast was so curious about. The Little Ditchman picked the original up at the library last week. We sat down to read it together, and this father had raised eyebrows all the way through. When that nameless cypher, The Man with the Big Yellow Hat, (and a shotgun) shows up in the jungles of Africa to remove the monkey from his happy life in the trees and stuffs him in a sack and hauls him off to the Big City, well, I was dying to see what happened next!



The illustrations are truly wonderful. Of course, in today's world, they would never fly with a story like that. Eventually, the monkey crank calls the firemen who arrive not as civic heroes, but as an overstaffed Keystone Humane Society:



I suppose that, more or less, this is the moral of the story: Don't crank call the firemen! Otherwise, you know what will happen to you...



But George escapes! He jumps the dimwitted cel watchman and bolts out the door, up onto the roof, and absconds out of the prison grounds via the telephone wires, "quickly and quietly over the guard's head" it reads.

And then...


Why there's a man selling balloons to little girls right outside the prison wall is not answered, but anyway, having not served his full sentence and achieving no semblance of rehabilitation, the curious monkey immediately steals the balloons. The balloons, as is the custom of fairy tale physics, swiftly lift George into the air and carry him up and over the Big City, where he is finally found by the Man with the Yellow Hat. You'll be glad to know that in the end the Man goes back and pays the guard for the balloons.

Here's the happy ending:


And that's it. What a happy place! Far better than the wilds they came from, free to choke on deflated latex and strangle themselves with discarded bits of string, the animals -not being bothered with that pointless separation in cages according to continent or specie stuff- live out their happy days.


The Jewish authors, the Reys, fled Paris and escaped the Nazis in June, 1940. They had the original manuscript in their luggage, which was strapped to the bicycles they rode off on, mere hours before the tanks rolled down the Champs-Elysees. They eventually made it to America, lost contact with their original French publisher, and today there are a hundred spin-off books written by child-sensitive literary analysts and painted by corporate artists, as well as the movies and PBS series (with the disclaimer about being overly-curious) and the video games and water park at Universal Studios Florida and, of course, the car seat covers.

In 1989 Margaret Rey established the Curious George Foundation to help creative children and prevent cruelty to animals.

Things change. Makes you wonder how badly we're screwing up our kids today and not even realizing it.


~

See? I'm not such an intimidating, far-right-wing crazy conservative -uh, am I? (And only mildly authoritarian, probably because I answered "strongly agree" to the query about spankings being a legitimate form of discipline.) Anyway, I'm not afraid to admit it: I'm a passionate guy -and at least I'm not way up there in the corner like Hitler. Those are my results from The Political Compass. Take the test yourself and see where you land on the grid. I admit I had to think a bit about some of those questions -they don't let you off easy with an "undecided" or a "don't know". It got me all fiery pensive, however, and I thought about it all day at work, went home and took it again, and got nearly the same score -so it must be fairly accurate, as far as these things go. I find it somewhat refreshing that they added two whole quadrants to the right/left thing.

Did you know that the political terms "right" and "left" came from the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly of 1789? Fascinating. Later, heads would roll. Also, I have the key to the Bastille on my fireplace mantle!

Okay, so it's a replica. I bought it at Mt. Vernon a couple years ago. The original key to the Bastille was presented to George Washington by the Marquis de Lafayette, who had served under Washington in the Revolutionary War. I think it cost me twenty-five dollars and my wife rolled her eyes when I bought it. I love the thing. People come over to my house and ask me what it is. "It's the key to the Bastille!" I say. Cracks me up.

Funny thing about the keys to the Bastille: the rioters were there all day, and they demanded all the gunpowder and arms and release of the prisoners. They took the keys off the wall and paraded them through the streets, and when they finally got around to actually storming the place later that night, they found that they didn't have the keys with them, so they had to break down the doors by hand and foot. Turns out there were only seven prisoners inside, as it had been previously decided by the French governors to move the prisoners and close the place down (it cost too much to maintain.) The revolutionaries must have been disappointed that they didn't have more freed inmates to show off, but all the same they paraded them through the streets of Paris as heroes, and so fell history upon them and the storming of the Bastille was the beginning of the French Revolution. The French National Assembly then became the effective government of France, they had assigned seating, and today it's all right and left, red state and blue state, and I have the key to the Bastille on my mantle. How about that?




~

Yesterday, I was "up with the concrete guys" as the old saying goes (?) and out the door before the family was awake, which never happens. I'm not sure why the concrete guys are up before dawn, but it has something to do with not sitting in traffic with a truckload of wet concrete, and then not pouring the stuff midday when it stiffens and cracks before it's even smoothed out. These guys get up early. There's a concrete and stone guy who lives on my street at the end of the cul-de-sac. He drives a diesel, and you can hear it rumble and chatter to life every morning just before sun-up, as he heads out to pave over the world. I waved to him yesterday as I was loading my truck (not a diesel) and he tentatively waved back, no doubt wondering why I hadn't hired him. (I could tell he knew where I was going.)

