I have a Couple Rhetorical Questions.

The first being, Is it wrong that I find women’s curling mildly erotic? Strange I know, maybe it’s just pornography escalation coming full circle back to the mundane.

This has by far been the worst month leading up to my birthday ever. It hasn’t been all bad I admit, but the highlights have just been muted, like my promotion. I’ve only had it dangled in front of me for like 6 months, so getting it wasn’t full of elation, it was just a well yeah, I’ve deserved that for way longer than this.

Just people dying, relationships fracturing, frustration escalating, and fear rising.

The only thing I can think of to make things better is to make detailed plans to make things better, which in some cases I have.

As a birthday/promotion/make me feel better present to myself I think I’m going to buy some new hockey pants, Warrior brand of course. With gift money from my parents, remaining fun tax money left over after buying my new shin guards, and money from selling my old shin guards, they’ll only cost $29 of real money. I think I deserve that. I’m such a whore for Warrior gear. I think that’s about all the Warrior stuff I could buy other than shoulder pads, but they would be so overkill for a no check league it would be ridiculous. (Some dudes don’t even wear them, and I cut off the hard plastic pads on mine anyway.)

Looks like I’m going to make it. One more post tomorrow on my birthday and I’ll have done it. It wasn’t as hard as I thought, maybe I’ll be able to keep it up, maybe not once a day, but I’ve been able to see the anecdotes in daily life now again.

Second question: Am I less of a man for really, really liking show tunes?



Substitute Peoria for skid-row and downtown, too many syllables I know.

And who do you think you are, Sir?

I forgot how frustrating and difficult my job can be. In the shit. Slangin' hydraulics. Breathing smoke.

I wanted to start early today, but you can't get a fucking thing done before 8:30 because of safety meetings and trying to hitch a ride to the test site in the fucking downpour.

I get my shit going, and I'm feeling pretty good. I need to get a pump adjusted. Turns out this pump is located in the belly of the beast and is nearly impossible to get a wrench on for my poor mechanic. Each adjustment takes about 30 min to determine how the pressures and fan speeds have changed. There are also two pressure settings that need to be altered and one affects the other. Turn one up and the other goes up also. Get one set and the other is fucked.

5 hours later and I think I've got it, and my software to interface with the machine goes crazy and I need to have IT fix it for me. They reinstall it because they have no idea what is going on with it either. By this time 1st shift is over. No more mechanic. I check my pressures and they aren't right. One day to set a pump, and I couldn't even get that done.

Tomorrow is another work day, however.

Swim lessons with the boy tonight were good though. His enjoyment and the warm water pool made the stress go down.

Or Maybe

I took a half day vacation on Friday, not to vacation as it were.

I was asked to help one of my wife’s friends move out of her house. She was moving out because she is getting divorced.

They needed people to help move the heavy shit. Myself and her dad were the only two dudes. It wasn’t all that bad. We had to move her out while her husband was a work. It was depressing on a number of levels, moving all this stuff out looking at all the smiling faces on the walls.

My wife is friends with 5 women who are going through divorces or separations right now. Crazy shit. I guess probability wise; it goes death, taxes, and then divorce.

Lawryde Gets Ejected

For the first time in four years of playing, I got ejected from a hockey game. Of all the shit I’ve ever done in games before, this was the most benign thing to get ejected for. I didn’t have bloody knuckles afterwards. I didn’t learn something about myself by being in a fight.

Here’s how it went down. We were playing a team of young kids (16-20 year olds) who had a cheering section of their moms and dads. These were your spoiled hockey kids who think the world owes them something. They’re way too cool for chin straps. They’re also fast as hell.

We weren’t playing well. I wasn’t playing well. Their speed exploited all the faults I have coming up from C-league and only playing 8 B-league games. It was my poor defense that lead to 3 breakaway goals.

Near the end of the second period, my D partner JJ, who played Canadian Juniors when he was 15 and is fucking phenomenal, road this jackass kid with a nice knit jersey with a big captain C on the shoulder into the boards and knocked the puck away from him. It was a clean play. Kid got all pissed off that someone schooled him. He threw his hands up and knocked his own helmet off. (That’s what chin straps are for kids!)

