A couple of nights ago I was standing out on my back patio, under the eaves of the house, watching the lightning from the storm that was pelting the area with rain.

Suddenly the sky right above me went completely white and I heard what I could only describe as the extremely loud, sinister crackly noise.

It is amazing how fast the brain can process thoughts: “slump back against wall out of fear”, “oh god that’s lightning”, “I am about to be struck by lightning”, “hold breath I may need it”, “I’m going to die”.

Then the white became an arc of lightning snaking its way through the sky, and a large boom coming from the direction of the front of the house that shuddered the wall I was slumping against and shook the ground I was standing on.

Shaking, I checked my underwear (they were okay) and I went inside, it did not seem like the lightning had struck my house, but had come down somewhere close on the other side. I grabbed my cell and went out the front door with the intention of driving around the neighborhood to see if there were any struck down trees.

It turned out that I would not need to get into my car. As soon as I opened my front door, the flashing of fire engines, police cars and an ambulance blinded me.

I went over to investigate and discovered that the lightning had arced over my house and struck the metal chimney top of a house across the intersection from mine.

I went over to check it out, as the crowds began to gather on the streets. There was smoke wafting from the roof, and the chimney top was pointing off at a warped angle.

Approaching the scene from my house.

The house that got struck is between and behind these two fire engines.

Looking at the scene from my front yard - you can see how close it was.

Who can tell why the lightning bypassed my chimney top, and hit one less than 30 feet away? I am thankful it did not choose to hit me instead.

I live amongst a menagerie of animals.

Have you taken a look around you lately to see that you are as well?

Of course, there are the pets - they are obvious. I have four cats sharing the house with me. Equally obvious are the birds. I commonly see Grackles, Doves, Robins, Mocking Birds, Sparrows, and the occasional Heron migrating in the spring and autumn.

Then, of course, you have things like all the winged insects and the spiders, which feed off them (also common in the diet of the birds). I had my own Charlotte whom had set up shop around the light bulb/garage door motor. I had to ask her to leave with a broom because her web was making the existence of flying insects way too obvious for my liking.

I have a plethora of lizards living in the greenery that livens up my back porch and they are enjoyable to watch. The males will often bob their heads and inflate a sac in their throats to attract the attention of females – as if having swallowed a pink balloon holds some sort of appeal in their circles. I even had the pleasure of watching a territorial dispute between two males whom would bite at the snout of their opponent in a show of dominance.

Less often, but most amusing is watching frogs come out in the summer evenings that I run the sprinklers, whom appear from who knows where and jump around having a good time in the water.

On rare occasions, you get a surprise, like discovering that there is a snake lurking around sharing your living space, or, as I recently did, you discover a turtle trundling along through your yard.

What do you have living with you?

I suffer household projects like a calf being roped by some pretentious “cowboy,” only to be dumped unceremoniously onto the ground for the amusement of a few hundred hick spectators. That is, I whine a lot, squeal, and call for my mama.

The remodeling of the guest bathroom was typical then.

Originally perfectly functional, though somewhat worn, and admittedly a little ugly, the guest bathroom was deemed to have somehow committed crimes unspeakable in polite company and sentenced to undergo re-imaging.

Commence squealing.

There I am curled up in a ball on the floor, wondering when mother will come, sucking my thumb and wishing it was a beer, realizing that no parental rescue will be arriving, and that I had just better suck it up and get this thing done so I can get back to beer and all those things that I actually enjoy.

As with all those damn room makeover shows, the first item on the torture checklist is ripping everything out of the room, and then, the often un-televised second item, finding somewhere to put all that crap in the interim.

Next phase in the plan is to render the bathroom completely and utterly non-functional: comprising of removing half of the toilet and taping up drop sheets around the stuff that you don’t want paint to splatter on, that is: everything that you are not painting.

With a guest bathroom that is no longer functioning on any sort of guest bathroom-ish level you proceed to the next step: wall paper removal.

I thank the entities above I did not have to get involved in that process.

I will however curse the entities above for the necessity of involving me in the process of sand painting.

Sand paint is a type of texture paint that is a jewel in the crown of Beelzebub. Thick as soggy clay, it resists going anywhere your roller/brush attempts to coax it. Think of a screaming kid throwing a fit in the middle of say, a grocery store, while its on-the-edge parental figure tries to soothe it. That is sand paint. Maybe quieter.

