So it's been a while....

I knew it had been some time since I last posted but didn't realize it had been so long. On top of that I just did some sort of jackass thing that erased all of my bookmarks and I apparently can't get them back :(

So here's my life lately:

Saturday I spent the day mostly hauling cow manure around and dumping it places.

Sunday I went to my other job for the winter, the house of death. (AKA the funeral home my friend Jen manages, Sunnyside Little Chapel of the Chimes/National Cremation Service/various other names owned by the evil corporate conglomerate funeral service company SCI) There I served lunch and punch to Buddhist monks.

Today it was back to the house of death to work on accounts receivable. There was a service in the chapel all day so people in and out and a body on display in a casket.

Tomorrow and Wednesday it's back to gardening.

My life even fascinates me :)

I meant to do more but I'm tired and my new Netscape is giving me a headache.

Monitors, creepy dolls, etc...

Oh, what a week. Today is my first day off in almost two weeks. I started back part-time at the house of death this week. The drive is a bit on the long side normally, but tolerable. Thursday is was really rainy (surprise!) and it took me an hour and a half to get home (for you locals, from Sunnyside). Wednesday it took me nearly as long to get home from Lake Oswego. I hate sitting in traffic more than almost anything.

So our monitor has been acting up forever. It's got to be 10 years old or something close to it, and for the last year or so it has been getting all... well... rolly or something that makes it unviewable and then it shuts off. Annoying, certainly, but if you smacked it real hard it would behave. The last couple weeks it degenerated into working for five or so minutes, then rolling, then shutting off. No amount of smacking seemed to help. (I have the sore hand to prove it.) Thus my lack of blogging lately. I can't get far in 5 minutes and my patience is about nil at this point. Since we're still poverty-stricken, a new monitor isn't really in the budget so I got on craigslist to see if I could find a free one. I did, but the guy flaked so no dice :( I was gonna head to the Goodwill up the street but I found a brand new, in the box one for $30. No smacking required.

Sooo... The creepy doll. This ad has been sitting on my computer desk for a while waiting to find its way here.

I don't think the text is going to be readable, so I'll give you some highlights.

"Look at his face. Doesn't he look like a real baby? Go ahead and pick him up. Fully as large as a newborn and artfully jointed to sleep blissfully or snuggle in your arms, 'William' captures forever that magical day your own little boy came into the world. "

"'William' is lovingly handcrafted from our trademarked Gentle Touch (TM) vinyl that exactly captures the look of a newborn. From his closed eyes and chubby cheeks to his wee hands and creased knees, every detail is a joy to discover." (I had to get the "wee" in there for Lottie. And that Gentle Touch vinyl... Imported!)

"If you are not delighted with 'William', we will gladly buy him back for the purchase price any time within 100 days..." (Buying a "him" isn't legal anymore, is it? Maybe it's okay with babies. I dunno.)

Anyway, they have a website. Many of their dolls are even more frightening. You must go look. It's www.paradisegalleries.com

Ummm... I think that's about it. Oh, wait, cute boy. I'm going with James Marsden, because we just saw The 24th Day, which he was in.

Also, with the dark hair and blue eyes, he reminds me of someone who lives in my house who would be a cute boy of the week if he didn't have some irrational fear of his picture being on the internet.

Netflix

Today I spent the day working in the rain and wind moving manure around. Humbling, but you have to pay the bills somehow.

So this is why I love the Netflix... A couple weeks ago I got an email survey from them and for some reason I filled it out and sent it back. All very positive, I've had no complaints. Then they asked me to take part in a focus group. By participating I'd get 6 months of free Netflix, and it would only take half an hour. I jumped on that one. Now I'm gold for half a year. Next thing was to go to an interview to be in a commercial, which I did today. I don't even know if it pays anything, but it sounds like fun. And I'm guessing this is how I get discovered, and become America's next top (male) supermodel :)

If you don't already have Netflix, by all means look into it. www.netflix.com And if you choose to sign up for it, say I sent you. I think I get a free month or something.

I'll let you know if I end up being famous...

Rain rain rain rain....

