And It's Only Monday....

**Was That The Dog??-Meat makes me fart. I don't know how else to put it. And not just your typical laughing-too-hard-toot. This is more like eye-watering-paint-peeling-check-your-shorts-make-the-dog-leave-the-room farts. For a while there I was even grossing myself out. But perhaps I should explain. My father-in-law's birthday was a while ago, and we've been having a hard time trying to find a day when we can all get together to celebrate. Turns out that this past Saturday night was that day. The restaurant of choice was Tapaluna, in downtown DeKalb. This proved to be quite fortunate, given that the generally crappy weather we got Friday night and Saturday morning would have made going anywhere out of town quite difficult. Anyway, the restaurant was pretty nice in a minimalist kinda way. Sheri claimed it was just as bad acoustically as Filo Spinatos, but I didn't agree. The menu is based on the South American idea of tapas, which are smallish portions of food on the order of appetizers. The idea is to have a little plate of food, then some alcohol, then another little plate of food, then more alcohol, etc, etc, etc. Not being a drinker anymore, that part was lost on me, but there were some interesting things on the menu. Unfortunately, once you excluded the deserts, I think there were only two vegetarian choices. Not good for me. I was outnumbered three to one, so meatfood was in my future. Now, Sheri has had to alter her eating since she was diagnosed with diabetes. Trying to keep her carb intake at a reasonable amount proved to be almost impossible on our vegetarian diet, so meat started to make a comeback on her plate. As a consequence, It also started to show up more in my diet, which I wasn't overly fond of. Mind you, I try not to be militant about being a vegetarian. I try not to make things difficult for others when it come to eating, so I do on occasion have something meatish when there are no other options open to me. But I'd rather not, given the choice. Saturday night, I didn't have that choice. I ended up with both beef and pork finding their way onto my plate. And later that night, my body started to register it's displeasure. Now I have a good reason to pass on the hamburgers. Meat gives me necrotic-bowel-dead-and-laying-in-the-sun-for-a-week-smelling farts. So, thanks anyway, I'll just have a salad and some fruit. Unless you want to spend some time in a closed up room with me afterwards.

**Wolf In A Yarmulke-Why the hell was Chris in a dream of mine as a divorced Jewish vegetarian??

**Dreaming Of The Amazon-In another weird dream this week, Morgan was there. I was back at the old house, trying to get moved into the small upstairs room from the main room. Oddly enough, there were now 2 rooms in between (which don't actually exist), one of which seemed to be set up like a disco, and one that I wanted to convert into a tiki bar. Even by my standards, that was a strange dream.

**If the pattern of the past continues to hold true, Jeweltiger is well on her way to meeting the man of her dreams in the near to immediate future.

**Minwax On, Minwax Off-I think I should have gone with the rubbed oil finish. The gel stain isn't giving me the color I was hoping for. Plus it stinks. It doesn't smell immediately bad, like the liquid stains, but saves it's stench for when it starts to dry out. But now that I have the back stained (somewhat), I'm locked into doing the front and hoping the whole thing matches halfway decently. Of course, before I blame the product, I also have to consider the wood I'm applying it to, and my own particular skill level. And, after taking all those things into thought, I still choose to blame the stain. Just hoping that I won't end up thinking that it would have been better if I had just left it unstained. The last thing I need is for this item to go up for auction and just have it tank because the finish looks like crap. That would do nothing for me as the artist, and nothing for TAILS as a means of raising funds. By Friday morning I should know if I need to panic or not.

**Winter Wonderland, My Ass....-As if I couldn't hate the weather here any more than I do already. We are under a freakin blizzard warning. A blizzard warning. A. Blizzard. Warning. What the fuck?? This is not the Yukon. This is not Siberia. This is not even North Dakota. The word blizzard in my life should only apply to a yummy frosty sweet treat from Dairy Queen, not an actual real weather condition that happens where you live. And can make you dead. And then freeze you. This just so sucks. I really need to live somewhere I can have a goddamn mango tree in the yard. And all you freaks who were singing "Let It Snow" last month can just get your happy little eggnog swilling behinds over into my driveway tomorrow morning. And bring your most festive snow shovel.

**Cheese Sticks With Peanuts- No great reaction to Friday's little prank yet. Does kinda leave me wondering how many uses I can come up with for packing peanuts. Next in line is the sleeve gag, which I just happen to have some nice pink peanuts all ready for. I may have let my window of opportunity slip by for the evening though. And she's still not wearing the perfume.