After the sand paint came the joint compound to be slathered in a mish mash of arcs across the walls for a stucco-like finish. At which point I pleaded for sanity and asked why the necessity for the damn sand paint: to which I was informed that there would be patches left in the joint compoundy swathes through which the sand paint would show giving the impression of stucco that had fallen off.

Great, I am remodeling a bathroom to make it look older than when I started.

I ran for the hills, and did not return until the faux stucco was in place and well and truly dried.

To be fair, when it comes to texturing there actually can be too many chefs in the kitchen – a person has their own particular way of texturing – having more than one doing it ends up with some sections looking one way, the other looking another. This is a classy operation I am running here, folks.

Next chapter in this already exceeded its welcome project is actually painting the walls with, gasp, color.

Will someone explain to me why it is that whenever I paint, I end up with clothing, skin and hair that anyone would look at and wonder: Dude, did you run out of brushes and just use whatever was handy?

I thought I had done a perfectly good job at painting all the nooks and crannies of the stucco texture until I re-installed the light kit above the mirror.

“Let there be light”

*flicks switch*

A moment passes…

“Fuck.”

That is how I ended up giving the walls and the ceiling a second coat of paint. It appears the light of day compares poorly with the light of six 60 watt bulbs when determining if you’ve done a good painting job or not. Whistling while I worked was certainly not the order of business that day, instead I consoled myself by coming up with creatively colorful curses which I muttered under my breath as I used whatever parts of my body were available (and sometimes a brush) to get the second coat on.

Finally it was done. The slightly worn, slightly ugly guest bathroom is gone, replaced with a newer-older, but pretty damn spiffy looking one, and I can sit back down on my toilet, look around at all the hard work, smile, and think:

“Fuck, I have to tile the floor now.”

For the past week, I have had no television. I have one TV, and over several days, I noticed that the picture had been becoming darker and the contrast had been going out. Then last weekend the picture went out altogether.

A TV technician came out midweek and determined that heating element and circuit board needed replacing. Yesterday he returned with the part and replaced returning my TV from inanimate furniture back to full TV-ness.

A week without TV.

TV is not something that I cannot live without. I do not watch much TV anyway. The total sum of my viewing largely consists of:

- No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain (Travel Channel)
- Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern (Travel Channel)
- Torchwood (BBC America)
- Red Dwarf (BBC America)
- USA the Wright Way (Travel Channel)

Occasionally I find a new episode of You Are What You Eat (BBC America). Sometimes I will sit down in front of Good Eats (Food Channel), and occasionally late at night I will recline on one of my futons and be amused by a re-run of MASH.

Overall, in a given week, that’s not a lot of TV viewing. So losing my only TV for a week did not have a huge impact, but it was certainly a noticeable one, as I usually watch TV while eating my dinner. Without TV, the dinner experience was completely changed (I was amused to learn that I could still listen to the TV, just not see it, and after a few comments like “Oooh, I wouldn’t mind seeing that!” I felt a tad pathetic and turned the sound off too).

My TV is back in operation now, $340 later, but the picture is much better and now I can catch up on my shows that have been recording all week.

I came home one evening after work to discover that my fenced backyard had become, at some point during the day, much less fenced.

As you can imagine, it was a bit of a shock to turn up to your driveway after a long day at work and discover a fence that had looked perfectly normal about ten hours prior.

This is a shot of the fence from inside the yard looking out onto the driveway. I am thankful that the left corner panel did not fall completely, taking out the newly planted Confederate Rose in the process.

In addition, there was some other less photo-worthy minor damage done to other sections around the fence. Six panels in total tried to revolt against the fence-like duties that day.

The cause for all this damage was apparently wind. I had noticed it was windy that day, but had not reckoned that it would be wild enough to give my fence a run for its money (and succeed).

I ended up screwing all the panels back in place that evening. I never understood the use of nails on wood fencing (other than sheer economics) as screws are so much more resilient in their duties securing two pieces of wood together that nails pale in comparison.

After all was said and done, I realized that I have a very aged fence that is going to need replacing sooner rather than later. A new major project has been added to my list of things to repair or rebuild. At least this will give me the opportunity to build the higher privacy fence that I have always wanted.

Two of my co-workers came into my office one evening at work as is unusual for them to do. They appeared to me in the midst of a heated discussion as they often are and wanted me to adjudicate.

“M claims that Wingstop Chicken Wings would taste better than my homemade Chicken, Cheese and Broccoli!” gasped U.

“There is no way that your Chicken, Cheese and Broccoli could stand up to Wingstop Chicken Wings!” flailed M.

