[spooky]

DEC 21 (or at least it should have been)

sooo...i posted last night, i wish i had cut and pasted it somewhere, because it never went up, a few hours later, myspace had bulletins down completely, so what i said is gone forever......guess i will have to recap. ggrrr

first let me say, thanks to my longer 26 hour days i have grown accustomed to, and the drugs im taking for my returning cedar allergies, i feel like im in a daze, and am constantly taking little 30 minute naps, and i have yet to sleep longer than about 3 hours at any given time. I feel all lethargic and mentally slow, as a result, its hard keeping up spirited conversation with so many people i need to get caught up with, and time is short....

the day before yesterday, i awoke at about 4am, i popped into the chatroom and ate a bannana and had a DrPepper, the coffee machine is still a mystery to me. Glowing buttons, blinking lights, beeping noises, i cant seem to find the right combination that will make it do something other than stare back at me. Damn the robots. I think, before they rebel, they will turn off all the automated coffee machines and turn our brains to goo through lack of caffene first, making their victory assured, as most of us cant function without caffene.

i recounted the day before's events, and messed around, looking at the daily woot, making a few people angry in the forums, the usual fare, until about 7am. Then i heard my dad get up, he had been called on by my uncle Gene to texture a house for him. The activity woke up Savannah, my sisters 5 year old daughter, who is staying the week here. she was asking if it was time to get up. It was still dark outside, the weather channel showed a line of green blobs rolling over us out of the west, so i wasnt sure if it was still dark because of the rain, or the time difference. In NYC, which, i suppose, is on the east edge of the eastern time zone, the sky is bright by 6am, the suns actually up before 7. She decided it wasnt too early to be up watching cartoons.

My dad asked the both of us if we wanted an omelette. i said yes, having made my mind up to tag along to the construction site with my dad to help out, and i thought i would need the fuel. Savannah, preoccupied with something on Nick, Jr. said she wasnt hungry. So my dad made omelettes, and even though i dont usually like ham, and there was chopped ham in it, it was still one of the best omelettes ive had. Im halfway done with mine when my dad starts on his, and Savannah looks up during a commercial break. "What are you eating, uncle chad?" My dad was already walking back to the stove when she said she wanted an omelette too.

After breakfast, we hooked up 'the machine' to his big red deisel truck. The machine is a big white tow behind machine, thats essentially a 100 gallon or so resevior with a motorized mixer inside, that mixes mud for doing drywall work. It then feeds the mud through a 100 foot cluster of reddish pink cables through an air pressurized nozzle, almost like a really massive airbrush for mud. This ones a replacement for the older model he had when i was growing up. its a tiny bit more streamlined, but as an industrial machine, it still looks built out of legos.

My dad is still a prison guard, another few years and he can retire if he chooses. hes already vowed to retire for the required 30 days, and return to work, at which time he receives his full retirement check every month, and gets paid his full wage on top of that. But he still does construction on the side, cherry picking jobs for my uncle. The machine costs about 25 thousand, and my uncle Gene, i think, isnt fiscally responsible enough to invest in a 25k machine when he can just pay my dad a couple hundered bucks at the end of each job to spray the house. My dads pretty fast, being an old pro, and does a three bedroom house, including prep and cleanup time, in about 2 hours. Pretty easy supplimental income, and he can cover up Gene's crews mistakes, if there are any, and keep Gene looking good.

So we show up on the job, a new subdivision going up on the side of a hill, across the highway from one of my grade school haunts, skateworld. My uncle is already there, waiting in his champagne colored full sized truck, he gets out as we pull up. He offers a warm hello and helps my dad back the machine over the muddy soon to be driveway up to the garage bay, for easiest access to the house.

My dad has Gene unroll and hook up dirty green water hose, and he does, and my dad starts dumping purple and cardboard brown boxes of Murco brand mud into the machine to be mixed with water. Genes crew starts to show up, and begin to prep the house, and Gene comments on one of his less responsible hands, i think his name might have been Cory? Cory doesnt show up on time ever. Cory is also absent alot, but can usually get an excuse note written by someone from county lockup, where he may have spent the previous night. Like clockwork, Cory shows up, his mid 90s white jeep belching white stinky oil smoke. One of the other guys comment that his jeep is burning oil, cory replies"i pour oil on the engine to get it to smoke like that, i like the smell". Cory is missing his jacket, and looks cold. My uncle, having the prerequisite number of employees on site to keep up with my dad, now looks happy.

"Mark, i gotta run to the house and take the garbage to the road, we'll be right back, c'mon Chad, you can come with me" My dad does a combination look of half disapointment, half amusement, and shakes his head a bit. I get the feeling Gene isnt on the job if he can help it, and my dads happy not to have him under foot.

Genes truck is messy, and we talk a little politics on the way across town. Though hes a democrat, we agree on alot of things, we are both porchoice, pro gay marriage, and we both think the media needs its ass handed to it for its twisted bias coverage of only the sensational news. He especially hates them for putting the locals through almost daily torture. FtHood is the big military base locally, and easily theres 10 thousand locals serving over in Iraq, many with wives and kids. Theres a graveyard, he says, with over 400 men and women buried who died in Iraq around here. And everyday thers the update on the death toll, "4 more dead in Iraq, news at 11" its 4pm now, and the kids just got home, was that daddy? guess we have to wait 7 hours to find out if hes dead. same thing tomorrow. they want you to tune in for advertisers, and they have a captive audience. Id hate to be a military kid right now.

He comments as we pull behind the Wal-Mart, that butts up against the land owned by FtHood, that AirForce 1 came swooping down right through here to land a few weeks back, shook his whole house, he says. I wonder where exactly we are going, he lives in a rural setting, i was told, and Copperas Cove is built pretty well up, right to where FtHood starts. But theres a road back there that i was unaware of that leads to some private property back a mile or so behind civilization.....

coming soon: Gene's menagerie and my missing cousin, Waylon's story