Catching up

So we had this ice storm…

All told, 800,000 people in the state of Kentucky lost power. About 30 deaths have been connected to the storm.

I lost power for, oh, 10 hours total.

Unfortunately, it also made work a little crazy. I worked 11 straight days. And on Wednesday, near the end of my rope and so tired I was making more than the usual number of mistakes in my writing, I sat up and suddenly it was all clear. This is a clarity of unknown origin and of miraculous quality.

I didn’t take a day off last week because I wouldn’t have been able to. I need to be working. I need to be making a difference. I needed to know everything and I needed to know right now.

Yesterday, I did finally take a day off. I slept most of it. It was the only way I could be out of the loop on a normal day. To take the weekend off seems natural though I still read the news like clockwork. Something in me does still allow me to turn it off and go back to relaxing.

But this drive in me, this need to work and be a part of it all… A part of me wonders if this is what love feels like… A need to do something or be something so powerful that all else pales in comparison.

And if I am in love with my work to the point that I’m practically married to it… does that mean that any future lovely lady would be my mistress?

That’ll be difficult to explain. Better keep that one to myself.

Wait…

25

On my ninth straight day of work since the ice storm last week. More to come.

Frozed

Winter storm. Six inches snow. An inch and a half of ice.

No power at home. Using Internets at work. No cell phones. Landlines unreliable.

If you don’t hear from me in a day or so, assume Cyrus ate me. Or used me like a tauntaun.

Aided in the course of committing evil

So I went to the local police station, as I do every day, to do flip through the reports and list anything interesting (felonies, DUIs, etc.) for the newspaper.

I also had the chance to pick up the accident report from my unfortunate Friday fender bender and to learn the name, age and insurer of my text-happy acquaintance.

As it turns out, I was correct in that he was younger than me. He is 21. So I do feel moderately justified in yelling at him to get the heck off my lawn, should the occasion arise.

Anyway, I was flipping through the reports and every day when I do this, it’s under the supervision of the police department’s PIO (public info officer), who actually is pretty nice. I call it babysitting, what she’s doing, but it does give me someone to talk to while I do records.

Side note: She is probably one of the scariest people I know. Ever. She’s 1) a female cop, B) an ex-Army drill sergeant and 3) physically very small, so she has to be insanely tough. She’s also a mother, which totally pushes the scariness factor over the top. Moms = terrifying.

I digress. As I was flipping through the reports sitting in a small briefing room off the main lobby, someone walked up to the records window just outside the door and asked for his police report. Just so happens, it was the guy who rear-ended me.

“Go say hi,” the PIO told me with an evil smile.

And so I did.

“Not texting and driving today, are we?” I asked, poking my head out of the room.

He laughed nervously and then gave me his phone number, just in case the estimate for repairs I’m going to get should be low enough for him to pay out of pocket.

But alas, the estimate will have  to wait a few days… Because tomorrow, we’re getting 5-10 inches of snow.

Or as I call it:

SNOWPOCALYPSE!

More to come.

Junk in my trunk

Let me just pass along this age-old nugget of wisdom:

If you are driving, it’s probably a good idea to not accelerate forward unless you are pretty darn sure that the person in front of you is also moving.

If you’re at a red light, tinkering with your phone is somewhat acceptable. But please, put it down before you hit the gas again.

Today, I was in front of someone who just didn’t seem to get the logic behind those statements.

You see, when someone is in front of me at a stop light and the light turns green, I wait for that person to go.

The guy behind me took his foot off the brake, tapped the gas and plowed right into the back of my car because he was too busy playing with his cell phone, sending text messages, to pay attention to the fact that I was in front of him.

Double bonus points because he was driving a Ford Ranger pickup which was just tall enough to clear most of my bumper, cracking the plastic on it, but also damaging my trunk lid to the point where it barely shuts and stays closed.