U rolled his eyes, “See what I have to deal with here?”

Me: “Wait, what flavor of Chicken Wings?”

M: “Cajun. Also Atomic”

Me: “I dunno U, that’s a pretty tall order. Wingstop’s Chicken Wings are pretty damn good.”

U: “I can’t believe you are siding with M on this!”

Me: “I am not, I am just saying that’s a pretty big mountain to topple”

This conversation went around and around, with various puffing of chests and other manly stuff. Apparently at some point it actually devolved into a official contest between the two, with actual judges and stuff.

Wow.

That was not the least of it. Apparently, in all this posturing and feather displaying, I somehow got involved in the contest, supplying my own chicken dish to go up against the Chicken, Cheese and Broccoli in one corner, and the Wingstop Chicken Wings in the other. My reaction to this sudden involvement, humorously, adds up to a lengthened version of the two initials of the main combatants involved in this dispute: “UM”

I told them both that I would have to think about a dish to contribute to this affair, and overnight I came up with Lime Chicken.

On the day before the big battle I composed an email inviting the five (largely unaware judges) to participate in the following day’s battle and to determine a winner that would settle this dispute that I somehow was dragged into.

For the email I devised a concept for the battle that mirrored the Iron Chef battles so popularized by the Food Network:

I blanked out the faces of my two competitors because they have no idea that I am posting this picture. I would say that the odds are thusly stacked in your favor for guessing which one I am.

I prepared my dish the evening before, and then warmed it up in that morning before I went into work. As lunch approached, M went and bought the Cajun and Atomic wings from Wingstop.

Shortly after, the judges started trickling in, and then as word of the battle spread throughout the company, volunteer judges started arriving until the point that we had double the number of judges that we had originally invited.

It was a fun day, with lots of people saying nice things about our dishes.

At the end of the day we tallied up the score cards (yes we even printed out little score cards that the judges could score the dishes one) and the final tally was:

1st – U’s Chicken, Cheese and Broccoli
2nd – My Lime Chicken
3rd – M’s Cajun and Atomic Wings

I would have been terribly crushed if I had not tasted U’s Chicken, Cheese and Broccoli and been very impressed, so I only ended up mildly hurt.

The moral of the victory that both U and I claimed over M was that home cooked food could indeed outdo the store bought stuff.* Sweet!

*Your results may vary.

I slept in until a little after 11am Sunday Morning. Then I commenced my day of rest:

• Windexed all of the windows in the house, and 409′ed all of the window sills (including puke that one of the cats decided to share)
• Tidied up around the house, dishes, straightening, putting stuff back in their place, making the bed etc
• Scooped all of the litter boxes
• Folded a load of laundry (and later in the evening put another load in the dryer)
• Washed the exterior of all of the windows, and their respective window screens
• Went out and got some Wingstop chicken wings as a surprise dinner. Turned out being a surprise as I had hoped and they were enjoyed.
• Re-painted the bronze base on a stone gargoyle. I would have preceded to patina it but I really need daylight for that

I nodded off on the futon for a little while between dinner and the gargoyle.

Pretty constructive day of rest….

I`m watching a big wheel
Inside of a big wheel
That`s part of a big wheel
Turn it round
I`m hooked on a big wheel
Stuck on a big wheel
In my mind there`s a big wheel
- Icehouse, Big Wheel

I’ve been pretty busy… my once regulars will probably have summed as much and faded away, attracted to those that update at least periodically. Thats fair enough. I can’t blame you, or them.

Anyways…

I am still busy. Actually really busy, and likely to get busier.

Bode well for updates? Probably not.

But I can try my best.

But enough of this… why am I so busy?

Well, work is ramping up, and will continue to do so over the next month or so as I temporarily take on extra duties.

I recently installed mounts for two speakers either side of our fireplace in our living room. That was a pretty decent sized project (and I am not talking about off the shelf type mounts - I made these from scratch out of some 1×2 lengths of wood), at least for me, and I got to use some new tools that my father-in-law generously gave to me. Unfortunately, that is just the beginning. Now I need to run speaker wire inside the wall on the other side of the living room, up into the ceiling, across it, and then down the side of the fireplace on the other side of the living room to the speakers. Once I do that we should have 7.1 surround sound from our entertainment center. But that seems like such a long way away, a journey of running wires, navigating studs, crossbars, crawling in attics, banging heads (mine, mostly), trial and error, and probably some mistakes to cover up. Yup, fun fun.