Kid wants to fight JJ. Dumb move against JJ who would have destroyed this kid in a fight. Kid takes two gloved swings at JJ and hits his cage once. Why would you try and swing at a guy with a cage on? At this point I’m pissed at this kid because in our league, to fight is to throw a punch. I take it upon myself to pin this kid up against the board with my right fist against his shoulder. My mistake was that my stick was in that hand as well. It probably looked bad from the back, where the fat stupid ref was. I told him the kid to stay the fuck off JJ and held him there until someone pulled me off him.

Stupid fat ref tells both the kid and JJ to go to the box. Kids dad is shouting about how I should be ejected for pinning his son to the boards, essentially breaking up the fight. Goalie Mike tells the kids dad to shut the fuck up, he’s not on the ice.

Stupid fat ref tells me I’m gone for being the third man. What the fuck? I break a potential blood bath on this kid if JJ is unleashed, and I get ejected? Bullshit. Kid should have been ejected and suspended for throwing two punches. I hate this ref from past experience, but I just leave the ice because it’s not worth it.

Kid’s dad is still talking shit as I walk to the locker room. I tell him to shut the fuck up. He says some bullshit about how my friend would have needed the help. I told him I saved his kid from drinking from a straw for a while and to go fuck himself. He had some bad tattoos and was like 40 or so. As I got closer to him he realized I’m about 6’6” on skates and he started to shut up.

I showered and walked past him again as I left. I gave him a wink and a kiss as I passed, tattoos blaring: Please say something so I can explode on you. He said have a good evening with a shit eating grin. I growled the same back to him.

I went out for some drinks with some of my teammates, and we just laughed about it. It was just a bizarre situation. I guess it’s Karma for all the times I probably should have been ejected playing in C-League.

Expiration Date 08-08

It seems as though everything I own is hitting its expiration date, my dog, my DVD/VCR combo, my stereo, my water heater, and my outdoor water spigot.

Friday I got the part to fix my water heater. Apparently Whirlpool flamelock water heaters are pieces of crap with a faulty design in the thermocouple. It went bad a couple years ago and we had it replaced, but it started acting up again. I called this warranty number and they sent me a free replacement for the front burner assembly. I still had to pay for shipping and if I was the kind of intelligent person who has no real world skills I would have had to pay for someone to swap it out for me. Luckily I rule first period gym class, and have the ability to do dangerous natural gas burner swaps. It wasn’t too bad of a job. I unhooked the old one from the main gas valve and cleaned out the inside of the combustion chamber, swapped the main burner onto the new assembly and then hooked everything back up. I relit it and the pilot tube was leaking a bit so I tightened that up, same was true about the main burner line, but I didn’t have it seating in the valve quite right. After I got the leaks taken care of it seemed to be functioning correctly. It took about an hour, and we still have hot water so I guess that fixes the problem.

Total cost: $11 +1 hour of $100/hr billable engineering time. I guess I won’t charge myself though.

On Sunday my decade old stereo broke, and I have no idea how to fix that so it’s just another piece of electronics I need to buy. The list is now, TV/DVD player combo, DVD player, Stereo. I’m considering going on a mad spending spree and throwing all of them onto my 0% interest credit card and paying them off next April when I get my bonus.

Then, when I was playing outside with the boys, I noticed that my outdoor water spigot was dripping even though it was “turned off”. Fucking needle valves suck my balls. Spend the money and put ball valves in, they don’t have packing nuts that fail. Luckily amateur plumbing runs in my veins. The only problem is that the inside shutoff for the outside spigot also doesn’t work, it’s also a needle valve. So we go further back and we get to the main shutoff, also a needle valve, also kind of scares me every time I have to shut it off. Really all three have bad packing nuts and I wasn’t up for shutting off the water at the street and replacing all of them. I would need some sort of moral support to do that kind of major surgery.

Since I get paid to come up with clever solutions to complex problems, the solution presented itself to me after I decided not fuck with the main shutoff. I ran to Lowes with Mr. Oz while Carter took a nap. I grabbed one of those dual spout brass valves with the ball valve shutoffs and a bag of hose seals. I made the female cashier’s uterus ache as we left because my wife and I have the talent of making cute babies. I crossed my fingers and screwed the new valve over the old shitty valve. It didn’t leak. I don’t know if it will last when everything freezes, it wasn’t a freeze proof spigot to begin with, which was most likely the problem. The freezing and thawing destroyed the packing nut.