Now, I can’t be 100 percent indignant. I text and drive. Yes, I am a bad person. But I don’t text and drive in dumb ways. I use stoplights and stop signs for it. Texting and driving in situations where you have to be watching is a no-no for me.

Grrr.

Oh yeah, and I was two weeks away from my insurance dropping significantly because I am about to turn 25. Not sure if that will go down now, but we’ll see.

Grrr.

The People’s Republic of Soviet Korea

In Soviet Korea, cat eats you.

Cyrus and I continue to have a strange relationship. It’s really more of a scam, to be honest. I give him food. He ceases attacking for maybe 5 minutes to eat some kibble, then returns, resumes attack for a few more minutes and then goes back to eat more.

This is a rinse-repeat cycle that goes through about 10 or 12 repeats. Every day.

I think he has finally realized, however, that if he succeeds in killing me that nobody would be around to give him kibble. And so he has opted to simply annoy, injure or maim. But he still tries to go for the full bounty and finish me off once and for all.

Top 10 Ways Cyrus Attempts to Injure/Kill me

10. The traditional cat under feet method. Any cat owner can tell you they develop a radar sense around their feet. This sense keeps them from tripping over a cat or from putting full weight down on said cat’s tail. Sometimes, however, this is done at lightning speed instead of with stealth. The quick attacks usually happen when I am carrying groceries or something else heavy.

9. Insanity via sleep deprivation. It’s not at all unusual any more for me to be wakened in the middle of the night to Cyrus sitting on my chest. This is, understandably, creepy.

8. Theft of soul via glowing eyes. Cyrus is the master at this one. It’s one of his favorite things to find some place in the room after I’ve turned out the light and then to just stare at me. What little light there is in the room is immediately all reflected off his eyes, which look positively scary. He does this several times a night.

7. Feline song of doom. I don’t know if cats can really sing, but Cyrus is definitely trying to, and on a daily basis. This song usually drives me to general craziness because it’s so awful and annoying. It probably will cause my head to explode.

6. Feigned ignorance of sharp claws. Cyrus has learned that the word “OW!” means that the claws shouldn’t be digging into my hand/foot/leg/face but not that he shouldn’t do it again. Still working on a way around this one.

5. Feline-induced diabetes. This one has me stumped. Cyrus will, quite often actually, go from being the harbinger of death to being my best friend. This is usually when I come home or when he’s hungry. I get kitty-cat hugs for 10 or so minutes, followed by incessant purring and demands for attention and ear scratches. This is usually followed by #6, #7 or #2.

4. Death laser. I know he has one somewhere.

3. The infamous booze incident. Knock bottle of booze off refrigerator during the night. Wait for human to slip and die.

2. Consume the unworthy. This one is fairly self explanatory. He has sharp teeth.

1. Death by fetchy-ball. Cyrus likes to play fetch. This is inexplicable and strange, but it also seems to delay my impending death. Of course, he also leaves these balls in my path all the time and they are too small to be detectable by foot sonar. So yeah. Sorry to my neighbors who heard me fall into my bedroom door the other night.

And Iran, Iran so far awaaaay

Despite its coherence, you could probably tell my last post was written through a severe inversely narcoleptic haze. This post will be much more lucid and less zombified. Mostly.

Anyway, last week I attended a media services dinner here in town. Basically, the local law enforcement from our area and the local media get together and gripe endlessly about what the other has done wrong hold hands, sing Kumbaya and eat.

Seriously. It’s almost like the local cops got together, decided that they would be cooperative with us just to confuse us and they’re waiting for the right moment to surprise us with obstinate refusal.

I happen to enjoy these meetings for another reason.

Let me tell you a story about a television reporter from Lexington, Ky. whom I used to have to work alongside. This television reporter was self-centered, arrogant, full of himself to the point that if you were to poke him with a pin, a large amount of you-know-what would most assuredly spew out.