For those of you not in the Pacific Northwest, it's been raining a LOT here this last week. Like inches per day. I know we have a rep as being rainy, but it's usually more drizzle and clouds and mist, which I have no problem working out in. Downpours and 30 mph winds are a different story. It sucks.

On a happier note, it stopped raining for like 5 hours in the evening on Halloween so we got a reasonable number of trick-or-treaters. It's always fun to see all the kids in their costumes, and the surly teenagers. We carved a couple pumpkins...

Mine:

Matthew's:

We also dressed the dogs up as usual. These are recycled costumes from a couple years ago so some of you may have seen them, but they're so appropriate if you know the boys.

Diablo: I have no idea what prompted this face but it seemed to fit the costume.
Jackson: Hard to tell, but that's a halo, some wings, and a very unhappy dog.

I considered trying to get a costume on the fat angry kitty but I have this strange aversion to being bitten and/or scratched. That's about all I have to report for now, as dinner is about ready. More soon, including how much I love Netflix...

The seed thief

When we moved in here and I started rearranging the backyard there was a volunteer sunflower (well, a lot of volunteer sunflowers) that came up. I let one grow and grow and grow until it had a gigantic head on it. I figured it'd feed the birds come fall or winter. As soon as the seeds ripened they seemed to be going pretty fast, and in rows from the top like a person would eat corn on the cob. I never saw a single bird eating them though. Then, one day I look out the kitchen window and see this....
He (or she) ate every seed on there within a week.

Other goings-on

Since my life doesn't revolve exclusively around looking at internet sites about cute boys, here are some other things I've been paying attention to lately. We just found out a few days ago that we now have Logo, one of the cable channels that cater to the gays. It's real fun... Here's their website:
http://www.logoonline.com/

In other news, I'm watching with growing pleasure the seeming downfall of the Republicans in general. They've found themselves in a heap of trouble lately, and I think it's about time. All this time listening to Air America wondering if ANYONE was ever going to be held accountable. It's very gratifying. I'd love to see the lot of them in prison somewhere.

Other than that, just a lot of working. I'll get some stuff about that up on the other blog soon.

Crawling out from under my rock

So yeah... I've been a bad bad blogger. The truck fiasco sent me into a tailspin that I'm just now working my way out of. It's fixed. I got a "real" mechanic to take it on and I'm so so so happy to be driving again. Two months is a long time to not really be making any money. I don't want to dwell on it though.

Sooooo... Cute boys of the week (or whatever time period is appropriate at this point). Since I was spending a lot of time at home and watching a lot of CNN during the hurricanes, Rob Marciano.
He used to be the weatherman on channel 2 here in Portland, and no pictures I could find really do him justice. Given I'm a weather and news junkie, present me with a weather/news guy who looks like that.... *sigh*

So my other cute boy of the whatever is Josh Duhamel. You may know him from "Las Vegas" or Gap ads or "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton".

If you google his name and go to images you can see his butt :) Anyway, I'll be better about posting now. I promise.

Dragonfly plus a truck update

So the other day I walked outside and found this amazing dragonfly on the fence by the garage:

It doesn't even look real, huh? A friend (Leslie) told me once that dragonflies are a symbol of eternal youth or something like that so I figure it's a good sign. This guy (or gal) was hanging out on the fence for a few hours and then took off.

The truck is STILL not fixed. I don't have much to say about it anymore, except here's a link to what other people have said about Ryan (my mechanic).

http://portland.craigslist.org/aos/

You have to look for the posts specific to Ryan's Automotive and they seem to be pretty fairly split between positive and negative. I actually posted a positive after he fixed my brakes... I think the big jobs are just more than he can handle. Regardless, I'm now about to lose new clients in the deal, and I'm pissed. This repair that was supposed to take a week or so started in July.

Finally, I know I've mentioned it before, but I implore people to do anything they can to help the people whose lives have been ruined by Hurricane Katrina. I'm a news junkie and what I see on CNN and everywhere else is sickening. I'll try to keep my feelings about W out of it, but I think the response of our government is embarassing at best. We're not so good at helping brown people, especially when they're our own brown people.