Total Cost: $9

So I spent like $20, and because I didn’t have to call a plumber I saved like $400. Maybe I can consider that and buy all the electronics shit that has crapped out on me.

Holy Balls, This is Hockey

Interesting weekend. On Friday I was sick, must have had some bad shellfish ;)

The the old girl finally kicked the bucket. I've been waiting for our 35+ year old furnace and blower unit to die. I knew it was just a matter of time. That shit just isn't engineered to last that long. I was sitting using the computer upstairs. The unit kicked on and I heard what I can only describe as what it would be like if you threw a kitchen knife into big steel fan spinning. That nice sound of shearing metal and the clanging aftermath of it bouncing around against other metal.

Then, just like an unbalanced load of laundry the bastard started to shake bad. I ran downstairs and shut it down. Sure enough, one of the blades of the fan sheared right off. Of all the failure modes this one was the about the best at the best time of year. The heat exchanger could have cracked when it was -20 outside and started to poison us.

This way I get to shop around for a new one at a more leisurely pace. I found some guys through some friends who will do it for a good price. Luckily it's been like 75 all weekend so we haven't needed the AC at all.

Here are some death photos.







Then on Sunday it was my first B-League hockey game. Holy Shit! I thought I was playing hockey before with my buddies on the frozen fields, and then here in Peoria in C-League. Nope. I was playing something that used the same equipment and followed the same basic rules.

What I played last night was this explosive high powered game where you need to give every bit of energy you have for the 1:30 or so you're on the ice. I didn't really understand what anaerobic meant until last night.

The league is actually an A/B league because in the summer there aren't enough A-Leaguers to form a full league. So I'm skating against dudes who have played some college or some juniors or other very high caliber players. It was fun. I'm on a good team, and we won 10-8. I made some good defensive plays.

I made some "how the fuck is this guy even on skates" plays. The most memorable was being on the blue line and side-stepping and falling with no one near me. You've got to watch out for that blue line, it trips you sometimes. I broke a stick blade right at the hosel.

It was fun though. I like not being one of the better players and having the pressure to try and make something happen My job is to concentrate on not fucking up and just making basic quality passes and try and be in good position. Hopefully by the end of this summer I'll be at that point.

I see the strings that control the system

I should be angry. I should want to burn everything down and then piss on the ashes. I should want to breathe smoke.

For whatever reason I don’t. I guess it’s a sign of maturity. I keep trying to get mad, thinking about it over and over. Rehashing it in my brain trying to find a way to make it illicit that hate. Listening to angry music, but still nothing.

I’m definitely less motivated now, but I don’t think the two are related. I’m never particularly motivated, my big problem in life. If it don’t come easy, it ain’t never going to come at all. (There are a few exceptions but it’s normally true)

I guess I’ve been beaten and bloodied enough to just accept whatever is given now. It’s not worth the frustration and pain. The ability to let that, which does not matter, truly slide. It’s like some sort of higher plane of existence, one step closer to enlightenment.

The World is Horrible

I was watching BBC news America while Oz slept on my chest after dinner last night.

Due to high food and fuel prices 6 million children in Ethiopia are, or are on the way to being, severely malnourished. They had the shots of the kids with the flies on their eyes and mouth, too weak to swat them away.

Same situation in this province in northern India. Families are spending 100% of their income on food and it's still not enough.

Thank you dude with a Flex Fuel truck, you Ethanol consumption is driving up the cost of corn around the world. Thank you commodities trader with your speculation of oil prices driving them through the roof due to your "bad" feelings. I hope your getting some quality steak dinners as a result of your buying and selling.



Sick of these yet? I like them. Maybe after I do enough of them I could show them in an art gallery. Anything is art, right?

It’s a Special Day in Peoria

Gas has broken the $4.00 per gallon barrier!!! At the bottom of the hill of the sandbox it’s $4.08 per gallon. How does that play in Peoria? I don’t know… That’s kind of a stupid saying anyway. My vehicles get about 21 and 29 mpg in the city. Each month I spend roughly $150 on gasoline when it was around $3.75. I use a Chase Marathon oil card and get 5% back in gas cards. So I’m really only paying $3.88 a gallon. The best thing I ever did though was sell my 14 mpg Silverado a few years ago.