**Can We Crash Here?- Need to check at Panera and Borders to see if either one would be a good place to hold impromptu game nights. At the rate I'm going, I'll never have the downstairs ready to start hosting events again anytime soon, despite all of Sheri's ranting. And I really want to get a semi-stable group going sooner rather than later. I had thought about the House, but their schedule is pretty erratic, and I don't think they really have any decent sized tables. I just kinda like the idea of having somewhere public and a bit more accessible for people to gather. Not that there's even been any issues with having people over to my place, aside from the Thundering Herd, and Forrest didn't seem to care about hosting either, but it's nice to have other options.

**I have broken yet another chain letter/text/e-mail. The penalty the universe will be imposing on me this time is that I will remain single for 13 years. Oh, darn.

Post #150!!

**I Still Object!!
What a thing to have to do on my day off. Go from getting kicked around at work on Sunday night to having to get up early to be over at the courthouse in Sycamore. Blech. And then to find out that they are trying to seat not one, but three, juries. Double blech. Not that I was overly concerned about getting picked, especially if it was a drunk driving case. Since part of my job includes drawing blood samples for the police, I usually get a pass on those right off the bat. So they took the 85 of us that were there and split us into 3 groups, one for each case, and we went to our respective courtrooms to begin the selection process. By now, it had to be getting close to noon, and we all had to be there by 0930. The judge came in, explained the case, introduced the lawyers and the accused, they selected the first 12 potential jurors, and we broke for lunch. Half of my day off was now gone.

At least I was in a city I knew and there were a couple of good choices for lunch. Unfortunately, Taxco was closed, so I opted to head over to Shawn's for a sandwich and a mocha. After a good mocha and a fairly dry sandwich, I meandered back to the courthouse. My second run through the metal detectors at the front door confirmed my opinion that the female Asian sheriff's deputy working there was quite a cutie. I wandered up to the 3rd floor jury room, sat by the window, and once again pulled out the paperback I had brought to pass the time. I had already put a 100+ page dent in it, and I had at least half an hour to kill before court was back in session. At least it was a good book.

Back in the courtroom, the jury selection process continued. They had only managed to seat four jurors before we broke for lunch, so the attorneys had 8 more left to agree on. I had been sitting there the whole time watching how the process went. The attorneys usually asked the same set of questions of each potential juror. So, in the time I was sitting there, I must admit to trying to figure out how I could answer any given question to get myself excused. But it wasn't looking like they'd even get to me. And so it went for the next couple of hours. The judge would make her little speech, and then the attorneys would both get a chance to question the potential juror. They managed to get four more seated, and threw out who knows how many before I was called to take one of the now empty seats in the jury box. I was then treated to the speech I had already heard a dozen times before from the judge. Then the judge asked me a question, the wording of which I don't exactly remember, but to which my response was that police officers should be held to a higher standard than the average citizen. That answer didn't seem to go over very well. When I mentioned that I was also responsible for collecting blood samples on persons suspected of DUI, the state's attorney dismissed me without even getting up from his chair.

So, back to the jury pool I went. By this point it was past three o'clock. Then, one of the judges came in and told us all that we would need to call the courthouse after noon the next day in order to see if we would need to come in to repeat this process all over again for a 4th trial (which they assured us was highly unusual) that was on the books for this week. Then they let us go home. We were all somewhat cranky. Even stealing a glimpse at the cute deputy by the metal detector did little to lift my spirits.

The next day, when noon rolled around, I was on the phone to the courthouse. The pre-recorderd message informed me that I did indeed need to report to the courthouse between 1315 and 1330. I was thrilled. After calling work and telling them what was going on, I gobbled some lunch, threw on some decent clothes, and made a beeline for Sycamore. My favorite deputy was there again. I headed up to the jury room and got settled in. The room started to slowly fill with somewhat grumpy and fairly vocal potential jurors. Seeing other people from the previous day on their way out of the courtroom, their duty served for the year, probably wasn't helpful. The bailiff checked everyone in, and the general muttering continued. Another half hour or so went by, when the judge from the case I had been excused from came walking in. She proceeded to thank us for coming in, but the case we were supposed to be seated for had been granted a continuance. We were free to go, and we wouldn't be called again for at least a year.
Looking at my watch, I saw I had plenty of time to make it into work. I was sooooo thrilled.