The Dog Whisperer

So I went to a wedding at the coast this weekend, Cannon Beach specifically. My friends Michelle and Aaron were getting married, and their dog Tara

was the ring bearer. I was assigned to manage the ringbearer and gave myself the title of "dog whisperer". We've dog-sat Tara a couple times before, and god knows I love me some dogs... The weather and the coast were perfect and beautiful, as usual. I love the Oregon coast more than I can tell you.

Here's part of the wedding party (bridemaids... Jen and Karie)...


And the bride and my charge for the event.

Yay! Food!

Our brand new local New Seasons opened today! For those of you not in Portland, it's a locally owned chain of grocery stores with lots of local and organic food. Here's their website: http://www.newseasonsmarket.com/ Ours is the Arbor Lodge location. As an added bonus, having one in your hood seems to be help to increase property values, especially when your hood was as deprived of grocery stores as our is. Anyway, very exciting...

Less exciting is the truck situation. Yesterday was a month without driving it. The mysterious Ryan didn't show up today at all, or call. Again.

Administrative matters

I just realized this was set up to not allow comments from people who were not members of blogspot.com. That's fixed and now anyone can comment. Sorry for my inexperience :)

Reality check

So my truck is still not driveable, but I no longer feel like I can whine about it, or anything else. Watching the reports from the Gulf Coast make me appreciate what I still have, even if it does rain in various parts of my house from time to time. I still have Matthew, Jackson, Diablo, and Xavier, a place to live, electricity, clean water, food, etc. I can't imagine what those people are going through.

When it rains it pours

Ooooohhhh... It's not been a good last few days. My truck is STILL not fixed (waiting for parts and waiting for Ryan to show up again) . Ryan did show up Sunday for a while and he PROMISES I'll be driving Wednesday. Uh huh.

Friday the TV died. Wouldn't normally be a big issue but I'm not feeling like I have a lot of discretionary income for things like televisions these days. For the time being we're using Lottie's TV that was being stored here anyway.

Yesterday (Monday) I came down to the basement and noticed it was raining. In the basement. Not so good. We knew the caulk around the bathtub needed to be replaced, but apparently it needed to be replaced NOW. That's what I did today. Turns out it's (doing my imitation of Geo. W) "Hard Work". Mostly getting the old caulk out was a problem and then my new caulk job was not so attractive. Just so long as it's functional...

We had this amazing thunderstorm this afternoon -- pouring down rain, thunder rattling the dishes in the cupboards -- very rare in Portland. I got to check out what happens to the house when it rains a whole bunch. Other than some clogged gutters on the patio cover, all was good... A relief certainly. So we get another thunderstorm tonight, I'm about to head to the grocery store, and Matthew calls me into the kitchen to tell me it's raining in there. I thought he was kidding (how often do two different rooms in your house leak in as many days) but there it was. Again, we knew the roof needed some attention but who knew we'd get a monsoon in August in Portland. Matthew got up in the attic, strategically placed some buckets, and hopefully his dad will be down to help us fix the roof next month.

On a happier, note, I do enjoy chickens.
Those are Lindsey's chickens, and I covet them. We'll pretend there are only three of them because that's all you can have in Portland city limits. I will have chickens in the spring, come hell or high water. The eggs are amazing. And the make fertilizer. And they're cute. If I can have dogs and a cat and frogs in the garden and chickens in a coop.... I'd be a happy man.

More boys

In my neverending hunt for cute boys I came across this site.

http://www.mostbeautifulman.com/sambagblog/

So delicious.

Cute boy of the week

So in the spirit of an entertaining blog, or at least some eye candy, I'm going to do a cute boy of the week feature. Mr. Timberlake was apparently the first. This guy was on the cover of Out magazine in June and he's a model (duh). Click on the links for lots more pics.

His "friend" is also a model and he's here... model #2 .

Pretty pretty boys :)

The truck story

People have been asking, so here's the full story of the truck fiasco. I try not to dwell on it.