This is really going to start screwing shit up in the economy. All those hard working blue-collar dudes with full size trucks are going to have to start shelling out $100 each time they fill up. These are the same dudes that don’t like living in the city and have to travel 20 miles one way to get groceries and go to work. Stupid. I have relatively fuel-efficient vehicles, and I live right in the middle of Peoria. I drive 14 miles round trip to work.

So the first internal combustion engine was designed in 1806, and from 1806 to around 1998 the cost of gas went up to .96 per gallon (in Wisconsin Rapids, the lowest I’ve ever paid.) in 192 years. In the next ten years it’s gone up $3.12. I don’t really have a point, it’s just interesting, and I’m sure if you adjust for inflation it’s been really expensive at other times.

Beef Sack

I try to use these cloth grocery bags to be a good steward of the environment and offset my 25 year old 50% efficient furnace.

I also shop at Super Walmart because I’m supporting a family of almost 4 on one salary. (What would I do with another $4500 a month. That’s another post itself.)

Last night I was at Super Walmart and I go to checkout with this 45-55 year old woman. It’s her last checkout of the night and she turns off her light. She looks at my cloth bags and gives this defeated look like I jus shot her dog.

She says something like she’s not very good with these and doesn’t really know how to use them. I tell her to just chock them full of stuff because they aren’t 0.00001mm thick like their shitty plastic bags.

She explains that they’re trained a certain way to bag and blah blah blah. I’m not asking her to operate a fucking pipelayer, it’s a bag with four sides and a bottom, it doesn’t require extensive training to use. I begin to think she must be one of those people that needs to read the instructions on the side of Poptarts.

I just keep loading my stuff on the belt and let her get some OTJT. She keeps struggling through it and another cashier comes around and “gives her a hand”. I keep watching her much like I’m at a zoo watching monkey’s learn how to use tools for the first time.

I give her a handy suggestion. “Since Walmart sells their own cloth bags in an attempt to be “green” why don’t you suggest to one of your supervisors they give you a little station to set cloth bags to help you out?”

They wouldn’t do that she tells me, since only a few people use these. I could have just nabbed her a promotion and she throws it away.

I continue to watch, much like passing a bloody car accident, my jaw drops and drool begins to form in the crack of my mouth. I’m snapped out of it as she scans my ground beef, puts it back behind the scanner, scans some other things and then re-scans it. I tell her she double scanned my beef. She tells me she didn’t. All the fight in me is drained post hockey playoff so I just say fuck it, I’ll go to the service desk after and get my money.

We’re nearing the finish line and she’s getting a bit better with the combined brainpower of TWO Walmart employee’s aiding her.

She says something along the lines of “Oh, there’s a science to it.”

Sorry lady, just like Creationism, there’s no science here. Just what two-year-olds manage to do every day, stuffing things into a bag.

I head up to the service desk to get my $3.72 back for the double scanned beef. There’s a 20 something girl working at the desk. I tell her about the double scan, and she asks how it happened. I explain the cloth bags flustered my cashier. She chuckles and says they aren’t all that bad and doesn’t even make me prove I’ve only got one tube of ground beef in my sack. (That’s a colloquial term: Sack, not a Wisconsin term).

The lesson: Don’t go to middle to older aged people if you have cloth bags at Walmart, they can’t handle deviating from their precious plastic bags.

I tried not to think of the words Searing or Flesh

All you suckers who have to work today.

I'd almost rather be freezing my ass off on a pipelayer than having took my dog to the vet after he got bit by another dog.

I remember why I hate dogs. They're annoying, they piss and shit everywhere, they cost money, and they like to bite things unexpectedly.

Last night I watched in awe as ragged 15 year old Skitch was chomped on by a stupid young dog five times his size.

All I could muster was a "Jesus Christ" as three relatives tried to pull the dog off Skitch. He seemed OK at first, but then this big hard mass swelled up on his neck. Blood was pooling under his skin from the puncture wound.