So it was off to get some posts set in some massive Escondido patio for a cover that won't be built until Thanksgiving, of all things. Meanwhile, another job was put on hold due to termites, one job was delayed because of inspectors, and another job, well, it's just making its small, daily demands of a cut here, a cut there. Re-run the electrical. All of it over a pool, no less.

That being said, I may just get a day off this week. I've still got some tooth pain, which I paid a few hundred bucks for, and the family 4Runner remains in the shop. We considered setting new appointments and trying it all over again with the Legoland trip (off-season hours are Thurs-Sun, in case you're wondering) but I'm not sure I could handle another car accident right now. I'd rather work in the garden (speaking of accidents.)

The garden. My vast suburban happy homeowner Versailles that proved to be a disappointment of Legoland proportions this past season. And here we are in Autumn, already. I've been wandering out back to see if any of the SoCal growing season could be salvaged, (you usually can) and I refuse to give up. I had a few straggler tomatoes coming in, heirloom types, and I was looking forward to plucking them for a nice plate of balsamic, basil and mozzarella, but the squirrels got there first. I went out to harvest and there was nary a sign of the fruit. I almost blamed my wife and child, but then I noticed the lettuce had been munched down to a hairy stump. And the grapes? Gone. The squirrels don't touch the jalapenos, however. Thanks, guys. Where's my BB gun?

So I was a flipping farming failure this year. It started out so strong and I had such high hopes for it all, but the soil wasn't amended properly (like that flopped attempt in '06, remember? Gawd, that was something awful!) and the drip system gave out right before a heat-wave. The lawn is near-dead, strung along on life support irrigation. Just for kicks, I plugged in my pressure gauge the other day and discovered it was down to about 40, which is like checking for a heartbeat and hearing the thing stop pumping right then and there. I reckon I got a bad regulator, so I banged on it with a hammer and cranked it up to full. We've got it up to 80 now, which seems to do the trick. No doubt the whole thing will blow when we go away some weekend, flooding the decrepit mess of dead neglected things I worked so hard to plant last Spring. Maybe I should just give up on this one. Call it a loss and make it a Halloween display. Fine: everything to the compost pile! In January we go again!

But it was a beautiful weekend, even though there was so much to be done. At one point I actually saw the wind change direction and could smell the end of summer. And It was all things PIRATES! which made for an entertaining succession of events. Taught the Little Ditchman how to wear an eyepatch and then took a break from the pirates to have a little Wizard of Oz, as there was a themed kid's party down the street. I poked my head in and represented the family, to let them know we were all still alive on the other end of the cul-de-sac, and ended up staying for beer and cake. Most notable decoration from the party: the mom had stuffed some stockings and ruby slippers and jammed them under the playhouse out back, so it looked like the house had fallen out of the sky and landed on the Wicked Witch. The kids loved it. (The Little Ditchman had no understanding of it, but she appreciated "the green castles" -i.e. The Emerald City)

Then it was back to PIRATES, arrrgh, down at the harbor where pregnant mommy was slaving away, shlepping the family wares. There was AN AUTHENTIC PIRATE BATTLE being staged in the harbor, which I went out of my way to check out. It consisted of an old ship putt-putting out into the water and then a bunch of guys dressed as pirates on the distant other side of the bay, up on the breakwater rocks, waving their swords. A hundred or so spectators lined up to watch. A cannon was fired. The end. I wish I had the highly anticipated event on video, but I was too enthralled with the whole extraordinarily unremarkable display. It was like waiting for the cars to get out of the way for a parade, and then realizing that the cars were the parade.

Oh, well. We'll get 'em next season.


~

Aarrrrrr... It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day, savvy? Still not sure what exactly is international about it, but hey, why not? Pirates were never bound by any territorial agreements and spent most of their days in international waters outside of the common law, so I guess it makes sense. Ditchman family will be spending the weekend talking like pirates at the Oceanside Harbor Days Festival, if I can make it through today to set up the display booth. Last year's theme at the festival was "Pirates", and I find it interesting that this year they're doing all the same pirate stuff without having an actual selected theme, so I guess if something works extraordinarily, go with it, mateys!

At dinner last night I was informed that there would be a talk-like-a-pirate playgroup meeting today that I was going to miss out on, unfortunately. And then the Little Ditchman donned the pirate hat she'd made at the library, got her treasure map, and led us around the house on a hunt for buried treasure! No, really. We pretended to dig on the stairway where the treasure took the form of Little Einsteins stickers and decorations. We all had hats. Mommy was Minnie Mouse, Steve was a fireman, and I, well, I got the monkey. (That's the dad's job, you know, "Pirate Monkey".) Anyway, it was all so fun and so cute that I just had to share. Moments like that make you want to have ten kids, and then you realize: TOO MUCH GROG.


Have an awesome weekend, scallawags.


~