**Aw, Aint It Purty?
The ground is once again white thanks to an inch or so of new snow here. It's that really light, poofy snow that really likes to blow around. While it was coming down I noticed that it wasn't even in the form of flakes, but little needles instead. I call it 'greasy' snow, because it doesn't stick to anything, not even itself. So, your feet, your car, and the car of the idiot behind you driving too fast just slide around over the top of it. Fun, fun, fun.

**Feche La Vache!
Got tickets for the matinee show of Spamalot on the 25th of this month. Probably gonna take the train in, and I'm going to check and see where Trader Vic's is in relation to the theater. And I'm going to do my best to forget what the cost of the tickets was and just enjoy the show.

**Wait...You Pee It Out?
How does a tropical parasite end up in the frozen wasteland of DeKalb? Apparently, you let an 8 year old go swimming in a lake in Africa, and poof! schistosomiasis! What's that? Check out this article and get back to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis

Pretty gross sounding, eh? Anyway, the doctor sent a urine sample on this kid and wanted it checked. My first thought was that the doctor was out of his flipping mind. My second thought was how the hell was I going to check for that? We don't do much in the way of parasitology here, so references are kinda scarce. Still, the ONE book we had was enough to point us in a general direction, and the good ol' internet supplied the rest. After spinning down the entire sample, I had maybe 0.2cc of condensed sediment. Not a whole lot to work with. The one good thing was that the eggs, should they be there, are huge (microscopically speaking, that is). I mixed up the sediment, put a drop on a slide, coverslipped it, and tossed it on the microscope, fully expecting to see nothing. Which is exactly what I saw, aside from a whole bunch of white blood cells.

Then, there it was, plain as day:an egg. And where there is one, there are more. Sure enough, as I continued to scan around the slide, more and more came into view. Frankly, I was stunned. This was one of those things that you hear about in MT school, but usually with the caveat that it's something you'll never see in real life. And here I was, seeing it in real life.

Now, the part I didn't know: these little critters apparently have a diurnal life cycle. So when they're in your nice dark bladder, they're just hanging out, basically sleeping. When you piss them out, and the daylight hits them, they switch on. Which means they start hatching. And simple as they are, they really can't tell the difference between daylight and the light that comes from the source lamp of a microscope. Can you see where this is going? I was quite enthralled by my discovery and spent a lot of time looking at my discoveries under various magnifications and light configurations. Until I saw what looked to be an empty shell. Odd. I didn't remember that being there before. Maybe I had just missed it in my initial scan. And my second scan. And my third.

Then, from the edge of the visual field, movement. I recentered the field, and there was a free moving cilliate, trying for all it was worth to move around a big clump of white cells. I knew that wasn't there before. The cilliate that is, not the white cells. The eggs were hatching. Right there on the slide. How freakin cool is that?

Now before you all wig out, what was hatching out on that slide is only infective and dangerous if I was a snail. I've been called a lot of things in my day, but I don't think that 'snail' was ever one of them. If you checked out the diagram on the article I told you to read, you'd know that. Did I mention that there was going to be a quiz? Anyway, I got to spend an evening watching the eggs of this tropical parasite hatch and release the free living intermediate form right before my very eyes. probably the neatest thing I've seen in my profession in years.

**Maybe 2010?- The hits just keep coming for Dhawk. Sorry about all the bad news, kiddo.

**Write On!- Kittyluv gots some of her writing mojo back!

**Tiki X3- Many thanks to Kari and Big Bri for adding to the ranks of my tiki collection! Kari was kind enough to contribute what are now the smallest and next to smallest tikis in said collection. Big Bri passed along a neat little tiki toothpick holder that he picked up god knows where.

**Is it a wreck or a trip? Sometimes it's really hard to tell. Even from where I sit.

**She wasn't wearing the perfume I like, so she deserved all the peanuts in her purse. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

**Did I mention the cute deputy I saw this week?

What A Way To Start The Year...