He survived the night and the vet says he should be fine.

I have a cold, my ear hurts, my kid isn't sleeping well, and my dog had a brush with death.

Four more days of restful vacationing.

Lawryde Ponders Causality, the meaning of Cheez-its, and why God is trying to kill him again.

As if God isn’t trying to kill us all at every given moment… but I digress.

My body is full of adrenaline right now, so we’ll start from the end and work back.

It snowed last night (less than a ¼ inch accumulation), and the sandbox at work is tucked away back in the country with only two country roads leading to it. I’ve lived in Illinois a touch too long apparently because every winter here I have an oh shit moment where I nearly get in an accident because I forget my Wisconsin winter driving skills. Luckily I have reflexes of a jungle cat (more on that later). The twisting winding road to work normally is really fun to drive at high speeds. So I’m kind of driving it the way I normally drive it. I come into a corner going way to fast and my ass end lets loose.

Oh shit moment begins.

I counter steer the skid, but my momentum keeps me going. The anti-locks are clicking and I’m counter steering the other way now. I’m facing the other direction and my car finally comes to rest about two feet from going into the ditch. The engine dies because I don’t push in the clutch in my moment of shit. I was lucky on two fronts. Number one I didn’t end up in the ditch because then I would have had to call a tow truck to get my ass out. I do think, however, that is covered in Hyundai’s roadside assistance program.

Where I am most lucky though is that a large semi carrying a piece of heavy equipment wasn’t coming the other way at that exact moment (a frequent occurrence on the road to the sandbox), or I would most likely be in the hospital right now or dead. Bottom line, I need to slow the fuck down and remember where I’m from.

Last night my wife and Carter and I went to see a specialist midwife. The only one within 60 miles is 60 miles away, so we took a ride through the Illinois countryside to see her after I got back from work. We stopped in Henry cause I had to pee. The boy had also run out of food and was hungry. I grabbed some Combos for myself and looked for something for him. I looked at the Cheez-its and had a Robert Frost moment of both Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and The Road Not Taken. I paused a few moments and grabbed them.

We continued on in the dark. We were chatting, mostly Carter (he doesn’t stop) and I saw a deer in the right ditch. I slowed, but it was continuing to the right. My wife said something about how I was going to hit that deer. I didn’t see the second one that was coming from the left until the last second due to my concentration on the first who I thought was heading left. I mashed the brakes and I saw him stop and turn. We were going to hit him. There were no cars in the other lane so I swerved hard. The Elantra pranced to the side nicely. We barely missed him. My body filled with adrenaline much like it was a few minutes ago.

On the way home I began to think about my pause at the Cheez-its. If I hadn’t paused for them, would I have hit the first deer (unable to swerve or hit the second), or would I have been delayed a few seconds elsewhere and the same thing would have happened? I’ve talked before about how seemingly insignificant choices have massive impact on our lives. This was one of them.

Was it inevitable that I was going to miss those deer? Was I never going to get stuck in the ditch or hit by a semi coming the other way?

This is the center of my dilemma with life, death, God, and the nature of time.

Cue the music.

Picking dirt out of my teeth

One of my pipelayers is messed up, so I've been out in a dust bowl trying to work on it with 32° mornings and 60° afternoons.

Trick or Treating was fun with Carter.

You can see pictures of it here, and the post before that has some news.

It's alive. Always blows me away.

The Life Aquatic With Lawryde

Well, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go on an overnight drunk...

and in 10 days I'm gonna set out to find the shark that ate my friend and destroy it.

Anyone that would care to join me is more than welcome.

Last night my wife and I went to a Halloween party at a friend’s house.

I went as Steve Zissou, and she went as Jane Winslet-Richardson. My costume was tits, my wife made it.


Early on in the night I decided I was going to get fucked up for a few different reasons.

1. I hadn’t gotten fucked up in quite some time.
2. I was paying money for a babysitter so I was going to enjoy myself.
3. I had a designated driver to drive me home.


We arrived at the party around 7, and I proceeded to drink sweet, sweet beer.

It was a fun party; I became chattier and chattier as I drank more and more. Not very many people had seen The Life Aquatic, but my costume was still tits.