When I arrived to cover a press conference once, he made fun of me in front of a room full of other journalists, and he did it because I was a lowly college student. Nobody else in the room laughed. They looked at him as if he was a very tiny piece of turd with glasses and a superiority complex.

He then asked leading, self-serving questions which he asked so convolutedly so as to show off his in-no-way impressive medical knowledge. The cardiac surgeon he was needling deftly maneuvered around all his questions and, I am convinced purposefully, gave him sound bytes to horrible that they could not be used.

That reporter got fired a few months ago. Tough luck, Jerry.

I digress, but the point is that I had a lot of interactions with television reporters that went kinda like that. I don’t get along with them because most of them look down on print journalists even though they still faithfully read my story in the morning paper every day over their Captain Crunch.

Not so out here.

If I were to describe Western Kentucky in journalistic terms, it would almost be paradise. A land where the police are understanding and forthcoming, where the county sheriffs answer their phones and return calls, where jailers keep interview appointments and even the TV news reporters are just plain nice guys.

Back to the dinner at the media services meeting.

Myself, the only print reporter still left in the room, and several of the TV reporters were sitting around, shooting the bull and someone remarked about what interesting heritage I have.

And the answer to the question is yes. I did proceed to launch into my five-minute standup routine from college about race.

“I get that a lot out here. In fact, most people out here just look stumped when I talk. They expect me to sound like I’m going to give them tech support with their computer and when I don’t have an accent, they really don’t know what to do. Then they wonder if I’m a fat guy or I’m wearing a dynamite jacket. Don’t worry, I’m overweight.

There’s nothing quite so priceless as seeing a bunch of TV news types totally speechless, caught in the Hellish purgatory that is the barren wasteland of “I don’t know if I should laugh.” They wanted to laugh, needed to laugh. But didn’t know if they should because I appeared to be a journalist with a sense of humor and a misplaced sense of political correctness with regards to self and they weren’t sure if I was being serious, because if I was being too serious their laughter might offend me.

And so I laughed. And they laughed too.

And there was much rejoicing.

See? That story made sense. I think.

Sweet lady slumber, please come to me

The one night that I want to sleep. And I can’t. Ugh.

That picture to the right? Me and sleep.

Any tips on what I can do to improve or to just plain face insomnia?

So late even the cat’s asleep

It used to be that I wrote on this blog just for the heck of it. I would write about anything.

Funny. Ridiculous. Borderline disgusting. Anything!

This blog has done so much for me. It has helped me make new friends, discover a latent ability that has blossomed into my daily happiness and career.

And then I log on, I look at the “Add New” button and it laughs at me. It knows I am not going to click it. Or if I do, the “Publish” button will stonewall me into submission

This blog has gotten me through the best of times. Through the worst of times. It has seen the best of writing I could ever hope to create.

But now, I look at it and it’s a shadow of itself. It goes for weeks untended and like a plant that is ready to give up the ghost, it is on its last breaths.

So maybe it really is time to let the old girl go…

Yes. I am a great, big liar. (I made that picture titanic so that you would at least have some surprise when you got to the bottom). And I think that hedgehog is captivating. I laugh every time I see the little guy.

As Dr. Mom would be the first to tell you, our brain is a creature of habit. We learn by doing and the more we do, the better we get at it. And so I hereby kick off…

THE GREAT BLOG REVIVAL OF 2009.

There are 14 days until my 25th birthday. Now, I don’t celebrate it but I do think this is a perfect opportunity to recapture a part of myself that has up until this point been left out entirely too much. If I can sit online and watch Star Trek episodes, I can most certainly blog, if only about the fact that I have about 10,000 different pictures made out of nothing more than screencaps of Star Trek TNG characters (mostly Captain Picard) and text.

And so here is the first post of 14 over the next two weeks (if not even more than that) and I will do so by honoring a good coworker of mine who sent me a survey. Now, normally these are long-winded and boring but she actually wrote answers that made me laugh and so I will fail utterly because I cannot be funny when I try do the same.

