Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Go Pats!

Wow, I've been away for a while! It's been a month since I posted, time does get away from me. It's all over but the Super Bowl! Every year when football season is over, I have to count...how many months till September?? I have been a loyal Pats fan for over 20 years now, ever since I met Preston who explained to me how football works. I remember when we were dating, sitting in his mother's basement, glued to the TV and watching Franco Harris work his magic (yeah I know, not the Pats). I did not grow up in a sports-oriented household, so I had no idea. To this day there are still aspects of it that I don't get, but he's still willing to explain them to me (in some cases, more than once cause I have CRS). Two things I just don't get and think are completely retarded; the push-out, and offensive pass interference. If I was in charge of the NFL, these things would be wiped from the rule book. But that's just me.

Anyway, things here are pretty much as they always are. I have been trying to get rid of a lot of my junk on Ebay, and having pretty good luck. Can't imagine why or how I manage to accumulate so much, then I look in my Dad's garage and I have a pretty good idea. The nut doesn't fall very far from the tree. But at least I'm getting rid of mine.

I'm also working on selling my handmade things on my website at www.incrediblethreads.com . I got a shopping cart in place there for PayPal, and now all I have to do is get some pictures on there. I have a few things, along with my friend Marilyn's jewelry, but I'm a horrible photographer so it's a slow process. But it's a work in progress.

Pretty soon I'll have to go back to Deb's house and continue work on the tree hallway. I finished up the tree just before Thanksgiving, and had all good intentions of going back and stenciling the ferns along the baseboard, but I haven't been back. Too many other projects, the most of which was getting rid of stuff I'll never use.

We've been playing some music, with Max from Narragansett. It's turning out to be some sort of jam-blues-hippie-sort of thing, totally unlike any project we've ever been involved in. At first I had serious doubts about it, but we decided we had nothing better going on at the time so we kept it going and now it's actually starting to sound like something. And Max seems like a good guy, without ego problems or any visible substance problems (I don't care what people do on their own time, but when you can't get through a practice without...ah..."supplements", it doesn't give me much hope for the long run).

Spent two days as a surgical assistant fixing Preston's truck this week. One day in the bitter cold, and one day in the miserable rain and cold. Ugh. Murphy's Law of Auto Repair states that things only need to be fixed in the dead of winter or in the hottest part of summer. And of course, nothing goes like it says it's supposed to in the Chilton book. "Loosen flange bolts and remove drive axle" is just a euphemism for "Loosen flange bolts ( if you can find those metric sockets), except you can't loosen them because you can't SEE them because they're behind that other thingie that the book neglects to mention (and what is that thingie, anyway, and why the hell do they design cars this way) so the other thingie has to be removed first, now loosen axle nut, two broken tools and a broken back later, and watch that ABS brake line because-oh yeah, remove the bolt that holds the brake line in, and don't for God's sake drop that washer on the ground because you'll never find it in the dark and the mud, and untangle the dog from the light cord, and go get the socket wrench back because she stole it (again), and now that you've removed the drive axle you can plainly see that you still can't get the ball joint out because you have to take the drive axle apart, not just take it out, and that's going to be hard to do because I can't feel my fingers....and on and on it goes. A job that in theory should take two hours, takes two days.

So that's life in the Valley so far this year!