The host of the party, Tom, pulled out some German apple schnapps and started pouring so I had a couple of those. Then he pulled out this other German booze that was labeled Korn, not related to the band. It was kind of like drinking isopropyl alcohol without the blinding side effects.

He also had some Sailor Jerry rum, so he mixed up some ‘bruisers’ (spiced rum, amaretto, coke, and a twist of lime).

By the time 11:30 rolled around and it was time to go, I was feeling no pain.

As soon as we got into the car I knew I was in for a bad time. We had to pull over one exit after we got on the interstate to go back home. I opened the car door and yacked. My wife said she could smell a whiff of alcohol after each splat hit the ground.

We ended up stopping 3 more times, twice on our street, before we got home. A 25 min drive turned into a 45. My world was spinning, and I wanted nothing more than to go to sleep, but my stomach was going to punish me for drinking so much. I spent most of the early morning hours sitting hunched over on the downstairs bed with a bucket dry heaving and puking every so often. I couldn’t lay down because it was just too dizzying. By 3 AM I had sobered enough to be able to sleep lying down.

This morning I feel pretty good, bit of a bad taste in my mouth, but no major headache, and I’m able to keep the food down.

It was a good time, with the exception of those 3 and a half hours. (kind of makes me hope that time is like a straight line rather than like a mountain range). Anyway, we’ve got another party to go to next Saturday. I think I’ll take it easy at that one.

Rumors of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

My dad never went to college.
- So it was real important that I go.
- That sounds familiar.

So I graduate.
Call him up long-distance
and say, "Dad, now what?"

- He says, "Get a job."
I Make my yearly call again.

"Dad, now what?"

He says, "I dunno. Get married."

I had to drop some Fight Club on you since I haven’t in a while. So I’m at this point in my life that I’ve achieved all these milestone sort of things. I’ve graduated college. I’m married. I have a house with two cars in the garage. I’ve got a son. I’ve got a stable, well paying job. These are big things to have done in life.

It’s not like I’ve fucking landed on the moon or anything, but I’ve accomplished a lot of major life goals.

I was trying to think of what my goals are now.

I don’t really have any killer ambition at work to climb super high on the corporate ladder. I just want to make enough money to live comfortably, and pay off all my debt in a year.

I want more kids, because Carter is the coolest little thing ever.

I want to play hockey every week. It’s a pretty short-term, simple goal, but I derive immense enjoyment from it.

I don’t want to die in Peoria. There’s my big long-term goal.

Like a Phoenix He Was Burned to the Ground

I talk to all these smart, intellectual people who tell me they are waiting to have kids, and I see these myspace profiles of married people who “some day” want kids. Society tells everyone that it’s OK to wait to have kids.

Modern society has lied to you about waiting to have kids. If you do wait until your late thirties or whenever you decide, your baby making tools will have started to deteriorate. You can expect to have a higher risk pregnancy, with a higher likelihood of genetic defects, if you can conceive at all the natural science free way.

“Pregnancies from men younger than twenty-five years are 40% less likely to end in miscarriage than pregnancies from men 25-29 years. Pregnancies from men older than forty years are 60% more likely to end in miscarriage than the 25-29 year age group.” From Wikipedia.

I guess standing around microwaves and not wearing athletic supporters during contact sports can make your guys swim less effectivly.

Back when Rome and Greece ruled the world, people only lived between 25 and 45 years. If you didn’t get to the business of making babies at an early age, you were dead before they were able to take care of themselves. Do you really think our reproductive organs have evolved as quickly as our standards of hygiene and medicine have?

So all you intellectuals who are waiting until you can’t conceive to try and conceive, maybe you should reevaluate you plan and start trying to make more little intellectuals because you known stupid people, the ultra religious, and people from the south are cranking out babies like crazy.

Sick and Sore

Everyone in the house other than our carrier monkey son has been sick the last few days. It started Saturday afternoon, aches, tired, stomach. I felt better Sunday and stupidly went to play rat hockey Sunday night. I now feel pretty crappy again.