The survey:

Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose more people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you…

1. I will be the first to tell you that my cat is a homicidal maniac but at the same time, he also has a very loving, sensitive side. He rarely leaves my side when I am home with the exception of dinner time and whenever he has to use the litter box. In the past few months, I have grown so attached to him, that I was almost in tears when I stopped to think about what life without the little furry guy would be like. I must not think about it or I will get weepy.

2. I like puns. My coworkers have learned to loathe this fact about me but if they actually read this and learn what I am about to tell you now, it may actually result in a murder. You see, Chuck of Beyond the Cheddar Curtain is even more of a pun lover than I am. And he and I will have wars of puns until one of us (almost always me) claims defeat at the hands of the other by groaning in disgust (at the other) or in shame (at ourselves). Without Chuck’s help, my punning would not be at the level it is today. Sorry Chuck. You may be a dead man now.

- Side note: This is also related to my love of clichés, which is so bad that while doing an article about massage therapy last week I literally had to force myself not to sneak in the words “Happy ending” because if it made it into the story and weaseled its way through the copy desk, I would almost certainly be fired.

3. One of my best friends in high school and I (semi-seriously) vowed that if we never found our true loves in life,  we would chip in, buy a duplex, each take a unit and then begin collecting cats to become the crazy cat people we knew we were always destined to be. I still think about what must be done to make this a reality.

4. I make a lot of jokes about race and ethnicity. Not just because I think they are funny, but because I think it’s important that people stop being so sensitive about offending a person just because they are whatever shade of lightly toasted that person is. Honestly. I live every day secure in the knowledge that the people who don’t know me expect me to sound like I should be giving them unintelligible tech support help over the phone and I revel in seeing their surprise when I do not. The more people who get used to having their expectations about a foreign-looking person torn down, the sooner I can rest assured that one day I can bring lightly toasted small children into the world where they can have names that will get them made fun of at school but not feared by their fellow man.

5. Okay, I lied. I want to name my first son Patrick. Mostly just so he can make jokes about non-existent Irish heritage and so that my father can laugh and see his original name idea for me come true.

6. There are days when I want to go back to school and become a doctor. Ninety percent of this urge is because it would simply be awesome to make it three straight generations of doctors in the family Ten percent of it is so that I can develop a limp and a serious case of misanthropy like Hugh Laurie in the TV show “House.”

7. I am well aware of the fact that my medically immersed upbringing has made me ridiculously aware of far too many of the terrible maladies and oddities that the human body can manifest. Not only has this had the side effect of making me a hypochondriac for far too many things, but it also has given me an attitude of reckless invincibility. Case in point: I went to work about three weeks ago with a raging fever and a festering sinus infection. I was so weak, I could barely carry out my assignments and my fever got bad enough at one point that I was hallucinating at my desk and could almost not write a story (but I did, and that makes me awesome). When a coworker finally convinced me that seeing a doctor was a good thing, the doc at the urgent care center basically called me a moron (but in a nice way), informed me that he couldn’t shine a light through one of my sinus cavities and and that I was running a temperature of 102.6. But who still went back to work? And then worked the next day? Yeah. Me. *tears open shirt, reveals big S on blue hidden superhero outfit*

8. When I wake up in the morning, I hear everything in the voices of either: 1) Morgan Freeman, B) Arnold Schwarzenegger or 3) Patrick Stewart

9. As seen in No. 8, I now do a sequence of 1) B) C) (or Third), depending on mood). I started it on this blog literally years ago and not a single one of you has called me out on it yet.

10. When I walk outside of a building, I will often look up and then try to will myself into flying up into the sky. Maybe this is a sign that I am far too imaginative or maybe it just means that I have watched “Heroes” far too many times, but I still hold out hope that one day I will be able to fly like Superman.