A little over a month ago, I needed a brake job on my truck so got on craigslist to find a mechanic. I've found all sorts of good things on there, so I figured it was a safe bet. Ryan came out, fixed my brakes, and I think I got a good deal. I was also leaking water, which he identified to be the water pump, so we planned on doing that next. I told lots of friends and clients about this great mobile mechanic I found. Before he made it out again, I checked my oil and it looked like a chocolate milkshake. Even I know that's not a good sign. Turns out I needed a whole new engine. After some consideration, I figured it was a good investment. I need it for work, and it already had a new transmission and brakes. A new engine, water pump, wires, etc. would essentially make it a new truck, and it was going to run around $1900.

That's when things turned bad. The engine in the truck had already been replaced once with a junkyard engine that turned out to have a block of wood in it. (I have no idea. No one has any idea.) Ryan got a new engine that was what should have been in the truck, but they had put a smaller one in. That's when the parts started not fitting. And when Ryan stopped showing up when he said he would. Or calling. Sometimes he was waiting on parts, or his uncle died. The latest was that he was supposed to be here Wednesday. No show, no call. I call and leave a message Thursday. No response. I call him this morning, he answers, says he'll be out today and it'll be done by the end of the weekend. No apology, no explanation. Now it's 9:00 and no show, no call again. There are parts all over the garage, he has one of them, and I'm not sure how I'd fire him and bring someone else in at this point. Sunday will be four weeks since I last drove the truck. I'm really really really broke and pissed off.

Blah Part II?

Hmmm... Still no truck. Three weeks and three days at this point.

Today I was working at Bobby's house (Lottie's dad) and I've seen this or a similar frog there but I'm just enthralled.... So cute, and not shy at all. I had to get my crappy camera pretty close to get this shot. He's sitting on a canna leaf by the fountain.
Let's see... I went to a 4-year old's birthday party over the weekend (Sunday). It was for my friend Jen's niece's (Tabi's) birthday. I got to be the pinata holder.


That's Tabi swinging at the pinata (and me). Fortunately I sustained no injuries from children wielding sticks.

Lastly, and I promise to move this elsewhere, here's this hibiscus I bought from Fred Meyer last year. It promised to be hardy, I had my doubts. The ones I took to a client's house didn't make it through the winter in a pot, but mine did. I moved it, stuck it in the ground here, and voila! Giant tropical flowers that are hardy in Portland... They're like 7" across.


And yet, they somehow look small. *sigh* More later I suppose.

Blah...

So I'm kinda cranky and I have nothing interesting to report from the last couple days. My quote unquote mechanic was supposed to be over yesterday or today to put my engine in my truck, and, of course, no sign of him, no phone call. I've been driving Matthew to work and then working as much as I can while he's at work. Yesterday it took two hours to get home from where I was working all told. We're working on three weeks without my vehicle that makes me money. I'm happy. OH SO HAPPY. I wish there was some way to express sarcasm and bitterness in a font. Anyway, when I need cheering up, I often turn to JT. For those uninitiated in my obsession, that'd be Justin Timberlake.


*sigh* See, don't you feel better now? I do :)

The vigil

So we went to the candlelight vigil in support of Cindy Sheehan and against the war in Iraq tonight. It was my first vigil, or protest, or whatever. It was really really mellow and cool. 5 or 6 blocks of people on either side of NW 23rd just holding candles and talking amongst themselves. A lot of people driving along the street were honking and doing the peace sign out their car windows. The local news has been pretty good about coverage, which is encouraging. The tide is turning, I hope. You can go to http://moveon.org/ for more info. I'm on their mail list and I probably should do more than I do but at least I'm informed.

If you're reading, feel free to comment. I'm curious as to who actually checks in...and I'm an attention whore :)

Shameless cross-promotion

I know I already linked to her blog once, but Amy wrote the nicest entry about her garden and, well, me :) She was my first client upon moving back to Portland 2+ years ago and a great friend as well. Here's her blog again: http://the-a-blog.blogspot.com/


I was blown away by the size of this Stargazer lily in my client's yard in Lake Oswego... So many blooms for one plant.

I think I might keep all the gardening stuff on a separate blog to keep from boring all of you not into that kinda thing.