I once had Mono. It was December ’99. I can easily remember because I was super sick when everyone else was having a great fucking time assuming the world was going to end. I was in a state that I wouldn’t have really cared if it had. I slept for like 23 hours a day, and hobbled painfully into the bathroom and attempted to eat things with my throat almost swollen shut from my tonsils. It was that point in my life that I became pro Euthanasia. If there had been no hope of me ever getting better from the mono, I would have wanted to die. It’s easy to wax on philosophically about the value of life when you’re healthy, wealthy and having fun. Try telling someone struggling to make it to the toilet how great their life is.

I’m nowhere near as bad as I was then, now. I still feel like shit. I really shouldn’t be at work. I’m such a fucking trooper.

There is a storm coming that I don’t know if I have the strength to weather. I hope I can.

I am a travel God

This past weekend my wife’s college roommate got married. The wedding was in Fargo, ND. That’s 670 miles away from Peoria. That’s 11-12 hours of driving. That’s 23 hours out of 72 that I spent driving. Luckily most of it was through the beautiful, wondrous state of Wisconsin.

The weekend really went pretty well. We left at 2 a.m. on Friday. We traveled north to Madison, my favorite city, to pick up The Poop Queen so she could watch Carter during the wedding and we could drink and stay late. By the time we got to Minneapolis, it felt like we should be there. Unfortunately it’s another 4 hours to Fargo.

When we got there we checked into the hotel. When The Poop Queen made reservations, they didn’t have any suites available. I asked them again when we checked in, and they did. It was an extra $60, but it ended up being totally worth it. It had a door that divided the bedroom from the living area so we were able to put Carter to sleep and still do stuff in the other room.

We went to the rehearsal dinner. I was kind of hesitant since I’m completely socially inept, but I took some lessons from the best and put my learning to the test. Mr. Fresh taught me to find something I find mildly interesting about a person and keep asking them questions about it. People always like to talk about themselves and the stupid shit they find interesting. The dinner was good.

The wedding was supposed to be outdoors and it rained like hell the day of. They had a church backup, but the reception was still under tents. It was also pretty cold, like 50 deg.

The wedding was like every other wedding I’ve ever been to, other than my own. The reception was pretty fun. My wife was in the wedding party, so The Poop Queen and I sat with the boy at a table with some fun other people. One of the girls was in her 20’s and was tattooed and pierced. She was fun to talk with.

After I took The Poop Queen and the boy back to the hotel so the boy could go to sleep, I started drinking heavily. I again exercised my new social skills, and, in an affirmation of how good I’d become, got offered some Hash by a dude in the wedding party I had met the day before. I respectfully declined since my wife doesn’t approve of illegal drug use.

As I got more and more drunk I became more philosophical. I waxed on about the nature of time with a dude I knew from college.

Even though it rained, it was a good time.

The next day we had to leave by 9 a.m. since it was another 12 hours home. I felt good, no hangover. I think it was the taco bell the night before after the reception.

When we got home I was exhausted. I still was yesterday.

I’m almost fully recovered now.

The Battle of Alpine Valley (At least the roads leading into it)

Saw Rage Against the Machine last night. We left for the 7:00 show at about 6:00 with an hour and 15 min drive. When we got to the exit for Alpine Valley, the traffic was backed up onto the freeway. We saw license plates from Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ontario, and Missouri.

There was about 2.5 miles to get to alpine valley. It took us until 9:15 to get into the concert. It didn't really matter. I didn't buy the ticket to see Queens of the Stoneage. It was either sit in the car and wait, or stand in the mud with the drunks. (Southern Wisconsin has gotten tons of rain the last week, and Alpine Valley is a steep slope.

It worked out well, we got in, went to the bathrooms, and 15 min later Rage started to play. There was no rain, and it was a pretty cool night.

They were fucking awesome. We were pretty far up the hill, but it didn't matter. I'm too old and have a kid so I don't want to be in the pit getting punched and muddied. Tom Morello is a guitar God. The band sounded great. Zach decided to tell Fox News off as well. Below is the second part of a speech he gave. It started by him talking about saying that Fox News reported that he said the Bush administration should be assassinated at their reunion concert. He said they were Fascists and always get it wrong. He said that he had said the entire Bush administration should be TRIED, HUNG, and THEN SHOT. Then the video picks up the rest.