**I Object!
I have rarely heard anyone express joy about being summoned for jury duty and that includes me. At least the average person can use it to get a day or two off of work. Me, I have to give up part of a regular day off (to start), and I am not sure that if the case should continue, that I can spin it into paid time off of work. And then there is the potential of this becoming a multi-day or multi-week process. Whoop-te-freakin-do. The last time I got called was for a DUI case, and I was dismissed from consideration. Seems they didn't care to have someone on the jury with a strong opinion and inside medical knowledge. I'm hoping that would happen again (the dismissal part), but until I get to the courthouse tomorrow morning, I have no idea what kind of case it is. If it's some other type of case, I could just get stuck there for who knows how long. At least I have a book to read while I wait, and if I take a pad of paper, I could get some sketch work or writing done. If I end up getting selected, I could end up getting a lot of all three done, depending on how things progress.

**Maybe By Easter
My progress towards getting holiday gifts out to those intended to receive them is not moving along at a pace that could be considered in any way rapid. Bu this point in time, most of them are wrapped. All except for the one that I now cannot decide if I want to keep for myself or not. I know I should just give this one and get another for myself, but it's quite tempting to just put this one on my shelf and let it merge into the books that are already there. Not to mention the development if new ideas for things I wouldn't mind giving people. Once that insane holiday pressure is off, I can come up with all kinds of good ideas. Plus, by now, no one is expecting to get anything, which makes for more exciting gift giving. I do think I need to run out to CJ's this week and pick up a thing or two. I should also check and see if my gift certificate to Moxie is still any good.

**On The Fence Over Water
Still not sure if I want to keep the aquarium or not. If I do, I need to order $100 or so of supplies to get the thing back into decent shape. If not, I have no idea what to do. Maybe Craigslist would work. Moving a tank is no fun at any time of the year, and even more not fun during the winter. Thermal shock can just wipe out plants and fish alike. But I'm just not sure if there is any interest on my part in this particular hobby anymore. I quit subscribing to my fish magazine a couple of years ago. But, on the other hand, I still have another tank that I special ordered and never set up stored in the basement of the folks house. If I was to get rid of the 75, I guess I could throw that one in as a bonus. Then I'd have more space to display my collection, or get a bar, blah, blah, blah. Right at the moment, I just don't know for sure.

**Ooooh, Gel....
I have the recurring thought that it is never a good thing to experiment with new techniques or materials at the end of an elaborate or extensive project. That very thing has been my undoing more than once. Knowing that, I cannot explain the gel stain I bought at Menard's the other day. I have managed to stain several of my carvings, to varying degrees of success, but never with this particular product. Makes me a tad nervous. More so when I consider that the piece in question is the one I intend on donating to the Tropical TAILS auction. But then I guess that's why they say right on the back of the can to test the product on an inconspicuous area first. The whole back of this piece could be considered an inconspicuous area. I figured the gel formula would be better for all the curves and oddly shaped surfaces on the tiki, since it's made to stick, and shouldn't run off like regular stain. I have no idea how stinky it is, though. Don't want to have all those fumes wafting around in the house, but I'm not real fond of the thought of having to do all this out in the garage in the cold. Plus, since the whole thing is pine, I have to pre-treat the surface so it takes the stain evenly. This could double the stinkiness of the process. Guess I'll find out exactly where I'll be doing the work when I crack the cans open tomorrow.

**From The West, Lo, An Idea!
Dhawk has supplied me with the bones of my current pictoral effort. Still turning over the notion of doing more variations on the Jaws themes, but I think that my have to sit for a while longer until I can generate something new. For now, I'm trying to decide if I am done with all the pencil work for this piece or not. Even as I sit here and type this, ideas for variations are floating through my head. So I may just leave this one simple and put in more details and flourishes in future reworks.

**Best description of group sex EVER:"...several sticks 'whacking' one kitty." Thanks for that one Jeweltiger!

**5:1=A Lot Of Tongue?
I have found that trying to work a design out on paper before trying to carve it can be helpful. Especially when you're talking about working a piece of wood that could have been 100 years old when it was a tree. Then you have to figure that the piece of that 100 year old tree may be 20-50 years old. Between those two things, and the somewhat irreplaceable nature of these pieces, eliminating possible sources of error is a good thing. Plus, it's much easier to carry around a pencil and a piece of paper than it is to carry around a log. Aside from the panel piece I started and have yet to finish (mostly because I can't decide how to do the eyes), I have a heavy piece of square stock that has caught my attention. That is where the need to sketch to scale comes in. The height:width:depth work out to be 5:1:1, which makes for odd proportions, except maybe in tiki carvings. I'll just have to wait and see what falls out of the old brain pan.