nature whoops it up

did you hear about the dust storms down in australia? check out these pictures that people took -- whoa!!!

young people

honestly, my memory seems to get worse and worse. a young gal at work invited the husband and me to her housewarming which was to take place yesterday evening. she had sent the invite within the last 2 weeks and i had responded that we'd be there. we were to bring a dish, but no gift.

all this week i thought about what dish i could possibly bring -- the husband and i are not social butterflies and don't have a catalog of dishes to draw from. so i never did really figure something out.

when i got off work yesterday, i called the husband on my way home to see if he wanted to go to our much-liked chinese restaurant. he reminded me about our obligation. shit. since i was already almost home and wouldn't be able to figure out anything any quicker if i turned around and went to the store, i headed on into the house and opened the pantry.

i didn't have a whole lot of time to come up with something, so i finally cooked up some basmati rice while frying slices of ring sausage. i added a can of black beans and a can of corn to the sausage, then threw in a couple of handfuls of the rice. i added cinnamon, 6 or 7 dashes of pepper sauce, then sliced up some banana peppers and threw them in for good measure.

it was a really nice house-warming. i enjoy the people who were there and the new homeowner is just a neat gal anyhow. she and her husband had personalized their new home and had done a really terrific job. the interior colors were neat and up-to-date, and she had added artistic touches everywhere that were very effective.

it was a lot of fun. and my impromptu dish was tasty. thanks, husband, for remembering our invitation!

true crime -- small town beat

September 10: Officers were dispatched to a report of a person trapped in a mudslide between Peace Portal Drive and the railroad. They arrived to find the victim homeowner in a berry dire predicament. A few minutes earlier he had been trimming the blackberries behind his house, blissfully unaware that the large bushes hid a slippery edge between his property and a steep embankment. He took one final step, and the gravity of his situation became suddenly clear. After a several yard fall through the mud and shrubs, the blackberry thorns dragged him to a halt. It took a bunker-geared fire crew with ladders to extract the gentlemen. Aside from obvious scratches and a berry stained ego, he was unharmed. Officers are recommending him for a new Deadly Yard of Week Award.

September 11: A resident called to report a theft from the Night Heron Drive area in Semiahmoo. Sometime between 4 p.m. and 8 a.m. a three-foot tall steel heron sculpture was stolen from the victim's front yard. No witnesses have yet been identified. Officers are looking for a thief with better taste than morals.

September 16: A man left municipal court after speaking with the judge about his driving while suspended offense. A public safety department employee then watched him climb into his vehicle and drive away. Police confirmed that the man's driving suspension is still in effect. He will be receiving a summons by mail for the new offense.

September 20: Multiple motorists called 911 to report a possibly suicidal female perched atop the SR 543 bridge over the I-5 freeway traffic lanes. Police contacted the young woman. She was not self-destructive, just enthusiastic about taking photos for a school project. An officer transported the teenager off the bridge and to her house.

September 21: Officers responded to a landlord-tenant dispute. The reporting person stated that her landlord was on the front porch, would not let her shut the door, and was refusing to leave. Officers arrived and found that the dispute was entirely civil, and the property owner was the renter's father. Officers mediated an agreement and the parties separated peacefully.

here we go ....

the girlfriend and i are going playing tomorrow. we take off once a year and go find something interesting to do. sometimes we take a week, sometimes just a weekend, but every year we've gotten together for the past 15+ years. it's always fun, sometimes elegant, sometimes muddy.

this year we're renting a house on hood canal. if it rains we'll probably stay inside and talk, read, talk, eat, and talk. if it's nice we'll probably visit poulsbo, maybe kingston, maybe suquamish, maybe agate point.

it's a relaxing time with no expectations other than kindness and support. everyone should be so lucky.

i scream, you scream, we all scream...

i just looked at some pictures of glaciers which were taken from space. they're pretty neat, although sad, because they point up how global warming is changing things.

i still remember not so long ago when people were going 'what? global warming? that's a crock. that's just people trying to scare us.' hmmm, well okay except that here it is september 21 and tomorrow it's supposed to get up to 76* and be in the 70s the rest of the week. global warming is not my favorite scenario.

i wonder if i should move to alaska? well, maybe not -- they have melting glaciers, too.

neologisms

remember that newspaper guy who would conduct this event every-once-in-a-while where people would submit words which had new, and pretty funny, meanings? i saw one of those recently and tried to check up on it. as it turns out the guy was from the washington post and is no longer doing that thing. that's a shame as it was really entertaining.

there's a new person who's doing some similar stuff, called The Style Invitational. i couldn't find out anything about this woman, but her stuff is not funny. maybe it takes getting used to. maybe you need to be from the beltway. whatever the reason, from what i looked at, her stuff really sucks. or maybe it's just that the people who send things in are a different caliber of intellect. whatever. i miss the neologisms and i hadn't even realized they were gone.

here are a few from the e-mail which started this whole exploration:
coffee -- the person upon whom one coughs
flabbergasted -- appalled over how much weight you have gained
abdicate -- to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach
willy-nilly -- impotent
lymph -- to walk with a lisp
gargoyle -- olive-flavored mouthwash
balderdash -- a rapidly receding hairline
oyster -- a person who sprinkles his conversation with yiddishisms
frisbeetarianism -- the belief that, when you die, your soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there

why do the good things go away and the horrible things last forever?

take a deep breath and think...

i had an interesting experience the other day, by which i mean disgusting. i had googled some stuff and i didn't notice until after i had clicked on this one link that it did not have the little green checkmark which google uses to say they think a site is clean. i tried to stop the link from filling in, but i had closed-in the window and didn't have the red x showing.

at any rate, up popped a whole bunch of warnings that a virus was infecting my computer and a screen came on which looked authentic, kind of like an explorer screen, and a couple of icons kept rapidly blinking and a little box which said microsoft on it said to click OK to save my computer and all i could think was, why should i do that when i've got norton, but all the same it was really hard to keep myself from succumbing to the urgency and clicking that little box.

so i brought up the norton screen and told it to do a check and closed everything else. it turned out there was nothing wrong with my computer, but i have no doubt there would have been if i had given in to the panic-type situation that link had tried to engender and had clicked OK on that box.

so .... beware. get norton or some other internet security, and try to not panic if something urgent happens. honestly -- some people are such bastards.