They closed up the show with Freedom, and Killing in the Name. Since we got there so late, we ended up getting in like the VIP parking area. We ended up getting out of the show pretty quick. It wrapped up at like 11:15, and got back to Hartford at about 2:00 AM after stopping for some taco bell. I read some other blogs about people getting stuck in the mud in some of the other lots they parked in early in the day. (The people that didn't wait hours to get in). They ended up having to wait 2 or 3 hours to get out. I was happy we waited on the front side.

Anyway, awesome show. My life feels a bit more complete now.

*Set List Edit*

Set: Testify, Bulls on Parade, People of the Sun, Bombtrack, Vietnow, Bullet in the Head, Take the Power Back, Tire Me, Guerilla Radio, Calm Like a Bomb, Sleep Now in the Fire, Wake Up > gov’t rant > Wake Up, Freedom > Township Rebellion* > Killing in the Name

The Power of the Mind

You may recall that a while back my dad and I replaced all (most) of the old galvanized water pipes in my house with brand new PEX tubing. The PEX and all of it’s connection points have been rock solid.

The problem is that somewhere you still have to tie back in to the old work in the house. This can either be copper or more shitty old galvanized pipe. I have one hot and one cold water line that go up to my second floor. We decided not to run PEX up through the walls and just connect to the galvanized.

Yesterday the connection on the hot side started to leak between the galvanized pipe and the brass PEX fitting. I immediately started to get nervous. I hated the idea of having to break further into the galvanized and potential create more leaks or fuck something up in the walls higher up. I had no choice though. The one fantastic thing about PEX is that it has a manifold system rather than a branch and tee system like most copper installations. This means that you have single lines of PEX running from hot and cold manifolds that each have shutoff valves on them. So I just shut off this small branch and still had water to the rest of the house.

I ran to Lowes and grabbed a few supplies I thought I’d need. It was about 8:30pm.

My first plan was to take apart the union that was left and replace the old pipe nipple on the union with a new one. The whole assembly was up near the ceiling between to joists so it was a bitch to get wrenches on. I was able to get the union off and replaced the nipple and PEX fitting. I redid the PEX to the manifold and crimped and tightened everything. Moment of truth, turned on the water. Nothing leaked at first, but then the union started to drip as well as both of the pipe connections.

I started to get worried again. So much so that I started feeling nauseated. I didn’t want to have to call a plumber and pay big coin to fix something I should be able to. (I am my father’s son after all). My stomach started to burn. I turned off the branch and all of a sudden I heard a loud but muffled explosion. I yelled, “What the hell was that”. I thought a PEX pipe had burst somewhere. I didn’t hear water rushing anywhere.

My dumbass cats had knocked over a florescent bulb package that I had leaned against our fridge downstairs while I worked on the plumbing. I had enough at that point, there was glass all over the floor, my plumbing was fucked. I just needed to relax. My wife said she would clean up the glass

I went up stairs and dry heaved a few times and then managed to get a few teaspoons of nervous stomach acid out.

I left a message with my boss at 3:00 AM telling him I wouldn’t be in the next day. I was sick, I was throwing up, and my stomach was in turmoil. I was sick, although it was completely self-induced. No virus, no parasites, no bacteria.

I headed to Lowes the next day and scratched my head as to how to really fix this thing. The problem with pipe thread is that you need to get it really fucking tight. The threads are tapered like an Aztec pyramid, and as you tighten the joint it makes a seal along with the pipe dope you put in, but that’s mostly just to lubricate as you tighten. I couldn’t get the torque I need with the location of the joint. I needed to get more clever than the pipe.

I found a couple options. A swivel PEX fitting with a rubber seal, and your basic braided stainless hose, also with rubber seals. With a rubber seal you no longer rely on the pipe threads for the sealing, the rubber does the job.

First I had to take the union completely off. It wasn’t easy. While I was loosening it I called it a dirty whore and a bitch. You have to show plumbing joints who’s boss while you work on them. It finally let go. I got everything hooked up and opened the branch to main.

It seemed OK. I let it sit for a bit, and a tiny bit of water had formed around the connection. I went back throughout the day and it looked like about a drop every two hours was coming out of it. That should take care of itself with corrosion and sediment deposit. I’ll have to keep an eye on it.

My stomach feels better today.