11. Despite trauma to both of my inner ears from a sneeze gone horribly wrong in the seventh grade (fell out of my chair while seated the vertigo from it was so bad), I have an unreal sense of hearing. Ask my coworkers. It is creepy. The current best example of it was being literally on the far side of the newsroom space in one of the advertising offices talking to a coworker, hearing my boss say my name from about 60 feet away over cubicle tops and office space  and then walking all the way to him and saying “Hey what’s up, boss?” He just kind of stared at me and thought I was joking until I told him what had happened. I use this ability best to inject puns into conversation or to impress coworkers with my stored up archives of useless trivia.

12. I recently had two more stitches put into my face after a dermatologist finished removing a mole he had nicked off the top of for a biopsy. This now brings me to an even 10 stitches in my lifetime and it is a load off the OCD center of my brain to have an even, round 10. Although if it has brought it up to 11 I would be okay with that too because 11 is a prime number. Or 13, for the same reasons. But not 12 because it is divisible in more than three ways. OH GOD MAKE IT STOP.

13. I thought about inquiring about buying a house in town the other day, remarking within my head that such a move would be both mature and a good investment for the future, even in such a troubled economy as this. Then i scoffed, laughed out loud and went back to talking to myself, quoting the episode of Star Trek where Picard gets tortured and ends up shouting “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!” at the end.

14. I was ridiculously lazy in college. And in high school. It was all my teachers/editors could do to get me motivated (hence the advent of one of my former college paper editors and best friends yelling “WOOOOORK” at me at each turn). Now, I can’t stop volunteering for whatever comes up at work, even if I don’t have to do it or there’s no real reason for me to volunteer. Screw brownie points. I like being busy.

15. I am terrified of clowns.

16. I just stayed up until 3:45 in the morning writing a hellaciously long blog post. I think this is a good start to the next two weeks. And just in case you are calling shenanigans and the fact that this isn’t really a fact about myself, here’s one for reals: I am, according to several tests and criteria, borderline autistic or living with Asperger’s Syndrome. I intend, one day, to get fully tested and see just how far this extends. In the meantime, I enjoy typing while actually staring at the ceiling and rocking back and forth in my chair at work. Creeps the coworkers out though.

Le fin.

A story about extended family

Yesterday afternoon, my grandfather died.

Clarifications are necessary. My stepmother’s father died.

It’s not just for brevity that I call him my grandfather. If I wanted to be brief, I’d just call him Papa, which is what I have called him for literally all of my life.

I remember my childhood visits to his home in Kalamazoo, a home filled with endless amounts of knickknacks and books that I believed only he could be smart enough to read.

There was the summer house up north, where he taught me how to drive his old motorboat while wearing a green, floppy hat that did absolutely nothing to shade a glowing smile.

There was the road trip, just he and I, where for three and a half hours I rambled on as children do and he told stories as only wise men can and the dread that I had felt before that trip began was totally replaced by an appreciation for the time we had spent together.

Then there was the stroke that took most of my Papa away from all of us, that left him in a wheelchair, largely unable to function and enshrouded in a cloudiness breached only by occasional flashes of clarity and humor. I learned to swallow my nervousness and read Russian poetry to him as though he were the grandchild and not I. I learned to help get him into and out of his wheelchair from the car. I silently lived in fear for years that the last time I saw him would stop being the last time until next and would eventually become the last time forever.

And that day came on the last Sunday of 2008.

I last saw my Papa at my aunt’s wedding. Some part of him must know that I loved him. I told him before I returned home. Some part of him knows I respected him. It was written upon my face each time I was around him. I hope he knows that a part of me always wanted to grow up to embody the best of his traits, because to do so would bring me so much closer to being a good man.

As I grew up, I sometimes wondered what it would be like if my parents had never gotten divorced, if Dr. Dad had never remarried. I eventually decided that this was crazy talk. On this day, I am fearful that such a reality could have ever existed.

Most people only ever get to have two grandfathers in their lives.

I got an extra.

Goodbye, Papa.