Well, I don’t know if you want to hear about it, the way you like the dark side of life and all, but things have been really good the last few days. I am looking forward to the move and have boxes from Mary all ready to pack. The goal is to be moved by Christmas so I am thinking about getting a truck for that Saturday before. We could move it piecemeal over the next few weeks, but we’d end up spending in gas what we’d spend on the truck and it would be harder to get our friends to help us as the moving would be random. I think it’s much better to do it in one or two trips when we can get the most amount of assistance from the tribe and just be done with it. I’ll just spend some odd free time packing everything and getting it cued up in the living room and then we’ll fire line it into a big ass U-haul. It’s books, furniture, and cooking/drink ware (and the fish). I also have a lot of clothing don’t I? So, tubs of clothing as well.


If you haven’t figured it out already, Jes and I are moving in together. We’re thinking about using Vanessa’s architecture software to do our floor plan. That could be fun. I was out in St. Charles today helping Chris and Vanessa pick up a plotter (sp?). A plotter is a huge printer the width of the back seat of my van that prints poster size whatever. Chris also helped me do a once over on my van, clearing up some starter problems I have been have by simply cleaning all the electrical connections with a steel wire brush. He has ramps, so we got the van up in the air in his mom’s garage with a space heater aimed at the engine and that made a pain in the neck job quite simple. It was my brother, the former owner of the van, who suggested a simple connection check as the probable remedy of the temperamental starter. So, well done there Philip.


I called to tell Phil that it worked and he told me he is off to Boston tomorrow to install software in a solar panel factory. He works for G.E. doing whatever – mid range industrial/software overlap. Phil is… he used to be part of the team of Navy physicists who ran the nuclear reactor on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson. Later he worked physically on the Space Shuttle in satellite deployment systems and early versions of the Space Station. He’s sort of freelance within G.E. now. He’s not the sort of person that people can afford to hire so he essentially works for a unit that hires him out. He trouble shoots industrial problems and then they get someone cheaper to stay on and implement the strategies he’s devised while he goes off to figure out the next problem and the next company. So far this year he’s been in Wisconsin, Rio, and Boca Raton.


My brother Andy may also get a job with a subsidiary of G.E. in Chicago. It would be great to have his twin boys and my godson Michael a little closer than their current California. My brother Kris is a pilot for an airline in Milwaukee who just passed his tests to fly jets. He’s been flying twin props around the Midwest, but the Jet gig means he’ll be flying further and less frequently, so more time with his young son as a bonus there. I feel a little like we’re all drifting back together a bit after the last fifteen years of going in different directions.


Yeah, I come from an odd family. Do you know Margaret Mead once slept on our couch in the Highlands of New Guinea? Sometimes I feel like we’re The Royal Tenenbaums. Once I have a teaching gig I’d like to spend a summer documenting our fifteen years in New Guinea. If it were safe I’d like to go back. It’s not really safe: gold mining, guns, landslides and tribal warfare. Our friends who still live there live in compounds with chicken wire around them and they all employ tribal bodyguards.


This is a “cute” story. My friend Bob once said that if you want to understand me you need to meet my father. My father is in his mid seventies and looks like he’s in his late fifties. We have good DNA. He was in the Marine Corps in Korea and is an imposing guy. As I become more bear-like in my own aging process I resemble him more and more. A few years ago there was a tribal war on one of the stations that we used to live on and nearly every western style structure was burned to the ground, all but one. No one was willing to touch my family’s old house because my dad now has head-man status in both of the fighting tribes.


I am being oddly confessional aren’t I? I don’t normally talk about these aspects of my life as they sound so out of left field and make an odd backdrop for the casual everyday ramblings that I normally write. When I first started going to school as a child and tried to interact with kids who had “normal” childhoods, let’s just say it did not go well. One of the things I tried to do to fit in was have my mom give me crew cuts. I saw my red curly hair as a direct link to the otherness that kids seemed to find so alienating. When I was seventeen I’d had enough conforming and my hair began to inch out. My long curly hair, last short in 1991, is something of a personal symbol of self acceptance. And yet I almost always wear it pulled back in a ponytail, still struggling to conform to a culture that will never know what to do with someone like me, just like I have almost no idea what to do with, and within, it. What can you do with that? Teach.