Leaning to the left

So I'm down in my basement (where the computer is) listening to Air America and I figured I should throw out a little political stuff. There's a woman named Cindy Sheehan who lost a son in the Iraq war/conflict/struggle who's camped out outside W's ranch in Crawford TX asking the jackass (my term) to meet with her and explain what "noble cause" her son died for. She's FINALLY bringing some serious attention to the peace movement and shining some light on the mess that is our president and his policies. She's part of an organization called Gold Star Families for Peace, and their website is here. Just my two cents for the day.

More...

Today I picked my first tomato! So late but at least they're ripening now. With the truck out of commission (for the rest of the week at least) I've pretty much been working when I can and working in the yard the rest of the time, trying to get a tan as well. Check out my skinny self :)
And notice the dirt mountain is gone from the backyard...
Matthew has been working on sanding/scraping the doors from one of the bedrooms. Turns out scraping is much easier and more efficient than sanding, just in case you're considering one or the other. Lead paint is not your friend...a mask and goggles are.

Ending the "closet blog"

So I'm coming out and actually sending the address of my blog to people now. More pics and stuff to come, and I imagine I'll get better at it as I go. *fingers crossed*

Finally... the house

For those of you who don't already know, Matthew and I bought our first house in June. It's 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, around 900 square feet, full unfinished basement, and a fixer to say the least. It was also EXTREMELY dirty. (Note the fridge.) Here's a bunch o' pictures... They were taken before we actually moved in.

Steep learning curve?

Grrrrrrrrr... I don't like how the pictures work on here (for me). I'll have to try to fix that cuz I want to go into the whole house thing and that's gonna be a lot of pics.

Let's get it started

So this last weekend I took a road trip with Matthew (I'll just apologize now for the bad photos in this post) and his brother Shawn and Shawn's girlfriend Melody. We went to the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Washington (I am NOT making this up) to see the White Stripes. Turns out the Gorge Amphitheater is not in the Gorge (Columbia River) but way the hell out in Eastern Washington in the desert.

We drove out the Gorge Gorge and passed throughThe Dalles. Now I always thought it was strange to have a town named "The Anything", but as we passed through there was a freeway sign that said "West The Dalles". This is wrong. If you have a town that has "the" in front of it, anything you put in front of the "the" sounds like it ought to be a verb... If you doubt me, say it out loud. "West the Dalles". "Downtown the Dalles". (I took a photo of the sign and, of course, it didn't turn out) It's just not right. Anyway, The Dalles was depressing and rife with horrendous wind gusts that had me white-knuckling my way through.

So we drove out to Biggs, OR and took a bridge across the Columbia River and went to the Maryhill Museum. This place has an interesting history involving an eccentric rich guy and a very strange assortment of art. We're talking Rodin, chess sets, and Native American art. There's a parka made of seal intestines. And peacocks roaming the sculpture garden. The eccentric rich guy also built a Stonehenge replica nearby.





















Random, but with an amazing view.

From there it was on to George. Driving driving driving. We passed through Yakima, WA. Apparently it's "The Palm Springs of Washington", as evidenced by the sign as you drive by the sawmill. Again, terrible attempt at a photo. Take my word that's what it says. Ummm... Yeah. So we got to the Gorge Amphitheater, set up our tents, drank some beer. It's just kind of camping in a field, surrounded by lots of other people. Note my shadow in the photo. Not bad, but not great at this point. So, time to go to the show... Being my responsible (paranoid) self, I ignored the advice to put either my camera or booze or both in my pants and smuggle it in or I'd have some amazing pics of the White Stripes, the venue, and me drinking. Instead, see the links above for 2 out of 3. Suffice it to say the amphitheater is amazingly beautiful, like a mini-Grand Canyon. The White Stripes were amazing as well, and I'm not even really a big fan. The trip back was uneventful, so I guess I'll leave it there.



Oh right. My truck. This is a picture of where my engine should be if I had one :(

Here we go...

Hmmm... First question would be the title I suppose. I had two friends (Amy and Daniel) in three days take photos of me cuz they were starting blogs. So I figured everyone else is doing it, I probably should. Y'know, when your mom asks "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?" Apparently I would.